Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 1st, '03

[JackSpratts]

Quote of the week: "If it's illegal in America, host it in Uzbekistan.” - Andrew Irgens-Moller, Age 14.





Progress Of A Subtle Kind

New England students near Boston at MIT University created a way to give their peers access to music that breaks neither banks nor laws and is good enough for school administrators to consider employing campus wide. In a nutshell the system replaces the digital internet with an analog cable and in so doing avoids many of the legal pitfalls of the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the altogether too restrictive Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems created to lock out users from their own computers. It’s been suggested however that if this is progress at all it is progress of the most subtle kind, betraying long sought digital promises of static free sound, zero-cost distribution and endless perfect copies, and I think there is an element of truth to that. While analog certainly has its adherents and advantages it is a twilight technology with its brilliant developments mostly behind it. But the MIT idea is not about improving the art nor is it particularly about technology. The MIT decision is a political one, of the type I believe we’ll be seeing more of soon.

Corporations are busily destroying the promise of digital communications by shunting users into their DRM-laden digital gulags. It was only a matter of time before people responded to the threat of diminished rights by doing something about it, in this case by calling the media companies' bluff. Are the DMCA/DRM’s really responses to alleged losses from shifts to digital media or are they excuses for media giants to grab even more control from users, control they've coveted for decades, since long before digital media was released? If it's the former then the RIAA/MPAA can't mind people exploiting analog. As a matter of fact they'll welcome it. No more endless "perfect copies" circulating through the cybersphere, destroying businesses and taking from starving artists what few scraps were left them by the labels. Analog has been in heavy use in every fashion and facet for a hundred years while the record/radio/movie/book and TV companies prospered fabulously. Nothing for them to fear there. But if it's what I suspect and the RIAA and the MPAA are deliberately using the digital bogeymen to scare congress and the courts (and the schools and the parents and the churches and the girl scouts) into satisfying their greed, then trying to silence what is essentially common cable radio will starkly illuminate the media companies' actions for the cynical cons that they are.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no intention of ceding our digital future to a handful of multinational sharks just so I can stream some tunes off the net. I’m not rolling over, not a bit, but I understand the student’s frustration with lawmakers who have handed control of the copyright agenda to the foxes guarding the henhouse and I sympathize. It’s going to be another remarkable techno/political boxing match, one I’ll be watching with interest over the next twelve months.










Enjoy,

Jack.










Digital Millennium Copyright Act toned down by U.S. Agency, cheaper products to benefit consumers.

Toner Firm Gets Key Support In DMCA Spat
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Copyright Office has sided with Static Control Components in a high-profile lawsuit over whether the company may sell chips that permit Lexmark International toner cartridges to be refilled.

As part of a 198-page opinion released late Tuesday, the office said Lexmark's invocation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in its lawsuit against Static Control was invalid. Lexmark is the No. 2 printer maker in the United States, behind Hewlett-Packard, and manufactures printers under the Dell brand.

The opinion is not binding on the judges who are considering the case, which is now before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio, but it is expected to be influential. In February, U.S. District Judge Karl Forester granted Lexmark a preliminary injunction ordering Static Control to cease selling its Smartek chip.

Static Control CEO Ed Swartz on Wednesday said the opinion was so sweeping that he may begin selling a second chip with similar functionality that would not be covered by the injunction. "It gave us a clear-cut legal path to create a chip that there are no legal issues with," he said. "We think we've done that, but we're going back and double-checking everything."

William "Skip" London, the company's general counsel, said: "We have developed code for such a chip. We've shown this code to Lexmark. Lexmark has taken the position that we can't sell it." Swartz said that he has not made a final decision on public sales yet. Static Control is a small Sanford, N.C.-based company that sells printer parts and other business supplies.

Lexmark did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5099112.html


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Tennessee Reinstitutes “Super-DMCA” Bill

Details.

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Valenti Out, Tauzin In – NY Post
Tim Arango

Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin has been plucked to replace Jack Valenti, the long-running head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), according to sources familiar with the matter.

Speculation that the 82-year-old Valenti, who has headed the movie industry's powerful lobbying group since 1966, would step down has run rampant for years. But now, sources say, Tauzin, a Republican, has agreed to take the job, which comes with a reported $1 million annual salary.

He could take up the reigns as soon as the end of this year, after the current congressional session ends in November.

A spokesman for Tauzin said, "No one has offered him a job, and there are no negotiations taking place." He added, however, that Tauzin is likely on the MPAA's wish list of candidates.

A spokesperson for the MPAA did not return calls seeking comment.

On CNBC this week, Hilary Rosen, the former head of the Recording Industry Association of America, said, "I think this is a done deal. I could have egg on my face in a couple weeks, but I think this is a done deal."

A high-level movie industry source confirmed Valenti's imminent departure to The Post.
http://www.nypost.com/business/41882.htm


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Students Develop New Online Music Tool
thewhir.com

According to several reports released this week, MIT students Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel say they have developed a tool allowing students at MIT and other schools access to music online without running afoul of the recording industry and copyright law.

Winstein and Mandel said on Monday that they planned to introduce their system, which allows MIT students to listen for free to 3,500 CDs over the school's cable television network, a setup they say is acceptable under copyright law.

The students say they intend to share the software with other schools, which could operate networks of their own for just a few thousand dollars per year. Transmit over analog cable networks, the service provides sound quality inferior to CD, but better than FM radio, and a viable means of avoiding the kinds of lawsuits the recording industry has been filing against alleged file traders.

The service takes advantages of rules that assign broad and inexpensive licenses to universities for broadcasting analog music, as well as rules that require radio stations to pay broadcast royalties to songwriters, but not to record companies.

Called "Library Access to Music" (LAMP), the system allows users to sign out one of 16 cable channels on the MIT system, through a Web site, for up to 80 minutes, during which they can program songs from the library of 3,500 CDs suggested by students in a survey, and compiled by Winstein and Mandel.

While only one person can control each channel at a time, anyone can listen to a channel. Should they fill up, MIT can add channels for a few hundred dollars each. Users can listen to the music, but are not able to store it.
http://www.thewhir.com/find/articlec...did=627&page=1


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With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?
John Schwartz

Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system for sharing music within their campus community that they say can avoid the copyright battles that have pitted the music industry against many customers.

The students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, drew the idea for their campus-wide network from a blend of libraries and from radio. Their effort, the Libraries Access to Music Project, which is backed by M.I.T. and financed by research money from the Microsoft Corporation, will provide music from some 3,500 CD's through a novel source: the university's cable television network.

The students say the system, which they plan to officially announce today, falls within the time-honored licensing and royalty system under which the music industry allows broadcasters and others to play recordings for a public audience. Major music industry groups are reserving comment, while some legal experts say the M.I.T. system mainly demonstrates how unwieldy copyright laws have become. A novel approach to serving up music on demand from one of the nation's leading technical institutions is only fitting, admirers of the project say. The music industry's woes started on college campuses, where fast Internet connections and a population of music lovers with time on their hands sparked a file-sharing revolution.

"It's kind of brilliant," said Mike Godwin, the senior technology counsel at Public Knowledge, a policy group in Washington that focuses on intellectual property issues. If the legal theories hold up, he said, "they've sidestepped the stonewall that the music companies have tried to put up between campus users and music sharing."

Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering at M.I.T., called the system an imaginative approach that reflected the problem-solving sensibility of engineering at the university. "Everybody has gotten so wedged into entrenched positions that listening to music has to have something to do with file sharing," he said. The students' project shows "it doesn't have to be that way at all."

Mr. Winstein, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, described the result as "a new kind of library." He said he hoped it would be a legal alternative to file trading that infringes copyrights. "We certainly hope," he said, "that by having access to all this music immediately, on demand, any time you want, students would be less likely to break the law.'"

While listening to music through a television might seem odd, it is crucial to the M.I.T. plan. The quirk in the law that makes the system legal, Mr. Winstein said, has much to do with the difference between digital and analog technology. The advent of the digital age, with the possibility of perfect copies spread around the world with the click of a mouse, has spurred the entertainment industry to push for stronger restrictions on the distribution of digital works, and to be reluctant to license their recording catalogues to permit the distribution of music over the Internet.

So the M.I.T. system, using the analog campus cable system, simply bypasses the Internet and digital distribution, and takes advantage of the relatively less- restrictive licensing that the industry makes available to radio stations and others for the analog transmission.

The university, like many educational institutions, already has blanket licenses for the seemingly old-fashioned analog transmission of music from the organizations that represent the performance rights, including the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or Ascap, the Broadcast Music Inc. or B.M.I., and Sesac, formerly the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers.

If that back-to-the-future solution seems overly complicated, blame copyright law and not M.I.T., said Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The most significant thing about the M.I.T. plan, he said, is just how complicated it has to be to fit within the odd boundaries of copyright law.

"It's almost an act of performance art," Mr. Zittrain said. Mr. Winstein, he said, has "arrayed the gerbils under the hood so it appears to meet the statutory requirement" - and has shown how badly the system of copyright needs sensible revamping.

Representatives of the recording industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America, Ascap and B.M.I., either declined to comment or did not return calls seeking comment.

Although the M.I.T. music could still be recorded by students and shared on the Internet, Professor Abelson said that the situation would be no different from recording songs from conventional FM broadcasts. The system provides music quality that listeners say is not quite as good as a CD on a home stereo but is better than FM radio.

M.I.T. students, faculty and staff can choose from 16 channels of music and can schedule 80-minute blocks of time to control a channel. The high-tech D.J. can select, rewind or fast-forward the songs via an Internet-based control panel. Mr. Winstein and Mr. Mandel created the collection of CD's after polling students.

Mr. Winstein said that the equipment cost about $10,000, and the music, which was bought through a company that provides music on hard drives for the radio industry, for about $25,000. Mr. Winstein said they were making the software available to other colleges.

Students have been using a test version for months, and Mr. Winstein said the system was still evolving. The prototype, for example, shows the name of the person who is programming whatever 80-minute block of music is playing. Mr. Winstein said he once received an e-mail message from a fellow student complimenting him on his choice of music (Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8) and telling him "I'd like to get to know you better." She signed the note, "Sex depraved freshman."

Mr. Winstein, who has a girlfriend, politely declined the offer, and said he realized that he might need to add a feature that would let users control the system anonymously.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/technology/27mit.html


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Waste –

No Fear Peer-To-Peer
Dan Warne

Truly secure P2P deploys military-grade encryption. Dan Warne shows how to share files among friends without anyone else snooping on you.


With the copyright police increasing its monitoring of popular file-sharing networks like KaZaA and eDonkey, savvy users are turning to WASTE, a new program that relies on file encryption and ad hoc networks of trusted members to escape prying eyes.

Our feature story on page 28 of this issue explains the “why” of WASTE; but here you’ll find the “how”.

What makes WASTE different from other file-swapping systems is that it has no central server. Instead it operates as a mesh in which each user connects to a few other users to form a loosely- structured P2P network. However, this group is virtually impenetrable to anyone who hasn’t been specifically authorised to join the group using PKE (public/private key encryption) technology.

PKE encryption in general works like this: each user has two keys — a private key and a public key. The public key can be given out to anyone, because it only allows them to encrypt a message to you. The same public key cannot be used to decrypt that message. Once you’ve received the message, you decrypt it with your private key, which you never disclose.

WASTE uses public keys to ensure that each user is known on the network, and bona-fide. As each public key is unique, and linked to the private key stored in your copy of WASTE, there’s no chance that someone can pretend to be you in order to gain access to the network.

The initial setup of WASTE guides you through creating a unique username and a private key, as well as automatically generating a matching public key.

To be accepted onto a network of WASTE users, a member of that group has to email you their public key, which is simply a block of what looks like random letters and numbers. This is entered into your WASTE client software through the Preferences panel’s Public Keys section — the same location to which you export your own public key so it can be shared with someone else.

If you’re not too concerned with security and are just curious, there’s a database of public keys at www.s4s.ip3.com/wasteb. You’ll also need to submit your public key there and wait for at least one other user to manually add your key to their system.

Alternatively, you can chat to other WASTE users on IRC. Join the WASTE channel on the http:// irc2.p2pchat.net server and swap your public key with anyone who’s online at the time.

To connect to a network of WASTE users, enter the IP address of one user with whom you’ve swapped public keys into the WASTE connect box.

You’ll also need to open port 1337 on your firewall, which is the port used by WASTE (this is a joke on the part of WASTE creator Justin Frankel, as 1337 is hacker-speak for “leet” — shorthand for “elite”).

Once you’ve both swapped keys, you’ll be accepted as a trusted member of the network and permitted to make connections to other people on the same network, because your key is automatically broadcast to the rest of the group and added into their copy of WASTE.

You can browse other users’ directories, search for specific files, and also chat using the WASTE chat client. Chat sessions and file swapping goes directly between the active computers rather than via a central server.

When you start a file transfer it’s encrypted using the fast but secure, open source “Blowfish” model to protect you from monitoring. Even 128-bit encryption is virtually crack-proof through brute-force, so you can be certain that any files you transfer, and any discussions you have with other users, are completely secure.

Of course, one weakness in WASTE’s security model is that it’s easy for other users on the same network to get hold of your public key. If you’re worried about this, simply reject other users’ public keys. Remember: if both of you don’t have each other’s public keys, neither of you can connect and view what’s on the other’s computer.

To do this, open Preferences, select Pending keys, then remove the tick from Auto-accept broadcasted public keys.

The latest WASTE client for Windows is included on this month’s cover CD set. There’s a Mac OS X client in development that allows encrypted chat and file serving but not downloading from other users (you can find it at hummusandpita.com/waste). A command-line Linux version is in alpha development at grazzy.mjoelkbar.net/waste.
http://www.apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/D...256DCD0082A79A

For our complete P2P-Zone rundown on Waste, from initial experiences to daily usage, please visit this thread.


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ITS Block On P2P Traffic May Be Permanent
Garth Sheldon-Coulson

After a spell of fierce network worms, Information Technology Services is considering blocking peer- to-peer music sharing for good.

Swarthmore’s connection to the Internet has taken a beating over the past two weeks, often slowing to a crawl or becoming completely inaccessible as newly written worms exploited holes Microsoft Windows systems all over campus. Two aggressive new file-sharing programs flooded the network with data packets, overrunning ITS’s firewall machines.

In response to the overload, ITS blocked all file- sharing programs last Tuesday, which have been disabled ever since. Now, ITS staff indicate that, although the outages were caused by a mixture of afflictions, a permanent choice might have to be made between “academic” network traffic and “entertainment” traffic.

Colleges and universities all over the country have been dealing with similar problems, according to ITS Director Judy Downing.

“Many schools block P2P traffic permanently. Our consultants are always amazed at how open we allow our network to be,” she said.

A problem for ITS staff is that, while they can block file-sharing to reduce stress on the network, they cannot easily predict or prevent attacks from new worms and viruses. File sharing and worm attacks combined can bring down the network, as students experienced last week.

“The nature of these worm attacks has changed,” ITS Network Manager Mark Dumic said. “They are a lot more complicated now, and they aren’t going away.”

Despite the dangers, ITS is working to restore the network to the status quo ante, at least for now. “At the moment, we’re just working out the finer technical points of restoring P2P,” Downing said. She added that BitTorrent and Blubster, the two programs most responsible for the overload in file sharing traffic, will remain permanently blocked.

But, regardless of ITS’s progress, some students are fed up.

“It’s unreasonable,” Chase DuBois ’07 said, of the idea that ITS might block file sharing permanently. “They’re here to manage network traffic, not manipulate it. They can probably figure out a better solution.”

ITS, however, places some of the onus on students to alleviate the problem. “There is an element of personal responsibility here,” said Downing. “We may have to look to the student entertainment realm to fix the problems.”

She added, “Swarthmore is always in touch with peer institutions, both small and large. Everyone is experimenting with different strategies.”

Two recent changes to Swarthmore’s infrastructure might help. The college recently negotiated a new bandwidth agreement with its Internet service provider, increasing available bandwidth by 50 percent. A new firewall was also put in place last week.

The file sharing question will be decided by ITS and the higher-ups in the college’s administration. For now, students can only hope that file sharing is restored soon, even if it might be down again before long.
http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2003-10-30/news/13393


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Music File-Sharing With USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham

Two MIT students have a new strategy in the music-download wars: a legal way for an entire campus to share music without running afoul of copyright laws or prohibitions against digital file sharing. The school's enthusiastic, but the recording industry will likely be less pleased. Is it a fair compromise or a flawed concept? Discuss the matter with USA TODAY writer Jefferson Graham.

Comment from USATODAY.com Host: Hello and welcome to our chat with USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham. The saga of music downloading and file sharing continues, as MIT announces this week that two of their students have a fresh approach to making music available legally. The school's impress (and hopes to convince other schools to use their system), but what about the music industry? Jefferson's taking your questions on this development and on other digital-music topics until 2pm ET. Let's get started!
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Provo, UT: This solution is just for students, right? Is there any chance that this can be scaled into a mainstream service?

Jefferson Graham: Provo, one of my favorite cities. I love University Avenue....anyway, yes, the two students have devised this program for colleges, as a way of getting free music to students and saving them from lawsuits. The beauty of it is that many schools have internal cable TV networks, and the students made use of existing copyright fees the school was paying to songwriters and songwriter organizations to make it work within the confine of an MIT. Could this go mainstream? Doubtful. What made it work was presenting the music in analog--described as better than FM, not as good as a CD. That's how they skirted the digital copyright laws.
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Comment from Jefferson Graham: The students are publishing their findings today on their lamp.mit.edu for other schools to follow in their footsteps, royalty free. Meanwhile, Penn State is working on its own program to get "free" music into dorm rooms, by adding a "music" fee into the tuition. A pilot program is supposed to start in the spring, and Penn State plans to announce details in the next few weeks.
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Lansing, MI: How is this system different from, say, what MP3.com was doing years ago when they let people stream music from the site if they had the CD (or had bought the CD and were awaiting delivery)?

Jefferson Graham: Again, the big difference is that the songs aren't in "digital," but in analog. My.MP3.com was in digital, which the labels think can offer perfect copies to anyone. MP3.com didn't offer to ability to download the songs, but where the website ran afoul of the labels was not getting prior approval. In the case of the MIT students, all the music is licensed, through deals MIT has with songwriters and songwriter organizations, and some new deals that were arranged.
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New York, NY: Will the RIAA eventually comment or are they just ignoring this project? If they ignore it, what are the implications?

Jefferson Graham: I suppose the RIAA will have to say something at some point. I don't think they're ignoring it, but instead, looking into it. I think it was refreshing to do an article and not have the RIAA blast a new technology.
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Lansing, MI: Thanks for taking my question earlier. So does this mean that MIT is in the Webcasting business, like Live365 or Netscape's Web-radio stations? Will they hav to pay artists plus the studios plus the songwriters?

Jefferson Graham: I believe the deals MIT has is with the songwriters (Harry Fox Agency) and songwriter organizations, like ASCAP, BMI and SEACAM, similar to radio. Where the LAMP project is different from a Live365 is that the music is available on demand. If it's in the library, you can click right to it, and use traditional jukebox tools like stop, pause, click to the next song, and creating playlists.
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Denver, Colo.: You mentioned in the story that the licensed songs are analog. Does that mean they have hard copies on tapes somewhere?

Jefferson Graham: MIT went to a Seattle company called Loudeye and paid them to put the songs onto hard drives. I don't think there are hard copies on tapes.
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Laramie, Wyoming: If the RIAA gets upset will they sue the students or the school since the school is talking about this publicly?

Jefferson Graham: The RIAA has been low profile on the MIT students and has declined to comment. I don't know how they sue the students, when MIT lawyers went over it with a fine tooth comb, and the music is licensed.
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Somewhere, USA: How many songs does MIT have and can students add more?

Jefferson Graham: I know the students (with money from a Microsoft grant) bought 3,500 CDs for the library and hope to add more. The CDs were based on student requests.
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Abilene TX: How can regular people use this?

Jefferson Graham: You can't, unless you sign up as a student at MIT. The students who developed the program have posted their codes at the lamp.mit.edu website, hoping other universities follow in their footsteps. So maybe it will come to a college near you. Next best thing: a subscription service like Rhapsody or Napster. They offer streaming music, with 375,000 and 500,000 songs respectively, for $9.99 monthly. And their music is digital, not analog.
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Comment from Jefferson Graham: Here's the press release from Loudeye. Loudeye Corp. (Nasdaq: LOUD), a leading provider of services for the management, promotion and distribution of digital media, today announced an agreement to provide music content and metadata services to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's new campus-wide electronic music library. Developed by two MIT students, MIT's Library Access to Music Project (LAMP) enables faculty and students to access a comprehensive licensed music catalog on areas throughout campus using MIT's closed-circuit cable TV system. Under the agreement, Loudeye is providing MIT with approximately 48,000 licensed digital music tracks with related metadata. The licensed content and data are delivered through Loudeye's Media Framework, a complete, outsourced digital media platform for integrating customers' in-house solutions with Loudeye's applications and services. The LAMP system, the brain trust of Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, two current MIT students, was developed as a way for the MIT community to access CDs without a trip to the library. With LAMP, MIT students, faculty and staff can select a song from the LAMP Web page (http:// lamp.mit.edu) and play it directly to campus stereos and TVs on the system. Users can only listen to songs but cannot download or copy them. The project relies in part upon Loudeye's digital media services to support the digitization of its CD catalog and delivery across MIT's closed-circuit cable TV service. Winstein and Mandel are publishing the system's design and software code as "open source" enabling universities and other organizations to deploy similar electronic music delivery solutions. "LAMP is about making a better music library that students and faculty can access all the time, immediately and on demand, from their rooms and offices. We collected a 'wish list' of 3,500 albums that students at MIT wanted in the library, and Loudeye provided the albums in MP3 format a week later. As far as we know, Loudeye is the only company in the country with all the rights and permissions in place to provide this service," said Keith Winstein, LAMP co- creator and MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science. "LAMP is an innovative approach to enabling legitimate digital music distribution at universities. With MIT making the LAMP code open, we are encouraged that other organizations and universities will deploy similar legitimate music services," said Jeff Cavins, Loudeye's president and chief executive officer. "Our work with MIT and the LAMP project demonstrates the flexibility of the Loudeye Media Framework to support next generation and emerging business models in the digital music space across all different segments." LAMP was funded by iCampus, the research alliance between MIT and Microsoft Research focused on furthering education through faculty and student technology projects. About Loudeye Corp. Loudeye provides the business infrastructure and services for managing, promoting and distributing digital content for the entertainment and corporate markets. For more information, visit www.loudeye.com.
http://cgi1.usatoday.com/mchat/20031027004/tscript.htm


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Four Companies Show Home Entertainment System That Can Download On Their Own

TOKYO (AP) - Four Japanese electronics makers have teamed up to make stereo systems that can download music directly from an Internet service,
without a home computer serving as middle man.

Sony Corp., Sharp Corp., Pioneer Corp. and Kenwood Corp. unveiled prototypes of the new equipment Tuesday and said they expect the systems to go on sale early next year. There are no plans yet for marketing it overseas, the companies said.

Each company owns one-fourth of a joint venture, Any Music Planning Inc., that developed the Linux-based stereo equipment in an attempt to adapt to rapid changes engulfing the music industry.

Sony, Sharp, Pioneer and Kenwood plan to sell versions of the music receivers under their own brands. The prototypes shown Tuesday resemble traditional stereo components, but have a liquid crystal display and Ethernet ports for broadband Internet connectivity.

The systems are automatically set to access a Web site run by LabelGate, a Japanese online music shop that opened in August. LabelGate has music licensing rights with some of Japan's biggest recording companies and offers a limited amount of Western music.

Users will be able to browse, download, store and play song files, record them on a mini-disc or transfer them to other digital music devices, said Any Music CEO Fujio Noguchi.

Any Music plans to focus first on the Japanese market, but ``ultimately, our dream is to make the service a worldwide standard,'' Noguchi said. In fact, four other Japanese audiovisual equipment makers -- NEC Electronics, Denon, Yamaha and Onkyo -- are also developing similar products.

Some consumer electronics companies have introduced so-called media receivers in the United States that can stream music from the Internet as well as play music files that are stored on networked computers. The model of purchasing music online via a standalone stereo component, however, is so far foreign to the U.S. market.

Details remain sketchy about how Any Music's system will work. It's unclear whether Any Music's hardware will restrict the number of times that users can copy songs, as U.S.-based services such as iTunes and MusicMatch do.

Also, executives from the companies refused to say how much the systems would cost, and said LabelGate hasn't decided how much it will charge per downloaded song.

The service will be separate from the one LabelGate offers to computer users. Currently, LabelGate charges 210 yen ($1.90) per downloaded song.

The electronics makers are betting that as broadband Internet connections spread in Japan, they can attract consumers who prefer downloading music to a trip to the music store. They hope Internet-savvy youngsters and adult music aficionados alike will be drawn to the prospect of convenience.

``Our industry is in crisis,'' said Moriyuki Okada, who heads Sharp's audiovisual systems department. ``We want to emerge from that by offering new business ideas.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/7067557.htm


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FTC Issues Report On U.S. Patent Policy
ILN

The Federal Trade Commission has issued a new report examining U.S. patent policy. The report makes a series of recommendations on how to foster innovation by ensuring a good balance between competition and patent law. Report at
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2003/10/innovationrpt.pdf

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Sharman Networks Launches Kazaa v2.6 Beta

New Beta Version Introduces Magnet Links and Kapsules
Press Release

Sharman Networks Limited today launched the Beta of Kazaa v2.6, the latest update of the world's most popular file sharing software. The new version presents users and the entertainment industry with features such as Magnet Links, Kazaa Kapsules, single click purchasing and the option to run multiple searches at the same time. Magnet Links connect Kazaa users outside the application directly to peer- to-peer technology. This means that through their websites, entertainment companies are able to offer files to Kazaa users, downloaded via peer-to-peer. This offers significant bandwidth savings for companies like computer game manufacturers who often sell games that are over 500 megabytes in size. By utilizing Magnet Links, these content providers can efficiently promote and sell their products. This also enables consumers to benefit from faster, cheaper and more varied content as a result of the efficiency of peer-to-peer technology. "Magnet Links combine Kazaa, the world's most popular peer-to-peer application, with the world's most popular Internet browsers," said Nikki Hemming, CEO of Sharman Networks. "The links are available to anyone who wants to benefit from the cost savings of peer-to-peer and the popularity of Kazaa. Magnet Links are a further example of our efforts to bring artists and consumers closer together in the most powerful way." With Kazaa v2.6, users can purchase individual files with a single click. This delivers content providers a seamless consumer purchasing system that compliments the distribution power of the application. In addition, v2.6 improves searching functionality with the ability to run multiple searches at the same time. The launch of Kazaa Kapsules 1.0 in this latest version is designed to enable artists to offer music, video and promotional material in a digital package or "Kapsule." This gives consumers a single purchase point for multiple files of varying formats combined together as a compelling offering. For example, musicians will now be able to offer a much greater variety of material, such as images, audio, video, lyrics, tour dates, and band information in one place. Equally, computer game companies can include game guides and hints, and movie distributors can include 'behind the scenes' footage. Kapsules are designed for maximum usability with two areas: Interactive windows, which contain information about the offered content, and Kapsule windows, which contain the actual files. Users will be able to view both windows at the same time, so that information on the contents (files, price, and exclusive elements) will appear alongside the content itself. Magnet Links, Kapsules and single click buying further cement Kazaa's position as the world's leading peer-to-peer software and build on its partnership with Altnet, the world's largest distributor of licensed, secure content on the Internet. Every month, Kazaa users download millions of licensed computer games, music, videos and software applications through Sharman Networks' relationship with Altnet. "The advances in version 2.6 have been designed to meet the needs of consumers and content owners, who are the key forces in the success of digital distribution over the Internet. It is encouraging to see content such as videogames, that can be up to 100 times larger and cost 30 times more than a single music file, being purchased by Kazaa users every day," said Hemming. "Seamless purchasing is an important step forward and these advances that tap into powerful peer-to-peer technology will be welcomed by consumers and artists alike." Kazaa v2.6 Beta is available to test in unlimited numbers at http://www.kazaa.com. Please see the kazaa.com site for important technical information about this release. The final version will be available in the coming weeks.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+11:13+AM


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Researchers: Digital Data Drives Storage Explosion
Jay Lyman

Researchers discovered that 92 percent of new information is stored on magnetic media -- primarily on hard drives -- and peer-to-peer file sharing helped MP3 music and digital video account for 70 percent of the files on P2P users' hard disks.

University of California Berkeley researchers report that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media has doubled in the last three years to five exabytes -- or 5 million terabytes.

The researchers, supported by tech giants Microsoft, Intel, HP and EMC, said the amount of new information produced in those forms last year alone was the equivalent of 500,000 libraries, each containing a digital version of the print collections of the Library of Congress.

Forrester senior storage analyst Anders Lofgren told TechNewsWorld that the IT industry is dealing with the information onslaught through hardware and software, but is still struggling to keep all of that data manageable.

"In general, the headache is that storage continues to grow -- and although hardware prices continue to decline, what doesn't is the cost of managing that storage," Lofgren said.

Indicating that worldwide production of information has increased 30 percent per year from 1999 to 2002, the UC Berkeley researchers told attendees at an information storage industry conference in Orlando, Florida, that most of the new information comes in the form of office documents and e-mail as opposed to books, newspapers and journals.

Researchers discovered that 92 percent of new information is stored on magnetic media -- primarily on hard drives -- and peer-to-peer file sharing helped MP3 music and digital video account for 70 percent of the files on P2P users' hard disks.

Research team leader Peter Lyman said the dropping cost of using magnetic hard drives and optical storage media such as CD-ROM and DVD has fueled the surge in retrieval and storage of files from the Internet. Lyman called the Web a utility that offers easy, steady access for institutions and individuals.

"The democratization of publishing is something that we thought would happen, and it has happened," he said.

The researchers -- who used a sampling of nearly 10,000 Web sites and studied desktop disk drives, reports and other information -- said the study illustrates the need for effective, reliable and cost-efficient data-storage strategies for consumers as well as corporations.

Meta Group vice president Steve Kleynhans told TechNewsWorld that users can no longer be forced to rely on their own memory to find data on the right server, file or other storage subdivision.

Kleynhans said data no longer centers on text documents and files, instead encompassing Web pages, digital video, pictures, music, Flash animation and more. He added that data is also unlikely to exist in one place going forward.

"In the future, files will exist in multiple places," he said. "Locating them will be built into the content of that file. These are really important concepts when you're dealing not with tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of pieces of information."

Despite the doubling of information stored on paper, film and hard drives, that increase paled in comparison with the amount of new information flowing electronically on radio, television and the Internet in 2002, which was nearly 18 exabytes -- equivalent to 18 million terabytes.

Researchers also reported that the telephone accounts for the largest percentage of information flow, with e-mail placing second.

Forrester's Lofgren said that while the IT industry has embraced the storage of structured data (such as documents and reports), the handling of unstructured data (such as phone calls and messages) remains a challenge.

"We're seeing huge growth in unstructured data formats," Lofgren said. "There's a fairly significant opportunity there, and obviously there's an opportunity to sell more hardware.

"There's also the opportunity to provide the kind of storage capabilities and functionalities in structured data formats for unstructured formats as well."
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31981.html



INFORMATION FACTS

Some findings of the study by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, professors at the University of California-Berkeley, to quantify the world's information:

• The world produced five exabytes (or 5 million terabytes) of new information on paper, film, optical and magnetic media in 2002. That is equivalent to the amount of information in a half-million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress' print collections.

• The amount of information the world produces increased by 30 percent annually from 1999 to 2002.

• North Americans use an average of 11,916 sheets of paper a year per person, while Europeans use 7,280 sheets.

• Peer-to-peer file sharing has taken off, with MP3 music files and digital video accounting for 70 percent of the files on hard disks of people who participate in online file exchanges.

• The United States produces about 40 percent of the world's new stored information.

• The Web contains about 172 terabytes of information, or 17 times what is contained in the Library of Congress' print collecti

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercuryne...ss/7130226.htm


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Korea Journal

Online Music Exchange Battle Heads for Second Round
Kim Sung-jin

A copyright dispute involving Soribada, a local free peer- to-peer (P2P) music exchange Web site, is set to enter a new phase with record companies considering suing people who use the file swapping program to download songs.

``We are reviewing filing a suit against individual users that swap music files via the Soribada 2.0 program with a criminal court as the ruling by the Seoul District Court is leaning towards finding the Yang brothers not guilty for providing the music file swapping program,’’ said Lim Hak-yeon, manager of the Recording Industry Association of Korea (RIAK), the music industry’s copyright watchdog.

The legal battle over P2P music file swapping services is growing more complex, as Yang Jung-hwan and his brother Il-hwan, who created the music file-sharing site, introduced Soribada 2.0, an advanced file swapping engine that allows members to exchange music files without passing through its main server. Soribada, means ``sea of sound’’ in Korean.

``Unlike traditional instant-messaging programs, music files shared by Soribada 2.0 program users don't pass through a central server operated by the Yang brothers, which makes the court believe that they don’t have responsibility for the free online music swapping,’’ Lim said.

``Someone has to be responsible for copyright violations that erode revenue of the offline record companies and they are content users. Thus RIAK, together with record companies, is planning to file criminal lawsuits against Soribada 2.0 users if the court again finds the Yang brothers not guilty of aiding users to infringe on copyrights of music labels by downloading music files for free,’’ he explained.

The effects on the music industry of the decentralized P2P technology that enables computer users to share their music collection with strangers remains unknown.

The Seoul District Court previously threw out the case in May and dismissed the charges against the Soribada’s operators. The court ruled that evidence provided by prosecutors was not sufficient to prove that Soribada, established in 2000, is liable for copyright infringements committed by users of their software.

But prosecutors later revived the case with more evidence.

However, the Suwon District Civil Court last week slapped a 19.6 million won ($16,300) fine on the Yang brothers. In imposing the fine, the district civil court estimated that some 5,000 songs were shared by Soribada users between June 2000 and July 2002.


It found the Yang brothers guilty of copyright infringement prior as to July 2002 they were providing the a centralized P2P music exchange program where music files exchanged should pass the central server run by Web site operators.

In line with the ruling, the brothers will have to pay RIAK, the organization that together with local offline record companies sued Soribada and sought to halt its operations in 2001.

Local record companies claim they have lost millions of dollars in album sales because of Soribada’s estimated 4.5 million users.

Lim said if individuals are to be put on trial, charges on free downloading of music files after July 2000 will be judged by the court, as that is when the Yang brothers launched Soribada 2.0.

The Yang brothers have previously said they should not be held responsible for music swapping via the program they developed as the Web site only provides private channels of communication and that they cannot control or monitor users’ activities. But they were not available for comment on the latest developments.

An official of RIAK, who asked not to be named, said the Yang brothers are considering appealing the Suwon Civil District Court ruling.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech...0305811800.htm


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The Fragility of Data

The Shifted Librarian reminds us how fragile modern data storage devices are by pointing to a librarian and archivists guide to preserving CDs and DVDs (Please Do Not Feed the DVDs). The HTML guide can be found here (Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists) or in ([PDF]). Jenny reports from a recent librarian's conference A/V panel:

One person in the audience said his library
gets only a dozen or so circs out of their DVDs because they are used so heavily and they don't hold up well. Judy from Schaumburg said her library gets a much higher circ rate, with some lasting as long as 120 circs.

One of the reasons I oppose DRM so strongly is because data storage is really quite fragile. Without the ability to freely copy, it is easy for information to be lost.
http://importance.typepad.com/the_im...agility_o.html


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A Case of Piracy Overkill?
Kim Zetter

Critics of proposed Federal Communications Commission rules designed to prevent consumers from redistributing copies of digital television shows on the Internet say the move won't stop piracy but will curtail technological innovation and the "fair use" of content.

The new rules, expected to win approval this week, mandate that devices capable of receiving digital signals -- including TVs, digital recording devices or computers containing a broadcast card -- be able to detect a broadcast flag encoded in the bit stream. The flag would allow users to copy and view digital content on any system in their home network, but would not allow them to upload the content to the Internet.

Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the movie industry fought in court for eight years to try to make it illegal for users to copy TV shows with their VCR. He said the industry is simply trying to find new ways to encroach on fair use, an individual's right to use copyright material in a reasonable manner without the consent of the copyright owner.

"They know that trying to take that fair use away from millions of Americans is way too unpopular, even though they would if they could," von Lohmann said. "So what they want to do is freeze things so that consumers don't get any new fair-use capabilities in the future."

If such restrictions had been in place in the early 1970s, von Lohmann said, there would be no VCR today.

"As they made clear through eight years of litigation with Sony, the industry never would have given you the opportunity to make copies in your home if it had been up to them."

Fritz Attaway, the Motion Picture Association of America's executive vice president for government relations and Washington general counsel, said the new rules are needed because Internet piracy has the potential to cut into the syndication market for shows abroad. According to the MPAA, total foreign TV revenues for the industry were approximately $4 billion last year.

"Those ancillary market revenues in foreign syndication are critical to the ability to recover costs," he said. "Foreign syndication, cable casting (the re-selling of broadcast shows to the cable market) and home video are important to the economic foundation of television production."

However, Attaway admitted that there were currently no recorded losses from piracy of broadcast shows.

"Because so few people are capable of trafficking in these large audiovisual files today, the economic impact today is probably fairly low," he said. "But we are trying to provide for the future."

Von Lohmann sees a problem with the MPAA requesting protection for a problem that doesn't currently exist and probably won't for four more years, if ever.

"What they're saying is we might have a piracy problem in several years' time, so we would like you to bail us out in advance," he said. "There is absolutely no benefit to this."

He also said "the broadcast flag would still be completely and utterly useless at addressing the problem. The thing leaks like a sieve."

The mandate, for instance, would not affect numerous devices already on the market, such as digital tuners and broadcast cards for PCs. This means that anyone who currently owns these products will still be able to trade digital content over the Internet even after the mandate is implemented.

"We're talking about hundreds of thousands of devices already in the field that can receive digital TV and save it to a hard drive with no protection at all," said von Lohmann, who predicts there would be a run on such devices in stores before the mandate goes into effect. "There will be a great market for PC broadcasting cards on eBay," he said.

Attaway acknowledged that this "will be a legacy problem for us until those TVs migrate out of the marketplace."

Even then, Attaway said in a March address to Congress, the flag would not completely solve the problem of Internet trafficking, since users could always bypass the flag restrictions by making a digital copy of content, converting it to analog, and then reconverting it to digital.

In a press release following his address, Attaway said the solution in that case would be "to close the analog hole," implying further restrictions on consumers down the line.

He said the mandate would not prevent a consumer who owns a "flagged" digital TV from recording a home copy of a program. The problem lies with one person sharing their copy with 10 million others.

"There is a very big difference between you making a copy of Friends and mailing a copy to 10 million people in Europe. We don't think you're going to do that. We do think that if you have the ability, you might take that copy of Friends and make it available to 30 million people in Western Europe over the Internet. That has an adverse effect on the economic foundation of producing that program," he said.

Von Lohmann charged the FCC mandate would curtail technological innovation, since technology companies would have to ask permission before they could design a new product.

"The mandate comes with all kinds of obligations about what kinds of features you're allowed to offer with your product and how they must be implemented, and the people who control those requirements are the Hollywood movie studios and other technology and consumer electronic companies," he said. "It creates an environment where small innovators who are not willing to compromise for someone else's business model essentially get shut out."

He pointed to DVD technology as an example of what happens when technology is controlled by a particular group.

"In order to interoperate with DVD, you have to sign on with a bunch of agreements and private licensing arrangements under the auspices of the DVD forum," he said. "There's been no new feature added to DVD players since their introduction. And that's exactly the way Hollywood likes things to go."

As for Attaway's argument that the industry stands to lose income from foreign sales if shows are traded over the Internet, von Lohmann said the copyright act is not designed to guarantee profitability for all time in all markets.

"The same argument applies here that we gave to the railroad industry when the auto industry emerged. It's a market economy: Adapt."

Von Lohmann pointed out that the industry was hardly suffering economically.

"Last year was the most profitable year that the movie industry had, and broadcast TV is doing a very healthy business in DVDs," he said. "The bottom line is that there is lot of money being made by the industry today, and there is no evidence to show that this is going to change if high-definition broadcasts are not protected."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60947,00.html


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Plaxo 1.0

Update Your Outlook Contacts Automatically
Review Paul Rowlingson

Plaxo is new from the co-creator of Napster, and is designed for use with Microsoft Outlook 2000/2002/ XP. Once installed it helps to keep your address book (Contacts) up to date.

The first step is to select the contacts you wish to request updates from. An email is then sent to these contacts requesting any new contact details they may have (this email can also include your contact details if you wish).

When a contact replies, any new details they've sent are automatically added to your Outlook.

If any of these people then download and install Plaxo, any future changes to your contact details or theirs are updated automatically.

In other words, Plaxo is a peer-to-peer network, just like Napster was.

Obviously, you need to be online in order for any updates to be made.

As mentioned, Plaxo currently only works with Outlook, but plans are afoot to make it compatible with other mail clients, including Lotus Notes, Mozilla (Netscape) and Eudora.

Verdict
A great idea that works well. Hopefully, compatibility with other email clients will follow soon.
http://www.vnunet.com/Download/1138899


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Reinventing The Jukebox? Or Rejecting Digital Over Copyright?
furdlog

Today’s Globe (and NPR’s Morning Edition) discuss the startup of MIT’s LAMP project: Reinventing the jukebox on campus [pdf] (MIT press release). The trick to the project is that, while the digital telecommunications infrastructure is used to request the music, the music is actually delivered over an analog channel, avoiding the pitfalls of current copyright law when it comes to digital delivery.

Armed with a clever idea and a $60,000 grant from Microsoft Corp., two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have wired the campus for sound. They’ve built a system to deliver popular music to student dormitories, without the illegal file swapping that’s goaded the recording industry into a furious round of copyright lawsuits.

[…] Winstein and Mandel never thought it would take so long to build LAMP. They soon discovered that building a system that would pass muster under federal copyright law is a lot more complicated than soldering circuit boards.

“We assumed that the technical part of doing this would be the hard part,” said [LAMP co-developer Keith] Winstein. “We were totally wrong.”

This strategy should scare the entertainment industries, not to mention the consumer electronics firms that have committed to digital delivery. This project shows that there is enough resistance to the current construction of copyright in the digital realm that people are prepared to design around the strictures, at the expense of the supposedly better technology. I believe that, if the FCC approves the broadcast flag, a similar response will arise in the television industry.

Consumer backlash is only going to get stronger, as the copyright industries continue to exploit the opportunities for increased control that digital telecomm offers them. And, as Phil Greenspun notes in this Globe article on Kodak’s plans to stop making slide projectors, there are more than just legal reasons to reject some of these technologies.

‘’It’s expensive, and there is a subtle loss of quality, like going from long-playing records to compact discs.'’

Contrast this LAMP system with the Penn State system that Derek alerted me to last week: Spin Machine: Penn

State’s Download Service. Although the article is skimpy on details, I love this bit from the president of the university:

“We like our approach to be educational in nature, not criminal,” [PSU president] Spanier said.

IMHO, understanding why the MIT system is legal might be even more educational! In particular, I can already think of one excellent economics question exploring the relative costs of (a) paying digital copyright licensing fees (and facing the legal lawsuit risks of a digital music network) and (b) building out the analog communications infrastructure.

(See this paper, by one of LAMP’s developers: Engineering an Accessible Music Library: Technical and Legal
Challenge)

The NYTimes article includes a photo of the designers and a nice Zittrain quote: With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who
Needs Napster? [pdf]

If that back-to-the-future solution seems overly complicated, blame copyright law and not M.I.T., said Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The most significant thing about the M.I.T. plan, he said, is just how complicated it has to be to fit within the odd boundaries of copyright law.

“It’s almost an act of performance art,” Mr. Zittrain said. Mr. Winstein, he said, has “arrayed the gerbils under the hood so it appears to meet the statutory requirement” - and has shown how badly the system of copyright needs sensible revamping.

Update: Slashdot discussion – MIT’s New Music Sharing Network. A particularly pointed comment:

How is this a good thing? (Score:1)

by no_choice (558243) on Monday October 27, @01:38PM (#7320571)

Let me get this straight: we already have numerous P2P networks through which people can freely share
digital media. These guys have created a system that distributes ANALOG versions of digital songs; only distributes data deigned appropriate by a central authority; only distributes locally, not worldwide; only allows users to hear the music from their TV, and not move it elsewhere.

And this is supposed to be a good thing?

No wonder Microsoft is funding the research… creating “innovations” that make people’s lives worse instead of better seems to be their specialty.

The only “benefit” I can see from the MIT system over P2P file sharing is that the MIT system allows the RIAA executives to continue to harvest extreme wealth from the creativity of underpaid artists and the greed of contribution-hungry politician.

Instead of creating technical kludges that make our lives worse instead of better, would it not be better to junk the DMCA and other obsolete copyright laws bought and paid for by the RIAA and friends?
http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/index.php?p=850&more=1&c=1


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Billy Tauzin's MPAA
Kevin Werbach

The New York Post is reporting that Congressman Billy Tauzin will take over from Jack Valenti as head of the Motion Picture Association of America. I think this is good news for defenders of openness and competition in the digital economy.

First, Tauzin will leave his powerful position as chair of the House Commerce Committee, where he is an effective advocate for the interests of the incumbent telephone companies. Second, he will replace Jack Valenti, whose supreme talent is his extraordinary gravitas. Billy Tauzin is a partisan street fighter. A very skillful, exceedingly well-connected street fighter, which is why he's getting this plum job. But someone who everyone sees as an advocate for one set of interest groups.

Valenti is able to float above the political fray. His aloofness suggests that what Hollywood thinks is good for the movie industry is obviously good for America. As the front man of Hollywood's crusade for copyright absolutism, he has made an extremist position feel downright reasonable. Tauzin can't do that. He may win his battles, but it will no longer be a secret that a war is going on. The same dynamic is occurring with the departure of the thoughtful Hilary Rosen from the Recording Industry Association of America.

The last, best hope to turn the tide in the conflict is for more people to realize that Larry Lessig is a centrist on copyright. With Billy Tauzin running the MPAA, perhaps the real policy spectrum will be easier to perceive.
http://werbach.com/blog/2003/10/26.html#a1282


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DirecTV Takes No Prisoners

DirecTV has been waging a war on piracy that makes the record labels look nonchalant. The company has filed about 10,000 lawsuits and mailed more than 100,000 "demand letters" giving suspected pirates a brutal choice: Pay $3,500 to settle or go to court. Problem is, the campaign targets anyone who bought smartcard programming gear from certain merchants; officials just assume it's used for hacking. Is that fair? DirecTV enforcement chief Larry Rissler thinks so. - Lucas Graves

WIRED: Those $3,500 settlement checks must be generating a nice little revenue stream. Has it put a dent in DirecTV's losses due to piracy?
RISSLER: We've never quantified the number who are stealing or quantified the losses. We do view it as a serious problem, and we're taking serious measures to address it.

How successful have you been?
By the number of Web sites we've taken down, the number of law enforcement actions we've taken, and the number of people who've been contacted by our end-user development group, it makes sense to say we've had an impact.

Your letters don't distinguish between pirates and people who program smartcards for legitimate reasons, like security systems. Why not?
If an individual claims to have a legitimate use, he or she can furnish information - a business plan, maybe schematics - and our staff will evaluate it. In at least 20 cases, DirecTV chose not to pursue the matter after the individual provided background.

You're putting the burden of proof on the accused.
There's a legal presumption that the purchase of the device implies use, and the burden switches to the defendant to show that it was used in a legitimate manner. We're talking about products that came into existence because of the satellite piracy industry.

But a lot of the equipment itself is perfectly legal.
That's correct. We also look at the Web sites these things are sold on. We're not going after people who purchased devices from Hewlett-Packard's site. We're going after people who purchased devices from pirate sites like White Viper. Anyone who looks at these sites would see the red flags.

What about the innocents who wanted to steal but were too dumb to make it work?
If they can convince a jury that was the case, then they prevail.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...w=wn_tophead_4


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Copyright Catch-Up in E. Europe
Roxanne Khamsi

RIGA, Latvia -- Not only can music enthusiasts in the Baltic states buy boatloads of pirated tunes on the streets, they pay taxes on the prohibited material.

And the governments of these former Soviet republics are doing nothing to stamp out piracy of intellectual property. In fact, they profit from it by imposing taxes on them, says Elita Milgrave, chairwoman of the Latvian Music Producers Association. By turning a blind eye to piracy, these governments could hold back the region as it tries to integrate into the economies of the developed world, particularly the European Union.

"The biggest problem in relation to piracy and the EU enlargement in new accession countries, and generally in Eastern Europe, is weak borders," said Raili Maripuu, regional expert for Eastern Europe's International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. "The new external border will be shared with Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, all three of which are notorious source or transit countries of pirate material."

Maripuu added that while the whole EU external border "needs a considerable improvement to make it watertight," the situation is the worst in the Baltics.

A report released in June by IFPI estimated the level of music piracy in Lithuania at 85 percent, with losses to the industry calculated at 12 million euros. The report also gauged the amount of piracy in the country's Baltic neighbors, Latvia and Estonia, at 65 percent and 60 percent, respectively. In comparison, the study found that Hungary, another country set to accede to the EU in spring, faced less severe copyright infringement at about 30 percent.

Western Europe is watching closely as eight Eastern European countries -- the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia -- plus Cyprus and Malta, try to join the EU. The established countries want strict incorporation of EU directives on copyright protection written into the Eastern countries' national legislation.

Francisco Mingorance, European public policy director at the Business Software Alliance, believes that enlargement of the EU will have a serious impact on levels of pirated goods circulating in the bloc.

"The level of piracy in the software industry is about 35 percent in current EU member states and in Eastern Europe the piracy rates are generally twice as high," he said.

Mingorance noted that many software producers hope that the European Parliament will approve a new proposal for a broad enforcement directive on copyright protection. But Mingorance also admits that some Eastern European countries will have to beef up their efforts to catch copyright criminals.

Enforcers of copyright protection in the Baltics face an uphill battle, said Romans Baumanis, the region's representative to the Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights, which has helped coordinate a local lobbying effort for fiercer implementation and interpretation of related legislation.

A person suspected of violating copyright law in Latvia is assumed innocent until proven guilty, placing the burden of proof on the prosecutors, according to Baumanis, who also works as vice president and managing director of the PBN Company in the Baltics. He said that in other nearby countries, such as Sweden, the problem has been judged as serious enough to make an exception and shift this responsibility in cases of copyright and trademark infringement.

Milgrave noted that such cases are currently very expensive to pursue because Latvian law enforcers must provide expert evidence in court on every disk of a suspected illegal goods -- regardless of the number of disks involved in the case.

So far, the Baltics have produced mixed results. Although Latvia and Lithuania have ratified two recent treaties from the World Intellectual Property Organization that cover the electronic distribution of copyrighted works and performance, Estonia lags behind.

"The Internet is global, so it's essential to have treaties which establish the minimum level of protection on a global basis," said Jorgen Blomqvist, director of the copyright law division at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Switzerland.

Toomas Seppel, copyright specialist at the Estonian Ministry of Culture, said although the country plans to ratify the two treaties at the beginning of next year, solid enforcement is more important than lawmaking when it comes to controlling piracy.

Indeed, the software industry is having more success than the music industry at combating illegal distribution of copyrighted material in countries such as Latvia, said Sandis Voldins, executive director of the country's BSA committee. Voldins explained that in 2002 only 10 CDs of music (and not a single disk of software) were confiscated by Latvian border officials, but this year the number of confiscated disks has already reached the thousands. In his view, improvement in copyright protection has much to do with the nation's pending accession to the European Union.

"The EU matters here very much, because the government understands it cannot just leave these things undone," Voldins said.

He added that the influence of organized crime groups, which many see as the primary force behind music and software piracy, has become less outwardly apparent over the past few years.

"We get calls from software users who tell us that Microsoft is already rich enough," said Voldins, who mentioned that people have threatened to deliver dead rats to his office. "But I know that earlier there were some much more serious threats from organized crime. They threatened to bomb the cars of people who fought against pirate material."
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60874,00.html


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Music companies want entire internet regulated.

Site At Centre Of Aussie Court Battle Switched Off
James Pearce

The Web site at the heart of a legal battle between several music industry behemoths and Australian Internet service provider (ISP) ComCen was taken down.

The takedown comes after Stephen Cooper, the maintainer of the Web site www.mp3s4free.net, gave undertakings to the Federal Court in Sydney on Friday that he would remove the Web site. On Tuesday last week, several music companies took Cooper and ComCen to court over alleged copyright infringements, the first time an ISP has been named as a respondent in such a case.

"We're pleased that it's come down, we asked them to take it down and it's come down," Michael Williams, a lawyer for Gilbert and Tobin who is representing the music companies told ZDNet Australia .

ComCen had refused to remove the site, claiming that since no music files were located on the servers which hosted the site, the mp3s4free.net site was analogous to a directory such as Yahoo.

The parties were due to appear before Justice Brian Tamberlin in court in Sydney tomorrow to debate whether the site should be removed while the case was being heard. As at early afternoon today, that hearing was scheduled to proceed. Regardless, the legal action seeking civil damages against both Cooper and Comcen will continue, according to Williams.

At the heart of the matter is the question of whether linking to copyright infringing material from a Web page is itself an infringing act. The legislation in question was introduced in the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000, which is due for review in March next year.

This Act laid a technology-neutral exclusive right of communication to the public, and the case will come down to how this is interpreted in a court of law.

If the music companies are successful in suing ComCen, more lawsuits are likely to follow, the director of Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) director Michael Speck told ZDNet Australia . He also indicated the music industry would lobby the government to introduce legislation regulating ISPs, and claimed that self-regulation would not work. He compared the current situation with the banks attempting to self-regulate cash transactions in the 1970s and 80s to prevent money laundering -- an unsuccessful effort which saw government intervention through the introduction of legislation.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/sec...9117400,00.htm


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EFA Condemns Music Industry "Piracy" Raids
Press Release

Electronic Frontiers Australia today condemned the heavy-handed legal action instituted by several major music labels against the operator of an Australian website and his Internet Service Provider.

The website, www.mp3s4free.net [1], was alleged to contain MP3 audio files which infringe upon the copyrights of the record labels, but is in fact a collection of links to other websites on the Internet, and other MP3 files distributed by permission of the Copyright holders.

Music labels named as applicants in the Federal Court action are Universal Music Australia, EMI Music Australia, Sony Music Entertainment (Australia), Warner Music Australia, BMG Australia, and Festival Mushroom Records.

On Friday 17 October, lawyers acting for the music labels raided the house of Stephen Cooper, the operator of the website, and the offices of Mr Cooper's Internet Service Provider, who hosted the site. Anton Piller orders (similar to search warrants) authorising the raids permitted agents for the music labels to seize information including copies of the site itself, and logs of Internet users accessing the site.

"EFA understands that the music industry has relied on a series of specious allegations concerning the content and illegality of the mp3s4free website, to obtain an Anton Piller order allowing them to perform these raids," said EFA board member Dale Clapperton. "In the absence of clear and unambiguous evidence that the website was directly distributing copyright infringing MP3 files, the use of an Anton Piller order against Mr Cooper and his ISP smacks of intimidation and is an unreasonable and unwarranted action."

"Now that their raids have failed to find any evidence that the website was directly distributing infringing MP3 files, the music industry has fallen back on allegations that merely linking to files on other websites, is in and of itself illegal. These claims are not supported by the Copyright Act, or by Australian case law. Using an Anton Piller order based on dubious evidence to launch an almost entirely speculative case in an untested area of law is typical of the heavy-handed bullying tactics employed by the music industry in similar cases overseas. The music labels have intentionally targeted a small Internet publisher and ISP who may not have the legal budget to mount an effective defence against these allegations."

"Recent claims made by spokespersons for the music industry to the effect that Internet Service Providers make up to one fifth of their income from trade in illegal music are completely unsupported, as are their arguments that hosting a website which links to other sites containing MP3 files is illegal."

The Federal Court action seeks declarations that both Mr Cooper and his ISP have infringed the copyrights of the music labels by making and/or distributing copies of copyrighted music, and seeks permanent injunctions and damages against them both.

"In launching this action, the music industry has made the same allegations against both Mr Cooper and his ISP. They are effectively claiming that an Internet Service Provider can be held liable for the content of a website hosted by them, as if the ISP were the author of the site. This flies in the face of recent amendments to the Copyright Act which were designed to prevent this very type of claim against Internet Service Providers."

"This case has major implications for freedom of speech on the Internet. Holding Internet publishers and hosting companies legally liable for the content of other sites that they link to threatens to chill the speech of all Internet users. This case should be of major concern to all Australian Internet users."
http://www.efa.org.au/Publish/PR031028.html


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Next DVD Spec. To Offer Net Access Not More Capacity
Tony Smith

The DVD Forum, the body that oversees the DVD specification, has decided to stick with red laser technology and current storage capacities rather than make the move to blue light and more capacious discs.

Instead, it will offer Internet integration to tempt upgrade-hungry consumers.

The Forum, which counts consumer electronics companies as well as music and movie industry giants among its 216 members, last week laid down its plans for the next generation of the DVD standard.

While Toshiba and NEC had been pitching a blue light technology that would have considerably increased the space available for movie and other data, the Forum has decided to stick with the existing laser specifications, NE Asia Online reports, presumably for greater backward compatibility.

As it stands, the next generation of DVD will work just like today's format, but with greater Internet integration. Many DVDs already include links to web sites, but they're included in a separate DVD- ROM partition on the disc that can only be read by a computer- hosted DVD drive.

The next version of the spec. will allow content creators to build those links directly into the scripts that tell a DVD player how to show the movie. The idea is that 'Enhanced DVD' players will have Net access built-in, either directly or via a home network, enabling consumers to access extra material at will.

The format will also support the use of "digital keys", as the report puts it, to authorise the connection to web sites.

Both technologies are expected to appear in product next year, which means the spec. isn't that far off completion.

Put them together and it's clear the move is about shifting the DVD spec. away from a simple storage medium to a kind of digital theatre ticket where purchasing the DVD buys you entry to the content - which will almost certainly be stored someplace else.

Today, broadband take-up is growing, but it remains a primarily PC technology. But presumably there will come a time when most homes have it, and it will feed a broader local network comprising not only computers but games consoles and other home entertainment devices. While a DVD is likely to prove the best medium for movies for the next few years, if not further out, there's still plenty of supplemental content that punters are going to want, and the movie industry is going to want to sell them.

But how to provide it without it being ripped off? Full-scale DRM is an option, but one consumers are unlikely to support, even those who aren't in the habit of filching films off the Internet. The solution then is to provide content on the Net, but through a controlled access system. Playing an 'Enhanced DVD' for the first time might begin a background process that links a disc ID to a player ID and records the connection on a server somewhere. Play the disc elsewhere and the system spots the fact and blocks access to the content.

Such an approach is likely to be used to deliver extras, which some buyers will want and many others won't. But extend the idea just a little and all the content, including the movie itself, comes down the wire to the player owned by the consumer who bought the disc. In essence the DVD is nothing but a entry ticket, perhaps with some free content on board that the industry doesn't mind giving away.

Such a system doesn't preclude nor is precluded by direct video on demand systems. Instead it provides a way into such systems for consumers who don't own a PC but have a 'transparent' Net connection, perhaps via a cable TV box, anyway.

Such a system neatly gets over the content industry's aversion to delivery technologies that don't involve physical product for punters to purchase, or at least business models that aren't based on the old 'x dollars for y items' mode. It also includes enough DRM to block piracy (at least theoretically) but not enough of it to make usage difficult for the customer.

Of course, the next generation of the DVD standard is unlikely to deliver all this, at least not at the outset, but it does appear to put in place the foundations for such a structure.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/33607.html


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Rights Tools Could Bite Back
Madeline Bennett

The ability to govern access to emails and other documents might create more problems than solutions

Microsoft technology designed to allow greater control over documents and emails could create security and privacy headaches for IT managers.

Under Microsoft's Information Rights Management (IRM) system, users will be able to set restrictions on email messages to selectively prevent recipients from forwarding, copying or printing content. An email expiration feature also lets users set a deadline after which messages cannot be viewed.

John Barker, an IT specialist at law firm Last Cawthra Feather, warned that the technology could encourage users to become more blasé about the content of emails.

"If people think the rude email they sent would be de-activated, and therefore 'undiscoverable', they might be more inclined to send it in the first place," he said. "However, they are not going to get away with it, as the technology means the email will be recorded on the Exchange Server, or equivalent."

The restriction features in IRM, introduced in Office 2003 last week, could also undermine productivity. Business partners may be unable to open messages due to incompatible email systems or if needed content has expired.

When an email using IRM is sent to someone using a different email system, the recipient will not be able to open the message, said Microsoft.

Jamie Cowper, senior technology consultant at messaging specialist Mirapoint, said, "Staff might want to control all emails using the access controls, but that's not best business practice."

Firms can only use the IRM features in Office 2003 if they also have the latest versions of Windows Server 2003. And IT managers deploying Office 2003 need to ensure appropriate-use policies are updated and training courses are in place, said Cowper.

"Firms need to decide beforehand exactly how they will allow the functionality to be used," he added. "Maybe they could divide staff into business groups (to control) who could set email restrictions, for example."

George Gardiner of law firm Stephenson Harwood said some businesses may feel the technology is too difficult to manage. "Many may want to prohibit the use of this new technology if it does not comply with their operational requirements," he said.

Another of Office 2003's programs, InfoPath, has also raised security concerns. An XML-based capability allows users to share and repurpose forms across organisations, using a digital signature to verify a form's integrity.

But John Boyer of electronic forms specialist PureEdge Solutions said the digital signature feature might convey a false sense of security, because forms could still be altered once they are signed off. For example, a user could sign a form to opt out of receiving spam, and the form could then be changed to appear as an opt-in agreement.
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1145826


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Use of Stots TemplateMaster Woodworking Tool Limited to One Shop
Ed Foster

Usage Restrictions -- Nasty EULA Terms – Ban on Resale

A small woodworking tool manufacturer, Stots Corporation, includes a license agreement on its TemplateMaster jig tool. The tool is licensed, not sold, and customers cannot sell it or lend it to others. Nor can they sell or lend the jigs they make with it. (Click on “Full Story” link to see details.)
Sources: Company Website, Reader Reports

We’re all familiar with license agreements on software tools that limit what you can with the product. But what about a license agreement on a real tool limiting what you can with the product and the things you make with it?

“Shrinkwrap licenses are showing up everywhere,” a reader recently wrote. “I just bought a jig for making dovetailing jigs -- this is woodworker talk if it's unfamiliar to you. The master jig contained a license that says I've licensed the master jig, not bought it. The license says I can't lend or sell the master, and furthermore I can't lend or sell the jigs I make with the master.”

The reader was referring to Stots Corporation of Harrods Creek, KY, and the user agreement for its TemplateMaster product. Sure enough, the Stots license says TemplateMaster may be used “in only one shop by the original purchaser only” and that “you may not allow individuals that did not purchase the original Product (to) use the Product or any templates produced using the Product…”

A FAQ document on the Stots website explains that the license is necessary because “the purpose of the TemplateMaster is to clone itself. Therefore we are verifying your honesty that only you will use the tool and you will not be passing it around to others to use for free. It is exactly the same as the ‘shrink wrap’ agreement that comes with almost all computer software. Please help us fight ‘tool piracy’.”

Challenged as I am to even hammer a nail, I certainly can’t judge the uniqueness of the TemplateMaster product compared to other woodworking tools. The reader doubts it’s particularly novel, in that the template or jig one creates with it will be virtually identical to “Keller” jigs that have been around for many years. “The key difference is that the instructions that came with the Keller jig said, in not so few words ‘here, use this jig to make a dovetail joint’,” the reader said. “The Stots jig, which is geometrically equivalent, comes with instructions that say ‘use a duplicating router bit to copy this jig to make a jig that looks almost exactly the same as me -- and exactly the same as the Keller jig -- then use that jig to make a dovetail joint.”

But even assuming the Stots tool is a wonderful innovation, does that give its inventor the right to restrict how you use the tool? The patent law doctrine of exhaustion would seen to overrule such restrictions, but that doctrine took a hit in one recent case. And then what about the idea of restricting how customers use the tools they make with the TemplateMaster? Don’t let the software companies hear about that one, or next thing you know there will be usage restrictions on who we can share our data with.
http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/...0/22/221921/32