Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 17th, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week

"File-Sharing booming." – Bernhard Warner

"One of the biggest myths put forth by the music industry - that they are winning the war on file-sharing - is simply wrong." -Andrew Parker

"Net users worldwide freely exchange a staggering 10 petabytes - or 10 million gigabytes - each day." – Cape Argus News

"Is Amazon.com becoming the Napster of the book business?" - Bob Tedeschi

"You wouldn't call it an elaborate operation because it was normal computers and burners that every one would have at home." - Acting Detective Senior Sergeant Terry Winters










File-Sharing Booming
Bernhard Warner

Internet users download twice as many films, games and music as they did a year ago, despite a big crackdown on the activity, according to a study.

Better broadband Internet connections and compression technologies mean larger files can be downloaded more rapidly, creating as big a piracy headache for movie studios as for music labels.

Each day, the equivalent of roughly three billion songs or five million movies zips between computers, according to the study by Cambridge technology firm CacheLogic.

It estimates Internet users around the globe freely exchange a staggering 10 petabytes -- or 10 million gigabytes -- of data, much of it in the form of copyright-protected songs, movies, software and video games.

The rogue exchanges continue to dwarf the nascent market for legitimate music downloads ushered in by the likes of Apple Computer's iTunes.

The popularity of file-sharing is costing the largest Internet service providers $10 million (5.4 million pounds) per year each in bandwidth and network maintenance costs, CacheLogic said on Tuesday.

In the light of its findings, the company also questioned the wisdom of the music industry's crackdown on file-sharers.

"One of the biggest myths put forth by the music industry -- that they are winning the war on file-sharing -- is simply wrong," said Andrew Parker, co-founder of CacheLogic.

"It's a case of displacement," he added. "Users are just moving to new networks."

Swapping To Upstarts

When the music industry began suing the most prolific song-swappers last September, a number of them switched from the most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as Kazaa to a host of upstarts to shake off the dragnet.

Today, the likes of Bit Torrent and eDonkey have become the P2P networks of choice, particularly for European and Asian file-sharers, CacheLogic said.

The face of file-sharing has changed too. The vast majority of files passing through P2P networks now exceeds 100 megabytes, meaning Internet users are as likely to download larger movie, software and game files as they are the smaller song files.

"It's all about video now," Parker said.

CacheLogic, which provides filtering technology for many of the world's largest ISPs, derived its results by monitoring daily traffic flow across its clients' networks.

On Monday, BigChampagne, a firm that tracks file-sharing networks, said that 1 billion songs were available for free trading on a variety of popular file-sharing networks in June -- up from 820 million a year ago.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040713/80/exvnl.html


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Musicians Promised A Cut Of Digital Pie
Matthew Liddy

The profits from file-sharing programs which allow users to swap music files will be shared with artists once litigation settles down,

according to an executive involved in digital download services.

Kevin Bermeister is the chief executive of AltNet, which distributes content via peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as Kazaa.

Mr Bermeister has told a Brisbane conference that file-sharing companies are exploring ways to return money to the artists whose songs drive the P2P market.

"As the progression of the litigation [against P2P companies] moves on ... there will in fact be a return of profits to artists," Mr Bermeister told a session on digital rights at Q Music's Big Sound conference.

"I know of certain actions that are already providing a return of profits to artists. There are funds established, there are distribution methods being explored for moving profits back to artists.

"In addition to that, there's obviously the potential for digital rights-managed content to be injected into search strings of users to choose those particular files, through which a direct relationship is established between the label, the artist and the fan.

"I'm witness to actions that will end up seeing distribution back to artists," he added.

The conference session was appropriately titled "Digital Rights Ho' Down", given Mr Bermeister - whose home was raided in connection with the music industry's ongoing lawsuit against Kazaa - was sitting on the panel next to the man chiefly responsible for the anti-piracy fight in Australia, Michael Speck from the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA).

The pair traded the odd barb but in the end were in agreement on at least one thing: that downloadable music is here to stay.

'Another place to get music to punters'

"The Internet is the next market segment," Mr Speck said. "It's clear that's the case."

But the anti-piracy chief was at pains to point out that the Internet does not revolutionise the way the music industry works.

"It's a place where none of the laws of nature or business are turned upside down," he said. "It must be a place where you can protect your property, where if it belongs to you, you make the choice about how it's delivered.

"The Internet is just another place to get music to punters," Mr Speck added.

He believes the music industry will emerge triumphant from its fight against the file-sharers.

"You can be sure that eventually the Internet market will be a place where businesses that are clearly and unequivocally operating legally will be the primary sources of product," he said.

"The future is one where the copyright owner has rights that they can protect and enforce in that marketplace, and we're clearly headed in that direction."

But Mr Bermeister says the major players in the record industry have failed to embrace the demands of the new market.

"AltNet has embraced file-sharing partners, provided technologies to those file-sharing partners, provided technologies to artists and labels and independent operations," he said.

"We've tried very hard to create relationships with the majors ... only to be attacked and targeted by litigation and attempts to control the activities of the file-sharing parties.

"I think that is a sad set of circumstances because in this environment, the market has already spoken. The users have already shaped what it is that they want and we need to listen and embrace and modify and change and build on those strengths."

Who pays?

The panel identified Internet service providers (ISPs) and hardware manufacturers as potential sources of revenue for artists since they benefit from users' demands for downloadable music.

Mr Speck says ARIA is "in dialogue with Internet service providers on a continual basis".

He told the audience of musicians and record company staff that "it should make all of you angry that this multi-billion dollar industry derives, in Australia at least, up to 20 per cent of its revenue" from file-sharing without any of that money going back into the music industry.

"The ISPs are in the background all the time," said Steve Johnston, who's in charge of digital rights management for the UK's Association of Independent Music.

"Their entire businesses are being driven by that traffic. People are getting broadband connections to get hold of all that free music and not any of that money has gone back to rights holders and creators."

But Mr Bermeister added: "I don't think you can really target the ISPs specifically here. The Internet is a new market and a new medium.

"There are CD-ROM manufacturers, there are computer manufacturers, there are MP3 players like iPod for example who all derive a benefit, including the ISPs, from the activities of access to content on demand.

"I think that to try to channel anger at any one particular group who derive a benefit is pointless.

"There really has to be a recognition that it is the art that is driving demand. Through that, there can be a progression towards a model that benefits artists to a much greater degree than artists currently benefit through the deals that are offered by the major music labels."

Mr Bermeister concludes that the "net result in the economics of the future market will be more direct revenue to the artist and a more evenly spread marketplace".

In other developments:

Australia's independent music sector may follow the lead of record labels in the UK and Europe and use its collective muscle to challenge the major brands in the digital marketplace. (Full Story)
Rock 'n' roll is synonymous with sex and drugs but Powderfinger's Darren Middleton has revealed that life in Australia's biggest rock band doesn't liberate you from the competing demands of work and family. (Full Story)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems...7/s1149743.htm


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Canada

Household Internet Use Survey

The number of Canadian households surfing the Internet continued to grow in 2003 according to the Household Internet Use Survey. However, growth rates remained relatively stable largely because the majority of households were already plugged in.

An estimated 7.9 million (64%) of the 12.3 million Canadian households had at least one member who used the Internet regularly in 2003, either from home, work, school, a public library or another location. This was a 5% increase from 2002, but well below the annual gains of 19% and 24% observed in 2000 and 2001.

Households with high income, members active in the labour force, those with children still living at home and people with higher levels of education have been in the forefront of Internet adoption.

Internet use was highest at home. About 6.7 million households had at least one member who regularly used the Internet from home, a gain of 7% since 2002. These households accounted for nearly 55% of the total, up from 51% in 2002.

Lower income households are making strides in logging on. Nearly 45% (1.3 million) of the households with income between $24,001 and $43,999, had someone who used the Internet from home in 2003, which is up 13% from 2002. This group of households had the highest growth in connections from home and work, as well as the combination of various locations. In contrast, the proportion of households regularly using the Internet from home remained relatively unchanged for the lowest income quartile.

Canadians continue their quest for speed

Of the nearly 6.7 million households with a regular user from home in 2003, an estimated 4.4 million (65%) had a high-speed link to the Internet through either a cable or telephone connection. This was up from 56% a year earlier.

At the same time, the proportion of households that had a low-speed connection fell from 44% in 2002 to 35% last year. Internet service providers have increased their expenditures on high-speed infrastructure in a competitive battle to provide subscribers with a wider range of online services.


Note to readers

The Household Internet Use Survey (HIUS) was conducted as a subsample of the Labour Force Survey. The HIUS collected information on the household as a whole. In total, 34,674 households were eligible for the HIUS and 23,113 (66.7%) responded. Data gathered in January 2004 covered household Internet use for the 2003 calendar year.

The respondent provided a proxy response to questions for all members of the household. Of households indicating that they regularly used the Internet, about 89% of the individuals who answered the survey for their household were one of the members that regularly used the Internet from various locations.

Regular-use households are those that responded "yes" to the question "In a typical month, does anyone in the household use the Internet?"

Of the estimated 4.4 million households with high-speed connection, the majority (61%) had a link through cable. The remaining 39% had a high-speed telephone connection, also known as a digital subscriber line, or DSL.

However, the number of DSL connections increased nearly 30% in 2003, compared with a gain of only 21% for cable. This may be an indication of price competitiveness of DSL over cable connections, or increased accessibility of households to high-speed telephone infrastructure within their neighbourhood.

Fewer households report downloading music

More and more households were using the Internet to search for medical or health-related information or to use online banking services. However, fewer reported downloading music.

Just under 38% of regular users from home reported downloading music in 2003, down from a high of 48% in 2001. This may be the result of a highly- publicized campaign by the music industry against downloading music for free.

Almost two-thirds (65%) of households had at least one member who used the Internet to search for medical or health-related information, compared with 61% in 2001. This was the third most popular use after e-mail and general browsing.

About 57% of households using the Internet at home had someone who accessed online banking services, well above the proportion o
http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/040708/d040708a.htm


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Canadian Record Labels Appeal P2P Ruling
John Borland

The Canadian Recording Industry Association on Monday appealed a court ruling in which a judge ruled that peer-to-peer file sharing was legal in Canada.

Like its American counterparts, the Canadian group is trying to sue file-swappers who are trading copyrighted music online. But in March, a court blocked the label's trade group from obtaining the identities of alleged file traders, saying that trading music over programs like Kazaa did not appear to be illegal.

The record labels group said the March ruling had put their industry--and other copyright holders such as movie producers and software companies--in jeopardy. They're asking the Federal Court of Appeal to reverse the lower judge, and let their lawsuits proceed.

"The recording industry is very vulnerable right now," CRIA President Brian Robertson said. "I think there is widespread concern from most owners of intellectual property."

Canadian courts and regulators have proved consistently troublesome in the record labels' war on peer- to-peer services. With the appeal, the record industry group hopes to remove the impression that Canada has become a legal haven for activity that is viewed more strictly in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Late last year, Canada's Copyright Board sent a first warning signal to the industry, saying that it believed using file-swapping services to download music--if not upload it--was legal.

When the CRIA later tried to sue 29 individuals, first seeking their identities from their Internet service providers, a court went even further in the course of dismissing the action. Sharing music on an online network did not appear to violate Canadian copyright law, Judge Konrad von Finckenstein wrote in a March decision.

"The mere fact of placing a copy on a shared directory in a computer where that copy can be accessed via a P2P service does not amount to distribution," Finckenstein wrote. "Before it constitutes distribution, there must be a positive act by the owner of the shared directory, such as sending out the copies or advertising that they are available for copying."

The CRIA brief filed Monday contends that the court should have let the group pursue the file swappers' identities, and that the act of uploading copyrighted files without permission does constitute illegal distribution of the works.

Reply comments are due on the brief in 30 days, after which the Federal Court of Appeal will set a date for arguments.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5266337.html


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MPAA Looks At Movie Download Habits
Stefanie Olsen

One in four people online has illegally downloaded a feature film--and it's cutting into box-office and DVD sales, the Motion Picture Association of America said in a study released Thursday.

A survey of 3,600 Internet users in eight countries showed that as many as 50 percent had downloaded copyrighted content in the last year. Of those people who have downloaded films, 17 percent said they are going to the movies less often, and 26 percent said they bought fewer DVDs, according to online researcher OTX, which conducted the study in partnership with the MPAA.

The trade group did not have box-office sales figures for 2004. But global movie admissions were down by 4 percent in 2003 to about 1.57 billion, compared with 1.64 billion in 2002, according to research provided by the MPAA.

Still, from 1993 to 2004, admissions have gone up 27 percent, by 330 million, and DVD sales and rentals have shot up by 50 percent from 2002 to 2003, the research showed.

The primary concern, the MPAA said, is as broadband Internet connections spread faster to countries around the world, more people will take to illegal downloading. For example, an estimated 98 percent of South Korea's population uses broadband. Nearly 60 percent of the population has reportedly downloaded movies, and one in three say they go to the box office less often, according to the survey.

"It's not hard to imagine as other countries become increasingly broadband based we'll see more of this happen," said Matthew Grossman, a spokesman for the MPAA.

There are approximately 29.2 million broadband households in the United States, according to market researcher The Yankee Group.

Also of concern is consumers' attitudes. The study found that 69 percent of those surveyed don't believe downloading movies is a major concern in today's society. Little more than half of people who have already downloaded films online expect to continue to do so, and 17 percent who don't already do it, plan to. Also, 38 percent of those surveyed said it was OK to download a film before it's released in theaters.

For this reason, the MPAA has launched a worldwide campaign to monitor online film-downloading more closely and educate people on the implications of pirating movies. It has created movie trailers to warn people against illegal downloading and making pirated copies of films, among other tactics.

The study was conducted with residents of Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5262427.html


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Ireland

IHF And INIA Win Landmark Copyright Case

On Wednesday 12 May 2004, the Irish High Court varied an arbitrator’s award which had set copyright fees payable by nightclubs to Phonographic Performance (Ireland) Limited – “PPI”. PPI is the collecting society which represents record companies in Ireland. A & L Goodbody Solicitors were hired in July 2003 to spearhead the High Court challenge to the Arbitrator’s award on behalf of the Irish Hotels Federation and the Irish Nightclub Industry Association – the successful parties in the case.

The case is a landmark one in terms of copyright law. It is one of the few cases in which a national court has set an amount for “equitable remuneration” due to record companies. The impact of the decision is also substantial – it operates to considerably reduce almost 15 years of excessive fees that were being claimed from the nightclubs and hotels by PPI.

Certain Irish nightclubs have been in dispute with PPI for the last 15 or so years about the level of fees they pay for playing records in their venues. In the early 1990’s, they referred their disputes to the Controller of Patents and Trade Marks. Under Irish copyright legislation applicable at the time of the disputes, PPI was entitled to “equitable remuneration” when its members’ records were played in public.

The Controller has jurisdiction to decide upon this “equitable remuneration” in the event of a dispute. In 1996, the Controller decided to refer the disputes to an arbitrator, who eventually gave an award in favour of PPI in 2003. The nightclubs/hotels immediately appealed this award to the High Court on the basis that it was excessive.
http://www.ihf.ie/innsight/page5-8.htm


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Queensland Couple Face Piracy Charges
Dale Paget

A COUPLE is facing film piracy charges after police found hundreds of illegally copied DVDs and recording equipment in a raid on a suburban house on the Gold Coast.

The lucrative backyard piracy operation involved mainly Australian films and music that were being sold to overseas buyers.

Police estimate sales of between $4,000 and $5,000 a week.

A 59-year-old man and his 58-year-old wife are assisting police with inquiries.

Acting Detective Senior Sergeant Terry Winters said the pirated copies were high quality reproductions and to the untrained eye looked to be authentic.

Police served a search warrant on a home at Burleigh Heads yesterday and seized hundreds of DVDs, two computers, three televisions and numerous video recorders and DVD burners.

In a raid at a post office box, a further 50 DVDs ready for shipment overseas were found.

"They were mainly being sold to the US but also to the UK, Canada, Japan and Germany," Sgt Winters said.

"You wouldn't call it an elaborate operation because it was normal computers and burners that every one would have at home."

The DVDs and CDs were sold in US dollars through an internet site, which offered copies of movies and television specials from actors including Eric Bana, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman and Heath Ledger.

Albums from Delta Goodrem, Kasey Chambers, John Farnham and Midnight Oil were also advertised.

Police raided the home after receiving a complaint from the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA).

ARIA has provided a forensic computer examiner to assist police with the investigation.

Charges are expected to be laid under the Commonwealth Copyright Act.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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Fee-Based Web Music Hits Asia--But Where's Apple?

Computer audio equipment maker Creative Technology and online music service Soundbuzz.com have launched an alliance aimed at capturing Asia's infant fee-based online music market.

The two companies are setting up online music stores in Singapore, Hong Kong and India--regions where knock-off CDs burned by sophisticated piracy syndicates or downloaded off the Internet for free are hammering sales of recorded music.

Soundbuzz.com and Creative launched the first of their online stores in Singapore on Tuesday, offering 250,000 songs at $1.16 each in a format designed for quick downloading into Creative's digital music players.

"We've all been through the huge CD-burning mania of the past. What has clearly emerged over the last 12 to 18 months is that the method of consumption of music is changing," said Sudhanshu Sarronwala, chief executive of 5-year-old Soundbuzz.

"It's very much portable device-led. That's really the future of consumption of music," said Sarronwala, a former managing director of MTV Networks Asia.

The idea closely resembles Apple Computer's iTunes online music store, where users download songs at a price onto Apple's popular iPod digital music player in services available only in the United States and Europe.

Sony entered the fray last week, launching a Walkman digital music player. Singapore-based Creative will soon sell a 20-gigabyte "Zen Touch" media player equipped with a function for transferring songs from Soundbuzz.com stores.

But while competition is brutal in the European and North American online music download markets, fee-based services are virtually nonexistent in Asia. Few Asian music labels are willing to release digitized music, often fearing piracy.

Apple has yet to announce plans for an Asian iTunes online music store, while Sony said it has no plan to build an Asian version of its "Connect" music stores, although it sells some music online through a PlanetMG.com site in Singapore.

But music labels are clamoring for growth in a region dominated by music piracy syndicates.

Hong Kong, India launch

Sarronwala said he expected Singapore, a wealthy, tech-savvy island of 4 million people, to download 300,000 to 500,000 songs annually--a market worth as much as S$1 million a year.

He said he planned to launch a similar service in India and Hong Kong this year, estimating Hong Kong's 6.8 million people would download about a million songs a year. India could be about twice the size of Hong Kong's market within two years, he said.

"Like the rest of the region, licensing has just become a reality pretty recently in India," he said.

Taiwan and China would wait, he said. Taiwan accounts for 80 percent of Mandarin-language music sales worldwide, but half of all music sold in the past two years was pirated, while nine of every 10 recordings in China were fakes, industry data showed.

Sarronwala said the start of Taiwan's fee-based online music market could be delayed by two years as the music industry battles in court with peer-to-peer networks, where surfers can download an entire 10-track album in 15 minutes.

Uncertainty over pricing is delaying services in China. The price of each song would need to be about 25 percent below other Asian markets, he said. "The music industry is very, very keen to see whether a legitimate digital market can be created there."

Asian 2003 music sales slid 9.8 percent to $5.8 billion, a fifth of the world's total and outpacing a fall of 7.6 percent globally, data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry shows.

Soundbuzz.com, which operates in Australia through a relationship with telephone company Telstra, plans to bill customers through Internet service providers rather than credit cards, hoping the easier form of billing will spur growth.

"We have to find a credit card alternative for these services to really take off," Sarronwala said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5258774.html


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French Law On Confidence In The Digital Economy (LCEN) Enters Into Force

The French Official Journal of 22 June contained "Loi N° 2004-575 du 21 juin 2004 pour la confiance dans l'économie numérique" (LCEN).

This is a wide-ranging piece of legislation, affecting internet service providers (ISPs), other xSPs, and also fixed and mobile telecommunications operators, as well as public bodies such as municipalities and groups of municipalities interested in developing telecommunications infrastructure and services within the geographical area that falls under their responsibility.

The law addresses, amongst other things, the following internet-related topics:

• the limited responsibility of hosting providers for hosted content
• the caching of content by ISPs
• e-commerce, online advertising, telemarketing, contracts
• cryptography, digital certification and digital signatures
• cybercrime

The law also sets out the conditions under which municipalities and groups of municipalities are entitled to provide telecommunications infrastructure to operators, and, more importantly and more controversially, are entitled to provide infrastructure below cost or to offer subsidies to operators, to use various financing systems (délégation de service public/marché public) and are entitled themselves to become full service telecommunications infrastructure operators and service providers to end-users.

Regarding mobile communications, the law introduces the possibility of infrastructure sharing and local roaming for GSM mobile operators in areas where no GSM coverage exists today, and foresees various mechanisms to extend such coverage, including municipalities making available infrastructure and by granting public subsidies.
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=2158


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Movie Studios Load Anti-Piracy Guns

Studios are breaking out new weapons in their battle against DVD piracy as increasing broadband penetration and DVD recorder sales threaten to aid and abet illegal copying.

"It's hugely important that we fight piracy now," says Matt Grossman, director of digital strategy for the Motion Picture Assn. of America. "Only one in 10 films makes its money from theatrical release. Studios need ancillary revenue streams like DVDs. Studios lost $3.5 billion in 2003 on the optical-disc piracy front."

Henry McGee, president of HBO Home Video, warns that the $20 billion U.S. DVD industry "could all come crashing down if we are Napsterized."

Though studio executives are reluctant to discuss specifics, they are trying several new weapons to shut off DVD pirates' two main sources -- illegal downloads and illegal replication.

New tactics

New strategies include increased Internet policing, the planting of false files (known as spoofing) and the use of DVD encryption technology. The studios also are understood to be discussing possible relationships with peer-to-peer networks to offer legitimate downloads.

These defenses are being complemented by a far-reaching education campaign spearheaded by the MPAA.

The MPAA reports that in addition to the $3.5 billion lost to illegal replication last year, an unquantifiable amount was lost because of file sharing. A likely estimate is that 400,000-600,000 films are being illegally downloaded every day.

What's more, the rapid increase of high-speed broadband Internet connections is expected to fuel illegal downloading.

Forrester Research reports that 19.5 million U.S. households had broadband by the end of 2003 and projects that 27.4 million will have it by the end of this year, a 40% increase. By 2009, more than 68 million households are expected to have broadband.

Online solutions

One anti-piracy mechanism for studios involves working directly with P2P networks on payment programs for legitimate downloads.

That is the idea behind the 1-year-old Distributed Computing Industry Assn., an Arlington, Va.-based organization whose members include Sharman Networks (owner of P2P network Kazaa) and whose goal is to commercialize P2P for legitimate distribution. Marty Lafferty, CEO of the DCIA, says the DCIA is in "very private discussions with some of the majors at the moment." Lafferty suggests that consumers could be charged a premium for legitimately downloading a file through an authorized P2P service on the day of its theatrical release.

Other P2P networks not aligned with the DCIA are also testing the legitimate distribution waters.

P2P network eDonkey, which claims about 2 million users and about 40 million downloads per year, has pursued licensing deals for independent films. New York- based eDonkey is one of the most popular file-sharing networks; its downloaders receive files faster than other P2P file sharers because they are accessed in small bits from numerous computers.

"We did some deals with independent films about a year ago," says Sam Yagan, president of eDonkey. "But because we licensed no-name movies, users weren't willing to take the risk. The idea didn't work."

Yagan says that it has proved difficult to work directly with major studios on similar programs thus far. "None of the major studios have agreed to license us any of their content for sale," he notes.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory...rity&OID=54923


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Fight censorship - use peer-to-peer

Some Theater Chains Refuse 'Fahrenheit'
Nicole Sperling

Michael Moore's controversial "Fahrenheit 9/11" will expand into 286 additional theaters Friday. But if you're an interested moviegoer in Grand Island, Neb., or Marquette, Wis., you'll have to drive to at least the next town to view Moore's critique of the Bush administration. Illinois-based GKC Theaters and Iowa-based Fridley Theaters have decided to not screen the film.

Both theater chains, which were not in domestic distributor Lions Gate's original 800-theater release plan, are protesting the content of Moore's film.

According to Fridley Theaters' Web site, the theater chain has received a deluge of e-mails, phone calls and letters, some praising the action and others criticizing it. But a statement from owner Robert Fridley said the company is not playing the film because it believes that "Fahrenheit" is propaganda.

"It has always been and will continue to be our policy to refuse to play what we feel are propaganda films, no matter the source. It was and is our feeling that 'Fahrenheit 9/11' falls into that category," he said.

In a statement to a local newspaper, GKC Theaters president Beth Karasotes confirmed that her chain, with 270 screens at 29 theaters, will not show Moore's film as long as the country is at war.

"We believe in Michael Moore's freedom to make this movie," Karasotes told the Michigan-based Mining Journal. "We trust that our customers will recognize and respect our own freedom to choose not to show it. During a time of war, the American troops in Iraq need and deserve our undivided support."

Calls to Karasotes were not returned.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" has already grossed more than $60 million since its release two weeks ago. Lions Gate's expansion into 2,011 theaters is expected to generate an additional $9 million this weekend. Lions Gate Films president of releasing Tom Ortenberg said that, in addition to the two chains in the Midwest, a few independent one- or two-screen theaters also have refused the film.

"This is a horrible precedent to be setting for someone to be putting their personal politics above the needs of their community," Ortenberg said. "It raises a lot of issues because in some cases these guys are the only ones in some of these small towns."

But Fridley, for one, does not want to be seen as someone imposing any form of censorship.

"We do not infer that Michael Moore has no right to make his film and have it distributed," Fridley said. "In fact, if he or anyone in our nation were ever denied that right, we would be on the front line defending his or her right to make and distribute his or her film. Mr. Moore's and every filmmaker's right to make and distribute a film is no different than ours ... Mr. Moore has the right to have his message just as we have the right to choose not to be his messenger."
http://www.backstage.com/backstage/n..._id=1000573707


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Online Battle of Low-Cost Books
Bob Tedeschi

IS Amazon.com becoming the Napster of the book business?

The analogy may not be far off, say some observers of the used-book industry. Publishers, particularly textbook publishers, have long countered used-book sales by churning out new editions every couple of years. But the Web, particularly sites like Amazon and eBay, have given millions of consumers an easy way to find cheap books - often for under $1 - without paying royalty fees to publishers or authors.

Mass-market publishers are not certain the used-book phenomenon is a problem worth addressing, but others in the industry have already made up their minds.

"We think it's not good for the industry and it has an effect, but we can't measure it," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, a trade group. "There has always been used-book sales, but it's always been a background noise sort of thing. Now it's right there next to the new book on Amazon."

Lorraine Shanley, a principal at Market Partners International, a publishing consultant, said that the industry was just starting to appreciate the dimensions of the problem.

"Used books are to consumer books as Napster was to the music industry," she said. "The question becomes, 'How does the book industry address its used-book problem?' There aren't any easy answers, especially as no one is breaking any laws here."

Ms. Shanley, whose company reported on used books this month in its newsletter, Publishing Trends, said that publishers were beginning to see the effects. "We've asked publishers how much of an issue it is, and the responses are either 'I have so many other problems to deal with,' or 'Yes, it's an issue, but as there are no easy fixes, I can't really focus on it,' '' she said.

Greg Greeley, Amazon's vice president for media products for North America and Japan, strenuously disagreed with the notion that online sales of used books harmed the publishing industry. And Kathryn Blough, the vice president for the Association of American Publishers, said that she "wouldn't jump to the conclusion that used books are eating away at the new-book market."

Ms. Blough said used-book sales were growing, particularly online, and new-book sales had been "a little flat." The publishers association reported earlier this year that 2003 sales for mass-market paperbacks and for hardcover and paperback books were virtually unchanged from 2002, when they reached roughly $3.5 billion. But Ms. Blough said the new-book market could be weak for several reasons, including a slow economy and a sharp increase in other media vying for the book reader's attention.

Amazon has listed used books alongside new books since late 2000. But analysts and industry executives said the momentum among consumers and newly minted used- book sellers was just now approaching the point of biting into new-book sales.

"We've not been able to pinpoint a definite effect, but my gut is that absolutely there's an effect," said Dominique Raccah, chief executive of Sourcebooks Inc. of Naperville, Ill., a publisher of both fiction and nonfiction titles. "And it concerns me that we're not formalizing a reasonable, proactive response."

The industry's response so far has been to consider a study on the effects of the used-book market, but in the meantime, some research already suggests that used-book purchases are surging.

Based on consumer surveys, Ipsos BookTrends, which is a division of the research and consulting firm Ipsos-Insight, said that 15 percent of all books for adults and teenagers that were purchased from April to December 2003 were used - an increase of 5 percentage points from the same period in 2002. Meanwhile, the Web's share of sales in the same time period increased to 12.7 percent from 9.7 percent.

"This is not a new phenomenon," said Albert N. Greco, a professor at Fordham University's graduate school of business administration. "But now it's different. The computer and the Internet have revolutionized things."

Furthermore, Mr. Greco said, there is no stigma attached to buying used books. "It's not like buying a used pair of shoes. And the prices are very reasonable," he said. "You can find good-quality used paperbacks on Amazon for under $2, and in some cases under $1."

Last week, for instance, used copies of Alexander McCall Smith's detective novel "Tears of the Giraffe," which was No. 5 on Amazon's paperback best-seller list, sold for 55 cents, compared to Amazon's list price of $9.56.

Of course, Amazon and eBay are not the only used-book merchants online. Alibris, the Advanced Book Exchange and others have also attracted a following among online buyers of the dog-eared. But industry executives and analysts widely acknowledge Amazon as the engine of the market.

Mr. Greeley, the Amazon executive, declined to cite statistics on the company's used-book effort, but he said sales had been growing nicely since Amazon started listing used books alongside new books and offering to sell its customers' used books for a 15 percent commission. Low-volume sellers must pay an additional commission of 99 cents a book.

Mr. Greeley said the site now carried "millions and millions of titles - many that you can't find through traditional channels."

Mr. Greeley also disputes the contention that Amazon could be hurting publishers or authors by selling books that yield no royalties. "Our interests are incredibly aligned with publishers and authors," he said. "We see this as a virtuous cycle. The lower prices of used books allow people to experiment with authors and genres in ways they might not have otherwise.

"We definitely see people who buy at a lower price point come back and buy new books in that same genre," Mr. Greeley added.

Advanced Book Exchange, a Canadian company that sells books through its Web site, Abebooks.com, recently added new books to its offering of used titles. Executives said that the company's used-book sales were increasing 20 to 30 percent a year, reaching $110 million in the last 12 months. That figure includes sales in Canada and Europe, but 70 percent of online sales are to American customers.

Abebooks.com's number of used-book sellers has also jumped, to 12,000 from 8,000 two years ago, the company said. And the number of books available roughly doubled, to 55 million from 30 million, in the same period.

The company's chief executive, Hannes Blum, said he believed new-book sales might be even softer were it not for the used-books market. "We're increasing the demand for books over all," he said.

But Professor Greco of Fordham, who conducts publishing industry research on behalf of the Book Industry Study Group, said he was "absolutely convinced that used- book sales will ultimately cut into an industry that's not growing at all."

He said that when publishers began to study the impact of used books on their backlists - the roster of older paperback books that enjoy steady demand from students and the mass market - they would find signs of damage from the used-book sellers.

"Trade publishing houses live and die with their backlist revenues," Professor Greco said. "The thing is, when you've got 8,000 to 12,000 titles in your backlists, unless you monitor carefully you won't notice the blips, because they're small right now. Ultimately, though, they won't be."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/te...gy/12ecom.html


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Net Pirates Win War

Internet users download twice as many films, games and songs as they did a year ago, despite a big crackdown on the activity, according to a study this week. It estimates Net users worldwide freely exchange a staggering 10 petabytes - or 10 million gigabytes.
http://www.capeargus.co.za/index.php...icleId=2151477

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For Hackers, Shop Talk, a Warning and Advice
Nicholas Thompson

Stephen Wozniak, a founder of Apple Computer, was speaking to the choir Saturday at a conference in Midtown Manhattan, recalling an era when the word "hackers" referred to technological wizards, not rogue computer users.

His choir was a group of self-described hackers, about 2,000 of them, listening to Mr. Wozniak's keynote speech at the H.O.P.E. conference - Hackers on Planet Earth - put on by the hacker magazine 2600 News.

Mr. Wozniak described his relationship with John T. Draper, a man who became known as "Captain Crunch" 35 years ago when he showed how a plastic whistle that came in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes could be used to manipulate the national phone system.

Mr. Wozniak said he had not cared that the technology could save him a few dimes. Rather, he said, he found it wonderful that a simple tool, cleverly used, could control something complicated and powerful in a forbidden way.

In an interview before the speech, Mr. Wozniak, 53, lamented that people now "think of hackers as terrorists" and argued that this fear had caused the government to give undeservedly harsh punishments to violators of computer fraud statutes.

In his speech, Mr. Wozniak supported this argument by pointing out the many pranks he had pulled with his technical talents. For example, Mr. Wozniak said he once used his skills with the telephone system to place a free call to the pope.

Another trick Mr. Wozniak said he enjoyed was using a device that could jam and unjam television reception, manipulating it so that the image would become clear only when other people did strange things to their screens. He once did this to a college classmate until his target thought the only way to keep the picture focused was to place a hand on the center of the monitor and keep one foot propped up on a chair. The hacking that many people fear, Mr. Wozniak said, "is often just some kid trying to do something funny."

Much of the conference was focused on making arguments for less monitoring and control of computer networks by the government. Speakers stood at lecterns in front of large red posters declaring "Big Brother is watching you."

Many sessions aimed to help hackers improve their technical skills, like their ability to send encrypted e-mail messages. Other events focused on tools that could help secure computer systems or break into them. One workshop trained participants how to pick locks.

Many participants and speakers acknowledged that they had used their technical skills to violate the law. But they rationalized their actions, saying their main goal was to expose flaws in corporate computer systems to spur better data protection and thus privacy for everyone.

"We point out weak security," said Emmanuel Goldstein, the chief organizer of the conference.

Mr. Draper, 62, said, "If a hacker breaks into a company's system, and that system isn't properly secured, that company should be held liable."

Government authorities dispute the idea that hackers should set their own criteria for right and wrong and can justify violating the law by claiming service to a greater goal. A Justice Department Web page aimed at young hackers describes the punishment meted out to a hacker who had used the Internet to disrupt the phones at an airport and knock out service for 600 homes in Boston. "Hacking can get you in a whole lot more trouble than you think and is a completely creepy thing to do," the site warns.

But the illegality of hacking is also an attraction. "It's a game. You want to get into the best system, leave your mark," and then get out, said Jason Schorr, 18, from the Bronx.

"There's always an attraction to being naughty," said Robert Osband, a hacker from Florida who had, like Mr. Wozniak, learned his skills on the old phone system.

Like many older hackers, Mr. Wozniak reveled in his past exploits and warned young people intrigued by the dark possibilities of hacking to avoid doing harm, despite the temptation.

"There are two kinds of people here," said Mike Roadancer, the conference's head of security, while shuttling between two groups of hackers - one trying to break into the conference's computer network and the other trying to protect it. "There are the old-timers. A lot of those guys are running their own venture capital operations or have made millions in the security business. Then you have the ones I consider to be kids that just really need to be turned over somebody's knee."

Dave Walker, a 19-year-old hacker from Rochester, who sat with friends, all tapping at laptops, insisted that he was not one of the people attacking the conference network. But he did not deny that he might try later. "It's a hacker conference. At some point, you've got to try to hack the system," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/te...gy/12hack.html


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Schoolchildren To Be RFID-Chipped
Jo Best

The rights and wrongs of RFID-chipping human beings have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school.

The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids' movements.

The chips will be put onto kids' schoolbags, name tags or clothing in one Wakayama prefecture school. Denmark's Legoland introduced a similar scheme last month to stop young children going astray.

RFID is more commonly found in supermarket and other retailers' supply chains, however, companies are now seeking more innovative ways to derive value from the tracking technology. US airline Delta recently announced it would be using RFID to track travellers' luggage.
http://networks.silicon.com/lans/0,3...9122042,00.htm


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DMCA Hammer Comes Down On Tech Service Vendor
Jason Shultz

This just in: A district court in Boston has used the DMCA to grant a preliminary injunction against a third party service vendor who tried to fix StorageTek tape library backup systems for legitimate purchasers of the system.

How is this a DMCA violation? Well, it turns out that StorageTek allegedly uses some kind of algorithmic "key" to control access to its "Maintenance Code", the module that allows the service tech to debug the storage system. The court found that third party service techs who used the key without StorageTek's permission "circumvented" to gain access to the copyrighted code in violation of the DMCA, even though they had the explicit permission of the purchasers to fix their machines.

What does this ruling mean? If it stands up on appeal, it means StorageTek has a monopoly on service for all of its machines. No independent vendor will be able to compete with them for service contracts because no independent vendor will be authorized to "access" the maintenance code necessary to debug the machine.

The DMCA was meant to stop digital piracy, not inhibit legitimate competition in the computer services market. How many more markets will we allow this law to kill before someone fixes it?

p.s. The Court also found, in a bizarre twist of logic, that while it is legal to load a program into RAM for repairs, it's illegal to allow it to persist in RAM while you fix it. I don't even know where to begin with that one.
http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/2...ammer_com.html


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Prosecutors Try to Halt Web Speech Suit
David B. Caruso

Prosecutors have asked a judge to freeze a free speech lawsuit brought by a suburban Philadelphia Internet firm while a grand jury investigates whether the company distributed child pornography.

Voicenet Communications and a subsidiary, Omni Telecom, sued the state and two county district attorneys last winter after investigators seized computer servers that subscribers had been using to browse pictures posted on Usenet, a global network of electronic bulletin boards.

The Ivyland, Pa., firm said it had no control over Usenet content and little way of knowing whether customers were using its "QuikVue" search tool to find child porn. The suit said the state acted unconstitutionally in seizing the equipment and demanded its return.

A federal judge had planned to issue a key decision on the complaint last week, but Bucks County District Attorney Diane Gibbons stalled the decision with a July 2 letter that revealed that a grand jury had been convened and asked that all rulings in the civil case be stopped until the probe was finished.

Voicenet attorneys said in a court filing that the grand jury was "a charade, done for improper and vindictive purposes," and suggested it was convened for the sole purpose of derailing the civil case.

"This court cannot countenance, let alone reward the Bucks County district attorney for improperly manipulating the county investigating grand jury for her own purposes," the filing said.

U.S. District Judge Mary McLaughlin scheduled a hearing on the matter for Tuesday.

The skirmish is part of a larger battle over the legality of the government's attempts to regulate Internet porn.

Civil liberties groups have gone to court to block Pennsylvania from enforcing a law requiring Internet service providers to block customers from accessing Web sites containing child pornography - a task they say would force ISPs to slash access to thousands of legal sites.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month blocked a federal law that would have required operators of U.S.-based Web sites to verify the age of customers before allowing them access to sexually explicit content. The court ruled that the law hindered the free speech rights of adults.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Jul11.html


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How many IP lawyers does it take to screw a documentary?

How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary
Robert S. Boynton

The offices of Robert Greenwald Productions occupy a slightly rundown, horseshoe-shaped building in Los Angeles, just down the street from Culver Studios, the legendary movie facility where ''Gone With the Wind'' and ''Citizen Kane'' were filmed. Back in the day, the R.G.P. building, then a motel, was used by studio executives for liaisons with starlets and mistresses. Though no longer a Hollywood love nest, it still has a whiff of the illicit about it -- and still operates in the shadow of several corporate studios.

Robert Greenwald, a 58-year-old film producer and director with a number of commercially respectable B-list movies under his belt, has always tried to imbue his work with a left-leaning political sensibility. R.G.P. has been involved in the making of some 50 movies, including ''Steal This Movie,'' a 2000 film based on the life of the radical activist (and Greenwald's friend) Abbie Hoffman, and ''Crooked E,'' a satirical TV movie about Enron's collapse that CBS broadcast last year. Greenwald is presumably the only director in Hollywood to adorn his workspace with a quotation from Walt Whitman's ''Leaves of Grass'': ''The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots.''

One morning in late May, I visited Greenwald at his studio to watch the making of his latest documentary, ''Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism,'' which will have its premiere this Tuesday at the New School University in New York. Over the past couple of years, Greenwald has developed a ''guerrilla'' method of documentary filmmaking, creating timely political films on short schedules and small budgets and then promoting and selling them on DVD through partnerships with grass-roots political organizations like MoveOn.org. The process, in addition to being swift, allows him to avoid the problems of risk-averse studios and finicky distributors. His 2003 film ''Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War,'' a documentary that was critical of the Bush administration's drive to war, took only four and a half months from conception to completion, coming out on DVD last November as public doubts about the war began to grow.

''Outfoxed'' has been made in secret. The film is an obsessively researched expose of the ways in which Fox News, as Greenwald sees it, distorts its coverage to serve the conservative political agenda of its owner, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. It features interviews with former Fox employees, leaked policy memos written by Fox executives and extensive footage from Fox News, which Greenwald is using without the network's permission. The result is an unwavering argument against Fox News that combines the leftist partisan vigor of a Michael Moore film with the sober tone and delivery of a PBS special. A large portion of the film's $300,000 budget came in the form of contributions in the range of $80,000 from both MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, the liberal policy organization founded by John Podesta, the former chief of staff for Bill Clinton; Greenwald, who is not looking to earn any money from the project, provided the rest.

A week after its New School premiere, the film will be shown throughout the country in hundreds of small local screenings, arranged by MoveOn, where people will be able to watch and discuss it. Though the existence of ''Outfoxed'' has been quietly publicized, its particular nature and content have been closely guarded for fear, Greenwald says, that Fox would try to stop the film's release by filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit. Nobody has ever made a critical documentary about a media company that uses as much footage without permission as Greenwald has, and the legal precedents governing the ''fair use'' of such material, while theoretically strong, are not well established in case law. He has retained the services of several intellectual-property lawyers and experts to help him navigate the ambiguous legal terrain. (A Fox News representative, in response to several phone calls, said that no one in the legal department was available to comment on copyright issues.)

If Greenwald is lucky, Fox will be gun-shy, having earned nothing but public chiding when it brought a trademark lawsuit last year against Al Franken, whose book ''Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right'' ironically appropriated Fox News's signature phrase ''fair and balanced.'' (The judge dismissed the suit as ''wholly without merit.'') But if Fox does sue, the fate of Greenwald's film is uncertain. Dennis Reiff, an insurance broker who has helped underwrite legally sensitive documentaries like Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' and Morgan Spurlock's ''Super Size Me,'' says that typically ''even the mere threat of a lawsuit can stop a documentary in its tracks.'' Greenwald is optimistic but guarded. ''I want to make a great film,'' he says. ''But I'd like to do so without losing my house and spending the rest of my life in court.''

visitor to Greenwald's office could be forgiven for thinking that he had stumbled across a dot-com startup. It is a 24-hour-a-day operation, crammed with computers, monitors, cables, digital recorders, DVD-burners and high-bandwidth Internet lines. One morning when I arrived, a group of bleary-eyed filmmakers were finishing up their night's work and putting on a fresh pot of coffee for the day-shift editors, who were just trickling in.

''Outfoxed'' was made in an unusually collaborative fashion. In January, Greenwald rigged up a dozen DVD recorders and programmed them to record Fox News 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for about six months. After scrutinizing the initial footage, Greenwald and a team of researchers compiled a list of what they saw as Fox's telltale themes and techniques: stories questioning the patriotism of liberals; relentlessly upbeat reports on Iraq; belligerent hosts who scream at noncompliant guests. Greenwald planned for the list's categories eventually to become organizing sections of the film. As he envisioned it, the film clips grouped by theme, together with voice- overs and commentary, would lay bare Fox's tactics, frame by frame.

Once the list of categories was complete, Greenwald asked MoveOn to round up 10 volunteers, each of whom was assigned a particular time slot during the day to monitor Fox, so that the network's news stories or commentaries were under observation virtually 24 hours a day. When a MoveOn volunteer would spot an example of footage that fit one of Greenwald's categories, he would note the date and precise time and send the information in an e-mail message to Greenwald, who had an assistant code it and transfer it to a spreadsheet.

By May, Greenwald had received enough examples to construct a rough outline of the film. He then hired five editors -- politically passionate filmmakers who can command up to $1,000 a day for TV commercials and movie trailers but who accepted $150 a day for the chance to work on the project. In the evenings, two editors would consult Greenwald's spreadsheets and locate the flagged footage in his vast library of Fox News segments. During the day, the three other editors worked simultaneously on separate parts of the movie, stitching together a coherent narrative from the Fox clips as well as interviews that Greenwald conducted with former Fox employees (some of them disguised to protect their identities) and commentators like the former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite and the liberal media critics Mark Crispin Miller and Eric Alterman. At the end of each day, the editors posted their work on a secure Web site for Greenwald's review.

It is not exactly earth-shattering, of course, to learn that Fox is more conservative than other news networks. What ''Outfoxed'' does is detail the specific ways, both onscreen and behind the scenes, in which the network's conservatism shapes its news and opinion programs. The most stinging blow that ''Outfoxed'' delivers to Fox's ''fair and balanced'' claim comes in a segment of the film on the daily memos apparently sent to the entire Fox news operation by John Moody, Fox News's senior vice president for news and editorial. The memos, which Greenwald says were provided by two unnamed employees at the network, set the agenda for how events will be covered. One memo, thought to have been circulated at Fox in April, instructs employees how to report on the increasing number of American fatalities in Iraq: ''Do not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of U.S. lives,'' it reads. Another memo outlines the approach to covering the United States military's siege on Falluja: ''It won't be long before some people start to decry the use of 'excessive force,''' it says. ''We won't be among that group.'' A third, on the 9/11 Commission, is equally firm: ''The fact that former Clinton and both former and current Bush administration officials are testifying gives it a certain tension, but this is not 'what did he know and when did he know it' stuff,'' it cautions. ''Do not turn this into Watergate.''

Greenwald is pleased with the finished product. ''I wanted to use Fox's own words and images to show exactly what they do,'' he says. ''Fox is a Republican, not merely a conservative, network.''

The walls and bookshelves of Greenwald's office testify to his longstanding passion for liberal and left-wing causes: a photo of Coretta Scott King; a ''Free Leonard Peltier'' poster; books by Robert McChesney, the left-leaning media critic. Greenwald got hooked on making documentaries in 2000, when two filmmakers, Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler, came to him with hundreds of hours of film they had shot during the Florida recount. With his help, they produced ''Unprecedented,'' a 2002 documentary about how the Bush campaign prevailed in that contest.

Last year, Greenwald followed up that effort with ''Uncovered,'' his critique of the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq, which featured interviews with former intelligence analysts, weapons inspectors and Foreign Service officers. Once the film wrapped, Greenwald turned the traditional distribution model on its head. Rather than taking the time-consuming route of entering film festivals or courting theater distributors, he sold the DVD of ''Uncovered'' through the Web sites of various left-liberal organizations: MoveOn, The Nation magazine, the Center for American Progress and the alternative-news Web sites AlterNet and BuzzFlash. After about 23,000 orders in the first two days, the courtyard of the R.G.P. building was filled with stacks of DVD's waiting to be mailed out. When the number of orders hit 100,000, Greenwald enlisted a commercial distributor, which sold an additional 20,000 copies.

The populist MoveOn and the more centrist Center for American Progress collaborated with Greenwald on ''Uncovered.'' Both sensed that film was becoming an important medium for disseminating their anti-Bush, antiwar messages -- different though the organization's politics are -- and both provided financial support and helped spread the word. Podesta says that this kind of multimedia, multiorganization project is an effective way of reaching a younger demographic, which policy groups traditionally have difficulty courting. ''Given the choice between sponsoring a policy book that nobody reads and a documentary that sells 100,000 copies and is seen all over the country,'' he says, ''I'll opt for the latter.'' In the first half of what Greenwald calls his ''upstairs-downstairs'' distribution model, Podesta saw to it that every member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives was invited to a screening of ''Uncovered''; the Center for American Progress also sponsored additional screenings at other elite institutions in Washington and Cambridge, Mass.

Meanwhile, ''downstairs,'' MoveOn alerted its 2.2 million members to the film and sponsored about 2,600 ''house parties'' on the night that ''Uncovered'' was released. From Anchorage to Boston, people plugged their ZIP code into MoveOn's Web site, located the nearest party and watched and discussed the film with a few dozen of their fellow citizens.

Lawrence Konner, a screenwriter and producer whose production company, the Documentary Campaign, made ''Persons of Interest,'' a film about Muslim detainees in the United States, says that ''Uncovered'' ''demonstrated to the rest of us that there was a new way of marketing a documentary.'' The film's grass-roots success attracted a distributor, Cinema Libre, which took it to Cannes and sold it all over the world. A new version with additional material is scheduled for theatrical release in the United States on Aug. 13.

Greenwald's office is now a veritable progressive-documentary incubator: future projects include a brief film for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and ''Unconstitutional,'' a movie about post-9/11 civil liberties violations that is supported by the A.C.L.U. Some in the entertainment industry argue that the collaboration between Greenwald and his political partners promises a new paradigm -- one in which Hollywood entertainers contribute their skills to a political cause rather than just their cash and left-leaning pieties. ''It used to be that the only time political people came to Hollywood was to go to parties and raise money,'' says Julie Bergman Sender, who has produced films like ''G.I. Jane'' and made short issue-advocacy films for political groups like America Coming Together, the grass-roots organization backed by George Soros. ''But now we're showing them that we can do more than write checks.''

Jim Gilliam, a 26-year-old former dot-com executive and a producer of ''Outfoxed,'' is enthusiastic about the way Greenwald's projects meld grass-roots politics with the culture of the Internet. He predicts a future -- augured by events like MoveOn's competition for the best 30-second anti-Bush advertisement -- in which young political filmmakers will be as likely to wield a camera phone as a digital camera. ''It won't be long before people will be shooting and editing short documentaries that they'll stream from their blogs,'' he says. If the Internet, as media critics like Jon Katz have suggested, has resuscitated the fiery journalistic spirit of Thomas Paine, guerrilla documentaries offer to put that polemical attitude in the director's chair.

wo weeks before production for ''Outfoxed'' had to lock so that it would be ready for its July 13 premiere, the atmosphere at the meeting in Greenwald's office was somewhat giddy, the staff burned out from late nights and seven-day workweeks. Greenwald lightened the mood by passing out ''Faux News Channel'' T-shirts (''We Distort, You Comply'') that were sent to him by someone who wants to distribute ''Outfoxed.'' Good news came over the speakerphone from a woman clearing rights for the movie: Eric Clapton had granted permission to use ''Layla'' at no charge -- his generosity said to be inspired by his dislike of Rupert Murdoch. (Don Henley, no stranger to liberal causes, has granted permission for ''Dirty Laundry'' to accompany a sequence in the film on the birth of Fox News.)

''O.K., we have only 16 days, so what's left?'' Greenwald asked. It turned out to be a lot. Sound editing, color correction, mixing. Video was still being downloaded as the editors looked for material to fill narrative gaps in the film; many segments were still in rough shape. Then there was the fact that several major news organizations were unexpectedly refusing to license their clips. (Such licensing is ordinarily pro forma.) CBS wouldn't sell Greenwald the clip of Richard Clarke's appearance on ''60 Minutes,'' explaining that it didn't want to be associated with a controversial documentary about Murdoch. WGBH, the Boston PBS station, wouldn't let Greenwald use excerpts from ''Frontline'' for fear of looking too ''political,'' it said.

Greenwald argues that this represents precisely the kind of corporate control of public information that he and his legal team want to challenge by strengthening the right to fair use -- the legal principle that allows you to use copyrighted material without permission for purposes of commentary, criticism or parody. Despite the principle's self- evident logic -- consider the impossible position of a critic forbidden to quote from the book he is reviewing -- it is murky in practice, and nowhere more so than in film. Part of the problem is that while a fair-use claim might stand a good chance of prevailing in court, as a practical matter the high costs of litigation force most filmmakers to simply remove the material in question.

The legal strategy for ''Outfoxed'' was still being devised by Greenwald's legal team, which includes the Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and Chris Sprigman, a fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. Lessig and Sprigman were deciding whether it would be most advantageous to go through the motions of asking Fox for permission (which it would very likely refuse), to release the film and wait to see whether Fox would sue or to ask a judge to rule on their claims right away by issuing a so-called declaratory judgment.

Glancing around the office, Greenwald took in the news of the various permission setbacks and other loose ends with a weary look. He made it clear to the staff that they would all be working on Memorial Day, and every day after that until June 21, when the film locked. ''Let's just go out there and make the perfect movie,'' he said as he sent the team back to their editing docks, ''and we'll figure out what we'll actually be able to use later on.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/magazine/11FOX.html


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Geolocation Tech Slices, Dices The Web
AP

Type ``dentist'' into Google from New York, and you'll get ads for dentists in the city. Try watching a Cubs baseball game from a computer in Chicago, and you'll be stymied. Pre-existing local TV rights block the webcast.

The same technology is also being used by a British casino to keep out the Dutch and by online movie distributors to limit viewing to where it's permitted by license, namely the United States.

The World Wide Web experience is becoming less and less worldwide: What you see and what you are allowed to do these days can depend greatly on where and even who you are.

As so-called geolocation technology improves, Web sites are increasingly blocking groups of visitors and carving the Web into smaller chunks -- in some cases, down to a ZIP code or employer.

To privacy advocates like Jason Catlett, that technology can detect users' whereabouts isn't the most disturbing aspect of this trend. Rather, it's the fear that Web sites will try to mislead visitors.

A company, for instance, might show different prices when competitors visit; a political candidate might highlight crime-fighting in one area, jobs in another.

``The technical possibilities do allow a company to be two-faced or even 20-faced based on who they think is visiting,'' Catlett said.

Alan Davidson, associate director for the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, worries that governments will try to employ the technology to enforce their laws within artificial borders they erect. Such concerns, not entirely new, have grown with the technology's reliability, he said.

A French court considered geolocation when it directed Yahoo Inc. in 2000 to prevent French Internet users from seeing Nazi paraphernalia on its auction pages. America Online Inc. sees geolocation as one way to comply with the French Nazi ban as well as a Pennsylvania child porn law.

But for the most part, any online restrictions appear to come from commercial companies, not governments. (China and other countries that censor the Internet use filtering technologies rather than geolocation.)

In the past few months, RealNetworks Inc. began offering soccer games and movies restricted to specific countries while Art.com coded its Web site so Americans automatically see prices in dollars, Germans in euros.

Google Inc., which already had redirected foreign visitors to country-specific home pages, expanded geolocation in April to let merchants target ads by city or distance from a given address.

Here's how geolocation works:

Each computer on the Internet has a unique numeric address akin to a phone number. It's generally assigned to the user's Internet service provider, a university or a company, and a database matches such assignments to the location the network has registered.

But a company's addresses may all be registered to headquarters, though it has branch offices worldwide. An ISP like America Online may route its customers' traffic through a single gateway, making AOL users in California appear to come from Virginia.

So companies like Digital Envoy Inc., Quova Inc. and Akamai Technologies Inc. refine that database, tracing data packets as they zip through ``traffic cops'' known as routers, thus narrowing the actual location of each address.

``It requires a lot of rolling up your sleeves and learning very deeply how do various carriers work, how AT&T sets up its network, how that's different from Level 3 and EarthLink,'' said Tom Miltonberger, a senior vice president at Quova.

Digital Envoy overlays data on Fortune 500 companies and their industries, so Web sites can target ads, say, to high-tech personnel. It also marries ZIP codes with census data to create demographic profiles.

Far from splitting the Web, geolocation's proponents say, the technology makes the Internet more meaningful to a global audience. AOL can distribute Web traffic more efficiently, while MSNBC.com is thinking of customizing news by time zones.

And the technology permits sports leagues and movie studios to offer content they would otherwise keep offline because of territorial licensing restrictions.

Advocates counter the privacy concerns by arguing that geolocation alone cannot identify specific users.

Still, there are skeptics.

SuperPages.com dropped the technology because it made incorrect assumptions about visitor interest, said Darrin Rayner, vice president of e-commerce sales.

Someone in Chicago, for instance, may prefer flower shops in New York to send flowers there.

And video of the Olympic Games largely remains off the Internet, though NBC will be permitted to provide highlights within the United States during the Aug. 13-29 games in Athens.

The major geolocation companies claim accuracy of 80 percent or more for city-level data and 99 percent for country targeting, though the figures are misleading because they generally exclude the addresses known to cause trouble.

AOL still poses problems, as do anonymizing services designed specifically to hide a user's true identity and location. Dial-up users also can call another state or country to connect.

``This service isn't meant (for) people are who trying to be evasive,'' said Andy Champagne, Akamai's director of network analytics. ``It's meant for the 99 percent of the general public who are just at home surfing.''

Problematic addresses are often flagged, so Web sites can assess how much credence to give. RealNetworks, for instance, often rejects all anonymizer traffic and may ask AOL subscribers to provide additional verification. Google won't deliver targeted ads at all when location is in doubt.

Sportingbet PLC, a British gambling outfit that blocks users from the Netherlands to comply with Dutch laws, invites visitors to report mistakes, but chief executive Nigel Payne isn't aware of anyone ever doing so.

Jim Ramo, chief executive of movie distributor Movielink LLC, said studios were aware of the shortcomings going in and have grown more confident now that the system has been shown to work.

``The laws for copyright and licensing and the business rules are different in every country, so it's important the content providers be given a facilitating technology,'' Ramo said. ``We're beginning to prove that we can do that.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/9119094.htm


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Amsterdam Appeals Court Upholds Decision Requiring ISP To Disclose Personal Data
Joe Figueiredo

The Appeals Court of Amsterdam has largely upheld the verdict by a judge at the District Court of Haarlem on 11 September, 2003, against Lycos, in which the internet service provider (ISP) is required to disclose personal data on one of Lycos’ subscribers to a third-party.

The case - brought by Augustinus Bernard Maria Pessers, who claimed that a Lycos subscriber had treated him unlawfully - and the court’s ruling have deep implications over individuals’ privacy and their right to voice their opinion anonymously.

Mr Pessers, a lawyer in the Dutch city of Tilburg, who also trades in postage stamps on the auction portal, E-bay, was accused of fraud by a Lycos subscriber, who published Mr Pesser’s name on his website and provided an e-mail address for anyone to report fraudulent incidents they felt Mr Pessers had committed.

Mr Pessers subsequently demanded that Lycos shut down the site - which it did - and reveal the personal data of the subscriber in question - which it refused to do, and so was taken to court.

Although the Appeals Court acknowledged that Lycos was not directly in a position to determine whether the content on the website in question was unlawful, the court nevertheless felt that it would be against the common interest were Mr Pessers denied the opportunity to confront the website’s publisher.

Explaining its ruling, the court said that it weighed the interest of the ISP and its subscriber against that of the third-party (Pessers), and also considered whether Pessers had a genuine interest in this information and whether there were other, less-intrusive means of obtaining the information.

“The consequence of this ruling is that ISPs will be less cautious about providing third parties with personal details. After all, the provider can be held liable,” said internet lawyer, Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm,

Perhaps even more disturbing, this ruling also increases the chances of groups, such as the music industry’s anti-piracy organisation, Brein, requesting personal information on music-file downloaders.
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=2295


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Miami Herald Drops Pursuit Of Yahoo e-mailers
AP

The Miami Herald has dropped a court petition it filed demanding that Internet provider Yahoo Inc. reveal identities of three subscribers accused of sending e-
mails to the newspaper's employees containing ``malicious and defamatory statements'' about its management.

The Herald filed for dismissal June 25, a month after seeking the identities of the three people who sent e-mails to its employees between January 2002 and March of this year.

Herald general counsel Robert Beatty would not say whether the paper learned the identities.

``We're very satisfied with the outcome. ... The matter is over,'' he said Wednesday.

He did say that since filing the petition in Circuit Court in Miami, no similar e-mails have been received.

One of the e-mails was titled ``stupid management tricks'' and referred to a management employee as a ``Psycho,'' the original filing alleged.

Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako declined comment Wednesday.

Yahoo does not disclose personal information without a subscriber's permission unless it is responding to a court order, among other reasons, according to its Web site.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/9153968.htm


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Apple Sells 100 Millionth Download
Matt Hines

Apple Computer reported Monday that its iTunes online digital music service crested 100 million downloads late Sunday. The milestone, which the company had been anticipating for several weeks, was achieved when 20-year- old Kevin Britten of Kansas downloaded the song "Somersault," performed by the band Zero7. As part of a promotion run by Apple, Britten will receive one of the company's 17-inch PowerBook notebook computers, along with a 40GB iPod digital media player and a gift certificate for 10,000 free downloads from iTunes.

The iTunes service, which launched roughly 14 months ago and clocked 70 million song downloads in its first year, continues to grow rapidly in the United States and around the globe. Consumers pay Apple 99 cents per song for most iTunes tracks. In June, Apple launched iTunes in Europe and sold more than 800,000 songs during the service's first week in business.
http://news.com.com/2110-1027_3-5265418.html


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Tech, Hollywood Heavyweights Create Content Coalition
John Borland

Consumers might soon be able to make legal copies of high-definition movies, if a new coalition of media companies can reach agreement.

Several high-profile technology companies and movie studios are expected to announce Wednesday that they have formed an alliance to ensure that high-definition video and other content cannot be pirated in home networks. In doing so, the group may also lay the groundwork for the legal copying of such content.

Sources familiar with the group's formation said the initial members include IBM, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Warner Bros., Walt Disney and Panasonic. The announcement is scheduled to be made at the cross- industry Content Protection Technology Working Group (CPTWG) meeting in Los Angeles, although last-minute membership changes could occur before then.

The alliance marks the culmination of years of tentative and often suspicious contact between the high-tech industry and Hollywood. It will be aimed at developing specifications to protect copyrighted content such as movies inside home networks. If the group is successful, a consumer might be able to download a high-definition movie, store it on a PC, watch it on a television and transfer it to a mobile device to watch while traveling.

Currently, differing formats and copy-protection schemes make this an arduous, if not illegal, task. Indeed, many technologies are being deliberately disabled (such as Firewire ports on some high-definition satellite boxes) because of piracy fears.

Despite the inclusion of some tech and content heavyweights, to be successful many hurdles will need to be overcome. Most importantly are the differing goals of the two main camps. Tech companies have much to gain from the digitization of the living room and want consumers to be able to perform a wide variety of tasks with digital content. Companies that produce movies and music want make sure that people are buying the content and not simply watching pirated material, a la Napster.

In addition, the details will likely to take some time to hammer out. As a result, rapid changes in technology could mean the target is constantly moving. For example, portable video players that store content on hard disks as opposed to DVDs are just now reaching the market.

To many companies, the home network of the future would connect a variety of computers, monitors, recording devices and consumer electronics devices located throughout a house. Content, whether movies music, games or other software, would no longer be tied to a single machine or type of device.

At trade shows such as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, executives have demonstrated applications such as watching the beginning of a movie on a living TV and then finishing it on bedroom TV. Much of the core technology to make that happen now exists, but content owners have to be comfortable that those kinds of digital hand-offs aren't a point where pirates can break in an make copies, executives say.

"We have to be careful about all the boundaries between these devices, the different user interfaces, (and) the complexity," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said in his keynote speech at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "A particular challenge here is making sure that we strike the right balance in managing digital rights and yet having the simplicity that you can move the content that you paid for around and have it available in the richest possible way--a very tough problem."

Hollywood companies in particular have long been suspicious of the technology industry, since it has been their computers, disc-burners and applications such as file-sharing programs that have helped create an explosion of casual copying and professional piracy.

Several rounds of often inconclusive meetings on the issue took place in 2001 and 2002. In late 2002, Microsoft, Sony and Intel formed a group to resolve consumer electronics standards, with one of its goals being to come up with a way to transfer files.

In his January CES speech, Intel President Paul Otellini said the suspicion had begun to thaw in earnest during 2003. During the speech, executives from Sony Entertainment, Disney and other companies pledged via videotaped statements to cooperate with Intel and others in coming up with better standards for transferring entertainment over the Web.

In several meetings over the past year, "we showed them (the film industry as a whole) that we are not about driving rampant piracy," Otellini said in a January interview.

Other recent cooperative strides have been made. Hollywood studios and some technology companies worked closely together creating the "broadcast flag," a bit of code that will be added to digital TV signals to block copies of shows from being put on the Internet.

Studios have put some movies online that are protected by Microsoft's digital rights management, accessible through services including Movielink and CinemaNow. Microsoft and Disney also struck a wide-ranging deal focusing on content protection earlier this year.

Tech companies have also been focusing specifically on the home networking problems for some time.

IBM has been working on a own home networking security system called extensible content protection, or xCP. Intel, working through the "5C" Consortium, has helped develop a technology called Digital Transmission Content Protection, which helps protect, compress, and move video between different points in a home network.

Both Warner and Sony have previously endorsed that technology.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5268315.html


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Microsoft's Ballmer Slams Open Source
Simon Avery

In a spirited and thunderous address, the head of Microsoft Corp. admitted that the company has much more work to do to improve software security, even as it rolled out several new products and strategies for combatting software viruses, which are attacking global information systems with greater frequency and sophistication.

“We're not perfect, we're not where we need to be, but we have velocity and purpose,” Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft, told several thousand people at a conference in Toronto.

Speaking for more than an hour, Mr. Ballmer also launched an impassioned attack on open-source software, tried to answer concerns about the long wait for the next Microsoft operating system, and fingered software that helps run small businesses as a multibillion-dollar growth opportunity.

Microsoft's latest security efforts include an appliance called an Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) server that plugs into a network of computers to guard against attack. The company also said it plans to add a feature to its Windows Server 2003 that will block infected computers from connecting to a network and spreading a virus. The product, called Network Access Protection, should ship next year, Mike Nash, a vice-president of security, told the conference.

Microsoft has also streamlined the process of issuing updates that fix flaws in products already bought by customers. The number of people using Microsoft's automatic update for Windows surged by 400 per cent during the past 10 months, Mr. Nash said.

Along with security issues, one of the largest concerns for the Redmond, Wash.-based company is the competitive threat from open-source products, such as the freely available Linux operating system. Mr. Ballmer told the audience of hardware, software and consulting companies that resell Microsoft's products that the only way they can make money today is to partner with commercial software firms.

“Technology innovation has happened much, much more from commercial software developers than from open source,” he said, adding that big companies also have marketing muscle and resources to support their products. “Who's going to stand up and support open source? At least, with us, it's clear who you have to come and pound down on. There's a clear line of responsibility.”

In a scripted question-and-answer session, some participants wanted to know whether the company's much publicized courtship with SAP AG, the German business software giant, meant Microsoft was looking to overhaul its line of business management software. Nothing about the merger discussions, which eventually fell through, should be taken as a mark against Microsoft's existing business management software, Mr. Ballmer said.

Partners also wanted information about the timeline for Microsoft's next operating system, Longhorn, and advice on how to ease the expensive transition from one platform to the next.

Mr. Ballmer said the road to improvement will be “lumpy” and admitted “these lumps are disruptive to our partners.” Microsoft is not ready to provide a shipping date on Longhorn yet, he said.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...rint/Business/


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Aussie Pirate Closer To Extradition
AAP

AN Australian man accused of running a worldwide, multi-million-dollar software piracy network is a step closer to being extradited to the United States after a brief hearing in a Sydney court.

A local court magistrate yesterday backed a ruling from the Australian Federal Court that Hew Raymond Griffiths, of Berkeley Vale on the NSW central coast, should be extradited to the US to stand trial.

Griffiths, 41, lost a Federal Court battle against the US government and now faces extradition for illegally copying software, music and games.

Unless he appeals against the decision within 15 days of the July 7 ruling, he will become the first person in Australia to be extradited to the US under copyright law.

He was last week ordered to remain at Silverwater Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre until the appeal period expires.

US authorities allege he was the ringleader of an internet group, "DrinkOrDie", which illegally copied and distributed more than $50 million worth of pirated software, movies, games and music before investigators raided the them in 2001.

Griffiths faces two charges, one of conspiracy to violate US copyright laws and one of criminal copyright infringement.

If found guilty, he faces a maximum sentence of 10 years jail and a fine of up to $US500,000 ($690,000).

In a brief hearing at Central Local Court, magistrate Allan Moore backed the decision by Federal Court Justice Peter Jacobson to remand Griffiths in custody.

"(Griffiths) does not satisfy me that there are substantial grounds for believing that there is an extradition objection in relation to the following offences," Mr Moore told the court.

He went on to say Griffiths "is eligible for surrender to the United States".

The appeal period is due to expire on July 22.
http://australianit.news.com.au/comm...E15306,00.html


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Ding-dong – the witch ain’t dead

Suit Against Napster Backers OK

A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday denied motions to dismiss lawsuits claiming past Napster investors like Bertelsmann AG and venture capital firm Hummer Winblad kept the song-swap site going, costing the music industry $17 billion in lost sales.

In her ruling on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel, who issued an injunction against the original Napster in 2000, permitted the case to proceed through its discovery phase, saying the plaintiffs, including music publishers, songwriters and record labels, had the right to try to prove their allegations.

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 the focus of the suits that claim that German media company Bertelsmann's $90 million investment in Napster in 2000 kept it operating eight months longer than it would have otherwise.

In addition to the Bertelsmann case, Vivendi Universal's Universal Music and EMI Group also sued Hummer Winblad, claiming the venture capital firm's $15 million investment and installation of a chief executive at Napster in 2000 also promoted piracy.

"Plaintiffs' allegations that defendants exercised full operational control over Napster during periods in which Napster remained a conduit for infringing activity may be wholly unfounded.... Regardless, such questions must be left for resolution upon motions for summary judgment or at trial," Patel wrote in her 14-page ruling.

In response, Bruce Rich, a lawyer for Bertelsmann, said, "Our position remains that those allegations are not factually true and will be disproven through the discovery process.

"And at the end of the process, we anticipate seeking summary dismissal of the lawsuit as this opinion invites us to do at the appropriate time," Rich added.

Record label EMI applauded the decision.

"We are pleased with Judge Patel's decision today. EMI stands firm in its belief that we have a strong case," said Jeanne Meyer, a spokeswoman for EMI Group.

"By investing both millions of dollars and management resources in Napster, which was an illegal enterprise built on the unlawful distribution of copyrighted works, Bertelsmann and Hummer Winblad enabled and encouraged the wholesale theft of copyrighted music," she said.

Attorneys for Hummer Winblad were unavailable for comment. A lawyer for music publishers was also not available.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64219,00.html


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Films 'Fuel Online File-Sharing'
BBC

File-sharing is booming, with people downloading millions of files despite efforts by the entertainment industry to stop the practice, say experts.

Films and other files larger than 100MB are becoming the most requested downloads on networks around the world, said UK net analysts CacheLogic.

It measures peer-to-peer traffic on the networks of internet service providers

It estimates that at least 10 million people are logged on to a peer-to-peer (P2P) network at any time.

Alive and well

"Video has overtaken music," CacheLogic founder and chief technology officer Andrew Parker told BBC News Online.

The firm has come up with its picture of file-sharing by inspecting activity deep in the network rather than just at the ports.

It found that file-sharing is very much alive and well, despite claims from the music industry that it is declining.

P2P is the largest consumer of data on ISP's networks, significantly outweighing web traffic and every year costing an estimated £332 million globally, according to CacheLogic.

In the sphere of music, traditionally assumed to account for the vast majority of file-sharing, it is no longer about the big guns such as Kazaa, which has declined in popularity since being targeted by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).

File-swappers have moved their attention to other peer-to-peer software, such as Bittorrent.

While the FastTrack network (which carries Kazaa ) still accounts for 24% of all P2P traffic, the lesser known Bittorrent and eDonkey together account for 72% of file-sharing, according to CacheLogic's report.

The idea that P2P is all about MP3 files is a myth, said CacheLogic.

It found that the majority of the traffic comes from files over 100MB in size, suggesting that net users are as likely to download larger movie, software and game files as they are the smaller MP3s.

On the release of one major Hollywood blockbuster, 30% of the P2P traffic at one ISP came from a single 600MB file.

"The growth is away from music. There is a new chairman coming to the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and he will probably be very aggressive," said a spokesman for CacheLogic.

Painful experience

The MPAA recently suggested that one in four net users downloaded movies and it has warned that the extent of film piracy online looks set to increase as people switch to broadband.

According to research firm Jupiter, 15% of European P2P users download one full length movie each month. In Spain, the number jumps to 38%.

"There will be a ramping up of activity from the MPAA but there will also be lessons learnt from the RIAA's approach and I don't expect anything so heavy-handed as that," said Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan.

He is not convinced that video downloads will take over from music at any time soon.

"I would be very surprised if movie downloads were the dominant form of file-sharing. This is largely because downloading is quite a painful experience for anyone with less than one megabit of bandwidth," he said.

It is also a question of convenience. Music files, being so much smaller, are easier to store on hard drives.

Music downloading is becoming an ingrained cultural norm for young people, who see it as an easy way of building up their collection.

"There is a whole generation of file-sharers growing up with no concept of music as a paid-for commodity," he said.

"Having said that, file-sharing remains a challenge to music, movie and TV industries alike," he added.

Killer app

Blame for the peer-to-peer problem, which is weighing down the networks of internet service providers, is often put at the feet of a few heavy users.

But over one month, a single one of CacheLogic's measurement tools, observed 3.5 million unique IP addresses.

"Peer-to-peer is the killer application of broadband," said Mr Parker.

"It has global use, never sleeps and has no geographical barriers."

Free software is often distributed via peer to peer networks and content providers, including the BBC, are considering using P2P protocols to distribute content.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm


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New Browser Super Charges Internet Explorer

Deepnet Technologies announces the launch of Deepnet Explorer, a powerful Web, P2P and News browser that allows users to surf the web faster, share and download files on the Gnutella P2P network, and view the latest RSS news and weblogs.
Press Release

Deepnet Explorer seamlessly integrates three web technologies into one application: web browsing, P2P file sharing and RSS news reader.

The Web browser allows users to view multiple web pages with its tabbed interface and it has a collection of innovative features that increase web browsing productivity, such as the pop-up blocker, direct search, keyword navigation, auto login, form filler, multiple start pages, mouse gestures, super drag and drop and more.

Deepnet Explorer’s built-in peer-to-peer file sharing technology enables the user to browse the web while sharing and downloading files on the Gnutella P2P network in the background. Users can search for different file formats including audio, video and documents.

The browser also has a built in news reader that allows the user to subscribe to and receive RSS or ATOM news and weblogs. A useful feature is the News filter which blocks unwanted news or adverts. The news reader is integrated with popular RSS search engines which makes it easy to find and subscribe to news.

Deepnet Explorer is a new generation browser that allows the user to easily browse the web, share files and read news simultaneously.

For more information or to download Deepnet Explorer visit http://www.Deepnetexplorer.com/

The product is free contains no Adware, Spyware or any 3rd party software.

About Deepnet Technologies
Deepnet Technologies a UK based company, dedicated to building advanced browser technology providing access to deep contents on the Internet.
http://www.e-consultancy.com/newsfea...-explorer.html


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John Paczkowski

RIAA to tech advisers: See what you can find out about this BitTorrent thing:

Back in January, the Pew Internet & American Life Project and comScore Media Metrix released a report claiming the number of people swapping music files online had declined dramatically since the Recording Industry Association of America began suing people who illegally trade copyrighted music online. At the time, I questioned Pew's methods, wondering why they sampled only four peer-to-peer applications -- Kazaa, WinMX, BearShare and Grokster -- each of them known to be heavily monitored by the RIAA. Shouldn't they have sampled BitTorrent, eDonkey and eMule as well (see "BitTorrent users chuckling over Pew peer-to-peer report") . Turns out I was right to do so. According to a CacheLogic survey of peer-to-peer network traffic, BitTorrent has eclipsed Kazaa as the most popular P2P protocol worldwide. It currently accounts for about 53 percent of actual peer-to-peer network traffic. That same survey also found that P2P traffic has not been declining, as some would have us believe. "The overall level of file sharing has increased," said Andrew Parker, CacheLogic's founder and chief technology officer. "Users have migrated from Kazaa onto BitTorrent."

RIAA -- The A's are for "asinine":

Corante's Ernest Miller has written a fantastic send-up/ deconstruction of an RIAA letter defending the astonishingly asinine INDUCE Act (see "Won't someone please think of the entertainment cart ... I mean children"). It's long, but well worth a read if you've got a few spare moments. Here's a sample:

In our business, the hits are what allow investment in genres that do not accumulate great sales, such as jazz, classical, bluegrass, and the blues. [What a bunch of philanthropists the RIAA is. They take their profits and invest them in less popular genres out of the goodness of their hearts. God bless 'em!] By decimating the sale of hits, online piracy has devastated investment in an entire industry and in the development of great future cultural contributions. [You know, because the freedom of the Internet hasn't led to any great cultural contributions or anything. The Internet is just one big wasteland, devoid of culture.] Some have suggested P2P drives sales - - or has little impact on sales. And pigs fly. The absurdity of that notion is made plain by the sales pattern of "hits." If you can get something for free, without consequence, buying it becomes less attractive. It's as simple as that. [Thank you Mr. Empirical Economist. Things aren't actually that simple. If they were, the RIAA would already be out of business. There is data for both sides of the argument and it isn't really clear where things are headed. After all, why did sales increase recently, if it were "as simple as that."]
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...sv/9162156.htm


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P2P Gets Serious

Two significant developments in peer-to-peer (P2P) networking have come to light, courtesy of a new product announcement by CacheLogic Ltd., a U.K. startup offering appliances to analyze and manage P2P traffic on ISP networks (see CacheLogic Launches P2P Analyzer).

First, another generation of protocols, headed by BitTorrent, has exploded onto the P2P scene this year, displacing older file sharing services such as KaZaA.
Second, powerful commercial applications for P2P technology are emerging. The companies that stand to reap the biggest benefits include those that are still struggling to stifle P2P because of its use in copyright pirating.

These developments have been identified in a global survey of P2P traffic patterns conducted between January and June of this year. The survey was organized by CacheLogic, which got a number of early customers (Tier 1 and 2 ISPs) to install its new appliance, the Streamsight 510, on their networks (more about the Streamsight 510 in a separate story).

The chart below shows how BitTorrent traffic has doubled, from 26 to 53 percent of the overall traffic surveyed between January and June of this year, according to CacheLogic's figures. FastTrack traffic (the protocol used by the KaZaA file sharing service) shrunk from 46 to 19 percent over the same time period.

As noted, BitTorrent is leading a bunch of new-generation P2P protocols that use a process called swarming to distribute files. Under this scheme, the files are broken into pieces so that a user can download parts of, say, a movie, from multiple locations at the same time, which speeds things up.

A central directory tells the user's software where it can find the different bits of the file, but the user is forced to download the least prevalent piece of the file first, and to offer it for download by other users. In that way, many more people end up offering files for download than with older P2P protocols such as FastTrack, where many people download files but don't offer them to others.

The bottom line is that files become available for download more quickly, in addition to the downloads themselves being faster overall, even though they start slowly.

A growing number of companies are now beginning to realize that P2P systems such as BitTorrent could offer an inexpensive way of distributing large files, such as movies and software packages, to mass audiences. It's simply not practical to have everybody download such files from a central server, because the bandwidth requirements (and, hence, the cost) would be enormous. Chopping up the files and having customers pass them around among themselves until they've collected a full set, avoids this.

One example of this is the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which is conducting a trial among its staff of something called the "Interactive Media Player" using BitTorrent technology. The IMP enables users to download TV or radio programs and play them on their PCs for up to a week after they've been broadcast. It incorporates some digital rights management software that kills the file when it's a week old.

If the internal trial is considered a success, a public trial will start in August. The eventual service will be free of charge. One reason the BBC is doing this is so that it can stay in control of digital rights. If it didn't do it, then people might start recording and distributing TV programs illegally, says a BBC spokesperson.

Another example of companies using BitTorrent for commercial use is cited in a June 26 article by the New Scientist magazine. It says Linspire, a company selling a Linux-based alternative to Microsoft Windows, has halved the price of its software for people that download it over BitTorrent. The magazine article cites Linspire's CEO saying it's enabled the company to serve a lot more customers and slash its distribution costs.

The use of BitTorrent appears to have caught on fastest in the Asia/Pacific, according to the results of CacheLogic's survey, shown in the chart below.

The Donkey rules in Europe, make of it what you will...

— Peter Heywood, Founding Editor, Light Reading

As it happens, Light Reading is staging a Webinar entitled Coming to Grips with Peer-to-Peer Traffic at 2:00 p.m. New York time today. It will be archived on the Light Reading Website within the next few days.
http://www.boardwatch.com/document.asp?doc_id=56198


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P2P Booming As Users Swap Large Files
Graeme Wearden

Data collected from a six-month study of Internet traffic shows that the exchange of films and software is booming, and that the vast majority of peer-to-peer traffic is made up of files larger than 100MB.

Peer-to-peer network traffic is taking up more Internet bandwidth than any other application, according to figures released this week.

CacheLogic, a UK network equipment maker, reported that BitTorrent has now superseded FastTrack -- which is used by Kazaa -- as the most popular P2P client worldwide. CacheLogic estimates that there are always at least 10 million people logged on to a P2P network at any time.

The company also said that the vast majority of P2P traffic came from files in excess of 100MB.

Many of these are likely to be copies of films, with CacheLogic reporting that 30 percent of P2P traffic for one ISP was all from a single 600MB file, which they suspect was a copy of a major film that had just been released.

Andrew Parker, CacheLogic's founder and chief technology officer, told ZDNet UK that P2P traffic is continuing to grow.

Because some P2P applications now use dynamic or variable network ports, even using ports used for other applications such as email and Web traffic (ports 25 and 80 respectively), it can be almost impossible for ISPs to block them, Parker said.

This also means that the true extent of P2P traffic isn't always obvious even to ISPs, Parker added.

CacheLogic reached these conclusions after spending six months monitoring the networks of several ISPs with a new product called Streamsight 510. This device can be placed in a local telephone exchange or other regional point of presence, to perform deep-level packet inspection of an ISP's network traffic. Streamsight 510 goes on sale to ISPs later this year.

According to Parker, BitTorrent's is particularly dominant in the Asian market, where it is used by Web users to access video files.

Last week the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) released a report claiming that one in four people have illegally downloaded a film from the Internet. The validity of this report has subsequently been called into question, though, with some critics pointing out that only broadband users were surveyed.

CacheLogic says that much P2P traffic is legitimate, pointing out that BitTorrent is also used to share content such as the Fedora Linux distribution. It estimates that the total cost of P2P is more than €500m per year.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/softwar...9153399,00.htm


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RIAA Cites Students For File-Sharing

On average, RIAA targets individuals sharing 800 or more songs. So far, two U students have been targeted.
Mehgan Lee

Last month, University officials provided the Recording Industry Association of America with the names of two students who were sharing copyrighted music using the University’s Internet Service Provider.

One of the students has since settled out of court with the association; the other’s case is unresolved.

The RIAA discovered the students’ illegal file-sharing on a peer-to-peer network last April, said Jonathan Lamy, RIAA spokesman. The association subpoenaed the University to obtain the identities of the individuals, he said.

The University’s information technology staff identified the students, said Lorie Gildea, University associate general counsel.

The University’s Office of the General Counsel “encouraged the attorneys for the RIAA to reach amicable resolutions with the students instead of dragging them through a lengthy court process,” Gildea said.

Although Lamy refused to provide the specifics of the University students’ settlement, he said the average settlement usually includes $3,000 in monetary damages and a written letter to the court promising to never engage in the offense again.

If the other student does not settle the case, the RIAA will file a new lawsuit identifying the defendant, Lamy said.

But “no case has gone to a full-fledged trial yet,” he said. “Our interest is in resolving the case before that. The objective is not to win a lawsuit, but to encourage fans to migrate to legitimate online music services.”

The University students were among 477 people served with civil action lawsuits in late April.

The RIAA routinely accesses peer-to-peer networks in search of individuals sharing music from the artists on their record labels, Lamy said. Generally, the more music individuals share, the more likely they will be a target for charges, he said.

The RIAA usually targets individuals sharing 800 or more songs, he said.

“But that is an average, it’s not a threshold number,” Lamy said. “It is illegal to share just one copyrighted song.”

Gildea urged University students to refrain from using unauthorized peer-to-peer services.

“University students have an obligation to comply with the law,” Gildea said. “That’s made very clear to them as part of the orientation process here.”
http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2004/07/14/9888

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Groove Virtual Office v3.0 Adds File Sharing And Chat Directly Into Microsoft Windows Explorer; 'My Documents' Become 'Our Documents'
Press Release

Groove Networks Inc. today introduced a new simple, secure file-sharing technology, shipping in Groove Virtual Office v3.0, that lets PC users synchronize Windows(R) file folders, such as My Documents or My Favorites, across multiple computers with two mouse- clicks.

Groove folder synchronization

Groove Virtual Office software's new folder synchronization capability eliminates the step of "sending" files by allowing users to synchronize the contents of Windows file folders across multiple PCs. Sharing, editing, and discussing files within Groove synchronized folders frees users from the bandwidth constraints and in-box clutter of email, the configuration and security issues inherent in using shared network drives, the online-only limitations of Web sites, and the delays and expense of overnight mail. Files and documents can be shared, reviewed, modified, and discussed right from where they are commonly stored - on the desktop. Customizable alerts can also notify individuals whenever a document has been added or modified. As a result, email and file-server storage is reduced, as is the time spent attaching, detaching, uploading, downloading, copying, and organizing files - increasing individual and organizational productivity.

Moreover, the new folder synchronization capability provides the benefits of a virtual private network (VPN) without the complexity and expense that typically places VPNs beyond the reach of individuals and small businesses. Individuals can work securely with colleagues, business partners, customers, and others by securely sharing the contents of a single folder. The folders inherit Groove Virtual Office security, meaning all information exchanged over the Internet is encrypted automatically.

How it works

To activate folder synchronization, Groove Virtual Office users simply select a folder in Microsoft Windows Explorer and click on the "Folder Sync" button. Groove then automatically synchronizes the folder's files across selected recipients' file systems. As with any Groove workspace, individuals can chat with one another, see when colleagues have logged on to the network or are working within the shared folder, see immediately what documents have changed or been added, or be notified instantly via taskbar or audio alerts when a document is revised or added.

Groove software's smart file synchronization technology particularly benefits users who need to share large files or directories of files. Groove transmits new file contents only when a colleague needs to review them and transmits just revisions instead of the entire document. In this way, Groove sharply reduces the impact on bandwidth and computer processing power.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2004/Jul/1055486.htm


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File-Sharing Over Peer-to-Peer Networks Growing Fast in Europe, Says OECD

Peer-to-peer (or P2P) networks are used to download music, movies, images, games and software from the Internet. The number of people logged on simultaneously to popular file sharing networks approached close to 10 million in April 2004, a rise of 30% from the same period a year earlier, according to a pre-released section of the OECD Information Technology Outlook 2004. The included country-specific data for all 30 OECD countries reveals that users in the U.S. make up over half the total number of people using file-sharing networks, followed by Germany (10.2%), Canada (8.0%) and France (7.8%). The report also shows that usage of P2P networks is growing fastest in Europe and Canada. Whereas the share of P2P users from the United States as part of all OECD users is falling, the share of Germany, France and Canada is on the rise.

The report also concludes that in 2003, for the first time, people downloaded more video, image, game and software files than music in OECD countries. In 2002 music made up the majority (62.5%) of non-commercial content downloaded in these countries, with videos, games, software and images accounting for the remainder (37.5%). But in 2003, the downloading of video and other files grew to make up slightly more than half (51.3%) of the total, while music downloading fell to 48.6%.

It is also concluded that this trend to larger video and other files is strongest in Europe. Europeans are actually using file-sharing networks that make it easier for people to download larger files, such as movies and software. Last fall, for example, in Germany, video files made up over 35% of the total of downloaded content. In Italy, they made up 32.4% of the total and in France 26.1%. This compares with only 12% in the United States.

But the report also makes clear that the peer-to-peer technology should not be equated to the illegal downloading of music. It also points to the commercial opportunities behind this new technology by analysing new applications of legal file-sharing networks in research and business. These include Voice over the Internet (VoiP) technology, as well as applications in the banking and insurance industries, and government and academia.

The released section is taken from the forthcoming biannual publication, OECD Information Technology Outlook 2004, scheduled to appear in October 2004.
http://www.oecd.org/document/39/0,23..._37409,00.html


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Napster! Get your Napster code here!

Hacker Source Code Shop Closes Its Doors
Paul Roberts

An online shop that was selling the source code for two computer programs has abruptly suspended its operations, citing a "redesign" of its "business model."

The Source Code Club opened its doors Monday, using an e-mail posting to an online discussion group to advertise the availability of source code and design documents for two products: the Dragon intrusion detection system (IDS) software from Enterasys Networks and peer-to-peer (P-to-P) server and client software from Napster, now owned by Roxio. By Thursday, the group's Web page displayed a message saying the Club had ceased operations due to "fears our customers faced."

The group used a Web page with an address in the Ukraine to advertise its wares, saying it was selling "corporate intel(ligence)" to its customers, along with other, unnamed, services, according to a message posted to the Full-Disclosure mailing list by a group or individual using the name "Larry Hobbles."

The group offered the Enterasys Dragon IDS 6.1 source code for $16,000 and the Napster code for $10,000, according Kevin Flanagan, an Enterasys spokesman.

On Thursday, the Club's Web site was renamed the "former SCC page," with the group saying it plans to re-emerge, but that it needed to change its business model to ease customers' fears.

"Selling corporate secrets is... very tricky, and we believe it is an area that we can conquer," the statement read.

Enterasys is working with the FBI to investigate the Club's claims, but company representatives are still not convinced that its product source code was stolen, Flanagan said.

Even if the theft did occur, the company is confident that the code was obtained from "media" such as a computer hard drive or CD, rather than the company's network, Flanagan said.

That opinion is based on a structural analysis of the source code files exhibited on the Club's Web site, he said.

Flanagan could not say how media containing the source code might have leaked, citing an ongoing criminal investigation, but said it was theoretically possible a company developer copied it onto a CD or other portable media "for convenience," even though the company prohibits such copying.

Dragon IDS 6.1 is around one year old, and customers who upgraded to Versions 6.2 and 6.3 were protected, because significant differences in the later versions make it difficult to carry out attacks on the upgrades using the 6.1 code as a model, he said.

Enterasys did not contact "Larry Hobbles" or the Source Code Club. Instead, the company turned directly to law enforcement, Flanagan said.

He declined to speculate on why the Web page was offline, saying only that "people who are doing overtly illegal things have lots of reasons to disappear."

The company will continue to pursue the source code theft, as well as any Source Code customers who want to benefit from the alleged theft, he said.

Enterasys and Roxio are just the latest companies to contend with the alleged theft of intellectual property from shadowy online criminals.

In May, Cisco confirmed that it was working with the FBI to investigate source code file thefts from the company's Internetwork Operating System (IOS) after IOS source code files were posted on a Russian Web site, a small piece of what was said to be more than 800M bytes of code.

In February, Microsoft said it was investigating a source code leak from the Windows NT and Windows 2000 operating systems to P-to-P file sharing networks.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/0715hackesourc.html


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Online File Swapping Endures
Jefferson Graham

Despite entertainment industry attempts to curb online song and movie swapping with lawsuits and education campaigns, more people than ever are using peer-to-peer services.

BigChampagne, which tracks Internet file sharing, says 8.3 million people were online at any one time in June using unauthorized services like Kazaa and eDonkey — up 19% from 6.8 million in June 2003.

The majority of files being traded were music, BigChampagne says. Porn videos and images were the second-biggest category.

Since September, the Recording Industry Association of America has filed 3,500 lawsuits against music sharers who uploaded songs to the Internet. It has settled about 600 of them for fines ranging from $2,000 to $15,000.

Phil Leigh, senior analyst at research firm Inside Digital Media, says the findings are the strongest evidence to date that the lawsuits aren't scaring people away from so-called P2P programs. "Many just don't think they'll be caught," he says. And users have become savvier about adjusting software so they can't be traced.

RIAA President Cary Sherman says the rise of legitimate alternatives such as Apple's iTunes Music Store shows the success of the litigation. ITunes was poised over the weekend to reach 100 million songs sold.

BigChampagne says 1 billion songs were available for free trading in June. That compares with 820 million a year ago. But Sherman says many song files now are "spoofs" the industry adds to the system to make life harder for swappers: a screeching sound effect instead of a Top 10 single, for instance.

After the initial wave of lawsuits, research firms released studies suggesting people were spending less time on the peer-to-peer services. "What people say and what they do are two different things," says BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland. "People were not willing to be forthright and admit to something that might get them sued. The fact is, peer-to-peer usage is much more widespread than it was a year ago."

Savvy file traders are spending less time at Kazaa, the top peer-to-peer service. A haven for adware, spyware and potential viruses, Kazaa's usage dropped from a peak of 5.6 million active users in October to 3.8 million in June, says BigChampagne. Users have migrated to two other unauthorized services, Israel-based iMesh and eDonkey in New York, which have less spyware and faster downloads, Leigh says.

Leigh says the only way the industry will put a dent in the peer-to-peer services is for the legitimate alternatives to become more user-friendly. Songs purchased at iTunes can play easily only on iPods, while songs at Sony's Connect service work only with Sony products.

"Until they fix those speed bumps and fill the holes in their catalogs — there are still too many missing songs — people are going to stick with the free services," Leigh says.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...ileswap_x.htm#













File-Sharing Booming

Net Pirates Win War

Films 'Fuel Online File-Sharing'

P2P Gets Serious

P2P Booming As Users Swap Large Files

File-Sharing Over Peer-to-Peer Networks Growing Fast in Europe

Internet users download twice as many films, games and music as they did a year ago

Online File Swapping Endures



Well done!

- Jack.













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