Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – September 20th, '03

[JackSpratts]

Court Weighs Subpoenas for Music Downloads
Ted Bridis

A U.S. appeals court wrestled with questions Tuesday over whether the music industry can use special copyright subpoenas in its campaign to track and sue computer users who download songs over the Internet.

Judge John Roberts of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia challenged Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) lawyer Donald B. Verrilli Jr. on whether computer users downloading music were any different from people who maintain libraries in their homes.

Roberts questioned whether the fact that copyrighted files were publicly accessible on someone's computer necessarily means the Internet user is illegally distributing those files. File-sharing software typically stores downloaded music in a computer folder that is freely available for other Internet users to browse.

"Isn't is equivalent to my leaving the door to my library open?" Roberts asked. "Somebody could come in and copy my books but that doesn't mean I'm liable for copyright infringement."

Roberts and the other two judges hearing the case also posed tough questions for Verizon Communications Inc., which is challenging the constitutionality of the subpoenas under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (news - web sites). U.S. District Judge John D. Bates earlier had approved use of the subpoenas, forcing Verizon to turn over names and addresses for at least four Internet subscribers.

"You make a lot of money off piracy," Roberts told Verizon lawyer Andrew McBride. People who download large collections of music traditionally favor high-speed Internet connections like those offered by Verizon's Internet subsidiary.

"That is a canard," McBride shot back. He said Verizon makes money when computer users purchase songs from online services affiliated with Verizon.

The 1998 law, passed years before downloading music over "peer to peer" Internet services became popular, permits music companies and others to force Internet providers to turn over the names of suspected pirates upon subpoena from any U.S. District Court clerk's office. A judge's signature is not required.

Critics of the procedure contend judges ought to be more directly involved, given the potential privacy issues involved when a corporation is asked to reveal personal information about customers who may be accused of wrongdoing.

In an unprecedented crackdown on music piracy, the Washington-based Recording Industry Association of America issued at least 1,500 such subpoenas this summer. It has filed civil lawsuits against 261 people so far it accused of illegally distributing music online and promised thousands more lawsuits.

The three-judge panel must decide whether Bates correctly ruled against Verizon earlier this year.

Verizon had argued unsuccessfully that Internet providers should only be compelled to respond to such subpoenas when pirated music is stored on computers that providers directly control, such as a Web site, rather than on a subscriber's personal computer.

Many of the day's courtroom arguments focused on esoteric provisions of the complex 1998 law, such as whether a computer connected to a file-sharing service functions as an "online site" — a crucial legal distinction for the music industry to successfully issue subpoenas.

Senior Judge Stephen F. Williams told Verrilli that permitting subpoenas in these cases "makes a lot of sense from a policy standpoint," but questioned whether they were permitted under some interpretations of the law.

In his ruling, Bates had criticized Verizon's "strained reading" of the law. He wrote that Verizon's interpretation "makes little sense from a policy standpoint," and warned that it "would create a huge loophole in Congress' effort to prevent copyright infringement on the Internet."

Sen. Sam Brownback , R-Kan., said he planned to introduce a bill Tuesday to protect Internet providers from such subpoenas. His proposal would block subpoenas except in pending civil lawsuits or in cases where pirated data files were stored on computers such as Web sites.

Still, a courtroom challenge may be Verizon's best hope.

Senate Judiciary Committee (news - web sites) Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah said last week that it was too early to consider changing the 1998 law. He asked lawyers on all sides and consumers to report to his office about their experiences with these subpoenas over the next six months.

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On the Net:

Contested ruling: http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/Opinions.../02-ms-323.pdf

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...usic&printer=1


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Study: Students Unfazed By Piracy
Stefanie Olsen

If attitudes on colleges nationwide are any indicator, then software piracy in Kazaa and other file-swapping communities could get out of control, according to a new study.

Nearly two-thirds of college students surveyed said they would download pirated software, according to a study released Tuesday by the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Only a third of those students who have already downloaded commercial software have paid for it.

Much of the blame rests on university educators who aren't discouraging illegal behavior, according to the study, called "Internet Piracy on Campus." More than 40 percent of educators say it's OK to share or swap software to cut costs.

"Students aren't being told, 'Downloading unlicensed or illegal files is a mistake,'" Robert Holleyman, CEO of BSA, said in a statement.

"With P2P use on the rise, student and educator attitudes toward illegal downloading and file swapping, if ignored, have the potential to become a gateway for increased software piracy on thousands of college campuses," he added.

The study was released at a time when Net music piracy is taking center stage in the media and U.S. courts. The Recording Industry Association of America recently filed 261 lawsuits against individuals who allegedly traded songs in peer-to-peer communities such as Kazaa, charging them with copyright infringement potentially worth millions of dollars.

Members of BSA--Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, Macromedia, Microsoft, Symantec and others--are calling attention to their own fight so that it doesn't get overlooked. Cash-strapped students could be more apt to download programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office and Outlook, without paying for them in order to do their work. The BSA's fear is that if students' attitudes are left unchecked, they will turn into habits in the workplace.

Holleyman said that while peer-to-peer technology has improved, its misuse still raises concerns. "Education is ever more important to changing these behaviors," he said.

The study found that of the 69 percent of students who have downloaded music, only 8 percent have paid for it. Of the nearly one-quarter of respondents who say they have downloaded movies, only 4 percent paid for it. Despite the statistics, 93 percent of students endorse intellectual property rights and the concept of contributing to software development.

The study also found that educators aren't setting a good example or making university policies known. Only about a third of students said that professors actively discourage them from swapping software or installing software on multiple machines.

The survey is part of a wider initiative at BSA to study attitudes toward downloading, file sharing and copyright law within universities. The BSA is developing educational resources to help universities address the piracy problem on campus.

The research, conducted by Ipsos, was compiled through online interviews with 1,000 university and college students and through telephone interviews with 300 college and university faculty and administrators.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5077451.html


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From the mouths of musicians…

Thoughts on File Sharing & Digital Delivery
Mark Bjornsgaard, lead singer, songwriter, London’s Ohm

A 14-year-old girl, pretending to do her homework, downloads the latest Avril Lavigne album on to the family PC and burns it onto a CD to play to her friends. A middle-aged management consultant hunts down his favourite Hootie & the Blowfish track on his laptop. A bored City receptionist listens dreamily to Justin Timberlake on her Mac between calls. Nearly four million people are sharing 800 million files on the internet.

Kazaa, the most popular peer-to-peer file-sharing software, is the new Napster. Installed from the web by 229,513,316 computer users worldwide since it was launched, making it the most downloaded resource ever, Kazaa provides access to every album ever published, from ABBA "Arrival" through Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" to "Afterburner" by ZZ Top. And it doesn't cost a penny.

The music revolution has begun. And if Napster stormed the major labels' Bastille three years ago, Kazaa now reigns terror over BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner. George Bernhard Shaw said "All great truths start as blasphemies." Well, here's one. Music copyrights no longer have any economic value.

"Peer-to-peer" file-sharing, or connecting two or more computers directly, without the need for a Napster- like central server in which to store the files, means it is almost impossible to hold anyone accountable for copyright infringement. The introduction of ADSL (last month, the number of broadband users exceeded two million, and it is expected to pass three million by the end of the year) has massively increased the scale, rate and quality of files shared. As CD sales continue to plummet worldwide, the Napster era is now considered something of a golden age for record sales. Who could actually be bothered to wait 45 minutes while a track downloaded on a dial-up connection? And yet, yesterday, having enjoyed a review of Dave Gahan's solo album, I downloaded it in 13 minutes, while writing this article.

This two-pronged assault has had a catastrophic effect on the share price of record labels. Sony's last annual report signed off: "The dollar value of its US music operation fell 4% for the year ending March 31, 2002", while ABN-Amro's most recent media research paper stated bluntly, "The outlook for the music industry remains bleak, with the next five years expected to see a compound average decline of almost 1%". Investors, it seems, can smell disaster, even if many in the industry cannot.

For the last three years, at every music industry convention, the number of record label CEO's pronouncing the imminent resumption of normal service was only exceeded by the number of possible solutions they were offering. Many, defying the shareholder stampede south, seem to be living in some sort of alternative reality - according to EMI's latest sales report, "Shareholders can expect a substantial improvement in operating performance in the year ahead... we intend to deliver sustained sales and profit growth." Profit derived from legal actions against the 10 million people who share music online, perhaps? The drastic cost-cutting in the last year, on which much of EMI's good news is based, hasn't even kept up with market shrinkage in real terms.

Vast sums have been spent developing expensive competing digital platforms, which continue to spring up like mushrooms in a murky forest. The latest, a joint venture between the majors and Apple, seems to be the equivalent of Cherokee Jeeps, when faced with "instantaneous car replication," consoling themselves by charging 10p for a fully kitted out SUV, and omitting to tell their shareholders that they still have to shell out £10,000 to throw the machine together.

If a clearer indication of the chaos the industry is in were needed, 2 months ago (June 26), the Recording Industry Association of America announced they intend to sue online file-sharers. But how exactly will they go about prosecuting 10 million people? And do they think that threatening to sue virtually their entire customer base is going to make it more or less likely that it will buy products from them legitimately in the future?

The explanation for this chaos favoured by major labels and articulated using the language of criminality - "theft," "piracy" - is that the business model they adopted 40 years ago - develop talent and sell the music on physical media (LPs, cassettes and CDs) has been trumped so successfully and so quickly by file-sharing, that the music industry simply hasn't been able to react fast enough.

However, this explanation excuses them from taking a much harder look at the nature of the business they now preside over. The real reason why labels are so exposed to the file-sharing storm is the culture of manufacturing music, as opposed to artist development. Although creating bands and music synthetically is appealing, as the production process is streamlined and costs can be managed, it is impossible to give such contrived products intrinsic values. It's hard to make the band a brand. And that, as Nike, Gap and the rest of the corporate world discovered 10 years ago, is the key to success.

Ironically, from time to time, the music industry has dabbled in the concept with, for example, Bob Dylan, The Sex Pistols, U2, The Manic Street Preachers and The Spice Girls. Did people love the Pistols just because they made great music, or because they confronted the establishment in troubled times, too? Were the Spice Girls played on every stereo because their songs were better than those of Bewitched, or because they cleverly hijacked post-feminism?

The problem for labels isn't content - it's context. Fans who are provided with a context in which to enjoy the content have proved time and again that they can be loyal, patient and generous. Radiohead's Kid A was hardly Pet Sounds, but the album went straight to number one in the States and the band's US tour sold out in four minutes.

Tinkering with the business structure is futile. The horse and cart owners of the 1920's bemoaned the advance of technology. The clever ones bought motorised vehicles. A new industry, artist lead, based on different core values and competencies must emerge.

Artist development and the live arena are crucial. Fans made live, will disseminate your message to a wider audience. Pay per view, as has happened in the football industry in the last 10 years, will assume a dominant position on the balance sheet. Fledgling bands will become adept at exploiting their merchandising capacity on the road - as the Rolling Stones and Kiss have done, with dramatic effect - Kiss fans are already driving Kiss-branded cars and planning to be buried in Kiss coffins.

Distribution costs disappear, marketing spends plummet, recording costs - helped by new technology - are slashed. A global promotional services market will evolve, which bands will use on a country by country basis, depending on budget and genre - with the world viewed as one market, exploited simultaneously. Instead of taking ten pounds from 100,000 people, the industry must aim to be taking one pound from a million.

To ensure that the music industry has any sort of future, label bigwigs must realise that albums are no longer their main breadwinner and file-sharing is not a threat, but the best chance they have to survive.
http://musicdish.com/mag/?id=8708


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Despite Risk Of Lawsuit, Students Download Music
Lina Shustarovich

There are some activities that the majority of college students engage in regardless of the risk -- it seems that downloading music is and will continue to be one of them.

Although the Recording Industry Association of America announced last week that it has filed over 250 lawsuits -- and plans to file thousands more -- against individuals who have allegedly been sharing and distributing music online, there does not seem to be much of a decline in downloading on Penn's campus.

"Me stopping downloading isn't going to stop everybody else from downloading... so what's the point?" Wharton freshman Vimarth Shukla said.

Shukla, who said he understands the problem that file sharing poses for the music industry, downloads music using "Kazaa Lite" -- a version of the original peer-to- peer network -- that blocks the majority of pop-up advertisements.

However, he added, he does not do so "excessively."

"It's just easier to download music if you don't like the whole CD," Shukla said. He added, though, that he never keeps over 100 songs on his computer. Instead, he downloads the songs that he wants to hear, burns them on a CD and then deletes them.

Because of this system, Shukla is not worried about the RIAA lawsuits and said that he "will continue to download music."

College junior Sheena Prakash -- who said she has more than 1,200 songs downloaded on her computer -- also said she will continue to participate in peer-to- peer file sharing, despite the warnings.

Although the amount of files she currently has may put her at risk legally, she is not worried -- mainly because she is getting a new computer.

"Once I get a new computer, I won't have any songs on it so I will probably continue" to download music, she said. She added that it is "easier than buying a CD because you get just the song you want."

Another reason for Prakash's lack of concern is because, according to her, "there are a lot more people out there who have more songs and will be targets before me."

If Prakash were to be faced with the threat of litigation, she would consider accepting the RIAA's amnesty policy -- requiring her to delete all her illegally obtained music files and agree to stop downloading.

However, Prakash said she would not pursue the amnesty policy or give up her downloading unless there was some "pressure" on her.

Information technology advisers, such as College sophomore Nikola Kojucharov, are offering advice to students about how to avoid a lawsuit.

Kojucharov uses "Kazaa Lite" to download his music and suggested that others do the same. He explained that because Kazaa is constantly downloading advertisements off the Internet, it is less safe and makes it easier to trace the user.

In addition, Kojucharov recommended students turn off the file-sharing function, so that while a user can download files, his or her own files cannot be uploaded by others.

Kojucharov thinks that the recent lawsuits are in the back of everyone's minds, but that nobody is too concerned about it.

"My thinking is that if you try to catch everyone that downloads songs, it's going to be the whole campus," Kojucharov said, explaining why he isn't too worried about getting into trouble himself.

"We're all playing with fire," he said. "Hopefully it doesn't backfire on me."

While Penn students say they are not overly concerned, some students at institutions where lawsuits have already been filed are taking alternative approaches to downloading songs.

Jennifer Beckley, a senior at Michigan Technological University -- where student Joseph Nievelt in May settled a suit for thousands of dollars with the RIAA -- said that she doesn't download MP3s onto her computer.

Instead, Beckley uses the "Yahoo Music!" Web site, which allows users to listen to music files, but not to download and store them in their hard drives.

"It's free, and also it isn't illegal, because you're not actually downloading the music onto your computer," Beckley said of her approach.
http://www.dailypennsylvanian.com/vn.../3f66ccce84c9e


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Senate Approves Repeal of New Media Regulations
Stephen Labatonc

The Senate approved a resolution today to repeal all of the new regulations that would make it easier for the nation's largest media companies to grow bigger.

By a vote of 55 to 40, the Republican-controlled Senate defied the White House and issued a stinging political rebuke of Michael K. Powell, the Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and architect of the rules.

Administration officials had spoken to several lawmakers before the vote in an unsuccessful effort to turn it around, Congressional officials said today. Administration officials expressed relief that the vote indicated the measure would not be able to withstand a presidential veto, which the White House has threatened.

The sponsors of the Senate resolution acknowledged that it still faced long political odds before becoming law in its current form, although they said they had better chances of repealing significant pieces of the new rules rather than the entire package. House leaders who oppose the resolution have refused to allow it to reach the floor of that chamber.

Still, the Senate vote demonstrated broad bipartisan hostility to the new rules and, as one lawmaker said today, a symbolically important vote of no confidence in Mr. Powell. Twelve Republicans and one independent joined 42 Democrats in voting for the resolution. It was opposed by 38 Republicans and 2 Democrats, Zell Miller of Georgia and John Breaux of Louisiania.

Speaking of Mr. Powell, Senator Byron L. Dorgan, the North Dakota Democrat and chief sponsor of the resolution, said: "I think he has made a horrible mistake. His leadership at the commission has led the commission to cave in to the special interests as quickly and as thoroughly as I've ever seen."

The vote was only the second time in history that the Senate has used a parlimentary procedure known as a resolution of disapproval to, in effect, veto an action by a regulator. It also had broader support than the final tally — four of the five senators absent from the chamber, including three presidential candidates, have said they would have voted for it.

Mr. Dorgan and a large group of other senators, ranging from Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader, to Trent Lott of Mississippi, the former Republican leader, vowed to continue to take steps to repeal the media rules by attaching amendments to other measures headed for floor action.

One such amendment, which would repeal the new rule that gives the largest television networks the ability to buy more local stations, has already been approved by a wide margin on a spending bill in the House and is expected to reach the floor of the Senate before it leaves for its recess this fall.

That amendment, unlike today's resolution, had strong support from the National Association of Broadcasters, a powerful lobbying group made up of local television and radio stations that is often at odds with the television networks.

Both the amendment and the resolution have been strongly supported by an unusual alliance of liberal and conservative organizations, civil rights groups, labor unions and religious organizations.

In an unusual political twist, the Senate action was made possible by the Congressional Review Act, a little-known law adopted seven years ago at the urging of Republicans who thought the administration issued too many burdensome regulations and wanted to make it easier for Congress to repeal them. It has only been used once before, in 2001, to repeal the ergonomics regulations adopted under the Clinton administration. Today the measure was being used by both liberals and conservatives to try to undo one of the most deregulatory packages completed under the Bush administration.

Mr. Powell had testified throughout the earlier part of his tenure that the Senate and House were always free to set policy that he would follow. But recently he has become more combative with the Senate.

In recent days, he has declined repeated requests to be interviewed, including one today. In an article today in Roll Call, a newspaper on Capitol Hill, he called the pending Congressional action "bordering on the absurd."

Soon after the vote, he issued a statement saying the resolution would "create peverse results" and was not in the public interest.

"This resolution, if passed by the House and signed by the president, would only muddy the media regulatory waters," Mr. Powell said in the statement. "It would bring no clarity to media regulation, only chaos."

"What is most important is to have the best policies for the American people," he added. "I hope the House will take a more considered view of the public interest."

The vote was the second setback for Mr. Powell in two days, and the latest in a string of defeats since the rules were issued in June.

On Monday, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia rejected a request by lawyers from the F.C.C. to move a case challenging the rules to a court in Washington. Earlier this month, the court in Philadelphia blocked the commission from imposing the rules and is viewed by lawyers involved in the case as being less sympathetic to the commission than the court in Washington.

The appeals court in Philadelphia will hear the case, brought against the commission by a group of small radio stations, in November.

The rules that the Senate voted to overturn would permit one company to own both a broadcast station and a newspaper in most cities. They would also permit a company to own up to eight radio and three TV stations, as well as a cable company, in the biggest markets. And they would enable the broadcast networks to acquire television stations that reach as much as 45 percent of the nation's viewers, up from 35 percent now.

The networks have lobbied vigorously for relaxing the station ownership rule and have come up against aggressive lobbying from the affiliates. Many large newspaper companies, including The New York Times Company, have sought to repeal the restrictions prohibiting one company from owning both a newspaper and a broadcast station in the same city.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/17/bu...17FCC.html?8bl


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New Worm Targets File-Sharing Nets

Antivirus vendors post updates to stop W32.Swen, which masquerades as a Microsoft update.
Paul Roberts

Antivirus companies are warning Internet users about W32.Swen, a new worm that spreads using e-mail messages, vulnerable network connections, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and peer-to-peer networks.

F-Secure, Network Associates, and Symantec all have issued warnings about Swen, indicating that the worm is spreading on the Internet. Customers are being advised to update their antivirus definitions to detect and nullify Swen.

Finding a Flaw

First detected on Thursday, Swen exploits a security hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser. It affects all supported versions of the Windows operating system, according to security products vendor F-Secure of Helsinki.

The worm poses as a software security update from Microsoft. Its message prompts users with "Yes" or "No" buttons to agree to install the update, and even provides an installation "progress" bar if they do agree.

However, the worm code is installed regardless of what users select. Once it has infected a system, Swen alters the configuration of Windows so the worm is launched whenever Windows is started. The worm also detects and disables antivirus software or other Windows features that could be used to disable it, according to F-Secure.

Like other mass mailing worms, Swen scans an infected machine's hard drive for e-mail addresses and uses those to send out more copies of itself, skimming SMTP server addresses and user names from Windows.

Infected e-mail messages are formatted to look like official correspondence from Microsoft. The messages appear to come from one of a variety of randomly generated senders like "MS Technical Assistance" and advertise a "cumulative patch" for Internet Explorer to patch "three newly discovered vulnerabilities," F-Secure says.

Other Routes

The worm also can detect the presence of IRC clients or the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing client application, and then distribute itself on those networks. Swen places a specialized script file that sends a virus file to every computer on the same IRC channel as the infected computer.

For machines running Kazaa file-sharing software, Swen enables the file-sharing feature, if it is not already enabled. It places multiple copies of itself in the Kazaa shared files folder, disguised as Kazaa client software, pirated software, or other popular applications, F-Secure says.

More than one antivirus company notes the similarity between Swen and an earlier worm, W32.Gibe, which appeared in March. Like Swen, Gibe also attempted to spread by e-mail as well as Kazaa and IRC networks, while posing as a piece of legitimate Microsoft software when installed.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112552,00.asp


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IBM Prepares Lockbox For Home Networks
Martin LaMonica

IBM is readying a digital rights management strategy for securing content everywhere from Hollywood to Wall Street.

The initiative, called extensible Content Protection (xCP), involves software that allows media companies to put controls on content distributed to consumers' home networks.

The initiative is aimed at preventing illegal use of commercial media. Dick Anderson, the general manger for IBM's Media and Entertainment group, will discuss the project Thursday at a conference to be held at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Mass. IBM is expected to announce its first entertainment industry xCP customer in about a month.

xCP includes encryption software that allows media providers to give consumers the right to, for example, watch a movie on a DVD player and any other xCP-compliant device on that consumer's home network. The software will let media companies protect their intellectual property and be simple enough for consumers to use, according to IBM.

Such safeguards will allow the media and entertainment industry to develop viable business models for content distribution, which at this point are lacking, said Steve Canepa, vice president of strategy for IBM's media and entertainment industry.

"The ground we're trying to get to is to maybe take the focus off rights specifications for control and limitation in what can be done with content and to change the focus to self-enablement and a new user experience," Canepa said.

Although high-profile battles waged by music and movie studios against illicit Internet media downloads generate the most headlines, IBM sees a parallel need for content protection in other industries.

An aerospace manufacturer, for example, would want to distribute engineering plans to its partners electronically with strictly controlled access rights. Also, regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) dictate certain data-protection procedures for medical patients' personal information.

However, because of inadequate digital rights management (DRM) software, companies lose billions of dollars each year in intellectual property in the form of stolen research or customer lists, said Stuart Sager, program director for copy protection and DRM at IBM's software group.

"The need to protect content in the enterprise space is very real," Sager said. "We think that DRM is really going to become very ubiquitous."

IBM will embed DRM capabilities across its software line. The company is now testing a system to add DRM controls to its DB2 Content Manager product and is targeting a final release of the add-on product at some point in 2004.

The DRM features will allow a company to assign access rights to content and track its usage. Customers can tap into the DRM feature, which is written in Java, via Web services programming protocols, but they do not have to change the code of existing applications, Sager said.

IBM will eventually embed its DRM software, called Copy Protection and Enabling, across its entire middleware line, including WebSphere and Tivoli products.

DRM is an important push for software giant Microsoft as well. DRM is a key feature of its Office 2003 desktop application suite and an important part of the company's ongoing security initiative. This week, Microsoft revealed pricing details on its plan for assigning authoring and viewing rights to documents for people using Microsoft Office and Windows Server 2003.

IBM's approach to DRM is broader than Microsoft's, Sager said. IBM is tracking standards for various content types, such as audio files, images or video clips, and the DRM software in Content Manager will support the various formats.

The DRM architecture also allows companies to reuse content in different scenarios. For example, a company could sell an audio file for download both to a mobile phone and to a home network using the xCP software.
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_210...3-5077368.html


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Broadband Adoption Skyrockets Worldwide
Jim Hu

The number of broadband subscribers worldwide surged 72 percent in 2002, to 62 million, as more households upgraded their dial-up modems for speedier access, according to a new study.

The study, conducted by Geneva-based International Telecommunication Union (ITU), noted that South Korea leads all nations, with 21 percent of its population subscribing to a broadband service. Out of all Internet users in South Korea, 94 percent subscribe to broadband.

Hong Kong was the second-highest region for broadband adoption, with 15 percent of its population on a high-speed connection. Canada came in third with 11 percent.

The study said that the impetus for growth is greater speed to handle online games and to download digital media. Indeed, the accessibility of broadband has created a widely reported online gaming culture in South Korea.

As for the United States, broadband penetration continues to rise, and could reach 25 percent of the population faster than PCs and mobile phones did, the study said. U.S. broadband providers, namely phone companies providing digital subscriber line (DSL) service and cable companies, have reported steady growth in broadband customers. Some studies have shown healthy demand for broadband despite difficulties in implementing high-speed lines.

A study released by the market research firm Strategy Analytics in June said consumers want broadband not only for faster access, but also for economic reasons. Households are turning to broadband because it's cheaper than paying for two phone lines.
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_210...3-5077230.html


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Compulsory Licensing - The Death of Gnutella and the Triumph of Google
Ernest Miller

Never have so many companies fought so hard to change the law so that they can so quickly be put out of business.

Back in July, a number of filesharing companies (Blubster, Grokster, BearShare, eDonkey 2000 and LimeWire - Kazaa being conspiculously absent) formed a trade association (P2PUnited - website coming soon, apparently), to push for, among other things, compulsory licensing, as noted in this New York Post article (File-Share Firms Hire a Lobbyist). I wonder how much they have really thought this through. After all, a compulsory license that legimitized filesharing would quickly put most of these companies out of business.

The Death of Gnutella

Why do most of these companies even exist? One very simple reason: the courts put Napster out of business. Napster was an extremely elegant solution for filesharing. It acted as a massive centralized database that allowed downloaders to easily find the uploaders with the files they wanted. By comparison, decentralized P2P networks, such as those based on the Gnutella protocol, are clunky and have serious issues with scalability, search efficiency and bandwidth use. Although services based upon the Gnutella protocol have gotten better, adopting strategies such as "supernodes", they remain hampered in their efficiency by their very reason for being: avoiding contributory and vicarious copyright liability (at which they have been successful, so far - though the farther they push for efficiency and control, the more shaky the legal ground they stand on, see, Decentralization, Gnutella and Bad Actors).

However, if filesharing becomes legal through a compulsory license, what is the purpose of the Gnutella-based software anymore? Napster's liability was based on theories of contributory and vicarious liability, which requires an underlying copyright violation. To the extent that filesharing is no longer copyright infringement, Napster could no longer be held liable. Since the Napster solution is far more efficient, particularly for searches, why would anyone use a Gnutella (or any decentralized P2P) network anymore? Virtually anything a Gnutella network can do can be implemented in a Napster-like network as well. Sure, current interfaces are better than Napster's, but they could easily be ported from a Gnutella client to a Napster-like one.

All that effort, all that clever programming optimizing the Gnutella protocol, gone in a flash of compulsory licensing. Sure Gnutella will still be around, but what will it be used for? Why will so much effort be devoted to develop and optimize it? Gnutella will be, as far as I can see, a dead end technology, at least for filesharing.

So what, you say? Of course all these companies will swiftly shift to a Napster-like network when the law is passed. Absolutely! However, it is very likely that all but one of these companies will soon go out of business. The reason is that, like the auction market eBay, there is reason to believe that very strong network effects occur in the filesharing market. After all, in the auction market, sellers go to where the buyers are and buyers go where the sellers are. If you attract more buyers, you will attract more sellers, which then attracts more buyers, and so on in a positive feedback loop. Such network effects should operate similarly in the filesharing market, though most people will be buyers and only inadvertantly sellers. For example, if I am looking for an obscure track, I will go to the filesharing service with the most participants, since I will have the greatest chance of finding what I am looking for. Therefore, once one filesharing service clearly distinguishes itself in popularity from the others, it will take off and its competitors quickly wither away.

True, there is nothing that would prevent people from participating in several filesharing services at once, but there is little that keeps people from posting listings on multiple auction sites either. People will most likely experiment with a few services at first, and there might be some shifting initially as rapid innovation occurs. There will likely be attempts to mimic Trillian for making the various networks work together. The competition will also likely be vicious and expensive. As few of these filesharing services have compelling and profitable business plans, particularly given the changes wrought by a compulsory licensing scheme, it will be interesting to see how many will be able to raise the money necessary to fight this battle. Ultimately, I think things will likely settle down in a year or two with one service triumphant.

The Triumph of Google Of course, I think the likely winner is none of the current participants. I think the winner will be Google. The most important aspect of a centralized filesharing service is fast, accurate and efficient searches. Downloaders want to find the right tracks from a reliable source. I think that Google will win this fight because nobody does searches better, and I don't see any reason why Google wouldn't want this market given that filesharing is legalized. The way I figure it, the brilliant minds at Google Labs will rather easily be able to create a P2P Google Tool that will be just as efficient as anything the competitors will be able to devise.

Even if Google technologists aren't up to the task (yeah, right), Google certainly has the deep pockets that will allow it to remain competitive and, if necessary, buy one of the leading competitors, just as they bought a certain blogging software company. Finally, because of strong network effects in the filesharing market, the winner must be able to handle catastrophic success. There must be scalability; the company that wins will have to be able to handle very rapid growth in the number of search queries their system can respond to. Interestingly, the decentralized nature of the current networks doesn't necessarily bode well for the existing P2P companies' ability to scale as quickly. I'm not sure if Google would even notice the increase in queries from filesharers.

If I'm right about what would happen to P2P filesharing services following the creation of compulsory licenses, is this good or bad? Well, I'm not sure. Google, despite its power, has been a pretty benign dictator so far. Also, I'm not entirely clear on how strong the lock-in effects of the main filesharing service will be. Somewhat stronger than the lock-in for search engines, I would imagine, but not as strong as in the auction market. The lock-in effect will determine to a large degree how much the winner of the filesharing war can abuse the system. In any case, it is certainly something to think about as we consider the merits and likely consequences of compulsory licenses.
http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/mod...ticle&sid=1206


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Word of the Day

...shamnesty. Courtesy of Ren Bucholz and yours, free for the taking.


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Music Industry Hits Wrong Note Against Piracy
Peter K. Yu

This past week, the Record Industry Association of America filed 261 lawsuits against individuals who downloaded music illegally via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, such as KaZaA, Grokster, iMesh and Gnutella. Unlike what the industry did a few months ago, it offered carrots in addition to sticks this time. Along with the lawsuits came a new amnesty program that allows individuals to avoid lawsuits from the RIAA if they remove all illegal music files from their computers and promise not to do so again. On its surface, the new program is quite attractive and creative. In reality, it represents another ineffective, costly and disturbing attempt to fight the copyright wars. The most egregious offenders would unlikely participate in the program. Many of them don't think what they are doing is illegal. Nor do they feel guilty about what they have done. The RIAA will end up with a list of only mild, and perhaps occasional, offenders. The list is far from what the industry wants. There are other problems as well. First, the music industry is not the only copyright holder out there that can go after illegal file swappers. There are other equally powerful industries, like the movie and software industries. The amnesty program also would not protect individuals from federal prosecutors, music publishers and independent labels not represented by the RIAA. A "clean slate" with the recording industry group is not very clean if many others can sue you the next day. Even worse from the perspectives of the file traders, by signing the affidavits, the traders will have admitted that they have traded copyrighted music illegally. If they commit any future infringement -- regardless of how serious and intentional that infringement is -- the affidavits will provide evidence for willful infringement. The affidavits also will create a blacklist of habitual offenders that the recording industry likely will monitor. It is not news that the industry has been tracking potential offenders using automated web-crawlers. In fact, the industry recently has created a widely publicized embarrassment when it sent a mistaken cease-and-desist letter to the astronomy and astrophysics department of Pennsylvania State University, because one of its retired professors has an acappella song about a gamma-ray satellite under his name in the departmental server. Finally, the promises made by amnesty participants are broad, arguably broader than what is prohibited under copyright law. The participants might have to give up rights that are available under current copyright law. To be fair, when the RIAA two years ago pursued MP3.com and Napster, critics asked the industry to leave technology alone and go after the offenders. The RIAA now has done so, but it is still being criticized. So far, the group has only targeted egregious offenders. Those named in the recent lawsuits have distributed on average more than 1,000 copyrighted songs via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Given the amount of music swapped and downloaded, these individuals won't be the industry's customers anyway. So what's wrong with going after shoplifters? First, copyright law is not as clear as laws against theft and shoplifting. There are a lot of "muddy" rules, like the fair use privilege, the first sale doctrine and various statutory exemptions that allow people to have limited sharing of copyrighted works. In addition, there are better alternatives. In Europe, many countries impose taxes on blank recording media and equipment to compensate composers and authors whose works have been copied without authorization. And proposals are on the table that call for a compulsory licensing scheme and campus-wide licenses in universities. Lawsuits are not necessarily the best and most effective way to deal with online piracy. In the meantime, file swappers might want to consult their lawyers and "plead the fifth."
http://www.detnews.com/2003/editoria...a13-269781.htm


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Is the MPAA Better Than the RIAA?
Ernest Miller

Slashdot notes (Music Industry Compared to Movie Industry) a commentary in the Denver Post that unfavorably compares the response of the recording industry to modern technology with the response of the movie industry (Recording industry's missteps). The opinion piece approvingly notes how much more value one gets for a DVD as compared to a CD. Importantly, the author also points out how many more distribution outlets there are for a wide variety of cinema (1st run, 2nd run, art house, cable, rental, etc.) as compared to the nearly monopolistic control of radio and venue ownership. All good points. But the author blows it here:

Threatened over the past decade by various forms of piracy, the movie industry chose to go after profiteering international crime rings while letting the local cable companies take on illicit home descramblers with low-key enforcement action.

DeCSS anyone?

Even without DeCSS, however, this is a good test case for whether better business models reduce filesharing. I do think that the members of the MPAA do provide more value than the members of the RIAA have. However, even given the better value, I'm not sure how the members of the MPAA can compete with free. The only thing holding things back now is bandwidth (what happens when everyone has last mile fiber?) and, importantly, it isn't as easy to transfer a movie from harddrive to your television as it is to burn a CD (though DVD recorders will become ubiquitous enough in the near future). The argument of many filesharing advocates (though certainly not all) is that people would be happy to pay for music if it were a better value. To a certain extent that is true, but the value would have to be awful high to compete with free.

I'd also like to ask the author why the difference, since the companies that make up the RIAA are pretty much the same companies that make up the MPAA.
http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/mod...ticle&sid=1203


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White Wolf Sues Sony Pictures over "Underworld" Movie
damonwhite

Damon White Reports: White Wolf, Inc. and author Nancy A. Collins Sue Sony Pictures, Screen Gems And Lakeshore Entertainment for "Underworld" copyright infringement

White Wolf, Inc. and Nancy A. Collins yesterday filed suit in US District court in Atlanta, Georgia against defendants Sony Pictures, Screen Gems and Lakeshore Entertainment, alleging 17 counts of copyright infringement for the film Underworld, set for release on September 19. White Wolf alleges that Underworld characters, theme and setting are based on White Wolf’s award winning games Vampire: The Masquerade® and Werewolf: The Apocalypse™, both set in White Wolf’s fictional World of Darkness®. Further, Collins alleges that Underworld’s script is based on her 1994 story Love of Monsters, published by White Wolf and also set in the World of Darkness.

Plaintiffs claim over 60 points of unique similarity between Underworld and their work. "Ours is a huge fictional world, supported by over 200 volumes of fictional material," asserts Mike Tinney, White Wolf’s President. "It’s infuriating to see Underworld’s script riddled with our property." Plaintiffs also claim that Underworld’s entire plot is based on Collins’ short story Love of Monsters. "Apparently they are marketing this as a remake of Romeo and Juliet," comments Collins. "What I think they really mean is that it’s an on-screen adaptation of my story."

White Wolf and Collins are seeking immediate injunctive relief and damages. "The volume of confusion in our marketplace is amazing," observes Tinney, "our fans think they’re going to be seeing our film. Of course, if the movie gets released, in a way they will be."
http://www.gamingreport.com/article.php?sid=10015


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Film Review – “Willful Infringement”
Susan DeMasi

It may be considered an act of subversion to purchase or even watch this documentary, but do it while it’s still on the market and not tied up in a court case. Willful Infringement asks provocative questions: Is copyright an instrument of censorship? Do newer copyright controls, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, suppress the free speech of scientists, artists and others? Does aggressive enforcement of copyright law inhibit artists today in ways that they weren’t in the past? Whose art is it, anyway?

This ambitious documentary argues that copyright law and growing restrictions on the Fair Use doctrine are being used by corporations to control information, suppress free speech and stifle the creativity of artists.

Major players in the movement promoting an “information commons” (i.e., more information entering the public domain, fewer restrictions on fair use) are interviewed, as well as people who have found themselves, perhaps inadvertently, on the wrong side of copyright law. Among others, the interesting mix of those interviewed include copyright attorneys; law professors; cultural historians; the manager of the rap group, Public Enemy; members of a Rolling Stones tribute band; a day care operator and two clowns.

One of the major arguments presented is that artists are inhibited because copyright law doesn’t allow them to build on ideas created by previous artists. Historically, folk, jazz and blues evolved because musicians were inspired by and borrowed from earlier artists. As one interviewee says, in music and other media, artists were able to take the cumulative circulation of stories, ideas and pictures, and then resynthesize them in their own, unique way. They would then pass on their new work to society and the process would continue. (The film does a nice job in covering all media industries - film, music, etc.)

The filmmakers believe that copyright law doesn’t protect artists so much as it protects corporations (or “content industries”). In a discussion of music “sampling,” an interview with the manager of the rap group, Public Enemy, provides an excellent illustration of this point. The group is being sued by a music publishing firm for using a piece from a George Clinton song. But because George Clinton doesn’t own the rights, “he won’t see a dime” from this lawsuit, according to the film.
http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/e...sp?Number=1316


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MP3s Are Not the Devil
Orson Scott Card

Since every penny I earn depends on copyright protection, I'm all in favor of reasonable laws to do the job.

But there's something kind of sad about the recording industry's indecent passion to punish the "criminals" who are violating their rights.

Copyright is a temporary monopoly granted by the government -- it creates the legal fiction that a piece of writing or composing (or, as technologies were created, a recorded performance) is property and can only be sold by those who have been licensed to do so by the copyright holder.

Without copyright, once a work was performed or printed, other people who saw or heard or read it could simply do their own performance or print their own editions, and keep all the money without paying a dime to the creator of the work.

At the same time, a book or song isn't land or even corporate stock. In exchange for the private monopoly of copyright, when it expires the work is then free for anyone to perform or print or record.

Until 1978, copyright only lasted 52 years in the U.S. -- and then only if you remembered to renew it. There were other technical lapses that could result in the inadvertent loss of copyright -- it wasn't really user-friendly.

And the most obnoxious feature of the law was that some authors outlived their copyright. Their most popular works would go into public domain while they were still alive and counting on the income. It's like revoking someone's Social Security at age 72, just because they had the temerity not to die when demographics predicted they would.

Since 1978, the law was changed so that copyright lasted until a certain number of years after the author's death. So not only did the author never outlive the copyright, but the author's dependents could continue to derive income from it for some time.

Also, copyright began, not when the work was listed with the Library of Congress, but rather from the moment of creation.

But there were loopholes. If you wrote something as an employee of a company that paid you a salary for creating it, then your writing was a "work made for hire" and the copyright belonged to the company. You had no rights.

Here's where the ugly stuff begins. A lot of publishers began routinely requiring writers to sign contracts that declared that what they wrote was a "work for hire," so that the authors wouldn't own any part of their own work. Of course the companies didn't actually hire the writers and give them benefits, like real employees. It was basically highway robbery -- the companies demanded that either the writers sign their names to a lie and give up all their rights, or the company wouldn't publish it.

Only a few of us were stubborn enough to refuse to sign work for hire contracts. It was an expensive moral quibble, but I have real objections to perjuring myself and pretending that I was hired by a company when in fact I never was. If I took all the risks and wrote something on spec, then the copyright should belong to me. I'd license them to do whatever was needed, but I wouldn't, in effect, declare them to be the author of my work.

So it's pretty hilarious to hear record company executives and movie studio executives get all righteous about copyright. They've been manipulating copyright laws for years, and all the manipulations were designed to steal everything they could from the actual creators of the work.

Do you think these companies care about the money that the actual creators of the work are being deprived of when people copy CDs and DVDs?

Here's a clue: Movie studios have, for decades, used "creative accounting" to make it so that even hit movies never manage to break even, thus depriving the creative people of their "percentage of profits." A few have dared to sue, but most figure that it isn't worth the ill will. (The sentence "You'll never work in this town again" runs through their minds. They remember what happened to Cliff Robertson after he blew the whistle on an executive who was flat-out embezzling!)

And record companies manage to skim enormous amounts of money from ever CD sold. As you can easily calculate by going to the computer store and figuring out the price of an individual recordable blank CD. Figure that the record companies have been paying a fraction of that price for years. Then subtract that from the price of a CD. Figure the songwriters and performers are getting some ludicrously small percentage -- less than twenty percent, I'd bet -- and all the rest flows to the record company.

In other words, the people complaining about all the internet "thieves" are, by any reasonable measure, rapacious profiteers who have been parasitically sucking the blood out of copyrights on other people's work.

And I say this with the best will in the world. In fact, these companies have expenses. There are salaries to pay. Some of the salaries are earned.

But remember that huge fortunes like, say, David Geffen's were made by getting ownership of record publishing companies. Count on it -- Geffen got a lot richer than any but a handful of the actual performers. And when their careers are over, the record company owner keeps right on earning.

Not only that, but the digital technologies that allow perfect-quality copying came as a huge windfall to the studios and record companies.

I basically replaced all my vinyl records and cassette tapes with CDs, and then replaced all our VHS tapes and laserdiscs with DVDs. The record companies and studios would have laughed if somebody said, "This is just an upgrade. I should be able to turn in my vinyl and cassettes for CDs and my videotapes for DVDs, for no more than the actual cost of production." Ha ha ha ha ha.

In all the ridiculously overblown "estimates" of how much the studios and record companies are "losing" from "piracy," nobody bothers to calculate just how much extra money they made from consumers paying full price for music and movies they had already paid full price for only a few years before.

That's all right, you see, because that helps the companies' bottom line, whereas piracy hurts it.

But how much?
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2003-09-07-1.html


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Study: Students Unfazed By Piracy
Stefanie Olsen

If attitudes on college campuses nationwide are any indicator, then software piracy in Kazaa and other file-swapping communities could get out of control, according to a new study.

Nearly two-thirds of college students surveyed said they would download pirated software, according to a study released Tuesday by the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Only a third of those students who have already downloaded commercial software have paid for it.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5077451.html


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Grokster, Morpheus File Briefs in Song-Swap Appeal
Sue Zeidler

Two file-sharing services on Wednesday filed responses to a closely-watched appeal by film and music studios of a court ruling that found the services were not liable for massive copyright infringement.

"The appeal is just one of several assaults that we face from the Recording Industry Association of America" (RIAA), said Michael Weiss, chief executive of Streamcast Networks Inc, the developer of the popular Morpheus peer-to-peer software, which filed its brief in response to the appeal.

Both Morpheus and Grokster, another peer-to-peer service, responded on Wednesday to the appeal filed in August with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco by the Motion Picture Association of America, the RIAA, and the National Music Publishers' Association.

Back then, the copyrights holders said U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles in April had dramatically departed from well-established copyright law when he ruled the file- sharing services should not be closed because they cannot control what songs are traded over their systems.

"The plaintiff's seem to think that Judge Wilson's decision was a typo," said Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster.

"They also seem to want to outlaw any legal technology that is content neutral," he said.

Wilson's ruling was the industries' first major setback in their ongoing anti-piracy efforts. Last week, the recording industry took the unprecedented step of suing 261 individuals for allegedly copying songs without permission, sparking waves of criticism from peer-to-peer and privacy advocates.

The RIAA, which represents record labels like AOL Time Warner's AOL.N Warner Music and Vivendi Universal's V.N EAUG.PA Universal Music Group, plans to file more suits and is also in settlement talks with several of the individuals.

It reached its first settlement last week with the mother of a 12-year-old girl targeted for song-swapping.

"Instead of asking the court to deputize every technology vendor to enforce their copyrights for them, they should license the technology at a fair price," Rosso said.

"Five bucks a month from each of 60 million filesharers beats the hell out of filing a federal case to get $2,000 from a 12-year-old girl," he said.

The RIAA has said these businesses were built for the exclusive reason of illegally exchanging copyrighted works and that the court of appeals should hold them accountable.

The RIAA succeeded in legally shutting down song-swap pioneer Napster and other networks, but millions still copy billions of songs, movies and other files from each others' computers each month, according to industry estimates.

The industry blames much of its steep slide in revenues since 1999 on online piracy.

Weiss of Streamcast said his company expects to prevail. If not, they will take it to the Supreme Court, he said.
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle....toryID=3461979


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Stand on Guard, Canucks

File sharing may not be so legal in Canada after all.
Shawn Abel and Ryan Black

There have been some articles circulating lately on the web which proclaim that file-sharing is legal in Canada. In addition, in the last few days I've seen several references to the latter article in slashdot commentary. I and a fellow law student have become concerned with the effect these articles might have, because in our opinion file-sharing is certainly not legal in Canada, and constitutes infringement that could get you successfully sued. As much as we would love to be able to share music freely, we don't want other Canadians who use p2p apps to increase their exposure to lawsuits because they think they're immune to legal repercussions. When you use p2p apps, please do so knowing that you're still at some risk. We have been in detailed discussion with Jay Currie, author of the techstation article, and this is what we have concluded. And before I get into it, let me say that this is our opinion, but is not legal advice. We are not your lawyers.

To begin with, it is, of course, infringement to make a copy of a copyrighted sound recording in any reproducible format. Data files like mp3s are considered sound recordings the same way that a track on a CD is.

Canada has a relatively unique provision in the Copyright Act, at s. 80, which provides:

80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or(br> (c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.

The key words here are "for the private use of the person who makes the copy". This means that you may make a copy of any sound recording and use it yourself. You may copy a friend's cd, or you may download music, and listen to it yourself. All of these activities are exempted from infringement.

In contrast, the following activites are not exempted by s. 80. You may not copy a cd or rip an mp3 and give it to anyone else. You may not send an mp3 to a friend over the net, because a copy is made in that process. You may not file share (or upload) over the internet without infringing. This last infringement is due to the nature of p2p file-sharing.

When a person requests a file over a p2p network, like Kazaa, the network sends out requests to the effect of, "Hey, Mr. X is looking for song Y, do you have a copy?" Your computer has results, and sends the information back through the network to Mr. X. Mr. X, seeing the result, decides to download it. He sends a request to your computer for the file. Here's what's key: he does not log onto your computer, make a copy of Song Y, and send it back. Your computer receives the request for Song Y, and then your computer makes the copy by reading the information off of your hard drive and transmits it to him. He now has a copy (which he downloaded, but most importantly, _you_ uploaded simultaneously), as do you.

Thus, whenever someone downloads from your computer, your computer makes a copy for their use. This is infringement with no exemption, because you are entirely responsible for what your computer does. Some have argued that, at least while you are away from your computer, you are not responsible for someone downloading from it. This would only be valid if (a) that person had complete control over your computer and (b) it was private control, rather than public (because only private copying avoids infringement). Complete control would mean physical control, usually, but also might mean full remote access. However, access to some of your files through an application that you, yourself, chose to execute would fall far short of relinquishing control of your computer, even if you turned on the p2p app and left the room. In addition, even if someone had full remote access of your computer, if that access was from outside your "domestic setting" (as the Copyright Board defines it) it would fall under "public" rather than "private" copying. Strangers over a p2p network fall outside your domestic setting. Therefore, when it comes to p2p applications, you are considered responsible for your computer's actions.

One important point of all this is that so long as you use a p2p application with sharing turned off, you cannot infringe copyright with that application. That's an imperfect solution, of course, because some of us need to share so that the system works. It's also worth noting that the RIAA has chosen only to sue "supernode" users in the US. If you are not a supernode, and if you share small amounts of material, you probably won't attract attention. It's the big sharers who are on the hook.

There are other reasons as well that file sharing is infringement, which I will canvas briefly: Offering your files on a p2p network is "public" rather than "private" copying, for two reasons. First, because sharing on a p2p network is allowing the public, in the common sense meaning of the word, to access your files. Second, because the Copyright Board has defined "to the public" as something intended to reach more than one person outside your domestic setting. Any public copying is of course not protected under the private copying provision in s. 80.

In short, when we share our files, we infringe copyright each time someone downloads from us on a p2p app, and we can't avail ourselves of the private copying provision in the Act. We are only safe in downloading. I hope that the Act is updated once again to give us some relief for sharing music through the medium of the internet (although full-on p2p file-sharing will probably always be considered infringment, it would be nice if at least ftp'ing music on a private scale would be legal).

We hope this article serves as a helpful and useful warning to fellow Canadians. Stand on Guard, Canucks.


Pawlo's comment: Please be advised that this is an anonymous (more or less) reader submission and the legal analysis has not been reviewed by the Greplaw staff. If you need help understanding your rights, I advise that you consult an attorney who is versed in the field.
http://grep.law.harvard.edu/article....33&mode=thread


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PeerCache Next Foe In Copyright War

Kazaa's founder markets speedier file-sharing software to ISPs, raising prospect of legal action by recording industry

Kevin J. Delaney

Swede behind the world's most popular song-swapping software is at it again. Niklas Zennstrom, who co-founded Kazaa B.V., the company that created the program of choice for sharing songs and videos online, now is offering Internet service providers PeerCache -- software that lets the ISP's users download commonly shared files from the ISP itself, rather than over the Internet from another user's hard drive.

The recording industry is taking note. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group, is investigating whether to sue Joltid Ltd., maker of PeerCache, or ISPs that use it.

Legal experts say Zennstrom's new product poses a fresh threat for the music industry, which already blames Kazaa and similar programs for its sharp drop in sales in recent years.

Sony Corp. estimates that file-sharing cost music companies $7 billion in sales over the past two years. Two weeks ago, Vivendi Universal S.A.'s Universal Music Group slashed wholesale compact-disc prices some 30 percent to try to lure buyers back.

And last week, the U.S. recording industry sued 261 individuals that it claims illegally share large numbers of music files online, an attempt to strongly deter the dissemination of copyrighted materials via file-sharing services.

"PeerCache is going to reduce the cost of file sharing to Internet service providers, which means the ISPs will have less incentive to cut down on the file sharing," said Ben Edelman, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "And it increases the speed for the users, which means they will just do it more."

Zennstrom counters that he has three paying Internet-provider customers, including Wanadoo Netherlands, a unit of France Telecom S.A. He will not, however, name the other two or say how much the ISPs paid for the service.

He said he has not yet approached any U.S. ISPs. However, a spokesman for America Online Inc., a unit of AOL Time Warner Inc. based in Dulles, Va., said the company has looked at the PeerCache technology and decided not to deploy it.

Microsoft Corp., based in Redmond, Wash., wouldn't comment on whether it is considering using Kazaa technology for its MSN service.

Bracing for a fight

It would seem that Zennstrom would be wary of taking on Big Music. The industry sued him last year, brandishing threats of criminal prosecution and millions of dollars in fines. He sold the Kazaa software and Web site in 2002 as his company's legal bills exceeded $100,000 a month.

Despite Kazaa's popularity, Zennstrom never struck it rich. He barely recouped the money, some $220,000, he put up to finance the company -- and he still rides a bicycle to work.

But he is bracing for another fight.

"Basically, what the [music industry] should do is outlaw the Internet," he said. "That's what they want to do."
http://www.sunspot.net/technology/ba...,5631336.story


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Kansan's Bill Could Slow Record Industry Suits
Alan Bjerga

The battle started on the Internet with Napster and Kazaa, but today it comes to Capitol Hill, as the downloading of copyright Internet files faces
a Senate hearing and new legislation from Sen. Sam Brownback.

Brownback introduced a bill Tuesday that would close the special subpoena powers record companies are using to prosecute people who download music from the Internet. Today the bill will be discussed before the Senate Commerce Committee.

Brownback's bill would make it more difficult for the Recording Industry Association of America to prosecute users of "peer-to-peer" file-sharing services -- the systems used to share music online. The association has filed more than 250 lawsuits aimed at stemming the flood of illegal music downloads.

Brownback says he's not arguing that those services should continue to offer free downloads of copyright music. He said he's more concerned about how other groups, namely pornographers, could abuse the subpoena powers the record companies are using.

No one should be allowed to invade someone's privacy, which is what's happening, he said.

"I'm coming at this from a different direction" from file-sharers, he said. "We can't allow anyone to abuse a subpoena."
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/678...printstory.jsp





Cheers and Jeers for the Recording Industry
Cynthia L. Webb


The Recording Industry Association of America's right to pursue a heavy handed legal attack on music pirates. Stealing is stealing, whether it's breaking into a home or downloading a file on the Internet.

No, the RIAA is arbitrarily suing the very people it should be courting and is failing to adapt to a new era of digitally delivered services.

The music piracy controversy is splitting newspaper editorial boards and opinion writers around those two arguments. Here's a sampling:

An editorial in the Detroit Free Press last week blasted the RIAA suits, saying "the music industry just doesn't seem to get it when dealing with its largely youthful audience. The youngest among them were practically born online. And online is where you reach them -- not where you hunt them down with lawsuits and half-baked 'amnesty' offers, as the Recording Industry Association of America started doing this week. ... People who want to do the right thing -- make sure artists are paid -- certainly hope for a cyber-solution. Somewhere between spending $13-plus per CD, when you want only one song, and worrying that the industry will sue you for sampling and swapping, the answer should be found online -- not in court."
• Detroit Free Press Editorial: Online Music -- Industry Should Find Better Solution Than Lawsuits

The Modesto Bee in California also took issue with the RIAA's lawsuit brigade: "The recording industry, basically, calls downloaders thieves. After all, says the industry, they are stealing copyrighted property. Under current law, the recording industry is right. Downloaders -- or filesharers, if you prefer -- are stealing. No one who uses Kazaa or Morpheus or another P2P can say they haven't been warned about the possibility of being sued. But the RIAA shouldn't lose sight of two critical points: Most of those 'thieves' are also their best customers, often buying CDs after having heard a song or two via a filesharing site. The world has changed and the music industry hasn't. To survive they will have to stop assaulting customers in court and find a way to harness the new technology to create profit. Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus figured it out and have at least 65 million fiercely loyal customers."
• Modesto Bee Editorial: Pirates Vs. Dinosaurs

But Mike Langberg of The San Jose Mercury News writes today that the RIAA's legal moves are "absolutely necessary." Langberg: "Internet apologists, who seem to believe the most basic rules of right and wrong don't apply to online activity, are appalled. Not me. Property, whether it's your house or the copyright on a song, deserves to be protected by law. Anyone who takes someone else's property without permission must face the possibility of real punishment."
• San Jose Mercury News's Mike Langberg: Record Companies Are Right to Sue Over Greedy Music Downloading

A Montana newspaper, The Missoulian, also sided with the RIAA in an editorial on Friday. "Do you think the neighbor kids should be able to waltz into your house and steal your stuff? Do you think shoplifters are entitled to take what they can carry out of a department store? Should your broker be able to skim money from your investment portfolio for his personal use? Well, of course not. So, what's all the uproar over the recording industry's filing lawsuits to stop thieves from pirating music over the Internet?," the paper wrote.
• Missoulian Editorial: Recorded Music Is Free Only To Thieves

A New York Times editorial from last week offered a more balanced assessment of the music industry's legal war against piracy. The editorial argued that the RIAA is "right to aggressively pursue people, even minors, who steal their products, but that alone will not solve their problems. They need to change how they do business, and fast, if they want to survive in the 21st century." The newspaper concluded that "[t]he only way for the industry to defend itself is to litigate hard, and publicly, against the copyright infringers. But it also needs to adapt to the times. Consumers do not want to pay $18 or $19 for a single CD, a steep price in absolute terms and when compared with other forms of entertainment, like DVD's, which offer more bang for the buck. Universal Music Group's recent decision to reduce prices as much as 30 percent stands as an example for other companies to follow. The industry also needs to improve its technology. File swappers get their music online not only because it is free, but also because it is convenient. Consumers want to get the music they want in their homes, immediately, and they don't want to be forced to buy a whole CD to get a song they like. Online music stores, which keep prices down by eliminating CD's, packaging, delivery and bricks-and-mortar stores, are the wave of the future."
• New York Times Editorial: Suing Music Downloaders (Registration required)

The Consequences of the RIAA Suits

While a number of musicians have quietly cheered the music industry's moves, some artists are worried that the sweep of lawsuits will alienate their fans, The New York Times wrote in an article on Sunday. "It would be nice if record companies would include artists on these decisions," Deborah Harry of Blondie told the newspaper, "adding that when a grandfather is sued because, unbeknownst to him, his grandchildren are downloading songs on his computer, 'it's embarrassing.'"

The singer Moby wrote about the debate on his Web site: "The record companies should approach that 14-year-old and say: 'Hey, it's great that you love music. Instead of downloading music for free, why don't you try this very inexpensive service that will enable you to listen to a lot of music and also have access to unreleased tracks and ticket discounts and free merchandise?'"

But the Times piece makes clear that artists have serious concerns about the release of their work online: "For some of them, the problem with file sharing is control. Before a CD is released, early versions of the songs often end up on file-sharing services, where fans download the music under the misconception that it is the finished product. Other times, songs online by one act are credited to another act. And fans exchange studio outtakes, unreleased songs, and live performances that some artists would prefer remain unheard."
• The New York Times: File-Sharing Battle Leaves Musicians Caught In The Middle (Registration required)

Meanwhile, in a separate article today, The New York Times reports that the RIAA's moves could backfire and create an anonymous black market of sorts for illegal file swapping. The Times said "hundreds of software developers are racing to create new systems, or modify existing ones, to let people continue to swap music -- hidden from the prying eyes of the [RIAA], or from any other investigators. ... Some experts wonder if the industry's efforts will create more trouble for it than ever. 'The RIAA is breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria,' said Clay Shirky, a software developer who teaches new media at New York University."
• The New York Times: Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground (Registration required)

The Associated Press noted in an article that while the RIAA may have a hard time collecting damages on its lawsuits since so many of the defendants are minors. Even though experts quoted in the articles said the RIAA has a good case against defendants who refuse to settle the charges, "proving a parent's liability for a child's activity is much harder, said Jonathan Zittrain, codirector of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. 'And in general, if you win an action against a kid, you don't get to collect against the parent,' Zittrain said."
• The Associated Press via The Philadelphia Inquirer: Song-Swap Suits May Face An Obstacle
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Sep15.html


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Music Business Facing New Reality
Leonard Pitts Jr.

I hate to say I told you so.

Well, not really. Like most people, I rather enjoy it, to tell the truth.

Not that one had to be a genius to foresee what happened this week: the music industry filing suit against 261 people who had downloaded songs from the Internet without paying for them. The suit seeks as much as $150,000 per stolen song.

Like I said: Big surprise. It didn't take a crystal ball to guess that an industry that estimates its piracy losses at over $4 billion a year would eventually do something drastic.

I and others have made that point repeatedly in recent years. But the young people -- they're almost always young -- for whom ''free music'' has come to seem an entitlement were never impressed.

They dismissed the industry's threats with the sense of blithe invincibility that characterizes young people, often justifying their thievery with the most guileless naiveté.

Consider two exchanges posted on a Napster bulletin board after the industry sued that company into submission.

''Music,'' wrote one fan, ``is not something which should be copyrighted and sold and still owned by the musician.''

''Music should be free for all,'' said another.

As if nobody had to pay the truckers and engineers, roadies and publicists, who make the industry go. As if fan worship was something you could cash.

Now comes the reckoning. Dozens of lawsuits filed and many more threatened.

And suddenly the news is full of people frantically wiping their hard drives of contraband songs and parents of minors having earnest conversations with the tykes about their Internet activities. There is fear, there is defiance and there is anger over the industry's tactics. One student complained to CNN, ``. . . [T]hey can't just hack into our systems and track our activities. It's our property.''

The poor child was apparently irony-impaired.

And it's hard to feel any sympathy for her or any of them because, hey, we told them so.

But one doesn't exactly overflow with sympathy for the industry, either. After all, we told them so, too. This goes back nearly a decade, to when ''Information Superhighway'' was just becoming a cliché and the idea that you could ''download'' music from the Internet was in its infancy. It didn't take a lot to see that this process could someday supplant two of the industry's primary functions: manufacture and distribution.

Given that one can now build a studio in the garage for a couple thousand dollars, you can strike another of the recording industry's traditional functions: recording. Which leaves what? Promotion and publicity?

The point is that we have arrived at a time when the very idea of a ''music business'' as traditionally constituted seems increasingly quaint. The industry could have adapted itself to the new realities 10 years ago, could have pioneered Internet pay services that would have, to some degree at least, headed off the current rush of online shoplifting. But it chose not to. Hidebound and hubristic, it resisted change any idiot could have seen coming. The music barons could have shaped the future, but ignored it instead.

Now they find themselves scrambling to catch up, scrambling to convince young people to pay for something they have become accustomed to receiving free. You think that won't be a hard sell?

I am to business savvy as Donald Rumsfeld is to tact, but this all seems a prime example of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. I mean, something's gone truly haywire when an industry is reduced to suing its own customers.

In so doing, the music business may well win the proverbial battle but lose the war.

Given the wealth of entertainment options we have at our fingertips these days, is it so hard to imagine that a young person might choose the one that isn't suing him?

Nobody's going to win this fight. Something else you don't have to be a genius to know.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...ts/6750275.htm


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Is It Wrong to Share Your Music?
Katie Hafner

IT shouldn't be illegal," said 14-year-old Sonya Arndt. "It's not like I'm selling it."

"Isn't it like recording movies?" asked Korbi Blanchard, 13. "They're making a big thing out of nothing."

"It's wrong to be downloading hundreds of songs, but if you only want one or two, it's not that big a deal," said 13-year-old Kristina Lee.

When the record industry's campaign against digital file-sharing yielded lawsuits on Sept. 8 against 261 people - at least one as young as 12 - it struck home with students at Foothill Middle School as news events seldom do.

Almost all of the 1,100 students at the school, in this suburb 25 miles east of San Francisco, have Internet-connected computers at home. And their musical tastes, like those of teenagers before them, are strongly held - Linkin Park, 50 Cent, Good Charlotte - as are their views of right, wrong and fairness.

So Valerie Kriger, a Foothill teacher, chose music downloading as her Friday current events topic.

Later that day, two of Ms. Kriger's classes - her yearbook class, with seventh and eighth graders, and her social studies and English students, all eighth graders - spent their class time sharing their thoughts on the subject with a reporter. In all, nearly 50 students wanted to weigh in with their opinions.

And those opinions came out in a flood. Virtually everyone wanted to express some indignation at the recording industry, mixed with no small amount of confusion over the legal issues.

Theirs is a downloading culture. A few clicks of a mouse bring them not just music, but movies, games, and instant communication as well. Legality seems beside the point as they click their way through licensing agreements, impatient for the software at the other end.

Although happy to give their views, Ms. Kriger's students were decidedly more guarded when asked about their own downloading practices.

Reluctantly, more than half said they had downloaded music. Several said they did not want their parents to know. And only half of those who downloaded music said they knew that they were violating copyrights.

Sonya Arndt, an energetic eighth grader known in class for speaking out, had the most to say. The record industry is simply greedy, she said. The industry should not be going after a bunch of kids. And how were her friends supposed to afford the high cost of CD's?

Individual musicians are not necessarily suffering, either, she said. "They're not losing money, because we still buy the T-shirts and go to their concerts," Sonya said. "They're still famous."

Her friend Korbi Blanchard, a 13-year-old whom Ms. Kriger identified as one of her brightest students, chimed in. "If you're not selling it, why is it wrong?" Korbi asked. "If it's something for personal use, as long as you're not redistributing it, it should be O.K."

At the same time, many of the students are thinking harder about their downloading habits now that they know they could be singled out for what they do.

"It makes me nervous," said Korbi, whose Internet use usually involves shopping and communicating with a small circle of friends. "They're intimidating people."

Sonya, Korbi and others in the class complained about the mixed signals they get from those who are supposedly responsible for informing them what is right and wrong.

That includes the PC makers ("Why do they sell PC's with CD burners if it's illegal?" Sonya asked) and the purveyors of such programs as KaZaA, which allow the downloading to take place. ("Why isn't there a warning that says that what we're doing is illegal?" Kristina Lee asked.)

Sonya's tone veered toward anger when the subject turned to drugs. She told of a friend at the school who was using ecstasy and other drugs, her life a mess. Music downloading, Sonya said, was innocuous by comparison. "Five hours in front of a computer is five hours away from drugs," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/18/te...ts/18kids.html


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Distributors of DVD-Copy Software Sued
John Borland

Hollywood studios Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox sued a handful of small software companies Wednesday, alleging that their distribution of DVD- copying software violates copyright law.

The studios filed suit against Tritton Technologies, QOJ, World Reach and Proto Ventures in New York federal court, asking for unspecified damages and a court-ordered halt to the distribution of the various software packages.

Tritton released its DVD CopyWare software, created by an affiliated European company, to mainstream retail channels in August. The other companies distribute largely online, through Web sites including QOJ's copiesanything.com and World Reach's dvdfastcopy.com.

Representatives for the two studios could not immediately be reached for comment. A Tritton representative declined immediate comment, saying the company needed to review the suit.

The lawsuit is the second focusing on software distributed at mainstream retail stores that gives consumers the ability to easily copy DVDs using standard computer equipment. Hollywood executives fear that such software will help push them into the same cycle of piracy and falling revenues that the music industry is now facing.

A coalition of Hollywood studios led by the Motion Picture Association of America sued 321 Studios, creator of DVD X Copy and the leader in the DVD backup software market, last year. An initial ruling in the case is expected any time. The studios contend that 321's software violates provisions of copyright law that bars distribution of software that circumvents anticopying protections.

Most DVDs are loaded with a copy-protection technology called Content Scramble System, or CSS, but information on how to crack that protection, and tools that do it automatically, have been widely available online for several years.

Studios have won several victories in their legal attempts to push that information offline, winning a court order barring publisher Eric Corley from posting one of the software tools, called DeCSS, on his Web site or even linking to other sites that were making the program available.

However, 321's software, which is much simpler to use, has been available on retail shelves at mainstream stores such as CompUSA for months. Tritton's CopyWare software is available at online stores including Buy.com.

In an interview last month, Tritton Chief Executive Christopher von Huben said he did not expect to be sued, since his company was simply acting as distributor for the CopyWare software, rather than creating it. He compared his company's role to that of CompUSA in distributing 321 Studio's products.

Copyright lawyers at the time said that was unlikely to prevent a lawsuit, however.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5078419.html


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Senate Commerce Testimony: Post-Mortem
Edward W. Felten

Today I testified at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. The issue under discussion was whether (or how) the government should require the inclusion of DRM (anti-copying) technology in digital TV equipment. Here is my written testimony.

If you haven’t been to such a hearing, you might be surprised at some of what happens. For one thing, unlike the hearings you see on TV, some of the Senators are absent, and some come and go during the hearing. (A Senator is on multiple committees, and various hearings are going on simultaneously, along with other business.)

You would probably be disappointed as well at the quality of the debate. It’s not that debate doesn’t occur; and it’s not that the issues at hand aren’t important. But much time is wasted on posturing that is irrelevant to the nominal topic of the hearing and seems designed only to show that one side is purer of heart than the other. An example was the repeated references to porn on P2P networks. This had no connection to the hearing’s topic, and nobody even bothered to connect it to the topic. And none of the witnesses had any connection with P2P technology.

At the witness table, I was seated next to the one and only Mr. Jack Valenti, whom Senator Brownback laughingly introduced as “the eternal head of the MPAA.” Mr. Valenti was accompanied by a seeming army of helpers who passed him notes at a furious pace. He struck his usual apocalyptic tone -- his testimony was titled “The Perils of Movie Piracy – and its dark effects on consumers, the million people who work in the movie industry, and the nation’s economy: Some facts, worries, and a look at the uncharted future”. The first paragraph is a real doozy:

No nation can lay claim to greatness or longevity unless it constructs a rostrum from which springs a “moral imperative” which guides the daily conduct of its citizens. Within the core of that code of conduct is a simple declaration that to take something that does not belong to you not only is wrong, but it is a clear violation of the moral imperative, which is fastened deep in all religions.

And this at a hearing about TV tuner regulation!

Mr. Valenti, characteristically, hit the P2P porn meme the hardest, even, in a surreal moment, inviting the Senators’ staffers to go download some porn from Kazaa and see for themselves how vile it is. As a parent, I had to chuckle on hearing the American movie industry complain about the distribution of inappropriate sexual content to kids. But then again the whole room seemed at times to be an irony-free zone.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000446.html


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TV Fans Tap Into Torrent Of Shows Online
Reuters

First music, then movies — now Internet file traders have tuned in to television, going online to download their favorite shows.

Web sites like Suprnova.org (suprnova.org) are doing for TV downloads what Napster did for digital music files. You can find last night's episode of American Idol, the entire collection of The Simpsons, and old favorites like Battlestar Galactica.

Such downloads, which may be on shaky legal ground, are popular outside the United States. This is especially true in Europe, where fans sometimes have to wait years to see the latest episodes of U.S. shows like The West Wing and Six Feet Under.

TV shows have long been available from online file trading networks like Kazaa, but can take many hours or even days to download, with the longest wait times for the most popular programs.

But a "file swarming" program called BitTorrent can speed up the process. When you click on a link, BitTorrent downloads the TV show to your computer in fragments, which are simultaneously transferred to other users seeking to download the same show.

In effect, the more popular the file, the faster the download. So the day after a new episode of Survivor airs, downloads are relatively speedy compared with peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa.

But even with a broadband connection, downloading a one-hour show usually takes least two hours, or even days for some of the rarer files. With a dial-up connection, forget about it. Get high-speed Internet, or watch TV the old-fashioned way.

Where do these TV files come from? Some are probably "ripped," or copied, from illegally decrypted DVDs. Others come from tech-savvy users who have turned their computers into personal video recorders like TiVo.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/te...wnloads_x.htm#


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His Beyonce, Her Beatles: A Primer on Trading
J. D. Biersdorfer

KAZAA, Morpheus, LimeWire, BearShare, Grokster - they may sound like heroes of a comic book superhero team, but they are all Internet file-sharing programs that provide membership in an online co-op of millions of digital traders.

A file-sharing system basically works like this: you download and install a file-sharing program like KaZaA, which allows you to search the Internet for specific material that somebody else's computer may have. When you find it, you can get a copy of the file. In exchange, you make a folder of your own files to be shared with other users. Because all of this trading is done directly between individuals, it is commonly referred to as peer-to-peer, or P2P, networking.

File sharing became a frequent activity and hot topic in 1999 with the arrival of Napster, a piece of software written by Shawn Fanning, then a computer science student. The prime stock in trade quickly became music, which with the advent of the MP3 format had become easier to compress into small digital files and exchange.

Although the files were kept on the computers of Napster's users, the system used a central index server to match up search requests and file locations. It was the use of this central server that ultimately made Napster legally vulnerable, and it was shut down in 2002 after litigation by the recording industry.

Napster was not the only file-sharing program out there, and several others popped up to take its place. These programs, like LimeWire and BearShare (both work with the far-flung Gnutella file-sharing network), do not use a central server. Instead, they rapidly pass along search queries from machine to machine along the network - making it legally difficult to stop since there is no one computer in charge. What's more, some peer-to-peer programs now encrypt shared files to protect users.

The legal defense of most file-sharing networks is that even if some users trade bootleg copies of "Pirates of the Caribbean" rather than just their own creations or works in the public domain, it is the users who are liable for any copyright infringement, not the network.

Given the open nature of most file-sharing programs, users run some personal risk.

For the best user experience, most programs strongly encourage two-way sharing and request that you designate a folder of your own files to share with anybody else on the network. This shared folder is usually easy to set up, but there is a danger that you might accidentally share all the files on your hard drive, including confidential information. (You can turn off your shared folder in most programs, but that might hinder your ability to download from others.)

Some files shared across the network might be corrupted or carry viruses that can infect your computer. And to make money, many free file-sharing programs inconspicuously bundle in additional software called spyware and adware, which can track your Internet use and deliver advertisements based on that use.

While the battle over peer-to-peer networks continues, a growing number of online alternatives have emerged that operate within the pale of copyright, like Apple's iTunes Music Store and the Pressplay service, whose new owner is planning to reintroduce it this year under a new yet oddly familiar name: Napster 2.0.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/18/te...rtne r=GOOGLE


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Boucher Presents P2P 101

Congressman Rick Boucher gave an introduction to the positive side of Peer to Peer networks to congressional aides and others on Wednesday. His presentation included a Powerpoint presentation, the MUSIC WARS special from TechTV, and some other demonstrations. This was certainly a bright spot in the dismal lack of objective coverage of the issue in Washington. TechTV showed a brief clip of Congressman Rick Boucher giving a presentation called P2P 101. Although the attendees were mostly congressional aides, it does show that at least one congressperson "Gets it". Boucher has in the past, demonstrated that he is able to cut through all the disinformation which the RIAA and others are spreading about this technology, and all those in his district should write him a nice e-mail and thank him for his efforts. We must show support for those who are demonstrating that they are open to reason on our issues, with at least as much passion as we oppose those who are fighting to impose draconian legislation against us. WAY TO GO CONGRESSMAN BOUCHER. WE APPRECIATE YOU!
http://www.p2pnet.net/article/8002


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Files Still Being Downloaded
Leah George-Baskin

Even with the Recording Industry Association of America filing more than 260 suits against people illegally sharing music last week, people appear to still be downloading file- sharing software.

Brian O'Neal, spokesman for Morpheus, said they have not noticed a decline in users. Morpheus is a software product used to download files. After Morpheus is downloaded, O'Neal said they have no way of tracking the actions of individual users. He said they can only determine how many times the product is downloaded. Last week their software was downloaded 262,000 times and 349,000 the week before that, O'Neal said.

"We don't support copyright infringement," O'Neal said. "We have messages to that effect on the Web site. There are many wonderful uses of file-sharing software that don't involve illegal files but it's up to individual users. If it's illegal, it's their choice."

Wayne Russo, president of Grokster.com, a free program similar to Morpheus, said they also inform their users of the copyright law. But like Morpheus, Grokster is unable to monitor what each user does with the software. To monitor those activities is against the nature of the network, Russo said. Grokster is downloaded 60,000 to 100,000 times per week worldwide.

Russo said the RIAA sued Grokster for vicarious contribution to copyright infringement but lost. A Federal Circuit Court found Grokster to be legal on April 25.

"We are no different from Sony, Panasonic, Mitsubishi or RCA, who make videotape players and market and sell them," Russo said. "Videotape players are used for illegal copyright infringement and piracy too, but you don't go after Sony, you go after the pirate."

Amanda Collins, spokeswoman for the RIAA, said recording companies have licensed thousands of their tracks to online music services. She said there are dozens of ways to get music legally from the Internet, and that there is no longer an excuse to obtain it illegally.

"The people have been gauged and peer-to-peer file sharing is a garbage filter," Russo said. It is a way for consumers to try songs before they buy them, he said.

Russo also claimed the recording industry is not merely being harmful to music fans, but is made up of "serial litigators and bullies."

There are easy solutions for these copyright issues, such as blanket compulsory licenses, he said. The Grokster.com president said people are willing to pay for music but the price right now is too high.

"The music industry has been educating the public for a long time now about illegal activity taking place on the Internet," Collins said. "You are not anonymous when you steal music off the Internet; anyone who thinks they are anonymous are sorely mistaken."

Even with the threat of being caught by the RIAA, some students said they don't see a need to stop downloading music.

Jackie Beard, sophomore in LAS, said it is a kind of justice when you can download songs for free.

"It takes less than a dollar for (the recording industry) to make a CD and then they charge you $15," Beard said. "They are ripping you off."

Sophomore in LAS Lori Scardina said she likes the idea of downloading music because it is easier and faster than buying CDs. She said she downloads songs so that she can listen to the songs she likes instead of buying a CD with songs she doesn't like.

"I'm more willing to pay 50 cents for a song than the entire amount for a CD I won't even listen to," Scardina said.
http://www.dailyillini.com/sep03/sep..._story08.shtml


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Slew Of Record Industry Lawsuits Hasn't Stopped OU File-Sharing
Jessica Moorman

In the wake of recent lawsuits filed by the recording industry, Ohio University students may be a little more worried about possible consequences, but most do not seem to have ceased downloading and sharing free music from the Internet.

As classes began at OU on Sept. 8, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed 261 lawsuits against Internet users who trade copyrighted material via peer-to-peer file- sharing services such as KaZaA, iMesh, Gnutella, Morpheus and others. The targets of these lawsuits were of various ages, backgrounds and professions, but most were sharing more than 1,000 copyrighted files.

File-sharing services have been and remain one of the most hotly debated issues in the news media. On the OU campus, students have 24-hour, high-speed Internet connections, and many computers come equipped with CD burners. Last spring The Athens NEWS even reported of a student-run file-sharing service on campus called Direct Connect. It has since been dismantled, and some universities have begun cracking down on these types of services.

Unlike these other universities, OU has chosen to inform students of the possible consequences of their actions but not aggressively combat file-sharing. Sean O'Malley, public relations manager for OU Communication Network Services (CNS), said that the university places responsibility with the students for correctly using campus computers.

"We believe they're adults and can use things properly," he said, adding that a stricter policy on computer use could hinder student learning.
http://www.athensnews.com/issue/arti...story_id=13980


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'Dual Disc' to Combine CD, DVD
Tim Burt

The global music industry is poised to launch technology that would combine compact discs and music videos on a single disc in its latest drive to bolster faltering recorded music sales.

Warner Music, part of AOL Time Warner Inc., is due to launch the so-called dual disc early next year in conjunction with Sony Corp., the Japanese electronics and entertainment group.

The three other major music companies — Universal Music, EMI and BMG — support the plan.

One music company chairman, who declined to be named, said: "We are testing the market and we are going to launch it early next year."

Under the proposal, a single disc would combine a music album on one side and a DVD on the other.

Production would be led by the CD manufacturing arms of Sony and Warner Music, which is selling its CD factories to Cinram International of Canada.

The project follows falling demand for traditional CDs and rising sales of DVDs.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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190 Terabytes

Half-Inch Tape Is The Way To Go, Says Spectra Logic

New format for tape libraries.
Bryan Betts

Spectra Logic has introduced its first tape libraries to use the LTO and SuperDLT half-inch tape formats, saying that its former focus on Sony's 8mm SuperAIT drive was a dead end.

"The late 90s were a time when Quantum got it wrong with DLT and messed a lot of people up on supply," says Spectra Logic's EMEA sales director Anthony Yeates.

"We thought DLT wouldn't be the future and chose Sony. In hindsight we should have done half-inch - we spent too much time trying to sell the drive when we should have been selling a technical solution."

He says that although Spectra Logic is late into the market, it brings intelligent libraries with the industry's highest storage density. It can fit 190TB of uncompressed data into a 30-inch rack, and up to four extra racks can be added to take it to 120 drives and over 6000 cartridges.

The high capacity is thanks to a design which stores and moves tapes around in small racks. It also allows media to be loaded and unloaded in bulk.

Yates adds that not only can SDLT, LTO and SAIT be mixed within a single library, it can have Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and be partitioned into multiple virtual libraries too. "We can replace five dumb libraries with one intelligent one," he says.
http://www.techworld.com/news/index....ews&NewsID=453


And the upload speed you’ll need for delivery…


BT Goes Symmetrical

Carrier finally rolls out SDSL.
Manek Dubash

BT Wholesale has finally launched its business-oriented SDSL broadband service, following a 12 month- trial at 100 exchanges around the UK. According to BT spokesman Francis King, 12 ISPs were involved in the trials and both the timing and pricing of their launches depends on them.

BT said available data rates will be 250Kbit/s, 500Kbit/s, 1Mbit/s and 2Mbit/s, with prices starting at £450 per month for all data rates plus a maximum of £1,440 annual rental, rising to a maximum of £3,000 as bandwidth increases.

The package will be branded as BT DataStream Symmetric and BT IPStream Symmetric. At first, it will be limited to 100 exchanges serving metropolitan areas in London, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Yorkshire, the West Midlands and Scotland, with 50 further exchanges to be enabled by January 2004. According to BT, details of the exchanges to be upgraded for SDSL in this phase of rollout are being finalised and should be confirmed by the end of October.

Bruce Stanford, director BT Wholesale products, said: "The launch of our broadband symmetric products strengthens the portfolio of business-class broadband products which service providers can offer to their customers. Demand is expected to be strong as SMEs can gain real competitive advantage from using this broadband capability.”

"The next phase of BT Wholesale's broadband symmetric rollout has been designed to help service providers address market demand and to meet their customers' needs."
http://www.techworld.com/news/index....ews&NewsID=438


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RIAA 'Encouraging Stalkers, Molesters' – Telco
Andrew Orlowski

US telco giant SBC has hit back at the Recording Industry Association of America's legal blitz against music lovers.

In testimony before the Senate this week, SBC's counsel Jim Ellis said that the RIAA was making an end run around the constitution by issuing a blitz of subpoenas with no judicial oversight.

Ellis argued that the legal tactics deployed by the RIAA could be adopted by Net stalkers and child molesters.

"Under the RIAA's interpretation of the law, anyone willing to pay a small fee and represent that its copyright is being violated would be entitled to know the name, address and phone number of the person behind an anonymous e-mail," said Ellis. "This would readily lead the Internet stalker, the child predator or the abusive spouse to their victims."

But the RIAA is already showing how. Its own stalking and child- bothering resulted in a public relations fiasco last week after a 12- year old girl was slapped with a lawsuit for using the Kazaa file sharing service. Brianna LaHara, a Manhattan schoolgirl living in public housing became the first to settle with the RIAA: the lobby group extracting a $2,000 fine despite there being no evidence that her downloading activity caused the loss of a single CD sale or a cent in artist's royalties.

The RIAA had its defenders, however: Senator Barbara Boxer (D) blasted both SBC and Verizon for "encouraging" music downloads. She quoted from a Verizon brochure Verizon Online – Your Guide to Broadband Living and Content [PDF, 8MB] and accused the ISPs of "attempting to protect privacy of theft."

Verizon lawyer William Barr pointed out that Boxer had got her knickers in a twist, and accused her of taking the quote out of context.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/32905.html


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Europe's Downloaders Are Big Consumers Too: Study
Bernhard Warner

Europe's Internet downloaders are avid music fans who own multiple gadgets and are as likely to buy a compact disc as anyone else, according to new research released on Wednesday.

The image belies the notion of the slacker teenager trawling the Internet for free music to hoard. They are regular shoppers in record stores today, and they are very likely to buy song downloads in the future, the researchers said.

"There are strong music fans within the file-sharing community," Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Jupiter Research in London, told Reuters.

"They are more likely to listen to digital radio and visit artist Web sites. There is compelling evidence that this group is the bedrock community for those willing to pay for legitimate (online) music services in the future," Mulligan added.

The music industry has waged an all-out war on Internet file sharing and CD burning, which it blames for a three-year decline in sales of recorded music.

In the United States, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents the world's big five music companies, Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI, BMG, and Sony Music, has begun suing individual music-swappers.

In Europe, industry trade bodies and the major music labels have tried a gentler tactic, promoting industry-backed services and educating consumers that downloading copyright-protected media is an illegal activity.

Europe's online downloaders differ from their North American counterparts, said Chris Colman, European, Middle East and Africa managing director of Canada's Sandvine Inc., a technology start-up that works with Internet service providers to minimize the escalating bandwidth costs associated with file sharing.

European downloaders prefer services such as WinMX and eDonkey, which are havens for film, software and music videos. Services such as Kazaa, which runs on the file-sharing Fasttrack technology and are teeming with songs, are more popular in North America, Colman said.

North Americans and Europeans appear to be using peer-to-peer services for different purposes, but there is one constant: file-sharing usage is escalating as the market for high-speed broadband Internet grows, he said.

"We're finding that new broadband subscribers are sharing files earlier and existing broadband subscribers are sharing files more," Colman said.

Jupiter's data, from a survey of 5,000 Internet users this summer in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Italy, Spain, France and Germany, backs up Sandvine's findings.

According to Mulligan, 15 percent of Europeans surveyed download a movie each month from a free file-sharing service. Spain tops the list with 38 percent admitting to downloading a movie each month.

In contrast, a separate Jupiter survey of U.S. Internet users reported that 12 percent of Americans download a video file each month.

Mulligan, for one, says it would be a mistake for Hollywood and television executives to embark on a legal crackdown against this consumer segment, which could some day be a media company's best customers.

"I think there's definitely an opportunity for television companies and movie studios alike to harness an emerging pattern of consumption here," Mulligan said.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=3461693













Until next week,

- js.









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Recent WIRs -


http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17495 September 13th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17325 September 6th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17374 August 30th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17325 August 23rd





Jack Spratts Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts at lycos.com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.