Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 19th, '03

[JackSpratts]

Sleepworking

Washington D.C. is supposed to snooze during the summer. Literally. The nation’s capitol is built on what is essentially an uninhabitable piece of swampland that under normal circumstances is as devoid of natural splendor as it is of political brilliance. In the summer things are considered so bad, so humid and so desperately uncomfortable that the entire cadre of lawmakers, staff and lobbyists depart to more hospitable climes, leaving the city in a kind of stasis where nothing much happens. Sometimes I think the lawmakers chose the spot just so they could take the summers off - and have a really good excuse for doing so. No constituent who ever visited the town in the height of summer could blame their representatives one bit for leaving. Summertime is when D.C. becomes the company town without a company, and that suits the locals just fine.

So it was with some surprise and a fair amount of perverse glee that I learned this week of an ugly proposal floating around the dripping halls of the Capitol building. Made by a couple of apparently over stimulated and definitely overheated congressmen stuck in the steam bath and deservedly so, it would turn the innocent act of sharing into a felony. A felony! Sharing One file. The Fine: $250,000; The Prison term: Five Years. Didn’t their Moms ever tell them that sharing was a good thing? So where is this coming from? We have a legal system based on precedent and this is very mucky ground. If I let a friend borrow a saw will Stanley now see me in court? If I share my car can I expect a subpoena from Detroit because I deprived them of a sale? If not, why not? We are talking about sharing, not piracy. This is when you allow someone to borrow something – without charge – even if it means they won’t buy it otherwise. Even if it means they won’t have to. If I lend my Dad a tomato and he takes a seed and it becomes another tomato and it begets still more tomatoes have I broken the law? If the answer to that is yes that’s no law I’d want to live under, and I’m not giving up sandwiches in America either…

Ever make someone’s day by sending them a clipping of an interesting newspaper story or a poem? Seems innocent enough and it is, wonderful even. But now they’d like to make it ugly and immoral. Probably soon felonious. What perverse brand of logic brought the country to this sorry state of naked greed?

Who are these people who call themselves lawmakers - Conyers, Berman? Why aren’t they back home snoring in a hammock or something, safely out of the way where they can’t get into trouble shilling for the RIAA? Don’t they know they could get hyperthermia? Yeah sure you can get a pretty good drink in D.C. but c’mon men, it’s just not worth it. Go home. Get in the shade. Take a nap. A long one. Don’t come back until October. Or later. Or ever. No one will mind. Hell, no one will even notice. Honest.

You Washington guys think it’s hot now? Wait until fall. Specifically that first Tuesday in November.









Enjoy,

Jack.









Interview With Niklas Zennstrom, The Founder Of KaZaa
Jo Maitland

Niklas Zennstrom, one of the founders of point-to-point file sharing software giant KaZaA, is a contradictory sort of fellow.

For starters, he’s a classic, doleful Scandinavian. Getting the 37-year-old Swede to laugh during this interview was like getting blood out of a stone.

And yet he’s got plenty to be happy about.

His invention – KaZaA – is arguably the biggest thing that’s happened on the Internet since the arrival of the World Wide Web. KaZaA browser software has been downloaded a staggering 250 million times – an order of magnitude more than anything else on CNET's download site. And P2P could end up being a platform upon which most of tomorrow’s Internet services are based (see More 3rd-Wave Internet).

At the same time, Zennstrom clearly enjoys cocking a snook at the recording industry, which is up in arms over the copyright piracy that’s been enabled by KaZaA and other file sharing services (see Service Providers Fear P2P Crackdown). He ridicules music and movie companies for failing to recognize the arrival of another distribution mechanism – one that will be good for their businesses in the long run.

By founding KaZaA, Zennstrom could be said to have aided and abetted copyright piracy on a massive scale. And yet he's very fussy about protecting his own copyright in at least one area: photos of himself.

Zennstrom flat refused to supply a photo for this interview, which led Boardwatch to (a) make do with the above picture and (b) speculate on possible reasons for his shyness.

Perhaps Zennstrom is actually a double being groomed by the mad scientists of Redmond for a key role in their diabolical schemes of world conquest?

To compare Gates with Zennstrom, you’ll have to click on this link: http:// media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I20476-2002Dec21. The picture appeared in the Washington Post “courtesy of Niklas Zennstrom.” In other words, Boardwatch would be breaching Zennstrom’s copyright if we published it. Ironic, isn't it?

These days, Zennstrom bats back questions about what’s going on at KaZaA and the distribution company he also helped found, Sharman Networks Ltd. He would rather talk about his new company, Joltid Ltd., which aims to help service providers handle P2P traffic more efficiently, using caching technology (see Euro ISPs Deploy P2P Cache).

The irony, of course, is that KaZaA creates most of the traffic that Joltid now aims to control. In fact, P2P has become a huge problem for some ISPs (see Peer-to-Peer Pressure and Caching In on P2P). In other words, Zennstrom is less a poacher- turned-gamekeeper than a poacher-and-gamekeeper.

As noted, he's a contradictory sort of fellow.

Zennstrom sees nothing untoward about this and thinks a lot of the current brouhaha about copyright piracy and P2P traffic swamping the Net bespeaks a blinkered view of the topic – and is a passing phase anyhow.

Zennstrom is already thinking further ahead. During this interview, in fact, he lets slip that he's planning another company that's likely to get the telecom establishment into a tizzy – one that will offer global voice services using P2P technology.

Check out what else Zennstrom has to say. Here's a hyperlinked summary:
http://www.boardwatch.com/document.asp?doc_id=36886


The Interview: Caching In on P2P

Boardwatch: MP3.com, a paid-for online music service, just announced it is closing its European office and looking for a buyer for its U.S. operation. It failed to make a profit. Analysts say that while free music services such as KaZaA exist, the pay-for-it model won’t work. Do you agree?

Zennstrom: First of all KaZaA is not a music service, but that’s semantics. Although people are using file sharing to get music for free there is always room for others to sell music. People buy a lot of bottled water, they pay for it, but you can also get free water from the tap.

Boardwatch: Can P2P become the next-generation distribution system of legal content? How do you see this transition occurring in the marketplace?

Zennstrom: P2P is by far the cheapest and most efficient way to distribute content from publishers. On the Internet there are centralized servers and streaming. It is much more costly, as you have huge servers and bandwidth. And if you print music or games on a CD and put it in boxes and sell it in retail stores that’s also very, very expensive. P2P is by far the cheapest way to distribute content.

The second advantage with peer-to-peer is the huge user base. There’s over 100 million consumers using P2P applications… They are hungry for media, and I don’t think these 100 million people have some kind of ideology where they don’t want to pay for stuff. I think they want to pay, if it’s easy for them to pay and if it’s reasonable prices.

Boardwatch: But they are used to getting this stuff for free. How are you going to change that?

Zennstrom: These are not some special kind of people – they are normal people who are used to paying for things. But of course on the Internet you always have free choice because everything is available, but if you package things nicely and prices are reasonable and payment is easy then definitely people will pay, not everyone, but plenty will pay.

Lots of software companies distribute shareware where they calculate that less than a few percent of their users are paying but that’s fine – that’s part of their business model, because the aim is to get it out to as many people as possible to try out the product. It ultimately pulls more customers and more people who will pay.

Boardwatch: Your Altnet Inc. [a joint venture of Joltid and Brilliant Digital Entertainment] is developing a software stack to enable studios to distribute content to paying customers. But this would operate over the same network that carries the very content infringing the studios' rights.

Have you licensed the stack to any studio to build a private content-specific distribution network?

Zennstrom: No. We are in discussions with various companies for distributing games. This is history repeating itself. The movie industry wasn’t fond of the video recorder when it came out. They tried to take it out of the market by lawsuits. After a Supreme Court ruling a few years after that, it turned out that video rentals were the largest revenue stream for the movie industry. Always when new technology comes about for distributing content, the industry is very reluctant to embrace it. They meet all new innovations with lawsuits, but it turns out that this technology is often very good for them and they make a lot of money. It will be the same thing with peer-to-peer.

Boardwatch: Care to make a guess on when peer-to-peer networks will reach the same level of acceptance in the industry as the video recorder?

Zennstrom: Oh I don’t know. Definitely [within] five years. A lot of traffic from ISP networks is file sharing. Up to 80 percent.

Boardwatch: One of the issues service providers have with peer-to-peer file sharing is that it works independently of the actual network topology and costs. Are you adding more network intelligence into the P2P stack so that it uses the network more efficiently from a service provider cost point of view? This would go along way in helping service providers live with P2P, because it could use their bandwidth more cost efficiently.

Zennstrom: The Fasttrack technology [which powers KaZaA] was designed with a mechanism in it to select peers closest to the user. If you were in Chicago, for instance, you would download files from people around Chicago, not from someone in Germany.

Several ISPs came to us with this issue. We analyzed it and came up with caching technology, which is a similar technology to Web caches. ISPs put network elements in the network that can temporarily cache a file, so that if you are downloading one file, that file has been temporarily stored in the network, and then when the next person downloads the same file, rather than downloading it from the source they can download it from the cache server. It turns out they can save up to 70 percent of the bandwidth of P2P traffic.

We have three ISPs commercially using Joltid’s P2P cache and several others trialing it.

Boardwatch: Will service providers be able to make money from P2P traffic?

Zennstrom: They do today. The primary reason for people to buy broadband services is for P2P. Not to get email faster or Web pages downloaded faster. They make money on selling subscriptions. ISPs love P2P. It drives their sales. It increases bandwidth as well – that’s one thing that has been a problem for them. But the increased bandwidth is not driving them out of business.

Boardwatch: But it's more expensive for the service provider to carry the traffic than what broadband users pay for access. How can they be making a profit?

Zennstrom: Some ISPs are forcing flat fees on heavy P2P users, or curbing bandwidth for peer-to-peer traffic. They are finding the right models. It takes some time, that’s all.

Boardwatch: Apparently the The Recording Industry Association of America’s announcement that it will sue every Tom, Dick, and Harry that’s downloading music files, is having the desired affect. Traffic to KaZaA declined by one million unique visitors during the week ending July 6, a 15 percent drop one week after the announcement, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, the standard for Internet audience measurement and analysis.

Are you worried?

Zennstrom: Not at all. We have millions of loyal users, and I believe we will have millions more. The RIAA will be very successful at alienating their consumers. It is impossible to get every second person, every school kid using the Internet. If they really want to alienate all their consumers and make them never buy a product from them again, I think they are on the right track.

Boardwatch: Verizon was forced to turn over the identity of a KaZaA user. Do you see service providers being burdened with this more and more? [see Service Providers Fear P2P Crackdown .]

Zennstrom: That happened to one service provider in the U.S., which sets a precedent in the U.S for others. It doesn’t have an impact on service providers in the Netherlands or Germany or Japan or Taiwan.

Boardwatch: In the Verizon example, what are your thoughts on the company being forced to turn over the identity of users?

Zennstrom: It puts them in a situation where they cannot protect the privacy of their users, and they may come into breach of end-user license agreements. I think it’s a dangerous road to take.

The other risk is that information that’s private – that might not be part of it – might also be disclosed, so it’s overly broad. They don’t verify that the file is the infringing file. They see file names that may be the same as a copyrighted artist but it’s not the same. For instance you may have pictures of the Holy Madonna but that may not be Madonna music. There is a whole new issue related to privacy that it is not being considered.

Boardwatch: KaZaA – is it really decentralized, or is it controlled by Sharman?

Zennstrom: The application is 100 percent decentralized. Sharman is just distributing the software. Take this example: Microsoft owns the intellectual property for the Internet Explorer browser and it is distributed by Microsoft. But IE downloads Web pages from various servers; it is not dependent on some central Microsoft server somewhere. When you have downloaded Internet Explorer on your computer, you are free to type in whatever Web page regardless of Microsoft – it doesn’t have any control over that. And it’s the same thing here with KaZaA. It’s nothing more than a browser. It’s an application on your computer that communicates with other nodes on the network.

Boardwatch: Did you ever think P2P would take off in the way that it has?

Zennstrom: I was responsible for the [business development activities of] service provider Tele2, the largest consumer-oriented alternative telephone company in Europe. It operates in 20 countries today. In the late 90s bandwidth on the Internet started to grow quite a lot. It had a very centralized model. It didn’t scale. So we thought peer-to-peer would be a natural evolution of the network – that it could solve a lot of problems. But file sharing is just one application of P2P.

There will be a whole lot of other application areas of peer-to-peer. Content distribution to deliver software or games, broadcasting, and streaming are natural areas; communications, messaging, P2P networks routing phone calls, text messages or video rather than going through expensive switches…

Boardwatch: A P2P voice network? Interesting idea. Does anyone do that today?

Zennstrom: No. We are launching a voice communication service, another company, later this year that will be available everywhere.

Boardwatch: Will it use SIP [session initiation protocol]?

Zennstrom: NO!

Boardwatch:Hmmm. How will it work then?

Zennstrom: We haven’t disclosed how yet. We haven’t announced any of this.

Boardwatch: Really [ed note: oopsie!]. Changing the subject then. How much music have you downloaded?

Zennstrom: I don’t download music. I buy CDs.

Boardwatch: You do?

Zennstrom: Yes.

Boardwatch: How do you know so much about this stuff then?

Zennstrom: My knowledge comes from testing it.

Boardwatch: Ah, just testing it, eh? Me too! So... what do you like doing when you’re not building P2P companies?

Zennstrom: Not much. This is what I’m doing. This pretty much fills it.

Boardwatch: Any more companies up your sleeve?

Zennstrom: [Laughing] No, that’s pretty much it.

Boardwatch: [Ed note: Garbo laughs!] Thanks, Niklas. See ya.

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New Bill Makes File Swapping a Felony
Jay Lyman

Despite figures that showed a decrease in activity following the RIAA's threat to pursue file-sharing network users, P2P use is on the rise once again.
Legislation introduced into the U.S. Congress this week would make uploading a file to a peer-to-peer (P2P) network a felony with penalties of up to US$250,000 in fines and five years in prison.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Michigan) and Rep. Howard Berman (D-California), is aimed at closing loopholes in current copyright legislation and more effectively dealing with crimes that are already against the law, an aide to Congressman Conyers told TechNewsWorld.

Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman, who covers file sharing on P2P networks such as Kaaza, Morpheus and Grokster, said the strategy of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and legislators that back their crackdown on file sharing is alienating customers and voters.

"Every time they win, they get closer to losing the ultimate war," Goodman told TechNewsWorld.

The proposed legislation, which targets computer users who upload files to popular P2P networks, might be combined with a less stringent bill currently under consideration, according to Conyers' aide.

Conyers' position is that the proposed legislation -- which makes uploading a single file a felony with the possible penalty of severe fines and jail time -- does not go too far in dealing with file traders. The aide said that despite education efforts and warnings regarding illegally sharing copyrighted materials, use of P2P networks remains high.

"If people don't think they are going to suffer penalties, what's the point?" she said. "Unless people see the ramifications of what they do, they keep doing it."

The Yankee Group's Goodman said the strategy of P2P foes currently centers on file uploaders, who are often untouchable by U.S. law because of their foreign origin.

"It's a supply-and-demand thing; they want to cut off the supply," he noted. "The thing is, they can't cut off the supply because the supply will just move to where [the U.S. government] can't touch it."

Despite P2P figures that showed a decrease in activity following the RIAA's threat to pursue file-sharing network users who do not disable uploading capability, he added, P2P use is on the rise once again.

The latest bill from Conyers and Berman –- who last year put forth legislation currently under debate to protect copyright holders who impede or disrupt P2P distribution of their content –- might be combined with "softer" file-sharing legislation, according to Conyers' aide.

Goodman said the bulk of Congress probably would like to see the issue go away, but that is unlikely given the amount of support on both sides of the issue. The analyst noted that legislators are split between fundraising from the media industries and the possibility of alienating voters by clamping down on P2P use.

Also, saying the proposed legislation has "RIAA fingerprints all over it," he called it unlikely that the latest bill will make its way into law, due to resistance by a Congress unwilling to anger voters.

Goodman said P2P opponents seem to be operating on two fronts: one that encourages digital delivery of content, such as the loosening of restrictions for Apple's iTunes service, and a second that entails lawsuits and restrictive legislation.

He added that, fundamentally, the RIAA and its supporters are hiding the fact that the music industry's business model is broken.

"They've been able to hide it," he said. "They controlled pricing, distribution -– everything –- and they were able to keep prices high; they can't do that anymore, but they sure are trying to protect that business model.
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31138.html


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Misguided "Anti-Piracy" Bill Introduced in Congress – Would Criminalize 60 Million Sharing Files in the U.S.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Advisory

San Francisco - Members of the U.S. Congress yesterday introduced the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security (ACCOPS) Act of 2003, targeting for criminal prosecution the 60 million Americans engaged in Internet file sharing of music and movies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today criticized the measure as an overbroad and misguided attack on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing technology.

"More Americans are using file sharing software than voted for President Bush in 2000," said EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "Throwing the book at music swappers makes great political theater, but jailing 60 million music fans is not good business, nor does it put a single penny into the pockets of artists."

"Jailing people for file sharing is not the answer," noted EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Proponents of this bill are casting aside privacy, innovation, and even our personal liberty as collateral damage in their war against file sharing."

The ACCOPS bill was introduced in the House of Representatives today by Representatives Conyers, Berman, Schiff, Meehan, Wexler, and Weiner, all member of the House Judiciary Committee.
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/20030717_eff_pr.php


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File-Share Firms Hire A Lobbyist
By Lauren Barack

The renegades of the peer-to-peer world are organizing.

After being attacked in court by the music industry, and watching the Recording Industry Association of America threaten its users, the peer-to-peer networks have formed a group called P2P United, according to industry sources.

The group has also hired a lobbyist: Adam Eisgrau, of the Washington, D.C.- based Flanagan Consulting, according to the same sources.

Eisgrau, who has lobbied in the past for the American Library Association and the Digital Future Coalition, will be trying to push P2P United's causes including asking for compulsory licensing from the music industry.

So far, six groups have signed up, including file-sharing networks Blubster, Grokster, BearShare, eDonkey 2000 and LimeWire, according to industry sources.

Sharman Networks, which distributes Kazaa, has formed a separate group to try to legitimize the networks.

After failing to shut down Grokster, Kazaa and other groups with a lawsuit earlier this year, the RIAA has shifted focus. Now the group is targeting heavy users of peer-to-peer networks.

The music trade group has demanded hundreds of names from universities and Internet service providers including EarthLink and Verizon. The RIAA has said that it plans to bring hundreds of lawsuits against those who have been "egregious" users.
http://www.nypost.com/business/877.htm


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Kokopelli Unveils New File-Share System
Jack Kapica

A new file-sharing system that allows artists and content owners to collect royalties by making use of existing peer-to-peer technology has been unveiled by Kokopelli Networks of Ottawa.

The network, called BluFilter: Authorize, is a software platform designed specifically for music distribution and sale.

File-sharing networks such as Kazaa, BearShare, WinMX, Grokster and Morpheus can plug in the free BluFilter ActiveX component into their applications. The program then checks a Web-based BluFilter database where copyright owners list their material and set prices.

When a user or file sharer finishes downloading a song, BluFilter extracts a "digital signature" of that file and cross-references it with the content database to check for copyright validity. If the file is copyrighted, the user can opt to purchase it for the preset price; otherwise the file is deleted.

Its creators say that while the larger share of the purchase price goes directly to the artists and record companies, a percentage will also go to the file-sharing network.

The system's maker, Kokopelli Networks, creates and markets products to fight digital property theft on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Other Kokopelli Networks applications track specific music downloads in real time and generate reports.

In the case of music files, the digital signatures used during cross-referencing are based on the individual waveforms of a piece of music. Kokopelli says the same recording will generate the same signature every time, regardless of the quality or distinctiveness of the file itself.

Kokopelli adds that the BluFilter component has been designed to handle elusive file-sharing practices that seek to circumvent the digital signature process.

"The BluFilter platform finally gives P2P network providers the ability to effectively control the content that is shared on their network," Kokopelli Network co-founder Alex Sauriol said.

"Our platform really provides a win-win solution," he said. "Content owners can receive direct payment from the end user and the transaction fees allow the P2P developers to create a significant new revenue stream in exchange for providing the network infrastructure."
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/


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DMCA Gives Blueprint For Chile Deal
Declan McCullagh

Congress is being asked to approve a trade agreement with Chile that would export a controversial U.S. law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In a letter to Capitol Hill sent Tuesday, President George W. Bush said the bilateral pact was necessary to enhance the prosperity of both countries and to "increase competition and consumer choice."

One chapter of the complex agreement, which closely mirrors the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), affirms both nations' commitment to punishing people who bypass copy-protection technologies--such as those used in most DVDs, a relatively small percentage of CDs, many videogames and some computer software.

In 1998, the U.S. Congress enacted the DMCA over the objections of some librarians and computer scientists who see it as a threat to security research and to legitimate uses of copyrighted materials.

According to a recent version of the proposed pact, Chile must punish with civil penalties--and in, some cases, criminal sanctions--"any person who knowingly circumvents" any technological measure that controls access to a copyrighted work. In addition, both nations agree to punish people who distribute software or hardware that "do not have a commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent any effective technological measure."

In May, the United States and Singapore signed a free-trade agreement (FTA) with nearly identical provisions. The agreement "breaks new ground in emerging areas like e-commerce," Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said at the time. "It also establishes high standards in intellectual property, transparency and customs. The FTA will expand opportunities for American businesses in Singapore. More importantly, the U.S.-Singapore FTA can be a model for other FTAs."

In his letter to Congress on Tuesday, Bush said the Chile pact "provides for state-of-the-art intellectual property protection and recognizes the importance of trade in the digital age by including significant commitments on trade in digital products."

Anticircumvention regulations are just one part of the long and complex agreement, which was imperiled after Chile did not back a U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq. But the Bush administration eventually completed the process, which resulted in a treaty that relaxes trade barriers and says that the sale of digital goods via the Internet will not be taxed: "Neither Party may apply customs duties on digital products of the other Party transmitted electronically."

Two bills that would defang the DMCA have been introduced in the U.S. Congress. The bills take different approaches, but both would rewrite section 1201 of the DMCA to allow circumvention for noninfringing purposes such as making a backup or taking a short excerpt of a video or music file. Neither has had a hearing.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-1026116.html


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How To Infuriate The RIAA And Stay Enragingly Legal

Charlie D comes up with a cunning scheme
Charlie Demerjian

THE RIAA is one of the most evil organizations on the planet. From the schemes that they have implemented, to the ones that they proposed, it is quite obvious to even the most casual observer that the planning committee of the RIAA has thought processes that would make a sadistic North Korean prison warden cringe. I will assume that you know about the lawyer wielding antics that have brought them to fame, the political curiosities that scurry from the legislative process like roaches every time you shine a light on them, and the other games they play. If you want a good start, go to Slashdot, and do a search for RIAA.

You will notice that I haven't used the term $!#£@*rs yet, the journalistic guidelines of The Inquirer will not allow the use of that term in reference to anyone who has more lawyers than we do. Damn. Those journalistic guidelines also state that I should disclose any biases that I may hold regarding the subject of my writing. Here goes, I don't like the RIAA much. I will however begrudgingly admit that I find their novel use of lawyers worthy of respect, in a Mussolini made the trains run on time sort of way.

Most people simply ignore the rantings and screed of the RIAA, it is easy (see here). If you do the math, and they make good on their threats to sue "thousands" of P2P users, the odds of any one of the 35 million plus users of Kazaa, not to mention the dozens of other networks, being sued are on the order of one in 10,000. Think roughly the odds of being trampled by a herd of zebra above the Arctic Circle, while being hit by a meteor and lightning. Oh yeah, those threats are going to matter.

A few brave individuals do something about it. They either spend their time, money, and effort to change the laws, or protest. You would think that more people would stand up to protect their legal rights from being trampled, but alas, we live in a world of really really dumb sheep.

Have you done anything, or do you just hope the odds don't catch up to you? I am not talking about hanging one of those little Christmas Tree air fresheners in "zebra repelling" scent in your car, but I mean really doing something, whether it is as simple as writing a physical letter to your Congressperson, or showing up at a local capital for a debate? Probably not, this is why we at Inquirer Labs US are going to do something for you.

As you know, the RIAA generously, with a flourish of backroom deals, set rates for webcasting songs. Curiously, they seem to have set them several times higher than what traditional radio stations pay. These rates are so high that only the largest commercial webcasters can pay them, more or less putting the smaller, worthwhile stations out of business. One would have to conclude that this was not by coincidence. We can all look forward to a vast wasteland of webcasting that resembles the sad state of FM radio in the US. Yipee, time for suicide if you liked music.

Why is this good news? Well, there is a gold hidden in the RIAA's moneygrubbing, power mad jihad, lots of gold. A closer look at the webcast rates shows that it charges .07 cents per song per listener. For the math challenged, if you have 100,000 listeners, you pay 70 cents per song. That can add up quickly, unless you are a US commercial FM station, where your bill probably won't exceed $4 a day due to necessary commercial time. If you still think this is bad news, bear with me a little longer.

The last piece of the puzzle is that the RIAA has gone after P2P networks with a vengeance, breeding hatred on a level rarely seen in modern times. No one, even most artists who they supposedly represent, likes them. Most people out there would happily pay a few dollars a year to put an end to them. Other than a donation to the EFF, what is one to do? Enter Inquirer Labs US.

We (OK, you saw through this, me) at Inquirer Labs US propose a new webcasting radio station, or a whole lot of them. This company, dedicated to bringing you the music you want and deserve, the way you want it, would be done in an "all request" format. No programming at the hands of bought and paid for "program directors", simply channels that you the listener make and maintain. Of course, this is not a 1 to 1 thing, no webcast radio station could support the bandwidth, that much is obvious. You simply can make a channel you want, and pick the programming you want from a large selection. Others can tune in, and listen to what you are playing if they want to, or make their own, or both.

I can almost sense the puzzled looks on the faces around the world. How is this any different from simply handing the RIAA more cash to sue you with? It seems like an extremely expensive way to write a custom chunk of software that funnels money back to the pigopolists. Well, you are half right, the software would need to be custom, no current internet radio software allows you to pick the songs you want to hear, they do it for you. Since we are starting from literally nothing, most of the money spent on software development will have to be put into the user interface and song selection mechanism. The technical details on streaming songs around are already written. Pick a format, say, .MP3 or .Ogg, and you can find already written open source libraries to do this part. So far, so good.

But isn't this sort of streaming illegal? Not if you tithe properly. Won't the bandwidth be rather expensive? Yes, it is, that is why you need to cache the music in various places around the internet, and stream it once to these network edge caches, whereupon they can be streamed out to other local listeners. A good place to have the cache is on the computer of the channel creator/'dj' for each channel, but others can be sub-caches if the channel becomes very popular. If you wanted to go a step further, you could make the song selection stream the music from other local channel owners who have the songs in their cache.

The other part of the software would be a very strict accounting program that tallies every song transmitted successfully to the listener, and dutifully pays the RIAA their .00007 cents per song, after all, the law is the law, we want to remain legal and stay "moral".

To remain moral, we would have to use technology to prevent the edge caches from being exploited as simple mp3 downloads. I propose two mechanisms to deal with this. First, it would only store the cache in a single directory, one that is easy to find in case the user feels there is any copyright violations going on. This way, all the music can be deleted in one easy step. On windows boxes, I propose using \my documents\my music, or c:\program files\Kazaa\my shared music. People know where these directories are, and can probably clean them easily upon notification of wrongdoing. Additionally, the files should be obfuscated in a way that they are not able to be played directly on any media players other than those that are used to collect royalties. Inquirer Labs US proposes that all files have their names changed to .MPx or .OGx to prevent misuse.

In an effort to stamp out piracy, the software should also do something that most people would find a little offensive, in a spyware sort of way. The software should search all cache directories, and, without the users knowledge, or more controversially, permission, and rename all .MP3s and .OGGs found to the encrypted file types. Guilt is presumed, that should make the $!#£@*rs happy. Oops, sorry Mike, won't happen again.

So overall, you have a custom, caching, webcasting software, that lets the user control what songs they listen to, and better yet pays its dues in a legal way! Wow. But isn't this a thinly disguised P2P network, that allows for a central database of songs anywhere on the network? Isn't this the reason that Napster searches were so much better than current peer to peer searches? Isn't this simply a way for people to download songs en masse, and pay a pittance for them once? Isn't this the ultimate P2P program?

The easy answer to this is no. That would be wrong, and an illegal, immoral use of a legitimate webcasting setup. This proposed program will be set up as a real radio station, and run as such, the only difference being that they have no DJs, are rather democratic, and run for profit.

The only downside is that this will be a non-commercial radio station, so in order to pay the RIAA its blood money, it would have to charge a monthly fee to users. Fair enough. If you look at a channel operator in this setup as a "worst case" scenario, and assume they have been in the DJ business for a long time, they might have a 20GB cache of MPx and OGx files built up. Assuming 4MB per song cached, and played 10 times per song cached, you have the following math to do:

.07 cents per song played
Played 10 times per cached copy
4 MB per song
20 GB total cached songs
20,000/4 * .07 = $3.50

I don’t know about you, but if you charge $1 per month per user, you can pay the RIAA their $3.50 per 20 GB downloaded, a 50 cent tip on top of that, and with 35 million users, still have enough to pay the rent. Legally. Cool.

This software has it all, and plays by the rules set down by the $!#£@*rs themselves. Damn, did it again. It only needs to be written, and have a company formed to tally the royalties, collect the yearly user fees, and write the software. It should probably be written in a cross-platform language to allow for widespread adoption, Java being the obvious choice here. It also needs seed money, and two people to help it along. One of those people should be a very rich, very repentant person, who has done the RIAA wrong in the past and is eager to make amends. The ability to stare lawyers in the face without blinking is a plus. Michael Robertson, are you listening?

The other person should be a technically aware, genius level programmer with a penchant for bending rules. With a person like that on the staff, you can be sure that all the laws would be followed to the letter. Getting repeatedly screwed for doing a good job by heartless corporate taskmasters for writing cool stuff would be a plus here. Justin Frankel, are you listening?
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=10452


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Music 'More Than Food Of Love' In Digital Age, survey
David Minto

When queried about their favourite daily media activities, more consumers found value in listening to music than in using a PC or even watching TV, according to Parks Associates' latest survey on home electronic living.

This consumer research project surveyed almost 2,500 US households over the phone and internet during the first half of this year, and reports that almost 60 per cent of ‘heads-of-households’ (presumably the inhabitant gullible enough to answer the questionnaire) ranked listening to music as important in their daily life, ahead of using the PC (53 per cent), watching TV (51 per cent) and other home media activities.

"Given that 75 per cent of US households now own two or more TVs, and that on average a household watches TV at least seven hours per day, there is no doubt that TV is the most frequently used media device in the home," said Michael Greeson, vice president and principal analyst for Parks Associates. "However, when consumers are asked about the most important media activity, music tops the list."

While Parks Associates found that listening to music ranked highest among heads-of-household, results varied within different age and income segments. For example, while listening to music ranked highest among heads-of- household between the ages of 18 and 24, using the PC topped the list among heads-of-household ages 45 to 54, and watching TV finished first among heads-of-household aged 65 and older.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=17062


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Asian Pop Stars Sing `No!` To File Sharing
Warren Lee

The biggest names in the Korean pop music industry gathered last Wednesday at the 63 Building in Yeouido, but it was no home version of the Grammy`s.

Instead, more than 100 singers and various heads of the Korean music industry held an unusual rally, saying "No!" to the illegal use of their songs on the Internet. In attendance were such pop-idols as BoA, Shinhwa, Park Jin-young, Baby-Vox, and the five-member boy-band, god.

"We are asking Internet sites to request permission in using our copyrighted material," said Kim Kyung-nam, head of Revolution No. 9 Productions. "It is our private property."

More quixotic appeals were made to listeners and citizens of the net. They urged fans to stop frequenting peer-to-peer or P2P Web sites, to erase all downloaded music to prevent further file sharing, and to support only legal Web sites that have obtained record company permission and approval.

With these pleas, and the sense of makeshift solidarity, the event emanated an odor of desperation and grief that signaled all is not well with the Korean music industry. Plummeting record sales in the past several years due to the increasing availability of free music on the Web have executives claiming that the state of Korean pop music is on the ropes. "The size of the total market is down 30 percent," said Kim. "If this continues, Korean music can no longer be competitive on the international stage."

With stars such as BoA becoming big outside Korea, the music industry is setting its sights on bigger pastures abroad. But they are all the more eager to settle unfinished business here and get their finances in order before focusing and capitalizing on the recent hankering for Korean pop-culture in China, Japan and Southeast Asia.

Despite everything that the music industry is facing, there was still cause for celebration. The rally was in response to the latest development in a lawsuit against Bugs Music. Late last month, the court found Bugs Music guilty of copyright infringement and banned them from playing 800 songs from their collection.

A group of 25 domestic and foreign record companies, which includes major giants such as Sony, EMI and BMG, brought Bugs Music to court last February saying that they copy their songs and distribute them on their Web site without prior permission.

Unlike peer-to-peer sites such as Kazaa or Napster, Bugs Music is a streaming site where people can log on and listen to songs without downloading them directly onto their computers.

Bugs Music also does not charge its members but relies on ads for revenues. It made 10 billion won last year, accounting for a 60 percent market share in the online music service industry.

Currently, Bugs Music already pays songwriters and singers directly for royalty fees. But the recording industry is asking for 7 billion won a month, a sum that Bugs Music says that will put the company out of business.

The freeze on those 800 songs will not be in effect immediately, as Bugs Music has filed an appeal.

Perhaps staged to offset a public backlash in the face of these latest developments, record executives stressed that the issue is not about money but about fairness and basic rights to one`s intellectual property.

But many are not buying it. Netizens flooded the Bugs Music Web site in the past week with angry messages lashing out against the music industry.

"Bugs Music has offered to pay the recording companies money but they turned it down," wrote one Bugs Music member. "Leave Bugs Music alone."

Others turned on the singers themselves: "Singers who are asking for more money are just bitching... the ones that are asking for money aren`t real musicians to begin with. If they want to sell more music they have to make real music."

Many well-known musicians, such as rock band Metallica and rapper Dr. Dre, faced similar backlash in the United States when they sued Napster, the first and the largest music file-sharing site.

"I think the fans will be understanding. We just want permission. It`s not about money," says Nathan Lee, member of Take, a five-person, all male pop band. "It`s our music. It`s our property. It`s like what your learn in elementary school: You don`t use other people`s pencils without asking."
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/da...0307150031.asp

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Superhighway Robbery

The record companies have been so badly crippled by internet piracy that they can barely afford to invest money to combat the problem. Kate Bulkley looks at their dwindling options
Kate Bulkley

So what will the musical summer of 2003 be remembered for? There's Beyoncé Knowles' sexy look, yet another Glastonbury, Craig David's smooth rhymes and the latest Robbie and Madonna hits. All this is true, but spinning around in the background all the time and getting louder is the issue of internet music piracy. What the worldwide music industry sees as the dark shadow of illegal music downloading is becoming an increasingly hot topic here in the UK.

We've all heard about Napster and that today there are a billion songs available on the web, many on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks like KaZaA and Grokster. We've also heard how the record labels suddenly feel vulnerable after having the business to themselves for half a century. But only now is the issue reaching the people who just might have the most influence in the matter: the government.

They may sound like dry topics, but copyright protection and the enforcement tools that go with it are the building blocks that politicians and lawyers need to police the explosion of illegal music. Even some artists are playing their part. Earlier this year, Madonna flooded the net with fake free MP3 files of her latest album American Life that when opened only gave the downloader a recording of Madonna saying: "What the fuck are you doing?"

As internet music piracy has doubled worldwide, the Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA (the equivalent of the BPI) has also begun toughening up on downloaders. Instead of the touchy-feely approach of trying to educate against music file-sharing, last month the RIAA said it will begin suing for copyright infringement those people who offer "substantial" amounts of music online to others over P2P networks. The chatrooms have been full ever since with people wondering what constitutes a "substantial" amount of downloading.

Of course, many of the fashions that begin in America eventually come to Britain, and this one is no exception. At the launch of the Recording Industry Commercial Piracy Report 2003 last week, industry figures described an 80% rise in physical music piracy (basically, the CD bootlegging industry) in the UK over the past year, but most of the questions from the attendees were about internet piracy because, like it or not, it is the future.

The music bigwigs in the UK say that when music downloading began with MP3 files, there was no way to collect money for the artist or the record label. The technology just did not exist, so the downloads of current music catalogues were fair game and no one got paid. "The cat was out of the bag when the digital CD arrived," says Tim Bowen, chairman of BMG UK and Ireland.

BMG and all its rival record companies are busily digitising their back catalogues since Napster launched in 1999 and they all, to varying degrees, have begun licensing their music for digital distribution to services such as MusicNet, PressPlay, iTunes and Peter Gabriel's OD2. "We are in a hiatus period at the moment because 100% of our music is available for free download," says Bowen. "But the digital download also gives us huge opportunities. There is no unwillingness to license our material to Apple or anyone else that has a business plan that makes sense. But to date, the offerings have not been there as marketable opportunities."

There are currently only 12 legal download sites in the UK, says Bowen, but they are all small and relatively fragile businesses and hold limited attraction for punters compared to free services.

At the piracy press conference last week, the record companies also took aim at parliament, accusing it of dragging its feet on passing legislation to combat piracy. The EU has passed two important directives in the past two years: one to protect music copyrights, and a second to harmonise enforcement laws against both bootlegging and internet piracy. Both are still awaiting UK legislation.

So while the RIAA is suing everyone it can, particularly university students - who are among the most adept downloaders - the BPI has yet to go down that route, partially because the laws are not in place. Peter Jamieson, executive chairman of the BPI, says the laws need to be strengthened, but for the time being, "We think [combating illegal downloading] is about education and legitimate business models. But if an individual starts uploading files without returning money to the investors behind the music, I would consider him a legitimate target."

The BPI has been sending out leaflets to universities and businesses to try to counter the problem, but it doesn't seem to be having much effect. The BPI will issue its first full-blown piracy report at the end of this year, but indications from the international body, IFPI, are that the amount of net pirate music will have doubled over the past 12 months, both worldwide and in the UK.

Jamieson wants his campaign to act as a carrot rather than a stick, to socially stigmatise illegal music downloading. "I'm a great believer in the moral majority, and if the alternative to illegal downloading is easy and usable, it will be attractive. It's just like the Americans and the war in Iraq - they overdid shock and awe and underdid hearts and minds. We want to overdo hearts and minds."

But while all this is going on, the music industry is suffering from a huge downturn in normal record sales. In May, EMI announced grim figures - a 12% slump in sales of recorded music and the termination of 400 artists' contracts. Last week, the BPI revealed that in the UK, levels of unauthorised consumption of music are one-third those of authorised consumption.

Other figures show that about five million people worldwide had used pirate sites in the past 12 months, up from three million in June 2002. The number of music files on these sites doubled to 1.1bn over the same period.

The dilemma for the UK music makers is that while business is down, there is little spare money to spend on educating consumers in the evils of illegal downloading. The BPI is now talking to ad agencies about creating a small-scale media campaign to reach the general consumer.

The commercial answer is obvious: better legitimate sites. I-Tunes, launched in America in May by the Apple organisation, is a case in point. I-Tunes sold a million songs online in its first week and features more than 200,000 songs in its catalogue, but is still a US-only and Mac-only service.

Meanwhile in the UK, Freeserve's year-old £4.99-a-month music club has proved popular (although no figures have been released), while AOL's version - which has no separate charge above the normal monthly AOL subscription fee - began three weeks ago with little fanfare, but much hope.

The most significant engine for legalised music downloading has been Peter Gabriel's OD2 company, which works alongside HMV, Microsoft's web portal MSN, BT and Tiscali among others. OD2 spearheaded Digital Download Day Europe in March to show consumers how easy it is download legitimately.

You would think that the record companies would all be scrambling to help out the legal download sites. But you would be wrong. Only EMI has clearly stated that it will make over 90% of its back catalogue available online. So without more support, companies like OD2 are left looking like the music shop on the corner trying to compete with the illegal P2P sites' Virgin Megastore.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediagua...997472,00.html


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MP3 Creator Speaks Out
BBC

The term MP3 is well-known to millions of the world's teenagers but its mere mention sends shivers down the spines of record industry executives. The format responsible for a musical revolution allows you to compress sound into a file which is a fraction of the size of the original. But a name which will be unfamiliar to many is that of Karlheinz Brandenburg - the German researcher who was one of the inventors of MP3. He first began working on a way of making small sound files some 20 years ago as part of the doctorate thesis.

"We had dreams from the start," he told BBC World's ClickOnline. But he never expected his work to achieve the popularity or notoriety it has. "In 1988 somebody asked me what will become of this, and I said it could just end up in libraries like so many other PhD theses," he recalls. "But it could become something that millions of people will use, that was the dream."

Dr Brandenburg finished his thesis in 1989. But that was just the start of the story. He went on to join the Fraunhofer Institute, one of Germany's most prestigious research facilities, and contributed greatly towards making MP3 what it is today. Now, it has established itself as the de facto format for sharing music over the internet, even though rival formats have since been developed.

The big challenge in the early days was making sure that none of the sound quality was lost by squeezing a song into a smaller file size. The researchers aimed for a MP3 file that would sound just like the original to discerning ears.

"There was a lot of testing," says Dr Brandenburg. "I remember sitting at the computer with very good headphones and always listening to a few items. I must have listened to some a thousand times."

One of the problems he faced was coping with the many different types of music. Each style, from pop to classical, reacted differently when it was compressed and it was hard to predict how much the sound quality would suffer.

The emergence of MP3 turned the music world on its head. Here was a format that allowed high quality music to be transferred over the internet and straight in to people's home computers. With the advent of file-sharing services like the now defunct Napster, millions of people were downloading music, in many cases without paying for the tracks. But Dr Brandenburg does not believe that by creating the MP3 format, he is contributing to the demise of the record industry.

"People should have easier access to music," he says. "They should be able to listen to it wherever they are and still pay for it. My sympathy is always with the artists and even with the record labels. They should get paid for the work they do. I don't like the Napster idea that all music should be free to everybody." Instead Dr Brandenburg argues that the record labels need to look at ways of using the technology, rather than fighting it.

"There are so many new opportunities for the music industry if they catch on and use the technology."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3059775.stm


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MP3 Developer Fraunhofer Institute, Others, To Reconstruct Shredded Documents

Stasi Files A Particular Challenge.

Picking Up the Pieces
Douglas Heingartner

BERLIN -- THROUGHOUT the 1980's, Sascha Anderson, a poet, musician and literary impresario, was one of the leading voices to speak out against the East German government and its dreaded secret police, the Stasi.

But his credibility gradually evaporated after the Communist government's collapse as rumors about him acquired the weight of proof: he had been informing on his dissident compatriots all along.

He had been told that his Stasi file had been destroyed. In fact, it was manually reconstructed from some of the millions of shreds of paper that panicked Stasi officials threw into garbage bags during the regime's final days in the fall of 1989.

Now, if all goes as planned by the German government, the remaining contents of those 16,000 bags will also be reconstructed.

Advanced scanning technology makes it possible to reconstruct documents previously thought safe from prying eyes, sometimes even pages that have been ripped into confetti-size pieces. And although a great deal of sensitive information is stored digitally these days, recent corporate scandals have shown that the paper shredder is still very much in use.

"People perceive it as an almost perfect device," said Jack Brassil, a researcher for Hewlett-Packard who has worked on making shredded documents traceable. If people put a document through a shredder, "they assume that it's fundamentally unrecoverable," he said. "And that's clearly not true."

In its crudest form, the art of reconstructing shredded documents has been around for as long as shredders have. After the takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979, Iranian captors laid pieces of documents on the floor, numbered each one and enlisted local carpet weavers to reconstruct them by hand, said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. "For a culture that's been tying 400 knots per inch for centuries, it wasn't that much of a challenge," he said. The reassembled documents were sold on the streets of Tehran for years.

That episode helped convince the United States government to update its procedures for destroying documents. The expanded battery of techniques now includes pulping, pulverizing and chemically decomposing sensitive data. Yet these more complex methods are not always at hand in an emergency, which is why the vagaries of de-shredding will be of interest to intelligence officials for some time to come.

"It's been an area of interest for a very long time," said William Daly, a former F.B.I. investigator who is a vice president at Control Risks Group, a security consulting firm. "The government is always trying to keep ahead of the curve."

Like computer encryption and hacking, "it's kind of a cat-and-mouse game, keeping one step ahead," he said. "That's why the government is always looking at techniques to help them ensure their documents are destroyed properly."

Modern image-processing technology has made the rebuilding job a lot easier. A Houston-based company, ChurchStreet Technology, already offers a reconstruction service for documents that have been conventionally strip-shredded into thin segments. The company's founder, Cody Ford, says that reports of document shredding in recent corporate scandals alerted him to a gap in the market. "Within three months of the Enron collapse at end of 2001, we had a service out to electronically reconstruct strip shreds," he said.

The Stasi archives are a useful reference point for researchers tackling the challenge, though perhaps more for the scale than the sophistication of the shredding. Most of the Stasi papers were torn by hand because the flimsy East German shredding machines collapsed under the workload. The hastily stored bags of ripped paper were quickly discovered and confiscated.

In 1995 the German government commissioned a team in the Bavarian town of Zirndorf to reassemble the torn Stasi files one by one. Yet by 2001, the three dozen archivists had gone through only about 300 bags, so officials began a search for another way to piece together the remaining 33 million pages a bit faster.

Four companies remain candidates for the job, including Fraunhofer IPK of Berlin, part of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft research institute, which helped develop the MP3 music format. The institute is drafting plans to sort, scan and archive the millions of pages within five years, drawing on expertise in office automation, image processing, biometrics and handwriting analysis as well as sophisticated software.

"It's more than just the algorithms about the puzzles," said Bertram Nickolay, the head of the security and testing technologies department. Indeed, the archive is a massive grab bag of randomly torn documents, many with handwritten and typewritten text on the same page. Combining all these technologies in a project of this scope "is on the borders of what's possible," Mr. Nickolay said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/17/te...ts/17shre.html


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Electronics Firms Accused Over Piracy
Darren Waters

One of the most influential figures in the global music industry has launched a scathing attack on consumer electronics firms for failing to help stem piracy.

Jay Berman, chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, made his comments as a report showed the number of illegal CDs produced globally in a year had hit the one billion mark. "We haven't been able to engage in a dialogue with either the consumer electronics companies or for that matter with the computer industry, from the very beginning Their attitude to copy protection has always been 'no way under no circumstances'."

The IFPI is battling industrial-scale CD copying across the globe as well as private copying by consumers on home PCs. The problem for the music industry is that the compact disc, as developed by Philips and Sony, has never incorporated copy protection.

The ability to make copies of CDs has until now only been limited by the cost of the copying technology. Over the last 10 years most pirated copies were "pressed" in unlicensed plants but the recent explosion in the use of CD-Rs, or recordable CDs, has exacerbated the problem. A large proportion of pirated CDs are now made using multiple CD-R copiers stacked in a lab, office or garage. In 2002 50 million pirated CDs were seized, split evenly between discs pressed in factories and discs copied using CD-R copiers.

"We would have been a lot further along than we are today if we had had a level of co-operation with the electronics industry," said Mr Berman.

Tim Heath, sales director of copy protection firm Macrovision, agreed.

"If copy protection had been thought of when CDs came onto the market in the 1980s then piracy would not have reached the stage it has," he said. Mr Berman said the music industry had been forced into the use of "unilateral protection" for CDs. Macrovision is one such company that provides protection for labels.

Many record firms have started using copy protection on their own CDs but such a fractured approach has brought its own problems.Some discs refuse to play on older CD machines, high-end hi-fi equipment, in-car CD players or on PCs. Mr Heath said the latest protection systems were sorting out many of the problems.

"Both we and the consumer would be better served if there was dialogue about the use of bilateral protection," said Mr Berman.

He added: "But we were told up front by the computer industry 'no way... [there should be] unlimited copying'."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3056015.stm


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I Am A 'Net Pirate'

One so-called 'net pirate' says the industry has got it all wrong and should not be trying to crack down on those who download music from the internet. I have been downloading music from online services such as Kazaa for the last couple of years. I probably have about 50 CDs worth of music on my PC's hard drive and about five actual CDs onto which I have copied some of my favourite tracks. I'm a casual music pirate, not the hard-bitten downloader that the music industry is trying to track down and I'm not worried about the FBI, or whoever, knocking on my door to hand me a writ. I know what I am doing is illegal, but I feel it is no more illegal or threatening to the music industry, than my videotaping of programmes from TV is threatening to broadcasters.

There is clearly a distinction between casual music piracy and the industrial-like piracy some users carry out, downloading thousands
of songs, copying them onto CDs and offering them to friends. The record industry has a valuable product to protect and is right to do so, but it wilfully fails to accept that the vast majority of people who download songs from the internet do so without paying for it because there is no legitimate and convincing alternative. For the last 10 years the music industry has resolutely refused to accept that technology and music lovers have changed and instead is clinging on to a view of the world forever stuck in 1993. In 1993, the CD was the undisputed king of the music market, the teenager was the hallowed consumer to be courted and chased while the internet and mp3s were the preserve of a few geeks.

The music industry still wants us to buy glossy CD albums with gatefold sleeves from record shops and does not care if we like tracks one to five but hate tracks six to 11. It wants us to buy CD singles, even though we are paying for a high price for one song with a few dodgy "b-sides" and poor packaging adding to the cost. The industry wants to create a handful of global superstars and foist them a global teen audience but is not interested in anyone over 30 years old.

But what happens if I hear a song on the radio and I want to own that one song?

Let's say the song is five years old and was never a chart hit and my local record store does not have a copy, or even an album on which it appeared. The music industry makes it virtually impossible for me to buy that one song, although it is more than happy to charge me £15 for a Beatles album released more than 30 years ago.

The technology to let me buy one song from the internet has been around for the last 10 years but still the record industry is dragging its feet. Back catalogues of millions of songs remain under lock and key in dusty archives rather than being offered as potentially lucrative choices to music lovers. And why? Because the music industry is afraid of losing control; it is afraid of giving too much choice to consumers; it is afraid that it won't be able to dictate what, how and when we listen to music. Issues of copyright and performing rights and digital rights management could and should have been sorted many, many years ago.

The advent of the internet age has given music lovers more freedom to listen to what we want, when we want and how we want.

More than 50 years of paying for music shows that consumers are willing to hand over money but until the music industry realises that it has to cede some control we will continue to use sites like Kazaa.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ic/3022996.stm


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Downloading Music: Harmful To The Artist, The Recording Company, Or Neither?
Carlton Vogt

I may be the best person to talk about Napster -- or the worst. You can see where this is going already. I don't buy a lot of CDs. In fact, I can't remember the last time I bought one. I don't download music from the Internet. And I don't write or perform music. So I'm either completely neutral or totally out of the loop.

That's the nice way of putting it. Some readers, responding to recent columns, put it less charitably. Their verdict: I haven't thought about it enough, I'm totally clueless, or I'm an idiot. All of these were comments about my position on Napster, which is puzzling, because I haven't taken one. However, these readers pointed out to me that the situation is perfectly clear:

1. Downloading music is not stealing.

2. Downloading music is definitely stealing.

3. Downloading music is wrong, but not stealing.

4. Downloading music is neither wrong nor stealing.

How could I be so dense? There were several variations on these themes. Some thought you could rip music off a purchased CD to use on other devices. Others thought you could share certain tracks -- but not the whole CD -- with intimate friends (although they didn't say what level of intimacy you need to have achieved first). A few argued that the music industry was so evil that anything you can do to use music for free is totally justified.

And, in typical fashion, many were convinced that their opinions were not only correct, but also self-evident. So I'm glad we've cleared that up.

A few argued the fine points of copyright law, but the connection between law and ethics is, at best, tenuous -- and the subject of a future column - so I usually hesitate to look to the law for the proper ethical answer.

But let's take my CD-buying experience as an entry point. What sometimes happens is that I go to the store, look at a CD that strikes my fancy, find four out of 12 tracks that I find appealing, and put the CD back. Is the recording company better off or worse off that I've not bought the album? I suppose you could say it's worse off, although I could argue that it's neither, because it's position hasn't changed from before I looked at the album. However, it has lost a potential customer. Have I done anything wrong? No. I have no obligation to make the company better off by buying the album.

How about the artist? Again worse off -- and on two counts. Not only has the artist not gotten whatever royalty would come from the sale of the CD, but also I haven't heard the music. And isn't the whole point of performing so that people will hear what you do?

I'm a writer, and I get paid for it. InfoWorld puts my column on its Web site. On one level I'm satisfied; I've got my money. However, if the Web site traffic maven were to come and tell me that my column got only two page hits, I would be devastated. I would be more devastated if InfoWorld didn't come through with the paycheck, but not having anyone read the column hurts a lot too.

Getting back to music, suppose I download the four CD tracks I like from the Internet? Is the record company better or worse off? It's not worse off, because I wasn't going to buy the CD anyway. It may be better off, because I just may buy the next CD the artist puts out if I like this one. Or I may tell someone about it, who might then go out and buy the CD.

How about the artist? The artist is definitely not worse off, because I wasn't going to buy the CD anyway. So he or she isn't losing anything. But, in the sense of having someone appreciate the performance, the artist is definitely better off. There may be some artists who don't care at all about audience appreciation, but if all a performer is interested in is the money, I suspect I wouldn't even be downloading the music.

So putting aside legal considerations, the ethical question at hand is, "Have I harmed anyone?" That is, have I set back any of their important interests without justification? Because I have no obligation to buy a CD, if I don't want one, it's hard to say that I have harmed either the artist or the recording company by not buying the CD. And in downloading the music, I may have advanced at least one of the artist's interests because I am listening to the music.

On the other hand, if I am downloading or sharing the music to avoid otherwise buying the CD, then you could say that I was harming both the artist and the recording company because I was depriving them of income they otherwise would have had -- my money. And that makes all the difference.

The fly in the ointment lies in who determines whether or not I would have bought the CD. You certainly don't know and neither does the recording company. I may think I know, but we have a remarkable ability to deceive ourselves, especially when self interest is involved.
http://www2.infoworld.com/articles/o...tfriendly.html



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'Phantom' Game Console Is Really A Copyright Protection Device
Robin Miller

Over the last few months computer and gaming-related publications) have gotten stacks of press releases from a company called Infinium Labs touting its upcoming Phantom game console. Some game industry insiders have derided the Phantom as vaporware, while others have laughed it off as "just another set-top box." The truth is, it is neither vaporware nor purely a set-top box, but part of an online PC game retailing system designed to protect game publishers' intellectual property while increasing profits for broadband ISPs. The promise for consumers is the availability of more games, for less money, than ever before. Will Infinium be able to pull this off? At least $25 million worth of venture capital is betting "yes."

Let's start by saying the console is real, not vaporware. I've seen a working prototype in action. Inside the spacy-looking case it's just a PC running Windows XP that has no CD or floppy drive, and uses a proprietary encryption scheme for data stored on its hard drive.

The specs for the final, finished version that will be shipped to end users are still in flux, but at the $400 price point mentioned by Infinium CEO Tim Roberts while he and I were looking at a mockup hidden away at respected (but low-profile) Robrady Design in Sarasota, Florida, it ought to be no big deal to deliver a 2GHz Mini-ATX PC with a wireless keyboard, mouse, and cool-looking game controller.

In fact, Roberts said during our chat, one of the reasons now is a better time than the height of the dot-boom to launch Infinium Labs is that "component prices have dropped" enough to make this computer feasible at $400 per unit, a`price even lower than the $600 to $700 he spoke of as recently as February.

Really, the only thing that differentiates this 'game console' from a standard, Windows-running PC is that it has no way to get data on or off of it except through a dedicated connection to Infinium Labs' own servers via your broadband ISP, plus the fact that if you try to open it up or modify it or grab data from the hard drive, bad things will happen, starting with violation of the terms under which you will lease or purchase the Phantom.

The console is only the tip of the netberg

http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/07/09/2042207


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Steer Clear Of The Suits

Following a recent decision by the RIAA to crack down on file swappers, Clint Witchalls went in search of providers helping users stay anonymous.

Quick! Here comes the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) with a bag full of lawsuits. Delete all your dodgy MP3s, uninstall your peer-to-peer software and scrub your hard disk with cleanser.

Isn't that what everyone is doing? Not according to Wayne Rosso, spokesman for Grokster, the popular P2P system. Since the RIAA recently made the announcement that they were going after individuals who swapped copyright protected music on P2P networks, Grokster's downloads have increased by 10%. "Users are sending a message to the RIAA. They're saying 'up yours'," says Rosso.

Other P2P providers experienced only momentary dips in traffic. One reason Grokster did not experience a dip may be because its biggest user-base is in London. The RIAA will probably go after the 60m P2P users in its own country before fighting battles in foreign courts.

But I don't feel entirely safe sharing my Charlie Mingus choons with the world when the RIAA is in such a litigious mood. They will probably come after me to set an example to the 100m P2P users outside the US. A born worrier, I was pleased to read that a number of P2P providers have been working assiduously to bring anonymous P2P to the masses. Keen to stay ahead, I took a look at some of the RIAA get-arounds.

Blubster
At the end of last month, Madrid-based Optisoft, SL released Blubster version 2.5. It has been around for a while, but this new version promises full anonymity to users. Pablo Soto, Blubster's developer, has written a proprietary MP2P protocol which he describes as: "If other means of delivering media files could be compared with a postal system with an identifiable sender and receiver, then Blubster's proprietary MP2P network could be likened to throwing a bottled message into the ocean. The message may get to a destination, but no one knows the full path of its journey nor what is in each bottle."

Blubster is a friendly application, so it is little wonder that the program has been downloaded 13m times. Blubster, aimed at your average P2P user, comes with an MP3 player, and supports the Ogg Vorbis file format (the open source compression and streaming technology). A word of warning, though: Blubster is bundled with Gator spyware. However, Hal Bring man, a Blubster spokesman, says you can download what is essentially Blubster, but without the spyware, from their sister company, Piolet.

Filetopia
Not only does Filetopia use strong cipher encryption, it also uses a "bouncer" described as "a program that 'bounces' connections from one machine to another". That is, you connect to the machine where the bouncer resides, and this machine connects to another user's computer. This way, the user only sees the IP of the bouncer machine. But there is a price for anonymity. Downloads can be about as fast and reliable as a Virgin train.

EarthStation5
From Gaza City in Palestine, Ras Kabir brings us EarthStation5, another anonymous P2P system that allows you to download via a proxy server. Kabir points out that this is not to be confused with a corporate firewall/proxy/socks proxy. ES5 allows users to send connection requests through intermediary proxy servers throughout the world so that the download destination of a file cannot be traced. On the plus side, ES5 is spyware free. However, it has more bugs than the Royal Entomological Society.

Waste
Waste was developed by AOL employee Justin Frankel. Frankel posted the application on the web without his employer's permission, and AOL has since been trying to stamp out proliferation of copies - a futile act. Although Waste is really a chat and IRC program with CIA-proof cryptography, it can be used for file sharing among small groups of friends - a dozen people, say. The upper limit on the number of users in a cluster is 50. Given the sparseness of its screens and the lack of a help facility, I wouldn't recommend this to a novice.

PeerGuardian
PeerGuardian is not an anonymous system, but an add-on that blocks "enemy" IP addresses from accessing your files. If the RIAA wanted to snoop on me, they could see my files, but they couldn't download them. The problem is that the RIAA and other music and film industry representatives can keep changing IP addresses. PeerGuardian's list of blocked IP addresses has passed 4m and is growing.

XS
The 23-year-old Englishman Tim Leonard, who developed PeerGuardian, has also developed XS, an anonymous P2P system. It offers file sharing, chat and instant messaging and employs a similar technique to Filetopia's bounce nodes.

BlueTack
BlueTack is another IP blocking system. Dominic Skey, who heads up BlueTack, takes blocks of IP addresses (lists of known hackers, the RIAA or anyone you don't want snooping around your hard drive), and converts them so they can be used with specific P2P programs.

Skey warns that blocklists don't stop snoopers from looking at what you share, but makes their life more difficult. "Even the most complete blocklist will not prevent a determined corporate spy," he says. "They can easily use a residential dial-up account to masquerade as a home user. The only way to remain 100% protected, when using P2P apps which do not hide your IP address, is not to share copyrighted materials!"

Ahem... this author does not condone the illegal sharing of copyright material. The above product reviews are for entertainment only.

Peer-to-peer providers

Blubster
www.blubster.com
Piolet
www.piolet.com
Filetopia
www.filetopia.org
EarthStation5
www.earthstation5.com
Waste
For obvious reasons, you'll have to find it yourself
PeerGuardian
http://methlabs.org/methlabs.htm
XS
http://methlabs.org/methlabs.htm
Blue tack
www.bluetack.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/sto...994670,00.html


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Comic Adaptation

Why the big-screen version of ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ is a failure.
Brad Stone

It should be an extraordinary time to be a fan of the cult comic book “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” the dark series written by the medium’s master, Alan Moore (“Watchmen,” “From Hell”), which brings together characters from classic 19th-century English literature.

HE HEROES OF “League” include Mina Harker from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”; Allan Quatermain, from H. Rider Haggard’s “King Solomon’s Mines”; Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, and the title character of H. G. Well’s “The Invisible Man.” For four years, this reluctant retinue has battled the most pernicious of Victorian villains, from Fu Manchu to Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime.

And yet it isn’t. As a devotee from the very first issue in 1999, released under Moore’s own imprint, ABC (now a division of DC Comics), I can testify that there’s nothing but uneasiness today in the minds of the fans. The series is nearing its end, and there are rumors of Moore’s imminent retirement from comics. Currently, we’re mired in one of those six-month-long waits between issues, the inevitable result of Moore’s heavy workload and illustrator Kevin O’Neal’s meticulous period drawings. But this delay is particularly grueling. Currently in the story, Quatermain and Harker are falling in love, the Martians from H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” are about to sack London—and Hyde has just performed an act of vengeance on the invisible man that is so gruesome and debased that it will shock even veteran consumers of Hollywood violence.

And then there’s the movie. “LXG” or “The League” or whatever Fox has decided to call it, opens today nationwide. The celluloid take on Moore’s original idea is thin, unsatisfying gruel. Bad writing, bad villains, bad acting, bad directing. Sean Connery as Quatermain stares into the camera as if he’d like to throttle director Stephen Norrington (they reportedly feuded on set). The incomprehensible fight scenes are reminiscent of Joel Schumacher’s franchise-killing Batman movies. Norrington swings for and misses the spirit of the comics.

One of the film’s problems, and the comic book’s strengths, is enormously relevant in an age of rampant online file-sharing and courtroom wars over extension of the copyright term. In the comic book, Moore shows the benefit of having a rich public domain. He plucks old characters from obscurity, brings them together and makes them dance. The public domain works the way it’s supposed to. New creators enliven old works and send interested readers scurrying back to the original texts.

At the same time, the film illustrates how modern copyrights restrict the use of established cultural texts that should be in the public domain. For American audiences, Tom Sawyer is added to the mix, but evidently Fox couldn’t clear his film rights, so he’s referred to only as “agent Sawyer.” A friend of mine walked out of the movie having no idea Mark Twain’s rambunctious kid was all grown up and inexplicably sneaking about London with a shotgun.

Then there’s the film’s generic invisible man. Though H. G. Well’s lunatic scientist, Hawley Griffin, was available to Moore for the comic book, Universal made “The Invisible Man” in the ’30s and still owns film rights. So this is an invisible man named Rodney Skinner, and his awkward origin story, explained early in the movie, brings the momentum crashing to a halt. A better script could have fixed these flaws, but someone didn’t love the film enough to care.

Here’s a disclaimer: my wife, Jennifer Granick, and her boss at Stanford Law School, Larry Lessig, spend a lot of time worrying about how Hollywood bigfoots like Disney successfully lobby Congress to extend the copyright term and keep works out of the public domain. In Eldred vs. Ashcroft, recently argued before the Supreme Court, Lessig tried to stop the most recent extension of the copyright term an additional 20 years, or a total 70 years past the life of the creator. He lost. Most Americans shrugged their shoulders.

“The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” both the comic and the film, demonstrate why ordinary people should care about Lessig’s cause. A rich public domain enables creative geniuses like Alan Moore to reach into society’s collective memory and produce complex, fun and socially valuable works. The existence of the “League” comic doesn’t harm the original creators, it directs a new generation of fans back to the source material that continues to inspire pop fiction today. Meanwhile, the film shows how ridiculous copyright restrictions have become. Fox probably could have used Wells’s original invisible man but didn’t want to risk an expensive legal skirmish with Universal. Just the existence of onerous copyright law has a chilling effect on creators.

The public-domain possibilities that Moore demonstrates are endless. What about a League of Extraordinary 20th-Century Gentlemen? Tom Swift joins with Doc Savage, the Shadow and Nancy Drew. Folks would pay a lot of money to see or read that story. But it couldn’t happen. Those heroes are all locked up under copyright.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/937833.asp?0cv=KB20&cp1=1


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Studios Stage Fight Against Internet Bill
Jon Healey, Times Staff Writer

The Hollywood studios are fighting a behind-the-scenes battle in Sacramento to derail a bill they say would promote online piracy — though the bill has little to do with downloading movies.

Actually, the fight may have more to do with who's behind the legislation: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties and technology advocacy group that frequently opposes the studios' anti-piracy initiatives.

The measure by Assemblyman Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) would help Internet users maintain the anonymity they have in chat rooms and elsewhere on the Internet when sued in state court for something they said or did online.

Passed by the Assembly on June 2 and scheduled for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, AB 1143 would require Internet services to notify customers of subpoenas seeking their identities and give customers 30 days to challenge the requests in court.

Because it would apply to lawsuits in state courts, the bill wouldn't affect people accused of pirating movies or other copyrighted works online. Copyright cases are heard in federal court.

Still, lobbyists for the movie, video game and retail industries argue that AB 1143 would take away one of the tools they need to ferret out Internet users who violate trade secrets, offer counterfeit goods or steal intellectual property.

The battle is the latest in a series between entertainment companies and privacy and consumer advocates. It's a near replay of the fight between the Recording Industry Assn. of America and Verizon Communications Inc. over the RIAA's use of federal court subpoenas to obtain the names of alleged music pirates who used Verizon's Internet services. Verizon released the names on a federal judge's order, but it is appealing the ruling.

For the studios' trade organization, the Motion Picture Assn. of America, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's support for AB 1143 is a main reason to work to block the bill, said Vans Stevenson, MPAA senior vice president for state legislative affairs. Alternatively, the group wants to exempt subpoenas related to intellectual property, a change the EFF says would gut the bill.

Stevenson said AB 1143 was part of the EFF's agenda "to make sure people have unfettered free access to everything on the Internet."

"It's clear that they have a legislative agenda, both defensively and offensively, to undermine the ability of the intellectual-property community to legitimately protect its work from theft."

Nonsense, said Cindy Cohn, legal director of San Francisco-based EFF. The purpose of AB 1143, she said, was to protect people from abusive "John Doe" lawsuits that aim to silence users online.

"You don't have the right to use the cover of anonymity to protect yourself" when breaking the law, Cohn said. But as it is, "the law is not giving a fair shake to those who are wrongly accused or who are accused for the purpose of shutting them up."

Simitian, whose Silicon Valley district has thrived on patents and other intellectual property, said both sides have legitimate concerns.

"I would hope that people would consider the bill based on merits, not motives, and based on consideration of the policy, not the players," he said. "I'm interested in doing good policy work. I'm not much interested in getting caught up in a spitting match between competing interest groups."

The EFF and the MPAA have been spitting at each other frequently in the last year.

They have faced off in state legislatures across the country over MPAA- sponsored bills to expand laws against the theft of services, which the EFF argued would weaken free-speech and privacy rights. They have butted heads at the Federal Communications Commission over a proposed regulation to bar retransmission of digital television broadcasts over the Internet, and in Congress over a bill to require anti-piracy technology in an array of digital devices.

The EFF is defending the distributors of a file-sharing program and the makers of DVD-copying software against copyright-infringement lawsuits brought by the MPAA. In the appeal of the Verizon case, the two groups are clashing over the ability of accused infringers to fight for their anonymity in court.

In Sacramento, AB 1143 is opposed by industries beyond the studios, the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild of America. Several California- based video game companies — including Electronic Arts Inc., Eidos Interactive Ltd. and Capcom USA Inc. — weighed in against the bill this month, contending that it would interfere with their ability to bring cases against pirates. And Yahoo Inc., which has won several changes in the bill, said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that it couldn't support the bill unless more changes were made to clarify and limit the obligations of Internet services.

In a letter to Simitian, Yahoo lobbyist John Scheibel said his company expected to receive 600 subpoenas in 2003, up 50% from last year.

Yahoo, like many large Internet services, voluntarily alerts users when it receives a subpoena. Under current law, Internet services have to turn over the requested name and address within 10 days, leaving little time for a user to challenge the subpoena in court. Simitian's bill is designed to give users 30 days to challenge a subpoena.

Cohn said her office gets two to five requests for help each month from individuals or groups who want to fight a subpoena in a "John Doe" case. One such request came from four people sued in 2001 by an Arizona-based ambulance company, which accused them of making false statements about the company and said they might be in a position to reveal trade secrets on a Yahoo message board.

One of the four, who asked not to be identified, said the message board was filled with comments criticizing the company's management for causing its stock price to plummet. The company went "on a fishing expedition with subpoenas and shut people up," he said.

"If I hadn't had the EFF on my side, financially I'd be devastated," he said. The EFF's intervention protected the group's anonymity and led the company to drop the lawsuit, he said, but by that time the message board had been silenced.

The California bill was drafted for the EFF and Simitian by law students at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley. Deirdre K. Mulligan, director of the clinic, said Virginia adopted a similar statute two years ago, causing no apparent damage to the enforcement of intellectual-property rights there.

But the MPAA's Stevenson said the bill would diminish the studios' ability to protect their copyrighted works against theft, hacking and other online perils by giving violators a 30-day warning. "All we're seeking is a name, that's it," Stevenson said. "We're seeking a name behind the Internet address. We have a long history, in California and elsewhere, of protecting people's 1st Amendment rights, and we're clearly on that side."

Besides, he said, California already provides plenty of protection against frivolous or abusive lawsuits. But Mulligan noted that those penalties typically don't kick in until after someone's identity is revealed.

"That's the problem with privacy," she said. "Once it's been disclosed, you can certainly get money back, but you can't get your privacy back."
http://www.latimes.com/la-fi-mpaa15j...,5330886.story


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Difficult Times Ahead, But Money Will Be Made From Digital Music, report
David Minto

The online music industry faces difficult times ahead with over 18 per cent of internet users still using illegal file
sharing, according to the Jupiter Research’s latest research.

Unsurprisingly, Jupiter Research contends that until genuine cooperation is reached between broadband service providers (BSPs) and the music industry, consumers will remain unconvinced of the need to pay for online music. According to the company’s survey, the European online music market has made little progress, with 43 per cent of consumers surveyed still not convinced of the need to pay for a digital music service. Whilst 29 per cent of BSPs remain confident that digital music will ultimately generate revenues, the company found that major barriers to uptake remain, with too little major label content available online, overly restrictive digital rights and low broadband penetration.

Though Jupiter Research says that access to online music remains a driver for consumer broadband uptake, consumers still primarily see this as a route to gaining improved access to illegal file sharing sites.

The research firm believes 2002 was a year of missed opportunity as the music industry failed to grant the types of licences to legitimate online music services that would have empowered them to compete with illegal file sharing. By contrast, however, Jupiter Research believes 2003 to have so far been a year of progress, with labels making more of their catalogue available for digital distribution and over half of BSPs interviewed by Jupiter Research stating that they intend to launch a music service later in the year.

Mark Mulligan, senior analyst at Jupiter Research, said, "Despite the optimism of BSPs, our research demonstrates that consumer revenues from the online music industry are likely to remain small in the near term. The real value of music services for BSPs though, lies in reducing churn and improving consumer satisfaction as part of a wider content strategy. However, until real cooperation exists between BSPs and the music industry consumers, illegal file sharing will continue to hinder uptake of legitimate music services."
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=17033


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A Royalties Plan For File Sharing
William Fisher

The Recording Industry Association of America has announced that it will soon bring its formidable legal forces to bear on the individuals who share copyrighted music files through the Internet.

Starting as early as mid-August, it expects to file "thousands" of lawsuits against people who make large numbers of songs available on peer-to-peer networks.

The RIAA is right about three things. First, under current copyright law, the behavior of the file swappers is illegal. Second, partly (although only partly) as a result of the ubiquity of file swapping, the music industry is in crisis. CD sales continue to decline, record company revenue is falling at an accelerating pace, and many music retailers are going out of business. Third, among the groups threatened by this crisis are the creators of music--the composers and performers.

The RIAA now takes the position that the only way to solve the crisis and protect the creators is to sue many individual file swappers, hoping that the threat of both civil and criminal penalties will prompt the millions of people worldwide who currently engage in this behavior to mend their ways. Its new strategy has many disadvantages and perils.

The proposed litigation campaign will be extraordinarily costly. It is likely to be ineffective--as file swappers use proxy servers, offshore Internet sites, and encrypted peer-to-peer systems to avoid detection. And it will further alienate the already disaffected community of music consumers. More importantly, better solutions to the crisis in the music industry are available. The more dramatic--but also the best--would be the establishment of a compulsory licensing system.

In brief, here's how such a system would work:

The creator of a recording would register it with the U.S. Copyright Office and would receive, in return, a unique file name, which would be used to track Internet transmissions of the work. The government would tax devices and services used to gain access to digital entertainment. The primary target of such a tax would be ISP access.

Secondary targets would include CD burners, blank CDs, MP3 players, etc. Using techniques pioneered by American and European performing-rights organizations, a government agency would estimate the frequency with which each song was enjoyed by consumers. Revenue collected from the tax would then be distributed by the government agency to creators in proportion to the rates with which their songs were being consumed.

Once this alternative mechanism for compensating creators was in place, the old one would be dismantled. In other words, copyright law would be reformed to eliminate the current prohibitions on the reproduction, distribution, public performance, adaptation, and encryption circumvention of published music recordings.

The social advantages of such a system would be large. Consumers would pay much less for much more music. Creators would be fairly compensated--indeed, would earn more than under the current regime. The set of musicians who could earn a livelihood by making their work available to the public would increase sharply. And litigation costs would decline dramatically.

To be sure, such a system is not yet ready for immediate implementation. Many technical and administrative issues need to be resolved before it could be launched. But several academics, programmers, and public-interest groups are currently working to address those issues.

The RIAA should join us. Instead of continuing to waste its money and credibility on an unwinnable war against the file- sharing masses, it should cooperate in the design of a solution to the underlying problem that would benefit all of the players in this drama.
http://news.com.com/2010-1071-1024856.html


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Give us our filthy lucre.

Holy War Declared On Religious Music Downloads
Chris Lewis

While the Recording Industry Association of America is preparing to file lawsuits to curb illegal music downloading, the Christian music industry is responding to the problem by appealing to their customers’ faith and moral values.

The Christian Music Trade Association has formed an anti-piracy task force that is meeting weekly to develop ways to spread the word to Church groups and CD buyers that downloading is not only illegal, it violates one of the key tenets of the Christian faith: Thou shalt not steal.

The Nashville-based trade group and affiliated Gospel Music Association reported earlier this month that sales of Christian CD units are down 10 percent the first half of this year over the same time last year, compared to an 8 percent decline in the overall music industry.

“Clearly one of the culprits is the fact that so many people are downloading music without paying for it and burning CDs illegally. It is causing economic harm to everybody in the food chain involved in music, from the songwriters to retailers,” said John Styll, president of both groups. “We felt like in the Christian community, there is, beyond a legal obligation, also an ethical and moral obligation. We think in the Christian community, we can appeal to that side.”

On the task force with Styll and Gabriel Aviles, director of the trade group, are presidents of the labels controlling about 90 percent of the Christian music business: Bill Hearn of EMI CMG (Christian Music Group), Malcolm Mimms of Word Entertainment, Terry Hemmings of Provident Music Group, and Jeff Moseley of INO Records.

As one of its first tasks, the panel is developing a warning label to be packaged with every Christian music CD that gently warns of the illegalities of downloading intellectual property without paying for it. The long-term goal to have a broader educational plan in place this fall, Styll said.

“We are planning to create programs and educational materials for churches to share with their congregations, starting with the youth departments, because that’s where the majority of the downloading takes place,” Styll said.

Interlinc, a youth ministries resource provider based in Nashville, is helping the panel develop an intervention program for the nation’s youth ministries. Interlinc has been tracking qualitative research by Baylor University to find out why Christian youth are illegally downloading music.

A quick poll in March revealed that 60 percent of youth workers reported that the majority of their clientele was burning CDs — not just Christian music — off the Internet for free, said Interlinc President Allen Weed.

“We’ve seen what we would call a moral disconnect because of the ease of downloading and file-sharing,” Weed said. “There’s been basically a desensitization among young people. They don’t think it’s wrong at all, a lot of them.”

Kevin C. Hall, youth minister at First Baptist Church, Nashville, has observed that young computer users don’t seem to grasp the illegality of an activity that is so easily accomplished, and by so many of their peers.

“They don’t see it as copyrighted materials, they see it as shareware. I think a lot of this generation, they see almost everything on the Internet as shared,” Hall said.

Aside from ignorance of the law, some file sharers are making the argument that downloading is actually enhancing the ministry by spreading the word of the Gospel through song, said Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne.com, which tracks illicit song downloads off the Web.

“The issues are complex because you have the Ten Commandments, on the one hand, but you have this mandate as a Christian to spread the word of God. And these songs of faith are, in many ways, the modern vehicle for doing that,” Garland said.

In fact, he said, Christian songs appear to be among the most heavily downloaded. The Christian artists fit into a category of music that goes beyond a catchy radio song to carry a lifestyle message.

“They associate themselves with a culture, with a scene, and that can mean jam bands, or a lot of the neo-folk songwriter stuff, like John Mayer and Jack Johnson,” Garland said. “These are artists very heavily swapped online because they are word- of mouth phenomenon where people are really interested in hearing everything that this artist does and learning from other fans of the artist.”

Styll said the industry will have to get the message across the violating copyright laws cannot be done in the name of ministry.

“Christians are specifically commanded in scripture to uphold the laws of the land. It’s no more right to copy a CD for somebody or send them downloaded music that you obtained illegally in the name of ministry than it is to walk into a store and take a Bible off the shelf and walk out without paying for it and handing it to somebody because they really need to read it,” he said.
http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/in...&news_id=24676


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Boycotts

Dutch Group Strikes Back At Self-Destructing Epson Ink Cartridges

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) - The Dutch Consumer Association has advised its members to boycott Epson ink jet printers, alleging that customers are unfairly being charged for ink they can never use.

The boycott call last week followed joint tests by several European consumer groups indicating that Epson ink cartridges prematurely block printers from churning out more pages even when there is enough ink to keep going.

In advertisements printed in several national Dutch newspapers, Epson acknowledged its printers stop working before cartridges are empty, but said the measure protects printers from damage. They also said customers aren't charged extra for the unused ink.

Ink jet cartridges manufactured by Epson are fitted with an ``Intellidge'' chip, which Epson says keeps the print head moist. If the print head dries out, air bubbles can form that destroy the printer, the company said.

The Dutch association, which has 620,000 paying members, wants Epson to modify its chip so that it gives a low ink warning, but doesn't block the printer.

It suggested that customers with Epson printers could override the current chip by using a $30 device to reset it, allowing the remaining ink to be used.

Epson spokesman Jan Willem Scheijgrond called the tip dangerous advice.

``It's like driving through a red light,'' he told The Associated Press. ``It can be fine, but if someone's coming from the other way, you can have an accident.''

Dutch Consumer Association spokesman Ewald van Kouwen disputed Epson's argument that print heads need extra ink.

``We don't deny that it's sensible to have a certain percentage of residual ink,'' he said. ``But we noticed (excesses of) 10, 20, 30 percent in our research. Then it's not residual ink any more. It's just a way of getting you to buy more ink faster.''

Scheijgrond said Epson might take legal action against the Dutch Consumers Association. The two parties are due to talk Wednesday to discuss their differences.

Tests of the Epson printers published this month in the magazine ``Which?'' said that by overriding the chips, researchers were able to print ``up to 38 percent more good quality pages, even though the chips stated that the cartridge was empty.'' Some cartridges indicated they were two-thirds empty when they were only half empty.

Prices of ink jet printers have been dropping for years, yet the ink cartridges remain relatively expensive. The ``Which?'' test showed that ink refills can quickly overtake the original cost of the printer. In fact, it said many leading ink jet suppliers charge more per milliliter than 1985 Dom Perignon champagne.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/6301640.htm


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Overheard

One cannot *steal* software, movies or music. They are an infinitely reproducible thing. Otherwise, something like Kazaa would not really work.

Seriously. No one calls "patent infringement" "patent, stealing", no one calls "trademark infringement" "trademark stealing".

Copyright infringement isn't stealing either, though they can both be independently illegal. The difference here is that the copyright holder doesn't lose his rights. His exclusivity is infringed upon, but nothing is taken.
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/07/1....shtml?tid=188


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New Morpheus(TM) 3.2 File-Sharing Software Released With Innovative Privacy & Security Features
Press Release

New Features Provide Increased Security to Protect Users' Privacy, Greater Ease of Use, and Faster & More Reliable Downloading

StreamCast Networks, Inc., creators of the popular file-sharing software Morpheus(TM) and a global leader in peer-to-peer communications technology, today released Morpheus 3.2, an upgraded spyware-free version with new features, making file-sharing faster, safer and more secure. Morpheus 3.2 improves on reliability, speed and stability while providing user options to enable advanced security tools that protect users' privacy from unwanted intrusions.

"Morpheus 3.2 is our response to the legitimate concerns of our users about the invasion of their privacy. While we do not condone copyright infringement, we also do not condone the targeting of our users and the invasion of their privacy," said Michael Weiss, CEO of StreamCast Networks, Inc. "Also, in an effort to keep file sharing legal and get artists paid, users of Morpheus software can easily send an instant and automatic e-mail message to their Congressional Representatives through a link provided within Morpheus."

Morpheus users are encouraged to download the new release so they may take advantage of the new features, highlighted with an eye-popping new design, improvements, and upgrades. The new features include:

· No Spyware
· Over 50 percent smaller in file size from Morpheus 3.1
· Superior global search capabilities
· One-click access to third party public blacklists
· Increased stability & performance, improved meta data handling and the ability to use your own default media player
· Advanced technology to verify a file in chunks as it is downloaded for better file integrity and improved partial file sharing
· Maximized bandwidth usage, improved network efficiency, up to 50 percent reduced traffic, and faster search results
· Scanning Images and Video files for meta info for more exacting searches
· Worldwide public proxy server connectivity as easy as 1-2-3

Morpheus 3.2 users will be able to directly link to a worldwide network of public proxy servers. A proxy server acts as an intermediary between two Internet users so that one user does not know the identity of the other. Additionally, users of the new Morpheus 3.2 software can link directly to third party websites that publish "blacklists" of IP addresses, believed by its contributors, to be among those that are used to snoop into the privacy of users. If a user chooses to click on any of these blacklisted IPs, those IP ranges will be blocked from the users computer.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+12:49+PM

[JackSpratts]

Grokster Unleashes Ad-Free Software
Lisa M. Bowman

Grokster on Tuesday released Grokster Pro, the first version of its software that's free of pop-ups and adware.

Consumers who want to use the software will have to fork over $19.99 for the ad-free experience.

Popular peer-to-peer software services such as Grokster and Kazaa have attracted millions of people through free downloads, which let them offer and access songs and other MP3 files without paying. But users of the services have long griped about the annoying pop-ups that greet them when they search for music.

Grokster said it was responding to some of those complaints.

"We can offer the user a better experience at a reasonable price that still allows us to pay our bills," Grokster President Wayne Rosso said in a statement.

The move comes as rival StreamCast Networks also released a new version of its Morpheus software that attempts to help people mask their identities by uploading and downloading files through proxy servers.

Both companies have been bolstered by a ruling in April, in which a federal judge said they were not responsible for the actions of file traders who used their software. The companies had been the target of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which said the file-swapping services were violating copyright laws by allowing people to trade major label music without paying.

Changing course, the RIAA has threatened to sue the people using the services to swap files, and last month it began an evidence-gathering campaign to identify people who offer music through Grokster, Morpheus and others.

A survey released Monday said the RIAA's legal threats seem to be deterring people from swapping music. Nielsen/NetRatings said the use of the top file- trading applications has declined by about 15 percent since late June, when the RIAA issued its warning, although StreamCast said it hasn't seen a drop and Kazaa has said its numbers have increased.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-1025994.html


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The Ovum View: DRM - Protecting Content And Revenues

DRM is key to many upcoming content services from mobile operators...

People have long trumpeted digital rights management (DRM) technology. But how can organisations make it work for them? Ovum senior analyst Michele MacKenzie sheds some light on DRM in wireless...

After high profile disasters such as WAP, the wireless internet finally seems to be experiencing an upturn.

The first signs are that MMS applications, such as picture messaging are proving popular and uptake of Java is growing. Ringtone downloads continue to grow and Ovum estimates that revenues from this application grew to $900m in 2002.

Evolution to the next phase, that of rich media incorporating music and video downloads, depends on a number of technological issues being resolved. This is where DRM (digital rights management) and content protection come into play.

What's at stake?

Premium content represents a significant opportunity for operators. Revenues will grow from around $9bn in 2003 to $39bn in 2007 but this revenue growth is dependent on DRM being in place.

In the fixed world, many service providers have ignored their responsibilities in protecting content and many have taken a short-term view on illegal file sharing as a means to generating extra traffic.

Content providers claim to have suffered significant losses from online piracy. The International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) estimates, in its June 2002 report, that the pirate market for music was worth $4.3bn and that this figure is conservative. It does not include any estimate of losses to the recording industry from Internet copying but estimates that 99 per cent of music files available online in 2001 were unauthorised.

Understandably, perhaps, content providers are now taking extreme measures to protect their content by limiting its availability. This business model is unsustainable and greater collaboration is required between the players.

Mobile operators will learn from the fixed experience but will have to educate both the users and the content providers.

In order to get buy-in from the content providers, mobile operators will need to convince them that they have a viable DRM solution in place. Initially this will consist of simple forward lock (once a user receives content that he has paid for he is unable to forward it to other mobile terminals), as in OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) version 1.

But it is critical that mobile operators work with content providers to gain their confidence in the mobile channel if they are to move to a super-distribution model at a later phase. O2 is a good example. It has worked closely with its content providers for its music download service to determine which DRM solution should be implemented.

Content owners need to ensure that they can capture the revenues for their content while allowing a fair degree of flexibility to meet user requirements. A 'fair play' policy - the middle ground - has to be reached and DRM is the technology that facilitates it.

Both parties have to build an understanding of the needs of mobile users. Those needs include the rights to use the content they have paid for the way they want to – including porting, duplication and distribution.

When will DRM be ready?

Early deployments of DRM are taking place now. Version 1 of the OMA standard was only released at the end of 2002. Handsets supporting DRM will be shipped in volumes in Q3 2003, although the first DRM handsets were announced in Q2. Deployment of the technology supporting version 1 will not really begin until 2004.

And phase 2 of OMA, which supports a more sophisticated and flexible DRM solution allowing rights management and super-distribution, is not expected commercially until the end of 2004. Therefore, most deployments of the standardised version 2 will only start in 2005.

Mobile users are used to paying for content over their mobile phones. Operators will need to manage the introduction of forward lock carefully as it might annoy some users to find that they cannot port their content to other devices or 'share' it. It is critical that do not view this as a long-term inflexible approach by operators to curb their rights. Once super-distribution becomes available, probably towards the end of 2004, operators will need to re-educate users to the benefits of DRM. That is the right to port, duplicate and distribute content.
In order to provide a dynamic portfolio of rich content, it will be imperative to have a viable DRM solution to:

Encourage content owners to consider mobile as a channel for their content

Protect operator revenues from sources from piracy

Eventually enable a 'paid-for' super-distribution mode. This will stimulate traffic as users become a distributor of content as well as generate new revenues from content.
http://www.silicon.com/opinion/500018/1/5097.html


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Piano Tuner Blues

Those who keep our ivories in key are rarely in sync themselves, especially when debating whether to work digitally or by ear.
Paul Pringle

A note about piano tuners: They often are not in accord.

Tuners can't agree whether their ranks resonate with talent or reek of the tone-deaf. A professional guild sets the bar for training, but most tuners won't join it.

Many are sharply critical of how piano owners treat their instruments — and their tuners. Others flatly don't care, as long as the customer pays scale.

And nothing stirs more dissonance in the do-re-mi trade than the debate over tuning by ear versus tuning by technology.

The dispute predates the Digital Age — electronic tuners debuted in the 1930s — but has grown louder as software becomes increasingly popular on the job. The Kansas City, Mo.-based Piano Technicians Guild says computers are now used by at least half the 10,000 tuners who service America's 18 million pianos.

"Piano tuners love to argue," said Jim Ogden, 55, a La Cañada Flintridge resident who got into the business nine years ago. "It's just endless."

Cyber-tuning has drawn a line between the likes of Richard Davenport and Ron Elliott, who otherwise have much in common. They occupy the upper range of Los Angeles tuners, with a combined six decades of experience, big-name clients, and steady gigs at recording studios and concert halls.

The similarities stop when they lift the piano lid and go to work.

Davenport's routine is to wrestle a laptop from his gear bag, place it gently on the piano's cast-iron plate, and power up a program that displays a spinning green disc that measures the pitches of the 88 keys. Davenport watches it as he tunes.

Elliott simply tilts his head toward the strings and listens. His tools are sleeved in a handyman's roll pouch. None requires batteries.

"I've always tuned by ear," he said.

Elliott stood over a nine-foot Steinway on the darkened stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. His task was to improve the "feel" of the piano for soloist Richard Goode.

Elliott tugged his tuning hammer — a misnamed wrench — this way and that on the pin of a B-flat string, adjusting it by hair-widths, while pounding the key. The B flat reverberated like a pipe banging in a storm drain, only purer.

"There are a lot of people who use electronic tuners," said Elliott, a soft-spoken 51-year-old with clipped, graying hair. He wore a suit and tie. "Maybe they never really learned to tune by ear." He said no computer can "hear" the subtle tonal differences between two pianos, or along the multi-string unisons within a single instrument.

Elliott also said the gadgets can't "stretch the octaves," making the bass flatter and treble sharper — to suit a performer's taste.

"A machine is very rigid," said the Pasadena resident. "Tuning is creative."

Elliott has tuned the Music Center's pianos for 17 years. He drifted into the craft after studying piano.

It took him an hour to sweeten the Steinway. The piano is tuned before every concert. Household pianos typically are tuned once a year.

"Richard Goode is a very sensitive player," Elliott said as he tinkered with the Steinway's felt hammers. They bounced on the Swedish-steel strings like woodpeckers peppering bark. Elliott jabbed one hammer with a needle — "sugar-coating" it — to render the string less strident.

Goode appeared from the gloom just as Elliott finished. The impish-faced pianist wanted another rehearsal before that night's performance.

Music to His Ears

Elliott hurriedly collected his tools and retreated backstage. After tearing into a Mozart concerto, Goode complimented Elliott. "Ron is one of my favorites," he said. Elliott was visibly pleased.

It's all about the ear, Elliot said later.

"When you start using a machine, you are allowed to become kind of lazy," he added. "You don't really have to pay attention to what you're doing. The machine becomes a crutch."

That view prevails at some prestigious music academies, including the Juilliard School, as well as at Steinway & Sons.

"We don't use electronic tuners here and we don't advise any of our technicians to use them," said Ron Coners, chief concert technician for Steinway in New York. "We feel you do not train your ear well enough because you're relying on the machine."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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Corporate P2P Use Is Common, Study Says
John Borland

File-swapping applications are deeply entrenched inside corporate networks, according to a survey of computer systems by a Canadian network monitoring company.

In a study spanning 560 companies, ranging from 10 to 45,000 employees, Canadian company AssetMetrix found peer-to-peer software such as Kazaa and Morpheus installed at least once in 77 percent of companies. The survey found that every company in its sample with more than 500 employees had at least one installation of file-swapping software.

The results highlight the potential risks that corporations and individuals run, as the record industry prepares to file potentially thousands of lawsuits against individuals who offer copyrighted materials online.

"Corporations are frantic about how to rein in some control over this," said AssetMetrix President Paul Bodnoff. "Like with software licenses, most companies want to be on the right side of the law. The challenge is how they do that."

The presence of file swapping on corporate networks has been a subject of increasing concern during the past year, for reasons extending beyond businesses' legal liability.

Copyright holders have steadily increased their pressure on corporations to crack down on their employees' file-trading behavior, sending letters to the Fortune 500 companies warning of legal risks, and even settling out of court for $1 million with one company where a large archive of copyrighted songs was found.

However, corporate technology managers say they are also worried about the drain of resources sparked by file-swapping applications. P2P software can allow viruses to worm their way onto corporate networks, and transfers of large media files such as movies can take up large amounts of bandwidth, resulting in unexpected network costs for companies.

Several companies have sprung up that offer network management tools aimed at finding and deleting unauthorized applications, including file-swapping software. AssetMetrix now offers a free service that lets corporations scan their networks to see how many P2P clients have been installed, and how much storage space is taken up by multimedia files downloaded through the services.

The first round of lawsuits against individual file swappers is expected from the Recording Industry Association of America in mid-August.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-1026184.html


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Now Hear This: Piracy Linked To Terrorism

Paris - (SA) The head of Interpol called on Wednesday for a global crackdown on software and music piracy, saying the illicit proceeds help finance al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist networks.

The international police agency's secretary-general, Ronald K Noble, urged governments and law enforcement agencies to treat such crimes as a priority, saying in a statement, "it is becoming the preferred method of funding for a number of terrorist groups".

The statement was issued on Wednesday ahead of a speech on the subject that Noble was to give in Washington to the House of Representatives' Committee on International Relations.

"There are enough examples now of the funding of terrorist groups in this way for us to worry about the threat to public safety," Noble said. "We must take preventative measures now."

An Interpol document to be presented in Washington later on Wednesday said that a wide range of terrorist groups have profited from the production or sale of counterfeit goods, including al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Chechen separatists, ethnic Albanian extremists in Kosovo and paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the statement said.

Noble called for stepped-up efforts to trace the proceeds of pirated CDs, DVDs, computer software, and counterfeit clothing and cigarettes.

Interpol, based in Lyon, France, co-ordinates information-sharing among police forces in 181 countries.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technol...388359,00.html


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New Company Touts Conditional Access Technology
David Minto

Latens Systems Limited, a new broadcast technology company based in Belfast, has not only announced its
arrival in the conditional access market, but claims it will saves operators up to 50 per cent of their current total security costs.

Well don’t they all…

Says Jeremy Thorp, CEO of Latens: “I began to realise that with a different strategy, new security techniques and the power of advanced 2-way networks a smartcard is no longer essential for strong security.”

Instead, Latens is offering two-way digital network to be provide conditional access for broadband and digital cable networks through secure software modules (SSM) in the set-top-box. The SSM are monitored and managed through the network, and whenever necessary are up-dated or replaced through the network, limiting the window of opportunity for hackers.

"At the birth of digital television, a chip, either in a smartcard or embedded in the set-top-box, was the most appropriate security solution,” says Jason Rogers, CTO, Latens Systems Limited. “However, over 15 years later, security technology and techniques have moved on. Latens is making the most of the power of the network and new advanced security systems to produce next generation Conditional Access systems that are cost-effective, scalable and flexible."
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=17054


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Listen to the Technology
Arnold Kling

Note: This piece ran a year ago – js.

The future is here. But distributors of music have tuned it out.

Technology has made the CD-centric business model of the music industry obsolete. Fifteen years ago, the CD became the superior alternative medium for storing and transporting music. Today, though, disks represent the truly low-cost storage medium, and the Internet represents the low-cost transportation medium for delivering music to listeners. In short, something like Napster was inevitable.

That music has become much cheaper to store and to transport would be good news for the music industry, if they would listen to the technology. Instead, they cannot seem to bear the thought of a transition away from the CD-centric business model. Like the people in a 1960's cigarette commercial, the industry would rather fight than switch.

The music industry's court victory over Napster was symbolic, but no judicial ruling can overturn the fact that downloading songs over the Internet is more efficient than purchasing them as recorded CDs. The industry's next idea -- a bill authored by Sen. Ernest Hollings to try to outlaw technology that can be used to make copies of creative works -- seems destined to replace "Luddite" as an expression to describe a pathetic, irrational attempt to forestall the future.

Who Needs CD's?

Let's pretend, though, that the CD didn't exist. How would music makers try to deliver their music today?

I believe there would be two modes of distribution.

First, music could come packaged with hardware, much like most software is packaged with computers today.

In the past, that might have been too expensive. But in a world with cheap, high-capacity hard disks, any system with stereo speakers could, and should, come complete with recorded music. Not just computers, but all car and home stereos as well. A reasonably priced hard disk can store all the music that you have time to listen to, and with several more iterations of Moore's Law a disk will be able to store everything that has ever been recorded.

With pre-installed music, the music industry would make money like Microsoft. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's) would pay music distributors for licenses to their collections. At first, because hard disk capacity is not unlimited, people would have to choose standard music packages and pay extra for custom collections. Eventually, just as the Evil Empire bundled more and more functionality into the operating system, the standard music packages would include more and more of what has been recorded.

How would the music companies do under such a distribution scheme? Well, suppose that each year in the United States sales of car stereos totaled 15 million units, personal computers for home use totaled 60 million, and home stereos totaled 25 million units. Then, if the music industry collected an average $100 license fee for the installed music on each product - a price well within the range of many consumer software packages- it would have $10 billion in annual revenue. This would nearly equal the revenue from CD sales today, but with much lower production and distribution costs.

Be Like Bill

A second method of music delivery would be through third-party developer licenses.

The software industry has learned that open systems that encourage third-party developers are more profitable than closed systems. I would argue that Microsoft and Apple are where they are today because Apple did less to encourage third-party developers. (Not that I want to plunge into the Apple-Microsoft debate here.)

Tim O'Reilly recently made an important pronouncement about the need for Internet companies, such as Google and Amazon, to create open interfaces to their data that would allow third-party developers to add value. No sooner was his article published than Dave Winer breathlessly reported that Google is doing exactly that.

Google is giving third-party developers licenses to access Google's catalog. Eventually, for high-volume licenses Google will charge a fee. Presumably, the high-volume applications will have revenue models attached to them.

Suppose that, like Google, a music distributor published an interface to its catalog, so that anyone could download music. Any third-party developer could obtain a license to access the catalog to create a play list, operate a radio station, create an algorithm to match people to music that suits their taste, or other value-added services. The developers would pay a license fee based on the intensity with which they access the catalog.

Subscription services, with revenue shared among third-party developers and music publishers, would be another revenue stream for the music industry. Consumers might pay low annual fees in order to be able to download a small number of songs. Third-party developers with high-volume services would pay higher fees. All in all, one can imagine 60 million subscribers paying $60 a year, plus 10 million subscribers paying $150 a year for premium services (more download privileges, custom music recommendation services, priority for concert tickets), for another $5 billion a year in revenue.

What about the Individual?

Suppose that the CD were to disappear and be replaced by these alternative revenue models. What does this scenario mean for individuals?

The music consumer would be paying flat fees for unlimited use. When you obtain a stereo with music installed, you pay a one-time fee embedded in the cost of the stereo. When you subscribe to a music service, you pay an annual fee for unlimited use of the service. I think that most music-lovers would gladly pay these modest flat fees in order to save on CD purchases and to enjoy the convenience of listening to whatever music they want whenever they want to listen.

Musicians and composers still would need to get paid. I am assuming that they would continue to be paid by the intermediaries in the music industry. Music distributors would pay musicians in order to keep their catalogs popular.

Of course, the nature of intermediation could change. Anyone who obtains the rights from artists and sets up a hosting service with a catalog and an interface could play the role of a music publisher. The third-party developers could access this catalog. Those developers might turn out to be the critical intermediaries, and they could end up paying musicians.

I suspect that fear of this sort of industry change -- and the potential loss of control -- is what is driving the behavior of the music industry today. However, eventually they will have to listen to the technology.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/10...D=1051-041802C


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Traffic to Web File Sharing Sites Down: Report
Reuters

Facing the threat of lawsuits from a music industry trade group, fewer people are using online file-sharing applications to swap songs, according to data released on Monday.

Internet audience measurement service Nielsen NetRatings said traffic on Kazaa, the leading file-sharing platform, fell 15 per cent in the week ended July 6 from the previous week.

It was during that prior week, on June 25, that the Recording Industry Association of America said it would track down the heaviest users of "peer-to-peer" services like Kazaa and sue them for damages of up to $150,000 per copyright violation.

Traffic on the Morpheus service also fell 15 per cent, NetRatings said, while usage on iMesh dropped 16 per cent. BearShare usage dropped enough that it fell below NetRatings' cutoff point for tracking.

"With the negative publicity and threat of steep fines, some surfers appear to be backing off," Greg Bloom, a senior analyst at NetRatings, said in a statement. "However, with millions of loyal users, these applications aren't likely to go offline in the near future."

In the wake of the RIAA's announcement, some peer-to-peer services have established relationships with lobbyists and set up trade associations to persuade lawmakers and the entertainment industry that they are legitimate businesses.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/c...how?msid=75589


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Australians Into CD Burning, File Sharing: survey
Steven Deare

Millions of Australians have obtained music illegally via CD burning and file sharing, a survey released by the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) claims.

Conducted by Quantum Market Research for ARIA, the survey researched CD burning and Internet file sharing and their effect on the Australian music industry.

According to the survey, 3.6 million Australians illegally burned a music CD in the six months prior to the survey. The survey was conducted from January to February and is based on 1001 telephone interviews with people aged 10 years or over across Australia.

While the survey did not provide a six-month figure for file sharing, it said around 1.8 million Australians had illegally downloaded music files in one month. The number of Australians who had ever used file sharing services totalled 3.5 million, it said.

Users of these services downloaded an average of 19.6 files a month, the survey said. Of these users, 21 per cent were broadband subscribers.

There had also been a 12 per cent decrease in CD purchasing among this file sharing group, the survey said.

The survey also found the level of music piracy among the under-25 age group to be almost twice as high as in the general population. That is, 22 per cent of the general population (all age groups) had been involved in CD burning, compared to 40 per cent in the under-25 age group.

However, 49 per cent of those surveyed in the 10-24-year bracket were unaware of the legality of CD copying and file sharing.

The results also found CD burners had been used by 22 percent of Australians to record music in the surveyed six months.

ARIA chief executive Stephen Peach said the levels of CD burning and file sharing in Australia were "significant", and weakened the local and international music industries.

ARIA said initiatives to combat music piracy included online business models, consumer education, technological solutions and litigation.
http://pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php?...58&fp=2&fpid=1


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Young Unfazed By Piracy: ARIA
Simon Hayes

THE music industry has fired a statistical salvo to stem the tide of file-sharing and CD burning, releasing "disturbing" figures that show many young people are unaware music piracy is illegal.

It has vowed to educate users to change their behaviour, while at the same time refusing to back down from a legal campaign that has seen both civil and criminal action taken in cases of alleged music piracy.

A survey of 1001 Australians conducted for the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) by Quantum Market Research found only 49 per cent of under 25s were aware copying was illegal, compared with 64 per cent of the general population.

While 57 per cent of those surveyed agreed burning music was like stealing, only 35 per cent of under 25s agreed.

Similarly, while 49 per cent of respondents agreed downloading music from the internet without permission was like stealing a CD from a record store, only 33 per cent of under 25s agreed.

ARIA chief executive Stephen Peach said copying and file trading had caused a downturn in sales of CDs.

"There is no way you can justify music theft by saying it might result in increased CD sales," he said. "(The respondents) say that as a result of using file sharing they are buying fewer CDs."

Mr Peach said the lack of awareness of illegality among younger music listeners would cause a worrying trend.

"Music is more popular than ever, but unfortunately no-one seems prepared to pay for it," he said. "It is disturbing that less than half of under 25s realise that stealing music is wrong."

The study found 3.6 million Australians, or 22 per cent, had burned a CD in the past six months, while 1.8 million, or 11 per cent, had downloaded pirated music from a filesharing service in the past month.

Among under 25s, 40 per cent had burned a CD in the past six months, while 26 per cent had swapped music online. About 40 per cent of respondents had at some stage received a burned CD.

The figures the industry finds most worrying are those that show 51 per cent of filesharers would "rarely or never" go and buy the music from a store, while 37 per cent would only buy the music "sometimes".

There was a 12 per cent overall decrease in CD purchases among file sharing users.

Citing successful internet services like Apple's iTunes, Mr Peach said the industry was interested in supporting legitimate online services.

The recording industry has been aggressively pursuing alleged pirates through the courts both in Australia and overseas.

A recent Federal Court action saw major music labels given access to data on the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania computer networks in search of alleged internet pirates.

The parties in that case are waiting the issuing of formal orders.

A separate case has seen three Sydney university students charged under the Copyright Act over their alleged involvement in an internet web site that allegedly distributed music.

That case has been adjourned until August.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15318,00.html


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Record Companies Join The Enemy In Music Revolution
Carla Caruso

RECORD companies have started to change their tune.

Their losing battle against Internet users downloading free music off the Internet has forced them to join the competition in an attempt to cash in on the relatively new market.

Major companies are set to join the dotcom ranks by offering a download service for paying customers.

Sanity and EMI will be the first local companies to introduce the new service by Christmas with other retailers set to follow.

The move comes as the Australian Record Industry Association revealed yesterday that about 3.6 million Australians had illegally burnt CDs in the past six months.

Youth have been blamed for a drop in CD music sales nationally – their growing habit of "burning" and downloading music cutting into the profits of record companies.

But Australian Record Industry Association chief executive officer Stephen Peach says consumers would be the "ultimate" losers from the scam and record companies were introducing "copy control" technology to protect their profits.

"With copying rampant, there is a diminishing motive to invest in music production or risk supporting new talent," he said.

Burning CDs on a home computer can reduce the cost of music singles from as much as $8 in stores to about $1 – the cost of a blank CD.

The shelf price of a new release album is generally between $20 and $40, while downloading music, in most cases, will only attract normal Internet charges.

ARIA yesterday released the findings of the independent Quantum Market Research study conducted from research compiled from 1000 phone interviews with people aged over 10 earlier this year.

Downloading music and CD burning was found to be highest in the under-25 age group, with 40 per cent of those surveyed admitting to burning CDs in the past six months compared with 22 per cent of the general population.

Those under 25 were also more guilty of file sharing – 26 per cent – compared with 11 per cent of the general public. Among file-sharing users there was a net decrease of 12 per cent in CD buying, which was greatest in the 17-and-under age group.

Two thirds of those surveyed were aware that CD burning and file sharing were illegal.

Pooraka student Marie Trimboli, 16, said CD burning was a cheaper and more convenient option to obtain music.

"I'd have to buy a whole CD just to get the one track. This way, you get the songs you want on one CD," she said.
http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au...55E911,00.html


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Firms Say File Swap Must Stop
Nik Bonopartis

Jesse Jordan has become somewhat of a poster boy for what can happen to people who get on the bad side of the music industry.

The 19-year-old student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy was one of the first people sued by the music industry in an initial round aimed at stemming illegal online trading of copyrighted music.

An information technology major going on his second year at the institute, Jordan ran a campus search engine where music could be traded. He says he didn't have many options -- or the money -- to fight the lawsuit in court. So he settled with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in exchange for his life savings: $12,000.

''There was nothing else I could do,'' he said. ''My parents aren't rich.''

Jordan's story may be a precursor of many more lawsuits. In six to eight weeks, hundreds of people who trade online will receive notice that they're also being sued by the industry.

The fight is joined

The lawsuits are the latest development in an increasingly pitched battle between the music industry and people who trade copyrighted material over the Internet. Even recording artists like Madonna are getting involved by spamming file-sharing networks with surreptitious, profanity-laced messages aimed at their fans.

An early report suggests the lawsuit threats may have had a small effect in the first week after the announcement. Nielsen/ NetRatings reported Monday that there was a 15 percent drop in activity on the networks during the week ending July 6. However, it's unclear how much of that drop-off was actually due to the threats or if other factors, such the July 4 holiday weekend, contributed.

A company working on behalf of the music and movie industries has been keeping tabs on online file-trading networks, recording not only what's being traded and the volume of copyrighted material exchanged daily between users, but also who is trading the songs and movies.

For instance, the company, BayTSP, can tell you that ''Finding Nemo,'' Disney's animated deep-sea adventure, was the most popular movie exchanged for free on online networks in June -- and that 103,788 people had that movie on their computers, despite the fact that it's still in theaters. The company spotted people trading the long-awaited ''Matrix: Reloaded'' several days before the official release.

BayTSP sends the information to the movie and music industries, and the industries decide who will be sent a letter of warning or slapped with a lawsuit.

''We're like the Internet private detectives,'' said Mark Ishikawa, CEO of BayTSP, which uses its MediaEnforcer software to track file traders. ''We can usually find (a movie) within a few minutes of it being put on the Internet. We find one copy, then we see 10 copies, then we see 100 copies.

''If we don't see it before a theatrical release, we typically see it the night of a theatrical release. And people have to understand that if you do that and get caught, you're going to go to jail.''

Or, at the very least, get sued for significant amounts of money.

The music industry says it has the cooperation of Internet service providers -- which can identify network users -- and is bringing the lawsuits as part of a multifaceted approach to stopping a crime.

To keep pressure on people who trade music and movies, the industries say some of the lawsuits will be random. So even small-time traders run the risk of a lawsuit.

''Making even one file available is illegal, so there's no hard and fast rule,'' said Amanda Collins, deputy director of the RIAA.

As for Jordan, handing over his life savings was his only option, he says. The paperwork on the RIAA lawsuit against him listed the names of music files that were searched for or acquired by people using his search engine -- along with a note that said it would cost him $150,000 per copyrighted song.

But thanks to the generosity of fellow file traders, Jordan ended up getting his $12,000 back by donations through his Web site.

''People have been really, really supportive,'' he said. ''In less than six weeks, I was able to get back all that I've lost in this thing.''
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/t...071603s3.shtml


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Internet Experts Dispute Lawmakers, News Reports
Nik Bonopartis

The future of music distribution may rest with lawmakers, and at the very least future versions of copyright law will go through both houses of Congress.

So it's with a bit of sarcasm that the Internet community, spurred by some of the comments below, see lawmakers as firmly in the pockets of the music and movie industries:

- In an early March congressional hearing on the effects of rampant pirating, the Justice Department's deputy assistant attorney general, John G. Malcolm, suggested that file trading could fund terrorism, according to IDG News Service.

- A new bill introduced by Texas Rep Lamar Smith, a Republican, would use the FBI to combat illegal file-sharing. The bill would instruct the FBI to "develop a program to deter members of the public from committing acts of copyright infringement," according to CNet News and Jupitermedia's Internet News.

- Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif., "who is forming a new congressional caucus on piracy and copyright issues, also wants to run the music industry's lobbying organization,'' according to the Associated Press. A CBS News report said Bono was trying to distance herself from that statement after criticism for her comments.

Bono's remarks have drawn coverage from a wide range of press, including Billboard Magazine.

An Associated Press dispatch quotes Steven Weiss of the Center for Responsive Politics, who says: "Angering the RIAA is certainly not going to advance her job prospects, so one must wonder whether her views on this issue are motivated more by personal beliefs or her future career."

- In a May 4 report, the New York Times detailed "the development and testing of software programs that would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music."

The New York Times notes that many of the new technologies, developed by Internet companies at the request of the music and movie industries, may never be used because of legal questions.

But Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said that destroying users' computers remotely "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights," according to several media reports.

An Associated Press report quotes Hatch saying: "If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that. If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines.''

- Hatch's comments caused a storm in both Web and print publications, and Wired News reported on June 19 that Hatch himself was using copyrighted software without a license:

"The senator's site makes extensive use of a JavaScript menu system developed by Milonic Solutions, a software company based in the United Kingdom. The copyright-protected code has not been licensed for use on Hatch's Web site."
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/e...ring_log.shtml


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KaZaA Founder Tips His Hand
Jo Maitland

Niklas Zennstrom, founder of the largest P2P network, KaZaA, has no intention of letting the heavy-handed arm of authority crush his ambitions for peer-to-peer networking. Au Contraire! He’s currently planning a fourth P2P company.

In an interview with Boardwatch, Zennstrom let it slip that he is working on a P2P voice communication business (see KaZaA Founder, Niklas Zennstrom).

He says it would allow people everywhere to talk to each other using intelligent end devices communicating across the Internet using P2P protocols. The need for "big hummer" telephone switches would disappear.

"Will it use SIP [session initiation protocol]?", Boardwatch asked.

“NO,” said Zennstrom, assertively.

Hmmm. How will it work then? He declined to say, for now. But expect something later this year.

Meanwhile, Zennstrom has other irons in the fire -- notably Altnet Inc., which is the paid-content distribution mechanism integrated with the KaZaA Media Desktop client. It's a joint venture of Brilliant Digital Entertainment and Zennstrom's third company, Joltid Ltd. (more on Joltid in a moment).

Essentially, Altnet provides a marketing and distribution campaign for content owners and distributors. All of the Altnet files are wrapped with DRM (digital rights management) software, and users pay for them. Songs that are legally on the KaZaA network with permission from the content owner are clearly marked with a gold label.

So why pay for them if they're also available, for free, on KaZaA? In the interview, Zennstrom likens this to selling mineral water to people who could drink tap water for free [ed note: which has always had me scratching my head].

As for Joltid, which Zennstrom just launched, it aims to help service providers reduce P2P congestion in their networks, using caching technology (see Euro ISPs Deploy P2P Cache).

Interestingly, Zennstrom says he doesn’t use the KaZaA service he invented to download music. “I buy CDs,” he retorts.

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?
http://www.boardwatch.com/document.asp?doc_id=37096

Interview at top – js.


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U.S. Bill Would Put Net Song Swappers in Jail
Andy Sullivan

Internet users who allow others to copy songs from their hard drives could face prison time under legislation introduced by two Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday.

The bill is the strongest attempt yet to deter the widespread online song copying that recording companies say has led to a decline in CD sales.

Sponsored by Michigan Rep. John Conyers and California Rep. Howard Berman, the bill would make it easier to slap criminal charges on Internet users who copy music, movies and other copyrighted files over "peer-to-peer" networks.

The recording industry has aggressively pursued Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer networks in court and recently announced it planned to sue individual users as well.

In a series of hearings on Capitol Hill last spring, lawmakers condemned online song swapping and expressed concern the networks could spread computer viruses, create government security risks and allow children access to pornography.

Few online copyright violators have faced criminal charges so far. A New Jersey man pleaded guilty to distributing a digital copy of the movie "The Hulk" in federal court three weeks ago, but the Justice Department has not taken action against Internet users who offer millions of copies of songs each day.

The Conyers-Berman bill would operate under the assumption that each copyrighted work made available through a computer network was copied at least 10 times for a total retail value of $2,500. That would bump the activity from a misdemeanor to a felony, carrying a sentence of up to five years in jail.

It would also outlaw the practice of videotaping a movie in the theater, a favorite illicit method of copying movies.

"While existing laws have been useful in stemming this problem, they simply do not go far enough," said Conyers, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

A Conyers staffer said the bill had won the backing of many Democrats but Republicans had yet to endorse it.

The staffer said backers hoped to discuss the bill at a hearing on Thursday and combine it next week with another sponsored by Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith.

A Smith spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle....toryID=3103468


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US Hotspots Outwit File-Sharing Purge
How wireless net access is bringing court cases to a dead end, by John Borland...

Early last spring, NYCWireless co-founder Anthony Townsend got a note in the mail saying that someone on his network had been violating copyright laws.

This type of note is becoming increasingly common as record companies and Hollywood studios subpoena ISPs for information about subscribers in order to stop people from trading songs and movies online. But Townsend's case was unusual: as the representative of a loose collection of wireless 'hotspot' internet access points, there was no way he or the relevant access point operator in New York's Bryant Park could identify or warn the file trader.

"We brought the notice to the attention of the park management but they weren't concerned," Townsend said. "That whole mechanism [for finding copyright violators] becomes really problematic when the ISP is someone sharing a wireless access point."

Townsend and others' similar experiences, no matter how limited today, point to a slowly widening hole in the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) recently announced drive to identify and ultimately sue what could be thousands of file swappers online.

Wireless net access through free, open or publicly available hotspots is proving to be a last bastion of privacy on an internet where the veil of anonymity can now easily pierced. Wi-Fi access points give anyone who possesses the appropriate computer equipment within a radius of about 300 feet the ability to reach the internet.

Traditional ISPs give each subscriber a unique, if temporary, identification number while they're online. Wi-Fi access points don't, and that makes it difficult for the RIAA or anyone else to pinpoint exactly who is doing what using these nodes on the net.

Wi-Fi access, meanwhile, is now one of the fastest-growing segments of the technology marketplace. About 28,000 publicly accessible hotspots exist around the world today, according to research firm Allied Business Intelligence. That figure is expected to grow to 160,000 by 2007, the firm predicted in a report last week.

Not all of those hot spots provide the same kind of anonymous access as the free services provided by Armstrong's network in New York. Most commercial Wi-Fi points are run as pay services by companies such as T-Mobile USA, typically requiring computer users to pay for their time, usually with a credit card, and log in to their account while online. This allows customers to be identified just as easily as they would on an ordinary ISP using telephone or cable lines.

Increasingly, cafes, parks and even private homes are offering access to the net where no registration is required. With people logging in and out without offering identities, it becomes virtually impossible for groups such as the RIAA to track down the identity of copyright infringers using these nodes.

It is hard to argue that this type of network access makes up more than a tiny fraction of file- swapping. People using public Wi-Fi access points typically use them for just a few minutes or hours, rather than staying online for the long periods of time necessary to download movie files, for instance.

This could change as the patterns of Wi-Fi use change, becoming more residential, however. Just last week, the ISP Speakeasy opened a programme that allows home broadband subscribers to sell wireless net access to their neighbors, becoming in effect a mini-ISP with Speakeasy's help.

This kind of approach illustrates further the potential holes in the RIAA dragnet. A Speakeasy customer who has several customers of their own could wind up unwittingly being the conduit for file-sharing activity.

In that case, Speakeasy would receive a subpoena, and be required under recent court decisions to give up the customer's name. Moreover, under the provisions of the company's new programme, the customer's role as 'administrator' for other people's accounts would make them responsible for any illegal activity by the people using the original customer's wireless net access.

"If our terms of service are violated on [that broadband] line, we hold the administrator responsible," said Speakeasy CEO Mike Apgar. "We think the best person to understand their local area is the administrator."

However, unless the administrator keeps detailed logs of everybody's account use - which is not required by law - they may well not know who was swapping files at the time the RIAA identified a problem and the subpoena may hit a dead end.

Recording industry officers declined to discuss their legal strategy in detail but said that the Wi- Fi issue was not necessarily a dead end for investigations.

"We are not limiting ourselves in that respect," said RIAA senior VP Matt Oppenheim.

What the group and other copyright holders can do if Wi-Fi access points turn out to be a substantial nexus for piracy isn't wholly clear. Unlike the file-swapping market, which in Napster's wake has been populated mostly by small companies that exist on the margin of the law, Wi-Fi is the technological darling of giants that range from Intel to Verizon Communications.

In theory, copyright holders could press policymakers for some regulatory framework that would require individual computer users to be identified wherever they were logged on to a network. That way, even people logging on to a free access point like the one in New York City's Bryant Park could be traced if found to be doing something illegal.

However, previous technological measures that involved the strict ability to identify users or users' computers, such as the unique serial numbers once built into Intel chips, have proven extremely controversial.

Privacy and civil liberties activists, by contrast, are encouraging the spread of Wi-Fi access points, whether officially under a plan like Speakeasy's, or simply by setting up a wireless access point on their own.

"I think there is good reason for people to become ISPs and offer this service in order to give people real anonymity again," said Fred von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney who has represented file-swapping companies against the recording industry.

Von Lohmann, a copyright lawyer, contends that individuals and businesses that operate open Wi-Fi hot spots should be eligible for the same legal shields that ensure that ISPs aren't liable for the online actions of their customers.

Hot spot operators like Townsend say they are likely to attract the RIAA's subpoenas and lawsuits, which are due in mid-August. But they say, for now, they're not worried.

"It is obvious that people are using wireless hotspots to do the same kind of thing other people online are doing," said Townsend, whose NYCWireless group is made up of 160 hotspots around the city, mostly run by volunteers, "but there's no evidence that this kind of thing is any more prevalent. We haven't been asked to make (identifying people) any easier."
http://www.silicon.com/analysis/148/1/5172.html


Top 10 D/Ls - Singles

BigChampagne


Record Labels Send ISPs Subpoenas in Piracy Battle
Reuters

The Recording Industry Association of America on Wednesday said it sent out subpoenas to Internet service providers as it prepares to sue hundreds of individuals who illegally distribute songs over the Web.

"This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Filing information subpoenas is exactly what we said we'd do a couple of weeks ago when we announced that we were gathering evidence to file lawsuits," said a spokeswoman for the RIAA, the music recording industry's leading trade body.

Sharply escalating the industry's battle against online piracy, which had so far focused on shutting down peer-to-peer services themselves, the trade group in late June said it would track down the heaviest users of these services and sue them.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ISPs are required to provide copyright holders with such information when there is a good-faith reason to believe their copyrights are being infringed, according to lawyers for the RIAA.

The trade group said it will probably file several hundred lawsuits this summer.

ISP EarthLink said it has received three subpoenas from the RIAA since the group pledged to track sites like Kazaa for heavy users.

RIAA last month said the time was right to go after individual users because a recent U.S. court ruling made it easier to track down copyright violators.

A federal court ordered Verizon Communications to reveal names of suspected song-swappers in April, prompting the Internet service provider to ask a higher court to stay the order while it appeals the case.

On June 4, the U.S Court of Appeals in Washington declined to suspend the order, allowing RIAA investigators to easily obtain the names of other Internet users it suspects of trading music illegally.

David Blumenthal, a spokesman for Earthlink, said the company had received three subpoenas in recent weeks asking the company to identify individuals.

"It is our intention to do so, based on the ruling on June 4," said Blumenthal. But, he added, "we disagree with the method that is being used here and while we support the right of them to enforce copyrights, we think this is the wrong method for doing so."

"We're urging the RIAA and other copyright holders to find a less intrusive method for protecting their intellectual property," he said.

The RIAA is the trade group for the world's major record labels include AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music, Bertelsmann AG's BMG Entertainment, EMI Group Plc EMI Recorded Music, Sony Corp.'s Sony Music and Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group.
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle....toryID=3104053


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Peer-to-Peer Hacking Bill Officially Introduced

Hollywood hacking bill hits House

By Declan McCullagh
July 25, 2002, 10:25 AM PT

WASHINGTON--Copyright owners would be able to legally hack into
peer-to-peer networks, according to a bill introduced in the House of
Representatives on Thursday.

As previously reported by CNET News.com, the measure would
dramatically rewrite federal law to permit nearly unchecked electronic
disruptions if a copyright holder has a "reasonable basis" to believe
that piracy is occurring.

Read the whole sorry thing. http://politechbot.com/p-03795.html


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“Overreacting six ways from Tuesday.”

House Proposal Targets File Swappers
Declan McCullagh

Peer-to-peer users who swap copyrighted files could be in danger of becoming federal felons, under a new proposal backed by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Their legislation, introduced Wednesday, would punish an Internet user who shares even a single file without permission from a copyright holder with prison terms of up to five years and fines of up to $250,000.

Written by Michigan's John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the House judiciary committee, the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act (ACCOPS) represents Congress' boldest attempt yet to shutter peer-to-peer networks, which the major record labels and movie studios view as a serious threat.

Currently, under a little-known 1997 law called the No Electronic Theft Act, many P2P users are technically already violating criminal laws. But if the ACCOPS bill were to succeed, prosecutors would not have to prove that a copyrighted file was repeatedly downloaded. Conyers' proposal would require them to prove only that the file was publicly accessible.

Other sponsors of ACCOPS are Reps. Howard Berman of California, Adam Schiff of California, Marty Meehan of Massachusetts, Robert Wexler of Florida and Anthony Weiner of New York. No Republican has supported the proposal.

One legal scholar viewed the legislation as an over-the-top measure.

"The business of expanding the criminal law so that making unauthorized personal copies of copyrighted works becomes a criminal violation is overreacting six ways from Tuesday," said Jessica Litman, who teaches copyright law at Wayne State University. "It's exceptional. But that does seem to be what the bill is trying to do."

Litman said that, without ACCOPS, criminal copyright infringement currently is "hard to prove, because you (have) to prove that a copy was actually distributed."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco, also criticized the bill. "Jailing people for file sharing is not the answer," EFF lawyer Fred von Lohmann said. "Proponents of this bill are casting aside privacy, innovation and even our personal liberty as collateral damage in their war against file sharing."

ACCOPS would also do the following:

• Require that anyone distributing certain search software include a notice that "clearly and conspicuously" warns downloaders that the software may offer a security and privacy risk. The definition of search software is broad and includes any application that "enables third parties to store data" on a computer. Violators could face up to six months in prison.

• Punish anyone who knowingly provides false contact information, with intent to defraud, while registering a domain name. Penalties would include fines and up to five years in prison.

• Order the U.S. Department of Justice to share information with foreign governments to aid in tracking suspected copyright infringers. Information that can be shared includes "the technological means through which violations of the copyright law has occurred" and "the identity and location of the person who has committed such violation."

• Create a new copyright crime of recording a "motion picture as it is being performed or displayed in a motion picture theater."
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-1026715.html


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Congressman pocketed $18,000 for RIAA 'lobbying trip'
Andrew Orlowski

The powerful Congressman at the center of the controversy over royalty rates for small webcasters took $18,000 from the Recording Industry Association of America.

As chair of the House Judiciary Committee, James Sensenbrenner was instrumental in forcing the deal that could result in an antitrust suit against the RIAA being filed by small webcasters.

The trouble is, Congressmen are forbidden from taking private donations to lobby abroad. Sensennbrenner recorded the visit to Taiwan and Thailand back in January, as a "fact finding mission".

According to the House Ethics Committee's advisory booklet on Gifts and Travel, "Members and staff may not accept expenses from a private source for travel the primary purpose of which is to conduct official business."

"If he's dictating policy, he should be a representative of the United States, not the RIAA," Boycott-RIAA founder Bill Evans told us.

The RIAA has confirmed that the purpose of Sensenbrenner's paid- for jaunt was one of exposition: "so they understand that this is a unified message coming from all levels of the U.S. government," according to an RIAA spokesperson.

"His own description belies that it was a 'fact-finding' trip," says Gary Ruskin, of the Congressional Accountability Project watchdog.

$18,000 can go a long way in Thailand. Sensenbrenner's brief trip was for just five days.

Three months before his five-day RIAA-sponsored trip, Sensenbrenner surprised observers by taking a close interest in the Small Webcasters Settlement Act (HR.5469) which morphed from the anticipated six-month cooling off period into a bill specifying detailed rates and conditions, which many small webcasters found unpalatable. According to participants in the negotiations, Sensenbrenner forced the webcasters to come up with a royalty settlement with the RIAA, threatening to use his staff to write the terms instead. Contacted by The Register this week, Sensenbrenner's office referered us to the House Judiciary Committee.

"It's not for us to say the rule was violated, but the House Ethics Committee should investigate, Ruskin told The Register. However, the Committee can only investigate the representative if asked to so by a fellow Congressman.

Boycott-RIAA and the Webcaster Alliance have produced an electronic form and urge music lovers to fax their Congressional representative so that an investigation can begin. You can find it here.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31812.html


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Radio Royalties: The Ticking Timebomb Under The RIAA
Andrew Orlowski

An obscure backroom deal that took place in Washington DC last Fall - unreported by the specialist music press, then dismissed as insignificant after extensive coverage here at The Register - could yet be the undoing of the Recording Industry Association of America.

At stake is the RIAA's right to set punitive royalty terms for webcasters - royalties that terrestrial analog radio stations don't have to pay. But lurking in the background is the RIAA's legitimacy to police copyright terms for online, digital music. In the closing stages of the Napster trial, even Judge Patel questioned whether the RIAA had a right to perpetuate its distribution monopoly into the digital age.

Being unable to pursue its valuable copyright claims on electronic music would reduce the RIAA from being one of the richest and most powerful lobby groups into a museum piece.

But Perry Narancic, attorney for the Webcaster Alliance which this week threatened to file a suit alleging anti-competitive actions by the RIAA, stesses that this is early days.

"This is not a class action on behalf of 10,000 small webcasters," he told us. The Webcaster Alliance was born out of the acrimonious deal, reported here (see 96 pc of Net Radio' to close after backroom deal screws grassroots 'casters ) No suit has yet been filed.

Narancic explains that under Section 16 of the Clayton Act a trade association has right to injunctive relief. Also under examination is the RIAA's claim to negotiate sound recording royalites, which he argues may fall foul of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, regarding monopolization claims.

Why does he feel confident that the Webcaster Alliance could succeed where Napster had failed? Narancic says that the tradition of judicial conservatism effectively tied Judge Patel's hands in the Napster hearings.

"We believe RIAA and members control 85 to 90 per cent of the dominant market for music. They're seeking to eliminate a distribution channel that is absolutely vital to competing music from independents," he argues. "Music has a very difficult time getting exposure through traditional means. And yet the regulatory barriers are very low - Internet radio is a great way to distribute music in a convenient fashion." Raising the barrier to entry cuts off the air supply to thousands of smaller webcasters.

So what happened last Fall? Webcaster were astonished when a bill, HR.5469 hit the floor of the House. An earlier version was expected to be a simple affair which called for a moratorium for royalty payments: a six-month cooling off period. But instead the 28- page bill bound webcasters of a certain size into quite detailed rates and terms.

The revised bill, which gave interested parties only minutes to digest the new terms, was the result of a shotgun compromise between the RIAA and a group of breakaway webcasters, who styled themselves the "Voice of Webcasters". The thirteen, later eight, webcasters who signed up to the terms of HR.5469 had been under intense pressure from high-ranking Senator James Sensenbrenner, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. According to those present, Sensenbrenner - anxious for a result and under pressure from the AFL-CIO - threatened to use his own staff to set the terms.

In November, Senator Jesse Helms - under pressure from the religious broadcasters - introduced a third, revised version of HR.5469.

The Webcaster Alliance now argues that the backroom deal was anticompetitive.

At the core of the argument is how streaming media stations should pay performance royalties. All legitimate radio stations pay publishing royalties to the songwriter direct which are collected by BMI and ASCAP (unless the songwriter doesn't belong to these organizations or choose to waive the royalty).

Under the DMCA, the RIAA is entitled to collect performance royalties too, which, unusually, terrestrial stations in the United States are not required to pay. The RIAA argues that a streamed broadcast equates to a reproduction, not broadcast, even though most streams are well below the quality of CDs, and stream ripping software is itself illegal under the DMCA.

But as Kevin Shively of Beethoven.com, who withdrew his endorsement from the VoW deal, told us last October, outside the USA the performance royalties rarely exceeds the publishing royalties. "There's no way a station needs to pay a multiple of songwriter royalties," he says. "And in some cases proposed it reaches double digits."

"We're counting on the financial and moral support of the public," Alliance attorney Narancic told us this week. The Webcaster Alliance reported with scorn to comments made by John Simson, Executive Director of the RIAA's royalty collection arm SoundExchange in The Register this week, which characterized the 300-strong Webcaster Alliance as an organization of hobbyists.

Most of the 300 members are for-profit or non-profit organizations, said Alliance president Ann Gabriel. "For John Simson to classify our members as 'hobbiests' - members who have taken the time to form corporations and other legal entities so they can provide services to streaming media enthusiasts is laughable,"she said. "I consider SoundExchange the 'unincorporated division' of the RIAA to be more of a hobby than any type of operation our Webcaster Alliance members are conducting right now."

"The RIAA is a public relations nightmare unto itself," adds Narancic. This, you already know.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31705.html


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More Can Be Done To Stem The Tide Of CD Sales Declines, Says NPD Consumer Survey

PORT WASHINGTON, NEW YORK, July 15, 2003 - According to the results of a recent survey of more than 6,000 music consumers conducted by The NPD Group, more than one-third of consumers claimed to have purchased fewer CDs this year versus last year. But it's not all bad news for the recording industry: Consumers report that enhanced CD features, in conjunction with better marketing of those features, would make them more likely to buy music commercially.

According to Russ Crupnick, VP of The NPD Group: "While zero- tolerance for file-sharing has received a lion's share of media coverage, other methods to combat dwindling sales are being regularly rolled out by record labels˜though consumers are responding better to some tactics than to others."

Major reasons cited by consumers for purchasing fewer CDs include a perception that CDs are priced higher than they should be (43 percent), as well as fiscal belt-tightening due to economic uncertainty (43 percent). Among younger consumers, downloading and burning music tracks were an additional primary reason cited for purchasing declines. Forty-one percent of consumers aged 13 to 25 reported that their use of file-sharing services caused them to purchase less music.

According to The NPD Group's survey, the following extra features were most often used successfully by record labels to combat falling sales:

* Bonus Tracks were the extra feature that was recognized most by consumers (cited by 55 percent of survey respondents).

* Stickers were the most effective way to draw attention toward CD extra features (68 percent).

* Extra features were perceived to have a more positive impact on current/favorite artist sales (54 percent) than they would on new artist sales (37 percent).

* Bonus tracks (54 percent), discount/rebate offers (48 percent) and video content (42 percent) were relatively more appealing to consumers than informational features, such as interview discs and Web links (29 percent).

"With music sales continuing to decline, it's important to note that there are several marketing strategies that are getting consumers' attention," Crupnick said. "It's incumbent upon record labels and music retailers, however, to really listen to the concerns of music buyers, in order to provide them with the kind of music product they're willing to pay for."
http://mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=54360


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Movies on the Run
Michel Marriott

REMEMBER the first Walkman? It has been almost a quarter-century since Sony's portable cassette player changed the way people listen to music on the go. Now another form of entertainment is getting the Walkman treatment. Palm-size portable video players are beginning to change where and how people watch movies, cartoons and music videos.

The gadgets, which play compressed video files on a small screen, are designed to be generally less expensive and more convenient than portable DVD players, which have been available for several years. None of these new-generation players, in fact, play DVD's. Instead, using advances in storage and compression technology, most store video on hard drives or memory cards, much the way digital audio players store music files.

"It's just what happened to music," said Ulrich Neumann, director of the Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California. "We went from cassette tape to CD's to MP3 on memory chips or tiny hard drives. What is happening now is that you have digital movie files going from DVD's down to probably small micro drives."

A few of these players are already in stores. At the high end, Archos has released AV320 Cinema to Go, a hard-drive-based player that costs $600. At the low end, the toy manufacturer Hasbro unveiled a hand-held player for children last week called VideoNow. The $50 device plays 30-minute cartoons on a monochrome screen.

Yet it is unclear whether the public will want to watch video on a screen the size of a dollhouse window, with a resolution that is no match for even a standard TV set. After all, some hand-held organizers can show video, but that function has never been a particularly strong selling point.

Watching a movie requires more attention than listening to music, so it is difficult to see how the mobile video players will be used in the on-the-go way that portable audio players are.

Industry experts also caution that providing legal content for the devices is and will continue to be a major obstacle.

Still, several other electronics manufacturers, including ViewSonic and Samsung, have announced plans to introduce video players later this year. And Sony is developing a device, the PlayStation Portable, that will play video and music in addition to games.

But it is another game company, Nintendo, that is hastening the development of these devices, calculating that they will appeal to young people, mostly boys, who are used to playing games on a small, relatively low-resolution screen. The first mass-market wave of these gadgets is likely to piggyback on the Game Boy, Nintendo's hugely popular portable video gaming device.

Nintendo estimates that more than 150 million Game Boys have been sold since the machine was introduced in 1989. Its most recent permutation, the $100 Game Boy Advance SP, released this spring, is just 3 inches on its side when folded and about an inch thick. Most important, it has a bright full- color screen.

Parrin Kaplan, Nintendo's vice president for corporate affairs, said the company recognized the flexibility of its hand-held gaming franchise. "There's so much you can do with it," Ms. Kaplan said.

With varying degrees of support from Nintendo, four electronics companies have developed technologies that use the Game Boy Advance SP's 2.4-by- 1.6-inch screen to play anything from cartoon shorts to full-length movies in full-motion video. Some Game Boy video technology is expected to reach the market as early as September.

"It is a new application for the Game Boy Advance," Dan Kitchen, vice president for hand-held development at Majesco, a video game publisher in Edison, N.J., said of his company's approach to augmenting the Game Boy for video playback.

Called Game Boy Video Pak, the Majesco product consists of special cartridges that appear to be no different from standard Game Boy game cartridges. But when they are inserted into the Game Boy they transform it into a video player, complete with stereo sound, DVD-like controls and full- screen playback.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/17/te...ts/17boyy.html


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Byte Of The Apple
Charles Haddad

The Chili Peppers' Sour Grapes Over iTunes

This rock group's refusal to be included on Apple's popular new music-download service is a backward move that's doomed to fall flat.
These guys call themselves rock musicians? Where, I ask you, is their sense of storming the Establishment ramparts, of thumbing their noses at authority? Instead, by refusing to let Apple (AAPL ) sell their music online at the new iTunes Music Store, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are leading a vanguard in the wrong direction. They might as well put their clothes back on.

Of all the iTunes holdouts, the Chili Peppers, with their longstanding popularity and reputation for artistry, are perhaps the most respected. Others include bands spanning hip-hop to metal rock, from Linkin Park to Metallica. All of them fret that they would lose creative control if they let Apple sell their songs individually on iTunes. "Our artists would rather not contribute to the demise of the album format," Mark Reiter of Q Prime Management Co., which manages the Chili Peppers, Metallica, and several other artists, told Reuters recently.

TOO MUCH FILLER. It's a bogus argument that makes these bands sound like shills for the music-industry's suits. After all, most individual artists and groups lost that kind of control when they signed up with a big label. For listeners, the album format has all too often been a tool of oppression.

Sure, some bands, including the Chili Peppers, do work hard to craft albums whose span of titles are consistently good. But under pressure from their label, most artists and groups combine three or four quality songs with filler, a strategy that lets the industry justify the $15 to $20 price tag for CDs.

Such thievery sparked the rise of downloadable music, generating an opportunity for pirates using file-sharing networks such as Napster and KaZaA. Pirating music is neither legal nor right, but it's an illegitimate response to a legitimate problem. Now, Apple has seized Napster's fallen banner and is taking the digital-music revolution mainstream.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...6812_tc056.htm


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N.C. Senate Approves Policy On Refilling Printer Cartridges
AP

RALEIGH, N.C. -- The state House agreed Tuesday to Senate changes to a bill that would give printer owners the right to refill any printer ink cartridge, voiding purchase agreements that ban the practice.

The bill, approved by an 80-32 vote, now goes to Gov. Mike Easley to be signed into law.

Rep. Joe Hackney, D-Orange, had supported the same provisions the Senate put back into the bill. He said the legislation would be ineffective without them and urged his House colleagues to accept the Senate version.

"I think if Ford Motor Company tried to completely control the aftermarket by trying to control the tire you put on your car by some device, I think this Legislature would act," he said.

Some other House members said the legislation essentially gives legislative endorsement to trademark infringement. Some called it legislative meddling in the courts.

"If there is an unfair and deception trade practice, that will be found and it will be stopped," said Rep. Paul "Skip" Stam, R-Wake. "The only way that the bill really matters is if in fact a court finds that it is not anti-competitive and it's not an unfair and deceptive trade practice. And if that's the case, why would we want to get involved?"

The bill was prompted by a lawsuit filed by printer company Lexmark International against Static Control Components of Sanford, which makes components for the laser printer cartridge industry.

Static Control makes computer chips that allow less expensive in cartridges to be adapted to Lexmark printers.

Static Control employs 1,200 people at plants in Sanford.

After Lexmark sued Static Control to try to stop it from manufacturing the chips, the Sanford company filed its own lawsuit, accusing Lexmark of monopolizing the toner cartridge market and falsely representing their products.

The Static Control chips mean consumers don't have to send their cartridges back to Lexmark for refills. Many Lexmark buyers agree to return the cartridges to Lexmark's factory in Kentucky in exchange for a rebate. The agreement is found on the box or in paperwork inside.
http://www.heraldsun.com/state/6-371743.html


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Milking The Last Drop Of Ink From Epson’s Printers
Joe Figueiredo

Thanks to an ingenious piece of free software from Dutch online-shopping website Digital Revolution, users of
Epson computer printers can continue printing their favourite text documents and pictures—even when their printer ‘thinks’ that its ink cartridge is empty.

According to Digital Revolution’s director, Gerben Kreuning, Epson printers use a software ‘counter’ in a chip in the ink cartridge that tracks the amount of printing done (and thus the amount of ink used), determining when the printer ink-cartridge needs to be replaced and when the user needs to be informed accordingly.

However, this message is apparently issued ‘prematurely’, and by resetting this counter, printers are fooled into thinking that a new cartridge has been installed, thus allowing computer users to continue printing merrily until the cartridge is truly empty.

Digital Revolution claims to have deployed this software (which is applicable to most Epson printers) to ‘re-use’ four Epson Stylus Colour 580 cartridges after they had been ‘declared’ empty (after three to four months of intensive use).

Earlier last week, the Dutch consumer association, Consumentenbond, advised consumers against buying Epson printers because of just this reason, stating that the printer manufacturer “wants to make money out of selling consumers cartridges more often”.

Epson, which reacted angrily to this allegation, calling it “factually incorrect”, is considering legal action.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=17030


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Can an MP3 Glutton Savor a Tune?
Rogier Van Bakel

WHEN Marcel Proust bit into a little madeleine, it famously triggered a book's worth of delicate memories. But when it comes to being jolted back in time, foodstuffs aren't nearly as effective as music.

Almost everyone knows hundreds of recordings that are time machines. With a few guitar notes, or just a couple of syllables sung by a familiar voice, they transport you into your past, perhaps placing you in the middle of teenage angst and your first love. Baby boomers like me may suddenly find themselves on a long-ago road trip with a Talking Heads mix tape blaring from the speakers, or reliving a sweltering backyard evening with friends and tubs of cold beer and David Bowie incanting his inscrutably cool lyrics. By virtue of repetition over weeks or months, music can become a soundtrack for a particular time in your life.

But all that may be changing now that music fans can indulge boundless appetites, and shoveling ever more music onto CD shelves and computer hard drives has become almost a quest unto itself.

With the advent of online music services both legally sanctioned and illicit, expanding your collection no longer requires deep pockets. At www.emusic.com, for example, I typically find a few hundred good-to-great tracks each month (the service charges as little as $120 a year for virtually unlimited downloads). I'm an EMusic aficionado because the site has introduced me to artists I might otherwise have missed, like the atmospheric Scottish rockers Mogwai and the wonderfully delirious Ethiopian sax player Getachew Mekurya.

But with so much worthwhile music pouring into my computer and from there into my iPod, none of it seems quite as long-lasting or momentous as the old tunes. I'll come across sets of MP3's I have no recollection of having downloaded just weeks earlier. Such forgetfulness would surely turn into full- blown musical amnesia if I used free illicit services like Grokster, KaZaA or Morpheus, where the repertory is many times bigger than that of any fee- based MP3 site and where my musical greed would go dangerously unchecked.

My iPod, by the way, is the most capacious player on the market. It's my fourth iPod, because I ran out of space on three previous versions with smaller hard drives. And I haven't exactly stopped buying CD's, either. Just months ago I had new shelves built in my living room to accommodate my ever-growing collection of the shiny disks. (If anything, my MP3 habit fuels my CD habit; I buy official CD's of my favorite downloaded music because the sound quality of the disks is markedly better. It's also nice to have printed lyrics, liner notes and artwork.)

But sometimes doubts arise. It's not that I beat myself up over the materialist aspect of it, over the money I spend. (My excuse is that in comparison with fine art, for instance, recorded music is a pretty good bargain.) Rather, I'm thinking about what the music means to me - to us, to music fans. Are we diminishing its emotional capital by spreading our affection for new cuts so thin?

When I was a student and money was tight, virtually every album I bought came to stand for something. The music became the marker of that period for the rest of my earthly existence. I remember who I was, where I was and what my life was like when the first two Joe Jackson albums were released. That music is forever tied to the post-adolescent turmoil of those years, and to my cramped room with its preposterously huge speakers (a belated apology to my former housemates). It brings back memories of the friends I had at the time, of plays and concerts I went to, of meals and vacations and embraces and discussions. Records by Wire, John Martyn and Tom Waits had the same effect. I wrapped myself in every note, lyric fragment and album cover.

At the time, my entire music collection, after seven or eight years of buying records, consisted of maybe 150 to 200 albums. That's 2,000 songs, give or take - all of which would probably now fit on the lowliest iPod. I own a hundred times that much music these days. Question is, was I somehow getting more out of my tunes when all my albums fit into a duffel bag?

The suffering recording industry aside, there is something to be said for consuming small portions of music instead of engaging in the gluttony that has become the norm for many music fans. So here's my back-to- basics admonition to myself: Buy two or three CD's, or download just a short playlist of songs, and listen to them repeatedly. Play them so often that they become a bookmark of the present. Years from now, the music will remind you who you were, where you were, whom you were with. It will call up myriad locations, colors, smells, moods.

In other words, music's mnemonic power, like Aretha Franklin in her signature song, deserves a little more R-E-S-P-E-C-T than it gets from us inveterate acquirers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/17/te...ne r=USERLAND


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ISPs And Labels 'Must Cooperate'
Electricnews.net

Since broadband providers and music labels have not shown a willingness to cooperate, European consumers are unlikely pay for e-music anytime soon.

That is the finding of a Jupiter Research report, which included a survey of 5,000 European consumers, 43 per cent of whom said they are not convinced that paying for a digital music service was a necessity.

Indeed, the report said that many European broadband users sign up for their high-speed connections so that they can more easily participate in illegal file sharing. Jupiter added that this motivation is not only bad for labels, but will pose an increasing problems for broadband Internet service providers (BSPs), putting their networks under greater strain.

According to the company's numbers, some 18 percent of European Internet users are still using illegal file sharing. Mark Mulligan, Jupiter senior analyst, said that as long as such high numbers are downloading illegal music, the take up of legitimate music services will be hindered. He also said that in order to convince music downloaders to switch to paid models, broadband Internet service providers (BSPs) and music labels must work together.

But this has not yet happened, despite the fact that 29 percent of BSP respondents in Jupiter's survey said that they believe that music downloads will eventually generate significant revenues. Currently, over half of the European BSPs surveyed intend to launch a music service later in this year.

Mulligan said however that any forthcoming e-music schemes from BSPs could face trouble unless broadband penetration broadens and labels must sufficient amounts of content on-line as well as offer less restrictive digital rights.

Still, some progress has been noted in 2003, Jupiter noted, with labels making more of their catalogue music available to on-line distributors. Mulligan added that BSPs and labels in Europe should learn from what's happening in the US, where the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken key ISPs to court to handover details of subscribers, and start cooperating.

Mulligan also said there was a huge willingness on the part of BSPs to cooperate with labels but that the strength of labels' focus on licensing was causing problems for the service providers. "Labels should not only see ISPs as a threat but see the potential to work as partners," he told ElectricNews.Net. "ISPs make a perfect distribution channel for digital music."

With respect to the prospects of major progress in the near future Mulligan said, "I don't think so, to be honest, the parties are too far apart. Labels are too concerned with tackling piracy rather than on legitimate alternatives and ISPs are focused on getting new subscribers."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31786.html


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A Congressional Look At IP Crimes
Declan McCullagh

A key legislator in the House of Representatives said Tuesday that he will release the first "Intellectual Property Crime Index" next week. Rep. Lamar Smith,

R-Texas, the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees copyright law, said the index would accomplish what he asserts the Department of Justice statistics currently don't do well: track intellectual property crimes and analyze trends over time.

"Our analysis will break down the numbers so we know precisely what type of IP (intellectual property) crimes are occurring, from copyright law to trademark violations to the theft of trade secrets," Smith told the Media Institute, a First Amendment nonprofit group. "While some of these statistics will be familiar to us, they will also be a useful tool for lawmakers as we move forward to increase the enforcement and identification of intellectual property crimes." A year ago, Smith signed a letter to the Justice Department that urges prosecutors to seek indictments against peer-to-peer pirates.
http://news.com.com/2110-1028-1026176.html


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Online Music Commune To Share-The-Wealth Of Downloads
David Minto

Hard as it may be to shed tears for platinum-selling pop princesses and cynically-sunglassed music execs, filesharers, ‘pirates’, and music-lovers are all unlikely to want their activities to make it more difficult for genuine, uncorporatised musical talent to eke out a living.

Which is why a new UK site, IntoMusic.co.uk, may come as good news indeed. Set up by musician and web- developer Gavin Molton, the site describes itself as a cooperative venture amongst independent music artists, through which the artists themselves get a 50 per cent cut of the revenue every time one of their tracks is downloaded.

With musical styles ranging from ‘Acoustic’ through to ‘Dance Experimental’, vetted submissions are reviewed and made available to download from the site.

Users purchase tracks through a ‘credit’ system, something Molton claims is unique to the site. Credits are available in batches of 5 or 20 (on a sliding pay-scale), each one allowing users to download further tracks with burn and transfer capabilities. A streaming preview facility enables user to ‘try before they buy’, whilst unlimited- use subscription for the site is also available.

Molton explains his motivation for launching the site: “I think there’s a lack of good UK sites for downloading and discovering new music, IntoMusic.co.uk is the antidote to the current dearth of anything interesting going on in the mainstream music industry.”
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=17040


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New Cable Boxes Record Shows, Play DVDs, MP3s
Posted by xix

In the cable industry's latest move to combat competition from satellite TV, Charter Communications will soon introduce its most feature-packed cable set-top box yet.

The box, to be released in the fall, records programming onto a hard drive, has a built- in DVD player and can serve as a media center for digital photos and music. The dual- tuner device supports two TVs, allowing users to simultaneously record two different shows, or watch one program in one room while playing another show in another. It also supports high-definition television, video-on- demand and pay-per-view services.

The device also has Ethernet or wireless networking capabilities, so users can transfer digital music or photo files from a desktop computer. The machine can feed stored music or photos to a computer -- but not television programs, because of built-in copy-protections.
http://www.geeknews.net/?info=168


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Apple Beats Expectations, Posts $19 Million Profit
posted by Shane

Apple released its third quarter financial statement yesterday, beating analysts' expectations. Apple was expected to report a net profit of three cents a share on revenue of US$1.48 billion. Instead, Apple reported a net profit of 5 cents a share on $1.545 billion in revenue, with a net profit of $19 million. This compares to a net profit of $32 million, or 9 cents per share, a year ago.

Apple's desktop line-up sales are down, however laptop sales are up considerably, accounting for 46% of Macs sold, with iBooks increasing 12% and PowerBooks up 71%. Overall, Apple shipped 771,000 Macs during the quarter, which was down 5% from last year.

iPod sales are going extremely well, and the iTunes Music Store has sold 6.5 million songs to date, with 5 million of those sales coming in the third quarter.
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/20...0717020861.htm


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Senate Committee Tables Bill on Privacy
Jon Healey

A California Senate committee has postponed action on a bill by Assemblyman Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) that would have required Internet services to notify customers of subpoenas seeking their identities and allow more time to challenge the requests in court.

At a hearing Tuesday, leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee told Simitian that he didn't have the votes to get Assembly Bill 1143 through the panel, and they suggested that he bring it back next year.

Opponents of the Assembly-passed measure, led by the Motion Picture Assn. of America and several video game companies, argue that it would make it harder to protect their intellectual property from being stolen online.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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Music Pirate Hunt Turns To Loyola
Robert Becker and Angela Rozas

2 students' names are handed over; lawsuit possible.

Preparing more lawsuits to fight music piracy, the recording industry has subpoenaed records from Loyola University Chicago seeking the names of students suspected of offering copyrighted songs over the school's computer network.

University officials said they have complied with the July 7 subpoena from the Recording Industry Association of America and have turned over the names of two students linked to an Internet address listed in the court document. The students, who have not been identified, share a dorm room, school officials said.

"We take these things seriously," said Rev. Richard Salmi, vice president of student affairs at Loyola. "We let the students know that from time to time."

The subpoena to Loyola is just the latest twist in a long fight waged by the recording industry to protect the work of such artists as Sheryl Crow and Shakira from being pirated off the Internet or local computer networks.

After battling big file-swapping services like Grokster and Kazaa, the industry is now also going after individual users.

RIAA attorneys are collecting evidence and sending out subpoenas to Internet service providers, including colleges. Officials declined to comment on any specific subpoena or on who may be a recipient.

Just last month, a federal appeals court rejected a request by Verizon Communications Inc. to delay turning over the names of four of its Internet subscribers suspected of illegally offering free music for downloading.

"They are sending a message," said Tom Lewry, a Southfield, Mich., attorney who represented a Michigan Technological University student who was sued by RIAA. "A lot of it is overkill."

Education officials say that while universities are typically under legal obligation to protect student privacy, the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act afford students suspected of copyright infringement no such protection.

The privacy laws "do not give students a license to steal," said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel with the American Council on Education, a Washington-based group representing college and university presidents. "And as such, the subpoenas rendered by the RIAA are reasonable and valid ... and the institutions have an obligation to comply with the law."

Some students, however, fretted that their privacy was being violated.

"I don't think they should go through the school to get names," said Laurence Stepney, 19, a sophomore from Oak Park studying psychology and theater. "If they want to go through on their own and find out who it is, that's fine, but I don't want record companies looking at what I look at at school."

For the moment, Loyola is the only local school known to be served with a subpoena. The University of Illinois and Northwestern University, for example, say they have had no such contact with the RIAA. Officials at the University of Chicago could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
http://www.mediareform.net/news.php?id=650


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Retooled Airplane Albums Ready For Takeoff
Troy Carpenter

Almost 30 years after a host of lineup changes led psychedelic-era pioneers Jefferson Airplane to rechristen themselves as Jefferson Starship (later just Starship), BMG Heritage has prepared deluxe reissues of the group's first four albums, all set for an Aug. 19 release.

"Jefferson Airplane Takes Off," "Surrealistic Pillow," "After Bathing at Baxter's" and "Crown of Creation" have each been digitally remastered from the original master tapes by engineer Bob Irwin and amended with rare or unreleased bonus tracks and liner notes by biographer Jeff Tamarkin.
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/ar...ent_id=1934939


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Neil Young Surveys 'Greendale'
Jonathan Cohen

Neil Young has set an Aug. 19 release for his next Reprise album, "Greendale." The 10- song set chronicles the life and times of the Green family, residents of the fictional town from which the album takes its name. "Greendale" will be bundled with a bonus DVD of Young performing the album in sequence during a recent solo acoustic show in Dublin.

In his review of the show for Billboard.com, Nick Kelly said the Green family seemed to "represent the best of America -- they're by turns kind, loyal, creative, rebellious, and self-possessed. We heard tales of Grandma and Grandpa Green and it's almost as if we were back on Sugar Mountain or at home with the Waltons."

Young is backed on the album by Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot. The artist is right at home as the all-knowing narrator of the stories, which run the gamut from "Carmichael" (where one character murders a policeman after being caught with drugs in his car) to "Bandit," marked by the bittersweet lament: "someday you'll find everything you're looking for."

"Greendale" will also exist as a stand-alone film, directed by Young under his alias Bernard Shakey. No dialog is included in the movie, which features a number of Young's family members and such longtime associates as musician Ben Keith and "Greendale" album co-producer L.A. Johnson. Young himself cameos as entertainer Wayne Newton.

The "Greendale" film will premiere in September at the Toronto Film Festival and will be released as a separate DVD in the fall. The "Greendale" acoustic concert will air on local cable television stations in more than 100 markets in August, as well as on DirecTV.

On the same day "Greendale" is released, Reprise will reissue the long out-of-print Young albums "On the Beach," "American Stars 'N Bars," "Hawks & Doves" and "Re.ac.tor," which were originally slated for June 24.
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/ar...ent_id=1933832


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Processing MPEG-2 Compressed Material
Irina Piens

Within the context of an IST project, a software development toolkit has been generated that supports editing operations in the compressed domain for MPEG-2 formats.

MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group), constitute a set of standards that are most often employed for coding audio- visual information in a digitally compressed format. Thereby, extremely robust compression methods are used that allow significantly smaller size files with the same quality in comparison to other coding formats. Among the various versions, the MPEG-2 format has already gained the wider acceptance of consumers and professional users of video material.

Focusing on developing new ways of easy and timely manipulation of video content, this EC-funded project has also introduced the so-called Compressed Editing Toolkit (CET). While most conventionally used approaches offer decode-edit-encode capabilities, the innovative CET offers manipulation of images to be directly applied to the compressed data. In this way, processing MPEG-2 in the compressed domain may be significantly improved as far as performance and quality are concerned.

More specifically, the smart rendering features of CET are limited to simple copy operations, thus preventing excessive encoding and decoding that may lead to loss of video quality. Additionally, this may also reduce processor intensive recording, which is a time-consuming and effort-requiring task. In particular, the integrated scene cut detection algorithms have been designed to offer preservation of video quality and fast execution. General MPEG-2 support functions such as key frame grabbing, optimised scaling, seeking and playback have been also included.

This special library may be used either as stand-alone software with simple and flexible integration and usage or an incorporated part of other project's results (VIZARD-Installer). The provider is looking for various sorts of collaborations with commercial and scientific organisations. Moreover, partners are sought who may act as sales points for marketing and distribution of the CET as standalone software kit or as an innovative part of advanced video publishing Tools in the worldwide market.
http://dbs.cordis.lu/fep-cgi/srchida...OFFR_O_BUSI_EN


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3 Blinks Means You're Hot: A Wireless Network Tracker
Glenn Fleishmann

You've seen them wandering through airports and conference centers, holding laptops up at strange angles and squinting at the screens. They move slowly forward, then backward. Then they often scratch their heads, stow their computers and wander off muttering.

They are the wireless network dowsers, wistfully searching for network signals in public places.

This month Kensington will add a helpful tool to the diviner's kit when it releases the WiFi Finder.

The tiny gadget ($29.99) has three green light-emitting diodes and a button. When the button is pressed, the device scans the area for a network within 200 feet using the common 802.11b or the newer 802.11g network standard. If it finds one or more networks, it displays the signal strength of the strongest network with one, two or three L.E.D.'s.

The WiFi Finder's set of Wi-Fi chips will sense only that type of network, filtering out other radio signals and interference in its frequency range from devices like cordless phones or Bluetooth networks. More information is available at www.kensington.com.

Kevin Ota, a spokesman for Kensington, said the company's engineers had come up with the idea for the WiFi Finder after experiencing frustration of their own in finding networks. The product is a bit out of character for a company known primarily for mice and other computer peripherals. "We just thought it would be practical," Mr. Ota said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/17/te...ts/17find.html


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DirecTV Dragnet Snares Innocent Techies

In recent months the satellite TV giant has filed nearly 9,000 federal lawsuits against people who've purchased signal piracy devices. But some of those devices have legitimate uses, and innocent computer geeks are getting caught in the crackdown.
Kevin Poulsen

In 2000, Texas-based physician Rod Sosa says he had the entrepreneurial notion that medical offices might pay a premium for a secure workstation -- one better suited for housing sensitive patient information than an off-the-shelf PC. A long time computer geek and tinkerer -- as well as a medical doctor and internist -- Sosa began working on a prototype. "I wanted to do this as a means of making extra money outside of my own practice," he says.

Sosa quickly became enamored of the idea of using smart cards to provide access control at the keyboard; the PC would have an attached reader, and physicians, medical assistants and office staff would all carry their own cards that would unlock the system. So the doctor ordered an inexpensive smart card programmer from the Web, and began experimenting. "It turned out to be much more difficult than I anticipated," Sosa recalls. He lost interest in the plan, and the $79 programmer was relegated to Sosa's electronics junk box with the old RS-232 cables and 5 1/4 inch floppy drives.

It sat there forgotten for nearly two years, until October, 2002, when Sosa received a letter from satellite TV giant DirecTV. The company accused him of purchasing piracy equipment, and, by extension, stealing DirecTV's signal. When he called the company to clear things up, he found they weren't interested in his explanations: they wanted $3,500 and the smart card programmer, or they would literally make a federal case out of it and sue him under anti-piracy laws. "I didn't know what to do, I was completely flabbergasted. So I sent the money in," says Sosa. "I have a livelihood, and I have a family, and there are a lot of things that I`d rather be than right."

And with that, Sosa was swept into and back out of DirecTV's vast anti-piracy machine -- perhaps the most massive corporate law enforcement effort since AT&T took on the blue box in the early 1970s. Backed by a legion of lawyers and empowered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, former FBI agents in the company's Office of Signal Integrity have staged raids against businesses that deal in piracy equipment, seizing customer lists and inventory with armed law enforcement officers as backup. The company has shut down scores of websites that sold or advertised equipment, often repurposing them with new content warning about the perils of piracy, and issuing dark threats like "your IP address has been logged" and "this site uses cookies" (it doesn't). Some of the commandeered sites now keep visitors up to date on DirecTV's latest courtroom victories, though ignoring their losses.

Last month DirecTV even won a court order gagging the webmaster of the Pirates Den, one of the largest and oldest electronic watering holes for satellite pirates. Using a Canadian legal instrument called an Anton Piller order, DirecTV had the site shuttered, and British Columbia-based proprietor Daryl "Risestar" Gray barred from discussing the action in public, according to sources close to the defense. The case is still being litigated, and Gray has launched another message board called Freedom Fight, where among fevered user discussions on the shutdown's implications for free speech and Canadian sovereignty, his court-ordered silence resonates.

But the most controversial pincer in DirecTV's piracy war is its fierce and growing campaign against end users -- the pirates themselves, who use devices like "bootloaders," "unloopers," and emulators to hack DirecTV receivers, or reprogram DirecTV smart cards, to receive standard and premium programming and pay-per-view content for free. Targeting pirates for their piracy is difficult, if not impossible, since receiving DirecTV is a passive operation. So instead the company is going after people like Sosa, who have purchased hardware from one of the equipment vendors shut down in the DMCA raids. Critics say that approach is misguided, and is snaring innocent hobbyists and security researchers, some of whom have never even owned a satellite dish. "Innocent people are being caught in DirecTV's dragnet," says Jason Schultz, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which began receiving calls for help from DirectTV defendants last year.

The company begins by sending the equipment-purchaser a letter, sometimes through a local law firm, citing a hefty sack of federal statues that outlaw piracy or possession of signal theft equipment. The letter gives the recipient a deadline of a couple of weeks to contact DirecTV, or face litigation and possible damages of $100,000 or more.

If the recipient calls the phone number on the letter, they're given a settlement offer -- usually the same $3,500 that Sosa paid. If they don't pay up, or if they ignore the letter entirely, another letter arrives in the mail as a reminder that settling with the company is the only way to resolve the matter "without either of us incurring significant legal costs." If the recipient still doesn't play ball, the company makes good on its threat and files a lawsuit. At that point, the settlement price tag jumps to $10,000 -- still less than the typical cost of paying a lawyer to go to trial against a corporate powerhouse in federal court.

DirectTV has sent out tens of thousands of these demand letters, and filed lawsuits against over 8,700 people around the country, most of them in the last six months. "The veil of anonymity has been lifted," says company spokesman Robert Mercer. "We believe that this really does send a very strong message to consumers that they can't steal DirecTV's signal with impunity."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31793.html


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The RIAA Offensive: Part III
Thomas Mennecke

Filetopia, while small compared to its powerhouse brethern, has long been an important member of the file-sharing community. With a stable userbase of approximately 3-4 thousand, the population of this network trade files in a secure and encrypted environment. In fact, Filetopia is the only sizable P2P network able to provide a secure environment while able to accommodate a mainstream audience.

Like our eDonkey interview, we asked three questions to "Enrique", the developer of Filetopia. We would like to thank him for his time and effort that made this article possible.

Slyck.com: What are your thoughts on the latest statement from the RIAA?

Filetopia: This is an indication of their weakness. They're losing the battle and this is a desperate move to scare the users. They will not succeed and their fanatical muscle cannot be big enough to sue a significant number of file-sharing users. This will probably make people share their files more, maybe taking more protective steps.

Slyck.com: How would you gauge the seriousness of this situation?

Filetopia: They're seriously losing the battle; their numbers probably show it. They may be able to sue a few hundred people, but we are many millions.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=196


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Fox, Disney, Universal Sue China Firms Over Pirated Films

SHANGHAI (AFP) - Three major US film studios have filed suit against three Chinese companies alleging copyright violations through the sale of pirated video discs.

In the first action of its kind in Shanghai, Fox Entertainment's Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp, Walt Disney Co and French- owned Vivendi Universal's Universal Studios are seeking a public apology, compensation and a halt to the alleged violations, the Shanghai Daily reported. The case was heard last week by Shanghai No.2 Intermediate People's Court, the report said. Yang Jun, a lawyer representing all three companies, told the newspaper that the plaintiffs had sent staff to the outlets of the three defendants and bought pirated VCDs and DVDs. "With China's entry to the World Trade Organization, the protection of intellectual property rights must be enhanced," Yang was quoted as saying. "If piracy is not properly combated, it could hamper the further introduction of good films from abroad and influence the development of the market." Fox is suing Shanghai Hezhong Enterprise Development Co for allegedly selling pirated copies of the fourth series of the television series "X Files" and is seeking 220,000 yuan (26,800 dollars) in compensation. The company is also suing Shanghai Yatu Film Culture for allegedly selling pirated copies of the same title and of "Speed 2", demanding 415,000 yuan (50,600 dollars) in compensation, the report said. Shanghai Husheng Audio-Visual Co is also in its sights for allegedly selling fake copies of the fourth series of "X-Files", and the films "Courage Under Fire" and "Moulin Rouge". Fox wants 615,000 yuan (75,000 dollars) compensation. Disney filed its suit against Yatu over alleged pirated copies of "A Bug's Life" and "Dinosaur" and is demanding similar compensation. Meanwhile, Universal has sued Husheng for allegedly selling pirated copies of "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III". It has also sued Hezhong over "The Bone Collector" and "Jurassic Park III". Chinese law currently allows foreign film companies to seek a maximum 500,000 yuan (61,000 dollars) in compensation for each title if they are unable to provide exact details on losses or the counterfeiters' profit. The newspaper cited court officials as saying that both plaintiffs and defendants have agreed to mediation, although there has been no discussion of money.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030714/323/e44w0.html


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Avril Plugs Into iTunes
Jonathan Cohen

Teen pop/rock sensation Avril Lavigne is offering a five-track live EP for paid download exclusively through Apple's iTunes Music Store, beginning today (July 15). The cuts, "Sk8er Boi," "Nobody's Fool," "Unwanted, "Losing Grip" and a cover of Green Day's "Basket Case" were recorded on March 23 in Dublin. Fans can purchase individual tracks for 99 cents or the full EP for $4.95.

Lavigne recently completed her Try to Shut Me Up world tour, which will be chronicled with "My World," a concert CD and DVD due in October from Arista. Beyond live performances, the DVD will sport "backstage and on-the-road shenanigans with Avril and her band, as well as opening acts who took part in the tour," according to Lavigne's official Web site.

The artist was touring in support of her Arista debut, "Let Go," which is No. 63 in its 57th week on The Billboard 200 and has been certified six-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for U.S. shipments of 6 million copies.

Lavigne is up for three Teen Choice Awards, including best album and best single, to be handed out Aug. 6 on Fox.
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/ar...ent_id=1933652

[JackSpratts]

Swappers Sprint To Cloak Identities

No way to stay hidden, some say.
Dawn C. Chmielewski


The response was predictable. The major file-swapping services are rushing to shield users' identities within weeks of the recording industry announcing plans to sue individuals who trade copyrighted music online.

Blubster, an upstart service in Madrid, Spain, was the first to claim to cloak users from the prying eyes of detection software. And it certainly isn't alone. Established file-swapping services such as Morpheus and iMesh say they'll implement new software to protect users' privacy -- some as soon as next week. Others are likely to follow.

Technologists working for the entertainment industry say these services are offering users a false sense of security. That there's no way to remain anonymous when exchanging data -- otherwise, like a letter without a postal address, the digital package would never arrive.

``If you are trading files on the Internet, we will find you,'' said Mark Ishikawa, chief executive of BayTSP.com, an Internet detective agency in Campbell that does work for major film studios, record labels and software companies.

The race for anonymity is only the latest move in the ongoing technological chess match between the technologists whose software enables an estimated 57 million people worldwide to exchange songs, movies and software, and the entertainment industry that's trying to stop it.

The entertainment industry has tried flooding file-sharing networks with millions of bogus or ``spoofed'' files and is developing more aggressive countermeasures that would freeze a user's computer or scour the hard drive for pirated files, then attempt to delete them. The peer-to-peer companies responded with new versions of software to sniff out phony files and to blacklist certain computers thought to be spewing phony files or snooping.

The record industry's latest anti-piracy initiative is intended to strike fear in the hearts of those who use file-swapping services to download music. The Recording Industry Association of America said it would spend the summer gathering dossiers on individuals who trade bootlegged songs over the Internet. And it plans to file hundreds -- and possibly thousands -- of lawsuits to scare people away from peer-to-peer networks.

There's no shortage of those within the file-swapping community who dismiss the RIAA announcement as a hollow threat. But the services are nonetheless acting quickly to shield users from detection.

Blubster uses an Internet protocol that allows computer users to trade data without directly connecting to one another. ``When you send a packet, you will never know what happened with that packet,'' said Pablo Soto, the 23-year-old creator of the underlying software. ``It's like throwing a bottle into the ocean with a message that may or may not go to somewhere else.''

A Blubster user tosses out a request for a file into an ocean of computer users -- at a rate of 15,000 computers a second -- and receives minute portions of the file flowing back from many users, not one identifiable source. Its technology is attracting interest from more established file-swapping services, such as Grokster, with its 10 million users.

Morpheus next week will begin directing users to a network of public proxy servers that act as a stand-in between the computer user requesting a file and the one offering it for download, effectively cloaking their identities.

IMesh, borrowing a page from the recording industry, plans to plant decoy computers from fake locations that trade non-existent files.

``It's the virus vs. the anti-virus software. The firewall vs. the hacker,'' said Elan Oren, chief executive of iMesh in Tel Aviv, Israel. ``They're going to come with a measure, we're going to come with a counter measure. At the end of the day, it serves nobody.''

Oren and other chief executives within the peer-to-peer community realize that they're just buying time. The services continue to evolve -- as much to skirt lawsuits as to improve the speed and reliability of downloads. But such mutations are only short-term solutions.

The file-swapping sites need access to licensed music and movies -- not just bootlegs, Oren said in a telephone interview. Despite discussions with record labels dating back to Napster's heyday in 2000 and continuing today -- those licenses are not coming.

``We had meetings with Sony Music, Universal Music with Warner Music. We had meetings with Bertelsmann,'' Oren said. ``They told us we're just not going to get our music. `Shut this service down, then we will talk . . .' I'm not going to shut this service down.''

The recording industry's intransigence is so complete it has prompted the competing file-swapping services to cooperate to counter efforts to shut them down. Seven major services have formed a consortium, called Peer-to-Peer United, to begin lobbying Congress to compel the record labels and movie studios to license their content. Their initiative is expected to begin this fall.

``We think the voices of 60 million Americans need to be heard,'' said Michael Weiss, chief executive of StreamCast Networks, the corporate parent of Morpheus. ``Up until now the debate's been one-sided, with the record industry painting file-sharing software as illegal. A federal judge said it's not. They're painting their customers as pirates, when they're not. Congress needs to know the right name for their customers. They're not pirates. They're voters.''
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercuryne...ss/6299172.htm


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Spanish Shawn Fanning Is Hot

Whiz's software may pop up in U.S.
Dawn C. Chmielewski

Pablo Soto has been hailed as the Spanish Shawn Fanning: a 23-year-old kid with a knack for coding, a passion for music and a certain brashness in his willingness to take on the record industry.

At least for now, Soto is better known in Europe, where two file-swapping services, Blubster and Piolet, are powered by the MP2P software he created. But he may gain a higher profile in the United States if established services, such as Grokster and iMesh, adopt his unique version of peer-to-peer software.

``I cannot say much,'' Soto said in an interview from his parents' home in Spain. ``But I will say that if you go to the rankings of the most downloaded peer-to-peer programs -- if you take from the second to the seventh, all of them are talking with me.''

Like Fanning, who started Napster and almost single-handedly launched the online music revolution, Soto is largely a self-taught geek who has been toying with computers since age 8. He has always professed a love of music -- and even did a brief stint as the front-man for a Spanish rock group.

It was the Napster revolution that captured his imagination. Soto left his job and retreated to his childhood room, where he began experimenting with Gnutella, open-source file-sharing software in which developers license the core onto which they add their own code. He relied, not on formal instruction, but on books and a virtual support group available through Internet chat sites such as P2Pchat.net.

``The problem was the Internet in Spain was terribly expensive. The only way to connect was through international calls,'' he said. His mother pulled the phone line from his room after he ran up astronomical phone bills. ``But even then, I still managed to connect,'' he said.

Soto began crafting his own file-swapping architecture, using a different file transfer protocol called UDP to move files, instead of the traditional Internet TCP protocol. It is a ``connectionless'' protocol that doesn't reveal the individual addresses of each computer connected to the network, affording users a certain degree of anonymity.

He calls his software MP2P. And he created Blubster, a file-swapping service created, and since sold, as a proof of concept. It has been downloaded 3.5 million times on CNet's download.com Web site -- and attracted the notice of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the European affiliate of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Soto seems unafraid of being hauled into court. He said he expects to be threatened. Indeed, he is almost defiant.

``Sooner or later, I'll have to defend myself in court,'' Soto said. ``But whatever. I am a developer. And nobody's going to stop me from writing code or, with my pen and paper, drawing little circles like ISPs and lines like connections,'' he added, referring to popular schematics showing how peer-to-peer architectures work.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/mer...ss/6299169.htm


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Ogg Vorbis Card Ready
Press Release

Achieved competitive 12MHz operation, targeting portable music player.

FineArch, Inc., Tokyo Japan based semiconductor LSI design company, developed the system IP to decode the next generation digital music compression format, Ogg Vorbis(http://www. vorbis.com). FineArch successfully completed the Ogg vorbis sytstem IP to run at 12 Mhz. This is about 1/6 of the clock speed required to decode Ogg Vorbis with a single CPU system. This ultra low power IP fits well with the today’s portable music player market where battery life is critical factor.

Ogg Vorbis is attracting much attention to the digital music world as a "license and royalty free" compression format. Ogg Vorbis is also known as its higher quality, higher compression ratio compared to MP3, current standard of the compression music format. Encoding and decoding process of Ogg Vorbis is more CPU intensive task than those of MP3. Hardware implementation of Ogg Vorbis has been
scarce. FineArch.Inc fully noted the potential of the Ogg Vorbis, developed the Ogg Vorbis playback System IP.



This "System IP" consisted of Hardwared IP and Software IP which needed to build a portable music player. It has all the necessary components to build a standard portable music player.

"Hardware IP" includes "MultiCore Architecture"; CPU and DSP, Memory card interface, External memory interface, LCD controller, and Key input function. Only external memory and audio D/A converter is needed to build a complete portable player system.

"Software IP" includes DSP firmware to decode Ogg vorbis and the CPU firmware for overall system control. Fully utilizing the advantage of MultiCore architecture system sofware stacks are carefully distributed to CPU and DSP, achieving 12 MHz. This is the lowest system clock speed in the industry known today.

This "System IP" will be licensed to any customers looking for the royalty free, high quality digital music decoding capabilities on their system. Such system includes the portable music player, the game console, PDA, and the portable music entertainment system. FineArch also has the FPGA evaluation kit, which can be ordered directly.
http://www.finearch.com/english/news...r_20030715.htm


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Techno-Posturing Kicks Off Over Ultrawideband
David Minto

Much techno-posturing is reportedly being exhibited over competing standards for ultrawideband, the wireless networking spectrum anticipated to eventually replace almost all forms of cabling between devices with the domestic home.

The proverbial cat was put among the pigeons after Texas Instruments, one of the chipmakers that has real potential to be a heavyweight in UWB standards discussions, and Intel put forward an updated standards proposal on behalf of the Multiband OFDAM Alliance (MBOA), a group that argues for splitting UWB into separate bands. In the other corner of the ring, however, stand Motorola and XtremeSpectrum, advocates of continuous spectrum. The referee for the bout is to be the 802.15.3a working group, which must define the physical aspect for UWB personal networking before August.

Fight!

Defining the best standard for UWB is of no small importance, since the technology, which will have an ability to carry high resolution video at half-a-gigabit speeds, is expected to be at the centre of the networked home digital media revolution – should such a revolution actually ever get round to occuring.

Both groups, of course, argue that their specification is the more sensible. According to ZDNet UK, MBOA says its solution will be more scalable and could more easily handle temporary interruptions to streaming. Meanwhile, Motorola et al claim their standard more adequately meets the stringent limits placed on ultrawideband, UWB being unique in that it reuses ‘taken’ spectrum and hence overlays existing services.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=17069


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Swappers Lay Claim To 'Harry Potter'
Amy Harmon

JC, a 36-year-old Harry Potter fan in Kansas City, Mo., decided he was too old to go chasing after the fifth book in the popular series when it came out last month. Instead, he downloaded the book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" from the Internet, conveniently avoiding both bookstore crowds and the $29.99 cover price.

"I thought it was a little slow until the second half, then it got much better," said JC, who insisted on being identified only by the online nickname because he thinks that what he did was illegal. He said he still intended to buy the book to read to his 8-year-old son.

So far, authors and publishers have mainly stood on the sidelines of the Internet file-swapping frenzy that has shaken the music industry and aroused fear among makers of motion pictures. But the publishing phenomenon around the young wizard appears to be forging a new chapter in the digital copyright wars: Harry Potter and the Internet pirates.

A growing number of Potter devotees around the world seem to be embracing the prospect of reading the voluminous new book (766 pages in the British edition; 870 in the American version) on the screen. And at least some of them are assisting in the cumbersome process of scanning, typing in or translating the book, which its author, J. K. Rowling, has not authorized for publication in any of the existing commercial e-book formats.

Last week, enthusiastic readers put unofficially translated portions of "Order of the Phoenix" on the Web in German and Czech, only to remove them after the publishers that own the rights in their respective countries threatened legal action.

English-language copies of the book — along with fan-written stories masquerading as the real thing — are available on all the major file-sharing networks in a variety of file formats.

The choices include Adobe's ubiquitous PDF and text files that can be opened in a word-processing program. There is also Microsoft's fancier LIT format — which requires use of its free e-book reader software and opens in a narrow window that looks a lot like a book, although with hyperlinks to each chapter and the ability to search for terms like Quidditch.

"What is unusual for us as people who deal with piracy of books is that these are people who are not directly making money for having put them on the Internet," said Ian Taylor, international director of the Publishers Association in Britain. "That is obviously what's been happening with peer-to-peer music, but it's not something we've had to deal with before."

Neil Blair, business manager at Christopher Little, Ms. Rowling's literary agency, said the firm was aware of several unauthorized copies of the book on the Web and was contacting Internet service providers to ask that they be removed.

"E-book rights are reserved to J. K. Rowling," Mr. Blair said. "so any Harry Potter novels on the Net are unauthorized. We also have an obligation to protect the children who might believe they are reading the official work."

Mr. Blair said he did not expect the illicit e-books to have an impact on sales of the printed book. More than 200 million copies of the first four books have been sold in 55 languages. And the fifth book, released at midnight on June 20 and published in Britain by Bloomsbury and in this country by Scholastic, is ranked No. 1 on children's books best-seller lists.

A spokeswoman for Scholastic said no one was available to comment. A spokeswoman at Bloomsbury did not return calls last week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/te...ne r=USERLAND


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What's Holding Back Online Music?
Knowledge@Wharton

The music industry believes that it loses $3.5 billion a year to pirating through sites like the now-shuttered Napster and its successors, such as Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster. Music sales have fallen 25 percent since Napster was launched four years ago, and the industry has had three responses: erecting technological barriers to downloading; filing lawsuits against downloaders and their enablers; and creating legal, alternative sites that charge downloading fees that flow to record companies and artists.

But according to Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader, who studies online businesses, another promising approach is getting too little attention.

When Napster was shut down in July 2001, just two years after it was launched, the music industry came to think legal challenges might stem online piracy, says Lee Black, a senior analyst covering music and media for Jupiter Media, the Internet data firm. Napster was vulnerable because it stored on its own servers records of the tracks its members were willing to share.

This spring, however, Apple Computer has enjoyed a breakthrough with its iTunes Music Store service, which offers about 200,000 tracks. Customers pay 99 cents to download each song. After that, it's almost like buying music on a CD, LP or tape. The customer can play it on a computer, burn it to a CD that can be played on any device, or transfer it to an MP3 player. The only restriction is an embedded signal designed to prevent the downloaded songs from winding up on Internet file-sharing services. "The significant thing is that Apple is the first one to come out and say, 'Look, you buy it, you can burn it, you own it," says Black. "I think that's really given the market a huge awakening."

Fader and Black say it's far too soon to say that Apple has found the best music model.

According to them, streaming services get around the problems that confront the legal downloading services like iTunes. Quality of the subscription-based services like Rhapsody is excellent. Consumers can hear what they want immediately. There are no annoying pop-up ads as on the pirating sites, and people don't have to worry about viruses or that they are giving hackers access to their computers--a major concern with file-sharing networks.

Most important, says Fader, selections are extensive, because the music companies don't have to worry about illegal copies. "With no downloading, you have access to a much larger selection of songs," he notes. "I think that's a very important point...Streaming is a much more sensible business model from the industry's perspective."

For $10 a month, an iTunes user would get 10 songs, while a Rhapsody customer could listen to hundreds. The flat fee approach allows people to listen to unfamiliar music without worry about cost, and Rhapsody offers a wide selection of commercial-free, radio station-like channels specializing in various genres. The streaming service involves considerably more interaction between the person and the service than the downloading model does, allowing for many additional features. By studying the person's choices and those of others with similar tastes, the service can recommend other music selections to the user, much the way Amazon recommends books.

Pressplay provides "lots of very cool value-added stuff," including Billboard charts and biographical information on artists," Fader says. "You can basically find out about other people who have tastes similar to your own. There are all kinds of things like that." Moreover, the interface--the steps for finding songs and listening to them--"is much nicer than using any of the illegal services," he adds.

And yet, streaming services have two shortcomings. First, people do not own the music they hear. If all the music they want is available all of the time, practically for free, this should not matter. But pride of ownership is an old habit that many music lovers may resist breaking. "Behavioral change is required for people to learn you don't need to own the music," Fader says. "Clearly," notes Black, "for these services to compete with free (sites) they are going to have to allow more ownership."

Even more important, streaming audio can only be heard via an Internet-linked computer. While the computer can be hooked up to the stereo system, streaming is no good for listeners who want to take their collections in their cars or download them to portable devices. But it won't be long before the spread of wireless Internet hot spots makes this less of a problem, Fader says. People will be able to log on while they are on the go, perhaps with small portable devices.

One thing is fairly certain, Black says: The CD will continue to lose ground to online music delivery systems of one type or another. "Downloading will become very pervasive. You will be able to get downloads just about anywhere...I don't think you're ever going to return to the glory of the CD." He expects downloading to attract more individual users than streaming, but adds: "I think your heaviest spenders, your biggest music lovers, will come with the subscription services."

Indeed, at the end of June, AOL Time Warner announced it is working on plans for a service to rival iTunes. Amazon.com, Microsoft and Yahoo are also reported to be preparing services. Some experts believe competition will quickly cut downloading charges in half, to less than 50 cents a track. At some point, legal services may charge little enough that they can truly compete with peer-to-peer networks, especially if sound quality is top-notch, the purchasing process is simple and the add-on features are captivating. "I think you will always have a free (pirating) market," Black says. "What you have to do is make the legitimate market much easier to use than the free market."
http://news.com.com/2030-1086-1025006.htm


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Buy.com To Open Digital Music Mart
John Borland and Sandeep Junnarkar

Buy.com plans to launch a digital music download site that would compete with Apple Computer's successful iTunes music store, according to music industry insiders.

The move, first reported in the San Jose Mercury News on Tuesday, marks the start of what is likely to be several moves by large e-commerce companies into the digital music market.

The service is being well-received by record industry insiders, who said Buy.com, a discount e-commerce Web site, is aiming to become "iTunes for Windows."

A Buy.com spokeswoman declined to comment on the impending release, but she said the company was planning a major announcement on July 22.

A flood of iTunes clones has been expected since April, when Apple Computer launched what was widely seen as the most attractive pay-per-song music download service yet to hit the Internet. Observers have been impressed by its ease of use and by the fast sales it generated--five million songs in its first eight weeks of operation. Rival music companies quickly intensified discussions with music labels seeking rights to offer similar services.

By launching the service quickly, even in the midst of a summer season when many computer users are on vacation, Buy.com may be able to get the jump on rivals. That includes Apple, which has said it won't release a Windows version of iTunes until the end of 2003 at the earliest. People familiar with the service said Buy.com has been able to use some technology previously built in-house, speeding its time to market.

Any music store moving into the Windows world will have a steeper hill to climb than iTunes had with Macintosh, however. Apple had the advantage of controlling the delivery technology all the way down to the iPod, the only portable music device that works with songs purchased from the company's online music store.

That made the job of integrating delivery, music format and anti-piracy encryption with hardware and software easier than in the Windows environment, where different brands of MP3 players and digital audio devices support varying music formats and digital rights management technologies.

Analysts said Buy.com is likely to pursue a broadly similar strategy to Apple's, offering cheap and easy music downloads in hopes of selling other goods with higher profit margins. In Apple's case, analysts said selling more iPod music players was an indirect goal for the music store. Similarly, Buy.com is likely attempting to lure visitors to its Web site, where they might also buy anything from computers to backpacks.

"For them, music would be kind of a loss leader," Jupiter Research analyst Lee Black said. "The download space isn't really profitable on its own, but it makes sense in conjunction with other things you do."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-1026067.html


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Congress Closer To Reversing Media Rules
Demetri Sevastopulo

The US Congress on Wednesday moved a step closer to overturning controversial media ownership rules when a key House committee unexpectedly voted to lower the Federal Communications Commission's new national television cap.

Last month the FCC voted to raise the cap - which had restricted networks from reaching more than 35 per cent of the national audience - to 45 per cent.

But on Wednesday, with Republican support, the House appropriations committee voted 40-25 to approve legislation that would reinstate the old cap.

The development represents the latest in a series of Congressional moves aimed at rolling back some or all of the FCC's new rules.

On Tuesday Senator Byron Dorgan the North Dakota Democrat, introduced a rarely used congressional veto resolution that would reinstate the old cap with bipartisan support. The Senate commerce committee has also endorsed a bill, sponsored by Ted Stevens, chair of the Senate appropriations committee, and Ernest Hollings, ranking Democrat on the commerce committee, to roll the cap back to 35 per cent. It would also overturn the FCC decision to eliminate a ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and television stations.

Tuesday's vote by the House appropriations committee, which saw 11 Republicans break rank, surprised many industry observers. Billy Tauzin, chairman of the powerful commerce and energy committee, has expressed strong support for Michael Powell, FCC chairman, and the new rules. But including the measure in a must-pass spending bill enabled critics of the FCC rules to bypass Mr Tauzin, who is not a member of the appropriations committee.

The White House has also told congressional leaders that the president's advisers would recommend that he veto any attempt to overturn the FCC rules.
http://www.mediareform.net/news.php?id=662










Until next week,

- js.









~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Current Week In Review.

Recent WIRs -


http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16893 July 12th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16830 July 5th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16759 June 28th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16705 June 21st







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

[TankGirl]

Geee, that was a major digest again..... thanks for the hard work, Jack!

- tg

[goldie]

and lots of uncomforting news for file swappers too.

All of these bills, legislations, and legal action is leading us all right to the edge.

The breaking point is arriving quickly.

Sooner or later something's gonna break...........

Just what it'll mean to all of us, the artists, the forever ignorant record labels, consumers and filesharers, god only knows.

[JackSpratts]

Originally posted by TankGirl
Geee, that was a major digest again..... thanks for the hard work, Jack!

- tg

i'd put in more - but it makes my laptop too heavy!

- js.