Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 28th, '03 - P2P-Zone

JackSpratts · 26-06-03, 10:01 PM

Hatchet Job

The fallout continues from senator Orrin Hatch’s disturbing comments regarding his intention to destroy the computers of file sharers. If he was trying to assist the copyright industry he failed thoroughly. He succeeded only in angering people, some of whom were initially sympathetic to the record industry, but are now incensed that the RIAA and Hatch would try to justify taking the ax to private property, particularly their own, without granting them their rights of self defense. The last straw had to be the reports that Hatch himself was a copyright violator who used without payment the product of a small software company. It’s one thing to stand on principal, but it’s quite another to wallow in hypocrisy.

Baby, It’s Hot Outside

After a very wet and exceptionally cold spring, the mercury started its relentless climb here in Connecticut, and while we’re seeing the heat index numbers exceed triple digits it’s nothing to how hot the RIAA is going to feel when the first of what promises to be hundreds – if not thousands of lawsuits are delivered to regular folks sharing files on the peers. It’s a fools errand, these lawsuits, and sure to provoke outrage and provide endless bad press when challenged in courts across the land. The very fact these lawsuits are aimed at what the RIAA sneeringly refers to as “distributors” shows the true nature of their strategy; a thinly veiled attempt to correlate file sharing with unsavory activities such as drug dealing and organized crime in order to marginalize the behavior of those involved and eliminate public sympathy before the trials even begin. It may work in congress and the conglomerate controlled Big Media (isn’t that the same thing now?), especially those companies with record and film subsidiaries, but it’s not going to work with the public, the record buyers or the voters; not when granny and junior are getting dragged in front of hostile judges. Oh the humanity!

The simple fact is that for Kazaa, Winmx, Blubster, BearShare etc it is technically impossible for a user to actively distribute anything at all. They just don’t work that way. They never have. It doesn’t matter how big a “distributor” they say you are, you just can’t send anybody anything. Your files sit there passively. The most you can do is watch someone “take” what you have, if you happen to be looking, but in no way can you actively distribute so much as a byte. If as the record companies are fond of saying, “file sharing is like shoplifting” - then these latest lawsuits are the equivalent of suing the stores. The concept alone’s absurd. Shock and awe, that’s what they’re up too, not win and collect.

There are now probably 80 million active file sharers in the U.S. and if they wanted to get under the RIAA's radar they could each reduce their shares to a measly 10 files. That means that in the aggregate even if 90 percent of those files are identical the networks will have a potential pool of 80 million unique files on the systems, which is probably enough to satisfy even the most enthusiastic of file sharing aficionados. As for those big “distributors” in places like Europe and certain other foreign ports of call, people in countries I find myself connected to more than half the time, well they can keep right on parking stuff in the pipes for their poor American cousins. These bad faith lawsuits won’t affect them at all.

Enjoy,

Jack.

Recording Industry to Sue Internet Song Swappers
Andy Sullivan

A recording-industry trade group said on Wednesday it plans to sue hundreds of individuals who illegally distribute copyrighted songs over the Internet, expanding its anti-piracy fight into millions of homes.

The Recording Industry Association of America said it hopes to curb illegal song downloading by tracking down the heaviest users of popular "peer to peer" services like Kazaa and suing them for thousands of dollars in damages.

"We're going to begin taking names and preparing lawsuits against peer-to-peer network users who are illegally making available a substantial number of music files to millions of other computer users," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a conference call.

The RIAA believes the popular peer-to-peer services, which allow users to copy music, movies and other files from each others' hard drives, are partly responsible for a decline in CD sales, and has aggressively sought to shut them down.

RIAA members include AOL Time Warner Inc AOL.N . Vivendi Universal V.N , Sony Corp 6758.T ., Bertelsmann AG BERT.UL , and EMI Group Plc EMI.L .
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle....toryID=2988703

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Radiohead Sales Stronger After New CD Leaked On P2P

Radiohead's latest effort for Capitol, "Hail to the Thief," enters at No. 3 with sales of 300,000 copies. This bests the first-week sales totals of 2000's "Kid A" and 2001's "Amnesiac," despite the fact that "Hail to the Thief" was illegally available online 10 weeks prior to hitting stores. "Kid A" entered at No. 1 with 207,000 copies, and "Amnesiac" arrived at No. 2 with 231,000 copies.
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/ar...ent_id=1916718

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Hollywood wants to hack your PC. Don’t like it? Well your congressman says “Drop dead”.

Hollywood Hacking Bill Hits House
Declan McCullagh

WASHINGTON--Copyright owners would be able to legally hack into peer-to-peer networks, according to a bill introduced in the House of Representatives on Thursday. As previously reported by CNET News.com, the measure would dramatically rewrite federal law to permit nearly unchecked electronic disruptions if a copyright holder has a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is occurring.

Text of bill as introduced:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/berm...nal.072502.pdf

Section-by-section analysis, prepared by Rep. Berman and friends:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/berm...is.072502.html

Berman's statement:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/berm...nt.072502.html

Compare and contrast to draft of bill circulated in the last week (no major changes):
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/berm...aft.072402.pdf (warning:
1+ MB file)

Previous Politech message:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03793.html
http://politechbot.com/p-03795.html

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iTunes Sharing Returns
Jim Heid

iTunes 4 Internet Sharing Returns. First it's here, then it's gone. Now it's back again: you can share your iTunes library over the Internet, even if you've upgraded to iTunes 4.0.1.

And you can thank James Speth, who gave us Internet-sharing features for iTunes before Apple did. Last year, Speth released iCommune, a free program that made it possible to share an iTunes library over a network or the Internet.

Speth promptly received some iCommunication from Apple's legal department, which claimed he violated the terms of a software licensing agreement. iCommune was shut down. iCommune has since returned in a version 2 update -- Speth rewrote the software to bypass Apple's legal complaint.

But what brings Internet sharing back to iTunes 4.0.1 isn't iCommune -- it's another James Speth production called 401(ok).

According to the 401(ok) documentation, the program operates as an "application-level proxy for the iTunes sharing protocol. The proxy allows your iTunes applications to communicate just as though they were sitting next to each other on a [network]."

The documentation also admits that the current version is "inefficient, ugly, and poorly written." I tried it, and it is indeed flakey. But by and large, it does work: I was able to access a remote music library using iTunes 4.0.1.

Before you music pirates start to drool, you should know that 401(ok) is not a getaway car for music theft. It doesn't, for example, enable you to access the shared libraries of people who haven't upgraded to version 4.0.1.

But if Speth refines the program, 401(ok) may be a good solution for honest folks who simply want to listen to their home-based music library while at work.
http://www.macilife.com/index.html

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Heritage Committee To Conduct Study On Copyright

For Immediate Release:

Ottawa, June 18, 2003 – The House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage announced today that it hopes to launch its statutory review of the Copyright Act, as mandated by section 92 of that Act, in the fall of 2003.

Section 92 further requires the Committee to complete its review and report back to Parliament within one year of the Minister’s report, unless an extension is granted. The Minister’s report, Supporting Culture and Innovation: Report on the Provisions and Operation of the Copyright Act, was released by the Government of Canada in October 2002.

Since the Committee was prevented by other business from commencing its review before next fall, it is clear that the October 2003 deadline will not be met. The Committee will therefore be seeking an extension to June 2004.

In order to assist the Committee in planning its review, individuals and groups interested in presenting briefs and/or appearing before the Committee are requested to forward a summary of their submissions to the Clerk of the Committee by no later than September 15, 2003. If possible, this summary should be provided in electronic form and forwarded to the following address: [heri@parl.gc.ca].
http://www.parl.gc.ca/InfoComDoc/37/...HERIPR03-e.htm

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Online Piracy Spurs High-Tech Arms Race
Brian Krebs

Sharing illegal copies of songs and movies on the Internet is a common practice, with the risks of getting caught slim. But even as the entertainment industry steps up its push to rid the online world of piracy, tech-savvy file sharers are devising new ways to avoid getting caught.

Swapping files online, by all accounts, is more popular than ever. In the past six months alone, no fewer than 50 new versions of "peer-to-peer," or P2P file-trading software programs have emerged on the Internet. Unlike some of the most popular services like Kazaa and Grokster, many of them try to shield the identities of their users with password-protected networks, encryption and other tools.

People who prefer downloading illegally copied files are jumping ship from the big-name networks in favor of these tightly knit communities, said Jorge Gonzalez, co-founder of Zeropaid.com, a Web forum for P2P enthusiasts.

Many leave because they don't want to get busted by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which yesterday announced a series of upcoming lawsuits against "major distributors" of illegal downloads. Once those lawsuits start making headlines, Gonzalez said, "I think there is going to be a natural recession where people will find other, more secure networks where they feel more comfortable, and there are lots that are ready and willing to take them in."

One new P2P network, called "WASTE," allows users to stake out small private networks to trade files and instant messages among trusted groups of friends. The system keeps unauthorized Internet users out of the system with encryption and authentication technology. It was created in the heart of the nation's largest Internet service provider, America Online, by programmer Justin Frankel -- best known as the author of the Gntuella software that later formed the core of several popular file-sharing services.

AOL quickly pulled WASTE from the Web site of Frankel's business unit after discovering what the program was used for. Copies, however, remain available for downloading at many other Web sites.

Another popular tool is "Peer Guardian," which lets users block Internet addresses that music companies and other copyright owners often use to troll P2P networks for illegal downloading.

File traders are looking at ways not just to make their activity harder to detect, but also to make it easier to do.

One of the most interesting is "swarming technology," which addresses the reality that downloading high-quality digital copies of feature films can take several hours to accomplish, even for people with high-speed broadband Internet access.

Swarming allows users to chop up big files into manageable chunks that are stored on numerous systems throughout the P2P provider's network. When a user requests a file, it gets routed in pieces through multiple systems, downloading it to the computer much more quickly. The technology also makes it more difficult to track the source and destination of the file.

Swarming networks are thought to be responsible for an enormous upsurge in illegal movie downloads. Eminem's debut film, "8 Mile," was downloaded 19,000 times in March, reported Los Gatos, Calif.-based BayTSP, a firm that searches the Internet for unauthorized trading of copyrighted files. May's most popular purloined movie was "Bulletproof Monk" with Chow Yun-Fat, which was downloaded more than 104,000 times.

The entertainment companies are not wasting time in battling new technologies. Some have enlisted firms that specialize in confounding file-sharing networks and in tracking copyright violations as they happen, even on closed networks.

"There is no lock that can't be picked, which is exactly why companies offering digital copy protection technologies are having such a hard time getting their products deployed," said Mark Ishikawa, chief executive officer of BayTSP.

Those "digital rights management" technologies will continue to frustrate the industry's efforts to attract file sharers from the free networks, said Mike McGuire, research director for San Jose, Calif.-based GartnerG2.

"With the Internet and especially high-speed connections, we now have a set of tools that can change how information flows, but many in the industry seem a little more interested in hanging on to the status quo," he said. "As long as the entertainment industry keeps trying to exert control through technology, that's going to continue to backfire."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jun26.html

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Rob Glaser - The Sound of Stolen Thunder
Peter Rojas

In April, streaming media pioneer RealNetworks bought Listen.com to the tune of $36 million - in a grab for Rhapsody, the dotcom's music subscription service. A week later, Apple launched iTunes Music Store, letting Mac users pay 99 cents a pop to download songs onto their iPods. Rhapsody, which charges $9.95 per month for unlimited streaming, is still deciding which MP3 devices to support in the huge PC market. We asked Real CEO Rob Glaser for the download.

WIRED: Why buy Listen.com now?
GLASER: Digital music has reached a tipping point. The major labels finally have made enough content available with sufficient flexibility for a consumer service to be workable.

Didn't Apple steal your spotlight with its new iTunes Music Store?
It's hard to design a better scenario for us than what Apple did. Apple serves only 5 percent of the market, and it doesn't offer an all- you-can-eat service, just downloads. One of our challenges is teaching consumers about digital music. It's great having Steve Jobs get the word out, since we have the best service for the 95 percent of people who don't use a Mac.

But with Rhapsody, all-you-can-eat applies only to streaming, and users can't load files onto their MP3 players like with Apple's service.
Rhapsody offers à la carte downloading - anyone can burn any song to a CD for 49 cents. As for MP3, we have a full set of alternatives to implement that securely. With so many different players out, the PC world borders on chaos. It's not like with Macintosh, where there's only the iPod to worry about. We'll pick a couple of popular devices and build out support for those.

Will Rhapsody be absorbed into your existing subscription service, RealOne?
We'll keep Rhapsody as a stand-alone service but also integrate it into RealOne. If all you care about is music and you want access to a library, then you'll go with Rhapsody. If you want a fully integrated experience - news, sports, and live entertainment as well as music - you'll go with RealOne.

Any buyer's remorse?
No, actually, quite the contrary. We're getting one of the best teams in the business with the best product, and a technology foundation that cost $100 million to build for $36 million. That's just 36 cents on the dollar.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/view_pr.html

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“More bloat”, say critics “and more things that only benefit Sharman.”

Sharman Networks Launches Kazaa V2.5

New Version Introduces 'Channels' and Rewards for Sharing More Licensed Content

Excerpts from the press release:

Sharman Networks Limited today launched a new version of Kazaa Media Desktop, the world's most popular file sharing software. Kazaa v2.5 adds a host of new features, including licensed content channels, a rewards program for sharing licensed content, and upgraded security.

"The evolution of Kazaa Media Desktop reflects our commitment to Sharman's long term goals”, said Nikki Hemming, CEO of Sharman Networks Limited.

New in version 2.5 is the Altnet Peer Points Manager, a global loyalty and incentive application that rewards users for sharing licensed content.

The core functions of Kazaa Media Desktop are improved in v2.5 with tabs for previous search results and improved advanced search. Based on their participation level, users can search up to five times more in 2.5 than previous versions.

"We've worked hard to create the most compelling licensed content distribution application possible," said Hemming. "Kazaa 2.5 takes significant steps towards our business goal of monetizing digital distribution of licensed content using peer-to-peer technology."
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+06:02+AM

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Streamwaves Aims to Get Kazaa Users to Pay
Jon Healey

Like an ice salesman setting up shop in Anchorage, an online music service plans to start recruiting paying subscribers today on the leading outlet for free music on the Internet.

Dallas-based Streamwaves is the first music service backed by the major record companies to cozy up to Kazaa, an online file- sharing network that attracts at least 4 million users at any given moment.

In addition to running advertisements on Kazaa software, Streamwaves plans to use Altnet, a subsidiary of Woodland Hills- based Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc., to deliver 30-second samples of the songs on its service to Kazaa users.

"Our main goal is to generate as many subscribers paying for music as possible," said Jeff Tribble, Streamwaves' chief executive.

And why should Kazaa users pay Streamwaves as much as $15 a month for music they could download free, albeit illegally? "At a low price point," Tribble said, "they're willing to pay for convenience."

Several record company executives welcomed Streamwaves' move, saying it could help lead some listeners away from illegal file sharing. The labels blame rampant piracy on Kazaa and other online networks for the prolonged slump in CD sales.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,6083342.story

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McCain Promises Review of DMCA Subpoena Power
Roy Mark

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee had a busy tech day Thursday, passing measures aimed at slowing spam, funding nanotechnology research and rolling back the cross-media ownership rules recently approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

As if that weren't enough, Commerce Chairman John McCain (R.-Ariz.) promised to get his committee involved in the digital rights legal dispute between Verizon and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the principal trade group of the music publishing industry.

The RIAA recently won a court decision forcing Verizon to reveal the names of two subscribers the RIAA suspects of illegally downloading copyrighted songs.

The case involves not whether file swapping is legal, but, rather, an ISP's responsibilities under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Verizon's position is that the RIAA is unfairly using the subpoena power provision of the DMCA. Under the DMCA, subpoenas can be issued without a judge's signature.

At Thursday's hearing, Sen. Sam Brownback (R.-Kan.) moved to add an amendment to a Federal Trade Commission reauthorization bill requiring DMCA subpoenas be used only after a copyright holder has filed a civil lawsuit or other court action. Brownback withdrew the amendment after McCain said he would hold a hearing on the matter.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled in January Verizon must comply with the RIAA subpoena, but the telecom giant appealed the decision. The RIAA, though, insisted that Verizon immediately turn over the names of the alleged infringers. Verizon then sought a stay for revealing the names while the appeal of Bates' ruling was pending.

Verizon lost the stay decision and turned over the names to the RIAA.

The case originally began last August when the RIAA became the first to invoke the subpoena power provision of the DMCA. Verizon refused to comply with the subpoena, arguing it didn't think the subpoena request met the circumstances that the DMCA allows for in compelling information in order to protect against piracy. Verizon contended the subpoena related to material transmitted over Verizon's network, but not stored on it, and thus fell outside the scope of the subpoena power authorized in the DMCA.

Verizon also expanded the legal defense to a constitutional review of the DMCA, particularly the subpoena power provision of the DMCA. Unlike a usual subpoena, which requires some underlying claim of a crime and must be signed by a judge or magistrate, under the DMCA a subpoena can be issued by a court clerk without presenting evidence of a crime being committed.

In ruling in the RIAA's favor, the court concluded, "that the subpoena power ... applies to all Internet service providers within the scope of the DMCA, not just to those service providers storing information on a system or network at the direction of a user."
dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2225131

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Senator's 'Extreme' Cure For Piracy Is Unconstitutional
Dwight Silverman

A powerful U.S. senator has a dream, and there's a chance that half of all Internet users are in it. Actually, it's more like a nightmare, and it goes something like this:

You hop online to download some of the new Steely Dan CD, Everything Must Go.Your reasons may vary, from wanting to hear more of a song you caught on the radio, to sampling the music before you buy, to, yes, maybe even getting the tunes without paying for them. The last few times you did this, you received pop-up warnings from someone that your computer would be damaged if you continue to download copyright works. Because it's the Internet, you can't be sure just who's sending those messages, so you ignored them. You find the song you want, and you start downloading. Suddenly, an error message appears, but before you can read it, your computer locks up and -- if you're lucky enough to be a Windows user -- you get the Blue Screen of Death. You try to restart your system, but when it comes to the point where you'd hope to see the Windows startup screen, you are presented with the ominous phrase, "Operating system not found."

Welcome to a scenario envisioned this week by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, during a hearing on copyright issues in Washington.

According to the Associated Press, Hatch -- himself a musician with several albums of inspirational and patriotic music to his credit -- asked witness Randy Saaf about what could damage computers involved in illegally trading music.

Saaf, president of MediaDefender, a company that tries to disrupt file-sharing networks on behalf of copyright holders, replied that "no one is interested in destroying anyone's computer."

"I'm interested," the news service quoted Hatch as responding. Hatch mused that such action "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."

He went on to describe a technology that would warn users twice about downloading, then "destroy their computer."

"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," he said.

"If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions. Net denizens reacted with astonishment, then fury.

Laurence Simon, an unemployed Houston system administrator, checked the source code on Hatch's official Web site at www.senate.gov/~hatch/ and discovered it was using unlicensed software. Cries of hypocrisy echoed across message boards Netwide.

In the face of outrage, Hatch backpedaled a bit, saying in a news release he was really trying to get the music and technology industries to come up with "moderate remedies" to the file-sharing problem.

But, he added, "I do not favor extreme remedies -- unless no moderate remedies can be found."

Hatch's original statement could be dismissed as that of a crackpot if it were not for one thing: He's the head of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, and thus one of the nation's most powerful lawmakers.

(Not that there aren't any crackpots in Congress, mind you. To quote Mark Twain: "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.")

What makes it even more ominous is that there actually has been proposed legislation that would exempt copyright holders from the laws banning the destruction of computer data or the machines themselves by hackers. Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., told CNet's News.com that he plans to introduce such a bill soon.

Of course, there are all kinds of problems with this notion, not the least of which is destruction of private property without due process of law. The act of handing copyright holders -- i.e., corporations -- the right to destroy a user's computer connected via a public network would hopefully be quickly struck down as unconstitutional.

The idea is also naive at this point, because there are many more than "a few hundred thousand" users of peer-to-peer networks.

In fact, the NPD Group, a market research firm, earlier this month released a study that indicated half of all those who connected to the Internet in the month of May use file-sharing networks to grab some music, the New York Times reported. That is about 43 million people.

Also consider that the file-sharing software Kazaa is now the most-downloaded application on the Internet, bypassing the instant-messaging program ICQ, which had long been No. 1. As of Thursday morning, it had been snagged more than 238 million times from Download.com.

And that same morning, more than 4.3 million were logged on to Kazaa's network, sharing more than 892 million songs.

The picture is clear: File-sharing is no longer the hobby of a few college kids with dorm-room Ethernet connections and not enough money to buy overpriced CDs. It has become a cultural phenomenon, a socially acceptable practice across all walks of society.

It's been likened to speeding -- an illegal act -- but also one routinely practiced by most drivers and sporadically enforced at best. One critic of Hatch said his solution would be similar to having cars explode if they travel over the posted limit.

Although he's not thought of as a friend of the Internet -- he was a staunch supporter of the wrongheaded and unconstitutional Communications Decency Act -- Hatch generally is not considered to be as stupid as his comment would indicate.

Then again, to offer another quote attributed to Twain: "It is better to sit in silence and appear ignorant than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory...siness/1961689

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Taps for Music Retailers?
Discounters -- and online music -- make it tough to survive
Louise Lee in San Mateo, Calif., with Kerry Capell in London

In late April, Madonna gave a rare in-store concert before 400 fans to plug her new American Life album. Outside the event, which took place at Tower Records in New York's Greenwich Village, another

2,000-plus fans thronged. For years, Tower has harnessed such star power to burnish its credentials as a purveyor of hipness. "It was the buzz around town," boasts store manager David Montes of the Madonna love-in. But the splashy appearance obscured a harsh backstage truth: Tower Records is in such deep trouble that its parent, privately held MTS Inc. in West Sacramento, has put the company on the block.

Tower is not the only music retailer singing the blues these days. Declining CD sales, the hit from online downloads, and growing competition from the likes of Amazon.com (AMZN ), as well as discounters such as Wal-Mart and Target (TGT ) are pushing specialty music retailers to the wall. In the past 15 months alone, Best Buy has put its Musicland unit up for sale, Wherehouse Entertainment has filed for bankruptcy, and Britain's HMV has closed two of its nine U.S. stores. The continuing drumbeat of bad news has some predicting that the traditional music store will soon go the way of the eight-track player. "The [specialty music] industry is dying," says Jerry R. Goolsby, a professor of music industry studies at Loyola University New Orleans. "No one knows what to do about it."

It's not as though the music retailers didn't see this coming. In the mid-1990s, two seismic shifts shook the industry: Big discounters started pushing CDs far more aggressively, and a slew of music stores popped up on the Web. Taking aim at the latter threat, Tower, Music-land's Sam Goody unit, and others launched e-tail operations of their own. But they were no match for the likes of Amazon.com Inc., which often undercuts them on price, or for eBay (EBAY ) Inc.'s half.com site, where buyers can find new and used CDs, sometimes for a fraction of the retail price. As a result, none of the record stores has been able to use the Web to boost total revenues or compensate for falling store sales.

Nor have they done any better against the general merchandisers. Discounters such as Wal-Mart Stores (WMT ) Inc. and category killers such as Circuit City Stores (CC ) Inc. stock cut-price CDs to entice shoppers into their stores. The strategy clearly works: Today, says Goolsby, 42% of the recorded music sold in America comes from the discounters and category killers, up from some 25% in 1992.

Another problem is consumers' growing appetite for grabbing music online. Downloading, legal or otherwise, has already hit CD sales hard: Since 1999, annual retail music sales have slid 15%, to $8.9 billion in 2002. And the tempo is likely to pick up as more companies, including Apple Computer (AAPL ) Inc. and RealNetworks (RNWK ) Inc., get better at selling music online.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...5/b3838044.htm

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Jesse Jordan v. the RIAA: It Ain’t Over Till Whenever

I have posted my Order of Dismissal (settlement) to the lawsuit filed against me by the RIAA. As stated in the settlement, I settled solely to avoid the costs of litigation. There is a very long story behind my settlement.

I am truly appalled by the RIAA's unprofessional conduct in dealing with my case. A very well-known top lawyer at the RIAA, while making threats of further legal actions, referred to himself as a "dentist" that I would not want to "have another visit with". I will not be intimidated by the RIAA - they're just going to have to put up with me.

The RIAA started yelling and tried to rescind my order of dismissal after they signed it because of comments that I made on CNN. Despite the $12,000 figure in my settlement, the other terms of the settlement were carefully negotiated over the course of several weeks.

"My fundamental view is that people should not be able to walk away from a deal they've made.", says RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen in response to California issues over artist contracts. It would seem to follow that the RIAA should understand the concept of a legally binding agreement. If an artist signs a contract and then later decides that they don't like the terms of that contract, the labels should understand now because that is exactly what they did with my dismissal (my dismissal is a legally binding agreement).

It is time to call the RIAA to task on their clear hypocrisy on many issues. I am legally allowed to run my search engine - it is not forbidden by my dismissal. I have a first amendment right to free speech. On the surface, the RIAA claims to support the right to free speech - but only when it benefits their bottom line. When their victim speaks out against them, they step up the intimidation.

They were so desperate to undo my dismissal that they were resorting to blatant lies. I have even been accused of tricking the RIAA into signing my dismissal.

Unfortunately for the RIAA, their basis for undoing the dismissal was so ridiculous that the judge didn't even take up my offer to mediate with the RIAA over their issues with the dismissal - he decided to enter the agreement.

A number of documents surrounding this issue will soon be published. For now, read my order of dismissal.
http://jessej.chewplastic.com/dismissal.pdf
http://www.chewplastic.com/

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DVD-Piracy Paranoia Proves Counterproductive
Rob Pegoraro

A little program called DeCSS caused a lot of commotion when it surfaced on the Internet four years ago. DeCSS does only one task: Remove the encryption on a DVD movie, allowing the video files on the disc to be used at will -- played back off the disc, copied to the computer's hard drive or burned to a second DVD.

Its author, a Norwegian teenager named Jon Lech Johansen, said he wrote DeCSS because he wanted to be able to watch DVDs on his Linux computer and no authorized playback software was available.

The movie industry preferred to describe DeCSS as a lock-picking tool, useful only for piracy. It successfully filed suit to prevent the posting of DeCSS to Web sites from the United States.

The entertainment industry's legal campaign against the DeCSS code (its name refers to the Content Scramble System used to regulate playback) has continued ever since. At the end of May, for example, the California Supreme Court opened hearings on a suit by the DVD Copy Control Association, the licensing body behind CSS, that argues posting DeCSS online violates the state's trade-secret laws.

Programmers continued to rework DVD-unlocking software, eventually writing new, more effective code. That, in turn, has given birth to a surprising variety of applications.

These unauthorized DVD programs handle a variety of useful tasks. They allow you to jump past the FBI warning that licensed playback software must display before showing the movie. They let you breeze by the otherwise unskippable commercials that some movie studios are fond of shoving into their DVDs. They can ignore the "region controls" that prevent you from watching the movie you bought in Paris on the player you picked up here.

For example, VideoLAN Client (www.videolan.org) allows DVD playback, independent of region-coding restrictions, on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and other operating systems. It can even stream a DVD over the Internet, if sufficient bandwidth is available. Like most software in this category, it's an open-source release, free for anybody to download or improve on.

It can, however, be a little clumsy at opening a DVD sometimes -- there's no guarantee that it will be able to play every title you throw at it.

Other software specializes in copying DVDs to disk. DVD Decrypter, a free download for Windows (www.dvddecrypter.com), makes copying DVDs to disk as easy as, if not easier than, copying songs off a CD. Load a DVD, fire up this program and just click the big DVD-to-hard-disk icon to have it do its thing.

In about 20 minutes, it had the latest Bond flick stored on my laptop's hard drive and had even automatically removed the region coding and the Macrovision analog copy prevention that stops you from duplicating a DVD to videotape.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?nav=hptoc_tn

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4.1 - Gramofile- A Vinyl Record Ripping Tool
John Murray

Mention ripping tools to most people and they'll assume you're talking about apps that copy tracks from audio CDs. But for crusty old farts like myself, it can have a slightly different meaning - ripping from vinyl. Like many others of my era, I've got a collection of vinyl LPs that pre-date the compact disk - though it's interesting to note that even now some indie bands (notably the White Stripes with their recent Elephant album) are still releasing stuff on vinyl.

The trouble with vinyl, of course, is that while the sound quality can be excellent, wear and tear reduces that quality with each successive playing. As well, vinyl is susceptible to damage from poor handling or storage - though I wouldn't be surprised if carefully stored LPs outlasted CDR media... Yet another problem is portability; playing an LP in a walkman or car player isn't all that easy...

Back in the old days, everyone would tape-record their LPs onto cassettes to overcome these problems, and somehow the recording industry survived the rampant piracy. Now, of course, they claim that the jillions of spotty-faced kids swapping Avril Lavigne mp3s have brought them to the brink of bankruptcy....

Since burning CDRs is now such a trivial job, there's really no reason why you can't enjoy those old records, many of which may no longer be available in any format. And this is where Gramofile comes in: it's designed to make the job of transferring music from vinyl to CD easier. Tools that can take the audio output from a turntable and record it as a .wav file are common, and are often installed by default with many distros. You may have something like the sox package, for example, already installed. Gramofile differs from these general purpose programs by including a tool that allows you to split a file into individual tracks, as well as filters to reduce the ticking and crackling. It's available as either source or binaries, and is quite a small download (about 76kB for an RPM package). The interface is curses based (think Midnight Commander), and runs from an Xterm or console. The advantages of this are low memory requirements and a lack of dependency hassles (it doesn't even need X); the downside is a plain (if not ugly) interface. Navigation is easy, and simply entails using the tab and arrow keys to move around the various options. It includes a couple of tools named brecord and bplay for recording to and playing .wav files, as well as the track splitting and filtering functions mentioned above.

Upon startup, Gramofile displays a splash screen briefly, then a menu giving the options of:

Record Audio to a Sound File
Locate Tracks
Process The Audio Signal
Play a Sound File

The recording option is pretty straight forward; just plug a pre-amped turntable into your soundcards' line-in jack and away you go. My initial recording was a bit on the quiet side, so I had to bump up the line-in level using aumix.

The Locate Tracks option is meant to allow an entire side to be recorded to a single file and then have the start/end points for each track detected automatically. Gramofile does this by looking for intervals when the volume falls below a set level for a certain period of time. This works quite well for most records, but it can become confused by others - tracks with quiet intervals and live recordings in particular. It's important to note that the sound file isn't actually split at this stage, Gramofile just writes a simple text file containing what it thinks is the number of tracks and their start/end times. If you disagree with its findings, it's a simple matter to fast-forward through the file with XMMS or whatever, noting the start/end times and editing the tracks file accordingly. You can also adjust the criteria gramofile uses to determine the track info; I played with this for a while but in the end I decided it was easier to just find the times manually with XMMS and edit the tracks file. Of course, you could also record each track individually, but this is a bit of a pain. For most of the LPs I recorded, Gramofile detected the tracks by itself; there were only a few tricky ones that required intervention.

Once you are happy with the track times, you can go to the next step, processing the audio signal. Here the file will be run through a filter, or series of filters, and if you select the Split Tracks box, it will be split into individual files for each track. I experimented with a few of the available filters, and eventually went back to the default (the Conditional Median Filter II), which seemed to do a reasonable job of clearing up the smaller pops and crackles. If you are serious about sound quality, or have scratchy records, you might want to spend some time playing with these filters in order to get the best possible result. The various filters can be used in whatever order you want, or even repeatedly, in a single pass.

I should also mention that the original source file remains unchanged during the splitting/processing steps, so if you somehow stuff things up you can simply delete the processed files and try again, without having to re-record.

The final option, Play Sound File, allows you to start or finish playing from any point in the file, though I never use this one as I find tools like XMMS simpler to use.

The included documentation is brief but quite good, though it's probably rarely needed for such a simple program. There's also a variety of patches or add-ons available from the website to add functions such as normalizing.

So, is it any good? Well, that depends on what you want from it. Serious audiophiles will probably want to use something more sophisticated, like Audacity for example. But for more casual users like myself, who just want a quick and easy way of ripping from vinyl, Gramofile does the job nicely.

Gramofiles' HomePage is here
http://www.linmagau.org/modules.php?...tid=153&page=1

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Legislation Doing Little To Stop Illegal Copying
Lisa Friedman

Congress has failed to find a way to effectively stop the illegal downloading of copyrighted movies and music that rob the entertainment industry of $3.5 billion each year, leading crusaders against Internet piracy say.

In recent interviews and testimony on Capitol Hill, advocates of anti-piracy legislation have come to the conclusion that strict federal regulation is all but useless in reining in the illegal uses of file-sharing software like Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster.

"We haven't come up with a legislative solution," admitted Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles.

Added California Sen. Dianne Feinstein: "I'm not sure what we can do at this stage."

Asked if she saw any legislative answers, Democrat Feinstein, who testified along with Waxman before the Senate Judiciary Committee a few days ago on the dangers of "peer-to-peer" networks, said, "Not so far."

Only Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who chairs the Judiciary Committee, has proffered a solution -- technology that would destroy the computer files of anyone who, once warned, continued to attempt a download of copyrighted material.

"Those laws are there to protect our artists and novelists. If we can find some way of doing this short of destroying their computers, I'm interested. But if that's the only way, I'm all for that," said Hatch, a musician who holds several copyrights himself.

But he later quickly retreated from those inflammatory comments, issuing a statement that said: "I do not favor extreme remedies, unless no moderate remedies can be found. I asked the industry to help us find those moderate remedies."

Peer-to-peer file sharing networks let users rummage through each other's hard drives for music and other files through a decentralized network. The entertainment industry in particular has targeted P2P because the shared files often are illegally downloaded songs and even first-run movies that are protected by copyright.

Recent testimony before Congress, however, has shown an even more dangerous side to the software. Users often unwittingly expose their entire hard drives so that anyone else with the same software can tap into that person's resume, tax returns or any other personal document saved on the system.

Even more disturbing to some officials, an anti-piracy company recently found more than 500 users of file-sharing software at Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA and the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval War Systems Command.

"We are aware of it, and we are dealing with it," said NASA spokesman Brian Dunbar, who declined to comment on whether sensitive data was exposed.

The Navy declined to comment on the matter. Los Alamos spokesman James Rickman issued a statement saying the nuclear weapons lab's classified computing system is not connected to the Internet, so no classified documents can be stolen through the use of P2P networks.

"While we are aware that peer-to-peer software crops up on a small number of computers from time to time, it is not a widespread problem at Los Alamos National Laboratory and does not present a threat to classified information or national security," he said.

Los Angeles-based MediaDefender Inc. found Kazaa operating on 155 Los Alamos computers, 138 NASA computers and 236 Space and Naval War Systems Command computers.

Lawmakers appear eager to fix the problem but confused as to how.

Just this month, Reps. Dianne Watson, D-Los Angeles, and Mary Bono, R-Palm Springs, launched separate caucuses devoted to focusing legislative attention on intellectual property matters. But neither of them has introduced legislation addressing the problems, and neither plans to.

"It's time to look at new business models," Bono said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., co-founder of the Intellectual Property Rights Caucus, said: "There's no single quiver. ... By the time you legislate, you're often obsolete."

Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti, in a briefing to Watson's congressional entertainment industry caucus this month, lambasted P2P networks like Kazaa as "thieves" but did not propose any regulations or new federal policies.

Instead, Valenti focused on education and security standards that technology companies and copyright owners are hammering out together to prevent unauthorized reproduction and distribution.

Chris Murray, legislative counsel for Consumers Union, agreed that better awareness and better technology, not new policies, are the best tools for solving piracy and protecting personal documents.

"Any time we try to regulate peer-to-peer ... we're also talking about regulation of the Internet in general," he warned.
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1...71539,00.html#

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'Harry' and 'Hulk' Available On Net
John Powell

The Hulk breaks loose from a top secret United States military containment center in a scene from the new film "Hulk" based on the popular comic book character. (Photo: ILM/Universal Studios handout).
An emerald comic book behemoth and a wondrous literary wizard were not just all the rage at movie theatres and bookstores over the weekend but also on the Internet as well where downloaders were swapping illegal copies of the newly released "Hulk" film and "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" on various file-sharing services.

Reportedly, the illicit copy of Universal Pictures' blockbuster "Hulk" has not been made by someone covertly filming in a movie theatre. Instead, it appears to be a post-production version minus some of the sounds effects. Distributed by the TMD (The Movie Depot) movie-pirating group, an identifying code of some sort on the copy has been blacked out in an attempt to conceal where the source tape came from.

When contacted by CNEWS, Universal Pictures Canada had no comment about the leak although the situation is being investigated by the company. "Hulk" had the highest gross ever for a June opening over the weekend bringing in $62.6 million U.S. surpassing "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" which hauled in $54.9 million U.S.

It is commonly believed that the majority of pirated films originate at various post-production companies in Asia or more commonly are converted from screener or preview tapes made available to journalists and industry professionals by the film companies themselves. In order to trace any illegal copies that might be created, the motion picture companies usually place special identifying codes or warnings on the screeners. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has stated that they believe Malaysia is the largest source of pirated films.

In the case of the latest in the popular 'Harry Potter' series, pirates have taken the time and trouble to convert the book into a multitude of Microsoft Word documents with each file containing two or three chapters. It is reported that "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" set records around the world this weekend with its release as well.

A few weeks ago, United States Senator Orrin Hatch sparked controversy when he suggested as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that illegal downloaders should be warned twice about their actions and if they attempt a third download he would favor technology which would remotely destroy their computers. American legal experts have denounced Hatch's suggestion saying it would infringe upon anti- hacking laws. Hatch himself is a composer who earned approximately $18,000 last year in royalties.

In a poll published on CANOE concerning Hatch's proposition, 82 per cent of 13554 respondents opposed Hatch's approach while 9 per cent agreed with it.

In April, a federal judge in the United States ruled that peer-to-peer software companies are not liable for copyright infringements by users of their software. In response, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) began using the instant messaging component of many peer-to-peer software programs to warn downloaders that they are breaking the law when they swap copyrighted files.
http://www.canoe.com/CNEWS/TechNews/...23/118026.html

Will The Average Downloader Get Sued?
John Farmer

Until recently, the music industry hasn't sued users of music file-sharing services such as KaZaA, with the exception of four college students. Those students were sued after they made massive quantities of copyrighted songs available for download.

Beware that the music industry might not forebear much longer.

The music industry desperately needs to reduce online music piracy. Music CD sales have declined since 2000. They previously had risen every year since 1980, when Nielsen Soundscan began keeping score.

The industry's trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, is mum about possible future legal action against individual music downloaders. Mitch Glazier, the RIAA's senior vice president for government relations, says "nothing is off the table."

Until recently, the RIAA focused its legal efforts on trying to unplug online file-sharing services. Recent litigation results and technological reality now force it to turn its legal attention to downloaders.

The RIAA lost a case against the operators of Morpheus and Grokster. The court held the way that these file-sharing networks function prevent the operators of them from controlling or even knowing (in real time) of copyright infringement activity, so they can't be liable for the rampant copyright infringement conducted using them.

While the recording industry will appeal, this ruling is a reasonable application of copyright law and may stand. But even if it's reversed and such companies are shut down, illegal downloading won't be stopped as a result. Peer-to-peer file-sharing networks aren't centralized, so the massive installed base of users can't be disabled at any single point.

At almost the same time, the RIAA won a more important legal battle. It persuaded a court that the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act enables it to subpoena the identities of people engaging in illegal music swapping without having to first file "John Doe" lawsuits against the infringers. Verizon, the subpoenaed Internet service provider, vows to appeal but has little chance of success.

The RIAA victory against Verizon raises the financial feasibility of taking legal action against individual downloaders. It could be prohibitively slow and expensive to file numerous "John Doe" lawsuits against music swappers and then go through the ordinary subpoena process to try to identify the culprits. Now the RIAA doesn't have to do so.

Internet service providers will fight the RIAA's pre-lawsuit subpoena initiative vigorously. The ISPs profess to be fighting to preserve the privacy of their subscribers, although they have no financial incentive to do so. Yet, if these pre-lawsuit subpoenas proliferate, fear of copyright infringement liability could force ISPs to drop vast numbers of customers identified as engaging in online music piracy.

So what will the RIAA do with the identities of individual music pirates? Although one can only speculate, the RIAA probably will send notices threatening legal action and sue some music uploaders.

Many casual users don't realize that all major file-sharing software programs (such as Morpheus, KaZaA and Grokster) permit you to disable the ability of others to download files from your computer. The default setting in such software permits others to download files from your computer (KaZaA's motto is "I share, therefore we are"), but you can change this setting and block such downloading (to learn how, visit MusicUnited.net).

If you disable the ability of others to download files from you, you won't be legal, but you will have a better chance of avoiding the legal wrath of the RIAA. A small number of folks who make files available for download ("uploaders") supply the vast majority of files downloaded, and the RIAA should have such uploaders at the top of its legal target list.
http://www.timesdispatch.com/frontpage/MGB2IG875HD.html

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P2PNews - Updated Daily: http://www.fasttrackmovies.com/forum...p?FORUM_ID=23. Registration required.

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P2P hackmeister Berman pulls out all the stops

House Bill Would Cast FBI As Copyright Pinkertons
Thomas C Greene

International terrorists will be able to sleep easier if US Representatives Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas) and Howard Berman (Democrat, California) have their way. A new bill Smith and Berman are sponsoring on behalf of their entertainment-industry patrons will divert limited FBI investigative resources from solving serious crimes and preventing terror attacks to waging a new War against File Sharing.

The FBI has long served as an unofficial 'copyright 911' organ at the pleasure of the media plutocracy, but to date it has fallen largely to the RIAA and MPAA to perform the legwork in discovering copyright miscreants. Berman's bill would ease that burden, saddling the FBI with responsibility to patrol the Internet, monitor P2P networks and root out evidence of copyright improprieties on its own.

According to the bill, "The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shall (1) develop a program to deter members of the public from committing acts of copyright infringement by (A) offering on the Internet copies of copyrighted works, or (B) making copies of copyrighted works from the Internet without the authorization of the copyright owners; and (2) facilitate the sharing among law enforcement agencies, Internet service providers, and copyright owners of information concerning activities described in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of paragraph (1)."

While it's true that the Feds customarily involve themselves in cases of serious piracy, this legislation is calculated to bring them in on petty infractions that would normally be handled in the civil courts, like the recent $60K judgment against four university students who did nothing worse than index music files.

There's great economic wisdom in this: by criminalizing such minor misbehavior, the RIAA taps public funds to bankroll its petty squabbles. We should all be so lucky.

In addition to the FBI's new enforcement regimen, the DoJ will be burdened with its own Stalinist mandate to 'educate' the populace about the sacred nature of copyright:

"There shall be established within the Office of the Associate Attorney General of the United States an Internet Use Education Program. The purpose of the Internet Use Education Program shall be to (1) educate the general public concerning the value of copyrighted works and the effects of the theft of such works on those who create them; (2) educate the general public concerning the privacy, security, and other risks of using the Internet to obtain unauthorized copies of copyrighted works; (3) coordinate and consult with the Department of Education on compliance by educational institutions with applicable copyright laws involving Internet use; and (4) coordinate and consult with the Department of Commerce on compliance by corporations with applicable copyright laws involving Internet use."

Tellingly, there's no mandate for DoJ to educate the public about their rights to duplicate copyrighted works according to the doctrine of fair use. No confusing distinctions are to be made between copying legally-purchased media, which is a privilege granted by court precedents, and piracy, which is a crime. Indeed, 'making copies of copyrighted works from the Internet without the authorization of the copyright owners' is to be understood as a crime hands down.

Only the problem here is, fair use is not and never has been authorized by the copyright owners. It's authorized instead by the US Supreme Court. Berman is trying to do a legislative end-run around the Sony decision on behalf of his greedy Hollywood owners.

Speaking of which, RIAA President Cary Sherman gushed about the Smith/Berman bill in a recent press release:

"The Smith/Berman legislation will strengthen the hand of the FBI and other federal law enforcement officials to address the rampant copyright infringement occurring on peer-to-peer networks. This common-sense, bipartisan bill will help ensure that federal prosecutors across the country have the resources and expertise to fully enforce the copyright laws on the books -- especially against those who illegally distribute massive quantities of copyrighted music online," Sherman trilled.

Berman made himself famous last year by trying to legislate an exception to computer misuse laws for copyright owners wishing to hack P2P networks. Then, only last week, Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican, Utah) did him one better, recommending that copyright owners be granted an exception allowing them to destroy the computers of file traders.

But now Berman's back on top, turning the Federal Police into virtual Pinkertons bound in service of a cartel. We expect this of little third- world dictatorships rich in gem stones and tribal warlords, but it's always a bit startling to encounter it in a modern, industrialized nation.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31374.html

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How to avoid Contact Rot and Improve ROI
Tony Farrow

To combat the costly aspect of data cleansing, more and more software solutions are emerging in the marketplace. Email solutions are proving to be an effective method to update contact information and unlike intrusive phone calls, email puts updating capabilities in the hands of the user. In addition, emails solutions are now available that allow for a "peer-to-peer" approach, which allows computers to communicate with one another and exchange information depending on access rules set up by the user.

In addition to fully understanding the available methods that are out there to update contact information, it is important that any solution you choose includes the following key aspects:
Automated - While services such as phone verification and information provided by data vendors is a strong starting place for data cleansing, it is advantageous to develop an automated system that can produce up-to-the-minute updates and prompt you to conduct an outbound inquiry of your contact information. Time constraints are one of the leading causes of incomplete or inaccurate data so it is necessary to develop a systems that can be automated so that you do not need to set aside time to conduct updates to your existing contacts.

Customizable - Not every company or individual is looking for the same information in its contact database. Some put a stronger emphasis on phone numbers while other companies simply need email addresses. It is important to develop a cleansing and updating system that can be customized to your company or individual needs.

Privacy Protected - In today's world of unsolicited phone calls and spam email it is important that whichever method you choose to update and cleanse your contact list, you choose one that will adhere to a strict privacy policy. In doing so, not only will you not alienate people in your contact list, but the response rate will be lower if people perceive your requests for updated contact information to be unsolicited. There are several companies out there that will house your contact information in a third-party server, but it is important to understand if those companies will sell your data to an additional party. Any vendor should explicitly explain its privacy policy and you should be familiar with it before signing on for their services.

Easy to Use - A final piece to better contact management solutions is often one of the most overlooked. No matter what method of contact management you choose, the process should be very easy for the user. Effective contact management is an ongoing process and the easier you make it for users, the more likely they will actually use the system. The bottom line is that if the solution is difficult, then it simply will not be utilized to its full capacity.
http://www.realmarket.com/experts/experts062303.html

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Net2Printer Provides Inexpensive Networking Solutions for Business & Government
Press Release

The revolutionary Net2Printer software, which allows users to print documents from their computer to any PC- connected peripheral printer in the world via the Internet, also has a peer- to-peer file transfer feature that allows businesses of all sizes to develop inexpensive intra-company document delivery and file transfer networks. Net2Printer uses peer-to-peer technology to implement its immediate delivery of printed documents and/or files from one Net2Printer user to another Net2Printer user. Because Net2Printer represents a software-only solution to Internet printing, and file transfer, the cost of implementing a company-wide Net2Printer network is minimal. Any business with an Internet connection can create a Net2Printer network utilizing the business' existing computing infrastructure without the need for additional hardware, printer drivers or networking expenditures. Additionally, companies using Net2Printer can establish direct print/file transfer communications with its vendors and customers that can transform the manner in which they conduct business. The following are examples of how business and government can integrate Net2Printer technology into daily operations:
- Eliminate the cost of dedicated phone lines and long distance charges for facsimile. Replace faxes with original-quality printing. Replace courier and overnight delivery of documents with immediate document delivery using Net2Printer, saving both time and money.
- Utilize Net2Printer's peer-to-peer file transfer capabilities to send large files and e-mail file attachments. More and more file transfers are being blocked and rejected by e-mail servers due to size limitations and e-mail filters. Net2Printer eliminates all file transfer issues providing companies with an opportunity to create corporate-wide document and file delivery networks with the availability of 128-bit encryption, including Digital Certificates, for secure transmission and authentication.
- Net2Printer works with firewalls, proxy servers and within VPN networks.
- Streamline order procedures and print communications with vendors and suppliers.
- Use Net2Printer for direct print communication to distribute the company's sales and marketing message to existing and potential customers without the need to install printer drivers or print servers.
- Salesmen and managers in the field, or away from their office, can use Net2Printer for print and file transfer communications from their laptops without needing to connect to their corporate networks.
Virtually every business-to-business and business-to-consumer transaction involving a printed document can take advantage of Net2Printer's technology thereby creating a new universe of business applications. Net2Printer's technology will fundamentally redefine how companies conduct business. Net2Printer networks the world's printers in a manner that has never been done before and heralds a new paradigm in both personal and business printing technology. The Vanguard Version of the Net2Printer software is free-of-charge and is available for download from the company's website
http://www.Net2Printer.com.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+07:50+AM

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Groove Workspace Software Enhances Higher Education Classroom & Distance Learning
Press Release

New pricing options allow faculty, administrators & students to improve learning practices with "virtual classroom" software

Groove Networks Inc., a leading provider of desktop collaboration software, today announced its Groove U program, designed to cost-effectively equip higher education institutions with Groove Workspace desktop collaboration software. Uniquely suited for distance-learning and classroom courses, and for project-based learning, Groove Workspace provides a persistent, "virtual classroom" environment that supports secure, two-way professor-to-student and student-to-student interaction and collaboration.
Interested higher education institutions can find more information about the Groove U program on the Groove Networks website at http:// www.groove.net/products/education/, or by contacting a Groove education sales representative at sales@groove.net. Academic discounting for individual students is also available by contacting a Groove education sales representative.
"We are one of the first academic institutions to use Groove Workspace on a broad scale," says Dr. Alex Bordetsky from the Naval Postgraduate School in San Diego, CA. "Groove has a well-refined balance between asynchronous and synchronous collaboration capabilities, and provides an unmatched level of shared awareness for both my classroom and remote students -- something they need desperately when they transfer collaborative work out of the physical classroom to the virtual classroom. The flexibility of the Groove U program will allow us to gradually introduce Groove Workspace into the delivery of all courses."
"My Groove-based virtual classrooms either take the place of, or augment, my physical classroom environments," said Dr. Rick Lillie, California State University at San Bernardino. "Groove software's peer-to-peer, desktop environment is far superior to Web-based learning management systems for supporting direct communication, collaboration, and coursework administration. The students who use Groove Workspace in my courses are beginning to introduce it to their peers in other courses."
"Much of the sharing of ideas and interaction among students and with professors traditionally happens outside the few hours a week of classroom time," said David Fowler, Groove Networks' vice president of marketing. "Groove extends the interactive nature of the learning process from the physical classroom to the virtual classroom."
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/...m&footer_file=

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Issues With Instant Messaging Security

Nary a day goes by that a new press release does not sing the praises instant messaging. Driven by a younger workforce, there is growing corporate acceptance of instant messaging as an "official" form of office communication. Readers of this site will no doubt have an interest in "secure" instant messaging. While we are buried in press releases about innovative new secure IM solutions, few providers have done much besides layering their IM protocol atop anonymous SSL. Some solution providers haven't even done that and are still claiming to be a "secure" product. Here then is a brief listing of features that would be really nice to see implemented.

It would be nice if we could use a strong authentication technique for identifying other parties in a communication session. Recent US federal government guidelines indicate that if there is a product that supports strong authentication, it should be used to the exclusion of other products that do not provide cryptographic authentication.

If you were going to provide strong authentication, you should use PKCS#11 or PC/SC to allow users to carry their authenticators around with them as a smart card or USB token. This would allow users of the system to use different machines when participating in an IM session. In theory, it should also provide enhanced protection for the private keys authenticating the user.

Being able to specify different "modes," and then adding peer's identities to different modes will help out when trying to segregate different aspects of your life. For instance, I might want to create a "work" group and place my coworker's digital identities into that mode. Then I would have a "personal" group that includes friends and family. Based on the mode I have selected (either work or personal,) the system would use a different set of encryption keys to secure IM messages.

Peer to Peer capabilities.

Some IM services insert a man in the middle. If they support encryption, messages are encrypted between clients and a central server. This is reminiscent of the "WAP Gap." When having a secure conversation, there should be no third party involved (with the possible exception of the situation where both parties are behind different NATted firewalls.) Even if there is a third party, it should not handle decrypted messages, only encrypted ones.

Scrubbing of "dirty words".

Many government products that involve moving messages between security domains support he concept of message scrubbing. This is where a message is scanned for "dirty words." In the government space, these dirty words might be the names of operatives, countries, dates, etc. In the corporate community, dirty words might be names of competitors, project codenames, etc. It would be very interesting if there was a capability where IM in a multi-level security environment would integrate some scrubbing capabilities.

Forward secrecy is what you get when all messages are protected even if a single message is decrypted. Another way of saying this is that decrypting a single message should not provide an attacker with information useful for encrypting other messages.
http://www.cryptonomicon.net/modules...=print&sid=386

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Piracy an Old Problem for Hollywood

Digital rights debate focuses on tighter laws, tougher technology.
Frank Thorsberg

Technology is outpacing laws, the entertainment industry insists: As consumers take advantage of the capability to record broadcasts, the industry fears it cannot afford to generate new material--so it stops.

Didn't hear about this lockdown? Don't worry, it's not imminent--it happened in the 1930s, when consumers first exploited the capability to tape radio broadcasts. The entertainment industry's simple but flawed answer was to briefly stop producing new shows.

Today Hollywood is facing an update of the same problem: the opportunity of digital distribution and the threat of digital piracy. Could we see the same result?

"How do we go backwards and lock things down today?" asked Douglas Olin, an intellectual property rights protection lawyer with Lerwick Partners. "I don't think you can do that."

This issue and many others regarding digital rights were debated at the recent Digital Studio Summit here. Plenty of questions--but few answers--were raised at the two-day conference focusing on the impact of digital technology on filmmaking and TV production.

Hollywood is struggling to straddle a line: After spending gobs of cash to make and market blockbusters, it wants moviegoers to fill theaters and then buy DVDs for home entertainment--but it doesn't want them to siphon its profits by making copies.

Moviemakers point to the music world as an act they fear that they'll follow. The number of pirated audio recordings has grown, due to global file-sharing networks like Napster that operate right under the noses of the recording industry. The Recording Industry Association of America is striking back, with its recent suit against four college students who set up their own peer-to-peer sites. Such efforts may have slowed the bleeding, but the industry still blames illegal recordings for a steep decline in new music sales.

One potential solution is the creation of new laws, but relying on lawmakers to solve the problem raises several concerns--one being the long delay in turning a bill into law.

"I also worry about preferences for particular companies and particular vendors," Olin said. "I don't want the government picking winners and losers."

Meanwhile, the pace of technological change moves furiously ahead. Technology bottlenecks--such as limited storage space on hard drives, and dial-up modems that make it impractical to download songs, let alone movies--have a way of disappearing, entertainment industry representatives noted. Though downloading feature-length movies, even with broadband connections, is a serious time commitment, that speed bump won't stand forever.

"We tend to very frequently look at what happened to the music industry and say that this is what is going to happen to the movie industry, but it's not necessarily so," Olin said.

"I don't think we want to criminalize everyone who made a copy of their DVD," said William Marks, director of business development for Disney Worldwide Services, who was on the panel with Olin.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,111288,00.asp

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From the Booby Hatch
George Smith

Senator Orrin Hatch says he wants to destroy music swappers' computers, but what he really means is that kids today have no respect for their elders, says SecurityFocus columnist George Smith.

"Powerful Senator Endorses Destroying Computers of Illegal Music Downloaders!" trumpeted the Associated Press last week.

What a tremendous headline! Orrin Hatch wants to smash the PCs of pirates.

Such opportunities present only occasionally in a journalism career. Impossible to predict, who would have guessed an old but very important poop would be so willing to go apoplectic and voice a desire for revenge on the scofflaw young.

Naturally, assorted minders immediately made excuses for the guy.

The senator was speaking metaphorically, he didn't really mean it, or -- best of all -- "we all take [his] views very seriously."

Yeah, yeah. What Hatch really meant was that kids have no respect for their elders and the RIAA, plus they don't pay for things. I hate kids -- they need to be taught a lesson. Whatsa matter with kids, today?

In the short term, I say cast Orrin Hatch in a remake of "Bye Bye Birdie."

But that might not happen, so someone should brief the Utah senator or his staffers on ways that computers could be destroyed remotely. These would all be mostly fabrications, but what's the harm in pandering to such an illustrious fool? Arming Senator Hatch with a raft of silly stories that satisfy his impulse to be a scourge of digital freeloaders seems right. It would give him more rope, maybe just enough to really hang himself the next time he pops off.

First up would be to resurrect the old canard that viruses or software acting remotely can manipulate PC power supplies. If they can do that, maybe they can start a fire or melt something critical! While this has never been done there's no reason a senator could not be convinced that new techniques make it possible. If computer programmers can make peer-to-peer networks, surely they can brew up malicious software to short circuit the PC permanently.
The "Toaster" virus was supposed to cause a high velocity ejection of a diskette.
There is no excuse for the violation of copyright, according to Senator Orrin, and if there's no way to convince kids to stop stealing music, then a hundred thousand computers must die.

The man's thinking like a computer vandal and to approach those numbers a new flavor of the CIH virus could be one tool.

CIH's payload included a routine to write a byte of data to the flash- writable BIOS. This made the machine unbootable until the BIOS chip was reprogrammed at the shop or replaced.

The CIH virus was real. But if it doesn't sound like a sure enough thing, the Senate's pirate punishment committee could be appraised of the more fantastic Blitzkrieg server.

The Blitzkrieg server, according to the trade magazine that originally hyped it, was "a new virus that automatically launches a lethal counter offensive against hackers... the digital equivalent of Star Wars technology" capable of knocking out the computer on the other end of the line by destroying its hardware and software.

That made it "a significant Internet breakthrough that could enhance electronic commerce" and protect data.

Although the Blitzkrieg server never lived up to its initial press, it's a story to warm the heart of those looking for ways to strike back at music-stealing children.

Another option is to escalate the attack to the physical well-being of the music pirate.

For this, Hatch could look into the technology of the Russian Virus 666. First mentioned in an article called "The Mind Has No Firewall" which appeared in the U.S. Army War College's scholarly magazine Parameters, virus 666 was said to be able to cause heart irregularities. It did this by altering every 25th frame of the visual display, putting the user into a trance that results in damage to the heart.

Since the senator claimed to be interested in more moderate solutions, the trance state could be shortened so that the user only was made nauseous.

And if even that seems too strong a measure, "Toaster" virus technology could be tried. The "Toaster" virus was supposed to cause a high velocity ejection of a diskette. While it would be a long shot, such a thing just might inflict a bruise on the pirate.

That would teach those kids -- with their awful clothes and rock 'n' roll -- some respect.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31361.html

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Centerspan Likely To Face Delisting
Aliza Earnshaw

CenterSpan Communications Corp. (Nasdaq: CSCC) announced last week that it expects its stock will be delisted from the Nasdaq National Market.

The Hillsboro software company had announced on May 14 that it would appeal Nasdaq's decision to delist CenterSpan, but on June 18, CenterSpan withdrew its appeal.

CenterSpan has recently gone into "hibernation"--that is, the company has essentially ceased operations without actually shutting down--in order to conserve cash while the company seeks either a buyer or another major investor.

CenterSpan's product, known as C-Star, is a secure peer-to-peer system for delivering large digital files over the internet at what the company says is significantly lower cost than traditional client-server systems. C-Star has not won more than a single paying customer since CenterSpan first began marketing the system in 2001, and that customer paid CenterSpan just $7,000 in the first quarter of this year.
http://portland.bizjournals.com/port...23/daily4.html

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Piracy On The Big Screen
Michael Goldstein

The film "Pirates of the Caribbean" will open in theaters later this summer. Yet a much scarier feature — "Pirates of the Internet" — is playing right now, on a computer screen near you.

Take "The Hulk." Apparently, some pirates did just that, taking a pre-release copy of the 'workprint' and slapping it on the Internet in early June, weeks before its opening last Friday.

The posting received an avalanche of publicity — all bad — around the world. Many fans who saw the pirated version were unimpressed, at least in part because the studio hadn't put in computer graphics that bring the Hulk to life.

"Gumby on steroids" and "Shrek," Internet viewers groaned.

At fan site aintitcool.com, one amateur critic wrote, "I saw the workprint of 'The Hulk' and it sucks! Bad CGI, bad acting, bad sound, bad script, bad casting choices…" Another predicted "Marvel's second biggest comic-to-film bomb to date," trailing only the infamous "Howard the Duck."

Universal, the company releasing the $150 million movie, freaked out.

"We are aware that an unfinished and incomplete version of our film, 'The Hulk' is available for illegal downloading on the Internet. We are conducting a thorough investigation to determine how this occurred, and those responsible will face serious consequences," the studio said.

Suddenly, the big film studios are coming face-to-face with the nightmare that's haunted music giants for years — an Internet that's a double-edged sword.

For years, studios have used the Internet to promote films on Websites, news and entertainment sites, and by word-of-mouth through fan communities.

But lately, as capacity and speed of computers and digital pipelines have grown, the Web's also become a place, as one spokesperson put it, where people like to steal and spread their theft around the world.

The fear is that there's a generation of kids who don't expect to pay for music, thanks to Internet filesharing, and eventually, won't pay for movies either. As radio shock jock Howard Stern said about The Hulk on June 11, "Nobody's going to see the movie if it's readily available."

"Internet filesharing is a problem that today has decimated the music industry, and tomorrow, if not stopped, might do the same thing to the movie industry," said intellectual property attorney Ian C. Ballon, a partner at Manatt, Phelps and Phillips.

While moviegoers spent $9.3 billion at the box office in 2002, the Motion Picture Association of America estimates the movie industry loses $3.5 billion per year in potential revenue from pirates.

But unlike commercial pirates who sell DVDs of current films on New York street corners, Internet pirates 'share' with each other, using networks like Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster and Gnutella — Napsters with pictures.

Kazaa's software has been downloaded more than 230 million times. Unlike the shut-down Napster, these networks have withstood legal challenges from the music and movie industry since they're acting only as a conduit.

One judge found file sharers like Grokster "are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders … which can be used to infringe copyrights" but have "substantial non-infringing uses."

Still, thousands of people use the networks to post and download — "share" — copyrighted material. The Hulk isn't the first film shared over the Net. Despite tight security, "Finding Nemo," "X-Men 2," "The Matrix Reloaded," "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones," "Lord of the Rings" and "Spider-Man" have all found their way to the Internet.

Such piracy is increasing rapidly, said Tom Temple, the Motion Picture Association's director of Internet enforcement.

"Last year we found 163,000 different sites offering movies for sale or download — a three-fold increase over 2001's 54,000," said Temple, who added that 65% of Internet piracy takes place in the U.S. and Canada. And it's spreading.

"We're not going to wait until everyone has broadband," said Temple. "We're taking action now."

Still, intellectual property lawyer Ballon observed, "It's hard to convince a jury that someone should be taken away from their family and locked in prison over filesharing copyrighted files."

And prosecution may be too late for the hapless Hulk. The film made just barely respectable numbers for a would-be blockbuster — $63 million in ticket sales on its first weekend. So while sharing the blame with doggy reviews and poor buzz, the studio's ultimate verdict could be "Pirates Sink Hulk."

But not everyone buys the movie industry's accounting.

"Show me the money," said Cory Doctorow, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit technology and civil liberties organization. "Did 'X-Men 2' ($153 million in its first week) get hurt at the box office? They're crying all the way to the bank. The idea that peer to peer poses a threat to movie studios is outrageous. These are the same companies that cried wolf about the VCR."

Tom Temple of the MPAA is unmoved.

Using the same language the music industry has been using for years, Temple said, "The movie industry is not opposed to technology. We are opposed to people stealing from us."
http://www.nydailynews.com/business/...9p-85864c.html

JackSpratts · 26-06-03, 10:01 PM

With Napster Coming, Roxio Raises $22M
Ryan Naraine

Digital media upstart Roxio on Friday announced the completion of a $22 million equity financing round to be used for capital expenses. The funding comes as Roxio readies a reborn-as-legitimate Napster music download service.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based Roxio, which surprised many with the $40 million acquisition of online music service Pressplay, did not say whether the money from the private placement would be used on the Napster relaunch, which is scheduled for later this summer.

Roxio has projected it would spend $20 million to integrate Pressplay into Napster.

"The offering expands Roxio's stockholder base and adds to the Company's working capital as it continues to expand its activities in the digital media sector," the company said in a brief statement.

Company officials could not be reached for details on the timing of Napster's relaunch, which could come as early as July month-end, when Roxio CEO delivers a keynote at the 2003 Jupiter Plug.IN conference in New York City.
www.atnewyork.com/news/article.php/2225291

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Look Where Wi-Fi Is Debuting In India!
Sudhir Chowdhary

So, Wi-Fi networks are all about state-of-the-science offices and hotspots where technocutives can roam around with their notebooks and still stay connected to their corporate LANs, hmm?

Maybe. And maybe not. India’s first pilot Wi-Fi project – involving the linking up of computers to networks without using wires – is taking place not in a hi-tech organisation but in the Dodabalapur district of Karnataka.

Essentially, a van roams around the district, stopping at different villages long enough for the local computer to connect to it wirelessly and transfer the data stored on it. From the van to the central database is also a Wi-Fi hop, thus resulting in a wireless end-to-end transfer of information – which is what Wi-Fi is all about.

The project – which involves creating an online database of land records - is being executed by the Karnataka Government in collaboration with the US-based technology consulting firm First Mile Solutions.

First Mile Solutions founder Amir Alexander Hasson, who helped initiate the project, told economictimes.com: “The benefits for common people are already emerging by using this low-cost wireless network that is easy to set up and maintain. They save time and money. Instead of having to pay to travel some 50 km to and from a taluka, wait in line all day with other villagers, and miss a day (or more) of work, they can receive the same service right from their village computer.”

Giving out the project details, Hasson said, “We are using IEEE 802.11b equipment at 2.4Ghz. We don't use base stations, but rather our custom DakNet Mobile Access Point (MAP) that is mounted on and powered by a vehicle. A laudable feature of the project is that the current implementation uses a Karnataka Roadways public government bus that transports the data to and from computers enabled with Wi-Fi cards.”

According to Hasson, “The network layer is ad-hoc peer-to-peer mode and not an infrastructure mode. Therefore, these are short point-to- point links that get established whenever the MAP comes within range of a kiosk or hub.” Omni-directional antennas are used on the bus and either directional or omni-directional antennas are located at each of the kiosks or hubs. Amplifiers are used to boost the signal and range for higher bandwidth applications.

“The speed of the connection between the access point and the kiosk or hub varies in each case. But on average, they can move about 21Mb or 42Mb bi-directionally per session. This is the period of time where the access point is within range of the kiosk or hub. The average goodput or actual throughput is 2.3Mbps,” Hasson pointed out.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...ow?artid=33234

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SME Business Networking and International Trade
dhdeans

Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) truly crave the prospect of growing their business development opportunities via open access to international trading partners. In fact, the rapid rise of the membership in online business community networks, like Ryze in the U.S. and Ecademy in the U.K. is somewhat being driven by this interest.

These commercial matchmaking services are carving a niche for themselves in the marketplace, by lowering the barrier for entry, and ongoing participation (i.e. both services offer free basic membership, with additional services available for a fee). Utilizing the model of a centralized member profile database, both services can assist in the process of business partner discovery, qualification and dialogue initiation – all enabled by the Internet and the web.

But, there’s yet another complementary model that could equally enable SMEs to construct and nurture their own ad-hoc professional referral-oriented “communities of interest” and “communities of practice.” What if there was a software application that used an industry standards-based file format to help you define your own business capabilities and operating environment, and then what if this application ran on your personal computer? What if you were able to easily share those files, via the Internet, with your existing trusted business partners?

What if you and your partners then shared these files with a growing network of additional pre-qualified target business partners, globally, would this create incremental networking value? What if I could search across other people’s business network partner profiles, within a secure peer-to-peer network, would that add even greater value to this model?

Imagine what it would be like to utilize your preferred public online business community networks, and then selectively apply and combine them with your own private online business community network of trusted peers. Now, imagine if that organic network of business contacts spanned the planet earth? Well, the good news, you really don’t have to dream it to experience it.

Fueled by nascent open standards with cryptic names like RDF, FOAF, ebXML, UDDI and a whole host of other related standards developments, the building blocks are actively coming together to enable not only the next wave of online business networking, but also any resulting online business transaction processing requirements.

On this backdrop of evolving standards and creative applications activity, the GeoBridge Project was launched to aggregate the vast body of knowledge that’s already available from an eclectic substratum of topic resources – and to witness the eventual mainstream deployment of a viaduct for international trade. What are your related thoughts, or “what ifs?”
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comm...id=593_0_5_0_C

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Applications On The Bleeding Edge
Loretta Prencipe

"The power-saving advantages of mesh networks will become critical to cellular as high-speed data use grows," says Peter Stanforth, CTO and co-founder of MeshNetworks.
Innovative technologies, such as Web services and wireless, are taking root across the enterprise, and they're spawning even newer, bleeding-edge ideas. Leading the charge into the future of IT are Graham Class, who is developing service-oriented Java; Alexei Trifonov and Audrius Berzanskis, who are building quantum-encryption hardware; and Peter Stanforth, who is breaking new ground in mesh networks.

Graham Glass, chief architect at The Mind Electric in Addison, Texas, is leading the effort to bring Web services into the mainstream with two key innovations: Glue, which transparently publishes any Java class as a Web service; and the forthcoming Gaia, which includes the features necessary to deploy and manage true SOAs (service-oriented architectures). Gaia also provides a high-performance Web-services fabric that will transform small, brittle, ad hoc networks of unmanaged Web services into larger, dynamic, robust, coordinated networks of managed services.

"Gaia will make it faster, simpler and less costly for enterprises to build and deploy non-trivial systems out of Web services," Glass says. "This in turn will free up their development resources to focus on business instead of software infrastructure."

Taking security to a mind-blowing level are New York-based MagiQ Technologies' Alexei Trifonov, vice president of R&D, and Audrius Berzanskis, principal scientist. They have developed Navajo, a QKD (quantum key distribution) hardware box currently in beta, which in a sense encrypts the encryption key. Using photons, the key is changed randomly as many as 1,000 times per second. If any machine copies or reads the key before the intended recipient does, the photon polarity changes, and the intended receiver finds evidence of tampering.

This QKD is "unconditionally secure," Trifonov says. "The term came from the classical cryptography. It means that the security does not depend on the computational resources of the eavesdropper. The key management problem is the most difficult problem in modern cryptography, and the quantum cryptography gives an effective and ready-to-be-deployed solution to this problem."

For more than 20 years, Peter Stanforth, CTO and co-founder of Maitland, Fla.-based MeshNetworks, has been a pioneering force in the R&D of soft-switch technology and mesh networking. Now he oversees the commercialization of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) ad hoc peer-to- peer wireless technology.

MeshNetworks' enhancements to DARPA's technology include extending it beyond a closed network to one that can interconnect to the public telephone network and the Internet and scale to large sizes. These networks instantly form mobile broadband networks that do not rely on cellular-based networks and cost considerably less to deploy.

"The power-saving advantages of mesh networks will become critical to cellular as high-speed data use grows," Stanforth says. "If [the cellular industry] ignores mesh's advantages, it is possible that an evolution of 802.11 with ad hoc capabilities will create serious competition for them."
http://sci.newsfactor.com/perl/story/21774.html

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Abolish Due Process for Internet Piracy?

ORRIN Hatch is a full-time senator from Utah and part-time composer of inspirational music. This week, he hit a sour note.

In a pique over Internet piracy, the usually genial chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee hatched a demonic idea: a three strikes law for downloaders. It would give copyright owners like him the right to destroy the computers of those who steal songs over file-sharing networks.

Thieves would get a warning for the first two downloads. After the third, kaboom.

Steal Hatch's "One Gentle Lamb," and you'd get a digital wolf in sheep's clothing -- a virus or Trojan horse that might wipe out your hard drive or disable critical files.

To heck with due process and burden of proof -- or liability for damaging the novel you've written or research you've compiled. So what if it's a public library or school computer. Too bad if a record company targeted the innocent -- or if your kid was using the peer-to-peer network Kazaa without your knowledge.

As Hatch said, it might take "a few hundred thousand" fried computers for pirates on peer-to-peer networks to get the message.

Piracy of songs and movies is a huge problem, but Hatch's solution -- granting copyright holders exemptions from federal anti-hacking laws -- lacks rhyme or reason.
http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/news...d.asp?id=11174

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Which PC Has Your Data?
Enrique Castro

Imagine it’s the evening before the electronic presentation you volunteered to produce after the quarterly team building activity is

due. You have six networked PCs at your home, including a laptop, which enable you to share files, printers and the Internet connection. Your troubles started with the mixed media given to you by your colleagues: floppies, negatives, slides, and prints and now you are frantically trying to assemble the presentation from slightly different folders on each machine. It does not matter that all the data is at your fingertips. Try as hard as you might, a few pictures that you intended to remove from the presentation slip by, and some that you really wanted to show are nowhere to be found. The point of this example is that even in a fully interconnected world, there is a data management problem.

In another example, why can’t stereo equipment talk to a PC, and download or play MP3 files, and why can’t the music from a copy protected CD playing in the family room be routed to your PC in the home office where you are working?

Technology exists to address these integration problems in the “digital” home. The solution for data problems may lie in a distributed solution, with some functional specialization. Paradoxically, additional technical complexity and intelligence is applied to the system to present a simpler and consistent, always-on data view to the user.

Relief may come from technologies moving from the small business and the small office/home office (SOHO) markets to the home. To solve the user’s problem referenced in the introduction, as an example, workgroup servers and network attached storage (NAS) devices may follow shortly. These devices are much simpler to configure than a server, and are essentially hard drives with a single board computer and a network interface attached.

The data abstraction presented to the user is that of a file system directory, regardless of device or location. There are differences in quality of service (QoS) depending on the customer’s desire or willingness to pay. QoS parameters include performance, security and convenience features with little change to the underlying abstractions. The directory abstraction traditionally presented in a single PC is preserved in a peer-to-peer network. The customer can purchase an integrated backup application that stores additional copies of the data transparently. Offsite backup services can be purchased through a service provider. There is no need for manual backups anymore. The user sees the same file system, with the only change being the enhanced reliability.

The same directory abstraction can be provided through a WAN or even a wireless WAN through service providers. This enables the customer to access the data in the directory from any wireless hot spot connected to the Internet, or from a cellular phone or connected PDA.

New business models will become possible in this integrated home environment. For instance, consumers could rent some of their storage back to the service providers. This service provider-administered space can be used for caching, i.e., as staging area for downloaded content ordered by the consumer or by neighbors. This will lead to an extremely scalable network because the storage space grows with the network. A service provider with one million subscribers with an average of 100Mbytes per subscriber can count on an additional 100Tbytes of storage for content caching. This would be difficult to achieve with centralized storage. A popular movie can be served pieces stored in neighboring homes, lessening the load on the provider’s servers. This is already happening in an uncontrolled way: some of the “free” peer-to-peer file sharing programs for downloading content from the Internet hijack hard drive space unbeknownst to the consumer. This capability needs to be brought back into the mainstream. Service provider owned local space simplifies digital rights management (DRM). Rights (such as temporary viewing rights) can be revoked after the rental time because the content never really leaves the control of the content owner.
http://www.e-insite.net/electronicne...305849&stt=000

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Kill Criminal Computers
A key senator suggests destroying pirate computers ... hmmm, is he onto something?
Allen Wastler

"We have detected illegal music on your hard drive. Your computer will self-destruct in five seconds. Good-bye, pirate ..."(kick in old "Mission Impossible" theme music).

Hey, that may be the brave new world if Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah known for hanging on the way right side of the political aisle, gets his way.

Well, we take away cars used in drug trafficking and the like. Why not blow up computers used for pirating too? If it's against the law, it's against the law, right?

In case you didn't catch it, during a Senate Judiciary committee hearing this week on copyright abuse, the chairman -- that'd be Sen. Hatch -- endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."

Nobody seemed to like his stance, which is a shame. Simple problem ... people steal songs using their computers ... simple answer ... destroy their computers.

Of course, there may be some unintended consequences. To download songs efficiently, you really need broadband connections. Sure, lots of people are getting that in their homes. But most folks ... well ... the office computer has a big honkin' Internet connection, right?

Of course, it's hard to tell how many are doing that. What do you do? Ask "everybody doing illegal music downloads at work, raise your hand."

But take this confidential memo recently circulated around Warner Music Group:

"If you have peer-to-peer software on your company computer, you must remove it immediately," General Counsel Dave Johnson wrote June 3. He even underlined the important part. "Failure to do so, and the failure to respect music copyrights may lead to disciplinary action, including termination. Beginning shortly, we will scan our computer network to detect the presence of file sharing software on company computers."

Now if a record company -- one of the companies at the forefront of the anti-Napster, anti-KaZaA, anti-you-name-it movement -- has to tell its employees to lay off the music downloads, well, what do you think the rest of the drones in Corporate America are doing? (The company, which is a corporate cousin of CNN/Money, declined to comment.)

Okay, so while we burn through the computers of long-haired grunge geeks staying up late in some dirty little garret downloading the latest from Disturbed, we also take out the corporate workstations of some button-down yes-man types listening to the Grateful Dead while they happily crunch numbers for their corporate masters.

Actually, there's probably just as many of the latter as the former. But hey, you get what you deserve. And if corporations need to replace a lot of computers it will up business spending and aid the economy, right?

Hey, I'm liking this solution. And it can take care of other cyber problems as well. Porn? Spam? Kill the offending computer. Even more opportunity to increase business and consumer spending.

Yeah, yeah. Some civil libertarians may object to the porn and spam thing. Freedom of speech and all that.

And some people (Steve Jobs at Apple, for instance) seem to think it may be easier just to offer people easy and cheap music downloads.

But c'mon ... destroying computers ... isn't that more fun?
http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/19/comm...tler/wastler/#

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Music-Sharing Program Wants To Set Standards
Jon Healey

The music industry has sputtered its way into the Internet Age, with technological innovation sidetracked by the battle between major labels and youthful geeks over free music.

Now, two music-loving programmers — alumni of the company that created the groundbreaking Gnutella file-sharing network — are trying to chart a path to peace between the labels and the geeks.

Their company, Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Mediacode, envisions a world of online services that work together to make music more valuable to consumers and more profitable for distributors.

By adopting the standards-based approach to the Internet, they argue, the music industry could create online opportunities that encourage programmers to promote the music business, rather than developing ways to steal from it.

"The goal here is to get the Linux hacker community to support the music community," Chief Executive Robert Lord said, referring to the zealous group of programmers working on an alternative to Microsoft's Windows software.

Mediacode has developed an online service to start the ball rolling. Dubbed Muse.Net, it lets people with high-speed Internet connections listen to the music on their computers from any other computer online.

The point of the service is to transform a consumer's music collection from something physical — a bunch of songs stored on a machine — into something virtual — a set of titles that can be played wherever their owner wants to play them.

That transformation would set the stage for more services that can plug into consumers' virtual collections, Mediacode Chief Technical Officer Ian Rogers said. For example, services could pump songs securely into a collection or help users pick what to play.

One key to Lord and Rogers' vision is the emergence of standard technologies that enable services to work with each other automatically. That is happening, largely because Microsoft is promoting a set of building blocks for Web services.

Another key is persuading copyright holders to embrace this approach and plug their products into the mix.

So far, the labels and Hollywood studios have followed a different muse, distributing music and movies online with electronic locks that don't work with virtual collections.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...ebmusic23.html

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Napster Case Pits Label vs. Label

Bertelsmann, sued for allegedly aiding music piracy, says its accusers are partly to blame
Joseph Menn and Jon Healey

Two years after music industry lawyers pounded Napster Inc. into submission, the major record companies are pointing fingers at each other over the flourishing of online music piracy.

AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Universal Music Group, EMI Music and a cadre of publishers blame Bertelsmann, claiming the German media giant abetted copyright infringement by supporting Napster financially in 2000 and 2001. Bertelsmann says its accusers are at least partly responsible because they missed the chance to turn Napster's song-stealing users into paying customers.

The companies are battling in federal court in New York, where record labels and publishers sued Bertelsmann this year, demanding compensation for the alleged assist the German company gave to copyright infringement. The case provides a rare look at the infighting spawned by the industry's failure to find an effective response to the Internet song sharing that the labels hold responsible for declining CD sales.

Recent interviews with Bertelsmann lawyers reveal an aggressive twofold defense: First, Bertelsmann can't be found liable because it didn't control Napster, let alone its users. Second, Bertelsmann had the right idea strategically, while others' refusal to license their music and otherwise support a legitimate version of Napster only drove the masses into the arms of ungovernable successors such as Kazaa.

Bertelsmann's ultimate goal in loaning money to Napster "was to create a licensed service that would provide users with the functionality they enjoyed in the old Napster service," said Bertelsmann attorney R. Bruce Rich. The company feared that consumers would flock to other free-music services if Napster didn't lead them away from piracy, Rich said, and "history has proved this to be absolutely correct."

Napster's estimated 40 million users scattered quickly to a new generation of file-sharing networks after federal judges forced the company to start cracking down on copyright infringement in March 2001. Those networks now attract an estimated 80 million users, according to anti-piracy firm MediaDefender Inc.

The relentless increase in piracy has infuriated record executives, whose courtroom victories have returned a fraction of the billions of dollars they claim to have lost to song sharing.

Bertelsmann will file a formal response to the suits within the next few weeks. But it already seems clear that both prongs of its defense will face difficulties.

For one thing, court documents show Bertelsmann executives planned to keep the original version of Napster running in order to convert the maximum potential audience to a copyright-friendly version the Germans and Napster planned to launch. And U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Griesa, who is presiding over the lawsuits in New York, may be unwilling to hear as much of the blame-shifting argument as Bertelsmann would like. The failure by the other labels to license music is hard to construe, at least in legal terms, as contributing to piracy.

Rich said his side will seek documents to show that at a minimum, Bertelsmann's rivals had contemplated striking deals with Napster before Bertelsmann beat them to the punch. The power of the Napster brand was evident last month when Universal and Sony acquired minority stakes in it. The companies sold their Pressplay music service to Roxio Inc. for Roxio stock. Roxio had bought Napster's name and technology at a bankruptcy auction and is expected to revise Pressplay by next year — and rename it Napster.

The original Napster, which launched in mid-1999, enabled users to copy songs for free from one another's computers. The major record labels and music publishers sued the company for copyright infringement late that year, and U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel issued a preliminary injunction against the service the following July.

Patel's order came as top Universal executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. was trying to negotiate a settlement with Napster that he said would have involved all the record companies taking an ownership percentage in the firm. Bertelsmann officials say Bronfman wanted Universal to have the biggest stake.
http://www.sunspot.net/technology/ba...logy-headlines

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Preserving That `Just-Released' Freshness
Corey Goldman

It is what every record label producer fears most: a hot new release showing up on a file-sharing service like Kazaa long before its official release date.

The radio stations get angry, the artists go into a tizzy, and the long, expensive process of marketing and releasing a song or album is derailed.

In the past year alone, songs from artists ranging from pop tart Britney Spears to rockers Lenny Kravitz and Radiohead have made their way on to the Internet — to the delight of millions of music junkies — long before making it on to the airwaves.

But if Musicrypt Inc. has its way, that will be a thing of the past. The Markham-based company is rolling out a new kind of desktop software application that allows record labels to securely ship their prized possessions — new releases — to radio stations, with a few simple clicks of the mouse.

"Leaks can be very, very damaging to the record industry," said Musicrypt president John Heaven. "There is a tremendous amount of money behind releasing singles for popular artists. When they get leaked and become available to a huge number of people, it destroys it for everybody — the labels, the radio stations and the artists."

Before MP3s, Napster and the Internet, record labels would produce single tracks, package them with promotional materials and courier them out to radio stations.

Nowadays, before being released, new recordings are burned to a master disc, then mass produced, labelled and couriered to thousands of radio stations, industry insiders and music critics around the world. En route, many different people end up handling the CDs. Some get "lost," only to mysteriously resurface on a file-swapping service.

Take the launch of Robbie Williams' album, Escapology, late last year. EMI Music London had sent out the usual advance copies of the album to journalists and other industry officials — copies that were specially marked with a digital code to make them traceable should one of the songs appear on a file-swapping service.

Sure enough, the album was leaked. And even though EMI London eventually traced the leak back to the source, the damage was already done.

Musicrypt says it has figured out a simple and inexpensive way to help record labels stop downloaders from getting newly released music before they're supposed to.

At the heart of its digital music distribution system, or DMDS, is a 1-million-bit encryption system; by contrast, most secure Web sites use 128-bit encryption to protect people's personal information.

"The same technology is used to log on to the NORAD defence system or to open missile silos," Heaven said. "It is a very secure technology that really hasn't had much use in the real world until now."
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=969048863851

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Reforming Copyright Is A Concern For Everyone
Michael Geist

Supporters and opponents of copyright reform paint very different pictures of the impact of the Internet and new technologies on copyright. Advocates, typically categorized as creators, seek new rules to stop both unauthorized copying and attempts to break encryption technologies that protect copyrighted works. They point to the seemingly unstoppable growth of peer-to-peer file sharing services such as Kazaa as evidence that the Internet currently represents the single greatest threat to copyright owners.

Opponents of this type of copyright reform, often characterized as users, argue that the Internet is actually the most promising opportunity for copyright owners as it creates new distribution channels and exposes a far broader audience to under-appreciated music and other work. In fact, opponents fear that the combined effect of new encryption technologies supported by additional legal protections will result in users enjoying fewer rights to use and access work to which they are entitled in the offline world.

While there are elements of truth in both of these positions, the emerging reality is that neither view reflects the Internet's most significant impact — the blurring of the distinction between creators and users such that soon everyone will be both creators and users. The days of content creation resting solely with a select few movie studios, music promoters, and book publishers is long gone.

In today's Internet, we all access traditional content on mainstream media sites, but alongside those activities we increasingly craft emails, maintain blogs or other Websites dedicated to a dizzying array of topics, publish our digital photos, contribute to community chat rooms, opinion sites, or open source software initiatives, and share our attempts at music creation with the world. In short, we both consume content and create it.

This new reality is spearheading a profound change in the world of copyright as the widespread realization that copyright matters grows. No longer an issue best left to lawyers, individuals are taking an interest in copyright policy as never before. This leaves policy makers with the challenge of balancing competing stakeholder interests in an environment where everyone believes that they too are stakeholders.

Consider the recent controversy involving a small provision inserted into a bill dealing with the Library of Canada archives. The provision called for the extension of the term of copyright for unpublished works of deceased authors. Ten years ago, the topic would have generated scarcely an acknowledgement, much less a major policy debate. Today, hundreds of individuals caught wind of the proposal and quickly mobilized into action.

Dubbed the Lucy Maud Montgomery Copyright Term Extension Act — referring to a controversial copyright term extension bill in the United States that was passed with the active support of the Disney Corp., which sought to delay Mickey Mouse's entry into the public domain — the Canadian bill arose at the request of the heirs of author Lucy Maud Montgomery of "Anne Of Green Gables" fame, who wrote 10 volumes of diaries during her lifetime that were not published until after her death. When it became clear that those works would enter into the public domain in 2004, the heirs sought a copyright extension from the government to maintain exclusive control over her works until 2018.

Any hope that the bill would sail through under the public's radar screen quickly vanished. Historians, copyright fairness advocates, and individuals all spoke out against the extension, noting that it did little more than transfer the value of the work from the general public to Ms. Montgomery's heirs while failing to create any new work or providing society with any tangible benefit. In addition, opponents feared that this legislation was the start of something ominous, foreshadowing a U.S.-style copyright term extension.

Those concerns seemed to resonate with a parliamentary committee considering the bill since it agreed to effectively drop the provisions just before the House of Commons recessed for the summer. Celebrations by opponents of the bill proved premature, however, as last week, with opposition MPs now out of town, several Liberal MPs, who perhaps have yet to appreciate the changes afoot in copyright, decided to go ahead with the legislation leaving the extension provisions intact.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=969048863851

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Ipod Cuts A Wide Swath
Limited catalog of iTunes a shortfall for tiny unit that holds up to 7,500 songs
Stephen Williams

If Steve Jobs is indeed King Arthur come to remake the stuttering, slumping record business into a musical Camelot, the new iPod is his Excalibur.

Sharp? As a Gillette Mach 3 blade. Sexy, like Antonio Banderas in Broadway's "Nine." Snow white and silver, the colors of purity. Sufficiently hip to make the redesigned iPods -- despite their premium prices -- the No. 1 MP3 music player in the United States.

But Jobs, Apple's silky-smooth chief executive, thinks he's got the "complete solution" for the record industry's woes, even as he insists that Apple is neither a media company nor a music company. ("We're just Apple," he recently told an interviewer from Esquire, apparently with a straight face).

If Apple's new iTunes Music Store, combined with the appeal of the iPod, isn't the Great White-and-Chrome Hope of the labels, it's the closest, best thing they've got.

I've got my hands on one of the new iPod-with-docking-station players, but first an update on the Music Store (www.apple.com/music/store), a cyber-shop fronted with slick Apple-esque graphics.

Since Apple is usually reluctant to release vital stats about any of its operations, it's difficult to quantify the project's success since it was introduced April 28.

According to a BBC report, based on info leaked from a June 5 closed-door meeting at Apple, more than 3.5 million songs had been sold since the service was launched, and the company is moving a half million tunes each week.

Of course, Jobs would like you to assume the best way to listen is via one of the redesigned iPods, which are priced from $299 to $499. He's got a point.

The new iPod is different from its predecessors. It maxes out (at $499) with a 30- gigabyte model, capable of storing 7,500 songs.

The light-touch backlit buttons are tres chic, the docking cradle (included with the two high-end models) downloads music and charges the internal battery, and includes a line-out jack for direct connection to a sound system.

With rounded edges and a slimmer profile, the "NewPod" boots up with smarter software as well. It now is able to compile and program playlists on the fly -- without connection to a computer -- and an alarm clock function can wake you up to Dylan (or any song), and there are even three games on board.

Sound quality is terrific, amplification robust (even through demanding headphones), and battery life is ample, more than five hours.

So is all this coming from a media company or a music company or a computer company? "We're just Apple," Steve Jobs says.

Whatever that means.
http://www.thehollandsentinel.net/st...62203075.shtml

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Excerpts
Techno Clouds Threaten “CONGLOMOSAURS”
James P. Pinkerton

The Federal Communications Commission has been criticized for allowing media companies to further conglomerate themselves. But eventually, the critics will notice that the real story isn’t the politics of media conglomeration, but rather the technological change that is eating the future of these “conglomosaurs.”

It’s no surprise that few companies want to expand their holdings in broadcast TV and newspapers, two of the media categories covered by the FCC’s June 2 decision. Why? Because both broadcasters and newspapers continue to lose market and mindshare. As the FCC notes, separate from broadcast TV are the 69 million households subscribing to cable, each with growing access to the 230 national cable networks and 50-odd regional networks.

Consider, for example, the fate of some acquisition-crazed combines. The stock price of Disney, owner of ABC, is down by a half in the past five years. Vivendi-Universal, purchaser of EMI music, is down by more than 70 percent in just three years. And perhaps the most spectacular conglom-catastrophe has been the merger of AOL and Time Warner, which has cost shareholders $200 billion.

What went wrong? Part of the answer is plain old competition, made all the fiercer by the proliferation of “new media.”

And, meanwhile, huge techno-clouds loom on these corporate horizons. One storm is TiVo, the system that lets consumers “zap” TV commercials. But an even bigger shadow-caster is file-sharing — or, if one prefers, piracy — over the Internet. Napster, the pioneering file-sharing system, was sued out of existence by the recording industry two years ago. But while Napster is gone, a slew of follow-up companies using even sneakier technology have moved in to fill the same file-sharing demand. These rascals are costing the corporate dinosaurs billions; compact disc sales are down some 20 percent in the last four years, with no uptick in sight. And now movies and videogames are the next target.

The basic business models of these conglomerates face extinction. It’s not necessary to pity these companies, although one might sympathize with their artists. But the point is that despite their partial success at the FCC, these conglomosaurs are seemingly helpless, watching Jurassic-ly as rodent-like geeks, hackers and neo-Napster-ers consume their copyrighted eggs via the Internet. And it’s only a matter of time before most reporters get wind of this story.
http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?C...&ID=105789&r=0

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Music Marketers Now Dependent On Internet

Online Exposure Crucial for Artist and Album Promotions
Tobi Elkin

On a chilly spring night, hundreds of 20-something fans of Staind packed a New York City concert hall to mark the band's return after a two-year hiatus and the impending release of its new album, 14 Shades of Grey. The concert bore all the typical trappings -- a mosh pit, sporadic bursts of body- slamming and bodies suspended over the crowd like petrified mummies. But this one was broadcast live, in real-time to broadband subscribers on America Online's AOL Music.

Record labels are now aggressively doing deals with online providers such as AOL Time Warner's America Online, Yahoo!'s Launch and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN in an effort to pump up sales for their artists. And the sites are anxious to showcase those artists as a way to keep people coming back and entice them to pay for premium services.

Avril Lavigne, a virtual unknown until early 2002, offers a testament to the power of online marketing. The rocker's single "Complicated" debuted on AOL Music's Artist Discovery Network, a showcase for emerging artists, on March 8, 2002, before the track had even hit radio. "Complicated" logged more than 350,000 digital streams in a month's time, helping to greatly boost demand for her first album Let Go, released on June 4 of that year.

"As a whole, these [online] services are tremendously helpful to us," said Adam Lowenberg, vice president of marketing for Arista, which also represents Pink, Dido and Sarah McLaughlin. "The fact that it's so difficult to break new artists especially, any leg up you can gain goes such a long way these days." The 350,000 streams even helped him persuade radio stations to put "Complicated" on their play lists.

Staind's label, Elektra Records, has done online promotion for the band before, but not to the extent of its current AOL program. "This was something different -- doing Artist of the Month and doing a live Webcast was a cool component," said Camille Hackney, vice president for strategic marketing and new media at Elektra. "It was a big, concerted effort that pushed the needle."

Indeed, between BroadBand Rocks! Special Edition concert, exclusive performances via Sessions@AOL, the First Listen and CD Listening Party franchises, Staind had more than 600,000 streams of its music on AOL in the five days leading up to the release of its new CD.

The push may have helped 14 Shades of Grey debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart for the period May 20-27, translating into sales of 221,000 CDs in a week. Staind also grabbed the No. 1 slot as the most-streamed artist on AOL properties during the week of May 16-22, beating out sexy songstress Beyonce, rapper 50 Cent and Pink.

Record labels are anxious to score all the online promotion they can for both emerging and well-established artists. With radio airplay harder than ever to secure and reality programming flooding the MTV schedule, labels are desperate for creative outlets to break new artists and music videos, as well as launch singles, albums and other content.

"It's vital when we book major TV shows. When you look at the audience reach that AOL has and Yahoo! Launch, it puts them up there in a competitive position with TV outlets and radio and all the rest of it," said Nikke Slight, senior vice president for new media at Atlantic Records. "[Online] is a critical part of our marketing plan. We have to be there."

J Records' Tom Corson, executive vice president of worldwide marketing and sales, agreed: "It's like radio play or press ... everything is an impression in a highly competitive environment. You want to get as many impressions for your artist in the right way as you can."

A division of BMG, J Records, like the other labels, is an equal opportunity promoter: It works with Lycos, Yahoo! Launch, MSN, Listen.com, AOL and others to push its stable of artists. "They all have different products and different approaches," Mr. Corson said.

For the online sites, especially subscription-based ones like America Online, offering exclusive access to artists is a way to entice users to spend more time online. In AOL's case, the race is on to convert the thousands of streams to MusicNet premium subscriptions and ultimately to broadband subscriptions. AOL needs to flog its music offerings in order to move millions of narrowband subscribers to broadband.

"Our mantra is 'discover, experience, own'," said Bill Wilson, senior vice president and general manager for AOL Entertainment. The biggest opportunity for labels is in CDs, DVDs and VHS sales. By the fourth quarter, Mr. Wilson said, AOL will offer digital singles for 99¢ apiece, much like Apple Computer's iTunes does, though providers like RealNetworks' Rhapsody have already undercut that with 79¢ singles. This summer, AOL will add a $13.95 price tier for unlimited music streams, downloads and five CD burns, as well as upgrading search, purchase and recommendation features. Since launching in late February, MusicNet on AOL has more than 70,000 subscribers, adding about 1,000 subscribers per day, according to people familiar with the situation.

Most analysts maintain that the music labels will probably never completely kill free music download and file-sharing services. Kazaa averages about 14 million visitors a month while the music channel on AOL logged 10 million unique visitors in April, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=38007

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Truth is a powerful solvent.

Stone walls melt before its relentless might.

The Internet is one of the most powerful agents of freedom.

It exposes truth to those who wish to see and hear it.

It is no wonder that some governments and organizations fear the Internet and its ability to make the truth known. The phrase "freedom of speech" is often used to characterize a key element of democratic societies : open communication and especially open government. But freedom of speech is less than half of the equation.

It is also vital that citizens have the freedom to hear and see.

It is the latter area in which many governments have intervened in an attempt to prevent citizens from gaining access to information that their governments wish to withhold from them. Vinton G. Cerf http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=378

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Internet Sparks a Copyright Fire
Robert MacMillan

Buying an album or watching a film used to mean going to the music store or the movies, renting a video, maybe checking out the Columbia House catalog.

Those were the '90s, the good old days, before the Internet's takeoff.

Now, millions of people worldwide purchase and download the goods from Web sites. But big business didn't rush to embrace the Internet as a medium for selling music and software. Rather, that spark was lit by the oddly named, yet irresistible Napster.

Napster, created in 1999 by the 20-year-old Shawn Fanning, was startling in its simplicity -- users could download the software, make songs saved on their computers available to other Napster users for downloading and vice-versa. It brought the digerati and the technophobes online in record numbers to "share" their music collections.

Based on popular response (at its peak, 60 million songs were being swapped per day on the service), Napster was a brilliant idea. The availability of millions of free songs via a simple software program and a few mouseclicks and keystrokes seemed too cool to be legal.

And it was.

Napster users were violating copyright law, which says artists -- or the companies that own artistic work and other intellectual property -- are entitled to compensation for their work, and that they have a say in how it's distributed.

Musical Shares

Until the Internet became the icon of a putative economic revolution, "copyright" was a term most people encountered while typing footnotes for their term papers. But to book publishers, song writers and scores of other creators of intellectual property, knowing a lot about copyright can be the difference between making money and standing in the bread line.

The clash between ordinary consumers and the music and movie industries heated up in the 1970s and 1980s with the emergence of cheap audio cassette and VCR players -- prompting perhaps its most visible icon, the FBI warning included at the beginning of rented videos. Industry ultimately learned to live with issuing a few stern warnings while average consumers taped albums or movies for friends. It was still relatively difficult for average consumers to engage in piracy on a huge scale.

The Internet and the availability of cheap, powerful computers changed all that. Technology now allows unlimited, near-perfect copying of digital files. On the Internet, Picasso's "Guernica," Microsoft's Windows XP operating system and the White Album are nothing more than easily copied bytes.

There were more than 5 billion music files downloaded from peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks in 2002, and there are 57 million users of file- sharing technology in the United States, according to the Boston-based Yankee Group research firm. The same research firm said 8 percent of U.S. Internet users downloaded at least one movie during a three-month period in 2002. San Diego-based Websense, a developer of employee Internet management software, said in January that P2P use had increased more than 300 percent in the preceding year.

The entertainment and software industries have assembled a formidable arsenal to fight the problem, from tough laws to Internet posses who trace the origins of piracy, and a phalanx of lawyers going after the pirates and the businesses that run file-sharing networks like Napster. Its leaders are the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major labels, and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Music was the first commodity that Internet users could easily share, elevating the once little-known RIAA -- and its chief, Hilary Rosen -- to arch- villain status among many Web users, as the industry group aggressively campaigned to stamp out online piracy.

The scorn comes from consumer rights advocates, freewheeling programmers and other believers in the germinal spirit of sharing and openness that characterized the Internet in the pre-commerce era. The Internet, they say, was never intended to be a profit center. Corporate copyright owners want to halt the free flow of information in the name of profits, their argument goes, adding the charge that if the entertainment moguls can strengthen copyright law for themselves by perpetually extending the length of copyright terms, creativity will be stifled and the concept of a public domain for cultural progress destroyed. A chief gripe is that Corporate America is trying to get rid of "fair-use rights" -- a vague loophole in copyright law that gives consumers limited rights to copy or repurpose protected materials.

Among copyright holders themselves, opinions vary. Some music groups stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the recording labels in the war against online piracy. Some "indie" label and unaffiliated artists say unrestricted distribution of their work is good marketing. Even some big name acts are joining the line of thinking that the RIAA does not speak for them on the Internet and copyright. Rock group Pearl Jam left Sony's Epic label as soon as its contract was up, and now is a prominent member of the independent music scene with no other means of distribution right now than the Internet. The heavy metal band Metallica, whose members once were vocal opponents of online music piracy, have surprised many by recently releasing some songs for free online.

Some intellectual property attorneys, programmers and artists sick of the entire copyright system have started proposing alternative distribution and compensation methods to explore ways to work around it while allowing artists to continue making a living.

One of the most famous is Creative Commons, started by Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, who also founded Stanford's Center for Internet and Society and stands at the forefront of the copyright debate. Creative Commons set up shop in 2001 with the aim of getting copyright owners to distribute their works for the public to use, more or less, as they see fit -- like sampling music or doctoring photographs in various ways.

Then there are the millions of children and adolescents who make up the first generation to grow up with file sharing and downloads as the norm, rather than a novelty. This means that the conglomerates must master the Internet and its challenges or else watch their profits vanish.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?nav=hptop_tb

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Down the Hatch
Douglas Wolk

When most people propose technology that can destroy other people's computers remotely, they're called cyberterrorists. When Orrin Hatch calls for that technology, as he did June 17, he's just doing his job as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a hearing on peer-to-peer systems, Hatch suggested that copyright owners should be freed from liability for damaging computers. If users exchange files online and ignore two warnings, "then I'm all for destroying their machines. . . . There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," he said. By "copyright laws," he appears to mean exclusively the ones that cover music and film; the entertainment business has been the fourth largest industry among Hatch's campaign contributors over the past six years, and he has never proposed, say, destroying photocopy machines on which newspapers or books are copied. (The next day, Hatch offered a non-clarification clarification: "I do not favor extreme remedies—unless no moderate remedies can be found.")

But hardware isn't all the Recording Industry Association of America has been trying to destroy lately. On April 3, the RIAA filed high-profile, high-ticket lawsuits against four students who had built search engines that could be used for file-sharing at three universities; it subsequently settled the suits quickly and brutally. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Jesse Jordan agreed to pay the RIAA $12,000 —his entire savings—and Aaron Sherman got hit for $17,500. Daniel Peng at Princeton settled for $15,000, as did Joseph Nievelt of Michigan Tech.

The point of this exercise, of course, wasn't for the RIAA to sue people for their life savings ($12,000 is chump change to them), or even to collect $97.8 billion—the total of the initial suit against Nievelt alone (at $150,000 per song) and yes, that's a b. It was to pick on small fry, to make them fold quickly instead of taking it to the courts, regardless of the legal merit of the lawsuits. (Arguably, since at least a couple of the defendants' programs were search engines rather than Napster-like networks, they were protected under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act against claims for "contributory infringement.") Ultimately, it was to create a chilling effect for file traders —and for service providers and schools, and anybody who uses their networks for any reason. Eight days after the RIAA announced its lawsuits against the students, Columbia University sent out a message threatening to cut off network access for copyright violations and pointing users to instructions for disabling several peer-to-peer programs.

Technology remains three steps ahead of the recording industry anyway. Even as Apple's new iTunes Music Store was getting ecstatic press last month, savvy users discovered that iTunes 4.0, the program that makes it work, could be used to share music between users across the Internet. Apple promptly released an "upgraded" version, 4.0.1, which limited sharing capability to local networks; shortly thereafter, maverick programmer James Speth released iCommune 401(ok), which makes iTunes think the rest of the Internet is on its local network. But don't expect the RIAA to pick on Apple; expect them to pick on you.

On June 4, Verizon lost a legal appeal and was forced to give the RIAA the names of four subscribers who appear to have downloaded copyrighted music files. (Earthlink, which had agreed to abide by the Verizon decision for a similar case, turned over another name.) It was the first test of the DMCA provision that allows any copyright holder to subpoena Internet service providers for users' identities by filling out a one- page form, without bothering to get a judge's signature—or any other kind of due- process protection. At a hearing on April 1, RIAA lawyer Donald Verrilli said, "We have no choice but to go after the users. . . . We are going to issue very substantial numbers of subpoenas." According to Sarah Deutsch, VP and associate general counsel for Verizon, "Any website you surf, any private communication, is subject to an automated shortcut to obtain your identity. . . . The recording industry could potentially obtain access to every Internet service provider's customer database. In fact, when we met with them, they asked if they could hook their databases directly into Verizon's, so they could just push a button and extract their information instantly." Verizon's next appeal comes to trial in September. http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0326/sotc.php

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How’s 10 Gigs per second grab you?

Sun, Network Appliance Boost File-Sharing Speed
Clint Boulton

With rising interest in ramping up the file transfer rates between computers, Network Appliance (NetApp) (Quote, Company Info) and Sun Microsystems (Quote, Company Info) have embarked on a technical collaboration to accelerate data exchange rates for file-sharing up to 10 gigabytes-per-second.

In their quest to update outdated standards in data exchange, Sun and NetApp will bring Network File System (NFS) , a distributed file system created by Sun that allows users to access files and directories located on remote computers and treat those files and directories as if they were local, up to 10Gb/s with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities.

One of the qualities that makes InfiniBand as fast as it is, RDMA is a network interface card (NIC) feature that lets one computer directly place information into the memory of another.

Computing companies such as Santa Clara, Calif.'s Sun and storage-centric outfits such as Sunnyvale, Calif.'s NetApp have been increasingly recognizing the need for faster interconnects, such as InfiniBand, and methods of transfer to meet increasing demands for faster computers in the future. With such technological advancements, Sun and NetApp hope to help customers protect their existing investment, while moving data center migration to a standards-based computing environment.

"NFS technology was developed and introduced by Sun almost two decades ago. It has since then become an industry standard for network file sharing. RDMA file access is fundamentally important for mission-critical data center environments," said Glenn Weinberg, Director of Software Engineering at Sun Microsystems. "RDMA technology will enable Sun to further accelerate NFS to achieve lightning fast data sharing. We are delighted to be working so closely with Network Appliance on a range of important initiatives."

Sun and NetApp are working with the Internet Engineering Task Force on speeding up NFS, but the collaboration has roots for both companies. Sun currently works with the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) on RDMA for NFSv3, while NetApp works within the DAFS Consortium on the Direct Access File System (DAFS) protocol.

Together, the companies also work within the DAT Collaborative and the Open Group Interconnect Software Consortium on platform-independent APIs for RDMA transports.

For Sun the move highlights its intense focus on high-speed interconnects. A staunch supporter of InfiniBand, which connects networks at 10Gb/s with the help of RDMA, members of the company were on hand at the InfiniBand Trade Association last week to discuss the status of that formative open standard.
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news...le.php/2226601

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Online Piracy Frightens Movie Moguls
David McGuire

Slasher flicks may be good for a thrill, but when movie studio chiefs really want to scare themselves, they ask to see the latest financial statements from their comrades in the recording industry. Music remains a very profitable industry, but illegal music file downloads are cutting away at recording firms' bottom lines, prompting them to wage an aggressive fight against a host of villains guilty of perpetuating music piracy.

Movie studios aren't in any danger of going bankrupt in the short term either, but their executives say if they don't learn from the record industry's experience, they'll also wind up as victims in the piracy horror film.

"In three to five years we could be in exactly the same place as the music industry," said MPAA Senior Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Ken Jacobsen.

To date, the size (huge) and quality (poor) of most of the pirated movies and television shows available online have dampened their popularity among casual "peer-to-peer" file swappers. The same high-speed Internet customer who downloads dozens of digital-quality songs every hour may have to wait several hours to get one grainy, cheaply recorded copy of the latest Hollywood release.

The MPAA conservatively estimates that there are 400,000 illegal movie downloads occurring every day, a relatively small number compared to the countless millions of music downloads. But that will change, movie industry officials contend. Computers are getting faster, hard drives larger and broadband Internet connections more ubiquitous. At the same time, television and movie creators are experimenting with digital filmmaking technologies that could generate a slew of clean, digital copies early on in production cycles.

To prevent that from happening, movie studios have gone on the offensive, developing their own online distribution services, researching technological anti-piracy measures, attacking file-sharing networks in court, and pushing an aggressive legislative agenda aimed at limiting the availability of technology that can be used to steal movies.

It's those efforts that have civil liberties advocates questioning the studios' motives in raising the specter of peer-to-peer piracy.

"In the video world, nothing worth anything can be downloaded in any reasonable length of time," said Public Knowledge Senior Technology Counsel Mike Godwin. "What they're using is the hysteria over Napster as a way of pushing legislators' buttons over video piracy."

Free speech proponents say the movie industry's anti-piracy efforts disguise the more sinister goal of controlling computers so that consumers must watch movies when and how the movie studios choose.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?nav=hptop_tb

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From The Bureau of National Affairs:

U.S. SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS CIPA The US Supreme Court has upheld Children's Internet Protection Act, which requires libraries to filter Web content or lose certain federal funds. Opponents said CIPA violated the free-speech rights of adults and could prevent minors from getting information about topics such as breast cancer or the Holocaust. In a 6-3 decision, the Court said that libraries could turn off the software upon request, so that people could have more access to Web material. Decision at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/02pdf/02-361.pdf
Coverage at
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-1019952.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59359,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/politics/24INTE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/politics/24LIBR.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jun23.html

WATCHDOGS RELEASE STUDY ON NET BLOCKING IN SCHOOLS The EFF and the Online Policy Group have released a study documenting the effects of Internet filtering in US schools. The study found that blocking software over blocked state-mandated curriculum topics extensively. For every Web page correctly blocked as advertised, one or more was blocked incorrectly. Study at:
http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Censor..._block_report/
Coverage at:
http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Censor...623_eff_pr.php

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World's First WiFi Nation
Press Release

ALOFI, Niue, The South Pacific -- The Internet Users Society – Niue (IUS-N), today announced that it has launched the world’s first free nation-wide WiFi Internet access service on the Polynesian island-nation of Niue. This new free wireless service which can be accessed by all Niue residents, tourists, government offices and business travelers, is being provided at no cost to the public or local government.

"WiFi is the prefect fit for the Island of Niue, where harsh weather conditions of rain, lightning, salt water, and high humidity cause major problems with underground copper lines," said Richard St Clair, Co-Founder and Technical Manager at The Internet Users Society - Niue and Chairman, Pacific Island Chapter ISOC. "And since WiFi is a license free technology by International Agreement, no license is needed either by the provider or the user."

WiFi, 802.11 or IEEE 802.11 is a type of radio technology used for wireless local area networks, based on a standard developed by the IEEE for local and wire networks within the 802.11 section. WiFi 802.11 is composed of several standards operating in different frequencies.

A substantial portion of Niue’s tourism comes from visiting yacht traffic during the non-cyclone season. Yachts with onboard computer equipment with WiFi cards and external antennas will be able to park in the harbor and access full Internet services from their vessels as an open node, also free of charge. Other visitors, consultants and tourists to the island who carry laptops with either built in WiFi or as an add-on, will also have the ability to connect to the open node free of charge for the duration of their stay. Local Internet users with recent-vintage laptops will find the built in wireless features useful as more areas are covered with RF, and users who may be in the more congested telephone circuit locales such as Alofi central will also benefit from the new technology. One government office is already hooked up to the WiFi service and it is expected others will join in as soon as the appropriate hardware is installed.

IUS-N continues to be a leader in developing appropriate technologies to enable low-cost, dependable Internet services for all, for small nations like Niue. IUS-N technology is a model for other providers to use in developing nations that face the same hostile weather environments and where there are restrictions on the older technologies for wireless Internet services or where license costs are very high. Because these are low-power RF (Radio Frequency) transmitters, plus they consume small amounts of electricity, the technology is appropriate for smaller nations like Niue.

WiFi is the latest free service offer by the IUS-N to all the people in Niue. In 1997, the IUS-N first introduced free Email services to the nation and subsequently launched free full Internet access services in 1999. Earlier this spring free broadband Internet services were deployed at its Internet Café in Niue.

For more information and a topographical network map please see: http://www.niue.nu/images/Nuiepaper38.pdf
http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=35876

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Quintuple Platinum

Apple Sells 5 Million MP3s
Agence France-Presse

APPLE Computer says it has sold five million songs from its online music store in the eight weeks since its launch.

Apple jumped into the controversial online music business on April 28 with the new venture called the iTunes Music Store that allows customers to download for US99c per song, without subscription fees.

Apple said in a statement that 46 per cent of the songs have been purchased as albums, and 80 per cent of the 200,000 songs available on the online store have been purchased at least once.

"The iTunes Music Store is changing the way people buy music," said Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive.

"Selling five million songs in the first eight weeks has far surpassed our expectations, and clearly illustrates that many customers are hungry for a legal way to acquire their music online."

The venture makes Apple an alternative to the free music-swapping services that the industry has been trying to shut down and those operated by the major labels, so far with little success.

Since the Apple launch, RealNetworks has launched a similar music venture and AOL Time Warner has indicating it is planning a new service.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html

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AU Democrats Blocking FOI Net Rules
Simon Hayes

THE Democrats are blocking controversial amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, declaring they will not support moves to tighten FOI rules to exempt information on internet censorship.

The Communications Legislation Amendment Bill is designed to stop FOI applications on internet content from the Australian Broadcasting Authority, the Office of Film and Literature Classification and the Classification Review Board.

The legislation aims to block applications from the likes of civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia, which has been using the Act to track the operation of the internet censorship regime.

Democrat communications spokesman John Cherry said the party would move to have the FOI provisions deleted from the Bill.

"We wouldn't support any diminution of Freedom of Information Act access," he said. "I can see the arguments for and against this, but our principle is you don't want to encourage any government authority to shield its activities from the public."

The FOI amendments would block applications for material, including documents, containing the names or URLs of banned websites or news groups.

EFA executive director Irene Graham said the group had no intention of publicising child pornography websites, but may publish URLs of content referred for classification but subsequently not banned.

"There's a fear if we get this stuff we'll publish it and kiddies will go and look at it," she said. "As if kiddies can't go to Google and get it. We have no intention of publishing bulk URLs."

The EFA has been using FOI applications with names of URLs blacked out to gather information on the workings of the government's internet censorship regime. It released a document showing some content referred by the ABA to the OFLC that was later classified G.

In 2002, the EFA lost an appeal before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal against a decision by the ABA to block out site names from documents it released. The Communications Legislation Amendment Bill passed the House of Representatives despite opposition from Labor.

The Government said it was disappointed by the Democrats' decision.

"This Bill is extremely important to us," a spokesman for Communications Minister Richard Alston said.

"We believe the restriction of the availability of highly offensive material, primarily child pornography, via the ABA's blacklist is extremely important.

"We think Australian families would be horrified to learn Labor and the Democrats support the availability of pornography by these means."
http://australianit.news.com.au/comm...=date&Intro=No

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Open Source Laws Likely For SA
Simon Hayes

LEGALLY-mandated open source software is a step closer in South Australia, with a private members Bill that requires government departments to use it "where practicable" likely to pass the upper house.

Backed by Democrats MLC Ian Gilfillan, The State Supply (Procurement of Software) Amendment Bill calls on public authorities to use open source in preference to proprietary software.

"Wherever practicable, a public authority should use open source software in preference to proprietary software," the Bill reads.
http://australianit.news.com.au/comm...nbv%5E,00.html

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The right to reproduction, which includes the right to copy books and CDs, is expected to remain.

Japanese Agency To Revise Copyright Rules
Yomiuri Shimbun

The Cultural Affairs Agency plans to rewrite the Copyright Law and simplify the language of its text with the aim of creating better public understanding of copyright protection rules, sources said Sunday.

The agency decided to amend the law as the spread of personal computers and the Internet has made it easier to duplicate and transmit copyrighted works, such as music compact discs and software, they said.

The agency plans to submit the amendment bill to the ordinary Diet session as early as next year, after the cultural affairs council, an advisory body to the education, science and technology minister, has studied pertinent issues.

The Copyright Law prohibits people other than copyright owners from exploiting such copyrighted materials as theater, film and television works, musical works and visual works without the copyright owners' permission. The current law distinguishes between rules governing copyrighted material based on the works' means and forms of communication.

Rules concerning theater, film, television and musical performances, for example, allow copyright owners to prohibit others from performing plays and musical pieces. Rules on showing visual works apply to films, while public transmission rules govern the Internet and broadcasting.

In an attempt to make these rules clearly understandable to the public, the agency will integrate the separate regulations into one public transmission right that prohibits nonowners from transmitting copyrighted works without owners' permission, they said.

The right to reproduction, which includes the right to copy books and CDs, is expected to remain the same as in existing provisions, the sources said.

The agency is to repeal the current regulation on the right to use secondary works, such as films based on novels. The law currently stipulates that such works' rights belong to authors even when copyrights are transferred to other persons.

In the revised bill, concerned parties such as authors and publishers are expected to negotiate contracts governing the use of secondary works.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20030623wo32.htm

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Businesses Battle for Song Sharers
David McGuire

Antoine, a sound engineer and part-time musician in Chicago, stays tuned into underground electronic music by downloading the latest mixes from techno DJs.

Dan, a Web developer in Arlington, Va., downloads hard-to-find radio shows.

Jim, a public relations professional in Washington, D.C., prowls peer-to-peer networks for '80s pop songs and snippets of movie dialogue to play at his house parties.

Despite being well employed, with plenty of disposable cash, they feel little guilt or apprehension as they regularly use the Internet to violate copyright law. Millions of other Internet users worldwide have the same attitude, prompting a wave of music piracy that artists and recording companies say threatens their very existence.

But if the recording industry gets its wish, Antoine, Dan, Jim (each asked that his full name not be printed) and millions like them will form the core of a lucrative new market for legal, user-friendly music download services.

It's become an article of faith among many in the file-sharing debate that "peer-to-peer" services like KaZaa, Morpheus and the now-defunct Napster never would have attained stratospheric popularity had there been an array of cheap, legal alternatives for consumers who wanted to buy digital music, rather than steal it.

That theory has taken hold in Silicon Valley, where technology companies are pouring money and manpower into developing a new breed of music services that are slicker, cheaper and less restrictive than the pay-to-play services that emerged in the immediate wake of Napster's demise.

In his forays onto Napster about three years ago, Antoine mainly used the program to preview new songs. A musician and sound engineer, Antoine was always interested in the latest tracks from his favorite artists. If he liked what he heard, he'd go out and buy the CD.

But as he probed deeper into the enormous catalog of songs available from the computers of millions of Napster users, Antoine realized that there was music on Napster he wouldn't be able to find in any store. A fan of electronic music, Antoine found DJ sets, unreleased recordings and remixes from the techno and other genres that were thriving in Europe, but barely saw the light of day in music stores in the United States.

"The real appeal to me is that there's this wealth of music that you couldn't go to the store and buy," Antoine said. He hasn't experimented with iTunes, but he wonders whether it will be able provide the breadth of material available on the peer-to-peer systems he uses.

His skepticism may be well founded.

Rhapsody and iTunes offer more than 200,000 tracks (Rhapsody's catalog tops 300,000), including most of the songs on the Billboard Top 40. Their catalogs expand almost daily, but they have a long way to go before they can match the breadth of material available to file-sharers, said Grokster's Rosso. "We have 4.5 million people [online] at any given time, and even if they are sharing just 10 files each, I think that dwarfs any music service," he said.

RealNetworks Chief Strategy Officer Richard Wolpert questioned the need to have millions of available songs, saying "80 to 90 percent of the songs people download [on free services] are the same couple hundred songs."

If pay services can provide most of the songs people are looking for, and do it in a safe, user-friendly environment, typical consumers will use them, he added.

But for Dan, the Web developer from Arlington, that's a big reason not to bother with paid services. Dan was drawn into file sharing because he could find old-time radio shows, and said that even the best pay services lack the "flea-market" essence that made Napster, and later Kazaa, so appealing.

When Dan downloads music from Kazaa, it's usually something that's out of print and not likely to be on an industry-sanctioned site.

"I don't think the pay services would cater to what I'm looking for in the first place," he said. "If it became every single album [ever made] then -- oh yeah -- I'd go for that."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?nav=hptop_tb

JackSpratts · 26-06-03, 10:02 PM

Music Sharing Services To Start Washington Lobby

“It takes a lot of chutzpah,” says the RIAA. They would know.

Weary of being cast as the Internet's black marketeers, proprietors of free online music and file-sharing services are coming to Washington to launch a formal lobbying campaign to convince Congress of their legitimacy.
David McGuire

Grokster, a West Indies-based firm, and the New York-based Lime Wire will join with several other unnamed services in a trade association to defend the rights of free "peer-to-peer" -- or P2P -- file traders, Grokster's president, Wayne Rosso, said today.

The coalition, which plans to launch in the next 60 days, has not announced its name or hired a lobbyist. The group probably will work out of the office of whatever representative or lobby firm it hires, Rosso said.

It also is honing what its message and core values will be, but the primary aim is to dispel the belief that online file sharing is at best seedy and at worst illegal.

"The problem is that legislators have just been pumped full of so much misinformation," Rosso said. "They think that we're all back-alley smut peddlers and identity thieves, and that's just not the case."

The misinformation, he said, comes from the entertainment industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The groups represent the biggest film studios and recording companies, which say they are losing money because of free, easily available copies of their music and movies on the Internet.

File-sharing services, such as Kazaa, BearShare and Morpheus, became popular after the pioneering Napster closed its doors in 2001. They accounted for 5 billion music downloads in 2002, and there are 57 million users in the United States alone, according to the Yankee Group, a Boston- based research firm. Kazaa says that its file sharing software has been downloaded more than 200 million times.

Music industry revenues, meanwhile, have seen an 11 percent drop in sales in 2002, according to analyst firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. More than half of lost music sales are due to file sharing, the Port Washington, N.Y.-based NPD Group says.

Rosso said file sharers are not trying to deprive the recording industry of its deserved cash.

"Copyright owners need to be paid and we certainly believe in copyright law," he said. "We just don't want it to be abused and don't want the rights of users to be trampled."

File sharing also has many legitimate uses, such as sharing information quickly and efficiently over long distances, said Greg Bildson, Lime Wire's chief operating officer.

"The media companies that are pushing their end of the issue have been tying file sharing [to] anything bad they can think of -- first it was child pornography then it was homeland security [threats]," Bildson said.

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy scorned the new lobby's goals.

"It takes a lot of chutzpah for companies that purposefully facilitate illegal copyright theft to turn around and lobby the nation's lawmakers," he said. "This is apparently a reaction to the interest of Congress in the rampant piracy, security and privacy concerns that these networks are responsible for."

"We welcome any debate that's based on facts," said MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor.

Gigi Sohn, president of D.C.-based Public Knowledge, a group that supports fair-use rights, said the voice of P2P proprietors has been absent from the copyright debate for too long. Nevertheless, she fears they will have a "tough row to hoe."

"If they just go in there and say peer-to-peer is good, without recognizing [the piracy problem], I think they'll just get blown out of the water," Sohn said.

Rep. Mary Bono (R-Calif.), who co-chairs a recently formed intellectual property and online piracy caucus, said she is eager to debate online copyright issues with the file sharing industry, but warned that it might get a chilly reception.

"If they start legitimizing piracy, they're in for a fight," said Bono.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jun24.html

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“Note to the RIAA: It's not the pirates, it's the music.”

Lawmakers Prove They Are Clueless About The World
David Hayes

It's no wonder the youth of America are turned off by politics.

Housed in Washington, the land of martinis, vodka gimlets and self-importance, the leaders of this nation too often show us they don't have a clue about what's going on in the rest of the country.

That was painfully apparent last week. Sen. Orrin Hatch, the 69-year-old Republican from Utah, suggested during a congressional hearing that using a virus to destroy the hard drives of those accused of downloading music illegally would be a splendid way to stop the problem.

Hatch, whose position in the Senate has given him enough notoriety to produce and sell Christian music of his own, said damaging an accused music pirate's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."

The senator, who later tried to qualify his statement by saying he didn't favor extreme measures, was just parroting a proposal the music industry first floated several years ago.

Let's forget, for one moment, the basic legal issues here -- those niggling little things like due process, fair trial and the variety of laws that would have to be broken to do what Hatch suggests. The senator should know these things. He leads the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Instead, let's look at the basics. Perhaps the only people more clueless on this issue than Hatch are those in the music industry who see digital downloading as a threat to their future.

The highly profitable music industry has been crying the economic blues for years now. Digital piracy is just killing the industry, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Note to the RIAA: It's not the pirates, it's the music. There just hasn't been as much music worth buying in the past few years.

Undoubtedly, business is down a bit. But consider: The music industry is comparing sales today with the blockbuster late 1990s. That's like comparing apples with really sour oranges.

At least six of the top 40 selling "albums" of all time were produced between 1997 and 1999. The numbers the RIAA uses for comparison were skewed by the golden (to the music industry) Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears phenomenon. Garth Brooks, Santana and Shania Twain produced their biggest-selling albums during the period.

So here we are in 2003. There's still good music being produced. But there hasn't been a teen phenom -- or two or three as there were in the late 1990s -- to drive sales.

And then there's that other minor issue the association fails to look at. The economy is not what it was during the late '90s, when the high- tech boom was running uncontrolled. With unemployment above 6 percent, consumers aren't buying as much of anything anymore. Music sales were down 9 percent in 2002. If you're working for a telecom company, those sound like pretty good numbers.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...ss/6154390.htm

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321 Studios Updates Controversial DVD Copy Software
Gillian Law

321 Studios LLC has released an upgrade to its DVD copying software despite still being embroiled in a court case over the software's legality.

The company announced last Friday that DVD X Copy Gold, an improved version of the software that includes all of the features of two previous products, DVD X Copy and DVD X Copy XPRESS, is now available. New features in DVD X Copy Gold let users copy most DVDs within an hour, and can record all features of an original CD or compress a DVD-9 to a DVD-5, fitting each backup copy onto a single DVD disk, 321 Studios said in a statement.

321 Studio's software uses a decryption technology called DeCSS to let users copy DVD movies onto recordable DVDs and CD-R discs, despite the CSS (Contents Scrambling System) encryption placed on the movies to prevent this sort of copying.

321 Studios is currently involved in a court case with MGM Studios Inc., Tristar Pictures Inc., Columbia Pictures Industries Inc., Time Warner Entertainment Co. LP, Disney Enterprises Inc., Universal City Studios LLLP and The Saul Zaentz Co. over the sale and use of its software.

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, began the case by saying that she was "substantially persuaded" by the opinions of other judges in earlier cases involving the DMCA, who had ruled it illegal to distribute tools to work around copy protection technology. The new software seems unlikely to help 321 Studios case.

Terry Rose, managing director of 321 Studios in the U.K. said Friday that the company has made several changes to the software but that these are not aimed at lessening the charges against it. He was unable to comment on the court case, other than to confirm it was still ongoing, he said.

Mark Fisher, a new-media attorney with Fish and Richardson PC in Boston, said Friday that 321 Studio's announcement shows they believe in their case that their product is not illegal.

"It's not a quantum leap in features, just an improvement to the compression, so I don't think it will change the court case. (321's) position is that they have every right to do what they're doing, so there's no reason not to bring out new products," Fisher said.

According to a timeline on its own Web site, 321 Studios began a suit against the companies in April 2002, asking the judge to declare that its product, DVD Copy Plus, did not violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The companies responded with their own suit in June 2002, asking that the original case be dismissed on the grounds that there was no case or controversy.

Claim and counterclaim have continued since then, and the current case, a motion for partial summary judgement ruling that 321 Studio's products are illegal, was begun by the movie studios in January of this year, 321 Studios' site said. Judgment is expected to take 30 to 60 days from the mid-May court date in front of District Court Judge Illston, the site said.
http://www.idg.com.sg/idgwww.nsf/uni...3?OpenDocument

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From the site -

///Soulseek News///

The first version of Soulseek Isle is now available here. Here's a short Q&A to try to explain what it is we're trying to do and what you should expect:

Q: What are the differences between Soulseek Isle and the regular Soulseek client?

A: Virtually nothing, except that the Isle client logs on to the new Soulseek Isle server, which runs on separate resources from the main server, and so is expected to have considerably less users, but at the same time, it's also expected to be a lot less congested than the main server.

Q: New server? Why?

A: We've reached a roadblock. The main server already simultaneously supports more than sixty thousand users and we just can't figure out any other ways to make it take more without becoming congested. This in turn affects the server's ability to process new logins, and probably even worse, severly restricts its ability to distribute searches. Testing and profiling the server software is extremely difficult because it's very busy 24 hours a day. So the next natural choice would be to start branching out, start creating new servers. Soulseek Isle is the very first step in that direction. While it is only a tiny patch over the original Soulseek client, we're hoping it would prove useful in starting the separation process.

Q: Wasn't the new server hardware supposed to take care of this?

A: Yes. It didn't. We're not sure why but even if it had, the solution would've only been temporary.

Q: So is this going to be like Napster, where people can't find each other because every person is on a different server?

A: Only to a lesser degree. Soulseek's always aimed to group users by areas of interest. When we started out, the system revolved entirely around the subject of electronic music. Everyone was interested in more or less the same thing, and on the whole the environment felt friendlier and more accommodating. As Soulseek became more popular, much of that was gone. That's something that we're hoping to have back once we successfully branch out.

Q: You said you wanted each server to be topic-specific. What's the "Isle" supposed to be specific to?

A: Nothing at the moment. Again, this is just the very first step in our branching out process. Personally we hope it would become the server of choice for people interested in electronic music, but there's no telling how things would turn out for the Isle. Once the Isle takes in a more specific direction, we'll designate it as such. In the meanwhile we're planning on taking advantage of the smaller, more manageable Soulseek environment to develop new features to better support a multiple server environment.

Q: Didn't Soulseek use to have multiple server support?

A: Yes, and it's going to be a lot like that again pretty soon.

Q: What if I'm not interested in anything specific, but just like to get files files files?

A: You would eventually be able to switch between servers as you wish. Besides that, Soulseek's generic selection of files was never its strong side.

Q: Can I run the Isle client at the same time I'm running the regular client?

A: Yes. The Isle client uses its own folder and registry settings. That also means you'd have to reenter your information into the Isle client once you install it, as it uses its own configuration files. Or, you can copy all *.cfg files from c:\program files\soulseek to c:\program files\SoulseekIsle before running the Isle client.

Q: Isn't the Isle client just the test client with a slightly different tray icon?

A: Yes.

Nir 7:24 PM

http://slsk.blogspot.com/

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i've been on isle now about an hour and it's just like the regular version. literally. there's no indication you're on another network, except that at this moment none of my contacts are here. i dropped my soulseek .cfg files into the isle folder which kept my prefs identical - nick, buddies etc. and i guess i've beaten them to it. i'm way ahead of them, but that's what happens when you make p2p-zone.com a regular stop on your p2p tour.

- js.

10:55pm, wed.

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Are You in RIAA's Cross Hairs?
Katie Dean

When the recording industry said Wednesday it would sue heavy music sharers, it left one unnerving question unanswered: Just who would they consider to be a heavy sharer?

In a conference call with reporters, the Recording Industry Association of America's President Cary Sherman said the group will begin collecting evidence against those who offer "substantial" amounts of music online to others over peer-to-peer networks, then will file hundreds of copyright- infringement lawsuits beginning in August. But he declined to say specifically what "substantial" means.

"They may go after people who are on really large pipes and seem to be uploading a lot," said Bram Cohen, a P2P programmer who developed BitTorrent. Or, the RIAA could "find someone who is unimportant but typical of everybody out there, and just sue them to make their life miserable to send a message."

The vagueness seems to be a deliberate move by the RIAA to strike fear in anyone who trades, experts said. The intent is to scare everyone from prototypical pirates who share hundreds of ripped CDs through T-1 lines to teens who trade a handful of pop tunes.

Still, the heaviest sharers are a distinct bunch relatively easy to pick out in a crowd.

There are no definitive statistics about usage patterns on P2P services like Kazaa and Morpheus. But a Xerox PARC study about Gnutella in 2000 discovered that a tiny portion of users accounted for an overwhelming majority of file-sharing traffic. For example, 50 percent of the responses for music searches came from just 1 percent of Gnutella's users. The researchers also found that 70 percent of the users shared no files. In other words, most people who use P2P networks tend to download, not supply, music, a phenomenon dubbed "free riding."

There is no current study of modern P2P networks, but experts believe that the same patterns persist.

If the RIAA truly begins by pursuing the heaviest music suppliers, the first people they net likely will be those who have a high-bandwidth connection like a T-1 line, hoard thousands of files and keep their computer on all the time, said Kevin Lai, a scientist who studies P2P systems at Hewlett Packard Laboratories.

"The people who are sharing the most are generally people at universities," Lai said. "If you're living on campus you'll have something … that's between 100 and 1,000 times greater than your average DSL capability."

In addition, if the RIAA wants to pack the most debilitating punch to the network, it will target the "supernode" users who pass along the most files. On services like Kazaa, some users can agree to have their computers serve as supernodes, which are hubs that distribute files to people close to them on the physical network. Generally, these users have access to very fast telecom lines.

"If you want to cripple a network, you go for the nodes, which are highly connected and responsible for most of the traffic," said Bernardo Huberman, director of the Systems Research Center at HP Labs. "You would target the most active nodes. You wouldn't target those who are downloading every month or so."

Or, to freak everyone out, the RIAA could choose to sue a smaller offender.

To sue people somewhat indiscriminately would "scare the bejesus out of everybody else," Cohen said.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59392,00.html

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Music Industry's Next Piracy Targets: Ordinary Folks
Stanley A. Miller II

The music industry raised the stakes in its war on piracy Wednesday, threatening to sue "everyday people" for as much as $150,000 for each song they illegally share online.

The search for individual computer users shifts the piracy focus away from file-sharing computer networks sites such as Kazaa, WinMX and Gnutella, which have proved difficult to shut down.

The Recording Industry Association of America will begin gathering evidence against individuals today, and the public should expect the first round of lawsuits in eight to 10 weeks, according to Matthew Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the organization.

The association plans to seek damages set by U.S. copyright laws, which allow for awards of $750 to $150,000 for each song offered illegally on a person's computer.

"We have engaged in a significant education campaign," Oppenheim said, from artists' ads saying "Don't steal music" to "instant- messaging millions of users to tell them they are not anonymous. We have been ramping up that message. People engaged in this behavior need to be deterred."

The industry has warned businesses that they could be held responsible if they let employees use their high-speed Internet connections for copyright infringement. And it has sued Internet service providers and the makers of popular file-sharing programs, which let millions of people freely trade files online.

This year, the association sued four college students who ran advanced, Napster-like systems over their schools' local area networks, indexing millions of files for downloading. All of those suits have been settled.

Now the industry is opening the field to everyone, a tactic that some legal experts and consumer advocates said is doomed to fail.
http://www.jsonline.com/bym/tech/news/jun03/150853.asp

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Piracy Dragnet
Cynthia L. Webb

Fresh off recent victories in the courtroom, the recording industry is out to tighten the vise on music pirates through legal action against the individual computer users the industry believes are responsible for facilitating online music theft.

The Recording Industry Association of America yesterday announced that it will start patrolling the Internet today for evidence to use against individual peer-to-peer network users and other file swappers suspected of trading "substantial" amounts of copyrighted music online. Expect users of KaZaa, Morpheus and Grokster, three of the most popular file-swapping sites, to be prime targets.

"We certainly will file at least several hundred lawsuits to start, but that's only the beginning," RIAA President Cary Sherman said, as quoted by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We intend to keep filing lawsuits on a regular basis until people get the message."
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Music Industry To Play Hardball

Call it a major scare tactic, but the RIAA has already had success with its campaign against digital piracy. College students targeted by the group for trading songs online settled their cases, paying thousands of dollars in fines and penalties. "Until a year ago, the industry's main strategy had centered on suing companies, such as the defunct Napster Inc. of Redwood City, that distributed file-sharing software. But as those suits bogged down in the courts, the industry began concentrating on individual file sharers," The San Francisco Chronicle said in its coverage today.
• The San Francisco Chronicle: RIAA To Sue Individual File Sharers

The RIAA is hoping its online sweep and legal actions will put the brakes on rampant file sharing. The music industry claims to have lost millions of dollars in CD sales to file swapping from the Internet. "We'd much rather spend time making music then dealing with legal issues in courtrooms. But we cannot stand by while piracy takes a devastating toll on artists, musicians, songwriters, retailers and everyone in the music industry," Sherman said in a statement yesterday.

Just how extensive will the RIAA campaign be? "We have no hard and fast rules about how many files you have to be distributing" to be targeted in the RIAA sweep, Sherman said, according to washingtonpost.com. "Any individual computer user who continues to steal music will face the very real risk of having to face the music." The Washington Post provided details of how the RIAA plans to play detective online: "The RIAA said it would use the public directories of peer-to-peer software programs and issue subpoenas to Internet service providers to track down people trading music files." A number of media outlets noted that the RIAA said it will begin filing suits within the next two months.
• washingtonpost.com: RIAA Plans Lawsuits Against File Traders
• The Washington Post: RIAA Plans to Sue Music Swappers

RIAA's Legal Ammunition

The San Jose Mercury News fills in the background on how the RIAA has gathered some legal ammunition for its ramped-up fight: "A recent federal district court ruling all but assured the strategy to target individuals, after a judge in Los Angeles found that the companies behind popular file-sharing software like Morpheus and Grokster could not be held liable for illegal activities of their users," the paper said. "That April ruling is under appeal. The recording industry has been laying the legal groundwork for this new, more personal assault on Internet music piracy for more than a year. It subpoenaed Verizon Internet Services in July for the name of a individual subscriber accused of downloading more than 600 songs via Kazaa. When Verizon refused, the RIAA successfully compelled the disclosure through federal court. That case, while still under appeal, established the recording industry's right to use subpoena power granted under federal copyright law to identify suspected copyright infringers."
• The San Jose Mercury News: Music Labels Plan Web Dragnet

A Strategy Bound to Backfire?

Even as the RIAA steps up its fight, a few cracks might be forming in the entertainment industry coalition against piracy. "Although RIAA represents the record industry -- and its action Wednesday was supported by acts as diverse as the Dixie Chicks and Shakira -- a number of record-label and online-music executives quietly questioned whether a legal offensive addresses the industry's fundamental problems," The Los Angeles Times said. "The labels, they said, need to stop focusing on lawsuits and start concentrating on the new market that is emerging online. "There is no positive message coming out, no coordinated, positive message coming out in support of the online services," one unnamed critic said, according to the paper.
• The Los Angeles Times: Labels Will See Music File Sharers In Court (Registration required)

Critics in the Internet service provider industry aren't happy either. "ISPs are bracing for what Verizon Vice President Sarah Deutsch called 'an avalanche of subpoenas,' as the labels turn to service providers to help them identify file swappers," CNET's News.com reported. "She said there's no mechanism in place under the subpoena process to ensure that customers aren't mistakenly targeted or that their personal information is only used for the purposes of the lawsuit. She also worries that other copyright holders might follow the RIAA's lead, putting ISPs in the middle of the copyright debate and forcing them to spend time and money processing thousands of requests to identify subscribers who haven't been proven guilty of anything."
• CNET's News.com: Labels Aim Big Guns At Small File Swappers

Fred von Lohmann, a civil liberties lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the New York Times that the RIAA's efforts could target minors, one of the recording industry's biggest customer base, a move that the paper paraphrased Lohmann as saying "could result in a backlash from angry consumers during a time of economic hardship." Von Lohmann: "We think it's a particularly outrageous and ill-advised strategy. Suing your best customer is always a bad idea. What we need is a way to better pay artists and to make file sharing legal." On EFF's Web site, the group calls for action -- against the RIAA's legal dragnet. "At a time when more Americans are using file-sharing software than voted for President Bush, more lawsuits are simply not the answer. It's time to get artists paid and make file-sharing legal. EFF calls on Congress to hold hearings immediately on alternatives to the RIAA's litigation campaign against the American public," Lohmann said in a statement.
• The New York Times: Recording Industry To Sue Internet Music Swappers (Registration required)

Meanwhile, the RIAA is getting support from at least one ally in the intellectual property business. The Business Software Alliance, which represents a number of tech firms and has a tagline that it supports a "safe and legal digital world," offered its praise. BSA chief Robert Holleyman: "P2P is an impressive technology and nothing should make us lose sight of its potential. Yet, there are illegal uses of this technology that necessitate actions such as the strategy announced today by the RIAA. BSA supports RIAA's ability to protect their members' works online. The strategy announced today is consistent with the joint principles announced in January by the IT and music industries where we agreed that private and government enforcement actions against infringers is critical to stemming the growth of piracy."
• BSA Press Release: IT Industry Execs Support RIAA Efforts to Protect Music On-Line

High-Tech Arms Race

Some people are so intent on finding ways to download music online for free, they are using hardball tactics of their own. A washingtonpost.com report today, part of a series on digital piracy and copyrights, explains how file-swappers are going stealth as the popularity of P2P networks grows. "Swapping files online, by all accounts, is more popular than ever. In the past six months alone, no fewer than 50 new versions of 'peer-to-peer,' or P2P file-trading software programs have emerged on the Internet. Unlike some of the most popular services like Kazaa and Grokster, many of them try to shield the identities of their users with password-protected networks, encryption and other tools," the article said, many in an effort to thwart the RIAA. "People who prefer downloading illegally copied files are jumping ship from the big-name networks in favor of these tightly knit communities, said Jorge Gonzalez, co-founder of Zeropaid.com, a Web forum for P2P enthusiasts."
• washingtonpost.com: Online Piracy Spurs High-Tech Arms Race

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that many business are cracking down on employees' use of P2P networks in the workplace. According to the newspaper, companies "are prodded by growing use of these file-sharing applications, which allow people to grab free but largely illicit versions of their favorite songs and movies. Besides distracting workers from their jobs, companies say, the applications can plug up computer networks and may pose security risks by spreading viruses -- not to mention opening up corporate hard drives to outsiders through peer-to-peer sharing."
• The Wall Street Journal: Thanks for Not Sharing (Subscription required)

A Spruced-UP AOL

America Online will unveil a new version of its Internet service later this summer, and the revamped version will feature better e-mail features and faster Web connection capabilities, Reuters said today. "The version -- AOL 9.0 Optimized -- emerges as the online division of AOL Time Warner Inc. tries to stem the shrinkage in its dial-up base and attract high-speed subscribers with more programming and services, including those targeted at advanced Internet users, to recharge growth."
• Reuters via washingtonpost.com: AOL Offers Peek At New Version

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted that AOL has been getting some raves recently from analysts -– even as its accounting practices are being vetted by investigators. "The bullish reports from analysts in recent days are giving a boost to the multimedia giant, which counts Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting System and CNN among its properties. On Wednesday, Salomon Smith Barney raised its rating on the company's stock to 'in-line' from 'underperforming' relative to the sector," the paper said. "Analyst Lanny Baker said consumers' accelerating migration from dial-up to broadband Internet service still threatens to erode America Online's U.S. subscriber base. But 'we believe that a combination of cost cuts, falling telecommunications network costs and stabilizing ad dollars will put a floor under the AOL unit cash flows in the near term,' he said in a research note."
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Analysts Give Thumbs Up To AOL

Not The Headline Most Companies Want: 'Merger From Hell'

Speaking of AOL, America Online's merger with Time Warner is the featured theme of a new book by Alec Klein, a reporter at The Washington Post. Klein was on CNBC yesterday to tout his book, "Stealing Time," and explained that the two mammoth companies were not able to execute their merger plan properly and got tangled in a war of egos. Klein's book grabbed some reviews this past weekend in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. An excerpt from the Times review: "Mr. Klein does add a contemporary interview with Gerald M. Levin, the former chairman and chief executive of Time Warner who agreed to the deal. 'I'm the one who got up and said -- and there are people who play this back all the time, when we announced the deal -- 'I believe in the Internet and, therefore, I believe in these values,' Mr. Levin tells Mr. Klein. 'Well, that was a terrible thing. Well, at that time, it made sense, and over time, I still think it will.'"
• The New York Times: AOL Merger: Dissecting A Deal That Soured (Registration required)

And from The Wall Street Journal's review: "AOL did much to stimulate interest in the Web, but its all-elbows business practices also helped strangle the goose laying the golden eggs. Mr. Klein notes that AOL had a goal of extracting, in advertising fees, at least half of the venture-capital funding of the dot-coms with which it did business, leaving them starved of operating capital. At the end of one especially tough quarter, AOL executives forced Spanish-language ads onto the AOL home page so that they could bill the advertisers for page impressions," L. Gordon Crovitz, senior vice president of Dow Jones and president of its electronic-publishing division, wrote. "In the interest of full disclosure -- and with gratitude for an early lesson -- I should note that AOL executives back in 1997 introduced me to the fever swamp of Internet business models. My Dow Jones electronic-publishing colleagues were negotiating to renew an agreement under which we provided a selection of our news for use on AOL. But instead of AOL continuing to pay us for our brands and content, its executives informed us that they now expected publishers like us to pay AOL to give away our content, without any licensing revenue. We scratched our heads at this economic logic and walked away."
• The Wall Street Journal: Merger From Hell (Subscription required)

Don't forget. A fun excerpt from Klein's book is available on washingtonpost.com.

Gates On George Orwell And Other Lofty Topics

This has been a spam-bashing week for Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. He wrote how his e-mail in-box is ravaged by awful junk e-mail in a The Wall Street Journal op-ed and in a letter to Microsoft users. Then yesterday, he spoke at a Washington conference on IT and homeland security. "In a 23-minute speech that ranged from George Orwell to spam, Gates focused on the need for government and industry to collaborate, to devise common security standards that can be used to block unwanted attacks. Protecting computer systems, he said, is as important to homeland security as finding weapons of mass destruction," The Seattle Post-Intelligencer said. "We worry not only about weapons of mass destruction, but also about weapons of mass disruption, ways to bring down our government, financial, military and other computer systems," Gates said yesterday, according to the paper.
• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Gates: Security Vital At Microsoft, Even If It Delays Products
• The Seattle Times: Gates: Essential To Keep Security, Privacy In Balance

Filter is designed for hard-core techies, news junkies and technology professionals alike. Have suggestions, cool links or interesting tales to share? Send your tips and feedback to cindy.webb@washingtonpost.com.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jun26.html

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How Hulk Crushed The Online Pirate

New Jersey man pleads guilty to posting bootlegged movie on the Internet
P.J. Huffstutter

When Karen Randall received a phone call late one night and learned that an early, rough version of "The Hulk" had been pirated and posted on the Internet, one thought came to her mind.

"We are going to get them. We are going to get them, crush them, stop them," said Randall, Vivendi Universal Entertainment's general counsel.

On Wednesday, Randall got her wish.

Kerry Gonzalez, a 24-year-old New Jersey insurance underwriter, pleaded guilty in a Manhattan federal court to criminal charges of posting the bootlegged movie on the Internet. He could face a maximum sentence of three years in prison and a fine of $250,000 when he is sentenced Sept. 26 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The winding trail leading to Gonzalez's plea began in early June at a Manhattan advertising agency that was working on the marketing campaign for the Ang Lee movie, studio sources said Wednesday.

An acquaintance told Gonzalez that he had seen a copy of "The Hulk," thanks to a friend who worked at the agency. The acquaintance asked Gonzalez whether he wanted to check it out, said Matthew Portella, Gonzalez's defense attorney.

Gonzalez said that he did and soon had a videotaped copy of "The Hulk" work print. Officials with the FBI, who said the case remains open, declined to name the ad agency or the man who gave Gonzalez the tape.

At his home in Hamilton, N.J., Gonzalez slipped the tape into a digital scanner and made an electronic copy, according to court documents.

The two-hour work print — the term used for such early copies of a movie in postproduction — is dark in spots, shows details of the digital wires used to create the virtual Hulk and lacks a soundtrack. It also includes security tags — unique markers on the top and bottom right-hand corners of the screen, as well as numerical strings embedded in the videotape.

Different markers are used each time studio officials make a copy of the work print. "That way, we can tell who's got what copy," said Rick Finkelstein, president and chief operating officer of Universal Pictures.

That information ultimately would help lead law enforcement officials to Gonzalez.

There were only a few early copies of "The Hulk." Some were in the hands of the director and film editors, who were piecing together the movie. At least one was sent to the ad agency to be used as a basis for figuring out how to market the film, law enforcement officials said.

Gonzalez, who knew about the security tags, used a software program in an attempt to black them out. On June 6, he logged on to a Web site based in the Netherlands and, according to court records, allowed people to download the work print.

Within hours, the movie files had spread from the Netherlands, reaching peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and also Internet Relay Chat, a computer protocol that allows users to copy files from other computers at high speeds.

By the time Randall's phone rang about 11:30 that same night, the damage had been done — and it was spreading, as many fans and Internet movie viewers reacted negatively to an unfinished film.
http://www.sunspot.net/business/bal-...ness-headlines

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RIAA Goes After The Little Guys
Jefferson Graham

When Karol Franks, a mother of two teens in Pasadena, Calif., heard Wednesday that the music industry was threatening to sue average folks who swap music online — like her kids — she posed a question that must have been on many minds: "How can there be a lawsuit when there are tens of thousands of people who use file- sharing programs?"

Because the Recording Industry Association of America, flush with recent court wins in its fight against digital piracy, can now move from suing the companies that facilitate the free swapping of music files to targeting some of the 57 million computers users who regularly swap. (Related item: Facts about file sharing.)

By the numbers

People who use file-sharing services in the USA: 57 million

Number of times Kazaa's software has been downloaded worldwide: 230 million

Users sharing files Wednesday afternoon on Kazaa: 4.2 million

Files being shared on Kazaa Wednesday afternoon: 900 million

Songs sold in two months at Apple Music Store: 5 million

Percentage of ages 12 to 18 who say they'd download a new song they like: 35%

Percentage of ages 12 to 18 who say they'd buy a new song they like: 10%

Source: The Yankee Group, RIAA, USA TODAY research

Going after home users is the industry's best chance to slow the growth of file-swapping services, which have boomed since Napster's demise in 2001.

And the record labels, suffering a drop of 20% in album sales since 2000 according to unreleased Nielsen SoundScan figures, feel they need to take action.

But for parents such as Franks, "these are kids who I believe are the majority of the thieves," she says. "To what extent would they be able to make financial amends if these minors can be held liable?"

In practical terms, not much. Four college students were sued in April, and settled shortly after for $12,000 to $17,500 each. But potential fines are a whopping $150,000 a song, which would make a person who shares as few as 10 songs online accountable for $1.5 million.

Attorney Whitney Broussard calls the copyright fines astronomical. "The penalty far outweighs the actual harm," he says. "When the reality of the size of these damages sinks in, when the parents of a 15-year-old downloader are sued for millions, people are going to be stunned."

Few expect that even legal action against users will end online piracy. But the industry hopes to at least give breathing room to some of the legal services starting to gain traction.

"It's very difficult to compete with free," says Bob Ohlweiler of MusicMatch, which has the largest subscriber base of any legitimate subscription service — 145,000 users for its listen- only MX Radio — and hopes to start selling song downloads by summer's end. "The injection of personal responsibility is a sensible approach. It's like a speeding ticket. Everybody doesn't get one, but a few people do, and a lot of people slow down."

Others see the offensive against fans as another wrongheaded move by an industry that could have handled the situation with vision years ago.

"Can you imagine Wal-Mart spending time to collect evidence, file lawsuits against its customers together and clog up the courts?" says Gale Daikoku, retail analyst with market research firm GartnerG2. She calls this kind of assault on a customer base "unprecedented." Theft in the $2.7 trillion retail industry is 2% of sales, she says, but stores like Macy's and Nordstrom "focus on making the customer experience better and having people return to the stores, not on chasing them away."

Not everyone buys into piracy as the sole cause of the industry's slump. "Digital copying, whether file sharing or CD burning, is definitely a factor, but it's not the only culprit," says Geoff Mayfield, Billboard's director of charts. "Music is not necessarily a recession-proof product. ... When you're not certain of your job status or how much money you have in the bank, it's easy to put off buying music, especially if you're not a kid."

"Has a theater ever sued a kid for sneaking into a movie without paying?" Karol Franks says. "I think the music industry will spend a lot of money for little reward."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/n...-25-riaa_x.htm

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New RIAA Chief Should Name Digital Advisors, Says CEO of Leading File Sharing Company
Press Release

The new chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, when named, should empanel a group of advisors from the Internet music community to help identify areas of cooperation between the recording industry, artists, lawmakers and the global community that accesses music via the Web, says Elan Oren, CEO of iMesh (www.imesh.com), a leading peer-to-peer file-sharing company with 40 million users worldwide.

"After years of acrimony -- and now new action by the RIAA -- a digital panel appointed to advise the new RIAA chief will enable the music industry, artists and Internet users to meet a common goal of legal and mutually beneficial music distribution worldwide," Mr. Oren said. "Peer to peer companies do not infringe copyrights; users do. (The RIAA lawsuit threat against users implicitly supports this view.) Furthermore, users download noncopyright-protected material because the music industry does not make copyrighted material broadly available on the Web."
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release...lease_id=54972

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Adds P2P Support

Windows Releases Windows 2000 SP4, Preps Windows XP SP2
Paula Rooney

Microsoft has released its fourth service pack for Windows 2000 and plans an update for Windows XP this summer.

On Thursday, Microsoft announced the availability of Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, an update for the three-year-old operating system that supports USB 2.0 and 802.1X wireless support on the desktop.

It also offers increased security and an easier set up, according to a statement issued by Microsoft.

The service pack, which is designed for Windows 2000 Professional desktop and Windows 2000 Server/Advanced Server, also offers updated application and hardware compatibility, better reliability and an updated End User License Agreement that reportedly gives customers added control.

As part of the change to the "Automatic Internet-Based Services" licensing, for instance, users can turn off features they don't want enabled.

Meanwhile, Microsoft plans to release an update for Windows XP this summer that offers support for peer-to-peer technology, a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed. One source, however, said the Windows XP Service Pack 2 will offer low level support for P2P calls.
http://www.crn.com/sections/Breaking...rticleID=42907

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Aural Intercourse: The Case For Legal Downloads
Mike Prevatt

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't visit Rollingstone.com. As far as music websites go, it's varied and updated frequently enough for anyone passionate about pop music to check out at least a few times a week. This is nearly ironic, as watching the print version of the institution endure its post-Maxim identity crisis has been both saddening and frustrating. On the site, I can see a majority of what's in the magazine with minimal "American Idol" invasion--as well as experience a wealth of supplemental features that includes the best music column found anywhere, "Well Hung at Dawn," and several audio and video clips for downloading or streaming.

The real boon to music-related websites of late has been what bonus features it can provide for the fan unfulfilled by the traditional media (broadcast radio, MTV, magazines) and seeking new musical blood. From VH1.com and Grooveradio.com, to Antimusic.com and the "Morning Becomes Eclectic" page at the website for Santa Monica, Calif.-based KCRW-FM, there is no end to the listening opportunities on the Net, something not lost on the online community and passionate music fan bases craving both hit singles and new discoveries. And it's good for the conscience because it's legal.

Now, I'm not going to badmouth file-sharing and its arguable illegitimacy. It's hard to fault the insatiable music fan who refuses to pay $19 for a CD, or wants more than that product and artist can commercially provide. But we all know one or two or maybe more cheapskates who have now pretty much substituted buying records because they now can obtain anything they could ever want for free through file-sharing. There shall be no crying for overplayed superstars like Shania Twain if she loses sales to this phenomenon, but until the industry undergoes some serious reform, I'll continue to worry about artists like Ed Harcourt and Black Eyed Peas--talented newcomers and slipstream acts that need sales to maintain recording contracts and the exposure their labels can provide, not to mention unsigned and underground acts needing to find an audience outside the local dive bar.

MP3.com, once a trailblazing site for amateur acts the world 'round until Universal bought it and emphasized its more popular artists, still provides an insane catalog of unsigned material. MTV.com has made catching particular videos easy with its numerous multimedia offerings, including the rookie and MTV2 tracks often broadcast after midnight. NME.com, the online home of revered British music weekly New Music Express, gave its devoted a week-long sneak of the entire new Radiohead album, Hail to the Thief, before its June 10 release, and offers newcomer clips, too.

There are smaller, lesser-known sites as well giving away music files, most of which can be saved onto your iTunes or WinAmp desktop players, and transferred to MP3 players like iPod and Rio, for unlimited use. Check out the likes of Epitonic.com, Trancedomain.com and Punkplanet.com--all featuring lesser- known artists--but watch for dead links when going the search engine route. Googling for music is as tricky as finding uncorrupted files on Kazaa.

"Aural" is going to now regularly feature a Legit Download of the Week of some artist bubbling somewhere under breakthrough status as a way of introducing new talent that may be unfamiliar to you. For the inaugural tip, Pitchforkmedia.com--an exceptional indie/CMJ-esque music site--gives us "Ratso Rizzo" by Laptop, an indie-electronic project consisting of one Jesse Hartman. It's a sublime `80s throwback befitting of any any electroclash party or alternative disco. Go to the site's MP3 area, look for the June 17 updates and double-click/right-click the song's link.
http://www.lasvegasmercury.com/2003/.../21591297.html

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"If 50 Cent was a rapper in Australia," says one local club DJ caustically, "he'd have been arrested rather than making the record industry $50 million.”

Crazy Remixed-Up Kids!

One minute you're mixing CDs in your bedroom, the next, the federal police are knocking on your door. And if you're a DJ, you can expect a visit, too. Richard Guilliatt reports on the music industry's all-out war on piracy.

If DJ Ace ever abandons music - which is possible, given that the multinational record companies had him arrested recently - he could probably make a living as a stand-up comic. The self-styled "Pimp Daddy" of Sydney's hip-hop scene was once a perennial clown on late-night internet chat sites, where he entertained fellow DJs by showing his flair for sexual braggadocio, inventing fictitious episodes of The Jerry Springer Show or uploading photos from his 19th birthday party at the Mercure Hotel in Sydney - the party that featured a Spider-Man cake and a fat-a-gram stripper who pinned Ace to the carpet while his friends laughed riotously in the background.

Which is not to belittle Ace's DJ-ing skills, for his remixes of popular rap and club tunes proliferated across the web, as did his mix CDs - Blazin' Up, Club Ace and Spades. Like a lot of young DJs, Ace compiled them on his home computer, in a bedroom at his parents' house in the south-western suburbs of Sydney (because even a Pimp Daddy can have trouble paying his own rent). He'd sample a song, pull it apart and put it back together with different beats, new vocal lines or whacked-out samples of dialogue, then send it out on the internet and invite comments. In the virtual music community that Ace and his peers inhabit, it's the way you show your skills; it's a scene in which guitar and drums have been replaced by CD-ROM and Pro Tools, where even the lingo has its own jump-cut rhythm in which gangsta slang is spliced with techie jargon.

"'Sup people!" Ace announced cheerfully at the beginning of this year. "My new CD, DJ Ace - Pimpology has been completed and will be available for downloading on March 17 on two web servers, FTPs and MIRC channels. Details will be available on my website. In the meantime, visit the website and vote for your favourite Pimpology cover design."

What DJ Ace surely never imagined was that the Australian federal police were monitoring his online antics as part of Operation Mezn, an investigation into music piracy launched by the record industry. And on April 23, Ace's parents answered a knock on the door and found themselves face-to-face with a contingent of cops armed with a search warrant. They came into the house, took Ace's computer and arrested him, taking him to police headquarters where he was charged with copyright violations for which he could face five years in jail.

When Ace appeared in court at Sydney's Downing Centre on May 13, he was plain old Tommy Le of Punchbowl, a clean-cut, spikey-haired, sober-looking teenage student in a dark suit and tie, hands clasped in front of him as if waiting for handcuffs. His co-defendants - Charles Kok Hau Ng and Peter Tran, both 20-year-old information technology students - were similarly attired. The trio have been accused of setting up an internet site, Mp3WmaLand, which allegedly enabled the world's computer users to illegally download $60 million worth of music.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...220597879.html

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Digital Piracy: Jack Valenti

Jack Valenti is the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood's industry association and chief lobbying arm in Washington.

Valenti was online to talk about the threat online piracy poses to the enterainment industry, and the legal and legislative solutions his organization would like to see enacted.

washingtonpost.com tech policy reporter David McGuire moderated the discussion.

The transcript follows.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

________________________________________________

David McGuire: Hi Jack, thanks for joining us. Your industry has an interesting perspective on Internet piracy. It hasn't done serious damage to your bottom line yet, but learning from the experiences of the record industry, you know the threat it poses. What's the MPAA doing to get out ahead of the problem?

Jack Valenti:We are meeting with the computer makers, chip makers, consumer electronic manufacturers to see if we can together forge technical solutions to the increasing peril of video piracy. We are also in contact with some of the best brains in the high tech industry to see if we can find technilogical solutions on our own. We know that technilogical magic that we find so amazing today will seem primitive a year to 18 months from now. So that is why we have a sense of urgency. We are also involved in Internet delivery of movies at a fair and reasonable price as an alternative to stealing.

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Washington, D.C.: What incentives do you think can be offered to keep people from turning to online bootlegs of movies? I think to some people it is just a novel way to catch a sneak-peek at films, but they still are likely going to their local theater to see feature-length films too.

Jack Valenti:I do not see the theatrical experience diminishing. To watch a movie in a theater with staduim seating, huge screen and state of the art sound is an epic viewing adventure that cannot be duplicated anywhere else. But 40% of the total revenues that come to the major studios emerges from home video. Therefore, if people have stolen a movie there is no need for them to rent or buy it at a local video store. Moreover, as the quality of Internet downloads improves expontentially it could have a decaying effect not only on the post-theatrical market but on the theatrical market as well. Movie theft on the Internet is not a casual issue. It puts to hazzard the future of the film industry.

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Pittsburgh, PA: Is your association planning to lob a massive attack of lawsuits and other action against online movie pirates, similar to what the RIAA announced yesterday?

Jack Valenti:We have no such firm plans at this time. But I don't rule out any options if the occasion requires it.

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Rockville, Maryland: Regarding DVD Movie copy rights, If a person can't make a archive copy of a DVD movie, shouldn't the price of the DVD be lowered?

Jack Valenti:If you allow people to make copies of a DVD then everyone can break the code and the DVD is no longer protected. My judgment is that the prices for DVDs at Wal-Mart type stores and other places are quite fair and reasonable.

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Kansas City: File-sharing isn't anywhere near as dangerous to you as it is to record companies. We're still a long way from having the technological means to download high-quality movie files in a reasonable amount of time. Aren't you exaggerating these fears to get more control over the computer industry?

Jack Valenti:I suggest that you keep in touch with experiments now going on which forcast an incredible increase in the speed of Internet delivery. In an experience at Cal-Tech a high quality DVD movie was downloaded in 5 seconds. This experiment is labeled FAST. In another experiement 6.7 gigabytes was hurled half way around the world in one minute. A movie has 4.6 gigabytes to give you some idea of the future rapidity with which we wil be confronted.

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“Music sales are falling but they are still at record levels compared with a decade ago.”

Music Industry 'Slow To Change'
Darren Waters

The music industry is threatening to sue individual computer users who download songs from the internet without paying for copyright.

But some people believe it is the industry's fault for failing to meet consumers' needs and adapting too slowly to new technologies.

Gerd Leonhard, founder and former chief executive officer of licensemusic.com and founder of digmarketing.com, told BBC News Online that the industry is clinging on to the past.

"The industry has always opposed new technology," he said.

"They are following a system that has worked for the last 50 years."

The industry says it is a facing a global crisis as sales continue to drop worldwide year on year.

Earlier this year the global music industry reported that album sales had dropped by 6%.

The industry frequently paints a picture of crisis as it tries to stop music sales haemorrhaging away through online piracy and CD copying.

Anthony Morgan, strategy director of music business and marketing agency Frukt, said the industry was trying to change.

"It's more accurate to say that the industry is evolving into a new structure," he told BBC News Online.

Music sales are falling but they are still at record levels compared with a decade ago, he said.

He added: "Globally there is a decrease in sales - but from some of the highest sales of all time.

"Sales are possibly dropping to something which is more realistic."

Worldwide music sales amounted to $32bn (£20.5bn), according to recent figures.

"Music is bigger than ever," said Mr Leonhard.

"When you look at the numbers - 250 million downloads from [online music service] Kazaa for example.

"People are enjoying more music more than ever before. That points to a great potential."

Mr Leonhard argues that the industry is reacting slowly to change because it does not want to abandon business practices that have brought it great success over the last half a century.

"The problem for the industry is: Who makes the money in the future?"

He added: "The people who are making the money now are much less interested in making these changes."

Mr Morgan said: "It is not an industry that has had to change much.

"Traditionally the music industry has been about selling product on a piece of plastic.

"The industry has been clinging to CDs for too long."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3019948.stm

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

The Copyright Cage

Bars can't have TVs bigger than 55 inches. Teddy bears can't include tape decks. Girl Scouts who sing "Puff, the Magic Dragon" owe royalties. Copyright law needs to change.
Jonathan Zittrain

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I WAS TALKING WITH A LAW SCHOOL COLLEAGUE about cyberlaw and the people who study it. "I've always wondered," he said, "why all the cyberprofs hate copyright."

I don't actually hate copyright, and yet I knew just what he meant. Almost all of us who study and write about the law of cyberspace agree that copyright law is a big mess. As far as I can tell, federal courts experts don't reject our system of federal courts, and criminal law experts split every which way on the overall virtue of the criminal justice system. So what's with our uniform discontent about copyright?

I think an answer can be gleaned from tax scholars. Without decrying the concept of taxation, every tax professor I've met regards the U.S. tax code with a kind of benign contempt, explaining it more often as a product of diverse interests shaped from the bottom up than as an elegant set of rules crafted by legal artisans to align with high-level principles.

Copyright is like that, too. While I hate its Platonic form no more than the typical tax maven hates Tax, I find myself struggling to maintain the benign part of my contempt for its ever- expanding 21st-century American incarnation. A gerrymandered tax code primarily costs the public money—measured by overall inefficiency or extra taxes unfairly levied on those without political capital. But copyright's cost is measured by the more important if inchoate currency of thoughts and ideas.

We live today under two copyright regimes: the law on the one hand and reality as experienced by the public on the other. The law—Title 17 of the federal code—proscribes such acts as the public performance of music without payment to the composer or the copying of books without permission of the author (or more likely the company to whom the author long ago assigned rights).

The limits on behavior enumerated in Title 17 have gone far beyond the wholesale copying of books, maps, and charts covered by the first copyright act of 1790. They extend to computer software, dances, boat hulls (delineated in a 1998 amendment as "the frame or body of a vessel including the deck of a vessel, exclusive of masts, sails, yards, and rigging"), and music—Congress covered performances in 1909 and copies of sound recordings in 1971. What the public can and can't do is described at a level of detail worthy of the most byzantine tax code.

For example, bars and restaurants that measure no more than 3,750 square feet (not including the parking lot, as long as the parking lot is used exclusively for parking purposes) can contain no more than four TVs (of no more than 55 inches diagonally) for their patrons to watch, as long as there is only one TV per room. The radio can be played through no more than six loudspeakers, with a limit of four per room, unless the restaurant in question is run by "a governmental body or a nonprofit agricultural or horticultural organization, in the course of an annual agricultural or horticultural fair or exhibition conducted by such body or organization." Then it's OK to use more speakers.
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/J..._julaug03.html

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European iTunes Delayed By Up To A Year
David Minto

Apple Computer’s plan to launch a European version of its prodigiously successful online music store, iTunes, faces a delay of up to year after European branches of record labels have proved even less amenable to digital technology than their US counterparts.

Actually, in this case it’s not entirely fair to pin all the blame of the record companies. The problem has primarily arisen because of the complexity of Europe’s legal environment, where artists often have different arrangements in each country for how much they are paid per digital download. Whereas in the US federal law meant that Apple was able to push licence agreements fairly easily once it had dealt with security issues, in Europe it faces a more difficult challenge to sell a ‘one-price-fits-all’ system.

After the infectious success of it US iTunes store, initial reports had expected Apple to launch a European counterpart as early as September. Now, most industry sources indicate the launch will be held back until well into 2004.

It is, as has become apparent with iTunes, in the record labels’ own interests to find a pay-download format that works. Current download and subscription services have attracted a minimal following amongst consumers, even when they have received support from the record companies. Meanwhile, the popularity of illicit downloads, the major source of digital paranoia in the music industry, shows no sign of abating.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16866

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

QnA

What's on the Menu? Command Shortcuts
J. D. Biersdorfer

What is a contextual menu? How does it differ from the regular menu bar at the top of the computer screen?

A. Menus - lists of options, commands and controls - are a common part of operating systems, like Microsoft Windows and Apple Computer's Mac OS, that use a graphical interface and a pointing device like a mouse.

But menus are not limited to the top of the screen; often one will pop up wherever your mouse is pointing when you right-click. These hidden menus are called contextual menus because they appear in the context of what you are doing. They can provide an efficient way to execute common commands that might be buried in the program's menu bar.

If you are working in Windows and want to change your wallpaper background, for example, rather than going from the Start menu to the Control Panel area and double-clicking on the Display icon to get to the wallpaper settings in the Display Properties box, you can simply right-click on the desktop and select Properties to bring the box up.

Many programs have built-in contextual menus related to common functions that can spare you from wasting time wading around in the menu bar looking for, say, the settings box for font or paragraph formats.

If you use a computer system that has a single-button mouse (as many Macintosh systems do), you will often call up a contextual menu by clicking on the screen while holding down the Control key on the keyboard.

In the most recent version of Microsoft Word for the Mac, control-clicking on a specific word in the document will call up a contextual menu of basic editing and formatting commands, plus a shortcut to the program's thesaurus and - if the word is misspelled - to the spelling-checker dictionary. Windows Word users can call up these contextual menus by right-clicking on a word.

Q. Why does a Web page's appearance differ depending on whether I am using Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator?

A. Although they started out as simple electronic documents that could display hyperlinked text and photographs, Web pages have in the last decade grown much more sophisticated in both their design and construction. Web pages now can contain cascading style sheets, Flash animations, JavaScript and other coding that turns a page view into an interactive multimedia experience.

Not all Web browsers are designed the same way, and the appearance of some pages can be affected by which one you are using. Some versions of Netscape's browser, for example, tend to display fonts at smaller sizes than Microsoft's Internet Explorer does, which can affect a page's appearance.

There are other Web browsers, too, including Opera, Mozilla and Safari; each may display the same page slightly differently. There are also differences between the way Web browser programs for Windows interpret a Web page and how a browser on a Macintosh may render it.

To save time and money, many Web design shops optimize their pages to look best in one or two of the most commonly used browser programs. The Windows version of Internet Explorer is the most frequently used Web browser program (partly because of its integration within the Windows operating system), so most designers create Web pages that look best in that browser.

Q. Is there an easier way to take screen shots in Windows than by using the PrintScrn button and pasting it into the Paint program?

A. If you are tired of saving screen images the old-fashioned way - by creating files with your built-in Windows Paint program - you might want to consider screen-capture shareware.

Freeware programs like Gadwin PrintScreen (www.gadwin.com /printscreen) can take screen shots of the entire screen or just one window with a keystroke, and save the file into one of several common image formats. Similar programs can be found at shareware sites around the Web.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/te...ts/26askk.html

Top 10 D/Ls - Singles

BigChampagne

Bill Seeks to Loosen Copyright Law's Grip
Brian Krebs

Two members of Congress today introduced legislation they said would ensure the American public's access to the nation's intellectual and artistic heritage.

The Public Domain Enhancement Act would require the owners of copyrighted works -- such as songs, books and software -- to pay a $1 fee to maintain their copyrights once 50 years have transpired from the work's original publication. If owners failed to pay the fee, the work would enter the public domain, and the public would be free to reproduce, republish or alter it.

The legislation is aimed directly at recent changes to copyright law that extended the lifetime of copyrights from 75 to 95 years after the author of a work dies. The changes were part of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which the Supreme Court upheld in January.

The sponsors of today's bill said that the 1998 law prevents the public from building upon and preserving creative works. The Internet, they say, has made more information and creative works available to the public than ever before. It allows the public to preserve materials that their owners might forget about once they're no longer profitable, and is built on a foundation of copying, enhancing and sharing all manner of content. Perpetually extending copyright terms, they say, cuts away at what makes the Internet a vibrant and important cultural exchange.

Stanford University professor Lawrence Lessig, who argued the copyright extension case before the Supreme Court last year, said that longer copyright terms give large corporations like the Walt Disney Co. a lock on material that should be readily available online.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), one of the chief sponsors of the copyright proposal introduced today, cited Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent to the Supreme Court's January decision to uphold the Sonny Bono law. Breyer, Lofgren noted, made the point that excessive copyright lifetimes go too far to protect a small percentage of commercially valuable works. The justice wrote that only 2 percent of copyrighted works between 55 and 75 years old retain their commerical value.

"As a result, there are so many works that are no longer published, read or even seen anymore that they have effectively been orphaned," Lofgren said in an interview. "It is time to give these treasures back to the public."

Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the new legislation would restore the balance between copyright law and legitimate uses of works that no longer hold commercial value.

"There are literally hundreds of millions of Web sites and other works that won't have economic value a few years from now but will continue to be copyrighted for 150 years, leaving archivists, historians and others interested in preserving these works shut out for no good reason," von Lohmann said. "As long as the author is finished exploiting the value of the work, it should fall into the public domain so that the best use can be made of it."

Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, said consumers are not necessarily better off when copyrighted works lapse into the public domain.

"Especially in the case of movies, those works are more available for public consumption when their owners have an economic incentive to preserve and market them," Taylor said. "Once those works fall into the public domain, those incentives are removed and consumers end up being the losers."

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said the legislation introduced today does not impose a severe burden on copyright owners. Instead, it requires them to take stock of their holdings to see which works still have commercial value.

"This bill simply says, 'Fine you can keep your copyright term extension, but show that you really want to exploit the work,'" Zittrain said. "If you're not willing to even invest a dollar to retain the monopoly on it, then why is there any reason to think that the monopoly will cause you to do anything with it?"

Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) joined Lofgren in introducing today's bill.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jun25.html

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

Content transfers “A snap.”

Pioneer Introduces World's First DVD Recorders With TiVo(R) Service
Press Release

Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc., a leader in digital home entertainment products, is revolutionizing home video recording with the introduction of the world's first DVD recorders featuring the TiVo service. These new recorders offer consumers the control provided by the easy-to-use TiVo service integrated with advanced DVD recording for the option of short-term storage on a hard drive or long- term archival of broadcast programming on DVD-R/RW discs.

The Pioneer Elite DVR-57H includes a 120-gigabyte hard disc drive while the Pioneer DVR-810H boasts 80 gigabytes of storage space. Both models are powered by the TiVo service and offer the ability to:

-- Schedule and record programs while playing a DVD.
-- Play programs from the hard drive while recording from the hard drive
onto a DVD.
-- Watch a program from the beginning while the recorder simultaneously
finishes the recording.
-- Transfer content at high speeds from the hard drive to a DVD for
long-term storage.

Both DVD recorders offer DCDi(TM) by Faroudja progressive scan circuitry for outstanding image quality when watching DVD movies.

"Pioneer is setting the standard for value-added DVD recorders by including the TiVo service with these two new products. Unlike many of the original DVD recorders, we're offering effortless operation with maximum benefit," said Russ Johnston, senior vice president of marketing for home entertainment at Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. "Consumers will not see this type of innovation from any other manufacturer in the near term."

Both the DVR-57H and the DVR-810H offer consumers the TiVo Basic(TM) service with no monthly fee upfront. Consumers will get DVR functionality such as; pausing live TV, recording from the program guide, manual repeat recording by time and date and three days of program guide data. Consumers can upgrade their TiVo service at any time, to include features such as a fourteen-day program guide, Season Pass(TM), WishList(TM) and Search by Title.

Both DVD recorders come equipped with a 181-channel cable TV tuner for instant one-touch recording to the hard drive. Once the content is stored on the hard drive, consumers can transfer the content on to a DVD-R/RW disc and navigate the DVD menus using the friendly TiVo interface. This is the first product to seamlessly integrate DVD-R/ RW and TiVo service functionality in one easy to use product.

When a disc is inserted, the recorder automatically searches for available recording space. There is no tedious process of finding blank space to begin recording as exists with today's VHS recorders. Through automatic menus and easy navigation with the sophisticated TiVo user interface, consumers can simply locate and play a desired portion of the broadcast material instead of fast-forwarding and rewinding through videotape.

By connecting a VCR via analog inputs to the DVD recorder, transferring content becomes a snap.

The DVR-810H and DVR-57H offer analog inputs, enabling consumers to connect a camcorder to the DVD recorder for basic transferring functions. Once the content from the camcorder is stored onto the hard drive, users have the ability to edit the content before burning it to DVD. The newly created DVD-R disc can be played back on most other automobile, home, portable DVD players and DVD-ROM computer drives.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030625/law044_1.html

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

MPAA Applauds Newly Signed Florida Law

The Motion Picture Association of America on Wednesday applauded the decision of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to sign into law legislation that will pave the way for new communication services for the people of Florida.

The law builds on existing legal protections by covering new technology and illegal devices used to steal communication services. Specifically, it protects movies, music, games, software and other intellectual property rights from piracy by shielding the communication services that deliver that content for a charge whether by the Internet, through new wireless and broadband technologies or by conventional cable service.

Supporters of the bill congratulated Bush and the Florida Legislature for "rebuffing the misinformation circulated in recent weeks by opponents of the legislation."

"Contrary to the claims of others, under this law computers, TIVOs, VCRs, multipurpose tools, including encryption software, remain perfectly legal and can be connected without committing a crime or fear of being sued by a cable operator or any communication service provider for that matter," says Vans Stevenson, senior vice president of state legislative affairs for the MPAA. "Indeed, only a deliberate thief will find this law inhospitable."
http://orlando.bizjournals.com/orlan...3/daily33.html

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

Latest Potter Book Scanned, Swapped
Paul Festa

People who want to read the latest Harry Potter book but don’t want to wait in line or pay for it can download a free copy.

As a result of the increasing ease and speed with which a book can be scanned and repackaged into an e-book format with common technology, the latest installment of the Harry Potter series--along with its four predecessors, movies based on the books and audio versions of the texts--can be obtained as easily as an audio file on file-swapping services such as Kazaa.

That, some predict, could be a harbinger of a nascent Napsterization of the book publishing industry.

"I think that just like MP3s, popular books will become popular downloads as more devices allow people to read with the ease of carrying the real thing," said Wayne Chang, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and systems administrator for PickATime.com, an online appointment book. "These e-books are made by users, not pros."

Many Web sites provide step-by-step instructions on how to scan books and format them for use with various software, including Microsoft's Reader. Because the books are scanned from printed copies, they evade the copy controls put on e-books that publishers produce and distribute.

Other sites aggregate shared e-books for download, much like the ill-fated Napster and a host of successors have done for audio and video files.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-1020984.html

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

Canadian MPs Vow To Overturn Copyright Term Extension

The National Post reports that both government and opposition members of parliament have vowed to overturn last week's decision to approve a copyright term extension in Canadian copyright law for unpublished works for deceased authors. Opposition MP Chuck Strahl vows to tie up the Canadian parliament, threatening the entire bill, should the extension provisions not be removed. http://www.nationalpost.com/national...4379-8B74-1BFC

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

Senator Presses Pentagon On Spy Plan
Declan McCullagh

A key U.S. senator expressed renewed concern about the Pentagon's data-mining project and asked the Defense Department to give more detail about how the system will collect information on Americans.

Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who wrote legislation requiring a report on the Total Information Awareness project, asked on Tuesday for the Pentagon to respond to 11 pointed questions about the project's scope, its implications for privacy and civil liberties, and which private-sector and government databases would be linked into the system.

"I remain very deeply concerned that TIA technology will be used to plow through large amounts of private information on individual Americans in the United States in search of hypothetical threat situations," Wyden said in a three-page letter to the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The Pentagon claims that TIA, which it has renamed to Terrorist Information Awareness in response to public criticism, is a promising collection of technologies that can track patterns in databases and provide advance warning of terrorist incidents. TIA will mine other databases but will not create a master computerized dossier on every American, DARPA says.

Earlier this year, in a triumph of privacy concerns over worries about terrorist threats, Congress required DARPA to prepare a report on what laws would cover a final implementation of TIA. In a 102-page report dated May 20, DARPA said TIA would track transactions that "would form a pattern that may be discernable in certain databases to which the U.S. government would have lawful access."

DARPA did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

In his letter on Tuesday, Wyden asked for additional details about which databases would be tied to TIA. "Does it include credit card activity, ATM activity, wire transfers, loan applications, and/or credit reports?" Wyden asked.

He also asked how DARPA plans to find 1 million photographs for its planned Next Generation Face Recognition program and how much authority a newly formed privacy advisory committee would have.

The TIA project became public in early 2002 when President Bush chose Adm. John Poindexter, who had been embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, to run DARPA's Information Awareness Office. Groups such as the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery, the professional association for computer scientists, have urged Congress to place limits on TIA.
http://news.com.com/2100-1029-1020674.html

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

Library Groups Want Info On Web Filtering Technologies

American librarians plan to step up pressure on software vendors to disclose more about how their products work in the wake of this week's Supreme Court decision. Filtering vendors have historically provided few details about their criteria for blocking Web sites, arguing that the information is proprietary.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1...074300,00.html

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

RIAA's Rosen Departs On An Optimistic Note
Jefferson Graham

The self-described "lightning rod" of the music industry wants to have a life again.

For five years, Hilary Rosen, 44, has been the public face and voice in the industry's battle against digital piracy. CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major record companies, Rosen leaves her $1 million-a-year in-the-hot-seat post today to spend more time with the two children she shares with her partner.

"It's been an extremely rigorous job, as it needed to be, because of what the industry is going through," Rosen says over coffee on a recent Southern California visit. "But I really feel we're poised for a recovery in the next 18 months. I'm optimistic."

In August she'll begin working for CNBC as an on-air commentator, and also will consult for the RIAA.

Rosen's tenure at the association has been rocky, to say the least. It has been marked by the growth of trading free music online, the ease of CD burning, declining sales and shutdowns of major record stores. All the while, she has been the industry's often angry voice, calling for change, enforcement and reason.

"She did everything humanly possible to get the important messages across, that certain behavior is not legal and fair. And she has been relentless in her advocacy at a time when the message was not popular," says Zach Horowitz, president of Universal Music and an RIAA board member. "At the beginning, it looked like we were campaigning against progress, but there's been a sea change in that perspective, thanks to her."

In the pre-digital era, the top RIAA job was mostly about issuing gold and platinum albums for best sellers, and tending to legislative minutiae in D.C. "It was always a big job," Rosen says. "Napster turned it into a public job."

The first major file-sharing program, created in a dorm room in 1999 to make it easier to find music files on the Web, Napster appealed to music fans on their most basic level: free music, freely traded.

The RIAA sued, enlisting acts such as Metallica along the way to speak out for artists' rights. The labels won the legal battles — in court, Napster was shut down — but lost the PR war.

Rosen "received death threats. She had stalkers," Horowitz says. "The attacks were so personal, unfair and inexcusable."

Rosen insists she wasn't troubled. "They were attacking me for something I was proud of doing: enforcing the rights of copyright owners. I never felt victimized."

The music fans, who often hacked the RIAA's site and made it inaccessible, "were just being silly," she says. "People took their free music way too seriously."

And as Napster's successors have flourished — Kazaa now has more than 230 million users — the RIAA recently has trained its legal guns on users themselves. Four college students accused of online trading settled suits for thousands of dollars. The RIAA began sending 500,000 to 1 million threatening messages a week to users of Kazaa and battled Internet provider Verizon to obtain the names of several music-sharing subscribers.

The point of the ramped-up efforts is to "unveil the cloud of anonymity infringers think they have," Rosen says.

Phil Leigh, an analyst for Raymond James and a longtime critic of the record labels, says he wishes Rosen had embraced digital distribution with the passion of her attacks on digital piracy. "She always seemed one- sided," he says. "Instead of suing companies and your users, why not also try to take advantage of digital, instead of trying to hold it back?"

The upside of digital distribution is huge, he says: "No manufacturing, shipping or stocking costs or returns. From the supplier's point of view, it makes all the sense in the world."

The industry's first answers to Napster — legitimate services such as Pressplay and MusicNet — were for the most part ignored by consumers and dismissed by critics for poor selection and onerous restrictions.

Then, in April, Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store, offering downloads for 99 cents a song, with few restrictions. Critics loved it, and Apple has sold 5 million downloads since. Rosen, an avid Apple user who regularly dons an iPod portable music player, says the industry's challenge is "to create as good an experience with the Windows audience."

Apple says it will do just that by year's end. AOL Music, MusicMatch, Amazon, MTV and Roxio also are working on download stores.

As for Rosen's replacement, the RIAA is currently searching for candidates. Several congressmen have been cited in speculation, as has former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The next phase in the music industry's growth won't necessarily be as combative, Rosen says. "A lot of important precedents have been set."

But anyone who thinks piracy will magically go away "is dreaming," she adds. "Right now, piracy has a 98% share. We need a better balance. And we're getting there."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...23-rosen_x.htm

Until next week,

- js.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Current Week In Review.

Recent WIRs -

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16705 June 21st
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16638 June 14th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16580 June 7th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16489 May 31st

The Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts at lycos.com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.

Ðiego · 27-06-03, 05:11 AM

Updated

http://www.naphoria.com/indexwir.htm

Ð

multi · 27-06-03, 06:24 AM

thats look ing good there..Mr.Ð

great read jack..

tho the news now, is starting to look all bad..

pod · 27-06-03, 11:31 AM

Quote:

Rosen leaves her $1 million-a-year in-the-hot-seat post today

Wow, for $1M/year I'd be happy to berate P2Pers all day too

Quote:

No manufacturing, shipping or stocking costs or returns. From the supplier's point of view, it makes all the sense in the world.

Every sound ever produced available instantly anywhere in the world to anyone with a few minutes of Internet access. No more out of stock, out of print disappointments. On demand stats, dynamic bundling, pricing and promotion, 'rich media' opportunities galore.... seems like a no brainer to me.

dingdongding · 27-06-03, 07:39 PM

as always great stuff jack

om another note did anyone see the "rap" (dare i say musical?) that u.s. senators mary bono and billy tauzin put together to lobby for the riaa head nazi position? they really are trying to turn ppl off from listening to music...

SJ56 · 27-06-03, 08:40 PM

There are 259506 words in this week Peer to Peer News

JackSpratts · 27-06-03, 10:00 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by SJ56
There are 259506 words in this week Peer to Peer News

yeah, it's a little light this week. with the hot weather and all i spent some time at the lake. i'll try to dig up a few extra stories next week.

- js.

27-06-03, 06:24 AM	#5
multi Thanks for being with arse Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The other side of the world Posts: 10,343	thats look ing good there..Mr.Ð great read jack.. tho the news now, is starting to look all bad.. __________________ i beat the internet - the end boss is hard Secret Temple of It

27-06-03, 07:39 PM	#7
dingdongding ddd Join Date: Jun 2003 Posts: 14	mary bono and billy tauzin scare the world as always great stuff jack om another note did anyone see the "rap" (dare i say musical?) that u.s. senators mary bono and billy tauzin put together to lobby for the riaa head nazi position? they really are trying to turn ppl off from listening to music...

27-06-03, 08:40 PM	#8
SJ56 Registered User Join Date: Feb 2002 Posts: 20	FYI There are 259506 words in this week Peer to Peer News

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