Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 10th, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week

"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates." - Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman S. Strumpf

"The single-bullet theory employed by the R.I.A.A. has always been considered by anyone with even a modicum of economic knowledge to be pretty ambitious as spin." - Joe Fleischer

"While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing." - Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman S. Strumpf

"When this generation have children they're not going to teach them that breaking copyright is wrong." - Jim Stoddart

"You can get a ton of content." - Matt Goyer



Food For Thought

I've often wondered if there's any way to e s t i m a t e the number of Waste users in the world. If it's even possible to k n o w how many times Waste has been downloaded. Well it might be - but downloaded from where? Like me, most of my friends send the program around ourselves and have since it came out in June of last year. There may be sites where you can go to get a copy and many people may do it that way but it’s not the way we’ve done it and there’re probably of lot of experimenters around like us. So my gut feeling is no, it's not possible to know how many copies are out there, how many are installed and more to the point, how many are actually being used. Unlikely as it is, even if you found that out you’d just be scratching the surface because you’d start digging into more detail like frequency of use; is it monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, minutely lol? And just what exactly is it used for? Downloading, uploading, chatting? You’d want to know what kind of chatting, what kind of swapping. Are you moving copyrighted content around? Public domain? Potato salad recipes? So it gets pretty convoluted pretty fast, plenty of questions, few answers, and even then not without spending some serious loot taking surveys and let’s face it, at this point the margins of error would be too high to produce usable statistics. But say somebody gave you a bunch of cash and barked “Do it!” Where would you start? Forums like this one? Schools, IT people, record collectors, hackers? I’m not sure you’d get dependable data. I was asked by a reporter this week, he needed to know and since I don’t know myself my curiosity’s been sparked. So, I’m asking. I’m asking for suggestions on how to begin getting some meaningful user stats for a network that’s defined by it’s privacy. If you have any ideas PM me here or email me at the Zer0share project (thezer0shareproject (at) lycos (dot) com). Just put “stats” in the subject line. If you’re as stumped as I am well then that’s that, but if you’ve got any thoughts and anything interesting shows up in my inbox I’ll cover it here in a later column. I’ll even mention your nic.

In other news, record sales continued their year long climb in the U.S., scoring double-digit increases with CD’s. "We've had a big run so far," said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts and senior analyst for Billboard Magazine. I’ll say. Maybe it’s time somebody told Congress. In the meantime if you’re looking for a quick fix I thought I’d pass the following along: It’s called Spew. Search, click, download. It works. Happy holidays.









Enjoy,

Jack.









How The Music Industry Blew Its Piracy Case

Landmark ruling
Robert Thompson

It was the Canadian music industry's worst nightmare: International media pronouncing that Internet music file sharing is legal in Canada.

"Swapping songs online is legal," read a USA Today headline yesterday, while the Houston Chronicle announced "Canadian judge allows file-sharing."

Neither of those headlines entirely reflects what Federal Court Judge Konrad von Finckenstein wrote in his decision. But they are representative of the public perception of the landmark ruling.

How did the music industry end up at a point where it is considered the Wild West of the Internet and Canada is considered a place where copyright has no value?

That's exactly what Brian Robertson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, and Richard Pfohl, the organization's chief counsel, are trying to figure out right now.

The case started simply enough. It was just an attempt to get Internet service providers to turn over the names of individuals the music industry alleges offered thousands of MP3 files using Kazaa software.

Things went wrong from the start. First of all, CRIA had intended to use Blake, Cassels & Graydon, one of Canada's largest law firms, to litigate the case. But Shaw Communications, one of the ISPs who were asked to turn over names of customers, balked, saying Blakes had done work with it and citing a conflict of interest.

So, with presentations before the court only days away, CRIA was forced to fall back on Dimock Stratton, a boutique firm that specializes in trademark cases.

Then, after publicly saying they wouldn't fight the case, several ISPs, including Shaw and Telus Corp., decided to battle with CRIA about handing over the names of customers.

The stage was set for a disaster from the start.

CRIA's started out on shaky grounds, appearing to rely, rather arrogantly, on the success its American counterpart had in getting U.S. ISPs to turn over subscriber names.

CRIA used MediaSentry Inc., a U.S. firm that can track Internet users, to pick Kazaa users. The music organization also used the president of MediaSentry, who didn't personally conduct the tracking music swappers and apparently couldn't explain how the company linked Internet protocol addresses to the aliases used on Kazaa. The judge discarded much of MediaSentry's findings as "hearsay."

And even though the case rested almost entirely on proving that file uploading had occurred, CRIA apparently couldn't convince the judge that anyone had shared anything.

"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings," the judge wrote in his ruling. "They merely presented evidence that the alleged infringers made copies available on shared drives."

Yesterday, Mr. Pfohl would not comment on the issues CRIA faced in the case, nor would he say whether the firm of Dimock Stratton would remain on the case.

"We're not engaging in that sort of hindsight right now," he said.

Despite his public posturing, Mr. Pfohl's team is probably hard at work on its best Monday morning quarterbacking, reviewing all the issues in the case and trying to find a better way to connect the dots for the judge.

Sources close to the music business say Mr. Dimock's firm is history. "We'll bring in the big guns," said one music industry source. Who that will be is in question. Many of Canada's largest law firms have conflicts that would keep them out of the case.

So where does the music industry go from here?

An appeal seems almost certain. CRIA could also launch an entirely new attempt to get ISPs to turn over their customers. Some of the issues in its case can be easily addressed, though some of the questions raised about copyright legislation in Canada will be more challenging.

Regardless, the legal wranglings could take months to resolve.

In the meantime, and largely due to significant problems in the case CRIA presented, Canada will be seen by some as the place where file sharing is legal and where the concept of "stealing" music on the Internet does not exist.
http://www.canada.com/national/natio...9-447d23c0ccbe


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A Heretical View of File Sharing
John Schwartz

The music industry says it repeatedly, with passion and conviction: downloading hurts sales.

That statement is at the heart of the war on file sharing, both of music and movies, and underpins lawsuits against thousands of music fans, as well as legislation approved last week by a House Judiciary subcommittee that would create federal penalties for using what is known as peer-to-peer technology to download copyrighted works. It is also part of the reason that the Justice Department introduced an intellectual-property task force last week that plans to step up criminal prosecutions of copyright infringers.

But what if the industry is wrong, and file sharing is not hurting record sales?

It might seem counterintuitive, but that is the conclusion reached by two economists who released a draft last week of the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying.

"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates," write its authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The industry has reacted with the kind of flustered consternation that the White House might display if Richard A. Clarke showed up at a Rose Garden tea party. Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America sent out three versions of a six-page response to the study.

The problem with the industry view, Professors Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf say, is that it is not supported by solid evidence. Previous studies have failed because they tend to depend on surveys, and the authors contend that surveys of illegal activity are not trustworthy. "Those who agree to have their Internet behavior discussed or monitored are unlikely to be representative of all Internet users," the authors wrote.

Instead, they analyzed the direct data of music downloaders over a 17-week period in the fall of 2002, and compared that activity with actual music purchases during that time. Using complex mathematical formulas, they determined that spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales. Even under their worst-case example, "it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy," they wrote. "After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error" given that 803 million records were sold in 2002. Sales dropped by 139 million albums from 2000 to 2002.

"While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing," the professors wrote.

In an interview, Professor Oberholzer-Gee said that previous research assumed that every download could be thought of as a lost sale. In fact, he said, most downloaders were drawn to free music and were unlikely to spend $18 on a CD.

"Say I offer you a free flight to Florida," he asks. "How likely is it that you will go to Florida? It is very likely, because the price is free." If there were no free ticket, that trip to Florida would be much less likely, he said. Similarly, free music might draw all kinds of people, but "it doesn't mean that these people would buy CD's at $18," he said.

The most popular albums bought are also the most popular downloads, so the researchers looked for anomalous rises in downloading activity that they might compare to sales activity. They found one such spike, Professor Oberholzer-Gee said, during a German school holiday that occurred during the time they studied. Germany is second to the United States in making files available for downloading, supplying about 15 percent of online music files, he said. During the vacation, students who were home with time on their hands flooded the Internet with new files, which in turn spurred new downloading activity. The researchers then looked for any possible impact in the subsequent weeks on sales of CD's.

Professor Oberholzer said that he had expected to find that downloading resulted in some harm to the industry, and was startled when he first ran the numbers in the spring of 2003. "I called Koleman and said, 'Something is not quite right - there seems to be no effect between file sharing and sales.' "

Amy Weiss, an industry spokeswoman, expressed incredulity at what she deemed an "incomprehensible" study, and she ridiculed the notion that a relatively small sample of downloads could shed light on the universe of activity.

The industry response, titled "Downloading Hurts Sales," concludes: "If file sharing has no negative impact on the purchasing patterns of the top selling records, how do you account for the fact that, according to SoundScan, the decrease of Top 10 selling albums in each of the last four years is: 2000, 60 million units; 2001, 40 million units; 2002, 34 million units; 2003, 33 million units?"

Critics of the industry's stance have long suggested that other factors might be contributing to the drop in sales, including a slow economy, fewer new releases and a consolidation of radio networks that has resulted in less variety on the airwaves. Some market experts have also suggested that record sales in the 1990's might have been abnormally high as people bought CD's to replace their vinyl record collections.

"The single-bullet theory employed by the R.I.A.A. has always been considered by anyone with even a modicum of economic knowledge to be pretty ambitious as spin," said Joe Fleischer, the head of sales and marketing for BigChampagne, a company that tracks music downloads and is used by some record companies to measure the popularity of songs for marketing purposes.

The industry response stresses that the new study has not gone through the process of peer review. But the response cites refuting statistics and analysis, much of it prepared by market research consultants, that also have not gone through peer review.

One consultant, Russ Crupnick, vice president of the NPD Group, called the report "absolutely astounding." Asked to explain how the professors' analysis might be mistaken, he said he was still trying to understand the complex document: "I am not the level of mathematician that the professors purport to be."

Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas at Dallas, author of an essay cited by the industry, said the use of a German holiday to judge American behavior was strained. Professor Liebowitz argued in a paper in 2002 that file sharing did not affect music sales, but said he had since changed his mind.

The Liebowitz essay appeared in an economics journal edited by Gary D. Libecap, a professor of economics at the University of Arizona, who said that his publication was not peer reviewed, though the articles in it were often based on peer-reviewed work. Professor Libecap said he attended a presentation by Professor Strumpf last week, and said the file-sharing study "looks really good to me."

"This was really careful, empirical work," Professor Libecap said.

The author of another report recommended by the industry said that the two sets of data used by the researchers should not be compared. "They can't get to that using the two sets of data they are using - they aren't tracking individual behavior," said Jayne Charneski, formerly of Edison Media Research, who prepared a report last June that she said showed that 7 percent of the marketplace consists of people who download music and do not buy it. That number is far lower than the authors of the new study estimated. "There's a lot of research out there that's conducted with an agenda in mind," said Ms. Charneski, now the head of research for the record label EMI.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/te...y/05music.html


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Double-digit increases.

US Music Sales Turnaround Continue
AAP

Online file-sharing and other digital piracy persist, but a gradual turnaround in U.S. music sales that began last fall picked up in the first quarter of this year, resulting in the industry's best domestic sales in years.

Overall US music sales - CDs, legal downloads, DVDs, etc. - rose 9.1 per cent in the first three months of the year over the same period in 2003, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Album sales were up 9.2 per cent. Sales of CDs, which represent 96 per cent of album sales, rose 10.6 per cent. For the first time since 2000, two recording artists - Norah Jones and Usher - managed to sell more than 1 million copies of their albums in a single week.

"We've had a big run so far," said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts and senior analyst for Billboard Magazine. "Because we've had three years of erosion, at least for the first eight months of the year, it will be relatively easy for the industry to post increases."

The sales data are a bolt of encouragement to an industry hit by a three-year sales slump it blames largely on file-sharing. The downturn prompted a wave of restructuring by record companies and thousands of layoffs.

Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, called the first-quarter figures "good news," but cautioned that the results were measured against a dismal period.

"The numbers of 2003 were down about 10 per cent to 12 per cent from the year before," Sherman said. "If we didn't have that kind of increase it would be really terrible."

US album sales declined annually in the three years following 2000, the biggest year since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking US music sales.

In 2001, sales were down 3 per cent. The next year, sales dropped 11 per cent. Last year, until September, sales were down 8.5 per cent, but the pickup in sales at the end of the year narrowed the total decline for 2003 to less than 4 per cent.

The burgeoning online music market accounted for the sale of more than 25 million tracks between January and March, eclipsing the 19.2 million tracks purchased in the last six months of 2003, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Stores also saw gains. Chain stores' music sales were up 7 per cent, while independent music retailers saw a 3 per cent increase. Discount chains such as Wal-Mart, Target and Kmart posted a 13 per cent jump in sales compared to the same period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

"There were a couple of major releases that certainly pushed this quarter," said Jesse Klempner, owner of Aron's Records in Hollywood. "It's been down the last two years, this is an upswing."

Industry observers said no single factor has driven the turnaround.

Mayfield sees similarities with the industry's slump 20 years ago.

Sales of disco music dried up after the dance scene fell out of vogue in the early 1980s. In the late 1990s, the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync and Britney Spears drew millions of teenage fans who had been out of the music marketplace, but sales didn't keep up as the audience got older.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...326960430.html


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Music Industry Does Not React With One Voice
Guy Dixon

Executives at the major record labels have always been clear on the matter: File sharing is wrong. Dead wrong. No court decision will ever likely change their minds.

But ask anyone else connected in some way with music -- from artists and small record company managers to listeners and file sharers themselves -- and you'll get myriad views on the matter, pro and con. The decision Wednesday in a Toronto Federal Court against the Canadian Recording Industry Association's attempt to sue file sharers in Canada doesn't seem to have changed opinions much.

"I think there should be a celebration. I think music lovers in Canada should immediately go to their favourite peer-to-peer software and just download something and listen to it. And have a big silly grin on their face," said David Jones, a computer science professor at McMaster University and president of Electronic Frontier Canada. The civil liberties group promotes freedom of expression on the Internet and made a formal motion in the case arguing against the recording industry's moves to stop file sharing.

Jones shares music files himself, in other words, accesses songs on his computer directly from other computer users through on-line, peer-to-peer programs such as Kazaa, while also making songs on his computer available for others to copy.

The judge ruled that CRIA didn't present sufficient evidence that these file sharers were infringing copyright law or that Internet service providers should have to release the names of users behind 29 file-sharing addresses -- presumably 29 individuals -- that the recording industry had hoped to sue in order to get them to stop. CRIA said Wednesday that it expects to appeal the decision.

"Their claim is that this case was so important.

"It's like the lifeblood of the industry, that we have to get these 29 teenagers because they are killing our industry," Jones said. "And the judge tells them, your evidence is deficient, that you have no evidence of infringement. Period. They dropped the ball."

For artists and smaller independent labels, however, the mood seemed more mixed.

"There are a lot of things involved in the decision. It's the whole battle over copyright," said Trevor Larocque, label manager for Pager Bag Records, an independent label in Toronto that continues to be a favourite among critics and hip, indie-store crowds, with bands such as Stars and controller.controller on its roster.

"I think that we are pro file sharing as a company," he said. Because most of Paper Bag's artists are new or lesser known, for a potential listener to be able to access a song or two by one of the label's acts only helps them to get noticed. The company's discs, though, are distributed by industry giant Universal Music. So Paper Bag isn't immune to the concerns of industry biggies.

Scott Kaija, guitarist with controller.controller, who also works with the music-promotion website UmbrellaMusic.com, is a little troubled by the industry's legal tactics. He feels that record companies need to "hold a mirror to themselves to answer questions about why the industry is failing. It kind of sickens me that they've turned it into a kind of lynching, like a witch-hunt for these kids who are downloading. I just don't see downloading music as the problem. It's a symptom of a larger issue."

On the West Coast, Joel Kroeker has a somewhat different take. A pop-oriented singer-songwriter from Vancouver, he is signed to independent label True North Records and feels that, in some respects, the court decision wasn't necessarily a good one.

"I think the general public is under the mistaken notion that the artists don't actually need the sales. I've heard people say it's about greed or things like this. At my level, it's definitely not. I'm struggling to pay my rent, right? So every sale is directly related to my own existence," Kroeker said.

Like many musicians, he believes the whole file-sharing debate cheapens the art. "I don't think people realize the amount of effort that goes into making an album. It's years of work. For me, I'm self-managed, so it's literally [working] 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for years at a time."

Toronto-based technology analyst Rick Broadhead, on the other hand, falls on the side of those who were outright stunned by the court decision.

"With all due respect to the judge, he doesn't seem to have a good grasp of what the Internet is and how it works," he said, describing it as a huge blow to the music industry, if not all areas in which artistic works are protected by copyright. "The very nature of these file-sharing services is that they allow distribution, worldwide distribution. To compare the Internet to a photocopy machine is ludicrous."

As part of his decision, the judge said he didn't see a real difference between a photocopier in a library and a personal computer with songs on its hard drive and linked to a peer-to-peer network.

The timing of the court decision had at least one plus for major Canadian labels. Nearly everyone who is anyone is en route to Edmonton for the Juno Awards, and they will be able to occupy their minds with parties and promotions over the next few days. On the flip side, guess what the No. 1 topic will be at those events?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...tainment/Music


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Proposed Legislation Targets P2P Piracy
Bill Holland

During a week of continuing cuts at major labels, both houses of Congress finally went to bat for the record industry.

In an effort to stem peer-to-peer piracy, House lawmakers sent a multipronged copyright protection bill to full committee this week, and Senate leaders introduced a bill authorizing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to go after online infringers in civil court.

In essence, the Senate legislation would take the load off the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA), which has been pursuing civil lawsuits against online infringers on its own.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., co-sponsor of the Senate bill, called the current situation "an intolerable predicament," and industry leaders applauded the move.

"Any law that provides a stronger deterrent against illegal file sharing is good," says Jay Rosenthal, counsel for the Recording Artists' Coalition (RAC).

"Until those engaged in this awful practice understand that it is wrong, there will be no chance at a meaningful resolution," he adds.

But the P2P community took a different view.

"Passing yet more penalty statutes to put an infinitesimal fraction of file sharers in prison may make Big Music and Hollywood feel more secure but a waste of taxpayer dollars," says Adam Eisgrau, executive director of the P2P United lobbying group.

The legislation "won't help real artists and rights holders make a single dime from the literally billions of downloads that will continue to occur every week without end," he says.

The move in both halls of Congress is bipartisan and, if anything, indicates that lawmakers may at last be taking seriously the industry's claims that piracy is devastating its business.

Lawmakers on the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property fashioned the bill out of several pending measures and marked up the legislation Wednesday (March 31).

The main provision gives prosecutors the authority to go after unauthorized uploaders of copyrighted files as felons, because just one upload meets the legal threshold for felonious copyright infringement.

That occurs when 1,000 or more copies are distributed and the value of the distributed copies is $10,000 or more. On the Internet, one copy could be available to millions of downloaders.

Repeat offenders using file sharing "for commercial advantage or private financial gain" would face 10 years in jail, in addition to fines.

Other provisions require P2P services to post warning notices on the legal dangers of file sharing, provide extra copyright enforcement funds and training programs at DOJ and allow the FBI to send warnings to alleged infringers.

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., said he has been bothered by the DOJ being "passive in their efforts to pursue copyright infringers."

In the Senate, Leahy and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the ranking member and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, respectively, jointly introduced the bill, S. 2237, on March 25.

Chiefly, it would give the DOJ the power to pursue civil claims for damages and restitution from illegal file sharers instead of pursuing them criminally.

Leahy said that criminal copyright infringement is unusually difficult to prove. For this reason, he added, prosecutors can rarely justify bringing criminal charges, and copyright owners have been left to fend for themselves.

Industry groups hailed the Senate legislation, much to the chagrin of file-sharing advocates.

"In this day, particularly, having the Justice Department chase down file swappers seems unnecessary," Eisgrau says.

He quotes from a new two-year study by the University of North Carolina and Harvard that observed 1.75 million downloads during 17 weeks in 2002. " found that file sharing's effect on album sales overall was 'statistically indistinguishable from zero,"' Eisgrau notes.

The bill also calls on DOJ to initiate training and pilot programs to ensure that federal prosecutors are better equipped to handle the technical and strategic problems posed by enforcing copyright law in the digital age.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=4741696


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The Teenage Pirates In No Mood For Mercy

Profits are running adrift as a generation grows up accustomed to downloading movies and music for free.
Rosie Murray-West

Picture the scene. It's midnight on the university campus. A wolf howls. The camera pans down past the full moon and focuses on a single light burning in a student's bedroom. A close-up shot shows he's hunched over his computer. But he's not working, he's downloading the latest cinema blockbuster. The audience gasps as the scary music begins to play...

OK, it isn't a horror movie, but for the film and music industries this is the stuff of nightmares. A whole generation is growing up which has no compunction about watching films or listening to music without paying for it, and it's getting easier and easier to do.

Jim Stoddart, chief executive of internet security company Harrier, says the industry estimates that 50,000 films every day are downloaded from the internet. For music the figure is much higher, with industry analysts saying that more than 2.6billion files are copied every month.

"With the proliferation of broadband and improved file compression techniques it is happening more and more," he says. "On an academic campus with a good computer system it might take you 20 minutes to download an entire film."

He reckons that the vast majority of people who are doing this are aged between 12 and 25. "Of course, they have no taboo about doing this," he says.

"People who are adults now are aware that they are doing something wrong in stealing other people's work but this taboo is breaking down. When this generation have children they're not going to teach them that breaking copyright is wrong."

Internet piracy is not a new problem for the music industry. This week music giant EMI announced that it was again slashing jobs and cutting its roster of artists in a bid to maintain growth in an increasingly tough market.

Although the company says piracy is only part of the problem, there are signs that the industry is getting increasingly twitchy about it, with 552 lawsuits against people who share music on the internet filed in January by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It's not just music. "You can get anything online," says one 24-year-old expert. "Software, games, films, anything. Films are available weeks before they hit the cinemas in the US and the quality really isn't bad."

Poor-quality copies of the final instalment of The Lord of the Rings were available on the internet before release, and as the film becomes more widely available the quality of the files improves. Action films like Pirates of the Caribbean - another popular internet choice - take a long time to download because of the amount of information within the files, but young computer buffs reckon it's worth the wait.

"Now everyone has broadband it really doesn't matter if it takes a while to download things, because it's not costing you anything," says one. "Even people who don't have broadband, like me, are paying for their internet access by the month so you could just leave the computer on overnight."

Catching the culprits isn't as easy as it used to be, either. We all remember Napster, the company that invented online music downloading. Because it had a central server, and a US presence, it was relatively easy to squash, but the so-called "Napster clones" that have sprung up in its place are far more slippery.

The most well known of these are Gnutella, Morpheus and KaZaA. They have no central server, and ownership through complex webs of companies makes it difficult to serve a lawsuit.

What's more, KaZaA, owned by Sharman Networks, is fighting back with a counterclaim against the music industry alleging anticompetitive behaviour and unfair business practices.

The company's website, kazaa.com, displays a list of companies that it says are trying to stop the "revolution which is changing the world of entertainment", including Disney, Paramount, Sony and Virgin.

KaZaA says it is fighting to keep what's called "peer-to- peer distribution", or exactly what the music and film industries are trying to stop. The basic idea behind it is that users download a tiny application on to their computers from one of the file-sharing sites and then use it to search for whatever it is they want. If anyone else on the system has the file available you can download it, and if there is more than one copy available they can be downloaded in half the time.

As the files are copied, they proliferate and downloading gets even quicker, making the file-sharing websites a self-fulfilling success story. Once you have the file, you can easily make it available to others. Films can be watched on your computer or put on to a CD and watched later, if you have the (fairly simple) technology to do so.

Using these websites is easy and largely anonymous. As Gnutella's website succinctly puts it: "One of the major differences between Gnutella and Napster-like software is that those applications are centralised. That means the technology uses central servers where the Government agencies can spy on you and infringe your freedom to search the net."

File sharing services proliferate faster than the music industry can shut them down. Grokster, Streamcast, Imesh, Blubster and a host of other weirdly named and popular sites are springing up.

"Lots of young people don't buy CDs and DVDs any more," says one source who owns an Apple Ipod, which can store 10,000 downloaded songs. "They've got used to getting these things for free."

Some analysts suggest that this is one reason why artists such as Norah Jones and Dido have done so well in the charts - they are bought by adults who are too old to know how to get their music for free. Music that appeals to younger listeners, such as Britney Spears or Blue, has to be hugely successful to make money.

"This prevents companies from investing in new talent," Stoddart says. "They are running scared and won't make films that aren't guaranteed to be successful because they fear they won't get the money back."

Aside from getting their lawyers on the case, movie makers and song promoters have a few sandbags at their disposal to try and hold back the flood. They have set up legal download services where customers can pay for the music they are used to getting for free.

This, together with an appeal to people's consciences, will work for some, but these sites nearly always require credit or debit card registration, which younger users don't usually have. There are plans afoot to allow them to pay by text message on some sites. Once they've grown up, they may be so used to getting things for free that they won't want to go back to paying.

Companies like EMI are reluctant to talk about piracy. They claim that users will not get good enough quality from illegally downloaded files. "Sometimes you think you're downloading the Lion King and you get porn," said one source, "or you get viruses on your computer." As file compression improves, quality will follow, although the porn will be more shocking, too.

There have been some attempts by the music industry to flood the internet with fake music files in an attempt to thwart the pirates, but this is of questionable legality because of the disruption to internet service providers.

For young people, downloading music rather than buying it is a very real choice. "I still buy CDs and DVDs," says one. "I like to own them, because I can be sure I know what I'm getting." The music industry is just going to have to hope that more of the younger generation continue to feel like that, but it looks increasingly unlikely.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/mai...03/ixcoms.html


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PLoS Co-Founder Defends Free Dissemination Of Peer-Reviewed Journals Online
Patrick Brown

Last year, Harold Varmus, Michael Eisen and I founded a new nonprofit scientific publisher, the Public Library of Science (PLoS; http://www.plos.org). In October, PLoS began publishing its premier scientific journal, PLoS Biology. Everything PLoS publishes is immediately available online, free of charge, with no restrictions on access or use.

Here's why: The public library, one of the greatest inventions of human civilization, has been waiting for the Internet. What seemed an impossible ideal in 1836, when Antonio Panizzi, librarian of the British Museum, wrote, "I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity,... of consulting the same authorities, ... as the richest man in the kingdoms," is today within reach. With the Internet, we have the means to make humanity's treasury of knowledge freely available to scientists, teachers, students and the public around the world. But it won't happen automatically.

Our government spends more than $50 billion a year on nonclassified research. What this investment yields are new scientific discoveries and ideas, recorded in scientific publications. The authors of these research reports, the scientists, give them away to publishers, receiving in return only an audience for their work and the satisfaction of sharing their ideas and discoveries with the world. But if your mother learns she has breast cancer and desperately wants to find what researchers have discovered about her disease, or when your daughter in high school reads a story in the New York Times about the latest research on climate change and wants to see it with her own eyes, they face a perverse and unnecessary obstacle. They, and countless others around the world who would benefit from timely access to scientific and medical knowledge, cannot freely access the published results of research financed by their own tax dollars. An ever-growing online treasury of scientific and medical knowledge is open only to the fortunate few who have access to a major university library, or who are able to pay the exorbitant access fees charged by publishers who claim the research reports they publish as their private property.

Even at Stanford, the restrictions on access prevent us from being able to search the entire corpus of scientific articles for particular terms, concepts, methods, data or images and retrieve the results — you can't "Google" the millions of scientific articles that have been published online!

The traditional business model for scientific publishing, in which individual readers or institutions pay publishers for access to research articles, is a vestige of an era when printing articles in paper journals and transporting them in trucks and boats was the most efficient way to disseminate new scientific discoveries and ideas. When each copy cost money to print and ship, it made sense to pass these costs on to the recipients. But today, research articles are delivered much more efficiently and conveniently via the Internet. Here at Stanford, most students and faculty use the Internet to access the scientific journals to which Stanford subscribes. The Internet has transformed the economics of scientific publishing. The costs of the remaining essential functions of scientific publishers — orchestrating peer review and professional editing — don't scale with the number of copies distributed, but with the number of articles reviewed and published. But the benefits — to the authors, the scientific community and the public — grow with the number of potential readers who can access the published work. Charging for access is therefore no longer economically necessary, rational or fair — it needlessly limits access to an essential public good.

What's the alternative? Just as midwives can earn a living without claiming ownership or control of the babies they deliver, publishers can and should be paid a fair price by the sponsors of the research — a "midwife's fee" — for their role in orchestrating peer-review, editing and disseminating the results. But they should not be given the baby — our baby — to own and control. By paying publishers for each article at the time of its publication, instead of allowing them to own the article and charge for access, the doors to the online library could be opened to everyone.

An "open access" system for scientific publishing will not entail new expenses, nor should it place a financial burden on the authors. The governmental and private institutions that finance the research already pay most of the costs of scientific publishing indirectly — through the funds they provide to research libraries. These same institutions would accomplish far more with the same money by phasing out subscription payments to restricted-access journals and, instead, paying for open-access publication of the research they support.

An impressive and rapidly growing list of scientific organizations now advocate open-access publication. Yet, despite widespread support from scientists and the public, institutional inertia and fear of change delay its progress. We who benefit from access to great research libraries and generous public support of our research should remember Benjamin Franklin's words: "As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/5.html


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File-Sharing Ruling Opens Pandora's Box

Music industry's court loss raises implications for TV programs, movies.
David Akin

While at the University of Waterloo, Matt Goyer and his housemates didn't want to buy premium television channels such as The Movie Network.

But to make sure they didn't miss an episode of The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, both of which air in Canada on The Movie Network, Mr. Goyer and his friends would fire up a new kind of Internet- based file trading software application called BitTorrent and download episodes that had been digitized by other fans.

"You can get a ton of content. You name any TV show," Mr. Goyer said yesterday from his office in Redmond, Wash., where he has started with Microsoft Corp. after finishing his studies at Waterloo this year.

Mr. Goyer and his friends scare companies that own the rights to television programs, films, software and books -- content that can be digitized and distributed on the Internet with ease using freely available software.

In the wake of a Federal Court of Canada ruling yesterday involving the country's biggest record companies, some rights holders are worried that they have lost the ability to protect those rights.

"It would be unfortunate if people saw this decision and suddenly decided to use file-sharing to distribute copyrighted works. That's just not the case," said Jacqueline Hushion, executive director of the Canadian Publishers Council.

Alastair Mitchell, co-chief executive officer of Moontaxi Media Inc. of Toronto called the ruling "disturbing." Moontaxi Media is the operator of Puretracks, a record industry-sanctioned on-line service where consumers can download music for 99 cents a song. "We believe emphatically that musicians should be paid."

Digital songs purchased at Puretracks contain software locks, which prevent or inhibit their widespread distribution. Movie makers, software publishers, book publishers and others who produce digital content have also been working on similar software locks.

But many in those industries worry that one day the Internet will be filled with users as sophisticated as Mr. Goyer -- and when that happens, they may lose control of the digital distribution of their content the way the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) seems to have lost control of its.

On Wednesday, Mr. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein of the Federal Court of Canada dismissed a request brought by CRIA that some of Canada's largest Internet service providers be forced to turn over confidential customer information, which CRIA believes could help it sue 29 Canadians for copyright infringement.

In what some lawyers privately said was an embarrassing loss for the record industry, Judge von Finckenstein not only denied the request but went further, ruling on a variety of issues involving copyright, on-line privacy and the liability of Internet service providers. Almost nothing in his 31-page ruling could be seen as favourable to the record industry, legal experts said.

Howard Knopf, an Ottawa lawyer who represented the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, who were intervenors in the CRIA matter, said Judge von Finckenstein's ruling would apply in some ways only to music copyrights.

"But the decision also speaks more generally to the meaning of distribution and authorization in the [peer-to-peer] context," he said yesterday. "So, its possible that the decision could have implications beyond music file sharing."

The CRIA case centred around the activities of several Canadian users of KaZaa, the file-trading Internet application distributed by Sharman Networks Inc. of Sydney, Australia. KaZaa users designate special directories or folders on their computer hard drives to become public folders.

Then, other KaZaa users can browse through that folder and make digital copy of the contents of that5 folder.

Most users trade music files in this way but KaZaa and several other applications that use a similar peer-to-peer distribution model are built to enable the exchange of any kind of digital file -- be it a version of a movie, a television program, software or electronic book.

"The larger issue is how does government and the courts intend on protecting proprietary rights," said Harvey Nightingale, executive director of the Canadian Interactive Digital Software Association, which represents Canada's videogame publishers and manufacturers.

"I think the government has to." he said. "Can you imagine all the money that would be lost and possible job losses if this ruling were allowed to be carried across all [content] boundaries, to software, publishing, anything you can digitize?"

And yet, there is some evidence that music downloads may not be as harmful to the music business as record industry associations here and elsewhere suggest.

First, a study released Monday by business school professors at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina concluded that there was no correlation between on-line downloads and music sales.

Secondly, despite the popularity of file-trading applications where music can be obtained for free, business at industry-sanctioned on-line music services where users pay to download is booming.

Market researcher Ipsos-Reid said this week that traffic on fee-for-download sites in North America tripled in 2003 from 2002 with more than 10 million people reporting that they had paid to download music at least once.

In Canada, the Puretracks service notched one million downloads within six months of starting up.

"Things are cooking," Mr. Mitchell of Moontaxi said. "We're pretty happy with the way people have responded."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...iness/Canadian


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Florida Court Sends RIAA Away

Record labels must file individual lawsuits against suspected file sharers rather than lumping them together in a single suit, a federal judge in Florida ruled Thursday.

The Recording Industry Association of America has sued nearly 2,000 file swappers in jurisdictions around the country. In this lawsuit, the music trade group bundled 25 suspected file swappers who share the same Internet service provider, Bright House Networks, into one legal action.

With this ruling, the RIAA must refile the lawsuits individually, marking another setback in its campaign to sue swappers. Judge David Baker of the U.S. District Court in Orlando is the second judge to rule that the RIAA cannot group individuals together. Last month, a Philadelphia judge made a similar ruling.

"Beyond the circumstances that the defendants used the Fast Track peer-to-peer network and that the defendants access the Internet through Bright House, no other facts connect the defendants," Baker wrote.

Over the past several months, the RIAA has had several legal hurdles to leap in its pursuit of file sharers.

Last year, the recording industry relied on a streamlined subpoena process in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to quickly collect suspects' names from ISPs. In December, a federal judge ruled that this process was illegal, so the RIAA was forced to use the so-called John Doe method, where alleged traders are only identified by their computer addresses. To discover the defendants' real names, the music industry must first file a John Doe lawsuit.

"Courts are beginning to recognize that the record companies' crusade against file sharers is stepping on the privacy and due-process rights of those accused," said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a statement.

"These decisions are simply requiring the record companies to follow the rules that everyone else has to follow when bringing lawsuits," Cohn said.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62915,00.html


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Court Ruling Points Way To Broadband Regulation
Jim Hu

A U.S. appeals court has rejected the Federal Communications Commission's request to rehear a case, in a move that could prompt local governments to regulate the cable industry.

In essence, the court said that cable networks' broadband services have an element of telecommunications services in them. The rejection could pave the way for municipalities to force cable companies to share their broadband Internet lines with third parties.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday stuck to its decision in October 2003 that the FCC incorrectly defined cable networks as information services instead of telecommunications services. The distinction is critical because local governments can force telecommunications services to share their broadband access lines, while information services are free from government intervention.

The cable industry has argued, with support from the FCC, that its lines are private and build on an estimated $75 billion to $84 billion of its own funding to modernize its network. Because of this investment, cable companies can now offer hundreds of channels, high-speed Internet access, phone service, video on demand and high-definition programming.

The FCC has long defined cable networks, such as those of Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications, as information services. At the same time, it has defined the Baby Bell phone companies, such as Verizon Communications, SBC Communications, BellSouth and Qwest Communications, under the telecommunications heading. The Bells are required by federal law to allow third parties to lease their copper lines to offer phone or Internet services.

Thursday's ruling strikes a severe blow to FCC Chairman Michael Powell's longstanding position that regulating broadband would stymie growth. Given the 9th Circuit's rejection, Powell faces two tough choices: appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court or drop the case altogether. Approaching the Supreme Court would mean seeking counsel from the U.S. Department of Justice, which has supported changing cable into a telecommunications status in order to extend its wiretapping jurisdiction into cable phone lines.

Powell did not say whether he plans to pursue a Supreme Court appeal, according to a statement on the FCC's Web site. The FCC has 90 days to file an appeal to the Supreme Court.

"I am disappointed that the court declined to address the merits of the commission's policy that was carefully developed over the past several years," Chairman Powell said in a statement. "This decision...prolongs uncertainty to the detriment of consumers. That is why we will study our options and explore how to continue to advance broadband deployment for all Americans."

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, a cable industry lobbying group, was more clear in its position for Powell's next step.

"While we are disappointed with the 9th Circuit ruling, we will urge the FCC to seek U.S. Supreme Court review," Dan Brenner, the NCTA's head of law and regulatory policy, said in a statement. "We believe that if and when the 9th Circuit's decision is given a full substantive review by the Supreme Court, it will be reversed."

While Powell has long protected the cable industry from local regulations, not all of the FCC's commissioners share his belief.

"This is a good day for consumers and Internet entrepreneurs," FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said in a statement. "I look forward to the start of a fresh dialogue on broadband service at the FCC."
http://news.com.com/2100-1034-5183423.html


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Google Moves to Block RSS Scraping
Ryan Naraine

A Web developer's attempt to create customized RSS (define) feeds from the popular Google News portal has run afoul of the search technology powerhouse.

Google issued a cease-and-desist order against British programmer Julian Bond with a warning that the creation of a news feed from the results of Google News was against its terms of reference.

According to Bond, the company requested the removal of RSS-powered Google News headlines from his Ecademy business networking site and made it clear Webmasters are not allowed to display headlines from Google News on third-party sites.

He posted the order on a mailing list dedicated to syndication discussions.

A Google spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

At the center of the dispute is Bond's gnews2rss, a PHP script that takes a Google News search and turns it into an RSS feed. The script allows users to enter search keywords into a field and create an RSS feed that can be used by any news aggregator.

Bond told internetnews.com he created the script a year ago to display categorized headlines at Ecademy.com. For instance, a section of the site devoted to wireless networking displays RSS-powered headlines from a variety of blogs (define) and one from Google News with the keywords "Wi-Fi" or "WLAN" or "80211."

Bond has since removed the Google News headlines and replaced them with those powered by Yahoo (Quote, Chart) but he said it was frustrating that the most popular search engine was not providing an XML (define) output from their search results. "It's also become pretty disappointing that their SOAP API (define) (define) still only covers the main search engine and hasn't been extended to support the other parts of Google."

Google's Web API service, which was released last April, lets software developers query more than 2 billion Web documents directly from their own computer programs. The API allows communication via Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), an XML-based mechanism for exchanging typed information but it is limited to the Web search portion of Google's services.

"I find it a little strange that Google was among the first companies to use a SOAP API but they've done nothing to extend it beyond Web search. Contrast that with Yahoo, which has introduced their own RSS aggregator and provides feeds from all sections of the search. I think Google is missing a trick here," Bond said.

Although Bond has removed the Google News headlines from his Web site, he has not moved to stop others from using the code to create their own feeds. Indeed, he has released it to the open-source community, which means anyone can use it to create customized feeds for newsreaders. "The script is still up there and I'm sure people are still using it. I'm not sure how they would even know that you are scraping Google News and sending headlines to your aggregator."

He said it was disappointing that Google has not yet embraced the use of RSS on all its services. "Google is one of the greatest sources of content but that content is available in HTML (define). Now, they are getting upset when anyone tries to turn it around in machine-readable format. I find that rather strange."

While many in the content syndication space view Google's reluctance to embrace RSS as a strategic move to boost the competing Atom format, Bond thinks the company has simply not gotten around to adding syndication to the news portal.

He said the company sent him a reply to an e-mail query that hinted at coming changes with the Google News service. In that e-mail, Google said: "We don't currently offer an RSS or other feed, but as you may know, Google News is still in beta. We're considering a number of improvements based on feedback from our users. Given that we're still fine-tuning this service, it's too early for us to know which of the many great ideas we've received will be implemented."

The creation of Atom by developers from IBM (Quote, Chart), Google and a host of blog tools vendors has led to acrimony among software engineers. Google, through its Blogger service, has ditched RSS in favor of Atom syndication format but critics argue that the availability of competing formats is scaring away mainstream adoption of RSS.

In March this year, Dave Winer, the co-author of the RSS format proposed a merger between the two formats, insisting "it's time to bury the hatchet and move on."

Winer urged developers to put their heads together in order to come up with a backwards-compatible format that would avoid confusion and bring the two competing standards together.
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3334651


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MP3 Phone Wrangling Finally Settled
Kim Tae-gyu

The dispute between MP3 phone handset makers and the music industry finally came to an end on Friday as LG Electronics agreed to a government-mediated proposal.

The Ministry of Information and Communication on Friday reported that LG accepted the arrangement of allowing its customers to download and listen to free music files on the MP3 phones for three days.

As a result, MP3 phone holders will be able to download any music files from their PCs and play them without charge. The files are programmed to stop working after the agreed time span.

In two months, mobile carriers will be required to provide music services for their customers, although at a low-quality sound less than 70 Kbps (FM radio level).

Such measures were geared toward helping the local music industry improve their bottom lines by blocking the spread of free music files through handsets.

The local music industry voiced strong opposition to the new phone features, and refused to cooperate with MP3 handset owners, preventing them from listening to music files.

In an effort to iron out the difference, the government stepped in and masterminded the three-day free play suggestion for the two-month grace period, which was accepted by Samsung earlier this week.

LG argued that the time span should be at least five days but finally decided to compromise on Friday in the face of strong pressure from LP-3000 holders, who urged an early settlement of the copyright dispute.

MP3 phones have stolen the spotlight since their debut earlier this month, when LG introduced LP-3000 models. Samsung Electronics will also release the SPH-V4200 model next week.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech...8541912350.htm


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Maker of DVD-Copying Software Appeals Court Rulings

A Missouri maker of DVD-copying products said Thursday that it has appealed a pair of federal court rulings that it stop making and marketing its software.

The company, 321 Studios Inc. based in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield, filed the appeals in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California and the 2nd U.S. Circuit
appellate court in New York.

Federal judges in both states ordered 321 in recent weeks to stop marketing the software, siding with Hollywood studios that contended the DVD-copying products violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law bars circumvention of anti-piracy measures used to protect DVDs.

Since those rulings, 321 has shipped retooled versions of the DVD-copying products, removing a built-in tool for descrambling movies.

The company has argued that its products merely guarantee consumers fair use of the movies they've bought, including backing up expensive copies of children's movies in case the originals get scratched.

In both appeals, which include requests that the court rulings be stayed, 321 argues that the DMCA is unconstitutional and illegally extends copyright protections.

The company also insists that the New York injunction is inconsistent with a federal court ruling that found the DCMA did not forbid the sale of a universal garage-door-opener remote control though it bypassed encryption.

In that case, 321 said, a judge ``upheld the garage owner's right to open his own garage door, and 321 similarly argues that lawful purchasers of DVDs have the inherent right to unlock their DVD's encryption to access the DVD's contents.''

Messages left Thursday with the Motion Picture Association of America were not immediately returned.

321 Studios says it has sold a million copies of the questioned DVD Copy Plus and DVD X Copy nationwide, and that it likely would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars destroying the versions with the descrambling tool built in.

That's on top of the millions already spent on legal fees.

Hearings are scheduled for April 13 in the New York case and for June 18 in the California one.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...printstory.jsp


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Speed of light “protection.”

Look! Up in Ottawa! It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane – It’s a Canadian Lawmaker!

Facing The Music



Minister pledges to protect artists from free file downloads
Doug Beazley

Federal Heritage Minister Helene Scherrer yesterday promised to plug the hole in Canadian law allowing people to legally download songs off the Internet without paying. Scherrer's announcement won loud applause from an audience of Canadian music industry types at yesterday's Juno Awards opening ceremony at City Hall, which also featured a staged "surprise" appearance from Prime Minister Paul Martin.

"As minister of Canadian Heritage, I will, as quickly as possible, make changes to our copyright law," said Scherrer yesterday.

The minister offered no details, but she was responding to the challenge posed by a recent federal court ruling that suggested uploading music files into shared folders on peer-to-peer Net networks is quite legal.

The ruling reaffirmed a recent decision by the Copyright Board of Canada.

Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association didn't prove file-sharing constituted copyright violation - and artists and producers have no legal right to sue those who swap files without paying.

The court decision inspired panic in the Canadian music industry; industry spokesmen were predicting the collapse of copyright control would cause severe financial hardship for people making their living from music.

Last night's announcement was greeted with relief by the Juno crowd.

"It means so much to everybody in this room," said Holger Peterson, president of Stony Plain Records.

"This is a very important statement.

"Copyrights have a value, and artists and songwriters would like to get paid for the use of their music. For the minister to confirm tonight that she's on our side, that's encouraging." But not everyone in the room was convinced.

Canadian Idol winner Ryan Malcolm expressed skepticism, and suggested the Canadian music biz find a way to live with file-sharers.

"Whether people download or not, as long as they're listening to music," he said.

"I think it's a challenge for the industry, to try and find a new way to survive."
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Edmont...03/407037.html


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China Jails Woman for Internet Posting
Reuters

China has sent a woman to a labor camp for posting comments on the Internet that accused police of roughing up people trying to submit complaints to the government, a U.S.-based rights group said on Thursday.

China has been cracking down on Internet content -- from politics to pornography -- but has struggled to gain control over the medium. It has created a special Internet police force, blocked some foreign news sites and jailed several people for their postings.

Ma Yalian posted articles on various Web sites saying she and others were physically abused when attempting to petition the government in Beijing during the annual session of the National People's Congress, or parliament, in early March.

New York-based Human Rights in China said the government, facing growing numbers of petitioners, had begun to take a hard line against petitioners to discourage such activity.

Most levels of government have offices where people can air their grievances.

Human Rights in China quoted sources saying Shanghai's Reeducation Through Labour Administrative Committee ruled that Ma's accusations were false and that she had "turned petitioning into pestering." It decided on March 16 to send her to a labor camp, the group said.

A committee official reached by telephone declined to comment, saying the committee's proceedings were secret.

Ma spent many years in Shanghai petitioning the authorities over her forcible removal from her home in China's financial hub as part of a development scheme, the rights group said.

In 2001, she was sent for a year to a labor camp, where police broke both her legs, and has been disabled since, it said.

The rights group listed several other people who it said had also been detained for petitioning.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=4723041


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BT Enters Software Business to Protect Film, Music
Bernhard Warner

LONDON (Reuters) - British telecoms giant BT Group launched a new software business on Tuesday to protect music, movies and photographs from digital piracy.

In making the belated plunge into the brutally competitive digital-rights management (DRM) software market, BT will be going head-to-head with some of the world's largest software and technology companies including Microsoft Corp, Sony Corpand Apple Computers Inc..

BT said it will work with a host of software partners, including RealNetworks Inc., whose Helix DRM technology is used by a variety of broadcasters from the BBC to EMI, to resell their publishing and content management tools to amateur film makers, local soccer clubs and major media firms.

The DRM offering is part of a larger digital media publishing product called BT Rich Media. The dominant fixed line carrier said it would target the consumer and small business sector with a 100 pound ($184.70) product and large media companies with an offering that costs several times that amount.

CONSUMER CONFUSION

Media companies are keen to see mass deployment of DRM technology to cut down on digital piracy. The DRM software can be used by musicians or film makers to fine-tune their works so that the content cannot be copied or viewed without permission.

But the new technology has become a muddle for consumers as a multitude of incompatible DRM technologies hit the market.

The result is consumers must familiarize themselves with a list of technological conditions before storing new music or film onto their digital play-back devices or onto their PC.

In a further sign of how competitive the market has become, Time Warner said on Monday it took an undisclosed equity stake in American DRM provider ContentGuard, a company that counts Sony as a customer and Microsoft as another investor.

Andrew Burke, director of online services for BT Retail, dismissed the notion that BT's late entry into the market would be a disadvantage.

"We see now the take-up of broadband has opened up a new market. This is the time to fight in this market," said Burke, adding that there over three million homes in Britain connected to cable and DSL broadband.

BT, which plans to sign up five million broadband subscribers of its own by the end of 2006, is relying heavily on brisk demand for the high-speed broadband services to offset falling revenues in its core fixed-line phone business.

Burke said the rich media offering is another broadband related product it can sell users in the hopes of upgrading them to more expensive, higher-margin services.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ms_bt_media_dc


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Like It Or Not, Music File Trading Is Here To Stay
Dwayne Fatherree

Whether the recording industry likes it or not, file trading and its required infrastructure have become an industry unto themselves, incorporating every aspect of our modern technologically oriented society.

Manufacturers are striving to develop smaller and more efficient players for digital music, much of which is downloaded from illegal file trading networks.

Those networks continue to thrive, despite legal attacks, through technological developments that have outstripped the limits of existing laws or, in most cases, the ability of government agencies to enforce those laws.
Despite the cries of record executives and others in the recording industry, a new study says this is probably a good thing.

Researchers at the Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill compared 1.75 million log entries from active peer- to-peer network servers over 17 weeks in the summer of 2002.

They then compared the downloaded songs against the top recordings on several industry charts to determine what effect the downloaded files might have had on sales.
The result was, statistically, zero.

In observing the average downloaders' habits, the researchers discovered that there was no correlation between file downloading and the 15 percent drop in sales the record industry saw between 2000 and 2002.

In fact, it is possible that file downloaders were more likely to go out and buy music after sampling it online.

One point made in the report is that music is not the only commodity shared on P2P networks. Electronic games, videos and movies are also available for download, yet none of those industries saw the drops in sales seen in the music industry.
In past studies to find out why the industry was hit so hard, researchers looked at economic data, user surveys, sales figures and other industry data to figure out where the audience went.

When none of those factors could explain the drop, it was assumed by default that the crowd must have left the record store to go home and download a bunch of songs for free.

Unlike those other projects, this new study uses the actual log files from live P2P network servers to watch what the end users did. The average user downloaded 17 files over two visits during the test period.
According to the study, in order for the downloaders to actually harm CD sales, some 5,000 tracks would have to be downloaded to negate the sale of one overpriced piece of industry plastic. On the other hand, the availability of downloadable music does have a positive social impact.

If the downloading of music does not injure the industry or artists, then the increased circulation of music can be seen as a boon both to society and to the artists themselves, who are being heard by ears that never before would have known they existed.
Greed is a great motivator.

Even if the illegal and unsanctioned downloading of music files doesn't harm sales, you can be sure that the recording industry will continue to seek some sort of compensation. Its a shame the legal arm of the industry is more flexible and creative than the artistic side.

Perhaps, if better music and a competitive delivery system were in place, the lawyers could all go home and forget about chasing down those rascally college students for a while.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pb...ST19/404090529


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A Cybersecurity Role for Uncle Sam?
Brian Krebs

The nation's top software companies today conceded that new government regulations may be needed to strengthen the nation's vital computer networks from online attack, a shift away from their traditional stance against regulation. But critics of the plan said it still falls far short of the aggressive action needed to protect the nation's information infrastructure from attacks by terrorists and online criminals.

The recommendations, released by the National Cyber Security Partnership, were intended to answer the Bush administration's challenge to the technology community to develop more secure software products as part of their contribution to the White House's national cybersecurity strategy.

Ron Moritz, chief security strategist for Islandia, N.Y.-based Computer Associates and chairman of the taskforce that released the plan, cautioned against government rules to hold software makers liable for security problems.

"[We] don't believe there has been sufficient study of the impact of liability regulation or legislation, and to make that call today would be premature," said Moritz. "We need to better understand the potential impact of new product liability laws, particularly on smaller software makers and open-source providers."

The report said that government intervention could be necessary in dealing with software that is responsible for insuring the safety of the nation's "critical infrastructures" such as the water, power and telecommunications grids.

"[It] is possible that national security or critical infrastructure protection may require a greater level of security than the market will provide," it said. "Any such gap should be filled by appropriate and tailored government action that interferes with market innovation on security as little as possible."

Amit Yoran, the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity chief, said that government regulation might be necessary.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Apr1.html


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Doubts About E-Voting Machines Driving Push For Paper Trail
AP

An effort to erase doubts about new ATM-style voting machines by backing up digital votes with paper records is gaining ground nationwide, as state officials heed warnings about security and potentially messy recounts.

Four states are demanding printers that will generate paper receipts voters can see and verify, and more than a dozen other states are weighing the change. But only one -- Nevada -- expects to have a paper trail in place by the fall elections.

``People are just realizing exactly what we've bought into in some states,'' said Maryland state Sen. Andrew Harris, a Republican. ``The stakes are so high. I don't put it above someone trying to manipulate elections on a grand scale.''

Harris wants to fix what many in the computer science world and elsewhere see as a dangerous flaw in the touchscreen machines that will be used in up to 34 states this November.

Their worry? That voters will make one choice, and the machine -- through a coding error or a hacker's manipulation -- will record it as another. With no one the wiser, election outcomes could be changed.

Many election administrators and voting machine industry representatives say that such fears are misguided, and ignore the rigorous tests and trial runs -- from manufacture to Election Day -- that protect the vote.

But the doubters are winning support. Harris has proposed that the 16,000 new touchscreen machines that all Maryland voters will use this year be outfitted with a paper ballot printed after a person makes a choice. The voters would then get to see and verify their selection, and the ballot would be secured in case of a recount.

The idea, known as a verified voter paper trail, has been proposed in at least 16 other states as lawmakers have begun responding to months of complaints, letters of protests and security studies that found serious flaws in the ATM-style equipment.

Secretaries of state in California, Missouri and Nevada have gone further and ordered changes. And Illinois passed a law last year requiring a paper trail. Only Nevada, however, will be ready for the fall elections.

``The issue is all about accountability,'' said Dean Heller, Nevada's GOP secretary of state. ``These votes are out there in cyberspace somewhere, and nobody can prove that they exist. The paper trail does.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/8331858.htm


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Microsoft's iPod Killer?
John Borland

Microsoft is expected to unveil copy-protection software this summer that will for the first time give portable digital music players access to tunes rented via all- you-can-eat subscription services--a development that some industry executives believe will shake up the online music business.

Sources say the technology--code-named Janus and originally expected more than a year ago--was recently released in a test version to developers and that a final release is now expected as soon as July.

Janus would add a hacker-resistant clock to portable music players for files encoded in Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media Audio format. That in turn would help let subscription services such as Napster put rented tracks on portable devices--something that's not currently allowed. Fans of portable players could then pay as little as $10 a month for ongoing access to hundreds of thousands of songs, instead of buying song downloads one at a time for about a dollar apiece.

Few online music subscription plans have enjoyed great success to date, but some music company executives said they believe Janus will make renting music more attractive to consumers and eventually give a la carte download services such as Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store a run for their money.

Device makers, too, see the software as a way to take on Apple and its industry-leading iPod player, which for now offers no support for rented music. Anticipating the Janus release, MP3 player makers including Samsung have already begun advertising support for the technology in a handful of high-end products.

"To us, Janus finally provides the platform on which we can build a new type of experience for the consumer," said Zack Zalon, president of Virgin Digital, the British conglomerate's new online-music division. "We believe this is it. This is what consumers are going to want. We want to be big participant in changing consumers' attitude towards what music really is."

Microsoft executives associated with the project declined to confirm details of the technology's release. "As we've said before, enabling access to unlimited downloads on consumer devices will open up all new scenarios for the distribution and enjoyment of digital content," Jason Reindorp, the group manager for Microsoft's digital media division, said in an e-mail statement.

Online-music insiders have debated for years about whether future services will ultimately resemble a traditional CD store--requiring consumers to purchase each single song-- or a new model in which subscribers pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to all available music, without the right to keep the music after they stop subscribing.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs has been the most prominent proponent of the pay-per-download model, saying that consumers want to own, not rent, their music. Apple's iTunes supports solely downloads, one of the few services to focus exclusively on a single model, and has captured a dominant part of the market to date, selling more than 50 million tracks in its first 11 months.

Others argue that consumers used to the anarchic world of Kazaa and other file-swapping networks have grown accustomed to having thousands of music files at their fingertips. Only services that offer that kind of breadth of content--without requiring customers to pay thousands of dollars--will wean digital music aficionados away from file swapping, argue subscription advocates.

Analysts said they expect subscription services to trail downloads in popularity, given the alien quality of the rental concept.

David Card, a digital media analyst with Jupiter Research, said he doesn't expect Janus to drive dramatic growth in online music subscriptions, adding that it could take years for music rentals to challenge CD and download sales, if they ever do.

"I think this is good, but it's not as if this is a silver bullet," he said. "It is important in adding another feature to the ultimate goal of creating the 'celestial jukebox,' but it's probably not going to jump-start the market."

The Janus release comes as Microsoft is prepping its own commercial music service, which is expected to launch on its MSN Internet service this year and may include a subscription component along with the ability to purchase downloads.

Although Microsoft plans to get into the retail music market, its primary ambition is to be a technology provider and ultimately make its software the de facto industry standard for encoding and playing back digital media files--goals toward which the company could take a big step if subscription services based on Janus catch on.

Microsoft has worked hard to establish its Windows Media file formats in the industry and has won converts among record labels and music services. But it has struggled to win over consumers, having made relatively little headway against the dominant MP3 file format even as it has drawn antitrust scrutiny over its digital media plans.

Last month, European regulators hit Microsoft with a $617 million fine in relation to its digital media practices and ordered the company to offer PC makers a version of its Windows operating system with its media player stripped out. The software giant is also battling a civil antitrust suit involving its digital media business in the United States, where rival RealNetworks is seeking up to $1 billion in damages.

Part of the trouble with subscription services to date is that subscribers typically haven't been able to transfer the millions of files available to them to their portable music players. Record labels have largely required that subscription content "time out," or be made unplayable if a subscriber stops paying, and MP3 players haven't had the capability to support that feature.

That's where Janus comes in. The technology would add a "secure clock" to Microsoft's Windows Digital Rights Management technology, which would let an MP3 player tell whether a particular file was past its expiration date.

Microsoft has been working on that problem--a technically tricky one--for quite some time, and industry sources have said the company originally planned to announce it at the 2003 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Considerable time has elapsed since then, but sources say Microsoft developers finally appear to be reaching the finish line. Beta, or test, versions of the software have gone out to some developers within the past month, industry sources say. The software is expected to be released by late summer or early fall, with some citing a date as soon as July.

A few MP3 player manufacturers, including Gateway and Samsung, have begun quietly advertising Janus support in the specifications for their new high-end products. A representative of MP3 player manufacturer Digital Networks North America said the company was in negotiations with Microsoft and would support Janus, when released.

A Gateway representative said that company had been mistaken in listing current Janus support in the iPod-like player now available on Gateway's Web site, since Microsoft has not yet provided final specifications. But the company would support the technology when it was released, the representative said.

Online music companies are clearly eager for the prospect to make their subscription offerings more attractive to a generation of consumers who are snapping up iPod-like MP3 players, which can hold thousands of songs at a time.

"We are very excited about it, and will support it," said one executive at a music service, who asked not to be named. "We believe it's real and think it will be implemented."

Music service executives said they were still in negotiations with record labels over how to treat the new technology. Allowing people to bring thousands of songs at a time to portable players may wind up costing more than the $10 a month that most subscription services charge today, the executives said.

Nevertheless, some music services are eager to drive more consumers to subscription plans, since per-song download stores have tiny or even nonexistent profit margins.

"There are a couple of companies that are dependent on (subscriptions) for a steady revenue stream that doesn't have a one penny margin," said Liz Brooks, senior vice president of business development for Buy.com's BuyMusic site, which does not offer a subscription plan. "This could be very important."

Jupiter's Card notes that consumers have repeatedly said in surveys that owning music is important, however. It will take considerable time before a large part of the market grows used to the idea of subscribing to music the same way people subscribe today to TV services, they say.

"I think we're really at the stage for the next few years where (subscription) music services are for music aficionados, not for the mass audience," he said. "There are not enough of them that this is going to be a $10 billion business anytime soon."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5183...feed&subj=news


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MS XP SP2 “breaks” P2P.

Q&A: Tony Goodhew, Manager, Microsoft Developer Group
Ryan Naraine

Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) eagerly anticipated Windows XP upgrade promises major security enhancements for customers but the company has already warned that Service Pack 2 (SP2) will break and disrupt existing applications.

In this interview with internetnews.com, product manager in the Microsoft Developer Group Tony Goodhew discusses the thinking behind the security enhancements, the code changes that need to be made and the tradeoff between security and functionality.

Q: You've already warned that XP SP2 will break and disrupt existing applications. What types of applications are going to be affected the most by the security-focused changes?

Some applications will be highly [impacted] but some others will have little or no problems. We launched an online course for developers to spell out all the changes to help them prepare. The peer- to-peer applications will be [impacted] the most. Those types of applications rely on a lot of network activity. They expect to be able to talk through a firewall that will now be turned on by default. So, the P2P guys will have to make major changes or their applications will break.

If you are writing code for applications that listen on a network, you are going to be impacted by these changes. It won't affect the entire applications market but we're mostly letting people know that it affects certain categories.
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news...le.php/3338171


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I Share, You Rip Off, They Pirate
Bill Thompson

Copyright law has become a tool for the powerful, argues technology analyst Bill Thompson, but that is not the way it is supposed to be.
I spent the weekend enjoying the products of other people's intellectual effort, and all for free.

I listened to the Grey Album, read some of Lawrence Lessig's new book on creativity and the internet, and watched The Return of the King on DVD at a friend's house.

Only one of these activities was entirely legal: Professor Lessig has made a copy of his book available under a Creative Commons licence which allows it to circulate freely without payment, as long as it is not exploited commercially.

One was pretty clearly illegal. The Return of the King is not released on DVD until 25 May, but all six gigabytes (or so), is available to download for those with a broadband connection and patience.

Happily for my son Max, who is a big fan of the movie, that number includes a friend of mine who was pleased to show off his success in stealing from Warner Home Video.

I felt uneasy about enjoying the movie, since although anyone can make music in a bedroom studio, film-making needs the millions of dollars that come from DVD rentals to support future work.

So I would like to reassure Peter Jackson that Max will be spending his pocket money on the film when it appears in the shops.

But my third exercise in online distribution was the really interesting one.

Legal battleground

The Grey Album consists of 12 songs created as an experiment by DJ Danger Mouse.

He mixed the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album with music elements sampled from The Beatles' White Album and circulated a few thousand promotional copies before EMI, who own the copyright, notified him that the album was in breach of their copyright and it was withdrawn.

Naturally, copies are circulating widely on the internet, and a couple of weeks ago one of my students was kind enough to pass the files on to me.

It is not, I have to admit, great music, but it is interesting and worth listening to as an example of what sampling and mixing can do.

The Grey Album is clearly a new work of art, inspired by its two sources in the same way as Cezanne influenced Picasso. Yet EMI believe they can
stop it, and are using copyright law to do so.

Whether or not they really do have a strong legal case, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has questioned the validity of their claims, their expensive lawyers have managed to persuade Danger Mouse to withdraw his work from public view, and this is where Professor Lessig comes in.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford University and one of the leading figures in the Creative Commons. In 1999 he wrote Code, the book that for the first time made it clear to non-technical people that the internet is controlled by the programs that create it, and that regulating the net is not only possible but inevitable.

Since then he has been heavily involved in the battle against those who are using new technologies and copyright law to restrict our online freedoms, especially our freedom to create new work that builds on the work of others.

Free Culture argues that cultural creativity is being undermined by rights holders who are abusing the power they have under existing copyright and intellectual property law.

For him, "the opposite of a free culture is a 'permission culture' - a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past".

Danger Mouse has not been granted that permission, and the result is that his music is forced underground, circulating via websites which operate in fear of a cease and desist letter from a corporate lawyer.

Creative possibilities

Both Prof Lessig and I can appreciate the difference between listening to the Grey Album and watching Return of the King.

Danger Mouse wants his music to be heard and is being stopped by a large corporation and its lawyers: his only route to an audience is through the web.

Peter Jackson wants to control the circulation of his films in order to recover the costs of making them and pay for more, and it is reasonable for him to do this.

As Prof Lessig says in the introduction to his book, "a free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom".

Copyright emerged as a bargain between creative people and the state, a bargain which gave creators certain legal rights in the belief that doing so would benefit society as a whole.

It is hard to see how EMI's suppression of the Grey Album helps anyone.

Whatever their legal rights, EMI have no moral right to limit Danger Mouse's creativity in this way.

By doing so, they make it clear that existing laws are simply not good enough to cope with the creative possibilities which are open to us all in the digital world.

We need to find the balance between the freedom exemplified by the Grey Album and the anarchy towards which completely unregulated sharing of stolen intellectual property could lead.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3578851.stm


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Speaking Right
Lawrence Lessig

The Wall Street Journal ran a review of Free Culture Friday. (I can’t show you a link because on the Journal’s theory of the web, it doesn’t make sense to even allow searches on your website without paying first.) Great review, with an interestingly critical twist.

The thrust of Stewart Baker’s criticism is that my argument should be directed to the Right: That copyright law is “asbestos litigation for the Internet age.” “Big Copyright,” he continues, “is one special interest that Republican strategists should love attacking.” And he ends by mapping copyright as a wedge issue:

What’s to fear, that Hollywood will end its generous support of Republican candidates? And talk about wedge issues. Voters under 40 are already more Republican than any other generation. What if the administration stood with them on this issue, proposing a cap on the damages that the industry can extract from college students for downloading music? Say, $1 a song, or even $10, instead of $150,000. Karl Rove could put that on the table, sit back and let John Kerry choose between his contributors and our kids. If that happens, Mr. Lessig could end up next to Ralph Nader in the pantheon of liberals that the Republican Party has learned to love.

Of course not a result I’m eager to see (though after my sniping about Nader, perhaps one I deserve), and of course, I am, as Baker suggests, a liberal.

But Baker is exactly right that this issue should play to the Right as well as to the Left. And as you’ll see in this video from the Progress and Freedom Foundation debate with Jim DeLong (recorded the day before Baker’s review), it is a point I’ve been making as well.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001803.shtml


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Study: DVR Adoption On The Rise
Dinesh C. Sharma

Digital video recorders are set to break out of their niche, and they have pay TV providers to thank for the movement.

Market researcher IDC said Tuesday that DVRs are finally catching on in increasing numbers with American consumers. At the end of 2003, there were 3.2 million DVR households in the United States, and the tally is poised for compound annual growth of 47 percent through 2008, to reach 28 million.

The rising adoption of DVRs--which use a hard drive to record television shows--has much to do with the competition between cable and satellite television providers. Initially, satellite providers promoted DVR-equipped set-top boxes to match cable companies' investment in video-on-demand, and now, the cable industry is being forced to respond, IDC said.

That trend may account for the relatively low market penetration of devices from TiVo, a company that has been practically synonymous with the product category. Despite the strong brand, TiVo accounts for just 39 percent of the U.S. market, according to IDC.

"For the first time, the DVR vendors are getting through to people and showing them that these devices are more than just high-priced VCRs," Greg Ireland, senior research analyst at IDC, said in a statement. "The pay TV providers can take a lot of the credit, and reap the rewards, for finally breaking through to consumers."

While the DVR market in Western Europe resembles that of the United States, Japanese consumers are starting to look to combination DVR/DVD-recording devices. Those hybrids will see shipments of 11.8 million in 2008, adding up to nearly 40 percent of the worldwide market, with the vast majority of the shipments occurring beyond the U.S. market, IDC said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041-5182035.html


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iTunes Case Study

Overview

In recent months, iTunes, Apple's Online Music Store, has become the pacesetter in the digital media marketplace. Its business model responds to many of the current legal and technological challenges in online media distribution. The Digital Media Project's Green Paper, iTunes: How Copyright, Contract, and Technology Shape the Business of Digital Media, provides an in-depth look at this service from the perspective of comparative law. Members of the Digital Media Team examined different legal and regulatory regimes from a range of countries to deterimine how iTunes and services like it are likely to fare under different sets of norms.

By focusing on the specific iTunes example, the Case Study offers a concrete view of the way law, technology, and business model interact in the post-Napster world. The Case Study has focused on four important regulatory issues:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/media/itunes


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When Copyright Is King
Campbell Deane

There’s an old line that one of the perks of the job for lawyers who look after the estates of dead people is that their clients aren’t around to tell them what to do. It came to mind last week when it was revealed that Elvis Aaron Presley may have roots in the village of Lonmay, Aberdeenshire, where one Andrew Presley was born before he sailed across the pond to the United States in 1745.

It was a story which inevitably tempted sad men in ill-fitting wigs and white jumpsuits to the scene, and invited speculation that the village could become somewhere the King’s fans might want to visit. Maybe the local bed-and-breakfast could change its name to the Heartbreak Hotel?

Elvis spent only two hours of his life in Scotland (that famously brief stop-off at Prestwick Airport), but might have been slightly tickled by the idea of his fame being marked in the rather backwater location from where his forefathers came. He came from Southern poor white trash, but was always proud of his family and his roots.

In any event, it has now been decreed that no such thing will ever happen by lawyers for the Elvis estate. They greeted the happy news of their deceased client’s Scottish connection with their customary heavy-handed copyright warning.

Within 24 hours of the discovery, Elvis Presley Enterprises had issued a reminder that it owns all the intellectual property (IP) rights in his name, his image and his songs, including the trademark of the very words Heartbreak Hotel.

To any lawyer who works in IP, this is not what you could call news. Over the past 20 years, Elvis has become something of a case study in defending artistic rights, as the company has not only enforced the laws vigorously but has even managed to change them - in its favour.

It has closed a nightclub named Velvet Elvis, ordered a fan website to take down a virtual tour they had created of Graceland, and is currently trying to block the development of an Elvis Dream Home on a site where he spent his honeymoon.

Even the vast number of (good and bad) Elvis impersonators don’t escape its wrath.

Elvis Presley Enterprises is also credited with lobbying for laws to be passed which result in Tennessee now having the tightest copyright laws in the US, if not the western world. Only there can you enforce the "right to publicity" to prevent others using likenesses of someone - even if they are long dead.

They did lose out once in the UK, when the Court of Appeal threw out its attempt to close down Sid Shaw, a fan who marketed souvenirs under the title "Elvisly Yours". It was reassuring that an English court was not prepared to recognise that someone could "own" the image and name of someone who died more than a quarter of a century ago. But it took Mr Shaw a total of 12 years of litigation before his victory.

Elvis Presley Enterprises argues that it is enforcing the Presley IP rights because it doesn’t want his name or his work subjected to tacky exploitation. But one of Mr Shaw’s arguments was that he only began to produce his own ornaments when he visited Memphis and was appalled at the shoddiness of the goods on show.

Critics point out that the company is always prepared to allow someone to use the songs or the image if they pay for the right, and more money will be generated for the estate.

Two years ago, it allowed a DJ to remix the track A Little Less Conversation as a trailer for the release of a compilation CD that summer. The single went to No1 across Europe, and so did the CD. It’s as a result of business decisions such as these that Elvis is worth more now than he ever was alive.

The firm was back in court in the US in November to prevent the distribution of The Definitive Elvis, a high-quality documentary lasting 16 hours that attempted to cover his entire career in a DVD boxed set. It argued, successfully, that the documentary had used too much television footage of his songs. A 16-hour Elvis documentary which featured none of his songs would, of course, not have any of these copyright problems. But then again, it might get a bit dull.

The principles of intellectual property law, and the attempts to get around them, frequently throw up situations which appear to defy commonsense, and in London this spring we have a classic case in Jailhouse Rock, a musical based on the Elvis film. It will be about Elvis, but it won’t feature the actual song Jailhouse Rock, or indeed any other songs from the film.

While the lawyers fight on, the Elvis fans are the ones left scratching their heads and, who knows, in a supermarket somewhere, maybe there is someone wearing a white jumpsuit who is doing likewise.

As the appeal judge, Richard Tallman, put it, in the documentary judgment: "The King is dead. But his legacy, and those who wish to profit from it, remain very much alive."
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scot...m?id=363862004