Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – March 1st, '03

[JackSpratts]

Justice Department Cops Website

This week the US government closed down a website and redirected its members to one owned by the Justice Department. The site, isonews.com, “did not contain illegal copies of video games, software or movies”, but did offer mod chips for sale and was a gathering place for those interested in trading copyrighted files.

The government considers the closing of the site, reached in a plea bargain with owner David Rocci, a major step forward in its fight against customizing, which if done on cars and kitchens is an old and honorable pastime, but if done on video games is apparently so threatening to policy makers it requires tossing out customs and laws so entrenched they go back to the Bill of Rights.

Regardless of how you feel about the customizing of products you own like your computers, your video games and your cars it’s hard to argue that the closing and redirecting of a web site is major step forward for your rights of free assembly and free speech.

Civil libertarians have expressed concern regarding the implications.

Who would have thought that so insignificant a hobby would terrify governments so profoundly they’d create precedents that destroy the laws and protections of our Constitution, created by towering figures of our past and defended with the lives of activists and soldiers for these last two hundred years?

Is it another example of a slow but seemingly inexorable march towards a world that more and more resembles that of the dysfunctional Corporatacracies from the nightmarish pages of Aldus Huxley and George Orwell rather than the world that most of us in the West came of age in? Whether or not this portends changes that profound, it remains a sorry state of affairs.

P2P Positive

In other developments this week a lone establishment voice was heard in Washington offering guarded support for file sharing, peer-to-peer technologies and the uninhibited flow of ideas. Graham Spanier, president of Penn State University and co-chair of a committee on intellectual property issues, sounded “decidedly ambivalent” about the wholesale shutting down of peer-to-peer networks. He told a hostile congress on Wednesday that institutions of learning need to guard against restrictions to the “free and open exchange of information that underpins the creativity, vigor and productivity of our education and research programs."

It was no surprise that the Congress greeted his words with less than enthusiasm. Indeed, they were openly antagonistic. On the other hand they almost never hear such words from anyone they consider even remotely responsible. Well maybe they should. Maybe if they did they’d become more enthusiastic, and more responsive towards the people they say they represent.






Enjoy,

Jack.








Nap’s Back!
Nap’s over for Napster
Owen Gibson

Controversial song swapping site Napster, the former nemesis of the music industry, is set to relaunch before the end of the year with whizzkid founder Shawn Fanning back on board.

Roxio, the US software company that bought the Napster brand in a fire sale late last year, has revealed it plans to relaunch the site as a paid-for download service before the end of the year. Confirming the plans, Elliot Carpenter, the chief financial officer of Roxio, said that the company, which specialises in CD copying software, was in advanced negotiations with major record labels. Mr Fanning, the former college student who founded the site from a laptop in the back room of his uncle's house at the age of 19, has been recruited by Roxio to work as a consultant on the project.

At the height of its popularity in 2000, over 80 million computer users were gorging themselves on Napster's huge library of free music. It caused panic in the record industry, which was already suffering faltering sales from traditional piracy and increased spending on other leisure products.

Napster was finally closed down in July 2001 after the major music labels won an injunction forcing the site to remove all copyrighted songs from its database. A year later the company closed down altogether after a brief attempt by German media giant Bertelsmann, which invested in the company, to resurrect the site as a paid-for service. The site never got back online and a US judge eventually ruled that Bertelsmann could not buy the bankrupt company's assets because the two businesses were too close. Last week the German media company was hit by a new £10bn lawsuit from music publishers, who claim it was responsible for lost royalties from Napster.

According to insiders at the company, Roxio plans to learn from the mistakes made by the major labels in launching their own music download sites PressPlay and MusicNet, both of which flopped.

"We won't launch until we've got agreements with all the labels to include a significant proportion of their catalogues. And we won't just be a subscription service, which asks users to make a commitment of at least £10 a month, but will also sell music on a track by track basis," said a source.

Despite getting rid of Napster, the record companies face an even greater challenge from "peer to peer" networks such as Kazaa and Gnutella. Because they simply act as huge worldwide networks, allowing users to transfer songs between their PCs, they are virtually impossible to close down.

Record company insiders confess that they are long way from getting to grips with the problem and acknowledge that they must work on making legitimate downloads more attractive and easier to use than illegal services.

In the UK, some feel an important legal precedent may be set by the successful recent prosecution of Easy Internet Cafe for allowing users to download songs onto CD. This could mean that they will turn their attention to other internet cafes, universities, libraries and internet service providers to force them to crack down on file sharing.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia...900541,00.html



Roxio inks Fanning for Napster II
John Borland

Former file-swapping wunderkind Sean Fanning has signed up to help CD-burning technology company Roxio build a reborn Napster service--but with a difference.

The new Napster won't look anything like the anarchic search-and-download service that kicked off file-trading legal battles more than three years ago, Roxio said Monday. The software company plans to work strictly by the record industry's playbook, and is taking the peer-to-peer component that was a foundation of much of Napster's appeal out of the service altogether, at least initially.

"We're looking to put a legal service up by year end," Roxio spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly said. "Our CEO, Chris Gorog, is in talks with all the major labels now."

The new Napster envisioned by Roxio--which purchased Napster's name and technology assets for $5 million in a bankruptcy auction in November--would fall more in line with authorized subscription and paid-download services such as Pressplay or MusicNet. As such, it would break little new ground, but could be a valuable new distribution channel for record labels' online efforts.

Roxio is planning to integrate the Napster music download service into its recently released Audio Central music jukebox program, which currently makes up part of its Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 disc-burning software. The jukebox and music download component may wind up being distributed separately, Kelly said.

Fanning, who created the original Napster file-swapping service while a university student, has been hired to help launch the new service as a consultant, rather than as a full- time Roxio employee.

Although the original Napster song-swapping service has been shuttered for more than a year and half, its influence lives on.

Last week, a group of songwriters sued German media giant Bertelsmann, asking for $17 billion in damages. Bertelsmann's loans to and corporate support for the file-trading service in its final year of operation extended Napster's life, and therefore contributed to copyright infringement, the music publishers claim.

Other file-swapping services--most notably Sharman Networks' Kazaa--remain strong. The Kazaa software itself has now been downloaded more than 193 million times, far more than Napster's, according to Download.com, a software aggregation site operated by News.com publisher CNET Networks.

Roxio already has a head start on its music licensing plans. Shortly before purchasing Napster's assets, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based business was named by the EMI Group record label as one of nine Net music companies granted broad licenses to offer download and CD-burning services using its music.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-985748.html

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RealNetworks Hedges Bets with Listen.com Stake
Sue Zeidler, Reuters

Digital media company RealNetworks Inc. RNWK.O on Wednesday said it had taken an undisclosed stake in struggling online music firm Listen.com, transforming a onetime competitor into a close ally.

Listen.com, which recently cut its staff to 50 from 70 and has been seen as a potential takeover target, said it will use the investment to boost its Rhapsody music subscription service, which competes with MusicNet, an online service 40 percent owned by RealNetworks.

Under the deal, RealNetworks' technology will become the primary platform for the Rhapsody service and the two companies will explore collaborating on future services, they said.

Prior to Wednesday, Rhapsody's primary platform had been Windows, made by RealNetworks' chief rival, Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O , which it will now support as a secondary platform.

The investment comes on the day that America Online began offering a revamped version of MusicNet to its 27 million U.S. Internet customers, the biggest move yet to bring commercial online services to the mainstream as they struggle against free, unauthorized services like Kazaa.

Analysts said the investment reflected RealNetworks' desire to hedge its bets in the still-developing field.

"They're making multiple bets. Now that they have a stake in Rhapsody, they can promote whichever service they feel best meets consumer needs," said Phil Leigh, analyst with Raymond James and Associates.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2295403

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All Over Save the Whining, Rep. Berman May Not Revive Internet Piracy Bill
Jon Healey

Rep. Howard L. Berman said he may abandon his controversial proposal to help Hollywood battle Internet piracy, in part because of complaints from an unexpected source: Hollywood.

Berman (D-Van Nuys) introduced a bill in July to give movie studios, record companies and other copyright holders limited immunity from lawsuits if they used technology to block piracy on file-sharing networks such as Kazaa or Gnutella. The immunity would not have applied to tactics that damaged users' computers or legitimate file-sharing activities.

The measure, which died when Congress adjourned last year, drew heavy flak from consumer advocates who said it would encourage copyright owners to become network-snarling vigilantes. Nevertheless, Berman was widely expected to try again this year with a revised version of the bill.

This week, however, Berman said he may not revive the measure. For one thing, copyright holders may not need extra protection to combat file- sharing piracy, he said. And though Berman wasn't deterred by complaints from consumer advocates, the concerns voiced by Hollywood studios -- among the biggest beneficiaries of the bill, given their active anti-piracy efforts online -- suggested that Berman was climbing out on a limb by himself.

In particular, Hollywood's enthusiasm for the bill was dimmed by Berman's insistence on imposing new liabilities on copyright holders that go too far in attacking pirates. "And if they're not for it," Berman asked, "where am I going?"

His comments came in an interview at a conference on copyrights and consumer rights at Intel Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif. "It still may be worth doing," Berman said of the proposal, "but realistically, a bill like this isn't going to zip through Congress."

Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said "the essence of the legislation makes all the sense in the world." However, some MPAA members were concerned about the new liabilities, and some doubted the need for the bill, he said.

"There were no self-help actions being taken in violation of state or federal laws," Taylor said.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...2Dtechnolo gy

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Teens Want Their MP3s
Some schools are looking for ways to track and limit music downloaded from Internet
Peter Wilson

Nothing, it seems, can stem the voracious appetites of tech-savvy teens for MP3 music files. Design a peer-to-peer network and they will come, by the millions.

An amazing 52 per cent of those aged 12 to 17 in the United States say they've downloaded MP3 files on the Net from the likes of Morpheus and KaZaa, according to a survey released Thursday by Ipsos- Reid. And, lest you think that such activity might be dropping off, 32 per cent of U.S. teenagers made at least one digital music download in December 2002. Both these figures are up from April 2002, when 41 per cent of teens said they'd grabbed an MP3 from a peer-to-peer network at one time and 23 per cent said they'd downloaded in the last month.

Just as startling is the overall figure of 40 million U.S. citizens of all ages who have grabbed for the MP3 gusto, according to the survey, carried out in late 2002. So it's no wonder that U.S. colleges, whose networks are hard hit by the bandwidth hogging of mostly male hardcore fire downloaders are considering drastic action.

Educational institutions are now testing "fingerprint" technology from a California company, Audible Magic (www.audiblemagic.com) that can detect exactly which songs, and even movies, are being downloaded. Some colleges already have in place traffic-management tools that let educational files and e-mail through while cutting back on the flow of MP3s. But fingerprint software, which runs inside routers, probes more deeply -- actually giving the network overseers a way of viewing just which files are being downloaded.

For example the University of Wyoming discovered during one recent 24-hour period that students were using the Gnutella Network to download 188 copies of an MP3 by Big Tymers.

What will likely happen next -- but not without a lot of computing power being utilized -- is the blocking of actual songs. The Audible Magic fingerprint library is said to be able to identify some 3.5 million distinct digital music files. However, with new music being released every day it may be difficult to keep up. And the privacy issue also has been raised over the use of such fingerprinting technology.

A Washington, D.C., lobby group, the Electronic Information Center (EPIC), has come out against recording industry requests for more university network monitoring.

In a November 2002 open letter to universities EPIC said: "Monitoring the content of communications is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of educational institutions to foster critical thinking and exploration. Such a level of monitoring is not only impracticable; it is incompatible with intellectual freedom.

One way that peer-to-peer networks could fight back would be to scramble or encrypt data so that it couldn't be recognized by fingerprinting programs.
http://www.canada.com/technology/sto...2-4D29F6A7E603

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Students catch downloading bug
Ali Shaughnessy

Digital technology has made its way into the hearts of many University students, as well as their residence hall rooms.

"Go for it," freshman Alex Crowder said when asked her opinion on downloading music and movies -- because, as many feel, downloading is as easy as one-two-three.

"A 12-year-old, with a click of a mouse, can send a movie hurtling to all of the continents," Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, has said.

But others disagree. Even with advancing technology, some say those things aren't yet possible.

"Transferring the sheer number of bits that compromise a single television show that was broadcast over the air ... is just not feasible," according to a study done by Raffi Krikorian, a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And this is just the latest debate in a battle between corporate and consumer rights.

According to Resident Hall Computing Services Coordinator Norm Meyers, the University started to monitor file sharing within the resident halls three to four years ago.

"(The computing services) focus is on the academic side, but the entertainment sides, such as music, movies, etc., are a plus," Meyers said. "We don't encourage (downloading), but we don't discourage it as long as (the students) are responsible."

The University, obliged to oversee uploads to protect itself from lawsuits, monitors what students do online through a $50,000 network program called Packeteer. The program restricts peer-to-peer file sharing by monitoring Internet traffic and directing entertainment downloads to a slower, lower-priority pathway.
http://www.dailyemerald.com/vnews/di.../3e56532d6d5af

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'Honest Thief' waves pirate flag
Sandeep Junnarkar

A Dutch company calling itself an "honest thief" has become the latest threat to an entertainment and recording industry beset by swelling numbers of file-swapping services.

Operating in the Netherlands, Internet services company PGR--doing business as The Honest Thief-- plans in the spring to license its software and provide legal advice to others who hope to set up the newest incarnation of peer-to-peer services.

The recording industry has succeeded in dismantling services like Napster and Aimster by taking legal action in the United States. But The Honest Thief, whose Web site went live on Friday, plans to take advantage of a Dutch appeals court ruling last March that essentially paved the way for the Netherlands to become a legal haven for file-sharing activities.

The appeals court said that file-swapping service Kazaa was not responsible for the illegal actions of people using its software. That decision is being appealed to higher court.

"Call it file-sharing or shoplifting, here in Holland we call it good business," Pieter Plass, founder of The Honest Thief, said in a statement. "With our file-sharing service and our new software, we hope The Honest Thief will become to file sharing what the Swiss are to banking."

The music industry sees things differently.

IFPI, the trade group representing the international recording industry and an affiliate of the Recording Industry Association of America. "It's hard to see how someone can claim they are making some 'honest money' by stealing other peoples' works."

Although only a few nations have shown permissiveness toward file-swapping service, the ruling underscored the mounting pressure on the copyright industry's struggle to retain control internationally of protected intellectual property such as music, movies and software.

"After two-plus years of legal wrangling with peer-to-peer sites, the file-sharing services' technology and business models continue to evolve in such a way as to circumvent U.S. legal rulings," said Lee Black, an analyst at Jupiter Research. "The fact that it continues to move into international areas will always pose a problem for the industry--these things keep sprouting up, and consumers keep finding the content they want."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-985525.html

Music Industry Faces New Threats On Web
Anna Wilde Mathews in Los Angeles and Charles Goldsmith in London

No one in the music industry has ever heard of Pieter Plass, the chief executive of a construction-management company in the Dutch city of Arnhem. But he and others like him may pose a serious threat to big record labels and other entertainment companies.

Based in the city best known for the World War II battle that spawned "A Bridge Too Far," Mr. Plass is about to go into business as an enabler of Internet peer-to-peer services. He wants to provide software, legal advice and other help to anyone who wants to start up the next Morpheus or Kazaa, the renegade online bazaars where users can swap copyrighted songs and movies for free. The twist is that his clients would launch their companies in the Netherlands, where a court ruling last March appears to provide legal protection for such operations.

The Dutch decision is being appealed, and it isn't clear how far Mr. Plass will get with his venture, which he's calling "The Honest Thief." But the effort illustrates the breadth of the challenge facing music companies and other owners of copyrighted works as more peer-to-peer providers base their operations overseas.

Record-label officials maintain that the Netherlands ruling was an aberration that will be reversed. Courts in South Korea and Japan have already ruled against peer-to-peer services in copyright cases. "We intend to enforce our rights not just in the United States, but world-wide," says Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America.

He also argues that under U.S. law, record labels should be able to get American Internet service providers to block customers' access to overseas Internet destinations that offer pirated music. In addition, record labels have taken steps lately to go after individual peer-to-peer users. A U.S. court recently found that American Internet service providers must disclose the names of customers who share copyrighted music online.

The record labels got a big win last month. A U.S. federal court said that Sharman Networks Ltd., which now offers the Kazaa software, could be sued in California even though it is based on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu and operates out of Australia. But a U.S. ruling may not be enough to shut down services based in countries where courts have said that peer-to-peer software is legal. Peer-to-peer operators based overseas say they believe they have a legal shield. "How are they going to enforce" a judgment? asks Rod Dorman, one of the lawyers representing Sharman Networks.

In the Netherlands, Mr. Plass says he's prepared to take a "calculated risk" and test the issue. In addition to the construction-management company he heads, he owns a nine-employee software firm, PGR BV, that has developed tools related to building and real estate. Its programmers created an application that works much like current popular services like Kazaa, enabling users to exchange files between individual computers rather than downloading them from centralized servers.

With his new venture, he plans to license the software -- which isn't yet finalized -- to clients who will create Netherlands-based file-sharing operations. His goal is to grab a chance to "make some honest money," he says.

Mr. Plass and his future clients may not be the only ones to try to exploit the Dutch ruling. Transparency Software LLC, a company based in Memphis, Tenn., makes software that blocks computers from exchanging copyrighted material on peer-to-peer networks, and it is considering launching its own Netherlands-based peer-to-peer service. The company would aim to have the operation contain no unauthorized works, says Pierce Ledbetter, chief executive of Transparency Software. But the Netherlands may provide "an extra layer of legal protection," he says.
http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/030221/72/382au.html

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Gov’t web sites offering ways to be prepared in emergencies. http://www.chicagotribune.com/techno...htopheds%2Dhed

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Pop stars learn to live with pirates
Thomas Crampton

In China, record companies find new ways to do business

SHANGHAI - Dimpled good looks and saccharin-sweet love songs may have made him an idol to millions of teenagers in China, but dark passions emerged at an album-promotion party recently when Wang Lee Hom brandished a sword to slash an oversized compact disk marked with the Chinese character for "theft."

In case anyone missed the point, the normally demure Wang announced that his favorite track on the new album was "Why," a pop-music diatribe against piracy.

"Pirates have already killed China's music industry dead," Wang said. "It frustrates my life and destroys China's creative future."

That may be an overstatement. Record companies say that what piracy has really done in China is to cause fundamental shifts in the way the country's music industry operates. It has simply forced Wang and his fellow stars to change the way they live, work and play.

"There is no income from the royalties, so artists in China record single songs for radio play instead of albums for consumers," said Lachie Rutherford, the president of Warner Music Asia-Pacific. "Stars need to look elsewhere to finance the rock-star lifestyle."

Industry executives say this reality also is beginning to draw attention in Europe and the United States, where music companies face falling revenue from compact disk sales as Internet piracy increases.

"The financial effect is the same for record companies whether people get illegal compact disks for $1 on the street in China or download a song for free from the Internet in Europe," said Jay Berman, chairman and chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a London-based group representing 1,500 firms. "Record companies everywhere find that they not only need to fight piracy, but also develop alternate revenue streams."

Piracy - which accounts for 95 percent of music sales in China, according to Berman's organization - has forced multinational record companies serving the world's most populous country to abandon classic-style album contracts, drop development of formal distribution channels and eliminate any possibility of a top-40 list based on sales.

"China is the ultimate example of industrial-scale piracy and its impact," Berman said. "The business model for the record industry worldwide is moving toward resembling what we see in China today."

Alternative sources of income tapped by top Chinese stars include paid appearances, sponsorship deals and extended concert tours through the nation's vast hinterland.

"In the United States and Europe, stars have it easy if they make a hit record," said Han Hong, named best female artist this year at Channel V's China Music Awards, and whose renditions of Tibetan songs have become nationally popular. "In China, we have to give so many concerts that we do not have time to rest our voices."

To add to the concert revenue and combat piracy, Han slashed the price of compact disks sold at her concerts to 15 yuan ($1.80), compared with 5 yuan for pirated disks and the 70 yuan that she formerly charged.

"You cannot fight piracy, so there is no point in even getting angry," Han said. "We must adapt to the environment."
http://www.iht.com/articles/87584.html

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Singapore Police Net Huge Piracy Software Haul
Reuters

Singapore police netted their biggest-ever haul of pirated software and music CDs in an island-wide raid, arresting 17 people and seizing S$1.7 million ($973,600)worth of goods, authorities said Wednesday.

Police in the strictly controlled city-state confiscated more than 124,000 pirated compact discs containing games, software and music Tuesday in a three-hour raid on 10 shops and an apartment and said more arrests were expected.

The haul is the biggest ever for a single raid in Singapore. Two years ago, police arrested 800 people and seized S$7 million in unlicensed software and music during at least 30 raids on the Sim Lim office block, a former showcase of contraband software.

U.S. film, software, video game and music companies are urging Washington to crack down harder on foreign piracy of their products, which they say cost the U.S. economy an estimated $20 billion-$22 billion in 2002.

Singapore, which has stepped up its fight against piracy in the past two years, has agreed to enforce copyright protection under a free-trade pact agreed last month with the United States.

A recent study by the U.S.-based International Intellectual Property Alliance estimated piracy losses in 56 countries they surveyed at US$9.2 billion in 2002.

Losses in the rest of the world were pegged at about $11 billion-$13 billion, not including piracy done over the Internet.

Trading in unlicensed software is a criminal offence in Singapore. Those arrested face a maximum S$100,000 fine or five years in jail, or both.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2288629

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Public Floods Copyright Office With Fair Use Requests
Roy Mark

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it helped 245 consumers submit comments to the Librarian of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office requesting protection for certain ordinary uses of CDs and DVDs. The consumer comments support the EFF's Dec. 18 request to the government to grant four exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in order to permit bypassing of certain technological protection measures for copyrighted works.

Currently, the DMCA prevents users from making the following four uses of some digital media: listening to copy-protected music CDs on certain stereos and personal computers; viewing foreign movies on DVDs on U.S. players due to region-coding restrictions; skipping through commercials on some movie DVDs; and viewing and making fair uses of movies that are in the public domain and released on encrypted DVDs.

"The large number of comments reflects consumers' growing concerns about the DMCA and the very real impact that the law has on their lives," said EFF Staff Attorney Gwen Hinze.

The consumer comments described their difficulties with the DMCA's ban on bypassing technological locks on copy-protected music CDs and movies released on DVD:
dc.internet.com/news/article.php/1592451

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No Need for Arguments Over Whose Music to Play
Ian Austen

As entertainment options multiply in cars and vans, delivering the appropriate soundtrack to every passenger is becoming complicated. Unwired Technology, a company that supplies audio components to several automakers, will offer wireless headphones that allow listeners and viewers to choose from among four sound sources.

That may sound like overkill for motorists who have, say, a radio and a CD player. But Larry Richenstein, president of Unwired, said some vans and cars have DVD players, satellite radio receivers and game systems, all of which generate sound, in addition to the traditional audio sources.

The signals are sent to the Unwired WhiteFire headphones using infrared light rather than radio waves to avoid interference problems. Unlike most other wireless headphone systems for cars, WhiteFire uses digital rather than analog transmission. The system, which comes with a transmitter, a digital encoding computer and two headsets, costs $600; extra headsets are $180. Information is available at www.unwiredtechnology.com.

Mr. Richenstein said he expected the system to be available as an option on some new cars in the 2005 model year. It will also be sold through auto audio dealers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/te...ts/27head.html

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Flexible Music. If the Neuros MP3/OGG player doesn’t do it all, it sure does most of it. It stores and plays over 5000 songs, acts as a portable 20 gig hard drive, receives, records and broadcasts FM radio, it identifies songs, transmits to other Neuros units and records off a built in microphone or through line-in inputs. Wow. Streetdate is March 1st, support for OGG and also Linux scheduled for May. $399.00 list. http://neurosaudio.com/

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Exclusive rights to stagnate
Lawrence Lessig

As pressure mounts on the European Parliament to extend patent protection to software, a crisis is developing in US patent law that Europe would do well to consider. The system in America is broken - to the great detriment of software developers generally - and there is no reason to believe the Europeans could do any better.

The claim that the US patent system is in crisis is nothing new. What is new is the identity of those making it.

From the start, Americans have been sceptical of the government-backed monopoly that is the patent. The first head of the US Patent Office, Thomas Jefferson, was a vocal critic of the very idea. Nonetheless, since the founding of the American republic, Congress has had the power to grant "exclusive rights" to "inventors" for their "discoveries". And for most of that period the scope of those "exclusive rights" was limited.

But since the middle of the last century, both the Patent Office and the courts, encouraged by Congress, have increasingly expanded the range of "discoveries" subject to patent. Most recently and controversially, the courts surprised most practitioners by concluding that both software and "business methods" can be subject to patent protection.

This last shift took place formally in 1998, although clever patent attorneys had been effectively patenting software for many years before that. Critics had been arguing for some time that this extension of patent protection would do more harm than good. As Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman, wrote in a 1991 memo: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."

Yet throughout the administration of President Clinton the Patent Office insisted that the system worked just fine. Patents were being granted for truly novel inventions only, the office said; and innovators had no trouble in identifying who owned what invention. Claims that the system was in crisis were little more than the ravings of Chicken Little. The system would work itself out. It always had.

Yet now the Patent Office is singing a different tune. As its new head, former Republican Congressman James E. Rogan, said in an interview with the L.A. Times on February 7, 2003: "This is an agency in crisis and it's going to get worse. It doesn't do me any good to pretend there's not a problem when there is."

The reason is the mess created by the last administration's patent office, especially in the context of business method patents (the type of patent, for example, that gives Amazon an exclusive right to its "one-click" method for selling merchandise online). "Some of [these] were fairly broad," Mr Rogan told L.A. Times reporter David Streitfeld. "We've gone from a 75 per cent acceptance rate to a 75 per cent rejection rate."

This early and easy acceptance rate led to an explosion in patent applications and patents granted - and, in turn, in the costs that software developers face. "Developing software is [now] like crossing a minefield," says Richard Stallman, the originator of the free software movement that has developed the GNU/Linux operating system. "With each design decision, you might step on a patent that will blow up your project."

This is the most surprising fact about software patents: they are generally opposed most strongly by the people they are intended to benefit. But such opposition is not difficult for a conservative like Mr Rogan to understand. Patents are a form of regulation. They represent a government decision on who gets a monopoly over what invention. Republicans like to claim that Democrats regulate first and ask questions later. They are therefore more eager to ask the right questions up-front.
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentSe...=1045510979794

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Digital rights: A thorny issue
Regulations on intellectual property are having some unintended consequences.
Adam Lashinsky

Digital Rights. It's a topic that doesn't jump off the page for the average investor, music and movie lover, or business person.

However, if you're in either the entertainment or technology industry, it has become the No. 1 issue, the polarizing hot-button topic that can make grown-ups shout at each other nearly as much as abortion rights, war with Iraq, and whether "The Bachelorette" has any socially redeeming qualities.

I confess that until now I have viewed this topic, from afar, as being fairly black and white. Stealing of any kind is wrong. Owners of intellectual property (like music, movies and online financial columns) have a right to make money from that property -- and to be protected by the law against piracy.

Folks who think Napster should have survived because ripping songs from the Internet was cool are whiners who were condoning music theft. (Though at the same time, I think Hollywood clearly didn't "get" the online revolution and was being stupid by antagonizing its customers.)

After attending a so-called "Digital Rights Summit" hosted Wednesday by a group of anti-Hollywood technology types -- including a little innovator called Intel -- I've come to realize that like any controversial issue, it's much more complex than I'd thought.

The summit was sponsored by folks with an agenda: They want to water down legislation the entertainment industry has passed that the techies think will bring the ruination of Silicon Valley. In short, the summit's sponsors want to strike a balance where Hollywood gets paid, but consumers still get to enjoy, share and modify that content.

The recent high point of this fight was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed with Hollywood's assistance in 1998. Without going into too much detail, it basically makes it illegal to copy proprietary content for just about any reason. There are exceptions to the rule, but not many. And it's giving some tech policy types nightmares about the future.

"I'm scared," said Joe Kraus, a founder of the deceased Web company Excite and also of DigitalConsumer.org, the group that organized Wednesday's "summit." What frightens Kraus is that the cornerstones of Silicon Valley -- interoperability (devices working with each other), innovation and empowering consumers -- are being threatened by the perfidious legislation.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/02/20/comm...ine/lashinsky/

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Hungary rolls back internet fees

As of March, the Hungarian government is to reduce internet connection fees by a quarter.

The Ministry of Information Technology and Communication hopes that this initiative will considerably increase internet access in the country.

The reduction coincides with the announcement of a E245 (HUF60,000) tax credit toward the purchase of a PC.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=15090

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Is vigilante hacking legal?
Robert Lemos

Striking back at computers that are attacking a company or home network could be legal under federal nuisance laws, a technology-law expert said Thursday.

Curtis Karnow, attorney for law firm Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, stressed during a speech at the Black Hat Security Briefings conference here that no court case has yet established precedent regarding the use of a limited counterstrike to stop Internet attackers, but that nuisance statutes appear to apply.

"It has a lot of promise...if we can get the court to look at it," Karnow said. "The law allows you to go in without permission and abate, or stop, the nuisance. You can even sue the malefactor for the expense of the abatement."

Nuisance laws allow the state and private individuals to file lawsuits aimed at ending activities deemed harmful to a community. They have been used to close buildings that house drug dealers and to shut down businesses, such as quarries that create excessive dust in a neighborhood.

Karnow pointed to "self help" provisions that allow citizens to take action to mitigate an obvious nuisance as a way of dealing with intruders and so-called zombie servers. Under the law, the victim of an attack could conceivably shut down the offending program on the attacking server--even if the server belonged to someone else, he said.

Karnow's solution could give hope to system administrators whose networks are under attack and who have found that petitioning law enforcement agencies is both slow and frequently ineffective.

Administrators on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) have for weeks discussed what to do about an estimated 20,000 servers still infected by the Slammer worm that continues to send an enormous amount of traffic though the Net. A similar number of computers are believed to be infected by the Code Red and Nimda worms and pose a threat to servers that haven't properly been patched.

However, Karnow warned that counterattacks would have to be used judiciously and only to a limited extent.

"The real problem is collateral damage," he said. "Suppose you screw up--you hit the wrong machine (or) you shut down an entire computer rather than just a process. What happens if you are sued, not by a bad guy, but by an intermediary who was affected by your counterstrike?"

Such issues should continue to deter anyone considering hacking back, he said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002-990469.html?tag=fd_top

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Silicon Valley vs Hollywood at Digital Rights Summit
Rachel Konrad

Repressive copyright laws and costly lawsuits from Hollywood could strike a lethal blow to the U.S. technology industry or even "break the Internet," according to entrepreneurs and academics who dominated a heated digital rights conference.

"Overbroad and overapplied copyright is a threat to all of us and affects everyone," DigitalConsumer.org co-founder Joe Kraus said Wednesday during the Digital Rights Summit at Intel Corp.'s headquarters. "It's eroding the foundation of Silicon Valley."

Punctuated by hisses, applause and shouts of "Amen!" from members of the 100-person crowd, the four-hour debate illustrated the gargantuan gap between Silicon Valley and Hollywood when it comes to so-called digital rights management.

With technology companies' stock prices and revenues mired in doldrums, digital rights management has also become one of the rare issues that provokes passions in Silicon Valley, epicenter of the American technology industry.

Entrepreneurs here say Hollywood's insistence on embedding anti-copying technology in devices would crimp product innovation in the flagging technology sector. Executives at startups say they have lost manufacturing contracts and venture capital funding because of the mere threat of litigation from television studios, multimillionaire movie directors and others in the entertainment industry.

Greg Ballard, chief executive of Santa Clara-based SONICblue, which makes digital audio players and other electronic devices, said his company spends about 20 percent of capital expenditures on legal fees. That comes to about $3 million per quarter defending lawsuits from 28 Hollywood studios.

"Companies like ours are going to stop innovating because at the edge of innovation is a lawsuit," he said. "We cannot afford that risk."

The lone Hollywood defender in the four-hour conference blasted technophiles' allegations as "overblown and simplistic."

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Van Nuys, said Silicon Valley's complaints were little more than trivial self-pity. Berman, who said he felt "like France at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council," said digital rights has become a smoke screen for discussing financial excess of Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and the realities of the industry's slump.

"Let's not believe in the notion that Hollywood and repressive intellectual property laws — rather than overcapitalized price-to-earnings models, fears about war and other aspects of a cyclical economy — have had the most repressive effects on innovation in Silicon Valley," he said. "Let's have some perspective. This issue is not as bad as 45 million people living without health insurance."

Berman and others with ties to Southern California's entertainment industry say too many consumers copy creative works illegally. They blame Silicon Valley companies for creating hardware and software that make it easy to copy and distribute creative works on the Internet, and they say artists — ranging from screenwriters to rock stars — would stop producing if they were not guaranteed royalties.

Stanford University Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig said the debate has cast a "nuclear pall" over both the technology and entertainment industries.

But he said his greatest fear was that Washington politicians would craft binding legislation about copyright laws based on how consumers use the Internet in 2003, when millions of consumers download content onto hard drives because slow dial-up connections make it tough to stream content quickly to a variety of devices.

Within a few years, Lessig said, extremely fast Internet connections would make the debate over encryption and copyright protection irrelevant.

"In the future, it will be easier to pay for subscription services than to be an amateur database administrator who moves content from device to device," Lessig told the crowd. "We're legislating against a background of the Internet's current architecture of content distribution, and this is a fundamental mistake."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Feb20.html

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"I think the onus is on the retailers to take care of this because the recording companies always shoot themselves in the foot.”
Twilight of the CD? Not if It Can Be Reinvented
Laura Holson

Introduced in the United States 20 years ago, the CD is losing its allure. From 2001 to 2002, some 62.5 million fewer of them were sold — a decline of 9 percent to 649.5 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Online swapping of songs is growing at a crippling rate, forcing almost every corner of the music industry to try to divine exactly what role, if any, the CD will play in a future dominated by Internet delivery and competition from popular new technologies like the DVD.

Most analysts and industry executives agree that selling music online is the future. But they say it will take at least two years for companies to devise a business plan for it that makes financial sense. In the meantime, the CD will remain the biggest source of revenue for both music retailers and recording companies, who will try to squeeze as much profit as they can out of each and every sale.

As a result, the CD is being rethought, repackaged and, in some cases, repriced.

Experiments to resuscitate this ailing product are growing. In January, Bon Jovi created a compact disc, with eight previously unreleased songs, exclusively for Target stores. Priced at $6.99, it was intended to help bolster sales of other Bon Jovi albums, including the newest, "Bounce."

All this is happening as the economic underpinnings of the CD continue to deterioriate, endangering the music business altogether. With the rising popularity of online music, much of it available free, technology-wise teenagers, the industry's most voracious buyers, can easily use CD-burning technology to make bootleg copies and sell them at school for as little as $1.

Companies are showing signs of cracking. Two industry veterans have recently lost their jobs: Thomas D. Mottola, the head of Sony Music Entertainment, which lost more than $132 million last year; and Jay Boberg, president of MCA Records. The music retailer Wherehouse Entertainment announced in January that it was filing for bankruptcy protection, partly because of lackluster sales. And the EMI Group, based in London, the only major music company that is not a part of a media conglomerate, is struggling with debt and is believed by analysts to be considering merger prospects.

"Large companies tend to wait until they feel pain to act," said Dan Hart, chief executive of Echo, a recently formed consortium of retailers that hope to sell music online. "Now they feel pain."

Mr. Arnold of Best Buy said he believed that DVD's could well replace the CD in the future because they play not only music but also video images. In the last 12 months, sales of DVD's have surpassed those of compact discs at Best Buy, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/bu...ey/23MUSI.html

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'Five years from now you'll see virtually no CD stores'
Music Biz: What’s Next?
On the eve of the Grammy Awards, the recording industry is under siege: As the Internet drives a file-sharing revolution, it's the end of the (music) world as we know it
Joan Anderman

It's 2008 and you want the new Coldplay album. You walk into a record store where there are no records, enter a kiosk, and download the collection directly onto your portable digital audio device.

Or maybe you're an old-schooler with a soft spot for quaint technology. You sit down at the computer, whip out the $30 prepaid card you got for Christmas, log on to Amazon.com, and burn a few of the 50 tracks you've got coming onto a compact disc. Voila: instant artifact.

Perhaps you'll click over to your music subscription service. Depending on your plan, you download tracks No. 2, 7, and 11 for a dollar each into your Internet-wired home stereo or, as a monthly subscriber, load an iPod to your heart's content.

Actually, it might be cooler to download the radio single directly to your mobile phone and make it your new polyphonic, master-quality ring tune.

The bold new world toward which the music industry is headed will barely be on display tonight, when a pageant of pop stars takes the stage at Madison Square Garden for the 45th Annual Grammy Awards. The industry's woes are likely to be drowned out by the sound of business as usual: fans screaming, stars swapping verses, label executives getting paid their due.

But like it or not, the music industry is in a free fall, and things are about to change. The very foundation on which the business is structured -- selling music to stores -- is eroding at an astonishing pace. Sales of recorded music have fallen about 16 percent over the last two years. By contrast, sales of blank CDs jumped 40 percent in 2002, and users of the biggest online file-trading service, Kazaa, outnumber what Napster ever had.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/05...ores_+.sht ml

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Awards aired amid music industry turmoil
Jonathan Takiff

For music fans concerned with the shaky state of their favorite industry, it's a good sign that the Grammys will be broadcast Sunday night in high definition television and 5.1 channel digital surround sound - the first major award show to make that claim.

The number of viewers actually capable of seeing the show in high def may only be in the hundreds of thousands, but by taking this technical leap, the Grammy- sponsoring National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and its member music labels are sending out an important message. Namely, that they want to reside at the cutting edge of technology and provide a heightened entertainment experience to their music-lovin' constituency.

Clearly, that communique is a positive one, equal to the exciting Grammy parade of vital young talents like Norah Jones, Coldplay, Ashanti and John Mayer, plus returning pros like Bruce Springsteen and the Dixie Chicks, all of whom will be entertaining at this year's music gala.

With prerecorded music unit sales off 12 percent in 2002, after an almost as sharp decline the year before, the industry is clearly suffering and of the mind-set that changes must be made.

Thus explains why music labels' talent rosters have been ruthlessly cut in recent months, with all but the most reliable moneymakers told "thanks for the memories."

Major label leaders have also been dropping like flies. Sony Music Entertainment chief Tommy Mottola has been the most visible, replaced by a guy who admittedly knows little about the music business, former NBC TV exec Andrew Lack. (Still, that naivete could work in his favor, if Lack can "innocently" cut Sony loose from some of the traditional practices of this industry, like greasing palms to win airplay.)

The music business' lobbying organization, the Recording Industry Association of America, is in a state of turmoil, too, following the recent resignation of its CEO Hilary Rosen. She was the lead attack dog going after illegal Internet file-sharing services like Napster and Kazaa.

You'll also note a new front guy for NARAS, Neil Portnow, speaking Sunday night at the Grammys. Portnow says he's jumped into the organization too late to make much of a personal dent on this year's Grammys, but will review "every aspect of the presentation" for 2004.
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/living/5229650.htm

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High-Speed Services May Cost More
Saul Hansall

Of the roughly 20 million users of high-speed Internet service, only a few hundred thousand customers are likely to have their rates increased as a direct result of yesterday's ruling by the Federal Communications Commission. But some executives argue that eliminating this form of price competition will lead to increased overall prices for the service, also known as broadband.

The companies that will be hardest hit are those that have built high-speed data networks that share the lines of local telephone companies into homes and offices. The F.C.C. voted to eliminate, over three years, a rule that forced local Bell companies to let these rivals offer broadband services using their networks.

But even under the old rules, which had been intended to help them, these companies have had a hard time competing, and most have failed.

The biggest company remaining in that market is Covad Communications, which provides high-speed data service to 200,000 homes; its service is sold to consumers mostly by Earthlink. Covad said that, with the ruling, the price it paid local phone companies for access to their wires would be $5 and $15 a month, up from the current rates of less than $5 or, in some cases, free.

Currently, Covad charges Earthlink and other Internet service providers about $30 a month, and Earthlink in turn charges consumers about $50 a month. If the new rules are carried out, Covad said it would be forced to raise its prices.

Phone companies use a technology called digital subscriber line, which allows a voice phone call and high-speed data to use the same copper wire at the same time, transmitting the data through inaudible high frequencies. The previous F.C.C. rules forced local phone companies to give access to these high frequencies to companies that were building their own data networks but did not want to string new wires to consumers' homes.

Michael K. Powell, the chairman of the F.C.C., argued yesterday that phone companies should have been forced to continue to share their lines for broadband service. He had taken the opposite point of view for voice service, arguing the Bell companies should not be forced to share their networks. He was outvoted on both counts.

"Line sharing has clear and measurable benefits for consumers," he said. "The decision to kill off this element and replace it with a transition of higher and higher wholesale prices will lead quite quickly to higher retail prices for broadband consumers."

Internet service providers can also buy D.S.L. service directly from local phone companies, without going through a company like Covad. Those arrangements, which are subject to both state and federal regulations, are not affected by the rule change yesterday. Indeed, most of the D.S.L. lines offered by the two largest Internet services, America Online and Microsoft's MSN, are purchased directly from local phone companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/business/21BROA.html

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US powers internet growth
BBC

The US continues to be the driving force behind the global growth in internet use, new figures suggest.

About 10 million US adults hooked up to the internet for the first time in 2002, boosting the overall number to 168.6 million, or 79% of the population, Nielsen Netratings said. But Nielsen pointed to Spain and Brazil as countries likely to host more spectacular internet revolutions in coming months. While the increase in US net users represented only 3% growth year-on-year, the number of Spanish surfers soared by 22%, Thursday's survey found.

Online populations
US: 169m
Germany: 38.7m
UK: 28.0m
Italy: 23.0m
France: 21.9m

"The report points to Spain as the next great internet market," said Nielsen spokesman Richard Goosey. "In addition to the largest increase in percent population with internet access, Spain also had the biggest percentage increase in most of the internet activities undertaken by surfers in the last six months."

E-mail volumes rose by 6%, with chat room participation rising by 9%.

"Spain now has the highest rate of instance message usage - 49% - and chat room participation - 44% - across all countries." Brazil, meanwhile, "displays enormous potential for future growth", Mr Goosey said. "An additional 18% of the telephone household population there plans to acquire internet access in the next 12 months."

Worldwide, the number of people with access to the internet from home hit 580 million in the October to December period, up 17 million on the quarter before.

Changes in online populations
Spain: +22%
UK, Italy: + 6%
Germany: +4%
US, Netherlands: + 3%
Hong Kong: -3%
Australia: -4%

Data: Q4 2002 compared with Q4 2001
Source: Nielsen Netratings

US surfers accounted for 29% of users, with Europe accounting for 23%. While growth in surfer numbers the UK, Italy and Germany outpaced that in the US - on a percentage basis - the number of Hong Kong and Australian residents with internet access declined. Mr Goosey attributed the falls to "maturity" of the markets. With Sweden and the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Australia show the highest rates of home computer ownership, and highest proportion of PC owners who have internet connections.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2786081.stm

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The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission today announced that it will hold a public inquiry into whether an Internet interconnection service should be regulated under Part XIC of the Trade Practices Act 1974. http://203.6.251.7/accc.internet/dig...m?RecordID=959

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An Appeal to Honor in Fight Against Internet Piracy
Amy Harmon

Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, has decided to take the battle against Internet piracy to a higher moral ground.

Mr. Valenti has long raged against the illegality of the swapping of unauthorized copies of movies by students on college campuses. But in a speech to Duke University law students today, he plans to shift his emphasis to more basic principles: "duty, service, honor, integrity, pity, pride, compassion, sacrifice," according to a preliminary text of the speech.

"If you treat these words casually," it continues, "if you find them uncool, if you regard them as mere playthings which only the rabble and the rubes, the unlearned and the unsophisticated, observe and honor, then we will all bear witness to the slow undoing of the great secret of America."

A former aide to President Lyndon Johnson, Mr. Valenti said last week that he was inspired by Mr. Johnson's approach to passing the Civil Rights Act. "He said `I'm not going to talk politics or legality or the constitution,' " Mr. Valenti recalled. "He said, `I'm going to confront these congressmen with their own morality.' "

Many college campuses have installed software to limit the flow of large digital music and movie files over their networks, but the unauthorized copying continues.

"Some people will read his speech or hear it and feel Jack is being idealistic and not realistic," said Graham B. Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, and co- chairman of a national committee working on the file-trading issue. "But what he is saying needs to be said because it is the crux of the issue."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/te...gy/24JACK.html

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Daniel Aaron, a Founder of Comcast Cable Television, Dies at 77
David Kirkpatrick

Daniel Aaron, a refugee from Nazi Germany and an orphan who went on to become a founder of Comcast, the largest cable company in the country, died last Thursday in Philadelphia, where he lived. He was 77.

The cause was Parkinson's disease, according to the company.

In 1963, Mr. Aaron persuaded Ralph J. Roberts, a Philadelphia entrepreneur who had recently sold a men's wear business, to buy a small cable television system in Tupelo, Miss. As part of the deal, Mr. Aaron agreed to help run it, and over the next 30 years they built or acquired dozens of other cable systems around the country. Last fall, the company they started, Comcast, acquired AT&T Broadband to become the largest cable television service provider in the country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/ob...es/24AARO.html

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Radio Plans Shift in Tone as Drumbeat of War Builds
Lynette Holloway

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, listeners denounced many radio stations for playing songs insensitive to a nation in mourning. Now, program directors are planning to adjust their playlists if the United States goes to war with Iraq.

Expect to hear more patriotic tunes, and songs that appear right for the moment. The changes most likely will occur on stations with the broadest appeal, like those with top 40's and country formats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/bu...ia/24RADI.html

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Swarm Radio - a cheaper, faster 'casting technology
Andrew Orlowski

The technology behind the next generation of file sharing legal battles was unveiled at CodeCon today. Brandon Wiley describes Alluvium as "Peer to Peer radio" - which it is, but it also blurs the distinction between streaming and downloading once and forever.

So what is it? To begin with, Alluvium "streams" Ogg. It's an umbrella project that uses some existing technologies - such as Tornado's swarm downloading - with the initial goal of providing a better IceCast than IceCast.

"It offers between 10 per cent and 90 per cent bandwidth savings," says Wiley. The worst case for Alluvium is Icecast - always going to be better than IceCast."

With distributed "swarm" downloading technologies such as BitTorrent and Tornado - which has half a million users already - it's possible for hundreds of users to download a file without hammering the server. They take advantage of the under-used uplink capacity of your net connection to upload portions of the file to another user. So when you download a file from a given location, you're actually getting it from many other users in chunks.

The upshot is that Alluvium needs much lower server overhead for the broadcaster than conventional streaming technologies. In fact it would be possible to run it from a Sharp Zaurus PDA, reckons Wiley, because all it needs to act as a server is httpd.

I learned some interesting details, such as Wiley designed it to use random ports to avoid P2P - something he learned from his experience working on FreeNet.

Now why, you're wondering, would this prompt legal issues? Well, there's an explicit distinction at the moment between streaming (which the RIAA thinks is OK, so long as the broadcasters pay royalties) and downloading (which is not OK under any circumstances). Technically they're similar in that both Alluvium and {insert your favorite streaming player here} leave stub files in the cache which they delete after the session has finished.

But Alluvium is a streaming technology that uses file downloading techniques. So some legal clarification will need to be made.

I liked Brandon's idea of running Alluvium on a PDA. I very much like the idea of each phone being a personal short-range station and it turns out that like me, he's waiting for a Bluetooth-enabled MP3 player before making his purchase.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/29436.html

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Alluvium - Technical Overview

Alluvium is a technology for doing low-cost streaming media broadcasts. However, it uses a very different approach from existing streaming servers such as icecast, Real Server, and the Quicktime Streaming Server. In fact, all you need server-side is a standard web server. You don't even need any modules or CGI scripts.

The first thing you need to run an Alluvium station is a playlist. This is a simple file in the Alluvium playlist format, which is based on the RSS 1.0 news format. All of the RSS tags used are standard tags from existing schemas and which retain their intended semantics. Radio station playlists and RSS newsfeeds are really quite similar. They both specify a sequence of content of possible interest to the audience. One interesting side project to do would be creating audio and video weblogs and news stations which are created by aggregating multimedia feeds about particular topics. For the moment, however, we're working on simple music and voice broadcast. You can generate an Alluvium playlist file easily from a normal music play playlist file using the playlist generation tool.

The playlist file specifies the locations of a series of files containing content and also the time at which that song starts. The client software will skip through the playlist until it finds the song which is scheduled for the current time and then fetch that song. The files are specified as URLs and so can be hosted anywhere on the web. Each file could even be hosted on a different site. Most importantly, the files don't have to be hosted on the same site as the playlist.

Files are downloaded using the Open Content Network (OCN) utilizing exciting swarming download technology. The client software first checks with the OCN gateway, which stores special headers for all of the files being distributed through the OCN. If the gateway doesn't know about a particular URL, it will fetch the necessary information from the URL and then cache it. The information stored by the gateway contains information needed to swarm download the file such as a hashtree.

Among the information obtained by the client from the gateway is a list of addresses for other clients who are also downloading or have recently download the file. Clients download multiple parts of the file simultaneously from each other. When a certain part of the file is unavailable from other clients, a client will fetch it from the original source URL and then share than part with the other clients, minimizing the load on the server which stores the content files. The majority of data transfer happens between peers. Additionally, priority for downloading is given to chunks earlier in the file. This means that while the file does geneally transfer out of order, it is sequential enough for file playback to happen immediately.

After the first file download has started, the client immediately starts sending it to a locally generated icecast-compatible stream. You can then direct your media player to the local stream and listen to it exactly as though it was a normal icecast stream.

The benefits of this technology are savings in bandwidth and processor usage. Since most downloads happen between listeners, the server has much less load. In fact, it is unlikely that an Alluvium station would ever have performance as bad as the icecast model, in which the server has to send every byte to every listener. Bandwidth savings are almost certain. Additionally, unlike icecast servers serving files for Alluvium stations have no need to decode the files. Therefore, you do not need to consume processing power decoding compressed music files. In fact, you don't even need a floating point processor. Alluvium broadcasts can be done from incredibly low-cost, obsolete hardware as long as they have sufficiently fast I/O and network speeds
http://tristero.sourceforge.net/allu...hoverview.html

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Filter, the technology digest form the Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Feb24.html

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File-sharing dilemma for broadband firms
Jane Wakefield

Fast net providers find themselves with a tricky dilemma as file-swapping becomes one of the most popular broadband activities. The ability to get hold of music, video and software at the touch of a button for free is proving a major draw for people making the switch to fast net services. But sharing material that is copyrighted is illegal and file-swapping is causing a huge drain on the bandwidth, and consequently the pockets of service providers.

File-sharing - known as peer-to-peer (P2P) networking - has all the elements of being the perfect online activity. Like many of the internet's success stories it is all about community, it is free and it is mutually beneficial to both the sharer and the recipient. But for the music and movie industries such services are a disaster because they offer no way of recouping royalties. Despite much- publicised battles with peer-to-peer providers, the industry seems to be fighting a losing battle.

According to analysts Jupiter Research, file- sharing in Europe is growing at a phenomenal rate, with over 75% of broadband subscribers using P2P networks at least once a month. This means that networks are being swamped with file-sharing traffic and the amount of bandwidth they use is causing serious headaches for providers.

"Although not the only factor in driving internet users to broadband, file-sharing has proven to be broadband's first killer application," said Jupiter analyst Dan Stevenson. "As well as being a big problem for record labels and the Hollywood studios alike, internet service providers are beginning to suffer too under the heavy weight that file sharing imposes on their networks," he added.

Many may have to follow the cable provider ntl and some European operators in limiting the amount of bandwidth users can get their hands on. If ISPs start managing peer-to- peer networks it could be argued that they are helping users to break copyright laws

Monthly data limits will increasingly become the rule rather than the exception, expects Jupiter Research. This will force users to either adapt their newly-learned broadband behaviour or pay a heavy price for being bandwidth hogs. There seems to be little alternative for operators, already struggling to make money on wafer-thin margins.

There are tools that operators can put into their networks to re-route or reduce the bandwidth being used by file swapping services but this could prove to be a legal minefield. "If they start managing peer-to-peer networks it could be argued that they are helping users to break copyright laws," points out Andrew Ferguson of broadband advice website, ADSL Guide.

ISPs appear to be in a no-win situation, either continuing to bear the brunt and cost of heavy network traffic or face the wrath of users by introducing punitive charging for using bandwidth-heavy services.

Some of the UK's smaller ISPs have already grabbed the bull by the horns. Andrews & Arnold is offering a tiered service, charging £60 a month for totally unlimited access and a more reasonable £29.95 for a service with bandwidth restrictions. UK ISP Sniff Out, true to its name, sniffs out those people using P2P services for more than six hours a day and moves them to a different part of their network.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2745445.stm

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They say it swats P2Ps like flies
TippingPoint Announces Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention for UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Appliances and Systems
Press Release

TippingPoint Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: TPTI), the leaders in high-speed intrusion prevention, today announced a Peer-to-Peer Privacy Prevention (PPPP) capability that allows corporations, universities and government agencies to control the use of peer-to-peer file sharing applications. PPPP is an optional capability for all UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Appliances and Systems.

Peer-to-peer file sharing applications like Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire, WinMX, and Bearshare are often used illegally to copy music and videos. This type of activity opens an employer or institution to copyright infringement liability, and lowers productivity due to bandwidth monopolization. TippingPoint's PPPP capability will enable organizations to block, limit and prioritize peer-to-peer traffic based on specific client, server, IP address, application or payload type.

The PPPP capability not only increases security and productivity, it also decreases the legal liability of an organization. Allowing this type of traffic to run unabated exposes organizations to potential royalty payments. "Several of our clients have been contacted by media companies threatening legal action for copyright infringement," said TippingPoint Chief Technology Officer Marc Willebeek-LeMair. "Now, in addition to helping our clients eliminate security risks, our PPPP capability will enable clients to reduce their legal risks."

The Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention capability is a feature on the UnityOne 400, 1200 and 2400 Intrusion Prevention Appliances, and will be available in June. The PPMS price is $9,995 per system.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030224/dam009_1.html

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UNCC aware of digital theft on campus
Online piracy could jeopardize students' academic careers
Josh Blacklaw

The UNC Charlotte Information & Technology Services department recently purchased software that could change the way the Web is surfed on UNC Charlotte's campus. The new software logs all Internet traffic and can be used to tell who was on a network computer at any given time.

Karin Steinbrenner, chief information officer for UNCC, said that according to the Millennium Copyrights Act, schools do not have to search for any illegal activity but are required to investigate when notified by outside agencies such as Mediaforce or the FBI.

"I receive two or three messages a week from the recording and video industry regarding copyright violations," she said.

Once information is provided, and the person owning the IP address is found, it is turned over to Student Affairs for review. The penalties could range anywhere from having your network account closed, to expulsion.

Susan Wagoner, who manages Student Computing, said she cares most about educating students on UNCC's copyright policy, and the dangers associated with downloading media illegally. She said that IT lab policies can be found at :www.uncc.edu/labs/LabInfo/. Policy #66 of Responsible Use of University Computing and Electronic Communication Resources, covers most everything and can be found there. Other information on the subject is posted in the computer labs, and all IT policies can be found on the University attorney's Web page.

Wagoner's colleague, Rowanne Joyner, is the director of User Support Services. She said that the FBI has been involved before. She has mixed feelings on the subject of online piracy.

"It's illegal," Joyner said but stressed that the Internet is designed for information sharing.

Wagoner agreed and said that information on the Internet is very valuable, but that digital theft is wrong.

"It's the same thing as plagiarism," she said in reference to school policy. Wagoner also mentioned that the logs don't tell us what a user was looking at, just which computer they were on and at what time, in regards to the information they receive.

"It is illegal," Steinbrenner said. "There will be punishment."
http://www.nineronline.com/vnews/dis.../3e59a0b885cb7

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Purdue cracks down on downloading
Jenny Jones

Students downloading copyrighted material through Purdue's computer network may soon be penalized for their actions.

With the recent flare of copyright infringement allegations, the University is cracking down on illegal downloading by sending out letters or making phone calls to students, warning them that downloading copyrighted materials, such as music, movies and games, is against University policy — not to mention the law.

"I think that the expectation might be that because it's on the Internet, it's OK to download, but just because it's out on the Internet doesn't mean it's not copyrighted," said Kathy Peters, associate dean of students. "And copyright infringement is a violation of federal copyright law."

Although the University is not tracking students for copyright infringement, members of the entertainment industry, such as Sony, are keeping track of copyright violations, including file sharing, said Peters. This comes after the Recording Industry Association of America claimed to be losing millions of dollars to file sharing programs such as Kazaa, a peer-to-peer network based out of Australia.

Once these entertainment companies detect copyright violations and determine that the infringements are taking place through a campus network, they contact the University. From there, the University is able to identify by name the students who are downloading copyrighted materials and take action on those students. Since June 2002, 420 accounts of copyright violation have been reported to Purdue alone.

"We contact the student and tell them to cease and desist basically," said Steve Akers, executive assistant to the dean of students, of the violations. But Peters said that depending on the case, students who are reported to be downloading copyrighted materials using University resources might receive punishments, such as having their University computer privileges revoked.

"I don't want students to think, 'I get one free shot,' because that's not the case at all," Peters said. "We evaluate every case as it comes in."

Purdue is not the only university to tighten up on student violations of copyright. In December, Indiana University sent e-mails to 177 students, telling them that they should delete files from their computers, according an article in the Indiana Daily Student.

Universities such as IU and Purdue, which provide Internet access to students, are allowed this type of jurisdiction over what materials students are able to download under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects copyrighted material online.

But universities could soon be required to do more than warn students about downloading. They could also be ordered to provide the names of individuals who are illegally downloading material from the Internet.
http://www.purdueexponent.org/interf...legaldownloads

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From file sharing to photos, these women loathe representational sex.
Ban on Porn Is Proposed at University
Stuart Silverstein and Rebecca Trounson

An engineering professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has launched a campaign to ban the use of school computers to view pornography, igniting debate over the limits of academic freedom.

Linda Vanasupa, chairwoman of the materials engineering department, plans to introduce a resolution in April before the academic senate to impose the ban.

The proposal -- known as the "Resolution to Enhance Civility and Promote a Diversity-Friendly Campus Climate" -- also would prohibit using the university's computer technology to gain access to hate literature.

Vanasupa, who joined the faculty 12 years ago, said her effort began after a university employee complained to her that she was unwillingly exposed to pornography downloaded onto a computer that she shared at work.

After receiving the complaint, Vanasupa said she asked campus administrators to crack down on online pornography in the workplace. But Vanasupa said she was told that the practice could not be banned without intruding on academic freedom and 1st Amendment protections.

Vanasupa counters that her resolution "is specifically to prevent personal sexual entertainment in the workplace," and would simply bring campus policy into line with anti-harassment legal standards for the workplace. She said it would limit only "a very small aspect of our access" to the Internet, and would not restrict use of computers for professional purposes.

In addition, she noted that the resolution provides that "faculty and staff who need to access hate literature, obscenity or pornography for bona fide work purposes" can petition the university for a waiver.

"It's easy to submit a request," she said. "How long does it take to write a memo?"

Carlos Cordova, the university's legal counsel, replied that viewing pornography at work "is stupid and wrong activity. We all agree with that."

But he said state and university policies already in place are adequate to deal with the problem without running afoul of 1st Amendment or academic freedom concerns. He cited the campus' anti-sexual harassment policy, along with state and university policies barring excessive use of computers for personal purposes.

Cordova cited the experience of many universities in the early 1990s that enacted codes barring hate speech, only to see them struck down by the courts on 1st Amendment grounds.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...s%2Dtechnology

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In Web disputes, U.S. law rules the world
Michael Geist

Few Internet law issues generate more controversy than concerns surrounding Internet jurisdiction. In recent months, courts in both Australia and the United States have grappled with the issue in high-profile cases.

The first involved an allegedly defamatory Wall Street Journal article about Joseph Gutnick, an Australian businessman who chose to sue in Australia rather than in the United States, where the newspaper is based. The second involved a copyright infringement suit launched in a California court against Kazaa, a leading online peer-to- peer file sharing service owned by an Australian company and incorporated in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu.

In both instances, the courts chose to assert jurisdiction over the disputes. While the Gutnick case spurred several ominous editorials in the U.S. about the negative implications for free speech that could ensue as a result of the decision, the truth is that both courts merely adopted an approach that is commonly used worldwide. Simply put, courts in all countries are inclined to assert jurisdiction over online activity, wherever it originates, so long as harm is experienced locally and the sense is that the party responsible either knew or ought to have known that the harm was a likely consequence of their actions.

This approach has been applied by French courts in cases involving the online availability of Nazi memorabilia, by U.S. courts in cases involving copyright and online gambling, and by British and Australian courts in cases involving online defamation. While the debate over cases such as Gutnick and Kazaa are bound to continue, a much greater Internet jurisdiction threat has arisen but received scant attention.

The larger threat comes not from courts asserting jurisdiction over online activity, but rather from national legislatures that create laws that are expressly designed to apply not just in their own country but worldwide. The United States has begun to use this approach quite regularly with new privacy, copyright, and computer crime legislation that feature extra-territorial provisions ensuring that the law may be applied both in the U.S. and abroad. The most blatant example of this extra-territorial approach comes from the U.S. Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, a law enacted in 1999 to deal with cases of domain name cybersquatting. Over the past three years, U.S. courts have faced numerous cases involving the application of the ACPA and it has gradually become apparent that this law has no limits.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=969048863851

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This media exec says peer-to-peer file sharing is "the greatest thing that ever happened to the music industry."
Atlantic Records VP talks talent
Jessica Feinstein

Mike Caren could have been as famous as grumpy American Idol judge Simon Cowell. But after two interviews with the producers of the popular television show, Caren decided that TV judge was not a role he wished to play.

"I thought that it would probably destroy my career," said Caren, vice president of Artist and Repertoire Development at Atlantic Records.

With an invitation from the Yale Entertainment Society, Caren spoke about his experiences in the music industry at a crowded Morse College Master's Tea Thursday afternoon. Caren, who at 25 has already worked with Rob Zombie and Courtney Love and signed successful artists such as Trick Daddy and Nappy Roots, has built a career upon making few mistakes.

While an average of one out of 10 artists signed to labels are successful, Caren said he has a 50 percent success rate.

"Mike Caren seems to be a person with a golden touch," Morse Master Frank Keil said.

Despite his accomplishments, Caren discussed what he felt are some of the current problems with the music industry, including the replacement of independent radio with corporate stations.

"I think popular music is at an all-time low," he said. "The problem is that there are fewer outlets for popular music that is cutting edge."

Nevertheless, Caren said he maintains a positive attitude about the future, especially new technology like Peer-to-Peer file sharing, which he called "the greatest thing that ever happened to the music industry."
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=21904

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Perspective: Get ready to be fleeced
Declan McCullagh

Don't look now, but a team of lobbyists and politicians is gearing up to enact new digital copyright laws that will cost you more money and result in more government regulations.

Unhappy with the current reach of the law, the lobbyists and politicians believe that more restrictions levied on U.S. companies are necessary. Their target: The consumer electronics industry, which is already suffering through America's economic malaise and, conceivably, companies that sell music and video-playing software as well.

Who is behind this maneuvering? Don't blame Jack Valenti, or the folks over at the Recording Industry Association of America (they're too busy protecting their Web site from further defacements). You'll find the culprits among the "fair use" crowd, whose champions include none other than Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and whose allies include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and DigitalConsumer.org.

At the Intel-sponsored Digital Rights Summit in Silicon Valley last Wednesday, Wyden said he was about to introduce legislation requiring consumer electronics devices and media such as music CDs to be clearly labeled with explanations of any anticopying restrictions. Boucher has already introduced a bill to give federal bureaucrats the power to require "prominent and plainly legible" labels on copy-protected CDs.

Their intentions may be pure, but their methods are not. Whether CDs should be labeled as copy-protected should be up to the public, not the merry band of aging technophobes in Congress. Consumers are not dumb or naive. If rational people can't use CDs on all their electronics devices, word will get around, and they won't buy anymore. Record labels, too, have an incentive not to overly annoy consumers: CD shoppers are not price-inflexible, and if copy protection schemes become too onerous, they'll be rejected. Just look at the miserable failure of DivX.

As tempting as it may be, the solution is not to follow Hollings' lead and use the political process to demand the kind of regulations that "fair use" advocates think are appropriate.
I can understand the frustration felt by the "fair use" folks. Congress enacted three worrisome copyright laws in quick succession in the late 1990s: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the No Electronic Theft Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act. Only now are we seeing the ridiculous ways that they're being wielded--to block third-party toner cartridges for laser printers and possibly toss the average peer-to-peer user in prison for up to three years. Last month's rejection by the Supreme Court of a challenge to the copyright extension didn't help either.

Even worse, Congress could go further and impose additional regulations on computer hardware and software makers. That's what Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., hoped to do in his reviled Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which would forcibly implant anti- copying technology in nearly anything with a microprocessor.

But as tempting as it may be, the solution is not to follow Hollings' lead and use the political process to demand the kind of regulations that "fair use" advocates think are appropriate. The right thing to do is try to repeal the worst sections of those three laws--hey, it could eventually happen--and then leave Congress out of it. To his credit, Boucher tries to do that in part through his Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act--but the other half of the bill is devoted to increasing regulations on the music industry.

Put another way, what's happening right now is lobbyists from the entertainment industry are seeking to regulate computer technology in hopes of limiting copying, and academics and left-leaning groups are seeking to regulate digital rights management technology in hopes of mandating "fair use." Both sides hope to enlist Congress--raising the very real possibility of interminable political battles that could shape the future of digital media more than the technology itself.

Both sides are wrong. It was a mistake for the movie studios and the record labels to start this political tussle in the mid-1990s, and it's a mistake to follow their lead. (And let's not forget the Business Software Alliance, whose members include Microsoft, Apple Computer and Adobe Systems, and which remains one of the biggest backers of the DMCA.)
http://news.com.com/2010-1071-985622.html

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Creation Myths
Does innovation require intellectual property rights?
Douglas Clement

The most forceful performance at last year’s Grammy ceremony was a speech by Michael Greene, then president
of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Speaking not long after the 9/11 attacks, Greene gravely warned of a worldwide threat -- "pervasive, out of control, and oh so criminal" -- and implored his audience to "em-brace this life-and-death issue."

Greene was not referring to international terrorism. "The most insidious virus in our midst," he said sternly, "is the illegal downloading of music on the Net."

Greene’s sermon may have been a bit overwrought, but he’s not alone in his fears. During the last decade, the captains of many industries -- music, movies, publishing, software, pharmaceuticals -- have railed against the "piracy" of their profits. Copyright and patent protections have been breached by new technologies that quickly copy and distribute their products to mass markets. And as quickly as a producer figures a way to encrypt a DVD or software program to prevent duplication, some hacker in Seattle, Reykjavik, or Manila figures a way around it.

The music industry has tried to squelch the threat, most conspicuously by suing Napster, the wildly popular Internet service that matched patrons with the songs they wanted, allowing them to download digital music files without charge. Napster lost the lawsuit and was liquidated, while similar services survive.

But the struggle over Napster-like services has accented a much broader issue: How does an economy best promote innovation? Do patents and copyrights nurture or stifle it? Have we gone too far in protecting intellectual property?

In a paper that has gained wide attention (and caught serious flak) for challenging the conventional wisdom, economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine answer the final question with a resounding yes. Copyrights, patents, and similar government-granted rights serve only to reinforce monopoly control, with its attendant damages of inefficiently high prices, low quantities, and stifled future innovation, they write in "Perfectly Competitive Innovation," a report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. More to the point, they argue, economic theory shows that perfectly competitive markets are entirely capable of rewarding (and thereby stimulating) innovation, making copyrights and patents superfluous and wasteful.
http://www.reason.com/0303/fe.dc.creation.shtml

[JackSpratts]

Anti-piracy efforts could increase iPod, MP3 player prices
Dennis Sellers

If the Canadian Copyright Board anti-piracy plan goes through, the price of iPods would increase by 33 percent, according to a BusinessWeek Online article. The board is considering a plan to raise the levy on every CD-R sold from 21 cents to 59 cents, as well place a levy on the hard drives found in MP3 players. Twenty-five other countries, including most of the European Union (news - web sites), have introduced similar plans.

The Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) (RIAA) blames a two-year plummet in CD sales on music piracy involving the downloading of music and "burn your own" CDs. The RIAA says that CD sales slid 7.2 percent in the first half of 2002, an ongoing trend.

However, not everyone agrees. In fact, some even hold the view that the RIAA is presenting a misleading view of CD sales trends to bolster its ongoing war against music pirates. For instance, George Ziemann, a musician and the owner of the MacWizards Music production company, reasons that sales may be down because the music industry released 27,000 new titles in 2001, a 25 percent drop from the high of 38,900 in 1999.

However, the RIAA claims it hasn't released an official tally of annual new releases since 1999. On the other hand, the research firm Nielsen SoundScan said new releases in 2001 totaled around 31,734, still a 20.3 percent drop, BusinessWeek Online reports.

The article adds that other factors may also be contributing to the CD sales slump. From 1999 to 2001, the average price of a CD rose 7.2 percent, from $13.04 to $14.19; during the same time consumer inflation was virtually flat. And the hefty sales of DVD players and discs offers competition to CDs, especially when you consider that the cost for DVD disc with a movie and soundtrack isn't substantially higher than that for a soundtrack-only CD.

Internet piracy is "undoubtedly" affecting the music business, but "it seems irresponsible for music-industry officials to present these sales statistics as proof that piracy is overwhelmingly responsible for the industry's woes while conveniently ignoring the economic and technological context that puts those numbers in perspective," BusinessWeek Online concludes.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp..._player_prices

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Portable OGG Player Soon
Emmett Plant
Press Release

Hey, folks! I just got back from Chicago, where I signed an agreement with Digital Innovations, creators and producers of the Neuros Digital Audio Computer.

What does this mean?

It means Vorbis support for a portable player. It means Linux interoperability for a portable player that's supported by the manufacturer, not an after-market hack supported by some guy in Johannesburg with a dialup connection and a copy of emacs. It means that you'll be able to go out and buy a portable audio device that will play Vorbis and support Linux at your local CompUSA.
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/portables.html

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Bertelsmann, in the dock over Napster investment, may have to sue itself.

Bertelsmann, the German media giant, has been slapped with a E16bn (USD17bn) lawsuit that claims the company’s funding of defunct P2P file-swapping music service Napster means it has aided music piracy.

According to Reuters, the suit has been issued by both music publishers and songwriters, including songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller who wrote such mega-hits as ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Stand By Me’. The plaintiffs are seeking class action status for their lawsuit, which would enable members of Harry Fox Agency, the rights organisation representing 27,000 music publishers, to join the action.

The plaintiffs claim that Bertelsmann’s investment in Napster, which amounted to E103m in the form of a secured loan, extended the life of P2P service, making Bertelsmann guilty of “willful participation ... in the widespread infringement of copyrighted music works."

A potential ironic twist in the lawsuit underlines the madness of the current digital rights saga. BMG, one of the world’s top five music companies, is owned by Bertelsmann - yet is also a member of the Harry Fox Agency and would theoretically join the lawsuit if the case became a class action. Under US law, BMG would have the opportunity to opt out of suing its parent company. However, lawyers familiar with such cases have speculated that this would make BMG vulnerable to separate lawsuits issued by its own songwriters.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=15054

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French postal service to become ISP

La Poste, the French post office and the second largest postal service company in Europe, is to launch its
broadband internet products March 17.

At the European level, La Poste is fairly late to the game, as many European postal services already offer broadband internet access – in particular, Deutsche Post, with its T-ISDN xxl product range long since having been introduced to the German market.

The state-owned postal company enters a tough and highly competitive market. La Poste will offer high and low broadband (512 Kbits at E44/month and 1024 Kbits at E72/month). More than 13 other intenet providers already offer similar, and sometimes cheaper, ADSL products.

La Poste is launching its service on ‘internet festival day’ - a nation-wide event to promote the use of new technologies and the internet.

La Poste aims in particular to attract users of its already existing internet products (free e-mail, financial services).
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=15085

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Lexmark wins injunction in DMCA case
David Becker

Printer maker Lexmark International Group won a preliminary injunction Thursday in efforts to prevent a company from selling computer chips that allow toner cartridges to be recycled.

Judge Karl Forester of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky issued the pretrial injunction against Static Control Components, a small Sanford, N.C.- based company that sells printer parts and other business supplies.

The order prohibits the company from selling its Smartek chip. When installed in compatible Lexmark printers, the chips allow the printers to use cheaper recycled toner cartridges that would otherwise be rejected by the printer's sensors

Lexmark filed the suit late last year, alleging the Smartek chip violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the dismantling of devices intended to protect intellectual property rights.

Printer makers have employed a variety of technological means in recent years to undercut the market for recycled toner and ink cartridges, which typically sell for much less than original items. Most printer makers sell their printers at or near cost, making their profit from sales of supplies.

Lexmark is the No. 2 seller of printers in the United States, behind Hewlett-Packard, and manufactures printers under the Dell Computer brand.

Anti-circumvention language in the DMCA has been a foundation for a number of recent copyright actions, including the Justice Department's crackdown earlier this week on a site distributing "mod chips" for Microsoft's Xbox video game console.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-990501.html?tag=fd_top

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"We never contemplated" cases such as Lexmark's when the DMCA was written, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys) said last week at a Silicon Valley panel.
Media Copyright Law Put to Unexpected Uses
Companies are using legislation meant to restrain Web piracy to try to shut down rivals.
David Streitfeld

Under pressure from the entertainment industry, Congress passed a bill in 1998 to restrain Internet piracy. The law made it illegal to break the digital locks shielding a piece of intellectual property -- an electronic book, say, or a CD or DVD.

Just as Congress hoped, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is proving a potent weapon. The recording industry, for example, is successfully using the law to force an Internet service provider to surrender the name of an alleged pirate.

But Hollywood isn't the only industry that can wield this sword. Companies that have nothing to do with the entertainment world have discovered the law's broad reach.

Dow Chemical Co. used the DMCA to shut down a Web site that attacked the company. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other retailers invoked it to remove the details of forthcoming sales from a site for bargain hunters.

Apple Computer Inc. cited the DMCA to stop one of its dealers from producing and selling software that allowed Apple's new DVD-burning technology to be used on earlier models of its Macintosh computers. Apple didn't explain its motivation, but commentators noted that upgraded older machines meant fewer sales of new Macs.

"The DMCA started with the noblest of intentions, but it is becoming the bright shiny new toy of enterprises looking for a way to stifle competition and to control what they might consider unfavorable information," said Mike McGuire, a policy analyst with research firm GartnerG2.

If the DMCA isn't modified, intellectual property experts warn, companies could claim violations when competitors made compatible products that linked up with their own. The result, they say, would encourage monopolies and severely curtail consumer choice.

"We never contemplated" cases such as Lexmark's when the DMCA was written, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys) said last week at a Silicon Valley panel that examined the law.

Another panelist, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), took a more critical view of Lexmark, saying she didn't intend to buy any of its printers. "There is a marketplace role in this," Lofgren said, suggesting consumers "march with their feet."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,4074563.story

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Studios hot to plug that analog hole
At issue is how to save anti-copying signals when they are converted from digital to analog.
Jon Healey

Trying to plug another potential hole in the anti-piracy dike, Hollywood studios have started a new round of private meetings with high-tech companies and consumer-electronics manufacturers to explore ways to stop unauthorized recordings.

This time, the issue is how to preserve anti-copying signals on a digital television show, online video or DVD when converted from digital to analog.

That kind of conversion, which has to happen before a digital program can be sent to the vast majority of TV sets, is inherently fatal to digital copy- protection techniques.

Years from now, when consumers have digital TVs that connect digitally to set-top boxes and recorders, the potential problem goes away. In the meantime, the studios' fear is that the mixture of analog and digital devices in homes will allow their movies and premium TV programs to be copied digitally and distributed freely via the Internet.

If that happens on a global scale, as it has in the music industry, the studios worry that they would lose the ability to sell programs to syndicators, overseas broadcasters and DVD buyers -- in other words, much of what they collect from a program after its first airing.

Some participants in the group, whose co-chairmen are from Philips Electronics, Microsoft Corp. and AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. unit, scoff at such dire predictions, arguing that today's Internet connections are too slow to enable widespread video piracy.

Nevertheless, there's no shortage of movies and TV shows already available for free online to those who know where to look for them. For example, numerous episodes from the first two seasons of HBO's "Six Feet Under" and a copy of the unreleased DVD version of "The Hours" are up for grabs from online sites that cater to video pirates.

"For those people who do suggest that audio-visual files are impractical to send over the Internet because of the size of the file and the speed of current Internet connections, here is a cautionary tale," said Andrew G. Setos, president of engineering at News Corp.'s Fox Group. "Ten years ago it took eight hours to download a song. Now it takes seconds."

The Analog Reconversion Discussion Group, as the inter-industry collective is called, says its purpose is simply to identify technological tools that may be relevant to the piracy issue. It's not supposed to select or even recommend any technologies, and it won't address such thorny policy questions as which programs can be protected and how severe the limits on copying can be.

Nor is the group operating under any timetable. Nonetheless, the studios are eager for results, and they warn that the group risks being irrelevant if it doesn't act promptly -- particularly with some members of Congress eager to legislate on piracy and digital TV.

Other participants, meanwhile, are wary of how Hollywood might use whatever findings come out of the group. Representatives of consumer groups and the computer industry, in particular, don't want the studios to characterize the group's work as setting the stage for the government to mandate anti- piracy technology in a sweeping array of devices.

Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Federation, a group that advocates civil liberties online, said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act puts the burden on Hollywood to protect its programs. But the studios' anti-piracy initiatives would shift the burden onto manufacturers so that "whenever you make anything technical, you have to go and ask them, 'How do I design this so that it protects your interests?' "
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...2Dt echnology

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Microsoft backs DVD rewritable group
Richard Shim

Microsoft is taking a more active role in developing one of the formats in the heated DVD rewritable debate.

The DVD+RW Alliance announced late Monday that Microsoft had joined its ranks, adding that the software giant will also have a seat on its policy-setting team with representatives from Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi Chemical/Verbatim, Philips, Ricoh, Sony, Thomson and Yamaha. The DVD+RW Alliance is a group of companies that promotes and develops the DVD+RW format.

The rival DVD Forum, which includes Apple Computer, Hitachi, NEC, Pioneer, Samsung and Sharp, advocates the DVD-RAM, DVD-R and DVD-RW formats. The two sides have been competing against one another to push their formats as the dominant ones in the market.

The move by Microsoft is not exactly a big surprise. Last year, Microsoft demonstrated software at its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference that supported the DVD+RW format in its next version of Windows. Microsoft also supports DVD-RAM in Windows.

Microsoft's more active role in the DVD+RW format could prove important in determining the dominant format in a long-running battle for market share.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-985787.html

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A secret war
Spike in "spyware" accelerates arms race

EarthLink's technical support staff handles a variety of problems: broken networks, corrupted files, coffee spills--and, increasingly over the past few months, bitter complaints from subscribers about "spyware" and "adware."

Those persistent types of programs, frequently operating on computers without owners' knowledge, have spread quickly in the last year, evolving as rapidly as anti-spyware software has been able to find them. EarthLink executives estimate that 40 percent to 50 percent of the Internet service provider's subscribers have running on their machines some kind of advertising or more-malicious program, which often monitors their behavior and sends the data back to the software's parent company.

The level of complaints has risen high enough that EarthLink says it's finally looking for an official spyware-killer to distribute to its angry customers.

"That's usually not what they've originally called to report, but when they find out (the source of their problem), that's what causes the most emotional reaction," said Jim Anderson, EarthLink's vice president for product development. "They feel that their trust has been broken."

EarthLink's move toward spyware-hunting marks just one new front in a bitter war over programs that sneak onto hard drives. Security companies say that the incidence of so-called spyware, adware, sneakware and other varieties of surreptitious software is climbing dramatically, adding that the most irritating of the bunch are becoming even more difficult to stop--or even identify.

These types of programs had been available for years but became more common as free file- swapping services such as Kazaa and Imesh began bundling these ad-supported programs with their software to help pay their bills. Today, many programs are automatically installed when a person views an unsolicited HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) e-mail or visits Web pages that activate a "drive-by download."
http://news.com.com/2009-1023-985524.html

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Promise of intelligent networks, radio peering
Mark Ward
US researchers are working on ways to make wireless computer networks organise themselves and manage data traffic levels without any human intervention.

Computer scientists at Intel are developing mesh networking technologies that can automatically work out the best route for data as demand changes or devices join and leave the system. The researchers believe such automatic networking systems will be needed as the numbers of devices that can communicate wirelessly proliferate. If the research proves fruitful, homes could soon be studded with small, smart wireless relays that shuffle data around at very high speeds. The ease with which wireless networks can be set up stands in dramatic contrast to the time and trouble it can take to set up computer networks with old-fashioned cables.

There are going to be tens of millions of computers out there with these capabilities and it's going to change the world But welcome as this move to wireless is, researchers at Intel think that we have yet to exploit the full potential of these untethered networks. "The first generation of wireless networks have just tried to replace the wires," said Mike Witteman, head of Intel's network architecture lab.

Mr Witteman said many companies were giving every wireless access points serving a cluster of PCs a direct connection to the corporate backbone. Far better, he said, would be to use outlying wireless access points as relays to pipe traffic from far-flung groups of PCs back in a series of hops to a small number of hubs cabled in to the core network.

Mr Witteman said his group at Intel and others outside the company, were working on so-called mesh network systems that can work out the best way to link all the devices they are in contact with, and find the ideal route for the data the devices are swapping. He said the mesh networking protocols would be of tremendous use in homes or workplaces of the future which would have many different devices all of which can swap data via radio.

"There are going to be tens of millions of computers out there with these capabilities and it's going to change the world," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2787953.stm

Operating systems will soon be obsolete
Robin 'Roblimo' Miller

Linux, Windows, Mac. All have their place, and before long that place will be in history books. The seeds of a new style of computing device have been sown, and as they grow they will inevitably lead to a world where the computer operating system as we know it today is as dead as the planetary transmission that drove the Model T Ford.

Right now, we don't have much in the way of "peer to peer" since we rely on connections through big companies to reach our "peers." when my (wireless) computer talks directly to yours, 300 meters away, and yours can talk to another one 300 meters in the other direction and pass messages back and forth, we'll have real peer to peer networking.

There have been a few stabs in this direction, but none of them have gone very far yet. One device allowed kids to SMS each other directly. It was promoted with a bang a year or so ago, but I haven't heard even a whimper from that vendor since. The technology is here, just not available in consumer form. It will come. It is inevitable. It will also be fought by "content producers" (RIAA, MPAA et al) like mad, because the devices will inevitably be hacked to remove any digital rights management built into them at the factory, and if they can talk directly to each other there will be no way to control files they pass back and forth the way there is now with ISPs and other network operators.

The other big deals that are going to revolutionize computing are improved input and output devices. Right now, the biggest laptop/handheld size bottlenecks are displays and keyboards. Replace our current displays with "eyeglass" LCDs or holographic projections, and replace keyboards with gesturing systems or voice recognition (or both), and we'll see some devices that bring new excitement to the computer industry.
http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/02...23.shtml?tid=1

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AMD Debuts New High-End Athlon Chip

Calling its new release "the world's highest-performing desktop PC processor," chipmaker AMD has unveiled a new Athlon XP 3000+ processor. Featuring the company's new Barton processor core, the 3000+ outperforms competing desktop processors by up to 17 percent in benchmark tests, according to AMD.

"The Barton 3000+ will probably represent one of the better values in the market," Giga Information Group analyst Rob Enderle told NewsFactor. However, he said, because the market was expecting something else -- AMD's next-generation Athlon 64 -- "this won't do for them what it otherwise would have done."

For his part, Aberdeen Group analyst Russ Craig noted that the new chip "is important for [AMD] because it gives them a functionality at the top of the line." He also told NewsFactor that the 3000+ should provide AMD with "a very favorable impact on their bottom line."
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/20710.html

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MusicNet Music Service Launches on AOL
Sue Zeidler

America Online on Tuesday said it would offer MusicNet to its 27 million U.S. subscribers, the broadest appeal yet to a mainstream audience by an online commercial music service.

America Online's entry into the music subscription race is viewed by analysts and even competitors as a positive development for online music services, which have struggled to gain a foothold in an area dominated by file-swapping.

MusicNet is owned by EMI Group Plc, Bertelsmann AG and Warner Music, which, like America Online, is owned by AOL Time Warner, three of the world's largest music companies.

By sending out an invitation to AOL's massive online audience, the hope is that people who have subscribed to AOL, many of which have may not even dabbled with peer-to-peer services like Napster, will sign up, executives said.

"This is the biggest digital music guinea pig to date. The entire music industry is going to watch this one closely for the next six months," said GartnerG2 analyst P.J. McNealy.

"Over the past year, AOL has led the way in making online music mainstream, and we've designed MusicNet service to be easy and convenient," said Kevin Conroy, senior vice president and general manager, AOL Entertainment, a unit of AOL Time Warner .

Music executives and analysts say the industry is in need of a fix as its very foundation of selling CDs is eroding fast due to free song-swapping services like Kazaa.

As of mid-February, sales of U.S. albums were down over 10 percent to date, on the back of a decline in 2002. By contrast, sales of blank CDs jumped 40 percent in 2002.

Job cuts and losses have piled up at many of the large labels, with merger speculation becoming a common topic in the press and around water coolers.

"Peer-to-peer services still thrive, but having AOL come into the picture helps elevate the knowledge of paid services in the marketplace," said Lee Black, analyst with Jupiter Research.

So far, MusicNet and Presslay, another major label-backed service owned by Vivendi Universal and Sony Corp, have lured only an estimated half a million users to date since launching on a variety of other distribution channels late last year. By contrast, Kazaa users number more than 60 million.

Launching with more than 250,000 songs and with new additions each week, MusicNet includes music from all five major labels and exclusive content from some AOL music programs. It lets subscribers find and listen to music, manage their music library and burn CDs.
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle....toryID=2288171


Top 20 Downloads - music

BigChampange


Battling Piracy: Business Students Suggest If You Can’t Beat Them, Do It Better
Penn St. Wins USC Marshall International Case Competition

Recording and movie publishers cannot defeat Internet intellectual property theft by peer-to-peer networks such as KaZaA and other Napster successors, but they can beat them at their own game. Business students from around the globe who took part in a contest examining the entertainment industry’s piracy crisis suggest fighting back with marketing mechanisms that offer greater personalization and convenience.

Eighty business undergraduates representing 20 top schools from 13 countries and four continents competed at the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business as part of the sixth annual Marshall International Case Competition, held February 19-22.

Their challenge: to argue new business models the entertainment industry can use to manage copyrighted works profitably and curb piracy in the new era of the Internet and other digital technologies.

Motion Picture Association co-COO and Executive VP William Murray led a panel of 24 judges comprised of consultants, attorneys and media executives, as well as business, law and communication scholars.

Nearly every team concluded that media publishers needed to break with traditional business models, embrace the new technologies and recognize that consumers want to customize the content they access. They recommended the industry ally and focus efforts on producing higher quality, more differentiated products to migrate consumers away from the often problematic, peer-to-peer networks.

Pennsylvania State University edged out other teams to win the Marshall Cup. Joel Frisch, Andrew Shingle, Jeff Drobish and Heather McGinnis urged building better customer relationships through enhanced content -- emphasizing extra features, product tie-ins and loyalty programs that leverage the collective power of copyright holders.

The common argument: people will pay for something they would otherwise get for free if it were delivered fast, securely and with added value. Penn State students used the example of consumer willingness to pay for pricey bottled water and Starbucks coffee.

Another recommendation suggested bundling anti-piracy software with anti-virus and security enhancing programs.
http://www1.internetwire.com/iwire/r...lease_id=51462

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Microsoft shows no shame with blocking tool
Robert Faletra

The role of all companies is to offer quality products or services and get paid for them in as many ways as possible. Diversification is always good in the business world. When one division is facing tough times, others can pick up the slack. This is just sound management.

This is why we talk about the need for value-add resellers to move into new areas of technology early so they can build expertise. It's also important because higher margins are available early in a new technology cycle.

But what if you developed and sold a product that encouraged a particular behaviour that some could argue has the potential to break some rules, and then attempted to make money at the other end? Before I lose you, let's consider an example. What would we think if tobacco firms diversified by creating lung cancer treatment centres? Or if firearms manufacturers opened trauma units for gunshot wounds?

Microsoft recently announced that it is developing a tool - Windows Media 9 DRM - to help music producers block users' ability to copy songs. But hold on. Isn't this the firm that supplies software to help me manage music on my PC, make copies of CDs or mix and match to create my own?

Interesting business model, don't you think? You seed the market with software that allows users to create CDs by burning songs from their collection or, God forbid, by downloading them from the net. Then, once the practice becomes widespread, you launch software to help music firms block it. Either way, Microsoft makes money. To me, this highlights the problem of when one company has too much control.

This has held true for recording firms for years. In fact, the business models of software developers and music producers are very similar. The recording companies have been able to keep the cost of music artificially high because they have a monopoly on music distribution. Thankfully, the internet has changed this - at least for a while.

I think we all know that the record firms will win this fight. They will twist enough arms and hire enough lawyers so you won't be able to buy and copy a music CD for personal use without paying again somehow.

But by playing both sides, Microsoft doesn't have to worry about who wins. You have to hand it to them on this one.
http://www.vnunet.com/Analysis/1138847

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Internet Rating Service Restates Numbers
Anick Jesdanun

A leading Internet traffic-measuring service says it underestimated workplace Web site audiences by several million visitors and is reissuing numbers for a three-month period.

ComScore Media Metrix sought Monday to portray the revisions as an improvement rather than a correction. But ComScore's main rival, Nielsen/NetRatings, said the change was more extensive than anyone in the business had done.

Such Internet traffic measurements are used, among other things, by advertisers in deciding where to place their ads and by Web sites for bragging rights. News organizations also cite the numbers.

Many analysts and even Web sites have long questioned their accuracy, but they are the best methods currently available for tracking the popularity of individual sites.

The extent of ComScore's revisions varied.

For instance, AOL Time Warner sites saw traffic for December adjusted to 111 million unique U.S. visitors, an increase of 3 percent from 108 million. Google's numbers became 49 million, a 14 percent jump from 43 million.

WeatherBug also lost bragging rights to what one press release described as "the number one source for weather information on the Web." Instead, the honor returns to rival Weather.com.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/techno...opheds%2Dhe d

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Report: AOL in talks to sell music stake

Media giant AOL Time Warner is in preliminary talks about selling a majority stake in its Warner Music Group business to music company EMI Group in a deal likely to be valued at $3 billion to $4 billion, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Sources close to both companies said last month that EMI had been holding "informal talks" with Warner Music about joining forces after a previous attempt to merge three years ago ran afoul of European regulators.
http://news.com.com/2110-1023-985642.html

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SHARES OF SONIC SOLUTIONS SOAR ON AOL PACT

Shares of Sonic Solutions rose as much as 24 percent yesterday after America Online agreed to license Sonic's technology for creating compact discs and DVD's. AOL is the world's biggest Internet service, with 27 million customers in the United States. MusicNet on AOL, a music-subscription service that AOL introduced yesterday, will include Sonic's AuthorScript program, which burns CD's. MusicNet subscribers will be asked to pay as much as $17.95 a month for access to 250,000 songs by performers from all five of the world's biggest music companies. People who buy tracks will be able to burn them directly to a CD. Shares of Sonic rose 53 cents, or 13 percent, to $4.63. The stock had dropped 31 percent in the last year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/business/27TBRF1.html

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Microsoft Gives P2P a Chance with SDK
Thor Olavsrud
Moving to add support for decentralized applications to Windows XP, Microsoft (Quote, Company Info) Wednesday unveiled a beta of its Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Software Development Kit (SDK).

The SDK features updated Windows XP application programming interfaces (APIs) and enhancements to the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) networking stack, intended to help developers leverage P2P infrastructure to create decentralized applications and services, like collaboration and data sharing features, for business and customer scenarios.

"By supporting both decentralized and centralized models of computing and information sharing, Microsoft can best address the high-level needs of its business customers, who need to be more agile, more flexible and more responsive to customer needs," said Jack Ozzie, vice president of developer services at desktop collaboration software maker Groove Networks. "the enhanced peer-to-peer support for Windows XP will enable developers to more easily build decentralized applications."

The APIs add support for scalable P2P name resolution, efficient multipoint communication, the creation and management of persistent P2P groups, and distributed data management. Microsoft said that the APIs described by the SDK will allow developers to focus on applications and not low-level plumbing required to support most P2P scenarios.

The IPv6 enhancements include support for Network Address Translation (NAT) traversal and an IPv6 firewall.

The SDK and the associated Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Networking Update capitalize on the capabilities of IPv6 to provide support for automatic tunneling, which allows IPv6 communication over existing IPv4 networks. It also allows NAT devices -- which are typically used in a home where a single public IPv4 address is shared among multiple computers with private IP addresses -- to communicate with each other without forcing the users to manually configure them.

The SDK is available for download http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...winxppeer.asp. The company said it expects to make the final release of the SDK and the Peer-to-Peer Networking Update later in the year.
http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/1609241

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Over half of American teenagers file-share, report

The figures are not going to be welcomed by the music industry – across the Atlantic, a study has found that over
half of American teenagers had downloaded audio material from peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, such as Kazaa, by the end of 2002.

According to the survey from global marketing firm Ipsos, nearly one-tenth (9 per cent) of US teens had downloaded MP3 and other audio files over the past 30 days. Ands it’s not only the imagination of adolescents that has been caught by digital downloading – almost one-fifth of all the Americans over 12 years old had used file- sharing services, translating to about 40m people.

The news will come as a dispiriting blow to the record industry which has recently been stepping-up its campaign to curb downloading from unlicensed sources. Despite legal campaigns against the largest internet-enabled corporations, ISPs, individual consumers and file-sharing services, the war against ‘piracy’ would seem to have been waged to little effect.

As well as file-sharing, the Ipsos study revealed record levels of CD-burning. One-quarter of all Americans aged 12 and older currently own a PC-based CD recorder/burner with more than one in ten Americans admitting to burning a pre-recorded CD from someone else. Over the past year, sales of blank CD-Rs have also overtaken pre-recorded CDs for the first time.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=15128

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House Panel Criticizes FCC Over New Telephone Rules
Lawmakers say regulations on Net access and local network leasing conflict.
Jube Shiver Jr.

Members of a House panel lashed out Wednesday at the Federal Communications Commission for approving telephone regulations that some lawmakers blasted as confusing and anti-competitive.

In their second grilling on Capitol Hill in six weeks, the five commissioners faced nearly five hours of questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee's telecommunications subcommittee.

Some lawmakers were upset with the FCC's 3-2 vote Feb. 20 to deregulate the market for high- speed Internet access while maintaining a requirement that the regional Bell companies lease parts of their local networks to competitors such as AT&T Corp. and WorldCom Inc. at deep discounts.

Singled out for criticism was Republican Commissioner Kevin J. Martin, who voted with the commission's two Democrats to defeat a competing proposal by FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell.

Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.) questioned Martin's party loyalty and his adherence to conservative, free-market principles. Tauzin asked why the FCC handed control over local phone policy to the states.

"You've said you want limited government, and yet you've taken a deregulatory commission and you've given that authority to 51 regulatory-minded commissions," he said.

Martin responded that he believed that only state regulators were in a position to assess competition in local phone markets.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...s%2Dtechnology

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Great article: Artificial stupidity

The saga of Hugh Loebner and his search for an intelligent bot has almost everything: Sex, lawsuits and feuding computer scientists. There's only one thing missing: Smart machines.
John Sundman

All Hugh Loebner wanted to do was become world famous, eliminate all human toil, and get laid a lot. And he was willing to put up lots of good money to do so. He's a generous, fun-loving soul who likes to laugh, especially at himself. So why does everybody dislike him so much? Why does everybody give him such a hard time?

Actually, not everybody does dislike him. He is beloved among sex workers, of whose rights he is a tireless advocate. Loebner also has friends, or at least people willing to hang out with him for short intervals, among the eccentric group of self-tutored hackers and robot builders who participate in the annual competition for the Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence.

Since 1989 Loebner has spent, by his account, more than $200,000 and a thousand hours of unpaid time to hasten the arrival of intelligent machines. He has set aside a gold medal and $100,000 in cash for the creator of the first machine that can pass for human. In the meantime he gives out annual prizes for programs that come closest to a long-sought holy grail in the artificial intelligence community: passing the Turing test.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...one/index.html

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Congress targets P2P campus pirates
Declan McCullagh

Key politicians chided universities on Wednesday for not doing enough to limit peer-to- peer piracy, calling unauthorized copying a federal crime that should be punished appropriately.

Members of the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees copyright law said at a hearing that peer-to-peer piracy was a crime under a 1997 federal law, but universities continued to treat file-swapping as a minor infraction of campus disciplinary codes.

"If on your campus you had an assault and battery or a murder, you'd go down to the district attorney's office and deal with it that way," said Rep. William Jenkins, R-Tenn.

"While I'm sympathetic to the young people, they're breaking the law," warned Rep. Maxine Waters, D- Calif. "Until the university or this committee is going to do something about it, we're wasting everyone's time."

The hearing illustrated the importance that the new chairman of the panel, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, places on addressing Internet piracy. Wednesday's gathering, which included testimony from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and two university administrators, was the first subcommittee meeting on courts, the Internet and intellectual property since last year and marked Smith's inaugural hearing as chairman.

Under a 1997 law called the No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act), it is a federal crime to willfully share copies of copyrighted products such as software, movies or music with anyone if the value of the work exceeds $1,000 or if the person hopes to receive files in return. Violations are punishable by one year in prison, or if the value tops $2,500, "not more than five years" in prison.

So far the Justice Department has not tried to use the NET Act to imprison peer-to-peer pirates. Last August, however, 19 members of Congress wrote to Attorney General John Ashcroft asking him "to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass-copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks."

On Wednesday, members of the committee expressed frustration that no criminal prosecutions had taken place yet and universities have not been sufficiently aggressive. "We are reaching the end of our ropes. There is a consensus that has emerged," said Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y. "Virtual unanimity should be a message to those testifying today that we are reaching a point at a bipartisan level that we want to stop this illegal activity."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-986160.html

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I’m Not Making This Up…

NetAccountability is a Christ-centered, 501.c3 non-profit organization, built and maintained by a team of Christian men that have come together in an effort to provide the first line of defense against online temptation. The ministry is rapidly becoming a central knowledge base for information and resources on the topics of purity and accountability.
Press Release

NetAccountability announces today Version 2.0 of the popular Internet accountability software.

NetAccountability provides a software service that facilitates real, human accountability between two or more people regarding Internet usage. This robust, patented solution, found at www.netaccountability.com, provides a highly secure software application designed to help men, women, families and ministry leaders enable purity and accountability.

The NetAccountability solution is a secure software application that resides on a user’s computer and monitors Internet traffic. If the software detects that a user visits an inappropriate website (i.e. pornographic content), it keeps a secure record of the site with a time, date and URL stamp. Then, the user’s NetAccountability partner accesses a secure online report of their Internet usage.

Chuck Swindoll of Insight For Living says, “NetAccountability represents the best approach I’ve come across for people who are interested in building personal character and making healthy decisions when it comes to their Internet use.”

The list of leading Christian ministries partnering with NetAccountability grows each week. Salem Broadcasting, New Life Ministry, Every Man’s Ministries, Saddleback Church, Wisdom Works, Joe Dallas, the National Coalition for Protection of Children and Families and Dallas Theological Seminary are all working with NetAccountability to help spread the word.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Pornography is a $10 billion industry in the US. The industry grows exponentially through Internet Pornography. The anonymous and available nature of Internet Pornography is too tempting to avoid for some users. Many who seek electronic solutions to this problem find frustration in the spotty performance of Internet filters due to “black lists” that pornographers outsmart routinely.

NetAccountability is not a filter. NetAccountability believes filters are especially useful for small children. The real difference lies in NetAccountability’s real-time algorithm that rates web content “on the fly” creating real-time “permanent history” of sites with questionable content.

“We do not block sites. Rather, we provide accountability partners a list of permanent surfing records. The goal is not avoidance of bad content. The Internet is a great place to explore, but just like rock-climbing or white water rafting, it is important to have a buddy with you to ensure safe adventure,” says CEO, Scott Covington.

Says Ministry Partner Director, Lance Loveland, “We have created a safer way to surf by building an effective software tool that provides relationship-based accountability for online behavior. It will assist in healthy life-change and lead people to view more appropriate content on the Internet.”

Version 2.0 will add new functionality to the tool that debuted in October of 2001 when Chuck Swindoll conducted a 10- minute announcement of the software release. The new features will include: advanced reporting, accountability question lists, scheduled reminders, user customizable set-up, expanded group sign-up and additional tamper-proof features including uninstall alerts. Future software will include features for expanded monitoring for: chat, instant messaging, NNTP, peer-to-peer file sharing.
http://www1.internetwire.com/iwire/r...lease_id=51495

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Wednesday in Congress. SENATE: Committees: Judiciary -- 10 a.m. Courts, the Internet and intellectual property subc. Peer-to-peer piracy on college campuses. 2141 RHOB. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Feb25.html

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California congresswoman Maxine Waters wants file sharers jailed - implies racism
Penn State president leads group against pirating

Lawmakers urged university leaders Wednesday to crack down on students who illegally download music and movies from the Internet, and suggested the so-called "P2P pirates" should face criminal penalties.

Peer-to-peer files, like KaZaA, AudioGalaxy and the now-defunct Napster, allow copyrighted CDs and DVDs to be shared and recorded for free off the Web. The entertainment industry has lost millions of dollars as a result of the estimated 2.5 billion unauthorized P2P files downloaded each month, lawmakers said.

Sixteen percent of all P2P files are downloaded by university Internet accounts, said Rep. Lamar Smith, who chaired the hearing in front of the House Judiciary subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property.

"It's unlikely that this amount of file-sharing activity is in furtherance of class assignments," Smith said dryly.

But Penn State University president Graham B. Spanier, who led a discussion among academics over how to curb P2P piracy, resisted suggestions that students who illegally download copyrighted material should be turned over to police.

Spanier likened the piracy to cheating, and said Penn State students are given three warnings to stop downloading large files off the Web before they face expulsion.

Mindful of students' privacy rights, Penn State does not examine the contents of downloaded files, but instead limits the size of material pulled from the Internet _ and large files generally consist of P2P material, Spanier said.

He said he did not know of any Penn State students who have been expelled for downloading P2P files.

"We have told them it's wrong for them to be doing what they are doing," Spanier said. "A lot of students will cheat if they're in the classroom and nobody cares whether they're cheating, and I think we have a little bit of that kind of phenomena here. It is something they can get away with, and therefore they do."

That did not placate lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle who said that P2P pirates should be treated like any other person who steals.

"If it's against the law, it's against the law," said Rep. Melissa Hart, R-Pa.

Added Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.: "If this was taking place in an inner-city, where kids were basically stealing other people's intellectual property, you'd see some movement. ... They're breaking the law. And it's a double standard."

Sales of DVDs and CDs dropped by an estimated 20 percent between 2001 and 2002 _ a decline that began in 1999, before the slump in the national economy, said Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif. The loss most hurts struggling artists who depend on the royalties they earn off sales, said Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.

"These are not the Britney Spears of the world," Weiner said, taking a jab at the pop goddess. "These are the people who help Britney Spears write her ... I guess they're called songs."
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?n...465812&rfi= 6

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Virtual' War Protest Ties Up Senate Phones
Alan Elsner, Reuters

Hundreds of thousands of opponents of war against Iraq called and faxed U.S. leaders on Wednesday in a "virtual march on Washington," jamming the White House switchboard and many congressional telephone lines for several hours.

Coordinated by the Win Without War Coalition, an umbrella protest group, the action aimed to direct at least one telephone call and fax to every U.S. senator every minute throughout the day. Organizers said they were far exceeding that goal.

The White House switchboard was also flooded and most callers heard a message that "all circuits are busy."

Tom Andrews, a former Democratic representative from Maine who is running the organization, said more than 500,000 people had signed up on the Internet to take part and a half a million more were also expected to participate without registering on the group's Web site (Moveon.org).

"We have hundreds of thousands of calls and faxes that we know are going in. It's a first-of-its-kind protest and a tremendous success already," he said. "People are making their voices heard loud and clear -- don't invade and don't occupy Iraq."

The Web site had a running total of what it said was the number of calls placed. As of 5 p.m. EST the number was almost 400,000. The Web site was flashing the names of individual protesters above a map of the United States with quotes from e- mails sent to the headquarters and to lawmakers. Each comment included the name and hometown of the protester.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2294501

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Hollywood, software firms aim at pirates
Stefanie Olsen

Two major trade groups filed on Thursday a slew of civil lawsuits against people they claim were selling pirated copies of films and software via online auction sites.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Hollywood's chief trade association, brought 12 cases against individuals who were allegedly auctioning pirated editions of popular films including "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" and "Die Another Day." The Business Software Alliance (BSA), whose members include Adobe and Apple, filed a handful of similar cases against people it said were selling stolen or illegally copied pieces of software.

Cases were filed in cities across the United States, including New York, Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles.

The MPAA's charges are part of the group's "Tactics for Auction Piracy" (TAP) initiative, a response to what the MPAA estimates was a near doubling last year in the number of auction sales devoted to pirated films. In December, the trade group kicked off the campaign by filing at least nine similar cases in cities around the country; a representative for the trade group said these cases were progressing well.

"It is an unfortunate reality that consumers may be sorely disappointed, finding that the DVD or video that they paid for is not a bargain at all, and that it is, in fact, of a much lower quality than what they expected," MPAA president and CEO Jack Valenti said in a statement. "It is my hope that the TAP II initiative will serve to help protect unsuspecting customers."

Similarly, the BSA is aiming to staunch lost sales from stolen copies of software. It says mail-order piracy is one of the growing contributors to an annual loss of $11 billion in sales to software publishers globally.

To catch the alleged offenders, the groups purchased advertised products in auctions and examined them to see if they were illegal copies. The MPAA said that in its suits it had targeted people it claimed were repeat offenders.

"Consumers...need to watch out for spam offers and online vendors at otherwise reputable Internet sites such as eBay," said Bob Kruger, vice president of enforcement for BSA. "The actions...are aimed at signaling to vendors that selling pirated software online is asking for a lawsuit."

The groups urged consumers to avoid buying pirated copies of software and films by watching for titles that are "too new to be true,"--or too recent to be legitimately offered for wide public sale yet--and by carefully reading labels.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-990489.html

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Feds Shut Down Piracy Website

The Justice Department said Wednesday it has seized a Web site used to sell modification, or "mod" chips used to sidestep copyright protections built into game consoles, such as Microsoft's Xbox and Sony Playstation 2, giving users unlimited play time on pirated games. The department said David M. Rocci, 22, of Blacksburg, Va., sold approximately 450 Enigmah mod chips, making about $28,000, through his iSONEWS.com Web site. The chips were imported illegally from the United Kingdom and were designed specifically to be used for the Xbox console, the DOJ said. On Dec. 21, Rocci pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to import, market and sell the mod chips. He reached an agreement with the government to surrender the Web site. As of this week, visitors to the site are greeted by DOJ and U.S. Customs seals. "The domain and Web site were surrendered to U.S. law enforcement pursuant to a federal prosecution and felony plea agreement for conspiracy to violate criminal copyright laws," the message on the site says. "The Department of Justice and federal law enforcement will continue to investigate and prosecute individuals and groups that violate the federal criminal copyright laws at home and abroad," it warns. Sentencing is set for March 7, and Rocci could face up to five years in prison and a $500,000 fine, the department said.
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=...7-084053-9070r

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P2P 'soldier's radio' bridging gaps
Dan Caterinicchia

While Defense Department and industry officials are developing the Joint tactical Radio System (JTRS) over the next few years, battlefield personnel are using the "soldier's radio," developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to communicate and enhance situational awareness.

JTRS uses software-centric radios that can be programmed to patch users into various radio frequencies. Initial production is expected in 2005, according the prime contractor, Boeing Co.

But while DOD users are waiting for JTRS to move from the drawing board to the battlefield, soldiers are using DARPA's Small Unit Operations: Situational Awareness System (SUOSAS), said A. Michael Andrews II, the Army's deputy assistant secretary for research and technology. He made his remarks Feb. 26 here at the Association of the U.S. Army's winter symposium.

The DARPA networking project has been designed to establish secure, reliable wireless communication for soldiers on the battlefield while keeping overhead low for real-time communication. The system uses mobile peer-to-peer nodes as intermediaries across long distances to coordinate voice and data communications.

SUOSAS is intended to improve communications among soldiers in restrictive environments, such as urban areas or mountainous regions. Each soldier wears a self-powered computer/communications device that serves as a peer-to-peer node.

Combined with mobile relay/router/beacons and tactical sensors, the result is a self-configuring, distributed information network. And because less power is needed for node-to-node communications, the system is less susceptible to detection and jamming than existing communications systems, according to DARPA.

DARPA Director Anthony Tether said SUOSAS helps meet DOD's goal of establishing robust, self-forming networks on the battlefield that enable commanders and soldiers to know where everyone is.

The DARPA solution is far less likely to be jammed than the heavily used Global Positioning System, which enables a person to determine his or her precise location on the Earth via devices that receive signals from a constellation of 24 satellites, said Philip Brandler, director of the Natick, Mass., Soldier Center at the Army's Soldier and Biological Chemical Command.
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2003...s-02-27-03.asp

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Cyber-Blackbeards Beware
Cynthia L. Webb

Uncle Sam is getting serious about piracy. No, not the parrot-toting knaves of the high seas, but their modern-day broadband namesakes. The latest development: The Justice Department this week seized a domain name and Web site that traded tips and products about copyrighted movies and games. Officials are using the case to warn other potential pirates about the risks of swapping illegal files and copyrighted products on the Internet.

The www.isonews.com site -- described by the U.S. government as dedicated to online copyright piracy -- now links to a message from the Justice Department with information on the case and this ominous message: "ISO News is now the property of the U.S. government." The domain's transfer to government control is part of a plea agreement with the site's 22-year-old owner, David M. Rocci of Blacksburg, Va. Rocci pleaded guilty in December to conspiring with others to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by importing, marketing and selling modification, or "mod," computer chips. The chips can bypass copyright protection mechanisms in Xbox and other online gaming devices.

According to federal officials, Rocci sold 450 Enigmah Mod Chips, taking in $28,000. "Because the Web site was 'facilitating' the crime and because Justice Department officials wanted to send a message to other violators, they came up with the idea of seizing the site. Officials said this could be a harbinger of enforcement actions," The Washington Post reported.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Feb27.html

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They don’t like “Free”
Singingfish Multimedia Search Engine Launches Paid Inclusion
Press Release

Singingfish, the search engine that holds a Google-like dominance in providing multimedia searching to audio-visual players, is launching a paid inclusion program this week.

You may not have heard of Singingfish, but if you've ever searched for streaming audio or video files using the Real Player or Microsoft's Windows Media Player, you've used their services. The company handles over more than a million multimedia queries per day, in large part thanks to distribution deals with these two streaming media giants.

Unlike many of the popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems like Kazaa, Singingfish searches only for legitimate, legal streaming media files. The company estimates that about 10% of all websites host at least one streaming media file. And Alexa Research estimates that the amount of streaming media on the Internet grows by more than 10 fold every six months.

Singingfish's paid inclusion program is designed for the growing number of web sites offering streaming media files, to help make their content more easily found found by searchers.

Similar to the paid inclusion programs offered by AltaVista, FAST, and other major text-based search engines, Singingfish's program not only offers a greater level of control over submissions, but also overcomes problems inherent in the web crawlers that are used to find online content.

Singingfish's crawler works in much the same way as text-based search engine crawlers. However, it is tuned to scour the web for audio and video files, largely ignoring text. This single-minded focus on streaming media presents a problem, however: While standard crawlers have no difficulty finding and indexing text on web page, Singingfish's crawler can't "see" or "hear" the contents of multimedia files.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...ngingfish.html

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Let’s see: the RIAA says P2Ps made pop sales drop 9%. So then P2Ps must’ve made country sales go up 12%!

With country records flying off the shelves, Music Row executives say Nashville has earned more attention than it's gotten from the industry's leading advocate.

They've invited representatives from the Recording Industry Association of America to town next week to discuss policy and get to know country and Christian label executives.

The idea is to create a direct line from Nashville to the RIAA, which is headquartered in Washington, said Fletcher Foster, senior vice president of marketing for Capitol Nashville. Most decisions that affect Nashville labels and artists are made by corporate parents in New York and Los Angeles, and Music Row doesn't want to be overlooked, he said.

Last year, when overall album sales were down almost 9%, country sales rose 12.2%, and Christian and gospel music held steady.

Among those coming to Nashville next Thursday are RIAA president Cary Sherman and Joel Flatow, head of its West Coast office.

The RIAA, music's leading trade group, is waging aggressive legal and political battles against copyright infringement and digital downloading, including the federal court fight that shut down the online free music sharing sites Napster and Aimster.
http://www.tennessean.com/business/a...nt_ID=29389423

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Digital Wrongs
Sonia Arrison

Silicon Valley's movers and shakers gathered in Santa Clara last week to debate intellectual property issues and demonstrate how laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) stifle innovation in the technology sector.

The "digital rights summit," hosted by Intel, the AEA, and Digitalconsumer.org, brought together a diverse group of high-profile tech executives, lawyers, and activists. "This isn't just about music and movies," said Joe Krause, co-founder of Digitalconsumer.org, "it affects the entire technology industry."

Krause put together a compelling panel of executives and venture capitalists to tell their stories of how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has put a chill - or, worse, a stop - to their business plans. Perhaps most memorable was the case of Static Control Components, a producer of replacement toner cartridges for a number of printers, including Lexmark.

Static Control Components reverse engineered the code that instructs Lexmark's printers to print only with Lexmark cartridges so that Static Control's replacement cartridges would work. Lexmark filed a lawsuit claiming that this violates the DMCA because it "circumvents the technological measure" that the printer uses to verify the cartridge is from Lexmark.

The DMCA was meant to protect music and movies from being stolen, but as William London, Static Control's general counsel, complains, "this has nothing to do with movies or music, but solely to do with interoperability of hardware." Indeed, this case has attracted attention from many quarters, including the automotive parts industry where DMCA-protected chips could easily multiply and these types of suits could become commonplace.

Other speakers at the summit discussed how investment in new technologies often disappears because of legal fears. Hank Berry, former Napster CEO and partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, said that because of the potential vulnerabilities under the DMCA, his firm recently refused to fund a new technology that would allow music streaming for cell phones. But the stories didn't stop there.

During the break, many of the attendees recounted similar tales, creating a frenetic atmosphere that harkened back to the days of the technology boom. Only this time, the energy won't go into creating new products, it will be spent fighting the unintended consequences of a law that stifles innovation in a sector that's critical for America's success. And it's not only the tech industry that suffers.

The entire economy is experiencing losses as a result of the DMCA chill. As SonicBlue's CEO Greg Ballard noted, the $3 million his company spends every quarter to defend itself against the movie studios and television companies could have been used to hire 120 new employees or make investments for new innovations. So what's the answer?
http://www.techcentralstation.com/10...D=1051-022703A

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They think they’ve seen evil of a kind. It’s like Bible Belters in the face of the sexual revolution. It’s the end of civilization. It’s everyone’s reason for being that’s under attack. It really isn’t just business.
Stop, Thief!
Michael Wolff

There’s an extraordinary, almost frightening passion in the way film and music executives talk about people downloading their products for free. It’s a moral position. Their fervor is genuine. These normally pretty bland, very business-languagey guys—suits—become incredibly intense and bent out of shape on the file-sharing issue. The ferocity of their counter-offensive—in lawsuits, in government lobbying, in semi-demented technological-protection schemes—also seems as personal.
This is real pain—and real fury.

The disconnect here occurs on several levels. For one thing, it is very strange to have entertainment executives —generally regarded as among the most amoral, conniving, and venal of all businessmen—taking the high ground. And yet here they are delivering heartfelt defenses of artists, and even art itself—they see the very essence of the nation’s cultural patrimony at risk. And you really don’t sense a phony or opportunistic note. Rather, these guys actually seem to be losing sleep over this. It’s right and wrong they’re arguing about here. Good character versus a virtual barbarian deluge. They believe, with feeling, that bad or sadly misguided people do this digital pilfering. Every time I get buttonholed—Peter Chernin, the COO of News Corp., gave me a very convincing what-for not long ago—I find myself feeling incredibly guilty and resolve to have a word with my children about this whole downloading issue.

The other odd thing is that these guys who have built their careers and their industry on trying to give an audience exactly what it wants—no matter how low and valueless and embarrassing—are now standing with a high-church rectitude against the meretricious desires of this same audience. It is a bizarrely out-of-character role: holding the line. Censuring the public. Suing the public! Indeed, branding the great American mass-media audience as a craven and outlaw group.

They don’t see file sharing as just a change in the nature of the transaction: a fundamental, but not unfamiliar, discrepancy between the ask price and the bid price.
But here’s the merciless trend (which obviously has big and heartbreaking implications for weakened media conglomerates): The price of content keeps falling.
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/...ialife/n_8384/

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Good Luck Pals
Opening People's Ears
Press release

People like music for many different and varied reasons. These are often social, habitual, historical or emotional.

But why do we really like the music that we like?

Well, much of what attracts us to a particular song is found in the basic structure of the music. Particular rhythms, changes in key and certain melodic patterns

Polyphonic HMI has developed proprietary music analysis technologies capable of identifying music preferences of a user or the whole current recorded music market and intelligently selecting music to recommend to the user or to release as a single.

Our technology not only allows similarities to be identified between existing successful music and unreleased or unsigned music, but can also use that data to identify emerging trends as the music landscape changes.
http://www.polyphonichmi.com/

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Fans of Classic Amps Find Nirvana in a Chip
Roger Van Bakel

THERE are days when Jeff Slingluff, a sound engineer, feels like a musical archivist, a bit like a latter-day Alan Lomax. The difference is that Mr. Lomax made recordings of vanishing American songs and music styles, whereas Mr. Slingluff seeks to preserve the sounds of vintage guitar amplifiers and fine guitars.

"Many guitar amps that are classics are now 40, 50 years old, and they may not be around in another generation," Mr. Slingluff explained. "Spare parts and replacement vacuum tubes are getting harder to find, and they're not necessarily made to the original specs. So gradually, the authentic sounds of a '65 Vox AC-30 or a '59 Fender Bassman amp will be lost unless we capture them."

And capture them he does, in the sound lab at Line 6, a company in Thousand Oaks, Calif., that pours those sonic particulars into silicon and sells them to guitarists worldwide.

Line 6 uses a technology called modeling to measure the characteristics of a particular vintage amp, from the distortion of its original tubes to the resonance of its speaker cabinet. The company has developed a way to reproduce those measurements in a powerful D.S.P., or digital signal processing, chip that contains models of dozens of classic amps.

That chip is at the heart of Line 6's Pod series of amp simulators.

Pods, which sell for $250 to $400 depending on the version, are burgundy-colored, kidney-bean-shaped boxes that have become many a guitarist's favorite tool for live performance and recording. Players can jack in their instrument, run a cable to a studio mixing board or a live sound system, and have an arsenal of amps at their disposal with the twist of a knob.

Collecting the actual amps can be taxing on the back, the ears and the wallet. Prices of classic amplifiers and replacement tubes have risen sharply in recent years. Even if a musician owned a large assortment of vintage tube gear, keeping the equipment in top shape and transporting it from gig to gig is nobody's idea of fun.

But another advantage of the Pod is that it produces the sought-after creamy distortion of tubes even at neighbor-friendly sound levels.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/te...ts/27guit.html

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University president visits Congress to discuss file sharing
Jeremy R. Cooke

In its push to end online piracy, the entertainment industry should not forget that peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing promises to have valid educational uses as well, Penn State President Graham Spanier told a congressional panel in Washington, D.C., yesterday.

"A technology may exist or be created that can block P2P transactions, but we would be reluctant to embrace technology that would block both legitimate and illegitimate uses indiscriminately," Spanier said.

Universities share with the music and movie industries a concern for the protection of intellectual property, Spanier said. But he said colleges want to guard against restrictions to "the free and open exchange of information that underpins the creativity, vigor and productivity of our education and research programs."
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive...03dnews-01.asp

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Blue collar pay for Gold record sales
The world of finance according to record companies

A look at a mythical rock band's earnings, with actual figures compiled from industry sources:

New York City's hottest new band is Grunthead, a four-piece hard rock group from Maspeth. Because they've got buzz, the band gets a 15% royalty rate, a few points above the usual amount for a new artist.

Its debut, "Gruntastic," goes gold – only 128 of more than 30,000 records reached that level in 2002.

The Gold Record Gross: 500,000 albums sell at $16.98 = $8,490,000 The Grunts' royalty is 15% of retail. That's $1,273,500.

But the Contract calls for "packaging deductions" of 25%, so the gross drops to $6,367,500. Then there's promotional albums and giveaways the labels give to wholesalers, retailers, radio and the press. That's a "free goods" charge of 15%, so the gross drops another to $5,094,000. So, the band's royalty is actually: $764,100. The record company keeps the packaging and "free goods" funds. After collecting a $9.99 wholesale price, it also reaps an additional $829,900. The $3,500,000 balance goes to retailers, assuming they sell the record for list price.

Because the band was hot, they got an advance from the record company of $300,000. They spent $200,000 of that recording the album, which included a $50,000 advance to the producer. They pocketed the remaining $100,000. Additionally, the label spent $100,000 making the band's first video, which got them played on MTV2. The band owes all of this money back to the label.

So the royalty drops to $364,100.

But the band's producer also earned a 4% royalty of $203,760, of which he already received $50,000. So the band has to pay him an additional $153,760, reducing their royalty to $210,340.

After pocketing $310,340 (which includes the remaining $100,000 of the advance), the band has to pay their manager 15%, or $46,551, and give 2% of the total deal, or $101,880, to the power lawyer who got them the deal in the first place. That takes the band down to $161,909.

That's not bad money, but it's split four ways, or $40,477.25 each, about the same as a city sanitation worker with two years' experience, without health benefits, vacation and retirement fund. But with, of course, groupies.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...1p-57008c.html







Until next week,

- js.






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Current Week In Review


Recent WIRs -

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=15292 Feb. 22nd
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=15219 Feb. 15th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=15128 Feb. 8th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=15063 Feb. 1st



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