Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 1st, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week

"There are lots of ways that people are [trading music online]." - Lee Rainey

"We've been seeing shifts to the smaller sites. Some of the smaller sites also use encrypted files, so it provides a little more protection." – Mike Goodman

"That's not true, that may be what the MPAA would like the copyright law to be, but that's not what the law says." - Wendy Seltzer on the MPAA’s classroom motto ''If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it," taught to disadvantaged school kids by Junior Achievement volunteers under a grant from Big Media.

"Commercialism has no place in the classroom. This program is a time vampire. Is it more important for kids to hear the movie industry's message or should they be learning to read and pass new test standards?" - Alex Molnar

"It's rather like inviting the American insurance industry into the classroom to tell kids about the future of health care." - Fred von Lohmann

"People tape movies on their VCRs and swap it with friends without getting arrested for piracy." – Wendy Seltzer

"The technology side of this story is very organic; it's changing and there will be new ways for people to share music for free online." - Lee Rainey

"When asked if he was bothered about the money it cost him, he replied that any real musician should be in it for the music, and you had to question the motives of certain groups and singers who were up in arms about music downloading." - New Music Express

"Un-fucking-believable." - JackValenti









Table Dancing

I’ve been listening to my new audio set-up. It’s a simple thing really, proving once again most good ideas usually are. A few years ago I bought one of Henry Kloss’s excellent table radios he called The Model One. I purchased it for my parents for some occasion or another and liked it so much I went back to the store and got one for me. I put it next to my computer and there it sat, but soundlessly and out of a job, like a big paper weight. See, the PC is the source for nearly all of my audio, radio and otherwise, and it’s piped throughout my home. It’s been this way for five years. Whether it’s music radio, talk radio or just plain songs, it all starts on my computer system before making its way around the house. Tunes In Every Room is the motto around here, and has been since I was old enough to wrap two wires together. So I don’t really need a radio. The thing is though for someone who grew up listening to over-the-air broadcasts a little something is lost when sound emanates from every point in space. In my mind I think somehow it’s not real if it isn’t coming out of hanger-sprouting box struggling to hold a jittery signal. I’m a product of my environment; years spent nodding off to sparky AM signals drifting in and out of a tough bakelite radio and an impressionable consciousness. Now it’s so easy; sound just appears, anywhere, everywhere, at the slightest touch, noiselessly, perfectly, continuously uninterrupted and forever pristine. Sounding exactly as good on the 100th play as the very first. Everyday is virgin-vinyl day at Jacks’ place. This is not a bad thing. But for me and others like me, it is a different thing. Progress is funny that way. We seem to move in a direction that answers a need but we do it in a way that changes the rules. I have my perfect radio now, but it’s so unlike what I think radio is supposed to be I forget what I’m listening to, and in a way feel robbed of the wish that has spectacularly come true. The solution was so easy I don’t know why I just didn’t do it to begin with. The Kloss Model One has an auxiliary jack in the back for playing other sources like a CD, but it’s a bit of a pain because it isn’t switchable like most aux inputs. If you plug a wire into it it only plays that source – and nothing else – until you unplug the wire. It’s inconvenient so I’ve never used it. Until now. I simply plugged a cable from the headphone output jack in my sound card into the aux jack on the back of the Model One and presto – faster than you can say Radio Luxemburg whatever my computer was playing came right out of the radio on my table, sounding like a radio, and not some sterile PC stream. It made all the difference. All of a sudden I had the best radio on the planet, and even friends well aware I stream 24/7 wanted to know how I was getting the tasty stations.

Now the Model One is a great little unit - simple to use with new technology and excellent sound - but from my point of view what makes it cool is it looks and acts like a regular, old fashioned radio, complete with big round dials and knobs, making everything I hear remind me of how far we’ve actually come in just a few short years, because all of a sudden the magic is tangible. It’s a real warm-sounding analog radio alright, only better. No commercials, no screaming idiots, no wandering signals, no static at all. Just what I want whenever I want, whether it’s streamed from Switzerland, Paradise California or my own PC and the 100 plus gigs of audio I keep around. It’s great for listening to old radio dramas and mysteries too. I’m a bit young to have caught them the first time around, and I really wished I’d been able to make them when I was working in radio but for some reason nobody thought there was an audience. Lucky for us there are thousands of hours of saved programs captured from transcription discs available everywhere on the peers, so being able to hear the boys of the Tear Gas Squad barking out my table radio is truly a hoot. I turn down the lights and I’m in there with them, coughing roscoes at the grifters and warming my suit on a smoking dame.

But that’s not the half of it. Since the advent of peer-to-peer I’ve discovered forgotten bands I hardly knew existed. It’s not surprising - during the last four decades record companies flooded the market with more than 50,000 albums a year - over 600,000 songs, some 10,000 per week. Well over 1000 new songs released each day. That’s a huge amount of music, making it easy to see how more than a few great tunes could get lost along the way. Which is a real shame because some of that flotsam was spectacular stuff. The good news is that thanks to peer-to-peer, “lost” doesn’t mean nearly as much as it used to a few short years ago.

Coming soon, some of those “new” discoveries.













Enjoy,

Jack.












U.S. vets will get no break from the RIAA/MPAA.

Army Chides Soldiers for Using P2Ps
Brooks Boliek

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - The U.S. Army is telling soldiers to get off the popular peer-to-peer networks because file sharing is hurting the worldwide war on terrorism, according to Pentagon memos and an article published by the U.S. Army Network Enterprise Technology Command.

"Since the start of the global war on terrorism, the most pressing issue from service members in the field has been the shortage of bandwidth to transmit battlefield intelligence to combatant commanders," according to the article published by the technology command. "Unauthorized use of P2P applications account for significant bandwidth consumption. It limits the bandwidth required for official business and storage capacity on government systems. While those who monitor the Army networks agree that copyright infringement is a valid issue, they do have other, more important concerns."

The article quoted a white paper written by the Army's Computer Network Operations Intelligence section saying that unauthorized P2P applications on government systems "represent a threat to network security."

According to the article, the soldier illegally downloading the files and the GI's company commander can be held liable for copyright infringement, and both could be disciplined under military charges that prohibit stealing.

Calls to the command headquarters in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., were not returned Thursday.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=4996708


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Ah, OK, now it's clear…

Exiting MPAA Chief: Pirates A Security Threat
Susan Crabtree

In what is likely his last performance in the congressional hot seat, outgoing Motion Picture Assn. of America topper Jack Valenti Thursday labeled piracy a national security threat and implored a Senate spending panel to devote more resources to fighting it....

Subscription - http://www.variety.com/index.asp?lay... oryID=13&cs=1


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CNET Launches Music Download Service
Reuters

Online technology company CNET Networks on Monday launched a free digital music service, allowing people to search and download what it said were thousands of songs contributed by independent and unsigned artists.

The service, based on CNET's Download.com Web site, has been collecting music for the past few weeks, encouraging musicians to register on the site and upload their songs.

The music download service will be separate from the MP3.com Web site, which CNET has said it will relaunch soon as a music information site. CNET also is the publisher of News.com.

The former MP3.com, which CNET acquired late last year, offered similar functions to those in the new music download platform. Many artists and fans of the site complained when it was closed down, fearing that hundreds of thousands of songs would be lost permanently.

CNET said it plans to add new technology and community features to its download service, which it intends to be the largest free-music download platform, over the course of the year.

Pay-for-download services have become the hottest trend in digital music, with one, Apple Computer's iTunes music store, having sold 50 million downloads in less than a year.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5199634.html


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RIAA Threats Push Music Traders Elsewhere
Jay Lyman

The Recording Industry Association of America is succeeding at pushing Internet users away from illegal music downloads, but those in search of free file trading are also moving to lower-profile applications and other platforms, such as e-mail and instant messaging, according to the latest research.

The Pew Internet and American Life project reported that the recording industry campaign against downloaders and online music traders has made an impact on several fronts, according to phone surveys done by the research firm. Sixty percent of those polled who had never downloaded a music file said they would not do so because of concern over the RIAA's lawsuits against individuals.

The RIAA strategy might keep those users from any online music offerings, the research suggested, including the array of legitimate services that have become available in the last year. However, the Pew research showed that the number of North Americans downloading music and sharing files online has actually increased, with many heading to legitimate sites and services while others turn to smaller, unlicensed services that provide more anonymity.

"There is some movement to the less popular, less prominent, less monitored peer-to-peer systems," Pew director Lee Rainey told TechNewsWorld. "There are lots of ways that people are [trading music online]," Rainey added, referring to e-mail, instant messaging and user groups, "although I think the incidence is smaller compared to peer-to- peer or even the paid services."

The Pew researchers said that while the RIAA lawsuits have pushed many away from online music, some of those who were using popular services such as Kazaa , Morpheus or BearShare are moving to smaller file-sharing applications such as iMesh, BitTorrent and eMule.

"While it's clear that the industry's legal campaign has made a lasting impression in the minds of American Internet users, we are also seeing evidence that a segment of users are simply moving away from the most popular and highly monitored file-sharing networks and are instead using alternative sources to acquire files," said Pew research specialist Mary Madden, co-author of the report.

Fellow co-author Rainey said that, over the long term, the number of online music fans is going to increase as Internet users discover and use the variety of legitimate services and business models.

In the meantime, the smaller P2P applications -- which have evolved in terms of increasing anonymity and privacy -- will continue to draw more users, as will other alternative file-trading methods, such as e-mail, instant messaging and discussion groups, Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman told TechNewsWorld.

"We've been seeing shifts to the smaller sites," Goodman said. "Some of the smaller sites also use encrypted files, so it provides a little more protection."

Goodman added that while illegal music downloading might be down overall, there are significant amounts of free file trading taking place through the smaller applications and through the other, non-P2P applications.

"I think there's a lot of it not being accounted for," Goodman said.

Analysts also have referred to the international aspect of free file-trading, where services and users might be out of reach of legal prosecution.

Goodman said that the anonymity of free services is likely to continue improving, perhaps to the point where the application and file trading are totally anonymous.

Rainey agreed that new free file-trading models are likely to emerge and then copyright owners such as the RIAA will change their aim in an ongoing "arms race."

"The technology side of this story is very organic; it's changing and there will be new ways for people to share music for free online," Rainey said. "I don't have a sense yet of where this is going to end up."
http://www.crmbuyer.com/perl/story/33532.html


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Ad Guru Opens iPod To The World
Steven Deare

A quick-thinking Sydney developer is cashing in on the iPod and file-sharing phenomena, and has launched what he claims is the iPod's first Web server.

The DOT-POD software, available in server and client versions, lets users share tracks from their iPod with others via the Internet. The software betters a standard Web server by displaying track data in HTML, and offers specialised searches and user controls.

DOT-POD was launched this month by Jeff Ayling, who may be more familiar to Australians as one of the voices of the PlaySchool theme song. An e-commerce guru, Ayling's family marketing business has composed well-worn jingles for Tip-Top, Berocca and many others.

Ayling uses his iPod to store his compositions for review. It was through collaborating on these jingles that Ayling had the idea for DOT-POD.

"We work from home [recording] studios and I'm on the other side of Sydney [to my dad]," he said.

"So the idea came to me when I put together parts of jingles and was sending them to Dad to collaborate."

Sharing and reviewing compositions through other methods like e-mail was less convenient, he realised.

Ayling created DOT-POD so he could select multiple files from his iPod (connected to his computer) and publish them to the Web, or drop them to his desktop.

The Web server URL is then e-mailed to his father, who can stream or download any of his son's tracks at a glance.

"We've been using it for about six months internally," said Ayling.

He believes many iPod owners have, or will, encounter a fundamental problem with the iPod, the one that led to DOT-POD's development.

"You can't take songs off your iPod," he said. "You just can't move them to your Macintosh."

This is due to a hidden folder on the device that prevents any content being uploaded, presumably to protect copyright owners, said Ayling.

DOT-POD can also run from the iPod, which allows the owner to share their songs via any available Macintosh.

Most importantly for Ayling, the software also has access controls that gives access to only his father, thus protecting their compositions.

"Peer-to-peer systems like KaZaA are designed to enable anonymous third parties to share music. This is much more closed off," said Ayling.

"The only way you can access my music is via the URL and password."

While Ayling admits DOT-POD could still be used to infringe copyright, he has chosen not to receive the IP addresses of users following legal advice. This puts him outside the file-sharing process, like the developers of Web servers like Apache. DOT-POD also presents users with several warnings on copyright infringement.

Accordingly, DOT-POD has a different market focus than common forms of music file-sharing software.

"We're after the professional and amateur music market," said Ayling, referring to users who want to control the distribution of their songs. He has priced DOT-POD server at $29. The client software is free.

In its first couple of weeks, DOT-POD has sold nearly 100 copies, with most sales coming from the US, said Ayling.

Ayling has also just launched a related product for another perceived limitation in Apple's music software.

Apple music programs such as GarageBand will generally only export tracks to the Macintosh's iTunes folder, claims Ayling.

He's developed the DOT-TUNES Web server (also $29), which allows users to publish music from this folder to the Web.

DOT-TUNES works in the same way as DOT-POD, allowing songs to be 'broadcast' to remote users via a Web browser.

"We feel it'll eventually be bigger than DOT-POD," said Ayling. "Only about 3 million people have an iPod but a lot more have iTunes [folders]."

Windows versions of both DOT-POD and DOT-TUNES should be available within a month, and later Linux, he said.

He later hopes to expand his Web server software to sharing Macintosh movie and photo files.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index....69;fp;2;fpid;1


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RIAA Files 477 More File-Sharing Lawsuits
Grant Gross

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed 477 more lawsuits against people trading unauthorised music online, including lawsuits against 69 people who allegedly used university networks to download music.

Fourteen universities across the US were home to those 69 file-traders, according to the RIAA.

The RIAA would continue to work with universities to educate students about legal music download services, according to RIAA president, Cary Sherman.

"Along with offering students legitimate music services, campus-wide educational and technological initiatives are playing a critical role," Sherman said. "But there is also a complementary need for enforcement by copyright owners against the serious offenders - to remind people that this activity is illegal."

The RIAA has filed more than 1500 lawsuits against file-traders since January. As with other recent lawsuits, the RIAA filed "John Doe" lawsuits against unnamed file-traders identified through their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. In December, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the RIAA did not have the authority under US law to subpoena the names of alleged peer-to-peer file traders from ISPs (Internet service providers). Copyright holders previously were allowed to file a subpoena request with a clerk of court and find out the name of an alleged copyright violator without going before a judge to request a subpoena.

The university networks allegedly used in the 69 cases were Brown University, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Gonzaga University, Mansfield University, Michigan State University, Princeton University, Sacred Heart University, Texas A&M University, Trinity College in Connecticut, Trinity University in Texas, University of Kansas, University of Minnesota and Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Brown University issued a statement reacting to the lawsuits: "Brown University has not yet received notice of the lawsuits announced today by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). If the University is served with a subpoena that meets the requirements of the law,

Brown will comply as fully as possible. Until the University is served, however, it does not know the extent of the RIAA action. Any Brown student found in violation of the law will also be subject to University disciplinary action."
http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php?i...9&fp=16&fpid=0


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Duma Adopts Amendments To Copyright Law

MOSCOW, April 21 (Itar-Tass) - Deputies of the State Duma lower house of Russia’s parliament on Wednesday adopted in the second reading amendments to the Law on Copyright and Allied Rights in order to counteract intellectual piracy in Russia.

The bill on amendments specifies criteria for providing protection in the Russian territory to publications and objects of allied rights depending on the citizenship of the author, place of origin and location of a publication or object of allied rights. The amendments introduce the principle of retroactive protection.

The bill enhances the copyright duration to 70 years after the author’ s death instead of the current 50 years stipulated by Russian legislation.
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=725118


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EMI Cries Foul Over Tunes In EA Sports Games

EMI, one of the world's largest music companies, has filed a federal lawsuit against Electronic Arts, the world's largest video game publisher, over claims of copyright infringement in EA's highly successful sports games.

The suit, filed in federal court in New York on Wednesday, says a number of EA's recent sports titles, including "Madden NFL 2004," "Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004" and "MVP Baseball 2004" use songs that "embody copyrighted musical compositions that EMI owns, co-owns, administers or otherwise controls."

EA and other publishers have increasingly made music an important part of their games, debuting new songs by both up-and-coming and established artists in their games before the artist's CD is released. Some have established divisions dedicated to producing and acquiring music for their titles.

"This entire lawsuit is related to a single song that samples lyrics from another song," Electronic Arts said in a statement. "Our use of that song was licensed directly from the artist. We have agreements for every song used in our games."

EMI claimed in the suit that EA sought licenses throughout 2003 from EMI for the use of certain songs for its sport games, but then released the games before the licenses were granted.

Subsequently, EMI said, EA renewed its license requests in mid-February of this year. EMI countered with a letter in early March claiming its rights had been infringed and withdrawing any outstanding licensing offers.

The suit seeks damages and the potential award of a percentage of EA's profits on those games, which EMI said was "believed to be tens of millions of dollars."
http://news.com.com/2100-1043-5198041.html


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Republican National Committee Advertises On E-Donkey

Share and share alike, right?
Charlie Demerjian

ONE OF THE major themes for politicos of all stripes this year is digital rights management. When you and I think about it, we think of annoying things that keep you from exercising your rights and using the media that you legally purchased. Fair use? Not anymore.

Politicians think about easy speeches wrapped in patriotic and capitalistic phrases, backed up by large checks from the entertainment industry. The RIAA and MPAA fret, fume, and sue 12 year olds while shoveling wagonfulls of cash to get laws changed. If it weren’t so comical and sad, it would make me smile.

So, is this a stupid rant? Far from it, it is documentation of hypocrisy. While certain political organizations are decrying things that our judicial system has declared legal, other wings of the same organization fund them. See?

Does this mean E-Donkey is the official file trading network of the Bush administration? Is this open war on Hollywood liberals? Tune in next week for another episode of "How the Money Flows". Next week’s episode, "Condi, Ed Gillespie did WHAT?"
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15399


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Debate Rages On Over Swapping Of Music And Videos
Reid Kanaley

Despite the growth of legitimate, paid music-downloading services online, the legal, moral and economic debate over free Napster-like music- and video-swapping shows no sign of being resolved soon. We looked for sites to tell us what's up with downloads.

Zero Paid

To check out the current scene in file-sharing, this Web site offers news reports on the various legal and technical issues -- including computer viruses that target downloaders -- and links to many of the sites that provide so-called peer-to-peer software or that host file-swapping services. Proceed at your own risk.

www.zeropaid.com

Zero effect

A recent study by Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero." Here is the study report.

http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/Fil...-March2004.pdf

Virtual Tuner

Not ready for downloading, but in search of Internet radio? This site links to online audio stations all over the world, including Radio Noord-Holland, various police scanners, the Boston Fire Department and Infidel Radio. There really is something for everyone to listen to out there.

www.virtualtuner.com

http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/8518891.htm


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Spanish Judge Rules X-Box Mods 'legal'
Lester Haines

A Spanish judge has ruled that modifications to games consoles to allow them to play DVDs and games from other countries "are not illegal".

According to El País, the ruling comes after the Guardia Civil charged Barcelona video games shop Innovagames with offering its clients "alteration of Play Station 2 and X-Box games consoles to allow them to read games from other parts of the world or downloaded directly from the Internet... by carrying out modification of their components as per diagrams found on the premises".

The judge noted that such modifications "might constitute a crime against the intellectual property of the equipment manufacturers", but he concluded that there is a legal loophole in the "Ley de Propiedad Intelectual" (Intellectual Property Law) which means that they are, by default, legal.

The loophole exists in article 270 of the penal code, which mentions "the manufacture, distribution or possession of means to crack computer programme security codes". It does not, however, cover "components of video games players nor, in general, equipment designed to run image or sound software".

The judge concluded, therefore, that he must reject the Guardia Civil's case.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04...odding_ruling/


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U.S. Court Asserts Jurisdiction Over Spanish Music Site
ILN News Letter

The District Court for the District of Columbia has asserted jurisdiction over the owners of puretunes.com, a Spanish based site that allowed users to download music. The court ruled that the registration of a local resident for the purpose of the suit was sufficient to meet the specific jurisdiction standard. The court added that "the 24 hour availability of downloadable files and transfer of files to those customers in the District is exactly the sort of purposeful, active, systematic, and continuous activity in the District of Columbia that constitutes 'doing business.'" Interestingly, the court also ordered disclosure of credit card transaction from a third party provider that would have provided evidence of sales in the jurisdiction. Case name is Arista Records v. Sakfield Holding Company.

Decision at http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/03-1474.pdf

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China

Website Loses Case Over MP3 Downloads

BEIJING, April 26, (Xinhuanet) -- A domestic MP3 website has to pay compensation of 160,000 yuan (US$19,000) to two Hong Kong-based entertainment companies for copyright infringement, the Beijing No 1 Intermediate People's Court has ruled.

The website - www.chinamp3.com - well-known for providing MP3 downloads, will now be required to stop infringing on intellectual property rights of the Hong Kong Go East Entertainment Co and Sony Music Entertainment (Hong Kong), according to a judgment in the first instance made by the court over the weekend.

The judgment was made according to the Copyright Law and a judicial interpretation issued by the Supreme People's Court over Internet-related copyright lawsuits, the court said.

Entertainment industry insiders say the judgment will encourage more music producers to safeguard their rights against illegal online MP3 downloads.

Bai Nian'en, the lawyer representing the accused Beijing-based Shiji Yuebo Scientific Co, which owns the website, said there will be an appeal to a higher court and the judgment was not accepted as final.

The website provided downloads for 35 songs by famous singer Kelly Chen, whose copyright is owned by Go East, and 11 songs by Lo Hau Yam, who is distributed by Sony Music.

"The two Hong Kong companies never authorized any person to use them online," the court verdict said.

But Bai claimed that the website only provided a link for downloads, instead of direct download services.

"We did not intentionally violate the intellectual property rights of the two entertainment companies, so we need not shoulder responsibility for rights infringement," Bai said.

Judge Liu Yong said that the accused website's MP3 download service provided not only links to downloads, but direct download services.

"As a large-scale professional music website, the accused is subjectively wrong," Liu said.

The judge said he believed that the court's decision to confirm it was illegal to provide online links to MP3 downloads would help regulate online linking behaviour.

The record industry was happy about the decision.

Famous domestic music producer Song Ke said the result was a milestone in the entertainment industry's development.

Former vice-president of Warner Music, Song said Warner and other major domestic music producers had never brought MP3 websites to court before the court decision at the weekend.

"This is because MP3 websites were mainly created by music fans in the past and at the time we thought it was not that bad," he said.

"But the current condition is quite different. They (website operators) even intended to make money from the websites and are violating our copyright in broad daylight," Song said.

He said he expected that more entertainment companies will follow the Hong Kong companies that won the court case and fight against copyright infringement over MP3 downloads.

Song, as the managing director of newly-established Taihe Rye Music, said that besides MP3s, discs, tapes, and ring tone downloads for mobile phones would also be focused on in future efforts to safeguard intellectual property rights.

Wang Ziqiang, spokesperson for the State Intellectual Property Office said earlier that anyone who provides music downloads online without authorization would be held to be responsible according to law.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_1439710.htm


China Shuts Down 8,600 Internet Cafes In Two Months
AFP

BEIJING : China has shut down 8,600 Internet cafes in the last two months as part of an ongoing crackdown on the media, state press said Tuesday.

"Since our video conference on this issue on February 19, we have banned 8,600 underground Internet bars," the People's Daily quoted Minister of Culture Sun Jiazheng as saying.

"At present, there still exists many problems with the management at Internet cafes and Internet service providers."

Sun suggested the campaign was far from over and urged governments at the grassroots level to crack down on Internet bars providing services to under-age users and to impose stiffer fines on cafes violating regulations.

Overseeing the crackdown was a special bureau headed by Sun, which has linked up with 10 other ministries responsible for areas including education, law, finance, civil affairs, youth and telecommunications, the paper said.

The crackdown comes after the propaganda ministry annnounced last October a new "educational campaign" aimed at reaffirming Communist Party control over the press, including television, print and the electronic media.

Despite government restrictions, China is second only to the United States in the number of people online, with users rising to 79.5 million by December 2003 from 59.1 million a year earlier.

Internet cafes are often the only way to access the web for many Chinese due to the prohibitive costs of home computers, especially in rural villages and towns.

Besides cracking down on anti-government and subversive material, the measures are also aimed at curbing pornography and banning those under 16 from Internet gaming bars that have become magnets for rural and village youth.

In the last two months, the government has also greatly restricted web logs (blogs) and discussion forums, banned Internet bars from operating within 200 meters (660 feet) of schools and set up video surveillance cameras in Internet cafes in Shanghai.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stori.../82025/1/.html


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Australia Copyright Code Stalled By FTA
Kate Mackenzie

A LONG-awaited review into digital copyright laws has been released, but recommendations for ISPs who may be hosting copyright-breaching material have been clouded by the new Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US.

The Digital Agenda Review, carried out by legal firm Phillips Fox, discusses the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000.

While the review says the laws are generally achieving their purpose, it says an industry code could address uncertainties around ISPs' obligations on receiving take-down notices for alleged breaches of copyright law, if for example an ISP's customer was storing pirated software or music on its servers.

However, it says in the absence of a code of practice, "there is a clear existing need for a simple and effective procedure by which parties can quickly and effective and effectively deal with allegations of infringing material".

The report says take-down notices should identify the copyrighted material and its location, provide contact details for the complaining party, and be accompanied by a Statutory Declaration. If known, contact details for the alleged infringer should also be included.

ISPs should also confirm whether the copyrighted material is hosted by
them, confirm the identity and contact details fo the alleged infringer, and inform the complainant if they cannot locate either, the report says. ISP must contact the alleged infringer who may themselves respond with a Statutory Declaration.

Internet Industry Association chief executive Peter Coroneos said his organisation, which represents the ISP industry, had commenced developing a Copyright Code of Conduct but the process had been stalled by the Free Trade Agreement signed between Australia and the US earlier this year.

"We're still keen to finalise a code, but unfortunately the FTA tended to distract everyone from what was happening in Australia," Mr Coroneos said.

The time taken for the federal Government to negotiate the FTA and release the full text of the agreement meant the IIA had been unable to develop a code, because major copyright holders in the music and software industries wanted to know the details of the bilateral agreement first.

"(Phillips Fox) had a timeline that they had to meet, but I think everyone's pretty clearly of the view that the FTA trumps the DAR, so in a sense it wouldn't matter what the DAR concludes, if the FTA concludes otherwise, that's what the Government has bound itself to implements," Mr Coroneos said.

In addition, Mr Coroneos said, neither Australia nor the US had ratified the FTA. He said he hoped the federal Government would opt for an industry code of conduct rather than a legisative approach to take-down notices.

Despite the prescriptive nature of the FTA, Mr Coroneos said he believed there would still be room for a "somewhat customised appraoch" for Australia to develop its own take-down procedures.

"If that's correct, then we (IIA) become players again in terms of code development," he said.
http://news.com.au/common/story_page...E15306,00.html


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Norwegian Court Fines Teen For Privacy Violation

A Norwegian court has fined a 17 year old girl for having posted an offensive message on an Internet chatboard in violation of national privacy legislation.

From the news site– knock yourself out lol. The gist of it is thus: the 17 year girl had called another girl a whore on a website, and that she hated the other girl, as well as her sister and mother. The court thought that this sort of language is not covered by freedom of expression. - Jack.

Historisk dom for sjikane på Internett
Ann Kristin Ernes

Oslo (23.04.2004) Som den første i Norge er en mindreårig jente fra Hamar idømt en bot for nett-sjikane.

Jenta har skrevet på nettstedet hamarungdom.no at hun hater en annen jente og i tillegg beskrevet henne som hore.

Ifølge Hamar Arbeiderblad er den 17 år gamle jenta dømt av Hedmarken tingrett til å betale en bot på 4.500 kroner for å ha krenket en annens fred gjennom hensynsløs atferd.

På nettstedet hamarungdom.no skrev 17-åringen at hun hatet den fornærmede, og hennes søster og mor. Meldingen ble skrevet som et tilsvar til en annen persons melding der den fornærmede ble beskrevet som «en hore».

Retten fant at meldingen fra den tiltalte ikke kunne betraktes løsrevet fra de andre meldingene som omhandlet den fornærmede. Meldingen var etter rettens mening med på å forsterke den krenkende effekten ved å følge opp og avslutte meningsutvekslingen.

– Jeg kjenner ikke til lignende saker, men det overrasker meg ikke at man kan bli dømt for sjikane over Internett, sier advokat Kyrre Eggen hos advokatfirmaet Wiersholm, Mellbye & Bech til digi.no.

Eggen har tatt doktorgrad om ytringsfrihet.

– Internett har ingen amnesti og blir heller ikke spesielt beskyttet av ytringsfriheten. Det er ikke oppsiktvekkende at hun fikk en bot for sjikane, men jeg tror likevel de fleste velger en annen forfølging framover enn å bruke politiet og påtalemyndighetene, sier Eggen.

Hedmark tingrett kom også til at meldingen fra den 17-år gamle jenta ikke skal vernes av ytringsfriheten. Meldingen har etter rettens mening ingen positiv eller samfunnsgagnlig effekt, og ligger langt fra de hensyn ytringsfriheten hviler på. Meldingen var heller ikke fremsatt i en beskyttelsesverdig foranledning, da den tiltalte forklarte at den fornærmede aldri hadde gjort henne noe vondt. Etter rettens mening hadde meldingen heller karakter av offentlig sjikanering og mobbing, som retten ikke fant burde vernes.
http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=103087


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Graphics Patent Suit Targets Dell, Others
Matt Hines

Forgent Networks has launched a patent infringement lawsuit against 31 major computer and electronics vendors, seeking damages related to its claim to the technology underlying the widespread JPEG file format.

The suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, contends that Forgent deserves royalties from the hardware and software makers based on its patent holdings that cover the compression technology behind JPEG. The format is one of the most popular methods for compressing and sharing images on the Internet.

Austin, Texas-based Forgent, which makes scheduling software, filed the suit through its Compression Labs subsidiary. The defendants read like a Who's Who list of the hardware business, including Apple Computer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, along with a slew of well-known electronics manufacturers such as Canon, Creative Labs, JVC and Xerox. Several software makers are also named in the suit, including Adobe Systems and Macromedia.

Forgent representatives said the company previously attempted to strike licensing deals with all of the vendors named in the suit but felt the process had reached a dead end.

"We've been pursuing negotiations for over a year, but that effort was no longer moving forward," said Michael Noonan, a company spokesman. "Litigation was a last resort and unfortunate but necessary."

Forgent has engaged in an aggressive pursuit of royalties related to JPEG since first announcing its claim to the patents in July 2002. In February 2003, the software maker won a $16 million licensing agreement from Sony based on U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672.

The company asserts that it has generated more than $90 million in licensing fees related to the patent over the last two years. Noonan said that one of the companies from which Forgent was created, Vtel, had earlier purchased the patent rights, which were granted in 1987.

The claim to the JPEG standard has long irked the Joint Photographic Experts Group committee, which has worked to create standards related to the file format since it was devised in 1986. When the company first staked its claim to JPEG, the committee denounced attempts to derive fees from the standard and expressed disappointment at Forgent's attempts to do so. The U.K.-based group could not immediately be reached for comment on the latest suit.

The actual patent held by Forgent relates to digital image compression; fields of use include any device, such as digital cameras, used to compress, store, manipulate, print or transmit digital still images. Forgent also asserts that its patent rights extend beyond digital cameras to include other devices such as personal digital assistants, cell phones, printers and scanners.

"We believe we will prevail in this litigation as the '672 patent is valid, enforceable and infringed," Richard Snyder, chief executive of Forgent, said in a statement. "It's unfortunate that despite the many opportunities these companies have had to license the patent, they have all declined to participate, leaving us no alternative but to litigate."
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5198582.html


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Mind control from Major Tom.

Laying Down The Copyright Law -- To Children

Film studios back antipiracy course
Kathleen Sharp

ENCINO, Calif. -- The $90 billion entertainment industry is teaching middle-school children a course in copyright law that some education specialists say is one-sided and promotes commercialism in the classroom.

In the past year, the Motion Picture Association of America has spent approximately $200,000 to launch its program called ''What's The Diff?" to combat digital piracy. Despite the criticism, the trade group plans to continue the program next school year.

The 45-minute class is taught by volunteers from the nonprofit business group Junior Achievement, and reaches about 900,000 children in primarily disadvantaged schools from Boston to Los Angeles. The volunteers, some of whom work in the entertainment industry, talk with students about the liabilities of downloading music and films from the Internet.

Critics say that the program does not adequately explain the public's rights in copyright law, nor does it discuss the proliferation of legal websites that offer free music and films. Worse, say the program's detractors, is that it rewards those students who parrot the industry line with trips and free DVDs. At the end of the school year, students are asked to write an essay ''to get the word out that downloading copyrighted entertainment is illegal and unethical," according to the teachers' guide. Prizes include an all- expenses-paid trip to Hollywood, worth about $1,000; a Sony DVD player and library of 14 hit movies on DVDs, worth about $350 total; and a selection of 21 Hollywood classic DVDs, valued at $250. Teachers whose students win the contest will also be rewarded with prizes, such as a year's worth of free movie theater tickets for the teacher and a guest.

''It's inappropriate to offer tips, gifts, and prizes in exchange for adults pushing a commercial agenda in the classroom," said Melinda Anderson, spokeswoman for the National Education Association. ''It speaks to a new era of commercialism in classrooms."

Others claim that the entertainment industry, whose revenues depend on copyrighted material such as films and music recordings, should not be teaching students about copyright law without inviting alternative views. ''It's rather like inviting the American insurance industry into the classroom to tell kids about the future of health care," said Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit technology group. ''The entertainment industry has a strong financial incentive to control a biased discussion."

The industry is dominated by five studio-based conglomerates that also own major recording labels, television networks, radio stations, and other media subsidiaries. Its antifilm-piracy curriculum was developed to preempt problems suffered by the music industry, which for years has claimed that it loses as much as $4 billion a year from illegal copying. ''We know we are losing a great deal of money in illegal movie downloads, too," said Rich Taylor of the Motion Picture Association of America.

He said that 500,000 movies are being downloaded every day around the world, although he wasn't sure how many of those are illegal. ''We know that one area we have to attack is on the educational front." Like its cousin, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America has started to sue those who download content illegally. But unlike the recording industry, the film industry is tapping a nonprofit business group to bring its antipiracy message to young people.

Earlier this year, Junior Achievement volunteers debuted the industry's program in California classrooms. One volunteer, Steve Dolcemaschio, an executive with E! Entertainment Television Inc. (jointly owned by Comcast Corp., The Walt Disney Co., and Liberty Media Corp.) worked with Diedre Ndiaye, who teaches speech and drama to sixth- through eighth-grade students at Markham Middle School in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Many children in the class indicated they had never downloaded anything before.

The volunteer and the teacher worked from a 25-page classroom guide to explain the concept of using a computer to download files, which they called ''morally and ethically wrong." The students played roles such as ''The Film Producer," ''The Starving Artist," and were asked questions such as ''Has anyone ever copied your homework? How did this make you feel?"

By the end of one session, the teacher asked one boy: ''Will you stop copying music online and download the right way?"

''Yes," he answered. ''I'll go to the music store and buy more CDs."

Students learn to repeat the program's motto: ''If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it."

''But that's not true," said Wendy Seltzer, a senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ''That may be what the MPAA would like the copyright law to be, but that's not what the law says."

The ''fair use" doctrine allows the public to use copyrighted material for educational purposes. One can use another's work to parody, review, or critique that material. You can even legally swap material, as long as it's not for commercial gain, said Seltzer. ''People tape movies on their VCRs and swap it with friends without getting arrested for piracy," she said.

Copyright law has become increasingly controversial because companies are trying to gain more control over creative material, Seltzer said. Meanwhile, many artists are turning away from corporate recording labels and studios and allowing people to download free independent films and music.

Artists at Creative Commons, garageband.com, and other websites encourage free downloads of their material, as long as people don't use the material for profit. . ''There are hundreds of thousands of artists who are desperately hoping that people will [watch and] listen to them," said George Ziemann, owner of a music production company, MacWizards.

Then there are questions surrounding piracy itself. Despite the companies' claim that downloads cost them billions of dollars, there is no reliable evidence proving that claim, according to Ziemann, von Lohmann, and others.

One study used industry figures to show that major recording labels in the last few years have been releasing as many as 25 percent fewer CD titles, while increasing the price of CDs. Excluding promotional CDs, the average price of a CD between 1998 and 2002 rose 19 percent, according to the study published by Sound & Vision magazine. These higher prices, combined with fewer titles being released, have probably hurt music sales, said von Lohmann.

Independent studies verifying financial loss from film piracy are also scarce. One study, performed by AT&T Labs, found that adults, not children, are the biggest illegal file- swappers.

Commercialism has no place in the classroom, said Alex Molnar, a professor who is director of commercialism in education at Arizona State University. ''This program is a time vampire," he said. ''Is it more important for kids to hear the movie industry's message or should they be learning to read and pass new test standards?"

Yet Darrell Luzzo, senior vice president of Junior Achievement, defends the industry's antipiracy program by saying it's not meant to cover all aspects of copyright law. Rather, the idea is to encourage student debate. ''We are learning ways to enhance classroom discussions."
http://www.boston.com/business/techn...ildren?pg=full


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TiVo Faces Clone War As Market Heats Up
May Wong

Debra Baker tells people she has TiVo. But she really doesn't.

The 33-year-old New York tax consultant has a variant --a digital video recorder offered through her cable company. She didn't know what "DVR" stood for until then.

"I thought DVR was Time Warner's name for TiVo," she said.

So, like many others, Baker simply uses the leading DVR brand as the catchall term for the new love in her lounging life: a machine that lets her easily record her favorite TV shows and watch them whenever she wants.

It's a flattering curse for TiVo, whose revolutionary technology records TV programs without the hassles of videotape, letting users pause live TV, do instant replays and begin watching programs even before the recording has finished.

As more clones crop up, the pioneer that helped popularize DVRs is in danger of becoming marginalized.

"TiVo was the proponent of time-shifting TV and their name is synonymous with it, but everyone else in the world that puts together a set-top box is doing the same thing and that's not helping TiVo," said Mike Paxton, analyst at In-Stat/MDR.

The key ingredients of a DVR are a hard drive to store video, an electronic programming guide to facilitate recording, and software to tie together the technology and give the user navigational control.

DVRs are primarily reaching the mass market through cable companies, and TiVo has yet to get its software, including its widely touted user interface, into their DVR-equipped set-top boxes. They are instead using unbranded DVR software from their longtime set-top-box suppliers -- Scientific Atlanta and Motorola.

"The cable train has left without TiVo onboard, and I don't think they're coming back for TiVo," said Sean Badding, an analyst with The Carmel Group.

TiVo's code also is missing from Panasonic's combination DVD Recorder-DVR and Mitsubishi's upcoming HDTV receiver with a 120-gigabyte DVR. Sharp is building DVR capabilities directly into some of its LCD TVs, again without TiVo.

At the end of 2003, more than a third of the 3.5 million U.S. households with DVRs had TiVo's software and services, according to Forrester Research. More than half of that comes though TiVo's partnership with DirecTV, which has been offering DVR services with its satellite offerings for years.

But as DVRs gain in popularity -- Forrester predicts nearly half of American households will have a DVR by 2009 -- TiVo may be hard-pressed to hold on to its leading market share.

Time Warner Cable was the first cable operator to launch a DVR in July 2002. Just 18 months later, 370,000 DVR customers were paying an extra $4.95 to $9.95 a month for the service. Comcast Corp., Charter Communications Inc. and nearly every major cable operator all plan to widely deploy DVRs this year.

"If Time Warner hadn't come out with a DVR, I would have considered a TiVo by now," said Robert Meyer, a 42-year-old finance portfolio manager from New York.

Dave Watson, a Comcast executive vice president, said choosing Scientific Atlanta and Motorola's technologies was simply the fastest path available to deliver DVR services. Comcast did a brief test with TiVo in 2000 and remains "in touch with TiVo, but there's nothing specific beyond that," Watson said.

TiVo, based in Alviso, Calif., has knocked on the cable industry's doors for years -- and admittedly changed its take-my-TiVo approach to a more flexible tactic of designing its software around the cable industry's needs.

"It's a kinder, gentler TiVo now," said TiVo president Marty Yudkovitz. "It's about building what your customer wants."

But why should cable companies pay more to get TiVo's technology and brand name when they already have apparently good enough DVR features from their entrenched partners?

TiVo's co-founder and chief executive, Mike Ramsey, maintains that clones can't compete with such hallmark TiVO features as automatically recording shows based on keywords, such as favorite actor, director or sports team. Unlike cable DVRs, TiVo machines also can guess what programs a user might enjoy based on viewing habits.

"This brain-dead knockoff stuff is not going to work," said Ramsey. "People's expectations are going to rise. They're going to hear about TiVo's (features) and they're going to want it."

But customers of cable's offerings seem satisfied.

Baker, a TV-holic who never owned a TiVo before, considers her new cable DVR system "the greatest invention" -- and easy enough to use that she never needed an operating manual.

Baker and her husband also appreciated the lack of upfront investment costs to get the cable DVR.

The cable company installed the digital cable box for the Bakers and charges $8.95 a month. TiVo charges subscribers $12.95 a month or $299 for the life of the unit, on top of the $150 or more to get the standalone equipment.

With all this competition from cable companies, now is a critical time for TiVo to turn its No. 1 brand into real sales, Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff said.

An additional threat may also be lurking if DirecTV decides to instead use the xTV DVR technology from its new sister Rupert Murdoch company, NDS Group.

TiVo executives are confident their deal with DirecTV is secure, but allying with cable remains a top priority. Getting into cable boxes would give TiVo a broad footprint to help drive its advertising business, which Ramsey sees as key to TiVo's future.

The company, meanwhile, says it has 60 foreign and domestic DVR-related patents and more pending, and won't hesitate to use them in court against competitors it deems infringers.

TiVo sued Echostar in January, claiming the satellite TV operator's DVR violates TiVo's patent for a "multimedia time warping system" that allows a user to store a TV program and watch another program at the same time.

But for now, even without a cable deal, TiVo is thriving and aims to become profitable by the end of 2005.

The company also estimates it will more than double subscribers almost 3 million by the end of January 2005. The company has earmarked $50 million in marketing and promotional rebates.

"This is it. This is their shot to get a whole lot of new subscribers before cable DVR subscribers really take off," Bernoff said. "And we'll see if they'll be a hitting a dribbler back to the pitcher or a home run."
http://www.crn.com/components/weblog...rticleID=49681


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Turner, NBC Downplay Impact of TiVo

Turner Entertainment Group isn't worried yet about TiVo's impact on traditional advertising models, said Keith Chandler, VP of business solution at Turner Entertainment Group, during a session Tuesday at the National Association of Broadcasters convention. "We view it as a positive at this point," he said.

That's because TiVo has raised viewership of the Turner networks, he said. "Right now we don't have any big guns aimed at the TiVo world. We think it's been slightly positive because it increases viewership," he said. Mr. Chandler added that Turner expects positve results from the coming cable upfront.

Brandon Burgess, executive VP of business development at NBC, was also on the panel and said NBC is expecting a strong upfront too for both cable and broadcast. He added that 2006 will be the year to watch the possible impact of TiVo on ad revenues because penetration of DVRs will reach 10 percent then. "That's when it starts hitting the radar screen," Mr. Burgess said.

Sony in Talks to Buy MGM

Sony has teamed up with a pair of private-equity firms to acquire venerable film studio Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer Inc. for $5 billion, according to sources familiar with the situation.

The deal terms floated Wednesday involved Sony and buyout firms Texas Pacific Group and Providence Equity Partners splitting a $1.5 billion cash payment, with the consortium borrowing the rest. If successful, Sony would then merge MGM into Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Officials from Sony declined to comment, while spokespeople for Texas Pacific and Providence could not be reached.

MGM shares rose 12 percent Wednesday to close at $19.75 a share on a day in which trading volume was 10 times the daily average.

With more than 4,500 film titles, MGM has long been an asset sought after by other media companies. Indeed, Sony came close to acquiring the studio once before, but the deal faltered over issues of who would control the combined entity.

In terms of television, sources said the benefits of combining the two operations are a bit more dubious. While both companies have distribution internationally, they are lacking it domestically. In addition, neither MGM nor Sony has a robust television production operation on the level of a Warner Bros. or Twentieth Television.
http://www.tvweek.com/news/web042104.html


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Glad that’s settled…

Trust Us, It’s “Confidential”

Complaint:
Objections to a cinema commercial that showed a man holding a brand in a fire while a voiceover said "The pirates are out to get you. Don't touch their brand". The man held the brand against a pile of video cassettes; as they burned and exploded, the voiceover said "Piracy funds organised crime and will destroy our film and video industry"; as they exploded a second time, the voiceover said "Piracy funds terrorism and will destroy our society and your future enjoyment. Don't touch the hot stuff. Cool is copyright. Copyright is a matter of FACT ...". The complainants:

1. challenged the claim "Piracy funds terrorism" and

2. objected that the commercial, particularly the claim "Piracy ... will destroy our society", exaggerated the effect of film piracy and caused undue fear and distress. Codes Section: 3.1, 6.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2 (Ed 11)

Adjudication:
The advertisers said the commercial had been given a "U" certificate by the British Board of Film Classification; they believed it did not appeal to fear unduly or without good reason. They said they could not send all the substantiation they held about the link between piracy and terrorism because it was confidential. The advertisers sent a report, published on the European Union website, that stated "Terrorist groups also commonly become involved in counterfeiting and piracy as a mean of financing their activities". They sent the Executive Summary of a report, by the Alliance Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, entitled "Proving the Connection"; that report claimed "There is evidence of proscribed groups in Northern Ireland using intellectual property fraud as a fund raising activity for their criminal activities. The PSNI (Police Service Northern Ireland) has established an Organised Crime Task Force specifically to address this area of illegal activity and its role in funding paramilitary groups". The advertisers also sent the text of a public testimony by the Secretary General of Interpol to the Congress of the United States and the US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations; that document stated "Generally, [intellectual property crime] is organised and controlled by criminals or criminal organizations. In Northern Ireland, however, paramilitary groups are known to control some manufacturing through their links to organised crime groups" and concluded "It is ... possible to state with certainty that paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland have financially benefited from [intellectual property crime]".

1. Complaints not upheld
The Authority noted that intellectual property crime had funded some paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland and that videos, DVDs and VCDs made up a significant proportion of the counterfeit goods seized in Northern Ireland. It considered that, because the advertisers had shown that intellectual property crime, which included film piracy, funded terrorism, the claim was acceptable.

2. Complaints not upheld
The Authority considered that, because some terrorist groups might benefit financially from film piracy, the claim "piracy ... will destroy our society" was unlikely to mislead by exaggeration or to cause undue fear and distress.

http://www.asa.org.uk/adjudications/...ation_id=37673


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The Internet Jukebox

Does Rhapsody Have The Answer To The Downloading Wars?
Clive Thompson

Streaming audio has long been regarded as the sorry second cousin to the heroic MP3. For years, Net users complained that streaming made music sound like it was being broadcast from the bottom of a bathtub, and the slightest congestion caused annoying pauses, burps, and warbles. But just as important, for decades we've treated music as our personal, tangible property. We buy albums and CDs, lend them to our friends, and sell them once we get bored. Forking over $10 a month to listen to music on demand—as the streaming-audio services at Rhapsody and the new Napster require—doesn't jibe with our sense that songs ought to be part of our stuff, not a service you pay for like cable TV.

But as music fans are finding out, when you buy a song online, it usually isn't property any more. It's a license, an agreement to let you use the song. And those licenses impose some maddeningly Byzantine limits on how you use your music. Most legal downloads will work only on approved devices. A song bought at iTunes in "AAC," or Advanced Audio Coding, format won't work on anything but an iPod, while songs bought at MusicMatch or Napster in Microsoft's "WMA," Windows Media Audio, format won't work on iPods or many older MP3 players. And what if you get bored of that Strokes album you downloaded? Too bad: You can't sell it to anyone. That, too, would violate most of the licensing agreements. Worst of all, licenses on downloaded music can be rescinded. If the music companies want, they can "turn off" your right to listen to the music you've bought.

By using licenses, the labels and their download sites are secretly transforming music into a service—something to which you subscribe, and about which they can change the rules any time they want. But it's a particularly crappy service. Who wants to "own" this sort of pseudo- property, these annoying, stubborn, mulelike music files? In contrast, a music-streaming site advertises itself as a service, with an entirely different sort of consumer logic and much more satisfying results.

I recently tried Rhapsody, a streaming-audio service that gives you quick jukebox-style access to any song on its 30,000-album collection, for the price of 10 iTunes songs a month. My fears of lousy audio were unfounded. Rhapsody first went online in late 2001, and by now the service has vanquished any technical problems. Songs began playing in barely a second when I clicked on them, and no matter how aggressively I used my Net connection—surfing Web sites and checking e-mail while I listened—the audio never skipped or lagged. Rhapsody achieves this partly by cunning use of caching: The player uses up to a gig of space on your hard drive to store parts of your most-requested songs, the better to play them at a moment's notice. The catalog is pretty good, too, and includes everything from modern diva histrionics to postwar jazz. Rhapsody is like the mutant child of broadcast radio and a record store, with the best DNA of both.

Using a streaming service such as Rhapsody also allows you to opt out of the AAC vs. WMA war, a face-off that is queasily reminiscent of the fight between Betamax and VHS. You probably remember the sad fate of the losers who bought Beta movies. The downloading services are forcing you to similarly gamble about which music format will win. Right now, because of iPod and iTunes, AAC looks pretty solid. But what happens if WMA triumphs, iPods die out, and the only music players available in 2014 won't play the thousands of songs you legally bought at iTunes? (Or vice versa.)

Some people have already been locked out of their music, after they slammed into the "three computers" rule: Almost all download sites let you listen to a song on only three different computers. Author and blogger Cory Doctorow buys a new Apple iBook every year, but when he recently had to send one of his machines in for repair, he got stuck: His old computer couldn't play his archive of legally paid-for songs because there was no easy way to "de-authorize" the computer he'd sent in for repair and "re-authorize" the old, still-functioning one. His stuff was there, sitting on his computer, but he couldn't use it.

Downloaded music is designed to work with a demographically average computer user, someone who uses only one or two computers most of the time. It actively discriminates against the sort of globe-trotting power-user whose life sprawls over lots of devices—even though those are surely the people most likely to blow tons of cash buying digital music.

In contrast, streaming services tend to be much more flexible. You're allowed to install the Rhapsody software on as many computers as you want, though you can only stream to one machine at a time. You could show up at your friends' party, set up the software on his computer (it takes less than a minute), then compose a massive 300-song mix for the entire evening. Like cable TV, Rhapsody's goal is to keep you so happy that you come back each month with another 10 bucks.

Sure, I've got complaints about Rhapsody. You can't tweak the bass or treble on the sound, the search engine is lame, and the music library has many weird bald spots: only one song from Nevermind and almost no Madonna? (Napster, Rhapsody's main streaming rival, has a slightly different mix of music, but I find the interface clunkier.) And Rhapsody is truly suited only for people who are around broadband computers all day long. That excludes teenagers or anyone who doesn't work near a screen. More important, there are philosophical problems with music as a service. People want songs as property because they understandably want control. They don't want a music label to take their stuff away at the press of a button.

So, no matter how good streaming might be, it won't end the download wars. (In fact, Rhapsody itself offers 79-cent AAC downloads of most songs, though it's not the service's central focus.) The flexibility of "unlocked" MP3s remains the gold standard for online music. Since you can store and play MP3s any way you want, they're the most like real stuff. There are legal routes to getting MP3s online: eMusic sells tunes in that format, but it specializes in super-alternative music. That's why many users are cracking the digital-rights limits on their paid-for downloads. You can, for example, burn your legal downloads onto a CD and then rip them back into MP3s. It's a pain, but I've done it myself, because my old MP3 player won't play WMA or AAC files. Meanwhile, geeks are beginning to create software like PlayFair, which strips the digital-rights limits from iTunes files.

But hard as it may be to believe, streaming is the best online-music option for the desk-bound. I've long been a slightly guilty user of KaZaA, but so many of the files there now are "decoys"—files of junk noise masquerading as real songs, sneakily seeded into the network by music labels—that finding a pristine version of a song has become a serious chore. I'd rather pay a reasonable fee for instant gratification.

Besides, put on your Jules Verne cap. Think about what it'll be like when wireless companies finally roll out broadband networks nationwide and streaming is possible out in the streets. Imagine subscribing to something like Rhapsody on a mobile device that lets you access any song, anywhere, instantly. What will you think of your iPod and its 1,000 songs then?
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099282/


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Sellers Claim Software Stops Illegal Song Trading
John Borland

Network-security company Palisade Systems this week will launch software that can identify and block copyrighted songs as they are being traded online.

Created by software firm Audible Magic and backed strongly by the Recording Industry Association of America, the song-filtering software has already triggered interest in Washington, D.C., along with strong scepticism in the peer-to-peer world and among some students and universities.

Palisade's new tool is the fruit of a cross-licensing deal struck early in the year, which also gave Audible Magic rights to use Palisade's network-monitoring technology to offer a similar product. Palisade executives say their university customers in particular are interested in the song-blocking capabilities.

"It's the kind of thing we hear from universities or customers that act more as an ISP," said Doug Jacobson, Palisade's founder and chief technology officer. "They want to take the position of not filtering out all peer- to-peer [traffic], stopping copyrighted works but not the other content."

Audible Magic's technology, which will be released as an option in the newest version of Palisade's PacketHound network-management services, has formed the centrepiece of an ongoing debate over the future viability of peer-to-peer networks. As the filtering technology begins to appear this year inside university and other networks, the intensity of that debate is likely to grow.

For much of the early months of the year, RIAA executives helped guide Audible Magic chief executive Vance Ikezoye around Washington, D.C., offices, advocating the song-blocking technology as a tool for stopping copyright infringement on file-swapping networks. If built into file-trading programs such as Kazaa or Morpheus, it could help block large numbers of illegal trades, the record industry group said.

File-swapping companies -- some of which have contended that filtering their networks is impractical or even impossible -- said they were sceptical of the claims, noting that neither RIAA nor Audible Magic had given them a demonstration of the filtering tools. Industry trade group P2P United says it has repeatedly contacted the company asking to see the filters in action.

Ikezoye said he still has not demonstrated the technology for the peer-to-peer companies.

"What we're looking for is a real serious business discussion," Ikezoye said. "At this point, it doesn't look like anybody's interested in real business."

Palisade's version of the technology sits inside a network, rather than inside a file-swapping program. If installed in a university, for example, it could look inside students' emails, instant messages and peer-to-peer transfers, seeking audio "fingerprints" that could be compared with information in Audible Magic's database.

If a match is found, it would block the transfer of the song midstream. Jacobson said the identification process would not work on an encrypted network, such as is used in several newer file-swapping programs. However, the Palisade software could also act to block those applications from using the network altogether, instead of blocking individual song transfers, he said.

Palisade's PacketHound software will be available to customers this week, the company said.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/sec...9152667,00.htm


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“Bad Faith” Fair Use
Jason

The Second Circuit Court of appeals today issued a ruling that republication on the Internet of quotes from an illegally acquired seminar manual can still be fair use, despite the fact that they were acquired in bad faith. The Court held that while good/bad faith does factor into the equation, the overall issue of transformation is what is most important to deciding what is fair and what isn't.

While the majority opinion will only hold interest for the true lawgeeks in the audience, I recommend reading Judge Dennis Jacob's concurring opinion which contains many spirited exhibitions on fair use, including this gem:

"Fair use is not a doctrine that exists by sufferance, or that is earned by good works and clean morals; it is a right--codified in § 107 and recognized since shortly after the Statute of Anne--that is “necessary to fulfill copyright’s very purpose, ‘[t]o promote the Progress of science and the useful arts . . . .’”
http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/003214.html


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Bringing Up Baby, but Not Giving Up Movies
Micheline Maynard

Up on the big screen, Jim Carrey sat behind his steering wheel, sobbing uncontrollably as the opening credits for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" rolled by.

In the theater some members of the audience cried, too. One, Sophia Lee, waved a clean cloth diaper at Mr. Carrey, a not inappropriate gesture considering that Sophia is only 9 1/2 months old.

These pint-size patrons, accompanied by their mothers and a stray father or two, were at the Madstone Theater for their weekly morning movie outing one Tuesday in early spring.

It used to be that new parents were fated to watch "The Lion King" or "Finding Nemo" endlessly on video while waiting for current, more adult fare to be released for the home market. But now thousands of moms and dads across the country are taking advantage of new programs that enable them to see first-run films with their children.

Theater chains like Loews Entertainment, Showcase Cinemas and the Madstone group and some individually owned theaters have begun holding weekly showings for parents and babies, usually 2 and younger.

"Regular paying customers don't want crying babies in their theaters, and parents don't want to be the ones who have that crying baby," said Staci Torgeson, Madstone's director of audience services. "This was a market that was waiting for movies to come out on DVD. They were not going to the movies."

Loews Entertainment, which has expanded its Reel Moms program to 24 theaters in 20 cities in the last two years, has shown romantic comedies like "Along Came Polly," action films like "Hidalgo" and the thriller "Spartan."

The showings are most popular at its theaters in New York, Chicago and Washington, cities with lots of young parents, said John McCauley, the senior vice president for marketing at Loews.

"There are a fair number of intelligent people who want to get out during their day with their kids," said Rachel Thompson, a health care consultant, who took her 7- month-old son, Charlie, to the Madstone in Ann Arbor.

In today's family-friendly culture, which no longer has sharp separations between adult- and child-centered activities, and in which children can be spotted at museums and tony restaurants, mommy-and-me movies are a natural. Ms. Thompson, for instance, already attends a mom-and-baby yoga class and a mother-and-child music program with Charlie. (He generally sleeps through the films, said Ms. Thompson, though he did wake up and wail during a loud moment in "Big Fish.")

Crowds vary according to the movie, said Mr. McCauley of Loews, adding that up to 600 mothers, fathers and babies attend showings. As a father of two young children, he has been one of them. He started the Loews program in late 2001 at its theater on 34th Street in Manhattan after the birth of his daughter, Jane, now 2 1/2.

Mr. McCauley, who was previously senior director of marketing and entertainment for the National Football League, used to see as many as 40 movies a year with his wife, Hope, before their daughter was born. They also have a 7-month-old son, Drew.

When his wife was preparing to return to her job after her first maternity leave, Mr. McCauley said he was distressed to learn that she hadn't seen a single film during her time off. " `How am I going to the movies? I can't bring her to the movies,' " he recalled her saying about their daughter.

Now, he said, he receives frequent e-mail messages from parents telling him that they have entered their movie outings in their baby books.

National Amusements, which owns Showcase Cinemas, began its program, Baby Pictures, last year at a single theater in Randolph, Mass., where the company is based, and has since expanded it to five states, Rhode Island, Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio and New York.

The Madstone chain, whose nine theaters nationwide are in cities and suburbs, mostly features independent films. It began its BYOBaby (Bring Your Own Baby) program in December, drawing 50 to 100 parents with children to its movie theaters like the one in Ann Arbor.

Culture-deprived parents, not to mention moviegoers sick of other people's noisy children, are happy as are theater owners, who are attracting customers when their houses would otherwise sit empty. (Parents pay the matinee price, about $6 in most parts of the country, while babies get in free.)

"It feels very normal to buy your ticket and get some popcorn, even if you have a baby on your lap," said Amy Kett, of Ann Arbor, the mother of 8-month-old Henry John, adding that she had skipped just one movie since the program began.

At the Madstone on that Tuesday morning, dozens of mothers began arriving with babies in strollers, car seats and on their shoulders about half an hour before the 10:30 a.m. showtime.

Soon there were babies everywhere. Some were crawling around on blankets, other sat quietly with their mothers, like Sophia Lee, who was perched on the lap of her mother, Jen.

At the back of the auditorium, a line formed to use a changing table, with baby wipes, powder and lotion provided by the theater.

Eventually, the lights went down, but only part way, so parents could keep an eye on their children and retrieve them when they crawled too far. That wasn't a problem for Walden Jones-Perpich, who at 6 weeks was attending his first film, rocked throughout by his mother, Katie Jones.

Mindful that its youthful audience is aging, Mr. McCauley is working on a ReelToddlers program. But it will be more difficult with slightly older children, said Ms. Torgeson at Madstone, which is also exploring the concept.

Toddlers are more active than babies and have shorter attention spans. "They won't be able to sit still for an hour and a half," she said, and "kids will be seeing things that they shouldn't be seeing." By sticking with babies, she said, the chains can continue to show a variety of fare, which at the Madstone theaters includes foreign films along with mass-market ones.

Ms. Torgeson said lighter movies like "Jersey Girl" tend to draw more moms and babies than darker, more serious films like "Osama." But many parents will come no matter what is being shown, happy for the chance to get out of the house with their little ones.

"After 10 years of working 80 hours a week," before having a child, Ms. Thompson said, "it's nice to be able to go to the movies on a Tuesday."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/27/movies/27BABI.html


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The Sound of The Industry

Brand-New Lag

Late as usual, labels learn that downloading is their friend
Douglas Wolk

The music business is finally figuring out how to profit from the previous generation of peer-to-peer technology. Companies like Webspins and BigChampagne monitor the most-traded songs on file-sharing networks (last week's No. 1 was Hoobastank's "The Reason"), and record labels have noticed that unauthorized MP3 traffic is a pretty good sign of what people want to hear. Billboard recently reported how, for instance, Maverick Records parlayed the heavy trading of Story of the Year's "Until the Day I Die" into airplay and, eventually, a gold album.

Not that the Recording Industry Association of America is grateful. On March 23, it sued another 532 uploaders, 89 of them college students; a week later, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry took legal action against 247 more swappers in Canada, Denmark, Germany, and Italy. On top of that, the RIAA has abruptly shut down its "Clean Slate" amnesty program, in which file traders could turn themselves in, delete their unauthorized files, agree not to do it again, sign an affidavit, and open themselves up to potential lawsuits from everyone else. No great loss—only 1,108 people had ever signed up for it anyway.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department formed an intellectual- property task force at the end of March. On April 21 and 22, the DOJ and FBI's "Operation Fastlink," in collaboration with law enforcement groups from 10 other countries, seized upwards of 200 computers involved with what John Ashcroft called "the international online piracy world." By that, he didn't mean college students trading String Cheese Incident MP3s, but "warez" groups, who specialize in cracked software, games, and movies.

Music geeks have been moving past old-fashioned peer-to-peer MP3 trading anyway. Audioblogs like Soul Sides and Said the Gramophone have proliferated over the last couple of months. They're just like regular weblogs, except that every day they present a special MP3 or two (often not-yet-released or out-of-print treats), usually with extensive explanatory comments. Most audioblogs only make songs available for a week or so; few, if any, have experienced legal hassles so far, although they occasionally get asked to remove a song.

The music business may have more reason to fear two other developments that have been around for a few years but are reaching critical mass. The first is FLAC, or Free Lossless Audio Codec—a way of making sound files smaller without compromising sound quality. (Metallica are selling FLAC as well as MP3 downloads of every show on their current tour; by comparison, Prince's online store, which sells only Windows Media files, seems positively Stone Age.)

The second is Bram Cohen's program BitTorrent. It's a tool for "swarming downloads": a way to quickly mass-distribute very large, popular files without using too much bandwidth from a single host. Initially spread by sites like the jam-band tapers' mecca etree.org it's become the program of choice for trading TV shows, movies, and concerts. Cohen has noted that using BitTorrent for illegal trading is "patently stupid," because users can't hide their IP addresses. (Evidently, there's a lot of stupidity out there.)

Let's say you want to get a copy of the Pixies' first reunion show, the Minneapolis gig from April 13—it's in demand right now, and therefore a likely candidate for BitTorrent. Once you've located a "torrent" file for it (which tells the program what it's looking for, and is usually a few dozen kilobytes), the program seeks out a bunch of other users who have the concert on their hard drives and downloads little pieces of it from each of them simultaneously. Before too long, you've got the whole 27-song set as CD-quality FLAC files, and in the meantime you're passing bits of it on to other Pixies buffs.

BitTorrent has legitimate uses for sure: A few weeks ago, Blizzard Entertainment used it to distribute a new 2-gigabyte game. But it also means that full-length, full-quality albums, with graphics, are now almost as easy to replicate over the Internet as MP3s. If the major labels are smart, they'll figure out a way to make money from swarming-download technology—but they don't have long.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0417/soti.php


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'Imminent' Lawsuits Force Syracuse University Officials To Explore Legal File-Sharing
Katy Stech

Despite legal threats from the recording industry, SU students continue to burn CDs and download music. And university officials are looking into ways to keep students from getting burned.

Sixty-three percent of Syracuse University students illegally download songs, movies and software from the Internet, according to a study conducted in the fall of 2003 by Computing and Media Services and the School of Information Studies.

But next fall, officials will research the idea of subscribing to downloading services such as Napster and Apple iTunes to prevent potential legal suits against SU students, because students seem apathetic toward possible punishments and a questionably suffering music industry.

So far, only a handful of students have experienced negative repercussions as a result of illegal downloading.

The Recording Industry Association of America has sent SU about 25 letters each month asking that a certain student's Internet port be disconnected because it facilitated illegal file-sharing.

But asking for the names of the students who use file-sharing ports is also an option for the association, which could result in issuing subpoenas and fines, or even jail time. The average punishment is about $3,000.

It's only a matter of time until the RIAA targets an SU student with more severe charges, said Deborah Nosky, manager of IT communications and professional development.

"I think students are gambling that it won't be their name when the time comes," Nosky said. "They certainly will ask us for the names - there's nothing magical about us to prevent it."

After receiving a letter, CMS engineers turn off the student's Internet access until he or she visits the CMS office. At the office, each offender receives a brief speech on the legality of file-sharing and signs a statement to the RIAA stating that they will not illegally download again.

Exceptions to the general punishment protocol do exist, though.

"Punishments can vary based on how serious the offense is," Nosky said. "You'll be in a lot more trouble if we catch you sharing 'Kill Bill Volume 2' than if you were downloading a Fleetwood Mac song from 1978."

A second-time offender's sanctions can include probationary status, temporary denial of access to the university network and assignment of an educational project, said Juanita Perez Williams, director of the office of Judicial Affairs.

The university's method of punishment, though, doesn't act as an effective deterrent to students, said Williams.

First-time offenses are not treated seriously enough, and the odds of being caught more than once are small, so steeper penalties may not be effective in scaring or stopping students, Nosky said.

The university itself doesn't actively look for students who are file-sharing, but Nosky said the university should crack down on file-sharers to protect them from future RIAA punishments.

On March 23, the RIAA issued 532 subpoenas to people who were allegedly file-sharing. Eighty-nine ports were associated with 20 different university networks - but none to SU students.

Nine of the 532 suits filed in March were against New York University students. NYU officials initially refused to release the students' names, but after a three-week investigation, NYU officials will most likely comply, according to an article in NYU's The Washington Square News.

SU officials, however, wouldn't refuse to cooperate with a legal request from the RIAA if one were lodged against an SU student, Nosky said.

"When the university is confronted with legal documents, we will follow rules of the court," Nosky said. "If we get that subpoena, we will comply."

Aware of the risks that file-sharing students face, universities - including SU - are looking into accepted alternatives to minimize the possibility of litigation.

Pennsylvania State University was the first institution to subscribe to an online file-sharing service, allowing its students to temporarily stream songs for free or to pay 99 cents a song for a permanent copy.

PSU's subscription to Napster, which began Jan. 12, facilitates about 100,000 downloads to about 18,000 students that live on campus, said Tysen Kendig, a spokesman for PSU.

Students initially criticized the program because it required that they pay a dollar for each song burned onto a CD. But eventually many students opted to keep the music files on their computers, Kendig said.

"The biggest thing was getting past students' mind-set that everything they get on the Internet is free," Kendig said. "Students on campus have grown up with the Internet and have gotten used to stealing music and not thinking twice about it."

PSU funded the program through an annual student technology fee, after rearranging its budget so that it would remain constant over the next few years.

Motivating students to respect copyright laws is becoming increasingly harder in light of advancing technology and a sense of invincibility that young people have, Kendig said. But the program not only protects students from the subpoenas but reinforces the idea that file-sharing is illegal.

"It's serving ethics education while providing a tangible music service," Kendig said.

But a study released March 29 found that file-sharing had little effect on the recording industry's revenue, and studies like these take away the RIAA's most powerful argument, he said.

In the study, OpenNap, a file-sharing network, analyzed which songs and movies were being downloaded most frequently over a period of four months then correlated the numbers with the sales statistics of 680 albums.

The study is the first to use technology-based research as opposed to survey-based research, said Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School, who led the study with Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

But RIAA officials were quick to criticize the OpenNap study, saying that four months was too short a time to detect an economic trend.

"It's like noticing that the sky is clear and concluding this has been the sunniest decade in history," said an RIAA memo released April 2.

Many songs, however, aren't popular for more than a few weeks, and four months is a long time in the music industry, Oberholzer-Gee said.

The SU study on file-sharing, however, found that students' attitudes towards the recording industry haven't changed over the years.

"We asked about whether people think that CDs are a rip-off or if they think that artists are making too much money," said Jeffrey Stanton, assistant professor in the School of Information Studies who led the study. "We looked to see if people were cynical about the whole record company deal."

The study also found that the varying opinions people had toward the industry did not affect the amount of money students budgeted for CDs and movies.

"There's a common claim by the record companies saying that people will always take something for free if they can and that, in some sense, we are a bunch of selfish jerks," he said. "Our data did not show that at all."

The Harvard/UNC-Chapel Hill study was too limited in simply studying file-sharing networks, said David Rezak, an SU music industry professor, adding that peer-to-peer sharing is one of many factors in the trend. DVD sales, piracy and legitimate sales of downloads over the Internet also contribute to the trend.

"The industry worldwide is experiencing a downturn," Rezak said. "It would be foolish to say that illegal file-sharing has no impact on the recording industry."
http://www.dailyorange.com/news/2004...g-666530.shtml


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Court Sets Date In Napster Damages Cases
Reuters

A federal judge in San Francisco set June 14 to hear motions to dismiss lawsuits claiming investors in Napster kept the song-swap site going, costing the music industry $17 billion in lost sales. Napster went bankrupt in 2002 and was bought by software firm Roxio, which relaunched it as a pay-for-use service last year. Roxio was not named in these latest cases. But Napster's renegade past is at the heart of lawsuits by music publishers, songwriters and labels that claim that German media company Bertelsmann's $90 million investment in Napster in 2000 kept the service operating eight months longer than it would have done otherwise. In addition to the Bertelsmann case, Vivendi Universal's Universal Music and EMI Group sued Hummer Winblad, claiming the venture capital firm's $15 million investment and installation of a chief executive at Napster in 2000 promoted piracy.
http://news.com.com/2110-1027-5201817.html


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Music Rivals Prepare To Fight iTunes
John P. Mello Jr.

The iTunes model is called a la carte. Listeners peruse a library of songs, pick a few and buy them. But another model is emerging that, its proponents say, will supplant the Apple approach in the future. That is the subscription model. With that model, listeners pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to a music library.

When Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) raised the curtain on its online digital music store a year ago this week, there were more than a few skeptics in the audience. Why, they asked, would websters buy something they could get for free through numerous file-sharing networks?

Well, after selling 50 million songs from its iTunes store, it's apparent that Apple is doing something right -- and its success has spawned a coterie of pretenders itching to carve into the Cupertino, California-based company's 50 percent share of the online music market.

Apple's song-selling success in the last year hasn't surprised some observers. While there was plenty of free music before iTunes opened shop -- and there still is, for daredevils willing to risk the legal wrath of the Recording Industry Association of America -- music downloading was a gamble at best, according to Jarad Carleton, an IT industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan in Palo Alto, California.

"When you're buying from iTunes or any of its competitors, you're getting a digital file with a guaranteed level of quality," he told TechNewsWorld. "For people who want a good listening experience, something like that is important."

When you download a free file, Carleton explained, "Chances are, the recording will have pops and snaps in it, or it will cut off early, or its volume will fluctuate."

But Apple's success at selling songs online may be less important than its success at getting the music industry to buy into the proposition. "The music industry was hard-core set against selling songs online," Carleton said. "Something happened in those negotiations between Steve Jobs and the record label executives where Steve Jobs was able to soften their position on it.

"After Steve Jobs softened their position on it, they began to roll out similar models to different online storefronts," he added.

The iTunes model is called a la carte. Listeners peruse a library of songs, pick a few and buy them. But another model is emerging that, its proponents say, will supplant the Apple approach in the future. That is the subscription model.

With that model, listeners pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to a music library.

"What we think is going to be interesting in this next year is the rise of subscription services," said Bob Ohlweiler, senior vice president for business development at MusicMatch, the San Diego-based maker of a popular media player and operator of an online music store.

"People will be spending more of their music consumption dollars subscribing to services," he told TechNewsWorld.

For the cost of a CD, subscription services give listeners access to any kind of music they want, observed Brad Duea, president of Napster, a Los Angeles-based online music provider.

"That's what's going to be driving subscription, and that will be the model of choice going forward," Duea told TechNewsWorld. "I foresee every online home having at least one music subscription and, depending on how many folks in their family, maybe more."

Ohlweiler admitted, though, that subscription services are a hard sell because music consumers are accustomed to owning their music, not leasing it from someone. "That's the reason why the adoption of subscription services is running slower than the adoption of a la carte download sales," he said.

"It's a bit of a harder sell," he noted. "It's more difficult to communicate the simple value proposition. But once people realize that for $10 a month -- the price of buying one album -- they can access an entire catalog of music that's available, word will spread like a virus."

Whatever models emerge for selling music online, some things never seem to change. Case in point: the latest news that major record labels are mulling over raising prices for songs sold online.

"I don't think it makes sense to raise prices on the Internet right now, because really what we're doing is competing with free distribution, with piracy," Ohlweiler contended.

"It's crazy, and it's highway robbery," added Frost and Sullivan's Carleton. "They have no packaging costs, no distribution costs, all they have is a fixed infrastructure cost. I think the record executives are being greedy," he said, "but, then again, that has pervaded the industry for a long time."
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/s...ech/33551.html


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‘Just Call Me Slick:’ An MIT Conversation With Slick Rick
Peter R. Russo

Before Saturday’s Spring Weekend concert, I sat down for a few minutes with Slick Rick (a.k.a. Richard Walters) to discuss his beginnings as a hip-hop artist, his current legal troubles, and his feelings on Internet file sharing. While perhaps now best known for his time spent in prison for an attempted murder conviction and immigration violations, Slick Rick was at the forefront of the East Coast rap scene during the mid-1980s. A collaborator with such luminaries as Run-DMC and Doug E. Fresh, he helped lay the groundwork for hip-hop as we know it today.

The Tech: I’m not sure what I should call you. Do you go by “Slick”?

SR: Just call me Slick...

TT: What do you think of MIT so far? Have you been around campus at all?

SR: Well, we just jumped out the limo right here. So I don’t really know what to expect yet...

TT: Are you planning on taking a look at campus at all?

SR: I don’t think we’re going to have too much time to look around. But I’m going to get to meet the kids after the show.

TT: I’m curious about your background. When did you decide to be a rapper? Was this during your time at LaGuardia [High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts]?

SR: No, it has always been a hobby. It was a hobby that turned into a profession. I had a regular job. Once I left high school, I didn’t bother to go straight to college. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. So I just did like a lot of other kids do, and went into the job market. I was a law library clerk and a mail clerk. But then my hobby just took off. It was just something I did as a play around thing. And next thing you know, I guess you stood out in a crowd, and you started generating finances, and I quit the job, and never looked back since.

TT: You were a close friend and colleague of Jam Master Jay. What was your reaction to his murder in 2002?

SR: It’s a sad day for hip-hop because I guess you don’t realize what you’ve lost until you lose it, because I think a lot of people overlooked Run-DMC. [Jam Master Jay was a member of the hip-hop group Run-DMC.] ... But then when an icon falls victim to such a heinous crime or whatever, then we realize the importance of icons in the game, and the whole root of the tree. ... So it was a sad situation to see a legend that was pretty much overlooked by mainstream to take such a fall.

TT: What about your own crime? [Walters spent six years in jail for an attempted-murder conviction in 1991.]

SR: My crime happened in 1990. I did my rag. I shot somebody that was trying to rob a liquor store or whatever the case. I’m not going to try to take the holier-than-thou route. I was wrong too. I injured some bystander I shot in the foot. But this was also in 1990. I served my time. This is 2004. So that’s 14 years ago. Now in 2002, ... now you want to deport somebody for something that happens over thirteen years ago? I mean, does that sound like human growth, or does that sound like backwards thinking? Thirteen years ago, and then to be on the street for over six, seven years with not so much as a traffic ticket? It shows that it’s illogical.

TT: How has your time in jail influenced your music?

SR: It opens your eyes to society, and errors that need to be fixed. ... There should always be laws. There should always be policing. We should always have boundaries. If you don’t have order, things will be chaotic. But if order is not run properly, then it could be defeating the purpose, just how like we see now with this fictitious war.

TT: What is your position on Internet file sharing, and do you think this is something that helps or hurts the music industry?

SR: Music is one of the last beauties left in the world, that is pretty much being spoiled now. ... The music industry, for a long period of time, has been cruelly manipulated and robbed. Like, a person could be born with a talent. He’s happy, he’s energetic, he goes and gives his talent to the world, and then when it comes time for him to get his paycheck, he’s totally robbed.

TT: By the industry?

SR: By the industry, exactly. They’re spitting their heart out to the world. The fans don’t know this. They want to see him a star. They’re admiring, they relate to you. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, these no-talent bums is robbing you and taking all your money, and making you put up a front like you’re wealthier than you really are, because you don’t want to let your people down. ... These stars, these god-given stars have been manipulated and robbed since the system became started. So when Internet sharing came, it was almost like God came and said, “Listen to me,” and he says “Look, you stole, you tried to gain and steal and profit off of everything you’ve given the world. This is a payback. You can’t control it. You can’t control Internet sharing.”

TT: So you think it’s affecting the industry more than it’s affecting the artists?

SR: We as artists, we was never getting a dime, regardless. We’re happy if we get, like Prince says. ... if Prince was to go and sell his own little records, even if he can sell a hundred-thousand records, he’s rich. If he sells it himself. In these industries, they tell you four million, five million, you’re not seeing the same money you would make if you sold your own records. Like if you sold 50,000 records, you’d be rich ... well, somewhat well-off. But if you let the industry, which is supposed to take their cut and give you your cut, do it, and they sell millions, they’re not giving you your fair share. They just keep on manipulating you. It’s like having a bunch of cows that are milked inappropriately. They lose their spirit to create. And the next thing, they’re just a dried-up cow, which means that you as a manager, industry, you have just manipulated, and brought despair upon your cows. Now they can’t create milk. ... I think Internet sharing is a blessing to humans. I think Internet sharing is a blessing to the average man. ... I think [Internet sharing] is a blessing in disguise.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V124/N22/sli..._inte.22a.html


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Ban taxes on Internet access? Are you insane? What's that? It'll guarantee the tech vote? Well, why didn't you say so!?
John Paczkowski

Some say President Bush's call for a broad moratorium on state and local taxes on Internet access is "an election-year two-step." And it may well be. But at least it's a two-
step in a good direction, right? On Monday, the President -- who said little to nothing on broadband issues in the first three years of his administration -- urged Congress to ban taxes on high-speed Internet access saying he wants to make high-speed Internet access available to every home within three years. "Broadband technology must be affordable," Bush said in a speech in Minneapolis. "In order to make sure it gets spread to all corners of the country, it must be affordable. We must not tax broadband access. If you want broadband access throughout the society, Congress must ban taxes on access." That Bush's remarks came on the very day the senate began discussing whether or not to renew a lapsed ban on Internet access taxes was, of course, not a coincidence. The debate over the moratorium promises to be a heated one, and those arguing in its favor need all the support they can get. With billions of state and local government tax revenue at stake, the opposition to the moratorium is already heavy, heavier still thanks to concerns that such a moratorium would exempt voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls from taxation as well. That's not such a big deal now. But it's going to become one very quickly, given the way things are going.

Did you substract the 1,977 we sued? According to the latest data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 17 million Americans said they have stopped downloading music over the Internet, nearly a third of them for fear of legal action by the recording industry. But at the same time, the number of Americans who do download music rose to an estimated 23 million -- a sharp increase from an estimated 18 million users in November and December 2003. Seventeen percent of those said they are using paid services, though not necessarily as their exclusive source of online music. The rest are getting their music from other sources. Top among them: file- sharing networks. "Last January, we reported that after the recording industry lawsuits were launched into the public eye, there was a considerable drop in the percentage of Internet users who said they were downloading music or sharing files," said Mary Madden, a Pew research analyst and co-author of the report. "And while it's clear that the industry's legal campaign has made a lasting impression in the minds of American Internet users, we are also seeing evidence that a segment of users are simply moving away from the most popular and highly monitored file-sharing networks and are instead using alternative sources to acquire files."

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Q U O T E D

"It's rather like inviting the American insurance industry into the classroom to tell kids about the future of health care."

-- Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, comments on The Motion Picture Association of America's efforts to teach middle school children copyright law.

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Red Hat: Sun COO full of it: "We are fully committed to open source and our code reflects that. Red Hat has no proprietary software built in our distribution. Our core strategy is built on open source and we will not deviate from that strategy." That's what Red Hat spokesperson Leigh Day had to say about Sun Microsystems President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz's claim that Red Hat peddles a proprietary Linux distribution. In an interview with eWeek, Schwartz said Sun worries about open sourcing Java under the GNU General Public License (GPL) because the GPL encourages forking. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, he said, is an example of that. "There is a fork in the Linux world: Red Hat and the others," Schwartz said. "Red Hat has pretty much forked the distribution. This has given Red Hat tremendous gains for now, but ultimately it's an impediment in the growth of Linux." Schwartz's comments obviously didn't go over well at Red Hat. Or anywhere else for that matter. Even Linux founder Linus Torvalds said Schwartz is mistaken. "Sure, RH definitely has their own vendor kernel," Torvald's told eWeek, "but it's not proprietary, and a number of the top Linux kernel contributors are Red Hat employees." So how did this little war of words get its start?

Before the IPO we had nothing. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish heap ... Google President Sergey Brin isn't very wealthy. Yet. This according to Brin's father who's apparently happy to grant interviews to media outlets that can't seem to score one with his son. "He does not have much money, I do not have much money," Michael Brin told Reuters. "Did we expect him to become, what's it called -- Time Magazine calls him a 'titan of industry'? No, I had no idea. I expected him to get his Ph.D and to become somebody, maybe a professor."

Oh, the irony: On Monday, the day that The Wall Street Journal reported that Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston would be the lead underwriters of Google's IPO (see "Spare change for Google shares?"), Frank Quattrone - the investment banker who helped build both firms into what they are today, was on trial for obstruction of justice in a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan. "Frank is the guy that put the word 'hot' in hot IPO," Andy Kessler, a hedge fund investor based in Silicon Valley who once worked with Quattrone, told The New York Times. "He may be gone and fighting for his innocence in court, but the firms he put on the map in the tech I.P.O. business live on."

"Time to pay the electric bill" supplants "I'm going to see a man about a horse" as most popular bathroom break euphemism: It's about the furthest thing from solar power that I can think of, but that's the way researchers are describing a new technology that can turn human waste into ... ahem ... "renewable" energy. Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have developed a microbial fuel cell that generates electricity by oxidizing organic matter. Currently, the device produces just enough electricity to power a circuit. But its creators say that with a little bit more work and the waste of 100,000 people it could crank out about 51 kilowatts of power.

Any food left in the space toilet? Of course, as any good biologist will tell you, human waste is good for generating more than power. Consider the Euroopean Space Agency's efforts to build a "space toilet," a device that will -- in a perfect world -- recycle astronauts' waste into food, oxygen and water. The Micro-Ecological Life Support Alternative system, as it's called in the industry, is basically a miniature ecosystem that contains plants and algae that will produce oxygen, water and food from decomposed waste. It's a less than appetizing prospect, but one that many believe will be integral to the future of space travel. "If we can't do it, we're not getting much further off this planet," Michael Dixon, a lead researcher on the project, told New Scientist.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...sv/8531925.htm

[JackSpratts]

FBI Questions UNCC Student For File Sharing

File sharing fight varies at different universities, official policies in place
Elizabeth Thomas

The FBI was on UNC Charlotte’s campus last week, and the agency wasn’t giving presentations to criminal justice classes.

According to police records, UNCC police officers assisted the federal agency with the service of a search warrant last Monday for stealing intellectual property.

Major William Harper, interim director for University Police, could not comment on details regarding the incident, citing his agency was merely assisting the FBI in their investigation.

"They just recently put together a task force dealing with copyright infringment," said Harper.

He did say the FBI confiscated the student's computer from one of the campus dorms.

"We do not actively investigate copyright infringement on the campus network unless we are notified by the Motion Picture Association of America and various other agencies on alleged music, video or software policy copyright violations," said Carter Heath, security administrator for UNCC's Information and Technology Services.

Carter said the University's dealings with the FBI on copyright infringement are a rarity.

"The only time we're contacted by them is within the constraints of a criminal investigation," said Heath.

Chief Information Officer Karin Steinbrenner, in an interview with NinerOnline.com last year, said she would receive two or three messages a week from the recording or video industries regarding illegal activity of UNCC students.

UNCC’s Information and Technology Services determines the IP address of such students and turns them over to the Student Affairs office. Discipline can range from the limiting of one’s computer privileges to expulsion.

In the wake of several rounds of lawsuits against illegal file sharers, colleges and universities around the country are taking steps to curb the practice among students.

According to the 2003 nationwide Campus Computing Survey, nearly two-thirds of schools who participated reported having institutional policies in place designed to reduce students’ illegal downloading of copyrighted music and movie files.

The policies differ among universities. Schools like the University of Rochester and Pennsylvania State University have provided students with a university-supported legal alternative to file sharing that allows students to download and purchase MP3s.

Other schools simply have policies that comply with the law, under which sharing copyrighted files is completely illegal without compensation. According to the survey, almost four-fifths of universities -- 80.9 percent of public universities and 77.5 percent of private universities – have campus codes of conduct that focus on downloaded commercial content.

Despite these statistics, there is no official policy against file sharing at Penn. "We try to stay away from technical details in our policies because technology changes so rapidly," said Dave Millar, Penn’s information security officer.
http://www.nineronline.com/vnews/dis.../408ecabb37098


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'Critical' Windows Hijack Flaw Reported
Ryan Naraine

Security researchers have discovered a serious boundary error vulnerability in multiple versions of Microsoft's Windows platform and warned that attackers could hijack systems via Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer (IE).

Rodrigo Gutierrez, a researcher with Trustix AS, notified Microsoft of the flaw with a warning that it could be exploited by malicious attackers to cause a buffer overflow and lead to system takeover.

Microsoft confirmed Gutierrez's findings in an advisory and recommended users install the latest service packs for Windows XP and Windows 2000. The software giant said the hole was fixed in the service packs but independent security consultants Secunia said the vulnerability "has been confirmed on fully patched systems running Windows XP and Windows 2000."

Secunia rates the flaw as "highly critical" and urged Windows XP and Windows 2000 users to restrict traffic in border routers and firewalls as a temporary workaround. Users could also disable the "Client for Microsoft Networks" for network cards to impact file sharing functionality.

The flaw also reportedly affects Windows 95, 98, and Me and Secunia said it was unknown whether Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2003 were at risk.

According to the advisories, the boundary error issue is triggered via Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer when connecting to a file server. This can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow by setting up a malicious share with an overly long name (about 300 bytes) containing no lower case characters.

"Successful exploitation may potentially allow execution of arbitrary code on a user's system but requires that the user is either tricked into connecting to a malicious file server, visit a malicious website, or follow a specially crafted link," Secunia warned.

The Secunia alert listed the affected Microsoft operating systems as Windows XP Pro, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows Millenium, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Datacenter Server and Windows 2000 Advanced Server.

Affected software include IE versions 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0.
http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/se...le.php/3345871


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Scam Sites - A New Threat to P2P
Thomas Mennecke

The RIAA and MPAA have been a constant threat in the P2P world. While they pose some danger to the activities of online users, it is one that can be sufficiently handled with the proper application of intellect. Even to new comers in the file-sharing world, it is hard to escape the media blitz the RIAA's lawsuit campaign is receiving.

Looking to avoid potentially devastating RIAA lawsuits, many individuals have been duped into paying for P2P software that is already free. The most infamous of these scams is Kazaa Gold. Kazaa Gold is basically the Kazaa Media Desktop Pro version that someone downloaded, then offer the software for a ridiculous price of $39.95.

While Kazaa has been corrupted most frequently by unscrupulous individuals, other P2P software such as WinMX has also been bastardized. If you follow the link, one will notice that one can pay up to $22.95 for access to already free networks such as eDonkey2000, Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire. These website are also cunning as they display shameful quotes such as "The real legal download source on [the] Internet", or "100% legal". While file-sharing software is indeed legal, the copyright variable is typically tucked away.

So far, the only P2P network to make any kind of effort to eliminate this deceptive software is Sharman Networks. Last year, Sharman sent Google a DMCA violation notice to remove links to Kazaa Gold. The effort was initially successful, however if one was to conduct a search for Kazaa Gold today, numerous results to this ghastly software still exists.

WinMX has become perhaps the second most violated program. Considering the lack of updates and little information on the official WinMX website, those looking for an update may easily fall for one of the many scamware sites. The link in this paragraphs' example is available for $14.95. Unfortunately, FrontCode Technologies (the legitimate intellectual property rights owner of WinMX) has made zero effort to combat this issue.

The most frightening aspect of these scamware sites is their proliferation. As more people become aware of the RIAA's lawsuits, individuals are becoming victim to the allure of such phrases as "100% legal."

With Google’s “hear no evil, see no evil” policy, the only way these programs can be combated is by the P2P developers. P2P United, who claims to stand up for the file- sharing community, can make tremendous strides in gaining public favor by aggressively pursuing such scam sites that victimize not only the users, but also the members of this lobby group. It is indeed an odd situation that Sharman Networks has been the only file-sharing company to make any kind of effort in this arena.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=462


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LimeWire: Gnutella Grows Up

For people looking to trade music in the post-Napster world, the Gnutella network is the best alternative. Unlike Napster, Gnutella has no central server. Also, it allows the sharing of any type of file, not just MP3's. That means videos, still images, and even programs can be swapped.

Gnutella no longer offers its own software, but there are many programs, called clients, available to make use of this vast network. One of the best Gnutella clients is BearShare, but LimeWire may be better still.

What makes LimeWire special? It's written in Java, and will run on any machine with an Internet connection and the ability to run Java version 1.1.8. In plain English, this means you can download versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, or a basic Java application that will run on many platforms.

The current version is 1.4, and many improvements have been made since the first release. So, how do you get started? Just go to the LimeWire downloads page and choose your platform. LimeWire is a bit larger than previous Gnutella clients and ranges in size from 3.3 to 10.7MB, depending on the platform. Still, it packs a lot of features. The installation process is painless, and during the install you can specify the folder you wish to share.

Launch the program, it will immediately try to connect to the Gnutella network and you can monitor the progress in the bottom window next to the Connect/Disconnect button. Don't be surprised to see thousands of hosts, a billion or so files, and several terabytes (TB) of data available!

There are five tabs: Search, Monitor, Connections, Community, and Library. The most useful is Search, where you can type in what you are looking for. A unique feature of LimeWire is the ability to specify type of file - audio, video, programs or images. Once you have found what you are looking for, you can judge the quality and reliability of the connections by the number of stars assigned.

The Community tab is not for chat, as you might expect. It is so you can log in to specific content areas and geographic regions.

"Monitor" allows you to see what others are searching for, "Library" lists the files you are sharing, and "Connections" shows the number and addresses of the servers to which you are connected.

I could go into great detail about the various features, but this program is so easy to use that you will enjoy figuring this out yourself.

Is this legal?: While the legal and ethical debate rages on, file sharing continues. Peer-to-peer networks offer great promise, but are also open to abuse. Be aware that much of the material being shared violates copyright. You can find some great, unknown gems. If you like the music you find on the Net, support the artists by buying their music!

A final caution: Like all file-sharing software, this is not for children since most any search will turn up some pornography. Just be aware of this, and you will find something worthwhile.
http://mp3.about.com/library/weekly/aa052101.htm


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Securing Wireless Connectivity Through Virtual Networking
Hasan S. Alkhatib

Computers in a virtual network can connect from anywhere to anywhere securely. No physical network reconfiguration is required. No change to firewall security policies is required. And, no cumbersome administration of parameters in every computer is required. The result is unconstrained secure connectivity.

As wireless networking begins to deliver on the promise of untethered, ubiquitous connectivity, a variety of security concerns associated with wireless technology present critical challenges to the enterprise. Traditional security solutions have failed to deal with these challenges in a comprehensive, economical and scalable fashion.

From the enterprise perspective, security challenges are centered on how to authenticate and authorize users to access enterprise resources with an economical and scalable solution, while blocking unauthorized users. An enterprise often has many geographically dispersed access points throughout its campuses. Information communicated over the RF channels has to be protected too.

Firewall and VPN vendors often recommend connecting wireless access points outside the firewall. Such solutions are expensive and require either building a dedicated network for the wireless access points or placing a firewall behind every access point. In addition, point solutions for securing physical links do not scale either.

VPN vendor solutions for securing wireless connectivity come with a heavy price, since they don't scale. Furthermore, traditional VPN solutions force all wireless traffic to go through the bottleneck of a VPN gateway.

For end-users, there are additional security and accessibility challenges. Users want to enjoy ubiquitous access using any wireless access point, whether it belongs to their enterprise, another enterprise, or a wireless service provider. The problem here is that point solutions to secure physical links often are not available to the user; hence, user communications are left fully exposed.
http://cio-today.newsfactor.com/stor...tegory=wlsnetw


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Cublicle Pirates

Office Workers Rival Teens in Digital Download Frenzy
Elizabeth Armstrong

Teens and their insatiable appetite for free music have highlighted the legal problems of sharing audio, video, and other files online. But there is mounting evidence that adults may be breaking the law just as frequently.

Many adults who download files — which are often pornographic videos — do so on their company networks, according to new studies, consuming sizable chunks of bandwidth and other resources and putting their companies at risk of lawsuits for copyright infringement.

Already, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are dropping subtle hints that corporations may be the next target of an already massive lawsuit campaign against file-sharers.

"To date, we have not taken actions against individuals the way the music industry has, but we don't rule out anything," says MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor. "We have arrows in our quiver, and we'll do what we need to."

Download While You Work

In one of the first studies of its kind, Blue Coat, a network monitoring company in Sunnyvale, Calif., reported last week that 39 percent of employees who use file- sharing services do so on company networks. That kind of activity can easily consume a third of a company's bandwidth, according to Blue Coat.

But wasted bandwidth may be the least of a company's worries, according to the Blue Coat survey of 300 respondents from public and private firms. Peer-to- peer downloading also consumes network storage, can result in lower worker productivity, and poses considerable legal risks.

"We've always assumed this is a youth thing," says Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, an online media measurement firm in Los Angeles. "But … the motivation that drives the kids in dorms is the same motivation that drives the overgrown kids in cubicles."

Both groups get free access to high-speed Internet and vast storage capacity for their files, he adds.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/busin...es_040428.html


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Stories from the NYU Nine

One CAS Junior Sued By The Music Industry Explains How She Fell Into Her Life Of Crime
Tim Farnam

Like most of us, Isabella has a lot on her mind: finals, a job search, an apartment for next year, a stolen wallet, school loans, law school, a kidney infection.

Oh, and she's getting sued for up to $1.5 million by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Of course, it's unlikely the College of Arts and Science junior, who asked that her real name not be used, will have to pay that much.

"I am really struggling to make a future for myself," Isabella said. "I can't let it be the end of the world."

Isabella is being sued for sharing music on her computer over the peer-to- peer network KaZaA. It is something many, many students have done, but Isabella is only one of nine members of the NYU community being sued by the RIAA.

The RIAA does not yet know the identity of the nine, just their IP addresses, which is why she insisted her name be changed.

Isabella didn't even know that her computer was sharing the songs that she downloaded. Even songs loaded onto the system years ago, before she came to NYU, were available to other people.

"I wasn't purposely trying to share these things," she said. "The people that are out there downloading and downloading and downloading are knowledgeable enough not to get caught."

Ironically, users can't download songs unless other people are willing to share them.

"I am the one that is caught, basically because I was naive," she said.

If Isabella didn't know she had the program, she probably wouldn't be liable for sharing the music, said Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at the NYU School of Law specializing in intellectual property law. But, since Isabella did know that downloading copyrighted music was illegal, she is probably in trouble.

"The courts are unlikely to slice the salami that thin," Tushnet said. "If she knew she was using KaZaA, she had to know that she was doing something that was unauthorized."

Downloading music has become a ubiquitous part of college life, a crime that is nevertheless socially acceptable among young people - even more so than underage drinking.

"Everybody just got wrapped up in it," Isabella said.

Isabella's friends and roommates would frequently download music on her computer. She had three roommates in her suite at University residence hall last year, but she was the only one with a CD burner. Her computer quickly became the entire room's source for free music, she said. Isabella said she personally had only downloaded five of the 10 songs mentioned in the lawsuit.

There was such a feeling of community in her dorm that she didn't think twice about it, Isabella said.

"You don't even lock your door," she said.

Isabella was at home in Long Island when she got an e-mail from NYU telling her about the lawsuit.

"I was hysterical," she said. "That week my wallet had been stolen."

The RIAA claims that downloading music hurts record sales, music stores, musicians and record companies. The organization collects royalty payments of $2 for every CD burner sold in the country and 2 percent of manufacturing sales of blank media, including MiniDiscs, DATs and CDRs.

Internet piracy grew undeterred until 1999, when the recording industry first sued down Napster, the first popular file-sharing network. Other networks that built on Napster's success were also sued by the RIAA, including AudioGalaxy, Grokster, KaZaA and Morpheus.

In 2003, after the industry lost its suit against KaZaA, it changed tactics in its crusade against Internet piracy and began an attempt to discourage individual users: by sending messages warning users their activities were illegal, by putting up bogus material on the networks and by bringing individual users to court.

The tactics have begun to have an effect but have made relatively little headway into the illegal online music trade, according to a study by Pew Internet & American Life Project, a part of the Pew Research Center.

The largest legal outlet, musicmatch.com, had 5.3 million users in March, compared to about 20 million for KaZaA, according to the study.

The numbers for KaZaA have dropped from a high of around 35 million in June 2003, when the RIAA announced it was preparing to sue individual file- sharers, according to the report.

The tactics might be effective, but they are devastating to those individuals that become their target.

"I am the one struggling to go to school," Isabella said. "Missy Eliott and OutKast are not."
http://www.nyunews.com/news/campus/7420.html


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Online File Sharing Has Increased
p2pnet.net News

If a new report is correct, despite the fact that Big Music's ongoing sue 'em all campaign is failing to stop Americans from downloading music and sharing files online, its relentless victimization of people who swap music is still having an effect.

The Big Five record labels - EMI (UK), UMG (France), BMG (Germany), Sony (Japan) and Warner (US) - are suing anyone they can identify whom they claim is sharing copyrighted music files without their permission, and the FBI has recently begun acting as the labels' enforcer.

In the US, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has, on behalf of its owners, the Big Five record labels, sued 1,977 people.

Victims always settle out of court rather than risk potentially huge financial penalties if they lose to the labels' bottomless pockets and endless, highly-paid music industry legal teams, and of the 532 suits brought a while back, 432 have been 'settled'.

It would be really interesting to know how much has been garnered to date, and where the money goes.

Be that as it may, millions of people around the world - including, of course Americans who are constantly bombarded by the RIAA's disingenuous statements routinely re-issued by the mainstream media - are under the entirely false impression that Big Music is taking people to court and winning.

The number of people who share music through the p2pnetworks has actually increased from an estimated 18 million to 23 million since the Pew Internet & American Life Project's November-December 2003 survey, it says a new report.

However, it also says more than 17 million people (14%) of "online Americans" say at one time in their online lives they downloaded music files, but now they don't do it any more.

"A third of the former music downloaders, close to 6 million Internet users, say they have turned away from downloading because of the suits brought against music file-sharers by the Recording Industry Association of America.

"The retreat is particularly pronounced among online men, Internet users between the ages of 18-29, and those who have broadband connections at home.

Of Net users who have never tried to download music, 60% say the RIAA lawsuits would keep them from trying it in the future, says Pew, going on that women with Net access are more likely than online men to "say they're deterred by the law suits".

New data from comScore Media Metrix show continuing declines or stagnancy in the number of people with popular peer-to-peer file sharing applications actively running on their computers, Pew goes on.

"Since our last data memo on downloading, in which we reported comScore data gathered between November 2002 and November 2003, the KaZaa user base dropped most notably. Between November 2003 and February 2004 alone, comScore estimates that over 5 million fewer people are actively running KaZaa."

One wonders if this might be as much due Kazaa's continuing efforts to become part of the commercial music industry, turning it into a bete noir to millions of former users, as to any effect the lawsuits may be having.

This thought might be supported by Pew's statement that according to comScore data, there's been growth since last November in usage of some of the smaller file-sharing applications such as iMesh, BitTorrent, and eMule.

"The number of those who say they download music online remains well below the peak levels that we tracked in the spring of 2003, but there was some growth in those who reported music downloading in our February survey," says Pew.

In the most recent survey, 18% of Internet users said they download music files, a "modest increase from the 14% of Internet users who reported in a survey just before last Christmas that they downloaded music files online. But it is still considerably below the 29% who said they had done this when we surveyed in the spring of 2003."

Among current music downloaders, 38% say they are downloading less because of the RIAA suits. In the pre-Christmas survey, 27% said they'd throttled back because of the RIAA suits and, says the report, "That represents a significant jump in just two months."

About a third of current music downloaders say they use p2p networks. Another 24% say they swap files using email and instant messaging; 20% download files from music-related Web sites such as those run by music magazines or musician homepages.

But while online music services are "far from trumping the popularity of file-sharing networks," overall, 7% of Net users say they've bought music from them at one time or another, including 3% who currently use paid services.

Online video downloading

Some 15% of Internet users report they have downloaded video files onto their computer, up from 13% who said they had done so in our November-December survey, says Pew and, "Online men are twice as likely as women to have done this. And young adults (those ages 18 to 29) are twice as likely as older Internet users to have done this. However, as bandwidth constraints become less of an issue for users, it is likely that video downloading will become significantly more widespread."

Sharing files online
Those who say they share files from their own computer, such as music, video or picture files, or computer games rose slightly to 23% in the February 2004 survey. In our November-December 2003 survey, 20% of all Internet users said they shared files with others online.
http://p2pnet.net/story/1302


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File-Sharing Lawsuits Have Mixed Effect
AP

NEW YORK - Driven largely by fears of copyright lawsuits, more than 17 million Americans, or 14 percent of adult Internet users, have stopped downloading music over the Internet, a survey finds.
But the overall percentage of people who say they currently do so has inched back up since November, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said in a study Sunday.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4830480/

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Movin’ on up.

The Pew Report – Latest Survey
Jack

They ask, people answer – or do they? File swapping down from last years’ all-time high, so they say. But up 28% recently. Read all about it here.


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Ten million albums per year.

iTunes Clocks 70 Million Downloads
Correspondents in Washington

APPLE said customers have downloaded 70 million songs since it launched its online music store a year ago, and claimed the service still had strong momentum.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs , speaking to reporters on the anniversary of the iTunes Music Store, said the figures show it is "the number one online music service in the world" with some 70 per cent of the market for legal music downloads.

"We currently (sell) 2.7 million songs per week, that is a rate of 140 million songs per year, so we feel we have a lot of momentum," Mr Jobs said, adding that the service posted "a small profit this past quarter".

Mr Jobs said that iTunes "has exceeded our wildest expectations during its first year, charting a new direction for the music industry".

To kick off its second year, Apple launched a new version of iTunes with additional features and a bigger selection of songs.

"We started with 200,000 songs, we now have over 700,000 songs, and expect to have over a million songs by the end of the year," Mr Jobs said.

Apple was the first to launch the US99c ($1.38) song download on the US market, spawning dozens of others offering a similar formula, helping computer users shift from illicit music-swapping to a legal download endorsed by the major record labels.

However, the company refuses to reveal when and if the service may become available in Australia.

Apple said it was making some changes in the rights for users who download from its site. The number of times a user can burn the same playlist onto CDs is being reduced from 10 to seven.

But at the same time, users will be allowed to listen to the downloaded songs on five separate computers, up from three.

Another new feature will allow iTunes users to convert songs from the Windows Media Audio format to Apple's AAC format so they can be played using iTunes software or downloaded onto the iPod music player.

Mr Jobs said reports that Apple was preparing to boost its price were unfounded.

"The prices will remain 99c per song and any rumours to the contrary are not true," he said.

Mr Jobs said the music sales have helped spur sales of its music player and probably helped boost its Macintosh computer sales. But the company last year broke tradition and created a version of iTunes for Windows to allow access to those using PCs of its longtime rival Microsoft.

"The unbeatable combination of iTunes and the market-leading iPod offers music fans a seamless experience for discovering, buying, managing and enjoying their music anywhere," he said.

In the first quarter, Apple sold 807,000 iPods, a tenfold increase from the same period of 2003.

Recent surveys indicate that illicit music-swapping may be fading somewhat following an industry crackdown on the practice, with authorised sites like iTunes showing rapid growth

The Pew Internet and American Life Project survey released Sunday found that 14 per cent of US internet users said they had once downloaded music files, but have stopped.

However, the number of people who say they download music files increased from an estimated 18 million to 23 million since the between November 2003 and February 2004.

This increase is likely due to the combined effects of many people adopting new, paid download services and, in some cases, switching to lower-profile peer-to-peer file sharing applications, the researchers said.

A survey by comScore Media Metrix showed five million fewer people are actively running KaZaa, the most popular file-sharing service, compared with a year ago.

The report indicated that more than 11 million US internet users visited six major paid online music services.

These services, such as Apple's iTunes and a new Napster - which in contrast to the former Napster is a legal, paid service - "have made great strides in relatively few months in drawing millions of consumers to a new breed of online alternatives," said Erin Hunter, senior vice president of comScore Media Metrix.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html


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Online Music Sales Could Be Sad Song For Big Record Companies

A year after Apple Computer Inc. launched iTunes Music Service, the online music industry is selling songs by the millions - and that might not bode well for the major record labels.

Online services account for just a fraction of overall music sales, but they're growing rapidly. And the new choices they give consumers threaten to remix the recording industry's traditional revenue streams, pumping up the volume of singles and subscriptions and turning down album sales.

Customers at three of the leading online services - iTunes, Musicmatch Inc.'s Musicmatch Downloads and RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody - buy about 10 times as many singles as they do albums. Offline, people buy 50 times more CDs than singles.

The shift to online shopping could be lucrative for the music industry if the flexibility and convenience lead more people to spend more on tunes. But some industry executives and analysts said they fear the singles trend could accelerate, with music lovers passing up $15 CDs in favor of the one or two 99-cent songs they heard on the radio.

And some industry veterans said they worry that moving to a singles-oriented business could lead to fundamental problems for artists and labels.

"There's no money to be made from singles," said entertainment lawyer Gary Stiffelman, whose clients include rapper Eminem. "Unless you can sell an album, you can't really afford to launch the artists. The whole economics are driven by some sort of critical mass of product."

But the new distribution system of the Internet is changing demand. Songs from virtually every album are available for illegal downloading through unauthorized file-sharing networks. People can buy tracks and play unlimited songs from authorized online jukeboxes.

"Consumers have moved on," said analyst Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. "The idea that they have to consume music by the album is something that many music consumers have left behind."

The authorized services' growth the last six months didn't seem to hurt offline CD sales, which have rebounded about 8% from last year, after a lengthy slide blamed largely on illegal downloading.

The online music business dates to the mid-1990s, when a handful of technology companies developed ways to sell downloadable songs. The first few waves of start-ups crashed and burned, largely because of onerous restrictions and high prices imposed by the major record companies.

In the meantime, online music piracy exploded. Dozens of free networks emerged to let people copy songs from one another's computers, drawing an estimated 63 million users in the United States alone by mid-2003.

The first breakthrough for commercial services came a year ago Wednesday, when Apple launched iTunes Music Store. Pressed by Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, the major labels enabled Apple to make a significantly simple and attractive offer to customers: 99 cents per song, with no real limits on CD burning or transfers to Apple's iPod portable music players. Apple said the service sold its 50 millionth song March 15.

Since the debut of iTunes, a rival business model - selling subscriptions that let customers play unlimited songs or specialized radio stations on their computers - has carved out a foothold. RealNetworks reported 450,000 subscribers as of March 31, up 80% in six months. Add in MusicNet on America Online, Musicmatch's premium radio services and other online subscriptions, and the total approaches 1 million.

Some online music companies continue to struggle, but the sector is growing rapidly and steadily. Analysts estimated that the services' revenue will grow from about $65 million last year to $250 million in 2004, with $120 million or more from downloadable singles and the rest from subscriptions. CD sales totaled $11.2 billion in the U.S. last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

So far, at least, online customers are buying a much broader range of music than is being sold in stores.

General Manager Ellie Hirschhorn of MusicNet, which operates a subscription music service for AOL, said about 75% of the paid downloads aren't in Billboard's Top 200, and about 60% are "catalog," or older, tracks. According to Nielsen SoundScan, more than 63% of the CDs sold in stores last week were new releases.

That's significant, she said, suggesting that online services lead to people to buy music they otherwise wouldn't. The music industry's hope is that paid downloads and subscriptions will attract people who haven't been buying CDs.

Sean Ryan, head of music services at RealNetworks, said Rhapsody customers spend about $150 a year on music, far above what the average American spends on CDs.

Even if Rhapsody prompts its customers to buy fewer CDs, Ryan said, the labels can still come out ahead because it costs virtually nothing for them to distribute music through Rhapsody. "Essentially, they send us spreadsheets, we send them money," he said.

The labels' wholesale price for CDs is about $10, and they collect about 70 cents per downloadable single; there are generally 10 to 16 tracks on a CD. Payments from subscription services depend on how much music users play, but typical amounts are around $5 per subscriber per month.

For years, the financial structure of the music industry - from artist contracts to manufacturing - has rested on sales of albums that can contain 16 or more songs.

Companies typically sign new acts to potentially lengthy contracts that let a label pick up options for five or six more albums if an artist's first album succeeds - or drop the act if it doesn't.

Music companies relied heavily on sales of singles in the 1950s and even earlier, when technology limited recording capacity.

Some record executives said that returning to a singles-driven business is an inescapable reality of the Internet era. The major labels have started to adapt: They've laid off thousands of workers to slash costs. Some are also talking about recording singles, not albums, with new artists and paying them smaller advances.
http://www.jsonline.com/bym/tech/news/apr04/225616.asp


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Apple Disables iTunes Song-Swapping Tool
Ina Fried

Among other additions Apple Computer made to its iTunes software, the Mac maker has plugged a hole that allowed some people to download music from another computer.

Apple's iTunes allows Macintosh and PC users to play music stored on other PCs on a network. The music is streamed off the other computer. But file-swapping enthusiasts quickly created other programs, such as MyTunes, to capture the songs and allow them to be saved to the computer's hard drive.

With the latest iteration--version 4.5--Apple appears to have plugged that hole.

An Apple representative on Wednesday confirmed that with the new version of iTunes, the company has "strengthened" the music-sharing feature to make sure that song sharing is limited to personal use and that only another copy of iTunes can access the music stream.

Also, once iTunes users have upgraded to the newest version of the software, they are no longer allowed to stream music from computers running older versions of iTunes.

Apple imposed a similar restriction earlier, after some people used the music-sharing feature to swap files over the Internet.

MyTunes creator Bill Zeller said he was somewhat surprised by Apple's move.

"It seems like a big step to make all previous versions incompatible," Zeller said in a telephone interview. "It was nice while it lasted."

The Trinity College sophomore said it appears that Apple tweaked its communications protocol to prevent MyTunes from capturing the song streams.

"I would assume that they changed the protocol in some way, which would make it not work," Zeller said.

Although someone could create an updated program that tries to capture the streams, Zeller said it won't be him. Last month, a massive computer crash took with it his only copy of the MyTunes source code.

"Someone else could come up with a program to get around the restriction," he said.

The iTunes content protection technologies have been the subject of continual attacks by programmers looking to evade Apple's restrictions on sharing.

While Zeller's program took advantage of the software's streaming capabilities, other programmers have worked to strip out the anticopying features, called FairPlay, included with every song purchased from the iTunes store.

Several programmers have created software that does appear to remove the FairPlay protections altogether, allowing the purchased songs to be distributed without restriction. Jon Johansen, the Norwegian youth who first released the DeCSS DVD-copying tool online, has led this drive, with the tools he has developed winding up in several other pieces of software.

While Apple has worked to keep some of these applications, including the recent anonymously released "PlayFair" offline, some record label executives have said the impact has been low, because consumers can still burn CDs from iTunes songs and re-rip them into unprotected MP3 form. Johansen said the project has been worthwhile, however.

"Burning a CD and ripping the music back to a compressed format takes time and results in loss of quality," Johansen said in an e-mail interview, noting that Apple's restrictions on copying remained a deterrent to iTunes purchases for some people. "Using a decryption utility like PlayFair takes only a few seconds per song and does not result in loss of quality."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5201781.html


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Darpa Looks Past Ethernet, IP Nets
Rick Merritt

In a handful of high-level programs, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is pushing beyond Ethernet and Internet Protocol to hammer home the message that peer-to-peer networks—intrinsically more efficient than end-to-end topologies—are the future, and the future is now.

Darpa is pushing toward a world of ultralow-cost, low-power, ad hoc mesh networks. The programs are part of a broad military drive toward ubiquitous computing based on next-generation networks, including RFID and wireless sensor nets.

At the Wireless Ventures conference here last week, Preston Marshall, a program manager in Darpa's Advanced Technology Office, moved the spotlight away from the rise of today's 802.11 networks in the business world, saying in keynote that an improvement of five orders of magnitude is needed. "We get trapped by the vision of Internet Protocol like its some sort of theocracy when in fact there are much better models," he said.

Marshall's contrarian note resonated amid predictions like the one by a venture capitalist that Wi-Fi nets will ultimately surpass even cellular as both race toward the consumer broadband era.

But such networks are grossly inefficient for sending small amounts of data that will be the hallmark of future machine-to-machine networks of embedded devices, Marshall said. An 802.11b network could take as many as 12,480 bits and 57 acknowledgments to send an 80-bit data packet, a 0.65 percent efficiency rating.

"This is five orders of magnitude from what we can do. This is like selling cars that get 10 inches per gallon," Marshall said. "We need to think as a community how we can get that efficiency up."

Darpa's vision is to create a new kind of peer-to-peer network for "edge-driven computing." Unlike Ethernet, that network will not depend on packets or predefined client/server topologies with guaranteed end-to-end connections. Instead, it will forward data one hop at a time over a distributed network of autonomous nodes using new and more reliable and efficient schemes.

Darpa is doing its part in at least four major programs now under way. One program is developing so-called connectionless networks using new physical layer chips and protocols that could reduce the energy requirements for communications three-hundredfold. The program includes experiments using silicon-on-sapphire technology to reduce energy requirements in oscillators and mixers.

Another program aims to create systems that automatically scan the airwaves in real-time for available spectrum in which it can set up and tear down ad hoc networks in hundreds or even tens of milliseconds. The project includes development of a machine-readable policy language as the basis for its software.

"This opens up hundreds of megahertz of new spectrum without new licensing," said Marshall, adding that the Darpa program is working in conjunction with the Federal Communications Commission's efforts in so-called cognitive radio.

A parallel project is exploring delay-tolerant networks based on work at NASA. In this scheme individual nodes collaborate to form complex relationships forwarding data reliably but without knowledge of the overall topology of the network.
http://www.commsdesign.com/showArtic...cleID=19201035


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Franz Ferdinand Star Lectures On File-Sharing

Franz Ferdinand star Alex Kapranos has given a lecture on file-sharing in Edinburgh.

The singer, who has spoken out in favour of file- sharing in the past, has spoken to students at Edinburgh University (April 29).

Alex had earlier told BBC news: "To be honest I'm all for song swapping online. Downloading music from the Internet is something I do myself and something that I'd be keen to encourage.

"From my experience it isn't necessarily the musicians themselves that are against it, but those companies involved in the music industry.

"The way the music industry is trying to regulate online sites at the minute is very heavy-handed - fining kids for downloading songs is just crazy.

"File-sharing is something that has really helped us as a band in getting established. When Franz Ferdinand played a gig in New York for the first time, a lot of people there already knew our songs and were singing along.

"For us it has been global word of mouth that has helped our progress, not hindered it. I don't think it is damaging musicians at all. Downloading music is as revolutionary an invention as the gramophone and I'm all for it."

18 year-old Chris McCall from Edinburgh University was at the lecture. He told NME.COM: "He was quick to establish his opinion on the record companies handling of music, saying how Internet downloading wasn't the musicians' problem, and that it was the industry’s problem to sort it.

"He seems to care very passionately about the subject, stressing that he knows plenty of musicians who use the Internet a very useful tool to hear and distribute their own music.

"When asked if he was bothered about the money it cost him, he replied that any real musician should be in it for the music, and you had to question the motives of certain groups and singers who were up in arms about music downloading."

The band are currently on a sold-out tour, which visits:

Edinburgh Liquid Room (29)
Manchester University (30)
Oxford Brookes University (May 1)
Bristol Anson Rooms (3)
Portsmouth Pyramid, (4)
London Astoria (5-6)
London Coronet (7)

Franz Ferdinand are also on the cover of this week’s NME, dated May 1, which is out now.
http://www.nme.com/news/108349.htm


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Record And Playback High Definition TV Signals
EatingPie

Want to enjoy HDTV, but haven't forked over the $21,999 for that 82'' LCOS Rear Projection HDTV yet? (Or even know what the heck that is!). Fear not, because with just about any Panther-capable Macintosh, you can enter the world of high definition recording and playback without breaking the bank... or buying a single new piece of hardware!

This 21st Century Holy Grail comes in the form of a recent FCC regulation requiring all cable companies to provide a Firewire-enabled Cable box to any customer who asks. (Yes, some government agencies are still on our side after all!) This law went into effect April 1st, and by now most Cable companies have complied.

Unlike regular TV, you cannot record HD with an analog VCR -- or even a standard issue Tivo. You must have a Firewire connection ... the very same Firewire that ships on every modern Mac. (bet you see where this is headed). You have the Mac, now all you need is the cable box and a pair of free programs: VirtualDVHS for recording, and VLC for playback!

Step 1 - Get the Cable Box!

If you have cable, your first step involves calling your provider and requesting a new "Firewire capable" or "IEEE 1394 enabled" HDTV cable box. Even if you don't own an HDTV, all these boxes have S-video out and work perfectly with regular TVs. Most cable companies charge a nominal monthly fee for the box, and provide local stations in high defenition for free (this is the only cost involved). For example, I am on Time Warner Cable, and I pay about $8.00 extra per month, which includes PBS, NBC, ABC, CBS and Discovery HD Theater. Plus, if you subscribe to any premium station, like HBO or Showtime, that price includes the high definition version!

Once your provider delivers the box, you just need a Firewire cable long enough to reach your Mac. Any Firewire cable (with the right connectors) will do. I actually used one of Apple's dainty-thin white iPod Firewire cables, and it worked like a charm when run to my Aluminum 15" PowerBook.

Step 2 - Get the Recording Software

VirtualDVHS. Remember that name! A free little piece of software that you can find in two different places. If you have the Developer Tools, VirtualDVHS comes in the Firewire SDK, available at Apple Developer Connection.

Far more conveniently, ninjamonkey provides a (very slightly) modified stand-alone version of VirtualDVHS [305KB download]. You probably won't notice any changes to the program, but not having to dig through a bunch of developer tools make this my favorite option for download.

Step 3 - Run the Recorder

You can follow the instructions on ninjamonkey's site, but since the software is really a developer example (not even beta quality), pay attention to these few pointers. First, create a new folder to store the recorded files into. Drag and drop this folder onto the D-VHS icon. You MUST do that drag and drop step, or your recordings will inexplicably fail. While presenting a somewhat daunting interface, just pay attention to the transport controls on the top right. The biggest trick is selecting the correct Firewire Channel for input. Most cable boxes will transmit on channel 63 (that's the "broadcast channel"). Also try channels 0 and 1 if 63 fails. To see if your channel works, just press the record button, and the "Bitrate" field takes off ... along with the recorded file size!

Step 4 - Playback

One word: VLC. Even if you don't plan to watch HD content, get the VideoLan Client. It rocks (beside the fact that it's free and open source)! AFAIK, VLC is the only client that can replay full-resolution high definition content in transport stream format -- what you get from VirtualDVHS.

If you're one of the lucky few and have an HDTV with a Firewire port, you can also use VirtualDVHS to play back directly to the TV. Just select the file, and use the transport controls on the left side of the interface. It's that easy!

A Few Caveats

Some cable companies encrypt HD content for copy protection. I put this caveat first because it's the biggest. Basically, if the content is encrypted, you cannot play it back. However, it's illegal for Cable companies to encrypt broadcast stations. So at the very least, you can record NBC, CBS, ABC, WB, UPN and PBS. If those are encrypted, a quick call (or two) to your cable provider should take care of it. If you're lucky, you will get subscription content like HBO in the clear ... but enjoy it while it lasts, because all Cable companies WILL implement copy protection sooner or later!

Now just a few notes on a bit more mundane issues...

HDTV basically comes in two resolutions: 1920x1080 and 1280x720. PBS, and most sporting events show at in 1280x720 (known as 720p). HBO, Shotime and broadcast stations like NBC and ABC use 1920x1080 (1080i). The Tonight Show was one of the first programs broadcast in HD, and if you're looking for a good test, that's your best bet.

VirtualDVHS stores files in MPEG2 Tranport Stream format. In the Windows world, this has an extension of ".ts" rather than the ".m2t" that VirtualDVHS uses. Transport Stream differs from standard MPEG2 files, like decrypted DVD (known as Program Stream), because it's packetized for transmission over a network.

HDTV recordings get huge. HUGE! Suffice it to say these constitute the largest single files I've ever worked with -- or seen!

Last but not least ... You MUST store your recordings on an HFS+ formatted volume. UFS has a 4GB limit to file size, while standard HFS is similar (2GB I believe). Plain and simply, anything over 15 minutes will overflow this limit. For example, my copy of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones clocks in at 12GB. And that's not even my biggest file!

Recording HD content has been one of the coolest things I've ever done on my Mac! It's awesome, and if you're friends don't have Mac envy yet, wait till they see a movie playing back on your G5 at 1920x1080 resolution!
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...40426151111599


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Crippled External Hard Drive for DVRs
Ernest

A number of gadget websites have noted what sounds like nifty new technology, an external hard drive especially designed for Digital Video Recorders (DVRs). The device, from hard drive manufacturer Maxtor, connects to an existing DVR to provide up to an additional 160 hours of recording capability. Read the press release: Maxtor Expands QuickView Outside the Box.

What the press release doesn't tell you:

The first devices will be available in the summer of 2004 and have an eSATA interface. Maxtor is exploring USB 2.0 and FireWire/1394 connections. Good enough.

However, the product will not be available in retail initially, but rather via your cable/satellite provider. In other words, you won't own it. Actually, ownership is probably not a good idea because the device will not be portable and will be designed to connect to a single DVR. Moving or switching providers will be fun.

Furthermore, according to Maxtor's press contact:

Due to content protection/privacy, the Expander will not communicate/share files with the PC.

Content privacy? Not sure what that is. Regardless, why are so many new consumer devices being designed deliberately crippled? Why is the United States sacrificing so much potential innovation? Perhaps, Mary Hodder is right and it is time for "Silicon Valley Lamented".
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/003386.html


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The New Surveillance

SONIA KATYAL
Fordham Law School

Fordham School of Law, Pub-Law Research Paper No. 46
Case Western Law Review, Vol. 54, No. 297, 2004

Abstract:
A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual property owners - such as record companies, software owners, and publishers - were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet, today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression - a virtual marketplace of ideas - alongside an insurmountable array of capacities for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and silences speech, often simultaneously.

This paradox, in turn, leads to the tension between privacy and intellectual property. Both areas of law face significant challenges because of technology's ever-expanding pace of development. Yet courts often exacerbate these challenges by sacrificing one area of law for the other, by eroding principles of informational privacy for the sake of unlimited control over intellectual property. Laws developed to address the problem of online piracy - in particular, the DMCA - have been unwittingly misplaced, inviting intellectual property owners to create private systems of copyright monitoring that I refer to as piracy surveillance. Piracy surveillance comprises extrajudicial methods of copyright enforcement that detect, deter, and control acts of consumer infringement.

In the past, legislators and scholars have focused their attention on other, more visible methods of surveillance relating to employment, marketing, and national security. Piracy surveillance, however, represents an overlooked fourth area that is completely distinct from these other types, yet incompletely theorized, technologically unbounded, and, potentially, legally unrestrained. The goals of this Article are threefold: first, to trace the origins of piracy surveillance through recent jurisprudence involving copyright; second, to provide an analysis of the tradeoffs between public and private enforcement of copyright; and third, to suggest some ways that the law can restore a balance between the protection of copyright and civil liberties in cyberspace.

This paper was selected as the winning entry for the 2004 Yale Law School Cybercrime and Digital Law Enforcement Conference writing competition, sponsored by the Yale Law School Information Society Project and the Yale Journal of Law and Technology.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...ract_id=527003


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Real Dialogue: The Tech interviews Jack Valenti
Keith J. Winstein

Jack Valenti, the iconic 82-year-old who has headed the Motion Picture Association of America for the last 38 years, spoke at the MIT Communications Forum last Thursday. The MPAA offered The Tech a chance to ask Valenti questions after his talk, and -- as a former Tech news reporter interested in technology and copyright -- I got drafted.

Valenti is an incredibly polished advocate for the movie studios. He has numerous legislative and regulatory successes to his name, and his stated commitment to honest debate (he spoke passionately several times about his commitment to the “ideal of civic discourse” and his disgust at Washington, D.C.’s lack of it) is admirable.

But we don’t have a real debate on copyright issues. We have rival camps that rarely understand each other. Virtually everybody I know and encounter on the Internet thinks Valenti’s signal accomplishments are bad. He can claim credit for the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which make it illegal to build your own DVD player and well-nigh impossible to watch DVDs legally under the GNU/Linux operating system, as well as the Federal Communication Commission’s Broadcast Flag, which will make it illegal or virtually impossible to build your own digital television receiver or, again, watch HDTV under Linux.

Everybody in Hollywood, and everybody in Congress, seems to love these things. There is little compromise, meeting of the minds, or mutual understanding, between these two sides.

Three years ago, I organized an MIT IAP class and invited Valenti to come. (He politely declined.) When the MPAA called to ask if I wanted to talk with him for ten minutes last week, I finally had my chance to take a shot at reaching some tiny mutual understanding.

I found Valenti woefully unfamiliar with the arguments of “our side” -- the same arguments that “we” wank about every day on Zephyr, on Slashdot, and in 6.805 (Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier), the class I TAed for Professor Hal Abelson.

A compromise, or at least a solution to these issues that doesn’t involve outlawing all tinkering and all independent engineering, seems to be possible: we’re just not getting through to each other. The dystopia of Richard Stallman’s “The Right to Read” at www.gnu.org/ philosophy/ right-to- read.html is not an inevitability. But if we can’t manage to have a real conversation with “the other side” -- and a longer one than my ten minutes with Valenti -- that’s where we might be headed.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

The Tech: You’re described by various people as the best lobbyist ever. Do you have any tips for the other side, about how they can achieve better victories in the legislative area?

Jack Valenti: I hope that I’m a good persuader, that I’m able to make advocacy of a cause that people say, “You know, that makes sense.” ‘Lobbyist’ has a connotation to me that gives me little shivers. But I like to believe that I try to make things simple to understand. And frankly, if I can understand it, then I figure everybody else can understand it, because I am not a technologist. ... But I try to make things simple and clear as I can, and I think that helps you persuade other people.

TT: Everybody I know thinks the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Broadcast Flag are awful. And everybody in Congress disagrees. This does not lead to good debate and good public policy, when people can’t even talk to each other. How can we have a good debate on these topics?

JV: I don’t know. I go on forums, and panels, and Rich [Taylor, an MPAA spokesman] does the same. We’re available to anybody. I never believe in hostile debates. That’s not my style. I believe that we ought to talk objectively about it. I think for anything that I’m advocating, I’m willing to be in an open debate with anybody about it. Because if my ideas have no bottom, then they ought not be even heard.

The broadcast flag -- if you are in your home, then you can copy anything that’s on over-the-air television to your heart’s content. The only time that you will know there’s a broadcast flag is if you try to take one of those copies and redistribute it on the Internet. Then, the flag says, ‘No, you can’t redistribute it.’ But you can do everything you’re doing right now -- you’ll never know there’s a broadcast flag. Well, why would people object to it?

TT: I’ll tell you, because I’m an engineer, I’m an engineering student, and this year I built a high- definition television, from scratch. But because of the broadcast flag, if I wanted to do that again after July 2005, that would be illegal.

JV: How many people in the United States build their own sets?

TT: Well, I’m talking about engineers.

JV: Let’s say there are a thousand. But there are 284 million people in this country. You can’t have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can’t do it that way.

TT:Okay, let’s take a different example. Four years ago, you said that people who use Linux, which is about a million to two million people, who want to play DVDs, should get licensed DVD players and that those would be on the market soon.

JV: And we have those now.

TT: But today, you still cannot on the market actually buy a licensed DVD player for Linux.

JV: I didn’t know that.

TT: So the question is, do you think people who go to Blockbuster, they rent a movie, they bring it home, and they play it on Linux by circumventing the access control, are those people committing a moral transgression?

JV: I do not believe that you have the right to override an encryption. Because if you have the right to do it, everybody can do it. For whatever benign reason you have, somebody else has got one even more benign. But once you let one person deal in a digital copy -- and I don’t have to tell you; you know far better than I that, unlike in analog, the ten thousandth copy is as pure as the original -- it is a big problem. So once you let the barriers down for your perfectly sensible reason, you gotta let it down for everybody.

I don’t want to get into the definition of morality. I never said anything was immoral in what I was saying. I said it is wrong to take something that belongs to somebody else.

TT: Indeed, but are you doing that when you rent a movie from Blockbuster and you watch it at home? ... I run Linux on my computer. There’s no product I can buy that’s licensed to watch [DVDs]. If I go to Blockbuster and rent a movie and watch it, am I a bad person? Is that bad?

JV: No, you’re not a bad person. But you don’t have any right.

TT: But I rented the movie. Why should it be illegal?

JV: Well then, you have to get a machine that’s licensed to show it.

TT: Here’s one of these machines; it’s just not licensed.

[Winstein shows Valenti his six-line “qrpff” DVD descrambler.]

TT: If you type that in, it’ll let you watch movies.

JV: You designed this?

TT: Yes.

JV: Un-fucking-believable.

TT: So the question is, if I just want to watch a movie--I rent it from Blockbuster--is that bad?

JV: No, that’s not bad.

TT: Then why should it be illegal?

Rich Taylor, MPAA public affairs: It’s not. ... You could put it in a DVD player, you could play it on any computer licensed for it.

JV: There’s lots of machines you can play it on.

TT: None under Linux. There’s no licensed player under Linux.

JV: But you’re trying to set your own standards.

TT: No, you said four years ago that people under Linux should use one of these licensed players that would be available soon. They’re still not available -- it’s been four years.

JV: Well why aren’t they available? I don’t know, because I don’t make Linux machines.

Let me put it in my simple terms. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, that’s wrong. Number two, if you design your own machine, you can’t fuss at people, because you’re one of just a few. How many Linux users are there?

TT: About two million.

JV: Well, I can’t believe there’s not any -- there must be a reason for... Let me find out about that. You bring up an interesting question -- I don’t know the answer to that... Well, you’re telling me a lot of things I don’t know.

TT: Okay. Well, how can we have this dialogue?

JV: Well, we’re having it right now. I want to try to find out the point you make on why are there no Linux licensed players. There must be a reason -- there has to be a reason. I don’t know.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V124/N20/Val...ervie.20f.html


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Giving It Away (for Fun and Profit)

Creative Commons encourages artists to share and distribute their work for free. And that could be the key to a new multibillion-dollar industry.
Andy Raskin

Allan Vilhan is a musician who has yet to hit it big in the United States. In part, that's because Vilhan who records under the name Cargo Cult -- lives in Filakovo, a small town in Slovakia's Cerova Vrchovina highlands. By day, he runs his family's restaurant. In his spare time, he mixes beats. Vilhan calls his music "trip rock" -- it's a kind of spooky, danceable electronica -- but his business model is even more intriguing. A year ago, after completing his first full-length album, he put MP3s of all the songs online and encouraged fans to listen for free. Nevertheless, to date he's recorded a profit of more than $1,000. "About what I expected," he says.

Vilhan is making money because he hosts his songs at Magnatune.com, an Internet music distributor that replaces standard "all rights reserved" copyright language with "some rights reserved" licenses drafted by a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit organization called Creative Commons. Magnatune and its artists make MP3s available for free to play or download. But they still demand payment when the music is used for commercial purposes, such as inclusion in advertisements or in films released to theaters.

In Vilhan's case, a programmer in Alabama downloaded the free versions of two tracks and later paid $450 to license them for use as background music in a videogame; a San Francisco design firm paid $370 to use one of Vilhan's songs in a client's Flash presentation. Magnatune also encourages listeners to voluntarily pay for downloads of Vilhan's music, which brought in $1,487 more. Since Magnatune splits net receipts from licensing and downloads equally with its artists, Vilhan ended up with a tidy little sum. "Creative Commons is like a marketing tool," says Magnatune founder John Buckman, who has grossed $180,000 for 126 musicians since May 2003. "Free distribution generates exposure, and that builds commercial demand, which is where the real money is."

If you have yet to notice a piece of work licensed under Creative Commons -- its logo looks like a regular copyright mark, but with two Cs enclosed in the circle instead of one -- chances are you will soon. Co-founded by Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons has been making its boilerplate licenses available, free of charge, since December 2002. The licenses rely on icons to indicate what uses are permissible; click on the license, and the specific terms are spelled out in plain English. Already, artists worldwide have used Creative Commons to relinquish some or all rights to 1.5 million pieces of music, video, text, and digital art.

But what's really interesting is that as more and more artists use Creative Commons to tell the world that it's OK to copy, distribute, and build on their work, the first glimpses emerge of an economy based on the free exchange of digital content. The "sharing economy" is built on a supply-and- demand equation wholly alien to traditional media companies -- the record labels, Hollywood studios, and publishing houses that support strict copyright enforcement. It's powered instead by the Allan Vilhans of the world, digital artists who promote sharing as a means to obtain everything from 15 minutes of Internet fame to licensing deals, job offers, and mainstream publishing contracts. For these artists, rampant Internet file swapping isn't a threat, but a blessing: the cheapest way to move from unknown to known.

The sharing economy is already worth billions of dollars, but its direct beneficiaries aren't mainstream entertainment companies. Instead, they're the likes of Apple (AAPL), Adobe (ADBE), and EarthLink (ELNK) -- firms that sell the hardware, software, and bandwidth required to produce and distribute, say, a Howard Dean howl remix. But for the sharing economy to expand its scope and realize its full potential, it needs a signpost: a branded icon participants can use to tell each other, "Download my work. Modify it. Send it to a friend. Please." Creative Commons aims to play that role.

How much money will unfettered sharing generate? At a minimum, figure that tens of millions of PC owners worldwide, inspired by Creative Commons to make and share content, will spend several hundred dollars more than they otherwise would have on specialized digital tools and services. Then add in license fees and other revenue generated indirectly by unencumbered sharing. Suddenly, you're talking about an ad hoc industry that could one day rival mainstream entertainment -- in theory, at least.

At a cafe near his San Francisco home, Lessig explains the economic logic that underpins Creative Commons. He draws a timeline on a napkin, labeling one point "1888." "That's when the first Kodak (EK) camera was introduced," he says. "And around this time, a legal question arises: Do I need your permission to capture your image? The courts say no, I can pirate your image in most cases." Lessig then draws a line that spikes upward, representing the boom in photo equipment and processing sales that resulted from the liberalization of image content. "Imagine if the decision went the other way, so that I had to get permission every time I took someone's picture," he says. "The growth of the photography industry would have been very different." And much less lucrative.

Lessig, 42, has spent the better part of the last decade battling legal decisions that "went the other way" in the digital age. A specialist in policy development for cyberspace, his career has taken him from the Supreme Court (where he clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia), to the University of Chicago, to a tenured position at Harvard Law School, and finally to Stanford, where he founded the law school's Center for Internet and Society. He made headlines in 1997 when he briefly served as a special master in the Microsoft (MSFT) antitrust case. (Microsoft launched a successful appeal to have him removed.)

In the 2002 Supreme Court case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, Lessig challenged Congress's 1998 decision to extend copyright protection to 70 years after an author's death. In that case, nicknamed the "Mickey Mouse trial" because it coincided with the Disney character's impending transition to the public domain, Lessig argued that most creativity -- including Disney movies like Snow White, which was adapted from a Grimm fable -- builds on previous work, and that the extension hurt society by limiting the amount of raw material available for creative reinvention. He lost.

The defeat triggered a change in tactics. Unable to reform copyright law, Lessig focused instead on facilitating contractual arrangements between sharers that could be implemented directly in HTML. That's the primary tool artists use to attach Creative Commons licenses to their work. Thanks to the Copyright Act of 1976, as soon as an original work is "fixed" -- i.e., takes tangible form -- it's automatically protected by copyright. Absent language to the contrary, distributing, copying, or performing that work without permission then becomes illegal. But with Creative Commons, an artist can place a link next to the work -- or even embed a license in, say, an MP3 or PDF file -- to explicitly grant the permission in advance.

To see how this works in practice, consider the experience of science fiction writer (and Business 2.0 contributor) Cory Doctorow. In January 2003, Tor Books published his hardcover novella, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Simultaneously, Doctorow released the book as a free download on his website, hoping the electronic version would generate buzz and spur bookstore sales. "I didn't do this because I'm a big-hearted slob," he says. "I did it because I saw an opportunity to make more money."

With no formal legal training, Doctorow wanted to tell online readers that he intended to protect his work in a new way. So he linked the online version of his novella to a Creative Commons license. From a menu on the Creative Commons site (see "A Spotter's Guide to Shared Content"), Doctorow chose a license called Attribution-NoDerivs-Noncommercial, meaning that people can distribute his book for free, so long as they credit him as its author; they're not allowed to use it as the basis for derivative works; and to retain his upside potential, such as a movie deal, he requires payment for commercial uses.

In the 15 months that the book has been available online, Doctorow has recorded more than 300,000 downloads from his site. It's impossible to measure the effect that had on book sales, but the initial print run of 8,500 copies sold out, and the title is now out in paperback. Doctorow estimates that the speaking fees he received from people who hired him based on the buzz surrounding the giveaway version exceed the advance he received from his publisher. Meanwhile, after the commercial success of his first book established his credentials as a marketable writer, Doctorow received a much bigger advance for his third and fourth books.

Of course, for many who use Creative Commons to license their works, profit is merely an afterthought. "It gets your name out there," says Adam Conover, a Bard College senior who attached one of the licenses to Dead Puppies, a short film he produced with classmates. Some do it simply to protest the recording industry's hard-line copyright policy. Whatever the reason, every artist who embraces Creative Commons helps to build its brand. It's a classic case of network effects: As more of the licenses appear on the Web, the collective value of the Creative Commons body of work increases, which creates greater incentives for other artists to use the licenses. "Say that someday there are 100 million objects out there that mark themselves with this kind of freedom," Lessig says. "People will begin to build on this in ways we can't even imagine."

To see how that vision can take shape, visit a website called MacBand.com. In January, Apple released a new music-production program called GarageBand. A few weeks later, a group of college students launched MacBand, a site where people can upload and share their compositions. Hal Bergman, one of MacBand's co- creators, wanted to encourage users to allow others to build on their projects. "A lot of people won't upload or download music on sites where everything's copyrighted," he says.

When composers upload songs on MacBand, they're presented with the option of choosing a Creative Commons license. The result is that nearly every song on MacBand functions as raw material for new songs. The sharing not only spurs activity on MacBand, but also builds demand for Apple software and hardware.

Lessig wants to integrate Creative Commons into the tools used to create digital art. The licenses now come in "machine-readable" form, which means that smart CD players can display a song's license as it plays. There is also a plug-in for Adobe's Photoshop that recognizes licenses embedded in image files. The open-source Mozilla project plans to put a Creative Commons search tool alongside one for Google in its Firefox 1.0 browser, due out this summer, making it easy to search the Web for, say, photos of the Empire State Building that are cleared for noncommercial use. A Japanese Creative Commons license is already available, and Lessig hopes to introduce 24 more country-specific versions by the year's end. A $1.2 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation should help the six-person Creative Commons staff complete the project.

Of course, the digital landscape is littered with failed companies that promised to give something away for free and make money down the road. The real potential of Creative Commons is that it could do for content what the open-source movement did for software -- that is, create a parallel sharing universe that even mainstream companies can tap profitably. (There was a day when the idea of IBM (IBM) embracing Linux sounded pretty outrageous too.) As Creative Commons assistant director Neeru Paharia recently asked, "Can you charge more for a Madonna CD that includes the right to make a noncommercial remix?" And if independent artists used this material to make commercially viable remixes, "couldn't this be a great new revenue stream for Madonna?"

According to Steve Fabrizio, formerly the Recording Industry Association of America's chief litigator and now a partner at the law firm Jenner & Block, it's far-fetched, but not impossible, to envision a top label embracing Creative Commons. "If Creative Commons builds enough brand awareness and respect for what it means, I see no reason why record companies that want to pre-authorize limited use of a work wouldn't think it was a great idea."

Lessig is doing his part to make the copyright establishment grapple with his views. In March, Penguin Press, part of the second-largest publishing house in the United States, released his third book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. You can buy the hardcover, but, for a limited time, Penguin has also authorized Amazon (AMZN) to offer a free, downloadable, Creative Commons-licensed PDF version of the text. "We could look like visionaries, or we could look like chuckleheads," says Penguin's Scott Moyers, who edited the book. "But I'm confident that we'll see greater book sales."

Inevitably, as more and more digital content is produced by so-called amateurs, sharing will increase no matter how Lessig's book -- or Creative Commons -- fares. As Allan Vilhan puts it, "I make music, and I want people to hear it." Yet if Creative Commons is successful, sharing will become even more pervasive. And a lot more money will be made along the way.
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/arti...608619,00.html


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ACLU Challenges FBI's Request for ISP Records
Curt Anderson

The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the FBI's use of expanded powers to compel Internet service providers to turn over information about their customers or subscribers.

A lawsuit challenging secret FBI national security letters was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in New York but not made public until Wednesday because of its extraordinary sensitivity.

The FBI can issue national security letters, or NSLs, without a judge's approval in terrorism and espionage cases. They require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses to produce highly personal records about their customers or subscribers.

People who receive the letters are prohibited by law from disclosing to anyone that they did so. Because of this legal gag order, the ACLU was forced to reach an agreement with the Justice Department before a heavily edited version of the lawsuit could be unsealed.

"We believe the public has a right to know much more about this lawsuit," said Ann Beeson, ACLU associate legal director.

Justice Department and FBI officials declined comment on the case.

The lawsuit challenges as unconstitutional one of several types of national security letters used by the FBI in counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations.

The letters in question involve records held by Internet service providers about their clients, including billing information, kinds of merchandise the clients buy online and the e-mail addresses of the clients' associates. The co-plaintiff in the case is identified only as an "Internet access business," with other identification blacked out.

The ACLU lawsuit contends that the Patriot Act, an antiterrorism law passed shortly after the 2001 terror attacks, expanded the FBI's power to use national security letters by deleting parts of an earlier law requiring that there be some suspicion that the subject of the probe was linked to spying or terrorism.

"As a result of the Patriot Act, the FBI may now use NSLs to obtain sensitive information about innocent individuals who have no connection to espionage or terrorism," the lawsuit says.

An FBI guidance document to its field offices acknowledges that the Patriot Act "greatly broadened" FBI authority to use these letters in relevant investigations. But the document says that FBI supervisors must exercise care in their use, particularly because that part of the Patriot Act is set to expire in 2005 unless renewed by Congress.

"Supervisors should keep this in mind when deciding whether or not a particular use of NSL authority is appropriate," the FBI document says.

The lawsuit contends that NSLs are unconstitutional because of the gag order, because a recipient has no way of challenging their validity and because the government is not forced to justify its reasons for not notifying the target about the records being sought.

The ACLU has also filed a lawsuit challenging another part of the Patriot Act that allows the FBI to obtain a variety of records and documents in terrorism and espionage cases by obtaining a warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

President Bush has been pushing Congress to renew all of the Patriot Act before it expires next year, arguing that it is one of law enforcement's best tools in preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Apr28.html


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No anchovies!

Missouri Tracks Scofflaws Via Pizza- Delivery Databases
Kelly Wiese

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — It's dinnertime, and you're hungry and tired, so you pick up the phone and order your favorite pizza. But you might have just landed yourself a lot more than pepperoni and cheese.

If you owe fines or fees to the courts, that phone call may have provided the link the state needed to track you down and make you pay.

That's one of the strategies of firms such as a company being hired by the Missouri Office of State Courts Administrator to handle its fine and debt collections.

David Coplen, the state office's budget director, said he discovered that pizza delivery lists are one of the best sources such companies use to locate people.

"There are literally millions of dollars of uncollected fines, fees and court costs out there," Coplen said.

How much?

A sampling in January of just three of Missouri's 114 counties found about $2 million owed to courts by people whose Social Security numbers were known, Coplen said. That finding suggests courts statewide could reap significant revenue once Dallas-based ACS gets to work this month pursuing people using phone numbers and addresses.

Databases compiled by private companies and government agencies are a key tool for firms such as ACS, Coplen said, and "one of the databases they find to be most helpful are pizza delivery databases."

"When you call to order a pizza, you usually give them your correct name, your correct address and your correct phone number," he said.

Just which pizza companies' databases might be mined is unknown.

A representative of Domino's Pizza said the company does not sell its customer information, and other national pizza chains did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Michael Daniels, an ACS division vice president, declined to reveal exactly which companies' databases ACS uses.

Daniels said sifting through private databases, from pizza deliveries to magazine subscriptions, is just one piece of the work the company does to help states collect more money and make the process more efficient.

The company's clients typically see their collections rise anywhere from 33% to 100% in the first year of a contract, Daniels said.

Some details of Missouri's contract with ACS are still being worked out, Coplen said, but the company makes money on court fees by adding a surcharge to the amount a person owes. For every $1 of a court fee it collects, ACS may charge — and keep — a maximum surcharge of 20%.

For handling the fine collection center, which processes citations such as traffic tickets that people pay without going to court, the company is paid per ticket, but the cost is tied to the amount it finds in the debt collection portion.

Coplen said having ACS pursue those who owe court fees and fines will not only bring money into the state but will teach people that when they are fined, they must pay up.

Currently, Coplen said, if an Illinois resident fails to pay a Missouri speeding ticket, a Missouri court can issue a warrant. But sheriffs' offices rarely have time or staff to drive hours away and deliver such a warrant, he said. For ACS, however, there's a financial incentive to go after such scofflaws.

Some privacy advocates say the public should be aware of how databases such as pizza delivery lists may be used.

Chris Hoofnagle, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., said the use of such seemingly innocuous information is a common strategy.

"The unfortunate reality is even if you are very careful in protecting your personal information, you give it to any business, they can turn around and sell it," Hoofnagle said.

"The first time your baby sitter orders pizza, that pizza delivery company has your phone number, address and name, and they sell it," he added. "They don't have to tell you about it, either."

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/in...-privacy_x.htm



















Until next week,

- js.















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