Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - Jan. 18th, ‘03

[JackSpratts]

Supreme Blunders

Perhaps it’s an American Yin to a European Yang, perhaps it’s because establishments change with agonizing slowness, perhaps it’s because something is fundamentally wrong with this system or perhaps it’s because of no particular reason at all but whatever the underlying factors ultimately are the verdict is abundantly clear: the U.S. Supreme court has decided that U.S. copyright law will remain firmly in the grip of a United States Congress that doesn’t need or understand it, and out of the hands of the citizens that do.

An early morning valentine to a grasping oligarchy came this week on a clear and frigid Wednesday in Washington when the Court delivered the best news a media giant could hear: There will be no reversal of any copyright extensions granted by Congress. Originally a temporary monopoly lasting fourteen years, copyrights have now been fattened to 95 years for corporations or lifetime plus 70 years for authors. Copyrights now cover more while the public gets less. European copyrights last for a comparatively brief 50 years, an irritant for the Americans and something they’ll focus their efforts to change.

The Supreme Court may well feel that Congress is derelict in its duty to its citizens but according to their latest assessment that dereliction is well within the powers granted by the Constitution.

A U.S. court delivered a second blow to the flow of information this week by ruling that offshore Sharman Networks, Ltd, owners of the file sharing powerhouse KaZaA, can be sued for copyright violations in the United States. While it remains to be seen what this will mean on a practical level since stack developers for Fasttrack say their system can run independently as a pure peer-to-peer, this may be the nail in the coffin for P2Ps backed by VC development cash. If the case is lost it will certainly accelerate the capping or closing of P2P bandwidth by ISPs and universities.

A third unsettling development comes to us this week by way of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The tech sector says they’ve done the math and figured the best odds are with the Content Cartels - so they’ve hopped into bed with the RIAA and delivered a honeymoon promise to use really good copy protection on their hot new hardware if the RIAA would just let their hair down and stop all the legal whining. Of course honeymoons end and relationships can fizzle so who knows what the union will produce, but I’m sure any failures won’t be from lack of effort. Meanwhile the movie guys are having none of it - for better or for worse they’ve decided to stay single - but only because they really are hot for a date with a certain legislature.

When policy makers start asking why the United States went from being a media powerhouse to an also ran they can find their answers in decisions like these.

The days of downloading content are far from over but as the world switches from old delivery models to new, I would’ve liked to have seen the U.S. take a more active and progressive leadership role instead of ceding the future of communications to others.

Enjoy,

Jack.








"failing to protect the public”
Supreme Court Keeps Copyright Protections
Gina Holland - AP

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld lengthier copyrights protecting the profits of songs, books and cartoon characters - a huge victory for Disney and other companies.

The 7-2 ruling, while not unexpected, was a blow to Internet publishers and others who wanted to make old books available online and use the likenesses of a Mickey Mouse cartoon and other old creations without paying high royalties.

Hundreds of thousands of books, movies and songs were close to being released into the public domain when Congress extended the copyright by 20 years in 1998.

Justices said the copyright extension, named for the late Rep. Sonny Bono, R-Calif., was neither unconstitutional overreaching by Congress, nor a violation of constitutional free-speech rights.

Eric Eldred challenged the copyright extension, which he said unfairly limits what he can make available on a public web library he runs.

The extension "protects authors' original expression from unrestricted exploitation," Ginsburg wrote in rejecting Eldred's free-speech claims. "Protection of that order does not raise the free speech concerns present when government compels or burdens the communication of particular facts or ideas."

Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer disagreed with their colleagues.

Stevens wrote that the court was "failing to protect the public interest in free access to the products of inventive and artistic genius."
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...N&SECTION=HOME
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jan15.html
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2003_01_1....html#87500874
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/bu...ia/16BIZC.html
http://www.forbes.com/2003/01/15/cz_...copyright.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,57237,00.html


‘Copyright will lose its meaning’
David Brooks

A Derry man’s attempt to put more free books on the Internet was shot down Wednesday by the U.S. Supreme Court, and he says the court’s support of extended copyright laws will encourage more Internet sharing of material of the sort that many copyright holders call piracy.

“The response from people who really want to have access to these works is to disregard copyright, and that’s dangerous,” Eric Eldred said after the court issued its ruling. “This will just increase the movement toward peer-to-peer networks.”
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/Main....rticleID=71766

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Digital Denial
George F. Colony

Digital media will transform the music and film industries--whether they like it or not.

And entertainment business models have worked phenomenally for the past 75 years. Edwin Booth, the superstar stage actor of the mid-19th century, had fame and a modicum of wealth. But he was compensated, inflation adjusted, in his lifetime, at less than what Mel Gibson brings in per movie. John Phillip Sousa was renowned for musical compositions and performances at the turn of the century, but his career take was less than what Eminem made in 2002.

What created this flood of money for today's artists and the companies that sponsor them? In a word, technology. Radio, records, film, tape, home audio, television, VCRs, CDs, and DVDs opened up avenues for syndicating music and film and drove high compensation. The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee Harrison Ford $25 million per movie. Technology got him to that figure.

Technology can create extraordinary business equations as it did with entertainment. And technology can rewrite the formula. There are three inexorable factors that are changing the equation for entertainment.

First, in the future there will be no medium--no piece of plastic, no spool of tape--that will contain film or music content.

Second, consumers want liquidity in their entertainment product. Much of the MP3 ripping and burning that infuriates the Recording Industry Association of America is devoted to achieving mobility.

Third, pricing will change.

Lawyers and lobbyists can't stop these trends. End the denial. Get over it, get on with it, figure it out. Or end up in the dustbin of history with sheet music publishers.

What it all means -
http://news.com.com/2009-1122-980364.html

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EFF Blasts Controversial Copyright Law
Lisa M. Bowman

A controversial digital copyright law is quashing free speech and choking innovation, according to a new study by longtime critics of the measure.

In its new "Unintended Consequences" report released Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) lists a variety of cases triggered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law passed in 1998 designed to bring copyright law into the digital age.

Hollywood studios, record labels and other intellectual property holders lobbied hard for the law, fearing that the Internet would become a forum for rampant piracy because it allows people to easily copy and distribute digital products. Unlike analog copies, which lose resolution with each replication, digital copies of products maintain their high quality.

In its report, the EFF said aggressive applications of the law have reached beyond the intention of the measure. The EFF said the DMCA has had a threefold effect: chilling free expression and scientific research; jeopardizing fair use; and impeding competition.

"In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright piracy," the study's authors wrote.

The study examines the fallout of a particular portion of the DMCA, known as the anti-circumvention provision, which prohibits cracking protections on copyrighted works, in most cases, or even telling people how to break into the software. Aside from narrow exceptions related to research or to reverse engineering, the law doesn't consider whether a person cracking the code plans to do so for legitimate purposes.

The study lists more than a dozen cases where intellectual property holders have wielded the DMCA in ways the EFF says are overly aggressive and chilling. The study cites cases including those of Ed Felten, a Princeton professor who backed down from giving a speech about his research under threats from the record industry; Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian programmer who was jailed after speaking about software he developed that could crack Adobe Systems' eBooks; and Static Control Components, a company that allegedly reverse-engineered some of Lexmark International Group's printer component programs to get toner cartridges to work with Lexmark products.

The study also cites media stories about foreign programmers who fear traveling to the United States because their work might get them in trouble, as well as comments from the White House cybersecurity chief Richard Clarke saying that the law needs be reformed because it's threatening research.

The study's release comes as some Washington lawmakers have introduced a bill to scale back the anti-circumvention provisions.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-980112.html

You’ll find the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) full report here: http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20030102_...sequences.html

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DMCA defendant to stop making chip
Declan McCullagh

A federal judge has agreed to Static Control Components' offer to temporarily cease manufacturing a toner cartridge chip that drew a lawsuit under a controversial copyright law.

Lexmark International Group, the No. 2 manufacturer of printers in the United States, sued Static Control in December 2002 for allegedly violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by selling the Smartek chip. Aftermarket toner makers use the Smartek chip to trick Lexmark printers into accepting their cartridges.

The lawsuit is one of the first brought under the DMCA, which is backed by copyright holders but has drawn fire from academics and programmers for restricting tinkering with software and hardware. Rep. Rick Boucher, R-Va., and three other members of Congress reintroduced a bill this week that would repeal key portions of the 1998 law.

A particular section of the DMCA makes it generally unlawful to circumvent technology that restricts access to a copyrighted work.

In a 17-page complaint filed Dec. 30, Lexmark claimed the Smartek chip mimics a technology used by Lexmark chips and unlawfully tricks the printer into accepting an aftermarket cartridge. That "circumvents the technological measure that controls access" to Lexmark's software, the complaint said.

Lexmark said Thursday that it expects fourth-quarter earnings of 88 cents to 90 cents per share, more than the 70 cents to 80 cents per share it had projected in October. The company said sales were up 5 percent to 6 percent compared with the prior year.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-980157.html

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Hubs Increase Risk to Internet
Kimberly Patch

The Internet has much in common with air travel, according to researchers from Ohio State University. This does not bode well, considering how disruptive storms can be to the airlines.

The researchers' analysis showed the overall vulnerability of the hub-and- spoke system for 41 network backbone providers. The most susceptible networks have the greatest reliance on hub-and-spoke configurations. The networks most susceptible to disconnection are AT&T, GTE, and Multacom, which would suffer significant performance hits and leave many smaller spoke cities without service with the loss of any one of eight, seven or six of the 14 largest hubs, respectively, according to the analysis.

In contrast, there are 11 network providers that use network topologies that resemble a mesh rather than a hub and spokes; these providers are robust enough to survive the loss of any of the largest hubs. These mesh-like topologies are more expensive to construct, but clearly have advantages where survivability is concerned, according to Grubesic.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/0...sk_122502.html

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For a fascinating look at the whole internet copyright conflict check out Bill Moyers’ excellent segment “Tollbooths on the Digital Highway” on his PBS program “Now”. It’s a well-crafted and zippy 20 minute primer on a usually dense and dry subject. You’ll find the transcript here http://www.pbs.org/now/printable/tra...ght_print.html

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AOL needs cash - looks to spin off cable stake
Reuters

A top AOL Time Warner executive told investors on Thursday that the media behemoth hoped to spin off its cable television operations during the second- quarter as part of its effort to begin paring down its weighty debt load.

Under ideal conditions, analysts predicted AOL Time Warner would spin off a stake of between 25 percent and 30 percent of Time Warner Cable, the nation's No. 2 cable operator, raising about $6 billion.

AOL Time Warner CFO Wayne Pace, speaking at the Salomon Smith Barney entertainment conference, said the company was aiming to close this month its agreement to buy Comcast's 27.6 percent stake in Time Warner Entertainment for about $9 billion.

"We are looking for a second-quarter initial public offering for the cable company," Pace told investors.

Spinning off its cable operations is part of the company's plans to expand its presence in the sector. The public offering will give the debt-laden company currency and the ability to acquire other cable rivals or take stakes in them.

AOL's $106.2 billion purchase of Time Warner was partially driven by the desire to gain access to cable lines to push high-speed Internet services.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-980097.html

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Feds mull broadband market shake-up
John Borland

U.S. regulators plan to unveil a major overhaul in telecommunications policy in the coming weeks that could strengthen the hand of local phone monopolies in a number of key areas, including high-speed Internet access.

At stake are arcane regulations governing how local phone companies must treat competitors seeking access to their lines and facilities. Those rules, set in 1996, were intended to be the cornerstone of a competitive marketplace for services that piggyback on the local phone networks. But some top policy-makers at the Federal Communications Commission have recently indicated that they believe consumers would do better if such rules were sharply curtailed.

"It sounds like they want to set up two monopoly toll roads and say that's enough for competition," said Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America. That's not a good idea, he added. "Proprietary gatekeepers destroy the innovative fabric of the Internet."

Bottom line, there's no argument that can be made that consumers would be better off with fewer broadband choices," said Jason Oxman, assistant general counsel for Covad, one of the few remaining independent DSL companies. "Consumers clearly have benefited from an explosion in broadband services."
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-979356.html

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Broadband Access Grows 59%, narrowband continues decline. http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=26972

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Mmmm Music
“Free Downloading Eating Net Music”

The European record industry must act now to curb the illegal free downloading of music and license their content to paid-for online music services. These are the main conclusions from new Net music industry research from Jupiter MMXI.

This latest study shows how the legal music-downloading sites (such as MP3.com, Peoplesound.com and Vitaminic.com) are suffering as the usage of grey market, peer-to-peer applications (such as KaZaA, MusicCity Morpheus and Audiogalaxy) are increasing.

Jupiter believes that the music industry’s attempts to regain control of this market through the courts, as seen with Napster, have not only failed to check the growth of file sharing but have also proved unpopular with consumers. In addition to tackling piracy, the record industry needs to offer compelling alternative options to the grey market that are worth paying for.

Mulligan concluded, ‘Europe’s legitimate online music market is being left in the starting blocks by the unchecked growth of illegal file sharing. The record industry needs to crack down hard and fast on the software companies behind file sharing networks and at the same time get serious about licensing content so that legitimate services can offer compelling alternatives. If they fail to do this, the free music mindset will become permanently embedded in the new generation of music listeners and paid- for music services in Europe will never get off the ground.'
http://www.mrons.com/drno/news1575.htm

One can only hope…

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Slumping record labels peer uneasily into Web-shrouded future
John Soeder

Eric Bazilian has seen the music industry's future and it's . . . a fish without gills?

Speaking at the third annual Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit, the singer-songwriter of Hooters fame compared the industry at the dawn of a new digital age to the first prehistoric creature to crawl out of the ocean for a go at life on dry land.

"Certain organs are going to develop further. But other organs like the gills are going to atrophy and fall away. Right now, we're all hoping we're not the ones [who] are going to atrophy," said Bazilian.

In other words, evolve or die.

That message came across loud and clear last week at Georgetown University, where artists, record company executives, dot-commies and others gathered to ponder their fates and the shape of musical things to come. The forward-thinking, three-day symposium was organized by the Future of Music Coalition, or FMC, a not-for-profit organization representing musicians and consumers.

Nobody actually ventured a guess as to what music is going to sound like in, say, 2013. Too many other issues were on the table, not the least of which was how compact discs are destined to become as obsolete as eight-track tapes.

"Ten years from now, you won't have CDs. The future of music is online distribution," said Bruce Lehman, president of the International Intellectual Property Institute.

Amid plenty of prognostication, there also was kvetching about how bad things are right now, especially on the radio and at retail.

Despite all the uncertainty out there, there's no reason to run scared from the future, said Marc Cooper, the Consumer Federation of America's research director.

"Technological change has the potential to expand markets," Cooper said. "The problem is the initial knee-jerk reaction . . . to defend old business models.

"It's absolutely critical to understand this is an opportunity."
http://www.cleveland.com/entertainme...8200893140.xml

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Music's Broken Record
Rick Aristotle Munarriz

Michael Jackson called him "devilish," and Mariah Carey married him... until she realized all that's Glitter isn't gold. Now, ladies and gentlemen, Tommy Mottola has left the building.

The abrupt resignation of Sony's (NYSE: SNE) music chief last night may have taken folks by surprise, but Mottola's not the only one frustrated with the current state of the music industry.

The sale of prerecorded music has fallen off in each of the last three years, and everybody is pointing fingers at someone else. The music industry blames listeners, who have taken to pirated MP3 downloads in droves. Listeners blame artists for not releasing compelling material to make an entire CD worth purchasing. The artists? Well, they blame the label's marketing efforts.

So if the blame game does nothing but go in circles, will anything ever be resolved? Four months ago, we looked at Napster's carnage. It's a real problem for the five major labels because there's no perfect solution. Copy-protected CDs can be defeated quickly, and they alienate the audience. Peer-to-peer file swapping is practically impossible to police effectively.

The saving grace is that the five major labels are owned by major entertainment conglomerates. Sony, AOL Time Warner (NYSE: AOL), Vivendi (NYSE: V), EMI, and BMG have more than just listening experience in the industry. Most of them are entertainment powerhouses, and you're already seeing more emphasis placed on the physical product. From bonus DVD discs to CDs that unlock rich band-related content online, it's the consumer-friendly way to win this very ugly war.
http://www.fool.com/News/Take/2003/mft/mft03011001.htm

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Easy as That…
TV Guy Now Label Guy
Frank Ahrens

Sony Corp. of America has tapped NBC President Andrew Lack, a recording industry outsider, to head its faltering music division, one day after Sony Music chief Thomas D. Mottola left the company to start his own record label.

Lack, 55, is an acclaimed television veteran, having run the network's news division since 1993 and building "NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw" into the top-rated evening news telecast. He also presided over the creation of MSNBC, the cable news channel produced in cooperation with Microsoft Corp.

He has never worked in the music industry, which he calls a "business in transition." However, his experience in merging television and the Internet fits nicely with Sony's strategy to sell its vast motion picture and music libraries online with the aid of Sony home electronics, such as the PS2 video game console.

The music industry "has some pretty well-reported challenges," Lack said in an interview yesterday.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jan10.html

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Music Industry Braces for a Shift
Laura Holson, Geraldine Fabrikant

The resignation last week of one of the music industry's most powerful figures, Thomas D. Mottola, the chairman and chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment, and his subsequent replacement by an outsider, Andrew Lack, a top NBC executive, has brought to the surface a growing sense of fear within the industry. The record business is bracing for a seismic shift and is increasingly reconciled to the fact that the current priorities of senior executives are outmoded.

What the Lack appointment underscores, analysts and industry executives agree, is the notion that the business is in such shaky condition that only an executive schooled outside the industry can come up with the radical approach that may be needed. In the last two years, the industry's basic business structure — selling music to stores — has taken a blow. The industry is now selling 100 million fewer CD's and cassettes than it did in 2000. According to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks album sales, 681 million were sold in 2002, down from 785 million in 2000. At the same time, music-swapping on the Internet, perceived as a major threat, continues to grow.

The industry's immediate problem is that although costs must be cut, the biggest costs of all — talent and marketing — are the toughest to rein in. And although many analysts and industry executives say they believe that further global consolidation is necessary — perhaps trimming the number of major recording companies to three from five — those financial benefits can go only so far.

To some extent, mergers can help companies reduce overhead, which amounts to about a third of expenses, said Michael Nathanson, a music analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York. But he points out that in the music industry, as in other entertainment businesses, mergers will not put the lid on the basic impulse of entertainment executives to bid against one another for talent.

The risk is that there will always be one profligate spender who starts a bidding war for artists, he noted. Talent and marketing costs are roughly 36 percent of overall budgets.

"The business model doesn't work anymore," Mr. Nathanson said. "There is going to be more pain before it gets better."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/13/bu...ia/13TUNE.html

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Thought it was cool…
Giant Lava Lamp May Rise In Small Town http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...nm/lavalamp_dc

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Napster’s concept morphs in networks
Jim.Hillibish

My nephew visiting for Christmas shocked me. He hasn’t bought a music CD in four years, yet he enjoys a huge music collection. Now I understand why the music business is so upset.

He’s a senior at a large university. Every computer in the school, from personal ones in the dorms and frat houses to those in classrooms and labs, is networked. That means anybody can share files, even over a wireless system that allows computing under trees in the campus park.

I’m certain the fathers of academia were sold on this system as a way to make students smarter, and indeed, they are. They can collaborate on discussions and work out problems and discover solutions at all hours, unencumbered by class schedules and time limits. Of course, since music and movies too are digital files, they share them, too.

Microsoft realized years ago that the more expensive the software, the more it will be pirated. So Microsoft cut prices to the point where software bundled with a new computer is a very small percentage of the price. They make up the difference because they sell more if less is pirated.

With music CDs running $18 for 12 songs, perhaps that’s something the industry should consider. The hardware cost of that CD probably is less than 50 cents. There’s room for substantial price cuts in exchange for higher sales. Of course, convincing an artiste of this economy may be impossible.

They’ve decided to take exactly the opposite track, rapidly increasing prices to recoup at least a fraction of the pirating. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more they charge, the more files will be shared for free.

Describing the file sharers as thieves and mobsters doesn’t seem to work, especially when they view the music industry as thieves and mobsters.

The music biz spent piles of its royalties shutting down Napster in court, only to see the concept morph into scores of new directions, almost instantly. Hence, nearly every university and many company networks now are miniature Napsters. At this rate, the Dixie Chicks may never become trillionaires.
http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?C...6&ID=79947&r=1

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Interview w/ former napster programer Nir Arbel of Soulseek. http://www.napjunk.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=712

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Says CD burners, internet to blame.
Lafayette loses legendary record store

Brad Kemp remembers the astonished looks on his customers' faces. Berry could literally hand them their favorite hits the second they walked through the door of his store, Raccoon Records.

Twenty years later, Berry is lucky if customers leave with anything -- if they bother to come in at all.

"We've had people at the counter decide not to buy," said Berry, who opened Raccoon Records in 1974. "One girl had something to buy and she turned to her friend, who said, 'Don't buy it. I'll burn you one,' " meaning she could get the music from the Internet for free.

Berry cites CD burners on computers, Internet file sharing and competition from national discount chains as the reasons why Raccoon Records is closing after 28 years. No closing day has been set, but Berry estimates all merchandise should be gone by mid- to late February.

"Kids are proud they have hundreds and hundreds of songs on their hard drives. Those that didn't have CD burners were getting them for Christmas. We can't make it like that," Berry said.

Raccoon's "Wall of Hits" is bare, just as most record bins in the 5,200 square-foot store. The remaining CDs and cassette tapes are marked at 30 percent off.
http://vh80299.vh8.infi.net/html/94A...8E4B19F9.shtml

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This Music store is beating the odds

With all the music megastores cropping up these days, it's not easy to keep a small underground music shop open.

One of the oldest and best of these offbeat but personal shops is Hyang Music in Sinchon, founded by Kim Gun-hil in 1992.

Although just a hole in the wall among a plethora of DVD-bangs, noraebangs and cell phone shops, Hyang Music is impossible to miss. The front window is bedecked with dozens of CDs and posters of underground artists. Inside, the walls are covered with electronica, rock and hip-hop disks.

And it's all underground. You can tell by the clientele: Deejays from the nightlife areas around Hongik University and Sinchon hang out at Hyang Music; many use the shop as a base to promote themselves.

The store has had some stiff challenges. One is the rise in MP3 file- sharing programs; another is the proliferation of big book and music stores, such as the Synnara Record outlet in Sinchon, which used to be Tower Records.

Before the financial crisis of 1997-8, a few other underground music shops were also operating in Sinchon. Now Hyang Music is the only one.

Mr. Kim kept the shop alive by consistently marketing underground labels from the United States, Europe and Korea; other underground music shops tried futilely to compete with the former Tower Records by switching to popular music.

Here's the update on Hyang Music: It's still stocking the latest imports in underground hip-hop, rock, electronica and sound tracks. After a purchase of an album that isn't on sale, you get a membership card good for discounts on later purchases.

The shop also has an online store at hyangmusic.com where you can find a wide range of disks and also read comprehensive music reviews.
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/20030...092109211.html

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Stolen Beatles Tapes Found

Police raids in England and the Netherlands on Friday recovered what could be about 500 original Beatles tapes that were stolen in the 1970s, including some never-released tracks.

British police said the tapes were "priceless," and that the only such recordings that have been heard before were bootlegs.

Dutch police, who recovered all the tapes in the Netherlands, agreed, but said they were still analyzing the material.

"We're currently investigating whether they really are the originals, but it appears to be so," said prosecutor spokesman Robert Meulenbroek in Amsterdam. "There are about 500 tapes, so there's quite a bit to research."

Five people were arrested in separate police raids in England and Holland. Their names were not immediately released.

The tapes contain what are known as the "Get Back" sessions, which were to become an album in 1969 before the project was shelved. Some of the songs, including "Get Back" itself, became part of the "Let It Be" album, said London police.
http://entertainment.msn.com/news/ar...px?news=111641

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Groove Codes for Tablet PC

Groove Networks, in Beverly, Mass., is adapting its peer-to-peer collaboration system to Tablet PC. Ray Ozzie, Groove's CEO says, "Almost daily I have conversations on the phone with business associates and partners where I could use the ability to sketch a picture or visually share and annotate a document to enhance the communication."

Ozzie agrees that the Tablet PC can help users work more naturally across business boundaries, reducing the cost of coordination and accelerating decision making.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/ap...13apcollab.xml

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Dream Discs - 47 DVDs Per Square Inch
Eric Smalley

Cramming lots of information into very small spaces means making and measuring infinitesimal containers for each bit of data.

Researchers from Tohoku University, the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science, and Pioneer Corporation in Japan have found a way to store huge amounts of data after figuring out how to make many tiny, inverted dots in a thin film of metal and determining how to sense the state of each dot.

The dots are as small as 10 nanometers in diameter and store one bit of information each. A nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter, or the equivalent of a line of 10 hydrogen atoms.

The researchers' prototype storage device packs 1.5 trillion dots per square inch, and so could store 1.5 terabits in one square inch of material, said Yasuo Cho, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Tohoku University in Japan. That's the equivalent of 48 million 250-page books, or 47 DVDs.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/0...ge_011503.html

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Power lines promising for Internet expansion
AP

The same power lines that bring electricity to televisions and toasters may become the next pathway into homes for high-speed Internet access.

The technology offers an alternative to cable and telephone lines as a way to get broadband service, with its ability to quickly deliver large amounts of data and high-quality video signals. Federal officials in the United States are seriously evaluating the technology for public use, the U.S. government announced Wednesday.

"Every power plug in your home becomes a broadband connection," said Edmond Thomas, chief of the Federal Communications Commission's Office of Engineering and Technology. He said companies developing the technology have overcome many hurdles in the past year.

"It's starting to look like a very viable technology," said Thomas, who described the technology in a presentation to the agency's five commissioners. "We're very excited."
http://rtnews.globetechnology.com/se...nology/techBN/

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Annual Snapshot of US Home Video

The US home video sector enjoyed record-breaking rental and sales revenues in 2001. This is according to the latest annual report on the home entertainment industry from the Video Software Dealers’ Association (VSDA).

The report details how the American home video industry experienced its best year ever in 2001. It is believed that it took in excess of $18 billion during the 12 months. Home video consumers spent $7 billion renting VHS tapes and an all-time-high $1.4 billion renting DVDs. Consumers spent an additional $5.4 billion purchasing DVDs and $4.9 billion purchasing VHS tapes.

The new data represents part of the VSDA's sixth consecutive Annual Report on the Home Entertainment Industry. The 2002 report is a year-end recap of 2001 and includes a view-from-the-top analysis of the rapidly changing landscape of home entertainment. The report also includes data on video game rental and sales data, hardware penetration rates, video retailer information, video control and piracy issues, the effects of the peer-to-peer networks on music sales, and the future of Internet video-on-demand.
http://www.mrons.com/drno/news1751.htm

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Converting to Wi-Fi
Making Pay Phones Pay
Stephanie N. Mehta

When was the last time you used a pay phone? Like many folks you probably long ago ditched quarters in favor of a cellphone. Which helps explain why Bell Canada recently started converting public pay phones in Toronto, Montreal, and Kingston into terminals for "Wi-Fi" Internet connections. Some U.S. phone companies may soon follow suit.

Wi-Fi, short for "wireless fidelity," is a wireless local area network that uses unlicensed airwaves to link laptop users. The service is the hottest thing in telecom these days, and Wi-Fi antennas and radios are popping up in Starbucks cafes, city parks, and shopping malls. The ideal location? A high-traffic area with a wired, high-speed connection to the Net.

Pay phones are a perfect solution. Phone lines can be sped up using DSL technology. Plus the phones are already installed in airports, hotel lobbies--the very places people want to communicate, notes Martin Dunsby of wireless consultancy InCode Telecom, which is working with Bell Canada.

Right now Bell Canada is offering a trial service free to users with Wi-Fi- enabled laptops. But you can bet that once phone companies start charging for access, those now overlooked pay phones may once again be raking in quarters.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/techn...405456,00.html

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Ian Clarks’ Locutus. Now Playing - v.02.2. http://locut.us/

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Capping again Ma? Get used to it.
Press release

MERRIMACK, N.H. -- Ellacoya Networksä, Inc., an innovative provider of service control systems for broadband networks, today announced it has received $14 million in venture financing for continued business operations and the commercialization of its IP Service Control System. The IP Service Control System improves broadband customer satisfaction by enabling the broadband operator to monitor network usage patterns and manage resources accordingly so that all users receive the level of service entitled by their service plan. New investors Flagship Ventures and Atlas Venture join existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Goldman Sachs in participating in the round.

The use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and other robotic applications are continuously rising, consuming up to 70% of network capacity at peak times, but primarily enjoyed by less than 10% of subscribers. Consequently, interactive users (web-surfers, e-mailers, etc), comprising a majority of the subscriber base, are experiencing poor service levels at peak usage times. Broadband operators can deploy Ellacoya technology to identify network traffic by application and insure that both interactive and P2P users receive the level of service to which they have subscribed even during peak times. The platform can further be leveraged to offer flexible service plans that meet the needs of a broad range of users.

“The broadband market is still in its early stages, so the potential for mass adoption of our technology is very exciting,” said Ron Sege, president and CEO of Ellacoya Networks. “Our platform helps broadband operators deal with the sudden increase in robotic applications, while providing a framework for flexible service plans that can speed the next wave of broadband service adoption. We are pleased to participate in this market with a product that contributes to its growth, and we appreciate our investors’ confidence.”
http://www.lightreading.com/document...g&doc_id=26763


Ellacoya Lands New Customers
Peter J. Howe

Ellacoya chief executive Ron Sege, a former senior executive of Web portal Lycos.com, said peer- to-peer file sharing ''is probably 10 times more popular now than it was at Napster's peak'' before federal courts shut down the pioneering service in the summer of 2000, ruling that it faciliated massive theft of copyrighted content. But today, network operators are finding 5 or 10 percent of their users are hogging 70 percent of the network usage by sharing music and video files over Napster successors.

After initially positioning itself as a wide-ranging system for big broadband operators to create and bill for specialized data services, Sege said Ellacoya has since found a promising niche selling systems to keep peer-to-peer traffic from clogging networks. It hopes to use these as a springboard to sell a full suite of network management services.

The customers being announced today are generally tiny and obscure utility and cable companies that operate small-scale broadband systems, including Aurora Cable Internet in Ontario, Cedar Falls Utilities and Muscatine Power & Water in Iowa, Coldwater Board of Public Utilities in Minnesota, Eastlink Cable Systems in Nova Scotia, and Murray Electric System in Kentucky. Sege hopes they will help clinch deals at larger cable and Internet system operators.

Ellacoya's system enables broadband network operators to ''look into'' data packets that are flowing over the network and give the highest priority to legitimate e-mail and Web surfing while making peer-to-peer traffic ''fly coach or standby instead of first-class,'' Sege said.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/01...funding+.shtml

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University has taken steps to limit bandwidth
P2P software brings problems
By Melissa Lemorie / News Editor

The Internet, with its seemingly infinite potential for communication and information, has proven an invaluable resource for the average college campus in recent years. Technologies such as peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing now make it easier than ever to exchange knowledge.

Since the lawsuits concerning the now defunct P2P sharing system Napster, P2P technology has been the focus of negative attention from the both the recording and motion picture industry, as well as software companies. The Recording Industry Association of America claims that illegitimate uses of this technology, such as the sharing of copyrighted music files, results in the potential loss of millions of dollars in their industry alone, according to information found on their Web site.

According to the Eastern Michigan University Acceptable Use of Information Technology Resources policy, “No person may copy or distribute software, or its documentation, without the permission of the copyright holder,” which means students who use file-sharing technology, such as Kazaa, Morpheus, Imesh, or Gnutella to obtain copyrighted files are subject to disciplinary action from the university. Internet piracy also violates the Michnet Acceptable Use Policy, of which EMU is a member.

“In the past, EMU has received specific complaints from the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America that alleged that a specific computer on our network was serving copyrighted material illegally to the Internet via something like Kazaa,” said Rocky Jenkins, director of Network and Web Services at EMU. “In these cases, we identify the person who owns the computer in question and disconnect the computer from the network. We ask the person who owns the computer in question that they show proof that they have a right to distribute the work in question or ask them to remove the allegedly illegal material from their computer. These complaints are directly attributable to file-sharing technologies.”
http://www.easternecho.com/news/2003...30103_p2p.html

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More sensible approach to campus bandwidth
File Sharing is at Heart of Server Speed Issues
Sharon Albright

Information Services connect last month's temporarily slow server to the need for additional software to handle file sharing, according to the department director.

For the last year and a half, Information Services has relied on a packet shaper device to ensure that file sharing does not take up more than a specified amount of the server's bandwidth at any given time. But, occasionally, this device needs to be brought up to speed to take into account new downloading options.

"The server was running slower because KaZaa had come up with a different way of getting around the limitations that we had in place," said Paul Crittenden, computer system administrator for Information Services.

"In order to get the speed under control, I had to update our software with these modifications."

Crittenden says that the limitations on file sharing should not cause concern among students, since its ultimate purpose rests in preserving everyone's right to use the Internet for their own purposes.

Crittenden reminds students and faculty that the server is a shared resource, and he recommends that everyone does their part to keep it running efficiently.

"Just use courtesy and consider using off-times to download large files. If a file is going to tie up the bandwidth for an awful long time, the best time to start it is between midnight and 6 a.m.," Crittenden said.
http://www.thesimpsonian.com/vnews/d.../3e25ec3baee42

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Hitting P2P Users Where It Hurts
James Maguire

Most of Marc Morganstern's top clients won't publicly acknowledge hiring his company.

And, for his part, Morganstern can't reveal the names of clients he describes as the leading music, film and game- development companies. As part of their contract with Overpeer, of which Morganstern is CEO, all parties sign a confidentiality agreement.

Why the secrecy? Unable to snuff out file-swapping networks in court, record labels and other media outfits are shifting their anti-peer-to-peer crusade to a new venue: the file-trading networks themselves. That's where Overpeer comes in.

Overpeer "intervenes on behalf of our clients to protect their content from piracy on P2P networks. And, in certain cases, we also may help them build relationships with potential customers who happen to be on the P2P site," Morganstern said. Overpeer's patent application offers a few more clues. The application, which credits Overpeer board members Cheol-Woong Lee and Chang-Young Lee as inventors, describes the methodology:

1) Search for digital music file on network.

2) Collect illegally produced digital music file.

3) Edit illegally produced digital music file (damage sound quality).

4) Distribute digital music file on network.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57112,00.html

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Digital Piracy: The Show Must Go On
Howard Greenfield

In a year or two, free broadband exchange of videos, music, and movies will begin to come under some kind of industry control.

In the mean time, the commercialisation of the current interactive sharing system seems elusive at best. In an effort to tame the situation, a bewildering number of rights management and security solutions are being floated by companies and organizations that stand to win or lose in the great digital marketplace.

Entertainment companies have a golden goose to protect and copyrighted assets will benefit from widespread digital rights management (DRM) and the thwarting of gratis distribution of digital media content.

For now though, consumers share files like crazy. Free access reigns, as new and classic material is bootlegged through CDs and global peer-to-peer networks. Broadcast television programming has always been supported by commercials and service subscriptions. However, in Cyberspace, there is a tradition, a great heritage of getting stuff for free on the internet. It is even arguable that the internet’s free access to words, images, and software (also eventually including cracked, copyrighted entertainment content) is what originally made the online experience so compelling and universal, contributing to its huge growth and current position as the world’s foremost new mass medium. Now, however, digital battle-lines have clearly formed between content-providers and consumers.

Government is trying to fix the problem. Representative Howard L. Berman (D - CA), U.S. congressman representing a Hollywood constituency, has been pushing a remarkable new piece of legislation this year. Berman asserts, "massive theft of copyrighted works is the predominant use for public P2P networks today." He also says, "copyright owners should have the same right as other property owners to stop the notorious, brazen, and open theft of their property."

But as a legislator, Berman’s position, however well intended, has struck many as being Orwellian. Though tempered by industry reaction, his bill authorises companies to secretly log on to the computer of someone caught illegally downloading copyrighted content, and eject them from the internet.

After government, there’s Microsoft. Their Media Player – bundled with every version of Windows – and therefore nearly every PC shipped – has just added new content protection features. For one, it enables a file format with fixed-time expiration licences. In other words, the customer "rents" a download. Peter Gabriel released his latest album, Up in this manner and provided free previews from October 1 to 8. However, some experts believe this is insufficient protection, and that the road to true, secure entertainment assets will not be simple or cheap.

Michiel Willemsen, of Irdeto Access – which provides secure conditional access to over 100 pay-media companies world-wide, thinks a real solution is still beyond the grasp of current PC economics and technology: "Software encryption in an open (Windows PC or any other open platform) environment is vulnerable to hacking attacks. The software environment is well known, excellently documented. There is an abundance of highly trained specialists." And security attacks can come 'from within' – someone with a legal subscription or legally obtained keys. Willemsen believes more formidable security is needed – such as smart card technology combined with integrated decryption/decompression, and an 'always-on' environment.
http://www.europemedia.net/showfeatu...ticleID=14358#

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Improved Morpheus client due by midyear
James Niccolai and Joris Evers

StreamCast Networks is preparing an upgrade to its Morpheus file-sharing software that will allow users to search further across the peer-to-peer network for songs and other files, making it easier to locate obscure or rare recordings, Streamcast Chairman and CEO Steve Griffin said Saturday.

The company also is preparing a Web-based, "remote control" version of its software for PDAs and mobile phones. While away from home, users will be able to instruct the Morpheus client software on their PC to locate and retrieve files for playback when they return, Griffin said. Both enhancements are due by midyear, he added.

Like some other file sharing services, when Morpheus scours the Internet for a file it looks at a "cluster" of only about 15,000 PCs, even though as many as a million Morpheus users may be online at any given time. Griffin said. While that's often enough machines to find a popular song, for example, more obscure files sometimes don't show up.

By midyear the company will introduce an upgrade to its client that allows "cluster-hopping." If the Morpheus client doesn't find what it's looking for in the user's local cluster it will hop further afield to different clusters until it finds the file, Griffin said, in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show.

The update will likely include other tweaks intended to boost the performance of the software and make it easier to use, he said. It will also be made smaller and therefore easier to download, Griffin said.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0113impromorph.html

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"I am happy to see it." - Napster prosecutor
Digital Experts Swap Copy Protection Talk
Elisa Batista

The battle over who owns digital content and whether it is moral or even legal to download and distribute over the Internet won't be resolved this year, said some high profile speakers at the Consumer Electronics tradeshow.

When asked to predict the outcome of proposed legislation and litigation brought by recording studios against digital file-sharing websites, Scott Dinsdale of the Motion Picture Association of America, said he hoped that the "progress" made by the studios to protect themselves from piracy wouldn't be hampered.

In the other corner, Steve Griffin, CEO of StreamCast Networks, a company that promotes peer-to-peer systems and has already been sued by "29 of the most powerful" media companies – "you can't get anymore sued than our company has," he joked -- was confident that the recording studios would drop their suit and embrace file-sharing technology to distribute their content.

Receiving more hoots and hollers than anyone else on that panel was Steve Wozniak, an Apple co-founder and perhaps the most prominent speaker. Wozniak said he couldn't comment either way, "I'm really kind of neutral."

But one thing's for sure: Some electronics makers have already made up their minds.

During last week's CES show at the Las Vegas Convention Center, many electronic manufacturers introduced products that would prohibit people from sharing copied or downloaded digital content.

Semiconductor chipmaker Silicon Image, for example, said it was testing silicon for digital television sets and other digital media products that would limit the recording of certain programs.

Meanwhile, TiVo said it added "TiVo Guard" to its digital recording service to prohibit people from sending content from their TiVo recorders to other people's homes. The guard also limits viewing of a program to one machine at a time even within a single home.

Such products caught the eye of George Borkowski, a lead attorney in the prosecution against Napster, who said, "I am happy to see it."
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,57181,00.html

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Hollywood muscles Australian ISPs over piracy
Dan Warne

Hollywood giant Warner Bros has started ordering Australian ISPs to disconnect users for sharing copyright material.

One ISP, which asked not to be named in this story, received a letter from a company called Media Force, acting on behalf of Warner Bros, listing the IP address of users who had shared movies, along with infringement times and dates.

The Australian ISP community was today hotly debating the topic of what to do in response to the demands. Some ISPs advocated warning or disconnecting users, while others believed US companies had no jurisdiction in Australian law, but were seeking legal advice.

The company behind the letter is Media Force, a New York based anti-piracy group that uses "advanced scanning techniques" to monitor piracy across the internet and report infringing users.

According to its website, the company monitors Napster/OpenNap, Aimster, Swapnut, Gnutella (Bearshare, Limewire & others), AudioGalaxy, Hotline, iMesh, KaZaA, Morpheus/MusicCity, Grokster, Xolox, FTP Sites and IRC.

But the company does not just monitor copyright violations, it encourages ISPs to block or restrict file sharing ports on their services. It is also behind 'decoy' files placed on file sharing networks which look like real pirate files, but are mostly garbled sound and picture.
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1054

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Senators Skeptical of Broadband Telco Deregulation http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=26951

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Judge: Kazaa Can Be Sued In U.S.
Roy Mark

After studying the facts of the case for more than a month, U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson has ruled music and movie picture companies can sue the off-shore file-swapping site Kazaa, which argued it was exempt from U.S. jurisdiction because it is based in Australia and incorporated on the island of Vanuatu.

The ruling is major victory for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which have been seeking to include Kazaa, which is owned by Sharman Networks, Ltd., in a massive copyright infringement suit brought against a number of file swapping companies, including Tennessee's MusicCity.com, Inc. and MusicCity Networks, Inc. (which runs the popular Morpheus service), and West Indies-based Grokster, LTD.

Wilson ruled that Kazaa does substantial business in the U.S and since it is alleged the company engages in copyright infringement, the company is subject to U.S. law.

The music and movie empires claim the file-swapping sites are costing the industries billions, and the entertainment industry has been unrelenting in its legal and legislative assault on what it considers to be largest heist in the history of intellectual property rights. The RIAA attorneys contend that Kazaa's peer-to-peer network is used by about 21 million users in the U.S. to share digital files.

In addition to its off-shore status, Sharman argued that Kazaa should not be held liable for copyright infringement, pointing out that PC makers aren't responsible for the actions of destructive hackers.
http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/1568591

Sharman Networks to fight Californian judgement
Jeanne-Vida Douglas

Sydney-based Sharman Networks, which owns the popular Kazaa peer-to-peer software, has announced it intends to launch a counterclaim following the US District Judge Stephen Wilson's decision to allow a US lawsuit against the company to proceed.

The company decided to go ahead with the counterclaim after reviewing Judge Wilson's "thoughtful" 46-page decision handed down on Friday last week.

"While Sharman is disappointed with the court's conclusion that the Constitution permits this case to be heard in the United States, we fully expect to prevail on the merits," the statement said. "Sharman's upcoming counterclaim will set forth the full story for the first time."

The company is declining to reveal any further details at this stage.

Friday's judgement ruled that record companies and movie studios are able to proceed with a lawsuit against the parent company of Kazaa--the most popular online file-swapping service--in the United States.

The decision was taken on the basis that Kazaa software had been downloaded and used by millions of Californians, thus enabling the US-based lawsuit to proceed.

Although based in Sydney, Sharman Networks is incorporated in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu and had previously filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing it was not bound by US laws since it did not have substantial contacts with California.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebu...0271194,00.htm

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"It is tragic that decisions are being made on copyright issues,"
SonicBlue Says Development of New Devices on Track
Ben Berkowitz

A slow holiday shopping season had a serious impact on consumer electronics sales, but development of new devices connecting digital media and home entertainment centers is still on track, according to the chief executive of consumer electronics maker SonicBlue Inc. In an interview with Reuters on Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, SonicBlue's Greg Ballard said the holiday season weakened as people spent less money on things for the home and more on relaxation.

Ballard said the main impact of the suit has been to keep the company from adding some features to devices in development that he said would have been legal but may have invited further legal action.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...h_sonicblue_dc

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Summus Chooses Calysto Communications for Strategic Public Relations Counsel
Press Release

Summus, Inc a developer of applications and information processing tools that optimize the wireless multimedia experience, has selected Calysto Communications, an Atlanta-based niche public relations firm focusing solely on wireless and communications companies, to promote the company's BlueFuel(tm) platform and multiple wireless applications.

Summus, Inc., based in Raleigh, N.C., has developed a series of solutions to change the way information is communicated and processed through mobile and wireless networks. Summus offers a host of products and services based on its BlueFuel platform that enable wireless users to access multimedia services faster and on a wider range of mobile devices.

exego, the first application powered by BlueFuel, gives users the ability to access, share, and transfer files and digital multimedia information of any size to and from any location in the world via their mobile phone or PDA.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+05:35+AM

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Security flaw may threaten cellphones running MS

Microsoft and U.K. carrier Orange are investigating whether hackers are sending rogue software to cellphones using Microsoft's Smartphone 2002 operating system.

Instructions about avoiding the security catches inside the smart phone, which Orange sells and calls the SPV, were made public the last few days, Orange spokesman Stuart Jackson said. The SPV is the only wireless device on sale that uses Microsoft's operating system for advanced phones.

The possibility of rogue software flooding through cellphone networks is among the worst fears that carriers have, said Alan Reiter, an analyst with consulting company Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing. Cellphone networks became vulnerable to such attacks when carriers began selling phones that can download software and games, ring tones and business tools became available for download, he said.

"Carriers will have to offer as many different applications from as many different vendors and make downloading as easy as possible," Mr. Reiter said. "But the easier it is to transmit and receive data, the more likely it is to get a virus or some rogue code."

To his knowledge, however, no one has accomplished on cellphones anything that even compares to the virus attacks that often cripple computer networks. "Obviously, the carriers can't stand this happening," Mr. Reiter said. But it's only a matter of time, he added.
http://rtnews.globetechnology.com/se...nology/techBN/

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A Novelist Who Walks the Walk
Paul Boutin

An award-winning science fiction writer and digital rights activist has persuaded the publisher of his first novel to make the book available free online for anyone to read, print or even republish on paper.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a science fiction tale that revolves around the employees of a dystopian Disney World sometime in the 22nd century, is writer Cory Doctorow's first published novel. The 31-year-old Canadian writer won the John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction writer at the 2000 Hugo convention.

Doctorow's fans aren't surprised to find his book online for free. The plots of his most recent short story, "0wnz0red," involves digital rights management, or how files are protected from sharing and copying.

Moreover, Doctorow is known outside science fiction circles for his prolific, passionate posts about digital rights issues on the BoingBoing weblog and other forums, as well as his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"I don't believe that I am giving up book royalties," Doctorow said about persuading his publisher, Tor Books, to make Down and Out available digitally for free under the new Creative Commons licensing system.

"(Downloads) crossed the 10,000-download threshold at 8 a.m. this morning," Doctorow said Thursday, "which exceeds the initial print run for the book."
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,57152,00.html

Downloads
http://www.craphound.com/down/download.php

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Yikes! Campus jitters used to mean the RA vs. your pot stash. Now it's it's the RIAA vs. your P2P horde. Doonesbury Comic.
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dail...b&uc_daction=X

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Cartel's Copyright Control Loosening
Dan Gillmor

For several days last week, the cavernous convention halls here became battlefields in the copyright wars. On balance, the entertainment cartel didn't seem to be doing very well.

Some of the gadgets on display at the annual Consumer Electronics Show were surely the kinds of things that make the Hollywood studios and their music- industry allies cringe -- increasingly capable digital devices that, yes, can be tools for copyright infringement as well as legitimate uses. There are more hard- disk music and video recording and playback devices all the time, for example, and the disk capacities are doubling about every year.

The gear I saw here paid lip service to the cartel's wish for absolute control over how copyrighted material may be used. So far, hard-disk music players can be connected to personal computers but not to each other, thereby requiring an intermediate step for anyone who wants to easily share files with someone else using the same kind of device.

Still, it was evident that -- technologically speaking, at any rate -- tomorrow is not on the side of the copyright control freaks. Information doesn't want to be free, but customers definitely want it to.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/4929834.htm

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Time to rethink the digital copyright act
Hiawatha Bray

You can see the future. Already some auto parts have chips embedded in them. Imagine a day when you can only replace a Ford headlamp with another Ford headlamp, or the car will stop running. Or imagine buying a house with nothing but Whirlpool appliances, designed so that a Kenmore fridge won't work. Extreme? Sure. But perfectly legal, if Lexmark has its way.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/01...ght_act+.shtml

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Holy war over gospel
Mbali Mlambo

Johannesburg - A copyright battle over gospel music is looming as churches square up against gospel artists who take church hymns without permission and rearrange them without crediting the composers or paying royalties to the churches.

The holy war erupted when a leading member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church (SDA), Wellington Ntshangase, accused Mthunzi Namba of Joyous Celebration fame of failing to credit the church for four hymns he used on his latest album, Send Your Glory.

Some of the artists remain defiant in their stance not to credit the original composers of recorded hymns, nor do they recognise church ownership of the music.

The music "belongs to God," said one. Ntshangase lashed out at the gospel star for "presenting songs taken from hymn books of the church as his original work".

An industry insider told City Press that this case might deter infringement of copyright in the R25m a year gospel industry.

He further estimated that the denial of acknowledgement to churches and hymn composers could mean that they are deprived of about R1.8 million a year.

"The gospel music industry in South Africa arguably sells about one million units (CDs and cassettes combined) a year. If one took an average wholesale price of R25 a unit, the gross sales revenue would be R25 million a year," said the source. "One income sector of musical work - mechanical copyright income from the making of the record - would amount to R1.69 million a year based on the one million units sold.

"If one factors in the performance, synchronisation and other copyright income sectors, one could apply a factor of 2.5%, to come up with a total copyright income generation of roughly R4.2 million."

Lesley Sedibe of the Recording Industry of South Africa confirmed that gospel music has the biggest share of the local market, followed by kwaito.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Enterta...306257,00.html

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Sharelive’s back up. http://www.intimidated.f2s.com/sharelive/