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

[JackSpratts]

The Rumor Mill Grinds A Pound or Two
In Iraq freedom means never having to hear Hilary Rosen

Monday’s rumor was a real eye opener, that’s for sure. It came to me from EuropeMedia.net concerning the post Iraq invasion contracts for infrastructure rebuilding. It seems that with the Bush administration alienated from just about every industrial nation on earth save Australia and the UK, the big construction jobs would be handed out to American firms, no surprise there. What got my attention though was an almost overlooked item near the end of the article and attributed to the BBC saying the U.S. is prepared to hire Hilary Rosen to write Iraq’s intellectual property laws. Yes, the Hilary Rosen of RIAA fame. You know, the one who shut down Napster, the one who had the Naval Academy students nearly expelled for swapping “copyrighted material”. The one who wants to arrest everybody who shares music! That’s kind of like hiring Jeffrey Dahmer to run a restaurant. I mean seriously, what freedom loving Iraqi would request the services of a person who’s devoted a majority of her intellectual capital, such as it is, to destroying individual rights in favor of those of dictatorial corporations? Haven’t they had enough of that already? I may be going out a limb here but I doubt any Baghdadi extended her the invitation. On the other hand a quiet word from a media mogul to a grasping Bush aid could land her the gig - but if I was in the Navy I’d make them walk the plank.

Like all great rumors there was enough outrageousness mixed with plausibility to make it hard to dismiss the tale outright. That it fed conservatives’ fears of an administration’s growing closeness to Hollywood special interests as well as liberals’ uneasiness surrounding ultimate U.S. motivations in the Middle East made it even more electrifying. Late Thursday a call from a media consultant set the record straight: It was, according to an RIAA spokeswoman, “Unequivocally false.” Hilary isn’t going to be doing any Iraqi rebuilding after all. I can hear an entire country breathing easier.







Enjoy,

Jack.







New German Copyright Law Pleases Scholars and Angers Publishers
But wait, there’s more…
Burton Bollag

A hotly contested copyright law adopted on Friday by Germany's Parliament gives universities and research institutions considerable leeway to digitally distribute copyrighted materials among students and scholars without paying extra charges. The law has been welcomed by academics. But academic publishers, who fought tooth and nail against the bill, say it will force them out of business.

The bill was designed to bring German law in line with a two-year-old European Union directive covering a wide range of digital-copyright issues. But the directive is silent on the issue of copyright exemptions for education and research. Publishers say they will challenge the new legislation with European authorities in Brussels.

The law in effect grants exemption from copyright restrictions, for specified nonprofit purposes, to "privileged institutions," meaning schools, higher-education institutions, and public research organizations. Passage of the bill was assured when a parliamentary committee last week inserted several compromises. The main opposition party, the Christian Democrats, then dropped its opposition.

Two key changes stipulate that only "small parts" of copyrighted material can be distributed this way, and that access to such material shall be for "a defined, limited, and small" number of people -- for example, the students in a particular course. Access must be controlled by the use of passwords or a similar mechanism. Moreover, to remain valid, this section of the law must be reviewed by Parliament and reapproved at the end of 2006.

Up to now Germany has had very restrictive legislation that, for example, made it illegal in most cases for scholars to put copyrighted material on even an internal computer network. Academics say the new law basically gives them the same rights over copyrighted material in digital form as they already have over such material printed on paper. Just as they may photocopy pages from a book and distribute them to students registered for a class, they will now be allowed to post such material on a Web page with access limited to those same students.

But the compromises did not satisfy everyone. Georg Siebeck is head of a loose group of 35 academic book publishers, who include the majority of German publishers producing books for academe and have combined annual revenues of $2-billion. He says allowing only "small parts" of copyrighted material to be distributed is no guarantee for publishers' commercial interests.

"You can still put the single chapters next to each other and with a click, download the whole book," he said. "No country would be as stupid as this" he said, and pass a law "to kill its own publishers."

Publishers and booksellers mounted a vociferous campaign against the bill. One ad stated: "Imagine you have produced a book and the state is allowed to steal it." Publishers sent appeals to scholars, warning the proposed law would mean an end to the royalties they receive from sales of their works, and managed to get almost 2,000 scientists to sign a petition against the bill.

Scientific associations, representing tens of thousands of researchers, and library associations responded with declarations rejecting the publishers' stance.

Scholars say the publishers are greatly exaggerating the dangers they will face. "Their whole campaign was based on lies," says Rainer Kuhlen, a professor at the University of Konstanz and chairman of the German Association of Information Scientists. "The law will be a challenge to publishers to develop -- along with academics -- new ways to organize and distribute digital material."

Tomas Hoeren, a professor of law and director of the Institute for Telecommunications and Media Law at Westfälische Wilhelms University, in Münster, says the new legislation will make Germany, along with the Scandinavian countries and the United States, among the nations with a relatively tolerant approach to the use of copyrighted materials for specified educational purposes. France and Spain are among those with a more restrictive approach.
http://chronicle.com/free/2003/04/2003041407n.htm

However…

Germany trying to copy DMCA
Staff

SITTING ON THIS SIDE of the pond might have seemed the safe option when you start looking at the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). German readers might want to sit up and take note that their parliament has effectively putting a very similar piece of legislation into law.

The rest of Europe is also at risk of trouble from laws like this. It all stems from the draconian Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament. It might as well have been drafted by the RIAA and the MPAA. But the directives guidelines are being pushed into law throughout Europe.

All in all, it's a quite dangerous time for Europe. But, of course, they will say it's all being done in the name of harmonisation so we should be good little EU citizens and take what our betters in the European Parliament hand to us without an argument.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8879

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What record industry slump? Independent labels say business has never been better
Lynne Margolis

Eight years ago, Nan Warshaw, Rob Miller, and their Chicago friends were lamenting the dearth of "new and exciting music - music that ignited their passion the way punk and alternative rock had before big record labels and Gap commercials co-opted their sounds.

Then they began noticing that several area bands were putting Hank Williams twists on their Nirvana and Elvis Costello influences. So they decided, for kicks, to put out a compilation album of "insurgent country." Warshaw and Miller anted up a few grand apiece.

"We had no expectation that this was going to become a business," Ms. Warshaw says. "The first few years, we'd put out a record and when it broke even, we would say, 'Oh, what record should we do next?' "

But 3-1/2 years after it first started, Bloodshot Records finally hired its first paid employee. Today, it's a popular and healthy independent label, one of many operating outside the grip of the five mega-majors: Sony Music Entertainment Inc., Universal Music Group, BMG Entertainment, EMI Group, and Warner Music Group.

While executives at those labels wail about the industry's imminent collapse, indie labels and artists are singing a much happier tune. Profits are up - in some cases by 50 to 100 percent. That's in contrast to overall album sales, which dropped about 11 percent in 2002.

"We don't do too much crying over here," Cameron Strang, founder of New West Records, admits proudly. The home of artists like Delbert McClinton, the Flatlanders, and John Hiatt has doubled its business for the past three years and is projecting a $10 million income in 2003.

Paul Foley, general manager of the biggest independent label, Rounder Records of Cambridge, Mass., happily brags, "2002 was actually Rounder's best year in history. We were up 50 percent over 2001."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0411/p13s02-almp.htm

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Electronic Frontier Foundation Opposes Digital Lockdown
Some States Pass, Others Consider Copyright Legislation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today released a detailed analysis of the dangers posed by digital copyright bills in individual states.

The product of stealth lobbying efforts by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), these new measures are aimed at criminalizing the possession of what the MPAA calls "unlawful communication and access devices," but which are so broad that they could ban critical security and privacy tools online as well as restrict what machines you can connect to the cable, satellite, and Internet lines in your home.

Because the bills are more extreme versions of the nationwide Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), pundits refer to them as "super-DMCA" legislation.

Even before these activities crossed activists' radar, seven states (Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wyoming) had already enacted them into law. Similar bills have been introduced and are currently pending in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee and Texas.

"The 'super-DMCA' measures represent special interest legislation that dramatically expands the reach of the federal DMCA, which has already put fair use, innovation, free speech and competition in peril," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Communication service providers -- meaning ISPs, cable companies, and providers of digital entertainment services -- can use this legislation to restrict what you can connect to your Internet connection and cable or satellite television lines and can ban a variety of tools critical to protecting the anonymity and security of Internet users."

EFF strongly opposes these state super-DMCA bills as unnecessary and overbroad. The proposed bills represent the worst kind of special interest legislation, sacrificing the public interest in favor of the self-serving interests of one industry.
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/states/20...f_sdmca_pr.php

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Whatever Happened to Peer-to-Peer?
Peer-to-peer strategies are still being used to gain efficiency. Why not let your customer do all the work?
Karl Jacob

The traditional business model is about control: How do I control distribution? How do I control the back end? How do I control the customer? How do I own the customer information? But that model is being challenged. Smart businesses are leveraging their businesses by adopting the peer-to-peer methodology by first gathering their customers into a community around a basic framework, then getting out of the way and lets the community do what it wants. It’s not the traditional top-down approach; it’s really more from the bottom up. More than anything, it’s community power in action.

The peer-to-peer business model is not about aggregating customer information and using it to manipulate them, like the Amazons do today. It's about identifying and matching people and allowing them to fulfill each other's needs. eBay has already given us a glimpse of the value proposition of a networked consumer base. But eBay is just the beginning.

Howard Rheingold deals with the concept of networked communities in his book Smart Mobs. He talks about how people are using technology to come together to solve problems. They don’t necessarily know each other, just that everybody is of like mind and wants to fix a particular problem (like spam) or share information about a common interest. What also makes peer-to-peer so exciting is that it leverages new technology to build things that nobody could have conceived just two years ago. New generation companies like Cloudmark, like Plaxo, can also get up and running quickly, lower the load on their networks, and keep equipment off of their balance sheets. At the same time your systems are more automatic, and your customer is doing the driving.

If a peer-to-peer business focuses on getting the framework right, then the community has the opportunity to deliver the value. Business have to design their sites simply, so it is obvious what the user is supposed to do, and make the return on the investment of their time obvious. This is very different from what we did in the first chapter of the web, which was to build everything for people and then force them into the mold of "you’ve got to come to this site, you’ve got to register, and you’ve got to put your credit card in at just this site."

The peer-to-peer model is arguably the most distinguishing value proposition on the Web. To build the Internet, we borrowed old ideas and concepts. We took brick-and-mortar business models and just transferred them to cyberspace. Ebay showed that their real payoff for Web entrepreneurs is in creating an arena and letting all your customers do the work, and actually be happy to pay for the control you give them. It is like the self service gas pump. In today's busy world, people are happy to pump their own gas because it means they don't have to wait.

The peer-to-peer model on the Web will eventually be pervasive as self-service gas stations. As more and more people move onto the Web, peer-to- peer models will become even more powerful and useful.

Another great thing about peer-to-peer is that it’s viral in nature. The more people who use the network, the more value people get out of it. When you have a system like that, and you’re not the one paying to add machines to your network operation center, and you’re not paying people to expand the network, your business can grow. All you have to do is put the right rules in place. You just have to make sure that people are treated fairly—if someone abuses the system they get kicked out, and if they do good things in the system they get rewarded. At Cloudmark, we let consumers forward their spam mail to a huge database, which then blocks the spam from going out to any other member of the community.

The community collaboration model offers innovative entrepreneurs a lot of opportunities. People naturally gather around common interests, from fly-fishing to investing to knitting, and they’ll pay a business to support that kind of collaborative environment. (Consumers are resilient; they will pay for value, period. If you’re delivering real value, even if the overall economy is down, people are willing to open up their wallets for what you have to offer.)

The new peer-to-peer networks are a boon to users as well. Because of this, now like-minded people are able to join together and achieve things that they couldn’t do before. It’s the new neighborhood. It used to be you lived in a neighborhood and in that neighborhood you could get a group of people together and you could make change happen. You could clean up the streets; you could help somebody build a house. That ability to create communities on the fly is the kicker. It used to be that in neighborhoods, of course, you knew each other. Now you’re going to deal with people you don’t even know. The implication is that groups of people who before had no influence because they were dispersed, because they couldn’t communicate, because they couldn’t join together, now have the ability to act as one large, powerful group.
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comm...id=310_0_2_0_C

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DRM And The Disabled

“Digital rights management” refers to hardware and software that attempts to control access to and reproduction of digital information. DRM masquerades as a method of protecting authors’ copyrights but, in practice and according to published proposals, actually limits the copyright freedoms of the general public, a group that includes people with disabilities and others who rely on accessibility features like captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. DRM has a number of implications for viewers who require accessibility features. Almost all the implications point to a reduction in usefulness, convenience, and engagement of existing legal rights.

Conclusions and recommendations

· Digital rights management, as currently designd, will harm people with disabilities and others who rely on accessibility features.
· DRM must needs to specifically enable at least the same level of customer use of, reuse of, and tinkering with accessibility features that are enjoyed today.
· DRM must be exempted for the process of producing captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing, whether those producers are deemed “professional” or “amateur” by DRM licensors or anyone else.
· DRM must not prevent legitimate, legal adaptations of copyrighted works for people with disabilities.

http://joeclark.org/access/resources/DRM.html

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Blank Media Tax
Copyright - the devil and the detail
Simon Minahan

A compromise nears but there's still so much to be worked out.

Screenrights, the Australian Audio Visual Copyright Society, has opened up a new front in the battle over digital content and rights management here in Australia. Together with APRA, the royalty collecting agency has put a proposal to Canberra for the introduction of a levy on blank recording media as a way of securing compensation for its members for private copying. The proposal is well developed. It comprises draft legislation and an explanatory memorandum and is supported by an opinion from a NSW QC (who was a co-author of the draft bill) on the constitutionality of the scheme.

Under the proposed scheme, buyers of recordable media will pay a levy on that media in return for a statutory licence that will enable them to legally use the media for private copying of content. At present there is no right in Australian copyright law for consumers to make back-up or alternative copies for private use of certain content - such as commercially distributed music (although there is a limited right to create a back-up copy of computer programs).

Notably the proposed licence would run with the media. A taxed CD-R, for example, will be able to store reproduced copyright material for private use. Untaxed media will not.

Consumers will have the right to "opt-out" of the licence and levy at the time of purchase on the basis of a declaration that the media will not be used to copy third-party content.

The proposal envisages that retailers will collect the levy at point of sale and be liable to account for it to manufacturers and distributors who, in turn, will account to the
collecting societies. Rebates will be calculated and dealt with in arrears. The societies will then make distributions along the lines used to distribute royalties from publicly performed music, for example.

Issues abound with such a scheme. In the '80s the Federal Government sought to introduce a comparable scheme. It was challenged by media manufacturers and overturned in the High Court in the early '90s as being an unconstitutional tax - mainly because of the manner in which it was introduced. More than 40 countries around the world, including the United States and much of Europe, have such schemes in place.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...962685581.html

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Hardware roundup
Arron Rouse

SOUND CAN BE RICHER with a valve (tube) based sound system and AOpen is just the company to prove that. Lost Circuits does a comparison of a valve based sound system onboard on an AOpen motherboard with a Terratec Aureon sound card. Do you really want the warm valve sound and warm valves in your case?

SubZeroTech has been getting to grips with a Swiftech MCX462T. It's not for everyone, especially those without headphones but it might be just the thing for cooling your CPU right down.

But, for those who want a real serious pair of headphones, Adrian's Rojak pot has some Bose QuietComfort Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headset . Better be prepare to part with some serious cash to get them too.

Hexus has been trying out a Vantec Nexus Multi-function Panel. It does port replication amongst other things. Craig take the temperature.

The D-Link DVC-1000 i2eye Videophone brings us all one step closer to an episode of The Jetsons. That might be a good thing but we'd have preferred the rocket pack.

The Via Epia has a reputation for being tiny. Tech Seekers aren't going to argue. It's small, it's cute and it's good.

It almost seems like a blast from the past to mention an ATI 9700 Pro. But this is the All-in-Wonder version. VR-Zone gives you the low-down.

X-bit labs has had the chance to play with three small form factor PCs. All of them are P4 based and all of them really, really needed a replacement graphics card. But they're still fun.

Article, links http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8810

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EchoStar Faces a Big Challenge
Seth Schiesel

While Rupert Murdoch and General Motors executives worked out the News Corporation's deal for control of DirecTV, Charles W. Ergen, the chairman of EchoStar, the nation's No. 2 satellite-television company, spent most of this week south of the border.

Mr. Ergen was at an undisclosed Mexican location for a previously scheduled conference with senior EchoStar executives and sales agents, said two people close to the company. While the meetings were meant to be all business, Mr. Ergen may have been well advised to take a few minutes to relax in the sun.

That is because it may be his last vacation for some time.

Now that Mr. Murdoch has finally made the deal he has been anticipating for at least a decade — the deal that brings the News Corporation into the United States satellite television market — EchoStar will be hard put to continue to outperform DirecTV the way it has for the last 18 months. As the cable television industry finally begins to deliver on the promise of its long-lamented digital upgrades and as DirecTV, the nation's No. 1 satellite television carrier, finally appears to be falling into the hands of aggressive and capable media operators, EchoStar and its mercurial chairman appear to face their biggest challenges in years.

Marc Lumpkin, an EchoStar spokesman, said yesterday afternoon that he did not know where Mr. Ergen was. Mr. Lumpkin said that the rest of EchoStar's senior executives were traveling and that neither he nor any other executive could discuss the DirecTV deal or EchoStar's future.

Yet while EchoStar's future remains murky, its immediate past was fairly bright, even though regulators rejected EchoStar's own deal to acquire Hughes Electronics, the parent of DirecTV, from G.M.

Ever since EchoStar announced that deal, in October 2001, EchoStar has maintained and even accelerated the pace of its business while DirecTV has appeared largely stagnant, adrift in a sea of uncertainty about its future.

"EchoStar has been significantly more focused over the last 18 months or so," said Mike Goodman, an analyst for the Yankee Group, a communications and technology consulting firm in Boston. "You have seen almost nothing new out of DirecTV in the last 18 months. In fact, you have seen their subscriber additions cut in half of what they had been previously. On the other hand, from EchoStar you continue to see innovation, you see different pricing promotions, you've seen them becoming more aggressive in selling new technology."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/business/11BIRD.html

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Rat a Pirate For Cash

A software industry association yesterday tripled its top reward for turning in software pirates. From now until the end of May, the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which includes Microsoft Corp and Norton Antivirus developer Symantec Corp, is offering NT$880,000 to anyone who offers information on factories making illegal copies of its members' software. Previously the top reward was NT$300,000.

"We have set no limit on the amount of money available for this special reward program," Sung Hong-ti chair of the Taiwan branch of the BSA. One in every two software disks sold nationwide is a fake, according to the BSA. Piracy cost domestic software makers US$160 million in 2001, according to the most recent figures published by the BSA. "The proportion of software disks pirated in Taiwan in 2001 was 53 percent, whereas the world average was 40 percent," the BSA's Stella Lai said.

Software makers in Asia Pacific lost US$4.7 billion in revenues in 2001, Lai said. Figures for last year are expected to be released next month. Potential claimants for the top prize are expected to appear as a witness in court against the factory owners they finger.

"There are definite dangers," said John Eastwood, a lawyer at Winkler Partners and co-chair of the Intellectual Property Committee of the European Chamber of Commerce in Taipei. "Organized crime involved in software piracy are not above making death threats," he said. Eastwood said the big cash reward may help ease potential fears.

The BSA is also offering two smaller rewards -- NT$20,000 for a court appearance that results in a warrant being issued and NT$2,000 for filing paperwork that identifies a counterfeiter. The announcement of the reward hike comes as the government tries to get tougher on intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in response to complaints from the US.

"The IPR issue is a priority for the government," Minister for Economic Affairs Lin Yi-fu said at yesterday's launch of the BSA's new reward program.
http://cdr-info.com/Sections/News/De...RelatedID=3647

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Out of the Mouths of Dogs
Bob Finds a Few Facts That Simply Don't Compute
Robert X. Cringely

Apparently, the CIA has been tapping fiber optic cables in Baghdad, listening in on telephone conversations in efforts to track down Saddam. Most people think fiber can't be tapped, but here's how to do it (I wrote about this at least 10 years ago). Strip the plastic casing off a couple inches of the fiber bundle, being careful not to damage the glass. Bend the fiber back on itself in a very tight loop. At that place where the bend in the fiber is sharpest, the internal reflective ability of the fiber is compromised enough for a little light to leak out (called "conductive emission" in the spy biz). That's where you put your detector. This is remarkably easy to do, yet we think of fiber as being totally secure.

A different form of security is available to purchasers of wireless file servers from Martian.com. These book-sized Linux servers that were featured recently in the New York Times have no fans and use hard drives with liquid bearings, making the units almost totally silent. With a WiFi connection you can have almost instant Network Attached Storage for your PC, Mac, or Linux network with 120 gigabytes of encrypted disk space for under $500. There is literally nothing to configure. Just plug it in. Yeah, but who would want one of these things? I would, for one, but my friend David from the UK points out that such a device hidden away from sight would be ideal for storing data you wouldn't want confiscated by the police. Nestle a Martian box under your attic insulation if you have something to hide.

This week, TiVo announced a new version of their Digital Video Recorder software (called the Home Media Option) that finally brings to life that USB connector on the later TiVo boxes. The "upgrade" costs $99, though it is pretty obvious that the capability was in there all the time. Releasing it this way just allows TiVo to make a lot of money directly from users and not have to share any of it with dealers or hardware OEMs. Ninety-nine dollars is certainly more than TiVo made from the box originally, so this will be a big boost for the company.

The new capabilities are pretty impressive, too, provided you connect that USB to an Ethernet or WiFi external adapter. You can stream MP3 music from your PC across the network to your TiVo-attached TV or stereo system. You can do the same thing looking at digital photos. And if you have more than one TiVo box, they can talk to each other, and you can finally watch in the bedroom the movie you recorded in the den.

But here is the part that makes no sense to me. A TiVo box is just a little Linux computer in disguise, and TiVo boxes have been hacked in a hundred or more ways. There are very few TiVo secrets left. This new software supposedly won't stream video to non-TiVo devices or to devices that are outside the home. Yeah, right. TiVo has to know that through MAC address and IP spoofing people will soon be streaming video across town or across the world to other TiVo devices or to PCs. They have to know this is going to happen, yet still they moved forward with the software release. Can this be a secret part of the marketing plan? Maybe plausible deniability is all TiVo is seeking here, counting on the hackers to promote the upgrade.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030410.html

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Librarians Use Shredder to Show Opposition to New F.B.I. Powers
Dean Murphy

The humming noise from a back room of the central library here today was the sound of Barbara Gail Snider, a librarian, at work. Her hands stuffed with wads of paper, Ms. Snider was feeding a small shredding machine mounted on a plastic wastebasket.

First to be sliced by the electronic teeth were several pink sheets with handwritten requests to the reference desk. One asked for the origin of the expression "to cost an arm and a leg." Another sought the address of a collection agency.

Next to go were the logs of people who had signed up to use the library's Internet computer stations. Bill L., Mike B., Rolando, Steve and Patrick were all shredded into white paper spaghetti.

"It used to be a librarian would be pictured with a book," said Ms. Snider, the branch manager, slightly exasperated as she hunched over the wastebasket. "Now it is a librarian with a shredder."

Actually, the shredder here is not new, but the rush to use it is. In the old days, staff members in the nine-branch Santa Cruz Public Library System would destroy discarded paperwork as time allowed, typically once a week.

But at a meeting of library officials last week, it was decided the materials should be shredded daily.

"The basic strategy now is to keep as little historical information as possible," said Anne M. Turner, director of the library system.

The move was part of a campaign by the Santa Cruz libraries to demonstrate their opposition to the Patriot Act, the law passed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks that broadened the federal authorities' powers in fighting terrorism.

Among provisions that have angered librarians nationwide is one that allows the Federal Bureau of Investigation to review certain business records of people under suspicion, which has been interpreted to include the borrowing or purchase of books and the use of the Internet at libraries, bookstores and cafes.

Today, the libraries went further and began distributing a handout to visitors that outlines objections to the enhanced F.B.I. powers and explains that the libraries were reviewing all records "to make sure that we really need every piece of data" about borrowers and Internet users.

Maurice J. Freedman, president of the American Library Association and director of the library system in Westchester, N.Y., said only a handful of libraries had posted signs or handed out literature about the Patriot Act. Warning signs are posted in the computer room at a library in Killington, Vt., and the library board in Skokie, Ill., recently voted to post signs, Mr. Freedman said.

Many other libraries, he said, including those in Westchester, decided that warnings might unnecessarily alarm patrons.

"There are people, especially older people who lived through the McCarthy era, who might be intimidated by this," he said. "As of right now, the odds are very great that there will be no search made of a person's records at public libraries, so I don't want to scare people away."

At the same time, though, thousands of libraries have joined the rush to destroy records.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said libraries were not breaking the law by destroying records, even at a faster pace. The spokesman, Mark Corallo, said it would be illegal only if a library destroyed records that had been subpoenaed by the F.B.I.

Ms. Turner, the library director here, said librarians did not want to help terrorists, but she said other values were at stake as well.

"I am more terrified of having my First Amendment rights to information and free speech infringed than I am by the kind of terrorist acts that have come down so far," Ms. Turner said.

Library officials here said the response to the warning signs had been overwhelmingly positive, and visitors interviewed today had nothing but praise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/07/national/07LIBR.html

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Unlike Napster, Kazaa can run and it CAN hide
Doug Bedell

Kazaa Media Desktop, the new king of Napster-like Internet file-sharing programs, is proving as hard to ignore as it is to destroy.

With 60 million users worldwide, 22 million of them in the United States, advertisers are dumping millions into Kazaa.com coffers.

Meanwhile, the Recording Industry Association of America is shelling out similar amounts to decipher Kazaa's labyrinthine corporate structure and stop unauthorized trading in copyrighted music, games, software, and movies.

Stopping Napster was a no-brainer by comparison. Napster used a central server to index files being shared. A judge ordered the server shut down until Napster could screen out unauthorized copyrighted files, and Napster died.

But everything about Kazaa -- from its technological setup to its strange worldwide organizational maze -- seems designed to thwart the methods by which Napster was felled in July 2001.

And that spells trouble for a music industry that only recently began licensing catalogs for use in a variety of legitimate, fee-based music download and streaming services, such as Rhapsody, eMusic.com and MusicNet on AOL.

''It has become the single biggest challenge to the online music industry,'' said Dave Williams, vice president for product development at Listen.com, owners of the subscription Internet music service Rhapsody.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/10...AN_hide+.shtml

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Tax Filers Getting Software From P2P
Press Release

The latest findings from Jupiter Research, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation (Nasdaq:JUPM), indicate surging popularity for online income tax preparation. However, Web preparation appears to be far less popular with those who intend to file later in the season, despite the relative immediacy of Web preparation over other modes. Based on a March 2003 consumer survey fielded by Jupiter Research, Jupiter Research's new report "Online Tax Preparation: Broaden Appeal Beyond Early Filers to Minimize Piracy" found that the number of online households intending to prepare their tax returns online will grow from 6.6% to 8.7%, a 31% increase year over year. Web-based tax preparation peaks in January and declines rapidly throughout the tax season, however, decreasing from 19% of online households reporting use in January, to just 4% in April.

According to the report, the more established desktop software applications providers, such as Intuit and H&R Block, are at the mercy of software pirates and should focus their efforts on Web alternatives. Thirteen percent of adults who use the Internet also use Napster-style peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks such as KaZaA, and tax preparation software is freely available on such networks. According to Robert Sterling, Senior Analyst at Jupiter Research, "Tax software providers have focused their efforts on converting people to the Web, but in failing to convert filers, they may be forfeiting sales and service revenue to piracy."

Another lost opportunity is in converting late filers to online filing -- among online households, April filers are almost three times as likely as January filers to submit a paper return. "Paper returns are more labor-intensive for the IRS to process than electronic (e-file) returns, and so the IRS is bogged down with unnecessary paper during its busiest period, the days leading up to and following April 15, decreasing efficiency and increasing costs at the agency," Sterling asserted.
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/...m&footer_file=

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New Product Manages Security Risks of Unauthorized Instant Messaging and P2Pcommunications
Press Release

SurfControl, the world's number one Web and e-mail filtering company, announced today the launch of SurfControl Instant Message Filter, a product for helping enterprises manage the growing use of Instant Messaging (IM) and peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing.

SurfControl Instant Message Filter enables companies to intelligently control the risks of unauthorized use of public IM and P2P to increase network security, optimize network resources and bandwidth consumption, reduce legal liability and increase user productivity.

The product, available in mid-May, was launched here at RSA, the industry's leading security show. IM is already a common communications medium in 80 percent of American enterprises, but most IM is used by employees without the knowledge or permission of IT administrators, according to Osterman Research. The amount of IM traffic is expected to increase to 4.3 million instant messages each day, or more than 130 percent per year through 2004, according to the analyst firm of IDC.

P2P file-sharing and file transfer Web sites also are skyrocketing, with 30 percent of products listed on CNET's Most Popular software download list being P2P applications.

"These extremely popular communications tools present a whole new and growing level of security threats to businesses. Intelligent tools are needed to stop the flow of unwanted content through the network," said Jim Murphy, product marketing manager.

Murphy said SurfControl's IM/P2P product stops IM and P2P content and gives companies a more intelligent way to manage these communications. Rather than simply blocking all such communications -- like a blunt instrument --

SurfControl's product identifies specific IM and P2P services to selectively block or enable communications according to each service's unique protocol signatures in the communications. Network administrators can manage communication flow across the enterprise by specific IP address, group or subnetwork.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+09:11+AM

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NetScreen Intrusion Detection and Prevention Solution Protects Against File Sharing and Instant Messaging Exploits
Press Release

NetScreen Technologies, Inc. today announced a software upgrade for its intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) product line that makes it the first platform to protect against exploitation of instant messaging (IM) and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application vulnerabilities. Additionally, NetScreen has expanded its IDP product line with a new low-end appliance, the NetScreen-IDP 10, to protect remote offices and secure extranet links.

IDC estimates that more than 229 million workers around the world will use IM to do their jobs by 2005. While instant messaging and file sharing applications can increase business productivity, IM and P2P file-sharing applications can introduce vulnerabilities in enterprise networks. This is because the applications enable users to download executables that can introduce rogue or untraceable "backdoor" applications on users' machines and jeopardize enterprise network security.

The newest version of the NetScreen IDP software, available for the NetScreen-IDP 10, 100 and 500, includes attack detection and prevention functionality for messaging and file exchange protocols, such as MSN, IRC, Yahoo Messenger, Gnutella and AOL. This functionality can preserve the business productivity benefits of these programs while mitigating the risks associated with these applications by accurately detecting and stopping attacks and allowing valid traffic to proceed unhindered.
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/...m&footer_file=

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Legacy: A brave new World Wide Web
Mike Yamamoto

To those who know Jon Mittelhauser, a founding father of the Web browser, it comes as no surprise that he labels one of the 20th century's most significant inventions as simply an "inevitable technology."

True to his pragmatic Midwestern background, the former University of Illinois researcher assumed that it was only a matter of time before something would be created to make the Internet's trove of information available to the masses. Serendipity determined that it would be Mosaic, the browser application that he developed with Marc Andreessen and a handful of other 20-somethings in 1993.

"We wanted to work on things that we ourselves would use," Mittelhauser said. "What surprised me was the speed with which it was adopted."

Ten years after Mosaic's first version was released, he is still trying to fathom the importance of the browser born in the nondescript labs of the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. That may be an exercise in futility, given the magnitude of the subject, for the modern concept of the Internet would not exist if the browser had remained in the exclusive realm of academia.

The unassuming piece of software revolutionized high technology akin to the way the remote control reinvented television, but in manifold more dimensions with universal consequences. In roughly six months of 1995, Mosaic transformed the Internet from the esoteric province of researchers and technophiles to a household appliance, creating a multibillion-dollar industry and changing the way society works, communicates and even falls in love--in short, affecting nearly every facet of life.

"Our friend's daughter just turned 11, and I saw her playing the 'Sims' game. She created a multimedia environment by going into her Sims world, opening up a Web browser and being on the phone with a friend doing exactly the same thing," said Clay Shirky, an industry veteran and adjunct professor of new media at New York University. "Each of them had a private world to decorate but were co-surfing and sharing URLs to find new items. Instead of some totalizing futuristic environment with big video heads floating around in virtual worlds, it was a self- contained social space created out of small pieces."

Others believe that the Net generation has been influenced in even more fundamental ways where business is concerned, having been instilled with a sense of entrepreneurship and independence born from the dot-com era that continues today.

"I was talking to a young guy running a fantasy baseball league as a business. Not once did he mention the Web, but it was totally clear that it was his mechanism for distribution, payment, recruitment," said Shirky, who counts venture capitalism among the many roles he has played in the Internet business. "For solo actors, the Web has been an astonishing inspiration."
http://news.com.com/2009-1032-995680.html

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GTV Launches New Instant Messaging Solution
Press Release

GTV, a leading provider of Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) and Collaborative Information Management solutions, today announced the launch of Sonork-EIM, the most reliable, extensible, feature-rich enterprise instant messaging solution on the market. Leading the evolution from IM to EIM, GTV’s Sonork-EIM enables businesses to dramatically reduce costs and improve workflow.

Sonork-EIM significantly improves workflow by seamlessly integrating with existing data sources and third-party enterprise application suites. The solution enables rapid internal communications that are archivable for accurate record-keeping, while its secure peer-to-peer data transfer reduces email server costs and is scalable for future enterprise information transfer needs. Sonork-EIM’s robust server boasts an extremely small footprint and is installed behind a customer’s firewall, supporting both intranet and extranet configurations.
http://www1.internetwire.com/iwire/r...lease_id=52812

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Lehigh University policy further limits bandwidth allowance
Diana Chirovsky

Library and technological services has recently enhanced the network switching equipment so that each student is allowed only 750 megabytes of bandwidth within 12 hours of downloading material. This is reduction of the allowance from last semester, when students were allowed one gigabyte within 12 hours.

Students complain that this change is causing slow loading of web pages, dropped connections to AOL Instant Messenger and notably slower access to Kazaa and other file-sharing programs. These opinions were revealed in a recent survey conducted among Lehigh students evaluating the speed of their Internet service.

In comparing the speeds of Internet connections and notably the speed of Kazaa downloads, the majority of students wrote that before the new policy they were able to download movies within a few hours, yet now it can take more than a day.

“I don’t like the fact that we pay a technology fee just to be limited in what we can use,” an anonymous survey respondent said. Another respondent commented that there are various loopholes around the policy. “I find the policy to be annoying, but I can still find different programs for downloads,” he said.

Some complained that they were no longer able to download important supplemental information for classes.
http://www.bw.lehigh.edu/story.asp?ID=16368

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Adventurous spirit will pay off for Wesleyan senior
Matthew Higbee

Like many of his peers graduating from college this spring, Joshua Blumenstock will spend a year abroad before heading into the workforce. Only this Wesleyan senior will be paid for his travels.

Blumenstock was one of 48 recipients of a prestigious $22,000 Watson Fellowship for his project proposal: "Outreach or Evangelism? Integrating technology into unexposed communities: China, South Africa, Cape Verde, Argentina, Costa Rica."

A duel major in computer science and physics, Blumenstock has been called by one professor "a social scientist posing as a natural scientist."

When he talks about his quest to better understand the impact of computers and the Internet on technologically underdeveloped countries, it’s easy to see why.

"Computer technology is a Western phenomenon and a first-world phenomenon, so it comes with a lot of first-world values," said Blumenstock. "I want to know why people in Rosario, Argentina are severing the phone lines at Internet cafés; how Chinese peer-to-peer networks are enabling the exchange of censored information; and how previously isolated communities in Cape Verde are reacting to tele-medicine and tele-education," he wrote in his personal statement.

Who stands to benefit from digital-divide initiatives under way in underdeveloped countries is the question at the heart of Blumenstock’s project. In some cases, the initiatives are funded by government programs. In others, major corporations like Coca-Cola and Hewlett Packard are the sponsors.

"I’m concerned that current efforts are too limited in their approach. The ‘cookie cutter’ solution of installing an Internet station and Microsoft Office could potentially ignore the priorities and perception of the people it is intended to benefit," he stated in his project proposal.
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?n...id=33198&rfi=6

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Making sense of broadband
McKinsey Quarterly

So many broadband providers disappeared after the dot-com boom that casual observers might think broadband itself has met with indifference from Internet users. Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact it has enjoyed striking growth throughout the world in the past three years. This expansion has implications not only for providers of broadband access and content but also for companies beyond the telecommunications and media sectors. The number of broadband users around the globe rose impressively during the past 36 months. By mid-2002, we estimate, operational broadband networks had a reach of well over 300 million households in the world's 20 largest economies. More than 40 million households and businesses actually subscribed to broadband, and more than 100 million people around the world had access to it. In certain markets, it is on track to become one of the fastest-growing technology-based consumer offers ever. In the United States, broadband will likely reach the 25 percent penetration mark more quickly than either PCs or mobile telephones did.

Active residential lines are spread fairly evenly across the Americas, Asia and Europe, though only a few countries--Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the United States--account for 84 percent of the total. Market penetration is most advanced in South Korea, where more than half of all households subscribe; and Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States have all reached penetration rates ranging from 10 percent to 25 percent. The vast majority of broadband connections are made over upgraded telephone or cable TV networks, though even faster newly laid fiber-optic ones are doing well in a handful of markets that include China, Italy and Sweden. Other technologies are proving valuable for particular customer segments: satellite for people in remote areas, to name just one.

Surprisingly, the market has continued to grow well even when conditions elsewhere in the telecom and Internet sectors were dire. During the first six months of 2002, the number of new subscribers increased by a quarter overall, while in 9 of the top 20 economies it increased by at least half. Even the more mature markets of Canada, South Korea, Sweden and the United States expanded by as much as a third.

That strong growth seems likely to continue. Our research shows much untapped demand for broadband. Only in the most highly penetrated markets--Canada, South Korea and the United States, for example--do those who have already switched outnumber those who are likely to do so. Moreover, the more price-sensitive users are likely to switch if prices fall, and in countries with lower narrowband penetration, many customers are going directly to broadband without first subscribing to the narrowband Internet.
http://news.com.com/2009-1085-995960.html


Graciela Guardado / Aggie graphic

The Music Piracy Myth
Tim O'Reilly

George Ziemann of MacWizards Music, the guy who has done the best analysis of RIAA sales statistics out there, sent me the following mail yesterday, and gave me permission to reprint it here. I've added a few links.

“Currently, if you do a google search on RIAA statistics, I'm number one and two; you are three and four, and your article refers to me, so I know you know who I am.

The article to which you referred was published in December. Since that time, a lot has happened, as I'm sure you are aware, not the least of which being the RIAA's recent lawsuits against college students.

First of all, I am a musician. The only reason I even started researching what the RIAA has to say is because of the problems I had selling my own work at eBay, which were entirely due to RIAA accusations of copyright infringement (it was my own CD).

After looking at the 2002 RIAA data, I also realized that over the last 5 years, the recording industry has shipped out more than 2 billion physical units of product, adding up to a retail value of more than $20 billion. You'd think that they would embrace a free marketing and promotion opportunity like mp3s. Let's face it, an mp3 is an inferior copy. I consider mp3s to be an ad for my actual recording.

My current consternation comes in the form of a letter from my congressional representative, who states that "In 2001, record sales were down 10 percent because of unauthorized music downloads..."

Yes, sales were down. Other than that obvious fact, there is no empirical data to suggest that downloading is the cause of the problem. I've asked the RIAA. In fact, I would go so far as to say I have relentlessly taunted them in hopes of a reasonable explanation. They offer none.

So think about this. As the original research I conducted indicates (and has been verified by SoundScan via BusinessWeek.com), the record labels began to reduce the number of releases BEFORE the Napster hearings. When they went in front of Congress to complain about downloading, Hilary Rosen could confidently state that sales were going to suffer.

Because it was engineered.”

http://www.openp2p.com/pub/wlg/3056

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Certain Demise?
Greg Kot

When it was introduced, the compact disc helped bail out the music business: Domestic sales of the new technology zoomed from 800,000 copies in 1983 to 288 million by 1990, and continued to surge by the hundreds of millions through the '90s.

But with March marking the CD's 20th anniversary, the boom is over.

Compact disc shipments in the U.S. plunged nearly 9 percent last year to just more than 800 million, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The statistics confirm a downward trend that has been gaining steam since 2001, and continues this year, with CD sales down more than 6 percent from their already slack 2002 pace.

The ripple effect is only beginning as the music industry braces for a future that will involve the death of CD stores and the rise of wireless, pocket-size MP3 players that will enable consumers to access thousands of hours of music at the touch of a button. The only real question is how long it will take for those scenarios to become reality.

"You'll see CD sections in stores decline quickly over the next few years because they will be replaced by technology that provides dirt-cheap storage and the ability to basically access and play any type of music anytime, anywhere," says Mike Dreese, CEO and founder of Newbury Comics, a New England record-store chain.

"Wireless technology basically will create a world where we can have anything we want all the time." The death knell is already ringing for CD stores, some retailers and industry observers say. In January, two major chains -- Warehouse Entertainment and Value Music -- filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. And nearly 500 music specialty stores nationwide have been shut down in recent months.

"Brick-and-mortar specialist CD stores are done in five years," Dreese says. "Stores like Tower or Sam Goody or Virgin are fast becoming anachronisms."

Not so fast, says Dan Hart, CEO of Echo, a joint venture of retailers (Best Buy, Tower Records, Virgin Entertainment, Warehouse Music, Hastings Entertainment and Trans World Entertainment) that is licensing songs from labels and plans to begin offering in-store downloads this year. Internet retailing was one of the few growth areas for music stores last year, with sales up 8.4 percent to 8.1 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

"There's no question CD sales are declining, but the phase-out of retail will take longer than people predict -- it'll be more like 30 years rather than five," he says. "There is a whole generation of people out there educated to using CDs as their primary music format."
http://www.modbee.com/life/mondaylif...-7495915c.html

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Taming the Internet frontier
The Internet was supposed to be a place without rules, without borders; Well, guess what?
Michael Totty

Don't look now, but the freewheeling days of the Internet are ending. Since its infancy, the Net has been seen as a place independent of the rules that governed the offline world. Borders could be transcended, new identities created, and old notions of property didn't apply.

This vision was summed up in a 1996 "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" by John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, who warned the old world's political powers: "Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. ... Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us."

Versions of this idea still have currency among some libertarians and legal scholars, but it's getting harder to see the Internet as a refuge from the rules and regulations that hold sway offline.

If the early cyberspace was a separate frontier, outside the reach of governments and laws, it's now beginning to look more like a later version of the Old West -- the one where settlers, marshals and lawyers come in and impose law and order.

Just consider: The entertainment industry is tracking down relentlessly those who it says are violating its copyrights, and courts consistently have backed the industry. Law-enforcement agencies are cracking down on Internet gambling and persuading credit-card companies to help.

And it isn't only Big Brother or Big Business reining in the Net. Consumers are also demanding tougher action to stop spam and protect privacy.

"We've reached the point where the demand for rules is about to replace the demand for chaos," said Debora L. Spar, a professor at the Harvard Business School. She is the author of "Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth," which describes how new technologies create unruly frontiers that are eventually brought under control.
http://www.sunspot.net/business/bal-...ness-headlines

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MusicNow? Not Yet
Rob Pegoraro

Buying music on the Internet isn't as easy as you think. You can order a CD with one-click efficiency -- but if you want to download a song instead of waiting for a plastic disc to arrive in the mail, you'll face a maze of fine-print restrictions, enforced by proprietary, sometimes buggy software.

This problem can't be blamed on technology. Tools to compress a song into an easily transferred file have existed for years, and millions of people use them every day.

But they're not paying for their downloads, nor have they been given any easy way to do so, even though online sales are also old hat.

The recording industry's ventures into digital-music sales, with one exception (Vivendi Universal's MP3-only, minor-label outlet EMusic), have consistently failed to heed the lessons of such file-sharing systems as Napster and Kazaa: People want downloads they can use as they see fit.

MusicNow, launched March 26 by Chicago-based FullAudio, could have learned from such predecessors as Listen.com, MusicNet and Pressplay. Instead, it compounds their errors.

MusicNow (www.musicnow.com) offers a $4.95-a-month plan that consists of souped-up Internet radio and a $9.95-a-month option that adds unlimited music streams, "conditional downloads" and the ability to buy "permanent downloads" at 99 cents each for copying to music players and CDs.

That two-tiered structure lends this service, which lives inside Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 (for Win 98 SE or newer), a split personality.

Its radio half, done up as a series of channels, looks slick but doesn't offer a lot over existing Web radio, much of which remains free. Its sole advantages are the lack of ads, the option to skip past a song and its display of what artist is next on the playlist.

MusicNow's downloading is much less remarkable. Both conditional and permanent transfers are offered as Windows Media Audio files, encoded at a good- but-not-great bit rate of 128 kilobits per second. You can search for music by artist, album title or song title, then stream it, obtain it in conditional form or buy it outright. (The two kinds of downloads are indistinguishable in Windows without inspecting file-properties windows.) Conditional downloads can only be played on a PC signed in to a MusicNow account, and you must also go online periodically to renew the songs' licenses.

Permanent downloads are touted as yours to keep but aren't quite: Each one can only be burned to CD twice and transferred to three portable players. And it remains in Windows Media Audio format, incompatible with a lot of digital-music hardware.

Most damning of all, these limits mean purchased tracks will not stay purchased. I burned three songs to a CD Thursday morning, but when I tried to burn them to a second CD that night, MusicNow's software asked me to cough up another 99 cents each.

Tech support, accessible only via e-mail, replied Friday that it had "reissued the licenses to these tracks"; a spokesman later said the buy-these-songs-again message shouldn't have appeared until my third copy to CD, but the damage was done.

This behavior is unacceptable in any kind of sales transaction. The nation's foremost foe of Internet piracy, Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti, has put it best: "If you cannot protect what you own, you don't own anything."

You can easily evade these restrictions by burning a permanent download to CD and then copying it back to your computer in MP3 format -- but why should you have to? Don't the record labels insisting on this know they're only annoying potential customers?

MusicNow's malfunctions might be forgivable if it offered better access to music, but it doesn't. Despite having signed up all five major record labels, the service's irritatingly erratic catalogue leaves out many artists big and small. As with other music services, this isn't all MusicNow's fault; some artists refuse to sell their work online, and others are still arranging for that.

But whatever the cause, any real-world music store that, say, offered a total of one song by the Rolling Stones would quickly find itself put down by the competition.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Apr11.html

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“Lately I have been downloading tons of music from Kazaa. There are tons of songs that I wanted without having to buy whole records.” - Kevin Russell.
Gourds lead singer runs, can't hide
Alexander Cote, Scene

Ever heard of the Gourds? Maybe not -- but even so, you have probably heard their music. Somewhere in the hard drive of your own computer probably lies the country/bluegrass cover of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice," and you have probably never had reason to doubt its label as a Phish cover. Well, it's not. It's a Gourds cover. And it happens to pale in comparison to most of the Gourds' wide repertoire of cross-genre songs with a southwestern flavor.

In the back room of Ray's Pizzeria on Avenue of the Americas and 3rd Street, five people speak to each other from different tables, occupying the whole room. Kevin Russell, the Gourds' lead singer, eats pizza while talking to old friends who walk in and out of the room. He sings along to the oldies station we can barely hear and raises an eyebrow when someone mentions that his girlfriend listens to his band ever since she found out they were into rap. Jay-Z and Missy Elliott, we are informed by drummer Keith Langford, figure prominently on the group's road mix.

Meanwhile, no one seems to notice or care that I am sitting in on their dinner, nor do they wonder why I don't seem to know anyone in the room. Supposedly, I am to interview Russell before his show, yet as dinner winds down and he is still chatting with old friends, the prospect of this seems to be getting slimmer. After dinner I follow Russell to the front of the Village Underground, where more conversations ensue -- interrupted only by a teenaged girl asking Russell if he had tickets to tonight's sold-out show.

Interestingly enough, the Gourds themselves do not seem to realize they are a nationally known band. A high school friend teases Russell like a proud older sister, "Look at this: you are sold OUT!" Nodding to me, she adds, "And what is this, you have paparazzi following you now?" Russell smiles wryly and responds, "I know, it's all happening so fast," before laughing healthily. Finally, Russell enters a room and turns around to tell me he will "find me later." End of interview. Later in the week I contacted him again, and we spoke of the Gourds, their music, and their steadily growing success:

scene: You guys sold out at the Village Underground. How does it feel to be in the Northeast again?
Kevin Russell: It was a pretty good experience. The intensity of the place is not too interesting to me. But we had a lot of old friends show up. That is always a treat, to see old friends. Not a real good place to park a large van either. The show was incredible, though. All in all we love the Northeast.

scene: Is the intensity something you can feel at a show?
Russell: Well, yes. But that does not seem to have anything to do with a given city. It has more to do with having real Gourd-heads in the crowd. And then the size of the room to crowd has an effect as well. Also, it helps if there are not too many chairs and tables.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=22542

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Former General Counsel Ende to Defend RIAA Student
Zachary A. Goldfarb

Dan Peng '05 has hired Howard Ende, a former University general counsel, and Melissa Klipp at the local firm of Drinker, Biddle & Reath to defend him in a suit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America, Ende said yesterday.

The RIAA announced last week that it had sued Peng and three other college students for what could be millions of dollars in copyright violations. The industry group alleged that Peng illegally shared copyrighted music from his computer and facilitated file-sharing of copyrighted music through his website, wake.princeton.edu, which Peng has taken down.

"We're currently in delicate discussions with the RIAA," Ende said yesterday in an interview. "I would like to see a swift and fair resolution."

Last week the University counsel office gave Peng a list of local lawyers. Ende said his nationally known firm will be paid. The University is not directly involved in the case, he said.

Ende said he has not worked with the lawyers defending the three other students but said he does not preclude working with them in the future.

He also said he did not know how the RIAA learned of Peng's site. The lawsuit cites publicity about the site, including an article in the 'Prince.'

Ende has previously defended computer science Professor Edward Felten against the RIAA, and Klipp is a specialist in intellectual property law.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/arc...ews/7900.shtml

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Extreme Security Keeps New CDs Off Internet For Now
Jeff Leeds

When rock-rap band Linkin Park locked down Studio A at North Hollywood's NRG Recording Services for three months last year, it was looking for more than shelter from autograph hounds.

Keys to the studio were collected from everyone but NRG's manager and an assistant engineer. Guards on rotating shifts logged the name of everyone who entered, including the chairman of the band's record label. And instead of storing recordings on the studio's high-security fiber-optic network, the band installed its own network with its own password.

The security surrounding the project is paying off for the band and AOL Time Warner's Warner Bros. Records. Unlike many of the music industry's major releases, the band's second album, "Meteora," didn't leak to the Internet months before going on sale. The album, which has sold more than 800,000 copies since hitting shelves two weeks ago, has been at the top of the national pop chart.

In scoring one of the year's biggest debuts, the label is teaching the recording industry a lesson about the power of old-fashioned discipline in the digital era.

"You can't be flippant or casual about this anymore," said Warner Bros. Records Chairman Tom Whalley. "When you have the cooperation of the band and management, you can protect it, but it has to start from the time they hit the studio. This is the most extreme we've gotten, and it worked."

While railing against piracy, the record conglomerates have largely failed to prevent early leaks of new releases to free Web sites - and still don't place technology on domestic CDs to prevent them from being copied after they are sold.

Only last week, British music giant EMI Group found itself racing to respond to the sudden appearance online of material from Radiohead, whose eagerly awaited album isn't due in stores until June. And industry executives say the premature release online of rock band Korn's "Untouchables" album contributed to its disappointing sales last year for Sony Corp.'s music division.

Such horror stories are slowly prodding a shift in the once-freewheeling internal culture of record companies, where advance copies of hot upcoming releases have long been traded back and forth among those in the know.

"There's been a kind of traditional marketing routine," said "Meteora" producer Don Gilmore. "People play things for other people. But something that might seem as innocent as trying to get someone excited about a new song by a big artist can cause the CD to fall into the wrong hands."

Increasingly, artists and labels are strictly limiting access to raw recordings. Tight controls surrounded recent releases by such acts as Eminem and Jay-Z. Across the industry, many executives now share songs internally only via encrypted e-mail and "watermark" individual CDs with identification numbers so online leaks can be traced.

Many labels now place some kind of protection software on early promotional copies of CDs given to media critics and radio programmers. But Warner Bros. decided to go one better in making "Meteora" leakproof: It didn't send out any promotional discs. Reviewers had to visit the company's offices, where security guards used metal-detection wands to check for recording devices. Radio stations received only the album's first song via satellite transmission.
URL: http://www.myinky.com/ecp/me/article...879239,00.html

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“I actually downloaded this one a while ago to burn on a nostalgic CD I was making.”
The Buggles and other memorable 1-hit wonders
Lori Jarvis, Todd Norden

Nostalgia is a commodity Gen-X'ers seem to lap up. From "That '70s Show" on Fox to VH1's "Behind the Music," it seems we have an insatiable appetite for the familiar and the past.

This week, we divulge our favorite songs by one-hit wonders of all time. You'll find more at www.onehitwondercentral.com. Here are our Top 3 one-hit wonders:

Todd

1. "Video Killed The Radio Star" -- The Buggles: It's funny how prophetic this new-wave nugget was in the early 1980s. Except the band got it wrong. Don't put the blame on VCRs. Put it on music channels that now show little else but redundant profiles of the same tired artists and reality shows about fraternities and sororities. And file-sharing services.

Lori: I blame this song/video (along with Devo's "Whip it") for cracking open the door for all the other techno-pop disasters in the '80s. C'mon, Todd. The world would have been a better place without bands like A Flock of Seagulls.

2. "Unbelievable" -- EMF: In the early '90s, everyone jumped on the dance floor for this song containing a sample of the once-popular, foul-mouthed comedian Andrew Dice Clay who says the title in his nasal Brooklyn accent. But once it fell out of favor with DJs, this group was never heard from again.

Lori: Except for on permanent loop late at night when Rhino Records wants to sell has-been compilations. Truth is, I never knew this song was anything more than a reason to sell cars or lipstick.

3. "Life in a Northern Town" -- Dream Academy: A true one-hit wonder if there ever was one, but they shouldn't have been. This Beatle-esque collage of folk and pop harmonies and its echoing chorus remind me of how alone you can sometimes feel when you're only 15 years old.

Lori: What a great song! It's one of those songs that you reach for the car radio's volume knob every time it comes along.
http://www.thedailyjournal.com/news/...ews/96569.html

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Peer-to-peer networks can't be unplugged
Stanley Miller II

In the ongoing struggle over digital downloading, technology will let those trading files triumph over the efforts trying to shut down online media piracy, experts say.

The technology allowing the unfettered sharing of files is called "peer-to-peer" networking. It allows each connected computer to act as a server and facilitate communication between other machines.

The decentralized nature of the network means the system is resilient, and it stays up as long as any of its members are active. Usually in peer-to-peer networking, there is no one plug that can be pulled in order to shut the entire system down.

Ultimately, efforts to stop the sharing of popular music, movie or other media through peer-to-peer networks will fail, according to some Microsoft employees who published a technical analysis - called a white paper - titled "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution."

The four researchers - writing on their own behalf, not for Microsoft - believe that the steady spread of file-sharing systems and improvements in their development will eventually make them impossible to shut down.

Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado and Bryan Willman prepared the darknet paper for a workshop at the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery's annual conference late last year on computer and communications security.

The darknet is a collection of networks and technologies that let people share digital information. They say that although the darknet can be hindered by digital rights management technology and new laws, "ultimately the darknet-genie will not be put back into the bottle."

Users will copy information as long as it is possible and interesting, they say. And high-speed Internet connections and only a fraction of users initially sharing content make the darknet ubiquitous.

"There seem to be no technical impediments to darknet-based peer-to-peer file sharing technologies growing in convenience, aggregate bandwidth and efficiency," they write. "The legal future of darknet-technologies is less certain, but we believe that, at least for some classes of user, and possibly for the population at large, efficient darknets will exist."

And some of the companies developing ways to manage peer-to-peer traffic agree.

"There are limitations to the degree of control you can exercise" over peer- to-peer networks, said Tom Donnelly, co-founder of Sandvine, a network equipment company in Waterloo, Ontario, that has created tools for Internet service providers to influence of peer-to-peer activity on their systems.

Donnelly said many high-speed Internet providers are struggling with the amount of network activity that programs like Kazaa, WinMX and eMule create by allowing users to share files.

Often Internet providers allocate more bandwidth on their residential networks for subscribers to download data rather than for uploading it to other people on the Net. But peer-to-peer networks require users to upload files to other members, so the upstream channel for sending out information is quickly consumed.

Late last year, Sandvine published a whitepaper saying peer-to-peer networks account for as much as 60% of the traffic on the Internet.

Donnelly said peer-to-peer programs are avoiding the traditional technological techniques typically used to stop them. Traditionally, applications transported over peer-to-peer connections have been assigned a specific port, making the traffic easy to identify.

"But like so many things attached to the evolution of file-sharing networks, that practice is now part of history," according to a whitepaper released last week by Sandvine. "Strategies to combat or manage P2P traffic that continue to assume this anachronism are doomed to fail."

"These applications are very dynamic," Donelly said. "They are constant evolving. It is simply a form of communication - a way to have a conversation. I think it would be very difficult technically to stop it altogether."
http://www.jsonline.com/bym/tech/news/mar03/128038.asp

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University of Washington students warned about copyright violations
Andrew Sengul

With tension building over intellectual-property rights on the Internet and many students unaware of the laws pertaining to the distribution of copyrighted material, UW staff members gave presentations this week in the residence halls to discuss the laws that govern file-sharing over University networks.

“Right now, we get an average of 40 complaints of copyright violation by students every month, and that number is steadily increasing,” said Catherine Innes, the director of the University’s Office of Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer.

Innes added that it’s not difficult to violate copyright law.

“Many of the existing copyright laws are contradictory to how we use computers,” said Innes. “I print out things from the Internet all the time, for instance, which can technically be a violation of copyright law.”

Clark Shores, an assistant attorney general who advises the UW on intellectual-property issues, was present at the presentations to describe the laws governing copyrighted material online.

“The recording and film industries aren’t happy about what’s being done on the peer-to-peer networks, and while I’m not trying to defend them, students need to be aware that they’re serious,” said Shores. “They’ve shut down Napster and are in the process of suing KaZaA, and now they’ve started filing suits against individual users.”

Shores pointed out that most users who are targeted for copyright violation on file-sharing networks are people who share large volumes of copyrighted works. Casual file-sharers are less likely to attract the industry’s attention.
http://thedaily.washington.edu/news....-Token.Count=7

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“My generation’s Paul McCartney and John Lennon are working 40 hours a week for some company, and I’m a music-stealing criminal. What is wrong with this picture?”
Music industry's off key
Charles Wesley

I am sick and tired of reading about how MP3s and peer-to-peer file sharing are breeding a generation of criminals and killing the music industry.

Big music companies would like everyone to believe that their recent troubles are all the fault of teenage deviants selfishly stealing music–they want you to think that everything that is wrong with these multinational behemoths is someone else’s fault. It couldn’t possibly be because they have made bad business decisions for decades, right?

Bull.

These big companies made bad business decisions for a long time, and instead of admitting to their shortsightedness and instituting changes to rescue the music industry, they have chosen instead, in full arrogance and ignorance, to vilify their customers and conjure up a bogey-man to take their place as the reason big music sucks.

Because lets face it, music today sucks. It’s been so long since we’ve heard any good music that we’ve almost forgotten what it sounds like. Either that or we’re longing for music that moves us so badly that we get excited about crap in the hope that maybe it will fill our collective void.

Regardless, the music industry has been screwed up for a long time. Musicians get no rights, little pay, and no say over how their music is developed, marketed, and sold. Before the age of the MP3, musicians couldn’t do anything about it. As a result, music industry fat cats got filthy rich, fat cats merged companies with fatter cats producing the fattest cats, and with their influence they bought up market share in production, distribution, and licensing.

As a result, companies had less and less incentive to invest in their musicians.

To the industry fat-cat, what incentive was there to build strong musicians when so much more money could be made up front by manufacturing fads? Many musicians spoke out about the peril the music industry would face by failing to allow music groups to mature and grow as artists, but nobody listened.

So the music industry had complete control over distribution (CDs whose prices mysteriously never came down), licensing (artists lost their rights the second they wrote a song), and artist pay (which usually amounted to next to nothing). As a result, the quality of music has fallen, and as a result, the long-term viability of many projects currently in progress is looking worse and worse. Basic business tells you that you should always invest in the long-term, not the short-term. The recent stock-market bubble burst is a perfect example.

Enter MP3s and what you have is the stone that crashed through the glass house.
http://www.spectator-online.com/vnew.../3e961e7327dc9

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He’s Totally Pissed and He’s Not Going to Take It
Not your standard newsbite column. I hate someone.

I’m sick, I’m tired, I’m at work, and me and the girl had a stuff swap last weekend. If ever it was a bad time to write a column, now’s the time.

However, this “news column” is just going about 10% news and 90% me tearing into the RIAA once again. If you don’t like that, tough… you’ve already clicked… I have your page view, and you can feel free to click back. I suggest reading Cody’s column or Ryan’s news from yesterday. Cocozza will get you the shit tomorrow. I have no interest in doing Music News today, however I do have a few pages of content to get off my chest. Maybe some newsbites at the end, I’ll decide when I get there.

Also, Note to Marshall: See, now I feel the need to start fucking with you, Drunken Legoman.

Daniels Hates the RIAA

Now, as most of you know from my previous columns here on the site, I am extremely anti-RIAA. I think they’re a bunch of disgusting fat cats who wield the legal system as a tool to try to regain control of an industry that is slipping from their grasp, rather than trying to adapt to the new technology and going with it. They are convinced they can stop the filesharing stuff from happening, rather than just realizing it’s not going away and it’s been around for almost a decade now.

See, back in the days before Napster, what most of you may not know is there was this thing called Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. Back in the days of IRC, those in the know, swapped music and movie files back and forth, and still do to this day. Also, college networks were already starting to share music files. When MP3’s were invented, taking away the disgusting hugeness of .WAV files (which could be up to 100 MegaBytes per SONG), we rejoiced. Then the networks like Scour.net started up, which was basically a huge IRC search engine.

Then Napster came along, and the file sharing network idea became available to the public. Now, everyone knew about this… and music was a giant free for all. Full CDs were available for network downloading, and the Recording Industry panicked. Now, someone who was smart would have looked at this Napster module, bought them out, and then figured out “how can we make money off this.” Some people would have come up with the fact that this could be a huge boon that, used properly, could actually increase record sales overall. Someone could have realized that millions of eyes would be on this network every day, and millions of ears, too. Some sort of crazy advertising revenue might be possible.

But instead, somewhere along the line, the RIAA decided to go the way of the MPAA in the 80s when they sued Blockbuster video for the idea of “renting” movies. The MPAA argued that the availability of VCR tapes for rental would cut into the revenue they made from VCR tape sales. This case was, obviously, eventually ruled in Blockbuster’s favor. But the MPAA wasn’t quite happy from there. They combated it by making video releases “priced to rent,” which meant that, to get movies to rent to people, video stores would have to pay $30 to sometimes up to $100 per rental copy, a pricing structure which continues to this day. So, next time you rent a videocassette and break it, keep in mind that the replacement costs on VHS tapes can be $75 or more. (PSA from your friendly neighborhood Daniels).
http://www.411mania.com/music/column...olumns_id=689&

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Campaigners call for unlimited broadband

A lobby group has been launched in the UK to campaign for unlimited broadband access. AntiCap UK has grown out of cable firm ntl's decision to limit the amount of downloads customers can make to one gigabyte per day. Many of the founders of the campaign are subscribers to ntl's fast net service and have been angered by the capping, which ntl introduced without warning.

"We consider it a very sharp business practice to attract users and later adversely change the contract and service conditions, especially in a hushed up, and in our view unfair, manner," reads a statement on the AntiCap UK website.

WHAT RESTRICTION MEANS

v One gigabyte = 200 music tracks
v or 100 software files
v or 10,000 pictures

Ntl has admitted that it did not handle communication of the changes well, but it is convinced that download limits are essential to maintain a good quality of service for all its customers. “Bear in mind that it is only a tiny number of people that are affected by this," said a spokesman for ntl. "Having looked at what is happening in other countries and the comments of other ISPs in recent weeks it would seem others are considering it," he added.

However ntl has delayed a decision to remove users exceeding the daily limit from the service, preferring instead to talk to its heavy users on a customer forum. It has, as yet, reached no decision about what to do with those that abuse the download limit.

Fast net services are attracting more and more people in the UK, and one of the biggest selling points is the ease and speed with which users can download music, video and other files over the net. The idea of capping, and the possibility of introducing tiered pricing with heavy users paying more are likely to become increasingly controversial issues over the coming months.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2932039.stm

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Today I declare that file trading is solely responsible for the dramatic rise in DVD sales!
Richard Menta

That is a heck of a declaration. OK stretch, how am I going to justify that statement? Well damn it, I have proof. Entertainment lobby endorsed proof. Proof from the figures on DVD sales that Borland mentioned in the same CNET article.

In 2002, retail DVD sales rose by 61 percent to $8.7 billion, or about $3.3 billion more than in 2001, according to the DVD Entertainment Group.

So how is that my proof? That proof is the direct correlation between the rise in file trading and the rise of DVD sales. It's undeniable.

What is really undeniable is the underlying problem with statistics. You can manipulate them quite easily to support disparaging positions. The entertainment industry has been manipulating them for years, the record companies by loudly pointing to losses and the movie Industry by remaining quiet about gains.

Don't try to tell me otherwise or I'll throw my hands over my ears and yell "La La La La La".

Every major DVD release has found its way to the file trading services, but people continue to buy DVDs in ever increasing numbers. Yes, the DVD arena is a new one with wide growth potential, but its nearly 9 billion in sales last year is already very close to the over 12 billion the record industry earned in 2002.

Motion Picture Association of America CEO Jack Valenti will immediately dismiss my arguments if he ever hears them. But Jack, how can you support this logic when it is conveniently applied to the record industry and then deny the same logic when it is inconveniently applied to yours?

Here is another question for Mr. Valenti. Why did DVD sales go up at all if file trading is so rampant (40 million US users and rising)? Shouldn't they also have dropped?
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2003/dvd_sales.html

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DMCA Prior Restraint Censorship, Again
Interz0ne's Freedom of Speech Questioned
Read the cease and desist order.

UPDATE: We've posted the full complaint filed by Blackboard as well as the restraining order served to Acidus and Virgil at the convention over the weekend. Stay tuned for more details as they develop.

We believe, as Aristotle wrote, that all human beings desire to aquire knowledge, and, through universal, easily accessible education, We make it possible for everyone who so desires it to gain that knowledge.

While the past demands respect, the Future commands attention!

Any persons knowledgeable with technology and computers, and those desiring such knowledge. Come gain a new knowledge or share what you know.

This year, We will be bringing you even more cutting edge info concerning the freedom of the Internet, Civil Liberties, Privacy Issues, and other information to enlighten you!
http://www.interz0ne.com/

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Tiny bubbles are key to liquid-cooled system for future computers

Researchers have made a discovery that may lead to the development of an innovative liquid-cooling system for future computer chips, which are expected to generate four times more heat than today's chips. Researchers had thought that bubbles might block the circulation of liquid forced to flow through "microchannels" only three times the width of a human hair. Engineers also thought that small electric pumps might be needed to push liquid through the narrow channels, increasing the cost and complexity while decreasing the reliability of new cooling systems for computers. Purdue researchers, however, have solved both of these potential engineering hurdles, developing a "pumpless" liquid-cooling system that removes nearly six times more heat than existing miniature pumpless liquid-cooling systems, said Issam Mudawar, a professor of mechanical engineering.
http://www.scienceblog.com/community...rder=0&thold=0

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Panel discusses file sharing, copyright laws
Justine Maki

There are about 900 million files available to download from peer-to-peer networks online for free, according to one Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) representative.

Jonathan Whitehead, legal counselor to the RIAA, said online piracy affects everyone from musicians to record store clerks and the record companies, to a crowd of 100 last night during a public forum.

He and four other panelists discussed illegal file sharing, Internet piracy and the technology that enables it to occur.

"How would you like to see the work of your life stolen?" asked Mike Negra, asking students to identify with the artists whose music is pirated on the Internet.

Negra, owner of the recently closed Mike's Music, 226 W. College Ave., said file sharing was the downfall of his business, costing him $2 million in sales and forcing him to lay off 12 employees. He said he spoke so students could put a face and a story behind what file sharing has done to one person and one store.

All on the panel agreed that artists need to be compensated for their work, but disagreed how to go about it.

Fred von Lohmann, legal representative of Morpheus, a popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program, said the current way record companies try to enforce copyright violations is ineffective.

Artists have gotten no money after lawsuits against Napster and Aimster, said von Lohmann, and litigation has had no effect on file sharing.

"Fifty million people voted for [George W.] Bush in the presidential election," he said. "Sixty-one million Americans use Kazaa."

Von Lohmann discussed alternatives to suits filed against college students "for sums more than they would earn in their entire lives."
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive...03dnews-10.asp

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No Keelhauling This Time: Naval Academy Slaps Wrists In P2P Case
They beat Saddam but not the RIAA
AP

Eighty-five Naval Academy midshipmen were disciplined for using a military Internet connection to illegally trade copyrighted music and movies.

Officials stopped short of their threat to expel or court-martial the students, instead punishing the midshipmen with sanctions ranging from demerits and extra work to loss of privileges and leave, an academy document obtained by The (Baltimore) Sun showed.

Academy spokesman Cmdr. Bill Spann declined to comment Monday on why the school chose not to impose its harshest penalties, the newspaper reported.

The academy seized 92 student computers in a widely publicized raid in November on suspicions the students had used the academy's super-fast T3 Internet line to set up round-the clock Internet hubs to trade music and movies — a violation of Defense Department policy and federal copyright laws.

The academy was alerted to the problem when the Defense Research & Engineering Network, which supplies the Academy's Internet connection, found file trading was consuming an enormous share of the school's bandwidth — a measure of the volume of information a network can carry at one time.

A Pentagon spokesman, Glenn Flood, confirmed the broad outlines of that account.

"They did their job," Flood said. "They found some unusually high traffic and notified the academy."

Over the last five months the academy has narrowed the bandwidth feeding Bancroft Hall dormitory and installed software to restrict peer-to-peer file sharing, a move already taken by several colleges and universities, including the U.S. Military Academy and the Air Force Academy.

Although the incident marked the first time an academic institution seized students' computers for Internet use, public and private higher education institutions have begun to crack down on the problem. Last week, Harvard University said it would suspend Internet privileges for any student caught illegally exchanging copyrighted material.

The academy said it gave students several warnings before raiding Bancroft dormitory while students were in class. It purged all illegal files from the computers before returning them to students a few weeks later.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Apr15.html

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Donuts? This cop works for peanuts
PC Cop Finds MP3s On Corporate Networks - Even if Renamed
First we’re gonna find ’em and then we’re gonna kill ’em
Paul Rotello

Software company Apreo announced the release of their program SoundJudgment for identifying and removing MP3 files and Peer-To-Peer programs from corporate computer systems. Even if the files are renamed and the extension changed the company says the software will still find them, based on a unique "content signature." According to their site the software uses signature evaluation to ferret out P2Ps as well,

“All MP3 files have the same signature, whereas every online file-sharing program has a different one. Consequently, SoundJudgment includes a database of signatures from P2P music-sharing applications to identify these programs, which is updated almost daily.”

After the discovery is made, administrators have the option of deleting the files automatically.

In addition the program can also find and remove over 21,000 games. The cost is less than $3.00 per networked PC.
http://try.apreo.com/quickStart.asp?...quickStartC=qa

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Movielink, Hollywood.com Team on VOD
Mark Berniker

Online movie site movielink has signed a deal with entertainment site Hollywood.com to offer
a co-branded broadband film download service.

The new service will reside on Hollywood.com's Web site, and is part of Movielink's strategy to diversify its movie content delivery options.

Movielink currently offers customers the opportunity to download full-length digital copies of movies directly onto their hard drives. The films then can be watched either directly on PC screens, or on television with some cabling connections.

Movielink is only available to online users with broadband access and offers new movie releases for $4.99, with older releases available for $2.95 per download.

In operation since last November, Movielink is a joint venture of five of the major Hollywood film studios, including, Warner Bros. (Quote, Company Info), Paramount Pictures (Quote, Company Info), Universal Pictures (Quote, Company Info), Sony Pictures Entertainment (Quote, Company Info) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Quote, Company Info).

One of the reasons the studios created Movielink was to combat piracy of their film content on the Internet from non-sanctioned, peer-to-peer swapping services.

It is part of the studios' efforts to offer film fans an inexpensive yet reliable download service in contrast to the free but unreliable and illegally copied films from peer-to-peer swap sites.

The new co-branded Movielink-Hollywood.com video-on-demand offering provides yet another means for the studios to generate revenue beyond theatrical film releases, video- on-demand services over cable and satellite systems, DVD and VHS releases to video stores, and direct marketing sales.

While Movielink has been around for only a few months, it is still unclear how strong demand will be for a video-on-demand over broadband Internet service.
http://www.atnewyork.com/news/article.php/2191871

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Broadcasters top ranked for Web listening
Frank Barnako

Half of the 10 most popular Webcast radio stations belong to traditional broadcasters, according to the February ratings compiled by Arbitron MeasureCast. The U.K.'s Virgin Radio and JazzFM were ranked 3rd and 6th, New York's WQXR was 4th, Tacoma, Wash.-based KPLU's jazz format was 7th, and Chicago news/talker WLS was 5th. The two most popular Web stations are subscription music formatted services that allow users to customize playlists, RadioioEclectic and MusicMatch's ArtistMatch.

Madonna tries to foil pirates

Madonna is set to release a new album next Tuesday and she is taking steps to prevent its piracy -- which are not working. Despite Warner Bros. Records (AOL: news, chart, profile) reportedly trying to discourage downloaders by uploading "spoofed" or phony files to peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa, tracks off the album are nonetheless readily available. One bogus file reportedly has Madonna saying, "What the (expletive) do you think you're doing?"

Meanwhile, Warner told some file sharing firms this week they could offer Madonna's previous releases to subscribers, the Los Angeles Times reported, but only as full albums, not as separate tracks. "That doesn't make sense," said one online executive. "It takes away one of the major conveniences for using a service like this."
http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/stor...le&dist=google

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Downloadin’ an’ Deletin’ - QnA
Reader has concerns. Deleting and formatting doesn't erase all traces
Mark Stacchiew

Q: I read an article some time ago that said deleting data on a hard drive doesn't really delete data. I want to clean out my hard drive and not leave any trace of existing files or programs in it. How can I do that?

A: You may be referring to a study in January that received a lot of coverage in the technology press.

Graduate students at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science bought 158 used hard drives on eBay and analyzed the data that they contained. They found more than 5,000 credit-card numbers, tons of personal e-mail, financial information, medical records and scads of pornography. They found that only 12 of the 158 drives were properly erased.

Microsoft's delete and format commands don't actually erase all traces of data from a hard drive.There are utilities that will enable anyone with a little bit of experience to recover virtually everything that the drive contained.

To properly erase a drive, the existing data must be overwritten with random information. There are utilities available that will do just that. For Windows users, one free program to consider is Wizard Industries' Sure Delete 5.1. You can download it from www.wizard-industries.com/sdel.html. Another free option is Eraser, which can be downloaded from www.tolvanen.com/eraser. If you prefer a commercial solution, try OnTrack's DataEraser. You can read about it at www.ontrack.com/dataeraser. Macintosh users can try Jiiva's SuperScrubber, which is described at www.jiiva.com/superscrubber.

Q: I would like to download classical music from Usenet newsgroups. I haven't a clue what to do. The music is uploaded in discrete packages that need to be woven together and saved as a file. I can't find info on how to do that.

A: In the olden days before Napster and other peer-to-peer networks made it easy to share files, Internet users would swap them on Usenet newsgroups. They would trade computer programs, movies, images and more. Since Usenet is nothing more than an elaborate bulletin board system that features plain-text messages, it was necessary to transmit all of that binary information as text.

Newsreader software was modified in such a way that the binary code of the files that were to be traded could be converted into text and then posted on the newsgroups. Since files of this type are typically very large and there are size limits for newsgroup messages, it is necessary to post the information over many messages. Anyone who wants to download a file must grab the text in those messages with their newsreader, then decode it to recreate the original binary file.

If you want to get started, you will need to find a suitable newsreader to decode multipart binaries. Just about all of them are up to the task, although many are designed expressly for that purpose. You can find links to many of these programs for a variety of operating systems at www.newsreaders.com. Many of them are freeware. There are also links to excellent resources that will describe how to connect to your ISP's Usenet news servers and get started in this less-travelled part of the Internet.

Do you have a technology question? Send it to webquestions@canada.com
http://www.canada.com/montreal/montr...D-8CD6D72A5A9C

Jay Lee

Q. Is there a better or safer music download program than Kazaa? I'm concerned about the piggyback programs that come with it and suspect they caused many of the system operating problems we've had in the past. We just got the computer back from the shop with all our basic software reloaded, and I don't want to mess it up again.

A. Kazaa is a pretty nasty program in terms of all the additional spyware attached to it. There is an alternative to Kazaa called Kazaa Lite. You can download this program from www.kazaalite.com. Kazaa Lite is free from the parasiteware and add-ons that come with Kazaa.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory...siness/1869530

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The Entertainment Police
Sarah Scalet

When music industry associations won the court battle to shut down Napster—that giddy but short-lived music-swapping service that made peer-to-peer (P2P) a household phrase— they were just getting started. The entertainment industry is at war with Internet pirates, which it believes are threatening its very livelihood. The MPAA, which estimates that the U.S. film industry loses $3 billion a year from physical piracy alone, is growing increasingly frustrated by how often video files are available on the Internet before the movies are released in theaters or on DVD and video. The RIAA, meanwhile, blames piracy for the 7 percent decrease in the number of compact disc shipments during the first half of 2002. That kind of research causes much eye-rolling among Internet libertarians who believe file-swappers aren't necessarily downloading files they would otherwise purchase, and others who say that a free sample might entice listeners into buying a whole album. But the threat to the industry is real, if overstated.

Part of the problem is organized hacking groups, plain and simple. So-called Warez (pronounced "wares") groups host websites that proffer pirated software, music, movies and pornography. Hackers get bragging rights for being the first to post new files or to crack copyright protection schemes. It's likely that our anonymous CIO's computer systems were being used by one of these groups.

To hear the entertainment industry tell it, though, covert Warez activity on the networks of unassuming companies—the risk of which can be minimized by heeding long-established security best practices—is only background music. Security 101 precautions such as properly configured firewalls, the dogged installation of patches to fix newly discovered software vulnerabilities and even carefully monitored intrusion detection systems will go only so far in preventing illegal activities. That's because, while Napster is no more, dozens of services, such as eDonkey, Gnutella, Grokster and Kazaa, have sprouted in its place—and have earned the reputation of being venues for exchanging pirated files.

These P2P systems, which allow people who download their software to exchange .exes, MP3s, .mpegs and other files directly with one another, have legitimate reasons for being. Some artists like to give away songs or videos to win fans, and the business possibilities of file-swapping are promising enough that Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie started a company, Groove Networks, that is working on P2P for the enterprise, with funding from Microsoft. Kazaa, the most popular P2P service in the United States, boasts that its software has been downloaded more than 200 million times.

Citing estimates from third-party analysts who put the number of illegal file downloads at 2.6 billion a month, RIAA President Cary Sherman says, "You're just not going to get those kinds of numbers from people going to Warez sites."

In response, the entertainment industry has launched a campaign the likes of which CIOs haven't seen since the Business Software Alliance and Software Publishers Association started cracking down on pirated software in the mid-1990s. Collectively, the two groups earned a reputation as "the software police," says Ted Claypoole, an attorney for Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice. "I've been to seminars where representatives have spoken and handed out whistles with their phone numbers on them for people to call and be a whistle- blower. That's what they rely on."

But the entertainment police don't need whistle-blowers. All they have to do is surf the Internet.

Tom Temple spends his workdays trolling the Internet for free copies of the latest blockbusters. After all, that is what the MPAA pays him to do. "If somebody is using a P2P server or is set up as a P2P server, then we will find it using our search engines," says Temple, director of worldwide Internet enforcement for the MPAA. When he and his team find copyrighted movies online, they mail an infringement notification to the owners of the IP address, warning them of potential liability and ask that the material be removed. When they unearth an operation larger than a single P2P user, they get law enforcement involved.
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