Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 9th, '05

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"DRM is theft." - Richard Stallman


"It's good to be the king." - Steven Van Zandt


"Commercial radio has begun to change." - Lorne Manly


"The answer to this question will have significant ramifications for the music recording industry, as well as these litigants." - N.Y. State Supreme Court


"The state can't condone speeding, but it condemns money-making schemes disguised as safety measures." - Richard Blumenthal


"This is a historic moment for blogs. The point of having free speech and a free press is to have people informed. These information bans are self-defeating for free societies. The politicians know, the media knows, but the Canadian voters are left in the dark and that's a backwards way of doing things." – Edward Morrissey


"We need a free BIOS, because if we don't control the BIOS we don't control our computers. It puts me in an ethically compromised position to have a non-free program in my machine." – Richard Stallman


"The idea of the free software movement is you should be in control of your own computer. Treacherous competing (his term for so-called trusted computing) is a scheme to make sure you're not in control." - Richard Stallman


"We thought about recording them and putting the recording on Grokster, but no one had a tape recorder." - Mike Coenan


February: MGM vs. Grokster at the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court. Download the oral arguments courtesy of the EFF. OGG, MP3, WMA. 68 minutes. Read along while you listen.























Witnessing justice

Students Hear MGM v. Grokster Arguments In Supreme Court
Jocelyn Hanamirian

Six students and their teaching assistant grabbed sleeping bags, blankets and tarps from the Outdoor Action supply room and spent the night on the sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court Monday, hoping to secure spots inside the courtroom for a landmark technology case.

The students drove to Washington, D.C., on Monday evening after spending four weeks discussing the MGM v. Grokster case in computer science professor Edward Felten's class, COS 491: Information Technology and the Law.

The case, which was argued Tuesday morning before the Supreme Court, pits 28 major entertainment companies and industry associations against the software company Grokster, which is responsible for popular peer-to-peer programs Morpheus, Grokster and KaZaA. Lower courts have ruled that such programs should be legal even though they are often used to infringe copyrights.

The group heard the oral arguments made before the Court, during which lawyers present their case and then answer a series of pointed questions from the justices.

"The questions revealed more about the justices than any sort of new insight about the case," said Dan Peng '05, one of the students who attended. "When you're reading cases you see these names. They really each have their own personality, and from their questions you can tell what they're thinking about."

That gave students "a welcome break from experiencing the case purely through paper," Felten said. "It's a chance to watch and hear how the Supreme Court justices are thinking about the case."

Friend of the court

Earlier this month, Felten, along with three Princeton colleagues and 12 computer science professors from other universities such as MIT and Yale, filed an amicus brief in the case. About 40 briefs were filed by various parties, from songwriters to an association of venture capitalists.

"We wanted to try to convince the court of the importance of leaving a wide field open for research and innovation in technology," Felten said. "The other purpose is to point out to the court several technical errors or incorrect arguments that other parties had made before."

The case has implications for whether a distributor of a P2P software can be held responsible for the illegal actions of its users. A ruling is expected this summer.

"We, as creators and distributors of technology, are worried about how companies could be held responsible for how people use the technology. We think that users who use the system illegally should be held responsible," Felten said. "It is a landmark case for this issue."

Down to the wire

The group — Peng, Stacy Chen '05, Jeff Alpert '05, Mark Melhan '05, Mike Coenan '05 and graduate students Halran Yu and class TA Alex Halderman '03 — left for Washington Monday night at 6 p.m.

When they arrived at about 10 p.m., they found that 40 other people had already camped out — many of them professional line-sitters hired to spend the night. Knowing that fewer than 40 people are typically admitted into the Court, the group was worried.

"It was nerve-wracking, nail-biting, down to the wire," Alpert said. "Crazy that we spent the whole night on the sidewalk and might not be able to see the trial."

Camped out for the night, the group hiked six blocks to the nearest bathroom several times. Halderman and Peng posed for a picture with Jack Valenti, former head of Motion Picture Association of America, who infamously said, "The VCR is to the movie industry as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone."

Protesters for both sides of the case squared off, carrying signs saying, "Feed a musician. Download legally" and "Don't steal my future."

"We thought about recording them and putting the recording on Grokster, but no one had a tape recorder," Coenan said.

Inside the Court

At 7 a.m., two hours before anyone was admitted to court, numbered tickets were distributed indicating everyone's position in line. The Princeton group, which held numbers 32 through 38, was relieved after being told that 40 people would be allowed into the court building.

But because of influx of media attention and the arrival of about 165 people who were on a priority list that guaranteed them admission, only 35 of about 200 people who eventually showed up were admitted.

Coenan was number 36. "It was really frustrating to see all these people cruise in in their taxies and walk right past you into the courtroom," he said.

But even those who did not make it were admitted for the first 15 minutes, then readmitted for short intervals.

"It was a rare opportunity to not only see a Supreme Court case in person, but to have seen it after studying it in depth and to be able to understand the nuances," Halderman said.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/arc...ws/12492.shtml


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Warner Music Gets Another Subpoena from Spitzer

Warner Music Group Corp. has received another subpoena from New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer as part of an industrywide probe of the financial relationship between music companies and radio stations, Warner Music said on Thursday.

The company, which is planning a $750 million initial public offering, said in a regulatory filing that it received a subpoena on March 31 as part of the probe, which includes a look at the use of independent promoters and accounting for payments to them.

The investigation is examining the time-honored practice of music companies' paying independent promoters hundreds of millions of dollars a year to help secure valuable radio air time for songs.

Warner Music previously disclosed that it had received subpoenas from Spitzer on Sept. 7 and Nov. 22 regarding the same matter.

The company, in the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said it has been producing documents and expects to complete the process in April.

It said it cannot predict the outcome of the investigation but that the probe has the potential to result in financial penalties or change the way the music industry promotes records.

EMI Group Plc said in October that Spitzer was investigating it as part of an industrywide probe.

Sources have said Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment have also received subpoenas.

Warner Music also disclosed in the filing that it intends to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. It did not propose a stock symbol. The company's previous filing said it planned to list on either the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq stock market.

The company has not yet disclosed how many shares it plans to sell or at what price.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...s/domesticNews


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End of public domain?

Court Rules Common Law Protects Recordings
Michael Gormley

New York's highest court ruled that common law protects the rights of a record company for music recorded before the 1972 federal copyright law in a decision the judges expect to have "significant ramifications for the music recording industry."

The result is that artists, their estates and others involved in recordings made before 1972 should be able to collect royalties in the United States for their performances, said Philip Allen Lacovara, the attorney for Capitol Records that won the state decision released Tuesday.

Currently, those recordings mostly feature classical performances that some companies now are simply copying and marketing without paying royalties, he said. But much of the court argument also centered on British Invasion groups from the 1960s. Many will soon lose copyright protection under British law and wouldn't be protected by the 1972 U.S. copyright law without Tuesday's state court decision, Lacovara said.

"I hope the companies who have been inclined to copy older classical recordings realize the New York court has spoken definitively on this and end any unlicensed copying," he said. "It does have enormous importance."

The case revolved around 1930s classical performances originally recorded on shellac disks in England by The Gramaphone Co. Limited, now known as EMI Records Limited. In 1996, EMI licensed exclusive rights to market the original recordings as compact discs and other products in the United States to EMI.

But in 1996, Naxos of America Inc., another music recording company, began to sell its own restorations of the recordings, competing with Capitol's compact disc and other recordings. Capital sued Naxos for copyright infringement based on the 1972 law.

A federal court dismissed Capitol's suit saying Britain's copyrights expired 50 years after the records were made and that U.S. copyright doesn't apply to recordings made before 1972. The federal court said Capitol had no common-law right, either, under New York state law, where the music industry giants are based.

Capitol appealed the common-law ruling to the New York Court of Appeals to determine whether Naxos is entitled to defeat Capitol's claims for copyright infringement under New York common law.

The state court also rejected the argument that copyright to the old performances of Bach and other masters was a "new product" when restored and recorded to compact discs.

The state's highest court ruled common law in New York "protects ownership interests in sound recordings made before 1972 that are not covered by the federal copyright act." The result is that Capitol can continue to sue Naxos for copyright violation for records made almost 50 years before the federal copyright law.

"The answer to this question will have significant ramifications for the music recording industry, as well as these litigants," the court stated.

Naxos attorney Maxim Waldbaum declined immediate comment.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...sto mwire.htm


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Inside job

Jail for Microsoft Employee Theft

A FORMER Microsoft employee has been sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay more than $US5 million ($6.5 million) for selling the company's products for personal gain.

Richard Gregg, 45, agreed to a plea agreement in US District Court in Seattle, where he admitted to ordering more than $US13 million worth of software meant for internal use and selling it to pay off a mortgage and buy luxury cars.

Gregg, who worked at Microsoft until late 2002, had cooperated with prosecutors in their investigation, a fact that Judge John Coughenour said he took into consideration at the sentencing.

Microsoft cracked down on criminal theft in late 2003 and put in more stringent policies after similar incidents involving employees selling Microsoft's high-end software for personal gain were discovered.

Microsoft hired investigators and made changes to its internal ordering system in order to prevent future incidents.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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Oh, Canada!

Heritage Minister Frulla On A Mission To Outlaw Internet Music Downloads

Canadian Heritage Minister Liza Frulla as a new mission in life and if she is successful, downloading music from the Internet without paying for it will be illegal and the practice subject to criminal charges.

During an interview this past weekend Frulla promised that peer-to-peer (P2P) music file sharing will "be addressed" arming the music industry and song writers with "the tools to sue", according to an article in the Toronto Sun.

The federal government had earler announced several proposed amendments to the Copyright Act by implementing two World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties. If passed, the new legislation would force Internet service providers (ISPs) to keep records of those who share high volumes of copyright-protected material including music. At that time, Canada would become the 51st country to make it illegal to distribute and trade music online.

The amendments would force ISPs to monitor individual customer internet connections for suspicious activity in the form of large file downloads and send warnings to home users whom they suspect of illegal file sharing. ISPs would also have to keep records of all warnings that could be used in a court of law if needed.

Minister Frulla stated that she would make it her mission to spread the word especially among children that downloading music without paying for it is wrong.

The reforms and amendments will be introduced in the House of Commons but the proposals have already been approved by all political parties.
http://www.halifaxlive.com/artman/publish/ _040405_77611.shtml


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Frulla Promotes Tougher Copyright Laws

In Winnipeg for the Juno festivities, Canadian Heritage Minister Liza Frulla took the opportunity to address issues such as music downloading and funding for the arts.

Frulla expressed her intention to toughen Canada's "antiquated" intellectual property laws through proposed new copyright legislation to be tabled in June.

"We'll also be addressing the peer-to-peer issue," Frulla told the Winnipeg Free Press Sunday. "It will give the tools to companies and authors to sue."

The music industry has long blamed peer-to-peer file- sharing and music downloading for declining music sales. Frulla said she wanted to persuade children that downloading music for free is wrong.

"Everything starts with the children," she said. "They're the ones who say 'recycle' and 'don't smoke.' The Internet is their world."

Frulla promised, however, that educational uses of material from the internet would be considered differently.

In March 2004, a Federal Court rejected a motion allowing the music industry to sue 29 individuals for sharing music files over the internet. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein said making files available in online, shared directories is within the bounds of current Canadian copyright law. An appeal is scheduled to begin in Toronto later this month.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005/04/04/Arts/ winnipeg050404.html


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Acquittal Overturned For 2 Cleared In TV Piracy Case
CBC News

The Quebec Superior Court has reversed the acquittal of two men who imported U.S. cable signals with a grey-market satellite dish.

Justice Wilbrod Claude Decarie found Drummondville, Que., resident Jacques D'Argy and his brother-in-law Richard Thériault guilty of three counts each of appropriating foreign signals.

Judge Danielle Côté cleared the two men in June. She ruled that the federal law that criminalized their actions was unconstitutional because it violated the right to free expression.

The federal government and the Canadian television industry, who consider it theft to use special decoders to capture foreign satellite signals, opposed the decision.

Decarie found that Côté erred in her decision.

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that unlicensed providers who sell decoders to capture foreign satellite signals are breaking a federal broadcasting law.

"Grey market" customers can purchase a satellite receiver for about $400 and pay monthly for programming – fed directly from the U.S. and other countries.

The Canadian industry says it has lost $400 million a year in subscriber fees to grey market customers.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/natio...ket050405.html


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Canadian 'iPod Tax' Repeal In Limbo
John Borland

A Canadian appeals court has temporarily blocked last year's ruling that overturned that country's "iPod tax," a fee collected on the sales of MP3 players that was distributed to copyright holders.

Last December, a court ruled that the fee, which is applied to all blank recording media in Canada, should not be applied to digital media players like the iPod. On Thursday, copyright regulators said the appeals court had stayed that ruling pending the Supreme Court's decision of whether to hear the case. The stay means that copyright regulators will not immediately have to return about $4.1 million collected though the program since late 2003.
http://news.com.com/Canadian+iPod+ta...3-5649170.html


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A Blog Written From Minneapolis Rattles Canada's Liberal Party
Clifford Krauss

An American blogger has suddenly emerged as a force in Canadian politics.

Edward Morrissey, a 42-year-old Minneapolis area call-center manager who runs a Web log, or blog, called Captain's Quarters as a hobby, last Saturday began posting allegations of corruption that reached the highest levels of the Canadian Liberal Party. The postings violate a publication ban instituted a few days earlier by a federal judge, Justice John Gomery, who is leading an investigation into accusations of money laundering and kickbacks in a government program from the 1990's that was aimed at undermining Quebec separatists.

The scandal, which involves government payments of up to $85 million to a handful of Montreal advertising firms for little or no work, has dominated national politics for a year and led to the Liberals losing their majority in the House of Commons last June.

But Justice Gomery moved to limit dissemination of information from the otherwise public hearing in Montreal so as not to influence potential jurors for coming trials in which a government bureaucrat and two advertising executives face criminal charges.

According to Mr. Morrissey's blog, recent testimony for the first time links people who have been close to Prime Minister Paul Martin to the scandal.

Mr. Martin has long insisted that he knew nothing of the workings of the program, which was intended to promote the federal government's presence at cultural and sporting events, even though he was finance minister at the time. The prime minister then was Jean Chrétien, who left office in December 2003.

Journalists and anyone else can attend the so-called Gomery commission hearings, and Mr. Morrissey said one of them, whom he would not identify, had approached him and had been passing him information for his blog. Mr. Morrissey has cautioned that he is basing his reporting on that one source, who he has said he believes to be reliable, and that he has not corroborated the information. Canadian journalists who have attended the hearings, or have spoken to those who have, say Mr. Morrissey's postings of the allegations, which have been made by a single witness, are generally accurate, though not complete.

Liberal Party leaders have questioned the veracity of the witness, Jean Brault, an advertising executive, who they note faces criminal charges and whose testimony is covered by the ban.

Mr. Gomery, meanwhile, is considering lifting the ban, now that so many people know so much about the proceedings.

While the Canadian news media have not reported explicitly what Mr. Morrissey is posting, their newspaper articles and television features about his work have led Canadians to visit Captain's Quarters (www.captainsquartersblog.com) to read the latest scandalous details. Mr. Morrissey said his blog had been flooded since Canadian CTV television first reported on its existence and contents Sunday night, and that he was now getting 400,000 hits a day.

"This is a historic moment for blogs," Mr. Morrissey said in a telephone interview. "The point of having free speech and a free press is to have people informed. These information bans are self-defeating for free societies. The politicians know, the media knows, but the Canadian voters are left in the dark and that's a backwards way of doing things."

Mr. Morrissey characterized himself as a libertarian conservative who had written extensively on his blog about Federal Election Commission regulations, free speech and foreign affairs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/07/in.../07canada.html


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Russia’s Biggest Online Library Found Guilty of Breaching Copyright
MosNews

A Moscow court has found Maxim Moshkov, owner of the biggest and most popular Russian on-line library, lib.ru, guilty of breaching copyright law.

The court ordered Moshkov to pay a 3,000-ruble ($107.7) fine to the plaintiff, writer Eduard Gevorkyan. The writer had initially wanted 1.5 million rubles (about $54,000) from the library owner. The court significantly decreased the fine after Moshkov explained he gains no profit from his library.

It was the only lawsuit brought against Moshkov that has ended in success for the plaintiff. Other writers have been unable to even start their cases. However, Gevorkyan had earlier won cases against two other libraries, edu-all.ru and aldebaran.ru, that were obliged to pay 50,000 rubles each. The writer’s interests were presented by the company KM- online.

Moshkov told the court that all the texts in his library were taken from the Internet or sent by readers. If the author disagrees with the release of his texts, Moshkov removes them. However, over 120 writers have agreed to publish their work on lib.ru. The library owner said he wrote letters to Gevorkyan asking if he would permit the publication of his texts but did not receive permission.

Moshkov’s lawyers intend to appeal the court decision.

Moshkov created his library in 1994. Every day over 20,000 people visit lib.ru.
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/04/...hkowlost.shtml


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Achtung! Speech loses, copyright wins

Court Decision In Music Industry vs. Heise online
Joerg Heidrich

In the legal dispute (reference: 21 O 3220/05) between eight companies from the music industry and German publisher Heise Zeitschriften Verlag, the first-instance district court of Munich I has just presented its written ruling. The matter in dispute was a report by heise online on a new version of software to make copies of DVDs. In the original version, this report not only took a critical view of software vendor Slysoft's claims, but also provided a link to the company's web site.

The Munich court ruled that, by providing a link to the company's homepage, heise online had intentionally provided assistance in the fulfillment of unlawful acts and is thus liable as an aider and abettor in accordance with Section 830 of the German Civil Code just as the vendor in itself is. While no link was provided to download the software, it could be downloaded two clicks later, which the court found to be inadmissible. For the court, it sufficed that readers could directly access the vendor's web site from the link in the report. The court also did not find it relevant that readers were also able to find the product via a search engine. Rather, it ruled that providing a link made finding the software "much easier", thus increasing the danger of violations of copyrights considerably.

The court did not find that the publisher had a right to provide such links in accordance with freedom of the press as defined in Article 5 of the German constitution. Rather, the provisions of copyright law limit the freedom of the press, in particular in the current case in which the music industry's ownership interests had to be preserved.

On the other hand, the court ruled that the music industry did not have the right to prevent the article in question from being published altogether. In these proceedings, the holders of rights had initially attempted to prevent Heise Zeitschriften Verlag in general from stating that software mentioned by name could be used to crack copy protection systems. In the hearing, however, the court proposed that this ban be limited to the article in dispute. However, in the end the court ruled against the music industry in this point.

In its ruling, the court explained that the news ticker report neither constitutes "advertising for the sale of illegal goods" as defined in Section 95a of the German Copyright Act (UrhG), nor does it provide instructions on how to get around technical measures. Instead, this type of reporting is justified by the freedom of the press and is in the public interest. In other words, the court ruled that the press has the right to mention the name of the product, the name of the vendor, and the name of copy protection systems affected by the product.

The court specified the amount in dispute at 500,000 euros. This amount, the court found, reflects the "considerable profit losses" of the music industry and the "great publicity" due to the prominence of heise online among readers of IT information. Each party will have to cover its own costs for the proceedings. The ruling is not yet legally effective. Heise Zeitschriften Verlag is considering appealing the case. (
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/58315


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The AIBO ate it

Lawyers Seek Missing Swiftel Evidence
Andrew Colley

A PERTH internet provider facing copyright infringement allegations over BitTorrent file sharing websites has failed to supply music industry lawyers with evidence that may assist their case, the federal Magistrate's Court has been told.

Music industry lawyer John Hennessy SC told the federal Magistrate that Swiftel had failed to supply music industry investigators with an electronic log of transactions between the ISP's servers and the BitTorrent sites.

Mr Hennessy asked federal Magistrate Rolf Driver to order the ISP to hand over the transaction records.

Music industry investigators attempted to obtain copies of the activity logs when they raided the ISP in accordance with so-called Anton Pillar orders on March 10th.

At the time, the ISP told investigators that the logs could only be retrieved from its Sydney operations and that it would be able to supply them the following day.

However, the court was told that the Swiftel's lawyers later wrote to music industry solicitors claiming that "no traffic" had been recorded at the sites for a number of weeks leading up to the raid, and that therefore, there were no logs.

However, Mr Hennessy argued that the company's explanation was inconsistent with evidence offered by music industry investigators.

The music industry alleged that one of its investigators was able to download music videos from the BitTorrent sites on March 6th; four days before the raids took take place.

He said that at no time had the ISP's technical representatives suggested the material would not be made available.

Swiftel lawyer Stephen Burley SC said he had "grave reservations" about the order. Mr Burely told the court that its original orders did not authorise music industry to subject the material to forensic analysis.

Judge Driver decided to reserve his decision on the order until the court reconvenes. Swiftel's legal team is expected to argue that the music industry does not have a prima facie case against the ISP.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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P2P Technology in the Web Hosting Industry

Currently, the RIAA is suing Grokster and trying to convince the Supreme Court that Peer to Peer or P2P file sharing has little or no legitimate uses and is almost exclusively used as a method to illegally trade music and movie files. The RIAA is complaining that P2P is severely damaging the music industry and this technology should be stopped. Despite that the music industry reacted in the exact same way with the invention of the radio they continue to see the glass as half empty rather than trying to realize the tremendous potential for revenue in not only the music industry but the web hosting industry as well.

Billionaire Mark Cuban has decided to step in and fund Grokster’s legal battle. In his blog he wrote;
"If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only," Cuban wrote. "It will be a sad day when American corporations start to hold their US digital innovations and inventions overseas to protect them from the RIAA, moving important jobs overseas with them."

While the RIAA may be wrong on a lot of points and their intention to illegalize peer to peer may be ill-founded but they are correct that P2P is used in large part for music, movie, and software swapping.

In other words, P2P file sharing has yet to be tapped into and utilized as a fully- fledged technology. Part of this is perhaps history. Products, whether it is news, music, soda pop, or hosting a web site traditionally features the product flowing from a central source to many consumers. Corporate America, like the RIAA, doesn’t take kindly to giving up the ‘control’ that this model provides over the product. However, there is one industry that has taken a peer to peer business model and made it massively profitable and it’s not even legal; spamming. Spammers can’t be stopped and they sell incredible amounts of goods. MCI was said to have made $5 billion a year hosting spammers through resale hosting. Has there ever been a more virile proof of concept?

Why not take the concept that viruses, music swappers and zombie PC spammers use and put it to good use? Why not fight virus and spam with their own weapons? Why not use P2P web hosting?

The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance may be a first step towards this. The FSA is a first-of-its-kind industry initiative aimed at helping network operators share Internet attack information automatically. The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance marks the first time companies are able to share detailed attack profiles in real-time and block attacks closer to the source. This global alliance marks a significant step forward in the fight against Internet attacks and major infrastructure threats that cross network boundaries, continents and oceans.

Global telecommunications companies participating in the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance include British Telecom, MCI and NTT Communications.
And leading carriers, network providers, hosting companies and educational institutions joining the Alliance include among others; Asia Netcom, Cisco Systems, EarthLink, Rackspace, The Planet,University of Pennsylvania and XO Communications.

It’s great that web hosts are sharing security information but it’s not particularly helpful during a DDoS or Denial of Service attack.

Net security and legal expert Ben Edelman described a recent DDoS attack in his website after he posted an article on spamming, “Globat was not particularly responsive in informing me of the problem -- my site was down for one and a half business days before they told me what was going on, and they only told me when I reached out to a personal contact who happened to work there. Then again, they're a $10/month company -- not exactly premium service. I was happy with them otherwise, and for most folks I think they provide an extraordinary value.”

What if, when the DDoS attack hit Edelman’s site, Globat had been able to switch on P2P mode and distribute the files to other web hosting providers and allow them to send the files out in response to requests for the site?

Globat could have changed the downtime from days to minutes. Then, with P2P, the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance or File Sharing Alliance could share attack vector information and shut them down the offending zombies.

How do you fight a million computers barraging a site? With a million servers of course!

This technique could even be used to knock spammers out by sharing spam source information and then spamming the spammers with mail that looks like answers to their ads or at the very least combining to lock them out of the internet.

Of course, all this is predicated on a high level of cooperation among web hosts, or rather, a large peer sharing network.

Web hosts or the web sites they host could also use P2P file sharing for cross site or even cross host advertising. Again, by cooperating, multiple web sites could form advertising cooperatives and share ads. While a single point of access could be developed for the advertising to make it easy for those who want to advertise to send their ads out to as wide a distribution as possible it could work from a many to many P2P model as well.

These are only a couple of ideas to incorporate P2P in web hosting but if the Supreme Court is wise they’ll see that P2P is more than just a music swapper.
http://www.hostsearch.com/news/phillips_news_2878.asp


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Ian Clarke & Steven Star

Dijjer is free P2P software that dramatically reduces the bandwidth needed to host large files.
Website blurb

Bandwidth is a problem for anyone hosting big files. As soon as your music, mp3 blog, or movie gets too popular, either your site goes down or you get hit with a huge bandwidth bill. Worse, the cost and hassle of distributing large media files means that the internet isn't living up to its potential as a democratic medium. Dijjer solves this problem. What distinguishes it from similar P2P tools (like Bittorrent) is how easy it is to use for publishers and users.

Using Dijjer on Your Website is So Simple

You don't need to install anything. Just put a file on your site as you normally do, but add "http://www.dijjer.org/get/" to the beginning of your links:

normal link: http://mysite.com/video.mov
dijjer link: http://dijjer.org/get/http://mysite.com/video.mov

When they click a Dijjer link, users will get some of the file from your website, but most of it will come from other people running Dijjer. That's how you save bandwidth. And when someone clicks on the link who hasn't used Dijjer before, they'll get help installing it. After that, downloads happen seamlessly inside their web browser. Try it! Download one of the videos on the right.

The Dijjer Difference

Downloads happen in your browser. Most p2p clients make you use a separate program. Dijjer doesn't.

Play media files as they download. If you're downloading a song or a movie, you can listen / watch it as it's downloading-- try it!

Works great with RSS & podcasting. Dijjer will work perfectly with ipodder, ipodderx, radio, and every other podcasting "aggregator". More info.

Works for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Everybody can run Dijjer.

No spyware. No adware. No secrets. The Dijjer source code is free, open source, and available to everyone (why this matters).

Copyright friendly. Dijjer only downloads files that are on websites. So for copyright holders, policing Dijjer is exactly the same as policing websites.
http://dijjer.org/


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The Powers Behind the Home-Video Throne
Christian Moerk

WHEN Steven Spielberg directs a movie, he gets final cut. But the last word is more likely to come from Laurent Bouzereau.

Mr. Bouzereau, 43, is barely known to the world at large. But in the clannish, status-obsessed corridors of Hollywood, he has a growing reputation as Mr. Spielberg's personal DVD producer, one of perhaps a dozen players who have mastered the young art of turning the video edition of a film into a sui generis event.

The Paris-born Mr. Bouzereau brings his own crew to film sets and works from a script for the DVD documentary while a filmmaker shoots the feature movie around him, a practice that is gaining in popularity. He is currently producing the bonus features for the disc version of Mr. Spielberg's forthcoming "War of the Worlds" with Tom Cruise (set to open in June), and has served as the director's go-to guy in all DVD matters for the last 10 years. He has added touches of his own to many movies, including "Schindler's List," for which he created the documentary "Voices From the List," featuring interviews with Holocaust survivors.

Mr. Bouzereau agrees that a good DVD producer can persuade directors with a large appetite that less is more. "You'll have 10 hours of extra material," he said. "But not all of it needs to be told."

Where feature films are mostly put together by producers pitching scripts to studios, which then attach a director and stars, the DVD business only has one star: the original film's director. A director's involvement - which means access to the set, extra footage and even ideas for special features - can mean the difference between a passable DVD and a great one.

"You don't say, 'I do everything for this or that producer,' you say, 'I do it for the director,' " said the veteran DVD producer Mark Rowen, who produced the DVD version of the animated comedy hit "Shrek 2," which sold 21.6 million units worldwide, more than any other DVD last year.

Mr. Rowen's job differs from Mr. Bouzereau's in a way that is invisible to consumers. Where a bonus-features expert like Mr. Bouzereau is mostly involved in creative matters, a producer like Mr. Rowen will also be expected to oversee the budget, the menu design that guides the viewer through the options and any interactive features, like online games.

That such people carry weight with filmmakers as powerful as Mr. Spielberg is the mark of a revolution that in a few short years has changed the pecking order in Hollywood, conferring status on those who can tap the potential in a former ancillary business that - with $25 billion in annual domestic DVD sales - has outstripped the take from selling movie tickets.

"Now the tail kind of wags the dog," said Richard Schickel, a film historian and a long-time critic for Time magazine. Like Mr. Bouzereau, Mr. Schickel - no longer content with a seat in the audience - also produces DVD's. He supervised for Warner Brothers the restoration of Samuel Fuller's brutally edited World War II epic "The Big Red One" for theatrical and DVD release.

Mr. Schickel's job resembles that of someone who adds features to DVD releases of new features - both require copious research and complex negotiations with the studio to include favorite pieces of footage within a given budget - but the older the film, the harder it is.

In Mr. Schickel's case, he said, he scoured around an underground vault, finding more than 110 extra reels, or more than 70,000 feet of film. "I try to speculate on what was going through the minds of the Lorimar executives," he said of the company that initially released the film in 1980, after cutting more than an hour of material from it. But Mr. Schickel was luckier than most DVD producers: he found a Warner executive who pushed his case for restoring the Fuller's movie to its former glory.

Some film executives have yet to be convinced that elaborate and increasingly expensive add-ons from the likes of Mr. Bouzereau, Mr. Rowen and Mr. Schickel are always worth the effort. "Our research has shown that less than half the people buying a DVD watch a single extra feature," said Steve Beeks, president of Lions Gate Entertainment.

Still, his company's re-release of "First Blood," the Rambo film, last year included something as rare as an alternate ending, in which the troubled war veteran John Rambo kills himself. And with the average American household now buying 15 DVD's a year, few will risk releasing a major title without hiring a star from the growing fraternity of DVD producers to enhance it.

"We're really a virtual studio," said Michael Gillis, whose DVD production company MogoMedia produced special features for Columbia Pictures' "Groundhog Day" and "Stripes." Like conventional film producers, Mr. Gillis said, DVD producers often land jobs thanks to close relationships with actors and directors, and are frequently represented by major agencies. "We have access due to a track record, or directly to talent," he explained.

Occupying what is, in effect, new space within the film industry, more than a few DVD producers appear to have stumbled into their now-glittering careers. Mr. Bouzereau, regarded by many as the industry's leading light, started in the now-defunct LaserDisc business. He later worked as an executive for Bette Midler's film production company, and entered the bonus-features world when the high-end Criterion Collection contacted him in 1991 to do a voice-over for its LaserDisc of Brian De Palma's "Carrie," because he had written a book about the filmmaker.

The DVD production community has its own list of hits and misses - just as the feature film community does - which has less to do with the value of a director's original work than with what a producer has later done, or failed to do, to amplify it. "You would be surprised at the material coming out of good places," Mr. Bouzereau said, politely referring to the copious amount of lesser DVD material being released.

Some insiders were less than impressed when Columbia TriStar released a remastered DVD of Wolfgang Petersen's seminal submarine drama "Das Boot" in its original German television version in 2004 for $39.95 with a new score and almost an hour of previously unseen, crisp footage, but with little back-up material and a 23-year- old "making of" featurette. Similarly, Warner Brothers put out David Mamet's thriller "Spartan" on DVD last year for $24.98 with only an audio track by Val Kilmer, and with Mr. Mamet conspicuously absent.

For many the art of the extra feature was born in 1999 when Tom Lesinski, then a Warner Brothers home video executive and now president of the home video unit for Paramount Pictures, had the filmmakers Larry and Andy Wachowski amplify the DVD version of "The Matrix" with two documentaries. The two DVD versions of the big-screen sequels delved even deeper, adding a second separate world, "Animatix," in which animated characters based on the films' actors continued the adventures.

The add-ons helped drive disc sales for the first "Matrix" film to more than a million copies, back when there were only three million DVD players nationwide. (Today, industry experts estimate there are more than 70 million.) Such plain profit logic convinced the film industry to take seriously those whose opinions about movies had been seen as after-thoughts. " 'The Matrix' was exactly the right audience," Mr. Lesinski said. Because the film was conceived as the first in an otherworldly series, he said, "it took over the culture and it happened over a fairly long period of time." He added, "We saw it as an opportunity to take that fascination and create something for the fan."

Using that same model, he explained, Paramount expects to release yet another "Titanic" DVD edition on Oct. 26, produced by Jon Landau, this time with "the most complete body of work completed for a movie," including more than 30 deleted scenes, a one-hour documentary by the director James Cameron, and an alternate ending. A Paramount spokeswoman declined to say how many DVD's will be shipped, but said that the studio had "enormous expectations" for it.

No word yet on whether Jack lives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/movies/03moer.html


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Japanese Record Labels Win Landmark P2P Settlement

Japanese record labels have won a landmark settlement from the MMO peer-to- peer service for breach of copyright.

It is the first time anywhere in the world that a peer-to-peer service has been found liable for the illegal sharing of files using its software.

A Tokyo court rejected MMO's appeal and awarded damages of Yen36.89mn (£183,000) to plaintiffs comprsing 19 labels, the Record Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) and JASRAC, representing song authors.

MMO was also found to have infringed the plaintiffs' right to make their recordings available on the Internet.

The RIAJ applauded the decision and vowed to continue its campaign against file sharing.

'RIAJ will continuously take dratic measures against illegal use of music on the Internet that corrupts the "cycle of music creation" and leads to decline of the music culture,' it said in a statement.

Allen Dixon, general counsel for the International Federation of Phonographic Industries stressed the significance of the ruling.

'This case is important in that it is the first decision world-wide that has found that providing an unauthorised file-sharing service itself constitutes an infringement of record companies' rights to "make available" their recordings on the Internet,' he said.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/71117/ja...ettlement.html


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Impatient TV Viewers Turn To BitTorrent
Kristyn Maslog-Levis

Some Australians are turning to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks for new episodes of their favourite American television shows.

According to an independent study conducted by Alex Malik, a former general counsel for the Australian Recording Industry Association, the popularity of one P2P application -- BitTorrent -- in Australia is driven in part by local television networks which "have adopted a strategy of being slow to air current episodes of popular TV shows".

Malik believes that by delaying the broadcast of these programmes, Australian TV programmers have increased the domestic demand for the shows. "As a result, impatient viewers have increasingly turned to BitTorrent to download their favourite shows," he said.

Malik told ZDNet Australia that online forums dedicated to discussions about popular TV shows revealed that one in three of the conversations touches on where and how to pirate TV programmes on the Web. He said although it was hard to quantify the number of people illegally downloading shows through BitTorrent, there was a "substantial" number of people doing it.

"It's difficult to put a number on it because not a lot of people talk about [online pirating] especially since it's illegal. It's similar to illegal music file sharing ... not a lot of people admit to it but there is a substantial amount happening," he said.

Malik's research showed that Australians have to wait an average of eight months to see first-run episodes of popular programmes from overseas. For instance, it takes an average of four months to watch the latest episodes of top-rated shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives, currently being aired in Channel Seven.

Malik said local networks also delayed the telecast of top programmes during summer [in Australia] so as "not to waste successful programs" during the unofficial non-ratings period.

"These delays provide a window of opportunity for viewers to upload TV programmes after their American broadcast date, thereby making them available to viewers outside of the US, and viewers within the US who may have missed the program.

"In order to download these shows, all consumers require is a broadband connection and BitTorrent software. While download quality is variable, and depending on its source, BitTorrent users have found the quality to be satisfactory," the report said.

"While there are no accurate Australian BitTorrent usage figures, anecdotal evidence and reports from online forums suggest that Australians are downloading TV programmes in large quantities. Australians are also uploading programs like My Restaurant Rules and Rove," he added.

A previous survey released by Web monitoring company Envisional found Australia as the second largest downloader of online pirated TV programmes in the world (15.6 percent), second to the United Kingdom (18.5 percent) and ahead of the US (7.3 percent).

The report said that increased bandwidth, technological advances and a high demand of US-based TV shows are some of the reasons for the boom in online piracy. It also said that around 70 percent of the piracy occurs through BitTorrent.

A spokesperson from Channel Nine told ZDNet Australia that "the major reason other countries around the world -- apart from the US -- are downloading [TV] series from the Internet is because the shows are US-based and are often seen many months after the original airdate".

Ben Coppin, chief operating officer at Envisional previously said in a statement that the number of people turning to piracy to satisfy their TV demands will only increase.

"If TV companies were to offer episodes for download at a small cost at the same time as they air offline they could generate revenue in the same way that Apple’s iTunes does. However, they must be aware of the dangers of losing their core audience to a delivery method that is free, unregulated and open to anyone with an internet connection," Coppin said.

Malik said unless the TV networks devote immediate attention to the problem of unnecessary delays, "the television industry is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the music industry".

FreeTV and other networks have not responded despite repeated queries.

Recently, there has been an effort to clamp down on the use of BitTorrent technology to aid copyright infringement. The recording industry's first scalp was Perth-based Internet service provider Swiftel.

In March, the Music Industry Piracy Investigations Unit took the ISP to court. The hearing will resume on April 7.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communi...9186748,00.htm


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The Whole Future Of Computing At Stake? Sounds Like A Movie
John Naughton

In a high-ceilinged courtroom in Washington last Monday, seven men and two women sat listening to arguments about technology. As far as we know, none of them is especially knowledgeable about technology.

Indeed, one of them disdains even to use a laptop, and writes his judicial opinions by hand on a yellow legal pad. But these are the highest judges in the US, and they are deciding the future of computing and possibly of the internet itself.

This may seem a grandiose claim, but bear with me. The Supreme Court was hearing arguments about MGM vs Grokster, a case which movie studios and other content owners had brought against Grokster, a file-sharing service, on the grounds that it enabled copyright infringement by allowing users to exchange music files freely over the internet.

Grokster's defence was that it provided an efficient technology for sharing files and could not be held responsible if users employed it for illicit purposes - in other words, that its file-sharing technology had substantial 'non-infringing' uses.

This phrase echoes the nub of a landmark precedent set 20 years ago by the Supreme Court in the famous 'Sony-Betamax' case, which held that Sony was not liable for any copyright abuses likely to be perpetrated by owners of video-cassette recorders because there were 'substantial non- infringing' uses of the product. Or, to put it another way, just because the VCR could be used for perfectly legitimate purposes - like viewing a rented movie - it was OK for Sony to sell it, even if some rogues were going to use it to record copyrighted TV programmes.

The core of the Grokster defence rests on this 20- year-old decision - made by a hair's breadth majority of one - and is supported by a range of briefs filed by technology experts. They argue that the 'Peer-to-peer' (P2P) networking technology (of which the Grokster system is a particular type) is a vital technology for a networked world.

A good example is provided by BitTorrent, an ingenious P2P system designed for sharing very large files, which is currently enraging the movie studios. I know of no better way to distribute very large files - for example new releases of operating systems or large industrial software applications - than BitTorrent, and many companies now use it precisely for that purpose. It saves them having to copy the files onto CDs or DVDs which then have to be FedEx'd round the world.

But of course BitTorrent - like the internet itself - is uncensorious about what's in those files: as far as the program is concerned, they're all bitstreams. And it just so happens that some of these bitstreams constitute copyrighted movies - hence Hollywood's ire.

The reason MGM vs Grokster is such an impor tant case is that the principle at stake is fundamental. It is about whether the inventor of a new technology can be held liable for uses that other people find for it at some point in the future. If the 'Supremes' decide against Grokster, the process of innovation in the computing and communications industries will be imperilled - for who would happily engage in the invention of a revolutionary new product or technology if they feared that some aggrieved company might subsequently sue them on the grounds that their work had undermined its cherished business model?

On this principle, the telegraph companies could have sued Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi for inventing (respectively) telephone and radio; the Post Office could have sued the inventors of the fax machine and of email; oil companies could one day sue the inventors of the fuel cell; and telcos will be free to sue the inventors of VoIP, the technology for making telephone calls over the internet.

If you look back over the history of technology, one thing stands out above all others, namely that the inventors of radical technologies rarely foresee the applications that people will find for their inventions.

Marconi conceived of radio as a point-to-point communications technology rather than broadcast (one to many) technology. Henry Ford thought he had invented a way of making motor cars, whereas in fact he invented a way of manufacturing products in huge volumes at low marginal cost.

And the geniuses who conceived the internet thought they were inventing a way of enabling folks to log in remotely to mainframe computers, whereas in fact they designed a technology for enabling us to send email, spin the World Wide Web, girdle the earth with a zillion lines of personal communication - and, yes, share music and video files. Which brings us back to those nine learned men and women in Washington.

They hold the future of technological innovation in their hands. If they get it wrong, we will all be screwed. Let's hope they don't fumble it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists...451089,00.html


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P2P Battle Looms In Sweden
Correspondents in Stockholm

A DRAFT law that would forbid the sharing of copyrighted material on the internet without payment of royalties is raising tensions in Sweden, where legal loopholes make such downloads hard to stop.

Sweden, where the government and industry claim unlicensed use of copyrighted material is rampant, wants to follow the lead from other countries which already prosecute internet file-sharers.But there is much doubt about how such a law could be implemented.

"There is an incredibly tense atmosphere here. I have had a number of threats made against me personally," said Henrik Ponten, legal council at the Swedish Antipiracy Agency.

The controversy began earlier this year when the Swedish government proposed a law that for the first time would make it a punishable offence not only to post stolen copyrighted music and films on the internet, but also to download the material.

"We want to cure the lack of clarity in the law so that regular people know" what is legal and what is illegal, Swedish Justice Minister Thomas Bodstroem told the Expressen daily last month.

"Since 2001, the record industry in Sweden has seen its revenue drop by more than 30 per cent," said Lars Gustafsson, chief executive of the Swedish branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, IFPI.

At least part of the decline reflected illegal downloading, he said.

"The (piracy) problem is bigger in Sweden than in any other country in Europe," Mr Ponten said, claiming that at least 500,000 of Sweden's nine million inhabitants use file-sharing programs to download and post illegal copies of films, music and computer games on the internet.

About 15 million illegal copies of movies are downloaded off the internet each year, Mr Ponten said.

Some 7,000 cases involving the illegal uploading of copyrighted material, are discovered annually per million inhabitants, compared to 2,000 on average in Europe, he said.

Not everyone agrees with the Social Democratic-led government that penalising downloaders will really curb the practice. Three opposition parties have already vowed to vote against the law, which comes up for parliamentary debate on May 25.

"Why should we criminalise the downloaders? It is often impossible for people to know whether what they see on the internet has been put there legally or illegally," Centre Party MP Johan Linander said.

If passed, the new law would go into effect on July 1, but the Antipiracy Agency, not willing to wait that long, has stirred up furore by cracking down on companies and individuals within the foggy framework of the existing law.

In March, the agency helped police conduct a widely publicised raid of internet provider Bahnhof's Stockholm office, confiscating four servers they said were filled with pirated music and films.

In all 450,000 sound files, 5,500 games and computer programs and 1,800 films were seized.

But in a twist, the company has claimed that the pirated material was placed there by an infiltrator from the Antipiracy Agency itself.

"It turned out that a large amount of the material had been uploaded by an infiltrator, or provocateur, working for the Antipiracy Agency. I have the impression that this was just a publicity stunt," Bahnhof chief executive Jon Karlung said, insisting that his company did not condone copyright infringements.

"But we're just a service provider. I mean, you don't blame the postal service for what people write in the letters they send," he said.

Mr Ponten acknowledged that his agency had an "informer" working at Bahnhof, but insisted that such methods are necessary in the fight against internet piracy.

"You can't find the perpetrators (of these crimes) by looking through the phonebook. You have to play the game to prevent crime," he said.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...nbv%5E,00.html


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Swedish File Sharing Crackdown Planned

However, the law is not with them
Nick Farrell:

THE SWEDISH government’s plan to crack down on file- sharers pirating illegal music and movies has hit a slight snag.

Although the country knows that unlicensed use of copyrighted material is rampant, there is much doubt about how such a law could be implemented.

There is also considerable anger at the concept of the idea. Much of this anger follows a high profile case where an ISP, Bahnhof's, was raided and four servers where found with pirated material in them.

It turned out that a lot of the pirated material was placed there by an infiltrator from the Antipiracy Agency.

Bahnhof was furious, calling the whole thing a publicity stunt by the Antipiracy Agency.

The incident proved that ISPs who hosted the file-sharing servers were completely unable to stop people from downloading illegal material, it claimed. It seems that the general public might be agreeing. Already three opposition parties have already vowed to vote against the law, which comes up for parliamentary debate on May 25.

Johan Linander, a Center Party MP said that it was bad to criminalise the downloaders when it was impossible for them to know whether what they see on the internet has been put there legally or illegally,
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22301


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Sweden

Parliamentarian Rejects New Copyright Proposal

Johan Linander is a member of Swedish Parliament, representing Centerpartiet ('Center Party') - see http://www.centerpartiet.se/template...ng____2247.asp

"Centerpartiet har idag beslutat att vi tänker avslå regeringens proposition om upphovsrätten. Bakgrunden är att lagstiftningen inte är tillräcklig överskådlig för att ens kunna få godkänt. Den nya lagen kommer att beröra miljontals svenskar och då måste vi kunna kräva att lagstiftningen är tydlig och möjlig att förstå.

Vi har också ställt oss bakom att det ska vara tillåtet att ladda ner musik och annat upphovsrättsskyddat material oavsett om den som gjort det möjligt att ladda ner begått ett brott. Vi kan inte göra miljontals svenskar till brottslingar för att de lyssnar på musik genom sina datorer."

Rough translation:

Center Party has today decided that we intend to reject the government's proposal on copyright laws. The background is that the legislation is not understandable enough to be acceptable at all. The new law will touch millions of Swedes, and therefore we need to require that the legislation is clear and understandable.

We have also taken a stand that it should be allowed for people to download music and other copyright-protected material even if the person who has made the material available has committed a crime. We can not make millions of Swedes criminals just because they listen to music through their computers.
http://johanlinander.se/blog/


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Fury In Land Of Internet Pirates Over Crackdown
Stephen Castle

A copyright crackdown by Sweden's film and music industry has provoked a backlash, with the country's anti-piracy investigators suffering an attempted break-in, computer-hacking attacks and death threats.

Passions are running particularly high in Sweden because the affluent nation has one of the highest numbers of broadband users in the world, giving many people the opportunity to download full-length feature films in minutes.

Globally, piracy is estimated to cost the music and film business billions of pounds, but attempts to curb the scale of the practice in Sweden have provoked fierce opposition. The country's anti-piracy bureau, which is a private company supported by the industry, has been accused of creating a climate of fear and of using infiltrators to get access to groups of computer file-sharers.

Branded by one newspaper as Sweden's most hated man, the bureau's main spokesman, Henrik Ponten, has become the focus of hostility and his mobile phone number is listed on one file-sharers' website which depicts him in Nazi uniform.

Mr Ponten says that in Sweden 15 million films are downloaded illegally each year, almost as many as those that are purchased. He said yesterday: "I have been described as the most hated man in Sweden. I get threats: people call me up and say 'I know where you live'. We have had computer-hacking incidents and they have tried to break into our office. We have a very strange situation in Sweden where, when you try to follow the law, everybody ends up screaming at you."

Tensions reached a new high when the bureau raided the offices of Bahnhof, a major internet service provider. Not only do the two share the same building but the anti-piracy bureau is a Bahnhof customer.

Jon Karlung, the chief executive of Bahnhof, said: "Around 20 people arrived in the office, they turned my keyboard upside down. They were quite aggressive and some of the office clerks were very disturbed; it was like they were making an ambush. It was like a B-movie."

Mr Karlung, who says he does not condone breaking the law, says he has dismissed one staff member for malpractice. However, he claimed that the employee had been acting under the influence of one of the anti-piracy bureau's infiltrators. "It is a kind of Kafka scenario," he said, "they filled the server with material and then called the police. They use scare tactics. It is a kind of witch-hunt."

Mr Karlung dismissed claims that pirated music and film with more than three years of playing time had been seized, and said no charges have been brought by the police.

Whatever the outcome, the dispute has put Sweden's law and its enforcement under the spotlight. Mr Ponten blames politicians for failing to give a lead on the issue of piracy, allowing many people to believe that it is acceptable. "Some of the politicians even say that file-sharing is OK," he says.

Others say the high prices for downloads meanthere is an irresistible incentive to break the law. Mr Karlung says: "The new technological situation makes it impossible to keep the old business model. They should lower the price and maintain profits by selling more."
http://www.ezilon.com/information/article_3202.shtml


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Uni-verse

Some Colleges Falling Short in Security of Computers
Tom Zeller Jr.

If the computer age is continually testing how well institutions protect personal information, the nation's colleges and universities may be earning a failing grade.

Last Monday, administrators at the University of California, Berkeley, acknowledged that a computer laptop containing the names and Social Security numbers of nearly 100,000 people - mostly graduate school applicants - had been stolen. Just three days earlier, Northwestern University reported that hackers who broke into computers at the Kellogg School of Management there may have had access to information on more than 21,000 students, faculty and alumni. And one week before that, officials at California State University, Chico, announced a breach that may have exposed personal information on 59,000 current, former and prospective students.

There is no evidence that any of the compromised information has been used to commit fraud. But at a time of rising concerns over breaches at commercial data warehouses like ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, these incidents seem to highlight the particular vulnerabilities of modern universities, which are heavily networked, widely accessible and brimming with sensitive data on millions of people.

Data collected by the Office of Privacy Protection in California, for example, showed that universities and colleges accounted for about 28 percent of all security breaches in that state since 2003 - more than any other group, including financial institutions.

"Universities are built on the free flow of information and ideas," said Stanton S. Gatewood, the chief information security officer at the University of Georgia, which is still investigating a hacking incident there last year that may have exposed records on some 20,000 people.

"They were never meant to be closed, controlled entities. They need that exchange and flow of information, so they built their networks that way."

In many cases, Mr. Gatewood said, that free flow has translated into a highly decentralized system that has traditionally granted each division within a university a fair amount of autonomy to set up, alter and otherwise maintain its own fleet of networked computers. Various servers that handle mail, Web traffic and classroom activities - "they're all out in the colleges within the university system," Mr. Gatewood explained, "and they don't necessarily report to the central I.T. infrastructure."

Throw in aging equipment, an entrenched sense that information should be as free-flowing as possible, and a long-standing reliance on Social Security numbers as the primary means of identifying and tracking transient populations, and the heightened vulnerabilities of universities become apparent.

"We sometimes battle networks and mainframes in place since the 1960's," said Mr. Gatewood, "and mind-sets in place even longer."

For years, the Social Security number served as the default identifier for students, faculty and staff at nearly every university and college. It was printed on identification cards, posted on bulletin boards along with grades, and used to link bits of information - spread across dozens of networked databases - on each individual.

A handful of states - Wisconsin, California, Arizona, New York and West Virginia - now ban or limit the use of Social Security numbers in this way, according to a compilation of state and federal laws by the privacy advocate Robert Ellis Smith. And many universities have already abandoned or are in the process of moving away from using Social Security numbers as the primary means of identifying students.

But a 2002 survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers indicated that at least half were still using it as the primary identifier for students in their databases. And because the number has been used to link so many records across so many different databases in so many different departments for so long, abandoning it quickly is nearly impossible.

"It's complicated," said Virginia Rezmierski, the assistant to the vice provost for information technology at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. "We started a long time ago, and gave the university seven years to complete the process."

The University of Michigan essentially completed a migration to randomly generated identifier numbers in 2003. But Professor Rezmierski points out that myriad entities both inside and outside the university still use Social Security numbers, forcing universities to continue to handle them. Most of the national testing agencies, for instance, still use Social Security numbers to identify the scores of incoming students, Professor Rezmierski said.

Another problem, according to Jonathan Bingham, the president of Intrusic, a company that develops tools designed to uncover security breaches, is that universities have tended to put too much emphasis on preventing attacks from worms and viruses and too little on capturing troublemakers who quietly stroll through their databases.

The leaking of names and Social Security numbers from all these universities was not the result of noisy, destructive attacks, Mr. Bingham pointed out. "These are all problems that have nothing to do with that," he said. Rather, "someone's been able to get into the network that doesn't want to be detected."

Of course, not all universities are equally vulnerable, and some are more adept at protecting their data.

"Many of the better universities have better security in place than some corporations," said Eugene H. Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University. And because federal laws governing the handling of student data - specifically the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 - have been in place for longer than many other privacy statutes, Mr. Spafford said, data security "has been a concern at universities for some time."

And yet it appears that, on the whole, schools remain comparatively low-hanging fruit for hackers and thieves.

"I think it has shaken people up," said Professor Rezmierski of the University of Michigan, who is conducting a study of computer-based incidents at colleges and universities across the country.

"Often it takes these kinds of incidents to get people to pay attention."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/04/te...gy/04data.html


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File Sharing Is Not The Problem

Conglomerates should try to profit from technology, instead of preserving old business models.
Manuelita Beck

File sharing made its way to the Supreme Court this week, but it’s anyone’s guess as to what the outcome will be.

Justices heard oral arguments in the case, in which the entertainment industry is trying to shut down online file-sharing services. The court is expected to rule on the case in July.

The movie and music industries want makers of file-sharing software to be held responsible if their users download copyrighted material.

According to The Washington Post, hundreds of millions of people worldwide use such programs to trade software, songs and videos. That could be why the entertainment industry sees file sharing as such a threat.

“The Massacre,” 50 Cent’s album, will be Billboard’s No. 1 album next week. Yet, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures, he only sold more than 325,000 albums. In the weeks since the release of “The Massacre,” 50 sold 2.5 million albums, and it’s counted as a great success.

Ashton Kutcher’s film “Guess Who” took the top slot in box-office figures two weekends ago with a $20.7 million opening. When you take into account the price of movie tickets, maybe a couple million people went out to watch Kutcher and Bernie Mac.

Yet, the population of the United States is just less than 300 million, according to the Census Bureau’s population projection.

Despite the seeming pervasiveness of the entertainment industry, its audience isn’t all that large. Given its sales numbers, it’s no wonder the existence of hundreds of millions of downloaders are flashing warning signs at the entertainment industry.

Music sales are down, and if those downloaders could be forced to buy their music instead of getting it for free, record companies could make much more money.

But who’s to say all those people would go out and buy music? Or that they aren’t already doing so?

And let’s not forget all those artists who aren’t in the system. Regardless of what the giants in the entertainment industry like to think, they aren’t the be-all and end-all of music and movies.

The claim by the entertainment industry that “copyright infringement is the only commercially significant use of file-sharing” is ridiculous. File sharing can be beneficial for all kinds of people without violating copyrights.

Plenty of musicians and moviemakers are distributing their work for free and file-sharing software can be a convenient way for them to distribute it.

Of course, that poses its own threat as well. With more choices, consumers don’t have to just choose from whatever artists are signed to big record companies or only watch movies distributed to their local theaters.

For that matter, plenty of people are writing software and want people to trade it. Libraries, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer noted, use the technology to transfer documents. Not all file- sharers are trafficking in copyrighted material. The Supreme Court case is asking for makers of file-sharing software to be put out of business because people might use it to do illegal things.

The Supreme Court ruled on a similar issue in 1984. Under that opinion, Sony couldn’t be held responsible for what people did with its Betamax video recorder. If a product or service is “merely capable” of substantial legal use, a company can’t be held liable for what people do with it.

Grokster and StreamCast Networks, the companies involved in the Supreme Court case, said the “Sony standard” should be applied to them.

Their supporters said the same, claiming that what the entertainment industry is asking for will have a chilling effect on innovation. If inventors have to worry about what people might do with their products, they might not release them.

Even if the court doesn’t agree, the entertainment industry is going to have to come to grips with technological changes. Times change. Even if file-sharing software gets taken out, what happens when someone comes up with some other way to share data?

Maybe the record companies and movie studios need to realize their financial models won’t work in today’s world of DVD-burners and iPods.

They would be better off trying to find a way to profit from new technology, instead of trying to preserve their outdated business models.
http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2005/04/04/63949


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Studios, University Fight Battles Against Illegal File Sharing
Rob Fishman

Last month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of MGM v. Grokster, the record industry's latest attempt to control the uninhibited flow of illegally traded music files over the internet.

Meanwhile, University students continued the illegal exchange of some of the estimated 2.6 billion copyrighted files traded nation-wide each month.

Cornell students partake in file sharing through a variety of means, from the publicly available peer-to-peer (P2P) programs like KaZaA or Limewire, to the somewhat more exclusively offered services provided by websites like www.i2hub.com, that operate by using a program called Direct Connect. In either case, there is clear tension surrounding what constitutes "the appropriate use of protected intellectual property," as Kent Hubbell, dean of students, said in the Cornell Chronicle last July.

At issue in Grokster is whether file sharing program makers can be held liable for secondary copyright infringement -- that is, if KaZaA and similar services are responsible for the files exchanged through their programs. MGM, among others in the recording and movie industries, alleges that since the vast majority of information traded among users is illegal, Grokster and other companies are contributing to copyright violations.

Although a major Cornell direct connect hub was shut down after a bootleg video of the Cornell Jon Stewart performance showed up on it, another student, Jae Kwon '05, restarted the file exchange room under a different name. Kwon said a "hub owner doesn't know what files are traded between users."

To counteract the exchange of illegal files, he said, he disconnects users whom he finds sharing copyrighted material.

In contrast to the dark image of file sharing services painted by attorneys for MGM -- B. Verrilli, Jr., a lawyer arguing before the Supreme Court, called Grokster "a gigantic machine that was built on infringement" -- Kwon credited his hub as "fostering a sense of community among Cornell Resnet users." Regardless of intent, though, Kwon said he is "protected by the Sony Betamax ruling, [a 1984 case at issue in Grokster] as well as the current Grokster v. MGM case."

Just as the issues confronting the campus and the court were similar, so too were the opinions voiced. The root cause of file sharing programs like Direct Connect or Grokster, for instance, was attributed in both venues to a basic desire to escape payment. From the bench of the Supreme Court, Justice David Souter said, "I know perfectly well that I can buy a CD and put it on my iPod. But I also know if I can get music without buying it, I'm going to do so."

Likewise, Rajiv Ravishankar '07 said, "Given the price of CDs today, downloading music seems inevitable. For how easy it is to download a CD online ... I don't see the point in paying $15 for music."

The simple fact that music is currently available for free might render the Supreme Court's decision irrelevant: "regardless of the legality of [file sharing] right now, it is still perceived as illegal," said Ben Arfa '08. Since the assumption is that file trading is already an illegal procedure, the Supreme Court's codification of that assumption will, in his mind, have little effect.

There are some indications that the Court's decision might also seek to solve a problem that will ultimately work itself out. Because of recent innovations in legal software, and frequent problems with the software created by companies like Grokster, users may autonomously accept more legal solutions.

Josh Teitelbaum '05 said that "the key is Napster and iTunes ... you can charge people a small amount for each song, and people will use these programs if available. College students aren't necessarily going to steal if they don't have to."

Like Arfa, Teitelbaum acknowledged that "what we're doing is illegal," but predicted a change now that legal -- and relatively inexpensive -- alternatives are available.

In addition, many students have expressed dissatisfaction with Grokster-like services, as these programs are frequently laced with viruses or secondary programs that generate pop- up ads.

"I used to download music from Limewire until my computer began to run more slowly. I was getting pop-ups every couple of minutes," said Chelsea Hall '08.

As the Court's decision in MGM v. Grokster approaches and new techonology becomes available, it is clear that file exchangers are approaching a major crossroads in music downloading. The decision in the case will likely be handed down in June.
http://www.cornellsun.com/vnews/disp.../42522b63dc56a


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Extending An Olive Branch To File Swappers?
John Borland

For the last year, a handful of companies has offered college students cut-rate music subscriptions on campus, looking to wean them from the free file-swapping networks.

Cdigix, the lone company wholly focused on this business, is now expanding into video services, hoping that movie studios see the same benefits as record labels in extending an olive branch to file-swapping students.

So far it has been a tough sell. Record labels are giving Cdigix and others wholesale discounts, and that means legal digital music can be extraordinarily inexpensive--and sometimes even free--on campuses. For their part, the Hollywood studios aren't yet proffering the same deals, and that means that downloading a movie online is no cheaper than going to the local Blockbuster.

But Cdigix founder and President Brett Goldberg believes that movie studios are starting to change their tune. He's already cut a few deals with studios and now offers movies from Walt Disney and Turner Broadcasting. Over the next year, he thinks other studios will see the advantages of extending attractive terms to students, and so be willing to offer him better terms.

That wouldn't necessarily guarantee the equivalent of hitting a home run. Some students are quick to adopt subsidized services on campus, but others have protested the use of their fees for online music. Nor is there any guarantee that when they leave campus, they won't be recaptured by the allure of file trading.

For now, however, Cdigix, which has a presence on 21 campuses, may be the closest thing to a bridge between campuses and Hollywood's version of acceptable movie watching. CNET News.com talked to Goldberg about what he's seeing on college campuses today.

Q: You've been doing music services on campus for a while now. What are you learning?
Goldberg: There are a couple of things that are indicative of the trend we're seeing. We offer two components to our services, subscription and per download offerings.

That's pay per download?
Goldberg: That's right. So far, the results seem to indicate that the subscription downloads, the tethered download service, is being used with much more frequency than the permanent downloads. Second, when a university is able to subsidize the service, the usage rates are certainly better.

When a university subsidizes the service it really makes a big difference.
That's particularly true where the student government was the one to subsidize it. That seems to have the potential to work the best, because...the student leaders out there on campus marketing the service for you.

What is the sweet spot in terms of price?
Goldberg: Again, what seems to be emerging is that when a university subsidizes the service it really makes a big difference. That said, our services are typically priced at about $3 per student per month. By and large, we've heard from students and from administrators that that works. It is certainly an acceptable price point, given that we're still in the early days.

To be clear, that's $3 a month for access to all the music they want.
Goldberg: That's right. On a tethered download basis. They cannot burn that music to disc or export that music to a portable device.

My understanding is that you're able to offer that low price because the record companies are cutting you a deal on the wholesale prices. Is that right?
Goldberg: That's right. The music industry, by and large, has been pretty open about the fact that the college marketplace is important to them. They started sending cease-and-desist letters to universities four or five years ago. So that trend has really stressed the importance of the college demographic as part of their strategy for getting people to use the services they should, and getting them away from the services they shouldn't. They've been generous and flexible in the deals they've worked with us.

How much of a discount are they giving you, compared to the commercial services like Napster or MSN Music?
Goldberg: Well, I should hold off on saying specifically, but you can kind of look at it in the sense that the typical standard price of our service is $3.49 per student today. When you look at the mainstream market prices, they start at a minimum of $7.99 and go to $9--if not higher. So the price break on the subscription experience is substantial.

We don't have iPod compatibility, but the deals we're putting together with device manufacturers will be a great response.
You're not getting a price break on per-download songs?
Goldberg: That's right. We offer permanent downloads on an 89-cent basis and albums at $9.99, but that's a choice we're making. It doesn't reflect any scaled-back economics on the label side.

Do you plan to move to portable downloads, with Microsoft's Janus software, like Napster to go?
Goldberg: Absolutely. It's on the very near horizon.

Given how popular iPods are on campus, how will it work for you not having iPod compatibility?
Goldberg: Stay tuned. We don't have iPod compatibility, but the deals we're putting together with device manufacturers will be a great response. I've spent a lot of time playing with these devices, like the iRiver H10 and the Creative devices. These are very strong products and certainly comparable with the iPod today.

To be clear, you're saying that the combination of the downloadable subscription and these new devices will be competitive with the iPod?
Goldberg: That's correct. It's a situation where we are coming up with a response at a period of time when Apple has decided to be proprietary in the way they distribute their files.

The record labels have made a big effort to get into the college market. Now you're moving into video as well. Are the movie studios working with you? Do the movie studios have the same concerns about educating students?
Goldberg: Absolutely. More and more when you talk to school administrators, they say that the letters they're seeing are from the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), not the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). That's a trend that's changed this year. In our conversations with the studios, we're finding them to be more and more cooperative and more and more supportive of working with distributors like ourselves.

You have a few deals already with Disney and a few others. What do those videos cost now?
Goldberg: It's $1.99 for direct to video and library titles and $3.99 for new titles.

So it's still pretty comparable to going out and renting a movie?
Goldberg: It is comparable. So far we haven't been in a position where there is any additional discount or different discount being offered because we are a college service. But those conversations are happening, and I'm optimistic that at some point in time there may be some discounts realized, given the importance of this audience, and the potential. The poor college student does seem to be somewhat of a reality.

So you ultimately expect to have a full CinemaNow-type range of content?
Goldberg: That's one of those things we're going to see. I'm pretty focused on not just doing studio deals that would put us in the position of just offering the same catalog that MovieLink does. I'm certainly interested in working with Hollywood, and I'm optimistic we'll get more deals done this year. But the situation with us is doing it on the right terms.

I think it remains to be seen, but given the way conversations have evolved, I think there are several deals that could be done with studios that would not just be deals, but would be deals that would get college students using our service in a high volume.

So the idea is to be cheaper than
Goldberg: I think the cost component is something to consider. I think there are three things that need to be evaluated by studios as well. One is cost. Two is business model. What is the right model? Is it pay-per-view? Is it subscription? What is the right way to package? Then you have other considerations. Our pay-per-view films are available on a 24-hour basis. Is that right, or should there be 48 hours or longer?

So there is an evolution that needs to happen on a price basis, on the business model basis, and on a user experience basis. When all that's combined, those are the kind of deals we want to get into.
http://news.com.com/Extending+an+oli...3-5653861.html


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Students Using New Generation of Downloads
Ted Bridis

College junior Kyle Taylor is downloading hundreds of songs by No Doubt, Bruce Springsteen and others onto the Compaq laptop in his cramped dormitory room. With a few more clicks of his mouse, Taylor is watching commercial-free "Seinfeld" episodes on his computer. In just minutes, he then downloads the entire movie "A League of Their Own." The 20-year-old is not breaking any laws. Nor is he at risk of expensive lawsuits by the entertainment industry over copyright violations.

Taylor and his classmates at American University - and thousands more students at other U.S. colleges - are among the earliest customers of a new generation of legal downloading services approved by the largest music labels and Hollywood studios. Students appear enthusiastic, despite some early kinks that can keep them from loading songs onto iPods.

"You can one-click-download an entire album, and the downloading time is, like, a minute," Taylor said. His laptop holds more than 3,000 songs.

In the search for online customers, entertainment companies are aggressively pursuing college students, who cannot remember life before the Internet.

High Court to Tackle Downloads

This generation works off laptops more than it watches television, plugs into high-speed university networks, uses the Web for homework and headlines - and on average carries around more than 1,000 songs on a hard drive.

Already, dozens of schools are rolling out downloading services from Ruckus Network Inc., RealNetworks Inc., Napster LLC and Sea Blue Media LLC. So important is this university market that Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world's largest label, has paid the entire bill at some schools during trial semesters. Sony-backed artists are available for downloading on all the major services.

"We're reaching into our pockets," said Andrew Lack, the chief executive for Sony BMG. "At a certain point, the universities have to step up, too, but this is about an investment in the future."

Sony BMG will not say how much it is spending on the effort. Many private schools will not disclose how they are paying for these services. American University, for example, says only that money came from a generous, anonymous donor to the school in the nation's capital.

The University of North Carolina system got $150,000 from Sony BMG in the fall to offer services in dormitories across five campuses, said Thomas C. Warner, UNC's director of coordinated technology management. Warner said roughly 60 percent of students regularly use the download services.

Most schools ultimately expect to charge students future subscription costs of $5 to $8 per month in dorm fees.

"If kids build a habit to not pay for media, that is a habit that will persist maybe for their entire lives," said William Raduchel, chief executive at Herndon, Va.-based Ruckus Network and a former executive at AOL Time Warner. "We want to be the place where kids want to be when they don't have to be anywhere."

Weary from problems blamed on illegal downloads - piracy lawsuits against students, virus outbreaks and congestion on school computer networks - universities are embracing these new services. Moreover, colleges are in fierce competition to enroll top students and fill empty dorm rooms, so they pitch music downloading to prospective students.

"Who's got music downloading and who's got the most comfortable mattresses really matters," said Julie Weber, American University's executive director for housing and dining programs.

Parents can feel more comfortable, too. At least three students at American were among hundreds nationwide forced to pay thousands of dollars to settle copyright suits by the recording industry.

Already available at eight schools, including American University, Ruckus' service offers unlimited downloads for a flat fee from a library of more than 525,000 songs and a collection of 50 full-length movies and television shows that rotate monthly.

More than 1,000 newer movies, such as "Spider-Man 2," can be downloaded for about $2.50 each. It's convenient enough to lead a student to put off that term paper for a few more hours.

Sophomore Scott Goldstein of Marlton, N.J., watches movies like "Groundhog Day" or "American Beauty" on part of his computer screen at the same time he does his homework. "It's a good distraction," said Goldstein, 19.

"Students spend a lot of time sitting around, spend a tremendous amount of time in their dorms and on their computers," said Kelly Crossett of Westchester, N.Y., a junior at Loyola College in Maryland, which offers music downloads from Sea Blue Media's rival Cdigix service.

"We are very happy with what we have right now. If you give students a legal way to get what they want, who's going to do it illegally?" Crossett said.

There are some frustrations. All-you-can-download subscription services typically offer "tethered" music and movies, meaning students must periodically reconnect to the service from their dorm - once every 30 days for music - to keep watching or listening. If they do not, their song and movie files are rendered useless.

This ensures that students cannot send copies of popular songs or movies to friends who are not subscribers. But it also means a library of music is automatically crippled after graduation unless users keep paying a monthly fee, higher than what a school typically charges, to the downloading service.

Also, college students are caught in the industry's esoteric battle over digital music formats and how record companies can best protect songs from hackers and pirates.

Most songs on these services can be played only on a Windows computer and cannot be transferred to most portable music players, including Apple's popular iPod. A few services, like Cdigix, let students purchase a song for an extra fee - from 79 cents to 99 cents - that can be loaded to an iPod.

"Music is no good to me if I can't get it on my iPod," Goldstein said.

Sony BMG's chief executive promises help is on the way.

"We've got to bust down all those walls," Lack said. "This is really the first year for the program, but we've got to improve and make them better."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT


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My GPX won’t play with my OGG

A Law Mandating Music File Compatibility?
Roy Mark

WASHINGTON -- Congress is toying with the idea of mandating one standard for all online music platforms.

Thanks but no thanks -- the industry can figure it out, said music industry and consumer groups at a congressional hearing about the plan Wednesday.

During a hearing to discuss mandating interoperability standards between competing music platforms such as Apple's iTunes and RealNetworks' Rhapsody, lawmakers sounded off on the lament of some hipsters frustrated by playback snafus when they try to transfer music files from other platforms to their iPods.

Although Real and Apple support Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), a compression format defined by the MPEG-2 standard, RealNetworks has hinted strongly in the past that it might consider using Microsoft's Windows Media (WMA) format because of the playback snafus with iPod devices.

The two companies have also sparred over Real's own DRM (define) translation technology that lets consumers securely transfer purchased music to every popular secure music device on the market, including ones from Creative, iRiver, RCA, Rio, Samsung, palmOne and all four generations of Apple's red-hot iPod. Apple later accused RealNetworks of hacking its DRM system.

"This interoperability issue is of concern to me since consumers who bought legal copies of music from Real could not play them on an iPod," Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) said at a hearing of a House subcommittee on intellectual property.

The ideas floated by Smith and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), who once sponsored an infamous bill that would have allowed music companies to jam the personal computers of illegal downloaders, included a national interoperability standard and warning labels on portable devices about what formats can play on the machines.

Government intervention in the burgeoning online music business, though, brought a unanimous no vote from industry officials who showed up to weigh in.

William E. Pence, chief technology officer of Napster, noted that the government has "historically not been a participant in competition between early-stage consumer technologies" such as between the VHS and Betamax, the cassette and the eight-track tape or USB and Firewire.

"Similarly, it does not seem prudent for government to pick a winner in the continuing marketplace battle between Apple's Fairplay DRM and its competitors," Pence told the panel.

Pence said government intervention "can lead to politicizing and inhibiting" innovation and urged the panel to allow the marketplace to select winners based on actual demand.

"Marketplace forces will continue to drive innovation in the DRM arena with attendant consumer benefits -- new ways to enjoy digital music at a variety of different price points -- while gradually solving the interoperability problem," Pence said.

Dr. Mark Cooper, the CFA's director of research, noted that Apple's early dominance of the download market does not guarantee its long-term success.

"A quarter of century ago a closed platform dominated the computer desktop market," Cooper said in a reference to the Apple II and MacIntosh computers.

"A more open platform quickly replaced it, forcing all platforms to improve compatibility. Given a choice that is not distorted by anticompetitive practices and good information, consumers will prefer and migrate to the interoperable platforms."

Ray Gifford, president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a Washington think tank focused on digital issues and public policy, urged Congress not to give in to "platform envy and mandate some sort of interoperability."

Gifford said antitrust and intellectual property laws are well suited to handle the situation.

"For public policy makers, we can never forget the lessons of public choice theory, which predicts that firms and interest groups will seek government favor in promoting their standards solution and handicapping their rivals," Gifford said.

"Any call for the government to prefer one standard or model over another must be subject to most exacting skepticism."

"Apple was invited to testify today, but they chose not to appear," Smith said. "Generally speaking, companies with 75 percent market share of any business, in this case the digital download market, need to step up to the plate when it comes to testifying on policy issues that impact their industry. Failure to do so is a mistake."

A spokeswoman for Apple declined comment.
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3495791


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Sony Refreshes Its Network Walkman

Hard drive-based device features a new design that more closely resembles the IPod.
Martyn Williams

Sony will soon launch a new member in its hard drive-based Network Walkman family, its fourth so far, and this time the new player is more than an update to the previous model.

The most immediately obvious difference between the NW-HD5 and Sony's previous models is in the design. While the previous players were based on a landscape design that had users holding the player horizontally in their hands, the NW-HD5 is based around a portrait design in which the display sits above the controls. This is more akin to competing products, including Apple Computer's IPod. Sony hasn't abandoned the landscape design completely, as the image on the display can be rotated a quarter of a turn should users want to hold it on its side.

The circular control pad has been replaced by nine buttons. The display has also been changed to an LED (light emitting diode)-backlit 1.5-inch LCD from a similar sized organic LED (OLED) display.

MP3 Support

Like the previous models, the NW-HD5 packs a 20GB hard drive. It supports Sony's ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus compression formats, Windows Media Audio, WAV files, and the popular MP3 format. It also has the same selection of menu languages: Japanese, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Good news for people on the move is a removable battery that, according to Sony, lasts longer. It provides enough power for 40 hours of continuous playback when measured with the lowest-fidelity files. Playback of MP3 files encoded at 128 kbps, one of the most common MP3 compression settings, is 30 hours, according to Sony. The equivalent times for Sony's previous model, the NW-HD3, are 30 hours and 22 hours, respectively.

Other changes include the addition of a USB port and power jack on the player; previous models required the use of an adapter.

To top it off, Sony managed to make the NW-HD5 smaller than its predecessor, at 2.4 inches by 3.5 inches by .6 inches. It weighs 4.8 ounces.

The device will also go on sale at a lower price. It will cost around $327 when it goes on sale in Japan on April 21. Sony plans to sell the player worldwide and will announce launch details for other markets shortly, it says.
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/arti...RSS,RSS,00.asp


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Demoted Sony Electronics Guru Is Outspoken
Yuri Kageyama

Ken Kutaragi, whose name is often paired with "geek" and "genius," seemed to many a logical choice to take Sony Corp.'s helm as it struggles to turn around its stumbling electronics business. He is, after all, known as "Father of the PlayStation" for siring the industry's most popular video game console.

And Kutaragi's latest creation, the handheld PlayStation Portable, is hot. An estimated 3 million been sold since it was released in Japan in December and the United States last month.

But instead of ascending in the dramatic management reshuffle last month that put Howard Stringer in the chief executive's chair, Kutaragi was demoted.

Not only was Kutaragi passed over for the Welshman who had overseen Sony's music and movie businesses. He also lost his seat on Sony's board, though he still runs Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc., the company's game subsidiary.

It appears the 54-year-old Kutaragi's outspoken nature, in a corporate culture that's oiled by consensus, may be to blame. Independent and shockingly frank by Japanese standards, Kutaragi hasn't held back from criticizing company decisions.

In January, he told the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo that fellow executives had been overly restrictive in controlling Sony content in a world where consumers of digital movies and music want hassle-free access.

Asked what he would do if he were running Sony, Kutaragi said the company must revive its original innovative spirit, when it boasted engineering finesse with the transistor radio, Walkman and Trinitron TV.

Sony also has been hurt by its insistence on making its content proprietary, Kutaragi said.

Some employees, he said, have been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products similar to Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod portable music player, mainly because Sony's music and movie units were worried about content rights.

Indeed, Kutaragi's comments came about the same time that Sony decided to finally agree to support the open and widely used MP3 digital audio standard on its portable music players.

It's unclear whether Kutaragi, who declined to be interviewed for this story, was punished for speaking out. But it is clear that consensus-builders - though he doesn't speak Japanese, Stringer is known for diplomacy - were chosen over potentially divisive critics.

Kutaragi's blunt manner may have been seen as problematic when the sprawling company, whose core electronics business has suffered amid its expansion into entertainment, desperately needs cohesion and revitalization. Sony's stock has fallen about 70 percent over the last five years.

Ryoji Chubachi, a production and electronics expert who became president in the March 7 reshuffle - making him No. 2 behind Stringer - later publicly praised Kutaragi as a talented engineer but hinted that top Sony executives didn't believe he was suitable for managerial leadership.

"I respect him as an engineer," Chubachi, 57, told journalists recently. "In the area of semiconductors, I consider him my teacher."

Outgoing Sony chief executive Nobuyuki Idei didn't say why Kutaragi was passed up but did characterize Chubachi as "a good listener" at a recent press conference.

Stringer said he still views Kutaragi as a key person at Sony, instrumental in the next- generation video game console dubbed the PlayStation3, or PS3, which is expected to be released next year.

"Obviously PS3 is a vital device for the company going forward. So I am under no illusions about the value and importance of Kutaragi-san," Stringer said, using the Japanese honorific "san."

Kutaragi, who joined Sony in 1975, broke away from Sony's mainstream thinkers in the 1990s to work on the PlayStation. At the time, the company was filled with skeptics about the potential of video gaming, but Kutaragi proved them wrong, turning the business into a cash cow.

Another widely held view about Kutaragi's demotion is that he had to share in the responsibility for Sony's failures.

Battered by competition from cheaper Asian rivals, seen in the dramatic rise of South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Sony has been in deep trouble in recent years. It fell behind in flat-panel TV sets and got beaten up by the iPod and Apple's iTunes online music store.

The PSX, which combined the PlayStation2 console with a DVD recorder and player, has bombed since going on sale less than two years ago. It was never sold outside Japan and Sony won't disclose PSX sales figures.

Kutaragi also drew criticism from even devoted Japanese game players over reported glitches in the PlayStation Portable, or PSP, after its initial release in Japan.

Some PSP machines in the initial shipment had a button that tended to get stuck, according to Sony. About 3,000 PSP machines are estimated to have required repairs, which were given for free, although Sony isn't giving exact figures. The glitch was fixed for later shipments.

Like many other Japanese, 47-year-old Kenichiro Usui has recently been disappointed by Sony's problems.

Usui, who works for an engineering company, said he stopped shopping for the Sony brand and just picks whatever he likes, having switching recently to what he thinks is a sturdier IBM computer from Sony's Vaio.

He still owns a Walkman but he also switched from a Sony model to a TV made by Victor Co. of Japan Ltd., a manufacturer allied with Sony's biggest Japanese rival, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., which makes Panasonic brand products.

"It was so great for Japan to have a shining star like Sony," said Usui. "It's sad we may be witnessing its decline."
http://www.forbes.com/technology/fee...ap1923096.html


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Napster Shares Jump After Boosted Guidance

Shares of Napster Inc. soared Tuesday after the online music distributor raised its fourth-quarter revenue guidance, citing strong subscriber growth and better-than-expected sales of downloads. Napster said it now expects revenue of between $16.5 million and $17.5 million for its recently ended fiscal fourth quarter. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial are looking for the company to post a fourth-quarter loss of 63 cents per share on sales of about $14.5 million.

This marks the second time in about five weeks that Napster has raised its forecast for fourth-quarter revenue.

The Los Angeles-based company said its subscriber base grew by 143,000 in the fourth quarter to total more than 410,000, including 56,000 university subscribers. This represents quarterly subscriber growth of more than 53 percent from the third quarter.

Napster has emerged as a chief rival to Apple Computer Inc.'s market-dominating iTunes music store, which charges 99 cents per download. The company has sold more 300 million songs through iTunes.

Napster, on the other hand, offers a subscription service that allows unlimited access to its 1 million tracks. The subscriptions cost about $10 a month. Napster To Go, released in early February, allows those songs to be transferred to a portable player for $5 more per month. Users also have the option to purchase songs for 99 cents each.

Napster shares rose $1.01, or 16 percent, to $7.18 in morning trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The stock has slowly declined since hitting a 52-week high of $10.40 on Dec. 7, although shares are still well above their 52-week low of $3.35, reached last August.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...stomwire. htm


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Napster Reports Subscriber Spike, Revenue Jump
Elizabeth Millard

One factor contributing to Napster's user spike might be the continuing wrangle over the legalities of peer-to-peer services. In an attempt to distance itself from its past alleged intellectual property infringement, Napster has repeatedly emphasized that its services are legal.

Napster raised its quarterly revenue forecast for the second time in a month, citing a spike in subscriber numbers and robust music download sales.

The company noted that it now has over 410,000 subscribers, with subscriber growth of more than 53 percent in just the fiscal fourth quarter.

Analysts estimated Napster's fourth quarter sales at about US$14.6 million on average, but the company now is predicting revenue of about $17.5 million.

On the Go

The main driver in the fourth quarter for Napster was its "Napster to Go" service, the company has noted.

Unveiled in September, the service allows users to move music from Napster's library onto MP3 players and other portable devices.

Unlike many other similar services, like iTunes, Napster to Go is not based on per-song charges. It promises an "unlimited amount of music" for a flat rate.

Ring a Ding

Napster to Go also was made available for users of one of AT&T's wireless smartphones , which gives the service a foothold in the increasingly lucrative ringtone market.

Called Napster Mobile, the service lets users download ringtones through their computers, and then onto smartphones. The service includes incentives for users to sign on to the company's PC-based offerings as well.

"The ringtone market is growing at a phenomenal rate," said IDC analyst Lewis Ward, who noted that 2004 revenues in the ringtone market were about $325 million. "Napster now has an edge that other music services don't, and that is no doubt contributing to their success."

Courtroom Drama

Another factor for Napster might be the continuing wrangle over the legalities of peer-to-peer services. In an attempt to distance itself from its past alleged intellectual property infringement, Napster has repeatedly emphasized that its services are legal.

Although many experts predict that piracy will continue to be a problem with digital entertainment , some also have noted that the majority of users prefer not to break the law if affordable and legal options are available.

Finally, part of Napster's growth might be simply its name. Although the company was shut down for copyright infringement before being relaunched, the brand name remains fixed in consumers' minds, Ward said.

"Napster is a strong brand, especially among the tech savvy," he noted. "That always helps."
http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xht...story_id=32323


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2nd time’s the charm?

Bertelsmann Launches New Peer-to-Peer Service

GNAP allows users to download and share content, but includes some copyright controls, company says.
John Blau

German media giant Bertelsmann, a former investor in the Napster file-sharing network, is taking another stab at peer-to- peer technology with a new service for downloading and sharing movies, games, and other content over the Internet.

The service, called GNAP, will allow mobile and fixed network operators, ISPs, TV stations, and other content distributors to market large downloadable files both legally and cost efficiently, Arvato spokesperson Gernot Wolf says. Arvato is the services and technology arm of Bertelsmann.

The new service has both centralized and decentralized components, according to Wolf. On the one hand, it uses a central server to store content and process DRM (Digital Rights Management) transactions. On the other, it offers users the opportunity to download and store content on their own computers and share it with others via P-to-P technology.

"In this way, content distributors don't have to invest in huge network capacity to be able to provide, say, 100 downloads at once but rather can take advantage of the storage capacity of its P-to-P customers," he says.

Users who choose to download a film or game from another user because, say, the central server is already flooded with requests must still pay for the film. "Each transaction within the user community is session controlled," Wolf says. "Our technology knows that customer A, for instance, has received a movie from customer B, so we have a strong control over copyrights."

End users must install GNAP client software to be able to use the software, according to Wolf.

Cutting Costs

In addition to copyright protection, GNAP offers content distributors a cost-efficient way for numerous customers to download large files at once. "It's not economic today for many companies to offer an on-demand download service for movies and games if they have to invest in all the necessary storage and networking equipment themselves," Wolf says. "GNAP makes this service more affordable with P-to-P by allowing users to choose alternative sites to download."

Arvato has completed beta testing of the GNAP service and is conducting "technical due diligence" tests with holders of content licenses "to ensure that all security requirements are met," Wolf says.

The Bertelsmann subsidiary hopes to sign up the first customers at the end of the second quarter, according to Wolf.

Bertelsmann, a co-owner of the Sony BMG music label with Sony, teamed with the former Napster in October 2000, only to see the service sued by the music industry for copyright infringements. Napster was later acquired by Roxio, which has since sold off its software business to become Napster.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120266,00.asp


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Got Playlist Anxiety? You're Not Alone
John Borland

It's the latest way to study natives in their natural habitat: Check their iTunes music libraries.

A group of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Palo Alto Research Center presented a study this week outlining the behavior of the wild cubicle-dweller when using Apple Computers' digital music software.

Sharing playlists on an office network turns out to be something like a peacock spreading his feathers for display. The researchers found that people actively work to create an image of themselves through the music they make available to others, just as they might by buying a new car or showing off a cell phone.

"I just went through (my playlist) and said, 'I wonder what kind of image this is...giving me,'" reported one of the study's subjects. "I just went through it to see if there was stuff that would be...annoying, that I would not like people to know that I had."

The rise of playlist anxiety isn't new. The phenomenon was noted on college campuses shortly after Apple began offering the ability to stream music from other people's hard drives over local networks.

Indeed, public embarrassment may now be the routine lot of the unhappy freshman who gets caught with a collection too heavily weighted toward the collected works of Weird Al. The Georgia Tech study is the first to apply this reasoning to a study of cubicle-dwellers, however.

As yet, the study remains more anthropological than representative. The researchers interviewed 13 people at an unnamed office about their use of iTunes and their perceptions of other people based on playlist-reading.

Along with the culling of personal playlists, the researchers detailed the way that people browsed and judged other people's collections. In general, people reported that music libraries didn't dramatically change their perception of their co-workers--except for one or two people who seemed a little too attached to the most current pop hits.

The researchers did offer some suggestions for future software developers. People didn't tend to try out new music randomly inside iTunes, they said--instead, they would hear recommendations offline, and then check their co-workers' libraries to see whether anyone had the songs to sample. Exploration tools could be improved, they said.

Similarly, researchers said people became attached to other people's libraries, and felt a sense of loss when their computers went offline. iTunes or similar programs could create some kind of ghost playlist information on unavailable music which could turn into purchases, they suggested.

The paper was presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems this week in Portland, Ore.
http://news.com.com/Got+playlist+anx...3-5657537.html