Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 10th, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week

"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates." - Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman S. Strumpf

"The single-bullet theory employed by the R.I.A.A. has always been considered by anyone with even a modicum of economic knowledge to be pretty ambitious as spin." - Joe Fleischer

"While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing." - Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman S. Strumpf

"When this generation have children they're not going to teach them that breaking copyright is wrong." - Jim Stoddart

"You can get a ton of content." - Matt Goyer



Food For Thought

I've often wondered if there's any way to e s t i m a t e the number of Waste users in the world. If it's even possible to k n o w how many times Waste has been downloaded. Well it might be - but downloaded from where? Like me, most of my friends send the program around ourselves and have since it came out in June of last year. There may be sites where you can go to get a copy and many people may do it that way but it’s not the way we’ve done it and there’re probably of lot of experimenters around like us. So my gut feeling is no, it's not possible to know how many copies are out there, how many are installed and more to the point, how many are actually being used. Unlikely as it is, even if you found that out you’d just be scratching the surface because you’d start digging into more detail like frequency of use; is it monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, minutely lol? And just what exactly is it used for? Downloading, uploading, chatting? You’d want to know what kind of chatting, what kind of swapping. Are you moving copyrighted content around? Public domain? Potato salad recipes? So it gets pretty convoluted pretty fast, plenty of questions, few answers, and even then not without spending some serious loot taking surveys and let’s face it, at this point the margins of error would be too high to produce usable statistics. But say somebody gave you a bunch of cash and barked “Do it!” Where would you start? Forums like this one? Schools, IT people, record collectors, hackers? I’m not sure you’d get dependable data. I was asked by a reporter this week, he needed to know and since I don’t know myself my curiosity’s been sparked. So, I’m asking. I’m asking for suggestions on how to begin getting some meaningful user stats for a network that’s defined by it’s privacy. If you have any ideas PM me here or email me at the Zer0share project (thezer0shareproject (at) lycos (dot) com). Just put “stats” in the subject line. If you’re as stumped as I am well then that’s that, but if you’ve got any thoughts and anything interesting shows up in my inbox I’ll cover it here in a later column. I’ll even mention your nic.

In other news, record sales continued their year long climb in the U.S., scoring double-digit increases with CD’s. "We've had a big run so far," said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts and senior analyst for Billboard Magazine. I’ll say. Maybe it’s time somebody told Congress. In the meantime if you’re looking for a quick fix I thought I’d pass the following along: It’s called Spew. Search, click, download. It works. Happy holidays.









Enjoy,

Jack.









How The Music Industry Blew Its Piracy Case

Landmark ruling
Robert Thompson

It was the Canadian music industry's worst nightmare: International media pronouncing that Internet music file sharing is legal in Canada.

"Swapping songs online is legal," read a USA Today headline yesterday, while the Houston Chronicle announced "Canadian judge allows file-sharing."

Neither of those headlines entirely reflects what Federal Court Judge Konrad von Finckenstein wrote in his decision. But they are representative of the public perception of the landmark ruling.

How did the music industry end up at a point where it is considered the Wild West of the Internet and Canada is considered a place where copyright has no value?

That's exactly what Brian Robertson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, and Richard Pfohl, the organization's chief counsel, are trying to figure out right now.

The case started simply enough. It was just an attempt to get Internet service providers to turn over the names of individuals the music industry alleges offered thousands of MP3 files using Kazaa software.

Things went wrong from the start. First of all, CRIA had intended to use Blake, Cassels & Graydon, one of Canada's largest law firms, to litigate the case. But Shaw Communications, one of the ISPs who were asked to turn over names of customers, balked, saying Blakes had done work with it and citing a conflict of interest.

So, with presentations before the court only days away, CRIA was forced to fall back on Dimock Stratton, a boutique firm that specializes in trademark cases.

Then, after publicly saying they wouldn't fight the case, several ISPs, including Shaw and Telus Corp., decided to battle with CRIA about handing over the names of customers.

The stage was set for a disaster from the start.

CRIA's started out on shaky grounds, appearing to rely, rather arrogantly, on the success its American counterpart had in getting U.S. ISPs to turn over subscriber names.

CRIA used MediaSentry Inc., a U.S. firm that can track Internet users, to pick Kazaa users. The music organization also used the president of MediaSentry, who didn't personally conduct the tracking music swappers and apparently couldn't explain how the company linked Internet protocol addresses to the aliases used on Kazaa. The judge discarded much of MediaSentry's findings as "hearsay."

And even though the case rested almost entirely on proving that file uploading had occurred, CRIA apparently couldn't convince the judge that anyone had shared anything.

"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings," the judge wrote in his ruling. "They merely presented evidence that the alleged infringers made copies available on shared drives."

Yesterday, Mr. Pfohl would not comment on the issues CRIA faced in the case, nor would he say whether the firm of Dimock Stratton would remain on the case.

"We're not engaging in that sort of hindsight right now," he said.

Despite his public posturing, Mr. Pfohl's team is probably hard at work on its best Monday morning quarterbacking, reviewing all the issues in the case and trying to find a better way to connect the dots for the judge.

Sources close to the music business say Mr. Dimock's firm is history. "We'll bring in the big guns," said one music industry source. Who that will be is in question. Many of Canada's largest law firms have conflicts that would keep them out of the case.

So where does the music industry go from here?

An appeal seems almost certain. CRIA could also launch an entirely new attempt to get ISPs to turn over their customers. Some of the issues in its case can be easily addressed, though some of the questions raised about copyright legislation in Canada will be more challenging.

Regardless, the legal wranglings could take months to resolve.

In the meantime, and largely due to significant problems in the case CRIA presented, Canada will be seen by some as the place where file sharing is legal and where the concept of "stealing" music on the Internet does not exist.
http://www.canada.com/national/natio...9-447d23c0ccbe


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A Heretical View of File Sharing
John Schwartz

The music industry says it repeatedly, with passion and conviction: downloading hurts sales.

That statement is at the heart of the war on file sharing, both of music and movies, and underpins lawsuits against thousands of music fans, as well as legislation approved last week by a House Judiciary subcommittee that would create federal penalties for using what is known as peer-to-peer technology to download copyrighted works. It is also part of the reason that the Justice Department introduced an intellectual-property task force last week that plans to step up criminal prosecutions of copyright infringers.

But what if the industry is wrong, and file sharing is not hurting record sales?

It might seem counterintuitive, but that is the conclusion reached by two economists who released a draft last week of the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying.

"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates," write its authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The industry has reacted with the kind of flustered consternation that the White House might display if Richard A. Clarke showed up at a Rose Garden tea party. Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America sent out three versions of a six-page response to the study.

The problem with the industry view, Professors Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf say, is that it is not supported by solid evidence. Previous studies have failed because they tend to depend on surveys, and the authors contend that surveys of illegal activity are not trustworthy. "Those who agree to have their Internet behavior discussed or monitored are unlikely to be representative of all Internet users," the authors wrote.

Instead, they analyzed the direct data of music downloaders over a 17-week period in the fall of 2002, and compared that activity with actual music purchases during that time. Using complex mathematical formulas, they determined that spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales. Even under their worst-case example, "it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy," they wrote. "After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error" given that 803 million records were sold in 2002. Sales dropped by 139 million albums from 2000 to 2002.

"While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing," the professors wrote.

In an interview, Professor Oberholzer-Gee said that previous research assumed that every download could be thought of as a lost sale. In fact, he said, most downloaders were drawn to free music and were unlikely to spend $18 on a CD.

"Say I offer you a free flight to Florida," he asks. "How likely is it that you will go to Florida? It is very likely, because the price is free." If there were no free ticket, that trip to Florida would be much less likely, he said. Similarly, free music might draw all kinds of people, but "it doesn't mean that these people would buy CD's at $18," he said.

The most popular albums bought are also the most popular downloads, so the researchers looked for anomalous rises in downloading activity that they might compare to sales activity. They found one such spike, Professor Oberholzer-Gee said, during a German school holiday that occurred during the time they studied. Germany is second to the United States in making files available for downloading, supplying about 15 percent of online music files, he said. During the vacation, students who were home with time on their hands flooded the Internet with new files, which in turn spurred new downloading activity. The researchers then looked for any possible impact in the subsequent weeks on sales of CD's.

Professor Oberholzer said that he had expected to find that downloading resulted in some harm to the industry, and was startled when he first ran the numbers in the spring of 2003. "I called Koleman and said, 'Something is not quite right - there seems to be no effect between file sharing and sales.' "

Amy Weiss, an industry spokeswoman, expressed incredulity at what she deemed an "incomprehensible" study, and she ridiculed the notion that a relatively small sample of downloads could shed light on the universe of activity.

The industry response, titled "Downloading Hurts Sales," concludes: "If file sharing has no negative impact on the purchasing patterns of the top selling records, how do you account for the fact that, according to SoundScan, the decrease of Top 10 selling albums in each of the last four years is: 2000, 60 million units; 2001, 40 million units; 2002, 34 million units; 2003, 33 million units?"

Critics of the industry's stance have long suggested that other factors might be contributing to the drop in sales, including a slow economy, fewer new releases and a consolidation of radio networks that has resulted in less variety on the airwaves. Some market experts have also suggested that record sales in the 1990's might have been abnormally high as people bought CD's to replace their vinyl record collections.

"The single-bullet theory employed by the R.I.A.A. has always been considered by anyone with even a modicum of economic knowledge to be pretty ambitious as spin," said Joe Fleischer, the head of sales and marketing for BigChampagne, a company that tracks music downloads and is used by some record companies to measure the popularity of songs for marketing purposes.

The industry response stresses that the new study has not gone through the process of peer review. But the response cites refuting statistics and analysis, much of it prepared by market research consultants, that also have not gone through peer review.

One consultant, Russ Crupnick, vice president of the NPD Group, called the report "absolutely astounding." Asked to explain how the professors' analysis might be mistaken, he said he was still trying to understand the complex document: "I am not the level of mathematician that the professors purport to be."

Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas at Dallas, author of an essay cited by the industry, said the use of a German holiday to judge American behavior was strained. Professor Liebowitz argued in a paper in 2002 that file sharing did not affect music sales, but said he had since changed his mind.

The Liebowitz essay appeared in an economics journal edited by Gary D. Libecap, a professor of economics at the University of Arizona, who said that his publication was not peer reviewed, though the articles in it were often based on peer-reviewed work. Professor Libecap said he attended a presentation by Professor Strumpf last week, and said the file-sharing study "looks really good to me."

"This was really careful, empirical work," Professor Libecap said.

The author of another report recommended by the industry said that the two sets of data used by the researchers should not be compared. "They can't get to that using the two sets of data they are using - they aren't tracking individual behavior," said Jayne Charneski, formerly of Edison Media Research, who prepared a report last June that she said showed that 7 percent of the marketplace consists of people who download music and do not buy it. That number is far lower than the authors of the new study estimated. "There's a lot of research out there that's conducted with an agenda in mind," said Ms. Charneski, now the head of research for the record label EMI.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/te...y/05music.html


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Double-digit increases.

US Music Sales Turnaround Continue
AAP

Online file-sharing and other digital piracy persist, but a gradual turnaround in U.S. music sales that began last fall picked up in the first quarter of this year, resulting in the industry's best domestic sales in years.

Overall US music sales - CDs, legal downloads, DVDs, etc. - rose 9.1 per cent in the first three months of the year over the same period in 2003, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Album sales were up 9.2 per cent. Sales of CDs, which represent 96 per cent of album sales, rose 10.6 per cent. For the first time since 2000, two recording artists - Norah Jones and Usher - managed to sell more than 1 million copies of their albums in a single week.

"We've had a big run so far," said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts and senior analyst for Billboard Magazine. "Because we've had three years of erosion, at least for the first eight months of the year, it will be relatively easy for the industry to post increases."

The sales data are a bolt of encouragement to an industry hit by a three-year sales slump it blames largely on file-sharing. The downturn prompted a wave of restructuring by record companies and thousands of layoffs.

Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, called the first-quarter figures "good news," but cautioned that the results were measured against a dismal period.

"The numbers of 2003 were down about 10 per cent to 12 per cent from the year before," Sherman said. "If we didn't have that kind of increase it would be really terrible."

US album sales declined annually in the three years following 2000, the biggest year since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking US music sales.

In 2001, sales were down 3 per cent. The next year, sales dropped 11 per cent. Last year, until September, sales were down 8.5 per cent, but the pickup in sales at the end of the year narrowed the total decline for 2003 to less than 4 per cent.

The burgeoning online music market accounted for the sale of more than 25 million tracks between January and March, eclipsing the 19.2 million tracks purchased in the last six months of 2003, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Stores also saw gains. Chain stores' music sales were up 7 per cent, while independent music retailers saw a 3 per cent increase. Discount chains such as Wal-Mart, Target and Kmart posted a 13 per cent jump in sales compared to the same period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

"There were a couple of major releases that certainly pushed this quarter," said Jesse Klempner, owner of Aron's Records in Hollywood. "It's been down the last two years, this is an upswing."

Industry observers said no single factor has driven the turnaround.

Mayfield sees similarities with the industry's slump 20 years ago.

Sales of disco music dried up after the dance scene fell out of vogue in the early 1980s. In the late 1990s, the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync and Britney Spears drew millions of teenage fans who had been out of the music marketplace, but sales didn't keep up as the audience got older.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...326960430.html


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Music Industry Does Not React With One Voice
Guy Dixon

Executives at the major record labels have always been clear on the matter: File sharing is wrong. Dead wrong. No court decision will ever likely change their minds.

But ask anyone else connected in some way with music -- from artists and small record company managers to listeners and file sharers themselves -- and you'll get myriad views on the matter, pro and con. The decision Wednesday in a Toronto Federal Court against the Canadian Recording Industry Association's attempt to sue file sharers in Canada doesn't seem to have changed opinions much.

"I think there should be a celebration. I think music lovers in Canada should immediately go to their favourite peer-to-peer software and just download something and listen to it. And have a big silly grin on their face," said David Jones, a computer science professor at McMaster University and president of Electronic Frontier Canada. The civil liberties group promotes freedom of expression on the Internet and made a formal motion in the case arguing against the recording industry's moves to stop file sharing.

Jones shares music files himself, in other words, accesses songs on his computer directly from other computer users through on-line, peer-to-peer programs such as Kazaa, while also making songs on his computer available for others to copy.

The judge ruled that CRIA didn't present sufficient evidence that these file sharers were infringing copyright law or that Internet service providers should have to release the names of users behind 29 file-sharing addresses -- presumably 29 individuals -- that the recording industry had hoped to sue in order to get them to stop. CRIA said Wednesday that it expects to appeal the decision.

"Their claim is that this case was so important.

"It's like the lifeblood of the industry, that we have to get these 29 teenagers because they are killing our industry," Jones said. "And the judge tells them, your evidence is deficient, that you have no evidence of infringement. Period. They dropped the ball."

For artists and smaller independent labels, however, the mood seemed more mixed.

"There are a lot of things involved in the decision. It's the whole battle over copyright," said Trevor Larocque, label manager for Pager Bag Records, an independent label in Toronto that continues to be a favourite among critics and hip, indie-store crowds, with bands such as Stars and controller.controller on its roster.

"I think that we are pro file sharing as a company," he said. Because most of Paper Bag's artists are new or lesser known, for a potential listener to be able to access a song or two by one of the label's acts only helps them to get noticed. The company's discs, though, are distributed by industry giant Universal Music. So Paper Bag isn't immune to the concerns of industry biggies.

Scott Kaija, guitarist with controller.controller, who also works with the music-promotion website UmbrellaMusic.com, is a little troubled by the industry's legal tactics. He feels that record companies need to "hold a mirror to themselves to answer questions about why the industry is failing. It kind of sickens me that they've turned it into a kind of lynching, like a witch-hunt for these kids who are downloading. I just don't see downloading music as the problem. It's a symptom of a larger issue."

On the West Coast, Joel Kroeker has a somewhat different take. A pop-oriented singer-songwriter from Vancouver, he is signed to independent label True North Records and feels that, in some respects, the court decision wasn't necessarily a good one.

"I think the general public is under the mistaken notion that the artists don't actually need the sales. I've heard people say it's about greed or things like this. At my level, it's definitely not. I'm struggling to pay my rent, right? So every sale is directly related to my own existence," Kroeker said.

Like many musicians, he believes the whole file-sharing debate cheapens the art. "I don't think people realize the amount of effort that goes into making an album. It's years of work. For me, I'm self-managed, so it's literally [working] 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for years at a time."

Toronto-based technology analyst Rick Broadhead, on the other hand, falls on the side of those who were outright stunned by the court decision.

"With all due respect to the judge, he doesn't seem to have a good grasp of what the Internet is and how it works," he said, describing it as a huge blow to the music industry, if not all areas in which artistic works are protected by copyright. "The very nature of these file-sharing services is that they allow distribution, worldwide distribution. To compare the Internet to a photocopy machine is ludicrous."

As part of his decision, the judge said he didn't see a real difference between a photocopier in a library and a personal computer with songs on its hard drive and linked to a peer-to-peer network.

The timing of the court decision had at least one plus for major Canadian labels. Nearly everyone who is anyone is en route to Edmonton for the Juno Awards, and they will be able to occupy their minds with parties and promotions over the next few days. On the flip side, guess what the No. 1 topic will be at those events?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...tainment/Music


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Proposed Legislation Targets P2P Piracy
Bill Holland

During a week of continuing cuts at major labels, both houses of Congress finally went to bat for the record industry.

In an effort to stem peer-to-peer piracy, House lawmakers sent a multipronged copyright protection bill to full committee this week, and Senate leaders introduced a bill authorizing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to go after online infringers in civil court.

In essence, the Senate legislation would take the load off the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA), which has been pursuing civil lawsuits against online infringers on its own.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., co-sponsor of the Senate bill, called the current situation "an intolerable predicament," and industry leaders applauded the move.

"Any law that provides a stronger deterrent against illegal file sharing is good," says Jay Rosenthal, counsel for the Recording Artists' Coalition (RAC).

"Until those engaged in this awful practice understand that it is wrong, there will be no chance at a meaningful resolution," he adds.

But the P2P community took a different view.

"Passing yet more penalty statutes to put an infinitesimal fraction of file sharers in prison may make Big Music and Hollywood feel more secure but a waste of taxpayer dollars," says Adam Eisgrau, executive director of the P2P United lobbying group.

The legislation "won't help real artists and rights holders make a single dime from the literally billions of downloads that will continue to occur every week without end," he says.

The move in both halls of Congress is bipartisan and, if anything, indicates that lawmakers may at last be taking seriously the industry's claims that piracy is devastating its business.

Lawmakers on the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property fashioned the bill out of several pending measures and marked up the legislation Wednesday (March 31).

The main provision gives prosecutors the authority to go after unauthorized uploaders of copyrighted files as felons, because just one upload meets the legal threshold for felonious copyright infringement.

That occurs when 1,000 or more copies are distributed and the value of the distributed copies is $10,000 or more. On the Internet, one copy could be available to millions of downloaders.

Repeat offenders using file sharing "for commercial advantage or private financial gain" would face 10 years in jail, in addition to fines.

Other provisions require P2P services to post warning notices on the legal dangers of file sharing, provide extra copyright enforcement funds and training programs at DOJ and allow the FBI to send warnings to alleged infringers.

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., said he has been bothered by the DOJ being "passive in their efforts to pursue copyright infringers."

In the Senate, Leahy and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the ranking member and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, respectively, jointly introduced the bill, S. 2237, on March 25.

Chiefly, it would give the DOJ the power to pursue civil claims for damages and restitution from illegal file sharers instead of pursuing them criminally.

Leahy said that criminal copyright infringement is unusually difficult to prove. For this reason, he added, prosecutors can rarely justify bringing criminal charges, and copyright owners have been left to fend for themselves.

Industry groups hailed the Senate legislation, much to the chagrin of file-sharing advocates.

"In this day, particularly, having the Justice Department chase down file swappers seems unnecessary," Eisgrau says.

He quotes from a new two-year study by the University of North Carolina and Harvard that observed 1.75 million downloads during 17 weeks in 2002. " found that file sharing's effect on album sales overall was 'statistically indistinguishable from zero,"' Eisgrau notes.

The bill also calls on DOJ to initiate training and pilot programs to ensure that federal prosecutors are better equipped to handle the technical and strategic problems posed by enforcing copyright law in the digital age.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=4741696


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The Teenage Pirates In No Mood For Mercy

Profits are running adrift as a generation grows up accustomed to downloading movies and music for free.
Rosie Murray-West

Picture the scene. It's midnight on the university campus. A wolf howls. The camera pans down past the full moon and focuses on a single light burning in a student's bedroom. A close-up shot shows he's hunched over his computer. But he's not working, he's downloading the latest cinema blockbuster. The audience gasps as the scary music begins to play...

OK, it isn't a horror movie, but for the film and music industries this is the stuff of nightmares. A whole generation is growing up which has no compunction about watching films or listening to music without paying for it, and it's getting easier and easier to do.

Jim Stoddart, chief executive of internet security company Harrier, says the industry estimates that 50,000 films every day are downloaded from the internet. For music the figure is much higher, with industry analysts saying that more than 2.6billion files are copied every month.

"With the proliferation of broadband and improved file compression techniques it is happening more and more," he says. "On an academic campus with a good computer system it might take you 20 minutes to download an entire film."

He reckons that the vast majority of people who are doing this are aged between 12 and 25. "Of course, they have no taboo about doing this," he says.

"People who are adults now are aware that they are doing something wrong in stealing other people's work but this taboo is breaking down. When this generation have children they're not going to teach them that breaking copyright is wrong."

Internet piracy is not a new problem for the music industry. This week music giant EMI announced that it was again slashing jobs and cutting its roster of artists in a bid to maintain growth in an increasingly tough market.

Although the company says piracy is only part of the problem, there are signs that the industry is getting increasingly twitchy about it, with 552 lawsuits against people who share music on the internet filed in January by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It's not just music. "You can get anything online," says one 24-year-old expert. "Software, games, films, anything. Films are available weeks before they hit the cinemas in the US and the quality really isn't bad."

Poor-quality copies of the final instalment of The Lord of the Rings were available on the internet before release, and as the film becomes more widely available the quality of the files improves. Action films like Pirates of the Caribbean - another popular internet choice - take a long time to download because of the amount of information within the files, but young computer buffs reckon it's worth the wait.

"Now everyone has broadband it really doesn't matter if it takes a while to download things, because it's not costing you anything," says one. "Even people who don't have broadband, like me, are paying for their internet access by the month so you could just leave the computer on overnight."

Catching the culprits isn't as easy as it used to be, either. We all remember Napster, the company that invented online music downloading. Because it had a central server, and a US presence, it was relatively easy to squash, but the so-called "Napster clones" that have sprung up in its place are far more slippery.

The most well known of these are Gnutella, Morpheus and KaZaA. They have no central server, and ownership through complex webs of companies makes it difficult to serve a lawsuit.

What's more, KaZaA, owned by Sharman Networks, is fighting back with a counterclaim against the music industry alleging anticompetitive behaviour and unfair business practices.

The company's website, kazaa.com, displays a list of companies that it says are trying to stop the "revolution which is changing the world of entertainment", including Disney, Paramount, Sony and Virgin.

KaZaA says it is fighting to keep what's called "peer-to- peer distribution", or exactly what the music and film industries are trying to stop. The basic idea behind it is that users download a tiny application on to their computers from one of the file-sharing sites and then use it to search for whatever it is they want. If anyone else on the system has the file available you can download it, and if there is more than one copy available they can be downloaded in half the time.

As the files are copied, they proliferate and downloading gets even quicker, making the file-sharing websites a self-fulfilling success story. Once you have the file, you can easily make it available to others. Films can be watched on your computer or put on to a CD and watched later, if you have the (fairly simple) technology to do so.

Using these websites is easy and largely anonymous. As Gnutella's website succinctly puts it: "One of the major differences between Gnutella and Napster-like software is that those applications are centralised. That means the technology uses central servers where the Government agencies can spy on you and infringe your freedom to search the net."

File sharing services proliferate faster than the music industry can shut them down. Grokster, Streamcast, Imesh, Blubster and a host of other weirdly named and popular sites are springing up.

"Lots of young people don't buy CDs and DVDs any more," says one source who owns an Apple Ipod, which can store 10,000 downloaded songs. "They've got used to getting these things for free."

Some analysts suggest that this is one reason why artists such as Norah Jones and Dido have done so well in the charts - they are bought by adults who are too old to know how to get their music for free. Music that appeals to younger listeners, such as Britney Spears or Blue, has to be hugely successful to make money.

"This prevents companies from investing in new talent," Stoddart says. "They are running scared and won't make films that aren't guaranteed to be successful because they fear they won't get the money back."

Aside from getting their lawyers on the case, movie makers and song promoters have a few sandbags at their disposal to try and hold back the flood. They have set up legal download services where customers can pay for the music they are used to getting for free.

This, together with an appeal to people's consciences, will work for some, but these sites nearly always require credit or debit card registration, which younger users don't usually have. There are plans afoot to allow them to pay by text message on some sites. Once they've grown up, they may be so used to getting things for free that they won't want to go back to paying.

Companies like EMI are reluctant to talk about piracy. They claim that users will not get good enough quality from illegally downloaded files. "Sometimes you think you're downloading the Lion King and you get porn," said one source, "or you get viruses on your computer." As file compression improves, quality will follow, although the porn will be more shocking, too.

There have been some attempts by the music industry to flood the internet with fake music files in an attempt to thwart the pirates, but this is of questionable legality because of the disruption to internet service providers.

For young people, downloading music rather than buying it is a very real choice. "I still buy CDs and DVDs," says one. "I like to own them, because I can be sure I know what I'm getting." The music industry is just going to have to hope that more of the younger generation continue to feel like that, but it looks increasingly unlikely.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/mai...03/ixcoms.html


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PLoS Co-Founder Defends Free Dissemination Of Peer-Reviewed Journals Online
Patrick Brown

Last year, Harold Varmus, Michael Eisen and I founded a new nonprofit scientific publisher, the Public Library of Science (PLoS; http://www.plos.org). In October, PLoS began publishing its premier scientific journal, PLoS Biology. Everything PLoS publishes is immediately available online, free of charge, with no restrictions on access or use.

Here's why: The public library, one of the greatest inventions of human civilization, has been waiting for the Internet. What seemed an impossible ideal in 1836, when Antonio Panizzi, librarian of the British Museum, wrote, "I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity,... of consulting the same authorities, ... as the richest man in the kingdoms," is today within reach. With the Internet, we have the means to make humanity's treasury of knowledge freely available to scientists, teachers, students and the public around the world. But it won't happen automatically.

Our government spends more than $50 billion a year on nonclassified research. What this investment yields are new scientific discoveries and ideas, recorded in scientific publications. The authors of these research reports, the scientists, give them away to publishers, receiving in return only an audience for their work and the satisfaction of sharing their ideas and discoveries with the world. But if your mother learns she has breast cancer and desperately wants to find what researchers have discovered about her disease, or when your daughter in high school reads a story in the New York Times about the latest research on climate change and wants to see it with her own eyes, they face a perverse and unnecessary obstacle. They, and countless others around the world who would benefit from timely access to scientific and medical knowledge, cannot freely access the published results of research financed by their own tax dollars. An ever-growing online treasury of scientific and medical knowledge is open only to the fortunate few who have access to a major university library, or who are able to pay the exorbitant access fees charged by publishers who claim the research reports they publish as their private property.

Even at Stanford, the restrictions on access prevent us from being able to search the entire corpus of scientific articles for particular terms, concepts, methods, data or images and retrieve the results — you can't "Google" the millions of scientific articles that have been published online!

The traditional business model for scientific publishing, in which individual readers or institutions pay publishers for access to research articles, is a vestige of an era when printing articles in paper journals and transporting them in trucks and boats was the most efficient way to disseminate new scientific discoveries and ideas. When each copy cost money to print and ship, it made sense to pass these costs on to the recipients. But today, research articles are delivered much more efficiently and conveniently via the Internet. Here at Stanford, most students and faculty use the Internet to access the scientific journals to which Stanford subscribes. The Internet has transformed the economics of scientific publishing. The costs of the remaining essential functions of scientific publishers — orchestrating peer review and professional editing — don't scale with the number of copies distributed, but with the number of articles reviewed and published. But the benefits — to the authors, the scientific community and the public — grow with the number of potential readers who can access the published work. Charging for access is therefore no longer economically necessary, rational or fair — it needlessly limits access to an essential public good.

What's the alternative? Just as midwives can earn a living without claiming ownership or control of the babies they deliver, publishers can and should be paid a fair price by the sponsors of the research — a "midwife's fee" — for their role in orchestrating peer-review, editing and disseminating the results. But they should not be given the baby — our baby — to own and control. By paying publishers for each article at the time of its publication, instead of allowing them to own the article and charge for access, the doors to the online library could be opened to everyone.

An "open access" system for scientific publishing will not entail new expenses, nor should it place a financial burden on the authors. The governmental and private institutions that finance the research already pay most of the costs of scientific publishing indirectly — through the funds they provide to research libraries. These same institutions would accomplish far more with the same money by phasing out subscription payments to restricted-access journals and, instead, paying for open-access publication of the research they support.

An impressive and rapidly growing list of scientific organizations now advocate open-access publication. Yet, despite widespread support from scientists and the public, institutional inertia and fear of change delay its progress. We who benefit from access to great research libraries and generous public support of our research should remember Benjamin Franklin's words: "As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/5.html


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File-Sharing Ruling Opens Pandora's Box

Music industry's court loss raises implications for TV programs, movies.
David Akin

While at the University of Waterloo, Matt Goyer and his housemates didn't want to buy premium television channels such as The Movie Network.

But to make sure they didn't miss an episode of The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, both of which air in Canada on The Movie Network, Mr. Goyer and his friends would fire up a new kind of Internet- based file trading software application called BitTorrent and download episodes that had been digitized by other fans.

"You can get a ton of content. You name any TV show," Mr. Goyer said yesterday from his office in Redmond, Wash., where he has started with Microsoft Corp. after finishing his studies at Waterloo this year.

Mr. Goyer and his friends scare companies that own the rights to television programs, films, software and books -- content that can be digitized and distributed on the Internet with ease using freely available software.

In the wake of a Federal Court of Canada ruling yesterday involving the country's biggest record companies, some rights holders are worried that they have lost the ability to protect those rights.

"It would be unfortunate if people saw this decision and suddenly decided to use file-sharing to distribute copyrighted works. That's just not the case," said Jacqueline Hushion, executive director of the Canadian Publishers Council.

Alastair Mitchell, co-chief executive officer of Moontaxi Media Inc. of Toronto called the ruling "disturbing." Moontaxi Media is the operator of Puretracks, a record industry-sanctioned on-line service where consumers can download music for 99 cents a song. "We believe emphatically that musicians should be paid."

Digital songs purchased at Puretracks contain software locks, which prevent or inhibit their widespread distribution. Movie makers, software publishers, book publishers and others who produce digital content have also been working on similar software locks.

But many in those industries worry that one day the Internet will be filled with users as sophisticated as Mr. Goyer -- and when that happens, they may lose control of the digital distribution of their content the way the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) seems to have lost control of its.

On Wednesday, Mr. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein of the Federal Court of Canada dismissed a request brought by CRIA that some of Canada's largest Internet service providers be forced to turn over confidential customer information, which CRIA believes could help it sue 29 Canadians for copyright infringement.

In what some lawyers privately said was an embarrassing loss for the record industry, Judge von Finckenstein not only denied the request but went further, ruling on a variety of issues involving copyright, on-line privacy and the liability of Internet service providers. Almost nothing in his 31-page ruling could be seen as favourable to the record industry, legal experts said.

Howard Knopf, an Ottawa lawyer who represented the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, who were intervenors in the CRIA matter, said Judge von Finckenstein's ruling would apply in some ways only to music copyrights.

"But the decision also speaks more generally to the meaning of distribution and authorization in the [peer-to-peer] context," he said yesterday. "So, its possible that the decision could have implications beyond music file sharing."

The CRIA case centred around the activities of several Canadian users of KaZaa, the file-trading Internet application distributed by Sharman Networks Inc. of Sydney, Australia. KaZaa users designate special directories or folders on their computer hard drives to become public folders.

Then, other KaZaa users can browse through that folder and make digital copy of the contents of that5 folder.

Most users trade music files in this way but KaZaa and several other applications that use a similar peer-to-peer distribution model are built to enable the exchange of any kind of digital file -- be it a version of a movie, a television program, software or electronic book.

"The larger issue is how does government and the courts intend on protecting proprietary rights," said Harvey Nightingale, executive director of the Canadian Interactive Digital Software Association, which represents Canada's videogame publishers and manufacturers.

"I think the government has to." he said. "Can you imagine all the money that would be lost and possible job losses if this ruling were allowed to be carried across all [content] boundaries, to software, publishing, anything you can digitize?"

And yet, there is some evidence that music downloads may not be as harmful to the music business as record industry associations here and elsewhere suggest.

First, a study released Monday by business school professors at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina concluded that there was no correlation between on-line downloads and music sales.

Secondly, despite the popularity of file-trading applications where music can be obtained for free, business at industry-sanctioned on-line music services where users pay to download is booming.

Market researcher Ipsos-Reid said this week that traffic on fee-for-download sites in North America tripled in 2003 from 2002 with more than 10 million people reporting that they had paid to download music at least once.

In Canada, the Puretracks service notched one million downloads within six months of starting up.

"Things are cooking," Mr. Mitchell of Moontaxi said. "We're pretty happy with the way people have responded."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...iness/Canadian


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Florida Court Sends RIAA Away

Record labels must file individual lawsuits against suspected file sharers rather than lumping them together in a single suit, a federal judge in Florida ruled Thursday.

The Recording Industry Association of America has sued nearly 2,000 file swappers in jurisdictions around the country. In this lawsuit, the music trade group bundled 25 suspected file swappers who share the same Internet service provider, Bright House Networks, into one legal action.

With this ruling, the RIAA must refile the lawsuits individually, marking another setback in its campaign to sue swappers. Judge David Baker of the U.S. District Court in Orlando is the second judge to rule that the RIAA cannot group individuals together. Last month, a Philadelphia judge made a similar ruling.

"Beyond the circumstances that the defendants used the Fast Track peer-to-peer network and that the defendants access the Internet through Bright House, no other facts connect the defendants," Baker wrote.

Over the past several months, the RIAA has had several legal hurdles to leap in its pursuit of file sharers.

Last year, the recording industry relied on a streamlined subpoena process in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to quickly collect suspects' names from ISPs. In December, a federal judge ruled that this process was illegal, so the RIAA was forced to use the so-called John Doe method, where alleged traders are only identified by their computer addresses. To discover the defendants' real names, the music industry must first file a John Doe lawsuit.

"Courts are beginning to recognize that the record companies' crusade against file sharers is stepping on the privacy and due-process rights of those accused," said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a statement.

"These decisions are simply requiring the record companies to follow the rules that everyone else has to follow when bringing lawsuits," Cohn said.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62915,00.html


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Court Ruling Points Way To Broadband Regulation
Jim Hu

A U.S. appeals court has rejected the Federal Communications Commission's request to rehear a case, in a move that could prompt local governments to regulate the cable industry.

In essence, the court said that cable networks' broadband services have an element of telecommunications services in them. The rejection could pave the way for municipalities to force cable companies to share their broadband Internet lines with third parties.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday stuck to its decision in October 2003 that the FCC incorrectly defined cable networks as information services instead of telecommunications services. The distinction is critical because local governments can force telecommunications services to share their broadband access lines, while information services are free from government intervention.

The cable industry has argued, with support from the FCC, that its lines are private and build on an estimated $75 billion to $84 billion of its own funding to modernize its network. Because of this investment, cable companies can now offer hundreds of channels, high-speed Internet access, phone service, video on demand and high-definition programming.

The FCC has long defined cable networks, such as those of Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications, as information services. At the same time, it has defined the Baby Bell phone companies, such as Verizon Communications, SBC Communications, BellSouth and Qwest Communications, under the telecommunications heading. The Bells are required by federal law to allow third parties to lease their copper lines to offer phone or Internet services.

Thursday's ruling strikes a severe blow to FCC Chairman Michael Powell's longstanding position that regulating broadband would stymie growth. Given the 9th Circuit's rejection, Powell faces two tough choices: appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court or drop the case altogether. Approaching the Supreme Court would mean seeking counsel from the U.S. Department of Justice, which has supported changing cable into a telecommunications status in order to extend its wiretapping jurisdiction into cable phone lines.

Powell did not say whether he plans to pursue a Supreme Court appeal, according to a statement on the FCC's Web site. The FCC has 90 days to file an appeal to the Supreme Court.

"I am disappointed that the court declined to address the merits of the commission's policy that was carefully developed over the past several years," Chairman Powell said in a statement. "This decision...prolongs uncertainty to the detriment of consumers. That is why we will study our options and explore how to continue to advance broadband deployment for all Americans."

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, a cable industry lobbying group, was more clear in its position for Powell's next step.

"While we are disappointed with the 9th Circuit ruling, we will urge the FCC to seek U.S. Supreme Court review," Dan Brenner, the NCTA's head of law and regulatory policy, said in a statement. "We believe that if and when the 9th Circuit's decision is given a full substantive review by the Supreme Court, it will be reversed."

While Powell has long protected the cable industry from local regulations, not all of the FCC's commissioners share his belief.

"This is a good day for consumers and Internet entrepreneurs," FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said in a statement. "I look forward to the start of a fresh dialogue on broadband service at the FCC."
http://news.com.com/2100-1034-5183423.html


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Google Moves to Block RSS Scraping
Ryan Naraine

A Web developer's attempt to create customized RSS (define) feeds from the popular Google News portal has run afoul of the search technology powerhouse.

Google issued a cease-and-desist order against British programmer Julian Bond with a warning that the creation of a news feed from the results of Google News was against its terms of reference.

According to Bond, the company requested the removal of RSS-powered Google News headlines from his Ecademy business networking site and made it clear Webmasters are not allowed to display headlines from Google News on third-party sites.

He posted the order on a mailing list dedicated to syndication discussions.

A Google spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

At the center of the dispute is Bond's gnews2rss, a PHP script that takes a Google News search and turns it into an RSS feed. The script allows users to enter search keywords into a field and create an RSS feed that can be used by any news aggregator.

Bond told internetnews.com he created the script a year ago to display categorized headlines at Ecademy.com. For instance, a section of the site devoted to wireless networking displays RSS-powered headlines from a variety of blogs (define) and one from Google News with the keywords "Wi-Fi" or "WLAN" or "80211."

Bond has since removed the Google News headlines and replaced them with those powered by Yahoo (Quote, Chart) but he said it was frustrating that the most popular search engine was not providing an XML (define) output from their search results. "It's also become pretty disappointing that their SOAP API (define) (define) still only covers the main search engine and hasn't been extended to support the other parts of Google."

Google's Web API service, which was released last April, lets software developers query more than 2 billion Web documents directly from their own computer programs. The API allows communication via Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), an XML-based mechanism for exchanging typed information but it is limited to the Web search portion of Google's services.

"I find it a little strange that Google was among the first companies to use a SOAP API but they've done nothing to extend it beyond Web search. Contrast that with Yahoo, which has introduced their own RSS aggregator and provides feeds from all sections of the search. I think Google is missing a trick here," Bond said.

Although Bond has removed the Google News headlines from his Web site, he has not moved to stop others from using the code to create their own feeds. Indeed, he has released it to the open-source community, which means anyone can use it to create customized feeds for newsreaders. "The script is still up there and I'm sure people are still using it. I'm not sure how they would even know that you are scraping Google News and sending headlines to your aggregator."

He said it was disappointing that Google has not yet embraced the use of RSS on all its services. "Google is one of the greatest sources of content but that content is available in HTML (define). Now, they are getting upset when anyone tries to turn it around in machine-readable format. I find that rather strange."

While many in the content syndication space view Google's reluctance to embrace RSS as a strategic move to boost the competing Atom format, Bond thinks the company has simply not gotten around to adding syndication to the news portal.

He said the company sent him a reply to an e-mail query that hinted at coming changes with the Google News service. In that e-mail, Google said: "We don't currently offer an RSS or other feed, but as you may know, Google News is still in beta. We're considering a number of improvements based on feedback from our users. Given that we're still fine-tuning this service, it's too early for us to know which of the many great ideas we've received will be implemented."

The creation of Atom by developers from IBM (Quote, Chart), Google and a host of blog tools vendors has led to acrimony among software engineers. Google, through its Blogger service, has ditched RSS in favor of Atom syndication format but critics argue that the availability of competing formats is scaring away mainstream adoption of RSS.

In March this year, Dave Winer, the co-author of the RSS format proposed a merger between the two formats, insisting "it's time to bury the hatchet and move on."

Winer urged developers to put their heads together in order to come up with a backwards-compatible format that would avoid confusion and bring the two competing standards together.
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3334651


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MP3 Phone Wrangling Finally Settled
Kim Tae-gyu

The dispute between MP3 phone handset makers and the music industry finally came to an end on Friday as LG Electronics agreed to a government-mediated proposal.

The Ministry of Information and Communication on Friday reported that LG accepted the arrangement of allowing its customers to download and listen to free music files on the MP3 phones for three days.

As a result, MP3 phone holders will be able to download any music files from their PCs and play them without charge. The files are programmed to stop working after the agreed time span.

In two months, mobile carriers will be required to provide music services for their customers, although at a low-quality sound less than 70 Kbps (FM radio level).

Such measures were geared toward helping the local music industry improve their bottom lines by blocking the spread of free music files through handsets.

The local music industry voiced strong opposition to the new phone features, and refused to cooperate with MP3 handset owners, preventing them from listening to music files.

In an effort to iron out the difference, the government stepped in and masterminded the three-day free play suggestion for the two-month grace period, which was accepted by Samsung earlier this week.

LG argued that the time span should be at least five days but finally decided to compromise on Friday in the face of strong pressure from LP-3000 holders, who urged an early settlement of the copyright dispute.

MP3 phones have stolen the spotlight since their debut earlier this month, when LG introduced LP-3000 models. Samsung Electronics will also release the SPH-V4200 model next week.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech...8541912350.htm


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Maker of DVD-Copying Software Appeals Court Rulings

A Missouri maker of DVD-copying products said Thursday that it has appealed a pair of federal court rulings that it stop making and marketing its software.

The company, 321 Studios Inc. based in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield, filed the appeals in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California and the 2nd U.S. Circuit
appellate court in New York.

Federal judges in both states ordered 321 in recent weeks to stop marketing the software, siding with Hollywood studios that contended the DVD-copying products violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law bars circumvention of anti-piracy measures used to protect DVDs.

Since those rulings, 321 has shipped retooled versions of the DVD-copying products, removing a built-in tool for descrambling movies.

The company has argued that its products merely guarantee consumers fair use of the movies they've bought, including backing up expensive copies of children's movies in case the originals get scratched.

In both appeals, which include requests that the court rulings be stayed, 321 argues that the DMCA is unconstitutional and illegally extends copyright protections.

The company also insists that the New York injunction is inconsistent with a federal court ruling that found the DCMA did not forbid the sale of a universal garage-door-opener remote control though it bypassed encryption.

In that case, 321 said, a judge ``upheld the garage owner's right to open his own garage door, and 321 similarly argues that lawful purchasers of DVDs have the inherent right to unlock their DVD's encryption to access the DVD's contents.''

Messages left Thursday with the Motion Picture Association of America were not immediately returned.

321 Studios says it has sold a million copies of the questioned DVD Copy Plus and DVD X Copy nationwide, and that it likely would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars destroying the versions with the descrambling tool built in.

That's on top of the millions already spent on legal fees.

Hearings are scheduled for April 13 in the New York case and for June 18 in the California one.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...printstory.jsp


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Speed of light “protection.”

Look! Up in Ottawa! It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane – It’s a Canadian Lawmaker!

Facing The Music



Minister pledges to protect artists from free file downloads
Doug Beazley

Federal Heritage Minister Helene Scherrer yesterday promised to plug the hole in Canadian law allowing people to legally download songs off the Internet without paying. Scherrer's announcement won loud applause from an audience of Canadian music industry types at yesterday's Juno Awards opening ceremony at City Hall, which also featured a staged "surprise" appearance from Prime Minister Paul Martin.

"As minister of Canadian Heritage, I will, as quickly as possible, make changes to our copyright law," said Scherrer yesterday.

The minister offered no details, but she was responding to the challenge posed by a recent federal court ruling that suggested uploading music files into shared folders on peer-to-peer Net networks is quite legal.

The ruling reaffirmed a recent decision by the Copyright Board of Canada.

Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association didn't prove file-sharing constituted copyright violation - and artists and producers have no legal right to sue those who swap files without paying.

The court decision inspired panic in the Canadian music industry; industry spokesmen were predicting the collapse of copyright control would cause severe financial hardship for people making their living from music.

Last night's announcement was greeted with relief by the Juno crowd.

"It means so much to everybody in this room," said Holger Peterson, president of Stony Plain Records.

"This is a very important statement.

"Copyrights have a value, and artists and songwriters would like to get paid for the use of their music. For the minister to confirm tonight that she's on our side, that's encouraging." But not everyone in the room was convinced.

Canadian Idol winner Ryan Malcolm expressed skepticism, and suggested the Canadian music biz find a way to live with file-sharers.

"Whether people download or not, as long as they're listening to music," he said.

"I think it's a challenge for the industry, to try and find a new way to survive."
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Edmont...03/407037.html


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China Jails Woman for Internet Posting
Reuters

China has sent a woman to a labor camp for posting comments on the Internet that accused police of roughing up people trying to submit complaints to the government, a U.S.-based rights group said on Thursday.

China has been cracking down on Internet content -- from politics to pornography -- but has struggled to gain control over the medium. It has created a special Internet police force, blocked some foreign news sites and jailed several people for their postings.

Ma Yalian posted articles on various Web sites saying she and others were physically abused when attempting to petition the government in Beijing during the annual session of the National People's Congress, or parliament, in early March.

New York-based Human Rights in China said the government, facing growing numbers of petitioners, had begun to take a hard line against petitioners to discourage such activity.

Most levels of government have offices where people can air their grievances.

Human Rights in China quoted sources saying Shanghai's Reeducation Through Labour Administrative Committee ruled that Ma's accusations were false and that she had "turned petitioning into pestering." It decided on March 16 to send her to a labor camp, the group said.

A committee official reached by telephone declined to comment, saying the committee's proceedings were secret.

Ma spent many years in Shanghai petitioning the authorities over her forcible removal from her home in China's financial hub as part of a development scheme, the rights group said.

In 2001, she was sent for a year to a labor camp, where police broke both her legs, and has been disabled since, it said.

The rights group listed several other people who it said had also been detained for petitioning.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=4723041


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BT Enters Software Business to Protect Film, Music
Bernhard Warner

LONDON (Reuters) - British telecoms giant BT Group launched a new software business on Tuesday to protect music, movies and photographs from digital piracy.

In making the belated plunge into the brutally competitive digital-rights management (DRM) software market, BT will be going head-to-head with some of the world's largest software and technology companies including Microsoft Corp, Sony Corpand Apple Computers Inc..

BT said it will work with a host of software partners, including RealNetworks Inc., whose Helix DRM technology is used by a variety of broadcasters from the BBC to EMI, to resell their publishing and content management tools to amateur film makers, local soccer clubs and major media firms.

The DRM offering is part of a larger digital media publishing product called BT Rich Media. The dominant fixed line carrier said it would target the consumer and small business sector with a 100 pound ($184.70) product and large media companies with an offering that costs several times that amount.

CONSUMER CONFUSION

Media companies are keen to see mass deployment of DRM technology to cut down on digital piracy. The DRM software can be used by musicians or film makers to fine-tune their works so that the content cannot be copied or viewed without permission.

But the new technology has become a muddle for consumers as a multitude of incompatible DRM technologies hit the market.

The result is consumers must familiarize themselves with a list of technological conditions before storing new music or film onto their digital play-back devices or onto their PC.

In a further sign of how competitive the market has become, Time Warner said on Monday it took an undisclosed equity stake in American DRM provider ContentGuard, a company that counts Sony as a customer and Microsoft as another investor.

Andrew Burke, director of online services for BT Retail, dismissed the notion that BT's late entry into the market would be a disadvantage.

"We see now the take-up of broadband has opened up a new market. This is the time to fight in this market," said Burke, adding that there over three million homes in Britain connected to cable and DSL broadband.

BT, which plans to sign up five million broadband subscribers of its own by the end of 2006, is relying heavily on brisk demand for the high-speed broadband services to offset falling revenues in its core fixed-line phone business.

Burke said the rich media offering is another broadband related product it can sell users in the hopes of upgrading them to more expensive, higher-margin services.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ms_bt_media_dc


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Like It Or Not, Music File Trading Is Here To Stay
Dwayne Fatherree

Whether the recording industry likes it or not, file trading and its required infrastructure have become an industry unto themselves, incorporating every aspect of our modern technologically oriented society.

Manufacturers are striving to develop smaller and more efficient players for digital music, much of which is downloaded from illegal file trading networks.

Those networks continue to thrive, despite legal attacks, through technological developments that have outstripped the limits of existing laws or, in most cases, the ability of government agencies to enforce those laws.
Despite the cries of record executives and others in the recording industry, a new study says this is probably a good thing.

Researchers at the Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill compared 1.75 million log entries from active peer- to-peer network servers over 17 weeks in the summer of 2002.

They then compared the downloaded songs against the top recordings on several industry charts to determine what effect the downloaded files might have had on sales.
The result was, statistically, zero.

In observing the average downloaders' habits, the researchers discovered that there was no correlation between file downloading and the 15 percent drop in sales the record industry saw between 2000 and 2002.

In fact, it is possible that file downloaders were more likely to go out and buy music after sampling it online.

One point made in the report is that music is not the only commodity shared on P2P networks. Electronic games, videos and movies are also available for download, yet none of those industries saw the drops in sales seen in the music industry.
In past studies to find out why the industry was hit so hard, researchers looked at economic data, user surveys, sales figures and other industry data to figure out where the audience went.

When none of those factors could explain the drop, it was assumed by default that the crowd must have left the record store to go home and download a bunch of songs for free.

Unlike those other projects, this new study uses the actual log files from live P2P network servers to watch what the end users did. The average user downloaded 17 files over two visits during the test period.
According to the study, in order for the downloaders to actually harm CD sales, some 5,000 tracks would have to be downloaded to negate the sale of one overpriced piece of industry plastic. On the other hand, the availability of downloadable music does have a positive social impact.

If the downloading of music does not injure the industry or artists, then the increased circulation of music can be seen as a boon both to society and to the artists themselves, who are being heard by ears that never before would have known they existed.
Greed is a great motivator.

Even if the illegal and unsanctioned downloading of music files doesn't harm sales, you can be sure that the recording industry will continue to seek some sort of compensation. Its a shame the legal arm of the industry is more flexible and creative than the artistic side.

Perhaps, if better music and a competitive delivery system were in place, the lawyers could all go home and forget about chasing down those rascally college students for a while.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pb...ST19/404090529


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A Cybersecurity Role for Uncle Sam?
Brian Krebs

The nation's top software companies today conceded that new government regulations may be needed to strengthen the nation's vital computer networks from online attack, a shift away from their traditional stance against regulation. But critics of the plan said it still falls far short of the aggressive action needed to protect the nation's information infrastructure from attacks by terrorists and online criminals.

The recommendations, released by the National Cyber Security Partnership, were intended to answer the Bush administration's challenge to the technology community to develop more secure software products as part of their contribution to the White House's national cybersecurity strategy.

Ron Moritz, chief security strategist for Islandia, N.Y.-based Computer Associates and chairman of the taskforce that released the plan, cautioned against government rules to hold software makers liable for security problems.

"[We] don't believe there has been sufficient study of the impact of liability regulation or legislation, and to make that call today would be premature," said Moritz. "We need to better understand the potential impact of new product liability laws, particularly on smaller software makers and open-source providers."

The report said that government intervention could be necessary in dealing with software that is responsible for insuring the safety of the nation's "critical infrastructures" such as the water, power and telecommunications grids.

"[It] is possible that national security or critical infrastructure protection may require a greater level of security than the market will provide," it said. "Any such gap should be filled by appropriate and tailored government action that interferes with market innovation on security as little as possible."

Amit Yoran, the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity chief, said that government regulation might be necessary.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Apr1.html


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Doubts About E-Voting Machines Driving Push For Paper Trail
AP

An effort to erase doubts about new ATM-style voting machines by backing up digital votes with paper records is gaining ground nationwide, as state officials heed warnings about security and potentially messy recounts.

Four states are demanding printers that will generate paper receipts voters can see and verify, and more than a dozen other states are weighing the change. But only one -- Nevada -- expects to have a paper trail in place by the fall elections.

``People are just realizing exactly what we've bought into in some states,'' said Maryland state Sen. Andrew Harris, a Republican. ``The stakes are so high. I don't put it above someone trying to manipulate elections on a grand scale.''

Harris wants to fix what many in the computer science world and elsewhere see as a dangerous flaw in the touchscreen machines that will be used in up to 34 states this November.

Their worry? That voters will make one choice, and the machine -- through a coding error or a hacker's manipulation -- will record it as another. With no one the wiser, election outcomes could be changed.

Many election administrators and voting machine industry representatives say that such fears are misguided, and ignore the rigorous tests and trial runs -- from manufacture to Election Day -- that protect the vote.

But the doubters are winning support. Harris has proposed that the 16,000 new touchscreen machines that all Maryland voters will use this year be outfitted with a paper ballot printed after a person makes a choice. The voters would then get to see and verify their selection, and the ballot would be secured in case of a recount.

The idea, known as a verified voter paper trail, has been proposed in at least 16 other states as lawmakers have begun responding to months of complaints, letters of protests and security studies that found serious flaws in the ATM-style equipment.

Secretaries of state in California, Missouri and Nevada have gone further and ordered changes. And Illinois passed a law last year requiring a paper trail. Only Nevada, however, will be ready for the fall elections.

``The issue is all about accountability,'' said Dean Heller, Nevada's GOP secretary of state. ``These votes are out there in cyberspace somewhere, and nobody can prove that they exist. The paper trail does.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/8331858.htm


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Microsoft's iPod Killer?
John Borland

Microsoft is expected to unveil copy-protection software this summer that will for the first time give portable digital music players access to tunes rented via all- you-can-eat subscription services--a development that some industry executives believe will shake up the online music business.

Sources say the technology--code-named Janus and originally expected more than a year ago--was recently released in a test version to developers and that a final release is now expected as soon as July.

Janus would add a hacker-resistant clock to portable music players for files encoded in Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media Audio format. That in turn would help let subscription services such as Napster put rented tracks on portable devices--something that's not currently allowed. Fans of portable players could then pay as little as $10 a month for ongoing access to hundreds of thousands of songs, instead of buying song downloads one at a time for about a dollar apiece.

Few online music subscription plans have enjoyed great success to date, but some music company executives said they believe Janus will make renting music more attractive to consumers and eventually give a la carte download services such as Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store a run for their money.

Device makers, too, see the software as a way to take on Apple and its industry-leading iPod player, which for now offers no support for rented music. Anticipating the Janus release, MP3 player makers including Samsung have already begun advertising support for the technology in a handful of high-end products.

"To us, Janus finally provides the platform on which we can build a new type of experience for the consumer," said Zack Zalon, president of Virgin Digital, the British conglomerate's new online-music division. "We believe this is it. This is what consumers are going to want. We want to be big participant in changing consumers' attitude towards what music really is."

Microsoft executives associated with the project declined to confirm details of the technology's release. "As we've said before, enabling access to unlimited downloads on consumer devices will open up all new scenarios for the distribution and enjoyment of digital content," Jason Reindorp, the group manager for Microsoft's digital media division, said in an e-mail statement.

Online-music insiders have debated for years about whether future services will ultimately resemble a traditional CD store--requiring consumers to purchase each single song-- or a new model in which subscribers pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to all available music, without the right to keep the music after they stop subscribing.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs has been the most prominent proponent of the pay-per-download model, saying that consumers want to own, not rent, their music. Apple's iTunes supports solely downloads, one of the few services to focus exclusively on a single model, and has captured a dominant part of the market to date, selling more than 50 million tracks in its first 11 months.

Others argue that consumers used to the anarchic world of Kazaa and other file-swapping networks have grown accustomed to having thousands of music files at their fingertips. Only services that offer that kind of breadth of content--without requiring customers to pay thousands of dollars--will wean digital music aficionados away from file swapping, argue subscription advocates.

Analysts said they expect subscription services to trail downloads in popularity, given the alien quality of the rental concept.

David Card, a digital media analyst with Jupiter Research, said he doesn't expect Janus to drive dramatic growth in online music subscriptions, adding that it could take years for music rentals to challenge CD and download sales, if they ever do.

"I think this is good, but it's not as if this is a silver bullet," he said. "It is important in adding another feature to the ultimate goal of creating the 'celestial jukebox,' but it's probably not going to jump-start the market."

The Janus release comes as Microsoft is prepping its own commercial music service, which is expected to launch on its MSN Internet service this year and may include a subscription component along with the ability to purchase downloads.

Although Microsoft plans to get into the retail music market, its primary ambition is to be a technology provider and ultimately make its software the de facto industry standard for encoding and playing back digital media files--goals toward which the company could take a big step if subscription services based on Janus catch on.

Microsoft has worked hard to establish its Windows Media file formats in the industry and has won converts among record labels and music services. But it has struggled to win over consumers, having made relatively little headway against the dominant MP3 file format even as it has drawn antitrust scrutiny over its digital media plans.

Last month, European regulators hit Microsoft with a $617 million fine in relation to its digital media practices and ordered the company to offer PC makers a version of its Windows operating system with its media player stripped out. The software giant is also battling a civil antitrust suit involving its digital media business in the United States, where rival RealNetworks is seeking up to $1 billion in damages.

Part of the trouble with subscription services to date is that subscribers typically haven't been able to transfer the millions of files available to them to their portable music players. Record labels have largely required that subscription content "time out," or be made unplayable if a subscriber stops paying, and MP3 players haven't had the capability to support that feature.

That's where Janus comes in. The technology would add a "secure clock" to Microsoft's Windows Digital Rights Management technology, which would let an MP3 player tell whether a particular file was past its expiration date.

Microsoft has been working on that problem--a technically tricky one--for quite some time, and industry sources have said the company originally planned to announce it at the 2003 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Considerable time has elapsed since then, but sources say Microsoft developers finally appear to be reaching the finish line. Beta, or test, versions of the software have gone out to some developers within the past month, industry sources say. The software is expected to be released by late summer or early fall, with some citing a date as soon as July.

A few MP3 player manufacturers, including Gateway and Samsung, have begun quietly advertising Janus support in the specifications for their new high-end products. A representative of MP3 player manufacturer Digital Networks North America said the company was in negotiations with Microsoft and would support Janus, when released.

A Gateway representative said that company had been mistaken in listing current Janus support in the iPod-like player now available on Gateway's Web site, since Microsoft has not yet provided final specifications. But the company would support the technology when it was released, the representative said.

Online music companies are clearly eager for the prospect to make their subscription offerings more attractive to a generation of consumers who are snapping up iPod-like MP3 players, which can hold thousands of songs at a time.

"We are very excited about it, and will support it," said one executive at a music service, who asked not to be named. "We believe it's real and think it will be implemented."

Music service executives said they were still in negotiations with record labels over how to treat the new technology. Allowing people to bring thousands of songs at a time to portable players may wind up costing more than the $10 a month that most subscription services charge today, the executives said.

Nevertheless, some music services are eager to drive more consumers to subscription plans, since per-song download stores have tiny or even nonexistent profit margins.

"There are a couple of companies that are dependent on (subscriptions) for a steady revenue stream that doesn't have a one penny margin," said Liz Brooks, senior vice president of business development for Buy.com's BuyMusic site, which does not offer a subscription plan. "This could be very important."

Jupiter's Card notes that consumers have repeatedly said in surveys that owning music is important, however. It will take considerable time before a large part of the market grows used to the idea of subscribing to music the same way people subscribe today to TV services, they say.

"I think we're really at the stage for the next few years where (subscription) music services are for music aficionados, not for the mass audience," he said. "There are not enough of them that this is going to be a $10 billion business anytime soon."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5183...feed&subj=news


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MS XP SP2 “breaks” P2P.

Q&A: Tony Goodhew, Manager, Microsoft Developer Group
Ryan Naraine

Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) eagerly anticipated Windows XP upgrade promises major security enhancements for customers but the company has already warned that Service Pack 2 (SP2) will break and disrupt existing applications.

In this interview with internetnews.com, product manager in the Microsoft Developer Group Tony Goodhew discusses the thinking behind the security enhancements, the code changes that need to be made and the tradeoff between security and functionality.

Q: You've already warned that XP SP2 will break and disrupt existing applications. What types of applications are going to be affected the most by the security-focused changes?

Some applications will be highly [impacted] but some others will have little or no problems. We launched an online course for developers to spell out all the changes to help them prepare. The peer- to-peer applications will be [impacted] the most. Those types of applications rely on a lot of network activity. They expect to be able to talk through a firewall that will now be turned on by default. So, the P2P guys will have to make major changes or their applications will break.

If you are writing code for applications that listen on a network, you are going to be impacted by these changes. It won't affect the entire applications market but we're mostly letting people know that it affects certain categories.
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news...le.php/3338171


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I Share, You Rip Off, They Pirate
Bill Thompson

Copyright law has become a tool for the powerful, argues technology analyst Bill Thompson, but that is not the way it is supposed to be.
I spent the weekend enjoying the products of other people's intellectual effort, and all for free.

I listened to the Grey Album, read some of Lawrence Lessig's new book on creativity and the internet, and watched The Return of the King on DVD at a friend's house.

Only one of these activities was entirely legal: Professor Lessig has made a copy of his book available under a Creative Commons licence which allows it to circulate freely without payment, as long as it is not exploited commercially.

One was pretty clearly illegal. The Return of the King is not released on DVD until 25 May, but all six gigabytes (or so), is available to download for those with a broadband connection and patience.

Happily for my son Max, who is a big fan of the movie, that number includes a friend of mine who was pleased to show off his success in stealing from Warner Home Video.

I felt uneasy about enjoying the movie, since although anyone can make music in a bedroom studio, film-making needs the millions of dollars that come from DVD rentals to support future work.

So I would like to reassure Peter Jackson that Max will be spending his pocket money on the film when it appears in the shops.

But my third exercise in online distribution was the really interesting one.

Legal battleground

The Grey Album consists of 12 songs created as an experiment by DJ Danger Mouse.

He mixed the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album with music elements sampled from The Beatles' White Album and circulated a few thousand promotional copies before EMI, who own the copyright, notified him that the album was in breach of their copyright and it was withdrawn.

Naturally, copies are circulating widely on the internet, and a couple of weeks ago one of my students was kind enough to pass the files on to me.

It is not, I have to admit, great music, but it is interesting and worth listening to as an example of what sampling and mixing can do.

The Grey Album is clearly a new work of art, inspired by its two sources in the same way as Cezanne influenced Picasso. Yet EMI believe they can
stop it, and are using copyright law to do so.

Whether or not they really do have a strong legal case, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has questioned the validity of their claims, their expensive lawyers have managed to persuade Danger Mouse to withdraw his work from public view, and this is where Professor Lessig comes in.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford University and one of the leading figures in the Creative Commons. In 1999 he wrote Code, the book that for the first time made it clear to non-technical people that the internet is controlled by the programs that create it, and that regulating the net is not only possible but inevitable.

Since then he has been heavily involved in the battle against those who are using new technologies and copyright law to restrict our online freedoms, especially our freedom to create new work that builds on the work of others.

Free Culture argues that cultural creativity is being undermined by rights holders who are abusing the power they have under existing copyright and intellectual property law.

For him, "the opposite of a free culture is a 'permission culture' - a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past".

Danger Mouse has not been granted that permission, and the result is that his music is forced underground, circulating via websites which operate in fear of a cease and desist letter from a corporate lawyer.

Creative possibilities

Both Prof Lessig and I can appreciate the difference between listening to the Grey Album and watching Return of the King.

Danger Mouse wants his music to be heard and is being stopped by a large corporation and its lawyers: his only route to an audience is through the web.

Peter Jackson wants to control the circulation of his films in order to recover the costs of making them and pay for more, and it is reasonable for him to do this.

As Prof Lessig says in the introduction to his book, "a free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom".

Copyright emerged as a bargain between creative people and the state, a bargain which gave creators certain legal rights in the belief that doing so would benefit society as a whole.

It is hard to see how EMI's suppression of the Grey Album helps anyone.

Whatever their legal rights, EMI have no moral right to limit Danger Mouse's creativity in this way.

By doing so, they make it clear that existing laws are simply not good enough to cope with the creative possibilities which are open to us all in the digital world.

We need to find the balance between the freedom exemplified by the Grey Album and the anarchy towards which completely unregulated sharing of stolen intellectual property could lead.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3578851.stm


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Speaking Right
Lawrence Lessig

The Wall Street Journal ran a review of Free Culture Friday. (I can’t show you a link because on the Journal’s theory of the web, it doesn’t make sense to even allow searches on your website without paying first.) Great review, with an interestingly critical twist.

The thrust of Stewart Baker’s criticism is that my argument should be directed to the Right: That copyright law is “asbestos litigation for the Internet age.” “Big Copyright,” he continues, “is one special interest that Republican strategists should love attacking.” And he ends by mapping copyright as a wedge issue:

What’s to fear, that Hollywood will end its generous support of Republican candidates? And talk about wedge issues. Voters under 40 are already more Republican than any other generation. What if the administration stood with them on this issue, proposing a cap on the damages that the industry can extract from college students for downloading music? Say, $1 a song, or even $10, instead of $150,000. Karl Rove could put that on the table, sit back and let John Kerry choose between his contributors and our kids. If that happens, Mr. Lessig could end up next to Ralph Nader in the pantheon of liberals that the Republican Party has learned to love.

Of course not a result I’m eager to see (though after my sniping about Nader, perhaps one I deserve), and of course, I am, as Baker suggests, a liberal.

But Baker is exactly right that this issue should play to the Right as well as to the Left. And as you’ll see in this video from the Progress and Freedom Foundation debate with Jim DeLong (recorded the day before Baker’s review), it is a point I’ve been making as well.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001803.shtml


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Study: DVR Adoption On The Rise
Dinesh C. Sharma

Digital video recorders are set to break out of their niche, and they have pay TV providers to thank for the movement.

Market researcher IDC said Tuesday that DVRs are finally catching on in increasing numbers with American consumers. At the end of 2003, there were 3.2 million DVR households in the United States, and the tally is poised for compound annual growth of 47 percent through 2008, to reach 28 million.

The rising adoption of DVRs--which use a hard drive to record television shows--has much to do with the competition between cable and satellite television providers. Initially, satellite providers promoted DVR-equipped set-top boxes to match cable companies' investment in video-on-demand, and now, the cable industry is being forced to respond, IDC said.

That trend may account for the relatively low market penetration of devices from TiVo, a company that has been practically synonymous with the product category. Despite the strong brand, TiVo accounts for just 39 percent of the U.S. market, according to IDC.

"For the first time, the DVR vendors are getting through to people and showing them that these devices are more than just high-priced VCRs," Greg Ireland, senior research analyst at IDC, said in a statement. "The pay TV providers can take a lot of the credit, and reap the rewards, for finally breaking through to consumers."

While the DVR market in Western Europe resembles that of the United States, Japanese consumers are starting to look to combination DVR/DVD-recording devices. Those hybrids will see shipments of 11.8 million in 2008, adding up to nearly 40 percent of the worldwide market, with the vast majority of the shipments occurring beyond the U.S. market, IDC said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041-5182035.html


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iTunes Case Study

Overview

In recent months, iTunes, Apple's Online Music Store, has become the pacesetter in the digital media marketplace. Its business model responds to many of the current legal and technological challenges in online media distribution. The Digital Media Project's Green Paper, iTunes: How Copyright, Contract, and Technology Shape the Business of Digital Media, provides an in-depth look at this service from the perspective of comparative law. Members of the Digital Media Team examined different legal and regulatory regimes from a range of countries to deterimine how iTunes and services like it are likely to fare under different sets of norms.

By focusing on the specific iTunes example, the Case Study offers a concrete view of the way law, technology, and business model interact in the post-Napster world. The Case Study has focused on four important regulatory issues:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/media/itunes


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When Copyright Is King
Campbell Deane

There’s an old line that one of the perks of the job for lawyers who look after the estates of dead people is that their clients aren’t around to tell them what to do. It came to mind last week when it was revealed that Elvis Aaron Presley may have roots in the village of Lonmay, Aberdeenshire, where one Andrew Presley was born before he sailed across the pond to the United States in 1745.

It was a story which inevitably tempted sad men in ill-fitting wigs and white jumpsuits to the scene, and invited speculation that the village could become somewhere the King’s fans might want to visit. Maybe the local bed-and-breakfast could change its name to the Heartbreak Hotel?

Elvis spent only two hours of his life in Scotland (that famously brief stop-off at Prestwick Airport), but might have been slightly tickled by the idea of his fame being marked in the rather backwater location from where his forefathers came. He came from Southern poor white trash, but was always proud of his family and his roots.

In any event, it has now been decreed that no such thing will ever happen by lawyers for the Elvis estate. They greeted the happy news of their deceased client’s Scottish connection with their customary heavy-handed copyright warning.

Within 24 hours of the discovery, Elvis Presley Enterprises had issued a reminder that it owns all the intellectual property (IP) rights in his name, his image and his songs, including the trademark of the very words Heartbreak Hotel.

To any lawyer who works in IP, this is not what you could call news. Over the past 20 years, Elvis has become something of a case study in defending artistic rights, as the company has not only enforced the laws vigorously but has even managed to change them - in its favour.

It has closed a nightclub named Velvet Elvis, ordered a fan website to take down a virtual tour they had created of Graceland, and is currently trying to block the development of an Elvis Dream Home on a site where he spent his honeymoon.

Even the vast number of (good and bad) Elvis impersonators don’t escape its wrath.

Elvis Presley Enterprises is also credited with lobbying for laws to be passed which result in Tennessee now having the tightest copyright laws in the US, if not the western world. Only there can you enforce the "right to publicity" to prevent others using likenesses of someone - even if they are long dead.

They did lose out once in the UK, when the Court of Appeal threw out its attempt to close down Sid Shaw, a fan who marketed souvenirs under the title "Elvisly Yours". It was reassuring that an English court was not prepared to recognise that someone could "own" the image and name of someone who died more than a quarter of a century ago. But it took Mr Shaw a total of 12 years of litigation before his victory.

Elvis Presley Enterprises argues that it is enforcing the Presley IP rights because it doesn’t want his name or his work subjected to tacky exploitation. But one of Mr Shaw’s arguments was that he only began to produce his own ornaments when he visited Memphis and was appalled at the shoddiness of the goods on show.

Critics point out that the company is always prepared to allow someone to use the songs or the image if they pay for the right, and more money will be generated for the estate.

Two years ago, it allowed a DJ to remix the track A Little Less Conversation as a trailer for the release of a compilation CD that summer. The single went to No1 across Europe, and so did the CD. It’s as a result of business decisions such as these that Elvis is worth more now than he ever was alive.

The firm was back in court in the US in November to prevent the distribution of The Definitive Elvis, a high-quality documentary lasting 16 hours that attempted to cover his entire career in a DVD boxed set. It argued, successfully, that the documentary had used too much television footage of his songs. A 16-hour Elvis documentary which featured none of his songs would, of course, not have any of these copyright problems. But then again, it might get a bit dull.

The principles of intellectual property law, and the attempts to get around them, frequently throw up situations which appear to defy commonsense, and in London this spring we have a classic case in Jailhouse Rock, a musical based on the Elvis film. It will be about Elvis, but it won’t feature the actual song Jailhouse Rock, or indeed any other songs from the film.

While the lawyers fight on, the Elvis fans are the ones left scratching their heads and, who knows, in a supermarket somewhere, maybe there is someone wearing a white jumpsuit who is doing likewise.

As the appeal judge, Richard Tallman, put it, in the documentary judgment: "The King is dead. But his legacy, and those who wish to profit from it, remain very much alive."
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scot...m?id=363862004

[JackSpratts]

UCLA To Consider Using Detection Device For Copyrighted Files
Dmitri Pikman

New hardware introduced in January and currently used at two universities may put an end to illegal music downloads among college students.

The hardware, called CopySense Network Appliance, can be used to identify copyrighted songs and to block those songs from being downloaded on peer-to-peer networks.

"Basically it's the digital equivalent of a human ear. It listens to content, 'hears' it, and then generates a unique digital fingerprint," said Roland Woodcock, a spokesman for Audible Magic Corporation, the makers of the new device.

Central Washington University is one of two universities using the hardware on a trial basis. The second university did not want to be named, said Ikezoye, the chief executive officer for Audible Magic.

Additionally, a couple of other unnamed universities have purchased the hardware for use on their campuses, Ikezoye added.

UCLA officials will see a demonstration of CopySense later this month, though university officials want some questions answered about issues such as student privacy before they consider the hardware, said Jim Davis, associate vice chancellor of information technology.

"We've been tracking the product, and it is our intent to evaluate it and understand it in detail," Davis said.

Privacy advocates have questioned whether CopySense violates privacy laws because of its ability to take a digital "fingerprint" of files.

Ikezoye said such worries are unfounded because the new hardware comes with two different versions, one of them aimed at maintaining the privacy of those using the peer-to-peer downloading networks.

One version, geared mainly towards businesses, will be used to identify individual downloading behavior by tracking IP addresses, which are unique to every computer involved in downloading copyrighted files.

"Higher education institutions are more interested in the second version, which does not report on individual usage but just blocks file traffic," Ikezoye said.

Blocking peer-to-peer networks at the university level always has been plagued with difficulties.

"The one way you can block peer-to-peer sharing of music is (to) block all peer-to-peer sharing, but there are a lot of legitimate reasons for peer-to-peer networking, so it results in overkill," said Christine Borgman, a professor and chair of the information studies department.

Eugene Volokh, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, said the university may choose to block the downloading of copyrighted music files – because it owns the network – while not barring access to other useful information.

"If a university decides to block access to racist or communist material, for example, then that might raise a question of academic freedom – but not with copyrighted songs," Volokh said.

Ikezoye said this perceived overkill would not present a problem for CopySense users, as the new hardware can be configured three different ways.

One setting would block all peer-to-peer network traffic, making it impossible to trade files over the network.

Another setting would block only copyrighted content or any content specifically designated by the hardware owners, and the third would monitor the network without blocking downloads.

This flexibility of use will allow universities to continue sharing information over their networks while protecting copyrighted files, Ikezoye added.

"It provides a very good balance, for a university to be able to block copyrighted files download while also allowing peer-to-peer network trading to go on," Ikezoye said.

UCLA does not monitor its networks for the purpose of discovering potentially illegal activities, but it does pursue a set of ongoing initiatives geared toward protecting copyrighted files.

Those initiatives include educating students on copyright laws and the possible sanctions against known violators of those laws.

UCLA also prioritizes Web and e-mail traffic over file-sharing to keep total network traffic below a certain cap, a practice which is common throughout the University of California and other universities.

UCLA also will be embarking on an educational campaign to make students more aware of the possible consequences of illegal file-sharing, Davis said.

Some anti-piracy organizations are saying this attitude of education might be most beneficial toward curbing the spread of downloads of copyrighted files.

"I hope that universities play a role in the education of their students about the importance of intellectual property," said Ron Roecker, a spokesman for the Recording Academy.

He added that his organization does not promote a Big Brother role in regard to copyrighted music downloads, preferring to remain primarily an education organization.

The Recording Industry Association of America, however, has been taking a much more proactive role in recent months, suing hundreds of people – including college students – who have downloaded copyrighted files over the course of the last several months.

Ikezoye said the new hardware might be a way to manage copyrighted downloads without lawsuits.

"Peer-to-peer networks are a great technology, a great way for a community to get together, but we need to balance (them) with the rights of the creative person who does not want (his or her) things to be out there," Ikezoye said.
http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/...s.asp?id=28276


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Universities Use Software To Squash File-Sharing
Virginia Zignego

Two universities are making it harder for students to download copyrighted music.

Central Washington University and another university, which requested to remain nameless, have installed a filter that prevents users on the university's network filter from downloading copyrighted songs.

The universities are the first to thwart attempts at downloading music directly. Other schools, such as the University of Wisconsin, employ a system that does not exclude downloading on the network but instead regulates such downloads to a slower network speed.

Central Washington University and the other university are in an experimental stage with the network filter, developed by Audible Magic Co., according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Audible Magic's product has been nicknamed a "file swap killer." It is slated as a way to "comprehensively control peer-to-peer file sharing," according to news articles and product descriptions on Audible Magic Company's website.

The technology allows users to block all peer-to peer-file transfer involving copyrighted material. All downloads on the universities' networks are matched against the filter's database of four million copyrighted songs. If a user attempts to download one of the songs in the database, the filter prevents the download.

Central Washington University officials have previously said the decision to use Audible Magic's product resulted from frustration with a slow network speed coming from a large numbers of songs being downloaded. Central officials also spent a large amount of time responding to cease-and-desist requests from the Recording Industry Association of America.

UW senior administrative program specialist Brian Rust said UW has no plans to use a network filter comparable to Audible Magic's.

Rust said, however, that UW housing has employed a "package shaper" since the beginning of the 2004-05 academic year.

"Our package shaper profiles the file sharing type and relegates it to a slower network speed. There isn't as much bandwidth access for file sharing as for other types of Internet usage," Rust said. "It was instituted at [UW] housing's request and seems to have taken care of most of the slow Internet problems in UW housing."

UW students expressed varying opinions on university property control issues.

"On campus is university property," UW senior Laura Kelash said. "If network bandwidth is occupied mainly by students downloading, the university also has to protect its property."

Some students, however, believe the property belongs to the people essentially paying for it.

"It's university property, but who pays tuition and UW housing fees, which all go into developing and maintaining the network?" said a UW junior who wished to remain anonymous. "Do all these people making the rules pay to have someone tell them how to use what they've paid for?"

As a response to results from a recent Harvard University study showing file down loaders actually buy more music than those who do not illegally download, UW sophomore Abby Vanderscheuren said she can understand both sides of the issue.

"As a musician, I can see where groups are concerned if they're not receiving royalties," she said. "But I don't think that most of the time people download a whole album. Usually it's just one song they don't want to spend $15 on a CD for."
http://www.badgerherald.com/vnews/di.../40761e0303e43


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Valenti, Right and Wrong, Is a Man to Respect
Dan Gillmor

How I wish Jack Valenti had been on our side in the copyright war.

Valenti will soon retire from his decades-long post as president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the industry's enormously effective lobbying arm. I'm going to miss him.

A little story will help explain why. In October 2002, a colleague called to say that Valenti, during a meeting with reporters in Los Angeles, had denounced a
column of mine. The piece had been harsh, not for the first time, about the entertainment industry's copyright stance, which sought -- and continues to seek -- absolute control over digital content.

I called the MPAA and offered a deal. I would interview Valenti and, to the best of my ability, reflect his views in a column, followed a week later by my response.

The answer was an immediate "yes." Several weeks later, we met in Valenti's Washington office, a short stroll from the White House where he had served as a key aide to Lyndon Johnson before taking the helm of the MPAA in 1966.

Nothing he said surprised me, or changed my views. But I was struck by three things. First, despite my best efforts, he used his well-honed ability to weave around the questions he either couldn't or didn't want to answer. Second, he reflected his employers' -- and, I believe, his own -- views in his typically eloquent yet plain-spoken way.

Finally, he was gracious and respectful -- a gentleman. And shortly after the interview was published, he wrote me a letter -- on paper, not e-mail -- thanking me for the opportunity to be heard.

No doubt, the huge sums of cash the MPAA throws around in Washington and the state capitals accounts for much of the industry's clout. But so does the personal charm of someone like Valenti, 82, who is testament to the fact that it's much more pleasant to have an intelligent debate with people like Valenti than with verbal bomb throwers. It's easier to listen, for one thing.

It's also important to note that while the film industry is guilty of many sins, movie people have been some of the most important and effective defenders of free speech in recent times -- at least since the days of the cowardly McCarthy-era blacklisting.

I loathe much of what comes out of Hollywood. I'm especially contemptuous of the gratuitous bloodbaths aimed at impressionable teenagers; I wish the people who put out this garbage had more of a conscience. But I also understand that free speech means defending unpopular speech, especially what makes you furious. You challenge bad speech with better speech. You don't censor it.

I thought this was largely a given in America. But the blue-nosed, neo-Victorians are on the move again, trying to stomp out speech they don't like. They say they're protecting children, as they ignore the best protection of all: changing the channel.

Valenti has been one of the most prominent voices in protecting our First Amendment, at least when it comes to the rights of filmmakers. I salute him for that.

As my friend Cory Doctorow -- a writer and campaigner for civil liberties in the Digital Age -- has observed, the film industry's lobbying clout stems in part from its defense of First Amendment rights.

But as he also notes, Valenti has not been a friend of free speech for programmers. Nor has Valenti been a friend of innovation, not when it challenged the movie industry's business model.

In this context I consider the members of the MPAA and its music counterpart, the Recording Industry Association of America, to be akin to a cartel. These industries are largely responsible for the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a law that turned First Amendment logic on its head.

To stop copyright infringements, the cartel has used the DMCA to threaten or stifle scholarly research. It has gotten courts to rule that journalists may not even publish hyperlinks to certain Web sites where people can find information on how to play DVDs on unauthorized machines. It has sued technology companies that dared to create products with entirely non-infringing uses.

I also believe Valenti and the cartel were dead wrong when they got Congress to keep extending copyright terms. They are taking away the public domain, the traditional bedrock of creativity and innovation, to protect the financial interests of a tiny group of corporate copyright holders.

These are not small matters. They are not solely about the rights of copyright holders vs. the rights of everyone else. They go to the heart of tomorrow's economy.

Valenti has shown respect for his opponents, something I can't say his employers have done as a rule. If they're smart they'll find someone who is equally charming, not just equally cunning, to fill his shoes.

So, as I said, I'll miss him. He has been a constant reminder that, as the saying goes, we can disagree without being disagreeable.

One of Valenti's longtime opponents in the copyright debate has been another friend, activist John Perry Barlow. I mentioned to him how much I wished Valenti had been on what I consider the right side. He replied:

"Jack has been wrong, but he's been so entertainingly, eloquently and charmingly wrong. He could never have been on our side, though. He was born into a different world. He still lives there."


Comments

And meanwhile my "Boston Strangler" keeps playing movies as I pump money into the Hollywood money machine. Jack was a man of limited vision, unfortunately, and even more unfortuunately that seems to be the norm in the copyright holders camp.

http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/colu...s/010192.shtml


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The Voluntary Collective License



This is a sketch of how a voluntary collective license might work if applied to P2P. I left out the bugs, snags and roadblocks in order to first illustrate the concept. However, the source files are available [PDF, OmniGraffle, Visio or PNG] under a CC license if you'd like to add those features yourself.
http://www.trubble.com/vcl.html


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The Invisible Inner Circle

Forget Gnutella. Frankel's Waste is where it's at.
Robert Capps

Kazaa and Gnutella are fine for the masses, but real peer-to-peer insiders do their file swapping behind the velvet ropes of Waste - and odds are you're not on the list. Credit file-sharing wunderkind Justin Frankel, who wrote the MP3 player Winamp and the P2P program Gnutella. His bosses at AOL ordered him to shutter the latter. So Frankel came up with a better idea: Waste, which hides file-sharing, chat, and instant messaging behind bombproof, munitions-grade encryption. Users can even run Waste as a "darknet," secretly piggybacking on university or corporate networks. Only the invited can join; no bosses, copyright watchdogs, or bandwidth hogs allowed.

Of course, AOL spiked Waste, too, and Frankel has since quit. The software is still on the Web, though, so if you can't score an invitation, you can start your own inner circle. But keep a close eye on the guest list. Like all the best clubs, Waste networks get overcrowded. One operator says he's already shut down two. "I don't care what some random jackass has to offer," he says. "It's much more interesting to see what my friends are doing." More proof of its exclusivity: Waste uses network port 1337 - in coder-doodz lingo, that's Leet, as in elite.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...tart.html?pg=9


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New York Police Bust Pirate CD Operation
David Gregorio

Thousands of illegal knock-off recordings by such artists as Bruce Springsteen and 50 Cent were seized and six suspected CD pirates arrested in one of the biggest raids to date on a pirate recording shop in the Northeastern United States, authorities said Saturday.

Police who raided the home Friday said they found 15,000 counterfeit recorded compact discs and blanks, along with equipment capable of churning out up to 5,000 CDs an hour.

Officials believe some 70,000 pirated CDs a week were coming out of the two-story, red brick house in the New York City borough of Queens. They arrested six suspects aged 19 to 29, who were to be arraigned on charges carrying sentences of up to four years in prison.

Police said they were combing through the thousands of recordings, which included music by Jessica Simpson, Alicia Keys, Sheryl Crow and Eminem. They also found apparently counterfeit designer handbags, luggage and pornographic DVDs.

"The counterfeit CDs turn up all over the city," Queens County District Attorney Richard A. Brown said in a statement. "They are sold in neighborhood retail stores, in flea markets and by street corner vendors" for $4 to $5 apiece, much less than the $15 to $18 charged by legitimate retailers for authentic CDs.

Acting on a tip by private investigators for the record industry, undercover officers placed an order at the pirate plant and turned up with a search warrant while the plant was making the discs, law enforcement sources told Reuters.

The pirate CD shop was one of the biggest such operations ever found in the Northeastern United States, Brad Buckles, director of the Recording Industry Association of America's anti-piracy unit, said Saturday.

"The size of this operation puts a different face on music piracy," Buckles told Reuters. "People who see a street vendor with a few phony CDs on a blanket tend to think this is no big deal, but it requires a very organized criminal enterprise to carry off something like this."

Buckles said the pirates were "able to produce these CDs for probably a half a dollar. They don't have to pay for the artist or anyone else involved. So that's an enormous amount of money in the underground economy."

The recording industry has estimated that CD pirates cost it $400 million a year in lost sales.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=4677504


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Cable or Phone? Difference Can Be Taxing
Matt Richtel

Are you paying monthly taxes on your high-speed Internet connection?

The answer, bizarrely, depends on whether you use a cable connection or a telephone data line, even though the two services offer comparable access to the Internet.

In Minnesota, for example, customers of Earthlink Inc., an Internet service provider, who get broadband access from a cable modem pay no tax on the service. But Earthlink customers who get their high-speed access through telephone digital subscriber lines have to pay $3.10 a month in state and local taxes and other surcharges. A similar tax distinction is made in 17 other states and the District of Columbia.

This odd situation has grabbed attention in the Senate, and is part of a debate on whether to extend a tax moratorium on Internet services, an issue the Senate may vote on this month. Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia, has strongly argued that state taxation of digital lines slows the spread of high-speed broadband and unfairly distorts the market.

"You're giving the advantage to one technology over another," Senator Allen said. "It's discriminatory taxes." He is sponsoring a bill that would ban taxes on all forms of Internet access, regardless of the technology involved, similar to a bill the House approved in September. But some lawmakers and state and local government officials argue that taxes on digital subscriber lines have become important sources of revenue.

Treating the two kinds of broadband access differently has its roots in the 1998 Internet Tax Freedom Act, which barred states from taxing Internet services for three years to encourage the expansion of online commerce.

The tax moratorium, which Congress extended in 2001 and expired in November, did not apply to "telecommunications services," industry experts said, because Congress feared that phone companies would use the moratorium to avoid paying tariffs like the universal service fee, which is used to subsidize telephone service in rural areas.

Congress is considering whether to extend, or even make permanent, the tax ban. Senator Allen's bill, which has passed out of the Commerce Committee, appears headed for a Senate vote this month. A competing bill, sponsored by Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, may also see Senate action.

During the moratorium, some states took the position that under the 1998 law they were still allowed to tax digital subscriber lines provided by phone companies because of the telecommunications exclusion.

Telephone industry representatives said it was difficult to generalize about how much state and local taxes add to digital line costs, but it could be as much as $4 a month. Cable and digital line services cost $30 to $50 a month, with cable costing slightly more in most markets, analysts said. Lee Goodman, a lawyer for Time Warner Cable and America Online, said Congress excluded telecommunications services from the tax moratorium because it wanted to draw a distinction between phone and Internet service. But Mr. Goodman says, "Technology has vaulted ahead of law, thus forcing this debate."

In the last five years, the distinction has become increasingly important for state and local governments as well as for the telephone and cable companies that are battling in the broadband market.

Cable companies control about two-thirds of that market, with phone companies controlling a third. Although those shares are holding fairly steady, phone industry representatives argue that the additional taxes place their Internet services at a significant disadvantage to cable.

Taxes on digital subscriber line services are collected in 18 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research institute.

Senator Allen's bill would ban all taxes on Internet access services, including digital subscriber lines. It would give state and local governments three years to phase out Internet taxes.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, those governments collect around $40 million a year in taxes on high-speed digital lines. But that is not the only potential tax loss. The 1998 Internet law allowed 10 states, which at that time were taxing Internet access from both cable and telephone companies, to continue doing so. If Senator Allen's bill is adopted, those states could lose $80 million to $120 million a year, the Congressional Budget Office said.

Harley Duncan, executive director of the Federation of Tax Administrators, said the loss in tax revenue would be devastating. "This really blows a hole in state budgets," Mr. Duncan said.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said she had been contacted by 121 cities and counties protesting a tax moratorium. "This will eliminate bona fide revenues from cities and counties that are struggling to stay afloat," she said.

The debate in Congress has split between those who want to nurture Internet technology and those who want to protect state and local tax revenue, with the sides supporting competing bills.

"Congress has taken a temporary ban on Internet access and turned it into a giveaway program to the high-speed Internet industry," said Senator Alexander, who has proposed legislation that would allow states that currently tax Internet services to maintain those taxes.

"If Congress wants to give big tax breaks to the high-speed Internet industry, Congress ought to pay for it," he said. Senator Alexander's bill, however, would not allow states to add Internet taxes.

He acknowledged that under his legislation, digital line customers would be subject to taxes while cable customers would remain exempt.

But he said that problem should be remedied by the Federal Communications Commission, which has defined the cable industry as an "information service" and the telephone industry as a "telecommunications service." If the commission defined the industries comparably, he argued, they would be subject to the same tax laws.

Senator Alexander compared efforts to roll back the states' ability to charge taxes on digital lines to an "unfunded mandate."

"Americans are sick and tired of Congress coming up with expensive ideas," he said, "taking credit, then sending the bill to state and local governments."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/te...y/05taxes.html


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Feds Tell States 'VoIP Is Ours'
Ben Charny and Declan McCullagh

Sen. John Sununu announced on Friday long-awaited Internet phone legislation that would effectively eliminate state and local authorities' ability to tax and regulate broadband phone calls.

The bill, which is expected to draw fire from state governments, says all authority over regulating VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) services is "reserved solely to the federal government."

The measure, VoIP Regulatory Freedom Act, also imposes some curbs on the Federal Communications Commission's ability to extend to
VoIP much of the thick quilt of rules and requirements that govern the traditional phone network. For instance, it bans imposing certain "access charge" taxes, but does require the FCC to levy VoIP universal service fees that will be redirected to provided discounted analog phone service to low-income and rural Americans.

VoIP "is at a critical stage in its development, but its potential to serve consumers, business, and society is enormous," Sununu, R-N.H., said Friday. "Unfortunately, some interests would like to impose an outdated and stifling regulatory framework on this service, rather than allow VoIP to continue to expand freely."

A backlash from states is expected, according to Mike Hurst, legislative director for Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., who introduced similar legislation in the House of Representatives on Monday.

"Of course they are going to be pissed," Hurst said.

Two representatives of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) did not return calls for comment. NARUC has battled earlier attempts to limit state authority over the broadband phone industry.

The legislation is another attempt by federal policymakers to claim lone responsibility for regulating VoIP calls. The FCC wants a light hand to foster the young industry, while states and cities fear that as more calls make their way onto the unregulated Internet, they'll have less taxes to collect to support 911 and other public services.

Federal regulators began proceedings weeks ago to answer many of the same questions posed in the congressional legislation.

Sununu's proposal also addresses the controversial issue of VoIP wiretapping, saying that VoIP companies that provide links to the existing telephone network--a category that would include Vonage, for instance--must provide some "access to necessary information to law enforcement agencies." But the access requirement, a key concern of the FBI, would not apply to instant messaging applications or peer-to-peer services like Skype.
http://news.com.com/2100-7352-5184603.html


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Judge Drops Internet Defamation Suit
NewsMax Wires

In a case defense attorneys called the first to test the limits of Internet free speech, a judge asked a court to drop her defamation lawsuit against someone who criticized her in an Internet chat room.

Judge Joan Orie Melvin no longer wants to know the identity of a critic who denounced her on the Internet in 1999, court documents filed in the past week show.

No reason was given for the decision. Melvin's attorney, Jack Orie, did not immediately return a call to his office Saturday.

Melvin sued after an anonymous person using the screen name "Grant Street 99" claimed in a chat room that Melvin had lobbied then-Gov. Tom Ridge to appoint a friend to a vacant county judgeship.

Political activity by judges is prohibited in Pennsylvania and Melvin, who denied the claim, sued. The case never made it to trial.

The American Civil Liberties Union defended the Internet critic, saying the case would be the first in the country to test the right to remain anonymous in an Internet forum.

A judge ruled in Melvin's favor in 2000, saying her attorney would have to know the identities of the people criticizing Melvin before trying to prove they did so falsely and maliciously.

The ACLU appealed twice before the state Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower court to decide whether a public official must first prove financial harm before the identity of his or her accuser is revealed.

It was unclear whether the court will still rule on that issue.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/arti...4/142559.shtml


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Virtual Map wins copyright case against NTUC Income
CNA

SINGAPORE : Virtual Map, which set up Singapore's well-known online streetdirectory.com, has won a copyright infringement case against insurer NTUC Income.

Virtual Map claims that NTUC Income copied nine of its maps in 2002 without its permission or licence.

NTUC Income had admitted to copying the maps, but disputed that Virtual Map owned the copyright.

The quantum of damages and legal costs NTUC Income would have to pay Virtual Map will be decided at a separate court hearing, to be held in a couple of months' time.

About 40 other companies are also facing legal action for downloading maps from Streetdirectory.com.

The maps were mostly used to show the location of their offices on their corporate websites.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stori.../77986/1/.html


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NASA Will Become First Agency to Get OSI Certification of Open Source Agreement

The open source software movement has moved beyond the academic and business communities to establish a new beachhead--on Cape Canaveral.

Open Source Initiative, a non-profit organization that certifies open source software licenses, told BNA March 28 that approval of an open source agreement drafted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should happen within a matter of weeks, making NASA the first federal agency to obtain OSI certification.

The certification coincides with the rollout of a pilot program at NASA that would permit the release of select NASA software on an open source basis, complementing the agency's current menu of release options.
http://ipcenter.bna.com/pic2/ip.nsf/...B?OpenDocument


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Digital Music: What’s In Store?
Jonny Evans

The music piracy debate has intensified once again, following controversial court decisions and a report released last week by Harvard Business School, and industry trends suggest the music business may eventually be forced to change.

The Harvard report disputes record industry claims that file-sharing has impacted against sales; calling the impact of file sharing "statistically insignificant". It suggests that competing entertainment formats; economic worries; limited breadth of music releases and the end of the vinyl to CD upgrade cycle have had more impact against music sales than file sharing.

The Canadian high court last week declared that music fans downloading songs using peer-to-peer services are not breaking local copyright law; and a Florida court also last week denied music labels attempt to extract personal information about file sharers from a local ISP. The Canadian decision is subject to change.

These revelations arrive as the music business prepares to extend its legal action against file-sharers internationally.

Commenting on the Harvard report, International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) chairman and CEO Jay Berman told The Guardian: "If I listened to that study my business would have improved."

It appears the music industry remains blinkered to the Harvard researchers’ alternative explanations for falling music sales, preferring to continue its tactic of demonizing file sharers as the business attempts to maintain its grip on the means of music production and distribution.

P2P United chair Wayne Rosso counters: "The recording industry is so completely misguided in its use of fear tactics that it can only engender even more contempt from fans. And what's even more ridiculous is that they're all profitable and their business is up, in part due to the free marketing they get from P2P networks. They should be paying us!"

Europe is ripe for digital music sales. Online music service OD2 sold one million tracks in Europe in the first quarter of this year. Support for licensed music-download services are an essential element to the music labels' strategic plan for dealing with digital music – litigation without a viable legal alternative can only be counter- productive. Berman observed: "I want iTunes, Real and Napster here as soon as possible. I'm trying more than ever for a licence on behalf of all these services."

Leave me alone

However, artists and music fans are increasingly vexed by the
music label's litigious tactics. And this is creating an interesting phenomenon. Artists are going it alone online.

Blur drummer Dave Rowntree is furious at music industry plans to litigate music fans, telling New Media Age: "It's preposterous". And the professional musician is not convinced that file-sharing music fans buy fewer records. "How do they know?" he asked.

Musicians are turning to the Internet in an attempt to create an alternative ways to make a living than working with the established music business, and since that business is built on artists' talent, it appears that its control of the means of production may be under attack.

George Michael last month announced plans to dump the music business, promising never to make another album for retail sale. Michael will instead make future releases available online to fans in exchange for charitable donations.

Explaining this decision, he said it would take him out of the music industry mechanism, which requires artists create new song collections every "so many" years, "which nearly killed me," he said.

Music-business contracts commit artists to certain release cycles. For example, a musician can have created a collection of songs across many years before winning a record deal. They then find themselves committed to a gruelling touring cycle, and to a record release every year.

This creates the phenomenon of the difficult second album, as artists attempt to manage more fame and commitments while struggling to find the inspiration to create new music in order to fulfill their contract. Commercial realities can arguably transform artists into musical battery hens, and dampen the quality of their art.

Thank you for the music

In recent weeks, both Metallica – renowned for their litigation against Napster – and The Bare
Naked Ladies have begun their own experiments with digital distribution – experiments that could lead musicians toward more-autonomous futures.

While both remain committed to their existing labels, the acts are making MP3s of their live shows available from their Web sites for sale to fans.

Metallica's unedited soundboard recordings cost $9.95 as MP3s and are available here. The band is also making FLAC (an alternative higher-quality digital music file format) downloads available for $12.95. Downloadable CD labels – including tray and front cover inserts are also supplied, along with special booklets. The band is currently engaged on a mammoth North American tour, and each gig is made available within days of its taking place.

Bare Naked Ladies are offering recordings from up to 80 per cent of their shows for download, as MP3s with cover art ($13.99), or on CD ($20). The band sold over 35,000 songs in the first week of the experiment, with downloads outselling physical CDs by two-to-one, reports claim. While existing label Warner takes a slice of those sales, the band gets three times the royalties it accrues from studio albums.

These actions show that established musicians are already in position to make a profit online.

BPI representative Steve Redmond said the Metallica and Bare Naked Ladies actions show what can be done using the Internet for copyright holders: "This is bands profiting from their own copyrighted music."

He added: "Some people have come up with the idea that the music business is against the Internet. That's absolutely not true. But artists still need to be paid for what they do."

Culture shock at the power exchange

Other recent innovations from the creative community hint at future developments in music. The recent story of the Grey Album shows how the Internet fundamentally changes music distribution and control.

The Grey Album in brief: DJ Danger Mouse remixed the vocals from Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' White Album and called his creation The Grey Album. He sent about 3,000 promos out, until EMI told him to stop. However, Internet activists continue to make the Grey Album available online.

The Beatles and Metallica pop-up once again in another recent online happening, Beatallica, a pair of anonymous musicians who play Beatles songs in the style of Metallica.

The songs are made available free, and the musicians concerned hope to avoid legal action from Metallica or Beatles lawyers by remaining anonymous. It appears popular – since the release of the second album last week the official site has run out of bandwidth.

Break on through

Is it possible we are seeing the creation of a 'third estate' for music, opening the doors to new
creative expression accompanied by a need to create new economic models. EMI's move to axe 1,500 jobs last week shows change is in the air. The company intends further focusing itself on a smaller roster of large artists.

Existing legal music download services are experimenting with the new territory. Apple's iTunes Music Store, for instance, has begun selling exclusive live shows – some recorded at Apple's own retail stores. The company is also offering pre-release tracks, for example from popular US novelty act William Hung.

The music business is reluctantly going through growing pains, as artists, consumers and the business itself renegotiate its business proposition, and the labels attempt to cling to control.

As Karl Marx once wrote: "Wherever a part of society possesses a monopoly of the means of production, the labourer must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production."
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_...fm?NewsID=8365


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More Americans Shunning Free File Sharing With Peers
Amy Ritchart

With paid music downloads from Internet businesses steadily on the rise, some music lovers say they don't understand the legalities of sharing computer music files or downloading music from the Internet for free.

"They say it's illegal. The way I see it, the rights of that CD are already paid for," said Clarksville resident Albert Casillas.

The Recording Industry Association of America, representing hundreds of record labels from various genres of music, is seeking through a lawsuit the names of more than 500 anonymous music consumers accused of using peer-to-peer file sharing software to download music or share songs via the Internet.

Peer-to-peer software is available on the Internet -- some versions are free while others have a fee -- and allows the user to download music files from other users they don't know from around the world. The software is legal because it can be used to retrieve files that are considered in the public domain, like speeches.

Last Tuesday the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a Swiss nonprofit RIAA-affiliated organization, announced in a written statement the group will take the campaign against illegal music downloading worldwide.

"This is the start of an international campaign against online copyright theft, and it is the logical next step in the fight against piracy, coming after our extensive education and warning campaigns of the last few months," Jay Berman, chairman and CEO of the Federation, said in Tuesday's statement.

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said U.S. investigations also will be ongoing.

"What we do is go on these Web sites like anyone else and see who is offering our members' songs," Lamy said. "If someone is offering a significant amount, they can be a target of a lawsuit."

Casillas thinks stopping illegal downloading will take more than lawsuits. One challenge, he said, is creating albums and compact discs with enough quality music that consumers don't mind paying retail for it.

Another is flexibility.

Most often, Casillas likes only a select number of songs on any given CD, and he wants the option of paying for only those songs.

"To me the whole point is, if they would come out with an actual decent CD, then I would buy it," he said. "I'm not going to spend $16 for a CD with one good song."

Peer-to-peer file sharing originally met such a need for music consumers, but with the recent RIAA lawsuits, pay services are quickly filling the gap.

"The whole thing with the peer-to-peer and pay services is, you're getting to choose just one song," Casillas said.

Clarksville resident Cheryl Hunter-Grah received an iPod, Apple's portable music computer, for Christmas. She downloads music from iTunes, Apple's legal digital music store that offers both Apple and PC-based software.

"With iTunes it's so easy. I have a Mac. When you plug your iPod in, it's seamless. They (advertise that it's seamless) and it is," she said.

Downloading music illegally puts the person at risk of getting a computer virus, Hunter-Grah said.

"It's just not worth the hassles and the troubles," she said. "It's even cheaper to buy the whole album (at iTunes) instead of at Wal-Mart."

In addition to downloading music, Hunter-Grah joined an audio book club and is able to download books, The New York Times and many shows from National Public Radio.

Lamy said legal downloading services are growing as a result of the RIAA lawsuits. The suits also have served to increase awareness that it is illegal to download music from file-sharing networks, he said.

"Last year when we asked people in our own consumer surveys whether they knew it was illegal to download from a file-sharing network, only 35 percent (knew)," he said. "Now there is two-thirds. Public awareness that this is illegal has skyrocketed."

Apple released a written statement in March celebrating the purchase and download of more than 50 million songs for iTunes Music Store, not including songs redeemed from the current Pepsi-iTunes promotion.

According to Apple's calculations, consumers are downloading an estimated 2.5 million songs per week, or 130 million songs per year.

And that's just at the iTunes store.

Use of the PC-based online music service Napster is also on the rise. Parent company Roxio Inc. released a written statement indicating revenue predictions for Napster were increased to $5.5 million, up from $3.6 million.

Both Napster and iTunes charge 99 cents per download and a new music service from Wal-Mart is offering songs at 88 cents each.

"Those services are experiencing an uptake in sales," Lamy said. "We need to transition people. It's not something that's going to happen overnight.

"This issue has become a frequent topic at dinner tables and in conversation between parents and children. The more parents talk to their kids about this, the more teachers talk to their students, those are all good signs that people are beginning to rethink what was before seen as a harmless and a risk-free activity."

Opposition abounds

Many, however, are resisting the transition. An informal afternoon survey of music downloaders conducted by The Leaf-Chronicle ascertained only one in 25 local people use a legal service.

None of them want to disclose their names for fear they will be sued by the RIAA.

Casillas thinks people in the music business are making enough money without having to sue music downloaders for more.

"They're still making a whole lot of money," he said. "When these rap people are making more than police officers and teachers, that's scary right there."

But Songwriters Guild of America president Rick Carnes said most people in the music industry aren't high salary. The illegal downloading surge, he said, has hit many musicians and song writers hard.

"Quite frankly, just check the average earnings," he said. "(They are) about $4,600 per year. The only way we're making any money as a song writer is by delivering pizza too."

Carnes said he's seen many dedicated song writers leave Nashville over the past two years, and he blames people who lift music from peer-to-peer networks.

"In the end, stealing music is self-defeating," he said. "If you love music, you've just killed it by stealing it."

Carnes said those who say it's acceptable to illegally download music because people in the recording industry are wealthy are only rationalizing theft.

"Even if somebody is rich, does that justify breaking into his house and stealing his television?" he said.

Amy Ritchart can be reached by telephone or by e-mail at amyritchart@theleafchronicle.com.
http://www.theleafchronicle.com/news...ws/172447.html


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Hollywood Competes With the Street in Russia
Erin E. Arvedlund

MOSCOW, April 6 — The American film industry is fighting rampant DVD piracy in Russia with a radical new tactic: cutting prices.

To fight piracy here, where 9 out of 10 DVD's sold are counterfeit copies, Columbia TriStar, a division of Sony, will price DVD's at no more than 299 rubles, or just over $10, less than half its current price. Warner Home Video, a division of Time Warner, has already cut its DVD prices in Russia to the equivalent of $15.

"The idea is to get Russian consumers used to buying licensed material, but at a price that most of the population can afford," said Vyacheslav Dobychin, general director of Columbia TriStar's licensee here. Columbia TriStar is setting up its own factory outside of downtown Moscow, which later this month is to start churning out licensed copies of "Bad Boys 2," "Big Fish," "S.W.A.T." and other movie hits.

The low-price idea has long been anathema to industry advocates in the United States. "You can never compete on price with a pirate," said Jack Valenti in a recent telephone interview. The longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America, he has made stern copyright enforcement his rallying cry.

But Hollywood appears to be running out of options in Russia. Piracy is getting worse, says Konstantin Zemchenkov, director of the Russian Anti-Piracy Organization, a group partly financed by Hollywood studios and the Motion Picture Association of America, which is leading the fight against producers, distributors and retailers of pirated discs and videos in Russia.

A former KGB officer, Mr. Zemchenkov said that piracy in Russia accounted for 9 out of every 10 DVD's sold and 6 out of every 10 CD's. His numbers stand in sharp contrast to estimates by the Trade and Economic Development Ministry that counterfeit disc sales fell 15 to 20 percent in 2003 from the previous year, when pirated production accounted for 76 to 86 percent of sales.

So far, a number of leading music labels in the United States and Britain have been content to file lawsuits against Russia's largest producers of audio, video and software.

Russian DVD distributors, however, said they had to find a way to compete with the street. As an example Mr. Dobychin cited Disney's animated children's feature "Brother Bear," which is just lighting up theater screens in Moscow. Already, he notes, pirated copies are for sale for 120 rubles (about $4). "The DVD quality is perfect," he said. "And yet licensed DVD's of 'Brother Bear' will only arrive in September of 2004. That's just too late."

At Gorbushka, a vast CD and DVD bazaar southeast of downtown Moscow, a pirated copy of Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ," not yet released in theaters here, fetches about $4. The stunningly professional DVD box and disc are lined with Cyrillic titles, and the movie is programmed to play in several foreign languages, including French, English and Russian.

On weekends, Gorbushka, the largest pirated CD and DVD market in Europe, is packed with hundreds of Russian families cruising for a middle-class good time: the latest software (Microsoft Excel: $3), music (Norah Jones's latest album: $2.50) and computer games (The Sims Livin' Large: $4). For educated city dwellers whose tastes outstrip their incomes — the average monthly wage is $200 — Gorbushka is a cultural motherlode. For the most part, the Russian Anti-Piracy Organization has devoted its resources to shutting down counterfeiting plants instead of markets.

Columbia TriStar argues that its price war represents the vanguard in the fight against piracy here. Moreover, homegrown factories will help create jobs and avoid import and customs duties. Other film and music studios may have no choice but to follow.

"Major studios understand that this situation is different here," Mr. Dobychin said. "And other studios will come around to that point of view," he predicted, both by lowering prices and by starting to produce here in Russia. "I don't know of one studio that hasn't at least thought about it," he added. A licensed but imported DVD carries so many customs duties and import taxes, that by the time the discs arrive from overseas, the price can range from $20 to $30.

"We now import from Western Europe," said Gregory Economou, vice president for licensee markets at Warner Home Video Europe, based in London. "We would like to find a way to replicate locally, and we're looking for a suitable local partner." Warner Home Video and its Russian distributor, Premier Video Film, have cut prices on licensed DVD's, and Premier Video will also sell discs more cheaply to retailers who stick with the recommended retail price, to combat piracy.

"Socially, it's crucial to cut prices," said Christopher Abel-Smith, the Moscow-based general director of Premier. "You can't just feed that top 1 percent of the population. You need to make product available to everyone, to low-income people." He pointed out that Russians could now buy a new German-made Rolsen DVD player for about $60. "So it's unlikely they spend $20 for one DVD," he said.

Most Russians, including law-enforcement agents, don't view buying or producing pirated goods as a serious crime. And Russia has historically copied the West: Stalin was an avid fan of Detroit sedans. He decreed in 1942 that "the workers' paradise" should produce a new limo, so the Russian limos were stamped right from the dies of the 1941 Packard Super 8. Soviet bloc nations built their computer industry around smuggled I.B.M. and Digital Equipment machines and contraband software. In the 1940's the Soviets copied piece by piece the American B-29, the only plane capable of transporting nuclear weapons at the time.

"It's part of the Soviet legacy," said Timothy Swanson, with the United States Embassy's commercial section here, which has been battling piracy on behalf of American film and music companies. "An artist was an artist — he got paid a salary. There weren't royalties for artists or composers. Everything was owned by the state — for 70 years intellectual property rights never existed."

This culture helps explain why "it often feels like we are fighting the sea," said Mr. Zemchenkov, director of the antipiracy group. His cramped downtown offices here house hundreds of "disc spindles" and boxes of pirated entertainment purloined in frequent raids — so many that they are stacked in the bathroom. The group conducted three warehouse raids just last week, one netting several thousand discs and $500,000 in cash.

Intellectual-property legislation is wending its way through Russia's parliament, and the police continue stepping up their raids.

In late February Moscow's regional Economic Crime Police mounted a raid on a clandestine DVD plant in Pushkino, a city about 20 miles from here. Authorities seized new DVD production lines; about 800 stampers; 25,000 pirated DVD's of films like "Snowboarder" and all three "Lord of the Rings" titles; artwork for "Indiana Jones" movie boxes and "Tomb Raider" computer games; and pornography.

Mr. Valenti, who will soon leave his decades-long post as president of the Motion Picture Association, insists, "The only way to kill piracy in Russia is strong copyright law with stern penalties and government resolve to enforce that law."

But there is another way, said Mr. Dobychin of Columbia TriStar's licensee here: "We're changing distribution from the `exclusive model' to the `mass model' in Russia. Our goal is to fight piracy, and with lower prices, we can finally compete."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/07/movies/07PIRA.html


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Today's Lesson for College Students: Lighten Up
Sara Rimer

BRUNSWICK, Me. — It was intended as a statement against the kind of perfectionism that drives some Bowdoin College students to spend two hours a day on the treadmill: plastered all over campus recently were photographs of naked undergraduate Bowdoin women — or at least their bodies, as the pictures had been shot from the neck down — in all their short, tall, thin, not-so-thin, fit and unfit, anonymous, unairbrushed glory.

Far from being shocked, Craig W. Bradley, dean of student affairs, said he supported the women's group that came up with the poster campaign — anything to get students to stop worrying so much about body image, grades, careers.

Mr. Bradley, along with other college officials, has been telling students to get off the treadmill. Go for a walk, go surfing. Read a novel just for pleasure. Eat ice cream. Hang out with the knitting club. Find your passion.

Bowdoin's efforts reflect the ever-increasing attention colleges across the country are giving to undergraduates' personal growth and emotional well-being.

It has been more than a decade since colleges became mindful of the new generation of students arriving on campus with serious mental health illnesses. But these days, as they respond to the rising number of students seeking help for stress-related conditions on campus and the expectations of consumer-minded parents, many colleges are extending the therapeutic culture far beyond treatment for clinical depression and bipolar disorders.

Private and public colleges alike have begun offering a wide range of services and activities intended to help students negotiate what used to be considered the ordinary rites of passage: homesickness, sophomore existential angst, romantic relationships. There are now free massages and dogs to cuddle in exam seasons, biofeedback workshops and therapists available to help students work through their first C.

At Harvard, the training given to graduate students who live in the undergraduate houses has in recent years expanded to include ways to help students fight perfectionism — a theme on many campuses — as well as negotiate matters involving race, class and sexual identity.

At Amherst College in Massachusetts, students can have unlimited sessions with the counseling center's therapists. They are free to discuss more mundane concerns like their futures and their relationships — with family members, roommates, boyfriends and girlfriends — as well as more serious issues like depression and eating disorders.

Washington University in St. Louis has established stress-free zones during finals, where students can get chair massages and listen to New Age music. Addressing the notoriously poor sleeping habits of undergraduates, the university recently celebrated Sleep Awareness Week by handing out sleep quizzes and reminding residential advisers not to brag about how little sleep they can get by on.

Kevin Kruger, the associate executive director for the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, with nearly 1,500 members, said the new services were the natural extension of the awareness raised by students with serious mental health problems.

"This movement is an indication of colleges trying to be more proactive," Mr. Kruger said, rather than waiting for students to "flunk out, have a breakdown or whatever the outcome is going to be."

But many college officials also acknowledge that they are responding to the heightened consumer mentality of many parents. "If you're paying a lot, you expect a lot in return," said Craig McEwen, dean of academic affairs at Bowdoin, one of the nation's top liberal arts colleges. "Unhappiness is not something you're supposed to feel."

Some college officials say that these services are not only driving up higher education costs but some may also be an extension of a therapeutic culture that has gone too far.

While it is important that colleges talk about "the whole student," said Steven E. Hyman, the provost at Harvard, and the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, "that doesn't mean they should all be in group therapy."

Dr. Hyman said he also doubted the value of the biofeedback and massage, suggesting that it might be more helpful if students learned to organize their lives.

"It's a difficult tightrope to walk," said Dr. Hyman, who is a psychiatrist. "There's a risk that we will medicalize what are really developmental issues: negotiating independence, deciding what your goals are in life, having the courage to explore your interests rather than follow the straight and narrow path of careerism. At the same time, we have to be very careful that we don't miss serious treatable illnesses like depression, anxiety disorders and eating disorders."

Colleges have been steadily increasing the availability of treatment and counseling, and students have responded. At the University of Michigan, for example, the number of students seeking counseling has risen 22 percent in three years, said Todd Sevig, director of counseling and psychological services.

Some college officials see the contradiction inherent in their new efforts to offset stress and encourage the joys of reflection and unstructured time. After all, it was multitasking, hyperorganized, résumé building behavior that helped some students get admitted to their schools in the first place.

"We admit only the most over-scheduled children and we boast of how many sports they play, how many clubs they organize, how many hours of volunteer service they provide," said Elaine Hansen, president of Bates College, in Lewiston, Me., in her inaugural address two years ago. How then, she went on, could Bates encourage those same children to risk "moments of woolgathering, daydreaming, improvisation" that she viewed as an essential component of a liberal arts education?

Ms. Hansen said she had thought about calling off classes on the spur-of-the-moment so everyone could enjoy, say, a glorious spring day in Maine. But, she said: "If we do it without a conversation first about why we're doing it, we're afraid people will just go to the library and get caught up."

In his January letter to parents, Bowdoin's president, Barry Mills, expressed his concern about what appeared to be a national increase in stress-related conditions among college students. Expanding on the president's letter, Dean Bradley spoke to the college's trustees recently about creating a culture that emphasizes the joy of learning for learning's sake, "a culture that can itself ameliorate the anxiety many students feel about grades, jobs, grad school admissions."

At the same, Bowdoin officials say they do not want their students to relax too much. "You still have to accomplish," President Mills said. "You still have to succeed. This is not about relax and schmooze your way through Bowdoin."

Many students here said they welcomed the emphasis on the joy of learning. And many said they were having fun at college. But they were quick to point out the realities of the world they live in.

Travis Brennan, a Bowdoin senior who wants to be a lawyer, said all his love of learning would not get him into a good law school. What he needs, Mr. Brennan said, are high law board scores. "You have to be mindful that you're operating in a larger system," he said.

In the 1960's and 1970's, with students demanding liberation from administrators, colleges relinquished their role as in loco parentis chaperones. Now, some of the students who once told administrators to get out of their lives are parents paying high tuition and expecting colleges to smooth over everything from their children's relationships with roommates to grades.

Colleges, in the meantime, are coaching their students on how to manage their overmanaging parents. At Austin College, in Sherman, Tex., Rosemarie C. Rothmeier, director of student services and counseling, coaches pre-med students who are afraid to tell their parents that they hate organic chemistry and do not want to be doctors after all. One piece of advice, "Don't drop the bomb at Thanksgiving dinner."

Some college officials say parents must share responsibility for their children's difficulties in coping with the inevitable stresses of college.

"Rather than seeing late adolescence as a time of learning by trial and error," Mr. Bradley told the trustees, "many parents put great energy into trying to eliminate the error." He suggested that perhaps parents were creating a generation of students afraid to take risks.

Another factor contributing to stress is the high price of education.

"If you break it down, it's about $75 a lecture," said Karen Jacobson, a Bowdoin senior, quoting a faculty member who had made the calculation based on Bowdoin's $37,950-a-year price tag.

Ms. Jacobson said she had sought her mother's advice about taking a dance class. "She said, `Are you sure you don't want to take something more intellectual?' " said Ms. Jacobson at a meeting of the college knitting club.

Ms. Jacobson said she figured her mother might have been thinking, quite understandably, that she was not paying that much so her daughter could take a dance class. "I ended up taking statistics," she said. "I realized I needed it for grad school."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/ed...TRE.html?8hpib


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Big Brother Journal

Cox Closes Wiretap Hole For VoIP
Ben Charny

Police can now wiretap all Internet phone calls on Cox Communications' network, kicking off a new era for law enforcement.

The cable and broadband provider turned to security specialist VeriSign to supply the know-how, the latter announced Monday.

Law enforcement officers can now eavesdrop on every call made by Cox's nearly 1 million voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone subscribers. Police can already tap calls on 12 of Cox's 13 telephone markets because they rely on traditional phone equipment equipped with eavesdropping abilities. But in December, Cox deployed VoIP, a much cheaper alternative that uses the unregulated Internet. Roanoke, Va., is the first of several small markets where Cox is deploying VoIP technology.

There is no requirement to tap Net phone calls yet, but all broadband providers are feeling pressure from a far-reaching FBI proposal that would require compliance with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). This act requires telecommunications carriers to rewire their networks to government specifications to provide police with guaranteed access for wiretaps.

Cable operators "realize they are going to have to do it one day," a VeriSign representative said.

VeriSign Vice President Raj Puri said VeriSign is talking with "all the major cable companies selling VoIP" but did not announce any additional deals Monday.

Cable operator Comcast offers broadband phone service that uses a mixture of VoIP and traditional phone switches. Time Warner Cable and Cablevision are VoIP-only.

Telephone services are playing an increasingly important role for U.S. cable companies, which are winning new customers by offering low-priced bundles of broadband, television and phone services. Traditional phone companies have responded with a "triple play" of services of their own.
http://news.com.com/2100-7352-5184774.html


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Zapping Old Flames Into Digital Ash
Anna Bahney

JILL HAMMELMAN, a hair colorist who lives in Manhattan, doesn't like to burn bridges with men she has dated. But she makes exceptions for those who have acted like creeps, as she did with a recent boyfriend she met online.

"When you're seeing someone," said Ms. Hammelman, 29, "they get top billing. When they lose their status, they have to go."

So when things unraveled in November, after Ms. Hammelman and Mr. Wrong had dated for three months, she cast a cold eye over the dozens of e-mail messages he had sent and the digital photographs of him on vacation that occupied a prominent folder on her computer desktop. She deleted everything in about three minutes. Having had a "ceremonial moving-on," she said, she felt empowered.

In predigital times, the end of a relationship might have been marked by the burning of letters. The ex would have been scissored out of photographs, and LP's too painful to hear dropped off in the nearest Goodwill bin. Or maybe everything would have been parked in a shoe-box way station under the bed.

But modern life means that mementos of affairs of the heart reside on computers. And they can be expunged with brutal efficiency.

While the Internet has sped up modern dating and made encyclopedic records about love interests more readily available, the magic of digital erasure allows the other end of a relationship, the bust-up, to be just as seamless: the lovelorn can simply delete away the pain.

It is debatable whether more sentiment is attached to physical mementos than to Internet text messages, blogs, postings at Friendster-like sites, electronic greeting cards, cellphone photographs and MP3 files of a couple's signature song. But the ease of consigning electronic remembrances to the virtual trash seems to be changing the age- old sorrow of the breakup and the rituals of moving on.

"In the old days it was burn the letters," said Dr. Kathryn Faughey, a psychologist in Manhattan, who counsels the lovelorn to destroy all trappings of failed relationships. "Today, clear the hard drive."

The natural reaction to a breakup — game over, start again — is played to a surreal end by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." The lovers opt to erase the memories of their relationship scientifically, as if their brains were hard drives. Kirsten Dunst, playing a nurse, quotes Nietzsche while Mr. Carrey's mind is being emptied: "Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders." A Manhattan legal assistant had a real-life catharsis of similar dimension after her boyfriend of three years coldly broke up with her in an instant message. She had saved many of his four-a-day e-mail messages, digital photographs from his camera phone and dozens of music files. But in minutes, she eliminated all trace of him. "It was fairly clinical," said the woman, who asked not to be named. "Technology makes it very depersonalized. It is just, `Select all — delete.' "

Jesse Lovelace, 23, who is studying math and computer science at North Carolina State, said the end of an affair leads to a sorting process. "Pictures and stuff, sometimes I'll keep them around," he said. "It is a lot easier to delete a digital photo than to trash something in a frame." A recent breakup led to a rewriting of his online biography. "I had all these references to her and pictures of her on my Web site. I did some editing."

Dr. Faughey suggested that digital keepsakes, which she calls "objects of magnetic emotion" that evoke memories, have a way of coming up again. If a new lover finds evidence of an old flame on a computer, it can be just as troublesome as finding physical evidence in a closet. "Some people come around with a lot of emotional stuff, and that becomes a lot of clutter in a new relationship," she said.

Gina Lynn, 32, a columnist on relationships and technology in Los Angeles for TechTV .com, recently wrote about digitally erasing her ex, an English professor whom she had dated for five months and who, she said, had confessed to cheating. She rounded up his e-mail messages, which she called long and prosaic; a screenplay and poetry he had written; and a digital folder containing pictures of them on a trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. All gone with a few clicks.

In her column, Ms. Lynn suggested tactics for digital deletion:

• "Block every I.M. handle."

• "Check `My Pictures,' `My Documents' and your attachments folder for images."

• "Don't forget to check your P.D.A., your text-messaging device and your cellphone."

"I didn't do it with a lit candle in a big ritual," Ms. Lynn said in an interview, adding, after a pause, "but I would recommend that."

But deleting isn't forgetting. And psychologists are divided over the value of expunging records of a failed affair, whether digital or tangible. This mirrors the ambivalence of some ex-lovers themselves. Dr. Michael Radkowsky, a psychologist in Washington, said that disposing of romantic detritus might slow the process of moving on.

"The important thing is the spirit in which you get rid of those things," Dr. Radkowsky said. "I could see how it wouldn't be useful — it might even be sad or heartbreaking — to hold on to that stuff. But if you get rid of it in a fury, that mood is more of a problem than what you choose to do with those artifacts."

Computers make actions taken in a pique irreversible, as anyone knows who has fired off an outraged e-mail message at the office, only to regret it instantly. Peter Rojas, a writer and editor for Engadget.com, a technology review site, cautioned that technology abets rashness. "Now it is too easy: you can delete a folder of pictures of you and your significant other and do it really quick," he said. "You might come to regret it later. But if you had photographs and letters, even if you throw them out you can still go get them out of the trash again an hour later."

Computer experts note that it takes more than hitting "delete" to consign an ex to the nether world — deleted files usually languish on the hard drive until they are overwritten or removed with special scrubbing software. And because of the interconnectedness of computers, it can be difficult to erase all the other virtual footprints of a relationship.

"For people who live some part of their life online, because they have a blog or use online networking sites, there is all this online detritus — that's the truly novel thing," said Dr. Bruce Barry, a professor at Vanderbilt who teaches a seminar on technology, culture and society. People are "communicating more often, more freely and more informally, using things that are archivable."

Last month, Jesse Hudson, 23, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, saw a revealing posting that his girlfriend, Jane Pinckard, 31, a writer and musician, had written about an ex-boyfriend on a Web site. Because so much information on the Web seems to exist in an eternal present, Mr. Hudson felt a sudden queasiness. Even after realizing that the posting was two years old, he remained uneasy. "I had a physical reaction to it," he said. "Sadness, jealousy, a little bit of anger."

Mr. Hudson explained his feelings to Ms. Pinckard. As it turned out, she had been there herself. Digital information lacks the time and place clues of old letters and pictures, Ms. Pinckard said. "Even if you see a date stamp on it," she said, "it is still there on the screen, indistinguishable from anything current."

While Ms. Pinckard is a saver — "I still have boxes and boxes of letters from predigital" — she agreed that hard copies are a different kind of marker of a relationship than digital remnants. "The fact that they are physical artifacts feels different," she said. "It is archival, and archaeological."

Mr. Hudson apparently feels the same way. He described a "cute, adorable moment towards the beginning of the relationship" when Ms. Pinckard sent him an e-mail picture of her computer's desktop with a photo of him as its background wallpaper. A note with it said, "This is what dorks do when they are in love."

He chuckled fondly, then confessed, "I deleted it." After a pause he added, "I regret that now."

Dr. Michael Anderson, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon who has done research with colleagues on the mind's ability to repress unwanted memories, said that saved mementos, paradoxically, may help people forget.

"Most people would agree forgetting is a bad thing," Dr. Anderson said. "It is neglecting responsibilities and losing your history."

"But forgetting is precisely what you want to do with things that are hurtful and distracting," he said. "To be able to remember something is more distracting than to try to forget." To deal with a painful memory, he said, it's best to confront the reminders regularly and desensitize oneself to it. "It is that mental act of pushing them away — that's the thing that makes you forget."

Dr. Anderson said "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," impressed him because of the philosophical questions about memory it raises and its technological sophistication. "I thought the science behind the movie was pretty on target," he said, explaining that homing in on specific areas of the brain is similar to his work in tracking brain activity using magnetic resonance imaging — though memory-zapping remains one step beyond.

But even if a bad relationship could be deleted from the brain like a computer file, it may prove impossible to completely move on. Triggers to recollection lurk everywhere.

Now that "Eternal Sunshine" has been in theaters a few weeks, Anthony Bregman, a producer of the movie, said he has been receiving the usual congratulations from friends and acquaintances. But many include a personal and confessional note, he said: "A large number of people are saying they just got an e-mail from an ex."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/fashion/04DIGI.html


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German Online Music Platform's Troubled First Weeks
DW Staff

Just weeks after its launch, Phonoline, Germany's first online music platform, is the object of much criticism. Soon the fledgling company will face heavy competition from oversees -- can it survive?

The launch of Phonoline, Germany's online music platform, was a fiasco – even embarrassing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Three weeks later, critics are still on the attack, claiming the selection is too limited and the price of downloading individual songs too high. With more competition coming from overseas in the form of a soon-to-be launched European version of Apple's iTunes and others, Phonoline will have to fight to survive.

Three weeks ago at the annual CeBit technology show in Hannover, Phonoline was set to debut with much fanfare. In a special ceremony, Chancellor Schröder, who in the midst of his "innovation offensive" is eager to align himself with all things high-tech, was supposed to download the first song.

But before the Chancellor could download Belgian singer songwriter Kate Ryan's "Only if I," the German Copyright Society (GEMA) put a damper on the festivities. In an open letter, the society suggested that the Chancellor would be engaging in an illegal activity because, "the required copyright licence for this download at CeBit had not yet been obtained by any party".

The flap exposed the ongoing battle between GEMA and Phonoline, who have been engaged in negotiations for months to determine under what circumstances music can be downloaded legally, from whom the necessary rights must be obtained, and at what cost. This begged the question: is this version of "legal" downloading really legal?

Instead of displaying his technological savvy and downloading the song himself, the Chancellor stood by and watched as someone else did the dirty work. What was supposed to have been a public relations coup became a fiasco. But that was just the beginning. Three weeks after the launch, Phonoline is still facing harsh criticism.

At the launch, Gerd Gebhardt, the head of Phonoline, promised consumers "a comprehensive catalogue of some 250,000 songs with the daily addition of chart- toppers". But that has not proven to be the case. Users have not failed to notice that the platform lacks hits from music icons, like the Beatles, Madonna and Robbie Williams. Ditto for German stars Herbert Grönemeyer and Sarah Connor. "Comprehensive" it's not, they say.

What's more, the cost of downloading individual songs is comparatively expensive at €1.19 to €1.99. And the songs are encoded, limiting the number of copies that can be made to between three and five depending on which online music store customers use to access the online database. Popfiles and Eventim are the two main distributors.

Phonoline was meant to be part of a two-pronged assault to reduce music piracy. In addition to proceeding with legal action against those who illegally use peer-to- peer file sharing software like Kazaa, Phonoline was supposed to offer music fans a viable (and legal) alternative. But given the limited selection and cost, the latter part of the plan may not work.

Phonoline will not only struggle to triumph over peer-to-peer file sharing sights like Kazaa, it will also soon face increased competition from other legal online music platforms planning to launch in Europe this year.

Apple's iTunes, considered the industry leader, is expected to launch in Europe early this year. Should the Apple execs choose to maintain the current U.S. asking price of $.99 (€.82) per song, they will undercut the Phonoline price. Apple may also offer users a better deal by not limiting the number of copies that can be made.

Also jumping into the ring is the British online music company Wippit, which is threatening to start a price war that will challenge both Phonoline and iTunes. Wippit recently started offering downloads for a mere €.39 per song and has plans to launch in Germany soon.
http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,336...16_1_A,00.html


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Scooch Over, Screwdriver: A Venerable Knife Gains a Chip
Andrew Zipern



Just when it seemed that metaphors comparing multifunction digital gadgets and the Swiss Army knife might have been waning, Victorinox, the venerable Swiss manufacturer, has upped the ante by actually adding a digital function to its famous knife.

The Swissmemory U.S.B. has the nail file, screwdriver and mini-scissors you would expect in a typical Swiss Army knife, but it also has a U.S.B. memory key that stores either 64 or 128 megabytes of data. The small device is compliant with the faster U.S.B. 2.0 standard and, like ordinary flash drives, has a red light-emitting diode to indicate read/write status.

The two versions of the Swissmemory knife, to be released in the United States this spring, are expected to sell for $73 and $88. More information is available at www.victorinox.com.

Oh, and for those who want to take their digital files past airport security, the U.S.B. plug is detachable, so the knife can be stowed in a checked bag.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/te...ts/01knif.html


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Janus Enables Music Renting
INQUIRER staff

SOFTWARE COLOSSUS Microsoft is likely to release copy protection software that will enable the online music industry to rent out titles legally.

Codenamed Janus, the software adds a clock function to portable music players using Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA).

This lets downloaded tracks to be programmed to expire, meaning that online music companies can "rent" unfettered subscription-based access to large music libraries rather than selling it on a per-song basis.

The Redmond Giant has not officially confirmed details of Janus, which is expected to launch this summer. But the technology is in beta, and Samsung is already advertising Janus compatibility.

However analysts say that while Janus would enable online music companies to sell a subscription service, it is unlikely that the music industry would buy into the idea.

It prefers to be paid by the title rather than giving users to access a large library of music which is too close to providing free music.

It will only allow it to take place if punters are not allowed to put the music onto portable devices, which has borked the market a lot.

But by time stamping music, Janus will mean that the music industry is more likely to accept file sharing and allow its music to be put on MP3 players.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15187


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Apple DMCA Sends iTunes DRM Decryptor Offshore
Andrew Orlowski

The PlayFair project, which removes fair-use restrictions from music purchased through Apple's online store, has become the latest victim of offshoring. Actually, that's not quite true: only the hosting provider has moved to India. Not surprisingly, Apple has used the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to ask SourceForge to remove the project. SourceForge declined to use the Safe Harbor provisions of the Act.

PlayFair uses Jon Johansen's iTunes circumvention to remove fair-use restrictions from iTunes Music Store files. Apple allows buyers to play the files on three authorized Windows or Macintosh computers and an unlimited number of iPods, and to burn up to ten CDs with the same playlist, which many Apple users have no problem with. However the circumvention allows you to play the files on a Linux machine, for example, or a smartphone or any other MP3 player that supports AAC playback. The new location for PlayFair is at Sarovar, a hosting company for software libre projects based in Trivandrum, India.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04...dmca_takedown/


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Editorial: Download this

File Sharing May Not Hurt Record Sales
The Saramento Bee

Just when the recording industry had almost convinced every last regulator and coed that downloading music is the root of all evil, along comes a study from the Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

After examining millions of actual music downloads and the legal sales of the same music back in stores, the researchers came to an unexpected conclusion: File sharing is as benign as it is free.

How could this be? One of the researchers theorizes that there are two different markets at play here: the market of folks who will only download a song if it is free, and the aficionados who covet the same music regardless of price. The freeloaders never were going to buy the CD. The aficionados still are.

So then why have sales dropped by 139 million albums since 2000? Maybe it's the economy. Or maybe, just maybe, the core music buyers are trying to tell the industry something. It's possible, thanks to the declining number of music options being played on cookie-cutter radio stations, there isn't as much new music worth buying. This new study shouldn't fall on deaf ears
http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinio...-9723195c.html


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NME Web Users 'Back File-Sharing'
BBC

Most music fans are refusing to change their downloading habits despite a campaign to stop illegal song-swapping, a music website survey suggests.

More than 1,000 readers of NME.com took part in the website's poll, with nearly 75% saying they would continue to use free download services on the internet.

That is despite the UK music industry threatening to pursue persistent illegal song-swappers in court.

Record companies believe illegitimate downloading damages CD sales.

Almost 90% of surveyed readers said downloading did not stop them buying music, with 85% believing downloading did not damage artists.

British Phonographic Industry (BPI) spokesman Matt Philips told the NME the BPI wanted to tackle "a few hardcore uploaders... we want to make it clear they can be sued".

He said the main object of the campaign was to raise awareness about the rules of downloading.

"You might find that we'll submit a lawsuit tomorrow. And we'd have been in our legal rights to submit a lawsuit a year ago," he told NME.

"But we don't want to do that. We want to continue on the awareness trail," he said.

But NME editor Conor McNicholas said the threats were creating a gulf between the industry and music fans.

"You'd think the BPI would be trying to build links between record labels and music fans," he said.

"But no, in threatening legal action against those who are currently swapping music over the internet, they've put more distance between labels and fans than ever before."

If the record industry had provided a decent legal alternative to unauthorised sites from the start, "then we wouldn't be in this mess", he added.

A recent report from Harvard and North Carolina Universities suggested that swapping songs online had no negative effect on music sales.

The research, conducted over 17 weeks in 2002, said high levels of file-swapping had an effect on CD sales that was "indistinguishable from zero".

But official music industry bodies branded the study "skewed".

And the number of songs sold via Europe's biggest music download sites has increased tenfold over the past year.

More than a million downloads have been sold via sites such as Freeserve, MSN and Mycokemusic from January-March - 10 times up on the same period in 2003.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ic/3611645.stm


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File-Sharing To Bypass Censorship
Tracey Logan
BBC

By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind.

This is the view of the man who helped kickstart the concept of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, Cambridge University's Professor Ross Anderson.

In his vision, people around the world would post stories via anonymous P2P services like those used to swap songs.

They would cover issues currently ignored by the major news services, said Prof Anderson.

"Currently, only news that's reckoned to be of interest to Americans and Western Europeans will be syndicated because that's where the money is,"
he told the BBC World Service programme, Go Digital.

"But if something happens in Peru that's of interest to viewers in China and Japan, it won't get anything like the priority for syndication.

"If you can break the grip of the news syndication services and allow the news collector to talk to the radio station or local newspaper then you can have much more efficient communications."

To enable this, Prof Anderson proposes a new and improved version of Usenet, the internet news service.

But what of fears that the infrastructure that allows such ad hoc news networks to grow might also be abused by criminals and terrorists?

Prof Anderson believes those fears are overstated. He argued that web watchdogs like the Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors internet- based child abuse, would provide the necessary policing functions.

This would require a high level of international agreement to be effective.

"The effect of peer-to-peer networks will be to make censorship difficult, if not impossible," said Prof Anderson.

"If there's material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, then it's possible to track it down and close it down. But if there's material that only one government says is wicked then, I'm sorry, but that's their tough luck".

Commenting on Prof Anderson's ideas, technology analyst Bill Thompson welcomed the idea of new publishing tools that will weaken the grip on news of major news organisations.

Such P2P systems, he said, would give everybody a voice and allow personal testimonies to come out.

But the technology that makes those publishing tools accessible to everyone and sufficiently user-friendly will take longer to develop than Prof Anderson thinks, added Mr Thompson.

Prof Anderson's vision underestimates the political obstacles in the way of such developments, he said, and the question of censorship had not been clearly thought through.

"Once you build the technology to break censorship, you've broken censorship - even of the things you want censored," said Mr Thompson.

"Saying you can then control some parts of it, like images of child abuse, is being wilfully optimistic. And that's something that peer to peer advocates have to face."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/3611227.stm

















Until next week,

- js.














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[TankGirl]

Thanks again for your dedicated work, Jack.

Originally posted by JackSpratts

File-Sharing To Bypass Censorship
Tracey Logan
BBC

By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind.

This is the view of the man who helped kickstart the concept of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, Cambridge University's Professor Ross Anderson.

In his vision, people around the world would post stories via anonymous P2P services like those used to swap songs.

They would cover issues currently ignored by the major news services, said Prof Anderson.

"Currently, only news that's reckoned to be of interest to Americans and Western Europeans will be syndicated because that's where the money is,"
he told the BBC World Service programme, Go Digital.

"But if something happens in Peru that's of interest to viewers in China and Japan, it won't get anything like the priority for syndication.

"If you can break the grip of the news syndication services and allow the news collector to talk to the radio station or local newspaper then you can have much more efficient communications."

....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/3611227.stm

The idea of a global P2P-based news distribution network is very interesting indeed. Both the elimination of censorship and a more versatile global coverage are reasons enough to set up such a network, and there would probably be many more benefits in the long run.

The basic technical requirements would be similar to any P2P network with an open access and potential hostile peer activity. There is a need for reliable identification of news sources and editorial middlemen plus a need for secure (proxying) mechanism to protect the real world identities of the sources when so desired. There is also an obvious need for a trust rating mechanism for the sources so that each peer can filter out her own personally trusted selection of news from the mixed offerings. A similar rating mechanism would be needed to classify the news according to their interest to each receiver so that people could easily subscribe their own favorite catering of information.

As there would likely be an abundance of sources with unclear trust levels, self-organizing communities of writers and editors could play an important role in the network. Instead of trying to spot and pick trustworthy and interesting sources from among myriads of individual candidates you could rather pick from among a much smaller number of newscast communities with established reputations, focuses, biases and styles.

- tg