Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – January 3rd, 2004

[JackSpratts]

Ripper of the Week

FreeRip
Jack Spratts

This CD ripper does a lot. It copies tracks to your hard drive, it encodes to MP3 or OGG or WAV, it finds and titles all tracks and it even fills out those id3 tags and ogg vorbis info panels and does it all automatically. It will rip, encode and title an entire CD, one track after the other with just a click. Load it, set it and forget it. It’s fast and it’s free.

http://www.mgshareware.com/frmmain.shtml


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From Vinyl to Digital, Hold the Crackle
Roy Furchgott

SEARCH the Gnutella Network as you may, some recordings are so scarce or of such limited appeal that you cannot find them anywhere, except maybe in your own vinyl collection. But your rare 45 of Blondie's "Little GTO" need not be a stranger in the land of the CD player. Technology is available that will not only enable you to turn your hot wax into digital tracks, but will also let you clean up the static that separates your favorite Bruce Springsteen bootleg from its glory days.

To turn LP's into CD's, you will need some hardware: specifically a turntable, a preamplifier and a computer. You will also need software to digitize the analog signal, edit the digital recording, clean it and burn it to a CD or DVD.

Any turntable with a line-out connector will do, although you can also digitize other analog sources, like a radio broadcast, reel-to-reel tape or 8-track player (if you rescued yours from the Gremlin before you sold it).

To record from a turntable to a computer, the signal must first go through a preamplifier that will boost it to a recordable level. You can use a stereo receiver (most have preamp-out or phono-out connections), or you can buy a no-frills phono preamp for about $30 at an electronics hobby shop.

You will also need to connect the preamp to your computer. The most common way to do that is with an adapter cable with two male RCA plugs at one end that attach to your preamp and a one-eighth-inch stereo phono jack at the other that connects with your computer. But different equipment makers use different connectors, so you might need another kind of adapter.

If sound quality is a big concern, consider investing in a preamp with an audio-to-digital converter. These devices incorporate a computer chip dedicated to converting analog signals to digital ones. In theory, the computer's main processor is always busy carrying out other tasks, so using a separate chip for conversion delivers better sound. In practice, the degree of improvement will vary with the quality of the converter. One such device is a preamp sound card, like the Phono PreAmp from Terratec ($100, www .terratec.net), which puts a preamp with an analog-to-digital converter chip inside your computer.

Some LP restoration software suites, including Pinnacle Clean Plus ($100), come with an external preamp that plugs into a U.S.B. port and works with your existing sound card. (Clean Plus and other software choices are described in more detail in the accompanying article.) There is also the iMic from Griffin Technologies ($40, www.griffintechnologies.com), a small input device that converts analog signals to digital outside of the computer, eliminating the possibility of electronic interference from other computer components.

Once the signal has been amplified and digitized, your computer takes over. Recording the signal and cleaning it up require extensive processing, so a powerful chip is needed to do it efficiently. The makers of most cleaning software recommend at least a 500-megahertz processor.

You also need lots of hard-drive space, because sound files occupy about 10 megabytes per minute; that would be almost a gigabyte for all 77 minutes of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's "Trout Mask Replica."

Three basic steps are necessary to get the digitized music ready and onto a disc. A recording program, sometimes called a ripper, captures the sounds. You can edit the digital recording, reducing static and other analog noise with filtering software and trimming excess lead-in time and adding fade-ins and simple effects with a wave form editor. Then you need a burning program to put the final product on a disc.

There are hundreds of individual sound-editing programs, from $15 shareware to professional-quality software costing $1,000 and up (see www.hitsquad.com for a list). Most consumer software costs $40 to $150, and often everything you need is bundled in a single suite. PC users can choose all-in-one products like Audio Cleaning Lab from Magix or Clean from Pinnacle, both of which are good for importing and cleaning.

For Mac users, things are a bit more complicated. There is only one moderately priced suite - Roxio's Toast 6 Titanium ($100 list price, but available for less) - and it has limited filters for reducing noises. Much improved over the previous version, Toast 6 is more than sufficient for converting a reasonably well-maintained record collection.

There are plenty of other programs you can use to make your own suite, like Peak from Bias for recording and editing and Ray Gun from Arboretum Systems for cleaning. But the actual recording and cleaning will require more work. With those two programs, for example, you would have to record and edit the file in Peak, then save it as a generic sound file. You would then have to import it into Ray Gun, clean it and re-export it as a generic recordable sound file.

The ripper software, at least, is simple. It works just like a tape recorder: you drop the needle onto a record, adjust the ripper's volume meters on your computer screen to the optimum level and click the Record command. It will capture the music in real time, producing a faithful copy that includes scratchy surface noise. Some audio purists like the noise, which lends authentic analog warmth. If you are in that camp, and you have recorded a well-cared-for album, your job is done, unless you want to use your editor to trim excess dead space at the beginning or end of a song or add a fade-in for a little flourish.

But if you want to get rid of static, the next step is to use cleaning software.

These programs rely on algorithms to sort noise from music. The simplest ones make some assumptions what a music signal looks like, then eliminate everything else. Some programs have automatic analyzers that check for static, then suggest appropriate filter settings.

But these programs are not as accurate as a pair of ears. Even the best cleaning programs can benefit from some manual adjustment. Some allow you to sample a particular sound - say, a pop heard with each rotation of your platter - and remove just that sound.

While experts spend more for their hardware and software than the typical home user, the restoration techniques they use are the same. Brian Slack, co-founder of Widget Post Production in Culver City, Calif., uses a $40,000 cleaning device from Cedar in combination with stacks of third-party software to restore about 250 movie soundtracks a year, like "West Side Story'' and the Pink Panther series.

Mr. Slack said that although some software offers preset corrections, say for 78 r.p.m. discs or tape, you are best off listening carefully and making your own settings. "For the most part, you want to sit down and do it on a record-by-record basis, sometimes on a track-by-track basis," he said.

He also recommended keeping a raw copy of your recording as a backup and saving a copy of the recording at each step as you work on it, so you can go back a step without starting over.

Do not overscrub. "There is definitely a point of diminishing returns where you can remove so much noise that you are removing the music as well," Mr. Slack said.

Finally, rippers can copy music at different sample rates. Generally, the higher the rate, the better the fidelity. For a CD that will be played on a home or car system, the standard settings are 44.1 kHz and 16 bits resolution. Higher sampling rates will not play on regular home CD systems, but will play on electronic devices (like an iPod). To capture the best sound possible, set the ripper at a higher level, like 24, 96 or even 192 bits resolution, which is what professionals use, and then play it through a hard drive.

Recordings made at higher sampling rates can always be converted to lower rates later if you want to burn them to a CD.

If you want to try professional quality software, Waves offers a spectacular freebie with its Restoration Bundle. You can download its $1,200 filters for removing static at no charge for a two-week trial. These filters work as add-ons, called plug-ins, with most sound editing programs.

To commit your work to CD, you need burning software. One program is about as good as the next, although there are subtle differences that will mean something to the technologically advanced.

One word of caution: not all burner software plays well together. If you use a software package that adds new burning software to your computer - like some of the suites discussed here - the new burner software may fight with the old software for control of your CD drive. Sometimes the program you want to use loses, and you cannot burn a disc. The simple solution to this problem is to get rid of all the burner programs except the one you like best. Uninstall the rejects carefully, though, so they will not leave behind pieces that could continue to bedevil your burner.

Cleaning up digitized recordings can take some practice. But won't you be pleased to be the only one on your block with a mix CD that includes Robert Ellis Orrall's "Call the Uh Oh Squad"?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/te...ts/01basi.html


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Firm Releases MPEG-4 Digital Recording Software

Public beta available

A US FIRM, PC DTV Technologies, has claimed a first by releasing HDTV MPEG-4 digital recording software for Windows multimedia PCs.

It said that it is shipping a beta public version of its Countdown HD software today.

The software, it claims, will give users of hardware decoded HDTV tuner boards to record two hours of HDTV to one 4.7GB DVD disk using the MPEG-4 compression format.

The software includes a digital video transcoder that will convert between MPEG-2 and MPEG4, direct transcoding burning to DVD-R/W, DVD+R/ W, DVD RAM or CD-R/W drives, and direct transcoding to PC hard drives.

The software includes a DiVX Pro 5.1.1 Codec, support for Windows Media 9, Xvid/Koepis COdec support, background trancoding, and crpping and resizing of videos.

The firm doesn't say when the full version is available, but is charging $150 for the public beta, which it said will be available today.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13406


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BitTorrent, 'Gi-Fi,' and Other Trends in 2004
Ryan Naraine

Thanks to a never-ending supply of sharp minds and energy in the information technology industry,
innovation will keep on marching ahead in 2004 -- good economy or bad. (But a good economy sure helps.) Editors from internetnews.com and across Jupitermedia have compiled a list of ideas/trends/ innovations to watch in 2004.

BitTorrent - The Next Wave of P2P
The original file-swapping site Napster made peer-to-peer networking a star. Later, swap sites Kazaa and Morpheus found ways to market it. Now comes BitTorrent to push peer-to-peer (define) technology to new heights in 2004. In the enterprise IT sector, where bandwidth wastage hurts the bottom line, BitTorrent adds a new twist to the upload/download technology.

Instead of just allowing file-sharers to grab content from each other's systems, BitTorrent targets the bandwidth nightmare by stripping digital files into tiny shreds. When multiple users request and trigger a download, the pieces of the files are then uploaded around the network and reassembled locally by the recipient's machine, much the same way the red-hot VoIP (define) technology works.

Early adopters see BitTorrent as an excellent solution because it provides very fast downloads while consuming a relatively small amount of server resources. Instead of things slowing down as more and more people are using the system, it actually speeds up. In 2004, we'll see a major spike in BitTorrent usage as software vendors, movie companies, and online gaming sites embrace the new peer-to-peer concept to large file transfers.

The next wave of P2P technologies won't stop with BitTorrent. Look for open-source P2P streaming standards and technologies to evolve and cut the costs for businesses.

DRM-Protected Online Music:
Finally, after years of stumbling around in search of a business model for online music, the record labels and technology partners appear to have struck gold. Apple's (Quote, Chart) iTunes, Roxio's (Quote, Chart) Napster 2.0, RealNetworks' (Quote, Chart) Rhapsody and a host of smaller players have discovered a gold mine in hawking DRM-protected downloads or fee-based subscription services.

In 2004, look for increased activity in digital music with Loudeye's (Quote, Chart) new off-the-shelf technology creating virtual music stores on just about every high-traffic Internet destination. Think of Loudeye's move as the music equivalent of the popular matchmaking business where companies like Spring Street Networks have put online personals services on hundreds of third-party sites.

The increased buzz around online music (and digital content) will lead to new hardware/software offerings to take advantage of consumers' acceptance of DRM (define). The music labels will grudgingly make additional concessions to sweeten the pot for retailers. But some problems with DRM compatibility, particularly in the networked home, will hurt the sector.

Micropayments - Is This The Year?
The micropayments sector has been in a state of flux since the late 1990s. Business models have been chopped and changed more times than an NFL roster and the dot-com bust has seen its share of micropayment victims. Yet, through it all, the likes of eBay-owned PayPal (Quote, Chart), smaller electronic payments providers BitPass and Peppercoin have carved a niche as legitimate players in the micropayments space. The skeptics continue to pour cold water on the micropayments concept but the concept keeps proving itself, in smaller ways, that are adding up, year after year.

With the success of online music and the gradual trend to push Web content behind the premium curtain, the micropayment market is opening up at a dramatic pace. With some minor tweaks, micropayments technology providers could flourish in 2004, or at least see some revenues start to add up.

Wi-Fi Gets (More) Mobile
Now that the hype has faded somewhat and strong business models are emerging in the Wi-Fi (define) space, look for new laptops, PDAs and cell phones to integrate the wireless standard in 2004. The dramatic growth in Wi-Fi will come in the first quarter when mobile phones with embedded Wi-Fi capabilities hit the market. On the enterprise side, a single device integrating a telephone, Web and e-mail access, contacts and meetings -- all connected by Wi-Fi will be a godsend. Look for Research in Motion and Palm's (Quote, Chart) HandSpring to make the most noise when Wi-Fi goes mobile.

On the consumer side, 2004 will see a gradual decline of the fee-based Wi-Fi hotspots (define) due to slowing demand. On the flip side, high-speed ISPs and telcos like Verizon, EarthLink, T-Mobile will move towards freeing up Wi-Fi access as a customer service/retention tool.

Is There Room for 'Gi-Fi'?
In November 2003, technology researchers at NewLans Inc. presented a tutorial to the IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee Plenary Meeting outlining a new standard to cover the potential use of millimeter wave frequencies for use in enterprise WLANs (define) with gigabits-per-second capacities. NewLans, headed by serial entrepreneur Dev Gupta, plans to use a frequency range recently opened up by the FCC on the 56GHz band to offer 2 Gbps on a wireless LAN.

If Gupta succeeds, the 'Gi-Fi' protocol could make big news in 2004 as enterprises come to grips with the reality of what 2 Gbps can offer in comparison to the Gig-E wired LANs deployed today. Think of the wireless possibilities: file transfers, video- on-demand, high-resolution video conferencing, data mining, and on and on.
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news...le.php/3294271


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Give The Money Back !
P2PNet

Downhill Battle says the RIAA should return the money it's collected from individuals and families it accused of p2p filesharing.

"The RIAA obtained these names illegally, and it's time for them to return the money that they've extorted from hundreds of families," says DB's Holmes Wilson.

The call comes in response to a federal appeals court ruling, issued today, which states that the RIAA may not force ISPs to reveal the names of individuals that the major record labels suspect of filesharing.

"These lawsuits have literally pushed families into bankruptcy, and now the basis of the suits has been invalidated," says the site's Nicholas Reville.

Downhill Battle is a music activism project dedicated to making the music industry fairer for artists and fans. It'as received widespread attention for its Peer to Peer Legal Defense Fund, which as of today has raised $3,394.17 for victims of the RIAA lawsuits.

Downhill Battle's whatacrappypresent.com is currently the most linked to site on the Internet according to popdex.com and blogdex.net, which track weblog links.

Its in-store guerrilla stickering campaign puts anti-RIAA stickers on CDs inside stores like Walmart and Best Buy.
http://p2pnet.net/ez/index.php/news/...6/?eZSESSIDnew


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Media, File Sharing & Messengers Beat Browsers

Nielsen//NetRatings reports that three out of every four home and work Internet users, or 76 percent of active Web surfers, access the Internet using a non-browser based Internet application. Media players, instant messengers and file sharing applications are the most popular Internet applications.

The total unique audience using Internet applications reached 106 million during the month of November 2003, an increase of 11 percent from the same period last year. Internet users spent an average of three hours and 37 minutes per month using Internet applications.

The top five applications are Windows Media Player, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger Service and Real Player. Of these top five applications, Windows Media has the largest active user reach at 34 percent. AOL Instant Messenger was next at 20 percent, followed by Real Player also at 20 percent, MSN Messenger Service at 19 percent and Yahoo! Messenger Service, which reaches 12 percent of the active user base.

"With 76 percent of Web surfers using Internet applications, functionality has grown beyond the browser to become a fundamental piece of the overall desktop," said Abha Bhagat, senior analyst Nielsen//NetRatings. "It's become harder to distinguish when you're on the Internet, blurring the lines between what's sitting on the desktop and what's coming from the World Wide Web."
http://www.in-sourced.com/article/articleview/1104/1/1/


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99-Cent Songs, Lawsuits Marked Watershed Year In Ongoing Downloading Wars
Angela Pacienza

Since about 1980, dictionaries have been defining downloading as the transfer of data from a large computer to the memory of a smaller one. For most of us, the term meant nothing until the late 1990s, when Napster hit the scene and downloading became a national pastime for thousands of kids.

The notion of all-you-can-download music took some dramatic twists and turns in 2003 with the advent of the 99-cent song and criminalization of uploaders.

Having taken substantial hits in sales over the past four years, the global recording industry had been eager to curb the ease with which people could access the musical buffet of services like KaZaA, which facilitates the download of close to three billion songs monthly.

In Canada, the solution was education - teach everyone through a series of TV and radio commercials that good boys and girls don't steal from hard working musicians. The conservative approach also included sending electronic warnings to major offending file-sharers.

The U.S. wasn't so gentle, and launched an aggressive campaign to discourage piracy. After months of threats, they started filing copyright lawsuits in July against Internet users who trade songs online. Those users included a 12-year-old New York girl living in subsidized housing and a 79-year-old retired man who said he didn't even own a computer.

That move meant a watershed year for companies like Apple's iTunes.com and Moontaxi's Puretracks.com, legal downloading websites based on a 99 cent per song model.

Fearing lawsuits, people started experimenting with such sites.

"There were a lot of eyes on our launch," said Derek van der Plaat, one of the co-founders of Puretracks. "It was a first for Canada."

In fact, in its first week of operation in October, Puretracks became the victim of its own success when high-volume traffic crippled its operation less than 24 hours after its launch.

"It really put us front and centre in the minds of people looking for a legitimate high quality alternative," said van der Plaat, who wouldn't divulge statistics of Puretracks' success citing that it's a private company. "We always felt there was a substantial opportunity. We never thought we'd be a 100 per cent replacement. It takes a significant amount of time to change the landscape."

Making up the landscape are millions upon millions of music lovers who take part in file-sharing networks using software that makes it simple for computer users to locate and retrieve virtually any song by any artists within seconds - all free of charge.

Internet users broadly acknowledge that trading music online is illegal, but the practice has flourished nonetheless since copyright statutes are among the most popularly flouted laws online.

"Copyright law is in flux all over the world," says Paul Chwelos, a professor at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and an expert in the management and economics of information technology.

In Canada, the law's application in the online world has never been tested in the courts.

Copyright law allows people to make personal copies of music, which currently includes downloading from the Internet for non-commercial purposes. Levies on blank CDs and cassettes have been collected for three years now, and are distributed to artists and music makers. So far, $54 million has been made.

The motivation behind copyright law is to give an economic incentive to make sure people create new works.

"It's not to guarantee that artists or record companies get a fair return," said Chwelos. "The point is not to make individuals or business better off, it's to make sure society is better off by making sure we have enough creative content out there."

To that end, new technologies are challenging the ability of record companies - and more recently movie companies - to control the production and distribution of their content, he added.

There are plans by government to revamp Canada's copyright laws, although a firm date has not been set.

Industry insiders like Brian Robertson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, are livid about current copyright laws.

"The act is entirely out of date," he said in a recent interview.

But rather than wait for government to update the rules, his organization has been mobilizing its own plan of action to curb downloading. According to CRIA, the Canadian music industry has been hit harder than other countries by illegal file sharing. Its numbers show that retail sales are down by more than $425 million since 1999.

In 2003, CRIA's actions included aggressive campaigns to support CD singles and teach people about the value of music as well as add bonus products to CDs like DVDs and concert tickets.

"We've been reacting as positively as we can," said Robertson.

But the gentle giant will soon turn savage as the Canadian record industry makes plans to emulate the U.S. lawsuit campaign.

"We've been encouraged at the results of that campaign. There seems to have been a 40 per cent drop in peer-to-peer file sharing since that campaign started," said Robertson, whose association represents all the major record labels and the manufacturers of CDs.

In September, CRIA sent instant messages to more than 500,000 Canadian users of the KaZaA network informing them that their actions were illegal and damaging to artists - basically, putting them on notice for future legal action.

It's the first step towards what will undoubtedly be a long litigation process.

"We've got to the point whereby we've gone through the education process," said Robertson. "We invested over $1 million in that process and it doesn't appear to be the route to go from an ongoing point of view."

The plan, he said, would be to go after the uploaders, those who host thousands of songs on their computer hard drives.

"These people are serial infringers who are not really music lovers at all. They're just trying to destroy artists and destroy their music. These are the individuals that if a decision is made, will be the principle target."

Robertson, and other music industry leaders, are hoping they won't have to endure too many lengthy - and pricey - legal battles. They're hoping services like Puretracks and Apple's iTunes, which is coming to Canada in the new year, will capture enough of the market to balance the music buying scale.

But industry analysts say those legal music downloading services will be put to the test in 2004.

"It's probably going to be a make or break year for a lot of the fledgling services that have been introduced over the last 12 months to allow people to legitimately download music," said Rick Broadhead, a Toronto-based technology analyst and author.

"By and large most people in Canada have not been frightened off (the illegal sites). The number of people downloading and the overall traffic on these services continues to rise."

As well, with new companies sprouting up almost monthly, companies like Puretracks will be tested. Already, a price war is happening in the U.S. with the recently launched Wal-Mart music site selling songs at 88 cents, compared to iTunes at 99 cents.

"Not all of them are going to make it. The market isn't big enough," said Broadhead. "Next year is going to be a vital year for the legal services. It was too early to tell this year."

But as those services duke it out for music sales, an entirely different model for downloading songs could be in the works.

The organization representing Canada's songwriters is taking its fight against Internet piracy to the Supreme Court of Canada, arguing service providers (ISPs) should begin paying tariffs for Canadian music downloaded by the public anywhere in the world.

The case, which could have far-reaching implications worth millions, has the potential to change how artists are compensated, how far a country can go to extract payment, what gets put on the Internet and how recording companies serve buyers.

No matter the outcome, some analysts believe the industry has no choice but to solve the Internet piracy problem with licence levies applied at the ISP level.

"It'll be closer to a TV cable model where you pay a cable provider so much a month," said Paul Hoffert, a music professor at Toronto's York University and author of several books on information technology.

When you pay your cable bill, explains Hoffert, you pay not just for the technology but for the programming.

"It allows you to consume as much or as little as you want," said Hoffert, who also approaches the issue as a musician who scored dozens of films and served as a keyboardist for the '70s band Lighthouse. "That's how people are going to want to consume music. They're not going to want to pay for every little thing that they do."
http://www.canada.com/technology/sto...2-E4D3273B052B


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A Wary Eye on Sites for Music Sharing
Neil Strauss

The last year has seen an explosion of pay music-downloading services. Some have been successes, like Apple's iTunes Music Store, with 1.5 million downloads a week. Others, like BuyMusic, are plagued by complaints from users. But there is another site that has iTunes Music Store and BuyMusic beat: Easy Music Download, which has a greater profit margin than iTunes Music Store and probably a greater percentage of dissatisfied users than BuyMusic.

On its Web site, Easy Music Download offers unlimited downloads from a catalog of more than 700,000 songs for an annual fee of $21.95. Theoretically, one could own tens of thousands of songs for the same price as just 22 tracks from the iTunes store. If it sounds too good to be true, that's because it is.

"When everything hit the fan about people being charged for illegal music found on their machines, that was just the get-up-and-go I needed to fork out the cash for the files I wanted," Angela Tennant, a 25-year-old student from South Carolina who subscribed to Easy Music Download, said in an interview conducted via e-mail. "I just ended up paying up to the wrong people, and now I'm just aggravated, downright jaded, and it won't happen again."

What Ms. Tennant and others found when they subscribed to Easy Download Music was not a song-selling service at all, but merely information on how to download file-sharing services like Kazaa, which provide access to the unrestricted swapping that Ms. Tennant was hoping to avoid.

Roderick Dorman, chief litigation counsel for Sharman Networks, which owns the Kazaa Media Desktop, said that Easy Download Music was issued a cease-and-desist letter.

Many of the services state in their terms of service that the subscription pays for recommendations and technical support for free, easily available software. Easy Music Download is not alone in this market: at least a dozen other sites, like mp3perfect.com, mp3entertainment .com, mp3downloadhq.com and my-free-music.com, also sell access and help with free file-sharing services. All these sites look similar, and some have even copied text from other sites. But they vary in the extent to which they inform customers about the service they provide: some are designed to look like legitimate subscription-music services while others clearly state upfront that subscribers are paying for information and assistance only.

"Since August of 2003 we've been identifying what we view as scam sites, which are trading on the technology and offerings of Sharman Networks and in our view defrauding consumers by failing to disclose the actual service they provide," Mr. Dorman said. Several other cease-and-desist letters had been sent, he said, and he is "exploring with governmental authorities whether the conduct of these sites is criminal and is the appropriate subject of criminal law enforcement."

Through an e-mail address provided by an Internet consultant who did not want to be identified, the owner of Easy Music Download was reached. He identified himself as Ganesh Singh, and said he was from Hyderabad, India. "We tell people our Web site shows how to use file-sharing software," he wrote. "Other Web sites do not, so they are misleading." He declined to say how many users Easy Music Download has.

To learn more about these sites and their intended purpose, e-mail messages were sent and phone calls made to the owners of seven similar sites. Most e-mail messages remain unanswered; at mp3perfect.com, a flustered man answered the phone, listened to the questions, and said his superior should answer them. But his superior never called back.

The seventh e-mail message led to a telephone interview with a 25-year-old woman from Florida, who owns the subscription services imusicshare.com and mp3run .com. Speaking on condition of anonymity, she provided some perspective on the Web sites.

She said that she worked at an Internet billing company, and conceived of her file-sharing-support sites when she noticed that such sites did well financially. She started iMusicShare three months ago, she said, and gets 20 to 30 new subscribers a day.

That site is not meant to be at all misleading, she said. "It's for people who have no clue what to do on the Web as far as downloading," she continued. "They don't know what to do and how to begin, so they're willing to pay for help."

So the service provides subscribers with links to download free programs like WinMX and iMesh, supplies them with user guides to these programs, and gives 24-hour technical support, which few file-sharing services offer reliably.

She said that about 15 percent of her imusicshare subscribers request refunds. It is in a company's best interest to keep refunds and complaints to a minimum, she said, because they will affect a merchant's online reliability rating. "I think that there are a lot of people out there who really depend on us," she said. "There are people who are 70 and 90, and have no clue how to download."

Depending on one's perspective, sites like Easy Music Download are angels of file-sharing mercy, providing an easy way for Internet neophytes to navigate the morass of song- and movie-swapping sites, or they are clever parasites, feeding off the good intentions of those wishing to pay for their music.

One result for those who hold the latter view is that the services may be driving people back to Kazaa. "Web sites like easymusicdownload .com make honest people feel as if they are punished for trying to do the right thing," Ms. Tennant said. "And how have I gotten my music since I have been scammed? Let's just say I don't risk being hung out to dry anymore."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/ar...rtne r=GOOGLE


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Western Show Ends With A Whimper

Much Smaller Booths, Less Floor Space, Fewer Attendees Mark Final Anaheim Confab
Alan Breznick

Despite the big hopes of convention organizers to stage one last memorable affair, the cable industry's 36th and final Western Show went out with a whimper rather than a bang last month.

The California Cable & Telecommunications Association (CCTA), which sponsored the convention in Anaheim as always, said it drew a mere 6,150 attendees for the four-day confab. That's way down from about 10,000 in 2002, 17,000 in 2001 and a record 33,000 in 2000, when the show was last staged in downtown Los Angeles. Indeed, attendance at what had long been the industry's second biggest annual convention was not much higher than that enjoyed by several of the largest regional cable shows.

Similarly, the total number of Western Show exhibitors plummeted to 150 from 240 last year, a 38% dropoff. Even with the addition of 44 new exhibitors on the floor, the falloff was substantial as such major tech vendors as Cisco Systems and Broadcom and many smaller ones either stayed home or hosted hotel hospitality suites and private meetings.

Moreover, the total exhibit space declined dramatically again this year, dropping to 30,000 square feet from 80,000 square feet last year, as those vendors that did attend cut back drastically on their booth sizes. Only a few tech stalwarts such as Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta maintained reasonably large exhibits. And the cable programming networks were scarce on the convention floor, with the notable exception of Starz Encore.

In a sign of how much the total exhibit area shrunk this time around, CableNet, the tech expo organized by CableLabs that is usually just a blip on the convention floor, took up a full one-third of the total exhibit space. CableNet's exhibits also appeared to generate more buzz and activity than anything else on the floor, except for possibly the Motorola and S-A booths. Thanks to CableNet's enduring popularity, NCTA and CableLabs will move CableNet to the National Show, starting with the next convention in New Orleans in early May.

Show organizers boasted that the 31 educational sessions drew plenty of conventioneers, in some cases playing to standing-room-only crowds. In particular, the first morning general session attracted an overflow crowd in the convention center auditorium, prompting organizers to peel back the sliding back wall and place 200 more seats in the 750-seat meeting space. But, in years past, general session crowds filled the entire auditorium without the need for sliding walls to slice the room in half.

In other signs of the Western Show's steep, sad decline, there were few, if any, blowout parties or otherwise standout evening events. Show organizers didn't even bother with a flashy montage of highlights from great shows of the past. Mostly, cable executives just paid tribute, perhaps somewhat guiltily, to long-time CCTA President & General Counsel Spencer Kaitz, who announced his retirement at the show.

Despite the show's disappointing sendoff, tech vendors and cable operators did make some news in Anaheim and there was still plenty to see. Our Western Show news roundup follows.

Service Control Solutions

Start-ups in the IP service control category -- Allot Communications, Ellacoya Networks and P-Cube Inc. -- were also active in Anaheim.

Allot and Northland Cable Television said the cable operator is using Allot's traffic management system, NetEnforcer, to manage bandwidth for the MSO's 80 headend sites in Alabama, California, Georgia, Idaho, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Texas and Washington. With NetEnforcer, Northland said it can now manage peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic and restrict aggregate peak bandwidth usage in particular areas. Separately, Allot debuted its new NetEnforcer AC-1020, which tracks, classifies and shapes network traffic up to Layer 7.

Ellacoya inked a non-exclusive pact with Arris that will allow Arris to distribute and sell Ellacoya's bandwidth management systems to cable operators throughout the world. Ellacoya's system consists of its 4000 and 16000-series IP switches and its Service Logic Software. The deal adds another feather to Arris' cap while Ellacoya gains access to Arris' worldwide sales and support network. The two companies said Arris has already installed Ellacoya's service management system with "several" undisclosed North and South American cable operators.

P-Cube introduced Engage 2.0, a network traffic optimization system designed to enable cable operators to scrutinize P2P traffic faster and more efficiently. It's also aimed at supporting new VoIP protocols and applications, such as SIP and Skype. In addition, Engage 2.0 offers enhanced abilities for cable operators to protect themselves against DDOS and worm attacks. P-Cube said the new software, crafted to work in conjunction with DOCSIS, extends the service control functionality across the entire HFC network.
http://www.cabledatacomnews.com/jan04/jan04-7.html


Cable Eyes A Quantum Leap In IP Access

Besides VoIP, MSO Chiefs Consider 50-Mbps Cable Modem Connections and Video Telephony
Alan Breznick

Although voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) may be the next frontier for cable operators, it's far from the final one. As a number of MSO and tech vendor executives stressed at the Western Show in Anaheim last month, cable's IP future extends beyond the current data and prospective voice offerings to a variety of new services, including video telephony, broadband gaming and telecommuting offerings.

Speaking on a general session panel of top MSO executives, Comcast President/CEO Brian Roberts created a stir when he suggested that the industry consider boosting cable modem speeds by a factor of more than 10. Roberts said Comcast, which is now doubling its data download speeds on many cable systems to 3 megabits per second (Mbps), is seeking to go much faster in the near future. "Our advantage is to stay ahead," he said, fresh from a visit to Silicon Valley with other top cable CEOs the day before. "Just like we planned on 500 channels, we're planning on 50 megabits per second."

Similarly, on a separate general session panel, Bob Miron, chairman and CEO of Advance/Newhouse Communications, gushed about the possibilities of expanding high-speed data services into new areas. Following the same CEO jaunt to Silicon Valley, he said cable operators could reap great benefits from boosting data speeds much higher and offering video telephony service, among other things. "We're going to go way up" from 3 Mbps, he said. "We're going to make the user experience much more friendly and exciting."

Miron noted that his company now uses just one or two of the more than 100 6-MHz channels on its cable systems for high-speed data, yet gets 10% to 20% of its total revenue from the service. He indicated that Advance/Newhouse will devote more channels to data in the future as its analog bandwidth frees up, enabling it to hike transmission speeds and offer other new IP services.

In another Western Show session, panelists agreed that cable could achieve such fast data delivery soon. They predicted that cable operators could deliver such high speeds in no more than 2 years if customers really demand it.

"That is definitely technically feasible," said Tom Cloonan, CTO of Arris Inc.'s broadband division. "The silicon out there today supports it. If people ask for it, it certainly can be provided in a year or two."

Cloonan and other speakers urged cable operators to create speed and service tiers to serve cable modem customers better, manage heavy traffic loads from peer-to-peer (P2P) users, control soaring data operational costs and rake in more revenue. For example, Terry Shaw, director of network systems for CableLabs, said speed-based and consumption-based tiers "can be a very effective bandwidth management tool." He noted that on cable systems without such tiers, 50% of the bandwidth is typically devoured by just 6% of data subscribers.
http://www.cabledatacomnews.com/jan04/jan04-3.html


New Trade Group Sees Cable As Model For Online Music Sales

DCIA Invites Cable Broadband Players to Help Build Music Download Subscription Business
Alan Breznick

Call it "downloading for dollars." In a novel move, a recently formed computing industry trade group is seeking to turn the emerging online music download business into the latest version of the cable TV business.

In a prospective economic model presented at last month's final Western Show in Anaheim, the new Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) calls on the music industry to drop its fierce resistance to all peer- to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications. Instead, the DCIA proposes that the record labels start actively selling their content to all cable modem and other broadband subscribers who use such popular free music file-sharing software as Kazaa. And, with cable accounting for the lion's share of broadband consumers, the group wants cable operators to play a big role in tracking, managing and promoting music-file use and sales.

"We really need the cable MSO broadband ISP to help," said DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty, a cable and broadcasting veteran, speaking on a show panel about digital lessons from Kazaa. "Cable operators understand the content management business." He said part of his mission is to bring MSOs into the fold.

Similar to the tried-and-true cable video business model, the DCIA's proposed economic model calls for imposing a flat universal subscription fee of about $5 a month on all broadband subscribers who use music file- sharing software. For this fee, broadband consumers would receive access to basic music content. Music rights holders would reap most of the revenues, but the broadband ISPs and P2P software firms would also share in the bounty.

As presented by Lafferty, the model then envisions levying optional pay cable-like fees for special packages of broadcast-encrypted genre-and- theme music channels. Cable modem and DSL users would pay perhaps an extra $1 per month for each premium music package they took, on top of the $5 monthly fee for basic access and their standard broadband subscription charge.

Lastly, the DCIA model calls for charging small, a la carte fees for downloads of the latest individual music tracks. Lafferty is thinking of charging broadband users about 50 cents to $1 per track for hot new music releases. "It's the cable model of basic, pay and pay-per-view (PPV)," he said.

With at least an estimated 60 million music file sharers worldwide, Lafferty argues that this business model would help curb the 2.6 million unauthorized music downloads from the Internet each month. So far, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents the music labels, has mainly focused on suing consumers for alleged copyright infringements, including some cable modem customers.
http://www.cabledatacomnews.com/jan04/jan04-6.html


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For the Discerning Eye, Crisper Images on the Screen
J. D. Biersdorfer

The increase in high-definition broadcast and cable programming has prompted more consumers to buy high-definition television sets. But once one gets used to the sharp, clear look of HDTV programming, video from other devices - like a DVD player - can take on a decidedly old-fashioned fuzziness.

To improve the look of images from video sources that are not high definition, ADS Technologies has created the HDTV Upconverter, a box that scales up standard video signals into the higher resolutions that HDTV sets were designed to display.

Standard television and video images typically consist of 480 horizontal lines, but HDTV resolutions can go up to 1,080 lines, producing a much more detailed picture.

The HDTV Upconverter reformats and displays video from satellite and cable television systems, VCR's, DVD players and video game consoles at the higher HDTV resolutions.

A list of retail stores that carry the $599 HDTV Upconverter, along with more information and technical specifications, is available in the Products section at www.adstech.com.

The Upconverter has enough jacks on the back to accommodate nine video and audio sources, so in addition to an enhanced picture, you may finally be able to plug in all your home entertainment components and still have room for the PlayStation 2.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/te...ts/01conv.html


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Ohio Man Pleads Guilty In Internet Piracy Sting
AP

An Ohio man on Friday became the 15th person to plead guilty to federal charges in an Internet piracy ring that sold million of dollars worth of stolen computer software, games and movies.

The Internet piracy ring dubbed ``Rogue Warriorz'' included 21 people from 14 states and Canada.

Eleven pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, a federal prosecutor said. As part of their plea agreement, each agreed to surrender copyrighted works, pay restitution, cooperate with the investigation and turn over computer equipment used in the scheme.

Each faces a sentence ranging from probation to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Parrella said Friday. They were scheduled for sentencing in March before U.S. District Court Judge James C. Mahan.

The indictments were revealed in June after undercover federal agents said they obtained more than 8,434 computer application and utility software programs, and 356 movies and 432 computer games.

``This was a large-scale operation that transferred millions of dollars worth of pirated software, games and movies,'' Parrella said. Authorities have put the combined value of the programs at more than $7 million.

Some movies cited in the indictment included ``Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,'' ``Legally Blonde,'' ``Zoolander,'' and ``American Pie 2.'' Software programs included Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Adobe Page Maker and Audiowriter version 1.4.

The prosecutions stemmed from a wider two-year national Internet piracy investigation based in Las Vegas dubbed ``Operation Bandwidth.''

In the ``Rogue Warriorz'' probe, FBI, federal Environmental Protection Agency and Defense Criminal Investigative Service investigators spent six months in 2001 obtaining copyrighted software, movies, and games from what authorities called illegal online warehouses. None of those charged lives in Nevada.

``These crimes not only harm the manufacturers and distributors of the products,'' U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden said in the statement, ``but they harm the general public because of the higher costs that consumers are eventually forced to absorb.''

After pleading guilty Friday, David Lowe, 42, of Akron, Ohio, said outside the courtroom that Internet swapping and selling of software, movies and games is common, and that the law under which he was charged is flawed.

``I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I got caught,'' he said in a brief interview. His sentencing was scheduled March 24.

Pleading guilty Thursday were Wolf Bachenor, 52, Park Slope, N.Y.; David Brandt, 36, Wake Village, Texas; Alexander Castaneda, 21, Federal Way, Wash.; Jacob Paul Clappton, 30, Livermore, Calif.; Jonathan Dow, 35, Ilion, N.Y.; Jorge Garcia, Jr., 30, Reddick, Fla.; Mark Konarske, 42, Flat Rock, Minn.; Timothy J. Lastoria, 25, Brecksville, Ohio; Christopher Mastrangelo, 32, Toms River, N.J.; Suzanne Peace, 38, Lombard, Ill.; and Elisa Sarino, 28, San Jose, Calif.

John J. Amorosi, 23, of Falls Church, Va., previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 12.

Lindle Romero, 38, of Houston, Texas, pleaded guilty Sept. 26 to a felony for failing to report illegal activity, and was scheduled for sentencing March 15.

Lukasz Doupal, 25, of Brooklyn, N.Y, previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced April 7. More information was not immediately available Friday, said Natalie Collins, spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office.

Joseph Yano, 35, of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, was due for trial next month in Saskatoon, Parrella said. Four defendants -- Bryan Ray Harshman of St. Joseph, Mo., Jeffrey Sasser of Charlotte, N.C., Peter Semadeni of Overland Park, Kan., and Dean Wuestenberg of Donahue, Iowa -- were due for trial Feb. 17 in Las Vegas, he said.

One defendant, Michael Meacham, 34, of Barberton, Ohio, died this year, the prosecutor said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/7532822.htm


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Move Over Internet2 -- Here Comes Internet3

While New Zealand pokes along on dial up and faux-broadband connections plagued by popup advertisements and spam, Internet 2, a research network running parallel to the world wide web -- the wide area network most netizens think of as the internet -- provides blazing connections for users at most of the world's leading universities, hospitals and other main research outposts.

New Zealand does not have access to Internet 2 because the government has not yet found the million or so dollars it takes to hook its research entities into the system.

Now, even Internet 2 is being left behind by a specialised ring that will connect Chicago, Amsterdam, Moscow, Siberia, Beijing and Hong Kong at speeds able to handle the demands of super computers.

Finishing touches are being applied to the multi-million project, which is scheduled to go live on 05 January.

Russian and US scientists have had direct computer linkage for about five years, but Russia and China often exchange scientific information by meeting in Chicago, Greg Cole of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, one of the leaders of the Little GLORIAD project, told the AP.

Data will flow over the ring at 155 million bytes per second.

The US National Science Foundation contributed $US2.8 million to support the project for the next three years. Russia and China invested similar amounts, Cole said.

"Little Gloriad" is an acronym for Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development.

The ring will allow scientists and educational researchers to work together on computationally intensive issues such as responding to natural disasters, safeguarding nuclear material, monitoring earthquakes or joint space exploration.

They also could collaborate to remotely monitor or control high-tech equipment and even get together face-to-face by video conferencing over the network, Mr Cole told the AP.

'This is specifically so our scientists and educators can work together more easily,' Mr Cole said. 'The technology is really rather amazing.'

The fiber optic connection between China and Russia that makes the network possible was completed a few months ago, Mr Cole said.

Meanwhile, Internet 2 now counts 204 US universities on its network, along with 70 corporations, such as Ford and AT&T, and about 40 organizations and federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation.

Internet2 is a US-led project, but one that is extemely international in scope, enabling collaborative research around the world.

Taiwan linked up to the international service earlier this month, for example, installing a 2.5 Gbps (gigabits per second) connection to the Pacific Wave International exchange point at the Pacific Northwest Gigapop in Seattle. Connections of 1Gbps and 622 Mbps will also be extended from Seattle to Chicago's Starlight facility, according to Pacific Business News.

The country joins dozens of others who have signed on to the project through one or more of its various super speed sub-networks.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_art...ame=Technology


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Future of TV Looks A Lot Like Broadband
Dan Gillmor

If the future of television is taking shape here, our choices of programming appear to be nearly infinite. But whether we have flexibility and
freedom in how we use those choices will be someone else's decision.

If a new digital age of television is emerging, it may look a lot like ``Now Broadband TV,'' a service launched earlier this fall by PCCW, Hong Kong's dominant telecommunications company. By year's end, it should have more than 200,000 subscribers, and could have as many as half a million in 2004.

Hong Kong is probably the world's most competitive telecommunications market, and Now Broadband TV is one of several television operations here looking to compete in the pay-TV arena. But this service has some distinct advantages, not least its backing by PCCW, which sees it as an add-on more than a stand- alone offering.

The PCCW broadband-TV service, one of the first in the world , doesn't use cable-television lines. It uses the copper phone lines in people's homes, most of which are capable of truly high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) data connections. Unlike the United States, where DSL customers are limited to speeds well below a megabit per second, the vast majority of Hong Kong's DSL subscribers have connections at 6 megabits per second.

That's fast enough to devote 4.5 megabits to a TV channel and still leave ample Web-surfing capacity. That's just what PCCW has done, guaranteeing TV- quality service for the channels it offers. The company reconfigured its own central offices and is requiring broadband-TV customers to install special set-top boxes.

In most of the world, cable systems have large numbers of customers and negotiate with programmers on an all-or-nothing basis. They've trained viewers to believe the best way to get programming is to pay a flat fee for a grab bag of channels chosen by the company.

A la carte

By contrast, the PCCW service, which launched with 23 channels including some U.S.-based programming (a few more have been added), is entirely a la carte. Customers don't buy a package of channels for a monthly price. They buy whichever channels they want, and pay a monthly price for each.

Channels range in price from about $1.30 to $5 a month, and higher in a couple of cases. PCCW and its content providers share the revenues in a formula that isn't disclosed.

It was done this way partly out of necessity, says Mike Butcher, PCCW's chief operating officer. Now Broadband TV was a new entrant in the market, with fewer channels than the local cable company could offer in its package -- which included some popular channels that the cable operator controls exclusively by contract for the next two or three years. Making the best of the situation meant providing the installation and set-top boxes at no extra costs, and the pick- your-own-channels service gave Now Broadband TV customers a way to start using the system at a relatively low cost.

This approach is appealing in many ways. First, it gives the choice to the customer. Second, it allows the operator of the system to slice programming into some smaller niches where the audience might be smaller but where there's still a way for everyone to come out with what they want -- revenues for the programming company and the delivery service (which is what PCCW becomes with this system) and, of course, cost savings for the home customer.

PCCW has enough capacity on its own systems to offer hundreds of channels. If the company is smart, it'll encourage local media entrepreneurs to create niche channels, including some public-service channels.

I can easily imagine a Hong Kong-oriented channel devoted solely to the city's cultural scene, or its phenomenal food. Or maybe the schools and universities could team up on a channel for showcasing student concerts, plays and other events; perhaps parents would be willing to pay a dollar or two a month for that. This is an entirely different model from trying to get onto a cable-TV operator's system. And it might produce true variety in programming.

No recording

But for all the possibilities, PCCW's service is burdened by some of the most stringent control-freakery I've seen in the TV world. If you want to tape one of the TV programs to watch later, forget it. You can't. Period.

The set-top boxes, based on DVD technology (many contain DVD players), have digital and analog outputs. But because the providers of the programming have been so paranoid about copying, PCCW has turned off customers' ability to make even personal copies, whether digital or analog, of anything on any of the channels.

``It was a significant factor with a number of the content providers in giving them increased security of intellectual property, particularly in this part of the world,'' Butcher says.

High-profile programmers, including an MGM movie channel, said they wouldn't do a deal if any copying was allowed. Maybe, with some future channel, the conditions won't be so strict, Butcher says.

PCCW's lockdown prompted a letter of complaint to the editor of the South China Morning Post. The correspondent wrote: ``Recording is essential to many viewers as it is generally difficult for busy Hong Kong citizens to watch TV according to broadcast schedules.''

I'm with the letter writer. Denying customers the flexibility to make even a lower-quality analog recording of shows takes away much of the value of the a la carte programming model.

But this is the way Hollywood and the copyright robber barons want the future to work. We'll get to watch what they produce on their terms, or not at all. To imagine that analog copies from Hong Kong TV systems are anything remotely like the threat of DVD factories stamping out thousands of counterfeit disks per day is absurd, but Hollywood puts them on the same plane, and the little guy loses what should be routine.

So, one and a half cheers for PCCW's broadband television experiment. It's a breakthrough technologically, and offering programming in more thinly sliced ways is a win for customers. Too bad their freedom ends there. If this really is the way digital-age TV will work, we may end up losing as much as we gain.
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/san...gy/7435555.htm


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A Crowded Bandwagon Yields Music Without Worries
J.D. BIERSDORFER

SEVERAL companies have jumped onto the legal-music bandwagon (with more to come), and most have followed the trail blazed by Apple Computer with its iTunes Music Store last spring: thousands of songs available, freedom to play the music on multiple computers and portable audio players, and the ability to burn the purchased tracks onto a compact disc.

Compared with services that allow only streaming - the digital equivalent of hearing a song on the radio any time you wish - a file-download service is more like buying the single and taking it with you to play wherever you go.

A high-speed Internet connection is advised, and if you want music on the go, an MP3 player that can play song files encoded with Windows Media Digital Rights Management software is needed for many of the PC-based services. That's because they use features of the Windows Media Audio format to restrict unauthorized copying and sharing of song files, the practice that got the original Napster and other file-sharing services into legal hot water.

MusicMatch
www.musicmatch.com
FILE FORMAT Copy-protected Windows Media Audio (W.M.A.) files. PRICES About 99 cents per track or $10 per album. SUBSCRIPTION Not required, but available for $5 a month for streaming and music-finding services. FEATURES Catalog of 360,000 songs, which can be burned onto a CD and downloaded to many compatible Creative, Dell and Rio portable audio players. Three computers at a time can play the purchased tracks. (For Windows 98SE and later.)

Napster 2.0
www.napster.com
FILE FORMAT Copy-protected W.M.A. files. PRICES Tracks are 99 cents each; albums cost around $10. SUBSCRIPTION Not required, but offered as a streaming service for an extra $10 a month. FEATURES Once the first name in illegal downloads, it has been reborn as a legal service with half a million songs, which can be played on three PC's and burned to disc. Downloading to a portable player is easiest if you have the $350 Samsung Napster YP-910GS 20-gigabyte jukebox; otherwise you need Windows Media Player software. (For Windows 2000 and later.)

Wal-Mart
musicdownloads.walmart.com
FILE FORMAT Copy-protected W.M.A. files. PRICES 88 cents per song; about $9 for an album. SUBSCRIPTION None. FEATURES Relies on Windows Media Player 9 to play the music once downloaded. Songs can be played on three computers, burned to CD and transferred to compatible audio players. As with CD's sold in Wal-Mart stores, edited versions - songs with explicit lyrics removed - are often available. (For Windows 98SE and later.)

BuyMusic
www.buymusic.com
FILE FORMAT Copy-protected W.M.A. files. PRICES Songs begin at 79 cents, albums at $8. SUBSCRIPTION None. FEATURES Uses Windows Media Player 9 as the jukebox program for managing the music. Thousands of major-label songs, but legal rights (like whether you can burn songs to a CD or transfer them to a portable player) vary according to record label, frustrating many users. (For Windows 98 and later.)

Rhapsody
www.listen.com
FILE FORMAT No downloads; streaming music and CD burning only. PRICES 79 cents per song to burn onto a disc. SUBSCRIPTION Required; $10 a month, including unlimited streaming. FEATURES Rhapsody is not so much an online store as a virtual concert hall where you listen to the company's 400,000 songs as often as you want. Not all songs are available for CD burning. (For Windows 98SE and later.)

iTunes Music Store
www.apple.com/itunes
FILE FORMAT Copy-protected Advanced Audio Coding (A.A.C.) files. PRICES 99 cents per song; album prices start at $10. SUBSCRIPTION None. FEATURES The site, an integrated part of Apple's iTunes jukebox software, offers 400,000 tracks, 5,000 audio books from Audible.com and allowance accounts for those too young for credit cards. Songs can be played on up to three computers, burned to a CD and downloaded to any portable player as long as it is an iPod. (For Macintosh OS X and Windows 2000 and later.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/te...ts/01tune.html


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P2P Wrap-up for 2003
Thomas Mennecke

Although file-sharing went through some its greatest challenges during 2003, it once again emerges as one of the greatest Internet driving forces. While some still long for the golden age of file-sharing under Napster, 2003 proved to be just as productive in its own right.


January

The beginning of 2003 proved to be no better for the RIAA than its end. On January 6, the RIAA website suffered perhaps its greatest hack. The message the hackers left was so well written that at first glance many felt the RIAA had actually surrendered. No such luck, unfortunately.

Also on January 6, the P2P community welcomed the arrival of Piolet. After months of stagnation, Pablo Soto released his spyware/adware-free version of his Manolito Client. The Manolito network has since grown to well over 200,000 simultaneous users and is considered one of the better networks for accessing a wealth of music files.

February

In the early stages of the RIAA/Verizon lawsuit, the telecommunications giant was seeking a compromise. Verizon was willing to give up the names of several file- traders if the RIAA would agree to certain conditions, such as the volume of subpoenas. The RIAA refused. The rest is history.

Although IRC is the god-father of modern P2P networking, DALNet announced on Feburary 5 they will enforce their "no file-sharing" policy. After this announcement, coupled by a series of crippling DOS attacks, DALNet's population remains a shadow of its former self.

March

On March 9, Janus Friis, one of the co-founders of Kazaa, admitted to Slyck that certain aspects of FastTrack did indeed require a central server. However, Janus pointed out these servers (host cache server) were used by older clients that required an IP address to connect to the network.

Steve Griffin, CEO of StreamCast networks (Morpheus), resigned on March 15. Plagued by a spiraling userbase, StreamCast rehired former CEO Michael Weiss. Micheal Weiss was the original CEO of StreamCast when it was known as "MusicCity" (under OpenNap) and during Morpheus’ reign as the lead FastTrack client.

April

The month of April reinforced the concept that CD sales were not improving any time soon. Countries such as Japan and Germany witnessed an exceptional decline of nearly 9%.

April 25 proved to be an important day in P2P history as StreamCast and Grokster defeated the RIAA in court. Similar to the ruling from the Netherlands, the judge ruled that neither company was responsible for the actions of its users.

May

May was a bit quiet for the P2P world; however it would prove to be the calm before the great storm. One news piece of particular interest was Kazaa's success in becoming the most downloaded piece of software ever, with nearly 300,000,000 downloads.

June

Although this news came as little surprise, the RIAA announced on June 25 they will begin suing individual members of the file-sharing community. In the long run, this botched campaign to terrorize the American people would prove to be their greatest fallacy.

July

As the RIAA began suing the American people, the last thing the file-sharing community did was stand by and watch. Read Slyck's interview with MetaMachine's Paul Reinheimer on July 11 and with FileTopia on July 16.

On July 29, the RIAA chose former Republican big wig Mitch Bainwol, former chief of staff to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, to replace Hilary Rosen as CEO and Chairman.

August

Some good news began to appear in August 2003. While the mainstream media painted a gloomy P2P picture, file-sharing remained steady despite numerous lawsuits.

Additional positive news came on August 8 when a Massachusetts District court judge gave MIT and Boston College the OK to reject the subpoenas issued by the RIAA. The judge cited that the subpoenas had to be filed in the state in which the alleged violation occurred. While the music industry was quick to brush this ruling off, it would prove to be one of the first cracks in the RIAA's armor.

September

The full scope of the RIAA's terror campaign is realized when a 12 year old girl, named Brianna LaHara was sued by the RIAA. The event is a public relations nightmare for the now embattled RIAA.

In an attempt to prevent movie piracy, the MPAA decides to ban "screener" distribution. Screener movies (varying quality, some are about VHS standard, while others are near-DVD) are sent to film critics prior to award ceremonies, such as the Oscars. As news of this broke, independent film artists reacted, stating their movies would be pushed out of competition against Hollywood. Their protests would prove fruitful as a New York City judge blocked the MPAA's ban.

October

Sandvine, a network research firm, reported on October 14 that FastTrack was facing stiff competition in foreign markets. While FastTrack is the most popular network in North American, Europeans favor the eDonkey2000 network.

WinMX 3.31 celebrated its one year anniversary on October 19. It is the only client to survive without an update and still draw an enormous userbase.

BitTorrent proves it is a force to be reckoned with, as its popularity continues to soar. Although this network was primarily used to trade TV shows and movie files, it resourcefulness has expanded to music and applications.

November

AltNet, the elusive shadow network that resides within FastTrack, announced that it plans to enforce its patent on "hashing" technology. Hashing technology is a method of creating a unique code that identifies a particular file. This is particularly useful in the fight against corrupt or false files. Little from AltNet has been heard since.

The GAO, or Government Accounting Office, released a report that greatly favors the existence of P2P networking. While many members of Congress have been quick to go on the data provided by the RIAA, the report provided by the GAO threw a very large wrench in the music industry's information campaign.

December

December would prove to be one of the greatest months in the history of file- sharing. The beginning of this moth did not bode well for P2P lovers; nearly all download resources of Kazaa Lite were eliminated, and the RIAA’s “sue ‘em all” campaign was in high gear.

However, a series of terrific reverses against the RIAA brought their world crumbling down. Befuddled and defeated, the RIAA is attempting to save face by clamoring the lawsuits will go on.

As modern file-sharing enters it fourth year of existence, despite its ups and downs, it has proven that the P2P world is a resilient, observant and adaptable community. Nearly every obstacle the music industry has thrown at us has been defeated. We’re looking forward to similar results in 2004.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=360


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In Chasing Movie Pirates, Hollywood Treads Lightly
John Schwartz

When Tim Davis got caught trading songs, it made him semifamous. Davis, an artist who teaches photography at Yale, was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America last September and was featured in news articles around the world.

Since then, he has made his plight a public cause to help recoup the $10,000 he spent on his legal defense and to settle the lawsuit. He sold "Free Timmy" T-shirts and held a fund-raising party at his studio. Visitors to his Web site, davistim.com, can leave a donation in an online "tip jar." The lawsuit, he said, is "an insane kind of disproportionate response" to his musical sins.

Then there is Jeff, who trades movies online. Jeff, who lives in New York and discussed his situation only on the condition that his full name not be used, received a letter from his cable company explaining that New Line Cinema had found a copy of "Freddy vs. Jason" available for sharing through his Internet account. The letter noted that the movie industry did not know his identity but could go to court to discover it and might eventually sue him. "It gave me a little scare," he said.

There are many more music traders than movie traders, but there are many more Jeffs than Tims these days. While the recording industry has made headlines with a few hundred lawsuits, the movie industry has been sending out hundreds of thousands of threatening notices via e-mail messages each week to the people who make its products available on the Internet.

The music industry's approach has contributed to a decline in downloading but has also produced a powerful public backlash, angering millions of its customers. That is one reason, among others, that Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said that his industry would not be following the music companies' path any time soon.

"I'm not ruling out anything, but at this moment we don't have any specific plans to sue anyone," Valenti said. "I think we have learned from the music industry."

The gentler threat works, said Mark Ishikawa, the chief executive of BayTSP, a company that helps the industry track down file sharers by scanning the Internet for movies and issuing the e-mail notices automatically. Fully 85 percent of those contacted "do not come back," Ishikawa said. "We never see them again," with no headlines and no public relations blowups.

"The movie studios," he said, "are trying to prevent themselves from becoming the next music industry."

But executives at the technology companies that serve both industries say that the movie industry, while avoiding some of the record industry's pitfalls, has not yet made enough progress on other fronts to head off a Napster-like disaster.

The different approaches to the problem of copyright infringement, they say, are--more than anything else--about timing.

The music industry is pursuing a late, desperate, rear-guard action against an army of tens of millions of downloaders. Meanwhile, legitimate online alternatives to file trading are only now becoming established. The movie industry, by comparison, estimates that it has at least 18 months before high-speed Internet access and high-capacity hard drives make grabbing a movie almost as quick and easy as grabbing a song.

Valenti says Hollywood is doing everything it can to get ahead of the coming storm. Along with the warning letters, the movie industry is paying for consumer education programs and technology research, and pushing for laws and regulations that executives hope will protect their wares. At the industry's urging, for example, California recently passed a law making it illegal to use a camcorder in a movie theater.

Yet experts in digital technology say Hollywood is fooling itself if it believes that its current steps will be enough, or even that they will take the industry in the right direction.

Gary Johnson, the chief executive of PortalPlayer, a company that makes the technology that helps consumer products like Apple Computer's iPod play music within the boundaries of licensing agreements and copyright law, was particularly blunt.

"We're not sure the lessons that were learned in the music industry have been picked up yet" in the world of video, he said.

The most important thing for Hollywood to do now, Johnson said, is to move faster to develop the kinds of licensing agreements and protective technology that can make digital video services easy to use and worth paying for.

Michael Maia, the vice president for sales and marketing for PortalPlayer, said: "It's all about the rights."

Send lawyers, tools and money
In other words, the biggest challenge for the video industry lies not with pirates, but with bytes, cash and lawyers.

What the industry needs, technology executives say, is to look harder for tools and contracts that allow people to get the movies they want at a competitive price, rather than concentrate on actions that restrict access.

"The film industry has a tremendous opportunity in front of it, and the bar is very low," said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a company that tracks file-trading activity for the entertainment industries.

Movie companies can prevent the free swapping of their wares from mushrooming into a mass phenomenon, Garland said, by offering easy-to-use services with broad selection that will shape the consumer experience, instead of trying to change bad behavior after the fact.

The movie industry, he said, has to ask itself what the music industry should have asked years ago: "Why do they want to steal from us?" The answer, he said, is simple: "Because you won't sell them what they want." The technologists say that what went wrong with the music industry can easily go wrong for movie companies, too.

Steve Perlman, a longtime executive in the technology industry who co-founded WebTV, said that because music companies had resisted online trends and did not make their wares readily available, "a pirate way of accessing content became the best way of accessing content."

People seeking a legitimate way to download music found nothing much, while Napster and its offspring became magical jukeboxes in cyberspace that offered every conceivable song. "They've got to make it so the best choice is legitimate content," Perlman said.

When a movie first appears, illicit copies show up online for the taking almost instantly. "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,'' which was released on Dec. 17, is already available on several peer-to-peer services. Many videos, though, are poor-quality copies made by people who bring camcorders to a theater.

Most of the higher-quality copies come from within the industry, often copied from "screener" discs sent out during the annual awards season.

Current attempts to sell movies online, like the industry-sponsored Movielink, are still limited in selection and ease of use. But Valenti, the movie industry's powerful lobbyist in Washington, said the problems were temporary.

"We're experimenting with all of this," he said. "This isn't anything that is a finished game." Technology and selection will improve, he pledged. "There's no expectation of keeping these films in a vault."

The path to a successful service has to involve the kind of technology that protects copyright unobtrusively, said Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. Kocher, whose San Francisco company helps clients in the cable and satellite industries foil piracy, said that hard-to-design but simple-to-use technologies could solve problems that might otherwise seem intractable.

"In the end, if people are stealing your stuff," Kocher said, "the technology has failed." Hand in hand with developing legal digital services, he recommends the kind of tough security that is built into satellite television equipment, so that the companies "make it not worth stealing" because the bar has been raised too high.

A cable thief, said Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, "can't say, 'I didn't realize it was wrong to climb up a pole, connect a wire, run it to my home and hook it up to my TV.' "

The costs of adopting the wrong strategy will be high. Jeff, the movie swapper, says that despite his scare he has not changed his ways. He has gone deeper underground instead, renaming files so that movie titles would not be as easy to find with industry search software, he said. (Ishikawa of BayTSP said that the strategy would not work against his service, however.)

Jeff also says that he does not make his own trove of movies available to the world as readily. "I just watch them and delete them instead of leaving it out there," he said. "I don't leave the network on 24 hours a day the way I used to."

But Davis, the former song trader, has changed his habits. He dusted off his turntable, bought a new needle and started haunting the bargain vinyl bins in junk shops, where he has discovered some treasures for a dollar a record.

"I'm really very excited about it,'' he said, "because there isn't much new to buy out there, is there?"
http://news.com.com/2100-1026-5133522.html


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VERBATIM

Screeners? Guard With Your Life

Things seem to have neared the airport-security level on the movie screener front. If you're a film critic preparing to receive a copy of a movie, you'll have to sign an agreement that you won't copy or loan it, and please — no jokes about piracy. It's almost certain, from the tone of the agreement below, that laxness, or levity, will not be appreciated.

NSFC AGREEMENT ON SCREENERS

I, the undersigned, herein confirm that I will adhere to the official policy of the NATIONAL SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS (NSFC) on receiving copies of movies ("screeners") from any source in any format, as set forth below.

Receiving screeners does not give me any underlying intellectual property rights to said films. Ownership of each screener remains the property of the company that supplied it.

Screeners cannot be sold or loaned to anyone.

Screeners cannot be circulated outside my home or office.

Screeners cannot be copied or reproduced in any fashion.

I will maintain possession of all screeners and not give them to anyone or any company except to return them to the company that provided them or to have them destroyed by an MPAA-approved recycling company.

I understand my responsibility to protect any screeners I receive from unauthorized use. I agree that if I violate this agreement I may be expelled from the NSFC and I may be subject to civil and criminal penalties….

http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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God Considers Smiting Bible Pirates
Kristian Werner

Vatican City - God did not rule out smiting as a final measure against those who share his most famous work, the Bible, on the Internet. This marks the first time a deity has spoken on IT-related questions since Steve Jobs was temporarily Enlightened when touching the One True iMac some years ago.

Authorized Version?
Citing misuse of His word, misquotation, and putting hardworking Bible printers out of work, God said he would now start hunting Bible pirating around the globe. "I have to defend both my world-famous brand - the Bible and its distinctive likenesses - and the livelihood of those who create and distribute legal copies of it. Sure, they live not by bread alone, but website hits - someone else's website mind you - don't pay the bills for these folks."

Since large portions of the Bible are many centuries old, many people believe the work to be in the public domain. Not so, said God. "Look, most copyright laws are based on something like the author's lifetime plus, let's say, 15 years. News flash: I'm still here."

" I am a jealous God," He said, "but I am by no means unreasonable. If the person will stop distributing My copyrighted materials, there will be no further consequences. Like I've said before: hate pirating, love the pirate."
Ironically, some of those most likely to be hit by these measures are among God's biggest fans. The Reverend Alfred Jackson is a minister at the church of St. Cecilia in Kansas City. In his spare time, he maintains the Bible study website "eChapter and eVerse," which cross-references large parts of the bible with commentary from clergy and laypeople from around the world.

God said that 'spreading the Gospel' was not a valid defense for distributing copyrighted materials. "Rev. Jackson has published at least 35% of My word electronically, where anyone with an internet connection can download it. Thrice did I call on him to repent; thrice did he ignore me or refer me to the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation]."

Jackson said he had had several emails from someone claiming to be the Deity, but had first dismissed them as pranks. When he received the second 'cease and desist’, Jackson contacted the EFF and asked for advice.
Marie Dang, an attorney with EFF said smiting was clearly an unreasonable response to alleged copyright infringement. "I realize that legal text often spells out all the details and ramifications right from the start. But mentions of smiting and damnation are hardly suitable for a first letter," said Dang.

Responding to widespread criticism over perceived misuse of omnipotence, God said people had misunderstood Him. "I repeat: Smiting would only be a last resort against the unrepentant. True, neither My Son nor I thought of electronic piracy when I sent him to earth. However, we have decided to include it as a 'sin' for purposes of forgiveness. I don't know who put in that 'damnation' stuff."

When asked what His next step might be, God was reluctant to discuss specifics. He stressed that He would consider the effect of His actions on the meek. "Let's make one thing clear," He said, "I may be omnipotent, but I'm not crazy: It's not like I think I'm Jack Valenti."
http://bbspot.com/News/2003/12/bible_pirates.html












Until next week,

- js.










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