Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 7th, '03

[JackSpratts]

"The FCC's decision to allow media monopolies (really, shared monopolies among the current major players – Disney, Time Warner, Fox, Viacom, maybe GE if it wants) didn't really happen today. It happened a long time ago." - Dana Blankenhorn.

Less Choice, More Illusion

By now you’ve probably heard that the Republican majority on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the U.S. agency in charge of allocating broadcast spectrum for radio and TV, has gutted ownership laws in a narrow 3-2 vote along party lines. These laws were put in place years ago to prevent the over concentration of news and media outlets into the hands of fewer and fewer companies. It’s more than a little strange actually when you think about it, because when you ask most people they think media companies are too big already.

The U.S. is quickly approaching a point where five companies will control film and television production, four companies will control music production and two companies will control most radio broadcasting. In addition, in any given area we’re now at a point where two, and often only one company controls access to the Internet. Here in Fairfield County where I live for instance I happen to have two choices for highspeed access, one choice for mid speed and one choice for dialup - but that’s one of the two companies that provides broadband, so I really have just three different outfits to choose from. A mile away from me however DSL is unavailable and out farther still so is cable. Friends in the country have just dial-up and the slightly faster satellite (faster for downloads only - they still have to use dial-up for uploads). Some progressive communities have as many as four access points through different providers (wow) but whether it’s one or whether it’s as many as five, it’s still not a whole hell of a lot of choices to get me or anyone else onto the Internet.

I mention this because the Republican appointed chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell (who happens to be the son of Colin Powell, the Republican Secretary of State), says he used the Internet as justification for the rules change. He seems to think we’re awash in media outlets now that we’re all a “nation of surfers” and he thinks it doesn’t matter if one company owns your TV stations, your radio stations and your newspapers - because he says you have all these new – and “independent” – channels. I guess he thinks a nation of navel gazing bloggers will make up for the mass consolidation of mass communications, but I doubt that will happen, and it’s no insult to boggers. I like them but bedroom essayists, no matter how much fun or interesting, can’t begin to marshal the resources needed to compete with major news organizations, and bloggers will be the first to admit it. Furthermore it doesn’t square a problem advertisers have to keep ad costs down when faced with no competition, especially since these same media giants also own the billboard companies in many communities.

Exploring the issues of Internet competition just a bit further brings us to another less than coincidental occurrence, and that’s Congress’ direct role in eliminating thousands of webcasters at the behest of the RIAA. It was just about this time last June the Librarian of Congress issued the payment fees webcasters would have to pay – as per a Congressional mandate – for the privilege of broadcasting music on the net. Fees so high that thousands of webcasters went silent that very day and have not come back since, in spite of frantic renegotiations that have continued for a year. The fact is regular radio doesn’t have to pay these fees and this makes Internet broadcasting more expensive, by law, and unable to compete on an even playing field with their established – and monopolized - over the air cousins, which was probably the intent all along. Don’t listen to those FCC members touting the increased competition the Internet brings. They looked the other way when thousands of broadcasters were silenced by Congress and the RIAA. They know as well as anyone that the same handful of giants monopolizing traditional media are doing the very same thing with the Internet. Using massive market power and the help of friends in Congress these giants and their allies are making sure their piece of the media pie just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You’re not getting more choice, you’re getting more illusions of choice. As a dissenting Democrat on the FCC succinctly put it, no matter how many electrical outlets you put in your house, your electricity still comes from the same company, and it’s no way to make public policy.

The one bright spot in all of this is peer-to-peer. Instead of a billion consumers getting information and entertainment force-fed to them by three of four giant media monoliths, they can choose to participate in hundreds of thousands of smaller news groups and connect to millions of individuals. The problem of limited Internet access remains but even here technology may offer a solution. On the horizon are systems that could soon allow huge groups of people to leave their ISP’s behind and move onto ad-hoc wi-fi SubNets, controlled by no one at all. This is real independence at last. But make no mistake; this is not what the FCC has in mind when they justify their duplicity with fables of “increased competition”. Decentralized P2P networks terrify them and they will do all they can to shut them down.

I couldn’t help smiling today when I read a memo from media giant Warner Music Group (WMG), a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner (last item). It seems there may be a small, ah, “problem”, with unauthorized file sharing among the company staff. WMG is one of the biggest of the old line, vertically integrated music monopolists. The business is so bloated they’re exploring a sale or a merger (there are only four others like them in the entire world and together the five conglomerates directly control 80% of the music business). In spite of the tough times their own staff is happily day trading copyrighted files! I’m not surprised. Why should the workers be any different from anyone else? But if Warners is unable to stop file sharing amongst their employees, what makes them think they can stop it anywhere else? Nothing really. But it’s just as well. They don’t know it yet but it’s the only thing that might save them, if they realize it in time.










Enjoy,

Jack.









Scrapping Copyright Law As We Know It
This is the last of a two-part interview with Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and Chair of the Creative Commons project. In Part 1, Professor Lessig talked about the Civil War between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

AlwaysOn: You were in front of the Supreme Court.

Lessig: Yes, the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, along with other groups, was challenging the Copyright Term Extension Act. For the 11th time in 40 years, Congress extended the term of existing copyrights. This time they extended the copyrights because two percent of the content covered still has commercial value. They wanted to extend the term for that two percent, but they extended it for everything, which means there is an extraordinary amount of content out there which can't be used or cultivated or copied, because you can't identify the copyright owner anymore.

One of the briefs in our case was from the guy who runs Hal Roach Studios, which has the Laurel and Hardy movies. In essence, he said, "We make millions of dollars from copyright term extension. It's the greatest thing in the world for us. But if you don't strike this law down, a whole generation of American films will disappear because nobody can clear the copyrights for this old film. It is not one copyright owner; it is a pile of copyright owners."

There is no registry. Companies dissolve, and often there is no way to find the owner. If we don't remove the copyright, nobody is going to restore this old nitrate-based film, and in 20 years it will literally be gone. He said there is a whole generation of American film that will have turned to dust by the time the copyrights expire.

AlwaysOn: What specifically did you argue before the Court?

Lessig: Simply that when the Constitution says "limited times," that means you shouldn't be allowed to extend the term of the existing copyrights. So you get whatever your term is: life plus 70, life plus 50, or whatever. But that's it. It doesn’t make sense to extend copyrights for everything just to protect the two percent that still has commercial value.

AlwaysOn: You’ve proposed a solution.

Lessig: Yes, a copyright maintenance fee. It’s a very simple procedure: 50 years after you published something, you’d have to file a copyright maintenance fee, say a dollar a year. If you didn’t pay the fee then the work would pass to the public domain, but if you did pay the fee then the copyright would continue. We know from past registration systems that 98 percent of copyright owners would not bother to renew, even for a dollar, because they don't care. So Disney would pay for Mickey Mouse for as long as they wanted, but 98 percent of the stuff would pass to the public domain.

AlwaysOn: The Court case is just one copyright project you’ve been involved in. You recently launched a new organization, Creative Commons. How did that come about?

Lessig: It came about because we live in a world that is divided between two types of extremists. One type thinks that all content has to be perfectly controlled, and the other doesn’t respect any type of rights at all. When the Internet was first born, the architecture supported the no-rights people because basically nothing could be protected. The counter reaction to that is to build an Internet in which all rights get protected all the time. The reality is that most creators live in between, not in the no-rights reserve or the all-rights reserve, but in the some-rights reserve.

AlwaysOn: That fits with what you’ve said before: we have a technology that supports the cut-and-paste culture, but a legal system that rejects the cut-and-paste culture.

Lessig: Exactly. So what Creative Commons is doing is enabling creative people to voluntarily liberate some of the rights associated with their content. Take musicians, for example. Right now there’s no easy way for one musician to say to another: "Yes, you can take content out of my music. You can sample it and even release it for commercial purposes, that's fine, just don't copy my whole song and release it for commercial purposes."

So we came up with a voluntary copyright system. There are now about 400,000 web pages, mine included, with these little Creative Commons tags. A Creative Commons tag has three layers. One is a machine-readable RDF expression of a license that outlines how the content can be used: for non-commercial purposes, or with attribution, or as long as you share and share alike, or with no derivative use, etc. The creator decides.

The second layer of the tag is a human-readable version of the license, which uses icons to very simply express what the permissions are. Finally, there is a legal license that would cost about $50,000 in legal time to construct from scratch—it provides a bulletproof way to license the content. So we’ve put those three layers together into this tag to create a copyright that people can build on and use to liberate more content while still receiving reasonable protection.
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comm...?id=P477_0_3_0

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Verizon Turns Over Names in Piracy Case
Brian Bergstein

Verizon Communications Inc. reluctantly surrendered to the music industry on Thursday the names of four Internet subscribers suspected of illegally offering free song downloads, but vowed to keep fighting the law that forced its hand.

Verizon was compelled to give up the names Wednesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., which rejected the telecom giant's request for a stay while it appeals a lower court decision won by the Recording Industry Association of America.

The RIAA has not decided what action to take against the four Verizon customers, said Matt Oppenheim, the group's senior vice president for business and legal affairs.

Though it released the names, New York-based Verizon, the nation's biggest phone company, plans to continue the appeal.

The provision in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that the recording industry invoked in seeking the names is unconstitutional and greatly exceeds traditional copyright and privacy laws, said Sarah Deutsch, Verizon's associate general counsel.

"We are committing to pursuing the case if necessary to the Supreme Court," she said Thursday. "The real harm here is to the consumer."

The recording industry has been unrelenting in fighting people and services who facilitate online song-sharing, calling the practice larceny.

In the Verizon case, the recording association relied on the DMCA law, which permits copyright holders to compel Internet providers to hand over the names of suspected pirates. All they need is a subpoena from a federal court clerk's office. A judge's signature is not even required.

Internet privacy and civil liberties advocates say that system is open to abuse.

"The RIAA's position would make it trivially easy to learn the name, address, and phone number of anyone who sends e-mail or visits a Web site," said Peter Swire, chief privacy counsel in the Clinton White House and now an Ohio State law professor.

Swire, who filed briefs supporting Verizon with the Washington court, believes copyright holders should be forced to rely on "John Doe" lawsuits in which a copyright holder has to persuade a judge that an Internet user's identity ought to be revealed.

The federal district court judge who originally heard the case, John D. Bates, wrote that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has adequate safeguards that in some ways are more protective of Internet users' rights than "John Doe" cases.

Verizon's Deutsch said the recording industry seems to be using the case "to teach Verizon and all the service providers in the future that we shouldn't dare challenge one of these subpoenas."
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...MPLATE=DEFAULT

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Net Radio Debate Simmers Amidst Ongoing Deals
David McGuire

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is hoping a deal it announced Tuesday will end a lengthy battle over Internet radio royalty rates, but many online "webcasters" say they still are facing royalty payments that will put them out of business.

The RIAA's deal allows college, nonprofit and religious broadcasters to pay up to $500 a year for the songs they play online. The agreement comes on the heels of similar deals the RIAA reached with commercial Web radio operators earlier this year.

"We know for a fact that the majority of webcasters out there are not comfortable in choosing from any of the deals that the RIAA say are on the table," said Ann Gabriel, president of the Las Vegas-based Webcaster Alliance, which represents 300 Internet radio operators, including several nonprofits. "It's our contention that the RIAA has selectively chosen parties to negotiate with to make it appear as though they’ve made an effort to address the royalty rates on the Internet, and we just don’t believe that's so."

Under the college deal, nonprofit webcasters with less than 200 listeners an hour on average will pay $250 to $500 as a flat annual fee. Stations exceeding that limit would pay .02 cents per song for each listener above 200.

But Deborah Proctor, the general manager of WCBE, a nonprofit classical music station based in Raleigh, N.C., said the rate is deceptive. With a growing international listener base that now tops 1,400 listeners an hour, WCBE is well over the caps set forth in the deal and could be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars a year, dating back to 1998, Proctor said. Even if she could afford to pay them, Proctor said the rates are too high for a nonprofit station that doesn't advertise.

"I think it would be immoral and an improper use of the contributions that were entrusted to us if I were to pay this very unethical rate," she said.

Proctor said she's had a hard time conveying her warning to other nonprofit stations that they could easily exceed the listener limits set forth in the deal and be on the hook for more money than they can afford to pay.

John Simson, the executive director of SoundExchange, which collects royalties for the record industry, said rates cannot be tailored to individual webcasters.

Simson also said that the record industry has tried to accommodate webcasters of different sizes and business models. "If people want very specialized deals, they've got to negotiate with the publishers themselves," he said.

Small commercial webcasters also are facing hard economic times under the royalty rates. Unlike nonprofits, they have to pay either a percentage of their revenues or expenses instead of the per-song rate established by the government. That system was developed as part of a congressionally brokered compromise between the webcasters and the recording industry, and was designed to keep small for-profit Web radio stations in business. The operators say those prices still are too high.

The Webcaster Alliance hopes that the U.S. Copyright Office will take notice of its members' plights. The Copyright office determines whether the royalty rates are fair, or whether to launch a round of federal arbitration to set new royalty rates. The last arbitration, which ended in 2002, took several years, cost participants millions of dollars and produced a royalty rate that nobody liked.

The RIAA hopes that the specialized deals it made with small and large Webcasters remove the need for arbitration, but Copyright Office General Counsel David Carson said the possibility remains on the table.

Not everyone is happy with the arbitration panel, however. The Webcaster Alliance has complained in the past that it costs too much money to afford a seat at the table. The U.S. House of Representatives is considering a bill that would put the arbitration process in the hands of the courts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?nav=hptoc_tn

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Negroponte Fetes Italian Inventor, Eyes Telecom Future
Philip Willan

Internet guru Nicholas Negroponte Wednesday outlined his view of the future of telecommunications -- light in infrastruucture but heavy in intelligence -- at a meeting in Rome to celebrate the Italian inventor of the telephone, Antonio Meucci.

Tomorrow's telecommunications will be influenced by the ability to put intelligence into increasingly small devices and by an ever more efficient use of radio spectrum, Negroponte said.

The chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Media Lab was addressing a ceremony at the Communications Ministry in Rome to honor the Florentine-born Meucci, who died in the U.S. in 1889, an unsung pauper. The "Meucci Day" celebration was hosted by Communications Minister Maurizio Gasparri and attended by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and leading figures from Italy's telecom industry. It came just a year after the U.S. House of Representatives officially recognized Meucci as the inventor of the telephone, righting the judicial and historical injustices that had handed credit for the discovery to his rival Alexander Graham Bell.

Negroponte pointed out that two Italian inventions, Guglielmo Marconi's wireless and Meucci's telephone, had come together to produce the cellphones in everybody's pocket. Last year the number of wireless handsets had overtaken the number of fixed-line telephones for the first time, he said.

Radio spectrum is currently inefficiently used, Negroponte said, with at most 5 percent being exploited at any one moment. "The reason for this is that we designed our laws assuming the devices were very stupid. In future they will be much more intelligent and will collaborate with one another. As a result we will be able to use spectrum with lower power and greater efficiency," he said. "Radio and telephones will become more peer-to-peer."

A new economic model will emerge to harness the new technological possibilities, Negroponte predicted. "Today's telephony, even wireless telephony, is like a heavy industry. You need a big company to pay for the towers for the infrastructure. That model will continue, but a new one will emerge. Radios and computers will become microcommunication entities."

Negroponte likened the emergence of Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) hotspots to waterlilies on a pond, with frogs hopping from lily to lily to carry messages. If every cellphone assumes the task of carrying messages for other people, he said, it could reduce the need for large, fixed infrastructures. "The more telephones the better in that system," he said.

"People object that there is no economic model for it, but there is: the economic model of flower-boxes," he said. "I put out flower- boxes to raise my self-esteem and make my house look more attractive. If almost everyone does it then the whole town becomes more beautiful. The same thing can happen with communications."
http://www.computerworld.com.au/nind...1&fp=16&fpid=0

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Music Execs Threaten Fansites - Again

Executives from the music world are again hunting down fan sites that may infringe copyright. This time, a number of Radiohead fan sites have been asked to remove their popular lyrics and tabs archives.

At least two high-traffic fansites devoted to the band, ateaseweb and GreenPlastic, have received emails from Warner/Chappell Music asking their owners to remove lyrics.

Its emails claimed the websites constituted “an infringement of our rights under US Copyright Law” and had a “direct impact on our ability to market and sell our musical arrangements and songbooks, and that adversely affects the royalities that we are able to generate and pay to the band. May we count on your cooperation?”

Adriaan Pels, webmaster of ateaseweb, told Internet Magazine that most of his visitors have expressed concerns in postings on his message board.

“There’s even a petition online,” he said of his site, which receives 20,000 unique visitors daily. “Most of them are shocked and angry. Just like me, they don’t understand what Warner Chappell is doing at the moment.”

Although Pels may have to remove his lyrics page, he hopes adding a disclaimer to individual song pages would suffice as a "compromise".

“Radiohead or their record company [EMI] have nothing to do with all of this,” Pels said. “I know that people are trying to contact the band about this. I’m sure they don’t approve of Warner Chappell’s actions. Only last week, bassist Colin Greenwood recommended ateaseweb.com on UK radio.”

Radiohead's album artist Stanley Donwood has also been in touch with Pels, saying in an email that he thought "fan sites do far more for both the band, the record label, and the publishing company than is generally recognised".

Meanwhile Jonathan Percy’s popular Greenplastic site – which came second in the Dotmusic Interactive Music Awards for most popular site last year - received a similar letter. “It’s understandable that Warner Chappell would be concerned that the hosting of lyrics and tabs would hurt the sales of Radiohead songbooks," Percy wrote on his site. "My feeling is that we, the fansites, are helping Radiohead by marketing and promoting the band for free.”
http://www.internet-magazine.com/news/view.asp?id=3462

UPDATE: Radiohead Sites Ok To Print Lyrics
Mark Brennae

The latest battle in the ongoing war between the music industry and Web sites carrying songs, lyrics and stories about bands appears to have been settled: it looks like the fans have won.

Warner/Chappell Music, which owns the publishing rights to the British rock group Radiohead, had asked two of the group's fan sites to remove concert set lists and lyrics, including those on its new album Hail to the Thief, due in stores next Tuesday.

But after what appears to have been direct intervention by the band or its record company, EMI, webmasters said Warner/ Chappell had indicated it was considering relenting and allowing lyrics to be published online.

"I can tell you that it appears that Warner/ Chappell has decided to step off due to Radiohead's interest in keeping the lyrics on the site," Jonathan Percy, webmaster for fan site www.greenplastic.com, said in an e-mail to The Canadian Press.

"I've just found out that they are going to grant me and the other fan sites a free licence to have the lyrics and tabs up."

GreenPlastic and Ateaseweb had each received e-mails from Warner/Chappell asking webmasters to remove lyrics because their publication may infringe copyright laws.

In e-mails published on both sites, Warner/ Chappell said the Web sites had a "direct impact on our ability to market and sell our musical arrangements and songbooks, and that adversely affects the royalties that we are able to generate and pay to the band."

The directive was another example of the music industry's inability to find common ground with fan sites and music-sharing Web sites, better known as peer-to-peer networks which labels say pose a threat to the sale and distribution of music and related materials from signed artists.

Percy wrote on his Web site "my feeling is that we, the fan sites, are helping Radiohead by marketing and promoting the band for free."

Adriaan Pels, webmaster of Ateaseweb, told Internet Magazine that many visitors -- he said his site receives 20,000 hits a day -- were upset and had posted expressions of concern on his message board.

Pels said he hadn't heard anything official from Warner/Chappell but believed that Radiohead intervened to ensure fans' access to their lyrics.

"I can safely say that the band has had some influence," he said in an e-mail to CP.

Both sites had posted a petition imploring Warner/Chappell to allow them to continue publishing lyrics, particularly since Radiohead is a band that rarely offers lyrics inside its CDs, and when it does they're often cryptic and incomplete. Hail to the Thief does come with lyrics.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 6,193 people had signed the petition.

The controversy came as EMI went on a full- court sales press, drumming up support for Hail to the Thief, the group's sixth album.

Unfinished recordings of the release's 14 new tracks were leaked months ago and made available on peer-to-peer sites, weeks before the album's first single, There There, was released last week.

Radiohead is to perform in New York City on Thursday -- a concert to be shown on the giant screen in Times Square and broadcast live in select movie theatres across North America.
http://www.canoe.ca/JamMusic/jun4_radiohead-cp.html

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PNC Has No Qualms About Copying Movies
Daniel Przybyla

Heather Howard doesn’t have any qualms about peer-to-peer file-sharing software that allows her to download movies for free.

Though downloading movies from software systems like Kazaa and Morpheus is considered by many to be copyright infringement, the 21-year-old Purdue North Central student does it anyway.

“It’s just out there. So many people use Kazaa,” she said.

Howard justifies not paying anything for the movies with her financial situation.

“I don’t have a lot of money. They’re not losing money. I go to PNC. I’m obviously not rich.”

Howard, an organizational leadership and supervision major, lives at home in Chesterton with her parents. She returned to Porter County from the main Purdue campus last semester after her savings ran out and she was unable to find work despite an arduous search.

Unable to find anyone to sublease her apartment to in West Lafayette, she’s still shelling out $400 a month in rent.

Other expenses have made it difficult for the stocker and waitress to pay bills on time.

She uses the lack of funds as rationale for the simple comfort of no-cost movies.

Besides, Howard says, the film industry is making profits from another outlet.

“I’m still seeing the product placement. I still see the guy holding the Coke can,” Howard said. “If anything, they should charge more for advertising in the film.”

Howard says she’ll still buy her favorite movies on DVD, but she has downloaded 30 to 40 movies through file sharing and views them on her computer.
http://www.heraldargus.com/content/s...p?storyid=2947

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It Doesn't Pay to be Popular
Glenn Fleishman

It rarely pays to be popular, unless you're a film star or an amusement park. On the Internet, popularity and cost often go hand in hand. The more traffic you get (unless it's tightly bound to sales), the more money it costs you. This is because most bandwidth usage is centralized: one server and one network feeds all of the hungry mouths, and you pay the piper for spikes and sustained use.

In mid-March, I narrowly averted a $15,000 bandwidth bill that arose when I offered Real World Adobe GoLive 6 as a free PDF. The site at which I hosted the download is a Level 3 Communications co-location customer, and Level 3 charges on sustained bandwidth.

The book had 10,000 downloads, representing nearly 250 gigabytes, in just 36 hours. I averted any cost because Level 3 drops the top five percent of the most busiest hours each month, which is just over 36 hours in an average month. My 36th hour was a few megabits per second, it turned out; my 37th or so, below 500Kbps.

If I were living in the future, the scenario might have been less harrowing. Systems that involve peer-to-peer file sharing -- which distribute parts or entire files across a whole system to reduce strain on any one part -- and edge server-to-edge server networks, like Akamai's system of pushing files topologically closer to downloaders, would make the effective cost of bandwidth lower by never straining single locations.

I learned a lot in the process of coping with the stress of a high-ticket bill and then the aftermath about managing expectations, dealing with high- bandwidth needs, and the true current cost of bandwidth. I also had a chance to reflect on how current distributed file sharing requires either too much work or involves too many unrelated political and legal issues.

(For more on the social costs and the follow-up on what happened, you can read the New York Times article I wrote that appeared in April 2003. The Times requires registration and is now charging for access to the archives after about seven days.)

Hosting and Co-Location: Where Things Stand Now

When I started buying in-house bandwidth at the T-1 level (1.544Mbps dedicated digital service) back in 1994, it cost about $2,000 per month. And that didn't include unlimited bandwidth: after a small number of gigabytes, I was charged $50 for each additional Gb. I, in turn, passed this on to the Web hosting clients.

In the near decade since, bandwidth costs have dropped but not plummeted; you still have to shop around. If you want in-house bandwidth with more than just a few static IP addresses, you'll wind up spending several hundred dollars a month on the low end for 512Kbps DSL to T-1 service in places, like Seattle, with lots of competition. In other parts of the country, with older infrastructure or less competition, a T-1 could still top $2,000 per month.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/p2p/...e_sharing.html

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Earth Station 5 – Burning Down the House Or Smoke and Mirrors?
Jack Spratts

After more than a year and a million plus in development, the file sharing and messaging system known as Earth Station 5 (ES 5) is said to be ready for its first public users. In beta for months and officially released just days ago this new product may or may not rewrite the rules of filesharing, but no argument can be made about the scope of its founders’ ambitions - they want it all. According to ES 5 spokesman Steve Taylor, six international owners with deep pockets and stakes in ventures ranging from software to satellites preside over some 70 full time developers responsible for creating and maintaining an operation that incorporates a complex decentralized peer-to-peer system, centralized chat, personal web-server and the ability to allow users to stream their own content over a new and proprietary network.

“They looked at Gnutella initially” says Taylor, referring to the open source file sharing system, “but weren’t satisfied. The developers felt they had to create their own network from scratch if they were going to have any hope of achieving the goals they’d set for themselves.” In what is certainly a bold and attention grabbing maneuver they’ve already “used it to stream the Matrix Reloaded over their high speed lines” to the amazement of over 11,000 viewers so far, and have plans for doing much more. “This network will include a world of features unheard of in present P2P’s”, continues Taylor, “as a matter of fact calling it a P2P may actually be too limiting, there’s so much more to it.” Upcoming versions are slated to include an Internet portal, a worldwide eBay type auction service, a sports gambling site and versions in twenty six different languages.


Welcome to the Neighborhood - Earth Station 5 HQ as seen from space.

The main office is in the Palestinian refugee camp Jenin, chosen as much for defensive purposes as for practicality (several founders are Palestinians). Legally they’re operating out of what’s essentially a no man’s land of chaos, where according to Taylor enforcement resources aren’t usually extended to cover intellectual policy disputes and even if they are, copyrights don’t extend to non-Palestinian owned content. The owners are confident the physical location alone protects them from distracting and expensive legal assaults but they claim they’ve incorporated robust defenses in the software as well. Features are said to include encryption, resistance to line sniffing, random ports and even proxy serving to block Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from sharing partners.

Many of the features announced for ES5 have aroused if not hostility at least a fair amount of skepticism in the P2P community, with outright rejection reserved for any claims of proxying. That feature is said to be critical for the future of peer-to-peer systems if users are to be insulated from subpoenas, court challenges and nuisance suits from rights claimants, legitimate or otherwise. To date the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has had its only real success attacking individual users through their open IP’s but huge bandwidth costs have prevented the widespread use of IP masking in other P2P’s so far. Interestingly it’s here that the confident bluster of official statements and Taylor’s own boosterism part ways. He’s unwilling to commit to the heady guarantee of “complete anonymity” promised in a recent press release, allowing only that the client has powerful protection, but it’s “not infallible.”

While accurate counts are hard to come by Taylor says the network is already “seeing worldwide user numbers in the 190,000 range.” An extraordinary claim that if true would make ES 5 one of the fastest growing file sharing systems in history.

As for business plans, nobody’s talking just yet. All anyone will allow is that money is not a priority at the moment. “These guys are all very well off,” says Taylor, “and they’ve got plenty of cash to carry them through the initial phases of the start-up - and then some.” Since the developers insist the application is adware and spyware free, there doesn’t seem to be a way for an income stream to start flowing anyway, but that’s not a problem with Taylor. “They’re looking way down the road", he says, "way down. They expect to be here when the others have left the stage. You’ve got to remember, not having to pay $1,000,000 a month in legal fees is a huge advantage in this business.”

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Metallica Changes File-Sharing Tune
Jam

Three years after suing Napster, Metallica is offering songs from its new album exclusively on the Internet.

The heavy metal band, whose first album in six years is scheduled for release Thursday, is making some tracks available online as well through a partnership with Speakeasy, the Seattle-based high-speed Internet access provider said.

Customers who buy Metallica's new compact disc, "St. Anger," will find a code inside the packaging allowing them to view, listen to and download exclusive, unreleased music tracks from a Metallica Web site.

Speakeasy will host and manage the Web site and music offerings. The company didn't disclose terms of the deal in its announcement Tuesday.

The arrangement is a show of confidence from Metallica, which in 2000 sued Napster, the now-defunct music file swapping service, alleging copyright infringement and racketeering.

"We've always wanted our fans to experience our music online," drummer Lars Ulrich said. "But up until now, the existing distribution methods have not passed the kind of 'quality' standards our fans have come to expect from us."
http://www.canoe.ca/JamMusic/jun3_metallica-ap.html

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Copy-Protection Technology: An Article Of Faith
Sam Varghese

Copy-control technology used on music discs demands one thing from users - absolute faith in the motives of the enforcer. That's the only conclusion one can draw after a fairly detailed Q and A with Roger Kuah, the new media projects manager of EMI.

EMI's copy-protected music discs have given people plenty to complain about ever since they were introduced in Australia in November last year.

The copy protection has 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, made one consumer go to the ACCC with a complaint, and sometimes had exactly the opposite effect to that it was intended to have.

Recently Philips, one of the creators of the CD specs, expressed concern over the side effects of the technology, though it tiptoed diplomatically through some of the more troublesome questions raised.

Not surprisingly, EMI has a different spin on the whole thing. Kuah provided the following answers to queries sent to him by email.

Given that you can't call your music releases CDs anymore, what do you call them?

The issue over what they are called is unresolved. They are still commonly referred to as copy protected CDs.

To the extent possible, give us a brief outline of the model followed by the copy protection technology which EMI employs. Why was this model selected? Were other
models considered?

There are a number of different companies working in this area and we are talking to several of them, but to date we have used the technology provided by only one (specifics are confidential).
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...406220122.html

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Altnet To Pay Kazaa Users For Swapping
John Borland

A year after launching its sometimes-controversial alliance with Kazaa, Brilliant Digital Entertainment subsidiary Altnet is kicking off a new, ambitious stage of its peer-to-peer marketing campaign.

Later this week, Kazaa parent Sharman Networks and Altnet will jointly release a new bundle of file-swapping software that will include components of a new high-security peer-to-peer network and a program that will pay users to be a part of it.

The idea, says Altnet CEO Kevin Bermeister, is to harness the computing resources of the tens of millions of Kazaa users to distribute authorized files such as games, songs and movies. Giving people an incentive to host and trade paid files could create a powerful medium for distributing authorized content and could diminish file-trading networks' role as hubs of online piracy, he said.

"The minute you begin shifting unauthorized files out of people's shared folders, the peer-to-peer networks (as sources of copyright infringement) begin to disappear," Bermeister said. "Lawsuits are the stick approach. This is the carrot."

The release of the new service is a landmark moment for both Altnet and Kazaa, which is far and away the most popular file-swapping software program online. Bermeister's plans for marketing authorized files using Kazaa have been an instrumental part in the strategy of Sharman since its inception in early 2002.

It also could serve as a first large-scale test of the idea that the current generation of file-swapping networks can be hosts for legitimate business as easily as for copyright infringement. This has long been a contention of peer-to-peer advocates, but the idea has been tested only in limited and small-scale ways to date.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-1011827.html

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Free for All
From downloading free music to movies and games, user-pays is a concept rapidly becoming a memory for the online generation.
Greg Thom

IF YOU believe the howls of the recording industry, online piracy is driving it to its knees. Profits and CD sales are tumbling and the viability of the music industry as we know it is on borrowed time. Major record labels are trying everything -- from intimidation in court to techno-based security solutions and heartfelt pleas to do the right thing -- to stem the music free-for-all.

Despite this, consumers don't appear to care. The one place the music industry can't seem to reach is inside people's heads. Most people downloading illegal MP3s and burning blank CDs believe they are doing nothing wrong or, at worst, are involved in a victimless crime.

Online music provider Napster may have been closed down, but replacement file-swapping services like KaZaA, which has more than 200 million registered users worldwide and is being pursued through the courts, have proved just as popular and elusive.

It seems the biggest battle faced by the entertainment industry in the war against piracy is human nature.

RMIT psychology lecturer Dr Kerry Hempenstall says it's a fight the industry is unlikely to win. He says most people, no matter what they are told to the contrary, have convinced themselves their actions are justified.

"Most people who fit into the honest category have bits of their life where they are dishonest," he says.

"It's the ability to live with such a contradiction within ourselves, a selective dishonesty if you like, that forms part of our ability to survive."

These are people who would never dream of shoplifting a CD, but will happily plunder music online.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/com...E11869,00.html

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Stop, Thief! (This Means You)
Christopher J. Cosenza

You're thieves, every last one of you.

Shocking? Sorry, but if you agree with the ongoing accusations made by the executives and artists of the music industry, then it's true. Here's why:

Their lawyers are fighting to stop computer peer-to-peer sharing of music because they believe copyright laws are being infringed. (Peer-to-peer sharing, for the uninitiated, is the process by which individuals share their music libraries and files with each other through computer software without necessarily paying for the acquired files. Remember Napster? Plenty of other programs have arisen to take its place: Morpheus, Grokster, the Gnutella Network, Kazaa.)

And not to be left out of this computer software conflict, Hollywood and the Motion Picture Association of America want to keep you from using DVD-copying software because they believe that also violates the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Are all of these people right? Be careful before answering "yes" because you may convict yourself. Okay, so you've read this far and thought, "I don't share music. I certainly don't copy DVDs. You're wrong Mr. Cosenza, I'm not a thief." Well, then let's take a different approach.

Suppose you visited the doctor last week and, while you were waiting, you picked up the office copy of the St. Petersburg Times. You thumbed through the pages and came across an article your family would really like. You asked the receptionists for permission to tear it out, but you were refused. So instead, you asked to make a dozen or so photocopies and they let you use their copier.

Gotcha! You're a thief.

Seem harsh? You're not using those copies for educational purposes, so you're not exactly protected under the "fair use" copyright provisions. Is it more justifiable to copy a newspaper that only costs 35 cents than it is to copy a record that costs $12.99? Your intention wasn't to sell the article; you just wanted your family to read it, right? Same goes for those who share music; they just want to hear the song, they don't want to sell it.

"Once you photocopy something like say, March Madness brackets, from a magazine or newspaper 25 or 50 times, and distribute them around to your office mates, you're walking a fine line and you're potentially infringing on copyrights," said Kembrew McLeod, a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa and author of Owning Culture.

Raise your hand if you've ever recorded your favorite song off the radio. Did you sell it? Of course not. You only listened to it. That's what blank cassette tapes are for - and don't say you use them for recording your innermost thoughts. You must be the same people who actually use fireworks to scare pesky birds from your crops.
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/06/01/Pe...his_mean.shtml

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File-Sharing Program Slips Out of AOL Offices
Amy Harmon

AOL Time Warner is trying to stop the spread of new software released by its Nullsoft division, whose founder and lead programmer, Justin Frankel, is known for leaking his work onto the Internet and causing headaches for his employer.

The new program makes it easy for groups of about 50 people to set up file-sharing networks that are secure and private. In addition to letting users search for and download files, it includes an instant messaging feature that could be seen as competition for AOL Instant Messenger, which provides AOL with a crucial presence on millions of computer screens.

"Whatever Justin releases tends to be of some import," said Shawn Yeager, a technology consultant in Toronto, who is making Waste available from his site. "Given his history and the personal respect I have for the work he does it seems to me to be important enough to preserve."

Still, Eben Moglen, a lawyer for the Free Software Foundation, said that if the release was unauthorized it would not matter if it had his group's "open source" designation. If AOL were to take one of the distributors to court, a judge would need to decide how much authority Mr. Frankel had, Mr. Moglen said.

"It doesn't matter what the license says if the distributor didn't intend to distribute it," Mr. Moglen said. But he noted the "open source" license, as a practical matter, makes it hard to recapture software once it has been released.http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/te...rtne r=GOOGLE

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Department Of Prior Restraints Department, Or If It’s Digital, Free Speech Does Not Apply
Internet Battle Raises Questions About the First Amendment
Adam Liptak

The beauty queen and the cad both have Web sites.

Katy Johnson, who was Miss Vermont in 1999 and again in 2001, uses her site to promote what she calls her "platform of character education." "She is founder of Say Nay Today and the Sobriety Society," the site says, "and her article `ABC's of Abstinence' was featured in Teen magazine."

Tucker Max's site promotes something like the opposite of character education. It contains a form through which women can apply for a date with him, pictures of his former girlfriends and reports on what Mr. Max calls his "belligerence and debauchery."

Until a Florida judge issued an unusual order last month, Mr. Max's site also contained a long account of his relationship with Ms. Johnson, whom he portrayed, according to court papers, as vapid, promiscuous and an unlikely candidate for membership in the Sobriety Society.

The order, entered by Judge Diana Lewis of Circuit Court in West Palm Beach, forbids Mr. Max to write about Ms. Johnson. It has alarmed experts in First Amendment law, who say that such orders prohibiting future publication, prior restraints, are essentially unknown in American law. Moreover, they say, claims like Ms. Johnson's, for invasion of privacy, have almost never been considered enough to justify prior restraints.

Ms. Johnson's lawsuit also highlights some shifting legal distinctions in the Internet era, between private matters and public ones and between speech and property.

Judge Lewis ruled on May 6, before Mr. Max was notified of the suit and without holding a hearing. She told Mr. Max that he could not use "Katy" on his site. Nor could he use Ms. Johnson's last name, full name or the words "Miss Vermont."

The judge also prohibited Mr. Max from "disclosing any stories, facts or information, notwithstanding its truth, about any intimate or sexual acts engaged in by" Ms. Johnson. That prohibition is not limited to his Web site. Finally, Judge Lewis ordered Mr. Max to sever the virtual remains of his relationship with Ms. Johnson. He is no longer allowed to link to her Web site.

The page of Mr. Max's site that used to contain his rambling memoir now has only a reference to the court order.

Ms. Johnson did not respond to telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment. In her lawsuit, Ms. Johnson maintained that Mr. Max had invaded her privacy by publishing accurate information about her and had used her name and picture for commercial purposes.

Her lawyer, Michael I. Santucci of Fort Lauderdale, declined to be interviewed. He has asked Judge Lewis to seal the court file in the case, a request on which she has not yet ruled, and to prohibit Mr. Max from talking about the suit, a request she has rejected.

Mr. Santucci did provide a copy of a news release he issued after the order was issued.

"This victory should send a clear message to all parasitic smut peddlers who live off the good names of others," he said in the release, which also noted that Ms. Johnson "emphatically denies the story contained on Tucker Max's Web site."

Mr. Santucci did not respond to an e-mail message asking whether his issuing a news release was at odds with his request to seal the court file on privacy grounds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/national/02INTE.html

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File Swappers Learn New Tricks
BBC

The popularity of file peer-to-peer networks is driving the development of novel technologies that capitalise on the huge numbers of people sharing music and movies. Unlike earlier systems the performance of the latest file-swapping software does not degrade as more people try to get hold of popular files. The newer software also makes it easier for people to find the files they are looking for. The programs make it easier to get hold of and download larger files which could spell problems for film studios keen to stamp out movie piracy.

Last week file-swapping software Kazaa became the most downloaded program ever. According to figures from Download.com, the Kazaa file-swapping system has been downloaded more than 229 million times, more than the previous record holder ICQ. But the technology behind Kazaa is being superseded by newer programs such as eDonkey and BitTorrent that use new techniques to get files to people.

By contrast to earlier peer-to-peer systems, eDonkey spreads the index of files people are willing to share across several machines. Instead of going to a master list to find a particular file, users would interrogate the machine holding the list of those types of file. Downloaded files are split into small pieces and shared out across the network. This means that other people looking for the same file can start downloading more quickly.

BitTorrent works in a similar fashion with those downloading a file becoming a proxy server for anyone else wanting the same track, program or film. The program started out as a tool for downloading large files such as CD images.

While these technologies have been in use for a while, now large numbers of people are starting to use them as their preferred downloading system. Making it easier to find and download large files might mean more problems for music and movie makers keen to stamp out piracy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2950850.stm

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Interview With BitTorrent's Bram Cohen
Roblimo/Slashdot

Here we go... direct questions and direct answers about BitTorrent, the latest big-time P2P file distribution system to hit the Internet. Bram Cohen made BitTorrent and maintains it, and perhaps, one day, just maybe, he'll even make a living from it...

1) Bit-Torrent browsing... by CashCarSTAR

Has any effort/thought been put towards bit torrent page distribution?

Specifically, a way that one can use BT to mirror webpages. A way to get around the /. effect, and as well would work wonders the next emergency that comes out (see 9/11).

Bram:

Images in web pages are very small and require very low latency. BitTorrent is designed for much larger files, which download on the order of minutes or hours rather than seconds. BitTorrent uses the significant amount of time those downloads take to try out and compare different connections. This process has inherent latencies which make it unsuitable for images on web pages.

Certainly it would beis possible on paper to dramatically reduce the cost of hosting an ordinary web site using peer transfers, but the logistical problems of handling many small files at low latency have yet to be solved, and will probably require a protocol which looks significantly different from BitTorrent.

The Interview: http://interviews.slashdot.org/inter...tid=185&tid=95

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Right Or Wrong, Lots Of Teens Download Music For Free
Selena Ricks

Music fans like Ryan Brown make the recording industry shudder.

Brown, 18, of Portland owns more burned CDs than pre- recorded CDs, and has about 700 songs downloaded onto his computer from the file-swapping program Kazaa Media Desktop.

"I'm going to have to really like an artist to buy the CD," said Brown, who graduates from Cheverus High School today. He said he downloads free music every day, and he doesn't feel sorry for the record companies or artists.

"They're fine, they still have money to fall back on," he said. "Back in the day it wasn't even about the money. It was about the fans."

Kazaa and other peer-to-peer file-sharing systems like Gnutella, Morpheus and FreeNet have radically changed the way teens learn about and get music.

Teens have always been major consumers of music, and with their generally limited disposable income, they have flooded sites like Kazaa, where they can learn about and download music for free. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 53 percent of American teens ages 12 to 17 download music files while online.

Last week, Sharman Networks Ltd. announced that its file-swapping program Kazaa Media Desktop has become the most downloaded software, beating the previous record-holder, ICQ, by reaching 230 million downloads worldwide. By comparison, Napster had an estimated 20 million registered users in 2000.

Kazaa is available for free at www.kazaa.com, and allows its users to download more licensed content than any other application. In a matter of minutes, users can easily find songs, music videos, television shows, movies, games and software.

The debate over the illegal sharing of copyrighted music and media on the Internet is well-known. Critics say Kazaa encourages people to take recordings for free instead of buying CDs, costing the record industry millions in lost sales. Supporters of Kazaa say they are merely taking advantage of a widely used technology that can't be stopped.

The major film and music companies are suing Sharman Networks Ltd. and other companies involved with the Kazaa software, accusing them of aiding copyright infringement on a massive scale. Sharman argues that its software has legitimate uses, adding that the company is not liable for what consumers do on the network.

While programs like Kazaa can hurt mainstream artists, many teens say the availability of free songs is helping bring underground music to the masses.

"The kinds of bands I listen to, you can't buy their CDs anywhere," said Ben Anderson, a 16-year-old sophomore at Portland High School. Anderson said he downloads about 20 songs each day from Kazaa and has about 300 stored on his computer, mostly hard-core punk and reggae.

"You can find out about bands, check 'em out, see if you like them," he said. "It's a trade-off. More people know who you are but you get fewer sales."

Anderson, who plays guitar in a band, wants to study recording at Berklee College of Music in Boston after he graduates from high school. He said mainstream artists shouldn't complain about losing money to Internet file traders when "they're ripping off other artists too."

It's too soon to tell what impact Kazaa and other file-sharing programs will have on the future of the music industry, but many teens say they are optimistic that recording artists will continue to thrive.
http://www.pressherald.com/mondaymag...602kazaa.shtml

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MacNN: Acquisition 0.92: file sharing client updated

David Watanabe has released version 0.92 of Acquisition, a popular Mac file sharing program. Acquisition is a gnutella client supporting modern gnutella features such as Ultrapeers, swarm (multi-source) downloads, download resumption, and distributed network discovery. Acquisition is built using code from the LimeWire gnutella client, and consequently supports the same rich set of protocol features. The new release has important protocol changes including support for compressed message streams. It also features various aesthetic and stability fixes as well. The $15 shareware runs on Mac OS X. Download - 1.6MB
http://macnn.com/news/19607

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Supreme Court Rules Against 20th Century Fox In Hollywood Copying Case
AP

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a video company cannot be sued under a trademark law for reusing old war documentary footage without giving credit to 20th Century Fox.

The 8-0 decision gives some freedom to people who want to reproduce works that no longer have copyright protection.

Justice Antonin Scalia said that the trademark law, which is intended to protect consumers from confusion, does not allow creators to claim plagiarism when their uncopyrighted works and inventions are used.

The original documentary was "Crusade in Europe." Dastar Corp. deleted one hour, added a half hour of new material, then sold tape sets for about $25 as "Campaigns in Europe."

Scalia said that Dastar could have been sued if it bought videotapes of "Crusade in Europe," repackaged them and put them on the market under the Dastar name.

Instead, he said, the company made some changes and cannot be held liable for misleading the public about the origin of the work.

"The consumer who buys a branded product does not automatically assume that the brand-name company is the same entity that came up with the idea for the product -- and typically does not care whether it is," Scalia wrote in the opinion.

The court had been asked to decide if the video distributor should turn over its profits, and pay damages over the use of the documentary, based on Dwight Eisenhower's memoirs. A judge had ordered the company to pay $1.5 million.

The documentary, which was made by Time Inc. for Fox, did not have copyright protection when Dastar used it for its own video in 1995 -- the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Dastar sold more than 35,000 copies of "Campaigns in Europe," court records show.

Scalia said that if creative producers were required under the trademark law to attribute the origin of any uncopyrighted materials they used, it would be difficult.

"We do not think the Lanham Act requires this search for the source of the Nile and all its tributaries," he wrote.

The Bush administration and other groups including the American Library Association had supported Dastar.

Justice Stephen Breyer did not take part in the case because his brother, a judge in California, was involved in the case in lower courts.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/02/scotus.copyright.ap/

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Judge Backs Labels' MP3 Search
Chris Jenkins

THE Federal Court appears to have opened the door for record companies to examine university data for pirated music.

Record companies Sony, EMI and Universal were seeking court approval to conduct a search of data held by the Universities of Tasmania, Sydney and Melbourne as part of the discovery process in an action against alleged student music pirates.

The universities had proposed searching by file type, where the record companies believed that a search of file headers was necessary to find any material that infringed copyright.

Computer forensic expert John Thackray had testified that the search method proposed by the universities was "very limited" and could potentially overlook pertinent files.

The universities argued that the type of search proposed by the record labels could compromise private information held on their systems, including information on third parties uninvolved in the case.

Justice Tamberlin preferred the search method proposed by Mr Thackray, which included using specialist forensic software known as EnCase, to the method proposed by the universities, which he said would prove too limited.

Nevertheless, he said the method proposed by Mr Thackray would "reveal a great deal of extraneous information , some of which may be privileged or subject to confidentiality obligations".

"It must be remembered that none of the parties in this application, it seems, are aware as to the full content of the material contained in the very extensive records," he said

Still, he argued it was unlikely the record companies and their lawyers would not " 'rummage' or 'trawl' through a miscellany of irrelevant material".
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...E15306,00.html

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Oz Police In Music Piracy Raid At Top University
Students watch out!
James Pearce

The Australian Federal Police raided the University of Technology, Sydney on Wednesday this
week in connection with a AU$60m music piracy case before the courts.

"We have executed a search warrant [on the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS)] which is connected to the investigation into the alleged AU$60 million piracy matter," a spokesperson for the AFP told silicon.com sister site ZDNet Australia.

The spokesperson declined to comment on whether anything of note was discovered at the university or any further action that will be taken.

Last month three tertiary students, Charles Ng, Tommy Le and Peter Tran, were charged with copyright infringement following an AFP investigation assisted by Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI). They were charged over an Australian-based website, MP3 WMA land, which allegedly offered illegal downloads of copyright-protected music.

The case was deferred until 8 July. If the accused are found guilty they face maximum penalties of up to five years jail and/or a AU$60,500 fine.

The music industry has stepped up its battle against online pirates in recent months. Justice Brian Tamberlin is due to hand down his verdict in the Federal Court case pitching music industry giants against three Australian universities this afternoon, which is poised to go to appeal whatever the decision.

MIPI has written to the State Ombudsmen of NSW, Victoria and Tasmania asking for an independent investigation into the behaviour of the universities during the case.

The effect of illegal online trading in music files on the music industry is also controversial, with some reports finding the practice increases the overall amount of money filesharers spend on music.
http://silicon.com/news/500022/1/4413.html

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Court Confirms DMCA 'Good Faith' Web Site Shut Down Rights
Ashlee Vance

A U.S. court has extended the power of the DMCA even further with
a ruling this week that backs up copyright holders' ability to shut down a Web site on "good faith."

InternetMovies.com had asked the District Court for the District of Hawaii to require that copyright holders investigate infringing Web sites before shutting them down. This rational request was rejected by the court, as its granted the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and any other DMCA zealot the right to put the clamp on Web sites at will.

"This decision rules that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) does not require a copyright holder to conduct an investigation to establish actual infringement prior to sending notice to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) requiring them to shut-down an allegedly infringing web site, or stopping service all together to an alleged violator," InternetMovies.com said in a statement.

In the land of the DMCA, a "good faith belief" of infringement makes it possible to hijack a Web site without investigation.

This decision seems to have thrown a large chunk of the Internet into a virtual Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. military describes its Cuban compound as the least worst place, which is an apt take on where Internet users appear to be.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30943.html

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Artists call for CD tax cut
BBC

Hundreds of music artists from across Europe are calling on the European Union to cut VAT on CDs. More than 1,200 international stars including Sir Elton John, Chris de Burgh and Andrea Bocelli have signed a petition being presented to the EU in Brussels on Tuesday. They want recorded music to be classed in line with other cultural products such as books, newspapers and theatre tickets - which attract reduced VAT rates.

Belgian pop star Alex Callier and German singer Rolf Zuckowski presented the petition, which has been sent to the 20 European Commissioners. Callier, from the band Hooverphonic, said: " When someone buys a biography of Jacques Brel in Belgium he pays a VAT rate of 6%, but if he buys a CD of his music he has to pay 21%. This makes no sense and does not recognise the cultural role of musical artists."

Other European artists involved in the campaign include Johnny Hallyday and Françoise Hardy from France, Zucchero of Italy, Greece's Nana Mouskouri and Spanish singer Julio Iglesias. The European Commission is currently considering changes to the EU's system of reduced rates as part of a review of VAT directives. VAT on CDs is set at between 15% and 25%. Rates range from Sweden and Denmark (25%) to Luxembourg (15%), with the UK on 17.5%.

A recent survey for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) found that 60% of people over the age of 16 would buy more CDs if they were made cheaper. It suggested that increased sales would compensate governments for any loss of revenue from a VAT cut within one or two years. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has reported a 4% slump in UK music sales, the biggest downturn since the launch of CDs in the early 1980s. It blames piracy, including illegal duplication and distribution by international criminals, for the decrease. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/2959096.stm

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The Abandonware Dilemma
When is the beagle legal?
Jack Russell

After the article we ran on classic adventure gaming earlier this week one reader wrote in suggesting that we or you our readers check into abandonware websites if you've got a hankering to do some classic gaming. Since the legal status of abandonware sites isn't always clear, and because there are a lot of great classic games out there, it seemed prudent to address the issue.

Abandonware is a term used to refer to software that's supposedly been "abandoned" by the manufacturer and is no longer being sold or produced on the market. The length of time before a website will declare a piece of software abandoned varies from as short as four years in one case to as long as fifteen in another. Abandonware sites are typically easy to find and even the oldest / most obscure games can often be located within minutes on a simple http server. Compared to the tremendous gap between the amount of advertised "warez" software online and the ability to find or download it, there's a notable difference.

The crucial question swirling around abandonware is whether or not it's legal to possess or download. The justification for such activity usually hinges on the fact that the product is no longer in the market, cannot be purchased (or in some cases may not even run on modern hardware), and is generating no royalty for the company, which may even have gone completely out of business in the meantime. Unlike the pirating of modern games, in which every stolen copy is a copy not sold, there is no financial loss to the company in question, according to this point of view, and hence, no violation of the law.

Companies inclined to fight the abandonware battle, unsurprisingly, see the situation differently and in much more black and white terms. If Company X owns the rights to "Dungeon Crawl" published in 1981, it doesn't matter if Company X has no intention of ever making a sequel or re-releasing the game - downloading Dungeon Crawl and playing it without purchasing the product is a copyright violation and hence illegal.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) the issue isn't quite this simple. Is it illegal, for instance, to download a copy of a game you once legitimately purchased but now, through no fault of your own, can no longer install? Anyone who gamed in the pre-CD ROM period will remember the disk failure rates that all gamers suffered and the hassle of procuring replacements even then. If a game shipped on ten 3.5" floppies it wasn’t at all uncommon to find a bad disk every third or fourth game, and now, over ten years later, there are precious few disk sets that are still going to reliably hold their data. Obviously most companies aren't going to be able to provide replacements, even if offered full original market value for the game. Can the legitimate owner of a game legally download a functional copy?
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9753

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End Of Browser Battle May Boost Digital Content
Mary Anne Ostrom

The decision by Microsoft and AOL Time Warner to patch up their legal differences and join forces to promote digital content could speed the delivery of music, magazines and movies to online consumers.

But, warned industry analysts, only concrete initiatives from the once-feuding companies in the months to come will prove the deal's significance.

Microsoft's decision to pay $750 million to AOL to settle a 2002 antitrust lawsuit over Internet browsers paves the way for the two companies to work more closely at a time when technology and entertainment companies are in a high-stakes battle to emerge as the premier players in bringing digital entertainment to the Internet.

Technology companies are banking on widespread adoption of broadband content to energize the sales of software, hardware and online services, while Hollywood and other content creators remain fiercely protective of their ownership rights to the material.

``There's been an interest in having a media company and a technology company really take some bold steps in this area,'' Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said in a conference call. The key, he added, is to ``not make it so cumbersome that it's unattractive for people to use things that have rights protection. And so this is the kickoff; we're hoping to draw others into these activities.''

Few details, however, were released on how Microsoft and AOL would cooperate, beyond promising that their products and services would work better with each other.

``The aftermath will be the most interesting part. They haven't necessarily committed to deploying any of the stuff. Going forward, the proof will be in the execution,'' said Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/5977149.htm

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California Supremes Hear DeCSS Case
Kevin Poulsen

California's Supreme Court on Thursday heard oral arguments in a case that pits the motion picture industry against a man who distributed a DVD descrambling program through his website, until he was forced by a court order to remove it.

Andrew Bunner, now 26, was one of hundreds of people who mirrored a copy of the open-source DeCSS program on the Web in 1999, after learning about the controversy surrounding the program on the "news for nerds" community site Slashdot. Shortly thereafter he was named in an injunction ordering him to take down the program, as part of broadly targeted lawsuit filed by the DVD Copy Control Association -- a motion picture industry group -- under a 1979 state law designed to protect trade secrets.

DeCSS was written by Norwegian teenager Jon Johansen, in part based on information Johansen reverse-engineered from a commercial DVD- playing program that included a click-wrap license agreement that barred reverse engineering.

Bunner, with the support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Project, appealed, and an appeals court overturned the injunction in 2000, ruling that the order violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The DVD-CCA then appealed to the state Supreme Court.

In a packed courtroom Thursday, the argument focused mostly on whether a computer program should be considered "pure speech" afforded the full protection of the First Amendment, or a mixture of expression and functionality protected by a lower standard.

Robert Sugarman, a lawyer for DVD-CCA, argued the latter view. He said the appellate court erred by treating DeCSS as pure speech, because code is designed to be functional -- to be executed on a computer -- and "not to communicate ideas [or] to comment on something of public concern."

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, appearing as a friend of the court, also sided with the industry, describing DeCSS as a "burglary tool" built for "entering and stealing the property" of the movie studios. Lockyer warned the court in stark terms that California's motion picture, music and technology industries would all suffer grave financial losses if trial courts had to treat computer code as speech when considering legal bids to suppress a program.

Bunner: A Matter of Principle
David Greene, from the non-profit First Amendment Project, represented Bunner. He argued that a computer program is no different from music lyrics or a novel -- it's just written in a different language, designed to be interpretable by machine. "This is pure speech because... it is purely the transmission of information via a language," said Greene.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/5239

State official testifies against DVD copying
Bob Egelko

Saying California's economy is threatened by computer-aided piracy, Attorney General Bill Lockyer joined the movie industry Thursday in urging the state Supreme Court to forbid the Internet posting of a program that lets users copy DVDs.

Making his second appearance ever before the high court, Lockyer asked the justices to reject a state appellate court's ruling that a San Francisco man was exercising free speech when he posted the program in 1999.

Lockyer said the unscrambling program, devised by a Norwegian teenager, was simply "a burglary tool" designed for "breaking, entering and stealing" a trade secret -- the industry-owned code designed to prevent unauthorized playback of movies recorded on digital versatile discs, or DVDs.

The state is taking sides in the private dispute in order to "prevent and combat piracy . . . encourage investment (and) promote the creative arts," Lockyer said. He said the motion picture industry estimates that as many as 350,000 movies are copied illegally every day, and recording companies are losing billions of dollars from unauthorized copying.

A lawyer for Andrew Bunner, the young software engineer whose use of his Web site landed him in the middle of a heavyweight fight, countered that a court injunction obtained by an industry group was intended to "stop the flow of information." Bunner did nothing wrong, and the program he posted is so readily available now that it can't be described as a trade secret, added attorney David Greene.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&type=business

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Creative Commons And Negativland Begin Work On Free Sampling And Collage License

Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a layer of reasonable copyright, announced today that it would begin development of the Sampling License, a copyright tool designed to let artists encourage the creative transformation of their work, for profit or otherwise. Leading the public discussion and development of the license is Negativland, practitioners of "found sound" music as well as other forms of media manipulation.

Glenn Otis Brown, Creative Commons Executive Director, commented: "The Sampling License is among the most exciting projects we've taken on so far. The technology and culture of the Net already facilitate the remixing of culture. The law does not, so we're helping it catch up by remixing copyright itself."

When completed, the Sampling License will allow people to create collage art and "mash-ups" - as well as other art forms based on re-used materials - from licensed works. Like all of Creative Commons copyright tools, the Sampling License will be made available for free to the public from the organization's website.
http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=52513

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Sony Unit To Trial Content With A 'Consume By' Date
"This film will self-destruct in five seconds..."

A subsidiary of the electronics maker Sony is to sell downloadable movie files that self-destruct after a given time.

According to Japanese newspaper Nikkei Business Daily, the So-net ISP will soon trial the service in Japan.

Many digital content providers currently use encrypted streaming to prevent users saving and copying movie files. But the downside is that the quality of the video suffers, as it is reduced in size for web transmission. In addition, users must stay online to view the feed.

However, allowing downloads of movie files opens the door to illegal copying.

To sidestep these issues, So-net's new service allows users to download the content from its website to their hard drives - but those hoping to add the file to a permanent collection or to copy it will have their attempts frustrated.

The firm has incorporated a DRM (digital rights management) technology from software maker Japan Wave which makes copying impossible, the report said.

Instead of saving the video to a single file and location, Japan Wave's technology splits the data into numerous directories on the hard disk. Users will need to download special software to play back the various pieces as a continuous movie.

There's a second layer of protection: Those who manage to join up the files won't be able to use them for very long. Software embedded in the file will cause it to self-destruct after a given time, said the report.

So-net's approach to DRM is part of a growing effort by providers to find robust copy protection without restricting the user's rights to enjoy the content.

Earlier this month, Disney announced plans for a trial in the US. The film-maker said it will start renting self-destructing DVDs which automatically become unplayable after a two-day period.

Major movie studios in Hollywood are also turning up the heat, joining forces in a slew of lawsuits against US-based DVD copying software makers like DVDBackupbuddy.com and DVDSqueeze.com.
http://silicon.com/news/500019-500016/1/4412.html

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Taking a page from China

Top Technology Used To Stop Us Movie Pirates
BBC
Cinemas in the US are using top technology to try and stop people from illegally recording the latest films.

Disney are desperate to stop their latest animated film Finding Nemo being recorded and put onto the internet. So they've asked a security firm to use metal detectors and special night-vision glasses that can see in the dark to help them. Should someone get a recording device past the metal detectors, then guards wearing the goggles would be able to spot them using it inside.

Film bosses are getting more and more annoyed because people are downloading films from the internet rather than paying to see them in the cinema.

A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said the US film industry estimates it loses between £1.8bn and £2.4bn to online piracy every year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/tv...00/2952716.stm

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Chatter

- “Here's how to download stuff from yourself Super fast, it is so cool. Type http://localhost:1214/ , in your address bar with your kazaa/kazaalite open, there will be a list of your sharing files, just click it, and bingo~~~~~~~~~”

- “And the point of this is? This was useful when we actually had to worry about participation level.”

- “I learned it from somewhere else, it doesn't download the files on kazaa, i don't know why.”

- “it's so people can get there participation levels up”

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/rema...ping~mode=flat

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Online Music Business May Soon Have 'Desi' Touch
Anand Parthasarathy

A flurry of activity this week, may give the whole business of online music sharing a new — and more legitimate — lease of life, even as a major Indian player looks poised to enter the arena.

A U.S.-based player in the electronic cash arena, E-C Logix, has launched what it calls "the world's first legitimate online music file- sharing service based on the popular peer-to-peer (P2P) delivery method". Called File-Cash (www.file-cash.com) the service claims to have signed up over 100 independent music publishers and in an innovative plan those who download the music at a small price are encouraged to open their files to others and earn a percentage of the author's asking price every time a fresh buyer is found. The company claims to be unique in one respect: micro-payments as small as one tenth of a U.S. cent (5 paise) will be made without a transaction fee.

By enabling affordable downloads, the creators of File-Cash hope to remove the incentive to make illegal downloads. "Our answer is not to fight P2P but to embrace it," they say.

The move comes exactly one month after Apple Computers, makers of the "other" PC platform, launched a phenomenally successful online music sale service called the "iTunes Music Store" where owners of Apple's Mac PCs and iPod portable MP3 music players could download music pieces from a 2 lakh-strong repertoire at 99 cents a track — and then use the Mac's CD cutting software to make their own customised disks.

Within weeks of the April 28 launch over three million tracks were downloaded — and paid for, making the major music publishers such as Sony, Universal/Vivendi, BMG and Warners looking rather foolish: for months they have been ranting about the rampant piracy involved in online music swapping services but could not come up with a compelling counter-service of their own.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/s...0302031300.htm

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New peer-to-peer management technology saving service providers millions via improved bandwidth utilization, but P2P-agnostic approach doesn't diminish subscribers' online experience, satisfaction
Press Release

Just-released customer metrics from Sandvine Incorporated show that Peer-To-Peer (P2P) Policy Management is dramatically reducing the amount of expensive bandwidth consumed by file-sharing applications. P2P programs like KaZaA and Morpheus consume as much as 70% of available bandwidth on broadband networks. Yet service providers who have deployed Sandvine technology report that they are improving bandwidth utilization to such an extent, file sharing has almost ceased to be a significant drag on network costs.

For example, one large MSO estimates that Sandvine's approach will save it in excess of $5 million dollars this year. P2P upload traffic was consuming approximately 150 out of 160 MB of the MSO's provisioned upload bandwidth - a full 94% of available upstream capacity. Once Sandvine Peer-To-Peer Policy Management was enabled, bandwidth utilization by P2P traffic fell abruptly - and sharply - without impacting peer-to-peer networking by subscribers.

"This effect was achieved without invoking the CAPEX, legal or QoS issues that node splitting, content caching and traffic shaping solutions, respectively, impose on service providers," said Tom Donnelly, co-founder and VP, marketing and sales of Sandvine Incorporated. "Sandvine was able to deliver these impressive cost benefits and efficiencies without degrading the online experience for the MSO's subscribers."

To learn more about this deployment, download Sandvine's just-released "P2P Case Study" at http://www.sandvine.com/solutions/download_center.asp.

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Announcing The NetEnforcer AC-1000 Series.
Press Release

Carriers, enterprises and universities can implement QoS device in the network core to control P2P and other traffic down to the application level --

Allot Communications, a premier provider of policy-based networking solutions, today announced the general availability of its next generation Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth and Service Level Agreement (SLA) management appliances - the NetEnforcer(R) AC-1000 Series. The new devices allow, for the first time, QoS deployment at Gigabit wire speed with layer seven protocol classification and monitoring supporting nearly 100,000 policies. Powered by a new high-performance and scalable hardware and software architecture for network computing tasks, the NetEnforcer AC-1000 Series sets a new performance benchmark by more than tripling the previous limits.

"Allot has reshaped the traffic management landscape with this incredibly powerful new series of NetEnforcers", said Eran Ziv, President, Allot Communications "Aside from shattering previous performance levels, we are enabling large-scale Peer-to-Peer (P2P) control and traffic management for the world's largest IP networks and empowering service providers with exciting new service capabilities for their customers. Until now, there simply hasn't been a solution with the power and reliability to support the largest enterprise, service provider and university networks."

The new AC-1000 Series allows customers to monitor, classify and shape IP traffic, enforce QoS policies, throttle P2P traffic and enforce SLAs. The support for Gigabit throughput provides carriers and service providers with a competitive edge and rapid ROI by allowing deployment in central hub locations and enabling an array of new revenue-generating services such as tiered services, class of service and usage-based billing. Supporting tens of thousands of users from a single location translates into a dramatically reduced cost per user for Fortune 500 networks, major universities and service providers.

"Carriers and service providers are facing major changes in usage patterns of their services in the recent two years," stated Claudia Bacco, President of TeleChoice, the strategic catalyst for the telecom industry. "With its service control features, the NetEnforcer AC-1000 can provide an essential building block for the carrier's service network by allowing its operator to control the traffic and costs and offer new revenue-generating services to its subscribers."
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/...m&footer_file=

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Row Over Gas Masked Queen
BBC

Pictures of the Queen wearing a gas mask which are on display in an art gallery in Brighton have caused a row with the Royal Mail. Three images representing first, second and third class stamps are on display at artrepublic in the North Lanes. They were created by former pop star James Cauty, who was in the group KLF, and are supposed to reflect his stance on the war with Iraq. But now the Royal Mail has said using the Queen's head is a breach of its copyright. We have had one or two objections and thousands of compliments Lawrence Alkin, gallery owner Gallery owner Lawrence Alkin said:

"Artrepublic has always been about demystifying art and bringing it to a mass audience. Nothing is original, it is through thousands of years of evolution of ideas - artistic and scientific - that has brought our culture to where it is today. So I am quite amazed. It has had a fantastic reception. We have had one or two objections and thousands of compliments. We have never sold a limited edition as fast as this one."



The images, which have been created through the Giclée printing technique, have been on display at the gallery since May. A spokesman for the Royal Mail said: "We do take any breach of copyright very seriously especially in relation to the Queen's image. We produce over three billion of these stamps every year and the images belong to the Royal Mail. It is still too early to say what action we will take. We hope this will be sorted out amicably."

The Royal Mail has given the artrepublic until Friday to take the images down. But Mr Alkin has said he is seeking legal advice on the issue.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/e...on/2963414.stm

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Security Standards Could Bolster File-Sharing Networks
Will Knight

Plans to build security features into personal computers to make unauthorised digital copying more difficult could backfire by strengthening controversial peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, say US researchers.

Peer-to-peer programs such as Kazaa and Morpheus let users scour each other's hard drives for music and other files though a decentralised network. The entertainment industry has targeted the companies behind these programs because many shared files are protected by copyright. But so far, it has proven difficult to eradicate the networks.

Security measures proposed by the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), a consortium of software and hardware companies, would help tackle the problem by making copying more difficult. The proposed measures include cryptographic signatures embedded in hardware and software which many observers believe will be used to create new audio and video formats and players that will restrict copying. The plans are controversial because some believe it will take control of a computer away from its user.

But Michael Smith and colleagues from Harvard University in the US say the same TCPA technology could, ironically, be used to make file sharing networks more robust. Cryptographic signatures could be used to verify that clients on the network are trusted thereby preventing an outsider from creating a client designed to disrupt network traffic or to spy on users' sharing activities.

The researchers say it will always be possible for a small number of people to copy content straight from a
computer's output, using a high-quality microphone, for example. They say this makes controlling the distribution of content through peer-to-peer file networks crucial.

"The bar can never be made high enough such that content can't eventually be broken out of the locked box and placed in a free format that can be distributed around," Smith told New Scientist.

Microsoft plans to release a version of the Windows operating system that will co-operate with this system but has promised to make this an open standard - one that anyone can use to write TCPA-compliant software.

Smith says, using open TCPA standards, software engineers could write peer-to-peer software that verifies that everyone on a network is trustworthy. "It would avoid scalable attacks where a little bit of work will let you pull down the network," he says.

The entertainment industry has already discussed using such measures, along with legal threats to disrupt peer-to-peer networks. Some companies have taken to uploading corrupted or incorrectly named files to these networks to make it harder for people to find music.

Chris Lightfoot, of the UK computer user lobby group Campaign for Digital Rights, says that providing the security standards are open, they could potentially be used in this way. He says: "Peer-to-peer technology has lots of legitimate applications and building robust networks to enable those applications is welcome."

But Lightfoot adds that TCPA technology could have serious implications for users' ability to use their computers as they wish. He says it could "stifle innovation, suppress open standards and create a serious invasion of privacy".
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993793

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Rogue AOL Subsidiary Leader to Resign
Matthew Fordahl

A young programmer whose software startup, Nullsoft, was gobbled up by America Online — and then caused numerous headaches for its corporate parent — plans to resign after his latest piece of rebel code was pulled from the Internet.

Justin Frankel, 24, announced his intentions late Monday, less than a week after a file-sharing program called Waste was posted and then pulled from the Nullsoft Web site.

"The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have," he said in his Web log. "This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leav (sic). I don't know when it will be, but I'm not going to last much longer."

Attempts to reach Frankel by telephone were not successful. An AOL spokeswoman declined to comment.

AOL paid $86 million for Nullsoft in 1999. At the time, the San Francisco company was best known for creating a popular music player called Winamp.

Despite the new corporate ownership, Nullsoft's team of programmers managed to maintain a freestyle hacker culture.

In March 2000, Nullsoft briefly posted a decentralized file-sharing program called Gnutella (news - web sites) before it was axed by AOL. But the genie had been set free, and other developers refined the code to create post-Napster (news - web sites) file-sharing programs.

Nullsoft's latest creation was a file-sharing program that allowed users to set up secure networks of no more than 50 people.

Within hours of its posting, Waste was deleted. In its place was a notice that said the program had been posted without Nullsoft's permission.

"If you downloaded or otherwise obtained a copy of the software, you acquired no lawful rights to the software and must destroy any and all copies of the software, including by deleting it from your computer," the statement said. "Any license that you may believe you acquired with the software is void, revoked and terminated."

Frankel, who is called "Our Benevolent Dictator" on the Nullsoft site, founded the company in 1998 after dropping out of the University of Utah.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...e/aol_nullsoft

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MusicNet Gets New Round Of Funding
Reuters

Online music service MusicNet said on Thursday it got about $10 million in new funding from its shareholders, including three of the world's biggest record labels and RealNetworks Inc. RNWK.O .

MusicNet is co-owned by AOL Time Warner's AOL.N Warner Music, Bertelsmann AG's BERT.UL BMG and EMI Group Plc EMI.L , as well as RealNetworks, a digital media software maker.

MusicNet is one of two online services launched by the recording industry in late 2001 to compete against popular unauthorized song-swapping services like Kazaa and Morpheus, which the industry blames largely for a decline in CD sales.

But both MusicNet and Pressplay have met with only limited success since their launch. This week Pressplay said it was purchased by digital media company Roxio ROXI.O , leading analysts to speculation whether MusicNet may next be acquired.

A source close to the company said the new round of funding should squash the rumors the service is for sale, showing that its partners remained committed to it.

"While we are a lean, strategically focused company, we will continue to set the bar because of our unique business approach as the digital music space grows and matures," MusicNet Chief Executive Alan McGlade said in a statement.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2796099

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Envoy Debuts; Download Manager For HTTP, FTP, Gnutella
Peter Cohen

Bains Software on Tuesday released Envoy, a new download manager for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. The software is designed to simplify HTTP, FTP and Gnutella-based downloads.

Envoy features the ability to resume transfers, even those started from other applications. It sports an integrated Gnutella client. Gnutella is a peer-to-peer file sharing network.

Envoy also has the ability to disconnect automatically, put the computer to sleep or shut down after the download queue is finished. You can schedule Envoy to start and stop its download queues; configure multiple download folders; play media files like songs or movies while downloading; and keep a download log to keep track of partial transfers and complete files.

Envoy costs US$18 to register. A downloadable version is available that expires after 30 days.

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/06/03/envoy/

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E-Books Catch On, but Only for Hardcore Fans So Far
Elinor Mills Abreu

Within 12 hours of Cory Doctorow's posting his new novel on his Web site, more than 10,000 free digital copies were snatched up by online readers.

Nearly five months later, the site (http://www.craphound.com/down/download.php) has passed along more than 110,000 copies of the science fiction book, titled "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom."

But while Doctorow's story illustrates the potential for e-books, it is not an accurate reflection of the market.

E-books, hailed in hi-tech precincts as the electronic alternative to traditional publishing, have failed to live up to their early billing as a replacement for the printed page, despite their popularity with gadget-obsessed pioneers.

"The (e-book) vendors will tell you that mass adoption is just around the corner," said Rich Levin, editor-in-chief of BookTech, a trade magazine for the publishing industry.

"When I talk to readers and publishers, they tell me the technology is just not ready for prime time," he said.

Publishers remain wary of releasing books on the Internet until there is a proven method of preventing people from copying and distributing them indiscriminately, Levin said. As a result, only a limited selection of current titles exist online.

Another problem is that competing technology standards restrict the type of digital files readers can use, he said. "Paper is going to remain the dominant medium for major titles for the foreseeable future."

Fewer than 5 percent of computer users say they have read an e-book over the last year, said Richard Doherty, research director at consumer technology assessment firm Envisioneering Group. That's up from 1 percent five years ago, he said.

"They (e-books) are not exactly taking off, but it is a groundswell movement that is growing," Doherty said.

Still, companies are trying to address the problem -- by coming up with new forms of temporary electronic "ink," that disappears, or is unreadable, after a few weeks or months, for instance. One company, Overdrive.com, has a copyright security technology and offers a service that enables libraries to "loan" e-books and stores like Barnes & Noble to sell them.

Meanwhile, the Open eBook Forum is working on standards to make electronic book publishing easier for publishers, said Nicholas Bogaty, executive director of the group.

But the biggest problem for electronic book readers remains that the reading experience still doesn't compare to curling up on the sofa with a riveting novel.
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle....toryID=2855493

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Free Trade With Us No Big Deal
Rod Oram

US president George W Bush, like many politicians, tries to rule by reward and punishment. But the tactic only works if he has something valuable to give or deny.

Sadly for him, a US-NZ free trade agreement carries no such allure. The odds on getting one were always long. Even if we eventually succeed, its value would be marginal and the US would extract from us a stiff economic price for agreeing to it.

Yet the US administration recently killed hopes of an FTA to punish the Prime Minister Helen Clark for her Gore and war comments and New Zealand's position on Iraq. The tactic backfired. As with the emperor's new clothes, the lack of substance was embarrassing.

Certainly, trade agreements are a tool of US diplomacy. Witness the unseemly speed with which Bush dangled trade in front of Middle East countries after he declared victory over Saddam Hussein.

But while the president initiates trade deals, the gift is from congress. The law requires congress to vote for or against an FTA. It cannot amend it. Therefore, the president has to craft a complex deal that carefully balances anti and pro-deal domestic lobbies to stand any chance of winning approval.

For us, the biggest anti-FTA lobby is the US dairy industry. Unfortunately that's the industry in which we face the largest trade barriers. Similarly, Australian hopes for its FTA face stiff opposition from the US sugar lobby.

It is highly unlikely Bush would expend considerable political capital to placate the dairy or sugar lobbies, even after next year's presidential election. His domestic political instincts are too strong. Witness his pledge of protection to US steel workers before the 2000 election. When he won, he paid them off by introducing new tariffs.

The Australians are beginning to wake up to the fact that FTAs are not all they're cracked up to be. Reports are beginning to circulate across the Tasman that even a US FTA including agriculture might eventually lift GDP by only 0.3% a year. And this analysis excludes the negatives the US would extract, such as a rewrite of Australia's copyright laws to suit US producers.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,...7a1865,00.html

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Friendster: Six Degrees of Sexual Frustration
William O'Shea

Just as Napster exploded in popularity a few years ago, Friendster is now making its own climb to Internet stardom. By May, just three months after its beta release, the site had grown to over 300,000 users.

In practice, Friendster is far different from its file-sharing cousin. It is completely Web- based, with no peer-to-peer application to download, and the "sharing" is purely metaphorical. But it is expanding for the same reason Napster did—members have an interest in making it more popular, because that means there's more to trade. While similar new services like Ryze.org and LinkedIn.com help people swap business contacts, Friendster is one of the few places that help you swap your friends.

Friendster works on the same principle as the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, where you find connections between movie stars. People who join post profiles of themselves including photos, interests, favorite books, TV shows, and movies. Browse someone's profile—anyone within three degrees of separation is fair game—and you also see thumbnail pictures of their friends. If one looks interesting, you can click it for a full profile. With another click you can send a message, though the site safeguards your e-mail address to thwart unwanted come-ons.

Not strictly a dating service, Friendster has built its success on its casual feel. There are no cupids or hearts on the site, nothing to indicate it's anything but a tool for connecting with friends. But although you could use it to meet a fellow Scrabble aficionado or an ultimate Frisbee partner, the site ends up being largely about dating. "For every one user of online dating services, there are probably 10 people who would use Friendster because they're more comfortable with the approach," says company founder Jonathan Abrams. "Friendster is less creepy. It's a little more like real life."

Harris Danow, a development assistant at Miramax, has used online personals services but prefers Friendster. "It isn't threatening, like dating sites. It's called Friendster, not 'Fuckster' or 'Makeoutster,' " he says. "It's like the kiddie pool of online dating." Harris has been contacted by several women through his online profile and went out with one. "I didn't think of it as a place for making dates, but women started contacting me. On Friendster people can check out your credentials, meaning that someone can ask your friend, 'What's the deal with this person?' It keeps you on your best behavior. You couldn't get away with meeting someone on Friendster, sleeping with her, and never calling her back. There's a net behind you."

Friendster is beginning to impact real-life socializing in intriguing ways. "It's interesting that now, when I go out to social gatherings, it seems as if just about everyone is on Friendster," says James Meetze, a publisher from Oakland, California. "The other night I was at an art opening when a girl approached me and said, 'I've seen you on the Internet.' I made the connection that she had recently sent me a message on Friendster about liking to eat kittens. I said, 'Oh, right, you're the kitten eater, please stay away from my kittens.' "

The site is emerging as a means to check out would-be mates. Lauryn Siegel, an unemployed production office manager in New York, spends much of her newfound free time browsing the service. "Friendster is the new Googling. It lets you find out more about a person, to put them in context."

This narrowing of social groups has created its share of awkward online moments. Lauryn found an old flame in her circle of friends, one she didn't want to rekindle. "I didn't think I would ever lay eyes on this person again. Maybe it's not so surprising. We're both from Northern California, both into music. . . . Everyone accepts that it's a small world, but Friendster makes it a lot more apparent."
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0323/oshea.php

[JackSpratts]

File-Sharing Networks May Battle Each Other
Stefanie Olsen and Evan Hansen

In a sign that file-sharing communities may start to turn on each other, Altnet said Thursday that rival networks may be violating its patent for digital tags and it plans to bring to them in line.

In a first step, the Brilliant Digital Entertainment subsidiary Altnet on Thursday licensed its TrueNames patent to its biggest partner, Sharman Networks, owner of Kazaa Media Desktop. Kazaa is one of the most popular file-sharing communities on the Net.

Altnet acquired rights to a 1999 patent that the company says covers the technique of identifying files on peer-to-peer networks using a "hash," or digital fingerprint based on the contents of the file. The company plans to approach virtually all other peer-to-peer services to seek license rights.

"Altnet is very focused on the infringement of the TrueNames patent and we believe that many of today's active peer-to-peer applications may be in direct violation," Altnet CEO Kevin Bermeister said in a statement.

"We're very focused on preserving the integrity of the patent and realizing the potential it offers peer-to-peer applications and content owners."

But the scope and enforceability of patents are notoriously difficult to evaluate barring actual court rulings on their validity.

Nevertheless, there is a growing sentiment in technology circles that many patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are most likely seriously flawed. Among other things, the agency has granted patents for side-to-side swinging on a swing set and for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without a crust.

Technology patents have drawn some of the harshest criticisms and have been at the heart of some of the most closely watched patent battles in years, especially so-called business method patents such as Amazon.com's one-click checkout system. Last year, the online retail giant settled claims against Barnes & Noble involving the patent.

Patent number 5,978,791, which Altnet licensed Thursday, has been litigated at least once before, when content delivery services provider Digital Island used it in a dispute with rival Akamai. A jury rejected Digital Island's claims in December 2001, according to a statement published on Akamai's Web site.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-1013851.html

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99-Cent Songs Online Not Really A Bargain
Jim Hillibish

I buy music CDs like most folks do, fifteen bucks for about 12 songs, ten of which I can live without.

Music collecting on computers changes all that. You can buy only the tunes you want, arrange them and burn them onto your own CD, for your home or vehicle player. Or skip the CD and store them directly on your MP3 player. This is a Declaration of Independence for music fans no longer dependent on the whims of the record producers.

We’ve endured a number of twists and turns on this road. It started with file-sharing schemes that spread music collections worldwide and brought networks to their knees under the data overload. The price to users was right: free.

That riled the artists and record companies to file floods of copyright lawsuits. The courts agreed, and most file sharing now is a legal liability to collectors and network operators.

Still, the compelling benefits of music on our computers remain. This time, it will cost us.

Apple Computer’s digital music Web site, iTunes Music Store, has promise. Yes, it will take a credit card, but you can download, legally, more than 200,000 tunes.

When I first heard of this, I thought, great, a solution to the vexing problem of starving artists. Then when I saw Apple’s suggested price per song, I wondered if indeed this was a major technological advance.

They charge 99 cents per song. That’s all you get, the song data file. You provide the CD, the labor to create it, the plastic case and the printer ink and paper for the album liners. That 99 cents per song is the same price as most commercial CDs. I’d hoped for a price a lot less than that, now a big, fat pipe dream.

I know what happened. Even though music producers no longer had to manufacture and distribute CDs, they were fearful of cutting out an important link in their money chain, the record stores. The 99 cents at least gives the stores a chance to compete.

If I were a Best Buy or a Borders, I’d join the revolution instead of trying to block it. The technology exists for them to place a music file server in each store loaded with thousands of titles. Then we could burn the ones we want onto a CD right in the store.

Imagine this. We’d no longer be dependent on store inventories. Songs could be distributed to us almost instantly from the artists, instead of waiting months for the CD plants to churn them out. A few square feet of store space could contain everything we need in music.

Then, hopefully, the economics of technology will take hold and the prices will drop as the competition rages. The stores will make more money as they sell us the blank CDs, jewel cases and, especially, the printer ink and paper. The downside is the commercial CD makers, who reap millions, will become dinosaurs.

Will it happen in our lifetime? Smells like a pipe dream.
http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?C...&ID=103062&r=1

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File-Cash- New Music Service From Apple
Dennis Sellers

File-Cash, a new Mac compatible music sharing service, will launch tomorrow (June 1). One of the ways it will differ from Apple's own iTunes Music Store is its focus on independent labels. However, the company feels that Apple's online music business has opened up the possibilities for other such ventures.

"Every day there are new developments regarding digital music and online music sales, as witnessed by Apple's iTunes Music Store," Todd Stinson, founder of File-Cash, told MacCentral. "The industry is becoming more ripe for such a service. The major labels have pretty much dropped their hands and given up. The future of music definitely will include digital distribution through the Internet."

He said that File-Cash will offer benefits for independent labels. In fact, indie labels are excited about the company's business model, he added. It will purportedly offer a catalog of music from over 100 independent labels.

"We're attracting companies such as MoonTaxi," Stinson said. "The big five music labels will be conspicuous by their absence."

The company plans to offer "financial incentives" for consumers to download registered files and co-host the files on their home computers’ shared directories. According to File-Cash President Bernie McGinn, copyright owners register their music into the File- Cash network via a Web-based control panel. They enter relevant artist and file information, search keywords, as well as set the price of the digital file. All files hosted on File-Cash will be encrypted with Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology.

You don't need a subscription service to use File-Cash. You install a cross-platform application provided by the company to find and download files. Additionally, consumers will get a percentage of the file price every time another consumer downloads the file from their shared drive, according to McGinn.
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/...5/31/filecash/

From the Site:

File-Cash Launch Update: Our focus groups are testing the File-Cash p2p service and the information we have gathered is invaluable. Minor changes are being implimented to the system for the most "Ease of use" for all participants. Please check back soon!

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Catch them if you can

The major record labels have realised that the only way to beat internet file-swapping is to make legal, pay-per-download sites more attractive. But is it too little, too late, asks Owen Gibson
Owen Gibson

After a period of procrastination that would put Hamlet to shame, the past few weeks have seen record industry bigwigs engaged in a flurry of activity around the issue of music downloads and online piracy. A series of court cases, launches and announcements have conspired to force the topic back to the top of the agenda for label bosses and artists alike. The catalyst was the unexpected early success of Apple's iTunes, which in the US has got record labels all hot under the collar about the possibility that online music might be a viable revenue stream after all.

But despite recent enthusiasm from consumers, it remains to be seen whether this is the start of a genuine fightback against the illegal peer-to-peer sites that have brought the labels to the brink, or the last gasp of a dying industry. The music business estimates that it lost £2.6bn worldwide to online and offline piracy last year and, to many, making a success of legal download services is their last chance to stem the tide.

Although only available to Macintosh users in the States, 3m tracks by major artists from Britney Spears to U2 have been downloaded from Apple's iTunes service at a price of 99 cents apiece since it launched last month. Even better news for five major labels - BMG, Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner - was the fact that most of the songs were downloaded as complete albums, soothing fears that online music would lead to the death of the album.

Almost immediately, record label executives were frothing at the mouth with excitement, issuing statements rejoicing in the fact that people did want to pay to download music after all. Which was perhaps a bit rich given that it took a third party to finally provide a user-friendly, pay-per-track service that people actually wanted to use.

The effects of the initial success of iTunes are already apparent. Online streaming giant RealNetworks last week announced the launch of its new download service, which will follow the Apple model, charging users 79 cents a time to download tracks once they have paid a monthly $10 subscription fee. And nothing epitomises the fresh momentum better than the purchase of Sony and Universal's unpopular PressPlay service by software company Roxio.

The manufacturer of CD burning software paid £24.3m for the service, chiefly as a quick and easy way to pick up PressPlay's existing agreements with major labels and online back catalogue rights to a variety of major artists including Justin Timberlake, Eminem and Coldplay. It plans to drop the tarnished PressPlay brand and use it as the backbone for the relaunch of Napster, the one-time scourge of the record industry, which it bought earlier this year. It too will operate along the lines of iTunes, with tracks from all current major artists and both subscription and pay-as-you-download options.

The irony of Sony and Universal's failed online distribution effort providing the backbone for the legit relaunch of the daddy of all illegal copying sites has not gone unnoticed. But it also signals a fundamental change in attitude, according to media lawyer Tony Morris. "The most important thing is Sony and Universal selling PressPlay. When you get Sony, who have traditionally guarded their rights zealously, giving a third party the right to do anything with their catalogue, that's a significant change in attitude," he says. But Morris also believes that it's a change that has been forced on the major labels, not one that has been embraced with enthusiasm.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/featu...968851,00.html

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Nokia teams with Warner Music
Jim Hu

Nokia on Monday struck an agreement to offer Warner Music Group songs through its upcoming Nokia 3300 music phone.

The deal will allow Warner to offer song clips from emerging artists, ring tones, multimedia message templates and wallpaper graphics for Nokia 3300 owners. Nokia will also include a CD-ROM with full-length tracks from Warner Music International artists that can be downloaded onto the 3300.

Nokia unveiled the 3300 in March as part of a line of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) phones. The 3300 is the model that focuses on music, offering digital playback in the popular MP3 format and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding).

More companies are beginning to embrace AAC, a technology developed by Dolby Laboratories, AT&T, the Fraunhofer Institute and Sony Electronics. Last week, America Online announced it would use AAC as the streaming audio format for its Net radio services, joining Apple Computer's iTunes as major AAC supporters. Online music subscription service MusicNet is planning to embrace AAC as well.

Along with the digital playback features, the Nokia 3300 offers an FM radio tuner, a digital recorder, ring tones and messaging capabilities. The phone also comes with a 64 MB MMC memory card.

Nokia has not disclosed when it will ship the 3300.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026-1012147.html

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Tales of Technology: Who stole my Internet?
James H. Morris

The first time I noticed the Internet was in 1965 when I saw an MIT professor typing madly at an old teletype. "He's talking to someone in California!" someone whispered. At first I didn't see why it was better than a telephone; but I quickly learned it was a vitally important tool.

In the early days, this new thing was called the Arpanet after the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Its use was restricted to a small number of universities and research labs, and it was meant primarily to link up precious computers rather than people. But time has shown that computers are not so precious, while human communication is.

For me and my computer friends, the best time for the Internet was the 1980s, when it was the private preserve of scientists and engineers. If we encountered someone there we could expect that they understood computers, were generally intelligent and were not selling Viagra. We discovered how great e-mail was for communicating -- as fast as a telephone without requiring the receiver's immediate attention. It was as clear as a written letter. It also facilitated group communication since the Internet was happy to distribute a message to as many people as you could name.

Another little feature: the Internet was cheap because it used telephone lines far more efficiently. Instead of requiring a continuous path of copper between every two transcontinental communicants, it could use one line for many pairs by chopping up the sender's message, interspersing the pieces and reassembling them at the receiver's end. Guess how the telephone companies liked that.

As more people got hooked up, the Internet became much more important. In fact, an observation called Metcalfe's Law predicts that successful new communications systems constantly accelerate their growth. This is because the value to each subscriber is proportional to the total number of subscribers. The hundredth telephone purchaser got access to only 99 other people, while today's gets a billion.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03152/187556.stm

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Much Ado About Smut-Free DVDs
Katie Dean

Three small companies that manufacture technologies that filter out the sex, gore and violence from DVD movies are hoping to avoid a protracted legal fight with Hollywood.

ClearPlay, Family Shield Technologies and Trilogy Studios filed a motion Friday in the United States District Court in Denver to dismiss claims that their products infringe on the copyrights of motion pictures.

The companies sell hardware and software applications that allow consumers to automatically skip or mute obscene or sexually explicit content in movies. They claim that the technology does not alter the movie itself, but customizes the way the film is viewed.

"You don't change the movie, you just change the experience," said Bill Aho, CEO of ClearPlay, who has been dubbed "a candidate for the most-hated man in Hollywood" by movie critic Roger Ebert.

Eight motion picture studios, the Directors Guild of America and 13 individual directors -- including Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg -- are suing the companies for copyright infringement and for altering their artistic products.

The parties are meeting for a scheduling conference in court Tuesday. The studios and directors have 20 days to file a response to the summary judgment motion.

"We believe the judge has sufficient facts to decide the case," Aho said.

Directors "have to get over the emotional response" that people can customize the way they watch movies, Aho said. "We're talking about people in their homes doing what they want to do. Directors may not like that."

"This is like the old joke that you can't remove the tag from the pillow," Aho said. "It's unreasonable for the director to think they can follow you into the home and control how you watch a movie."

Carol Stogsdill, a spokeswoman for the Directors Guild of America, said "we haven't really had a chance to look at (the motion) at this point in time."

"The studios are defending what they feel are violations of their copyright," she said. "The directors are filing their claims citing the Lanham Act, which basically protects the reputation of the artists."

She said that the companies named in the lawsuit are making a profit by creating different versions of movies.

"They are not just taking out a few four-letter words," she said.

For example, Stogsdill said that in the film Proof of Life, the companies edited out the entire opening scene, a kidnapping, which is the basis for the entire movie.

"It removes the heart and soul of the movie," she said. "There are many examples of this."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59071,00.html

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Software Piracy Rate Dips
Reuters

Corporations cracked down on pirated software last year, trimming the glut by a percentage point, an industry report said on Tuesday.

The rare bit of good news comes at a tough time for software and media conglomerates. They are battling to stem the black market trade of cut-rate or free software, music and movie copies available online and on the street.

Industry lobby group Business Software Alliance (BSA) said the worldwide software piracy rate fell last year to 39 percent from 40 percent.

"We're pleased with the results, but we're still facing a piracy situation where nearly four in ten pieces of business software is used without authorization," said Beth Scott, BSA vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa.

The BSA has spent huge sums to try to reduce the installing of unlicensed software duplicates in areas such as word processing and spreadsheet programs to avoid paying the license fees.

The modest improvement brings to an end two straight years of piracy escalation. The industry had blamed the burgeoning traffic in copyright-protected materials on Internet file-sharing networks and on so-called "warez" trading sites for the recent upsurge in unlicensed software duplicates.

The 2002 figure is 10 percentage points below the 1994 level, the point at which the industry first confronted the problem in a united front, suggesting the group's anti-piracy lobbying and education initiatives are showing results.

The BSA has also pressured governments to bolster piracy enforcement and laws with limited success.

For example, the EU's Copyright Directive, a law requiring European Internet service providers to more actively police their networks to shut down piracy activities, has stalled on the state level. Thirteen of the 15 member states have yet to ratify it six months after the passing of the deadline.

The BSA counts Microsoft Corp, Apple Computer and Intel Corp among its 22 members.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2866379

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Reclaiming The Public Domain
Lawrence Lessig

We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don’t, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would suggest 98% of works would pass into the pubilc domain after 50 years. The Act would do a great deal to reclaim a public domain.

This proposal has received a great deal of support. It is now facing some important lobbyists’ opposition. We need a public way to begin to demonstrate who the lobbyists don’t speak for. This is the first step.

If you are an ally in at least this cause, please sign the petition. Please blog it, please email it, please spam it, please buy billboards about it — please do whatever you can. And most importantly, please help us explain its importance. There is a chance to do something significant here. But it will take a clearer, simpler voice than mine.
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/...6.shtml#001254

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Record Labels Again Sue Creators of Morpheus Service
The new suit is filed in Nashville, and targets a Streamcast online radio database that was never launched.
Jon Healey

Like frustrated prosecutors charging an acquitted crime boss with tax evasion, the major record labels are suing the creators of the Morpheus file-sharing network again — not over the software that millions of people use to copy billons of songs for free but over a service that never launched.

The claims come about a month after the labels, music publishers and Hollywood studios suffered a stunning setback in their first copyright infringement lawsuit against Morpheus' creator, Streamcast Networks Inc. U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson ruled that Streamcast and Grokster, the distributor of another popular file-sharing program, weren't responsible for the piracy committed by their programs' users.

Wilson is in Los Angeles. The labels took the new case to a federal court in Nashville, where Streamcast and its precursor companies were based when they developed the service in dispute.

"The legal term for this is 'forum shopping,' " said attorney Mark Radcliffe, a copyright-law expert at Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich in Palo Alto. "You get a bad decision someplace, you go someplace else They're filing in a place where music is important, where they've got a good chance of getting a sympathetic decision."

The Recording Industry Assn. of America issued a brief statement in response to questions about the lawsuit, saying only that "this is another step in our ongoing litigation against Streamcast, a company that we believe is responsible for widespread copyright infringement."

Streamcast executives said they were outraged. They said the company tried to develop an online radio service three years ago, abandoning the effort when it couldn't get licenses from the labels. Now, they complained, they're being sued for legitimate steps they took to prepare for the would-be venture.

The record labels are "sore losers," said Michael Weiss, chief executive of Streamcast. "It looks like they're coming after us for exploring another legal business model, one that we didn't even launch."

At issue is a computerized collection of music that Streamcast — previously known as MusicCity.com Inc. and Infinite Music Inc. — compiled in 1999 and 2000.

The lawsuit alleges that Streamcast acquired CDs with thousands of songs, then converted them into a digital database on hard drives and other storage devices. The company made multiple copies of the songs and the database, all without the permission of the copyright owners, the lawsuit alleges.

The labels made a similar accusation in 1999 against MP3.com Inc., which launched an online music-storage service without the labels' permission. A federal judge in New York ruled that MP3.com violated the labels' copyrights, forcing the company to pay more than $100 million in settlements.

Unlike MP3.com, Streamcast created its database for an Internet radio service that complied with the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, said Charles S. Baker, the company's attorney. Streamcast tried to strike licensing deals with the labels; Baker said it did that even though it wasn't clear that a radio service needed to be licensed.

All Internet radio stations convert their discs into an electronic database, and a legitimate station's database shouldn't be grounds for a lawsuit under the 1998 act, said Jonathan Potter of the Digital Media Assn., a trade group for online broadcasters.

Potter, a frequent opponent of the RIAA, had a different reaction: "The record companies have a history of suing people that they just don't like."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...,7552757.story

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Senator Wants Limits On Copy Protection
Declan McCullagh

A conservative Republican lawmaker is expected to announce a bill next week that would dramatically scale back the ability of record labels, movie studios and others to use anticopying technology, according to a source familiar with the proposal.

The bill, authored by Sen. Sam Brownback, would regulate digital rights management systems, granting consumers the right to resell copy-protected products and requiring digital media manufacturers to prominently disclose to consumers the presence of anticopying technology in their products.

The Kansas Republican's proposal could also derail the recording industry's legal pursuit of the identity of a Verizon Communications subscriber by requiring that a copyright holder file a lawsuit in pursuit of the name of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate. That would amend the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which a federal court concluded does not require a judge's approval before a copyright holder can force the disclosure of a suspected pirate's identity.

The main thrust of the Brownback bill, however, is to slap regulations on digital rights management (DRM) technology, which has become increasingly popular as a way to reduce widespread copyright infringement on the Internet. Last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stressed his company's support for DRM technology, and Apple Computer uses DRM to limit how customers can reuse music downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. Some consumer groups argue that DRM infringes on the right to make "fair use" of copyrighted works and to back up legally purchased digital files.

If the Brownback proposal were enacted, the Federal Trade Commission would have the power to ban DRM systems that limit a consumer's right to resell any "digital media product," a category that includes everything from computer software and e-books to copy-protected CDs and movies. It also says that companies selling such products must offer "clear and conspicuous notice or a label on the product" indicating the presence of anticopying techology that follows FTC regulations, starting one year after the law's enactment, unless the FTC determines that industry groups have created reasonable "voluntary" guidelines of their own.

At a privacy and politics summit in Washington on Tuesday, an industry representative said the measure will likely be introduced at a press conference in the middle of next week. A spokesman for Brownback said Wednesday that he could not confirm when the event would be held. Brownback, a conservative with a 100 percent voting record from the American Conservative Union in 2000, is a member of the Senate Communications Subcommittee.

"We're going to support it," Mike Godwin, an attorney with advocacy group Public Knowledge, said of Brownback's plan. "I think that Sen. Brownback and his staff have clearly made an effort to develop a bill that addresses some of the major excesses that we're seeing in the policy arena at the intersection of copyright policy and technology policy."

However, a representative at the Recording Industry Association of America said the legislation is "weighted down with a variety of bad public policy judgments hostile to all property owners. The DMCA was a carefully crafted compromise and balance struck by Congress. That's why efforts to cherry- pick particular provisions are likely to fail."

"With respect to the information subpoena provision," the RIAA representative continued, "the intent of Congress was clear and appropriate, and the district court's decisive rulings show that Congress got it right."

A draft of the Brownback bill provided to CNET News.com by a congressional aide also:

• Says the Federal Communications Commission may not force companies that create or sell PCs or digital video products to include specific copy- protection technology in them.

• Requires the FTC to create an advisory committee to describe "the ways in which access control technology and redistribution control technology may affect consumer, educational institution and library use of digital media products based on their legal and customary uses of such products."

• Says the FTC must prepare a report two years after the bill is enacted into law. The report would include information about how prevalent DRM technologies are, if they allow "consumers, educational institutions and libraries to engage in all lawful uses of the product," and how often copyright holders have tried to glean subscriber information from Internet service providers.

Adam Thierer, an analyst at the free-market group Cato Institute, applauded parts of Brownback's bill--such as limiting the FCC's power--but said it was a mistake to involve the federal government in regulating DRM technology.

"It's a decidedly mixed bag," Thierer said. "There are some things worth praising, such as opposing technology mandates from the FCC, but the baggage in this bill in terms of the FTC regulations are somewhat troubling...There are requirements that cut in the opposite direction. That's really unfortunate."

An unrelated bill already introduced in Congress by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., takes a similar approach in part, saying that software, music and movies that include copy-protection technology must be prominently labeled as having such technology, with consumer warnings.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-1013037.html

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Anti-Piracy Team Scanning Asia P2P Sites
John Lui

A U.S.-based anti software-piracy group has begun to target Asia-Pacific Web sites and users of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks, looking for those who trade in illegal software.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA), whose members include large firms such as Adobe and Microsoft, has recently aimed its software-sniffing Web crawler specifically at Asia-Pacific sites, said a spokesman.

The action was prompted by the high rates of Internet-based piracy in the region, which is beginning to rival more traditional methods such as illegal discs, said Jeffrey Hardee, BSA vice president and regional director, Asia Pacific.

"P2P is one the biggest problems we have in Asia Pacific, " he said. As for the Web sites, he expected the crawler to turn up thousands of infringing sites every month.

So far, software-swapping Web sites have been found in Singapore, Korea Taiwan, Australia, Taiwan, Japan and China, he said.

Many of these Web sites discovered by the crawler have been shut down by the Internet service providers (ISPs) hosting them after being served with a legal letter called a 'notice of take-down' by the BSA.
http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/indust...9134980,00.htm

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Dept Of Time On Your Hands Dept

The Cover Project is a place devoted to music covers, songs written by one performer and redone by another. The goal is to create long “Cover Chains”, huge lists where a song is covered by an artist who in turn has a song covered by another who in turn has a song covered by yet another artist, and on and on and on. Why? Beats me. Just for fun I guess. It’s been around for a while. I just thought it was weird enough to post.

Here’s the cover chain for Prince

124 songs long

Jack.


124 songs long:
The Prince song "Sign O the Times" was covered by PJ Proby
The PJ Proby song "That Means a Lot" was covered by Beatles
The Beatles song "Come Together" was covered by Craig David
The Craig David song "Walking Away" was covered by U2
The U2 song "Mlk" was covered by Joan Baez
The Joan Baez song "Old Blue" was covered by Byrds
The Byrds song "Change Is Now" was covered by Giant Sand
The Giant Sand song "All Done In" was covered by Rainer Ptacek
The Rainer Ptacek song "The Good Book" was covered by Emmylou Harris
The Emmylou Harris song "Till I Gain Control Again" was covered by Willie Nelson
The Willie Nelson song "Funny How Time Slips Away" was covered by Al Green
The Al Green song "Take Me To Theriver" was covered by Talking Heads
The Talking Heads song "Burning Down Thehouse" was covered by Tom Jones
The Tom Jones song "Sexbomb" was covered by Max Raabe Orchestra
The Max Raabe Orchestra song "Lucky" was covered by 10th Floor Orchestra
The 10th Floor Orchestra song "When Th Roll Is Called" was covered by 10 Cent Wings
The 10 Cent Wings song "Stain Alive" was covered by Bee Gees
The Bee Gees song "Words" was covered by Elvis Presley
The Elvis Presley song "Heartbreak Hotel" was covered by Guns N' Roses
The Guns N' Roses song "Paradise City" was covered by Robert Johnson
The Robert Johnson song "Crossroads" was covered by Stephen Stills
The Stephen Stills song "Go & Say Goodbye" was covered by Poco
The Poco song "Do You Feel It Too" was covered by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band song "Ripplin' Waters" was covered by John Denver
The John Denver song "Leaving On a Jet Plane" was covered by Bobby Bare
The Bobby Bare song "Detroit City" was covered by Arthur Alexander
The Arthur Alexander song "Rainbow Road" was covered by Steve Goodman
The Steve Goodman song "Elvis Imitators" was covered by Jimmy Buffett
The Jimmy Buffett song "Escape" was covered by Rupert Holmes
The Rupert Holmes song "Who, What, When, Where, Why" was covered by Dionne Warwick
The Dionne Warwick song "All Kinds of People" was covered by 5th Dimension
The 5th Dimension song "One Less Bell To Answer" was covered by Gladys Knight & The Pips
The Gladys Knight & The Pips song "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" was covered by Creedence Clearwater Revival
The Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Lodi" was covered by Bo Diddley
The Bo Diddley song "Before You Accuse Me" was covered by Thirteenth Floor Elevators
The Thirteenth Floor Elevators song "Reverberation" was covered by ZZ Top
The ZZ Top song "Sharp Dressed Man" was covered by Johnny Zhivago
The Johnny Zhivago song "Gorilla In the Janitors Hole" was covered by Traffic
The Traffic song "Feelin' Alright" was covered by Badfinger
The Badfinger song "Midnight Caller" was covered by Tim Hardin
The Tim Hardin song "If I Were a Carpenter" was covered by Leon Russell
The Leon Russell song "A Song For You" was covered by Ray Charles
The Ray Charles song "Hallelujah I Love Her So" was covered by Eddie Cochran
The Eddie Cochran song "Summertime Blues" was covered by James Taylor
The James Taylor song "Carolina In My Mind" was covered by Count Basie
The Count Basie song "When My Dreamboat Comes Home" was covered by Fats Domino
The Fats Domino song "Goin' Home" was covered by Rosco Gordon
The Rosco Gordon song "No More Doggin'" was covered by John Lee Hooker
The John Lee Hooker song "Crawling King Snake" was covered by Doors
The Doors song "Light My Fire" was covered by Jackie Wilson
The Jackie Wilson song "I'll Be Satisfied" was covered by Shakin Stevens
The Shakin Stevens song "Oh Julie" was covered by Barry Manilow
The Barry Manilow song "Could It Be Magic" was covered by Donna Summer
The Donna Summer song "I Feel Love" was covered by Blondie
The Blondie song "Heart of Glass" was covered by Associates
The Associates song "The Rhythm Divine" was covered by Shirley Bassey
The Shirley Bassey song "Big Spender" was covered by Queen
The Queen song "Get Down Make Love" was covered by Nine Inch Nails
The Nine Inch Nails song "Head Like a Hole" was covered by Devo
The Devo song "Beautiful World" was covered by Rage Against The Machine
The Rage Against The Machine song "Bombtrack" was covered by Mambo Kurt
The Mambo Kurt song "Aliens From Alleinunterhalter" was covered by Luke & The Apostles
The Luke & The Apostles song "Been Burnt" was covered by Nomads
The Nomads song "Low Down Shakin' Chills" was covered by Hellacopters
The Hellacopters song "Jive and Juice" was covered by Gufs
The Gufs song "Blistering An Alligator" was covered by 45 Grave
The 45 Grave song "Watson" was covered by Johnny "Guitar" Watson
The Johnny "Guitar" Watson song "Gangster of Love" was covered by Steve Miller Band
The Steve Miller Band song "Thejoker" was covered by Todd Snider
The Todd Snider song "Alright Guy" was covered by Jerry Jeff Walker
The Jerry Jeff Walker song "Night Rider's Lament" was covered by Ian Tyson
The Ian Tyson song "Red Velvet" was covered by Gordon Lightfoot
The Gordon Lightfoot song "Ribbon of Darkness" was covered by Marty Robbins
The Marty Robbins song "Don't Worry (About Me)" was covered by Don McLean
The Don McLean song "Wonderful Baby" was covered by Fred Astaire
The Fred Astaire song "Cheek To Cheek" was covered by Lew Stone
The Lew Stone song "Red Sails In the Sunset" was covered by Platters
The Platters song "Thegreat Pretender" was covered by Freddie Mercury
The Freddie Mercury song "Easy Lovin" was covered by Freddie Hart
The Freddie Hart song "Easy Lovin" was covered by Charlie Rich
The Charlie Rich song "Lonely Weekends" was covered by Billy Swan
The Billy Swan song "I Can Help" was covered by Drifters
The Drifters song "On Broadway" was covered by Neil Young
The Neil Young song "After the Goldrush" was covered by Joni Mitchell
The Joni Mitchell song "Woodstock" was covered by Crosby Stills Nash & Young
The Crosby Stills Nash & Young song "Ohio" was covered by Mott The Hoople
The Mott The Hoople song "Golden Age of Rock 'n Roll" was covered by Gyllene Tider
The Gyllene Tider song "Threnody" was covered by Frida
The Frida song "There's Something Going On" was covered by Bomfunk MC's
The Bomfunk MC's song "(crack It) Something Going On" was covered by Twisted Sister
The Twisted Sister song "We're Not Gonna Take It" was covered by Naked Raygun
The Naked Raygun song "Treason" was covered by 76% Uncertain
The 76% Uncertain song "Feliz Navidad" was covered by Jose Feliciano
The Jose Feliciano song "Rain" was covered by Ann Murray
The Ann Murray song "Snowbird" was covered by Ron Sexsmith
The Ron Sexsmith song "Kiss of Life" was covered by Dan Bryk
The Dan Bryk song "Street Team" was covered by Nova Social
The Nova Social song "Break Bread" was covered by Desmo Donte
The Desmo Donte song "Blubber In Your Teacup" was covered by Raw Power
The Raw Power song "State Oppression" was covered by Kreator
The Kreator song "Tormentor" was covered by Black Witchery
The Black Witchery song "Hopelessly Devo" was covered by Hazel O'Connor
The Hazel O'Connor song "Mush and Spreadleg" was covered by Ultima Thule
The Ultima Thule song "Cover You Ass" was covered by Dead Kennedys
The Dead Kennedys song "Your Emotions" was covered by Electric Frankenstein
The Electric Frankenstein song "Teenage Shutdown" was covered by Supersuckers
The Supersuckers song "On the Couch" was covered by Fastbacks
The Fastbacks song "My Letters" was covered by Seaweed
The Seaweed song "Did Jit Or Not?" was covered by Romy Schneider
The Romy Schneider song "La Chanson D'helene" was covered by Françoiz Breut
The Françoiz Breut song "La Plume De Ma Tante" was covered by Jacques Dutronc
The Jacques Dutronc song "Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi" was covered by Dump
The Dump song "It's Not Alright" was covered by Lambchop
The Lambchop song "Mmmmmmm" was covered by 2 Nice Girls
The 2 Nice Girls song "Love Affair" was covered by Ottawan
The Ottawan song "D.i.s.c.o." was covered by Kelly Llorenna
The Kelly Llorenna song "Love Makes Me Blush" was covered by theodorakis
The theodorakis song "Grampian Pipes For Aye" was covered by Wickerman
The Wickerman song "Halbert Joined Johnny" was covered by Philip Boa & The Voodooclub
The Philip Boa & The Voodooclub song "Hospitality Bunker" was covered by Hope Blister
The Hope Blister song "Didn't They Smeg Ma?" was covered by Goethes Erben
The Goethes Erben song "Glacier and the Eternity Drool" was covered by Red Box
The Red Box song "Hoover the Street With Glasses" was covered by Granfaloon Bus
The Granfaloon Bus song "Morphing In a Stranglehold" was covered by Sister Double Happiness

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MediaSeek.pl is back online
Press Release

We are happy to announce that the file sharing network of MediaSeek.pl is back online!

During the last few months both client and server software has been completely rewritten in order to provide you with a high quality product capable of fulfilling your P2P needs.

The key features of the new MediaSeek.pl network are:
- Web-based user interface
- Auto-resume of broken downloads
- MPEG Audio Layer 3 Support (64-320 kbps VBR & CBR)
- Pure music indexing (only the audio frames are indexed not ID3Tags)
- Ability to queue off-line files (download starts when the file becomes available)
- Download location optimizer (finds the fastest link from you to the file)
- High anonymity (other users do not see your username and can not list your files)
- High security (only shared MP3 files can be accessed by remote users)
- W3Cache proxy support (download only)
- Remote management - ability to run MediaSeek.pl Client on one PC and queue files from another (i.e. queue form work, download at home)

We hope that you will find our service interesting.
http://web.mediaseek.pl/

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Western Europe

Verizon Ordered To Hand Over Names Of 'Pirates'
David Minto

Internet service provider (ISP) Verizon Communications was ordered yesterday by the US Court of Appeals to hand over the names of two suspected song-swappers to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

The RIAA’s case against Verizon has been rattling on since August last year when it attempted prise from Verizon the identity of a person it claimed had copied and distributed hundreds of unlicensed music tracks. Later, it added the name of a second alleged ‘pirate’, pursuing the case through a controversial clause in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows copyright owners to issue subpoenas without a judicial review. Unlike a normal subpoena, no underlying claim of a crime needs to be officially alleged and signed by a judge or magistrate.

The original US District Court verdict in January ruled that the RIAA was indeed entitled to the names of those it suspected of copyright infringement and ordered Verizon to co-operate. Verizon had sought a stay on the order to protect the names while the company appealed the decision. In April, a US District Judge rejected a full stay request, but granted a temporary stay until the Court of Appeals could decide the matter. Now the Court of Appeals has ruled that Verizon must immediately hand over the names.

The RIAA has inevitably reacted to the verdict with delight. "The Court of Appeals’ decision confirms our long-held position that music pirates must be held accountable for their actions, and not be allowed to hide behind the company that provides their internet service," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "We look forward to Verizon's speedy compliance with this ruling."

The wider case is likely to continue, however, and both the RIAA and Verizon believe that their legal battle will end up in front of the US Supreme Court where a precedent can be set on the issue.

Verizon’s appeal is based on its objection that the RIAA is abusing the subpoena provision in the DMCA, saying the clause could not be applied in this case as the subpoena related to material transmitted over, not stored on, the Verizon network. Verizon also claims that the move violates customer privacy and may be unconstitutional, contravening First Amendment rights to anonymity.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16607



DVDs Ever More Popular In Germany, report

The number of DVDs sold in Germany during the first quarter of 2003 has risen 57 per cent year-on-year whilst revenue from sales increased 30.4 per cent, according to new figures released by video trade body BVV.

DVD unit sales leapt from 7.4m in the first-quarter of 2002 to 11.6m during the same period one year on. Revenue coming in from sales of the format rose from E149m to E194.2m. Sales on VHS cassettes, meanwhile, fell 37 per cent from 8.1m to 5.1m with the sales revenue from combined DVD and video sales staying almost static, rising just 0.3 per cent.

Though Germany’s sell-through market remains buoyant, however, BVV reports that the rental market is suffering somewhat, with many laying the blame at the feet of internet ‘pirates’. Film rental stores have seen their revenue drop from E104.7m on 37.2m transactions in the first quarter of 2002 to E86.3m on 32.3m transactions in the equivalent period of 2003. However, even as the number of video rentals has halved year-on-year in this timeframe, the year-on-year increase for DVDs is 80 per cent.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16534



EU Moves Against Illegal And Harmful Content Online
Leigh Phillips

As part of Europe's determined effort to tackle illegal and harmful content on the internet and new delivery
platforms such as mobile phones, a two year extension to the Safer Internet Action Plan has been adopted by the European Parliament and Council upon the proposal of the European Commission.

To better equip parents and children with the tools and awareness they need for daily life in an information society, the EU Council has agreed with the European Parliament to accept the Commission's proposal for a two-year extension to the Safer Internet Action Plan. This is the EU's response to tackling the controversial issue of illegal and harmful content on the internet. The Action plan supports a network of hotlines in Europe where illegal content can be reported. It encourages self-regulation; benchmarks content filtering and rating systems and supports a European network of safer internet awareness centres.

The extended Safer Internet Action Plan includes measures to encourage exchange of information and co- ordination with the relevant actors at national level, and has special provisions for accession countries. Actors in the field of self-regulation are brought together through a forum - the Safer Internet Forum - modelled on the EU cyber-crime forum. The extended action plan covers many different types of illegal content or conduct including racist material, and takes account of new online technologies such as mobile and broadband content, online games, peer-to-peer file transfer and all forms of real-time communications such as chat rooms and instant messages. The networks of hotlines and awareness nodes continue to be key instruments of the programme, alongside the benchmarking of filtering software.

First calls for proposals under the Safer Internet Action Plan (€13.3m) will be launched in July 2003.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16560



Pornography Pushes European Broadband Penetration – report

The significant increase in broadband internet access is being pushed by consumer demand for music and pornography downloads, says a new report from market analysts Nielsen-NetRatings.

The pornography industry has seen year-on-year growth right across Europe with the exception of Italy – where broadband access is the relative lowest in Europe, say the researchers. The largest increase on the continent was in Britain, where high-speed internet access has reached 3.7m subscribers.

France, Spain and the Netherland have penetration rates of 39 per cent, 37 per cent and 36 per cent, respectively. The United States has a penetration rate of 35 per cent of all internet users, and, in terms of absolute numbers – 38m, is the number one broadband country in the world.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16532



MTV Becomes Latest Swedish Mobile Operator

Music video channel MTV is to venture into the world of mobile phone service provision in Sweden.

Beginning this month, MTV Europe is to offer pre-paid mobile services in the Scandinavian country as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) over Telia Mobile’s GSM network, branded ‘Hello MTV’.

Aiming its service at the young viewers of its music television network, the country’s newest mobile operator will include various musical data services such as music news, premium ringtones and programme information. Users will also be able download music charts and contact musicians and MTV VJs though special numbers.

The music channel has subcontracted mobile virtual network enabler Spinbox to provide network management, billing and customer care. This company, has, in turn, subcontracted SmartTrust to provide and manage the network’s mobile data services.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16530



Software Piracy On The Wane In The Netherlands
Joe Figueiredo

The illegal use of software in the Netherlands fell last year by three percentage points to 36 per cent, and 28 per cent since 1994, reports the Business Software Alliance, BSA.

In the eight years, the anti-piracy association has been tracking this threat to the computer software industry, software piracy worldwide has also decreased from 49 per cent to 39 per cent in 2002.

According to the BSA, this decline is attributed to the growing belief among company software-users that software piracy, measured in lost revenue, is bad for business.

Despite this significant drop, however, the ‘software police’ are still not satisfied with the results.

In absolute terms, the total global loss in software revenue due to piracy rose from E9.4bn in 2001 to E11bn in 2002. This rise of 19 per cent can be attributed to the rise in software prices, says the BSA, which would like the see the EU tighten its anti-piracy laws and take a zero-tolerance attitude towards this scourge.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16585

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Future still uncertain
College Radio Will Stream On
Katie Dean

A new agreement will allow college radio stations to pay a more palatable price to webcast music, but still saddles them with limitations on what they can play and when.

Over the weekend, educational and other noncommercial broadcasters reached a settlement with the recording industry on royalty rates for streaming music over the Internet. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires that the artists and labels be paid when their songs are streamed.

Under terms of the agreement, stations will pay a flat rate of $250 for use of songs in 2003. In 2004, schools will pay $250 or $500, depending on the size of the school's enrollment. Other noncommerical broadcasters will pay roughly the same amount. That's a lower price than the per- song and per-listener royalty fees set by the Librarian of Congress last year in an effort to comply with the DMCA.

Still, the payment agreement came too late for some college webcasters. Will Robedee, vice chairman of Collegiate Broadcasts said that at its peak, between 500 and 600 college radio stations played music over the Web. After the uncertainty over royalty fees, that number was sliced in half.

One casualty was the State University of New York at Brockport's radio station, WBSU, which started webcasting in 1998 but stopped in 2000.

One drawback to the deal, Willer said, is that as Internet radio becomes more popular, the fees go up. The RIAA's rates are based on an average of 200 simultaneous listeners per month. Once a station surpasses this, they must pay .251 cents per listener, per hour, making it financially difficult for webcasters to greatly expand their audience.

"Today Internet audiences are very small," Willer said. "As we grow and we get over that 200 figure, these fees will continue to be intolerable."

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59105,00.html

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EMI Sues Bertelsmann Over Napster
AP

EMI, the music group that includes Capitol Records, has sued Bertelsmann AG, saying the German giant's support of the music- swapping service Napster led to the infringement of EMI's copyrights.

The suit is similar to one brought last month by the Universal Music Group.

It claims Bertelsmann's 2000 investment in Napster kept the service alive for another year, during which people illegally swapped and downloaded countless copies of songs by EMI artists.

"By investing both millions of dollars and management resources in Napster — which was an illegal enterprise built on the unlawful distribution of copyrighted works — Bertelsmann enabled and encouraged the wholesale theft of copyrighted music," EMI said in a statement.

Bertelsmann spokeswoman Liz Young said the company had no immediate comment.

The lawsuit, filed in New York federal court, requests at least $150,000 for each copyrighted song that was shared under Napster, which a federal judge shut down in California in 2001.

EMI's labels represent artists such as Norah Jones, Janet Jackson and the Rolling Stones.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinv...-napster_x.htm

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Mobs Move Into 'Sims Online' Power Vacuum
Dawn C. Chmielewski

Tony Soprano can keep Jersey (who wants it, anyways?) A new family is movin' in on unclaimed turf -- online.

An underground group known as the Sims Shadow Government has taken over the fantasy world that is ``The Sims Online,'' meting out mob
justice.

It's a violent twist for ``The Sims,'' the dollhouse-inspired computer game that has long been portrayed as the antithesis to guns-'n-gore bestsellers like ``Grand Theft Auto.'' The emergence of a seedy underbelly in the online game may reveal more about the dark fantasies of middle-aged suburbanites than anyone suspected.

Turns out, everyone wants to be Tony Soprano or Don Vito Corleone.

To hear the ersatz mob boss, Piers Mathieson, tell it, it all began innocently enough, with the desire to impose order on the chaos that is ``The Sims Online.''

The game's designer, Will Wright, deliberately created a blank stage on which players could act out their fantasies.

To Mathieson, the lack of a government to lay down laws in virtual online communities like Alphaville -- let alone cops to enforce the rules -- resulted in anarchy. ``Grievers'' arose -- players who delight in creating misery for other players -- stealing money, trashing houses or even appropriating another's online identity.

Mathieson, 34, who lives in Las Vegas and promotes bands, said players turned into racketeers.

``They show up at your house and they request protection money. `You have to pay me 100,000 simolians if you don't want your house torn down.' It's technically harassment.''

The most popular person in the Sims universe -- Mia Wallace, a composite character played by Mathieson and his wife, Jennifer -- stepped into the power vacuum and organized the Sims Shadow Government.

``We weren't playing the games as hoodlums, we were playing the game as protectors of the city,'' said Mathieson.

At least at first. Somewhere along the line, though, the Sims Shadow Government turned from benevolent overseer to a virtual version of La Cosa Nostra.

Maybe it was the emergence of a rival family, the Playtime gang. Or maybe it was the Mia impostor, who tarnished the real Mia's reputation by inviting other players to work for her as a prostitute. Perhaps the final straw was when someone hijacked Mathieson's America Online account -- and stole all of his in-game cash and property.

Whatever the pretext, Mia morphed from prom queen to mob boss. A handful of the SSG's 160 members would meet outside the game -- in Yahoo discussion groups or by phone -- to talk about offenses against the ``family'' and plot revenge.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/6019958.htm

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Senators Scorch FCC For Media Ownership Vote
Jan Crawford Greenburg and Naftali Bendavid

WASHINGTON - Lawmakers of both parties harshly criticized the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday for approving regulations they characterized as favoring media conglomerates over consumers.

They promised a push to scale back the new rules.

In a contentious hearing marked by sharp personal exchanges, Republican and Democratic senators said FCC Chairman Michael Powell and his colleagues overstepped their authority Monday when they voted 3-2 to ease restrictions on media ownership. All five commissioners appeared before the committee less than 48 hours after making the historic, controversial revisions.

Several senators pointedly told FCC commissioners their decision was wrong on policy grounds and was made without adequate public input.

``It looks like ... the FCC could not or would not stand up to interests of big business here,'' said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. ``It appears to me so evident that the big interests were served here at the expense of the public interest.''

``The question now,'' said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., ``is whether this Congress is going to stand up for the public interest.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/6017336.htm

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Guard Indicted In Deletion Of Protective Orders
AP

A grand jury has indicted a jail guard on charges of deleting nearly 500 court protection orders that authorities suspect were lost when he tried to erase an order involving a friend.

Protection orders typically are issued to prohibit suspects of spousal abuse or stalking from having contact with a victim.

Hector Delgado, 32, was indicted Tuesday on felony counts of tampering with records and unauthorized use of a computer. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.

Prosecutors suspect he accidentally erased all 497 orders recorded in the city from December to March 24 while trying to delete one that was issued against a friend. Prosecutor's spokeswoman Kim Kowalski said Wednesday she couldn't characterize the complaint against the friend, who had not been charged.

Records of the orders have been restored. The prosecutor's office had no reports that anyone was harmed because of the deleted records, Kowalski said.

The gap in the records was discovered by a court clerk about two weeks after the March 24 erasures, Prosecutor Bill Mason said. Investigators linked the deletions to Delgado's computer logon. He had been allowed to use the computer to record inmate information.

Delgado could not be reached for comment. The only local phone under his name is unlisted.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/co...database_x.htm

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Outlook Brighter For HDTV, Viewers
Mike Langberg


High-definition digital television is finally escaping from an ironic time warp.

Aside from offering a much sharper picture than conventional TV, high-definition today is a throwback to 1953: There are only a few channels
to watch; they broadcast only a few hours of programming a day; there's no way to record for later viewing; and signals can only be received through a roof antenna.

But I believe we'll look back on 2003 as the pivotal year for HD, the moment when the pieces fell into place to justify the cost and effort of upgrading for anyone other than bleeding-edge early adopters.

The single most important change is the long overdue decision by cable systems nationwide to carry HD. As my colleague Dawn Chmielewski reported Sunday, Comcast on Tuesday begins offering three local HD channels and two HD movie channels to about half its Bay Area customers. By the end of next year, most cable households in the United States should have access to HD.

That's not the only reason the outlook for HD is improving. There are crucial improvements in four areas:

• HDTV sets. When HD broadcasting began in the United States on Nov. 1, 1998, television sets capable of viewing the digital signals cost $10,000. Early sales, no surprise, were dismal.

But the relentless downward march of prices for all products based on digital technology is coming to the rescue.

All these changes together should create some gradual momentum for HD. But the TV industry could still screw this up. The big Hollywood studios who create most network TV shows are worried about piracy of digital broadcasts and are considering copy protection systems that could make most HD sets already sold obsolete. If the studios are stupid enough to spit in the face of their audience with such a move, HD could yet end up in the landfill of failed technology.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/5995722.htm

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"Our estimate is that tape will outlive hard drives."

Storage Methods Come and Go, but Tape Holds Its Own
Ian Austen

WHEN it comes to storing data, magnetic tape would seem to represent the past, not the future. The basic technology is half a century old, and those rooms full of reel-to-reel tape machines that were once a symbol of computing power are all but gone.

But corporations around the world still spend billions of dollars annually on tape cartridges that whirl away, backing up data. While the declining cost of hard drives, optical technologies like DVD's, and research into new storage methods like holography are all potential threats to tape, few storage experts are predicting its demise. "I've been asked if tape will disappear for a long time," said Gordon F. Hughes, the associate director of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at the University of California at San Diego. "But I fundamentally don't think it's any different than the idea that radio will be pushed out by television."

Some researchers, in fact, are doing their best to make sure that tape will never go the way of the dinosaurs by looking at ways to store even more data on it. While at some laboratories this involves the development of new coatings or new drive technologies, for scientists at Ohio State University the solution literally involves smoothing out a tape's rough edges. They are looking at the manufacturing process, working to eliminate irregular edges so they can squeeze more data tracks onto each length of tape.

Increasing capacity can help reinforce what has always been one of tape's strong points: it is an economical form of data storage in comparison with other methods like hard-disk drives and optical technologies like DVD's.

But Dr. Hughes, whose work focuses on hard-drive technologies, said that today, "there's serious cost pressure on tape."

While making cost comparisons can be an arcane exercise, Dr. Hughes said that ordinary personal computer hard drives can be less expensive than tape for some short-term storage systems.

Tape also suffers from a practical shortcoming: unlike the data on a hard drive or optical disc, the information on it is arranged in linear form. A tape has to be wound backward and forward to retrieve or record data, making it slower in operation.

But Saurin Shah, the director of advanced technology and applications at Imation, which makes tapes and other storage media, said that tape has benefited from increased concern about protecting data from terrorist attack or natural disasters. It's easier to take a tape cartridge with backed-up data to a secure warehouse than it is to take a hard drive.

"The ability to send it off-site for storage, that's a key feature for tape," Mr. Shah said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/05/te...ts/05next.html


Top 10 D/Ls - Singles

BigChampagne


NYT QnA

Decoding the Shorthand for Better Music Files
J.D. Biersdorfer

Q. What is MP3 V.B.R.?

A. The abbreviation MP3 V.B.R. stands for MPEG Audio Layer 3, Variable Bit Rate.

MP3 is the common file format used for encoding and compressing audio files for use on computers and portable digital music players. Variable bit rate is a type of encoding that is used with MP3 files to make them sound better than standard audio files.

The sound quality of MP3 or other digital music files depends partly on the kilobits-per-second rate at which the file was recorded. During the recording process, software like MusicMatch Jukebox Plus or iTunes copies a song from a compact disc (a process called ripping) and encodes it as an MP3 file. The higher the bit rate, the better the sound quality of the file and the larger the MP3 file's size.

Most MP3 encoding programs let you adjust the bit rate for better sound quality but use the same bit rate consistently during the encoding process by default. MP3 files encoded this way are the most common and are classified as having a constant bit rate, or C.B.R.

As the name suggests, variable bit rate encoding adjusts the bit rate for different parts of a song, using a higher rate for more complex parts of the music and a lower bit rate in simpler areas. This produces better overall sound quality, but a bigger file size to accommodate the varying bit rates.

Q. What kind of DVD burner do I need to produce disks that can be played on a DVD player connected to the TV?

A. The formats that are available for recordable and rewritable DVD discs, like DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW, can confuse both consumers and living room DVD players.

If you want to record DVD's on your computer to watch on the DVD player in your home entertainment center, first check the DVD player's manual to learn which disc formats it can read. You might also try the DVD Player Compatibility List at www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdplayers. If your player is listed in the site's database, you can see which DVD formats are compatible with it and in many cases read comments posted by other owners.

Finding a DVD recorder for the computer that can record discs in the player's desired format should not be difficult. Several hardware manufacturers now offer DVD recorders that can record multiple formats.

Having a multiple-format recorder allows you to buy the type of blank disc that your DVD player likes while using faster or more efficient formats.

Sony and Pioneer Electronics are among the companies that make multiple-format DVD recorders. Sony's DRU510A internal drive for the PC ($350; www.sonystyle.com) can record and read DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW discs, as well as those in CD-R and CD-RW formats. The same DVD and CD formats can be recorded by the Pioneer Electronics DVR-A06 internal DVD recorder, which is to be released later this month and is expected to cost $329. Information will be available at www.pioneerelectronics.com.

Q. I am the director of a nursery school and would like to make a slide show of school-year activities and set it to music. I would also want to copy the show onto CD's to sell to parents. Is there easy-to-use software for this purpose?

A. PhotoParade Maker from Callisto can be used to make slide shows and screen savers and comes in versions for both Macintosh and Windows systems. A basic version of PhotoParade Maker costs about $20 at www.photoparade.com.

Full-featured multimedia programs like MediaShop Digital Studio 2 for Windows ($29.99 at www.broderbund.com) can make slide shows, retouch digital photographs, burn CD's and much more. Apple's iPhoto 2 software for Mac OS X can also make slide shows and burn them to CD. The program is available as a free download at www.apple.com /iphoto. Slide-show shareware for both Macintosh and Windows systems is also at www.download.com.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/05/te...ts/05askk.html

Lurking Within the Hi-Fi Rack, a Hard Drive That Rips

Home audio components are catching the MP3 wave as the popular digital music format makes its way from hard drives and portable players into the living-room sound system. Although from the outside the new DA-9000 CDRW Jukebox from TDK looks like any other component for the home stereo, deep inside it spins a 20-gigabyte hard drive alongside a conventional CD system that can play and record standard and MP3 audio CD's.

The DA-9000 can store more than 4,000 MP3 tracks, and it offers various ways to get the music onto its hard drive. It can rip MP3 files to its drive directly from prerecorded audio discs inserted into the player.

A U.S.B. port on the front of the machine makes it easy to link the device to a computer and copy MP3 files from the PC's music library.

The DA-9000 has a suggested retail price of $399 and comes with software for transferring files from the PC, audio and U.S.B. cables and a remote control.

Not content to be a mere MP3 jukebox and CD player, the DA-9000 also has the powers of a CD recorder and can fill blank discs with MP3's from its hard drive with a push of the record button. Because it has a full array of audio inputs, the DA-9000 can even record music that is piped in from other stereo components onto CD's. For those who can't wait to burn MP3's to disc right away, a blank recordable CD is included.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/05/te...ts/05juke.html

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Maverick Composers Boom and Crackle Online
Matthew Mirapaul

INTERVIEWED in 1969, the composer Harry Partch complained about the use of electronics in classical music. While conceding that music might eventually be "computerized like crazy," he predicted that listeners would ultimately rebel against technology. "This is my objection to it: the individual is lost in this, totally lost,'' he said.

But with the help of computer technology, Partch's individualistic spirit has been revived on the Internet. American Mavericks (www.musicmavericks.org), a new Web site focusing on unorthodox classical composers, allows visitors to hear Partch's music, read one of his manifestos or, by tapping on a computer keyboard or moving the mouse, play virtual versions of 20 of the unusual instruments that Partch himself devised. These include the Chromelodeon, an organ-like instrument with unconventional tunings, and a marimba made from two dozen light bulbs.

While the virtual instruments give anyone a chance to sample Partch inventions that are rarely played in public, they raise questions about the authenticity of such digital recreations. Still, the virtual instruments provide an entertaining introduction to the prickly Partch, who died in 1974. Richard Kessler, executive director of the American Music Center in New York, said, "The opportunity to interact with the instruments, the opportunity to learn about the tuning systems, the opportunity to be put in touch with Partch - it's pretty extraordinary."

The Web site, which went online in May, was produced by Minnesota Public Radio as a companion to "American Mavericks," a 13-part radio series celebrating Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, John Cage, Steve Reich and other iconoclastic composers of the 20th century. In the New York area, the hourlong programs are being broadcast on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on WFUV-FM (90.7 on the dial) and will be carried later this year on WNYC-FM (93.9).

The programs can also be heard at the site, where the audio is augmented by interviews with 60 composers, more than 12 hours of exclusive recordings of concert performances by the San Francisco Symphony, and interactive features like the Partch instruments. The site also offers two channels of continuous music, a "smooth" one for easier listening and another labeled "crunchy" for more challenging material. "We asked ourselves what would it look like if the radio show were about the Web site and not vice versa," said Sarah Lutman, senior vice president for cultural programming and initiatives at Minnesota Public Radio.

The American Mavericks site is the latest attempt to find a home on the Internet for progressive classical music, which is played sparingly in concert and on the radio. Sites like Art of the States (artofthestates.org), sponsored by WGBH radio of Boston; the American Music Center's NewMusicJukebox (newmusicjukebox.org); and Kalvos and Damian's New Music Bazaar (www .kalvos.org) continually document the breadth and vivacity of American musical creativity in a way that, given its relatively tiny audience, no concert promoter or station manager could possibly afford.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/05/te...ts/05musi.html

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Nothing Much Yet

...on the Aimster/Madster hearing here. But there are rumblings here, here, here, and of course, here.

Later: Aaron Swartz: "I got there a little late, but I got in and sat down quickly. The courtroom is a big black box with a ceiling of fluorescent lighting and painted portraits of (presumably) justices on the wall. Very nice, but not quite as regal as the Supreme Court. Judges Ripple, Posner, and Williams heard the case...

...[The MPAA lawyer] pointed out that there were no screenshots or evidence in the record of Aimster being used for a non- infringing use. Posner then asked for his definition of contributory infringement. He argued it was a material contribution with knowledge. Posner pointed out Sony would fail this test. The MPAA lawyer maintained that Sony actually provided a narrow exception to this general rule. He also tried to imply that Sony was mostly based on facts of the specific case and is not directly applicable here, but Posner wasn't buying that."

Later #2: For a prime example of the kind of access to & sharing of information that ought to be preserved on the Internet, see Howard Bashman's post on the hearing. Writes Howard (italics & note, mine): "Thanks to the Seventh Circuit's amazing website, you can listen to an audio file of today's oral argument via this link. Trading of this audio file is permitted as best as I can tell. [;-)] Also, you can access the briefs filed in the appeal via this link.

Later #3: Howard points to another option for downloading the audio.
http://www.copyfight.org/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To Our Staff:

Warner Music Group
Policy on copyright infringement and the use of "peer-to-peer" systems

TO: All WMG Personnel
FROM: Xxxx Xxxxxxx
SUBJECT: Policy on copyright infringement and the use of "peer-to-peer" systems
DATE: June 3, 2003
COPIES TO: Xxxxx Xxxx

As each of you is undoubtedly aware, the illegal copying of CDs is a serious matter that is adversely affecting the entire music community. Lost revenue as a result of piracy undermines the passion and hard work we bring to our jobs, threatening our livelihood and the livelihood of our artists. Copyright infringement is also illegal, no less so than shoplifting a CD. Downloading copyrighted music and burning CDs from peer-to-peer networks such as KaZaA, Morpheus, Gnutella or any other similar service is a violation of the law, and will not be tolerated among WMG employees.

If you have peer-to-peer software on your company computer, you must remove it immediately. Failure to do so, and the failure to respect music copyrights may lead to disciplinary action, including termination.

Beginning shortly, we will scan our computer network to detect the presence of file sharing software on company computers, so again, it is important that you remove the software immediately. If you need assistance in removing file sharing software, please contact your IT department. Your cooperation on this matter is essential.

The good news is that we have been working hard in recent years to stimulate a legitimate online market for music, and we encourage you to try out the music services in which we're involved. You can access some of them at the following link: http:// www.musicunited.org/6_legalsites.html

We understand that a few employees need to access peer-to-peer services in connection with legitimate company business activities. Those employees should contact Xxx Xxxxxx (Xxxxx.Xxxxxx@wmg.com) so that proper authorization and access can be arranged.

If you are not sure whether an activity is covered by this policy, you should consult your supervisor or Xxxx Xxxxxxx (xxx-xxx-xxxx) [xxxx.xxxxxxx@wmg.com] of the WMG Legal Department.

You also may want to take this opportunity to consider whether any peer-to-peer services are being used on computers in your home. Please keep in mind that use of peer-to-peer services to download copyrighted material without the consent of the copyright owner, whether in your office or your home, is illegal. It is also unfair to all of the talented individuals (including yourself) who contribute to the creation and marketing of creative works.

Thank you for your attention.

http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/m...p?memo_id=1609











Until next week,

- js.











Current Week In Review.

Recent WIRs -


http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16489 May 31st
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16411 May 24th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16318 May 17th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16211 May 10th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16135 May 3rd



Jack Spratts Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts at lycos.com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.

[multi]

looks good jack, i will be back to read the rest of that soon...