Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 16th, '03 - P2P-Zone

JackSpratts · 14-08-03, 10:32 PM

Blackout Edition

The whole coast is out tonight. It’s scary gorgeous. No lights. Just a blazing Moon and Mars and stars - and more than I’ve seen in years. I’m helping at the Emergency Operations Center in my city, coordinating providers with those in need. With temperatures high and the humidity index peaking there’s worry that people who don’t cope well with heat, like the aged and infirm will have a tough, maybe even fatal time of it. We’re trying to prevent that from happenning. Right now I’m dealing with a group of stranded tenants waiting on the sidewalk for a basement pump-out if they’re going to have any hope of sleeping in their own beds tonight.

In the meantime a couple of great secretaries are running a 24 hour buffet keeping the troops fed and filled with swill; so in between emergencies we’re joking around and managing to find some fun where we can, and maybe send out a dispatch or two. All in all not the worst way to spend a blackout.

Theories are fine, but every once in a while it’s good to do some hands on work, if only to remember what the theories were for.

Enjoy,

Jack.

Recording Industry's Subpoenas Met With Legal Challenges
Mike Snider

As the record industry's campaign against home music swappers expands, legal challenges are building as well.

The Recording Industry Association of America has filed more than 1,200 subpoenas since July, and court clerks are seeing more every day. The subpoenas seek identities of home users accused of copyright infringement.

Now, a Sacramento attorney plans to file a motion this week in U.S. District Court in Washington on behalf of one of them — the first legal action by an individual targeted in the RIAA's campaign.

The argument is a new one in the increasingly contentious battle over the blizzard of subpoenas being served to colleges and Internet service providers: Just because a user's PC has music files stored within a peer-to- peer file-sharing program doesn't mean the user is illegally distributing copyrighted material, says attorney Daniel Ballard. Distribution implies sending, rather than leaving something where it may be taken, he says.

"It is an assumption they (the RIAA) are making," says Ballard, who will file a "Jane Doe" case for a user whose personal information has been subpoenaed.

The RIAA wouldn't comment before the motion is filed but said it asked the court to force ISP Verizon to turn over the user's information, after which it would discuss any issues with the individual.

This brings "another dimension to the fight," says Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is leading the battle against the record industry's targeting of individuals. "Actual subscribers have a perspective that has so far been absent."

The RIAA says it intends to file hundreds of lawsuits against the biggest offenders, starting later this month or in early September. A federal judge in April ordered Verizon to supply identities of customers accused of sharing copyrighted files, a ruling that set off the flurry of subpoenas. Verizon is appealing the decision; a court date is set for Sept. 16.

Other recent developments:

•A federal judge ruled late last week that RIAA subpoenas issued in Washington, D.C., to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College were invalid. Both schools argued that the subpoenas should have been issued in Massachusetts and that they did not have sufficient time to respond. Columbia University filed a similar motion last week.

•Earlier this week, the Net Coalition, a group representing dozens of ISPs, sent a letter to RIAA president Cary Sherman questioning the validity of its campaign. In addition to the cost that ISPs face in complying with the RIAA subpoena process, "we are concerned over the broad implication of turning over all this personal information," says executive director Kevin McGuiness.

•Two weeks ago, Pacific Bell sued the RIAA, differing with its interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that eases the subpoena process when used by copyright holders seeking to halt infringements.

On Friday, the RIAA filed a motion asking the court to enforce subpoenas sent to Pacific Bell and the parent corporation, SBC.

•The RIAA has sent copies of its subpoenas to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Chairman Sen. Norm Cole- man, R-Minn., demanded information about "this barrage of RIAA subpoenas," saying he was "concerned about the potential for abuse" in the subpoena process.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people who have been notified by their Net providers that their names have been subpoenaed are anxiously wondering whether, or when, the RIAA will sue them.

Heather Gillette, 23, of Revere, Mass., has removed the 3,000 songs she had on her PC. Based on the RIAA's statements, Gillette figures the group could seek more than $2 million from her.

"It's unrealistic, but I definitely freaked out," she says. "The fact that they can go see what I've downloaded bothers me to begin with, but to actually go ahead with (a lawsuit), I really hope not."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/te...-follow_x.htm#

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Subpoena contested in piracy ID case
Verizon Customer Fights For Anonymity
Jon Healey

After serving Internet providers with more than 1,000 subpoenas demanding the names and addresses of people who share pirated music and video online, the Recording Industry Association of America has run into someone who wants to fight for her anonymity.

The unidentified woman is a Verizon Internet Services customer accused of offering copyrighted songs on a file-sharing network for others to download free. The woman, who has hired a lawyer to contest a subpoena, apparently is the first to try to prevent her identity from being disclosed to the record companies' trade association.

People identified through the subpoenas will be prime targets for the copyright-infringement lawsuits the RIAA plans to file in its campaign against online music piracy. The trade group's subpoenas have been resisted by some Internet providers but not, until now, by the customers whose anonymity the RIAA wants to penetrate. Since Internet providers aren't required to notify customers about subpoenas, many might not be aware they're targeted.

Sarah Deutsch, associate general counsel for Verizon Communications, said the company -- which challenged in federal court the subpoenas with which it has been served, and lost -- has notified all customers whose names have been sought by the RIAA. One of them retained an attorney, Daniel Ballard of McDonough Holland & Allen in Sacramento, who asked Verizon last month not to comply with the subpoena because he planned to contest it.

Verizon informed the RIAA of Ballard's request, then waited for the two sides to resolve the dispute themselves, Deutsch said. Last week, the RIAA asked a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to compel Verizon to release the woman's name, she said.

Ballard said he planned to file a motion this week to quash the subpoena. He said he would challenge the constitutionality of the RIAA subpoena process on grounds that it has violated people's rights to privacy and due process.

Verizon made the same case when it tried to block the RIAA subpoenas earlier this year, and U.S. District Judge John D. Bates in Washington rejected the argument. The RIAA motion to force Verizon to honor the subpoena demanding the woman's name raises new questions about whether individuals have the right to intervene to protect privacy, Deutsch said.

``This type of issue will go beyond pure copyright law to important questions of due process and consumer rights,'' Deutsch said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/6528816.htm

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Ads Ape Apple's Air Guitarists
Danit Lidor

A potbellied, middle-aged man stands against a white background. He's listening to a portable music device and singing The Who's classic "My Generation" out loud. Change the channel. A stout, middle-aged woman stands against a white background. She's listening to a portable music device and singing the Sugarhill Gang classic "Rapper's Delight."

Both ads are for Apple's new iTunes paid music download service, right? Think different. The fat lady is hawking BuyMusic's new music service. The similarities between the BuyMusic commercials -- which feature other out- of-tune crooners -- and the iTunes ads have escaped no one's notice.

"When I saw the BuyMusic.com ad, the first thing I thought was, 'Huh, Apple got some more people to dance and sing in front of a white background while they kill their favorite songs,'" Mac News Network forum poster keekeeree wrote. "Then the voice-over started and I realized it wasn't an Apple ad at all."

It's no coincidence that the ads look alike. BuyMusic.com is intentionally mimicking its successful competitor's campaign.

"Yes, there is a similarity between the ads," BuyMusic spokeswoman Stacey Doherty said. "It was meant to be a compliment to Apple."

Since Apple introduced its iTunes Music Store in late April and reported opening-day downloads of 200,000, companies have been scrambling to jump on the bandwagon. It was only a matter of time, considering the aggressive tactics the Recording Industry Association of America is using in its war against peer-to-peer file sharing.

What's more, iTunes only works on Macs for now, and Macs make up only about 3 percent of the personal computer market.

Doherty says the point of the commercials is to entice people who own PCs, which happens to be almost everyone. "'Music for the rest of us' (BuyMusic.com's slogan) means everyone who doesn't have a Mac, which accounts for about 150 million PC users," she said.

"I think there is imitation that is meant to be homage. There is imitation that is meant to be parody," MacNN forum user thunderous_funker wrote in a post. "In this case, it appears to be simply predatory."

Apple could choose to fight back, certainly. Copyright law provides protection for an expression of an idea, but not for the idea itself. However, there is "substantial similarity" between the two ads that could be used "at least as a valuable argument" for a copyright-infringement lawsuit, said Robyn Crowther, an intellectual property attorney at Caldwell, Leslie, Newcombe & Pettit.

"The fair-use doctrine does provide a defense to copyright- and trademark-infringement claims," Crowther said. "The critical issue will be whether the BuyMusic.com is a parody of the Apple ads."

"When the second work just borrows from the first work to get attention or to avoid having to develop something new or fresh and does not make fun of the original work … it is not a parody and may not have protection," Crowther said.

Parody or not, a copyright-infringement suit wouldn't necessarily be an open-and-shut case. "The dichotomy between 'ideas' and 'expression' is hard to get across," said Blaney Harper, an intellectual property attorney at Jones Day.

"Showing average people air guitaring their way through a song against a white background" is not enough to show BuyMusic is copying Apple's expression, he said.

Tighter copyright restrictions could have potentially far-reaching results. Big corporations and single individuals are held to the same laws.

"We have to be very careful about how strongly we enforce copyright law to prevent any kind of chilling effect on artists and others that rely on the First Amendment," said Jason Schultz, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Apple declined to comment, but iTunes fans haven't. They are ticked off at both the commercials and the ads' creator.

BuyMusic parody sites such as DontBuyMusic.com and BoycottBuyMusic.com have appeared in protest.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59958,00.html

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Recording Industry Campaign Faces Scrutiny
Bill Holland

A top Republican senator wants to bring the recording industry before his subcommittee next month to answer questions about its campaign to root out and sue Internet music swappers.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., is the first Republican to voice apprehension about the Recording Industry Assn. of America's campaign, which could end up targeting teens.

"It raised a concern," says Coleman, who is chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. "On the one hand, I recognize the legitimacy of the interests of record companies, but I am worried about the response. Does the punishment fit the crime?"

For the moment, there are no signs that Coleman's action could lead to a GOP backlash against the RIAA on Capitol Hill. But Coleman told Billboard magazine that he might introduce a bill to curb the RIAA's campaign if it proves to be "overbroad."

Billboard also has learned that the Senate Judiciary Committee is considering a hearing on the subpoena process this fall. "The issue falls squarely in our jurisdiction," says a spokesperson for chairman Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah. "We will be monitoring Sen. Coleman's involvement in this issue, and should the occasion seem appropriate, we would hold a hearing."

The involvement of the Hatch committee may be rooted in the deep-seated reluctance of committee chairmen to relinquish "turf" jurisdiction. Hatch is already on record as saying he would consider going farther than the RIAA and call for even more drastic measures.

Because Coleman is a Republican, insiders say his potential reform bill, if written as a pro-consumer measure, might find majority support in Congress. Such a development would be the first big test for incoming RIAA chairman/CEO Mitch Bainwol.

Coleman says he knows Bainwol from Republican political fundraising circles and trusts him "to do the right thing."

Coleman, elected in 2002 after the death of Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone, says he decided to pursue the inquiry "after reading news reports of 'broad sweeping action by the record industry' and 'making criminals out of 14-year-olds.' "

Coleman says he believes the record industry is "so freaked out" about Internet piracy that it felt it had to do something really tough.

"I'm an ex-prosecutor, and I worry about that mentality that if you make an example of somebody, you're going to change somebody's behavior," he says.

The RIAA has complied with Coleman's request to forward copies of the subpoenas by Aug. 14. It will also provide answers to Coleman's questions concerning the methodology used to find infringers and safeguards to protect innocent consumers.

The subpoena program is one of several tools, including public education, that the RIAA is using to counter peer-to-peer (P2P) piracy.

"This is a program of deterrence," RIAA president Cary Sherman says. "We've made it clear from the beginning that for individuals interested in settling out of court, we're certainly prepared to discuss ."

Leading up to Coleman's move, leading Republican lawmakers have given the RIAA the green light to pursue individuals who have been making copyrighted music files available to others over the Internet.

Hatch suggested in a June 17 hearing on piracy that he supported destroying the computers of copyright infringers if it were the only way to control the problem.

In June, after the RIAA began to send subpoenas to Internet service providers (ISPs), the Republican chairman of the House panel that oversees copyright issues also released a statement of support.

"Illegal fire sharing on peer-to-peer networks has reached unacceptable levels," wrote Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. "Music companies have laid off thousands of employees, music stores have closed and artists are not signing contracts. Today's action is an appropriate and reasonable step."

Earlier this year, Democrats on Smith's subcommittee also voiced support and introduced bills to help the RIAA deal with P2P infringers.

Coleman says that other senators who have shown interest in the issue have contacted him.

His call for a hearing on the subpoenas caught his colleagues by surprise, say sources close to the subcommittee, and did not allow other members the opportunity to study the issue beforehand.

The RIAA claims that its authority to obtain subpoenas is granted by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If the RIAA's campaign is overbroad, Coleman says he would consider changing the DMCA provision.

Reuters/Billboard http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml...toryID=3249096

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Free P2P Data Within Your State On Netspace
Dan Warne

Netspace has improved its ADSL plans by offering free peer-to-peer data within users' local states.

"Netspace is pleased to announce that traffic to and from another Netspace HomeADSL customer in your state is now considered free usage. This only applies to traffic within the state in which you are located. This is also applicable only if your proxy settings are correct (as per all other free traffic sites)."

One industry insider said he thought the deal was likely to cause Netspace problems due to the way Telstra requires ISPs to route data.

"Telstra requires all peer to peer traffic to go into Telstra's network, back to the ISP and then back out to Telstra's network again. If users take advantage of this, the ISP will find its links to Telstra becoming saturated."

"The deal has probably been introduced because Netspace has been getting a lot of heat lately, since iiNet came onto the scene and started taking a lot of the 'word of mouth business'" he said. (The source was not from iiNet).
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/942

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Paying To Play

Industry spreads subpoenas and fear over music copying.
David Hechler and Aaron Lauchheimer

When singer-songwriter John Hiatt performed with his band in Westbury, N.Y., this month, he did what every performer on a promotional tour does: He announced that his new CD was available in stores.

"Or," he added with an impish grin, "you could download it from a friend." As his audience laughed knowingly, he wagged his finger. "But be careful!"

What Hiatt was referring to, of course, was the sharing of music files over the Internet, and the controversial response of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Since June, it has sent Internet service providers and a handful of colleges more than a thousand subpoenas demanding information about individuals who allegedly infringed on copyrights. The association has said it will begin suing violators this month, and expects in time that there will be thousands of lawsuits.

Some lawyers see this as long overdue, an initiative both legally and morally correct. Others see a strategy built on suing your own customers—a measure so drastic it's almost an admission of failure. On one point, several lawyers on both sides agree: The law in this area is hard-pressed to keep pace with technology.

"We're trying to get the message out to people that this is not a victimless crime, and it's not a crime you can engage in without fear of consequences," said Matt Oppenheim, the RIAA's senior vice president for business and legal affairs.

Marci Hamilton, a professor at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, wrote an article posted on the legal Web site FindLaw supporting this position. For a couple of years, Hamilton said in an interview, no one seemed to know what to do about file-sharing.

"I'm not the RIAA's biggest fan," she said, "but I think somebody has to start imposing the law on the Web. And I think the RIAA is in a good position to do it now."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has led the opposition. A San Francisco-based legal organization, it has defended companies that produce file-sharing software and has assisted Internet service providers (ISPs) resisting subpoenas.

"Artists should be paid," said Fred von Lohmann, the foundation's senior intellectual property attorney. "Let's develop a mechanism to accomplish that goal and make file-sharing legal." The obvious solution, he said, is some form of licensing—preferably adopted by the industry or, if necessary, imposed by Congress. Branding customers as criminals isn't the answer, he said.

News of the subpoenas came just a few weeks after the RIAA sued four college students who used their personal computers to create informal networks from which fellow students could download music for free.

Though file-sharing programs operate differently, all allow users to designate files that others, using the same program, can download to their computers. The software also permits users to view all files available at any given time. Estimates of the number of file-sharers have been slippery. Last month the Pew Internet and American Life Project announced that its survey found that 26 million Americans share music files.

In a manner designed to maximize publicity, the RIAA announced in April that four students had violated copyright laws, and it claimed thousands of dollars in damages. The students could have been penalized $150,000 for each infringement, and the complaints alleged that there had been thousands of infringements.

In May, the music association announced that the suits had been settled. The students had agreed to pay the association amounts ranging from $12,000 to $17,000.

In this context, the subpoenas evoked more than a little apprehension. The message board has been buzzing at Zeropaid.com, a site devoted to file sharing. There were expressions of fear and anger and suggestions of ways to avoid detection.

Wrote one nervous file-sharer: "Im just going to have to cancel my DSL [Internet service], and get the dsl in my dogs name, so his personal info of what kind of dog food he likes can be obtained."
http://www.nlj.com/news/081103music.shtml

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Internet Providers Question Subpoenas to Stop File Swapping
Amy Harmon

Arguing that the record industry is trying to force its members to become the "police of the Internet," a group representing over 100 Internet service providers plans to deliver a letter to the industry's trade association today. The letter asks a series of pointed questions about plans to sue people suspected of illegally trading music files online.

The letter from NetCoalition is the latest objection from Internet service providers to a flood of subpoenas from the record industry seeking the identities of Internet subscribers suspected of swapping files.

"There are understandable fears among many in the Internet community that the real purpose of this legal campaign is to achieve in court what the association has not yet been able to accomplish in Congress — to make Internet companies legally responsible for the conduct of individuals who use their systems," the NetCoalition letter says.

The group includes the Internet service provider associations of Virginia, Washington and Wyoming, as well as several companies, including Bway.net in New York.

Record industry officials said they could not comment on the specifics of the letter because they had not yet received it.

But Matt Oppenheim, a lawyer for the record industry group, said Internet providers were protesting the subpoenas because file-swapping attracts customers, now accounting for more than half of the traffic over broadband cable networks. "We're not asking them to police the Internet," Mr. Oppenheim said. "We're asking them to comply with the law. If they were policing we wouldn't have this problem."

A 1998 copyright law sought to limit the liability of Internet providers over how subscribers use their resources, while making it easier for copyright holders to pursue online infringers. The law allows copyright holders to obtain subpoenas from court clerks, without first filing a lawsuit or going before a judge, compelling Internet providers to release subscriber contact information.

The record industry has taken advantage of that in recent weeks as it seeks to crack down on Internet piracy. Verizon and SBC Communications, two major Internet providers, have argued in court filings that the subpoena provision is unconstitutional because it violates the due process rights of its subscribers.

The NetCoalition letter instead focuses on the details of how the record industry is carrying out its goal of filing thousands of subpoenas in the coming months. It asks for a meeting to discuss how the industry trade group ensures the accuracy of the subpoenas, how it decides whom to target, and it raises concerns over the cost of compliance.

"There has to be a better answer than litigation," the letter says.

On Friday, a federal judge granted a request by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College not to comply with the subpoenas they had received because the record industry group had filed them in a Washington court.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/11/te...rtne r=GOOGLE

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'Big bang' To Jolt Microsoft Users
John Fontana

Microsoft might be hyping its next-generation Longhorn software as a "big bang" event, but the company is being quiet about the fact that the products will require corporate customers to perform multiple, carefully planned upgrades reminiscent of the difficult migration from Windows NT to 2000.

The Longhorn lineup also will wreak havoc with the hardware and software plans of corporate executives, especially those now running Windows 2000 Server, which could reach its early 2007 end-of-support life cycle before the Longhorn server is released.

Longhorn is an umbrella term that Microsoft uses to define its collection of infrastructure software. It's the first step toward integrating all that software around .Net and Web services and requires overhauling the client and server operating systems, Office and everything that runs on top. The integration effort to create a "software stack" aligns with similar efforts by competitors such as IBM with WebSphere and Sun with Project Orion.

"All the desktop products will have Longhorn dependencies," says Peter Pawlak, an analyst with Directions of Microsoft, an independent research firm. It's akin to the Active Directory upgrade, "Microsoft didn't think it would be smooth and it wasn't. With Longhorn, it is going to be one of those unavoidable things. It will make people stop, but to move the technology forward they have to do it."

The Longhorn "wave" (as Microsoft calls the set of products) will include a dramatically new client, with integrated universal data storage called WinFS. It also will include a chip-based security model formerly called Palladium; a user interface overhaul; a new application model built around an API called Avalon that supersedes Win32; and improved communication and collaboration features based on a Web services framework code-named Indigo.

Longhorn also will have a corresponding server to support WinFS and new management capabilities, among other features. It will include an Office upgrade built to take advantage of the new API; upgrades to Microsoft's CRM and ERP applications; new versions of Visual Studio .Net development tools, code-named Orcas; and a range of server software from collaboration to electronic commerce, Microsoft says.

Details about those products are sketchy because Microsoft is still trying to define their feature sets.

However, sources say Longhorn will include a full-scale, identity management infrastructure, which Microsoft started to preview in July and is expected to expand upon in October at its Professional Developers Conference.

Also expected is integrated peer-to-peer technology in the client and server that will support patch- and virus-update distribution, and real-time project tracking. It is also expected that Longhorn will enable collaboration and secure document sharing outside the firewall. Integration of IPv6 to enhance security also is planned.

Early efforts with peer to peer and IPv6 are being bolted onto Windows XP and offer a glimpse of the type of feature packs and piecemeal upgrades that Microsoft plans, before and during the Longhorn upgrade to jump-start migration. Microsoft did a similar jump-start with Windows Server 2003 by releasing early public-key infrastructure and Exchange 2003 schema changes that were needed in Active Directory.

In a forthcoming report, Gartner says it expects Microsoft to deliver at least three, and possibly five or more, "server feature packs" and limited-edition offerings between Windows Server 2003 and the Longhorn server.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0811longhorn.html

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Rio Reveals 20GB Ogg Vorbis Network Music Player
Tony Smith

Rio has announced its first raft of MP3-based portable music players since it was acquired by consumer electronics company D&M Holdings in April following the collapse of Sonic Blue. Today, the company unveiled seven players under five brands, including its first hard disk/Flash combo unit, the Rio Nitrus.

Said player is an iPod-sized 1.5GB machine that runs off a built-in Li-ion rechargeable battery. Connectivity is provided by a USB 2.0 link.

An IDC rent-a-quote announces the devices a "pioneer in an important new MP3 player category", but we're not convinced - there seems little need to bring the Flash and HDD player markets together. The Nitro isn't capacious enough to challenge the iPod, iRiver's iHP-100 or Creative's Zen, or small enough to match the convenience of most modern Flash-based players. At $299 it's not particularly cheap, either - you can get a 10GB iPod for that.

Of the latter category, Rio announced the Chiba, Fuse and Cali players, the latter essentially Rio Sport S30S with more memory - up to 128MB (which retails for $169)and 256MB ($99) from 64MB - and with an improved play time: 18 hours off a single AAA battery over the S30S' 15 hours.

The Chiba and Fuse are new models, both offering the same play time as the Cali. The Chiba appears to have the same spec. as the Cali - it's available in $169 128MB and $199 256MB models, both with FM tuner, five-band equaliser and backlit LCD, as per the Cali.

The Fuse is a 128MB device designed to plug straight into a USB port - music files can be dragged and dropped onto its icon. It too sports a backlit LCD and an adjustable equaliser. Fuse costs $129.

The $399 Rio Karma is a 20GB HDD-based player. Its built-in Li-ion battery provides 15 hours of play time. Like the iPod, it ships with a docking cradle, which serves as the PC connection point and battery charger.

Unlike the iPod, the Karma connects to its host via an Ethernet connection. Can it be networked? Rio doesn't say. However, the Karnas does offer Ogg Vorbis support. Users can create playlists on the fly, crossfade from one song to another, and adjust the output using a five-band equaliser.

All seven models will go on sale in the US this month.

Creative will begin shipping its tiny Nomad MuVo NX 128MB Flash MP3 player in the UK this month.

The NX is the successor to the original MuVo, and adds a backlit LCD, a scroll wheel controller and an eight-hour voice recording facility, courtesy of a built-in microphone. Like Rio's Fuse (see above), the NX connects directly to a PC's USB 1.1 port, allowing MP3 and WMA files to be copied directly to the device. The NX contains 128MB of Flash memory.

Creative claims 11 hours' of MP3 play time from a single alkaline AAA battery, less if you're playing back more decode-intensive WMA files.

The MuVo NX will cost £119.99
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/32273.html

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The Secrets Of Free P2P
Dan Warne

File sharing tutorial

Forget download limits — Dan Warne shows how to tap into free peer-to-peer file sharing over almost any broadband connection.

This article is featured in APC July 2003
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Download limits are the bane of the Australian broadband enthusiast. Broadband provides the speed for file sharing at a fantastic clip, but this usually comes with a strict limit on downloads, and the risk of an excess usage bill if you exceed it.

Fortunately, many broadband ISPs in this ferociously competitive market are taking advantage of the minimal cost of transferring data within their networks by offering free peer-to-peer connections between users.

The key to harnessing these free downloads is to get a P2P file-sharing program that can be configured to download only from other users your ISP deems eligible for free P2P.
Once you’re set up, you’ll find customers sharing the same huge range of files as on open P2P networks, but with higher speeds and no fear of passing your download cap.

The first step is to determine if your ISP offers free P2P, and to what extent. Some offer free services only to customers in the same state and others across their entire network. Some providers even let you download from customers on other ISPs connected through the same Internet exchange — the central points where ISPs connect to share data directly at a lower cost than sending it out via the Internet at large.

We can’t stress enough how important it is to check your ISP’s P2P arrangements. Different ISPs have very different restrictions. Check broadbandchoice.com.au for details or contact your ISP.

The most popular file-sharing programs Australian broadband file swappers use are eMule (an open source program based on eDonkey2000) and DC++ (an open source program based on DirectConnect). Unlike KaZaA, these allow you to specify which server or network you’ll be joining, which is the key to free ISP-based P2P. Both are included on this month’s cover CDs.

eMule and DC++ use different file-sharing networks, so it’s worth running both to get access to the maximum number of shared files. The jury is out over which is better. DC++ can find files faster because it connects to a central hub that lists both users and files being shared, while eMule discovers only users sharing from a central server and gets file lists directly from them.

However, DC++ lets you download a file from only one user at a time whereas eMule can fetch the same file from several users at once by breaking it into fragments.

The effect is to reduce the traffic on any single user and boosts the overall download speed for everyone.

Setting up eMule

eMule is fairly easy to use. The challenge is ensuring it downloads only from other users your ISP deems eligible for free P2P. This involves modifying eMule’s IP filter file, and it’s tricky to manually set up.

You need to research which IP ranges are “free” on your ISP and get the format of the IP filter file just right so that eMule can understand it.

Fortunately, in most cases, someone else has already done the hard work. Several community sites let you download the correct config files and drop them into your eMule program folder. The files you need to snag are:

ipfilter.dat: includes a list of IP address ranges for free P2P. This list can change daily as ISPs change their commercial arrangements, and users find mistakes in the file, so update it often.
preferences.ini: includes optimal eMule settings for your ISP (including the local chat server).
staticservers.dat: lists servers run by users on a particular Internet exchange (for example, West Australian Internet Exchange). These servers provide a constantly updating list of users sharing files at any one time so eMule knows where to search.

To get the files, first you need to identify which Internet exchange your ISP is connected to in your state (assuming your ISP offers free P2P to other users on the same exchange in the state).

For example, NSW customers of iiNet and Netspace peer through the PIPE Internet exchange — netspace.net.au/~pfarac provides all the files you need to get started. Victorian customers of Netspace, iiNet, Alphalink or Comindico-based ISPs nationally peer through the VIX/AUSIX Internet exchange, and can find the files they need at DIY.vixmule.net.

There are also user-maintained sites and config files for SA and WA. Some allow you to download eMule with the files already in place.

Once eMule is running with the modified files, if you have a firewall, open port 4662 (TCP) and port 4672 (UDP). If you’re using NAT connection sharing, forward the ports to the correct IP address on your local network.

Even when correctly configured, ZoneAlarm is known to cause eMule problems. eMule uses a credit system to encourage users to share files. When you allow a fellow user to download files from your PC, eMule records it at the other end.

When you go to download files from that same user, you’ll get a higher priority than other people. Over time this amounts to credit with other users and results in faster downloads.

Setting up DC++

DC++ is simpler to configure than eMule. Instead of having to get setup files for an IP filter, all that’s required is the address of a DirectConnect “hub” run by a customer on the Internet exchange your ISP uses.

The downside is that server names change; users take servers down and new ones spring up. A good place to find current DC hub addresses is Whirlpool’s peer-to-peer discussion forum at forums.whirlpool.net.au.

Armed with the DC hub address for your ISP, state and Internet exchange, start DC++, click the Favourite Hubs button on the toolbar, click New, enter a name and the address for the hub, click OK and you’re away.

In general, DC++ hubs require you to share a minimum quantity of files or you can’t download from other users.

To get started with sharing your own files, click Settings (in the File menu), and select the Sharing tab, click Add Folder and then browse to the folder you want to share.

When you’re downloading with DC++ you’ll have to wait for a “download slot” to become free on the other user’s PC. Because all residential connections have quite limited upload speeds, most users set a maximum of two or three concurrent uploads at once to ensure that files can be sent in acceptable amounts of time.

Some people like to use a modified version of the DC++ client, which is known as Black Claw DC++ or BCDC++. This boasts extra features, such as the ability to limit your upload speeds to prevent your Net connection becoming so congested that you can’t send network requests.

BCDC++ requires DC++ to be installed first. Then extract the files from the BCDC++ archive into the DC++ directory, overwriting some of the original files. You’ll find many additions under the program settings, especially a new tab for bandwidth limiting. You should set your upload limit a few KB below your connection’s maximum upload speed.
http://www.apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/F...256D80001E3B1C

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Internet Trade Group, Colleges Fight RIAA's Anti-Piracy Campaign
The Newshour

NetCoalition, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group representing over 100 Internet Service Providers (ISP) and other Web companies, sent a letter late Monday to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), to express concerns over the RIAA's online enforcement methods.

The letter is the latest round in the ISPs' efforts to fight numerous subpoenas from the RIAA. The recording industry has issued hundreds of subpoenas seeking information on Internet users suspected of illegally downloading copyrighted songs through Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-swapping networks, such as Grokster, Kazaa and Morpheus.

"There are understandable fears among many in the Internet community that the real purpose of this legal campaign is to achieve in court what the association has not yet been able to accomplish in Congress -- to make Internet companies legally responsible for the conduct of individuals who use their systems," the trade group wrote in the letter addressed to Cary Sherman, the acting president of the RIAA.

In the six-page letter, NetCoalition Executive Director Kevin McGuiness expressed support for the music industry's right to protect its copyrighted material, but raised questions about the RIAA's tactics.

"Very little is known or understood about this initiative, how individuals are being targeted, what's being done with the information, who pays for compliance, or how this information is protected,'' McGuiness wrote.

McGuiness contended the RIAA's enforcement tactics would essentially force its members, such as EarthLink and America Online, to act as the "police of the Internet" for the recording industry's interests.

NetCoalition asked the RIAA whether it intends to compensate ISPs for costs stemming from identifying subscribers cited in subpoenas, and if the subpoenaed information would be used exclusively for the RIAA's lawsuits against individuals, or if the RIAA would share the information with other entities.

The trade group's letter comes a month after the RIAA -- which represents music companies like Sony Music and Warner Music, among many others -- launched a massive anti- piracy campaign to track down alleged violators of digital copyright laws.

Earlier this summer, the RIAA filed more than 1,000 subpoenas in the U.S. District Court in D.C., demanding that ISPs -- such as Comcast Cable Communications, Verizon, SBC and its Pacific Bell Internet division, and EarthLink -- and dozens of colleges turn over personal information of Web users suspected of copyright infringement.

NetCoalition is not the only group to challenge the RIAA's campaign.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston College earlier this month requested a Massachusetts district court reject the RIAA subpoenas on the argument the recording trade group improperly filed the subpoenas. The two universities have refused to reveal the names of students accused of illegally downloading music from the Internet.

On Aug. 8, Massachusetts District Judge Joseph Tauro ruled in favor of MIT and Boston College, saying the subpoenas were invalid because the RIAA filed them with a court in Washington, D.C. The recording industry group in a press release called Tauro's decision a "minor procedural issue," but has not yet said whether it would resubmit the subpoenas in a Massachusetts court.

Commercial ISPs, like Verizon and SBC's Pacific Bell Internet, have also taken legal action against the RIAA. According to court documents, the companies contend that the RIAA's use of the "expedited subpoena" process -- allowed under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- is unconstitutional and threatens individual privacy rights.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/me..._08-12-03.html

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Service Providers Seek To Extend ADSL
Warwick Ashford

The greatest dissatisfaction with SA's asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL) service has been with the monthly download limit of 3GB. Local Internet service providers (ISPs) have responded by extending the Telkom service by introducing a variety of solutions involving load balancing and utilising additional user names. Telkom's corporate communications senior manager Hans Van der Groenendaal says ADSL is aimed at providing fast Internet access for the residential and small business market and is optimised for that. “However, for those who wish to use ADSL for peer-to-peer connections, Telkom is investigating the possibility of introducing an additional ADSL service.” He says such a service will require expensive international bandwidth and will therefore cost more. Meanwhile, ISPs like Tiscali are making additional user names available to subscribers, effectively increasing the download limit by 3GB with each additional user name or ADSL plug-in purchased. Tiscali's business-to-consumer manager Michelle Branco says although Telkom aimed the ADSL at the small business market, up to 70% of ADSL users are online gamers and downloaders of MP3 and video. She says Tiscali decided to offer additional “raw plugs” after Telkom conceded it was “powerless to block this method of bypassing the 3GB cap”.Telkom says although this approach may increase the cap, it does not increase the capacity of peer-to-peer communication required by those who are most dissatisfied with the initial ADSL offering. For small businesses wishing to make the best use of what ADSL provides within the constraints set by Telkom, some business solution providers have introduced the necessary load balancing between up to five simultaneous ADSL links. Network Sentinel Solutions director Gregory Nietsky says his company is offering server-based software that manages the connectivity. “Each additional ADSL link from a client's ISP is dedicated to a specific service and allocated a service level to ensure the 3GB limit is not reached before month-end.” Nietsky says to achieve the benchmark of downloading 20GB a month, a user would need about seven ADSL links, and although this will cost around R3 000 each month, “it's a lot cheaper than the R5 000 to R6 000 it would cost for a leased-line”.
http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/inte...1254.asp?O=FPT

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Avalanche of New Music Players

New players try to keep up with online download services.
Tech Live staff

The iTunes Music Store has launched, BuyMusic.com is live, and you're swimming in legitimate, paid-for MP3s, right?

And since you wouldn't dare trade them on certain peer-to-peer networks, you'd best lock down those tunes in a stylish portable music player. If you don't already own one, or if you're ready to upgrade, now's your chance.

Perhaps piggybacking on the new, pay-for-play download services, gadget makers are lining up to showcase their latest digital-music gadgets.

Lucky for you, we've found the hottest of the bunch from Rio and Gateway. Yes, even traditional PC makers are jumping into the fray. Just when you thought the selection of players was longer than a California gubernatorial recall election ballot, we've taken some of the guesswork out of choosing a player by helping you decide which player fits your digital lifestyle.

Rio

Rio has introduced a new line of MP3 players, including the Rio Karma, Rio Nitrus, Rio Cali, Rio Chiba, and Rio Fuse.

Rio Karma
Rio's going for the iPod's throat with this sleek, black, 20GB player. The Karma is tiny at just 2.7 inches by 3 inches by 0.9 inches, but it packs some groundbreaking features. It includes cross-fading between songs, a five-band equalizer, and a backlit display that lets you create animated menus in 16 shades of gray. Rio claims it'll play for 15 hours on its rechargeable lithium-ion battery. Cost is $399.99.

Rio Cali
Designed for sport use, the Rio Cali features two models: one a 128MB player and the other a 256MB player. The 256MB model, however, comes with an expansion slot, so it can hold up to 512MB of memory. The players come in a variety of colors and work with PCs and Macs via USB. According to Rio, the Cali will run on a single AAA battery for 18 continuous hours. The 256MB Cali costs $199.99.

Rio Nitrus
The Nitrus could be the answer for people looking for a smaller player that fits somewhere between a 10GB jukebox and a 256MB player. The Nitrus comes with 1.5GB of memory, which still lets users pack songs on. This stylish black player is affordable at $299. It's also small at just 3 inches by 2.4 inches by 0.6 inches.

Rio Chiba
The Chiba -- at 128MB or 256MB -- is a simple, small, cool-looking player that features a five- band equalizer, 18 hours of playback on a single AAA battery, and compatibility with PCs and Macs. The $199.99 256MB model also features a 512MB expansion slot.

Rio Fuse
The 128MB Fuse is Rio's smallest player but comes loaded with features such as separate bass and treble adjustments. The LCD lets you see what's playing. And, like all of Rio's players, the Fuse works with Macs and PCs. Rio says one AAA battery powers the Fuse for 18 hours. Costs $129.99

The downside

None of the Rio players is available yet, but Rio's website is taking preorders on its entire selection.

Gateway

Gateway 128MB Digital Music Player
This is Gateway's first foray into digital music. The company has offered players made by third parties, but it has never offered a player under its own brand name. The 128MB player is small and sleek at 3 inches by 0.5 inches by 1.4 inches. It only works with Windows-based PCs, and it plays MPEG-3 and WMA files. The Gateway doesn't require any software. You can plug it in via USB and drag and drop audio files to the player. You can also use the player as a digital voice recorder and external storage drive. Cost is $129.99.
http://www.techtv.com/news/products/...497862,00.html

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Labels To Take Fingerprints
John Borland

Digital song-tracking company Audible Magic is striking a deal with Universal Music Group for song information, getting another leg up in its quest to be able to identify--and potentially block--music as it is transferred online.

The new arrangement, expected to be announced Tuesday, will see Universal give Audible Magic a "fingerprint," or digital identification tool, for each song it releases, before albums are shipped to retailers. The company uses those fingerprints to identify copyrighted songs online or in other venues such as CD-manufacturing plants to help guard against unauthorized copying.

Audible Magic already has information from Universal and other labels in its databases, but getting the songs directly from the label before release will help make the identification business more efficient, Audible Magic CEO Vance Ikezoye said.

"What it does is accelerate the time to get music into our database," Ikezoye said. "That's when piracy is the biggest problem--right around the release date."

Audible Magic is one of a handful of companies that are creating increasingly ambitious systems that are aimed at identifying and potentially blocking music as it is swapped though peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa or other online services.

The company has created a library of audio fingerprints that it said allows it to identify close to 3.7 million songs on the fly, essentially by comparing the audio characteristics of a digital music file to the files it has on record.

Today, that system is largely used in CD-manufacturing plants to help the pressing plants make sure their customers aren't ordering batches of counterfeit compact discs. The deal with Universal is initially geared at preventing that kind of physical reproduction of unauthorized copies.

"With the growing concern about the physical piracy of copyrighted material, we believe (Audible Magic's technology) offers an accurate and reliable solution to verify the use of copyrighted content," David Benjamin, senior vice president of antipiracy at Universal Music, said in a statement.

But Audible Magic also is building a system it said will help identify copyrighted songs being traded on file-swapping networks and potentially even block the trades. The company recently tested an early version of this network-monitoring tool at the University of Wyoming, where the software watched the traffic flowing through the college network to the outside world.

A public release of that file-swapping monitor software likely will be available by the end of September or early October, Ikezoye said.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-5062517.html

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Group Warns Of Europe's 'DMCA On Steroids'
Matthew Broersma

A coalition of 38 civil liberties organisations is the latest to attack proposed EU legislation on intellectual property enforcement, which has also come under fire from the recording industry and a British Internet policy think tank.

The groups argue that the proposed IP Enforcement Directive, is a "DMCA on steroids" that would hand broad anti-competitive powers to large foreign companies, limit competition, and erode the traditional rights of consumers to use the products they purchase as they see fit. The DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is a controversial US law being used by the US recording industry to sue users of peer-to-peer networks.

In a letter to the EU Committee on Legal Affairs and Internal Market (Juri) issued on Monday, they urged the parliament to reject the proposal in its current form when it comes up for voting on 11 September. The groups launched the Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (Code) to raise awareness of the problems raised by the draft legislation.

"One can think of the EU IP Enforcement Directive as a 'DMCA on steroids' since any industrial property right that can be licensed will be enforced through technical devices that it will be absolutely illegal to circumvent throughout Europe," stated Robin Gross, executive director of US-based IP Justice.

Code's letter focused its criticism on two of the directive's measures: Article 9, which allows intellectual property holders to subpoena data on alleged infringers without jumping through the usual legal hoops, and Article 21, which forbids technology capable of bypassing intellectual property restrictions. Both articles have counterparts in the DMCA.

Of Article 9, Code wrote that it violates consumer privacy rights and "unreasonably burdens universities, Internet service providers, and other innocent third-party intermediaries who must respond to massive numbers of subpoenas and turn in customers for prosecution."

The coalition wrote that Article 21 "erodes the public's fair use (fair dealing) and freedom of expression rights by outlawing all technologies, including software, that are capable of bypassing technical restrictions."

Code argued the article would also allow companies that already dominate a market to extend their dominance by prohibiting the sale of compatible, competing technologies.

Ville Oksanen, a lawyer and vice chairman of Electronic Frontier Finland, said that a slew of incoming legislation, including the IP Enforcement Directive, the EU Copyright Directive and the EU Software Patent Directive, threatened to create disruptions in the European intellectual property system that would end up being worked out in court. Contrary to what the Enforcement Directive claims, Member States are already obliged by international treaties like Trips to protect intellectual property rights," Oksanen stated.

Code is urging voters to contact Juri about their concerns over the directive.

The group includes three British organisations, the Campaign for Digital Rights (CDR), Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties, and the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), as well as organisations from Portugal, Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Germany, Bulgaria, Spain and the US.

When the draft directive appeared early this year, it was criticised by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry as too lenient toward individual infringers.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/leg...9115624,00.htm

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MeshNetworks to Provide Position-Location and Personnel Tracking Solution to Orange County Fire and Rescue
Press Release

MeshNetworks Inc., an industry leader in the development and commercialization of location-aware mobile broadband networking solutions today announced that Orange County Fire and Rescue (OCFRD) has begun a field trial of the company's Mesh Enabled Architecture (MEA(TM)) technology. OCFRD is actively working with MeshNetworks to accelerate the development of a rapid-deployment, in-building personnel tracking system for use by first responders. IBM Corporation is acting as the systems integrator for the OCFRD project. Since its launch in December 2002, MeshNetworks' MEA solution has gained wide acceptance in Public Safety, Intelligent Transportation and other markets.

OCFRD, the department responsible for all fire, emergency medical and rescue services in Orange County, Florida, will conduct an extensive evaluation under real- world first responder conditions. Feedback from the evaluation will be incorporated into future commercial versions of the product. The MEA system being evaluated is also capable of supporting voice, video and megabit data communications in addition to its location and tracking capabilities.

"Protecting the community and our firefighters is priority one. Sometimes things go wrong. When they do, knowing the exact location of firefighters in a building is the difference between going home to family - or not," said Bill Godfrey, Deputy Chief of Orange County Fire and Rescue. "MeshNetworks has put on the table the technology for real-time location of first responders in a building, and Orange County Fire Rescue is committed to validating that technology. This may save firefighters' lives, and we couldn't be more excited."

When deployed as part of a wide area MEA mobile broadband network, incident commanders can monitor and direct their units via voice, video, and data-enhanced communications either at the scene or remotely. Automatic vehicle location (AVL) and asset tracking are also available throughout the MEA network.

"First responders have a clear need for the position location and incident communications solutions offered by MeshNetworks," said Chris Couper, IBM Distinguished Engineer and a retired firefighter. "The technology is also suited for a wide variety of Homeland Security and Public Safety initiatives because of its ability to support voice, video, data and position-location from a single integrated, and interoperable mobile broadband network."

The self-forming, self-healing networking technology developed by MeshNetworks enables emergency personnel to instantly communicate with each other, to public safety networks, the Internet and other state and federal systems. This coupled with its end-to-end support for industry standard Internet Protocol (IP), ensures transparency between a wide variety of devices, databases and interagency networks. The result is a robust, tactical communications system for first responders, even in the most remote or adverse emergency situations.
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/...m&footer_file=

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Seeing Past The Hype
Michael.Hoch

I had hoped our industry would have learned something in the past year. Companies large and small are experiencing real, significant benefits from IP- delivered audio and video. Proof points are everywhere. This column and Streaming Magazine features have profiled many case studies, not just in the typical innovation hot beds of education (City of New York, August Streaming), government (U.S. Navy, November), oil and gas (ChevronTexaco, October) and automotive (Mercedes Benz, April).
Why, then, isn’t rich media rapidly ascending the technology adoption curve? Only executive communications and distance learning are showing expanding usage. Apparently, we still need a bridge to cross Moore’s chasm.

Hesitation Dance
Part of the problem is the overall economy. IT budgets in 2002 were frozen or shrinking, with only the top three IT priorities getting funding. Rich media succeeded only as part of a higher priority, as seen in the example of Palm’s customer service portal (December). It’s not yet clear whether 2003 will be a better year.
The second huge hurdle is our old enemy, FUD: IT managers categorically shut media out of their networks due to Fear that it would overwhelm the network, Uncertainty of how to deploy and manage it, and Doubt that vendors’ solutions would perform as advertised.
I can’t fault their caution. You’d think that, with growing customer references, vendors could clearly articulate the value that audio and video add to mission- critical applications. You’d also think vendors could accurately characterize the trade-offs between various delivery strategies. Customers should be able to evaluate their options based on a vendor’s proven value to a small but growing customer base.
Yet, surprisingly few vendors risk telling customers the truth about what they do and what they don’t do. Here are some common claims that should cause anyone to pause when evaluating a potential supplier for rich media needs:

“Live is much more difficult than on-demand.”
A favorite claim of some peer-to-peer providers, this statement is partly true. It is very difficult to enable 500 or 50,000 people to simultaneously watch an event over a private network. The claim is generally used when competing for an executive communication project (“egocast”) driven by a high-level exec. The error, though, is assuming that building your own streaming systems is the best option. Deploying a high-volume, simultaneous live streaming infrastructure has limited cross-purpose uses and high ongoing management costs. “Live,” it turns out, is simple when you don’t do it yourself. Consider using media service providers for large, company-wide events. Also, there are other alternatives for small group communications. Some Web conferencing products, for example, are quicker to deploy, easier to manage, and cheaper to use than many streaming options available today.

“On-demand is much more difficult than live.”
Suppliers of on-demand products always claim that their pain is greater than their live-focused competitors. In one sense, they’re right: Delivery of truly on- demand media with VCR-like interactivity to users when and where they want it is a very difficult problem — if the content is remotely hosted and served. However, recent advances in digital rights management and download-then- play technologies have significantly cut cost and complexity of on-demand solutions.

“Ours is an end-to-end solution.”
If you hear a vendor say this, your next question should be, “What are the ‘ends’ we’re talking about?” In most cases, the vendor has a quite constricted definition in mind. Most rich media vendors focus on a particular link in the content delivery value chain. They frequently do not include such elements as content creation and production, delivery and network management, or down- to-the-desktop monitoring.

“Multicasting is the only answer to your bandwidth problem.”
While unicasting a simultaneous broadcasts to hundreds of users incurs a high bandwidth cost, multicasting is not the only — or often even the best — answer. Multicast-enabling your network requires (1) time and (2) costly hardware and software upgrades. Instead, consider whether the video or audio must be broadcast live. If it can be time shifted by even a few minutes, store- and-forward and managed-delivery strategies are a faster and cheaper option. Also, solutions that use distributed delivery or peer-to-peer can dramatically cut bandwidth costs without requiring multicast.
http://www.streamingmagazine.com/vie...s&TI=thismonth

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What's Your IP Address?

An IP address is a unique identifier used by your computer to let it communicate with other computers on the Internet. It's similar to a telephone number.

Your browser announces your computer's IP address to every web site it visits, as does file sharing software. This is how the recording industry is developing its set of targets.

You can find out what your own computer's IP address is by visiting a browser header check utility. This shows all of the information your browser reveals to sites you visit.

Note: If you're on a network, behind a firewall, or use a large ISP, your IP address may be temporary, assigned only for your current online session.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/2241591

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PlayStation 3 Chip Nears Completion
John G. Spooner

Collaborating engineers from IBM, Sony, and Toshiba have wrapped up the design for the inner workings of a mysterious new chip called "Cell."

The new multimedia processor, touted as a "supercomputer on a chip," is well on its way to completion, IBM says. The chip could end up inside the PlayStation 3, and elements of its design will be seen in future server chips from IBM.

Cell has nearly "taped out"--an industry term meaning that the chip's pen-

and-paper design and layout have been completed. Soon the design will be handed over to engineers in manufacturing, who will craft samples.

Meanwhile, engineers have been testing various subelements of the processor, both separately and together, before the manufacturing unit connects them inside actual Cell chips.

At this rate, commercial production of Cell could begin as soon as the end of 2004.

While details remain vague, Cell will differ from existing microprocessors in that it will have multiple personalities. The chip will not only perform the heavy computational tasks required for graphics, but it also will contain circuitry to handle high-bandwidth communication and run multiple devices, sources say.

This multifaceted approach is possible because a single chip will contain multiple processing cores (hence the name "Cell"). Communications features expected to be in the chips will also allow devices to form powerful, peer-to-peer-like networks, some analysts believe.

While the processor's design is still under wraps, the companies say Cell's capabilities will allow it to deliver 1 trillion calculations per second (teraflop) or more of floating-point calculations. It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz.

Cell will likely use between four and 16 general-purpose processor cores per chip. A game console might use a chip with 16 cores, while a less complicated device like a set-top box would have a processor with fewer, said Peter Glaskowsky, editor in chief of influential industry newsletter Microprocessor Report.

Some of these cores might perform computational functions, while others could control audio or graphics. But not everyone thinks this approach is groundbreaking, given that some processors already use inter-chip multiprocessing. "I just don't see that Cell is revolutionary, except in its marketing impact," Glaskowsky said.

While Cell's hardware design might be difficult, it's creating software for the chip that will be the trickiest part of establishing it in the market. "It's going to take an enormous amount of software development," said Richard Doherty, analyst with Envisioneering. "We believe the chip architecture is going to be on time and ahead of the software wizardry that is going to really make it get up and dance."

Furthermore, creating an operating system and set of applications that can take advantage of the Cell's multiprocessing and peer-to-peer computing capabilities will be the key to determining if Cell will be successful, he said.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/chi...2120395,00.htm

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Crackdown On Internet File Sharing

AMSTERDAM — Internet users who illegally offer en masse films, music or software for download on the internet will face fines running into the tens of thousands of euros in a crackdown announced on Tuesday by an author and artists' rights foundation.

Until now, the Brein (Brain) foundation has focused on tackling professional "pirates" who copy CDs on a large scale, but a planned prosecution of individuals is in line with a hardline stance being taken in the US, Italy and Denmark. The Dutch crackdown is set to start in the autumn.

Thousands of people in the US, Italy and Denmark have already been offered the chance to come to an out-of-court settlement if they pay a fine up to USD 10,000 (EUR 8,833). Those who refuse to pay risk a court case in which they could be sentenced to a much tougher fine.

Brein wants in particular to prosecute people who place too much material online via software such as Kazaa, Gnutella and Grokster. Other internet users can use the software to download the films, music or software without paying.

But the border between offering a "normal" and a "large" amount of material remains unclear. Despite this, Brein said anyone who is found to have a film that is not already showing at a Dutch cinema will be prosecuted. Offering music, films or software is illegal and the safest option is not to offer anything, an NOS news report said.

The music industry has suffered heavy financial losses as a result of illegal downloads, launching a precedent-setting case against MP 3-sharing industry pioneer Napster. A February 2001 court ruling eventually forced the website to shut down, but Napster recently reported it was planning to launch a paid- service comeback by Christmas.

Brein director T Kuik said preparations for the crackdown are on schedule and all involved parties will make a definitive decision after the summer.

Brein can obtain via the internet the IP number of a computer and intends to use this information to demand internet providers release the personal details of a suspected individual. But it must first obtain a legal order to obtain the personal details, after which the path is freely open to take someone to court.

If someone is tracked down, they will be first offered an out-of-court settlement that can extend into the tens of thousands of euros, Dutch associated press ANP reported.

But Kuik did not expect many people to be taken to court, saying it was only a small percentage who would be prosecuted. He hoped to make an agreement with internet providers in which suspected individuals are given several warnings. If they fail to heed the warning, their internet connection might be cut off.
http://www.expatica.com/index.asp?pa...&item_id=33419

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Claim: RFID Will Stop Terrorists
Mark Baard

Facing increasing resistance and concerns about privacy, the United States' largest food companies and retailers will try to win consumer approval for radio identification devices by portraying the technology as an essential tool for keeping the nation's food supply safe from terrorists.

The companies are banding together and through an industry association are lobbying to have the Department of Homeland Security designate radio frequency identification, or RFID, as an antiterrorism technology.

In addition, they are asking members of Congress and other influential figures to portray RFID in a favorable light.

Companies like Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart and Johnson & Johnson see RFID technology as a godsend. By implanting tiny radio transponders in their product packaging, the companies can instantly track their goods from factory floors all the way to retailers' warehouses. What's more, retailers can get a 100 percent accurate inventory of products on their shelves instantly with RFID detectors. Taking inventory now involves countless hours of overnight work with inaccurate results.

Experts estimate industry could save billions of dollars each year in inventory and logistical costs with RFID. Trouble is, privacy advocates see RFID as a massive invasion of privacy. They say the technology would let retailers, marketers, governments or criminals scan people -- or even their houses -- and ascertain what they own. The technology hasn't been rolled out widely yet, but already it's causing controversy. Earlier this summer, Wal-Mart caved to protests and pulled radio-tagged items out of a store in Brockton, Massachusetts.

To win the hearts and minds of consumers, retailers and food and drug companies may portray the technology as an antiterrorist tool. They say the technology can help them keep precise track of all goods and help in recall efforts should their products be contaminated or laced with poison during a terrorist attack.

The Auto-ID Center, an RFID consortium, presented its technology to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in Washington, D.C., last year. In fact, many Auto-ID Center sponsors consider Ridge's blessing to be key to public acceptance. An internal presentation by Fleishman-Hillard, the powerhouse PR firm that advises the center, lists Ridge as a "top-tier opinion leader." And the minutes (PDF) of another meeting, attended by a representative of the Department of Defense, records a group statement that the technology will catch on "when the government mandates it for homeland security reasons."

The center also has targeted Sens. John McCain and Patrick Leahy, and Reps. Charles Dingell and Billy Tauzin, for recruitment to help Americans overcome their suspicions about RFID tags on consumer goods.

Members of the privacy rights group Caspian uncovered the Auto-ID Center documents, which are marked "confidential," in early July.

With Ridge's approval for RFID, the food and drug companies and retailers hope to win over a wary public. They also may get legal protection under the Safety Act of 2002 -- a tort- reform law that offers blanket lawsuit protections to makers of antiterrorism devices, should those devices fail during a terrorist attack.

"If we get a declaration from Homeland Security that this is the step we need to take to protect the food supply, that's the step it will take to move this technology forward," said Procter & Gamble supply-chain executive Larry Kellam at an RFID industry conference in June.

Procter & Gamble and other Auto-ID Center sponsors -- including Sara Lee, Kellogg, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer -- lobbied lawmakers and officials last year for the lawsuit protections that they now hope will apply to RFID technology.

"We have been working with legislators to make sure the right regulations are in place to make RFID tags commercially feasible," said Stephanie Childs, a spokeswoman for the Grocery Manufacturers of America, which lobbied on behalf of the food and drug companies and retailers.

But not all legislators on Capitol Hill are buying into RFID tags, especially when they see companies playing the terrorism card to gain acceptance for the technology.

"We would never support legislation to prevent businesses from using RFID the way they want to," said Jeff Deist, a spokesman for Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who is a staunch privacy rights advocate. "That's a question for the marketplace. But once the Homeland Security Department gets involved, that's another story entirely."
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59624,00.html

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Arcade Addicts Joust With Past
Suneel Ratan

The Electronic Entertainment Expo each May draws upward of 60,000 people to the Los Angeles Convention Center for a glimpse of the gaming industry's future.

The Classic Gaming Expo comes as close as anything to representing a Museum of Video Games, albeit one that only comes into existence for one weekend each year.

Efforts to preserve the medium's history otherwise seem to be lagging, and enjoy little support from the game business itself. That's symptomatic of a young industry that's always looking ahead, perhaps not yet aware of the importance of keeping its past alive.

"Every time I'm here on the floor of the Classic Gaming Expo, I'm transported back to the time when I was in high school and A Flock of Seagulls was playing in the background and I was playing Missile Command on a black-and-white TV set," said expo organizer Joe Santulli. "That was heaven."

But would-be preservers of classic games say they battle both time and, often, the game industry itself.

There likely will come a time when old coin-op games or consoles simply won't work -- especially since there are few institutions with museum-like resources now dedicated to preserving them.

Older games can be made widely available to today's gamers for download via the Internet, as already happens through many so-called "abandonware sites" (so named because they archive games that publishers neither sell nor support).

Standing in the way of such efforts is a gaming industry that often jealously guards its intellectual property rights.

Game companies often have blocked efforts to make older games available through downloads and emulators, even if they no longer sell and support those titles. They label such moves piracy that could undercut future efforts to reissue such games in the form of classic compilations or to update them as remakes.

"The reason people pirate older classic games is that in many cases, there's no other way to get access to these games at the moment," said Greg Costikyan, a longtime game designer who last year tried unsuccessfully to start a Museum of Gaming.

Douglas Lowenstein, head of game-industry trade group the Entertainment Software Association, said his organization focuses on immediate legal and regulatory issues such as copyrights and piracy. It simply hasn't yet put a priority on preserving the industry's history, which he said would be a huge undertaking. Nor does he know of any other efforts in the industry.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59948,00.html

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Broadband Over Power Line Is "Spectrum Pollution," Says Ham Radio Official

BPL would use low and medium-voltage lines like these in a typical residential area to distribute digital data using HF and low-VHF frequencies.

ARRL President Jim Haynie, W5JBP, says Broadband over Power Line (BPL)--if widely deployed--would represent "spectrum pollution" on a level that is "difficult to imagine." Haynie reacted after seeing videotape and early data from recent ARRL field studies in four states where BPL is undergoing testing.

"BPL is the most crucial issue facing Amateur Radio and the one that has the most devastating potential," Haynie said. In terms of interference potential on HF and low-VHF frequencies, "nothing is on the same scale as BPL."

A form of power line carrier (PLC) technology, BPL would use existing low and medium-voltage power lines to deliver broadband services to homes and businesses. Because it uses frequencies between 2 and 80 MHz, BPL could affect HF and low-VHF amateur allocations wherever it's deployed. BPL proponents--primarily electric power utilities--already are testing BPL systems in several markets, and one reportedly is already offering the service. FCC rules already allow BPL, although industry proponents want the FCC to relax radiation limits. It's feared such a change could exacerbate BPL's interference potential.

At the West Gulf Division Convention (Austin Summerfest 2003) August 1-2 in Austin, Texas, Haynie previewed a short video that covers highlights of a recent field tour by ARRL Lab Manager Ed Hare, W1RFI. The video, which will complement technical data ARRL is gathering and compiling, turned out to be a real eye-opener for many in the audience.

Walt Dubose, K5YFW--assistant chairman of the ARRL High Speed Multimedia (HSMM) Working Group--said it was about what he'd expected. "But for most attending--maybe 60 percent--it was much worse than they had imagined, and for some it was a real shocker," he reported. Dubose said a few of those viewing the video simply couldn't believe that BPL actually was causing the high noise level.

In late July, Hare traveled some 1350 miles to visit BPL trial communities in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York to take measurements over significant parts of the HF spectrum. He also took initial readings at low-VHF frequencies. Driving a specially equipped vehicle loaded with radio gear and measurement devices, Hare said he didn't need to look long or track down "a few hot spots" to find BPL interference. "The signals were all over," he said.

"The interference found ranged from moderate to extremely strong," Hare said. The video shows the S meter of an HF transceiver holding steady in excess of S9 as the speaker emits a crackling din, which one observer described as sounding like a Geiger counter. Only the very strongest amateur signals broke through on 20 and 15 meters. Hare noted that the field strengths of the various systems all were within FCC Part 15 limits for power line carrier (PLC) devices.

At a couple of points, the video shows noise continuing nearly unabated on 15 and 20 meters as the car moves down long streets lined with overhead wiring. Hare said the signal propagated for at least a couple of miles down one road.

"Signals would have been much stronger using a gain antenna," he observed. Hare's vehicle carried a roof-mounted, horizontally polarized Buddi-Pole antenna--a loaded dipole.

Each BPL system exhibited a unique sound depending upon the modulation scheme it used, and Hare said he was able to distinguish three types during his recent tour. While in most cases, the signal sounded like static or pulse noise, in one city, it resembled sort of interference a computer monitor or similar device might generate, with warbling "birdies" blanketing the bands at closely spaced intervals. "Naturally, overhead wiring was the worst," Hare said. BPL signals continued to be audible in neighborhoods with underground electrical utility wiring, although it was somewhat attenuated.

"The BPL industry and their associations have told the FCC and the world that there is no interference potential from BPL systems," Haynie said. He noted that the American Public Power Association, in its comments to the FCC, put the burden on the technology's challengers to empirically demonstrate its interference potential.

"The video presentation does just that," Haynie said. "Anyone seeing these BPL signals for megahertz after megahertz for miles along a power line should be convinced that BPL--even operating at the present FCC limits--poses a serious threat to all HF and low-VHF communications."
http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2003/08/08/2/?nc=1

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When Is 54 Not Equal to 54? A Look at 802.11a, b, and g Throughput
Matthew Gast

Now that the 802.11g standard has been finalized, comparisons with the other standards in the 802.11 family are inevitable. One conclusion that is frequently drawn is that 802.11g offers similar speeds to 802.11a. After all, both products are advertised as having a data rate of 54 Mbps.

This article develops a simple model for the maximum TCP throughput of 802.11 networks so that a comparison can move beyond a simple comparison of nominal bit rates. According to the model, 802.11g is significantly faster than 802.11b. In a network consisting only of 802.11g clients, it is even slightly faster than 802.11a. However, "protection" mechanisms added to 802.11g to ensure backwards compatibility with legacy 802.11b clients can cut the throughput by 50 percent or more.

The basic transactional model assumed by this article is a maximum-length frame containing a single TCP segment followed by a TCP acknowledgement. To cope with the inherent unreliability of radio waves, the 802.11 MAC requires positive acknowledgement of every transmission. Each TCP packet must therefore be wrapped up in a frame exchange. The complete transaction consists of the two 802.11 data frames carrying TCP embedded in their respective exchanges:

The TCP data segment:

Distributed Interframe Space (DIFS): this interframe space indicates that an exchange has completed, and it is safe to access the medium again.
The data frame containing the TCP segment.

A Short Interframe Space (SIFS), which is a small gap between the data frame and its acknowledgement.
The 802.11 ACK frame.

The TCP ACK:

For this model, I will assume that the host operating system limits the outgoing frame size to 1,500 bytes. 802.11 permits much larger frame sizes, but this flexibility has not traditionally been used by client products. Most access points connect to existing networks with Ethernet, and therefore limit the payload size to the maximum Ethernet payload size. (In fact, this simple precaution is required to obtain Wi-Fi certification.)
http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/4085

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The Hidden Cost Of Hardware
What you don't know about licenses for the software that powers your machines could come back to haunt you
Ed Foster

Michael Tague couldn’t believe his luck. As president of Win.Net, a Louisville, Ky.-based ISP, he had purchased several Network Appliances (NetApp) data storage systems in the past and was pleased with their performance. So, when he found a used but serviceable NetApp model on eBay for a mere $4,000 — a fraction of its original cost — he was delighted.

But his delight turned to anger when he contacted NetApp to purchase a maintenance agreement for the used system. “They weren’t interested in negotiating the maintenance agreement until we paid $15,000 to relicense the operating system that came with the unit,” Tague says. “No way we were going to pay that. They got paid for the software when they originally sold the system. Why should they get paid again? So, that NetApp box is sitting in a corner — we’re not using it except for spare parts.”

Tague’s experience is increasingly common for those purchasing dedicated hardware systems secondhand. Manufacturers of systems with proprietary operating systems such as high-end routers, data storage devices, and a variety of telecommunications equipment, now generally say their software license agreements prohibit transfer of the software when the hardware is resold. It’s mostly Internet or gray- market bargain hunters who are encountering this policy, but it represents a variety of hidden costs that could eventually affect all IT customers.

Curtailing the Secondhand Market

Blanket prohibitions against license transfer have been standard language in software license agreements for many years. Only after the dot-com bust did it occur to hardware manufacturers that they could try to enforce them. IT managers report that Cisco Systems in particular has been aggressive in its demands for relicense fees.

Tague and others think the manufacturers’ restrictions are just not right. “It’s a flat out scam,” he says. “Just because it’s typical, just because the other guys are doing it too, doesn’t mean it’s OK.” It would be fair, Tague argues, for manufacturers to negotiate a maintenance agreement for their used equipment, as he was more than willing to do with NetApp. “That way, they would have a continuing revenue stream. By demanding we pay $15,000 just for the license, they get nothing.”
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/...1FEfair_1.html

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Consultation on Review of Australian Copyright Reforms

Four issues papers have been released as part of an independent analysis of the Government’s Digital Agenda copyright reforms.

The issues papers have been prepared by law firm Phillips Fox in consultation with the Attorney- General’s Department.

Major amendments to the Copyright Act, which came into effect in March 2001, were introduced to meet the challenges posed by the Internet and other new communications technologies, and to place Australia at the forefront of international developments in online copyright law reform.

Phillips Fox were appointed on 1 April 2003 to analyse key aspects of the Government’s reforms from legal, economic and technical points of view. The analysis will form part of the Government’s broader review of these reforms.

The issues papers released today cover:

· Libraries, Archives and Educational Copying;

· Carrier and Carriage Service Providers;

· Technology and Rights;

· Circumvention Devices and Services, Technological Protection Measures and Rights Management Information.

The issues papers will be discussed at public forums held by Phillips Fox on August 14 in Melbourne and on September 4 in Sydney. An online discussion forum will also be held on September 9. Anyone interested in attending any of these events must register through the Phillips Fox web site. Public submissions on any of the matters raised in the issues papers must be made by September 30.

Copies of the issues papers are available from the Phillips Fox website at http://www.phillipsfox.com/whats_on/...italAgenda.asp
http://www.findlaw.com.au/news/defau...=read&id=15941

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Music-Swapping Firm Faces Financial Seizures

The Seoul District Court yesterday said that it would allow musical recording companies to temporarily seize 1.56 billion won ($1.3 million) worth of the properties of Bugs Music, a company that offers free music downloads via the Internet to users of its Web site.

Twelve major record and music production companies last month filed a request with the court to seize Bugs Music’s properties because the online music company caused losses for them by illegally copying songs for which they hold the copyrights. The songs were then posted on the Internet without royalties to the copyright owners.

The prosecution is also investigating charges of copyright violations against the company.

The court last month, however, rejected a prosecution request to detain Park Seong-hoon, the president of the company.
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/20030...090409041.html

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File Swappers Face Action In The Netherlands

Dutch file swappers may face prosecution if anti-piracy group Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands (BREIN) goes ahead with its threat to sue those who share copyrighted music over networks like KaZaA, according to a report by TheRegister.co.uk yesterday.

The Dutch group is the latest in a series of anti-piracy organisations or music associations to turn their attention to individual file swappers, rather than corporate pirates or service providers.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is already in the process of serving hundreds of subpoenas on ISPs in order to identify file-sharers. It received a setback on Friday in a Massachusetts court, which rejected subpoenas from a Washington DC court as having no jurisdiction. The RIAA was told instead to file its subpoenas where it alleges the copyright infringement occurs, rather than targeting all 50 states from a single court.

Similar threats were issued in Spain last month, when legal services company Landwell announced that it was working with the Spanish Technological Investigation Brigade in order to prosecute up to 4,000 file sharers – albeit details of the legal grounds for prosecution as opposed to civil action were vague and, as yet, no cases have been filed.

Detection software

A difficulty in suing individuals who use P2P software for piracy purposes is, inevitably, the problem of identifying those involved. Organisations such as the RIAA rely on software that scans the public directories available to any user of a peer-to- peer network.

These directories, which allow users to find the material they are looking for, list all the files that other users of the network are currently offering to distribute. When the software finds a user who is offering to distribute copyrighted music files, it downloads some of the infringing files, along with the date and time it accessed the files.

Additional information that is publicly available from these systems then allows the organisation to identify the user’s ISP. ISPs are then told to reveal the user's identity.

The software is getting more sophisticated. Audible Magic Corporation, a digital audio and video identification company, is currently developing a network monitoring tool which would identify each copyrighted song on a P2P network according to its digital fingerprint, and block its transfer, according to a report on CNet News. Audible Magic announced yesterday that its system called RepliCheck is to be used by the Universal Music Group to combat piracy.
http://www.out-law.com/php/page.php?...9801&area=news

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Why File-Sharing Isn't Illegal

Yet the RIAA "will continue to bankrupt families"
Paul Hales

FOLLOWING ATTEMPTS by the RIAA to force universities in the US to hand over details of students using their servers to share files, we asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation - one body attempting to stand up for users' rights in the whole debacle - a few basic questions on the legality of file sharing.

Here's what the EFF Staff Attorney Jason Shultz had to say on the matter:

INQ: Surely file-sharing per se is not illegal?

EFF: File-sharing is not per se illegal. Just like a VCR or copy machine, file-sharing software has both legal and illegal uses. You can't hold a manufacturer liable for a device simply because some of its users are using it for the wrong reasons. In fact, we recently won a victory in Los Angeles this Spring when we convinced a judge there to throw out the recording industry's lawsuit against the makers of file-sharing software. The case is currently on appeal and we expect the decision to stand.

INQ: Is downloading a song from the Internet a bit like taping from the radio - inevitable and rather hard to police?

EFF: Usually, yes. However, because the recording industry was able to change the U.S. copyright law in 1998, they now have the power to subpoena Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to force them to reveal the names and addresses of users without even filing a lawsuit. Even though we require police to have a warrant to search your home, Congress has now given the recording industry permission to search your computer with little more than a guess that you're downloading their music. Colleges and ISPs have been fighting this law, but so far they have not been able to make it void.

INQ: Isn't the RIAA being a little heavy-handed?

EFF: Extremely. These lawsuits are very real for the families who are being sued. They turn their lives upside down and often bankrupt them of their life savings. The RIAA has been questioned on this and simply refuses to back down. They fully intend to keep bankrupting families until file-sharing goes away. That's hardly fair or compassionate. We need to shift the focus away from lawsuits and toward a more positive solution where file-sharing is legal and artists get paid. We have posted at least 8 or 9 different ways to make this work at www.eff.org/share/
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10999

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IBM Adds P2P Community Vehicle To alphaWorks

IBM today launched a new suite of peer-to-peer applications for community-based problem solving, available on alphaWorks, IBM's resource for emerging technology. IBM Community Tools (ICT) allows users to interact with various communities using instant and broadcast messaging, transforming the way customers and business partners interact, collaborate and respond to changing business needs.

IBM Community Tools is a dynamic messaging client that combines the highly-scalable one-to-many broadcast messaging technology in IBM MQ Event Broker[tm] with the leading enterprise instant messaging capabilities of IBM Lotus[r] Sametime[r], with Web services running under WebSphere[r] Application Server, Apache and DB2[r]. Together, these technologies can help give users the ability to locate experts, start impromptu discussions and to alert and survey large groups of people instantly, all in real time.

"By offering IBM Community Tools to the alphaWorks community, we can broaden the reach of ICT to a group that historically has proven to be a willing test bed for IBM emerging technologies - and leaps at the opportunity to experiment with the next hot tool from our labs," said Stu Feldman, Vice President, IBM Internet Technology. "ICT gives users the ability to target communities, instantly broadcast questions, polls, alerts, and ideas to thousands of other online community members and get real-time feedback from peers worldwide, who have agreed to share their skills, knowledge and opinions, which we feel is a really good fit with alphaWorks users."
http://www.ebizq.net/news/2548.html

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BNA Highlights

JUDGE RULES AGAINST FREE USE OF MOVIE TRAILERS ONLINE

A federal court judge in New Jersey has ruled that movie trailers are protected by copyright and cannot be streamed on the Internet without permission. The judge noted that the fair use doctrine did not protect a company that created their own version of a trailer after the movie studio requested that theirs be taken offline. Case name is Video Pipeline v. Buena Vista Home Entertainment.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1059980453492

CHINA SHREDS MILLIONS OF CD'S

Authorities across China have shredded more than 42 million smuggled and pirated discs. The move was part of a continuing anti-counterfeiting effort aimed at silencing critics overseas.
<http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E%5Enbv%5E1530

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DMCA Subpoenas: Technology Outracing Law?
Roy Mark

The current legal battle unfolding between Internet service providers (ISPs) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a classic case of technology outracing the best intentions of lawmakers, according to Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel for Verizon.

In a case both sides readily agree is ultimately headed to the Supreme Court, Verizon is appealing a January ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia requiring Verizon to comply with a subpoena request by the RIAA to reveal the identities of customers who allegedly infringed copyrights on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems.

The subpoena was issued through a provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows copyright holders to issue subpoenas that have not been reviewed by a judge and requires no notice to, or opportunity to be heard by, the alleged infringer.

While promptly announcing it would appeal the decision, Verizon also asked the court to issue a stay regarding revealing the names, pending the outcome of the appeal process. The telecom giant lost that decision in April and by June the U.S. Court of Appeals also agreed Verizon had to pony up the identities of the alleged infringers prior to the actual appeal of the underlying decision.

The next round of the controversial case comes on Sept. 16, when the actual appeal will be heard in Washington by the U.S. Appeals Court.

"(The RIAA) has taken an old law and twisted it to fix new business problems," Deutsch told Internetnews. "A lot of has transpired since the original appeal. We argued then that the decision was subject to abuse and now we have proof."

The 42-year-old Deutsch is a veteran intellectual property attorney who represented Verizon in the heated negotiations over the passage of the DMCA five years ago. She also was Verizon's point person during the World Intellectual Property Organization treaty talks that ultimately led to Congress enacting the DMCA.

One of the central issues in 1998 was the liability of ISPs for the possible copyright infringements of their customers. The DMCA gives ISPs liability protections in exchange for assisting copyright owners in identifying and dealing with infringers who misuse the service providers' systems, including complying with an expedited subpoena process for copyright owners who want to pursue legal action against infringers.

Deutsch said the ISPs' understanding at the time was that they agreed that if an infringement was residing on an ISP's network, the service provider would agree to remove it from the system after receiving a valid notice from the copyright owner.

Neither side ever anticipated the development and explosive growth of peer-to-peer networks.

"The technology didn't even exist then," Deutsch said, noting there's nothing for an ISP to take down from its systems when file swappers engage in copyright infringement. "The infringement moved from the service providers to the customer's hard drive."

Deutsch contends P2P infringement violations shouldn't be covered by the DMCA subpoena provision since the law only anticipated copyright infringement on service providers' systems. She is quick to point out that Verizon is in no way endorsing infringement.

"Verizon is not attempting to shield customers who break copyright laws. We are, however, seeking to protect the fundamental privacy and due process rights that should be afforded to our customers and all Internet users," Deutsch said, adding that Verizon and and other ISPs have always complied with subpoenas obtained through the traditional process of presenting the court with evidence of suspicion of a crime and reviewed and signed by a judge.

D.C. District Judge John Bates, though, didn't see it Verizon's way.

"Under Verizon's reading of the Act, a significant amount of potentital copyright infringement would be shielded from the subpoena authority of the DMCA," Bates ruled. "That would, in effect, give Internet copyright infringers shelter from the long arm of the DMCA subpoena power, and allow infringement to flourish."

The first indication that the RIAA had a different interpretation from Verizon's came in August of last year when it went to court to force Verizon to comply with a DMCA subpoena seeking information related to "a computer connected to the Verizon network that is a hub for significant music piracy." The motion said Verizon was the only entity that could identify the infringer behind the computer.

Since prevailing in June, the RIAA has issued hundreds of DMCA subpoenas to ISPs in what Deutsch characterized as "taking advantage of a procedural delay." Deutsch said since Verizon turned over the original two names sought by the RIAA, the music industry trade group has hit the company with almost 200 more subpoenas.

Deutsch says the RIAA is engaging in a fishing expedition in order to obtain as many names as possible before the appeals court ruling and that the music industry is "trampling on the privacy rights" of thousands of ISP customers.

"The court's decision has troubling ramifications for consumers, service providers and the growth of the Internet. It opens the door for anyone who makes a mere allegation of copyright infringement to gain complete access to private subscriber information without the due process protections afforded by the courts," Deutsch said after the January ruling. "This case will have a chilling effect on private communications, such as e-mail, surfing the Internet or the sending of files between private parties."

Other ISPs are now joining Verizon in the legal fray. Earlier this month, Pacific Bell Internet Services, a subsidiary of SBC Communications, filed a lawsuit against the RIAA after it received 200 subpoenas demanding the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the ISP's subscribers who the RIAA claims are engaging in copyright infringement.
http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/2248641

JackSpratts · 14-08-03, 10:33 PM

Refugee P2P Outpost Escapes Authority
John Borland

Deep in the tense Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian West Bank, a new file- swapping service is daring record labels and movie studios to turn their piracy-hunting into an international incident.

Dubbed Earthstation 5, the new file-swapping network is openly flouting international copyright norms at a time when many older peer-to-peer companies are trying to establish themselves as legitimate technology companies. One of the brashest of a new generation of file-trading networks, it is serving as a new test case for the ability of high-tech security measures and international borders to preserve privacy on the Net.

As the deadline looms this month for what will likely be thousands of copyright lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against individual computer users, anxious file swappers are turning to this and other new services in hopes of avoiding legal consequences. In EarthStation 5's case, it is returning industry legal threats with bravado.

"We're in Palestine, in a refugee camp," said Ras Kabir, the service's co-founder. "There aren't too many process servers that are going to be coming into the Jenin refugee camp. We'll welcome them if they do."

On its face, Earthstation 5 appears to be at the leading edge of the movie and music industry's next nightmare--copyright-flouting networks based in a territory without strong intellectual property laws, with security built in that protects users from scrutiny. Indeed, the company is confident enough in its territorial immunity that it even streams and offers downloads of full albums and first-run movies like "Terminator 3" and "Tomb Raider" directly from its own servers, an activity that has previously resulted in lawsuits and the prompt disappearance of predecessors.

As an unabashed advocate of unrestricted file swapping, the company may also serve to undermine recent conciliatory efforts of older peer-to-peer companies. Companies such as Kazaa parent Sharman Networks have tried to open negotiations with the recording and film industries in hopes of ultimately reaching a legal compromise. Several groups of peer-to-peer companies have opened trade associations and lobbying branches in Washington, D.C., aiming to show they are legitimate parts of the technology economy.

Like others in a new generation of file-sharing networks such as Blubster and Filetopia, Earthstation 5 bills itself primarily as an anonymous service. That's helped all of them draw computer users anxious to escape the high-profile recording industry campaign to find, identify and ultimately sue thousands of individuals trading music on networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

Trouble is, the claims to anonymity are as highly controversial as the services themselves.

"We have yet to see a P2P network where we have not been able to target individuals who are infringers," said Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of the RIAA. "This is marketing hype of the worst kind. It is playing on the fears of others, encouraging them to engage in behavior that will get them into a boatload of trouble."

Out of the West Bank
According to Earthstation 5 founder Kabir, the company was formed after a conversation with his brother Nasser in Ramallah two years ago, as Napster was circling toward its nadir. Over time, they won the financial backing of investors in Israel, Saudi Arabia and Russia, who have asked to remain anonymous. Those funds were used in part to pay contract programmers, largely in Russia, to help build the basic software.

The 35-year-old Kabir, who speaks fluent English, says he is Palestinian but spent much of his childhood in Manchester, England, with his mother. He now has homes in Jenin and elsewhere in Palestine, where Earthstation 5 is based, he said.

He's not worried about legal attacks from the RIAA or the Motion Picture Association (MPA), groups that have successfully shut down many of the most blatant copyright violators online, he said. In the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli government has ceded civil law enforcement to the Palestinian Authority. That body has propagated copyright rules that protect Palestinian copyrights but don't have strong protections for foreign works, he said.

He's now making sweeping claims for the success of the service: that it has been translated into more than a dozen languages, ranging from Turkish to Chinese, which has helped it be downloaded more than 22 million times--a number that would put it on track to rival the reach of file- swapping giant Kazaa.

Like much else in the gray areas of Internet file swapping, much of this is hard to confirm in detail. Nor are claims always genuine in this industry. In April, a Netherlands- based company that calls itself "The Honest Thief," which similarly advertised file sharing beyond the reach of American law, turned out to be a hoax.

Internet addresses Earthstation 5 uses point to Israeli hosting company SpeedNet, which did not return requests for comment. The file-swapping company's domain name itself is registered to an address in "Jenin refugee Camp #23," although that does not prove its actual location there.

The company's Web site gives an address in Gaza, as does the contact information for another Net address used by the service.

According to Download.com, a popular software aggregation site News.com publisher CNET Networks operates, the English version of Earthstation 5 has been downloaded just 25,500 times, with far fewer instances of other languages. Kabir said most of his downloads come from other sites or from the company's own site.

The software itself does not include a way to verify the number of people online at any given time.

Is secure really secure?
If the story of a refugee camp-based network that's flying in the face of international copyright norms is compelling, it is ultimately the strength of the technology itself that will determine the success of the service or of any of its new generation of rivals.

By comparison to more established services, Earthstation 5 is difficult to use and buggy. It claims to use a series of different technologies--most of which are similar to nascent efforts by rivals--in order to keep its users' identities safe.

First, it uses a different Web protocol, called UDP (for User Datagram Protocol), to transmit much of its information. This is harder to detect and track to a single computer than is TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which is used by most file-swapping services and Web functions.

The company adds SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption--the same technology that prevents hackers from seeing password or credit card numbers being sent to e-commerce sites--to protect data in transit. And finally, it encourages users to search and even transfer files through proxy servers, the electronic equivalent of using a middleman to exchange goods. That way, anybody who tries to download files will see only the Net address of the proxy server doing the relaying, not the person originally sharing files, according to the company.

None of these methods is a perfect guarantor of anonymity. Nor does the company provide enough real detail on its security to satisfy others in the privacy business.

"If I'm going to lay my anonymity on the line, I would want to see all the details about how a system works," said Ian Clarke, founder of Freenet, a yearslong project dedicated to producing a genuinely anonymous file-swapping and Net publishing system. "This is an issue we think about a lot. When we have people in China who could go to jail or worse for using Freenet, we want to make sure that we're not exaggerating those claims and what level (of anonymity) they afford."

Companies dedicated to scouring file-swapping networks for infringements say proxy servers could help people be temporarily anonymous, but they have flaws as well. A server could, for example, be a "honey pot," a trap set up by a group like the RIAA or MPA that will in fact do nothing to preserve privacy.

Kabir said his company runs several of its own proxy servers and encourages people to swap files through these. But if the service becomes extremely popular, with hundreds of gigabytes going through the service every day, running anonymous proxies would likely become prohibitively expensive and impractical.

"Right now, the proxy features in just about every P2P client don't work well. They end up slowing downloads and aren't highly utilized," said Travis Hill, director of engineering for BayTSP, a company that works for record companies and movie studios to find copyright infringements online. "But if and when they do start being used effectively--if proxy operators are allowing their machines to distribute copyrighted material--copyright owners will start notifying them and pursuing them also."

The U.S. copyright community has previously shown some restraint in dealing with infringing issues in the Middle East. File-swapping firm iMesh, based in Israel, is one of the oldest and most popular of the post-Napster networks and has thus far escaped lawsuits altogether.

Even if the RIAA and MPA can't go to Israel or the Palestinian territories to have the company's servers shut down, they do have options inside the United States. They've previously filed lawsuits against major U.S. backbone Internet service providers to block access to Web addresses that offer copyrighted material online and have said they are willing to do so again.

For now, Kabir and his brother are worrying just as much about maintaining a functioning technology operation in an area where suicide bombings and military reprisals are still a way of life. The company has talked to militant Palestinians as well as Israelis and has gotten the go-ahead to operate without being drawn into the ongoing conflict as much as possible, he says.

"We have met with the organizations on our side, met with the leadership, and we said we just want to support ourselves and support Palestinians," Kabir said. "Everyone thought we were nuts. But we all came to agreement. We're entitled to eat, too."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-5063641.html

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Pop Goes The Warning
Jack Kapica

The Canadian music industry will be sending warnings to users who are offering copyright music files on peer-to-peer programs.

In what it calls "the second phase of our education program with Canadian users of file-sharing services," Canadian Recording Industry Association president Brian Robertson said CRIA will use the Instant Messaging function of the peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa to communicate its message to individuals who appear to be distributing copyrighted music without authorization from the rights owners.

Unlike the Recording Industry Association of America, its U.S. counterpart, its U.S. counterpart, CRIA has not launched lawsuits against users of such networks as Kazaa, which share digitized versions of music CDs.

The test of the message reads:

"Warning

"It appears that you are offering copyrighted music to others from your computer. While we appreciate your love of music, please be aware that sharing copyrighted music on the Internet without permission from the copyright owner is illegal. When you do so, you hurt the artists, songwriters and musicians who create the music and the other talented individuals who are involved in bringing you the music.

"More than 40,000 Canadians work hard producing and supporting the music you appear to enjoy, including producers, engineers, retailers, music publishers, distributors, manufacturers, record companies, concert promoters and broadcasters.

"When you break the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a simple way to avoid that risk: Don¹t distribute music to others on a file-sharing system like this. For further information, please go to www.cria.ca.

"Remember that you need music and music needs you."
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/

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Singingfish To compete with iTunes and File-Sharing programs?
Mr Ocean

Is Singingfish.com the Multimedia Search engine (Owned by Thomson) competing with File-sharing programs like Kazaa etc?
Producing a monthly top list of most popular song searches shows Beyoncé Knowles "Crazy In Love" as the #1 searched song, at doing a search several results come up, most of them streamed, similar to online radio streaming.
For most somewhat handy computer people it's not that difficult to download the existing file, but here is a though, when i listen to the streamed audio (Of the whole song) do i commit an illegal act?
I don't have any idea, i would guess not, and if my instinct is correct, will this be a legal way to listen to music without downloading it to your computer (Which in most cases makes it illegal) like a personal radion in a way, you can request any song you want.

To me this makes Singingfish also a competitor to services like iTunes, sure you will have to stream the file each time you want to listen to it, but for people with broadband connections this shouldn't cause a problem.

Searching multimedia isn't a new thing, it's been done before and most search engines like AltaVista and Fast-WebSearch include Multimedia as a choice of search, Singingfish presents undoubtly much better results in all areas than they do.

I am certainly looking forward to see where this ends it may prove a good competitor for both Pay-Per-Song services like iTunes but also File-Sharing services like Kazaa and Morpheus etc.
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comm...id=817_0_5_0_C

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Higher Education & Entertainment P2P Report:

A report explicating what could happen to students who use school networks for file sharing has just been released by the Hollywood inspired Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities.

Among other things, "mandatory-minimum statutory damages even for non-willful infringements by a student could be enormous (in the millions of dollars)," it states, going on, "Within the range, a court would consider what is 'just'. Juries could act with compassion, but that is not guaranteed."

It also warns, "Students engaged in file sharing, distributing P2P software, or operating P2P networks are not likely to qualify as online service providers under the DMCA."

Called Background Discussion of Copyright Law and Potential Liability for Students Engaged in P2P File Sharing on University Networks, it's released under the ACE banner.

Behind the Joint Committee are educational institution administrators, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), the heads of several movie studios, and various Hollywood lawyers and marketeers.

"[...] a number of colleges and universities have begun to inform students about potential liabilities that arise from certain P2P file-sharing activities," it states. "Given the seriousness of the liabilities and their negative implications for students’ lives, it is right to catalog the liabilities and appropriate to weigh the risks."

Graham Spanier, Pennsylvania State University president, used to be its chair, with Cary-Sue Sherman, RIAA president, as co-chair. But Spanier seems to have been replaced by John Hennessy, Stanford University president, and relegated to co-chair, alongside Sherman. See the bottom of the story for a full list.

A preface to the report signed, interestingly, only by Hennessy and Spanier, states:

"As discussed in the paper, the P2P file sharing software is not itself unlawful, but its use for unauthorized downloading and uploading of copyrighted music and other works likely constitutes copyright infringement. Copyright owners are expanding their efforts against such infringement through a variety of legal means. The enclosed paper is intended to assist campus administrators in understanding the application of copyright law to P2P file sharing and the potential serious liabilities that may be incurred by students who engage in that activity; we encourage you to share this paper with appropriate members of your administration.

"We intend to distribute another document shortly that will describe a number of approaches that various institutions have taken to educate students, faculty, and staff about copyright rights and responsibilities and P2P file sharing. In the meantime, we hope that you will find the enclosed paper to be helpful in thinking about this issue and framing your own
institutional policies."

What's the bottom line?

• As to the merits of P2P file sharing by students on university networks, serious liability could arise for direct infringements of multiple copyrighted works. There also appears to be a reasonable likelihood of success on contributory copyright infringement claims against students who materially contribute to the direct infringements of other students. Given the complexities and conflicts in recent court decisions, this determination will turn on the facts of each case.

• Students engaged in file sharing, distributing P2P software, or operating P2P networks are not likely to qualify as online service providers under the DMCA.

• As a general proposition, whether a student has acted 'willfully' and, therefore, qualifies for augmented statutory damages will depend on the facts and circumstances of each case. In any event, mandatory- minimum statutory damages even for non-willful infringements by a student could be enormous (in the millions of dollars). Within the range, a court would consider what is 'just'. Juries could act with compassion, but that is not guaranteed.

• Upon a finding of infringement, entry of an injunction against a student’s infringing activities is likely. Court- ordered impoundment or other disposition of a student’s computer and telephonic equipment used to facilitate file sharing is a possibility.

• A student could be ordered to pay the costs and attorney’s fees of a successful plaintiff in addition to the student’s own costs and attorney’s fees. To mount a vigorous defense, substantial monetary resources might be necessary. The attorney’s fees just for a settlement can cost thousands of dollars.

• If the student engages in file sharing of live musical performances that have been taped, similar liabilities could arise from the federal anti-bootlegging statute.

• In the worst cases, criminal prosecutions could occur with multiple counts, raising the possibilities of potent penal sanctions including terms of imprisonment, fines, and forfeitures of technological equipment used in P2P file sharing.

• Finally, liabilities might arise from application of other state and federal statutes. Given the right fact pattern and jurisdiction, lawsuits could also arise in foreign countries. Colleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students’ private conduct. Students therefore should not assume that their college or university will accept liability for them or provide them with legal representation.
http://www.p2pnet.net/article/7408

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Are You Wanted by the Recording Industry?
Chris Sherman

Concerned that information about your file-sharing user name may have been subpoenaed by the Recording Industry Association of America? Check this database to see if you're a potential target.

Ever since Napster made it easy for music lovers to share files, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been on a crusade to put an end to what they allege is illegal file sharing. The RIAA successfully sued Napster, resulting in the demise of the popular service.

The battle has escalated this year, with the RIAA shifting its targets from companies to individual users. On June 25, 2003, the RIAA announced that it will begin suing users of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems beginning at the end of August.

Targets of RIAA actions are users of services like Grokster, Morpheus, KaZaA, Aimster, Gnutella, and others. According to the RIAA, it plans to selectively target users who upload or share "substantial" amounts of copyrighted music.

How does the RIAA identify those users? By using software that scans users' publicly available P2P directories, and then identifies the ISP of each user. Then, under the provisions of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the RIAA subpoenas ISPs for each user's name, address, and other personal information. The RIAA will then sue those individuals.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is helping users deal with the draconian tactics of the music industry cartel. It has created a Subpoena Database that lets you check the user names and IP addresses used on a file sharing service against a database of those user names specified in hundreds of subpoenas the RIAA issued to Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

"The recording industry continues its futile crusade to sue thousands of the over 60 million people who use file sharing software in the U.S.," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "We hope that EFF's subpoena database will give people some peace of mind and the information they need to challenge these subpoenas and protect their privacy."

"EFF is also documenting the scope of privacy invasions committed by the RIAA," explained EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "EFF's subpoena database will help document the damage done to innocent people misidentified as copyright infringers in the RIAA's overzealous campaign."

If you're a user of a P2P system, it's important to realize that these systems are legal, and using them is not a crime, despite the RIAA's heavy-handed tactics. If you are a P2P user, take a look at How Not to Get Sued by the RIAA for File Sharing.

If you feel you've been wrongly targeted by the RIAA, visit the Subpoena Defense Alliance, a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the US Internet Industry Association and other organizations that began in April of 2003. Its purpose is to assist consumers and Internet Service Providers who have been served subpoenas seeking the identity of customers who use the Internet for private communications.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/2241591

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Download Battle Reaches Europe
BBC

Microsoft has launched a music download service in Europe after the success of a similar service run by rival Apple in the United States.

Microsoft's MSN Music Club allows fans in the UK, France and Germany to buy single songs from 75p, or 0.99 euros. It is being billed as the first pan-European pay-as-you-go online music shop.

Apple's iTunes music store, which offers songs for $0.99 (62p), was an instant hit when it launched in the US in May - but Microsoft has beaten it to the European market. Through Microsoft, fans can buy more than 200,000 songs from all five major record labels - roughly the same as the iTunes catalogue. Many tunes are priced at 75p, with more popular songs at 99p and "gold" singles at £1.19. Gold tracks are new singles, available as soon as they are sent to radio stations - up to six weeks before the CDs reach shops and full albums will be priced to download from £7.99, or 12.49 euros. Songs are available through the 250 million copies of the latest version of Microsoft's Windows Media Player as well as its website.

The new service was given a "soft launch" last week and is being run in conjunction with digital music company OD2. There has already been a "dramatic" increase in users after Microsoft 's previous subscription-only model was expanded, OD2 chief executive Charles Grimsdale said. ITunes enjoyed surprise success when it launched in the US in May, selling more than five million songs in the first two months. Microsoft's service was not a direct response to iTunes' popularity, but was designed to please fans who were reluctant to sign up for a subscription, he said. It had also been made possible because record companies had "opened up" their licensing requirements in the last six months, he said.

"These new services represent the second generation of online music stores in Europe," he said. Fans can copy tracks, burn them to CDs and transfer them to other devices as much as they want "within reason", he added. An Apple spokesman could not say when iTunes music store was likely to launch in the UK because they were currently negotiating with record companies.

"There are people thrashing out deals as we speak," he said. He added that iTunes used a higher quality audio file and that users had the same level of rights as people who bought CDs. It is currently only available to Mac users, but a Windows version of iTunes is expected to be launched in the US by the end of the year.

The new services are leading the way in legitimate downloading after several years during which unofficial sites have allowed fans to access music for free.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ic/3148327.stm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

RIAA Says 'Happy to Talk'
Jo Maitland

The ISP community, represented by NetCoalition, has received a lukewarm response from the Record Industry of America Association (RIAA) regarding its complaint against the association’s litigious approach to preventing file-swapping on the Internet (see ISPs Hit Back at Record Industry).

Yesterday, NetCoalition hand-delivered a letter signed by several major ISP associations, to the RIAA, criticizing it for its heavy-handed approach to slapping subpoenas on ISPs’ customers that are downloading music files on the Net. The full text of the letter can be read here.

The RIAA responded to NetCoalition via an email to Boardwatch:

We welcome the opportunity to sit down with anyone in the ISP community to discuss internet piracy and how we can work together constructively. We have already reached out to many ISPs to discuss these issues. We look forward to dispelling some of the gross inaccuracies contained in the letter, and hope that these ISPs will help to foster the legitimate on line music marketplace.

An RIAA spokeswoman told Boardwatch, "We are happy to talk."

NetCoalition is unimpressed. “They have responded through the media, which is indicative of this whole effort,” says Kevin McGuiness, executive director and general counsel of NetCoalition. “It’s a campaign of intimidation."

McGuiness says he hasn't received an official response from the RIAA, “not even a phone call."

Industry observers say it might be time for some of NetCoalition’s larger members to stand up and make some noise on behalf of ISPs in this battle. The Virginia ISP Alliance signed the letter and among its members are AOL Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: AOL) and EarthLink Inc.
http://www.boardwatch.com/document.asp?doc_id=38575

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D’oh!

Fancy Fragrances Provoke Hornets To Attack

A common ingredient of cosmetics and perfumes can cause hornets to attack humans, new research has revealed. Professor Masato Ono and his team at Tamagawa University, Tokyo, have shown that hornets release chemicals similar to those found in certain cosmetic products when they are threatened. It follows from this that humans wearing such cosmetic products might inadvertently provoke confused hornets into attacking them.

The researchers identified a multi-component alarm pheromone in the venom of the world's largest hornet, Vespa mandarinia. One of the ingredients of this chemical cocktail elicits a strong attack reaction by fellow hornets, the team found. Worker insects exposed to the extract flew excitedly around the nest and rushed towards the target.

The team went on to analyse the volatile components in venom from all seven Japanese hornet species. The samples contained chemicals that are common in manufactured food as well as cosmetic products.

'As these chemicals are sometimes used in food flavourings, and as fragrances in cosmetics, it is possible that they might provoke a seemingly unwarranted hornet attack on humans,' Professor Ono writes in the latest edition of the journal, Nature.

'It may therefore be sensible to screen these commercial products for the presence of pheromones that might act as an alarm signal to dangerous insects,' he adds.

Up to 74 people die each year in Japan after being stung by insects, with hornets being among the worst offenders.

Source: http://www.nature.com
http://www.cordis.lu/express/

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Steve Jobs is Raking It In
Graef Crystal

One group seems to have totally escaped the hard economic times of the last three years: chief executive officers of major U.S. companies.

Would you believe average annual pay of $12 million a year?

A review of total pay from 2000 through 2002 for 243 CEOs running companies with 2002 revenue of $5 billion or more also shows that total pay ranged from a low of $336,000 a year received by Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Warren Buffett to $219 million a year for Steve Jobs of Apple Computer Inc.

My review looked at three years because all compensation elements aren't present in any single year. Data for the study were furnished by Equilar, Inc. an independent provider of executive compensation information.

Sharing the spotlight with that $12 million average annual total pay figure is that there is little rhyme or reason why one CEO makes more than another. Consider these findings:

-- Company revenue and its three-year total return to investors can explain 20 percent of the variation in the combination of base salary and annual bonus. Still, 80 percent of pay variation seems not to be explained by anything rational.

-- That pay variance explanation drops to 16 percent with the combination of salary, bonus, grants of free shares of stock, and payouts under other long-term incentive plans. Even worse, three- year total returns explain no pay variation at all.

-- The pay-level variance drops to 14 percent if you look at everything just mentioned and the estimated present value of stock option grants (measured at the date of grant using the Black- Scholes model). And forget about any emphasis on three-year total returns.

Besides having the group's highest three-year average annual pay, Jobs also wins my Most- Ludicrous-Pay-Package trophy, which isn't awarded every year. When Jobs returned to Apple in August 1997 to run the company he co-founded, he started out with a pay package of precisely one element -- $1 a year in salary.

Then, in a stunning display of love gone out of control, Jobs' board in 2000 gave him title to a free Gulfstream 5 jet for his personal use and also history's most valuable stock option grant, one covering 20 million shares, equal to about 6 percent of all outstanding shares.

The jet, including reimbursing Jobs for all of his taxes on the gift, as well as the taxes on the taxes on the taxes, set back the shareholders $84 million.

In fiscal 2002, after it became clear his 20 million option shares weren't likely to rise out of the muck of San Francisco Bay, Jobs's board gave him options on another 7.5 million shares.

In March 2003, after the end of my study period, Jobs gave up the ghost entirely on stock options. He turned in his 27.5 million option shares for a grant of five million free shares worth $74.6 million.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news...=a2lC5UYqKkSI#

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Publishers Cut Back Despite Big Sales
Hillel Italie

This should be a great time for the book world.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has set sales records. Hillary Clinton's memoirs, Living History, has sold more than one million copies.

Other recent successes include Oprah Winfrey's book club pick, East of Eden, and Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin.

But instead of celebrating, publishers have been cutting.

Scholastic, Inc., the U.S. publisher of the Potter books, announced in May that 400 employees had been fired worldwide and said that in mid-July there would be additional spending reductions. Simon & Schuster, which released both the Clinton and Isaacson books, announced this week that 75 employees would be laid off.

"The fact remains that our industry continues to be challenged by any number of issues, including the most prolonged period of depressed sales in memory," Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos wrote in a companywide e-mail.

For publishing people, the value of books like Living History and Order of the Phoenix isn't only in the splash, but in the ripples. The industry had hoped the Potter boom would carry over to other titles, but most report either modest increases or none at all.

Once the boom receded, fundamental problems remained: a slow economy, a distracted public.

"It's not a brand new day," says Laurie Brown, a vice-president for sales at Harcourt Trade Publishers. "I would guess you'll find universally cautious positions on sales figures and marketing budgets."

"It's harder for books to catch on," says Gary Fisketjon, a longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf.

"I think the slump probably started in the (2000) presidential election that wouldn't end. And that spring (2001) was the dot-com crash. Then you have Sept. 11 and a constant war footing ever since. People are just preoccupied in all sorts of ways."

Big sales don't necessarily mean big profits, especially if everyone is expecting a hit. With Clinton receiving an $8-million-US advance, Simon & Schuster needed hundreds of thousands of sales to make money on the book. And Amazon.com, anticipating tremendous competition for the Potter book, offered a 40 per cent discount on the $29.99 US suggested price.

The result: Despite more than one million sales worldwide, the online retailer announced it essentially broke even with Order of the Phoenix.

With more than 100,000 titles annually released in the United States, the industry doesn't sustain itself on high-profile books alone. It also needs steady sales of older titles and surprise hits like Alice Sebold's million- selling novel, The Lovely Bones.

Sebold's book, published a year ago, was the literary event of 2002 and cost a fraction of the Clinton book to produce. But more than halfway into 2003, no new literary novel has had any significant impact, despite books from Robert Stone, Norman Rush, Don DeLillo and Jane Smiley.

"The fiction market in general has been very sluggish," says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "I don't think there has been a book this year that really took the world by storm. That's what it takes, something that lights people up."
http://www.canoe.ca/JamBooks/jul25_cut-ap.html

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Software Helps Tame the Copyright Jungle

Clients seeking footage can view it online and apply for licenses
Jon Healy

Executives at the nonprofit National Geographic Society see gold in the videos they've amassed of exotic locales and roving wildlife.

But each of the hundreds of thousands of clips in the society's vault comes with a tangle of strings attached, thick as a jungle.

A producer may hold distribution rights outside the United States. A song in the soundtrack may be cleared to play in Asia but not in Africa. And a billboard in the background may show the logo for a brand-name sneaker, requiring the shoe's manufacturer to weigh in.

All that can be intimidating to filmmakers, ad agencies and others that might want to use the footage. So the society is trying to make its collection more accessible, with a Web site where customers can review its vast trove and apply for myriad licenses.

The site is powered by software developed by RightsLine Inc. of Beverly Hills, which sees a gold mine of its own in helping companies sort through the maze of overlapping copyrights affecting their video, music, images and trademarks.

RightsLine was founded in 1999 by three former executives at database powerhouse Oracle Corp.

Russell P. Reeder, RightsLine's chief executive, said the major bottleneck for media companies has been understanding what they own — what footage, images and other items they have the right to distribute, and where those rights apply.

The Internet has opened the door to a slew of new opportunities for offering content, but copyright law still can get in the way. Each segment of a video may be covered by different restrictions on where it can be shown, what it can be used for and when it can be sold.

RightsLine's software is designed to track those restrictions down to a single frame of film. It also helps companies discover the rights they have yet to exploit. For example, a Hollywood studio may have licensed the rights to sell the Spanish-language DVD of a film in South America, but not the Portuguese version.

"Once you understand what you own, then you can create these new business models," Reeder said.

The Internet-based approach doesn't eliminate the need to have people physically review license applications to make sure footage or images won't be used inappropriately or fuel copyright violations, a prime concern in an era of widespread Internet piracy.

Still, Vivendi Universal's Universal Studios, which started using RightsLine's software in 2001, has cut the approval time for the average deal from 10 days to two — with some deals taking as little as 15 minutes, said Jeremy Laws, Universal Studios' vice president of media licensing.

Universal also has seen revenue from its film clips and photographs go up 50% over the last two years, "and the rate of revenue growth continues to accelerate," analysts Gale Daikoku and Van Baker of GartnerG2 reported in June.

What's more, by making it easier for companies to obtain footage legally, Universal reduced the amount of unauthorized uses, said Robert Gleiberman, RightsLine's chief operating officer.

Matthew White, vice president of the film library at National Geographic Television & Film, sees another potential benefit to his organization's new Web site, which it plans to unveil this month. By eliminating much of the pain from licensing, the library hopes not only to spur more creative uses of its footage, but also to prompt other libraries to follow suit.

"We're expecting others to come with us as well," White said. "If we provide those kinds of tools to producers, all of these archives around the world open up."

RightsLine is trying to attract more than just video companies.

Its customers also include telecommunications company Sprint Corp. and image clearinghouse Corbis Corp. Although the market for video "stock footage" is about $300 million worldwide, White said, the Licensing Industry Merchandisers Assn. estimates that the market for all copyrighted or trademarked images — think Laker jerseys and Mickey Mouse watches — is $105 billion in the U.S. alone.

As a result, the potential for firms that manage copyrights is huge.

NextQuarter, a corporate research firm in Rye, N.H., estimated that the market for rights-management software would rise from $3.1 billion in the U.S. this year to $5.5 billion over the next three years, and from $9 billion worldwide to $16.2 billion.

RightsLine steps in after a firm has done the painstaking work of combing through its contracts and cataloging all the restrictions on its assets. It lets its customers hide that complexity from potential licensees, while also keeping track of any new restrictions imposed by exclusive deals for footage or images.

White said that National Geographic Film & Television used to require customers to describe the footage they were looking for, then wait for the library's researchers to send them segments on videotape that might fit their needs. If clients saw something they liked, they would have to come back to the library for a license and a copy suitable for broadcasting.

With the Web site, customers will be able to search through a digitized collection of about 100,000 videos, view and select the footage that suits their needs, and fill out a license application online. RightsLine's software is designed to show only those clips that would be eligible for licensing.

The process still has some major flaws, White said, noting that the library can't deliver master versions of the clips to most customers because of the lack of a standard format. But a group of stock-footage companies hopes to address those shortcomings through a trade association formed this year.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology

Cell Phone Music Plans Have Labels Listening

BPOD Network hopes to offer downloadable songs for about $2 each. Sprint, Warner Music already have a deal.
Jon Healey

Dick Wingate spent the late 1990s on a largely futile mission: trying to persuade the major record companies to use Liquid Audio Inc.'s technology to sell songs that could be downloaded to computers.

By the time top label executives were gung-ho about downloading, the market had been overtaken by free file-sharing services on the Internet. And Liquid Audio, which had morphed from pioneer to also-ran, had been gutted by dissident shareholders.

Music downloads — An article in Monday's Business section about music delivered to cellphones misstated the amount of time it would take to
download a song using JukePhone technology from DotPhoto Inc. and BPOD Network Inc. The typical JukePhone song would take six minutes or less, not at least 10 minutes, to download to a cellphone.

Now, Wingate is president of BPOD Network Inc., and he's trying to talk the labels into selling downloadable songs for what he thinks will be the next hot platform — cell phones.

This time, label executives acknowledge they can't afford to move as slowly in the wireless market as they did on the Internet. And Wingate has noticed the difference.

"Back then, it was like screaming into the Pacific Ocean," he said. Now, "You're not speaking to people who are not listening."

Wingate expects a deal with a major mobile phone company that would offer downloadable songs within two months, potentially reaching millions of customers in more than 30 states. The downloads would be made available through DotPhoto Inc., a digital media software company that New York-based BPOD is assisting.

Meanwhile, Sprint Corp.'s Sprint PCS wireless unit and AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music Group are days away from offering an online jukebox with full-length songs that customers can play on their cell phones.

The success of these ventures — and whether more will roll out quickly — will depend in part on how well music fans respond to the diminished sound quality produced by today's wireless phones and networks. Another important factor is whether concern about piracy gives the labels cold feet again.

Mobile phone networks are the next great opportunity for distributing digital music; they can deliver songs on demand to hundreds of millions of music fans wherever they go. But in most of the world, wireless technology isn't up to the task. Downloads are painfully slow, transmissions are unreliable and sound quality is poor.

Many mobile carriers are limited to offering ring tones based on popular songs or, for those with advanced phones, rings that are snippets of the songs themselves.

Consumers have shown a voracious appetite for custom ring tones. The number of U.S. Internet users who have bought a ring tone exceeds the number who have paid to download a song to a computer by more than 50%, according to Jupiter Research. And ring tones sell for as much as $3 each, which makes them two to three times more expensive than a downloadable song for a computer. Worldwide, consumers have spent about $2 billion on ring tones, according to Strategy Analytics, a technology research firm.

That kind of money is what's driving the development of music-oriented applications for cell phones, despite the technological hurdles. Labels and technology companies are working on novel ways to promote concerts and CDs, introduce people to new music and let artists create short works specifically for cell phones.

Sprint and Warner Music are likely to be the first to offer full-length songs to cell phone users across the United States. The companies already offer unlimited access to 30-second samples of songs for a little less than $16 a year. Within a week, they expect to let customers play full-length songs from an online jukebox for the same price.

Paul Vidich, executive vice president for business development at Warner Music Group, acknowledged that the sound quality "is not as good as we'd like it to be." Nevertheless, he said, the samples attracted a "meaningful" number of subscribers.

"People have a lot of curiosity about how they can use cell phones in new and exciting ways," Vidich said.

At BPOD, Wingate is negotiating deals with the major record companies that would let his company and DotPhoto offer 50 to 100 downloadable songs to cell phone users for about $2 apiece.

To prepare them for wireless transmission, Wingate said, the "JukePhone" songs would be squeezed to about one-sixth the size of the typical MP3 file — yet they would still take at least 10 minutes to download. To make room for a new song, the previous one would have to be erased. And to deter piracy, songs would be stored in a portion of the cell phone's memory that cannot be copied or forwarded.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology

Techies, Politics Now Click

The 'geeks' who once shunned activism amid the digital revolution are using their money and savvy to influence public policy.
Joseph Menn

The first call came before 9 a.m.

For the next eight hours, they kept coming: call after call at the rate of 20 per second, crippling the telephone systems of several U.S. senators.

The geeks were speaking — in opposition to the imminent war in Iraq.

After years as political agnostics, the programmers and engineers who orchestrated the technological revolution of the 1990s are trying to reboot government. Top technology executives such as Bill Gates found their public voice years ago. Now, the tens of thousands of technology workers who toiled in cubicles writing software and creating gadgets are making their influence felt.

They have money, earned during the boom. They have time, found since the bust. And they are using their technological savvy to recruit even casual Internet users to their causes.

They want to make sure civil liberties aren't trampled in the push for greater security. They want privacy respected. And they want the media and the political conversation in general to be freed from the dominance of a small number of powerful groups and corporations. Otherwise, they are hard to place on the political spectrum.

One of the leaders of this loose-knit movement is Wes Boyd, a 42-year-old computer programmer who works out of a book-lined home office in a leafy section of Berkeley.

He made his money selling computer games and screen savers — those flying toasters that became an early icon of high-tech chic. Then, disgusted by what he saw as the political grandstanding surrounding the impeachment of President Clinton in 1998, Boyd posted a Web site to vent.

MoveOn.org fielded 500 hits its first day, 7,000 the second. Within a few months, more than 250,000 visitors had signed an electronic petition calling for Congress to censure Clinton and "move on." Those early visitors formed the core of a group that now claims more than 1.3 million U.S. followers.

MoveOn members pay no dues but agree to receive e-mail notices of new positions and calls for action. Many pass on the information they get, becoming volunteer recruiters. MoveOn takes stands on a variety of issues, but describes itself primarily as a catalyst for grass-roots action — on whatever its members think is important.

The group helped persuade more than 100,000 people to join an antiwar march in San Francisco in February, the largest such demonstration in the U.S.

It generated 150,000 electronic complaints to the Federal Communications Commission about its plan to let big media companies get even bigger, a policy change now under assault in Congress. And hundreds of thousands of MoveOn supporters took part in the February phone blitz of U.S. senators over their support of the Iraq war.

"You wish these things would be taken care of by other people," said Boyd, who founded MoveOn with his wife, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Joan Blades, after spending most of his life on the political sidelines. "But it turns out that if we don't play, if we don't work to make a difference, no one's going to do it. We just discovered that we couldn't look away anymore."

The organization raised $3.5 million to give to candidates who ran for federal office last year. In April, it said it was dedicating itself to unseating President Bush in 2004, though it has not come out in support of a candidate to replace him.

"We've been trying to engage people in other things, and almost always the answer comes back, 'Why bother? It's not going to matter if we don't get rid of Bush,' " Boyd said.

Dislodging a well-funded president might be beyond its reach. But some analysts see MoveOn and similar groups as a potent political force.

"I don't know of any group that has 1.3 million members who are as motivated to act when asked to," said Michael Cornfield, research director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. MoveOn, he said, "has the potential to become through the Internet what the Christian Coalition became through direct mail."

Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee credit MoveOn and other Web activists with igniting the uproar that caused them to vote to cut off funding for the Terrorism Information Awareness program, a Bush administration initiative to scour databases for information on private citizens.

Another techno-populist group, DigitalConsumer.org, has attracted more than 50,000 adherents to its cause of protecting the right of consumers to make copies of the electronic content they buy.

The group was founded in 2001 by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, Stanford University graduates who made millions of dollars from their Web search firm Excite Inc., and it reflects the wider geek movement in its preference for personal freedom over increased protection of intellectual property.

DigitalConsumer's congressional testimony and lobbying helped kill a bill that would have granted legal immunity to entertainment companies if they damaged computers suspected of being used to swap pirated music. The group is now drumming up opposition to legislation that would make uploading a copyright song to the Internet a crime punishable by more than a year in jail.

Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, technology enthusiasts became irritated that movie studios and television networks were trying to prevent them from skipping commercials when using ReplayTV, a digital version of a videocassette recorder.

The entertainment companies sued Sonicblue Inc., the Santa Clara, Calif., firm that made ReplayTV devices, prompting a group of consumers — including Craig Newmark, founder of a popular Internet bulletin board, Craigslist.org — to file a countersuit supporting the manufacturer. ReplayTV is now made made by a division of D&M Holdings Inc., which recently decided to eliminate the devices' ad-skipping ability, though the suit is pending.

Similar techno-activism helped the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has operated below the radar for most of its 13-year history, triple its dues-paying membership to 8,500 in the last three years. The foundation made its name representing in court a programmer who developed a system for encrypting private e-mail. The case established that software deserved protection as speech under the 1st Amendment.

More recently, the foundation has provided legal support to two song-swapping services, Morpheus and Grokster, in their battles with record labels. It also has helped block state versions of a controversial federal law that would have given Internet service providers the power to decide what sorts of devices could get access to the Net.

A primary issue uniting activists is what they see as the war on terrorism's collateral damage to civil liberties. Elements of the USA Patriot Act — including secret property searches and the tracking of e-mail — have provoked the libertarian right even more than the liberal left.

"There's nothing that gets people in the high-tech world more excited than Big Brother and the misuse of technology, especially by the federal government," said Wade Randlett, an advisor to DigitalConsumer.

The libertarian mind-set among the technologists who congregate around San Francisco has many origins, said Paulina Borsook, author of "Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech."

The technology culture of Silicon Valley came into its own after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, "when people were very suspicious of government," she said. Many engineers were impressed with the tech sector's rapid advance when it was free of most regulation. Then there is what Borsook calls "the scary, essentialist notion that there's something about working with computers that makes you the solo commander of your destiny."

Although libertarian philosophy has had adherents in Silicon Valley, they have shied away from political activism. This was in stark contrast to Hollywood, whose screen stars and studio bosses have long lent glamour and financial support to Democratic candidates and causes.

"There was a generalized feeling here, whatever your politics, that it was sort of unseemly," said Doug Carlston, who directs MoveOn's political action committee and previously co-founded Broderbund Software Inc., the company that made "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" and other educational computer games.

That feeling began to change in 1996, when a San Diego trial lawyer, William Lerach, spearheaded a statewide ballot initiative to make it easier to sue companies in California courts when their stocks tumbled. High-tech companies, whose stocks are famously volatile, felt they had to fight back. Led by Tom Proulx, co-founder of financial software firm Intuit Inc., and prominent venture capitalist John Doerr, the valley led the trouncing of Proposition 211.

"We concluded that the valley needed to have a political voice," Proulx said. "It can't just rally the troops in an emergency and then disband our army."

That realization was cemented in 1998 with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As the DMCA extended copyrights into the digital world, it limited the ability of technologists to tinker with software protecting copyrighted material. Because the language in the act is vague, it has been used for purposes far removed from protecting movies and music from piracy. Many in Silicon Valley saw it as stifling innovation and creativity.

Among the firms successfully sued under the act was a maker of ink cartridges that tweaked software to make its products compatible with another company's printers. The DMCA also reduced protection for those who cracked DVD encryption for innocent purposes — such as playing a legally purchased movie on a computer running the Linux operating system.

Then came the Bush administration's expansion of searches, wiretapping and other law enforcement powers after Sept. 11, 2001.

All the while, technology was spilling out of office parks and into homes. Consumers were getting increasingly concerned about junk e-mail and the amount of personal information available on the Internet. Tens of millions flocked to song-swapping service Napster, which was shut down by a federal judge because it ran afoul of the DMCA and other copyright laws.

At MoveOn, issues and allies are chosen carefully. The group created its own software that allows members to set priorities and take stands on issues by plebiscite.

On those key issues, MoveOn provides money for full-page newspaper ads. A recent series depicted Bush under the headline "Misleader" and faulted his prewar claims that Iraq was concealing "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

The group also conducts campaigns with groups such as People for the American Way, which monitors judicial nominations, and Win Without War, which opposed the war in Iraq.

"What is new in the valley is people applying the tools they know how to use to other problems — the problems of politics," said John Gilmore, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Indeed, Boyd of MoveOn works like any other business-minded engineer with enough seniority to sign on from home. As one computer displays e-mail and another instant messages, he uses conference calls to query his tiny staff about what political acts would provide the biggest return on MoveOn's investment.

For some groups, the challenge is simply to make voters and politicians aware of issues that might otherwise escape notice.

At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, staff activist Ren Bucholz is trying to thwart what the group sees as an attempt to shackle communication between the government and its citizens. The U.S. Forest Service floated a proposal in December that would let it give less weight to e-mails commenting on proposed rules if the messages appeared to be computer-assisted versions of the same letter.

To forestry officials, the change would mean a welcome reduction in workload. To Bucholz, it would undercut electronic activism.

"It's important that all the comments at least go into the public record," Bucholz said, because that would give the writers standing for subsequent court challenges.

Looking to the future of techno-activism, Boyd sees vast numbers of frustrated people who are just starting to act.

"I think the base is inexhaustible," he said. "Hopefully, we can show others that."

MoveOn is considering hiring a Washington lobbyist. It's a tricky step for a group that shuns the methods of the political establishment. Boyd and his colleagues think they can manage the transition — as long as they don't adopt Beltway tactics.

"People have gotten so turned off, so cynical, that you see policy torqued around by the extremes. The only people playing are freaks and weirdos," Boyd said. "The more people we get back to the table, the more sound our policy will be."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology

Rio Making a Play to Regain Dominance in Portable Music

The firm is replacing its entire product line, exiting the CD market to focus on hard- disk and chip-based MP3 players.
Jon Healey

It took Rio Audio just three weeks this spring to go into bankruptcy protection, cut its ties to floundering former owner Sonicblue Inc. and emerge as part of Tokyo's D&M Holdings Inc.

Now, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based maker of portable digital music players is spending the next three weeks replacing its entire product line in a bold bid to regain the dominance it squandered during Sonicblue's financial troubles.

The company has a long way to go. Once the leading name in pocket-size MP3 players, which store music on computer memory chips, Rio saw its share of the market shrink from about 40% at its peak to about 15% today, President Jeff Hastings said.

The decline came as demand for MP3 players started to heat up. Manufacturers' sales of MP3 players to dealers were stuck at or below $100 million from 1999 to 2001, according to the Consumer Electronics Assn., but steadily declining prices caused demand to more than double in 2002 and sales to rise to an estimated $178 million.

Sonicblue's financial problems were a major factor in Rio's slide, Hastings said. Sonicblue, which filed for U.S. Bankruptcy Court protection in March, couldn't pay its suppliers enough to keep stores stocked with its products, which included ReplayTV digital video recorders and Rio MP3 players.

D&M bought Sonicblue's Rio and ReplayTV units at a bankruptcy auction in April for $18.2 million and $18 million, respectively, and established them as separate business units under its Digital Networks North America subsidiary.

The market for chip-based players had shrunk in the face of two new lines of MP3 products: portable CD players that could handle discs filled with MP3 songs, and palm-sized players with hard drives that could store 100 times as many songs as the top-selling Rio models.

Rio then responded on both fronts, offering a hard-drive-equipped model and a line of CD-based MP3 players. Those efforts, however, proved to be failures.

Hastings said the company was dropping out of the portable CD business, which he said accounted for 40% to 45% of the market for MP3 players.

"The CD market is extremely unprofitable now," he said, adding that it was hard for manufacturers to differentiate their products.

The company also is replacing its bulky hard-drive player with a smaller and lighter 20- gigabyte model, dubbed Karma, that's shorter but thicker than Apple Computer Inc.'s acclaimed iPod. And it's breaking ground with an even smaller player, dubbed Nitrus, that uses the new slender 1.5-gigabyte hard drive from Cornice Inc.

Analysts expect Cornice drives to power a new and potentially profitable niche in the MP3 market: devices that combine the portability of chip-based players with the capacity of hard-drive models, with prices that fall between the two.

Although hard-drive-based players have created most of the buzz in the industry, in large part because of Apple's marketing of the iPod, they represent only 10% to 15% of the market, Hastings said. That's why Rio expects most of its profit to continue coming from chip-based players.

With that in mind, Rio is trying to breathe new life into its chip-based players with slicker designs and better software, including the ability to load the players automatically with a new set of songs whenever they are connected to a computer.

Hastings, who was vice president of engineering at Sonicblue, said D&M had kept a restructured Rio team in place, although with fewer people and a tighter focus.

"The first thing is profitability," Hastings said. "If you lose money, there's a bad outcome at the end of it, no matter how good it sounds in the short term."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology

Don't Use Those Words: Fox News Owns Them

Jack M. Balkin

Fox News is suing comedian and writer Al Franken in the New York courts, attempting to stop the sale of his forthcoming book, "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Fox claims that Franken may not use the expression "fair and balanced" because it has been trademarked by Fox News and that Franken's book would confuse viewers about the source of the book and about the objectivity of its coverage.

The court papers filed by Fox are particularly colorful, describing Franken as a "parasite," "shrill and unstable" and as a person whose "views lack any serious depth or insight." It also accuses him of attacking Fox news personalities when he was either "intoxicated or deranged" at a press correspondents' dinner in April 2003.

Because Franken's obvious purpose is political parody and satire and, in particular, parody of Fox News among others, the lawsuit should not succeed.

Fox may well argue that Franken's parody tarnishes its business and its mark, but the whole purpose of political parody is to poke fun at people one disagrees with. If Franken may not use the expression "fair and balanced" in a book that accuses Fox News of failing to be "fair and balanced," there is something seriously wrong with trademark law under our 1st Amendment. And if Fox can get an injunction preventing the sale of the book, we can be sure that the expansion of intellectual property rights has gone too far.

The most troubling aspect of the lawsuit is its attempt to harass a political opponent through the use of intellectual property laws. Fox News vs. Franken is merely one episode in a much larger conflict between freedom of speech and intellectual property rights.

Trademark, like copyright, has now become a general-purpose device for private parties to use when they want the state to suppress speech they do not like. And they are trying to suppress the speech of others not merely to protect their legitimate economic interests but because of aesthetic and political disagreements as well. This is a misuse of trademark, which is designed to protect ongoing commercial interests, and it is a misuse of copyright, which is designed to promote progress in ideas, not inhibit robust debate about ideas.

Fox will richly deserve the bad press it's going to get for filing this lawsuit, first, for being on the wrong side of a free speech controversy and, second, for attempting to squelch criticism of its coverage of the news. It is egregious for a news organization to try to use the courts to harass its political critics.

In 1964, at the height of the civil rights movement, an Alabama police commissioner, L.B. Sullivan, tried to use the state's libel laws to shut down the New York Times for publishing an advertisement that condemned racial discrimination in the South and implicitly criticized him.

The Supreme Court wisely decided that protection of an individual's reputation had to yield to the promotion of "uninhibited, robust and wide-open" debate in a democracy. Its decision in New York Times vs. Sullivan established that free speech was protected even if it included "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks."

Now Fox News is trying to circumvent that rule by claiming not that Franken is defaming it but that Franken is stealing and misusing the words "fair and balanced," which Fox News claims to own. But no one should own the words necessary to engage in public protest.

It's time for the courts to consider whether trademark law, like defamation law before it, needs greater constitutional boundaries to protect robust debate. Throwing out Fox's lawsuit would be a good first step.

Jack M. Balkin teaches constitutional law at Yale Law School.
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/s...n14aug14.story

LETTERS TO THE TIMES

Internet File Sharing: Theft or a Loan?

Re "Tone-Deaf Music Industry," editorial, Aug. 4: Calling Internet song sharing "theft" is like calling the Major League Baseball Players Assn. a "labor union." Ordinary people just don't use the language like that. If you take something of mine without my permission, that is theft. If I give it to you, it isn't theft. If I buy a CD, it's mine and I can burn a copy for a friend if I want. It's my CD. The artists got paid when I plunked down my money and got paid quite handsomely, given the incredible price gouging that goes on in retail music stores. If Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-North Hollywood) wants to sponsor legislation to protect corporate profits, he should consider outlawing all sharing, not just file sharing.

Every time I lend my chainsaw to a friend, I cost Sears some money. Every time I lend my truck to a friend, I cost Ford some money. How can we tolerate the millions of Americans who share equipment every year? If outlawing lending your tools strikes you as ludicrous, why doesn't outlawing the sharing of your music? There isn't any difference between the two.

Michael Helwig

http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology

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Tandberg Demos DSL TV
Press Release

SOUTHAMPTON, U.K. -- At IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) 2003,TANDBERG Television will build on its leadership in the advanced encoding and video over DSL markets with the launch of a complete system designed to open up new low bit-rate video business opportunities for Telcos. On TANDBERG Television’s stand (1:461), visitors will be able to see a live system that combines products from a number of vendors, all of which are designed to bring the benefits of Windows Media 9 Series to DSL operators. Key components include very low bandwidth real-time encoding of turnaround and local channels, IP multicast of live TV, content capture and distribution, video on demand (VoD), EPG portal, set-top-boxes, live encryption and DRM.

“It is clear that Telcos see video-centric services as a key driver for revenue and customer retention in the future. However, the battle for bandwidth in video over DSL application creates a number of challenges and puts operators in a position of potential compromise regarding quality of video services, number of channels and even coverage/penetration. By deploying the bandwidth and operational benefits of our end-to-end Windows Media Audio and Video 9 based system, operators can realistically look to offer broadcast quality multichannel TV and on demand services on their deployed ADSL networks,” says Eric Cooney, President and CEO of TANDBERG Television.

The core of the new system is the TANDBERG EN5920 real-time hardware- encoding platform for Windows Media 9, a result of TANDBERG Television and Microsoft Corp‘s engineering collaboration, which provides the very lowest possible bit-rate available on the market today. Launched at NAB earlier this year, the EN5920 will have its IBC debut in Amsterdam this September. The EN5920 can be provided with the capability to transmit MPEG-2 video alongside the Windows Media 9 Series streams, making it ideal for operators to test and transition to the new encoding platform.
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=38584

Top 10 D/Ls - Singles

BigChampagne

A Private Windfall For Public Property
Norman Ornstein and Michael Calabrese

We're no fans of the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to relax ownership requirements for TV stations and newspapers, but it would be a shame if the battle between FCC Chairman Michael Powell and Congress on this issue distracted attention from another harmful move being contemplated by the commission.

We're talking about the privatization of the airwaves, a public resource worth hundreds of billions of dollars in both market value and future federal revenue. The contemplated FCC action could result in the biggest special interest windfall at the expense of American taxpayers in history.

The rapid trend toward wireless communication has made access to the prime frequencies that pass easily through walls, trees and weather an increasingly valuable right. A recent study estimated the market value of this spectrum at $770 billion. These airwaves are owned by the public. For more than 75 years broadcasters, cellular phone companies and other commercial service providers have acquired exclusive access to scarce spectrum space only under temporary, renewable licenses; in return, they serve the public interest.

But if the FCC has its way, that social contract will be voided. In recent months, through a series of rule changes, the FCC has begun to implement a radical shift in the nation's spectrum allocation policy. Recently it adopted rules allowing licensees -- whether or not they paid the public for their license -- to sell or rent unused capacity to other firms. It also proposed to let universities and other holders of free licenses sell their spectrum to private firms, thus encouraging these hard-pressed nonprofit institutions to abandon their educational use of the airwaves in return for a quick buck on the new private spectrum markets.

The blueprint for this privatization of the public airwaves is a pair of FCC staff reports released last November. In essence, the FCC's Spectrum Policy Task Force proposes that incumbent licensees be granted permanent, private-property-like rights in the frequencies they currently borrow. The task force proposes that future licenses grant firms "maximum possible autonomy" to decide what services to offer, what technical standards to adopt or whether instead to sell or sublease their frequency assignments to other firms. In the future, access to the airwaves would be a commodity traded on secondary markets and free of virtually all public interest obligations.

This is not all bad. The FCC's outdated command-and-control approach -- based on rigidly zoning the airwaves by service and assigning exclusive licenses at zero cost -- has exacerbated the scarcity of wireless bandwidth, stifling competition, slowing innovation and restricting citizen access to the airwaves. The problem is not the stated goals of the task force but the means of achieving them.

The commission's senior economists have added a proposal that these new and valuable rights to sell and sublease frequencies be given away to incumbent licensees at no charge. The proposal is dressed up as an "auction," but it is one in which any incumbent opting to sell its license would be entitled to keep 100 percent of the revenue -- money that under current law would flow into the public treasury. The logic of the proposal is that broadcasters and other spectrum incumbents have so much political clout that the only practical way to reduce scarcity is to bribe them to bring their spectrum to market.

But this approach confers a massive and undeserved financial windfall -- up to $500 billion -- on a few lucky industries. And freezing the old zoning system into permanent private property rights would forestall emerging "smart" radio technologies that can dynamically share today's underutilized spectrum space. Today the fastest-growing demand for telecommunications involves inexpensive WiFi -- short for "wireless fidelity." College campuses and "hot spots" in airports and Starbucks offer this cheap and mobile Internet access by creating a wireless local area network on a small band of "unlicensed" frequencies shared with cordless phones, microwave ovens and baby monitors. Unfortunately, privatizing frequencies would turn this sharing into "trespassing," allowing licensees to demand payment for access to their airwaves.

Market-based spectrum reform can be achieved without a massive giveaway. The flexible new licenses proposed by the FCC task force could be rented for fixed terms. This would put all companies on a level playing field, permit property-like rights for limited periods, protect capital investment by incumbents and internalize incentives to use spectrum efficiently.

The good news is that the FCC cannot transfer a wireless windfall to special interests without additional authorization from Congress. Both the administration and some influential members of Congress have expressed support for spectrum user fees. The bad news is that Congress is not exactly trustworthy when it comes to protecting the public interest from broadcasters and other powerful license holders. The champions of the public, led by Sen. John McCain, have their work cut out for them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Aug11.html

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As Belated Converts, Schools Keep Vigil for Internet2
Jeffrey Selingo

IN its early days, the Internet was essentially the domain of the government and universities. Few elementary and secondary schools were connected to the worldwide computer network by the time the Internet spread to the masses as a commercial enterprise in the mid-1990's. Even today, many public schools log on to the Internet through sluggish dial-up connections.

Public schools do not want to be left behind again. That's why a few educators are now looking for ways to take advantage of the speedier data transfers promised by Internet2, the next-generation Internet, which was developed by the nation's largest research universities in 1996 after the original Internet became too clogged to allow researchers to share huge amounts of data easily.

Today, only about three million people, mostly on college campuses, have access to the network backbone, known as Abilene, that is the heart of Internet2, compared with an estimated 600 million users of the original Internet. But for those sharing data, sending e-mail or browsing the Web on Internet2, the difference in speed is striking.

Just how fast is Internet2? Recently, scientists transferred 6.7 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of two feature-length DVD movies, across 6,800 miles in less than one minute. That is more than 3,500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.

While university researchers need such speedy connections to trade large files like astronomical data, an eighth grader's need for such a huge pipeline is less demonstrable. What's more, most local networks will need to spend thousands of dollars on upgrades to reach the speeds of the Abilene backbone.

As a result, only about 7,100 of the nation's public elementary and secondary schools, about 8 percent, are now connected to Internet2. (The Education Department says that 99 percent of the nation's schools now have Internet connections.) As more schools are linked to Abilene through statewide education networks, however, the challenge for teachers will be to learn how to take advantage of the technological advances that are useful to them, said Louis Fox, the director of the Internet2 K20 Initiative. The initiative is a broad effort by college and state education officials to enlist innovators at schools, libraries and museums to develop curriculums and master technical issues related to Internet2.

"There are a set of capacities that most of higher education takes for granted that can add value and be relevant for K-12 schools," said Dr. Fox, who is a vice provost at the University of Washington. "What we're trying to do is figure out which technologies are useful for schools and which ones are not very useful."

One of the most popular functions of Internet2, and the most appealing for public schools, is digital videoconferences. The new network also allows for "multicasting" digital video, which means that instead of creating separate copies of the video at the source to send to each user's computer - which eats up valuable bandwidth along the way - the original is sent over the network and copies are made closer to the user's computer.

With such high-speed videoconferencing, for instance, a team of educators in different parts of the country can get together in a virtual classroom to teach a course that is then sent to other schools. State officials are already looking at Internet2 as a way to bring specialized classes like Advanced Placement courses to schools that do not have them now.

Internet2 can also help busy teachers get training without leaving the classroom. Such classes are already being offered over the high-speed network in California. Last year, for instance, 25 teachers in the state took part in videoconferencing to learn how to use Hands-On Universe, an astronomy project based at the University of California at Berkeley, as a teaching tool.

"The teachers were 200 miles away, but they seemed to learn just as much as if they were here," said Carl Pennypacker, a research astronomer at Berkeley.

As more schools get access to Internet2, Dr. Pennypacker said, researchers will develop applications for children that demand the faster network. In the future, for instance, he anticipates that fourth graders will be able to search Internet2 to request images of black holes. Given the bandwidth that such images consume, he said, "You need Internet2 for that kind of traffic."

The higher speeds of Internet2 will also make it easier for teachers to develop multimedia presentations that can be shared with colleagues around the country. In Oklahoma, geography educators have put together classroom materials on Great Plains Indians, and hope to use the Internet2 in the coming school year to share the oral history narratives of tribe members.

"What happened here is important to students in Oklahoma, but it's also significant to students around the country," said Brooke Barnett, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Alliance for Geographic Education, which directs the project. "Without Internet2, it would be very difficult to share all this information easily and quickly with everyone else."

It's not just elementary and secondary schools that are seeking to take advantage of Internet2. Nearly 1,500 public libraries are connected to Abilene. Access to the high- speed network could change the perception of libraries as places that only house books, said Joseph Janes, an associate professor at the University of Washington's information school. "There hasn't been a screaming need for bandwidth among library users," Dr. Janes said. "When people walk into a library, they aren't thinking of downloading a film from the Library of Congress."

That soon could change, since the Library of Congress is in the process of digitizing part of its collection of historical films. At a library with Internet2 access, a user could download the old movie to create a multimedia presentation.

"Internet2 is one of those things that if you build it, they will come," Dr. Janes said. "Once this kind of bandwidth is readily available, then you will see people develop applications and services for it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...ts/14next.html

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All Quiet on Campus Save the Click of Keys
Katie Hafner

SOON after Bill Brawley arrived at Dartmouth College eight years ago to work for the campus computing services, something about his new office struck him as odd. At first he had trouble putting his finger on it. All seemed normal enough. He had been supplied with the usual accouterments - a desk, a computer and, of course, a phone.

Then he figured it out: the phone never rang. In fact, nobody's phone rang much at all.

That's because everyone on campus was busy blitzing.

For nearly 20 years, the 13,000-odd students, faculty and staff members of Dartmouth have communicated by using Blitzmail. Strictly speaking, Blitzmail is a campuswide e-mail system, but it is so fast that it qualifies as instant messaging. And as instant messaging becomes a fixture on college campuses, Blitzmail serves as a signpost for what others might come to expect when most communication on campus is accomplished by way of keyboards.

The Dartmouth e-mail system has become such a vital part of campus life that many cannot imagine a day without it. Not only is Blitzmail the centerpiece of campus logistics, but it is the warp and weft of the student body's social fabric.

But like any technology, Blitzmail has its less appealing side. It has technical limitations. And Blitzmail can be annoying, even oppressive at times, occasionally prompting users to seek refuge from the constant flow of messages.

Back in 1984, administrators at Dartmouth, long known for its innovative use of computers, decided that personal computers were a good idea and should perhaps even be a requirement for students. The campuswide e-mail system was established the following year.

"We decided e-mail would be the killer app," said Larry Levine, Dartmouth's director of computing. But when he and his colleagues looked for a commercial e-mail application to buy for the campus, none fit the bill. "So we said, hell with it, we'll write one of our own,'' he said.

The original program, written by Dartmouth students, was nicknamed Blitzmail because it was put together in a hurry, and the name stuck. Blitzmail quickly became an indispensable tool even among those who had never heard of e-mail. "In the old days you could say, 'Blitz that to me,' and people would say, 'Sure,' " said Mr. Levine. "But if you said, 'E-mail it to me,' they'd say, 'What's that?' ''

Everyone on the Dartmouth campus has a Blitzmail account. Sending a message does not require knowing the recipient's log-in name; the sender simply types in a name and the system can supply the moniker (for common names, it presents several choices). Blitzmail can be set so that messages pop up on the screen the way they do with instant messaging.

New users take to the program immediately as they grasp that to live the Dartmouth life, constant use of Blitzmail is expected.

Dartmouth designates one day each fall for distributing computers to freshmen who did not arrive with one. "We watch the statistics," Mr. Brawley said. "By midnight of the first day with the computer, 99 percent have logged in to Blitzmail." The program has become so ingrained on the campus that the word "blitz" can be used as a noun, a verb and an imperative.

" 'I'll blitz you this,' or, 'Please blitz me that,' " said John Winn, a professor of chemistry at Dartmouth. "It's changed the way people talk."

The system is students' primary means of contact with the faculty. If a class is canceled, a teacher conveys the message through Blitzmail, and it is the rare professor who does not encourage students to ask questions by Blitzmail. Tory Fodder, a Dartmouth junior, said he was taken aback when a professor warned students not to blitz him. "It was surprising," said Mr. Fodder as he lounged on the campus green one day in July. With a computer on his lap and an astronomy textbook at his side, Mr. Fodder blitzed periodically while he studied.

The bleat of cellphones, common on other campuses, is relatively rare at Dartmouth. When Cordelia Zukerman arrived on campus as a freshman last fall, she had her cellphone close at hand, expecting to be as dependent on it as she had been at home in New York. Soon she found that she wasn't using the phone at all, and let the contract run out. "It seemed like a waste of money," she said.

"Blitzmail has taken cellphones off the map," Dr. Winn said. "They just aren't an issue the way they are elsewhere."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...ts/14blit.html

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To Each, His Own: Sharing a Family PC
Ian Austen

FOR the family with just one, a computer can rival toothpaste-tube etiquette as a source of disagreement. I don't share my youngest son's view, for example, that a Web site about the arcane world of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards makes a useful browser home page. His older brother and I similarly disagree about what makes a pleasing computer desktop. And my wife, who works all day on a Windows-based computer, seems to approach the family Mac with despair after the rest of us have had our way with it.

The easy way out, of course, is a computer for everyone. In the era of the $600 PC and relatively simple and inexpensive networking equipment, that has become the 21st- century version of a chicken in every pot for some people. But when multiplied by four or five family members, the cost adds up quickly.

And there are other reasons for having a one-computer household. It is simpler to police time limits on games or keep track of children's computer activity when the machine is in a common family space rather than in a child's bedroom. Owning a single computer also means having just one set of programs to update and maintain.

The trick is to find a way to make the lone computer act as if it is each person's private possession rather than communal property. That, and making sure that while the kids are engrossed in Age of Empires, they are not also (inadvertently or otherwise) corrupting the PowerPoint presentation you promised your boss for Monday.

Owners of relatively recent computers running the latest versions of Windows or the Macintosh operating systems may already have some of the solutions for peacefully sharing one computer.

"A lot of people don't know that they have features that allow them to have multiple users and give them control over what the kids do on the machine," said Chris Bourdon, Apple's senior product line manager for the OS X operating system.

The feature that sets the new operating systems apart from their ancestors is something that has long been common in corporate computer networks. Windows XP and OS X allow owners to set up a password-protected account for every user. When a computer has a single user, the log-on feature of Windows XP can be a bit of a nuisance. But with multiple users, it does much more than prevent unauthorized snooping. The log-on also summons the users' personal settings (and personal tastes in desktop decoration), file folders, Web browser bookmarks and address books.

With Microsoft's system, one user must be designated as the computer's administrator. In the home version of XP, everyone else then gets a limited account. (Detailed directions for setting up accounts can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/h...g/default.asp.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...ts/14basi.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For Luscious Laptop Listening, a Wireless Link to the Hi-Fi
Ian Austen

Laptops may be handy for students who are on the move between classes and libraries. But back in the dorm, they fall short in one area: their tiny speakers take sound quality back to the earliest days of transistor radios.

The RCA Lyra RD900W, however, offers a way to get downloaded music from a laptop - or any other Windows-based computer - into a proper sound system without the bother of burning CD's. It creates a wireless link between the two electronic devices and even gives users the luxury of issuing the commands through a remote control.

Rich Phipps, the director of audio and video at Thomson, the parent company of RCA (www.rca.com), said the device should appeal to students with tinny computer speakers as well as those in a "communal living situation."

A transmitter plugs into the laptop or PC, and a receiver plugs into the stereo unit. But while it is wireless, the $100 RD900W is not one of the countless gadgets based around the 802.11b, or Wi-Fi, wireless standard. It uses a proprietary 900-megahertz transmission system that Mr. Phipps said would not degrade audio quality and is relatively unaffected by interference from microwave ovens.

The system does have some specific technical requirements. It will only work with Windows computers that have the MusicMatch Jukebox or Rhapsody Digital Music Services software installed.

Once the system's two pieces of hardware and its software are installed, it can move any kind of audio, including Internet radio, from the computer to the stereo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...ts/14musi.html

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Q & A

Smaller and Smarter: The DVD Advantage
J. D. Biersdorfer

Q. What are the differences between DVD's and laser discs?

A. Before the DVD format arrived in the late 1990's, laser discs were the preferred format for prerecorded movies among home-theater buffs who found the picture and sound quality superior to that of films on videocassette. DVD has since become the dominant format for movies, however, supplanting laser discs and even VHS tapes in some stores.

In addition to an obvious difference in size - laser discs measured 12 inches across, versus 5.7 inches for DVD-format discs - the discs differ in their picture quality and the amount of data they hold.

Most laser discs held about an hour of video on each side, which meant that a viewer had to flip the disc or insert another one in the middle of a film. A DVD, on the other hand, can store at least 4 hours of video on one side and up to 8.7 hours by using dual layers of data on both sides of the disc. Because they can hold so much more data, DVD movies often come with extra features like alternate soundtracks, video outtakes and interactive menus.

A laser disc usually displayed images in 400 to 425 horizontal lines of resolution; DVD yields 480 to 500 lines, giving it the edge in picture quality.

Although a digital soundtrack was used in some later titles in the laser disc era, films on laser discs were originally recorded in analog form. A DVD stores all of its its video and audio data in digital form.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...ts/14askk.html

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My Dead Hard Drive Story Or How I Restored My Save Games
This is the story of how I ressurrected my hard drive.

How I fritzed my hard drive

I went away on holidays for 2 weeks, came home, turned on my PC and after about 10 seconds, heard some electrical fizzing. Ack! I quickly turned off my PC, but being an idiot, thought, "I'll just make sure all the cables are in correctly and try again." So I do that and hit the power switch. This time I get more buzzing and smoke starts coming out of my power supply. Nice one! Ok, so I go and buy a new power supply. No worries. Get it home, replace the fritzed one. Turn on the PC. Hmmm, something's wrong. Something's dead wrong. My main Seagate 80gig hard drive is not being recognised. I put my ear next to the drive - there's no sound - it's not even spinning up. I try a few things - using a different power connector, different ide connector, etc - all to no avail.

My hard drive is dead. Panic sets in...Backups? What backups? Uh, yeah - maybe 3 months ago... 3 months of emails, 3 months of code, 3 months of NeverWinterNights save games...

How to fix a hard disk

So I do some searching on Google. I turn up lots of sketchy info about how other people have fixed hard drives. I even try some of them. One of my favourites - put the hard drive in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer - cooling it down shrinks the parts and may enable the drive to spin up properly. I actually try this and get lots of funny looks from my wife. Still, it doesn't work. I look at some businesses that do hard drive recovery - the prices are exhorbitant! I could buy 2 replacement drives for those prices.

The techy answer to everything - open it up! So I look at the hard drive - man, I don't even know what type of screws those are! More searching on Google lifts my ignorance - they are Torx screws. So off I go to the shops to buy a Torx screwdriver set. Dick Smith's has them for 12 bucks. Cool. I get them home and off comes the cover. I can't discern anything wrong but I assume the logic board is fried somehow.Now I get to thinking - I'm almost positive the actual drive is ok - if I could just replace the logic board...

Shopping for hard drives

So I go get a replacement hard drive. I'd only bought this hard drive 5 months previously so it wasn't too hard to find exactly the same model from a number of dealers. I actually end up buying it through my brother's business.

The grand experiment

I get the new drive home and things are all set.Here are the drives - Mmmmm lovely new drive in its clamshell - am I about to kill it as well??? Note at this point how they look the same - they are both Seagate Barracuda IVs model number ST380021A.

I take the logic board off the old drive.

Ok, let's get the new drive...Now I take the board off the replacement drive. Here are the 2 logic boards. Wait a sec. There are some differences there.... Hmmmmm - a closer look is in order.

My original drive's logic board :

The new drive's logic board :

Oh well, still worth a try. I put the new logic board onto the original drive. Put the cover back on and cross our fingers...

The moment of truth...http://www.deadharddrive.com/

Until next week,

- js.

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Recent WIRs -

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17176 August 9th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17108 August 2nd
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17051 July 26th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16975 July 19th

Jack Spratts’ 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.

SA_Dave · 16-08-03, 04:03 PM

Thanks Jack!

Quote:

"We have yet to see a P2P network where we have not been able to target individuals who are infringers," said Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of the RIAA. "This is marketing hype of the worst kind. It is playing on the fears of others, encouraging them to engage in behavior that will get them into a boatload of trouble."

You said it!

What about Freenet, Groove etc.?

Quote:

But Audible Magic also is building a system it said will help identify copyrighted songs being traded on file-swapping networks and potentially even block the trades. The company recently tested an early version of this network-monitoring tool at the University of Wyoming, where the software watched the traffic flowing through the college network to the outside world.

A public release of that file-swapping monitor software likely will be available by the end of September or early October, Ikezoye said.

Fingerprinting isn't new. Neither is encryption..

Maybe this is what will finally kill Kazaa, assuming that every ISP installs the blocking software.

I doubt it'll happen though.

Quote:

The greatest dissatisfaction with SA's asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL) service has been with the monthly download limit of 3GB.

Cheapskate monopolists!

Die Telkom, die!

ADSL would be worthwhile, if not for the cap. Currently the monthly cost of internet calls is often a bit higher than the ADSL line rental & ISP charges would be. However, 8GB unrestricted on dial-up versus only 3GB on ADSL makes the choice clear.

Telkom's extended the cap to local traffic as well!!

multi · 18-08-03, 02:43 PM

i liked the "my dead hard drive story"

18-08-03, 02:43 PM	#4
multi Thanks for being with arse Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The other side of the world Posts: 10,343	i liked the "my dead hard drive story" __________________ i beat the internet - the end boss is hard Secret Temple of It

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