Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – August 28th, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"It's a revenue stream. I'm not saying we could sell lots of records if we sold them out of our garage or the Internet, but you know what? We might, it's a crazy time." – The Pixies’ Frank Black


"[While] the Justice Department is there to enforce the law, there's something to be said for those who help themselves." – DoJ’s Hewitt Pate on P2P


"File sharing, particularly the swapping of video files, remains popular with many students." - John Borland, journalist


"Everybody is pretty upset we are being targeted as a distribution group. We never distributed any kind of material. We did nothing illegal." - www.udgnet.com spokesman


"I thought, prior to today, we had been making some real progress with the labels and the studios. This comes as a total surprise. This is not the behavior of a business partner acting in good faith." – eDonkey’s Sam Yagan


"I've never had a situation like this before, where there are powerful plaintiffs and powerful lawyers on one side and then a whole slew of ordinary folks on the other side." – P2P-Lawsuit Judge Nancy Gertner


"RIAA names Ashcroft Poet Laureate." - John Paczkowski, journalist















Justice Dept. Takes P2P With 'Grain Of Salt'
Declan McCullagh

A top Justice Department official on Monday took a swipe at one of the recording industry's favorite ideas: a law encouraging federal prosecutors to sue copyright infringers.

Hewitt Pate, assistant attorney general for antitrust, expressed skepticism toward a bill called the Pirate Act that the Senate overwhelmingly approved in June. It's designed to curb peer-to-peer piracy by threatening individual infringers with civil lawsuits brought by the government.

That idea is "something that people should take with a grain of salt," Pate said at a conference held by the Progress & Freedom Foundation. While "the Justice Department is there to enforce the law, there's something to be said for those who help themselves."

Pate said the Justice Department's formal position on the Pirate Act and other copyright legislation would appear in a task force's report that will be presented to Attorney General John Ashcroft this fall. Ashcroft created the intellectual property task force, headed by David Israelite, in March.

The Recording Industry Association of America has lobbied for the Pirate Act as a way to give federal prosecutors the option of filing civil suits in addition to their current ability to seek criminal sanctions. Mitch Glazier, senior vice president of government relations at the RIAA, said on Monday that Pate's comments weren't that negative. If the Pirate Act becomes law, Glazier said, prosecutors would "now have a choice of how badly they want to hurt the violator."

The Pirate Act has raised alarms among copyright lawyers and lobbyists for peer-to-peer firms, who have been eyeing the recording industry's lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer users with trepidation. The Justice Department, they warn, could be far more ambitious.

"Tens of thousands of continuing civil enforcement actions might be needed to generate the necessary deterrence," Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said when announcing his support for the Pirate Act. "I doubt that any nongovernmental organization has the resources or moral authority to pursue such a campaign."

Under a 1997 law called the No Electronic Theft Act, federal prosecutors can file criminal charges against peer-to-peer users who make a large number of songs available for download. A July 2002 letter from prominent congressmen to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft urged the prosecution of Americans who "allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks."

But not one peer-to-peer criminal prosecution has taken place in the United States. The Justice Department has indicated that it won't target peer-to-peer networks for two reasons: Imprisoning file- swapping teens on felony charges isn't the department's top priority, and it's always difficult to make criminal charges stick.

Criticism of the Pirate Act in the Justice Department's final report could imperil its chances on Capitol Hill, where the House of Representatives has not held one hearing on the measure. Pate "gave a pretty strong message against the Pirate Act," said Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel at Verizon.

Also in his speech:

• Pate called for mandatory eavesdropping access to be provided by broadband and Internet phone companies: "As voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) becomes more and more important, it is not going to be acceptable for it to be closed to law enforcement...It is important that we do something to address national security issues."

• Pate took aim at what he called an "anticopyright faction" that dislikes big media. That's an "overreaction" that "needs to be thought about," Pate said.

• He noted that European antitrust officials are more regulatory than their U.S. counterparts, especially in targeting companies like Microsoft. It's unclear how European antitrust rules are "going to be appropriately applied to companies that have achieved that position in a competitive market without government intervention."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5320748.html


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AC-DC

U.S. Searches Computers, Trying to Disrupt Piracy
Saul Hansell

Federal authorities searched computers in six locations yesterday in an attempt to disrupt a network used to trade copies of movies, software, games and music.

The Justice Department said the searches represented the first time that so-called peer-to- peer networks had been singled out for a criminal enforcement action under copyright law. The department has stepped up enforcement of copyright law this year, but until now it has focused on organizations known as warez groups, which steal copies of movies and other materials to make them available to downloaders.

In a peer-to-peer network, like the widely used Kazaa system, the computers of individual users trade files without going through a central computer. This arrangement has allowed such networks to become very large and to resist legal challenges.

"We will pursue those who steal copyrighted materials even when they try to hide beyond the false anonymity of peer-to-peer networks," Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a statement.

The government said its action was aimed at a group called the Underground Network.

An affidavit filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that the network required members to share at least 100 gigabytes of data in order to join. The people whose computers were searched, the government said, operated hubs that coordinated the sharing of files.

By pursuing the leaders of a private peer-to-peer group, the Justice Department appears to be broadening its enforcement of copyright law online but is steering clear of prosecuting individual users who download songs or other material, said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes "digital civil rights."

"They are trying to show they are being responsive to the concerns of Hollywood," he said. "But they are wise not to take on the 20 million Americans who are downloading music today."

John Malcolm, a senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America, praised the move as a sign that the government takes online piracy seriously.

"This sends a clear message that downloading and uploading of copyrighted material is a crime," he said, adding that the association would welcome more actions like this one. "I always want more," he said.

The F.B.I. conducted a covert investigation by loading two computers with copyrighted material and joining the Underground Network, a move that let it identify five hub computers that coordinated the file sharing. An F.B.I. agent then downloaded 84 movies, 40 software programs, 13 games and 178 songs from the network.

The network operates a Web site - www.udgnet.com - that is registered to an address in San Antonio. A man who answered the telephone at the number associated with the domain, who declined to give his name, said the government's charges were baseless. The Underground Network, he said, is an online community that is used for social communication and to share tips. It is used by people involved in file sharing and others, he said, but the network itself is not involved in trading files.

"Everybody is pretty upset we are being targeted as a distribution group," he said. "We never distributed any kind of material. We did nothing illegal."

The case relates to the No Electronic Theft Act, a 1997 law that extends criminal copyright law to cases where there is no clear profit motive. It imposes fines of up to $250,000 and jail terms of as long as five years for those who distribute copies of copyrighted works.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/te...y/26share.html


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RIAA Files 896 New File-Trading Lawsuits
Grant Gross

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken new legal action against 896 alleged file traders using peer-to-peer (P-to-P) services, the organization announced Wednesday.

Wednesday's total includes new lawsuits against 744 users of a variety of P-to-P services, including Kazaa, eDonkey and Grokster Ltd. The RIAA filed an additional 152 lawsuits against people already identified in the litigation process who declined RIAA offers to settle their cases, according to the RIAA. Those 152 people were previously sued by the RIAA as unnamed defendants. Not including the lawsuits announced Wednesday, the RIAA has taken legal action against about 1,500 alleged music uploaders since January.

The lawsuits against the 744 "John Does," unnamed users of P-to-P services, were filed in Atlanta; St. Louis; Oakland, Calif.; New York; Austin, Texas; Covington, Ken.; Denver; Trenton, New Jersey, and Madison, Wis.

The RIAA's expansion of lawsuits to eDonkey users is an attempt to respond to "changing circumstances" in the P-to-P world, RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "Without a strong measure of deterrence, piracy will overwhelm and choke the creation and distribution of music," he added.

A July survey by Peter D. Hart Research Associates Inc. found that 64 percent of those surveyed believe it is illegal to make music from the computer available for others to download for free, while only 13 percent said it was legal, according to the RIAA. By a margin of 60-17, those polled were "supportive and understanding" of legal action against individual illegal file sharers, the RIAA said.

The RIAA did not disclose the perimeters of the survey.

But P-to-P vendors continue to question the RIAA tactics. Instead of suing music fans, the RIAA should negotiate a way to pay artists with P-to-P vendors, said Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a trade group representing five P- to-P vendors, including Grokster and eDonkey.

"Nothing's new," Eisgrau said of the new lawsuits. "The fact that the RIAA has the right to bring these lawsuits doesn't make them the right thing to do."

Eisgrau called the lawsuits "highly unproductive."

"These kinds of suits just can't be squared with a pathological refusal to so much as even discuss collective licensing proposals advanced by respected academics and economists across the country," Eisgrau added.

EDonkey owner Meta Machine Inc. has tried to talk with music labels about licensing music for the P-to-P service during the past six months, said Sam Yagan, president of the New York-based company. The lawsuits announced Wednesday are the first such lawsuits against eDonkey users to Yagan's knowledge, he said.

Meta Machine is more concerned about the lawsuits' influence on those discussions with music labels than the potential negative effect on the number of eDonkey users, Yagan said.

"I thought, prior to today, we had been making some real progress with the labels and the studios," he said. "This comes as a total surprise. This is not the behavior of a business partner acting in good faith."
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/08/25/riaa/


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Group Offers Alternative To P2P Bill
Declan McCullagh

Electronics manufacturers and some Internet providers are mounting a counterattack to a copyright bill that is intended to ban peer-to-peer networks and could imperil devices like Apple Computer's iPod as well.

That measure, called the Induce Act, has been widely panned by the technology industry. Now some groups, including SBC Communications, Verizon Communications and the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), are fighting back with their own proposal that will be sent to Capitol Hill on Tuesday afternoon.

Their proposal, dubbed the "Don't Induce Act," is designed to provide the Senate with an alternative that's less threatening to the industry. It is far narrower, saying that only someone who distributes a commercial computer program that is "specificially designed" for widescale piracy on digital networks could be held liable for copyright violations. Hardware like the iPod and other music players would not be targeted.

In an interview, Michael Petricone, a CEA vice president, said that Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch said to "give us something that reflects your concerns."

"We came back and tried to do what Hatch asked us to do," Petricone said. Hatch, a Utah Republican, is the primary Senate proponent of the original Induce Act, which also enjoys support from top Democrats.

Others involved in the drafting of the Don't Induce Act include the American Library Association, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), DigitalConsumer.org, the Home Recording Rights Coalition and Public Knowledge, Petricone said.

CCIA President Ed Black said that his organization, whose membership includes Covad, Nortel Networks and Verizon, does not actually endorse the new proposal, even though the group helped draft it. Black called the Don't Induce Act a "good framework to approach these issues" that could serve as a starting point for negotiation.

The recording and movie industries, which strongly back the Induce Act, were lukewarm in their reception to the new, completely rewritten version of the bill.

Fritz Attaway, vice president for the Motion Picture Association of America, said the Don't Induce Act was so narrowly drafted it would be impossible to use it to shutter even operators of peer-to-peer networks. "There is no way that anyone could ever meet the burden of proof that this establishes," Attaway said. "It's spin. (They're) not being honest here."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5322019.html


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A Ruling On File Sharing
The software is legal, but its uses might not be.

If you were scared off Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster or any other peer-to-peer computer file-sharing service because of the record industry's lawsuits, it's OK to log back on. The software networks aren't illegal, a California appeals court has ruled. However, the software still shouldn't be used in illegal ways.

That's an extremely important distinction to make in a free society. Technology that has useful, lawful purposes shouldn't be outlawed, even if some people may find illegal uses for it. The action could be illegal, but the device isn't.

The new generation of file-sharing software is different from the early Napster Web site, which contained a database of songs on a central computer network available for downloading. Software such as Kazaa allows computer users to trade songs and other material directly with other computer users.

The music and movie industries' arguments against peer-to-peer file sharing are the same ones used when they tried to stifle audio cassettes and Betamax videotape recorders decades ago. But those changes in technology revolutionized the industry and created an entirely new revenue source through home video sales and rentals.

File sharing is different, certainly. But it poses the same challenge to the industry: how to best adapt and profit from a new method of reproduction and distribution. And, as one of the judges noted in the court's decision, market forces have a way of finding equilibrium over time.

The court's decision doesn't condone the theft of copyrighted material. That is wrong and will always remain so. Peer-to-peer networks have other uses, however, particularly for the many lesser-known bands, artists and filmmakers that embrace file-sharing for its distribution power.

The court's ruling rightfully recognizes that technology doesn't make moral choices, humans do.
http://www.presstelegram.com/Stories...52099,00.html#


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Kazaa Owner Cheers File-swapping Court Decision
AP

The distributor of file-swapping giant Kazaa on Friday welcomed a U.S. court's ruling that two of its rivals are not legally liable for the songs, movies and other copyright works shared online by their users.

Among other reasons for its landmark ruling Thursday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc. were not responsible because they don't have central servers pointing users to copyright material.

Nikki Hemming -- chief executive officer of Sharman Networks, the Sydney-based company that distributes the immensely popular Kazaa peer-to-peer, or P2P, software -- hailed the ruling as ``a fantastic result for the peer-to-peer community. This ruling reinforces similar decisions in other courts around the world that P2P is legal.''

She called on the entertainment industry to ``stop litigating and start partnering with us. Legislation is not the answer, commercialization of P2P is.''

Rod Dorman, lead trial counsel for Sharman Networks in the U.S., said in a statement that Sharman would now seek a U.S. court ruling that the Kazaa software is legal.

``This is a victory for the technology industry and fans, artists and owners of entertainment content,'' he said.

Sharman is involved in litigation in the U.S. and Australia over whether its Kazaa software, used by millions of computer users around the world, is responsible for copyright infringement.

Dorman said the ruling also sent a message to file swappers ``that they must use the software responsibly.''

Dorman pointed out that the U.S. decision could not be used as precedent in Sharman's Australian copyright infringement case, because U.S. and Australian laws are slightly different.

``Regardless, the reasoning of the Ninth Circuit decision is powerful, sound and persuasive,'' he said. ``In addition, and more importantly, we are a global community and there should be consistent doctrines governing the application of copyright law to the Internet worldwide. I expect that the Australian court will consider the reasoning of the Ninth Circuit during its deliberations.''

In February, investigators from the Australian recording industry raided the Sydney offices of Sharman and Hemming's home, using rarely exercised search powers to hunt for evidence to support allegations of copyright infringements. The case is still before Australian courts.

Late last year, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that Kazaa's Netherlands division cannot be held liable for copyright infringement of music or movies swapped using its free software.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/inte...-Swapping.html


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They’ll have plenty of free time

P2P PATROL to Combat Child Pornography
Press Release

The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) is expanding its initiative to combat child pornography through law enforcement support, deterrence, and user education programs. The DCIA is a trade association dedicated to the advancement of file sharing to benefit consumers as well as technology and entertainment companies.

The DCIA today announced the launch of its deterrence program under a new service-marked umbrella organization for all of its anti-child-pornography efforts: P2P PATROL -- Peer-To-Peer Parents And Teens React On Line. These are in addition to its initial ongoing program in support of law enforcement agencies, which began in October 2003. "Eradication of child pornography should be the goal of every participant at every level in the distributed computing industry," said DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty. "We applaud our P2P software providing Members for taking a zero tolerance stance and backing it up in word and deed."

The first new P2P PATROL program is focused on deterrence and will commence with a series of pop-up warning messages, shaped like a red stop sign, that appear when a user of a participating P2P software program enters a search term known to be associated with child pornography. The target for these escalating messages will be users who appear to be on the threshold of involvement with child pornography.

The initial message will read, "WARNING -- The search term you entered has been associated with child pornography. Any person who receives, reproduces, or redistributes a visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct shall be subject to severe fines and imprisonment. P2P PATROL reports suspected violations of Title 18, USC 2252 to the FBI. -- PEER-TO-PEER PARENTS AND TEENS REACT ONLINE."

The warning messages will be served by DCIA member Altnet and be field- tested with DCIA member Grokster, before being offered -- without cost -- to other file-sharing software suppliers. The initial keywords will be seeded by international law enforcement agencies, and ultimately will be updated for participating P2P PATROL file-sharing software programs by the users themselves.

"This real-time warning, which begins field-testing immediately, will be an effective weapon in P2P PATROL's arsenal for combating child pornography," added Lafferty.

The P2P PATROL deterrence program will launch additional components as the program develops and rolls out. These additional elements will include notifications of suspected trafficking in child pornography to Internet service providers (ISPs), and state, federal, and international law enforcement agencies for investigation.

The third P2P PATROL program, focused on education, will be presented to appropriate officials in September for implementation by November 2004. The education program will be aimed at empowering general users, who inadvertently encounter undesirable material online, with the tools they need to recognize, report, and remove (i.e., hard-drive wipe) any criminally obscene content. P2P PATROL seeks to utilize advanced collaborative-filtering techniques to purge such files from redistribution. The DCIA is working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) on the education program of the P2P PATROL initiative.

Today's announcement comes just three months after the first law enforcement actions against those trafficking in child pornography by means of P2P software were announced in May 2004. DCIA Members supported the covert operations that led to the arrests.

The DCIA and its Members have unanimously praised the enforcement actions of the Cyber Division of the FBI and the coordinated law enforcement efforts of the Department of Justice and Homeland Security, stating, "No amount of child pornography is acceptable, and we are committed to doing all we can to eliminate this illicit content from peer-to-peer file-sharing environments."

The DCIA is also working with state police Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force units to enhance the effectiveness of regional enforcement in combating child pornography by tapping P2P technology to prosecute suspected traffickers.

P2P PATROL is accepting financial contributions to help defray the expenses of implementing its programs and expanding their reach. Any party interested in supporting P2P PATROL's mission and its broad adoption should contact sari@dcia.info or call 888-864-DCIA. DCIA Members participating in the September education presentations include Chip Venters, CEO, Digital Containers; Les Ottolenghi, President, INTENT MediaWorks; Marc Freedman, CEO, RazorPop; and Chris Haigh, CEO, SVC Financial.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2004,+08:13+PM


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Future Sonics SofterWear gives universal earphones custom fit option
Press Release

Future Sonics is proud to announce the release of our new SofterWear custom fit sleeves for use with our universal fit product line. This option provides an affordable option for those who want custom fit personal monitoring and is a good "stepping stone" to our Ear Monitors brand custom fit professional products. "The SofterWear product is designed for use with our Future Sonics Ears and the Sennheiser IE3 models on the pro-audio side, plus provides a custom option for digital media product users who are embracing our products on the consumer side," reports Marty Garcia, company founder and president.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/4/prweb122075.php


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Part Three

BBC Begins Open-Source Streaming Challenge

We explain how a free codec could rival commercial streaming software, in the third part of our special report on the BBC's Kingswood Warren research and development lab.
Clive Akass

The BBC is quietly preparing a challenge to Microsoft and other companies jostling to reap revenues from video streams. It is developing code-decode (codec) software called Dirac in an open-source project aimed at providing a royalty-free way to distribute video .

The sums at stake are potentially huge because the software industry insists on payment per viewer, per hour of encoded content. This contrasts with TV technology, for which viewers and broadcasters alike make a one-off royalties payment when they buy their equipment.

Tim Borer, manager of the Dirac project at the BBC's Kingswood Warren R&D lab, pointed out: 'Coding standards for video were always free and open. We have been broadcasting PAL TV in this country for decades. The standard has been available for anyone to use... If the BBC had to pay per hour of coding in PAL we would be in trouble.'

The cost of the Real Networks player used on the BBC site will become prohibitive as the number of users rises, Borer said. 'Ultimately we would like to support millions of users with streaming services. It is uneconomic to use a codec with a per-user licence.'

There is the technical hassle, too. 'You need a back channel from the media player right back to the server to audit how many channels are being played. That complicates the entire system.'

The Dirac codec will infringe no patents and will be freely available worldwide for any platform including Windows, Linux and the Mac OS, potentially undercutting the market for commercial formats. It can be used for passing video round home networks, rights-managed peer-to-peer file sharing, or playing media in handheld devices, as well as for web streaming.

Borer sees open-source as a natural fit with the BBC's not-for-profit, public service remit. 'We have a different ethos to a commercial company,' he said. 'Open-source software development is really a parallel development. It's got the same ethos.'

Controversial player

The media player used on the BBC site has been controversial from the start. The BBC standardised on the Real Media module, opening itself to accusations of favouritism, because it did not want the complication and expense of offering all major commercial players.

Users who downloaded the player from Real Networks also complained of having to negotiate screens apparently trying to trick them into buying the full player, though the system has since become more straightforward.

Dirac began as a project to compress high-definition TV but researchers realised it had wider applications both for internal desktop production and external streaming. The immediate aim is to be able to decode standard digital TV definition (720 x 576 pixels at 25 frames per second) in real time; the current version can decode a quarter-standard resolution at 20fps (frames per second), which is enough for Internet streaming.

'I'd expect the decoding speed to have been sorted out certainly within the next year... We have already done some optimisation work and have had large speed- up - of the order of 10 times,' said Borer. The figures assume a 3GHz processor but the focus is on gaining speed by code optimisation rather than hardware because the BBC wants Dirac to be usable on a broad range of devices.

Bolt-on software libaries

Borer's team is trying to make project more accessible to open-source developers; lead Dirac programmer Anuradha Suraparaju is developing an interface to facilitate use of the module by C coders. 'They can simply bolt on a software library to their existing application,' said Borer, who hopes the developer community will write Dirac plug-ins for players such as Windows Media Player 9.

The Dirac format will be submitted to relevant organisations for ratification as a standard. Usually only a bitstream is standardised, with the code and decode methods being left to the implementers; but the BBC will be providing implementation.

Borer believes Dirac could turn out to be more efficient than standards based on commercial patents, even though it has to use technology more than 20 years old to avoid breaking patents.

Many of the techniques were published by academics long before they were used commercially, and some are relatively new in being applied to video compression. 'Wavelets [exotic waveforms used to map changes] have been around for 20 years now but they have only recently been ratified as part of the JPEG 2000 specification,' said Borer.

Efficiency depends on how techniques are used as much as on the techniques themselves. Commercial organisations trying to agree a standard currently fight to get their own intellectual property included, which makes for complexity and does not necessarily lead to the adoption of the best of breed. 'We have tried to make our codec as simple as we can so it is easy to understand and easy to implement efficiently,' said Borer.

Cost benefits

Unsurprisingly a number of commercial and public organisations have expressed interest in a project that could cut their own costs; and Dirac, like other open- source products, can act at the very least as a restraint on the greed of commercial developers.

Borer says the BBC would be happy to use commercial products, provided they had a viable licensing model, and he insists that he is not trying to compete with them. 'We are happy to work with them,' he said. 'We work a lot with Microsoft. It is purely that we wish to preserve open standards.'
http://www.pcw.co.uk/news/1157260


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Heritage egghead comes out against P2P. About what you’d expect from an industry mouthpiece.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Int...ogy/bg1790.cfm


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Not so fast industry flacks!

College P2P Use On The Decline?
John Borland

A combination of authorized music services and lawsuits is helping to control illegal file swapping on campuses, a joint entertainment industry-university group said Tuesday.

In the last year, more than 20 schools have signed up for deeply discounted access to music services such as Napster, MusicNet and RealNetworks' Rhapsody, the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities said in a report to Congress. In the same period, 158 students have been sued for copyright infringement, the group said.

"Since the beginning of the last school year we have seen progress on all counts," Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and co-chairman of the joint group, said in a conference call with reporters. "A legion of college music fans who are getting their music for free and getting the impression that music has no value are now being introduced to the idea that music does have value."

In some cases, the traffic devoted to peer-to-peer networks on campuses has dropped by as much as half, the group said.

The report to Congress comes two years after the formation of the cross-industry group and more than a year after the consortium began focusing heavily on ways to provide legal music services on campus that might entice students away from peer-to-peer networks.

The group's efforts have been augmented by the SonyBMG-led Campus Action Network (CAN), which has helped make introductions between university officials, record labels and music services for at least 10 campuses.

Napster was the first company to sign a campus deal, agreeing to offer service to the Pennsylvania State University last spring in a pilot program. The fees, which were undisclosed, were folded into a mandatory information technology charge of $160 a year imposed on students. University representatives have said the fee was not raised as a result of picking up the Napster service.

Penn State President Graham Spanier, who also serves as co-chair of the joint college and entertainment industry group, said on Tuesday that the pilot program had been a success and that it would be rolled out to all of the university's campuses this fall. In the pilot, up to 100,000 songs had been downloaded a day by the 12,000 students participating, he said.

"I think this will all mushroom (to other universities)," he said. "For universities, it's really not just a legal issue. It is an ethical, it is a moral issue."

Napster has since announced eight deals with universities, while MusicNet, distributed through partner Cdigix, has signed six. RealNetworks said Tuesday that it had made two college deals--with the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Minnesota--to provide students with subscriptions to its Rhapsody service for less than $3 a month.

Apple Computer offers site licenses for its iTunes music software to universities, which can include volume discounts for song purchases. The company said Tuesday that 55 colleges have taken site licenses to iTunes.

Those low rates are made possible, in part, by a deep discount from record labels on the amount they charge for digital music services. A representative for one digital music company said that music publishers, which are also entitled to receive a small portion of payments, have not granted similar discounts.

Sherman and Spanier said that these new services, along with education campaigns and new technologies blocking peer-to-peer swaps, have diminished file trading on campus, but the two men provided few concrete details on overall reductions.

File sharing, particularly the swapping of video files, remains popular with many students, however.

A peer-to-peer network called i2Hub has recently appeared on the supercharged Internet2 network, which enables students at participating campuses to download files from each other's system at rates much faster than on the open Internet.

Spanier and Sherman said that the film industry has also been involved in the joint group's efforts and that the on-campus services would likely expand more deeply into video in the future.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5322329.html


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Colleges, RIAA Pleased With Progress In War On File-Sharing
Joe D'Angelo

As the fall semester looms near, colleges and universities are ramping up the programs and penalties to prevent illegal file-sharing on campus, and it shows on their report card.

On Tuesday (August 24) the Joint Committee of Higher Education and Entertainment Communities issued a report to Congress outlining the initiatives schools have taken in the areas of education on copyright infringement; technological solutions to the problem; and future collaborations between the recording industry, legitimate download services and college administrations.

The report focused mainly on new deals that have been struck between colleges and legal download services such as Napster. Since Pennsylvania State University began offering Napster 2.0 to a select number of students last spring (see "Penn State Students To Get Free Napster Next Semester"), 19 other schools have adopted similar programs.

The University of Southern California, the University of Miami, George Washington University, Cornell University, Middlebury College, Vanderbilt and Wright University have signed on with Napster. DePauw University students can purchase discounted downloads from Music Rebellion. Ruckus offers music and movies to students at Northern Illinois University, while the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota have partnered with RealNetworks.

Schools pay for the students' subscriptions through fees included in tuition. For example, Penn State uses its Information and Technology Fund to pay Napster, and even though the program will be expanded this semester, Penn State President Graham Spanier said during a press conference Tuesday that fees won't be going up.

"Focus group meetings and early research on campus led to students telling us that music was very important to them, so we did not have to raise the fees," said Spanier, who along with RIAA President Cary Sherman co-chairs the Joint Committee of Higher Education and Entertainment Communities. "When we initially announced it, there were some students who weren't very supportive of it, who'd rather not see any university funding used for this purpose, but those complaints have pretty much vanished. Now what we have is students embracing the service, using it, and actually asking for additional enhancements."

Movies, which are increasingly popular on peer-to-peer services, are one of the next frontiers the schools are expected to explore. The college-only service Cflix had already been offering its on-demand video services to Yale, Duke, Wake Forest and the University of Colorado, and having partnered with its Ctrax music service to form Cdigix, the multimedia streaming service will partner with more schools, including Marietta College and the Rochester Institute of Technology, in the 2004-05 academic year (see "New Service Offers College Downloaders A Student Discount").

Students also want the ability to download music to portable devices, and later in the semester Napster will partner with Microsoft for an extra service for an additional charge that allows students to do that. Apple Computer has also offered to license its iTunes Music Store to a number of schools, following up on its program that provided iPods to Duke University students.

And similar to Duke's use of the iPod as an educational tool to share notes and class documents, Penn State students will be able to use files downloaded from Napster in lieu of going to library labs for their music and pop culture courses.

Although 20 schools is a tiny percentage of those nationwide, the education and entertainment committee is confident the trend will continue to spread.

"A lot of universities have adopted a wait-and-see attitude," Spanier explained. "Penn State was the first, and a lot of other universities wanted to see what happened. And as they saw the student body embrace the Napster experience, they became more interested in going down that road as well. I think there's going to be a peer-to-peer influence among universities, where more and more schools will be getting into this marketplace."

Educating the student body on the legal ramifications of copyright infringement continues to be a top priority (see " 'Online Piracy 101' Required For Freshman At Some Schools"), the report stated. E-mails, letters and fliers have been issued to students, ensuring that they understand the laws, while dozens of schools — Indiana University, Brown University and Dartmouth College, among them — have updated their acceptable-use policies to reflect stricter school rules.

Enforcement of those rules will be a priority, with some schools threatening expulsion for multiple offenders. Although Spanier and Sherman couldn't say whether illegal downloading on campus has decreased in the past year, they believe the RIAA lawsuits against 158 people at 35 schools earlier this year had a deterring effect on those schools' use of P2P networks.

"There's nothing like hearing that someone you know has been caught, to basically make you aware that the risk is real and not hypothetical," Spanier said.
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/149...headlines=true

Note: MTV is a unit of media giant Viacom, which owns the CBS television network, the Infinity radio network, the movie studio Paramount Pictures and many other media properties directly affected by P2P. – Jack


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Artists Take Advantage of P2P Music Sharing
Chris Marlowe

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - While politicians and lawyers argue the legalities of peer-to-peer technology, several highly respected musicians are getting on with the business of using it to reach their audience.

Most recently Sananda Maitreya, the artist formerly known as Terence Trent D'Arby, has made three songs from his "Angels and Vampires" project available via P2P. The soulful singer's career never again reached the 1987 heights of "Wishing Well" or "Sign Your Name," but he still has hard-core fans who are avidly following his artistic evolution.

Maitreya chose Weed technology to distribute his project. Each song is digitally packaged to protect its integrity and maintain its copyright control, using a version of Microsoft's WMA audio format and related digital rights management. But Weed adds the twist that each person who downloads a track is allowed to play it three times free of charge. A fourth attempt at playing is greeted by a request for payment.

With that distribution choice, Maitreya joins rock veterans Heart. The Sovereign Artists act is working with Weed to distribute tracks from its new album, "Jupiter's Darling," as well as an exclusive version of "Love Hurts." Rhythm Cartel's Sir Mix-A-Lot, best known for his 1992 hit "Baby Got Back," is another artist who chose to "Weedify" his music, to use the company's terminology.

Weed is a product of the Seattle-based company Shared Media Licensing. Files that use Weed can be shared by any means, including direct downloads and peer-to-peer networks, and once purchased, the songs can be burned to CD or transferred to portable devices. The rights holder sets the price and always earns 50% of every sale. The rest gets distributed as commission on a sliding scale to everyone along the song's distribution path, with Weed receiving 15% as its share. Weed also will work with artists and other content owners to create their own on-site store.

According to Sovereign Artists president George Nunes, Heart sold more songs via Weed than they did through Apple's iTunes Music Store during its first weeks of release. "The entire P2P community came together to allow Heart to reach out to millions of fans worldwide," he says, adding that he chose Weed because it encourages sampling while ensuring that artists are properly compensated for their work.

SML president John Beezer says Weed's ability to generate secondary revenue is something older distribution methods -- including used CD sales -- cannot do. It's also a way to have fans promote artists by letting their friends hear entire songs legally and easily before getting out their wallets. Currently it is primarily used for music, but Beezer says there's no reason Weed would not work equally well for video or any other type of media file.

"Peer-to-peer networks are an extremely efficient way to distribute music," Beezer says. "Rather than trying to eradicate file-sharing, the challenge confronting the music business is to develop business models that take advantage of the efficiencies file-sharing offers."
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=6062360


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Making a Web Search Feel Like a Stroll in the Library
Anne Eisenberg

A VISIT to the school library was once a necessity before writing term papers or reports. But nowadays many students use the Internet as their library.

However convenient it may be to search the Web from home or a dorm room, the Internet cannot replace many of the built-in benefits of the library, like browsing the stacks for related information that could add spark and depth to an essay or a report.

But researchers are working on more flexible approaches to searching for digital information not only on the Web, but on one's own hard drive, where elusive details may be scattered through photos, e-mail and other files.

At the University of California, Berkeley, a professor and her students have created a search program called Flamenco that lets users browse a digitized collection in ways that are similar to a stroll among the shelves of a library.

"It's for when you are not quite sure what you want," said Marti Hearst, an associate professor at the School of Information Management and Systems, who led the research. "It's meant to help people find things, in part, by serendipity."

To create Flamenco, Dr. Hearst started with one archived collection of art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which included 35,000 images that were identified by written descriptions. She used the descriptions to classify the items in a variety of ways, including the medium, the date, the artist and the content of the image.

The categories were then cross-linked so that when people clicked on a category, they immediately saw not only the images within it - say, of landscapes - but those in related categories, like other artists working on landscapes at the same time in the Netherlands.

The effect, she said, is very much like walking down a library aisle and finding related books on a subject.

The search program is also intended to let people look at multiple subcategories at once, she said. For example, a student doing research for an essay on the depiction of flowers in the 18th century can click on the "flowers" category. The system can immediately group the flowers in the collection by subcategories like the kind of flower and show thumbnail-size images of them.

It can then group the irises or chrysanthemums by medium, for instance, listing all the ceramics pieces showing these flowers or all of the prints or drawings that include them. It can group the images by decade - showing, for example, how flowers were portrayed in 1740 compared to 1780. "This way," Dr. Hearst said, "people can compare and contrast, discovering new categories and relationships."

Dr. Hearst has been working for 10 years on ways to browse digital collections, inspired in part by her own frustration in searching the Web. Flamenco, financed in part by the National Science Foundation, is still a prototype; she will be testing it this month with students.

The Web is not the only place where searches are made. Often, necessary details are scattered across a computer hard drive, making them hard to find. To address this problem, Bruce Horn, the founder of Ingenuity Software in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., has created an information management system, now being tested, that lets people individually tailor and cross-index all kinds of files.

Dr. Horn, one of the members of the original Macintosh team at Apple Computer, has added another layer of organization beyond folders to his desktop system. The layer is called "collections" because the system collects and cross-links all references to any subject that the user specifies. For example, someone researching John Adams and his presidency could make a collection by telling the program to find any mention of him and related historical events.

While some current software uses a "collection" system to keep track of one kind of file - digital photos, for instance - Dr. Horn's software can handle many kinds of files.

The collection does not copy the actual items, a move that could multiply storage demands and possibly lead to changes in original documents. "The items remain in their original folders," he said, "and are referenced by the collection."

There are many ways to put objects into collections. "People can drag and drop them in," he said, "or use an annotation to classify items one by one, for instance, in a group photo." Items can also be put into collections automatically by using key phrases.

Dr. Horn and Dr. Hearst both presented their work at a conference at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in California, organized by Daniel Russell, senior scientist there, to discuss new approaches to dealing with the ever-increasing mass of the Web. "Too much information was our topic this year," Dr. Russell said. "Way too much information."

New types of information are constantly evolving, he added, citing moblogs - Web pages filled with photos from cellphones - as one of the latest examples. Video, too, is being stored at a ferocious rate, he said, as are radio shows.

And all of it has to be made searchable, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/19/te...ts/19next.html


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Sing With a Soundtrack; Watch the Movie, Too
Neil McManus

Suddenly, a device that's just a portable music player hardly seems sufficient. For those who want to upgrade to multimedia, iRiver has a new portable media player, the PMP- 120. With it, you can view photos and watch recorded TV shows and movies when you get tired of listening to music.

The PMP-120 has a 20-gigabyte hard drive, enough room for about 75 hours of video or a lot more audio. It can handle various video, still photo and audio formats, including AVI, MPEG-4, DivX, JPEG , MP3, WMA and WAV. It also comes with PC software that lets you convert home videos into a playable form.

The device, which measures 5.5 by 3.3 by 1.2 inches, has a 3.5- inch color screen, a built-in speaker, microphone and FM tuner, and an audio-video out jack. Two U.S.B. ports let it act as a docking station for many digital cameras, flash drives or MP3 players, copying files back and forth without the aid of a PC.

The iRiver player's rechargeable battery lasts up to 10 hours playing songs and about 5 hours playing videos.

The PMP-120, shipping this month for $500, can be purchased at electronics stores or at www.iriveramerica.com. If 20 gigabytes is not enough, the PMP-140, identical except for a 40- gigabyte drive, costs $100 more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/19/te...ts/19play.html


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BitTorrent Snaps Up Hollywood Bit By Bit
Doug Bedell

Earlier this year, as filmmaker Michael Moore put the final touches on "Fahrenheit 9/11," he unwittingly thrust himself into the debate over Internet file- trading ethics and the relatively unknown, free program BitTorrent.

In an interview, Moore compared file-sharing of copyright movies to friends lending one another purchased DVDs.

"I don't agree with copyright laws," he said, "and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it . . . as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labor."

That was all his political enemies at MooreWatch.com needed to hear. In hopes of denting Moore's box office profits, the Web site's manager decided to help people download free copies.

But rather than simply posting one huge pirated version of the movie for everyone to fight over, MooreWatch.com's backers used the power of BitTorrent to distribute tens of thousands of "Fahrenheits" faster and more efficiently. All they had to do was link to a tiny torrent file.

BitTorrent is like the old Napster with one major twist. Napster and its peer-to-peer, or P2P, cousins connect users directly with each other to receive entire files. That makes downloading full-length, digitized movies a long, arduous task for both the downloader and the person offering the file, especially when a lot of people are trying to glom the same copy simultaneously.

BitTorrent breaks up large files into pieces, then allows users to swarm -- exchanging small portions of files with one another -- until everyone has a complete set.

Download speeds depend on two factors. First, like the computer bulletin board systems of the 1980s, the software keeps track of how much you contribute to hosting files for the group. The more you share, the faster your downloads.

Second, the more people trading a file, the more options for obtaining its pieces. So, unlike the old Napster, popularity doesn't bog down the process -- it gives it a shot of adrenaline.

But it's not instantaneous. A "Sopranos" episode might take six hours or more to download, depending on network traffic. A crude "screener" copy of "Fahrenheit" last week required 36 hours on a moderately fast DSL connection.

Washington programmer Bram Cohen, 29, developed BitTorrent and presented to the world at hacker conventions more than three years ago. The program is gaining widespread attention as corporations and individuals -- and those interested in trading large copyright works -- warm to its speed and simplicity.

Fans of the open-source Linux operating system, for example, use BitTorrent to distribute perfect copies of the latest versions. A commercial Linux distribution, Linspire.com, formerly Lindows, does the same.

When Downhill Battle (downhillbattle.org) disseminated an entire album as part of its February Grey Tuesday protest over music censorship, organizers used BitTorrent as part of an effort to move more than 1 million digital tracks to sympathizers in 24 hours.

"BitTorrent lets you have a file on a Web site that lets people click on a link and download in a peer-to-peer way," says Nicholas Reville, Downhill Battle cofounder. "It's an amazing tool for people or small organizations running their own Web sites. Most can't just host the large files of video or bundled music files. They can't afford the hosting costs that it would take."

Cohen says using his creation to exchange copyright files is not smart. It takes digging for the music industry and the Motion Picture Association of America to find who is offering illegal uploads within KaZaA, eDonkey and similar networks. With BitTorrent, the links to torrent files for each download must be posted for everyone to see on Web sites.

A spokesman for the MPAA declined to comment on BitTorrent, but Hollywood is clearly worried about the Napsterizing of its products. It recently commissioned a survey showing that about one in four Internet users had downloaded a feature-length film online at least once and that downloaders averaged about 11 films each.

By some measurements, the use of BitTorrent has eclipsed that of KaZaA, the most popular P2P program for music. The firm CacheLogic says its six-month analysis shows that BitTorrent accounts for 53 percent of all European network P2P traffic.
http://www.freep.com/money/business/...e_20040826.htm


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RIAA Names Ashcroft Poet Laureate
John Paczkowski

"The message is simply this: P2P, or peer-to-peer, does not stand for ‘permission to pilfer.' "

That was Attorney General John Ashcroft's alliterative comment on an FBI raid on five people and an Internet service provider linked to the Underground Network, a peer-to-peer system used by some to distribute massive quantities of copyrighted movies, music, software, games and other materials over the Internet. No arrests were made, no charges filed. But the raids show the Justice Department for the first time singling out peer-to-peer networks for criminal enforcement action under copyright law. And, if we are to take the department at its word, similar actions are in the offing.

"Today's actions send an important message to those who steal over the Internet," Ashcroft said in a statement. "The Department of Justice is committed to enforcing intellectual property laws, and we will pursue those who steal copyrighted materials even when they try to hide behind the false anonymity of peer-to-peer networks."

Ashcroft's comments offer a interesting counterpoint to those of Hewitt Pate, assistant attorney general for antitrust, who earlier this week suggested that a law encouraging federal prosecutors to sue copyright infringers should "be taken with a grain of salt."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...sv/9504009.htm


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Geeks Battle Movie Stars
AP

Internet service providers and other technology firms are proposing to soften a bill in Congress that they claim will make them targets of frivolous entertainment industry copyright lawsuits.

The group, including Verizon Communications, SBC Communications and MCI, submitted its alternative to the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act to lawmakers on Tuesday, said Sarah Deutsch, Verizon's associate general counsel.

The companies behind the alternative to the so-called Induce Act want to restrict the scope of the proposed bill, which would essentially make companies liable if their software or technology encourages users to violate copyright laws.

The Induce Act was introduced this summer by U.S. Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, among others.

Hollywood movie studios and the recording industry are the bill's principal backers. They see it as their best hope for shutting down companies behind online file-sharing software, who by and large have escaped liability for the rampant distribution of movies and music by users of their programs.

Although the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal to circumvent copyright protection systems, the entertainment industry has largely failed to persuade courts to hold file-sharing companies legally liable.

If it becomes law, Induce would make it easier for the entertainment firms to sue file-sharing companies. But the Induce Act has alarmed many critics, who claim it would also endanger many other companies.

Among those companies and organizations seeking changes in the Induce Act are business groups such as the Consumer Electronics Association, which counts Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. as members.

Critics of the Induce bill have argued that, in its current form, it could be used as the basis of a copyright infringement case against a company like Apple on grounds that its popular iPod digital music player encourages owners to copy music, perhaps without permission.

"The way it's written it would basically grant a hunting license to every copyright owner to go after companies," Deutsch said. "Even if you're an innocent company, you're going to be forced to go through lengthy court proceedings to prove your innocence."

The tech firms' alternative Induce bill narrows the scope of the bill to target P2P software companies by specifying the grounds under which a firm would be found to be encouraging copyright infringement, Deutsch said.

The alternative Induce bill would apply only to companies that distribute a computer program created specifically for the purpose of mass distribution of copyright works. The program's commercial success would have to depend on that large-scale unauthorized distribution of media and the company would have had to encourage someone to redistribute the works on a massive scale.

"Under this kind of test, you wouldn't find the manufacturer or TiVo or an ISP or the Apple iPod (liable)," Deutsch said. "It would be much less likely you would have frivolous lawsuits."

In a letter to Hatch, Leahy and other congressional leaders, the tech firms asked the lawmakers to consider the draft a basis for negotiations on a compromise bill, Deutsch said.

A spokeswoman for Hatch said he welcomed the input on the Induce Act, but had no comment Wednesday. A Leahy spokesman said he was not aware of the tech firms' draft.

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America said the trade group had no immediate comment. The Motion Picture Association of America had yet to review the alternative bill, spokesman Rich Taylor said.

"We're pleased that a broad array of groups recognize a need for legislation that will punish bad actors who induce often unsuspecting consumers to engage in unlawful behavior," Taylor said.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in638698.shtml


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Taiwan Copyright Law Gets Major Makeover

New amendments passed by the legislature this week provide more protection to digital-content publications and includes more penalties
Jessie Ho

"We are glad to see that the new law strengthens protection against online piracy and pirated optical media products, which were not addressed in the last version [of the Copyright Law]."

Robin Lee, secretary general of theInternational Federation of the Phonographic Industry Representatives from copyright holders and trade groups yesterday welcomed new amendments to the Copyright Law, which were passed by the Legislative Yuan on Tuesday.

"Taiwan may finally have a chance of getting off the US' `Special 301' priority watch list this fall," John Eastwood, a lawyer at Wenger Vieli Belser and co-chairman of the Intellectual Property Committee of the European Chamber of Commerce Taipei, told the Taipei Times in a phone interview yesterday.

The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) retained Taiwan on the priority watch list for the fourth consecutive year after it released its "2004 Special 301 Report Watch List" in May.

The USTR will conduct another review at the end of September to evaluate Taiwan's progress.

While lauding the progress being made in legislation, Eastwood said he hopes the government to increase police and prosecution resources to execute the law, adding that more training on the task force will be helpful to crack down piracy.

Tsai Lien-sheng, director-general of the Intellectual Property Office under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, said that the amendments may eventually lead to a free trade agreement with the US.

The new amendments provide more protection to digital-content publications.

The law now stipulates that without authorization from copyright holders, users are not allowed to decode encrypted CDs, DVDs and video and audio files from the Internet. Violators will be sentenced to up to a year in prison or fined between NT$20,000 to NT$250,000.

"We are glad to see that the new law strengthens protection against online piracy and pirated optical media products, which were not addressed in the last version [of the Copyright Law]," said Robin Lee, secretary general of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in Taiwan, which represents record-industry heavyweights.

The new amendments also clarify the definition of piracy, which previously stated that making more than five copies of a product -- or copies that were worth more than NT$30,000 in street value if sold in original packaging -- constitutes a copyright violation "without intent to profit."

The phrase "intent to profit" can easily be exploited by copyright violators.

The new rule states that anyone who reproduces the intellectual properties without authorization can be sentence to three years in prison.

In addition, Article 51, a high-profile section in the draft that proposes compensation measures to copyright holders from losses caused by peer-to-peer (P2P) file- sharing software, was shut down.

The music and movie industries allege that the wide availability of file-sharing software has eroded their massive profits.

IFPI Taiwan has filed lawsuits against the nation's two largest P2P music file-sharing sites -- kuro.com.tw and Ezpeer.com.tw.

Kuro spokesman Eric Yang said that despite the article did not even reviewed by the Legislature, the company will not give up on its efforts to legalize the online file-sharing business.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/.../26/2003200286


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Reining In The Web In Japan

Stories in the Japanese media about a flood of "illegal and irresponsible" postings on the Net are being accompanied by calls for stricter regulation. Some observers worry that traditional gatekeepers of information are trying to tighten control over Japan's Net entrepreneurs and users.

Anywhere else Hiroyuki Nishimura might expect to be treated as a role model for aspiring young entrepreneurs. Still only in his late 20s, he has built a Web site used by almost 8 million people a month. His Channel 2 ("ni chaneru") bulletin board is thought to be the largest in the world. It attracts more users than any of Japan's newspaper Web sites. Yet, instead of lauding his success, the media has largely concentrated on the less savory aspects of his massive Net community.

Hand-wringing reports about "out of control" anonymous bulletin boards like Channel 2, illegal file-sharing and the dangerous influence of the Internet on young people may be a sign that the Internet's salad days of youthful freedom are coming to an end. The Japanese Internet has a record number of users and its role in the economy is more important than ever. But recently the Internet has been getting a distinctly bad press recently. Some believe that traditional gatekeepers of information see the Internet as a threat, so tighter controls are on the way.

The Internet hit the headlines with the May 10 arrest of Isamu Kaneko, a research associate at the prestigious University of Tokyo and creator of "Winny," a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing application. After 20 days in detention, Kaneko was charged with the criminal offense of assisting copyright violations. His supporters claim that the creation of file-sharing software is legal in Japan and that Kaneko had no intention that his software should be used illegally. They allege that the arrest was arbitrary and overly strict.

"Up till recently the Internet was used freely and without charge," says Toshimitsu Dan, one of a group of 14 lawyers set to defend Kaneko. "It's a space for business now." The case may be a sign that large corporations want to get more control over the Internet, including stricter copyright controls, he argues.

Use of file-sharing software in Japan is already widespread. According to the Computer Software Copyright Association, file-sharing software was used by 9.5 million Japanese in 2003. Half of those people were using Kaneko's Winny software. The Japan Times reported that even the police were using the software. (Earlier this year the police were embarrassed to find confidential files leaked onto the Internet after their computers were hit by a virus that only targets machines using Winny.)

But despite the large number of users, the cards may be stacked in favor of the authorities. Dan worries that the debate over copyright in Japan is too one-sided. "In the U.S. there are people supporting Internet regulation and people opposing it, so there is balance," he says. "Unfortunately, we don't have that in Japan." Dan says that many program developers in Japan were shocked by Kaneko's sudden arrest. Without an organization like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to represent programmers, the battle could be a very unequal one. He fears that eventually stricter rules in Japan may drive smaller software creators abroad.

Channel 2, arguably Japan's most famous Web site, gets no shortage of coverage in the media. (See Japan Media Review Q&A with Nishimura.) Recently The Asahi Shimbun's popular weekly AERA magazine featured a three-page report on Hiroyuki Nishimura and the Channel 2 bulletin board. The article focused on more than 20 defamation suits that Nishimura faces for his Web site and scathingly referred to Nishimura's "dodges for not paying" over $135,000 (15 million yen) in compensation.

"Anonymity" is something of a catchword in news reports on the Internet -- coverage often concentrates on the dangers of Internet users being able to say anything without being identified. Providers are coming under pressure from the authorities to remove postings that damage the reputation of individuals, companies or companies' products.

The same edition of AERA that covered Channel 2 carried a report on Weblogs that was as positive as the report on Nishimura's site was negative. Headlined "The Era of Blogs Has Come," AERA wrote approvingly: "You can see poster's 'face,' therefore terrible slanders and slurs won't spread." The magazine gave a laudable example of blogs in action in Japan: A company president who had instructed all of his employees to write personal blogs. The CEO finds the blogs a useful tool for monitoring his employees' interests and personalities, reports AERA.

"In the real world ... sometimes (people) are too frightened to speak. But the relative anonymity of the Internet has made it easy for them to spread information." -- Toru Maegawa

The most concern has been about a number of cases in recent months of bulletin board users posting information about the identity of children arrested for high profile murders. Earlier this year, over the course of one week the Justice Ministry made over 1,100 requests to Web site managers to remove information about the identity of a junior high school boy arrested for the murder of an infant in Nagasaki. In one case, a photograph of several children was posted with the caption "the killer is among these."

But despite problems that have come from anonymous posting, the very anonymity of Channel 2 may be the root of its success. It seems that Channel 2 has become so popular precisely because it's a place where people can say what they want without fear of censorship or being identified.

"In the real world ... sometimes (people) are too frightened to speak," says Toru Maegawa, an Internet analyst at the Fujitsu Research Institute. "But the relative anonymity of the Internet has made it easy for them to spread information."

Media keep eye on bulletin board

Channel 2 has become an anarchic and free alternative to Japan's mainstream press and uncompromised by the main media's networks of press clubs, political and corporate allegiances, and consensus-minded stances. Channel 2 can't rival the mainstream media for authority or accuracy, but it is obvious why the Japanese media sense a threat.

It seems that a somewhat ambivalent relationship has developed between the Web site and the traditional media. The media criticize Channel 2 for spreading wrong or malicious information, but still keep a close eye on the bulletin board for breaking stories. Anonymous unverifiable posts are anathema to Japanese journalists bred on the importance of personal contacts and solid fact, but few can afford to ignore the flood of firsthand information.

But can the Internet offer a space for public discussion to compete with the main media? Not yet, say some observers. Even commentators who value the bulletin boards' role as an information source -- especially as an alternative to a paternalistic establishment media -- are concerned about an apparent flood of confession and accusation. There is no shortage of argument, but reasoned discussion is more rare.

"An important issue is whether the users of Channel 2 have the critical media literacy to separate reliable information from unreliable information," says Fujitsu's Maegawa. "Channel 2 doesn't yet have the power to directly affect public opinion itself. The reason 2 Channel is talked about is because it is reported on weekly magazines, on the TV, in the newspapers."

Koichi Kobayashi, a professor of media communications at Tokyo's Toyo University, says that the Japanese Internet plays a meager role as a space for public discussion. He compares Japan's 'JanJan' news Web site unfavorably with South Korea's popular OhmyNews site (see Japan Media Review Sept. 17, 2003 report). Instead, the Japanese Internet is mostly "a space for expressing personal interests, personal feelings and confessions," he says. Kobayashi compares reading the content of bulletin boards to reading a novel written in the first person.

Regardless of the tone of their coverage, the main media companies in Japan have long had a notably standoffish attitude towards the Internet. "Most of the Japanese media haven't seen the Internet as a chance to expand their business," says Maegawa. He suggests that few organizations have taken advantage of the Internet. "It seems to me that they see the Internet as competition instead." The Web sites of most print and broadcast organizations are relatively unsophisticated. Some of the major newspapers do little more than publish an online copy of the day's newspaper, without even an archive of old articles.

The country's politicians have been equally chary of the Internet, even when it might help them get elected. "Many politicians are not interested in using the Internet as a campaign tool, a reflection of the large cultural gap that exists between the generations," comments a Japan Times report. At present, campaign funding regulations stop politicians from even updating their Web sites during an election campaign.

But despite the media and authorities' lack of enthusiasm for the digital world, the Internet is being used by more people of a wider range of ages than ever. It's now far too big and popular for even the most Luddite politicians and media executives to ignore. A government survey found there were 77 million people using the Internet in Japan in 2003. The highest numbers of new users are people in their 40s and 50s.

Perhaps it's no surprise that conservative voices are trying to bring the Internet into line. Japan's population is graying, the median age getting older and older. Young Internet pioneers and users will soon be outnumbered online by their not necessarily computer-illiterate elders. The Internet may have to change, become more regulated and more conservative. The cyber world is still a chaotic and unconstrained place compared to the "real" Japanese world -- but if recent press coverage is anything to go by, perhaps not for much longer.
http://ojr.org/japan/internet/1093543502.php


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Dutch Labour MP Questions Brein Anti-Piracy Actions
Joe Figueiredo

Martijn van Dam, the energetic Labour member of the Dutch lower house, has sought clarification from the minister of justice, Piet Hein Donner, over the powers Brein, the Dutch entertainment industry’s anti-piracy foundation, may exercise in tracking down possible offenders.

Apparently encouraged by a recent court ruling in America, the foundation is planning to send out warning notices to users of such peer-to-peer file downloading and exchange software as Kazaa.

A civil-rights activist, the parliamentarian is asking 11 questions, wanting to know if this is permissible and whether the minister considers such an action as violating the fundamental right to the free exchange of information.

According to Mr van Dam, there is much misunderstanding over downloading of film and music content through the internet, pointing out that using such a computer program to download content is not unlawful as such. “What is not permissible is to use such a program to download certain types of music and film files.”

Furthermore, to track down possible ‘offenders’ Brein would need to collect personal information, like IP addresses and the downloadable files on offer. “That could mean a major invasion of privacy, considering that these files are stored on the hard disk of possible offenders,” explained Mr van Dam. Moreover, it is quite simple to falsify an IP address and consequently accuse an innocent internet user of a misdeed.

In addition, one has the right to anonymity while surfing the internet, argued Mr van Dam. “As far as I am concerned, only official intelligence and law- enforcement agencies are exempt [from such privacy regulations], and not organisations such as Brein, which are governed by civil law.”

Crucially, Mr van Dam would like to know the limits within which Brein may operate—seeing that the Dutch data protection agency, CBP, has approved the methods employed by the foundation.

Minister Donner has yet to react to the questions.
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=2656


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Lycos To Appeal Dutch Order To Release Subscriber Details
Joe Figueiredo

Lycos is to appeal the recent decision by the Appeals Court of Amsterdam—requiring the internet portal-service provider to reveal to a third party name-and-address details of one of its subscribers—all the way to the Hoge Raad, the highest court in the Netherlands.

The Appeals Court largely upheld the verdict against Lycos last September by a judge at the District Court of Haarlem.

The case was brought by Augustinus Bernard Maria Pessers, a lawyer in the Dutch city of Tilburg and postage-stamp trader on the auction portal E- bay, who had been accused of fraud by a Lycos subscriber, apparently.

Mr Pessers subsequently demanded that Lycos shut down the site, which it did, but Lycos refused to reveal confidential information on the subscriber in question—and had to go to court.

What looks like the beginning of a test case, the Dutch Supreme Court will have to decide between Dutch privacy regulations, and the importance placed on individuals’ privacy and their right to voice an opinion anonymously, on the one hand; and proper justice for improper treatment, on the other.

The Supreme Court’s ruling could also affect the actions and behaviour of civil organisation, such as Brein, an anti-piracy foundation representing the interests of the Dutch entertainment industry, in their attempt to gain access to personal details of internet users.
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=2705


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Hackers Revive iTunes Music Sharing
John Borland

A Stanford University programmer has released new software that allows music to be swapped via Apple Computer's popular iTunes jukebox.

Like an older piece of software called "MyTunes," student David Blackman's new "OurTunes" allows a person to browse complete iTunes libraries on other computers and download songs, either in MP3 or the AAC format preferred by Apple. Songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store and wrapped in Apple's copy protection technology cannot be traded.

OurTunes works only among computers that share a network, however. That means that students or employees can swap songs on a local network but cannot use it to browse computers on the Internet, as happens with file-trading programs such as Kazaa. Still, the software is likely to ring an alarm at Apple and among record company executives, who have waged war against file swapping since Napster's heyday.

"I'm a Linux guy. I expect my software to be extensible," Blackman said in an instant-message interview. "I really think that this will encourage people to join their local iTunes communities, and that's a good thing."

An Apple representative declined to comment for this report.

Apple has spent much of the past two years trying to balance its own desire to expand the way people use their music with record companies' requests that songs be protected against unauthorized copying. iTunes' ability to stream songs throughout a home network has been one of the sources of this tension.

Since iTunes' release, Apple has increasingly touted it as the core of a home music system. It initially allowed streams to flow between
Macintosh and, later, Windows computers on a network and ultimately released the AirPort Express wireless device for beaming music directly to a stereo receiver.

Outside programmers quickly turned this capability into a way to stream songs over the Internet, and a host of iTunes-based Net radio stations emerged.

Apple blocked the Net streaming capability but retained the ability to stream inside a single network. Trinity College student Bill Zeller then figured out how to turn the streaming capability into a way to download and save MP3s, and created MyTunes.

However, in April, Apple blocked MyTunes from functioning. A representative for Apple said at the time that iTunes technology had been "strengthened" so that song sharing was limited to authorized personal use.

Other programmers continued to test Apple's code, however. A Mac-only program called GetTunes has done much the same thing as MyTunes for months, despite Apple's changes.

More broadly, an Australian student named David Hammerton cracked through the encryption and authentication system used by iTunes last spring and posted details online, allowing other non-iTunes programs to access Apple's software. With this tool available, Zeller said, it was fairly easy to turn iTunes' streaming function into a download instead.

With OurTunes, the developers have expanded on the earlier tools, writing the software in Java so that it will work on Windows or Macintosh computers and adding a search tool that MyTunes lacked. The software has been released freely under an open-source license.

Blackman said he drew heavily on Hammerton's work and on another piece of software called AppleRecords to create OurTunes. He and other friends are continuing to develop new features and the interface for the program, he added.

"This isn't the first bit of software to do this," Blackman said. "We just do it better and in a more friendly way."
http://news.com.com/2100-1026-5316700.html


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Six minute coasters

Sony DVD Burners Hit Sweet 16x

Two new drives support 16x DVD+R, 8x DVD-R and 4x DVD+/-RW recording speeds
Robert Jaques

Sony Electronics has unveiled its latest generation of DVD+R Double Layer (DL) burners that support 16x DVD+R recording.

Burning a full write-once single layer disc in approximately six minutes, the internal DRU-710A and external DRX-710UL drives will be targeted at consumers.

The 710 series marks Sony's seventh generation of Dual RW drives, and can support 16x DVD+R, 8x DVD-R, 4x DVD+/-RW, 48x CD-R and 24x CD-RW recording speeds.

According to the electronics giant, with 2.4x DVD+R DL recording, users can burn up to four hours of high-quality Mpeg-2 video or up to 8.5GB of data, music and/or images on compatible DVD+R DL media. This is equivalent to about seven days of music, said Sony.

In addition, the latest duo of high-speed burners feature software from Nero, providing users with a suite of tools for burning and authoring home movies, creating digital scrapbooks and backing up crucial data.

"As we reach the physical limitations of DVD recording speeds and the price of drives continues to drop, now is a great time for consumers who have been waiting on the sidelines to take the DVD burner plunge," said Robert DeMoulin, marketing manager for branded storage products in Sony's IT products division, in a statement.

The internal DRU-710A drive comes with an ATAPI interface, while the external DRX-710UL drive offers connectivity with both i.LINK (IEEE 1394) and USB 2.0 digital interfaces.

The internal DRU-710A is currently shipping to retailers for an estimated selling price of under $180, while the external DRX-710UL is expected to ship in October for an estimated selling price of under $280.
http://www.vnunet.com/news/1157610


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Heap Big Discs
Press Release



Optware Corp., the developer of Collinear Holographic* Data Storage System, announced today that it had achieved successfully world's first recording and play back of digital movies on a holographic recording disc with a reflective layer using Optware's revolutionary Collinear Holography. This is a major milestone for commercializing holographic data storage system.

The recorded movies were played back in a series of meetings from July eight through 12 with Optware's six existing investors as well as eight enterprises both domestic and overseas including leading manufacturers of electronic and electric products for consumer, business and industrial use. Company names are not disclosed.

Holographic recording technology records data on discs in the form of laser interference fringes, enabling existing discs the same size as today's DVDs to store as much as one terabyte of data (200 times the capacity of a single layer DVD), with a transfer speed of one gigabyte per second (40 times the speed of DVD). This approach is rapidly gaining attention as a high-capacity, high-speed data storage technology for the age of broadband.
http://www.optware.co.jp/english/what_040823.htm


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HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives And The Future
Mark Cuban

I love looking for ways to screw up conventional wisdom. Right now in the entertainment world, the conventional wisdom is that both sides on the HD DVD vs Blue Ray DVD will battle it out and a standard for HD on DVD will emerge. No one is trying to rush to a compromise because the big media companies want to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out the current DVD business cycle.

Good. The longer it takes, the less chance any format of DVD has of having a place in the future of home entertainment. Don’t look now, but the price and size of hard drives have fallen like a rock, while capacities have soared, with no slowdown in site.

Which leads to the question — What is the best way to distribute content? DVDs which will be limited in capacity to 9.4gbs on a single DVD for another year, and then after that 50gbs on a single disk for years to come after that, or rewritable media that can hold 2gb already in a device half the size of a pen, or in a hard drive that can hold 200GBs plus in a drive the size of your cell phone?

Which device should content distributors like HDNet invest in ? DVD, knowing that the future standards will be locked for 7 to 10 years, or these storage devices that will grow in capacity, and shrink in size and price, not to mention the additional flexibility of being able to erase and rewrite the drives?

It’s not a question being asked in many places, but it is something we are talking about at HDNet. The choices we and others in the industry make can have a big impact on the future of your home entertainment.

Personally, I like putting content on rewritable drives. Let me tell you about how I personally made the USB Flash Drives work for me.

I had a couple DVDs that I had PURCHASED, that I hadn’t had the chance to watch. I had a couple 512mb Flash Drives that I had bought specifically to test them out for video. I took the first movie, and using an encoder with compression (not going to tell you which one, don’t want to play favorites), I encoded the movies at DVD quality and saved the output onto each of the 512mb Flash Drives. I popped those tiny little puppies into my pockets and off I went to the plane. Keys, some money and my keychain flash drives in one pocket, phone in the other. No hassle, no fuss no muss.

On the plane, I popped the first keychain drive into the USB Port. Got the ready signal, got prompted to open my video player, and watched a nice movie right from the keychain drive. On the way home, did the same thing with the other movie. I loved it. Far less space than DVDs. Could put them in my pocket instead of filling up my briefcase. I immediately went out and bought a 1gb keychain drive so I could hold 2 movies on 1 drive, in addition to my first 2 drives.

After having such a great experience with putting my DVDs on the keychain drives, I decided to test HDNet content in HD. The keychain drives, even the 1gb didn’t have enough capacity to hold a full movie, so I tried just some of our promos. They were short enough that they would fit in 512mb, but long enough to let me see if it worked.

I used a standard HDTV MPeg2 transport stream. The keychain drive wasn’t fast enough to allow me to pull the video directly. I had to copy it to my hard drive on my laptop, where it played with no prob, as it should.

Since I was getting fired up about the possibility of putting HDNet content in a format that could be transportable and work easily with MediaCenter PCs, and in the not to distant future, USB or FireWire enabled TVs, PVRs and Setop boxes and even DVDs (yes, tvs with hard drives are right around the corner, and yes, all your CE devices with a future, will have storage and expansion ability), I decided to buy a portable 20gbs USB 2.0 drive that was about half the size of a pack of cigarettes. Cost me 150 bucks. I also bought an external 80gbs FireWire Drive for under 100 dollars. I loaded a full 2 hour movie on the cig sized drive, and all the episodes I had of our HDNet Word Report.

Connected to my laptop, the cig drive couldn’t quite keep up. It had a couple hiccups, but it was close. If I had used any compression at all on it, no doubt it would have kept up no prob. After copying to my laptop hard drive, it played no problem at all.

I connected the 80gb firewire drive to my HP Media Center PC and to my PC, it was fast enough to play without any problems. I loved it.

I loved it, for a ton of reasons. Let me name a few.

I know that the price per GBs of an external hard drive is now down under 50c. That price is going to fall further. A lot further as capacities increase. This time next year we should be talking about 1TB (that’s 1,000GBS) drives at 25c per GB or less. The increased capacity means not only that I can stick more HDNet movies or TV shows on a drive and sell them to consumers, but it also means that I can increase the quality of the picture substantially.

What few people realize is that when we shoot something in HD for HDNet, the quality we capture the content at is far, far better than the picture quality that you see on your HDTV. We have to compress it to fit in the bandwidth defined by broadcast standards. That compression reduces the quality of the picture you see. Your TV can handle the quality we capture it at, but we don’t have a way to get it to your TV at that quality level — yet.

Bigger cheaper hard drives gives HDNet the ability to use that additional storage to hold our content in uncompressed quality and increase the picture quality that you can see on your TV. A bunch. We can take advantage of new cameras to capture at better and better qualities, and of new compression schemes that approach future camera capabilities, only because we have ever expanding storage. That’s something DVDs will never have. So by delivering content on Hard Drives rather than DVDs, we will be able to continue to increase the picture quality for years to come.

The other cool part is that the video playback devices that will be in your home over the next couple years will have the ability to connect via USB or Firewire to these drives. PVRs, Set top Boxes, Media Center PCs,even DVDs designed to play today’s DVDs and whatever future DVD standard is settled on, all will have the ability to connect to Hard Drives in some shape or fashion, or people wont buy them. There is going to be a big, big war to host your content in your house. Whoever does it the best, provides the most flexibility, and expandability at the best price, will win.

Next on my reasons to love this approach to distribution is that it basically kills off the “Piracy is going to kill us” threats from the big movie companies. Hard Drive storage is expanding far more quickly than upload or download speeds to our homes. The ability to use that hard drive storage to increase the quality and file size of a movie, makes it practically impossible to distribute it over the net. I have a question I always ask at speeches, and have asked for the last several years. I ask if anyone in the room has ever downloaded or uploaded a movie or TV show in HD quality to or from a P2P network. No one has ever raised their hand. That is in spite of the fact that HDTV has been in the clear, over the air since 1998. EVERY SINGLE SHOW that has ever been broadcast over the air, and continues to be broadcast today, could be picked up and copied by any of quite a few different, now under 200 dollar HD encode/decode cards and then put on the net. It hasn’t and won’t happen, because shipping around 18gbs per 2 hour movie isn’t going to be fast anytime soon. Make the file sizes bigger to accommodate better quality, and forgettaboutit.

When we get to TB hard drives for under 250 dollars, we will be able to fit 50 movies in HD quality on that drive. More than ONE THOUSAND movies in DVD quality on that drive. The keychain drives will be able to hold an entire HD movie and cost under 20 dollars. That same keychain drive I talked about earlier, in the next 2 years or so, will be able to store a DVD and cost under 10 dollars. So which is the better way to deliver a movie or movies? On a DVD with a boring, lifeless future, or hard drives?

Once the prices of a keychain drive get to a couple bucks for storage enough for a DVD quality movie, then it will be easy to distribute and sell to consumers. (Of course they will still be packaged in pain the ass plastic that no normal person can open right when they buy it, but that’s another issue.) The question will be who other than HDNet will be selling it that way. Will companies stick to DVDs because that’s the way they feel comfortable, or will they support a new medium?

That’s a little question. The bigger question, the Billion Dollar question is how to deliver content on or to hard drives, regardless of size and capacity, in a way that consumers will enjoy it, and do it cost effectively today?

Realize, that whatever happens in the next couple years, that you won’t be able to buy the newest releases and the biggest hits this way. There is no major media company who is going to disrupt their DVD cash cow to take a chance on a new business like this. The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentally is big. But again, that’s a good thing for entrepreneurs with content. While they hope it won’t break, we can be out there trying to break it, and then they usually can’t fix it.

So without the biggest hit movies, what is the best way to deliver content to homes and for travelers?

We are looking at kiosks. Walk up to an airport kiosk, or a kiosk at a retail location. Pick the movies or shows or music they have available, pay for it via credit card, and wait a couple minutes while the content is copies from a server right there on the premises.

We are looking at customizing it per user. Go online, pick the content you want. Pay for it, the next day your hard drive with all the movies, shows, music, whatever, shows up on your doorstep. You plug it in your MediaCenter PC, your DVD, PVR, whatever, and watch, listen and play.

There is also the Netflix rental approach that could work as well. Pay 100 bucks for the first 200gbs external drive. Pay us 20 bucks a month, and we send you a new drive with the new goodies, and you send us back the one you just watched — Easy and breezy. Well, that is if consumers like working that way.

Probably the best short term solution is to work with high end home theater installers. The best belong to CEDIA (www.cedia.org). They are the folks that are most capable of integrating Media Center PCs, Hard Drive based storage systems , HDTVs and all the media devices in your house. I can only guess that they would have a field day selling hard drives full of HD quality or better movies to their high end customers who want to truly enjoy their home theater systems.

There are a lot of open ended questions and challenges in this, but that’s what makes business fun. What kind of device will be the content server in the home? Who will sell it? How will content be delivered, and by who? What will the pricing be? What will the business model be?

A ton of questions. The good news is that none of the solutions involve good ole’ fashion DVDs, other than as an interim solution. That means there is one hell of an opportunity out there for HDNet and others — as long as we can execute.

I also wanted to add just a couple of comments, questions, remarks.

1. Why haven’t the Media Center PC companies and the cable and satellite industry gotten together to put set top box capability in mediacenter PCs? People who buy media center PCs, might want to use them as media centers, and given that cable and satellite deliver the media, doesn’t it make sense to combine the two? It would cut customer costs for all involved significantly.

2. Why aren’t Media Center PCs promoting the fact that they can play HD files and shipping with Demo and samples to show them off? All of them can. I just bought a new HP Media Center PC, and it didn’t come with squat to show off what it can do. It works great, but I had to figure out all of its capabilities. A showcase would make it a far better solution.

3. The biggest decision facing HD cable and satellite distributors today is quality vs quantity. Right now most are looking at using compression to squeeze more channels into the existing space they have rather than squeeze a better picture into the same bandwidth that channels take today. The reason it’s a huge decision is that once they decide to fit in more channels, they can’t go back. You can’t all the sudden decide you need 15mbs per channel to deliver a picture that compares to a competitor’s better picture after compressing down to 6or 8mbs per channel.

4. In a world of multiple Terrabye drives, is VOD a good business? One of the things I learned at broadcast.com is that when you give thousands of choices on demand, people go to the little things that they couldn’t find anywhere else. The sailing fan will choose the show about sailing over the blockbuster movie because they can’t get the sailing show anywhere else. Or maybe they choose both. The problem is that when people all choose different things at the same time, its a huge bandwidth hog. Thousands of choices, thousands of people using different movies, particularly when the expectation is for HD quality, and there is a huge problem. The cost of delivery per movie if the system is used a lot is incredible. Unicasting DVD or higher quality video is an incredibly inefficient business. (Unicasting is where there is one connection per user to the movie being shown. Each user has to have his own bandwidth, they cant’ share streams) It’s why movie delivery over the net will never be a big business.

I know bandwidth on your own network is cheaper than the net, but when hard disk storage costs 25c per GB, and falls fast from there, unicast won’t be the best way to go.

The real solution for VOD is TIVO/PVR from the main office. PVR customers are becoming trained that when you fill up the hard drive, you have to delete something to get something. Put some PVR software on the front end, and allow users to pick from a menu of content that they can add. Then overnight, they are multicast the content , whether its via cable or satellite, it’s saved to the hard drive. If they watch it, they get billed for it and everyone is happy, and distributors maximize their revenue per bit.

Ok, I’m HD worn out — for now. Thanks for letting me core dump some of the things that have been on my mind re HD and the future.
http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/7706137582525561



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DoJ Nabs 103 in Online Crime Sweep
Roy Mark

More than a hundred individuals have been arrested and charged this summer in a federal computer and Internet-related crime sweep known as Operation Web Snare, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said today.

The operation was launched on June 1 and concluded today with several arrests. In all, Ashcroft said, approximately 350 individuals were targeted for major forms of online economic crime and other cybercrimes, resulting in 103 arrests and 53 convictions.

"Operation Web Snare is the largest and most successful collaborative law enforcement operation ever conducted to prosecute online fraud, stop identity theft and prevent other computer-related crimes," Ashcroft said.

Thursday's announcement marked the second consecutive day Ashcroft held a media briefing to tout the Department of Justice's (DoJ) online anti-crime efforts. Wednesday, he said search warrants had been issued in the DOJ's first criminal probe of copyright theft on peer-to-peer (P2P) (define) networks.

Ashcroft said Thursday the summer-long investigations revealed the "continuing internationalization of Internet fraud."

Of the 30 case summaries presented to the media, many of them previously reported, six involved foreign nationals or U.S. citizens originally from Morocco, Pakistan, China, Korea, Romania and Nigeria.

In one of the most recent cases, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles charged Jie Dong last week in the largest PayPal and eBay fraud scheme to date. The DoJ considers Dong, who has subsequently fled the country and is at large, a "skilled Internet fraudster"; he allegedly stole more than $800,000 from unwitting victims. The DoJ claims Dong conducted more than 5,000 fraudulent sales to eBay customers in just four months.

In another case, Jay R. Echouafni, CEO of Massachusetts-based Orbit Communications, was indicted Wednesday along with five other individuals on multiple charges of conspiracy and causing damage to protected computers. According to the DoJ, Echouafni and a business partner launched "relentless" Denial-of-Service attacks on Orbit's competitors.

Using the services of computer hackers in Arizona, Louisiana, Ohio and the United Kingdom, the DoJ claims the attacks caused more than $2 million in damage to competitors in revenue and costs associated with responding to the attacks. Echouafni, a U.S. citizen of Moroccan origin, has subsequently fled the United States and is the target of what the FBI characterizes an "international manhunt."

Also on the run is Calin Mateias, an alleged Romanian computer hacker who was charged earlier this month with conspiring to steal more than $10 million in computer equipment from Ingram Micro in Santa Ana, Calif. The indictment claims Mateias, a Bucharest resident, hacked into Ingram's online ordering system and placed fraudulent orders for computers and related equipment.

The DoJ says Mateias then had the equipment sent to dozens of addresses throughout the United States as part of an Internet fraud scheme. Mateias's U.S. co-defendants would in turn allegedly either sell the equipment and send the proceeds to Mateias or repackage the equipment and send it to Romania.

In a case where the DoJ successfully extradited a Cyprus citizen, Roman Vega of the Ukraine is facing a 40-count indictment alleging credit card trafficking and wire fraud. The DoJ claims Vega used Internet chat rooms to gather thousands of individuals' credit card information, which had been illegally obtained from sources around the world, including credit card processors and merchants. The DoJ also alleges Vega operated a Web site where stolen and counterfeit credit card account information was bought and sold.

"Operation Web Snare ... shows that America's justice community is seeking to anticipate, out-think and adapt to new trends in Internet crime," Ashcroft said.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3400491


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Record Industry Suits Take Toll On Defendants
AP

A woman in Milwaukee and her ex-boyfriend are under orders to pay thousands to the recording industry. A man in California refinanced his home to pay an $11,000 settlement. A year after it began, the industry's legal campaign against Internet music piracy is inching through the federal courts, producing some unexpected twists.

``I'm giving up and can't fight this,'' said Ross Plank, 36, of Playa Del Ray, Calif. He had professed his innocence but surrendered after lawyers found on his computer traces of hundreds of songs that had been deleted one day after he was sued.

Plank, recently married, refinanced his home for the money.

``Apparently, they would be able to garnishee my earnings for the rest of my life,'' Plank said. ``For the amount I'm settling, this made sense. I didn't see any other way. They've got all the power in the world.''

The campaign has also produced worries, even from one federal judge, that wealthy record companies could trample some of the 3,935 people across the country who have been sued since the first such cases were filed in September 2003.

``I've never had a situation like this before, where there are powerful plaintiffs and powerful lawyers on one side and then a whole slew of ordinary folks on the other side,'' said U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner at a hearing in Boston. Dozens of such lawsuits have been filed in her court.

On the West Coast, another judge rejected an injunction sought by record companies against one Internet user, saying it would violate her rights.

So far, however, record companies are largely winning their cases, according to a review by The Associated Press of hundreds of lawsuits. They did lose a major ruling this week when a U.S. appeals court in California said manufacturers of software that can be used to download music illegally aren't liable, leaving record labels to pursue lawsuits against Internet users.

James McDonough of Hingham, Mass., said being sued was ``very vexing, very frustrating and quite frankly very intimidating.'' He told Gertner, the Boston judge, that his 14-year-old twins might be responsible for the ``heinous crime'' of downloading music ``in the privacy in our family room with their friends.''

Gertner has a teenage daughter and said she was familiar with software for downloading music. She blocked movement on all the Massachusetts cases for months, ``to make sure that no one, frankly, is being ground up.''

Gertner started ruling on cases again this month, when she threw out counterclaims accusing record companies of trespass and privacy invasions for searching the online music collections of Internet users.

At least 807 Internet users have already settled their cases by paying roughly $3,000 each in fines and promising to delete their illegal song collections, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the largest labels.

Experts said the amounts of those settlements -- compared to $7,500 or more for losing in court -- discourage people from mounting a defense that could resolve important questions about copyrights and the industry's methods for tracing illegal downloads.

``When you're being sued for a relatively small amount of money, it doesn't make sense to hire the specialized entertainment or copyright counsel,'' Gertner said at a hearing this summer.

In Milwaukee, Suheidy Roman, 25, said she couldn't afford a lawyer when her ex-boyfriend, Gary Kilps, told record companies that both of them had downloaded music on Roman's computer. Although she denies the accusation, Roman ignored legal papers sent to her home. A U.S. judge earlier this year granted a default judgment against her and Kilps, ordering each to pay more than $4,500.

Industry lawyers said they have won an estimated 60 such default judgments nationwide.

``I've got brothers and sisters and family who come here and use my computer all the time,'' Roman told the AP. ``But as far as downloading or distributing music, I don't do that. ... I don't have any money for an attorney, let alone for any judgment against me.'' She said she is unemployed with two small children.

Roman said that since she was sued, she hasn't talked to Kilps. He doesn't have a telephone listing and didn't return calls from AP to his relatives.

Lawyers said they traced to Roman and Kilps an Internet account distributing songs by UB40, Tu Pac, Destiny's Child and Air Supply. They said the illicit music collection also was associated with an account under the name ``Flaka,'' which Roman acknowledges is her nickname. She told AP she deleted all the files on her computer, not just any songs.

In a few courthouses, the music industry has stumbled even in victory. A judge in California rejected an injunction banning Lisa Dickerson of Santa Ana, Calif., from illegally distributing music online. Although the judge agreed Dickerson was guilty, he said there was no evidence she was still breaking the law and determined that such a ban on future behavior would violate her rights. She was ordered to pay record companies $6,200 in penalties and court costs.

Still, the California consultant who recently agreed to pay the largest settlement in any of the lawsuits, $11,000, urged Internet users not to take solace in rare procedural victories.

``It scares me,'' Plank said. ``For anyone fighting any of these lawsuits -- unless they have nothing to lose -- the only thing to do is settle. You have no power against these people.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/9454577.htm


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Record Companies, Schmecord Companies Say The Pixies
Leigh Phillips

College radio favourites the Pixies are back, having recently reformed and released the first new song in 13 years, ''Bam Thwok" as a download exclusively on the iTunes .

However, fans of the seminal alternative band - and there are many, myself included - shouldn''t hold their breath waiting for a new album. It may never appear.

"Record companies, schmecord companies – who needs ‘em? That’s not where the money is. The business is with the real customers – the fans. That’s who we’re trying to connect with," band member Frank Black, AKA Black Francis, told the Associated Press this week.

"I never really was much of a believer in the album anyway," Black said. "Singles are what people relate to."

Apparently, the band doesn''t feel it needs a record label any more and, while their plans are still unformed at the moment, the idea generally is to combine selling live CDs made and then sold at concerts, producing music for movies and commercials and distributing singles via the internet.

"It''s a revenue stream. I''m not saying we could sell lots of records if we sold them out of our garage or the Internet, but you know what? We might," said Black, "It''s a crazy time."

The aim is to take the business directly to the fans, completely bypassing the record companies.

In a sense, the bolshy Pixies have taken the old anarchist epigram, "the boss needs us; we don''t need the boss", and applied it to the music industry. Now, the Pixies aren''t the first band to make use of the internet and alternate methods of distributing their music - every garage band worth its salt has a website, and there are a dozen odd sites dedicated to unsigned bands, but the Pixies certainly are the biggest group to walk away from the traditional business arrangement. Furthermore, the unsigned bands use the internet because they have to. Every single band on those sites would very much like to be signed by a record label.

If the Pixies, one of the biggest bands of the nineties, is able to make a go of it, watch other big names to follow.

If they get away with it, this could be the beginning of the end for big music.
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=2706
















Until next week,

- js.














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[TankGirl]

Thanks again for an excellent WiR, Jack!

Don't miss Mark Cuban's blog entry. What he says about HDs as a better media compared to DVDs makes a lot of sense. Why to settle for a fixed-size media when the alternative is much more flexible, endlessly reusable and grows in capacity every year. His idea of kiosks filling HDs with what customer wants is not bad, and there are natural business opportunities there, especially with very high resolution content. On the other hand p2p combined with 10 Mbit/s and faster domestic line speeds should be able to provide more than enough high quality content for everybody. Hence the niche and the time window for a content kiosk business might be limited.

- tg