The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

AOL, Bertelsmann music talks heat up
Media giants AOL Time Warner and Bertelsmann are making headway in talks over a music merger and could strike a deal over the next couple of months, sources close to the companies said on Tuesday. The companies hope to merge their Warner Music and BMG music labels in a deal that would bring together artists ranging from pop queen Madonna to Latin rocker Santana, sources said. A deal could be struck as early as August if talks continue to progress at this pace, according to one source. However, another cautioned that discussions were still at an early stage and the two sides had not yet agreed on fundamental issues such as the value of each company and who would manage the merged labels.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-1022794.html?tag=fd_top

Microsoft wins European contracts
Microsoft announced a trio of European government contract wins on Tuesday, the latest salvo in the growing turf battle between the software giant and sellers of the upstart Linux software. The Redmond, Wash., software giant would not disclose financial terms of the deals, which it said it won after competing head-to-head for the business with various Linux companies. Microsoft said it will install its signature Windows server and desktop software on thousands of computers for the city governments in Frankfurt, the Latvian capital of Riga, and Turku in Finland.
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-1022724.html?tag=fd_top

Netscape updates as Andreessen yawns
Netscape Communications on Monday updated its browser, touting improvements in navigation and spam control -- days after Netscape's founder pronounced browser innovation moribund. Netscape, a unit of AOL Time Warner, has entered what many see as a precarious period in its nine-year history. Originally launched, feted and taken public as an Internet-based end run around Microsoft's operating system, Netscape and its browser fell into marginal status after Microsoft steamrolled the market with its Internet Explorer browser. Now, with Microsoft and AOL Time Warner having buried the hatchet in a $750 million settlement that includes an extension of AOL's IE license, some wonder whether Netscape is worth its parent company's time or money.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-1022657.html?tag=fd_top

Vivendi's game gem gets tarnished
As part of its asset divestiture, Vivendi has been trying to sell its gaming unit for the better part of the past year. Monday, the asking price on that unit probably dropped. The co-founders of Blizzard Entertainment's Blizzard North unit - as well as a prominent vice president who served as the public voice of the company - shocked Vivendi and the gaming world by resigning from the gaming powerhouse they helped build. The Blizzard North unit was responsible for creating the 'Diablo' franchise, one of the most successful games in the industry's history. Blizzard is the crown jewel in Viviendi's gaming empire. But analysts say it may not be worth as much today as it was last week.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/07/01/comm...ming/index.htm

Anti-spam legislation: Chocolate teapot or Holy Grail?
Today the UK government sent out a rallying cry in the fight against spam, with the inaugural Spam Summit, organised by the All Party Internet Group. Stephen Timms, the minister for ecommerce, kicked off the event with two truisms. "The problem [of spam] is getting worse and there is growing public concern," he said. True. "This isn't a problem which will be solved by legislation alone," he added. Definitely true. In fact, he probably didn't need to add the "alone". The fact is that legislation and policy will make very little difference in the fight against what most of us think of when we talk about spam.
http://www.silicon.com/leader/165-500001/1/4939.html

A Safer System for Home PC's Feels Like Jail to Some Critics
Your next personal computer may well come with its own digital chaperon. As PC makers prepare a new generation of desktop computers with built-in hardware controls to protect data and digital entertainment from illegal copying, the industry is also promising to keep information safe from tampering and help users avoid troublemakers in cyberspace. Silicon Valley — led by Microsoft and Intel — calls the concept "trusted computing." The companies, joined by I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Advanced Micro Devices and others, argue that the new systems are necessary to protect entertainment content as well as safeguard corporate data and personal privacy against identity theft. Without such built-in controls, they say, Hollywood and the music business will refuse to make their products available online.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/te...partne r=CNET

DreamWorks casts Linux in 'Sinbad'
Movie studio DreamWorks has expanded its use of Linux for its latest animated feature, "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas." In partnership with Hewlett-Packard, the movie studio dipped its toes into Linux waters with "Shrek," using some lower-end HP servers to speed up the brute-force "rendering" process under which skeletal images are fleshed out with detailed color and texture. In "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron," DreamWorks extended Linux use to the workstations that animators use to create the images in the first place. With "Sinbad," scheduled for release this week, HP Linux workstations and rendering servers were used 100 percent of the time, said Jeff Wood, director of product marketing for HP's personal workstation business.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1022472.html?tag=cd_mh

Study finds early Apache code so-so
The source code for a newer version of the Apache Web server software is of the same quality as that of proprietary competitors at a similar stage of development, a new study has found. The review compared version 2.1 of the Apache Web server software, which is used to house Web sites, with several commercial packages that handle the same chores. Reasoning, a company whose business is analyzing code quality, compared the recently released version with code of competitors at a similar stage of development. The study found 0.53 defects per thousand lines of code for Apache, compared with 0.51 for the commercial software, on average.
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-1022469.html?tag=cd_mh

Software patent vote delayed
The European Parliament, facing mounting controversy over U.S.-style software-patenting legislation, has delayed a key vote until September. A Monday vote on a controversial software patents proposal in the European Parliament has been put back until September, amid criticism that the legislation would institute a U.S.-style patent regime that would be detrimental to European small businesses and open-source software developers. The proposed software-patenting legislation is the result of a European Commission effort to clarify patenting rules as they apply to "computer-implemented inventions," a term that includes software. The patent offices of various EU member states currently have different criteria for accepting the validity of software-related patents, a situation that the commission's proposal aims to remedy.
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-1022181.html?tag=cd_mh

P2P alliance to counter RIAA?
The company behind the popular Kazaa file-swapping software plans to launch a trade group Wednesday to push the case for peer-to-peer networking. Kazaa distributor Sharman Networks and partner Altnet hope their new group, called the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), will help legitimize the much-maligned peer-to-peer industry, which has come under fire from Hollywood, politicians and the recording industry for being a haven for pirates. Martin Lafferty, the DCIA's chief executive, said the group is hoping to provide a neutral forum where companies that are affected by or involved in peer-to-peer or distributed computing technology can meet to establish business practices, to encourage the adoption of standards and to help shape public policy.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-1022811.html?tag=cd_mh

Court says Gator-style ads are legal
A federal court has ruled that pop-up ads for rivals of U-Haul International, placed atop the moving company's own site by a third-party software application, are legal. The summary decision, handed down last week, was a blow to U-Haul in its lawsuit to bar software maker WhenU.com from delivering competitors' ads to visitors to U-Haul's site. The judge granted WhenU's motion to dismiss charges of trademark infringement, unfair competition and copyright infringement. A full opinion from the Eastern District Court of Virginia is expected in coming weeks, along with decisions related to other claims such as a violation of the Virginia Business Conspiracy Act, according to the order, filed last Tuesday.
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-1022791.html?tag=cd_mh

Electronics makers rally around Linux
Several large consumer electronics companies are banding together to spread the usage of Linux in a range of new devices. Matsushita Electric, Sony, Hitachi, NEC, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung, Sharp and Toshiba on Tuesday announced the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum, or CELF, a consortium designed to adapt and advance the operating system for use in consumer electronics. Linux is widely used in large computers such as servers, but the eight companies wish to extend the operating system to other devices. While some companies, including MontaVista, have already created their own consumer electronics-oriented versions of Linux, the CELF wishes to spread out development work and take a more collaborative approach.
http://news.com.com/2100-1045_3-1022584.html?tag=cd_mh

Giving Sharers Ears Without Faces
In response to recent threats to file traders, peer-to-peer developers say they're seeing an upsurge of interest in tools that purport to hide identities. The pressure comes from the Recording Industry Association of America's announcement Wednesday that it plans to sue hundreds of uploaders, and a recent court ruling requiring Verizon to reveal the names of subscribers accused of piracy. Blubster developer Pablo Soto of Madrid said his music-swapping service relaunched today as a secure, decentralized system providing users with anonymous accounts. The MP2P network (short for Manolito Peer-to-Peer) on which Blubster is based consists of more than 200,000 users sharing over 52 million files, according to Soto. The update is also said to include a new, streamlined file-distribution method that disassociates transfers from specific users.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59448,00.html

What a Difference 20 Cents Makes
Listen.com on Tuesday said it has seen a nearly 100 percent increase in CD burning among subscribers to its Rhapsody online music service since cutting its fee to 79 cents from 99 cents per track. Rhapsody would not disclose how many tracks were actually burned in June, but said that on-demand streaming has increased 45 percent to more than 11 million songs, or more than 350,000 songs per day, in June. Listen.com said the brisk activity for its service as well as Apple Computer's new music service, which has sold more than 5 million songs, show that consumers are willing to pay for music online if services are compelling.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59464,00.html

Ex-Intel Coder Wins E-Mail Case
Sending e-mails to a company's employees, even when those messages are critical of the company, can't be considered trespassing, according to a decision released Monday by California's Supreme Court. In a 4-3 ruling applauded by free speech advocates, the court overturned a Court of Appeals decision that barred Ken Hamidi, a disgruntled former Intel employee, from e-mailing his former co-workers at the chipmaker. "The court understood that this case is about communication," said Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a friend of the court brief on Hamidi's behalf. "If the decision had gone the other way, the Internet's fundamental structure -- where everyone is connected to everyone -- would have been compromised. It would have Balkanized the Internet."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59450,00.html

Brace for Onslaught of Privacy Laws
One would think that, some eight years into the Internet age, enlightened self-interest would have motivated financial services and e-commerce vendors to put a higher value on maintaining the integrity of customer data. But companies' seeming inability to follow a consistent and reliable security model for the use of customer data, and the secretive approach taken to handling credit card security breaches, have helped create a consumer backlash -- and a torrent of state and federal legislation.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,111416,00.asp

Fileswappers urged to join lobby
Music fans who swap songs on the internet are being urged to demand changes in copyright law by a US lobby group. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Let the Music Play campaign is encouraging the estimated 60 million Americans who swap files to push for artist royalties and legal status for file sharing. It comes a week after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said it would sue individual internet users who consistently uploaded or shared music files on the internet.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3034928.stm

The free research movement
Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC-Berkeley, once spent a summer working as a play-by-play announcer for the minor league Columbia Mules, and when he talks about the sorry state of scientific publishing, he has a tendency to slip into an announcer's voice -- quick, high-pitched, loud, intense. "It's ridiculous," Eisen said in this voice during a recent phone interview from Washington. "All these things we're so used to doing with information on the Internet, we're preventing clever entrepreneurial people from doing with works of science. The idea that a narrow profit motive would prevent the dissemination of this information -- it's insane!" On June 26, Rep. Martin Sabo, a Minnesota Democrat, introduced the Public Access to Science Act, a bill intended to rectify the situation.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20.../index_np.html

New labels reveal video game violence
The New-York based Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) said it has developed four new content descriptors: shorthand phrases that will be printed on the back of game boxes to describe a game's contents. And, as cigarette companies have moved to make health warnings larger and more visible on packets, video game content labels will be bigger and bolder to attract consumers' attention, starting 15 September. The Board said it consulted a number of experts, including child development specialists, on the new ratings, which are "cartoon violence," "fantasy violence," "intense violence" and "sexual violence." Cartoon violence describes content that may be violent, but where characters are unhurt. Fantasy violence depicts violent actions "of a fantasy nature", involving human or non-human characters in situations that are easily distinguishable from real life.
http://www.electricnews.net/news.html?code=9365562

US plans hypersonic bomber
The initial description of the concept - called the "reusable hypersonic cruise vehicle" (HCV) - has recently been placed on the website of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the central research and development organisation of the Pentagon. A conference of companies interested in the project is to be held soon. The idea is that the HCV would take off from a conventional airfield in the continental United States carrying a 12,000 pound (5,500 kilogram) payload. This payload would be made up from a variety of munitions, including cruise missiles and a new "glide bomb" dropped from space, called a Common Aero Vehicle (Cav).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3035332.stm

Gene Variant May Hamper Efforts to Kick the Habit
Giving up cigarettes is notoriously hard to do. Now researchers report that some people carry a gene variant that leaves them especially hard-pressed to kick the habit. The findings appear in a paper published today in the journal Thorax. The addictive nature of cigarettes stems from nicotine, which is metabolized in the body primarily through an enzyme known as CYP2A6. Previous work has revealed a number of varieties of the gene that encodes this enzyme, CYP2A6. Hidetoshi Nakamura of Keio University in Tokyo and colleagues studied 203 current or former smokers suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a disease for which smoking is a risk factor, as well as 123 healthy, nonsmoking volunteers to determine what type of CYP2A6 they carried. The researchers found that the percentage of people with the D genotype of CYP2A6 was significantly higher among current smokers than it was among ex-smokers.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...#038;ref=sciam

British troops try out 'James Bond' style X-ray specs
British troops have been carrying out secret tests on a revolutionary new device that allows them to ‘see’ through walls, scientists have revealed. The tiny radar device works like the futuristic X-ray specs recently seen in the James Bond film The World is Not Enough. Soldiers, including members of the Black Watch and Scots Guards, have been helping to test the machine. The machine allows soldiers not only to see through walls but also underground to find hidden passages. It transmits low-frequency radar pulses that can pass through the walls and detect objects and movements.
http://www.news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=709772003

New file-sharing sites hide users' IDs
Music fans continued swapping songs over the Internet, though a bit more cautiously, despite the recording industry's threat this week to sue individuals engaged in digital piracy. The threat appeared to have little effect on the pace of downloading over the most popular file-sharing services. But the move drew the ire of many fans, driving speculation that it could ultimately backfire and encourage a new crop of file-sharing services capable of keeping users anonymous. Filetopia already promises to do just that, and another, called Blubster, launched Monday.
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/int...load.music.ap/

Is Downloading Killing Albums One Song at a Time?
Video didn't kill the radio star, but downloading could very well spell the end of the album. With the monster success of Apple's iTunes, in which 5 million songs were legally downloaded in eight weeks, the big question in the music industry is, will full 10- to 15- song albums become extinct? The answer, according to some experts' best guess, is yes and no. “Albums for people like Britney Spears are over, but for other people it means more opportunities,” said Ian Rogers former president of new media for the Beastie Boys' company Grand Royal. Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America (search) dealt downloaders a blow by pledging to sue hundreds of computer users who illegally share music files. Despite such a daunting step, most experts agree that file sharing (search) is here to stay.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../07012003a.php

More news later on

[JackSpratts]

Ranked as the world's fourth- and fifth-biggest music companies, Warner Music and BMG are under pressure to make a deal in an industry ravaged by piracy and grappling with what some consider an outdated business model.

A deal would cut out rival EMI Group, which has held talks with both companies in recent months. However, some sources said EMI could still try to revive talks.

It's unclear whether regulators, who have ruined similar music deals in the past, would approve a merger of any of the labels.

depending on who controls the merged ccompany, this could very well spell the end of america's ownership of any record company conglomerate.

universal/mca/geffen - french

columbia/epic/cbs - japanese

rca - german

capital - english

warner bros/electra/atlantic - german?

we know the riaa doesn't represent american file sharers, there's plenty of evidence it doesn't represent american musicians and after the proposed merger it won't represent american record companies either.

it keeps harder and harder to justify a us congress writing laws beneficial to foriegners that send american citizens to jail.

- js.