Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 3rd, '04

[JackSpratts]

Early Edition


Quotes Of The Week

"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings. They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service." – Canadian Federal Court judge Konrad von Finckenstein

"The big labels have still sued less than 0.1% of illegal file-sharers." - The Economist

"It was very difficult to have this kind of spotless thing going for so many years, then all of a sudden you're the most hated band in the world." - Lars Ulrich

"It doesn't cease to be theft just because the person you're stealing from is doing better." - Stephen Peach, ARIA CEO

"The recording industry can't prove that they have a problem. This P2P may actually be saving the record industry from worse problems." - Howard Knopf, attorney who represented the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic against the CRIA.

"I think I know what country I'll go to college in now." – danhm.








The Myth of Illegal Filesharing

Now I’ve been saying it for years (even here - see last week), and many observers of the file sharing scene have been saying it as well but sometimes it has to be told with the authority of the court to really be heard. That’s just what happened in Canada, and there has never been better words for file sharers than those spoken this week.

The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) has started a legal assault on file sharers that mimics the assault in America. That the Canadian group got a later start may have let them think they’d have an advantage over their sister group in the U.S., allowing them to avoid many of the same legal mistakes that led to unfavorable rulings against the RIAA. Like that group, the CRIA has to go through a legal process in order to identify file sharers’ identities from the IP addresses collected off the internet, and for that they need the courts to force the ISP’s to give up names because the ISP’s won’t do it voluntarily, which is a thorn in the side of copyright extremists but a huge point in the ISP’s favor. The Internet service providers forced the issue in front of a judge, but unlike the American ISP’s, the Canadians had a different take on the matter. In America all ISP’s are publicly opposed to file sharing, so they say anyway, like record companies they equate it with stealing and go so far as to actually stipulate it’s illegal. They may not have wanted to give away customers’ names every time a media company came calling but that’s always had more to do with money, and trying not to alienate their subscribers than any pro-filesharing sentiments they may share, according to official statements at any rate. The situation could not be more different in the North. When faced with the same record company arguments the Canadian ISP’s responded in another way. Not only did they refuse to stipulate the illegality of file sharing, they went so far as to suggest that file sharing itself might actually be legal, that specifically uploading is legal, and therefore there is no need to give up subscriber’s names. They simply wouldn’t do it. That’s a claim no other ISP in the world has advanced. That I happen to agree with them has put me squarely at odds with every government that has weighed in on the subject, until now. In a decision far more favorable to individual file sharers than even last years’ wonderful court ruling legalizing peer-to-peer programs in the States, a court in Canada has ruled that the personal sharing of copyrighted material is itself legal and that downloading and uploading does not violate Canadian statutes. This could not be bigger news. For unlike the U.S. ruling legalizing P2P programs because they can be used for the transfer of non-copyrighted material, the Canadian court places no such restriction on the user.

As of this moment it looks like Canadians can legally share whatever they have on their hard drives, as long as the material itself is legal to own. This means songs, albums, movies, and probably anything digital in their possession. Due to the nature of the decision it may even include software programs, newspaper and magazine articles, DVD’s, and yes, even how-tos for making maple syrup. The judge, Konrad von Finckenstein, alluded to Xerox machines, which always figure prominently in any discussions about copying. He made it clear that distribution is not a passive act, that even having a copy machine in a library does not make the library a distributor, since the librarian isn’t the one engaging in the activity, and you have to take action if you’re going to be liable for distribution.

Said the judge, “Before it constitutes distribution, there must be a positive act by the owner of the shared directory, such as sending out the copies or advertising that they are available for copying.” This means that having a folder potentially accessible to someone who may stumble across it is not the same thing at all as pushing that folder on a user. Well, certainly. But here is where it gets interesting; if Canadian copyright law allows citizens to copy and download for their own personal use, and according to the copyright board it does (Canadians, like those in the U.S. pay for the privilege with special taxes on blank media), then allowing them to copy out of your folder must be legal as well, making uploading as legal as downloading, and that’s where the judge was heading. That this changes everything is an understatement, that this will be fought to the bitter end by the copyright extremists is unfortunate but to be expected. Yet today, right now, we see a fundamental shift in the consciousness of the courts, and it’s a shift that may spread to other states in time.

Never again can a Canadian newspaper, website, television or radio program precede the words “file sharing,” with the word “illegal.” To do so would be a falsehood. A libel. A slander. There is no such thing as “illegal file sharing.” It is an ugly myth. That I’ve always said so makes it for me a matter of philosophical conviction. That the courts have now said so makes it for Canadians a matter of law.

Well done Judge von Finckenstein. Well done Canada.









Enjoy,

Jack.





Canadian court decision here





File Swappers Win Big
Mathew Ingram

In his ruling Wednesday on whether the Canadian record industry could force Internet service providers to identify digital music-swappers, Federal Court judge Konrad von Finckenstein didn't just poke a few holes in the industry's legal case – he blew it completely out of the water. In fact, if it was a turkey and this was hunting season, it would be nothing but a cloud of feathers.

There were a number of reasons why Judge Finckenstein might have quashed the Canadian Recording Industry Association's attempt to identify individual music uploaders, including the fact that it is difficult to tie specific IP (Internet Protocol) addresses to individual users, or to ensure that those users were the ones who actually shared the music files at the time in question.

As it turned out, Judge von Finckenstein did both of those things. But then, after the industry's case was already weak and wobbly at the knees, he delivered the knockout punch: According to the judge, there is no compelling evidence that either downloading or sharing of digital music files is even illegal. In other words, regardless of the other flaws in the industry's case, the CRIA didn't have a leg to stand on in the first place.

This decision – which the record industry has said it will appeal – goes substantially farther than a U.S. ruling in a similar case in December. In that case, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was trying to force Verizon to identify some of its customers who were sharing music files. An appeals court judge ruled that the U.S. legislation only applied to material that ISPs kept on their own servers, not data that merely passed through their telephone or cable lines.

Even that decision left the door open for the industry to pursue file-sharers in other ways – they just have to go through a more time-consuming subpoena process using what are called “John Doe” lawsuits. Judge von Finckenstein's ruling removed any legal basis for the recording industry to make a claim in the first place, effectively putting the CRIA back at ground zero.

On the topic of downloading, the judge was succinct: Canada's Copyright Act allows users to reproduce a musical work onto a recording medium for their private use, and thus, “downloading a song... does not amount to infringement.” Judge von Finckenstein referred in his decision to a Copyright Board of Canada ruling in December which came to the same conclusion, based on the copyright levy consumers pay on blank CDs, which in turn is distributed to rights holders.

That part of the judge's decision wasn't all that surprising, and it's why the CRIA has focused not on the downloading of digital music files but on the sharing or “uploading” of them. But Judge von Finckenstein blew that argument apart as well. He said that “no evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings. They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service.”

Simply setting up a situation that allows copying does not amount to authorizing infringement under the Copyright Act, the judge ruled. In fact, he said, “I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service.” The mere fact of placing a copy where it can be found by another user, he said, “does not amount to distribution.”

In other words, as far as the Federal Court is concerned, neither the downloading nor the sharing of digital music files is illegal under Canadian law. Should it be? Judge von Finckenstein didn't deal with that issue, since it's not the court's job. If the federal government wants file-swapping to be illegal, it will have to make that clear – because as of Wednesday, one of the country's senior judges is convinced that it is not. And the recording industry is left to lick its wounds and plan some other form of attack.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...tory/Business/


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Court Rejects Music Lawsuit

Internet Providers Don't Have To Name Users
Angela Pacienza, Canadian Press

File swappers in Canada can rest easy for the moment after a Federal Court ruling today said that uploading music files into shared folders on peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa is legal.

Justice Konrad von Finckenstein's decision throws a wrench into plans by the music industry to sue people who share songs over the Internet. Unlike similar cases in the United States, he said the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) didn't prove there was copyright infringement by 29 so-called music uploaders.

CRIA had sought a court order to force Internet service providers to identify alleged high-volume music traders identified only as John and Jane Does. Without the names, CRIA can't begin filing lawsuits.

The ruling follows a recent decision by the Copyright Board of Canada that downloading music in this country is legal.

Von Finckenstein said that downloading a song or making files available in the shared directories does not constitute copyright infringement under the current Canadian law.

"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings," he wrote in his 28-page ruling. "They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service."

He compared the action to a photocopy machine in a library. "I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service," he said.

CRIA said it would not be derailed in its fight against music piracy and will appeal the ruling.

"We feel that we have firm grounds for appeal," CRIA president Brian Robertson said in an interview.

"You cannot have widespread copyright infringement without any penalties or deterrents. We believe the case that we filed was a strong case proving copyright infringement. It's something we will continue to pursue."

He added CRIA will continue to seek the identities of the 29 John and Jane Does it has collected evidence against.

The verdict sent shock waves through the industry and surprised some copyright analysts.

"It raises questions of the viability of suing individual users in Canada under current Canadian copyright law," said Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in Internet and e-commerce law and technology counsel with the law firm Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt.

"It is a remarkable decision. He's clearly ruled that (uploading/downloading) activity isn't unlawful."

Calling the decision "stunning," Geist anticipates it will push the industry to increase lobbying efforts for legislative change to copyright laws.

The recording industry is pushing for Canada to sign the World Intellectual Property Organization Performances and Phonograms Treaty which would automatically change some copyright law including the definition of distribution like that done via Kazaa, WinMX, eMule and iMesh.

Internet forums were abuzz with the news, the majority in favour of the judge's decision.

"I think I know what country I'll go to college in now," wrote "danhm" on the slashdot.org forum. "Nice to see privacy winning one for a change. Now if we can get the U.S. Supreme court to rule the same way. After all, they've been using foreign court rulings more and more recently," added "Sharp'r."

Last month, the industry association took five Internet service providers to Federal Court, trying to force the companies to hand over the names and addresses of 29 people who allegedly shared hundreds of songs with others over the Internet last November and December.

The alleged infringers are currently identifiable only through a numeric Internet protocol address and user handles like Jordana(at)KaZaA and Geekboy(at)kazaa.

Bell Canada, Shaw Communications, Telus Communications and Rogers Cable all fought CRIA's request. Videotron agreed to comply, saying owner Quebecor is also concerned about piracy in other parts of its business, which includes newspapers, television, Internet services and CDs.

Peter Bissonnette, president of Shaw Communications, was delighted with the ruling.

"We are very, very pleased and I'm sure our customers are as well," he said from his Calgary office.

Shaw had argued privacy legislation protects the identities of its clients.

"We have obligations to protect the privacy of our customers. We've always taken that approach," said Bissonnette.

Shaw and the other ISPs also argued the information they'd be forced to collect wouldn't be 100 per cent accurate because of the dynamic nature of IP addresses.

Today's decision combined with a recent Harvard Business School study on CD sales strikes a blow to a worldwide movement to curb music swapping, says Howard Knopf, a lawyer who represented the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic in the case.

The study, released yesterday, found that downloading had no impact on sales of CDs in recent years.

"The recording industry can't prove that they have a problem," said Knopf. "This P2P may actually be saving the record industry from worse problems."

Earlier this week, the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry held a news conference to outline its international campaign against music piracy, pointing to lawsuits launched in Germany, Denmark, Italy and Canada.

The group claims worldwide sales of recorded music fell seven per cent in 2002, and added that it expected figures for 2003 to show sales dipping by at least the same amount.

In the United States, the recording industry has sued 1,977 people since launching its assault against illegal file- sharers last fall. It has reached out-of-court settlements in around 400 cases.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=968793972154


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Uploaders Not ‘Pirates,' Court Told
Keith Damsell

The music industry's “war against file sharing,” if successful, will mean “significant collateral damage” to the rights and interests of Internet users, a federal court was told Monday.

“These folks are civilians, not commercial pirates,” Howard Knopf, a lawyer representing an Ottawa Internet rights advocacy group, told the Federal Court of Canada. Sharing music via the Net is “clearly not illegal,” he said, adding that the court should “apply the [copyright] law as it is today.”

Last month, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) asked the court to order five of Canada's largest communications firms to identify 29 so-called uploaders who they allege posted hundreds of songs illegally. The industry says cyberspace song theft has led to job losses and an estimated $425-million in lost sales over the past five years. The Ottawa-based Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic claims a court order would strip away the important anonymity the Internet guarantees. If identified, alleged uploaders “can never regain their privacy rights. Once breached, those rights are gone forever,” said CIPPIC lawyer Alex Cameron.

CRIA's bid for a court order is “a private dispute between private parties” with no impact on personal freedoms, replied lawyer Ronald Dimock. Each alleged uploader agreed to disclose personal information if required when they signed a service contract with their high-speed Internet provider, he said. “There's really no privacy rights ... to be balanced here.”
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...tory/Business/


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P2P 'No Threat' To Music Sales
Robert Jaques

Academic research disputes claim that file sharing is hitting CD shipments

Sharman Networks, the company behind the Kazaa peer-to- peer (P2P) file sharing software, has welcomed research claiming that the sharing of digital music files has no effect on CD sales.

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, CD shipments in the US fell from 940 million to 800 million between 2000 and 2002, with file sharing getting the blame.

And last week, the British Phonographic Industry published research reporting that retail spending on music is down 32 per cent on albums and 59 per cent on singles among UK downloaders from P2P sites.

But research by Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee, of Harvard Business School, and Professor Koleman Strumpf, of the University of North Carolina, disputes the claims.

"We find that file sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample. Based on our results, we do not believe file sharing will have a significant effect on the supply of recorded music," the academics concluded.

Sharman Networks insisted that the loss of revenue from music sales as a result of P2P use is one of the first arguments "wheeled out" by the entertainment industries.

The company said that the new study's primary finding supports its position that instead of hindering the sales of entertainment media, P2P could be leveraged to increase the amount of revenue generated by more traditional media.

"Consider the possibilities if the record industry actually co-operated with companies like us instead of fighting," said Nikki Hemming, chief executive at Sharman Networks, in a statement.

"We have offered content providers the opportunity to work with P2P customers for nearly two years, yet the record industry continues its narrow-minded strategy of litigation and legislation."

A PDF of Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee's draft paper on file sharing can be downloaded here
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1153936


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Tokyo Court Denies Copyright For Web News Headlines

A damages suit filed by the Tokyo head office of the Yomiuri Shimbun against an Internet service firm that used the newspaper's headlines without permission was rejected in the Tokyo District Court on Thursday.

Denying the newspaper's demand that the Internet firm stop using the headlines and pay damages of 68 million yen, the court ruled that using Internet headlines without permission did not violate copyright.

"Using headlines that are open to the public on the Internet without authorization does not constitute a copyright violation," Presiding Judge Toshiaki Iimura said in handing down the ruling.

The ruling is reportedly the first on Internet headlines.

In making the ruling, the court denied that the headlines were creative expression. "These headlines were created within 25 characters, and either stated objective facts, or used only very short qualifying words, and cannot be described as creative expression," the ruling said.

The newspaper had filed the suit against Kobe-based Digital Alliance. The headlines the Internet firm used either duplicated headlines that various newspapers had used on their sites, or modified them slightly.

A representative of the newspaper said the paper could not agree with a ruling that allowed unauthorized use and would appeal the ruling. (Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, March 25, 2004)
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20040...dm002000c.html


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Attempt To Extradite Online 'Pirate' Blocked
John Borland

An Australian judge on Wednesday rejected an attempt by U.S. prosecutors to extradite a man accused of helping lead a high-profile Internet piracy group.

U.S. federal attorneys want to bring Hew Raymond Griffiths, a 42-year-old computer programmer who lives in New South Wales, to the United States to face criminal copyright charges. If extradited and convicted of his alleged role in leading the DrinkorDie group, Griffiths would face up to 10 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

The Australian magistrate blocked the move, ruling in part that the extradition attempt did not provide enough information about specific instances of Griffiths' alleged copyright infringement.

"It was a major problem for how he was being prosecuted," said Antony Townsden, the Legal Aid Commission solicitor who represented Griffiths. "I don't know how anyone would be able to represent themselves if they were to face such a general charge."

The ruling could be a significant setback for U.S. prosecutors, who have invested considerable resources into tracking down elements of DrinkorDie and other Net "warez" groups who distributed pirated versions of software, music and movies online, often before they were released commercially.

The U.S. and British governments have brought charges against other individuals targeted in the long-running piracy sweep dubbed "Operation Buccaneer," leading to more than 20 convictions and guilty pleas.

A representative for the U.S. Attorney's office in the eastern district of Virginia, which is leading the extradition proceedings, could not immediately be reached for comment.

According to the indictment, filed by U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, Griffiths helped oversee DrinkorDie operations that resulted in the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted software, games, music and movies worth more than $50 million. The group was founded in Russia in 1993, the legal documents alleged, but was run by computer hackers worldwide.

Townsden said the U.S. government's attempts to extradite Griffiths, who did not have resources to defend himself overseas adequately, were unfair. All other defendants in the DrinkorDie cases have been charged in their home countries, he noted.

Australian authorities, acting on behalf of the United States, have 15 days to appeal the verdict to that country's federal courts.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5179588.html


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Ashcroft Creates Task Force For Copyright Violations
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday that it had created a task force to evaluate prosecutions of copyright violations, including Internet piracy, and make recommendations about how existing efforts can be improved. "The task force will determine how best to meet the evolving challenges that law enforcement faces in the intellectual property arena," said David Israelite, deputy chief of staff to Attorney General John Ashcroft and chairman of the task force.

Although Congress has pressured the department to use the powerful No Electronic Theft Act to jail file-swappers, no such prosecutions have taken place. Wednesday's announcement also comes as proposals are circulating in Congress to give the Justice Department the power to levy additional civil penalties on copyright infringers.
http://news.com.com/2110-1023-5182781.html?tag=nefd_hed


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U.S. House Panel Approves Copyright Bill
Declan McCullagh

A House of Representatives panel has approved a sweeping new copyright bill that would boost penalties for peer-to-peer piracy and increase federal police powers against Internet copyright infringement.

The House Judiciary intellectual property subcommittee voted for the "Piracy Deterrence and Education Act" (PDEA) late Wednesday, overruling objections from a minority of members that it would unreasonably expand the FBI's powers to demand private information from Internet service providers.

The PDEA--the result of intense lobbying from large copyright holders over the past six months--has emerged as a kind of grab-bag that combines other proposals introduced in the past but not approved. One section that first surfaced last year punishes an Internet user who makes available $1,000 in copyrighted materials with prison terms of up to three years and fines of up to $250,000. If the PDEA became law, prosecutors would not have to prove that $1,000 in copyrighted materials were downloaded--they would need only to show that those files had been publicly accessible in a shared folder.

One part of the PDEA that did not appear in earlier bills would require the FBI to "facilitate the sharing" of information among Internet providers, copyright holders and police.

"I am sure (that its sponsor) does not mean to expand the powers of the FBI," Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D- Calif., said during the subcommittee hearing. "The concern I have is that this is very ambiguous. The language itself could lead an aggressive FBI to a different conclusion." Lofgren's attempt to amend the PDEA failed by a 4-14 vote.

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., a PDEA supporter whose district abuts Hollywood, said that Lofgren's conclusions were unfounded. "They have been as passive as you can be," Berman said, referring to the FBI. "They have authority they don't exercise."

Although Congress has pressured the department to use the No Electronic Theft Act to jail file swappers, no such prosecutions have taken place so far. Earlier Wednesday, however, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the creation of a task force on copyright violations.

The PDEA is an improved version of last year's legislation and will assist "federal law enforcement authorities in their efforts to investigate and prosecute intellectual property crimes," Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., the subcommittee's chairman, said in his opening remarks. Smith said that the reworked version "clarifies and narrows the application of criminal copyright law to the worst P2P offenders."

Other sections of the PDEA would require Ashcroft to boost the number of antipiracy cops on the Justice Department's payroll, and order the U.S. Sentencing Commission to revisit prison term guidelines to make sure they reflect "the loss attributable to people broadly distributing copyrighted works over the Internet without authorization." The PDEA also combines parts of another of last year's proposals that bans unauthorized recording in movie theaters and includes harsh penalties if pre- release movies are swapped on peer-to-peer networks.

Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that agitates for fair use rights, said in a statement after Wednesday's vote that: "We hope the full Judiciary Committee will take a harder look at the change in the standard needed for prosecution of copyright infringement under this bill. The new standard created by the subcommittee could criminalize what is now lawful use of copyrighted materials."

At the same hearing, the House subcommittee also approved a bill that would increase criminal penalties for selling counterfeit labels that could go on CD-ROMs or software packages, and another bill to increase felony penalties for using false contact information when registering a domain name.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5182898.html


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Free Book

Lawrence Lessig’s latest book is now available for download.

From the site –

“FREE CULTURE is available for free under a Creative Commons license.
You may redistribute, copy, or otherwise reuse/remix this book provided that you do so for non-commercial purposes and credit Professor Lessig.”
http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/


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Word Pictures on Internet Radio
Carol Vogel

It may seem odd that the director of a contemporary-art center, whose life is consumed by visual experiences, would be obsessed with radio. But for 20 years Alanna Heiss has dreamed of running her own radio station.

"I like the idea of hearing without always looking," said Ms. Heiss, the director of the P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art in Long Island City, Queens.

She is about to realize her dream. On April 19, P.S. 1 is starting an online radio station, WPS1, at its Web site, www.ps1.org. It is based in recently constructed studios in the Clocktower Building, a city-owned property designed by Stanford White at Leonard Street and Broadway in Lower Manhattan, where P.S. 1 has an exhibition space. Bloomberg L.P. has sponsored the project.

Two years in the making and billed as the world's first art radio station, WPS1 will present original talk and music shows with contemporary writers, artists and musicians as hosts. The station will also broadcast historical audio material from a variety of sources, like the sound archives of the Museum of Modern Art, with which P.S. 1 merged in 1999.

Being part of the Modern has its advantages. The radio station will have access to 2,500 sound recordings of curators and directors. They include Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum's founding director, giving a talk called "Art Under the Soviet and Nazi Dictatorships" in 1952.

Also caught on tape is a mix ranging from Walt Disney giving a speech on the Modern's 10th anniversary on May 10, 1939, to Marcel Duchamp speaking at the Modern on Oct. 20, 1962.

The radio station will coordinate with the Modern's curatorial programming as well. It plans to play sound pieces by Dieter Roth, the German-born multimedia artist now based in Switzerland, whose work is the subject of a retrospective that opened two weeks ago at the Modern's temporary space in Long Island City.

Some of the Modern's curators will also be broadcast on the station. Other plans call for a real estate show featuring Heather Cohane, the founder of Quest magazine, with advice for artists on buying and renting places to live.

"This will not be seen as a talking head situation, but an extension of P.S. 1," Ms. Heiss said. "It's like an important new wing."

Ms. Heiss is the station's executive producer, and Linda Yablonsky, a writer, will be the program manager. Several P.S. 1 staff members are involved, too, including Brett Littman, the station's managing director, who is P.S. 1's senior administrator.

P.S. 1 officials hired the architect William Massie to design the studio. Using bright orange laser-cut steel and plastic, he has created an ear-shaped space for recording and broadcasting. The design combines a 1960's psychedelic feeling with a futuristic one, something that will eventually be visible on the Web site. In a space that P.S. 1 once used as a gallery, it will show "HiFi," detailed photographs of vintage recording devices by Todd Eberle.

While the exhibition is not open to the public, in time P.S. 1 plans to show the images on its radio Web site.

Just outside its offices is the clock tower that www.wps1.org is using as its symbol. "That's where we're broadcasting from," Ms. Heiss said. "The tower itself becomes a symbol of time and sound. Because it's Internet radio, you have real time and back-in-time."

Modern Art Treasures

On May 6, the night after Sotheby's is auctioning the fabled art once owned by the financier and publisher John Hay Whitney and his wife, Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney, it will auction a group of paintings collected by Ray Stark, the movie producer, and his wife, Fran.

The collection was in Stark's West Hollywood home until his death in January. (Mrs. Stark died in 1992.)

Thirteen works will be offered for sale, seven in the important evening sale of Impressionist and Modern art on May 6 and six the following day in its auction of less expensive works.

The Starks also bought sculpture, forming one of the great collections of 20th-century Modern sculpture by artists like Moore and Giacometti, which is not being sold. The works belong to a foundation set up by Stark.

Among the highlights of the collection that is for sale is one of Monet's "Water Lilies" paintings, this one executed from 1917 to 1919. It is large — 39 3/8 by 79 inches — and like many of the other late "Water Lilies," it is unsigned but stamped by his son Michel with the artist's signature. David Norman, a co-chairman of Impressionist and Modern art for Sotheby's worldwide, said he believed the painting was one of the artist's best examples from the series.

"It is one of the most complete and most vibrant," Mr. Norman said. "It was painted in huge sweeps. It virtually surrounds the viewer."

Sotheby's estimates that the painting will bring $9 million to $12 million.

Before the foundation decided to sell a portion of the collection at Sotheby's, officials approached several art dealers to see if they would be interested in selling the Monet. That was several months ago. At the time, the asking price was around $20 million, said some art experts who were offered the painting, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Another top painting that belonged to the Starks is Braque's "Woman With Guitar"(1931), one of his Cubist interpretations of a classical subject. It is expected to sell for $1.5 million to $2 million.

Popular Again

At a meeting of the Collectors Committee at the National Gallery of Art in Washington last week, the patrons' group, which has been financing acquisitions there since 1975, agreed to buy a 1962 sculpture by the artist Lee Bontecou.

Ms. Bontecou has been experiencing something of a renaissance. In the 1960's she was represented by Leo Castelli and became known for making relief sculptures of iron, canvas and wire. But tastes and fashions change, and over the years she faded into relative obscurity — until now.

Her renewed popularity is due in large part to a traveling exhibition that opened in October at the U.C.L.A. Hammer Museum and is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago until May 30. Then it travels to the Museum of Modern Art from July 30 to Sept. 27.

The National Gallery acquired an untitled 1962 work that experts say is worth $700,000 to $1 million. "We only had a small sculpture in our collection," said Earl A. Powell III, the gallery's director.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/26/ar...gn/26INSI.html


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When Instant Messages Come Bearing Malice
Sandeep Junnarkar

RICK GROLEAU, a 40-year-old technical manager from Mountain View, Calif., received a message last month from a friend on his AOL Instant Messenger buddy list alerting him that Osama bin Laden had been captured. When he clicked on a link ostensibly directing him to a news article, it took him instead to a site offering a game to download.

Although Mr. Groleau declined to download the game, his friend admitted that she had done so. She was among the many IM users who unwittingly triggered a virus- like effect.

Clicking on the link not only installed a game but also added a slick trick to propagate itself across the AOL Instant Messenger network, known as AIM. When gamers accepted the terms and conditions for installing the application, they inadvertently let the program send the same invitation to contacts on their buddy list.

Downloading the game also installed adware - software that runs undetected, tracking users' Web habits and interests, presenting pop-up advertisements and resetting the home page.

"This was not e-mail from some random person," Mr. Groleau said. "It came through AIM from someone I personally know. I clicked on the link right away."

It is that reflex that the perpetrators are counting on to transform IM services into a handy route to deliver spam (known as "spim" on IM), unleash viruses, create back doors into the systems of unsuspecting users and cause general mayhem across the Internet.

Instant messaging was first popularized by teenagers in the 1990's; it has since gained widespread use among consumers and businesses as a vehicle for sharing documents, digital photos and links while knowing which contact on a list is online at any given moment. Last year there were an estimated 162 million consumer IM accounts worldwide, compared with 82 million in 2000, according to IDC, a technology research firm in Framingham, Mass.

While the numbers are far short of the estimated 524 million consumer e-mail accounts worldwide, experts say that hackers and spammers may increasingly make IM users a target because of the nature of instant communication.

"Now that everyone is using Instant Messenger, it has become a popular target," said Sharon Ruckman, the senior director of Symantec Security Response, a provider of Internet security updates and solutions.

The CERT Coordination Center, a computer security response team based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has repeatedly cautioned that IM users are especially susceptible to "social engineering," meaning attacks that prey on human foibles by enticing people with promises of free products, pornography and interesting-sounding links.

In responding to strangers' offers, people may divulge personal information or leave their systems vulnerable. "It's a tactic to get you to open your door and have people come in and take pictures around your house so they learn the weaknesses," Ms. Ruckman said. "Then when you're at work they know exactly how to break into your house."

IM also leaves much to be desired when it comes to privacy. When two people communicate through instant messaging, the messages are relayed as plain text through an IM service's central servers before they reach the recipient. An unscrupulous systems administrator could easily train a program to search for words, passwords or combinations of numbers to harvest critical personal information, privacy advocates say.

The lack of privacy is compounded when IM messages travel over public wireless networks like those at cafes, airports and hotels. These wireless hot spots keep security levels low to give users access to the network with little trouble. Using a commercial sniffer, "you can see all these packets of text data flying around," said John LaCour of Zone Labs, a computer-security firm in San Francisco.

One of IM's biggest attractions, file sharing, may also be its greatest weakness. IM users can transfer files to each other and give others access to their shared-files folder. These folders sometimes contain family photographs and documents with names, addresses and telltale financial information, "all the little pieces of information that actually might help someone assume a person's identity," said Fred Felman, the vice president for marketing at Zone Labs. Consumers, he added, are "blissfully unaware" of the dangers.

But consumers alone cannot be blamed for their victimhood.

The CERT Coordination Center and other security firms have often publicized flaws in the IM software from each of the top services - AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger. The warnings have almost exclusively involved "buffer overflow" attacks, a common software error. This programming defect allows a hacker to overwhelm a system with a string of characters far too large for a particular input field and sometimes seize control of the machine.

In January, Tri Huynh, a researcher at SentryUnion, a computer security firm in Woburn, Mass., reported just such a buffer overflow vulnerability in Yahoo's messenger service. Yahoo patched the flaw, which was one of several discovered in 2003.

Problems can extend beyond buffer overflow issues. This month, Microsoft disclosed that a bug in its MSN Messenger program could allow an attacker to rifle through a victim's hard drive without leaving a trace.

Dan Moniz, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, said most hackers and security researchers discover vulnerabilities through reverse engineering and trial and error because AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN closely guard information about their software.

"Open design and open protocols are the best insurance against future catastrophic bugs," Mr. Moniz said. "They don't prevent them, but they do make them easier to find and, hopefully, easier to fix."

Officials at Microsoft said that MSN Messenger's relatively small size made it easier to test and control programming defects. Still, programs like the Osama Found game are likely to increase as spammers begin to harness the power of instant messaging.

Many of the tricks for spreading viruses and spam through IM are inspired by tactics that are used to exploit e-mail, like the typical attacks through Microsoft Outlook, in which viruses and worms propagate by e-mailing themselves to everyone in a person's address book.

"In instant messaging a similar thing has happened, where it takes the buddy list and sends out the instant message to people on the buddy list," said Tatiana Gau, America Online's chief trust officer. AOL is now screening for the Osama Found link as messages pass through its gateways and blocking instant messages that have it.

In some ways, victims of the Osama Found spim can count themselves lucky. "It didn't carry a nasty payload," said Mr. LaCour of Zone Labs. "Imagine if that was an executable link that was actually malicious. It could have spread pretty fast."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/25/te...ts/25mess.html


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From the strange mind of the RIAA’s favorite hatchet man.

RIAA Applauds Civil Lawsuit P2P Bill
Dinah Greek

File sharers charged under proposed legislation would face fine but no criminal record

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has welcomed the tabling of legislation that would allow the US Department of Justice to bring civil copyright infringement cases rather than criminal ones.

The proposed law follows the recent announcement by the FBI and the RIAA of a new voluntary, government- sanctioned anti-piracy seal for copyrighted music to warn users on illegal file sharing.

Introduced by US senators Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch, the latest proposal would allow for federal civil claims with damages without resulting in a criminal record for the defendant.

RIAA chairman and chief executive Mitch Bainwol said in a statement: "This legislation provides federal prosecutors with the flexibility and discretion to bring copyright infringement cases that best correspond to the nature of the crime.

"Copyright infringement is a serious crime damaging the thousands of hardworking artists, songwriters and everyone else who helps bring music to the public.

"Despite some encouraging signs, piracy continues to plague the music community. There's an essential role for education, enforcement by copyright owners, and federal prosecutions of the worst offenders."
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1153836


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IPv6 Test Demonstrates Peer-To-Peer Network
Nicolas Mokhoff

The second test phase of the Moonv6 network, the world's largest multivendor IPv6 network, demonstrated the ability of the IPv6 spec to operate with most network elements as well as handling real-time business applications.

The Moonv6 phase II test, running from March 7 to 19, included a test network stretching from Durham, N.C., to California. The test, supported in part by a Defense Department communications agency, showed that the IPv6 network operated with high-speed links, firewalls, routing, common applications and quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning.

The end of the second testing phase formally launches the next version of the Internet Protocol to be used as the backbone for network peer-to- peer communications. "What could not have been achieved with IPv4 is now possible with IPv6, that is, an end-to-end secure network using IPv6," said U.S. Army Maj. Roswell Dixon, IPV6 action officer at the Defense Department. "For the government sector that is a big deal."

IPv6 significantly increases the number of addresses that can be assigned to devices and computers. "In a mobile army, moving on a terrain at 20 miles per hour, you need the implementation of IPv6 in all your communications gear," said Dixon.

End-to-end communication is also important for academic research where half of deployed networks already use IPv6, according to Rick Summerhill, director of backbone Internet infrastructure for Internet2. "We are well along to the full transition to IPv6 by 2008 with the this latest testing phase," Summerhill said.

Network domain name server functionality was provided using Linux, Microsoft, Sun and Hewlett-Packard HP-UX operating systems over the wide- area network between North Carolina and Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

The Moonv6 project is a collaboration between the North American IPv6 Task Force (NAv6TF), the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), Internet2, the military's Joint Interoperability Testing Command (JITC) and other DoD agencies.

According to Jim Bound, chairman of the NAv6TF, adoption of IPv6 in Asia and Europe has been a forgone conclusion for several years. Doubts about the technology have persisted in the North American market, however. Asian and European governments and universities have been investing resources to speed IPv6 deployment and integration experience, Bound said.

With DoD backing, Moonv6 aims to provide a platform for the North American IT community to garner IPv6 deployment experience. Routing vendors Procket, Hitachi, Fujitsu and Cisco have agreed to leave equipment at UNH-IOL to keep Moonv6 operating to connect multiple service providers and the U.S. military in a global IPv6 backbone.

"The success rates we've seen here argue that IPv6 is clearing the hurdles to inevitable adoption. We plan to continue industry-wide multivendor testing on a rolling basis," said Ben Schultz, the UNH-IOL managing engineer who organized the test.

Also participating in the second phase of testing were AT&T, Chunghwa Telecom, France Telecom, KDDI Labs USA, Native6, NTT R&D, Root Server Test Bed Agilent, Ixia, Spirent Communications, 6Wind, Check Point, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks, Hitachi, Hexago, Lucent Technologies, Netscreen Technologies, Nokia, Panasonic and Symantec.

QoS functionality also was demonstrated, proving that IPv6 is capable of allowing different classes of traffic to maintain different priorities. This was achieved by assigning priority to important phone calls or video streams over routine file transfers or e-mail.

Basic firewall and stateful firewall technology, which can be used to prevent network attacks, passed all test security requirements.

Among the basic applications demonstrated over the native IPv6 network topology were Microsoft Windows Media Player and Panasonic's IPv6- controlled, Web-enabled video cameras. Several commercially available media conferencing software applications were also tested, including France Telecom's eConf, an application that turns PDAs equipped with a miniature camera into mobile videophone connected via a wireless video link.

Testing also showed that dual-stack configurations (networks running IPv6 and IPv4 in parallel) could provide the most seamless method of accommodating both protocols over the next several years, when both will need to coexist on the Internet.

Rose Klimovich, vice president and general manager of AT&T VPN Services, said customers can sign up for its IPv6 service. "We will implement new features as demand rises in a year or so," said Klimovich.
http://www.commsdesign.com/showArtic...cleID=18401469


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Memo to Steve Ballmer
Steve Gillmor

Dear Steve,

I know this comes at a busy time, with you most likely distracted by the European situation. But I know that you're always open to feedback from the community and most of the press, and your popular Longhorn evangelist Robert Scoble has assured us that Microsoft execs are listening. So here goes.

Steve, you need to support RSS. Where do I want to go today? To my RSS reader. Why? Because I'm spending more and more of my screen time in the RSS space. It's far more time-efficient than browsing the Web. Together with instant messaging, it's become an effective and reliable workaround for e-mail outages.

When Dave Winer developed SOAP with Don Box and Microsoft engineers, you and Bill signed on
and jumpstarted the Web services revolution. In fact, I first met Dave when you invited him to the Forum 2000 .Net rollout in recognition of his pioneering efforts. Now both Dave and his counterparts in the Atom community have agreed to seek a unification of the syndication standards via an IETF working group.

Certainly RSS has been popularized as an efficient way to aggregate blog postings. But RSS adoption in the media and e-commerce spaces is accelerating even faster. Server-based aggregation sites such as Bloglines and MyYahoo are evangelizing the technology. Newsletters and direct marketing campaigns are shifting out of e-mail to take advantage of RSS' efficiencies and positive word-of-mouth characteristics.

And then there's the intersection of peer-to-peer and RSS enclosures, where companies such as Disney are taking advantage of TiVo-like time shifting of rich media payloads. Groove 3.0's new Windows file sharing technology and the BitTorrent distribution specification are just two of the powerful tools now capable of enhancing the scalability and economic viability of RSS feeds.

But lack of Microsoft support at the highest levels is retarding the RSS momentum. Neither you nor Bill has mentioned the technology in any public setting. Yet your engineers and developers continue to produce a raft of RSS aggregators, servers and Outlook add-ins in their spare time. A product manager even demoed a phone-based photo-blog application during Bill's keynote at VSLive this week.

Perhaps it's just as a friend of mine suggested: RSS is not a high-priority item in the queue, dwarfed by the challenges of security, open source, digital rights management and the Longhorn evolution. These issues are rightly top-of-mind, but that doesn't mean RSS shouldn't be up there too.

First, RSS offers a powerful evangelism tool for your security efforts. For example, distributing Windows update information via RSS would let you annotate hot fixes and updates with timely information and tutorials about the reasons why the update should be accepted. Delivering the updates as RSS enclosures might mitigate the concerns of people who are concerned about unauthorized changes to their configurations.

Another opportunity presents itself in the instant messaging space, where important collaborative information is often lost to the ad hoc IM bit bucket. Instead, IM data could be pipelined into an RSS feed for archiving, auditing and indexing. RSS enclosures could speed the adoption of audio and video messages, as well as provide a persistent transport and collaborative synchronization for Tablet ink, OneNote meeting recordings, music and photo sharing.

But the biggest Microsoft opportunity is in the authoring space, where you could perform the same powerful ratifying effect you first rendered with SOAP. What if you were to authorize a freely redistributable runtime version of InfoPath that produced XHTML-ready RSS content? The tool would empower users to drag and drop RSS objects into the container, annotate and format them, then post them via an IETF-standardized API mechanism that you would participate in producing.

Not only would such a tool promote substantial adoption of well-formed XHTML, but it would also promote the use of RSS as an event mechanism in workflow apps and even calendaring and scheduling. RSS enclosures would be a convenient addition to InfoPath forms' e-mail distribution methodology to boot.

If InfoPath can't be opened in this manner, there's another prime candidate for RSS authoring: OneNote. As the strategic core (at least for me) of the Tablet platform, OneNote promises a terrific environment for rich text/ink/audio/video micro-content creation, management and routing. With an XML API waiting to be switched on for its second release, now would be the time to act to gain significant market share in the developer community where RSS is already well-seeded.

Steve, thanks for listening. RSS may appear to be just a niche technology, a hippie miracle cure for everything from information overload to e-mail dysfunction. But I'd like to see the data on relapsing from RSS. Once you kick the browser, it's very hard to go back to the old way of doing things. I look forward to hearing from you, perhaps via your own RSS feed. That's one channel I look forward to subscribing to.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1554846,00.asp


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Cornell University Hosts Computer Policy And Law Program

ITHACA -- The Institute for Computer Policy and Law will be held on the Cornell University campus from July 6-9. This intensive four-day program, which has become one of the nation's premier forums for discussing and learning about technology policies in higher education, will examine how the widespread use of the Internet impacts college and university policies, procedures and judicial systems.

It is designed for Webmasters, technology administrators, attorneys, judicial officers, risk managers, publication directors, public relations administrators and anyone else involved in developing, implementing or enforcing technology policies in higher education.

Through lectures, case studies and panel discussions, participants will explore topics including recent developments in computer policy, law and the Internet; laws that apply in cyberspace; developing technology policies; security and spam; Internet governance and liability; online privacy; copyright; and peer-to-peer file sharing.

For more information or to register, contact the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions at 255-7259; e-mail: cusp@ cornell.edu; or visit their Web site at www.sce.cornell.edu/exec.
http://www.theithacajournal.com/news...ws/148817.html


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Media Giants Need To Learn to Sing A New Tune
Leslie Walker

Lately I've been testing several new software programs, which together make me think no amount of suing by big-media kingpins can snuff out the creative flame sparked by the digital revolution.

Roll over Time Warner, tell Vivendi the news
The cut-and-paste clan has a new set of tools
Gonna write a little letter, gonna post it on my P2P
Got a rockin' DVD movie, I want my PC to play.

Lately I've been testing several new software programs, which together make me think no amount of suing by big-media kingpins can snuff out the creative flame sparked by the digital revolution.

One, called Onfolio lets you grab anything you find surfing online and store it in a database, then mix and match your Web gems to produce custom reports. With the click of a button, you can e-mail the reports, store them on your computer or publish them to the Web. Onfolio is deaf, dumb and blind to copyright law; any unprotected image or text you find on the Internet is fair game for this $30 scrape-and-store toolkit. Founder J.J. Allaire says he is pioneering a new category of software he calls a "search information manager" to help the Google generation organize stuff they find online.

Another new program, Easy Media Creator 7 from Roxio Inc., combines editing software usually found in separate programs into one unified menu. It lets people edit photos, sound and video, create fancy menus and special effects, then burn the results onto a DVD or CD. The goal of this $100 program is to simplify creation of personal movies, slide shows, multimedia business reports, video birthday greetings and the like.

At the same time I've been experimenting with this software, I've been reading the latest book by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, titled "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity." For those unfamiliar with Lessig's work, he's an intellectual firebrand who has long argued (in prior books such as "The Future of Ideas" and "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace") that the old guard of culture -- large media conglomerates -- is seizing control of the Internet to protect its interests in ways that threaten innovation. His new book closely examines copyright law, contending that today's media dinosaurs have been conspiring with Congress to expand the scope of copyright and make other legal changes that trample on our tradition of "free culture."

It is easy to succumb to Lessig's intellectual pessimism, especially as the Recording Industry Association of America continues its barrage of mass-action lawsuits charging young people with illegal song-swapping on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Just this week, the RIAA filed another round of legal actions against 532 file-sharers, including people at 21 universities, demanding that Internet providers cough up their names. Nearly 2,000 folks have been targets of the RIAA's legal rampage since it started last year.

Song-swapping is not the only copyright fire the music industry is fighting. Consider the cease-and-desist letter EMI Music issued last month to a small-time record producer demanding that he halt distribution of a clever musical mix he had made. Producer Brian Burton's "The Grey Album" electronically combined sounds from the Beatles' recording commonly known as "The White Album" with rapper Jay-Z's "The Black Album" -- without seeking permission from the artists or their labels. But the noteworthy part wasn't EMI's move against Burton. It was how quickly the Web rallied to his defense. More than 100 Web sites offered "The Grey Album" for unauthorized, free downloading as part of an ad-hoc "Grey Tuesday" protest on Feb. 24.

Today's digital technologies make repurposing all kinds of media much easier, and for all sorts of purposes, too -- promotional, artistic, even duplicitous ones. Consider the political snafu over the doctored photo that got zapped around the Internet in February, purporting to show Sen. John F. Kerry (D- Mass.), a presidential hopeful, sitting beside Jane Fonda at a 1971 rally against the Vietnam War. It took a few days for the media to realize the hoax - - that Hanoi Jane had been dropped into the vintage photo courtesy of an image editor.

The Kerry photo and "The Grey Album" dust-ups hint at bigger battles to come from a generation getting its hands on emerging technology that makes it a snap to sample and blend published photos with recorded music, digital books, live TV broadcasts and even -- can this be stopped? -- Hollywood's prized blockbuster films.

It is easy for me to envision all kinds of nefarious video hoaxes roiling politics and Hollywood, especially since lately I've also been testing a Gateway computer running Microsoft Corp.'s Media Center Edition operating system. For those unfamiliar with this son-of-Tivo technology, Microsoft's Media Center software runs on PCs equipped with TV tuners, allowing you to record TV shows to the computer's hard drive with the click of a remote control. You can also burn your recorded shows to DVDs in case you want to play them later on a TV or portable DVD player.

I happened to have recorded the Super Bowl halftime show while I was testing the Media Center PC, and it's easy for me to imagine creative ways to repurpose those few seconds of video.

My experiments have convinced me it is only a matter of time before millions of consumers will be doing things like creating custom concert videos of their favorite artists. They'll mix and match video from TV shows and DVD recordings which they (hopefully) will have acquired legally -- much as music fans have been creating custom music discs and tapes for years.

Record companies and Hollywood studios may not willingly cede control over how future fans watch stars perform, but it's hard to imagine how they could lock down digital video so tightly that clever youngsters won't eventually find ways around them. Already, the Internet abounds with freely available software that lets consumers circumvent copy-protection systems used on commercial DVD movies and concerts.

But as with music, it's also possible that the rip-and-mix generation will actually wind up buying more recorded video than before, all the better to fuel their digital creativity.

Roll over Time Warner, tell Vivendi the news.
http://www.bizreport.com/article.php?art_id=6647


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Industry Panel Debates File-Sharing Future

Head honchos of the entertainment industry met yesterday to discuss the shaky future of Internet file-sharing.
Jason Amirhadji, Cavalier Daily (University of Virginia)

(U-WIRE) WASHINGTON - Representatives from the file-sharing, film and recording industries are still at odds over the future of Internet downloading.

A group of industry executives -- including leaders from the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, Verizon Communications and major file-sharing software companies -- and consumer advocates held a panel discussion yesterday at the D.C. Bar Association to an audience of over 40 members, mostly lawyers, to discuss the emerging landscape for content distribution over the Internet.

The panel was moderated by Robert Kasunic, the principal legal advisor for the U.S. Copyright office.

The discussion highlighted a fundamental rift between content industry and those representing file-sharing interests, panelists agreed.

As lawsuits continue to be filed against individuals accused of illegally sharing copyrighted works over the Internet, the RIAA is hoping to make a significant dent in the social acceptance of music downloading, said Stanley Pierre-Louis, the association's vice president for legal affairs.

"The suits are a means to an end," Pierre-Louis said. "People are responding positively to [the lawsuits], believe it or not."

He said the industry has been encouraged by the relative success of paid-distribution programs, such as Apple's iTunes software, which allows users to purchase songs protected with Digital Rights Management software.

When prompted by Adam M. Eisgau, executive director of P2P United, an alliance of five companies which distribute popular file-sharing programs, only one audience member agreed with Pierre-Louis in foreseeing the eventual demise of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as a result of current and future lawsuits and litigation.

Instead of such measures, Eisgau promoted an alternative approach of restructuring copyright law to meet the demands of modern Internet distribution, making it easier for content creators to be compensated for file-sharing activity.

"The question is how to [create] customers out of people who engage in file sharing," he said.

The suggestion was met with a cool reception by representatives from the music and film industries.

"We don't believe that this is a beneficial, productive way to compensate the content creator," said David E. Green, vice president and counsel for the MPAA.

Michael Goodwin, legal council for Public Knowledge, an organization which describes itself as an advocate for a fair and balanced approach to copyright and technology policy, offered what he considered to be the consumer's perspective as a middle-ground between both sides of the debate.

"Sharing music is an underlying design feature of human culture," he said. "I'd like to think in a democracy that trusting individuals with those prerogatives is the right thing to do."

Sarah B. Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel for Verizon, an Internet Service Provider, agreed that regulation was stifling the industry. Deutsch offered the example of the printing press as another revolutionary means of distributing information that was initially opposed.

"ISPs are a conduit function," she said. "We shouldn't be in the business of monitoring this content."
http://www.datelinealabama.com/artic..._news_art.php3


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VLC Will Play iTunes Music Store Tracks
Cory Doctorow

My favorite media player is something called Video LAN Client, or VLC, which plays everything from Quicktime to Divx and RealVideo. It's free and open source, and improves steadily. Now, someone's hacked in support for M4Ps, the DRM format used by Apple for the iTunes Music Store singles. Alas, it requires that you be using a machine that's been authorized by Apple to play the tracks in question.

That's a pretty big problem for me. Let me tell you my iTunes horror story. I'm a great Apple customer. I buy a new Powerbook every ten months or so. I've convinced all my family members to buy Powerbooks. Wherever I go, I leave a wake of Apple customers behind me.

So last year, when the iTMS debuted, I was in Toronto, and I showed my Mom how to stream music off of my Powerbook. I even authorized her to play my iTMS tracks -- I spent about $50 in the first day that the store was online.

Then I got back to San Francisco, and everything was fine. Apple announced the Aluminum 15" Powerbook, and that day, I ordered one to replace my 10-month-old 12" Powerbook, which was dying and underpowered. The 15" machine died a week after it arrived. I sent it back to Apple as a lemon and it was broken up for parts and a new machine was sent to me. I restored my data to the new Powerbook's HDD and tried to authorize iTunes to play my music, but I was SOL: I'd already authorized my old 12", my mom's iBook, and the Powerbook that was now back in Apple's parts- stream. So I de-authorized the 12" and away we went.

The first run of Alumninum Powerbooks had a screen defect, the "white blobs" problem. I had it in spades: huge, distracting white blobs all over the screen. Once I had the time, I moved all my data over to the old 12" and send the new machine back to Apple a second time, this time to get a new screen. While the new machine was in Texas getting repaired, I was in San Francisco, and I attempted to use the iTunes on my 12" Powerbook, only to be prompted to authorize the machine to play my susbtantial, expensive library of iTMS tracks.

But I couldn't. Between my mom's iBook (3,000 miles away in another country), my original Powerbook (broken up for parts by Apple) and the replacement Powerbook (back in the shop due to a manufacturing defect), I'd done all the authorizations that Apple's "speed bump" DRM would allow me. The Help links on Apple's site went to pages with support forms that returned errors when I filled them in. So, the "FairPlay" system was punishing me for:

Buying so much iTMS music that burning it to CD and ripping it back as MP3 (and re-entering all the metadata) was too big a chore to contemplate
Buying a new Powerbook at full retail every 10 months
Buying new Powerbooks as soon as they are announced, before all the manufacturing bugs have been shaken out

Apple tells us that its DRM "keeps honest users honest." I'm a pretty honest user. Apple's DRM hasn't kept me honest, though: it's kept me angry with Apple. It's kept me feeling like a sucker for giving them my money. It's kept me in chains.

So I'm waiting for someone to hack support for unauthorized AACs into VLC, because I'm not confident in my ability to continue to authorize the machines I buy to play the music I pay for. Link (via Hack the Planet)

DVD Jon has written in with more info on this -- once you crack your music with VLC, you can play it on as many CPUs as you want
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/26...ay_itunes.html


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E-book Vendors Fail, Canadian Reader Left Without Easy Access To Books
David Rothman

The headline in the Montreal Gazette tells the story well: Versaware a casualty of Internet crash. Company went out of business in 2001, so software is no longer available to download on the Web. A Gazette reader complains of no longer being able to read the e-books he downloaded from an outfit called Xoom, which in turn relied on coding from Versaware. Both companies are apparently kaput after hard times or at least are very hard to find.

Would-be Microsofts and proprietary formats: Dangerous mix

Could similar disasters eventually happen to customers of Palm Digital Media or other e-book-related companies? Remember how invincible Gemstar's e-book operation once looked? Just wait until Microsoft wakes up from hibernation and really cares about e-books again. Readers trusting PDM and similar firms could well be the losers, not just the software people foolish enough to think they can beat Microsoft at its own proprietary game. With proprietary formats and DRM, you may well be renting a book, not buying it. Even if the software still exists, the hardware to read it from may not. It will be derelict of the e-book industry not to come up with a Universal Consumer Format (and if elements of the e-book files can be separately archived, then so much the better).

Still boycotting

So far I have yet to "buy" e-books in proprietary formats. The best way to be an e-book booster is to vote with your wallet and let the industry know that you won't put up with obvious consumer abuse. Many people grasp this instinctively. While e-book sales are growing rapidly, they're still a pathetic speck of p-book sales. When will the Open eBook Forum understand? People either want to borrow books from libraries or own them for real.

Advice for librarians: Do experiment with e-books but don't overdo it. Beware of gambling too much money on proprietay formats--at least not without assurances that your investments will be protected with replacements. Of course, that might play into the hands of outfits like OverDrive. OD is a major DRM-related vendor that juggles around four formats and perhaps will say, "Look, we're here to protect you"--when OverDrive itself is part of the problem.

Detail: A Xoom.com exists but apparently not as the same company. As for Versaware, some kind of site seems to be trying to come up, but won't display in either Internet Explorer or Netscape. A whois says that Versaware.com is owned by a company called The HolmesGroup. That site, in turn, does not mention e-books, just small appliances; apparently it just wanted the name "Versaware."

Noticed: The LawMeme at Yale, where they apparently like their books to last, has just blogged the above. Hey, Ernie, thanks for caring about this pathetically stunted industry!

Software tracks P2Pers and e-mailers

From a press release from Digital Containers, seller of "SuperDRM" The central concept of "Tracking Electronic Content" is that access to electronic content can be tracked as it passes from user to user, whether they use the Internet, peer-to-peer networks, e-mail or physical media. The tracking function is accomplished by sending and receiving notification information as each successive user accesses or attempts to access the electronic content. The notification information can include any of the following: --The user's name, email address or credit card number --Demographic data collected from the user interactively --System or network identification information derived from the user's computer. (Found via eBookAd.)
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2004_03...80138042298048


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Save the Orphans
Lawrence Lessig

So the Stanford Center for Internet and Society has filed an action on behalf of the Internet Archive and the Prelinger Archive challenging unconditional copyright restrictions that “orphan” works. Relying upon the silver lining in that dark cloud that was Eldred v. Ashcroft (“But when, as in this case, Congress has not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary”), this case challenges a fundamental change in the contour of copyright protection, and asks the district court to therefore provide “further First Amendment scrutiny.”

The fundamental change in the “traditional contours of copyright protection” is Congress’s abandonment (formally in 1976, but effectively only in 1992) of any formalities for copyrighted work, and in particular, the requirement that copyrights be renewed. In 1992, Congress passed the BCIA, extending the term of all works in their initial term in 1964 through 1978. The Sonny Bono Act then extended those terms in 1998. The CTEA was thus the first statute in the history of the US generally to extend the term of copyrights that did not, or would not, pass through the filter of renewal.

The case is described on the CIS site. The complaint is linked here.

Pundit watch: you’ll be able to identify a pundit who has not read either Eldred or the complaint when they suggest the case is the same as Eldred was. It is not. Indeed, the claims are fundamentally different. The only relation between the two is that Kahle/Prelinger v. Ashcroft follows the rules suggested in Eldred for challenging Congress’s transformation of the traditional contours of copyright law. Eldred said: tradition matters. This case says: the tradition was radically changed.

If the case were to prevail, Congress would have to reenact the Sonny Bono Act to protect non-orphaned works. Of course, there’d be more opposition now, so it’s not clear such a law would pass, but under Eldred, they’d be free to do so. Or, alternatively, Congress might moot the case by passing a law that effectively imposed a renewal requirement. Say, for example, the PDEA.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001796.shtml


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Nader Wins Priceless Fair Use Victory v. MasterCard
Jason Schultz

Back in 2000, Ralph Nader ran a bunch of ads critiquing the corporate interests behind the Bush and Gore campaigns. To make his point, he used the style and some of ideas behind MasterCard's "Priceless" ad campaign -- specifically calling out the dollar amounts that corporate interests paid to candidates to secure their positions on the issues.

MasterCard sued Nader and his campaign committee, claiming that use of the ads violated copyright and trademark laws. My old firm, Fish & Richardson, defended Nader claiming that any similarity to the ads was protected by the fair use doctrine. Mastercard moved for a TRO against Nader and lost but continued to press the case toward trial.

Today, after four years of discovery battles and summary judgment briefing, the trial court ruled that Nader's use was, in fact, fair. A strong victory against overzealous copyright and trademark ownership and for non-commercial political speech.
http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/2...wins_pric.html


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Light Weight DRM?
Derek Slater

That's what Fraunhofer is calling their new project. See this fawning Wired article (gotta be a stringer) for the dumbed down version - the site is pretty straightforward.

The basics: Light Weight DRM (LWDRM) itself does not directly impede the manipulation and copying of copyrighted content. Instead, to make certain uses (as determined by copyright holders), users will have to include a certificate, provided by a third party, that both links the file to the user and includes the necessary decryption key. In addition, Fraunhofer intends to implement watermarks, though this seems like a minor part of LWDRM. Regardless, the point is to allow copyright holders to identify the origin of content distributed in an infringing manner. Those users could then be sued for infringement. LWDRM accepts and expects that infringement will still occur on a small scale, alongside perfectly legitimate copying for family and friends. Fraunhofer only expects that LWDRM will help stop large scale infringement, particularly over P2P networks.

Notably, Fraunhofer says that this will encourage people to share only with trustworthy parties - sound a lot like Clay Shirky's File-Sharing Goes Social (in addition to those saying "share with friends not with strangers").

Sounds good, at least at the outset, but it's got problems. Some may be technical - though I'm no expert, I know that at least watermarking is difficult (see summary in this interesting doc). The public key infrastructure part seems plausible and interesting, but everything is evadable (see Darknet paper). I can't imagine being much harder to evade than your typical music store's DRM. There are also some privacy issues, though Fraunhofer intends the key signing to be pseudonymous and all done with a "trusted" third party.

I'm also not sure how much it will actually achieve its aim. LWDRM's tries to stop infringement before the fact by enhancing the after infringement threat of a lawsuit. Just like other DRM, it does nothing to actually stop the spread of the copy once its on P2P; the only difference between this and other DRM is that LWDRM actually lets you spread a functioning copy over P2P. With this in mind, does this add anything to the current threat of lawsuits? Does the possibility of having downstream infringements traced back to you really add to people's fears? Moreover, it is unclear to what extent LWDRM would make it more likely that one could be successfully sued. Some uses that involve sharing with friends will be perfectly legitimate. If the first user's sharing is legitimate, but the receiving second user decides to share the file, it doesn't help that you know where the copy originated - the initial sharing could still be legit. There's room for some plausible deniability. Even if the first sharing was infringing, that does not necessarily make the the first user responsible for the second person's infringement, and thus LWDRM won't necessarily lead to enhanced penalties.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cmusings/2004/03/23#a638


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When Copyright Law Meets The 'Mash-Up'

Sampling has spawned new art forms — and a complex battle over how to treat them.
Jon Healey and Richard Cromelin

Record producer Brian Burton knew he'd done something technically illegal when he electronically blended tracks from the Beatles' "White Album" and vocals from Jay-Z's "The Black Album" into a CD called "The Grey Album."

But he was so excited by the mix of Fab Four riffs and Jay-Z raps that he badly wanted people to hear it. "When I was finished, it was the biggest sense of accomplishment I've had over anything," he said. So in January, the Los Angeles-based Burton, who records as DJ Danger Mouse, made a couple of thousand copies of the disc and started mailing them out.

His wish to be heard has come true many times over, although not in the way he expected. On Feb. 10 the Beatles' record company, EMI Music, stopped Burton from distributing "The Grey Album." That action triggered an online revolt that led tens of thousands of people to download digital copies of the CD, generating enough buzz to draw reviews from such mainstream outlets as CNN.

EMI's move against Danger Mouse was a spectacular backfire in the war over what's fair when the muse runs afoul of copyright law in the Digital Age. Technology is making it easier than ever to sample and rework recordings, and to the chagrin of entertainment companies and some artists who hold copyrights, the public is showing little sympathy for their efforts to control original works.

Fred E. Goldring, a Beverly Hills-based music-industry lawyer, likened EMI's response to "The Grey Album" to the major labels' earlier mishandling of the Napster file-sharing service. "By creating a controversy and trying to shut it down, they actually attracted more interest in it," Goldring says. "They created their own hell." He adds, "It became probably the most widely downloaded, underground indie record, without radio or TV coverage, ever. I think it's a watershed event."

That's the dilemma faced by entertainment companies and other copyright holders in a sampling, file-sharing world. The law may be black and white, but among artists and audiences, the creative landscape has been remixed in shades of gray.

A landmark skirmish

The main force behind the online release of Burton's album was a loosely organized confederation of websites and online activists who believe copyright holders in general, and the major record labels in particular, have gone too far in trying to enforce their rights.

To them, "The Grey Album" epitomized how new digital tools allow artists to build on earlier works in unexpected ways, enriching society by turning old creations into new ones — this time by using the originals as raw material, not just inspiration.

It's not in the public interest to hold back that kind of creativity, argued the free-"The Grey Album" forces. So despite threats from EMI's lawyers, they recruited more than 150 websites to offer downloadable versions of the work on Feb. 24 as part of a protest called Grey Tuesday.

It was a landmark skirmish in a battle that dates to the mid-'80s, when digital recorders, or "samplers," found their way into studios. Soon hip-hop artists were routinely borrowing snippets of sounds from LPs without seeking permission from the artists who recorded them or from their labels.

Those freewheeling days didn't last long. Objections from R&B giant James Brown, among others, forced some samplers to pay for the material they used. Then, in 1991, a federal judge in New York staggered the sampling world by granting British songwriter Raymond "Gilbert" O'Sullivan's request for an injunction against rapper Biz Markie, who had built a song around samples from O'Sullivan's biggest U.S. hit, "Alone Again (Naturally)."

Not only did U.S. District Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy order the rapper's label to reclaim and destroy every unsold copy of the offending record, but he also referred the case to the U.S. attorney's office for possible prosecution. Biz Markie wasn't hauled back into court, but Duffy had sent a clear — and chilling — message to everyone in the field.

Today, most copyright experts say that the rule on sampling is pretty clear. With limited exceptions, artists can't use a recognizable sample from someone else's recording unless the copyright holder grants permission. The copyright holder is in the driver's seat, able to set the price for a sample (ranging from a few hundred dollars to a share of the revenue from the song) or to withhold permission entirely.

The Beatles, for one, have never given their approval to any sampling requests. Jay-Z, on the other hand, doesn't seem to mind. He released a vocals-only version of "The Black Album," which was widely viewed as an open invitation to people like Burton to use his work. (The Beatles did not respond to requests for comment on "The Grey Album." Jay-Z was not available but said through a representative, "I applaud creativity in any form.")

As Grey Tuesday organizers see it, the law gives copyright owners too much control, in part because getting permission to sample an existing work is rarely as simple as one artist calling another and asking. They tend to peg the artists' record labels as the bad guys and unsung musicians as the victims.

"Sampling is something that's been sort of made illegal by the major labels over the last decade and a half," says Nicholas Reville, co-founder of Downhill Battle, an independent-music advocacy group based in Worcester, Mass., that spearheaded efforts to distribute Burton's work.

"It sounds hyperbolic, but they really have banned an art form from the mainstream. This wasn't about getting whatever album for free just to defy the major labels, it was about making sure that they weren't able to censor this work of art and about [demonstrating] why there needs to be a reasonable and practical sampling right."

"Reasonable" and "practical," though, are somewhat in the eye of the beholder. Ask Dexter Holland, the lead singer of the Offspring, how he'd feel if someone mixed his band's hit album "Smash" with, say, Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde," and he says: "Honestly, I'd be flattered. I would think that would be a good thing. That's a tough line, like exactly how can you control your music in all ways and all respects?"

Of course, if someone sold that remix, "that would be a different story," the Huntington Beach-based musician says. "But in terms of just having it, putting it up for people to listen to, I think that's totally fine."
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedi...ll=cl-calendar


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P2P Telephones Illegal In South Africa, Monopoly Telcom Claims

Legal Threat to Skype Users
Rodney Weidemann


Johannesburg - People using peer-to-peer (P2P) 'network bypass' software to make cheap international telephone calls over the Internet may yet face action for illegal practices.

According to Andrew Weldrick, senior manager for media relations at Telkom, the incumbent is currently the only operator licensed to carry and land international voice traffic, although the second national operator (SNO) will have the same rights once it is granted its licence.

"As far as Telkom is concerned, 'network bypass' software is illegal and - although it is difficult to police - if we feel there has been a transgression in this regard, we can investigate and file a complaint with the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA), and it will then take the necessary legal action," says Weldrick.

It is estimated that thousands of South Africans have downloaded the Skype software program, which is available free and allows users to make international calls from the Internet at no extra cost, although the full extent of its use in SA is unknown.

Developed by the same people that created the KaZaa P2P music file-swapping network, Skype's only operating cost is for users to allow their computers to become part of the P2P network and provide processing time for the routing of other calls on the network.

Weldrick says that while this technology has not had any significant impact on Telkom's revenues at this point, the company will be keeping an eye on the issue and will seek legal redress if it feels this is necessary.

"Given that our revenue for outgoing traffic is not a large part of our overall revenue, we are not overly concerned at present, but in terms of a legal and regulatory perspective, this remains a key issue, as it is an infringement of our rights."

Laws need overhaul

Ray Webber, spokesman for the Communications Users Association of SA (CUASA), says that according to the law, this practice is illegal and anyone using this technology is doing so at their own risk, as the monopoly would be fully within its rights to take legal action.

"However, the realities of technology development mean that the law is, in effect, lagging behind and we feel the whole Telecommunications Act needs a serious rethink, because technology has moved on since the Act was promulgated," says Webber.

"CUASA is definitely in favour of this and we believe this is the point of the draft Convergence Bill - we hope the final Convergence Act will help to resolve a lot of the issues that surround new technology such as this."

He says people should be allowed to experiment with new technologies, and technology growth and development should not be stunted because of laws that are badly in need of an overhaul.

"People should have the choice of whether they want to use this technology or not. After all, if I invent a car that can run on half the petrol an ordinary one uses, I shouldn't be prevented from using it just because it will affect the revenues of the big petrol companies," he says.

"Ultimately, CUASA's position on this is that people should not use this technology now as it is patently illegal, but they should band together to lobby for changes to be made in legislation that would result in such programs being declared legal."
http://allafrica.com/stories/200403250016.html


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VoIP Provider To Block Eavesdroppers
Ben Charny

Net-phoning provider VoicePulse says it plans to use encryption to secure calls, part of an industry trend that could pull in business customers but raise problems for law enforcement wiretaps.

The company announced the move on Tuesday at the Spring 2004 Voice on the Net Conference & Expo here, where industry executives spoke on the growing adoption of encryption security as an added service feature.

VoicePulse said the new feature will prevent electronic or traditional eavesdropping on customers' phone calls. It encrypts the part of the
call that travels alongside other data on the public Internet, the first time this approach has been taken by a commercial voice over Internet Protocol service provider (VoIP), according to VoicePulse.

VoicePulse President Ravi Sakaria said he believes the company's competitors, which now include AT&T, will also make it standard to protect the data in calls from being captured by outsiders. He said it will ease privacy concerns, satisfying current subscribers and making voice calling over the Internet more palatable to potential business customers.

"Encryption will not cost extra, and we do intend to encrypt every call on all plans," Sakaria said. "As a service provider, we feel that providing encryption is a requirement, not an option."
http://news.com.com/2100-7352-5181428.html


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Ever hear his stuff?

Hatch's Legislative Acumen Exceeded Only By His Musical Talent
John Paczkowski

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who once said he favored developing new technology that would disable the computers of people who illegally exchange music and movie files over P2P networks (see "Orrin Hatch's staff makes quick appointment for medication review"), is in full manic mode again. On Thursday, Hatch introduced legislation that would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof. Dubbed the "Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 200," (PIRATE), the bill would ensure hefty fines and prison time of up to 10 years for anyone convicted of file sharing. Hatch explained the inspiration for the bill in some remarkably alarmist declarations to the United States Senate:

"Recently, some unscrupulous corporations may have exploited new technologies and discovered that the narrow scope of civil contributory liability for copyright infringement can be utilized so that ordinary consumers and children become, in effect, 'human shields' against copyright owners and law enforcement agencies. Unscrupulous corporations could distribute to children and students a 'piracy machine' designed to tempt them to engage in copyright piracy or pornography distribution. Unfortunately, piracy and pornography could then become the cornerstones of a 'business model.' At first, children and students would be tempted to infringe copyrights or redistribute pornography. Their illicit activities then generate huge advertising revenues for the architects of piracy. Those children and students then become 'human shields' against enforcement efforts that would disrupt the flow of those revenues. Later, large user-bases and the threat of more piracy would become levers to force American artists to enter licensing agreements in which they pay the architects of piracy to distribute and protect their works on the Internet. Federal enforcement action is surely warranted if such 'business models' are driving the increasing ease of piracy on peer-to-peer filesharing networks. Such business models exploit children, cheat artists, and threaten the future development of commerce on the Internet."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...sv/8304740.htm


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Behind The Lawsuit Madness
Chuck Solitude

It is safe to say many know of a source to download material on the Internet. A plethora of programs exist, only keystrokes away from being downloaded to the dismay of the establishment. Who is right? Who is wrong?

Before the summer of 2003, those who downloaded never would have believed or conceived of being labeled a criminal. Today, one must be careful not to be caught offguard. Ever since the lawsuits have started to fly, many have sought ways to safeguard themselves and others from the wrath of the RIAA, and indications show the MPAA will soon join in suing those who share content over the Internet. It is their belief that file-sharing is stealing - without any excuses. So many times, articles are reported about “John Does” being sued.

As early as July 2003, warning signals were starting to appear.

The RIAA is in the beginning stages of a campaign to stamp out music piracy by bringing civil lawsuits against consumers. While many question the advantages of suing your customers, I would like to point out how this policy could potentially devastate innocent users. Source: http://clearstatic.org:2396/node/view/185

Yet they slipped up on September 15, 2003, in their initial stages of a campaign that looks more like a declaration of war.

The music industry could have been seen as a victim - a generations-old industry being robbed blind by thieves depriving hard-working artists of their livelihoods.

But the Recording Industry Association of America, representing the largest record labels in the world, sued Brianna LaHara, a 12-year-old girl who lives with her single mother and younger brother in public housing in New York City. Source: http:// http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...ss/6775671.htm

On and on it goes. They still claim we are just thieves. Holding us all in the same light as those who reproduce copies for only one reason, profit. When will those enlightened realize a difference between one who downloads for personal use as opposed to those who download or copy for the sole purpose of profit? Would it make sense that those who download for personal use would buy that work at a later time?

Recently on February 26, 2003 the EFF proposed compulsory licenses here:

EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann, speaking as part of a panel on peer-to-peer music sharing, proposed that music fans pay a small monthly fee – perhaps $5 – to share files with impunity, using whatever software they like. The money could be collected by a central organization and then distributed among those who own the rights to the songs, based on popularity.

The idea has worked before. Broadcast radio stations paid a similar flat fee to ASCAP and BMI – organizations representing songwriters, composers and music publishers – to play their music as much as they wanted, he said.

David Sutphen, vice president of government relations for the RIAA, immediately pooh-poohed the idea. File sharers still would search out a way to download music for free, he said, and under the proposed system, all music would have the same value, which doesn’t make sense. One-hit wonder Vanilla’s Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” for example, would have the same value as The Beatles catalog.

He said these types of compulsory licenses are “not a wise or logical thing to do.” Source: http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/index.php?p=1366

The music industry has already been very clear that they see compulsory licensing in analog radio as having been one of their greatest setbacks/failures — and they made sure the DMCA took back as much as possible.

The record companies have seen the compulsory license in radio as a huge giveaway on their part, and the digital performance rights provisions in the DMCA are a specific effort to redress that "wrong." They’re not about to accept this, and they have aggressively tried to reframe the discussion around the idea that compulsory licensing is about putting a government agency in charge of something that should be the market’s business – an argument that failed when the 1976 copyright act bill was up for discussion, but has far more power in today’s political climate.

And yet the industry has lobbied for exemption from antitrust law.

Senator Orrin Hatch begins pushing legislation that would make the RIAA and MPAA exempt from anti-trust litigation. Hatch suggests the protection is needed due to certain "market realities".
Source: http://www.boycott-riaa.com/article/11231

From the beginning, to win the battle over p2p, the RIAA and others in the industry have lobbied politicians, manipulated laws, and even filed improper proceedings in court to protect an outdated model of business. We are consumers are caught inside a vortex of greed and corruption only now becoming understood. The downloaders are scapegoats to an industry that has lacked vision and too full of pride to ride the wave of the future. Again the question is asked: Who is right? Who is wrong? Many forgot the oldest cliché of all in sales: The customer is always right.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=437


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Blur attacks BPI Music Download Warnings

Blur's Dave Rowntree has hit back at the BPI following the warnings it plans to issue to online song swappers.

The British Phonographic Industry is set to following the RIAA when they launch a new campaign threatening legal action against people who illegally use P2P or uploading music to the internet.

Its the first move by an industry trade association outside the US.

The BPI plan to send instant messages to peer-to-peer filesharing networks warning users that if they do not stop they may face legal action.

The drummer contacted NME following the news, he said "It's so difficult for artists to speak out without pointing fingers because artists make money from the sale of records and it's seen as if we want the best of both worlds."

"I'm certainly not saying 'File sharing is great but I also want to make a living out of selling records', Rowntree explained. "What I'm saying is if the BPI wanted to take a stand, then the time to take that stand was a number of years ago and do it in a kind of inclusive and grown-up way rather than now posturing and spitting like a bunch of schoolyard bullies. This will only lead to a bunch of 12 year- olds being taken to court as happened in the States which will serve nobody and nobody will make a penny."

Speaking about down P2P networks, Rowntree told NME.com "It's something that you can't un-invent. The time to have taken action would have been around the Napster time when Napster were holding out the olive branch - we should have taken it and started working with them to get models whereby people who downloaded music from the Internet paid for it so that it became commonplace from early on."

He added. "Since some bad decisions were taken then - now the whole industry is on the back foot."

"It's the musicians who generate the money - the record companies may think it's them but actually it's the musicians - so the will of the fans and the will of the musicians will out eventually, I have no doubt. But if the BPI want the bloody nose along the way fair enough, but as long as everybody's aware that it's not the performers who are doing this - it's the BPI."
http://www.dancefrontdoor.co.uk/article2776.html


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Note to self: don’t share crime data.

Crime Data On Cop's PC Accidentally Leaked To Net
Yomiuri Shimbun

Kyoto prefectural police announced Monday that names and addresses related to a criminal investigation that were saved on an officer's private laptop computer had mistakenly been circulated on the Internet.

According to police, the information was listed in 19 documents, including investigation reports and "wanted" lists that the officer, who works at a Shimogamo Police Station police box in Sakyo Ward, Kyoto, made for practice.

Twenty names were mentioned in the documents and 11 of them were names of actual persons, police said.

The information might have been circulated via peer-to-peer data-sharing software, according to police.

The police also suspect that a computer virus might have caused the distribution.

The officer saved investigation-related documents to a file on his private computer in 2002, according to Kyoto prefectural police.

As a way to practice making documents, the officer reportedly entered the names, birthdays, addresses and other personal data of people related to the crimes in the documents.

Detailed descriptions of the crimes were included in the documents distributed on the Internet, police said.

The officer had received permission to use his own computer for work.

A file of the 19 documents was saved to the hard drive and the whole file is believed to have been circulated on the Internet.

The Kyoto prefectural police suspect the information was spread when the officer logged onto the Internet at home or other places.

The police learned of the distribution on Friday morning when it was reported to the police's public relations division that the information was being circulated on the Internet.

The police have an internal regulation that prohibits officers from saving information that they learn in the line of duty to the hard drives of their personal computers.

The police are questioning the officer about the alleged violation.

Data exchange via a peer-to-peer data sharing software is not administered by any specific person.

Therefore, once data are circulated on the Internet via peer-to-peer data sharing software, they are virtually impossible to recover or delete.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20040330wo27.htm


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Plumtree and Yahoo! Team to Deliver Instant Messaging for the Enterprise Web
Pres Release

Haynes and Boone Uses Real-Time Presence and Messaging in Its Enterprise Web Deployment

Enterprise Web leader Plumtree Software (Nasdaq: PLUM) and Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced the integration of Yahoo! Messenger into Plumtree's Enterprise Web Suite. The new offering allows Plumtree customers to add presence awareness, instant messaging and application alerts into the service-oriented applications they create in their Enterprise Web deployments. By integrating IM into business applications, such as customer support or sales productivity applications, organizations can ensure that IM is used in a context that delivers business value in a secure and cost-effective way.
"Instant messaging is very popular in the enterprise market today, but until now, companies have not been able to use it as a corporate service embedded in their applications," said Glenn Kelman, vice president of marketing and product management at Plumtree. "What is most exciting about Yahoo! Messenger for the Enterprise Web Suite is that it combines the security and archiving of enterprise software with the low cost of ownership of a hosted service."

"Our combined service delivers business value unmatched in the marketplace, both in terms of functionality and quality," said Lisa Pollock Mann, senior director, Yahoo! Messenger. "The integration of Yahoo! Messenger with Plumtree's world-class Enterprise Web solution offers businesses an efficient and powerful new medium for real-time communication and sharing of key resources."
Haynes and Boone, LLP, an international law firm, added Yahoo! Messenger to its Enterprise Web deployment last November to accelerate collaboration on case work in both litigation and transactional practices. "We wanted to give our attorneys and staff the ability to communicate instantly and securely with one another and with clients through portal applications," said Thomas Wisinski, Chief Knowledge Officer of Haynes and Boone, LLP. "Yahoo! Messenger met our enterprise security requirements, and gives users instant access to collaborate in IM or through WebEx. The solution is useful as a back-channel communication tool and in the future we'll use it in a Virtual Helpdesk portal application."

Emphasizing the need to provide collaboration tools in the context of business applications, META analysts Matt Cain and Mike Gotta wrote that in the next decade, "Collaboration services such as instant messaging, Web conferencing and teamware will be ingrained in business processes, enabling a massive reduction in coordination costs across the enterprise ecosystem. Almost every business activity can be made more efficient by enabling users to plan, negotiate, brainstorm, and resolve conflicts within the context of a business process." (June 2003 report Collaboration and the Evolution of the Enterprise)
Instant messaging can be a core service of many Plumtree-powered applications. For example, a support application built with the Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite and Yahoo! Messenger could allow customers to communicate directly with support technicians to resolve problems in real-time, logging and indexing the entire communication in the Enterprise Web's knowledge base. Or, in a research and development application, the IM solution could be used to facilitate collaboration between two pharmaceutical companies helping scientists see which of their peers are on line and communicate on research issues as they come up.

Integration and Availability

Yahoo! Messenger for the Enterprise Web Suite offers business-class features including administration, logging and integrated Web conferencing services in addition to text messaging and file transfer. The product includes 128 bit-encryption, spam control and virus scanning on incoming files, and allows for peer-to-peer messaging. As a hosted service with these features, Yahoo! Messenger gives organizations the encryption and control of a locally deployed instant messaging system without the hardware, deployment and administration costs of such a deployment.

The integration of Yahoo! Messenger into the Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite also includes:

-- Unified user management: administrators manage one set of users for Plumtree and Yahoo! technologies;
-- Integrated activity rights management: administrators can govern instant messaging access alongside Enterprise Web privileges;
-- Contextual presence: online presence and user availability is embedded in several Plumtree applications; code samples jump-start the process of embedding presence into any customer application;
-- Notifications: event-driven alerts on documents, tasks and discussions within projects can be routed through Yahoo! Messenger, or to any mobile device;
-- Logging: Yahoo! Messenger conversations can be stored in projects and indexed for search; and
-- Presence: Status indication integrated throughout the Plumtree Enterprise Web solution.

Plumtree is now offering Yahoo! Messenger for the Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite as a services engagement that includes one to two days of installation assistance from Plumtree Consulting Services, with a one-time installation fee of $5,000 plus a yearly per-user subscription to the instant messaging service*. Plumtree plans to standardize the integration between Yahoo! Messenger and the Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite later this year.

Interested parties can see a demonstration and hear more details in an on-demand Web Seminar with registration available at www.plumtree.com/04/yahoo.
http://www.transformmag.com/news/pr_news.5i2.htm

[JackSpratts]

Hmmm…

Fish Exposed To Buckyballs Develop Brain Damage

A university study has found that nanoparticles can cause brain damage in fish.

The small, preliminary study, led by Southern Methodist University researcher Eva Oberdorster, found rates of brain damage 17 times higher in largemouth bass exposed to a form of water-soluble buckyballs than unexposed fish. The concentration of nanoparticles used in the 48-hour laboratory study were .5 parts per million.

Oberdorster said in a written statement that the current study is believed to be the first to show that the particles can cause brain damage, but researchers have not performed human studies. She said she plans studies to determine how the buckyballs can get into the fishes' bodies and cause damage.

Kevin Ausman, executive director of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University, said in an e-mail it would be irresponsible to comment too strongly until the work has passed peer review. He also said it's not conclusive whether the effects seen in the study were from the nanomaterial or a contaminant.

The study was presented Sunday at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, Calif.
http://www.smalltimes.com/document_d...cument_id=7630


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New Haven For Free Music: Canada

A Canadian judge ruled this week that it is legal to download copyrighted files for personal use.
Doug Alexander and Peter Ford

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, AND PARIS - Want a free copy of Janet Jackson's newest album? Or the latest song by Sarah McLachlan? If you're in Canada, just go to the Internet.

Music lovers north of the border can swap songs online without fear of breaking the law, thanks to a Canadian court decision this week.

A Federal Court judge ruled Wednesday that downloading songs for personal use or having files available on a computer connected to the Internet doesn't violate copyright laws.

"This is a victory for new technology and the Internet and the rights of users of new technology in Canada," says Howard Knopf, an Ottawa lawyer involved in the case.

But Americans and Europeans beware: this strictly Canadian decision doesn't bring any more clarity to the murky issue of file-sharing in their parts of the world.

"Canadian and American laws are very different," Knopf says. "This won't have any direct effect on the United States, but it'll certainly cause a lot of concern down there."

Nonetheless, this court decision is a blow to the music industry's crusade to stop people from swapping songs through popular Internet file-sharing services like Kazaa or Grokster, also known as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

The Canadian court decision comes one day after the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) announced a new wave of lawsuits against 247 individuals in Canada, Denmark, Germany, and Italy accused of illegally sharing copyrighted music.

An intellectual-property lawyer in Germany, where the IFPI has reported 68 individuals to the police, expects the industry body to pursue its case there, even in light of the Canadian ruling.

"My best guess is that the industry will continue its campaign because for the time being that is the only thing it can do," says Stefan Dittmar, a lawyer at the Berlin office of the international law firm Baker & McKenzie. "They have failed to come up with any strategy other than intimidating people. But it won't work."

A spokeswoman for IFPI, whose members brought the Canadian and European suits, says she does not think the Canadian ruling "will impact our European campaign much, because we think it is a misreading of the law in Canada." Should the judgment stand after appeals, however, "it probably will have an impact."

In Denmark, more than 120 people are being sent letters asking them either to stop file-sharing and pay compensation, or face legal action, according to the IFPI. In Italy 30 people have been charged with copyright infringement since the Milan prosecutor's office began ordering raids in January, which have netted computers, hard discs, and files.

So far the legality of file-sharing in Germany has not been tested in the courts, says Mr. Dittmar. "The first cases in Germany are being talked about now, but there have not been any major judgments" to clarify the law, he says.

If file-sharing is ruled to be illegal in Europe, he adds, the Canadian judgment will not shelter European music-swappers, even if they download their songs from a Canadian server. "A copyright holder can pursue an infringement wherever it occurs," he explains. "If you download something in Germany, German law applies."

Just like a library

The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) tried using the courts to force Internet service providers to release names of 29 people suspected of "distributing thousands of digital music files to millions of strangers" for its Canadian lawsuit.

Justice Konrad von Finckenstein not only rejected CRIA's request in his ruling, he destroyed the industry's case by declaring that making files available on a public network doesn't infringe on copyright.

"I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user who places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service," he said.

His ruling backs a decision by the Copyright Board of Canada last December that stated that downloading a song for personal use isn't copyright infringement. The CRIA plans to appeal.

"In our view, the copyright law in Canada does not allow people to put hundreds of thousands of music files on the Internet for copying, transmission, and distribution to millions of strangers," says Richard Pfohl, a lawyer for the CRIA.

The head of Nettwerk, a record label based in Vancouver that represents more than 40 artists including Ms. McLachlan and Barenaked Ladies, says the judge is "completely out to lunch" on this issue.

"He has basically said that anything you've put up in a file-sharing system - it doesn't matter whether it's music, books, movies, it can be any copyrightable material - if people want to take it from your computer that's perfectly fine, because that's private use," says Terry McBride, CEO of Nettwerk. "But the problem is it's not private use."

Mr. McBride blames file-swapping for driving the global music business into recession.

Indeed, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Britain's record-industry trade association, released a study last week saying that while nondownloaders' spending on music last year was flat, downloaders spent 32 percent less on albums and 59 percent less on singles than the year before.

According to IFPI, global sales of recorded music fell 7 percent in 2002, and while last year's sales figures aren't available it expects similar results.

Ren Bucholz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a consumer advocacy group based in Saf Francisco, doesn't buy such arguments.

"It's always been a red herring for the recording industry to say that file-sharing was responsible for the huge downturn in their sales," he says. "There's lots of other reasons that are much more believable," adding that DVDs, console games, and movies all compete for the same entertainment dollar.

A study released this week by two professors, from Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, says that file-sharing doesn't hurt record sales and in some instances it actually increases them.

Mr. Bucholz calls Canada's court decision "amazingly good news" on an international level.

"If this decision holds it means we have a highly industrialized nation with pretty good broadband penetration that has declared that having songs in your shared folder isn't illegal," he says.

No change for US users

Bucholz says Canada's decision won't legalize file-sharing in the US, even if someone downloads from a Canadian server. "Users in the US will still have to abide by US law," he says.

Yet US law has yet to be fully clarified. While file-sharing in the US is considered illegal, US judges have not yet ruled definitively on the issue. Most of the Recording Industry of America's nearly 2,000 lawsuits have either been settled out of court or have not yet made it to court because Internet service providers (ISPs) refuse to release the identity of their customers who have been sued, citing privacy rights. A US appeals court ruled in December that the industry can't force ISPs to turn over the identities of file-swappers unless the ISPs are formally sued.

In Canada, the music industry's battle to crack down on pirated music is just background noise for many who embrace file-sharing programs.

Mimi Lee, waiting with a friend outside a Vancouver record store, says she's downloaded 10,000 music and videos from the Internet and file-sharing services in the past six years. "I've always thought of it [as] being illegal," Ms. Lee admits. "I'm surprised that the government [made that decision] but for us we really don't care - we still do it."

Such ambivalence has also entered the corporate world, where employees use work computers with fast broadband connections to beef up their online music collection. A study last year by Ottawa's Assetmetrix found file- swapping software installed on company computers in 77 percent of 560 corporations surveyed. Some companies had these programs on as many as 58 percent of their PCs.

Bryan Hsu, a salesman for one retail electronics chain, says customers do ask about the legality of downloading music, but it hasn't dampened sales.

He personally doesn't see any problem copying music files off the Internet - he has 1,000 tunes on his home computer - and applauds the latest news.

"It's good," he says. "At least we can still find something for free."

• Elizabeth Armstrong contributed to this report from Boston.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0402/p06s01-woam.html


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Students Undaunted by New Round of File-Sharing Lawsuits
BY Kim-Mai Cutler

A second round of lawsuits against anonymous file-sharers in college networks has not yet sent shockwaves across the residence halls, students say.

Back at the dormitories, old episodes of “The O.C.” and copies of Outkast’s “Hey Ya” were still zipping through peer-to-peer networks.

“As long as there will be free songs and videos on the Internet, people will find ways to share them,” said freshman Laura Davy. “It’s just too hard to stop them.”

Several students were unaware of last week’s announcement that the Recording Industry Association of America is filing 532 lawsuits against song-swappers nationwide, including UC Berkeley students who have yet to be named.

“This will probably scare students for a little bit and then they’ll just start up again,” said UC Berkeley freshman Megan DuBois.

Still others were unclear about what constitutes unlawful distribution of music.

“I’m under the impression that if you download music and keep it for personal use, it’s OK,” said UC Berkeley freshman Ryan Panchadsaram, who turns to Apple’s iTunes for music.

Others who have heard of the lawsuits have since turned off sharing abilities in large peer-to-peer services.

“On big networks like Kazaa, I block people from downloading my files, but they can’t really find you out through direct connection,” said UC Berkeley freshman Blake Lee.

Indeed, students who complained of garbled music on Kazaa are turning to a direct connection client called DC++, said Kevin Tong, who has since stopped using Kazaa.

Residential Computing does not actively scout the servers for students who share music.

But if students are caught, the university will receive a “take down” notice from an agency representing the copyright holder.

Students then receive an e-mail warning asking them to confirm they have removed the copyrighted material.

Tong was once warned by Residential Computing after downloading a copy of “American Wedding” from a Web site and was asked to quickly delete the file.

Repeated violations are reported to the resident director.

“The thing is we’re teenagers,” Davy said. “This is the age of information and it’s hard not to share it.”
http://www.dailycal.org/particle.php?id=14664


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Australian Music Industry Has Record Sales Year
Thomas Mennecke

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) has taken a similar path to its American brethren, the RIAA. Convinced that file-sharing and CD copying is evil, the ARIA has been actively pursuing Australian based Sharman Networks (owners of Kazaa). Although the industry has not yet declared war against it own customers, it has directly blamed P2P networking for the apparent decline of music sales.

"Apparent" is the key word mind you. Many global music industries, such as the Australian, American and British, have clamored that file-sharing has crippled music sales. However, many critics have questioned whether P2P is to blame, as alternative explanations such as a global economic recession, is more plausible. Interestingly, as the global economy has improved, so have music sales. Oddly enough, despite the increased music sales, file-sharing activity has stood its ground.

While the American music industry is recovering, the Australian music industry enjoyed its best year ever in 2003. However, The Sydney Morning Herald points out that the ARIA's press release, "Music DVD continues its rise whilst CD singles slide further" lacks this one piece of key information. The Herald continues to state that a savvy finance reporter, SBS's Peter Martin, discovered that CD sales topped 50 million copies in 2003. In addition, total sales (all formats) were 65.6 million. This value is well over the 63.9 million sales in 2001.

So, has file-sharing hurt the Australian music industry? The evidence appears to say "no", as Sydney Morning Herald points out that in 1998, a year before the Napster revolution, CD sales were a paltry 39.6 million units.

When looking at the ARIA press release, it fails to mention that 2003 was a record sales year. The ARIA instead discusses that the CD single, an out dated and antiquated relic, suffered a 16.57% decline in unit sales and 23.90% decline in dollar value in 2003.

Many agree that the CD single may have its days numbered, as the Internet has largely replaced the need for this entity. Whether you prefer P2P or "legitimate" sources, it seems bizarre to spend at least 5 dollars for a single when its available online for a maximum of 99 cents.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=438


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Cheqtrack File Sharing

p2pnet.net News:- Ian Dickson has a background in financial services and, while professionally engaged in arcane pensions stuff, also "ran a little dance label and promoted raves".

In 1993/44, he got involved in the Net, built a financial services dot com (Moneyweb) "even advising the
Financial Services Authority on the Internet and Compliance," sold Moneyweb in 2001 and since then has been involved in building a new type of social software community platform he calls CommKit.com and which (he modestly states : ) "is a must for all artists and labels".

However, Dickson also has other interesting thoughts one of which, he's convinced, could be the answer to
the 'How do we make p2p work for everyone?' dilema.

"Maybe someone will take the idea and run with it," he told p2pnet

Now read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

How p2p and a clearing house can save the music recording industry


By Ian Dickson

The Problem

The content industry cannot hope to control its content.

Whatever happens, there's no way around the problem that content designed to be experienced by people must always be turned into something that can be experienced, and at this point, it can be captured, ie, "the air gap" problem where I buy a DRM protected music file and play it, through a speaker system attached to headphones on a binaural recording head.

Result - an almost perfect copy, DRM broken. I upload to my share system. Soon everyone has a perfect copy of a 'good enough' original. You only need a few people who will break the DRM, to make DRM useless.

Also, the industry has the problem that the buyers perceive that not enough money goes to the musicians, and are loath to pay what they perceive to be a bunch of parasites living off the genius of content creators. Note - perception is what matter here as it determines ideas of fairness.

Fairness - people are, on the whole, willing to pay a fair price for everything. What they want to be sure of is that the money goes to the person they perceive is providing the service. And what people consider fair depends on the strength of their relationship with the content provider.

Summary - the present make up of the content industry is doomed, because it will never be able to stamp out file sharing, and its attempts to do so will alienate the consumers AND new technology will allow creators (new bands in particular) to bypass the present structures WITHOUT losing money.

Cheqtrack could be the solution.

Accept psychological reality, and work with it.

1) People will pay a fair sum, which will be much lower than CD prices, (most CDs have 2-3 tracks that you


play a lot, so work out at $2-$3 per track liked), and must be seen to go direct to artists (who may then pay out of their pocket for other services).

Working numbers - 2c per play, 50c to burn (and have unrestricted use thereafter).

In practice artists would set their own play/burn prices, and users would simply be warned if costs were above their personal settings - eg 'warn if play charge over 3p'.

This is a VOLUNTARY scheme, but works on the basis that most people will actually adopt it, if presented right, because people are willing to pay for the music that they choose to listen to IF they believe that the artists will benefit.

(There will be a freeloader effect, but this will tend only to affect those artists who are perceived to be very rich, or unappreciative of their fans, or who want too much money. I.E. they the problems of great success, not those of the majority of artists.)

By adopting a model of psychologically easy payment it is likely that actual total spend will increase, compared to that of buying CDs, which for most buyers has to be a definite decision.

This may sound outlandish - will people pay for that which they don't have to? Yes. Enough of them will, because they know that if they LIKE something and don't pay for it, then there may not be a next one.

2) P2P is FREE DISTRIBUTION for creators.

Why artists benefit

The Net becomes an interlinked series of P2P nodes.

In effect you want your content as widely distributed as possible to aid distribution to people who want to pay you.

You get paid for every play/burn. Note that while fans will pay to burn (up front income), many people who like, but not enough to buy, will provide a drip feed long term income by playing a track say 4-5 times a year, possibly for life. (Certainly whatever people like at age 25 they pretty much like for ever, and will play, on occasion, for decades.).

Math for artists

100,000 who burn in year 1, and a million who play 5 times a year.

Year 1 income, $50,000 from burns, $100,000 from casuals.

Long term income, $100,000pa for years and decades. From ONE SINGLE TRACK.

Plus, CRM possibilities - the system could track usage and use that to help bands reach fans. (automated or opt in options). So if there were 2000 casual listeners in GL area, the artist could take that into account when planning a tour etc, reach those people directly with tour info, thus garnering extra revenue.

It could also run opt in playlist monitoring - and thus flag to people what new music they might like. This could be automated matching, or human editorial.

There are a lot of other opportunities here, when you combine the automated logs with user choice, and this relationship building will be very important over time, and enhance artist revenue.

Overall - a potentially massive boost to income, AND, an income that spreads over a longer term, and a closer relationship with fans. Very attractive to any creative person.

Read more from p2pnet.


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Groups Go After Illegal Music Swapping Outside U.S.
AP

The music industry's campaign of lawsuits and threats against song-swappers moved overseas Tuesday as trade groups went after 247 people in Europe and Canada they accused of piracy.

The London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said individuals in Germany, Denmark, Italy and Canada had been hit with lawsuits, criminal charges or threatening letters.

The IFPI promised similar actions in other countries in the coming months. National music-industry groups in Sweden and Britain recently began warning users of online song-sharing networks by sending them online instant messages.

``This is our first coordinated effort to take this campaign over the range of countries where file-stealing is a problem,'' said Allen Dixon, general counsel and executive director of the IFPI, which represents the recording industry worldwide.

The group claims piracy is behind a five-year global decline in music sales. It said worldwide sales of recorded music fell 7 percent in 2002, with a similar plunge expected in 2003 figures.

The Recording Industry Association of America began targeting individual file sharers last fall and has sued 1,977 people. The RIAA has settled some 400 cases, generally for a few thousand dollars each.

The actions in Europe and Canada were taken by national recording industry groups affiliated with the IFPI. The targets were people who made at least hundreds of songs -- 54,000 tracks in one Danish case -- available for distribution and copying on free file-sharing services, Dixon said.

The tactics differed in each country, but in each instance the IFPI hopes to wrest a few thousand dollars in fines or settlements.

More than 120 people in Denmark were sent letters demanding that they stop illegal file-sharing and pay compensation -- or face lawsuits. In Germany, 68 people were reported to law enforcement authorities, while 30 Italians were charged with copyright infringement.

In Canada, 29 people were sued on copyright infringement claims.

In most cases, the industry had the full cooperation of Internet service providers in identifying the defendants, except in Canada, where the recording industry filed its cases against unidentified people it hopes to unmask later.

Analyst Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media said he thought the actions probably would have a chilling effect, as the RIAA cases have. If people are scared into ceasing to share their music collections online, free downloading services like Kazaa will lose their value internationally.

But Leigh pointed out that the U.S. lawsuits came as the industry began to provide strong alternatives to illegal song-swapping -- commercial downloading services including iTunes, Napster 2.0, MusicMatch and Rhapsody. Those services have yet to work out the licensing and logistical issues needed to launch outside the United States.

Leigh expects the music industry to come under fire in Europe and Canada for assuming the RIAA tactic without aggressively launching commercial services there.

So far, licensed commercial download services in Europe are ``small little operations,'' Leigh said.

Cases against individual song swappers have been contentious in the United States, where Verizon Communications Inc. successfully challenged the industry's use of subpoenas to seek identifying information about Verizon's Internet subscribers.

A U.S. appeals court ruled in December that the recording industry can't use the subpoenas to force Internet providers to identify file-swappers unless a lawsuit is first filed. In response, the music industry has sued ``John Doe'' defendants -- identified only by their numeric Internet addresses -- and expects to work through the courts to learn their identities.

Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said it's unclear whether the RIAA's lawsuits in the United States have significantly reduced free music downloading.

But he said the cases are part of a broader strategy for the recording industry.

Zittrain believes the industry eventually plans to sue Internet service providers (ISPs) directly for failing to police piracy on their networks. If so, he expects the record labels will point to the individual lawsuits filed in the United States and now in Canada and Europe and say, ``Look, we have been trying everything -- it hasn't been effective,'' Zittrain said.

''I think the ISPs are quietly worried about it.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/inte...ing-Music.html


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Fight Against Illegal File Sharing Is Moving Overseas
Mark Landler

The music industry announced legal action Tuesday against 247 people accused of illegal file sharing outside the United States, taking its war against Internet piracy abroad for the first time.

Recording industry associations in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Canada have filed lawsuits or taken other legal action, aiming mainly at heavy users accused of offering a large number of songs online.

"This is not a U.S.-only problem," said Jay Berman, chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry in London. "We always knew we would have to take action outside the United States. At some point, you have to ask yourself when. That moment was now."

The unauthorized swapping of music has wreaked as much havoc on the global industry as it has in the United States. In Germany, where the effects of file sharing are compounded by the rampant "burning" of songs onto blank CD's, sales of recorded music plunged nearly 20 percent last year.

Mr. Berman said the threat of legal action had pinched the renegade file sharing industry. The most popular service, Kazaa, offered more than 900 million files in April 2003, shortly before the industry filed its first lawsuits in the United States, according to Mr. Berman. On Monday night, it offered 550 million files.

"That's still a lot," he acknowledged. "But we believe the number of files being copied has shrunk."

The recording industry said the lawsuits could result in fines or damage payments amounting to several thousand euros a person. Still, the legal actions taken vary widely from country to country.

In Italy, 30 people have been charged with criminal copyright infringement by the public prosecutor's office in Milan, which ordered raids to seize computers, hard disks, storage systems and 50,000 files. In Germany, 68 people have been reported to the authorities for suspected violations.

Denmark has sent "civil demand" letters to 120 people, ordering them to stop illegal sharing of files and to pay compensation, or face legal action. In Canada, the identities of 29 people accused of large-scale file sharing are being sought from their Internet service providers.

The nature of the industry's campaign - it announced no lawsuits in Britain or France, nor any in Asia - attests to the patchwork of copyright laws outside the United States. While the European Union has passed a uniform copyright protection law similar to that in the United States, it has yet to be ratified by all of the union's current 15 member states.

The existing cases are being prosecuted under national laws, Mr. Berman said. He predicted that lawsuits would be filed in other countries, but said the timing is dependent on stricter enforcement of copyright protection.

The British Phonographic Industry, which represents Britain's record labels, has continued sending warning messages to users of file sharing services, though it, too, has threatened legal action.

Critics of the lawsuits said the piecemeal approach would bewilder consumers, particularly in Europe.

"People won't understand the message," said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Jupiter Research in London. "If you're file sharing in Germany, you're in trouble. If you're file sharing in Spain, you're fine."

Mr. Mulligan also questioned the timing of the lawsuits, since, he said, Europe still does not have compelling legal alternatives to the unauthorized services. Sony has announced plans to offer its online music service, Connect, in June in Britain, France and Germany. Apple Computer has also indicated it will introduce its popular iTunes service in Europe later this year.

"This could hurt them," Mr. Mulligan said. "People will think, 'If you try to source music online, you'll have legal action taken against you.' ''

Mr. Berman made the opposite argument, saying that the lawsuits would clear the field for legitimate services. He said that there were more than 50 legal online music services already in operation in Europe and that more than 650,000 people were downloading songs through them.

Still, Mr. Berman said he was prepared for the same backlash that erupted after the American labels began suing file sharers last year. Nearly 2,000 lawsuits have been filed there, including 532 fresh cases announced last week by the Recording Industry Association of America.

"We're not going into this with the idea that we're trying to win a popularity contest," he said.

Gerd Gebhardt, chairman of the German Phonographic Industry Association, stressed that the legal action was aimed at "uploaders" - those who copy songs in large numbers and place them on servers for distribution - rather than people who download the occasional song for personal use.

Under German law, the downloading of music is illegal, too, but only if the user knows the material is copyrighted.

Mr. Gebhardt conceded that the campaign would do little to stem the main piracy problem in Germany: CD burning. Last year, according to a market survey, Germans copied music onto 325 million CD's. The German recording industry sold 133 million CD's with recorded music.

"In the case of one-to-one CD burning, we can't do anything," he said. "But with downloading, we have legal recourse."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/bu...s/31music.html


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Wal-Mart Hits Snags in Push to Use Radio Tags to Track Goods
Barnaby J. Feder

When Wal-Mart Stores surprised its suppliers last summer by announcing an aggressive timetable for them to put radio frequency tags on their shipments, it put manufacturers of the most tightly controlled prescription drugs on the fastest track of all. They were supposed to send bulk shipments of such drugs in radio tag containers to a distribution center near the company's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., by the end of March.

With that deadline just days away, Wal-Mart is now admitting that it will not be met.

A few companies have begun sending radio-tagged drugs, a Wal-Mart spokesman, Gus Whitcomb, said, although he declined to identify them. Mr. Whitcomb said that the company, which operates 3,000 pharmacies, had revised its goal and wanted all drug makers on board by the end of June.

The drifting deadline is the latest in a string of accommodations Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has been forced to make as it pushes to deploy radio frequency identification in its supply tracking process.

"Wal-Mart keeps cutting back on its requirements," said Michael J. Liard, the senior analyst following radio tag technology at the Venture Development Corporation, a market research company in Natick, Mass. "They're not ready; the industry's not ready; and the technology is not ready."

A radio identification system uses electronic readers to retrieve digital data stored in microchips embedded in plastic product tags, with metal grids around the chip that serve as an antenna.

Unlike bar code scanners, the radio readers can collect data from tagged items packed in boxes or hidden behind other items. And unlike common bar codes, the digital chips can carry more information about a product, like when and where that specific item was made. Radio tags could one day be integrated with sensors to record and report, among other things, whether refrigerated goods became too warm during the trip from manufacturer to consumer.

One hurdle bogging down Wal-Mart and its suppliers is the cost of the devices. The tags alone cost 25 cents to 30 cents each. Analysts contend that for many users the price needs to fall to 5 cents or less before the investments can be recovered from the savings generated by moving goods more rapidly and accurately through supply chains.

In the drug industry and others where counterfeiting and tampering are major concerns, the tags may pay off sooner.

Everyone, meanwhile, faces challenges like figuring out how far electronic readers can be positioned from the tags without missing crucial data and how to overcome the tendency of liquids and metals to block the signal. While today's readers can easily identify a pallet of Coca-Cola in cans, for example, and cartons on the outside edge of a pallet, they have trouble picking out cartons in the middle of the pallet.

It is also becoming apparent that industrywide standards for advanced tags and readers are developing more slowly than the technology's advocates had hoped. That adds to the incentives for delaying investment.

Wal-Mart was aware of these issues when it announced last June that it expected its top 100 suppliers to use radio tags on shipments by the end of this year, with all suppliers complying by the end of next year. But in November, Wal-Mart told the top group of suppliers - which swelled to 132 participants as companies eager to be pacesetters asked to be included - that the year-end deadline would apply only to a limited number of goods shipped to three distribution centers serving 150 stores in Texas.

The first big test for tagging of pallets and boxes of general merchandise is scheduled for next month in Dallas. Many analysts do not expect a full-scale rollout of radio tagging at Wal-Mart until after 2005.

The use of the technology has been endorsed by the Defense Department and other retailers like Albertsons, the supermarket chain based in Boise, Idaho, and Target Stores, the Minneapolis-based chain that is one of Wal-Mart's largest rivals. And technology giants like I.B.M., Microsoft, Oracle and Sun Microsystems have begun marketing products and services to help manufacturers and retailers gather and store data that radio tagging is expected to generate.

Major suppliers may also be focusing on the broader strategies of deploying the technology rather than what is necessary simply to meet Wal-Mart's initial deadlines.

"A company that might have gotten away with investing a couple of hundred thousand dollars to equip one of its distribution centers serving Wal-Mart in Texas now has to worry about the centers serving Target and Albertsons and how to tie it all together," said Erik Michielsen, an analyst at ABI Research, a technology research firm in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

Over time, he said, spending on software and services to handle the data gathered from radio tags will surpass the investment on the tags and readers. And, he predicted, Wal-Mart is likely to let short-term deadlines slip for suppliers that are investing tens of millions of dollars to make the technology more valuable in the long run.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/te...y/29radio.html


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Bush Focuses On Internet Access In Crucial Battleground States
Editorial

President Bush, hunting for votes in hotly contested Sun Belt states, said Friday his administration is working toward wiring homes throughout America with high-speed Internet access by 2007.

``We've got to make sure this country's on the leading edge of broadband technology,'' Bush said. It is vital, he added, to open ``new highways of knowledge'' to spread innovations in education, medicine and other areas, and keep the country competitive in global trade.

Bush also said the tax cuts enacted since he took office were largely responsible for the record high rate of home ownership, a bright spot in the economy he highlighted in New Mexico and again in Phoenix en route to a weekend at his Texas ranch.

During the last three years, Bush has sporadically sought to focus public attention on expanding the number of homes connected to high-speed Internet providers such as DSL and cable. But his call for ``universal, affordable access'' by 2007 was new.

It was a cause sure to resonate with voters still exasperated by slow dial-up Internet connections, or none at all.

In an outdoor speech here, the president stopped short of promising he would reach the goal by 2007, saying instead that ``we ought to have'' cheap high-speed access everywhere. Nor did he offer a detailed plan on how he hoped to achieve it.

But his administration has been working at it behind the scenes. Last month, the Federal Communication Commission voted to write rules for a third way to bring high-speed Internet service to homes: through conventional electric lines, where a homeowner could plug a modem into an electrical outlet.

In November, the FCC expanded the frequencies that wireless devices could use to provide high-speed Internet connections for computers and other electronic equipment.

At the same meeting, the commission voted to make it easier for rural health care providers to tap into federal funds to subsidize Internet connections. The high-speed connections allow rural hospitals to obtain diagnoses and other medical assistance from better-equipped medical facilities in more populated areas.

In his Albuquerque speech, Bush warned lawmakers not to impose taxes on high-speed access. A temporary ban on such taxes expired last fall. The House has passed legislation to make it permanent.

The Internet remarks were part of a speech largely devoted to homeownership. Bush said the current 68 percent homeownership rate was a record high, and he credited both low interest rates and the tax cuts he pushed through Congress in 2001 and 2003.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/8287224.htm


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Study: File-Sharing No Threat to Music Sales
David McGuire

Internet music piracy has no negative effect on legitimate music sales, according to a study released today by two university researchers that contradicts the music industry's assertion that the illegal downloading of music online is taking a big bite out of its bottom line.

Songs that were heavily downloaded showed no measurable drop in sales, the researchers found after tracking sales of 680 albums over the course of 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. Matching that data with activity on the OpenNap file-sharing network, they concluded that file sharing actually increases CD sales for hot albums that sell more than 600,000 copies. For every 150 downloads of a song from those albums, sales increase by a copy, the researchers found.

"Consumption of music increases dramatically with the introduction of file sharing, but not everybody who likes to listen to music was a music customer before, so it's very important to separate the two," said Felix Oberholzer-Gee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and one of the authors of the study.

Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina's Koleman Strumpf, also said that their "most pessimistic" statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.

"From a statistical point of view, what this means is that there is no effect between downloading and sales," said Oberholzer-Gee.

For albums that fail to sell well, the Internet may contribute to declining sales. Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf found that albums that sell to niche audiences suffer a "small negative effect" from Internet piracy.

The study stands in opposition to the recording industry's long-held assertion that the rise of illegal file sharing is a major cause of declining music sales over the past few years. In making its case, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) points to data showing that CD sales fell from a high of more than $13.2 billion in 2000 to $11.2 billion in 2003 -- a period that matches the growth of various online music piracy services.

The RIAA has fought illegal music swapping by filing a raft of lawsuits against hundreds of individuals suspected of engaging in music piracy, as well as suits targeting companies like Kazaa and Grokster that make software or run Internet downloading services.

Wayne Rosso, president of the Madrid-based file-sharing company Optisoft, said he hoped the study would spur the RIAA to abandon litigation and look for ways to commercialize file sharing. "There's no question that there is a market there that could easily be commercialized and we have been trying for years to talk sense to these people and make them see that," he said. Rosso formerly ran the Grokster file-sharing service.

Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, an Atlanta company that tracks file-sharing activity, said the findings match what his company has observed about the effect of file sharing on music sales. Although the practice cannibalizes some sales, it may promote others by serving as a marketing tool, Garland said.

The RIAA questioned the conclusions reached by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf.

"Countless well respected groups and analysts, including Edison Research, Forrester, the University of Texas, among others, have all determined that illegal file sharing has adversely impacted the sales of CDs," RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said.

Weiss cited a survey conducted by Houston-based Voter Consumer Research that found those who illegally download more music from the Internet buy less from legitimate outlets. Of respondents ages 18-24 who download, 33 percent said they bought less music than in the past year while 21 percent bought more. Of those ages 25-34, the survey found 25 percent bought less and 17 percent bought more, Weiss said.

Larry Rosin, the president of Somerville, N.J.-based Edison Media Research, said it was absurd to suggest that the Internet and file sharing have not had a profound effect on the music industry.

"Anybody who says that the Internet has not affected sales is just not paying attention to what is going on out there," he said. "It's had an effect on everything else in life, why wouldn't it have an effect on this?"

Edison Media Research has done a series of surveys for a music industry trade publication to track the effect of online file sharing on music sales. Rosin said while file-sharing networks can generate advertising value for some CDs, the net effect of file sharing on music sales has been negative.

The Harvard-UNC study is not the first to take aim at the assertion that online music piracy is the leading factor hurting music sales. In two studies conducted in 1999 and 2002, Jupiter Research analyst Aram Sinnreich found that persons who downloaded music illegally from the Internet were also active purchasers of music from legitimate sources.

"While some people seemed to buy less after file sharing, more people seemed to buy more," Sinnreich said. "It was more likely to increase somebody's purchasing habits."

The 2002 Jupiter study showed that people who traded files for more than six months were 75 percent more likely than average online music fans to spend more money on music.

Sinnreich, no longer with Jupiter, has appeared in court as an expert witness on behalf of Grokster, a popular music downloading site that was sued by the recording industry for facilitating music piracy. In that case, a judge ruled that Grokster and several other services that distribute peer-to-peer software could not be shut down just because the software was used to violate intellectual property rights.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Mar29.html


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

Industry Repudiates Downloads Research
Iain Shedden

THE head of the Australian music industry has criticised new claims that internet music file-sharing operators, such as the Australian-owned Kazaa, have no effect on CD sales.

Australian Record Industry Association chief executive Stephen Peach attacked findings from a study released this week by the Harvard Business School in the US, which claim that the downloading of music from file-sharing services has minimal effect on CD sales and that in some cases it increases the sales of popular CDs.

Peach told The Australian yesterday that he did not give much credence to the survey because "it undertakes a mathematical analysis of sales rather than just going and asking people about their file-sharing habits. We would challenge the research on a number of levels."

The major record labels, such as Universal, Warner and Sony, have been arguing against file-sharing for years on the strength of their own surveys, ever since Napster's illegal file-swapping service was launched in 1999.

Peach says the industry has an obligation to protect the interests of copyright owners, who are under threat from the free distribution of their work.

"It doesn't cease to be theft just because the person you're stealing from is doing better," he says. "With home taping there was, somewhere, an original, legitimate copy. In this new world order that everyone is trying to promote, there isn't an original copy within cooee. Perhaps one original copy is bought, if you're lucky, and millions of copies are then swapped."

ARIA and Sydney-based Kazaa owner Sharman Networks are embroiled in a legal dispute that resumes in the federal court next month. Kazaa had 3 million online users last year.

This week the court denied ARIA access to documents seized by its piracy unit in raids on Kazaa headquarters in February. The raids were initiated on the grounds that Kazaa's operation was allegedly illegal.

Sharman Networks chief executive Nikki Hemming has welcomed the Harvard research, which she says "supports the vision we've always had for Kazaa".

"We've offered content providers [the record industry] the opportunity to work with peer-to-peer customers for nearly two years, yet the record industry continues its narrow-minded strategy of litigation and legislation," she says.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...E16947,00.html


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Australian Record Sales Up
Leigh Phillips

Okay, so the Antipodes don’t come close to counting as European, but this story’s just so juicy you could squeeze it and make lemonade.

While the Australian record industry recently made headlines around the world (and on our very own humble product, DMeurope) when it had engineered raids on Kazaa file-sharing software owners Sharman Networks, as well as on a number of universities and ISPs, it seems that the country’s music sector has been doing rather well lately, which must frustrate to no end the Chicken Littles in the Australian Record Industry Association, who, along with other countries’ music bourgeoisies, have been bleating on* about how peer-to-peer file-sharing is la fin du monde.

The latest stats from ARIA itself show that sales figures for 2003 show an overall increase in music sales and revenue over the previous year of 5.98 per cent. This works out to be some €25m (AUS$40m). There was, however, a decline in singles sales, although CD album sales continue to be robust, with an increase over 2002 in units sold and revenues from the sales.

Nonetheless, diehard ARIA just couldn’t take the good news, as it failed to fit with their anti-P2P ideology, saying in response to the figures: "The industry is encouraged by the significant increase in the volume of CD sales over the past year… [but the adverse impact of illegitimate CD burning and internet file sharing continues to be of significant concern, particularly in relation to CD singles where there has been a significant decline in both volume and value."

(Personally, I think it’s because Midnight Oil haven’t released anything for ages. But that’s me)

* Apologies. Bit of a mixed metaphor there. Chickens, obviously, don’t bleat: goats and sheep do.
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=1380


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Kazaa Owner Welcomes Survey Findings
Sam Varghese

Sharman Networks, owner of the Kazaa peer-to-peer software, has been quick to seize on the findings of a survey released in the US on Monday which concluded that downloading music had no effect on album sales.

In a media release issued last evening, Sharman chief executive Nicola Hemming said "We welcome sound research into the developing peer-to-peer industry and this study appears to have covered some interesting ground.

"The findings certainly support the vision we've always held for Kazaa and crystallises our vision for the future of content distribution."

The 2002 study was conducted jointly by researchers from Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and used data from file-sharing services with 1.75 million downloads being studied over 17 weeks in autumn 2002.

"Consider the possibilities if the record industry actually cooperated with companies like us instead of fighting," Ms Hemming said. "We've offered content providers the opportunity to work with peer-to-peer customers for nearly two years, yet the record industry continues its narrow- minded strategy of litigation and legislation.


"We applaud the independent labels and artists, as well as the Bollywood movie companies and computer game and software developers who have had the vision to engage with us to grow this new industry."

The recording industry, predictably, had a different view. Michael Speck, general manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, the enforcement arm of the Australian recording industry, said the survey should have looked at the impact of file-sharing services on legitimate online services.

While agreeing that various recording industry officials have claimed in the past that record sales are affected by dowloading music, Speck said the survey also was somewhat outdated.

"The survey's findings confim what we in the industry have always said - that online piracy is about a core of highly valuable content," Speck said.

MIPI has filed a copyright infringement case against Sharman and some other companies following raids on their premises in February. The matter is due back in court on May 14.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...544527334.html


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New Study Keep File-Sharing Debate Raging
news@nme.com

Days after the latest claims that Internet music piracy is directly responsible for declining CD sales, a new American independent study has rubbished the allegations.

Last week the Britishmusic industry produced new figures which it says proves, for the first time, that downloaders are spending less on albums and singles than they were a year ago compared to non-downloaders.

But a joint study by researches at two leading US business schools says this is not the case and in certain circumstances downloading can even help boost sales.

Felix Obeholzer-Gee at Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf, a professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina, have tracked millions of music files downloaded through the OpenNap peer-to-peer network and compared them with CD sales of the same music.

The researchers monitored nearly 700 albums chosen from a range of musical genres, downloaded over 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. They compared the download figures to changes in album sales over the same period to see if a link could be established.

The study found that in a "worse case scenario" it would take more than 5,000 downloads to reduce album sales by a single copy.

"If this worst-case scenario were true, file sharing would have reduced CD sales by two million copies in 2002. To provide a point of reference, CD sales actually declined by 139 million copies from 2000 to 2002," claimed the authors.

They even found that downloads can help to sell the most popular CDs - for the top 25% best-selling albums, 150 downloads increased sales by one copy.

Professor Strumpf added that the American music industry's campaign of legal action against file-sharers which began last September, is likely to prove ineffective.

Last week the BPI launched an instant messaging campaign warning UK downloaders that they risk prosecution if they continued with their actions.

Has the download issue made you angry, outraged, scared or delighted?

Would you like to share your thoughts directly with NME? Then we want to hear from you.
http://www.nme.com/news/108025.htm


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ACCC Readies For Telstra Showdown
AAP

AUSTRALIA'S competition watchdog is actively preparing for any courtroom showdown with Telstra over the telco's controversial broadband pricing strategy.

Telstra is facing possible multi-million dollar fines and damages action after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) earlier this month labelled its broadband pricing anti-competitive.

ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel told the ABC that the competition watchdog was busy readying itself should court action be needed, although he hoped another solution could be found.

When questioned whether he was preparing for court, Mr Samuel replied: "Yes. We are at the moment."

"We've started to put together the necessary documentation, briefed senior counsel and we've started to gather together now the witness statements necessary for us to go to court.

"I sincerely hope that that's not necessary, but that's going to be up to Telstra."

Rival internet service providers (ISPs) were angered last month when Telstra slashed its retail broadband internet prices to $29.95 after making a deal with Optus and other parts of the industry to sell broadband capacity to them at $36.

If Telstra is taken to court and found guilty, the telco faces the prospect of a one-off $10 million fine and then fines of $1 million a day for as long as the practice is deemed to have continued.

Telstra claims it has already negotiated prices with over 60 per cent of its wholesale customers, while companies such as Optus, Comindico and Primus have all failed to reach any agreement.

A Telstra spokesman said the telco hoped to sort out the situation before any court action was necessary.

"We hope that the minority of wholesale customers - who are holding out and are wishing for court action - will sign up and we'll be able to successfully negotiate satisfactory deals with them," he said.

He said Telstra had been in consultation with the ACCC over the past few weeks.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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iPod Mini Release Stalled
AAP

APPLE Computer has postponed the overseas launch of the smaller version of its iPod music player, citing unexpectedly strong US demand since the product's launch last month.

The company said it pushed back the international release of the iPod mini from

April to July because it needs more time to meet expected demand.

"The iPod Mini is a huge hit with customers in the US and we're sure it will be the same worldwide once we can ramp up our supply in the July quarter," said Tim Cook, Apple's executive vice president of worldwide sales and operations, in a prepared statement.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html


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Music Labels Use File-Sharing Data To Boost Sales
Dawn C. Chmielewski

It was one of those sunglasses-required summer days in Los Angeles when Eric Garland, a leading expert on music downloading, arrived for his meeting with a senior media company executive. Rather than talking in the company's air-conditioned offices, the executive led Garland and his partner through a fetid back alley to a secluded courtyard.

Only then did the executive ask his question: Which songs, exactly, are the millions of Napster users illegally downloading? ``I just thought, this is crazy,'' recalled Garland, who had to prop his laptop on a dumpster to give his presentation.

The reason for the cloak-and-dagger theatrics, which continue even today: While the music industry publicly flays Kazaa and other file-swapping services for aiding piracy, those same services provide an excellent view of what's really popular with fans.

Record-label executives discreetly use Garland's research firm, BigChampagne, and other services to track which songs are traded online and help pick which new singles to release. They increasingly use such file-sharing data to persuade radio stations and MTV to give new songs a spin or boost airplay for those that are popular with downloaders.

Some labels even monitor what people do with their music after they download it to better structure deals with licensed downloading services. The ultimate goal is what it always has been in the record business: Sell more music.

``I know of a case where an artist had obviously gone with the wrong single, and everyone loved this other song they had on their record,'' said Guy Oseary, Madonna's business partner and head of her label, Maverick Records. ``In the world of what we do, it's always good to have real information from real fans.''

Maverick used BigChampagne's 100-city breakdown of popularly downloaded songs to persuade radio stations to start playing a new band, Story of the Year, during prime daytime listening hours instead of at night.

The online data revealed that despite Story of the Year's lunar rotation, its single ``Until the Day I Die'' ranked among the top 20 most popular downloads, alongside tracks from Blink-182, Audioslave and Hoobastank that received significantly more airplay. And when the band performed in a city, ``we didn't necessarily see the phones blowing up at radio, but we saw download requests for the song skyrocket as they went through,'' said Jeremy Welt, Maverick's head of new media.

Armed with this data, Maverick fought for more airtime at radio, which translated into more CD sales. Story of the Year's album, ``Page Avenue,'' just went gold, selling more than half a million copies.

``I definitely don't like to spin it that piracy is OK because we get to look at the data. It's too bad that people are stealing so much music,'' said Welt. ``That said, we would be very foolish if we didn't look and pay attention to what's going on.''

It's not an isolated example.

Garland said Warner Bros. followed a similar promotional strategy with ``Headstrong,'' the new single from the Los Gatos rock band Trapt. Indeed, nearly all the labels work with BigChampagne on a project or subscription basis, he said.

Some promoters at the major labels have gone a step further, using advertising agencies or other intermediaries to place ads on popular file-swapping networks to promote new acts.

Before the music industry effectively shut down AudioGalaxy in 2002, the labels would pay the file-swapping service to sponsor search terms to direct fans looking to download songs from, say, Radiohead, to an emerging band with a similar style.

``We'd promote it to you right there,'' said AudioGalaxy founder Michael Merhej, whose account was confirmed by two independent sources. ``The link took you to a third-party Web site done by the label, but you couldn't tell it was done by the label. . . . This went on for a long time.''

None of the major labels has been as bold as Artemis Records, a New York-based independent label with such mainstream acts as Lisa Loeb, Rickie Lee Jones and Steve Earle. This month, it began distributing paid versions of these artists' songs on Kazaa and other file-swapping networks. Using technology developed by Kazaa's business partner, Altnet, the first listen is free. After that, downloaders must pay 99 cents to buy the song, as they would on licensed services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store.

``My feeling is there's a promotional value to exposure,'' said Artemis Records Chairman Danny Goldberg, an influential industry player who previously headed Mercury Records, now part of giant Universal Music. ``Give something away for free, and hope they fall in love.''

While the smaller labels are willing to discuss the value of file-swapping information in promoting their artists, the legal crusade by the industry's giants to shut down Kazaa and two other file- swapping services, Morpheus and Grokster, makes it difficult for them to admit that they, too, want to know what's being downloaded.

Indeed, all but one of the Big Five labels refused to discuss how they use data from the file- swapping services, which are also known as peer-to-peer services because the files are technically exchanged between individual computer users.

A spokesman for Warner said he'd been advised against granting an interview, for fear of undermining the company's legal arguments that such services have no significant legitimate uses.

The one executive who spoke on the record said the download data provides a glaring look at the obvious.

``Kids in the neighborhood, they get the track they want because they heard the track on the radio or at a friend's house,'' said Ted Cohen, a senior vice president at EMI. ``I don't think you're going to see this great undiscovered artist discovered on peer-to-peer. The ones getting the biggest numbers are getting the biggest play.''

Nevertheless, EMI pays researcher NPD MusicWatch Digital to watch everything NPD's panel of 40,000 computer users do with the songs they download from file-swapping networks or purchase or transfer from CDs. EMI plans to use the information to shape artist promotions and craft terms for future digital distribution deals.

Wayne Rosso, chief executive of Optisoft, said file-swapping services like OptiSoft's Blubster and Piolet have helped the record companies, not hurt them.

``It's a great marketing vehicle,'' Rosso said. ``In fact, they should be paying us.''
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...gy/8318571.htm


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File-Sharing A Matter Of Balance For Metallica

The names "Metallica" and "Napster" are going to be forever linked in the public's mind after the metal band was the first big name to publicly take on the downloading service."I park it in an area of my brain that I rarely access," says drummer Lars Ulrich, who was the spokesman for the band in the controversy. "The only time I think about it is in interviews when I'm asked about it."

Metallica went after the file-sharing service and were lambasted as greedy rock stars - until the rest of the industry realized they were right.

"It was very difficult to have this kind of spotless thing going for so many years, then all of a sudden you're the most hated band in the world," he says. "People so just missed the point. This was not about downloading. It's not about money. It's about choice or control.

"Of course downloading is the future. A 3-year-old could tell you that. But on whose terms? On the artists' terms? On the record companies' terms? On the fans' terms? Or on the software producing companies that made the downloading available? That got lost behind the greedy, record-company-loving Metallica."

One of the ironies of the situation is Metallica leads the pack in legally selling entire shows, past and present, to fans via the Web. Not only are they available in MP3, but also as FLAC files - a lossless way of downloading that is on the technological edge, even more advanced than SHN files.

"We're trying to find the right balance between all the stuff and still have one or two shows left for that commemorative box set in 30 years or whatever," Ulrich says.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drm...768102,00.html

[JackSpratts]

Fightback Or Death-Rattle?
The Economist

The recording industry has launched a wave of lawsuits outside America in a bid to curb illegal file-sharing on the internet, which has contributed to a steep decline in music sales. The industry is cutting costs, consolidating and—finally—getting to grips with legal online distribution

DESPITE a wave of hostile publicity, the 1,500-plus lawsuits launched by the music industry in America since last September seem to have had some success. Final figures for 2003 have yet to be released, but preliminary estimates suggest that the decline that has seen worldwide music sales fall by more than a fifth in the past four years (see chart) was arrested in the second half of last year in America. Heartened by this, the industry’s lawyers launched a second wave of lawsuits—this time in Canada, Denmark, Germany and Italy—on Tuesday March 30th.

This is just one of many defensive measures being adopted by an industry that is feeling the pressure. There has also been a round of actual and attempted mergers and alliances, and a wave of restructuring, in a bid to improve efficiency. EMI has tried to merge with Warner Music, and was also linked with Bertelsmann’s BMG music arm. But BMG instead got together with Sony Music, while Warner Music was bought by a private-equity consortium. On Wednesday, the still-partnerless EMI said it will cut 19% of its 8,000-strong workforce and slim down its portfolio of artists in order to save £50m ($91m) a year.

None of these actions has done anything to change the public's view of the music industry as one that gouges its customers. One reason that the illegal sharing of music files online is still so widespread is that music-lovers know how little of the price of a compact disc goes on its manufacture, or to the artist. Musicians, too, are becoming fed up. In an interview with BBC radio at the weekend, Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall described recording contracts as an “absolute disgrace” which belonged to “a Dickensian era”. He was particularly annoyed that musicians pay for recordings, but the music companies retain the rights to these. He suggested that this “immoral” system be replaced by a leasing type of arrangement, in which the artist gets control of the music once his relationship with the record label ends. Mr Hucknall has set up his own company and plans to re-record old output and release it in competition with existing recordings. Another pop star, George Michael, has said he will release his songs free on the internet, to remove himself from “all that negativity” surrounding the pressure to produce new records that comes from major labels.

When it comes to the internet, the music companies have, after years of burying their heads in the sand, finally got the message. The industry has at last given its backing to online music stores, such as Apple Computer’s iTunes and Roxio’s Napster 2.0 (not to be confused with the company killed off by the music industry for aiding illegal downloads). Even so, the number of 99-cent tracks sold by these companies remains dwarfed by the free downloads still available using the likes of KaZaA and Grokster. The industry has failed to shut down file-sharing companies whose peer-to-peer software has legitimate applications. However, behind the scenes the big labels are understood to be in talks with these pirates, to see if they can agree on a way to extract payments for songs.

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the lawsuits against file-sharers in America had a “healthy effect on the industry”, the Wall Street Journal reported. From an initial 250-odd cases, the industry has now sued more than 1,500 alleged file-sharers, of whom around 400 have settled. This provided the impetus for this week’s suits against 247 users in Canada and Europe. One Danish case allegedly involved some 50,000 songs; Denmark has seen a whopping 50% decline in sales of CDs over the past four years.

Despite the industry’s official optimism about its legal strategy, it has limitations. Even after lowering the bar to go after those who have shared hundreds of songs—rather than thousands—the big labels have still sued less than 0.1% of illegal file-sharers; the lawsuits have made many of the others think twice before downloading illegal music, but plenty have continued regardless. Moreover, the strategy has created public-relations problems, exacerbating the public view of the industry as rapacious.

Meanwhile, there are signs that the industry is looking at more imaginative ways to arrest the decline in music sales. Universal Music and Sony Music are both working with their stars to remix songs into shorter versions, up to two minutes long, that can be sold through mobile phones. A.T. Kearney, a consultancy, reckons this market could account for almost a third of all music sales by 2006 if it is priced attractively. There’s the rub: songs on handsets are currently being sold for a pricey $4.50 a time in Britain and $3 in Germany. Anyone for illegal ringtones?
http://www.economist.com/agenda/disp...ory_id=2552490


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Music Industry Emits Static On MP3 Phones

The newest battle line between old and new technology can be held in the palm of a hand. Roiled by technology that allows consumers free access to Internet music files, the entertainment industry wants to lower the sound on MP3 mobile phones.

The music industry is demanding that the new phones only be capable of playing music at radio-level sound quality, but MP3 phone makers oppose the restriction.

Today, Samsung Electronics was expected to unveil its MP3 Anycall phone. But yesterday, instead of anticipating entry to a hot market, the world's No. 3 cell phone maker was enmeshed with record producers and government officials over the operational features of the phone and decided to delay the launch.

MP3 is a format for compressing a sound sequence into a very small file while preserving the original level of sound quality. It allows consumers to download unauthorized music files from the Internet.

Between 2000 and 2003, MP3 players along with pirate copies of compact discs and tapes have nearly cut in half the value of Korea's music recording market.

When LG Electronics, the fifth-largest mobile phone maker in the world, and Samsung Electronics announced plans to release MP3 phones this year, alarm bells went off at groups claiming music copyrights, such as the Korea Association of Phonogram Producers and Korea Music Copyright Association.

In a nation where more than half the population carries a mobile phone, the potential for downloading illegal music files is huge in Korea.

All of the major handset phone makers are ramping up their product line. Overall, about 150 mobile phones are expected to debut in Korea this year and with discriminate consumers demanding more and more features, the MP3 option is viewed as a likely favorite. LG's Cyon MP3 phone already is for sale.

"Our industry has been in a nose-dive since the release of MP3 players in 2000. At that time, we felt hopeless because Korean people were insensitive to copyright issues and we did not have any unified organization that could cope with the situation," said Yoon Seong-woo, a director of the Korea Association of Phonogram Producers. "Because the MP3 phone market is big enough to destroy the music industry, we're struggling to defend it."

On the other hand, MP3 phone makers are worried that nobody wants to pay for something that they can download over the Internet for nothing.

In an MP3 player market where 95 percent of songs are illegally downloaded, an MP3 phone that can play only paid music files is unlikely to appeal to consumers.

After fierce debate over the new mp3 phone, the two parties have found some common ground by agreeing that MP3 phones can play illegal music files, but only at low sound quality.

Illegally downloaded music files will only be available for three days at the original high quality speeds until the technology of transmitting illegal music files at a low speed is developed, which will possibly take two months.

However, the controversy is still raging with Samsung Electronics insisting that record producers should eventually let them have high sound quality.

Without an agreed solution with KAPP, Samsung Electronics was inclined to still move ahead with its MP3 phone release. But the Korea Association of Phonogram Producers was said to withhold songs on Internet pages related to Samsung Electronics.

It also said it would consider not releasing any recent songs to mobile carriers and gradually stop providing songs that have been already transmitted to the mobile carriers via a content provider.

Overall, the producers' association is trying to protect artists' rights by discouraging consumers from downloading music files without payment. MP3 producers and mobile carriers' interests are diametrically opposed, as they are trying to attract many consumers by letting them download free mp3 music files.

But some companies have overcome such problems. Apple Computer's iPod portable music player is an example of an MP3 player that works successfully with a paid-for on-line music store. At iPod's website, called itunes, iPod users can download music files for about 99 cents a time and it carries more than 500,000 songs.

For the iPod mini that was released last month, Apple had advance orders for more than 100,000 units - representing sales of $25 million even before its launch.

Korean MP3 producers are still working on providing a music service in collaboration with music portal sites.

ReignComm, the biggest MP3 producer in Korea is also planning to start an online music service through its subsidiary, Uricomm. Samsung Electronics is seeking a coalition with an online music portal to provide songs for its MP3 players.

However, as long as free peer-to-peer music websites like Kazza and Soribada still seduce the fans, artists are hardly going to be rewarded for their music.

Digital sales of download and subscription services are estimated to increase 20-fold and amount to $1.8 billion by 2008.

The prospects for the music industry are still bleak, however, as the peer-to peer file-sharing services will take away $4.7 billion in revenues from the music industry in 2008.
http://www.phonecontent.com/bm/news/gnews/243.shtml


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ITunes Dubbed Music Leader

Apple's approach straddles law, user desires, researchers declare.
Jonny Evans

A Harvard Law School research team has deemed Apple's ITunes "the pacesetter" among digital music sites, noting that the company's approach bridges user wishes and copyright law.

The green-paper report examines how copyright law affects the digital media business, using the ITunes Music Store as a case study.

"In recent months, ITunes, Apple's Online Music Store, has become the pacesetter in the digital media marketplace," it says. The researchers say Apple's business model "responds to many of the current legal and technological challenges in online media distribution".

The report looks at the laws affecting copyright, consumer sales contracts, and technology in different countries in an attempt to figure out how ITunes and other services are likely to succeed in the different legalistic set-ups.

The researchers, from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, identify an "international trend toward convergence on many of the basic principles in these domains."

However, the researchers do not observe the trend observed by Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University and copyright law expert. He has identified a trend in terms of U.S. foreign trading policy to encourage other nations to adopt copyright laws he describes as equivalent to U.S. laws. This leads to sometimes-inappropriate harmonization, Lessig told a Royal Society of the Arts conference looking at digital copyright in January.

The Harvard report notes that digital media firms often resort to contract law (couched in terms of service or license agreements) to govern how consumers use digital content.

Consumer rights

"License agreements may override rights consumers would otherwise enjoy under contract law" the study states. It adds, "In both Europe and Japan, these provisions often prohibit users from reselling, lending, or transferring songs--actions which are ordinarily protected under the first sale doctrine of fair use."

The evolution of digital rights management technologies such as Apple's FairPlay, and a legalistic network (such as Europe's recent Copyright Directive) are also part of the observed matrix, according to the Harvard study. An increasing move to recognize the laws affecting digital content in the country of sale within international law is also spotted, so called "first sale" rights.

Harmonization does not yet exist, the researchers say. "Many European nations are still in the process of determining exact implementation of the EU directive," they point out.

Differences in what are construed as "fair-use rights" internationally may also affect ITunes Music Store's business success.

"These differences may have two important effects on online music services. First, broad fair use privileges might decrease the record industries’ willingness to license their music to online music services. Second, and even more important, fair-use doctrines affect users' expectations regarding what they can and cannot do with purchased digital content.

"In order to be successful abroad, services like ITunes must address both the concerns of copyright holders and the different expectations of users around the world," the report says.

Local laws

Additional local laws may also affect Apple's business. For example, European consumers have the right to "withdraw from any distance contract within seven business days without penalty", a right that cannot be lost through contract law. This is because of EU legislation called the Distance Contract Directive.

Because of this law, Tiscali Music Club lets customers "return" downloaded music within seven days.

The report's authors say they are not certain whether this will affect U.S.-based services like ITunes. However, they note, "It will depend on the location of the store's European business center". Apple Europe is based in Paris. France is subject to this law.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which continues prosecutions against individual file downloaders as it seeks to demonize peer-to- peer file sharing, sees "little barrier" to legal action, the researchers say. However, Europe's music industry seems "more reluctant" to launch suits. "Only a few raids have taken place," they note.

"The foreign recording industry places greater emphasis on developing digital rights management, drawing public attention to the illegality of file- swapping, and increasing cooperation with ISPs rather than pursuing litigation," they point out.

The EU's recent Directive on Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights may change elements of the landscape: "It remains to be seen whether this will lower litigation barriers abroad," the researchers say.
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/prin...,115455,00.asp


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DVD Forum Chooses Apple Music Format For DVD Audio
Tony Smith

The AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), the audio format supported by Apple's iTunes Music Store, has been chosen as a key future DVD Audio disc technology by the standard's governing body, the DVD Forum.

According to an unnamed Forum member cited by web site High Fidelity Review, AAC beat Microsoft's Windows Media 9 format, MP3 and Sony's ATRAC because it "sounded better than the others".

Ironically, the Forum recently selected Windows Media as the basis for its future high-definition video DVD format.

First launched in the late 1990s, DVD Audio is being pitched as a successor to the CD. Sony and Philips are similarly promoting their own next-generation audio format, Super Audio CD (SACD). Keen to avoid the freedom the CD format has granted to PC users to rip tracks to compressed audio formats, DVD Audio was always intended to feature copy protection, though initial versions of the specification lack this 'feature' in order to allow manufacturers to bring players to market.

In order to ensure DVD Audio playback on personal computers, the DVD Forum has proposed the inclusion of a DVD-ROM 'zone' on each DVD Audio disc, which the PC-based player will read in preference to the main audio area. That DVD-ROM will hold compressed versions of the songs encoded in DVD Audio format, and its for these compressed tracks that AAC has now been chosen.

In addition to its superior sound quality, the format was selected for its support for both multi-channel audio and DRM. Apple uses the latter to protect tracks bought from ITMS. AAC doesn't inherently feature DRM, but its file structure was devised to allow the addition of DRM-related control data.

Just as DRM is optional within the AAC file, so too is the DVD-ROM zone within the DVD Audio disc. However, the fact that it is there as a choice for music labels to use should encourage more portable music player makers to build AAC support into their devices as Apple has with its iPod. AAC is also part of the MPEG 4 specification.

DVD Audio provides music encoded in multi-channel format, such as Dolby 5.1, or as high-resolution stereo. The latter digitises sound in 24-bit blocks at up to 192kHz, compared to CD's 16-bit quantisation and 44kHz sample rate. With a single-layer disc, that's enough for two hours' high-res stereo, rising to over three-and-a-half hours' playback with a dual-layer disc.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/36463.html


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PIRATE Act Reveals Sen. Hatch as Strange Ally of Pornography Industry
Ernest Miller

Conservative Senator Orrin Hatch (R - UT) has frequently cast aspersions on sexually offensive broadcast programming. For example, see his recent comments regarding the current brouhaha over indecency on television (Hatch Decries Declining Morals on Broadcast TV). Yet, the logic of his statements on behalf of the recently introduced "Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act" (PIRATE Act) would have the Department of Justice lawyers working on behalf of pornographers. In Hatch's world, the FCC would work to crackdown on indecency while the DOJ fought on behalf of pornographer's rights.
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/002700.html


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Funding the War on Filesharing
Donna Wentworth

You may not agree with the recording industry's litigation campaign against people who use peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. No matter. Under legislation introduced Thursday by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), you'd still have to pay for it.

The legislation in question is the Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act (PIRATE Act). It would allow federal prosecutors to bring civil copyright infringement suits--meaning a lower burden of proof and no need to show that a defendant had knowledge of knowledge of/willful engagement in her wrongdoing.

"For too long, federal prosecutors have been hindered in their pursuit of pirates, by the fact that they were limited to bringing criminal charges with high burdens of proof," said Senator Leahy in a statement introducing the bill. "In the world of copyright, a criminal charge is unusually difficult to prove because the defendant must have known that his conduct was illegal and he must have willfully engaged in the conduct anyway."

Two million dollars are earmarked, four U.S. Attorney's offices must set up a "pilot" program, and the Department of Justice is required to file annual reports with the Judiciary committee to identify how many civil actions have been brought.

Okay--so the recording industry rejects voluntary collective licensing, implying that it's a compulsory system and therefore tantamount to the dreaded government solution to a private sector problem. Yet it supports the PIRATE Act--a government solution that would have taxpayers paying for lawsuits, not music.

Says Sharman attorney Phillip Corwin over @ Wired: "It's unfortunate that the entertainment industry devotes so much energy to supporting punitive efforts at the federal and state level, instead of putting energy into licensing their content for P2P distribution so those same people could be turned into customers."

Sure is.
http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/002696.html


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OK, That’s It
Furdlog

It’s time to take it to legislators that think hamstringing the use of tools (and asking me to pay for it) is the solution to problems that they’re too lazy to put real thought into solving: Congress Moves to Criminalize P2P (see also Donna’s rundown: Funding the War on Filesharing and Errata)

Maybe these legislators think that the FBI should be spending their time on KaZaA instead of helping to explain the threat of terrorism to Condi Rice and the rest of this administration?

(Yes, I’m pissed - and no I haven’t read the bill yet, and yes, I know that these sorts of bills are generally just showboating, but showboating like this is too dangerous to leave unremarked)

Update: Ernest has put together a comprehensive look at the bill and its discussion, with the conclusion that Senator Hatch may end up spending a lot of time running away from: PIRATE Act Reveals Sen. Hatch as Strange Ally of Pornography Industry. Maybe we can ask Larry Flynt to call a press conference to thank Senators Hatch and Leahy for their efforts? Any other pornographers out there who would make excellent poster children for this initiative?

Further update: PIRATE Act Introduced in Congress

Even further (and later!): Ernest just gives more examples of why it’s really important to think you federalize/"felonize" things — PIRATE Act - Wiretaps for Civil Copyright Infringement?
http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/index.php?p=1613


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Students Find Ways to Fight High Cost of Textbooks

With the average price of a new tome reportedly at $102, online retailers and swapping services emerge as alternatives.
Stuart Silverstein

USC junior Kristen Louis is a savvy textbook shopper.

She has tried to save money by purchasing books through an online discount retailer and from a Web-based, student-run "swap" service on campus. When she can, Louis borrows or exchanges books with friends and acquaintances.

"I'm in college, I don't work, and I don't have a whole lot of money," said Louis, a philosophy major from Oakland. Cutting her spending on textbooks, she said, "is one of the best ways I can save."

Students' frustration over the high cost of college texts, along with their willingness to turn to the Internet and elsewhere to find better prices, is fostering book-buying alternatives.

"You can't blame the student for trying to find the best bargain," said Albert N. Greco, a Fordham University business school professor who has studied the college textbook business.

Some campuses are using Internet-based "book swap" services, which create marketplaces for students to buy and sell used texts among themselves.

Online book retailers have been making inroads into the college textbook business for several years, sometimes by offering discount prices.

Some resourceful online shoppers have saved money by ordering from foreign Web sites that sell English-language textbooks for less than their U.S. counterparts.

Another option for reducing California college students' book expenses is envisioned by Assemblyman Paul Koretz (D-West Hollywood), who has introduced legislation to prod community colleges and public universities to offer textbook rental services.

The available alternatives now account for a small fraction of what Greco estimates is the $6 billion that U.S. college students spend on new and used textbooks each year.

Concerns about textbook costs were highlighted in a report in January by the California Student Public Interest Research Group.

It found that students surveyed in California and Oregon were spending an average of $898 for books this school year. The average cost of a new textbook, the survey found, is $102.44.

CALPIRG's study blamed publishers for the high costs, saying that they often release unnecessary new editions and frequently bundle texts with unwanted extra materials, such as CD-ROMs and workbooks.

The textbook publishing industry defended its practices, and some observers questioned whether CALPIRG's findings had somewhat overstated actual costs.

Still, students appear increasingly interested in alternatives to the traditional college bookstore.

The student government at Cal State Dominguez Hills last fall launched a book swap service that can be reached via a link from its Associated Students Inc. page on the university's Internet site.

David Gamboa, president of the university's student government, said that about 600 students had bought books through the site so far.

By putting buyers and sellers directly in touch, he said, the service cuts out middlemen, and both parties get better prices.

Gamboa said student leaders, in another effort to reduce costs, were urging professors to keep older books on their reading lists, so that students would have more opportunities to buy used copies. They also have asked professors to avoid textbooks packaged with workbooks and CDs.

At USC, student government also offers an electronic book-swapping system, and two other free Internet-based swapping services set up by students have been introduced this year.

One of those services, BookDonkey.com, was launched by business major Caleb Inman and computer engineering major Hunter Francoeur as what they called a "social entrepreneurial" project to help fellow students. Inman and Francoeur said they eventually might try to turn their service into a for-profit business by marketing the technology to other colleges.

Louis, the 20-year-old philosophy major, said timeliness and convenience were important advantages of BookDonkey.com over online book retailers.

With BookDonkey.com, she said, the student does not have to wait for deliveries. "You can just meet somewhere … and exchange the books," she said.

Louis said she had sold an organizational behavior text through BookDonkey.com for $50 that she could not sell back to the USC bookstore, apparently because it was an international edition that was somewhat different from the U.S. version.

She also used the service to buy an accounting textbook for about $60 — about $70 less, she said, than buying it new from the campus store.

Still, BookDonkey.com remains a tiny enterprise, with about 200 books sold so far.

The USC bookstore, by contrast, carries as many as 5,000 titles and generates book sales of more than $10 million annually. The existing services, as well as earlier, failed swapping efforts, have never diverted much business from the bookstore, said Mark Ewalt, an associate director in charge of book sales at the store. "It isn't much of a factor for us," he said.

Textbook rental programs have been offered at university campuses in Wisconsin, Illinois and other states.

The aim of the CALPIRG-backed Koretz bill is to push the state's public colleges and universities to offer students the option of renting books at 50% or less of the cost of buying.

Still, experience suggests that this option might have limited potential.

Pierce College in Woodland Hills, which is part of the Los Angeles Community College District, offered book-leasing from 1999 to 2001. It is planning to resume the service when its bookstore moves into a new building in January 2005.

But during its previous two-year run, the program was expensive to operate, mainly because about 45% of the participants failed to return the books and the school was not always able to collect the students' penalty charges.

In addition, students' savings proved modest.

Larry Kraus, the college's enterprise manager and the originator of the book-leasing program, said students would pay $65 to lease a book retailing for $100.

Yet Kraus said the book-renting program helped students by ensuring that they would not be stuck with expensive books that could not be sold back to the bookstore.

"It's not the end-all. It's not the magic bullet," Kraus said. "It's just another option for students."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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IBM Seeks Knockout Blow In SCO Case

It asked for a declaratory judgment in its favor
Robert McMillan

A recent court filing from IBM appears to indicate a growing confidence on the part of the computing giant that it will prevail in its legal dispute with The SCO Group Inc., according to lawyers following the case.

In an amended counterclaim to SCO's lawsuit filed Friday, IBM asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah to enter a declaratory judgment in its favor. IBM asked the court to rule that it hasn't infringed on SCO's copyright or breached its contractual obligations to SCO. The filing further asks the court to rule that SCO, which was at one time a Linux vendor, can't impose restrictions on the software that it previously distributed under Linux's open-source software license.

By seeking a declaratory judgment, which a judge could issue as soon as the discovery process is over and before the case goes to trial, IBM appears to be indicating that it has conducted an internal analysis of SCO's claims and has found them to be without merit, said Jeff Norman, an intellectual property partner at the Chicago law firm Kirkland Ellis LLP.

"It just means that they didn't find any smoking gun. If they had found something really bad, they probably would have gone to SCO and talked settlement," Norman said.

It would be typical in a case like this for IBM to undergo an internal investigation to determine whether any of SCO's claims were true, Norman said. Such an investigation would involve interviewing IBM's Linux programmers and reviewing e-mail and code contributions, he said.

IBM has over 7,500 employees involved in various aspects of its Linux efforts, including more than 600 developers who work in the company's Linux Technology Center.

Jeffrey Neuberger, a partner in the New York office of law firm Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner LLP, agreed that the filing appears to show growing confidence on the part of IBM. "They're saying to the judge, 'We don't know what SCO is talking about; there is no infringement,'" he said. "They must feel very comfortable that there's no infringement."

Because IBM's filing seeks the broad judgment that IBM hasn't infringed on "any valid or enforceable copyright owned by SCO," a declaratory judgment in its favor would prevent SCO from bringing up new copyright claims later in the trial and would have a devastating impact on SCO's case, Neuberger said.

"If the judge comes out and says there is no copyright infringement, then essentially there is nothing else to fight over. It would be the knockout blow to SCO's case," he said.

Representatives from IBM and SCO declined to comment on the court filing.

SCO sued IBM in March 2003 claiming that IBM had violated SCO's Unix license, which was originally granted by AT&T Corp. but later transferred to SCO. Lindon, Utah-based SCO further claimed that IBM had illegally contributed source code to Linux. Last month, SCO amended its complaint to include charges that IBM had violated its Unix copyrights. SCO is seeking $5 billion in damages in the case.

SCO claims that Linux users don't have the right to use the Linux operating system without a license from SCO because Linux violates its Unix copyrights.

"SCO's threats and its claims against IBM and other Linux users are meritless, and are simply part and parcel of SCO's illicit scheme to get Linux users to pay SCO for unneeded licenses to Linux," IBM said in its filing.

How much longer IBM and SCO will continue with the discovery stage of the case remains unclear. In a complicated case, the discovery process can last for years, Neuberger said.
http://www.computerworld.com/softwar...,91789,00.html


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Spammer's Porsche Up For Grabs

AOL says the Porsche has "symbolic value"
BBC

Internet giant AOL has ratcheted up the war against unsolicited e-mail with a publicity-grabbing coup - an online raffle of a spammer's seized Porsche.

AOL won the car - a $47,000 Boxster S - as part of a court settlement against an unnamed e-mailer last year.

"We'll take cars, houses, boats - whatever we can find and get a hold of," said AOL's Randall Boe.

According to Mr Boe, the Porsche's previous owner made more than $1m by sending junk e-mail.

Hitting them where it hurts

AOL is one of the noisiest opponents of the evasive spam trade, and this month joined forces with Microsoft, Yahoo and Earthlink to sue hundreds of spammers.

Seizure of property is becoming a major tactic in these lawsuits, since guilty spammers often protest their inability to pay large fines.

The Porsche-owning spammer, whose identity remains confidential, was one of a group sued last year for having sent 1 billion junk messages to AOL members, pitching pornography, college degrees, cable TV descramblers and other products.

Mr Boe said the Porsche was seized mainly for its symbolic value, as the obvious fruit of an illegal trade.

The Porsche sweepstake lasts until 8 April, and will be open only to those who were AOL members when it was first announced.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3581435.stm


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Wireless Technology: A Cushy Wi-Fi Ride

Fast Net access in a luxury limo.
Michael S. Lasky

Well-heeled business travelers who crave constant Internet access can now stay connected even when riding in a limousine. Limo company Carey International has partnered with In Motion Technology to offer Mobile Office, which allows passengers to use Wi-Fi-enabled devices in transit.

I tried the service on a recent trip to the airport from downtown San Francisco (cost: $90). Carey's black Lincoln Town Car featured comfortable leather seating, a sleek wooden desk, and a power outlet. The Wi-Fi connection's DSL-like speeds let me download my Yahoo e-mail to my Palm Tungsten C in under a minute.

Carey offers Mobile Office service in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.; In Motion expects to partner with other companies, as well. The service is primarily designed for corporate customers, but is also available to individuals (for more information on making reservations, click here).
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115375,00.asp


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Mobile Phones to Operate TV Recorder, Says Opera
Reuters

Mobile phones can soon be used to control a video recorder for people away from home when their favorite programs are on, Norwegian mobile phone Internet browser maker Opera Software said on Tuesday.

Opera, which made its debut on the Oslo bourse on March 11, said that the Mobile Interactive Programming Guide (IPG) would allow clients to look up television schedules on a mobile phone and then press "record" to a video recorder, no matter how far away.

"The mobileIPG means full freedom to see what you want when you want it," Christen Krogh, vice president of engineering at Opera said in a statement.

"It takes just a few seconds to look up the program on the mobileIPG on your handset, and then activate your recorder at home with just a click," he said.

Opera said that it cooperated with two German companies, DiscVision GmbH and TVinfo Internet GmbH, in the research.

Opera's Internet browsers are installed on a range of mobile phones. It said that the new mobileIPG system could attract clients ranging from pay TV operators to mobile phone operators.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=4701084


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ILN News Letter

New England Court Rules Scanned Photos Meets Statutory Theft Standard

BNA's Electronic Commerce & Law Report reports on State v. Nelson, a New Hampshire Supreme Court decision in which the court ruled that scanned images of intimate photographs removed by a landlord from his tenants' residence without permission constituted stolen property under state law. The court dismissed the defendant's argument that he returned the photos, noting that property ownership includes the right to exclude others from possessing, using, and enjoying the property. Article at <http://pubs.bna.com/ip/BNA/eip.nsf/is/a0a8h0g8d6> For a free trial to source of this story, visit http://www.bna.com/products/ip/eplr.htm Decision at http://www.courts.state.nh.us/suprem...4/nelso020.htm



AU State Bans 'Cybersnooping'

New South Wales will outlaw unauthorised cybersnooping on employees using technology including video cameras, email and tracking devices. The new laws would make it a criminal offence to undertake any form of covert surveillance unless an employer could show a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing by an employee.
http://australianit.news.com.au/chan...w_news,00.html



French Music Industry Set To Go After File Swappers

France is poised to join a cross-border legal battle against people who swap songs for free on the Internet. This week the IFPI announced suits in several other European countries. http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62868,00.html



DirecTV Takes Thousands Of Infringement Cases To Court

The WSJ provides an update on DirecTV's strategy of suing users that acquire equipment to descramble its signal. The company has sent letters to more than 100,000 people and launched lawsuits against more than 24,000 individuals.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1...669395,00.html



Korean MP3 Phone Dispute Nears Settlement

A dispute over the availability of MP3 playing cell phones in Korea is nearing a resolution. Samsung Electronics, the world's third-largest cell phone maker, on Tuesday accepted the government's second mediation of allowing people to download free music files and listen to them via cell phones for three days. After an initial phase-in period, the cell phone makers expect to allow MP3 playing only at low-quality sound.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech...7544211810.htm

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Indicted

This is a quick translation of the original page I wrote in french. When I'm pissed off, I write much better in french
Guillermito

It's quite interesting to discover, from the inside, how the french justice system works. I'm back from Paris. I've just been indicted and charged of distributing programs that violated Intellectual Property rights (literally translated, it's "counterfeiting and concealment of counterfeiting"). Maximum punishment for these charges are two years in jail and a fine of 150.000 euros. I'm not yet judged guilty or innocent, but I already had to pay around two or three thousands dollars for two trips to Paris (I live in Boston, MA, USA), plane tickets, and lawyer fees. I already talked about my story here (in french).

Let's start from the beginning. In 2001 and 2002, two journalists suddenly pop up in the french usenet forum fr.comp.securite.virus. They are preparing a serie of two articles (published in no 9 et no 12) in the paper magazine "Pirates Mag'" (an independant journal, 2600- style, which is now almost officially forbidden) about the french generic anti-virus Viguard, by a company called Tegam. They need some independant point of view, and my curiosity about security software is picked up. In march 2002, I published on my website a long analysis about this software. This webpage showed how the program worked, demonstrated a few security flaws, and some tests with real viruses. I showed that, unlike the advertizing claimed, this software didn't detect and stopped "100% of viruses". So, nothing really extraordinary. The company first reacted in a weird way: they denounced me publicly as a "terrorist", probably a nice attempt to make me change my mind. Later on, they filed a formal complaint against me in a Paris tribunal. The computer on which my website was hosted in France was seized by the police, and disconnected (the incriminating analysis of the anti-virus is still present - written in french - on the Internet Archive, and cached by some other people). The redirection with which I signed my e-mails and Usenet posts (guillermito.net) was blocked at the french registrar level, to follow a judge orders. The actual problem is that I coded and shared a few "exploits", ie the practical demonstration of my thorical analysis, which demonstrated the reality of the flaws I discovered, in a way that everybody could reproduce them on their own computer. The judge says that these demonstrations "reproduct and copy the code and structure of the Viguard software" (hence the counterfeiting), which is not true. Since then, I analysed the same way a dozen of steganography softwares (in english this time), and coded a few exploits for them too. Some of these softwares claim to be "unbreakable" or use "military grade encryption", but the hidden data is actually very easily detectable and often retrievable. No security at all.

If independant researchers cannot analyse security softwares and publish their discoveries, final users will just have marketing press releases from editors to assess the quality of a sofware. Unfortunately, it seems that we are heading to this kind of world in France and maybe in Europe.

To use an analogy, it's a little bit as if Ford was selling cars with defective brakes, if I realized that there was a problem, opened the hood and took a few pictures to prove it, and published everything on my website. And then Ford filed a complaint against me for that.

More in my professional domain, because I am a biologist and my job is to discover how biological systems work and publish my results, one can imagine the scandal if a pharmaceutical company filed a complaint against me because I published, for example, that a drug is not as efficient as their advertizing claims.

But when we are talking about computer security, there is no more rationality.

There is something very strange when you are in front of the judge who is doing the preliminary investigation: we do not speak the same language. I'm unable to understand law jargon, and the person in front of me does not understand anything about computer security and the internet. The lawyer is supposed to be the translator. But the lawyer in this case cannot speak during my declarations. It's kind of weird. You have to find a good argumentation, try to explain in simple words complex methods, how programs work, try to show that the accusations of the company are basically void.

There never was a similar judgement in France. The few "counterfeiting" cases I could find concerned people who copied and sold hundred of unlicensed programs, to make some money. That's very different from my case. So my case, like the Tati/Kitetoa case before (Kitetoa showed a commercial website flaw; I showed a commercial software flaw; in both cases the company filed a complaint; Kitetoa was finally cleared of any wrongdoing after two years of a costly procedure), is going to set a precedent. The question: is it possible in France today to publish software flaws, and the practical demonstration of these flaws? I am not yet judged, but I am pessimist about it, and it seems that we are heading towards a negative response. If I am declared guilty, full disclosure is going to be de facto forbidden in my country. Users will have to use marketing press releases from editors to be informed. Except Transfert (RIP - it was an excellent online news agency) and a few friends, nobody really seems to care about it.

For those of you who are not familiar with the computer security world, numerous advisories about software flaws, often including the code to exploit them, are published daily in very famous mailing-lists like Bugtraq and others. Government official organisms in France like the CERTA do the same thing. Even computer engineering schools like EPITECH ask their students to find flaws in anti-viruses. Everybody does it. It's an accepted and widespread methodology to increase the global security level. Even behemoth editors like Microsoft accept it, although not always with good grace, and thank people who discover flaws. I am indicted for doing the exact same thing.

It's a nice world we are heading towards. A world in which software editors have the right to lie blatantly, but an isolated individual cannot publish the technical truth. No more possible counter-balance power. Everything for companies, and too bad for consumers.

To give a quick feeling about the good faith of the two parties involved here, let me remind the reader that the company which filed a complaint against me, Tegam, accused me publically six or seven times at the beginning of 2002 to be a "terrorist wanted by the DST (French secret service) and the FBI", and a "computer pirate". The truth, because I have to tell it, is that I am a researcher in molecular biology in both the department of Genetics of Harvard University and the department of molecular biology in the Massachusetts General Hospital, two venerable institutions.
http://www.guillermito2.net/archives/2004_03_25e.html


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BuckTV - TV Episodes
Thomas Mennecke

When a giant falls in the file-sharing world, another entity is almost certain to take its place. After Napster's collapse, a multitude of newer P2P networks sprung into action, feeding the community's hunger for the file-sharing experience.

Unfortunately, last week we saw the indefinite end of ShareReactor. However, just because one eDonkey2000 link site is gone, does not mean you are out of options.

Let us take a look at BuckTV.net. Their logo "The Place for TV Hits" may very well be right on target. Keep in mind that BuckTV.net specializes in one thing, TV episodes. No music, no software, no CD image, just TV shows.

One of the more striking aspects of the site is the manner in which it is organized. On the right side of the screen is an alphabetical folder listing, where all available shows are organized. While new rips of recent show seem to catch the most attention, older episodes are also widely available. If you are concerned about video and audio quality, older TV shows such are available via DVD rip. New or newer TV shows are usually very good or excellent in quality.

The site also goes an extra step in having a very thorough description of many of the shows they offer, including a TV guide. There is little doubt that BuckTV.net is a TV junkie’s paradise. Many US and foreign based shows are also available.

Although ShareReactor may be gone, eDonkey2000 link sites continue to persevere. The drawback these resourceful sites is their vulnerability to copyright holders, as their centralized location make them easy targets. The jury is still out on whether linking to copyrighted material on P2P networks is legal.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=436


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Circuit City Buys Online Music Store
John Borland

Electronics retailer Circuit City Stores has purchased digital music service MusicNow for an undisclosed sum, the companies said on Wednesday.

MusicNow, formerly known as FullAudio, is one of the oldest subscription services. It recently added an iTunes- like song-download store to its line-up. The company, which currently powers services from SBC Communications, Charter Communications, and others, said it would continue to serve other customers in addition to Circuit City.
http://news.com.com/2110-1027-5182902.html?tag=nefd_hed


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Photo Sharing, Desktop to Desktop
David Pogue

DIGITAL photos are glorious, brilliant, liberating, flexible and free. They can also be a royal pain.

Take, for example, the ostensible joy of sharing today's high-resolution, multimegapixel photo files with friends and family members elsewhere on the Internet. What happens when you try to e-mail some baby pictures to, say, your mother?

Chances are, they'll bounce back to you because their file sizes exceed her account limit. Or if they get through - after a very long wait while they upload - they may well wind up clogging her in-box, exceeding its storage limits and causing all subsequent messages to bounce back to their senders. (Sorry 'bout that, Mom.)

But even if everything goes well, remember that a typical four- megapixel photo measures 2,304 by 1,704 pixels; most computer screens can't show more than a fraction of that without scrolling or zooming. What your mother might finally see of your new family member, in other words, is a pair of gigantic baby nostrils.

The best digital shoebox programs, including iPhoto and Photoshop Album, can automatically shrink your photos to a reasonable size before e-mailing them. But what if your recipients have wisely absorbed the message that, these days, opening any e-mail attachment is a virus risk? They'll never see your photos.

You could post your pictures at a Web site, of course, and just send your mom its Web address. But to do that inexpensively, you need a recessive geek gene and familiarity with such cheerful protocols as HTML and FTP. And to do it simply, you usually have to pay an annual fee, either for a one-click photo-gallery service (like Photosite.com or Apple's .Mac) or for a photo-hosting site. (One attractive exception: webshots.com, where you can post up to 240 pictures at no charge. Your fans can sign up for automatic e-mail notification whenever you add to your gallery.)

Of course you could always drag your pictures directly into an instant-messaging window, using a chat program like Apple's iChat or LifeScape's Hello (an add-on for its Picasa photo software) - but that system doesn't work unless you and your mother are online and chatting at the same time.

It finally occurred to somebody - two somebodies, in fact - that there might be a better way. Why not adapt the desktop-to-desktop, peer-to-peer formula of networks like Kazaa, so popular in music trading, for trading photos? After all, it would be perfectly legal.

The two contenders, ShareALot (sharealot.com) and OurPictures (ourpictures.com), are designed to shoot your photo files directly to the desktops of designated friends and family members, completely bypassing e-mail and Web sites.

The simpler service, and the one most devoted to its task, is ShareALot. When the program is running, a yellow folder icon sits on your Windows or Mac OS X desktop. To share some photos, you just drag them onto that folder. From a pop-up menu, choose Create a New Share. Your ShareALot address book appears, and you click on the names of the lucky recipients.

Now you name your shared batch of photos, type a little message ("Apart from the overturned spaghetti bowl, isn't she cute?") and click on Finish.

The next time your mother spends at least a few minutes online, a Mac dialog box or Windows system-tray balloon will appear on her computer to announce the arrival of the new pictures. When she points to the yellow ShareALot folder icon on her screen and clicks Show Albums in the shortcut menu, your photos will open in her Web browser. (ShareALot simply uses the browser as a viewer. The photos aren't actually on the Web; they're dispatched from your hard drive to your mother's, for viewing even after she goes offline.)

Next and Previous buttons let your mother conduct her own little grandmotherly slide show of your baby shots. Short of hiring a professional mouse manipulator, it couldn't get much easier.

In the current, early release of the software, the Rename, Rotate and Order Prints buttons say "coming soon." Already, though, your recipients can click on the "Higher resolution available" button. ShareALot sends an invisible message back to your computer requesting the transmission of your original jumbo high-resolution picture files, which your fans will need if they want to print out the photos. Otherwise, what they see on the screen are scaled-down, 640-by-480-pixel versions that transfer quickly and are ideally sized for display on the screen.

ShareALot is a treat to use, especially because it's simple, free and equally satisfying for Mac, Windows and (soon) Linux fans. The company indicates that the finished version of the service will offer premium features for a fee - ordering prints, for example - but that basic photo sharing features will remain free.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/te...ts/01stat.html


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For Those Who Play, Laptops Get Serious
Seth Schiesel

HUNCHED over his keyboard, eyes flicking intently over the digital animations dancing before him, Victor J. Group looked just like the other pale young gamers in the basement of a house on a nondescript side street in this Buffalo suburb. With his black T-shirt and blue jeans, he was even wearing the all-but-required uniform.

But unlike most of the others who were stalking, shooting and invading one another at a Saturday night gaming party, he was not performing in the shadow of a hulking computer tower and massive monitor. Victor, a 14-year-old high school freshman, waged his attacks from the $2,800 Hewlett-Packard laptop he bought last summer after working a paper route for 13 months to earn the money.

"I know I could have bought something comparable for about $1,500 less in a desktop machine, but those guys have to carry those towers and monitors out of here," he said, looking over the rows of behemoths. "Three years ago, laptops couldn't have compared to a desktop. Everyone knows that. Even six or seven months ago, desktop gaming was superior to laptop gaming. But things have changed."

Shane M. Kluskowski, 16, leaned over the row of empty caffeine drink bottles that separated him from Victor and said that he was washing dishes 20 hours a week at a nearby diner to pay off his own $2,100 laptop.

"It's the best investment ever," Shane declared. "I am going to keep it for the rest of my life, probably, because I won't be able to afford another one."

It is unlikely that he will actually be able to use his prized possession for the rest of his days. It is certain, however, that the two teenagers are in the vanguard of a significant shift in how the world's most serious gamers show their stuff. For the first time, laptops can compete with the big boys.

"It always used to be that if you did a story on laptop gaming, it would be looking at the best games from two years ago and saying, 'Play these on your laptop,' " said Rob Smith, the editor in chief of PC Gamer magazine. "Now I use a laptop and I can play the latest games flawlessly, and it wasn't even really possible two or three years ago."

While the gaming laptop trend took off last year with specialty PC makers like VoodooPC and Alienware, mainstream manufacturers are now jumping into the fray. In February, for instance, Dell introduced its first laptop aimed specifically at gamers. As overall PC prices continue to decline and competition rages in the budget end of the market, computer makers are realizing that gamers for whom "frame rate is life" are willing to pay top dollar for top-performing machines, including laptops. In addition to high-school students, that audience includes young professional adults weaned on video games.

"The difference between the power of a notebook versus an extremely powerful desktop is getting so close that our customer typically has both a desktop and a notebook," Rahul Sood, 31, the president of VoodooPC, said in a telephone interview. For his contemporaries, "there's basically a bunch of kids that grew up on Atari 2600, ColecoVision, Intellivision," he added. "Well, now we have money, so the people we're dealing with are this young, hip crowd that makes an income and still wants the best they can get in terms of an entertainment experience."

Since the 1980's, laptops have been the weaklings of the computer world. Sure, the gamers scoffed, let the executives write e-mail on their laptops. But when it comes to hard-core graphics and contests in which an eye blink is an eternity, only big desktop towers will do, or so the thinking went.

But no more. Of the 30 or so gamers at the 15-hour party here, four were on laptops. That might not seem like a lot, but it looked like the inkling of a trend.

"Even a couple years ago, there would have been no one on laptops here," said Zachary M. Thomas, 22, the host, who started having gaming parties in his parents' basement in 1996 and now puts on such events a few times a year. "Over the last year, though, we've started to see the laptops come in, and I think they will continue to become more popular. You can finally actually play the games on them, which in some ways wasn't even possible in the past. Over all, it's a mix of affordability, convenience and power in the machine that is making them more popular."

The new breed of gaming laptop is not for everyone. For most consumers and corporate users, the most important factors in selecting a laptop are size, weight and battery life. In those categories, top-end gaming laptops leave much to be desired. They are relatively bulky and can weigh eight pounds or more (while some laptops come in under four pounds), and a user is lucky to coax even an hour out of their batteries.

All of that, however, is secondary for a serious gamer, who is almost surely going to plug into a wall socket and add an external mouse anyway. (While a touchpad or pointing stick might work for some slower-paced strategy games, it is hard to use either device precisely enough for action gaming.)

To conserve battery life, chip makers and mainstream computer manufacturers long focused on reducing the power used in laptops' central processing units, or C.P.U.'s. The ability to render three-dimensional graphics was an afterthought.

Darren McPhee, a product marketing manager at ATI Technologies, a leading maker of graphics chips, said that some laptop manufacturers started putting higher- end desktop C.P.U.'s into laptops a couple of years ago, mainly as a way to save costs. A standard C.P.U. might cost less than a low-power version at the same speed.

Around 2002, specialty makers of gaming PC's seemed to realize that they too could put desktop C.P.U.'s into a bigger laptop. But instead of saving money, the idea was to enhance performance.

As Mr. McPhee put it: "Companies like Alienware and VoodooPC said, 'Hold on. We have this clientele of the high-end gamer. On the desktop side they want a 3- gigahertz C.P.U. and the fastest memory and the latest graphics processor pushed to the max. Those customers want the same thing on the mobile side.' "

Now, manufacturers routinely put desktop-caliber C.P.U.'s running at 3 gigahertz and faster into laptop machines. Some makers are even using Intel's new Extreme Edition Pentium 4 chips, which cost far more than normal C.P.U.'s. Others are using the latest 64-bit chips from AMD. Graphics makers including ATI and Nvidia are making high-end mobile graphics chips that come close to (though rarely if ever quite match) the performance of their top desktop technologies. Some manufacturers are also beginning to allow end users to upgrade the graphics chips in their laptops, just as they do with desktop machines.

The price of that progress is increased heat and power consumption. Dissipating the heat requires bigger cases. Feeding the power means lower battery life.

At the same time, liquid-crystal displays with low response times have become more widely available. L.C.D. screens are inherently slower to respond to electrical signals than traditional cathode-ray tube designs are. The average consumer wouldn't notice the difference, but gamers who measure virtual life and death in milliseconds definitely do. Now, more expensive L.C.D. screens can almost replicate the experience of playing on a big, bulky tube.

It is all part of a broader surge in the popularity of laptops. According to IDC, a technology research firm based in Framingham, Mass., only about 9 percent of consumer PC's shipped in the United States in 2000 were laptops. That figure is expected to rise to 31.4 percent this year.

Meanwhile, the average price of a consumer laptop sold in the United States fell to $1,064 last year from $1,890 in 2000, according to IDC. (The comparable figure for consumer desktop computers fell to $825 from $1,250 over the same time period.)

The target audience for high-end gaming laptops, however, is not too concerned about price. Whether washing dishes or wearing a suit, the users seem willing to pay to play. The top gaming laptops often cost more than $3,000 and can top $4,000, although good machines can now be found for under $2,000.

"Gamers tend to be the heat seekers," said Tim Mattox, a Dell vice president for client product marketing. "What you have in the gamer market is people who value performance over incremental cost savings."

Alan Promisel, an IDC analyst, said that "by moving into this gaming segment, Dell and HP are really opening up gaming to a much broader segment, and it's really going to raise the profile of gaming."

Gaming's profile could not have been much higher at the party in North Tonawanda. Some time before the pizza arrived, Rob Glaser, a 29-year-old Web designer, was getting ready to play Unreal Tournament 2004, a futuristic combat game. His laptop, purchased in December from an obscure Internet shop, was dwarfed by a black water-cooled tower on one side and an equally imposing white machine on the other.

"I wanted a good gaming PC, but I also wanted something I could take with me instead of lugging around this big box," he said. "Now I can have both."

And now that gamers have paved the way, it appears that other potential consumers are being drawn to high-end laptops.

"We are seeing folks going for high-performance PC's as more than a gaming system," said Brian M. Joyce, the director for marketing at Alienware. "Our customers include General Dynamics and Boeing, professional musicians, engineers.

"A lot of professionals need mobile power, and basically it's a lot easier to convince your boss to buy you an Alienware laptop, because it's one of the only really high-performance mobile solutions, than it is to convince him to buy you an Alienware desktop. That's just the way it is."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/te...ts/01lapp.html


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Films: Have Hard Drive, Will Travel

Sharon WaxmanFor years independent cinema has been a big-city phenomenon, the non-Hollywood movies available only in major urban centers and — perhaps — on cable.

Now a New York-based company is trying to take art-house movies to small cities around the country by relying on digital projection. The company, Emerging Pictures, has sent computer hard drives to theaters in five cities to coincide with the opening on April 1 of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C.

The hard drives, which can be connected to inexpensive digital projectors, contain 10 digital films from the documentary festival. The movies will be shown simultaneously in theaters in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Mich.; Lincoln, Neb.; Charleston, W.Va.; and Sarasota, Fla., in addition to Durham.

The theaters are at museums, science centers and universities that not only have underused spaces but also built-in audiences through their membership lists.

The idea is to show high-quality movies to people who usually cannot see them because of the huge cost of movie prints and marketing budgets, explained Ira Deutchman, a partner in Emerging Pictures.

"A lot of really quality films can never get mainstream distribution," he said in a telephone interview. "Those films left on the table can't find a way to reach theatrical audiences with the current economic model. We're trying to bust through this problem of how much you have to spend on prints and advertising to get your film out there."

Distribution has been a persistent problem in independent film. Independent producers and filmmakers have long believed that audiences in the American heartland were willing to pay to see small, interesting movies like last year's "Thirteen" or the unusually animated "Triplets of Belleville," which were both nominated for Oscars.

But only major art-house distributors like Miramax or Focus Features have had the cash to release such movies, and even those that are released often do not earn enough to justify the costs.

"I'm a big believer that the audience does exist," Mr. Deutchman said. "It may not exist in numbers necessary to make it a business to attract a big studio, but that doesn't mean there isn't an audience."

With digital technology each package of 10 films for this year's festival arrived on a single hard drive in a compact box. The cost of the hard drive, owned by Emerging Pictures, is about $10,000.

"Projecting is as simple as working a P.C.," explained Barry Rebo, another partner in the company and a technology expert. "They double-click on a film, and it starts." After the festival the hard drives will be sent back to the company to be reprogrammed with other films and then sent out again. "This is a prototype," Mr. Rebo said. "Clearly we want to grow this as big as we can."

The documentaries at the Full Frame Festival, which is co-sponsored by TheNew York Times, include movies like "Farmingville," about immigrant workers on Long Island; "Home of the Brave," about a civil rights worker who was murdered in the 1960's; and "Dirty Work," about the unsung lives of a septic tank cleaner, a bull- semen collector and an embalmer.

In the past independent filmmakers seeking broader audiences have taken their one or two prints on the road, driving from one regional art-house theater to another. With digital replication, which costs a tiny fraction of the amount necessary for striking a print, the travel is no longer necessary.

Directors of regional art-house theaters say they are eager for sophisticated content, and this is an economic model that makes it possible to get such films more often.

"My whole idea is that eventually this is going to be very important for low-budget independent films we show here regularly," said Dan Ladely, director of the Mary Riepma Ross Media Center in Lincoln, Neb., one of the festival's regional participants. "It will enable filmmakers who do documentary films, for example, to distribute films without spending money on 35-millimeter prints."

Emerging Pictures will share profits from the box office receipts with the theater owners.

Distributors of art-house films in Hollywood say they like the Emerging Pictures concept. "I think it's a noble idea," said Ruth Vitale, co-president of Paramount Classics. "I go to Cannes and Venice and see amazing small films, and we rack our brains — how can we take these on and make money? At the end of the day we don't, because we have to make a financial decision."

If the syndication of the Full Frame festival is a success, Mr. Deutchman and his partners say they will branch out to a few dozen cities in the coming year, though that plan will require advertising funds to attract new audiences.

"Our goal is to have as many as 400 outlets, and we would call it a network rather than a theater chain," he said. "We want to show the world it can work, with the hope that by next year it will be all over the United States."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/movies/01DIGI.html


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Sales are steady, maybe even up.

EMI to Cut Artist Roster and Close 2 CD Plants
Heather Timmons

The EMI Group, which has been under pressure as music sales decline globally and has repeatedly failed to forge a deal in a consolidating industry, said Wednesday that it would reduce its roster of artists by 20 percent and cut 1,500 jobs.

The cuts will result in £25 million ($45.66 million) of savings in the fiscal year ending next March, and £50 million ($91.31 million) in years following, the company said. But EMI will also post £75 million ($136.97 million) in one-time charges and write-downs.

This is the second time that EMI Music, the recording division, has cut artists and jobs since Alain Levy, the former president of Polygram, was hired as chairman and chief executive of the unit in October 2001. The job cuts represent 20 percent of the division's work force.

"Whilst we remain optimistic that the market will return to growth in due course, we are committed to being in the best possible shape to compete in all conditions and take advantage of improving trends," said the group's chairman, Eric Nicoli, in a statement announcing the cuts.

This year, EMI benefited from the singer Norah Jones, whose second album sold 1.02 million copies in the first week of its February release, the best performance of any album in two and a half years. Still, the company said Wednesday that full-year sales in recorded music would be "close" to last year's £2.18 billion ($3.98 billion); most analysts interpreted "close'' as meaning slightly below that level.

EMI, which also produces the Rolling Stones and Coldplay, is doing better than the industry as a whole, where sales slipped more than 7 percent in 2003, according to estimates from IFPI, an anti-piracy trade group, because consumers continue to download music illegally from the Web. On Tuesday, music industry representatives said they would take legal action against 247 people for illegal file sharing in Europe, the first time that legal action has been taken outside of the United States.

The bulk of the EMI job losses stem from the outsourcing of compact disc and DVD manufacturing. EMI will close its manufacturing plants in Jacksonville, Ill., and Uden, the Netherlands, cutting 900 jobs. The Uden plant's employees will be transferred to MediaMotion, a unit of the ECF Group of the Netherlands, which will handle manufacturing in Europe. The production of the Jacksonville plant, EMI's only manufacturing plant in the United States, will be transferred to Cinram, a Toronto manufacturer.

Music producers industrywide have been increasingly outsourcing the making and distribution of their discs. In July of last year, AOL Time Warner sold its CD, DVD and video manufacturing units to Cinram. Sony and the Bertelsmann Group still produce their own compact discs, but analysts maintain that it is only a matter of time before all the major recording companies outsource manufacturing and distribution.

"That's where the music business will end up, without a question," said Mark Harrington, an analyst with Bear Stearns in London.

EMI will also be cutting about 350 "niche and underperforming" artists from its roster, the company said, and combining some music labels and some marketing departments. The company did not specify which artists would be released. EMI let go about 400 artists and eliminated 1,800 jobs in 2002, with positive results.

Analysts said it was unclear whether this round of cuts would help the bottom line, or eat into future profits. But the market reacted favorably to the announcement, sending EMI shares soaring almost 8 percent on the London Stock Exchange, to close at 277.5 pence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/bu...a/01music.html


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Warner Music Names East Coast Managers
Reuters

The Warner Music Group outlined a new East Coast management structure on Wednesday, continuing the record company's transformation under new ownership by an investor group led by Edgar Bronfman Jr.

Warner named Jason Flom, Lava Records' president and founder, as chairman and chief executive of the Atlantic Records Group, consisting of Atlantic, Elektra and Lava Records.

Warner Music now operates two label groups, including the Elektra- Atlantic-Lava combination on the East Coast and Warner Brothers Records, headed by Tom Whalley, on the West Coast.

This month, Warner Music, purchased for $2.6 billion by Mr. Bronfman and other investors, ousted several executives and cut 1,000 jobs.

Atlantic's president, Craig Kallman, on Wednesday was named co- chairman and chief operating officer of the Atlantic Records Group, while Julie Greenwald, formerly executive vice president of the Island Def Jam unit of Vivendi Universal, was named president, reporting to Mr. Flom and Mr. Kallman. Atlantic's founder, Ahmet Ertegun, will continue with the company as founding chairman of Atlantic Records.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/bu.../01warner.html


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What's Next

All the World's a Soundstage as Audio Formats Evolve
Seán Captain

DESPITE the ultramodern aura of devices that play compressed digital music files, from the Apple iPod player to the Rio Karma, they all share one anachronistic trait: they only have two audio channels. The basic stereo format used on vinyl records since the 1950's and carried over to CD's in the 1980's still defines most recorded music.

By contrast, DVD movies come with Dolby Digital 5.1-channel soundtracks that can parcel the audio among five speakers (and a subwoofer for extra-low tones) to provide the illusion that you are inside the action, surrounded by sound.

Such surround-sound or multichannel audio is making its way into recorded music through high-end entertainment systems that play Super Audio CD's or DVD Audio discs. But surround sound may soon come to the Internet and hand-held music players as well.

The Fraunhofer Institute, the German research center that led the effort to create the MP3 digital music format, recently announced a new version called MP3 Surround that adds the extra audio channels needed for 5.1 sound without appreciably increasing file size. According to Jürgen Herre of the institute, MP3 Surround files can also play in conventional stereo mode on two-channel devices.

While the MP3 format was a pioneer in the original online music explosion of the 1990's, it's a latecomer in adding surround sound. Microsoft's Windows Media format, MP3's main competitor, added multichannel capability (for up to 7.1 surround sound) in its Windows Media Audio 9 version. Microsoft introduced the format in September 2002 with Peter Gabriel's "Up," the first album recorded in the surround-sound Pro version of Windows Media 9. Since then, a few artists, including Sheryl Crow, DJ Andy Hunter and Pink Floyd, have released singles in the format.

RealNetworks introduced a surround-sound version of its format, called RealAudio Multichannel, in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. No major artists have released recordings in RealAudio Multichannel yet. And the handful of titles in Microsoft's WM9 Pro recordings represent only a tiny portion of all compressed digital music.

Few paid music services use MP3 because, unlike most other formats, it does not have a built-in digital rights management mechanism to restrict copying and swapping, although companies can add that capability. That same trait, of course, has made the MP3 format wildly popular for ripping music from CD's to compressed files and swapping them over the Internet.

But the surround-sound version of MP3 is unlikely to have much appeal to swappers because, unlike conventional stereo CD's, the Super Audio and DVD Audio discs that contain surround-sound music use formats that prevent ripping.

Dr. Herre of the Fraunhofer Institute said he had just begun speaking with record labels about using the MP3 Surround format for legal downloading. The Recording Industry Association of America, which is pursuing an aggressive legal battle against music trading, has not taken a position on the format.

Another seeming barrier for surround sound in MP3's or other formats is that the main devices using them - portable music players - have only two speakers: the left and right headphones. So some manufacturers view the issue of surround sound as largely irrelevant.

"Does it matter for us? Not particularly," said Richard Bullwinkle of Rio, a maker of hand-held digital music players.

Yet surround sound may not need more than two speakers. A few years ago, Dolby Laboratories introduced Dolby Headphone, which manipulates multichannel signals to create the illusion of more than two speakers when the listener is wearing only two. Last year Dolby introduced a similar technology for stereos called Dolby Virtual Speaker.

Dolby's technology has just begun to make its way into products like Denon's $699 two-speaker DM71DVS home theater sound system. It is also used in some DVD-playing software that allows people to watch movies on laptops and hear the multichannel soundtracks through headphones. Ron Vitale, Dolby's director of consumer marketing, says the company is working on getting the software to run on the processors of hand-held devices, including digital music players and even cellphones.

Compressed audio with surround sound may find a home in downloaded movies, where limited bandwidth makes the compressed files attractive. Surround sound in recorded music is "a matter of personal taste," says Phil O'Shaughnessy, a spokesman for the audio technology company Creative Labs. Some people like to hear the sounds of a crowd from a concert recording or a guitar reverberating around the room, while others are happy with stereo. But by going to the movies and watching DVD's at home, consumers are growing accustomed to surround sound in movies.

Many movies available for downloading use the DivX format for video compression and the MP3 format for audio. (Many newer DVD players can read DivX files.)

Moving to MP3 Surround would give these downloadable movies the multichannel effects of their DVD counterparts. But movies can also be compressed with several other formats, including Windows Media and RealVideo. A handful of films, including "Terminator 2" and "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," have been released on DVD in the Windows Media format, which supports not only 5.1 sound but also high-definition video unavailable on standard DVD's. Those versions can play only on PC's now, but Microsoft is lobbying to get support for its format built into DVD players.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/te...ts/01next.html


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Sharing Music Over Internet Not Illegal, Federal Court Rules

Surprise ruling stalls music industry's planned lawsuits against uploaders
Gillian Shaw

Canadian Internet music fans can breathe easy with Wednesday's Federal Court decision that will protect them from the prying eyes of the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

In a move that marks a blow to the recording industry and online music sellers, computer users who freely share music online were delivered a reprieve from the industry's plan to file lawsuits against 29 John and Jane Does it alleges are high- volume music traders.

Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruled Wednesday that the CRIA did not prove there was copyright infringement by the 29 so-called music uploaders. The ruling means Internet service providers won't have to hand over the users' names, a prospect that had already sent a chill through the music- sharing community.

It was more bad news for the recording industry that was already scrambling to denounce a study released on the eve of the court decision by researchers at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The study found, contrary to industry claims, that online file-sharing isn't responsible for the decline in CD sales.

In what analysts termed a stunning decision, von Finckenstein ruled that file-sharing, the uploading and downloading of files over the Internet using shared directories like those on Kazaa, is not illegal under Canadian copyright law, reaffirming what the Copyright Board of Canada has already ruled.

The overriding issue saw the court rule there is no infringement of copyright in the file-sharing practice.

"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings," Von Finckenstein wrote in his 28-page ruling.

"They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P [peer-to-peer] service."

Peer-to-peer is a type of connection between two computers; both perform computations, store data and make requests from each other, unlike a client-server connection where one computer makes a request and the other computer responds with information.

Von Finckenstein compared the action to a photocopy machine in a library.

"I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service," wrote the judge, who was commissioner of competition at the Competition Bureau of Canada from 1997 until last summer when he was appointed to the Federal Court of Canada.

The CRIA vowed to fight the ruling which was cheered by technology and privacy advocates alike.

"It's not just a victory for file sharers, it is a victory for technology itself and for Internet users in Canada," said Howard Knopf, a lawyer with the Ottawa firm Macera and Jarzyna, representing the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Internet Clinic.

"It is a victory for anybody who does research, who is interested in innovation, education -- anything where file-sharing might play a role."

The court decision puts an immediate block to plans announced Tuesday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry to take its fight against file-sharing to several countries around the world, including Canada. The IFPI said 247 file-sharers worldwide would be targeted with lawsuits, including users in Canada.

The IFPI is based in England and was not available to comment on whether it is changing its plans since file-sharing has been ruled legal in Canada.

In Canada, the Canadian Recording Industry Association vowed to continue fighting what it calls the "widespread infringement of music copyright on the Internet."

CRIA general counsel Richard Pfohl said the association expects to appeal the decision.

"In our view, the copyright law in Canada does not allow people to put hundreds or thousands of music files on the Internet for copying, transmission and distribution to millions of strangers," he said in a prepared statement.

"We put forward a compelling case of copyright infringement in seeking these disclosure orders. We presented more initial evidence than has ever been put forward in a request for disclosure of user identities from ISPs --which Canadian courts have granted on numerous occasions."

The CIRA motions filed on Feb. 11, if granted would have required Bell/Sympatico, Rogers Communications, Shaw Communciations, Telus Corp. and Videotron Telecom to reveal the identities of subscribers it alleged were sharing music on a large scale.

Not surprisingly, the ruling pleased Sharman Networks, the company behind Kazaa.

"We welcome today's ruling as a win for peer-to-peer technology and its users," said Nikki Hemming, chief executive officer at Sharman Networks, the Australia-based company that owns Kazaa and operates kazaa.com.

"We hope that this decision marks a turning point away from litigation and towards cooperation between peer-to-peer providers and the entertainment industry."

Calling the decision "stunning," Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in Internet and e-commerce law and technology counsel with the law firm Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt said he anticipates it will push the industry to increase its lobbying efforts for legislative change to copyright laws

"Certainly the copyright aspects of this decision came as a bit of a surprise to a lot of people," he said.

Geist said there were questions about the evidence advanced by the recording industry, weaknesses that were pointed out by the judge.

The recording industry was seeking to tie IP (Internet protocol) addresses and names, a method that wouldn't guarantee making a correct identification of people who are heavy file-sharing users.

"You're not necessarily talking about a single person, or the same person," said Geist.

Knopf agreed.

"If you're living in an apartment building and have WiFI network and you're not very careful about how you set it up, you could be sharing your network with 300 of your friends and neighbours," he said, adding the user wouldn't necessarily know if someone was engaged in extensive file-sharing using the same IP address. (WiFi -- wireless fidelity -- is a local area network that uses high frequency radio signals to transmit and receive data over distances of a few hundred feet.)

Geist pointed out that the ruling could have simply stopped with that issue.

"The judge could have ruled on this alone but he went much further," he said.

The ruling dealt with the issue of privacy and striking a balance between privacy and the right of copyright holders and also with the ISP's contention that they should be compensated for the cost of complying with the motion if it were to go through.

The ruling thrilled Peter Bissonnette, president of Shaw Communications, whose company had vowed to protect the privacy of its subscribers.

"As you can well imagine we're delighted at Shaw as are Jane and John Doe who were certainly named in their warrants," he said. "We're delighted that the arguments that we put forth were in fact compelling enough for the judge to make the decision.

"He really looked at those two issues: One was the whole issue of privacy as well as the unreliability of the data that they were asking for."

Bissonnette said Shaw customers appreciated the company going to bat for them.

In the U.S. some Internet file sharers were forced to settle for thousands of dollars with the Recording Industry Association of America and Bissonnette said Wednesday's ruling protects Canadians from such actions.

"The CRIA thought they had a slam dunk," he said. "You can look at what's happened in the U.S. and the approach of the recording industry there, which is somewhat bullying."

For Telus, both an Internet service provider and a seller of online music through Puretracks, Wednesday's ruling had a double impact.

Jay Thomson, assistant vice-president of broadband policy for Telus, said the company was glad the ruling protected the privacy of its customers.

"It's a very interesting decision," he said. "I think there is going to be a fair amount of fallout from it.

"It shows we stepped up when it comes to addressing our customers' concerns and we're pleased with the results and think they will be too."

Thomson said it is too early to determine what impact the ruling will have on Puretracks' online sales.

"We have a marketing arrangement with Puretracks," he said. "We certainly have an interest in promoting that service as clearly one that is a legitimate service and provides the kind of access to music that might not be available through the peer-to-peer networks.

"It's too early to say as a result of today's decision what the impact will be on services like Puretracks."
http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vanc...6-fbf956ea5828


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What It Iz: Scofflaw!

Theft of intellectual property seems like the only crime black people don't get busted for on the regular basis. So I don't mind telling you, I stole music.
Jimi Izrael

It's probably from my background as a club DJ, but in the main, I'm an LP guy — I like to listen to music from a turntable. I like the way vinyl sounds — warm and soulful, compared to CDs. But times changed, and it got to the point where only DJs can find LPs with any regularity, and even then at outrageous prices. So I did just what you did — I put my record collection in the basement and proceeded to buy all my favorites on CD. At $18 a pop, though, that got to be an expensive proposition.

If this technology had existed when I was a kid, I never would have left the house.
A few years back, I kept hearing and reading about a way to get music off the internet for free, but I didn't pay it much attention. I'd read that the fidelity of the selections weren't that great and besides, it was illegal. But after spending $100 on a handful of CDs that contained only a couple of hot tunes the idea of illegal file-swapping became more and more enticing. So about a year ago, I got a T1 line put in and hooked up the ole' Toshiba... and I started stealing music. I'm not afraid to tell you about it either — theft of intellectual property seems like the only crime black people don't get busted for on the regular basis.

You'd think I'd have some problems about stealing another's intellectual property. After all, people steal my work by posting it and sometimes printing it without proper permission or compensation, and it pisses me off pretty good. But I'm no millionaire —Courtney Love or Dr. Dre whining about losing a few cents from the comfort of their mansions just doesn't engender any sympathy from me. Besides, the record companies are charging too much money for a CD.

And it's not just music. When I first entered the world of file-sharing, I had no idea you could download computer programs, TV shows, porno flicks and films of all types with this technology. WordPerfect, The Sopranos, Spongebob Squarepants, Bootytalk — it's all there. I was shocked, disgusted, yet intrigued, by the things you can bring into your home at the simple click of a button. Free music, TV shows, movies and smut? Giddy-up.

If this technology had existed when I was a kid, I never would have left the house. Thanks to the internet and file-sharing, your 11-year-old probably owns more software and knows more about sex than you ever could. God Bless America, man.

At first, I thought that as soon as I downloaded my first song, the Feds were gonna come kicking my door down Starsky and Hutch-style and bust my black head open like a casaba melon, reading off a litany of charges. But I'm real with mine — a scofflaw of modern convention if ever there was one — plus I'm cheap. So I looked through the various kinds of free peer-to-peer file-sharing services until I settled on Morpheus. I downloaded my first song — Aaliyah's "Hot Like Fire" remix — and to my surprise, nothing happened. No helicopters, no trained police dogs or baton-wielding vice cops in cheap suits — nothing. Not even a phone call admonishing me to watch my step. "Hot Like Fire" played clear like a bell — none of the skipping or muffled levels I'd read about. So from that moment, I started flipping through the mental Rolodex of songs I loved but wouldn't buy and began searching for them. To my surprise, they were all there: from the Jimmy Castor Bunch to Bjork, Massive Attack and everything in between. I'd found the promised land of free music. Or so I thought.

The searches sometimes took a long time, and could take anywhere from a few seconds to an hour to download. Morpheus was okay for a minute, but then I switched over to Kazaa, which is known for having a better selection. But it came with a few strings. When you download Kazaa or any other free service, they tell you that you are accepting programs that will subject you to all kinds of commercial come-ons. It doesn't sound so bad, but nobody tells you how many. Morpheus wasn't bad with the pop-ups, but the service sucked. Kazaa had great service, but just like with everything, there was a catch — pop-ups, man. Pop-ups out the yang.

Ads for penis enlargement, breast augmentations, home cleaning products, Russian mail-order brides, hemorrhoid remedies, gender reassignment surgery (!) and cheap, teenage sex began appearing on my screen randomly and in fast succession. I spent more time fighting off ads than getting any work done. All those ads would drop off spy ware in my computer, and that made me nervous, never mind that my computer ran slower. It wasn't just the ads. The quality of the downloads ebbed and flowed — and sometimes I'd try to download a cut only to hear some fool shouting throughout the whole song: AYO, SON! PICK UP MY NEW MIX CD, YO! I'm all for self-promotion, but I don't want to have to download eight versions of the same song just to get one that is promo-free.

Between the bad downloads and the pop-up ads, I just couldn't take it anymore — I removed Kazaa and Morpheus from my hard-drive, and I've been music-less for a few weeks. I'm even thinking about going legit. But I have to admit it — even though I don't miss the ads and the headaches, there's something about breaking the law and beating the system that's a rush.
http://www.africana.com/columns/izra...31scofflaw.asp
















Until next week,

- js.














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