Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - Feb. 15th, '03

[JackSpratts]

Round Trip

Winter is absolutely, positively refusing to let slip it’s icy claw here in the northeast corner of the refrigerator that is these United States. It’s been one “snow event” and “frigid episode” after another...

Though spring may be far off for some Easter came early to the peer to peer world this week when Soulseek, the most popular of the “unknown centralized P2Ps” today came roaring back to life after silently going down in a copyright dispute. There was much misinformation and rumor mongering during the nine day outage, but it turns out the rumors were closer to the truth than the official word, as is often the case in matters P2P. We were reminded once again of the dangers in relying on ISPs because the one serving Soulseek cut them off after a simple copyright complaint. Soulseek says they didn’t get a chance to present their side of the story or to institute corrective action before the plug was pulled. But back they came. As of this writing they’re up and files are trading as if nothing happened at all, although if it’s this easy to shut them down it’s hard to imagine they’ll be up for very long. I highly recommend the application, especially if you’re fond of acid jazz, techno, trance or new blues. With hotlists, browsing and auto resume it’s a combination of the old Napster and AudioGalaxy (both killed of course by the RIAA). Take a look while this one’s still warm.

Does it really say "three below" on this thing?



Enjoy,

Jack.




Click for current Week In Review.




Verizon Asks Judge to Delay Naming Web Downloader
Reuters

Verizon Communications struggled Thursday to convince a skeptical judge that it should not be forced to reveal the name of a customer alleged to have downloaded more than 600 songs over the Internet.

U.S. District Judge John Bates ordered Verizon last month to give the name of the alleged song-swapper to recording companies who are trying to crack down on the practice, which they believe cuts into compact-disc sales.

Verizon asked Bates to suspend the order while it appeals his decision to a higher court, arguing that the appeal would be pointless if the record companies already knew the alleged infringer's identity.

"Once the cat's out of the bag, it can't be put back," said attorney Andrew McBride, who argued the case for Verizon.

An attorney for a recording-industry trade group said Verizon's argument was weakened by its previous suggestion that record companies use an alternate legal method to get the user's identity.

"This is not a case of whether the cat is going to get out of the bag, this is a case of how the cat is going to get out of the bag," Don Verilli, representing the Recording Industry Association of America, told the judge.

Bates said he would rule quickly. Verizon has indicated that if the judge refuses to suspend his order, the company will ask the appeals court to suspend it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Feb13.html

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Boston Globe Editorial
Pirating privacy online

The Recording Industry Association of America does not want to suggest that it will be suing millions of computer users for sharing music files over the Internet. But its power to have them subpoenaed, affirmed by a federal judge last month, raises grave privacy concerns and ought to be appealed, as Verizon Communications intends to do. The industry has a point that most file sharers are violating copyright law, costing it substantial business. The advent of file sharing has radically transformed the music business, however, and the industry cannot rely on legal action to quash technological advances.

In his ruling, US District Judge John D. Bates interpreted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as allowing copyright holders to demand the identity of alleged violators from Verizon and other Internet service providers. Verizon contends that the accuser should first have to go before a judge to make a case for obtaining the identity. At stake is the connection between the IP (for ''internal protocol'') number attached to every computer on the Internet and the identity of the user. At present, people can freely surf the Net knowing that the name behind a computer's IP number cannot easily be known without permission. Bates's ruling would allow copyright holders using IP numbers to demand the identities of millions of people who have shared music files. This would be a major violation of personal privacy, and Bates ought to stay his decision until an appeals court can rule on the Verizon appeal.

A spokesman for the industry association says it has used the subpoena power fewer than 100 times in the past, and not against Verizon customers. The alleged copyright violators merely receive a note from the association asking them not to do it again. No one can guarantee that this civility will last, even though harsher action would be counterproductive. The most active file sharers are also potentially the industry's best customers if a business model can be found to attract their interest.

Consumers can no longer be expected to pay $14 to $20 for a compact disc containing 10 or more songs when all they wanted was one or two. Yet music executives have been slow to establish websites that can compete with free file sharing.

Paid sites are up and running, and the industry ought to seize this opportunity to attract customers by making sure the services are reasonably priced and offer a wide selection. The industry could also work with Kazaa and other free file sharers to replace their illegal copies with pay-to-play music.

Instead of forcing Internet service providers to reveal the names of file sharers, the industry ought to work with them to turn copyright violators into paying customers.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/04..._online+.shtml

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“In more ways than one, the American people have already paid for the case law produced by our courts.”
Democracy in the Dark: Public Access Restrictions from Westlaw and LexisNexis
Melissa Barr

"Democracies die behind closed doors....When government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation." So spoke Judge Damon Keith in Detroit Free Press, et al. v. Ashcroft. Judge Keith was discussing closed immigration hearings in the wake of 9/11. He might have been talking about the public's lack of access to legal information databases, especially case law databases. Although many courts now publish case law on the Internet for free, thousands of older cases are not available to those who cannot pay. Hundreds of public libraries across the country provide online access to their patrons in an attempt to bridge the digital divide, covering all areas of information need. Yet often these public libraries are not allowed to offer access — free or fee — to legal subscription databases maintained by the two largest legal vendors in the U.S. And those same vendors also constitute the largest publishers of legal materials in print. Amidst a growing wealth of free, reliable information on the Internet, there is a poverty of access to the decisions and opinions of the courts that protect our liberties.

Why should ordinary citizens be interested in opinions written by judges decades or even centuries ago? After all, we can read the laws ourselves, since most public libraries buy copies of the local ordinances and may also have state and federal codes. And it's available free on the Internet. Do we really need judicial opinions? Yes, we do, because even century-old case law can still be "good law." A U.S. Supreme Court case from 1888 was instrumental in overturning an Internet copyright case covered in the February 2002 edition of Searcher. Carol Ebbinghouse13 discussed the then- unresolved copyright infringement case involving Peter Veeck, his Web site, and the basic building codes of two small Texas towns.
http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/jan03/barr.htm

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In Verizon Case Facts Were First Victim of RIAA
George Mannes

Here at the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab, we're all in favor of blind justice. The problem comes when blind journalism follows close behind. Yep, that's what we decided this week after close examination of a story that dominated the business press late last month. We're talking about the legal battle between Verizon and the music industry trade group known as the Recording Industry Association of America.

At issue, you may remember, is a subpoena that the RIAA sent to Verizon last year as part of the record industry's battle against illegal sharing of copyrighted music. Citing the authority of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the RIAA asked the phone company for information that would identify a certain customer that the RIAA alleged participated in the KaZaA peer-to-peer file sharing network. Verizon, arguing that the RIAA was misinterpreting the music copyright act, refused. That's when the lawyers got busy.

The RIAA vs. Verizon case, by all accounts, is a crucial legal clash as far as Internet cases go. It pits privacy rights on a collision course with the protection of intellectual property rights in the digital age. It's seen as a key courtroom battle in the music industry's attempt to smash online piracy -- a case that may have as much impact as the one that knocked Napster on its rear. So you'd expect that in a high-profile case like this -- one that conceivably will end up on the doorstep of the Supreme Court -- the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, would make sure he got the basic facts of the case straight.

You'd be wrong.

Yes, when Judge Bates issued a ruling in favor of the RIAA on Jan. 21, here's how he described a key action on the day last summer when the RIAA served its subpoena on Verizon: "Along with the subpoena," wrote Bates on page 6 of his opinion, "RIAA provided Verizon with a list of more than 600 files (predominantly individual songs, most by well-known artists) allegedly downloaded by the user in one day." Except that's not what the RIAA gave Verizon. According to both sides of the case, RIAA's list didn't comprise files that the anonymous user had downloaded -- that is, copied from elsewhere on the Internet onto his anonymous computer. No, the list contained files that the anonymous user was willing to upload. They were files already on his computer that he was willing to share with others via KaZaA.

Got that straight? Not downloading, but uploading. And not even uploading -- simply ready to upload. The RIAA made no allegation as to how many copies of the files at issue were actually made from the files at issue.
http://www.thestreet.com/_tsclsii/te.../10067417.html

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Speaker talks about file sharing
Jeremy R. Cooke

Music and movie industry groups are pressing computer and software makers to craft new technology that will restrict rampant illegal file sharing, a Harvard Law School professor told a campus audience last night.

As a result, Internet appliances designed to keep a tighter fist around copyrighted material will blossom and perhaps threaten the popularity of today's personal computers, said Jonathan Zittrain, a Pittsburgh native who co-founded Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

"The giants have woken up. They're not happy. They're smart and rich and powerful," Zittrain said. "They are doing what they can on a technical level, so that it will be harder and harder to use a [peer-to-peer] network like Morpheus."

People's instincts for what is right or wrong is clashing with lawyers' sometimes convoluted attempts to guard against what their clients see as outright stealing, Zittrain said.

The law professor, who kept the audience of about 100 laughing for much of his lecture, showed two letters that students at Harvard and Penn State received from their universities, warning them about suspected violations of copyright law.

One accused the Harvard student of exchanging an illegal copy of "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Badass Song" from The Simpsons over the university network. Zittrain said it was probably the first and only time that name appeared on Harvard stationery. "Universities are in the weird position of becoming the Net police -- something they just don't want to do," he said.

He also cited a British report on teaching the next generation about copyright law. It said: "School children should recognize their own creativity by including the copyright symbol on their coursework."

B.J. Donovan (junior-information sciences and technology) said Zittrain did a good job of showing both sides of the copyright debate. He also enjoyed his humor. "You don't normally think a lawyer would be that funny," Donovan said.
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive...03dnews-11.asp

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Spyware found on one in three corporate networks
John Leyden

One in three European companies are harbouring spyware apps on their networks, a new study claims.

Spyware applications, programs which surreptitiously send information from surfers' PCs to marketing outfits, are becoming a bigger problem, according to the Emerging Internet Threats Survey 2003.

Spyware on company systems leaves companies vulnerable to unknown outside parties such as competitors, crackers or spammers, who can gather confidential company information without consent, the survey warns.

The survey, which includes input from 408 IT professionals across Europe, was conducted by employee Internet management specialist Websense, and trade show Infosecurity Europe 2003 to identify which Internet-related security threats are posing the most problems for IT staff.

Ninety four percent of IT departments quizzed admitted to dealing with security issues as a result of employees' use of the Internet.

Personal Web surfing (31 per cent), software downloads (24 per cent) and Web-based email (24 per cent) figured as the top three concerns for IT professionals surveyed.

The survey also highlighting growing concern such as spyware and anxiety over the security risks posed by instant messaging and malicious mobile code (MMC). The use of peer to peer (P2P) applications also created security concerns, with 70 per cent of those surveyed believing P2P apps creates an "open door" to hackers.

The Websense/Infosecurity survey found that less than half of the organisations which claim to have Internet policies in place have included any guidelines for emerging threats, such as instant messaging or P2P.

Websense has something of a bee in its bonnet about P2P apps, not shared by us, and it's worth pointing out that there several techniques for securing P2P apps. It's also worth remembering that P2P is used in some business applications (distributed computing and Internet search) came to mind, as well as file sharing networks.

Websense is, however, correct to flag up the increasing trend of bundling file-sharing apps with spyware components, such as Gator and the like.
http://online.securityfocus.com/news/2282

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Apeera launches ARPU driven DRM for mobile phones
Press Release

Apeera, Inc. today announces a new solution which will enable mobile phone operators to track and manage the downloading of copyrighted material via a mobile handset, addressing the need for a digital rights management (DRM) solution.

Today, Apeera offers a managed peer-to-peer sharing experience via mobile handsets. With this solution, mobile phone users can easily share applications with friends and colleagues at the push of a button.

Using intelligence residing on the phone SIM card, network providers can also use the Apeera solution to control the distribution of commercial and copyrighted content by providing a secure process of downloading right protected content. Being able to monitor this super-distribution means that the operator can apply copyright charges and restrictions to users as required.

"Copyright protection is currently a major issue for media organisations and the advent of 3G mobile technology makes this issue even livelier. A new channel is about to open to enable the super-distribution of content direct into the consumers' hand," says Bruno Suard, chief executive officer of Apeera. "Peer-to- peer solutions are often unfairly compared to Napster and other Internet equivalents. The difference, quite unlike the Internet, is that the mobile phone presents a manageable and controllable environment through the presence of the SIM."

The interaction between the SIM card information and the mobile applications gives the Operator full control over the application distribution.

Apeera's solution enables operators to offer subscribers the opportunity to create a network-based, personal repository system for all types of mobile applications, such as games, ringtones and logos. Any changes, such as sharing an application with another user, automatically triggers events and notifications, which gives the service provider visibility of what files and applications are being distributed. These capabilities can be offered to current and next generation phones.
http://www.telephonyworld.com/cgi-bi...&id=1044625522

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Filmmakers Seek Protection From U.S. Dominance
Alan Riding

During the countdown to the last global free trade accord in 1994, an outspoken group of French movie producers, directors and actors scored an impressive victory over Hollywood when cinema and other forms of audiovisual entertainment were excluded from the agreement. The compromise became known as the "cultural exception," a term that, in France at least, quickly assumed the patriotic resonance of the opening line of "The Marseillaise."

What it meant in practice was that France — and any other country that opted for the cultural exception — could favor its movie, television and radio industries with subsidies and minimize foreign competition through quotas. Such protectionism was necessary, it was argued, to prevent Hollywood and a handful of international media giants from imposing their will on the global entertainment market and wiping out all expressions of local culture.

Now alarm bells are again ringing. The World Trade Organization has started negotiations on trade in services, and the United States, Japan and a handful of other countries are eager to reopen the cultural exception debate. But this time the French are no longer alone.

This week, with the support of France and Canada, representatives of professional cultural organizations from 35 countries met at the Louvre to campaign for preservation of the cultural exception and to promote adoption of a global convention on cultural diversity by Unesco as a way to remove culture from the World Trade Organization.

As a measure of the political power of France's arts elite, the three-day meeting was opened on Sunday by France's culture minister, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, and by Viviane Reding, the European Union's commissioner for education and culture. The entire gathering then went to the Élysée Palace, where President Jacques Chirac spoke to the participants and leading movie directors, actors and writers and strongly endorsed the meeting's objectives.

But he warned that a new battle lay ahead. "With the opening of a round of international trade negotiations," he said, "the champions of unlimited trade liberalization are once again lining up against those who believe that creative works cannot be reduced to the rank of ordinary merchandise."

Mr. Chirac also threw France's weight behind having a convention on cultural diversity.

The meeting at the Louvre highlighted the immense obstacles to taming an American audiovisual industry that already dominates much of the globe. For instance, American productions regularly account for 85 percent of movie audiences worldwide. And in audiovisual trade in 2000 with just the European Union, the United States had an $8.1 billion surplus, divided equally between movies and television rights.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/movies/05FAVO.html

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University of Cincinnati Busts 13 students for File Sharing
Search uncovers pirated movies, CDs
Amanda Heironimus

A group of UC students faces punishment by the Board of Judicial Affairs after an investigation uncovered an extensive operation of illegal downloading in the residence halls last week, according to university officials.

After searching suspected computers in the residence halls, investigators discovered significant breaches of state and federal copyright laws as well as violations of the student code of conduct, said UCit manager and UC Police Department Special Investigator Jim Downing.

The students involved had illegally downloaded vast amounts of material, some of it pornographic, said Downing.

"This included pictures, movies, music and software," he said.

To date, officials have implicated 13 residents from Sawyer, Daniels, Calhoun, Turner-Schneider and Siddall residence halls in the case.

Using the campus Internet service to download such material violates the student code of conduct.

This action falls under the misuse of information technology; breaking a criminal law is also part of the code.

Complaints from a point-of-contact outside the university about possible copyright infringement on campus sparked the investigation, said Downing.

He said in such cases, an entertainment company outside the university will file a complaint, and the university is required to investigate.

Although the students could have potentially been charged criminally, university officials chose to handle the matter internally, according to Downing.

"We turned the case over to UC Judicial Affairs and are waiting for their decision," he added.

Though Downing was unsure what consequences the board would hand down, it has the power to put the students on probation or suspend them for non-academic misconduct, according to the student code of conduct.

While he knows downloading is a common practice among college students, Judicial Affairs Director Daniel Cummins said the university draws the line when downloading is a direct violation of the law.
http://newsrecord.tuc.uc.edu/read.asp?ID=12566

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File sharing and storage available for Aggies in MySpace

What is MySpace?
MySpace is a file-sharing system available through MyUCDavis (my.ucdavis.edu/), the campus Web portal where students can, among other things, check e-mail, register for classes and read the news.
MySpace allows you to store and share up to 100 megabytes of school-related files, such as Microsoft Word documents, sound and image files, and PowerPoint presentations.

What would I use MySpace?
MySpace allows you to access your files from any browser, anywhere, anytime. This is especially convenient if you need to work on a project on campus and then access it again from a different computer at home; keeping your files in MySpace will allow you to access them from both places. (Sure beats e-mailing big documents to yourself.) Also, if you opt to make your files public, you can use MySpace to share your documents with other students you're working with on a group project. Statistics show that MySpace is widely used among students; in fact, there are currently 15,278 total unique users of MySpace, over 13,000 of whom are students.

With whom can I share my folders?
You can share your folders with any MyUCDavis users. To share files, you create a list of "file friends" who can tap into your folders. They can do the same for you, thus creating an easy flow of information between people in different locations.

What kind of files can I download or upload to store or share in MySpace?
MySpace accepts any file type. Be sure that file names include their proper file extension (.doc, .txt, .jpg, etc.).

How secure is MySpace?
The files and folders in MySpace are completely secure and are protected by the same authentication system as that of MyUCDavis.

Do I need to clean up MySpace or move MySpace files to my local hard drive at the end of the quarter or academic year?
No. Your files are kept in MySpace as long as you have an active UCD computing account.

Where can I get specific information on how to access and navigate MySpace?

Try out MySpace first by going to my.ucdavis.edu/. Click on the "MyTools" tab in the top navigation menu and then select "MySpace." You may also want to consult the MySpace tutorial, available online. Go to the MyUCDavis home page and before logging in, click on the "Tutorials and Training" link. You will find the help topic "Using MySpace" under the category "MyUCDavis Portal." For personal help with MySpace, contact IT Express at 754-HELP or ithelp@ucdavis.edu, or drop by their office in 182 Peter J. Shields Library.
http://www.californiaaggie.com/_articles/5554.taf

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Copper Lines Regaining Luster
With the Obstacles to Fiber, Phone Companies Are Tapping the Old Infrastructure
Jonathan Krim

For years, replacing the nation's copper telephone wires with fiber-optic cable has offered a promise of digital heaven: quick downloading of full-length movies from the Internet; phone companies offering television programming to compete with cable; two-way, interactive video for online gaming, education and medicine.

But the regional telephone giants also have warned that as long as they are required to lease those fiber networks to competitors, they will be unwilling to spend significant sums to build them.

Now, with the Federal Communications Commission ready to revamp its competition rules in the next two weeks, many telephony experts, financial analysts and some phone company officials say that even if the former Bell telephone companies get the regulatory relief they seek, fiber to people's homes will remain a far-off dream.

Not only does stringing fiber to the home remain enormously expensive, but advances in technology allow significantly faster connection speeds to be squeezed out of the country's 1.5 billion miles of existing copper lines.

Tests in engineering labs and in a handful of areas around the country are yielding Internet connection speeds five to 50 times as fast as what is now considered "broadband" digital-subscriber-line service offered over phone lines.

"I'm amazed and encouraged with what we can do with our copper network," said William L. Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth Corp., the regional phone company in the Southeast. "I still want to have fiber to every home and every business, but there's a lot we can do with copper."

Qwest Communications International Inc., which primarily serves the Rocky Mountain region, has for three years served a handful of communities with a full menu of television programming, equivalent to cable packages, over its copper lines using a technology known as VDSL (very-high-data-rate DSL).

"Copper is far from dead," said Steve Starliper, vice president of consumer product management for Qwest, which has 50,000 VDSL customers in Colorado and Arizona.

Qwest offers its residential VDSL customers only two speeds, neither of which exceeds what is possible on DSL. Company officials said they are evaluating whether to extend VDSL to more neighborhoods.

Even Grande Communications in Texas, one of a handful of small companies that have strung fiber to residential areas, offers customers a top speed of 2.5 megabits per second, with slower speeds at lower prices.

State regulators, who set certain rules and rates and who oppose changes to the FCC's rules, worry that the former Bells are executing a well-honed strategy: Promise dazzling broadband networks in exchange for regulatory relief, then pull back.

In Pennsylvania, Bell Atlantic, which later became Verizon, promised state regulators in 1994 that over a 20-year period, it would deliver a broadband network capable of speeds of 45 megabits per second, according to public filings.

State public service commission officials say the company has deployed roughly 22 percent of what should be in operation. The commission is considering sanctions against the company.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2003Feb6.html

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When the Music Stops
Sonia Arrison

Last week marked another stage in the battle between Hollywood and the technology industry when Verizon Communications appealed a judge's order to reveal the identity of an alleged music pirate to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The legal skirmish highlights the music industry's resolve for old business models and points to some flaws in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

If Judge Bates's decision stands, anyone who claims copyright infringement can fill out a simple form, give it to a court clerk (not a judge), and bingo - they get information such as the name, home number, and address of any Internet user. This is worrisome for several reasons.

"The subpoenas will become a new form of spam," argues Peter Swire, law professor and former Chief Counselor for Privacy in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Swire warns that "fraudulent subpoenas will be easy to file, with no judicial oversight."

This could lead to a situation where ISPs are inundated with requests. And unscrupulous web sites, identity thieves, or even stalkers could exploit the process to get information about an Internet user. There's another problem too - the ability to easily identify Internet users could have a chilling effect on speech.

Consider the Harry Potter debacle when, in December 2001, Warner Brothers sent ISP UUNET a notice asking it to disable a user's Internet access and account because he or she was allegedly infringing on the "Harry Potter" copyright. The request was based on a 1k file titled "Harry Potter Book Report."

As long as copyright holders have nothing to lose in filing the requests, which can be done in large part by automated robots that scour the web for certain file names like "Harry Potter" or "George Harrison," thoughtless, privacy-infringing, and harassing requests will continue. If the DMCA allows the music industry and others this type of unsupervised investigative power, even worse scenarios can be envisioned.

For instance, imagine if a political group organizes a meeting to be held in Chinatown and distributes agenda items or video clips of its president using a peer-to-peer network. If the copyright holder of the movie "Chinatown," starring Jack Nicholson, happens to see this "Chinatown" file, they could file a subpoena for the user's information, unnecessarily invading privacy and eventually curtailing speech.

Many of Hollywood's suspected Internet pirates are also paying customers in real space, prompting singer-songwriter and nine-time Grammy nominee Janis Ian to write that if the judge's ruling in the Verizon case stands, many musicians "will be pushed out of the music business altogether."

Rather than focusing so much attention on prosecution, the entertainment industry should spend time promoting its own online services. Even if songs can be found for free on the Net, it takes time and effort to find them. If consumers had an easy place to get reliable music files at market prices, it stands to reason that many would go there instead of wasting time looking for free files and becoming thieves.

The new Echo.com site that Virgin Megastore and Tower Records recently launched is a start, but there's more work to do. In the meantime, if the record industry is convinced that it has identified a music pirate, it should have to go through the same process as everyone else who wants to discover the identity of an online infringer: file a John Doe suit.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/10...D=1051-020703C

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Suits Test Limits of Digital Copyright Act
Steve Seidenberg

What if Ford designed its cars so that all replacement parts and add-ons had to come from Ford? If a consumer installed spark plugs or a radio/DVD-player that were manufactured by a third party, the car wouldn't run. Plus, the consumer would be liable for copyright infringement.

Such restrictions may soon be coming to a vast array of products, depending on how the courts rule in two recently filed cases. These lawsuits are testing whether businesses can use copyrighted software -- and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- to prevent customers from using third-party add-ons or replacement parts.

The potential impact of these cases is "scary," according to Edward Felten, associate professor of computer science at Princeton University. If the plaintiffs win, Felten said, "many, or even all, makers of interoperable products will be at risk, and end users will lose even more control over their technological devices."

The results won't affect the makers of dog food, but they will affect companies that manufacture or service dishwashers, garage doors, refrigerators, cars, dryers -- anything that uses computer software, said David Nimmer, of counsel at Los Angeles' Irell & Manella, which represents Static Control Components, a defendant in one of the two cases. He said this use of the DMCA was "novel and unprecedented" and that plaintiffs were using the law in a way not intended by Congress.
http://www.law.com/servlet/ContentSe...LawArticleTech

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Internet access hits the wall
BBC

Half the UK population remains offline,according to the latest research from telecoms watchdog Oftel. The regulator has found that net take-up is levelling off, despite a huge increase in the uptake of broadband. Much of the interest in high-speed net services seems to be coming from people who already have a dial-up connection. In the past year overall figures for both dial-up and broadband net access at home have remained at around 42% of the population in the UK, according to Oftel.

Jupiter predicts it will continue to grow slowly to around 51% in 2007. "But there is always going to be a digital divide with a significant chunk of the population who don't want to get online," said Mr Stevenson. One of the main reasons will be the lack of a computer at home.

The government is keen to promote the 6,000 UK Online centres it has dotted around the country as an alternative to home access. "I think the government is barking up the wrong tree with internet centres," said Mr Stevenson. "People without a PC are most likely to use their friend's computers if they want to get online or to go to an internet café," he said. "They are less likely to go to the library and even less likely that they would go to an online centre," he added.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2734035.stm

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Labels battle to hold onto DMCA win
Declan McCullagh

The recording industry on Friday fought to preserve a preliminary courtroom victory, arguing that Verizon Communications has no choice but to hand over the identity of an alleged Kazaa music pirate.

In a strongly worded brief filed in federal district court in Washington, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) assailed Verizon's request for a stay of a Jan. 21 order as a brazen attempt by the telecommunications firm to "evade its responsibilities under the law."

The lawsuit, filed last August, pits the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against Internet users' right to remain anonymous online. With the vocal assistance of civil liberties groups, Verizon has argued that the DMCA's turbocharged subpoena process is not sufficiently privacy-protective, because it can be used to glean the identities of hundreds or thousands of suspected peer-to-peer pirates at a time.

Matthew Oppenheim, a senior vice president at the RIAA, said in a conference call Friday that Verizon was exaggerating the privacy risks of complying with requests made under the DMCA. Verizon and its allies, including a former Clinton administration privacy official, have suggested that copyright holders should file a "John Doe" lawsuit to unmask suspected peer-to-peer infringers instead of wielding DMCA subpoenas.

"In private conversations with the RIAA, Verizon has made it very clear that this is not a privacy issue," Oppenheim said. "They said they would be happy to turn over the names of some of their customers, as long as they don't have to turn over the names of a lot of their customers."

Sarah Deutsch, a Verizon vice president and associate general counsel, said: "This is just the RIAA's desperate attempt to divert public attention from the fact that they want unlimited access to private communications. They're trying to divert attention from some of the bad publicity that this case has garnered."

Deutsch said the RIAA had spurned a compromise proposal. "We offered that while the case was pending, we would forward cease-and-desist letters to our subscribers, at our own cost, without revealing our customers' identities," Deutsch said. "But RIAA refused."
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-983896.html








LocustWorld MeshBox released!
Press Release

A software upgrade to the hardware MeshAP, still fitting within the same 32MB footprint. The MeshBox extends the MeshAP into a set-top box Internet Appliance and wireless mesh router!
Now the device can be a workstation too. Connect into remote windows terminal server installations, or another pc, browse the web, stream mp3 audio and mpeg video, connect to multiple peer to peer networks, chat on any instant message network and exchange files.
http://locustworld.com/modules.php?o...catid=&topic=9
More Mesh! http://locustworld.com/

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Revolution? It's all go on the western front
Frustrated at the slow roll-out of broadband access, people all over the UK are clubbing together to do it for themselves in the hope of building a free network for all. David Cohen reports

The sleepy town of Kingsbridge, Devon, isn't exactly high on the list of places you'd expect to lead the broadband revolution in the UK. But this quiet, west country backwater recently became the staging ground for a project that is pioneering a new technology to switch on broadband Britain.

A group of enthusiasts fed up with waiting for BT to provide broadband internet access in the area is causing the stir. And if their plans work out, they could soon be providing the service to the entire community - for free.

"We felt we were being ignored by BT," says Bill Noyce, co-founder of the project and a part-time computer technician at a local web design company. "So, we decided to ignore them and get on with finding our own way to get broadband."

It's still early days in Kingsbridge, but already most of the town centre has access to broadband, and Mr Noyce has plans to expand coverage to surrounding communities.

The Kingsbridge scheme is just one of a growing number of communities across the UK frustrated with the slow roll-out of broadband, or who take exception to the high cost of getting a broadband connection (£25-£30 per month). They are clubbing together and taking matters into their own hands.

A stone's throw from Loch Lomond, in the Scottish Highlands village of Gartocharn, Mark Henderson has just started gathering names for his local broadband project. "If I get 30 households signed up I'll be able to get us broadband within a few months. It would never become available to us otherwise," he says. "We're too low on BT's list."

Brian McMillan, director of a local internet service provider called Colloquium, which plans to install the service in Gartocharn, says if there's enough interest costs can be brought down.

"I expect it will cost around £25-£30 per person," he says. "We can cover an area of about 4km in radius with one base station and expand that to other local villages and communities at much lower cost and much quicker than BT," he adds.

The key to all these projects lies in a new low-cost technology that uses radio waves on an unlicensed frequency to link computers in a network. It avoids the need for cumbersome wires and the time-consuming digging-up of streets to lay them.

Savvy communities as far afield as Southampton and Edinburgh, Cardiff and Kent, are experimenting with WiFi (Wireless Fidelity), a global standard for equipment that can help give you high speed net access using high frequency radio waves. The equipment can be bought off the shelf and requires only basic technical knowledge to install and operate.

And in recent months, the equipment has fallen in price to a little over £100. Just three years ago, the same equipment cost thousands of pounds.

Evan Jones, who chairs Cardiff's community wireless project, Arwain, says that though normal broadband is available in some areas of the city from BT and the cable companies, it is the ability to use it anywhere in town, in a park, a coffee shop or at home, that makes WiFi so special.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian_j...891166,00.html

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Instant live CDs of a concert? Testing to begin in Boston
Steve Morse

Experiments are rife in the music business these days -- and Boston will be a test market for one of the most novel of them. Clear Channel Concerts, the nation's largest concert promoter, has ambitious plans to record live CDs of its shows and sell them to patrons within five minutes after those shows end. Clear Channel is targeting Boston as the first site for the new plan, according to sources within the organization.

Multiple CD burners would be brought in, and the live CDs would probably sell for around $15 in the same way that T-shirts and other merchandise can be purchased after concerts. No one knows what the demand would be, but the project is expected to begin at club shows within a couple of months, then be refined and work its way up to the amphitheater level, though that may not happen until next year, sources say.

Clear Channel spokeswoman Pam Fallon would not confirm or deny word of the CD burning and sales plan. ''All I can say is that we're working on a series of initiatives in the next couple of months,'' she said.

Clear Channel vice president Steve Simon, who works at Cambridge's Clear Channel office and has helped manage the platinum-selling band Boston, is said to be heading the project.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/03...oston+.sh tml

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Anger over broadband limits
BBC

Users have vented their fury after it emerged cable company NTL is imposing download limits on its broadband service. The company now limits its customers to one gigabyte of downloaded data per day despite advertising that an advantage of broadband is "unlimited surfing". Subscribers say the limit amounts to as little as two-and-a-half hours of use a day for a service that says it is "24/7".

Broadband has generally been sold on the basis that it is "always on" and is a much faster way of downloading pictures, videos and music.

Businessman Kingsley Smith has set up a website to protest against the NTL's conditions. He told BBC News Online: "I've had lots and lots of e-mails - I'm struggling to answer them all. "It is disgusting the way they have slipped it in under our noses. "They are taunting their customers."

Mr Smith said NTL had closed internal services because of cost-cutting which had forced users to download more. "They have said this is the Ferrari of broadband services. But it is no good having a Ferrari if you can only pop down to the shops in it."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2740621.stm

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Intel, others to oppose copyright tax
Bloomberg News

Intel and other computer-related companies will oppose a German official's proposal that personal-computer makers pay a fee to copyright holders for every PC
sold, a spokesman from the chip maker said.

``We still strongly believe that digital copyrights should be protected, but mandating a tax is not the right solution,'' said Chuck Mulloy, spokesman for Intel, the world's biggest maker of PC microprocessors.

The Wall Street Journal's European edition reported that a mediator in Germany's patent office recommended PC makers pay copyright holders 12 euros ($13.06) for every system sold to compensate for the unauthorized copying of movies and other digital programming.

The 15-nation European Union last year broadened copyright protections to include the Internet, cell phones and digital television following music-industry assertions they enable piracy. Microsoft, Nokia and Siemens in January wrote to European Commission President Romano Prodi to protest taxes on photocopiers, scanners and other electronic products.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/5109624.htm

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Singing The Blues
As CD sales tank, the music industry changes its tune
Betsy Streisand and Dan Gilgoff

All five major music companies--BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner--are either losing money or barely making any, and most analysts predict that it won't be long before consolidation forces five into four and maybe even three. Retail music outlets such as Wherehouse and Musicland are closing down by the hundreds.

Musical chairs. And heads are rolling, among them, legendary Sony Music Entertainment CEO Tommy Mottola, who launched the careers of such divas as Celine Dion, ex-wife Mariah Carey, and Jennifer Lopez. With Sony's profits slipping, Mottola was forced out in January and replaced by Andrew Lack, the former president of NBC, whose virtues include never having spent a day in the music business. Also exiting is Hilary Rosen, the industry's chief Washington lobbyist and Napster killer. Rosen recently said she will call it quits as head of the Recording Industry Association of America by the end of this year--with the industry's blessing (now the group can replace her with someone even tougher). Things have gotten so bad that Wired's February issue, featuring Led Zeppelin's flaming Hindenburg album cover under the freeloaders' creed "Rip. Mix. Burn," declares 2003 "The Year the Music Dies."

Not surprisingly, the music industry regards reports of its death as greatly exaggerated. "It's pretty difficult to kill a multibillion-dollar industry," says Lee Black, a music industry analyst with Jupiter Research. "I haven't seen one die yet." But while Black, and most in the music business, agree that it will eventually right itself, they also acknowledge that 2003 is going to be a bloodbath. "We are in for a giant upheaval," says one record company CEO. "All our business practices need to change."

To regain their footing in a digital world, music companies must find a way to market single tracks to buyers conveniently and cheaply; stave off the pirates who use services like Kazaa and divert billions in revenue from record companies each year; and cut the spiraling costs of grooming new artists. And they must win back music buyers who can't fathom why--other than greed--the Spider-Man soundtrack costs more than the Spider-Man DVD. Each of these problems is daunting. But none is more pressing than piracy.

The industry says it is moving aggressively to provide music online to counter illegal downloaders, investing more than $1 billion so far. But industry-backed subscription services like Rhapsody, Pressplay, and MusicNet came on line only in the past year. And it wasn't until November that they all had deals with the five major labels. The services charge between $10 and $20 a month and limit copying of songs. They also remove some of the pitfalls of file sharing, like downloading mislabeled or infected song files--and they make sure that artists get paid. But so far, they have signed up fewer than 100,000 custom- ers each, a pittance compared with Kazaa's service, which in one week in January was downloaded 3 million times. And many artists, including Madonna, Garth Brooks, and the Beatles, remain absent from playlists because of licensing issues.

Still, these sites may yet catch on. "Ultimately, I think the Internet will be a huge good thing for the industry, and they will make tons of money off of it," says Black. Sixty percent of Pressplay's free-trial members, for instance, become paying customers. And a September poll by Ipsos-Reid, a market research firm, shows that 31 percent of Americans who have downloaded music from the Internet actually paid for it, up from 27 percent last June. "But it's going to take time," says Larry Kenswil, president of Universal Music Group's eLabs division, noting that the services are only just beginning to advertise. "People are going to have to see the value of access to music rather than ownership of music."

That's a huge leap for file swappers accustomed to downloading files gratis and having their way with them. "People don't want to pay a fee to be able to burn a track to a disk and know that it is forever locked on that CD," says Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, an Internet consulting firm.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/0...ch/10music.htm

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Anti-Pirates slam EUCD proposals
electricnews.net

A group that calls itself "Europe's creative sector" has slammed the EU's crackdown on piracy, calling the measures "inadequate".

The detractors include the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE) and six other concerned software, music and film organisations.

The group said that last week's new piracy-fighting proposal from the European Commission is "inadequate in view of the magnitude of the piracy problem and fails to introduce urgently needed measures to hold back the epidemic of counterfeiting." The group claims that in Europe, film, video, music, business and leisure software industries alone suffer losses in excess of EUR4.5 billion annually due to piracy.

The biggest complaint from the so-called creative sector is the lack of harmonisation across the 15 EU nations the proposed draft would put in place. "In fact, implementation of the directive in its current form would cause confusion and perpetuate a patchwork of different legal measures and procedures across the EU," the association said in a statement.

What's more, the statement said the proposal may not even match existing international standards that fight piracy, insisting that it could create a two-tier system of enforcement where some types of piracy are acceptable and others are not.

However, in other quarters, the new directive has been deemed a much tougher version than the standards already in place to fight the illegal copying of software and other digital materials. For example, the Commission's proposal could see to it that counterfeiters are jailed and their bank accounts frozen, if they are found to be in breach of the law.

For its part, the European Commission claims that the proposed laws will actually fill gaps in national law that pirates currently exploit. "The proposed directive would ensure a level playing field for right holders in the EU, reinforce measures against offenders and thus act as a deterrent to those engaged in counterfeiting and piracy," the Commission said.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/29184.html

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May the DVD X Copy lead me not into temptation
Ed Baig

I never bought into the spurious argument that guns don't kill people; only people do. So it should follow that I reject the idea that software doesn't "steal" copyrighted music and movies; only people do.

The reality is, I'm torn. I don't dare equate the two moralistically, but software such as Napster, not unlike hardware that fires bullets, can make it painfully easy to accomplish the mission at hand, whether it's whacking folks or merely ripping them off.

Frankly, I always felt a bit uneasy about the myriad tunes I lifted with Napster (and its successors), though never to the point where my conscience stopped me. And I noted with trepidation a judge's recent ruling that Verizon must disclose the name of a customer said to share hundreds of songs via the Kazaa file- swap site. (Lest you worry, my scruples aren't so compromised that I'd irresponsibly or lawlessly fire a pistol.)

These days, a killer program called DVD X Copy, from Chesterfield, Mo., startup 321 Studios, challenges my ethics. Used with a burner on your Windows computer, the controversial $100 program allows you to make a flawless "backup" copy of a commercial DVD, including menus, trailers and special features, whether you own that disc or merely rent it.

Moreover, you can watch that backup on your PC or any compatible DVD deck or portable.

Hollywood is up in arms. Several major studios and 321 Studios are butting heads in court. The movie industry claims DVD X violates the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and is seeking a federal injunction aimed at stopping the sale of DVD X Copy and a sister product, DVD Copy Plus (it copies movies onto CDs).

Meanwhile, the powers that be at 321 Studios say they are protecting the principles of "fair use." The company launched a preemptive lawsuit against several studios, challenging the constitutionality of the DMCA. 321 Studios contends that consumers by law are allowed to make backup copies for personal use.

I appreciate both sides. Surely, if your kids ever trampled on your only copies of Citizen Kane or Lord of the Rings, or turned those DVDs into Frisbees, you'd welcome a second copy. I could see wanting a backup disc for a coast-to-coast business junket or for when you pile the family into the SUV. You might also make a backup DVD of your own home video footage to send to grandma.

But I also understand where the film community is coming from. Is it legit to clone a DVD for a friend? Doubtful, whether you sell it to your pal or give it away. Nor is it kosher to duplicate a loaner from Blockbuster.

321 Studios is not advocating improper use. "We cannot distinguish between a rented DVD and one you own," 321 founder and president Robert Moore told me. "But you can."

I need only look in the mirror. Just the other day when Magnolia arrived in the mail from the NetFlix DVD rental service, I confess to having used DVD X to make a copy. Most remarkably, the clone played back smoothly even when the scratched original disc hiccupped in several spots: DVD X can digitally restore damaged discs.

Later I also cloned a NetFlix copy of Monster's Ball. Never mind that replicating these rentals was done strictly for testing purposes (wink, wink).

Incidentally, 321 execs said they would love to work with a NetFlix or Blockbuster to render rentals incapable of being copied with their software. But that's akin to providing the weapon that shoots someone in the belly, then helping remove the slug.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columni...04-baig_x.htm#

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Will Peer-to-Peer Streaming Work for You?
Troy Davis

Ask webcasters to name their largest recurring cost, and most will scream, "Bandwidth!" A chunk of cash leaves the webcaster's wallet for every stream served, so claims of cutting bandwidth elicit serious interest. Peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming makes exactly that claim.

Content delivery networks and streaming services clearly separate media servers from end users. P2P turns that model on its head by encouraging or even requiring every computer to fulfill both roles: Your downloading a song or listening to an Internet radio station enables other netizens to request that content from your computer. Controlled P2P systems rely on a central server to keep track of who has which content and to redirect users to an appropriate peer. An application or media player plug-in handles behind-the-scenes redistribution on the user's computer.

In one of the highest-volume P2P Internet radio deployments to date, Radio Free Virgin used Blue Falcon Networks' Live service in its RFV Player to cut bandwidth usage by 60 percent. And since available serving bandwidth grows as more listeners join, RFV can burst without overload worries. Of course, the "free" bandwidth comes from somewhere. Many donors of serving bandwidth are not directly responsible for the per-byte transfer costs: university students (university pays), all-you-can-eat broadband customers (service provider pays), and corporate employees (company pays).

Universities and broadband service providers were caught off guard by an explosion of traffic from Napster, Kazaa, and other ad hoc P2P file-sharing applications in 2001. Their network administrators responded by throttling the amount of bandwidth available for P2P services or even restricting all upload capacity. The massive traffic came from users sharing copyrighted files without the P2P software vendor's permission, something not likely to happen with "controlled" P2P networks, where the vendor decides what content is available.

The industry is currently fragmented, with vendors like Blue Falcon, ChainCast, and AllCast offering live peer technology and CenterSpan and Kontiki with on-demand systems. However, as controlled P2P streaming grows and coalesces around a few vendors, it will come under network management scrutiny.
http://www.streamingmagazine.com/vie...s&TI=thismonth

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There's Hope for Webcasting
Jim Rapoza

I'm lucky enough to live in Boston, where several great college radio stations make it possible for me to listen to a wide variety of eclectic music that will never be on a Clear Channel playlist. But I have lived in other places where my choices were the commercial "alternative" rock station, playing the same Strokes song every hour on the hour, or a commercial jazz station whose idea of jazz was pretty much limited to Diana Krall and Kenny G.

Of course, for a while, the Internet changed all of this. The ease of streaming audio and the low barrier to entry turned anyone who wanted to be one into a radio station and made it possible for people to find and listen to anything they wanted to.

It was nice while it lasted, but Webcasting became one of the first targets of the music industries' quest to defend their business model and quash all alternative methods of distribution. After all, given time, Webcasting could have become pervasive enough to make it possible for some future band to become big without selling their souls to the record companies.

The first threat, CARP, aimed painful royalty payments at Webcasters (although not at regular radio stations), and drove out a majority of Webcasters in its first wave. Now, those that managed to hold on by their fingernails are facing a new threat in shaky but legally dangerous patent claims from Acacia Media Technologies. If these claims hold up, we may end up with Internet radio that mirrors the airwaves, with only Clear Channel-like giants able to stay in business.

However, there may be hope.

For the last few months I've been playing around with an open source application called PeerCast.

The application leverages the same SHOUTcast/ICEcast technology that lets anyone stream audio from their system. However, it includes two important additions.

PeerCast uses the same underlying peer-to-peer technology used by Gnutella, making it possible to distribute bandwidth costs across the peer-to-peer network rather then serving each connection from your single system.

More importantly, however, Peercast adds a layer of anonymity. When one is listening to a stream through Peercast, it could be coming from any peer on the network, making it impossible to determine where the actual stream is originating from.
http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0...a=36934,00.asp

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Peer-to-peer sharing limited in campus housing
Students experience slower downloading; University network speed increased
Margaret Wu

On Jan. 17 Towson began a program to limit the rate of data transmission, or bandwidth, for peer- to-peer file sharing on the student computer network.

According to Greg Church, associate vice president of Computer and Network Services, data collected during the Fall 2002 semester indicated that P2P activity, which includes downloading on programs such as Kazaa and Gnutella, was occupying more than 90 percent of the newly installed student-computing network's bandwidth.

Other network functions, such as Web browsing or checking e-mail, utilize a much lower level of bandwidth and are considered more valuable for academic life than P2P sharing, which is often used by students to obtain large files such as songs or movies.

University officials considered these factors as well as long-standing requests from record companies to hinder illegal file sharing and decided improving network speeds would require significantly decelerating P2P bandwidth.

An earlier attempt during the fall semester to restrict file sharing was unsuccessful and disrupted the use of AOL Instant Messenger, resulting in numerous complaints from students.

Church said he has not heard any complaints from students about the new changes.

Sophomore biology major Leisel Martin predicts the initial improvement of network speed will not last long.

"It was good before, but I did notice pages are opening up a little faster [this semester]," Martin said. "I don't think what [CANS is] doing is going to help anything. People will always find ways around it. [When people were] trying to shut down Napster, other sites to facilitate file sharing came up."

Another student said the modifications were made with the right priorities in mind.

"People are going to need to deal with the fact that other programs for [academic work] need bandwidth, too," junior graphic design major Josh Harding said. "I mean, I'm against it as much as anyone, but [this change] makes things fair."
http://www.thetowerlight.com/vnews/d.../3e387fa718ab3

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It pays to keep in mind these apps exist
Monitor what people do on a PC
Press release

e-Surveiller Team, developer of the Windows-based e-Surveiller surveillance software, announces the release of version 1.2. This product addresses the need for offices, homes and schools to monitor their computer users affordably.

e-Surveiller is a scaleable, easy to use and yet powerful monitoring software package that empowers users to monitor what happens on their computers. It allows the user to watch the screen of the monitored computer and it sends activity reports of what went on when the user was not around to watch.

The software is network and Internet enabled, allowing the user to remotely monitor computers on a Local Area Network (LAN) and across the Internet. e-Surveiller helps many parents, schools, offices and libraries monitor their computer users' online and offline activity. It monitors and records all keystrokes, Web site visits, windows, applications, file changes and more. Other features include password-protection, malicious- use detection/prevention, peer-to-peer network support and remote monitoring configuration updates.

This release features an easier user interface and user-guides online. A 14-day trial download is available at the e-Surveiller web site. Full time- unlimited licenses ranging from $30 to $120(USD) may be purchased immediately online or via conventional payment means.
http://www.idg.net.nz/pressroom.nsf/...256CBE007D78DF!opendocument

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Captures ALL your data at work
Network Associates Unveils 'Black Box' for Networks
Reuters

Security software and services provider Network Associates Inc. NET.N unveiled on Monday a "black box" that records all of the data passing through corporate networks.

The Santa Clara, California-based company said its new product, InfiniStream Security Forensics, allows users to analyze security breaches, virus threats and performance problems by accessing recent activity on the network.

Chris Thompson, vice president of marketing at Network Associates' Sniffer division, which makes network maintenance software, likened the InfiniStream product to the black box on airplanes that stores flight record and cockpit conversations.

"We can see everything that flows through the network and keep up to two and a half days of data for a typical gigabit site customer," Thompson said, referring to the standard speed that large corporate networks use to manage their data.

InfiniStream can capture and record all of the file transfers, Web accesses, e-mail, instant messaging conversations and Internet-based voice traffic, Network Associates said.

A network with such a black box would have, for example, helped to prevent the spread of the recent 'SQL Slammer' worm, which nearly shut down Web access in South Korea, shut down automatic teller machines and paralyzed corporate networks.

InfiniStream, which is already being released to a limited number of customers, will be available early in the third quarter of this year and will be priced at approximately $85,000, Network Associates said.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2202897

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Q&A
Music file sharing might include song of the virus
Patrick Marshall

Q. Recently, one of my daughters downloaded Morpheus 2.0, which she is using to swap music files with other computer users.

I am concerned about this file sharing and wonder if these files may contain viruses, Trojan horses, spyware and similar computer evils. I am also concerned about access other users have to my computer.

I am using Norton Antivirus 2002 (with Live Update to keep the program current) and also the current version of ZoneAlarm as an Internet protection program.

How dangerous is this MP3 file sharing?

— George Holzapfel

A. Any download from the Internet carries risks of infection by a virus.

File-sharing sites are particularly dangerous because you can't be sure the files made available for posting have been checked for viruses.

It sounds like you've taken reasonable precautions. It is, of course, possible you might encounter a new virus that can get by your antivirus software. That's the risk of being connected.

Apart from viruses, there's also the risk of downloading spyware — software that tracks your movements on the Internet and reports back to the home site. Spyware generally is used for marketing purposes, and many sites employ it without informing visitors.

I recommend scanning your system with a program such as LavaSoft's Ad-aware to see what's been left on your computer. You can download the program at www.lavasoftusa.com.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm..._ptmrsh08.html

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Cornell Makes New File-Sharing Policy
Jonathan Square

Cornell has recently increased its efforts to prevent the violation of copyright laws. Last week, an e-mail notice was sent to all Resnet account holders that outlined the new procedures for dealing with copyright violations.

This new fervor is due to recent legal developments, ever- present computer insecurities, and the fact that scanning agencies like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have stepped up their efforts to find copyright violators.

"We used to try to get in contact with a violator before blocking their Internet connection," said Tracy Mitrano '95 Law, a policy advisor to Cornell Information Technology (CIT).

There are three reasons why Cornell Information Technology (CIT) has decided to change the way it contacts violators. First, students tend to doubt the seriousness of notifications, instead considering them mere warnings. In addition, the detection of copyright violations is increasingly due to insecurities on students' computers, not the use of file sharing programs. Cornell is also concerned with the need to protect itself, because recent legal developments have raised the stakes for Internet service providers.

A federal court in New Jersey recently ordered Verizon to reveal the identity of an alleged downloader to the RIAA. This is troubling news to some because it sets a landmark precedent. If all Internet service providers are required to reveal the identities of users accused of copyright infringement, private organizations like the RIAA could legally sue both Internet service providers and the accused violators.

If Cornell was to continue to allow file sharing, Cornell and the accused violator would be vulnerable to lawsuits.

Only a few months ago, according to Mitrano, the University received 10 to 15 copyright infringement notices per month. Now, the number averages about 20 per month.

"I don't believe that downloading music is the same as stealing. I think that burning CDs from copyrighted material and selling it could be considered stealing, but not downloading for one's own personal collection," said Bryn Fuller '05, who was referred to the J.A. last year for using the file sharing program Morpheus.

"If the companies lowered their CD prices, I'm sure a lot of people would be more inclined to buy the original CDs instead of downloading potentially dangerous files off the net," said Jamie Richard '05.

"The music industry needs to suck up their minimal losses and turn this new fad into a positive thing for both the producers and consumers," said Fuller.
http://www.cornellsun.com/articles/7447/

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Legalize It
P2Ps suit up, corporate style
Aliya Sternstein

Travis Kalanick likes to surf. For sport he takes to the water outside his Hermosa Beach, Calif. home. For a living he surfs the Web. His first plunge into this business was with a little company called Scour, which knocked off the famous music knockoff site Napster. Scour became one of the most popular MP3 sites on the Web, helping larcenous teenagers get free copies of copyrighted music by sharing files. Scour made its money on advertising.

No surprise, music publishers sued Scour two years ago, seeking damages for contributing to copyright infringement. Kalanick settled the case by giving the publishers $1 million for their trouble and agreeing to shut down the site. He also sold Scour for $9 million to CenterSpan Communications. Kalanick left for Hawaii to surf for a bit.

Now the 26-year-old is back with a new company, in Westwood, Calif.: Red Swoosh, which aims to use the same file-sharing technology legitimately. By adding a layer of copy protection and user authentication to his prior application, Kalanick is making nice with the people he once drove mad. "We want to make customers of every one of the 33 litigants in the Scour suit," he says.

If you can't beat 'em, hire 'em. Finding it next to impossible to shut down all the Napster-like sites that facilitate illegal copying, Hollywood is trying to make honest businessmen of some of the perpetrators by teaming up on digital distribution of content. Microsoft has joined forces with Altnet, a mogul-friendly accessory to the notorious Kazaa network. One of Napster's cofounders has launched a movie download service that is in early discussions with MGM. The once- anarchic creator of Freenet has produced an application to help office workers search one another's hard drives for important memos and documents.

The legal battle over the unauthorized copying continues. The music labels shut down Napster and still blame it for their sales slump. The Motion Picture Association of America is suing Kazaa, MusicCity and Grokster in a federal district court in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, operators of some corporate networks are trying to keep file sharing out of the workplace, lest they become entangled in copyright suits or simply lose bandwidth to MP3 frivolity. Home Depot and IBM, for example, ban the peer-to-peer music-sharing technology that Napster used. Companies that upgrade to Windows XP can deploy a new feature that prohibits employees from installing anything on their desktops that would bypass the server.

But file sharing is a powerful technology, and its legitimate uses cannot be denied. The beauty of it is that it doesn't require a central server. Users who want a file search among other "peers," scanning all the computers on a network and then swapping bits. The bottleneck at the file server is bypassed.

Red Swoosh has signed up such clients as Cable & Wireless and IGN Entertainment to download songs, videos and games. As with Kazaa, the Swoosh networks' content comes from disparate PCs near the user that have already installed Swoosh. Data is assembled for download on the fly. But unlike Kazaa, which involves the drudgery of searching through massive file databases and smears your desktop with annoying pop-up ads, Swoosh allows its 1.4 million users to click on a download easily. Its digital-rights-management feature blocks unauthorized users from downloading, encrypts the file while in transit and makes it difficult to burn additional copies.

Even Napster cofounder John Fanning is making a comeback. Fanning, uncle of Shawn Fanning, is chief technology officer and founder of NetMovies, a movie subscription service. The Hull, Mass. company, similar to studio-backed Movielink, is testing its publishing system, which, for $5 a month, will allow viewers to download old classics and purchase new releases, like Bruce Willis' Hart's War. Blockbuster (nyse: BBI - news - people ) is an investor.

Ian Clarke, the 26-year-old behind file-swapping service Freenet, is about to enter the corporate world. In March he will launch Locutus Enterprise, an application that wraps a three-piece suit around Freenet's technology. Companies that buy Locutus will enable employees to search for and share work documents by placing them into one of, for example, three folders: one for a work group, one for a department and one for the company. Locutus will transport encrypted PowerPoint presentations, e-mails and Word documents on a system built on Microsoft's .NET.

The corporate market is getting other file-swapping schemes. Groove Networks, started by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie, has won a $50 million investment from Microsoft to promote its document-sharing platform beyond customers such as Bertelsmann AG, Neutrogena and Pfizer. Blue Falcon Networks has legally dealt downloads for years for companies such as Virgin.

As file sharing matures into a big business, its proponents will inevitably evolve beyond defending lawsuits to maximizing profits. "I don't have any doubt that in 20 years peer-to- peer will be as ubiquitous as the telephone," says Stephen Griffin, chief executive of StreamCast Networks, creator of the Morpheus peer-to-peer service.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/fre.../0217/099.html

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Packeteer Accelerates Web Traffic
Paula Musich

Traffic shaping veteran Packeteer Inc. on Monday will branch out into compression when it launches its new PacketShaper Xpress.

The Cupertino, Calif., bandwidth management company leveraged compression and Web acceleration expertise it gained with its acquisition of Workfire Technologies International Inc. last year to create a universal traffic acceleration offering.

PacketShaper Xpress combines Layer 7 classification, traffic shaping and application-intelligent acceleration to help users get the most efficiency out of their expensive WAN links and to ensure that mission-critical applications get the bandwidth they need.

As more and more non-mission critical Web traffic traverses corporate networks, the need for such tools will only grow—especially in the face of predicted pricing increases for already costly WAN connectivity, said Packeteer President and CEO Dave Cote.

"The use of compression technology represents a nice starting point coupled with basic policies in our shaping technologies to give people additional virtual bandwidth for applications that matter, rather than just delivering compression. The combination of shaping technology to set priorities or minimize unwanted traffic, combined with acceleration, makes for a better solution for overall application performance," he said.

As performance issues arise for applications traversing WAN links, most companies typically "throw bandwidth at the problem," said Lawrence Orans, industry analyst at Gartner Inc., in Stamford, Conn.

But with the rise of Web surfing and peer-to-peer file sharing as well as predicted price increases of 7 percent a year for the next few years—according to Gartner—that solution will likely see much greater resistance.

Cote said Packeteer's new compression technology is unique in that it uses different algorithms for different applications. "Today you have voice traffic that's already compressed, Web traffic with some files compressed and some not. We believe you need different forms of compression and intelligence not to compress other traffic that's already been compressed. We do it based on a more intelligent application architecture and enable different compression algorithms for different types of traffic, and we don't compress traffic that doesn't lend itself to that or is already compressed," he said.

The integration of traffic classification and shaping with compression represents a logical consolidation of functions, Gartner's Orans said.
http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0...a=36724,00.asp

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The Music Business and the Big Flip
Clay Shirky

The first and last thirds of the music industry have been reconfigured by digital tools. The functions in the middle have not.

Thanks to software like ProTools and CakeWalk, the production of music is heavily digital. Thanks to Napster and its heirs like Gnutella and Kazaa, the reproduction and distribution of music is also digital. As usual, this digitization has taken an enormous amount of power formerly reserved for professionals and delivered it to amateurs. But the middle part -- deciding what new music should be available -- is still analog and still professionally controlled.

The most important departments at a record label are Artists & Repertoire, and Marketing. A&R's job is to find new talent, and Marketing's job is to publicize it. These are both genuinely hard tasks, and unlike production or distribution, there is no serious competition for those functions outside the labels themselves. Prior to its demise, Napster began publicizing itself as a way to find new music, but this was a fig leaf, since users had to know the name of a song or artist in advance. Napster did little to place new music in an existing context, and the current file-sharing networks don't do much better. In strong contrast to writing and photos, almost all the music available on the internet is there because it was chosen by professionals.

The curious thing about this state of affairs is that in other domains, we now use amateur input for finding and publicizing. The last 5 years have seen the launch of Google, Blogdex, Kuro5in, Slashdot, and many other collaborative filtering sites that transform the simple judgments of a few participants into aggregate recommendations of remarkably high quality.

This is all part of the Big Flip in publishing generally, where the old notion of "filter, then publish" is giving way to "publish, then filter." There is no need for Slashdot's or Kuro5hin's owners to sort the good posts from the bad in advance, no need for Blogdex or Daypop to pressure people not to post drivel, because lightweight filters applied after the fact work better at large scale than paying editors to enforce minimum quality in advance. A side-effect of the Big Flip is that the division between amateur and professional turns into a spectrum, giving us a world where unpaid writers are discussed side-by-side with New York Times columnists.

The music industry is largely untouched by the Big Flip. The industry harvests the aggregate taste of music lovers and sells it back to us as popularity, without offering anyone the chance to be heard without their approval. The industry's judgment, not ours, still determines the entire domain in which any collaborative filtering will subsequently operate. A working "publish, then filter" system that used our collective judgment to sort new music before it gets played on the radio or sold at the record store would be a revolution.
http://shirky.com/writings/music_flip.html

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Broadband Over Power Lines? It's Possible
Jim Suhr

Coming to a home or office near you could be an electric Internet: high-speed Web access via ubiquitous power lines, of all things, making every electrical outlet an always-on Web connection.

If it sounds shocking, consider this: St. Louis-based Ameren Corp. and other utilities already are testing the technology, and many consider it increasingly viable. This truly plug-and-play technology, if proven safe, has the blessings of federal regulators looking to bolster broadband competition, lower consumer prices and bridge the digital divide in rural areas. Because virtually every building has a power plug, it "could simply blow the doors off the provision of broadband," Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) chairman Michael Powell said last month. For competition's sake, "absolutely, we would applaud it," says Edmond Thomas, chief of the FCC 's Office of Engineering and Technology.

"We're going to have an absolute stampede to move on this. This is a natural," said Alan Shark, president of the Power Line Communications Association, which includes Internet providers such as Earthlink as well as utility companies. "It'll change the way we do business on the Internet."

While existing providers of broadband through cable TV lines or phone wires consider the technology intriguing, they stress that talk of it has been around for years, with nothing to show for it. Existing broadband providers such as St. Louis-based Charter Communications Inc., the nation's third-largest cable company, believe they have the edge because they are known commodities and can bundle high-speed Internet with video and even telephone service in some markets.

If ever deployed, power-line broadband "certainly is competition, but we feel our product would stand up well," said David Andersen, a spokesman for Charter, which has nearly 1.1 million high-speed Internet customers.

Digital power lines are believed to be able to carry data at roughly the same speeds as cable or DSL lines. And because electricity is more prevalent in homes than cable or even telephone lines, a vast new communications infrastructure could be born overnight — notably in rural areas, where broadband access has lagged.

There, the scarcity of potential subscribers hasn't justified the high cost of laying cable or building satellite towers. A December 2001 report by the FCC-created National Exchange Carrier Association estimated it would cost about $10.9 billion to wire all of rural America.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...ctric_internetcurrent

[JackSpratts]

Woodstock Systems Introduces a Breakthrough in Music & P2P Software
Non-Sharable Downloads
Pres Release

The Woodstock PDSTM is the first all in one music application that provides consumers with a breakthrough way to legally and ethically play and lend their digital MP3 music.

New York, New York - February 11, 2003 - Woodstock Systems, LLC, the New York- based software development company, announced today the launch of its revolutionary new music software. The Woodstock PDSTM is the first software combining a full-feature media player with powerful Peer-to-Peer file lending ability. Users of the Woodstock PDSTM software can easily play digital music, convert their CD’s into MP3’s, or listen to thousands of the best Internet radio stations. In addition, the Woodstock PDSTM incorporates a unique, patent pending, file lending method that allows consumers to legally and ethically remotely access and lend their digital media files.

Woodstock’s approach dramatically differs from the Napster and Kazaa like forms of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software. Those products are purposely anonymous in nature, promote open file copying and have come under aggressive attack from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Woodstock’s alternative promotes the concept of P2P networks among groups of friends, family, and co-workers. In addition, the Woodstock PDSTM uses a method of file lending versus file copying. This method “lends” access to a file to a user, while at the same time restricting others from accessing that file. The patent-pending “lending” system neither requires nor permits copying of the file. Thus the original file never leaves the possession or control of the user serving the content. To read more about our approach to file lending, go to:
http://woodstocksystems.com/release-2-11-2003.html

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AOL's Jekyll and Hyde act
The world's biggest Internet provider is also the world's biggest media company. As the entertainment industry prosecutes users who share music, will AOL take a stand?
Farhad Manjoo

One day last summer, a person using Verizon to access the Internet logged on to Kazaa, a popular peer-to-peer music-swapping service, and started downloading MP3s. It was the sort of thing that millions of people do every day; the only difference this time was that an analyst at the Recording Industry Association of America was monitoring the action.

The RIAA's efforts to obtain this single Verizon subscriber's identity has ballooned into a major courtroom battle over the scope of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that outlines protections for online content. The litigation has split the ranks of Internet service providers and content companies: ISPs, who say they worry about their subscribers' privacy, have generally sided with Verizon, while copyright holders have supported the RIAA.

But stuck in the middle of this fight is a firm that is both a huge copyright holder as well as a huge Internet company -- in fact, it is the leading company in each industry. This is AOL Time Warner, a neither-fish-nor-fowl hybrid of copyright and consumer interests, a combination that has left the company pretty much speechless on a case that could determine the privacy rights of its more than 30 million subscribers, not to mention the rest of us. While other ISPs are running scared, AOL, the biggest ISP of all, is keeping mum.

In January, after months of legal back-and-forth in the Verizon-RIAA case, U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled in the recording industry's favor, ordering Verizon to hand over the Kazaa user's name and address. Internet service providers, privacy advocates, and people critical of the growing influence of copyright owners were devastated by the Bates opinion. The ISPs are worried that they'll be flooded with requests for their subscribers' information, and that they'll have no way to determine the accuracy of these claims.

"You could simply walk into a courthouse, sign a form, and send us a subpoena," says Les Seagraves, the chief privacy officer of EarthLink. "We would have to turn over the name and address of that user. And of course that could get abused -- and there's really nothing we could do about it. The volume of these things would increase, and we'd find ourselves in the subpoena-compliance business, not the Internet business."
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...ing/print.html

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Web Radio Royalty Debate Resumes
David McGuire

The multi-year legal struggle between upstart Internet radio operators and record companies over music royalties kicked off anew Thursday, when the U.S. Copyright Office issued an order that could send the combatants back before an arbitration panel.

Web radio operators and music industry representatives must brief the Copyright Office by March 5 on their efforts to hammer out a compromise on royalty payments. If the negotiations are unsuccessful, the Copyright Office will restart the process to establish the royalties that "webcasters" must pay to artists and record labels.

The outcome of the debate -- which is slated to come before arbitrators in August if no agreement is reached -- could determine whether online radio has a future, observers said.

The royalty debate has been down this road before. Just last year, arbitrators capped more than three years of wrangling by setting a per-song royalty rate for webcasters.

That rate -- which was adjusted and approved by the Library of Congress -- expired at the end of 2002. Neither side was pleased with the rate, and representatives from both said they wanted a private settlement so they could avoid another arbitration round.

But record companies and Internet radio stations disagree on what constitutes a "reasonable" royalty rate, and members from both camps are gearing up to plead their cases to the arbitrators, anticipating that the private negotiations might fail.

Jonathan Lamy, spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said record companies are optimistic that they can reach private agreements.

"We are still in the process of private negotiations and hope that those will bear fruit so we can avoid" arbitration, he said.

Kevin Shively, vice president of business affairs at online classical radio station Beethoven.com, said that the record companies "still are holding onto positions that would potentially bankrupt the industry."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer

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Questioning the Economic Justification for (and thus Constitutionality of) Copyright Law's Prohibition Against Unauthorized Copying: §106
Mark S. Nadel. Related Publications 03-1. Jan 2003.

This article questions the economic justification for copyright law’s prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyer’s 1970 Harvard Law Review article, "The Uneasy Case for Copyright," it contends that not only may copyright law’s prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. §106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that §106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that §106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of §106. Hence, the article questions whether the current §106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of §106 exceed its costs.
http://www.aei.brookings.org/publica...ct.php?pid=302

314k PDF File
http://www.aei.brookings.org/admin/a...7&aei_brooking

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White Stripes Battle Piracy With Vinyl

The White Stripes have sent out copies of their new album to a select few on vinyl, but fret not, come tax day, you'll have your Elephant spinning in your CD player.

While other bands have toyed with everything from watermarked CDs to hermetically sealed CD players to keep their music from leaking to the Internet, the White Stripes took a decidedly more retro approach when sending out advance albums to critics, the logic being that any music journalist worth their weight in free CDs owns a record player.

"[Frontman] Jack [White] wanted people to hear the music the way it was meant to be heard, which is on vinyl. [He wanted them] to listen to it as [we] used to listen to records," V2 Records president Andy Gershon said. "In addition, it just creates one extra step before someone can put it up on Limewire or KaZaa."
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/145...headlines=true

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Video-on-demand anxiety
Lisa Singhania

Fed up with driving to the video store in the cold of winter, Beverly Boyarsky thought she had found the perfect solution: video on demand.

For about $80 a month, the Huntington Station, N.Y., woman could order movies and premium programming over digital cable. She figured she'd be able to watch whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

Two months later, Boyarsky's enthusiasm is gone.

"There are movies four, five, six years old that are shown on regular TV and I don't feel a need to pay for," she said. "If they're going to offer movies they should show movies that are more recent."

Boyarsky's frustrations reflect the concerns of media companies, who are afraid the combination of digital and on-demand technology will make their movies and TV shows vulnerable to piracy and render them less lucrative platforms for advertising.

"For the most part content providers are not licensing their content," said Yankee Group analyst Aditya Kishore. "There's a lot of risk for them, and most of them aren't in a rush to do this."

The cautious approach might work as long as the number of digital and video-on-demand customers remains low.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...ndemand10.html

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Sarnoff’s Invisible Digital Cinema Watermarking Survives Camcorder Capture and Data Compression
Technique Can Trace Illegal Copies Of Movies Back To Source Of Piracy
Press release

Sarnoff Corporation today announced a breakthrough approach to digital cinema watermarking that will let a movie studio reliably trace a pirated copy of a film back to its source, even after the copy has been captured by a camcorder in a theater and then compressed at low bit-rates for illegal digital redistribution, such as over the Internet. The technique was presented at the 15th Annual Symposium on Electronic Imaging Science and Technology in Santa Clara, CA, by its chief developer, Dr. Jeffrey Lubin, Senior Member of Technical Staff.

The watermarking technique was developed in part under an Advanced Technology Program funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the Department of Commerce, with Dr. Lubin and Dr. Jeffrey Bloom, Technology Leader, as co-Principal Investigators.

According to Dr. Lubin, this new technique embeds digital codes in the on-screen image that can identify individual distributors or exhibitors of a film. Tests using expert viewers and Sarnoff’s Emmy®-winning JNDmetrix™ tool for measuring human perception show that these codes are invisible to the human eye.

“Just as crucial for studios and other content creators, it’s almost impossible for pirates to detect and defeat these watermarked codes,” said Dr. Lubin. “If they try, they’ll get an image so degraded it’s likely to be unacceptable to the average viewer.

“So not only is it hard for pirates to cloak their identity, the very attempt to do so makes their product unattractive to buyers. It’s a double deterrent to piracy.”
http://www.sarnoff.com/news/index.asp?releaseID=116

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Tracking tag for Net music unveiled

A music industry trade body launched on Monday electronic identity tags to keep tabs on Internet music sales in a bid to compensate musicians and song writers as more of their works become available online.

The Global Release Identifier, or GRid, is a code akin to the Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code found on a CD or cassette tape in stores. The aim is to track each time a record label, online retailer or distributor such as Microsoft's MSN or Italian Internet service provider Tiscali sells a song in the form of a Web stream or download.

Such tracking initiatives are considered vital to an industry that is reeling from lost sales compounded by a slumping global economy and the growth in online music piracy.

With the GRid initiative, resellers would be charged an annual fee of about $245, for which they can issue an identity tag to millions of songs sold online. Each track will be distributed with an individual GRid serial number. Like a bar code, it will be reported back to rights societies and collection agencies so that artists can be compensated for sales.

International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have been developing the standard for the past two years. "If this is done properly, the artists and authors of music will be paid adequately for the sale of their works online," said Paul Jessop, chief technology officer of the IFPI. He added the GRid initiative is a voluntary system, and that the fee would, initially at least, be covered by the resellers.

Jessop cautioned that GRid is not designed, nor is it intended for, keeping track of songs that wind up on online file-sharing networks, a major source of music piracy. The music industry blames the popularity of such networks, including Kazaa and Grokster, where millions of consumers swap songs for free, for the decline in recorded music sales. On Monday, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) reported a 3.7 percent decline in recorded music sales in the fourth quarter of 2002, traditionally the strongest selling period.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/interne...ut/index.html#




Mr. Altnet




New Kazaa software released
Dawn Kawamoto

Sharman Networks released a new version of its Kazaa file-trading software Thursday, adding new features and advertising partners the company hopes will aid in its legal struggle for its life.

The new software adds little to the basic functions of the Net's most popular file-swapping program. However, Kazaa users will see an increase in the proportion of advertiser-paid, copy- protected search results as they hunt for their favorite artists or movies, the company said.

Sharman, which is fighting a copyright infringement lawsuit mounted by the record and film industries, touts Kazaa's role as a distributor of content as a cornerstone of its legal defense. In a recent court filing, the company contended that people download more than 15 million copy-protected files a month through the Kazaa service and its Altnet affiliate, which provides that content.

Kazaa "users have shown great interest in premium Altnet content," Sharman CEO Nikki Hemming said in a statement.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-984525.html?tag=fd_top

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P2P virus fakes nude Zeta Jones pics
John Leyden

A virus posing as racy pictures of Oscar-nominee Catherine Zeta Jones, or other well-known celebs, is doing the rounds on the Net.

Users of file sharing networks are been lured into opening a file that promises compromising pictures of Catherine Zeta Jones and other celebrities such as Britney Spears, Sandra_Bullock and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Instead of cheap thrills, these files offer a poisoned payload.

Users who open the infectious file activate Igloo, a backdoor Trojan horse and Internet worm which spreads via file sharing on KaZaA networks and via IRC channels. Igloo is the latest in a line of worms to target file-sharing networks.

The supposed photos of Catherine Zeta Jones are being used to spread a virus at the same time the Welsh actress is in the courts fighting Hello! magazine over the unauthorised publication of wedding snaps.

The worm has not spread very far as yet, according to AV vendor Sophos.

Nonetheless standard precautions apply. Users should update their AV packages to detect the latest threat and attempt to practice safe computing practices, the most relevant of which here is never to trust potentially executable files of uncertain origin.
http://212.100.234.54/content/56/29323.html

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SBC moves in to scupper Murdoch

SBC Communications, one of the US’ biggest and most powerful telecommunications companies, is moving to acquire General Motors’ DirecTV, the nation’s second biggest pay-TV provider, according to a report in the New York Times.

If SBC is successful in acquiring DirecTV, the deal would scupper Rupert Murdoch’s long-held ambition to enter the US satellite market. Murdoch’s hopes of acquiring DirecTV had previously been dashed after General Motors agreed to sell DirecTV (along with the rest of its Hughes Electronics division) to EchoStar Communications in 2001. That move was blocked by antitrust authorities, however.

According to the New York Times, SBC may be willing to pay out more than E9bn (USD10bn) in order to buy the pay-television provider. Analysts suggest that SBC is looking to secure its position in a market where its core activities are increasingly under threat from mobile and cable operators. SBC currently specialises in local telephone communications, an area that is being increasingly outflanked by cable operators who frequently bundle their digital television packages with telephone service provision.

Acquiring DirecTV would give SBC an strong weapon in fighting back against the wide-range of service provision offered by cable operators.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=14835

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Yamaha Pulls Out Of CD Burner Market
Mark Hachman

Yamaha Electronics Corp. has bowed before the decline in the CD writer market and will exit the business, company executives confirmed Monday.

Citing uncharacteristically rapid price erosions, continuing market difficulties, and the highly volatile competitive environment, Yamaha Electronics Corporation stated that the company is discontinuing its sales and marketing of computer-based CD-RW recorders, effective immediately.

Since compact discs can only be spun up to a certain rotational speed without damage, makers of CD burners have said that the current generation will be the end of the road. Hewlett-Packard, in fact, reached this conclusion in late 2001.

Yamaha will continue to market its other multimedia offerings, including computer speakers, computer receivers, headphones, and CD-R/RW media, and provide CD-RW drives for music and audio applications, the company said.

Technical support and warranty service for all Yamaha CD recorders will continue uninterrupted for the full warranty period, Yamaha added.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...,880541,00.asp

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SubPop, other indies, hook up with Pressplay
Reuters

Online subscription music service pressplay said on Monday it has reached agreements with a number of independent record labels that will add artists like Frank Zappa, Nirvana and Nelly Furtado to its catalog.

Pressplay, a joint venture of the music arms of Japan's Sony Corp. 6758.T and France's Vivendi Universal EAUG.PA , said it signed deals with DreamWorks, Palm, Ubiquity, Rykodisc/Ryko Label Group and Sub Pop, bringing its total available songs to about 250,000.

The company also said that, starting with the Feb. 14 launch of version 2.5 of its service, it will add interactive features to its radio service allowing users to create customized radio stations.

The company will also offer 47 years' worth of music chart data from industry magazine Billboard as of the launch of version 2.5.

"It's a terrific way for people to discover and rediscover music that was a part of their lives over time," Mike Bebel, the chief executive of pressplay, told Reuters.

Pressplay, which offers unlimited streaming and downloads starting at $9.95 a month and licenses content from all the major record labels, has been making progress in converting trial users to paying subscribers, Bebel said.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2203321

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How the record companies made the world a worse place for everyone, including themselves
David Toomey

Imagine yourself as a record company with a large steady stream of profit coming in. Then one day, someone appears to try to take some of that stream away from you. What is probably your first reaction -- to go after whoever is causing the trouble. Simple, primitive, but generally effective for dealing with such situations.

This probably isn't too far from the mindset of record companies around the end of 1999. Napster appeared on the scene, record companies felt their profits threatened, and consequentially they launched a full out assault against Napster.

However, the situation was much more complex than Napster just causing the record companies some trouble. The files supported by Napster, mp3's, had been around for some time. Mp3's were popular not only because they were easy to transfer over computer networks, but also because people could turn their computers into supercharged jukeboxes with mp3's, adding things like visual effects and crossfading. Plus, mp3's could be used on portable devices that were quite a bit more convenient than discmans.

Mp3's, or something very similar, was bound to be the way that music would go for a large portion of the population. The problem for the record companies, though, was the ease with which these files could be transferred between individuals, as this would potentially result in fewer record sales.

Before Napster, mp3 trading was decentralized. Most trading took place using FTP servers. With such decentralized trading, there was essentially no way that record companies could have extracted any profits from these trades.
http://www.omniscienceisbliss.org/record_companies.html

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Free music offered to net users

Customers of Tiscali are getting six months of free digital music included with their standard net service.

Tiscali's dial-up and broadband customers will get access to a large library of digital music files as well as special content such as concerts, interviews and radio programs. Customers will be given credits that they can trade in to listen to tracks or burn the music they like to a CD. The European net firm has signed a deal with music distribution firm OD2 and software giant Microsoft to set up the service.

The free music downloads are available from today to every existing Tiscali customer and gives them access to 150,000 tracks by 8,500 artists Tiscali currently has about 7 million active subscribers in 16 countries. The library of music, including artists signed up to Warner, BMG, EMI and Universal, is being supplied by OD2, the online music firm backed by ex-Genesis front man Peter Gabriel.

Dial-up users will get 50 credits per month over the next six months that they can trade in to listen to 300 tracks streamed to their computer or to download 30 music files to their home computer.

Broadband users will get credits to listen to 400 tracks over the same period and will be able to cash in 100 credits at a time to burn music to a CD.

Keen music fans will be able to buy more credits or upgrade to a pay service. "To show there's a compelling alternative to piracy, we need to publicise the growing digital music catalogue available through legitimate channels," said Charles Grimsdale, chief executive of OD2.

The popularity of peer-to-peer file swapping services such as Kazaa is posing problems for music firms who are keen to stop people sharing pirated pop.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2752355.stm

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More ISPs 'to impose download limits'
Graeme Wearden .

The widespread and growing use of peer-to-peer networks is likely to force broadband operators to restrict the amount of data their subscribers are allowed to download, according to analyst group Jupiter Research.

Jupiter Research warned this week that file sharing is growing "at a phenomenal rate", and that the sheer volume of music and movie files being transferred between users is putting a huge burden on broadband service providers. According to Jupiter, some broadband ISPs in Europe are finding that over 50 percent of the traffic on their networks is caused by P2P file-sharing.

"Although not the only factor in driving Internet users to broadband, file-sharing has proven to be broadband's first 'killer application,'" said Dan Stevenson, analyst at Jupiter Research, in a research note. "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."

As a result of the increased traffic, these operators will probably be forced to limit the amount of data its broadband customers are allowed to download from the Net. Should they exceed this limit, they will be charged extra.

"Not wanting to take on the file-sharing networks in court, the best solution for broadband service providers to address this issue would be to impose monthly data limits on their subscribers," Stevenson advised.

Jupiter predicts that by the end of 2003 such data limits will be "the rule, not the exception."

Such a move is likely to prove unpopular with broadband users, though, who are likely to feel that data limits are at odds with the idea of an unlimited, always-on service.

NTL caused a large amount of controversy over the last few days after introducing data limits for its broadband service. It plans to target people who regularly download more than 1GB of data per day.

Back in October 2001, BT also caused a storm of protest when it blocked the ports used by some peer-to-peer applications. It said the move was an attempt to ensure it offered a decent service for all users, but did back down after many customers complained.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t26...zdnetukhompage

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New ADSL chipset enables speeds of 20Mbps
Might take a while before you can get it at home
Arron Rouse

BROADBAND CHIPSET MANUFACTURER Centillium Communications has launched a new ADSL chipset that will make the Net fly. The company's new Palladia 210 chipset for ADSL modems can reach speeds of up to 20Mbps.

It will probably take a while to filter down to the average end user but the new chipset points the way that Internet connections are headed. It was only a few years ago that 10Mbps was the speed of a normal LAN. The downside is that telcos will have to install new kit at your local exchange before you can get it.

The new chipset is an all-in-one design with USB, Ethernet and ADSL built onto a chip with a MIPS processor. The processor allows the use of an embedded version of Linux to control the ADSL modem. Depending on the end customer, the chip can be used to make a USB modem or an ADSL Ethernet router.

To give you an idea of the speed, a modem equipped with the 210 would be capable of downloading files at over 2 megabytes per second. That's a whole CD's worth of information in five and a half minutes or an entire DVD in forty minutes. It brings the possibility of real-time streaming of high quality video, something that movie studios are keen on and video rental companies are frightened witless about.

With some telcos slapping limits on how much their users can download each day, we have to wonder how they will cope when this technology goes online. We suspect that the new technology will only be available to selected users even when the exchanges are upgraded and it's bound to be expensive at first. But these things have a way of trickling down to the average customer eventually.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7759

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“I get for you wholesale!” Song prices finally dropping.
Listen.com discounts CD-copying fee
Reuters

In an aggressive move to boost subscriptions, online music company Listen.com on Thursday cut what it charges subscribers to burn songs from its Rhapsody service from 99 cents to a loss-making 49 cents.

The drastic discount underscores the lengths to which legitimate online music companies will go to jump-start the fledgling marketplace. Their competitors are the still-popular unauthorized services such as Kazaa, which attract millions with offers of virtually limitless content for free.

"We look at this as a limited-time promotion and an effort to get people in the door," said Matt Graves, a spokesman for independently owned Listen.com.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-984455.html?tag=fd_top

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Digital plans for libraries revealed
Richard Agnew

The government has detailed plans to position libraries as the "hub" of new local communities' online activities and e-government services, as part of a new ten-year modernising strategy.

A new framework detailing the government's long-term vision for the future of the library network, includes plans to move beyond its scheme to provide internet access in libraries to the creation of a new raft of interactive services to enhance 'digital citizenship' in the communities they serve.

The document, published this week by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), details plans for libraries to create and host local community group websites and provide access to interactive services developed under the DCMS' Culture Online initiative.

They could also become a physical point of contact for home-based e-learning services provided by broadcasters and through the public programme learndirect.

Under the plans, Resource (The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries), will also act a central agent to broker deals with industry content players to bring services such as classical music downloads to libraries across the UK.

The plans would build on investment made by the government in establishing web-enabled PCs and learning centres in libraries and making staff computer literate, under the UK Online programme.

But the report says the move would see libraries' positioned not just as a centre for providing access to the web and national government services through infrastructure, but as a centre for "collaboration, sharing and peer-to-peer services".

Of the plans, Arts Minister Tessa Blackstone said: "The Government is committed to public libraries and all that they stand for. Our strategy for their future makes promoting reading their key priority. Libraries also have - and will continue to have - a central role in helping people from all walks of life to be part of the communications revolution sweeping the world."
http://www.netimperative.com/cmn/vie...ews_0000048866

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Reliance on a succession of technological measures has proven unavailing. There is no reason to believe that the result will be different next time, or ever
A Full, Fair And Feasible Solution To The Dilemma of Online Music Licensing
Bennett Lincoff

Practically no one is satisfied with the rules governing online use of copyrighted musical works and sound recordings. Rights holders believe that the rules are inadequate to protect their ability to sell recorded music. Information technology firms and consumer electronics makers are concerned that they will not be permitted to develop new media or new markets. Webcasters are being driven out of business by statutory license fees that exceed their gross revenues. Those who survive must operate with unprecedented program content restrictions. And consumers are alarmed that the rules will expose them to liability for enjoying music when, where and how they want.

Despite the growing conflict between the music industry and each of these other groups, their interests are not necessarily incompatible. It is possible simultaneously to protect the integrity of copyrights, promote technological innovation, facilitate the growth of digital audio services, and meet consumer demand

The problem is, however, that because of the Internet it will not be possible to prevent the widespread unauthorized distribution of recorded music in digital form

This, in turn, jeopardizes the music industry's $40-plus billion dollars in annual worldwide revenue from the sale of recordings

The industry has responded with legislative proposals, technological access restrictions and anti-copying measures, and infringement litigation. Nonetheless, digital music piracy is on the increase and CD sales are in decline. It appears that the only effect -- if not the intent -- of the industry’s strategy has been to thwart development of a lawful market for the online use of music

Simply put, the music industry soon may no longer be able to sustain its traditional sales-based revenue model. Neither law, nor technology, nor moral suasion will suffice

An alternative to the sales-based revenue model is needed for online uses of music; an approach to rights management that will not depend on access restrictions or anti-copying technology for its success; one that is structured specifically to accommodate the changed circumstances imposed on the music industry by the emerging global digital network

I suggest this: http://www.quicktopic.com/boing/D/uhAMNwVb8yfkc.html

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Why are CD sales down?
Kevin Johnson

The music industry frowns on people like St. Louis music fan Evan Hilliard.

Though a devout music lover, Hilliard estimates that last year, he bought a grand total of only four CDs, including India.Arie's "Voyage to India" and Scarface's "The Fix." But he downloaded tons more CDs online, and he has burned numerous copies for friends. He has no qualms about what he's doing. He says that record labels need to lower their prices.

"There's no way I should have to pay $16 or $18 for a CD with only four good songs on it," Hilliard says. "That's really stupid. And some CDs are now coming with only 10 songs on it. That's not getting the most bang for my buck."

Hilliard kicked off his downloading frenzy last year with "The Eminem Show" and has since downloaded CDs from Linkin Park, Brandy, Incubus, Aaliyah and dozens of others - but never St. Louis artists, he swears. He also has pieced together a number of compilation CDs through downloading and burning.

The system isn't perfect. He says downloaded songs are often mere loops. Or he'll think he's downloading one song and actually get another. Still, he figures, "This is easier for me. I like so many different forms of music, but my money doesn't spread so far and wide."
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/ent...+sales+down%3F

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Share the files, share the wealth
Sean Piccoli

What is a good song worth? Legend has it that a young, broke Willie Nelson sold Crazy, one of the first hits he ever penned, for somewhere between $50 and $150 to cover a bar tab or to buy groceries. The details change, but the point never does -- that someone acquired an eventual classic for, well, a song.

Willie got paid, as every composer should for work that people enjoy. But considering how beloved Crazy would become with Patsy Cline's 1961 recording, in hindsight Willie also sold himself short.

What he needed was the Internet.

Don't laugh. For all the hand-wringing over music's migration into digital space, and the supposed folly of people swapping digitized tracks, there may be no better measure of a song's true worth than what happens to it once it gets online.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/template...02digitalfeb09

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Of the Pentagon, he said, "They've got some crazy people over there."
TIA Hobbled: Conferees in Congress Bar Using a Pentagon Project on Americans
Adam Clymer

House and Senate negotiators have agreed that a Pentagon project intended to detect terrorists by monitoring Internet e-mail and commercial databases for health, financial and travel information cannot be used against Americans.

The conferees also agreed to restrict further research on the program without extensive consultation with Congress.

House leaders agreed with Senate fears about the threat to personal privacy in the Pentagon program, known as Total Information Awareness. So they accepted a Senate provision in the omnibus spending bill passed last month, said Representative Jerry Lewis, the California Republican who heads the defense appropriations subcommittee.

Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the subcommittee, said of the program, "Jerry's against it, and I'm against it, so we kept the Senate amendment." Of the Pentagon, he said, "They've got some crazy people over there."

The only obstacles to the provision becoming law would be the failure of the negotiators to reach an agreement on the overall spending bill in which it is included, or a successful veto by President Bush of the bill.

Lt. Cmdr. Donald Sewell, a Pentagon spokesman, defended the program, saying, "The Department of Defense still feels that it's a tool that can be used to alert us to terrorist acts before they occur." He said, "It's not a program that snoops into American citizens' privacy."

One important factor in the breadth of the opposition is the fact that the research project is headed by Adm. John M. Poindexter. Several members of Congress have said that the admiral was an unwelcome symbol because he had been convicted of lying to Congress about weapons sales to Iran and illegal aid to Nicaraguan rebels, an issue with constitutional ramifications, the Iran-contra affair. The fact that his conviction was later reversed on the ground that he had been given immunity for the testimony in which he lied did not mitigate Congressional opinion, they said.

Katie Corrigan, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "This is a positive first step toward protecting the privacy of Americans. Congress represents the people's interests and appropriately responded to broad public concern about a program that does not reflect the goals of making us both safe and free."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/12/politics/12PRIV.html

Anti-terrorism draft could expand spying
'Emergency' surveillance allowed without court order
Grant Gross

A proposal that a government watchdog group said is being circulated in the U.S. Department of Justice would expand the electronic surveillance powers of law enforcement and spy agencies within U.S. borders, and that's raising concerns from civil liberties advocates and at least one U.S. senator.

The Center for Public Integrity, a government watchdog group, posted what it said is a Justice Department draft follow-up to the USA Patriot Act, an antiterrorism law signed by President George W. Bush in October 2001. A PDF (Portable Document Format) version of the draft is available at the center's Web site, and an HTML version is available at http:// www.dailyrotten.com/source-docs/ patriot2draft.html.

Among the provisions in the draft is a proposal to extend the limits on court orders for electronic surveillance from 30 to 90 days in antiterrorism investigations inside the United States, and the limit on wiretapping devices such as pen registers and trap and trace devices from 60 to 120 days. A pen register is an electronic device that can be attached to a telephone line and record outgoing numbers and information about incoming calls. A trap and trace device can capture the originating number of electronic devices such as telephones.

The draft also would relax the need for court orders for electronic surveillance, allowing surveillance of suspected terrorists without a court order in "emergency situations."

It's not clear how those changes would affect other electronic communications, such as e-mail.

The draft also would eliminate most court-sanctioned consent decrees that law enforcement agencies entered into before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which placed limits on gathering information. Some law enforcement agencies "lack the ability to use the full range of investigative techniques that are lawful under the Constitution, and that are available to the FBI," the draft document noted.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/...iterror_1.html

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17 Charged in Satellite TV Case
Barbara Whitaker

Seventeen people have been charged with developing technology used to steal millions of dollars in satellite television service. The charges culminated a yearlong federal investigation into the underground world of computer hackers, the authorities announced today.

One key defendant, Randyl Walter, 43, pleaded guilty to manufacturing satellite decryption devices, admitting responsibility for nearly $15 million in losses to satellite companies like Dish Network and DirecTV. He faces fines up to $500,000 and a maximum of five years in prison. Nine other defendants have also agreed to plead guilty to charges related to significant losses by the companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/12/national/12TEEV.html

Indictments to test copyright law
Dawn Kawamoto

Invoking the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal grand jury has indicted six people on charges of developing software and hardware designed to hack into paid TV satellite transmissions.

The defendants allegedly created software and hardware designed to unscramble transmission signals sent by satellite TV operators, such as DirecTV and Dish Networks, said IDC with the computer crimes section of the U.S. Attorney General's Office for the Central District of California.

The defendants allegedly sold or distributed free software and hardware to hundreds of thousands of people, giving them free access to paid subscription satellite TV services, Spertus said. The satellite TV industry and the Motion Picture Association of America lose millions of dollars from piracy, he noted.

Seventeen defendants were indicted in all, but only six were charged under the criminal antidecryption provisions of the 1998 DMCA. The 11 others were charged with breaking federal laws against conspiracy and manufacturing devices for the purpose of stealing satellite signals. The DMCA-related charges were unsealed Tuesday and marked only the second time a grand jury has issued indictments involving the act.

The first case involved the highly publicized arrest of Russian encryption expert Dmitry Sklyarov, and eventual charges against his company, ElcomSoft, which published software capable of cracking the antipiracy protection of e-books. Ultimately, a jury acquitted the company.

"The message we're trying to send out is we have infiltrated the hacking community," Spertus said. "There is massive theft going on, with satellite signal providers as the victims...The FBI investigation into this rampant theft is still ongoing."
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-984408.html

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Rivals of Microsoft File Antitrust Complaint in Europe
Paul Meller

An alliance of technology companies said today that it had filed a new complaint with European antitrust regulators about the Windows XP operating system of Microsoft, just as the regulators were nearing the end of an investigation into earlier versions of Windows.

The alliance, called the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said in a news conference today that Microsoft's dominance was stifling innovation and competition in the development of software for all kinds of digital devices, from computers to mobile phones. The alliance includes Sun Microsystems, a longtime foe of Microsoft, as well as companies like Nokia, AOL Time Warner, Eastman Kodak, Fujitsu and Oracle.

Amelia Torres, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, said that its competition department would look into the complaint. The alliance filed the 260-page submission at the end of January. She said the new complaint would probably not delay a ruling in the existing five-year investigation of Microsoft, expected by the end of June.

At the heart of that case is the commission's accusation that Microsoft leveraged its dominant position in operating systems software to win advantages in related markets, like network software. It also accused Microsoft of trying to wipe out the market for rivals' audio and video-player software programs by incorporating its own product, Media Player, into Windows, a practice known as bundling.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/12/bu...ss/12SOFT.html

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FRENCH COURT REJECTS SUIT AGAINST YAHOO
Kerry Shaw (NYT)

After a three-year legal fight, a Paris court yesterday rejected a lawsuit by French human rights advocates and Holocaust survivors who sued Yahoo for one symbolic euro. They accused Yahoo of having condoned war crimes when it sold Nazi paraphernalia, including flags with swastikas, on its auction pages. French law forbids the display or sale of racist material, but the items were available to French users who clicked on the American pages. The court said that Yahoo did not seek to "justify war crimes and crimes against humanity" when it sold the items on its Web site. It was the second lawsuit against Yahoo by French human rights advocates; the first was started in 2000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/12/te...y/12TBRF2.html



Top Ten Downloads - Singles

BigChampange


Pirates & Paranoids
Recording Restricted
Arik Hesseldahl

Video recording is a convenience that consumers have grown accustomed to since the introduction of the first videocassette recorders in the 1970s. Many consider it an entitlement.

To a point, it is. The U.S. Supreme Court, in fact, said so: In 1984, in the landmark Betamax case, which pitted Sony against Universal Studios and The Walt Disney Co. , the court ruled that recording television programs for private viewing in homes does not infringe on copyright protections.

However, the rights handed down by the court don't seem so clear now. When the videotape in the VCR is replaced by a hard drive so that the copy made is as good as the original and can be shared over the Internet with a multitude of people, the right to record looks more--at least in the view of several media companies--like a license to steal.

The recording industry's legal victories over the music-sharing service Napster and some of its emulators has emboldened media companies eager to protect their TV programming from a Napster-like fate. For consumers, the basic convenience of recording television would start to erode, especially as they navigate the transition to digital and high-definition television (HDTV).

For one thing, what media companies such as Viacom and Disney want sounds innocuous enough. It's a few bits of code embedded into the signals of the programming they send. These "broadcast flags" would give broadcasters the ability to prevent certain programs from being copied and shared over digital networks.

And late last year, consumer electronics manufacturers, among them Hitachi , Royal Phillips , Sony and Matsushita's Panasonic, announced a major agreement with cable companies such as AOL Time Warner's Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications . The crux of the deal focused on eliminating digital set-top boxes. But the deal also included an agreement on proposed "encoding rules."

Under the proposed rules, most regular TV shows available for free from the major networks would fall under the "copy freely" category, while pay- channel programs on networks such as HBO or Showtime might fall under "copy once" that would allow recording but restrict sharing. Pay-per- view and video-on-demand programs would likely be tagged "copy never."

But copying and sharing programming over a network is at the heart of what many consumer electronics and PC manufacturers want to pursue. If the recent International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is any indication, manufacturers such as Sony and Hewlett-Packard and even software giant Microsoft showed off product concepts that would allow consumers to record a show from a TV in one room to a hard drive, and then watch it later on any TV or computer screen in the home. And all of those networks were in turn connected to a broadband line to the Internet.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...artner=newscom

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“Creativity has never been more controlled in our history – ever”
Copyright defender advises Number 10
Bill Thompson

Net freedom fighter Lawrence Lessig has urged the UK Government to ensure that laws designed to prevent digital piracy do not trample over the right of fair use. On his recent visit to the UK, the Stanford University law professor held a private meeting with government media policy advisers at Number 10 Downing Street.

The meeting, organised by Damian Tambini, Director of the Program for Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP) at Oxford University, was attended by Ed Richards, the prime minister's media policy adviser and the man behind the recent Communications Bill.

At the meeting professor Prof Lessig spoke about ways in which the UK Government can ensure that new laws protecting digital information from piracy do not result in the erosion of the public's right to share and use intellectual property.

His views may influence the government's approach to proposals to change the Patent Act to implement the European Union Copyright Directive. These were so widely criticised by copyright campaigners that the original timetable for implementation was put back by three months.Prof Lessig's intervention at a senior level may result in a rethink of plans to make it illegal to use a multi-region DVD player or copy DVDs for personal use.

He explained how a reader of the Adobe eBook version of George Eliot's Middlemarch is only allowed to cut and paste 10 sections of the book every 10 days, even though the work is out of copyright.

By contrast, no cutting and pasting is allowed of the eBook version of his latest book, The Future of Ideas, even though both UK and US copyright law would allow quoting from the book in a review or academic study.

The problem arises because the technology used to protect the material from copying - in this case Adobe's program code - is itself protected by law. In the United States the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it an offence to break the protection even if the purpose is to do something allowed by copyright law.

Soon we may have a similar law here under the European Union Copyright Directive.

Prof Lessig pointed out that this means that unregulated use of copyright material becomes impossible, "entering the jurisdiction of the law because of an accident of design".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2743961.stm

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New Finnish industry coalition formed to fight internet regulation

A number of Finnish telecom and media companies have formed a coalition to fight against proposed government
legislation that they say would stifle freedom of expression on the internet.

The new coalition delivered a statement to the Finnish Parliament late last week stating, "excessive domestic regulation of internet content will create significant uncertainties for business and have a chilling effect on commercial communication."

According to Marja-Liisa Virtanen, of telecom operator, TeliaSonera Finland, one of the companies to dispute government plans to censor internet message boards, illegal and offensive material is already deleted from most message boards - mostly upon request of visitors, but also, to some extent, on the webmaster's own initiative.

"In proportion to the mass of messages received, there are very few problems on the message boards," she said.

If passed, the law would force liability of content onto newspaper website owners who allow for message boards – just as in the form of letters to the editor to print media publishers.

The campaign is supported by ICC Finland – the Finnish affiliate of the ICC – who represents the interests of both small and large business organizations and whose members include Nokia and Kone.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=14833

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Companies warned over music piracy

Workplace music piracy is hurting the record industry

Hundreds of large companies are being sent a guide by the music industry warning them that staff are downloading music illegally over the internet. The guides, sent out by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) on Thursday, show companies how to prevent staff from downloading tracks using office computers and networks.

The global campaign has been started to try and curb the massive amounts of music being downloaded during office hours. Such copying "can tarnish corporate reputations, increase security risks for computer systems and put organisations at risk of legal prosecution," an IFPI statement said.

A US company got fined $1m for staff swapping illegal music
The record industry says such downloading deprives it of billions of dollars in revenue.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/2757185.stm

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U.S. telecom regulators split over state role
Spat delays crucial vote
Andy Sullivan

U.S. regulators have delayed a crucial vote on rules for local telephone competition because they cannot agree on the role state regulators should play, sources close to the negotiations said on Tuesday.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell has run into resistance from three of the agency's other four commissioners, who do not support his plans to relax rules that require local-phone giants like Verizon Communications to share their networks with AT&T and other competitors, industry sources said.

Republican commissioner Kevin Martin has joined the commission's two Democrats, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, in proposing an alternative that would give state regulators more say in determining when Verizon and other "Baby Bells" could be freed of the network-sharing requirements, industry sources said.

The FCC has delayed its decision by a week until Feb. 20 to reach a consensus on the issue, which is expected to reshape the telecommunications industry for years to come.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/...fccvote_1.html

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I Know That Song!
Sebastian Rupley

In an effort to provide an open standard for recognizing and identifying digital music files, MusicBrainz, an
open-source metadata service, has unveiled a new music-recognition service. Working with partners who've developed technology that can recognize file tags associated with digital music files, MusicBrainz is aiming to create a complete public database of tagged music files that allow for easy identification, searching, and sorting. This database could, for example, help online music sites provide automated song recommendations.

Since 1998, MusicBrainz has, with the help of a community of 2,000 contributors, been building an archive of over 650,000 music tracks. Each track is tagged so that client software can recognize the song. The technology that MusicBrainz uses to recognize digital songs through these tags comes from a partner company, Relatable. Another company, AgentArts, provides the technology used for data mining of the information in the MusicBrainz database.

In the nearly five years that MusicBrainz has been pursuing its goal, intelligent music data-mining has become a Holy Grail for entertainment software developers, device manufacturers, and online music services, all of whom already spend heavily to license metadata services that can recognize songs through digital fingerprints. The explosive popularity of digital music players and online music downloading is driving the need for such data mining. The recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas presented many high-capacity digital music devices that can archive and sort vast music libraries. MusicBrainz has been signing commercial and non-commercial sponsors to help it grow an open-source service that can compete with services that license song recognition technology.

"Currently there is no free and universally accepted digital music metadata available to the online music space," said Robert Kaye, founder of MusicBrainz, "and the very few commercial companies who provide this resource offer their services under highly restrictive and expensive licenses. It is our belief that a universal standard for digital music recognition is simply too important and valuable to all online music services to be monopolized by any one company. We also believe that online music consumers would much rather contribute to a truly open source resource."

MusicBrainz has posted a white paper on the technology and goals behind its effort. MusicBrainz is releasing its dataset of tagged songs into the public domain under the name Creative Commons.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,885830,00.asp

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Smith to lead piracy panel
Gary Martin

Rep. Lamar Smith was named chairman Wednesday of the House Judiciary subcommittee on courts, the Internet and intellectual property — a panel that oversees high tech issues important to South Texas.

"The issues before this subcommittee are some of the most important facing the nation," said Smith, a San Antonio Republican who was elected to Congress in 1986 and is serving his ninth term.

Also Wednesday, Sen. John Cornyn was assigned to a Senate transportation subcommittee that will oversee the reauthorization of a federal fuels tax.

Smith, a lawyer, has chaired other Judiciary subcommittees, including a panel on immigration and another that oversees issues relating to crime, terrorism and homeland security.

The San Antonio lawmaker was tapped for his new assignment by Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R- Minn., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

"His dedication and hard work exhibited in other committee leadership positions the past eight years will serve him well in his new post," Sensenbrenner said.

Smith said his subcommittee oversees legislation on digital rights, copyright and patent protections, piracy, e-commerce, cyber security and state sovereign immunity — issues with national and regional implications.

Smith's appointment was applauded by the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents companies with Texas connections, including Austin-based Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola.

Last year, Smith sponsored and passed legislation that addressed the increasing threat of cybertech crime and offered protections for businesses, consumers and government entities.
http://news.mysanantonio.com/story.c...180&xlc=935210

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Cox Swings to Profit on Subscriber Growth
Karen Jacobs, Reuters

Cable television operator Cox Communications Inc. said on Wednesday it swung to a profit in the fourth quarter from a year-earlier loss as it picked up more customers for its high-speed Internet and digital telephone services.

The company said growth in those services was mainly driven by the success of its bundling strategy, which seeks to get customers to subscribe to multiple services.

"We continue to prove that the digital bundle is the industry's growth engine," Chief Executive Jim Robbins said in a statement. Cox had 1.7 million bundled customers at the end of 2002, up 53 percent from a year earlier, he said.

Cox had 1.4 million high-speed Internet customers at year-end, including 135,650 added in the fourth quarter, for year-over-year growth of 59 percent. The company said a $5 rate increase in some markets last year had no noticeable effect on penetration rates.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2218223

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BT tests water with rural ADSL project
Tim Richardson

BT is to confirm next month whether it will proceed with a scheme that could bring ADSL to areas currently deemed not commercially viable for investment in broadband.

Last autumn the telco began a trial of a community broadband project, which makes it financially possible to convert an exchange to ADSL with just 16 customers.

The initiative, known as ADSL Exchange Activate or Community Broadband, also uses "sponsors" such as development agencies and local authorities to help subsidise the cost of rolling out the ADSL service.

BT has recently released "indicative pricing" to ISPs and potential sponsors in a bid to test the market and assess whether there is enough interest. If there is - and BT is "hopeful" - then the telco is likely to press ahead with the scheme.

Key to this is the pricing. It's set the price at an upfront charge of £55,000 (ex VAT) per exchange, which will pay for 30 people to get ADSL for three years.

This works out at a wholesale cost of around £50 (ex VAT) per user over the three-year term of the contract. With the ISP's margins on top this could lead to a retail price of between £60 and £70 per user.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/22/29306.html

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Is ultrawideband too wide?
Ben Charny

The satellite industry and its TV and cable customers say a short-range wireless standard called ultrawideband threatens to interfere with many of their broadcasts.

Ultrawideband, better known as UWB, is something the wireless industry has never dealt with before. Wireless devices almost always operate in a narrow band of spectrum. Interference from signals crossing paths is avoided by assigning each wireless broadcast a certain area of the airwaves.

But UWB operates across a wide range of these so-called frequencies all at once. The "flooding" of the airwaves creates a short but powerful signal--about 100 times faster than Bluetooth, another short-range wireless standard.

Beginning last February, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) let a handful of UWB start-up companies, plus tech heavyweights Intel, Cisco Systems and Texas Instruments, make UWB devices that use the same spectrum satellite companies use. Some of the products are just now being shipped to stores.

But the new neighbors are starting to chafe as they rub bandwidth shoulders, just as the first commercial UWB products are being shipped. A number of satellite companies and their customers, including AOL Time Warner and Viacom, have raised concerns about interference in the past few days. The broadcast TV and cable arms of AOL Time Warner and Viacom use satellites to ferry programming to customers worldwide.

Recent FCC filings made reference to two studies published last month that found UWB poses some interference problems, especially when used outdoors, the companies said. One study was conducted by the Satellite Industry Association, which represents Lockheed Martin, PanAmSat and other aerospace equipment makers.

The second investigation was published by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

"Widespread deployment of UWB devices under current technical rules could cause significant disruption to video programming distribution," Steven Teplitz, an AOL Time Warner vice president, wrote to the FCC last week. Viacom filed a similar letter with the same complaints.

Companies supporting ultrawideband, such as chipmaker XtremeSpectrum, say the interference concerns are overblown. The issue could come to a head next week, when the FCC discusses the rules it created last January for UWB.

"The (Satellite Industry Association) has greatly overestimated the effect of handheld UWB systems," John McCorkle, XtremeSpectrum's chief technology officer, wrote to the FCC last week.

Ben Manny, Intel's director of wireless technology development, also played down the impact of UWB on satellites or any other kinds of devices.

He said interference is highly unlikely, but if it were to occur, it would probably create the same level of annoyance as everyday mishaps such as "when I drape my phone cord over my PC."
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-984388.html

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Social networks sturdier than 'Net
Kimberly Patch

Although many types of networks, including biological networks, social networks, and the Internet, have a lot in common, when you get right down to who is connecting to whom, social networks follow different rules.

A researcher from the Santa Fe Institute has found that social networks are assortative, meaning people who are social gravitate toward others who are social. This is very different from many other types of networks.

The nodes of social networks are people. People who already have connections like to associate with other nodes who have connections, said Mark Newman, now an assistant professor of physics at the University of Michigan.

In contrast, non-social networks like the Internet, World Wide Web, and biological networks are disassortative, meaning highly-connected nodes tend to connect to nodes that have few connections, said Newman.

There's a "big difference between social networks and all other kinds of networks," said Newman. This was somewhat unexpected, and it has several ramifications, he said.

In social networks, where popular people are friends with other popular people, diseases spread easily, said Newman. At the same time, however, this type of network has a small central set of people that the disease can actually reach. "They support epidemics easily, but... the epidemic is limited in who it can reach," he said.

The opposite is true for the Internet, the Web and biological networks, said Newman. This makes these types of networks more vulnerable to attack than social networks are.

The implications for vaccinating people and for protecting networks like the Internet against attacks are not good, according to Newman. The networks that we might want to break up, like social networks that spread disease, are resilient against attacks; but the networks that we wish to protect, like the Internet, are vulnerable to attack, said Newman.

Social networks hold together even when some of the most connected nodes are removed. This may be because these nodes tend to be clustered together in a core group so that there's a lot of redundancy, according to Newman. This means that vaccination and similar strategies are less effective than in other types of networks.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/0...et_021203.html

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Moving data to a DVD? Here’s a look at the formats
Gordon Laing

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to tonight's big fight. Once again it's the DVD Alliance versus the official DVD Forum for the title of ultimate rewritable champion. Sensationalist perhaps, but it certainly felt that way at this year's Comdex trade show. And a confident outcome to this ongoing situation couldn't happen too soon as, according to countless reports, we're allgagging for a DVD recorder but are worried about investing in the wrong format.

Painfully aware of both this and the fact the competition doesn't appear to be weakening, the two rival camps have come up with the only sensible short-term solution: producing drives that support multiple formats. The DVD Forum used Comdex to launch its long-awaited DVD-Multi drives, which can handle the official DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD-Ram formats. The DVD Alliance, meanwhile, was showing off high- compatibility reports of its relatively new write-once DVD+R format.

But all eyes in this pavilion were on Sony's new DRU- 500A Dual-RW drive, the first to support both DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W) formats.

A quick check later though and one thing is obvious: DVD-Multi and Dual-RW drives may support more recordable and rewritable DVD formats than ever before, but there's still no one drive that does them all.DVD-Multi won't do either of the Plus formats, while Dual- RW won't do DVD-Ram. We may be in a more flexible position than 12 months ago, but most people will still be torn between two drives.

Meanwhile, back at Comdex, questions needed answering.
http://vnunet.com/Analysis/1138621

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Blue laser format gets green light
Richard Shim

Manufacturers looking for a higher-capacity recordable DVD format will want to mark Feb. 17 on their calendars.

The nine companies promoting Blu-ray Disc technology--a next-generation recordable DVD format using blue-violet lasers--announced Thursday that licensing will begin Feb. 17. Blu-ray Disc technology allows for 27GB storage capacities on a single-sided 12cm disc. DVDs hold 4.7GB of data. Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Pioneer, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, Sony and Thomson are known as the "Blu-ray Disc Founders" and have been pursuing a broad acceptance of the format.

Blu-ray technology uses a short-wavelength blue-violet laser instead of the red lasers in current optical drives to read data off discs. The higher-capacity Blu-ray discs will enable the recording of high-definition broadcasts, which offer better picture quality than the more broadly available TV broadcasts.

The licensing agreements, which are 10-year renewable contracts, will include the right to use the Blu-ray format and logo as well as the content protection specifications. Licenses for the format and logo will range from $20,000 to $60,000 depending on which products--discs, players or components--manufacturers want to develop. The same is true for the protection specifications, which range in price annually from $4,000 to $12,000.

Companies already have been developing products using Blu-ray technology. Philips has demonstrated a prototype miniature Blu-ray disc drive that uses a 3cm disc that can store up to 1GB of data. Typical CDs, measuring 12cm in diameter, can hold up to 650MB of data. The prototype drive is suitable for use in portable devices such as digital cameras, handhelds and cell phones. Philips has been working to shrink the drive.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Sony Chief Operating Officer Kunitake Ando said recordable DVD Blu-ray Disc products will likely appear this year, initially in Japan. Ando said the technology is ready, but some licensing issues still need to be worked out.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-984520.html

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Some Rights Reserved
Cyber-law activists devise a set of licenses for sharing creative works
Gary Stix

In a book published in 2001, Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig decried the threat to the Internet from both large media interests and burgeoning intellectual-property laws. In Lessig's view, the Internet should serve as a commons, a medium that encourages creativity through the exchange of photographs, music, literature, academic treatises, even entire course curricula. Lessig and like-minded law and technology experts have now decided to go beyond making academic arguments to counter the perceived danger.

On December 16, 2002, the nonprofit Creative Commons opened its digital doors to provide, without charge, a series of licenses that enable a copyrighted work to be shared more easily. The licenses attempt to overcome the inherently restrictive nature of copyright law. Under existing rules, a doodle of a lunchtime companion's face on a paper napkin is copyrighted as soon as the budding artist lifts up the pen. No "©" is needed at the bottom of the napkin. All rights are reserved.

The licenses issued through Creative Commons have changed that. They allow the creator of a work to retain the copyright while stipulating merely "some rights reserved." A user can build a custom license: One option lets the copyright holder specify that a piece of music or an essay can be used for any purpose as long as attribution is given. Another, which can be combined with the first, permits usage for any noncommercial end. Separately, the site offers a document that lets someone's creation be donated to the public domain.

A copyright owner can fill out a simple question-naire posted on the Creative Commons Web site (www. creativecommons.org) and get an electronic copy of a license. Because a copyright notice (or any modification to one) is optional, no standard method exists for tracking down works to which others can gain access. The Creative Commons license is affixed with electronic tags so that a browser equipped to read a tag--specified in XML, or Extensible Markup Language--can find copyrighted items that fall into the various licensing categories. An aspiring photographer who wants her images noticed could permit shots she took of Ground Zero in Manhattan to be used if she is given credit. A graphic artist assembling a digital collage of September 11 pictures could then do a search on both "Ground Zero" and the Creative Commons tag for an "attribution only" license, which would let the photographer's images be copied and put up on the Web, as long as her name is mentioned.

Lessig and the other cyber-activists who started Creative Commons, which operates out of an office on the Stanford campus, found inspiration in the free- software movement and in previous licensing endeavors such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's open audio license. The organization is receiving $850,000 from the Center for the Public Domain and $1.2 million over three years from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Some legal pundits will question whether an idea that downplays the profit motive will ever be widely embraced. Creative Commons, however, could help ensure that the Internet remains more than a shopping mall. For his part, Lessig, who last year argued futilely before the U.S. Supreme Court against an extension of the term of existing copyrights, has translated words into action. Now it will be up to scholars, scientists, independent filmmakers and others to show that at least part of their work can be shared and that a commons for creative exchange can become a reality in cyberspace.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?cha...E0809EC588EEDF









Until next week,

- js.






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[i]Recent WIRs -

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=15128 Feb. 8th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=15063 Feb. 1st
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=14979 Jan. 25th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=14892 Jan. 18th




Current Week In Review

Submit articles, press releases and letters in English - text only, no HTML - to jackspratts at lycos dot com. Please include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.

[Eagle]

damn man your work is much appreciated. many thanks!

[assorted]

groovy stuff as always... i like this part...

Boyarsky's frustrations reflect the concerns of media companies, who are afraid the combination of digital and on-demand technology will make their movies and TV shows vulnerable to piracy and render them less lucrative platforms for advertising.

"For the most part content providers are not licensing their content," said Yankee Group analyst Aditya Kishore. "There's a lot of risk for them, and most of them aren't in a rush to do this."

this sounds so eerily like the record labels right when napster was starting...

[TankGirl]

Absolutely great work again, Jack!

You keep sounding like a war correspondent in your introductions - which is cool!

- tg

[JackSpratts]

y'all are makin me blush.

assorted: exactly, and while amazingly the "content providers" drag their feet again (the real lessons of napster lost to them), the people go right on ripping and sharing.

if each person d/l's just 1 film per week, it means that demographic is getting more films off the net than at the theaters. a sobering statistic for a media exec but one that withholding content seems to do zero to prevent.

so maybe they should reassess.

thanks for reading!

- js.

[chefws]

White Stripes Battle Piracy With Vinyl

The White Stripes have sent out copies of their new album to a select few on vinyl, but fret not, come tax day, you'll have your Elephant spinning in your CD player.

While other bands have toyed with everything from watermarked CDs to hermetically sealed CD players to keep their music from leaking to the Internet, the White Stripes took a decidedly more retro approach when sending out advance albums to critics, the logic being that any music journalist worth their weight in free CDs owns a record player.

"[Frontman] Jack [White] wanted people to hear the music the way it was meant to be heard, which is on vinyl. [He wanted them] to listen to it as [we] used to listen to records," V2 Records president Andy Gershon said. "In addition, it just creates one extra step before someone can put it up on Limewire or KaZaa."

What can I say?

[theknife]

University of Cincinnati Busts 13 students for File Sharing
Search uncovers pirated movies, CDs
Amanda Heironimus

A group of UC students faces punishment by the Board of Judicial Affairs after an investigation uncovered an extensive operation of illegal downloading in the residence halls last week, according to university officials.

After searching suspected computers in the residence halls, investigators discovered significant breaches of state and federal copyright laws as well as violations of the student code of conduct, said UCit manager and UC Police Department Special Investigator Jim Downing.

dunno if anyone saw this on ZeroPaid, but here is a reply from one the 13 students:

Oh hello,
I have come to enlighten you on what has happened regarding the latest "bust" of the 13 UC students. I am one of those students, a freshman at UC, my name is Aaron.
Oh and btw, we weren't busted for using Kazaa, we were using DC++. It is complete bull$h1t.
My nick on the private hub that UC students created for other UC students only to share on was Apollyon. I had the 2nd largest share on the hub with a total of 179 GB of music and movies shared.
Being somewhat unaware, or naive, that we were not allowed to do this or furthermore, that we were being watched like a hawk, the hub generally would get new members that would sign on then download everything that they wanted and then leave. The steady members, like myself, usually left DC++ running 24/7 becausewe had gone for over 1/2 a year with having no problems from the internet department here at UC and such.
The way that we got caught was that a VPN user who frequented the hub, took down his firewall for some god damn reason, and his connection was hacked by a member of the RIAA. The RIAA then took a "snapshot" of the members on and their file lists.
They then reported this to UC and told the president and dean of the University that the university had to do something. Then the administration offices told the University information technologies to go interrogate. I was playing the game "Mafia" late one night peacefully relaxing. Then at about 1:45 in the morning, a cadre of 2 UCit employees, 2 University policemen, and one RA knocked at my door and forced their way into my room. They then tried to intimidate and scare me into giving out more information about the hub. I held my ground, while somewhat expectantly, the computer nerds from the UC hub gave way and confessed everything because they are dickless *@$%suckers (which is how I got caught seeing as though I wasn't one of the poeple cited for copyright infringement violations by the RIAA etc). I was then forced to provide a written statement confessing my evil file sharing.
Half of my floor population is drug dealers from the ghetto of Cincinnati but yet I get the cops showing up at my door at 1:45 in the morning because I was sharing f#$@ing files for godsake. Does any1 else see the moral dilemna presented by this?
So now they have yet to give us our internet back or even try to inform any of us about what is going on, what's happening, or what is going to happen in future time. I am appalled that they have the right and power to do this. I now have big brother breathing down my neck because the system lost out on some much undeserved money which I wouldn't have paid anyway for extremely overpriced media that only goes to fatten the wallets of the corporate *@$%suckers at the top and has little if any effect on the average person. Media is the digital representation of human art. Art in all of its forms was meant to be free and created, shared, and loved by humanity openly.
Thank you,
Aaron

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/read_co...?id=02172003h#<a%20href=/php/user.php?uid=147653>havok1515</a>

while i am definitely in sympathy with this guy and deplore the gestapo tactics described in the bust, it also points out the wisdom in showing a little discretion in your file-sharing activites. leaving 179 gigs of music and movies out there 24/7 might be ill-advised in the current climate.