Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 21st, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week

"We have seen attempt after attempt by government agencies to implement sometimes ominous regulations to allow the federal government to invade the privacy of American citizens." - Rep. Steve Chabot.

"These types of scare tactics are not permissible and amount to extortion." – Bart Lombardo, attorney for file sharer.

"Controlling distribution on the Internet is now central to success in the music business. There are strategic changes that the industry must make in order to survive." - Eric Briggs





Um, Can I Borrow Everything?

A new survey claims that the overwhelming majority of online files is concentrated in the hands of surprisingly few filesharers. Less than ten percent of computer users who have music files on their harddrives control “nearly three quarters” of all content. These so called power users are getting a lot of attention lately since in theory it’s a lot cheaper stopping a few with lawsuits than it is going after everybody. That’s what they say anyway, in practice the lawsuits seem to be waste of time. It’s been nearly a year since the RIAA started them and filesharing is as big as ever. As a matter of fact some studies show it’s gotten bigger. Nevertheless a pundit could spend his life explaining why the RIAA does what it does and still not get to the bottom of what motivates their self-defeating activities. So let’s forget for a moment the whys and how comes and let’s look at some figures.

From The Article:

"The study estimated that only 8 percent of downloaders have more than 1,000 music files on their computers. But those large users account for about 56 percent of an estimated 11.1 billion downloaded files, according to the group's research. And the average number of music files held by those heavy users is 2,300 songs.

Another 18 percent of music files are held by another 8 percent of the downloaders with 501 to 1,000 music files. That means that nearly three-quarters of all music files can be found on 10 percent of computers that have more than 500 music files, according to NPD.

Overall, about 40 million households had at least one music file downloaded to the computer."

It may be small percentage wise, but relative or not, 10% is huge in real numbers. If approximately 40 million households have at least one file, and a household is defined as three people, that's 120 million file sharers in the US alone, a number more inline with my own estimates of 100 million, and many more than the usual 60 million users we hear quoted by most people in the media.

10 % of 120 million is 12 million people.

That the NPD uses their own survey to justify the RIAA's lawsuit campaign makes less and less sense - not more – when user bases get this large -

"The RIAA's focus on those sharing the most files makes sense, because this group provides the most egregious example of one of the music industry's most pressing business issues -- copyright infringement."

It may seem like it makes sense and it sure sounds good to corporate boards, but if in fact suing 1000 people a year out of twelve million users is not having the desired effect, or having the opposite effect which it arguably is, it’s time to rethink the policy if only from a business point of view.

Then There’s This

As harddrive capacities skyrocket and prices continue to plunge, soon everyone, not just the 12 million users now ahead of the wave will have the space and the ability to create – and fill - their own celestial jukeboxes. Don’t expect them to fill 10,000 slot 40 gig iPods at 99 cents a song. It won’t happen (all the same I’d love to see the receipt!) Soon capacities will hit a Terabyte and when they do we’ll need $250,000 bucks just to load them with (DRM restricted) tunes and that’s clearly out of the question, not when hooking up two drives together will transfer the contents in minutes for free. If anything can slow the percentage usage of P2P for transfers it will be this “new” sneaker net, especially when transferring that much content over even a fast P2P network could take 6 months!

At this point in their history the artists, the RIAA and increasingly the actors and the MPAA should rethink policies of chasing away users off P2P networks. Not when speeds, price and capacities are making it attractive for traders to use other methods. In person cloning of multi-terabyte harddrives will make P2P look like a picnic. The answers will not be found in courtrooms and, note to Don Henley, Washington isn’t hiding them someplace either.

I’m increasingly of a mind that direct, person-to-person swapping will be the coming huge wave, at least until bandwidth catches up to capacity, and the way things are going bandwidth will trail capacity for a long time to come. It’s been estimated that before the end of the 00’s the average personal computer will have enough room to store every single song ever recorded, plus every book and a few thousand movies. Within weeks of that happening the trades will be done and everyone will have everything everyone else has, and that means everything. Fundamentally changing – again – the equation between consumer and distributor. There will be no turning back.











Enjoy,

Jack.











So Not Intimidated

Dorm downloaders aren't fazed by recent lawsuits, they've just sharpened their skills.
Patrick Day

On a recent weekday afternoon, a 19-year-old college freshman named Shawn sat in his dorm room at the University of Southern California and broke the law: He illegally downloaded a copyrighted song off the Internet.

Shawn knows all about the record company lawsuits against those who download without permission — including more than 500 filed last month — and ongoing investigations by the Recording Industry Assn. of America into downloading activities. And he doesn't care.

"The lawsuits are a joke," Shawn says. "That doesn't stop me and my friends. It gives us something to joke about. When I'm downloading a song, I'll say, [sarcastically] 'Here I go breaking the law again. Hope I don't get sued.' "

Across town at UCLA, Jessica, a third-year sociology major, has developed a firm rule to avoid getting in trouble: "Don't share files; don't get caught."

That doesn't mean, however, that Jessica has stopped downloading music. Her desktop computer in her dorm is full of songs by Britney Spears and Radiohead, all taken illegally from file-sharing services like Kazaa and Morpheus.

She noticed that the lawsuits focused on Internet users who made their song file libraries available to others and who traded more than 1,000 songs. By making her files inaccessible to other downloaders and by keeping their number well under 1,000, she feels confident she won't get sued.

"I have friends who say I should just buy the CDs," she says. "But I don't have the money."

Shawn and Jessica (their last names, like other students quoted in this story, aren't given to protect their privacy) are just the kind of people who scare the entertainment industry to death. Alarmed at the drop-off in album sales in recent years and at the increasing ease of movie downloading, the music and film industries have been working feverishly to change attitudes about their products, whether it's with lawsuits or advertisements or working with colleges to cut down on downloading.

Is it working? The RIAA says yes, noting that 56% of college students polled last month were supportive of the downloading crackdowns. In an e-mail, Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA, said: "Students are learning both that 'sharing' music on peer-to-peer networks without permission of the copyright holder is illegal and that there are terrific legal alternatives for getting their music online.…. This transition won't occur overnight, but we're making real progress."

But recent visits to dorm rooms on the campuses of UCLA and USC revealed a student body more interested in avoiding the authorities than obeying them. Most of the students interviewed continue to download music, movies and TV shows using their universities' high-speed Internet connections unmindful of possible legal action. In their view, it's easy and available, so why not?

"The way I see it, it's only illegal if you get caught," says Shawn, who proudly notes that he shares every song file on his computer.

Students interviewed knew the name of at least one person whom they could turn to for downloading missed TV shows and a student at UCLA showed clips of everything from "Fight Club" to "Finding Nemo," all available from a menu on his computer screen.

Record labels began filing lawsuits last year, beginning with four college students in April, then 261 lawsuits in September and the latest round of 532 suits coming in January.

But instead of acting as a deterrent, the lawsuits have made many college students more savvy of what type of online behavior will get them noticed and what they feel they can get away with. And when one file-sharing service, such as Kazaa, makes headlines, students migrate to a different service, such as Soulseek or LimeWire, to avoid the authorities, USC and UCLA dorm residents say.
http://www.latimes.com/features/life...=la-home-style


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Music Industry Wants Info On Canadian File Swappers
CTV.ca News Staff

The Canadian Recording Industry Association has kicked off what promises to be a lengthy battle against online music sharing, and the first hurdle may be the most difficult to clear.

The CRIA has asked a number of Internet service providers to hand over contact information for customers it suspects of "egregious" uploading of music files. But at least one of those companies, Calgary-based Shaw Communications, says it intends to oppose the CRIA, citing new federal privacy laws that protect its customers.

"We're absolutely compelled under the privacy act not to provide that information," Shaw Communications president Peter Bissonnette told The Globe and Mail.

Arguments in the case begin Monday at a federal court in Toronto.

Working on behalf of major record labels, the CRIA is reportedly hunting for 29 Canadian customers from at least five different ISPs, including Shaw, Telus Corp., Rogers Cable, Bell Canada's Sympatico service and Quebec's Videotron.

So far, Shaw is the only ISP to openly oppose the CRIA's request. The company provides high-speed Internet service to about 900,000 Canadians.

Record labels contend that online file sharing violates copyright law and has hurt sales of albums and singles. Supporters of it say it stimulates demand for music and say the industry is to blame for falling sales.

The CRIA's search follows the lead of the Recording Industry Association of America, which has sued some 400 individuals in the United States. On both sides of the border, the recording industry is targeting computer users who upload musical files, not those who download songs.

In December, a California court ruled that the recording industry could not force ISPs to identify customers unless it launched a formal lawsuit and obtained a subpoena.

Such a ruling might be considered by a Canadian judge, but would not be a binding precedent.

There are also doubts about whether lawsuits against file sharers will be successful here, since Canadian laws on reproducing music for personal use differ from those in the United States.

For example, it has been legal in Canada since 1998 to make a single copy of a recording for personal use, such as copying a CD onto your hard drive or MP3 player. But the practice is illegal in the U.S.

But under the Copyright Act, it remains illegal to give or sell a CD copy to a friend, since it's not for personal use. In the same vein, distributing copies to friends online is prohibited.

Each of the ISPs involved in the case have reacted differently to the CRIA's request.

While Shaw is adamantly opposed, Telus says it plans to ask for an adjournment while Rogers remains undecided on a course of action.

Videotron is in a unique position because its parent company, Quebecor, also sells music, Videotron says it is concerned about copyright protection and considers file sharing to be "theft."

"In terms of protecting the identity of our subscribers, we're doing everything we can, but if there's a court order we certainly won't fight it," executive vice-president Luc Lavoie told The Globe and Mail. "We're actually delighted that the CRIA is doing what it's doing."
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNew...4/?hub=SciTech


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Big setback for DVD copying

Judge Rules Software for Copying DVD's Is Illegal
John Borland

After eight months of deliberation, a San Francisco federal judge has ruled that software company 321 Studios' popular DVD-copying products are illegal.

In a ruling released Friday, Judge Susan Illston granted Hollywood studios' request for an injunction against 321 Studios, saying the small software company has seven days to stop distributing its DVD-copying products.

The case was widely viewed as a test of how far commercial software could go in helping consumers make backup copies of their own legally purchased digital entertainment products, such as DVDs or video games. Illston wrote that federal law made it illegal to sell products that--like 321 Studios' software--break through DVDs' antipiracy technology, even if consumers do have a legal right to make personal copies of their movies.

"It is the technology itself at issue, not the uses to which the copyrighted material may be put," Illston wrote. "Legal downstream use of the copyrighted material by customers is not a defense to the software manufacturer's violation of the provisions (of copyright law)."

The ruling, which had been pending since arguments last May in Illston's court, goes a long way toward shoring up Hollywood's weakening digital copy protections for its profitable DVD business--even while potentially eliminating one key driver of sales in the DVD burner market.

In previous interviews, 321 Studios has said it has sold about 1 million copies of its DVD-copying software, many of them through mainstream computer stores such as CompUSA. Under the ruling's terms, the company will have to remove from its software the ability to "rip" copies of copy-protected DVDs or take the products off the market altogether.

The company said it would immediately ask for an emergency stay that would let it keep the software on the shelves but would appeal Illston's ruling, regardless of what happened.

"We can't just lay down for this," 321 Studios President Robert Moore said. "It is too important for the consumer; it is far too important to the evolution of our culture...We think the final battle will be fought at the Supreme Court or at the congressional level."

Hollywood executives praised the ruling.

"Companies have a responsibility to develop products that operate within the letter of the law and that do not expose their customers to illegal activities," MPAA Chief Executive Officer Jack Valenti said in a statement. "Today's ruling sends a clear message that it is essential for corporations to protect copyrighted works while facilitating the enjoyment of entertainment offerings through new digital technologies."

Long battle over DVDs
Illston's ruling is the latest in a long string of rulings that have largely gone against critics of Hollywood's protection efforts, even as the technology to copy DVDs has spread more widely online and off.

Most Hollywood DVDs are protected with a technology called Content Scrambling System, or CSS, which encrypts the content on the discs so that they can only be read by devices with authorized "keys" to unlock the data. A studio-affiliated trade group licenses those keys to DVD player manufacturers.

However, in 1999, a Norwegian teenager named Jon Johansen released a software program called DeCSS, which allowed computers to decrypt DVDs, even without a licensed "key." Once the video was decrypted, it could easily be copied, and so DeCSS quickly found its way into DVD-copying tools.

Hollywood studios sued to keep DeCSS offline, and a New York federal judge ultimately agreed that posting the software online violated parts of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars distribution of tools that break through digital copy protection mechanisms.

Not long afterward, 321 Studios began selling its own software, however. Despite the New York ruling, the company argued that its software was legal and necessary in helping consumers make the personal copies federal law allows.

The company actually initiated the legal battle in early 2002, suing studios in hopes of winning a ruling that'd say its software was legal. The studios later countersued.

In her ruling Friday, Illston was unconvinced by any of 321's arguments.

Hollywood critics have long said CSS simply controls access to DVDs and that it's not a direct copy protection mechanism. And 321 has argued that since consumers who buy a DVD have the right to access their own movie, it would not be illegal to help them access it by using 321's software.

Illston disagreed, saying CSS was plainly a way to protect copyright holders' rights, as envisioned in copyright law.

She said blocking people from making perfect digital copies of their DVDs did not unconstitutionally hamper free speech or fair-use rights. People were free to make copies of movies in other, nondigital ways that would give them access to the same content, even if not in the same, pristine form, she said.

And, she said, the fact that DVD decryption keys were widely available online in programs like DeCSS did not make Hollywood's attempts to block copying useless.

"This is equivalent to a claim that, since it is easy to find skeleton keys on the black market, a dead bolt is not an effective lock to a door," she wrote.

Earlier this month, 321 Studios released new software that makes backup copies of computer games. That product will not be affected by this ruling, the company said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5162...?tag=nefd_lede


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Untrue Names
Annalee Newitz

LOUIS ALTHUSSER, a brilliant French philosopher famous for writing eloquently about the nature of disobedience for many years before suddenly and inexplicably shooting his wife, is the author of a little essay that reminds me very much of a hacker who named himself Fyodor. The essay, one of Althusser's masterpieces, is called "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Fyodor's masterpiece is a software program called nmap.

I had the pleasure of watching Fyodor conduct an informal presentation about nmap at the San Francisco OpenBSD User Group (SFOBUG). With his generous intelligence and humble plainspokenness, Fyodor is a geek's geek. Since he published an article about it in Phrack six years ago, nmap has grown from a small-scale program to a powerful precision tool called a port scanner that's used for investigating whether a computer is running any programs that might make it vulnerable to attack or exploitation.

The difficulty with nmap is that it's a great tool to use if you want to break into a computer network. The difference between a "good" nmap user and a "bad" nmap user is that the good one wants to fix the vulnerabilities she or he finds and the bad one wants to exploit them. Several members of SFOBUG reported that nmap's naughty reputation has gotten them into numerous scrapes – some of them said their ISP accounts had been shut down by administrators who found nmap in their directories and accused them of possessing "dangerous hacker tools."

In 2000 an engineer named Scott Moulton was brought up on criminal charges in Georgia for using nmap to scan a network he'd been contracted to maintain. A judge ruled that port scanning was legal under state computer crime laws, but Moulton still faces criminal charges from another company he scanned.

The ambiguity nmap confers on its users reminded me of Althusser's essay and the concept of "interpellation" he elaborates in it. Interpellation refers to the way people come to know themselves through a curious process of misrecognition. Althusser's argument rests on the notion that people learn who they are from the way institutions and other people define them. A person who considers himself a quick-witted computer programmer, interpellated by propaganda from the federal government or ISP administrators, might suddenly misrecognize himself as a criminal. In a famous passage about this, Althusser describes a person walking along the street suddenly hailed by a police officer who screams, "TRESPASSER!" The person cannot help turning around as if his own name is being called; by responding to the hail, he seems to say, "Yes, I am a trespasser." In that moment of misrecognition, he is given a new name, a new identity. The police officer has made him see himself, if only briefly, as a trespasser.

The word interpellation comes from the Latinate "inter" (between) and "appello" (to name). In a literal sense, the philosopher is describing how humans' names for themselves arise out of interactions between people: parents name their children, police officers name trespassers, and judges name nmap users bad or good. Regardless of your intentions or desires, you cannot always control the names you are given. And those names define you in ways you never intended; indeed, they can even confine you, as Moulton discovered when he was brought up on criminal charges for using nmap.

Names carry political freight. That's why it's crucial for nmap users – and others like them – to fight back when ISPs refuse to offer them service because they misrecognize a tool that most people use to defend computers against intrusions or to learn about the vulnerabilities in their networks. When the authorities call us trespassers, we should refuse to acknowledge that name. We are not criminals.

Talking to Fyodor in another context, with Althusser still on my mind, I asked him, "Do you want to tell me your real name?" Fyodor is the hacker handle he picked out for himself as a teenager. It isn't as if the name his parents gave him is a huge secret, although I don't know it. I was simply curious about whether he wanted to tell me, which isn't the same thing as finding it out.

"No," he said with a smile.
http://www.sfbg.com/38/11/x_techsploitation.html


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Pay, Don't Sue, Song-Swappers, Trade Group Urges
Andy Sullivan

Internet users could collect paychecks rather than lawsuits when they share music through "peer-to-peer" networks like Kazaa, under a proposal outlined by an industry trade group on Thursday.

Rather than losing millions of dollars in potential sales to online song swappers, the recording industry should give them a cut of the revenues when they distribute songs in a protected format, the Distributed Computing Industry Association said.

The scenario follows two others put forth by the trade group in an effort to forge peace between peer-to-peer networks and the major record labels that have hounded them and their users in court.

DCIA chief executive Marty Lafferty said record labels could see sales grow by 10 percent over the next four years if they embraced the new technology, much as movie studios increased their market when they embraced the videocassette recorder in the 1980s.

"Each time there's a technology breakthrough in entertainment distribution, once it's harnessed and embraced and an industry finds a way to capitalize on it, the industry does enjoy accelerated growth," he said.

Under the plan, record labels would encode their songs with copy-protection technology so users would have to pay a small fee, between 80 cents and 40 cents, to listen to them.

Prolific song-swappers would be encouraged to convert their collections of unprotected material into the protected format, and then paid a portion of the fees collected each time somebody purchases a song after copying it from them.

Eventually, user-friendly software would allow amateur musicians without recording contracts to make their music available as well, DCIA said.

But implementing the plan could be difficult as it would require the cooperation of Internet providers, record labels and peer-to-peer networks.

Most peer-to-peer networks back a model in which musicians and record labels could be reimbursed through surcharges on blank CDs, CD burners, and fees from Internet providers and peer-to-peer networks themselves.

Though any proposal to pay artists for peer-to-peer activity is welcome, DCIA's suggestions "need to be taken with a large portion of the salt shaker," said Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a competing trade group.

An earlier DCIA proposal would have positioned member company Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc.'s copy-protection technology as a standard, Eisgrau noted.

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America said he had not had time to look over the proposal and declined comment.

Major record labels include Vivendi Universal, Bertelsmann AG's BMG, EMI Group Plc, Sony Corp.'s Sony Music and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=4296386


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Friday the 13th Unlucky for Microsoft, Windows Users
Jay Lyman

"This is definitely impacting the bottom line for Microsoft," iDefense director of malicious code Ken Dunham told TechNewsWorld. "They are losing steam in the sales area and losing ground in servers because of security issues. It may not be the courts that dissolve the monopoly of Microsoft, but it may be the attackers."

What started out for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) as a bad day with the reported theft and Internet posting of source code for some of its Windows operating systems turned worse as the technology giant once again saw the security of its software tested with the emergence of a dangerous Internet Explorer exploit.

Security experts said the attacks via Microsoft's Web browser -- although not connected to the source code spillage -- are particularly dangerous to Internet users because it would take only casual visiting of a Web site to become infected.

The alarming rate of emerging vulnerabilities, exploits and wriggling worms this year is compounded by the source code leak, which is likely to lead to even more security issues, according to experts who predicted the situation might spell the start of a switch from Microsoft products to other alternatives.

"This is definitely impacting the bottom line for Microsoft," iDefense director of malicious code Ken Dunham told TechNewsWorld. "They are losing steam in the sales area and losing ground in servers because of security issues. It may not be the courts that dissolve the monopoly of Microsoft, but it may be the attackers."

Malicious Leg Up

Security experts agreed that the Windows NT and Windows 2000 source-code leak -- which is being investigated by the software giant and law enforcement officials -- has broad implications for the number and severity of future attacks against Windows machines.

"Six hundred forty megabytes' worth of lines of code should be enough to find some vulnerabilities in there," Gartner research vice president Richard Stiennon told TechNewsWorld. "There will be new exploits, there will be patches, and there will be worms."

Dunham called the capability to come up with new vulnerabilities and exploits based on the exposed source code "incredible."

"The attackers are saying this morning that it does give them a leg up," Dunham said of the source-code leak. "They can look at source code they've never seen before and do things they have never done before."

He added that the source-code leak also might give an advantage to Microsoft's competitors, which now have access to their rival's code. The source code is being widely distributed and downloaded via the Web, FTP sites and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

Attacks Not Prevented

The theft and distribution of Windows source code comes at a time when several Internet viruses, virus variants, exploits and attacks are pounding at the Windows operating system and particularly the Internet Explorer browser.

Dunham -- who reported at least 5,000 infected computers as a result of a new, as-yet-unpatched or so-called zero-day exploit -- said the serious vulnerability in Explorer 6 could facilitate silent infection if a user merely visits a hostile Web site. Dunham recommended using alternative browsers, such as Mozilla, Netscape or Opera.

"It's flat scary to think that by just surfing the Internet your computer could be infected with a virus," he said. "This [attacker] has specific plans to hijack computers and control them, maybe to steal data, maybe to use in attacks."

Dunham, who said the danger from exploit code was tempered because it is not widespread, nevertheless warned that companies using Explorer 6 are likely vulnerable even with the most up- to-date and comprehensive security patching.

"Corporations that use IE -- even if they are fully patched because they are sensitive to security -- are wide open to attack," he said.

Death of Monoculture

Stiennon, who referred to the increasing attractiveness of alternate Web browsers on the Windows platform, said that although distaste for Microsoft wanes with the fading of issues, the company is likely to lose market share over time because of security concerns.

"During actual patch activity, the disgust level gets pretty high," Stiennon said. "Companies start looking at other platforms, and you hear words like 'diversity.' But the half-life of that sentiment seems to be about three weeks, then they're moving onto the next ones."

He added that at some point, however, it will be easier to measure the cost of dealing with patching and the pain of an all-Windows or "monoculture" approach, which will drive companies to switch. He also said the other shoe to drop will be the reaction of consumers, who have helped Microsoft gain its dominant position.

"When consumers abandon ship and buy Macintosh or anything else, it will be the beginning of a tidal shift in computing," Stiennon said.
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/32854.html


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FCC: 'Pure' VoIP Not A Phone Service
Declan McCullagh and Ben Charny

Handing a partial victory to Internet phone providers, federal regulators said Thursday that voice communications flowing entirely over the Internet are not subject to traditional government regulations.

The Federal Communications Commission, in a split decision, approved a request from voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider Pulver.com to be immune from the hefty stack of government rules, taxes and requirements that applied to 20th-century telephone networks.

"This is in no way different than e-mail and other peer-to-peer applications blossoming on the Internet," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said. "Such services have never been held to be telecom services." Commissioner Michael Copps opposed the decision, and Jonathan Adelstein said he partially dissented.

In a significant limitation, the decision does not address whether traditional phone regulations might apply to VoIP services that interconnect with the traditional telephone system. As a result, the FCC's vote for now only applies to developers of VoIP applications similar to Pulver.com's Free World Dialup (FWD)--software that allows voice conversations to take place between computers, but not between computers and ordinary telephones.

Other applications covered by the decision include Skype and instant-messaging programs from Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online. But the ruling appears to leave in limbo VoIP services from Vonage Holdings, cable giants and others that allow calls to be placed from a computer over a broadband connection to any phone number in the world, and vice versa.

In a second, unanimous vote Thursday, the FCC said it would begin a public comment period to decide what to do about other VoIP services. Commissioners cautioned that they might take a different approach to variants that more closely resemble traditional phone service.

"Where these applications become more complicated, or more traditional, or they touch public-switched networks, they present even more complications," Powell said.

The FCC also Thursday began a rulemaking proceeding to address the problems that VoIP creates for police wiretaps and other law enforcement activities sanctioned by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement act.

Industry views
The outcome of the pending comment period is likely to dictate the future of state-by-state efforts to regulate VoIP providers, highlighted by a federal court decision issued last year that found that VoIP provider Vonage was not a telephone service and was thus not subject to phone rules crafted by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.

Still, VoIP providers said the FCC's action was a boon to their industry.

"This is a watershed event for the future of IP communications in the U.S.," Pulver.com's CEO Jeff Pulver said after the vote. "I think this is a day to celebrate if you're involved in the IP communications industry in the U.S. This should have a ripple effect around the world."

Pulver said that "state regulators should be put on notice that...they should wait for the FCC to take action before they act, and they should follow the leadership of the chairman along the way."

"It's all very good news," said Brooke Schulz, spokeswoman for Vonage, one of the most recognized VoIP providers in the United States.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Nokia, Time Warner and Yahoo, said it applauded the FCC's "decision not to regulate voice communications made with personal computers running peer-to-peer software." The Telecommunications Industry Association, representing hardware makers and related firms, said the vote "brings a sense of confidence that neither the federal nor state governments are going to be in the business of regulating the dynamic Internet application space."

By ruling on these issues, the FCC puts even more pressure on states like Minnesota and California to stop drafting their own separate Net telephony rules, said Vonage's Schulz. VoIP service providers fear that if unchecked, states will create a patchwork of different rules that will slow the technology's spread.

"It sends a very loud message to the states," she said.

Schulz added that the FCC's vote has an immediate impact on Vonage: Some 4 percent of its calls never use traditional phone networks, and will remain unregulated.

The view from the states
Brad Ramsey, the general counsel of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, said he was "concerned" that a majority of FCC commissioners seem to believe that VoIP services, like the Internet, are off limits to state rules.

But for now, the FCC has left room for state utility regulators to serve a "consumer protection" role for the growing number of VoIP subscribers, he said. "None of the state commissions are interested in applying a heavy-handed treatment to VoIP providers."

California is the most influential of 25 states that are drafting Internet phone rules. These states are worried that as more conversation flows onto the Internet, there will be less funding for state public services raised from taxes on traditional telephone companies.

California's Public Utilities Commission began its own "investigation" into VoIP regulations on Wednesday. A spokesman for the commission said Thursday's FCC ruling agrees with the state's "go-slow approach" to regulating Internet telephony.

"The (FCC's) message to state regulators was clear: We should not rush to regulate this new technology under the old rules," said Susan Kennedy, a commissioner of the California commission whose antiregulatory opinion is in the minority on the board.

"It is my hope that the FCC will make further determinations on pre-emption."

A representative from the Minnesota PUC declined to comment on the decision.

Eavesdropping establishment
In fact, the decision leaves unresolved numerous policy issues relating to VoIP and has not quelled simmering dissent within the FCC.

Probably the most bitter controversy at Thursday's FCC meeting centered on concerns at the Justice Department and FBI that federal law enforcement agencies may find it too difficult to wiretap VoIP calls.

Although Thursday's decision was limited, it drew heated opposition from commissioner Copps, who objected that the ruling left unanswered how VoIP would comply with wiretap laws, among other things.

Copps said that the FCC's vote in favor of Pulver.com creates unreasonable "challenges for law enforcement and has implications for universal service and public safety." After meeting with the FBI and the Justice Department, Copps said he concluded it is "highly unwise to proceed, and I cannot and will not support this proceeding."

In correspondence made public earlier this week, the Justice Department said it is "currently drafting a request" that would ask the FCC to rule that a weighty set of wiretapping regulations applies to VoIP providers. Until the bureau backed down earlier this month, the FBI had tried to block the FCC from considering the Pulver.com request until its wiretap concerns were resolved.

Powell noted that the FBI is currently able to conduct VoIP wiretaps even without the FCC doing anything and said "we have worked exhaustively, on almost a daily basis with law enforcement authorities" before Thursday's meeting.
http://news.com.com/2100-7352-5158105.html


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Subpoenas On The Way For Nine Vanderbilt File Sharers

The RIAA sent subpoena notices to ITS officials for nine campus IP addresses targeted for illegal distribution.
Kristin Smith

Nine Vanderbilt students could be among the latest individuals sued by the

Recording Industry Association of America for illegally distributing music over the Internet — and none of them know about it yet.

The RIAA has sent nine individual subpoena notices to Information Technology Services this semester, the latest one arriving Wednesday. These notices essentially make ITS aware that Vanderbilt will be subpoenaed at a point in the future to provide the names matching the nine Vanderbilt IP (Internet protocol) addresses detected by the RIAA for distributing high volumes of media files over the Internet.

“They give me a computer’s IP address and we are obligated to identify the individual,” said Terry Cavender, network security officer for university central. “We haven’t located the names yet since we haven’t been subpoenaed. This is new ground Vanderbilt is covering.”

Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Michael Schoenfeld stressed that lawsuits have not been filed.

“When we receive a subpoena, our attorneys will review it,” he said. “No suits have been filed. A subpoena is the step before the lawsuit, which is one of the number of things the RIAA is doing.”

Both Cavender and Schoenfeld said they do not know how long the time period is between receiving subpoena notices and receiving actual subpoenas.

“It’s basically an agreement between service providers and the RIAA to provide a notice first,” Cavender said.

By stipulations set down in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the RIAA can file suits through the “John Doe” process, meaning they can begin the suit process before a name is known.

The recent subpoena notices are a step beyond the more common copyright infringement notices which ITS receives a few of each week.

“People like the RIAA, Paramount and Disney employ people to find people who are distributing their product,” Cavender said. “When we receive a copyright infringement notice, I’m obligated to remove the machine from the network and wait for the student to contact me.”

Cavender said that students should remember that even if they have stopped downloading music from an Internet peer-to-peer network, they can still be distributing music.

“The nature of peer to peer is that anyone can get files from you,” he said.

He suggests deleting peer-to-peer software like Kazaa and Gnutella to avoid lawsuits and potential viruses.

In a recent study, security firm TruSecure found that 45 percent of files downloaded from Kazaa, the most popular file-sharing program, contain malicious code like viruses and Trojan horses.

The RIAA began suing individuals in 2003, and illegal downloading of music has dropped by 50 percent since the crackdown, according to Information Week.

When the RIAA serves subpoenas to Vanderbilt, the students involved will be notified.
http://www.vanderbilthustler.com/vne.../402c56db14a66


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Privacy Is In The House
Ryan Singel

For the third year in a row, a bipartisan congressional coalition is pushing a bill that would require all government agencies to study the privacy impact of new rules before they put them into effect.

The Defense of Privacy Act (PDF), which was approved by a House subcommittee on Tuesday, would complement the E-Government Act of 2001, which requires agencies to submit privacy impact assessments whenever they buy new technology.

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) introduced the bill. It is backed by three Republicans and a handful of Democrats, including Rick Boucher (D-Virginia), who many consider to be the Internet's best friend in Congress.

Former Republican Rep. Bob Barr, who now works with the ACLU, introduced a similar bill, known as the Federal Agency Protection of Privacy Act, in 2002. Barr's bill and a similar one introduced in 2003 passed the House of Representatives, but were never taken up by the Senate.

Privacy groups, ranging from the Free Congress Foundation to the Center for Democracy & Technology to the ACLU, hope the third bill will be the charm.

The original impetus for the privacy impact requirement stemmed from congressional efforts to kill controversial Treasury Department regulations that would have required banks to closely monitor their customers and report suspicious behavior to the federal law enforcement agencies.

Although those rules were withdrawn after public and congressional outcry, portions of those rules were later included in the Patriot Act.

At Tuesday's meeting of the House Judiciary's Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, Chabot argued that "privacy is not a partisan issue" and that civil liberties need not be sacrificed for counter-terrorism programs.

"I introduced the bill because a reasonable expectation of privacy is too often a regulatory afterthought, and we have seen attempt after attempt by government agencies to implement sometimes ominous regulations to allow the federal government to invade the privacy of American citizens," said Chabot.

James Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, testified before the committee, calling the bill a good first step that would force government agencies to think of privacy when drafting rules, rather than scrambling later to address privacy.

"One of the best ways to protect privacy is to raise privacy concerns early in the development so those concerns can be addressed and mitigated in advance," Dempsey said. "We call this privacy by design, building in the privacy protections from the ground up, before a system is implemented and before it is too late."

Gregory Nojeim, the associate director of the ACLU's Washington office, called the bill a "very sensible and modest piece of legislation."

"The bill doesn't tell agencies they can't issue regulations that violate people's privacy rights," Nojeim said. "It simply tells them they must consider alternative, privacy-sensitive regulations. They don't have to adopt those, however."

The hearing, which included testimony from former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore and University of Michigan law professor Sally Katzen, also doubled as an oversight hearing on the activities of Nuala O'Connor Kelly, the chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security.

Although several agencies -- including the Postal Service, the State Department and the Internal Revenue Service -- have chief privacy officers, O'Connor Kelly is the only one whose position is mandated by law, which committee members agreed gives the position more clout.

Both the committee and the other witnesses praised O'Connor Kelly's work over the last nine months, calling her work proof that other agencies and the Office of Management and Budget also should have privacy officers.

Over the past year, O'Connor Kelly has been involved in the development of the second generation of the airline passenger-screening system (known as CAPPS II), the ongoing negotiations with the European Commission over the transfer of passenger data to border-control agencies, and the new foreign visitor biometric database system (known as US-Visit).

Despite continuing reservations about US-Visit, privacy advocates have praised O'Connor Kelly's work on the program's privacy impact assessment (PDF). They point to the report's description of the program's database structure and the discussion of possible security risks that could expose personal data as evidence of O'Connor Kelly's thoroughness.

In her testimony, professor Katzen, who helped guide the Clinton administration's privacy policies, guardedly praised O'Connor Kelly's work in revising CAPPS II's privacy act notices, though she said changes still needed to be made.

"O'Connor Kelly's success demonstrates that the government needs 24 more O'Connor Kellys, along with a chief privacy czar in the Office of Management and Budget," Katzen said.

She added that the Patriot Act shows that the Justice Department in particular needs a strong privacy officer, an idea that at least one committee member said he would be looking into.

The Bush administration has yet to take a public position on the bill, which now heads to the full House Judiciary Committee for final markup and approval, before it can be sent to the House floor for a vote.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,62243,00.html


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iPod Journal

The World at Ears' Length
Warren St. John

Idea for a sci-fi horror flick: New York is invaded by zombielike robots. They ghost along the sidewalks, oblivious of pedestrians, and have frequent near misses with taxis and cyclists, causing chaos. They carry a secret weapon — no bigger than a deck of cards — that can render humans invisible. The only sign they are not quite human themselves: two white wires that run from their ears into their clothes, just below the neckline, as distinctive as the bolts in the Frankenstein monster's neck.

No need to make the movie, of course. They're already here: the iPod people. Apple sold around 750,000 iPods during the holiday season, up from 250,000 in the same period in 2002, and a disproportionate number were bought by New Yorkers, said Vipul Patel, an analyst at Jupiter Research, a technology research firm. Having had time to figure out how to use the gadgets and their new imitators, and to load them up with a gazillion tunes, the wave of new iPod owners are strutting around Manhattan in a seemingly endless parade of one-person dance parties.

Much has been made of the reasons for the device's popularity — you can D.J. the soundtrack to your life, for example, or iPods hold a record store's worth of music. But not a few New Yorkers also notice that, corked off from reality by their ear buds, iPod users are gumming up the works of the city. They stand in line at Starbucks and at banks, unaware that the person at the counter is yelling "Next!" No matter how loudly you shuffle your feet on the sidewalk behind them — making the scrunchy sole-on- cement sound that New Yorkers instinctively understand as "Move!" — they won't step aside. And as the less fortunate among us know, forget asking these people if they can spare some change. They can't hear you!

"They're in a daze," said Rosie Garcia, the manager of the Hot & Crusty bakery in Grand Central Terminal, who said she deals with customers in earphones "all the time."

"It's: `Can I help you? Can I help you? Can I help you!' " she said. "You have to wave at them to get their attention."

Since the Walkman arrived in the United States in 1980, New Yorkers have been using gadgets to tune each other out, and cellphones have certainly done their share to complicate social relations. But the rise in sales of iPods and other portable digital players like the Rio Cali amounts to a significant escalation in New Yorkers' continuing campaign to ignore, snub and look through one another.

The immense storage capacity of iPod and its imitators offers at least the opportunity for total, uninterrupted isolation from one's surroundings for long — extremely long — periods of time. It is now possible to commute, to stroll, to shop, even to go to a Knicks game, without having to listen to another human being, or even the same song. There is no rewinding or CD-changing to permit the outside world to leak inside the cocoon. With a jukebox in your pocket, a suitable tune is always at the ready, no matter your mood. And if you have little white ear buds rammed in your ears, there is always an excuse not to acknowledge fellow humans. "I'm busy right now," iPod users seem to say. "I'll get back to you in 10,000 songs."

"It's `I'm listening to my music — don't bother me,' " said Douglas Ladendorf, 40, a Webmaster who got his iPod in December and uses it to listen to Sting and Seal on his daily commute in Manhattan. "Someone stops you, and they ask for money or any number of guilt-trip-type things — everyone is trying to avoid those situations. Having an iPod makes people pass over you. It's too much effort to get your attention."

Michael Gitlitz, an iPod-wearing art dealer walking down Fifth Avenue on Wednesday, put it another way: "It's the next best thing to being transported from place to place in a pneumatic tube."

Much of America — the part that lives behind the wheel of a car and views life through the glare of the windshield — has long since adapted to life in a bubble. But city dwellers are supposed to be different; their constant interaction with other human beings, urbanites like to think, makes them more socially advanced creatures than the detached inhabitants of car culture. But could the iPod and similar high-capacity players be turning the vibrant sidewalks of New York into the pedestrian equivalent of the soulless freeway?

Yes, it could, says Michael Bull, a lecturer in media and culture at the University of Sussex in England and the world's leading — perhaps only — expert on the social impact of personal stereo devices. Mr. Bull has studied both the Walkman and the iPod, and says the iPod is changing urban life.

"The potential for continual play means you never have to tune in to the environment you're in," he said. "You're perpetually tuned out."

Mr. Bull said that wearing an iPod all the time amounts to "blanking out" other people.

"We have certain rules of civility and recognition — to recognize their use of space," he said. "In some ways the use of these devices denies that prerogative. If you're in an environment where many people are blanking you out, that makes the environment more inhospitable."

Asking actual iPod users about this subject is no easy matter, since it means invading the cocoon they have spent $300 or more to construct. To get their attention on Wednesday at rush hour in Midtown, I made a sign saying, "I'm an NY Times reporter — CAN I INTERVIEW YOU ABOUT YOUR iPOD?" which I held in front of anyone wearing those telltale white wires to see if I could make mental radio contact.

Peterpaul Scott, 33, was walking home from work at Tommy Hilfiger when he saw the sign and removed an ear bud, acknowledging for a moment that I existed.

Mr. Scott said he has 1,400 songs on his iPod — hip-hop, house classic, soul, rock 'n' roll — and he said he listens to it three to four hours a day.

"I like that it drowns out New York," he said. "The only time I feel weird is on an elevator. When you get on an elevator, you've got to tune back into the world."

The only strangers with whom Mr. Scott actively engages while he is in his special place are other iPod users, he said.

"It's a society within itself," he said. "You've got your biker community, your hip-hop community. And now you've got your iPod community. It's all about those wires."

Griffin Creech, a 27-year-old actor, stopped for the sign and removed his earphones. He has a thousand songs on his iPod, which he got in November, and said listening to the device in Manhattan makes him feel as though he is in his own music video. He dismissed Mr. Bull's concern over the iPod's social impact as "something some professor would say."

"It's hard to ignore New York City," he said, before replacing his earphones and going back under.

The fear that personal stereos could lead to antisocial behavior is an old one. The late Akio Morita, a founder of Sony and the company's chief executive at the Walkman's introduction, was said to have been so afraid of the device's capacity for creating solipsistic drones that he insisted early on that the Walkman have two headphone jacks and a microphone so listeners could communicate with each other. There is little evidence that the Walkman wrecked modern society, so some technologists say there is little reason to fear the iPod.

"I don't see it as a private cocoon," said Mark Poster, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the social impact of cellphones. "I see it as connecting with a musician and therefore making a connection that's not related to physical space. We need to understand it, instead of saying, `It's not how we used to be, so it's bad.' "

The people at Apple, which makes the iPod, concede that a few antisocial types might use the iPod to turn off the world, but call such people a small minority. The notion that the hot-selling contraptions could lead to social ills almost seemed to hurt one company executive's feelings.

"It's a little wacky to look at it that way, when the iPod has brought so much happiness into people's lives," said the executive, Greg Joswiak, the vice president for hardware product marketing.

Of course someone trying desperately to get the attention of a zoned-out digital-player user — someone being blanked out — might see it differently. Ms. Garcia, the Hot & Crusty manager, said that when a long line of customers are frozen in place by someone lost in his own mental music video, it can be highly irritating. But she expressed a measure of awe at the immersive powers of those white wires.

"These people are very distracted by whatever it is they listen to," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/fashion/15IPOD.html


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CBS Pulls Advertisement on Medicare Prepared by Administration
Robert Pear

CBS said on Friday that it had stopped running a television advertisement for the new Medicare prescription drug law while Congress investigates its accuracy.

The 30-second advertisement, prepared by the Bush administration, assures Medicare beneficiaries that the program is not changing in any way except to provide "more benefits." Democratic members of Congress and some liberal advocacy groups say the advertisement amounts to a taxpayer-subsidized political commercial for the administration.

Dana McClintock, a spokesman for CBS in New York, said: "The ad has been pulled. It violated our longstanding policy on advocacy advertising. We pulled it as soon as we became aware of the investigation."

The government is spending $9.5 million to run the advertisement on national network and cable programs in the next six weeks.

The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, is examining the advertisements at the request of several Democrats. The lawmakers say the commercials are inaccurate and constitute an illegal use of federal money to promote the re-election of President Bush.

The CBS policy says the network "does not sell time for the advocacy of viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance." A commercial is considered unacceptable if it explicitly takes a position on such an issue, or if it presents arguments parallel to those made by one side, "so as to constitute implicit advocacy."

CBS's decision angered Republicans in Washington.

"This is a political decision," said John P. Feehery, a spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois.

Mr. McClintock said the decision had been made by Martin D. Franks, an executive vice president of CBS.

Mr. Feehery asserted that Mr. Franks was "a partisan Democrat" who had contributed money to Democratic candidates. CBS executives rejected the criticism as a smear tactic, and they insisted that their policy had been applied in an evenhanded way.

"People on both sides express displeasure when you have a clear and consistent policy down the middle," Mr. McClintock said.

Last month CBS rejected a request from a liberal group, MoveOn.org, that wanted to run a Super Bowl advertisement criticizing President Bush's fiscal policies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/politics/14MEDI.html


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DVD-Copying Maker Says Reach Too Far
Jim Suhr

ST. LOUIS - A maker of DVD-copying software accused the United States and its movie industry Wednesday of unfairly influencing copyright and privacy matters overseas, perhaps accounting for the product being pulled off shelves in Australia.

Though Australia is a sliver of 321 Studios Inc.'s global market, a distributor's yanking DVD X Copy from Australian store shelves under threats of lawsuits by a movie industry lobbying group reflects Hollywood's troubling reach, 321 chief executive Rob Semaan said.

The company since has replaced the original software with a version unable to unlock copyright-protecting encryption, though such tools readily can be bought from 321 or other Web sites.

"It's the United States kind of forcing its copyright laws on any Western country that wants to do business with the United States," Semaan said of the Australian flap.

Messages left Wednesday with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Australian headquarters of 321 distributor Conexus were not returned.

Based in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield, 321 is being sued in California by seven Hollywood movie studios arguing that DVD X Copy facilitates copyright infringement and piracy. Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox filed a similar lawsuit in November in New York; 321 wants that case transferred to California, given the other cases there.

The company also is being sued on similar grounds in the United Kingdom.

At issue is software that lets users make backups by defeating the copy protections encoded onto movie discs. The company has said the process protects against piracy because it injects electronic barriers into copies, to keep them from being duplicated further, and inserts digital watermarks and identifying information that can trace the source of any file that's transmitted over the Internet.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Feb18.html


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Feds Step Up Push To Wiretap VoIP Calls
Declan McCullagh

The Bush administration plans to ask the Federal Communications Commission to order Net telephony providers to comply with a law that would permit police to wiretap conversations carried over the Internet.

In a series of letters made public Tuesday, the Justice Department said it is "currently drafting a request" that would invoke the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). That law requires telecommunications carriers to rewire their networks to government specifications to provide police with guaranteed access for wiretaps.

It is debatable whether CALEA's decade-old definition of "telecommunications carrier," crafted long before the Internet era, applies to Voice over
Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers. If the FCC rules that CALEA's definitions are not a close enough fit for the fast-growing and somewhat amorphous VoIP sector, then the Bush administration could ask Congress to rewrite the law.

Until earlier this month, the FBI had tried to block the FCC from considering VoIP's regulatory structure until the wiretap issue was resolved. But last week, the two agencies said they had reached an agreement allowing a vote on VoIP regulations to take place on Thursday.

"While it would obviously be our preference that the FCC decide these issues prior to considering other broadband proceedings, we recognize that this is not practical, and have no desire to prevent the FCC from doing its work," Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Malcolm wrote in a letter to the FCC. "We expect that the FCC will commence rule-making proceedings on CALEA-related matters in response to our petition in the near future."

Malcolm added that based on the Justice Department's conversations with FCC attorneys, he expects them to recommend that the commission "tentatively concludes that CALEA applies to broadband Internet access services, including VoIP, whether provided over DSL or cable modem."

Civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the American Civil Liberties Union contend that CALEA's definition of telecommunications carrier clearly does not apply to most VoIP providers.

In general, VoIP providers have pledged to work with police, and some, including Level 3 Communications, do not oppose the regulations the FBI is seeking. Others, such as a coalition of 12 smaller VoIP providers that includes BullDog Teleworks and PingTone Communications, have told the FCC that "there are various industry initiatives under way, and the commission should allow those initiatives time to succeed before pre-emptively regulating."

Vonage already is able to comply with police wiretap requests, company spokeswoman Brooke Schulz said Wednesday. "We have a way to capture the data, to give them everything they need," Schulz said. "But we don't really have a way to get it from our system to their system. We've had meetings with various law enforcement agencies to figure out the best way to do that."

CALEA defines telecommunications carriers as companies that are "engaged in the transmission or switching of wire or electronic communications as a common carrier"--which probably does not apply to VoIP providers. A second definition, which covers services that are "a replacement for a substantial portion" of the local telephone network, comes closer. So far, the FCC has interpreted CALEA's wiretap-ready requirements to cover only traditional analog and wireless telephone service.
http://news.com.com/2100-7352-5157282.html


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Singapore Journal

NUS and NTU fine students for illegal music downloads
Crystal Chan

AT LEAST 25 students here have been fined by their university in the past six months for illegally sharing copyrighted music files on campus networks.

They downloaded the music via the Internet from other users who offer the music for free in the form of digital files through certain websites.

Such sharing of copyrighted material is illegal under Singapore law.

However, it was the universities, not the copyright owners, which acted against the students.

The National University of Singapore (NUS) fined 20 students $200 each. Nanyang Technological University (NTU) fined at least five students, but wouldn't say how much the fines were. No other action was taken against the students.

In the United States, many university students face legal action by copyright owners who began to file lawsuits last year.

Copyright owners complained to NTU and NUS after they tracked down the computers involved in the illegal swops.

An NUS spokesman said: 'From our logs, we are able to trace the student who logged on to the PC. The student will be interviewed. If found guilty, he or she will be fined.'

The number caught so far is a tiny fraction of NTU and NUS students, who number more than 64,000 in all.

Copyright owners have not complained about Singapore Management University, which has about 2,200 students.

All three universities have rules that bar anyone using campus resources to break the law here, which covers downloading, copying and sharing copyrighted materials without copyright owners' permission.

Lawyer Wong Siew Hong, who specialises in copyright issues, said: 'Under Singapore copyright law, the students can be sued for copyright infringement as they have made unauthorised copies of copyrighted materials.'

The law provides for offenders who sell, make or possess illegal copies to be fined up to $100,000 and jailed for up to five years.

The Recording Industry Association of Singapore (Rias), which protects the copyright of performers here, works with Internet service providers, the police, polytechnics and universities to nail culprits.

Rias chief executive Edward Neubronner warned last August: 'Those who think the Internet offers anonymity so they can get away with copyright infringement should think again.'

And now, the students know they can't be anonymous in cyberspace.

A 22-year-old engineering student at NTU, who spoke on condition he wasn't named, said: 'Now I know my identity can be tracked, I'll remove the Kazaa program from my computer and stop sharing files over the network.'

The universities do not, on their own, investigate possible illegal file-swopping unless there has been a complaint.

However, the action in this case has stopped others swopping files.

NTU engineering student Valerie Wu, 19, said: 'I won't take the risk of being fined or faced with lawsuits.'
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/sin...235748,00.html


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U.S. Copyright Office Sets Webcaster Royalty Rates
Sue Zeidler

The U.S. Copyright Office has published long-awaited royalty rates for Web music broadcasts, ending a year-long process marked by legal and financial wrangling, the group named to handle the royalties said on Tuesday.

Regulations published on Feb. 6 essentially rubber-stamped a resolution reached last April between online music broadcasters and the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry trade group for big record labels like Time Warner Inc.'s (nyse: TWX - news - people) Warner Music and Vivendi Universal's (nyse: TWX - news - people) <EAUG.PA> Universal Music.

In addition to setting rates for the 2003-2004 license period, the Copyright Office also named SoundExchange -- a former RIAA arm spun off as a separate non-profit group in September 2003 -- as the sole designated agent to collect and distribute royalties from Webcasters and new online subscription services.

The recording industry and Webcasters finally agreed on a proposed 0.0762 cents per performance or 1.17 cents per aggregate hour tuned in for free, advertising-supported services. Webcasters had opposed other rates suggested by the RIAA, saying they would put them out of business.

The new regulations made official last week govern rates and terms for online music subscription services with non-interactive streaming components, Internet radio stations and traditional broadcasters that simulcast signals online.

The negotiated rates were submitted to the Copyright Office for adoption on April 14, but a legal objection by one company, finally dropped last month, led to a delay.

Under the new regulations, all covered services are required to submit a lump sum payment to SoundExchange covering the period from Jan. 1, 2003 through Feb. 29, 2004 on or before April 14, 2004, SoundExchange said on Tuesday.

Starting from March, services are required to make royalty payments within 45 days after the end of each month.

Additionally, commercial Webcasters, broadcast simulcasters and new subscription services must choose their preferred rate structure by March 8, 2004.

John Simson, executive director for SoundExchange, told Reuters that the group expects to shortly sign on to a worldwide agreement that would let Webcasters stream into foreign territories without fear of liability.
http://www.forbes.com/home_asia/news...tr1254818.html


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EMI Admits Problems With Copy Control Software
Sam Varghese

EMI Music Australia has admitted that there are problems with the copy control software which it has been using since November 2002 on music discs which it sells here, in order to try and prevent copying of the discs.

In an email sent to Canberra-based system administrator Michael Ellerman, the company wrote: "We have been advised from our parent company that an updated version of the Copy Control software will be available in April 2004 and believe that this version addresses most, if not all, of the incompatibility issues that have been raised in relation to earlier versions."

Ellerman said he was surprised to hear from them as he had made a complaint around one year ago. "It is so long back that I can't recall when exactly I sent them an email except that it was before I took a holiday in March," he said. "And, frankly, I never expected to hear back from them, certainly not after such a long time."

Ellerman's complaint was about the Massive Attack disc 100th Window; as he is a AIX and Linux admin, he uses Linux on his desktop and could not get the disc to play. He also tried it on a couple of standalone CD players at home with similar results. "It only played on a PC which runs Windows," he said.

In its reply to him, EMI said: "... we also appreciate that you have been very patient in awaiting for a response from EMI. As such, we are looking to source a replacement copy of "100th Floor Window" (sic) from a different EMI manufacturing territory which should resolve the compatibility issues that you have experienced. If you would like a replacement copy please complete the details below and reply to this email."

Ellerman laughed wryly at the reply. "Although I appreciate their sentiment, I know none of my customers would accept waiting almost a full year for a response to their complaint," was his reaction.

It may be recalled that last year one Australian consumer, Tom Dullemond of Queensland, lodged a complaint with the consumer watchdog about the low quality sound which the discs generate. The last we heard of it, the ACCC had not given him a response.

In June 2003, a resident of NSW complained to the Federal MP for his area, Workplace Relations Minister Tony Abbott, about the problems he faced in getting some of these discs to work.

Last year, there were occasions when the discs irked music buffs, served to turn people off EMI products for life, prevented radio stations from giving artists play-time, raised questions about whether they are fish or fowl, resulted in EMI pulling its copy-control forum off the web, and at least in one case had exactly the opposite effect it was intended to have.

Philips, one of the creators of the CD specs, has expressed concern over the side effects of the technology.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...548143941.html


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China Launches Web Site On Copyrights, Patents

SHANGHAI, China (AP) - Chinese inventors have a new, electronic option for registering and advertising patents.

Under foreign pressure to stamp out rampant piracy of patents and other intellectual property, the government launched the site in collaboration with state
television.

The site -- http://www.cipmun.net/ -- is in Chinese only. Launched Tuesday, it is crammed with information on patents, news and a patent search service.

Sponsors include the State Intellectual Property Office, China Central Television and local television stations.

Among the patented products listed on the site Wednesday:

--A bicycle with solid tires (no more hunting down a sidewalk repair stall for a bicycle pump).

--A voice-controlled cellular phone advertised as ``convenient for the elderly and disabled.''

--A biodegradable plastic said to be ``kind to the environment.''

The Intellectual Property Office said an online patent application office will debut March 12.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/7927945.htm


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EFA Slams IP Clauses In US-Aust Trade Deal
Online Staff

Australians are likely to face legal action from multinational media companies according to from the intellectual property clauses of the recently announced US-Australia free trade agreement, Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) said today.

In a statement, the group, a non-profit national organisation representing internet users concerned with online rights and freedoms, said it was dismayed over the IP clauses which represented a massive step backwards for Australian IP law.

"The US has one of the worst systems of intellectual property laws in the world," EFA board member Dale Clapperton said. "Their Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been widely condemned by civil liberties and users groups throughout the world, and now the Howard government has committed itself to implementing its worst, most insidious, provisions."

EFA said US copyright terms had been extended numerous times after pressure from lobbyists and now extended to 120 years from publication, a period which it said "had no purpose but to protect the vested interests of large corporate copyright holders."

Clapperton said the 50 years (from the death of the author) specified by Australian law were ample, as it promoted the growth and re-use of public domain material, supporting ongoing innovation and development both in the arts and business. It was also in line with Australia's commitments under the World Intellectual Property Organisation treaty.

"Nothing published in the US since 1923 has ever come into the public domain, thanks to lobbying from the music and motion picture industries to repeatedly extend the term of copyright. The public domain has ceased to grow, and unless these continual senseless extensions are stopped, it will never grow again," he said.

"There is nothing positive for Australia in these clauses. No additional usage rights are granted to Australians or Australian companies, and these provisions are a blatant sell-out to the interests of large US-based media companies."

Further, "harmonisation" of Australian patent law with the US risked the creation of "software patents" in Australia, EFA said. Such patents had been regularly abused in the US by major software companies who used them to intimidate and suppress competition and innovation. "Litigation over the alleged infringement of "software patents" has become a lucrative business model in the United States, and is a path that Australia would be ill-advised to follow," it said.

Clapperton said Australian copyright law recognised only very limited "fair dealing" rights, typically for the purposes of scholarly study or review. "In contrast, Americans enjoy wide-ranging 'fair use' rights, which Australians do not, such as the right to record TV programs for viewing at a later time, or to copy a legally purchased CD to an audio cassette. Unless very specific and limited exemptions apply, Australians who perform these acts are breaking the law.

"If the Howard government couples the draconian enforcement and prosecution provisions of the DMCA with the already unbalanced Australian copyright law, it will place every Australian at the mercy of a lawsuit for breach of copyright," Clapperton said. "It will turn the Australian Internet industry into a litigation mill, as well-funded US media groups launch waves of prosecutions against Internet users and Internet Service Providers themselves."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...388479843.html


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Firm Develops Video Game Copying System
Jim Suhr

A company whose DVD-copying software prompted copyright and piracy-related lawsuits from Hollywood is expanding into the realm of computer games, rolling out a system that lets game buyers make backup copies.

With 321 Studios Inc.'s Games X Copy software, launched last weekend, users can burn PC games onto a hard drive, CD or DVD. The company says parents requested those options to safeguard original discs from rough-and-tumble handling by young gamers.

"You no longer need to worry about scratches and broken or lost games," said Robert Moore, founder and president of 321, based in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield, Mo. "The software is easy enough to use that even the kids could make the backup and take it on vacation or to a friend's house -- and parents no longer have to worry about the original being damaged or lost."

Games X Copy -- fetching $60 at www.dvdxcopy.com -- creates four "virtual drives" on a hard drive, letting the user play multi-disc games without the interruption of inserting different discs. No compression is used, making the backup a true one-to-one disc conversion.

The company hopes to sidestep the cloud that has shadowed its DVD-copying software, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The movie industry claims the software facilitates copyright infringement and piracy.

"We feel we have a much stronger case with Games X Copy," said Julia-Bishop Cross, a 321 spokeswoman. "PC games are widely recognized as software, and with software there's a legal precedence set that you can make backup copies."

Analysts agreed -- though there are some restrictions, including that consumers can't sell a backup copy unless they sell the original with it, said Keith Kupferschmid, vice president of intellectual property policy and enforcement for the Software and Information Industry Association.

"We endorse and fully support the advancement of technology, and we think this is a great idea and innovation," Kupferschmid said. Still, "we want to make sure the software is being used for legitimate reasons. From our perspective, we'd be on watch on how (321 is) marketing it, how it's being used and whether it's being used to create whole new piracy," as in making copies of copies.

Schelley Olhava, an analyst with market research firm IDC, suspects that 321's game-copying offering may have little impact, given already flat growth of the PC gaming market. She questioned whether consumers would need -- or take the effort -- to buy and download the 321 software at a time when "there are people already copying" without it.

It's not immediately clear how much the PC gaming industry perhaps loses each year to pirates; by some estimates, piracy costs the software industry in general well into the billions.

The Entertainment Software Association -- formerly the Interactive Digital Software Association -- said Wednesday it had no comment on Games X Copy.

The DVD-copying program lets users make backups by defeating the copy protections encoded onto movie discs. Moore has said the process protects against piracy because it injects electronic barriers into copies, to keep them from being duplicated further, and inserts digital watermarks and identifying information that can trace the source of any file that's transmitted over the Internet.

However, 321 is being sued by seven Hollywood movie studios that argue that DVD X Copy violates the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars the circumvention of anti-piracy measures.

Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox filed a similar lawsuit in November in New York; 321 has motioned to have that case transferred to California, given the other cases there.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Feb11.html


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Producer Of The Grey Album, Jay-Z/ Beatles Mash-Up, Gets Served
Joseph Patel

It was an ingenious idea, and one that played so dangerously close to the third rail of copyright law that it was sure to get shut down eventually.

Cease-and-desist orders went out last week to the producer who created The Grey Album and the few independent retail stores that were carrying the CD.

DJ/producer Danger Mouse married vocals from Jay-Z's recent The Black Album with beats made from the Beatles' classic The White Album to create The Grey Album. The "mash-up" CD is one of several bootlegs created using vocals from Jay- Z's supposedly final LP (see "Remixers Turn Jay-Z's Black Album Grey, White and Brown"). But it was the only one that dared to use music from the Beatles' guarded catalog.

A representative for EMI Records served the cease-and-desist orders to Danger Mouse and stores such as Fat Beats and hiphopsite.com. EMI Records controls the sound recordings for the Beatles on behalf of Capitol Records Inc. The publishing side of the Beatles' catalog is owned by Sony Music/ ATV Publishing, a venture between Sony Music and Michael Jackson.

Danger Mouse said he created The Grey Album strictly as a limited-edition promotional item (only 3,000 copies were pressed), but it quickly caught the ear of everyone from Damon Dash to the Neptunes to Jay-Z himself, and copies found their way to hip-hop retail outlets and auction sites like eBay.

Danger Mouse said he's complied with the order not to distribute any more copies of The Grey Album. Because of the small number pressed, he didn't expect any further legal action to take place.
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/148...headlines=true


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Copyright Enters a Gray Area
Noah Shachtman

Wack.

That's what copyright critics and Big Music foes are calling record label EMI, for clamping down on a hotter- than-hot remix album.

When DJ Danger Mouse released The Grey Album last month, the response was thermonuclear. Music critics dubbed the record, which piled the words from rapper Jay-Z's Black Album on top of the rhythms and chords from the Beatles' legendary White Album, an instant classic. File traders turned the remix into an Internet hit. The few thousand copies printed suddenly went from novelties to must- have collectors' items.

But executives at EMI, the label that owns the rights to the Beatles' sound recordings, heard the sounds of theft in The Grey Album. Danger Mouse hadn't paid for the rights to the Fab Four's music -- the 26-year-old, originally from White Plains, New York, hadn't even asked for permission to use their songs. So late last week, EMI's lawyers sent a letter to Danger Mouse -- as well as to the select record stores and eBay retailers selling his remix -- ordering them to cease and desist.

As news of EMI's demand spilled online this week, music-industry and intellectual-property activists went ballistic. It's a sign of everything that's wrong in the American copyright system, they contend. And besides, by releasing an a capella version of The Black Album, Jay-Z and his record label, Roc-a-Fella, practically begged DJs to pair his rhymes with new beats. So why should a remixer now suffer for answering the call?

"It's a great example of our two-tiered copyright system," said Glenn Otis Brown, executive director of Creative Commons, a Web-based copyright-licensing group. "Labels are saying, 'If you do (a remix) on the underground scene, it's OK. But if it's so compelling that people trade it all over the Internet, then we're going to sue you.'"

Not so, says EMI.

"This is something we do as a matter of course," said an EMI representative, "whenever we're made aware of copyright violations."

Unlike other illicit remixers -- such as avant-garde ensemble Negativland, which got into a famous fight with a certain Irish rock band over their album U2 -- Danger Mouse won't challenge EMI's directive.

"He wants a career after this," a source close to the DJ said.

"I'm just worried ... whether Paul and Ringo will like it. If they say that they hate it, and that I messed up their music, I think I'll put my tail between my legs and go," Danger Mouse recently told The New Yorker.

But remixers like Danger Mouse shouldn't have to worry about hurting musicians' -- or labels' -- feelings, argues Nicholas Reville, co-founder of the music industry gadfly group Downhill Battle.

"All kinds of artists have always borrowed and built on each others' work," he said. "These corporations have outlawed an art form."

Once a musician has released a song commercially, Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain notes, other acts are free to perform and record their own versions of the song -- as long as they pay the songwriter a standard royalty. That's why so many bands are able to play their takes on tunes like "Take the A Train" or "Louie, Louie."

Remixing and sampling are a different matter, however. There is no freedom to beat-match. And there are no set licensing fees. So while the Beatles' tunes have been recorded by thousands of bands, their song catalog has been notoriously off-limits to hip-hop and dance-music producers' manipulations. (The one exception to the rule, the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, came out before the rules of sampling were clearly established.)

To Zittrain, that smacks of "copyright as a means of control, rather than a means of profit." In the American legal tradition, he notes, copyright is seen as a way to make sure innovators get paid for their work, not to keep others from being creative.

"So long as there's money to be made, it's a negotiation," he said. "There's not a lot of excitement for further downstream innovation being blocked. Nobody wants to see that."

Jay-Z's engineer, Young Guru, told MTV.com last month that the rapper released a words-only version of The Black Album so DJs could "remix the hell out of it." And they have. Kardinal Offishall and Solitair, the dance-hall reggae artists from Canada, gave the record a rude-boy twist. Atlanta-based producer Kno fused Jay-Z words with Southern sounds.

But it's Danger Mouse's pairing of classic rock and brand-new hip-hop that is the most jarring remix of the rapper nicknamed Jigga. The Boston Globe called it "the most intriguing hip-hop album in recent memory." "The ultimate remix record," gushed Rolling Stone. Copies on eBay are going for $81.

With all that hype, "Why not just sign the guy?" asks the Creative Commons' Brown. "Why not license the record, and have everybody make a bunch off of it?"
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62276,00.html


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Free legal downloads for $6 a month. DRM free. The artists get paid. We explain how...
Andrew Orlowski

Imagine a world where music and movies could be freely exchanged online, where artists are recompensed and the labels don't lose a cent, and where 12-year old girls need not fear harboring an MP3 of their favorite TV show theme tune on their PC.

All that could be yours for less than the price of a subscription to Napster: for less than $6 a month. Harvard University Professor Terry Fisher has completed the first comprehensive examination of various alternative models and the one we outline here offers such tantalizing social benefits, that even the most jaded sceptic ought to pay attention. Professor Fisher belongs to the school of forensic sceptics rather than the school of wide-eyed techno-utopians, and he's spent three years trying to make the sums add up. We think it's worth a look, and we think you ought to take a look too. (To make his task even more difficult, Fisher's license model also takes on the additional onerous task of compensating Hollywood, too).

How does it work? Let's look at the sums: what level of compensation do the labels, studios and artists need to make it worthwhile?

Fisher actually lays his philosophical armory down for us to inspect at a very early stage, and it's thus. Economies have had a lot of trouble with public goods that are 'nonrivalrous' - if you use it you're not depriving someone from access - and 'nonexcludable' - it's actually hard to make them exclusive. Examples of the latter include roads, defense, and culture. It's a real danger that if no one pays, then nothing gets done: the roads crumble, the country becomes vulnerable, and aspiring pop stars give up their dreams of one day snorting cocaine from an expensive prostitute's thighs.

But our flippant illustration of the final example is not entirely accidental. Many artists forsake fame for fame's sake - but the beauty of alternative reward models is that there's no disincentive for them to become popular, either. To cite an example, when we've discussed flat fees before, someone usually writes in with some anguish to complain how this would only reward Michael Jackson for being popular. But what's wrong with that? There was a time when he was very popular, and deservedly so.

So let's start at an accountant's year zero.

Calculating lost revenue
In the year 2000, the record labels earned $7 billion on retail sales of $13 billion. For the sake of argument, let's assume that in the first year 20 per cent of retail sales were lost to unlimited copying. That's $1.4 billion, although they'd save $210 million in manufacturing costs, and approximately $145 million in mechanical royalties. That brings the compensation to $1.045 billion for the recordings royalties and $138 million for songwriters, plus an amount for lost radio-related royalties.

For the movie industry, calculating the potential loss is extremely difficult. Firstly it's hard to estimate how much the industry earns now from DVD and VCR sales and rentals, and cable and satellite deals. And it's even harder to gauge the loss from file swapping. Even with the advent of Bitorrent, downloads are slow, and few have the patience or resources to find value in them compared to the availability on offer at plentiful late night retail outlets. Fisher reckons five per cent, rather than twenty per cent for the music business, of a $10 billion industry, or $479 million.

So combined, that's $1.677 billion to keep the RIAA and the MPAA happy.

But of course that's not all it would cost: the model requires an organization to calculate and distribute the royalties, performing the duties of ASCAP or BMI today. ASCAP reported that its 1998 administrative overhead was 16 per cent, so Fisher generously estimates 20 per cent. (It's pretty generous, as we'll see, because the digital overheads may actually be much lower). This takes - and bear with us, because it also generously throws in a 10 per cent charge for inflation between 2000 and 2004 - the net result to $2.306 billion.

So who pays?

Raising the money

If it was implemented as a regressive poll tax, with 87 million household filing IRS returns, each household would pay a mere $27 extra a year: a little over $2 a month, or 51 cents a week. That's half the price of a single iTunes Music Store song.

That's the most efficient way, with the lowest overheads.

However, any kind of income tax increase is obviously a hard sell, especially in God and Gubbment-fearing America. And there are many sound objections. Why should the poor subsidize the rich? Why, notes Fisher (who clearly must remember the culture wars of the early 1990s), should a proportion of the population which finds the entertainment products blasphemous be asked to subsidize their creators? And why should Net-free households want to subsidize the broadband users who are actually taking advantage of the system?

Fisher then exhaustively discusses four other options: taxing the playback devices and/or burners, levies on the physical media, levies on the delivery service, such as Kazaa, or on the Internet access point (your ISP). The latter is by far the largest: spending on broadband in the US in 2004 is estimated to be $16.4 billion. By contrast, blank media sales generate $2 billion in revenue. In total, these four categories gross $20.248 billion. And so to get our $2.3 billion to compensate artists, studios and labels would require an 11 per cent hike.

But what if it fell entirely on broadband users? Some might find the figure surprising: excluding all of the other penny taxes we've just mentioned, the cost will be $6 per broadband user per month. Um, is that all? Well, actually, yes it is.

So what do consumers gain from suddenly being able to exchange music? It's perhaps the most delicious question that's ever been asked - and there are so many advantages to the free exchange of culture that we may have forgotten what they are.

Fisher puts it thus:

"Consumers would pay less for more entertainment.

Artists would be fairly compensated. The set of artists who made their creations available to the world at large – and consequently the range of entertainment products available to consumers – would increase.

Musicians would be less dependent on record companies, and film makers would be less dependent on studios, for the distribution of their creations.

Both consumers and artists would enjoy greater freedom to modify and redistribute audio and video recordings. Although the prices of consumer electronic equipment and broadband access would increase somewhat, demand for them would rise, thus benefiting the suppliers of those goods and services. Finally, society at large would benefit from a sharp reduction in litigation and other transaction costs."

Is that enough? Well, there are two other benefits Professor Fisher doesn’t list. The high street music chainstore would find itself in competition with informal music distribution points - such as concert venues, clubs or coffee shops. Given the availability of cheap wireless playback hardware (phones or Bluepods) every café or laundrette could become a 'record store'.

The stores that survive would of necessity focus on their expertise and social relationships. It's hard to see what would draw customers into a Virgin chainstore, but it's easy to see an Aquarius Records (a feted specialist store in San Francisco's Mission district continuing to draw a loyal following). Social spaces could be transformed. Nor does Fisher attempt to calculate the demand for Internet infrastructure which might result, with potentially huge macroeconomic benefits.

Divvying up the pot

So what's the fairest way to divide the revenues? Professor Fisher points out that only a representative sample is required: the model need not involve Big Brother surveillance and aggregation of every song played. TV advertising buyers trust a system already: Neilsen's ratings are calculated from only a few thousand households. And in any case, it's doubtful any agency could afford the IT infrastructure required to aggregate such a vast data warehouse. However Fisher has a technical proposal which could simplify auditing enormously. He suggests that digital media carries embedded watermarks which would not restrict the playback of the song but would help auditors.

Fisher says that the "ballot stuffing" is the biggest technical hurdle.

"You can never eliminate but you can minimize the ballot stuffing problem," he tells us. "This most promising solution is an automated sampling system that counts the frequency members of the sample play a song all the way through. It's possible for artists to inflate the figure somewhat, to persuade family members to leave computers on 24x7, but that static is tolerable."

The most significant disincentive to ballot stuffing is the model itself: most people would simply want the model to work. Unlike the current situation, where there's a monetary advantage to be gained by breaking the system.

As for cross-border 'leakage' - Fisher says it is troubling from a fairness standpoint and this could limit its political appeal. "But it could work internationally especially when compared to a regime that leaks like crazy - the regime currently using illicit P2P."

The simple idea is very powerful. Fisher identifies four constituencies necessary to accept the model: consumers, artists, device manufacturers and finally the intermediaries: the studios and labels. The model has huge advantages for three of the four. And what incentives, we asked, would the labels and studios have?

After hearing his presentations, Fisher says industry is intrigued but hardly feels impelled to jump. The biggest 'carrot' is that it would see its revenues guaranteed at 2000 levels. If it believes its own rhetoric, that could be a very powerful incentive indeed.

Aside from a fringe of partisans, consumers are likely to embrace it enthuasiastically. Several months into the infancy of DRM-locked music sales, the online stores are dwarfed by the quantity of peer to peer file swapping, which is again on the rise. Consumers will likely face two futures.

In one, the music industry succeeds in locking music sales through DRM restrictions on MP3s, and equally restricted CDs. It's then at liberty to 'reinvent' itself, introducing such multi-sales opportunities we outlined here, and that Ross Anderson suggested in his TCPA FAQ: one-time plays, songs that only play on your birthday, graduated pricing models that charge a 'premium' for higher bit rates. Our favorite has already been suggested by the RIAA's Cary Sherman: a locked iPod full of all the music you'll ever need, which you can pay and unlock at your leisure. (It's deliciously illustrative of the lobby group, which has made the cynical, and not entirely false calculation that most of the people in the world have the same record collection. Or one that varies only by such sufficient degrees that it can apply the logic of the battery farm.)

The other comes at a price, but a predictable and low price, and promises to see high street and the economy rejuvenated. That isn't a hard choice for consumers to make, but it will be need to be fought against entrenched lobbyists. Our thanks to Professor Fisher for his exhaustive research in making our choices clear.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/35260.html


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Why Wireless Will End 'Piracy' And Doom DRM and TCPA - Jim Griffin
Andrew Orlowski

Don't worry about DRM and lock-down computing, says Jim Griffin.

Historically they're doomed to fail. The former director of Geffen's technology group believes that wireless networks such as 3G, 4G and WiFi will provide the tipping point at which the entertainment industries come to the table to cut a deal - before political pressure forces a deal upon them.

The deal will involve one of the flat-fee models, such as 2002's Blur/ Banff proposals [PDF, 473kb] or the model Harvard's Professor Fisher summarized here. Both of these envisage a pot of compensation money and a mechanism for divvying it up, permitting the free exchange of artistic goods. And with 'piracy' abolished, there's no need for DRM.

At a time when 12-year old girls are being arrested for harboring an MP3 file of their favorite TV show's theme tune, and the RIAA dons paramilitary outfits to terrorize street vendors, this seems to be an unfashionably optimistic view. But as Griffin explained in a lengthy interview with us, flat fee pricing will eventually prevail, forcing the industry to the table. Why? Because the pigopolists will realize that they'll make more money out of a flat fee model than by trying to force the world - particularly developing countries - to buy expensive content under lock and key.

He shuns the word 'tax'; partly because he believes that such a model won't penalize anyone who doesn't participate, and also because Griffin wants to minimize the role of Government, relegating it to the role it plays in business of Antitrust watchdog.

But Griffin's optimism is founded on the belief that where the marginal cost is zero consumers have historically opted for bundles rather than onerous one at a time pricing.

"Can you think of a single model where we haven't had a pool of money then split it up?" he asks. "Since the 1920s we've had public address systems, radio, TV, and cable - and all of those are monetized with a pool. You simply can't find an example to the contrary."

By promising to play nice, and building DRM and TCPA technologies, the computer industry is simply making come-hither noises that the rights holders want to hear.

"When I was 14, I told girls I loved them to sleep with them too. It was a fiction. Steve Jobs just leaves a little money on the table," he says. "These theoretical notions of control run headlong into the real historical experience."

High bandwidth wireless networks will tip the balance, thinks Griffin, because not only do they allow people to build new peer-to-peer networks to distribute content and exasperate the RIAA - an unstoppable trend, he believes - but because they offer the rights holders the chance to make more money.

So much for the executive summary. Now for the detail, with Jim in bold.

- What's your starting point for the flat fee model?

We have to start with the a priori notion that we must democratize access to art and knowledge. That's a baseline notion of a civilized society. We have libraries that will get you any movie, and any song, and any book; and price or money should not stop you hearing those songs. Museums go even further, with the idea that great art should be able to travel, to come to you, and feel free.

For anyone who doesn't start with that notion, you have to ask who they're working for.

- But don't we have the problem of a new fee, which may cost most people less, but which will still be regarded as a new fee?

Society is afraid of new taxes and rightfully so. I really object to even the partial notion that art or any other human creativity should be priced by a government commission; when we do, we slide so quickly into a place that is a huge mistake. But we don't have to go there.

You just have to look how we dealt with similar circumstances in history. Now go back to the 1920s, which was a time of much greater change than now. The move from acoustic to electric was much more savage than electric becoming digital.

Before then, artists were accustomed to controlling their output completely, with their feet. Then artists lost control. After loudspeakers came broadcasting, and the audience could see or hear you across the ocean, even without your permission. That had no real precedent.

So ASCAP and BMI came along with a model that embraced performance, and this continues to grow, while sound revenue continues to fall. It's a model that has survived the times and grown, while the sound recording model has really only existed for a blip in history. Now we're re-living what happened in the 1920s: it's just a matter of gradations stronger, but it's not revolutionary.

Locks and keys are probably the one thing people find more antithetical than having the Government involved. But we do need people to make money.

- You're so certain that DRM will not succeed, but the temptations for the industry are so great - one-time party CDs - that surely it's too tempting for them not to try?

Theoretically what you're saying makes some seductive logic. But it's obvious that not only should it not happen, it's not going to happen.

The flow of information once digitized, this anarchy of art and knowledge and creativity, can't be controlled. We've designed our societies around the anarchy. For example, we've been emphatic about the notion that we can't control speech. We may send out the secret police and have all manner of efforts of control; but basically we don't believe in it.

So we're left with two paths here. Will we try and end the anarchy of art, or will we try and monetize it? Art and knowledge and creativity are fascinating to us because they make our lives better when they're not controlled. And we've monetized it successfully throughout history.

- For example?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/35498.html


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Today We're Selling Digital Rights Management, Tomorrow We're Making Water Run Uphill
Mitch Wagner

It's rather appropriate that the logo for Disney is a mouse, because The Walt Disney Company this week announced its intention to throw money down a rathole. Disney became the latest company to license Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. DRM doesn't work and consumers don't want it, so of course it's very appealing to big business, who are also in a big rush to sell other, equally practical products, such as anchovy flavored ice cream and bicycles with square wheels.

We learned that DRM doesn't work in the late 80s, only back then it was applied to software and we called it "copy protection." Software companies tried to control how many copies of individual applications their customers could make. Even if copy protection had worked right, it would have prevented customers from making backup copies of applicatons, or moving applications between systems. But it didn't work &emdash; copy protection was buggy and caused even legitimate, licensed installations of software to fail. Given a choice between copy-protected and non-copy-protected products, consumers went for the non-copy-protected products. Eventually, the vendors gave up.

Now, the media companies are going to have to learn the same hard lessons. Customers just don't want unreliable, DRM-infested products. And, what's worse for the media companies, their attempts to enforce draconian copyright laws are creating a backlash among consumers &emdash; the harder media companies push to get people to believe filesharing is wrong, the more consumers seem to believe that filesharing is their right.

Media companies face a tough climate. Their existing business model is disappearing. The existing business model depended on reproduction and distribution of products being somewhat expensive. It cost a significant amount of money to print up a book or CD and get it to stores, or to ship movies nationwide and play them in a theater.

Now, that's changing. Reproduction and distributions costs are nearly free for music, the same thing is happening for movies and I expect it will happen for books. Media companies are reacting by trying to use laws and police to change public opinion, and DRM to shackle technology. They're trying to get water to run uphill.

As Cory Doctorow, a writer, blogger, and digital rights activist, is fond of saying, "No Windows user rolled out of bed this morning and said, 'I wish there was a way that I could get Microsoft to deliver me tools that allow me to do LESS with the music I buy.'"

If people are unwilling to buy something, technology and law won't make them buy it.

So what's the alternative? I don't know. Right now, digital media are available for free over pirate services over the Internet. How do you get people to be willing to pay for it? The technology and content already exist, what's waiting to materialize is the business model to harness digital media.

Media companies are going to have to compete with the pirates, they're going to have to figure out what service they can provide that's so good that people will pay for it rather than pirate stuff for free. I don't know for sure what the answer is, but I know where to start looking: look to the producers and editors. These are the people who scout out the best talent out of all the wannabe writers, musicians, actors and directors, find the best content these guys are producing, polish it up until it's reached its peak, and package it for the consumer. That's what the media companies have been selling all along, really, and they need to figure out a way to adapt that service to new, electronic distribution channels.

My company is a media company too, of course. We went through something like this in the mid-90s, when the web started booming. Newspapers and magazines at first resisted coming out with Internet editions, fearing they'd compete with their own print editions. And they were right to be afraid, because that's exactly what happened -- but the smart journalists realized the transition was inevitable, and adapted to the new condition. Smart journalists realized that the essential service we sell is timeliness, our articles lose value faster than bananas. Some of our articles have a shelf-life of months, some have a shelf-life of weeks or days, but most of them are pretty useless a day or two after they are published. That's how we beat out piracy &emdash; it's easier and faster to get the news and information from us than it is from anybody foolish enough to pirate our information.
http://www.securitypipeline.com/show...cleID=17603511


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Killing The Music
Don Henley

When I started in the music business, music was important and vital to our culture. Artists connected with their fans. Record labels signed cutting-edge artists, and FM radio offered an incredible variety of music. Music touched fans in a unique and personal way. Our culture was enriched and the music business was healthy and strong.

That's all changed.

Today the music business is in crisis. Sales have decreased between 20 and 30 percent over the past three years. Record labels are suing children for using unauthorized peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems. Only a few artists ever hear their music on the radio, yet radio networks are battling Congress over ownership restrictions. Independent music stores are closing at an unprecedented pace. And the artists seem to be at odds with just about everyone -- even the fans.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the root problem is not the artists, the fans or even new Internet technology. The problem is the music industry itself. It's systemic. The industry, which was once composed of hundreds of big and small record labels, is now controlled by just a handful of unregulated, multinational corporations determined to continue their mad rush toward further consolidation and merger. Sony and BMG announced their agreement to merge in November, and EMI and Time Warner may not be far behind. The industry may soon be dominated by only three multinational corporations.

The executives who run these corporations believe that music is solely a commodity. Unlike their predecessors, they fail to recognize that music is as much a vital art form and social barometer as it is a way to make a profit. At one time artists actually developed meaningful, even if strained, relationships with their record labels. This was possible because labels were relatively small and accessible, and they had an incentive to join with the artists in marketing their music. Today such a relationship is practically impossible for most artists.

Labels no longer take risks by signing unique and important new artists, nor do they become partners with artists in the creation and promotion of the music. After the music is created, the artist's connection with it is minimized and in some instances is nonexistent. In their world, music is generic. A major record label president confirmed this recently when he referred to artists as "content providers." Would a major label sign Johnny Cash today? I doubt it.

Radio stations used to be local and diverse. Deejays programmed their own shows and developed close relationships with artists. Today radio stations are centrally programmed by their corporate owners, and airplay is essentially bought rather than earned. The floodgates have opened for corporations to buy an almost unlimited number of radio stations, as well as concert venues and agencies. The delicate balance between artists and radio networks has been dramatically altered; networks can now, and often do, exert unprecedented pressure on artists. Whatever connection the artists had with their music on the airwaves is almost totally gone.

Music stores used to be magical places offering wide variety. Today the three largest music retailers are Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target. In those stores shelf space is limited, making it harder for new artists to emerge. Even established artists are troubled by stores using music as a loss leader. Smaller, more personalized record stores are closing all over the country -- some because of rampant P2P piracy but many others because of competition from department stores that traditionally have no connection whatsoever with artists.

Piracy is perhaps the most emotionally gut-wrenching problem facing artists. Artists like the idea of a new and better business model for the industry, but they cannot accept a business model that uses their music without authority or compensation. Suing kids is not what artists want, but many of them feel betrayed by fans who claim to love artists but still want their music free.

The music industry must also take a large amount of blame for this piracy. Not only did the industry not address the issue sooner, it provided the P2P users with a convenient scapegoat. Many kids rationalize their P2P habit by pointing out that only record labels are hurt -- that the labels don't pay the artists anyway. This is clearly wrong, because artists are at the bottom of the food chain. They are the ones hit hardest when sales take a nosedive and when the labels cut back on promotion, on signing new artists and on keeping artists with potential. Artists are clearly affected, yet because many perceive the music business as being dominated by rich multinational corporations, the pain felt by the artist has no public face.

Artists are finally realizing their predicament is no different from that of any other group with common economic and political interests. They can no longer just hope for change; they must fight for it. Washington is where artists must go to plead their case and find answers.

So whether they are fighting against media and radio consolidation, fighting for fair recording contracts and corporate responsibility, or demanding that labels treat artists as partners and not as employees, the core message is the same: The artist must be allowed to join with the labels and must be treated in a fair and respectful manner. If the labels are not willing to voluntarily implement these changes, then the artists have no choice but to seek legislative and judicial solutions. Simply put, artists must regain control, as much as possible, over their music.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Feb16.html
http://www.theunionleader.com/articl...?article=33325

[JackSpratts]

Angry With RIAA Tactics, Programmer Creates Mask For File-Sharers
AP

Wyatt Wasicek was so outraged by the recording industry's legal assault on users of free music-downloading sites that he decided to ride to the rescue. He created a program called AnonX that masks the Internet address of people who use file-sharing programs such as Kazaa.

Available for $5.95 per month, AnonX sets up a virtual private network, or VPN, between a user's computer and the company's computers. The AnonX computers act as proxies, and actually do the Web surfing for the subscriber.

In theory, no one outside of AnonX can see the subscriber's Internet address -- including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which has forced Internet service providers to turn over subscriber information as part of its campaign to sue hundreds of individual song downloaders, including children.

Wasicek, 29, promises not to divulge his 7,000 users' Internet addresses, and believes he can't be forced to do so.

Although Wasicek lives in Austin, Texas, he says AnonX's official owner lives in Vanuatu, the loosely regulated Pacific island that also hosts Kazaa's parent company, Sharman Networks Ltd. AnonX's servers are strategically placed overseas as well.

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy declined to comment on Anonx.

Wasicek says he put a filter on AnonX to block its use for child pornography. He also says he'll cut off service for egregious downloaders of copyrighted material.

So why bother creating AnonX?

Wasicek's day job is at an Internet service provider that frequently gets letters from the entertainment industry demanding subscriber information, and he claims most of them are erroneous, wasting everyone's time. Wasicek said he decided to shield file-sharers who generally use the technology legitimately but might occasionally break copyright law without realizing it.

``I'm doing this to protect the family with the 13-year-old, not the 25-year-old with 25 movies he's sharing with his buddies,'' he said. ``I wanted to go back to the good old days when people could surf anonymously.''

AnonX subscriber John Bayreaux, 42, said he understands why record companies want to protect their copyrights, but he disapproves of their attempt to foil peer- to-peer technology. He said he downloads some songs, mainly ``international music that is hard to come by,'' and doesn't want to fear the prying eyes of the RIAA.

Proxy technologies like Anonx can dramatically slow Web surfing because they force data to take extra steps to get relayed to the end user's computer. Bayreaux said AnonX ``works like a charm,'' with no noticeable delays.

Still, AnonX's technical claims were met with suspicion by Sascha Wildgrube, director of development at Steganos GmbH, a German provider of Internet privacy services.

``There are a number of products available that state they can hide the (Internet) address in file-sharing networks like Kazaa. We closely observe that market, and all products we reviewed turned out to be snake oil,'' Wildgrube said. ``We will take a look at AnonX.com, but I do not expect it to be what it claims.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/7927993.htm


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Skype Launches Free Conference Calling
Press Release

LUXEMBOURG - Up to 5 People Can Talk Together From Anywhere in the World -

Skype Technologies S.A., the Global P2P Telephony Company that offers consumers the ability to make free voice calls using their broadband connections, today announced the world's first peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet telephony conference calling feature, allowing up to five friends to talk with each other simultaneously, regardless of geography. The new version also includes a multiple call hold feature that allows for 16 callers to be simultaneously put on hold by a single user.

"Skype aims to delight users by offering free global telephony with a superior quality that's never been heard before," said Niklas Zennstrom, CEO and Co- founder of Skype. "The free conference calling ability means that people can Skype with groups of their family, friends and colleagues, enhancing real-time communications and the value reaped from their investments in technology and connectivity."
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/SC0402/S00041.htm


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Morpheus Maker To Launch Net Phone Service
Ben Charny

StreamCast Networks, the creator of the Morpheus file-swapping application, has become the latest peer-to-peer software maker to pick up on Internet phone service.

Next month, the company will begin selling Internet phone services that cost between $10 and $35 a month to Morpheus users, StreamCast said on Tuesday. The $10 program covers 300 minutes of calls to the traditional phone network, while the $35 plan gives unlimited calling to anyone within the United States.

The VoIP equipment and call time for the service will be supplied by i2 Telecom International, according to a representative for the communications company.

StreamCast's jump into VoIP is part of broader trend among peer-to-peer software makers, which are trying to use their presence on broadband-enabled desktops to launch Internet phone service.

Several months ago, file-swapping software maker Kazaa unveiled Skype, a peer-to-peer VoIP service that's been downloaded six million times already, according to the company.

StreamCast's voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service is open to the 120 million people that have downloaded Morpheus, provided they also buy a Morpheus-branded adapter. The adapter is needed to allow traditional home phones to make calls over a broadband connection.

VoIP is a technology for making phones calls using the Internet Protocol, the world's most popular method for sending data from one computer to another. After years of overpromising and underdelivering, VoIP is generating significant interest among telecom carriers, corporations and consumers, thanks to significant improvements in quality of service.
http://news.com.com/2100-7352-5160624.html
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...&newsLang =en - Press Release

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DataPod Redefines the Boundaries of Your Data
Press Release

New Secure, Private Peer-to-Peer Technology Provides Business Users and Mobile Workers With Seamless, Anywhere Access To All Their Data By Synchronizing User's Data Between Multiple PCs

Attendees of DEMO 2004 will get a sneak preview of the next-generation in anywhere data access technology, as DataPod unveils new software to end the headaches of accessing data from home or on the road. DataPod seamlessly ensures the most current versions of users' information, such as their desktop, e-mail, address book and critical documents, are available at all times, and that data stored on multiple PCs is fully synchronized and available - even when offline.

According to recent studies, the number of professionals in the United States telecommuting, remotely accessing corporate networks and working from multiple locations has surpassed 45 million. DataPod's technology establishes a secure, private peer-to-peer (P2P) network that automatically synchronizes information between a user's PCs. This allows users to work on their data most efficiently from multiple PCs, since their data follows them anywhere. For individuals traveling without a laptop, DataPod provides access to their data via any Web browser. Additionally, secure, private P2P file sharing allows for the easy exchange of large files, such as presentations or multimedia-rich documents, with business partners, colleagues, customers or friends.
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...&newsLang =en


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Harassment Alleged In File Sharing Case

Complaint filed in reference to student who reported Direct Connect last week
Adam Lewis

A harassment complaint was filed Wednesday to protect the student who reported popular file-sharing hub, Direct Connect to authorities (WiR 2/14/’04) and set off a wave of student anger University Police officials confirmed yesterday.

"A report has been filed about harassment, but it was not filed by [university senior Pavel] Beresnev," said Maj. Cathy Atwell, a University Police spokeswoman. "The complaint was filed on Wednesday regarding activities involved with shutting down this hub. The police are investigating that."

Beresnev reported the Direct Connect hub to the Office of Information Technology's Project NEThics and the Recording Industry Association of America last week, resulting in the administrators of the hub shutting down the server, according to OIT officials.

University Police could not release the filer's identity or further details about the complaint because the investigation is ongoing, Atwell said.

University officials said an investigation into potential harassment issues could take several different forms.

"The complaining student could determine that he or she believes there's a violation of the Student Code of Conduct," said Linda Clement, the university's vice president for student affairs. "That charge would be explored if it was brought to the Department of Judicial Affairs."

Meanwhile, criminal action depends on an investigation's findings.

"It depends on what the complaint is," said University Police Maj. Paul Dillon. "If we determine a crime has been committed, a lot of different ways an investigation can go. We consult with the victims or whoever files the charges and see what actions they want taken."

The controversy surrounding the Direct Connect hub coincides with the work of the Residence Halls Association's task force on file sharing, task force members said.

"I feel bad that this has become a personal attack on [Beresnev]," said Seth Zonies, a member of the University Senate's executive committee and a task force member. "I don't think it was a great decision on his part, because the consequences weren't very nice. Direct Connect itself is not illegal because hosting the file-sharing software has been upheld as legal by the courts."

As a result of this, however, task force members said they feel legal downloading alternatives for the university should be explored.

"It really highlights the need to look for a legal alternative because students are now stuck," Zonies said. "Now is really an excellent time for this committee to do some good work and seek out other legal options for students."

The administrators for the Direct Connect hub could not be reached for comment.
http://www.inform.umd.edu/News/Diamo.../13/news3.html


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The P2P Beast: Kill It Or Tame It?

Love it or hate it, file-sharing technology is here to stay, say experts
Eugene Wee

IN THE past few weeks, the recording industry has stepped up its attacks against those who download music illegally and those who facilitate those downloads.

Last month, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced it was suing another 532 computer users for downloading music illegally.

Then during the recent Superbowl in the United States earlier this month, Pepsi and computer maker Apple, with the help of the RIAA, ran an ad humiliating four young computer users for their part in downloading music illegally from the Internet.

The four were shown looking at the camera as the captions 'Incriminated', 'Accused', 'Busted' and 'Charged' flashed on screen.

And last week, agents representing the Australian recording industry raided and executed search-and- seize orders at the Sydney offices and homes of executives of Sharman Networks, the company that runs the popular Kazaa file-sharing network.

Faced with increased heat from the authorities, a whole new breed of P2P (peer-to-peer) software has come online to help their users stay under the radar on the Internet.

Last year, Spanish company Optisoft launched Blubster ( www.blubster.com ), a P2P program that promises its users anonymity when trading files.

Optisoft chief executive Wayne Rosso recently announced that the next version of Blubster will feature encryption technology to disguise illegally downloaded music on the users' computer so that it is harder for the authorities to find them.

Two months ago, 26-year-old New York computer programmer Jason Rohrer created his own stealth P2P network with Mute ( mute-net.sourceforge.net ), a program that allows computer users to remain anonymous and untraceable when they share files.

Mr Rohrer, who wrote the program after seeing how ants communicated with each other as they were invading his home, said in media interviews that he created Mute because he was not happy with the way computer users' privacy had been invaded by organisations such as the RIAA.

To add to the recording industry's headache, StreamCast Networks released the latest version of its Morpheus P2P software ( www.morpheus.com ), which allows users to connect to all the major P2P networks such as Kazaa, Grokster, iMesh and LimeWire, multiplying the sources of music and movie downloads available to the user.

While industry authorities are trying to kill the P2P beast, some industry experts believe they would be better off taming it instead.

Mr Michael Robertson, chief executive of Lindows.com and founder of pioneer digital music site MP3.com, believes that the recording industry is looking at the technology all wrong.

'When cars were first invented, one argument against them was that bad guys would use them to escape the police who at that time were on horses,' he said. 'That argument is laughable today.'

As a software company that is naturally finicky about copyright protection, Mr Robertson's Lindows, which distributes its own version of the Linux operating system, is putting its money where its mouth is by actually encouraging users to trade LindowsLive, a free online version of its product, on P2P networks.

'By distributing LindowsLive to the millions of P2P users, we are increasing the number of people who are familiar with Lindows.com products, which provides valuable marketing.

'In addition, since we do not have to pay bandwidth fees associated with P2P systems, we will be saving millions of dollars in networking costs over the course of a year,' he said.

A new organisation called the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) is going as far as calling on record companies to actually pay computer users to share music rather than sue them.

Mr Marty Lafferty, who heads the DCIA, has been promoting a plan that sees computer users helping record companies to increase sales of digital music by sharing them on P2P systems and getting paid a small commission for it.

He estimated that record companies could see sales increases of about 10 per cent over the next four years if they embrace the technology, similar to how the movie studios increased their sales when they eventually embraced their nemesis, the VCR.

Mr Eric Garland, chief executive of market research firm BigChampagne, told The Sunday Times that getting the music and movie companies to embrace P2P technology is simply a case of 'show me the money'.

'Major media companies will embrace P2P when they profit from P2P, when these content owners appreciate the sheer volume of this potential online business and the extent to which it can grow their business,' he said.

'The only way to minimise the illegal distribution of copyrighted material on P2P is to establish a collective licence, granting rights like those allowed to radio and web broadcasters, and allow a legitimate business to flourish online.'

Judging by the recent legal victories in the US and Netherlands favouring P2P software companies, Mr Robertson believes that whether music companies like it or not, the technology is here to stay.

This is one reason why Singapore is taking proactive steps to get the recording industry on the online music distribution bandwagon.

Mr Edward Neubronner, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association (Singapore), said that aside from enforcement measures, the organisation is trying to encourage music companies here to provide legal alternatives for computer users who want to download music.

However, he said the best solution to the piracy problem is neither a legal nor a technological one.

'There will always be new types of technology that will appear to try to get around the system. So if we focus just on deterrents, it will drive illegal downloaders further underground,' said Mr Neubronner, who estimates there are about half a million Singaporeans who download music illegally.

'Our main focus will continue to be education and creating public awareness.

'To reach out to the youth to highlight the damaging consequences this infringing activity has on the music they love.'

Musical hydra monster

DESPITE a slew of arrests of computer users who illegally download music, the recording industry faces a tough battle. Every time the authorities put on the heat, a whole new breed of P2P software would come online to help users stay under the radar on the Internet. Here are a few of the recent ones:

BLUBSTER

THIS program promises users anonymity when trading files. The next version will feature encryption technology to disguise illegally downloaded music.

MORPHEUS

STREAMCAST Networks' latest version of this software allows users to connect to all major P2P networks, greatly multiplying the sources of music and movie downloads.

MUTE

THIS program allows computer users to remain anonymous and untraceable when they share files on the Internet. New York computer programmer Jason Rohrer wrote the program after seeing how ants communicated with each other as they were invading his home.
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/cli...235303,00.html


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Kazaa In Legal Battle

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT

Reporter:

KERRY O'BRIEN: Now to the Australian company at the epicentre of a global legal battle with enormous implications for the future of the world record industry.

For almost two years, millions of Internet users around the world have exchanged songs through the Sydney-based Internet service Kazaa, which allows users to share their computer files online.

This week five major record labels have joined forces to take Kazaa to court, claiming copyright infringement.

Last year the Dutch Supreme Court dismissed a similar case, while an American court is still considering the record companies case.

While the record companies argue that Kazaa is profiting by piracy, Kazaa counters that it provides nothing more than a connection between Internet users.

Andrew Geoghegan reports.

SEAN ROBINSON: It doesn't cost anything.

I don't have to go down to the shop now the shop is pretty much in my house.

It's that virtual shopfront.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: This is how 18-year-old Sean Robinson shops for his music.

Logging on to a file-sharing website such as Kazaa allows him to download music millions of Internet users around the world are willing to share for free.

SEAN ROBINSON: Kazaa and P2P networks are good because they allow me to access music that I may not be able to get because I cannot afford it or find it.

For a multitude of reasons it is good.

TIM DEAN, EDITOR PC AUTHORITY: As you can see, we are connected now.

There are 2.8 millions users online.

They are sharing 450 million files and that comes to 3.7 million gigabytes in information.

So that is a staggering number of people on there just right now.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: IT writer Tim Dean explains why file sharing has exploded in popularity.

TIM DEAN: All it takes for me to use a P2P file sharing system is to turn on my PC, sit down and type in my name.

I can download it and listen to it within five to 10 minutes of me hearing it on the radio.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Peer to peer software means there is no central site for distributing information.

Instead, Internet users log on to a program such as Kazaa to connect directly with each other.

This allows them to search for and swap digital information.

DAVID CASSELMAN, SHAMAN NETWORKS: Everything from independent music and movies and dating services and video games and many, many more applications that are are being developed daily and that's why it's been downloaded 300 million times more than any other software application in history.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: The popularity of free music websites such as Kazaa has the music industry worried and for good reason.

In the past year, CD music sales have fallen more than 17 per cent while the industry claims it's losing $200 million a month in royalties.

MICHAEL SPECK, MUSIC INDUSTRY PIRACY INVESTIGATIONS: It's very clear that an industry cannot compete against another corporation that takes their property without permission for their own benefit.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: The major recording labels call it piracy and it's prompted them to take legal action against the Australian company Sharman Networks, owner of Kazaa, the world's most popular music sharing site.

Michael Speck heads the music industry's piracy investigations unit.

MICHAEL SPECK: Quite simply, they have established in Australia a global operation that is a clear-cut infringement of copyright.

They trade in other people's music.

It's for their benefit.

They know it's wrong.

They acknowledge it's wrong and it's time for it to stop.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Frustrated, the Australian recording industry has resorted to legal means.

A Federal Court order allowing the industry to raid the offices of Sharman Networks and seize documents to use in a civil action to stop the distribution of unlicensed music.

DAVID CASSELMAN: They contend that because we facilitated in the sense that it's possible that we're responsible for what end users do.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: It is well known you can log on to Kazaa and download songs for free.

Are you not fostering piracy?

DAVID CASSELMAN: no more than Google is fostering piracy because you can search on Google and find songs.

AOL Instant Messenger allows you to transfer.

HP's CD burner allows you to burn.

Are they fostering?

You can go to the Xerox machines.

There are a million technologies that are in the loop.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: But you are not actively discouraging, are you?

DAVID CASSELMAN: We do not promote it or release it.

Sharman, the Kazaa website, requires every user to sign an end user license agreement that they will not violate the copyright laws of any country in which they are using the software.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Sharman Networks has offered to cut a deal with the recording industry to supply fully licensed music but the record companies aren't interested.

MICHAEL SPECK: It's important that when Kazaa's illegal activity is finally stopped people do go somewhere else.

We believe that with pirates out of the marketplace they'll go to the legitimate operators and allow artists and music businesses to flourish.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Unlike the music industry distributor Napster, which was closed down by the recording industry, Kazaa does not have a library of music.

Sharman Networks is fighting back by working to remove record companies from the whole equation of producing and distributing artists.

DAVID CASSELMAN: All of their music will be created through producers and artists and straight to Kazaa, the idea being that this is the most efficient way to distribute it and they don't need the studios.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: But up-and-coming artists are sceptical.

NICK NEAL, MUSICIAN: I don't think things like file sharing with Kazaa really promote sort of lesser-known bands.

I think the sort of records that are on the shelves that HMV that people are buying a lot of copies of are the ones being download a lot.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Nick Neal, bass band player with the band Starky, says aspiring chart toppers need music listeners to pay CD prices for their music to fund their work.

NICK NEAL: If I found out people were downloading thousands and thousands of copies of our album off the Net, that is affecting our income and us paying back our advances to our record label.

Obviously that is going to limit what sort of future I have as a musician, really.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: But artists may have little choice but to join the cyberspace bandwagon if they're to make it in the real world.

TIM DEAN: There are a lot of other file sharing applications out there.

Some of them are decentralised and cannot be brought down.

The record industry will have a constant battle against these kind of things.

They will never be able to wipe them out totally.

SEAN ROBINSON: There will be another person who will make another one that they will try and close.

You just can't close something like this.

It would be better if they work with it instead of against it.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1043987.htm


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Names Sought In Battle Over Internet Song Sharing
CBC News

Canadians who get their music free from the internet will be closely watching a court case that gets underway in Toronto Monday.

The Canadian Recording Industry Association will ask a judge to order the country's largest internet providers to disclose the identity of 29 people who share copyrighted music through music swapping networks such as Kazaa, Grokster and Morpheus.

BACKGROUND: Copyright in the digital age

The Canadians in question are customers with at least five internet
providers, including Telus, Rogers, Shaw Communications, Bell Sympatico and Videotron.

The association announced in December that it planned to sue the 29 internet subscribers. It will seek a court order to find out their names at the Federal Court of Canada.

"These are people who've been going on to what are called peer-to-peer services… that allow people to distribute illegal music on a widespread basis," said association lawyer Richard Pfohl.

He said uploading, or making the songs available to others, means there are as many as five million people "at any given time" who can copy that file. "So we have, basically, massive copyright infringement on a scale that we've never known before."

At least one of the providers, Calgary-based Shaw, will fight the order, arguing it violates federal privacy laws.

Technology author Rick Broadhead said the court action by the recording industry in Canada comes as no surprise.

The U.S. music industry has been going after internet users for some time for distributing copyrighted material. The Recording Industry Association of America has sued about 400 individuals in the U.S. for allowing others access to song files.
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/02/15/online_music040215


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ISPs Won't Give Out Customer Information
Kevin O'Connor

Regina's online music fans can breathe a little easier.

Although the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) putting pressure on Canadian Internet service providers (ISPs) to release names of some customers who they say are sharing songs on the Internet, at least two Saskatchewan ISPs say they won't make it easy for them.

SaskTel and Access Communications, the two companies that have the lion's share of the Internet service market in Regina, both say they will turn down any request by CRIA for names.

Earlier this week, the Federal Court of Canada heard an application by CRIA to compel ISPs to identify customers they say have been distributing songs on the Net.

CRIA is focusing on 29 people whom it says have been sharing songs on peer-to-peer filesharing networks, such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

The industry group has named the country's five largest ISPs in their application -- Bell Canada's Sympatico, Rogers Communications Inc., Shaw Communications Inc., Telus Corp. and Vidéotron Ltée.

CRIA says it has tracked file-sharing activities to IP addresses, but needs the help of ISPs to connect those numbers to actual people.

In a news release, the association says it's after "large-scale pirates who have been openly and illegally distributing thousands of digital music files over public networks."

Regina-based SaskTel and Access Communications aren't involved in the legal dispute, which has been adjourned to March 12, but spokespersons for both companies indicated they aren't about to hand over customer information upon request.

Victoria Klassen, spokesperson for Access, said any requests by a third party for names and addresses would be denied.

Handing over the information would violate the company's customer privacy policy and federal privacy legislation as well, she said.

However, if a court ordered the company to turn over customer information, Access would have to consider its legal options, she said.

SaskTel will take a similar approach, according to company spokesperson Michelle Englot.

"We wouldn't provide that information unless we were required to do so by the courts," she said.

To date, the Canadian Recording Industry Association hasn't made any requests for customer information, she said.

Last year, the Canadian Copyright Board said people are permitted to download songs from the Internet for personal use, but uploading songs constitutes copyright infringement.
http://www.canada.com/regina/news/st...6-B70378CAF80B


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Net Song Swappers Identities' Likely Hard To Track
Keith Damsell

Identifying the alleged song swappers at the centre of the music industry's legal battle with the Internet community may be near impossible, sources warn.

“It may be hard to track these people down,” warns Peter Bissonnette, president of Calgary's Shaw Communications Inc. “The last thing we want to do is to be giving out names and phone numbers of our customers that in fact haven't done what is being suggested they have done.”

On Monday, the Canadian Recording Industry Association asked the Federal Court of Canada to order five communications companies to hand over the identities of 29 so-called “uploaders,” Internet users who posted hundreds of songs illegally on the Web. The motion has been adjourned until March 12 for the parties involved to review the scope of CRIA's request, including the technical ability for the Internet service providers to meet the order.

MediaSentry Inc., a New York–based Internet watchdog, is the source of CRIA's evidence. The on-line data mining firm declined to discuss its methods, operations or history. “The fact is we are involved in a lot of litigation and we can't answer questions,” said Gary Millin, company president.

In five affidavits, Mr. Millin detailed how MediaSentry tied the alleged uploaders to Canada. Last fall, individuals using alias user names on the popular Kazaa file-sharing service were tied to a specific Internet protocol number, an address that provides an on-ramp to the Internet. Those numbered IP addresses were then linked to five ISPs: Shaw, Bell Canada, Rogers Communications Inc., Telus Corp. and Vidéotron Ltée.

The catch is, tying an IP address to an alleged uploader for the purpose of a lawsuit may prove difficult. Each ISP has thousands of IP addresses that float from customer to customer as on-line sessions begin and end. Each firm manages its network differently and there is no standard for record keeping of Internet traffic or e-mails.

Over the past week, Telus has, with little success, tried to track down three alleged uploaders identified by MediaSentry. Only two of the three customers were successfully contacted and only one of these accounts was active at the time of the alleged uploading, the company's legal counsel said.

“I have never downloaded a single song. I honestly wouldn't know how to do it,” said one Alberta Telus customer who asked not to be identified. The 35-year-old woman received a letter from the ISP last week advising her to seek legal counsel because the music industry was seeking her identity.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco public interest law firm, claims mistakes have been made in the U.S. music industry's battle to prosecute about 1,000 alleged song thieves.

“Most ISPs claim to have generally accurate records of who was using an IP address at a particular time. Now we have found in the U.S. that some people have been misidentified. It's not quite clear yet who has been making the mistakes,” said Seth Schoen, staff technologist at the EFF.
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/...ry/Technology/


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Ban Planned On Imports Of Japanese CDs
Yomiuri Shimbun

The Cultural Affairs Agency plans to submit a bill to the current Diet session

to revise the Copyright Law with the aim of banning the import of low- priced Japanese music compact discs pressed abroad for overseas markets for a set period from January, sources said.

The move is a response to growing calls from the music industry for the introduction of the ban, the sources said.

Many Japanese music companies say they are being hurt by the cheaply priced imports that mostly target the Asian region.

The agency is considering limiting the ban to about five years in anticipation of consumer resentment to the move.

Japanese record companies permit overseas companies to produce and sell CDs of Japanese music--which is popular in other parts of Asia--abroad on condition they do not merchandise the products in Japan.

Since the CDs are cheaper than Japanese-made ones to meet local price levels, an increasing number of discount stores and other retailers import and sell them in Japan.

The Japanese music industry had asked the government to introduce measures to counter the influx of imports on its international operations.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20040218wo12.htm


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Music Piracy Case Tests Net Free Speech
John Saunders

Message to chat room orators and e-mail addicts: Legal experts say a record industry campaign to ferret out those who share songs on the Internet may yield the first definite signs of how Canada's courts will approach wider questions of on-line anonymity.

"We're talking about free speech on the Internet, people being accused of defamation when they're simply criticizing companies on the Internet," said Philippa Lawson, executive director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa law school.

"We're talking about people who may be engaged in highly sensitive and dangerous human rights work where they're being persecuted and pursued and the only way they can communicate safely is by using pseudonyms and being anonymous on the Internet. The same thing with whistle blowers. I mean, there are many situations where anonymity on the Internet is critical in order to permit free speech."

An anticlimactic Federal Court of Canada hearing yesterday (little happened except that the matter was adjourned to March 12) involved an application by the Canadian Recording Industry Association for an order to compel Internet service providers (ISPs) to put names to certain customers alleged to have violated copyright rules by offering their music collections to the world.

As Ms. Lawson sees it, a decision to grant such an order would embolden companies that see grounds for legal action when their stocks, ethical practices or environmental records are bad-mouthed on the Web. "I'm really frightened about this. If ISPs are forced to turn over the identities of their subscribers every time someone makes an allegations about them, that's not due process and that is seriously undermining the potential of the Internet for democracy."

Lawrence Munn, who heads a privacy law group at the Vancouver firm of Clark Wilson, similarly sees implications beyond music swapping. Whatever the court decides, he said, it will be the first such ruling since the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act took full effect across the country last month except in British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec, where similar provincial laws exist.

For Internet firms, it may be "the first clear indication" of their obligations in dealing with information about customers, he said.

The same obligations may apply when companies complain of slander or other harm at the hands of Internet users, he said. "If there is actually a breach of law occurring here, then there may be good reason the Internet service providers have to provide the information. I think a careful company will want a court order or subpoena."

The new federal act specifies that Internet firms may provide personal information without a customer's knowledge or consent under a valid subpoena, warrant or court order (a clause presumably applying to civil cases) and also when requested by government authorities for purposes relating to law enforcement, defence, foreign relations and national security.

Teresa Scassa, associate director of the Law and Technology Institute at the Dalhousie University law school, finds comfort in those provisions.

"The fact that a court order is required is certain element of protection," she said, "in that a company just can't go to an ISP and say, 'We think we're being defamed. Give us the name of the person.'

"You have to actually go to court and produce enough evidence in the court for the court to issue an order to compel the ISP to disclose the information, so there's a certain level of protection.

"On the other hand, if it's criminal activity on the internet -- pornography, child pornography, obscene materials, hate propaganda -- then of course if it's a police investigation and disclosure can be made to police at their request, essentially. So there's a higher standard if it's just a private company that wants the information because of a lawsuit they're planning to launch."

Glen Bloom, an intellectual property specialist in the Ottawa office of Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP said Ontario courts have ruled in favour of plaintiffs seeking the names of people behind website names, although that was before the current federal act "came into force, if we can call it that. You're aware there's some doubt about how it applies in the provinces, but since Ontario didn't legislate, the federal legislation seems to apply."
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/...40217/RPIRA17/


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RIAA Unleashes Another Round of Lawsuits
Roy Mark

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) targeted 531 more alleged music file swappers in legal actions Tuesday, bringing the total sued for copyright infringement over peer-to-peer (P2) networks since January to more than a thousand.

Like the 532 RIAA lawsuits brought in January, the suits employ the "John Doe" process, which is used to sue defendants whose names aren't known. The lawsuits identify the defendants only by their Internet protocol computer address.

Once a John Doe suit has been filed and approved by a judge, the RIAA can subpoena the information needed to identify the defendant by name from an Internet service provider (ISP).

Tuesday's RIAA legal blitz involved five lawsuits naming 531 John Doe alleged infringers. The suits were filed in Philadelphia (the home of Comcast), Atlanta (EarthLink), Orlando, Fla., and Trenton, N.J.

RIAA President Cary Sherman said, "we are sending a clear message that downloading or 'sharing' music from a peer-to-peer network without authorization is illegal, it can have consequences and it undermines the creative future of music itself."

A decision by a Washington, D.C., federal appeals court on Dec. 19 that the information subpoena process allowed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) cannot be used in infringement cases involving P2P networks forced the RIAA to change to John Doe process.

From September to mid-December, the RIAA issued more than 3,000 DMCA subpoenas to obtain names for copyright infringement suits. The DMCA subpoenas were filed prior to any charges of infringement and were not subject to a review by a judge, and required no notice to, or opportunity to be heard by, the alleged infringer.

The lawsuits filed Tuesday bring the total number of legal actions to 1,145 since the RIAA launched its legal campaign against individual file-swappers in September. Sherman said 233 of the lawsuits have been resolved with an average settlement of approximately $3,000.
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3313881


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BBC Ponders P2P Distribution
Lucy Sherriff

The BBC is to make its programme archive available over a peer- to-peer network, it said at the International Broadcasting Convention last weekend.

BT, meanwhile, has confirmed that it is in talks with the BBC to find a way "of ensuring that their plans have a positive impact on broadband Britain".

The BBC plans to develop a "super electronic programme guide", which allows users to record content as they do with a personal video recorder, New Media Age reports.

The announcement comes after confirmation that Auntie* will be making its archive accessible via the Internet, and clarifies the mechanism by which this will happen.

The BBC's new media director, Ashley Highfield, said that a P2P network will allow the BBC to handle the volume of traffic it expects when the Internet Media Player (IMP) goes live. The IMP will enable users to download or stream content to their PC, laptop or palmtop computer.

The corporation is exploring ways of using legitimate P2P systems to "get users to share on our behalf", Highfield said.

This is a neat way of tackling the bandwidth issues it would otherwise face, but in effect passes the buck to the broadband providers. With BT in talks with the Beeb*, it seems reasonable to expect some kind of partnership deal.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/35617.html


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Microsoft Code Leak Invokes Issues Beyond Security
Jay Lyman

While the leak was limited to incomplete portions of the Windows 2000 and NT source code, Gartner research vice president Richard Stiennon told TechNewsWorld that the code is more than enough to enable attackers to punch holes in other Windows systems. "It's sad that [the source code] was released, and it's sad it was written so [badly] from a security standpoint," he said.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/perl/story/32882.html


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Legal, Security Headache For Microsoft
John Markoff

Not only does the leak expose it to hackers, but outsiders could also find damaging material in the code

The illicit distribution last week of portions of the secret programmer's instructions for two versions of the Windows operating system poses vexing legal and security challenges for Microsoft.

Computer security experts said having even relatively small parts of the blueprints for Microsoft's Windows 2000 and Windows NT operating systems as easily available reference material for potential vandals and troublemakers could complicate the company's already difficult task in securing its software.

Indeed, Internet users have ferociously downloaded pirate versions of the source code, stoking concerns that hackers and virus writers could use it for a new wave of cyber attacks.

Microsoft has been criticised on security issues in recent years, and the company has devoted increasing resources in an effort to restore its credibility with its customers.

The posting of the information on the Internet does not present any direct threat to the hundreds of millions of users of Microsoft's software, but it may fuel the fire among those who say the company has done a poor job of protecting computer users from hackers and invasions of viruses and worms.

The company may also face a debate over its contention that the secrecy of its proprietary software offers a computer security advantage over the publicly available text of open source programs such as Linux.

Several computer security experts speculated that the Microsoft operating system source code had been stolen from a computer in California-based Mainsoft Corporation, a Microsoft partner, via the Internet and then posted on peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

Even though Windows 2000 and Windows NT are older versions of the company's operating systems, they are still widely used by corporations around the world.

'This raises real national security concerns,' said Mr William Cook, a partner at Wildman Harrold in Chicago and a former federal computer crime prosecutor.

'The fact that Microsoft's software is so widely available will have an impact across the computer security industry,' he said.

Several computer security and legal experts said Microsoft's biggest challenge as a result of the incident may unfold as skilled programmers begin to examine the texts in search of material that may be embarrassing or damaging to Microsoft.

'There have been lots of stories about the existence of undocumented features' in Microsoft's operating system that were intended to harm competitors, said Mr Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technical officer of Counterpace Internet Security, a computer security firm.

In 1999, Microsoft suffered a black eye when a Canadian programmer, examining a portion of its software, discovered an element inside the company's Windows operating system labelled NSAKey.

At the time, Microsoft said the reference was not an indication that the company was engaged in a conspiracy with the National Security Agency, a United States intelligence operation.

However, the label undercut the company's credibility within the computer security community, where it was widely criticised.
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/tec...235659,00.html


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A Windows Source Code Feast Online
Sean Michael Kerner

News about the leaked Microsoft Windows source code has raced through the Internet Relay Chat (IRC)--the Internet's real-time discussion forums--like wildfire.

On Friday, there were more than 1,000 active IRC discussion channels in operation with ongoing conversations about the Windows leak. At the same time, the leaked code remained widely available over peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and the open-source eMule network.

In discussions monitored by internetnews.com, IRC chatters boasted about being the first in their group to get the leaked Microsoft property. Many mentioned that the code is not complete and therefore will be unintelligible to many.

A number of chatters talked about why they downloaded the source code and what they hope to gain from it. "I wanted to see how Microsoft puts it together and their comments," wrote one participant on the Dalnet IRC channel. Another wrote, "I just wanted to look at it 'cause it's there; I'm not evil."

Other were not as sincere. One "undernet" IRC chatter wrote: "We've got to spread it as fast as humanly possible." He opined that the availability of the source code damages Microsoft by allowing people to understand how to attack a Windows system. Proliferating the code, he wrote, allows downloaders to make a name for themselves. It may also help open-source developers "work stuff out."

"I already found 5 exploits!," boasted another Dalnet IRC user.

Linux users were for the most part unimpressed with the source code leak. Comments seen included: "I'm a Linux guy, I get the source code for my OS for free," and "We care not for Windows source code. Why would I want to see how full of bugs it is?"

Another Linux user said he thought that the source code leak might be able to show that Microsoft code uses either GPL-licensed or copyrighted code.

Turning to the quakenet IRC channel, one user addressed the size of the leak. "It's 650 megs of source code. You cannot deploy it, and I doubt anyone in the world outside of Microsoft would have had the time to work out the code structure by now."

Another chatter retorted, "Anyone who's written for Windows NT and knows the application programming interface is going to be able to track down the object model for specific bits, no problem. The standard stuff--like locking, pipelining and scheduling--is all going to be easy enough to router-out, because the algorithms are all off-the-shelf stuff."

By afternoon, interest in the topic on some IRC channels was beginning to wane. A popular refrain became: "We don't have the leaked code here so don't ask us!"
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news...le.php/3312951


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Microsoft's Do Not Open Letter
Susan Kuchinskas

Microsoft (Quote, Chart) has started sending letters to people who have already downloaded the company's Windows source code that was illicitly leaked last week, warning them that such actions are in violation of the law.

The Redmond, Wash.-based maker of the Windows operating system said it also has placed alerts on several peer-to-peer clients where such illegal sharing of the leaked source code has taken place. The alerts are designed to inform any user who conducts specific searches on these networks to locate and download the source code that such activity is illegal, the company said.

The letters come after portions of the company's Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 source code appeared on the Internet last Thursday, Feb. 12th. Microsoft said the code leak was not the result of a breach in its corporate network or internal security. Neither did it lay the blame on participants in its Shared Source Initiative or Government Security programs. These initiatives provide access to the code for academic institutions and independent software vendors.

By press time, Microsoft executives did not return calls asking for clarification on how they identified rogue downloaders.

In a similar copyright-infringement battle waged by the Recording Industry of America, the RIAA subpoenaed customers' records from ISPs in order to sue infringing subscribers who download copyrighted songs. The RIAA also copied and used Kazaa's P2P software to find and warn people who downloaded protected material. (In January, Kazaa filed its own copyright infringement suit against the organization.) Kazaa officials did not answer requests for comment.

The RIAA and the Motion Picture Association America also seeded the Kazaa network with decoy copies of copyrighted files that gave downloaders a good nagging instead of the music they hoped for. For good measure, it sent warning instant messages to users who offered illegal recordings. Microsoft may employ similar guerilla tactics.

StreamCast hasn't been asked to work with Microsoft, according to Michael Weiss, CEO of the company, which makes the Morpheus file-sharing software application.

Wayne Grosso, CEO of Optisoft, creator of the Blubster, Piolet and MP2P Technology file-sharing applications, said Microsoft would have to sign onto each P2P network and offer dummy versions of the code, then hope users would download them instead of the real stuff, in order to put file-traders on notice. "Networks don't have a way to push something," Grosso asserted.

Microsoft said it working with the FBI to find the source of the leak. The company has promised to use its might to crack down on not only the original thief or thieves, but also on those who violate its copyright or trade secrets.
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news...le.php/3314691


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First Exploit Based On Leaked Windows Code Surfaces
Online Staff

The first exploit based on Windows NT and 2000 source code which was reported last week as having leaked from Mainsoft, a longtime partner of Microsoft, has shown up on a vulnerability mailing list.

The exploit targeted a vulnerability in Internet Explorer and was released by a security researcher who goes by the moniker GTA. A remote user can create a specially crafted bitmap file that, when loaded by Internet Explorer, will trigger an integer overflow and execute arbitrary code.

Internet Explorer 5 is vulnerable to this exploit, but not IE 6.

The impact of the vulnerability is that a remote user can execute arbitrary code on a target user's computer when the target user's browser loads a specially crafted bitmap file. The code will run with the privileges of the target user.

There has been some debate about how much of the code has leaked - some say it is only a part while one researcher said it comprised 27,142 files from Windows NT 4.0 SP3, a total of 338MB, and 28,782 Windows 2000 SP1 files totalling 658MB.

He said it appeared that all of both versions were present, apart from IIS.

The researcher said 10,425 of the NT files were source totalling 193MB uncompressed, and 8367 of the Windows 2000 files were source totaling 217MB uncompressed.

Another researcher said the copies of the Windows 2000 code he had found unzipped to 30,915 files. The expanded size, however, tallied with the is correct though. The NT4 he had found expanded to 956Mb and contained 95,188 files.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...779956168.html


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Australian ISP Staffer Faces MP3 Case
Kate Mackenzie

AN employee and a director of an internet service provider which is facing legal action from the music industry over MP3 files can also be sued, the federal court has ruled.

The court ruled Chris Takhoushis, and a director and majority owner of the company which hosted the website, Liam Bal, would also be respondents in the case along with the website's operator Stephen Cooper.

The major music labels Universal Music, EMI, Sony Music, Warner, BMG and Festival Mushroom, launched legal action against small Sydney-based ISP trading as Comcen Internet Services in October last year.

The claim centred around a website with the domain name mp3s4free.net, which Mr Cooper registered and hosted with Comcen and which the music companies claim allowed users to download illegal MP3 files.

The music companies have pursued Mr Cooper, E-talk Communications Pty Ltd (which trades as Comcen) and Com-Cen Pty Ltd, and in November sought to broaden the action to include E-talk director and majority owner Liam Bal, and Comcen employee Chris Takoushis.

Justice Tamberlin ruled on Friday that both Mr Takhoushis and Mr Bal would be respondents in the case.

"Importantly, there is evidence that he was the "primary contact" between Com-Cen and Cooper," Justice Tamberlin said in his ruling.

"In my view, this material provides a sufficient degree of involvement to support the addition of Mr Takoushis as a respondent."

Comcen has argued that the website hosted on its company web servers did not contain the MP3 files, but only linked to the files, which were hosted on another server.

Michael France, who represents Comcen and Mr Bal, said he was disappointed with the decision but his client was unlikely to appeal the interlocutory decision due to the difficulty of mounting such an appeal.

The parties will agree on a timetable for a further hearing.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html


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Australian Legal Pressure Forces DVD Software Off Shelves
Alison Turner

Copies of 321 Studios’ DVD X Copy software have been pulled from retail shelves after distributor Conexus was threatened with legal action by an industry lobby group.

In December 2003, Conexus received a letter from the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), previously known as the Australian Film and Video Security Office (AFVSO), directing them to pull the product immediately or be sued.

The software in question allows users to create copies of DVDs.

“The letter advised Conexus that, according to AFACT’s interpretation, the product was infringing Australian copyright law,” a spokesperson for Conexus, Steven Noble, said. “They were told that legal action would follow if they continued to distribute it.”

Resellers that stocked the product were also contacted and advised that they should remove not just DVD X Copy, but 321 Studios’ entire product line. This included DVD X Maker, DVD X Show and CD X Rescue - products that do not involve the copying of DVDs.

“These other products were not even legally challenged,” CEO of 321 Studios, Rob Semaan, said. “In fact, Conexus spoke with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and they were on our side.”

“So we replaced the original software with a ripper-free version, and resellers put our products back on their shelves. The AFACT then called and told us that this was acceptable.”

Consumers who bought the new version could nonetheless easily obtain a ripper from the Internet, or buy the original version from 321 Studios’ website, he said.

The actions of the AFACT were not totally unexpected. Currently, 321 Studios is involved in five separate legal cases – three in the US, two in the UK – surrounding the DVD X Copy software.

“To be honest, I didn’t really expect it to happen so quickly,” Semaan said. “I thought that, with the market being so small in Australia, both in the digital media and film industries, that it wouldn’t be seen as such an issue.

“But then, of course, I discovered that the AFACT is an affiliate of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), one of the organisations that we are currently battling in court," he said. "This obviously made the AFACT nervous.”

In this new digital age, copyright law can be quite a grey area. The Copyright Act of 1968 states that it does not infringe copyright to make a copy of a cinematograph film or sound recording “for preservation and other purposes” (Section 110B/C). This is the reason why many people want such software.

“It’s not for the big pirates out there,” Semaan said. “I understand the concerns about piracy, and I don’t advocate it.

“This product is for the mums and dads who’ve had to buy three copies of Shrek because the kids keep watching it to death. People want to protect their expensive DVDs and CDs by making back-up copies. Why should that be illegal?”

DVD X Copy is also sold in many other countries, where there has been no complaint made about copyright infringement, he said.

Semaan does not plan to pursue the issue here at present. “It’s still a new market over here,” he said. “I want to be sensitive to that fact. It’s too early to force it just yet.”

The managing director of Conexus, David Murray, and AFACT were both unavailable for comment.
http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php?i...46&fp=2&fpid=1


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$16,000.00 a pair

A Speaker That Adjusts for Furniture That's in the Way
Henry Fountain



IN the universe of hi-fi loudspeakers, where bigger is often equated with better, the Bang & Olufsen Beolab 5 more than holds its own. It's just over three feet tall, weighs 134 pounds and, with amplifiers inside it capable of producing 2,500 watts of power, can make enough noise at a party to ensure a visit from the police.

Yet for all its brutish qualities, the Beolab 5 has a warm and fuzzy side as well. With the press of a button, it gets in touch with its inner self.

The speaker, Bang & Olufsen's top-of-the-line model (with a top-of-the-line price tag, $16,000 a pair), is equipped to overcome a common audio problem. Design engineers may be able to control most of the elements that make for great sound from a pair of speakers, but they have no control over perhaps the most important one: the person who buys them. That consumer may have a living room with poor acoustics or may otherwise harm the sound by hiding the speakers behind furniture or shoving them against the walls.

"Especially in the low-frequency region, placement of the speaker has a big influence on sound," said Poul Praestgaard, senior technology manager of Bang & Olufsen, which is based in Struer, Denmark.

Audiophiles who want to optimize their speaker setup often use a microphone placed in the listening area and a computer to analyze the sound and then adjust the response over ranges of frequencies, a process called equalization, to compensate for the room's deficiencies.

The Beolab 5 does a similar job on its own. As its downward-facing deep bass driver, or woofer, emits several test tones, an onboard microphone at the bottom of the speaker picks them up. Then a servomotor moves the microphone several inches so that it protrudes from the bottom and can pick up reflections from the room, and the tones are emitted again. A signal-processing chip within the speaker analyzes the difference between the two tests and digital equalization circuitry, also on board, adjusts the sound.

"They're really very tiny differences," Mr. Praestgaard said. "But they are big enough to calculate the impact of the room."

The calibration is done only with sounds below 300 hertz (middle C is about 262 hertz), because these long-wavelength tones are much more affected by room acoustics and speaker placement than high-frequency, shorter-wavelength ones. At any rate, the speaker uses other tricks, two acoustic lenses, to ensure faithful reproduction at the higher frequencies.

Acoustic lenses have been used with loudspeakers since the 1940's, said Edgar Villchur, a home-audio pioneer who with Henry Kloss was responsible for introducing the acoustic suspension driver, which is now the standard in loudspeaker design. Early lenses consisted of a series of multicellular horns that were intended to spread the high- frequency sound around so that it reflected off room surfaces.

"When you listen to a loudspeaker in a normally reverberant room, a major part of what you hear is the sound reflected from the walls, floor and ceiling," Mr. Villchur said. If a speaker sends most of its high frequencies directly in front of the speaker with little reflection, he added, "the sound you hear will be dull."

The Bang & Olufsen speaker uses a different kind of acoustic lens that sits atop an upward-facing high-frequency driver, or tweeter. The elliptical walls of the lens's casting help radiate the sound evenly in a horizontal semicircle.

The lens is the work of David Moulton and Manny LaCarrubba, partners in Sausalito Audio Works, a California company that licenses the technology to Bang & Olufsen. Designing it has been a long-term project: Mr. Moulton started developing the concept in 1981, and, he said, "had a big cognitive breakthrough about the validity of what we were doing in 1985."

Mr. LaCarrubba invented the lens in its current form in 1990. He and Mr. Moulton installed it on some speakers and demonstrated it at audio engineering shows. "We realized we had a winner here," Mr. Moulton said. Bang & Olufsen was interested in the concept and cooperated with Mr. Moulton, who works out of his own audio studio in Groton, Mass., and Mr. LaCarrubba to adjust the design.

Mr. Villchur said that an acoustic lens could improve a speaker's performance by dispersing sound. But even more important is ensuring that the reflected sounds have adequate tonal response, he said, and for that, a lot of power is needed. "If they start out with a speaker that has adequate high-frequency energy, then a dispersing lens might help it," he said.

Bang & Olufsen takes care of the power issue by including four amplifiers in each speaker - 1,000 watts each for each speaker's deep- and midbass woofers and 250 watts apiece for the midrange and high-frequency tweeters.

That's enough to provide window-rattling volume, but Mr. Praestgaard said that wasn't exactly the point. "You only need that much power for a fraction of a second," he said. "You don't need it all the time."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/te...ts/19howw.html


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Giving away fish may be fine when you’re Jesus…

Workers Charged For Copyright Conspiracy
ILN

US federal authorities have charged three former employees of Lightning Media with conspiracy to violate copyright law after movies they allegedly copied found their way onto the Internet. The FBI started an investigation after a three-minute excerpt from "The Passion of the Christ" appeared on the Web site filmstew.com in October, before director Mel Gibson had even found a distributor for the movie.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1...629033,00.html


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The Web: The Effect Of Illegal Downloading
Gene J. Koprowski

A 12-year-old boy illegally downloads pop music from the song-swapping site, Morpheus.com. His friend down the block in his leafy, upscale suburb also is online, sharing copies of the latest Christina Aguilliera tune he found on the peer-to- peer portal, Kazaa.com.

"Ask any 12-year-old and they probably would not think that what they just did was wrong," said Brian Caplan, an entertainment lawyer with the New York City law firm of Goodkind, Labaton, Rudoff & Fucharow, LLP. "You have a climate in the middle schools where illegal downloading becomes a way of life, and you have a psychology where you have the youth thinking that they are entitled to this music, for free, from the Internet."

This mindset last week helped lead to an event that is sending reverberations throughout the music industry -- one that finally might force record companies to revamp the way they market and embrace downloading as a viable technology for music sales.

Tower Records Inc. last week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in federal court in Wilmington, Del., citing the dramatic impact that illegal downloading has had on its bottom line.

"Our issues are financial, not operational," E. Allen Rodriguez, chief executive officer of the 44-year-old record store chain, said in a statement.

Until the bankruptcy filing, the music industry had dealt with declining sales for the past few years -- because of illegal downloading technology proliferation -- by suing the leading alleged offenders.

The Recording Industry Association of America in Washington, D.C., last month filed 532 lawsuits in federal courts in New York City and Washington hoping to deter others from illegally sharing online copyrighted songs by artists.

"Controlling distribution on the Internet is now central to success in the music business," Eric Briggs, a principal with the music industry consultancy The Salter Group in Los Angeles, told United Press International. "There are strategic changes that the industry must make in order to survive."

Once known for innovative marketing and embracing new ideas, record companies through the past few years, as music downloading on peer-to-peer networks evolved, have acted as "dinosaurs," Caplan said.

They were stuck in a business model, which developed during the 1960s when the Beatles began selling smash hit albums of a number of songs, after the debut of "Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band," said Caplan.

Record executives did not want to yield the profits that came from selling albums at $15 to $20 per CD -- and paying the recording artists 9 cents per sale.

"They thought it would bastardize their business by promoting the single over the album," said Caplan.

Record companies did not want to embrace the way they did business in the 1950s -- selling singles of artists like Elvis or Chuck Berry.

"Four years ago, at industry conferences, executives were debating whether 99 cents per song was a fair price," Caplan added. "But there was a lack of foresight. Life didn't stand still."

The failure to respond to the online downloading phenomenon has meant music sales have declined by close to 45 percent during the past few years, said Owen Sloane, an entertainment law attorney at the Los Angeles firm of Berger Kahn, who has represented Elton John and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac.

A vicious cycle has emerged where record companies' revenues have declined, forcing them to cut back on the development of new artists.

"Now there's a problem with the quality of the product they are offering," Sloane said.

The debut in recent months of Apple Computer's iPod service -- where consumers pay for songs legally -- has given the industry the idea it can ride the wave of the Internet and make sales with new audiences, Briggs said.

"Buy.com is adopting it, this kind of downloading technology," he said. "Microsoft and Sony will come out with their plays in this space shortly. This is harkening back to the early Internet days. It's a fascinating business model. Within the next year or so, we will start to see some emerging winners here.

"We don't know if it will be Apple or the major music companies. But once the smoke clears, all the major music companies will be selling online," Briggs said.

He also predicted singles will sell for as little as 39 cents per download.

Record stores like Tower will survive -- but not by targeting youth, Briggs noted. They will target older consumers, ages 35 and up, with in-store CD sales and offerings of a rich variety of recordings of popular artists, like the Eagles and the Rolling Stones.

"In the future, there will be a market for physical CDs," Sloane said. "Retail will have to adapt and become more user friendly, like Barnes and Noble. They will have to let their customers listen to the music, but as part of a social experience."

Still, some technology developers are concerned the illegal downloading phenomenon may continue.

One company, PentaWare Inc., located in Hampton, N.H., told UPI it no longer is offering MP3 software with its digital file compression product out of concern over the widespread, illegal swapping of songs online with that kind of technology.

"We're just being realistic," CEO Claude Ostfeld said in a telephone interview from his office in Milan, Italy.

Experts, however, have concluded that if the music producers in New York, Hollywood and Nashville had moved more quickly they would not have allowed a culture that tolerates lawlessness online -- the taking of songs without paying for the product -- to have emerged.

"People tended to minimize it. Lots of excuses for doing it were voiced," Sloane said. "But the primary problem is once you tolerate petty unlawful conduct, you are condoning lawlessness. There's a tipping point. It becomes like people jumping over turnstiles to get on the subway."

One rationalization used by illegal downloaders is that all artists are wealthy so what would missing the revenue from a few songs be to them, he said.

"That's a Robin Hood attitude," said Sloane, who represents the estate of the late musician Frank Zappa. "But a lot of the people living off of these copyrighted works are not rich. They are widows and orphans. They are small businesses."
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=...7-094656-5863r


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Singing A New Tune
Susan Crabtree

The Recording Artists' Coalition has quietly laid plans to beef up its inside-the-beltway presence and become a stronger voice for artists' concerns in Washington.

Four months after the Eagles and the Dixie Chicks (news - web sites) held a fundraising concert in D.C. that raked in more than $1 million, RAC is looking to hire an executive director, add more staff and open an office in D.C.

If RAC's plans are successful, the group will be forced to share the lobbying turf with the Recording Industry Assn. of America, which currently serves as the music industry's main muscle in Washington. Although music labels and artists are natural adversaries, right now they share a common enemy in peer-to-peer Internet Web sites and the proliferation of online music piracy.

Singer-songwriter Don Henley (news), one of the main founders of RAC, wants lawmakers to hear musicians' stories about the devastating impact of online file-swapping and consolidation in the media and radio industries, as well as pressure from big radio nets on artists.

"Artists are finally realizing their predicament is no different from that of any other group with common economic and political interests," Henley wrote in a Washington Post editorial that ran Tuesday. "They can no longer just hope for change; they must fight for it. Washington is where artists must go to plead their case and find the answers."

Henley's editorial appeared the same day the RIAA (news - web sites) issued a new wave of lawsuits against 531 individuals who swapped hundreds of music files on peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and Grokster.

The new wave of suits and the previous round the RIAA issued in January were filed against unnamed "John Does" in federal courts in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Orlando, Fla., and Trenton, N.J. A federal judge will decide whether there's enough evidence to force the ISPs to provide the identities of those accused in the suits.

The RIAA has been a powerful force in Washington for decades, best known for the trade group's high-profile fight against Napster (news - web sites). RAC was formed as a lobbying vehicle after the RIAA tried in 1998 to slip a provision into a copyright bill that would grant labels the rights to songs forever, instead of the rights falling back to artists.

The coalition has focused most of its energies on California issues, fighting work-for-hire laws and corporate responsibility issues.

"We thought we did great in California, but the big issues and the issues we see building in almost a snowball effect are issues relating to the Internet and media consolidation," Jay Rosenthal, RAC's lawyer told Daily Variety. "These are not California issues, they are national and international issues and that's why we are refocused on D.C., because the issues are here."

Rosenthal also believes RAC could do a better job convincing members of Congress to support music biz efforts to fight online piracy because lawmakers may find the plight of musicians more palatable than corporate record labels.

In December, the RIAA suffered a serious blow when a federal appeals court ruled that the record labels could no longer force Internet service providers to cough up the names of subscribers accused of illegally trading music on peer-to-peer Web sites.

RAC and the RIAA have crossed swords many times throughout the coalition's six year history, but right now record labels realize they can use all the help they can get on the piracy front.

"The music industry's survival is at stake and artists have as much to lose or more to lose as the labels," RIAA prexy Mitch Bainwol told Daily Variety. "We have a common interest on this struggle. I think over the course of the next few years, there will be more issues that we're working together on that on issues where we diverge."

Peer-to-peer sites have recently formed two separate trade associations designed to influence the debate and have a powerful ally in Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.).

The Distributed Computing Industry Assn., one of the peer-to-peer groups, held a symposium just last week where Coleman encouraged its members to get more involved in Washington.

Clear Channel, the largest radio net, has also expanded its Washington office in recent weeks. The radio conglom Tuesday announced the appointment of Andrew Levin to a new position of exec veep for law and government affairs, a move representing a key reorganization of the company's legal and governmental affairs departments.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...g_a_new_tune_1


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RIAA Sued Under Gang Laws
John Borland

It's probably not the first time that record company executives have been likened to Al Capone, but this time a judge might have to agree or disagree.

A New Jersey woman, one of the hundreds of people accused of copyright infringement by the Recording Industry Association of America, has countersued the big record labels, charging them with extortion and violations of the federal antiracketeering act.

Through her attorneys, Michele Scimeca contends that by suing file-swappers for copyright infringement, and then offering to settle instead of pursuing a case where liability could reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the RIAA is violating the same laws that are more typically applied to gangsters and organized crime.

"This scare tactic has caused a vast amount of settlements from individuals who feared fighting such a large institution and feel victim to these actions and felt forced to provide funds to settle these actions instead of fighting," Scimeca's attorney, Bart Lombardo, wrote in documents filed with a New Jersey federal court. "These types of scare tactics are not permissible and amount to extortion."

Scimeca is one of a growing number of people fighting the record industry's copyright infringement campaign against file- swappers, although few have used such creative legal strategies.

According to the RIAA, which filed its latest round of lawsuits against 531 as-yet-anonymous individuals on Tuesday, it has settled with 381 people, including some who had not yet actually had suits filed against them yet. A total of nearly 1,500 people have been sued so far.

The industry group says that "a handful" of people have countersued, using a variety of claims.

"If someone prefers not to settle, they of course have the opportunity to raise their objections in court," an RIAA representative said. "We stand by our claims."

Few if any of the cases appear to have progressed far, however. The first RIAA lawsuits against individuals were filed more than five months ago, although the majority of people targeted have been part of the "John Doe" campaigns against anonymous individuals this year.

Several individuals and companies have started by fighting the RIAA attempts to identify music swappers though their Internet service providers (ISPs).

The most prominent, known by the alleged file-swapper's screen name "Nycfashiongirl," resulted in at least a temporary victory for the computer user. A Washington, D.C., court ruled in December that the RIAA's initial legal process for subpoenaing ISP subscriber identities before filing lawsuits was illegal. Because "Nycfashiongirl" had been targeted under this process, the RIAA dropped its request for her identity.

However, that may have provided only a temporary reprieve. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that is closely following the RIAA's campaign, the Internet address used by "Nycfashiongirl" was included in the batch of lawsuits filed on Tuesday against anonymous individuals, raising the likelihood that she will be drawn back into the courts.

Separate attempts to fight subpoenas are ongoing in North Carolina and St. Louis, where the American Civil Liberties Union and ISP Charter Communications are respectively challenging the RIAA's information requests.

In San Francisco, computer user Raymond Maalouf has taken the first steps toward fighting the RIAA's suits. His daughters were the ones that used Kazaa to download music, and one of them even wound up in last month's Super Bowl advertisement for Pepsi's iTunes promotion, which featured a handful of teens caught in the RIAA dragnet.

In documents filed with San Francisco courts, Maalouf's attorneys noted that downloading through Kazaa was openly discussed at Maalouf's daughter's school by teachers, and they downloaded songs used in classes. That should be a protected fair use of the music, the attorneys said.

At a status conference held in San Francisco early in February, Maalouf's case was just one of five RIAA lawsuits moving through the courts together, attorney Ted Parker said. However, several of those others involved defendants who appeared close to settlement, he added.

Even RIAA critics look at Scimeca's racketeering-based countersuit as a long shot. But it's worth trying, they say.

"It is the first I've heard of anyone attempting that," said EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. "I guess that is a silver lining of the fact that the RIAA is suing so many people, that there are a lot of lawyers trying to figure out ways to protect folks."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5161209.html


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"WHAT is RESPECTBOOTLEGGERS.org”?

As part of our ongoing effort to educate audiences about the value or bootlegging copyrighted works and how to promote piracy in the digital age, the anonymous members of Respectbootleggers.org have created this site.

Here, you’ll learn more about bootlegging, piracy, and the people who earn a living working in one of the creative industries that fuel the American economy. You will also find how easy it is to enjoy high-quality entertainment online in ways that both entertain your family, and promote the artistic creations of those who create that entertainment. We hope you find the site useful, that you’ll visit it often and we welcome your feedback.
http://www.respectbootleggers.org/



















Until next week,

- js.













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