Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 16th, '05

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"I don't think anybody should make any money on music. Maybe we would pay audiences." - Wilco


"The television audience today has a coliseum mentality, and they are not cheering for the gladiator, they're cheering for the lion." - Robert W. Arnhym


"I don't buy the reports that the classical record market is collapsing. It's just a question of recording the right repertory, marketing it convincingly and applying the right discipline." - Michael Smellie


"Mr. Hetherwick pointed out that in the 15 months he ran BMG Classics, before the merger [with Sony/CBS], he was able to turn a profit with a line devoted fully to classical repertory." – Allan Kozinn


"Sony has avant-garde productions from the 1960's that are important but that we couldn't afford to remaster, put into a plastic box and sell in stores. What the Internet offers is a place where nonspecialists can go and listen to samples to see what they like in the privacy of their homes, without being embarrassed. For the collector, you could have the complete Toscanini always available online." - Gilbert Hetherwick


"So if you, your sister or your daughter is walking around in Australia listening to his #1 hit on your favourite music player, there’s a good chance someone has broken the law." - Alex Malik


"Microsoft hit the jackpot last week with the acquisition of [peer-to-peer program maker] Groove Networks. The acquisition…may well prove to be as important to Microsoft as that of Lotus by IBM back in 1995." – The Butler Group


"The publicity created by the MPAA actually drove users to find out what all the fuss was about and resulted in an increase in [Internet] traffic levels." – Andrew Parker















Supreme-Court Transcript Shows Legal Reasoning In Grokster Case
Alexander Wolfe

The U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday released the transcript of last month's oral arguments in the contentious Grokster file-sharing copyright-infringement case.

The 55-page document filled in details on arguments by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, which is seeking to overturn a California court decision allowing Grokster to continue offering its peer-to-peer software. That decision relied on the precedent famously set in the 1984 Betamax case, which essentially held that technologies with legal applications couldn't be shut down due to illegal actions by some users.

"The things that seem very clear are that the Justices really do understand this problem now," said Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia Law School and general counsel to the Free Software Foundation, which is supporting Grokster. "There's no question at all that this isn't beyond their technical understanding and that they're culturally aware of what file sharing is about."

"Like most Supreme Court arguments I've heard, you couldn't tell the way the court will line up in the case from what was said in the oral argument in any way at all," Moglen said. "Both sides got a pretty tough going over."

In his oral argument, Donald Verrilli, the attorney who spoke on behalf of MGM, sought to drive a wedge between Betamax and Grokster. "Copyright infringement is the only commercially significant use of the Grokster and StreamCast services, and that is no accident," Verrilli said, according to the transcript. "The evidence in this caseshowed that 90 percent of the material on the services was either definitely or very likely to be infringing."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg interjected that there could be legitimate uses; Verrilli replied that he didn't think that was true.

Throughout his presentation, Verrilli hammered away at Grokster's legitimacy. Peppered by the judges with questions about contrasts with Xerox machines, CDs and videotape, Verrilli pointed to Apple's iPod as his model of a technology with acceptable copy protection. "From the moment that device was introduced, it was obvious that there were very significant lawful commercial uses for it," he said

Halfway through in the session, Grokster attorney Richard Taranto began his presentation. To buttress his contention that the Supreme Court shouldn't overturn the lower court's decision in favor of Grokster, he took a Betamax-like tack, stressed that peer-to-peer services have at least some legitimate uses. "This case was decided on the assumption that the respondents [i.e., Grokster] knew that there would be widespread infringing use of a product that they were putting outwhich they had no ability to separate from non- infringing use," he said, according to the transcript.

Taranto painted Grokster as a tool of autonomous communication. "The great virtue of peer-to-peer decentralized software is that it doesn't require anybody to put stuff onto a server and then bear the cost of bandwidth, of being charged by the Internet service provider when a million people suddenly want it," he said, according to the transcript.

A decision is the case could come down as early as June. "The guessing game of all time is how the Supreme Court is going to rule," said Jay Rosenthal, the attorney for the Recording Artists Coalition, in an interview. The group supports MGM in the case. "Personally, I think they're going to send it back down [to the U.S. District Court in California] for a new hearing where they hear evidence as to whether there was intent to commit copyright infringement [and] whether there's legitimate fair use."

"Everybody acknowledges here that the underlying use by the user is infringement," Rosenthal added. "So I think they're going to look at the analysis [of fair use] and whether this falls into Sony, was really not made because they didn't have enough evidence to base it on."

Moglen believes the issues raised by the case should be settled in an entirely different venue. "It's very hard to argue that this is a decision for the courts and not for Congress," he said. "All by itself, the Supreme Court is supposed to set rules to determine how big technology industries and much smaller entertainment industries are going to exist for decades? The hardest thing for the movie industry to argue is why Congress doesn't have to do anything here."
http://www.internetweek.com/breaking...leID=160702555


SCOTUS TRANSCRIPT: METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS, INC., :ET AL., :Petitioners, :v. : No. 04-480 GROKSTER, LTD, ET AL. - PDF, HTML, ASCII.

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Three File-Sharing Icons Move On

A look at careers, then and now
Benny Evangelista

The mere mention of the early file-sharing icons -- Shawn Fanning, Niklas Zennstrom or Wayne Rosso -- used to be enough to send top recording industry executives and artists into a tirade.

But times have changed in a matter of years. All three have moved on. Two head companies that offer solutions to online piracy, and one has gone on to disrupt another industry.

Here's a look at the careers of these three, then and now.

Shawn Fanning

Then: As a Northwestern University student in 1999, Fanning wanted an easier way to find and download MP3 music files, which were a growing underground hit among U.S. college students. So he wrote an online file- sharing program and named it after his own nickname, "The Napster."

Napster quickly grew into a worldwide phenomenon used by millions of people who were swapping as many as 3 billion songs a month. Fanning, who later moved to the Bay Area to help found Napster Inc., became an enemy of the major record labels and artists.

A string of lawsuits forced the company to shut down its file-sharing service and eventually close.

Now: Fanning, 24, is co-founder and chief strategy officer of Snocap Inc., a San Francisco startup that provides the record industry with digital music licensing and copyright management services for use on peer-to-peer networks.

Snocap has already signed as clients the two biggest labels, Universal and Sony BMG, and many independent labels.

Niklas Zennstrom

Then: After court rulings forced Napster offline in mid-2001, another file- sharing technology filled the void: FastTrack. Introduced in September 2000 by Zennstrom and Janus Friis, it was the underlying platform for the next generation of file-sharing programs, Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster.

Kazaa went on to become the most downloaded software ever.

Dutch courts eventually ruled that Zennstrom's company, then Kazaa B.V., could not be held liable for copyright infringement by Kazaa users. But legal costs forced him and Friis to sell to Sharman Networks, the Australian firm that still distributes Kazaa software.

Now: Zennstrom, 38, is CEO of Skype, the Luxembourg firm he and Friis, 28, founded.

Skype distributes a free program based on peer-to-peer technology that lets users make and receive free telephone calls over the Internet. In 19 months, Skype has attracted 30 million unique users worldwide, adding about 155,000 new users a day. Skype is a leading player in the Voice over Internet Protocol revolution that is transforming the telephone industry.

Wayne Rosso

Then: When Rosso, a veteran music industry publicist and consultant, took over as president of Grokster Ltd. in 2002, he reveled in his role as outspoken critic and thorn in the side of the recording industry, especially its efforts to stamp out file sharing.

Offering colorful sound bites such as calling record industry executives fools and idiots, Rosso became the de facto voice of file sharing in the news media and on shows such as "60 Minutes."

He once compared leaders of the Recording Industry Association of America to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Now: Rosso, 56, is the CEO of Mashboxx, a new company that is hoping to start a legal file-sharing service next month. Mashboxx, which will use Snocap's services, is obtaining recording industry licenses to sell songs on a new peer-to-peer network.

Rosso, based in Virginia Beach, Va., said record industry executives have become more willing to work with file-sharing firms such as Mashboxx, even if many "still hold their nose" when he's around.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...leshare31.html


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Jesus would’ve joined the RIAA

Gospel Music Association President to Address Music Piracy at GMA Music Awards Tonight
Press Release

While the Gospel Music Association (GMA) is handing out its highest honors tonight in Nashville, the music being celebrated with Dove Awards will be stolen thousand of times through illegal peer-to-peer networks.

John W. Styll, president of the GMA and executive producer of the 36th Annual GMA Music Awards, will remind the audience of artists, songwriters, musicians, producers and music fans at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, that gospel music has a great stake in the ongoing battle to eliminate music piracy, a fight currently being waged in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The text of Styll’s comments: "I’d like to pose a question: Is it wrong to take something that is not yours? Even a 5-year-old knows the answer: ’Of course, it’s wrong.’ That is the bottom-line principle of music piracy. If you download music using the Internet without paying to do so, you are robbing its creators of the right to make a living-and that includes every artist nominated for an award tonight. Every time you participate in file-sharing or connect with businesses who encourage and profit from such downloading, you are making an intentional decision to do something that is just plain wrong. Yes, there are plenty of rationalizations: ’I don’t do it that much.’ ’It’s just one song or one album.’ ’That artist probably makes a lot of money.’ Or the old standby: ’Everybody does it.’ But the truth is that ’millions of wrongs don’t make it right.’ What may appear to be free actually comes with a very heavy price. It cuts short the careers of artists and others who can’t make ends meet. It hits record companies who don’t have the money to invest in new artists because of the losses they experience every day through music theft. And ultimately it is an attack on all of us who enjoy music. As piracy increases, the financial resources to create new music decreases. And when new music is silenced, we all lose. To those of you who work in the music industry, please know that the GMA is fully supportive of all efforts to protect what is rightfully yours. We pledge to continue to advocate on your behalf--both to the government and to the general public. And to those of you who enjoy owning and listening to music, I make this appeal: I ask you to take a stand to protect the rights of the music community, including the artists whose music you are passionate about. Please, don’t be a thief. Protect the music."

The GMA has been a vocal supporter of music industry efforts against music piracy. Last year, the GMA and Barna Research Group reported on a study which showed that nearly 80 percent of Christian teens were illegally downloading and copying music, a trend that has coincided with a downturn in gospel music sales.

The Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments in late March on "MGM vs. Grokster," the lawsuit brought by music and movie companies that will decide the legality of Internet file-sharing networks that let users exchange free copies of copyrighted movies and songs. The lawsuit was brought by 28 of the world’s largest entertainment companies against the makers of the Morpheus, Grokster, and KaZaA software products. The entertainment companies petitioned the Supreme Court to take the case after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that file-sharing companies are not liable for their users’ copyright infringement. The decision upheld a lower-court ruling from April 2003.

Asking the Supreme Court to reaffirm the fundamental principles of the protection of private property, including intellectual property, the GMA joined the unprecedented coalition of movie and music organizations through the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in signing the friend of the court briefs filed for the Supreme Court case. The Supreme Court’s ruling is expected in June.

The 36th Annual GMA Music Awards will be televised in national syndication in June by Central City Productions of Chicago, Ill., with an expected audience reach of at least 75 percent of U.S. television households. Top nominees for Dove Awards include Switchfoot, Casting Crowns, The Crabb Family, Michael W. Smith, MercyMe and Israel Houghton.
http://www.mysan.de/article77412.html


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Exploring the Right to Share, Mix and Burn
David Carr

The tickets for the event Thursday sold out in five minutes on the Internet, and on the evening itself the lines stretched down the block. The reverent young fans might as well have been holding cellphones aloft as totems of their fealty.

Then again, this was the New York Public Library, a place of very high ceilings and even higher cultural aspirations, so the rock concert vibe created some dissonance. Inside, things became clearer as two high priests of very different tribes came together to address the question of "Who Owns Culture?" - a discussion of digital file- sharing sponsored by Wired magazine, part of a library series called "Live From the NYPL."

Both Jeff Tweedy, the leader of the fervently followed rock band Wilco, and Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor who has opposed criminalizing file sharing, seemed to agree that just about anybody who owns a modem also owns - or at least has every right to download - culture products.

"I don't think anybody should make any money on music," Mr. Tweedy said at one point, only half joking. "Maybe we would pay audiences."

It is a curious sight when a rock star appears before his flock and suggests they take his work without paying for it, and even encourages them to. Mr. Tweedy, who has never been much for rock convention, became a convert to Internet peer-to-peer sharing of music files in 2001, after his band was dropped from its label on the cusp of a tour. Initially, the news left Wilco at the sum end of the standard rock equation: no record/no tour, no tour/no money, no money/no band. But Mr. Tweedy released "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" for streaming on the band's Web site, and fans responded in droves. Wilco then took on the expenses of its tour as a band.

The resulting concerts were a huge success: Mr. Tweedy remembered watching in wonder as fans sang along with music that did not exist in CD form. Then something really funny happened. Nonesuch Records decided to release the actual plastic artifact in 2002. And where the band's previous album, "Summerteeth," sold 20,000 in its first week according to SoundScan, "Yankee" sold 57,000 copies in its first week and went on to sell more than 500,000. Downloading, at least for Wilco, created rather than diminished the appetite for the corporeal version of the work.

Both Mr. Tweedy and Mr. Lessig used their talk to say that the Web, in an age where conglomerated FM radio has squeezed out virtually all possibility of hearing anything worthy and new, is where fans are best exposed to music they might want to buy. And during the presentation (which was streamed live on Wilco's Web site), Mr. Lessig added that the decision to outlaw downloading would have a profoundly inhibiting effect on the creation of culture. He said that in every instance, from the player piano to radio to VCR's to cable, the law had landed on the side of the alleged "pirates," allowing for the copying or broadcasting of cultural works for private consumption. Thus far, both the music industry and the film industry has succeeded in making it illegal for consumers to download their products .

Mr. Lessig said that "the freedom to remix, not just words, but culture" was critical in the development of unforeseen works of art. He pointed to "The Grey Album," produced by the D.J. Danger Mouse, a remix of the Beatles' "White Album" and Jay-Z's "Black Album" that resulted in a wholly new and unexpected piece of music.

"What does it say about our democracy when ordinary behavior is deemed criminal?" he asked. Mr. Lessig and the moderator, Steven Johnson, a contributing editor at Wired, made much of the fact that the discussion was taking place in a library, where much of the Western cultural canon is available free.

Mr. Tweedy has little sympathy for artists who complain about downloading. "To me, the only people who are complaining are people who are so rich they never deserve to be paid again," he said.

Mr. Lessig, one of the philosopher kings of Internet law, and Mr. Tweedy, the crown prince of indie music, traded places more than a few times during the presentation, with Mr. Lessig, who has argued copyright cases before the United States Supreme Court, enthusiastic about the artistic possibilities the Web engenders, and Mr. Tweedy making sapient pronouncements on the theoretical underpinnings of ownership.

"Once you create something, it doesn't exist in the consciousness of the creator," Mr. Tweedy said, telling the audience that they had an investment in a song just by the act of listening. Later, at a dinner at Lever House, Mr. Tweedy suggested that downloading was an act of rightful "civil disobedience."

All of it - high and low culture, Supreme Court rulings and mashed-up video clips ridiculing the president - was eagerly lapped up by the audience, which included musicians like David Byrne and D.J. Spooky, along with a throng of fans who would show up to hear Mr. Tweedy read from a digital phone directory.

Afterward, Alex Sherwin, a 36-year-old graphic designer, said, "It would have been better with a guitar, but I still enjoyed hearing what he had to say." Mr. Sherwin said his favorite CD was a live Jeff Tweedy performance in Chicago, one that had been recorded and distributed with the artist's happy assent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/ar...ic/09nypl.html


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The President's iPod: Is He File-Sharing?

Spencer Critchley

Following this article in the New York Times Monday (April 11, 2005), the question has popped up on some music lists: Is President Bush, inadvertently or not, participating in illegal file-sharing?

"...The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist during the 2004 campaign. Among them are "Circle Back" by John Hiatt, "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" by Joni Mitchell and "My Sharona," the 1979 song by the Knack..." (Emphasis is mine.)

If Mr. Bush didn't pay for those songs, it's not just a gotcha for the man who could probably claim the title of the world's leading defender of private property. It's an indication of the challenge the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and others are facing in trying to get the public to remember that easily cloned digital files are, officially anyway, not free.

And come to think of it, it also raises this question... Would the RIAA sue him?
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/wlg/6864


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White House Letter: President Bush's iPod
Elisabeth Bumiller

Between his return on Friday from Pope John Paul II's funeral in Rome and his meeting today with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, President Bush spent an hour and a half on Saturday on an 18-mile mountain bike ride at his Texas ranch. With him, as usual, was his indispensable new exercise toy: an iPod music player loaded with country and popular rock tunes aimed at getting the presidential heart rate up to a chest-pounding 170 beats per minute.

Which brings up the inevitable question. What, exactly, is on the First iPod? In an era of celebrity playlists - Tom Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback, recently posted his on the iTunes online music store - what does the presidential selection of downloaded songs tell us about Mr. Bush?

First, Mr. Bush's iPod is heavy on traditional country singers like George Jones, Alan Jackson and Kenny Chesney. He has selections by Van Morrison, whose "Brown Eyed Girl" is a Bush favorite, and by John Fogerty, most predictably "Centerfield," which was played at Texas Rangers games when Mr. Bush was an owner and is still played at ballparks all over America. ("Oh, put me in coach, I'm ready to play today.")

The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist during the 2004 campaign. Among them are "Circle Back" by John Hiatt, "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" by Joni Mitchell and "My Sharona," the 1979 song by the Knack that Joe Levy, a deputy managing editor at Rolling Stone in charge of music coverage, cheerfully branded "suggestive if not outright filthy" in an interview last week.

Mr. Bush has had his Apple iPod since July, when he received it from his twin daughters as a birthday gift. He has some 250 songs on it, a paltry number compared to the 10,000 selections it can hold. Mr. Bush, as leader of the free world, does not take the time to download the music himself; that task falls to his personal aide, Blake Gottesman, who buys individual songs and albums, including Mr. Jones's and Mr. Jackson's greatest hits, from the iTunes music store.

Mr. Bush uses his iPod chiefly during bike workouts to help him pump up his heartbeat, which he monitors with a wrist strap. The strap also keeps track of calories expended for the intensely weight-focused president, who has recently lost eight pounds after eating a lot of doughnuts during the 2004 campaign. Mr. Bush burned 1,300 calories on his bike ride on Saturday, Mr. McKinnon reported.

As for an analysis of Mr. Bush's playlist, Mr. Levy of Rolling Stone started out with this: "One thing that's interesting is that the president likes artists who don't like him."

Mr. Levy was referring to Mr. Fogerty, who was part of the anti-Bush "Vote for Change" concert tour across the United States last fall. Mr. McKinnon, who once wrote songs for Kris Kristofferson's music publishing company, responded in an e-mail message that "if any president limited his music selection to pro-establishment musicians, it would be a pretty slim collection."

Nonetheless, Mr. McKinnon said that Mr. Bush had not gone so far as to include on his playlist "Fortunate Son," the angry anti-Vietnam war song about who has to go to war that Mr. Fogerty sang when he was with Creedence Clearwater Revival. ("I ain't no senator's son ... Some folks are born silver spoon in hand.") As the son of a two-term congressman and a United States Senate candidate, Mr. Bush won a coveted spot with the Texas Air National Guard to avoid combat in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, Mr. Levy sized up the rest of the playlist of the 58-year-old president. "What we're talking about is a lot of great artists from the 60's and 70's and more modern artists who sound like great artists from the 60's and 70's," he said. "This is basically boomer rock 'n' roll and more recent music out of Nashville made for boomers. It's safe, it's reliable, it's loving. What I mean to say is, it's feel-good music. The Sex Pistols it's not."

Mr. Jones, Mr. Levy said, was nonetheless an interesting choice. "George Jones is the greatest living singer in country music and a recovering alcoholic who often sings about heartbreak and drinking," he said. "It tells you that the president knows a thing or two about country music and is serious about his love of country music."

The songs by Mr. Jackson indicate that the president "has a little bit of a taste for hard core and honky-tonk," Mr. Levy said, adding that both Mr. Jackson and Mr. Jones "are not about cute and pop, and they're not getting by on their looks." And while Mr. Chesney "is about cute and pop and gets by on his looks," Mr. Levy said, "he's also all about serious country music."

Mr. McKinnon, who has downloaded "Castanets" by Alejandro Escovedo and "Alive 'N' Kickin' " by Kenny Loggins into Mr. Bush's iPod, said that sometimes a presidential playlist is just a playlist, nothing more.

"No one should psychoanalyze the song selection," Mr. McKinnon said. "It's music to get over the next hill."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/po.../11letter.html


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RIAA Cracks Down On Internet2 File-Swapping
John Borland

The Recording Industry Association of America filed suit Tuesday against students at 18 universities accused of operating file-swapping services on the supercharged Internet2 network.

The suits are the first to focus on the next-generation research network operated by universities. The i2Hub file-swapping service has operated for a year on campuses that are connected to Internet2.

Recording industry executives said i2Hub had become a serious problem over time as students believed they could not be observed trading files.

"i2Hub has been seen as a safe haven, and what we wanted to do was puncture that misconception," said Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA. "This has been a subversion of the research purposes for which Internet2 was developed."

The suits mark a substantial expansion of the record labels' approach to universities, which have been a core of the file-swapping population since the emergence of Napster in early 1999.

The RIAA has already sued the operators

Record labels also have given discounts to authorized services such as Napster, RealNetworks' Rhapsody, Cdigix and Ruckus to offer cheap, legal music subscriptions on campus, hoping to attract students away from peer-to-peer networks.

i2hub had taken advantage of a feature in universities that let student transmissions--e-mail, Web surfing or peer to peer--default to Internet2 if both sides of a connection were connected to that network. Thus, two students at Internet2 universities who wanted to trade files would automatically see their traffic flow over the fast network, instead of the ordinary Internet.

That has meant that songs and videos could be downloaded extraordinarily quickly--just minutes for a full-length movie, and 20 seconds for an average song, assuming perfect conditions.

The RIAA said its suits will be filed against no more than 25 students at each of the 18 universities, which include Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Drexel University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at San Diego, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Pittsburgh and the University of Southern California.

As with its other lawsuits against individual file-swappers, the recording industry group said it is filing anonymous "John Doe" lawsuits, based on individual computer users' Internet addresses. The identities of the students will be determined later though a court process.

Sherman said that no suits are being filed against the operators of the i2Hub network for now, although the group does have names of individuals who created the service. He declined to give details on how the RIAA gathered the data on the individuals who are being sued.

A representative of the i2Hub service could not immediately be reached for comment. Since launching as a pure file-trading network, i2Hub has expanded into other services such as textbook exchanges.

According to Sherman, the Motion Picture Association of America will also take legal action against i2Hub file-swappers. An MPAA representative could not immediately be reached for comment.

The MPAA opened discussions with Internet2 officials last year, hoping to be help test high-speed content delivery on the network, as well as monitor it for piracy. Sherman said he would like the RIAA to join those discussions.
http://news.com.com/RIAA+cracks+down...3-5667385.html


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File-Sharing Suits Again Target Princeton
Brian Kladko

Princeton University students, for the third time in two years, are being sued for using the school's computer network to illegally distribute copyrighted music.

The lawsuits to be filed today against 25 Princeton students, plus 380 other students throughout the country, are similar to thousands of others filed by the recording industry since the fall of 2003. This time, however, the recording industry is targeting users of a superfast network available only to university staff and students.

Known informally as Internet2, the network allows a song to be downloaded in 20 seconds and a movie in five minutes. By comparison, downloading a song with a DSL or cable connection takes one or two minutes, and a movie could take several hours.

"Quite simply, this special high-speed Internet technology designed for important academic research has been hijacked for illegal purposes," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Sherman called on university presidents to do more to ferret out illegal activity on their computer networks, such as filtering or blocking. "We would hope that they would be a little more proactive in identifying these problems and helping us avoid the need to file the kind of lawsuits we're filing today," he said.

Sherman said many students have been using the network through a service called i2hub, created by a student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I2hub is software tailored for Internet2 that allows users to share files from their own computers with a wider audience.

Sherman believes students have migrated to i2hub from better-known file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and Grokster, drawn by faster downloads and the belief that Internet2 is a "safe zone," beyond the reach of the recording industry's monitoring.

"What we wanted to do was puncture that misconception and let people know that when you're on the Internet, there's no such thing as a safe zone for lawlessness," Sherman said.

The recording industry previously notified Princeton that it would seek a court order to identify 39 people who had been caught distributing copyrighted music.

But the industry ultimately decided to sue no more than 25 students at each school.

"There were 14 lucky students who will have escaped a lawsuit," Sherman said.

Two years ago, the recording industry sued Princeton student Daniel Peng, accusing him of creating a Web site on Princeton's network that listed songs available for download. Peng agreed to pay $15,000 without admitting wrongdoing.

A year ago, the industry filed suit against a handful of students at Princeton and 13 other schools. Like this latest batch, they were accused of using the university's network to share music.

Princeton officials would provide only written comments in response to Tuesday's news.

"We're not aware of effective technology that would block someone from illegally sharing copyrighted material while at the same time continuing to allow legitimate file sharing used for academic work," wrote Eric R. Quinones, a university spokesman.

A university document tells students that the university "does not actively monitor its computing network" for illegal activity, out of respect for students' privacy. But if network administrators discover that a student's computer is causing a drain on the network, it will alert "the appropriate disciplinary authority."

The students to be sued - each of whom will be identified as "John Doe" because their names are not yet known - distributed an average of 2,300 music files, the equivalent of 175 CDs, Sherman said.

Besides the Princeton students, the industry will file lawsuits against students at Columbia University, New York University, Boston University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. It's also preparing to bring suits against students at 140 other schools.

Of the 10,000 people the recording industry has sued, it has reached settlements with about 2,000, forcing them to pay an average of $3,000 to $4,000 and to promise to stop sharing copyrighted music.
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?...ZxZWVFRXl5Mg==


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MPAA Follows RIAA Lawsuits

Motion picture group sues college students, but Harvard is spared
Matthew S. Lebowitz

Following similar actions taken by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed lawsuits yesterday against students at 12 universities for allegedly violating copyright law.

The MPAA is targeting users who allegedly have shared movies illegally over the Internet, while the RIAA’s suits focus on copyright violations concerning online music sharing.

In a press release Tuesday, the MPAA said that such copyright violations perpetrated over the Internet have become a serious problem on college campuses.

Like the RIAA, the MPAA specifically cited file-sharing applications such as “i2hub” that take advantage of special networks used by academic institutions.

The MPAA sued students at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Texas, Columbia University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Rochester, Boston University, the University of Ohio at Cincinnati, the University of Ohio at Columbus, Ohio State University, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, according to spokeswoman Kori Bernards.

Bernards said the MPAA, like the RIAA, will litigate against college students using “John Doe” lawsuits—meaning that each lawsuit is filed against an

In such cases, the plaintiff typically would subpoena the colleges and universities involved in order to obtain the names of the people using those IP addresses.

Bernards said the MPAA wants to send the message to students that their illegal actions can be detected.

“A lot of people who are stealing movies over the Internet think that they’re anonymous, and the more we point out that they’re not, the less likely they are to do it,” she said.

While the MPAA has not announced any suits against Harvard students at this time, Bernards said that it will continue to pursue legal action “as needed.”

Boston University will comply with the MPAA’s subpoenas, Spokesman Colin D. Riley said.

“We’re in the unenviable position of having to comply with subpoenas to identify individuals who allegedly have broken the law,” he said.

Riley added that students have no excuse for pirating copyrighted material.

“We communicate with students that they should not be illegally downloading material, and if they do, they run the risk of having to obtain lawyers and defend themselves from lawsuits,” he said. “Students...are certainly intelligent enough to understand that.”

In addition to the lawsuits against i2hub users on college campuses, the MPAA also filed several dozen lawsuits against named defendants yesterday, according to Bernards.

This marks the first time the MPAA has sued individuals under their actual names instead of using the “John Doe” suits.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=507077


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Microsoft Sues Over Counterfeit Software

Microsoft is filing lawsuits against eight computer system builders and resellers in seven U.S. states, accusing them of distributing counterfeit and unlicensed software and components, the company said on Monday.

The lawsuits follow similar action in November 2004 against eight dealers. Legal amendments in 2003 provide criminal and civil penalties for distributing software without authenticity certificates.

"Our partners are coming to us and asking for our help," Microsoft senior attorney Bonnie MacNaughton said in a statement. "They are being undercut and forced out of business by having to compete with dishonest PC manufacturers and resellers who continue to sell illegitimate software."

Microsoft said the lawsuits, filed in California, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, Alabama, Maryland and Rhode Island, allege distribution of counterfeit, illicit and unlicensed software and components.

The lawsuits stem from an ongoing test purchase program started by Microsoft in 1997. Through it, the company acquires software, components or computer systems from dealers and tests them for authenticity.

If they are not legitimate, the dealer is generally sent a cease-and-desist letter and told how it can obtain legal, genuine software before Microsoft takes further action.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft cited the Business Software Alliance, which says 22 percent of software being used on computers in the United States is unlicensed, including counterfeit and pirated software.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+sues+o...3-5663516.html


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File-Sharers Fighting the Good Fight in Canada
Jon Newton

Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E- Commerce Law and a law professor at the University of Ottawa, said recently, "File sharing is certainly here to stay and the lawsuits and attempts at new legislation are attempts to put the toothpaste back in the tube."

Canadians concerned about attempts to have Canada's Copyright Act re-written to suit the entertainment industry's desires are marshaling their efforts to make sure it doesn't happen.

Member of Parliament Peter Julian has introduced "Petition for Users Rights" signatures in Canada's Parliament. More than a thousand people have signed so far, and MPs will continue to hand in additional signatures by the batch.

"Petitioners want this House to maintain the balance between the rights of the public and the rights of the creators," said Julian. "They demand that the government not extend the term of copyright, and preserve all existing users' rights to ensure a vibrant public domain. The petitioners also call upon Parliament to ensure that users are recognized as interested parties and are meaningfully consulted about any proposed changes to the copyright act."

Creeping into Canada

If Canadian heritage minister Liza Frulla has her way, the Big Four record labels will soon be feeding their self-interested messages directly to Canadian kids in schools. And, "We'll also be addressing the peer-to-peer issue," she says. "It will give the tools to companies and authors to sue."

In the U.S. and Britain, "copyright law" has already been added to the three Rs; and the members of the Big Four music cartel routinely invade classrooms pushing "educational" programs to kids, with teaching institutions acting as sales and marketing outlets, and administrators, supported by taxpayers, working as unpaid staff.

The CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) has been trying to do the same in Canada, but with a marked lack of success.

Frulla wants to remedy this. Using the 2005 Big Music Juno advertising fest in Winnipeg as her vehicle, she made it clear she'll follow the path laid out by her predecessor Helene Chalifour Scherrer, who a year ago this month promised to re-organize Canada's copyright act to enable the music cartels to sue Canadians for sharing music online.

Labeling 'Criminals'

"Frulla expressed her intention to toughen Canada's 'antiquated' intellectual property laws through proposed new copyright legislation to be tabled in June," said the Winnipeg Free Press.

When the minister talks about "tools" to "sue," she's referring to the fact that at the moment, the cartel (none of whose members have a significant presence in Canada) can't use Canadian law to terrorize online music lovers into buying over-priced and inferior "product."

In the U.S., close to 10,000 ordinary people have been mis-characterized as criminals and, thanks to cartel propaganda, most American are under the entirely false impression that file-sharing is a crime.

The music industry says it's successfully 'sued' these people for sharing files. In reality, every one of Big Music's victims has settled out of court (see story), being unable to take the multi-billion- dollar industry on by themselves. The labels use this to imply the people they're persecuting have admitted guilt of some kind.

The music industry, "has long blamed peer-to-peer file-sharing and music downloading for declining music sales," says the CBC.

Here To Stay

This isn't the case, however, as an ever increasing body of evidence, such as the most recent, a Japanese study, clearly proves.

Big Music also claims its legal actions are significantly reducing file sharing. In fact this, too, is manifestly untrue, as a number of academic and other studies, including an OECD report, amply demonstrate.

And as professor Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law and a law professor at the University of Ottawa, said recently, "File sharing is certainly here to stay and the lawsuits and attempts at new legislation are attempts to put the toothpaste back in the tube."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/c...ary/42179.html


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Letter Sent To MPs: High Cost And Minimal Benefit To Current Government Copyright Proposals

Submitted by Russell McOrmond on Tue, 2005/04/12 - 11:14. Jeanne-Le Ber | Ottawa South | Ottawa--Vanier | PCT | Vancouver Kingsway | Winnipeg South

The following cover letter was used in packages sent to a few key MPs.

David McGuinty, my MP
Hon. Mauril Bélanger, who was previously my MP when I lived in Sandy Hill
Hon. Reg Alcock, who I have had many conversations about FLOSS
Hon. David Emerson, Minister of Industry, as I believe it would be better for creativity and innovation if Industry Canada took over copyright policy from Heritage

Included in the package were:

Piercing the peer-to-peer myths
Heritage minister pledges anti-downloading law
CDs that demonstrated peer-production or peer-distribution such as TheOpenCD.org, copies of the Fading Ways Share samplers, and Ubuntu Linux.

Dear Hon. Mauril Bélanger,
Deputy Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Minister responsible for Official Languages, Minister responsible for Democratic Reform and Associate Minister of National Defence
MP for Ottawa-Vanier

I am sending you a copy of an article published in First Monday. First Monday is one of the first peer-reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. This article is by Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. It discusses the myth that unauthorized peer-to-peer distribution of music has led to billions in lost sales in Canada.

This myth is being used to justify radical changes to the Copyright act. Any legislation should have adequate cost-benefits analysis. My analysis suggests that proposed changes come at a very high cost and offer minimal benefits if any. I have sent articles in the past that discussed the high costs of proposed legislation to new-media creativity and innovation. This article suggests that even if unauthorized peer-to-peer was entirely eradicated that this would have minimal or no beneficial effect on the bottom-line of the recording industry.

It appears Canadian Heritage Minister Liza Frulla has not yet spent the time to read the legal or economic analysis, and is currently acting on misinformation. When organizations like the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) claim that they are being harmed by unauthorized peer-to-peer, she accepted this without question. When CRIA claims that the copyright act makes it hard to sue copyright infringers she believes them, even though the problem with the recent court case was a lack of evidence of infringement offered by CRIA.

"We'll also be addressing the peer-to-peer issue," Frulla said. ``It will give the tools to companies and authors to sue."

"Everything starts with the children," she said. "They're the ones who say `recycle' and `don't smoke.' The Internet is their world." (Toronto Star, Apr. 4, 2005, "Heritage minister pledges anti-downloading law")

Believing the Chicken Little "sky is falling" rhetoric of CRIA, the Minister seems intent on making it easy for CRIA to sue children without adequate evidence of wrongdoing. Legislation is planned to be introduced as early as June. This is not the type of message that the Liberal party wants to be offering if we head into an election, especially as other parties in Canada are modernizing their thinking about copyright and new media.

Thank you.

Russell McOrmond


http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/view/777


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Newspapers Support Bloggers In Apple Trade Secrets Case

More than a half-dozen news organizations are supporting three online reporters who wrote about a top-secret product that Apple Computer Inc. says was protected by trade secret laws.

In December, Apple sued 25 unnamed individuals -- possibly Apple employees -- who allegedly leaked confidential product information to three Web publishers. The Cupertino- based company said the leaks violated nondisclosure agreements and California's Uniform Trade Secrets Act.

In Apple's attempts to identify the source of the leaks, the company asked the reporters' Internet providers to turn over e-mail records.

The reporters -- Monish Bhatia, Jason O'Grady and another person who writes under the pseudonym Kasper Jade -- tried to block the subpoenas. They said that identifying sources would create a ``chilling effect'' that could erode the media's ability to report in the public's interest.

But Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg ruled in Apple's favor last month, saying that reporters who publish ``stolen property'' aren't entitled to protections. The reporters appealed.

Now the mainstream media have weighed in: Eight of California's largest newspapers and The Associated Press submitted a court brief Thursday asking that the online publishers be allowed to keep their sources confidential.

The media companies said Kleinberg's ruling, if upheld, could impair the ability of all journalists to report important news. Before demanding that the online publishers' Internet providers turn over e-mail records, the companies said, Apple should ``exhaust all alternative sources'' of identifying the source of the leaks.

``Recent corporate scandals involving Worldcom, Enron and the tobacco industry all undoubtedly involved the reporting of information that the companies involved would have preferred to remain unknown to the public,'' the 38-page brief stated. ``Just because a statute seeks to protect secrecy of such information does not mean that the First Amendment protections provided to the news media to inform the public are wiped away.''

Signing the brief were the Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times, Hearst Newspapers' San Francisco Chronicle, Knight Ridder Inc.'s San Jose Mercury News, The Copley Press Inc.'s San Diego Union-Tribune, Freedom Communications Inc.'s Orange County Register, and The McClatchy Co.'s Bee newspapers in Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto.

Also signing were the California Newspaper Publishers Association, Society of Professional Journalists, Student Press Law Center and the California First Amendment Coalition.

On Friday, the U.S. Internet Industry Association and NetCoalition filed a separate brief. The trade groups, which represent search engines and other online companies, said Internet service providers should be able to protect their clients' confidentiality.

``These protections are critical to ISPs and their ability to provide safe, reliable and secure communications channels to their subscribers,'' the brief stated.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling wouldn't comment on the briefs but emphasized that Apple must protect its product secrets. In November, the reporters published information on their Web sites, Apple Insider and PowerPage, about a digital music product code-named ``Asteroid.''

``Apple's DNA is innovation, and protection of trade secrets is crucial to our success,'' Dowling said Monday.

In a 46-page document that Apple filed to the appeals court Thursday, attorneys said two investigators from the company's security department questioned employees who had access to the confidential product specifications, threatening to fire them if they lied. They also conducted ``broad forensic searches'' of Apple's e-mail servers.

Other than subpoenaing Nfox.com, a Las Vegas-based Internet provider that may have e-mail records for at least one of the reporters, Apple attorneys said they had ``no other recourse'' to finding the source of the leaks.

Apple has also questioned the credentials of the reporters, who publish entirely online and have become a cause celebre among people who produce independent Web logs, or blogs. Although California's largest newsrooms are backing the reporters, in court documents Apple always uses quotation marks around the word journalist, noting that one article was written by someone named ``Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem.''

Apple also says the reporters merely reproduced technical specifications that may have tipped off competitors or bungled a planned product launch.

``There may be public curiosity about an individual's wealth, but that would never justify the theft and publication of the individual's tax returns,'' Apple's court filing stated. ``Similarly, no legitimate public interest was served by the theft of Apple's trade secrets.''

But Peter Scheer, executive director of the San Rafael-based California First Amendment Coalition, said the reporters were members of the media -- and the case could impair all journalists' abilities to develop sources.

``Even if these stories had been written by The New York Times, not only could The New York Times be forced to disclose its sources but because of the nature of the information, The New York Times might even be at risk for criminal prosecution for publishing such a story,'' Sheer said. ``This started out as an important but quirky case about bloggers but it morphed quickly into a much more important case about First Amendment protections when newspapers are writing about information that can be characterized as being a trade secret.''

Dave Tomlin, assistant general counsel for the AP, said the case has implications for bloggers, online reporters and traditional journalists.

``For us, this case is about whether the First Amendment protects journalists from being turned into informants for the government, the courts or anybody else who wants to use them that way,'' Tomlin said.

Shares of Apple, which is scheduled to release quarterly results Wednesday, fell $1.82, or 4.2 percent, to close at $41.92 on the Nasdaq. The stock rose 15 cents in after-hours trading.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/11368329.htm


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New House Bill Protects Political Bloggers
Declan McCullagh

Political bloggers and other online commentators are gaining more support in the U.S. Congress.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican, introduced a bill Wednesday that would prevent the federal government from extending campaign finance laws to the Internet.

The bill mirrors a companion measure in the Senate that was introduced last month by Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat. Both would effectively rewrite a 2002 campaign finance law popularly known as McCain-Feingold in a way that would bar the Federal Election Commission from regulating political Web sites.

Bloggers beware:

As the Federal Election Commission takes its first steps to shape campaign rules for the blog era, FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith warned that proposed rules present unanswered questions for bloggers:

· The draft rules provide some protections for "individual" political commentators. But what if a group of people jointly publish a blog? "If one of the bloggers received payment for an activity, would it turn the group into a political committee" subject to campaign finance regulation, Smith asked. He pointed to the academic-leaning Volokh Conspiracy blog, which has multiple contributors.

· Some blogs, such as Daily Kos, are published by a corporation. If they endorse candidates, they must be approved by the FEC as legitimate news organizations or run afoul of the law, Smith warned. If such a site "did not qualify for the press exemption, the mere fact that they're unpaid does not get them out from under the regulation."

· The FEC's proposed regulations talk about "announcements placed for a fee on another entity's Web site." Smith asked: What if those are pop-up political ads generated by a software program such as Claria's "adware," instead of by a Web browser? Should the FEC target Claria, the advertiser or the Web site that happens to be in the background?

"Within the next 60 days, the FEC is expected to finalize rules and regulations that could squash not only free speech and political activism, but could well impede innovation and technology--unless Congress acts now," Hensarling wrote in a letter to his colleagues that his spokesman said would be circulated Thursday.

The Hensarling and Reid bills represent a bipartisan departure from Congress' earlier decision to sweep the Internet into the McCain-Feingold law. In a recent interview with CNET News.com, FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith warned that the law could regulate everything from Web links to political campaigns to a party activist who forwards e-mail from a political candidate.

During the debate over McCain-Feingold, Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, offered an amendment saying that "none of the limitations, prohibitions or reporting requirements of this act shall apply to any activity carried out through the use of the Internet." But the House of Representatives rejected the measure by a 160-268 vote, with only five Democrats voting for it.

The FEC voted on March 24 to go forward with its Internet regulations, which are now required by a federal court order. The public has 60 days to comment on the proposed regulations, which can be done through e-mail to Internet@fec.gov, and a public hearing is scheduled for June 28.

Mike Krempasky, a contributor to conservative Web site RedState.org, applauded the Hensarling bill. "I've already heard from some liberal colleagues in the blogosphere, and we're going to push this bill--and hard," he wrote Wednesday.
http://news.com.com/New+House+bill+p...3-5669806.html


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Yurp n Asia

French Data Protection Authority Allows P2P Monitoring

The French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) has decided that the software industry may track and monitor file exchanges on P2P networks. The software lobbying organisation SELL is allowed to send "piracy prevention messages" to file-sharers and collect their IP addresses in databases. These are common anti-piracy practices and widely used.

In Sweden the collection of IP addresses by the national anti-piracy organisation was reported to the Swedish Data Inspection Board, because "it is illegal to archive information that purports to, and can be linked to, individual data (i.e. IP-numbers that can be linked to subscribers) and to try to link this to criminal actions." While the Swedes still have to decide, the French now have.

CNIL said that IP addresses will only get a "personal character within the framework of a legal procedure". It also thought that the actions presented by "SELL were likely to preserve a balance between the protection of the rights of the people of which data are processed and the protection of the rights from which the authors and other rightsholder profit." [translation mine-RL]

Interesting to call this the "preservation" of a balance. That's a new balance then, with less privacy protection due to increased monitoring and registration of individual internet behaviour. You can argue that this provides the preferred balance, but it certainly does not preserve the (in)balance that was.
http://constitutionalcode.blogspot.c...authority.html


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Irish Face Net Copyright Crack Down
Correspondents in Dublin

IRELAND'S music industry plans a series of lawsuits against 17 people who have illegally uploaded hundreds of thousands of copyrighted music tracks on the internet

Abuse of copyright on the Internet has contributed to a €28 million ($46.6 million) drop in music sales in Ireland between 2001 and 2004 - a decline of 19 percent - the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) said.

"This action is being taken against serial file sharers," IRMA director general Dick Doyle said.

"The top six offenders have uploaded in excess of 2,000 illegal files which is equivalent to 200 albums," he said.

"This is wholesale mass distribution and is effectively stealing the livelihood of the creators of music."

The association had been issuing warnings for 15 months now, Doyle noted.

"It is time to take action - we are not accepting this situation anymore," he warned.

Last year, IRMA were involved in piracy raids throughout the country that led to the seizure of 38,085 pirated CDs and 380 cassettes compared to 18,822 CDs and 1,098 cassettes in 2003.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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Indies Plan Assault On UK Singles Chart
Lester Haines

A UK independent record label boss has warned that indies may this week launch an assault on the UK singles chart to prove that it is not secure following the incorporation of downloads into sales figures. The plan is simply to download specific songs as many times as possible to improve their chart position - an armchair version of the old "send out the manager to buy every copy in HMV" ploy.

Gut Records supremo, Guy Holmes, told the BBC: "I know of two different labels who are considering buying records online because they believe it's the only way they can teach the chart people that the security of the chart is no longer there. The people who have instigated the chart have failed dismally in their responsibilities to make and keep our charts secure and to stop people with large amounts of money being able to take advantage of it."

The Official UK Charts Company (OCC) has already said it would monitor the chart "very, very carefully" in the lead-up to this weekend's first "integrated" Top 40. OCC rep James Gillespie asserted: "It's very important that the chart isn't open to corruption, isn't open to being hyped." He added: "We're very confident that [the security system] is going to ensure that the singles chart remains the most accurate barometer of people's music tastes."

The Beeb notes that said security system will keep an eye out for "the same credit card or mobile phone numbers buying multiple copies of the same song".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04...chart_assault/


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The #1 Song In Oz
Alex Malik

Everybody in Australia is getting to know Jesse McCartney. He’s a likeable young pop star and actor who epitomises all of the attributes the recording industry likes to push.

He’s young, wholesome, American and you could describe him as a typical teenaged girl’s heart-throb … a kind of male Ashlee Simpson.

McCartney has just turned 18 and so far, he’s done well: a hit song in the US, and his Beautiful Soul is number 1 in Australia on the ARIA singles chart.

There’s only one problem – in Australia, you can’t buy his hit as a download.

In the meantime, the ARIA, RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), BMI (Broadcast Music

International) and IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) have been busily pushing so-called legitimate downloads.

In their recent sales figures press release ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) had this to say:

“In 2004, there was a ten-fold increase in the global market for legitimate digital music downloads – a trend that the industry anticipates will start to be replicated locally during 2005. Whilst the online services currently operating in Australia have yet to break through in the same way that they have overseas, the industry is encouraged by the overseas results during 2004 and looks forward to similar success locally during 2005.”

In the ARIA recent court proceedings against Kazaa-owner Sharman Networks and others, it was clear the ARIA was also attempting to disseminate these messages:

(1) Don’t download music from peer to p2p services such as Kazaa. Buy your CDs.

(2) But if you have to download music, pay for it – and buy it from one of the three authorised retailers of downloads in Australia – Bigpond music, Ninemsn or Destra (through Sanity or one of their other partners).

So after all of this, and all of the money spent in the Kazaa case you’d think you could buy a download of Jesse McCartney’s national #1 single.

Right? Well, wrong!

This left fans with two choices: either buy the CD singles (or the newly released album) and rip then them into a compressed digital format; or, download an mp3 from an unauthorised peer to p2p service/mp3 website.

Both alternatives are illegal under Australian copyright law, and Australian consumers still can’t access iTunes and other download services from the United States without a US credit card.

The Federal Government will be reviewing Australian copyright fair use laws. But that’s some time in the future.

In the meantime, Jesse is #1 this week.

So if you, your sister or your daughter is walking around in Australia listening to his #1 hit on your favourite music player, there’s a good chance someone has broken the law.
http://p2pnet.net/story/4508


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Finnish authorities gear up for strikes against peer-to-peer file sharing networks

IFPI Finland Sends 28 Requests For Investigation By Police Over Piracy

In keeping with moves in several other countries, steps are now being taken by Finnish authorities to stamp out illegal distribution of copyright music material via the Internet.
Suomen Ääni- ja kuvatallennetuottajat (ÄKT, the Finnish Branch of IFPI) have sent police requests for investigations of 28 individuals who they would like to see brought to justice for net piracy through the peer-to-peer file sharing networks.
ÄKT wants prosecutions brought against persons who have been spreading music through file sharing applications such as BitTorrent, KaZaa, eDonkey, and eMule.

The intention is not apparently to target those users who have been downloading small quantities of music for their own use, but individuals who have offered up files for thousands to download. ÄKT argues that these persons are guilty of illegal distribution of music that is subject to copyright, and that the time has come to put a stop to the practice, through the courts if need be.
In cases elsewhere in the world, fines have usually been handed down for persons found guilty. In May 2001 a 25-year-old man from Jyväskylä was obliged to pay fines and compensation totalling FIM 32,000 (EUR 5,400) in a similar case.

The requests to the police represent the first concerted Finnish involvement in an extensive international operation targeting illegal file sharing and safeguarding authors' rights and the legal end of online sales.
Cases have already been brought against users of peer-to- peer networks in the United States, Denmark, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria. Aside from Finland, countries such as Iceland, The Netherlands, Ireland, and Japan have now come on board.
This week a record number of 963 cases have been launched, and in all nearly 12,000 such cases are being heard.

In the background to the dispute over file sharing are the fears of the music industry, which has seen a decline in sales worldwide of around 20% over the past five years.
Last year alone, legal sales of recorded music in Finland fell by 12.5% in value terms.
Film producers, manufacturers of computer games, and software suppliers are equally dismayed and angry at the free distribution of their wares among potential paying customers.

The increasing public awareness of the illegality of the activity has had some effect.
Apparently the number of users of one such peer-to-peer arrangement, KaZaa, have declined from 4.2 million to 2.3 million, in spite of an increased number of people now enjoying the broadband connection speeds that facilitate large downloads - for example entire feature films, often available illegally online before they reach the cinemas.
However, if KaZaa's popularity is waning, it has been replaced by another application, BitTorrent.
Sites using BitTorrent have been forced to close by action from authorities in several countries, Finland among them. In December of last year, the country's largest file-sharing server was forced to go offline following a request to police from the Business Software Alliance
http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/engli.../1101979127547


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New Wave Of Lawsuits To Hit 'Illegal Song-Swappers'
Charles Arthur

The record industry is targeting nearly 1,000 people in a new wave of lawsuits against alleged "illegal song-swappers" in actions in 11 countries in Europe and Asia.

Following its first year of legal actions in Europe, which resulted in 248 people paying fines or facing "sanctions", the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) said this morning that it will bring lawsuits to four new European countries, specifically the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland and Iceland.

Japan is also joining in the fun, becoming the first Asian country to take legal action against people who use P2P services to trade the record business' wares without payment.

Those found guilty by a court, or who settle with the IFPI, are likely to face compensation payments of thousands of pounds, or euros. Or hundreds of thousands of yen.

The IFPI claimed that the first round of European lawsuits, which began last autumn, have already seen illegal file-sharing fall by one third in Germany, where CD sales have dropped precipitiously in the face of widespread CD-burning. "The number of music files downloaded there fell to 382m files in 2004, compared to 602m the previous year," the IFPI said in a statement.

John Kennedy, the IFPI's chairman, said: "Today, people across Europe can be in no doubt that uploading copyrighted music on to file-sharing networks is against the law, affects jobs, investment in music and livelihoods, and carries the risk of financial penalties. We have spent two years raising public awareness of this, and ignorance really is no longer an excuse."

However Julian Midgley, of the Campaign for Digital Rights, thinks the lawsuits are a bad idea. "The CDR has always stood up for copyright law," he said. "But we will say that we aren't convinced that the record industry is going about keeping its buying public on its best side. There's still plenty of evidence that the people who are using file sharing services buy more music than they would otherwise. And it's obvious that suing your customers isn't likely to make them happy." He said the money being spent on lawsuits could better be used providing more - and cheaper - services like Apple's iTunes Music Store.

The IFPI is also extending the range of P2P services it targets, so that it's not just users of KaZaA who are in its sights, but also those of what it calls "newer" file- sharing services such as eDonkey, eMule, Bearshare, OpenNap, DirectConnect and BitTorrent.

Pretty much everyone who uses such services is now a target of the IFPI. Initially, it is chasing what it calls "uploaders", who let files on their machine be available for download by anyone else using the services. The largest case it has settled was a French man with 56,000 tracks - "equivalent to more than 5,000 CD albums" - in his music library. However people who have "uploaded" even a few hundred tracks are in the spotlight in the latest legal cases.

We wondered whether that didn't mean that the IFPI is targeting people who have large music collections, and are thus in a sense already its best customers. The IFPI disagreed. "The default settings of the file-sharing software makes all your files available, but you can change that," said a spokeswoman for the IFPI.

The IFPI is happy that its strategy - of going after those who make big libraries available, rather than download - is working in a 'softly softly' manner, especially as broadband - the technology it sees as assisting evil file-sharing - spreads. The lawsuits have had "a noticeable effect on file-sharing figures despite the growth of broadband penetration," it said today. "Overall, the number of infringing music files on the internet dropped from its peak of 1.1bn in April 2003 to 870m in January 2005, a drop of 21 per cent. In the same time period global broadband penetration grew by 75 per cent, from 80m to 140m households worldwide."

Last month the British Phonographic Industry won settlements (http:// http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03...e_settlements/) from 23 Britons accused of distributing copyrighted music over file-sharing networks. Three cases are still pending, and expected to reach the courts sometime.

The IFPI's latest assault brings it in line with the US's RIAA, which has filed more than 900 lawsuits, though it made what many saw as the strategic mistake of targeting both downloaders and "uploaders" indiscriminately, leading to bad publicity when one of the first turned out to be a 12-year-old girl.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04...ring_lawsuits/


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Wirelessly Wired To The Max
Devangshu Datta

An Indian student at an English university recently had a spot of bother with the constabulary. He was found at 0300 hours sitting in a moonlit field with a laptop. He said he was a student, a resident of the college visible on the edge of the field. And, he claimed to be surfing the Internet.

The English policemen refused to believe him. Being comparatively cyber- savvy, they pointed out he couldn’t be on the Net without a cellphone handy. Ergo, he must have stolen the laptop (his dark clothes and the hour may have triggered this leap of logic).

Our hero stuttered out an explanation of Wi-Fi but the coppers let him go only after a very sleepy professor vouched for him. They also watched an impromptu demo of Wi-Fi before wandering off, marvelling.

In a Wi-Fi hotspot, anybody who switches on a Wi-Fi-enabled device receives Net access, with an extremely fast connection. Some network providers charge, many don’t. Companies, universities, government offices, airports, railways stations, and so on, all install Wi-Fi networks and leave them open for passerbys.

It costs less to be generous. It is a messy job securing a Wi-Fi network while allowing multitudes of people to use it in passing doesn’t make much difference. Data transfer speed slows down more due to distance rather than network crowding.

Even as far away as 100 metres from an access point, in a flat, open area, the user might get a 1 Mbps connection. Near an access point, it could be as high as 11 Mbps.

Wi-Fi is a low-power, short-range technology, open to interference. The next thing in wireless could be “Wi-Max”, which has greater range (several km), better encryption and interference protection. But Wi-Max costs over 10 times as much as Wi-Fi.

People near hotspots are developing creative uses for them. In downtown metro areas, on wired campuses, and in “smart” cities like Orlando, Florida or Singapore, a mesh of hotspots has caused viral changes in cyber-culture.

“War-driving” has become a new geek recreation. People drive around with a laptop and a packet-sniffer. The sniffer is a software utility that finds Wi-Fi networks. A sniffer combined with a global positioning device maps access points.

War-drivers create hotspot lists and sometimes leave graffiti at access-points as user-guides. Some companies have started using hotspots for promos by delivering “welcome to the ABC Corp network” messages.

In a couple of US universities, music downloads at very reduced rates are offered on the campus Wi-Fi networks. The cheap songs won’t play off the network. It’s an interesting, if partial, solution to file-sharing.

Wireless gaming is another entertainment option and so are “silent discos”. High data speeds make rich audio-visual content delivery possible. In a hotspot, everyone can put on wireless phones and listen to music or play interactive games with other users.

The entertainment industry and event managers might find this a godsend in urban zones with noise-pollution laws. Live concerts where the audience wears wireless headphones are being experimented with. The “silent disco” will go mainstream at the Glastonbury Festival this year.

For municipalities, Wi-Fi might be the best option in terms of broadband access. Wi-Fi doesn’t require digging or expensive subscription patterns. To put a citywide mesh in place cost just Rs 10 lakh per square km in cities like Philadelphia and New Orleans. One US service provider estimated that just 2,000 subscribers at $ 16 per month paid for a 25-square km network in three years.

A wired city has enormous service delivery benefits. A Wi-Fi public safety video surveillance system in New Orleans reduced murder rates by 57 per cent, and auto-theft by 25 per cent in six months. Police can improve reaction time due to easy access to HQ and databases. Wi-Fi based meter-reading systems can scan as many as 70 water meters or power meters every second.

As Wi-Fi catches on, more uses will be found and more innovative revenue models developed. What we need in India now is enabling legislation to ensure that the 2.4 GHz band where Wi-Fi operates, is intelligently regulated.
http://www.business-standard.com/com...&autono=186070


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Testing Copyright Limits

Grouper's Creators Say It's Not Like Other File-Sharing Programs. The entertainment industry isn't so sure.
Jon Healey

Jennifer Urban, a law professor at USC, wanted to watch home movies of her 7-month-old nephew Peter in England, but nothing seemed to work. The videotapes and DVDs were in the wrong format, and the digital movie files were too big to e-mail.

Then Urban hit on a software program called Grouper. And in addition to movies of her nephew, Grouper offers Urban, who specializes in copyright law, insight into how technology is testing the boundaries of copyright in a digital age.

For the record:

Grouper program —An article in Tuesday's Business section about the Grouper file-sharing software misquoted Jennifer Urban, a law professor at USC. Urban talked about wanting to download a copy of a home video from her in-laws in England and was quoted saying, "That's non-profit-infringing." In fact, she said, "That's non-infringing."

Like Kazaa and other popular file-sharing programs, Grouper allows Urban to copy movies and pictures of young Peter directly from her brother and sister-in-law's
computer without worrying about formats or oversized e-mail attachments. Unlike those global networks with millions of users, though, Grouper also lets Urban pick and choose with whom she shares online — and sets a strict limit of 30 people per group.

"I'm very attracted to the privacy afforded by having a private group protected by encryption, particularly for sharing letters, family photos, movies, etc.," Urban said. "This isn't the case with other peer-to-peer networks."

What makes Grouper troubling to some entertainment industry executives are the other things people can do with it. For example, the program lets people copy bootlegged Hollywood movies and listen to songs on one another's computers, all without paying a dime to the studios, artists or songwriters.

Grouper Network Inc.'s founders, Josh Felser and Dave Samuel, say the built-in limits of their peer-to-peer software make it a poor substitute for more controversial file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and Grokster, which are hotbeds for piracy. In addition to limiting the size and accessibility of groups, they say, their program requires songs to be streamed — that is, played through the Internet — not downloaded.

Those limits may not add up to a legal service, argues Nicolas Firth, chairman of BMG Music Publishing Worldwide.

"I'm not so sure that I see a big distinction between this and, say, Grokster because you're at 30 people," Firth said. "Where are you going to draw the line at what constitutes unlicensed use of copyrighted music?"

Firth's question has no clear answer yet, copyright experts say. Nor have the courts settled many issues surrounding streaming, such as whether streaming a song to a private group online violates a songwriter's copyright over "public performance."

This murkiness has opened the door for Internet entrepreneurs like Felser and Samuel to test the limits of copyrights.

Their innovation supplies a steady stream of new ways to access, use, store and copy digital goods, raising a succession of unanswered questions about how laws from the era of turntables and tape recorders apply to a digital age when virtually every device can connect to and share with other devices.

The Supreme Court is expected to clear up a few knotty issues later this year when it issues a ruling in the major studios and record companies' lawsuit against Grokster and StreamCast Networks Inc., the company behind the Morpheus file-sharing software. Although that ruling probably will affect a variety of technologies that can be used both for legal copying and piracy, its most direct effect will be on file-sharing programs that enable people to download whatever they please from an unlimited number of anonymous people online.

Grouper, by contrast, is part of an emerging trend in the file-sharing world to let people swap digital goods with a limited audience of invited guests. Even if the justices rule against Grokster and StreamCast, their decision will not necessarily affect these more constrained approaches.

And Mill Valley, Calif.-based Grouper is just one of many new faces in the ever-evolving world of file sharing. Like water behind a dam, technological innovation continually flows through the cracks in the legal shield erected around copyrighted works.

Felser and Samuel's previous effort had been San Francisco-based Spinner.com, a pioneering online radio outlet. The pair sold Spinner to America Online in 1999 for $320 million worth of AOL stock. They continued working for AOL for a year or two before dropping out of the high-tech world — Felser said he thought about buying a carwash, and Samuel got into the high-end toilet business.

They got back into the software business a few years later, Felser said, because they kept running into problems similar to professor Urban's.

The last straw came in 2003 when Felser returned to the Burning Man festival, an annual party for artists and others in the Nevada desert east of Reno.

"I couldn't share all the video clips I had with my friends," said Felser, an annual Burning Man pilgrim whose festival nickname is "the Frog Prince."

The two set about developing a way to link people's hard drives into private groups. The idea was to let people use the Internet to show off their homemade goods and music collections, just as they might do in their own homes.

The company's free software lets people invite others into secure networks where each member can browse through the others' computers and download files. Users are not anonymous, however; in compliance with a new California law, the software requires people to reveal a real e-mail address.

The company, funded by $3.5 million from private investors, plans to make money by selling premium versions of the software, presenting targeted advertisements and offering users the chance to buy images, music and other digital goods.

To deter piracy, Grouper does not let users search for items outside the groups they've been invited to join. And MP3 files may only be streamed, not downloaded, although the program cannot stop users from copying songs in some other formats.

"We try to limit the opportunities for people to use our technology in ways that might put us in legal hot water," Felser said. He added that as the technological and legal environment changed, Grouper would do whatever it was required to do to stay on the right side of the law.

What the company does not want to do, he said, is monitor or control what users do with its software.

"It's a friends' network. We shouldn't be involved at all in what they're sharing," he said.

A spin through the directory reveals a number of groups with seemingly innocuous titles along with several others with eyebrow-raising descriptions, including ones devoted to sharing episodes of the "Lost" and "Veronica Mars" TV programs and bootlegged DVDs.

"Any swapping of copyrighted materials on the Internet is a cause for concern," said Kori Bernards, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Assn. of America. "We hope Grouper will adapt its program to prevent the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material."

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Assn. of America declined to comment.

One Grouper backer is Strauss Zelnick, a former top executive in the music and movie industries who now is a partner in Zelnick Media, a wide-ranging media and advertising company. To Zelnick, Grouper promotes "fair use" of media by limiting the size of groups and enabling streaming, not downloading, of MP3s.

"Fair use is beneficial to the record companies, I think," Zelnick said. "Sampling is what music marketing is all about."

Still, Zelnick said the same was not true for movies because one viewing might be enough for most people. "When you share a movie, you've kind of stolen the intellectual property," he said.

Although the courts have yet to rule on the issue, several copyright-law experts said there was little difference legally between file-sharing with large groups or small ones.

"There's no family-and-friends exception in copyright law," said attorney Robert Schwartz of O'Melveny & Myers, a Los Angeles firm that has several entertainment- industry clients.

"Every time you make a copy, technically it's a copyright law violation," said attorney Mark Radcliffe, a copyright expert at DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary in Palo Alto. "But for a long time, there's kind of been an unspoken agreement that if you make copies for your friends, people weren't going to go after you. There's been an argument that that might be a fair use in some way…. The whole issue of private copying is a big challenge to American copyright law."

Urban of USC said Grouper appeared to have been designed to fit into several exemptions that copyright law provides for nonprofit or educational uses. "They really have mined the Copyright Act for all the opportunities for sharing digital files," she said.

To Urban, though, the most compelling thing about Grouper has nothing to do with copyright infringement.

"I want to see my nephew crawl," she said. "That's non-profit-infringing."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,1076225.story


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VoIP Calls Get Podcast Treatment
Ben Charny

Calling all music players.

A growing number of people are sharing the digital music on MP3 players and other music devices using freely available software and Skype, a free Internet phone service.

The enthusiasts are borrowing heavily from another personal broadcasting phenomenon called podcasting, in which digital recordings are posted on a Web site for download to a variety of music players, including desktop PCs and portable gadgets like Apple Computer's wildly popular iPod. "Skypecasters," as they call themselves, use Skype's peer-to-peer telephone network to distribute recordings over the Internet directly to each other for free.

Some evidence suggests that Skypecasters may be becoming more widespread, even though it requires a high level of technical know-how.

The "implications are very disruptive," according to the SkypeJournal, a well-known Web community that provides Skypecast instructions. "Many Skypers want to record their Skype conversations and turn them into podcasts."

Skype is the largest of the new breed of companies offering voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, which lets Internet connections double as telephone lines by treating calls no differently than e-mail, Web pages or other common Internet travelers. Skype gives away its VoIP software, and phone calls that stay on the Internet are free. Skype also has premium services that charge about 2 cents a minute to call cell or landline phones.

The Luxembourg-based upstart has so far signed up 29 million registered users for its free PC-to-PC Net phone calling service. Earlier this month, the company reported that its SkypeOut service, which connects PC calls to traditional phone lines for a fee, reached 1 million customers since launching in July 2004. To some extent, Skype competes against Vonage, which at 550,000-plus subscribers is among the world's largest commercial VoIP providers, as well as some cable companies, which have commercial VoIP services of their own.

Skype's peer-to-peer infrastructure--similar in construct to Kazaa, Morpheus and other file-swapping programs--makes it well- suited for turning Net phones into a broadcasting system, as Skypecasters now do. Skype and Kazaa were both developed by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

Other possibilities discussed by Skypecasters at Unbound Spiral or Moodle are to turn an MP3 player into a radio station for any of Skype's 29 million registered users to dial up using their Skype line. Instructions also are available on how to record a personal soap opera and use Skype to distribute it en masse. Even more ominously, some Skypecasters record Skype calls and post them on the Internet.

All of the work is being done without Skype's active input. But it has made some of its source code public so developers can tinker with new applications, such as Skypecasting, said Skype spokeswoman Kelly Larrabee. "We're aware of this and encourage developers to help facilitate it," she said.

"It's a relatively complicated set-up that requires some technical sophistication and awareness of one's entire hardware and software environment," she added.
http://news.com.com/VoIP+calls+get+p...3-5645776.html


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Get Ready For Corporate P2P Apps

They're coming, and they'll dramatically change how your applications load up your network.
Frank Dzubeck

Peer-to-peer networking has caused a dramatic increase in Internet traffic. Today, the major P2P user is the consumer, and the major application is media file sharing. Music, films and the like now are available to consumers using P2P technology. Depending on the analysis methodology, P2P networking accounts for 60 percent to 89 percent of all Internet traffic.

P2P uses the computing power at the edge of a connection rather than within the network. The concept of clients or servers does not exist. Instead, peer nodes function as both clients and servers to other network nodes.

Although pure P2P networks exist, almost all efficient P2P networks use a hybrid approach in which the critical applications of indexing and searching are implemented in a client/server form, and data transfer is accomplished in a P2P manner. This technology is analogous to a router's use of a route or table look-up processor and multiple forwarding processors.

There is a fundamental difference between P2P and client/server network traffic. For example, when using the classic client/server Internet FTP application, a user uploads a file to the FTP server and then other users can download that file, without any user-to-user communication. The only network bandwidth being consumed is that of the client and the contended server. As the number of clients increases, the available server bandwidth decreases. If the same file distribution application is implemented using P2P networking, the download bandwidth increases with the number of distributed peer nodes.

Don't think it's just for consumers

Most corporate networkers believe P2P, with its ability to hog bandwidth and its myriad security issues, is a consumer phenomenon. This is a misconception that in the future may be the undoing of the corporate network. P2P network applications such as KaZaA or Napster may not have a place in the corporate environment, but the same cannot be said for BitTorrent's File Sharing technology, currently being used for Linux software distribution, and Groove Networks' Virtual Office application, designed for shared workspace/online collaboration.

The use of BitTorrent and Groove software currently does not impose a significant bandwidth demand on corporate networks. But Microsoft's recent acquisition of Groove may drastically change the bandwidth consumption equation. One of Microsoft's stated intentions is to add Groove's P2P technology to its next- generation operating system called Longhorn. With Longhorn's arrival on the desktop and server, Microsoft may single-handedly redistribute and accelerate corporate bandwidth demand.

Grid computing is P2P too

Also on the horizon is another corporate networking nightmare called the grid. Lo and behold, the underpinning of all grid technology is P2P. With the adoption of Globus 4.0 as the new XML-based protocol standard, grid services will become the P2P of Web services.

As corporate terminal-mainframe centralised networking evolved into client/server distributed networking, so shall all forms of corporate networking eventually evolve into P2P. The networking traffic dynamics are not trivial in the P2P world. Complexity is the norm, with today's clients and servers becoming next- generation IT peer nodes.

This seems to be a natural blueprint for the future. All edge nodes will become highly intelligent, simultaneously and randomly capable of dynamically participating in the combined execution of an application as well as interfacing directly with the user. The corporate network also will become more internally intelligent, being required to optimise applications bandwidth demand dynamically while simultaneously managing network latency/jitter and corporate policy.

Be forewarned, get educated and be prepared for the network implications of corporate IT P2P applications. The corporate next-generation network future may be just around the corner in 2006.
http://www.techworld.com/networking/...FeatureID=1332


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It's a P2P World

Microsoft hit the jackpot last week with the acquisition of Groove Networks, as not only does it acquire a ready-made .NET Peer-to- Peer (P2P) platform, but it also gets a new CTO, in the shape of Mr. Ray Ozzie, inventor of Lotus Notes and one of the world's great software pioneers.

The Big Picture

Microsoft will be hoping that the acquisition of Groove Networks - a company specialising in super-secure P2P collaboration software - will make corporate IT managers think again about the innate power of the corporate PC, and also re-establish the company as a leader in the provision of information worker tools and technologies.

Founded in 1997 by Ray Ozzie, Groove has, over the last three years or so, steadily acquired key accounts, keen investors, and critical acclaim. Microsoft's own interest in Groove Networks goes back to October 2001 - just a few months after Groove 1.0 became commercially available - when the company invested US$51 million in the Windows-centric P2P platform. It would appear that Microsoft is now finally going to harvest the fruits of that investment; plugging the last major gap in the company's portfolio of collaboration products and technologies.

Ray Ozzie started development of what was to become Lotus Notes over 20 years ago, under contract and funded by Lotus. Now, some 15 years after the launch of Notes 1.0 (yes, it really is that old!), and nearly a decade since that technology was acquired by Microsoft's staunch rivals IBM, Groove Virtual Office (with a little help from the Microsoft marketing machine) may be about to start a whole new revolution in PC software - déjà vu anybody?

Today, however, despite the best efforts of enterprise-centric vendors, such as Groove Networks, P2P is still perceived as being 'dark' technology - something used by adolescent file-swappers to download illicit music from dubious sources; therefore Microsoft will have its work cut out trying to convince the traditionally conservative corporate IT manager that P2P is something worth investing in.

The companies, consultancies, government agencies, and small firms that are already using Groove Virtual Office, however, clearly understand that the world of the information worker has changed: co-workers no longer work in the same location and at the same time; project team members do not always work for the same company or organisation; and high-speed network connections are not always safe or available.

So why is it, despite huge corporate investment in centralised collaboration products and technologies, most of us turn to e-mail when a project involves information sharing and working with others? The answer: we are a P2P (i.e. person-to-person) species. When we require important or valuable information we usually like to get it from a person; not a faceless portal or corporate Web site. Corporate e- mail systems are bursting at the seams for this very same reason - P2P is the way we prefer to work given the choice.

Butler Group Opinion

P2P technology is just as important in the enterprise as centralised technology, and so the acquisition of Groove Networks may well prove to be as important to Microsoft as that of Lotus by IBM back in 1995.
http://www.enterprisenetworksandserv...nw/art.php/174


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Hollywood Looks To BitTorrent For Distribution
Renai LeMay

Hollywood is anxious to embrace BitTorrent as a method of movie distribution, according to the father of the Internet, Dr Vinton Cerf.

Cerf, who wrote the original TCP/IP protocol and is currently chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), told a roundtable on Internet governance in Sydney this week he had recently discussed peer to peer file-sharing program BitTorrent with at least two interested movie producers.

"I know personally for a fact that various members of the movie industry are really getting interested in how to use the Internet--even BitTorrent--as a distributed method for distributing content," Cerf said. "I've spoken with several movie producers in the last month."

However Cerf was adamant the entertainment industry still did not understand the online environment. "They are only just now starting to come to honest grips with the possibilities of using the Internet," he said.

The ICANN chairman was particularly enthusiastic about pointing out what he said was a flawed perception about the Internet's ability to deliver movies in real-time.

"People think of video and they think of real-time, watching it as it's coming out [downloading]," he said. "But most video doesn't have to be watched in real-time. With Tivo and those other things it doesn't have to be watched in real-time."

"It doesn't matter whether it's delivered by a real-time video stream, or a triple-charge thing that drops packets into a file like BitTorrent. Who cares? At some point you get the whole file and then you watch it. You don't care how long it took to get a file before you watch it."

Cerf concluded that too many people got caught up in the real-time functions of the Internet, rather than realising only a very small number of Internet applications actually needed real-time capabilities.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communi...9188314,00.htm


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P2P Fuels Global Bandwidth Binge
Joanna Glasner

Internet users consumed more bandwidth than ever last year, driven by the growing popularity of peer-to-peer networks and heightened demand for video files.

Burgeoning demand also prompted internet carriers to upgrade their network capacity to handle the upswing in traffic, a new report indicates.

According to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research firm, international demand for bandwidth grew 42 percent in 2004, with the largest upswing in usage coming from Asian nations. Last year marked the second consecutive annual upswing in demand, the firm said, after carriers added 62 percent more capacity in 2003.

"It really seems to be picking up again," said Alan Mauldin, senior research analyst at TeleGeography, regarding demand for bandwidth among internet carriers surveyed for the report, released this month.

As internet service providers and operators of backbone networks sucked up more capacity, so did end users.

Researchers singled out peer-to-peer file trading as the single fastest-growing consumer of network capacity. Currently, Mauldin said, the amount of traffic from peer-to-peer trading rivals that generated by regular web surfing.

Growing demand for data-rich files, such as movies, is further boosting bandwidth consumption.

"From mid-2004, we saw a significant shift away from music and on to video," said Andrew Parker, chief technical officer at CacheLogic, a firm based in England that monitors global peer-to-peer traffic. "Before that it was mainly music."

According to Parker, efforts by the film and recording industries to crack down on illegal trading of copyright works haven't resulted in a drop in traffic volumes.

In North America, where the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have focused enforcement efforts, Parker said there has been virtually no change in P2P traffic levels since the groups began cracking down on illegal file trading.

"In some parts of the world we have seen the opposite happen. The publicity created by the MPAA actually drove users to find out what all the fuss was about and resulted in an increase in traffic levels," Parker said.

Today, CacheLogic estimates that P2P applications consume between 60 percent and 80 percent of capacity on consumer ISP networks. The fastest growth in P2P usage is coming in Asian nations with high broadband penetration rates, Parker said.

The average size of traded files is growing, too, Parker said, and today exceeds 100 MB. In one period of observation, which took place just after a much-anticipated film release, CacheLogic found that 30 percent of peer-to-peer traffic at one ISP was from a single 600-MB file.

While ISPs aren't suffering from a shortage of bandwidth yet, Parker believes demand for video content could be a problem in the future for broadband providers who charge a single price for all-you-can-eat access.

"ISP business models were based on the idea that not everyone would be using their internet capacity all the time," he said. If customers are using their broadband connections to download movies and television programs all day, that could put a strain on networks.

But Roopak Patel, senior internet analyst for Keynote Systems, believes ISPs will be able to cheaply increase capacity or fine-tune their networks to handle a rise in video traffic.

"It's not as if we're hurting for bandwidth," Patel said, noting that there are still plenty of under-used fiber-optic networks that were built early in the decade, a boom period for telecommunications infrastructure investment.

"I wouldn't say (ISPs) are worried about delivery of video content. They probably say, 'Bring it on.' That's what will drive their revenue," he said.

While P2P activity accounts for the lion's share of rising bandwidth consumption, internet traffic analysts said the growing popularity of voice over internet protocol, or VOIP, is a factor, too. However, Patel said VOIP calls typically require a data-transmission rate of less than 30 Kbps, compared to more than 300 Kbps for a video file.

"It's important to note that VOIP is all the rage, but as far as what it means in terms of bandwidth, it's not very big because VOIP is not a very bandwidth-intensive operation," Mauldin said. He estimates that VOIP accounted for 5 percent to 10 percent of most carriers' traffic in 2004.

In 2005, TeleGeography predicts that international VOIP traffic will grow by more than 30 percent from last year and that the volume of global internet traffic will continue to rise sharply.

Prices for bandwidth capacity, meanwhile, will continue to drop, Mauldin said, until carriers use up the glut of bandwidth capacity created during the fiber-optic building boom five years ago.

Mauldin takes comfort in the fact, however, that bandwidth prices aren't falling as much as they have in past years. If this keeps up, he said, prices may actually start going up.

"Obviously, traffic can't grow faster than the underlying capacity forever," he said.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,67202,00.html

[JackSpratts]

A Challenge for Miss America in Reality TV Era
Iver Peterson

Miss America has lost her TV show, and now has to decide how much of her famous modesty she's willing to shed to get it back on the air.

Organizers of the pageant are considering a number of plans to resuscitate the 85-year-old contest and bring it back to television this September. The mildest plans include tweaking the broadcast program slightly by eliminating the talent portion, which the ABC network had complained about before dropping the show in the aftermath of last year's disappointing ratings.

A bolder plan is being shopped by national pageant officials among network executives: turning the event into a multinight elimination, complete with appeals for audience sympathy and votes, something like "American Idol" on Fox. It would include behind-the-scenes segments and, perhaps, some of the plotting that has made shows like "The Apprentice" on NBC so popular.

Even the pageant's executives say that Miss America has to face the realities of reality television, although state and local organizers say they would rather see their program stay off the air than have contestants get down in the mud and the bugs like the competitors on "Fear Factor."

"I'll tell you one thing, I am not going to have my contestants eating bugs," said Joe P. Sanders 3rd, president of the Miss South Carolina Organization. "That's just not something that's going to happen in this state."

Short of that, though, organizers say that something needs to change to catch up with an audience whose tastes have wandered far beyond the Miss America pageant's mild tone.

"The television audience today has a coliseum mentality, and they are not cheering for the gladiator, they're cheering for the lion," said Robert W. Arnhym, director of California Miss America, the group that runs the state-level pageant. "I'll tell you this: We're going to have to cross the line somewhere or we're not going to appeal to those folks."

Other state and national officials agree that the pageant has to do more to grab the public's attention.

"Television is a very competitive game, we all get that," said Kevin McAleese, executive director of the Miss Philadelphia Scholarship Pageant. "The question is, how do we adapt to that and bend the rules a little, but not give up all the values that we've stood for 85 years? We've got to be realistic, because we've got to be visible, and if you're not on television, you're not visible."

The Miss America pageant was born in 1921 as a stunt to keep summer visitors at the Jersey Shore after Labor Day, and it has felt the pressure to change before. After feminists protested on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City in 1968, pageant officials shifted the emphasis from beauty to scholarship, and stressed the talent portion of the contest over the famous runway parade in swimsuit and four-inch heels.

These days the challenge is not to move away from female exploitation, but to make it work for the pageant - without giving up too much of the core values of a show that did not even allow two-piece bathing suits until 1997.

The pressure is coming from a television industry that now embraces shows like Pamela Anderson's "Stacked." Despite polls showing that Americans deplore the values being beamed or cabled into their family rooms, the ratings say otherwise, and in its 50 years on the air, the pageant's audience has eroded.

Last year, when its audience fell to fewer than 10 million viewers, ABC decided to drop the pageant. At stake is the pageant's long-term viability: Miss America relies on the $3.2 million broadcast contract to help stay afloat as a national organization.

Broadcasters show data proving that the talent show and the interviews, the pageant's answers to feminist criticism, were the least popular portions of the pageant, while the swimsuit part still had the power to bring viewers back from the kitchen.

So pageant officials - who still require chaperones for contestants when they are in Atlantic City - are thinking about showing a little more.

"What we are proposing out in L.A. is that we open up the sacred doors of Miss America," said Art McMaster, executive director of the national organization, who said he was negotiating with several networks and producers to find a perch for the pageant on television.

He said the organization was proposing to "offer up to the networks the entire group of young individuals who have been out there competing, so they can see them backstage, rehearsing or getting ready - to see their strengths and their fears."

People close to the negotiations say Mr. McMaster is pitching a multinight competition that allows viewers to develop a connection with individual contestants, perhaps capped by a national phone or Internet vote for the winner.

"The only way Miss America is going to get a piece of the competitive craziness out there is for Miss America to be chosen by Americans themselves," said Mr. McAleese of the Philadelphia pageant.

Late last month, Broadcasting and Cable Magazine, a trade publication, reported that the pageant was close to reaching a deal, but the pageant refused to discuss the report.

"We are still in negotiations in Los Angeles, and there are still several people who are interested in this thing," Mr. McMaster said. "Where we end up is up to our board of directors, but we still believe strongly that we can be on live network television this fall."

Ronica Licciardello, who as the newly crowned Miss Philadelphia is in line for the state and then the national competition, said she liked the idea of giving viewers a look backstage. But she was sure that what the sacred curtain conceals is only more of what goes on in front of it: women who are positive, supportive and cheerful.

"Seeing the real side of these contestants could be a real experience for people," she said, "because I think they would go into this with the expectation of cattiness and meanness, and they don't realize the sense of camaraderie and the sense of support that we feel for each other."

But Jessica Eddins, 25, a former Miss South Carolina and now a graduate student in Southern California, insisted that Miss America's values were more durable than the cheap thrills of reality television.

"Everybody has expressed to me the moral value of retaining this positive tradition, one that shows traditional values and personal achievement," she said.

The organization's chief rival, Miss USA and its subsidiary, Miss Universe, are beyond these concerns. Both show more skin than Miss America shows, and both are annual broadcasting successes.

While Miss America is a nonprofit, volunteer-run organization whose pageant is the culmination of a network of separate local contests, Miss USA is a show business venture - with no local competitions - owned by Donald Trump and NBC. And where Miss America insists that it is all about the millions in scholarships its contestants win each year, Miss USA, as its Web site points out, is simply "the search for the most beautiful girl in the U.S."

NBC has even combined Miss USA with "Fear Factor." It is staging "Miss USA Fear Factor" as the lead-in for the national telecast of the beauty pageant on Monday. With the broadcast possibilities limited for Miss America, though, organizers say a potential reality television savior has come knocking: Mr. Trump.

"He has reached out to us, no question about it," Mr. McMaster said. "He has made no proposal to us, and we're not sure where this thing is going to wind up, and as we continue down the road with the networks, we are going to be interested in seeing what kind of proposals Donald is willing to bring to the Miss America Organization."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/ny...09pageant.html

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BET Cancels Its Nightly News Program
David Bauder

BET canceled its "Nightly News," saying it instead will offer news briefs throughout the day, specials about newsworthy events and an urban affairs show, "The Cousin Jeff Chronicles," that will run four times a year.

Robert Johnson, founder of the leading cable channel for black viewers, said the change does not represent a lessening of BET's news commitment. He said it would improve how BET offers news.

"With 24-hour news networks and everyone getting news off the Internet, our audience doesn't want to wait until 11 p.m. to find out what the news is," said Debra Lee, BET president and chief operating officer.

As its executives explained in a sales presentation to advertisers in New York on Tuesday, BET's focus is reaching black viewers aged 18-to-34 with music programming as its primary focus. Lee said it had not been decided what would replace "BET Nightly News" when it ends this summer.

The decision comes after BET canceled other public affairs programming such as "Lead Story" (now replicated by host Ed Gordon on National Public Radio) and "Teen Summit" in recent years, noted Richard Prince, who writes the "Journal- isms" online column for the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

BET also fired "BET Tonight" host Tavis Smiley in 2001 following a dispute about Smiley offering a newsworthy interview to ABC instead of BET.

"What can you say?" Prince said. "I guess one could sigh. But that hasn't done much in the past."

If the hourly news briefs are done well and manage to reach more people than the half-hour newscast does, it could be a good thing, he said.

But BET has to overcome the perception that it marginalizes its news and public affairs responsibilities, he said, and it's especially crucial that BET's young viewers learn the importance of news and public affairs.

Lee said that "hopefully people will work with us and we'll find a way of doing the news in a way that works."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT


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Actors' Union Shouts 'Cut' On Digital Film
Seamus Byrne

The Australian actors union is blocking a world-first remixable film project, and possibly forcing the production offshore, out of fear that footage of actors could be misused.

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has stopped production on the "re-mixable" film experiment because of plans to release the film under a Creative Commons (CC) licence. The $100,000 short film Sanctuary has been seeking a dispensation from the MEAA since January to allow professional actors to participate in the production. The film's cast supports the concept but the MEAA board has refused any dispensation, stalling production scheduled to start in late March.

The CC licence will allow audiences to freely copy and edit the film's digital assets for non-commercial purposes, this being the issue of central concern to the MEAA. "We don't see any safe way a performer can appear in this," says Simon Whipp, MEAA national director. "Footage could be taken and included in a pro-abortion advertisement or a pro-choice advertisement.

"Any non-commercial usage the performer may or may not agree with. Then for commercial work, performers are asked to sign a statement about what other commercials they have appeared in and this can be used to determine whether or not to include that performer. Without full knowledge of future usage of the film, it could unwittingly place that performer in breach of future commercial agreements."

The film's Australian director, Michela Ledwidge, received an Inventions award from Britain's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, in recognition of the groundbreaking nature of the experiment.

This has led to further support from the Australian Film Commission, which is funding the interactive and CGI elements of the work. Carole Sklan, AFC director of film development, says: "We appreciate that there are many issues raised by the application of the Creative Commons licence to Australian productions and have encouraged both the MEAA and the producer to negotiate to address these."

Ms Ledwidge hopes to allay MEAA fears as part of the application for dispensation. "We (showed) our intent to be conservative in the re-use we showcase. If we fail in our duties to operate a trust network there will be problems but we're up for the responsibility."

The licence supports the moral rights of the author, but Mr Whipp says the conflict with the CC licence is particular to Australia. "If you come from where performers also have moral rights, this isn't such an issue. But here performers have no moral rights - nothing prevents the ridicule of the performers. We have spoken with Brian Fitzgerald, the dean of the faculty of law at QUT (who is closely associated with Creative Commons development in Australia), who understands our concerns and will look to work with us on the matter."

Ms Ledwidge fears her project will have to head back overseas. "We will still make the film but plans for an Australian shoot will have to be revised."

The Creative Commons system is a "some rights reserved" form of copyright, providing an alternative to the black and white of full copyright and public domain. Australian versions of the CC licences only came into effect in February.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Outsou...?oneclick=true


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DIRECTV Awarded $21.7 million in Case Against Company that Sold Signal Theft Devices

Federal Court Grants Summary Judgment Against California-based SD Logic Technologies
Press Release

DIRECTV, Inc., announced today that U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner for the Central District of California, awarded the company $21.7 million in damages in a lawsuit it filed against SD Logic Technologies, Inc., and other defendants.

DIRECTV alleged in its complaint that SD Logic and its proprietors Scott and Ken Booth, based in Big Bear, Calif., designed, manufactured and sold via a Web site, pirate access devices that enabled users to steal DIRECTV's satellite signals.

Among the devices sold by SD Logic was the "Universal Smart Card Terminal," which SD Logic claimed was a legitimate, general purpose smart card device. Based on a substantial amount of evidence that the Universal Smart Card Terminal and other devices were primarily designed and marketed for DIRECTV piracy, DIRECTV moved for summary judgment on its claim against SD Logic.

Judge Klausner granted DIRECTV's motion, finding that DIRECTV had provided "overwhelming evidence" to support its claim that SD Logic's products were primarily of assistance in the unauthorized decryption of DIRECTV's satellite television broadcasts and awarded DIRECTV $10,000 per device sold by SD Logic.

"Despite their persistent claims to the contrary, the Booths and SD Logic were selling pirate devices, and now a federal court, after reviewing the evidence in the case, has come to the same conclusion," said Dan Fawcett, executive vice president, Business and Legal Affairs, DIRECTV, Inc. "Booth and his company picked up the misguided endorsements of digital civil liberties advocacy groups, who cited SD Logic as a source for legitimate smart card technology, giving the company's Web site a patina of respectability that it didn't deserve. This is a significant victory against signal thieves who often masqueraded as respectable businessmen."

The case against proprietors Ken and Scott Booth has been stayed since they filed for protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

The devices, like the Universal Smart Card Terminal, were used to operate illegally modified P3 access cards. Last year, all P3 cards were replaced with cards using new conditional access technology, and to date those cards have not been compromised.
http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/aboutu...id=03_29_2005A


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Consolidation

In Restructuring, Sony BMG Introduces Classical Label
Allan Kozinn

Sony BMG Music Entertainment said yesterday that it would restructure its classical music division with the introduction today of Sony BMG Masterworks. The division will encompass the former Sony Classical and BMG Classics lines.

The individual labels, including subsidiary imprints, will retain their names, logos and artist rosters. So, as examples, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the pianists Emanuel Ax and Murray Perahia, and the violinists Midori and Joshua Bell will continue to be marketed as Sony Classical artists; the pianist Evgeny Kissin and the tenor Ramón Vargas will still record for RCA Red Seal; and the conductors Nikolaus Harnoncourt and David Zinman will record for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi and Arte Nova, respectively.

But Gilbert Hetherwick, who became president of the division in January, said yesterday that the new name was meant to suggest a change of philosophy. It is intended not only to evoke past glories - Masterworks was CBS's flagship classical line long before Sony bought the company from CBS in 1989 - but also to signal what Mr. Hetherwick described as a renewed commitment to the core classical repertory.

Mr. Hetherwick reports to Michael Smellie, the chief operating officer of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and both men repudiated the notion, standard at classical labels since the mid-80's, that pop-classical crossover projects were necessary to keep a classics line afloat. Peter Gelb, who ran Sony Classical until Mr. Hetherwick's appointment and who is to become general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, was a strong proponent of crossovers.

"This is a dream job for me and an amazing opportunity to get it right," said Mr. Hetherwick, 52, who joined BMG Classics in 2003 after running EMI's American classical operations and holding positions at Polygram, Telarc and Sony Classical. "The people above me totally buy and support what I'm trying to do, which is to put the focus on classical music. We will do some Broadway and soundtrack recording, as we've always done. But it has to start with classical artistry."

Mr. Hetherwick pointed out that in the 15 months he ran BMG Classics, before the merger, he was able to turn a profit with a line devoted fully to classical repertory. At BMG, the theater and film departments, originally part of Red Seal, had been spun off, and there were no crossover projects: just straightforward standard repertory recordings by the likes of Mr. Kissin and Mr. Harnoncourt.

Mr. Hetherwick added that during his years at EMI, when crossover projects by Sarah Brightman accounted for 30 percent of the label's sales, he ran the numbers for the classical projects alone and found them to be profitable as well. (He declined to provide numbers.)

Mr. Smellie, who professed to know nothing about classical music, said he found Mr. Hetherwick's approach persuasive.

"I don't buy the reports that the classical record market is collapsing," Mr. Smellie said. "It's just a question of recording the right repertory, marketing it convincingly and applying the right discipline. And in my view, getting rid of crossover allows people to be focused.

"Crossover distorts people's values. You have a record that sells a million copies, and the universe shifts towards finding the next one. That's not what we want to do."

Central to Mr. Hetherwick's plans is exploring the back catalog of the combined label. That trove reaches back to the 1890's, when Sony's original predecessor, the Columbia Phonograph Company, and BMG's ancestor, the American Gramophone Company, were rivals in the nascent record market.

In the heyday of classical recording, from the late 20's through the late 70's, each label amassed a huge library of recordings that are now considered classic.

Mr. Hetherwick said that he had no idea how many master tapes the company's combined archives now hold, but that a computer catalog is being created. In any case, the trove is extraordinary, with legendary recordings by the conductors Fritz Reiner, Arturo Toscanini, Charles Munch, Pierre Monteux, Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Eugene Ormandy and Pierre Boulez; the violinists Jascha Heifetz and Isaac Stern; the pianists Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin and Glenn Gould; and a vast array of vocal stars, from Enrico Caruso to Plácido Domingo, many of them appearing in complete recordings of operas.

Before the merger, Mr. Hetherwick restored some of RCA's legendary recordings, reissuing them as hybrid conventional and Super Audio CD's. He said he would do the same for Sony's Masterworks Heritage series, an archival project that was shelved after several well-regarded releases in the late 90's.

Reissues may, in fact, become the engine that drives Sony BMG Masterworks. Mr. Hetherwick said he would probably release more than 100 (but probably fewer than 200) reissues a year, a number that dwarfs the 20 to 25 new recordings. He said, too, that he hoped to use the Internet to revive even more of the back catalog.

"For the collector, you could have the complete Toscanini always available online," he said. The Internet, he added, "would be ideal for some of the contemporary-music recordings that Sony has: avant-garde productions from the 1960's that are important but that we couldn't afford to remaster, put into a plastic box and sell in stores."

The Internet is crucial for marketing, too, he said, pointing out that Yo-Yo Ma's latest disc, "Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon," has sold extremely well through iTunes, where it was the No. 4 seller for a time.

"What the Internet offers," he said, "is a place where nonspecialists can go and listen to samples to see what they like in the privacy of their homes, without being embarrassed."

More broadly, the label's plans are still vague. Mr. Hetherwick did not hold out great hope for a revival of operatic or symphonic recording, at least in the United States, although he is interested in opera DVD's. As for expanding the currently small rosters of his labels, Mr. Hetherwick said he would do so cautiously.

"There are two kinds of artists," he said. "Those who look at a recording as a work of art and those who see it as a snapshot of what they were doing that day. I like the ones who see recordings as art, who are passionate about making statements with their work in the studio."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/ar...ic/12sony.html


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Fiona Apple Saga Shows Sony's Core Dilemma
Charles Arthur

Comment You think that record companies are all geared up for the 21st century, and that the fact that online downloads will count towards the Official Chart Countdown means that they're au fait with the online future - right? That they realise that you can make a profit by continually selling a small number of digital copies of songs, because there's no cost of replication, compared to CDs - right?

As I discovered while half-listening to an internet radio station the other day, wrong.

What grabbed my attention was a voice I hadn't heard for some years: Fiona Apple, American chanteuse best known for her 1996 debut album "Tidal" and its 59-word- titled followup "When The Pawn..." (we'll save you the rest). Noted the title of the song being played, thinking to listen to it again, as both her ripped albums lurk in my MP3 collection. But the track ("Red Red Red") wasn't there.

Odd: it can't be off her third album, because Ms Apple hasn't released one. But Google the song title, and a much more interesting story emerges. It turns out she has done a third album, titled "Extraordinary Machine", which was completed in May 2003. Recorded, produced, done, dusted. All it needed was the nod from the people at Sony for the CD presses to roll.

They didn't. The album "was quickly shelved by the sad corporate drones over at Sony because they didn't 'hear a single' and because it doesn't sound exactly like Norah Jones and because they're, well, corporate drones," wrote (http:// http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...otes031605.DTL) Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sony wanted something more like her earlier stuff. But she wasn't writing that stuff any more. Impasse.

Which has left Ms Apple in artistic limbo, her contract half-fulfilled and her music unheard, for 18 months. The site set up for her by Sony, at http://www.fiona- apple.com (http://www.fiona-apple.com/), gathers virtual dust, untouched since the launch of her second album in 1999.

Enter a group of fans of Ms Apple. First there was fionaapple.org (http:// www.fionaapple.org), set up in 2002. Then, enter BitTorrent, and somehow the tracks from Extraordinary Machine began showing up here and there on the Net. Somehow again the whole CD (or the tracks off it) reached a Seattle DJ, Andrew Harms, who began playing it on his show. And then a CD-quality version appeared on BitTorrent which, according to its BitTorrent page (http://www.torrentbox.com/torrents- details.php?id=13132), has been downloaded (as I write) more than 18,500 times.

OK, 18,500 sales barely registers for Sony, which wants sales in the hundreds of thousands to feel warm about an album. But that's the old thinking - that you have to sell tons of physical copies of something to make a profit.

As Chris Anderson of Wired has demonstrated with his Long Tail©™® (http:// www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html) concept, that's not true online. Amazon and iTunes sell loads of tracks which make them money even though they'd never get onto a physical store's shelves. The music business has heard of this too: Rob Wells, Universal Music's head of new media, quoted the "long tail" concept at me late last year: the iTunes Music Store, he noted, has 1.2m tracks, "and every one of them has been downloaded at least once."

So let's ask: why hasn't Sony gone for a digital-only release on Ms Apple's new album? It would save all that tedious CD pressing. Every track would get downloaded at least once. After all, the intersection of people who are mad keen Fiona Apple fans with those who are on the internet and who understand BitTorrent can't be that huge; yet it's already got 18,500 members. The intersection of people who are mad keen Fiona Apple fans and are online and have access to the iTunes Music Store or Napster or whatever must be a lot bigger. Surely there's a big profit waiting there for Sony, which might even recoup that whacking advance. Perhaps restart her multi-platinum career, who knows.

But my contacts in the music industry listened to this suggestion and pursed their lips. "Well," said our mole - who sadly we can't name; but he's been around, trust us. "It's like this. OK, so there's now no retailer standing in the way between the owner of the repertoire, which is still the record company - though that could change - and the consumer. There's no retailer acting as a middleman. If Sony owns the rights to the album, they could just put it out on the Web."

Uh-huh. So why don't they? "Because you have to ask whose interest it serves. It doesn't do much for the artist or the record company. When you release an album, there has to be a story that you tell about it for the release to make sense." You thought it was about making a profit? No, it's about what Joni Mitchell called "the star-making machinery".

And the trouble with Ms Apple's difficult third album is that it won't do what Sony wants. "They've got to be thinking that even if they do put it out only in virtual form, they're not going to sell many more of the first two albums. And taking it one stage further, when it comes to marketing repertoire online, all four major labels are much more interested in getting their huge back catalogue there that hasn't been available for years and years. Just look at what Sony and BMG have - Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, how many albums are there of theirs? It's all about real deep catalogue."

So a picture starts to form. Ms Apple's problem isn't that Sony wouldn't everwant to put her stuff online. It's just that she should join the queue in an orderly fashion - somewhere behind all the more famous artists who recorded something in the 20th century.

But what about the fans, and the 18,500 downloads? Doesn't that indicate significant suppressed demand? "Look. Right now, online is only about 2 per cent of our business. It's still just a piss in the ocean. The whole underlying media theme for the past five years or whatever is that the record companies had their heads up their arses and ignored the online element. But actually when you add up the amount of time spent in meetings about the digital space on the subject by people at Sony and other labels in the past five years, it's ridiculous, compared to where the business was really coming from. Which is bricks and mortar stores up and down the UK."

Which leaves us where we came in, with an artist who has willing buyers, but no way to reach them; a record company that has a conduit to put the artist and buyer together, but prefers to keep them apart; and a cadre of fans who have used a technology that the US Supreme Court might declare illegal to cut out the middleman.

So nobody wins. Fiona Apple's album goes mostly unheard. Sony gets no revenues from its being downloaded. And all because the idea of selling music online has to be made to fit into the strategies used for 90-odd years. You've adapted your job and your business to this interweb thing. But the record labels still think the Net should bow to their thinking.

Oh, and there's a final irony in it all. Sony, the company at the centre of all this, should be celebrating whoever wins that case. For it's arguing on both sides. That's right. Check the dockets at this page (http://washingtonpost.findlaw.com/supreme_court/ docket/2004/march.html#04-480) and you'll find that one of the "petitioners" (http:// news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/mpaa/petitioner12405brf.pdf) (379KB PDF) along with MGM is Sony Music.

Look further down at those "supporting respondents" (ie backing Grokster), and you'll find the Consumer Electronics Association's amicus brief (http:// news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/mpaa/cea030105brf.pdf) (273KB PDF). And among the members of the CEA? Sony Electronics.

So you could look at it this way. If MGM wins, Fiona Apple might get her album released some time, because there'll be less "piracy" eating away the record companies' profits (assuming you buy their claims that P2P ate their breakfast, rather than their insane use of "groups" and "artists" from "talent" shows), so they'll feel safe putting tracks online.

Or if Grokster wins, then Sony Electronics can sell lots more gizmos that will store songs. Such as those you downloaded via BitTorrent from Fiona Apple's unreleased third album. It's a mess. The sort of thing you never expect to find from listening to a bit of radio.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04..._online_music/


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Will Sony Crack Down on PSP Hacks?
Eric Hellweg

Less than two weeks after Sony released its long-anticipated PlayStation Portable, a handheld gaming device with multimedia capabilities, the device's most ardent fans began spreading details about their successful hacks. Among the more ingenious: Web browsing additions, instant-message chats, and TiVo-recording playbacks.

The PSP is already a strong seller in that short timeframe. Reviews of the multi-function device are almost universally positive, and with the heavy overlap between hardcore geeks and hardcore gamers, it seems a natural fit for hacker interest to run high. What's more, the unit comes with 32MB of memory, music and movie playing capabilities and built-in WiFi access, meaning it offers plenty of tools for hackers to play with.

Sony has been mum on the hacks so far. The company didn't respond to TechnologyReview.com's request for comment.

However, the company's history with product hacks suggests that it will tread this situation very carefully. In 2001, Sony forced a fan of the company's robotic dog toy Aibo to remove code from his site that allowed the dog to do such things as dance.

That fan, known as AiboPet, was served with a lawsuit for his efforts. As a result, Aibo fans boycotted the robotic dog and Sony eventually relented in its efforts when public outcry over the crackdown grew.

The lesson learned: Sony might do well to let the hackers run their course with the device -- it would likely engender an even more slavish devotion to the device.

"The hacks show there's enthusiasm for the platform -- that”s good news," says P.J. McNealy, an analyst with American Technology Research. "If people want to use the device to chat with someone, where's the revenue loss for Sony?"

With Aibo, Sony's hand was forced by the public's reaction, but in the game space, several examples exist of companies succeeding by allowing -- and even encouraging --these hacks.

One particularly striking example came with Valve Software's decision to make the code for its popular game Half-Life available to hackers who then took to the code and created Counter-Strike, which grew to become the most-played online game. Eventually, Valve Software decided to release the game -- with full support --- in 2002, while still allowing the players to use the older, hacked versions.

The decision turned out to be a good one. After its official release, it went on to become one of the most popular multiplayer games of the year.

Sometimes, consumers come up with entirely new ideas for a product, ideas that loosely adhere to the product's original intention such as the nascent pod-casting phenomenon.

Podcasting is the act of recording an audio "show" similar to a radio program, and then putting it online for other people to freely download to their iPods. Apple is happy to let these users explore podcasting, provided they're not playing copyrighted music or allowing others to download their playlists.

If podcasting really catches on, then companies such as Apple likely will sell more iPods as a result, thereby increasing revenues, profits, and user devotion.

But Apple hasn't always acted so benevolently, as evidenced by the company's steamroller legal assault on blogs that posted pre-release product information.

These days, companies are faced with the problem of correctly guessing when to embrace their customers and when to clamp down. "Very few companies encourage hacking," says Schelley Olhava, an analyst with IDC. "But at the same time, how do you stop it without alienating your users?"

Clearly, there are times when a company must crackdown on user modifications of its products. In 2002, for example, Microsoft shut down a Hong Kong-based company that was selling modified chips for the company's Xbox game system. The chips allowed users to play pirated games on their Xboxes, and Microsoft move was swift and warranted.

But for Sony, the decision on how to react to this PSP hack is a tough one indeed. Any company has a right to defend its intellectual property, but Sony must weigh the balance between coming down hard on this hack and gently steering users away from more malicious modifications.

Making the decision even tougher, Sony as a company is struggling to find its way in the digital era. Most of its digital music efforts have been disastrous, and the PSP is the first technology hit the company has had in some time.

With a new CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, at the helm, maybe now's the time to strike a new relationship with its most ardent fans, by allowing these innocuous hacks and saving the lawyers for the ones that will hurt the bottom line.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...805hellweg.asp


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Authorities Seize 60,000 Pirated Nintendo Consoles, Arrest Four
AP

More than 60,000 pirated copies of Nintendo Co. game consoles were seized Wednesday during raids in New York and New Jersey, prosecutors announced.

Four people were arrested in the crackdown on the theft of popular games such as ``Donkey Kong,'' ``Mario Brothers,'' ``Duck Hunt,'' ``Baseball'' and others, according to a
release by federal authorities and papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The arrests occurred after the defendants agreed to sell the games to FBI agents posing as gaming thieves willing to resell the games in Manhattan and through a distributor in the Midwest, prosecutors said.

According to a criminal complaint filed in the case, the defendants between September and December 2004 had imported into the United States more than 280,000 illegal video game consoles.

More than 60,000 game consoles were seized during searches Wednesday in Brooklyn, Queens and Maple Shade, N.J., authorities said.

The Japanese game maker told the FBI that individuals and companies copy the video games and sell the pirated versions throughout the world, costing the company millions in lost revenue annually, according to the complaint.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/11386090.htm


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Apple iPod Mini 6GB
Trusted Reviews

Review In a hundred years' time, if there one object was to be chosen to represent the Western world of the early 21st Century, the iPod would be a strong contender. Once merely a music player it's become the 'must have' fashion accessory of the moment. And even with its ubiquity, there's no backlash yet in sight, writes Benny Har-Even.

Introducing the Mini was certainly a very smart move on Apple's part, and the player could be seen as the most important of the entire current iPod line-up. By moving from a 1.8in HDD to a 1in drive, Apple was able to shrink the already svelte iPod to an irresistibly cute, highly pocketable package. It opened up the iPod to a whole range of new listeners, such as girls and accountants, to whom having a tiny, cool looking MP3 player was far more important than being able to carry round their entire music collection.

The original Mini saw introduced the click wheel which integrated the four navigation buttons, later adopted by the fourth-generation iPod and the iPod Photo. While the original sported a 4GB hard disk, the Mini's competitors, such as Creative's Zen Micro (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11...ive_zen_micro/) and the iRiver H10 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01...ew_iriver_h10/), featured 5GB disks. Now Apple has hit back by leapfrogging them with a 6GB drive, only for Creative to respond again with a 6GB Zen Micro.

However, big news is how effectively Apple has dealt with the Mini's biggest failing: the feeble battery life. Thanks to a new, more efficient chipset from PortalPlayer, the Mini now boasts a very impressive claimed battery-life of 18 hours - a lot better than the eight hours of the original. This figure is based upon playback of 128Kbps AAC files, which is a lot more realistic than the 48Kbps figure used by Sony. Higher bit- rates will lower battery life due to increased CPU usage, but the figure is still very impressive.

The other change is that Apple retired the 'bling' Gold-coloured Mini, while changing the shade of the remaining colours. Our review sample is a rather lovely blue colour but you can also be silver, green and pink.

But it's not just about looks - the iPod Mini sounds fantastic. After comparing it with my third-generation iPod, tracks definitely sounded clearer on the iPod Mini, as if it were capable of better frequency response. By comparison the 3G iPod sounded positively muffled. A sign of PortalPlayer's enhanced audio chip, perhaps.

The Mini's packaging is as lovely as ever. The box lid slides off to reveal the mini wrapped in plastic. The box underneath is split in two halves - one for the install discs and one for the headphones, USB cable and a belt holster. As with all the new iPods there's no Firewire cable, no dock, no remote - but they are available as optional extras. There's no AC adaptor either, so you can only charge when connected to the PC.

There are other missing features that might give pause for thought, such as a radio, recording function and microphone. But if it's just a player you want these absences won't be noticed. For me the only reason I wouldn't want one is that I do want to carry my entire music collection around with me. Or at least more of it than I could fit on a 6GB drive.

The good news is that Apple is still offering a 4GB version, with all the benefits of extended battery life, at an affordable £139/$199. So if your main aim in owning a Mini is to look trendy, the cheaper 4GB version could be the way to go.

One day of course, a 20GB iPod will be this size, but for now six gigs is your limit. At this capacity it no longer loses out to the Zen Micro and H10, but while Creative and iRiver have both worked hard on improving the look and usability of their players, the Mini is still miles ahead. With its rounded sides and neat click-wheel interface, it feels right in you hand and is easy to control and use too.

Verdict

With the new iPod Mini, Apple has increased its capacity by a third, battery-life by two-and-a-half times and improved sound quality. It's a pretty impressive triple whammy and as long as its capacity is large enough for you, the iPod Mini would be our recommended digital audio player.

Revied by
(http://www.trustedreviews.com/)

Apple iPod Mini

Rating
90%

Price
£169 inc. VAT/$249 (6GB), £139 inc. VAT/$199 (4B)

More info
The Apple iPod Mini site (http://www.apple.com/ipodmini/)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/12/ review_apple_ipod_mini_6gb/


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Apple Beats Outlook on iPod and Mac Sales
Laurie J. Flynn

Continuing a trend that has run for several quarters, Apple Computer on Wednesday reported a profit for the second quarter that beat even its expectations based on continued brisk sales of its iPod portable music player, as well as improving sales of Macintosh computers.

The company, based in Cupertino, Calif., posted revenue growth of 70 percent in the second quarter, from $1.91 billion to $3.24 billion. Profit in the quarter was $290 million, or 34 cents a share, compared with $46 million, or 6 cents in the period a year ago.

The chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, called the quarter "fantastic," and said that Apple was clearly picking up market share from Windows-based computers. "IPods did very well but so did Macs," Mr. Jobs said in an interview, in which he tried to move the focus from Apple's success in the music business to its increasing success in selling Macs. "We had a fantastic Mac quarter."

Mr. Jobs said Apple had a 43 percent increase in sales of Macs during the quarter, including strong demand for the new low-priced Mac mini. Today, Apple's share of the PC market is around 2 percent, but its sales are growing at a faster rate than the overall PC market. Macintosh business accounted for 52 percent of the company's total revenue.

"The two key areas - Macs and iPods - are doing very well," said Eugene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. "I think the evidence of a halo effect is very clear," he said, referring to the idea that the iPod is driving sales of the Macintosh.

The results beat Apple's own outlook. In January, Apple had forecast earnings of 20 cents a share, adjusted for a February stock split, on $2.9 billion in sales. Analysts had, on average, forecast earnings of 24 cents a share and revenue of $3.15 billion, according to Thomson Financial,

Looking ahead to the third quarter, executives said they expected revenue of about $3.25 billion and earnings of 28 cents a share.

Yet given the high expectations of investors, Apple shares fell $1.62 on Wednesday, to $41.04, before the earnings were released.

Apple's iPod sales appear to have disappointed many investors and helped cause the sell-off late in the day. Many investors had expected Apple to report it had sold six million iPods, whereas the company shipped 5.31 million iPods in the quarter, a 558 percent increase over the period a year ago. In the quarter, Apple introduced the iPod Shuffle, its first flash-based digital music player.

"I think there was a lot of chatter about iPod sales," said Charles R. Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company, who owns Apple shares. "Investors were looking for something even better. Some investors weren't paying enough attention to Mac sales, which grew 43 percent."

During the quarter, Apple shipped 1.07 million Macintosh machines, generating $1.49 billion in revenue. In the second quarter a year ago, it shipped 749,000 Macs and generated $1.16 billion. The company has 103 retail stores, and expects to have 125 stores by the end of the year.

Apple's earnings report came a day after it announced that it would release the next version of its Macintosh operating system, called Tiger, on April 29, as much as a year earlier than Microsoft is expected to release the next major update to Windows. Apple hopes the new software release will bolster Macintosh sales even further.

In the call with analysts, executives tried to temper investors' expectations going forward and warned that they did not expect Apple to sustain its record-high growth rates indefinitely.

The chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, said that he expected revenue growth to eventually start to hover at a more reasonable 15 percent level, still higher than the industry average.

Gross margin for the quarter, an indicator of profitability, was 29.8 percent in the quarter, higher than the company's projected range of 27 percent to 28 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/te...rint&position=


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Pirates of the 'Share'-ibbean

Music File Sharing Is Not The Harmful Crime The Music Industry Claims
Aylsworth, Tim

Music piracy is a clever phrase. It denotes unauthorized copying and redistribution of property; however, it connotes an idea of parrots and eye patches. Pirates were vile plunderers whose crimes at sea ravished innocent victims. Today's pirates no longer need warships, cannons or swords. To become a pirate in modern society, one only needs a computer, an Internet connection and a fondness for music. Everyone is being told that this crime is robbing the music industry blind. This heinous villainy is supposedly destroying the industry to the point that it has compelled legal retaliation. This brings into question intellectual property rights, technological specificities and the amount of real harm being done to musicians. In reality, music downloading hurts no one; The Record Industry Association of America must leave people alone.

The RIAA is planning on suing nine students at Texas A&M. Industry sales have been dropping, and the association is quite certain that music downloading is to blame. At first, members of the industry targeted the big guns. They went after Napster, which was one of the original file sharing programs during the dawn of music downloading. The case was taken all the way to the Supreme Court, where Napster lost and a precedent was set.

This did not have the intended effect. People were still downloading music. Programs like KaZaa did not have centralized servers, and the owners were not easy to target. According to Marci Hamilton from FindLaw.com, "The industry then had no choice but to go after users, which meant going after students," and it did.

These claims are justified by the notion that there is a clear, undeniable link between music downloading and dropping CD sales. This would consequently harm the musicians, which could possibly ward off future music production. After all, if Lars Ulrich, member of the band Metallica, can't afford a Gulf Stream Jet, then why would he want to play the drums?

First, the correlation between music downloading and CD sales is not so obvious. Kembrew McLoud made this claim in the New York Times, saying "The two primary direct competitors for young music buyers' dollars - video games and DVDs, both also widely and freely traded on the Internet - continued to do quite well." He also pointed out that during the first quarter of 2004, sales were up more than 10 percent from the previous year. The industry proudly stated that this is a result of its legal action against the scurvy- ridden Internet pirates. Strangely, a survey came out at the same time, which said that music downloading had increased by 5 million downloads since the survey the year before.

Janis Ian is a singer/songwriter. In a pro-music downloading article, she pointed out that, "The music industry had exactly the same response to the advent of reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, DATs, minidisks, VHS, BETA, music videos and MTV." Each and every creation was thought to be the end of purchasing music. This notion has clearly proven to be nonsense.

This premise that music downloading is killing the industry is clearly mistaken. The second premise, which states that this will hurt musicians, is even more defective. If it is not hurting the industry, it does not hurt musicians. But even if this did harm the sales, how much could it hurt musicians?

Downhillbattle.org, a Web site dedicated to a more fair music industry, claims that in most cases, the purchase of a $16 CD only translates into a dollar or less for the musicians. Practically all of the money that musicians make comes from concert tickets. Downloading music does not keep anyone from coming to the concerts. The site also claims that the music industry is dominated by five major corporations that do not really protect the interest of artists. The site says that a breakdown of these corporations would allow more artists to come out and could give them a chance to make plenty of money.

So why are college students being sued by the RIAA? Unlike piracy of the high seas, this crime seems victimless. Even shoplifting does more damage. Downloading music does not mean the labels will stop making money, it does not hurt the artists and it doesn't seem to be directly stealing from anyone. To the contrary, it is aptly named music "sharing." The RIAA is suing nine students at A&M. It can sue 12-year-old girls for downloading songs by Britney Spears or Disney movies. This tactic is somewhat shady. These pirates want to listen to music, not make the RIAA walk the plank.
http://www.thebatt.com/news/2005/03/...n-904007.shtml


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Review

Goodbye to Privacy
William Safire

NO PLACE TO HIDE
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
348 pp. The Free Press. $26.

CHATTER
Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.
By Patrick Radden Keefe.
300 pp. Random House. $24.95.

YOUR mother's maiden name is not the secret you think it is. That sort of ''personal identifier'' being used by banks, credit agencies, doctors, insurers and retailers -- supposedly to protect you against the theft of your identity -- can be found out in a flash from a member of the new security-industrial complex. There goes the ''personal identifier'' that you presume a stranger would not know, along with your Social Security number and soon your face and DNA.

In the past five years, what most of us only recently thought of as ''nobody's business'' has become the big business of everybody's business. Perhaps you are one of the 30 million Americans who pay for what you think is an unlisted telephone number to protect your privacy. But when you order an item using an 800 number, your own number may become fair game for any retailer who subscribes to one of the booming corporate data-collection services. In turn, those services may be -- and some have been -- penetrated by identity thieves.

The computer's ability to collect an infinity of data about individuals -- tracking every movement and purchase, assembling facts and traits in a personal dossier, forgetting nothing -- was in place before 9/11. But among the unremarked casualties of that day was a value that Americans once treasured: personal privacy.

The first civil-liberty fire wall to fall was the one within government that separated the domestic security powers of the F.B.I. from the more intrusive foreign surveillance powers of the C.I.A. The 9/11 commission successfully mobilized public opinion to put dot- connection first and privacy protection last. But the second fire wall crumbled with far less public notice or approval: that was the separation between law enforcement recordkeeping and commercial market research. Almost overnight, the law's suspect list married the corporations' prospect list.

The hasty, troubling merger of these two increasingly powerful forces capable of encroaching on the personal freedom of American citizens is the subject of two new books.

Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s ''No Place to Hide'' might just do for privacy protection what Rachel Carson's ''Silent Spring'' did for environmental protection nearly a half-century ago. The author, a reporter for The Washington Post, does not write in anger. Sputtering outrage, which characterizes the writing of many of us in the anti-snooping minority, is not O'Harrow's style. His is the work of a careful, thorough, enterprising reporter, possibly the only one assigned to the privacy beat by a major American newspaper. He has interviewed many of the major, and largely unknown, players in the world of surveillance and dossier assembly, and provides extensive source notes in the back of his book. He not only reports their professions of patriotism and plausible arguments about the necessity of screening to security, but explains the profitability to modern business of ''consumer relationship management.''

''No Place to Hide'' -- its title taken from George W. Bush's post-9/11 warning to terrorists -- is all the more damning because of its fair-mindedness. O'Harrow notes that many consumers find it convenient to be in a marketing dossier that knows their personal preferences, habits, income, professional and sexual activity, entertainment and travel interests and foibles. These intimately profiled people are untroubled by the device placed in the car they rent that records their speed and location, the keystroke logger that reads the characters they type, the plastic hotel key that transmits the frequency and time of entries and exits or the hidden camera that takes their picture at a Super Bowl or tourist attraction. They fill out cards revealing personal data to get a warranty, unaware that the warranties are already provided by law. ''Even as people fret about corporate intrusiveness,'' O'Harrow writes about a searching survey of subscribers taken by Conde Nast Publications, ''they often willingly, even eagerly, part with intimate details about their lives.''

Such acquiescence ends -- for a while -- when snoopers get caught spilling their data to thieves or exposing the extent of their operations. The industry took some heat when a young New Hampshire woman was murdered by a stalker who bought her Social Security number and address from an online information service. But its lobbyists managed to extract the teeth from Senator Judd Gregg's proposed legislation, and the intercorporate trading of supposedly confidential Social Security numbers has mushroomed. When an article in The New York Times by John Markoff, followed by another in The Washington Post by O'Harrow, revealed the Pentagon's intensely invasive Total Information Awareness program headed by Vice Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra infamy, a conservative scandalmonger took umbrage. (''Safire's column was like a blowtorch on dry tinder,'' O'Harrow writes in the book's only colorful simile.) The Poindexter program's slogan, ''Knowledge Is Power,'' struck many as Orwellian. Senators Ron Wyden and Russell D. Feingold were able to limit funding for the government-sponsored data mining, and Poindexter soon resigned. A Pentagon group later found that ''T.I.A. was a flawed effort to achieve worthwhile ends'' and called for ''clear rules and policy guidance, adopted through an open and credible political process.'' But O'Harrow reports in ''No Place to Hide'' that a former Poindexter colleague at T.I.A. ''said government interest in the program's research actually broadened after it was apparently killed by Congress.''

The author devotes chapters to the techniques of commercial data gatherers and sellers like Acxiom, Seisint and the British-owned LexisNexis, not household names themselves, but boasting computers stuffed with the names and pictures of each member of the nation's households as well as hundreds of millions of their credit cards. He quotes Ole Poulsen, chief technology officer of Seisint, on its digital identity system: ''We have created a unique identifier on everybody in the United States. Data that belongs together is already linked together.'' Soon after 9/11, having seen the system that was to become the public-private surveillance engine called Matrix (in computer naming, life follows film art), Michael Mullaney, a counterterrorism official at the Justice Department, told O'Harrow: ''I sat down and said, 'These guys have the computer that every American is afraid of.' ''

Of all the companies in the security-industrial complex, none is more dominant or acquisitive than ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Ga. This data giant collects, stores, analyzes and sells literally billions of demographic, marketing and criminal records to police departments and government agencies that might otherwise be criticized (or de-funded) for building a national identity base to make American citizens prove they are who they say they are. With its employee-screening, shoplifter-blacklisting and credit-reporting arms, ChoicePoint is also, in the author's words, ''a National Nanny that for a fee could watch or assess the background of virtually anybody.''

From sales brochures that ChoicePoint distributed to its corporate and government customers -- as well as from interviews with its C.E.O., Derek V. Smith, the doyen of dossiers, who claims ''this incredible passion to make a safer world'' -- The Post's privacy reporter has assembled a coherent narrative that provides a profile of a profiler. As if to lend a news peg to the book, ChoicePoint has just thrust itself into the nation's consciousness as a conglomerate hoist by its own petard. The outfit that sells the ability to anticipate suspicious activity; that provides security to the nation's security services; that claims it protects people from identity theft -- has been easily penetrated by a gang that stole its dossiers on at least 145,000 people across the country.

ON top of that revelation, the company had to admit it first became suspicious last September that phony companies were downloading its supposedly confidential electronic records on individual citizens. Not only is the Federal Trade Commission inquiring into the company's compliance with consumer-information security laws, but the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating prearranged sales of ChoicePoint stock by Smith and another top official that netted a profit of $17 million before the penetration was publicly disclosed and the stock price plunged.

''ChoicePoint Data Cache Became a Powder Keg'' was The Washington Post headline, with the subhead ''Identity Thief's Ability to Get Information Puts Heat on Firm.'' This was followed by the account a week later of another breach of faith at a competing data mine: ''ID Thieves Breach LexisNexis, Obtain Information on 32,000.'' Now that a flat rock has been flipped over, much more scurrying about will be observed. This will cause embarrassment to lobbyists for, and advisers to, the major players in the security-industrial complex. ''No Place to Hide'' names famous names, revealing associations with Howard Safir, former New York City police commissioner; Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO commander; and former Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas. (If you hear, ''This is not about the money'' -- it's about the money.)

More of the press has been showing interest, especially since Congressional hearings have begun and data is being disseminated about the data collectors. A second book -- not as eye-opening as O'Harrow's original reporting but a short course in what little we know of international government surveillance -- is ''Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping,'' by Patrick Radden Keefe. This third-year student at Yale Law School dares to make his first book an examination of what he calls the liberty-security matrix.

Chatter, he notes, is a once innocuous word meaning ''gossip . . . the babble of a child'' that in the world of electronic intelligence has gained the sinister sense of ''telltale metabolic rhythm: chatter; silence; attack.'' The flurry of ''sigint'' -- signals intelligence, picked up by the secret listening devices of our National Security Agency -- sometimes precedes a terrorist attack, and almost always precedes an elevation of our color-coded security alerts.

Keefe does what a brilliant, persevering law student with no inside sources or a prestigious press pass should do: he surveys much of what has been written about sigint and pores over the public hearing transcripts. He visits worried scientists and some former spooks who have written critical books, and poses questions to which he would like to get answers. He doesn't get them, but his account of unclimbable walls and unanswered calls invites further attempts from media bigfeet to do better. Keefe is a researcher adept at compiling intriguing bits and pieces dug out or leaked in the past; the most useful part of the book is the notes at the end about written, public sources that point to some breaks in the fog.

''Chatter'' focuses on government, not commercial, surveillance, and thereby misses the danger inherent in the sinister synergism of the two. Moreover, the book lacks a point of view: at 28, Keefe has formulated neither a feel for individual privacy nor a zeal for government security. It may be, as Roman solons said, Inter arma silent leges -- in wartime, the laws fall silent -- but the privacy- security debate needs to be both informed and joined. This is no time for agnostics.

For example, what to do about Echelon? That is supposedly an ultrasecret surveillance network, conducted by the United States and four other English-speaking nations, to overhear and oversee signals. ''We don't know whether Echelon exists,'' Keefe writes, ''and, if it does exist, how the shadowy network operates. It all remains an enigma.'' Though he cannot light a candle, he at least calls attention to, without cursing, the darkness.

Keefe's useful research primer on today's surveillance society, and especially O'Harrow's breakthrough reporting on the noxious nexus of government and commercial snooping, open the way for the creation of privacy beats for journalism's coming generation of search engineers. A small furor is growing about the abuse of security that leads to identity theft. We'll see how long the furor lasts before the commercial-public security combine again slams privacy against the wall of secrecy, but at least Poindexter's slogan is being made clear: knowledge is indeed power, and more than a little power in unknowable hands is a dangerous thing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/bo...VERSAFIRE.html


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Surveillance

Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest
JIM DWYER

Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.

"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."

Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.

For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.

Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to pick up sushi.

Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer, prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the material by mistake.

Seven months after the convention at Madison Square Garden, criminal charges have fallen against all but a handful of people arrested that week. Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney's office agreeing that the cases should be "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal."

So far, 162 defendants have either pleaded guilty or were convicted after trial, and videotapes that bolstered the prosecution's case played a role in at least some of those cases, although prosecutors could not provide details.

Besides offering little support or actually undercutting the prosecution of most of the people arrested, the videotapes also highlight another substantial piece of the historical record: the Police Department's tactics in controlling the demonstrations, parades and rallies of hundreds of thousands of people were largely free of explicit violence.

Throughout the convention week and afterward, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that the police issued clear warnings about blocking streets or sidewalks, and that officers moved to arrest only those who defied them. In the view of many activists - and of many people who maintain that they were passers-by and were swept into dragnets indiscriminately thrown over large groups - the police strategy appeared to be designed to sweep them off the streets on technical grounds as a show of force.

"The police develop a narrative, the defendant has a different story, and the question becomes, how do you resolve it?" said Eileen Clancy, a member of I-Witness Video, a project that assembled hundreds of videotapes shot during the convention by volunteers for use by defense lawyers.

Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said that videotapes often do not show the full sequence of events, and that the public should not rush to criticize officers simply because their recollections of events are not consistent with a single videotape. The Manhattan district attorney's office is reviewing the testimony of Officer Wohl at the request of Lewis B. Oliver Jr., the lawyer who represented Mr. Kyne in his arrest at the library.

The Police Department maintains that much of the videotape that has surfaced since the convention captured what Mr. Browne called the department's professional handling of the protests and parades. "My guess is that people who saw the police restraint admired it," he said.

Video is a useful source of evidence, but not an easy one to manage, because of the difficulties in finding a fleeting image in hundreds of hours of tape. Moreover, many of the tapes lack index and time markings, so cuts in the tape are not immediately apparent.

That was a problem in the case of Mr. Dunlop, who learned that his tape had been altered only after Ms. Clancy found another version of the same tape. Mr. Dunlop had been accused of pushing his bicycle into a line of police officers on the Lower East Side and of resisting arrest, but the deleted parts of the tape show him calmly approaching the police line, and later submitting to arrest without apparent incident.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney, Barbara Thompson, said the material had been cut by a technician in the prosecutor's office. "It was our mistake," she said. "The assistant district attorney wanted to include that portion" because she initially believed that it supported the charges against Mr. Dunlop. Later, however, the arresting officer, who does not appear on the video, was no longer sure of the specifics in the complaint against Mr. Dunlop.

In what appeared to be the most violent incident at the convention protests, video shot by news reporters captured the beating of a man on a motorcycle - a police officer in plainclothes - and led to the arrest of one of those involved, Jamal Holiday. After eight months in jail, he pleaded guilty last month to attempted assault, a low-level felony that will be further reduced if he completes probation. His lawyer, Elsie Chandler of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, said that videos had led to his arrest, but also provided support for his claim that he did not realize the man on the motorcycle was a police officer, reducing the severity of the offense.

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said that despite many civilians with cameras who were nearby when the officer was attacked, none of the material was turned over to police trying to identify the assailants. Footage from a freelance journalist led police to Mr. Holiday, he said.

In the bulk of the 400 cases that were dismissed based on videotapes, most involved arrests at three places - 16th Street near Union Square, 17th Street near Union Square and on Fulton Street - where police officers and civilians taped the gatherings, said Martin R. Stolar, the president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Those tapes showed that the demonstrators had followed the instructions of senior officers to walk down those streets, only to have another official order their arrests.

Ms. Thompson of the district attorney's office said, "We looked at videos from a variety of sources, and in a number of cases, we have moved to dismiss."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12video.html


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Security

Boris and Natasha?

Russian Police: 'Our Hackers Are The Best'
Dan Ilett

The Russian police's cybercrime division has warned that Russian hackers are the best in the world.

"Everyone knows that Russians are good at maths," said Lieutenant General Boris Miroshnikov of the division known as Department K. "Our software writers are the best in the world, that's why our hackers are the best in the world."

Speaking at the e-Crime Congress in London on Tuesday, Miroshnikov said that the casual teenage hackers of the past developed their techniques as they grew older.

"It used to be naughty boys (doing this)," he said. "But now they've grown up. They realize if you are clever at something then you should use it to earn a living. They are hacking to get rich and uniting over networks."

Miroshnikov called for unified international laws for Internet crime that would make it easier for the police to carry out arrests and charges around the world.

Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit said Tuesday that cybercrime costs British firms 2.4 billion pounds ($4.5 billion) last year as consequence of online crime last year. Miroshnikov said this was alarming, but that the international police effort was starting to take effect.

"The statistics are really very worrying," he said. "If you look at 2001, 2002 and 2003, computer crime was doubling. It's only this year that we've started to hold back the growth. That's because we've worked so hard.

"When governments get (ISPs), law enforcement, public and private sector cooperating, then and only then will we be able to succeed in holding back this type of crime."
http://news.com.com/Russian+police+O...3-5661547.html


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Beats smoke signals

Spyware Threatens to Pierce Vatican Walls
Aidan Lewis and Jim Krane

Computer hackers, electronic bugs and supersensitive microphones threaten to pierce the Vatican's thick walls next week when cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel to name a papal successor.

Spying has gotten a lot more sophisticated since John Paul was elected in 1978, but the Vatican seems confident it can protect the centuries-old tradition of secrecy that surrounds the gathering.

"It's not as if it's the first conclave we've handled," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Vatican security refused to discuss the details of any anti-bugging measures to be used during the conclave. But Giuseppe Mazzullo, a private detective and retired Rome policeman whose former unit worked closely with the Vatican in the past, said the Holy See will reinforce its own experts with Italian police and private security contractors.

"The security is very strict," Mazzullo said. "For people to steal information, it's very, very difficult if not impossible."

Thousands of reporters will be watching as the 115 cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel on April 18. Hackers and government informants may also be monitoring the conclave.

The temptations to spy will be immense. The papal election will likely see keen competition, notably between reformers and conservatives. It is also expected to witness a strong push for the first non-European pope.

Revelations of the proceedings could prove embarrassing to the Vatican. For instance, sensitive discussions on a papal candidate's stand on relations with Muslims or Jews, recognizing China rather than Taiwan or views on contraception would be sought-after by governments or the press.

John Paul was sensitive to meddling from outside. He spent his formative years in Soviet-run Poland under pervasive government spying. The Turkish gunman who shot him in 1981 was suspected of ties to the Soviets, a regime later brought down by forces the pope openly supported.

In 1996, John Paul set down rules to protect cardinals from "threats to their independence of judgment." Cell phones, electronic organizers, radios, newspapers, TVs and recorders were banned.

The ban on cell phones and personal data organizers makes sense, security experts say, since they can be hacked and used to broadcast the proceedings to a listener.

"An eavesdropper can reach into those devices and turn on the microphone and turn it into an eavesdropping device," said James Atkinson, who heads a Gloucester, Mass., company that specializes in bug detection. "It's extraordinarily easy to do."

Another worry for the Vatican will be rooftop snoops with sensitive microphones. Laser microphones can pick up conversations from a quarter-mile away by recording vibrations on window glass or other hard surfaces. The Sistine Chapel has windows set near the roof.

"You focus the laser on a window or on a hard object in the room, like the glass on a picture," said a New York-based security expert with Kroll, Inc., who asked that his name not be used. "When people are talking the glass will modulate with the sound of the voice and they can recover the audio."

Laser microphones can be thwarted with heavy drapes and by masking conversations with ambient noise.

Tougher to root out are tiny bugs: transmitters or recorders as small as a coin.

To handle those, bug-sweeping teams - acting on the pope's 1996 orders - will need to mount complex sweeps of sensitive meeting areas, taking out carpets, poking through chair cushions, opening heating ducts, testing electrical wiring, light bulbs and water pipes, Atkinson said.

The late pope deemed the threat to the conclave serious enough to decree that those who break their oaths of secrecy can be cast out of the Roman Catholic Church.

For the first time, however, cardinals voting in the conclave will be free to move outside the complex that includes the Sistine Chapel. Previously, cardinals were allowed to sleep only in the adjoining Apostolic Palace, but this time they will be housed in a $20 million hotel residence, the Domus Sanctae Marthae. They will be allowed to use Vatican City chapels for Masses.

In a sign of nervousness about maintaining secrecy, the College of Cardinals decided Saturday to halt interviews with the media. Cardinals had been giving interviews, and the clampdown is believed unprecedented.

"They've assured us there are ways to block all communications and conversations," Chicago Cardinal Francis George told reporters earlier in the week.

But even with precautions, halting a spy inside the Vatican - perhaps an unwitting one - is probably the toughest threat to block, experts said.

A spy could import a listening device, or even signal people outside the Vatican by a color-coded message. Atkinson suggested using colored smoke or by flushing dye down a toilet with a discharge pipe that could be monitored elsewhere.

"Are they going to search all the cardinals to see whether someone bugged their spectacles or crucifixes?" asked Giles Ebbut, a surveillance expert with the London consultancy Jane's. "The imagination can run riot."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2005Apr11.html


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Tips From The DIMACS Cybersecurity Conference

Industry and academic cybersecurity experts will convene Thursday and Friday (April 14-15) at Rutgers University to discuss new and as-yet- unresolved threats to safe and secure e-commerce. Their meeting is the first scientific conference devoted specifically to phishing and related e- commerce issues.

Industry and academic cybersecurity experts will convene Thursday and Friday (April 14-15) in Piscataway, N.J., to discuss new and
as-yet-unresolved threats to safe and secure e-commerce. Their meeting is the first scientific conference devoted specifically to phishing and related e-commerce issues. It will be hosted by the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) at Rutgers University. J.P. Morgan Chase Senior Vice President for Consumer Risk Management Richard A. Parry is an invited speaker.

"Messin' with Texas" reveals President Bush's not-so-personal information

Mothers' maiden names may seem like a safe way to authenticate the identity of an Internet user, but Indiana University School of Informatics research assistant Virgil Griffith and IU Bloomington computer scientist Markus Jakobsson will show how easy it is to mine online public records for this information using President George W. Bush and 3,773,882 other Texans as faux-victims. The researchers were able to retrieve the names despite the removal of online birth and death records in 2000 and 2002, respectively, as ordered by the Texas legislature. Because mothers' maiden names are so easily retrieved, the researchers urge American businesses to use other means of authentication. Jakobsson is an associate director of the IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research.

Distributed phishing attacks could evade authority

The easiest way for Internet service providers (ISPs) to end a phishing attack is to pull the plug on the phisher's fake Web site. This protects future victims from revealing their personal information. But what if phishers use their computer savvy to make endless copies of their false Web sites, each one hosted in a different place? Many of these sites may be unwittingly hosted by companies and individuals whose firewalls have been compromised by the attacker. Indiana University Bloomington computer scientist Markus Jakobsson and LEGC LLC Senior Managing Consultant Adam Young will discuss how phishers might go about hijacking users' accounts to stay one step ahead of ISPs. They'll also explain how ISPs might protect themselves -- and their clients. Although this type of phishing attack has not yet been seen, Jakobsson and Young believe it is inevitable unless something is done preemptively to stop it. Jakobsson is an associate director of the IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research.

A better way to can spam: block it, don't screen it

Experts estimate 60 to 80 percent of today's e-mails are unsolicited junk, and that's because e-mail "spammers" are playing the averages. For a mere $100, spammers can buy a list of 30 million e-mail addresses. If a mere 0.001 percent of those who receive a spam message respond favorably to a $10 scam, that still earns the spammer a $2,900 net profit. If the spammer is an e-mail phisher, a similarly low success rate still yields personal information from 300 victims. Indiana University Bloomington computer scientist Minaxi Gupta says a better way of preventing spam e-mails from ever reaching their intended recipients is to perform active "spam management" by creating criteria that block or delay spam, turning the local incoming mail server into a sort of nightclub bouncer. Today's spam filtering software does not stop spam at the door. Instead it screens and deletes unwanted messages only after they've been copied to the local server. Gupta says this method of spam prevention is costly -- in terms of both hard drive space and Internet bandwidth use.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/511060/?sc=swtn


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LexisNexis: Files May Have Been Breached
Jane Wardell

Criminals may have breached computer files containing the personal information of 310,000 people, a tenfold increase over a previous estimate of how much data was stolen from information broker LexisNexis, the company's parent said Tuesday.

Last month, London-based publisher and data broker Reed Elsevier Group PLC said criminals may have accessed personal details of 32,000 people via a breach of its recently acquired Seisint unit, part of Dayton, Ohio-based LexisNexis. LexisNexis is a Reed subsidiary.

Reed said it identified 59 instances since January 2003 in which identifying information such as Social Security numbers or driver's license numbers may have been fraudulently acquired on thousands of people.

Information accessed included names, addresses, Social Security and driver license numbers, but not credit history, medical records or financial information, the company said.

Reed spokesman Patrick Kerr said that the first batch of breaches was uncovered by Reed during a review and integration of Seisint's systems shortly after it purchased the Boca Raton, Fla.- based unit for $775 million in August.

Seisint provides data for Matrix, a crime and terrorism database funded by the U.S. government, which has raised concerns among civil liberties groups. The Matrix database was not involved in the breach, the company has said.

Seisint's databases store millions of personal records including individuals' addresses and Social Security numbers. Customers include police and legal professionals and public and private sector organizations.

The company said the 59 identified instances of fraudulently obtained information - 57 at Seisint and two in other LexisNexis units - are largely related to the improper use of IDs and passwords belonging to legitimate customers. It stressed that neither LexisNexis nor the Seisint technology infrastructure was breached by hackers.

Kerr said the company has since ensured that the system is watertight by improving login systems and security checks.

He said only 2 percent of the 32,000 people it notified about the possible theft of their personal information in March have contacted LexisNexis to accept its offer of free credit reports and credit monitoring, and none has so far advised LexisNexis that they have experienced any form of identity theft.

However, LexisNexis Chief Executive Kurt Sanford said Tuesday that of the 32,000 who were notified, law enforcement officials have identified 10 who investigators believe may have been victims of identity theft. He said it is unclear whether those possible thefts are related to the breach at LexisNexis.

Investigators said only three of those people appeared to have been the victims of financial fraud, Sanford said.

The breach is being investigated by the FBI's cyber-crime squad in Cincinnati. FBI spokesman Mike Brooks would say only that the agency is pursuing leads.

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who has introduced legislation designed to increase protections of consumer data, said LexisNexis turned a blind eye to customer protection.

But Sanford said LexisNexis had initiated the review and notified potential victims.

"We're going to fix this," he said. "The congressman's statement overreaches and mischaracterizes the situation."

Reed Elsevier played down the effect of the breach on its profits, reaffirming its target of higher earnings and at least 5 percent growth in revenues excluding acquisitions.

The breach at Seisint is the second of its kind at a major information provider in recent months. Rival data broker ChoicePoint Inc. announced last month that the personal information of 145,000 Americans may have been compromised in a breach in which thieves posing as small business customers gained access to its database.

In the ChoicePoint scam, at least 750 people were defrauded, authorities say. The case fueled consumer advocates' calls for federal oversight of the loosely regulated data-brokering business, and Capitol Hill hearings on the topic were held last month and are continuing this week.

Reed Elsevier specializes in the education, legal and science sectors, publishing more than 10,000 journals, books and compact discs, as well as almost 3,000 Web sites and portals. It also organizes 430 trade exhibitions. The LexisNexis division specializes in legal and business information.
http://staging.hosted.ap.org/dynamic...04-12-12-47-26


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Some Mastercard Holders Exposed To Data Theft

Global bank HSBC Holdings is notifying at least 180,000 people who used MasterCard credit cards to make purchases at Polo Ralph Lauren that criminals may have obtained access to their credit card information, and that they should replace their cards, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The situation involves a General Motors-branded card, the Journal reported.

It is the latest in a string of high-profile incidents in which personal data were stolen from retailers or financial institutions.

More than 20 U.S. states are considering legislation after data security scandals involving ChoicePoint and LexisNexis.

HSBC's U.K. office was not immediately available to comment.
http://news.com.com/Some+MasterCard+...3-5670509.html

[JackSpratts]

Only half?

Illegal software and film downloads exhaust university computer networks

Up To Half Of Data Network Capacity Taken Up By Film, Music, And Software Downloads

Films, music, and computer software spreading in the Internet's peer-to-peer networks take up huge portions of the Finnish universities' data transfer capacity.
For example, last autumn up to two-thirds of the server capacity at the University of Turku was spent on transferring data in the peer-to-peer networks.
The University of Helsinki's corresponding figure is 30-50 percent. The number of students making use of the peer-to- peer networks is in the hundreds in every university.

"At least 90 percent of the information circulating in the peer-to-peer networks is protected by copyright law", says Mauri Rosendahl, information security manager at the University of Helsinki.
Rosendahl explains that the authorities intervene in the illegal dissemination of copyright-protected material whenever international copyright organisations report on any wrongdoings. Usually this happens a couple of times a week, in both the Helsinki and Turku universities.
Belonging in peer-to-peer networks in itself is not illegal. According to Finnish law it is not illegal to copy films, music, or computer software for one's own use. Many of the peer-to-peer networks, however, require that the members allow access to their downloaded material for further circulation. This, in turn, is illegal.

Last Wednesday, Tampere University of Technology resorted to expelling three students who had been identified as distributors of illegal material.
In other universities such drastic measures have not been introduced as yet. In Helsinki and Turku, computer connections have been temporarily disconnected, while in some other universities of technology students have been issued with warnings.
"Network supervision can be problematic. We cannot decide for other people what kind of usage is good or bad. The peer-to-peer networks cannot be closed down as the scientific community benefits from them as well", explains information security manager Mats Kommonen from the University of Turku.
Peer-to-peer networks cause problems mainly at universities where the student accommodation connections are not separate from the university network.
"At the end of the day, the number of students guilty of software and entertainment piracy is fairly small, but even a few pirate servers can drastically slow down other information traffic", says information security manager Kaisu Rahko from the University of Oulu.

Executive director Antti Kotilainen of the Anti-Piracy Centre in Finland, CIAPC, sees the decision by Tampere University of Technology to expel students suspected of piracy as an encouraging step in the right direction.
"There is no justification for the usage of networks that were set up with tax-payers' money for the purpose of acquiring free entertainment for the students", Kotilainen emphasises.
Kotilainen feels Finland should act even more forcefully to stop the use of the peer-to-peer networks for copyright violations. In the United States and Great Britain, surveillance campaigns have effectively reduced the illegal copying of music. This has put a stop to the downward trend of the music industry's sales figures.
It is estimated that each year the 50,000 Finnish peer-to- peer network users copy from each other over 340,000 films, almost 800,000 CDs' worth of music, plus hundreds of thousands of computer games and programmes.
http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/engli.../1101978960379


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Meet interesting people. Make new friends.

A Slow, Steady Descent Into Madness...
Ben Hurwitz & Greg Staiti

We had the day marked on our calendars for weeks: Tuesday, March 29, 2005. The reason: the Supreme Court was hearing oral argument in Brand X v. FCC, a case which presented serious administrative law implications (involving the interplay between stare decisis and Chevron deference). This seemed like the perfect case on which to hear our very first Supreme Court oral argument.

General admission to oral argument at the Court (with a capital "C") is free. As Professor Ippolito (or Parisi, for the 1Ls) taught us, free admission creates a queue problem: since competition for spots in line isn't measured by actual dollar values, it takes the form of opportunity cost of time waiting in line. Thus, those who value attending argument most will arrive earliest. We'd heard the horror stories about people spending hours waiting in line to get into the building just to be denied within eyesight of the finish line. Nonetheless, we figured that: (a) our boring case certainly wouldn't attract too much attention; and (b) people who wait in line for more than a few hours before attending oral argument are just plain crazy, and there can't be that many crazies, right?

Wrong. Our first mistake was not checking the daily docket in advance. In addition to our case, the Court was also hearing MGM v. Grokster, an important internet file-sharing copyright case. Of course this would attract every zit-faced teenage tech-head who wanted to witness first-hand the death or salvation of free song-swapping. In fact, approximately 90 percent of those in line were probably there for Grokster and had never even heard of Brand X. (On the flip side, we learned a lot more about copyright law from fellow line-waiters than we'd ever cared to know.)

Despite the line, we still hoped our robust 1 a.m. arrival time (that was not a misprint) would be plenty early to put us at or near the front of the line. Wrong again. Despite the ridiculous hour, we met a line that had already begun to stretch around the sidewalk
adjacent to the Court.

Our time in line proved that, like many things in life, the journey can be more interesting that the destination. We were amazed by the cottage industry that is Supreme Court line-waiting. Most of the folks in line were professional "line sitters," holding spots for attorneys for ten dollars an hour. The professionals came comfortably-dressed, equipped with food, blankets, umbrellas, and (most-importantly) folding beach chairs. We law students naively overdressed and brought little food, but we did have books and coffee!

In a perfect example of just how screwed-up general admission to the Court is, the next person to arrive after us, at 1:30 a.m., was the wife of one of the litigating attorneys for the Grokster case. When such a well-connected attendee has to wait in line for nearly ten hours to hear argument, you know there is a problem with the system. (On the positive side, her husband did arrive at 5 a.m. - understandably, he could not sleep - with coffee and donuts for her, which she was nice enough to share.)

As the minutes slowly crept towards morning, we felt that every aspect of human endurance was being tested. Boredom - check. Try arguing against the merits of free music sharing at 3:30 in the morning. Physical exhaustion - check. Let's just say that a cold, damp sidewalk with a briefcase pillow is not exactly a Craftmatic Adjustable. Mental exhaustion and delirium - check. We'd been up for over 24 hours before the Court's doors even opened. Physical exertion - check. With the wind and misting rain pummeling us throughout the early morning, we now understood how lost campers could actually die of exposure. And let's not even begin to discuss the lack of bathroom facilities.

The night passed with good conversation, several trips to Union Station for relief, and a two-hour hunt on the ground for a screw from a pair of eyeglasses. We also learned all sorts of British euphemisms not fit for print in this paper as our new friend became extremely agitated with each perceived line cutter.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, 7:30 arrived and general admission tickets were handed out. Our numbers: 45 and 46 respectively. We'd heard that numbers below 50 were nearly a sure thing, so we felt good.

At long last we were ushered into the Court at 10:55. We rushed through security, stuffed our bags into lockers, and checked our coats. We were then guided to (silently!) take our seats. After ten hours of waiting in line in the cold, the stuffy courtroom was nearly enough to put us to sleep. Adding insult to injury, the Court didn't even approach the legal issue we were there to hear (they spent their time on communications law or something ...). Thus, the long-sought fruit of our labors ended up as just a chance to glimpse our nation's judicial beacons from the back of the courtroom.

Collecting ourselves and our belongings at the end of the one-hour argument, we trudged off to the Metro to head home. Taking stock of the day, we asked ourselves: was it worth it? Probably - every lawyer (or lawyer-in-training) should attend a Supreme Court argument at least once in his or her life. But will we soon repeat it? Only under pain of death ...
http://www.docketonline.com/news/200...s-921622.shtml


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2 Rivals Reach Tentative Deal for Adelphia
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Geraldine Fabrikant

Time Warner and its bidding partner, Comcast, have reached a tentative deal to acquire Adelphia Communications for nearly $18 billion in cash and stock, executives involved in the discussions said yesterday. Adelphia, the nation's fifth-largest cable TV operator, has been in bankruptcy protection since 2002.

The deal, if ratified by Adelphia's creditors and the bankruptcy judge, would be Time Warner's first major acquisition since its disastrous merger with AOL in January 2000.

The transaction would be the latest in the rapidly shrinking cable industry as providers try to offer not just television, but also high-speed Internet and telephony services. The industry has come under increasing pressure as satellite and telecommunications rivals also try to transform their businesses with similar services.

The tentative deal, which was presented privately to the bankruptcy judge yesterday, would give Time Warner and Comcast control of Adelphia's 5.3 million subscribers in 31 states, including systems around Los Angeles and in upstate New York.

Adelphia sought bankruptcy protection after its founder, John J. Rigas, and two of his sons were accused of looting the company of billions of dollars. Mr. Rigas and one son, Timothy J. Rigas, were found guilty and await sentencing. A hung jury was declared for Michael Rigas.

Time Warner and Comcast appear to have won the auction for Adelphia despite an 11th-hour bid on Tuesday from Cablevision Systems for $16.5 billion in cash. An executive close to Adelphia said the company chose the bid from Time Warner and Comcast "because it was far and away the best deal actually on the table."

The executive dismissed Cablevision's bid as being "far behind on price and a realistic timetable," but added that the bankruptcy process allowed for it and other bidders to challenge the offer.

Spokesmen for Time Warner, Adelphia and Comcast declined to comment last night.

Under the agreement, the executives said, Time Warner and Comcast would pay Adelphia bondholders about $13.5 billion in cash and about $4.5 billion in warrants for stock in a company that would be created by combining Time Warner's cable business and Adelphia. The deal includes a protection mechanism known as a collar that guarantees the value of shares in the combined company when shares are sold.

As part of the transaction, Comcast will contribute about $2 billion in cash and swap its 21 percent stake in Time Warner's cable business in exchange for about two million of Adelphia's subscribers, the executives said. Time Warner is paying about $3 billion in cash and borrowing about $8 billion secured against the combined business.

The next step for Adelphia is to present the deal to the bankruptcy court as part of a reorganization plan; a majority of each class of creditors must approve the plan. A single bondholder can block the plan if he or she owns enough of the debt.

William R. Huff, known for being a tough negotiator, is one of the largest bondholders. The funds he manages are said to hold more than a $2.5 billion stake in Adelphia, including a blocking position in the bonds with the first claim on Adelphia's assets after the banks.

Mr. Huff's company, W. R. Huff Asset Management, had set the minimum price of $17.5 billion for the company.

For Time Warner, the deal would catapult its cable business from 10.9 million subscribers to about 14 million. The deal would also allow Time Warner to spinoff its cable unit into a publicly traded business.

Several analysts said that the merger would benefit Time Warner because it would increase the size of the company's holdings. "They are paying a fair price and Time Warner will get control of the Los Angeles market as a result of this deal, which is a fast-growing market," one investor who spoke on condition of anonymity said.

However, not all investors are so happy to see Time Warner extend its cable holdings.

Several analysts, including Richard Greenfield of Fulcrum Global Partners have argued that Time Warner already owned enough cable. It is the nation's second-largest cable operator after Comcast.

"My concern is that acquisitions have not benefited the stock price of companies in the media sector over the last several years," Mr. Greenfield said. Other critics have said they would prefer to see Time Warner buy more programming.

Since the AOL Time Warner merger, the chief executive, Richard D. Parsons, has focused on paying down debt and calming a frayed corporate culture torn about by conflicts created in the merger. His major effort was the sale of Warner Music to a group of private equity investors.

The company recently settled a complaint with the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission over accounting irregularities related to AOL. Those cases had precluded Time Warner from entering into a transaction in which it would issue stock.

Mr. Parsons did consider one deal. He made an all-cash bid for MGM Studios. However that studio was sold to a consortium led by Sony.

Several analysts have said that they think Mr. Parsons was eager to get the Adelphia deal done to begin to put his stamp on the company.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/bu...a/08cable.html


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Ethernet Forum Plots Death Of SONET
John Leyden

Cheaper bandwidth at higher speeds is promised with the introduction Tuesday of a new telco standard 'Carrier Ethernet'. The standard is backed up by an international certification programme from trade association the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF).

Carrier Ethernet promises wide area networking scalable beyond 10Gbps using ubiquitous Ethernet technology as an alternative to traditional SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) telephony infrastructures. The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) said Carrier Ethernet could deliver business connectivity at tens of Gbps as well as broadcast-quality video on demand as a fraction of the cost of traditional telco technologies such as ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and SONET. "Carrier Ethernet will kill SONET," Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe told El Reg.

To infinity and beyond

Over the last five years or so, Ethernet has expended from its primary role as a local area network technology to become the basis behind many metropolitan area networks. Having all but seen off seen off Token Ring and marginalised Frame Relay, Ethernet's champions are beefing the protocol up for a "title fight" against traditional telco technologies such as SONET.

Nan Chen, president of the Metro Ethernet Forum, explained carrier Ethernet would have five attributes. These are: scalability to 10 Gbps and beyond, end-to-end protection, backwards compatibility with older telco protocols (such as Time Division Multiplexing), the ability to deliver robust service level agreements and 'rock solid' quality of service features. "We want to develop a clear definition of Carrier Ethernet and to encourage interoperability between different vendors," he said.

The MEF has developed Carrier Ethernet technical specifications and implementation agreements to promote interoperability and deployment of the technology worldwide. The result of first testing of equipment under the MEF Certification Program is due to be announced at the Carrier Ethernet World Congress in Berlin, Germany, September 2005.

The net effect

Analysts IDC estimates that more than 200 million Ethernet switch ports were shipped worldwide last year. In the 31 years since Ethernet was conceived by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC, as a simple way to network computers via a standard interface, more than three billion ports have been shipped. "The technology has little relationship to how it looked in 1973," Metcalfe, now advisory director at the MEF, explained.

"I see Ethernet developing in four directions: UP, DOWN, OVER and ACROSS. UP in speed and... DOWN to the 8 billion processors shipped each year that are not yet networked. Ethernet is increasingly moving OVER wireless links - WiFi, WiMax, ZigBee and others - which is ironic as it was derived from the 1970 Alohanet packet radio network. And now it's moving even further ACROSS the chasm between LANs and WANs with the development of Carrier Ethernet," he said

The Carrier Ethernet market should exceed $2.7bn in equipment revenues by 2008, according to an April study by Infonetics Research. IDC predicts Ethernet-based service revenues will exceed $19bn by 2007.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04...rier_ethernet/


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Skypecasting The New Trend In Peer-To-Peer File Sharing

Skype is an online software service that allows users to contact one another over the internet for free voice conversations. Podcasting is a personal broadcasting phenomenon in which users create digital recordings and post them on a web site for distribution to music players such as iPods or desktop PCs.

Technologically savvy users are merging these technologies to "Skypecast", using Skype's service to distribute recordings across the internet for free. This allows expert users to run their own mini-radio stations, which can be accessed by any Skype user. Skype does not actively support these uses, but encourages its users to find new applications for their service.
http://www.newstarget.com/006593.html


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Internet Phone Customer Service Uncertain
Matthew Fordahl

Lured by the promise of a low monthly rate for unlimited domestic calls, Sherry Willis jumped at the opportunity to ditch the old phone company in favor of 8x8 Inc.'s Packet8 Internet telephone service.

The family of six - including two chatty teenagers - was so pleased with the quality and reliability of the $19.95-a-month "Freedom Unlimited" plan that Willis canceled her old phone service, which had been costing about $175 a month.

But last month, Packet8 e-mailed the Minonk, Ill., woman to say her family was on the phone for nearly 9,000 minutes, exceeding the limits of "Freedom Unlimited." The company wanted to put the Willises on a partially metered plan that would have cost about $200 a month.

So much for savings.

When Willis called Packet8's customer support, the agent refused to transfer her to a manager. Her request to speak with someone in billing was denied because, the agent said, they're swamped with phone calls. An e-mail address she was given bounced back as undeliverable.

"Steam started shooting out my ears," Willis said.

She posted her story to BroadbandReports.com, a discussion and news board for high-speed Internet users. Readers offered up 8x8 contacts - as well as suggestions that she call the Better Business Bureau and the Illinois attorney general's office.

After several days of trying, Willis finally started to get responses from 8x8. First, agents suggested she order a second phone line and cut down on usage. Both options didn't sit right with Willis, who pointed out the word "unlimited" in the ads.

After another round of e-mails, the dispute appeared resolved.

Bryan Martin, 8x8's chief executive, said Willis was incorrectly misidentified as a business user because her family's usage was abnormally high.

He said that the terms and conditions of the provider's contract state that Freedom Unlimited is for "normal, single residential use."

Martin said it's rare that a real home user is misidentified as a business customer and that the Willises' account would be flagged so the family isn't bothered again.

Willis isn't convinced. She says she's concerned the company will continue to monitor her family's calling activity and that she's actively looking for another provider.

"I fear that Packet8 is going to continue to monitor us. I'm going to have a little spy sitting in there checking to see how much I use," she said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS


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A New Reality in Video Games: Advertisements
Matt Richtel

In video game vernacular, which of these commands seems out of place: throw punch, slay dragon or view Sprite billboard?

It's a trick question; they all belong.

At least they do to Mitchell Davis, who says he believes that advertisements and product placements will soon become as integral to video games as story lines and action.

Until now, ads have appeared occasionally and haphazardly in video games. But Mr. Davis, chief executive of Massive, a new advertising agency with headquarters in New York, hopes to bring a more aggressive marketing approach to interactive media - he wants to put up billboards and make product placements for mainstream advertisers in the cyberworlds of sports, shooting and strategy games.

For now, the Massive ads will appear only in games played on personal computers connected to the Internet. But eventually Massive's technology will work in games played on consoles like the Sony PlayStation 2 and the Xbox, if they have an Internet connection. The Internet link allows Massive's software to modify the ads as players progress through a game.

"As you move through levels and zones you'll see fresh advertising," said Mr. Davis, 43. "You might see an ad for Mötley Crüe one minute and for T-Mobile the next."

Mr. Davis, a former executive at Britannica.com, has signed deals with 10 major game publishers, including Take-Two Interactive and Vivendi Universal Games, which together will include Massive's software in 40 games by the end of this year . He has also signed agreements with advertisers like Dunkin' Donuts, Intel, Paramount Pictures, Coca-Cola, Honda and Universal Music Group to place their ads with the game publishers.

Industry analysts and executives said that Mr. Davis was not the first entrepreneur trying to jump-start the video game advertising business, but that he was probably the farthest along in building an advertising agency around the idea.

There are, however, plenty of skeptics. Some game players worry that such ads will be distracting, while some game developers are concerned about having to modify their designs to satisfy advertisers.

"I don't want to pick up a sword and have it read Nike on the side," said Jeff Evertt, a video game player and programmer. But less intrusive product ads would not necessarily bother him, he said. Brian Fisher, another gamer and programmer, agreed.

"If the character drinks a Pepsi to get health points, it doesn't bug me," Mr. Fisher said.

Both Mr. Fisher and Mr. Evertt, who work at different video game studios, said they would be concerned if advertisers tried to dictate how and when the ads appeared.

"I don't want to have to go to Nike and get approval," said Mr. Evertt, speaking hypothetically.

Electronic Arts, the world's largest independent game publisher, has not signed a deal with Massive because its executives said the Massive technology had not been proved. They are also wary of possibly compromising the quality of their games for ad revenues that are still quite small.

"We're skeptical the promise meets the resource commitment," said Julie Shumaker, director of in-game advertising for Electronic Arts. The company currently sells ads in a variety of ways in games that are not played online. For example, some sports games have billboards for Burger King.

So far, those ad revenues have been limited. Electronic Arts, which had $4 billion in sales last year, for example, took in only about $10 million in revenue from placing commercial images.

That may change as game publishers seek new sources of revenue to offset the growing cost of producing games, which can reach $10 million to $20 million, excluding marketing expenses. At the same time, advertisers are looking for new ways to reach 18- to 34-year-old males, a sought-after audience that is increasingly abandoning television (and TV commercials) and spending more time playing video games.

The confluence of these trends is likely to make product placement in games more appealing.

"This is the next big way publishers are talking about growing their revenue," said Evan Wilson, an industry analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. Mr. Wilson added that the use of commercials was "almost inevitable in mass-market games."

A big challenge has been convincing advertisers that they can measure the effectiveness of their in-game advertising. To address this problem, Mr. Davis signed a deal in December with Nielsen, the company that tracks TV viewership, to use Massive's software to measure whether video game players are viewing the in-game commercial messages.

The software allows game publishers set aside locations inside a game to post ads. In one popular action game called Splinter Cell, for example, boxes on cargo ships are stamped with the names of advertisers.

The technology makes it possible to track how often a player comes across those boxes inside the game and reports back to the company over the Internet.

"Measurement is the key part of the proposition," Mr. Davis said. "Advertisers are looking for accountability."

Mr. Davis also said that ads could actually make a scene in a game feel more real. Not all game publishers and industry analysts agree, particularly if the ads interfere with the action.

Ms. Shumaker, from Electronic Arts, said full creative control was crucial for game developers. She added that if Massive proved its advertising approach to be profitable, Electronic Arts might well get more aggressive in its ad placements, though it would not hire an outside ad agency.

Smaller publishers, however, do not have the resources to go it alone, said Monika Madrid, who oversees product placement at Ubisoft, the publisher that makes Splinter Cell. She said Ubisoft had been very happy with its relationship with Massive.

Massive says it will pay a portion of the money it earns from advertisers to the game publishers. Mr. Davis said the publishers could eventually get ad revenue of $1 to $2 on each game sold. Ms. Madrid, however, said it was far too soon to know whether the partnership would lead to significant revenues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/te...game.html?8dpc


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I.B.M. Hopes to Profit by Making Patents Available Free
Steve Lohr

I.B.M. is renowned for its rich storehouse of patented inventions. It once again led the research sweepstakes in America last year, collecting 3,248 patents, more than any other company. And it earned more than $1 billion last year from licensing and selling its ideas.

So why has I.B.M. shifted course recently, giving away some of the fruits of its research instead of charging others to use it? The answer is self-interest.

Diverging from conventional wisdom, the company has calculated that sharing technology can sometimes be more profitable than jealously guarding its property rights on patents, copyrights and trade secrets. The moves by I.B.M., the world's largest supplier of information technology services and computers, are being closely watched throughout the business world.

Earlier this year, I.B.M. made a broad gesture toward what it called a new era in how it controls intellectual property. It announced in January that it would make 500 patents - mainly for software code that manages electronic commerce, storage, image processing, data handling and Internet communications - freely available to others.

And it pledged that more such moves would follow.

This month, the company said that all of its future patent contributions to the largest standards group for electronic commerce on the Web, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, would be free.

I.B.M. is at the forefront, but companies in industry after industry are also reconsidering their strategies on intellectual property: What do you share? What do you keep proprietary?

The Internet, globalization and cost pressures are driving businesses to collaborate in the pursuit of higher productivity and profits, and to accelerate the pace of product development. That collaboration requires companies to share more technical information with corporate customers, suppliers and industry partners. The result, specialists say, is that the terms of trade in intellectual property, and the boundary lines, are shifting.

"The business world today is engaged in a huge experiment in figuring out what different parts of intellectual property should be open and closed," said Steven Weber, director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. "The fate of many companies, and the strength of national economies, will depend on how the experiment turns out."

The change at I.B.M. began last May when Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.'s chief executive, told John E. Kelly, a senior vice president, to lead a team to rethink how the company handles its intellectual property.

Mr. Kelly recalled his boss telling him, "This is a hugely important area, and I think we need to redirect our strategy and policy and practices." Mr. Palmisano, according to Mr. Kelly, then added, "If any company can take the lead on this, it's us."

Mr. Kelly, leading a 12-person group, traveled, studied, brought in outside specialists, and by last September concluded that more of I.B.M.'s homegrown ideas should be shared instead of being tightly held.

The shift, admittedly, is carefully calibrated.

I.B.M. is not forsaking its lucrative technology licensing business or pulling back on new patent filings. And the company is not giving away the technology for its mainframe computers, its proprietary database software and other complete products.

Instead, it is freely contributing the technology building blocks that allow broader communication across industry networks.

Such moves do carry risk for I.B.M.

"When you open some of your technology, it forces you to run higher up that economic food chain in your business," said Jim Stallings, an I.B.M. vice president for intellectual property and standards.

Another consideration is the need to keep intellectual property as both an offensive and a defensive weapon. The best shield against a patent infringement suit is often the threat that the target company may file a countersuit based on its own patent arsenal.

"The layer of technology that is open is going to steadily increase, but in going through this transition we're not going to be crazy," Mr. Kelly said. "This is like disarmament. You're not going to give away all your missiles as a first step."

Still, I.B.M.'s new strategy represents a response to a number of changes in the marketplace for ideas.

More and more innovation in business, company executives say, is occurring across cooperative information networks, which require open technical standards. (The Internet and the Web stand as proof of the success of that model; their public standards make low-cost, global communications possible.)

Companies in fields like health care, chemicals and car manufacturing are already working on standards for sharing more information. To create robust and widely used standards, companies have to make their own intellectual property - usually specialized software for handling information - available either for small licensing fees or free, as I.B.M. pledged to do for the Internet e-commerce group. The potential payoff is that open standards will help the entire industry grow faster, and may even work to the advantage of the company making the contributions.

"If you open up your technology and reveal quickly, people will build on your stuff," said Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of a new book, "Democratizing Innovation" (MIT Press, 2005). "It becomes more economically efficient to be open."

In its software business, I.B.M. has been a champion of open-source projects like the Linux operating system, on which programmers collaborate and share code. The patents it made available in January are for use in any open-source project.

Another development in recent years that pushed I.B.M. to reconsider its patent approach has been the surge in patent filings and lawsuits, including the rise of firms whose only business is to file patent infringement suits, known as "patent trolls."

"It seemed to us the pendulum has swung way too far in the direction of companies blindly chasing patents, and blindly chasing the enforcement of patents," Mr. Kelly said.

There is also a sense of urgency to the intellectual property issue, I.B.M. executives say, because government officials in the United States, Europe, China and elsewhere are expected to make crucial policy decisions in the next year or two.

I.B.M., not surprisingly, wants a "balanced" intellectual property policy intended to maintain incentives for inventors and to foster open technical standards so collaboration can flourish. It supports proposals in the United States to make software patents more difficult to obtain, hoping to help curb the patent-and-litigate frenzy.

The company is particularly interested in a proposed law to harmonize patent rules in the 25 countries of the European Union. Many European countries, legal specialists say, effectively allow software patents already as computer-accomplished inventions, which cover hardware and software working in tandem.

A proposal last month by the European Commission would recognize and define software patents across Europe as computer-accomplished inventions. But it would also require patent holders sometimes to share the technology to create open standards.

The commission recommendation contains a provision that says software for allowing data sharing across different computer systems - interoperability, in computer terms - should be open. And interoperability, the commission added, should trump intellectual property rights, regardless of a company's patents. I.B.M., for one, is a strong proponent of that approach.

But the compromise is fiercely opposed by some open-source advocates, small businesses and politicians, who argue that the formal legal endorsement of software patents could slow innovation, invite lawsuits and mainly serve the interests of big American software companies.

In Europe, software is covered by copyright, which protects a complete software product; patents go further, restricting the use of individual ingredients of technology. The European Parliament is expected to vote on the commission proposal this summer.

Technology standards for data sharing and collaboration are the equivalent of trade agreements in the modern economy, said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a vice president and technology strategist at I.B.M. "Anything that enhances interoperability has to be open," he said.

The message from Europe, Mr. Wladawsky-Berger said, is clear: if companies do not ensure openness in their voluntary standards groups, governments will step in to enforce it.

Still, software is malleable and tends to resist sharp boundary lines. Microsoft, for one, has resisted Europe's antitrust sanctions that seek to force the company to share its technology with rivals so that their products can operate smoothly with Windows server software. Microsoft initially argued that following the order could amount to giving away its valuable property to competitors.

Last Monday, under threat of new fines, Microsoft said it would meet most of the demands of the European regulators.

I.B.M. is taking a different path, though it, too, is driven by self-interest and competitive advantage. Even as it preaches greater openness and collaboration, the company is also intent on extending its use of patents in its big technology services business. For example, it has software patents for new mathematical formulas that can be used to optimize orders in supply chains for retailers or manage risk in financial markets.

"But in services, when you are co-inventing with a customer, you have to take a lighter hand on intellectual property," Mr. Kelly said. "It's very different from our proprietary tradition of 'it's ours and we'll license it.' "

Mr. Kelly added that I.B.M. was still feeling its way in determining what technology it was willing to share. "We don't know quite where this is headed, and the line will obviously evolve over time," he said. "But every action we take will be done with an eye toward striking this more subtle balance between proprietary and open."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/technology/11ibm.html


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France Detects a Cultural Threat in Google
Alan Riding

As president of the French National Library, Jean-Noël Jeanneney has good reason to feel safe from the frequent incursions of American popular culture into contemporary French life. With its collection of 13 million books, the library is a reassuring symbol of the durability of French literature and thought.

Yet Mr. Jeanneney is not one to lower his guard. He grew alarmed last December when he read that Google planned to scan 15 million English-language books and make them available as digital files on the Web. In his view, the move would further strengthen American power to set a global cultural agenda.

"I am not anti-American, far from it," Mr. Jeanneney, 62, said in an interview in his office in the library's new headquarters overlooking the Seine river. "But what I don't want is everything reflected in an American mirror. When it comes to presenting digitized books on the Web, we want to make our choice with our own criteria."

So, when Google's initial announcement went unnoticed here, Mr. Jeanneney raised his voice. In a Jan. 23 article in the newspaper, Le Monde, entitled "When Google Challenges Europe," he warned of "the risk of a crushing domination by America in the definition of the idea that future generations will have of the world."

Europe, he said, should counterattack by converting its own books into digital files and by controlling the page rankings of responses to searches. His one-man campaign bore fruit. At a meeting on March 16, President Jacques Chirac of France asked Mr. Jeanneney and the culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, to study how French and European library collections could be rapidly made available on the Web.

But where there is a will, is there a way?

Mr. Jeanneney is the first to acknowledge that he has a clearer idea of where he wants to go than how he will get there. On the technology required, for instance, he said that Europe had the choice of trying to develop its own search engine or of reaching agreement with Google, the world's most popular Internet search service, or perhaps with other Internet search providers, like Amazon.com, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Money, too, is a variable. Newly rich from its stock offering last summer, Google expects to spend $150 million to $200 million over a decade to digitize 15 million books from the collections of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, Oxford University and the New York Public Library.

In contrast, the French National Library's current book scanning program is modest. With an annual budget of only $1.35 million, it has so far placed online some 80,000 books and 70,000 drawings and will soon add part of its collection of 19th-century newspapers.

"Given what's at stake, $200 million is very little money," Mr. Jeanneney said of Google's planned investment in its program, known as Google Print.

Specifically, he fears that Google's version of the universal library will place interpretation of French and other Continental European literature, history, philosophy and even politics in American hands. This, he says, represents a greater peril than, say, American movies, television or popular music.

Google says his fears are unfounded. It notes that, as with Google, page rankings on Google Print will be defined by public demand and not by political, cultural or monetary variables. Further, according to Nikesh Arora, vice president for European operations for Google, the company fully supports all moves to make information and books available on the Web in all languages.

"Our intent is in no way to impose one culture or another," Mr. Arora said in a telephone interview from London. "Our intent is to offer the information responding to the priorities of users. And we are willing to support others, either as an active partner or with technical support. We are supportive of the French National Library and are ready to do anything to facilitate development of its expertise."

Still, it is no coincidence that concern about Google Print is being expressed first in France. It has often tried to persuade the rest of Europe to close ranks against what it calls Anglo-Saxon culture. And with digitized books, Mr. Jeanneney argued, "European ranking should reflect a European vision of history and culture."

But which Europe? That of the French, German and Spanish languages? That of the 25 members of the European Union? More crucially, will European governments or the public have the power to define the books and criteria used in response to search requests?
Even with questions unanswered, however, President Chirac now seems bent on promoting a European parallel to Google Print. And if the rest of Europe does not echo his call, France may well go it alone. After all, no one cares more about French culture than France. And thanks to Google, it seems, Mr. Jeanneney has spawned a new national cause.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/te.../11google.html


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Microsoft Agrees To Pay Gateway $150Milion To Settle Suit

Microsoft Corp., the world's biggest software maker, has agreed to pay Gateway Inc. $150 million over four years to settle a legal dispute and the companies will work together on the marketing and development of Gateway personal computing products.

As part of the settlement announced Monday, Gateway will release all antitrust claims against Microsoft based on past conduct.

Gateway shares rose 7 cents to $4.15 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Microsoft shares climbed 11 cents to $25.05 in morning trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Gateway expects to use the funds for marketing initiatives, including advertising, sales training and consulting, as well as for the research, development and testing of new Gateway products that can run current Microsoft products and Microsoft's next-generation operating system and productivity software.

"Gateway continues to enjoy a strong relationship with Microsoft and we're pleased to put these legacy legal issues behind us," said Wayne Inouye, president and CEO of Gateway. "We look forward to even greater collaboration with Microsoft going forward as we work together towards the future of computing."

Gateway's claims arose from the United States v. Microsoft antitrust case in the mid-1990s, where Gateway was specifically identified in U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's findings as having been impacted in its business by practices on which he ruled against Microsoft.

Under the statute of limitations, the time period for Gateway to bring claims against Microsoft based on these findings of fact expired in late 2003. Before the expiration date, Microsoft and Gateway agreed to extend the period in order to explore a mutually beneficial solution.

The companies said today's agreement resulted from a recent mediation. Microsoft denies any liability to Gateway, but said it is "very pleased to be able to resolve our past differences in a constructive manner that will allow us to continue our focus on the interests of our mutual customers."
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan...=apn_tech_down


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Cuban's Defense Of E-File Sharing Will Protect Fair Use
Jonathan Smith

Mark Cuban is best known for being the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and starring in the reality television show "The Benefactor." Yet, Cuban's real claim to success is based on his emergence as a tycoon in the media content and computer industry. It is interesting that he recently offered to support StreamCast Networks and Grokster in the controversial MGM v. Grokster case that will soon be decided by the Supreme Court. Although StreamCast's peer-to-peer software Morpheus, along with Grokster, allows users to download copyright infringing media content, Cuban is willing to financially support the defense because he believes that "If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it that it will be the domain of the big corporations only."

Cuban believes that if the original ruling of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is overturned, the content industry and consumers will be greatly harmed in the long run. If anyone is qualified to talk about how to succeed in the information economy, it's Cuban. He co-founded the Web radio company Broadcast.com that was sold to Yahoo! at the climax of the technology bubble in April 1999. He owns many other media companies and a lot of intellectual property.

In his blog, www.blogmaverick.com, he describes with great optimism the possibilities of new ways to distribute media in the Internet age: "Content could be delivered digitally in thousands of different ways, and the number of methods for distribution would only expand over time. To me, this meant the power of the gatekeepers would diminish, and the power of independent content creators and owners would increase." Just as Cuban made a place for him self within the industry, he believed that media content in its current legal form threatens traditional media companies - the gatekeepers - because they can no longer have complete control over distribution.

In order to better understand the implications of the case, one must know a small amount of history regarding a copyright property ruling Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, otherwise known as "The Betamax Case." Sony Corp. of America was defending its right to produce a device that could easily copy any movie or television program that comes through a coaxial wire. In 1984, the Supreme Court sided with Sony Corp. of America and created a precedent that a maker of technology - that can be used to infringe copyrights - is not guilty of any crime for creating such technology. According to the EFF Web site, it was this ruling that allowed devices such as VCRs, "photocopiers, personal computers, Cisco routers, CD burners and Apple's iPod" to exist.

It is now more than 20 years later, and many things have changed. Now, the major media-based entertainment industries - the movie industry and the music industry - have formed groups that actively work to whittle away at fair use rights. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is a trade organization that represents the seven biggest movie companies: Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. And the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) represents many music producers and distributes. A thing to note is that Sony, the hero in the Betamax case, is now backing both of the organizations that are working to erode the privileges granted in the first case.

The original court decision created what is now called the doctrine of "fair use." This generally means that you can make backup copies of media you own as long as you don't distribute the copies. If Grokster loses in the Supreme Court, then this doctrine will no longer serve a purpose, as the very devices we use to copy will fall to legal jeopardy.

In fact, since the Betamax trial, there have been more recent movements in the legislative area that have almost destroyed fair use. The most significant action was the creation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or DMCA). After the DMCA was signed into law in 1998, it became illegal to "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work" or to "manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in" a device which overrides a control feature. These provisions were intended to prevent consumers from easily buying mass produced devices that overcame protections created to stop the copying of media- unless the media companies allow it. The DMCA has good intentions, but it opens up a Pandora's box of problems.

DVDs are copy protected by a security key called a Content-Scrambling System (CSS) and it is illegal to break that protection to back up your DVDs. Now that CDs are beginning to ship with copy protection, the DMCA will create a situation where it would be illegal to copy your new CD to your iPod to listen to it if the creator of the CD forbids copying using Digital Rights Management (DRM) software.

Cuban does not hesitate to speculate about what could happen in the future if the Supreme Court overturns the appeals court ruling in the Grokster case. "It won't be a good day when high school entrepreneurs have to get a fairness opinion from a technology oriented law firm to confirm that big music or movie studios won't sue you because they can come up with an angle that makes a judge believe the technology might impact the music business," Cuban said.

The fight for Peer-2-Peer software is more than just a fight for the right to steal. It is a struggle to avoid harmful relegation whose absence has been a big part of the Internet's rapid growth. Hopefully the Supreme Court will not overturn the previous ruling in the MGM v. Grokster case, and will set a clear precedent that protects "fair use" in the future.
http://www.thebatt.com/news/2005/04/...e-922046.shtml


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As if

Music Moguls Trumped By Steve Jobs?
John Borland

When Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs walked into the suites of top record label executives in 2002, iTunes software in hand, he was welcomed as a trailblazer to a digital music future.

Now, nearly two years after Apple's iTunes launch, record executives have become worried that they have inadvertently ceded too much power over their industry to this charismatic computer executive.

Frustrated at what they see as Jobs' intransigence on song pricing and other issues, some record executives are now turning their hopes toward other partners, particularly mobile phone carriers eager to get into the business of selling music. They see this new focus as a way to broaden the digital music business, and lessen Apple's dominance over their market in the process.

"The (wireless) carriers' economics are aligned with us much better than Apple is aligned with us," said one senior executive at a major record label, who asked to remain anonymous due to his company's ongoing relationship with Apple. "The mobile market is very important, as important to us as the PC."

Jobs is given undeniable credit for jump-starting what is now a fast-growing digital music market, but some music executives complain that his company, with 70 percent of the digital download market, is setting the ground rules for their own business.

While iTunes is designed to propel the sales of iPods--more than $1 billion worth in the last quarter alone--the labels complain that Apple's policies are insensitive to their goals and limit their ability to grow their digital business even faster.

For example, Apple wants to sell all its songs for 99 cents, a single price point that's easy for consumers to understand. But the record labels have pressed for the ability to vary prices to maximize their own sales. They want to sell older titles at a discount--like the $9.99 CDs available in most record stores--and charge more for popular songs to take advantage of market demand.

Jobs also has refused to license Apple's antipiracy technology, called FairPlay, to rival MP3 player makers, and has blocked music formats from other companies such as Microsoft from the iPod. This makes iPods and the iTunes store incompatible with rival digital music devices and stores, fragmenting the market in a way the labels fear ultimately limits sales.

"We hate the current situation," one top record industry executive said, referring to the issue of incompatibility between different companies' music devices and services. "There is one man who's going to decide this...No record company by itself can basically tell Steve Jobs, 'You're not going to get our catalog unless you open up FairPlay to Microsoft.' We can't do it together."

Apple declined to comment for this story.

Despite the critics, Apple continues to win praise from many customers and industry analysts. They point to Apple's clear success in spurring the download business as proof that Jobs is on the right track with pricing and other policies.

"Apple really understands that pricing models are critical," said Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg. "I think 99 cents resonates with consumers as a sweet spot."

Many customers like the convenience and pricing. "iTunes really sucks you in," said Jackie Kerr, an iTunes customer in Baltimore, Md. "I don't mind the 99-cent cost, though sometimes I do feel stupid for paying $1 for some horrifying 80s band I don't want to admit liking."

When iTunes launched, most of the record labels were more squarely in Apple's camp. Part of the reason was Apple's limited role in the computer industry: They saw the Macintosh market--less than 5 percent of the total U.S. computer market--as a small, relatively safe way to experiment with Jobs' ideas.

Instead, iTunes, replicated on the PC platform a few months later, exploded into a popular hit that almost overnight defined the standards for the digital music business. Apple's iTunes store captures close to 70 percent of digital music sales, according to the most recent analyst figures. The iPod holds a similar share in the portable MP3 player market.

"I think it's safe to say that Apple has generated so much interest in digital music downloads as a paid service, the labels clearly understand Apple's influence," Gartenberg said.

Wireless, the music industry's new savior
For the most part, the labels have remained loath to push too forcefully against the company that still accounts for the vast majority of their new online sales.

Instead, they are turning hungrily to the mobile phone market, where phones are slowly gaining the capacity to play music. Executives note that there are many times more cell phones than iPods in the world, potentially offering a far larger digital music market. Already full-song download services for cell phones are operating in Europe and Asia, and are expected to come to the United States as soon as this year.

Part of the mobile market's attraction comes in pricing. Consumers around the world have shown they will eagerly pay $2.50 or more for a ring tone, a mere snippet of a song that costs just 99 cents for the full version at iTunes. Labels see these consumers as receptive to variable prices for different songs.

But some music executives also describe mobile carriers as simply a better potential partner than Apple. Like the labels, the carriers' bottom line depends directly on selling content, while Apple's profit sheets depend on hardware sales.

The carriers' interests were underlined in the case of Motorola's iTunes-enabled cell phone, announced nine months ago but now delayed. As described by the companies, the phone would let people transfer their iTunes-purchased songs from computers to the phone.

Publicly, carriers say they are interested in the idea and will offer the phone to their customers if there is demand.

"Ultimately, the consumer is the boss," said John Burbank, Cingular Wireless vice president of marketing. "We're going to create products that best match what the consumer wants to do."

But mobile industry sources say some carriers have been critical of Motorola's move, which would encourage consumers to buy music on a computer rather than over the phone network. Because most phones are sold with a substantial subsidy from the wireless carrier, their lack of interest has set back the release of the iTunes phone.

"Carriers subsidize phones and features when they drive network usage," said Iain Gillott, a wireless industry consultant. "Yet here was a phone that I was supposed to sync to my PC so I could buy music from Apple. Why would the carriers subsidize that?"

None of this means the labels are likely to stop dealing with Apple. Indeed, the companies continue to work closely behind the scenes discussing issues such as CD copy protection and new promotions. And label executives are quick to commend Apple for doing more than any other company to create the digital download business.

And any business relationship, particularly in new arenas, is bound to have its bumps, insiders say.

"The relationships are really better than ever," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. "Everybody understands where the other side is coming from. Everybody understands that there is a market here, and everybody's trying to find a path. The dialog is healthier and more wide-ranging than it's ever been."
http://news.com.com/Music+moguls+tru...3-5671705.html


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Soma-FM in the car man

Minneapolis Envisions Citywide Wi-Fi
Steve Alexander

Minneapolis is about to become an unwired city, creating a universal wireless Internet access network available to every citizen, visitor, business and municipal facility within city limits.

On Wednesday, the city will unveil a request for a proposal for a privately owned, $15 million to $20 million citywide wireless and fiber-optic network. It is likely to use the Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) technology that has created several hundred Internet access "hot spots" for laptop computer users in metro coffee shops, bookstores, airports and hotels.

A contract for the wireless and fiber network should be signed later this year, with initial service likely to begin 12 months later and citywide service six to 12 months after that, Minneapolis officials said.

The citywide wireless network is necessary to improve government communications by linking every city building, police car and housing inspector to the city's databases, city officials say.

But the network also would be available to every individual and business in the city.

Consumers would be able to buy broadband access of 1 million to 3 million bits per second for $18 to $24 a month -- a bit slower than wired cable modem service but about half the price. The network also is expected to create an economic incentive for businesses to locate in Minneapolis.

"If someone gets off a plane at the airport and signs up for Minneapolis Internet service, they can sign on with one password anywhere in the city," said Bill Beck, director for business development in the city of Minneapolis' computer operations. "Cities that have that will be in a much better position to attract new business opportunities and economic development. It will be the ante to get into the game in the next several years."

No tax money would be used for the Minneapolis wireless network, which would be paid for, built, owned and operated by the winning bidder on the city's proposal. That is a markedly different approach than in Philadelphia, where the city will own and operate a new Wi-Fi network.

Minneapolis officials decided not to build their own wireless network because of high construction and administrative costs, Beck said. In addition, city officials were concerned that cities offering high-speed Internet service have been accused by large telephone companies of competing with the private sector, he said.

Minneapolis officials envision putting Wi-Fi antennas atop Minneapolis city buildings, light poles and traffic signals and also using a high-capacity fiber-optic network to combine all the wireless signals for connection to the Internet. Fiber-optic connections also would be provided to business customers who need more capacity than wireless connections can provide.

As part of the network's start-up, the city hopes to incorporate into it all Internet hot spots already operated by private businesses such as coffee shops. Jim Farstad, a telecom consultant to the city, estimated there are 300 to 400 Internet hot spots operating in Minneapolis.

Wi-Fi hot spots often are about 300 feet in diameter, but they can be linked to create a citywide network, as they have been in the city of Chaska, which charges consumers $16 a month to use the service, called Chaska.net. In the city of 22,000 people, about 25 percent of the 7,500 households subscribe to Chaska.net, said Dave Pokorney, Chaska city manager.

Suburban pressure

Minneapolis wireless network project leaders said the inexpensive networks operating in suburban Chaska and Buffalo put pressure on Minneapolis leaders to do the same. In addition to the political pressures, the city also needed an improved network that could speed up data traffic in its 47 main buildings and extend high-speed access to 300 other buildings -- all at a savings, Beck said.

The city also wanted to replace expensive cellular radio communications used by police cars with a cheaper and faster wireless data network. There also was a desire to provide broadband to an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the city's population that either isn't served by high-speed Internet access or can't afford it.

"Our goal is a common, ubiquitous network infrastructure that is seamless and provides a common communications backbone for all the needs of the city," Beck said.

City officials think that no single company can build the whole network and that bids are likely to come from consortiums consisting of a prime contractor and several subcontractors. The city has had talks with 26 potential bidders, including Qwest, Minnesota's largest phone company; equipment suppliers Siemens and Alcatel, "and some new players," Beck said.

Cable TV company Time Warner expressed interest in the project, but Qwest was noncommital.

"We need to look at the city's request for proposal, but we're interested in seeing how our resources meet their needs," Time Warner spokesman Lance Leupold said.

"We cannot offer any comment until we have read and reviewed the request for proposal," Qwest spokeswoman Cyndi Barrington said.

Other bidders

Other local firms considering bidding are those that already offer more expensive wireless Internet services to Twin Cities businesses. StoneBridge Wireless Broadband of Eden Prairie and Implex.net Inc. of Minneapolis offer WiMax, a next- generation wireless Internet access technology that travels several miles instead of Wi-Fi's 300 feet but requires costly receiving equipment that consumers usually can't afford.

Tim Johnson, StoneBridge director of strategic alliances, said his firm might bid on some aspects of the proposed network, probably as a subcontractor, but isn't sure the project is practical.

"There is a place for Wi-Fi hot spots. But the cost-effectiveness of a border-to-border Minneapolis city Wi-Fi network is in question," Johnson said.

Stuart DeVaan, CEO of Implex.net, said his firm is testing a Wi-Fi network that would serve businesses and consumers along Nicollet Mall for $39 a month. His firm will bid on the Minneapolis network using a "meshing technology" that allows Wi-Fi hot spots to exchange data with each other, effectively expanding their range.

"Using antennas on light posts and power poles, we can in theory cover every square inch of Minneapolis with Wi-Fi," DeVaan said.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/535/5342733-2.html


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Faster Handoff Between Wi-Fi Networks Promises Near-Seamless 802.11 Roaming

Software developed by two computer scientists at UC San Diego cuts by 90% the time it takes to hand off from one Wi-Fi wireless network to the next -- overcoming a major obstacle in Wi-Fi roaming.

Road warriors may no longer have to stay put in an airport lounge or Starbucks to access the high-speed Internet via an 802.11 Wi-Fi
network. Thanks to software developed by two computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, the time it takes to hand off from one Wi- Fi wireless network to the next can be dramatically shortened -- overcoming a major obstacle in Wi-Fi roaming.

Jacobs School of Engineering professor Stefan Savage and graduate student Ishwar Ramani have a patent pending on the basic invention behind SyncScan, a process to achieve practical, fast handoff for 802.11 infrastructure networks. Their study is published in the Proceedings of the IEEE InfoCom 2005.

“Wi-Fi offers tremendous speeds if you stay in one place or at least within 100 meters of the same access point,” said Savage, an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department and academic participant in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. “SyncScan is a handoff algorithm which can cut the time it takes to switch from one Wi-Fi access point to another by a factor of a hundred over existing solutions. This is a requirement for demanding applications like Voice over Wi-Fi, where even short interruptions can disrupt the illusion of continuous connectivity.” Savage notes that SyncScan also allows mobile devices to make better handoff decisions and therefore improve signal quality overall.

At present, Wi-Fi handoffs are cumbersome and time-consuming. Not until the access-point signal weakens substantially and begins losing packets of data does a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop, PDA or mobile phone begin scanning for a stronger signal. At that point, it broadcasts requests on all channels to find nearby access points. The result: a delay of up to one second, during which any packets may be lost. That may not seem inordinate when downloading data, but it can be unacceptable if the user is trying to listen to Internet radio, watch a streaming movie trailer or talk on a Wi-Fi phone.

“Today most Wi-Fi users accept being tethered to a single location in exchange for the broadband speeds that Wi-Fi offers,” said Ph.D. candidate Ramani. “But increasingly they want to be able to make Voice of IP (VoIP)phone calls or stream multimedia while commuting or on the move, and a one-second disruption can seem like an eternity.”

The SyncScan solution proposed by Savage and Ramani is a method to continuously monitor the proximity of nearby 802.11 access points. Instead of looking for surrounding access points just when the current signal is running low, a Wi-Fi device with SyncScan regularly checks signal strengths nearby — but only for very short periods of time. These times are picked to precisely coincide with regularly scheduled “beacon” messages sent by all standard Wi-Fi access points. The process eliminates the current need to start from scratch when looking for a stronger signal, and replaces the long scanning delay with many small delays that are imperceptible to the user.

To test their SyncScan algorithm, the researchers used a laptop running a voice application while walking between two areas of the UCSD campus served by neighboring Wi-Fi access points. “We used a popular VoIP called Skype which uses UDP [user datagram protocol] packets exchanged between two clients for voice communication,” explained Savage. “Using SyncScan with a measurement interval of 500 millseconds, handoff delay was virtually imperceptible – roughly 5 milliseconds. Repeating the tests without SyncScan, the average handoff time was 450 milliseconds, but ranging up to a full second in some cases.”

The researchers also observed a big difference in the number of lost data packets that can contribute to loss of data or voice dropout. Zero packets were dropped using the SyncScan algorithm in the UCSD tests, compared to substantial packet losses using current technology. “That is because the overhead of scanning for nearby base stations when the current signal weakens is routinely over 250 milliseconds, during which incoming packets are dropped,” said Ramani. “We expect that the same improvements can be achieved on most Wi-Fi devices and using most applications, not just voice.”

SyncScan is also economical, because it can be deployed incrementally and implemented in software without requiring any changes to the 802.11 standard or any hardware upgrades.

Just over 110,000 Voice over Wi-Fi handsets were sold in 2004, mostly in Japan. Vonage is set to roll it out commercially in the U.S. later this spring as an add-on to its popular VoIP service, and sales of dual-use phones incorporating both cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity could reach $3 billion by 2009, according to a study by Infonetics Research.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/511105/?sc=swtn


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The Download Debate Strikes Back

Panelists from the recording, television and movie industries and lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Napster will join in a unique debate on the controversial issue of digital copyright in a forum titled 'The Download Debate Strikes Back,' at Cornell University April 14, streamed live on the Web.

Cornell University will host a forum on the controversial issue of digital copyright, titled 'The Download Debate Strikes Back,' April 14 at 7:30 p.m. in Call Auditorium of Kennedy Hall, on campus. The public is invited to attend.

The forum will be streamed live at: http://www.cit.cornell.edu/oit/UCPL.html .

Panelists from the recording, television and movie industries, plus lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Napster will examine the complex issues related to the downloading of music and movies from the Web.

"We're watching the development of new relationships between artists and their audience, and our students are learning that the protection of intellectual property begins with the author," said Kent Hubbell, Cornell's dean of students. Hubbell's office, along with Cornell's Student Assembly and the University Computer Policy and Law Program, is sponsoring the forum.

The panelists will discuss the MGM v. Grokster case, which was heard in late March by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this case, entertainment companies brought suit against the developers of the Morpheus, Grokster and KaZaA software products, which facilitate the sharing of copyrighted materials online.

In order to provide an alternative for its students, Cornell began a one-year experiment in legal downloading of music last fall. A campuswide site license for Napster has provided students with free streaming and downloading access to the company's library of more than 750,000 songs. Next fall, the Cornell Student Assembly will decide if the program should be continued.

Forum panelists will include: • Cary Sherman , president, Recording Industry Association of America; • Fritz Attaway , executive vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America; • Siva Vaidhyanathan , New York University assistant professor; • Fred von Lohmann , senior staff attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation; • Alec French , senior counsel, NBC/Universal; and • Avery Kotler , senior director of business and legal affairs, Napster.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/511056/?sc=swtn


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Piracy: A Deadly Scourge
Jason Roberts

So I hear the RIAA is starting to crack down on pirates in Oklahoma. I have to say it’s about time.

No matter that a landlocked state isn’t the most common area of pirate activity. These mad sailors need to be stopped wherever they set their dark sails.

It is interesting, however, that the RIAA is the one going after these buccaneers. You’d think the Recording Industry Association of America would be spending all their time lining their pockets and leeching on to the musically talented. But the association hates competition, so here we are.

But instead, they are nobly opposing piracy. And it’s a good thing too.

Pirates have long been the scourge of the seas. Like bums with ships and swords, they are a leach on society’s underbelly. And not helpful leeches, as seen in “Speed 2: Cruise Control,” and an episode of “General Hospital” that I heard about on an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” It was the one with George Clooney hosting.

The liberal media has been trying to put a happy face on piracy, with such films as “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Finding Neverland,” but even liberals have had it with these swashbucklers.

Ever wonder how pirates get those parrots to perch on their shoulders? Well, PETA did, and it’s bad. Think veal meets Monty Python, and just try to sleep tonight.

Pirates are also in trouble with PETW — People for the Ethical Treatment of Wood. They think they can just walk around on peg legs like they own them. Get your own leg back from an evil whale, you fascist pig!

As time goes on, pirates are only getting worse and worse. It used to be, when a pirate wanted a little fun at an innocent’s expense, they would just force a random sailor to walk the plank, falling into shark-infested waters. Now, pirates make crappy movies about sharks attacking scantly clad coeds on spring break and force major television networks to run them. Oh, the humanity.

Only with the help of the RIAA and other greedy, evil, soulless organizations like it will we be able to turn the tide against those who salute a black flag that stands for villainy, ruthlessness and TiVoing “Newlyweds.”
http://www.ocolly.com/new_ocollycom/...php?a_id=26090

















Until next week,

- js.














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Current Week In Review.





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


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black

[legion]

thanks jack, once more some very good reads in there

jesus would never ever join the riaa

But last month, Packet8 e-mailed the Minonk, Ill., woman to say her family was on the phone for nearly 9,000 minutes, exceeding the limits of "Freedom Unlimited." The company wanted to put the Willises on a partially metered plan that would have cost about $200 a month.

9000 minutes ????