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Old 12-06-03, 10:03 PM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Post Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 14th, '03

Foundlings and File Sharing

There’s a new kid on the file sharing block and if he isn’t the biggest or the strongest yet, he just may turn out to be the most useful.

A major problem facing most users familiar with peer to peer is the all or nothing approach to making connections. Take KaZaA for instance, or WinMx WPN, or Gnutella or Blubster, it doesn’t really make much difference which one you choose because in this instance they’re all the same; when you connect to one of the clients on the network, you connect to all of them. While this seems obvious to the point of redundancy, it’s worth taking the time to consider. Unlike AIM, ICQ or MSN for instance you can’t control your social groups. You’re at the mercy of the Internet when you log onto to a P2P. It’s all for one and one for all. And that’s great – most of the time. Maybe even nearly all of the time. But for those instances when you’d like a little bit of say over who you’re dealing with, well, up until now you’ve been out of luck. There may be times when you just don’t want to invite the whole planet in for the party. A small get together with a few good friends might be the perfect afternoon.

That’s where Waste comes in, and with the help of a crack team of Napsterites’ P2P-Zone regulars we’ve been checking it out for a week now. If you haven’t heard yet, Waste is the latest brainchild of Justin Frankel, Nullsoft programmer extraordinaire and the man who brought forth such indispensable applications as Winamp (always on at my place) and the decentralized peer-to-peer application Gnutella. The story goes that Frankel’s bosses at AOL were dissatisfied with his latest baby. Even though they were using it successfully for internal communications and file transferring it was felt too destabilizing for their established AIM consumer base and the company was going to let it die. So to make sure the foundling had a fighting chance at survival Frankel left it on the Internet’s doorstep, hoping that some kind soul would take it in. Well, somebody did. Like me, and a few thousand others, and we’re kind of growing fond of the little tyke.

Take a really good centralized P2P with all that that means, like instant searching and instant downloading (what Napster tried to be), combine it with a solid centralized chat that lets you make your own rooms and have open or private conversations, then set it up so you can pick only the members you want to let in; add some very useful features like the ability to start uploads, that is, make it so you can send people files instead of waiting for them to come and get them; encrypt the hell out of it so any bad guys sniffing around your pipe can’t rip off your data and then to make it really useful, get this - use multicasting to decentralize the whole thing so nobody can control it or shut it down. Finally, make it small and easy to use. So easy as a matter of fact that with zero documentation, the P2P-Zoners had it up and running in minutes.

So here’s what you get: Easy to use decentralized file sharing that’s fast, encrypted searches, encrypted flexible chat and the ability to invite who you want, all on a personal network controlled by you, not some faceless 3rd party giant like AOL or MSN. Hey, it’s your cyber room. Do what you want in it.

This program is going to find it’s way onto everybody’s desktop from ages 8 to 88. It’s as killer an app as I’ve ever seen. As powerful in its way as email or instant messaging and it may find itself just as indispensable. It works effortlessly and like a good servant disappears into the background while it waits for your instructions. You’ll wonder how you got along without it.

Justin Frankel can be proud of this one for giving it birth, but users all over the world can be equally proud for saving it’s life.

This little baby is going places when it grows up.








Enjoy,

Jack.









Appeals Court May Hear Copyright Case
Jon Healey

A federal appeals court may soon consider the entertainment industry's copyright-infringement claims against two popular online file-sharing systems.

U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson in Los Angeles cleared the way for the major record labels, music publishers and movie studios to appeal his preliminary ruling in favor of the Morpheus and Grokster file-sharing networks, without having to wait for a final decision in the case.

The entertainment companies have 10 days to ask the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to accept their appeal, which the court is expected to do.

Wilson ruled April 25 that a recent version of the Morpheus and Grokster software didn't violate copyright law, even though many users of the software were pirating music and movies.

Wilson is still considering whether to let the entertainment companies pursue claims based on earlier versions of the software.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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Copyright Controls 'Out Of Tune'
Bill Thompson

Copyright holders like record labels have too much power over what people do with songs, argues technology analyst Bill Thompson

After failing to persuade an appeals court of its case, US ISP Verizon is handing over the names of four of its customers to the lawyers at the Recording Industry Association of America. The disclosure marks a significant shift in the way that customer privacy is dealt with in US law and will, as with many aspects of the regulation of the internet, have an impact on net users around the world.

The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) first contacted Verizon last year after finding files being shared through the Kazaa peer- to-peer network from computers with IP addresses on Verizon's network. They had no way to find who the users behind those computers were, so used a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to issue a court-authorised subpoena to the ISP, asking for the subscriber names. Verizon refused, arguing that they were just a communications channel and had nothing to do with the potentially copyright-infringing behaviour of their customers. They also said that because the DMCA subpoenas were issued by a court clerk and not by a judge they were unconstitutional.

Now a court has ordered them to hand over the names, although the legal arguments will continue for a bit longer as the appeal has not been finally decided. But it seems pretty clear that under existing law Verizon have little chance of winning. The DMCA was written to give massive power to copyright owners, and it is working. There is also little chance of any changes to the law getting through a US political system where many elected representatives rely on campaign funding from the entertainment industry.

So we can assume that from now on any time the record or music industry wants to know whose computer is hosting a pirate version of Spiderman, a few ripped MP3s of some old songs or the odd installation of a piece of unpaid for software, they will be able to find out - at least in the US.

This does not mean all of those people will be prosecuted. One of the aspects of the law raised by this case is that the RIAA can ask for people's names before they start proceedings - they just have to turn up, say "we think these people are abusing our copyright" and they can get the subpoena. But it may result in even more nasty and threatening letters going out from the RIAA, and have a chilling effect on the free sharing of music over the net and the growth of the file sharing networks.

Over here we do not have the DMCA, although our very own European Union Copyright Directive does lots of the same stuff. However this does not mean we should be relaxed about privacy, especially after recent Home Office proposals for storage of and access to data about e-mails sent and web pages visited. But UK practice does at least involve the police and the courts: a record company cannot just walk into an office, ask an official for a stamp on a form and send it off to an ISP.

US net users should be very worried about the implications of the Verizon case. The techno-optimists say that the next generation of file- sharing services will make it impossible to pin down which computer is hosting a file and so the law will be helpless. This may work for a while, but just as in the ongoing battle between virus writers and anti-virus tools, each side has clever programmers and an incentive to develop new ways to get what it wants.

The real fight here is political. The record industry wants complete control over what people do with the songs it publishes; the people want some freedom to decide for themselves. Until we can resolve this difference we will continue to see more court cases, threatening letters, and new releases of file-sharing tools. We need to rethink what copyright means in a digital world, rather than wasting so much time, effort and money on this conflict.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2968216.stm


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Spike Lee Blocks Spike TV Name Use
Samuel Maull

Spike Lee has temporarily spiked Spike TV.

A Manhattan judge on Thursday granted Lee's petition and ordered Viacom Inc. to stop using Spike TV as the new name for its TNN network, pending a trial on the issue.

State Supreme Court Justice Walter Tolub ordered Lee to post a $500,000 bond to cover Viacom's losses in case the company wins.

Viacom announced the name change in April as part of its transformation of TNN into "the first network for men." Spike TV shows reruns of "The A-Team," "Baywatch" and "Miami Vice," sports entertainment such as pro wrestling and "American Gladiators" -- plus an animated series featuring Pamela Anderson as the voice of Stan Lee's "Stripperella," an undercover operative who is also a stripper.

Lee, whose numerous directing credits include "Malcolm X" and "Do the Right Thing," said he sued Viacom to protect his name from a deliberate attempt to capitalize on his image and prestige.

Viacom's lawyers said Lee cannot prove their network's new name refers to him. And they said no New York law gives a celebrity's first name the protection Lee is seeking without some other suggestion of the person's persona.

But the judge disagreed.

"Contrary to defendants' position, the court is of the opinion that in the age of mass communication, a celebrity can in fact establish a vested right in the use of only their first name or a surname," the judge wrote. "There are many celebrities that are so recognized, including Cher, Madonna, Sting and Liza."

He also said the name protection would probably be available if a network proposed a program called the "Cronkite News Hour."

Lee's lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, said, "We're obviously elated. We had a good judge who looked at the law and at the facts."

Dan Martinsen, spokesman for the network, said Viacom would appeal immediately and seek a stay of the judge's order. "We respectfully disagree with the judge's decision, which was not supported by the law or the evidence," Martinsen said.

Viacom, which bought TNN in 2000, also owns the CBS, VH1 and UPN networks, the Showtime movie channel and book publisher Simon & Schuster.
http://www.canoe.ca/Television/jun12_spike-ap.html


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ITunes Music Swap Just Won't Die By
Leander Kahney

Apple Computer may never be able to stop Mac users from sharing music over the Internet, despite its best attempts.

Last week, Apple released an iTunes update that disabled the ability to stream music over the Internet.

In April, Apple added a feature that let Mac users share tunes over a local area network, such as an office or a couple of Macs hooked up at home. This feature also permitted users to stream iTune music files. When some users published their addresses and began streaming iTunes music files over the Net, Apple responded by disabling the streaming aspect of the feature.

The move enraged a lot of Mac users, who were using the feature to stream music from their home machines to machines at work.

"Apple force-feeds customers shit, calls it sunshine," is how Cory Doctorow put it in a widely cited rant against Apple on the boingboing weblog.

But what Steve Jobs takes away, hackers are giving back.

On Thursday, programmer James Speth released a hastily written piece of software called 401(ok) that restores Net-wide music streaming to iTunes.

"I really liked the ability to access my music from anywhere, and I didn't like that the 4.0.1 update removed that feature," Speth wrote.

In the software's Read Me file, Speth writes that the software is "inefficient, ugly and poorly written. If anyone really uses this thing, I'll work on making it better."

The hack makes it fairly easy to restore Net-wide music streaming to iTunes. A more complicated, but more powerful hack exists in Andromeda, a software application that makes use of Mac OS X's built-in Web technologies, the Apache Web server and the PHP scripting language.
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,59127,00.html


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Boring Music As Bad For Cd Sales As P2P
Dinah Greek

Don't blame file sharing alone for declining CD sales, analyst group warns record companies

Boring music, not file swapping alone, is causing falling sales of music CDs, according to research from NPD Group.

The analyst group warned record companies that unless they address this factor they will not reverse market decline.

The music industry has been waging a long-running series of legal battles against peer-to-peer sites, which it blames for the slump in music CD sales.

Last year, sales in the US fell by 13 per cent, and were down another nine per cent in the first quarter of 2003.

But the year-long study from NPD into the buying habits of internet users showed that, even though 60 per cent of music buyers had never downloaded free music, CD sales for this group had still declined by seven per cent.

NPD Group attributes more than half of the slump to free file-sharing activity on services like Kazaa and Morpheus, but it also said that a significant portion of the decline came from older music buyers.

This group, which is not generally associated with illegal file sharing or digital piracy of any kind, complained of a dearth of interesting new material.

"Our research shows that even if digital file sharing were to disappear tomorrow, the record labels and retailers would still need to overcome important underlying causes of recent market declines," said Russ Crupnick, NPD's vice president.
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1141446


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Ben Harper Gets Mad

...Do you think you would ask Virgin Records, your parent label, to assist in distribution for Inland Emperor as it expands?

No [flatly]. You know, right now, I … [long pause] Unless I get an amazing call from the head of EMI, I’m going to wash my hands of major-label record deals. I’m going to finish out my contract and then move on.

Really?

Yeah. Let me give you an example. Not to overexaggerate or overindulge my own sense of self-worth, but all I have is my music! No, let me correct that—I have a lot of other things: I’ve got family, I’ve got friends and I’ve got health. Let’s just really get things in their proper perspective, right? But, beyond that, my voice is my music, and everything that goes with it, whether it’s the artwork, the layout or the graphic design. And I have existed in a corporate environment, autonomously, with my own opinions and ideals. Successfully, dare I say. And that’s no small feat in this day and age. Especially making music that’s against the commercial grain. It’s one thing if you’re going to take an indie approach on a corporate label while making music that’s considered “pop.” But when you’re not only operating as an indie artist on a major label, when the music itself is outside the mainstream, it’s twice as hard. So to remain in this situation 10 years shouldn’t go unnoticed.

With that said, what EMI has done in Europe is print my CD with an embossed label on the cover. Now, a CD cover is only five inches by five inches, right? Well, they’ve embossed an inch-and-a-half insignia saying, “THIS CD IS COPY-PROTECTED.” Without me knowing and without checking with me!

As much energy and time as I put into my music … [long pause] My music is what I give of myself to culture. And it’s my cultural statement. And they have gone and embossed this huge, ugly insignia on the cover of my record. Without checking with me first! That’s not my technological statement. That’s not my social or cultural statement. That’s not my musical statement. Yet they have used my voice as a vehicle to make their copy- protection statement. And it’s bullshit. And the heads of my record label aren’t even calling to discuss the matter with me!

I can’t believe that.

Give me a break, man. I’m done. So when you ask me about EMI handling distribution for my label … I’m sorry you’re getting the long answer to a short question, but, man, I’m done with these guys.

How long have you known about this decision?

I’ve known about this a week. The record company has known … how long? And I can’t … [pause] Let’s not get egotistical about this. There are plenty of people I’m not. But I am Ben Harper, whatever that means to whoever it means. And I can’t get these guys on the phone! I’m expecting a call right now. I called them two hours ago, and they haven’t called back! And I don’t get a call but once every six months from the record company president!

I can probably guess your advice for up-and-coming songwriters, then ...

Just stay independent. Big labels offer you the potential for bigger accomplishments faster, but you’re better off just staying on a small label and working it out over the long term. Just stick to your voice.

That’s my advice, man...

http://www.performingsongwriter.com/...b_ex/07003.cfm


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Overheard

"It's just like how they removed vinyl and moved it over to compact disc. Hello? Now we find out that compact discs don't last forever. They deteriorate really rapidly," he said. "The whole world of MP3 is the worst, lowest level of fidelity in sound you could ever expect. You're being conned and you've got a whole world out there thinking 'Hey, hey, I've got it free.' " – Johnny Rotten

http://www.canoe.ca/JamMusic/jun6_rotten-cp.html

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Apple Out To Acquire Napster Owner?
Tony Smith


Apple is in talks to buy Napster, Mac rumours site LoopRumors has claimed, citing "reliable sources".

Well, not Napster per se but Roxio, the CD burning software specialist, which itself acquired Napster's assets for $5 million after the peer-to-peer pioneer declared itself bankrupt last summer.

Roxio also owns PressPlay, the online music service launched by major music labels Sony and Universal in 2001.

It's not hard to see what might interest Apple in Roxio. Roxio's Mac portfolio is limited, but does include Toast, long the leading CD tool until Apple shipped iTunes and built disc burning into the Mac OS. But for many pro users, Toast remains the best solution for disc creation.

But of greater interest to Apple is Roxio's Windows offerings, which include Toast, video editing and digital photo software. Apple bought MP3 jukebox software from Casady & Greene, reworked the user interface and renamed it iTunes. You can see it doing the same with Roxio's Photosuite (iPhoto for Windows) and Videowave (iMovie for Windows).

Now that Apple is charging for its iLife bundle - iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD - its entirely possible that the company believes it can make more money selling the software than by giving it away to encourage consumers to buy a Mac. It certainly has to port iTunes to Windows to broaden the availability of its Music Store - indeed, it has been looking for a new member of staff to handle the port - so why not the rest of iLife?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/31096.html


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EU Ends Free Internet Tax Ride
Reuters

They've survived the bursting of the tech bubble, a global economic downturn and the occasional virus, but now overseas Internet retailers may see their European profit push derailed by one of the oldest drags on business: tax.

On July 1, a new EU directive goes into effect requiring all Internet companies to account for value added tax, or VAT, on "digital sales."

The law adds a 15 percent to 25 percent levy on select Internet transactions such as software and music downloads, monthly subscriptions to an Internet service provider and on any product purchased through an online auction anywhere in the 15-member bloc of nations.

The VAT is nothing new for some Net companies. European dot-coms have been charging customers VAT since their inception. Their overseas rivals, though, have been exempt, making foreign companies an obvious choice for the bargain-hunting consumer.

"It's a massive competitive disadvantage. It's good to see at last it being eroded," said David Melville, general counsel of U.K. ISP Freeserve, a division of French ISP Wanadoo.

Freeserve has lobbied furiously for the past two years to get the loophole closed, saying its chief rival, AOL U.K., the Internet unit of AOL Time Warner, saved $249.7 million in tax payments over the years.
http://news.com.com/2100-1019_3-1014519.html


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Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Privacy And Security

Summary Mr. Chairman, Mr. Waxman, and Members of the Committee, the Center for Democracy and Technology welcomes this opportunity to testify on the timely issue of privacy and security on popular peer-to-peer file-sharing systems.

The use of file-sharing software can raise serious privacy problems, often through mistakes by users that result in the sharing of very sensitive personal information. At the same time file-sharing technology is largely user controlled, oftentimes beneficial, and decidedly hard to regulate. A broad public education effort and better software practices are needed in order to inform people about the risks of file sharing while preserving the benefits of this valuable technology. CDT is a non-profit, public interest organization dedicated to promoting civil liberties and democratic values on the Internet. Since its creation in 1994, CDT has been heavily involved in the policy debates concerning privacy and computer security online. More recently, in partnership with other consumer groups, CDT has undertaken a project to articulate balanced consumer perspectives on digital copyright issues.[1] So-called "peer-to-peer file-sharing" systems - like the popular Kazaa, Morpheus, or Grokster applications - are among the most downloaded computer programs today. People who install these powerful tools need to be aware of the potentially serious privacy and security risks that may come from their use or misuse. Key concerns facing file-sharing users include:

* Inadvertent sharing of sensitive personal information - Peer-to- peer systems make it possible, and in some cases too easy, for people to share personal files. There is evidence on major peer-to- peer networks of users sharing very sensitive documents like their tax returns, inboxes, or check registers, certainly in most cases by mistake. * Spyware and adware - Many file-sharing programs contain "spyware" that communicates information for advertising or other reasons, often without the user's knowledge. Whether in peer-to- peer or other software, consumers deserve notice and real choices about how their computers communicate with third parties.

* Security concerns - File trading introduces risks similar to those faced by Internet users generally. People should take care to only execute files whose source they trust, and they should safeguard their computers when online.

* Legal risks - File traders who violate copyright laws face obvious legal risks. At the same time, CDT is concerned that at least one provision of current law - the broad subpoena power granted any copyright holder under Section 512(h) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - too easily allows the identity of a peer-to-peer participant or any Internet user to be unmasked wrongly or by mistake without their knowledge. These concerns are exacerbated by the growing use of file-sharing programs by millions of individuals and families, often with little or no training or experience. With these risks come benefits. Peer-to-peer file sharing can be used for legitimate, non-infringing file distribution. Its underlying technology, not so different from peer-to-peer networks like the World Wide Web, is rapidly evolving and being adopted for many new uses. Regulating this technology without broader ramifications would be difficult, and could have many unintended consequences. How then do we address these real privacy and security concerns? CDT believes that an active program of education and better software practices is needed. Such a program would:

* Inform people about the risks in file sharing - The public, and particularly the families of file-trading minors, need greater awareness of the potential risks of file sharing. Educational efforts- like the Internet community GetNetWise website-are already including tips for safe peer-to-peer use that should be widely disseminated.

* Seek fair information practices in file-sharing software - Much more should be done to design peer-to-peer software with transparency and better control over shared files. Software producers should reject invasive spyware, adopt fair information practices, and must provide better notice when information is transmitted to third parties. * Add privacy protections for DMCA subpoenas - Privacy and safety protections for end users should be included in the broad DMCA Section 512(h) subpoena provision in order to require more due process - including notice to the user and other protections- before ISPs are compelled to reveal sensitive personal identity information.

* Prevent invasive "self-help" tactics- In no circumstances should it be legal to damage another person's computer or files based on allegations of wrong-doing, including copyright infringement. All of this should take place against the broader backdrop of action regarding Internet privacy generally, where the continued growth of privacy technologies and industry self-regulatory efforts along with baseline privacy legislation are necessary to ensure public trust and democratic values. Congress has a valuable role to play in educating the public about the potential risks of file-sharing systems, in encouraging companies to design more user-friendly systems, and in modifying current legal provisions that create privacy risks. CDT looks forward to working with this Committee and others to further these efforts.
http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=52920


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Stock And Roll - Changing The Music Indistry
Press release

STOCK AND ROLL PRESS RELEASE & EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Whereas Music is the perfect partner for the World Wide Web, as both can so easily reach across jurisdictional lines and bring very diverse people to a common ground, the web is causing grave problems for the current music industry. File swapping servers such as Kazaa (which allow more than 130 million users, to download free copyrighted works without authorization) have created an ever increasing threat to the standard business model and more importantly, to the artists. There are also legitimate legal issues regarding whether they can even be shut down.

The Industry recently spent millions attempting to restrict access by developing the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) and so called “copy proof” compact discs. The SDMI code was cracked within one hour of it’s release and it now appears that a common felt tipped marker will easily defeat the “copy proof” CD’s. Even though the digital revolution is well under way, and the people have demonstrated what they want… free music. The current music establishment is alienating both the fans and the artists as they continually and futilely seek ways to keep the status quo by attempting to maintain control over the distribution of the music, the profits, and the artists.

At Stock and Roll we simply developed a better business model…

Stock and Roll will change the very nature of the music industry, as it will meet the challenges proposed by the new threat, while providing a more creative and profitable environment for both the talent and the fans. As there seems to be no way to legally halt the peer to peer servers such as Kazaa, we have decided to give the fans exactly what they want… free music. While still protecting the artist, and offering them other streams of revenue.

The innovative business strategy developed by Stock and Roll allows the fans to buy shares of stock directly in any of our artists for less than the price of a CD ($10 per share). The Stock and Roll strategy will instantly allow the artist to grow a base of loyal fans that are literally invested in the music. Each artist can gain up to 100,000 shareholders/marketing agents, who will help “spread the word” about the band and the company because when the artist prospers so does the shareholder (fan). An unintentional yet, fortuitous virtue of the Stock and Roll strategic business model is that the Stock and Roll record label does not take any financial risks on the artists, as it is the fan who provides the funding.

To provide worldwide visibility to our artists, Stock and Roll has developed an interactive internet Music TV channel, web radio station and internet music delivery platform that provides a live, 24 hour a day worldwide broadcast or stream of original music programming and free music downloads.

By combining an interactive Music TV broadcast, delivered to a worldwide audience, free music downloads, and the exclusive ability to purchase shares in any of our bands, Stock and Roll shall offer a better alternative to the fan. By offering majority ownership rights, up to 100,000 marketing agents, and a more equitable playing field to the artist Stock and Roll is positioned to become the leading international Music TV station, record company and Internet delivery system for music and related merchandise in the new millennium.

As no other company has ever offered “artist authorized” and therefore free and legal music downloads, nor the ability to purchase stock in an artist, Stock and Roll shall instantaneously garner international notoriety upon launch. Offering free and legal downloads will allow Stock and Roll to capture many of the 130 Million registered users at Kazaa and other free sites, as well as those consumers opposed to stealing the music. We also come full circle… as we finally provide the fans with a real motivation to spread the word and purchase the merchandise, as there is a real chance to make a profit when the band prospers.

In essence, Stock and Roll is seeking to take the “industry” out of the music by allowing the fans to directly interact with and literally become invested in the music. Stock and Roll offers a better, more equitable and intimate environment for the investor, the consumer, the fan, and musician as well as the chance for the fan/ investor to profit as the artist prospers.

Please also note that we are seeking accomplished artists to help us in two ways; we are seeking to form an advisory panel to help us ensure that the company philosophy and focus always remains on the artist, and we are also seeking a second round of funding.

To offer an added incentive if an investor donates all or a portion of their proceeds to a reputable charitable organization Stock and Roll will match those donations dollar for dollar in perpetuity.

STOCK AND ROLL - INVEST IN THE POWER OF MUSIC!
http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=52803


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10-4 On That Wi-Fi, Good Buddy?
Ben Charny

Wi-Fi wireless networking is rolling into a lot more truck stops.

In one of the largest projects of its kind, Knoxville, Tenn.-based IdleAire Technologies, a maker of in-cab gadgets for trucks, is installing Wi-Fi hot spots in 200 truck stops in 35 states, the company announced Tuesday.

The IdleAire plan is a sign of just how pervasive Wi-Fi is in the United States. Millions of homes and offices with broadband connections already use the networking equipment, which creates 300-foot zones in which laptops can wirelessly connect to the Web or to an office network.

Operators of offices, restaurants, Starbucks cafes, independent coffeehouses, delis, bookstores, airport lounges and train terminals have also installed pay- as-you-surf Wi-Fi networks, hoping to lure new customers or make new profits from veteran users.

Truck stops are no longer sparsely outfitted lots where truckers get gas and a few hours of rest before moving on. Aside from staples like electrical hook-ups and air conditioning, truck stops are also providing television, movies and long-distance phone calling, all paid for with the swipe of a credit card. The IdleAire plan adds Web access to the mix.

"They can stop at the nearest interstate exit," said David Everhart, IdleAire senior vice president. "They won't have to find a coffee shop, an airport or a hotel."

A second factor pushing more technology into truck stops is new legislation requiring truckers to rest eight hours after driving for 10 hours straight. It's created a miniboom for movies and entertainment, or a broadband connection to catch up on inventory or other record keeping.

IdleAire said in a statement that it will charge truckers $1.25 per hour, $3 per day or $25 a month for unlimited use of these wireless networks. The company has also signed agreements that will let subscribers to nationwide Wi-Fi network operators Boingo Wireless and iPass use the same networks.
http://news.com.com/2100-1039-1015303.html


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Digital Media Wars Heat Up
Steve Lohr

The corporate armistice declared recently between Microsoft and AOL Time Warner reflected two companies moving from the past to the future. The abandoned past included a last lingering vestige of the Internet browser wars of the 1990s, a civil antitrust suit that Microsoft has now agreed to pay AOL Time Warner $750 million (U.S.) to settle. The future involves using the Internet to deliver commercial program content, mainly movies and music, to consumers who are equipped with a growing array of digital devices to receive it, from personal computers to digital televisions to smart cellphones. And the two companies must do so in a way that is convenient for users and profitable for media companies, while keeping digital piracy to a manageable minimum.

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, and Richard Parsons, his counterpart at AOL Time Warner, spoke about how their collaboration could accelerate the adoption of digital media for the Internet while maintaining copyright protection. The central technology in pursuit of that goal is the software for handling and protecting digital media. And last month's pact included a long-term, non- exclusive licence agreement allowing AOL Time Warner to use Microsoft's Windows Media software for distributing and playing back digital media. The media player is the crucial piece in the puzzle. It resides on the user's computer or other device and opens a portal to what the industry calls rich media — movies, music, video — delivered over the Internet, just as the browser is a portal for viewing Web pages. The media player takes on additional importance because it seems to be the likely vehicle for some of the vital technology in the emerging field of digital rights management — a fancy name for piracy protection. "The big battleground in software is going to be the media player itself," said Chris Charron, an analyst for Forrester Research, a computer industry research and consulting company. "The media player will become a more important link to own than the browser, and Microsoft recognizes that.''

Can Microsoft dominate the market for digital media distribution software as it came to dominate the browser market? The media-player market today looks quite similar in some ways to the browser market in, say, 1997. An early media-player leader, Real Networks, is under pressure from Microsoft, just as the commercial pioneer of the browser market, Netscape, was then. Microsoft bundles its digital media software with its Windows operating system, a monopoly product running on about 95 per cent of all personal computers. As for user acceptance, at the moment Microsoft's player is neck and neck with Real Network's Real One Player, with each having more than 300 million registered users. But Real Networks, founded in Seattle in 1995 by Rob Glaser, a former Microsoft executive, is an embattled challenger. It lost $2.8 million (U.S.) on revenue of $47 million in the first quarter of this year, bringing its cumulative loss since it started to $261 million. A former highflier on Wall Street that raised a lot of money early, Real Networks still has $320 million in cash, so it has financial staying power for a while, but it must find a way to make money.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...d=968350072197


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No Such Thing As A 'Free' Lunch
Chris Barton

The word "free" has many uses that we deem good - free speech, free country and, depending on your point of view, free market.

Similar to the 60s' "free love" and the affectionate "free spirit" the meaning suggested here is largely unfettered - by political, moral, social or regulatory constraints.

But the other meaning of free, no cost, we tend to view as bad.

We know there is no such thing as a free lunch. But ever since the beginning of the internet the "bad" definition of free - as in free music, free internet, free software, and more recently free spectrum - has made its presence felt.

It began with free information. Almost overnight, vast libraries of information - news, research, rants, trivia and trash - were on the web for the taking.

Free? It certainly felt that way - if you wanted to you didn't ever have to buy a newspaper or magazine again.

But there is a cost - about $3000 for a computer and between $15 and $65 per month for access.

The cost of access is often forgotten in the free argument - costs that help keep telcos, internet providers, computer manufacturers, and those who make and run the net's plumbing, in business. So while traditional content providers suffered, others benefited.

The same is true with free music.

Thanks to the file swapping phenomenon a lot of people don't pay for music any more, but while many in the music industry are now missing out, business is booming in burnable CD discs and MP3 players. Not to mention the lawyers who will be employed for years chasing the file swappers.

Free is not what it seems. And what free takes with one hand it gives with the other.

But free is certainly a market force to be reckoned with.

Telecom felt its power in 2000 when there was a period of free internet in New Zealand.

Local company i4free exploited Telecom's exorbitant interconnect charges to provide free dial-up connections to thousands of people. An outraged Telecom cut off i4free's lines. I4free got an injunction.

But then Telecom did a deal with Clear which was supplying i4free with the interconnecting network, and a slice of the interconnection fees.

I4free's revenue stream was cut off and free internet dried up.

But i4free - an offshoot of CallPlus - may yet have the last laugh. Its case against Telecom for anti-competitive behaviour in which it's seeking about $18 million in damages is still making its way through our legal system.

Microsoft too is no stranger to the power of free. It used the tactic in the 90s' browser wars to win back market share from Netscape.

By giving away its web browser with its operating system, the software giant was able to claw back a market it was late to recognise.

It also faced costly anti-competitive legal action that has not yet been fully resolved. Its recent payment of US$750 million ($1.3 billion) to AOL, which bought Netscape in 1999, is the latest episode in the saga.

Today Microsoft faces its own free onslaught - from the open source software movement, and especially Linux.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer says much is at stake: "Non-commercial software products in general and Linux in particular present a competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry, and they require our concentrated focus and attention."

Ironically, the tendency towards free signals that a free market is operating.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydispl...ondsubsection=


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Industry Offers a Carrot in Online Music Fight
Amy Harmon

Like a lot of music fans roaming the Internet these days, David Bishop registers one basic sentiment when he thinks about the record industry. "They're a bunch of greedheads," he says. "They've been really fat on what I think of as huge profits and now they're trying to maintain the status quo."

Mr. Bishop is not your typical college-dormitory Internet pirate. A 49-year-old illustrator in San Rafael, Calif., he has steered scrupulously clear of file- sharing software like Napster and KaZaA. But he recently discovered how to play the music provided by other online fans without copying it, and has no compunction about flouting recent efforts to stamp out the practice.

"I'm not doing anything wrong," he insists.

Until recently, music executives have largely failed to acknowledge the millions of individuals, from teenage Eminem fans to Elvis-obsessed baby boomers, who have joined in what amounts to an online rebellion against the industry by some of its most important customers. Hoping to end Internet music piracy by ridding the world of the technologies that make it possible, they have so far focused on legal battles against KaZaA and its many brethren.

But for the first time in the Internet file-sharing wars, record industry executives have in recent weeks started to address music fans directly, both offering carrots and wielding sticks to persuade people to buy their product again. How well they succeed is likely to determine the way music is produced and consumed for years to come.

"The technology has destabilized us, it has hurt us," said Doug Morris, the chief executive of the Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi Universal and the largest of the five major record companies. "But now it's going to take us to new heights."

The industry is pursuing lawsuits against music pirates but is also offering new ways to legally listen to and buy music online through deals like a recent alliance with Apple Computer.

That prospect may be difficult to achieve. Forty-three million Americans — half of those who connected to the Internet — used file-sharing software last month that allows people to copy music without paying for it, according to a survey by the NPD Group, a market research firm. The file-sharing program KaZaA, which rose in popularity after the record industry won its lawsuit against Napster, has been downloaded more than 270 million times, more than any other free program available on CNet's Download.com site.

The migration of music from shiny disks to the online arena has personalized debates about intellectual property rights once reserved for lawyers, turning passive consumers into political activists in increasingly large numbers. Having discovered the virtues of the new online form, many people are demanding the freedom to sample, trade and make available music in ways that were never before possible.

Some of those ways, like making unauthorized copies of hundreds of copyrighted songs without paying for them, are clearly not legal. Others may be the subject of a negotiation that the music industry is beginning to accept it may have to enter into.

"I have rights to listen to my music the way I want to," said William Raleigh, 33, a marketing manager in Los Angeles who says he never buys music produced by the major record labels, preferring to reserve his acquisitions for independent bands that sell CD's through the Web site CD Baby. "I'm not a criminal if I want to share it with some friends, and I'm opposed to the technology that tries to restrict my rights as a consumer."

Meanwhile, the industry's critics are calling for a more radical restructuring of the way music is distributed online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, is organizing a campaign to rally students to push Congress to create alternative approaches that would legalize some forms of file-sharing.

One would require record companies to license their entire catalogs to anyone who wants them for a fee set by the government. Another approach would levy a tax on Internet service providers and, perhaps, other related businesses to create a fund that would be used to compensate copyright holders based on a measure of how frequently individual songs are downloaded. For consumers, the tax would be less noticeable than directly charging for the music.

"Right now copyright law is broken and the music industry is bullying everybody into being scared," said Shari Steele, the foundation's executive director. "There are new ways of distributing music that don't require the record companies to be a part of it."

For its campaign, the group has paid for an advertisement, to be published in Rolling Stone and other publications next month, showing five people standing in a lineup with headphones on. "Tired of being treated like a criminal for sharing music online?" it reads. "Filesharing is music to our ears."

Roger Ames, the chief executive of Warner Music Group, said any plan that handed control of the industry's licensing to the government would simply shrink its revenues and prevent it from financing artist careers. As for the taxation idea: "It sounds like communism," Mr. Ames added.

However unlikely Congress may be to order the music industry to act differently, some analysts and many music fans argue that the record labels need to do more to wean people away from file-sharing services. For better or worse, the Internet file-trading bonanza of recent years has given lovers of popular music a taste of what it means to have near-instant access to almost anything created by their favorite performers for free, to use their personal computers as listening stations, to burn their own music mixes on CD's and e-mail songs to their friends.

"There's a lifestyle issue about how people want to use music that has been missed," said Russ Crupnick, vice president of the music division of NPD. "The industry needs to reconnect with consumers and understand what they are seeing here besides the free part."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/te...gy/08TUNE.html


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wasted
Lucas Gonze

Web home for WASTE: I've gotten a bunch of queries about WASTE, generally with a focus on user problems like how to get a connection or FAQ issues like how to build on OS X. To help people to help each other, as well as to foster discussion of technical issues related to WASTE, I have created a mailing list and web home at Yahoo! Groups.

Spin control successful: the New York Times adopted the argument that WASTE is IM. Hopefully this means that we won't have yet another wave of paranoia about P2P.

Where's the OS X version? Is it really possible that it's been almost a week without an OS X port running?


WASTE competes with AIM, not Kazaa.

The early reaction to WASTE is that it's yet another filesharing tool, and that's wrong in a way that matters.

The reason that WASTE is not a filesharing tool is that it doesn't support searching in any meaningful way. (incorrect – ed.) Under the hood, Kazaa et al are nothing but search engines, while WASTE clusters are too small for search. A real cluster would be 5-10 people, not even the 50 given by developers as the maximum size, and at that scale searching is pointless.

WASTE is a tool for chat and IRC, with no more or less suport for filesharing than AIM. Indeed, this is a very good reason for AOL to come down hard on the project. AOL's strategic leverage is that it has the largest base of instant messaging users, and hence is the easiest way to reach somebody over instant messaging. WASTE not only ignores the AOL Instant Messenger namespace, it sets up a new namespace, and the decentralized nature of that namespace means that no provider -- not Jabber, not MSN/Passport, not even AOL/Nullsoft -- can get a strategic edge. If the WASTE namespace were to to take off, the new mega-namespace established by the Microsoft/AOL truce would be obsolete.

WASTE is scorched earth for AIM.

As with a lot of P2P, WASTE represents scorched earth for companies that want to own a namespace. If you want to use centralized IM, you have to pass ownership of your IM identity to a service provider like AIM or Passport. But if you don't want to talk to everybody in the world, just the few that you actually know, and the overhead to whitelist your friends is low relative to the length of time that you'll stay in contact with them, there's no reason for identity service providers. In WASTE, nobody owns your identity but you.

WASTE also bypasses much of the need for presence providers to interconnect people behind firewalls. If any member of a WASTE cluster is not behind a firewall, messages are passed through that node. In my WASTE cluster, for example, there has always been at least one node not behind a firewall. There has always been at least one broadband node, and there's no incentive to be a free rider, since clusters are formed around meatspace relationships. Most people are happy to help out their friends, as long as it isn't too much of an inconvenience.

WASTE is nothing new.

Gnutella was fundamentally new in that it gave slacker developers a way into autonomous networks, which were ivory tower stuff at the time. WASTE introduces no new ideas -- everything in it has been shipped already in Groove, and WASTE is missing a lot of things that Groove has.

The only thing new about WASTE is that it works. Groove is too bloated for normal use. If you need Groove's quality of service, security, and replication, there is no competition. If you don't need all that you're better off with WASTE. Fair enough: Groove is for enterprise workgroups, WASTE is for friendnets. WASTE is worse. Which is better.

TO DO

There are two big things that could be improved.

It's not worse enough. There's still a bunch of junk that can be factored out -- we'll know it can get no smaller when there's a Javascript version. The Unix console code doesn't have a bunch of functionality, but it works, and console versions imply good things about simplicity. Still, there are console versions of SOAP, so that by itself doesn't prove anything.
Poor support for transitive relationships. You automatically get a connection to a friend of a friend, and after that, friends-of-friends are treated the same as friends themselves. That's not good enough. There needs to be a way to keep introducers in the middle, so that names and bytes continue to be vouched for and guaranteed by the introducer.
http://www.gonze.com/index.cgi/2003/06/01#wastenotes


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Music Marketers Now Dependent On Internet
Online Exposure Crucial for Artist and Album Promotions
Tobi Elkin

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- 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
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.

Pushing digital needle
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.

Old promo avenues clogged
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.

Exclusive access
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, general manager for AOL Music. 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.

In some cases, labels are locked in a competitive race to get premium real estate on the sites. "During the last couple of years, as the outlets have become really seriously programmed entertainment channels. We're competing to get on there, to get that space," Atlantic's Ms. Slight said.
http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=38007#


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Math Wiz Claims Piracy Solution

A software developer is set to unveil technology he dreamed up after finding that visitors were copying from his Web museum's jukebox.
Jon Healey

When Internet users started ripping off songs from the online Museum of Musical Instruments, they angered the wrong guy: millionaire mathematician Hank Risan.

Risan drew on his mathematical skills to come up with a different approach to the problem of unauthorized recording. Drawing on a branch of topology known as network theory, Risan said he could look at the networks a computer uses to move data internally and "visualize how to protect the copyrighted material as it transfers through those networks."

The firm claims that its technology controls those pathways, letting copyright owners dictate what can and can't be copied. "We control pathways that don't even exist yet," Risan said.

Music Public Broadcasting uses the same basic approach to prevent CDs and DVDs from being copied, protect downloadable songs from piracy and deter music and movies from being copied through file-sharing networks without the copyright owners being compensated. In order for it to work, though, the company must put software in users' computers to control those internal networks. Risan acknowledged that consumers won't accept such controls unless they're allowed a reasonable amount of freedom, but he said his technology can strike that balance.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...lines-business

LATimes – Nick/Pass: peermint


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CD’s. High Speed Hijinx.

This Dub Really Is The Bomb


Thar she blows! Click pic for story.


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Fighting For A New Net Copyright Deal
Paul Festa

Five months after losing a high-profile argument in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, foes of federal copyright law are launching a public campaign to create a policy that they see as better in step with the Internet age. Lawrence Lessig is leading the charge.

The Stanford University law professor, who was once the court-appointed "special master" in Microsoft's antitrust trial and is a noted Internet privacy and intellectual property advocate, on Monday launched an online petition as the first salvo in what he expects to be a long battle to change the way the U.S. government renews patents.

The goal of the petition is to convince Congress to require copyright holders to pay a $1 fee every 50 years in order to extend their copyrights.

The way it is now, Lessig says, copyrights are automatically extended whether or not their owners are alive or want their work protected by copyright. As a result, Internet information repositories are prohibited from including vast amounts of information, including film that curators expect to disintegrate before newly and automatically extended copyrights expire.

The germ of Lessig's petition was the Supreme Court's decision in January to uphold Congress' move to automatically extend copyrights by 20 years.

At that point, Lessig, the 11 plaintiffs he represented and their fellow public domain advocates ran out of legal recourse and have turned to legislative remedies. Now the activists are gathering evidence of public support with their petition, talking to legislators and warding off early opposition from Hollywood for their proposed dollar renewal fee.

Lessig spoke with CNET News.com about his campaign from his home in San Francisco.

Q: When did you launch the petition?
A: This morning (Monday). It's been pretty exciting--I blogged it, sent it out to a couple of e-mail lists, and by lunch we had 2,000 signatures.

What spurred it?
We've been working to put together this response to the Eldred decision for months. We've hammered out language for the bill that would comply with the Berne Convention (for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works), which the U.S. is a signatory to. We're ready and eager to build a large grassroots organization of people who demand of Congress that it do something to restore some balance here. This petition is a first step toward going to Washington and saying that there's a large number of people who want you to consider this.

How long will you run the petition, or how many signatures will you get before presenting it to Congress?
We have not decided. I've never done something like this before.

Well, you've gotten up and said: Hey, if you care about copyright or privacy you'd better send money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Yes, but I've never tried to mobilize a political movement. What we've found with this idea, after having taken it on the road for the past year, is that this is the first time we've had an issue that's unambiguous for most people. With Napster and file sharing, I had strong opinions, but there were strong and some compelling arguments on the other side. This issue doesn't cut both ways. If the copyright's not worth a dollar to you after 50 years, what reasonable person would say it should be extended?

In other words, if they won't even give us this, then who are the extremists in this debate? You either have to say the public domain should be abolished, or it's too much for us to pay a dollar to sustain the copyright of Mickey Mouse. Either of those two claims would be extreme in our tradition, and it's about time that the Congress do something to benefit the public domain that does not in any significant way burden copyright interests.

Speaking of your EFF pitch, you said at the time that it was better to give money to a group like that because talking directly to politicians was unproductive since they weren't interested in genuine debate. Have you had any more experience talking directly to politicians since making those remarks? Have you had any more luck?
I have, and I have been surprised. I think most want to do the right thing. The key is to give them that chance.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-1013830.html


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That's Fighting Talk

Our computer use is being threatened by a wild west-style land grab that only the rich giants can win, argue Richard Stallman and Nick Hill. Software patents will lead to job losses, higher prices, and less choice

The computer industry is threatened by a wild west-style land grab. The biggest, richest players are being assisted by governments to take unassailable exclusive control of the ideas that programmers combine to make a program.

Our society is becoming more dependent on information technology. At the same time, centralised control over and ownership of the information technology field is increasing, and mega-corporations with law-given dominion over our computers could take away our freedoms and democracy. With an effective monopoly on modern software, the largest grabbers of the "land" will have control over what we can ask our computers to do, and control over production and distribution of information on the net, through monopolies that the EU plans to give them.

The monopolies are patents that restrict use of these software ideas. We call them "software patents" because they restrict what we programmers can make software do. How do these monopolies work?

If you wish to use your computer as a word processor, it must follow instructions that tell it how to act like a word processor. This is analogous to instructions found on a musical score, which tell an orchestra how to play a symphony. The instructions are not simple. They are made up of thousands of smaller instructions, much like sequences of notes and chords. A symphonic score embodies hundreds of musical ideas, and a computer program uses hundreds or thousands of software ideas. Since each idea is abstract, there are often different ways to describe it: thus, some ideas can be patented in multiple ways.

The US, which has had software patents since the 1980s, shows what this can do to the development of everyday software. For example, in the US there are 39 monopoly claims over a standard way of showing video using software (the MPeg 2 format).

Since a single piece of software can embody thousands of ideas together, and those ideas are arbitrary in scope and abstract in nature, writing software will only be worthwhile for those who are rich and have a large software monopoly portfolio: those with the war chest and clout to fight off claims that might otherwise sink a business. In the US, the average cost of defending against an invalid patent claim is $1.5m. The courts favour the wealthy, so even when a small business gets a few patents, it will find them useless.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/sto...970294,00.html


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High Schooler On File-Sharing
File Sharing, Bootleggers Make It Easy To Get A Sneak Peek At Films
Gareth Olds

On May 15, millions of people across the nation plugged into "The Matrix Reloaded." Not me, though -- I plugged in a week earlier.

In a trend sweeping the nation faster than Avril Lavigne, Net-savvy moviegoers such as yours truly are beating the rush and avoiding the crowds. With the click of a mouse, you can have instant access to the latest movies before they're even released in theatres. Oh, and did I mention they're free?

Movie bootlegging has become the arch-enemy of the Motion Picture Association of America. Pirated copies of this year's blockbusters are freely available to all those armed with motive and modem. So how exactly does a flick get from cutting room to desktop? It all starts with a man, a plan and a camcorder.

When a movie comes out, Web-surfing pirates (the not-so-peg-legged type) swagger into theatres with video camera in hand. Avoiding ushers and other patrons, they record the movie and then retire to their hideouts. Using free downloadable programs, they load their booty onto a public network, and just like that, an Internet user can watch "Malibu's Most Wanted" the day of its release.

So how did I watch "The Matrix Reloaded" before it came out in theatres? Simple, Neo: I just followed the white rabbit ... to Asia.

In many Asian nations (with China and Philippines at the forefront) production companies release U.S. films before their domestic release date. So an Asian pirate does the same as a U.S. pirate -- records a copy and puts it up on the Net. Granted, I had to see Agent Smith taunt Morpheus with Korean subtitles, but it was well worth it.

Getting the film is easy. Using a peer-to-peer (more commonly called a P2P) network, users can access all media files residing in hard drives of other users. However, this also means that people can access your media files, so you might want to hide those home movies. Almost all P2P programs are free of charge and available for download on many sites. I'm a KaZaA fan myself, which uses the Gnutella network, and according to News.com has been downloaded 299 million times.

Most P2P programs have a built-in search function, which will locate someone with the movie you want. And if you don't mind subtitles and background laughter, next week's Hollywood hit is just a click away.

OK, so it's more than just a click. You'll need some time, too.

On a cable modem, downloading a full-length movie can take several hours. Also, because movie files are so large, they are broken into smaller chunks, which have to be reassembled using programs such as WinRAR or XAce (also free for download).

The movie quality itself ranges from clear and crisp to grainy and out-of-focus. Some bootleggers are theater workers and mount their cameras on tripods beside the projector, while others are averages Joes using camcorders. Because quality varies, file-sizes vary as well, as better-quality movies tend to be larger. DVDs, for example, hold several gigabytes of information. How can these huge files travel over the Internet, you ask? With the help of a little friend I call DivX.

In 1999, Jerome Rota of Montpellier (the Montpellier in France, not Vermont) "invented" an encoder called DivX. The program compresses files to less than one-tenth their original size. This means a full-length feature movie (say, for example, "The Matrix") is whittled down to several hundred megabytes, small enough to be sent over the Internet. When Rota made DivX available on his Web site, within a week it was downloaded more than 50,000 times. The March 2002 release of DivX 5.0 spawned 1 million downloads in just two days.

To watch DivX encoded movies, you just download the DivX Codec (a free program that reads the files), and you're ready to enter "The Matrix."

A movie's journey from theaters to the Internet is a confusing one but generally short. These file-swapping pirates can have a new release ready for download before you can say "copyright infringement."

Now, if only I could get an Agent Smith for my little sister ...
http://www.adn.com/life/story/3286871p-3316099c.html


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BellSouth, SBC Set Standards For Fiber To The Home

BellSouth Corp., SBC Communications Inc., and Verizon Communications Inc., announced on 28 May their agreement to standardize construction of residential fiber-optic networks. The move is aimed at creating both affordable and an ultra- fast Internet access.

Although fiber-optic network links have been around for 20 years, major corporations who can afford the higher installation costs have mostly benefited from its practically limitless bandwidth. According to statistics provided by the market research firm Render Vanderslice & Associates, there are 37 000 U.S. residences taking advantage of fiber to the home. BellSouth chief technology officer Bill Smith said on the day of the announcement that by the end of 2003 the phone giant will have installed fiber-optic cable in nearly one million homes. Smith said that BellSouth "plans to work quickly to select and deploy products that will ensure the most-cost effective network design."

In February, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made a ruling which lifted the sharing requirement on new broadband networks. Verizon spokesman Ells Edwards noted in a phone interview, that for anything to proceed, the FCC needs to release the final details of its ruling. And should that ruling be amenable to Verizon’s plans, Edwards said the carrier could begin installing the high- speed cable by the end of 2004. As for the cost, Edwards said, "it is a whole lot less than what it used to be and we see it coming down even more in the near future."
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY.../index.html#s5


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Cable Still Rules US Broadband
Craig Matsumoto

In the United States, asynchronous digital subscriber line (ADSL) and cable- modem use continued growing briskly last year, with DSL continuing to lag cable, according to figures released yesterday by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Most of the numbers aren't surprising. The number of U.S. broadband connections grew 55 percent last year, to 19.9 million. Cable continues to outnumber ADSL, at 11.4 million connections, compared with ADSL's 6.5 million as of December 2002 (see FCC Posts High-Speed Net Info ).

Summary: Both sides are growing steadily, but cable's still outpacing ADSL 2 to 1. And that gives ADSL advocates another chance to rail against the fact that cable isn't regulated like DSL is.

Cable clobbers DSL in "advanced" services -- defined by the FCC as service that offers more than 200-kbit/s speeds in both directions.

Now, a lot depends on what's considered "advanced." For example, Verizon Communications Inc. is offering residential DSL subscribers 1.5 Mbit/s downstream and 128 kbit/s upstream -- which would feel pretty darned nifty to a lot of users but doesn't count as "advanced" in the FCC's tally. Still, the numbers imply that cable is more consistent about offering high- speed upstream access, which could be a key in pitching to business customers.

Increased spending could help here, because service providers can boost DSL speeds by putting facilities closer to customers. This happens in the form of digital loop carriers and similar boxes, provided by the likes of (gee, surprise!) Catena, as well as competitors including Advanced Fibre Communications Inc, Alcatel SA, Calix Networks, Marconi Corp. plc, and Occam Networks Inc.

ADSL also has to contend with trouble zones in the telephone infrastructure, due to bridge taps that degrade performance or lines that just plain suck. There are ways around that as well; chip makers are upping the ante on their signal- conditioning capabilities, trying to make ADSL more resilient (see TI Beefs Up DSL Chip ).

As for that state-by-state breakdown -- not surprisingly, California tops the list with 3 million high-speed connections. New York ranks a distant second with a paltry 2 million -- no, wait, it's not even 2 million: a paltry 1.997 million connections.

The state or territory with the smallest number of connections? That would be (drum roll) Wyoming, with 14,696. South Dakota is second, around 18,000, while North Dakota and Montana rank barely above 20,000. (Caveat: Figures for Hawaii weren't included, to protect the confidentiality of the few service providers working that state.)
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=35334


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IBM, Infineon Tout Magnetic Memory
Michael Kanellos

IBM and Infineon will jointly present a paper this week that demonstrates how MRAM, one of the leading candidates to replace flash memory in cell phones, could be ready for commercial production by 2005.

MRAM, or magnetic random access memory, combines technological principles from both the magnetic world--the basis for the hard-drive industry--and silicon manufacturing. In MRAM, a tiny magnetic field is created inside a memory cell on a chip. The computer then measures the electrical resistance exhibited by the magnetic field at any given moment to determine whether the cell should be read as a "1" or a "0," the binary building blocks of data.

Conventional flash memory, the mainstay for storing data on phones, also works by exhibiting different levels of electrical resistance, but it requires a considerable amount of electricity to switch between the "1" and "0" states. Ideally, MRAM will use less power and capture data faster than current flash memory.

While IBM has shown off MRAM circuits before, the data being released at the Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Symposium taking place this week in Kyoto, Japan, shows that MRAM chips are amenable to mass manufacturing, said Randy Isaac, vice president of strategic alliances at IBM Technology. The chip described in the paper was made on the 180-nanometer process, which has been used in mass manufacturing since 1999, and holds 128 kilobits of data.

"The big advantage here is the write time. In flash, the write process can take milliseconds. MRAM could put it in the nanosecond range," Isaac said.

Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and others will present papers at the Kyoto event, one of the major, annual semiconductor research conferences.

Although humans can't detect the difference between a millisecond (one thousandth of a second) and a nanosecond (one billionth), the gap could make a lot of difference to cell phone manufacturers in the future. With the advent of picture and video cell phones, capturing and storing large amounts of data is becoming more crucial, Isaac said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1004-1014865.html


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MPEG Royalty Dispute Threatens 3G Interoperability
Howard Dicus

The future of e-commerce is expected to be affected by how many consumers use next-generation cell phones that are always broadband-connected to the Internet. And that in turn could be affected by a dispute between the Japanese companies leading that charge and the U.S. developers of streaming audio-video compression formats.

The Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun reports that the Digital Media Association and the Mobile Content Forum, the two Japanese trade groups representing companies producing 3G (third generation) wireless content, believe the copyright holders for the next generation of MPEG compression want to gauge them, and are seriously considering not adopting the MPEG-4 standard.

More than a dozen companies including Sun Microsystems and Apple Computer have patent claims on the technologies connected to MPEG-4 compression of digital audio and video files. They stand to make big money from more widespread use of the compression standard to make audio and video files practical for handheld computers that double as cell phones (or vice versa).

Because MPEG-4 is the most popular compression standard, it is likely that if Japan, always on the cutting edge of wireless technology, doesn't adopt it, then there will be no global standard at all. The 3G pioneer DoCoMo uses MPEG-4 but could switch if the rest of the Japanese tech community migrates to something else.
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjo...2/daily46.html


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Close Loophole In Copyright Law

A major goal of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed by Congress in 1998 was to strike a fair balance between the rights of musicians and other copyright holders against the privacy rights of music consumers. But in retrospect, it appears that lawmakers have tipped the scale too far.

The Recording Industry Association of America has been granted a subpoena, issued legally but without a judge's approval, forcing Verizon Communications, an Internet service provider, to surrender the names of four of its customers accused of swapping copyrighted material online.

Despite the popularity of file-swapping among younger, computer-savvy users, the RIAA considers them lawbreaking "pirates" -- and the courts have generally agreed. While that debate is far from settled, the Verizon case has exposed a little-known loophole in the law that can, and should, be patched.

Under the DMCA, allegedly aggrieved copyright holders need only get a subpoena from a lowly court clerk in order to glean information about suspected file-swappers. That standard is inconsistent with the higher burden of proof required in the nation's civil and criminal courts. At the very least a judge should be involved in granting a subpoena.

The dangers of allowing such casual intrusions have already become evident. In another case involving Verizon, the RIAA went after Pennsylvania State University for what they believed was illegal file-swapping of music by Atlanta-based R&B idol Usher Raymond. The trade group later apologized after learning that the electronic references were about a retired professor named Peter Usher who, by all accounts, has never recorded a hit song worth swapping.

The Verizon case remains under appeal and is set for a hearing in September. In the meantime, Congress should consider a sensible amendment to the law, such as the one being sponsored by Sen. Samuel Brownback (R-Kan.) that would require copyright holders to file a lawsuit and show a judge good cause before getting the right to ascertain the identities of music file-swappers.

It's bad enough that Big Brother may be watching you; it shouldn't be so easy for the recording industry to get in on the act as well.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/o...6privacy.html#


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“Take it or leave it, babe.”

Confidential Apple Music Details Leaked
BBC

An insight into the success of Apple's online music service has been provided by leaked details from a meeting with representatives from the independent record industry.

According to notes published on the web, Apple has sold 3.5 million songs since it launched its iTunes music store at the end of April

The computer manufacturer is selling about 500,000 songs a week and about half of those are sold as albums, allaying fears that people would choose individual tracks instead of a whole record.

Apple's music store has proven to be a major commercial success, overshadowing the online subscription services offered by the major record labels.

The iTunes store has more than 200,000 songs from artists such as U2, Eminem and Sting for sale at 99 cents (62 pence) each.

The service got off to a flying start, selling a million tracks in its first week.

The initial buoyant sales have continued. The leaked notes from the meeting last week show that Apple has sold 3.5 million songs in the six weeks the store has been open.

Worries in the record industry that customers would cherry-pick hits have not come true, with 45% of all songs downloaded as part of a full album.

The store offers an opportunity to sample 30 seconds of a track before you buy. The notes say that people tend to listen to 10 previews for every song they buy.

And most people seem happy to store their credit card details on the iTunes store. Some 90% of sales are one-click downloads, which means a credit card is automatically charged when a track is bought.

The independent music representatives were told they would be offered the same terms as bigger labels and have the same team looking after their tracks.

According to the notes, Mr Jobs said: "We have to be more efficient, though. We're not going to deal with 200 lawyers.

"Everyone is going to get the exact same deal. It's not negotiable. It's take it or leave it."

So far the iTunes service is accessible to fewer than 5% of the world's computer users - those owning an Apple Macintosh and living in the United States.

A Windows version of iTunes is planned for later this year, and an overseas expansion is also on the cards.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2971790.stm


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Microsoft Plays to Film Industry
Aram Sinnreich

Better known for browsers than blockbusters, Microsoft is still angling for a major role in the digital film business. The company is downplaying its ambitions until it finds out whether or not Hollywood will bite.

Microsoft debuted its Windows Media 9 Series technology last fall with great fanfare. Celebrity guests from the film and music industries touted the new technology before hundreds of journalists, technologists and media professionals. Even Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates came out to brag, along with director James Cameron and former Beatles producer Sir George Martin.

With vast improvements in audio and video compression and a sleek, new interface full of bells and whistles, Windows Media left its humble beginnings as a Web format and entered the professional fray. Now Microsoft plans to use the tool to dominate the film industry's distribution technology, from digital dailies to theatrical releases to digital cable and DVDs.

"Microsoft is creating a platform to support every link of the value chain, from creation to distribution to consumption," said David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Research in New York. "Nothing like that has ever worked before. In the past, each distribution window required a different technology. A VHS tape was one thing, a copy of the film in the theater was another. One of the cool things about digital media is that it enables you to change that."

Microsoft's strategy is apparent both in the feature upgrades of Windows Media 9 and in the partnerships and projects it has announced since the technology was unveiled.

Features such as 7.1 channel surround sound and high-definition video support will position the technology well for theatrical performances and high-end consumer electronics. Variable bit rate encoding, or VBR, and integrated digital rights management, or DRM, make the technology flexible and secure enough to deliver a movie to a broad range of potential viewing environments.

Many recent announcements show the technology is slowly being adopted, opening the way for Microsoft's grand vision to become a reality:

• While filming Sniper 2, the filmmakers used Windows Media 9 instead of film to view dailies, the footage used to review the day's shooting.
• Independent theater chain Landmark Theatres announced it would equip 177 screens with Windows Media-based digital cinema technology by the end of the year.
• Leading film industry production software companies such as Avid Technology, Adobe Systems and Sonic Foundry announced export support for the format in their new product lines.
• Artisan Home Entertainment released a new version of Terminator 2 on DVD this week that offers a second disc with a high-definition, surround-sound version of the film in Windows Media 9.

"From the studio end, they're really interested in preserving their libraries," said Joshua Pines, director of imaging research and development at Technique, a division of Technicolor. "But filmmakers are interested in improving the quality of their art. They don't want to see a standard adopted that impedes technology improvement, the way VHS did."

Pines, who has worked in post-production on more than 80 films -- including Jurassic Park, Pearl Harbor and Star Wars: Episode I -- said he fears that committing now to digital film standards would be a grave error.

"As the technology improves, will they be able to handle it?" he asked. "Or, in classic Microsoft fashion, will they realize too late that there were hidden limitations in their technology?"
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59107,00.html


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Microsoft Stalls Software Maker
David Becker

A shareware developer and former Microsoft worker is vowing to fight his ex-employer for the right to distribute his home-networking software.

Lawyers representing the software giant sent a cease-and-desist letter last week to Esiod Systems, a small, Monroe, Wash.-based software company formed early this year by former Microsoft developers Siddhartha Rao and Caleb Doise. The letter demands that the company halt planned distribution of Schnazzle, an inexpensive shareware application Esiod had planned to begin selling this week.

Microsoft claims that Schnazzle--which allows PCs on a home network to share music, photos and other media--is similar to planned Microsoft technology and therefore violates the non-compete clause of the employment agreements Rao and Doise signed when they began working for Microsoft. The company's standard employment contract prohibits ex-employees from using knowledge they gained at Microsoft to work on competing products for one year after they leave the software giant.

The Microsoft letter says Schnazzle competes with a planned extension to the Windows operating system that would allow PCs to wirelessly stream media files to other devices.

A Microsoft representative confirmed the letter and said the company is negotiating with Esiod. "We're working with them to protect our intellectual property rights," the representative said.

Rao said he and Doise never had access to the code for the Microsoft project cited in the letter and their software uses completely different networking methods.

"Schnazzle is based on an extremely proprietary protocol we dreamed up," he said. "We created this highly secure, tightly coupled peer-to-peer network, which has nothing to do with what Microsoft is talking about."

Rao said the case also raises questions about the scope of non-compete agreements, given Microsoft's position in the technology industry.

"They do everything in the software industry," he said. "I think a court would have a hard time agreeing with the idea Microsoft should be able to restrict someone from doing anything in the software industry for a year."

The Microsoft representative said the company's employment contract uses standard non-compete language to protect intellectual property rights.

Rao said he's agreed to temporarily withhold Schnazzle from distribution but will fight Microsoft's demand for him to turn over the source code for the application.

"We will fight this until we run out of cash...and my family has a lot of cash to lend me," he said. "We refuse to let a big bully like Microsoft take us out of business."
http://news.com.com/2100-1046-1015223.html


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Was Movie Service's Failure a Studio Plot?
Michael Hiltzik

The one thing about the Intertainer service on which everyone can agree is that it was ahead of its time.

Founded in 1996 to deliver movies on demand to cable television subscribers, it soon evolved into a system to deliver movies on demand to customers' PCs over a dedicated Internet connection. In both incarnations, the service seemed to stretch the information infrastructure to the limits of its capabilities, and possibly a little beyond.

It relied on broadband Internet connections at a time when only a minuscule minority of American consumers had access to cable modems or DSL. (It's still a minority, but much larger today than it was then.) The very notion of receiving entertainment content digitally was a novel one for consumers, as Napster Inc. hadn't yet turned millions of music listeners into pirates. And many technical issues associated with managing and sending video streams through cyberspace were still being worked out.

But there was never any doubt that Intertainer Inc. was onto something revolutionary: video you could order for viewing at any time, with the ability to fast-forward, reverse, pause and stop the program at will. By September 2002, the company claimed 125,000 Internet subscribers and an additional 35,000 who received a TV-based service via Comcast Corp.'s cable system.

At that moment, just as the technical issues seemed to be on the verge of getting resolved and broadband penetration into the home seemed about to take off, Intertainer shut down. The reason, according to its co-founder, Jonathan Taplin, had nothing to do with technology or customer acceptance. Instead, he says, it was torpedoed by the movie studios.

Their concern, he contends in a lawsuit currently in the discovery phase in federal court in Los Angeles, was that Intertainer stood to become a serious competitor to a service, now called Movielink, that was about to be launched by five major studios. (Movielink's owners include Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Entertainment, Vivendi Universal's Universal Studios and AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., which had contracts with Intertainer and are named in the Intertainer lawsuit. The other owners are Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures, which aren't named in the litigation because they never reached distribution deals with Intertainer.)

Because the studios saw Movielink as a vehicle to exercise control over the price and terms for digital distribution of their films, Taplin maintains, they wanted to make sure it had a clear field. The idea was that they could set prices for film licenses by negotiating Movielink's distribution deal with, in effect, themselves; they could then cite those terms as the industry standard in talks with other distributors.

Movielink "completely represents collusion," Taplin says. "It's price fixing. They're using it to not only screw us, but anyone else who wants to buy movies from them."

He's not alone in that view, as it happens. "One of the main purposes of Movielink is to give the studios a way to put pressure on cable operators to get a better deal," Josh Bernoff, a media analyst at Forrester Research, told me.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,3389460.story


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Valenti Says 'Cut' To Film Piracy
Lisa Friedman

Calling popular file-swapping networks like Kazaa "thieves' nests" that bilk the movie industry out of more than $3.5 billion each year, Motion Picture Association of America Chairman Jack Valenti said Thursday he thinks those services should be shut down.

"Either shut them down or make them go legal," Valenti said in a Capitol Hill briefing for lawmakers and congressional aides on entertainment industry issues, particularly the illegal downloading of box office and DVD movies.

Valenti told the Congressional Entertainment Caucus, chaired by Rep. Diane Watson, D-Los Angeles, that between 400,000 and 600,000 films are illegally downloaded and uploaded daily.

"This is a problem that broods over the future of America's motion picture industry," he said, noting that the movie industry contributes to about 5 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.

"This goes beyond mere thievery. This has to do with the diminution of the American economic engine," he said.

In April, the FBI charged a Los Angeles man, 33-year-old Johnny Ray Gasca, in connection with taping prerelease screenings of motion pictures such as "Anger Management" and "The Core." Officials who searched Gasca's home found 15 VHS recorders, video editing equipment and other devices they believed he used to pirate films, FBI Special Agent George Steuer said.

Gasca is awaiting trial on charges of copyright infringement.

Despite that high-profile case, however, federal officials acknowledged that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks diverted resources away from cracking down on piracy.

"A significant amount of resources left the white collar division and went to counterintelligence," said Chris Dowd, a special agent for intellectual property rights in the FBI's cybercrime division.

Congress is not currently considering legislation to address the Internet file-sharing problems. Rather, the movie industry is leaning on universities to erect firewalls on campuses to prevent downloads.

Valenti also said technology companies and copyright owners are working to develop security standards to prevent copyrighted works from unauthorized reproduction and distribution.

Acknowledging that someone will always find a way to work past encryptions, Valenti said, "We're trying to make it so difficult to steal that most people will say, oh, the hell with it."
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1...37976,00.html#


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Sun Pushes P2P With New Protocol, Verizon Partnership
Paula Rooney

Sun CEO Scott McNealy will bring service provider partner Verizon on stage during his keynote at JavaOne on Friday to demonstrate how Juxtapose (JXTA) peer-to-peer technology better enables collaboration between corporate users, Sun executives said.

As part of an effort to push its JXTA technology at JavaOne, Sun announced the release of its enhanced JXTA 2.1 P2P protocol on Tuesday as well as a version of Java 2, Micro Edition (J2ME) that conforms to the JXTA 2.0 protocol, said Juan Carlos Soto, group manager of Sun's Advanced Technologies Group. JXTA 2.0 was released last spring.

As reported earlier by CRN, JXTA 2.1 offers expanded metering and monitoring, a new access control service, JXTA sockets and bi-directional pipes.

Many of the features are aimed at driving more corporate use of the Java collaboration technology, Soto said. The access control service in JXTA 2.1, for example, will enable users to assign access control rights for one peer, whether a desktop or mobile device, so that it can communicate with another peer.

In addition, JXTA 2.1 will make it easier for developers to write applications and services that can be metered and monitored, sources said.

While the Verizon demonstration will illustrate classic P2P collaboration between PCs on a broadband network, Sun also plans to demonstrate a myriad of collaboration scenarios among wired and wireless devices on the show floor, Soto said.

"The Verizon [implementation of JXTA] will enable their customers to collaborate, interact and exchange data using desktop class machines," said Soto. "But P2P does not mean PC-to-PC. The vision for Sun is much broader, and collaboration is possible from a sensor to superserver."

Soto said the JXTA 2.1 access control services improve security and that a future release of JXTA will build upon that by offering enhanced integration with other security mechanisms.

"The access service is an important step in that direction," Soto said. "You'll see enhanced interaction with other security mechanisms out there so you can plug into [the] Liberty [specification] and crypto-based IDS, which give you a unique identifier. This is a service so you can check a certificate and know it's a real message and know it's not someone posing as someone else."

The executive would not comment on reports that Sun is integrating JXTA into N1 or the SunOne software stack. When asked if JXTA would be integrated into Sun's Instant Messaging server software, Soto was a bit more forthcoming. "It might use JXTA," Soto said. "Stay tuned. We'll tell you when it does."

Project JXTA is an open-source initiative funded by Sun and devoted to developing P2P protocols and a collaboration framework for Java.
http://www.crn.com/sections/Breaking...rticleID=42552


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This Week in Electrical History[
12. Jun
(1837) William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone received a patent on electric telegraphy; on 4 September the first message was sent on a line they built from London (Euston Station) to Camden Town.
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Yo, Home Is Where Your Work Is

Yo Inc.'s VisEdge uses PKI to provide remote users with secure access to internal network applications.
Chantal Payette

The recent outbreak of SARS that forced the closure of several medical facilities in the Greater Toronto Area and set tourism in a deep recession also affected a wide range of businesses. Forced SARS-baticals, a term coined for SARS-related quarantines of people who may have been exposed to others carrying the virus, have meant that some people have had to work from home. As a result, businesses concerned with a possible downturn in productivity are looking for IT solutions that can be rapidly deployed to enable people to work remotely — but still securely.

Media Replication Services (M.R.S.) is one of the Toronto-area companies that isn't waiting around for something like SARS to knock its business off track. M.R.S. provides replication services on all media platforms, such as pre-mastering, graphic layout services, packaging, fulfilment and distribution, and in its industry there is no time for a slowdown if the company want to stay competitive.

Staff at (M.R.S.), an end-to-end replication services company, are beginning to work remotely using a new network security software platform called VisEdge. It's a system developed by Toronto-based Yo Inc., a 15-person enterprise software company, established in July 2000.

"The recent SARS outbreak made us realize that we didn't really have plan in place that would enable our own workers to remain productive in the case of an emergency," says Noble Musa, vice-president of M.R.S. "We've since implement a business continuity plan, with VisEdge as the remote access solution."

The system has benefits beyond just allowing workers to do their jobs remotely. As a service bureau, Media Replication Services has had to rely on unsecured e-mail, FTP file transfer and the shipping of physical media in order to receive digital artwork and masters from its customers. To gain a competitive edge and meet customer needs, M.R.S. was seeking an Internet-based solution that would enable customers to simply drag their finished documents from their PC folders and drop them into separate and secure repositories residing within M.R.S.'s internal network.

So in April of this year, M.R.S. launched the industry's first "Secure Service Bureau," an innovative Secure Private Network. Built upon Yo's VisEdge platform, the Secure Service Bureau allows M.R.S.'s customers to easily and securely deliver confidential documents directly from their desktop to M.R.S.'s internal network across the Internet. A Secure Service Bureau deploys within minutes and features fully automated PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) based security tools that simplify the management of remote Trusted Members.

"Until we saw VisEdge work, we really did not fully appreciate how much we needed it or what it could do for us. Now that VisEdge is in place it has opened up new opportunities and ensures that we have a solution in place for remote productivity," said Mr. Musa.

M.R.S.'s IT staff was familiar with other VPN (Virtual Private Network) products on the market, but deploying VPNs and additional security such as PKI on customers' desktops was simply out of the question. As with many small companies, they did not own or manage their own networks and they could not send IT staff out to companies to install software.

Another problem was that a basic VPN would give anyone logging in complete access to all the resources on M.R.S.'s network. It needed to be able to restrict or limit what network access it would give to customers. A VPN could not be configured easily to do this.

VisEdge is a software alternative to a VPN that provides PKI security with "transparent" or easy security management. It embeds digital certificates (PKI - X.509) to authenticate the remote user's computer (i.e. an added level of security beyond a user name and password), enabling the user to securely access the enterprise network and run applications across the Internet as if they were accessing those applications in the office. Remote users can be employees, business partners, vendors or customers.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/


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EU project develops interoperable smart space for learning
Cordis

An EU project consortium has announced that it has moved one step closer to making a reality of an interoperable smart space for learning in Europe.

ELENA is an Information Society Technologies (IST) project, funded under the Fifth Framework Programme (FP5). The project has a total budget of nearly four million euro and includes partners from four Member States, as well as Slovenia and Iceland. Its aim is to develop an educational service network, consisting of learning assessment tools, learning management systems, educational (meta) repositories and live delivery systems such as video conferencing systems.

The ELENA project has recently reached the first milestone in its work agenda: it has developed a peer-to-peer network (P2P), linking the two instances of the already established UNIVERSAL brokerage service for the exchange and distribution of learning resources among educators and trainers. Progress has also been made in connecting other educational management systems so that users can be kept up to date on events and novelties in the world of education.

Users are being invited to test the network guidelines from the project's website. Users are also requested to provide feedback and contributions on the project's specifications and prototypes.

The project consortium is hopeful that developing a learning network in such a way will 'provide an advantage for all learners by offering them the choice amongst a variety of knowledge sources.'

'ELENA prepares the ground for the rise of educational service markets and new service value chains, which will allow institutions to treat the performance of educational services as a make or buy decision,' explains the consortium.

For further information, please visit the following web address:
http://www.elena-project.org/
http://dbs.cordis.lu/cgi-bin/srchida...RCN_ID :20389


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GLOO Technology, aJile Java Microprocessor Combine To Bring Low-Cost Multimedia Distribution to the Home
Press Release

GlooLabs, LLC and aJile Systems, Inc. have announced a strategic partnership to provide an end-to-end Java hardware and software solution for home multimedia distribution. GlooLabs is the developer of GLOO, an open-platform, digital convergence technology that will be ported to aJile's embedded Java microprocessor platform. The combined platform will allow hardware manufacturers to quickly produce low-cost digital media adapters and other multimedia convergence devices. aJile's groundbreaking 100 percent Java processor dramatically transforms the Java device landscape by bypassing software Java translation and directly executing Java bytecode in silicon. The result is significant performance enhancement that delivers music, digital images and full-motion, 16-bit color animation rivaling the Java execution of a desktop PC.

"GLOO is an excellent opportunity to show the power and flexibility of our aJile Java microprocessors," said Danh Le Ngoc, vice president of marketing for aJile Systems. "With a combined Java hardware and software solution, we can help companies bring affordable digital media distribution devices to people's living rooms."

The GlooLabs software technology, called GLOO, allows digital files stored on a PC, Mac or stand-alone storage medium to be played back through a variety of devices on a wireless or wired network.

The GLOO platform uses DMTP (Digital Media Transfer Protocol) to allow new and existing media devices to discover and communicate with each other on a network in a peer-to-peer fashion. DMTP has the ability to detect and communicate with UPnP and Rendezvous devices that may also be on the network. GLOO also brings Internet-based media services, such as Internet radio, into the household, school or office environment.

The first jointly developed platform will be a digital audio distribution device to get music from the PC to the home stereo system. Manufacturing partners will be able to license the GLOO software running on an aJ-100 based hardware platform. The 100 percent Java solution will benefit manufacturers by helping them lower their product life-cycle costs -- from parts and software licenses to software development, upgrades and support requirements.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+02:09+PM


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Independent streak

Apple wooing a host of indie record labels to join online service
Chris Gaither

For the blues music label Blind Pig Records, the Internet has been both savior and nemesis.

With conglomerates controlling radio station playlists and mom-and-pop record stores giving way to retail chains, the independent record label has turned to online retailers like Amazon.com to hawk albums by its musicians, including Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and James Cotton. But its own experiments in downloading or listening to music over the Internet have borne few results. Many of the early digital music services it worked with have folded. Blind Pig let partnerships with others expire.

Now, however, the San Francisco-based label's president, Edward Chmelewski, is singing the praises of iTunes Music Store, the new music-download service by Apple Computer Inc.

''They've been able to take advantage of some of the false starts of these other companies -- Napster for example -- and see what works and what doesn't,'' he said. ''It's really the first business model for online retailing that actually makes some sense.''

It took Apple 18 months of cajoling to persuade the world's largest record labels to contribute their songs to Apple's upstart music service. But after seven weeks of surprisingly strong sales, Apple needed little more than a boxed lunch to win over independent music publishers.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/16..._streak+.shtml


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In February, Smith convened a hearing to discuss peer-to-peer piracy on college campuses.
Members of the panel said that piracy was a federal crime that should be punished as such, likening it to assault, battery and murder.

FCC Warned On Digital TV
Declan McCullagh

A key legislator in the House of Representatives warned Tuesday that copy protection used in the transition from analog to digital television broadcasts must protect Americans' "fair use" rights.

In a carefully worded speech, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House subcommittee overseeing copyright law, said that future Federal Communications Commission regulations involving digital TV should not "have an adverse affect on how consumers may legitimately use lawfully acquired entertainment products."

Smith also signaled his firm opposition to a bill introduced last year by Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., which would implant mandatory copy-protection technology in PCs and consumer electronics devices. "I am skeptical of government mandates on the technology industry...Until evidence shows otherwise, I believe existing copyright law is adequate," Smith told a one-day conference organized by the Progress and Freedom Foundation.

Smith called for greater disciplinary action against peer-to-peer pirates at universities, saying that research showed 16 percent of the files available on Kazaa are located at schools and universities. "It's unlikely that this amount of file-sharing activity is in furtherance of class assignments," Smith said.

Cary Sherman, president and general counsel of the Recording Industry Association of America, said in an interview after Smith's speech that "this is something he feels very deeply about. He's been pressing universities to be very aggressive on this issue. For that reason, I wasn't surprised by his speech."

Tuesday was not the first time that Smith questioned the FCC's digital TV proposals. During a March hearing, Smith questioned the FCC's "broadcast flag" proceeding relating to digital TV, saying that copy-protection rules were being set by an executive branch agency instead of by the appropriate committee in Congress. Although Smith's intellectual property subcommittee is responsible for drafting copyright laws, the Energy and Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over the FCC.

The FCC has not yet decided to go forward with a broadcast flag rule. The movie studios say that a law or FCC rule will be necessary to require that televisions sold after a certain date recognize the flag and, if it is present, limit consumers' rights to distribute digitally transmitted shows without restrictions.

But at that March hearing, Democrat Howard Berman, whose Southern California district borders Hollywood, said he was worried that the FCC could veer in a direction that might mandate "fair use" rights that would not be favorable to the entertainment industry. "I'm opposed to the FCC attempting to...limit the exclusive rights of copyright holders in its broadcast flag rule making," Berman said.

In February, Smith convened a hearing to discuss peer-to-peer piracy on college campuses. Members of the panel said that piracy was a federal crime that should be punished as such, likening it to assault, battery and murder.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-1015469.html


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FCC: High-Speed Net Growth Slowing
Reuters

A report from the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday showed households and businesses are signing up for broadband service at a slowing rate.

High-speed Internet connections grew 23 percent in the second half of 2002, down from the 27 percent posted in the first half of the year. For the full year, the number of high-speed lines increased by 58 percent.

Broadband access, which allows users to surf the Internet at speeds up to 30 times faster than a standard dial-up connection, is seen as an important next step by technology companies eager to roll out video on demand, Internet-based telephony and other advanced services.

While 19.9 million homes and businesses connected via broadband at the end of last year, the rate of growth has decreased gradually. A report last month by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that many of those interested in broadband have already signed up, while others who may be interested in the service find it is not available in their neighborhoods.

Broadband providers until recently have charged between $40 and $55 per month, while dial-up providers usually charge around $20 per month.

Broadband service is now available in 88 percent of the nation's ZIP codes, the FCC found, but service can vary widely within ZIP codes as the equipment necessary to provide service is not always available.

Coaxial cable-TV connections remained the most popular, accounting for 57 percent of all reported lines.

Digital subscriber lines (DSL) offered over telephone wires made up 33 percent, though analysts expect DSL would gain a larger share of the broadband pie if other telephone companies followed the lead of Verizon Communications and dropped prices to around $35 per month.

Satellite, fixed wireless and fiber-optic connections account for the remainder of broadband lines.
http://news.com.com/2100-1034-1015415.html


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Microsoft Cables New TV Technology
Paul Festa

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, speaking at the opening session of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association's annual trade show, outlined his company's new software for bridging cable television and interactive digital technology.

Microsoft TV Foundation Edition, for use by cable operators with their existing hardware and network systems, is designed to offer cable TV viewers features like video on demand and advanced parental screening.

Gates gave his remarks at a show panel Monday morning, along with executives from several other cable and Internet companies including Viacom, AOL Time Warner and Comcast.

The panel, titled "Leading the Digital Revolution," was devoted to "the business opportunities and challenges in transition to digital television, as well as the relationship among the various marketplace segments that are bringing consumers benefits of the broadband digital platform deployed by the cable industry."

To what degree Microsoft is bringing benefits to cable consumers in any substantial numbers is a matter of debate in the cable industry.
http://news.com.com/2100-1031-1014695.html


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ReplayTV Puts Ad Skipping On Pause
Lisa M. Bowman

ReplayTV said Tuesday that its new digital video recording boxes won't include some of the features that have angered copyright holders.

The company said its upcoming ReplayTV 5500 boxes, which are expected to be released in August, will not contain the Send Show and Automatic Commercial Advance tools as the company tries to "address the concerns of copyright holders."

ReplayTV has come under fire from major TV networks and movie studios for offering the features, which let consumers play back TV shows without commercials or send the shows to others. Digital video recorders (DVRs) are similar to VCRs, but instead of storing shows on a tape, they are stored on a hard drive.

"It is our goal to try to resolve issues that emerge in the area of digital media networking and be a positive force in the industry," Michael Seedman, chairman of Digital Networks North America, which bought ReplayTV in April, said in a statement.

Two years ago, the major movie studios and TV networks filed a lawsuit against Sonicblue, which at the time owned ReplayTV. The resulting legal tangles were partly responsible for hobbling Sonicblue, which filed for bankruptcy in March. The company was aggressive in promoting commercial-skipping and show-sharing technologies. The lawsuit, which has been combined with a case involving ReplayTV owners, is still ongoing in federal court in Los Angeles.

A representative for ReplayTV's new owner said the company made a business decision not to offer the disputed features in future products after reviewing the matter, but current models will still have them.

ReplayTV said the new 5500 DVRs will come with version 5.0 of the company's software, which will offer new tools including the ability to identify recording conflicts and assign recording to another ReplayTV device, pause a movie on one set and continue watching it on another, and skip recording repeats of shows.

The company also said it will maintain offerings such as QuickSkip, which lets people fast-forward through programs in 30-second increments. In the future, it hopes to let consumers use their ReplayTV units to send non-copyrighted materials, such as home videos, across the Internet to other ReplayTV units and computers.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041-1015121.html


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Internet Giants Plan Music Services

Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and others may follow Apple's lead by offering downloads a la carte.
Jeff Leeds and Jon Healey

Some of the Internet's biggest names are looking to take a bite out of Apple Computer Inc.'s novel online music venture.

Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and AOL Time Warner Inc.'s America Online unit are among the companies expected to launch services to compete with Apple's 6-week-old iTunes store, which charges 99 cents to download a song onto a personal computer. Viacom Inc.'s MTV, another popular Web destination, is also exploring a download venture, according to sources.

The arrival of these Internet heavyweights marks a dramatic shift for the five major record companies. For more than a year, they have unsuccessfully tried to thwart widespread piracy by drawing fans to their own Web music services. Now they are placing their hopes in established Internet companies with their built-in audience of tens of millions.

Music executives hope the new players will help the industry reverse its sales slump.

"I think the whole thing is a revolution," said Doug Morris, chairman of Vivendi Universal's music operation, the world's largest. "Yahoo has an enormous number of people coming through all the time. Amazon sells a ton of content. MTV certainly is an enormous bull's-eye for people who like music. This is an amazing moment."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,7750299.story

LATimes – Nick/Pass: peermint


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Media Chiefs Express Fears Of Digital Piracy
Peter J. Howe

For all of the new ways that digital technology and high-speed Internet connections are making music and movies available, many of the nation's media giants remain profoundly fearful that online distribution will open the door to massive piracy.

At the National Cable & Telecommunications Association annual meeting here yesterday, AOL Time Warner chief executive Richard D. Parsons and Viacom Inc. president Mel Karmazin -- appearing with the heads of Microsoft Corp. and Comcast Corp. -- said solutions are urgently needed but may take considerable time to be developed.

The issue for consumers is the pace at which they will get lower-priced access to buying, not just renting, tens of thousands of movies and music albums as an alternative to buying compact discs, DVDs, and videotapes.

Online music services with access to thousands of songs that can be ''burned'' on a CD for $1 a song or less have blossomed in the last year, including Listen .com's Rhapsody and Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store, but they face fierce competition from free but legally questionable file-sharing systems like Kazaa. Matthew Blank, chief executive of Showtime Networks, the cable movie channel, said film distributors want to ensure that ''we're not the next to be Napsterized like our friends in the music business,'' a reference to the music file- sharing system that spawned an epidemic of online music piracy.

''We've got to put our best minds and collaborate with others across the industry on coming up with the best ways for digital content to move in a way that is secure,'' Parsons said. ''We could actually all be losers if we don't solve this security issue.''

His company, AOL Time Warner, includes the Warner Bros. Film studios, music labels, and Time Warner cable broadband systems and the AOL dial-up and newer broadband services.

On a zero-to-10 scale, with 10 being fully adequate security for online content distribution, Parsons said: ''I think we're probably between three and four, but we're moving in the right direction.''

If ways to control piracy of online digital content are not rapidly strengthened, Parsons said, ''eventually it's going to begin to choke our creation'' of entertainment.

''People won't . . . put the time and talent in that's required if they can't get remunerated in some way,'' he said.

Karmazin said Viacom's CBS television unit remains a strong backer of transmitting shows in rich high-definition format, including not just prime-time network shows but HDTV versions of events such as the Masters golf tournament and college basketball playoffs.

''We're very much committed, [but] we're very concerned about piracy'' of digital HDTV programs through online file-swapping, Karmazin said.

Outside of carefully protected video-on-demand services controlled by cable companies, Karmazin said, ''I would certainly not feel good about taking a movie'' that may have cost $120 million to produce and market and put it online for downloadable access, given current safeguards.

''I'm not feeling very secure, and it concerns me a great deal,'' Karmazin said.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates agreed that ''the music case is a very cautionary case'' for broadcasters and movie studios.

''What's happened is really scary for the artists who created that content and the businesses who helped them with that,'' Gates said. ''The movie people are looking at the music experience and saying, `Let's get ahead of this thing.' ''

Brian L. Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, which has begun rolling out video-on-demand services in New England and nationally, cited the urgent need for industry wide agreement on authorized ways to distribute content online that protect its producers' economic interests, given that movies are already beginning to show up in file-swapping services.

Roberts agreed with Gates that ''the music industry is instructive. If you wait too long, it's too late'' and content piracy services will blossom.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/16..._piracy+.shtml
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