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

[JackSpratts]

Quote of the week: "If it's illegal in America, host it in Uzbekistan.” - Andrew Irgens-Moller, Age 14.





Progress Of A Subtle Kind

New England students near Boston at MIT University created a way to give their peers access to music that breaks neither banks nor laws and is good enough for school administrators to consider employing campus wide. In a nutshell the system replaces the digital internet with an analog cable and in so doing avoids many of the legal pitfalls of the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the altogether too restrictive Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems created to lock out users from their own computers. It’s been suggested however that if this is progress at all it is progress of the most subtle kind, betraying long sought digital promises of static free sound, zero-cost distribution and endless perfect copies, and I think there is an element of truth to that. While analog certainly has its adherents and advantages it is a twilight technology with its brilliant developments mostly behind it. But the MIT idea is not about improving the art nor is it particularly about technology. The MIT decision is a political one, of the type I believe we’ll be seeing more of soon.

Corporations are busily destroying the promise of digital communications by shunting users into their DRM-laden digital gulags. It was only a matter of time before people responded to the threat of diminished rights by doing something about it, in this case by calling the media companies' bluff. Are the DMCA/DRM’s really responses to alleged losses from shifts to digital media or are they excuses for media giants to grab even more control from users, control they've coveted for decades, since long before digital media was released? If it's the former then the RIAA/MPAA can't mind people exploiting analog. As a matter of fact they'll welcome it. No more endless "perfect copies" circulating through the cybersphere, destroying businesses and taking from starving artists what few scraps were left them by the labels. Analog has been in heavy use in every fashion and facet for a hundred years while the record/radio/movie/book and TV companies prospered fabulously. Nothing for them to fear there. But if it's what I suspect and the RIAA and the MPAA are deliberately using the digital bogeymen to scare congress and the courts (and the schools and the parents and the churches and the girl scouts) into satisfying their greed, then trying to silence what is essentially common cable radio will starkly illuminate the media companies' actions for the cynical cons that they are.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no intention of ceding our digital future to a handful of multinational sharks just so I can stream some tunes off the net. I’m not rolling over, not a bit, but I understand the student’s frustration with lawmakers who have handed control of the copyright agenda to the foxes guarding the henhouse and I sympathize. It’s going to be another remarkable techno/political boxing match, one I’ll be watching with interest over the next twelve months.










Enjoy,

Jack.










Digital Millennium Copyright Act toned down by U.S. Agency, cheaper products to benefit consumers.

Toner Firm Gets Key Support In DMCA Spat
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Copyright Office has sided with Static Control Components in a high-profile lawsuit over whether the company may sell chips that permit Lexmark International toner cartridges to be refilled.

As part of a 198-page opinion released late Tuesday, the office said Lexmark's invocation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in its lawsuit against Static Control was invalid. Lexmark is the No. 2 printer maker in the United States, behind Hewlett-Packard, and manufactures printers under the Dell brand.

The opinion is not binding on the judges who are considering the case, which is now before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio, but it is expected to be influential. In February, U.S. District Judge Karl Forester granted Lexmark a preliminary injunction ordering Static Control to cease selling its Smartek chip.

Static Control CEO Ed Swartz on Wednesday said the opinion was so sweeping that he may begin selling a second chip with similar functionality that would not be covered by the injunction. "It gave us a clear-cut legal path to create a chip that there are no legal issues with," he said. "We think we've done that, but we're going back and double-checking everything."

William "Skip" London, the company's general counsel, said: "We have developed code for such a chip. We've shown this code to Lexmark. Lexmark has taken the position that we can't sell it." Swartz said that he has not made a final decision on public sales yet. Static Control is a small Sanford, N.C.-based company that sells printer parts and other business supplies.

Lexmark did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5099112.html


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Tennessee Reinstitutes “Super-DMCA” Bill

Details.

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Valenti Out, Tauzin In – NY Post
Tim Arango

Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin has been plucked to replace Jack Valenti, the long-running head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), according to sources familiar with the matter.

Speculation that the 82-year-old Valenti, who has headed the movie industry's powerful lobbying group since 1966, would step down has run rampant for years. But now, sources say, Tauzin, a Republican, has agreed to take the job, which comes with a reported $1 million annual salary.

He could take up the reigns as soon as the end of this year, after the current congressional session ends in November.

A spokesman for Tauzin said, "No one has offered him a job, and there are no negotiations taking place." He added, however, that Tauzin is likely on the MPAA's wish list of candidates.

A spokesperson for the MPAA did not return calls seeking comment.

On CNBC this week, Hilary Rosen, the former head of the Recording Industry Association of America, said, "I think this is a done deal. I could have egg on my face in a couple weeks, but I think this is a done deal."

A high-level movie industry source confirmed Valenti's imminent departure to The Post.
http://www.nypost.com/business/41882.htm


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Students Develop New Online Music Tool
thewhir.com

According to several reports released this week, MIT students Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel say they have developed a tool allowing students at MIT and other schools access to music online without running afoul of the recording industry and copyright law.

Winstein and Mandel said on Monday that they planned to introduce their system, which allows MIT students to listen for free to 3,500 CDs over the school's cable television network, a setup they say is acceptable under copyright law.

The students say they intend to share the software with other schools, which could operate networks of their own for just a few thousand dollars per year. Transmit over analog cable networks, the service provides sound quality inferior to CD, but better than FM radio, and a viable means of avoiding the kinds of lawsuits the recording industry has been filing against alleged file traders.

The service takes advantages of rules that assign broad and inexpensive licenses to universities for broadcasting analog music, as well as rules that require radio stations to pay broadcast royalties to songwriters, but not to record companies.

Called "Library Access to Music" (LAMP), the system allows users to sign out one of 16 cable channels on the MIT system, through a Web site, for up to 80 minutes, during which they can program songs from the library of 3,500 CDs suggested by students in a survey, and compiled by Winstein and Mandel.

While only one person can control each channel at a time, anyone can listen to a channel. Should they fill up, MIT can add channels for a few hundred dollars each. Users can listen to the music, but are not able to store it.
http://www.thewhir.com/find/articlec...did=627&page=1


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With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?
John Schwartz

Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system for sharing music within their campus community that they say can avoid the copyright battles that have pitted the music industry against many customers.

The students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, drew the idea for their campus-wide network from a blend of libraries and from radio. Their effort, the Libraries Access to Music Project, which is backed by M.I.T. and financed by research money from the Microsoft Corporation, will provide music from some 3,500 CD's through a novel source: the university's cable television network.

The students say the system, which they plan to officially announce today, falls within the time-honored licensing and royalty system under which the music industry allows broadcasters and others to play recordings for a public audience. Major music industry groups are reserving comment, while some legal experts say the M.I.T. system mainly demonstrates how unwieldy copyright laws have become. A novel approach to serving up music on demand from one of the nation's leading technical institutions is only fitting, admirers of the project say. The music industry's woes started on college campuses, where fast Internet connections and a population of music lovers with time on their hands sparked a file-sharing revolution.

"It's kind of brilliant," said Mike Godwin, the senior technology counsel at Public Knowledge, a policy group in Washington that focuses on intellectual property issues. If the legal theories hold up, he said, "they've sidestepped the stonewall that the music companies have tried to put up between campus users and music sharing."

Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering at M.I.T., called the system an imaginative approach that reflected the problem-solving sensibility of engineering at the university. "Everybody has gotten so wedged into entrenched positions that listening to music has to have something to do with file sharing," he said. The students' project shows "it doesn't have to be that way at all."

Mr. Winstein, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, described the result as "a new kind of library." He said he hoped it would be a legal alternative to file trading that infringes copyrights. "We certainly hope," he said, "that by having access to all this music immediately, on demand, any time you want, students would be less likely to break the law.'"

While listening to music through a television might seem odd, it is crucial to the M.I.T. plan. The quirk in the law that makes the system legal, Mr. Winstein said, has much to do with the difference between digital and analog technology. The advent of the digital age, with the possibility of perfect copies spread around the world with the click of a mouse, has spurred the entertainment industry to push for stronger restrictions on the distribution of digital works, and to be reluctant to license their recording catalogues to permit the distribution of music over the Internet.

So the M.I.T. system, using the analog campus cable system, simply bypasses the Internet and digital distribution, and takes advantage of the relatively less- restrictive licensing that the industry makes available to radio stations and others for the analog transmission.

The university, like many educational institutions, already has blanket licenses for the seemingly old-fashioned analog transmission of music from the organizations that represent the performance rights, including the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or Ascap, the Broadcast Music Inc. or B.M.I., and Sesac, formerly the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers.

If that back-to-the-future solution seems overly complicated, blame copyright law and not M.I.T., said Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The most significant thing about the M.I.T. plan, he said, is just how complicated it has to be to fit within the odd boundaries of copyright law.

"It's almost an act of performance art," Mr. Zittrain said. Mr. Winstein, he said, has "arrayed the gerbils under the hood so it appears to meet the statutory requirement" - and has shown how badly the system of copyright needs sensible revamping.

Representatives of the recording industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America, Ascap and B.M.I., either declined to comment or did not return calls seeking comment.

Although the M.I.T. music could still be recorded by students and shared on the Internet, Professor Abelson said that the situation would be no different from recording songs from conventional FM broadcasts. The system provides music quality that listeners say is not quite as good as a CD on a home stereo but is better than FM radio.

M.I.T. students, faculty and staff can choose from 16 channels of music and can schedule 80-minute blocks of time to control a channel. The high-tech D.J. can select, rewind or fast-forward the songs via an Internet-based control panel. Mr. Winstein and Mr. Mandel created the collection of CD's after polling students.

Mr. Winstein said that the equipment cost about $10,000, and the music, which was bought through a company that provides music on hard drives for the radio industry, for about $25,000. Mr. Winstein said they were making the software available to other colleges.

Students have been using a test version for months, and Mr. Winstein said the system was still evolving. The prototype, for example, shows the name of the person who is programming whatever 80-minute block of music is playing. Mr. Winstein said he once received an e-mail message from a fellow student complimenting him on his choice of music (Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8) and telling him "I'd like to get to know you better." She signed the note, "Sex depraved freshman."

Mr. Winstein, who has a girlfriend, politely declined the offer, and said he realized that he might need to add a feature that would let users control the system anonymously.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/technology/27mit.html


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Waste –

No Fear Peer-To-Peer
Dan Warne

Truly secure P2P deploys military-grade encryption. Dan Warne shows how to share files among friends without anyone else snooping on you.


With the copyright police increasing its monitoring of popular file-sharing networks like KaZaA and eDonkey, savvy users are turning to WASTE, a new program that relies on file encryption and ad hoc networks of trusted members to escape prying eyes.

Our feature story on page 28 of this issue explains the “why” of WASTE; but here you’ll find the “how”.

What makes WASTE different from other file-swapping systems is that it has no central server. Instead it operates as a mesh in which each user connects to a few other users to form a loosely- structured P2P network. However, this group is virtually impenetrable to anyone who hasn’t been specifically authorised to join the group using PKE (public/private key encryption) technology.

PKE encryption in general works like this: each user has two keys — a private key and a public key. The public key can be given out to anyone, because it only allows them to encrypt a message to you. The same public key cannot be used to decrypt that message. Once you’ve received the message, you decrypt it with your private key, which you never disclose.

WASTE uses public keys to ensure that each user is known on the network, and bona-fide. As each public key is unique, and linked to the private key stored in your copy of WASTE, there’s no chance that someone can pretend to be you in order to gain access to the network.

The initial setup of WASTE guides you through creating a unique username and a private key, as well as automatically generating a matching public key.

To be accepted onto a network of WASTE users, a member of that group has to email you their public key, which is simply a block of what looks like random letters and numbers. This is entered into your WASTE client software through the Preferences panel’s Public Keys section — the same location to which you export your own public key so it can be shared with someone else.

If you’re not too concerned with security and are just curious, there’s a database of public keys at www.s4s.ip3.com/wasteb. You’ll also need to submit your public key there and wait for at least one other user to manually add your key to their system.

Alternatively, you can chat to other WASTE users on IRC. Join the WASTE channel on the http:// irc2.p2pchat.net server and swap your public key with anyone who’s online at the time.

To connect to a network of WASTE users, enter the IP address of one user with whom you’ve swapped public keys into the WASTE connect box.

You’ll also need to open port 1337 on your firewall, which is the port used by WASTE (this is a joke on the part of WASTE creator Justin Frankel, as 1337 is hacker-speak for “leet” — shorthand for “elite”).

Once you’ve both swapped keys, you’ll be accepted as a trusted member of the network and permitted to make connections to other people on the same network, because your key is automatically broadcast to the rest of the group and added into their copy of WASTE.

You can browse other users’ directories, search for specific files, and also chat using the WASTE chat client. Chat sessions and file swapping goes directly between the active computers rather than via a central server.

When you start a file transfer it’s encrypted using the fast but secure, open source “Blowfish” model to protect you from monitoring. Even 128-bit encryption is virtually crack-proof through brute-force, so you can be certain that any files you transfer, and any discussions you have with other users, are completely secure.

Of course, one weakness in WASTE’s security model is that it’s easy for other users on the same network to get hold of your public key. If you’re worried about this, simply reject other users’ public keys. Remember: if both of you don’t have each other’s public keys, neither of you can connect and view what’s on the other’s computer.

To do this, open Preferences, select Pending keys, then remove the tick from Auto-accept broadcasted public keys.

The latest WASTE client for Windows is included on this month’s cover CD set. There’s a Mac OS X client in development that allows encrypted chat and file serving but not downloading from other users (you can find it at hummusandpita.com/waste). A command-line Linux version is in alpha development at grazzy.mjoelkbar.net/waste.
http://www.apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/D...256DCD0082A79A

For our complete P2P-Zone rundown on Waste, from initial experiences to daily usage, please visit this thread.


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ITS Block On P2P Traffic May Be Permanent
Garth Sheldon-Coulson

After a spell of fierce network worms, Information Technology Services is considering blocking peer- to-peer music sharing for good.

Swarthmore’s connection to the Internet has taken a beating over the past two weeks, often slowing to a crawl or becoming completely inaccessible as newly written worms exploited holes Microsoft Windows systems all over campus. Two aggressive new file-sharing programs flooded the network with data packets, overrunning ITS’s firewall machines.

In response to the overload, ITS blocked all file- sharing programs last Tuesday, which have been disabled ever since. Now, ITS staff indicate that, although the outages were caused by a mixture of afflictions, a permanent choice might have to be made between “academic” network traffic and “entertainment” traffic.

Colleges and universities all over the country have been dealing with similar problems, according to ITS Director Judy Downing.

“Many schools block P2P traffic permanently. Our consultants are always amazed at how open we allow our network to be,” she said.

A problem for ITS staff is that, while they can block file-sharing to reduce stress on the network, they cannot easily predict or prevent attacks from new worms and viruses. File sharing and worm attacks combined can bring down the network, as students experienced last week.

“The nature of these worm attacks has changed,” ITS Network Manager Mark Dumic said. “They are a lot more complicated now, and they aren’t going away.”

Despite the dangers, ITS is working to restore the network to the status quo ante, at least for now. “At the moment, we’re just working out the finer technical points of restoring P2P,” Downing said. She added that BitTorrent and Blubster, the two programs most responsible for the overload in file sharing traffic, will remain permanently blocked.

But, regardless of ITS’s progress, some students are fed up.

“It’s unreasonable,” Chase DuBois ’07 said, of the idea that ITS might block file sharing permanently. “They’re here to manage network traffic, not manipulate it. They can probably figure out a better solution.”

ITS, however, places some of the onus on students to alleviate the problem. “There is an element of personal responsibility here,” said Downing. “We may have to look to the student entertainment realm to fix the problems.”

She added, “Swarthmore is always in touch with peer institutions, both small and large. Everyone is experimenting with different strategies.”

Two recent changes to Swarthmore’s infrastructure might help. The college recently negotiated a new bandwidth agreement with its Internet service provider, increasing available bandwidth by 50 percent. A new firewall was also put in place last week.

The file sharing question will be decided by ITS and the higher-ups in the college’s administration. For now, students can only hope that file sharing is restored soon, even if it might be down again before long.
http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2003-10-30/news/13393


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Music File-Sharing With USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham

Two MIT students have a new strategy in the music-download wars: a legal way for an entire campus to share music without running afoul of copyright laws or prohibitions against digital file sharing. The school's enthusiastic, but the recording industry will likely be less pleased. Is it a fair compromise or a flawed concept? Discuss the matter with USA TODAY writer Jefferson Graham.

Comment from USATODAY.com Host: Hello and welcome to our chat with USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham. The saga of music downloading and file sharing continues, as MIT announces this week that two of their students have a fresh approach to making music available legally. The school's impress (and hopes to convince other schools to use their system), but what about the music industry? Jefferson's taking your questions on this development and on other digital-music topics until 2pm ET. Let's get started!
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Provo, UT: This solution is just for students, right? Is there any chance that this can be scaled into a mainstream service?

Jefferson Graham: Provo, one of my favorite cities. I love University Avenue....anyway, yes, the two students have devised this program for colleges, as a way of getting free music to students and saving them from lawsuits. The beauty of it is that many schools have internal cable TV networks, and the students made use of existing copyright fees the school was paying to songwriters and songwriter organizations to make it work within the confine of an MIT. Could this go mainstream? Doubtful. What made it work was presenting the music in analog--described as better than FM, not as good as a CD. That's how they skirted the digital copyright laws.
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Comment from Jefferson Graham: The students are publishing their findings today on their lamp.mit.edu for other schools to follow in their footsteps, royalty free. Meanwhile, Penn State is working on its own program to get "free" music into dorm rooms, by adding a "music" fee into the tuition. A pilot program is supposed to start in the spring, and Penn State plans to announce details in the next few weeks.
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Lansing, MI: How is this system different from, say, what MP3.com was doing years ago when they let people stream music from the site if they had the CD (or had bought the CD and were awaiting delivery)?

Jefferson Graham: Again, the big difference is that the songs aren't in "digital," but in analog. My.MP3.com was in digital, which the labels think can offer perfect copies to anyone. MP3.com didn't offer to ability to download the songs, but where the website ran afoul of the labels was not getting prior approval. In the case of the MIT students, all the music is licensed, through deals MIT has with songwriters and songwriter organizations, and some new deals that were arranged.
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New York, NY: Will the RIAA eventually comment or are they just ignoring this project? If they ignore it, what are the implications?

Jefferson Graham: I suppose the RIAA will have to say something at some point. I don't think they're ignoring it, but instead, looking into it. I think it was refreshing to do an article and not have the RIAA blast a new technology.
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Lansing, MI: Thanks for taking my question earlier. So does this mean that MIT is in the Webcasting business, like Live365 or Netscape's Web-radio stations? Will they hav to pay artists plus the studios plus the songwriters?

Jefferson Graham: I believe the deals MIT has is with the songwriters (Harry Fox Agency) and songwriter organizations, like ASCAP, BMI and SEACAM, similar to radio. Where the LAMP project is different from a Live365 is that the music is available on demand. If it's in the library, you can click right to it, and use traditional jukebox tools like stop, pause, click to the next song, and creating playlists.
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Denver, Colo.: You mentioned in the story that the licensed songs are analog. Does that mean they have hard copies on tapes somewhere?

Jefferson Graham: MIT went to a Seattle company called Loudeye and paid them to put the songs onto hard drives. I don't think there are hard copies on tapes.
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Laramie, Wyoming: If the RIAA gets upset will they sue the students or the school since the school is talking about this publicly?

Jefferson Graham: The RIAA has been low profile on the MIT students and has declined to comment. I don't know how they sue the students, when MIT lawyers went over it with a fine tooth comb, and the music is licensed.
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Somewhere, USA: How many songs does MIT have and can students add more?

Jefferson Graham: I know the students (with money from a Microsoft grant) bought 3,500 CDs for the library and hope to add more. The CDs were based on student requests.
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Abilene TX: How can regular people use this?

Jefferson Graham: You can't, unless you sign up as a student at MIT. The students who developed the program have posted their codes at the lamp.mit.edu website, hoping other universities follow in their footsteps. So maybe it will come to a college near you. Next best thing: a subscription service like Rhapsody or Napster. They offer streaming music, with 375,000 and 500,000 songs respectively, for $9.99 monthly. And their music is digital, not analog.
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Comment from Jefferson Graham: Here's the press release from Loudeye. Loudeye Corp. (Nasdaq: LOUD), a leading provider of services for the management, promotion and distribution of digital media, today announced an agreement to provide music content and metadata services to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's new campus-wide electronic music library. Developed by two MIT students, MIT's Library Access to Music Project (LAMP) enables faculty and students to access a comprehensive licensed music catalog on areas throughout campus using MIT's closed-circuit cable TV system. Under the agreement, Loudeye is providing MIT with approximately 48,000 licensed digital music tracks with related metadata. The licensed content and data are delivered through Loudeye's Media Framework, a complete, outsourced digital media platform for integrating customers' in-house solutions with Loudeye's applications and services. The LAMP system, the brain trust of Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, two current MIT students, was developed as a way for the MIT community to access CDs without a trip to the library. With LAMP, MIT students, faculty and staff can select a song from the LAMP Web page (http:// lamp.mit.edu) and play it directly to campus stereos and TVs on the system. Users can only listen to songs but cannot download or copy them. The project relies in part upon Loudeye's digital media services to support the digitization of its CD catalog and delivery across MIT's closed-circuit cable TV service. Winstein and Mandel are publishing the system's design and software code as "open source" enabling universities and other organizations to deploy similar electronic music delivery solutions. "LAMP is about making a better music library that students and faculty can access all the time, immediately and on demand, from their rooms and offices. We collected a 'wish list' of 3,500 albums that students at MIT wanted in the library, and Loudeye provided the albums in MP3 format a week later. As far as we know, Loudeye is the only company in the country with all the rights and permissions in place to provide this service," said Keith Winstein, LAMP co- creator and MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science. "LAMP is an innovative approach to enabling legitimate digital music distribution at universities. With MIT making the LAMP code open, we are encouraged that other organizations and universities will deploy similar legitimate music services," said Jeff Cavins, Loudeye's president and chief executive officer. "Our work with MIT and the LAMP project demonstrates the flexibility of the Loudeye Media Framework to support next generation and emerging business models in the digital music space across all different segments." LAMP was funded by iCampus, the research alliance between MIT and Microsoft Research focused on furthering education through faculty and student technology projects. About Loudeye Corp. Loudeye provides the business infrastructure and services for managing, promoting and distributing digital content for the entertainment and corporate markets. For more information, visit www.loudeye.com.
http://cgi1.usatoday.com/mchat/20031027004/tscript.htm


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Four Companies Show Home Entertainment System That Can Download On Their Own

TOKYO (AP) - Four Japanese electronics makers have teamed up to make stereo systems that can download music directly from an Internet service,
without a home computer serving as middle man.

Sony Corp., Sharp Corp., Pioneer Corp. and Kenwood Corp. unveiled prototypes of the new equipment Tuesday and said they expect the systems to go on sale early next year. There are no plans yet for marketing it overseas, the companies said.

Each company owns one-fourth of a joint venture, Any Music Planning Inc., that developed the Linux-based stereo equipment in an attempt to adapt to rapid changes engulfing the music industry.

Sony, Sharp, Pioneer and Kenwood plan to sell versions of the music receivers under their own brands. The prototypes shown Tuesday resemble traditional stereo components, but have a liquid crystal display and Ethernet ports for broadband Internet connectivity.

The systems are automatically set to access a Web site run by LabelGate, a Japanese online music shop that opened in August. LabelGate has music licensing rights with some of Japan's biggest recording companies and offers a limited amount of Western music.

Users will be able to browse, download, store and play song files, record them on a mini-disc or transfer them to other digital music devices, said Any Music CEO Fujio Noguchi.

Any Music plans to focus first on the Japanese market, but ``ultimately, our dream is to make the service a worldwide standard,'' Noguchi said. In fact, four other Japanese audiovisual equipment makers -- NEC Electronics, Denon, Yamaha and Onkyo -- are also developing similar products.

Some consumer electronics companies have introduced so-called media receivers in the United States that can stream music from the Internet as well as play music files that are stored on networked computers. The model of purchasing music online via a standalone stereo component, however, is so far foreign to the U.S. market.

Details remain sketchy about how Any Music's system will work. It's unclear whether Any Music's hardware will restrict the number of times that users can copy songs, as U.S.-based services such as iTunes and MusicMatch do.

Also, executives from the companies refused to say how much the systems would cost, and said LabelGate hasn't decided how much it will charge per downloaded song.

The service will be separate from the one LabelGate offers to computer users. Currently, LabelGate charges 210 yen ($1.90) per downloaded song.

The electronics makers are betting that as broadband Internet connections spread in Japan, they can attract consumers who prefer downloading music to a trip to the music store. They hope Internet-savvy youngsters and adult music aficionados alike will be drawn to the prospect of convenience.

``Our industry is in crisis,'' said Moriyuki Okada, who heads Sharp's audiovisual systems department. ``We want to emerge from that by offering new business ideas.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/7067557.htm


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FTC Issues Report On U.S. Patent Policy
ILN

The Federal Trade Commission has issued a new report examining U.S. patent policy. The report makes a series of recommendations on how to foster innovation by ensuring a good balance between competition and patent law. Report at
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2003/10/innovationrpt.pdf

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Sharman Networks Launches Kazaa v2.6 Beta

New Beta Version Introduces Magnet Links and Kapsules
Press Release

Sharman Networks Limited today launched the Beta of Kazaa v2.6, the latest update of the world's most popular file sharing software. The new version presents users and the entertainment industry with features such as Magnet Links, Kazaa Kapsules, single click purchasing and the option to run multiple searches at the same time. Magnet Links connect Kazaa users outside the application directly to peer- to-peer technology. This means that through their websites, entertainment companies are able to offer files to Kazaa users, downloaded via peer-to-peer. This offers significant bandwidth savings for companies like computer game manufacturers who often sell games that are over 500 megabytes in size. By utilizing Magnet Links, these content providers can efficiently promote and sell their products. This also enables consumers to benefit from faster, cheaper and more varied content as a result of the efficiency of peer-to-peer technology. "Magnet Links combine Kazaa, the world's most popular peer-to-peer application, with the world's most popular Internet browsers," said Nikki Hemming, CEO of Sharman Networks. "The links are available to anyone who wants to benefit from the cost savings of peer-to-peer and the popularity of Kazaa. Magnet Links are a further example of our efforts to bring artists and consumers closer together in the most powerful way." With Kazaa v2.6, users can purchase individual files with a single click. This delivers content providers a seamless consumer purchasing system that compliments the distribution power of the application. In addition, v2.6 improves searching functionality with the ability to run multiple searches at the same time. The launch of Kazaa Kapsules 1.0 in this latest version is designed to enable artists to offer music, video and promotional material in a digital package or "Kapsule." This gives consumers a single purchase point for multiple files of varying formats combined together as a compelling offering. For example, musicians will now be able to offer a much greater variety of material, such as images, audio, video, lyrics, tour dates, and band information in one place. Equally, computer game companies can include game guides and hints, and movie distributors can include 'behind the scenes' footage. Kapsules are designed for maximum usability with two areas: Interactive windows, which contain information about the offered content, and Kapsule windows, which contain the actual files. Users will be able to view both windows at the same time, so that information on the contents (files, price, and exclusive elements) will appear alongside the content itself. Magnet Links, Kapsules and single click buying further cement Kazaa's position as the world's leading peer-to-peer software and build on its partnership with Altnet, the world's largest distributor of licensed, secure content on the Internet. Every month, Kazaa users download millions of licensed computer games, music, videos and software applications through Sharman Networks' relationship with Altnet. "The advances in version 2.6 have been designed to meet the needs of consumers and content owners, who are the key forces in the success of digital distribution over the Internet. It is encouraging to see content such as videogames, that can be up to 100 times larger and cost 30 times more than a single music file, being purchased by Kazaa users every day," said Hemming. "Seamless purchasing is an important step forward and these advances that tap into powerful peer-to-peer technology will be welcomed by consumers and artists alike." Kazaa v2.6 Beta is available to test in unlimited numbers at http://www.kazaa.com. Please see the kazaa.com site for important technical information about this release. The final version will be available in the coming weeks.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+11:13+AM


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Researchers: Digital Data Drives Storage Explosion
Jay Lyman

Researchers discovered that 92 percent of new information is stored on magnetic media -- primarily on hard drives -- and peer-to-peer file sharing helped MP3 music and digital video account for 70 percent of the files on P2P users' hard disks.

University of California Berkeley researchers report that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media has doubled in the last three years to five exabytes -- or 5 million terabytes.

The researchers, supported by tech giants Microsoft, Intel, HP and EMC, said the amount of new information produced in those forms last year alone was the equivalent of 500,000 libraries, each containing a digital version of the print collections of the Library of Congress.

Forrester senior storage analyst Anders Lofgren told TechNewsWorld that the IT industry is dealing with the information onslaught through hardware and software, but is still struggling to keep all of that data manageable.

"In general, the headache is that storage continues to grow -- and although hardware prices continue to decline, what doesn't is the cost of managing that storage," Lofgren said.

Indicating that worldwide production of information has increased 30 percent per year from 1999 to 2002, the UC Berkeley researchers told attendees at an information storage industry conference in Orlando, Florida, that most of the new information comes in the form of office documents and e-mail as opposed to books, newspapers and journals.

Researchers discovered that 92 percent of new information is stored on magnetic media -- primarily on hard drives -- and peer-to-peer file sharing helped MP3 music and digital video account for 70 percent of the files on P2P users' hard disks.

Research team leader Peter Lyman said the dropping cost of using magnetic hard drives and optical storage media such as CD-ROM and DVD has fueled the surge in retrieval and storage of files from the Internet. Lyman called the Web a utility that offers easy, steady access for institutions and individuals.

"The democratization of publishing is something that we thought would happen, and it has happened," he said.

The researchers -- who used a sampling of nearly 10,000 Web sites and studied desktop disk drives, reports and other information -- said the study illustrates the need for effective, reliable and cost-efficient data-storage strategies for consumers as well as corporations.

Meta Group vice president Steve Kleynhans told TechNewsWorld that users can no longer be forced to rely on their own memory to find data on the right server, file or other storage subdivision.

Kleynhans said data no longer centers on text documents and files, instead encompassing Web pages, digital video, pictures, music, Flash animation and more. He added that data is also unlikely to exist in one place going forward.

"In the future, files will exist in multiple places," he said. "Locating them will be built into the content of that file. These are really important concepts when you're dealing not with tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of pieces of information."

Despite the doubling of information stored on paper, film and hard drives, that increase paled in comparison with the amount of new information flowing electronically on radio, television and the Internet in 2002, which was nearly 18 exabytes -- equivalent to 18 million terabytes.

Researchers also reported that the telephone accounts for the largest percentage of information flow, with e-mail placing second.

Forrester's Lofgren said that while the IT industry has embraced the storage of structured data (such as documents and reports), the handling of unstructured data (such as phone calls and messages) remains a challenge.

"We're seeing huge growth in unstructured data formats," Lofgren said. "There's a fairly significant opportunity there, and obviously there's an opportunity to sell more hardware.

"There's also the opportunity to provide the kind of storage capabilities and functionalities in structured data formats for unstructured formats as well."
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31981.html



INFORMATION FACTS

Some findings of the study by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, professors at the University of California-Berkeley, to quantify the world's information:

• The world produced five exabytes (or 5 million terabytes) of new information on paper, film, optical and magnetic media in 2002. That is equivalent to the amount of information in a half-million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress' print collections.

• The amount of information the world produces increased by 30 percent annually from 1999 to 2002.

• North Americans use an average of 11,916 sheets of paper a year per person, while Europeans use 7,280 sheets.

• Peer-to-peer file sharing has taken off, with MP3 music files and digital video accounting for 70 percent of the files on hard disks of people who participate in online file exchanges.

• The United States produces about 40 percent of the world's new stored information.

• The Web contains about 172 terabytes of information, or 17 times what is contained in the Library of Congress' print collecti

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercuryne...ss/7130226.htm


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Korea Journal

Online Music Exchange Battle Heads for Second Round
Kim Sung-jin

A copyright dispute involving Soribada, a local free peer- to-peer (P2P) music exchange Web site, is set to enter a new phase with record companies considering suing people who use the file swapping program to download songs.

``We are reviewing filing a suit against individual users that swap music files via the Soribada 2.0 program with a criminal court as the ruling by the Seoul District Court is leaning towards finding the Yang brothers not guilty for providing the music file swapping program,’’ said Lim Hak-yeon, manager of the Recording Industry Association of Korea (RIAK), the music industry’s copyright watchdog.

The legal battle over P2P music file swapping services is growing more complex, as Yang Jung-hwan and his brother Il-hwan, who created the music file-sharing site, introduced Soribada 2.0, an advanced file swapping engine that allows members to exchange music files without passing through its main server. Soribada, means ``sea of sound’’ in Korean.

``Unlike traditional instant-messaging programs, music files shared by Soribada 2.0 program users don't pass through a central server operated by the Yang brothers, which makes the court believe that they don’t have responsibility for the free online music swapping,’’ Lim said.

``Someone has to be responsible for copyright violations that erode revenue of the offline record companies and they are content users. Thus RIAK, together with record companies, is planning to file criminal lawsuits against Soribada 2.0 users if the court again finds the Yang brothers not guilty of aiding users to infringe on copyrights of music labels by downloading music files for free,’’ he explained.

The effects on the music industry of the decentralized P2P technology that enables computer users to share their music collection with strangers remains unknown.

The Seoul District Court previously threw out the case in May and dismissed the charges against the Soribada’s operators. The court ruled that evidence provided by prosecutors was not sufficient to prove that Soribada, established in 2000, is liable for copyright infringements committed by users of their software.

But prosecutors later revived the case with more evidence.

However, the Suwon District Civil Court last week slapped a 19.6 million won ($16,300) fine on the Yang brothers. In imposing the fine, the district civil court estimated that some 5,000 songs were shared by Soribada users between June 2000 and July 2002.


It found the Yang brothers guilty of copyright infringement prior as to July 2002 they were providing the a centralized P2P music exchange program where music files exchanged should pass the central server run by Web site operators.

In line with the ruling, the brothers will have to pay RIAK, the organization that together with local offline record companies sued Soribada and sought to halt its operations in 2001.

Local record companies claim they have lost millions of dollars in album sales because of Soribada’s estimated 4.5 million users.

Lim said if individuals are to be put on trial, charges on free downloading of music files after July 2000 will be judged by the court, as that is when the Yang brothers launched Soribada 2.0.

The Yang brothers have previously said they should not be held responsible for music swapping via the program they developed as the Web site only provides private channels of communication and that they cannot control or monitor users’ activities. But they were not available for comment on the latest developments.

An official of RIAK, who asked not to be named, said the Yang brothers are considering appealing the Suwon Civil District Court ruling.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech...0305811800.htm


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The Fragility of Data

The Shifted Librarian reminds us how fragile modern data storage devices are by pointing to a librarian and archivists guide to preserving CDs and DVDs (Please Do Not Feed the DVDs). The HTML guide can be found here (Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists) or in ([PDF]). Jenny reports from a recent librarian's conference A/V panel:

One person in the audience said his library
gets only a dozen or so circs out of their DVDs because they are used so heavily and they don't hold up well. Judy from Schaumburg said her library gets a much higher circ rate, with some lasting as long as 120 circs.

One of the reasons I oppose DRM so strongly is because data storage is really quite fragile. Without the ability to freely copy, it is easy for information to be lost.
http://importance.typepad.com/the_im...agility_o.html


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A Case of Piracy Overkill?
Kim Zetter

Critics of proposed Federal Communications Commission rules designed to prevent consumers from redistributing copies of digital television shows on the Internet say the move won't stop piracy but will curtail technological innovation and the "fair use" of content.

The new rules, expected to win approval this week, mandate that devices capable of receiving digital signals -- including TVs, digital recording devices or computers containing a broadcast card -- be able to detect a broadcast flag encoded in the bit stream. The flag would allow users to copy and view digital content on any system in their home network, but would not allow them to upload the content to the Internet.

Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the movie industry fought in court for eight years to try to make it illegal for users to copy TV shows with their VCR. He said the industry is simply trying to find new ways to encroach on fair use, an individual's right to use copyright material in a reasonable manner without the consent of the copyright owner.

"They know that trying to take that fair use away from millions of Americans is way too unpopular, even though they would if they could," von Lohmann said. "So what they want to do is freeze things so that consumers don't get any new fair-use capabilities in the future."

If such restrictions had been in place in the early 1970s, von Lohmann said, there would be no VCR today.

"As they made clear through eight years of litigation with Sony, the industry never would have given you the opportunity to make copies in your home if it had been up to them."

Fritz Attaway, the Motion Picture Association of America's executive vice president for government relations and Washington general counsel, said the new rules are needed because Internet piracy has the potential to cut into the syndication market for shows abroad. According to the MPAA, total foreign TV revenues for the industry were approximately $4 billion last year.

"Those ancillary market revenues in foreign syndication are critical to the ability to recover costs," he said. "Foreign syndication, cable casting (the re-selling of broadcast shows to the cable market) and home video are important to the economic foundation of television production."

However, Attaway admitted that there were currently no recorded losses from piracy of broadcast shows.

"Because so few people are capable of trafficking in these large audiovisual files today, the economic impact today is probably fairly low," he said. "But we are trying to provide for the future."

Von Lohmann sees a problem with the MPAA requesting protection for a problem that doesn't currently exist and probably won't for four more years, if ever.

"What they're saying is we might have a piracy problem in several years' time, so we would like you to bail us out in advance," he said. "There is absolutely no benefit to this."

He also said "the broadcast flag would still be completely and utterly useless at addressing the problem. The thing leaks like a sieve."

The mandate, for instance, would not affect numerous devices already on the market, such as digital tuners and broadcast cards for PCs. This means that anyone who currently owns these products will still be able to trade digital content over the Internet even after the mandate is implemented.

"We're talking about hundreds of thousands of devices already in the field that can receive digital TV and save it to a hard drive with no protection at all," said von Lohmann, who predicts there would be a run on such devices in stores before the mandate goes into effect. "There will be a great market for PC broadcasting cards on eBay," he said.

Attaway acknowledged that this "will be a legacy problem for us until those TVs migrate out of the marketplace."

Even then, Attaway said in a March address to Congress, the flag would not completely solve the problem of Internet trafficking, since users could always bypass the flag restrictions by making a digital copy of content, converting it to analog, and then reconverting it to digital.

In a press release following his address, Attaway said the solution in that case would be "to close the analog hole," implying further restrictions on consumers down the line.

He said the mandate would not prevent a consumer who owns a "flagged" digital TV from recording a home copy of a program. The problem lies with one person sharing their copy with 10 million others.

"There is a very big difference between you making a copy of Friends and mailing a copy to 10 million people in Europe. We don't think you're going to do that. We do think that if you have the ability, you might take that copy of Friends and make it available to 30 million people in Western Europe over the Internet. That has an adverse effect on the economic foundation of producing that program," he said.

Von Lohmann charged the FCC mandate would curtail technological innovation, since technology companies would have to ask permission before they could design a new product.

"The mandate comes with all kinds of obligations about what kinds of features you're allowed to offer with your product and how they must be implemented, and the people who control those requirements are the Hollywood movie studios and other technology and consumer electronic companies," he said. "It creates an environment where small innovators who are not willing to compromise for someone else's business model essentially get shut out."

He pointed to DVD technology as an example of what happens when technology is controlled by a particular group.

"In order to interoperate with DVD, you have to sign on with a bunch of agreements and private licensing arrangements under the auspices of the DVD forum," he said. "There's been no new feature added to DVD players since their introduction. And that's exactly the way Hollywood likes things to go."

As for Attaway's argument that the industry stands to lose income from foreign sales if shows are traded over the Internet, von Lohmann said the copyright act is not designed to guarantee profitability for all time in all markets.

"The same argument applies here that we gave to the railroad industry when the auto industry emerged. It's a market economy: Adapt."

Von Lohmann pointed out that the industry was hardly suffering economically.

"Last year was the most profitable year that the movie industry had, and broadcast TV is doing a very healthy business in DVDs," he said. "The bottom line is that there is lot of money being made by the industry today, and there is no evidence to show that this is going to change if high-definition broadcasts are not protected."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60947,00.html


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Plaxo 1.0

Update Your Outlook Contacts Automatically
Review Paul Rowlingson

Plaxo is new from the co-creator of Napster, and is designed for use with Microsoft Outlook 2000/2002/ XP. Once installed it helps to keep your address book (Contacts) up to date.

The first step is to select the contacts you wish to request updates from. An email is then sent to these contacts requesting any new contact details they may have (this email can also include your contact details if you wish).

When a contact replies, any new details they've sent are automatically added to your Outlook.

If any of these people then download and install Plaxo, any future changes to your contact details or theirs are updated automatically.

In other words, Plaxo is a peer-to-peer network, just like Napster was.

Obviously, you need to be online in order for any updates to be made.

As mentioned, Plaxo currently only works with Outlook, but plans are afoot to make it compatible with other mail clients, including Lotus Notes, Mozilla (Netscape) and Eudora.

Verdict
A great idea that works well. Hopefully, compatibility with other email clients will follow soon.
http://www.vnunet.com/Download/1138899


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Reinventing The Jukebox? Or Rejecting Digital Over Copyright?
furdlog

Today’s Globe (and NPR’s Morning Edition) discuss the startup of MIT’s LAMP project: Reinventing the jukebox on campus [pdf] (MIT press release). The trick to the project is that, while the digital telecommunications infrastructure is used to request the music, the music is actually delivered over an analog channel, avoiding the pitfalls of current copyright law when it comes to digital delivery.

Armed with a clever idea and a $60,000 grant from Microsoft Corp., two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have wired the campus for sound. They’ve built a system to deliver popular music to student dormitories, without the illegal file swapping that’s goaded the recording industry into a furious round of copyright lawsuits.

[…] Winstein and Mandel never thought it would take so long to build LAMP. They soon discovered that building a system that would pass muster under federal copyright law is a lot more complicated than soldering circuit boards.

“We assumed that the technical part of doing this would be the hard part,” said [LAMP co-developer Keith] Winstein. “We were totally wrong.”

This strategy should scare the entertainment industries, not to mention the consumer electronics firms that have committed to digital delivery. This project shows that there is enough resistance to the current construction of copyright in the digital realm that people are prepared to design around the strictures, at the expense of the supposedly better technology. I believe that, if the FCC approves the broadcast flag, a similar response will arise in the television industry.

Consumer backlash is only going to get stronger, as the copyright industries continue to exploit the opportunities for increased control that digital telecomm offers them. And, as Phil Greenspun notes in this Globe article on Kodak’s plans to stop making slide projectors, there are more than just legal reasons to reject some of these technologies.

‘’It’s expensive, and there is a subtle loss of quality, like going from long-playing records to compact discs.'’

Contrast this LAMP system with the Penn State system that Derek alerted me to last week: Spin Machine: Penn

State’s Download Service. Although the article is skimpy on details, I love this bit from the president of the university:

“We like our approach to be educational in nature, not criminal,” [PSU president] Spanier said.

IMHO, understanding why the MIT system is legal might be even more educational! In particular, I can already think of one excellent economics question exploring the relative costs of (a) paying digital copyright licensing fees (and facing the legal lawsuit risks of a digital music network) and (b) building out the analog communications infrastructure.

(See this paper, by one of LAMP’s developers: Engineering an Accessible Music Library: Technical and Legal
Challenge)

The NYTimes article includes a photo of the designers and a nice Zittrain quote: With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who
Needs Napster? [pdf]

If that back-to-the-future solution seems overly complicated, blame copyright law and not M.I.T., said Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The most significant thing about the M.I.T. plan, he said, is just how complicated it has to be to fit within the odd boundaries of copyright law.

“It’s almost an act of performance art,” Mr. Zittrain said. Mr. Winstein, he said, has “arrayed the gerbils under the hood so it appears to meet the statutory requirement” - and has shown how badly the system of copyright needs sensible revamping.

Update: Slashdot discussion – MIT’s New Music Sharing Network. A particularly pointed comment:

How is this a good thing? (Score:1)

by no_choice (558243) on Monday October 27, @01:38PM (#7320571)

Let me get this straight: we already have numerous P2P networks through which people can freely share
digital media. These guys have created a system that distributes ANALOG versions of digital songs; only distributes data deigned appropriate by a central authority; only distributes locally, not worldwide; only allows users to hear the music from their TV, and not move it elsewhere.

And this is supposed to be a good thing?

No wonder Microsoft is funding the research… creating “innovations” that make people’s lives worse instead of better seems to be their specialty.

The only “benefit” I can see from the MIT system over P2P file sharing is that the MIT system allows the RIAA executives to continue to harvest extreme wealth from the creativity of underpaid artists and the greed of contribution-hungry politician.

Instead of creating technical kludges that make our lives worse instead of better, would it not be better to junk the DMCA and other obsolete copyright laws bought and paid for by the RIAA and friends?
http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/index.php?p=850&more=1&c=1


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Billy Tauzin's MPAA
Kevin Werbach

The New York Post is reporting that Congressman Billy Tauzin will take over from Jack Valenti as head of the Motion Picture Association of America. I think this is good news for defenders of openness and competition in the digital economy.

First, Tauzin will leave his powerful position as chair of the House Commerce Committee, where he is an effective advocate for the interests of the incumbent telephone companies. Second, he will replace Jack Valenti, whose supreme talent is his extraordinary gravitas. Billy Tauzin is a partisan street fighter. A very skillful, exceedingly well-connected street fighter, which is why he's getting this plum job. But someone who everyone sees as an advocate for one set of interest groups.

Valenti is able to float above the political fray. His aloofness suggests that what Hollywood thinks is good for the movie industry is obviously good for America. As the front man of Hollywood's crusade for copyright absolutism, he has made an extremist position feel downright reasonable. Tauzin can't do that. He may win his battles, but it will no longer be a secret that a war is going on. The same dynamic is occurring with the departure of the thoughtful Hilary Rosen from the Recording Industry Association of America.

The last, best hope to turn the tide in the conflict is for more people to realize that Larry Lessig is a centrist on copyright. With Billy Tauzin running the MPAA, perhaps the real policy spectrum will be easier to perceive.
http://werbach.com/blog/2003/10/26.html#a1282


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DirecTV Takes No Prisoners

DirecTV has been waging a war on piracy that makes the record labels look nonchalant. The company has filed about 10,000 lawsuits and mailed more than 100,000 "demand letters" giving suspected pirates a brutal choice: Pay $3,500 to settle or go to court. Problem is, the campaign targets anyone who bought smartcard programming gear from certain merchants; officials just assume it's used for hacking. Is that fair? DirecTV enforcement chief Larry Rissler thinks so. - Lucas Graves

WIRED: Those $3,500 settlement checks must be generating a nice little revenue stream. Has it put a dent in DirecTV's losses due to piracy?
RISSLER: We've never quantified the number who are stealing or quantified the losses. We do view it as a serious problem, and we're taking serious measures to address it.

How successful have you been?
By the number of Web sites we've taken down, the number of law enforcement actions we've taken, and the number of people who've been contacted by our end-user development group, it makes sense to say we've had an impact.

Your letters don't distinguish between pirates and people who program smartcards for legitimate reasons, like security systems. Why not?
If an individual claims to have a legitimate use, he or she can furnish information - a business plan, maybe schematics - and our staff will evaluate it. In at least 20 cases, DirecTV chose not to pursue the matter after the individual provided background.

You're putting the burden of proof on the accused.
There's a legal presumption that the purchase of the device implies use, and the burden switches to the defendant to show that it was used in a legitimate manner. We're talking about products that came into existence because of the satellite piracy industry.

But a lot of the equipment itself is perfectly legal.
That's correct. We also look at the Web sites these things are sold on. We're not going after people who purchased devices from Hewlett-Packard's site. We're going after people who purchased devices from pirate sites like White Viper. Anyone who looks at these sites would see the red flags.

What about the innocents who wanted to steal but were too dumb to make it work?
If they can convince a jury that was the case, then they prevail.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...w=wn_tophead_4


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Copyright Catch-Up in E. Europe
Roxanne Khamsi

RIGA, Latvia -- Not only can music enthusiasts in the Baltic states buy boatloads of pirated tunes on the streets, they pay taxes on the prohibited material.

And the governments of these former Soviet republics are doing nothing to stamp out piracy of intellectual property. In fact, they profit from it by imposing taxes on them, says Elita Milgrave, chairwoman of the Latvian Music Producers Association. By turning a blind eye to piracy, these governments could hold back the region as it tries to integrate into the economies of the developed world, particularly the European Union.

"The biggest problem in relation to piracy and the EU enlargement in new accession countries, and generally in Eastern Europe, is weak borders," said Raili Maripuu, regional expert for Eastern Europe's International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. "The new external border will be shared with Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, all three of which are notorious source or transit countries of pirate material."

Maripuu added that while the whole EU external border "needs a considerable improvement to make it watertight," the situation is the worst in the Baltics.

A report released in June by IFPI estimated the level of music piracy in Lithuania at 85 percent, with losses to the industry calculated at 12 million euros. The report also gauged the amount of piracy in the country's Baltic neighbors, Latvia and Estonia, at 65 percent and 60 percent, respectively. In comparison, the study found that Hungary, another country set to accede to the EU in spring, faced less severe copyright infringement at about 30 percent.

Western Europe is watching closely as eight Eastern European countries -- the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia -- plus Cyprus and Malta, try to join the EU. The established countries want strict incorporation of EU directives on copyright protection written into the Eastern countries' national legislation.

Francisco Mingorance, European public policy director at the Business Software Alliance, believes that enlargement of the EU will have a serious impact on levels of pirated goods circulating in the bloc.

"The level of piracy in the software industry is about 35 percent in current EU member states and in Eastern Europe the piracy rates are generally twice as high," he said.

Mingorance noted that many software producers hope that the European Parliament will approve a new proposal for a broad enforcement directive on copyright protection. But Mingorance also admits that some Eastern European countries will have to beef up their efforts to catch copyright criminals.

Enforcers of copyright protection in the Baltics face an uphill battle, said Romans Baumanis, the region's representative to the Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights, which has helped coordinate a local lobbying effort for fiercer implementation and interpretation of related legislation.

A person suspected of violating copyright law in Latvia is assumed innocent until proven guilty, placing the burden of proof on the prosecutors, according to Baumanis, who also works as vice president and managing director of the PBN Company in the Baltics. He said that in other nearby countries, such as Sweden, the problem has been judged as serious enough to make an exception and shift this responsibility in cases of copyright and trademark infringement.

Milgrave noted that such cases are currently very expensive to pursue because Latvian law enforcers must provide expert evidence in court on every disk of a suspected illegal goods -- regardless of the number of disks involved in the case.

So far, the Baltics have produced mixed results. Although Latvia and Lithuania have ratified two recent treaties from the World Intellectual Property Organization that cover the electronic distribution of copyrighted works and performance, Estonia lags behind.

"The Internet is global, so it's essential to have treaties which establish the minimum level of protection on a global basis," said Jorgen Blomqvist, director of the copyright law division at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Switzerland.

Toomas Seppel, copyright specialist at the Estonian Ministry of Culture, said although the country plans to ratify the two treaties at the beginning of next year, solid enforcement is more important than lawmaking when it comes to controlling piracy.

Indeed, the software industry is having more success than the music industry at combating illegal distribution of copyrighted material in countries such as Latvia, said Sandis Voldins, executive director of the country's BSA committee. Voldins explained that in 2002 only 10 CDs of music (and not a single disk of software) were confiscated by Latvian border officials, but this year the number of confiscated disks has already reached the thousands. In his view, improvement in copyright protection has much to do with the nation's pending accession to the European Union.

"The EU matters here very much, because the government understands it cannot just leave these things undone," Voldins said.

He added that the influence of organized crime groups, which many see as the primary force behind music and software piracy, has become less outwardly apparent over the past few years.

"We get calls from software users who tell us that Microsoft is already rich enough," said Voldins, who mentioned that people have threatened to deliver dead rats to his office. "But I know that earlier there were some much more serious threats from organized crime. They threatened to bomb the cars of people who fought against pirate material."
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60874,00.html


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Music companies want entire internet regulated.

Site At Centre Of Aussie Court Battle Switched Off
James Pearce

The Web site at the heart of a legal battle between several music industry behemoths and Australian Internet service provider (ISP) ComCen was taken down.

The takedown comes after Stephen Cooper, the maintainer of the Web site www.mp3s4free.net, gave undertakings to the Federal Court in Sydney on Friday that he would remove the Web site. On Tuesday last week, several music companies took Cooper and ComCen to court over alleged copyright infringements, the first time an ISP has been named as a respondent in such a case.

"We're pleased that it's come down, we asked them to take it down and it's come down," Michael Williams, a lawyer for Gilbert and Tobin who is representing the music companies told ZDNet Australia .

ComCen had refused to remove the site, claiming that since no music files were located on the servers which hosted the site, the mp3s4free.net site was analogous to a directory such as Yahoo.

The parties were due to appear before Justice Brian Tamberlin in court in Sydney tomorrow to debate whether the site should be removed while the case was being heard. As at early afternoon today, that hearing was scheduled to proceed. Regardless, the legal action seeking civil damages against both Cooper and Comcen will continue, according to Williams.

At the heart of the matter is the question of whether linking to copyright infringing material from a Web page is itself an infringing act. The legislation in question was introduced in the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000, which is due for review in March next year.

This Act laid a technology-neutral exclusive right of communication to the public, and the case will come down to how this is interpreted in a court of law.

If the music companies are successful in suing ComCen, more lawsuits are likely to follow, the director of Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) director Michael Speck told ZDNet Australia . He also indicated the music industry would lobby the government to introduce legislation regulating ISPs, and claimed that self-regulation would not work. He compared the current situation with the banks attempting to self-regulate cash transactions in the 1970s and 80s to prevent money laundering -- an unsuccessful effort which saw government intervention through the introduction of legislation.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/sec...9117400,00.htm


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EFA Condemns Music Industry "Piracy" Raids
Press Release

Electronic Frontiers Australia today condemned the heavy-handed legal action instituted by several major music labels against the operator of an Australian website and his Internet Service Provider.

The website, www.mp3s4free.net [1], was alleged to contain MP3 audio files which infringe upon the copyrights of the record labels, but is in fact a collection of links to other websites on the Internet, and other MP3 files distributed by permission of the Copyright holders.

Music labels named as applicants in the Federal Court action are Universal Music Australia, EMI Music Australia, Sony Music Entertainment (Australia), Warner Music Australia, BMG Australia, and Festival Mushroom Records.

On Friday 17 October, lawyers acting for the music labels raided the house of Stephen Cooper, the operator of the website, and the offices of Mr Cooper's Internet Service Provider, who hosted the site. Anton Piller orders (similar to search warrants) authorising the raids permitted agents for the music labels to seize information including copies of the site itself, and logs of Internet users accessing the site.

"EFA understands that the music industry has relied on a series of specious allegations concerning the content and illegality of the mp3s4free website, to obtain an Anton Piller order allowing them to perform these raids," said EFA board member Dale Clapperton. "In the absence of clear and unambiguous evidence that the website was directly distributing copyright infringing MP3 files, the use of an Anton Piller order against Mr Cooper and his ISP smacks of intimidation and is an unreasonable and unwarranted action."

"Now that their raids have failed to find any evidence that the website was directly distributing infringing MP3 files, the music industry has fallen back on allegations that merely linking to files on other websites, is in and of itself illegal. These claims are not supported by the Copyright Act, or by Australian case law. Using an Anton Piller order based on dubious evidence to launch an almost entirely speculative case in an untested area of law is typical of the heavy-handed bullying tactics employed by the music industry in similar cases overseas. The music labels have intentionally targeted a small Internet publisher and ISP who may not have the legal budget to mount an effective defence against these allegations."

"Recent claims made by spokespersons for the music industry to the effect that Internet Service Providers make up to one fifth of their income from trade in illegal music are completely unsupported, as are their arguments that hosting a website which links to other sites containing MP3 files is illegal."

The Federal Court action seeks declarations that both Mr Cooper and his ISP have infringed the copyrights of the music labels by making and/or distributing copies of copyrighted music, and seeks permanent injunctions and damages against them both.

"In launching this action, the music industry has made the same allegations against both Mr Cooper and his ISP. They are effectively claiming that an Internet Service Provider can be held liable for the content of a website hosted by them, as if the ISP were the author of the site. This flies in the face of recent amendments to the Copyright Act which were designed to prevent this very type of claim against Internet Service Providers."

"This case has major implications for freedom of speech on the Internet. Holding Internet publishers and hosting companies legally liable for the content of other sites that they link to threatens to chill the speech of all Internet users. This case should be of major concern to all Australian Internet users."
http://www.efa.org.au/Publish/PR031028.html


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Next DVD Spec. To Offer Net Access Not More Capacity
Tony Smith

The DVD Forum, the body that oversees the DVD specification, has decided to stick with red laser technology and current storage capacities rather than make the move to blue light and more capacious discs.

Instead, it will offer Internet integration to tempt upgrade-hungry consumers.

The Forum, which counts consumer electronics companies as well as music and movie industry giants among its 216 members, last week laid down its plans for the next generation of the DVD standard.

While Toshiba and NEC had been pitching a blue light technology that would have considerably increased the space available for movie and other data, the Forum has decided to stick with the existing laser specifications, NE Asia Online reports, presumably for greater backward compatibility.

As it stands, the next generation of DVD will work just like today's format, but with greater Internet integration. Many DVDs already include links to web sites, but they're included in a separate DVD- ROM partition on the disc that can only be read by a computer- hosted DVD drive.

The next version of the spec. will allow content creators to build those links directly into the scripts that tell a DVD player how to show the movie. The idea is that 'Enhanced DVD' players will have Net access built-in, either directly or via a home network, enabling consumers to access extra material at will.

The format will also support the use of "digital keys", as the report puts it, to authorise the connection to web sites.

Both technologies are expected to appear in product next year, which means the spec. isn't that far off completion.

Put them together and it's clear the move is about shifting the DVD spec. away from a simple storage medium to a kind of digital theatre ticket where purchasing the DVD buys you entry to the content - which will almost certainly be stored someplace else.

Today, broadband take-up is growing, but it remains a primarily PC technology. But presumably there will come a time when most homes have it, and it will feed a broader local network comprising not only computers but games consoles and other home entertainment devices. While a DVD is likely to prove the best medium for movies for the next few years, if not further out, there's still plenty of supplemental content that punters are going to want, and the movie industry is going to want to sell them.

But how to provide it without it being ripped off? Full-scale DRM is an option, but one consumers are unlikely to support, even those who aren't in the habit of filching films off the Internet. The solution then is to provide content on the Net, but through a controlled access system. Playing an 'Enhanced DVD' for the first time might begin a background process that links a disc ID to a player ID and records the connection on a server somewhere. Play the disc elsewhere and the system spots the fact and blocks access to the content.

Such an approach is likely to be used to deliver extras, which some buyers will want and many others won't. But extend the idea just a little and all the content, including the movie itself, comes down the wire to the player owned by the consumer who bought the disc. In essence the DVD is nothing but a entry ticket, perhaps with some free content on board that the industry doesn't mind giving away.

Such a system doesn't preclude nor is precluded by direct video on demand systems. Instead it provides a way into such systems for consumers who don't own a PC but have a 'transparent' Net connection, perhaps via a cable TV box, anyway.

Such a system neatly gets over the content industry's aversion to delivery technologies that don't involve physical product for punters to purchase, or at least business models that aren't based on the old 'x dollars for y items' mode. It also includes enough DRM to block piracy (at least theoretically) but not enough of it to make usage difficult for the customer.

Of course, the next generation of the DVD standard is unlikely to deliver all this, at least not at the outset, but it does appear to put in place the foundations for such a structure.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/33607.html


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Rights Tools Could Bite Back
Madeline Bennett

The ability to govern access to emails and other documents might create more problems than solutions

Microsoft technology designed to allow greater control over documents and emails could create security and privacy headaches for IT managers.

Under Microsoft's Information Rights Management (IRM) system, users will be able to set restrictions on email messages to selectively prevent recipients from forwarding, copying or printing content. An email expiration feature also lets users set a deadline after which messages cannot be viewed.

John Barker, an IT specialist at law firm Last Cawthra Feather, warned that the technology could encourage users to become more blasé about the content of emails.

"If people think the rude email they sent would be de-activated, and therefore 'undiscoverable', they might be more inclined to send it in the first place," he said. "However, they are not going to get away with it, as the technology means the email will be recorded on the Exchange Server, or equivalent."

The restriction features in IRM, introduced in Office 2003 last week, could also undermine productivity. Business partners may be unable to open messages due to incompatible email systems or if needed content has expired.

When an email using IRM is sent to someone using a different email system, the recipient will not be able to open the message, said Microsoft.

Jamie Cowper, senior technology consultant at messaging specialist Mirapoint, said, "Staff might want to control all emails using the access controls, but that's not best business practice."

Firms can only use the IRM features in Office 2003 if they also have the latest versions of Windows Server 2003. And IT managers deploying Office 2003 need to ensure appropriate-use policies are updated and training courses are in place, said Cowper.

"Firms need to decide beforehand exactly how they will allow the functionality to be used," he added. "Maybe they could divide staff into business groups (to control) who could set email restrictions, for example."

George Gardiner of law firm Stephenson Harwood said some businesses may feel the technology is too difficult to manage. "Many may want to prohibit the use of this new technology if it does not comply with their operational requirements," he said.

Another of Office 2003's programs, InfoPath, has also raised security concerns. An XML-based capability allows users to share and repurpose forms across organisations, using a digital signature to verify a form's integrity.

But John Boyer of electronic forms specialist PureEdge Solutions said the digital signature feature might convey a false sense of security, because forms could still be altered once they are signed off. For example, a user could sign a form to opt out of receiving spam, and the form could then be changed to appear as an opt-in agreement.
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1145826


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Use of Stots TemplateMaster Woodworking Tool Limited to One Shop
Ed Foster

Usage Restrictions -- Nasty EULA Terms – Ban on Resale

A small woodworking tool manufacturer, Stots Corporation, includes a license agreement on its TemplateMaster jig tool. The tool is licensed, not sold, and customers cannot sell it or lend it to others. Nor can they sell or lend the jigs they make with it. (Click on “Full Story” link to see details.)
Sources: Company Website, Reader Reports

We’re all familiar with license agreements on software tools that limit what you can with the product. But what about a license agreement on a real tool limiting what you can with the product and the things you make with it?

“Shrinkwrap licenses are showing up everywhere,” a reader recently wrote. “I just bought a jig for making dovetailing jigs -- this is woodworker talk if it's unfamiliar to you. The master jig contained a license that says I've licensed the master jig, not bought it. The license says I can't lend or sell the master, and furthermore I can't lend or sell the jigs I make with the master.”

The reader was referring to Stots Corporation of Harrods Creek, KY, and the user agreement for its TemplateMaster product. Sure enough, the Stots license says TemplateMaster may be used “in only one shop by the original purchaser only” and that “you may not allow individuals that did not purchase the original Product (to) use the Product or any templates produced using the Product…”

A FAQ document on the Stots website explains that the license is necessary because “the purpose of the TemplateMaster is to clone itself. Therefore we are verifying your honesty that only you will use the tool and you will not be passing it around to others to use for free. It is exactly the same as the ‘shrink wrap’ agreement that comes with almost all computer software. Please help us fight ‘tool piracy’.”

Challenged as I am to even hammer a nail, I certainly can’t judge the uniqueness of the TemplateMaster product compared to other woodworking tools. The reader doubts it’s particularly novel, in that the template or jig one creates with it will be virtually identical to “Keller” jigs that have been around for many years. “The key difference is that the instructions that came with the Keller jig said, in not so few words ‘here, use this jig to make a dovetail joint’,” the reader said. “The Stots jig, which is geometrically equivalent, comes with instructions that say ‘use a duplicating router bit to copy this jig to make a jig that looks almost exactly the same as me -- and exactly the same as the Keller jig -- then use that jig to make a dovetail joint.”

But even assuming the Stots tool is a wonderful innovation, does that give its inventor the right to restrict how you use the tool? The patent law doctrine of exhaustion would seen to overrule such restrictions, but that doctrine took a hit in one recent case. And then what about the idea of restricting how customers use the tools they make with the TemplateMaster? Don’t let the software companies hear about that one, or next thing you know there will be usage restrictions on who we can share our data with.
http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/...0/22/221921/32

[JackSpratts]

Poll: Lower CD Prices Will Curb Downloading
Billboard

Bringing down the consumer's cost of music CDs will stem the tide of illegal downloading, according to a Billboard.com poll. Of 13,180 voters, 73% said lower prices will encourage fans to purchase new releases rather than seek out the songs illegally online.

On the other side of the coin, 27% opined that if the same music that's on the CD is available for free, why pay for it?

As previously reported, Universal Music Group announced in September that it will drop its frontline pricing in the U.S. to $12.98 from $18.98.

A new poll about legal download sites is already underway in The Voting Booth. Stop by and register your opinion today!
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/ar...ent_id=2010376


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Two-Day DVDs a Slow Sale

Disposable DVDs have been on store shelves for a little over a month and, for the most part, they seem to be staying there.
Katie Dean

Four states are serving as test markets for the 48-hour DVDs, called EZ-Ds. The product is vacuum-packed; once opened, the disc will play for two days before a resin on the DVD reacts with the atmosphere, rendering it unplayable.

Flexplay Technologies, which manufactures the EZ-D, touts the product as the "no return, no late fee movie rental" on its website. The company markets the EZ-D to movie enthusiasts who want to avoid rushing back to the video store to meet a deadline. Instead, customers can choose to throw the disc away or recycle it.

Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a division of Disney, is testing the market for the format in Illinois, Texas, South Carolina and Kansas at grocery and convenience stores and electronics retailers.

A Buena Vista official had no comment on sales of EZ-Ds, but a survey of stores that sell the new product reveals that the EZ-Ds are not appealing to many customers.

"They haven't sold very well yet," said Tom Mullen, the store manager for Cub Foods in Peoria, Illinois. "We've got them up front in a prime location right by the check-out lanes."

In more than one month's time, the store has sold around 15 to 20 of the EZ-Ds, he said.

"I think the biggest reason is the price. It's a tad bit too high," he said.

Cub Foods sells the EZ-Ds for $7 and offers about 10 titles, including Sweet Home Alabama, The Hot Chick and Shanghai Knights.

"Too expensive," said Tom Tow, who manages the Cub Foods 40 miles away in Bloomington. "That's the most echoed comment I've heard."

Customers aren't interested in paying more than $6 for a limited-play DVD when they can pay $2 at the video store. Even with a $2 late fee, it's cheaper than buying a disposable DVD, Tow said.

"I don't think they like the idea that it self-destructs in 48 hours," he said. "I think a lot of them are worried about the quality of the DVD for that price. Seeing as how it self-destructs, can it really be that good?"

Tow said the cardboard display is still full of EZ-Ds, and that less than an eighth of the movies in stock have been sold.

In Charleston, South Carolina, one Winn-Dixie store has also had trouble getting customers to buy the disposable movies.

"They think it's ridiculous," said Joseph Pellegrino Jr., manager of the Rivers Avenue store in Charleston. "They won't pay that type of money for something that's going to vaporize."

Pellegrino said the company made a mistake when it chose to sell EZ-Ds at his store because it's located in a low-income, inner-city area, and his customers are very price-conscious.

"Probably in a yuppie market it would do excellent," he said.

Pellegrino said he hasn't seen one customer purchase an EZ-D, though some of them have been shoplifted out of the store.

"The good thing is that they tear them out of the packages and they don't realize that they've started (the EZ-D's) disintegration," he said.

Susan Ghertner, environmental manager of H-E-B, a grocery chain in Texas, said that response to the EZ-Ds is mixed: Some stores report the product is selling "fairly well," and in others, the EZ-D is "not selling so well."

"That could be the product or it could be because there's not that much of a selection," she said.

An October article in Video Business surveyed several retailers in Austin and found that customers gave the EZ-D movies a look but were hesitant to plunk down their money.

One Kansas electronics store reported that the titles are selling steadily and a handful of customers asked about the limited-play DVDs even before they had arrived in the store.

"People are grasping the concept and think it's a good idea," said Shane Pohlman, manager of media at Nebraska Furniture Mart in Kansas City. "It's convenient for the customer."

Convenient perhaps, but environmentalists are angry that the product even exists, as DVDs can be re-used multiple times anyway. They see this limited-play DVD as a sure-fire way to create more junk for landfills.

Environmental groups have vigorously protested the EZ-D since it was first introduced. In August, volunteers staged a phone protest and dialed Disney CEO Michael Eisner to complain about the product. The Texas Campaign for the Environment has also mailed over 1,000 postcards to Eisner and local retailers to urge them to stop selling the EZ-D.

"We want to send a clear message from our organization to the community that this is a product that is wasteful and we don't want it in our community," said Eleanor Whitmore, a spokeswoman for the Texas Campaign for the Environment.

The EZ-D website lists four options for recycling the old EZ-Ds: bring the used DVD to a local collection point, request a postage- paid mailer or print a prepaid postage label to send the EZ-Ds to a recycler, or participate in an incentive program. The incentive program awards a free EZ-D to those who mail back six expired EZ-Ds.

GreenDisk is handling the recycling for Flexplay. GreenDisk founder David Beschen would not reveal how many EZ-Ds have been mailed back.

Instructions to mail back the EZ-D are included on the package. However, several of the retailers selling the EZ-Ds did not know the name of a local collection point for the obsolete EZ-Ds.

"If they included an envelope, and you could drop it in the mail when you get done, that would definitely be an improvement for the environment, anyway," said Cub Foods' Mullen. "If you don't make it easy for (the customer), they won't do it."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,60983,00.html


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Court OKs Death For Analog TVs

Appeals court upholds rule requiring digital tuners by July 2007

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a government rule requiring all but the smallest new televisions to have tuners that can receive digital TV signals by July 2007.

The makers of TVs, VCRs and DVD players tried to block the Federal Communications Commission rule, saying it would make sets more expensive and is unnecessary because cable and satellite viewers don't need the tuners.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the FCC, which said the requirement was needed because the industry was not moving quickly enough to make tuners available.

The tuners, either inside a TV or in a separate box used with the TV, will be needed to receive broadcasts over the airwaves after the nation switches from analog to digital signals. Congress has set a goal of December 2006 for the switchover.

The FCC wants to ensure that anyone who buys a TV can take it home, plug it in and receive local stations without subscribing to a cable service or buying an extra tuner box for digital signals.

The first phase of the tuner requirement begins next year, when half of all TV sets 36 inches or larger are required to have the tuners. By July 1, 2007, all TVs 13 inches or larger, and all VCRs and DVD players, must meet the new standard.

Unlike traditional analog television, digital TV signals use the language of computers, allowing for sharper pictures and potential features such as Internet access, video games and multiple programs on one channel. Digital signals can be sent with satellites, by cable or as over-the-air broadcasts.

High-definition television, or HDTV, is another possible feature of digital television. Sets designed for HDTV signals offer more lifelike pictures and sound. The sets cost from about $800 to many thousands of dollars, but prices are dropping.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/1....ap/index.html


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Who Needs Radio Anymore?

TV talent shows, Internet give musicians new access to fans
Carolyn Brown

All the big names were there. P. Diddy, Beyonce, Justin, Jewel, Avril, Tim McGraw, and yes, even old-timer Tom Petty, to name a few, came out Monday night for the Radio Music Awards. The obligatory awards were given out, with many “thank yous” to radio deejays across the country for their support. There was even a relatively “normal” appearance by Michael Jackson.

ALL SEEMED WELL in the radio industry on its special night. But, at a time when reality TV shows create pop stars, music is downloadable from the Internet with a click of the mouse and Carson Daly is arguably the most important deejay (vee-jay?) around — is radio even relevant anymore?

With Apple’s Internet downloading service, iTunes, now available for PC users, and Napster back up and running, there is a library of music available out in cyberspace, that has nothing to do with AM or FM or what you hear while channel surfing in your car. With a virtual jukebox of music at your fingertips why would anyone tune in to their local radio station, where a limited play list, abundance of commercials and cookie-cutter deejays flood the airwaves.

Well, with the exception of being stuck in your car, without a CD or cassette player, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to tune in. There was a time when deejays could play whatever they wanted, and the radio was the place to go to hear a variety of music and discover new artists. But, as the play lists shrink and become more of the same, the Internet is quickly becoming the place to go for music lovers of all kinds. Many big radio stations have even caught on, and have started streaming on the Internet. Who would have ever thought that there would be a time when people would listen to the radio on their computer?

Maybe the same people who believed in a crazy idea call MTV.

Which brings us back to his weirdness, Michael Jackson, one of the first artists to extend music to new mediums (think “Thriller”). Maybe Napster and TV talent shows are part of an inevitable music revolution that began way back when Elvis first shook his hipbones so provocatively. Music and image are completely inseparable, and with the advent of reality TV and the Internet, music consumers aren’t about to relinquish power to a solitary deejay and squirm at the fickle whims of their radio reception.

Do artists trying to make it in the music industry even need radio? With a new stream of talent shows out there, “American Idol,” “Star Search” and even “Nashville Star” for the country music lovers, it turns out television could be all it takes to become a successful recording artist. Take a look at “American Idol,” the wildly popular Fox talent show. Its first winner, Kelly Clarkson, strutted her stuff at Monday’s Radio Music Awards. After turning herself into a Christina Aguilera clone, the radio industry embraced her, playing her first single “Miss Independent” incessantly on Top 40 stations this summer. From TV star to pop-diva, Clarkson has taken her place among the ranks of pop’s biggest stars, at least for now.

But the heir to her throne, runner-up but reigning king, Clay Aiken, didn’t have as much luck with radio. Deejays across the country mocked him, didn’t take him seriously, and often refused to play his music. Well the joke just might be on them. Despite little radio play, Aiken’s debut album went double platinum in its first week of release, out-selling Clarkson’s album by a landslide. Aiken’s success serves as a shining example of the power television now has over the music industry, and the arguably insignificant power radio has these days.

NBC’s “Today” show has even taken a stab at its own version of “American Idol.” The morning show’s “Today’s Superstar” is in its second installment. The singing contestants get national exposure and the winner gets a recording session with Warner Bros. Records. Only time will tell if the current crop of TV-made artists have staying power.

So will radio still be around in 15 years? It is still one of the only places where you can discover new music for free. Although it’s minimal, Napster has started to charge for downloading music. Big market, Top 40 stations are still a prime place for exposure for up-and-coming artists. They just might not need that exposure as much as they would have 10 years ago.

And, the fact of the matter is most people stuck in traffic are tuning in to the radio, for the traffic report if nothing else.

Now back to the Radio Music Awards. It begs asking, would anyone have really “listened” or cared about the awards if they were broadcast on radio not television?

People watched the show because they wanted to see what Michael Jackson looked like, how tight Tim McGraw’s jeans were going to be, if there would be a girl- girl kiss and if Justin Timberlake was indeed growing out his hair.

It is telling that perhaps the most recognizable deejay on radio, Casey Kasem, received the first-ever Radio Icon award Monday night.

Sorry Carson Daly, Kasem might be the first and the last to get that award.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/986050.asp?cp1=1


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Half of UK Homes Are Online

The telecoms regulator says half of all households in the UK now have a connection to the internet. An Oftel study has found that 12.5 million British homes are online, with 750,000 connecting to the web in the last three months alone. And efforts to promote broadband - which speeds up connection times dramatically by giving customers a permanent link to the web - also appear to be paying off.

The regulator estimates that around one million dial-up customers are likely to upgrade to broadband within the next year.

Oftel also compared prices for internet services across Europe and found that the cost of both dial-up and broadband connections were cheaper in the UK than in other countries. David Edmonds, director general of telecommunications, said: "Growth in internet access, coupled with some of the lowest prices in Europe, is excellent news.

"Oftel's policy of creating competitive markets for internet access continues to drive the growth in internet access."
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm...ews.technology

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Net's Dark Side Dents Broadband
BBC

People are so fed up with spam, porn and viruses that they are put off high-speed broadband, says a study.

The telecoms industry could do more to help users avoid the "dark side" of the net and pitfalls, says the study by think tank the Work Foundation

They also need to do more to understand what people want to do with broadband to encourage take-up.

The UK is still only seventh in global broadband take-up, despite the official push to be a world leader.

'Misunderstood'

"Ordinary people are promised that broadband makes the internet better," said one of the report's authors James Crabtree from The Work Foundation's iSociety project.

"In fact it sometimes leads to a disaster on the desktop which makes people consider stopping using the net altogether."

During the year in which the research was conducted, these problems became a huge concern for people, particularly after a summer of viruses.

Companies need to help people find new ways to create and share
James Crabtree, iSociety

The broadband industry largely misunderstands what people actually want out of their broadband connection too, the report suggests.

"The industry has this impression broadband allows computers to be like clever TV and that people want to sit there consuming content," Mr Crabtree told BBC News Online.

"But we have no evidence this is really true yet."

Instead, the report showed people like to interact socially and do creative things with broadband, instead of being passive.

People need to be shown the social and community benefits that broadband can offer which can enrich their everyday lives, according to co- producers of the report, the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG).

"What we have been doing so far is selling broadband to people who have clear idea what they want it for," said Anthony Walker from the BSG.

"If we want to maintain the rate of growth for broadband, we need to get a new message across that makes broadband relevant to people who aren't already heavy net users."

Sharing, caring

The broadband industry needs to listen more to people about what they want to do online so they can give them ways to get the best out of broadband, the report suggest.

Activities which have little to do with fast download speeds, but more about sharing and getting family and friends talking really showed the true benefits of such a connection.

"In a world where there isn't much to do but shop, you look for a thing that allows you to be creative," said Mr Crabtree.

"Broadband was at its best when it allowed people to create things for themselves."

The report, Fat Pipes, Connected People, suggests some of the best example of this included downloading and sending friends and family digital pictures and competing to see who could get the best deal on net auction sites.

"Companies need to help people find new ways to create and share," said Mr Crabtree.

They also need to get better at supporting users when things go wrong with their broadband, during the installation process for example.

But they also need to be more efficient in helping people avoid "the dark side of the net", like spam and chatroom dangers.

The Fat Pipes, Connected People research was presented at the BSG annual conference in London this week.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3217487.stm


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Ratings

Hip-Hop Radio Leads Digital Race

The BBC's black music radio station 1Xtra has been the most successful of the BBC's four new digital stations, listening figures have revealed.

1Xtra, which broadcasts hip-hop, R&B and garage, averaged 313,000 listeners per week during the last three months, official Rajar ratings showed.

BBC Radio 2 is still the UK's most popular station but its audience slipped 500,000 to 12.5 million.

In London, long-term number one station Capital has been overtaken by Heart.

BBC DIGITAL-ONLY RADIO STATIONS, WEEKLY AUDIENCE

1Xtra - 331,000
Five Live Sports Extra - 312,000
BBC7 - 236,000
6Music - 154,000
Source: Rajar

The Rajar figures, which cover three months from July to September, are the first to track the audiences of the BBC's digital stations.

The BBC launched 1Xtra, BBC7, Five Live Sports Extra, and 6Music last year - to complement digital broadcasts of its existing stations.

The ratings put 1Xtra ahead of Five Live Sports Extra, which broadcasts sports commentaries and had 312,000 listeners per week.

BBC7, which includes children's shows plus spoken word comedy and drama, had an audience of 236,000.

And 6Music, specialising in classic rock and alternative music, had 154,000 per week, the figures showed.

BBC MAINSTREAM RADIO, WEEKLY AUDIENCE

Radio 1 - 9.9 million
Radio 2 - 12.5million
Radio 3 - 2.2million
Radio 4 - 9.5m
Five Live - 5.7m
Source: Rajar

But 6Music's audience was the most dedicated, the BBC said, tuning in for about five hours a week each - longer than listeners to its three sister stations.

BBC director of Radio and Music, Jenny Abramsky, said they were "very encouraging figures".

"The age of digital radio has come at last and the BBC has played a crucial role in getting us there," she said.

Earlier this week, she warned that the first digital figures would be "modest", but stressed that "these are very early days".

London change

The BBC's digital stations are still behind other digital broadcasters, especially those based on magazines such as Smash Hits, Kerrang! and Q.

In mainstream listening, Radio 2 slipped further from the record high of 13.3 million it recorded at the start of this year, while Radio 1 and Radio 4 also dropped slightly.

Capital's flagship 95.8 FM London station, which had been the top commercial broadcaster in the city for 30 years, saw its share of the market drop from 8.9% to 7% in the last three months.

Heart 106.2 rose from 6.7% to 7.2% in the same period.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...io/3207435.stm


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Speed 'Tempts Dial-Up Net Users'

A million Britons will swap dial-up for broadband in the next year, says the telecoms watchdog Oftel.

More are signing up to broadband, an always-on connection 10 times faster than dial-up, as it gets cheaper.

Oftel's latest figures show half of all households in the UK are online, with 750,000 new web users in the last three months.

Both dial-up and broadband net access is cheaper in the UK than other European countries.

"Growth in internet access, coupled with some of the lowest prices in Europe is excellent news," said David Edmonds, Oftel's Director General of Telecommunications.

"Oftel's policy of creating competitive markets for internet access continues to drive the growth in internet access," he added.

There are now 12.5 million households online in the country.

The push towards broadband, which offers a much faster, permanent connection of 512Kbps, has also proved successful, the research suggests.

The UK Government is aiming to make the UK one of the most competitive broadband markets in Europe, with more people connecting to high-speed net than in Germany and France.

About 80% of the UK is now able to get broadband access through ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), while about 40% of the country is covered by cable broadband connections.

The figures from the watchdog's quarterly research comparing consumer use of net services with other European countries, also show 90% of households are happy with their net services overall.

"We look forward to these trends continuing," said Mr Edmonds.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3216973.stm


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Conference To Promote The Value Of Patents And Patent Information

A conference to promote the value of patents and patent information will take place from 10 to 12 November in Kirchberg, Luxembourg.

The European Commission and the European Patent Office, in close association with the Luxembourg Patent Office, are joining forces and combining the events PATINNOVA '03 and EPIDOS in order to highlight issues surrounding patents.

PATINNOVA '03 will consist of two parallel sessions and will address the interface between intellectual property and innovation. The EPIDOS event will focus on the latest developments in the retrieval of patent information, the Internet and other tools available on the market.

Key players from the patent community, including patent offices, patent information suppliers, universities and information brokers, will be present at the parallel exhibition on current trends in the world of patents and innovation
http://www.cordis.lu/express/summary.htm#aaa


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Walruses Revealed As 'Right-Flippered' Creatures

Walruses are ‘right-flippered’, according the first study of walrus feeding behaviour in the wild. Researchers from Denmark, Greenland and Sweden have showed that the animals preferentially use their right flipper to remove sediment from buried food. This is the first time that any aquatic animal has been shown to prefer using one flipper to the other when foraging.

On a part of Northeast Greenland, scuba-diving researchers filmed male Atlantic walruses while they ate. Walruses eat invertebrate animals that live on the seabed and are particularly fond of clams. They suck out the soft part of the clam, and discard the empty shells. As clams can be buried up to 40 cm deep, the walruses must remove sediment to find them.

Video recordings made by the research team show that the walruses have four different types of foraging behaviour. They remove sediment by beating their right flipper, beating their left flipper, or using a water-jet from their mouth. They also root through the sediment using their muzzle – almost like pigs in the ground.

Reviewing the videos, the researchers found that walruses used the right flipper 66 per cent of the time. They used the left flipper only 4 per cent of the time, the muzzle 29 per cent of the time and the water-jet 1 per cent of the time. When considering flipper use only, the walruses used their right flipper 89% of the time.

Right-handed people tend to have longer bones in their right arm than their left, probably because they use it more often. To see if the same was true for walruses, the researchers compared the lengths of the right and left scapula, humerus and ulna from 23 walrus skeletons. They found that walruses did indeed have longer bones in their right flipper.

The findings of this study were published recently in the online journal, BMC Ecology.


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New Ways to Skirt DMCA … Legally!
By Katie Dean

Busting open a digital lock to get hold of copyright works normally is forbidden, but the Librarian of Congress ruled Tuesday that there are exceptions.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, prohibits, among other things, bypassing any technology that controls access to copyright material. This provision is criticized frequently by digital-rights groups because they say it stifles many legitimate activities in the process, including academic research, competition and innovation.


But the controversial law also recognizes that there are certain cases when circumvention should be permitted. Thus, it mandates that every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress review and grant exceptions to the anti-circumvention provision.

Those who are exempt from the rule are those who are "adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make non-infringing uses of that particular class of works," according to the DMCA.

Basically, those who have a non-infringing, fair-use reason to circumvent copy protections should be allowed to do so.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Copyright Office released the four "classes of works" exempted from the anti- circumvention rule. People may bypass a digital lock to access lists of websites blocked by commercial filtering companies, circumvent obsolete dongles to access computer programs, access computer programs and video games in obsolete formats, and access e-books where the text-to-speech function has been disabled.

One programmer who testified at the Copyright Office rule-making proceedings in April was jubilant that the filtering exemption was renewed.

"How sweet it is," said Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and anticensorship activist. "Without the exemption, the DMCA would make it a violation to decrypt the blacklist to find out what (filtering companies) are actually censoring. The actual contents of these blacklists are an important censorship issue.

"The Copyright Office has recognized the importance of fair use in this area affected by the DMCA," Finkelstein said. "It's not a blanket declaration of being legal, but it's an ability to argue fair use."

Filtering advocates had hoped the exemption would be dropped.

"I'm disappointed because I thought we had made it clear that the exemption is unnecessary to conduct meaningful evaluations of filters," said David Burt, a spokesman for Secure Computing, which purchased N2H2, a filtering company.

He cited extensive studies from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Consumer Reports and the Department of Justice, among others, in his testimony and said that "these methods are adequate for evaluating filters."

Gwen Hinze, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the group was pleased that the Librarian of Congress renewed and granted important exemptions, but was disappointed that exemptions the EFF proposed on behalf of consumers were not granted.

The digital-rights group asked that the Copyright Office allow consumers to do the following:

defeat copy-protection technology on CDs that do not play in certain devices, like PCs, in order to make them play;
circumvent region coding on DVDs from outside the United States so they play on U.S. DVD players;
circumvent Content Scrambling System protection on DVDs to access public-domain motion pictures, and skip advertising on DVDs they own.

"There are millions of Americans who are affected by copy protections in digital media," Hinze said. "We're disappointed that those people aren't going to get any benefits out of this rule-making process."

"This underscores the need for legislative reform of the DMCA," she said.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60996,00.html


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Copyright Law Catches Up With UK Surfers
Dinah Greek

Just copying one CD or DVD for personal use can make you a criminal under EU directive

UK users of peer-to- peer (P2P) websites could soon find themselves running the same legal gauntlet as their US counterparts.

The European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) comes into force today, making uploading to P2P sites such as Kazaa and Grokster illegal.

The EUCD, or Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003, amends the Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988 and is the EU's attempt to update copyright protection to the digital age and combat software piracy.

Indivuals who make a copy of a copyrighted DVD, CD or music file, whether for back-up or for use on another device such as an MP3 player, are committing a crime.

Even if this is for personal use they theoretically face up to two years in jail or an unlimited fine, and possible civil action from copyright holders.

It will also be illegal for anyone to break anti-copying technologies and publish their findings, as in the 'DVD Jon' case, in which Norwegian encryption cracker Jon Lech Johanson was prosecuted for distributing DVD encryption-cracking software.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the UK equivalent of the litigious Recording Industry Association of America, has always said it would wait for the EUCD before deciding whether to take legal action against UK users of P2P sites. It is still deliberating.

Peter Jamieson, the BPI's executive chairman, said in a statement given to vnunet.com: "Once we have digested the implications of the revised copyright legislation and communicated this to our members we will consider the need for a wider awareness campaign and, as and when this is carried out, assess its impact and effectiveness before taking further steps."

But the EUCD has been severely criticised by civil liberties groups and lawyers for following too closely the controversial and much criticised 1998 US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and infringing human rights.

"Why shouldn't I be allowed to make a copy of a CD I have paid for so I can listen to it on my computer or put it on an MP3 player? This shows that the law can be an ass," said George Gardiner, technology lawyer and partner at law firm Stephenson Harwood.
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1146800


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Three Minutes With RIAA Chief Cary Sherman

New music industry leader wants to embrace online opportunity as well as quash piracy.
Tom Spring

To millions of people, Cary Sherman is about as popular as the New York Yankees are in Boston. As president of the Recording Industry Association of America, Sherman has vigorously prosecuted online music pirates, as the archenemy of popular file-swapping services from Napster to Kazaa.

Sherman, 55, coordinates the RIAA's legal, policy, and business objectives. Before joining the RIAA in 1997, Sherman worked at the Washington D.C. law firm of Arnold & Porter, where he headed the firm's Intellectual Property and Technology Practice Group. Sherman not only represents musicians and songwriters, he is one as well.

His challenges today are daunting. He wants to wean millions of people off freewheeling file-swapping networks and steer them toward legitimate online music services. Sherman also says he aims to lead the music industry into wholeheartedly embracing the Internet and uploading its entire repertoire for legal online distribution.

PC World invited Sherman to weigh in on a variety of hot topics, from suing music fans to buying songs online. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

PCW: How are your efforts to protect your members' copyrights going?

Sherman: Good. People are more aware now than ever before that uploading and downloading other people's copyrighted music without permission is illegal. They're thinking twice about doing it.

Having taken the action we have--namely, going after individual infringers--it looks preliminarily as though we are seeing a beneficial impact.

PCW: How have enforcement efforts evolved over time, and how might they change in the future?

Sherman: We started with an education campaign, and have been running it for a number of years. Next we combined education with litigation against the peer-to-peer services for facilitating infringers.

But it became obvious that it would be necessary to go after the individual infringers once the courts ruled that Grokster and Morpheus couldn't be held liable for the copyright infringements.

We will continue to pursue infringers. Anything less is like telling people that there won't be anymore cops looking for speeders.

But the most significant component of our strategy is to offer legitimate alternatives. Unfortunately, some people feel they have an inalienable right to steal music.

PCW: So protecting copyrights includes offering new services like Apple ITunes.

Sherman: That's right. It's very difficult for legitimate services to compete with stolen copies of the same product. The RIAA is, in effect, taking action against a shoplifter in order to preserve the retailers' market.

PCW: Don't you risk perpetuating a decline in CD sales by suing music fans?

Sherman: People need to understand enforcement actions are intended to support the legitimate alternatives. If consumers gravitate toward those legal services, we will have done our job.

The only people who will not buy CDs because we are taking action against infringers are the people stealing music. That's not a very good customer base.

Retailers sue shoplifters. DirecTV has filed over 10,000 cases against people who steal their satellite signal. It just surprises me that when record companies do precisely the same thing, people think that it will alienate their customers.

PCW: What's the public's biggest misconception of the RIAA?

Sherman: People think the RIAA is insensitive to what consumers want and assume we are trying to preserve old business models. That couldn't be further from the reality.

The record industry has woken up to the reality of the new Internet marketplace. We are excited about the prospects that the Internet offers for an entirely new distribution mechanism for music.

We just have to bring the piracy under control to enable new business models to take root and prosper.

PCW: What kind of new business models are you talking about?

Sherman: We are already making a lot of new business models. Just look at the past month, with the opening of Apple ITunes [for Windows], Napster is launching, and BuyMusic.com is only a couple months old. The number of legal download and subscription services that are getting really good reviews right now is staggering.

PCW: When do you think consumers will embrace legitimate services? I keep trying these services out, and am disappointed because of restrictions--and I still can't find all the music I want.

Sherman: First off, artists have an obligation to support the rest of the artistic community by licensing their works. Music services have not been able to get licenses from superstar artists like the Beatles. When an artist refuses to license their work, I think that is a vote in favor of piracy instead of the legitimate marketplace.

PCW: Do you feel like you need to improve the RIAA's image with music fans?

Sherman: We aren't trying to win a popularity contest. This is about whether you're going to have a vibrant music industry and an investment to support artists' careers. If somebody has to be the heavy on this, better that it be the RIAA than the artists whose livelihoods are at stake.

PCW: Do you believe that the RIAA's interests come before the interests of Silicon Valley companies that are trying to market tools that give consumers the ability to do more with their media?

Sherman: No. This is not a question of one industry's interests being more important than another's. It's a question of finding the right balance.

We love new technologies and have inevitably prospered from them.

What we are opposed to is businesses built on infringing other people's copyrighted products. We love peer-to-peer technology; we hate businesses that are built on using peer-to-peer to sell advertising with the draw of stealing other people's works.

There are legitimate ways to use technology, and then there are abuses of technology, and just because you go after the abusers doesn't mean that you have a problem with the technology.

PCW: Do you support mandating copyright protection mechanisms in PCs, CD players, or anything else that can play, record, or manipulate data?

Sherman: We actually were not supporters of the Hollings bill that called for just such measures. We thought it was an important means of emphasizing the problem of digital piracy. But technical mandates are not the best way to fix the piracy problem. These issues are best addressed voluntarily in the marketplace.

PCW: You mean makers of computer software and devices should voluntarily put restrictions on equipment?

Sherman: Look at the DVD model, where multiple industries worked together to come up with some form of protection that was sufficient to encourage the motion picture studios to release their content on this new format, and consumer electronics and IT companies have been able to support [the medium] because they thought that these were reasonable protections.

PCW: Do you sense that your lawsuits have changed any file-swapper's attitudes?

Sherman: I believe we have. We certainly have received a large number of letters from people commenting how they hadn't thought about peer-to-peer as piracy before. They understand why we're doing what we're doing.

PCW: Senator Sam Brownback [R-Kansas] is concerned that the RIAA is overstepping its bounds, such as when you issued subpoenas for downloaders' names. He and other critics argue that you are invading people's privacy. What do you say?

Sherman: We expect to have those kinds of issues raised. We're fighting with ISPs about this issue right now. I'm not surprised that a senator or two would take the side of the ISPs.

But I think that you really have to look at the big picture. Is Senator Brownback, or any other senator, going to say we shouldn't be able to protect our interests against thieves that are decimating our industry? The answer to that is no.

PCW: In the age of digital distribution, some argue that the RIAA is obsolete. Why should the RIAA, which is composed primarily of five music companies, control 80 percent of the music?

Sherman: We have no problem with a music industry that is more diversified, that gives new opportunities for new labels and new artists. This is not about maintaining control; it's about being fair in regards to the ability of people to get paid for their work.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,113133,00.asp


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Aural Intercourse: File-Sharing 2.0
Mike Prevatt

Music fans and industry people alike have every reason to cheer: This month has been a watershed one for the digital music revolution. No sooner will you be able to pick up a copy of this paper than you can also participate in the scheduled re-emergence of Napster, the O.G. file trading service that not only popularized song swapping online, but sent the message to the recording industry--namely, the Big Five record labels--that their customers were no longer content with its traditional business model.

However, Napster 2.0 is no longer the rebellious bit of technology it was in 2000-01. Since it was sued and shut down by the courts and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2001, it has gone fully legit, and its new owner is Roxio, a high-profile company in the digital music business. When it launches Napster 2.0 on Thursday (you can pre-register at Napster.com), it will give patrons the choice of downloading individual songs (99 cents) and albums (averaging $10), or any of the 500,000 songs the service offers through a monthly subscription (though you lose the files once you cancel).

Napster 2.0 is predicted to be the biggest challenger to Apple's successful iTunes Music Store, which has been live for Mac users since April, and PC users since Oct. 16. The service--which offers almost 400,000 individual songs and albums--sold a million files in its first week of operation for Mac users. Apple beat its own record last week when PC users bought over a million tunes in the first three days the Windows version was available. Steve Jobs has opened his big gob once again and made it a goal to sell 100 million recordings by next April 28.

This, to say nothing of virtual record shops like RealNetwork's Rhapsody, which is label-sanctioned, as well as BuyMusic.com, Emusic.com, Musicmatch.com and Musicnet.com--all of which means nothing to the millions of file- sharing loyalists who still fiercely believe the exchanging of music online should be free, or protest the music industry's campaign against those using Kazaa, Grokster and the like. Last month, the RIAA sued almost 300 people, and aims to start a second wave of litigation in November--though, this time the alleged criminals get a chance to settle before the lobbyists' lawyers can launch into their opening statements about how Beyoncé needs to get paid.

But copyright-snubbing downloading through the file-sharing networks may have already peaked. Before the RIAA was handing subpoenas out at school playgrounds and retirement homes, between 60 and 100 million online pirates were trading Dashboard Confessional and Ludacris bootlegs. Now that the RIAA is in litigation mode, traffic at Kazaa is down 40 percent, and those still cherrypicking there have stopped making their own music library available, so the number of files up for grabs is down considerably, too. So, it's back to Sam Goody for the kids, right?

Not exactly. Though the fall season has seen a slew of best-selling new releases--propelled mostly by the likes of Clay Aiken, OutKast, Dave Matthews and Dido--some vocal music fans have flooded message boards online to decry the RIAA, some going as far as boycotting anything the Big Five releases. Most of them ask why they should support a business that's suing their target demographic. Meanwhile, the industry is still hemorrhaging, most visibly in the human resources department. Universal, which owns imprints such as Interscope and Island/Def Jam, announced plans to layoff some 1,350 employees by early 2004.

And, just in from Associated Press, two MIT grad students recently managed to circumvent the record labels--while operating within the confines of copyright and licensing--by creating a cost-efficient system through the school's cable TV network to hear analog recordings from the school's 3,500-album library. The RIAA has yet to comment, but experts say the "LAMP" system devised by Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel might be one alternative to Kazaa.

Or maybe not. A lot has happened since Napster irreversibly altered the music industry in 2000, but music fans remain impatient for a music service that has none of the petty limits of the newer, industry-sanctioned ones. Once someone launches a legit outlet as boundless as the file-sharing services the focus will go back from lawsuits to discovering new favorite tunes.

Legit download of the week

Amazon.com has brief snippets of almost all its albums for you to stream and sample, but it also has a sizeable section of free MP3s, too. Most of the pickins are of the emerging artist variety--yay--but this week, we're recommending 1997's "Between the Bars," in honor of revered singer/songwriter Elliott Smith, who died at 34 last Tuesday from an apparent suicide. Just go to Amazon's free music downloads page and type in a search for Smith or the track title.
http://www.lasvegasmercury.com/2003/.../22466236.html


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Music Industry ‘Must Change Business Model’
Macworld staff

The future of the music industry remains uncertain, despite the success of Apple's iTunes Music Store.

Music-industry insiders are more optimistic right now than they have been for some time, The Economist reports, but face pressure to force them to change their business model.

"iTunes has won customers in far greater numbers than once seemed possible," the report explains, but warns that despite consumer acceptance of digital music services, peer-to-peer file sharing will take $4.7 billion in lost revenues.

"Paying 99 cents for a song on iTunes, says one British teen, is unappealing because at that price she may as well buy the CD in a shop. Nor do the new services yet come close to matching the libraries of nearly all music ever recorded that the peer-to-peers boast," The Economist writes.

Recording artist Moby says the industry is going to have to reduce its prices and move toward a new business model, that will be more- favourable to the artists.

In related news, the Recording Industry Association of America filed an additional 80 lawsuits against individual file sharers last night.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_...fm?NewsID=7192


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Justice Department As Antipiracy Shill?
Rick Boucher

In response to peer-to-peer file swappers, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that would place the Department of Justice at the head of a public education campaign about the niceties of copyright law.

While I applaud effective deterrence against the use of peer-to-peer technology to commit piracy, I find this proposed legislative response severely misguided on numerous levels.

The job of the Justice Department is to prosecute crimes--not give lectures and educate the public. In order to launch an effective campaign on the proper use of copyrighted material, the department would first have to educate itself. Given its crime-fighting orientation, I have little confidence that it would ever adequately explain public doctrines such as "fair use" or other proper uses of copyrighted material.

Under the proposed bill, the Justice Department would be under no obligation to ensure that consumers are informed of their fair-use rights to view, excerpt, and copy digital newspaper articles, music clips and other media in the privacy of their homes. At a minimum, it should be required to balance its presentation by emphasizing consumer rights. Otherwise, the education campaign would likely frighten users and chill the exercise of their historically protected rights.

For example, an aggressive antipiracy campaign could have the unintended effect of discouraging positive uses of peer-to-peer systems--such as the interchange of ideas for scientific research and the sharing of family recipes--out of the fear of criminal prosecution. Just as likely, the campaign would scare students away from legally downloading a music or video excerpt for use as part of a school project.

We have already seen a 12-year-old honors student sued by the Recording Industry Association of America, which mistakenly thought that she was using her computer as an Internet-accessible digital jukebox. In addition, we have seen the threat of lawsuits deterring professors and scientists from engaging in legitimate scientific research. We don't need to make things worse by putting FBI agents on TV, waving handcuffs.

An aggressive antipiracy campaign could have the unintended effect of discouraging positive uses of peer-to-peer systems.

The Justice Department has more pressing matters to attend to--such as helping in the war against terrorism. Unfortunately, given tight budgets in Washington, D.C., any funds that are used for this new education campaign would almost certainly divert resources from these more urgent priorities.

Finally, if the Justice Department, at public expense, decides to educate the public about respect for copyright laws, an indefensible precedent will have been set. It would be very difficult for Congress to draw the line and say "no" to the next powerful interest group that wants a tax-funded education campaign to promote respect for another criminal statute in furtherance of its commercial interests. There is no need to start down a slippery slope of having law enforcers become educators, depleting the department's limited resources or redirecting it from its principle responsibility of enforcing the law.

In short, the proposed legislation adopts a fundamentally wrong-headed approach to copyright education and piracy prevention. In my view, an effective and appropriate education campaign should come from those who would benefit most from it--the music and movie industries. In fact, certain companies have begun to do just that, and I support their efforts.

There is no need to start down a slippery slope of having law enforcers become educators.

One studio, for example, airs short clips before the main attraction in theaters that focus on the lesser-known victims of piracy: the film crew, makeup artists and others. This is a good start, but just that--a start. For affordable sums, these industries could mount a substantial TV and radio public education campaign more effectively--and appropriately--than can the Justice Department.

An effective approach to online music piracy prevention would be for record labels to put their entire inventories of recorded music on lawful sites that allow for the permanent, portable downloading of reasonably priced single tracks.

The music industry has started moving in this direction. The success of Apple Computer's iTunes demonstrates that this model works and is what consumers want. The number of downloads from iTunes has broadly exceeded expectations. Now, other Web sites are offering music on a pay-per-track basis. I am convinced that a continued movement in this direction, coupled with an industry-sponsored education campaign, is the best response to peer-to-peer abuse.
http://news.com.com/2010-1028-5099583.html


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Give It Away And Share The Weed
Bob Baker

According to Rob Lewis of WeedShare: "There is a way for artists to give away their music ... and get paid!"

"Our new Weed service turns any Windows Media file into a self-promoting asset that can spread 'like a weed.' The file can be given away by e-mail, peer-to-peer, download site, CD or any other way you can think of. Anybody who gets a copy can play it three times for fre-e. On the fourth play, they're asked to buy it (at whatever price the artist sets).

"When you buy a song, 50% of the price goes immediately to the artist. 20% goes to the person who turned you on to the song. 10% goes to the person above them, and 5% to the next person up the chain. Weed gets the remaining 15% for operating the service.

"Once you've bought a song, send it to your friends. If they buy, you get 20%. And so on."

This concept seems like it has a lot of potential. It takes advantage of the file-sharing craze while building in an automatic sales mechanism. Very cool.

I'd like to hear from any artists who use this service. I'll pass along any feedback I get.

"Reprinted from Bob Baker's The Buzz Factor, featuring fre-e marketing and self-promotion ideas for songwriters, musicians and bands on a budget. Visit www.TheBuzzFactor.com for details."
http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/news/1796/#body


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South Park on Copyright

Via Furdlog, Slashdot and DigtailConsumer - A transcript of a South Park episode: "This month [Lars Ulrich] was hoping to have a gold- plated shark tank bar installed right next to the pool, but thanks to people downloading his music for free, he must now wait a few months before he can afford it. [...] Still think downloading music for free is no big deal?"
http://www.spscriptorium.com/Season7/E709script.htm


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Washington Post Confused On CD-DRM
Edward W. Felten

Today's Washington Post runs an odd, self-rebutting story about the sales of the copy-protected Anthony Hamilton CD -- the same CD that Alex Halderman wrote about, leading to SunnComm's on-again, off-again lawsuit threat.

The article begins by saying that the CD's sales had an unusually small post-release drop-off in sales. Sales fell 23% in the first week, where 40-60% is more typical. There are several reasons this might have happened: the album was heavily promoted, it was priced at $13.98, and it had good word of mouth. But the article tries to argue that the SunnComm DRM technology was a big part of the cause.

The article proceeds to rebut its own argument, by undercutting any mechanism by which the DRM could have reduced copying. Did the DRM keep the music off peer-to-peer networks? No. "Songs from Hamilton's CD appeared on unauthorized song-sharing Internet services, such as Kazaa, before the release date..." Did the DRM keep people from making CD-to-CD copies? No. "Though buyers of the Hamilton CD are allowed to make three copies, nothing prevents them from copying the copied CDs"

Was the DRM unobtrusive? Here the reporter seems to misread one of the Amazon reviews, implying that the reviewer preferred DRM to non-DRM discs:

"I give this CD four stars only because of the copyright protection," wrote one reviewer. "This CD didn't play too well on my computer until I downloaded some kind of license agreement, and was connected to the Internet. Otherwise, it's very good."

It should be clear enough from this quote (and if you're not sure, go read the full review on Amazon) that this reviewer saw the DRM as a negative. And at least two other reviewers at Amazon say flatly that the CD did not work in their players.

The topper, though, is the last paragraph, which shows a reporter or editor asleep at the switch:

A Princeton University graduate student distributed a paper on the Internet shortly after the CD's release demonstrating, he argued, how the copy-protection could be broken. But Jacobs, who initially threatened to sue the student before backing off, said his technology is meant to thwart casual copying, not determined hackers.

What's with the "he argued"? The claims in the student's paper are factual in nature, and could easily have been checked. SunnComm even admits that the claims are accurate.

And how can the reporter let pass the statement by Jacobs implying that only "determined hackers" would be able to thwart the technology? We're talking about pressing the shift key, which is hardly beyond the capabilities of casual users.

We've come to expect this kind of distortion from SunnComm's press releases. Why are we reading it in the Washington Post?
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000467.html


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Latest DMCA Takedown Victim: The Election Process
Ed Foster

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of the speech, or of the press ... except as needed to allow trademark and copyright holders complete power to control discussions about their brands."

Forgive my minor editing of the First Amendment, but I wanted to illustrate just where we are in the era of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Nothing has made it clearer just how fundamentally the DMCA threatens our most basic rights than the current flap about electronic voting machines from Diebold, Inc.

Just as a capsule summary in case you've missed it, over the last several months there has been a rising tide of concern regarding the verifiability of electronic voting machines in general and the security, reliability, and integrity of Diebold's technology in particular. Adding fuel to the fire is the leaking of a large cache of internal Diebold documents and e-mails that have been circulating on the Internet. Critics pointed to memos that they said demonstrated Diebold's technology was buggy, badly tested, and vulnerable to backdoor manipulation. Some even claim to see evidence that outcomes of elections have already been influenced.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Diebold's first response was to begin cease-and-desist letterings to websites that had posted its internal memos, threatening to have those sites taken down under Section 512 of the DMCA. Section 512 provides a very big hammer to copyright holders because it requires Internet service providers to either quickly remove any allegedly infringing material they are hosting or face liability for the infringement themselves. If the ISP refuses, the copyright holder can go to the ISP's upstream provider and ask them to pull the plug. To protect themselves and their other customers, therefore, most ISPs will automatically and immediately take down their client's site upon receiving a 512 notification.

Diebold went the typical DMCA takedown one better, though. Not only did it go after the ISPs whose clients were posting the Diebold memos, it also began sending cease-and-desist letters to secondary sites that were reporting the controversy and merely contained hyperlinks to sites that were hosting the Diebold material. One such website and its ISP refused to accede to the DMCA takedown order and are being defended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In other words, not only are you subject to DMCA takedown for what's on your own site, but you and your ISP are responsible for what might be on a site you link to. From a journalist's point of view, this raises some interesting questions about how one can fairly report this story and provide readers with resources for making up their own minds without incurring Diebold's wrath.

When I asked Diebold spokesman Mike Jacobsen whether I could provide links to Diebold-targeted sites as Blackbox Voting or Why-War, he acknowledged I could but said that it was possible I could get a cease-and-desist notice. "I'm not saying we're going to do it, but you would be at risk for getting a letter," he said. "Anyone that's hosting a direct link to someone hosting those files, we want them to understand this is our stolen property and we want those links to be removed. Looking at it from a legal perspective, we were advised the DMCA was the best resource for getting that done. All we're really requesting that the links be removed from the site, although it does seem that the ISPs wind up taking down the whole site."

Of course, I'm probably going to have a long wait for my cease-and-desist letter, because Diebold's actions have backfired in a number of ways. A mushrooming number of sites are now mirroring the entire set of memos, and by claiming intellectual property rights to them, Diebold has given backhanded authentication to the material. But in using the DMCA to try to suppress the debate about its voting machines, Diebold has made another tactical error - it's closed off the discussion to all but its most virulent detractors. Academicians or journalists who might find evidence in the memos to debunk the more sensational claims about stolen elections are going to feel their hands are tied.

The Diebold controversy has raised a number of troubling questions that can only be answered by an unbiased, transparent examination of the facts. Trying to avoid that examination through questionable intellectual property will only leave a lingering cloud of suspicion hanging over the electoral process. And it proves yet again that the DMCA is in practice totally antithetical to everything Americans believe about how a democracy is supposed to work.
http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/...0/30/9197/8110


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Hollywood Takes Its’ Propaganda To School, Students Give It Right Back
AP

SAN FRANCISCO -- As part of its campaign to thwart online music and movie piracy, Hollywood is now reaching into school classrooms with a program that denounces file-sharing and offers prizes for students and teachers who spread the word about Internet theft.

The Motion Picture Association of America paid $100,000 to deliver its anti-piracy message to 900,000 students nationwide in grades 5-9 over the next two years, according to Junior Achievement Inc., which is implementing the program using volunteer teachers from the business sector.

Civil libertarians object that the movie industry is presenting a tainted version of a complex legal issue -- while the country's largest teachers' lobby is concerned about the incentives the program offers.

"What's the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship" launched last week with a lesson plan that aims to keep kids away from Internet services like Kazaa that let users trade digital songs and film clips: "If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it."

"We think it's a critical group to be having this conversation with," said MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor, suggesting online piracy may not have yet peaked. "If we sit idly by and we don't have a conversation with the general public of all ages, we could one day look back at October of 2003 as the good old days of piracy."

The effort doesn't stop in the classroom. Beginning Friday, public service announcements are being released to approximately 5,000 theaters nationwide, profiling people in the movie industry and arguing that digital piracy threatens their livelihoods.

Indeed, Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA, told Penn State University faculty and students this week that his industry is in "a state of crisis" over digital theft.

But some copyright law experts aren't pleased that the MPAA is the only sponsor for such classroom discussions. They worry that the lesson plans don't address "fair use" constitutional protections for digital copying for personal or educational use.

"This is really sounding like Soviet-style education. First they're indoctrinating the students and then having students indoctrinate their peers," said Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The takeaway message has got to be more nuanced. Copyright is a complicated subject."

Melinda Anderson, a spokeswoman for the National Education Association, says it's unsettling when corporate presence in the classroom is tethered to sponsored incentive programs.

In this case, Junior Achievement is offering students DVD players, DVD movies, theater tickets and all-expenses-paid trips to Hollywood for winning essays about the illegalities of file-sharing. Teachers, too, can win prizes for effectively communicating the approved message in class.

"What it speaks to is kind of a new era in commercialism emerging in classrooms where the attempts to connect with students are becoming more and more sophisticated. Schools that are often strapped for cash are more tempted to partner with these organizations," Anderson said.

"Coming from school, these companies are getting a tacit endorsement for their product," Anderson said. "That's not a school's role -- to be the purveyors."

The program got a rocky start during its first presentation, to some relatively cyber-savvy teens at Raoul Wallenberg High School in San Francisco.

Andrew Irgens-Moller, 14, buried his head into a backpack on his desk and rolled his eyes as the guest teacher warned of computer viruses and hackers that could take control of a user's desktop via file-sharing programs. He objected that antivirus software could scan downloaded files and only sophisticated hackers could pull off the remote desktop computer takeover.

Then the teacher cut him off.

Bret Balonick, a tax accountant on loan from PricewaterhouseCoopers to teach the anti-piracy class, was arguing that some downloaders have been affected by malicious activity. Besides, he said, it's illegal to upload and download unauthorized content online.

"If it's illegal in America, host it in Uzbekistan," snapped the 14-year-old.

Balonick then had the freshmen role-play as singers, actors, producers, computer users. But even the "producers" quietly acknowledged that they too share song files over the Internet.

"It's not illegal if you decide to give it away," said Wilson Cen, 13, regarding burning copies of music CDs for his friends. "They don't want you selling them. It's a gift, you're not selling it."
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory...e/tech/2176045


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Happy Halloween, Nosferatu (No Thanks to Copyright)
Ernest Miller

Tonight, while the trick-or-treaters visit, I will be screening Nosferatu in my driveway on an 80" HDTV projection screen.

Released in silent black and white in 1922, Nosferatu is an unauthorized adaptation of the novel "Dracula" by Bram Stoker and is widely considered one of the classics of cinema. Certainly, many think it is the best adaptation of Dracula in film, one of the most influential horror movies of all time and a masterpiece of Expressionist filmmaking. Thanks to copyright law, however, this film was very nearly lost to us.

Florence Stoker, widow of Bram Stoker (who had died in 1912), sued the producers of Nosferatu for infringement and won. As part of the 1925 decision, all copies of Nosferatu were to be destroyed. Most were. Over the next few years, any copies that became public were also destroyed. This may have meant the end of the film, except that a few isolated copies managed to survive Florence Stoker's death in 1937.

Thank goodness for "pirates."
http://importance.typepad.com/the_im...halloween.html

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Tuesday, November 4th Is Election Day.

Don’t Forget To















Until next week,

- js.










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Current Week In Review.

Recent WIRs -


http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17790 October 25th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17741 October 18th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17709 October 11th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17666 October 4th





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

[SA_Dave]

Why shouldn't I be allowed to make a copy of a CD I have paid for so I can listen to it on my computer or put it on an MP3 player? This shows that the law can be an ass," said George Gardiner, technology lawyer and partner at law firm Stephenson Harwood.

He has a point, but I have to wonder where he bought...uhmm earned ...his law degree?

This is not a question of one industry's interests being more important than another's. It's a question of finding the right balance.

We love new technologies and have inevitably prospered from them.

What we are opposed to is businesses built on infringing other people's copyrighted products. We love peer-to-peer technology; we hate businesses that are built on using peer-to-peer to sell advertising with the draw of stealing other people's works.

There are legitimate ways to use technology, and then there are abuses of technology, and just because you go after the abusers doesn't mean that you have a problem with the technology.

Horseshit! Just for Cary , developers are hard at work on the next generation of community-oriented file-sharing clients. These clients will be designed specifically NOT to make any company or organisation prosper, his in particular!

We have no problem with a music industry that is more diversified, that gives new opportunities for new labels and new artists. This is not about maintaining control; it's about being fair in regards to the ability of people to get paid for their work.

Be careful what you wish for! It might just happen...