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

[JackSpratts]

Sleepworking

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

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

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

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

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









Enjoy,

Jack.









Interview With Niklas Zennstrom, The Founder Of KaZaa
Jo Maitland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Interview: Caching In on P2P

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you worried?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zennstrom: NO!

Boardwatch:Hmmm. How will it work then?

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

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

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

Boardwatch: You do?

Zennstrom: Yes.

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

Zennstrom: My knowledge comes from testing it.

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

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

Boardwatch: Any more companies up your sleeve?

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

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

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New Bill Makes File Swapping a Felony
Jay Lyman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Advisory

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

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

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

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

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


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File-Share Firms Hire A Lobbyist
By Lauren Barack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Kokopelli Unveils New File-Share System
Jack Kapica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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DMCA Gives Blueprint For Chile Deal
Declan McCullagh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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How To Infuriate The RIAA And Stay Enragingly Legal

Charlie D comes up with a cunning scheme
Charlie Demerjian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Superhighway Robbery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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MP3 Creator Speaks Out
BBC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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MP3 Developer Fraunhofer Institute, Others, To Reconstruct Shredded Documents

Stasi Files A Particular Challenge.

Picking Up the Pieces
Douglas Heingartner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Electronics Firms Accused Over Piracy
Darren Waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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I Am A 'Net Pirate'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

1. Downloading music is not stealing.

2. Downloading music is definitely stealing.

3. Downloading music is wrong, but not stealing.

4. Downloading music is neither wrong nor stealing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

The console is only the tip of the netberg

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


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Steer Clear Of The Suits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peer-to-peer providers

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

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


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Comic Adaptation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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A Royalties Plan For File Sharing
William Fisher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Give us our filthy lucre.

Holy War Declared On Religious Music Downloads
Chris Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Boycotts

Dutch Group Strikes Back At Self-Destructing Epson Ink Cartridges

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epson spokesman Jan Willem Scheijgrond called the tip dangerous advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Overheard

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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