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Old 16-10-03, 09:31 PM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – October 18th, '03

Quotes of the week: "It's like the pope of software meeting the Dalai Lama of integration, that's why I'm here to kiss the corporate ass. I don't kiss everybody's." – Bono, on Apples’ iTunes for Windows.

“Hell froze over.” – Steve Jobs




Review: New Napster Returns a Bit Buggy

A test version of Napster 2.0 launched with more than a half- million songs from all the major music...
Matthew Fordahl

Anyone who thinks music should cost nothing will be disappointed with the reincarnated Napster online music service, which has emerged from the ashes of the old free-for-all as a legal, recording industry-sanctioned, pay-to-play store.

That's not to say Napster 2.0, available to the public Oct. 29, has lost all traces of the old. The headphoned kitty logo is still there - in fact, everywhere. Its new owner, Roxio Inc. (ROXI), also has maintained some of the spirit of old Napster. Minus the theft, of course.

Several old Napster features that helped build community and encourage musical exploration give its successor a slight edge over the competition, including Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iTunes Music Store, which has been available to Macintosh users since April and will soon be available to the Windows crowds.

But the basic service provided by all the online stores - selling difficult-to-steal songs for 99 cents - is more or less the same, thanks to very similar licensing deals struck with the record labels that have, after many years, started to see the light and profit potential.

Napster, which works only on Windows-based computers, will launch with half a million songs - more than its rivals. Still, that number pales in comparison to what was available on Napster 1.0 or today's illicit file-swapping networks.

As with the other legal services, songs purchased on Napster are more reliably a higher quality than those downloaded from a peer-to- peer network where you're never quite sure if the file was properly labeled, ripped on an underperforming computer or contained a virus.

And like the rest, Napster's digital rights management technology limits what can be done with each file. Each purchased song can be shared on only three computers but can be burned to a CD as long as the play order occasionally changes. The tunes also can be transferred to a portable music player an unlimited number of times.

(Napster can be used to move songs to Samsung's Napster-branded player. Owners of other players, which must support Microsoft's secure Windows Media Audio format, have to switch to Microsoft's Windows Media Player to transfer songs.)
http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/200...D7U7AEBO0.html


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Apple Launches iTunes for Windows
John Borland and Ina Fried

Apple Computer unveiled the Windows version of its closely watched iTunes music jukebox software and song store Thursday, in a rare foray away from the Macintosh platform.

Like the iTunes Music Store service it unveiled for the Macintosh computer last April, the new jukebox software for Windows is free and offers a one-click access to downloads of an expansive music catalogue, with most songs priced at 99 cents. The company had promised to launch the Microsoft version, widely anticipated to be unveiled at Thursday's event, by the end of the year.

The new Windows iTunes jukebox, which is compatible with Windows 2000 and XP, has the same look and feel of the Mac version. It supports Apple's copy-protected Advanced Audio Coding format as well as MP3--but not Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) format.

The performance of the Windows-based iTunes service will be closely monitored as a bellwether of Apple's future outside its traditional computing product line and also as an indicator of the future of the digital music business.

"This is not some baby version of iTunes or the music store," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at the Moscone West convention center here. "This is the whole thing." In his typical marketing hyperbole, Jobs declared, "iTunes for Windows is probably the best Windows application ever written."

Acknowledging that developing products for the dominant Windows platform marks a deviation for Apple, Jobs began his introduction by pointing to an image with the words "hell froze over." The company later handed out posters with that phrase below a picture of a Windows PC that's running iTunes.

As expected, Apple also announced new accessories for the iPod, including a microphone and a reader for removable flash memory cards that will allow users to store--but not display--digital photos on the devices. PC accessories maker Belkin is making both accessories, which Apple is selling through its site.

The release of the iTunes service will be closely monitored as a bellwether of Apple's future outside its traditional computing product line but also as an indicator of the future of the digital music business. Like Microsoft and Sony, Apple characterizes its products as the centerpieces of digital home entertainment systems. The leap onto the Windows platform--which has a PC market share of more than 90 percent compared with Apple's less than 5 percent--marks an expansion of that ambition.

Apple's launch of its online music store in April jump-started a digital music industry the collapse of numerous start-ups and restrictive licensing terms had demoralized.

In large measure due to Jobs' negotiating power and his stature in Hollywood as CEO of the successful Pixar Animation Studios, Apple was given a much freer hand than were its predecessors. As a result, iTunes was hailed as the first consumer-friendly digital music store. In less than six months, the company said it sold 13 million songs, far more than any online song store in a similar time frame despite only being available to the relatively small market of Macintosh users.

As part of the launch of the Windows service, Apple also announced a pair of new marketing partnerships that are aimed at driving iTunes use deeply into the mainstream. Apple and America Online have agreed to put iTunes "buy this song" buttons next to every song that's listed in AOL's music service, which its 25 million subscribers can access. Clicking the button will automatically launch the iTunes music jukebox and begin downloading the song; billing will be handled through the customer's existing arrangement with AOL.

Beginning early next year, PepsiCo will launch a separate promotion, giving away 100 million iTunes songs as part of a sweepstakes it will launch in connection with the 2004 Super Bowl. Pepsi will produce 300 million specially marked bottles, 100 million of which will contain caps that entitle the customer to download one free song from Apple's music store.

The company's San Francisco launch also drew on endorsements from music stars. U2 singer Bono, rap artists Dr. Dre and Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger each gave a live endorsement of the iChat videoconferencing software. Singer Sarah McLachlan also appeared live to sing several songs and to talk about how she used the iPod.

This marketing blitz will be needed. Several rivals are seeking equally relaxed terms from the record labels, and Apple's Windows version of the digital song store will have considerable competition it lacked in the Macintosh world.

Already, Musicmatch and BuyMusic are offering similar access to downloaded music, and Napster is slated to launch later this month. Sony, RealNetworks, Dell and Amazon.com, among others, are all expected to provide their own music stores.

The rhetorical battle lines between Apple and its rivals are already being drawn.

Most of those other services for Windows are distributing music in Microsoft's WMA format, for which Microsoft also produced the digital rights management software. That means that songs that are purchased from BuyMusic.com, Musicmatch, Napster and other rivals can be played on any music device that supports Microsoft's WMA--a list of about 40 different portable devices--and played in most major MP3 software programs.

By contrast, songs that are purchased from Apple, wrapped in its proprietary FairPlay content protection technology, can be played only on the iPod, which represented 31 percent of all MP3 players sold in July and August. Songs sold through the service can be played on any software player that supports Quicktime, Apple's longstanding audio and video format, the company said.

Microsoft and other device makers say this Apple strategy limits consumer choice--although the selection of devices available with other services is resulting in a de facto industry standardization on Microsoft's own audio software and digital rights management.

"I think one of the expectations of a Windows customer, really something that people see as one of their basic rights, is choice of multiple services and being able to mix and match," Dave Fester, general manager of Microsoft's Windows Digital Media division, said in an interview shortly before the Apple launch.

The impact of Apple's entry into this unfamiliar Windows environment wasn't lost on the artists who endorsed the iPod and the iTunes store.

"It's like the pope of software meeting the Dalai Lama of integration," cracked U2's Bono. But Apple produced a genuinely good service, the singer added. "That's why I'm here to kiss the corporate ass. I don't kiss everybody's."
http://news.com.com/2100-1041-5092414.html


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Grokster Chief Faces Critics; 60 Minutes Films Campus Visit
Chris Lewis

A cadre of songwriters and musicians, angry at being ripped off by online song swappers, confronted the head of a major file- sharing service during his speech Monday at Vanderbilt University — a drama that was caught on film by a 60 Minutes camera crew.

Wearing a headset microphone, Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster, paced a campus classroom, railing against the recording industry for trying to block new peer-to-peer (P2P) software services, such as his, then suing the computer users who trade songs for downloading.

His speech was punctured by a flurry of piercing questions from music professionals sprinkled among the audience of mostly college students. They took him to task for sponsoring a service that does not pay them royalties for their intellectual property.

“This is something that’s affecting the economy here. This is something that’s affected me, it’s affecting incomes,” said Denny Sarokin, who recently went to Washington D.C. on a lobbying mission with the Nashville Songwriters Association International.

Rosso remained defiant throughout, stressing that P2P technology developed by Grokster and similar software services, Morpheus and Kazaa, have survived lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America, just as the VCR survived past legal attacks by the music and film industries.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you I condone copyright infringement. I’m going to tell you that, the way to stop unauthorized content from moving across peer-to-peer networks is simple. You authorize it. You license it,” he said.

Rosso urged songwriters to direct their anger to the record companies, which he said have refused to negotiate with him on licensing. He has formed an advocacy group, P2P United, to lobby Congress to force the record labels to license their songs for use by P2P users, who swap digital files without having to log onto a central server.

“I think the only thing that’s going to really make this whole thing work is something called compulsory licensing. Radio stations pay a licensing fee. (The proceeds) go to a fund to be distributed accordingly. We should be treated like radio,” Rosso said.

He said the P2P services would protect the content with digital rights management software, distribute the files for a fee, and share a percentage of revenue from the licensing arrangements with both content creators and content owners.

His comments were met with skepticism by the songwriters and musicians, who accused him of contributing to the theft of 2.5 billion song files a month.

“He’s spinning this whole deal to make it sound like they’re going to do the right thing. There’s no possible way they can do the right thing by doing a compulsory license on this. It wouldn’t work,” said Bruce Bouton, a member of the American Federation of Musicians.

Rosso has been shadowed by a CBS television crew filming a 60 Minutes episode on file sharing, which hasn’t been scheduled to air yet.
http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/in...&news_id=27459


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Grokster Chief Heads To Spanish P2P Firm
John Borland

The head of file-swapping company Grokster, Wayne Rosso, has resigned from his post and will take the helm of younger Spanish peer-to-peer technology rival Blubster.

Rosso has long been one of the most colorfully outspoken executives in the file-trading world, known for comparing recording industry executives to Josef Stalin and the fight over digital file trading to the Vietnam War protests.

But in recent months, he's also taken issue with the market leadership of Kazaa parent Sharman Networks and the FastTrack file-swapping technology, which his own company originally licensed to launch Grokster.

As head of Blubster parent Optisoft, he'll take on Sharman and FastTrack more directly, licensing the fast-growing, newer technology to other file-swapping companies in hopes of creating a new giant, he said.

"We've got our sights on FastTrack," said Rosso, who held the title of president of Grokster. "We want to knock them off, and we think we can."

Rosso, largely through flights of well-placed rhetorical excess, has given Grokster a public profile that exceeds its relatively small share of the file-sharing download market.

But that profile was solidified when the company won a key legal battle in April, where a federal judge ruled for the first time that companies that offered software tools for file-sharing, as opposed to operating networks directly as Napster once did, were not responsible for copyright infringement that took place using the software. Record labels and movie studios have appealed that decision, but the ruling gave new optimism to demoralized peer-to-peer developers.

Optisoft and Blubster are largely the creation of Pablo Soto, a 23-year-old Madrid programmer who has muscular dystrophy. Soto created the technology with an aim to eliminate many of the networking inefficiencies of previous generations of file- swapping services, while greatly improving people's privacy.

As the Recording Industry Association of America prepared to file lawsuits against individual file swappers this summer, Blubster touted its technology's ability to shield its users from prying legal eyes. However, at least one Blubster user was included in the RIAA's lawsuits.

Optisoft and Blubster have already begun the process of building a network that rivals the FastTrack technology, which is used by Kazaa, Grokster and iMesh, and reaches tens of millions of people. According to Download.com, a software aggregation service operated by News.com publisher CNET Networks, Blubster has been downloaded more than 3.9 million times. Piolet and RockItNet, two newer software programs, also tap the same network.

Rosso promised that he would be just as vocal in his new position, and he predicted that Optisoft would soon be the target of industry lawsuits.

"I will continue fighting for the rights of the little guy," he said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5091358.html


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Rockitnet Joins Private P2P Network MP2P

Offers Privacy Protection for P2P Users
Press Release

Optisoft, S.L., announced today that Rockitnet has joined the MP2P Network, uniting with popular software programs Blubster and Piolet. Rockitnet is a new P2P (Peer-to-Peer) software application that provides superior privacy to its users. (www.rockitnet.com)

Rockitnet launches onto the MP2P (Manalito P2P) Network, the most efficient private P2P network in the world, as the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) continues its misguided and unprecedented legal battle against music consumers. MP2P network will provide Rockitnet with the proprietary protocol that forms the sea of user traffic that media is accessed from. MP2P brings Rockitnet users to more than ten million sources of media and entertainment already hosted on the peer-broadcasting network.

"The recording industry is bypassing judge and jury in their legal assault against music consumers, so we're especially gratified that we can provide enough privacy to our users that they are not needlessly attacked by predatory litigation," said MP2P developer Pablo Soto.

Rockitnet 1.0 provides a sleek and easy to use interface to create playlists from audio and video files that can be viewed and enjoyed on the internal media player. Users can communicate with others all over the world through voice chats, instant messaging, and file sharing. Rockitnet ensures fast searches, no failed downloads, the highest quality MP3 and OGG files, and quick media previews.

"We created MP2P to be the fastest means of transmitting media around the Internet and in light of recent lawsuits against children, the elderly, and the misidentified, I'm elated that the protocol makes it difficult for them to wage a war against the people who use Rockitnet, Blubster, or Piolet," said Pablo Soto.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release...lease_id=58553


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Record Industry Warns Of New Lawsuits
John Borland

The Recording Industry Association of America has begun preparing a second round of file-swapping lawsuits, notifying 204 individuals that they are in line to be sued for copyright infringement.

Unlike with the previous wave of suits, the record labels' trade association is giving the lawsuit targets warning this time around, offering them a chance to settle before the suits are filed. The change in tactics comes after considerable criticism from federal lawmakers and others concerning the group's first batch of court actions against 261 individuals last month.

"We take the concerns expressed by policy makers and others very seriously," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "In light of the comments we have heard, we want to go the extra mile and offer illegal file sharers an additional chance to work this out short of legal action."

The advance notification preceding this second wave of suits marks only a small concession to critics of the RIAA actions, which have been the most controversial tactics taken by copyright holders in years of fighting piracy online.

The first round of suits, launched early in September, targeted 261 individuals whom the RIAA said had been identified as the most "egregious" file swappers, often offering more than 1,000 songs for download over peer-to-peer services such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

But as the identities of those individuals hit the press, criticism arose. The case of a 12-year-old girl living in New York public housing quickly became emblematic of what critics called the RIAA's excessive enforcement action. A 60-something Boston woman, accused of offering hardcore rap songs for download through the Kazaa service, was dropped from the lawsuit lists after it emerged she actually used a Macintosh computer, which did not support Kazaa.

A Los Angeles area man is also challenging his lawsuit, saying that the RIAA's suit identifies him as using an Internet address that was not his, and that he can prove it.

In congressional hearings last week, RIAA executives promised they would begin sending letters to potential targets of lawsuits in advance of the actual filings, allowing those who wish to settle early to do so, and giving people who believe they were misidentified a chance to make their concerns known.

The letters, sent out in two batches Monday and Friday, are primarily focused on settlement.

"We have gathered substantial evidence that you have been using a peer-to-peer network such as Kazaa or Gnutella to download and upload music owned by our clients," reads a sample letter provided by the RIAA. "We are writing in advance of filing suit against you in the event that you have an interest in resolving these claims through settlement."

The letter reminds potential defendants that "ignorance of the law is not a defense," and that the law provides for minimum damages of $750 for each copyrighted recording that has been "shared." It also warns potential defendants not to destroy any evidence, such as MP3 files stored on computers, that may relate to the lawsuits.

It says that the RIAA will "proceed to litigation" if it does not hear from the recipient of the letter within 10 days after the date of the letter.

From this point on, the lawsuits against accused file-swappers will proceed on a rolling, weekly basis, rather than in waves of hundreds, an RIAA spokeswoman said. To date, the organization has reached settlement agreements with more than 50 of the people sued in the first round.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5093078.html


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Lime Wire Launches Content Portal
Tony Smith

Peer-to-peer software provider Lime Wire has launched a 'legal download' portal, in a bid to make it easier for its users to find content they are authorised to download.

Lime Wire's MagnetMix content portal uses a URL-style location system to pin-point content on the Gnutella network. Content owners who want their material - be it audio tracks, video, photography, written content, a game or other software - can submit the source of their material to the portal.

For content owners, it's a way of making their material rise out of the morass of illegally shared songs and pirated DVDs - something that's hard to do even if you host your material on the network yourself. The other option would be to offer your material on your web site, but this way you potentially get closer to your audience.

Lime Wire, meanwhile, shows itself to be promoting the use of P2P for legitimate purposes rather than the dodgy ones for which it and its ilk are infamous. At launch, MagnetMix was only able to offer maybe a handful of items in each category, little of it compelling or not widely available from other download sites. But Lime Wire no doubt hopes that content owners will begin adding material in earnest, now the service is up and running.

Of course, the snag is that by emphasising what they are allowed to give away - out-of-copyright novels, unsigned bands' demo tracks, royalty free photos, and so on - Lime Wire is highlighting the fact that almost all of the good stuff on offer, the contents that's worth having, isn't legal.

And is downloading the complete works of Shakespeare from Gnutella any better than taking it from Project Gutenberg? Or downloading a software update or shareware tool via MagnetMix any better than getting it from the manufacturer or downloads.com?

No, it's not, and that's the problem Lime Wire and co. face trying to build a solid business out of P2P. Only by providing a large enough collection of legal content can they persuade us that the $20 they charge for the ad-free version of their client apps - or the revenue they make from ad sales - isn't ultimately being made on the back of illegal content swaps. But in doing so they de-emphasise exactly what differentiates them from all other legitimate download services.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/33434.html


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CD Fair Warning
Stereophile Magazine

NARM publishes new brochure it hopes will smooth over some consumer fears about the coming wave of restricted-use CDs.

Whether listeners like it or not, record labels, including major players like BMG and Arista Records, are now making moves to rein in how their CDs are played and used. Unfettered CDs have been on the shelves for almost two decades, and some industry observers note that changing how they work at this late stage could be a recipe for trouble with consumers.
Recognizing that the flash point for much of this trouble will be at the record counter—imagine the scenario when angry customers bring back new discs that won't rip to their iPods—the National Association of Record Merchandisers (NARM) has decided a little proactive propaganda is in order.

In a letter to music retailers, NARM's Jim Donio explains, "Consumer education in regards to copy-management technology [is] a key priority for the industry. With this introduction of copy-management technology into the marketplace comes a wide array of questions that retailers and their employees who interact with customers—as well as the customers themselves—need to have answered."

To address some of these questions, NARM has published a new brochure intended for both store personnel and consumers. Questions such as "Why copy-management technology?" (piracy, of course) and "Why are music labels deciding to move forward with copy-management now?" are answered from the record industry's point of view.

Also included are warnings about possible compatibility issues and simple explanations of how the restrictions work. The brochure notes, "These discs play just like an enhanced CD. Certain products tested last year had playability issues with DVD players, car stereos, and game consoles. These discs play on nearly all DVD players, car stereos, etc. Anywhere an enhanced CD will play, these discs will play."

One major drawback of the restricted disks, however, is non-compatibility with the Apple iPod. Since the new discs are based on SunnComm's MediaMax, which itself is rooted in Microsoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM) applications, the brochure leaves it up to iPod owners to read between the lines, explaining only, "It will play on any device that supports Windows Media DRM. These include Creative Labs Nomad players, Compaq iPAQ personal audio players, RCA personal audio players, Sanyo personal audio players, RIO personal audio players, and eDigital personal audio players."

NARM's brochure assures consumers that the restricted discs are not compromised when it comes to sound quality, but warns, "The technology will continue to be upgraded, not just from release to release, but in some cases from shipment to shipment of the same release."

Donio's note concludes, "As other titles are released with copy-management technology, NARM will actively work with companies to ensure that retailers, their employees, and customers all have access to information that answers any and all questions that may arise. Our ultimate goal is to achieve a positive consumer experience as the industry transitions to this new technology."
http://news.designtechnica.com/article1453.html


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Is the Music Industry Stuck in the Past?

Companies must embrace digital distribution, report says.
Macworld.co.uk staff

The music business needs to adopt new business models that embrace digital music distribution, rather than engage in costly legal action, a research firm claims.

In its report, 'Thinking outside the disc', Dallas-based analyst firm Parks Associates suggests the music industry has "so far failed to adapt" to the digital age. The analysts argue that the businesses fight digital piracy by creating a free music-on-demand service that relies on advertising for its income stream.

Research analyst John Barrett said: "Digital music has changed the market, and business models need to change too or the industry will suffer the consequences.

"Even if file-swapping networks were to magically disappear, the traditional revenue models would still be under strain," he warns.

Barrett argues that the recording industry has always been able to sell the same musical works multiple times to the same consumer simply by repackaging it. "Digital music allows consumers to repackage music themselves," he warns.

The music business is unlikely to adopt such a business model, however, as industries reliant on advertising have been hard hit by an advertising slump in recent years.

Industry insiders also point out that conventional audio CDs have only finite shelf-lives, and that digital music collections can themselves be lost, through computer error or theft. "If consumers want to keep music, they should buy vinyl--it lasts for years," a music executive told Macworld.

In related news, Roxio will launch its Napster 2.0 beta service Thursday morning in New York. The service will launch fully October 29, the company Web site claims.

The digital distribution industry is an increasingly crowded place--AOL Time Warner yesterday revealed plans to launch a European music download service by next spring and an online radio station next week. This service will be available to AOL subscribers.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112857,00.asp


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New Discs Double DVD Storage
Martyn Williams

There is good news at this week's Ceatec Japan 2003 exhibition for users looking to squeeze extra data onto a recordable DVD disc. Companies are demonstrating dual-layer versions of both DVD-R and DVD+R discs that offer almost double the data capacity of today's standard blank DVD discs.

Pioneer, Koninklijke Philips Electronics, and Mitsubishi Kagaku Media, the latter better known by its Verbatim brand name, have said they have developed prototype discs that can hold up to 8.5GGB of data and will show them at Ceatec, according to statements from the companies.

Most DVD-R and DVD+R discs on the market at present offer a data storage capacity of 4.7GB. That's plenty of space for your family snapshots and word processor file backups, but this space gets filled up fast when large multimedia files, such as video clips, are recorded onto the disc.

Anticipating the need to store more data, the developers of the DVD format specified several additional types of discs when the format was decided on in the mid-nineties.

The simplest of these disc types, and the most common today, is the 4.7GB single-sided, single-layer disc--that is, a single recording layer that can be used on one side only.

Developers also included support for double-sided discs, double-layer discs, and a combination of the two. Mitsubishi Kagaku is already selling double-sided,
single-layer discs which double the data capacity to 9.4GB by allowing recording on both sides of the disc although these require the user to eject, flip-over and reinsert the disc when wanting to switch from side one to side two.

The prototype discs from Pioneer, Philips, and Mitsubishi Chemical have a single recording side, like current discs, but two recording layers. By adjusting the focus of the laser beam each layer can be targeted without disrupting data on the other. This allows for up to 8.5GB of data to be stored on a single-sided disc, which isn't quite the data capacity of a double-sided disc but can all be accessed without the hassle of turning the disc over.

Dual-layer discs are already supported under the DVD-Video format and some commercial video discs already use the format. If you've seen a momentary pause in the middle of a DVD movie that's likely the player switching from layer one to layer two.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...pcworld/112795


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Reality TV
Andrew Lee

A prototype digital video system producing images of such high quality that the human eye struggles to distinguish them from reality has been developed by Japanese engineers.
The system, called ultra high definition video (UHDV), achieves image resolution 16 times greater than even the most advanced video broadcasting technologies now available.

Its developers at the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) said the system could be used to provide an ultra realistic 'immersive' viewing experience when, for example, showing sporting events.

UHDV displays images with 4,000 horizontal scanning lines, compared to the 1,000 offered by the current state-of-the-art high definition television (HDTV) technology and just 625 for standard TV broadcasts. When horizontal and vertical scanning are both taken into account a UHDV picture contains 16 times the number of pixels ? individual image components - of HDTV.

NHK, which unveiled details of UHDV for the first time at broadcast technology conference IBC in Amsterdam, said its engineers had to custom-design a video camera, data-storage device and projection system, as no standard broadcasting equipment could cope with their extreme demands.
http://www.e4engineering.com/item.as...0014&type=news



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Note to Sony: Skip IPod Knockoff
Peter Rojas

A few years ago, Sony made a colossal mistake. Rather than build a hard-drive-based MP3 player, the Japanese company sat back while Apple Computer wowed the world with the iPod. The iPod quickly became not just the most popular MP3 player ever, but the epitome of portable audio, as Sony's Walkman had been in the '80s.

Sony was so worried about piracy, and sapping revenue from its Sony Music division, that it chose to do nothing and let Apple ascend. Apple made boatloads of cash from the iPod, while Sony struggled to remain profitable as revenues from its main cash cow, the PlayStation 2, plummeted.

But it's not too late for Sony. We don't mean the rumored hard-drive MP3 player that Sony supposedly will introduce next year. There probably isn't a whole lot the electronics giant can do now to unseat the iPod, but Sony does have a chance to leapfrog competitors in the next wave of entertainment gadgets: personal video players.

PVPs are basically hard drives with screens attached for watching videos. There are already a few models on the market from Archos, RCA and others, and it seems every month or so another obscure Taiwanese manufacturer announces another offering. Microsoft and Intel have developed a design of their own for others to build.

While there isn't as much demand for watching video while on the go, plenty of people will want a PVP to watch movies or catch up on TV while traveling or commuting.

With color LCD screens getting cheaper by the minute, the difference in price between an MP3 player and a device that can also play videos will be small in a year or two. Besides, having an MP3 player that can play videos is icing on the cake (just like it doesn't hurt to have a DVD player that also plays CDs). You can expect to see at least a dozen personal video players on the market by the middle of next year, if not sooner.

Anyway, if Sony is smart, rather than try to fight last year's war, its marketers will look ahead and see that now's the company's chance to steal the thunder back from Apple.

It looks like they just might do that. A few weeks ago, a prototype of a Sony PVP turned up at the WPC Expo trade show in Tokyo. The sleek-looking gadget -- which has a high-resolution 3.5-inch display and the sort of design that makes you remember why you ever liked Sony in the first place -- has space for about 10 hours of video, or five full-length movies, on its 20-GB hard drive.

Besides looking good, a Sony PVP will have to make it easy for people to have stuff to watch. But here's where things get hairy. Because it's illegal to copy a DVD to a computer, and most people won't want a PVP to watch home videos, the most likely source of content will be peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Kazaa, where it's not too hard to find MPEGs of The Sopranos and The Simpsons.

I'm also guessing Sony higher-ups aren't thrilled with the idea of a gadget from their own shop that encourages piracy of Sony Pictures movies off the Net. But some recent encouraging movements show some enlightenment: Sony plans to introduce a gadget that can record TV shows onto Memory Stick memory cards for later viewing on a Sony Clié handheld computer. It requires no stretch of the imagination to see how this recorder would be a perfect complement to a Sony PVP.

Besides, Sony might not have much choice but to introduce a PVP, lest Apple come to dominate another market that would have been a natural fit. Of course, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has indicated before that he thinks a "video iPod" is a bad idea, but the company has a history of being secretive. Even with Jobs pooh-poohing, you shouldn't be surprised if Apple unveils a PVP down the line.

Now there's a tantalizing thought! An iFlicks online movie store where people could buy video files for any PVP.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60767,00.html


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My (Brief) Career As An ISP
Declan McCullagh

The FBI is convinced that I'm an Internet service provider.

It's no joke. A letter the FBI sent on Sept. 19 ordered me to "preserve all records and other evidence" relating to my interviews of Adrian Lamo, the so-called homeless hacker, who's facing two criminal charges related to an alleged intrusion into The New York Times' computers.

There are a number of problems with this remarkable demand, most of which I'll get to in a moment, but the biggest is the silliest. FBI Supervisory Special Agent Howard Leadbetter II used the two-page letter to inform me that under Section 2703(f) of the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act, I must "preserve these items for a period of 90 days" in anticipation of a subpoena. So far I haven't received such a subpoena, which would invoke a lesser-known section of the USA Patriot Act.

Leadbetter needs to be thwacked with a legal clue stick. The law he's talking about applies only to Internet service providers, not reporters. Section 2703(f) says in its entirety: "A provider of wire or electronic communication services or a remote computing service, upon the request of a governmental entity, shall take all necessary steps to preserve records and other evidence in its possession pending the issuance of a court order or other process."

Last I checked, electronically filing this column to my editors does not make me a provider of "electronic communication services." Nor does tapping text messages into my cell phone transform me into a "remote computing service," as much as I may feel like one sometimes.

Perhaps I'd be immune from the FBI's demands if I used an Underwood No. 5 typewriter instead.

I'm not the only one who's concluded that the FBI is out of control. The Justice Department's own cybercrime manual says the law applies to "network providers" and offers AOL as an example. In a recent column, former Justice Department prosecutor Mark Rasch says the law "was never intended to apply to journalist's records."

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, says the FBI demand to journalists who wrote about Lamo is more than wrongheaded. "It's stupid. Journalists are not Internet service providers. I think someone at the Justice Department just plain screwed up. Maybe they thought they were getting very creative by going after online journalists and saying they were ISPs."

Last Friday, Dalglish's group sent a letter of protest to the FBI's general counsel. The letter also was signed by the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the National Press Club.

So what are Leadbetter and his colleagues in the FBI's New York City field office trying to pull off here?

Lamo--who surrendered to the FBI last month and was released into his parents' custody until a hearing scheduled for later this month--has spent the past few years bragging to journalists about how he broke into the networks of companies such as The Times, Yahoo, Microsoft, Excite@Home and WorldCom.

Lamo does appear to be a singularly polite electronic intruder. Not one of Lamo's known targets has accused him of deleting or altering information, and at least one company thanked him for pointing out vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could have used to do great damage. But if Lamo was telling the truth, he did violate federal law.

That said, the FBI is nuts to think there's anything helpful in journalists' notes and other records that agents can't get somewhere else--like from Lamo himself, who has not denied his earlier claims. Not only would turning reporters into de facto agents of the prosecution be unlikely to result in additional convictions, it would also violate constitutional protections for the press.

That's the second problem with the FBI's letter and promised subpoena: It runs afoul of the First Amendment's protections of freedom of the press. Judges have ruled that a wide-ranging inquiry into a reporter's unpublished work is unreasonable, a protection that one federal appeals court described as reflecting "the preferred position of the First Amendment and the importance of a vigorous press." Who would confide in a reporter who was nothing but a lackey for Attorney General John Ashcroft?

Recognizing this, CNET News.com referred me to its First Amendment attorneys, Roger Myers and Lisa Sitkin. Their response to the FBI on my behalf reminds the government that, "as many courts have recognized, reporters have a privilege under the First Amendment against demands that they produce records or testify in connection with unpublished information, regardless of whether or not their sources are confidential."

The letter is addressed to Leadbetter's boss, Pasquale Damuro, and says: "We write to request your assistance, as assistant director in charge, in correcting your agent's misuse of the (Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act) and in prohibiting further efforts to obtain the threatened subpoena, which, if issued, will raise serious First Amendment concerns and result in a constitutional confrontation between the FBI and the media." It demands that the FBI withdraw its letter and not serve a subpoena.

As another example of the FBI's constitutional carelessness, government regulations say: "Negotiations with the media shall be pursued in all cases in which a subpoena to a member of the news media is contemplated." That never happened here.

The third problem with the FBI's letter is that it requests that I not "disclose this request or its contents to anyone." Those are chilling words for any journalist to read--after all, our job is to report the news, not cover it up by muzzling ourselves. That request almost certainly violates the First Amendment, but more importantly, it violates a journalist's duty to be straightforward with his or her readers.

I haven't heard anything since the original letter last month, but the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said Wednesday that the FBI admits its New York field office did not follow correct internal procedures. Unfortunately, Leadbetter and his colleagues are still eyeing subpoenas, insisting that reporters should "take appropriate action to preserve relevant records and materials."

An apology is too much to ask for. An unequivocal statement from the FBI and Ashcroft that this will not happen again and no subpoenas will be forthcoming--even if proper procedures are followed--is not.
http://news.com.com/2010-7355-5089267.html


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Cable Firms Bet On Broadband Speed, Not Price
Jim Hu

Comcast broadband subscriber Ron Beman said he couldn't care less about Comcast's plan to double Internet download speeds for customers at no extra charge.

The Issaquah, Wash., customer-service representative considers himself a mainstream, e-mail- and Web-type Internet user and said the extra bandwidth, slated to jump from 1.5mbps to 3mbps, won't change his habits significantly.

"There comes a certain point where speed does matter," Beman said, "but then it gets to a certain threshold where I have enough."

Cable companies are betting raw speed will help them win the broadband race, but they may be backing the wrong horse. Slower services from rival DSL (digital subscriber line) providers are showing signs of popularity thanks to aggressive discounts. Although cable currently leads DSL by a wide margin in the United States, that gap is set to close if enough new customers vote for price over speed.

At the end of 2002, there were 5 million DSL subscribers in the United States, compared with more than twice as many--10.5 million--cable broadband subscribers, according to market-research company In-Stat/MDR. By the end of 2003, the gap is expected to remain, with 7.5 million DSL subscribers compared with 13.3 million for cable, In-Stat/MDR estimates. However, the researcher said its projections don't take into account the latest round of DSL price cuts and warned that it may revise its numbers.

Faster connections have been a major factor in convincing Americans to upgrade to broadband from dial-up Internet services, a switch that can boost download rates from 56kbps to 256kbps on the low end. That's enough to take most of the frustration out of Web surfing and much of the wait out of downloading files over the Internet, but not enough to allow for easy fetching and viewing of video or for turbocharged online gaming.

Still untested is how much demand there is for services promising top speeds well above the 1.5mbps currently offered by most cable companies.

Cable companies offer temporary discounts to first-time broadband subscribers that can cut monthly fees by more than half for the first six months or so of service. Ultimately, though, they don't want a price war. Instead, they hope customers will pay a normal price of between $45 and $55 a month for speeds up to 40 times faster than those available with standard dial-up connections.

In contrast, $26.95 a month gets subscribers to SBC Communications' industry-low promotional DSL plan speeds that are about five times those available through America Online's $23.90 a month dial-up service. The SBC price applies for the first year of service, then rises to the normal rate of $39.95.

Although there is substantial demand for dial-up upgrades, analysts said cable companies face a hard sell peddling superfast speeds.

Cable companies can jack up speeds to levels much greater than 3mbps, but that won't happen until there is a sound reason to do so.

During the Goldman Sachs Communicopia conference in September, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts praised the broadband business but cautioned that its true potential has yet to be realized.

"In the last six months, more people are coming up to us and suggesting broadband applications for high-speed Internet," Roberts said, "whether that's ESPN for broadband or Xbox Live or voice-over-IP or video chat or a variety of broadband-only applications."

"We could do 50 megabits if there's a market for that, or 100 megabits," Roberts added.

The problem is there isn't a clear revenue opportunity for cable by opening up its bandwidth floodgates. The recording industry is suing consumers for downloading songs illegally through services such as Kazaa, while legal downloading businesses such as Apple Computer's iTunes are in their initial phases. Entertainment and content outlets are still figuring out how to make money off of video streaming without compromising their television assets, which leaves a limited amount of content available for Web users.

"The one thing that was forecasted to happen was a lot of streaming video," said cable veteran Hindery, recalling Wall Street's expectations. "But if you stream too much video, you destroy the core traditional video business."

The hard part for cable and DSL providers alike is figuring out the balance between speed, price and demand.

This is especially true for SureWest Communications, a Roseville, Calif., company that serves video, phone and broadband to a market limited to the Sacramento region. As a starting point, subscribers can get 10mbps broadband for $49 a month, both downstream and upstream.
http://news.com.com/2100-1034-5089322.html


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The recording industry has a pricing problem. People do not want to pay $15-20 for a compact disc when they can download the same music for free over the Internet. The industry’s solution appears as novel as the technology that is giving it such headaches: launch hundreds of lawsuits against otherwise law- abiding consumers who download music. But, as Wharton legal studies professor G. Richard Shell writes below, this same tactic was tried 100 years ago against Henry Ford. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work today. Shell is author of a forthcoming book on legal and business strategy.

Suing Your Customers: A Winning Business Strategy?
G. Richard Shell

The recording industry has a pricing problem. People do not want to pay $15-20 for a compact disc when they can download the same music for free over the Internet. The industry’s solution appears as novel as the technology that is giving it such headaches: launch hundreds of lawsuits against otherwise law- abiding consumers who download music.

After all, the music industry has invested billions of dollars in its product and thought it had iron-clad intellectual property protection for these investments – copyrights in recorded songs issued by the United States government. But having a strong legal claim on the merits is only one factor in legal strategy success. Indeed, this factor is often the least important one from a business point of view. Other key strategic considerations include the public legitimacy of an industry’s legal attack (i.e. how the move will play in the court of public opinion), the vulnerability of an industry’s strategic position in its market, the resources it has available to sustain a legal war, and the access an industry has to important legal decision makers such as regulators and legislators who can make new rules in the industry’s favor.

The recording industry balanced these factors well in its initial legal strategy – suing online distribution companies such as Napster. Napster was a direct threat with no legitimacy of its own. Its only appeal was whimsy: Average citizens thought its creator, Shawn Fanning, had a neat, new technology. But they also recognized that Fanning was selling the key to somebody else’s candy store. Nobody formed a “Free Fanning” committee to bail him out of legal trouble.

The recording industry, however, has gone one step too far with its latest legal move. Suing your customers is not a winning business strategy. Industries have a completely different strategic relationship with customers than they do with rivals. And this sort of strategy does not play well in the court of public opinion.

But it’s hardly the first time an industry has tried to solve strategic problems using litigation against its customers. And the strategy is no more likely to work today for the recording industry than it did 100 years ago, when the leading automobile manufacturers in 1903 tried to put down the threat of cheap, mass- produced cars by suing consumers who bought Henry Ford’s automobiles. Napster founder Shawn Fanning may have little else in common with Henry Ford, but both men sparked a wave of innovation that transformed their worlds. And both brought down the wrath of incumbent industry associations which tried to stop their new technologies with litigation. The story of Henry Ford’s eight-year legal battle with the “Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers” is a cautionary tale for today’s Recording Industry Association of America.

In 1903, when Henry Ford launched the Ford Motor Company, his third attempt at making cars, automobiles were high-priced, custom-made playthings for the rich. What’s more, the major manufacturers had figured out a way to keep it that way. They had acquired a strategic property right very much like the recording industry’s copyrights on recorded songs. It was called the Selden Patent and it gave its owners the exclusive right to sell a very basic invention: self- propelled vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Many people in the car business thought this patent was an outrage – much as some online retailers today are angry that Amazon.com received a patent on its “One-Click” checkout system. But the U.S. Patent Office had issued the Selden Patent and a group of powerful incumbents had purchased it and formed an association to enforce it. Litigation, then as now, was very expensive – especially for start-up companies with limited working capital. Nearly every car company fell into line to pay royalties to the Association for the privilege of making and selling cars.

Except Henry Ford. The association did not want another competitor in Detroit and it did not like his idea of driving prices down to where average people could afford a car. So it refused to license him. For Ford, it was either exit the industry or fight the Selden Patent in court. He decided to raise a legal war chest and fight the incumbents. The litigation lasted from 1903 until 1911 and along the way, the association launched hundreds of lawsuits against Ford’s customers to scare them away from his showrooms for buying “unlicensed vehicles.”

Most ordinary people of Ford’s era had been content to stand by and watch the automobile makers slug it out over the Selden Patent. It was just an industry cat fight. But when the big “money men” started suing ordinary people who were just trying to buy a cheap car, public sympathy shifted against the incumbents. People rallied to Ford’s side against the bullies. Editorials weighed in against the industry’s heavy- handed lawsuits, and Ford helped his own case by purchasing litigation insurance for his customers. By the time the patent litigation was over – Ford won on appeal in 1911 when the court ruled that the Selden Patent covered only cars made with a special type of engine nobody was using anymore – Ford was a hero, and the largest car manufacturer in America.

What can the Recording Industry Association of America take from Henry Ford’s story? First, you will never win your market by suing your customers. Quite the opposite: you will rally ordinary people to your opponents and alienate a generation of buyers. Exactly what has the industry gained by suing, among others, a 12-year-old girl in New York for downloading songs? A raft of bad publicity, a reputation for being a bully, and a new litigation insurance scheme devised by peer-to-peer software companies who can now cloak themselves in Robin-Hood green.

Worse still, the RIAA’s wholesale use of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to obtain the names of telephone company customers for its lawsuit program has sparked a legislative reaction based on privacy concerns. Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas recently introduced a new bill in the Senate to require judicial review of subpoenas such as those used by the recording industry to fuel its downloading cases. When Kansas Republicans start lining up with liberal Democrats against your industry, you’ve got a whole new kind of legal strategy problem.

Second, no legal rule is strong enough to overcome a radical technical innovation. Courts can delay progress but they cannot stop it. Unlike the automobile cartel that tried to stop Henry Ford, the recording industry’s copyrights are perfectly valid. But so are the speed limits on the interstate highway system. The fact that cars are designed to go faster than those speed limits explains why most people do so, regardless of the law. The Internet is designed to transfer data at zero marginal cost, so people want to download all kinds of things, including songs. Ultimately, no copyrights can stop that.

Third, innovation always drives the prices of yesterday’s technology into the dirt. The way to respond to the demise of the commercial CD is not to sue Internet-users. It is to figure out new ways to make money on music. Maybe concert ticket prices will have to rise. Perhaps groups should be giving more live performances on the web for premium prices. Innovative companies are beginning to sprout up all over the place with new ideas that incorporate digital music – such as selling customized CDs with mixes of a consumer’s favorite songs, video clips, and messages for friends. An Indian company called Saregama India is already doing this with music from old Hindi films and classical Indian artists. The U.S. music industry should be leading the way toward such new concepts, not lashing out at its customers like the angry, injured giant that chased Jack down his bean stalk.

As Henry Ford once summed it up, lawsuits against new technologies provide “opportunities for little minds ... to usurp the gains of genuine inventors ... and under the smug protest of righteousness, work a hold- up game in the most approved fashion.” What the recording industry needs now are new business models, not outdated legal strategies.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/a...3&homepage=yes


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The Beginning of the End of the Internet?
Jessica Rosenworcel

Discrimination, Closed Networks and the Future of Cyberspace... Just over a month ago, Karl Auerbach asked, "Is the Internet Dying?". Today, Commissioner Michael J. Copps, of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in a speech at the New America Foundation, is asking the very same question, "Is The Internet As We Know It Dying?" and warning about FCC policies that damaged media now threatening the Internet.

"The Internet as we know it is at risk. Entrenched interests are positioning themselves to control the network's chokepoints and they are lobbying the FCC to aid and abet them. The Internet was designed to prevent government or a corporation or anyone else from controlling it. But this original vision of the Internet may soon be lost. In its place a warped view that open networks should be replaced by closed networks and that accessibility can be superceded by a new power to discriminate is emerging."

"Our ill-advised Internet policy is only one piece of a tectonic shift across the whole range of FCC issues. From media to telecom to the Internet, we appear to be rushing toward breathtaking regulatory alterations. The Commission is permitting, even encouraging, competition to wither in the face of centralization. It is short changing its responsibility to protect the public interest."

The FCC may soon implement fundamental regulatory changes that would have deep and lasting effects on consumers, innovators, and business users. Copps: "Until now the big corporations that control Internet bottlenecks have been unable fully to capitalize on this power. But now we face scenarios wherein those with bottleneck control will be able to discriminate against both users and content providers that they don't have commercial relationships with, don't share the same politics with, or just don't want to offer access to for any reason at all. From the not so distant shadows of the past, old attitudes favoring industry consolidation and limited access are again seeking to reestablish themselves."

At issue are upcoming decisions at the FCC that will determine how much control companies will have over Internet access and their ability to discriminate against users, data, websites, or technologies. In the dial-up world, current protections require these companies to treat everyone equally. This equal treatment has contributed to enormous growth and innovation on the Internet. These decisions come on the heels of the FCC eliminating related media concentration protections. A federal court has stayed that decision, and Congress is now debating reversing it. In addition, on Monday, another federal court ovhttp://www.circleid.com/print/315_0_1_0/erturned aspects of the FCC's cable broadband policy.

Remarks of Michael J. Copps, FCC Commisioner - "The Beginning of The End of the Internet?" PDF 123k.


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Penn State, Internet2 to develop authenticated P2P software
Press Release

A $1.1 million grant, recently awarded to Penn State by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, will enable the University to partner with the Internet2 consortium in the development of a technology called LionShare, an innovative tool that will facilitate legitimate file-sharing among institutions around the world through the use of authenticated Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks.

Though P2P technologies are typically associated with the well-known controversial file-swapping networks recently highlighted in mainstream media, the LionShare project has been designed to promote responsible file-sharing by providing a way for faculty, staff and students to exchange academic, personal and work-related materials on an officially sanctioned P2P network.

“It’s vital for higher education today to make a concerted effort to develop technologies that encourage responsible file sharing,” said J. Gary Augustson, vice provost for information technology. “We believe that LionShare will lead the way in this effort by providing a model for the positive ways P2P technology can be used for legitimate educational purposes.”

According to Michael J. Halm, principal architect of the project, a prototype of LionShare already has been constructed and is functioning in test form at Penn State as part of a previous University Libraries/ Mellon initiative known as the Visual Image User Study (VIUS). New funding from Mellon will be used to extend LionShare’s capabilities on a global scale, creating a collaborative networks that will enable individuals from a diverse range of institutions to connect to the same secure P2P system.

The unique structure of Peer-to-Peer, which allows a high level of bandwidth and computing power to be shared equally among a community of network users or “peers,” will make it possible for participants to extract specific resources from fellow peer computers, while simultaneously ensuring that these interactions are secure. LionShare also will provide a means for users to access well-known, large-scale repositories that contain digital video, images and other data throughout the U.S., Europe and other locations.

Halm also points out that a critical element of the project will be the participation of university teams in the Internet2 consortium in the creation of Open Source, or freely shared and distributed, software releases of LionShare. These groups will work closely with Penn State researchers on implementing the project’s conceptual design, creating the software development plan, ensuring security and testing the completed system at their respective institutions.

“One of the best features of P2P is that it optimizes bandwidth consumption by distributing it throughout the community of network users — an aspect that will make it possible for an oceanographer, for example, to use this system to request and acquire a complex animated representation of sea floor spreading within minutes from the LionShare network. Hence, researchers and academics will be able to exchange extremely large files via LionShare that just would not otherwise have been transferable. We believe the knowledge Internet2 member institutions have acquired in this area will be essential in fine- tuning the system for academic interests of this nature,” he said.

Two additional partners under the plan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Open Knowledge Initiative and a Canadian group known as eduSource, will collaborate with Penn State to create bridging technologies between LionShare and the centralized international digital repositories such as Merlot, SMETE, CAREO and EdNA, so that data from these centers can be interpreted and shared universally on the system’s P2P networks.

In addition, Augustson said that project developers are designing LionShare’s services to be flexible, enabling the network to accommodate both small private groups or large public organizations depending on specific needs. He also emphasized that the system will track user identity to ensure security, so that participants will never appear as “anonymous” to fellow network members when they’re on the system.

“We envision that it will soon be possible for a physicist at Penn State to collaborate with a group of colleagues from different institutions around a specific set of scholarly resources using LionShare, and do this in an entirely secure and seamless way,” he said. LionShare will demonstrate that P2P truly provides an exciting new tool for scholarly collaboration and synergy.”
http://live.psu.edu/story/4312p



Contact
Heather Herzog
heh4@psu.edu
814-777-1454

Contact
Michael Halm
mjh@psu.edu
814-865-2159
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e-Sharing; Why Should We Pay?
Theresa Leary

Thousands of years ago, people gathered 'round to hear a bard recite Homer's Odyssey.

They didn't buy a copy to read at home, they just listened. The bard used epithets and structural devices so that he, as well as his audience, would remember the story. The idea is very similar to the chorus of a song, or the hook, if you will.

The bard, the artist, wants you to remember what he or she has to say.

Homer did not compose Odyssey to make a quick buck. Neither did the person who finally bothered to write it down.

It was about sharing the story, not finances. Poets coming down through the ages would agree—poetry is not about money, but doing something you love.

Most "real" musicians of the present day would agree. They sing because they love to make music, and if they get rich in the process, even better.

So what's all this hullabaloo coming from the record industries about?

Very seldom (not never, but seldom) does one hear a statement from a band saying, "It hurts us that you download our music."

That's because the musicians want you to listen to their music, they want to share their creation with the world. The record companies themselves are not about creation, they are about the quick buck.

When you buy a recording of Bach, who do you think gets the money? What about Bob Dylan? Do you think he is seeing any of the money? Of course not; The record industry is.

According to www.boycoutt-riaa.com, 56.4 percent of every album sale goes directly to the record label. Two dollars from every sale goes directly to the Recording Industry Association of America, the organization that is presently suing twelve year-olds and anyone else they can get their hands on for pirating music..

Compare that to the 37.6 percent that the musicians get for each sale (you know, before recording costs, instruments, etc.). Not to say that you don't support a band by buying its music, but you're also keeping record execs in "the lap of luxury."

I'm very careful about where my money goes. I buy plenty of CDs—if I know the band needs my sales. Blink-182, Disturbed, Rob Zombie, they don't need my money. They are making more money than I can dream of having. I have burned copies of each of their CDs. However, I've also attended a concert performed by each of these bands. Not only do I get the thrill of hearing a band play live, but I support them monetarily without going through the record label.

I would much rather burn a CD, learn all their music so I can scream with them at the shows, and pay exorbitant amounts for a t-shirt than help finance the record industries' attempt at scaring people from burning music.

Let's face it. We are a bunch of poor college students. I am sure that if we had the money, we would buy every CD we own. As Evan Riley-Williams pointed out last week, we have tuition to pay.

So I say, support the bands you love. Check out www.artistdirect.com, www.boycott-riaa.com, and www.riaa.com to learn the facts. Do not let the RIAA execs scare you out of listening to the music you love. Oh, and read the Odyssey online for free at http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.html.

I don't think Homer will mind.
http://www.spectator-online.com/vnew.../3f87653d0c006


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Outlook: File Sharing
Jeff Howe

Are the big record companies, which have begun suing computer users who share music files online, simply targeting the poor, beleaguered music lover? Absolutely not, says music journalist Jeff Howe in Sunday's Outlook section (Listen, It Isn't the Labels. It's the Law). Howe, a contributing editor for Wired magazine, defends the big labels' right to keep what's theirs. Which isn't to say that the public shouldn't be outraged by some aspects of the lawsuits. They should. But so far, he arguess, music lovers have missed the point.

Howe was online to discuss his article, file sharing and the rights of major record labels.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guessts and hosts; guessts and hosts can decline to answer questions.

________________________________________________

Alexandria, Va.: An RIAA lawyer was part of a Live Online chat last week, and I felt he ducked a good question about why the RIAA had spent so much time fighting against the boogeyman of file sharing and hadn't (at least publicly) appeared to even look at the prospect of finding ways to take advantage of these new technologies and successfully proven sales/distribution methods like iTunes. Do you have any insight on this? My impression is that most people are willing to pay for songs they really want.

Jeff Howe: This is an excellent question, and I wish I had a better answer. The conspiracy theory for some time has been that the music industry is just trying to stall until it can get hold of the distribution channels and get a bigger slice of the resulting pie. I don't doubt that there is some truth to this. It's only natural that a company undergoing a technological cataclysm would attempt to get the best deal it can under the new paradigm, if that makes sense.

That said, the labels also have an excellent defense that they rarely seem to articulate clearly. Before individual tracks, albums or an artist's body of work can be offered in digital form, the labels, artists and song publishers need to negotiate new licensing agreements, ie, decide who gets what cut of the pie. If everything I've heard is true, this has been time consuming, fractious and onerous, for everyone involved.

This gets to another beef I have with the labels. I think they've failed to discuss these licensing difficulties with their consumers because these issues are incredibly complex and, let's face it, skull-crushingly boring. But that doesn't mean it's not the right course. The labels have really treated much of the media as antagonists for many years now. My pitch to the labels for some time has been to let us in on the process they're going through, and lift the hood on the whole rights-negotiation process, so we can at least offer the reading public a look at what sort of obstacles the labels are facing in trying to offer consumers an appealing alternative to KaZAa, et. al. Until they do that, I think it's understandable that consumers question their motives, and are frustrated with the delays. For what it's worth, I also believe that most consumers would gladly pay 99 cents a track (providing they have some manner of flexibility over how they use that track, see above response) or a subscription fee for a COMPREHENSIVE, user-friendly, legitimate service.

_______________________


Washington, D.C.: Great piece in yesterday's paper. Here's my frustration as a music consumer:

I like to use my music in ways that are legal, not yet typical, but which I think will become increasingly common. When I buy a CD the first thing I do is pop it into my Mac, and use iTunes to make AACs (MP4s basically) of all the tracks. From there, they get loaded onto my iPod and/or used to burn mix CDs for the car. Once TiVo starts supporting the AAC format they will also get streamed into my stereo system downstairs thru my home network. (Yes, I am gadget boy -- but these are all pretty run of the mill consumer electronics devices, and I think I'm not that far ahead of the curve in terms of using them.)

So along comes the music industry playing with all kinds of new copy protected formats that make my legal ways of listening to music impossible. If other people start using music the way I do - and I think they will, thought the brands and systems of devices may change -- there's a major problem.

The practical effect of this is simple: I buy 95 percent of my music from the iTunes music store, and when I can't find some there there my first stop is a used CD store/Web site. Two reasons: one, I don't want to buy a CD that I can't use. Two, I resent the record labels using technology to remove my legal fair use rights, and so I don't WANT to give them money for CDs.

Full disclosure -- I played with Napster and downloaded some stuff a year or so back. It was a big pain and I am happy to just pay 99 cents at iTunes to quickly and easily get a high quality copy of a song. I actually have replaced most or all of the stuff I downloaded -- maybe 30 tracks -- with legal, higher quality copies.

Jeff Howe: Thanks for these two provoking posts. This is an excellent real-world scenario of the kinds of media environments most of us will come to inhabit in the coming decades. The transition from analogue to digital is inevitable, which makes it all the more important that we understand the kinds of business models the entertainment conglomerates are constructing, and the laws that make them possible.

The celestial jukebox, a term I clumsily use to represent a future when all our media arrives in digital form, on-demand, could be a magical thing. But as Washington DC poster points out, the reality of the celestial jukebox home will require a fair amount of flexibility from our digital media. I recently had drinks with a DRM guru at one of the major labels, who admitted that as advanced as DRM (digital rights management) schemes are, they still don't allow for the kind of flexibility that different consumers will require. Time-shifting and space-shifting, which are protected reasons for making copies, might require making three or four copies of a song/book/movie, so that digital file can be used in different devices, etc. When everything we consume is "copy-protected," the effect will be to dampen the otherwise great incentive to create these kinds of media environments in our homes. We should all -- consumers as well as media companies -- be concerned about a scenario in which legitimately purchased digital media is so inflexible that the incentive to create unlicensed copies is too strong for most consumers to ignore.

I include the Ft. Wayne post because I believe it touches on these themes. You do indeed rent the content contained on whatever media vehicle (CD, Book, VHS tape, whatever) you purchase. But this has been the case long before the emergence of digital media. If you buy Catcher in the Rye, you don't own Salinger's story, you just own a physical medium for the ideas. I believe it's important for consumers to understand this relationship, but not reason to stop buying music, movies or books. What IS crucial is that consumers demand the kind of "rental agreement" they deserve, one that provides for fair use and conforms to the kinds of consumer behavior (such as that elucidated by Wash DC poster) that are increasingly emerging.

Hope all that was clear -- Jeff

_______________________

Ft. Wayne, Ind.: If I go out and pay $10 - $15 for a music CD, at what point do I own it? I know I can't make money off it, but when is it mine? when I die do they have someone to come around and retrieve the CD from my estate? If all I'm getting is a rental agreement for my CDs, then I want out. The RIAA can re-purchase all my CDs at the price I paid for them and we can terminate the rental agreement. I'm sure they have lots of money for the re-purchase from all the lawsuits.

Jeff Howe: This is the other post I reference in the response to Wash DC poster ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2003Oct3.html


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“DRM” Players
Dan Kaufman

Portable digital audio players.

The phrase doesn't exactly roll off your tongue, does it? They may be small, sexy and have the ability to make your friends envious but the name leaves a lot to be desired - and while you could call them MP3 players, this is rapidly becoming inaccurate.

This is because a number of competing file formats are beginning to emerge, with the most significant being Windows Media Audio (WMA). Developed by Microsoft, it not only has better sound quality than MP3 but also better compression, meaning that each song takes less of your player's memory. It also has another advantage, at least for artists and record companies: the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology.

This can limit the distribution of songs so that, for example, a file can only be played once, or for the first 30 days after being downloaded, or after the user pays. Other rival formats include AAC, WAV, OGG and ATRAC3, which is the only file format used by Sony Network Walkmans.

As if this wasn't confusing enough, the players are also becoming more complex. It may not have been long ago that most took the form of glorified CD players that also recognised MP3 tracks burned onto CD-R discs, but now they have features such as voice recording, radio tuners, cameras and external storage for other files. Apple's latest iPod, for example, not only plays games and acts as an organiser but also has a hard-disk capacity of up to 20GB - a specification many desktop PCs would have been proud of only a few years ago.

Even non-hard-disk-based players offer more storage capacity than before. Whereas it's standard for flash media players to offer 128MB, only a few years ago 32MB was the norm. More players also use FireWire instead of USB.

Both are technologies for transferring data and while USB ports can be found on every computer, FireWire is considerably faster. Developed by Apple, it's not surprising the iPod uses it but other players, such as JNC's Haas player, are also moving to it (although you can generally buy USB adaptors if your PC doesn't have FireWire).

However, the latest trend has more to do with the law than actual hardware - namely the push by record companies and industry bodies to punish individuals.

Both the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have said they would target people who pirate music files en masse and the prosecutions have already begun. ARIA, for example, recently began court action against three university students in Sydney for alleged file-swapping while RIAA has generated bad publicity overseas by, among other actions, fining both a 71-year-old grandfather and a 12-year-old girl.

Yet even with the law on its side the music industry has an uphill battle - a recent survey by research firm Quantum found a third of all music obtained by teenagers was pirated and that a quarter of people aged under 25 regularly used file-sharing services. It's hard to imagine that changing anytime soon.

Not all downloadable music requires you to break the law, however. As well as some artists offering songs free as samples or promotions, people are increasingly becoming used to paying for downloadable songs - as the recent success of Apple's iTunes Store, which sold more than 1 million songs during its first week, shows.

TIMELINE

1979 Sony Walkman

OK, it wasn't digital, but Sony's tape-based Walkman set the standard for portable audio players in terms of size and functionality and remained the market leader for more than a decade.

2000 Napster

Most of its files may have been pirated but Napster, an Internet service that allowed people to download thousands of MP3 songs, certainly kick-started the industry.

2001 Apple iPod

Not only did it hold up to 8000 songs and act as a removable storage device, the iPod injected style and mainstream appeal into the market.

2003 Sony Network Walkman

The name's the same but not the technology - Sony's NW-MS70D Network Walkman is no larger thana matchbox and stores 256MB (about 11 CDs) of music in its flash memory.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...676145040.html


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File-Sharing Lawsuits Show Industry Ineptitude
Christopher Rodkey

It’s almost sad, the level to which record companies are stooping to harass those pesky little college students.

They’ve been suing us here and there, in some kind of “shock and awe” campaign that will try and intimidate us into being afraid to trade songs online.

If they send out enough carefully planned subpoenas and summons in just the right places, they might have an effect, they think.

How about a 12-year-old girl? That’ll show even the young are eligible.

Maybe a 53-year-old Rolling Stones fan? All ages are encompassed in this scare tactic.

And, of course, a smattering of lawsuits are hitting college campuses all across the country. It was almost a surprise that the University of Montana didn’t have a student who received the downloading death knell.

The Recording Industry Association of America must have a pretty short short-term memory. Remember when they went nutso on Napster and shut it down? They missed a chance to work with the current base of Napster users and integrate a pay service. No, they had to flip out and take the most 5-year-old-like action they could: Shut it all down. All or nothing.

They’re missing this chance again. Instead of finding a way to truly embrace the digital revolution — and by all accounts this is a true rebellion — they are acting like the totally uncool parent who thinks its more important to discipline than to fix the problem.

And just like the child of that uncompromising parent, file swappers will find a way around the petty rules and the RIAA will always be playing catch-up.

It’s time for the record labels to figure it out. Mp3 files are here to stay, and any attempt to stop their trade and use will result in even more hard-to-track file sharing.

Instead of constantly feuding, record companies should holster the lawsuit guns and come up with a creative way to sell artists’ products without being unreal about it.

Apple got a head-start with its iTunes software this summer, where customers pay 99 cents to download a song of perfect audio quality for unlimited use.

The program has since been a success, and shows that if the RIAA is able to give up just a little bit of its ego for the sake of working out a solution, it might find a resolution that works.

Artists will still get paid, but the labels probably fear they might not rake in as much cash as when they were making a $15 profit off a $16 CD.

But so long as they keep sending out ineffectual lawsuits from sneaky, back-door monitoring techniques, they will always be an enemy to fight.

And there’s nothing young people like to do more than anger the establishment.
http://www.kaimin.org/test2.php?ardate=20030916&id=1724


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End The Agony Of CDs And MP3s
Christopher Hutsul

I was sitting around a campfire with some old high school friends when I first heard the word MP3. I remember not really getting it.

They told me that an MP3 was a compressed music file that sounded "almost as good as CD" that could be traded over the Internet.

At the time, I shook my head and wrote it off as geek talk.

I was still weary of the whole thing a few months later when a friend convinced me to download Napster ? a file sharing program that was said to be popular with university students and computer hacks.

But before long, the program was magically channelling sweet precious music on to my hard drive and something stirred inside ... I was hooked.

Maybe it has something to do with the timing. I was totally broke and my girlfriend had just departed for an internship in England.

What I did have was an Apple G4 tower (purchased in better days) and a high-speed Internet connection (spliced illegally throughout the apartment).

I hardly slept that winter. I just cruised the Web, exploring, sampling, and discovering music in a way that was intuitive and natural. By spring, about 4,000 songs had streamed into my computer.

I'd loved music my whole life, but this simple piece of software was renewing my vows.

I don't even think I stopped to consider the legal or moral implications of my burgeoning music collection. I was too geared up about all the great artists I was learning about to question my new hobby. I'd tapped into genres of music I didn't even know existed. My friends and I took turns playing our most recent discoveries for each other. We analyzed lyrics and contemplated the lineage of musical genres ...

Who knew at the time we were up to such evil?

And it is evil, according to the music industry and to some of its more surly pawns.

In September, the family of a 12-year-old New York girl who downloaded music using the Kazaa network agreed to a $2,000 settlement in a lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America. The high-profile legal action served as a warning to file sharers ? big and small ? of an ensuing large-scale crackdown.

I won't try to debunk the anti-file sharing movement. Their stance is obvious, and easily defended.

To defend free music sharing, on the other hand, requires a certain degree of rationalization. But without endorsing one side or the other, I'd like to propose a solution that would put an end to the reactionary lawsuits and whiny Metallica press conferences:

A return to analog.

That's right, a return to cassettes and vinyl records. Now realistically, neither the music industry or the music audience would be willing to fully embrace these formats. But on some level, it makes a lot of sense.

If all new albums were to be released on vinyl and cassette formats exclusively, file sharing would pretty much shrivel up.

Because nobody, well, almost nobody, is going to bother encrypting a record or a tape. To do so would be a hassle ? and file sharers are a lethargic breed who have to rest up to do a double-click.

Look, we already know that vinyl is the choice of DJs and audiophiles. The sound is softer, deeper and more satisfying. And has there ever been a more durable music format than cassettes?

Remember what it was like to pop a cassette into a player and hear that long tone at the beginning ... remember what it was like to have different feelings about the two sides of the tape? Side one of Morrissey's Viva Hate, for example, had some grit. Side two faded gently into melancholy ...

A switch to vinyl would also open the door for new technologies: Imagine slipping the new Interpol album into an in-dash record player.

And in some way, records and tapes are more durable than CDs. A record can get a little scratchy, and a tape can develop a wobble. But I'd take that any day over a scratched CD. I don't even have to elaborate on this, because I know you know what I mean.


Look, I'm not trying to say records and tapes were perfect.

But as long as the music industry churns out music in digital platforms, free music will flow through the Web freely. Transferability is the very nature of digital information, so it begs to be uploaded and downloaded.

If the music industry was serious about ending file sharing, it might consider switching back. That it hasn't, tells me there's still plenty of money to be made from people like me.

That's because I'm still buying CDs from artists that I discovered during a fleeting affair with a simple program that opened my computer, and my heart, to music.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...d=991479973472


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Finns May Track Youths On Cell Phones
Reuters

Finland has proposed a new law that would let parents track the movements of their young children via mobile phone, even without their consent, in a move that could set an European Union benchmark in privacy and handset use. Finland's parliament will likely start discussing the proposal early in November.

According to the draft, individuals aged 15 or older could only be tracked after giving their consent, but for children under 15 such consent could also be given by their parents or guardians. In emergency situations people can still be tracked without their consent regardless of their age. Finland's top two mobile operators, TeliaSonera and Elisa, currently offer positioning services that locate the phone user based on the mobile base station he or she is nearest to.
http://news.com.com/2110-1039-5092915.html
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What Price Music?
Amy Harmon

Since the introduction of vinyl records after World War II, recorded music has assumed many shapes and sizes, each one coming with a higher price tag than the last. Eight-track tapes cost a dollar more than LP's when they rose to popularity in the late 1960's and cassettes commanded a premium over eight-tracks. When CD's debuted in the mid-1980's, record labels sold the shiny discs for $18, more than double the price of what they charged for the same music on LP's and cassettes that cost more to manufacture.

Unlike these formats, which the industry adopted voluntarily and marketed vigorously, the latest shift— to digitized versions of songs that can be distributed online— have been thrust upon it, the outgrowth of a technology it could not control. Battered by a sales slump it attributes largely to digital piracy and heartened by a limited test with Apple computer owners, this fall the record industry is trying to catch up with its file-swapping customers: the major labels and many independents have agreed to deconstruct the album, allowing anyone with a computer to buy any of hundreds of thousands of individual songs. Soon huge catalogs of every genre of music will be available for sale on the Internet from over a dozen retailers, bearing the blessing and license agreements of the major record labels.

No one knows what all the effects will be. But one will certainly be on price; music in the new format will cost at least a little less than it did in the old. The standard charge has become 99 cents a track. Albums that cost between $12 and $18 on CD now sell for about $10 online. The labels have also authorized several services to offer a kind of online lease program for music: subscribers pay a flat $10 a month to listen to as many as half a million tracks as often as they want over the Internet, rather than storing them on a computer or burning them to a CD.

And the next months are expected to bring price wars — in both the usual and a more figurative sense of the term. As musical recordings have increasingly shed their physical form, the record industry and its customers have been at odds over what it all should cost. Music fans complain of high CD prices and copy more music illicitly than they purchase legally, while the record companies rail against the devaluation of their product and take file-sharers to court.

Since legal ways to experience online music are only now becoming widely available, there is no established record of what the market will bear or how these innovations will be received. Will each song purchased online represent the loss of a whole CD sale in the store? Or will customers respond to the ease and selection of e-commerce by buying more, overall? One possible development is that hit songs could cost more than obscure recordings. Another is that retailers would set prices on a sliding scale, to favor students or high-volume buyers — a departure for an industry that has basically sold one product, in one configuration, discounted at periodic intervals, for decades.

With all these unknowns, and with all the labels in competition with one another, how did the online services decide — even for the time being — on what to charge for a song? By most accounts, the 99 cent trend started with Apple Computer's chief executive, Steven P. Jobs. One record executive who insisted that he not be identified described a meeting last winter of the company's senior management that Mr. Jobs addressed in New York. "He came in and said, `People pay $3.99 for a cup of Starbucks coffee, and it's gone in 10 minutes,' " he recalled. "If you compare it to free, then 99 cents may seem like a lot. If you compare it to a cup of Starbucks coffee, it seems like a very good value."

An executive at another label, who also declined to be identified, put it slightly differently: "Who the hell knows?" he said of the pricing decision. "It's a shot in the dark."

Ninety-nine cents is only slightly less than the cost of a song on a CD (given the usual price, around $14, and the usual number of tracks, around 12). And adjusting for inflation, it is about 10 times more than 45-r.p.m. singles cost during their heyday in the 1950's. Still, Mr. Jobs's take on the psychological appeal of the price, at least for the small, affluent audience of Macintosh users to whom the iTunes service has been marketed, may be apt. Apple said last month that the iTunes store had sold 10 million songs in its first four months of operation, about half of which were sold as full albums. The company plans to offer the service to the much larger market of Windows PC users this week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/ar...ic/12HARM.html


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Ares Update
Thomas Mennecke

Forged form the roots of Gnutella, Ares departed this community in the latter part of 2002 to create its own network. Success has developed quickly as this network begins to pick up steam.

Just like any other network that was of a similar size, Ares is experiencing its fair share of growing pains. This includes frequent network redesigns and constant client upgrades. Also, typical of a network of its size, its resourcefulness is limited to more popular music.

Its important to note that a typical search query yields an impressive amount of results; its actually getting a file to download that remains problematic. There is a bit of a silver lining however; many of the songs put into queue did eventually download. Like any popular networks such as SoulSeek or WinMX, waiting for a song to download is the key to success.

While problems do still exist, Ares has improved considerably, and continues to do so. To get a better idea about Ares, we talked to Alberto, head developer. First off, we asked him to explain some of the noticeable improvements to the network.

"I think that the increased download/rate may be simply related to the fact that September has always been a good month for file sharing. [In addition,] Ares is more stable than it used to be, the program has a clean interface, it's quite easy to use and doesn't install spyware."

We also addressed the network size, noticing that the population has remained fairly constant. While the network may appear small, it is in fact organized into smaller clusters of approximately 10,000 users.

"Ares it's among the fastest programs to download popular files, but its network topology is quite conservative when you're looking for rare content. In fact, in order to reduce load on supernodes and keep upload queues reasonably small, I've limited the average peer's search horizon to 10,000. So..I'd like to increase advanced user's satisfaction by making Ares more 'community oriented' and therefore I'm working to release an improved version of the program which is going to include new features, mostly on chatroom servers."

Will Ares turn into the next Manolito or SoulSeek network? This remains to be seen, but all the right moves, including the backing of a well-sized community are already in place. The lead developer maintains an open dialog with his community, an attribute that helped SoulSeek and the Manolito networks become the successes they are today.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=269


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Record Companies Sue New Jersey Flea Market
David Kocieniewski

As shoppers at the Columbus Farmers' Market browsed through table after table of battery-operated nose-hair trimmers, $10 bras, Spice Girls posters, athletic socks and smoked pigs' ears on Thursday, there were few signs that they were on the front lines of the recording industry's latest effort to discourage music piracy.

But a group of record companies is suing the owners of the market, where, they say, more than 15,000 counterfeit CD's have been seized during raids over the past three years. The industry group says the Columbus market and other flea markets knowingly act as havens for thousands of illegal discs and cassettes each year and deprive record companies of millions in sales.

Managers of the market, which attracts tens of thousands of shoppers from central New Jersey and Philadelphia each weekend, say they have already chased out bootleggers, and — at the recording industry's request — spend $24,000 each year to hire off-duty police officers to patrol the tables for contraband.

The lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America charges that the market has made only token efforts to deter the sale of counterfeit and pirated recordings, and says that, like many flea markets, Columbus profits by virtue of its underground reputation as a marketplace for cheap discs.

"There are 3,000 flea markets in the country, and at many of them, vendors are offering home-burned CD's or other illegal recordings," said Cary Sherman, president of the music industry group. "It adds up to a huge problem."

The lawsuit against the Columbus market, and similar suits against flea markets in Texas and California last year, is just part of the record industry's aggressive attempt to control a problem that executives say costs them $4.2 billion a year in sales worldwide and more than $300 million annually in the United States. The industry first challenged Internet file-sharing companies like Napster, and more recently began suing individuals who had illegally downloaded music.

Those moves brought the industry some criticism; some people view the file sharing as a natural extension of the Internet as a medium for the exchange of ideas, and others recoil at the thought of multinational entertainment corporations bullying teenagers for downloading a copy of the latest release by Bubba Sparxx.

In contrast, the effort to rein in flea markets has brought little public outcry, even from critics of the music industry. Many of the illegal discs sold at the markets are counterfeited en masse at offshore facilities, and the advancement of CD-copying methods has also begun to transform the bootlegging business from a sophisticated underground operation to a desktop cottage industry.

"No one in the music community would argue that the industry should not be vigilant in addressing that kind of piracy," said Michael Bracy, director of government relations for the Future of Music Coalition, a nonprofit group that promotes broadcast diversity. "The more difficult question is how the industry is responding to the new technologies that are flourishing and allow for digital transmission of music."

Indeed, the owners of the Columbus Farmers' Market, which was opened as a livestock and farm equipment auction in 1929 and today operates under the corporate name Flea World, say they have no sympathy for purveyors of illegal CD's.

Matthew R. McCrink, a lawyer who represents the market, said that after 12,000 illegal CD's were seized in a police raid in 2000, managers issued stern warnings to vendors and hired extra security guards to look out for illegal merchandise. Mr. McCrink said that after spending $2,000 a month to hire extra security, the market invited record industry inspectors to patrol the grounds, but the music industry group declined.

"The recording industry wants all this enforcement, but they want the market to pay for it," he said. "We've done everything they've asked. This whole lawsuit is frivolous, and it's a publicity gimmick, and we may countersue them."

Mr. Sherman, of the recording industry group, conceded that the industry did hope that its suit against the market would serve as a warning to others, but he insisted that the market had shirked its legal obligation to deter the sale of counterfeits.

"Are they saying that they'll only obey the law if we enforce it for them?" he asked. "Stores aren't allowed to sell illegal merchandise, and there is a clear body of law that states that flea markets aren't either."

Vendors and patrons said the number of illegal discs being sold at the market had dropped sharply in the past three years.

Mary Sharp, owner of Wojciechowski Bologna Kitchen, said she thought it was unfair to single out CD vendors, because many of the merchants who rent tables in the lot sell second-hand merchandise.

Despite the crackdown on illegal-disc sales, the owner of a music store in the market said he could not afford to sell new music because he had to pay $10 a disc wholesale and the flea market shoppers were unwilling to pay enough for him to turn a profit.

Instead, he sells classic tapes and discs in his store and was busily setting up a table in the parking lot Thursday afternoon to expand his business.

"This is where the money is now," he said, unpacking a box of X-rated DVD's, which sold for $2 a copy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/10/nyregion/10PIRA.html


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Tuning Up for the Online Music Business

Making a buck selling songs online will be tough, but a raft of sites are at the ready
Peter Burrows, Ronald Grover, Jay Greene and bureau reports

For years, record companies squelched efforts to sell tunes online, for fear of Napster-style piracy. Now, suddenly, the floodgates are opening. Giants ranging from Dell (DELL ) and Sony (SNE ) to Amazon.com (AMZN ) and Wal-Mart (WMT ) are scrambling to set up Web music stores. So are a number of smaller players including -- yes -- a revived Napster, which is being relaunched by Roxio (ROXI ) Inc. this month. Also within weeks Apple Computer (AAPL ) Inc. will likely go ahead with the much-anticipated launch of its iTunes online store for Windows users. "Within a very short period," says Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell, "the labels will want to be on as many music stores as they can."

With at least a dozen players likely to enter the market over the next few months, competition will be fierce. Just as the real world has everything from Wal-Mart to the indie record store, the new entrants are looking to carve out niches. Two classes of winners will likely emerge: those with sufficient scale to convert meager per-song margins into meaningful profits and those that use music to sell add-ons, be it hardware, subscriptions to online music magazines, or concert tickets. Says Jonathan Hurd, a vice-president with management consultant Adventis Corp.:"The ones that get the customer experience right will benefit -- but there are many ways to mess up."

To avoid that fate, the new services will largely mimic the business model Apple created for its popular iTunes site. Most will sell songs for 99 cents apiece. Users will be able to burn the songs to as many CDs as they want and play them on up to three PCs or mobile devices. Music execs hope that will provide listeners with the flexibility they crave while preventing mass copying and file-sharing.

TOUGH ECONOMICS. But even at 99 cents a song, making profits selling music online could prove tough. Under existing arrangements, 75 cents or so will go to the label, and credit-card processors will pocket another 5 cents. That leaves just 19 cents for marketing, technology, and all other costs. The rush for market share will almost certainly force services to slash prices -- and to find other ways to make money. Earlier this year, Listen.com experimented by charging 49 cents a song but ultimately retreated to 79 cents -- and only for those with a $9.95 subscription.

So why the rush to jump in? For hardware giants such as Dell, Sony, or Apple, the real money will be made selling music players. Dell is clearly counting on its online music offerings to create demand for its new player, the DJ, set to launch this month. And for Wal-Mart, which accounts for 20% of all music sold in the U.S., it's too big a market to ignore.

Smaller players are counting on selling premium content. For a monthly subscription of $10 or so, customers of Musicmatch Inc. and Napster 2.0 will get a range of perks -- say, exclusive recordings or the ability to easily buy a song heard on a Web radio station.

Whatever the model, getting downloaders to pay for online music will mean giving them sufficient control over their songs. Already, there are signs that the labels will be slightly less flexible with the vast Windows universe than they were with Apple; with 2% of the market, it was less of a piracy concern. Industry insiders say that to discourage users from sharing playlists of, for instance, dance or jazz tunes, EMI (EMI ) Group PLC has forced the services to reduce the number of playlists consumers can burn to a CD to five, for example. That's down from 10 at iTunes.

Other limitations could also give music fans pause. Many new songs won't be available, and acts such as the Beatles still won't be online. Different services, moreover, will use different technologies to ensure customers don't cheat on copying or downloading. Without standards, users will find their portable players won't play songs from every online service.

Still, a year from now, many kinks will be gone. The best services may match the elegance of iTunes, and prices will probably have dropped. That's the best news music fans have heard in a long time.
http://www.businessweek.com/premium/...53060.htm?se=1


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Microsoft Sued Over Music Downloads
John Borland

A small New York company has sued Microsoft, charging that the software giant's new music download service in Europe infringes on a patent it owns nearly 20 years old.

E-Data, a Long Island-based company that's focused largely on licensing its patents, contends that Microsoft, Internet service provider Tiscali and digital music company OD2 are collectively trespassing on its rights with their new music download services, recently released in several European countries. E-Data is asking that the services, variously called MSN Music Club and Tiscali Music Club, be shut down until a patent licensing deal is worked out.

"(Those companies) are offering downloads of music over the Internet, which can be downloaded onto CDs for a fee," said E-Data spokesman Gerald Angowitz. "We believe that violates our patent."

The little-known company's claims could ultimately affect businesses on both sides of the Atlantic, as music services from MusicMatch to Sony rush to emulate the initial success of Apple Computer's iTunes music store. With razor-thin margins on digital sales of songs, any unexpected patent licenses could prove a headache for these companies.

The patent in question was granted in 1985 and covers the transmission of information to a remote point-of-sale location, where information is then transferred to a material object. Courts in the United States have held that this does not include saving information such as a song onto a computer's hard drive, but that selling the information on a physical media such as a disc at an in-store kiosk could be covered.

E-Data contends that when music is sold over the Internet, a person's home computer takes the role of that remote kiosk, and when the music is saved on a CD or an MP3 player, it has been transferred to the requisite physical object.

A Microsoft spokesman had no immediate comment on the suit, which E-Data filed in Germany last week. E-Data's patent is also valid in nine other European countries, including England, France, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium and Sweden.

Angowitz said his company's patent expired in the United States in January, making Apple's service--which launched in April--an unlikely target for an infringement suit.

However, other music companies that previously allowed download and burning might find themselves in court on the issue. Federal law allows companies to sue for past infringements for six years after a patent has expired, and E-Data says it still may take a look at U.S. companies that were operating services in 2002 and earlier.

"We'll likely take action to protect our past rights in the United States in a not-too-distant future," Angowitz said.

E-Data previously settled with or won court judgments against several companies over download services, including sheet music publisher Hal Leonard and computer games company Broderbund.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5090679.html


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Can’t scare ’em with music, drags out kiddie porn myths.

Hatch: P2Ps Are Child Porno Central

In a twisted turn of unintended consequences, the enormous success of the Internet as a distribution vehicle for pornography has created competitive pressures among smut purveyors to provide more depictions than ever of children engaging in violent and deviate sexual conduct.

John G. Malcolm, deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, told the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday afternoon that the "proliferation of this material and the desire by pornographers to differentiate themselves in a highly-competitive market have prompted pornographers to produce ever-more offensive materials."

Malcolm said that in addition to child pornography, depictions "glorifying" bestiality, scatology and rape are "readily available" and "aggressively marketed" on the Internet.

"Because the Internet has popularized the trade in child pornography, there has been a surge in demand and a corresponding surge in production of child pornography," Malcolm said.

Malcolm cited a recent survey by the National Society of the Prevention of Cruelty of Children stating that approximately 20,000 images of child pornography are posted to the Internet every week. He added that the study indicates that about half of new images appearing on the Internet depict children between the ages of 9-12 years-of-age and the rest are younger.

"We must never forget that each image represents the rape of a child. Each image is a tragedy and a gruesome memorial of trauma, abuse, powerlessness and humiliation that will be with that child for the rest of his or her life."

While Wednesday's witnesses focused on Web sites featuring Internet child pornography, Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch singled out peer-to-peer (P2P) networks as the most pernicious purveyors of online child pornography.
http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/3092661

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Labels Launch Mobile Song-Swapping Tech
Reuters

Warner Music Group and Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment introduced on Monday a new antipiracy technology that enables music fans to download songs onto a mobile phone and share the music with other phone users.

The new digital rights management (DRM) technology, called OMA (object management architecture) DRM, was developed by three-year-old technology company Beep Science of Oslo, Norway, the music giants said in a statement.

The technology works on the concept of a restricted peer-to-peer network in which owners of mobile phones equipped with Multimedia Message Service, or MMS, can send and receive pictures and sound clips to and from other mobile phones.

With OMA DRM, the music labels can collect revenue for each song that's downloaded from a central computer server and for those that are swapped between mobile phone users, said Jan Rune Hetle, chief executive of Beep Science.

The emergence of MMS phones enables media companies to sell a variety of short media clips, including songs and condensed sports highlights.

The money-making potential, however, is fraught with uncertainty. Music executives are desperate to keep tight controls on the exchange of songs between mobile phones.

Unsanctioned peer-to-peer networks on the Internet such as Kazaa and Grokster have created a booming black market for free music, which the industry blames for contributing to a three-year decline in recorded music sales.

Hetle said BMG and Warner Music are the first two major music labels to test the technology, which 50 mobile phone operators, including Vodafone Group and Swisscom, are introducing across Europe.

The technology works with Nokia's 6220 handset. "All the big handset makers are expected to follow suit, including Siemens and Samsung," Hetle said.

The ITU Telecom World 2003 trade fair in Geneva showcased OMA DRM for the first time Monday.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5090135.html


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Copyright Lawsuit Is Turnabout for SCO
John Markoff

The SCO Group, the company that touched off a computer industry slugfest last spring by suing I.B.M. over its use of Unix software, may find itself embarrassed by a similar claim against a company once related to SCO.

Since filing a lawsuit claiming that I.B.M. added parts of the Unix operating system to the freely distributed Linux software, SCO has threatened other computer companies, the open source software movement and hundreds of corporations that rely on Linux, saying they are unfairly using Unix software that SCO owns.

But in an unpublicized case, one of SCO's former sister companies, Lineo, has agreed to quietly settle a third party's accusations that it engaged in the same kind of copyright infringement that is at the heart of SCO's claim against I.B.M., industry executives who have been briefed on the matter said.

The case spotlights the behind-the-scenes role of Canopy, an investment firm formed by Ray Noorda, the founder of Novell and a personal computer industry pioneer. Canopy is SCO's largest shareholder and formerly controlled Lineo.

Mr. Noorda, who has retired, acquired the rights to the Unix operating system from AT&T in 1992 while he was running Novell. He hoped to use Unix in his strategy to compete with Microsoft. Later that strategy shifted to backing the freely distributed Linux operating system, and Mr. Noorda helped finance a number of Linux software companies, including Caldera Systems, which last year changed its name to SCO Group. Lineo, was spun out of Caldera in 1999 and sold to Motorola last December.

Lineo was sued last year by MontaVista, a maker of software for specialized computers used in consumer and industrial applications that is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. The MontaVista executives said they had been notified that software their programmers had written and licensed under the GNU General Public License - the license that governs companies that distribute Linux software - had appeared, with copyrights removed, in Lineo's software. The license, which allows for the free distribution of software, still requires that the copyright notices be retained.

Neither side would comment on the settlement, which was put under a court seal last month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/technology/13sco.html


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Shift Key Opens Door to CD and Criticism
Lisa Napoli

The latest twist in the story of the music industry and the Internet generation involves a Phoenix company, a Princeton University graduate student and the shift key on a computer keyboard.

The student, John A. Halderman, a 22-year-old Princeton doctoral candidate in computer science, published a research paper on the Web revealing how easy it was to skirt a new security feature of the music industry. "I believe artists are entitled to be compensated," he said in an interview. "My hope is that my research demonstrates how weak these technologies can be."

Mr. Halderman had tested the encryption technology used on a CD by the R&B singer Anthony Hamilton, released by Arista/BMG. The technology was meant to be the first to allow a buyer to make several, but not limitless, copies of the songs. Earlier encryption experiments did not allow any copying. Mr. Halderman found that by holding down the shift key after inserting the disk he was able to override the encryption software, freeing him to make as many copies as he liked.

Peter Jacobs, chief executive of SunnComm, the creator of the encryption software, said Mr. Halderman was free to make his discovery, but that did not give him the right to publish a paper and send it to reporters. Mr. Jacobs and BMG said the security feature was not designed to be foolproof but was merely the latest experiment in piracy deterrence.

Mr. Jacobs was quoted threatening to sue Mr. Halderman and Princeton over the $10 million decline in the company's stock last week. . But he said on Friday that after receiving "three thousand e-mails'' criticizing him, he had decided not to sue. Instead, in the interest of encouraging encryption research, Mr. Jacobs, being cynical, said, he would consider the plunge in shares as a "donation of $10 million to Princeton.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/te...gy/13disk.html


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Patriot Act Curbing Data Retention
Bob Tedeschi

COULD the Patriot Act threaten the growth of e-commerce?

That is the question being raised by some online booksellers and e-tailing analysts, who suggest that the Patriot Act, passed in October 2001 to give the government new counterterrorism capabilities, has already changed the way some companies and consumers do business online. For some consumers, it has meant fewer online purchases of politically incorrect books. For the Web sites, it has meant changes to privacy policies and marketing strategies, among other things.

Some moderate voices among online businesspeople see no true threat, and the Justice Department dismisses the risks of the Patriot Act altogether. But Phillip Bevis sees it otherwise.

Mr. Bevis, the founder and chief executive of Arundel Books, which sells used and rare books online and off line, says that his customers' concerns about the Patriot Act have forced him to severely curb the amount of customer data he retains, and to alter his marketing as a result. Because he no longer keeps information about customer purchases - so as to avoid the possibility of having to disclose it to the government - he can no longer discern the buying habits of his patrons and then offer them advertisements for books they may like.

"This has certainly had a chilling effect on us, and our customers," Mr. Bevis said.

At the core of his concerns is Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Under that section, businesses, organizations or citizens can be compelled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, if it has a federal judge's order, to hand over any records the F.B.I. deems relevant to an investigation of terrorism or espionage, as long as the investigation is not based solely on actions already protected by the Constitution's free speech provisions.

If an investigation, for example, is based solely on a suspect's radical religious statements, which receive broad First Amendment protections, the investigator would very likely be denied access to records of related books the suspect bought. But if the investigation is based on suspected terrorist bombings, and a federal judge deemed the records of a suspect's book purchases on bomb making a necessary part of the inquiry, a bookstore might be required to produce the records.

Compared with companies that sell their wares only in stores, online businesses - particularly those engaged in selling so-called expressive materials like books, music and videos - are good candidates for law enforcement requests under the Patriot Act. While off-line customers can avoid creating an audit trail by paying cash for their purchases, consumer anonymity is hard to achieve online, where transactions typically involve credit cards and shipping addresses.

Even before the Patriot Act raised Mr. Bevis's anxieties, he was served with an F.B.I. subpoena in August 2001, seeking more than six years worth of customer data in connection with an investigation of campaign contributions to Robert G. Torricelli, the former Democratic senator from New Jersey, who in January 2002 was cleared of accepting illegal gifts and cash from a wealthy contributor. Mr. Bevis said he fought the subpoena until the matter was dropped - as it happened, a few days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But that legal battle, and the subsequent passage of the Patriot Act, led him to conclude that he should keep little customer data.

"Unfortunately, that restricts our ability to serve our customers," Mr. Bevis said. "We've had to stop customer follow-on contact, we've disabled the software that tracks customer purchases - all the things that turn a transaction into a continuing customer relationship."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/te...gy/13ecom.html


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The DMCA Doesn't Go Nearly Far Enough
Donna Wentworth

...or so argues the MPAA, which appears perilously close to victory in its long battle to persuade the FCC to make the "broadcast flag" mandatory.

As my colleague Seth Schoen notes in an Advogato piece published Friday, no current law requires that technology manufacturers include digital rights management (DRM) in their products. In fact, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) contains a "no mandate" provision, 17 U.S.C. 1201(c)(3), stating that the law cannot be construed to require consumer electronics, computer, or telecommunications products to "provide for a response to any particular technological measure."

Translation? In passing the DMCA, Congress made it very clear that its provisions could not be used to dictate the design of consumer electronics, computer or telecommunications products.

Needless to say, Hollywood isn't very happy about that.

Writes Seth:

MPAA has been saying for several years that this principle (in the DMCA and prior related caselaw) is untenable. It's been saying so in court (in litigation against file-sharing software developers) and in Congress and before the FCC.

This position is remarkable. Most people in our community consider the DMCA anticircumvention rules to be insane technology and copyright policy, but MPAA still says these rules are insufficient for its needs!

The MPAA's "fix"? The broadcast flag mandate--which Seth warns is only one of three promised MPAA initiatives (PDF) to expand technology regulations beyond the scope of the DMCA.

So what can we do about this? Seth encourages readers to take advantage of the EFF's current broadcast flag action alert to voice their objections to the mandate. He also urges fellow technologists to write their own letters to the FCC, providing arguments from a technologist's perspective about why the mandate isn't the right direction for technology policy.

I also recommend a reading, or re-reading, of Senator Sam Brownback's (R-KS) statement introducing the Consumer, Schools, and Libraries Digital Rights Management Awareness Act of 2003 (PDF). Much of the press attention has focused on provisions to amend the DMCA's rules on subpoenas, but Brownback tackles the broadcast flag mandate as well. States Brownback (emphasis, mine):
http://www.copyfight.org/20031001.shtml#56006


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Let's Play Starving Artist, the New Game From the RIAA. Except it Ain't New
Richard Menta

I could not help but be stunned when I first read about it in the New York Times. It was surreal, even comical, but delivered in a distorted seriousness that begged my concern. A campaign aimed school children through the schools and lead by the entertainment industry with the help of Junior Achievement.

You can read the details in the above Times article, but essentially the film and record industries (mostly the film industry) have orchestrated a school-to-school tour to "educate" 5th through 9th graders about the evils of file trading. A program designed to reach 900,000 students that is offspring of those ancient industrial films regularly parodied on the Simpsons (smokestacks are your friends kids).

One of the key activities of this program - and what caught my eye - was a game called 'Starving Artist' where students come up with an idea for a record album, cover art, and lyrics. After this exercise is completed a volunteer teacher drops the supposed bombshell, that the album is already available for download for free. From the Times article "According to the lesson, the volunteer would then "ask them how they felt when they realized that their work was stolen and that they would not get anything for their efforts."

All I could think of when I read this was what a wonderful opportunity this was for the record industry in particular to use file trading to its advantage. Not as a promotional tool as we have written about so many times in these pages, but as an entity to take the rap for their past actions. Something to take the blame for the record industry's decades-old systematic exploitation of artists through their audit departments.

Rock Historian Dave Marsh once described being an artist in the record industry as the equivalent of sharecropping. In sharecropping, the farmer doesn't really own the vegetables they raise, the landowner does. The landowner pays them a fee for the amount of produce they create, but charges back the cost of the feed, fertilizer, use of equipment, even water - all at inflated prices. In the end, the sharecropper makes the minimum it takes to keep them and their families alive so they can work the land the next year and the next. As the sharecropper suffers in poverty, the landowner garners excess wealth.

This fact has become very clear to the music buying public. Several months back another NY Times reporter queried a few 13 year-old boys about file trading and if they thought there was anything wrong with it. The boys, who were active traders, told the reporter that the record industry steals from the artists they idolize anyway, so they felt they were doing nothing wrong. I am going to assume these kids do not regularly read the Times, yet the message that the record industry cheats artists is reaching them. Whether one thinks this message is accurate or not is beyond the point. This is the consumer perception and one that extends not just to adults but to children.

To me this was evidence of the bad PR the record industry has generated over the last few years, bad PR coming from the public dissection of industry practices in the wake of the Napster trial. The original Napster is gone now, but its specter is still there and still changing the music industry dramatically.

The media companies in a savvy twist are looking to change the perceptions of children who have yet to reach any such conclusions about them. If kids hear artists are starving no less than their own teachers will collectively point all the blame on KaZaa, iMesh, and the various Gnutella clients.

I say, if our schools are going to allow industrial propaganda like 'Starving Artist' in our school, if we are going to allow the teachers we pay to be shills for the record industry, then let's do it right.

Let the game represent Marsh's reality, not the RIAA's version of it. Balance this game by also letting Courtney Love and Janis Ian and Pearl Jam tour these classrooms and give them THEIR reality of the record business. That the only ones taking their livelihood from them and taking the foods from their mouths are the record companies who claim ownership of the music they create and the ticket and venue monopolies who collect their concert receipts.

Do that and then you have a more accurate program called Starving Artist.

Good lord, my taxes go to pay school boards that would allow this? What's next, a school tour by the Christian right warning of the temptations of Islam and Judaism?
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2...ingartist.html


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New Internet Speed Record Set
Reuters

Two major scientific research centres said on Wednesday they had set a new world speed record for sending data across the Internet, equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD film in seven seconds.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN, said the feat, doubling the previous top speed, was achieved in a nearly 30-minute transmission over 7,000 kms of network between Geneva and a partner body in California.

CERN, whose laboratories straddle the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, said it had sent 1.1 Terabytes of data at 5.44 gigabits a second (Gbps) to a lab at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, on October 1.

This is more than 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection, and is also equivalent to transferring a 60-minute compact disc within one second -- an operation that takes around eight minutes on standard broadband.

Using current technology, a DVD -- or digital video disc -- film of some 90 minutes length takes some 15 minutes to download from the Internet.

Olivier Martin of CERN, which is also the European Laboratory for Particle Physics and home to a hugely ambitious particle-smashing project to unravel the fundamental laws of nature, hailed the feat as a milestone.

It would bring closer researchers' final goal of abolishing distance and making collaboration between scientists around the world efficient and effectively instantaneous, he said.

Harvey Newman of Caltech, another of the world's major research centres, said the achievement boosted hopes that systems operating at 10 gigabits per second "will be commonplace in the relatively near future."
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/interne...ut/index.html#



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Seagate Spins 100GB Platter
Ed Frauenheim

Seagate Technology on Tuesday said it has pushed the data-density envelope in the disk-drive industry, announcing a product that squeezes 100GB onto a single 3.5-inch platter.

Today's highest-density hard disk drives pack 80GB onto a 3.5-inch platter, the part of a drive that rotates and contains data. Although Seagate's news can be seen as a step forward for the disk-drive industry, it also reflects a slowdown in the pace of data density advances. For several years beginning in the late nineties, density doubled annually. Drives with 80GB per platter shipped late last year, so this new advance demonstrates the slower growth in data density.

Seagate's new product is part of its Barracuda 7200.7 family of drives. The drive has two platters, for a total capacity of 200GB. It can use the more-traditional parallel ATA interface or the newer serial ATA interface (SATA).

Seagate said the Barracuda 7200.7 is the industry's first hard-drive family capable of supporting SATA Native Command Queuing. This is a feature that allows a SATA hard drive to reorder outstanding commands before reading or writing data, improving the performance of queued workloads, according to Seagate.

Seagate said it would demonstrate the queuing technology on its new 200GB Barracuda 7200.7 SATA hard drive on Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, Calif.

The queuing technology isn't generally available on Seagate products yet. Seagate said it would be installed on Barracuda 7200.7 SATA hard drives for shipment when computer designs that support the technology become more broadly available.

Seagate said the new 200GB drives are ideal for products such as network-attached storage devices, entry-level ATA servers, mainstream and high-performance PCs and home-entertainment PCs. The 200GB drive with a parallel ATA interface is slated to ship worldwide next month through distributors, while shipments of the 200GB SATA version are scheduled to begin in November.
http://news.com.com/2100-1015-5077293.html


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Maxtor's New Slant On Disk Recording
Ed Frauenheim

Disk-drive maker Maxtor says it has reached a milestone in devising cost-effective platters for a next-generation technology called perpendicular recording.

The company announced Monday that its subsidiary, MMC Technology, has demonstrated a method of making disk-drive media for the new technology at roughly the same cost as media used in today's drives. With the new media and perpendicular recording technology, Maxtor said it is possible to more than double the amount of data that can be crammed onto a typical disk, from the standard 80GB per 3.5-inch platter to 175GB.

Ken Johnson, vice president of research and development at MMC Technology, said other companies may have ways of making perpendicular recording media, but not necessarily a means to do it cheaply. "As we know, in this industry, cost effectiveness is very important," he said.

Perpendicular recording involves arranging magnetic charges--which hold digital information--vertically on a platter. In a sense, the disk surface is made up of tiny magnets standing vertically. The approach contrasts with the current industry standard method, called longitudinal recording. In longitudinal recording, charges are arranged horizontally on the surface of the platter.

Perpendicular recording is decades old, but it has yet to be widely used. The disk-drive industry has enjoyed rapid advances in data density without it. For example, data density doubled annually in the late 1990s. But the rate of growth has slowed, thanks partly to technical challenges.

Perpendicular recording has had its own challenges. One relates to the "soft underlayer" of magnetic material that helps a perpendicular recording head to write and read charges on the disk. Johnson said researchers have thought the underlayer needed to be as thick as 400 nanometers. Given that the final top layer of magnetic material is about 30 nanometers, the underlayer represented a relatively large amount of material to deposit on a platter, he said.

Using novel compositions and structures for the soft underlayer, Maxtor was able to reduce the thickness to 100 nanometers, he said. "That makes it 'make-able' in today's equipment," he said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1015-5089953.html


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An Invitation to Groove on the Move
J. D. Biersdorfer

LIKE the herds of ever-smaller personal cassette players that roamed the earth in the 1980's, droves of tiny devices that play music in digital form are peeking out from pockets, purses, briefcases and backpacks everywhere you turn these days.

Although some will argue that their audio fidelity is not as high, digital music players do have one distinct advantage over the portable cassette, disc and minidisc players competing for the public's ear: you can leave the tapes, CD's or minidiscs at home and still listen to lots of different albums or mixes. With a digital player, you can carry anywhere from two hours to four weeks of continuous music with you, ready to pour through your headphones.

To the uninitiated, it may seem like there are as many digital audio formats (MP3, WMA, AAC and so on) as there are brands of digital audio players (iRock, iRiver, Yepp, Nomad and others). To those less than fluent in gadgetspeak, it may seem more confusing than it really is. Here is an outline of what you need to know and acquire to get your music moving.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/te...asi.html?8hpib


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File-sharing Goes Social
Clay Shirky

The RIAA has taken us on a tour of networking strategies in the last few years, by constantly changing the environment file-sharing systems operate in. In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA's waves of legal attacks driving experimentation with decentralized file-sharing tools, file-sharing networks have progressively traded efficiency for resistance to legal attack.

The RIAA has slowly altered the environment so that relatively efficient systems like Napster were killed, opening up a niche for more decentralized systems like Gnutella and Kazaa. With their current campaign against Kazaa in full swing, we are about to see another shift in network design, one that will have file sharers adopting tools originally designed for secure collaboration in a corporate setting.

Napster's problem, of course, was that although Napster nodes acted as both client and server, the central database still gave the RIAA a single target. Seeing this, Gnutella and Kazaa shifted to a mesh of nodes that could each act as client, server, and router. These networks are self-assembling and self-reconfiguring with a minimum of bootstrapping, and decentralize even addresses and pointers to files.

The RIAA is now attacking these networks using a strategy that could be called Crush the Connectors. A number of recent books on networks, such as Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Barabasi's Linked, and Watts' Six Degrees, have noted that large, loosely connected networks derive their effectiveness from a small number of highly connected nodes, a pattern called a Small World network. As a result, random attacks, even massive ones, typically leave the network only modestly damaged.

The flipside is that attacks that specifically target the most connected nodes are disproportionately effective. The RIAA's Crush the Connectors strategy will work, not simply because highly publicized legal action will deter some users, but because the value of the system will decay badly if the RIAA succeeds in removing even a small number of the best-provisioned nodes.

However, it will not work as well as the RIAA wants, even ignoring the public relations fallout, for two reasons. The first is that combining client, server, and router in one piece of software is not the last move available to network designers -- there is still the firewall. And the second is simply the math of popular music -- there are more people than songs.

Networks, Horizons, and Membranes

Napster was the last file-sharing system that was boundary-less by design. There was, at least in theory, one Napster universe at any given moment, and it was globally searchable. Gnutella, Kazaa, and other similar systems set out to decentralize even the address and search functions. This made these systems more robust in the face of legal challenges, but added an internal limit -- the search horizon.

Since such systems have no central database, they relay requests through the system from one node to the next. However, the "Ask two friends to ask two friends ad infinitum" search method can swamp the system. As a result, these systems usually limit the spread of search requests, creating an internal horizon. The tradeoff here is between the value of any given search (deeper searches are more effective) vs the load on the system as a whole (shallower searches reduce communications overhead.) In a world where the RIAA's attack mode was to go after central resources, this tradeoff worked well -- efficient enough, and resistant to Napster-style lawsuits.

However, these systems are themselves vulnerable in two ways -- first, anything that reduces the number of songs inside any given user's search horizon reduces the value of the system, causing some users to defect, which weakens the system still further. Second, because search horizons are only perceptual borders, the activity of the whole network can be observed by a determined attacker running multiple nodes as observation points. The RIAA is relying on both weaknesses in its current attack.

By working to remove those users who make a large number of files persistently available, the RIAA can limit the amount of accessible music and the trust the average user has in the system. Many of the early reports on the Crush the Connectors strategy suggest that users are not just angry with the RIAA, but with Kazaa as well, for failing to protect them.

The very fact that Crush the Connectors is an attack on trustworthiness, however, points to one obvious reaction: move from a system with search horizons to one with real membranes, and making those membranes social as well as technological.

Trust as a Border

There are several activities that are both illegal and popular, and these suffer from what economists call high transaction costs. Buying marijuana involves considerably more work than buying roses, in part because every transaction involves risk for both parties, and in part because neither party can rely on the courts for redress from unfair transactions. As a result, the market for marijuana today (or NYC tattoo artists in the 1980s, or gin in the 1920s, etc) involves trusted intermediaries who broker introductions.

These intermediaries act as a kind of social Visa system; in the same way a credit card issuer has a relationship with both buyer and seller, and an incentive to see that transactions go well, an introducer in an illegal transaction has an incentive to make sure that neither side defects from the transaction. And all parties, of course, have an incentive to avoid detection.

This is a different kind of border than a search horizon. Instead of being able to search for resources a certain topological distance from you, you search for resources a certain social distance from you. (This is also the guiding principle behind services like LinkedIn and Friendster, though in practice they represent their user's networks as being much larger than real-world social boundaries are.)

Such a system would add a firewall of sorts to the client, server, and router functions of existing systems, and that firewall would serve two separate but related needs. It would make the shared space inaccessible to new users without some sort of invitation from existing users, and it would likewise make all activity inside the space unobservable to the outside world.

Though the press is calling such systems "darknets" and intimating that they are the work of some sort of internet underground, those two requirements -- controlled membership and encrypted file transfer -- actually describe business needs better than consumer needs.

There are many ways to move to such membrane-bounded systems, of course, including retrofitting existing networks to allow sub-groups with controlled membership (possibly using email white-list or IM buddy-list tools); adopting any of the current peer-to-peer tools designed for secure collaboration (e.g. Groove, Shinkuro, WASTE etc); or even going to physical distribution. As Andrew Odlyzko has pointed out, sending disks through the mail can move enough bits in a 24 hour period to qualify as broadband, and there are now file-sharing networks whose members simply snail mail one another mountable drives of music.

A critical factor here is the social fabric -- as designers of secure networks know, protecting the perimeter of a network only works if the people inside the perimeter are trustworthy. New entrants can only be let into such a system if they are somehow vetted or vouched for, and the existing members must have something at stake in the behavior of the new arrivals.

The disadvantage of social sharing is simple -- limited membership means fewer files. The advantage is equally simple -- a socially bounded system is more effective than nothing, and safer than Kazaa.

If Kazaa, Gnutella and others are severely damaged by the Crush the Connectors attack, users will either give up free file-sharing, or switch to less efficient social spaces. This might seem like an unalloyed win for the RIAA, but for one inconvenient fact: there are more people than are songs.

For the sake of round numbers, assume there are 500 million people using the internet today, and that much of the world's demand for popular music would be satisfied by the availability of something like 5 million individual songs (Apple's iTunes, by way of comparison, is a twentieth of that size.) Because people outnumber songs, if every user had one MP3 each, there would be a average of a hundred copies of every song somewhere online. A more realistic accounting would assume that at least 10% of the online population had at least 10 MP3 files each, numbers that are both underestimates, given the popularity of both ripping and sharing music.

Worse for the RIAA, the popularity of songs is wildly unequal. Some songs -- The Real Slim Shady, Come Away With Me -- exist on millions of hard drives around the world. As we've moved from more efficient systems like Napster to less efficient ones like Kazaa, it has become considerably harder to find bluegrass, folk, or madrigals, but not that much harder to find songs by Britney, 50 Cent, or John Mayer. And as with the shift from Napster to Kazaa, the shift from Kazaa to socially-bounded systems will have the least significant effect on the most popular music.

The worst news of all, though, is that songs are not randomly distributed. Instead, user clusters are a good predictor of shared taste. Make two lists, one of your favorite people and another of your favorite songs. What percentage of those songs could you copy from those people?

Both of those lists are probably in the dozens at most, and if music were randomly distributed, getting even a few of your favorite songs from your nearest and dearest would be a rare occurrence. As it is, though, you could probably get a significant percentage of your favorite songs from your favorite people. Systems that rely on small groups of users known to one another, trading files among themselves, will be less efficient than Kazaa or Napster, but far more efficient than a random distribution of music would suggest.

What Happens Next?

Small amounts of social file-sharing, by sending files as email attachments or uploading them to personal web servers, have always co-existed with the purpose- built file-sharing networks, but the two patterns may fuse as a result of the Crush the Connectors strategy. If that transition happens on a large scale, what might the future look like?

Most file-sharing would go on in groups from a half dozen to a few dozen -- small enough that every member can know every other member by reputation. Most file-sharing would take place in the sorts of encrypted workspaces designed for business but adapted for this sort of social activity. Some users would be members of more than one space, thus linking several cells of users. The system would be far less densely interconnected than Kazaa or Gnutella are today, but would be more tightly connected than a simple set of social cells operating in isolation.

It's not clear whether this would be good news or bad news for the RIAA. There are obviously several reasons to think it might be bad news: file-sharing would take place in spaces that would be much harder to inspect or penetrate; the lowered efficiency would also mean fewer high-yield targets for legal action; and the use of tools by groups that knew one another might make prosecution more difficult, because copyright law has often indemnified some types of non-commercial sharing among friends (e.g. the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992).

There is also good news that could come from such social sharing systems, however. Reduced efficiency might send many users into online stores, and users seeking the hot new song might be willing to buy them online rather than wait for the files to arrive through social diffusion, which would effectively turn at least some of these groups into buyers clubs.

The RIAA's reaction to such social sharing will be unpredictable. They have little incentive to seek solutions that don't try to make digital files behave like physical objects. They may therefore reason that they have little to lose by attacking social sharing systems with a vengeance. Whatever their reaction, however, it is clear that the current environment favors the development and adoption of social and collaborative tools, which will go on to have effects well outside the domain of file-sharing, because once a tool is adopted for one purpose, it often takes on a life of its own, as its users press such social tools to new uses.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/file-sharing_social.html


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Indian Minister Joshi: “Expand Fair Use” - Publishers Immediately Attack
Bisheshwar Mishra

NEW DELHI: HRD minister Murli Manohar Joshi’s recent speech at a Unesco conference has raised the hackles of legal experts here in the wake of the controversy over plagiarism in NCERT textbooks.

Many of these experts suspect a design to justify plagiarism in Joshi’s plea for expanding the ‘‘fair use’’ clause in copyright law.

Speaking in Paris on October 3, Joshi had argued for inclusion of ‘‘fair use’’ clauses in copyright laws for defending the interests of researchers, academics and poor book-lovers. ‘‘We urge Unesco to mobilise an international consensus on reasonable interpretation of ‘fair use’ clauses in international and copyright laws which should provide a good balance between private profit and public good and allow the pursuit of research and education,’’ Joshi said.

Copyright law experts, however, question Joshi’s move which comes in the wake of reports that the NCERT had lifted para after para from Ralph & Burns’ World History to embellish its history textbook for Class XII. ‘‘Joshi was essentially trying to expand the defence of ‘fair use’ in favour of infringers of the law,’’ a copyright law expert said. Joshi was trying to find legal justification for NCERT’s plagiarism, she said.

‘‘Why was the minister pleading for reasonable interpretation of ‘fair use’ doctrine when the Indian Copyright Act itself provides what constitutes ‘fair use’ and the courts have already laid down guidelines and parameters for its reasonable interpretation?’’ asked advocate Hemant Singh.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/c...ow?msid=233224


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To Whom May I Direct Your Free Call?
Nicholas Thompson

IN the fall of 2000, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had not yet earned any powerful enemies, at least so far as they were aware. They were just two obscure Swedish entrepreneurs who had worked with three Estonian programmers to write a file-sharing application called Kazaa. At the time, the free program was merely one of Napster's several weak stepsisters, lumped together in news reports with the likes of Snarfzilla and ToadNode.

But a few months later, the record industry and its lawyers swatted down Napster. And Kazaa, with its easy-to-use interface and reliable technology, quickly began scooping up users. Kazaa does essentially everything Napster did, with one important difference.

Because Kazaa's file sharing relies on routing requests through individual users' computers instead of central servers, the record industry has been unable to shut down the service in court - but not for lack of trying.

As their legal bills mounted, Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis decided to sell the company to Sharman Networks last year. But the two have since hatched a plan that has a chance at causing another, potentially bigger uproar.

Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis have reunited with the same team of Estonian programmers who wrote the code for Kazaa and have created a way to allow people to make high-quality phone calls over the Internet without having to pay a penny.

On Aug. 29, their new company, called Skype, released a preliminary version of the program. Already, more than a million people have downloaded it, the company's Web site says.

It is "a real opportunity to do something that is disruptive in a very positive way," Mr. Zennstrom said. "We have a big ambition with Skype: it is to make it the global telephone company."

Skype, which rhymes with "hype" and has no particular meaning, allows free calls between any two users who have downloaded the software. It is simple to use and provides clear connections to anyone with a broadband connection and a basic headset.

The program relies on a technology called "voice over Internet protocol,'' or VoIP. By routing calls over the Internet, VoIP essentially turns computers into phones. It is the core technology driving a number of small phone companies and is causing headaches for traditional providers, who are trying to fend off new rivals even as they attempt to integrate VoIP into their own systems.

Everyone, it seems, is getting into the act. Cable companies like Time Warner Cable are starting to offer VoIP calling plans; Microsoft and Yahoo are using the technology to power their instant-messaging programs; and Cisco Systems is selling hardware that allows businesses to convert their internal phone systems to VoIP.

What makes Skype so special? Well, it's free.

And unlike other VoIP offerings, Skype's software and audio connections are based entirely on the same peer-to-peer infrastructure that powers Kazaa. For example, if two users want to call each other, the call can be routed directly between their computers instead of having to pass through central servers. Peer-to-peer routing also frees the company from having to buy and maintain much equipment, because its system relies entirely on the computers of individual users.

Even Mr. Zennstrom, 37, and Mr. Friis, 27, say they are surprised by how fast Skype is catching on. Based in Stockholm, the company is controlled by a privately held holding company called Skyper Limited. It has spent no money on marketing the software.

The company does not earn any money right now, but is betting that consumers will eventually pay for premium services, like voice mail. This winter, Skype plans to introduce a feature that will enable users to call people on regular telephones - for a fee it says will be "substantially lower'' than current phone service. That means that Skype wouldn't just allow computer-savvy users to call one another; it would allow them to call anybody with regular phone service.

IN a recent report on the telecommunications industry, Daiwa Securities wrote that Skype "is something to be scared of, and is probably set to become the biggest story of the year'' in the telecom sector. "We think the Skype offering (and whatever may follow it) is akin to a giant meteor hurtling on a collision course toward Earth," the report said.

Other analysts are more skeptical. Eventually, they say, Skype's growth will depend on customers who do not understand peer-to-peer networking or have computer headsets. Moreover, the program works best over broadband connections, which just 16 percent of Americans have at home, according to a May report from the Pew Research Center.

"Will Skype be important and influential? It absolutely has the potential to be that and to drive regulatory debates and to be a financial disruption," said Blair Levin, a former chief of staff at the Federal Communications Commission who now works as a senior telecommunications analyst at Legg Mason. "But I don't think it's as scary to the phone companies as Napster and Kazaa were to the record companies." If the phone companies are scared, they're certainly not showing it. "Skype has a couple of challenges,'' said Vint Cerf, senior vice president of technology strategy at MCI. Most of all, he said, Skype "needs to deal with the fact that there are a lot of people who need to be reached who are not on the Internet.''

Skype, which has been around for only a month, doesn't dispute that. But the company says that enabling its users to call regular telephones is one of its chief priorities.

And even skeptics who do not think that Skype is much of a threat agree that the basic technology that drives it - VoIP - will lead to fundamental changes in the industry.

"VoIP is going to change everything," says Jeff Kagan, a telecommunications consultant based in Atlanta.

"The big telecom companies worry that VoIP could completely undermine their business within 12 months," says Berge Ayvazian, a senior research fellow at the Yankee Group.

With VoIP, when someone speaks into the telephone, or microphone, the sounds are broken down into ones and zeros, sorted into packets of information, and then shot across the worldwide network of fiber lines, just like e-mail messages. At the designated end points, the packets of binary code are reassembled and turned back into sounds. In the regular phone network, calls initially pass over less efficient copper wires and the phone companies must maintain dedicated connections between users, instead of just mixing the information in with the rest of the Internet.

The first VoIP companies were established in the mid-1990's, but they were plagued by confusing technology and connections that made users sound as though they were talking in caves, and with mouths full of cotton candy. Now, though, new engineering, faster connections and agreements on standards have solved many of those problems. All the interviews for this article were conducted either using Skype or an alternate VoIP service.

A few start-ups - most notably Vonage, based in Edison, N.J. - offer customers complete VoIP calling plans for a fee, using standard telephones connected to VoIP adapters. Vonage already has 55,000 subscribers and offers unlimited calls within the United States and Canada for $35 a month. The presidential campaign of Howard Dean has installed Vonage's system in several of its field offices.

THE major phone companies have responded with a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, they are rapidly building the technology into their own offerings. MCI expects to have made a complete transition to VoIP by 2005. AT&T will offer a major digital voice service to businesses in 2004 and has begun a consumer pilot program, based mainly in New Jersey.

On the other hand, the regional Bell companies are arguing for new regulations that would tie up VoIP companies that let consumers make calls to customers on the regular phone network, as Skype hopes to do soon.

According to critics, VoIP companies receive an unfair advantage because the F.C.C. and state governments regulate them as information, not phone, companies because they rely completely on the Internet. That frees them from multiple tax and regulatory commitments, like directly paying into the federal "universal service fund" that subsidizes rural telephone access. Some state governments are considering that issue; in Minnesota last week, a federal judge overruled a decision by the state's Public Utilities Commission to force Vonage and other VoIP companies to submit to the state's traditional phone regulations. The F.C.C. and Congress will almost certainly take up the issue soon, too.

"When Congress looks at it, it will be an interesting collision of two mantras: One, you shouldn't regulate the Internet; and two, there should be regularity parity," says Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the House telecommunications subcommittee.

UNLIKE their experience with Kazaa, Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis said they did not see any fundamental problems on the legal front for Skype, a contention that major phone companies agree with. Skype's main use will almost certainly be social - making phone calls.

Ultimately, Mr. Zennstrom said, Skype will have to deal with regulations once the company allows users to call the existing public phone network. But he said he hoped that the Internet service providers that give subscribers access to Skype would end up paying the universal service fees.

For the most part, Mr. Zennstrom is taking the same position with Skype that he adopted with Kazaa. He says that the company is just providing software; that users can do with it what they want; and that there are too many potential legal issues internationally to worry about them all.

"We don't know if Skype will be banned in Bhutan," Mr. Zennstrom said. "The only thing that we know for sure is that we are providing something very competitive that is very good for the consumers using it. If a country were to ban it, that would be very bad for consumers there."

Skype also faces a potential standoff with the F.B.I. Because traffic over Skype is strongly encrypted and distributed over wide-ranging sources, it could hamper authorities' ability to wiretap.

Paul Bresson, an F.B.I. spokesman, said, "It is legal; it is a concern; and it is something that we are looking into."

For now, Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis are charging ahead. "I am here to have fun and to have some challenges and try to achieve them and to make an impact,'' Mr. Zennstrom said. "Of course, I want to make money, too."

Does Mr. Zennstrom relish the idea of causing trouble for the telecom industry? He laughed, then said, "Yes, that's fun."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/bu...ey/12kaza.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Public Spaces – Communal P2P “Video Walls” From Project Dynamo
Jack Spratts

Researchers in England have created software that facilitates file sharing in open environments.

Designed either for business meetings or public communities Project Dynamo lets users walk up to a video wall, view content and start a transfer. The USB based system supports both up and downloading and can also handle “sealed” files for privacy. You can put up a file for a friend who might be along later confident it will reach only the one it's meant for - or you can post public content that anyone can access.

It sounds like a great idea for musicians, performers and promoters, and anyone interested in reaching large numbers of people who gather in public spaces and I imagine the walls will become popular very fast.

I can see these in parks and in Great Spaces like Piccadilly Circus or Rome’s Piazza Navonna, where thousands gather mixing cultures from all over the world, but also in more prosaic spots as well like small town Main Streets and shopping malls.

It’s tailor-made for the new pocket-sized high capacity thumb drives, now reaching two gigs.

Here’s thier video.













Until next week,

- js.









~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Current Week In Review.


Recent WIRs -


http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17709 October 11th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17605 September 29th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17552 September 20th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17495 September 13th





Jack Spratts Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts at lycos.com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.



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Old 17-10-03, 10:18 AM   #3
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great work...jack
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Old 18-10-03, 10:30 PM   #4
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equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD film in seven seconds
I bet that puckered some bungholes at the MPAA!
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I will never spend a another dime on content that I can’t use the way I please. If I can’t copy it to my hard drive and play it using the devices I want, when and where I want, I won’t be buying it. Period. They can all take their DRM, broadcast flags, rootkits, and Compact Discs that aren’t really compact discs and shove them up their bottom-lines.
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Old 22-10-03, 05:47 PM   #5
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Old 22-10-03, 08:42 PM   #6
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