Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 27th, ’05

[JackSpratts]

"It's not piracy in the classic sense. These are people who are downloading music purely for their own pleasure and certainly not for their financial benefit other than the fact they're not paying for it. This isn't someone who's going and making 10,000 copies of the new Britney Spears CD and trying to sell them on a street corner, this is certainly not that." – Paul Rapp


"People who make movies should have the same rights software engineers have had for years. Fair use makes new art possible." – Jason Schultz


"For most in the culture industry, the chance of the file-sharing program BitTorrent serving a positive function is as likely as Darth Vader joining Habitat for Humanity." – Charles Solomon


"That is guaranteed to slow down innovation on the Internet -- and even more guaranteed to drive innovation offshore." – John Morris


"What applying CALEA to VOIP means is not that law enforcement can do wiretaps under legal authorization, but that government officials have the right to design the standards for wiretapping...That means they’re in the Internet protocols. It doesn’t matter whether you use the publicly switched Internet or private networks that use the Internet protocols -- you’ve introduced a vulnerability. What you will get is [attacks from] organized crime and well-funded organizations like Al-Qaeda that come on infrastructure." – Susan Landau


"Your worst nightmare has just come true! The gravy train has come to a full stop. And, it's only a matter of time before your victims (oh, excuse me, licensees) come after you. God Bless America!." – Robert Shillman



























August 27th, 2005




Welcome To The World Of Acquiring Music
John E. Mitchell

"Music Industry Targets 765 Internet Thieves In New Round Of Lawsuits" screams the headline on the Web page of the Recording Industry of America -- what the accompanying story fails to reveal is that these 765 "thieves" are actually ordinary citizens who have done little more than the modern day equivalent of taping some songs out of their friend's record collection.

Welcome to the brave new world of acquiring music.

Many think that the current situation is the music industry's own fault, that its short-sightedness led to customer dissatisfaction, then to file sharing. In the 1980s, when compact discs came out, few in the industry foresaw the full scope of the digital revolution. By the mid-90s, it had become obvious to many that the Internet was going to be the vehicle for obtaining music -- and that CDs were the instruments from which the music would originate. Consumers didn't wait for the industry to move forward.

"The music industry refused to license its music and allow its music to be traded that way," said Albany, N.Y., copyright lawyer Paul Rapp, "and so it developed by itself, by overwhelming public demand with underground services like Napster and the second generation like Grokster and Kazaa. It all could have been avoided -- or at least it wouldn't have become the cultural phenomenon."

What had not occurred to the industry was that, back then, a large number of consumers would have appreciated a reliable source for quality downloads at a reasonable price. The fact is, peer-to-peer file sharing is not necessarily an easy way to obtain music and is sometimes very unsatisfying. File quality is highly uncertain, and when albums are being compiled track by track, it can take forever to complete -- and sometimes never. Furthermore, a downloader never knows when a virus is attached to the file he is downloading.

Despite the efforts of various groups to devise licensing structures that would create a royalty system for file trading, the industry balked and file trading continues to grow.

Such behavior is not unusual in the history of the music industry. The pattern, Rapp points out, never seems to change. At first, the industry attempts to shut out new technology and, when that fails, ends up embracing it and making it the standard.

"It's always been a cat-and-mouse game," said Rapp. "Gilbert and Sullivan were going apoplectic because their plays were being performed in the United States and no royalties were being paid to them. Then there were the big piano-player roll wars in the first decade of the 1900s. Finally, records started getting made and then radio came along and everyone thought that it would be the end of the record industry. And then cassettes came along and then video cassettes, and every one of them was deemed a burglar's tool and the industry tried to shut them all down and this is just the next iteration in the endless cat-and-mouse game."

There are other tools causing agony for the entertainment industry. One is DarkNet, a proposed application that would allow anonymous online file trading, although it is unclear when that will finally make an appearance. One current thorn in its side is Bit Torrent, a program that decentralizes peer-to-peer file sharing and makes it much harder to track down large numbers of music files on anyone's hard drive. Bit Torrent is the preferred target of the movie industry; a movie currently in theatrical release that is downloaded onto a hard drive can lead to a lawsuit. However, Bit Torrent may end up changing the television and video market, since the most popular downloads, other than movies, are television shows from other countries recorded on digital recorders such as Tivos.

"I think using Bit Torrent to make available to people things that are otherwise unavailable will put pressure on the owners of these things to make things more universally available. I think it does have that positive effect," said Rapp.

The entertainment industry has been able to harness so-called "illegal" file sharing for market research, prompting the existence of a market research company called Big Champagne.

"The music industry pays huge amounts of money to Big Champagne," said Rapp, "which monitors peer-to-peer sharing and gives them a more accurate view of the popularity of their music than their own surveys do. They see what songs and what artists are being traded illegitimately and it's the best marketing research that they can buy. They're paying for this market research of illegal file usage and using it to make their own marketing decisions, which is a bizarre sort of synergy."

One of the more interesting realizations of market research is that those who download the most through peer-to-peer networks also purchase the most downloadable music through services such as iTunes or eMusic.

Lawyers are making as interesting use of the situation. Rapp knows of one lawyer in New York who has filed a motion claiming that it is not enough to just provide a list of file names in a share folder to sue a music downloader -- the RIAA must provide proof that these files were obtained by illegally downloading as opposed to ripping the files from CDs.

Kazaa, the embattled file-sharing protocol, has lobbed its own countersuit at the music industry.

"When you download the Kazaa program you have to click through their user agreement," said Rapp, "and they're claiming that snooping on users in order to sue them is a violation of the user agreement. I love that one."

For Rapp and many others, the situation is hitting an absurd level when such arguments are being made in courts. As the last century has shown, things will work themselves out and the industry will be left waiting for the next technology to combat. In the meantime, some still want to make it clear that the music industry is making use of some classic political spin when it sells downloading as piracy -- and that people should consider this as they form their opinions of it.

"It's not piracy in the classic sense," said Rapp. "These are people who are downloading music purely for their own pleasure and certainly not for their financial benefit other than the fact they're not paying for it. This isn't someone who's going and making 10,000 copies of the new Britney Spears CD and trying to sell them on a street corner, this is certainly not that."
http://www.thetranscript.com/Stories...11037,00.html#





File-Sharing Continues at Colleges
Alex Veiga

As a college freshman, Will Mount feasted on the free but mostly illegal music available through online file-sharing software such as Kazaa. Now a senior, Mount has seen his free music fix become legal, thanks to an initiative by American University in Washington, D.C., to dissuade students from using its computer network to illegally swap music online.

If the music industry only had more like Mount. Many students still prefer to plumb file- sharing networks, despite efforts to make legal music available on campuses for free.

Shifting from the file-sharing free-for-all to a licensed music service largely has been positive for Mount, but he can understand why some students shun it. For instance, he can't transfer the songs to his iPod music player.

"If you want to get the music in your iPod, you have to go to other places to buy it," said Mount, 21, an Ohio native. "Or you are going to have to do something illegal to get it."

Limited song selection and other restrictions also are factors.

American University is one of about 50 colleges that have begun providing students with a legal means to get music online through services like Rhapsody, Ruckus, Cdigix and the now-legal version of Napster.

In many cases, services that can cost as much as $15 a month to the general public are being funded through existing technology budgets or student activities fees.

But American estimates that only about half of the 3,800 eligible students actually used the Ruckus service last spring, despite having an anonymous benefactor cover the subscription costs. (It's switching to Napster this fall and will start using student fees.)

"People downloaded it a lot in the beginning to create their playlists and then didn't do much after that," said Julie Weber, who runs the university's housing and dining programs. "Some people downloaded zero songs. They downloaded the (software), played around, looked at it, decided they didn't want to do anything with it."

Other universities found that although students use such services to listen to music on their computers, many continue to tap file-sharing networks or syphon digital music files from friends to load their portable music players.

Getting music on file-sharing networks can mean an unrestricted selection of tracks with no limits on copying if one is willing to take the risk of being sued for copyright infringement or contracting a computer virus.

Legal services typically offer some 1.2 million tracks, but limit how and where the songs can be heard - often requiring that students stay at their desks. Getting songs to transfer to digital players costs extra, and tracks may not work with all gadgets.

Market research conducted by American University found that a key stumbling block was the inability to move music from Ruckus to their players, including the market-leading iPod.

"The complaints were you couldn't burn music for free, you couldn't put it on iPods," said Bill Raduchel, chief executive for Ruckus, which provides music to more than a dozen universities. "No legal service is going to meet that need."

At the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., about half of the 10,000 students have used Napster, which has been available for free since spring 2004, said Charles Phelps, the university's provost.

But internal studies suggest that virtually no Rochester students purchased songs from Napster - at 99 cents per track for the right to burn or transfer music to portables. Napster executives weren't surprised.

"Students are a little more transitory. They're not necessarily trying to burn a CD immediately," said Aileen Atkins, Napster's senior vice president of business affairs.

Music retailers say they are banking not so much on students buying tracks now, but on becoming paying subscribers after they graduate.

"For us, it's not about purchasing behavior," said Matt Graves, a spokesman for RealNetworks Inc., which operates Rhapsody. "We are more interested in introducing students at that age ... getting them used to Rhapsody."

Although the companies behind the legal music services continue to add new universities to their client roster, it doesn't appear they are driving away illegal file- sharing operations - although some university officials contend the legal services have curtailed the illegal activity.

"We suspect there's been a drop off," said Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, where about two-fifths of the 70,000 students statewide use Napster.

Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, said the response to the legal services show that universities also need to employ technical measures to block file-swapping of copyright music.

"We've had the impression that there has been a decrease in the amount of illegal activity on many campuses but not all," Sherman said. "That's a reflection of the fact that a legitimate alternative is not sufficient in and of itself."

Although universities have taken some measures to monitor file-sharing, many remain conflicted over the privacy issues raised by filtering data to block access over their networks. Nonetheless, they are likely to continue bringing in legal music options, if only to ward off any hint of litigation.

A Supreme Court decision in June established that Hollywood and the music industry can sue companies who can be shown to encourage customers to steal music and movies over the Internet.

"There's some language there that caused the hair on my arms to stand a little bit," Phelps said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





P2P Is Not a Four Letter Word -- "P2P Backups" Certainly Isn't
Press Release

Vembu Technologies, a leading provider of innovative backup and storage solutions, has announced the release of version 1.5 of Vembu StoreGrid, a flexible desktop backup software that simply works with your existing hardware! StoreGrid can enable Peer to Peer, Client-Server, and Remote Online Backups. An innovative concept, Peer-to-Peer backups are the result of applying P2P principles to desktop and laptop backups.

StoreGrid helps users back up data on their desktops and laptops on to free hard disk space on their peers' machines. A group of 'trusted peers' simply install StoreGrid on a bunch of networked machines, and the machines discover each other to create a Storage Grid for backups. Considering the continual increase in hard disk capacities in personal computers and the corresponding increase in unutilised space, most small networks have backup infrastructure right under their noses. This is particularly relevant to home and Small Office Home Office (SoHo) users running small networks without elaborate backup infrastructure.

As the company's website at www.vembu.com details, StoreGrid works very well with traditional client-server backups, and relatively recent 'online backups' as well. Simply run StoreGrid on a server, and you could have multiple clients backing up to it. SMBs and Enterprise workgroups are using StoreGrid to back up desktop data. Gartner, IDC and the Meta Group mention that between 40-80% of a company's business critical data resides on PCs -- this is often an ignored area in most corporate backup strategies.

StoreGrid works on the Windows, Linux, Mac & FreeBSD operating systems, and this is good news for the many Linux Server users who have become especially vocal after Google's statements on using Linux at the recent LinuxWorld conference!

While StoreGrid's flexibility is expected to appeal to a broad spectrum of users from Home/SoHo to Small & Medium Businesses to Enterprise Workgroups, its features have also found an interested audience in online backup providers and other Value Added Resellers (VARs). Considering the diversity in the typical VAR's clients' requirements and infrastructure, StoreGrid's flexibility and multi-platform support help address this diversity.

The company reports, "StoreGrid 1.5 features include encryption, configurable compression, server management, detailed reporting, versioning, and whole bunch of features -- not all of which are required by the average Home/SoHo user." As a consequence, Vembu Technologies is also working on "StoreGrid Diet," a simpler version of the existing software -- meant exclusively for Home/SoHo users.

Vembu Technologies offers a free trial of StoreGrid 1.5 on its website at www.vembu.com. The company offers different pricing options -- annual subscription licenses and perpetual licenses are offered. A single user annual subscription license to StoreGrid 1.5 Professional Edition is priced at US$ 19.95.

About Vembu Technologies:

Vembu Technologies is a leading provider of innovative backup and storage solutions. Vembu's flagship product "StoreGrid" is a flexible desktop and laptop backup software that simply works with your existing hardware! StoreGrid facilitates trusted peer-to-peer backups, network backups, traditional client-server backups, online backups, and more. Vembu plans to develop more innovative products in the storage domain, all with one objective: that of making storage and backup affordable and "easy to deploy and manage" for a broad spectrum of users. Vembu Technologies is located in Chennai, India.

CONTACT:
Lakshmanan Narayan
VP Marketing
Vembu Technologies
Tel: +91-9840-573-784
Web: http://www.vembu.com
Email: Email Contact
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release...lease_id=93401





File Share and Share Alike
Charles Solomon

For most in the culture industry, the chance of the file-sharing program BitTorrent serving a positive function is as likely as Darth Vader joining Habitat for Humanity. The popular program is a well-known tool for downloading pirated versions of films and television series. It has been especially popular among fans of Japanese animation, or anime - especially "fansubbers," anime lovers who swap their own subtitled versions of programs, and frequently get them into circulation before the original series is on the market. Fansubbers tend to think of themselves as enthusiasts sharing material they love, rather than pirates who buy, sell or horde it. Nonetheless, lawyers are not amused: in December, a Tokyo law firm representing one Japanese anime distributor e-mailed four major Web sites, asking them to stop encouraging the theft of the distributors' series.

But ADV Films, the largest distributor of anime in the United States, has decided to make the best of a bad situation. To publicize its new series "Gilgamesh" and "Goddanar," it is releasing promotional packages - not in stores, but via the dreaded BitTorrent. "BitTorrent has been used extensively in a kind of underground environment up until now," said David Williams, a producer at ADV, in a telephone interview from the company's Houston headquarters. "There's a large group of people who have it on their systems. Since this core group already exists, we figured why not give them legitimate material to download that would help them learn about some of our products."

In late July, as a test, ADV released a trailer for the series "Madlax" through BitTorrent. The positive response led the company to assemble more extensive packages for "Gilgamesh" and "Goddanar" that include biographical information about the characters, images and statistics of the giant robots, promotional clips and links to online reviews.

Dossiers about giant robots might not seem like the highest calling to which 21st-century technology can be put, but as an act of electronic rehabilitation, it was a big step forward. "The response to the 'Madlax' trailer was just phenomenal," Mr. Williams said. "People were excited to see us using this technology in a legitimate way." Especially lawyer people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/arts/21solo.html





Sony Frees Music For File-Sharers

The first net service provider aimed at people who want to share music legally has struck a significant deal with global music giant Sony BMG.

Playlouder MSP, launching at the end of September, will let its customers share Sony licensed music with others on its network.

In return, Playlouder will pool some of its broadband subscriptions to share with music rights owners.

The deal is seen as a groundbreaking move to use file-sharing legally.

"Ensuring record companies are adequately and reliably recompensed for the use of their copyrights on the internet is the number one issue for our business," said BPI - the UK recording industry body - chairman Peter Jamieson.

"The BPI welcomes the innovative thinking which has gone into the creation of Playlouder MSP and we give it our full support."

Acts under the Sony BMG umbrella include Beyonce, David Bowie, Macy Gray, Oasis, Travis, Will Young, Outkast, Alicia Keys and Dido.

Broadly welcomed

The deal signals the first time that music fans can use existing popular peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as Kazaa, eDonkey and Limewire, to share music in an unrestricted and sanctioned way.

It has been widely welcomed by figures in the music industry, which has tried to battle illegal file-sharing for several years.

In August, the BPI continued its campaign against illegal file-swapping with legal action against five "large-scale" music uploaders in the UK.

Although legal threats exist, it has had mixed success. P2P sharing is still proving a popular and efficient way to distribute files that people want,
quickly.

Sony BMG's Clive Rich recognised that the Playlouder service had tried to keep some of the features that have continued to attract file-sharers since the early illegitimate days of Napster.

"It retains the sense of community and spontaneity which makes P2P and super distribution so attractive to consumers, whilst ensuring that this activity takes place within a framework in which the music can be tracked and rights owners get paid" he said.

In a recent survey of more than 800 online music fans for Playlouder, more than half said they would prefer to download music using legitimate P2P networks over other legal download services, such as iTunes and Napster.

Playlouder said it would use digital fingerprinting techniques to track the sharing of music in any format over its own network.

It added that if all broadband net service providers followed this model, the music industry would have a revenue source of more than £300m a year in the UK, and $13.5bn globally.

The music-based net service provider will offer its basic 1Mbps broadband package at £26.99 a month, and says its network has been specifically designed for downloading files, such as digital music.

What is called "deep packets search" technology is used in Playlouder's network to spot file-sharing traffic so it can be re-routed to Playlouder's "walled garden", allowing only other Playlouder subscribers access to it.

The technology behind Playlouder's service is provided by Audible Magic.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/4176120.stm





Warner Music Readies CD-Free 'e-Label'
Declan McCullagh

Warner Music Group is creating a new music-distribution mechanism that will rely on digital downloads instead of compact discs.

Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music's chairman and CEO, said Monday that the new mechanism will be called an "e-label," in which artists will release music in clusters of three songs every few months rather than a CD every few years.

"We're trying to experiment with a new business model," he told an audience of about 150 people at a Progress & Freedom Foundation conference here. "We're going to try to see where this goes."

Warner Music's move seems to be a response to the exploding popularity of music-download services and the slowly slipping sales of physical CDs. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, about 180 million songs were sold online in the first half of 2005, up from 57 million in the same period last year. Apple Computer's iTunes recently passed 500 million downloads.

The e-label will permit recording artists to enjoy a "supportive, lower-risk environment" without as much pressure for huge commercial hits, Bronfman said. In addition, artists signed to the e-label will retain copyright and ownership of their master recordings.

Bronfman also took a few swipes at the technology industry while praising the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in the Grokster file-swapping lawsuit. It will "inspire further technological innovation and will accelerate the growth of legitimate digital music services," he said.

He said he didn't support government interference in "what should be normal fair-market mechanisms," but praised mandatory requirements designed to filter pirated material from peer-to-peer networks and levies such as Canada's proposal, currently on hold, to tax iPods.

"We like government levies when they benefit us," Bronfman said. "I would like none of the legislators in France, for instance, to say they should no longer pay us a levy for all the blank CDs that are being sold, (though) it doesn't make up for the revenue that we're losing...If the government mandated filtering technologies, we'd be delighted."

A Warner Music representative said afterwards that the company did not believe it was politically feasible to push for mandatory filtering and it was not supporting such a requirement--or blank media levies--in the United States.
http://news.com.com/Warner+Music+rea...3-5841355.html





Movies Plan Move On Pirates
Simon Hayes

THE movie industry may consider prosecuting internet users who download pirated copies of Hollywood blockbusters, warning it will take pirates to court if consumers "migrate to illegal downloads en masse".

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft is already warning that organised crime is using popular peer-to-peer networks and pirate websites to download illegally copied movies and burn them to DVD, selling them in markets.

AFACT executive director Adrianne Pecotic said the movie industry would continue with education campaigns aimed at convincing consumers piracy was wrong, but it would consider prosecutions if those campaigns were not successful.

"We want to start with education, but ultimately if that doesn't work you can't rule out dealing with the problem by enforcement," she said.

"You can't rule out anything if consumers migrate to illegal downloads en masse. The civil law makes it an offence to make pirated copies, and in the US individual users have been targeted in civil suits."

The music industry, affected first by electronic piracy because of smaller file sizes, has not prosecuted individual users in Australia, but has pursued companies it alleges are contributing to copyright infringement.

The industry is awaiting a Federal Court judgment in the record labels' civil copyright violation case against Kazaa.

The US Supreme Court found in July that peer-to-peer networks Grokster and StreamCast were liable for copyright infringement.

Ms Pecotic said although most movie piracy still involved DVDs, the internet was beginning to play a bigger role as a direct delivery mechanism and as an intermediate delivery mechanism before the content was burned to DVD.

She was concerned piracy would increase as broadband costs came down and uptake of the technology increased.

"Australians now are very fast uptakers of broadband, and it takes 50 minutes to download a movie using broadband," she said.

Ms Pecotic said AFACT was trying to head off the impact of this on the movie industry in the same way it had done for the music industry.

The movie industry was worried that young people did not understand or appreciate copyright issues.

"When you talk about stealing physical property, we were taught as toddlers not to steal from the supermarket," Ms Pecotic said.

"When you talk about intellectual property, there's no moral or legal underpinning."

The movie makers were mainly concerned about people who "make a business model out crime", particularly rogue ISPs that turn a blind eye to downloaders, she said.

"When you have websites that facilitate piracy and ISPs that turn a blind eye, we want to talk to them," she said. "The film industry wants to have a dialogue with the internet industry about how to deal with this issue."
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html





HP Preps Pirate-Fighting Projector
Declan McCullagh

Hewlett-Packard is developing a projection technology designed to foil camcorder-outfitted pirates in movie theaters, according to a board member.

Tom Perkins, a legendary venture capitalist and partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, alluded to the research at a dinner gathering here Tuesday, part of the Progress & Freedom Foundation's annual conference.

"We have a new projection technology that we think will make the image immune from a teenager sitting in the (audience) with a video camera," Perkins said.

An HP spokesman confirmed that the company was working on a research project fitting that description, but declined to provide any further details.

If adopted, the company's technology could help prevent the piracy of movies with handheld camcorders, a technique that typically yields low-quality results but nevertheless has bedeviled the movie industry. A federal law enacted this spring makes it a crime to videotape movies without permission of the copyright owner.

Another company, called Cinea, won a $2 million National Science Foundation grant in 2002 for a similar idea. That company used slight modifications in the "timing and modulation of the light used to display the image" in order to distort any videotaped version of the film, the company's grant proposal said.

Cinea was acquired by audio pioneer Dolby Laboratories in late 2003.

Perkins didn't elaborate on what HP had planned, and joked that he probably wasn't supposed to divulge what he did. "I'll probably get whacked for saying this," he told the audience at the conference.

HP sells a line of digital projectors for office and home theater use.
http://news.com.com/HP+preps+pirate-...3-5842763.html





Broadcast Flag "Recommendations" For Congress Published
Declan McCullagh

An array of non-profit groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the American Library Association spent years fighting the idea of a "broadcast flag," a federal regulation that would have outlawed many digital TV receivers and tuner cards starting July 1.

They won. In May, a federal appeals court unceremoniously tossed out the Federal Communications Commission's regulations.

But now one non-profit advocacy group is breaking ranks with its usual allies and handing Congress a road map to reinstating the broadcast flag. The idea is to reduce piracy of digital TV by prohibiting the manufacture of computer and video hardware that doesn't sport copy protection technology.

The Center for Democracy and Technology on Tuesday published its "recommendations" for Congress. Instead of telling politicians that such a law would be unwise and that it would necessarily infringe on Americans' fair use rights, CDT merely offers some guidelines for what the first President Bush might have called a kindler, gentler broadcast flag.

CDT said, for instance, in its road map: "The FCC did a number of things right in its initial broadcast flag decisions, including being open to approving new technologies even if they were controversial."

"We're not lockstep with EFF/PK on this, so we're not out there saying 'a broadcast flag regime inevitably sucks for consumers,'" CDT analyst David Sohn told me in e-mail. "Aggressive opposition to any and all possible versions of a flag rule is simply not our position."

Does that mean that CDT -- which receives about half its revenue from corporate contributions -- is quietly cashing checks from the big media companies that have begun to lobby Congress to reinstate the broadcast flag?

A now-deleted Web page, saved in February 2003 by Archive.org, shows that Time Warner, Disney, and Vivendi (an owner of NBC Universal) have been supporters. Though for the record, a CDT spokesman said Tuesday that only Time Warner (that is, AOL) currently is providing cash.
http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-584...2143&subj=news





Sirius Introduces Portable Unit That Stores Music
Derek Caney

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. on Thursday said it will introduce a small portable device for its subscription radio service that can store 50 hours of music, news and programs from Sirius channels, a move to narrow the gap with its larger rival XM Satellite.

The new player, roughly the size of a deck of playing cards, is the company's first device to be used outside the confines of cars and trucks. The automotive market accounts for the vast majority of satellite radio usage. XM has had a portable device on the market since last fall.

Sirius's player, dubbed the S50, underscores the trend of the converging consumer electronics devices, specifically satellite radio with digital music players.

With the success of Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod digital music player, many consumer electronics makers have been looking for ways to add digital music as a feature on other devices such as cellphones and other handheld devices.

One of the key features of the S50, which will be available in October, is the ability to create digital music files from satellite radio broadcasts that can then be transferred to PCs, other players or burned to CDs.

But how much the S50, which has a suggested retail price of $360, narrows the gap with XM is subject to debate. S50 cannot independently receive a satellite signal the way that XM's portable MyFi device can.

The S50 has to be attached to a docking device that is not portable in order to receive signals. That device costs an additional $100.

"One thing that disappoints me is the pricing," said Legg Mason analyst Sean Butson said. "To pay close to $500 for this strikes me as too much." MyFi costs about $300.

Sirius' device comes a month after Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said it would sell a digital music player that can receive satellite signals from Sirius' larger rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc.. XM also has a deal with Napster Inc. to start a service that allows users to buy music they hear on XM stations.

XM subscribers outnumber Sirius subscribers more than 2-to-1, but Sirius has been investing heavily in programing, including expensive contracts with shock jock Howard Stern and the National Football League.

Sirius shares rose 8 cents to $6.59 in midday Nasdaq trading.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...-SIRIUS-DC.XML





VHS & Beta, part 2

Toshiba President: Two DVD Formats Staying
AP

Toshiba Corp.'s president said Wednesday his company has no plans to revive failed talks with a Sony Corp.-led consortium to find a unified format for next-generation DVDs, indicating that two rival - and incompatible - formats of the discs are here to stay.

"There's no plan for (resuming) such talks at this moment" with Sony, Toshiba President and Chief Executive Officer Atsutoshi Nishida said.

Toshiba Corp. leads a group supporting the HD DVD format, while the Sony-led bloc backs the Blu-ray format.

Nishida said it was very likely that DVD products using the two different formats will remain on the market for the time being, but he added Toshiba hasn't given up efforts to unify the next-generation DVD formats.

Fears are growing that this may be a repeat of the VHS-versus-Beta battle of the early 1980s over the format for video tape recorders. Nishida said it would take up to two years to develop DVD devices once the two sides agree on the new format.

Sony's Blu-ray disks have a more sophisticated format and play back 25 GB of data, compared with HD DVD's 15, but they are more expensive to produce.

Both sides are already developing products that feature their respective DVD formats. Toshiba plans to roll out HD DVD players by the end of this year and HD DVD recorders next spring, Nishida said.

Sony's popular game console PlayStation 3, which will play Blu-ray disks, is also due out next spring.

Regarding Toshiba's core semiconductor business, Nishida said the company was having difficulty meeting demand for NAND-type flash memory chips amid brisk demand for consumer products using the chips, such as portable music players.

Toshiba is the second-largest NAND flash memory chip maker after Samsung Electronics Co. and is now fulfilling 70 percent of demand for the chips compared to 80 percent in late July, he said.

But even as demand grows, prices are falling, Nishida said. "We expect prices to drop 30 percent to 40 percent every year," he said.

Toshiba can absorb that price drop by cutting costs, he said, to keep posting profits in its memory chip business.

Analysts say Toshiba faces tougher competition in the memory-chip market from new suppliers such as Hynix Semiconductor Inc. and Micron Technology Inc. Some critics also say Toshiba's dependence on its semiconductor business is too high, making its earnings vulnerable to chip market trends.
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...stomwir e.htm





Canada's Big Brother Plan to Reshape the Internet
Michael Geist

Justice Minister Irwin Cotler's announcement late last week that the federal government plans to aggressively move forward to establish new Internet-related law enforcement powers has justifiably attracted considerable critical attention.

The federal government refers to the proposals as its "lawful access" initiative, because they would make legal dramatic new surveillance powers. The plans are being called "awful access" by critics, however, who have good reason to believe they will seriously erode citizens' rights and privacy while failing to truly boost Canadians' security.

The lawful access initiative dates back to 2002 when law enforcement first raised the prospect of establishing new powers to combat terror activities online. While the possibility fell off the radar screen soon after, it was back – this time on the fast track --earlier this year. The government hosted a series of consultations with interested stakeholders and now it confidently plans to forge ahead with a legislative package early this fall.

Although the specifics of the actual bill remain unknown, the spring 2005 consultations provided a good sense of what Canadians can expect.

If enacted, lawful access would compel Internet service providers to install new interception capabilities as they upgrade their networks. The country’s major ISPs, who provide service to the majority of Canadians, will eventually be capable of intercepting data, isolating specific subscribers, and removing any encryption or other changes that they make to data transmissions.

The proposal will likely contain an exemption for smaller ISPs, but all will be required to report on their readiness to conduct interceptions six months after the law takes effect. Failure to comply with the new standards would carry stiff penalties with fines of up to $500,000 and potential imprisonment for five years.

Lawful access would also provide law enforcement authorities with a wide range of new powers. For example, authorities could apply for new “production orders” with which they could compel disclosure of tracking data such as cell phone usage as well as transmission data, including telecommunications and Internet usage information.

Law enforcement authorities would also have access to a new “preservation order” that could be used to compel ISPs to preserve Internet usage information for up to three months, forcing ISPs to store far more data than is currently the case.

Among the most troubling aspects of the lawful access proposals are a series of new powers that are not accompanied by any judicial oversight. Law enforcement authorities, including the police, CSIS agents, and even Competition Bureau authorities, will have the right to obtain ISP subscriber information simply upon request without a warrant. In fact, the proposals even envision ISPs responding to such requests in certain situations within 30 minutes based solely on a phone call.

With the London bombings still fresh in mind, many Canadians may be inclined to support the lawful access initiative. The threat of terrorism remains real and undoubtedly everyone wants to ensure that law enforcement has the tools it needs to provide effective security.

Before supporting this initiative, however, Canadians ought to ask some tough questions.

First, are all these new powers necessary? Obtaining personal information without a warrant or establishing new tracking capabilities will obviously make life easier for law enforcement authorities. The price for these new powers should not be underestimated though as lawful access will lead to reduced privacy and increased consumer costs.

Given the high price, it should fall to law enforcement to make the case that their existing powers are inadequate. They have thus far failed to do so, neglecting to point to a single case where current Canadian law ultimately resulted in a botched investigation or failed prosecution.

Second, do the new powers contain sufficient judicial oversight? The answer to this question appears to be an obvious no. In order to preserve the privacy and security balance, greater safeguards should accompany the increase in network surveillance. Instead, the proposal contemplates the opposite approach with greater surveillance and fewer safeguards.

Third, are the lawful access provisions constitutional? There is considerable uncertainty on this issue since the lack of judicial oversight and the potential for access to information without judicial warrants suggest that the provisions will, at a minimum, face constitutional challenge and tough scrutiny from the Canadian courts.

Fourth, is lawful access strictly designed to address the threat of terrorism? Once again, the answer appears to be no. While the genesis of the initiative dates back to the post 9/11 environment and the desire to address terror concerns, lawful access is now envisioned as a catch-all for Internet-related issues including child pornography, identity theft, phishing, and spam. It is certainly important to address these issues, yet many would question why we must sacrifice our privacy in order to protect it.

Fifth, will lawful access actually prove successful in battling Canadian terror? While no one knows the answer to that question, there is reason to doubt it will. Encryption technologies are left largely untouched by this proposal, which may allow some groups to communicate without fear of surveillance. Moreover, with smaller ISPs exempt from the new surveillance requirements due to cost considerations, evading the surveillance may require little more than subscribing to exempt providers.

Once new surveillance is built into the network, it will be virtually impossible to “unbuild” the dramatically different Internet that has been created. Given the long-term implications, it is crucial that Ottawa now strike the right privacy and security balance.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php...sk=view&id=935





China Tries To Wipe Internet Icon From Web

Beijing, August 19: Floozie or role model, attention monger or free spirit? For months, China has been debating what to make of its latest Internet-born star, a young woman known nationwide as Furong Jiejie, aka Sister Furong.

She is seen as a pioneer pushing the boundaries of traditional media controls but in the process has become a target of government censors in the tightly controlled country.

Sister Furong started the craze by posting pictures of herself -- draped back-down over a stone ball, bent at the knees with her chest thrust out suggestively and in other poses -- on Internet bulletin boards of two top Beijing universities to which she had tried but failed to gain entrance.

The shots, and accompanying captions and passages she wrote proclaiming her own beauty and talent, became a campus sensation.

But when her cult status began to sweep the whole country, Beijing stepped in.

"They've cracked down on me," Sister Furong, a 28-year-old girl next door whose real name is Shi Hengxia, told Reuters.

In late July, authorities told the country's top blog host to move Furong-related content to low-profile parts of the site. Her pictures can still be found online, but links to them and chatrooms about her have disappeared from the front pages of major Web portals.

And after blanket coverage earlier this year, newspapers, magazines and television have recently given almost no time to Sister Furong, who originally came from a rural area of central Shaanxi province.

"When I first heard about it I was really disappointed," she said. "My friends all said the government should be encouraging a positive, helpful girl like me," said Sister Furong, whose nickname means Hibiscus.

Beijing has worked hard but struggled to extend its heavy-handed control of domestic media to the country's booming Internet, which is forecast to have 120 million users, second only to the United States, by the end of the year.

Undercover Police Online

The government has created a special Internet police force believed responsible for shutting down domestic sites posting politically unacceptable content, blocking some foreign news sites and jailing several people for their online postings.

Bulletin boards operated by some of China's most prestigious universities have been barred to outside users, while a number of Internet cafes and online game companies have been shut for allowing users to access pornographic, violent or otherwise off-limits content.

Cities have even reportedly formed teams of undercover online commentators meant to sway public opinion on controversial issues in discussion on Internet chatrooms and bulletin boards.

Despite all of Beijing's controls, pockets of free speech still appear online and more and more Chinese are tapping the Internet for information outside of official sources.

China's latest crackdown has clearly dampened Furong fever, but Beijing-based film production company Zongbo Media is betting she has star power.

The company had hired her to star in a series of short films shot on digital video that would be broadcast only online to both appeal to Sister Furong's Internet fan base and slip through loopholes in government Web controls, Zongbo chairman Chen Weiming told Reuters.

"People will be able to watch these and see new sides of me and my talent," Furong said.

Media regulators had basically approved the project because they could not determine which rules applied to Internet video broadcasts, Chen said.

"Chinese youth are looking for different new ways to express their freedom," he added.

"Some people still have the old mentality of wanting to control everything, but these days, with the Internet, they can't control things any more. There's no use trying."
http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=53013





Unsealed Court Records In Rackspace Case Shed Light On Cyber Privacy
Catherine Dominguez

Local tech company Rackspace Managed Hosting last October silenced for nearly a week the Web servers for some 20 community journalism sites operated by an Internet-based global newsgathering consortium known as the Independent Media Center (Indymedia).

The operators and supporters of the journalism sites were outraged, claiming Rackspace had trampled on the rights of the press. Rackspace claimed it had no choice but to pull the servers off-line because it was facing a subpoena issued by a U.S. prosecutor in San Antonio.

The subpoena was served on Rackspace by FBI agents through a special process known as a commission procedure -- through which a foreign government, in this case Italy, seeks the assistance of U.S. law enforcers in securing evidence.

The special "commissioner's" subpoena ordered Rackspace to provide data from its Internet servers to Assistant United States Attorney Don Calvert in relation to a murder investigation in Italy. However, at the time the subpoena was issued, Rackspace was prohibited from commenting on the matter.

Now, almost a year later, officials with Rackspace, a San Antonio-based Internet hosting company that provides dedicated servers to customers, are responding to claims that they exceeded the parameters of the subpoena by shutting down two servers hosting the nonprofit Indymedia Web sites.

Officials with Rackspace originally said the subpoena demanded the entire contents of the servers be provided to the FBI.

But when the court documents related to the case were unsealed recently, they revealed the subpoena only requested that the company provide "log files in relation to the creation and updating of the Web spaces" for the Indymedia servers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based nonprofit "digital" civil rights group, filed a motion on Oct. 20, 2004, with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in San Antonio seeking to unseal the documents. The EFF's motion argued that "the public and the press have a clear and compelling interest in discovering under what authority the government was able to unilaterally prevent an Internet publisher from exercising their First Amendment rights."

The court granted the motion in late July, unsealing a majority of the record in the case. EFF received those documents earlier this month.

Officials with the EFF now claim it is clear that Rackspace over-reacted and should have never provided the government with the entire content of the servers.

Tight deadline

However, Annalie Drusch, director of corporate communications with Rackspace, says the company's actions were due to the perceived time constraints put on them by the subpoena. The subpoena states that the data was to be supplied to the U.S. prosecutor by Aug. 13, 2004. But Drusch claims the subpoena was not delivered to the company until early October of last year, leaving Rackspace little choice but to comply with haste. The Indymedia servers were taken off-line on Oct. 7.

"As soon as we got the subpoena, we acted on it," Drusch says. "We had to find those log files, which is a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack, in time to meet with the deadline of the subpoena."

In a written statement, Rackspace officials stated, "Rackspace employees searched for the specific information requested in the subpoena, but were unable to locate this information prior to the strict delivery deadline imposed by the FBI. In order to comply with the mandated deadline, Rackspace delivered copied drives to the FBI.

"Shortly thereafter, Rackspace succeeded in isolating and extracting the relevant files responsive to the subpoena and immediately asked that the drives be returned by the FBI. The FBI returned the drives and it was our understanding that at no time had they been reviewed by the FBI."

Rene Salinas, spokesman for the local FBI office, says the subpoena was, in fact, faxed to Rackspace officials on Oct. 7.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Calvert concedes he does not recall the date that the subpoena was actually delivered to Rackspace. But he could not explain why it would have been delivered in October, some two months after the Aug. 13, 2004, deadline listed in the subpoena.

"... Rackspace is here in San Antonio; all they had to do was drive over there and hand it to them," he says.

Additional clues to the date-discrepancy mystery may well exist in other court documents that still remain sealed in the wake of the EFF's motion.

Bad precedent

Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney with the EFF, says he along with other EFF representatives are reviewing the unsealed documents and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to determine what the group's next step will be.

"The commissioner's subpoena was seeking only log files and yet Rackspace handed over the entirety of the servers going beyond what the government had requested," Opsahl notes. "We think it was inappropriate to provide the government with the entirety of the servers."

Opsahl says his organization is concerned about this "censorship" happening to other companies and is exploring what steps EFF can take to prevent the same scenario from playing out again in the future.

"We don't want a situation in which a simple subpoena leads to a series of events (and) speech is taken off the Internet," Opsahl explains.

Drusch says Rackspace is now better prepared to handle similar situations going forward.

"We definitely feel the Indymedia case has given us more experience in this type of situation," Drusch explains. "Today we are better prepared to handle challenges like this.

"Privacy laws are the key here, and as this area of law continues to develop, we are going to adapt and refine our policies and procedures to make sure we are protecting our customers' rights."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9038293/





Sun Launches Open-Source Digital Rights Plan
Stephen Shankland

After years of work, Sun Microsystems has begun trying to rally corporate allies behind a neutral standard for digital rights management, technology that governs how music, video or other information can be used or copied.

Sun President Jonathan Schwartz announced the long-brewing project, called the Open Media Commons, at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Aspen Summit on Sunday. The software the company hopes will be employed for digital rights management (DRM) is coming from Sun Labs and is called Dream (DRM everywhere available).

Dream is open-source software governed by Sun's Community Development and Distribution License--the same license it uses to cover its OpenSolaris operating system. Dream's components include software for letting different DRM systems interoperate based on credentials held by individuals, not by particular devices; server software for delivering streaming video; and Java software for managing video streams.

"There are a small number of companies that are presenting themselves as tollgates to the management of digital rights," Schwartz said in an interview. "The Dream DRM solution will bypass the InterTrust and ContentGuard and MPEG LA patents, so that when your child grows up they won't have to pay a buck to watch a home movie."

The lack of DRM standards has been a problem. For example, music downloaded from one company's music store can't always be played on any digital music player.

Sun has been working on DRM since at least 2002, when Chief Executive Scott McNealy first spoke of his aspirations in that area. During that time, some DRM technologies have become dominant. For example, Apple Computer's iTunes music store works tightly with its iPod music player, and Microsoft employs another DRM in its Windows Media Player software.

Sun is nonplussed with the lag, though. "We are nothing if not deliberate," Schwartz said. "We had to get a few of the major pieces in line."

Critical to the success of the initiative will be in the partners Sun can enlist--and the rivals for interest are strong and numerous. Besides Microsoft and Apple, for example, the Coral Consortium includes many consumer electronics giants. And efforts akin to Sun's haven't caught on--for example, a DRM standardization push by RealNetworks and the Digital Media Project.

Sun isn't afraid to step on toes, however. Asked whether Microsoft and Apple might sign up, Schwartz said, "We're interested in companies who would like to see a free and open-source DRM solution in the marketplace. Those who (prefer) a single-vendor or single-device solution don't see the network as we do," he said.

Missing those allies might hamper adoption of Sun's technology, but at the same time it could attract other partners. Hollywood studios and record labels have been notoriously nervous about standardizing on a technology that ties them too closely to Apple or Microsoft.

And Schwartz believes partners will come, as they did when Sun launched the Liberty Alliance for simplifying the process of logging on to multiple servers. With Liberty, "we clearly brought a tidal wave of support across the industry. You should expect we will do exactly the same here," Schwartz said.

Liberty was initially intended to thwart a Microsoft-centric technology called Passport, but the software behemoth backed off that plan, and now the field is the first area of cooperation in a detente between Microsoft and Sun.

On the heels of that new detente with Microsoft in 2004, Schwartz said he hoped the software company would cooperate in DRM. "I would like to believe we will have cooperation on a single standard," Schwartz said.

Sun also believes it can bypass corporate powers though use of open-source software. "Now it's no longer simply about engaging a few corporate interests. The open-source community is all about engaging the planet," Schwartz said, including individuals who might want to sell their own digital content over peer-to-peer networks.

Corporate allies are part of the plan, though. Here, Sun is turning to one of its traditional allies, the carriers who sell mobile phone service. "They recognize, as do we, that requiring $1 per handset for a DRM license is impractical," Schwartz said.

Sun's technology governs the sharing of digital information, but not how it's encoded with methods such as MP3 for audio. Ultimately, "codecs" for encoding and decoding media should also be part of the alliance, said Glenn Edens, a senior vice president and director at Sun Labs.

"I think a solid open-source community around codecs is equally important to the DRM. We're trying kick off both communities," Edens said.
http://news.com.com/Sun+launches+ope...3-5840492.html





Local news

Will Sticks Lick Broadband Fix?
Steven Levy

When Bob Dylan sang "Time passes slowly up here in the mountains," he wasn't referring to the speed of Web pages loading on his computer. But this month I've had plenty of time to think about that Dylan lyric, as well as re-read the paper and stare at the hummingbird that flutters outside my window at my western Massachusetts retreat. This is dial-up country, and my browser refreshes in slo-mo, my mailbox fills up in dribbles and two coats of paint can dry before a PowerPoint file downloads. Though the Berkshires are only hours away from superwired citadels like New York and Boston, in terms of telecommunications this might as well be Nepal.

The sticks are getting shafted when it comes to broadband. The Pew Internet and American Life Project study reports that rural users are only half as likely as urbanites to use high-speed Internet service, and that two thirds of rural dial-up users either don't know of their options to get the fast stuff or have checked it out and learned for sure they can't get it. There are just too many areas like mine, where cable companies never bothered to lay wire and telcos haven't made the "final mile" investment to extend broadband to their phone customers. Earlier this year Verizon canceled its plans to make DSL upgrades in this part of the county, explaining it wasn't worth the expense. The Berkshire Eagle gave one resident's response: "You've just given us a death sentence."

Hyperbole, but the guy has a point. High-speed Internet is quickly becoming an essential, just like electricity and phone service. Dial-up is a temporary setback for me but a full-time reality for many rural residents. If someplace doesn't have broadband, people are less likely to move there and start businesses there. A century ago our government pursued a policy of "universal access" to make sure that those technologies would be available to all. In that spirit, President George W. Bush has set a goal of high-speed Internet access available in every home in America by 2007. But where's the beef? "It's one thing to set a goal, and another to create policies to make it happen," says Sen. Byron Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota. "Everybody understands that universal access is broken."

Dorgan, along with Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, is sponsoring a bill that would direct up to $500 million from the telephone Universal Service Fund (one of those confusing charges on your long-distance bill) to building out broadband in unserved areas. A good start, but compared with the highway bill the president signed last week—a breathtaking porkfest that designated $286 billion for overpasses, museum renovations and bridges to nowhere— it seems comically modest.

The good news for rural America is that new wireless technologies might make it much easier for companies to extend broadband down the unpaved roads and over the hills. Here in the Berkshires a company called WiSpring is hoping to use something called "fixed wireless" (sort of a cross between Wi-Fi and satellite, with powerful transmitters on poles and sensitive receivers in the home) to serve the towns here. As it turns out, Verizon itself is looking at fixed wireless as a way to get its customers into the cyber fast lane; last week it expanded a trial program with three towns in Illinois and one in Pennsylvania.

It's great that new ideas might help extend broadband to the boonies, but why not hasten the process with a national policy that recognizes the importance of universal service, and invests wisely to give everyone access to the Net at geek-pleasing speeds? Isn't it better to build connections to everywhere than to build bridges to nowhere?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8938152/site/newsweek/





Adds encryption

Google Revamps Desktop Search Program
Matthew Fordahl

Google Inc. updated its software for searching PC hard drives and the Internet, giving the free program a new look and adding tools that deliver personalized information based on a user's Web surfing habits.

Google Desktop 2, available Monday as a public beta test, is the company's latest volley against Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. as all three race to expand their presence on PC desktops.

The latest Google offering includes several twists. Beyond providing search results, it monitors the user's behavior and presents relevant information in a resizable and moveable vertical window called the Sidebar.

One module aggregates e-mail messages from a variety of accounts, including Google's Gmail service or the user's Internet provider. Others display stock prices, personalized news headlines, weather reports and what's popular on the Web.

Another module pulls Really Simple Syndication feeds from Web sites that have been visited and offer that service. Unlike other feed aggregators, the user need not take any action for a feed to be added.

"For the novice, it's very easy. They don't even have to know what RSS feeds are," said Nikhil Bhatla, Google Desktop's product manager. "They'll just start seeing them in the Sidebar. Advanced users can go in and customize to their hearts' delight."

A photo module displays pictures from the local PC. It also pulls pictures from Web-based galleries that have been visited.

Some features, including personalized news, involve sending details of its users surfing habits back to Google. Bhatla said no personally identifying data is transmitted, and users can opt out.

The program has several tools for finding information buried on local and network drives as well as the Internet. The Sidebar has its own search box and it adds a new toolbar to Microsoft's Outlook e-mail program for quick access to mail messages.

After the initial indexing of all content on a drive - a process that takes place when the PC is not being used, subsequent indexing takes place in real time. That means a file can be found as soon as it's been saved to the disk.

The Sidebar's search box also finds applications, which can be launched directly from the results list that appears as words are typed in. It's similar to the Spotlight feature of Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X and the built-in search of Microsoft Windows Vista, which is expected to be released next year.

Google, which has come under fire for making private information a bit too easy to find, said it has now disabled the caching of secure Web sites - an option that can be enabled if the user desires.

It also recommends against using the desktop program tool on computers in Internet cafes or in cases where many people share the same operating system account.

Google Desktop 2 also offers the ability to encrypt - or scramble - the index to protect it from being read by unauthorized parties.

The software works on computers running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Mac OS X is not supported.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...M&SECTION=HOME





Robert Moog, Music Synthesizer Creator, Dies
Allan Kozinn

Robert Moog, the creator of the electronic music synthesizer that bears his name and that became ubiquitous among both experimental composers and rock musicians in the 1960's and 1970's, died on Sunday at his home in Ashville, N.C. He was 71.

The cause of death was a brain tumor, according to his daughter Michelle Moog-Koussa.

At the height of his synthesizer's popularity, when progressive rock bands like Yes, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer built their sounds around the assertive, bouncy, exotically wheezy and occasionally explosive timbres of Mr. Moog's instruments, his name (which rhymes with vogue) became so closely associated with electronic sound that it was often used generically, if incorrectly, to describe synthesizers of all kinds.

Mr. Moog's earliest instruments were collections of modules better suited to studio work than live performance, and as rock bands adopted them, Mr. Moog expanded his line to include the Minimoog and the Micromoog, instruments that could be used more easily on stage. He also expanded on his original monophonic models, which could play only a single musical line at a time, to polyphonic instruments that allowed for harmony and counterpoint.

Even so, by the end of the 1970's, Mr. Moog's instruments were being supplanted by those of competing companies like Arp, Aries, Roland and Emu, which produced synthesizers that were less expensive, easier to use and more portable. (Those instruments, in turn, were displayed in the 1980's by keyboard-contained digital devices by Kurzweil, Yamaha and others.)

In 1978, Mr. Moog moved from western New York to North Carolina, where he started a new company, Big Briar (later Moog Music), that produced synthesizer modules and alternative controllers - devices other than keyboards, with which musician could play electronic instruments. His particular specialty was the Ethervox, a version of the theremin, an eerie-toned instrument created by the Russian inventor Leon Theremin in the 1920's that allows performers to create pitches by moving their hands between two metal rods.

It was the theremin, in fact, that got Mr. Moog interested in electronic music as a child in the 1940's. In 1949, when he was 14, he built a theremin from plans he found in a magazine, Electronics World. He tinkered with the instrument until he produced a design of his own in 1953, and in 1954 he published an article on the theremin in "Radio and Television News" and started the R. A. Moog Company, which sold his own theremins and theremin kits.

Mr. Moog was born in New York City on May 23, 1934, and although he studied the piano while he was growing up in Flushing, Queens, his real interest was physics. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and earned undergraduate degrees in physics from Queens College and electrical engineering from Columbia University.

By the time he completed his Ph.D in engineering physics at Cornell University, in 1965, his theremin business had taken off, and he had started working with a composer, Herbert Deutsch, on his first synthesizer modules. Mr. Moog was familiar with the huge synthesizers in use at Columbia University and RCA and those that European composers were experimenting with, and his goal was to create instruments that were both more compact and accessible to musicians.

The first Moog synthesizers were collections of modules, connected by electronic patch cords, something like those that connect stereo components. The first module, an oscillator, would produce a sound wave, giving a musician a choice of several kinds, ranging from the gracefully undulating purity of a sine wave to the more complex, angular or abrasive sounds of square and sawtooth waves. The wave was sent to the next module, called an A.D.S.R. (attack-decay-sustain-release) envelope generator, with which the player defined the way a note begins and ends, and how long it is held. A note might, for example, explode in a sudden burst, like a trumpet blast, or it could fade in at any number of speeds. From there, the sound went to a third module, a filter, which was used to shape its color and texture.

Using these modules and others that Mr. Moog went on to create, a musician could either imitate acoustic instruments or create purely electronic sounds. A keyboard, attached to this setup, let the performer control when the oscillator produced a tone, and at what pitch.

"Artist feedback drove all my development work," Mr. Moog said in an interview with the online magazine Salon in 2000. "The first synthesizers I made were in response to what [composer] Herb Deutsch wanted. The now-famous Moog filter was suggested by several musicians. The so-called A.D.S.R. envelope, which is now a basic element in all contemporary synthesizers and programmable keyboard instruments, was originally specified in 1965 by Vladimir Ussachevsky, then head of the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center. The point is that I don't design stuff for myself. I'm a toolmaker. I design things that other people want to use."

University music schools quickly established electronic music labs built around the Moog synthesizer, and composers like Richard Teitelbaum, Dick Hyman and Walter Carlos (who later had a sex-change operation and is now Wendy Carlos) adopted them. For most listeners, though, it was a crossover album, Walter Carlos's "Switched- On Bach," that ushered the instrument into the spotlight. A collection of Bach transcriptions, meticulously recorded one line at a time, "Switched-On Bach" was meant to persuade casual listeners who regarded synthesizers as random noise machines that the instrument could be used in thoroughly musical ways. Ms. Carlos's sequels included the haunting Purcell and Beethoven transcriptions used in the Stanley Kubrick film, "A Clockwork Orange."

University music schools quickly established electronic music labs built around the Moog synthesizer, and composers like Richard Teitelbaum, Dick Hyman and Walter (also known as Wendy) Carlos adopted them. For most listeners, though, it was a crossover album, Ms. Carlos's "Switched-On Bach," that ushered the instrument into the spotlight. A collection of Bach transcriptions, meticulously recorded one line at a time, "Switched-On Bach" was meant to persuade casual listeners who regarded synthesizers as random noise machines that the instrument could be used in thoroughly musical ways. Ms. Carlos's sequels included the haunting Purcell and Beethoven transcriptions used in the Stanley Kubrick film, "A Clockwork Orange."

Rock groups were attracted to the Moog as well. The Monkees used the instrument as early as 1967, on their "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, Ltd." Album. In early 1969, George Harrison of the Beatles had a Moog synthesizer installed in his home and released an album of his practice tapes, "Electronic Sound," that May. The Beatles used the synthesizer to adorn several tracks on the "Abbey Road" album, most notably John Lennon's "Because," Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" and Paul McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer."

Among jazz musicians, Herbie Hancock, Jan Hammer and Sun Ra adopted the synthesizer quickly. And with the advent of progressive rock in the early 1970's, the sound of the Moog synthesizer and its imitators became ubiquitous.

In 1971, Mr. Moog sold his company, Moog Music, to Norlin Musical Instruments Inc., but he continued to design instruments for the company until 1977. When he moved to North Carolina, in 1978, he started Big Briar, to make new devices, and he renamed the company Moog Music when he bought back the name in 2002. He also worked as a consultant and vice president for new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems, from 1984 to 1988.

In 2004, Mr. Moog was the subject of "Moog," a documentary by the filmmaker Hans Fjellestad.

"Bob Moog embodies the archetypal American maverick inventor," Mr. Fjellestad wrote when the film was released.

His marriage to Shirleigh Moog ended in divorce. Mr. Moog is survived by his wife, Ileana, and his children, Laura Moog Lanier, Matthew Moog, Michelle Moog-Koussa, Renee Moog and Miranda Richmond.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/te...n er=homepage