[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week

"When your primary marketing message is understood to be ‘sue you,’ there’s something seriously wrong with your business model." – Adam Eisgrau.

"I'll hopefully be a happier man, giving [away] my music and also doing something really positive with my music if people are generous enough to donate to the site. I'll remove myself from all that negativity." - George Michael.

"The Taliban burnt them all – around 2,600 films – in the very place we wanted to raise a new building to house this archive. It was a catastrophe." - Siddiq Barmak, Afghan film director.

"Pay the artist as little as you can. Tie the artist up for as long as you can." - Walter Yetnikoff, ex-president, CBS Records.





Here and There

Big news this week on the legal fronts. In the third major blow to the RIAA a judge ruled the lobbying group must sue each file swapper separately instead of in bunches. A retail approach as opposed to wholesale you might say. This serves to reinforce basic American tenets of democracy while making life difficult for the RIAA, both equally valid actions in my view. The first and second blows were, respectively; P2P software is legal and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) doesn’t allow wholesale subpoenaing of file sharers. It’s a retail world it seems.

Speaking of which, all the latest sales reports indicate that retail record sales are up, up, up, demonstrating once again that peer-to-peer file sharing and record selling can peacefully and productively co-exist.

Halfway around the world Sharman Networks got a sliver of good news when an Australian Federal Court announced they’d allow an application to appeal a ruling that went against the company that makes Kazaa, the world’s most popular P2P program. That ruling resulted in secret “Anton Pillar” raids into private homes by the Australian equivalent of the RIAA. To get permission for such a raid all a company has to do apparently is tell a judge somebody’s copying their software, or allowing somebody to copy it, or contributing to an environment in which copying is possible. The court then leaps into action, letting loose the goons of war on terrible home-raiding sprees. When it comes to reevaluating their own decisions however the court takes a more delicate approach. Apparently it’s one thing to break into other people’s homes, quite another to expose your own house to ridicule. They insist on a slow and complicated maneuver. First the court might set a date to hear an application for an appeal. Maybe. There’s no guarantee they’ll do that, but if they do, and they in fact hear the application, they may then allow an actual appeal to proceed. Of course the odds of them deciding their first decision was wrong is a genuine long shot, even after all the bad publicity that follows. As a matter of fact judge Murray Wilcox, who gave the original go ahead for the home invasions passed the buck, complaining the record companies handed him some questionable pre-raid information. Tellingly, the judge stopped far short of saying he made the wrong decision. Never hurts to do a little homework before you break into someone's house, eh judge?

Though expected soon no date has yet been set to hear this application.

While Australia careens down a dangerous path, things are not so smooth elsewhere. The Europeans, getting ready to add 10 more stars to their flag next month, have made sure the new states get some serious copyright screws with which to squeeze the thumbs of their file sharing citizens. A bill regarded as even worse than the U.S.’s own draconian DMCA has left its committee and is now law. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It contains no changes from an earlier draft that alarmed just about everyone. Like Australia, it too allows secret raids on the homes of individuals suspected of minor violations. Does anyone actually think record companies are worth this? They write these laws.

Coming back around the globe to the U.S., which in comparison to China, Europe and Australia is now beginning to look like a bastion of individual-rights utopias (looks can be deceiving), 321 Studios is optimistic about it’s future. The company, which makes DVD back-up software, found itself with a product but no market when California judge Susan Illston ruled the ripper portion of the software violated section 1201 of the DMCA and told the company they couldn’t sell it anymore (CD back-up software remains legal to sell, own and use). This week the company issued press releases expressing confidence they’d eventually win even after New York district judge Richard Owen also ruled against them in a similar matter. Why the optimism? A federal judge issued a stay against the NY ruling. The separate rulings do not affect individual owners of the programs, who may continue to use them.

Meanwhile rumors that 321 Studios is offering “free downloads to all comers” have not been confirmed, but in what may be a well deserved tweak at the courts the company is making ripper-free versions available for sale, leaving it up to purchasers presumably to download and install the missing component. 321 Studios is planning an appeal of both judgments.












Enjoy,

Jack.











RIAA Must Sue One Swapper At A Time: Judge
Charles Farrar

PHILADELPHIA - Heard of “one man, one vote?” Meet “one file swapper, one lawsuit.” That’s the order from a federal judge March 5, after he authorized a single suit in a music industry action against 203 “John Doe” defendants, but ordered the Recording Industry Association of America to file separate, individual actions against the remaining 202.

P2P United executive director Adam Eisgrau hailed the ruling from Judge Clarence Newcomer as underscoring the idea that anyone who is to face any significant penalty under any kind of law is entitled to the full process of the law. Newcomer accepted the single filing, because in this instance, the RIAA offered a detailed case against the individual in question, according to one published report.

“The Recording Industry Association benefited initially form a draconian statute, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was criticized prior to its adoption for dramatically tilting the so-called copyright bargain in the favor of the significant corporate entertainment interests and against the users of information of all kinds,” Eisgrau told AVNOnline.com.

An earlier federal court ruling banned the RIAA from using the DMCA for its subpoenas, prompting the RIAA to take the John Doe course.

Eisgrau also said the ruling “ought to point” policymakers toward re-evaluating the DMCA, but without a “significant public outcry, it is unlikely that the political power and sophistication of the entertainment industry lobbying groups can be overcome.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in the Pennsylvania case, also praised the Newcomer ruling. “We’re glad the judge has recognized that the RIAA was trying to skirt around the regular rules for lawsuits by grouping over 200 individuals as a gang of file sharers,” EFF attorney Jason Schultz said in a statement. “We think each individual who is being sued has a right to have their own trial, and have their own privacy interests evaluated independently of anyone else who’s being sued.”

To Eisgrau, the ruling also reinforces the presumption of innocence, a presumption critics of the RIAA’s subpoena-and-sue strategy against peer-to-peer file swapping sometimes accuse the music industry trade group of neglecting or ignoring.

“To my knowledge, no court has yet actively considered in a detailed fashion whether some degree of the kind of downloading activity the RIAA has aggressively sued over falls within the established legal boundaries for what’s considered unauthorized, but still legal, use of copyrighted information,” Eisgrau said.

“In addition, clearly, courts in a broad sense have not determined whether there is or ought to be a difference in the way the law treats requesting a file from someone else, as compared to just making a file available for someone else’s use,” he continued. “It connects to this idea of the presumption of innocence because, were the RIAA permitted to make blanket allegations against hundreds of people, the court hearing that case necessarily would not be making fine distinctions between those cases.”

The RIAA has said only that they are “weighing their options” following the Newcomer ruling, as a spokeswoman told Wired after the ruling came down. The group has offered no other comment on the ruling at this writing.

Eisgrau said his group’s hope in the long term is to get the P2P issue out of the courts and into the halls of Congress and across informal bargaining tables, the latter option the music industry, he said, has so far refused at every invitation by their silence.

“Our longstanding position on the RIAA suits... is that at any given stage of this issue working its way through the courts, the RIAA may have been acting within its legal rights; but it was, nonetheless, wrong as a social matter, and as a matter of what policy ought to be,” he said. “When your primary marketing message is understood to be ‘sue you,’ there’s something seriously wrong with your business model and your view of the public policy process... It’s time to stop the suing and start the talking.”
http://www.avn.com/index.php?Primary...ntent_ID=76604


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CD Sales-Decline Moderates
Thomas Mennecke

The RIAA has been reporting for years that file-sharing is directly responsible for the decline of the music industry. The logical approach, from the RIAA's point of view, dictated that as P2P networking thrived, CD sales declined.

However, an interesting situation has presentment itself, as the RIAA has released its updated 2003 sales statistics. Despite some initial success against FastTrack, the decline of CD sales continues to moderate. Seemingly, the RIAA's argument that a thriving P2P market directly and negatively affects CD sales is called into greater question.

From the RIAA's report:

"The value of U.S. music shipments from record companies to retail outlets declined 4.3 percent in 2003 (compared to a 6.8 percent drop in 2002) and unit shipments declined 2.7 percent (compared to a 7.8 percent drop in 2002.)"

File-sharing's impact on the music industry has always been a point of speculation. Alternative explanations, such as a global recession, have been suggested as the primary decline of music sales. For example, the great music sales decline of 2001- 2003 correlated well with the stagnation of the global economy; then increased as the economic picture improved in late 2003.

As file-sharing continues to grow and FastTrack shows no real sign of significant decline, it appears the RIAA's logic against the P2P community is at best faulty.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=422


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MEPs Wave Through IP Rights Enforcement
Lucy Sherriff

The European Parliament has passed the IP Rights Enforcement Directive, unchanged from its mid February draft.

It includes none of the amendments proposed by civil liberties and consumer rights groups, and sets the scene for a European version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The directive will become law in two days, and member states have two years to draft and pass legislation.

The announcement on the European Parliament's website refers to a "compromise agreement" with the Council, and says that the directive's full force need not be applied to individuals copying music files for their own use.

Although this sounds promising, the key phrase is: "need not be". Robin Gross, director of IP Justice, a US-based campaigning group, says there is no justification for such as statement.

"The scope of the directive, laid out in plain English in Article 2, remains unchanged," she says. This means file-sharers remain the same in the eyes of this law as large scale commercial pirates.

She also argues that references to a compromise are extremely misleading. In fact, the "compromise" is an earlier agreement between Parliament and the Council of Ministers, says Gross. The original draft had called for criminal sanctions. This was dropped by Janelly Fourtou, the MEP responsible for the directive, to get the bill passed before the European elections on 13 June. Her husband is the CEO of Vivendi Universal.

Gross continues: "Madame Fourtou, the Rapporteur who has been ramming this directive through the process, will personally be enriched by through her family ties to (one of the) the world's largest entertainment companies, which (could) now use these new enforcement procedures to harrass and extort consumers for non- commercial and other minor infringements."

Her concerns about Fourtou were echoed during the debate. UK MEP Sir Neil MacCormick, who sits on the jury committtee, it was inappropriate fo Fourtou to be pushing this bill through, because she stood to gain so much personally from its passing.

Some 330 MEPs voted in favour of the bill and 151 against, with 39 abstentions, so the bill will become law.

A statement on the European Parliament's website said the directive will help to combat counterfeiting and piracy in the single market, a problem which affects software, toys, CDs and even pharmaceuticals.

It also means European civil liberties and consumer rights have taken a serious knock, and file-sharers are on borrowed time.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/36128.html

More draconian than DMCA

The European Union is drafting copyright protection legislation that could end up being more comprehensive than the digital millennium copyright act (DMCA) signed into law in 1998, reports say.

The DMCA, signed into law by president Clinton, protects copyright holders from Internet piracy. The law has been used in several lawsuits concerning copyright infringement on the Internet, many of those involving the downloading of music on file sharing networks. Critics of the legislation say the law provides too much protection and stifles technological innovation.

The proposed European law has faced similar criticism, drawing charges of being overly excessive. According to reports, the legislation contains provisions that would make it legal for music companies to raid the homes of peer-to-peer file sharers. Critics also say the law fails to distinguish between unintentional copyright infringement and violations perpetrated by criminal organizations.
http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/eur030504.cfm


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Kazaa Gets Green Light For Appeal
AAP

The owner of the world's largest file-sharing network will appeal against an Australian court's ruling that it be prosecuted for alleged music copyright breaches.

A coalition of music companies claim Sharman Networks - owner and distributor of the Kazaa file-sharing software - has breached Australian copyright rules.

Sharman Networks lost its bid in the Federal Court on March 4 to have the lawsuit delayed until a similar case in the United States was finalised.

The company today announced it had lodged an application for leave to appeal against Judge Murray Wilcox's decision that the case should proceed.

Sharman Networks CEO Nikki Hemming said the court had failed to consider findings by foreign courts that the owners and operators of Kazaa had no means of control over the activities of users.

"We remain resolute about our position in this case," Ms Hemming said.

"This appeal is about standing up for what we believe in - the right for peer-to-peer technology to exist as a legitimate model for digital distribution."

Universal, Festival Mushroom Records, EMI Music, Sony Music, Warner Music Australia and BMG Australia are supporting the action.

Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) conducted last month's raids of three universities and several internet service providers.

MIPI general manager Michael Speck said Kazaa software was costing both the record industry and music creators billions of dollars in lost royalties each year.

The Australian Federal Court is expected to set a date to hear the application for leave to appeal, and the appeal itself.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...594497753.html


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Universal Pays Fine for Privacy Violations

The Universal Music Group in Santa Monica, Calif., has agreed to pay a $400,000 fine to the Federal Trade Commission for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The commission called it the largest such penalty ever.

The commission found that a Universal Music Web site promoting Lil' Romeo, a teenage hip-hop artist, had been collecting personal information from visitors younger than 13 years old for marketing purposes without securing parental permission, a violation of the privacy law.

Peter LoFrumento, a spokesman for Universal, part of Vivendi Universal, was traveling yesterday and could not be reached for comment.

The case began with a complaint from the Children's Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, part of the self-regulatory efforts of the advertising industry. Much of the work of the ad unit deals with cases involving the collection of online information from children that is deemed inappropriate for marketing purposes. In this instance, the commission said, the data that children were asked to provide included name, address, e-mail address, birth date, telephone number and preferences in music, sports and apparel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/05/bu...a/05addes.html


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Police Seize Bootleg 'Passion' DVDs in Pa.
AP

State police found more than 1,500 bootleg compact discs, DVDs and videocassettes, including a couple dozen copies of Mel Gibson's ``The Passion of the Christ,'' during a traffic stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Police didn't immediately release the man's name because charges hadn't been filed. He was being held at the Somerset County Prison on an outstanding warrant from Allegheny County for drug possession, Sgt. Anthony DeLuca said.

The 30-year-old Philadelphia man was stopped Tuesday morning for tailgating and using his high beams on the westbound turnpike, DeLuca said. Police discovered a small amount of marijuana and, while arresting him, noticed several movies and music and obtained a search warrant.

DeLuca said the man had 1,040 compact discs of recently released music and about 475 DVDs. Besides ``The Passion of the Christ,'' DeLuca said police found ``Starsky & Hutch'' -- which won't be in theaters until Friday -- ``Twisted'' and ``Monster.''

``He admitted he purchased them in New York for $5,000'' and was taking them to Pittsburgh, DeLuca said. He estimated they were worth $300,000.

DeLuca said there was no doubt the items were counterfeits, noting the movies seemed as though someone taped them during a theater showing and that the CD labels seemed to have been made on a color photocopier.

Police have contacted the FBI to help in the investigation.

Gibson's film, about the Crucifixion of Christ, took in $125.2 million over five days, the biggest debut ever by a film opening on a Wednesday.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...n-Bootleg.html


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If Jesus were alive He’d sue too

Film Duplicator Sued In Piracy Of 'Passion'
Jesse Hiestand, Sheigh Crabtree

Mel Gibson's Icon Distribution Inc. has sued the Hollywood duplication facility where allegedly illegal copies were made of "The Passion of the Christ," potentially fostering widespread piracy on the Internet and among bootleggers.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against Lightning Media, seeks damages for lost sales because of piracy. The film earned more than $125 million in its first week of release.

"Damages could be in the millions if it turns out this thing is on the streets as a result of what these people did," said attorney George Hedges, who filed the case Thursday on behalf of Icon. "It's extremely serious to imagine a dubbing facility not having lock-down security on a film."

Last month, three former employees of Lightning Media were indicted for making copies of films including "Passion" and Miramax Films' "Kill Bill-Vol. 1" (HR 2/13). While Richard Young of Northridge, Victor Ochoa of Reseda and Frank Pelayo of Burbank were charged with conspiracy to violate federal copyright laws, the night- shift tape operators have not been named as defendants in the civil suit brought by Icon.

Lightning received a copy of the civil complaint late Friday afternoon. "We're in the process of investigating the facts," Lightning attorney Adam Bass said. "Piracy clearly is a brand-new area for the industry as a whole."

Bass noted that as a result of the alleged actions, Lightning has implemented rigorous anti-piracy standards: Areas where client materials are stored are now only accessible to Lightning employees with swipe cards, 24-hour surveillance cameras have been installed in duplication areas to guarantee the safety of clients' materials, potential hires are now be subject to criminal background checks, and employees will have to sign and adhere to Lightning's new anti-piracy policy.

"We figure that facilities all over town are investing lots of money right now into technology to ensure protection of customers' copyrights and property rights," Bass said.

According to the suit, Icon hired Lightning to make copies of "Passion" in September.

Hedges said his clients first became aware that the illicit copies were being circulated when an article on a film-related Web site boasted about how easy it was to obtain illegal copies of Hollywood films. Other copies also have been traced back to Lightning, he said.

"As a result of such actions by Lightning, unauthorized copies of the motion picture 'The Passion of the Christ' have been made publicly available through a number of different and widespread sources," the suit states.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr..._id=1000455680


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The computer ate my source code.

iTunes Song Swap Helper Vanishes From Net
John Borland

When a program called "MyTunes" appeared online last year, allowing networked users of Apple Computer's iTunes digital jukebox software to download songs from each other, it had the feel of a breakthrough that wouldn't last forever.

Now, as some predicted, the popular software has all but vanished from the Net, and its programmer's sites have gone dark. But this time, it's not the doing of an angry record industry or a conflict-averse Apple. Trinity College sophomore Bill Zeller, who wrote the program in less than two weeks of off-time coding last year, says he simply lost the source code in a catastrophic computer crash.

"I was about to release the second version, when I lost everything," Zeller said. "I may put it back online, but there won't be any updates. I don't want to rewrite it."

Zeller's MyTunes software was a prominent example of how even the most tightly controlled software can be retuned by its users for unauthorized purposes. Apple has worked hard to establish itself as a loyal supporter of the record industry's copyrights and has previously moved to block features of its software that allowed unauthorized file sharing.

The program took advantage of iTunes' ability to let computers that are located on the same network, such as those within a single home or office complex, to look at and listen to each other's music collections. But where iTunes itself only allows different computers to listen to other people's songs, streaming the music without saving it, MyTunes turned this into the ability to capture and save the songs as MP3 files.

The feature did not work with songs purchased from Apple's iTunes Music Store, which are wrapped in copy protection technology and require passwords to copy them to additional computers.

Apple, which has spent considerable time over the past year wooing the music industry to support iTunes, did not comment on MyTunes' release last year and did not return calls for comment for this story. Previously, Apple had limited some iTunes music-sharing functions when Macintosh owners took advantage of them to share songs over the Net.

Because it worked only within a single network, MyTunes did not have that same ability to share songs widely and indiscriminately over the Internet. However, anecdotal stories from users showed that it was widely used by people to share music collections over internal corporate networks, which often have dozens or hundreds of people online.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which has worked hard to shut down programs such as Kazaa or Grokster that allow file sharing over the Net, also declined to comment when the program was released.

Although Zeller said he might put the original version of the software, which was buggy enough to crash periodically, back online, he will not restart the project. He did not have backups of the source code and would have to start from scratch, the computer science student said.

Others might take up where he left off, however. The project would not be hard for another programmer to replicate, he said.

Zeller's program was downloaded more than 30,000 times over the course of several months, according to Download.com, a software aggregation site News.com publisher CNET Networks operates.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5171519.html


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U.S. Pressing China to Yield on Wireless Encryption
Steve Lohr

The Bush administration stepped up its pressure on China this week to back off its plan to impose a software encryption standard for wireless computers that American technology companies regard as an unfair trade barrier.

In a joint letter, Secretary of Commerce Donald L. Evans, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the White House trade representative, Robert B. Zoellick, expressed their concern about the Chinese plan and urged China to work with the United States to resolve the issue. The letter was addressed to Deputy Prime Ministers Wu Yi and Zeng Peiyan, and delivered in Beijing on Tuesday.

The unusual appeal by three cabinet-level officers is an attempt to defuse the first of a handful of potential conflicts between China and the United States in high-technology trade. The wireless encryption issue, analysts say, points to what may be a trend of China setting its own exclusive standards, including formats for future generations of cellphones and DVD players.

American industry executives and trade officials express fear that the Chinese approach could fragment global markets in high-technology products in a misguided protectionist attempt to give Chinese producers an edge.

But some industry analysts note that powerful nations over the years - Britain and the United States, for example - have exercised that kind of power by setting technical standards. With its huge population and fast-growing economy, China, they say, is merely trying to take its turn as a standard-setter.

This week's letter refers only to the Chinese software standard for short-range wireless networks, known as Wi-Fi. In December, China announced that foreign computer and chip makers that want to sell Wi-Fi devices in the country would have to use Chinese encryption software and co-produce their goods with Chinese companies on a designated list. Foreign computer makers, led by Americans, have protested the plan.

In addition to having to use a separate standard, the foreign companies worry about the loss of intellectual property if they are forced to work with Chinese companies who might become competitors. The Chinese plan, unless modified, will take effect on June 1.

Industry representatives praised the effort by the Bush administration to resolve the issue. In recent months, administration officials have raised the wireless security standard with the Chinese. "But this will broaden and escalate the discussion," said Rhett Dawson, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group. "This makes it clear on a high-level, government-to-government basis that this is an important issue."

The cabinet letter is "unusual and significant," said Bruce Mehlman, a former Bush administration official who is executive director of the Computer Systems Policy Project, an industry group. "It speaks to the importance of the issue and the precedent of using technology standards as a nontariff barrier to restrict access to the Chinese market."

The administration has not released the letter. But an official confirmed that it focused on the wireless dispute and also expressed the broader concern about use of a technical standard as a trade barrier.

An economic counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Washington could not be reached for comment yesterday. But in recent months, Chinese officials have reiterated their commitment to free trade and said short-term conflicts could be negotiated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/bu...ss/04wire.html


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NCSU Professor Receives $400,000 Grant for Peer-to-Peer Research
Special To LTW

Dr. Khaled Harfoush has won a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue peer-to-peer research.

Harfoush, an assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State, received a Faculty Early Career Development Award, one of the top honors from NSF.

The grant is worth $408,894.

Harfoush is researching “New Directions in Managing Structured Peer-to-Peer Systems.” Peer-to-peer enables computer users to exchange resources and information.

“The key objective of this project is to address the challenges and opportunities that accompany the deployment of these systems, which are currently deployed on a limited scale and mostly for file-sharing applications,” NCSU said in a statement. “The primary focus will be on the design and implementation of robust network protocols that support new schemes for organizing structured P2P system resources, new strategies for locating and servicing these resources, and varied network measurement techniques for monitoring and optimizing the users’ experience. The final deliverable will be a publicly available prototype that will give researchers and students hands-on experience with new ideas in P2P technology.”

Harfoush, a native of Egypt, joined the NCSU faculty in 2002. He received undergraduate and master’s degrees in Egypt and a doctorate in computer science from Boston University.
http://www.localtechwire.com/article.cfm?u=7316


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Pondering Digital Music's Future

Chiefs talk formats, paid services, and p-to-p at industry forum.
Jonny Evans

Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store was under discussion at New York's Digital Music Forum this week, even though the company did not officially attend the event.

RealNetworks Vice President of Music Services Sean Ryan offered the keynote at the show. He said, "2004 will be a great year for digital music", and said that successful services need to supply a "mix of offerings, multiple services (a la carte and subscription), control of the media player, and the ability to efficiently acquire customers and to get music off the computer."

With the industry ready to reach critical mass, Ryan shared his belief that the industry is now closed to new start-ups. "The time is over for start-ups in this sector," he said.

Ryan observed that a roughly 50/50 split exists between subscription and a la carte services, and warned that format incompatibility "will be the bane" of the year, predicting this would ease in 2005.

Format Wars

The latter remarks look at the emerging digital music format war. Real offers its own formats, which also support Apple's basic format of choice, AAC. Real's offering does not support the extended proprietary version of AAC (which integrates an Apple-developed digital rights management system called FairPlay). In the other corner sits software giant Microsoft, which parades a concept of "consumer choice" to promote its Windows Media Audio standard that it would like to see emerge as the industry standard in the sector.

Apple's outgoing Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson touched on the format war on Monday, saying: "With the HP deal we are going to get tremendous momentum behind establishing our digital music standard AAC as the digital music standard."

Anderson also confirmed that Apple is "hard at work" on bringing iTunes Music Store to other geographies, and agreed the company expects that doing so will "impact more on iPod sales."

He added that iPods are "doing really well in Europe", adding: "I hear in the U.K. it has generated the same sort of cultural change as you see in New York."

The format war highlighted by Ryan may be a tough campaign. Apple will fight to keep its leading position in the new industry. Anderson said, "We are not going to let anyone else take our leadership position."

World on a (Digital) Plate

A conference panel on selling music online alleged: "consumers want everything, everywhere and they want it now." Speakers from Napster, MusicNet, America Online, AOL Music, MusicNow, The Orchard Enterprises, and Payment One made a several key points on the topic.

They agreed that consumers want a lot from their digital music stores and operators that deliver what they want will "define the space." They also stressed the need to "sort out" format incompatibilities, and agreed that individual track downloads are easier for consumers to understand, and will therefore remain attractive to them.

Steven Marks, senior vice president of legal and business affairs at the Recording Industry Association of America, discussed the music industry's strategy to create a legitimate online music business.

He believes that educating consumers doesn't work without the litigation the RIAA is currently employing against 2,500 file sharers. He agreed that peer-to-peer services could emerge as part of the digital music industry mix, but existing groups would need to "legitimize" their services. He also said that current laws regarding copyright are good enough. "We have no plans to overhaul copyright law," he added.

P2P Levels the Field

Peer-to-peer champions at the show observed that peer-to-peer services are seeing massive growth, and claimed independent labels and artists have seen sales increases through such services, as they gain access to consumers--this reflects the major labels dominance of existing ways to reach consumers, TV, radio and retail.

"Peer-to-peer provides an entry point for smaller players" they said. Approximately 12 billion tracks are downloaded using such services, they said.

Jonathan Potter, who leads the Digital Music Association, warned that Apple may face unexpected resistance to its success: He described the "antiquated" rights system that exists in the US that hindered development of legitimate services, and limits the number of tracks services can offer today.

He warned that some music industry dinosaurs regard Apple's success as an indication that usage restrictions are too lax, and "should be tightened." He admitted to a sea change in the industry's treatment of the new services, noting "labels care about our success."
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115092,00.asp


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Record Company Turns to Net for Music Distribution
Lindsey Arent

When musician Shaun Bivens crafts his beats in his Northern California studio, he doesn't just play instruments. He punches buttons, stacks samples, and programs computers to create his digital sounds.

"I went from playing the drums, to guitar, to mixing. And [now] everything in here is basically a computer," Bivens says.

When it came to distributing his music, Bivens hit up a "digital record label" called INgrooves.

"I make the music. I send them tracks. And if they dig it, they upload it, put it in their system, and people can go to their site and get the music," Bivens says.

INgrooves exists solely on the Web (www.ingrooves.com).

"We don't make any physical CDs. We distribute it all online, market it online, and we find many of our artists online," INgrooves president Adam Hiles says.

INgrooves features mostly house and electronica music. Its goal is to find the coolest new artists out there and introduce them to the mainstream masses.

"We help in licensing their music for film and TV. We help distribute their music through all these new portals like iTunes, Napster, and Rhapsody," Hiles says.

INgrooves' talent scouts check out new demos and tracks daily.

"We give a lot of people a chance that wouldn't normally get a chance with the major record labels," Hiles says.

Artists Get Bigger Cuts

Bivens had record deals with labels before, but he hated their terms.

"You see how much money you make from your record sales, you think, 'Wow, I'm getting hosed,'" he says. "'I'm just getting ripped [off].'"

But he's hopeful his deal with INgrooves will result in more money for digital artists like him.

INgrooves pays its artists 50 percent on any sale of music to clients such as film, TV, and videogame producers. Artists receive a check every three months.

"With a regular record label, the record company would make 17 bucks and you'd make $1 off every CD," Bivens says. "This way you split it right down the middle."

If you want to hear some of Shaun Bivens' music, you can find his stuff at INgrooves.com under the name "jemel."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...tv_040304.html


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Carry a Concert Home in Your Pocket
Mark Walsh

MAXWELL'S in Hoboken is better known as a showcase for new rock acts than for new technology. But that could change later this month when the club becomes a testing ground for digital kiosks that will enable clubgoers to download a recording of the show to a small U.S.B. drive almost immediately after a performance.

The experiment is the brainchild of eMusic Live (formerly the Digital Club Network and a sister company of the online music service eMusic) and represents the latest initiative to offer concertgoers instant digital recordings of shows they have just seen. After the kiosks are introduced at Maxwell's and the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex., eMusic Live plans to install others this year throughout a network of 23 clubs nationwide from which it has been Webcasting live shows since 1999.

"We'll just be opportunistic about how this evolves," said Greg Scholl, a managing director at the private equity firm Dimensional Associates, which acquired eMusic from VU Net USA in November. Besides eMusic and eMusic Live, the firm's holdings also include the Orchard, an independent music distributor that supplies both online music sellers and physical record stores.

As Dimensional seeks to integrate the online offerings of eMusic and its live music affiliate, Mr. Scholl views the kiosks as a way to help draw new subscribers to eMusic, which specializes in independent and alternative music. EMusic fans were irked last fall when the service's new owner capped the previously unlimited number of downloads at 40 for $10 per month or 65 for $15. It now offers up to 90 downloads for $20 per month.

EMusic is not alone in trying to woo concertgoers with the instant delivery of concert recordings. Last year Clear Channel Communications introduced its Instant Live program, in which the concert giant uses dozens of CD burners at venues to pump out mastered CD's minutes after shows end. Last year bands including Phish and Pearl Jam began offering MP3 downloads of concerts through their Web sites within 48 hours of performances to satisfy demand from avid fans. EMusic Live itself started selling instant live CD's at certain clubs last year, including Maxwell's.

But with its digital kiosk plan, the company is taking the next step in instant audio gratification. A prototype of the wall-mounted kiosk, created with help from the interactive media design studio Funny Garbage in Manhattan, features a touch screen that gives users a few options for getting shows. For $10, nonmembers of eMusic can download a concert in about 30 seconds by entering an e-mail address (to generate a receipt, the company says), swiping a credit card and then inserting a U.S.B. drive with a 128-megabyte capacity, either their own or one they can buy from a dispenser attached to the kiosk at an anticipated price of $20.

Eventually, eMusic subscribers using a U.S.B. drive would be able to enter their account information and have the individual songs that make up the concert deducted from their monthly plan. Subscribers could also use the kiosk to log on and order the concert for download the next day from the eMusic site. Nonsubscribers could simply enter their e-mail address to begin a free 50-song eMusic trial and a free download of the show the next day. Kiosk users will someday be able to download concerts directly to an iPod or other portable music player.

While still working out some kinks with its homemade machine, the company expects it to be in place at the South by Southwest conference on March 18 and at Maxwell's a week later. EMusic Live's president, Scott Ambrose Reilly, said club owners throughout its network had expressed enthusiasm for the project.

Maxwell's co-owner, Todd Abramson, expects that the kiosks will appeal to the serious music fans who frequent the club. "I would think people would treat this as a new toy and be excited about the technology," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/te...ts/04musi.html


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QnA

Q. Is it possible to rip tracks from Super Audio CD's to MP3 files on a computer?

A. Older rock albums are being remastered and rereleased as super audio compact discs. SACD is a high-resolution audio format with sound that is thought to be superior to that of standard compact discs. You need a special SACD player to hear the improved fidelity fully, but many discs are available in a hybrid format that will allow an SACD to be played on a standard CD player.

Although most computer drives will probably not recognize a non-hybrid Super Audio disc, a hybrid SACD designed for use in all CD players may work. If you can get the computer to read the disc, you should be able to rip tracks to MP3.

Not all computer drives can handle the hybrid discs, though, and some may have copy- protection features built in to prevent such activity.
J. D. BIERSDORFER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/te...ts/04askk.html


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Review.

A Dizzying Ride on the Turntable
Janet Maslin

HOWLING AT THE MOON
The Odyssey of a Monstrous Music Mogul in an Age of Excess
By Walter Yetnikoff with David Ritz
Illustrated. 304 pages. Broadway Books. $24.95.

Late in Walter Yetnikoff's memoir, when his career at CBS Records is on the rocks, and Barbra, Bruce and Mick have stopped speaking to him, he cites a former associate's remark: "The business is boring without you." Now, with slingshot in hand, Mr. Yetnikoff settles old scores while providing a book-length occasion to contemplate what those words mean. If there are other contenders for this year's Robert Evans Award for Self-Promoting Show Business Reminiscence, they may as well desist: Mr. Yetnikoff has it in the bag. As he makes clear in "Howling at the Moon," he brought a when-in-Rome attitude toward keeping up with the musical talent when he was president of CBS Records. "Not only was it cool to party with them, hell, it was practically obligatory," he says, before going on to provide countless name-dropping incidents to prove his point. Like the following exchange with Marvin Gaye.

Mr. Yetnikoff: "Don't you realize that pot can lead to coke?"

Gaye: "I have some of that too."

Mr. Yetnikoff: "Great. Bring it out."

Books in this "and then I drank . . ." genre pose an inevitable question: If the author was as ceaselessly pie-eyed, stoned or skirt chasing as he claims to have been, how much does he really remember? Mr. Yetnikoff's way of dealing with this is to rely on the services of David Ritz, a prolific ghostwriter with the lyrics to Gaye's hit "Sexual Healing" also to his credit.

Together Mr. Yetnikoff and Mr. Ritz devise a kind of sitcom snappiness that turns Mr. Yetnikoff into the Henny Youngman of CBS. This is an approach that definitely has its points. For instance, Mr. Yetnikoff claims to have had a dream of being with Paul Gauguin in Tahiti and wowing the local women by dropping the names of Billy Joel and Neil Diamond. "Gauguin grew jealous of all the attention I was getting," the book recounts. " `Keep painting, Paul,' I said, `and I'll give you my leftovers.' "

The book begins by presenting Mr. Yetnikoff at the height of his corporate powers and as a man uninterruptedly in touch with his inner child. He claims to have been fawned over at lunch by Jacqueline Onassis and serviced by a girlfriend called Boom Boom. His book is filled with big-shot quips about Mick Jagger ("He's under contract. He can wait.") and Michael Jackson. ("Your peacocks hate me. They're jealous.") His office is apparently Substance Abuse Central for CBS headquarters. He has a secretary who claimed never to have seen anyone take his clothes off and put them back on so many times in one day.

Then comes the wake-up call, right on cue. Here is Mr. Yetnikoff's doctor, warning him to quit his evil ways before it's too late. Now "Howling at the Moon" flashes back to a Brooklyn boyhood: "For high Yiddish drama, you couldn't beat the Yetnikoffs." Since both authors are savvy enough to know that readers are more interested in rock stars than in Mr. Yetnikoff's grandfather, who kept his fly open and spit on the floor, this section is mercifully brief.

Soon Mr. Yetnikoff has been to law school and landed a job in the record business courtesy of a classmate, Clive Davis, another future mogul. It is not this book's style to let Mr. Davis or anyone else get by uninsulted. But beyond the ad hominem swipes, "Howling at the Moon" also devotes itself to the special business etiquette that ruled the record business, or at least Mr. Yetnikoff's end of it. Something he learned early on: "If you hired a hooker for a company party, you buried the charge among the flowers and wine."

The cover of "Howling at the Moon" features Annie Leibovitz's vintage photograph of a bare-chested, robust and clearly maniacal Mr. Yetnikoff, flanked by images of the biggest stars in his particular galaxy. One of them was Mr. Jackson; anyone needing further evidence of his unusual nature will notice that he supposedly regarded Mr. Yetnikoff as the nice, kindly father he wished he'd had.

But Mr. Yetnikoff has his own problems with paternal authority, and he uses them to explain his own obnoxious, sometimes diabolically funny behavior in business situations. Surely he was the only CBS employee who insisted on addressing William S. Paley, the company's distinguished founder, as "Daddy," and suggesting that Paley adopt him.

"Howling at the Moon" describes some of the vicious in-fighting that led him to taunt Laurence Tisch and David Geffen, among many others, and eventually brought Mr. Yetnikoff to the brink (Time's headline on his career implosion in 1990: "A Music King's Shattering Fall.") However frivolous he is about recycling old party-boy stories, he is more serious about depicting the power struggles, back-stabbing airplane envy and creative accounting that defined the business as he knew it.

"What overall philosophy drives the companies?" he says he was asked by a lawyer. His answer: "Pay the artist as little as you can. Tie the artist up for as long as you can. Recoup as often as you can."

Nowadays Mr. Yetnikoff is a sober septuagenarian on a motorcycle, with a tendency to get bossy when he goes to 12-step meetings. "It took me a lifetime to learn to listen," he says, with about as much contrition as he can muster. But this is a book about his wicked, wicked ways, not a story that hinges on penance.

When he refers to himself as "Yetnikoff, that brilliant and fun-loving fox," he hardly seems to regret the excesses of his ancient history. Now those excesses have earned their niche in the Robert Evans Hall of Fame.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/05/books/05BOOK.html


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The Great Downloads War

Apple's iPod has put it in pole position in the MP3 downloads race, but with the entry of aggressive new competition, the running order may be about to change, says Victor Keegan

The music downloads industry is about to enter the third stage of its revolution.

The first phase was illegal downloads from the internet, the second was the corporate counter-revolution led by Apple with the runaway success of its 99 (54.4p) cents-a-track downloads through iTunes. This has all but killed the market for singles (though the music industry as a whole is in rude health).

The third stage is the turf wars between dozens of competing devices to establish market dominance five years hence. At the moment Apple is top banana with iTunes and the justly acclaimed iPod, and looks invincible.

But Apple has been here before - it dominated the computer market decades ago but later blew it - and the question is whether history will repeat itself in an eerily similar manner.

Among Apple's competitors are the corporate Siamese twins Roxio, a leading provider of digital-media software, and Napster, now selling paid-for music downloads, both of which have the same chairman and chief executive, Chris Gorog.

Napster, the former notorious file-sharing site, whose brand name and patents were bought by Roxio for a mere $5m, claims to have the world's largest catalogue of online music with over 500,000 tracks available. It also has a $9.99 a month subscription option (which Apple sneers at) enabling punters to sample or download a wide range of music at no extra cost.

Roxio claims a competitive advantage in being compatible with Windows Media Player, installed as standard in hundreds of millions of Windows-based PCs, leverage that Apple doesn't have, even though iPods and iTunes can be used with PCs.

Apple is trying to establish dominance with the quality and style of its products. It is also trying to keep customers within its own walled garden - just as it did in the early days of popular computing, with near-fatal effects.

But the attraction of all this could wane if Apple's first-mover advantage evaporates and second movers offer cheaper products compatible with Windows Media Player and by extension, the majority of the world's computers.

Of course this market dominance may not last much longer if the European commission, which is investigating Microsoft's Windows monopoly, insists that its Media Player must be detached from the operating system. Could this open up the possibility of Apple a greater toehold in PCs?

There is a third scenario: that mobile phones will provide a cut- down but viable alternative to dedicated digital music players. There are already a number of phones - like the Sony-Ericsson P900 - that offer digital music in MP3 form.

At the moment they do not have the quality or the capacity of dedicated music players. But there is an interesting comparison with phone cameras. They are getting better so quickly that analysts predict that in a few years' time most customers will use them as their main camera, removing the need for carrying around a second one.

If you mentioned that about digital music players now, you would be laughed out of court. But in five years' time?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/economicdi...163013,00.html


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Direct Connect Upgrade

From the site

Today's a big day for Direct Connect. We've released a new weekly build that brings a great new feature into the client - Tiger Tree Hashes. Most of you won't, don't and shouldn't know what this is. What it lets you do is what matters. Tiger Tree Hashes allow Direct Connect to find alternate sources for the files in your queue. These alternate matches are based on the content of the file, rather than its name. So, if two people have two copies of the same file, but with totally different names, and you start downloading from 1 of them and they leave, Direct Connect will automatically find the other copy and start downloading!

The feature required quite a bit of work to integrate, but make sure to try it out by right clicking on files in your queue and choosing 'Auto Complete' or 'Find exact copy'. If 'Find exact copy' isn't in your menu, it means you started downloading the original file from a user who did not support tiger tree hashing - no worries, as more people start using this build, the feature will become more prevalent.

Here's a list of some other changes -

· Tiger Tree Hashing! As described at http://open-content.net/specs/draft-...e-thex-02.html

· Automatic download completion. Direct Connect now finds alternate sources for file-transfers closed by remote peers. It can find alternates by Tiger Tree Hash (Exact Match) or it can choose files with similar names and the exact same file size.

· If the remote peer supports Tiger Tree Hashes, Direct Connect will verify data as it is written to disk. This prevents transfers from becoming corrupted.

· ZLib Compression

· GetZBlock/GetTestZBlock support

· Client-2-Client Tiger Tree Hash Exchanged via GetMeta command

· Preference to control automatic download completion. Choices are 'Exact' vs 'Apparent'. An exact match occurs only when you have the tiger tree hash of the file in question and are able to find another client exporting that same tiger tree hash. Hence, both clients must support hashing. Direct Connect currently works with BCDC++ at this point. An apparent match is a file with a similar name and the exact same size.

· The back-end of the queue (Not GUI) has been rewritten.

· When a file completes all queued files with he same local path are removed from the queue.

Have Fun - Jon Hess

http://www.neo-modus.com/?page=News


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A Software Aimed at Taming File-Sharing
John Schwartz

The record industry is hoping that a little magic will solve its problems with online piracy by file sharers.

The Recording Industry Association of America has been talking up a company named Audible Magic to lawmakers and regulators in Washington in recent weeks in an attempt to show that file-sharing networks can be tamed.

The company, based in Los Gatos, Calif., has developed a technology that it says can spot copyrighted materials while they are being passed from computer to computer and block the transfer.

Audible Magic executives say that their software can be used in devices that attach to computer networks, or it can be written into the file-sharing software from companies like Kazaa and Grokster.

"We think the technology is extraordinarily promising," said Mitch Bainwol, the chairman of the music industry group. "We said from the start that technology may pose some risks, but it offers the solution."

File-sharing companies have argued that they cannot control copyright infringement on their networks.

"I think it does change the game," said Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst with Forrester Research. "Now if you're a legislator, you're going to have to make a decision about whether you're going to protect the rights of downloaders, or of the people who own the copyrights to the music."

Record industry executives, who have said that they are against government-ordered technology fixes for copyright problems, said that they are not asking Congress to act, at least at this time. Instead, Mr. Bainwol said, his industry would like to see the "peer-to-peer" companies add the software to their wares.

"It really puts the P2P community to the test," he said. "Are they serious about becoming legitimate, or are they not serious?"

The chief executive of a company with a product that could be put to similar uses said that the file-trading companies were unlikely to sign up.

"It destroys their model," said Mark M. Ishikawa, the chief executive of BayTSP, a company that monitors file-trading activity for entertainment companies. He never developed a file blocker, he said, because "for us, it's a waste of time."

Vance Ikezoye, the chief executive of Audible Magic, said that businesses could emerge from the use of his technology, which he said could be used to help sell legitimate music, not just block the illegitimate kind.

The file-sharing companies and those that work with them are unsurprisingly unenthusiastic about the music industry's flirtation with Audible Magic. Marty Lafferty, the chief executive of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, a trade group for the companies, said the software "falls considerably short" of what is necessary to work with such fast-changing technology. "P2P is an evolving technology that can only be understood by working more closely with the developers of these applications."

But some universities are already looking at the technology. Charles E. Phelps, the provost of the University of Rochester, one of two schools that has signed a contract with the new Napster service to provide legitimate music to all students, said that he was impressed with Audible Magic's ability to allow legitimate files to be traded while preserving privacy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/te...rtn er=GOOGLE


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Copyright Suit Raises Concerns
David Canton

A legal action that could potentially affect anyone who has downloaded music on the Internet was recently initiated in Canada. The plaintiffs in this civil suit are some of the biggest music record labels, represented by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA).

The action claims individuals have infringed upon the plaintiffs' copyright by reproducing the plaintiffs' sound recordings -- using peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as Kazaa and iMesh -- and have knowingly distributed this material in a manner that prejudicially affects the owners of the copyrights.

CRIA intends to go after "egregious" or high-volume file-sharers that make massive quantities of music available for free.

The defendants in these proceedings are unknown for the moment. CRIA is requesting a court order that could change that. If granted, it would require Internet service providers (ISP) to produce names and addresses of the alleged perpetrators.

Electronic Frontier Canada and the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic have both been allowed by the court to intervene in this matter to argue the legal issues surrounding privacy, due process, and copyright law.

CRIA has tracked computers trading in copyrighted songs using their Internet protocol (IP) addresses through the use of surveillance technology. CRIA needs to match those IP addresses with subscriber information to identify the defendants.

Five ISPs have been targeted by CRIA for the disclosure of personal information that would lead to the identification of subscribers using the Web to upload music. The court ordered an adjournment until March 12 so the parties can cross-examine each other's affidavit documents to determine the technical and legal issues in dispute.

Downloading involves taking information from another computer. Uploading is transferring data from one's own computer to another. It is generally accepted that the Copyright Act allows music downloading so long as it is for personal use. Uploading is not so clear. These issues have not yet been decided in courts.

One might ask why CRIA is trying to stop uploading when the recording industry gets royalties from the sale of blank recording media as a result of the same Copyright Act provisions that allow downloading.

Unfortunately, the fact that the case may ultimately be between several large recording companies on one side, and a few individuals on the other, may skew the chances for a proper hearing in the courts in order to determine the answer once and for all.

Under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), an ISP is not permitted to disclose a subscriber's personal information without the person's knowledge and consent. One exception is a court order.

There are many issues to be considered, such as whether civil actions should be held to a higher threshold before privacy is violated than in criminal cases, and whether uploading music as done by the peer-to-peer networks is actually copyright infringement.

There is also concern about the accuracy of the information being sought. Dynamic IP addresses can be reassigned to different customers on a continual basis, making it difficult to determine which individuals upload music files.

The worry is that ISPs could be compelled to provide private information that wrongly identifies someone. One of the ISPs maintains it can not accurately match the IP addresses with alleged file-sharers.
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/London...06/372123.html


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Global Swarming
Edmund Tadros

Downloading illegal MP3s using programs such as Kazaa may be quick and easy (and illegal), but downloading pirated movies has always been trickier. Even over a broadband connection it can take hours, if not days, to download files that are usually hundreds of megabytes in size.

But a new generation of file-sharing programs has emerged that allows large files to be rapidly downloaded by swarms of users without crashing the website hosting the file. In fact, the more "swarmloaders" simultaneously downloading the file, the quicker the download.

These swarming programs get around the main problems of existing music sites and peer-to- peer file-sharing programs - namely too many users and not enough sites hosting the files - by allowing users to share bandwidth.

"File-sharing networks like Gnutella or KaZaA can quickly become flooded with search requests," says Doan Hoang, an associate professor at University of Technology, Sydney. "'Leeching', where users download files without sharing, is also a problem. This results in more people fighting to download popular pirated files from the same small group of 'super-sharers', putting pressure on their websites and increasing download times."

Swarming programs, such as the well-known BitTorrent, allow downloaders to share their bandwidth, easing pressure on individual websites and decreasing download times, says Mark Gregory, a senior lecturer in computing at RMIT University.

"The principle of this system is it splits the larger file up into many smaller chunks that you download at the same time," Gregory says. "The minute you download a whole chunk, you're also making it available from your system. Retrieval speeds are far better, because you can get one file from multiple sources at the same time. The more people downloading the file, the more you will experience an exponential speed increase."

Gregory says these types of programs discourage leeching because download speeds are affected by how much a user shares their bandwidth. The net result is an elegant solution to the cyber-problem of having a file that everyone wants.

While the system was designed to help websites cope with large levels of traffic, its most prominent use to date has been sharing copyrighted material across the internet. There has been an outbreak of renegade sites packed with pointers to pirated "seed" files of copyright movies, television shows, programs and music. The pointer files are easily downloaded by swarmsharers for use in programs such as BitTorrent, to find and download pirated material.

Naturally, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), with fields of copyright material to protect, has taken note and called in the legal exterminators. But this time around, the copyright holders aren't going after swarming programs such as BitTorrent. Instead, they want to shut down the websites filled with pointers to their material.

"BitTorrent does not have its own search function, such as that found in popular peer-to-peer applications," says the MPAA's Marta Grutka.

"Once a user has installed the BitTorrent client application on his computer, the user can click on BitTorrent links on websites to begin downloading files. Since November 2003, the MPAA has sent approximately 300 infringement notices to the hosts of these types of sites."

The MPAA hopes their lawsuits will kill or push into obscurity many of the websites providing pointers to copyright materials. Whether they can legally do so, and whether this will prevent the sites from re-emerging in countries without strong copyright protection, remains to be seen.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...464632708.html


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Streaming on a Shoestring
Doug Kaye

About a year ago I decided to build IT Conversations, a Web site of recorded audio interviews, and I wanted to do it for essentially no money. I was already running a Linux/Apache server, but nothing else. The project is still evolving, and what follows is by no means an exhaustive exploration of the options, but my experiences to date should be enough of a guide for anyone who's got the same ambitions and budget to get started.

We're all familiar with the Windows Media Player (WMP) and the RealPlayer (RP), since most high-end streaming sites tend to deliver content encoded for one or both. The players are free, but RealNetworks charges for its Helix servers, and the latest Windows Media Services run only on Windows Server 2003. Either option would have cost something. Besides, I had in mind that listeners would like the option to download .mp3 files into their iPods and other players, and I wondered if there was a way to stream those same .mp3 files rather than use proprietary .rm or .wma files.

I found two free server solutions. SHOUTcast (shoutcast.org) from Nullsoft, suppliers of the Winamp audio client for Windows, is available for Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris, and can deliver streaming and on-demand .mp3 files. Icecast (icecast.org), an open- source project available in source or pre-packaged for Windows or Red Hat Linux, supports .mp3 and Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) files. The latter format can be important, since there are intellectual-property rights associated with the creation and distribution of .mp3 files. I found both servers very easy to install, although I had to do a little digging to uncover all the configuration documentation I needed for on- demand streaming. (Two options I didn't test are the mod_mp3 Apache add-on and GNUMP3d.)

The most significant difference between both of the .mp3 and .ogg solutions and the proprietary RealNetworks and Microsoft technologies is the protocols they use. By default, Real's Helix server uses PNM and RTSP listening on ports 7070 and 554, respectively, while Microsoft's server typically uses its own protocol over UDP or TCP on port 1755. SHOUTcast and Icecast, however, both use good old HTTP, nominally over port 8000. From an .mp3-streaming client's perspective, SHOUTcast and Icecast appear identical.

Until recently, users who wanted to listen to streamed .mp3 files had to download one of the specialty players such as Sonique, Macast, SoundJam, Winamp 2.x, 5.x (not 3.x) or Zinf. But just recently, the mainstream players have added support for .mp3 streaming, so visitors can now use the latest versions of iTunes, Windows Media Player, and RealPlayer.

So that takes care of the servers and players, but what about the source material? Streaming servers depend on small metafiles. RealNetworks uses .ram and .rpm files to specify content for standalone players and browser-embedded content respectively. The formats are simple - they merely contain the URLs of the actual content - but they must be delivered with the proper MIME types. Similarly, Microsoft uses ASX metafiles containing XML and allow for the optional specification of various metadata such as artist, title, copyright information, etc.

In the non-proprietary world of streaming .mp3 files, there are two metafile playlist files: .m3u and .pls. The former originated with Winamp, but the latter now seems to be the more widely used. Both are simple text files containing the URLs of the .mp3 files and, in the case of .m3u, a bit more information. You can create playlists with a text editor, or you can write scripts to create them in batch or on- the-fly.

The most important conclusion I've drawn from my experiments is that it's now quite practical to offer streaming audio without an expensive proprietary server. So long as you stick to HTTP, you can stream virtually every type of compressed audio file: .mp3, .ogg, .rm and .wm, and you can do it with free software, even a standard web server. The results may not scale as well as when using a specialized protocol, and a few users may experience more connection and buffering problems, but my experience has been that these problems are minimal for low-volume sites.
http://thewhir.com/king/doug-kaye-021604.cfm

You’ll find IT Conversations here. - Jack.


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House Passes Bill to Help 'Webcasters'
David McGuire

Small Internet radio stations are facing improved odds of survival after the House of Representatives approved a bill yesterday to make it more affordable for them to negotiate royalty deals with music publishers and the recording industry.

The House voted in favor of the Copyright Royalty Distribution and Reform Act, which would authorize a judge appointed by the Librarian of Congress to hear royalty disputes, eliminating a system that webcasters say excludes them from the process of determining the amount of money they pay to musicians, songwriters and record companies for broadcasting their music.

Under the current system, arbitration panels decide the royalty rates that Internet radio stations pay, but the cost of participating can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The new system would charge participants $150 to argue a royalty case before a judge.

"Those are the folks your sympathy goes out to. They incurred incredible expenses before they even got to the point of hiring an attorney," said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the bill's sponsor and chairman of a House subcommittee on intellectual property.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, Congress said that webcasters must pay copyright royalties to songwriters and record companies when they play songs online. The government-approved royalty rates that were negotiated in the arbitration panels proved manageable for large Internet radio operations owned by major companies but were prohibitively expensive for small webcasters.

That small webcasters have been able to survive so far is in some part because of a law signed by President Bush in late 2002 that allows them to negotiate royalty payment rates on a case-by-case basis with SoundExchange, the recording industry's principal royalty collector. Bush signed the bill after many webcasters complained to Congress that they could not afford paying .07 cents per song per listener as determined by the Library of Congress.

Smith's bill will make it more feasible for webcasters to challenge the Library of Congress's royalty rate, said Ann Gabriel, president of the Las Vegas-based Webcaster Alliance.

"It does give small webcasters a better chance to be heard," she said.

Gabriel said she expects a judge to do a better job tracking the effects of previous royalty rulings on the industry and keeping abreast of the complicated issues associated with royalty payments.

In hearings on the bill, Smith said all the major participants in the royalty debate have criticized the current arbitration process.

"It was clearly a system that everybody from individuals to large businesses felt was not working," Smith said. "There was a unanimous agreement among all our witnesses that the process itself needed to be streamlined and needed to be modernized."

Smith said he plans to meet with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) next week to discuss the legislation. He predicted that it could pass the Senate and go to the White House within one or two months.

Hatch aides were unavailable for comment.

Recording Industry Association of America spokeswoman Amy Weiss released a statement saying that the group "appreciate[s] this step forward in addressing important issues related to the process of determining the royalty rates for music delivered by digital services."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Mar4.html


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Use Of World Wide Web Is Widening, Says Study

In yet another sign that the Internet has become more pervasive, a quarter of adult users have logged on outside the traditional settings of home or work.

Some are lower-income Americans who have no other choice but to do their Web surfing in schools or libraries. But many are younger adults who are "moving toward this anytime, anywhere access," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which conducted the study.

Beside work and home, the most popular places for logging on are friends' or neighbors' homes, schools and libraries. Less common are from a relative's house, Internet cafes and churches.

Work PCs are used to swap music files, survey reports

Employees are using their companies' computer networks to download and swap music and video files, showing little concern about recent legal threats issued by the major music labels' trade group.

An e-mail survey of several hundred people, conducted by online security company Blue Coat (www.bluecoat.com) found almost 40 percent said they are using peer-to- peer networks at work.

"The enterprise environment appears to be a safe haven for the use of illegal peer-to-peer file sharing," said Steve Mullaney, Blue Coat's vice president of marketing, in a statement.

Almost 15 percent of the respondents said they spend more than an hour a day sharing files. "In addition to the legal risks created with illegal P2P file sharing, downloading can easily consume 30 percent of network bandwidth, consume network storage and initiate spyware," Mullaney added.

Maker of toner-cartridge chips seeks court go-ahead

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A company at the center of a legal skirmish over remanufactured printer toner cartridges has re-engineered its computer chips to address the objections.

A year ago, a federal judge in Kentucky barred Static Control Components from making or selling chips that match remanufactured toner cartridges to Lexmark International Inc. printers.

Lexmark's chips have a formula for computing how much toner is loaded in a cartridge, and Lexmark claimed Static's use of them was a copyright violation. Static attorney Skip London said that Static's new chips for Lexmark's T520, T620 and T630 printer cartridges use a different formula Static developed.

Last week, Static asked a court to declare that it can sell its re-engineered replacement chips.

In a statement, Lexmark said it would obtain copies of the new chips to determine if they are legal.

New fluid-based lens uses electricity to change focus

AMSTERDAM — Philips Electronics has developed a fluid-based lens whose focus can change using an electrical charge.

Philips, Europe's largest maker of consumer electronics, said the lens does not employ moving parts, so it is difficult to break and can focus more than a million times without wearing out.

"The idea isn't new," Philips spokesman Koen Joosse said. "As far back as the 17th century people made a fluid lens, but it wasn't capable of focusing."

The company believes it can mass-produce the lens for digital cameras, camera phones, home security systems and other uses. Many low-cost models of such cameras now have only fixed-focus lenses.

The FluidFocus lens contains two fluids, one of which responds to a weak but variable electrical charge. Adjusting the charge changes the surface tension of the solution and hence the shape of the lens.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...tbriefs08.html


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Keeping It RealNetworks
Dawn C. Chmielewski

At the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge last week, RealNetworks Chairman Rob Glaser spotted the father of hip-hop on the patio, reclining under the palms in a cream sweater and slacks, chatting on his cell phone.

They'd met twice in recent months so Glaser couldn't resist stopping by to greet Def Jam Records founder Russell Simmons.

"Where are we meeting next?" joked Glaser.

"I've got your schedule," rejoined Simmons.

The exchange reveals how deeply a button-down computer guy from Seattle has established ties with the Hollywood elite. The Mercury News asked Glaser to talk about online music, movies and RealNetworks' looming antitrust suit against Microsoft.

QUESTION: RealNetworks is transforming itself from a provider of technology to broadcast music and video over the Internet to selling consumers subscriptions to digital media content. What prompted the change?

ANSWER: We launched Real Audio in 1995. The very first day we launched we had available on our Web site ABC News, National Public Radio. So we always thought of ourselves as more than a technology company.

In 2000, we started getting into subscriptions and premium content. There was clearly a chicken and egg problem. Nobody was buying content on the Internet, therefore people weren't making premium content available. ...

This was just around the time the Napster phenomenon was ramping up. I remember having conversations with the labels in which they said they'd sue Napster. And we said, "Listen, you can sue an instance of this but I don't think you can sue away the phenomenon. It isn't going to go away because you won a court case." And sure enough, that's how it played out.

Q: The original Napster is gone, but file swapping certainly hasn't gone away. Despite the more than 1,000 lawsuits brought against individuals, usage is up 40 percent since December 2002. How can a paid service compete?

A: I said all along that I think our No. 1 competitor is the pirate services. We will continue to grow because consumers that have their own charge cards, or are parents of small children, understand that the law is clear and that file sharing is illegal. But there is a very large market of people whose attitude is, "Well, I don't yet see a reason why I have to stop."

The music industry is going to continue to file lawsuits around that. The cows just got so far out of the barn with illegal piracy, before there were legitimate services, that I think we should expect that the amount of time it will take to really turn it around will be measured in years, not months.

Q: What happens to services like RealNetworks' Rhapsody if the music industry finds a way to license these peer-to-peer services?

A: I think it would be great if the music industry came up a true detente with the peer-to-peer, but the problem is there's not just one you can create a detente with. What happened with Napster is instructive because one company, Bertelsmann, tried to do just that. The other guys' attitude was, "Hey why do we want to give you, Bertelsmann, control over this thing that's so important to the future of our industry?"

Q: When will RealNetworks begin offering downloadable movies as part of its RealOne subscription service?

A: We think as sure as night follows day, movies will follow music. And will be a hugely important part of our business.

We work very closely with MovieLink (a company that sells downloadable movie rentals over the Internet). The same happened with the initial form of music services like Pressplay and MusicNet, where the rights holders were too restrictive as to the rights.

For instance this phenomena where you download a movie on MovieLink and 24 hours after you start watching it, it gets deleted from your hard drive. It would be kind of like if Blockbuster sent, after 24 hours, some guy with brass knuckles to your door and grabbed the tape back from you.

The way Blockbuster did it is they understand you want to rent another video. And when you rent another video, they ask for that one back and they charge you a late fee.

Q: When will studios permit consumers to create a permanent copy of a movie purchased though a service such as MovieLink?

A: I don't think that the studios understand the degree to which there is pent-up demand on these things. I don't want to sound pessimistic. We've seen a sea change in the last six months that's encouraging. But I do think that more communication from average consumers will only accelerate the studios doing the right thing.

The good news is the movie industry and the television industry understand the need to slice and dice distribution. They have the rights, generally speaking, all packaged up. So once the decision is made, the infrastructure is in place to move.

Q: RealNetworks filed a complaint against Microsoft in December, in which your company alleges a wide range of anti-competitive conduct. Was RealNetworks forced to change its business in response to the competitive landscape?

A: We're growing business. We're a successful company. We made a set of transformations in our business for sure. Some of those transformations we would have made, regardless of anti- competitive activities. The importance of them was enhanced, let's say, by Microsoft's anti- competitive activities.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...al/8132914.htm


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What Does Broadband Mean?
Simon Aughton

'What does broadband mean?' might sound like a stupid question, but a spate of new 'broadband' services are leading many to ask whether the word has lost its meaning.

Not only are connections which offer only slightly more than twice the speed of dial-up being called broadband - 128 and 150K services from the likes of NTL and Tiscali for instance - but the increased take-up of ADSL in some urban areas is reportedly having a significant decelerating affect on 512K users contending for one fiftieth of a busy pipe.

To cap it all, Supanet has just launched a 'broadband- enabled' 60Kbps service; that's a whole 4Kbps faster than dial-up. Industry-regulator Ofcom defines broadband at 128Kbps. Supanet as so far declined to comment.

Questionable speeds are only part of the problem. The latest initiative from the ISPs in order to get monthly charges below £20 is to introduce hefty capping - limiting the amount of traffic to your computer to 2GB or 3GB per month.

That may sound a lot, but average it out over 30 days and it makes a mockery paying the extra for a broadband connection. Three gigabytes over a month is 100MB per day. Now consider the limitations of that when engaging in perfectly legal, typical online activities. (The effect of P2P file-sharing is a separate issue, given its dubious legality.)

In a single day you could view streamed media, download software - including recommended security updates, hold a video or voice conference via instant messaging software, play an online game and buy music (at around 4MB per song an album could add up to over 50MB). And if the Internet connection is shared amongst two or three computers in a household or small business, usage will be multiplied.

At what point does the combination of bandwidth, capping, contention and usage render broadband as a meaningless description. It is something that Ofcom needs to address, though its recent pronouncement at the ISPA Awards that the industry should self-regulate was not promising.

MP Michael Fabricant is campaigning for a new definition of broadband. In a speech to the Access to Broadband Campaign Conference in January, he argued that the current definition is '"Always On". And that's it.

'But you and I know,' he continued, 'that a fast pipe should be the criterion.' Because it is not, one in ten 'broadband' users are unhappy with the speed of their connection.

Supanet's 60Kbps service illustrates this perfectly. Spokesman Adrian Kerr said, 'We've found there is a genuine interest in a package that may be the same speed as dial-up, but gives customers the other benefis of true broadband packages: an always-on connection and the ability to use the phone and surf at the same time.' He added that a new less ambiguous description would be on the website by tomorrow, but under some definitions of the term the service can be legitimately labelled broadband.

'Broadband' these services may be, but whether they provide a true broadband experience is questionable.

We are constantly being told, by government, by analysts and by business, how important broadband is to the economy. We run the risk of diluting the experience to such an extent that people begin to switch off.

We also risk being left behind. As BT and the ISPs continue to divide up the existing ADSL capacity, other countries are investing technologies that, in the case of Japan, are already delivering 100Mbps services. Per second, when certain ISPs in this country are limiting users to that per day.

UK ISPs are quick to defend themselves, and to be fair they have a strong case. With one or two exceptions, they have to make do with the services that BT makes available to them, through its near monopoly of exchanges. Local loop unbundling was meant to dilute BT's dominance, but up to now has failed to do so, although interest in it is being rekindled.

There is also the suspicion that BT's presence on the retail side - through both BT Openworld and BT Retail - has a strong bearing on what it decides to do on the wholesale side. It would be interesting to see the effect of excluding BT from retail altogether, forcing its efforts into developing a truly competitive broadband infrastructure, which would be a much better way of getting prices down than usage capping.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/?http://www.p...y.php?id=54578


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Groups Challenge File-Sharing Suits
Samantha Chang

NEW YORK (Billboard) - In yet another round in the unending saga of music downloading, civil-liberties groups are arguing that individual (as opposed to group) complaints be lodged against file sharers.

The move is an attempt to block the efforts of the Recording Industry Assn. of America to efficiently prosecute multiple accused file sharers in a single lawsuit. Forcing the RIAA to pursue each defendant individually would drastically slow down settlement efforts.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed amicus briefs asking that accused file sharers be accorded "minimal due process rights before subpoenas are authorized to identify them."

So far, the courts appear to be listening. Earlier this month a Philadelphia judge ordered record companies to file separate complaints against each of the 203 "John Doe" defendants in BMG Music v. Does 1-203.

Judge Clarence Newcomer ruled that the recently subpoenaed group should not be tried in a single lawsuit and ordered the plaintiffs to pay a full filing fee for each case, for a total of $30,000.

The move is clearly an efficiency challenge for the RIAA, which is seeking quick settlements to discourage illegal file sharers, lawyers note. Meanwhile, the RIAA insists it will continue to seek group settlements and litigate.

The case was filed in Philadelphia against defendants whose Internet service provider (ISP) is Philadelphia-based Comcast.

In a similar case filed in Atlanta against 252 "John Doe" defendants whose ISP is Cox Communications, Judge Willis Hunt authorized a subpoena but required that Cox be given 25 days before complying with it, to give subscribers time to object to identification if desired. The case is Motown Record Co. v. Does 1-252.

Meanwhile, the judges who are hearing Virgin Records v. Does 1-44 (filed in Atlanta seeking to subpoena the identity of alleged file sharers whose ISP is Earthlink) and BMI Recordings v. Does 1-199 (filed in Washington, D.C., against defendants whose ISP is Verizon) are still mulling the issues presented by amici, according to the EFF.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...section=new s


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Some Like It Hot

OK, P2P is "piracy." But so was the birth of Hollywood, radio, cable TV, and (yes) the music industry.
Lawrence Lessig

If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today - film, music, radio, and cable TV - was born of a kind of piracy. The consistent story is how each generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Each generation - until now.

The Hollywood film industry was built by fleeing pirates. Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early 20th century in part to escape controls that film patents granted the inventor Thomas Edison. These controls were exercised through the Motion Pictures Patents Company, a monopoly "trust" based on Edison's creative property and formed to vigorously protect his patent rights.

California was remote enough from Edison's reach that filmmakers like Fox and Paramount could move there

Marilyn photo from Kobal Collection, pirate photo from Corbis
and, without fear of the law, pirate his inventions. Hollywood grew quickly, and enforcement of federal law eventually spread west. But because patents granted their holders a truly "limited" monopoly of just 17 years (at that time), the patents had expired by the time enough federal marshals appeared. A new industry had been founded, in part from the piracy of Edison's creative property.

Meanwhile, the record industry grew out of another kind of piracy. At the time that Edison and Henri Fourneaux invented machines for reproducing music (Edison the phonograph; Fourneaux the player piano), the law gave composers the exclusive right to control copies and public performances of their music. Thus, in 1900, if I wanted a copy of Phil Russel's 1899 hit, "Happy Mose," the law said I would have to pay for the right to get a copy of the score, and I would also have to pay for the right to perform it publicly.

But what if I wanted to record "Happy Mose" using Edison's phonograph or Fourneaux's player piano? Here the law stumbled. If I simply sang the piece into a recording device in my home, it wasn't clear that I owed the composer anything. And more important, it wasn't clear whether I owed the composer anything if I then made copies of those recordings. Because of this gap in the law, I could effectively use someone else's song without paying the composer anything. The composers (and publishers) were none too happy about this capacity to pirate.

In 1909, Congress closed the gap in favor of the composer and the recording artist, amending copyright law to make sure that composers would be paid for "mechanical reproductions" of their music. But rather than simply granting the composer complete control over the right to make such reproductions, Congress gave recording artists a right to record the music, at a price set by Congress, after the composer allowed it to be recorded once. This is the part of copyright law that makes cover songs possible. Once a composer authorizes a recording of his song, others are free to record the same song, so long as they pay the original composer a fee set by the law. So, by limiting musicians' rights - by partially pirating their creative work - record producers and the public benefit.

A similar story can be told about radio. When a station plays a composer's work on the air, that constitutes a "public performance." Copyright law gives the composer (or copyright holder) an exclusive right to public performances of his work. The radio station thus owes the composer money.

But when the station plays a record, it is not only performing a copy of the composer's work. The station is also performing a copy of the recording artist's work. It's one thing to air a recording of "Happy Birthday" by the local children's choir; it's quite another to air a recording of it by the Rolling Stones or Lyle Lovett. The recording artist is adding to the value of the composition played on the radio station. And if the law were perfectly consistent, the station would have to pay the artist for his work, just as it pays the composer.

But it doesn't. This difference can be huge. Imagine you compose a piece of music. You own the exclusive right to authorize public performances of that music. So if Madonna wants to sing your song in public, she has to get your permission.

Imagine she does sing your song, and imagine she likes it a lot. She then decides to make a recording of your song, and it becomes a top hit. Under today's law, every time a radio station plays your song, you get some money. But Madonna gets nothing, save the indirect effect on the sale of her CDs. The public performance of her recording is not a "protected" right. The radio station thus gets to pirate the value of Madonna's work without paying her a dime.

No doubt, one might argue, the promotion artists get is worth more than the performance rights they give up. Maybe. But even if that's the case, this is a choice that the law ordinarily gives to the creator. Instead, the law gives the radio station the right to take something for nothing.

Cable TV, too: When entrepreneurs first started installing cable in 1948, most refused to pay the networks for the content that they hijacked and delivered to their customers - even though they were basically selling access to otherwise free television broadcasts. Cable companies were thus Napsterizing broadcasters' content, but more egregiously than anything Napster ever did - Napster never charged for the content it enabled others to give away.

Broadcasters and copyright owners were quick to attack this theft. As then Screen Actors Guild president Charlton Heston put it, the cable outfits were "free-riders" who were "depriving actors of compensation."

Copyright owners took the cable companies to court. Twice the Supreme Court held that the cable companies owed the copyright owners nothing. The debate shifted to Congress, where almost 30 years later it resolved the question in the same way it had dealt with phonographs and player pianos. Yes, cable companies would have to pay for the content that they broadcast, but the price they would have to pay was not set by the copyright owner. Instead, lawmakers set the price so that the broadcasters couldn't veto the emerging technologies of cable. The companies thus built their empire in part upon a piracy of the value created by broadcasters' content.

As the history of film, music, radio, and cable TV suggest, even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all piracy is. Or at least, not in the sense that the term is increasingly being used today. Many kinds of piracy are useful and productive, either to create new content or foster new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition, nor any tradition, has ever banned all piracy.

This doesn't mean that there are no questions raised by the latest piracy concern - peer-to-peer file-sharing. But it does mean that we need to understand the harm in P2P sharing a bit more before we condemn it to the gallows.

Like the original Hollywood, P2P sharing seeks to escape an overly controlling industry. And like the original recording and radio industries, it is simply exploiting a new way of distributing content. But unlike cable TV, no one is selling the content that gets shared on P2P services. This difference distinguishes P2P sharing. We should find a way to protect artists while permitting this sharing to survive.

Much of the "piracy" that file-sharing enables is plainly legal and good. It provides access to content that is technically still under copyright but that is no longer commercially available - in the case of music, some 4 million tracks. More important, P2P networks enable sharing of content that copyright owners want shared, as well as work already in the public domain. This clearly benefits authors and society.

Moreover, much of the sharing - which is referred to by many as piracy - is motivated by a new way of spreading content made possible by changes in the technology of distribution. Thus, consistent with the tradition that gave us Hollywood, radio, the music industry, and cable TV, the question we should be asking about file-sharing is how best to preserve its benefits while minimizing (to the extent possible) the wrongful harm it causes artists.

The question is one of balance, weighing the protection of the law against the strong public interest in continued innovation. The law should seek that balance, and that balance will be found only with time.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/lessig.html