Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 22nd, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week

"The Xerox machine has always been the arch enemy of the printed music world, and copying is impossible to police." – Fred Anton, chief executive of Warner Brothers Publications

"If this kind of arrest is allowed, there is no future for the development efforts of software creators." – Toshimitsu Dan

"[The record labels] don't have a future here unless they recast themselves in a dramatically different way, there doesn't seem to be a solution for them and that's their problem, not ours." – Dave Winer




Yearly Porn Perp-Parade

Once again the evil minions of the industrial media complex have snookered global governments into chasing red herrings by going after open P2P networks looking for kiddie porn distributors - instead of getting them where they hide. As everyone who uses P2P knows by now, it’s wide open. Your IP address hangs in the breeze, and any copper looking to score a collar can dial you up in 2 seconds flat. The crooks are onto this of course and that’s why they don’t use P2P for their nefarious schemes; it’s too easy to get busted. It’s also why, with an estimated 100,000,000 P2P’ers in the U.S. alone, this latest porn purge, the third in as many years, netted a paltry 65 arrests. Who’s kidding who here? It’s just a way to make headlines in advance of congressional hearings on copyright "reform," using precious crime busting resources to divert the public eye from uncomfortable truths about media malpractice and turning them into a taxpayer subsidized PR propaganda campaign against regular file sharers. If this was really about stopping criminals the last places they’d look would be peer-to-peer networks of any kind. 65 arrests? It may be a sad fact of modern life but my guess is your local post office probably handles more of the stuff each day. When searching for bugs you don’t waste your time staring at the center of the kitchen floor with the arc lights on, you work the dark recesses under the counters if you really want to get at them.

The Japanese meanwhile, busy cracking down on just about everyone, have recently added posting screenshots to their list of arrestable offences, according to a late report. Not content to lock up software writers and leave it at that the authorities must think free-speachers are getting away with copyright murder because they’re sure treating them as if they were. I’d love to say it can’t happen here but if I did I’d be lying. It can and it probably will, unless we all step up and make some personnel changes in Washington.

No Middlemen Allowed

New on the horizon is a portable product from Delkin devices called the USB Bridge that lets users connect two USB powered devices together and swap files – without the need of a computer playing traffic cop. The $70 item, about the size of a pack of smokes and limited to slow USB 1 transfer speeds allows data to be migrated from a photo memory card to a portable hard drive, or from an iPod to a CD burner, or any two USB storage devices directly, in the field, no PC or Mac required. They tell me they’re considering upgrading the battery powered device to speedy USB 2 and that’s good because as it stands now anyone using it to transfer data from one big hard drive to another might need a week to swap 300 gigs. While that’s orders of magnitude faster than standard broadband, USB 2 would cut that down to a few hours, making the unit really handy. The model debuts in June.

The clever Dutch have come up with a marketing solution that gets movies onto the Internet and directly into your homes months, if not years ahead of feet-dragging studios. In a sale/leaseback scheme so complicated lawyers in Philly were paying not to take the case, Dvdstream.nl is selling films - then buying - to - and from - users - all to stay within the letter of plain old hopelessly convoluted/outdated Dutch copyright law. Insisting it’s “all legal” and backed up in that assessment by the entertainment industry, the service will provide unlimited movie downloads for about $15 a month. Reading from their standard script the film industry meanwhile says they may have a problem with the service, but that’s not news – it’s the same old song and dance.









Enjoy,

Jack.









Arrest Of Japanese File-Sharing Developer Is A Threat, Lawyer Says

TOKYO (AP) - A lawyer for a Japanese professor detained on copyright violations for his file-sharing technology called the arrest ``extremely dangerous'' Monday, saying the move threatened the freedom of software creators.

Isamu Kaneko, a 33-year-old assistant professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo, was arrested May 10 on copyright-related charges for developing and offering the popular Winny software, which lets people swap movies and video games over the Internet.

Kaneko was also accused of helping two people illegally distribute games and films online, police said. The other two were arrested in November.

Toshimitsu Dan, an attorney on Kaneko's defense team, said there were no laws in Japan that declare file-sharing software illegal, adding Kaneko only created the software.

``The police are arbitrarily making their own judgment about what is lawful,'' Dan said in a telephone interview. ``And that is extremely dangerous. If this kind of arrest is allowed, there is no future for the development efforts of software creators.''

Within days of Kaneko's arrest, a defense fund was set up on the Internet, drawing dozens of like-minded users of ``blogs,'' or Internet journals, who'd never met in person but wanted to support Kaneko.

As of Monday, the fund has raised 5 million yen (US$44,000) for Kaneko's defense, said Shunichi Arai, a software engineer and one of the initiators of the fund.

Dan said Kaneko was still in police custody and his release was unlikely for the first 20 days after he was arrested under Japanese law. Kaneko has not been formally charged.

A hearing before a judge is set for Tuesday, but police can continue to hold him for questioning, Dan said.

``It is a system that has serious problems,'' he said. ``But his situation is not unusual.''

Kaneko's arrest is believed to be the first in Japan of a suspected developer of file-sharing software. The charge of violating copyright laws carries up to three years in prison or a fine of up to 3 million yen (US$26,000).

``Why should file-sharing software be illegal?'' said Arai. ``It's a very unfair arrest.''

Winny, which Kaneko developed in 2002, has become a headache for digital content providers here, as users have been drawn by its reputation for protecting users' anonymity. As many as a million Japanese have used Winny, according to media reports.

Kaneko has issued only a brief statement to his backers through his lawyers: ``Thank you for supporting me.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/8687322.htm


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Video-Game Website Owner Arrested For Posting Screenshots
Luke Guttridge

Reports this morning inform us of the rather troubling news from Japan that the owner and Editor of popular online gaming site Gamesonline, one of Japan's most popular news sites, has been arrested for alleged breach of copyright concerning screenshots used on his website. The webmaster was deemed to have fallen foul of Japanese copyright law having used hundreds of videogame images taken from overseas press and online media without the permission of the games publishers in question (an offence under Japanese law).

The games publishers in question: SNK Playmore, Capcom, Square Enix, and Namco, allegedly pressed charges after finding 'offending' screenshots on Gamesonline, though other publishers had given their permission for some of the images featured. Before its closure, Gamesonline was a profit making website funded by advertising.

This unprecedented arrest and site closure has apparently come as a genuine shock to the Japanese gaming media, and it's not surprising given that the role such sites fulfil in promoting company's titles would surely suggest that to arrest and close in such a fashion is counter-productive, though further details on the vagaries of the case might present a different view. More as we get it.
http://www.ferrago.com/story/3777


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Moscow Mayor Backs Legislative Limitations for Internet
MosNews

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov stated Monday that a special law on the Internet was needed to raise the “responsibility of network journalists and operators for the objectivity of information”. In his article in the Izvestia newspaper, he wrote that the “vital goal of society” was to bring the Internet “back into the framework of civilized legislation”.

Luzhkov wrote that a simple definition of rights and obligations of web users was needed. Then, Internet providers will be able to receive official licenses and websites will have to be registered as media.

First of all, “the Internet must be put in the law on media as a separate item,” Luzhkov wrote. “The legal channels must appear to release official warnings to web media, and it will be possible to close them only after a court decision.” After that, a special law must appear, he said.

The Moscow mayor described such a law as necessary because the web had turned into “a territory of pirates’ rule”. He accused them of promoting violations and drugs, trading in people and child pornography. “The Internet is gradually being settled by unconcealed terrorists who turn the web not only into their own mailbox but into a real military infrastructure of world underground.”

“The notorious anonymity of real owners of network media is poorly compatible with the principles of an open and democratic society,” the mayor’s article said. And the current laws cannot save a person “offended and slandered by the spiders from the World Wide Web.”

An official from the press office of the Moscow mayor who learned about the article from MosNews staff was unable to give “a hundred percent” guarantee that this article was really written by Yuri Luzhkov. However, the illustration for the article in Izvestia is the mayor’s photo, and the sources in the newspaper said that the author really was the Moscow mayor.
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/05/17/luzhkov.shtml


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New Spin on the Music Business
Katie Dean

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- Rather than modify the current, failing copyright system to save the entertainment industry, one legal scholar is proposing radical plans for a system that he claims will pay artists fairly and bring more digital media to the people who crave it.

But convincing the music and movie industries to embrace the idea seems unlikely, at least in the near future.

Harvard Law School professor Terry Fisher detailed his proposal Friday at the Internet Law Program, a three-day event sponsored by the school's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Fisher advocates an alternative compensation system that would pay artists based on the popularity of their music. Artists would first have to register their work with the copyright office, which would track how many times that work was downloaded. Revenue generated from taxes on things like Internet access and the sale of MP3 players would then be used to pay the artists. Similar plans have been proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and University of Texas at Austin law professor Neil Netanel, among others.

The Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, which represents the labels, has used copyright law to sue thousands of music fans for infringement since September. But the problem remains: More than 60 million people -- "more than voted for President Bush," Fisher said -- continue to share music on peer-to- peer networks.

Fisher said his alternative model would allow music fans to obtain more music for less money, without fears of legal action from the RIAA. All artists would be paid better than they are under the current regime.

He said that while record industry execs "hated" his idea, there are "much more significant prospects for building this in other countries."

Fisher said Brazil is interested in exploring the idea and is building a database of digital music, an effort supported by the country's minister of culture, musician Gilberto Gil.

If, in a few years, the system is successful in Brazil and American entertainment industries continue to see their businesses suffer, an alternative compensation system may seem more appealing.

"What's more likely in the United States is a voluntary version," Fisher said. That would require the participation of both musicians and music fans to be successful, and could be financed by subscription revenues.

"I think it's great, but it's so far in the future," said Heather Ford, who is helping to build a branch of Creative Commons, an organization that enables creators to use more flexible copyright licenses, in South Africa.

Others were skeptical about the idea.

"If it was implemented it would create a bureaucracy that would make all bureaucracies benign by comparison because it would intrude the government into an incredibly important part of national life," said Chuck Rosenberg, an entertainment attorney and adjunct professor at Pepperdine University School of Law.

Also, the idea seems to underestimate the cost and importance of those who help artists create their works and attract the public's attention, he said. For instance, Rosenberg wondered if those who produce the music, promote the band and make the videos would have the same incentive to invest in new talent under this kind of system.

One programmer in the audience said it's up to the recording companies to find a new paradigm for their industry.

The record labels "don't have a future here unless they recast themselves in a dramatically different way," said Dave Winer, who runs Scripting News. "There doesn't seem to be a solution for them and that's their problem, not ours."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,63474,00.html


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The Future Of P2P File Sharing
p2pnet.net Opinion

Janko Roettgers is a German journalist living in Los Angeles.His book "Mix Burn & R.I.P. - Das Ende der Musikindustrie (The End of the Music Industry) - was published in Germany last fall.

Since the recording industry sued Napster in December 1999, the P2P community has tried to evade persecution by making their systems more autonomous and less traceable. Unfortunately this process has also adversely affected the user experience. This may not be so obvious when we look at P2P just from a technological perspective. Today's networks serve many more users than the first generation of file sharing platforms. They also enable us to move bits around the network much faster than before.

But second and third generation networks and services like Fasttrack / Kazaa, Gnutella and Bittorrent lack one thing that Napster had: Community. Napster enabled users to engage in discussions and discover new content simply by browsing the shared folders of random people who happened to attend the same chat room. This sort of accidental collaborative filtering is very unlikely in modern networks.

With the music industry suing users worldwide two main concepts emerged as possible solutions: the concept of anonymity and the concept of darknets. Anonymous file sharing is not a new idea, but with increasing legal pressure more and more users demand technical solutions that allow tham to share content without concealing their identity. Unfortunately in most cases anonymity goes along with a loss of community. If I don't know who is downloading a file from my hard disk I won't have a chance to engage in a discussion about that file.

On the other hand, darknets are small networks that are based on trust rather than on anonymity. The idea of such webs of trust isn't really a new idea either, but it recently received lots of attention when a group of Microsoft researchers envisioned it as a possible future of P2P. The problem with trusted communities is that they face a dilemma of differenciation. If their users trust too many people they could face intrusion. If they are too paranoid they'll suffer from a lack of new content. However this is only true if we define such a group or network as a closed system. I don't think this is necessarily true for today's darknets - people exchanging content with their pals over Instant Messaging or in real life - and it doesn't need to be true for technical more innovative darknets that might eventually be able to replace today's P2P networks.

An interesting model for these future darknets emerged when the social networking site Friendster.com started in spring of 2003. Friendster connects people based on their immediate relations and allows to build quite impressive personal networks. Originally the website connected people up to the fourth degree. Average users could easly be connected to more than half a million fourth-degree friendsters. To sustain a feeling of intimacy Friendster recently reduced the personal network horizon to three degrees. Even with these limitations it is very well possible to build a personal network of tens of thousands of people.

Friendster made the idea of social networking popular, but it is by far not the only platform offering such services. Other websites have introduced significant additions. Tribe.net for example allows to form topic-related networking groups. Orkut offers it's users the chance to distinguish between a general, a professional and a personal profile, offering individual access for many bits of information. The decisions made when completing such a Orkut profile are based on calculated risks. How much can I gain from making such information accessible to other people, and how high are the risks? If I publish my e-mail- address publicly I might risk getting even more spam. Not publishing it at all might make it hard for people that are important to me to get in contact with me.

Such decisions based on calculated risks could also help us to create very effective social P2P networks. Instead of relying on the trust of a closed community, each participant could determine on a case by case basis how much he wants to risk. I might want to share my whole digital music collection with only a handful of close personal friends. However I might be willing to take the risk to share a few hundred files with everyone in my extended personal network. Introducing different layers of groups and relationships might even expand each participant's network horizon.

Unlike closed groups, a social P2P network can not be compromised that easily because each user has different trust settings and in fact, a different network. And finally social networks will almost automatically introduce a whole bunch of collaborative filtering mechanisms. Napster made it possible to accidentally discover new content by connecting with strangers. Social networks automatically connect you to people with similiar interests, making it much easier to find what you want without even knowing what to search for.
http://p2pnet.net/story/1451


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65 Arrests In Child Pornography Sweep
AP

A nationwide inquiry into child pornography trafficking on Internet file-sharing networks has resulted in 1,000 investigations and at least 65 arrests, federal officials said. The investigation centers on the growing use of "peer-to-peer" networks that allow users to connect computers directly with one another to exchange files. That provides greater anonymity than traditional Internet servers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/na...rtn er=GOOGLE

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Panel Urges New Protection on Federal 'Data Mining'
Robert Pear

A federal advisory committee says Congress should pass laws to protect the civil liberties of Americans when the government sifts through computer records and data files for information about terrorists.

"The Department of Defense should safeguard the privacy of U.S. persons when using data mining to fight terrorism," the panel says in a report to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The report, expected to be issued in about two weeks, says privacy laws lag far behind advances in information and communications technology.

The eight-member panel, which includes former officials with decades of high-level government experience, found that the Defense Department and many other agencies were collecting and using "personally identifiable information on U.S. persons for national security and law enforcement purposes." Some of these activities, it said, resemble the Pentagon program initially known as Total Information Awareness, which was intended to catch terrorists before they struck, by monitoring e-mail messages and databases of financial, medical and travel information.

The Pentagon program, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, was flawed from the start, though its goal was worthwhile, the panel said. "Our nation should use information technology and the power to search digital data to fight terrorism, but should protect privacy while doing so," it concluded. "In developing and using data mining tools, the government can and must protect privacy."

Data mining is defined in the report to mean "searches of one or more electronic databases of information concerning U.S. persons, by or on behalf of an agency or employee of the government."

The panel, the Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee, said the Pentagon program was "not the tip of the iceberg, but rather one small specimen in a sea of icebergs."

Although the panel was created by Mr. Rumsfeld to scrutinize Pentagon programs, it offers sweeping recommendations for privacy safeguards throughout the government.

"The privacy issues presented by data mining cannot be resolved by the Department of Defense alone," the panel said. "Action by Congress, the president and the courts is necessary as well."

One of the panel's most important recommendations is to involve the courts in deciding when the government can search electronic databases.

In general, it said, the Defense Department and other federal agencies should be required to obtain approval from a special federal court "before engaging in data mining with personally identifiable information concerning U.S. persons."

To obtain such approval, the government would have to show that it needed the information to prevent or respond to terrorism. In an emergency, the government would not have to get approval in advance, but would need to seek a court order within 48 hours of beginning the search.

Lawyers who work with the panel said its report was sent to the printer earlier this month and would probably be issued within two weeks. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.

Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who led opposition to the Pentagon program, said Sunday that he had not seen the report but that it sounded like "a very constructive step."

"This confirms what I've been saying as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee," Mr. Wyden said. "It's possible to fight terrorism ferociously without gutting civil liberties. The challenge in striking that balance is to have ground rules. I've introduced a bill to set rules for data mining by the federal government. I suspect that federal agencies are doing an immense amount of data mining."

The panel said existing laws on information privacy were so disjointed and out of date that they threatened "efforts to fight terrorism and the constitutionally protected rights of U.S. persons," defined as citizens and permanent resident aliens.

"Government access to personal data can threaten individual liberty and invade constitutionally protected informational privacy rights," the panel said, and these risks will grow as the government amasses data on United States citizens who have done nothing to warrant suspicion.

Under the panel's recommendations, a federal agency could search an electronic database of publicly available information without a court order. But the head of the agency would still have to certify in writing that the data mining was necessary and appropriate for a lawful purpose. This requirement would apply to electronic databases of "information that is routinely available without charge or subscription to the public - on the Internet, in telephone directories or in public records."

The panel, headed by Newton N. Minow, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, acknowledged that its proposals would "impose additional burdens on government officials." But, it said, the requirements would enhance personal privacy and national security by clarifying the rules.

"Good privacy protection in the context of data mining is often consistent with more efficient investigation," the panel said.

The greatest risk of data mining by the government is that it "chills individual behavior," so people become more likely to follow social norms and less likely to dissent, the panel said. The report traces the tension between security and liberty to the earliest days of the Republic. "Those who trade liberty for safety all too often achieve neither," it says, echoing Benjamin Franklin.

One member of the panel, William T. Coleman Jr., who was transportation secretary in the Ford administration, filed a lengthy dissent, asserting that the proposed restrictions could cripple the fight against terrorism. The proposals, he said, go far beyond what is required by the Constitution, federal laws or Supreme Court decisions.

But the panel insisted its proposals would not interfere with searches based on "particularized suspicion about a specific individual, including searches to identify or locate a suspected terrorist." Federal agents could still review passenger lists for airlines and cruise ships without new regulatory requirements.

Mr. Rumsfeld appointed the panel in February 2003 to quell a political uproar over the Pentagon data mining program, headed by John M. Poindexter, a retired rear admiral. Congress cut off money for the program in September 2003, with certain exceptions described in a "classified annex" to the 2004 military spending law.

Members of the panel, besides Mr. Minow and Mr. Coleman, were Floyd Abrams, a leading First Amendment lawyer; Zoë Baird, president of the Markle Foundation, which focuses on information technology; Griffin B. Bell, who was attorney general under President Jimmy Carter; Gerhard Casper, former president of Stanford University; Lloyd N. Cutler, who was White House counsel under Mr. Carter and President Bill Clinton; and John O. Marsh Jr., an aide to President Gerald R. Ford who later served as secretary of the Army.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/po...17privacy.html


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For This Animated Movie, a Cast of Household Names
Eric A. Taub

Remember "Toy Story,'' the $191 million blockbuster that introduced Pixar Animation Studios in 1995 as a major producer of computer-animated movies? Two of the most popular offbeat characters were Mr. Potato Head and Slinky Dog, both based on long-established products.

Threshold Entertainment, a modestly sized animation and special effects company that has never made a full-length animated film before, hopes to go "Toy Story" one better - actually, 78 better - with "Foodfight!," an animated movie that takes place in a supermarket after the lights go down.

The company has the right to use animated versions of 80 name-brand products and their associated characters, including Charlie the Tuna and the Brawny paper towel man.

Threshold - like Pixar, DreamWorks and Disney before it - is trying to spin gold from digital threads in the always-challenging animated film business, and it is pinning its hopes on "Foodfight!" The movie is not expected to be released until late 2005, at the earliest, and the company does not yet have a deal with a distributor.

But it does have a clever script, some Hollywood heavyweights, high-powered technology and a widely, even globally, known cast. In the movie, Charlie, Mr. Clean, the Coca-Cola polar bears and other well-known product icons come alive at night after the customers have left. Joining with characters created by Threshold - among them Dex Dogtective, who runs the Copabanana nightclub in the produce section, and Daredevil Dan, a chocolate squirrel - they try to save the store from the evil Brand X.

"I'm fascinated by worlds that are wholly different worlds when you turn your back,'' said Larry Kasanoff, Threshold Entertainment's chairman.

Before starting Threshold in 1994, Mr. Kasanoff, then working with James Cameron, the director best known for "Titanic,'' served as an executive producer on "True Lies," and, along with other projects, as a producer or executive producer of the "Mortal Kombat" movies and television series.

Now, Mr. Kasanoff is striving to make Threshold the next cutting-edge animation studio, building on its broad expertise across various entertainment sectors. "We're the only animation company in the world that does movies, TV shows, direct-to-video movies and theme park attractions," he said.

Some working with the company see "Foodfight!" as Threshold's entry to the big time. "The movie looks wonderful,'' said Mark Mills, president of Motion Picture Magic, a product placement company in Encino, Calif. "Threshold will be considered to be the new and upcoming Pixar.''

But audiences are discriminating, and the popularity of family films is particularly difficult to predict. Depending on how it turns out, word of mouth advertising and its competition when it is released, "Foodfight!" could be a huge success - or bomb at the box office.

Whatever the film's fate, Mr. Kasanoff says that his frugal production methods should be seen as a worthy operating model for new studios trying to break into the movie business.

Threshold, a privately held company, received an initial investment from a venture capital fund run by a predecessor to C. E. Unterberg Towbin.

It has created special effects for movies like "Win a Date With Tad Hamilton,'' and "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,'' and has made digital film attractions for Disneyland Paris, Epcot at Walt Disney World in Florida and Hershey's Chocolate World in Pennsylvania.

In March, Threshold's newest entertainment, "Star Trek: The Experience - Borg Invasion 4D," opened at the Las Vegas Hilton. The 7½-minute film, enhanced by spray-in-your-face effects and gyrating seats, takes participants through the wild ride of a space station under attack, while enveloping them from all sides in 3-D images.

But "Foodfight!" is the company's most ambitious project. To pay for it, Threshold and Natural Image, a Korean investment consortium, have jointly put up $25 million; the rest of the budget, expected to total $50 million, will come from foreign presales and loans against those sales.

In seeking a domestic distributor, Mr. Kasanoff is looking for a deal that would cover an additional $25 million in print and advertising costs in return for a share of the box office revenues.

The theme park attractions help pay the company's bills while also offering a laboratory to test new techniques. For "Foodfight!,'' Threshold is combining elements of the classic Warner Bros. "squash and stretch" style, in which characters expand and contract like Wile E. Coyote, with deeply saturated colors and a dimensionality made possible using digital 3-D tools adapted from computer games.

To hold down costs, Threshold outsources most of its work. It employs only 22 digital animators at its headquarters in Southern California; it expects to use about 100 others, many of them working from their homes in Australia, Europe and South Korea.

Threshold has also struck a deal with I.B.M. to use its Linux server farm in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., when extra processing power is needed to supplement Threshold's 120 on-site PC's.

"We do not want the 200,000-square-foot facility, because the day you build it is the day you can't say 'no' to any job," Mr. Kasanoff said. "This is the future of digital entertainment. You no longer have to live in Hollywood to work in Hollywood."

I.B.M. has taken Threshold under its wing, hoping that the relationship will help it establish a Hollywood beachhead and open the door to other opportunities to offer entertainment companies digital services.

"We can scale Threshold's needs very quickly," said Steven Canepa, an I.B.M. vice president. "There are various times when they need a large capacity, but then we can cut back their usage dramatically when they don't."

For all its technological sophistication, Threshold has struggled to bring "Foodfight!" to the big screen. It was originally announced in 2001 and due to be finished 15 to 18 months later. The expected completion date is still almost 15 months away.

The delay was a result of an unexpected calamity. As one of the film's characters might say, "We wuz robbed!" During the 2002 Christmas holiday, the hard drives that held the film's files were stolen.

"It was an incredibly complex crime,'' Mr. Kasanoff said. "They got into the cold room, a room within a room within a room." Because it was a large-scale theft of intellectual property, the Secret Service took part in the investigation. The crime remains unsolved, and no material has appeared on the black market, Mr. Kasanoff said.

The company was insured for the loss, but except for some reference images, it had to start over.

"Foodfight!" is now half-finished, according to George Johnsen, Threshold's chief animation and technology officer.

The film includes 130 speaking roles and 340 locations. In crowd scenes, as many as 15,000 extras are portrayed. The processing power available to Threshold means that every moving figure in the movie can be animated independently.

Mr. Kasanoff insists that "Foodfight!" will not be one long product commercial. To guard against that charge, the product-based characters will play a lesser role than Threshold's creations and do not overtly promote the packaged goods they represent.

"If you're 11 years old, and I'm going to make you believe this is real, you have to see something that you're familiar with," Mr. Kasanoff said. "But the main characters are the ones we've created."

Mr. Kasanoff nonetheless expects the packaged goods manufacturers featured in the movie to spend heavily to promote it. Amy Donges, a Procter & Gamble marketing specialist supervising that company's interest in the film, said that it might cross-promote the movie on some product labels but that no specific marketing budget has been formulated yet.

Still, she says she is impressed with what she's seen so far.

"The 'Foodfight!' graphics are absolutely amazing, comparable to Pixar's," she said. "It's even more real life.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/bu...mate.html?8dpc


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PocketSkype – Peer-2-Peer Voice Over IP On the Xda II

When combining your Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PC with a Wi-Fi card you too can have high quality, real-time voice conversations with your contacts from around the world!

After some initial difficulties between the initial public releases of PocketSkype and the Xda II, version 0.94.0.11 has been released which is now compatible with the Xda II.

Skype on the desktop is freeware that will allow you to make free calls to anywhere in the world. It is made by the people who produced the KaZaA file sharing software and uses similar Peer-2-Peer (P2P) technology to connect you to other Skype users. By exploiting the idea behind P2P, Skype will allow you to connect to the network and initiate/receive calls, even from behind the majority of firewalls.

Providing a similar User Interface to other Instant Messaging software such as AOL IM, MSN Messenger, ICQ and Yahoo Messenger etc, Skype allows you to maintain a list of contacts and shows you when contacts are online with whom you can initiate Voice and/or Text conversations.

PocketSkype is a cut down version of Skype for the desktop and is also freeware. Once the software is installed on your Pocket PC, sign in using your Skype login details; add your contacts and you will be talking in moments. Although the functionality provided by the Pocket PC version is limited in comparison to the desktop product, you can still initiate Voice or Text conversations and partake in conference calls with multiple contacts.

After testing the software this evening, I can report that I am very happy with the quality of the voice calls, and the stability of the program. A brilliant idea and so far two fantastic pieces of software.
http://www.mtekk.com.au/browse/page844.html


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Court Clears Dutch Music Search Engine Of Copyright Violation
Joe Figueiredo

A court in the Dutch city of Haarlem has cleared Techno Design, the operator of music search- engine portal, Zoekmp3.nl, of copyright violation. The charge had been brought by BREIN, the Dutch entertainment industry’s anti-piracy association.

Zoekmp3.nl, which appears in the top twenty of the most popular Dutch websites, has access to some 30,000 music links. In its hey-day, Zoekmp3.nl had some 50,000 daily visitors and offered MP3 music files worldwide through an estimated 200,000 web pages.

The court ruled that providing links to an MP3 file did not constitute disclosure or publication of contents according to Dutch copyright law.

It went on to say that what Techno Design did is not unlawful, largely because providing services or assistance that could subsequently lead to infringement and unlawful trade by third parties is in itself not (yet) unlawful.

The verdict means that the portal will not be shutdown and can continue to be used to search for music on the internet, regardless of whether its findings point to music that is legal or not.

This is the very first time that any court in the world has concerned itself with the legality of a software programme that trawls web pages in search of files.

According to Techno’s lawyer, Alberdingk Thijm: "If BREIN wants to do something against unlawful music on the internet, it should go after the music providers and not the search engine."

Commenting on the inadequacy of the copyright law and the need for change, Tim Kruik, BREIN’s director, said: "Justice Minister Donner did say that he finds it undesirable that people are permitted to download [unlawful files], but the average internet user does not seem to give a hoot. The lawmaker should also forbid music downloads, just like the purchase of other illegal goods are."

BREIN is planning to appeal the verdict.
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=1789


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AU

Govt Cracks Down On Offensive Tele Content
AAP

Canberra - Risque adult material will no longer be accessible to children using hi-tech mobile phones with internet access, under a crackdown by the federal government.

Communications Minister Daryl Williams said he had ordered the telecommunications watchdog to put in place new measures to protect hi-tech mobile phone users from offensive content.

As part of the new measures, the Australian Communication Authority (ACA) will regulate access to content provided on new premium mobile phone services.

"These new measures will help make access to the internet and mobile communications services safer and more enjoyable for all Australians, particularly children," Mr Williams said.

"These controls will restrict access by children to adult content."

The new access controls will cover text messages deemed to be "of an adult nature" on hi-tech phones such as 3G (third generation) models, and other audiovisual content with MA or R ratings.

Content classified X or which is refused classification will be banned from the premium mobile phone services.

Mr Williams said telecommunications companies and content providers wanting to provide adult services will only be able to do so on specific phone numbers set by the ACA.

The new controls are being introduced after the release of a federal government review of the regulation of content delivered to convergent mobile phones.

The review found that while some types of filtering devices to restrict access to adult material on mobile phones were possible to use, mandating them would be an onerous task.
http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/1...289857211.html


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MIPI Claims Russian Music Download Site Is Illegal
Sam Varghese

A Russian website which is selling music online is doing so illegally, without the authorisation of the copyright holders, the general manager of the enforcement arm of the Australian record industry claims.

Michael Speck, general manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, said the website www.allofmp3.com was an illegal one. "The offered downloads are without the authorisation of the respective rights holders and therefore infringe copyright," he said.

The site sells music by the megabyte, at the rate of 500 MB for $US5.

Speck said the "so-called collecting society" (ROMS or Russian Organisation for Multimedia and Digital Systems) had never had the authority to license sound recordings from record producing members of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

"ROMS did have an earlier agreement with RAO (the authors' collecting society in Russia) and RPA (the record producers' collecting society in Russia) but it was terminated and is not relevant," Speck said.

"There is nothing then, in the way of authorisation from the copyright owners or in Russian law, that allows the website in question to legally offer the downloads in question."


Speck said that purporting to have a licence or authorisation was a standard operating procedure for commercial pirates "and generally anyone who hopes to get away with the use of someone else's work."

Comment was sought from allofmp3.com on May 7. There has been no response.
http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/1...646114240.html


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Bloggers Set Up Defence Fund For Developer Of File- Sharing Tool
AP

TOKYO: Internet users have raised about 3mil yen (RM98,800) for the defence of a Japanese professor arrested on copyright violation charges for his file-sharing technology.

The word about the defence fund for Isamu Kaneko, a 33-year-old assistant professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo, spread mainly through “blogs,” or Internet journals, which are rapidly attracting thousands of users in Japan.

Kaneko was arrested Monday on copyright-related charges for developing and offering a popular software called Winny, which lets people swap movies and videogames. He was also accused of helping two people illegally distribute games and films on the Internet, police said. The other two were arrested in November.

Within days of Kaneko's arrest, his defence movement grew as 200 like-minded blog users – who'd never met in person – found each other on the Internet and decided to take a stand, said Yasutaka Machimura, a law professor at Nanzan University in Nagoya and a proponent of the fund.

“Winny is being viewed as a prototype case at a time when file-swapping is becoming uncontrolled,” Machimura said on Saturday in a telephone interview. “But accusing someone of a crime is out of the question.”

The rise of free file-sharing networks over the past several years has made it easy for millions of individuals to distribute songs, movies and software worldwide.

Like many Internet experts, Machimura believes in the need for a system to charge money fairly for copyright content as file-sharing technology develops.

Kaneko's arrest has drawn almost no criticism in Japan's mainstream media – but it has triggered a heated debate on the Internet.

Critics have compared the arrest to blaming a knife for a stabbing, and fear the arrest may deter advances in software technology.

Kaneko's lawyers said in a statement issued on the Internet Friday that they'll contest the charges, and defended Winny as a useful Internet tool.

“It is clearly the wrongful act of the police authorities to accuse him of the crime of helping the dubious use of that software,” the statement said.

Kaneko's arrest is believed to be the first in Japan of a suspected developer of file-sharing software. The charge of violating copyright laws carries up to three years in prison or a fine of up to 3mil yen.

Kaneko issued a brief statement to his backers through his lawyers: “Thank you for supporting me.”

Winny, which Kaneko developed in 2002, has become a headache for digital content providers here, as users have been drawn by its reputation for protecting users' anonymity. As many as a million Japanese have used Winny, according to media reports.
http://star-techcentral.com/tech/sto...sec=technology


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Judge: MSU Must Identify 9 Accused Of Illegal Music Sharing

A federal judge has ordered Michigan State University to produce the identities of nine people accused of using the campus computer system to illegally make music available to others via the Internet.

The university is one of several nationwide where people have been targeted by lawsuits in the recording industry's effort to stop online piracy.

"If you are offering contents of your hard drive to millions to come and download for free, that's a violation of federal copyright law," Jonathan Lamy, spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, told The Grand Rapids Press.

Residence halls and other campus buildings in East Lansing offer Internet access and users repeatedly are warned against sharing files without the permission of copyright owners. The request was approved last week.

The university hasn't objected to the request, the newspaper said.
http://www.freep.com/news/statewire/...1_20040515.htm


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P2P “Qtrax” Inks Deal To Pay Royalties

Middle ground created to compensate artist
Ben Fritz

New peer-to-peer service Qtrax has signed a deal with BMI to pay artist royalties on songs illegally downloaded on the Internet.

Unusual relationship creates a middle ground that allows music downloaders to compensate artists at the same rate they receive for radio performances each time they play a song downloaded from Qtrax on their computer. At the same time, they'll be vulnerable to lawsuits from the RIAA for downloading songs without paying.

Songs put onto the Qtrax service, scheduled to launch in the third quarter of this year, will be translated into a new format that tracks playback and prevents users from burning them onto CDs or transferring them to portable devices. Singwell Intl. and LTDnetwork, the companies behind Qtrax, are hoping to sign deals with labels to allow users to purchase the right to burn or transfer those tracks.

"Our view is that free music downloads aren't going away and somebody ought to attempt to find a middle ground between the needs of record companies, artists and consumers," LTDnetwork CEO Allan Klepfisz said.

Royalties will be funded by contextual ads related to searches. When users search for songs from Madonna, for example, they'll be presented with links to purchase CDs, DVDs and books by her in addition to pirated tracks of her songs.

If successful, Qtrax will be the first service to provide some compensation for songs on peer-to-peer networks without user payment. Its model is similar to one long championed by P2P supporters who want artists to receive standard royalty rates for playback of downloaded songs.

It remains to be seen, though, whether other performing rights groups and labels will partner with QTrax or whether BMI will instead find itself allied with another P2P service scorned by the rest of the music industry.

"By signing the BMI agreement, Qtrax is breaking new ground for a new breed of licensed peer-to-peer services," said Richard Conlon, BMI veep of business development and marketing. "We hope that the BMI agreement will be the first in a series of agreements that Qtrax and others will enter into to create totally licensed services."
http://www.variety.com/ index.asp?layout=print_story&articleid=VR1117905136&category id=1009


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6 Former Fox Staffers Charged With Piracy

Federal inquiry began after Fox's internal probe last year
Claude Brodesser

Internal and external antipiracy probes at Fox have netted six former employees, all charged with conspiring to commit copyright infringement for pirating movies and software from a company computer server, federal prosecutors said Friday.

A federal inquiry began after an internal investigation by Fox, which late last year contacted the Secret Service after finding illegal copies of movies such as "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Daddy Day Care" (Daily Variety, March 17). Software worth more than $121,000 as well as dozens of films owned by Fox and other motion picture studios were pirated, according to Secret Service documents obtained by Daily Variety last March.

Those charged are Lisa Yamamoto, 45, a former message system and services administrator; Kevin Sarna, a former infrastructure consultant at Fox Cable; Jonathan O'Brien, 30, a former network engineer; Christopher Willis, 31, formerly a network engineer; Peter Mariano, 25, formerly a network administrator; and Garry Martin, 32, a former manager of desktop/user support.

All are charged with one count of conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison.

Were it not for an apparently unrelated earlier breach of the studio's Internet security in November, Yamamoto might never have surfaced as a suspect, nor would Fox have necessarily discovered that its servers and bandwidth were being used for movie piracy.

In the earlier incident, some 1,800 Fox employees were surprised to receive an anonymous email that contained the names, social security numbers and salaries of hundreds of their co-workers at the FX and Fox Sports cable networks (Daily Variety, Nov. 6).

As a result of that embarrassing leak, Fox Entertainment Group director of corporate security James Chaffee began an investigation. It led to the discovery that a server maintained by Yamamoto and other Fox information technology employees was being used as a "Warez" server. Warez groups are underground Internet communities that compete for high-quality pirated computer software, DVDs and movies.
http://www.variety.com/story.asp?l=s...117905047&c=22


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Franco-American fascism

U.S., France Launch Global Bootleg Battle
Timothy M. Gray

In a rare display of Franco-American amity, Gallic and U.S. film honchos were united May 16 in a plan to tackle global piracy -- with Americans uncharacteristically happy to let their overseas compatriots take the leadership role.

At a press confab after the closed-door sesh, French Minister of Culture & Communication Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres said he'd read the group a statement from Gallic prez Jacques Chirac and that France plans to introduce global-reaching legislation on the matter.

The meeting was hailed as successful, with the promise that such pow-wows will be repeated in the future, including participants outside the film industry.

Asked who will spearhead subsequent gatherings, outgoing MPAA topper Jack Valenti said, "I would have no problem asking the French Minister of Culture to take the lead" adding, "We (Americans) would be avid and energetic participants."

The two-hour high-power huddle included not only U.S. and Euro participants, but honchos from such piracy trouble spots as China, India and Russia.

At the press conference, Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart, who participated in the huddles, described it as "unprecedented in terms of depth and reach" and "unusually candid."

Bart moderated the English-lingo portion of the noon press confab at the Espace Mediteranee at the Palais, while the French-language seg was headed by writer-director Philippe Labro.

Reps of the Hollywood majors included Sony Pictures' Jeff Blake; Warner Bros.' Richard Fox; 20th Century Fox's James N. Gianopulos; DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg; Universal's Rick Finkelstein; and Buena Vista Intl.'s Mark Zoradi.

There were also participants from numerous global companies: Luc Besson, prexy of Europa Corp.; French Telecom exec Franc Dangeard; helmer Jacques Fansten; Vivendi president Jean-Rene Fourtou; Mukta Arts' Subhash Ghai; global producers group prexy Andres-Vincente Gomez; Canal+ prez Bertrand Meheut; Gaumont prez Nicolas Seydoux; Mosfilm's Karen Shakhnazarov; and China Film Group prexy Buting Yang.

Yang said China has adapted some very aggressive policies against pirates, adding, "You need united action."

Similarly, Valenti emphasized that piracy is a problem that affects "every creed and culture" in the world and tech changes in the next two years will be "dazzlingly swift." In other words, he said, no country can do it alone.

Seydoux said "our American friends" will be a big help in the need for international solidarity. Unless piracy is stopped, "Creation itself will disappear. Cultural diversity will disappear."

The event was part of the fest's ongoing effort to tackle the issue, taking advantage of the fact that reps from around the globe are here for the fest. Ministers of culture of more than 20 EU countries will meet on Tuesday, with another huddle the next day.

Many of the participants emphasized that this is not a movement against freedom, but rather, in the words of Donnedieu de Vabres, a matter of finding "the maximum audience for the maximum number of works" while respecting the rights of artists and their creations.

When a journo quoted Quentin Tarantino as saying on May 12 that piracy was OK in some circumstances, Gomez said, "We are not in agreement with Mr. Tarantino. Probably Mr. Tarantino is not in agreement with himself."

But Seydoux clarified that Tarantino was talking specifically about China, where his films are not distributed, and that he wants his films to be seen.
http://www.variety.com/ story.asp?l=story&a=VR1117905029&c=1706

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How To Disrupt The World


Photo: Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail

Zennstrom: ‘Technology is just a tool, like a hammer or scissors. You don’t know what people will use it for.’


Jack Kapica

One of the highest compliments you can pay an inventor is to say a creation is "disruptive technology." It means that the product is revolutionary because it disrupts or even derails the way things are usually done.

Niklas Zennstrom knows better than most engineers that being disruptive can also lead to big trouble.

That happened when he invented Kazaa, the decentralized file-sharing technology. Within months of releasing it in 2000, Mr. Zennstrom found himself in the crosshairs of lawyers representing some of the most fabulously wealthy enterprises, notably Hollywood and the recording industry.

Now he's at it again. As the creator of Skype, a software program that allows free phone calls using the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), he's trying to disrupt the way we've been using the phone since Alexander Graham Bell barked an order to his assistant over copper wires in 1876.

With Kazaa, however, Mr. Zennstrom wasn't trying to disrupt the movie and recording industries, he said Tuesday over lunch in Toronto just before delivering a speech to the VON Conference on the convergence of telecom and Internet technologies. This time, he's more than aware of the strength of the opposition: the global telecommunications industry.

With Kazaa, he had no intention of confronting the big moguls of entertainment. He and his partner, Janus Friis, had created it as a business tool.

They were just a couple of engineers working in Amsterdam trying to come up with a new idea. And Mr. Zennstrom had prepared himself for such a career path, with degrees in science and engineering from the universities of Uppsala, Sweden, and Michigan. He also picked up a business degree as well.

"The architecture of peer-to-peer technology could be used for all sorts of things," he said. "I didn't think it could be used for music — people were using Napster for that. But it's just a tool, like a hammer or scissors. You don't know what people will use it for."

What he imagined for Kazaa was sharing documents within a corporate intranet. Rather than storing documents on a central server, employees could simply get what they need from each other's computers — Kazaa would be disruptive in the sense that it could make complex file servers obsolete. He set about trying to sell the idea in May, 2001.

But music file-sharers were picking it up, the record and movie industries sued Kazaa that October, and more lawyers showed up trying to have Kazaa declared illegal technology. So when he and Mr. Friis finally sold the product to Sharman Networks the following January, the price did not reflect the disruption Kazaa had been creating. The Dutch Supreme Court later ruled Kazaa legal technology, but by then that part of Mr. Zennstrom's life was more or less over.

Last year, Mr. Zennstrom, now 38, and Mr. Friis announced that they had created Skype, which would do to telecommunications companies what Kazaa did to the entertainment industry. It's now a conscious decision to take on the giants — although he says he's not doing it out of revenge, or some political motivation.

But he wants it to be disruptive for a pure engineering reason — it's a technology that changes the way we do things.

He believes that he won't be sued over Skype, simply because telcos around the world are jumping on the VoIP bandwagon, and because there's no copyright violation involved.

"Disruptive technology is about quantum leaps in evolution, and it should disrupt competition in a free market," he said. "And if you're the one who can do that, you will have the ultimate advantage."

His business model is a classic of Internet thinking. He will give away the basic Skype program for free; to make a phone call, a user has to plug in a microphone and earphones into the standard jacks in any computer. The program comes with a global directory of people who use Skype — at last count, Skype downloads have passed the 11 million mark, and there are almost five million unique registrants in 170 countries.

The revenue stream will come from a package of new features — the extra stuff is due to be rolled out this summer — that will include the ability to call any telephone in the world, whether it is using Skype or an old-fashioned land-line. (So far, the free version is limited to conversations between people who are running Skype on their computers, which must have always-on connections.)

He doesn't figure on having a tough time of it, even though many of the new VoIP services being rolled out everywhere are running about $20 to $30, which is already much cheaper than landline phones.

Why?

"Skype isn't about making cheaper phone calls — it's about communicating better. It's much more convenient, has superior voice quality, instant messaging and conference calling."

But disruption has its limits too.

Mr. Zennstrom is in Canada, but not planning a trip south of the border. If he does, the entertainment giants will slap him with a lawsuit over the Kazaa business.

And that would prove to be too disruptive.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/


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Schwarzenegger Files Suit Against Bobblehead Maker
John Broder

Arnold the Litiginator?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's film production company filed a lawsuit last week against a small Ohio toy maker, claiming that the company's $19.95 Schwarzenegger bobblehead doll illegally exploits his image for commercial purposes. The suit says that Mr. Schwarzenegger is an instantly recognizable global celebrity whose name and likeness are worth millions of dollars and are solely his property.

Ohio Discount Merchandise Inc., a family-owned business in Canton, came out earlier this year with a line of dolls of political figures, including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Representative Tom DeLay of Texas. The company has long sold bobbleheads of public figures and celebrities. Its two biggest sellers are likenesses of Anna Nicole Smith and Jesus Christ.

But when the company added a doll of Mr. Schwarzenegger last month, wearing a gray suit and a bandoleer and brandishing an assault rifle, lawyers for the California actor-turned-politician pounced.

First in a letter, and then days later in a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Mr. Schwarzenegger's lawyers contended that the toy company and its president, Todd D. Bosley, had violated the governor's rights to his image. They cited several California and federal cases that support a public figure's right to control the use of his name and likeness, and to be paid royalties if they are used to sell products.

"California has very strong laws that protect celebrities," said Martin D. Singer, the lawyer for Mr. Schwarzenegger and his company, Oak Productions Inc. "His name, voice and likeness are not in the public domain. If you use them for commercial purposes, you are potentially liable for damages."

Mr. Bosley says the governor should lighten up. The dolls are meant as a political parody and are thus protected under the First Amendment. Besides, he said, part of the profits go to a cancer charity.

"Obviously we're making a little bit of fun of Arnold with a caricature of him," Mr. Bosley said. "No other politician has done this. Jimmy Carter sent me a book. Hillary Clinton signed one and sent it back to me. Rudy Giuliani carried his around with him to several of his speeches. We've never had a problem like this."

The case pits two legal concepts against each other, the First Amendment's protection of free speech and political commentary, and the "right of publicity," a branch of trademark and copyright law that protects an individual's image and voice from unauthorized commercial use by third parties.

The courts have tried to define the difference between protected speech and copyright infringement, though several rulings have left a large gray area, said Eugene Volokh, professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Use of a public figure's name, voice or likeness is permitted for journalistic purposes and as an artistic or political statement as long as the artist "transforms" the image into an original work, according to several court rulings.

The California Supreme Court ruled in 2001 against an artist who rendered an image of the Three Stooges on a T-shirt without making an original statement about them. But last year, the same court ruled in favor of the DC Comics division of Time Warner, which produced a takeoff on the rock musicians Johnny and Edgar Winter, creating figures it called the "Autumn Brothers," half-human, half-worm creatures. The parody was deemed original enough to warrant protection under the First Amendment.

"People have a right to stop their name and likeness being used in commercial advertising, for things other than books and biographies," Professor Volokh said. "If someone's image is used without much transformation, if it's not a parody or commentary, that is indeed legally actionable, and under that theory Arnold has a very good claim."

Hollywood celebrities zealously guard their images and likenesses, he said. Those are, after all, their livelihood. Bette Midler successfully sued the Ford Motor Company in the 1980's after Ford used a sound-alike singer in its advertising. Elvis Presley's estate has filed numerous suits to try to banish the King's unauthorized images from T-shirts, coffee mugs and velvet paintings. Mr. Singer said that Bruce Willis, Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise have all recently sued over unauthorized use of their images.

That noted, Mr. Volokh said, it is rare for a politician to file a claim based on the right of publicity. "It just doesn't look good when a public official tries to sue this way," he said. "It makes him look like a heavy. It makes him look humorless. It makes him look like he doesn't want his constituents to express themselves this way."

Mr. Bosley said that while he felt significantly outgunned by Mr. Schwarzenegger and his team of Hollywood lawyers, the case has become a matter of principle for him.

"There's a lot at risk here for me and a lot at risk in the future for people like me," said Mr. Bosley. "Do we succumb to threats and heavy-handedness? Or do we stand up for what America really is?"

A San Francisco intellectual-property law firm, Townsend & Townsend & Crew, has taken on the case at no charge. William T. Gallagher, a partner at the firm, said that Governor Schwarzenegger cannot expect to be immune from satire.

"It's clearly a parody," Mr. Gallagher said of the doll. "It is also making a statement about the cult of celebrity in America. If you're famous, then suddenly you're highly electable. That's what the bobblehead does. It is a transformative statement and absolutely protected under the First Amendment."

Not so, replied Mr. Singer. The doll, he said, is nothing more than a rip-off of Mr. Schwarzenegger's solid-gold image, which other companies have paid millions of dollars for the right to use in advertising and marketing.

"Arnold has always been very vigilant about uses of his image. The reason is his name, photo and likeness are one of the most valuable in the world," Mr. Singer said. "It's not being a bully when you're looking at people taking advantage of somebody and making commercial exploitation for their own benefit."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/18/na.../18arnold.html


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Ventures Aim to Cut Cost of Overseas Cell Calls to Pennies
Ken Belson and Matt Richtel

Mobile phone users have in recent years enjoyed plummeting rates for local and long-distance calling thanks to new technology and fierce competition among cellular companies. Now several entrepreneurs want to use Internet technology to reduce to pennies the cost of using cellphones to call overseas.

Dialing internationally on cellphones is typically so expensive that the service is used mostly by businesspeople on expense accounts. But a two-year-old company called i2Telecom, based in Boca Raton, Fla., plans to release a modemlike device this month that effectively turns an international call into a local one by routing it over the Internet.

Another company, Skype Technologies, recently introduced free software that lets people turn hand-held computers into mobile phones by sending calls over the Internet.

Both ventures take to a new level the market-disrupting potential of the technology called voice over Internet protocol. And both will be on center stage at VON Canada 2004, a conference on Internet telephony opening in Toronto tomorrow that will bring together telecommunications heavyweights like Nortel and Bell Canada, as well as dozens of entrepreneurs and media companies.

Using the Internet to route calls could significantly reduce costs, in part, because data and voice traffic will use a single network, advocates say. The shift presents a threat to traditional telephone companies, which have invested heavily in their networks.

Now upstart companies like i2Telecom hope to shake up the cellphone industry in much the same way that Internet calling is challenging long-distance carriers.

"It puts the cellphone providers under attack for the first time," said Rick Scherle, vice president for marketing at i2Telecom. "The land-line guys have been wrestling this technology," he said. "We're telling the cellphone guys that you have to grapple with it now, too."

I2Telecom's product, the InternetTalker MG-3, is about the size of a hand-held electronic organizer and will cost less than $100. Once connected to a phone and a broadband Internet connection, the router can be programmed to recognize three phone numbers, including those of cellular handsets.

When cellphone users call the phone where the InternetTalker is installed, they receive a second dial tone and access to an Internet calling network from which they can dial any phone number in the world. Instead of paying, say, $1.75 a minute to call London directly by cellphone, people using the InternetTalker would pay for only the local call to their home and just 3 cents a minute, the price of an Internet call on i2Telecom's network. Users can call other i2Telecom subscribers free.

Curiously, cellphone calls routed through the Internet to other cellphones have cleaner signals than cellphone calls sent directly to other cellphones, Mr. Scherle said. Engineers at i2Telecom, who discovered this accidentally, say they believe that by redigitizing the signal, extraneous noise is eliminated.

The new service, however, will not eliminate roaming charges when cellphone users are outside their coverage area. Nor is it likely to offer much savings on long- distance calls if a user has a cellphone plan with unlimited long-distance calling. But the InternetTalker could erode the amount of business cellular carriers have in connecting international calls. It could also hurt overseas phone companies that rely on fees from American carriers to connect international calls.

"There's a huge impact on the international carriers because a lot of carriers subsidize their capital spending with high fees from international voice traffic," said Daniel Briere, the chief executive of TeleChoice, a consulting firm in Mansfield Center, Conn.

Many long-distance carriers have tried to prevent Internet calls from coming into their country, Mr. Briere said, but that requires checking every data packet traveling over their networks, an impractical task.

Wireless carriers in the United States say Internet-based cellular calls will not affect their business because the vast majority of the calls they connect are within North America. They also say the quality of calls traveling over their networks is superior to that of calls routed over the Internet.

"We're a business that trades on quality," said Edward Salas, vice president for network planning at Verizon Wireless. He added that while the Internet technology "has been there for some time, I'm not sure we're ready for prime time to make it a mainstream way of moving traffic." Mr. Salas said the wide-scale use of that technology is about 10 years away.

Skype, a company founded by the creators of Kazaa, the digital music sharing software, also hopes to create software that can route Internet calls from mobile phones. But for now, the company is focused on distributing software that lets people place Internet-based calls through wireless connections to hand-held computers that use the Microsoft PocketPC operating system. Once the software is installed, users attach a headphone to the hand-held computer to make calls.

To use the Skype technology, both the caller and the recipient need the software. But the company plans to make it possible for callers to reach people outside the Skype network. Niklas Zennstrom, Skype's chief executive, said Internet technology eliminates any price difference between calls traveling one mile or thousands of miles. "The concept of national borders," Mr. Zennstrom said, "is disappearing because on the Internet there are no borders."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/business/17voip.html


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The Hon. Al Swift, Home Recordist
EFF

The most remarkable testimony at last week's DMCRA hearings was that of former Congressman Allan Swift.

Swift was testifying as a private citizen, as a "home recordist." Basically, he's been making "mix tapes" for 54 years:

In that time, I have given friends many tapes, cassettes and now CDs containing "programs" I have created from my own collection of LPs and CDs. In that time, I have never made a straight duplicate of a record for anyone. If they ask me to, I tell them politely how easy is it to buy it on the Internet. In that time I have never charged a person a penny - even for the cost of the raw cassette or CD blank. It is just my hobby.

As a copyright lawyer, I know that copyright has a complicated relationship with "home taping." But Swift's testimony tells us how the law ought to be. No member of the committee dared to call him a pirate (with the notable exception of Rep. Mary Bono, who appears not to have learned much since announcing that we should enact a copyright term of "forever less one day").

Perhaps it's time we all focus more on the fans, the people who actually make the entertainment industry possible. For them, we need a copyright law that lives up to Swift's simple statement of common sense:

When I buy a CD or a DVD, that content should be wholly mine to do with as I please as long as I am in no way selling its contents or profiting from it. ... Present law is predicated on the assumption that consumers will rip-off copyright holders. The vast majority are innocent of that assumption, but all are treated as guilty.
http://blogs.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001535.php


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Point, Click And Swap--Digital Photos Go P2P
Paul Festa

Peer-to-peer technology, made famous by music-sharing networks like Napster, may have found a new lease on life in the digital pictures business.

OurPictures, a Palo Alto, Calif., start-up, on Tuesday plans to launch its service for letting subscribers share pictures over the Internet but without the constraints of e-mail attachments or Web sites.

The idea behind OurPictures, which is set to conclude a three-month test of its service, is that subscribers can post pictures to a network of fellow subscribers who transfer the pictures directly from one computer to another.

"Our belief is that the desktop is the right place where a consumer wants to organize and manage their digital photos--not on a Web site," said John Paul, CEO and founder of OurPictures. "If you have one photo you want a thousands people to see, that's one thing. But a Web site is not the right place to place thousands of photos."

Web sites that offer digital photo organization, storage, editing and printing abound. They include Kodak's Ofoto, Shutterfly and services on major portals like Yahoo.

But OurPictures--a privately held upstart whose investors include Sutter Hill Ventures, Foundation Capital and Legacy Venture--is betting that consumers will find file sharing a better way to edit and circulate large numbers of photos.

"You want the speed of the PC to be able to do that," Paul said. "Up until now it's been too complicated. Now you have one piece of software that's easy to use."

In addition to sharing photos with one another, OurPictures subscribers will be able to digitally send pictures to most Ritz Camera or Wolf Camera retail locations in the United States for printing within four hours. Subscribers also can print with their own computer or get prints by mail through an OurPictures-branded service provided by ClubPhoto in Austin, Texas.

OurPictures charges $19.95 per year for membership and is offering a 30-day free trial. The service is available for use with Microsoft's Windows operating system. A version compatible with Apple Computer's Macintosh OS is planned, but with no target release date.

Mindful of legal problems that music-sharing peer-to-peer sites encountered when users traded copyrighted songs without paying for them, OurPictures sets stringent guidelines on what kinds of pictures subscribers may share.

In its end-user license agreement, OurPictures forbids "content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, harassing, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, vulgar, invasive of another's privacy or right of publicity, infringing of a third party's intellectual property rights...hateful, racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable, encouraging of conduct that could constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law."

The company isn't the only site offering photo sharing on the peer-to-peer model. In February, a Menlo Park, Calif., start-up called It's The Content launched a service called ShareALot, for which it has a patent pending. Other similar services include How2Share Technologies' Pixpo and Picasa's Hello.
http://news.com.com/2100-1038-5214575.html


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Kids smarter than lawyers?

Majority of youth understand 'copyright,' but many continue to download illegally

New poll indicates more education, parental supervision needed
Press Release

An understanding of copyright law is not enough to stop kids from downloading copyrighted software, games, music and other digital media through illegal, online file-sharing networks, according to a new Harris Interactive(R) poll conducted for the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

"Unfortunately, many kids and teens continue to download copyrighted works illegally even though more than half of them think there are laws against downloading digital works," said Diane Smiroldo, vice president of public affairs for BSA.

"What's most alarming is that eight out of 10 kids and teens understand the definition of copyright and nearly all of them, especially teens, are aware that software, music and movies are protected by copyright. The fact that kids know stealing software is wrong, and yet they behave like it's okay, clearly illustrates a challenging ethical dilemma."
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2004,+09:44+AM


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Intel takes PlanetLab to India
Dinesh C. Sharma

Intel has expanded its PlanetLab project to include two technology institutes in India.

The chipmaker said that the groups, the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Information Technology and the Roorkee-based Indian Institute of Technology, will test the performance of networking and distributed-computing protocols being developed as part of the PlanetLab programme.

PlanetLab is an open, distributed network being used to try out new technologies in areas like distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables and distributed query processing. The programme operates at 156 sites worldwide. It is one of several research initiatives that Intel is working on in conjunction with universities and other academic groups.

The company said researchers from the two centres will work closely with those from Intel India. Additionally, workers at the Indian PlanetLab institutes will collaborate with those from other countries to solve technical and non-technical problems.

"PlanetLab creates a virtual laboratory that researchers around the world can use to develop novel Internet services, while at the same time exploring how to evolve the Internet to better support continued innovation," Frank Spindler, vice president of Intel's corporate technology group, said in a statement. "India will play a role in developing a new class of services and applications that are distributed over much of the Web and will affect the design of intelligent servers, network storage and network processors."
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/dev...9155019,00.htm


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Remembering Brianna LaHara, 12-Year-Old 'Criminal'
Jon Newton

Perhaps Sony and other companies will now apply the same laid-back nonjudgmental philosophy elsewhere, freeing them to deal with the real copyright criminals -- the thousands of organized gangs and individuals around the world who, day in, day out, are counterfeiting and duplicating countless millions of CDs.

Q: What's the difference between Chi-Hi, a high school, and a 12-year-old named Brianna LaHara? A: 500 CDs.

It's now routine for the Big Five record labels to sue innocent people for allegedly sharing music online without permission, and 12-year-old Brianna LaHara was one such person sued by Big Music.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) set its legal teams on her for allegedly downloading "If You're Happy and You Know It" and the Family Matters TV theme, which were among 1,000 songs Big Music claimed Brianna had snagged illegally with a P2P file-sharing application.

"We're trying to send a strong message that you are not anonymous when you participate in peer-to-peer file-sharing," said Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman at the time.

What has that to do with Chi-Hi, short for Chippewa Falls High School? The other half of Bainwol's comment was that the "illegal distribution of copyrighted music has consequences," and that's certainly true -- even if the "illegal distribution of copyrighted music" part hasn't yet been upheld in a court of law.

Chi-Hi's Prom Committee

LaHara's mother had to pay the music industry US$2,000 to settle out of court. But Sony (NYSE: SNE) -- one of the Big Five labels -- decided not to sue the members of Chi-Hi's prom committee even though they'd burned Sony songs onto CDs and then distributed them to students so they could remember their prom night.

Chi-Hi is in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and its prom committee bought the custom CDs at $3.69 each, paid for with proceeds from junior-class fundraisers and other proms. The CDs were given to 500 people who each had paid $14 to attend the prom.

"We use the funds to offset the costs of the prom, and if there's anything left over, it goes into the senior-class fund," Chi-Hi principal Dr. Jim Sauter told me.

The prom committee had burned The Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian," Sara Evans' "Born to Fly" and "100 Years" by Five for Fighting onto them. No, the committee hadn't considered the possibility that it might have been breaking anyone's copyright.

Nor, apparently, had Stumps, the company that supplied the CDs.

Unwanted Attention?

A Stumps catalog actually suggested making CDs, Sauter told me. "Record songs from prom night on CDs and store them in imprinted cases for memories that will last a lifetime," said the catalog, quoted in a Chippewa Herald story.

Sauter said the thought that burning and then distributing the CDs might bring unwanted attention from the music industry hadn't occurred to anyone.

But it had occurred to the local newspaper that contacted Eugene Quinn, a patent attorney and law professor at Syracuse University -- which is having its own problems centering on the music industry -- asking what kind of danger the school was in.

Predictably, Quinn issued dire warnings.

"This might be big enough for the RIAA to follow up on," he told staff reporter Jeff Hage. "What the recording industry does is pick someone who has a clear infraction and make an example of them."

The bottom line, Quinn said, was that burning the CDs wasn't unlike stealing from the recording artists, who count on the royalties from music sales . "Burning 500 CDs could get the recording industry's attention. A handful doesn't. Hundreds do."

Applying the Philosophy Elsewhere

The copyrights to all of these songs are owned by Columbia Records, which is, in turn, owned by Sony.

"Columbia told school officials that the record company would grant retroactive licensing to the school for three songs that were burned onto a CD used as prom gift on May 8," said the Herald, which went on to quote Sauter as saying of record company officials: "They were very nonjudgmental. They said they get hundreds of request like ours every month."

With that as a precedent, perhaps Sony and the other companies will now apply the same laid-back nonjudgmental philosophy elsewhere, freeing them to deal with the real copyright criminals -- the thousands of organized gangs and individuals around the world who, day in, day out, are counterfeiting and duplicating countless millions of CDs and DVDs for resale on the international underground market.

In the meantime, adds the Herald story, when the dust clears, Sauter said the school might send the catalog company a letter.
http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/33876.html#


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When Free Is Profitable
Brian Mansfield

The first time Moe played San Francisco, the band didn't have a song on the radio. It didn't have a video; it didn't even have a record deal. Yet the group sold out the 750-seat Great American Music Hall.

Wilco found that putting out pre-release tracks from its Yankee Hotel Foxtrot primed the pump for bigger record sales when the CD came out.

The secret to Moe's success? A community of West Coast music fans had been trading tapes of the New York band's concerts, duplicating bootlegged recordings and distributing them to friends. The members of Moe never saw a dime off those concert tapes, but they arrived in San Francisco to a full house.

That experience helped shape guitarist Al Schnier's views on the file-sharing debate.

"We always encouraged taping of our shows, from Day 1," Schnier says. "There's tons of live Moe that gets traded over the Internet. We're breeding fans who have an investment in this thing, because they're discovering us. It's very cutting-edge to find something underground.

"The same is true for the file sharing that goes on these days."

Though unauthorized file sharing may be illegal, not all artists view it as bad for business.

"I definitely believe that file sharing has helped our business," Guster guitarist Ryan Miller says. "We've sold only a couple hundred thousand copies of each of our last albums. We've never made a cent from our album sales, so we don't really see that money anyway."

The notion that bands could make more money because people steal their music seems counterintuitive. But Barnaby Greenberg, who manages Donna the Buffalo, says file sharing may help "heavy-touring acts that aren't depending on huge releases."

Greg Joseph, bassist for Pittsburgh-based rock band The Clarks, says, "We're a big enough band that CD sales do affect our bottom line." Joseph says his band sold about 45,000 copies of its 2002 release Another Happy Ending. "And lack of CD sales certainly affects our bottom line. However, we're a small enough band that we still need the free, word-of-mouth spreading of the good news."

Bands such as The Clarks or The Rosenbergs, who once toured under Napster's sponsorship, may not be able to pay (or have their labels pay) hundreds of thousands of dollars to promoters for a chance at getting their songs on the radio. They can, however, give away an equivalent amount in royalties through free downloads and file sharing. The desired result is the same: finding an audience. And to The Rosenbergs' David Fagin, taking that chance is better than not being heard at all.

"That's why we signed on with Napster when it was so controversial," Fagin says. "The alternative was just to be a regular band trying to do radio promo."

A revenue trade-off

Artists generate revenue from a variety of sources — not only through CD sales, but also from publishing income, ticket sales and merchandise. Acts that control most, if not all, of those income streams have the most flexibility when it comes to their position on file sharing. For some, they're essentially trading in part of their publishing income to increase tour and merchandise revenue.

Donna the Buffalo owns its publishing and now releases its own CDs. Greenberg says the band has quadrupled its fan base and tripled its gross income since it started releasing its recordings independently and aggressively giving away copies of its music. Though Donna the Buffalo typically sells around 10,000 to 20,000 copies of a release, Greenberg says, the band played before 300,000 people in 2003 and expects to double that number this year.

"Our approach in that time has been to focus on getting our music heard by new people by any means possible, mainly by giving it away," he says.

Not everybody in the music industry can work with such a business model, particularly record companies, which typically have just one way to make money: selling recorded music.

"Artists obviously have a different blend of revenue — they have endorsements, and they have touring," says Mitch Bainwol, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA). "Sales represents a piece of it, but not the totality. (Related story: Artists mix it up with file sharers)

"For us, the guys who basically are the venture capitalists, the investors in the creation of music, our revenue stream is rooted in sales. That explains some of the perspective differences."

In some genres, the revenue streams run to different places. Country singers, for instance, often record songs written by other people. If unauthorized file sharing undermines the sales of those records, the results can be devastating for songwriters without any other source of income.

"The story I'm getting from most other songwriters is that mechanical royalties are definitely dropping," says Hugh Prestwood, who has written hits for Trisha Yearwood, Randy Travis and others. "If you make songwriting a profession where you can't make money, you're going to completely eliminate the talent from the field."

For some acts, file sharing seems to have actually increased sales. When Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out in 2002, the entire album had been available through peer-to-peer networks for nearly a year. Yet the album sold more than 50,000 copies its first week out — the best debut of the band's career and more than double the first-week tally of its preceding album.

Like a 'down payment'

The band hopes to replicate that success with A Ghost Is Born, due June 22. The album's tracks already are easily available through unlicensed sites Limewire and Kazaa. Anticipating that, the band has begun streaming the album on its Web site and has partnered with a group of fans to accept donations from downloaders via a Web site called Justafan.org. The money raised through that site will be donated to Doctors Without Borders.

"They came to us and said, 'We want to encourage the people who are downloading to do something positive,' " Wilco manager Tony Margherita says. "Kind of like a down payment."

Bainwol says the RIAA has no beef with copyright owners who choose to give away music or encourage the sharing of their music.

"There may well be outliers that choose to market their products in a different way," Bainwol says. "That's perfectly fine. It does not change the essential reality, that you have to have an economic basis for an industry to survive."

Even some of the musicians who feel they have benefited from unauthorized file sharing admit to feeling conflicted about the practice. And few endorse it outright. Even Moe, which outlines a concert-taping policy on its Web site, specifically prohibits trading of the group's official releases.

The Clarks' Joseph warns fans to be careful what they wish for when it comes to free music. "If sales are down, the band will not be on the label anymore," he says. "That could end up hurting us, because our label definitely helps us."

At the same time, Guster's Miller is not keen on the idea of sharing his other income sources with his record label.

"It makes more sense for the labels," he concedes, "but it's not like touring is incredibly lucrative. ... We make a decent living, but if the record label was to take a percentage of our merchandise and touring, we wouldn't be able to do it."

But that's exactly where The Rosenbergs' Fagin believes the industry inevitably is headed.

"Labels and artists are going to have to share. The label and the artist will benefit if the label promotes the shows a lot more, and the artist gives them a percentage of concert grosses."

Fans paying 'dues'

In the Moe business model, the band shares with its fans by allowing them to tape its concerts, then trade those files or burn CDs for their friends.

Schnier believes Moe fans who share the band's music feel more invested in the band.

"We have fans who are so dedicated to our music that they want to own everything we put out," Schnier says. "Having a burned version of a studio album is OK, but it doesn't have the artwork.

"Our fans, very much in an NPR/PBS way, feel it's a voluntary effort. You can listen to NPR for free, but the people who understand it pay their membership dues. It's the same way with our fans.

"They're not just consumers; they're part of the equation."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/n...ng-main_x.htm#


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File Sharing Works for Berklee College of Music

Berklee Discloses Berkleeshares.com File Sharing Campaign Results
Press Release

Berklee College of Music, the world's premier music college, announced today that its file-sharing initiative, Berkleeshares.com, providing free online music lessons, is helping the college increase awareness of its programs and its faculty. Both the Berkleemusic.com online school and Berklee Press, Berklee's publishing division, have experienced a 40 percent increase in visitors as a result of the launch of Berklee Shares and increased revenues of 32 percent. Berkleeshares.com was launched on November 10, 2003.

Commenting on the announcement, Dave Kusek, Vice President of Berklee Media said, "The success of Berkleeshares.com is a testament to the need for music education on a global level. It is also proof that file sharing can be embraced by musicians as a meaningful way to share information and knowledge with each other. Berkleeshares.com was launched to initiate a dialogue about the benefits of file sharing in the music community. We have succeeded and we intend to keep the dialog going."

The Berklee Shares online lessons are comprised of a growing catalog of music lessons covering instrument performance, music production and technology, songwriting and arranging, music business and careers, music education and improvisation. The lessons are derived from curriculum developed at Berklee by its world-renowned faculty and are available in the form of MP3s, QuickTime movies and PDF files.

File sharing as a promotional tool has proved to be effective for Berklee. Since its launch, Berkleeshares.com has received more than 250,000 visitors who have downloaded more than 350,000 lessons. The site has received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback from within the music industry and others who have made use of the available files.

Respected artist manager and record label owner Ken Levitan, commented: "The music community has changed dramatically in the past several years with the advent of file sharing and related technology and we all have to keep up the pace. Berklee Shares demonstrates how we can all take advantage of these innovations. Education can be brought to students on their own time, in their own homes, reaching that many more people and that much more effectively." Levitan's Vector Management and Vector Recordings clients include Steve Winwood, Patty Griffin, Peter Cincotti, Lyle Lovett, Queen Latifah, Damien Rice and Chris Robinson.

Bruce Kirkland, President of Tsunami Entertainment said: "Berklee College of Music has demonstrated the words 'file sharing' to have a very positive connotation, and indeed be used to further the interests of musicians and their art form. Our artists have always regarded technology as their friend, helping to establish important one-to-one relationships with their fans. Berklee is yet again helping us to be brave in the new world." Tsunami Entertainment clients include Bon Jovi, Sarah Brightman, The Dandy Warhols, GusGus, Goldfrapp, Ozomatli and DJ Dan Mancini.

Berklee is committed to providing music education that is widely available to the global music community. The Berklee Shares program is designed to create an open exchange of ideas for musicians everywhere and as a means to gain unprecedented access to quality education through the Internet. Berklee believes that digital distribution networks will have a significant impact on the future of music and music education.

Berklee continues to explore, through innovative programs such as Berklee Shares, positive ways to take advantage of digital distribution networks and to better understand the future direction of the music industry. Berklee stands alongside other leading organizations that are committed to educating the industry and the general public about important music and technology issues, such as file sharing.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040519/sfw045_1.html