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

[JackSpratts]

Justice Department Cops Website

This week the US government closed down a website and redirected its members to one owned by the Justice Department. The site, isonews.com, “did not contain illegal copies of video games, software or movies”, but did offer mod chips for sale and was a gathering place for those interested in trading copyrighted files.

The government considers the closing of the site, reached in a plea bargain with owner David Rocci, a major step forward in its fight against customizing, which if done on cars and kitchens is an old and honorable pastime, but if done on video games is apparently so threatening to policy makers it requires tossing out customs and laws so entrenched they go back to the Bill of Rights.

Regardless of how you feel about the customizing of products you own like your computers, your video games and your cars it’s hard to argue that the closing and redirecting of a web site is major step forward for your rights of free assembly and free speech.

Civil libertarians have expressed concern regarding the implications.

Who would have thought that so insignificant a hobby would terrify governments so profoundly they’d create precedents that destroy the laws and protections of our Constitution, created by towering figures of our past and defended with the lives of activists and soldiers for these last two hundred years?

Is it another example of a slow but seemingly inexorable march towards a world that more and more resembles that of the dysfunctional Corporatacracies from the nightmarish pages of Aldus Huxley and George Orwell rather than the world that most of us in the West came of age in? Whether or not this portends changes that profound, it remains a sorry state of affairs.

P2P Positive

In other developments this week a lone establishment voice was heard in Washington offering guarded support for file sharing, peer-to-peer technologies and the uninhibited flow of ideas. Graham Spanier, president of Penn State University and co-chair of a committee on intellectual property issues, sounded “decidedly ambivalent” about the wholesale shutting down of peer-to-peer networks. He told a hostile congress on Wednesday that institutions of learning need to guard against restrictions to the “free and open exchange of information that underpins the creativity, vigor and productivity of our education and research programs."

It was no surprise that the Congress greeted his words with less than enthusiasm. Indeed, they were openly antagonistic. On the other hand they almost never hear such words from anyone they consider even remotely responsible. Well maybe they should. Maybe if they did they’d become more enthusiastic, and more responsive towards the people they say they represent.






Enjoy,

Jack.








Nap’s Back!
Nap’s over for Napster
Owen Gibson

Controversial song swapping site Napster, the former nemesis of the music industry, is set to relaunch before the end of the year with whizzkid founder Shawn Fanning back on board.

Roxio, the US software company that bought the Napster brand in a fire sale late last year, has revealed it plans to relaunch the site as a paid-for download service before the end of the year. Confirming the plans, Elliot Carpenter, the chief financial officer of Roxio, said that the company, which specialises in CD copying software, was in advanced negotiations with major record labels. Mr Fanning, the former college student who founded the site from a laptop in the back room of his uncle's house at the age of 19, has been recruited by Roxio to work as a consultant on the project.

At the height of its popularity in 2000, over 80 million computer users were gorging themselves on Napster's huge library of free music. It caused panic in the record industry, which was already suffering faltering sales from traditional piracy and increased spending on other leisure products.

Napster was finally closed down in July 2001 after the major music labels won an injunction forcing the site to remove all copyrighted songs from its database. A year later the company closed down altogether after a brief attempt by German media giant Bertelsmann, which invested in the company, to resurrect the site as a paid-for service. The site never got back online and a US judge eventually ruled that Bertelsmann could not buy the bankrupt company's assets because the two businesses were too close. Last week the German media company was hit by a new £10bn lawsuit from music publishers, who claim it was responsible for lost royalties from Napster.

According to insiders at the company, Roxio plans to learn from the mistakes made by the major labels in launching their own music download sites PressPlay and MusicNet, both of which flopped.

"We won't launch until we've got agreements with all the labels to include a significant proportion of their catalogues. And we won't just be a subscription service, which asks users to make a commitment of at least £10 a month, but will also sell music on a track by track basis," said a source.

Despite getting rid of Napster, the record companies face an even greater challenge from "peer to peer" networks such as Kazaa and Gnutella. Because they simply act as huge worldwide networks, allowing users to transfer songs between their PCs, they are virtually impossible to close down.

Record company insiders confess that they are long way from getting to grips with the problem and acknowledge that they must work on making legitimate downloads more attractive and easier to use than illegal services.

In the UK, some feel an important legal precedent may be set by the successful recent prosecution of Easy Internet Cafe for allowing users to download songs onto CD. This could mean that they will turn their attention to other internet cafes, universities, libraries and internet service providers to force them to crack down on file sharing.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia...900541,00.html



Roxio inks Fanning for Napster II
John Borland

Former file-swapping wunderkind Sean Fanning has signed up to help CD-burning technology company Roxio build a reborn Napster service--but with a difference.

The new Napster won't look anything like the anarchic search-and-download service that kicked off file-trading legal battles more than three years ago, Roxio said Monday. The software company plans to work strictly by the record industry's playbook, and is taking the peer-to-peer component that was a foundation of much of Napster's appeal out of the service altogether, at least initially.

"We're looking to put a legal service up by year end," Roxio spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly said. "Our CEO, Chris Gorog, is in talks with all the major labels now."

The new Napster envisioned by Roxio--which purchased Napster's name and technology assets for $5 million in a bankruptcy auction in November--would fall more in line with authorized subscription and paid-download services such as Pressplay or MusicNet. As such, it would break little new ground, but could be a valuable new distribution channel for record labels' online efforts.

Roxio is planning to integrate the Napster music download service into its recently released Audio Central music jukebox program, which currently makes up part of its Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 disc-burning software. The jukebox and music download component may wind up being distributed separately, Kelly said.

Fanning, who created the original Napster file-swapping service while a university student, has been hired to help launch the new service as a consultant, rather than as a full- time Roxio employee.

Although the original Napster song-swapping service has been shuttered for more than a year and half, its influence lives on.

Last week, a group of songwriters sued German media giant Bertelsmann, asking for $17 billion in damages. Bertelsmann's loans to and corporate support for the file-trading service in its final year of operation extended Napster's life, and therefore contributed to copyright infringement, the music publishers claim.

Other file-swapping services--most notably Sharman Networks' Kazaa--remain strong. The Kazaa software itself has now been downloaded more than 193 million times, far more than Napster's, according to Download.com, a software aggregation site operated by News.com publisher CNET Networks.

Roxio already has a head start on its music licensing plans. Shortly before purchasing Napster's assets, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based business was named by the EMI Group record label as one of nine Net music companies granted broad licenses to offer download and CD-burning services using its music.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-985748.html

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RealNetworks Hedges Bets with Listen.com Stake
Sue Zeidler, Reuters

Digital media company RealNetworks Inc. RNWK.O on Wednesday said it had taken an undisclosed stake in struggling online music firm Listen.com, transforming a onetime competitor into a close ally.

Listen.com, which recently cut its staff to 50 from 70 and has been seen as a potential takeover target, said it will use the investment to boost its Rhapsody music subscription service, which competes with MusicNet, an online service 40 percent owned by RealNetworks.

Under the deal, RealNetworks' technology will become the primary platform for the Rhapsody service and the two companies will explore collaborating on future services, they said.

Prior to Wednesday, Rhapsody's primary platform had been Windows, made by RealNetworks' chief rival, Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O , which it will now support as a secondary platform.

The investment comes on the day that America Online began offering a revamped version of MusicNet to its 27 million U.S. Internet customers, the biggest move yet to bring commercial online services to the mainstream as they struggle against free, unauthorized services like Kazaa.

Analysts said the investment reflected RealNetworks' desire to hedge its bets in the still-developing field.

"They're making multiple bets. Now that they have a stake in Rhapsody, they can promote whichever service they feel best meets consumer needs," said Phil Leigh, analyst with Raymond James and Associates.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2295403

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All Over Save the Whining, Rep. Berman May Not Revive Internet Piracy Bill
Jon Healey

Rep. Howard L. Berman said he may abandon his controversial proposal to help Hollywood battle Internet piracy, in part because of complaints from an unexpected source: Hollywood.

Berman (D-Van Nuys) introduced a bill in July to give movie studios, record companies and other copyright holders limited immunity from lawsuits if they used technology to block piracy on file-sharing networks such as Kazaa or Gnutella. The immunity would not have applied to tactics that damaged users' computers or legitimate file-sharing activities.

The measure, which died when Congress adjourned last year, drew heavy flak from consumer advocates who said it would encourage copyright owners to become network-snarling vigilantes. Nevertheless, Berman was widely expected to try again this year with a revised version of the bill.

This week, however, Berman said he may not revive the measure. For one thing, copyright holders may not need extra protection to combat file- sharing piracy, he said. And though Berman wasn't deterred by complaints from consumer advocates, the concerns voiced by Hollywood studios -- among the biggest beneficiaries of the bill, given their active anti-piracy efforts online -- suggested that Berman was climbing out on a limb by himself.

In particular, Hollywood's enthusiasm for the bill was dimmed by Berman's insistence on imposing new liabilities on copyright holders that go too far in attacking pirates. "And if they're not for it," Berman asked, "where am I going?"

His comments came in an interview at a conference on copyrights and consumer rights at Intel Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif. "It still may be worth doing," Berman said of the proposal, "but realistically, a bill like this isn't going to zip through Congress."

Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said "the essence of the legislation makes all the sense in the world." However, some MPAA members were concerned about the new liabilities, and some doubted the need for the bill, he said.

"There were no self-help actions being taken in violation of state or federal laws," Taylor said.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...2Dtechnolo gy

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Teens Want Their MP3s
Some schools are looking for ways to track and limit music downloaded from Internet
Peter Wilson

Nothing, it seems, can stem the voracious appetites of tech-savvy teens for MP3 music files. Design a peer-to-peer network and they will come, by the millions.

An amazing 52 per cent of those aged 12 to 17 in the United States say they've downloaded MP3 files on the Net from the likes of Morpheus and KaZaa, according to a survey released Thursday by Ipsos- Reid. And, lest you think that such activity might be dropping off, 32 per cent of U.S. teenagers made at least one digital music download in December 2002. Both these figures are up from April 2002, when 41 per cent of teens said they'd grabbed an MP3 from a peer-to-peer network at one time and 23 per cent said they'd downloaded in the last month.

Just as startling is the overall figure of 40 million U.S. citizens of all ages who have grabbed for the MP3 gusto, according to the survey, carried out in late 2002. So it's no wonder that U.S. colleges, whose networks are hard hit by the bandwidth hogging of mostly male hardcore fire downloaders are considering drastic action.

Educational institutions are now testing "fingerprint" technology from a California company, Audible Magic (www.audiblemagic.com) that can detect exactly which songs, and even movies, are being downloaded. Some colleges already have in place traffic-management tools that let educational files and e-mail through while cutting back on the flow of MP3s. But fingerprint software, which runs inside routers, probes more deeply -- actually giving the network overseers a way of viewing just which files are being downloaded.

For example the University of Wyoming discovered during one recent 24-hour period that students were using the Gnutella Network to download 188 copies of an MP3 by Big Tymers.

What will likely happen next -- but not without a lot of computing power being utilized -- is the blocking of actual songs. The Audible Magic fingerprint library is said to be able to identify some 3.5 million distinct digital music files. However, with new music being released every day it may be difficult to keep up. And the privacy issue also has been raised over the use of such fingerprinting technology.

A Washington, D.C., lobby group, the Electronic Information Center (EPIC), has come out against recording industry requests for more university network monitoring.

In a November 2002 open letter to universities EPIC said: "Monitoring the content of communications is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of educational institutions to foster critical thinking and exploration. Such a level of monitoring is not only impracticable; it is incompatible with intellectual freedom.

One way that peer-to-peer networks could fight back would be to scramble or encrypt data so that it couldn't be recognized by fingerprinting programs.
http://www.canada.com/technology/sto...2-4D29F6A7E603

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Students catch downloading bug
Ali Shaughnessy

Digital technology has made its way into the hearts of many University students, as well as their residence hall rooms.

"Go for it," freshman Alex Crowder said when asked her opinion on downloading music and movies -- because, as many feel, downloading is as easy as one-two-three.

"A 12-year-old, with a click of a mouse, can send a movie hurtling to all of the continents," Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, has said.

But others disagree. Even with advancing technology, some say those things aren't yet possible.

"Transferring the sheer number of bits that compromise a single television show that was broadcast over the air ... is just not feasible," according to a study done by Raffi Krikorian, a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And this is just the latest debate in a battle between corporate and consumer rights.

According to Resident Hall Computing Services Coordinator Norm Meyers, the University started to monitor file sharing within the resident halls three to four years ago.

"(The computing services) focus is on the academic side, but the entertainment sides, such as music, movies, etc., are a plus," Meyers said. "We don't encourage (downloading), but we don't discourage it as long as (the students) are responsible."

The University, obliged to oversee uploads to protect itself from lawsuits, monitors what students do online through a $50,000 network program called Packeteer. The program restricts peer-to-peer file sharing by monitoring Internet traffic and directing entertainment downloads to a slower, lower-priority pathway.
http://www.dailyemerald.com/vnews/di.../3e56532d6d5af

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'Honest Thief' waves pirate flag
Sandeep Junnarkar

A Dutch company calling itself an "honest thief" has become the latest threat to an entertainment and recording industry beset by swelling numbers of file-swapping services.

Operating in the Netherlands, Internet services company PGR--doing business as The Honest Thief-- plans in the spring to license its software and provide legal advice to others who hope to set up the newest incarnation of peer-to-peer services.

The recording industry has succeeded in dismantling services like Napster and Aimster by taking legal action in the United States. But The Honest Thief, whose Web site went live on Friday, plans to take advantage of a Dutch appeals court ruling last March that essentially paved the way for the Netherlands to become a legal haven for file-sharing activities.

The appeals court said that file-swapping service Kazaa was not responsible for the illegal actions of people using its software. That decision is being appealed to higher court.

"Call it file-sharing or shoplifting, here in Holland we call it good business," Pieter Plass, founder of The Honest Thief, said in a statement. "With our file-sharing service and our new software, we hope The Honest Thief will become to file sharing what the Swiss are to banking."

The music industry sees things differently.

IFPI, the trade group representing the international recording industry and an affiliate of the Recording Industry Association of America. "It's hard to see how someone can claim they are making some 'honest money' by stealing other peoples' works."

Although only a few nations have shown permissiveness toward file-swapping service, the ruling underscored the mounting pressure on the copyright industry's struggle to retain control internationally of protected intellectual property such as music, movies and software.

"After two-plus years of legal wrangling with peer-to-peer sites, the file-sharing services' technology and business models continue to evolve in such a way as to circumvent U.S. legal rulings," said Lee Black, an analyst at Jupiter Research. "The fact that it continues to move into international areas will always pose a problem for the industry--these things keep sprouting up, and consumers keep finding the content they want."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-985525.html

Music Industry Faces New Threats On Web
Anna Wilde Mathews in Los Angeles and Charles Goldsmith in London

No one in the music industry has ever heard of Pieter Plass, the chief executive of a construction-management company in the Dutch city of Arnhem. But he and others like him may pose a serious threat to big record labels and other entertainment companies.

Based in the city best known for the World War II battle that spawned "A Bridge Too Far," Mr. Plass is about to go into business as an enabler of Internet peer-to-peer services. He wants to provide software, legal advice and other help to anyone who wants to start up the next Morpheus or Kazaa, the renegade online bazaars where users can swap copyrighted songs and movies for free. The twist is that his clients would launch their companies in the Netherlands, where a court ruling last March appears to provide legal protection for such operations.

The Dutch decision is being appealed, and it isn't clear how far Mr. Plass will get with his venture, which he's calling "The Honest Thief." But the effort illustrates the breadth of the challenge facing music companies and other owners of copyrighted works as more peer-to-peer providers base their operations overseas.

Record-label officials maintain that the Netherlands ruling was an aberration that will be reversed. Courts in South Korea and Japan have already ruled against peer-to-peer services in copyright cases. "We intend to enforce our rights not just in the United States, but world-wide," says Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America.

He also argues that under U.S. law, record labels should be able to get American Internet service providers to block customers' access to overseas Internet destinations that offer pirated music. In addition, record labels have taken steps lately to go after individual peer-to-peer users. A U.S. court recently found that American Internet service providers must disclose the names of customers who share copyrighted music online.

The record labels got a big win last month. A U.S. federal court said that Sharman Networks Ltd., which now offers the Kazaa software, could be sued in California even though it is based on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu and operates out of Australia. But a U.S. ruling may not be enough to shut down services based in countries where courts have said that peer-to-peer software is legal. Peer-to-peer operators based overseas say they believe they have a legal shield. "How are they going to enforce" a judgment? asks Rod Dorman, one of the lawyers representing Sharman Networks.

In the Netherlands, Mr. Plass says he's prepared to take a "calculated risk" and test the issue. In addition to the construction-management company he heads, he owns a nine-employee software firm, PGR BV, that has developed tools related to building and real estate. Its programmers created an application that works much like current popular services like Kazaa, enabling users to exchange files between individual computers rather than downloading them from centralized servers.

With his new venture, he plans to license the software -- which isn't yet finalized -- to clients who will create Netherlands-based file-sharing operations. His goal is to grab a chance to "make some honest money," he says.

Mr. Plass and his future clients may not be the only ones to try to exploit the Dutch ruling. Transparency Software LLC, a company based in Memphis, Tenn., makes software that blocks computers from exchanging copyrighted material on peer-to-peer networks, and it is considering launching its own Netherlands-based peer-to-peer service. The company would aim to have the operation contain no unauthorized works, says Pierce Ledbetter, chief executive of Transparency Software. But the Netherlands may provide "an extra layer of legal protection," he says.
http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/030221/72/382au.html

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Gov’t web sites offering ways to be prepared in emergencies. http://www.chicagotribune.com/techno...htopheds%2Dhed

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Pop stars learn to live with pirates
Thomas Crampton

In China, record companies find new ways to do business

SHANGHAI - Dimpled good looks and saccharin-sweet love songs may have made him an idol to millions of teenagers in China, but dark passions emerged at an album-promotion party recently when Wang Lee Hom brandished a sword to slash an oversized compact disk marked with the Chinese character for "theft."

In case anyone missed the point, the normally demure Wang announced that his favorite track on the new album was "Why," a pop-music diatribe against piracy.

"Pirates have already killed China's music industry dead," Wang said. "It frustrates my life and destroys China's creative future."

That may be an overstatement. Record companies say that what piracy has really done in China is to cause fundamental shifts in the way the country's music industry operates. It has simply forced Wang and his fellow stars to change the way they live, work and play.

"There is no income from the royalties, so artists in China record single songs for radio play instead of albums for consumers," said Lachie Rutherford, the president of Warner Music Asia-Pacific. "Stars need to look elsewhere to finance the rock-star lifestyle."

Industry executives say this reality also is beginning to draw attention in Europe and the United States, where music companies face falling revenue from compact disk sales as Internet piracy increases.

"The financial effect is the same for record companies whether people get illegal compact disks for $1 on the street in China or download a song for free from the Internet in Europe," said Jay Berman, chairman and chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a London-based group representing 1,500 firms. "Record companies everywhere find that they not only need to fight piracy, but also develop alternate revenue streams."

Piracy - which accounts for 95 percent of music sales in China, according to Berman's organization - has forced multinational record companies serving the world's most populous country to abandon classic-style album contracts, drop development of formal distribution channels and eliminate any possibility of a top-40 list based on sales.

"China is the ultimate example of industrial-scale piracy and its impact," Berman said. "The business model for the record industry worldwide is moving toward resembling what we see in China today."

Alternative sources of income tapped by top Chinese stars include paid appearances, sponsorship deals and extended concert tours through the nation's vast hinterland.

"In the United States and Europe, stars have it easy if they make a hit record," said Han Hong, named best female artist this year at Channel V's China Music Awards, and whose renditions of Tibetan songs have become nationally popular. "In China, we have to give so many concerts that we do not have time to rest our voices."

To add to the concert revenue and combat piracy, Han slashed the price of compact disks sold at her concerts to 15 yuan ($1.80), compared with 5 yuan for pirated disks and the 70 yuan that she formerly charged.

"You cannot fight piracy, so there is no point in even getting angry," Han said. "We must adapt to the environment."
http://www.iht.com/articles/87584.html

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Singapore Police Net Huge Piracy Software Haul
Reuters

Singapore police netted their biggest-ever haul of pirated software and music CDs in an island-wide raid, arresting 17 people and seizing S$1.7 million ($973,600)worth of goods, authorities said Wednesday.

Police in the strictly controlled city-state confiscated more than 124,000 pirated compact discs containing games, software and music Tuesday in a three-hour raid on 10 shops and an apartment and said more arrests were expected.

The haul is the biggest ever for a single raid in Singapore. Two years ago, police arrested 800 people and seized S$7 million in unlicensed software and music during at least 30 raids on the Sim Lim office block, a former showcase of contraband software.

U.S. film, software, video game and music companies are urging Washington to crack down harder on foreign piracy of their products, which they say cost the U.S. economy an estimated $20 billion-$22 billion in 2002.

Singapore, which has stepped up its fight against piracy in the past two years, has agreed to enforce copyright protection under a free-trade pact agreed last month with the United States.

A recent study by the U.S.-based International Intellectual Property Alliance estimated piracy losses in 56 countries they surveyed at US$9.2 billion in 2002.

Losses in the rest of the world were pegged at about $11 billion-$13 billion, not including piracy done over the Internet.

Trading in unlicensed software is a criminal offence in Singapore. Those arrested face a maximum S$100,000 fine or five years in jail, or both.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2288629

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Public Floods Copyright Office With Fair Use Requests
Roy Mark

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it helped 245 consumers submit comments to the Librarian of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office requesting protection for certain ordinary uses of CDs and DVDs. The consumer comments support the EFF's Dec. 18 request to the government to grant four exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in order to permit bypassing of certain technological protection measures for copyrighted works.

Currently, the DMCA prevents users from making the following four uses of some digital media: listening to copy-protected music CDs on certain stereos and personal computers; viewing foreign movies on DVDs on U.S. players due to region-coding restrictions; skipping through commercials on some movie DVDs; and viewing and making fair uses of movies that are in the public domain and released on encrypted DVDs.

"The large number of comments reflects consumers' growing concerns about the DMCA and the very real impact that the law has on their lives," said EFF Staff Attorney Gwen Hinze.

The consumer comments described their difficulties with the DMCA's ban on bypassing technological locks on copy-protected music CDs and movies released on DVD:
dc.internet.com/news/article.php/1592451

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No Need for Arguments Over Whose Music to Play
Ian Austen

As entertainment options multiply in cars and vans, delivering the appropriate soundtrack to every passenger is becoming complicated. Unwired Technology, a company that supplies audio components to several automakers, will offer wireless headphones that allow listeners and viewers to choose from among four sound sources.

That may sound like overkill for motorists who have, say, a radio and a CD player. But Larry Richenstein, president of Unwired, said some vans and cars have DVD players, satellite radio receivers and game systems, all of which generate sound, in addition to the traditional audio sources.

The signals are sent to the Unwired WhiteFire headphones using infrared light rather than radio waves to avoid interference problems. Unlike most other wireless headphone systems for cars, WhiteFire uses digital rather than analog transmission. The system, which comes with a transmitter, a digital encoding computer and two headsets, costs $600; extra headsets are $180. Information is available at www.unwiredtechnology.com.

Mr. Richenstein said he expected the system to be available as an option on some new cars in the 2005 model year. It will also be sold through auto audio dealers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/te...ts/27head.html

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Flexible Music. If the Neuros MP3/OGG player doesn’t do it all, it sure does most of it. It stores and plays over 5000 songs, acts as a portable 20 gig hard drive, receives, records and broadcasts FM radio, it identifies songs, transmits to other Neuros units and records off a built in microphone or through line-in inputs. Wow. Streetdate is March 1st, support for OGG and also Linux scheduled for May. $399.00 list. http://neurosaudio.com/

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Exclusive rights to stagnate
Lawrence Lessig

As pressure mounts on the European Parliament to extend patent protection to software, a crisis is developing in US patent law that Europe would do well to consider. The system in America is broken - to the great detriment of software developers generally - and there is no reason to believe the Europeans could do any better.

The claim that the US patent system is in crisis is nothing new. What is new is the identity of those making it.

From the start, Americans have been sceptical of the government-backed monopoly that is the patent. The first head of the US Patent Office, Thomas Jefferson, was a vocal critic of the very idea. Nonetheless, since the founding of the American republic, Congress has had the power to grant "exclusive rights" to "inventors" for their "discoveries". And for most of that period the scope of those "exclusive rights" was limited.

But since the middle of the last century, both the Patent Office and the courts, encouraged by Congress, have increasingly expanded the range of "discoveries" subject to patent. Most recently and controversially, the courts surprised most practitioners by concluding that both software and "business methods" can be subject to patent protection.

This last shift took place formally in 1998, although clever patent attorneys had been effectively patenting software for many years before that. Critics had been arguing for some time that this extension of patent protection would do more harm than good. As Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman, wrote in a 1991 memo: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."

Yet throughout the administration of President Clinton the Patent Office insisted that the system worked just fine. Patents were being granted for truly novel inventions only, the office said; and innovators had no trouble in identifying who owned what invention. Claims that the system was in crisis were little more than the ravings of Chicken Little. The system would work itself out. It always had.

Yet now the Patent Office is singing a different tune. As its new head, former Republican Congressman James E. Rogan, said in an interview with the L.A. Times on February 7, 2003: "This is an agency in crisis and it's going to get worse. It doesn't do me any good to pretend there's not a problem when there is."

The reason is the mess created by the last administration's patent office, especially in the context of business method patents (the type of patent, for example, that gives Amazon an exclusive right to its "one-click" method for selling merchandise online). "Some of [these] were fairly broad," Mr Rogan told L.A. Times reporter David Streitfeld. "We've gone from a 75 per cent acceptance rate to a 75 per cent rejection rate."

This early and easy acceptance rate led to an explosion in patent applications and patents granted - and, in turn, in the costs that software developers face. "Developing software is [now] like crossing a minefield," says Richard Stallman, the originator of the free software movement that has developed the GNU/Linux operating system. "With each design decision, you might step on a patent that will blow up your project."

This is the most surprising fact about software patents: they are generally opposed most strongly by the people they are intended to benefit. But such opposition is not difficult for a conservative like Mr Rogan to understand. Patents are a form of regulation. They represent a government decision on who gets a monopoly over what invention. Republicans like to claim that Democrats regulate first and ask questions later. They are therefore more eager to ask the right questions up-front.
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentSe...=1045510979794

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Digital rights: A thorny issue
Regulations on intellectual property are having some unintended consequences.
Adam Lashinsky

Digital Rights. It's a topic that doesn't jump off the page for the average investor, music and movie lover, or business person.

However, if you're in either the entertainment or technology industry, it has become the No. 1 issue, the polarizing hot-button topic that can make grown-ups shout at each other nearly as much as abortion rights, war with Iraq, and whether "The Bachelorette" has any socially redeeming qualities.

I confess that until now I have viewed this topic, from afar, as being fairly black and white. Stealing of any kind is wrong. Owners of intellectual property (like music, movies and online financial columns) have a right to make money from that property -- and to be protected by the law against piracy.

Folks who think Napster should have survived because ripping songs from the Internet was cool are whiners who were condoning music theft. (Though at the same time, I think Hollywood clearly didn't "get" the online revolution and was being stupid by antagonizing its customers.)

After attending a so-called "Digital Rights Summit" hosted Wednesday by a group of anti-Hollywood technology types -- including a little innovator called Intel -- I've come to realize that like any controversial issue, it's much more complex than I'd thought.

The summit was sponsored by folks with an agenda: They want to water down legislation the entertainment industry has passed that the techies think will bring the ruination of Silicon Valley. In short, the summit's sponsors want to strike a balance where Hollywood gets paid, but consumers still get to enjoy, share and modify that content.

The recent high point of this fight was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed with Hollywood's assistance in 1998. Without going into too much detail, it basically makes it illegal to copy proprietary content for just about any reason. There are exceptions to the rule, but not many. And it's giving some tech policy types nightmares about the future.

"I'm scared," said Joe Kraus, a founder of the deceased Web company Excite and also of DigitalConsumer.org, the group that organized Wednesday's "summit." What frightens Kraus is that the cornerstones of Silicon Valley -- interoperability (devices working with each other), innovation and empowering consumers -- are being threatened by the perfidious legislation.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/02/20/comm...ine/lashinsky/

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Hungary rolls back internet fees

As of March, the Hungarian government is to reduce internet connection fees by a quarter.

The Ministry of Information Technology and Communication hopes that this initiative will considerably increase internet access in the country.

The reduction coincides with the announcement of a E245 (HUF60,000) tax credit toward the purchase of a PC.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=15090

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Is vigilante hacking legal?
Robert Lemos

Striking back at computers that are attacking a company or home network could be legal under federal nuisance laws, a technology-law expert said Thursday.

Curtis Karnow, attorney for law firm Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, stressed during a speech at the Black Hat Security Briefings conference here that no court case has yet established precedent regarding the use of a limited counterstrike to stop Internet attackers, but that nuisance statutes appear to apply.

"It has a lot of promise...if we can get the court to look at it," Karnow said. "The law allows you to go in without permission and abate, or stop, the nuisance. You can even sue the malefactor for the expense of the abatement."

Nuisance laws allow the state and private individuals to file lawsuits aimed at ending activities deemed harmful to a community. They have been used to close buildings that house drug dealers and to shut down businesses, such as quarries that create excessive dust in a neighborhood.

Karnow pointed to "self help" provisions that allow citizens to take action to mitigate an obvious nuisance as a way of dealing with intruders and so-called zombie servers. Under the law, the victim of an attack could conceivably shut down the offending program on the attacking server--even if the server belonged to someone else, he said.

Karnow's solution could give hope to system administrators whose networks are under attack and who have found that petitioning law enforcement agencies is both slow and frequently ineffective.

Administrators on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) have for weeks discussed what to do about an estimated 20,000 servers still infected by the Slammer worm that continues to send an enormous amount of traffic though the Net. A similar number of computers are believed to be infected by the Code Red and Nimda worms and pose a threat to servers that haven't properly been patched.

However, Karnow warned that counterattacks would have to be used judiciously and only to a limited extent.

"The real problem is collateral damage," he said. "Suppose you screw up--you hit the wrong machine (or) you shut down an entire computer rather than just a process. What happens if you are sued, not by a bad guy, but by an intermediary who was affected by your counterstrike?"

Such issues should continue to deter anyone considering hacking back, he said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002-990469.html?tag=fd_top

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Silicon Valley vs Hollywood at Digital Rights Summit
Rachel Konrad

Repressive copyright laws and costly lawsuits from Hollywood could strike a lethal blow to the U.S. technology industry or even "break the Internet," according to entrepreneurs and academics who dominated a heated digital rights conference.

"Overbroad and overapplied copyright is a threat to all of us and affects everyone," DigitalConsumer.org co-founder Joe Kraus said Wednesday during the Digital Rights Summit at Intel Corp.'s headquarters. "It's eroding the foundation of Silicon Valley."

Punctuated by hisses, applause and shouts of "Amen!" from members of the 100-person crowd, the four-hour debate illustrated the gargantuan gap between Silicon Valley and Hollywood when it comes to so-called digital rights management.

With technology companies' stock prices and revenues mired in doldrums, digital rights management has also become one of the rare issues that provokes passions in Silicon Valley, epicenter of the American technology industry.

Entrepreneurs here say Hollywood's insistence on embedding anti-copying technology in devices would crimp product innovation in the flagging technology sector. Executives at startups say they have lost manufacturing contracts and venture capital funding because of the mere threat of litigation from television studios, multimillionaire movie directors and others in the entertainment industry.

Greg Ballard, chief executive of Santa Clara-based SONICblue, which makes digital audio players and other electronic devices, said his company spends about 20 percent of capital expenditures on legal fees. That comes to about $3 million per quarter defending lawsuits from 28 Hollywood studios.

"Companies like ours are going to stop innovating because at the edge of innovation is a lawsuit," he said. "We cannot afford that risk."

The lone Hollywood defender in the four-hour conference blasted technophiles' allegations as "overblown and simplistic."

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Van Nuys, said Silicon Valley's complaints were little more than trivial self-pity. Berman, who said he felt "like France at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council," said digital rights has become a smoke screen for discussing financial excess of Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and the realities of the industry's slump.

"Let's not believe in the notion that Hollywood and repressive intellectual property laws — rather than overcapitalized price-to-earnings models, fears about war and other aspects of a cyclical economy — have had the most repressive effects on innovation in Silicon Valley," he said. "Let's have some perspective. This issue is not as bad as 45 million people living without health insurance."

Berman and others with ties to Southern California's entertainment industry say too many consumers copy creative works illegally. They blame Silicon Valley companies for creating hardware and software that make it easy to copy and distribute creative works on the Internet, and they say artists — ranging from screenwriters to rock stars — would stop producing if they were not guaranteed royalties.

Stanford University Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig said the debate has cast a "nuclear pall" over both the technology and entertainment industries.

But he said his greatest fear was that Washington politicians would craft binding legislation about copyright laws based on how consumers use the Internet in 2003, when millions of consumers download content onto hard drives because slow dial-up connections make it tough to stream content quickly to a variety of devices.

Within a few years, Lessig said, extremely fast Internet connections would make the debate over encryption and copyright protection irrelevant.

"In the future, it will be easier to pay for subscription services than to be an amateur database administrator who moves content from device to device," Lessig told the crowd. "We're legislating against a background of the Internet's current architecture of content distribution, and this is a fundamental mistake."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Feb20.html

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"I think the onus is on the retailers to take care of this because the recording companies always shoot themselves in the foot.”
Twilight of the CD? Not if It Can Be Reinvented
Laura Holson

Introduced in the United States 20 years ago, the CD is losing its allure. From 2001 to 2002, some 62.5 million fewer of them were sold — a decline of 9 percent to 649.5 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Online swapping of songs is growing at a crippling rate, forcing almost every corner of the music industry to try to divine exactly what role, if any, the CD will play in a future dominated by Internet delivery and competition from popular new technologies like the DVD.

Most analysts and industry executives agree that selling music online is the future. But they say it will take at least two years for companies to devise a business plan for it that makes financial sense. In the meantime, the CD will remain the biggest source of revenue for both music retailers and recording companies, who will try to squeeze as much profit as they can out of each and every sale.

As a result, the CD is being rethought, repackaged and, in some cases, repriced.

Experiments to resuscitate this ailing product are growing. In January, Bon Jovi created a compact disc, with eight previously unreleased songs, exclusively for Target stores. Priced at $6.99, it was intended to help bolster sales of other Bon Jovi albums, including the newest, "Bounce."

All this is happening as the economic underpinnings of the CD continue to deterioriate, endangering the music business altogether. With the rising popularity of online music, much of it available free, technology-wise teenagers, the industry's most voracious buyers, can easily use CD-burning technology to make bootleg copies and sell them at school for as little as $1.

Companies are showing signs of cracking. Two industry veterans have recently lost their jobs: Thomas D. Mottola, the head of Sony Music Entertainment, which lost more than $132 million last year; and Jay Boberg, president of MCA Records. The music retailer Wherehouse Entertainment announced in January that it was filing for bankruptcy protection, partly because of lackluster sales. And the EMI Group, based in London, the only major music company that is not a part of a media conglomerate, is struggling with debt and is believed by analysts to be considering merger prospects.

"Large companies tend to wait until they feel pain to act," said Dan Hart, chief executive of Echo, a recently formed consortium of retailers that hope to sell music online. "Now they feel pain."

Mr. Arnold of Best Buy said he believed that DVD's could well replace the CD in the future because they play not only music but also video images. In the last 12 months, sales of DVD's have surpassed those of compact discs at Best Buy, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/bu...ey/23MUSI.html

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'Five years from now you'll see virtually no CD stores'
Music Biz: What’s Next?
On the eve of the Grammy Awards, the recording industry is under siege: As the Internet drives a file-sharing revolution, it's the end of the (music) world as we know it
Joan Anderman

It's 2008 and you want the new Coldplay album. You walk into a record store where there are no records, enter a kiosk, and download the collection directly onto your portable digital audio device.

Or maybe you're an old-schooler with a soft spot for quaint technology. You sit down at the computer, whip out the $30 prepaid card you got for Christmas, log on to Amazon.com, and burn a few of the 50 tracks you've got coming onto a compact disc. Voila: instant artifact.

Perhaps you'll click over to your music subscription service. Depending on your plan, you download tracks No. 2, 7, and 11 for a dollar each into your Internet-wired home stereo or, as a monthly subscriber, load an iPod to your heart's content.

Actually, it might be cooler to download the radio single directly to your mobile phone and make it your new polyphonic, master-quality ring tune.

The bold new world toward which the music industry is headed will barely be on display tonight, when a pageant of pop stars takes the stage at Madison Square Garden for the 45th Annual Grammy Awards. The industry's woes are likely to be drowned out by the sound of business as usual: fans screaming, stars swapping verses, label executives getting paid their due.

But like it or not, the music industry is in a free fall, and things are about to change. The very foundation on which the business is structured -- selling music to stores -- is eroding at an astonishing pace. Sales of recorded music have fallen about 16 percent over the last two years. By contrast, sales of blank CDs jumped 40 percent in 2002, and users of the biggest online file-trading service, Kazaa, outnumber what Napster ever had.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/05...ores_+.sht ml

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Awards aired amid music industry turmoil
Jonathan Takiff

For music fans concerned with the shaky state of their favorite industry, it's a good sign that the Grammys will be broadcast Sunday night in high definition television and 5.1 channel digital surround sound - the first major award show to make that claim.

The number of viewers actually capable of seeing the show in high def may only be in the hundreds of thousands, but by taking this technical leap, the Grammy- sponsoring National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and its member music labels are sending out an important message. Namely, that they want to reside at the cutting edge of technology and provide a heightened entertainment experience to their music-lovin' constituency.

Clearly, that communique is a positive one, equal to the exciting Grammy parade of vital young talents like Norah Jones, Coldplay, Ashanti and John Mayer, plus returning pros like Bruce Springsteen and the Dixie Chicks, all of whom will be entertaining at this year's music gala.

With prerecorded music unit sales off 12 percent in 2002, after an almost as sharp decline the year before, the industry is clearly suffering and of the mind-set that changes must be made.

Thus explains why music labels' talent rosters have been ruthlessly cut in recent months, with all but the most reliable moneymakers told "thanks for the memories."

Major label leaders have also been dropping like flies. Sony Music Entertainment chief Tommy Mottola has been the most visible, replaced by a guy who admittedly knows little about the music business, former NBC TV exec Andrew Lack. (Still, that naivete could work in his favor, if Lack can "innocently" cut Sony loose from some of the traditional practices of this industry, like greasing palms to win airplay.)

The music business' lobbying organization, the Recording Industry Association of America, is in a state of turmoil, too, following the recent resignation of its CEO Hilary Rosen. She was the lead attack dog going after illegal Internet file-sharing services like Napster and Kazaa.

You'll also note a new front guy for NARAS, Neil Portnow, speaking Sunday night at the Grammys. Portnow says he's jumped into the organization too late to make much of a personal dent on this year's Grammys, but will review "every aspect of the presentation" for 2004.
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/living/5229650.htm

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High-Speed Services May Cost More
Saul Hansall

Of the roughly 20 million users of high-speed Internet service, only a few hundred thousand customers are likely to have their rates increased as a direct result of yesterday's ruling by the Federal Communications Commission. But some executives argue that eliminating this form of price competition will lead to increased overall prices for the service, also known as broadband.

The companies that will be hardest hit are those that have built high-speed data networks that share the lines of local telephone companies into homes and offices. The F.C.C. voted to eliminate, over three years, a rule that forced local Bell companies to let these rivals offer broadband services using their networks.

But even under the old rules, which had been intended to help them, these companies have had a hard time competing, and most have failed.

The biggest company remaining in that market is Covad Communications, which provides high-speed data service to 200,000 homes; its service is sold to consumers mostly by Earthlink. Covad said that, with the ruling, the price it paid local phone companies for access to their wires would be $5 and $15 a month, up from the current rates of less than $5 or, in some cases, free.

Currently, Covad charges Earthlink and other Internet service providers about $30 a month, and Earthlink in turn charges consumers about $50 a month. If the new rules are carried out, Covad said it would be forced to raise its prices.

Phone companies use a technology called digital subscriber line, which allows a voice phone call and high-speed data to use the same copper wire at the same time, transmitting the data through inaudible high frequencies. The previous F.C.C. rules forced local phone companies to give access to these high frequencies to companies that were building their own data networks but did not want to string new wires to consumers' homes.

Michael K. Powell, the chairman of the F.C.C., argued yesterday that phone companies should have been forced to continue to share their lines for broadband service. He had taken the opposite point of view for voice service, arguing the Bell companies should not be forced to share their networks. He was outvoted on both counts.

"Line sharing has clear and measurable benefits for consumers," he said. "The decision to kill off this element and replace it with a transition of higher and higher wholesale prices will lead quite quickly to higher retail prices for broadband consumers."

Internet service providers can also buy D.S.L. service directly from local phone companies, without going through a company like Covad. Those arrangements, which are subject to both state and federal regulations, are not affected by the rule change yesterday. Indeed, most of the D.S.L. lines offered by the two largest Internet services, America Online and Microsoft's MSN, are purchased directly from local phone companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/business/21BROA.html

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US powers internet growth
BBC

The US continues to be the driving force behind the global growth in internet use, new figures suggest.

About 10 million US adults hooked up to the internet for the first time in 2002, boosting the overall number to 168.6 million, or 79% of the population, Nielsen Netratings said. But Nielsen pointed to Spain and Brazil as countries likely to host more spectacular internet revolutions in coming months. While the increase in US net users represented only 3% growth year-on-year, the number of Spanish surfers soared by 22%, Thursday's survey found.

Online populations
US: 169m
Germany: 38.7m
UK: 28.0m
Italy: 23.0m
France: 21.9m

"The report points to Spain as the next great internet market," said Nielsen spokesman Richard Goosey. "In addition to the largest increase in percent population with internet access, Spain also had the biggest percentage increase in most of the internet activities undertaken by surfers in the last six months."

E-mail volumes rose by 6%, with chat room participation rising by 9%.

"Spain now has the highest rate of instance message usage - 49% - and chat room participation - 44% - across all countries." Brazil, meanwhile, "displays enormous potential for future growth", Mr Goosey said. "An additional 18% of the telephone household population there plans to acquire internet access in the next 12 months."

Worldwide, the number of people with access to the internet from home hit 580 million in the October to December period, up 17 million on the quarter before.

Changes in online populations
Spain: +22%
UK, Italy: + 6%
Germany: +4%
US, Netherlands: + 3%
Hong Kong: -3%
Australia: -4%

Data: Q4 2002 compared with Q4 2001
Source: Nielsen Netratings

US surfers accounted for 29% of users, with Europe accounting for 23%. While growth in surfer numbers the UK, Italy and Germany outpaced that in the US - on a percentage basis - the number of Hong Kong and Australian residents with internet access declined. Mr Goosey attributed the falls to "maturity" of the markets. With Sweden and the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Australia show the highest rates of home computer ownership, and highest proportion of PC owners who have internet connections.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2786081.stm

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The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission today announced that it will hold a public inquiry into whether an Internet interconnection service should be regulated under Part XIC of the Trade Practices Act 1974. http://203.6.251.7/accc.internet/dig...m?RecordID=959

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An Appeal to Honor in Fight Against Internet Piracy
Amy Harmon

Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, has decided to take the battle against Internet piracy to a higher moral ground.

Mr. Valenti has long raged against the illegality of the swapping of unauthorized copies of movies by students on college campuses. But in a speech to Duke University law students today, he plans to shift his emphasis to more basic principles: "duty, service, honor, integrity, pity, pride, compassion, sacrifice," according to a preliminary text of the speech.

"If you treat these words casually," it continues, "if you find them uncool, if you regard them as mere playthings which only the rabble and the rubes, the unlearned and the unsophisticated, observe and honor, then we will all bear witness to the slow undoing of the great secret of America."

A former aide to President Lyndon Johnson, Mr. Valenti said last week that he was inspired by Mr. Johnson's approach to passing the Civil Rights Act. "He said `I'm not going to talk politics or legality or the constitution,' " Mr. Valenti recalled. "He said, `I'm going to confront these congressmen with their own morality.' "

Many college campuses have installed software to limit the flow of large digital music and movie files over their networks, but the unauthorized copying continues.

"Some people will read his speech or hear it and feel Jack is being idealistic and not realistic," said Graham B. Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, and co- chairman of a national committee working on the file-trading issue. "But what he is saying needs to be said because it is the crux of the issue."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/te...gy/24JACK.html

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Daniel Aaron, a Founder of Comcast Cable Television, Dies at 77
David Kirkpatrick

Daniel Aaron, a refugee from Nazi Germany and an orphan who went on to become a founder of Comcast, the largest cable company in the country, died last Thursday in Philadelphia, where he lived. He was 77.

The cause was Parkinson's disease, according to the company.

In 1963, Mr. Aaron persuaded Ralph J. Roberts, a Philadelphia entrepreneur who had recently sold a men's wear business, to buy a small cable television system in Tupelo, Miss. As part of the deal, Mr. Aaron agreed to help run it, and over the next 30 years they built or acquired dozens of other cable systems around the country. Last fall, the company they started, Comcast, acquired AT&T Broadband to become the largest cable television service provider in the country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/ob...es/24AARO.html

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Radio Plans Shift in Tone as Drumbeat of War Builds
Lynette Holloway

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, listeners denounced many radio stations for playing songs insensitive to a nation in mourning. Now, program directors are planning to adjust their playlists if the United States goes to war with Iraq.

Expect to hear more patriotic tunes, and songs that appear right for the moment. The changes most likely will occur on stations with the broadest appeal, like those with top 40's and country formats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/bu...ia/24RADI.html

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Swarm Radio - a cheaper, faster 'casting technology
Andrew Orlowski

The technology behind the next generation of file sharing legal battles was unveiled at CodeCon today. Brandon Wiley describes Alluvium as "Peer to Peer radio" - which it is, but it also blurs the distinction between streaming and downloading once and forever.

So what is it? To begin with, Alluvium "streams" Ogg. It's an umbrella project that uses some existing technologies - such as Tornado's swarm downloading - with the initial goal of providing a better IceCast than IceCast.

"It offers between 10 per cent and 90 per cent bandwidth savings," says Wiley. The worst case for Alluvium is Icecast - always going to be better than IceCast."

With distributed "swarm" downloading technologies such as BitTorrent and Tornado - which has half a million users already - it's possible for hundreds of users to download a file without hammering the server. They take advantage of the under-used uplink capacity of your net connection to upload portions of the file to another user. So when you download a file from a given location, you're actually getting it from many other users in chunks.

The upshot is that Alluvium needs much lower server overhead for the broadcaster than conventional streaming technologies. In fact it would be possible to run it from a Sharp Zaurus PDA, reckons Wiley, because all it needs to act as a server is httpd.

I learned some interesting details, such as Wiley designed it to use random ports to avoid P2P - something he learned from his experience working on FreeNet.

Now why, you're wondering, would this prompt legal issues? Well, there's an explicit distinction at the moment between streaming (which the RIAA thinks is OK, so long as the broadcasters pay royalties) and downloading (which is not OK under any circumstances). Technically they're similar in that both Alluvium and {insert your favorite streaming player here} leave stub files in the cache which they delete after the session has finished.

But Alluvium is a streaming technology that uses file downloading techniques. So some legal clarification will need to be made.

I liked Brandon's idea of running Alluvium on a PDA. I very much like the idea of each phone being a personal short-range station and it turns out that like me, he's waiting for a Bluetooth-enabled MP3 player before making his purchase.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/29436.html

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Alluvium - Technical Overview

Alluvium is a technology for doing low-cost streaming media broadcasts. However, it uses a very different approach from existing streaming servers such as icecast, Real Server, and the Quicktime Streaming Server. In fact, all you need server-side is a standard web server. You don't even need any modules or CGI scripts.

The first thing you need to run an Alluvium station is a playlist. This is a simple file in the Alluvium playlist format, which is based on the RSS 1.0 news format. All of the RSS tags used are standard tags from existing schemas and which retain their intended semantics. Radio station playlists and RSS newsfeeds are really quite similar. They both specify a sequence of content of possible interest to the audience. One interesting side project to do would be creating audio and video weblogs and news stations which are created by aggregating multimedia feeds about particular topics. For the moment, however, we're working on simple music and voice broadcast. You can generate an Alluvium playlist file easily from a normal music play playlist file using the playlist generation tool.

The playlist file specifies the locations of a series of files containing content and also the time at which that song starts. The client software will skip through the playlist until it finds the song which is scheduled for the current time and then fetch that song. The files are specified as URLs and so can be hosted anywhere on the web. Each file could even be hosted on a different site. Most importantly, the files don't have to be hosted on the same site as the playlist.

Files are downloaded using the Open Content Network (OCN) utilizing exciting swarming download technology. The client software first checks with the OCN gateway, which stores special headers for all of the files being distributed through the OCN. If the gateway doesn't know about a particular URL, it will fetch the necessary information from the URL and then cache it. The information stored by the gateway contains information needed to swarm download the file such as a hashtree.

Among the information obtained by the client from the gateway is a list of addresses for other clients who are also downloading or have recently download the file. Clients download multiple parts of the file simultaneously from each other. When a certain part of the file is unavailable from other clients, a client will fetch it from the original source URL and then share than part with the other clients, minimizing the load on the server which stores the content files. The majority of data transfer happens between peers. Additionally, priority for downloading is given to chunks earlier in the file. This means that while the file does geneally transfer out of order, it is sequential enough for file playback to happen immediately.

After the first file download has started, the client immediately starts sending it to a locally generated icecast-compatible stream. You can then direct your media player to the local stream and listen to it exactly as though it was a normal icecast stream.

The benefits of this technology are savings in bandwidth and processor usage. Since most downloads happen between listeners, the server has much less load. In fact, it is unlikely that an Alluvium station would ever have performance as bad as the icecast model, in which the server has to send every byte to every listener. Bandwidth savings are almost certain. Additionally, unlike icecast servers serving files for Alluvium stations have no need to decode the files. Therefore, you do not need to consume processing power decoding compressed music files. In fact, you don't even need a floating point processor. Alluvium broadcasts can be done from incredibly low-cost, obsolete hardware as long as they have sufficiently fast I/O and network speeds
http://tristero.sourceforge.net/allu...hoverview.html

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Filter, the technology digest form the Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Feb24.html

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File-sharing dilemma for broadband firms
Jane Wakefield

Fast net providers find themselves with a tricky dilemma as file-swapping becomes one of the most popular broadband activities. The ability to get hold of music, video and software at the touch of a button for free is proving a major draw for people making the switch to fast net services. But sharing material that is copyrighted is illegal and file-swapping is causing a huge drain on the bandwidth, and consequently the pockets of service providers.

File-sharing - known as peer-to-peer (P2P) networking - has all the elements of being the perfect online activity. Like many of the internet's success stories it is all about community, it is free and it is mutually beneficial to both the sharer and the recipient. But for the music and movie industries such services are a disaster because they offer no way of recouping royalties. Despite much- publicised battles with peer-to-peer providers, the industry seems to be fighting a losing battle.

According to analysts Jupiter Research, file- sharing in Europe is growing at a phenomenal rate, with over 75% of broadband subscribers using P2P networks at least once a month. This means that networks are being swamped with file-sharing traffic and the amount of bandwidth they use is causing serious headaches for providers.

"Although not the only factor in driving internet users to broadband, file-sharing has proven to be broadband's first killer application," said Jupiter analyst Dan Stevenson. "As well as being a big problem for record labels and the Hollywood studios alike, internet service providers are beginning to suffer too under the heavy weight that file sharing imposes on their networks," he added.

Many may have to follow the cable provider ntl and some European operators in limiting the amount of bandwidth users can get their hands on. If ISPs start managing peer-to- peer networks it could be argued that they are helping users to break copyright laws

Monthly data limits will increasingly become the rule rather than the exception, expects Jupiter Research. This will force users to either adapt their newly-learned broadband behaviour or pay a heavy price for being bandwidth hogs. There seems to be little alternative for operators, already struggling to make money on wafer-thin margins.

There are tools that operators can put into their networks to re-route or reduce the bandwidth being used by file swapping services but this could prove to be a legal minefield. "If they start managing peer-to-peer networks it could be argued that they are helping users to break copyright laws," points out Andrew Ferguson of broadband advice website, ADSL Guide.

ISPs appear to be in a no-win situation, either continuing to bear the brunt and cost of heavy network traffic or face the wrath of users by introducing punitive charging for using bandwidth-heavy services.

Some of the UK's smaller ISPs have already grabbed the bull by the horns. Andrews & Arnold is offering a tiered service, charging £60 a month for totally unlimited access and a more reasonable £29.95 for a service with bandwidth restrictions. UK ISP Sniff Out, true to its name, sniffs out those people using P2P services for more than six hours a day and moves them to a different part of their network.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2745445.stm

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They say it swats P2Ps like flies
TippingPoint Announces Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention for UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Appliances and Systems
Press Release

TippingPoint Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: TPTI), the leaders in high-speed intrusion prevention, today announced a Peer-to-Peer Privacy Prevention (PPPP) capability that allows corporations, universities and government agencies to control the use of peer-to-peer file sharing applications. PPPP is an optional capability for all UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Appliances and Systems.

Peer-to-peer file sharing applications like Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire, WinMX, and Bearshare are often used illegally to copy music and videos. This type of activity opens an employer or institution to copyright infringement liability, and lowers productivity due to bandwidth monopolization. TippingPoint's PPPP capability will enable organizations to block, limit and prioritize peer-to-peer traffic based on specific client, server, IP address, application or payload type.

The PPPP capability not only increases security and productivity, it also decreases the legal liability of an organization. Allowing this type of traffic to run unabated exposes organizations to potential royalty payments. "Several of our clients have been contacted by media companies threatening legal action for copyright infringement," said TippingPoint Chief Technology Officer Marc Willebeek-LeMair. "Now, in addition to helping our clients eliminate security risks, our PPPP capability will enable clients to reduce their legal risks."

The Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention capability is a feature on the UnityOne 400, 1200 and 2400 Intrusion Prevention Appliances, and will be available in June. The PPMS price is $9,995 per system.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030224/dam009_1.html

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UNCC aware of digital theft on campus
Online piracy could jeopardize students' academic careers
Josh Blacklaw

The UNC Charlotte Information & Technology Services department recently purchased software that could change the way the Web is surfed on UNC Charlotte's campus. The new software logs all Internet traffic and can be used to tell who was on a network computer at any given time.

Karin Steinbrenner, chief information officer for UNCC, said that according to the Millennium Copyrights Act, schools do not have to search for any illegal activity but are required to investigate when notified by outside agencies such as Mediaforce or the FBI.

"I receive two or three messages a week from the recording and video industry regarding copyright violations," she said.

Once information is provided, and the person owning the IP address is found, it is turned over to Student Affairs for review. The penalties could range anywhere from having your network account closed, to expulsion.

Susan Wagoner, who manages Student Computing, said she cares most about educating students on UNCC's copyright policy, and the dangers associated with downloading media illegally. She said that IT lab policies can be found at :www.uncc.edu/labs/LabInfo/. Policy #66 of Responsible Use of University Computing and Electronic Communication Resources, covers most everything and can be found there. Other information on the subject is posted in the computer labs, and all IT policies can be found on the University attorney's Web page.

Wagoner's colleague, Rowanne Joyner, is the director of User Support Services. She said that the FBI has been involved before. She has mixed feelings on the subject of online piracy.

"It's illegal," Joyner said but stressed that the Internet is designed for information sharing.

Wagoner agreed and said that information on the Internet is very valuable, but that digital theft is wrong.

"It's the same thing as plagiarism," she said in reference to school policy. Wagoner also mentioned that the logs don't tell us what a user was looking at, just which computer they were on and at what time, in regards to the information they receive.

"It is illegal," Steinbrenner said. "There will be punishment."
http://www.nineronline.com/vnews/dis.../3e59a0b885cb7

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Purdue cracks down on downloading
Jenny Jones

Students downloading copyrighted material through Purdue's computer network may soon be penalized for their actions.

With the recent flare of copyright infringement allegations, the University is cracking down on illegal downloading by sending out letters or making phone calls to students, warning them that downloading copyrighted materials, such as music, movies and games, is against University policy — not to mention the law.

"I think that the expectation might be that because it's on the Internet, it's OK to download, but just because it's out on the Internet doesn't mean it's not copyrighted," said Kathy Peters, associate dean of students. "And copyright infringement is a violation of federal copyright law."

Although the University is not tracking students for copyright infringement, members of the entertainment industry, such as Sony, are keeping track of copyright violations, including file sharing, said Peters. This comes after the Recording Industry Association of America claimed to be losing millions of dollars to file sharing programs such as Kazaa, a peer-to-peer network based out of Australia.

Once these entertainment companies detect copyright violations and determine that the infringements are taking place through a campus network, they contact the University. From there, the University is able to identify by name the students who are downloading copyrighted materials and take action on those students. Since June 2002, 420 accounts of copyright violation have been reported to Purdue alone.

"We contact the student and tell them to cease and desist basically," said Steve Akers, executive assistant to the dean of students, of the violations. But Peters said that depending on the case, students who are reported to be downloading copyrighted materials using University resources might receive punishments, such as having their University computer privileges revoked.

"I don't want students to think, 'I get one free shot,' because that's not the case at all," Peters said. "We evaluate every case as it comes in."

Purdue is not the only university to tighten up on student violations of copyright. In December, Indiana University sent e-mails to 177 students, telling them that they should delete files from their computers, according an article in the Indiana Daily Student.

Universities such as IU and Purdue, which provide Internet access to students, are allowed this type of jurisdiction over what materials students are able to download under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects copyrighted material online.

But universities could soon be required to do more than warn students about downloading. They could also be ordered to provide the names of individuals who are illegally downloading material from the Internet.
http://www.purdueexponent.org/interf...legaldownloads

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From file sharing to photos, these women loathe representational sex.
Ban on Porn Is Proposed at University
Stuart Silverstein and Rebecca Trounson

An engineering professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has launched a campaign to ban the use of school computers to view pornography, igniting debate over the limits of academic freedom.

Linda Vanasupa, chairwoman of the materials engineering department, plans to introduce a resolution in April before the academic senate to impose the ban.

The proposal -- known as the "Resolution to Enhance Civility and Promote a Diversity-Friendly Campus Climate" -- also would prohibit using the university's computer technology to gain access to hate literature.

Vanasupa, who joined the faculty 12 years ago, said her effort began after a university employee complained to her that she was unwillingly exposed to pornography downloaded onto a computer that she shared at work.

After receiving the complaint, Vanasupa said she asked campus administrators to crack down on online pornography in the workplace. But Vanasupa said she was told that the practice could not be banned without intruding on academic freedom and 1st Amendment protections.

Vanasupa counters that her resolution "is specifically to prevent personal sexual entertainment in the workplace," and would simply bring campus policy into line with anti-harassment legal standards for the workplace. She said it would limit only "a very small aspect of our access" to the Internet, and would not restrict use of computers for professional purposes.

In addition, she noted that the resolution provides that "faculty and staff who need to access hate literature, obscenity or pornography for bona fide work purposes" can petition the university for a waiver.

"It's easy to submit a request," she said. "How long does it take to write a memo?"

Carlos Cordova, the university's legal counsel, replied that viewing pornography at work "is stupid and wrong activity. We all agree with that."

But he said state and university policies already in place are adequate to deal with the problem without running afoul of 1st Amendment or academic freedom concerns. He cited the campus' anti-sexual harassment policy, along with state and university policies barring excessive use of computers for personal purposes.

Cordova cited the experience of many universities in the early 1990s that enacted codes barring hate speech, only to see them struck down by the courts on 1st Amendment grounds.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...s%2Dtechnology

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In Web disputes, U.S. law rules the world
Michael Geist

Few Internet law issues generate more controversy than concerns surrounding Internet jurisdiction. In recent months, courts in both Australia and the United States have grappled with the issue in high-profile cases.

The first involved an allegedly defamatory Wall Street Journal article about Joseph Gutnick, an Australian businessman who chose to sue in Australia rather than in the United States, where the newspaper is based. The second involved a copyright infringement suit launched in a California court against Kazaa, a leading online peer-to- peer file sharing service owned by an Australian company and incorporated in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu.

In both instances, the courts chose to assert jurisdiction over the disputes. While the Gutnick case spurred several ominous editorials in the U.S. about the negative implications for free speech that could ensue as a result of the decision, the truth is that both courts merely adopted an approach that is commonly used worldwide. Simply put, courts in all countries are inclined to assert jurisdiction over online activity, wherever it originates, so long as harm is experienced locally and the sense is that the party responsible either knew or ought to have known that the harm was a likely consequence of their actions.

This approach has been applied by French courts in cases involving the online availability of Nazi memorabilia, by U.S. courts in cases involving copyright and online gambling, and by British and Australian courts in cases involving online defamation. While the debate over cases such as Gutnick and Kazaa are bound to continue, a much greater Internet jurisdiction threat has arisen but received scant attention.

The larger threat comes not from courts asserting jurisdiction over online activity, but rather from national legislatures that create laws that are expressly designed to apply not just in their own country but worldwide. The United States has begun to use this approach quite regularly with new privacy, copyright, and computer crime legislation that feature extra-territorial provisions ensuring that the law may be applied both in the U.S. and abroad. The most blatant example of this extra-territorial approach comes from the U.S. Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, a law enacted in 1999 to deal with cases of domain name cybersquatting. Over the past three years, U.S. courts have faced numerous cases involving the application of the ACPA and it has gradually become apparent that this law has no limits.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=969048863851

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This media exec says peer-to-peer file sharing is "the greatest thing that ever happened to the music industry."
Atlantic Records VP talks talent
Jessica Feinstein

Mike Caren could have been as famous as grumpy American Idol judge Simon Cowell. But after two interviews with the producers of the popular television show, Caren decided that TV judge was not a role he wished to play.

"I thought that it would probably destroy my career," said Caren, vice president of Artist and Repertoire Development at Atlantic Records.

With an invitation from the Yale Entertainment Society, Caren spoke about his experiences in the music industry at a crowded Morse College Master's Tea Thursday afternoon. Caren, who at 25 has already worked with Rob Zombie and Courtney Love and signed successful artists such as Trick Daddy and Nappy Roots, has built a career upon making few mistakes.

While an average of one out of 10 artists signed to labels are successful, Caren said he has a 50 percent success rate.

"Mike Caren seems to be a person with a golden touch," Morse Master Frank Keil said.

Despite his accomplishments, Caren discussed what he felt are some of the current problems with the music industry, including the replacement of independent radio with corporate stations.

"I think popular music is at an all-time low," he said. "The problem is that there are fewer outlets for popular music that is cutting edge."

Nevertheless, Caren said he maintains a positive attitude about the future, especially new technology like Peer-to-Peer file sharing, which he called "the greatest thing that ever happened to the music industry."
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=21904

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Perspective: Get ready to be fleeced
Declan McCullagh

Don't look now, but a team of lobbyists and politicians is gearing up to enact new digital copyright laws that will cost you more money and result in more government regulations.

Unhappy with the current reach of the law, the lobbyists and politicians believe that more restrictions levied on U.S. companies are necessary. Their target: The consumer electronics industry, which is already suffering through America's economic malaise and, conceivably, companies that sell music and video-playing software as well.

Who is behind this maneuvering? Don't blame Jack Valenti, or the folks over at the Recording Industry Association of America (they're too busy protecting their Web site from further defacements). You'll find the culprits among the "fair use" crowd, whose champions include none other than Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and whose allies include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and DigitalConsumer.org.

At the Intel-sponsored Digital Rights Summit in Silicon Valley last Wednesday, Wyden said he was about to introduce legislation requiring consumer electronics devices and media such as music CDs to be clearly labeled with explanations of any anticopying restrictions. Boucher has already introduced a bill to give federal bureaucrats the power to require "prominent and plainly legible" labels on copy-protected CDs.

Their intentions may be pure, but their methods are not. Whether CDs should be labeled as copy-protected should be up to the public, not the merry band of aging technophobes in Congress. Consumers are not dumb or naive. If rational people can't use CDs on all their electronics devices, word will get around, and they won't buy anymore. Record labels, too, have an incentive not to overly annoy consumers: CD shoppers are not price-inflexible, and if copy protection schemes become too onerous, they'll be rejected. Just look at the miserable failure of DivX.

As tempting as it may be, the solution is not to follow Hollings' lead and use the political process to demand the kind of regulations that "fair use" advocates think are appropriate.
I can understand the frustration felt by the "fair use" folks. Congress enacted three worrisome copyright laws in quick succession in the late 1990s: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the No Electronic Theft Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act. Only now are we seeing the ridiculous ways that they're being wielded--to block third-party toner cartridges for laser printers and possibly toss the average peer-to-peer user in prison for up to three years. Last month's rejection by the Supreme Court of a challenge to the copyright extension didn't help either.

Even worse, Congress could go further and impose additional regulations on computer hardware and software makers. That's what Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., hoped to do in his reviled Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which would forcibly implant anti- copying technology in nearly anything with a microprocessor.

But as tempting as it may be, the solution is not to follow Hollings' lead and use the political process to demand the kind of regulations that "fair use" advocates think are appropriate. The right thing to do is try to repeal the worst sections of those three laws--hey, it could eventually happen--and then leave Congress out of it. To his credit, Boucher tries to do that in part through his Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act--but the other half of the bill is devoted to increasing regulations on the music industry.

Put another way, what's happening right now is lobbyists from the entertainment industry are seeking to regulate computer technology in hopes of limiting copying, and academics and left-leaning groups are seeking to regulate digital rights management technology in hopes of mandating "fair use." Both sides hope to enlist Congress--raising the very real possibility of interminable political battles that could shape the future of digital media more than the technology itself.

Both sides are wrong. It was a mistake for the movie studios and the record labels to start this political tussle in the mid-1990s, and it's a mistake to follow their lead. (And let's not forget the Business Software Alliance, whose members include Microsoft, Apple Computer and Adobe Systems, and which remains one of the biggest backers of the DMCA.)
http://news.com.com/2010-1071-985622.html

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Creation Myths
Does innovation require intellectual property rights?
Douglas Clement

The most forceful performance at last year’s Grammy ceremony was a speech by Michael Greene, then president
of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Speaking not long after the 9/11 attacks, Greene gravely warned of a worldwide threat -- "pervasive, out of control, and oh so criminal" -- and implored his audience to "em-brace this life-and-death issue."

Greene was not referring to international terrorism. "The most insidious virus in our midst," he said sternly, "is the illegal downloading of music on the Net."

Greene’s sermon may have been a bit overwrought, but he’s not alone in his fears. During the last decade, the captains of many industries -- music, movies, publishing, software, pharmaceuticals -- have railed against the "piracy" of their profits. Copyright and patent protections have been breached by new technologies that quickly copy and distribute their products to mass markets. And as quickly as a producer figures a way to encrypt a DVD or software program to prevent duplication, some hacker in Seattle, Reykjavik, or Manila figures a way around it.

The music industry has tried to squelch the threat, most conspicuously by suing Napster, the wildly popular Internet service that matched patrons with the songs they wanted, allowing them to download digital music files without charge. Napster lost the lawsuit and was liquidated, while similar services survive.

But the struggle over Napster-like services has accented a much broader issue: How does an economy best promote innovation? Do patents and copyrights nurture or stifle it? Have we gone too far in protecting intellectual property?

In a paper that has gained wide attention (and caught serious flak) for challenging the conventional wisdom, economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine answer the final question with a resounding yes. Copyrights, patents, and similar government-granted rights serve only to reinforce monopoly control, with its attendant damages of inefficiently high prices, low quantities, and stifled future innovation, they write in "Perfectly Competitive Innovation," a report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. More to the point, they argue, economic theory shows that perfectly competitive markets are entirely capable of rewarding (and thereby stimulating) innovation, making copyrights and patents superfluous and wasteful.
http://www.reason.com/0303/fe.dc.creation.shtml