Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 24th, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week

"Between January and mid-March this year, Americans spent $1.78 billion at the box office. But in the same period they spent $4.8 billion — more than $3 billion more — to buy and rent DVD's and videocassettes.

"Six years ago, before DVD mattered, Americans spent $18 billion on movie videocassettes. Last year, when the DVD ruled, they spent $22.2 billion on videos and DVD's, according to DVD Exclusive, adding some $4 billion of new consumer spending to the entertainment pot without visibly affecting sales at the box office." – Sharon Waxman

"[At U.S insistence China] agreed to increase the range of violations of intellectual property rights that are subject to criminal investigations and penalties, [however] piracy is carried out on such a large scale that it may be unstoppable." - Elizabeth Becker

"The culture of theft that turns around MP3 is detestable, and I’m very disappointed about that. But neither MP3 nor peer-to-peer are monsters. They are terrific technologies for distributing content." - Leonardo Chiariglione, Founder, Chair, Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)

"My findings suggest that file sharing is not the cause of the recent decline in record sales." - Eric Boorstin

"The studios are making money hand over fist." - John Lesher

"I don’t think you can build a crack-proof system." - Leonardo Chiariglione

"When I get an exciting dload I get up extra early to check it." - Blady, ze0share member.






Justice Dept. Sweeps Suspected 'Warez' Groups
Jim Hu

The U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday that it conducted an international sweep of suspected online copyright pirates.

Dubbed "Operation Fastlink," the sweep consisted of 120 searches in 27 states and 10 countries. Officials seized 200 computers, 30 of which were alleged to have been used as storage and distribution servers, containing thousands of copyrighted works, including newly released movies and music.

The Justice Department estimated that the seized copyright material was worth $50 million.

"In the past 24 hours, working closely with our foreign law enforcement counterparts, we have moved aggressively to strike at the very core of the international online piracy world," U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a statement.

The operation specifically targeted "warez" groups, which allegedly disseminate pirated copies of computer software, games, movies and music on the Internet. Members of such groups may distribute material to "select clientele" over secure servers, and those files eventually end up on an Internet Relay Chat network or a peer-to-peer file-sharing service, according to the Justice Department.

Operation Fastlink is the latest in an ongoing campaign by law enforcement agencies around to world to target suspected warez groups. In 2001, the Justice Department and foreign agencies conducted a two-day raid that seized computers from a group named "DrinkOrDie."

The Justice Department added that Fastlink targeted a number of suspected warez groups, including Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class and Project X. Investigations were conducted in the United States, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Industry trade groups such as the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Business Software Alliance and the Entertainment Software Association were involved with the investigation. Separately, the RIAA has filed nearly 2,000 individual lawsuits against alleged file-swappers in hopes of scaring people away from using peer-to-peer software such as Kazaa.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5198047.html


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Internet Technology Vulnerable to Hackers


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Researchers uncovered a serious flaw in the underlying technology for nearly all Internet traffic, a discovery that led to an urgent and secretive international effort to prevent global disruptions of Web surfing, e-mails and instant messages.

The British government announced the vulnerability in core Internet technology on Tuesday. Left unaddressed, experts said, it could allow hackers to knock computers offline and broadly disrupt vital traffic-directing devices, called routers, that coordinate the flow of data among distant groups of computers.

''Exploitation of this vulnerability could have affected the glue that holds the Internet together,'' said Roger Cumming, director for England's National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre.

The Homeland Security Department issued its own cyberalert hours later that attacks ``could affect a large segment of the Internet community.'' It said normal Internet operations probably would resume after such attacks stopped. Experts said there were no reports of attacks using this technique.

The risk was similar to Internet users ''running naked through the jungle, which didn't matter until somebody released some tigers,'' said Paul Vixie of the Internet Systems Consortium Inc.

''It's a significant risk,'' Vixie said. ''The larger Internet providers are jumping on this big time. It's really important this just gets fixed before the bad guys start exploiting it for fun and recognition.''

The flaw affecting the Internet's ''transmission control protocol,'' or TCP, was discovered late last year by a computer researcher in Milwaukee. Paul Watson said he identified a method to reliably trick personal computers and routers into shutting down electronic conversations by resetting the machines remotely.

Experts previously said such attacks could take between four years and 142 years to succeed because they require guessing a rotating number from roughly 4 billion possible combinations. Watson said he can guess the proper number with as few as four attempts, which can be accomplished within seconds.

Routers continually exchange important updates about the most efficient traffic routes between large networks. Continued successful attacks against routers can cause them to go into a standby mode, known as ''dampening,'' that can persist for hours.

Cisco Systems Inc., which acknowledged its popular routers were among those vulnerable, distributed software repairs and tips to otherwise protect large corporate customers. There were few steps for home users to take; Microsoft Corp. said it did not believe Windows users were too vulnerable and made no immediate plans to update its software.

Using Watson's technique to attack a computer running Windows ''would not be something that would be easy to do,'' said Steve Lipner, Microsoft's director for security engineering strategy.

Already in recent weeks, some U.S. government agencies and companies operating the most important digital pipelines have fortified their own vulnerable systems because of early warnings communicated by some security organizations. The White House has expressed concerns especially about risks to crucial Internet routers because attacks against them could profoundly disrupt online traffic.

''Any flaw to a fundamental protocol would raise significant concern and require significant attention by the folks who run the major infrastructures of the Internet,'' said Amit Yoran, the government's cybersecurity chief. The flaw has dominated discussions since last week among experts in security circles.

The public announcement coincides with a presentation Watson expects to make Thursday at an Internet security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, where Watson said he would disclose full details of his research.

Watson predicted that hackers would understand how to begin launching attacks ''within five minutes of walking out of that meeting.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/tech...et-Threat.html


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Next Anti-P2P Technology? Sharks With Friggin' Laser Beams Attached To Their Heads:

The entertainment cartel has a new weapon in its war against file sharing and it's looking for willing beta-testers. News.com reports that Vivendi Universal Entertainment and Universal Music Group are talking to universities, ISPs and technology companies about testing their Automated Copyright Notice System (ACNS), a technology that can automatically cut off an individual's access to peer-to-peer networks while Internet access of individuals suspected of sharing copyrighted material. It's an interesting concept but, as Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann notes, it's almost certain to be defeated by hacks and workarounds. "Whether it's an opening gambit for the recording industry to try to tell universities how to design their computer systems, we'll have to wait and see," von Lohmann told News.com. "The trouble I have with this, there will be countermeasures, and who is going to absorb costs to constantly modify this system to make it work? Do universities really want to be drawn into the arms race?"
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...sv/8467648.htm


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FCC To Look At Digital Radio Piracy?
John Borland

Federal regulators appear to be making a surprise move toward proposing new content protection rules for digital broadcast radio, consumer groups said Wednesday.

In a joint letter to the Federal Communications Commission, Consumers Union and Public Knowledge asked regulators to avoid issuing new antipiracy proposals for the nascent medium before holding a strict review of technical costs and benefits.

The two groups said the letter was triggered by private information indicating the FCC was close to releasing a proposal or starting an inquiry on the issue, possibly as early as Thursday. The technology proposal would be similar to the "broadcast flag" already instituted for video, a plan that has not yet been seriously considered for digital audio, the groups said.

We "urge that the commission avoid a rush to judgment in this matter," the groups wrote. "There are neither pressing technological issues nor spectrum-related issues that require the commission's immediate action to protect digital radio content."

In comparison to other mediums, digital radio is still young enough to have barely triggered the kind of antipiracy debates already seen with the Internet and digital TV. But few believe that controversies surrounding the technology are far-off.

Digital radio, which is already beginning to broadcast in a few places around the world, turns over-the-air radio signals from analog into digital broadcasts. Its receivers better resemble computers than they do traditional radio.

Because the content is digitized, and potentially could be played on radios with processors and hard drives, people predict it will offer the ability to record CD-quality sound from airwaves or set up tracking and archiving capabilities much like TiVo. Consumers could listen for and save particular bits of music, for example.

That worries record companies, which foresee another way for consumers to get music for free, rather than purchasing CDs or songs from online stores like Apple Computer's iTunes. They suggested ideas like the audio broadcast flag in an FCC informational roundtable held earlier this year, but found little support from consumer groups or consumer electronics device makers. Most in the industry expected the issue to drop.

A Recording Industry Association of America representative had no immediate comment on the FCC's unconfirmed plans or the consumer groups' letter. A representative for the FCC could not immediately be reached for comment.

The video broadcast flag, on which an audio proposal might be based, was approved by the FCC late last year. It creates new rules that would let digital TV broadcasts include bits of data indicating whether a program could be copied and sent over the Internet. Computers and consumer electronics devices must read and obey this bit of information in order to receive digital TV signals.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5186980.html


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Did the RIAA Secretly Lobby the FCC for a Digital Radio Tech Mandate?
EFF

Just over a year ago, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) issued a policy statement condemning government-mandated technical protection measures for digital content.

"The imposition of technical mandates is not the best way to serve the long-term interests of record companies, technology companies, and consumers," read the statement. "The role of the government, if needed at all, should be limited to forcing compliance with voluntarily developed functional specifications reflecting consensus among affected interests."

You read that right, folks: for a moment, there, the RIAA agreed with EFF.

Unfortunately, that moment appears to have passed. On Friday, our friends at Public Knowledge put in a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to determine whether or not the RIAA has covertly been lobbying the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for the latest government tech mandate: a "broadcast flag" for digital radio.

Explained Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn in the media release, "There has to be a reason why the Commission was so drastically prepared to change course, and it didn't show up in the required public filings." She added that she didn't buy the RIAA's claim that the group "didn't know" it had to disclose its contact with FCC commissioners and staff.

"If the request turns up any previously undocumented communications," noted EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz, "the RIAA will have violated the Ex Parte disclosure laws."

Whether or not the RIAA is found to be at fault, the problem remains of convincing the FCC not to adopt yet another ill-considered government tech mandate. EFF is working with Public Knowledge and others to fight both the original broadcast flag and the push for this new mandate -- which comes in the absence of a demand for action from Congress, a record of argument in the FCC docket, and any attempt by the RIAA to work out an industry solution.
http://blogs.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001434.php


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Levies Could Double, Group Warns
Jack Kapica

The levies imposed on blank digital media to compensate recording artists for acts of piracy could double if Canada ratifies an international copyright treaty, a coalition of interested industries warned today.

In a submission to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, the Canadian Coalition for Fair Digital Access said that increases of up to 100 per cent on the levies are possible if Canada goes ahead with ratification of the World Intellectual Property Organization treaties.

If the levies were kept in place, the CCFDA said, they would have to be raised because Canada would be obligated to pay compensation to artists in other countries that signed the treaty.

Canada has signed the international WIPO treaty, but has not ratified it. To ratify the treaty, Canada must rewrite its copyright laws to conform to the international agreement.

Doing that and keeping the levies would be counterproductive to the interests of Canada's recording artists, the coalition argued. Foreign artists have greater air play than Canadian artists, and so most of the revenue would go directly to rights holders outside the country.

"Ratifying WIPO without repealing the levy would not only create an extra financial burden on consumers and businesses, but ... it would provide little or no additional assistance to Canadian artists," the CCFDA said in a statement.

The CCFDA is an organization of manufacturers, retailers and distributors seeking to repeal Canada's private copy levy and replace it with a more equitable system. Its members include AMD, Apple Canada, Best Buy Canada/Future Shop, Costco Wholesale, Dell Canada, HP Canada, InterTAN/Radio Shack, Intel Canada, London Drugs, Micron, Retail Council of Canada, Sony Canada, STAPLES Business Depot and Wal-Mart Canada.

The group says it would be ready to support WIPO ratification if the levy were repealed or if the federal government committed itself to phase out the levy as digital-rights management technologies become more widely used by the recording industry.

The levy allows the Canadian recording industry to be compensated by consumers and businesses whether or not they copy music.

The CCFDA called Canada's copyright legislation "outdated" and said the current levy system leaves Canadians "unfairly penalized." The coalition urged the government to support measures that provide Canadian copyright holders with fair payments.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/


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File Sharing Fight Varies Across Universities
Elizabeth Thomas

In the wake of several rounds of lawsuits against illegal file sharers, colleges and universities are taking steps to curb the practice among students.

According to the 2003 nationwide Campus Computing Survey, nearly two-thirds of schools who participated reported having institutional policies in place designed to reduce students' illegal downloading of copyrighted music and movie files.

The policies differ among universities. Schools like the University of Rochester and Pennsylvania State University have provided students with a university-supported legal alternative to file sharing that allows students to download and purchase MP3s.

Other schools simply have policies that comply with the law, under which sharing copyrighted files is completely illegal without compensation. According to the survey, almost four-fifths of universities -- 80.9 percent of public universities and 77.5 percent of private universities -- have campus codes of conduct that focus on downloaded commercial content.

Despite these statistics, there is no official policy against file sharing at Penn. "We try to stay away from technical details in our policies because technology changes so rapidly," said Dave Millar, Penn's information security officer.

However, Penn's policies expressly forbid copyright infringement of any kind. "We maintain that infringement is against both our own policies and the law," Millar said.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a specific anti-file-sharing policy that defines fair use and copyright infringement for students and forbids using any programs that "generate excessive network traffic apart from educational purposes."

As an example, the policy cites Kazaa, a file-sharing program students often use to download music and movie files.

In addition to prohibiting file sharing, some schools have adopted strict enforcement policies.

Students who use the University of Michigan's technology in ways the school deems inappropriate are subject to "termination of Internet access, disciplinary review, expulsion, termination of employment, legal action or other disciplinary action" from the school.

The Recording Industry Association of America has encouraged colleges to take steps to curb illegal file sharing. Surveys have shown that schools are starting to do so.

"The 2003 data confirm that colleges and universities are making significant efforts to respond to the concerns of media industry officials regarding the unauthorized distribution and downloading of music, video and other commercial content on campus networks," Kenneth C. Green, who founded and runs The Campus Computing Project, said in the survey report.

As of 2003, 92.3 percent of universities have policies intended to stem the unauthorized duplication of commercial software, and 87.4 percent have codes of conduct regarding the fair use of copyrighted content like books and articles.
http://www.dailypennsylvanian.com.


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Ex-policeman Quits DirecTV, Says It Was Like Working for the Mob
EFF

Security Focus (hyperlinks, mine): "A one-time enforcer in DirecTV's anti-piracy campaign is suing his ex- employer for wrongful discharge, after he allegedly resigned rather than continue to prosecute the company's controversial war against buyers of hacker-friendly smart card equipment.

John Fisher, a former police officer, alleges in a complaint filed in Los Angeles County Court late last month that he joined DirecTV as a senior investigator in July, 2002, expecting to serve a legitimate investigative role tracking signal pirates. He wound up instead 'as little better than a "bag man for the mob,"' the lawsuit claims. He's seeking unspecified damages, and an end to DirecTV's tactics."
http://blogs.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001433.php


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Labels Peer at Pirates for Insights
Scott Banerjee

Say what you will about Internet pirates, their downloads speak volumes about what's hot in music.

That fact hasn't been lost on record labels, which are increasingly subscribing -- albeit discreetly -- to companies that monitor illegal download traffic on peer-to-peer services.

"If we weren't looking at the data, we'd be pretty foolish," says Jeremy Welt, head of new media at Madonna's Maverick Records, one of the few labels that admits to subscribing to services that track illegal downloads.

But John Fagot, a consultant for Webspins, a company that monitors P2P services, says its data is being used at every major label.

BigChampagne, the other major player, acknowledges that Warner Bros., Interscope, Elektra, DreamWorks, Atlantic and Disney's Hollywood label have all used its data, as well as MTV and MTV2.

All of which raises the question, Does the industry's use of peer-to-peer data for marketing purposes somehow add legitimacy to the very services that it is trying to stamp out through an aggressive legal campaign?

"Just as it is valuable to understand how pirated CDs are hawked at flea markets, the same applies to the online world. That in no way is any justification for the illegal activity or those who facilitate it," says a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA), the lobbying arm of the major U.S. record labels.

SEARCHING DATA

BigChampagne, which is based in Beverly Hills, Calif., and opened for business in 2000, tracks the two basic activities that can be monitored on peer-to-peer networks: "queries," or searches, and "acquisitions," or downloads.

Then it matches a computer's IP address to its zip code, creating a map of P2P activity.

Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, says searches can isolate the use of any form of copyrighted material, from music, feature films, software and videogames to instruction manuals or TV episodes.

Webspins, which opened in 2001 in Studio City, Calif., employs a similar strategy, except it monitors traffic across "supernodes," or computers acting as file-sharing devices, Fagot says.

At a client's request, it inserts a searchable digital file into a filter to see who is searching for what by zip code, he says.

Maverick has subscribed to BigChampagne reports since 2000.

"Sometimes you're in a vacuum," Welt says, "and having more information on songs that people in your market helps you stay focused on your goal."

For labels, the instantaneous research into a target audience can translate into increased radio spins and more record sales.

A case in point is Maverick act Story of the Year and its single "Until the Day I Die." It recently ranked among BigChampagne's top 20 downloads.

But the single was getting substantially less radio airplay than adjacent top 20 artists like Blink-182 and Audioslave.

With data in hand, Welt took his case to radio stations.

"Week after week, we looked at BigChampagne reports and data on the conference call," Welt says. "We gave them a different picture of what was happening."

Eventually, Welt persuaded stations in certain markets to play Story of the Year during prime-time listening hours, which he believes helped CD sales. Story of the Year's album, "Page Avenue," recently went gold for U.S. shipments in excess of 500,000 units.

Though BigChampagne's "TopSwaps" chart often mirrors the Billboard Mainstream Top 40, "sometimes it lets you see things before they happen," Welt says. "You might not be aware that the buzz has already started."

BILLBOARD CHART?

Nielsen SoundScan is considering the tracking services to create a standardized metric for P2P activity, similar to how it monitors legal downloading for Billboard charts.

But the industry has let it be known that it would oppose a chart that specifically tracks illegal music downloads.

Some executives liken it to Billboard tracking CDs that have been shoplifted. But the idea isn't without precedent. The news media frequently report on the most widely stolen cars.

"Whenever you have a new technology, it takes a while to get accepted," Fagot says.

Ted Cohen, senior VP of digital development and distribution for EMI music, is taking a longer-term approach to P2P trends, as well as overall digital consumer behavior.

EMI and NPD Music Watch Digital, a service that tracks online music distribution, have developed a method to chart what consumers do with their music after they download it from either a P2P network or a legitimate site.

"The more we know about usage, qualitatively and quantitatively, the better it's going to help us shape the next iteration of business model," Cohen says.

"We've had great first starts, but for them to be great long-term businesses, they have to evolve," he adds.

Over the long term, some industry insiders think P2P services will go legitimate.

The industry is already privately discussing how to eventually monetize file traffic.

That eventuality, however, will hinge on copyright litigation and cooperation among major labels, independent labels, publishers, software manufacturers, artists and Internet service providers.

"It's going to be a difficult transformation, but not impossible," Garland says.

"Our original intent was to treat downloadable music as a proof of concept," he adds. "This can be done."
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...section=new s


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EDITORIAL OBSERVER

The Recording Industry Soldiers On Against Illegal Downloading
Verlyn Klinkenborg

In the past few weeks there have been some mixed developments in the recording industry's battle against illegal file sharing. On the legal front, the industry began a new round of international lawsuits against foreign file sharers. A misguided new bill authorizing civil charges in file-sharing cases is making its way through the Senate, and a bill criminalizing copyright violations over peer-to-peer networks has been passed out of committee in the House. The Justice Department has established an Intellectual Property Task Force to look at ways to crack down on violations. Meanwhile, a Canadian judge has refused to force Internet providers to give up the addresses of file sharers. His ruling effectively makes the sharing of music files legal in Canada.

But this isn't just a legal battle, of course. It's a battle of information and ideas. A new book from Lawrence Lessig called "Free Culture" makes a forceful, cogent defense of many forms of file sharing. And — perhaps worst of all from the industry's perspective — a new academic study prepared by professors at Harvard and the University of North Carolina concludes, "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero." This directly counters recording industry claims that place nearly all the blame for declining CD sales on illegal file sharing.

Without condoning the theft of intellectual property or the violation of copyright, it's still possible to find a great deal of common sense in Mr. Lessig's arguments in favor of balancing "the protection of the law against the strong public interest that innovation continue." As it stands, the position of the recording industry and its ally, the movie industry, is simply to shut down innovation. That is the clear purpose of the file-sharing bills pending in Congress. That has been the entertainment industry's reaction to all new distribution technologies since Thomas Edison.

But the recording industry's interests are not synonymous with the public interest. The industry assumes that the main reason people engage in file sharing is simply to get free music. For many people, certainly, that is its main appeal. But file sharing — like the new generation of legal music-downloading services, including Apple's wildly successful iTunes Music Store — is also a direct response to a number of unpleasant realities in the music business. As long as the recording industry lives and dies by the blockbuster, music listeners will be looking for ways to see deeper into the music catalog. For some listeners, file sharing has become a way to experiment — to try out new music without first shelling out $16 or $17 for a CD. There was a time when radio gave listeners a chance to hear lots of new music. Thanks to conglomerates like Clear Channel, those days are dead.

The recording industry needs to catch up to music lovers, and soon. Punitive tactics protect the industry's legal rights, but by themselves do not address its deeper problems. Some recording companies have realized this and begun to use file-sharing data, which offers an immediate reading on consumer interest, to hone their marketing. One or two companies have even begun to post paid versions of songs on file-swapping networks simply for exposure. The industry's tactics in the battle against file sharing look to many people — including many artists — less like an effort to protect copyright and more like an attempt to continue the industry's control over the distribution of music. The resources of the industry could be better spent if, as the authors of that recent study suggest, it is waging war against a financially negligible problem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/op...rtne r=GOOGLE


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In a Fast-Moving Web World, Some Prefer the Dial-Up Lane
Matt Richtel

High-speed Internet access is being adopted by millions of Americans each year, growing as quickly as any modern technology. So what makes Dana Jenkins think she can resist?

In fact, she is part of another big group, the tens of millions of Americans seemingly immune to the lure of more speed and satisfied with dial-up services. A majority of Americans who surf the Internet still do so by dialing in on regular telephone lines, despite the rapidly narrowing price gap between high-speed and dial-up connections.

People like Ms. Jenkins are neither Luddites nor laggards, but consumers content to pay for a service that is less than optimal, and at times even frustratingly slow, because they say greater speed is not worth the trouble of starting over with a new telecommunications provider and getting a new e-mail address, even if the added cost is small.

"I resent it," said Ms. Jenkins, 61, an avid Internet user in Marietta, Ga., of the mild pressure she feels to get a high-speed connection. She pays $21.95 a month to dial into the Net — mostly to do research for the doctorate in communications that she is working toward — and said paying even $10 more for a faster connection would feel wasteful.

"I don't do gaming. I don't download a lot of graphics," she said. "For the money I would spend, I don't need it."

Those are words that can give high-technology industry executives chills. They have proclaimed the spread of high-speed, or broadband, connections to be integral to the industry's growth, essential to American competitiveness and indispensable to consumers. Even President Bush jumped into the fray last month, calling for affordable, universal high-speed access by 2007.

Up to now, the market for high-speed connections has been dominated by the young, educated, affluent and tech-savvy. In some circles, it is considered not just functional, but an essential bit of modernity, like knowing what happened on "The Sopranos" or that Diesel refers to jeans, not fuel. Some users of dial-up sheepishly acknowledge that they avoid admitting their low network speeds when they are with their better-connected friends.

The situation is likely to change as more users move to broadband. In 2003, 23 million households had high-speed access, up from 16 million the year before, according to the Yankee Group, a research firm. In 2003, 51 million American households connected to the Internet through a dial-up connection, down from 55 million a year before, the firm reported.

A typical dial-up connection delivers information at 56 kilobytes a second; broadband connections are 5 to 25 times faster.

In practical terms, the performance depends largely on what task a person is doing. E-mail, for example, can take about the same amount of time to download, because it is a small amount of data. But high-speed connections can make a huge difference with the transfer of graphics, elaborate Web pages or video.

For those uses, the denizens of the dial-up world have learned to wait.

"I bring a newspaper and sit and read," said Alex Pope of Berkeley, Calif., explaining how he passes time waiting to download data, like the music programs for upcoming symphonies, on dial-up.

Mr. Pope, 74, a retired lawyer, does not have the option millions of dial-up users have: broadband connections at work that allow them to surf the Internet quickly when they need to. If office connections are counted, 55 percent of Americans have high-speed access, according to a study released on Sunday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit research group.

Danielle Kolko, 31, of Louisville, Colo., who works in the human resources department at a marketing company, is one who does high-speed surfing at the office. But some people in her social circle still give her grief about her slow-speed home life.

"I have friends who are high-tech computer engineers who are horrified by the fact I have dial-up," Ms. Kolko said. "I just tell them I'm more patient than they are."

While many dial-up users cite cost as one reason to stick with their existing service, the price of high-speed service is becoming more affordable.

Dial-up service costs can range from $10 a month from discount companies to $21.95 a month for services from big operators like EarthLink and MSN. Cable modem service — one of the two principal forms of high-speed access — costs $40 to $45 a month, according to the Yankee Group. Telephone digital subscriber line service, the other principal form, can cost $35 a month, but the price typically drops to $30 a month if users also buy long-distance and local phone service from the same phone company.

Some dial-up services, like Juno and America Online, are now selling what they call accelerated dial-up services. These services — which can cost several dollars more than regular dial-up — use a new compression technology to load some Web pages 40 percent faster, though some content takes just as long to download, the Yankee Group said.

Patrick Mahoney, an analyst with the Yankee Group, said some dial-up users do not realize how much the price difference has narrowed. Many users may not know that a digital subscriber line can be "as little as $8 more per month than some dial-up services," Mr. Mahoney said.

The industry already has a label for people who have not yet moved into the fast lane: prime prospects. Verizon Communications, the nation's largest telephone company, has begun a campaign to convince consumers that high-speed access is affordable and easy to set up.

"There's a mind-set that broadband is hard to install and complex," said John Wimsatt, vice president of broadband marketing for Verizon. Noting that some consumers will always be wary of new technology, he said, "Some people still have their VCR's flashing 12 o'clock."

Verizon's marketing is not convincing everybody. In a survey taken in February, the Pew project found that 60 percent of dial-up users said they were not interested in switching to broadband, roughly the same result as in a February 2003 survey. According to the survey, 47 percent of men wanted to switch, compared with 34 percent of women, a notable gender difference.

The Yankee Group has reported a number of differences between dial-up and broadband users: 47 percent of young unmarried people have broadband, compared with 30 percent of young married couples. It found that broadband has the highest penetration among upper-middle-class households, suggesting that price remains a factor in decisions to get high-speed connections.

There are other factors, too, for loyal dial-up users. Gena Haskett, 46, a computer skills tutor in Glendale, Calif., and a frequent Internet user, worries that a high-speed connection would make her computer more susceptible to viruses and attacks by hackers.

Cameron Brown, 49, of Oakland, Calif., said her reasons for sticking with dial-up were based on "fear, inertia and self-governance." Ms. Brown, a former journalist, said that faster speeds would probably entice her to spend even more time in front of the computer. Besides, she said, she does not want to deal with "another hassle" in subscribing to a new service.

Then again, she is feeling a bit behind. As it is now, she says, she hits the download button, goes to do something else — get dinner, maybe — and comes back later.

It would be nice, she acknowledged, to be able to download information "without having to wait 20 minutes."

"I need to bite the bullet and do it," Ms. Brown said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/19/te...19DIAL.html?hp


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No Politics Are Local
Christopher Caldwell

As readers of Adult Video News and the 2005 federal budget will be aware, Attorney General John Ashcroft is staffing up the Justice Department for a prosecutorial assault on America's $10 billion pornography industry. Moderate civil libertarians have traditionally taken the side of pornographers on such matters. While a local community can make its own rules, they say, prosecuting smut at the federal level is Orwellian overkill. But this localist view makes less sense in the Internet age. It is unfair to ask bluenoses to band together to sway their city councils when most porn gets made not by some louche photographer living in a trailer across the railroad tracks but by multinational corporations with lobbyists in Washington.

One Ashcroft target is a company near Los Angeles whose films show simulated rapes and murders. You would think that would pass muster as obscene in any setting -- at least according to the Supreme Court's ''Miller test,'' which defines as obscenity anything that disgusts ''the average person, applying contemporary community standards.'' But Ashcroft isn't taking any chances. The Justice Department placed an order for the offending videos in Pittsburgh and will prosecute the company before a jury there. Now, suddenly, porn executives are changing their tune on localism. Pittsburgh is not the real community under which the Miller test should be enforced, they argue. The real community is the broader ''community'' of Internet users.

The battle between Ashcroft and the pornographers fits a pattern. By consensus of the adversaries, divisive issues are being argued in ever-widening jurisdictions. The natural arena for discussing them turns out to be not the bedroom or the town but the nation or even the world. This is not what most people expected of our age. Ever since the media theorist Marshall McLuhan announced that electronic interdependence was turning the world into a ''global village,'' we have put the stress on the adjective ''global.'' The wired world would bring a bigger choice of cuisines, we thought, but no increase in aggravation. Instead, the key term turns out to be the noun ''village.'' And villagers are notoriously bad at tolerating differences that bug them.

Why else should the enthusiasm of Massachusetts judges and a San Francisco mayor for same-sex marriage be such a big deal to the rest of the country? It is not because the issue pits libertarians against moralists, dionysiacs against prudes. (On the contrary, what worries the skeptical global villager is not that gay marriage will bring moral laxity but that it imposes a rigorous notion of tolerance on those who may not want it.) Two moral orders that worked fine in isolation -- human rights and traditional values -- wind up locked in a death struggle when, thanks to the Internet, television and the pressures of law and politics, each cannot get out of the other's hair. And it is in the national arena that it will be decided which of those orders emerges as the new uniform morality.

Many gay-marriage advocates claim that same-sex marriage should remain a local issue. They argue that once one state recognizes gay marriage, there is little danger that the Constitution's full-faith-and-credit clause will compel other states to follow suit. But this is little more than the signature debating trick of our time: trying to advance one's own effort to enforce national standards in the guise of a modest localism.

It's a trick that gets deployed in the most unlikely venues. Look at this month's rejection of a proposed Wal-Mart megastore by the people of Inglewood, Calif. Superficially, this ballot-initiative vote looked like local government in action, but it was hardly that. A Wal-Mart official complained that ''outside special interests'' had snookered the natives into rejecting the store. If so, those outsiders can't have been more aggressive than Wal-Mart itself. After Inglewood's city council initially rejected the store, the company's national headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., began collecting 10,000 signatures to put the matter before the voters. Today, even when it comes to opening a store, no politics are local.

This spring, national governments all over Europe were engaged in village politics of their own. Ireland began enforcing the E.U.'s most comprehensive smoking laws. The incoming Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, promised that his government would wage an ''unceasing fight against criminal machismo.'' Both efforts put moral absolutism before local pragmatism. Ireland is not allowing a few spots to welcome smokers so that a little piece of Dublin can stay as it was when James Joyce haunted the pubs. Spain is not going to carve out an exception whereby Basques or Estremadurans can boss women around in the time-honored Iberian fashion.

We (stupidly) believed that McLuhan's global village would be a friction-free Brotherhood of Man. But McLuhan never said that. In his last television interview, in 1977, his interviewer began, ''I had some idea that as we got global and tribal we were going to try to --''

McLuhan interrupted. ''The closer you get together, the more you like each other?'' he said. ''There's no evidence of that in any situation that we've ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each other.''

That is why what used to be penny-ante administrative arguments or obscure regional quarrels have been transformed into high-stakes battles over universal values. Of course, McLuhan's readers weren't the first to mix technology and visionary optimism. Walt Whitman, considering ''the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war,'' asked: ''Are all nations communing? Is there going to be but one heart to the globe?'' Apparently there is, and it's waiting for us to fight over it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/magazine/18WWLN.html


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Fake "Clean Slate" Gone - How About a Real One?
EFF

The RIAA has finally seen the light with regard to its "Clean Slate" program, which offered false amnesty, or shamnesty, to people who admitted to file sharing. Citing the success of its "education" campaign, the group has abruptly cancelled the program.

"Clean Slate" promised that in exchange for a confession, you could gain meaningful protection from lawsuits for copyright infringement. In fact, the program left you vulnerable to lawsuits by record companies and music publishers, as well as bands like Metallica that retain independent control of music rights.

Eric Parke, represented by Ira Rothken, brought suit, charging fraudulent business practices -- and here, perhaps, we can glean the true reason for the RIAA's change of heart. Its attorneys announced during a recent court proceeding that the group had discontinued "Clean Slate" -- and that therefore the case was moot. The announcement took Mr. Parke, his attorney and the judge by surprise.

These kinds of machinations are a terrible waste of time and money. If the RIAA is sincere about helping music fans come in from the cold, it should turn its considerable energies toward offering a true "amnesty" program -- say, by adopting a voluntary collective licensing plan that would turn millions of people from criminals seeking shelter from the law into legitimate paying customers.
http://blogs.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001435.php


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Teaching an Old Walkman Some New Steps
Ken Belson

Last July, while most people were taking summer vacations, the Sony Corporation of America made a little noticed, but crucial announcement. Jay Samit, a longtime music industry executive, was appointed general manager of Sony Connect, a new subsidiary that will sell songs online and allow consumers to play them on their Sony gadgets.

His appointment was largely overlooked outside the company, but inside, the move was immediately understood as a way to unite the sometimes conflicting electronics and content divisions.

That internal battle was seen by many as the reason Sony, the inventor of the Walkman and the biggest player in the portable audio market, was being trounced by Apple Computer and its hit, the iPod music player, in the emerging digital segment. Something had to be done.

How Sony got outflanked is as much about Sony's inflexibility as Apple's initiative. With its ownership of premier music labels and its foundation in electronics, Sony had all the tools to create its own version of iPod long before Apple's product came to market in 2001. But Sony has long wrestled with how to build devices that let consumers download and copy music without undermining sales in the music labels or agreements with its artists.

Mr. Samit, 43, came from the EMI Group with experience untangling technological and legal knots. He had had a long career selling traditional content in new formats. And he was an outsider, and considered better able to bridge the gap between Sony's engineers in Tokyo and its music team in the United States. "The only reason we didn't do this earlier is the guys didn't talk to each other," Mr. Samit said of Sony's new digital music venture.

A lot is riding on the Connect online store, which will be released in a few weeks. If it catches on with consumers, it will help validate the company's long-held goal of integrating its electronics, music and movie businesses - and give it a shot at re-establishing its leadership in the latest generation of portable music.

"Now it's about integration," said Robert S. Wiesenthal, the chief strategy officer of Sony Broadband Entertainment, who works with Mr. Samit. "Unless you have the integration, it won't work."

Sony's brand name, vast retail network and expertise in electronics are notable advantages, which Mr. Samit said made it possible for Sony to offer a more affordable and more convenient alternative to Apple's music system.

Like Apple's iTunes online music store, Connect will have 500,000 songs that can be downloaded for 99 cents each. But while iTunes songs can be played only on iPods, Sony already sells a variety of devices, including minidisc and compact disc players, which can play songs bought on Connect's Web site. Sony's new Hi-MD disc player, for instance, will hold up to 45 hours of music on one disc, which will retail for about $7.

One of Sony's flash memory players will store up to 22 hours of music and have batteries that last about 100 hours.

"We're not about one-size-fits-all," said Mr. Samit, sitting in his Manhattan office with Louis Armstrong playing in the background. "You can't believe it's about just one brick that people will carry," he said, referring to the iPod.

Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, said the minidisc player, which uses discs that can be recorded on, much like a cassette player, would not catch on in the United States the way it had overseas.

"We have a very healthy respect for Sony," Mr. Jobs said in a telephone interview. "But Sony believes very strongly in the minidisc, and we don't. It might work in Japan but not here." Apple's most expensive iPod, by contrast, uses a hard drive that can store up to 10,000 songs.

Mr. Samit said Sony would cover all bases when it releases a player this year that included a hard drive just like the iPod. Sony is also developing a portable device that plays video downloads, he said.

Sony will compete strongly on price. The most expensive iPod costs $499, while Sony's devices capable of using Connect - including network Walkmen and players that use memory sticks - will sell for $60 to $300.

And Sony is planning to market broadly, starting this summer with promotions with McDonald's - buy a Big Mac and get a free downloadable song - and United Airlines, which will let fliers exchange mileage points for songs.

Apple will remain a formidable rival. The company's new mini version of the iPod and longer battery life for its products make its brand as sought after as ever. To extend its reach, Apple has licensed iPod technology to Hewlett-Packard and made the iTunes site available to AOL and its 25 million subscribers. It wisely made iTunes compatible with Windows operating systems.

"This is a different phenomenon from 15 years ago," said Megan Graham-Hackett, an equity analyst at Standard & Poor's. "Sony wouldn't have looked at Apple as a competitor then. Apple has been quite innovative."

Apple, though, is not the only rival Sony faces. Dell and other manufacturers have come out with digital music players. What's more, songs downloaded from Dell's MusicMatch Web site can be copied onto a much wider variety of devices.

"We don't like to lock people and force them to use this or that service," said Mark Vena, director for the digital home marketing team at Dell.

Dell, like many others, is betting that the digital audio market will become like the computer industry, where prices for computers fell as more machines used the Windows operating system. If this happens, Apple and Sony, with their more proprietary services, may fall victim to the music software program that is most widely used. Microsoft, with its Windows Media format, is trying to become that standard. Already, dozens of online stores use its software, which is compatible with hundreds of devices.

"Sony is coming out with their own format, but we don't need another standard," said Joe Wilcox, an analyst at Jupiter Research. "The market for protected digital downloads is in the early stages of a format war. It's a recipe for consumer confusion."

Still, Mr. Wilcox and other analysts said that Sony had a loyal following that could help it seize a share of the digital music market quickly.

"Look at the resources at their disposal," said Douglas Krone, the chief executive of Dynamism.com, a Web site that sells high-end electronics. "They own all the intellectual property and they have the retail channel. It will be hard for Apple to maintain its market share."

While the competitors take on each other, they are also fighting music piracy. Despite the efforts of the recording industry and government, more than 99 percent of the songs downloaded or swapped on the Internet are still copied illegally. This has forced legitimate companies to charge low prices, even before they pay the recording artists or cover their costs.

Even so, the market for downloadable music and digital music players is potentially lucrative. By 2008, the percentage of music sales online is expected to triple, to 12 percent, according to Jupiter Research. Online music sites sold 25 million songs in the first quarter this year compared with 19.2 million in the second half of 2003, according to Scoop Marketing, which tracks legal music downloads.

The majority of those songs were downloaded from the iTunes site, and Apple sold a whopping 807,000 iPods in the quarter ended in March. The company, analysts said, has done the best job in the industry of using music as the link between its computers and audio devices.

Sony would like to emulate that success, but catching up will not be easy. Sony entered the digital camera market late, yet became one of the top makers in that field. But its computers and cellphones have struggled and remain niche products while others grabbed those markets.

This time, Mr. Samit and other Sony executives say they can recover lost time because all parts of their corporate empire are on the same page.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/19/te...gy/19sony.html


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DVD War Looms As Advancements Draw Near
AP

The DVD stands out as one of the most rapidly adopted consumer technologies ever, but in the electronics industry it's akin to an aging king in Shakespearean drama -- rivals are lurking, knives drawn.

Just as consumers are beginning to get comfortable with their DVD players, electronics manufacturers are set to introduce next-generation discs that store more -- and would be harder to copy.

A dozen companies, headed by Sony Corp., are pushing a disc called the Blu-ray.

The other main contender, the High Definition DVD, is promoted only by Toshiba Corp. and NEC Corp. But it has an important endorsement from an industry group and is also expected to get Microsoft Corp.'s support as the software giant seeks a toehold for its multimedia format in the consumer electronics arena.

Movie studios generally aren't commenting on the new formats. And the rival industry groups aren't saying exactly when they expect to have players on the market. Both, however, consider the DVD ripe for replacement next year.

For consumers, the benefit of a new format would be better image quality. Sales of high-definition TV sets have finally started to take off, but current DVDs don't have the resolution to get the most out of HDTV sets.

For the industry, a new format could mean an escape from the low-margin market DVD players have become. From costing more than $500 when introduced in 1997, players are now available for less than $50.

The new discs, which look much like DVDs, would be read by players with newly developed blue lasers, which can pick out finer detail than the red lasers used to play DVDs and CDs. This lets the new discs store three to five times as much data as a DVD, enough for high-definition movies with surround sound.

Manufacturers from both groups plan to also build red lasers into their new players, allowing them to read current DVDs.

The Blu-ray disc has the most storage capacity, up to 50 gigabytes. However, it achieves that capacity by using a structure quite different from DVDs. This means that the companies that make prerecorded DVDs would have to invest in new equipment, which is sure to give Hollywood pause as it ponders which format to back.

The Blu-ray does have the widest support among electronics manufacturers, counting not only most of the big Japanese names but also Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. in its consortium.

Toshiba's HD-DVD stores up to 30 gigabytes, but can close the quality gap with the Blu-ray by using more efficient compression software than the MPEG-2 standard already used in DVDs and planned for the Blu-ray. One of the several compression schemes that may go into the final HD-DVD standard is none other than Microsoft's Windows Media 9 software.

``If that goes through, it's going to be a huge win for Microsoft,'' says Vamsi Sistla, an analyst at ABI Research. It wouldn't necessarily mean a significant financial windfall -- the analyst estimates that Microsoft may get 10 to 15 cents per player in royalties -- but that's not the point.

``More than money, they're looking for the muscle power to enter the consumer electronics industry,'' he says.

The HD-DVD has been endorsed by the DVD Forum, the industry group that created the DVD, but that may not be as crucial as it sounds. The group has not succeeded in gathering industrywide consensus for any disc standard since the original DVD in 1997. Both its audio and rewriteable DVD standards have competitors.

The Blu-ray and HD-DVD both use hardware advances to store high-definition movies. However, that's not strictly necessary. Improvements in the software used to pack a movie onto a disc means that it's possible to store a high-definition movie on a regular DVD, albeit with poorer quality and fewer special features than on a blue-laser disc.

Microsoft demonstrated that when it helped bring out a high-definition version of ``Terminator 2: Judgment Day'' on a DVD-ROM last year. It played only on computers, but in theory, a specially built DVD player could play it back. That lesson wasn't lost on Japan's Asian competitors. In China, the EVD, or Enhanced Video Disc, is already on sale. It uses software from On2 Technologies Inc. to store a high-definition movie on a slightly modified DVD, read by a red laser.

Not to be outdone, Taiwanese researchers this month demonstrated the FVD, or Forward Versatile Disc, based on the same principle. Players should be on sale this year.

The advantage of using red lasers is that the components are much cheaper than the blue-laser technology, and the players can read DVDs without a second laser.

With all these alternatives, there's a ``very good chance'' that there won't be one successor to the DVD, but several, says Sistla. The Blu-ray may dominate Japan, the cheaper EVD the rest of Asia, and the HD-DVD could be the format of choice in the United States and Europe.

The real kingmaker in the drama is Hollywood. Of the big studios, only Columbia TriStar has expressed support for either format. Since it's owned by Sony, its choice was clear.

One thing the studios are sure to appreciate is that the new discs promise much better copy protection than DVDs. While the older format has been a boon to the studios - - it grossed them more than theatrical releases last year -- its susceptibility to piracy has been a thorn.

A new disc format probably holds another attraction for the studios -- the opportunity to sell old movies all over again on new media.

But Geoffrey Kleinman, who runs review site DVDtalk.com, doesn't think consumers are clamoring for something better than the DVD.

``A high-quality progressive-scan DVD player properly connected to high definition TV looks fantastic,'' he says.

Also, what made the DVD popular isn't just the quality advantage over videotape, but also the addition of special features. So far, Kleinman hasn't seen any similar must- have advantage planned for the new formats.

If there's a pent-up demand for a new disc, it's probably on the recording side, Kleinman believes. There's no cheap or easy way to record HDTV broadcasts, something recordable versions of the new discs would address.

Sony is already selling a Blu-ray recorder for HDTV satellite broadcasts in Japan.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/tech...-DVD-Tech.html


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Tiny Films Part of Ebert's Film Festival
AP

A film that cost less than $200 to make is among the attractions at Roger Ebert's sixth annual Overlooked Film Festival.

This year's festival, which opens Wednesday, includes a variety of big-budget movies and independent works such as ``Tarnation'' by Jonathan Caouette, which cost $187 to make on a computer.

Film restoration expert Robert Harris, who discovered a 70mm print of the 1962 Oscar-winning film, ``Lawrence of Arabia,'' in a studio vault and then restored it, will kick off the festival. He will explain how he found and restored the movie.

The lineup also includes Gregory Nava's ``El Norte,'' Buster Keaton's masterpiece ``The General,'' Jay Russell's ``My Dog Skip'' and the obscure Al Pacino drama ``People I Know.''

Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, started the festival in 1999 to call attention to movies he feels have been forgotten or ignored by audiences, critics and distributors.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...-Festival.html


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Studios Rush to Cash In on DVD Boom
Sharon Waxman

The other day the chairman of 20th Century Fox, Jim Gianopulos, said he got a call from a lawyer friend. The friend said it was an anniversary of the firm and asked where he could get 100 DVD copies of the cult Fox movie "Office Space." The film made only $10 million at the box office but has become a hit on DVD. No one at Fox pretends to know why, but the film's success is another big drop in the river of DVD cash now flowing into Hollywood's coffers.

Not since the advent of the videocassette in the mid-1980's has the movie industry enjoyed such a windfall from a new product. And just as video caused a seismic shift two decades ago, the success of the DVD is altering priorities and the balance of power in the making of popular culture. And industry players, starting with the Writers Guild, are lining up to claim their share.

There's good cause. Between January and mid-March this year, Americans spent $1.78 billion at the box office. But in the same period they spent $4.8 billion — more than $3 billion more — to buy and rent DVD's and videocassettes.

Little wonder then that studio executives now calibrate the release dates of DVD's with the same care used for opening weekends, as seen by Miramax's strategic release of "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" a few days before the theatrical release of "Kill Bill: Vol. 2." (The DVD made $40 million its first day out.)

Studios now spend comparable amounts of money on DVD and theatrical marketing campaigns. Disney spent an estimated $50 million marketing the "Finding Nemo" DVD last year, said officials at Pixar, which made the film. It was money well spent. The DVD took in $431 million domestically, about $100 million more than the domestic box office. DVD has resuscitated canceled or nearly canceled television series like "The Family Guy" and "24," and has helped small art movies like "Donnie Darko" win rerelease in theaters. It is also beginning to affect the kinds of movies being made, as DVD revenues figure heavily in green-light decisions and are used as a perk to woo craft-conscious movie directors.

"There's not a sector of the entertainment industry to which DVD is not a significant, if not the dominant, contributor of revenue," said Scott Hettrick, editor in chief of DVD Exclusive, a trade paper, pointing to the movie and television libraries being released on DVD. Even in the ailing music industry, he noted, music DVD's are an area of growth.

"This is an unprecedented, huge influx of new money into the motion picture business," Dan Petrie Jr., president of the Writers Guild of America, West, said of the DVD boom. Union negotiators are demanding higher royalty payments in contract talks under way with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios. Whatever deal is finally struck when the contract runs out on May 2 is expected to be followed by all the other Hollywood guilds.

While few dispute that DVD's are low-cost, high-profit items for the studios, the studios say they need every penny to survive in a time of dwindling profit margins, and with the menace of piracy looming large. The average movie now costs $64 million to make and another $39 million to market, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

"In the last five years maybe 6 pictures out of 1,000 recouped their cost in the theatrical marketplace," said Nick Counter, president of the studio alliance. "Today the hits have to make up for all the losses."

For bigger-budget movies the DVD revenue has become critical. Nowadays, "basically the movies are commercials for the DVD's," observed John Lesher, an agent for the Endeavor talent agency who represents leading directors like Walter Salles, Paul Thomas Anderson and David O. Russell. Movies with budgets over $100 million now commonly just break even at the box office.

Stacey Snider, chairwoman of Universal Studios, said she had just asked her executives to analyze more closely the breakdown of profits in terms of the DVD revenues to figure out the changing model of the industry.

The old Hollywood model of needing to recoup three times the production cost at the box office to make a profit is long gone. But many are asking: What is the new model?

The answer to that may lie with a little-known movie called "Office Space" (1999). The satire by Mike Judge, co-creator of the animated television series "King of the Hill," cost 20th Century Fox about $10 million to make, and took in just $10 million at the box office. But on DVD the movie has become a hit, with the studio so far selling 2.5 million units, well over $40 million worth.

There are other examples of surprising windfalls. The Lion's Gate comedy "Van Wilder" was renamed "National Lampoon's Van Wilder" and has unexpectedly become a hit on DVD, where it sits alphabetically next to other National Lampoon movies.

A moderate hit like the DreamWorks comedy "Old School" starring Will Ferrell took in $73 million at the box office, but made an astounding $143.5 million on DVD.

Of course, even before DVD some films found larger audiences on video than at the box office; DVD has amplified the effect and the profits.

The format has another draw, a creative one. Directors now invest a lot of time into putting extra material into the DVD version, and the studios can improve their relationships with directors by creating special editions of their movies with hours of extra features. Peter Jackson added 43 minutes to the extended DVD of "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" (New Line).

But that does not mean the studios do not wring every cent from each movie. Miramax is planning to release a half-dozen different DVD editions related to "Kill Bill."

"This is the beauty of having two volumes," said Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax. " `Vol. 1' goes out, `Vol. 2' goes out, then `Vol. 1 Special Edition,' `Vol. 2 Special Edition,' the two-pack, then the Tarantino collection as a boxed set out for Christmas. It's called multiple bites at the apple. And you multiply this internationally." Mr. Tarantino has also cut an alternate version of the movie for Japan.

With the explosion of DVD advertising, it is easy to forget that the plastic plate, the digital versatile disk, has existed in the marketplace for only seven years.

Six years ago, before DVD mattered, Americans spent $18 billion on movie videocassettes. Last year, when the DVD ruled, they spent $22.2 billion on videos and DVD's, according to DVD Exclusive, adding some $4 billion of new consumer spending to the entertainment pot without visibly affecting sales at the box office.

One of the main changes is that consumers tend to buy DVD's, while they tend to rent videocassettes. (Studios sell their rental cassettes to stores like Blockbuster for far more than they do to consumers.)

The profit margin for studios is significantly higher on the laser disk format. A new study by Jessica Reif-Cohen, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, found that studios make an average of 66 percent profit margin on the DVD, compared with just 45 percent profit on the videocassette. She concluded, "We believe the perception of low returns on feature film production is no longer valid."

The guilds are not the only ones who are demanding their share of the new loot. Talent agents are also demanding that the studio abandon its long-standing formula of calculating profits, in which only 20 percent of revenues from DVD's and videos are used to calculate profit participation for directors and top actors.

The question has also become a principal focus of negotiations with actors being asked to participate in re-releases. Last fall the supporting cast of the hit television series "Seinfeld" balked at giving interviews for the DVD compilation until they were included in a share of the profits.

What no one knows is how long the windfall will last, whether DVD is a consumer bubble that will burst once the studios finish releasing the films and TV shows in their libraries, or whether it will remain a strong current in the entertainment industry profit stream.

"Right now the studios are making money hand over fist," said Mr. Lesher. "But in five years when you can download a movie as fast as a song, that will go away."

Mr. Gianopulos disagreed. DVD's will last "because of the uniqueness of that experience," he said. "It's no longer `I saw that movie.' It's `I saw that movie, now I'm going to see multiple dimensions of that movie.' That's why you want to own it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/20/movies/20MOVI.html


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24 hours all it takes to download every single movie ever made.

New Internet Speed Record Set
Marguerite Reardon

Researchers have set a new data transmission record over the Internet2's high-speed backbone.

The new record, announced Tuesday at the Spring 2004 Internet2 member meeting in Arlington, Va., was for transmitting data over nearly 11,000 kilometers at an average speed of 6.25 gigabits per second. This is nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The network link used to set the record reaches from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland.

Internet2 is a consortium of more than 200 universities working with industry and government to develop next-generation Internet technology. The Internet2's contest, which began in 2000, is open and ongoing, and it tests researchers' ability to build the highest-bandwidth, end-to-end Internet Protocol network.

The new record used IPv4, the current system for Internet addressing, and was set by members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Geneva-based CERN. The same team had previously set a new mark of 4 gigabits per second over the same distance using IPv6, the next generation of Internet protocols.

"By pushing the envelope of end-to-end networking," Rich Carlson, chairman of the judging panel, said in a statement, "their efforts demonstrate new possibilities for enabling research, teaching, and learning using advanced Internet technology."

While no one expects the average person to need this type of bandwidth anytime soon, the demonstration is important in the research community, where high-capacity links are needed to transfer large amounts of data. Many groups have already begun developing high-speed grids to connect research institutions and laboratories, so that scientists can more efficiently share large volumes of data.

CERN and its partners have already begun building such a network; it's called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid. Caltech is involved in building the TeraGrid supercomputing network, which connects the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Argonne National Laboratory, the Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

Recent studies by the U.S. Department of Energy have shown that researchers in high-energy physics, astrophysics, fusion energy, climatology, bioinformatics and other fields will require networks in the terabit-per-second range within the next decade. As a result, research on these high-speed networks is starting to move into production settings.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5195614.html


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Filetopia Making Headway
Thomas Mennecke

Filetopia has a history that exceeds even Napster. Arriving onto the file-sharing scene several months prior, Filetopia was more of a community chat program than a P2P application. However, as time progressed, added functionality was incorporated which has given Filetopia the potential to become a major player in the P2P world.

As the copyright industry turns up the heat on the file-sharing community, more individuals are seeking secure networks that can blanket their online activity. One network that has the potential to fulfill this mighty obligation to the masses is Filetopia.

Despite its lengthy history, Filetopia has not been known as a great P2P resource. Frequent server problems and simply the lack of advertising have kept this network in the relative dark. However, things are starting to change for the better as Filetopia has reached 5,000 users for the first time. Enrique, the sole programmer for Filetopia, weighs in on the current growth of his network.

"[The reason for our recent growth is due to more] stable servers, a very loyal user base and some of the communities that have been in Filetopia for [a] long [time]…keep growing."

In addition, the allure of participating in a secure network has also been a strong selling point of Filetopia. While SSL is a common (and excellent) encryption scheme, Filetopia allows users to select a variety of encryption devices.

"Filetopia uses a public key based encryption, similar in concept to SSL. In Filetopia, an EC encryptor is used to generate the asymmetric keys (SSL uses RSA) and the symmetric ciphers are optional (the user can choose among the strongest ones, including AES, blowfish, Twofish, etc.)

Of course, using SSL is as secure, the only advantage is probably that the EC cipher is a bit more efficient than the older RSA cipher."

Despite the growth and allure of Filetopia, one nagging issue remains – WinMX-itis. Similar to WinMX, Filetopia has not been updated in nearly a year (WinMX over a year.) Although this is of some concern, Filetopia 4.0 (a seemingly cursed release number) should be released sometime this summer. The delays are attributable to numerous projects, such at TorrentTopia.org.

"I've had to work on other projects in this past year. One of the projects is also related to P2P and it is having a big growth now. It is a BitTorrent client that has embedded search capabilities: Torrentopia.org.

I'm working on FT4 right now, it is a big rewrite, and I expect to have a beta maybe for the summer."

The delay can certainly be forgiven in exchange for a client that may revolutionize BitTorrent. Although the client in its existing state does not have an encryption scheme, future versions promise to add this much sought after feature.

"This version does not add any security to the BitTorrent protocol. That is what I plan to do with then next major version, adding virtual trackers and a secure DHT network. I just wanted to get used to the BitTorrent protocol in this version."

The future certainly looks bright for Filetopia. His current project, TorrentTopia, is a testing ground for eventually intergrating a secure BitTorrent element to FileTopia 4.0. Enrique talks about the future of Filetopia.

"Filetopia 3 is a lot more decentralized than the previous versions, it is based on supernodes; a fully decentralized DHT network (Filetopia 4.0) is a step forward in that direction. Overnet is the first big scale network that used DHT (that I know) and it has proven to be very effective. I will try to improve on that model adding security (PK encryption) and anonymity (using concepts from the Achord (Anonymous Cord) DHT (distributed hash tables) model and some ideas of my own.) Before DHT, fully decentralized networks where not too efficient, that is why I chose the supernodes model for Filetopia 3.

[In addition,] I plan to change key aspects that will help with the scalability. Although I have done a lot of work to improve the server protocols, some things could not be changed without breaking compatibility. FT4 will be a different, more efficient network, with changes in the overall architecture.

Of course, FT4 will borrow from Torrentopia many things (skinned interface, BitTorrent compatibility, usability aspects) but it will work on a new P2P network that will be even more secure than the current one and the file sharing will be completely decentralized (a DHT based network with anonymity improvements.)”

Although things seem stagnant, the Filetopia project is just getting started as version 4.0 hopes to break into the mainstream. With a secure BitTorrent client in the works coupled by an even more secure Filetopia, this aspiration is very possible.

“Although Filetopia seems to be frozen now, things move very fast here and my main focus is now again in the Filetopia project. I do this for the users, when I get a mail or message from a user that is enjoying one of my programs I find the motivation I need to advance faster.”
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=454


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iTunes Browser Script
Jack Spratts

Curious about iTunes? You can now search the apple pay music site - and even preview songs - without using their program. Works inside your browser with quicktime. Multiple platforms, including Opera, Mozilla etc
http://www.downhillbattle.org/itmsscript/index.html


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Plaxo Puts Peer-To-Peer Networking To New Use
Louise Story

AFTER Jennifer Cahill changed jobs a few weeks ago, one of the first things she did was spend a few minutes "Plaxo-ing" her new contact information to 400 friends and business acquaintances.

"You just go down the list of people" in your address book, said Cahill, who now works in the marketing group at Muirfield Capital in New York, "and you click, click, click who you want to send it to."

Will "Plaxo" become the next ubiquitous Internet verb, like Google? That is the hope of the founders of Plaxo, an online service that helps computer users keep their address books updated with the latest postal addresses and phone numbers of everybody in their circle.

After downloading Plaxo's free software in conjunction with either the Outlook or Outlook Express e-mail program, a PC user can choose which friends to ask for current contact information.

Recipients can provide new contact information, decline the request or ignore it. They can also click a link in the message and join Plaxo themselves.

Plaxo then automatically inserts any new information provided into the sender's e-mail address book. As people join Plaxo, their contact information is inserted into the address books of other members who have given permission for such updating.

The program also automatically transfers any future changes they make in Outlook to the computers of other members they have listed as their contacts.

About 1.8 million people have subscribed to Plaxo since the company, based in Mountain View, began offering its software online in November 2002, and the company says it is gaining about 10,000 to 12,000 members a day.

But for all of its success at attracting a following, Plaxo has an Achilles' heel. It is just the kind of Web-driven business that fits perfectly with the ambitions of Microsoft and others aiming to incorporate a wide array of business and personal services into their software products.

Plaxo executives say they are not worried. Their success may attract competition, but they say their rapidly expanding network gives them a major advantage.

"What we're essentially building is this network, because it has no value to me unless everyone I know is on the network," said Todd Masonis, a Plaxo founder. "You can't just go with another network because you wouldn't have the value of so many users."
http://www.marinij.com/Stories/0,141...78640,00.html#


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RIAA Halts Amnesty for P2P File-Swappers
Jay Lyman

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has withdrawn its offer of amnesty to file-sharers. Previously, the group had agreed not to sue individuals who would pledge to stop trading copyrighted music through peer-to-peer (P2P) services and applications.

However, the RIAA also diverged from its standard message of blaming online P2P file-sharing for its dwindling sales figures, instead calling P2P "one factor" of several that are hurting album sales.

"The decline in young buyers, who are the most active downloaders on peer-to-peer systems, is another confirmation that illegal downloading is one factor, along with economic conditions and competing forms of entertainment, that is displacing legitimate sales," RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol said.

"That's a fairly significant change in tune," Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman told TechNewsWorld. "They're being forced into a reactionary position, with more and more research coming out showing P2P downloading is not quite the green-eyed monster the RIAA makes it out to be."

In a brief filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court -- where the RIAA is being sued over its Clean Slate amnesty program -- RIAA attorneys wrote that the amnesty deal is no longer necessary, has been stopped and should not be the basis of litigation.

"As public awareness about the illegality of unauthorized copying and distribution of music files over peer-to-peer computing has dramatically increased since the inception of the program, the RIAA has concluded that the program is no longer necessary or appropriate," the brief said.

For her part, however, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Wendy Seltzer said the program likely ended because the RIAA's promise of immunity was hollow.

"The problem that the RIAA was forced to recognize was that they couldn't guarantee they were not creating more liability for the people they were signing up," Seltzer told TechNewsWorld, referring to admissions of copyright infringement and violations of law by those who signed up for Clean Slate.

Last November, the RIAA reported 156 settlements and 1,000 participants in the Clean Slate program. In its latest court filing, the group indicated a total of 1,108 individuals had taken the amnesty offer.

The EFF's Seltzer, who referred to the quiet end of the amnesty program as "a slimy way to do it specific to the lawsuit," said record labels could offer real amnesty through the EFF's proposed alternative to the RIAA's legal campaign: a voluntary collective licensing program that would legitimize file-sharing and help pay artists.

Meanwhile, Goodman, who indicated the RIAA probably did not expect to be sued over the amnesty program, said the vast majority of file-traders likely ignored the offer because the odds of being sued were extremely slim.

Goodman added that although the amnesty program's cessation was expected, the RIAA's decision to blame other factors for declining music sales may be more significant.

"There's some fairly high-profile stuff that is increasingly contradictory to the RIAA research and less biased than the RIAA research," he said, referring to studies and reports that show P2P has a minimal effect on CD sales.

For every report that indicates other forces are at work, corresponding research from the RIAA highlights P2P's impact. However, RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy told TechNewsWorld that although the group has always said online file-sharing is the main culprit, it also has included other factors.

"We have consistently said we think piracy is the primary, not exclusive, reason for the decline in sales," Lamy said. "We've never said it's the sole point; we think piracy is primary, but there are always other factors that are at play here."
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/33487.html#


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iTunes Delay Fillip For Euro Services
Jonny Evans

Leading US digital music distribution services are being hampered in launching services in Europe – leaving the territory wide open for local players in the space.

Apple Europe vice president Pascal Cagni this week warned that the launch of the iTunes Music Store in Europe may be delayed for "a few months", while the company works to ensure that the service will be "perfect". He cited Europe's sometimes-conflicting music-business bureaucracy and its recalcitrance in arranging digital music licences as cause of the delay.

Yesterday Roxio/Napster CEO Chris Gorog offered a similar warning to impatient music fans. Citing "red tape and licensing negotiation snags", he told Reuters: "We intend to launch before the end of summer. I am ever- hopeful it will happen, but it has been very challenging to get the rights together."

Napster had indicated its intent to launch in the UK around August/ September, but has so far been unable to secure the licences it needs to launch the service. "It's a bit frustrating", he explained. Napster faces similar problems in continental Europe, and is arranging permissions to launch in Japan – the world's second-largest music buying market, after the US.

Europe's Byzantine music-licence system is holding the market back. The European Commission (EC) released a report on Monday in which it urged the music industry and its disparate collection of died-in-the-wool rights bodies to create a pan-European music download licence.

On this topic, Gorog told Reuters: "The EC has managed to put together a currency system for all of Western Europe. I would think extending the same powers of cooperation would be very well received by all online music providers."

Speaking to Macworld in January, Universal Music's Larry Kenswil hinted at a potential underlying motive for the level of cooperation Apple and Roxio may be seeing from Europe's labels. Observing that the market is ready to open for business, he stressed that this was for all operators, "Why should the American services make all the money?" he asked rhetorically.

Long-established in Europe, Peter Gabriel's OD2 service, which acts as a warehouse for European companies who want to sell music online has been benefiting from the hype surrounding digital music services, shifting one million tracks in the first three months of this year – a ten-fold increase in sales, year-on-year.

Operators working to enter the European market should note that it took OD2 three years to secure the licensing it needed.

Meanwhile, European entrepreneurs are exploiting the market opportunity inherent here, as essentially honest consumers stare across the Atlantic, anxious to share the US music downloading experience.

Europe's music fans want elegant legal services they can use today, in preference to file-sharing networks.

New services launching to service the UK market – designed to profit from the delay – include: Wippit; War Child Music and Trackitdown. These vie with larger portal-based services such as Tiscali and MyCokeMusic, which work with OD2 to supply music online.

All the action has a sting in its tail, as the litigious music industry prepares to take one of its own to task in a San Francisco court – ironically, for file sharing.

The labels want Bertelsmann AG to stump up $17 billion, alleging that $90 million investments the company made in Napster in 2000 kept the then peer-to-peer service operating for eight months longer than it would otherwise have done. They believe the industry lost $17 billion as a result.

The legal counsel for the litigants Carey Ramos shared the industry's rationale for the case: "Napster created the piracy we've seen in the last four years that continues unabated worldwide."

However, some music industry insiders, technologists and the public reject such assertions, saying that music piracy evolved precisely because the music industry acted slowly in bringing legal digital-music distribution services to market, depriving essentially honest consumers of a legal way to buy songs online.

Anxious to reduce the scale of piracy, music industry associations across Europe have this month launched a program of intimidation and litigation against European music downloaders that echoes the strategy of the RIAA.

However, the launch of major music-download services that provide a legal and compelling alternative to theft for Europe's consumers is an essential element to the RIAA strategy.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_...fm?NewsID=8474


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Hollywood's New Lesson For Campus File Swappers
Stefanie Olsen

Hollywood is poised to up the ante in its war against file swappers, with new technology that could make it easier to remove suspected pirates from campus networks, CNET News.com has learned.

Movie studios, record labels and technology companies have been testing the system for months, according to sources familiar with the project.

Known as the Automated Copyright Notice System (ACNS), the technology promises to make copyright enforcement easier on peer-to-peer networks, saving schools and Internet service providers (ISPs) time and money. ACNS allows them to automatically restrict or cut off Internet access for alleged infringers on notice from a record label or movie studio. For example, universities using ACNS could instantly send notices of copyright infringement to students by e-mail and restrict their network access until they have removed the file.

Though not specifically ACNS, a similar system is set to go live Monday at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the nation's largest universities with 37,500 students.

"ACNS is an open-source, royalty-free system that universities, ISPs, or anyone that handles large volumes of copyright notices can implement on their network to increase the efficiency and reduce the costs of responding to the notices," according to a technical summary.

College campuses are ground zero for illegal file swapping via peer-to-peer networks because students often have access to high-speed Internet or local area network (LAN) connections through their school's network. Hollywood and the music industry say that such violations have cost them billions of dollars and thus have targeted universities to help to curb file swapping. ACNS, one such measure, is designed to takes some of the burden off universities and ISPs as they field thousands of content takedown notices from copyright holders.

Universities have an incentive to cooperate with the technological solutions because they can be held liable in lawsuits charging their students with digital theft.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is still working on gathering support among universities, which are key to helping curb piracy, said Matthew Grossman, director of digital strategy at the group. "If it enables them to properly implement their copyright policies, we're all for it," Grossman said.

ACNS was jointly designed by Vivendi Universal Entertainment and Universal Music Group in response to an open call for technical solutions to peer-to-peer piracy. The two groups are still talking to universities, ISPs and technology companies about offering it as a pilot program. They have also applied for a patent on the piracy notice and prevention tool.

ACNS is the latest effort from record labels and Hollywood studios to crack down on piracy over peer-to-peer networks. The industries' tactics have grown increasingly aggressive, drawing charges from some critics that copyright holders have trampled the rights of accused infringers.

Last year, for example, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) began suing hundreds of individual file swappers and using fast-track subpoenas allowed under digital copyright law and aimed at making it cheaper for intellectual property holders to sue dozens of people at once. A judge later invalidated most of those subpoenas, forcing the industry to pursue more costly and time-consuming filings aimed at specific individuals.

Privacy vs. policy

ACNS is aimed at slashing the costs of copyright enforcement on peer-to-peer networks, although its backers say the system does protect end-user rights.

According to its technical summary, ACNS does not invade privacy. Rather, it assists universities or ISPs in enforcing their own policies on network abuse and copyright infringement. ACNS can also be used to protect networks from viruses, Trojan horses and other nefarious activity, the summary asserts.

"We're helping the ISP or university with policy enforcement. We're not dictating the policy, but we're saying, 'Here's a tool to help with automating the process.' We're the friends of the ISP," said Mark Ishikawa, chief executive officer of BayTSP, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based digital protection company that is using the system on behalf of copyright holders.

MediaSentry, another copyright searching company, and packet shaping vendor Ellacoya have started testing ACNS. According to the technical specification for ACNS, the group is working with a university that has installed the system using its Cisco routers. Universal Studios, Paramount, MPAA and RIAA have all begun using Extensible Markup Language (XML) tags in their copyright notices.

Although universities are interested in tools that can help them reduce campus piracy, some are reluctant to use ACNS because of concerns that it might not give students a chance to contest the charges against them.

UCLA's new piracy prevention program, for example, is based on principles used in ACNS but ensures that students will always get a fair shake, according to the school's director of IT policy, Ken Wada. The policy affects 7,500 students who live on campus.

"It would be easy to accept a claim and shut the computer off without understanding the circumstances," Wada said. "We seek to balance our responsibilities to respect copyrights and our responsibilities for due process and student privacy."

Under section 512 of the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a representative of a copyright holder can send a "takedown" notice to a university or ISP requesting that copyrighted material be removed. Universities may be obliged to comply with such requests from copyright holders.

ISPs have argued that the DMCA takedown requirements do not apply to peer-to-peer networks because the ISPs are not in a position to police the private hard drives of their customers. The statute applies only to material hosted on the providers' own servers, the ISPs have argued.

UCLA sent letters to resident students and staff last week, describing its new policy for file sharing and intellectual property, and warned of the personal risks of file sharing by highlighting the RIAA's latest round of lawsuits against students in March. The university will launch the new piracy prevention program on Monday as a test throughout the spring quarter, Wada said.

Since July, UCLA has received 300 takedown notices from copyright holders, a school representative said.

UCLA's policy will give students two strikes. A first-time offender will lose his or her Internet access until the infringing files are removed. On a second offense, the process is the same, but the student faces disciplinary action from a dean.

"When we receive a claim of copyright infringement and when we've identified the computer, it's put into the form of restricted network access. That computer can only get to resources on the UC campus; file sharing has been stopped," Wada said. "You'll see some commonality with ACNS."

ACNS isn't the first automated network piracy-prevention tool.

Last year, the University of Florida created a similar open-source program called Icarus (Integrated Computer Application for Recognizing User Services). When Icarus detects illegal file trading on the school network, it automatically sends an e-mail and a pop-up notice warning the student that he or she is about to be disconnected.

Utilizing digital tags
ACNS relies on reports of illegal file swapping from movie studios and record labels, which notify schools of infringement. It enhances current reporting methods by using software tags to automate some of the steps.

Several studios and record labels, including Universal Music Group, have begun to standardize the tags at the bottom of their takedown notices into XML, code that allows data to be used seamlessly in various contexts.

The digital tags contain the name of the copyrighted material that's been comprised, the copyright holder's name, date and time stamp, and the Internet Protocol address of the infringer. Receipt of this tag triggers the internal notification process at a university or ISP using the system.

Typically, it can take days or weeks for a university to act on a copyright violation request. When a request reaches the IT administrators, they must investigate who used the IP address in violation of its file-sharing copyright policies. Then they send a note to the residential housing adviser where the student lives. The adviser then sends a note to the dean's office about the student's activity. And the dean will act on the school's policy for such behavior, notifying the student and potentially disconnecting Internet access to the student's machine.

ACNS would trigger such e-mail notifications and could automatically choke off the student's access to a peer-to-peer network, while leaving his Internet or e-mail connection untouched. Depending on the school's policy, it could put the student into a 30-minute penalty box, without access, on the first offense. The second offense could warrant a week without peer-to-peer privileges, and so forth.

A report is generated on the infringing act, including who was notified and how the situation was handled, and a log is created at the monitoring station.

Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Internet consumer rights group known as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said ACNS is an interesting concept but doubted that it will solve the problem of campus piracy. He predicted that students ultimately create workarounds, for example, using wireless devices to avoid detection. He said that the more sensible solution is for the copyright holders to collectively license their content to college campuses.

That approach has proven controversial as well, however. Penn State signed a deal last fall with Napster to offer a legitimate online service for its students, but many people balked because it translates into added fees to their tuition.

"Whether it's an opening gambit for the recording industry to try to tell universities how to design their computer systems, we'll have to wait and see," von Lohmann said. "The trouble I have with this, there will be countermeasures, and who is going to absorb costs to constantly modify this system to make it work? Do universities really want to be drawn into the arms race?"
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5194341.html