The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

Music services jump on iTunes bandwagon
In a rush to market that's reminiscent of the dot-com bubble's headiest days, a stampede of companies is following Apple Computer pell-mell into the online music sales business. Napster's new owner, Roxio, is scheduled to launch a legal version of the service by Christmas. Musicmatch said Monday that it will soon sell songs through its jukebox application. RealNetworks, America Online, Amazon.com and potentially even Microsoft are planning to sell digital downloads. For consumers torn for years between downloading music illegally through file-swapping services or signing up for complicated monthly subscription services, the impending flood of available music may be little short of overwhelming. And having hundreds of thousands of songs just a mouse-click away from listeners could dramatically change the distribution and consumption of music, and potentially even alter recording practices, music industry insiders say.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5056162.html?tag=nl

GOP staffer chosen to head RIAA
The Recording Industry Association of America has tapped a former Republican Senate staffer to replace Hilary Rosen as chief executive, firming up the group's leadership during one of the most controversial moments in its history. The big record labels' trade group said Monday that Mitch Bainwol, former chief of staff to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, will replace Rosen at the RIAA's helm. Rosen left the group several months ago, after announcing her planned departure in January. Although Bainwol has little experience inside the music industry, he brings deep connections to the Republican Party, something the RIAA has largely lacked under Rosen's leadership. "Mitch brings to the RIAA the consummate insider's understanding of political nuance in Washington," Roger Ames, CEO of Warner Music Group, said in a statement. "I'm confident he has the ability to clearly communicate the issues and challenges the music industry faces and to partner effectively with the computer, consumer electronics and music publishing businesses to help us address those issues in all appropriate forums."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5056299.html?tag=nl

New Napster gets set to rock and roll
Roxio says its revamped online music service, Napster, will debut in time for the holiday season and will give people access to music through a subscription or via an a la carte option. The new service, Napster 2.0, will likely debut with the largest legal music catalog in the world with close to half a million songs, Chris Gorog, chief executive of CD-burning software company Roxio, said Monday. He declined to comment on the price of a subscription or of the per-song option for the relaunch of Napster, the song-swapping pioneer shut down by copyright infringement lawsuits in 2001. The details of the launch come amid plans later this year for online music services from several other players including AOL Time Warner's America Online and services from retailers such as Amazon.com.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5055891.html?tag=nl
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59798,00.html

Online music sales to be muted
Online music sales are expected to be weaker than analysts earlier forecast because of overall sluggishness in the industry and lackluster digital services, according to Jupiter Research.
The research firm, however, still expects Net music sales to grow to $3.3 billion in 2008 from less than $1 billion in 2003. Jupiter, which released its updated estimates Monday, said it expects Internet sales to account for just over 25 percent of U.S. music spending by 2008. Sales of CDs over online outlets will remain flat in 2003 at about $750 million, according to the study. "The industry is suffering from competition for entertainment dollars, changing demographics, the end of the CD upgrade cycle, and piracy," Jupiter analyst Lee Black said in a statement. Services such as Apple Computer's iTunes and BuyMusic -- launched last week by Scott Blum, the founder of Internet retailer Buy.com -- have created some new buzz for digital download services by offering songs from major labels and independent recording companies.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5056020.html?tag=nl

U.S. shrugs off world's address shortage
As much of the world nears an Internet address crunch, North America stands as an island apart, threatening to fragment plans for the biggest overhaul of the Web in decades. Global momentum is growing for a new address system, known as IPv6, which promises to vastly expand the pool of unique numbers available for connecting PCs and other devices to the Net. The standard is widely seen as a necessary successor to the current IPv4 system, which some fear could run short of addresses in Asia and Europe within the next few years. But few analysts expect the problem to affect North America and influential U.S. networks any time soon, thanks to unique conditions that will likely guarantee the region a steady supply of IPv4 addresses for years to come. Since fear of an address shortage is the single biggest argument in favor of a switch, the United States could stay on the sidelines as the rest of the world wrestles with the upgrade over the coming years, networking experts said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033_3-5055...g=fd_lede2_hed

Judge sets rules for e-mail retrieval
A federal judge has ordered financial firm UBS to pay most of the cost of restoring lost e-mail in a gender discrimination suit against it, but she did shift some of the burden to the plaintiff. In a decision with wide-ranging ramifications for any company that keeps electronic records, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin outlined and applied a set of legal principles that judges and parties in a lawsuit must consider when deciding who should pay for electronic evidence retrieval. These include whether the information sought is relevant to the case and whether the costs of retrieving the documents would be too costly. Based on those principles, she determined that UBS must pay 75 percent of the estimated costs of restoring the documents from backup tapes. She also ruled that UBS must pay the entire cost of "producing" them, which includes costs such as hiring a lawyer to review the restored documents for privileged information before releasing them. That brings the UBS share of the costs to about $232,000.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023_3-5056365.html?tag=fd_top

Big bang meets graphics at confab
The Earth isn't flat, but it looks as if the universe is. Astronomical data, computer graphics and the emerging field of "conformal geometric algebra" are giving researchers a clearer picture of the shape of the universe, according to Anthony Lasenby, a professor at Cambridge University and the keynote speaker at Siggraph, an annual conference sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery that highlights advances in computer graphics. "The universe is actually pretty close to flat at the moment," Lasenby said Monday. "We may be close to understanding the geometry of the universe." The four-day convention is dedicated to outlining new techniques for recreating three (and four and five) dimensional worlds through equations. "Rendering is the modeling of the appearance of the everyday world," said Pat Hanrahan, a professor at Stanford University and this year's winner of ACM's Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics.
http://news.com.com/2100-1008_3-5056354.html?tag=fd_top

Experts sharing tips to help defend against file-sharing lawsuits
As the recording industry tries in unprecedented fashion to enforce copyright laws against individual consumers, legal experts say people can take several steps to try to avoid costly litigation. For starters, legal experts advise file-sharers to stop sharing any unauthorized files. That action could, though not necessarily, eliminate the need for more costly legal steps if a file-sharer learns he or she has been caught in the Recording Industry Association of America's copyright infringement dragnet. It's possible the courts could one day rule file-sharing is legal or a consumer backlash could force Congress to change current copyright laws. Before that happens, however, the legal costs for an individual battling the powerful RIAA could be devastating.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg....DTL&type=tech

The battle for Middle Earth gamers
For the "Lord of the Rings'' films, director Peter Jackson's version is all you get. But in video games, two starkly different visions of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy universe are unfolding in a competition between Electronic Arts and Vivendi Universal Games. In round one of the Tolkien wars, EA outsold Vivendi 4 to 1. Eventually EA's "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers'' game sold nearly 4 million units worldwide, while Vivendi's "Fellowship of the Ring'' sold 1 million. Combined, the EA and Vivendi games sold nearly $250 million at retail, blockbuster numbers for video games but small compared with the $1.8 billion generated by the movies. In round two, much more money is at stake.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/6401813.htm

Beating Sony to the punch
Sometime late next year, Sony will enter the handheld gaming market with the PSP -- a device that combines big-name games, an MP3 player and video playback. This September, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup will offer the same thing -- and throw in strong PDA functionality as well. The start-up's name is Tapwave. Its product is called the Zodiac. And while the gaming industry is littered with the carcasses of Johnny-come-latelys, this one has a pedigree. Its founders were the first and second engineers of the Palm PDA system. Other executives come from Hewlett Packard, Electronic Arts and Apple. Motorola, ATI, and Yamaha have all signed on as partners. And 368 developers and publishers, including Atari, Activision, and THQ, have lined up to make games for the system. Previously known as the Helix, the Zodiac won't be cheap, compared with Nintendo's $99 Game Boy Advance.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/07/25/comm...ming/index.htm

Telstra foreshadows online music store
Telstra is in discussions with two major record labels over plans to offer a paid music download service on its BigPond music channel. The service -- which will allow customers to download music from the site for a fee -- is envisioned as an online music store that would compete directly with storefront music shops operated by retail heavyweights. Telstra hopes to have the system operational by Christmas. Telstra spokesperson Kerrina Lawrence told ZDNet Australia the online music store would be associated with the bigpond.com/music/ channel -- part of a recent relaunch -- which also houses The Basement, a joint venture with the famous Sydney music venue of the same name that provides a streaming music service.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebu...0276587,00.htm

Open Group goes open source
The Open Group, goaded by open-source advocates and from within its ranks, has begun a drive to improve its street cred in the world of open source and open standards. The San Francisco-based company, a trade association and publisher that does certification for Unix and other technologies, published a draft policy calling for the group to newly embrace open source and open standards and acknowledging that until now, it has not lived up to its name. "As an organization we must catch up," said the Open Group's draft policy, written by open-source gadfly Bruce Perens. "We couldn't have known that open source would be this successful, and it brings profound changes to our main areas of practice: open systems and standards. We must now fully integrate open source into our operation. If not, it's time to change the name of our organization." The Open Group represents more than 200 organizations and is just shy of 4,000 active individual participants.
http://news.com.com/2100-1013_3-5056121.html?tag=cd_mh

Robot cars rally for desert race
By day, Seth Cabe is a manufacturing engineer for a mannequin maker. By night, he's working on what could become the battlefield vehicle of the future. Cabe, leader of Team Loghiq, is one of a number of engineers, researchers and robot aficionados who have signed up for the DARPA Grand Challenge, a contest designed to generate ideas that ideally will lead to the development of self-driving combat vehicles. Put simply, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) will give $1 million to the team whose robotic car drives itself the fastest from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, on an off-road course. The race, which must be won within 10 hours, will take place on March 13 next year.
http://news.com.com/2100-1008_3-5053627.html

Signs of Life in Silicon Valley
For recruiters in California's Silicon Valley, the technology job market has never been especially well balanced. In an economic upturn, such as the one that ended about three years ago, there were plenty of jobs and far too few qualified people available to fill them. Nowadays, as the Valley struggles to recover from one of the deepest downturns in its history, the picture is reversed. While brilliant computer scientists line the unemployment rolls, the companies that once wooed them with stock options and sign-on bonuses are no longer clamoring for their services.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59749,00.html

Iraqis Log On to Voice Chat
Baghdad resident Usama Kamil Al-Sharqi paid a taxi driver $50 in 2001 to smuggle him a copy of Yahoo Instant Messenger on a CD-ROM from a friend in Jordan. It was a high price to pay for a program that has been downloaded for free by millions of people around the world. But Al-Sharqi says he would have paid an even steeper price had the regime of Saddam Hussein, which banned the use of instant messaging software, found out about it. "If the government knew what I was doing, I am sure they would kill me, because they would think I was a spy," says Al-Sharqi. Today, with Saddam toppled, Iraq's State Company for Internet Services has lifted its prohibition on IM. At Internet cafes around Baghdad run by SCIS and its newly launched competitors, IM has become -- figuratively rather than literally -- a "killer app."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59786,00.html

Diagnosis and Medicine in a Pill
Engineers at the University of Calgary have developed a pill that, once swallowed, will determine how healthy or ill the patient is, and will release just the right amount of medicine accordingly. Dubbed the Intelligent Pill or iPill, the new drug-delivery system packs a micropump and sensors that monitor the body's temperature and pH balance into one pill. If the body's temperature and pH reach certain levels, the iPill responds by pumping out more or less of its drug payload. It could be used to treat many ailments like AIDS or diabetes. "If you overdose yourself with pain relievers, you are killing your kidneys and liver," said the iPill's inventor, Wael Badawy, an electrical engineer at the University of Calgary. "The iPill will help people have healthier kidneys and liver, as it will only deliver the dose that's needed."
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,59761,00.html

Telcos Scowl at 'Bill of Rights'
California is about to pass a so-called telecommunications bill of rights that would force telephone companies to provide timely and consistent service, even to customers who are late paying their bills. State Public Utilities Commissioner Carl Wood said his team has drafted the final version of a Telecommunications Consumer Bill of Rights, which could become law as early as September. The proposed law, the first of its kind in the country, would require all phone companies, including wireless, local and long distance, to be upfront about the quality of their services and provide the utmost customer care, including a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week hotline with live operators. Among other provisions, companies would have to disclose key rates, contract terms and conditions, and prices clearly on all print material, advertising and websites. Any "written solicitations by carriers or their agents" must be "unambiguous, legible and in the equivalent of 10-point type or larger," the bill states.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59789,00.html

File-sharers fight legal moves
File-sharers can find out if they are being targeted by the US record industry via a website created by civil liberty activists. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, (EFF), has set up an online database which allows people to check if a subpoena has been issued for them by the Recording Industry Association of America, (RIAA). "We hope that EFF's subpoena database will give people some peace of mind and the information they need to challenge these subpoenas and protect their privacy," said the group's senior lawyer Fred Von Lohmann. Hundreds of subpoenas have been sent to suspected file-sharers as part of the industry's battle to stop people swapping songs over the internet.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3102261.stm

Happiness helps fight off colds
Happy people are three times less likely to get a cold, according to researchers who squirted cold virus up the noses of volunteers. Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, also found that the positive thinkers who do develop symptoms complain about them less. The team studied over 300 initially healthy volunteers. First, each person was interviewed over two weeks to gauge his or her emotional state. This involved being scored in both positive categories - happy, pleased, relaxed - and negative categories -anxious, hostile and depressed. Next the researchers squirted rhinovirus, the germ that causes colds, into each subject's nose. Follow-up interviews questioned them daily for five days about any developing symptoms.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993989

Technology offering flakes in the summer may be white gold for winter sports industry
Dan Egan thrives on doing the implausible. Egan grew up in Milton and went on to become one of the planet's best-known extreme skiers. As a featured player in a dozen Warren Miller documentaries, including "Endless Winter," Egan ripped up remote peaks that hadn't been skied before in Siberia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and the Arctic. He once jumped out of the aerial tram at Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire, his skis on and perfectly parallel. This summer, skiing's emperor of the implausible is onto something new. He's running a small ski area in Plymouth, N.H., using a new technology that allows snow to be made regardless of the temperature outside. The ski area Egan now manages, Tenney Mountain, was open on July Fourth weekend for snow tubing and limited snowboarding, in 90-degree weather. Call it "EndlessWinter: The Sequel." It's the first time the Japanese-developed technology, called Infinite Crystal Snowmaking, is being used in the United States.
http://business.boston.com/business/.../snow_business

Ancient Roman cosmetic cream unearthed
A stunningly well-preserved cosmetics canister, containing a white cream, has been unearthed at the site of an ancient Roman temple in London, UK. The container, made of tin and complete with its user's fingerprints, could offer unprecedented insights into rituals and use of cosmetics 2000 years ago. Archaeologists think the white cream found in the tightly-sealed, cylindrical tub is either a face cream or face paint. The canister was most probably buried in a ritual offering, they say. "It's an incredible find - almost the most exciting thing we could possibly have found in terms of breaking new ground in our understanding," says Headley Swain, curator at the Museum of London. "To my knowledge nothing of this nature has ever been found in Britain or indeed in the Mediterranean. It will receive worldwide interest."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993994

Copy Controls Crackdown
Multimedia lovers find themselves caught in a digital vise these days, as Hollywood tightens its copyright controls on movies, games, and music on DVDs and CDs--most recently squeezing customers accused of copyright infringement in court. But even well-meaning consumers are feeling pressured (and baffled) by conflicting messages about what is allowed. Meanwhile, the courts and Congress mull legal answers to the ongoing digital rights struggle. The ISP Verizon Online recently buckled and gave the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the names of four customers suspected of downloading large quantities of music from file-sharing sites in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. More than 40 privacy groups and ISPs are joining Verizon in fighting procedural aspects of the copyright holders' demands. But it is clear that customer privacy has sustained a hit. The RIAA also recently settled with four university students who ran Napster-like file-sharing networks campuswide.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../07272003e.php

Copying is Theft - and other legal myths
As the war over P2P downloading heats up, and the record companies launch the novel marketing technique of suing their customers, I think it is an appropriate time to settle some of the pervasive myths about U.S. copyright law which fuel both sides of the debate, writes Mark Rasch, SecurityFocus columnist and former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit. The current state of the battleground is that the RIAA, having lost a lawsuit against Kazaa, Morpheus and others for copyright infringement, and having won a lawsuit against Verizon, is actively pursuing subpoenas against various ISPs to force them to pony up the names and addresses of the uploaders and downloaders themselves.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/32004.html

Downloader Dragnet
Bob Barnes never dreamed that the long arm of the music industry would reach into his personal computer. Sure, the bus operator from Fresno, Calif., had used Napster to grab music files off the Internet. And when that file-swapping service was put out of business, he switched to its most popular successor, Kazaa. But he was careful not to leave a trace, transferring all his downloaded songs to separate discs. A visiting teenage grandson wasn't so careful, however, and last week Barnes, 50, was slapped with a subpoena from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It alleged that he had posted online — for the world to steal — digital copies of songs by Savage Garden, Marvin Gaye and the Eagles. "This is like shock and awe," says Barnes. "Blitz them until they submit." Barnes may be a pirate, but he has plenty of company. An estimated 60 million Americans, more than the number of Bush voters in 2000, are using file-sharing networks on the Internet. Until last week it seemed like a safely anonymous pursuit. But then RIAA started subpoenaing colleges and Internet-service providers (ISPs) for the names and addresses of more than 950 computer owners — some of whom, like Barnes, were trafficking in stolen music without knowing it.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...471178,00.html

More news later on

[MRON]

thanks newsman!


"Napster" ...hmm.....it appears legendary already

at this point, Roxio can only further tarnish it's initial brilliance

"music" in twenty years......imagine

[JackSpratts]

File sharing is not theft.

A number of years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with a man named Dowling, who sold "pirated" Elvis Presley recordings, and was prosecuted for the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property. The Supremes did not condone his actions, but did make it clear that it was not "theft" -- but technically "infringement" of the copyright of the Presley estate, and therefore copyright law, and not anti-theft statutes, had to be invoked.

So "copying" is not "stealing" but can be "infringing." That doesn't have the same sound bite quality as Valente's position.

no, it's not the same sound bite, not the same at all.

so there you have it. according to the highest court in the land, according to the law, copying is not stealing.

- js.

[TankGirl]

Thanks for the news, Netcoco!

Originally posted by walktalker
Online music sales to be muted
Online music sales are expected to be weaker than analysts earlier forecast because of overall sluggishness in the industry and lackluster digital services, according to Jupiter Research.
The research firm, however, still expects Net music sales to grow to $3.3 billion in 2008 from less than $1 billion in 2003. Jupiter, which released its updated estimates Monday, said it expects Internet sales to account for just over 25 percent of U.S. music spending by 2008. Sales of CDs over online outlets will remain flat in 2003 at about $750 million, according to the study. "The industry is suffering from competition for entertainment dollars, changing demographics, the end of the CD upgrade cycle, and piracy," Jupiter analyst Lee Black said in a statement. Services such as Apple Computer's iTunes and BuyMusic -- launched last week by Scott Blum, the founder of Internet retailer Buy.com -- have created some new buzz for digital download services by offering songs from major labels and independent recording companies.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5056020.html?tag=nl

Jupiter's earlier forecasts 1-2 years ago sounded more like industrial pipe dreams already then... Now the figures are a bit more realistic but Jupiter still seems to have a lot of trust in the industry's capability to adapt to the challenges of P2P.... I wouldn't count on it.... "Overall sluggishness in the industry" is a nice way of saying that we have a relatively clueless industry that stubbornly refuses to change its outdated business model, choosing to scare and bully its customers instead...

- tg