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03-06-04, 06:51 PM
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,017
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Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review June 5th, '04
Quotes Of The Week
"Winny was not developed and distributed with the intent to incite copyright infringement." Japanese defense lawyer "The court order as far as resellers were concerned didn't concern us." DVD-backup Technology One spokesperson "As technology gets better and devices on which you can read books get more and more popular, people will look for ways to obtain books freely." David Price "Your movies are doing nothing for you on the shelf." DVD trader Dan Robinson Labels To Dampen CD Burning? John Borland The recording industry is testing technology that would prevent consumers from making copies of CD "burns," a piracy defense that could put some significant new restrictions on legally purchased music. Tools under review by the major labels would limit the number of backups that could be made from ordinary compact discs and prevent copied, or "burned," versions from being used to create further copies, according to Macrovision and SunnComm International, rivals that are developing competing versions of the digital rights management (DRM) software. SunnComm said a version of its new "secure burning" technology is already being tested by BMG Music Group, the world's fifth-largest record label and the most aggressive to date in pushing CD copy protection schemes in the United States. Macrovision's version is expected to be ready in the next few months. If implemented widely, the new technology would mark a substantial change in the way ordinary people can use purchased music, possibly alienating some customers, analysts said. Given the costs of piracy, however, the labels are moving ahead cautiously in the hope of striking on a formula that works. "There is a fine (DRM) balance that nobody has struck, especially with physical CDs," said Mike McGuire, an analyst with the GartnerG2 research group. "If there's somebody who's making 25 copies for the world and finds they can't do that, then few people will probably complain. But if someone finds they can't make a copy for their kid so he can play it in the car, you're going to have a lot of people returning broken CDs." The trials come as record labels seek to tighten copying restrictions on CDs, a market worth more than $11.2 billion in the United States in 2003. The labels have attributed recent, significant slides in retail CD sales in part to competition from home copying, as well as online file swapping. Record labels are seeking a way to let consumers make a limited number of copies of their music--enough for a car, a vacation home and a friend, for example--without allowing for uncontrolled duplication. Under the current system, each copied CD can itself lead to an unlimited number of additional copies, cutting substantially into sales, they say. Consumer advocates, meanwhile, have protested against abridgments of today's unlimited freedom to copy, remix or sample from music CDs. Record labels in the United States have been sensitive to these consumer concerns, worrying particularly about earlier versions of copy-protection technology that had difficulty playing in nontraditional CD players such as game consoles or car stereos. They've released many protected CDs overseas, but only a small number in the United States and United Kingdom, where perceived opposition has been the highest. The new plan to lock down burns could reignite a controversy that's smoldered in the United States since the independent release of country artist Charley Pride's album in 2002 incorporated SunnComm's early copyproofing technology, prompting at least one consumer lawsuit. In addition to adding a new layer of copy protection on CDs, SunnComm and Macrovision each say their CD burning limitations could be applied to digital download businesses such as Napster or Apple Computer's iTunes, which do not put any restriction on burned CDs. That potentially could set off a new round of skirmishes between such digital download businesses and the record labels over how consumers can use the music they buy online. "What labels have told us is that their agreements (with the download services) are relatively short term, a year or under, and so they believe that they have the capability to require (the burning tools to be added) next time around," Macrovision Chief Executive Officer Bill Krepick said. Record label executives, although they take very different individual approaches to the market, say they ultimately want to see the rules for CDs and digital downloads converge. "I would say that similar values should apply," said Jordan Katz, executive vice president and general manager of BMG's distribution arm. Digital download services say they aren't yet feeling pressure to add the "secure burning" feature, however. Some said the labels had spent more time discussing the issue as much as six months ago but that it hadn't been a priority recently. "I think the labels have been relaxing a little in terms of usage rules," said Liz Brooks, vice president of business development at Buy.com's music division. To date, the history of CD copy protection in the United States has been spotty. Though Macrovision and SunnComm each say their technology is used widely overseas, only a few albums have been publicly released using their technology here. BMG, which has taken a lead in this area, used SunnComm's anticopying tools on last year's Anthony Hamilton disc. The release gained some prominence after a Princeton student demonstrated that the protections could be easily evaded simply by pushing a computer's Shift key while loading the CD. Executives at SunnComm and BMG said they were aware of the issue and that they had been satisfied with the technology as a deterrent to casual copiers, rather than trying to create an unhackable protection. BMG announced last week that it would release three more albums using the technology over the next two months, including recordings by Velvet Revolver, Angie Stone and Yung Wun. Other labels say they are still very interested, but not quite as far along as BMG. "EMI does use Macrovision's technology in just about every country in the world," EMI spokeswoman Jeanne Meyers said. "We're testing other forms of technology from a lot of different companies before launching in the U.S. and the U.K." http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5224090.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Two Movie Studios Sue Online Seller Of DVD-Copying Software Two Hollywood movie studios have sued an online retailer, accusing Technology One of defiantly selling DVD- copying software previously barred by two federal courts. The lawsuit, filed in New York by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. and Paramount Pictures Corp., marks the first time a movie company has sued a retailer of the forbidden software by 321 Studios Inc. Other retailers voluntarily halted sales of the software after federal judges in New York and California -- at Hollywood's behest -- ordered 321 of suburban St. Louis to stop making and marketing it. Hollywood studios long have insisted that DVD-copying products violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars circumvention of anti-piracy measures used to protect DVDs and other technology. Since the New York and California rulings, 321 has shipped retooled versions of its DVD-copying products, removing the software component required to descramble movies. The latest lawsuit, announced Friday by the Motion Picture Association of America Inc., was filed in the U.S. District Court for New York's southern district, where a judge in March barred 321 from marketing the software. ``Technology One, by categorically refusing to comply with the studios' cease-and-desist notices, will learn from the courts that by continuing to sell the banned software it is breaking the law,'' said Jim Spertus, vice president and chief of the MPAA's domestic anti-piracy operations. ``With two federal injunctions prohibiting the further sale of 321's DVD circumvention products, it has no excuse to flout the law,'' Spertus said. A worker at California-based Technology One, who refused to identify himself, said he was unaware of the lawsuit but that ``nobody ever told us to stop selling'' the questioned software. That employee said Technology One no longer has the software in stock, though the company's Web site -- www.save365.com -- suggests otherwise. ``The court order as far as resellers were concerned didn't concern us,'' he said. The latest lawsuit seeks a court order barring Technology One from continued sales of the software, as well as damages including profits from the previous sales. ``When faced with such flagrant violations, the MPAA member companies will aggressively defend copyright laws,'' said Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA. In court and before Congress, 321 has argued that its products merely guarantee consumers fair use of the movies they've bought, including backing up expensive copies of children's movies in case the originals get scratched. Robert Moore, 321's chief executive, testified May 12 before a House panel in support of a measure that would amend the DCMA to let film buffs make personal copies of DVD movies and other digital content for limited purposes. Sponsors described the proposal as a consumers' rights bill for digital media that would allow consumers to bypass encryption locks built into DVD movies by Hollywood to prevent copying. Such encryption schemes are increasingly common in music and movies. Hollywood studios and the music industry said that would lead to more piracy and lost sales. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/8786701.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 'Winny' P2P Software Developer Indicted Asahi Shimbun KYOTO-In a case watched closely by legal experts and Web surfers, prosecutors on Monday indicted the developer of the file-swapping ''Winny'' software. Isamu Kaneko, 33, a University of Tokyo teaching assistant, was charged with violating the Copyright Law by allowing his software program to assist other people in downloading and sharing copyrighted movies, music and game files. Legal experts are worried that the meaning of ``assist'' has been stretched too far. Kaneko, from Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, who was taken into custody by Kyoto prefectural police on May 10, has denied the charges. ''Winny was not developed and distributed with the intent to incite copyright infringement,'' a defense lawyer said. But prosecutors have apparently concluded Kaneko is to blame for rampant copyright infringements that his peer-to-peer (P2P) program enables. They said Kaneko has stated that he did not support the current copyright system, and that the suspect said he felt the only way to destroy the control wielded by big business over digital content was to spread ways to violate copyright laws. Prosecutors said Winny is mainly used to swap illegal copies of copyrighted music and video files. They said Kaneko made his first version of Winny available for free via download in early May 2002. The software allegedly enabled a 41-year-old employee of a sex parlor in Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture, to copy movies and games in September last year, which he later made available to others on the Web. The man was arrested on suspicion of violating the Copyright Law last November. Software engineers are rallying to Kaneko's support. Many organizations say that P2P technology is used to link computers to share noncopyrighted data. http://www.asahi.com/english/nation/...406010157.html Winny Developer To Go On Trial Over Illegal Copying KYOTO -- The Kyoto District Public Prosecutors' Office on Monday filed charges against the developer of the controversial file-sharing software Winny, accusing him of assisting illegal copying. Prosecutors accuse the developer, Isamu Kaneko, of aiding violations of the Copyright Law. It is the first time a software developer has been held criminally responsible for deliberately assisting illegal copies. Kaneko and his lawyers have maintained that he has no connection with the users of Winny and that his actions do not constitute supporting illegal copies made using the software. However, prosecutors said that when Kaneko was first arrested, he questioned the situation regarding copyrights on digital software, and said spreading violations of copyright was needed to destroy the system. Because of this, they concluded that he was aware the software would be used illegally. Investigators in the case said Kaneko announced the release of Winny on "Ni Channeru" (Channel 2), Japan's largest Internet message board, in April 2002. He then provided it free of charge on his own home page the following month. While knowing that the software could be used illegally, he released updated versions of it, investigators said. He is specifically accused of allowing a minor in September last year to use Winny and provide movies and software to an unlimited number of people free of charge. The minor, aged 19 at the time, has already been convicted. (Compiled from Mainichi and wire reports, Japan, May 31, 2004) http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20040...dm008000c.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Neowin : Justin Frankel Interview, creator of Winamp and Nullsoft Mr magoo If you were to look for one person who has singularly had an influence on most peoples lives, you'd probably come up with Justin Frankel. Creator of Winamp and Nullsoft, he's very kindly taken the time to have a (quite funny!) chat with Neowin. Q. First of all Justin, can you introduce to the people who have been living under a rock who you are, a brief history of Frankel, and what you did at Winamp/Nullsoft? Perhaps my story would benefit from beginning at the beginning: In the beginning, the universe somehow came to exist, which caused great speculation much much later as to how, why, and who. An immense amount of time passed, until one year a man was born who some years later, according to Douglas Adams, would "be nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change." Nearly two thousand years later, I was born. It was the 1970s. Disco was apparently fashionable, but I don't really remember, and my parents were borderline anti-social cultist hippies (mostly kidding). When I was young, my older brothers started playing with and programming on an Atari 800XL, so that got me learning to program (and type) BASIC. Which was good. I'll just shorten this paragraph by saying that I went from BASIC on the Atari to Turbo Pascal on the PC, then to Turbo C++ (though initially C++ seemed dumb, as all I knew of it was cout << "lame"; and whatnot, so I just did C stuff), and so on. In highschool and college I primarily worked in DOS and Linux (and Solaris when I got to college), doing random things like making a filesystem based mail program for Novell networks, a portable 3d engine, all the standard stuff people write when they learn to code. I was using the name 'Nullsoft' as sort of a joke company name. So after college is where things get more, erm, above the rock? In 1997 I ported AMP (a free mp3 decoder at the time) and ported it to Windows, using a UI that Tom Pepper (who later developed Shoutcast, our mp3 streaming platform, with me) had been making (for the Mac version), and made Winamp. Winamp got popular about the same time as MP3s did on IRC and the web, so I spent a few years updating it and making it something I wanted to use. During this time my father and I incorporated Nullsoft, and made it into a business that went pretty well. AOL acquired Nullsoft in 1999... This isn't terribly interesting I know, but hey, if you've been living under a (the?) proverbial rock (which according to my interviewer you may have), then this is probably better than staring all day at earthworms and the little bugs that ball up if you lift up the rock. I worked for AOL for about four and a half years, and had my share of little indescretions-- it was somewhat like my replacement for going to college (since I only went for about 6 months), I got to experiment in a safer environment than the real world, trying things out. Two significant things to come of this were Gnutella and WASTE. Q. Can you tell us exactly how bad it was (or wasn't) working under AOL? How did you guys differ? Did they buy Winamp because it was a really great music player, or for other reasons? I had a very different way of doing things than AOL, so it was very frustrating being within that organization and trying to get things done. It was as much my fault as theirs-- if anything, the fact that they were the way they were (this sentence is turning into a mess) was due to being a big public corporation. Some things are inevitable, well until a company like Google comes along... Q. So now you've left Winamp /AOL, what will be your relation, if any, to the development of Winamp? What's the situation regarding Nullsoft? I've been taking some time working on a few new projects, and will likely be contracting for AOL / Winamp / Nullsoft / etc to do more development. Christophe and Francis have been doing a great job of updating Winamp, but I think they want me to do the particularly boring stuff. Q. Do your future plans include setting up something similar to Nullsoft, or something more freelance? It'll be what it is... or turns into. I don't know. Q. Looking back at the programs you've made, such as Gnutella, WASTE, Shoutcast, and others, what has been the most important to you? Well, to be honest, safesex is probably the one I use the most. Somewhere to put all those damned web passwords! Q. So with this all behind you, tell us what you're up to at the moment. I've been very interested in music the last couple of years, so I've been spending more time actually practicing various instruments and whatnot. What I'm working on now that I'm most excited about is something combining general purpose computers with music. I'll probably have more info in a month or two when the prototype is done. (ed - more info here) Q. There was speculation that you were up to something regarding mobile text messaging. Would you care to elaborate on that project? That was just an item from a list things that *might* be interesting. I haven't really spent too much time on that, but I'll mention another one of those ideas I was tossing around a couple years ago. It was basically to make a well funded ($400M or more) startup that would develop something like ReactOS-- specifically, a win2k compatible (driver, application, UI, filesystem, everything) OS. You could base it on a lot of open source code, but make a commercial product. Buy the companies you would need (i.e. Stardock, Transgaming, etc), hire the right people, have a big ass legal defense fund for fighting off Microsoft, get investors who are anti-MS (I'm sure some computer manufacturers would love to ship this OS), etc etc. And do it all in 2 or 3 years. If we had started this in 2002, look where would be today! Win2k is still relevant! But will it be in 2 or 3 more years? I hope so. Cause I hate XP, and it's all downhill from there.. Q. What are your thoughts on the direction that companies like Apple and Napster have taken in the area of digital downloads? What do you think they are doing right and what do you think they need to improve? I think DRM is a huge waste, I won't touch it. Or, rather, I won't pay for it. It is just completely ridiculous what they want us to accept. Fuck no. I'll be buying my CDs, and ripping them, thank you. Until they make everybody move to some DRM-protected CD format, then I'll just be buying indie label titles or whatever it takes. God knows what idiocities will happen. Q. Do you own a Ipod or a similar device? What do you think that other companies need to do to make a product of similar quality to the Ipod, but at a more accessible price? I have an iPod, and I must say I do love the iPod (btw, the iPod Winamp plugin rules, too -- I can't stand iTunes, either). It really does amaze me that nobody else has produced an mp3 player whose UI is even in the same league of decent as the iPod's -- don't get me wrong, the iPod's UI is nowhere near perfect and pisses me off now and then too --but everything else I've seen is just an order of magnitude worse. What gives? It's NOT THAT HARD PEOPLE. As far as price goes, I think once other people make mp3 players with at least decent user interfaces, prices will naturally go down. I'm sure Apple is making so much money on those at this point, because there's no decent alternative. Q. What was the coolest piece of tech/gadgetry that you bought recently? I just got the HD Directv Tivo. Haven't gotten DSS service for it yet (still gotta put the dish up), but over the air HDTV is pretty crazy, when it works. Q.conversely - what was the lamest! Actually, this doesn't really count, but the aforementioned HD Tivo would overheat after a couple hours and throw an error message. At the advice of a friend, I opened the case to find the cooling fan unplugged. Not partially plugged in, but completely and obviously unplugged. Made in the USA, woot! Q. Finally, for all of the "l33t" coders out there, would you care to divulge your "weapons of choice" in the fields of code editors and late night snack food?! I usually use MSVC6's IDE on windows for working on Windows apps, and vim everywhere else (console apps, linux/freebsd apps, php, email (in conjunction with mutt), whatever). As far as food, I literally drink a crapload of water. Literally! I go measure my poo (which brings me to this idea I have, called "Professor Shatz", which would be a smart toilet that would measure your excretions and have a lovely voice activated interface, so you could say things like "Professor Shatz, how much did I shat today?"), and ok just kidding I won't drag that on.. Well thanks for a very interesting insight into the world of Frankel! Best of luck in the future Justin, and i hope you'll keep us an informed with your future developments. http://www.neowin.net/articles.php?action=more&id=89 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Hollywood's Casting Problem: Who Will Run the M.P.A.A.? Sharon Waxman FOR two years Jack Valenti, the venerable, 82-year-old chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, has been trying to retire. After nearly four decades as Hollywood's leading lobbyist, the silver-haired former adman and White House adviser announced in March that he would be gone within a few months. But those months have passed, summer approaches and the association is nowhere close to finding Mr. Valenti's successor. Doesn't anyone want to run the M.P.A.A.? "This is one of the most fascinating, exciting jobs a person can have," Mr. Valenti said with some urgency in a recent interview. "This is a global job. You'll meet the premier of China, the cultural minister of France. You'll be involved with creative people. It pays well. If that's not something that engages people, I don't know what the hell would." The job of running the association ought to have a long, juicy waiting list of Washington V.I.P.'s. Who wouldn't want a million dollars a year to plump for Tom Cruise instead of, say, biomedical tax credits? Oddly, not too many folks. Representative Billy Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana, at first accepted, then after being offered a lot more money by the pharmaceutical industry rejected the job last fall. Since then Senator John Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, has also been wooed by the the association, to no avail. He let it be known that he wasn't eager to defend Janet Jackson's right to show a nipple ring. The process of finding Mr. Valenti's replacement is nonetheless moving forward, if ever so slowly and under a cloak of heavy secrecy. According to several people familiar with details of the search, in the past three weeks, three new candidates have been interviewed by the seven studio chairmen who serve as the board members of the Motion Picture Association. Those candidates are: Victoria Clarke, the former Pentagon spokeswoman under President Bush who is now a consultant for Comcast, the cable giant; Daniel J. Glickman, the former agriculture secretary under President Clinton who now heads the Institute of Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government; and Pat Mitchell, a former television producer who is now president of the Public Broadcasting Service. All are respected members of the Washington establishment who would need crash courses in show business. Traditionally, the role of the motion picture association chief has been to marshal the towering egos and competing interests of the seven major Hollywood studios to win favorable legislation or trade incentives for the movie industry. By all accounts, Mr. Valenti, who also created the industry's rating system, was spectacularly successful at wrangling the contentious moguls. He has unparalleled status in Congress, whose favor he has long courted with invitations to swanky screenings at the bunker-like M.P.A.A. building on I Street. But the job is becoming even harder. The crisis of worldwide movie piracy, held at bay only by technological limits, threatens to sink the movie industry entirely, as it may the music business. Numerous Hollywood and Washington figures, including candidates for the job, point out that it's a double whammy: the new chairman will have to follow Mr. Valenti's 38-year act while coming up with a solution to the industry's new perils. Potential candidates may remember that even the polished Mr. Valenti received a very public black eye last fall when he attempted to end the longstanding practice of distributing videotapes and DVD's to people who vote on the Academy Awards. He introduced the change as a way to cut down on piracy, but it was met with a revolt by art-house distributors and a rebuke by the courts. "I think it's a job people are interested in, but it's perceived and rightly so to be a hard job," said Hilary Rosen, the former chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry lobby. "If there are easier jobs available, for more money, then why take a hard job?" Indeed, even if the job is ultimately offered to one of these three candidates, he or she may not take it. The studio chiefs have asked to meet with at least three other candidates in the wake of the recent interviews a sign they are not entirely confident with their short list. Some of the names frequently mentioned for the job are those of Representative David Dreier, Republican of California; the actor and former Republican senator Fred Thompson; the outgoing Universal lobbyist Matt Gerson and Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida. Executives inside the studios say that they will have to offer well above Mr. Valenti's $1.2 million salary to attract the best person for the job, since other lobbying jobs now pay up to $2 million a year. The current top three candidates have varying strengths and flaws, and it is unclear which of them, if any, is qualified to manage the studio moguls from Disney, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, Sony, Fox and MGM, who make up the association. Ms. Clarke, a lively and intelligent public speaker, is a devoted Bush Republican, having learned her politics at the knee of the consultant Mary Matalin. Hollywood liberals tend to regard that as a mixed blessing; she will have close contacts among the right wing, but may put off some of the more left-leaning moguls. Friends of Ms. Clarke say she is also being courted for another top job by a former employer, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, and is more likely to take that position if it is offered, given her familiarity with the organization. The interest in Pat Mitchell, a staid Southerner, has puzzled many Hollywood and Washington insiders. She does not have much experience in Hollywood, since she comes from a background of documentary filmmaking. Ms. Mitchell once headed CNN productions and Time Inc. Television, where she worked on series like the 24-part "Cold War." She also does not have the stature in Washington of a former member of government or Congress. If her reign at PBS since 2000 has been a turbulent one, she is also credited with revitalizing the public network's prime-time schedule. A moderate Democrat with an engaging personality and sense of humor, Mr. Glickman made a positive impression on at least some of his interviewers, according to people close to them. He has a built-in Hollywood connection a son, Jon, who works as a producer and lives in Los Angeles. Perhaps another sign of his standing with the interviewers was that Mr. Glickman was back in Los Angeles last week. He, along with the other candidates, declined to comment for this article, but a close friend of Mr. Glickman's said he was "interested, but cautious. It's not an easy job." That is a common refrain. Everyone in Washington seems to want to know what the association will become in the post-Valenti era. The diminutive lobbyist with a peculiarly florid vocabulary came to personify the organization over the decades, not just creating the movie ratings system in 1968, but traveling tirelessly around the world to promote the Hollywood agenda. Throughout the 1980's, Mr. Valenti successfully protected the so-called "fin-syn" regulations giving the Hollywood production community complete control over the rerun market for former hit network television shows. Under the rules, networks could share only minimally in profits from television's secondary markets, which created millions of dollars in additional profits for the association's member studios. There is already a consensus that two people will probably be needed to replace Mr. Valenti, one to be the public face of the association and another to run its day-to-day operations. But that doesn't resolve the fundamental question of the association's identity. "The challenge is not just replacing Jack Valenti," acknowledged Leslie Hortum, the executive headhunter leading the search for a replacement. "You have to be saying: What is the M.P.A.A. today? What does it need going forward? That's been the focus." Without careful definition, the association could easily fade into irrelevance. Each of the member studios is now a small part of a huge, multinational empire from NewsCorp to Viacom to General Electric to Sony and their interests diverge as often as they coincide. And the parent companies all have their own individual lobbying operations based in Washington. This dynamic has changed the way the association operates; Mr. Valenti no longer meets en masse with the studio chairmen. Instead he plays the handmaiden, consulting with them as individuals as he cobbles together consensus on important issues. Piracy, however, is the one issue that can be counted on to unite the seven studios and the one reason they are focused so intently on finding Mr. Valenti's replacement. But even here they cannot easily agree. One senior studio executive, who declined to be named because of the secrecy of the association's process, said that one of the first acts of the new chairman would be to bring lawsuits against individuals who download movies over the Internet much as the music industry did against users of Napster and Kazaa. This plan does not reflect consensus. Fox, Paramount and Universal are keen to prosecute downloaders, while Disney is more reluctant to do so. One potential candidate, who spoke anonymously so as to not ruin a chance at the job, said the association had to more clearly define what it wants to be in this new era. "What are we?" the candidate asked. "Are we an anti-piracy organization? A pro-copyright organization? It's all about the association, its functionality, or dysfunctionality." The candidate observed that the job had "a high probability of failure," then amended that judgment to "possibility of failure." The former M.P.A.A. spokeswoman and Hollywood-Washington veteran Barbara Dixon put it this way: "You really need a power broker who can sit these guys in a room and carve out a consensus. It takes real people skills, it takes respect. It's really hard." Perhaps, as some suggest, the association doesn't need a charismatic replacement for Mr. Valenti. Maybe it just needs a Washington functionary. In the ongoing Washington parlor game of Who-Will-Follow-Jack, another question frequently arises: why not wait until November to fill the job? To many, it seems like folly to choose the association's first new chief in decades with only months to spare until a new president is elected. Many wonder aloud if the current delay isn't deliberate, a way to wait for the election results in Congress and the White House. Meanwhile, lobbyists perceive not-too-subtle pressure in Republican-heavy Washington to choose a Republican for the job. One senior M.P.A.A. executive put it bluntly: "There's probably a sense that we need not to look like we're stalling, because we're being watched" by powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill. Mr. Valenti said the election had no bearing on the succession. "This is not about politics," he said. "Power changes. Power passes. Who's in power today is not in power tomorrow. You have to find someone you believe has a wise and trusting relationship with Congress." Meanwhile, Memorial Day will come and go with no successor in sight. Few acquainted with the process expect a decision in June, as Mr. Valenti had lately hoped. "It's important to go through the process," said Ms. Hortum, the headhunter. "With each conversation we get closer to the right fit." And in the meantime, Mr. Valenti still gets up to go to work every day, as he has for so many days and nights before. "We were going to give a going-away party for Jack," sighed Ms. Dixon, a close friend. "But I don't know when that's going to be." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/movies/30WAXM.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Media princes exposed The Portrait of a Family, as Painted at a Fraud Trial Barry Meier HILE testifying this month at the fraud trial of John J. Rigas and two of his sons, Timothy and Michael, in connection with the financial collapse of Adelphia Communications, a former executive of the company recalled an incident that revealed a lot about the relationship between the father and sons. That executive, James R. Brown, said he had spoken to Timothy J. Rigas, the company's chief financial officer, shortly after John Rigas, Adelphia's founder and chief executive, told investment bankers in 2002 that none of the Rigases had ever taken big salaries from the company or sold any of their stock holdings in it. Mr. Brown, Adelphia's former vice president for finance, said he "told Tim that he really had to tell his father to stop making that speech, which I'd heard in various forms before, because people will either think he is dumb or lying." Timothy Rigas's reply, according to Mr. Brown: "He said, 'I can't control my father.' " Last week, after more than three months of testimony, the government's case against the Rigases and a fourth man, Michael C. Mulcahey, former assistant treasurer at Adelphia, began to draw to a close. In many ways, it has resembled other criminal cases against high-ranking corporate executives, with prosecutors and defense lawyers sparring over whether arcane accounting procedures were used to deceive investors and banks about the company's finances. But what has set this trial apart from all the others is the Rigas family dynamic. The most memorable moments so far - like Timothy Rigas's reported comment - illuminated issues that can affect any family-controlled business, from nepotism to personal use of corporate assets to the inability of a company's founder to give up control. There is plenty to suggest that family was everything in the insular world of the Rigases, for better and, if prosecutors are right, for worse. Both Michael, 50, and Timothy, 47, are unmarried and live in the same house as their father and mother in Coudersport, the small town in north-central Pennsylvania where Adelphia was based until it sought bankruptcy protection, when it moved its headquarters to Colorado. Family members also operated privately held cable companies that they financed with loans obtained through the public company - a relationship that, in the differing views of defense lawyers and prosecutors, was either symbiotic or parasitic. It was in Coudersport, starting in the 1950's, that Mr. Rigas began to build Adelphia from the ground up. Several experts said that it was not unusual for a founder of a company to perceive it as his own, even after he reached retirement age or after it went public, as Adelphia did in 1986. "It is hard for them to make the distinction between the business and themselves," said James Lea, a professor of family medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who advises family businesses. That certainly seemed to be the case for John Rigas. According to testimony, he often took cash advances - as much as $1 million a month - from the company to pay for personal interests like operating an area farm that produced products like maple syrup. And while Mr. Rigas was known as a very generous contributor to community causes, he was not above hitting employees up for cash, according to court testimony. Christopher Thurner, Mr. Rigas's personal accountant, testified that his boss asked him in 1995 for a $20,000 loan, saying he was short of cash. Moreover, Mr. Thurner, who earned about $40,000 a year, said Mr. Rigas encouraged him to take out a bank loan to get the money and offered to repay it only recently, after learning that Mr. Thurner would testify for the government. Timothy Rigas is also charged with tapping company funds to pay for extravagances like golf club memberships. According to testimony, he used the Adelphia jet to ferry around a friend, the Hollywood actress Peta Wilson; Adelphia funds also went to an interior design firm operated by John Rigas's wife, Doris, and helped pay for a film made by his daughter, Ellen Rigas-Venetis. (Mr. Rigas's wife, daughter and other son, James, have not been charged in the case.) Such personal excess can often be cut short in companies with independent top executives or boards of directors. When Timothy Rigas took over as the de facto head of Adelphia after bladder cancer was diagnosed in his father in 1999, he tried to put his father on a shorter leash but failed, according to testimony. Wayne Rivers, the president of the Family Business Institute, a consulting firm in Raleigh, N.C., says that it takes tremendous courage for a son to face down his father in a business setting because of potential ripple effects in the family. "It may not only affect the dad but also the relationship with his own mother," Mr. Rivers said. Whether the Rigas family had any such confrontations is not known. And it was while Timothy Rigas was ostensibly running the company that activities at issue in the trial took place. The Rigases and Mr. Mulcahey have all denied any wrongdoing. And Professor Lea, the family-business adviser, said it was possible that the Rigases did not perceive the use of Adelphia proceeds to finance their personal businesses or hobbies as crimes. "To them, this probably did not appear like embezzlement or malfeasance of any kind," he said. "It was more like you go to work in the store in the morning, you spend what you make and Adelphia was their family-owned store." Throughout the trial, John Rigas and Timothy, his youngest son, have seemed upbeat. (The elder Mr. Rigas has often engaged reporters in light-hearted banter.) But on a day in early May, Michael J. Rigas, a slightly built, reticent man, failed to appear in Federal District Court in Manhattan, where the trial is taking place. He had been hospitalized briefly over the preceding weekend and was still feeling disoriented on the next Monday, when the trial was set to resume, family associates said. The nature of his health problem was never disclosed, and he returned after a day's absence. But just before the weekend break, Mr. Brown, the former Adelphia executive who has pleaded guilty to fraud charges and is the government's most crucial witness, had taken the stand to begin his testimony. That day, Mr. Brown provided damaging testimony against all the Rigases, describing a variety of accounting gimmicks, sham transactions and phony financial reports that helped Adelphia mask the eroding financial performance that led to its filing for bankruptcy protection in June 2002. Defense lawyers, who are likely to start their case this week, are expected to argue that the Rigases had planned all along to pay back the money they had borrowed from Adelphia. But even for a family as well off as the Rigases, that would not be easy. According to the last witness called by the government, the Rigases ran up a hefty tab at Adelphia: more than $2 billion. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/bu...ey/30fami.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Sananda Maitreya chooses new legal file-sharing program "WEED" to spread the first songs of his project "ANGELS & VAMPIRES." Press Release Multi-platinum artist Sananda Maitreya chooses new innovating file- sharing program "WEED" to distribute his music. Sananda Maitreya releases the first 3 songs of his project "Angels & Vampires", this first Chapter is called "The Jaguar and The Jungle Sound". "WEED" has a different view on Internet file-sharing. Instead of trying to shut down file-sharing, they think people should be paid for it. Instead of punishing fans who don't respect artists' rights, they think it makes more sense to reward those who do. http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/5/emw128505.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Sony/Bertelsmann merger A Trustbuster's Song Is Ending. But a Coda Is Possible Andrew Ross Sorkin DON'T call Mario Monti a lame duck. Mr. Monti, the European Commission's chief antitrust enforcer and the world's de facto trustbuster, is planning to retire this fall. But the man who blocked General Electric's acquisition of Honeywell, helped kill WorldCom's planned purchase of Sprint and branded Microsoft a monopoly still seems to be going about his job as if it were just starting. In what could be one of his last acts as mergers god, Mr. Monti, 61, still has to decide whether to bless - or veto - the combination of the music units of Sony and Bertelsmann, a deal that would create the second-largest record company in the world, behind Vivendi's Universal Music Group. If the concerns he raised last week in a 60-page statement of objections about the transaction are any indication, the prospect of another deal funeral on his watch is not remote. Sony, which has a roster of artists that includes Bruce Springsteen and Cιline Dion, and Bertelsmann, home to Britney Spears and OutKast, are betting that they can get approval for the deal. Privately, they seem genuinely confident about their chances. But maybe they should recall the words of John F. Welch Jr., the former chairman of General Electric, who was similarly confident when he flew to Brussels in 2001 to negotiate concessions with Mr. Monti over his deal with Honeywell International. "The European regulators' demands exceeded anything I or our European advisers imagined,'' Mr. Welch said at the time, "and differed sharply from antitrust counterparts in the U.S. and Canada.'' Most experts expect the Sony-Bertelsmann merger to be approved in the United States and Canada. But they also anticipate that Europe - and Mr. Monti in particular - will be a problem. Mr. Monti has, after all, been tough on previous music deals. In the fall of 2000, under pressure from him, Time Warner and the EMI Group withdrew plans for a $20 billion joint venture in music. He also scuttled talks between EMI and BMG, the Bertelsmann music unit. Why do Sony and Bertelsmann think that it will be any different this time? The companies contend that the merger is necessary, what with the music industry being pummeled by piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing. That argument may have worked a year or so ago - before Apple's iMusic Store and other legitimate online services and the recent rebound in music sales - but may be less persuasive today, experts said. What's more, in his statement of objections, Mr. Monti revisited the subject of a 2001 investigation: possible price fixing and collusion among the world's top music companies, which charge different amounts for the same product in different countries and have long appeared to be in lock step. You have to believe that Mr. Monti will not approve any merger in an industry he sees as rife with abuse. Still, Sony and Bertelsmann may have a chance to win approval. Indeed, they were so adamant about getting their deal past Mr. Monti that they rushed last year to sign a merger agreement without nailing down many of the most important details. The reason was that they wanted to get it on the regulator's docket ahead of another deal proposal that was anticipated at the time - Time Warner's sale of its music unit to EMI. The clever maneuver had an extra beneficial effect. Time Warner ended up rejecting a deal with EMI out of fear Mr. Monti would kill it in light of Sony's and Bertelsmann's proposed merger. Instead, it sold Warner Music to a consortium of investors led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. and Thomas H. Lee Partners, who posed almost zero regulatory risk. So Mr. Monti does not have to confront the prospect of two giant music deals that would have taken the industry from five big players down to three. But as his statement of objections indicated, he still seems to have grave concerns about any consolidation in the industry. Executives briefed on Mr. Monti's list of objections said he was concerned mainly with the effect the deal would have on the diversity of music and artists to be offered and how the music would be priced. Warner Music, Apple and several groups of independent artists have objected to the deal, arguing that it would significantly dampen competition. Coincidentally, Mr. Monti's statement came as General Electric and Honeywell made arguments this week in Luxembourg appealing Mr. Monti's decision to block their deal several years ago. The companies do not want to merge any more, but they hope that a successful appeal may diminish Mr. Monti's judge-and- jury powers. He has been overruled before: a European court overturned his decision to block the merger of two British travel companies, Airtours (now MyTravel Group) and First Choice Holidays. The court also overruled his decision to stop a merger of the French electrical equipment maker Schneider Electric with a rival, Legrand, and reversed his ruling to block the acquisition of the French bottle maker Sidel by Tetra Laval, the Swiss packaging conglomerate. That has not seemed to have any discernible effect on his aggressiveness. And a lame duck - if you insist on calling him that - has nothing to lose. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/bu...ey/30deal.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ LimeWire Software Downloaded Most The file-sharing software from Manhattan-based music service LimeWire was the most popular download on the Internet in the week ended May 23, according to Download.com. Set up in June 2000 as a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, LimeWire is already profitable. The site welcomes 350,000 visitors a day and 2 million a month. It generates revenues from sales of the advanced version of its $19 downloading software, which just under 2% of its users purchase. Music companies consider the downloading of songs to be illegal. http://www.crainsny.com/news.cms?newsId=8090 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Sony Finger-Prints Music To Stymie P2P Pirates John Borland Audible Magic, a content-filtering company, announced in the US early Saturday a wide- ranging agreement with Sony Music, aimed in part at improving tools to combat peer-to-peer piracy. The record label will provide digital "fingerprints" to Audible Magic, which creates technology that identifies and blocks songs as they are transferred online through file-swapping applications or other tools. Sony will also license Audible Magic's song-identification software for use in its internal operations, and the two companies will work together on an anti-piracy program targeted at universities, they said. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/busines...9149127,00.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ China Bans Computer Game Accused Of Distorting History AFP China has banned a Swedish-made computer game accused of "distorting history and damaging China's sovereignty," by showing Manchuria, Tibet and Xinjiang as independent nations, state press said. The computer game, "Hearts of Iron", made by the Stockholm-based games developer Paradox Entertainment, also showed Taiwan as a part of Japan, Xinhua news agency said, citing a censorship committee under the Ministry of Culture. "All these severely distort historical facts and violate China's gaming and Internet service regulations," the ministry said. "The game should be immediately prohibited." All websites are banned from releasing the game and copies of the game on CD-ROM will be confiscated. Sellers will be punished, it said. Internet bars that provide downloads of the game or fail to stop surfers who download, install or play the game, will be fined or even ordered to stop business, it said. Earlier this year gaming regulators ordered all copies of a Norwegian-made computer game to be pulled off store shelves after alleging it "smeared" China's national image. "Project IGI2: Covert Strike" was accused of blackening Beijing and the Chinese army's image by featuring a freelance mercenary stealing intelligence and conducting sabotage in China. The mercenary fights in the game are across three linked campaigns in the former Soviet Union, Libya and China. With the popularity of the Internet, computer games have become a booming industry in China. In 2002, computer games pulled in earnings of 910 million yuan (110 million dollars), according to a report by state-run television station CCTV's website. Analysts predict growth in the industry will be enormous with rising demand and the improvement of the broadband network and domestic game developers. China's previous attempts to control burgeoning Internet use has been targeted at politically sensitive messages or essays in online discussions forums, websites and emails. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040529/323/eutem.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Copyright Lawsuit In China The Music Copyright Society of China has filed a music copyright lawsuit against the local handset manufacturer, Capitel accusing the company of using copyrighted music for ringtones without permission of the copyright holder. Last June, the MCSC says that it discovered three Capitel cell phones (C6088C6088AC6288) were using ringtones based on "Liang Zhu" or "Butterfly Lovers," two well-known pieces of Chinese music. According to the MCSC, Chen Gang and He Zhanhao, the co-composers of "Butterfly Lovers," who are also members of the MCSC, never authorized Capitel to use the song. MCSC claims that Capitel violated the music copyright for the two songs, as well as infringing on the composers' intellectual property rights (IPR). "The court has accepted the case, and MCSC is now negotiating with Capitel for a justified compensation," Ma Jichao, Director of the MCSC's Licensing Department, told Interfax in an interview. The music copyright society of china (MCSC) was established on December 17,1992,and was initiated by Chinese musicians? association and the national copyright administration of china. The MCSC has become the only officially recognized, non-profitable social organization of collective administration of music copyright, in china. http://www.cellular-news.com/story/11184.shtml ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ China Closes Down 16,000 Internet Cafes In Three Months AFP China has closed 16,000 Internet cafes in the past three months, as a campaign to protect its 367 million children and adolescents from corrosive influences picks up steam, state media said. The number of cafes forced to cease operations was reported by the Xinhua news agency and suggests a much more comprehensive drive to control a once-thriving industry than previously believed. A month ago, Xinhua said a total of 8,600 unlicensed Internet cafes had been shut down since February. China has long seemed divided on how to deal with the Internet, since on the one hand it holds huge potential for the economy, while on the other it poses a risk to the communist regime by making information more freely available. In recent months, the Chinese leadership appears to have decided to err on the side of caution, partly as a result of a new push to raise the ethical standards of the young. This new drive, which makes daily front-page news in the state newspapers, has targeted not just the Internet, but also the mass media, as TV stations have been ordered to air "healthier" programs to their youthful audiences. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040602/323/ev1ci.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ China Unveils National IPR Strategy As Latest Pirated Films Arrive AFP China has unveiled a national strategy aimed at beefing up intellectual property rights (IPR) protections even as pirated versions of latest Hollywood blockbusters like 'Troy' and 'Shrek 2' were available in Beijing stores. It normally only takes days for Chinese pirates to get versions of the latest Hollywood releases into the shops despite the repeatedly stated determination of the government to crackdown on the practice. In an effort to beef up existing schemes to protect IPR, the government has put in place a new national strategy which will begin with an education campaign, Zhang Qin, deputy commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office, told the China Daily. "The national IPR strategy will include an educational programme to deepen IPR knowledge among officials of ministerial and provincial levels," the newspaper said. Foreign companies and governments are becoming increasingly frustrated with the continuing problems of piracy and counterfeiting in China, which leads to billions of dollars of losses each year. In his annual report on the practices of its main trading partners, US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick in April criticized China for failing to protect IPR, saying enforcement of relevant laws was "seriously inadequate". Despite periodic campaigns, "counterfeiting and piracy remain rampant", the report said. The US estimates the value of counterfeit goods in China at 19-24 billion dollars, with losses to US companies exceeding 1.8 billion dollars a year. One of China's commitments to the World Trade Organization is that intellectual property rights have to be better protected. Yet despite the public destruction of DVDs and CDS, piracy and other IPR infringements remain rampant, with not just fake music and video discs readily available but all manner of brand- named goods. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040603/323/ev4er.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ India Mumbai Police Gag Hinduunity.Org Priya Ganapati Key Internet service providers, including Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, India's largest ISP with more than 800,000 subscribers, have blocked access to a web site, www.hinduunity.org The web site is run by a Hindu activist from the US, Rohit Vyasmaan, and logs about 17,000 hits a day. The site has been blocked on the basis of a request from the Mumbai police commissioner's office in a letter sent out to ISPs on April 28. Sources at the Mumbai police commissioner's office said the directive was issued because the web site published inflammatory material against Islam. Joint Commissioner of Police (crime) Dr Satyapal Singh, a decorated officer of the Indian Police Service, authorised the note. "They will go to great lengths to obliterate Hinduism, Hindu pride and Hindu culture from India," Vyasmaan wrote in an e-mail. "Today HinduUnity.org stands as a major roadblock to anti-Hindu forces. Patriotic Hindu youth are coming together by the power of the Internet and finding the truth behind the dark clouds of misinformation, propaganda and media-controlled brainwashing. HinduUnity.org flourishes as one of the major web sites that promotes Hindu defence, pride and patriotism." The police commissioner's office countered that the web site was blocked on the basis of a complaint registered against it in Latur, Maharashtra. Details of the complaint are currently unavailable. VSNL, India's largest ISP, has been quick to implement the request. It has blocked the web site, rendering it inaccessible to subscribers. Despite repeated attempts, VSNL officials were unavailable for comment. Apart from VSNL, a host of smaller ISPs like Hathway and HCL Infinet also complied with the police request. But one ISP has stood its ground. Sify, which claims to have 700,000 Internet subscribers, says it has not blocked the web site because the order to do so has not come from the right authority. "Only CERT has the right to issue such an order," said Sify spokesman David Appasamy. "In case they do, we have no option but to comply. When we got the request from the police commissioner's office, we spoke to them and explained that we could block the site only if the order came from CERT." CERT, or the Computer Emergency Response Team, which comes under the department of information technology in New Delhi, is the authority for issuing orders to Indian ISPs to block web sites. In September 2003, CERT issued an order to block a Yahoo! e-group for allegedly carrying anti-India messages. Sify, meanwhile, has spoken to CERT about the Mumbai police commissioner's request. The ISP has been told that CERT is "processing" the request. The HinduUnity.org site has faced problems in the past too. The site posts messages and content against Muslims in a significant way. Its pages also have interpretations of Indian history offensive to Muslims, verses from the Koran that try to present the religion as bloodthirsty, and other anti-Muslim statements, presented from a Hindutva point of view. Vyasmaan says he started the web site in March 2000 with the aim of "moulding the minds of young Hindus to take the initiative and responsibility towards a better India by making them completely selfless in their duties towards their motherland." In 2001, the site's then host in the US, Addr.com, received complaints about the site and shut it down. The blocking of the web site in India has raised questions about the freedomof expression available online to Indians. Earlier, the blocking of the Yahoo! e-group raised a furore online. Last September, the e-group called kynhun was blocked for allegedly carrying anti- national messages. http://us.rediff.com/news/2004/may/26hindu.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Korea Lawfirm Brings Charges Against Netizens for Copyright Infringement According to a report by Munhwa Ilbo on Thursday, Dongnyuk Law firm plans to bring charges against 20 Korean Internet users for violating copyright laws. Those netizens are accused of downloading and sharing singer Baek Ji-youngs music video Concert for Adults and several movies -including Kill Bill 2, The Grudge 2, and Shin Yukiguni- on the Internet without permission. The law firm is entrusted in dealing with criminal lawsuits relating to copyright infringement by Digitalprizm, the copyright holder of Baek Ji-youngs music video; Taewon Entertainment, the company that imported Kill Bill 2 and The Grudge 2; and Hanmaek Entertainment, the representative company for the Korean Film Producer Association. The Munhwa Ilbo report cited the firms lawyer Jo Myun-sik saying, We confirmed that as many as 3,500 Korean Internet users have violated the copyright law. We sent the certification of contents to a 100 of them, and we are initiating procedures to negotiate with them. But 20 refused to negotiate, so we made criminal complaints against them. The certification of contents states, In return for not being sued, elementary, middle and high school students should pay W100,000, university students W300,000 and adults W500,000 in compensation. Jo also said, Bringing charges against Internet users was a desperate countermeasure to raise awareness about copyright infringement throughout society. Without improving the institution, we cannot help but sue individual Internet users. The Korea Recording Industry Association plans to ask the Cyber Terror Response Center to investigate 10 Internet users who share MP3 files through online storage services and Internet portal sites. The Association once filed copyright violation complaints against 50 Internet users for using Soribada, a service provider of P2P (person to person file sharing), with the Cyber Crime Investigation Department of Seoul Central Public Prosecutors' Office last December. Meanwhile, since the Internet users are faced with lawsuits from the copyright holders, they established an Internet cafι called The Group for Impeaching the Law Firm Dongnyuk, on April 28 to discuss countermeasures for the criminal lawsuits and contents certification brought against them, reported Munhwa Ilbo. http://english.chosun.com/w21data/ht...405270042.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Holland Eminem Wins Case Against Dutch Online Retailer A court in the Hague ruled in favour of Eminem in a case the popular 28-year-old American rap and hip- hop artist brought against Ramshorn BV, a Dutch online company. Ramshorn, whose website offers cheap and rare CDs by artists like Eminem, was charged with copyright and trademark violations. Cases cited included the CDs Eminem is Back and All Stars Eminem - The Greatest Hits. The first contains tracks that had been rejected for release. The other has a misleading title - considering that it only contains covers of Eminems songs. All of this was done without the artists approval, the court was told. In addition to immediately ending the sale of the illegal Eminem CDs, Ramshorn was also ordered by the court to place a rectification notice on the companys website. Furthermore, the retailer was required to send, within seven days, a letter to all its clients who had purchased the CDs, stating the courts decision and requesting that they return the CDs (for which clients would receive back the original price, plus postage). Failure to comply could result in a daily fine of 25,000, and 7,500 for each breach of a series of restrictions stipulated by the court. "We won on just about every point," said the Dutch lawyer for Eminem. Ramshorn is reviewing its options. "The company sells CDs through the internet, just like other record shops. However, we first need to further study the verdict," said the lawyer for the defense. http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=1916 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dutch Gov't Wants to Shutdown Pirate Radio Before It Can be Legalized dsolomonoff On May 23, The Dutch government auctioned off radio frequencies to the highest bidders as part of their new Zerobase Radio Frequency Policy. As a result only the biggest, most commercially and mainstream oriented stations are able to exploit Dutch radio frequencies for the eight year term of the licenses. The auction was preceded by "Project Etherflits" in March -- a crackdown on pirate radio stations which are technically illegal but were previously tolerated. Studio equipment was confiscated and large fines imposed on the operators. Most stations have now been forced off the air. The ZeroBase Policy acknowledges only two kinds of radio: public and commercial. Any radio formats that don't fit within either of these categories have in effect become criminal organizations and can never be granted a legal broadcasting permit. And even the most successful pirate stations don't have the financial or legal resources required to apply for a legal permit if they were allowed to do so under the current policy. Now the mayor of Amsterdam has granted permission to use police and riot- control forces to get rid of the country's last remaining Free Radio stations. Radio 100 Radio Patapoe and Radio de Vrije Keyser are all based in Amsterdam. On Monday February 9th the Telecom authorities tried to raid Radio Patapoe. Their attempt failed because they were unable to locate the transmitting equipment but they promised to return. Some pirate FM broadcasters in the Netherlands have been known to use netcasting as a remote link to a transmitter at a different location. While I don't know that any of the Amsterdam stations use this method it raises interesting legal complications. The people in the studio aren't violating any laws because they're netcasting. If someone is rebroadcasting their internet feed, they could conceivably claim ignorance of that operation. The justification for the crackdown has been the prevention of interference with licensed broadcasters. Ironically the Dutch government was so anxious for space to be found for additional commercial stations - meaning extra revenue - that interference between licensed radio stations has become a serious problem in many areas of the country. Due to poor planning on the part of the government access to existing transmitters for powerful commercial stations has been allocated very poorly. And there is a shortage of suitable sites in the Netherlands where broadcast transmitters can be installed without falling foul of planning and environmental regulations. But since radio pirates transmit at unused frequencies and without interference (owing to their limited range) they do not interfere with commercial broadcasters -- except to compete for listeners -- as Telecom officials admit in the case of Radio Patapoe. Until 1964 there were no legal commercial radio or television stations in the Netherlands and the government programming was extremely limited. Free Radio culture in the Netherlands has played an important role in filling that gap, as well as providing a base of operations for stations that have broadcasted to England and the rest of Europe. From the sixties (when they were the first to play the new underground rock and offer countercultural news) through the eighties and nineties when they gave extensive airplay to techno, electronic and world musics, they remain innovative, popular and highly valued as an important cultural and political resource. There has already been a huge outcry, including pressure from The Dutch Christian Democrats (CDA), the party led by Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende, who have introduced a a motion urging that space be found on the airwaves for Dutch pirate radio stations. It appears that a majority of members of the Dutch lower house agree with him. Several other political parties have expressed their support for the CDA position. Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst has reluctantly agreed to investigate easily accessible ways to give permits to local free frequencies. Yet the phenomenon itself, with its importance to a healthy democracy, is about to disappear. It will be hard to get back once it's gone. Radio Patapoe is requesting letters in support of their continued existence which can be used to make the case for legalization of pirate radio. Letters can be sent to patapoe@freeteam.nl http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/27/115517/137 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ireland Emergency Law To Prevent Copyright Threat To Joyce Show The Government is bringing emergency legislation before the Seanad today to ensure that a major exhibition of James Joyce's work is not blocked by a copyright dispute. The Government paid 12.6 million in 2001 for more than 500 sheets written by Joyce, including drafts of eight episodes of Ulysses as well as proofs of Finnegans Wake. The material will form the centrepiece of the National Library's James Joyce and Ulysses exhibition, due to open on June 14th. The biggest staged by the National Library, it will mark Bloomsday 1904, the day on which the events described in Ulysses take place. However, Mr Stephen Joyce, the author's grandson, has warned the library that the exhibition could breach copyright legislation. His intervention created significant problems, the library's acting director, Mr Aongus Σ hAonghusa, acknowledged to The Irish Times last evening. "It is a shot across the bows. We have no option but to keep going until somebody tells us to stop. (But) it makes the holding of the exhibition problematic," he declared. The threat to the exhibition has been caused by the 2000 Copyright Act which creates a doubt about its ability to display manuscripts bought by the State because the Joyce estate still holds copyright. Discussions have taken place involving the library, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism. The Government will today bring the Copyright and Related Rights (Amendment) Bill 2004 before the Seanad to deal with the library's difficulties. It "will remove any doubt as to the right of any person to place literary or artistic works protected by copyright or copies thereof on public exhibition without committing a breach of copyright", according to an explanatory memorandum of the legislation. The author's grandson has frequently had difficult relationships with people seeking to publish extracts from Joycean works, threatening legal action on numerous occasions. Last year, he warned the organisers of the Bloomsday centenary festival, "Rejoyce Dublin 2004" and the Government that he would sue for any breach of the estate's copyright. The warnings, which were delivered to RTΙ and others, ended plans for public readings of Ulysses and a proposal by the Abbey Theatre to stage Joyce's play, Exiles. Copyright on Joyce's works ran out on December 31st, 1991, 50 years after his death. However, EU regulations revived copyright from July 1995 when it extended the lifetime of copyright to 70 years. http://home.eircom.net/content/irela...view=Eircomnet ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Web Users To Gain Creative Commons Access To The BBC Graeme Wearden The BBC's decision to let British surfers download TV footage and share it between friends could help to drive broadband and the take-up of new, faster PCs The BBC has given a major boost to the Creative Commons movement this week by revealing how it plans to open up its archive of broadcasting material to UK Internet users. The corporation has decided to allow surfers to download, distribute and modify digital clips of BBC television programmes through an initiative called the Creative Archive. While users won't be allowed to resell the material, they will enjoy increased access to content that many potential users effectively paid the BBC to create through their licence fees. A Creative Commons licence allows content creators to dictate whether or not anyone can copy their own work, creative derivative works from it, or use it for commercial purposes. It is an attempt to create a middle-ground rather than making content owners choose between putting something fully into the public domain or controlling it tightly through copyright. This move has been warmly welcomed by Professor Lawrence Lessig, chair of the Creative Commons project, who has played a major role in driving the Creative Commons agenda for several years. Professor Lessig believes the Creative Archive could give a massive boost to Britain's digital content market, and could also encourage more people to take up a high-speed Internet connection and a faster PC. "The announcement by the BBC of its intent to develop a Creative Archive has been the single most important event in getting people to understand the potential for digital creativity, and to see how such potential actually supports artists and artistic creativity," said Professor Lessig. "If the vision proves a reality, Britain will become a centre for digital creativity, and will drive the many markets in broadband deployment and technology that digital creativity will support," he added. The BBC plans to open up the Creative Archive this autumn. Initially, users will just get access to clips from factual programmes but Corporation expects to add more types of content in the future. "Should we be successful with our approach," says Paula Le Dieu, Joint Director, BBC Creative Archive, "we may be able to release, over time, more programme genres sport, music, drama and possibly longer formats to the public. "We can build on the initial factual clips offered at launch by the BBC Creative Archive and offer a new public asset drawn from broadcast content for the whole UK." At this stage, though, the BBC hasn't revealed precise details of the Creative Commons licence that it will use. It's also not clear how, or even if, it will restrict access to UK licence-fee payers. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040527/152/eunor.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Belgian Court Denies Complaint Over CD TPMS ILN News Letter EDRI reports that the Belgian court of Brussels has rejected a complaint launched by the consumer organisation Test-Achats against four record companies in Belgium over their use of technical copy protection measures. Test-Achats demanded that the companies stop using technical measures on their CDs and remove all copy-controlled CDs on the market. The judge ruled that copyright legislation does allow for a private copy, but does not grant a "right" to do so. Test-Achats plans to appeal. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Czechoslovakia Movie Download Service Sparks Net Battle Cesky Telecom's new product called unfair, illegal by competition Lenka Ponikelska If you want to avoid the legal ambiguities of using Kaaza, Limewire or Edonkey servers, there is now a way to download music and movies here and have them charged to you Cesky Telecom (CT) launched a new service called Starzone May 13. It allows customers to download movies, songs and TV shows for fees ranging from 35 Kc to 60 Kc ($1.30 to $2.30) as part of a new product called Internet Express that offers Internet connections at a maximum speed of 1,024 kilobits per second. The company is also considering branching out into books, CDs and other retail areas. "Apart from offering a fast Internet connection, we also wanted to offer content to go with it, and an entertainment portal was an obvious choice," said David Duron, CT's chief marketing officer. But Starzone may face some problems. Competitors are already crying foul that the company violated fair-use laws by launching the service without offering it wholesale to other telecommunications companies, and a complaint has been filed with the European Commission. Computer experts also warn that customers could find that the service does not always live up to its promised speed. Starzone so far offers a selection of 130 movies that can be downloaded and played either once or for a 24-hour period depending on price. The company is also considering adding erotic movies to attract men between the ages of 40 and 45, a demographic group with a low number of Internet users. The company says its payment system also makes the service attractive for customers. "In contrast to payment through the Internet we introduced a much more convenient way to pay via the telephone bill," Duron says. With 3.6 million customers, CT has a unique tool to provide for all kinds of online purchases. Starzone and Internet Express are expected to bring in hundreds of millions of crowns in revenue, and the company is considering expanding. "We will keep widening the offer of movies and music," Duron said. "But we plan to soon introduce other goods that are often purchased through the Internet, like books and CDs, for example. "Right now we are negotiating with a major company that runs shopping online, and we expect to sign the contract by the end of the week," Duron said without naming the company. Despite the early success, however, CT may have to deal with a legal battle from competitors. The future of Starzone could rest with the courts and a number of government oversight agencies that have been asked to look into the product. Telecommunications providers Nextra and Tiscali are already arguing that CT is violating the rules of fair competition by launching Internet Express. Nextra claims it did not receive a wholesale offer that would allow it to set up a similar service. Another service provider, Tiscali, has already filed a complaint to the European Commission and the Czech Telecommunications Office and has asked the Anti-Monopoly Office to postpone the launch of Internet Express until CT provides other operators with an equal wholesale offer. "It is in Tiscali's interest to offer this product to its users, but we cannot do so under the conditions provided by Cesky Telecom," a Tiscali press release stated May 13. Duron said the reactions only confirm the attractiveness and competitiveness of Internet Express. "Other telecommunication operators have all the means and the contracts to offer a competitive service," Duron said. "It looks as if they were trying to slow down the development of the Internet." Both sides have been down this road before. In 2002 the Czech Anti-Monopoly Office fined CT 23 million Kc for launching IOL Platinum high-speed Internet service without offering it to other licensed operators. The decision is not yet final. CT, however, is confident that will not be the case with Internet Express. "Internet Express was launched and prepared in accordance with the law and the rules of the Czech Telecommunications and Anti-Monopoly offices that we are obliged to follow," said Vladan Crha, spokesman for CT. If CT fends off the assault by the competition, it could face customer criticism if Internet Express does not live up to the hype. Stanislav Sochor, a technician with Pramacom, a radio communication service company, said CT promises the fastest speed but does not guarantee it. After a customer receives 1 gigabyte of data, the download speed varies. CT acknowledges the slowdown as a part of the fair-use policy and said it would affect only 1 to 2 percent of customers. http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2004/Art/0527/busi5.php ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Australia Region Mods Safe In FTA Simon Hayes THE Federal Government has moved to reassure users of DVD players they will not be restricted by a regional encoding system. In the wake of the US-Australian free trade agreement, the Government has hinted it would introduce exceptions to a ban on circumvention devices. Senior officials have confirmed that the manufacture, distribution, sale and use of circumvention devices would be illegal under Australia's FTA commitments, but they have suggested exceptions would be made for viewers' legitimate material. Australian copyright law bans the distribution of circumvention devices, but not their use, and DVDs are encoded for regions in an attempt to restrict their sale around the world. Officials told a Senate committee examining the FTA that the Government was looking at whether it could "introduce exceptions" to technological protection measures outlined in FTA negotiations. "We have also been very careful to ensure that we maintain the ability to put in place exceptions where we regard those to be appropriate to the Australian circumstance," Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade lead negotiator Toni Harmer said. "If the copyright owner were considered to be acting in some way that was considered anti-competitive they would still be subject to the provisions of the Trade Practices Act." Ms Harmer said some lobbyists had suggested introducing US-style regulation in Australia, but "what may be appropriate in the US may not be appropriate in Australia". Simon Cordina, acting general manager of the Department of Communications IT and the Arts intellectual property branch, said it was "unlikely" the FTA would outlaw multi- zone DVD players. The new copyright restrictions will be phased in over two years, allowing the Government to craft exceptions. The regulations would need parliamentary approval. The committee also discussed the potential for television broadcasters to use digital rights management information to restrict copying of programs. http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html |
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03-06-04, 06:52 PM
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,017
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'Pirate Act' Raises Civil Rights Concerns
Declan McCullagh File swappers concerned about getting in trouble with record labels over illegal downloads may soon have a major new worry: the U.S. Department of Justice. A proposal that the Senate may vote on as early as next week would let federal prosecutors file civil lawsuits against suspected copyright infringers, with fines reaching tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The so-called Pirate Act is raising alarms among copyright lawyers and lobbyists for peer-to-peer firms, who have been eyeing the recording industry's lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer users with trepidation. The Justice Department, they say, could be far more ambitious. One influential proponent of the Pirate Act is urging precisely that. "Tens of thousands of continuing civil enforcement actions might be needed to generate the necessary deterrence," Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said when announcing his support for the bill. "I doubt that any nongovernmental organization has the resources or moral authority to pursue such a campaign." The Pirate Act represents the latest legislative priority for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its allies, who collectively argue that dramatic action is necessary to prevent file-swapping networks from continuing to blossom in popularity. "We view this as a key component of an enforcement package," RIAA lobbyist Mitch Glazier said Tuesday. "If you're going to try to make sure that you have effective deterrence, then one of the tools you'll need is to make sure that prosecutors have flexibility." Foes of the Pirate Act have been alarmed by the unusual alacrity of the proposal's legislative progress. It was introduced just two months ago, on March 25, and not one hearing was held before the Judiciary committee forwarded it to the full Senate for a vote a month later. "This was an attempt to move it in a stealthy manner," said Philip Corwin, a lobbyist for Sharman Networks, which operates the Kazaa network. "I can't imagine that (Hollywood lobbyist) Jack Valenti or (RIAA chairman) Mitch Bainwol really wants to come before Congress and give testimony saying, 'We can't afford to bring these lawsuits. That's why we want the taxpayer to pay for them.' I can't believe they want to do that in public." Potential P2P prosecutions Underlying the public jockeying over the Pirate Act is a classic political war of wills between the federal government's legislative and executive branches. Under a 1997 law called the No Electronic Theft Act, federal prosecutors can file criminal charges against peer-to-peer users who make a large number of songs available for download. A July 2002 letter from prominent congressmen to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft urged the prosecution of Americans who "allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks." But not one peer-to-peer criminal prosecution has taken place in the United States. The Justice Department has indicated that it won't target peer-to-peer networks for two reasons: Imprisoning file-swapping teens on felony charges isn't the department's top priority, and it's always difficult to make criminal charges stick. The Pirate Act was crafted to respond to the Justice Department's concern. "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," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in March. "Prosecutors can rarely justify bringing criminal charges, and copyright owners have been left alone to fend for themselves, defending their rights only where they can afford to do so. In a world in which a computer and an Internet connection are all the tools you need to engage in massive piracy, this is an intolerable predicament." The RIAA's Glazier said: "The idea was to give prosecutors the flexibility to decide whether to bring a civil case against somebody. Giving them a criminal fine with a criminal record was viewed as a fairly harsh penalty for the activity...You're still committing a crime. But (prosecutors) are given a flexible remedy so there's some proportionality." For copyright holders, there's an additional bonus. Unlike when the RIAA files its own lawsuits against peer-to-peer users, such as the 493 defendants it announced this week, the Justice Department likely would be able to seek wiretaps to collect evidence about P2P infringement. Current wiretap law says electronic communications may be intercepted when a potential federal felony is being investigated. "Corporate copyright welfare" In addition, the Pirate Act gives Ashcroft six months to "develop a program to ensure effective implementation and use of the authority for civil enforcement of the copyright laws" and report back to Congress on how many civil lawsuits have been filed. The Justice Department would receive an extra $2 million for the fiscal year beginning in October. "It represents yet another point in another very long line of major corporate copyright interests pushing for and receiving what amounts to significant corporate welfare," said Adam Eisgrau, a lobbyist for the P2P United trade association. "This legislation literally offloads the cost of enforcing copyrights traditionally borne by the copyright holder onto the federal government and therefore the taxpayers." Last week, the Pirate Act had been considered for a floor vote under a process normally restricted for noncontroversial measures. But the vote didn't happen, which one foe of the bill attributed to opposition from Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota. Coleman has slammed the RIAA in the past for going too far in its fierce legal campaign against individual file swappers. A representative was unable to confirm Tuesday whether Coleman had placed a "hold" on the bill. Critics also charge that the Pirate Act may invent a form of double jeopardy: It would let the RIAA sue the same people already sued by the Justice Department. "The kinds of things we have a double-jeopardy doctrine to prevent seem to be implicated by the bill," said Jessica Litman, author of "Digital Copyright" and a law professor at Wayne State University. "I find it disturbing that the committee reported this out without at least having a hearing to consider some of the alternatives." The RIAA points out that the bill does limit damages it can collect in a subsequent lawsuit, but opponents of the proposal said they weren't convinced. "Why should someone be sued by the government and then be subject to a second lawsuit brought by a private party?" said Corwin, the Sharman Networks lobbyist. "The RIAA is settling most of these lawsuits. What's the Justice Department's policy going to be?" http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5220480.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Study: DVRs 'Recapture' 96% Of TV Ad Zapping Joe Mandese Digital video recorders (DVR) typically are seen as the ultimate threat to TV advertising, giving consumers unsurpassed control over what they choose to watch or not watch on their TV sets, including TV commercials. And while it is true that most DVR subscribers do fast-forward through TV commercials when watching programming in replay mode, new research indicates that the net effect of DVRs actually increases the likelihood that viewers will see a TV commercial not decrease it. The report, "Demystifying Digital Video Recorders," jointly published by InsightExpress and MediaPost, was based on multiple online surveys of DVR and non-DVR adopters, and finds that DVRs create incrementally higher opportunities for viewers to watch TV advertising than those viewers who do not use DVRs. The main contributors to this incremental boost are the fact that DVR subscribers have a higher satisfaction level with TV and typically spend 24 percent more time watching TV during an average week. Most importantly, the research concludes that DVRs "recapture" TV commercial exposures that otherwise would have been "zapped" by non-DVR viewers. The study estimated that 51 percent of non-DVR viewers zap TV commercials, usually by using their remote control to change the channel when they come on. However, 96 percent of those viewers actually watch TV commercials when they become DVR subscribers, albeit in fast-forward mode. While such fast-forwarding clearly diminishes the communications effectiveness of TV commercials, the study found that most fast-fowarders "notice" TV commercials either "always" (15 percent) or "sometimes" (52 percent) while zipping through the spots. Moreover, some big ad agencies and digital TV developers are exploring methods that would digitally compress commercials in such a way that would enable an abbreviated real-time version of the spots to be viewed during fast-forwarding. As a result, the report concludes that DVRs actually recapture ad exposures or opportunities to see ads that would otherwise be lost from channel surfing in a non-DVR environment. The report also suggests some interactive upside for advertisers, noting that "DVRs provide the unique opportunity to expand today's broadcast advertising model. Interestingly, 37 percent of DVR users stated they would like to be able to request information form advertisers when viewing a commercial for a product or a product category of interest to them. Such an approach would be received twice as favorably as the current 15- or 30-second broadcast advertising model." DVRs May Be A Net Positive From An Ad Exposure Standpoint Before After Impact DVR DVR (Change) Weekly Viewing Hours 19.2 23.9 +24% TV Viewing Satisfaction 27% 37% +37% Ad Erosion Due To Fast-Forwarding -- -- -7% Recapture* Of 49% Viewers Who Zap Ads -- -- +96% http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_ne...?newsID=252619 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ringtones Left Out Of Digital Music Price Wars A recent price war has made Internet song downloads cheaper while the price tag on a mobile phone ringtone has barely budged, and in some cases, is creeping up, a new report on Tuesday said. The price discrepancy between downloads and ringtones -- those ubiquitous tuneful greetings programmed into millions of handsets -- can be laid squarely at the feet of record companies, according to London- based consultancy Informa Plc. The main culprit is the advent of so-called "sample" ringtones, the latest stereophonic tones pulled from actual studio recordings. They carry a price tag of as much as four times higher than the typical Internet download price in Western Europe -- a price gap that could prematurely stifle a promising ringtone business, Informa said. Record labels are demanding mobile operators and other ringtone resellers pay a royalty rate equivalent to between 25 percent and 55 percent of the total retail price for a "sample" ringtone, Informa said. "The reseller is really between a rock and a hard place," said Simon Dyson, a co- author of the report. "They are torn between raising the price or keeping it steady in the hopes of establishing a market." "Demanding such high percentage rates by the record companies could certainly lead to the market being depressed." Strong side business Ringtone sales have become a surprisingly strong side business for the music industry, one that is expected to grow to over $5.0 billion in 2007 from $3.0 billion in 2003, Informa predicted. But the problem for the piracy-battered music labels is that licensing restrictions have kept music labels out of the sector's early growth. With "sample" ringtones, the labels hope to cash in on the business. The "sample" tone's predecessors -- the monophonic and polyphonic tones -- are crude renditions of a sound recording. Royalty payments could be collected by artists and music publishers, usually at a rate of roughly 10 percent, but the labels were sidelined from the collection process. But "sample" ringtones, because they are often taken from studio renditions, can now be licensed by the labels too. As a result, prices for "sample" ringtones across Western Europe are on the rise, ranging from the equivalent of $1.38 from Web-based reseller F1-Live in Belgium to $7.35 from T-Mobile in Britain, Informa said. In contrast, song downloads tend to follow Apple Computer Inc. iTunes straightforward pricing model of 99 cents per track. In Europe, downloads are priced in the range of 0.99 euros ($1.20) or 99 pence ($1.79). Meanwhile, the increased competition in the download market has seen download services such as Britain's OD2 and Wippit discount the price of downloads. The more established ringtone market shows no sign of following suit, Informa said. http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/0...eut/index.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Lossy Audio: What's New And What's Good? m0rbidini This small article is about the new breed of lossy audio formats that emerged after MP3 hit the world in late 90s. Almost everyone has heard about MP3 and the way it changed how people listen to music. Even if the RIAA partially blames it for the drop in record sales, people just got used to having a more or less big number of songs on their computers, whether they come from legit online services, "evil" p2p networks or from the original CDs. But, in recent years, more formats have been developed and most of them correct some deficiencies that exist on MP3 (lack of a good standard tagging system, native gapless capability, need for higher bitrates to obtain transparency, built-in ReplayGain support, etc.). The most notorious are Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, WMA and ATRAC3. In the Second 128 kbps listening test by Roberto Amorim, the joint winners were aoTuV b2, (a third party tuning of Ogg Vorbis, which is 100% bitstream compatible with the reference encoder) and Musepack. The third place was taken by iTunes AAC closely followed by LAME MP3 (with a new VBR adjustment). WMA Standard came in fourth and in last was Sony's ATRAC3. These last two results were no big surprise for most of the Hydrogenaudio community. Very few were expecting Vorbis to do this well on this test. That's because Xiph has been a bit slow updating its reference encoder and because it didn't win the first 128 kbps test by Roberto Amorim, which used the last official Vorbis encoder at the time. Since then, some Vorbis users took the matters in their own hands and started working on improving Vorbis. You can check the Recommended Vorbis encoders versions and settings thread in Hydrogenaudio. iTunes was chosen as the AAC encoder for this test because it won a previous 128 kbps test featuring only AAC encoders. AAC is an ISO standard and has the support of big companies like Apple, Ahead, AOL, Dolby, Fraunhofer and even Sony, among others. The good part of this is that it makes it easy to have hardware support for it (like Apple's iPod). The bad part is that AAC is mainly driven by corporate interests. The companies that support it put most of the development efforts in the low/mid bitrate area, where transparency (defined as the inability to distinct from the original source for almost everyone and under good conditions, preferably under blind testing) is impossible, with its current implementations. Vorbis already has a reasonable amount of hardware support and though it's more difficult to decode, a lot of the latest generation portable players (from Rio, iRiver, Neuros, etc) already support it. The first thing you can notice is that both winners are Open Source and patent free formats. They have been tuned and optimized with the help of the community supporting them. While Ogg Vorbis is well known and supported for a long time by the Open Source community, Musepack is mainly known by people with a more deep interest in lossy audio compression. It's known for targeting transparency with its standard preset, that results in lower bitrates than what is possible with other codecs, if you want them to achieve transparency as it was defined earlier. While low bitrates are not Musepack's main driving force, it managed to stay on top on all 128 kbps tests made recently. Even Vorbis doesn't scale so well in higher bitrates (there's a third party encoder that tries to solve this but doesn't succeed completely), but work in that direction may start soon. Musepack has all of the advantages mentioned in the first paragraph and it decodes faster than all of them (with one possible exception being ATRAC3). But hardware support is still lacking. But that may change soon as Peter Pawlowsky, the author of foobar2000, recently completed his work on a LGPL-licensed portable mpcdec library, which comes with floating and fixed-point math modes and performs at around 10x realtime on a Intel XScale 400Mhz and is even fast enough to bring MPC decoding to slower ARM chips like the iPod's ARMv4. AAC and MP3 are open standards but both are heavily patented and free binaries can't be legally distributed in most countries (check Via Licensing and mp3licensing.com for more details; there are subtle differences in the licensing schemes). This is another plus for Vorbis and Musepack. MP3 has already been tuned extensively and transparent results can be achieved using LAME's -standard and -extreme presets. AAC has a bigger potential to be transparent at lower bitrates, but its tuning is more complex and there are some problematic samples in which it fails, while Musepack has less problems, being the format with less known problematic samples and also the one that scales best in high bitrates (check this thread on Hydrogenaudio: High Bitrate Tests). WMA9 Standard is Microsoft's biggest bet on lossy audio encoding. All online music services that offer WMA files use this version and there's no portable support for the Pro version. When Microsoft introduced WMA8 one of their marketing phrases was "WMA8 achieves CD-quality sound at 64 kbps", which is obviously false. Not even WMA9 at 128 kpbs can achieve this, as many tests have shown. It is worse than AAC and even MP3 can beat it as this test showed. I find this kind of funny, since Microsoft always claimed WMA to be superior than MP3 (it is superior than MP3 in very low bitrates such as 48- 64 kbps, but these cannot match a decent 128 kbps MP3). It also shows how desperate MS is in trying to dominate the online services market. This test also showed that none of the formats can achieve transparency at 128 kbps yet. This is the bitrate that most online stores use. And while it may be sufficient for most people, I find the prices at which the songs are sold completely ridiculous (about $1 per song). They expect users to pay more or less the same price as Audio CDs (for full albums), for a product which is inferior and has DRM restrictions. So, this raises the following questions: Will online music services offer better quality files in the near future? Can Open Source and patent free technology, better than proprietary solutions, gain an acceptance outside the geek world? Why aren't there more companies adopting these Open Source solutions? The answer is yours. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/5/30/05011/4293 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Protecting Music By Destroying Records? Online Protesters vs. The Music Industry amino It was supposed to be a musical experiment when last december Brian Burton, aka 'DJ Danger Mouse' from White Plains, NY began remixing a contemporary rap album, Jay-Z's 'Black Album' with the 1968 'White Album' by the Beatles. On one hand, this turned into an interesting musical piece of work and a big media affair on the other: 'EMI Group', who are controlling rights to all Beatles Music owned by Capitol Records Incorporated, started sending 'cease and desist' letters to Danger Mouse himself, record stores and online shops like FatBeats, hiphopsite.com and ebay asking them to destroy all remaining copies of the remix album and to stop all distribution and sale. The 'Rolling Stone' wrote it was 'an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time' and the 'Boston Globe' called it the 'most creatively captivating' album of the year. It is questionable wether the 'Rolling Stone' or the 'Boston Globe' really know anything about Hiphop at all, but the remix album, which is taking its name 'Grey Album' from the two originals it used samples from, created a huge hype largely because of the fact that the music industry is trying to ban it. In total, approximatly 3000 copies of the album were pressed by Burton himself and sent to a number of record shops, which is common for underground dj's and usually not connected to the prospect of big revenues. But the tracks were popular and beginning to be played in clubs. The media hype regarding its illegal status further spured a demand and the album was being shared all over the net. Musically, the remixes are certainly interesting and some of them sound pretty good. However, a masterpiece it is not. How original could sampling the Beatles be? Especially in combination with a mediocre MC such as Jay-Z. Were it not an underground endeavor, certainly many would be hating it. But nonetheless, this scandal is exposing the questionable moral ground of the record industry and its profit-oriented copyright-fanatism. And it helps initiate an evaluation of the decade-long supression of musical creativity by the corporate world, which until now everyone took for granted. 1. What rational basis do corporations have in protecting copyrights on sonic airwaves? Because this is what music ends up being, even though it might temporarily be abstracted on an analog or digital data carrier. Musical notes, too, could be reduced to a very basic pattern which, once copyrighted, could stifle any further musical work with the help of legal enforcement. This doesn't happen as long as corporations do have an economic neccessity for expanding the definition of copyright, however, they will try to restrict anything that goes any further than their very own understanding of creative freedom and which is therefore likely to weaken their guarantee on profit. If the concept of copyright were put into an extreme, one could have protected the bit strings '10', '11', '01' and '00' and thereby claim rights on any successive digital data in the world. No state would allow this and noone in their right mind would think this justifiable. However, commonly practiced copyright is no less than a moderate form of this questionable claim on 'intellectual property'. It will only be enforced as long as current beneficiaries are able to interpret and enforce it for their own good. Or as long as social consensus allows for a restrictive form of exploitation of music and art (or intellectual product in general) to exist and dominate our culture. The non-existance or the non-enforcability of copyright would essentially put the very legitimacy of the socalled 'copyright controllers' in question. These are the main beneficiaries of the current state of an artificially created scarcity in goods, upheld per law (namely: the prevention of free copying of artistic or intellectual content), who would otherwise no longer be neccessary for actual distribution of content due to technological progress. The record companies' role as a distributor of music has long been replaced by their role as an uncompromising 'royalty collector', often against the will of the artists themselves. 2. What moral basis do musicians have to expect a guarantee on financial revenues through the duplication of their music? Nowadays, copies -especially in digital form- are created and distributed by the fan's extra effort at almost no additional cost at all. This helps ensure a bigger public exposure for the artist's work and a higher level of popularity, which in turn increases his/her prospect for paid for performances. And this, without the musician having to waste a lot of time thinking about distribution him/herself. What we have here is a distribution system that could hardly be any better in regard to artistic content: because it is the fans themselves who are becoming the distributors, those contents which are considered valuable by them will also be shared more; bad art (such as bad music) will be shared less. This would be a natural distribution system regulating the quantity of content by the people's judgement, not by the profit-driven motivation of big corporations and their concept of a centralized distribution scheme. 'Publishing' music means to make it publicly available. For example on a website or a filesharing network. The rest will be subject to demand. 3. Why should the music industry have a permanent right to continuous revenues? Over the past decades, the record industry has been cartellizing and exploiting their legally protected de-facto-monopoly in distribution of musical content, excercizing usury in media sales. I suggest, they have had revenues, which in a free media market they would otherwise never have been able to make. 4. Who ever asks the artists -especially once they're dead- if they'd really appreciate a rigid prosecution of copyright 'violators' as is common. Do they really have a big problem with their content being used for successive art? It is extremely doubtful wether Frank Zappa, Bob Marley or John Lennon would really be outraged by young artists reinterpreting their work by using parts of their music, especially for non-commercial, or less-commercial purposes. And even if so: these artists' piano melodies and guitar riffs are no more than bizarre sound fragments that had their inspirational origin who-knows-where, only to be captured on a volatile carrier at some point in time. Just like the noise of a river, they are to be put into public domain, because in the end, everything has a common physical and creative origin. Copyright protection is a temporary capital exploitation of artistic creativity by the profiteers of the present. 5. Shouldn't musicians and artists in general be happy about other people enjoying their art? Is it a personal quality to sue radio dj's and online fans for playing or sharing your music? As a musician, shouldn't you be making music so other people can listen to it? Commonly, after a live show, artists bow before the audience to thank them for accepting their art. It would be appropriate for musicians to thank people for listening to their music instead of suing them or prohibiting them from listening to it. The audience's gratitude, often in the form of money, is a reward the artist has to put effort into. But he or she, just like a street musician, has no preemptive right on payment. Many freelance musicians on the net are now offering paypal accounts to upload money to. I'm not sure if this works, however, it is still self-explanatory for people to pay entrance fees at live performances because there, musicians are almost playing for you personally and there is a visible live effort. Another good way for musicians to make money is to press their own records and offer them in exchange for money, believe it or not. Or to organize in labels or art collectives to make production and sale of their records possible. This makes a lot of sense especially for artists whose music is so underground you cannot even find it on filesharing systems; and of course for dj's working with vinyl. This way, there is still money to be made without the need to be restrictive; neither to sign with a major label. Simple copying and sharing of music, digitally or analogically, usually is no extra effort on the artist's part, quite to the contrary: it is usually an extra effort on part of the fan who even spends money on bandwidth and computer resources to enable others to be exposed to the artist's music, while at the same time helping different industries grow and prosper - that of the internet service provider and related ones. If big record companies think they have to sue even the last teenager for sharing their music online, it will have a predictable effect on the global music scene in that people will stick to sharing only alternative and independent music instead of corporate music. The majority of all music worldwide has no corporate affiliation, and usually, it is of better quality than whatever the majors can offer, too. 6. Finally, do we really need rules for art? Is it really neccessary to subject every sample, cover version, public performance, copy, dissemination, listening and playing to fees and conditions? Is it desirable for society having to deal with license enforcement, 'cease and desist' letters and a parasitic secondary industry feeding on legal disputes when it comes to art? All this, so corporate executives and bigheaded pop stars can have a financial guarantee for their disproportionate lifestyles. Is it too much to ask wether so called 'professional' musicians could earn their money like everybody else and pursue music as a hobby and be happy when making a little bit off of it on the side, like so many people do? How much longer will it take for the public to realize that enforcing copyright does not protect the poor, independent artist, but the ones who are not in the need of being on the receiving end of legally backed subsidies. Once more, the much hated music industry, this time represented by EMI, will not make themselves popular in pretending to be protecting art and creativity by vigurously enforcing their concept of copyright, while at the same time demanding the ban and destruction of something as harmless as a cut-up 60's rock record remixed with contemporary rap acapellas. For Tuesday 24th of February 2004, the online initiative greytuesday.org organized a worldwide protest against banning the record and encouraged websites and radio stations to host and/or play it throughout the day. But why would you stick to playing it only for a day?.. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/24/124918/798 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Hollywood, Politics and File-Sharing Technology Jon Newton Sooner or later, the entertainment industry will realize that the only effective way to deal with peer-to-peer file- sharing technology is to embrace it. It's not going to go away. But until that happens, the file-sharers of the world will continue to provide all kinds of lucrative opportunities for lawyers to get into Hollywood's bottomless pockets, not to speak of all those surefire digital rights management technologies, copyright- protection scams, P2P filtering systems, pseudo-cops and spoofing operations. You name it. And when you do, don't forget the politicians. Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and a well-known supporter of all things Hollywood, last year expressed a serious interest in remotely destroying file swappers' computers. "No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," Randy Saaf of MediaDefender, one of the scalp-hunting services used by Hollywood to chase down file-sharers, was quoted as saying in a Wired News article. "I'm interested," Hatch interrupted in the story, saying that destroying somebody's PC might be "the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights." This earned him the sobriquet "terminator," after the murderous android portrayed by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the "Terminator" movie series. Pirate and Protect Acts Now Hatch's Hollywood-inspired kill-P2P bill, called the Pirate Act, amends federal copyright law so that the U.S. attorney general can "commence a civil action against any person who engages in conduct constituting copyright infringement." Short for Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation, the Pirate Act also "Directs the AG to develop a program to ensure effective implementation and use of the authority for civil enforcement of the copyright laws, including training programs for qualified personnel from the Department of Justice and United States attorneys offices." The Piract Act more properly would be called the Use Taxpayer Money to Protect Hollywood Profits Act. The Senate might even vote on it this week. Moreover, the Pirate Act will allow the Department of Justice to do what even the RIAA hasn't been able to do: use wiretaps to collect evidence against alleged copyright infringers -- thanks to another Hatch-supported measure, the Protect Act, named after Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today. Among other things, the Protect Act authorizes "the interception of wire, oral or electronic communications in the investigation of kidnaping [sic], sex trafficking, and sex offenses against children." Works for Hire The Protect Act so far has led to only one arrest. Under it, FBI agents attached a monitoring device to the suspect's phone line and tracked his Internet activity in real-time. With the wiretap in place, "it doesn't matter who you're dealing with, we're standing over the top of you watching everything that's going on," Ronald Wilczynski, the Sacramento FBI agent overseeing the probe, was quoted as saying. Hollywood is nothing if not inventive in finding ways to interpret legislation to suit its purposes, whatever they might be at any given moment. It's also adept at suborning police forces around the world into acting as unpaid enforcement agents. Operation FastLink, for example, had FBI agents raiding schools in Arizona looking for pirated digital movie and music files. And let's not forget the National Security Letters (NSLs) freely used by FBI agents to demand detailed information about people's private Net communications from ISPs, Web-based e-mail providers and other communications service providers. Flexible Prosecution? In the meantime, RIAA lobbyist Mitch Glazier was recently quoted as saying, "If you're going to try to make sure that you have effective deterrence, then one of the tools you'll need is to make sure that prosecutors have flexibility." Flexibility is Glazier's middle name. He was once chief counsel of the subcommittee on courts and intellectual property, and former chief of staff to Howard Coble, onetime chairman of the subcommittee. Glazier became infamous in 1999 after slipping the "sound recording" amendment into the completely unrelated Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, slated for safe passage through Congress. This made music recordings "works for hire" that in turn meant artists weren't able to get possession of their own masters. Naturally, the artists believed they'd been hung out to dry. Oversight Hearings The scandal led to an oversight hearing in May 2000, chaired by (you guessed it) Coble, who led off with the following statement: "As many of you know, this amendment has caused some to criticize my colleagues, my staff and me as having indulged in unfair, deceptive and sneaky behavior." Under the 1997 No Electronic Theft Act, federal prosecutors can file criminal charges against peer-to-peer users who make a large number of songs available for download. A July 2002 letter from prominent congressmen to Attorney General John Ashcroft urged the prosecution of Americans who allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks. But not one peer-to-peer criminal prosecution has taken place in the United States. The Justice Department has indicated it won't target peer-to-peer networks for two reasons: Imprisoning file-swapping teens on felony charges isn't the department's top priority; and it's always difficult to make criminal charges stick. Pirate Act Responds to Justice "The Pirate Act was crafted to respond to the Justice Department's concern. 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," Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) said in March. "Prosecutors can rarely justify bringing criminal charges, and copyright owners have been left alone to fend for themselves, defending their rights only where they can afford to do so," said Leahy. "In a world in which a computer and an Internet connection are all the tools you need to engage in massive piracy, this is an intolerable predicament." Critics also charge the act might invent a form of double jeopardy because it would let the RIAA sue the same people already sued by the Justice Department. But back to Hatch and Leahy: In the 2002 cycle, Hollywood supported Hatch to the tune of $175,332 and, so far in 2004, has pumped $157,860 into his coffers. Meanwhile, Leahy's top supporters for 2004 include Disney at $44,500, Viacom at $36,000, Time Warner at $28,250 and General Electric at $22,500. At $160,250, Leahy's top contributor in 2002 was, once again, Hollywood. And for 2004, he's so far chalked up $181,000. http://www.infoshop.org/inews/storie.../06/02/3245344 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Vaunted RIAA p2p 'Filter' Software p2pnet.net News For some time, now, the RIAA has been aggressively boosting a p2p software 'filter' which, as RIAA boss Mitch Bainwol tells anyone who'll listen, is the answer to unauthorised music sharing. In fact, so insistent is Bainwol that you could be forgiven for thinking maybe he and/or the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) have invested in Audible Magic, the company that makes the 'filter,' called the CopySense Network Appliance. Audible Magic has been, "making the rounds of Washington, D.C., legislative and regulatory offices for the last month, showing off technology it says can sit inside peer-to-peer software and automatically stop swaps of copyrighted music from artists such as Britney Spears or Outkast," says a March CNET story here. And helping it make the rounds was, and presumably still is, Bainwol. "Audible Magic says it can identify copyrighted songs and block illegal downloads," says CNET. "Its technology is still being tested and could yet prove unworkable, but limited demos are turning heads in legislative offices." And there's the rub. "Limited demos" and "Still being tested." For months the members of the p2p industry trade group P2P United have been trying to get hold of a copy to test in the wild. Morpheus spokesman Brian O'Neal told p2pnet today that so far, none of the p2p operators have evenseen CopySense, let alone try it out. Six months ago P2P United hand-delivered a letter to RIAA boss Bainwol demanding access to the Audible Magic 'song-recognition software' being touted under the aegis of the RIAA. More than a week after the letter was delivered, the trade group members - BearShare, Blubster, e-Donkey, Grokster and Morpeus - still hadn't been able to conduct a hands-on trial although Bainwol disingenuously told CNET News he "would be delighted for them to do so". Audible Magic quotes RIAA svp of anti-piracy Frank Creighton as saying, "We have joined forces with trade associations and rights holders to combat the theft of intellectual property" and "Audible Magic's RepliCheck helps protect artists and our business from copyright infringement, and it takes a huge burden off our employees." The 'rights holders' Creighton is talking about are, of course, the Big Five record labels, which own the RIAA in the first place. And the 'trade associations' are other RIAA-like enforcement organs - also owned by Big Music. CopySense, "has evolved from Audible Magic's RepliCheck service, which has become an anti-piracy industry standard in the CD/DVD replication business," says Audible Magic. One weakness of the filter ...In the meanwhile, a p2pnet reader sent us a .pdf with summaries of four articles which have recently appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. One of them, dated April 16, is slugged Universities Test Controversial Filter to Fight Online Piracy and reads: "This article examines the use of another technique to stop students from engaging in illegal file sharing: a filter called CopySense Network Appliance, which is sold by the company Audible Magic. Central Washington University is one institution that is testing the filter on its residence-hall network. Unlike Icarus, the filter does not identify individual offenders; instead, it identifies illegal file transfers and cancels them before they can be completed. One weakness of the filter is that it can only identify and cancel the transfer of songs that exist in its database of copyrighted works (currently about four million songs." That the 'filter' is still being tested suggests its abilities aren't proven, even though it must be at least a year since it was written. That being so: How are the RIAA and Audible Magic justified in claiming the CopySense Network Appliance is ready for use in real-world, commercial situation? When the number of copyrighted works the software can recognise- four million - equals the number of people who are logged onto p2p networks at any given moment (four million) and at least one billion files are downloaded every month, how can the software have any kind of effect on a practice the multi-billion dollar music industry claims is "devastating" it? We'll leave out the question of how the Central Washington University (or any other teaching institution) justifies the fact it's testing a commercial device. Stay tuned. http://p2pnet.net/story/1585 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Aurors Blanket Cinemas But Dark Forces Prevail David Haber In widely covered news stories the past few days, in an attempt to thwart piracy of the latest Harry Potter movie, Warner Bros. has let it be known that cinemas all across the UK (and presumedly in the US when the film opens this Friday) will be using theatre employees with futuristic military-type night-vision goggles to try and catch patrons attempting to the tape the movie with hand-held cameras. This is a first for the UK cinema industry, although the tactic has already been used in the US recently for at least two movies for which the industry felt there was a piracy threat. Jamie Graham, who runs the Vue Complex in Ellesmere Port, northern England, told CNN, "Our ushers are using the goggles in every screening to check nobody is making any illegal recordings. If anybody is caught they will be reported to the police." However, an observer outside of the movie industry might wonder why all the fuss, especially in the light of information made public by IT Innovations and Concepts in Canada, a company which analyzes and reports on worldwide digital piracy. According to ITIC, various qualities and versions (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian...) of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban were already propagating around the internet via P2P (peer-to-peer) networks at a rate of 318,592 downloads per hour a full six days before the worldwide theatrical premiere, with the number of downloaders continually growing all around the world. And as of Sunday May 30, the day the movie premiered in London, ITIC says Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban pirate downloads reached rates close to a million per hour. It is unknown where the copies on the net of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban originated, but it would appear it was not a cinema-goer taping the movie from the audience, since pirate copies of the movie on the internet predate any public screenings. http://www.wizardnews.com/story.200406015.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In the Virtual Stacks, Pirated Books Find Eager Thumbs Sandeep Junnarkar EARLY in his undergraduate years at Indiana University, Joseph Ruesewald said, he had trouble finding the required titles for a couple of his classes at the local bookstores. When he tried ordering the books online, he learned it would take too long for delivery. Having come of age in the era of Napster, Kazaa and other file-sharing networks infamous as bazaars for pirated music, he knew exactly how to obtain the books - if not in his hands, at least for his computer's hard drive. Over the semesters, downloading books free and reading them on his monitor became routine, he said. He learned to adjust the screen color to off-white to help reduce eyestrain and depleted his university printing allotment by running off hundreds of pages at a time. "It became an alternative to going out and looking for the books in stores," said Mr. Ruesewald, 21, who graduated from the university's school of informatics last month. He emphasized that he had sought alternatives to downloading books without permission by turning to publishers that allow readers to view a book's pages one at a time. And he confesses to a sense of guilt over playing the role of a "leech.'' But "as a student, I was pretty broke and couldn't really afford $100 textbooks,'' Mr. Ruesewald said. "I had to turn to the Web for help." He is clearly not alone. While the music industry's effort to quash the trading of pirated songs over the Internet has attracted far more headlines, the unauthorized sharing of digitized books is proliferating in news groups, over peer-to-peer networks and in chat rooms. The activity is all the more striking because making a book available online is as cumbersome as ripping a CD is effortless. Each page must be scanned, run through optical character-recognition software and proofread before the complete work is uploaded to a network or transferred directly to a recipient. Yet a quick survey conducted with peer-to-peer file-sharing software revealed the digital availability of dozens of titles currently on the New York Times best-seller list, including "The Da Vinci Code," "The South Beach Diet" and, of course, hundreds of copies of any Harry Potter title. Even the official audio-book versions read by the authors or celebrities are easy to come by. Computer and technical books that can cost as much as $100 in print are also a mainstay. Other recesses of the Internet are also rich in illegally traded literature. A visit to a group called "#Bookz" on the Internet Relay Chat network revealed a multitude of titles being offered or sought every second. News groups like alt.books also draw a steady flow of visitors, like Steven Audette of Verona, a town in central New York known for its casino rather than its literary establishments. Mr. Audette said he had downloaded about 2,000 titles, including some duplicates in varying formats. "I download philosophy, religious, technical, engineering, science, sci-fi, horror, musical theory and almost anything but tawdry romance novels," said Mr. Audette, a 39-year-old father of two with a background in management and logistics. Mr. Audette said he had never felt pangs of conscience when downloading books although he sometimes buys a copy if he finds a book to be of great interest. "Perhaps the cost factor has numbed the sense of guilt," he said. "I bought my first books when they were priced for 95 cents a paperback and less than $10 for a hardcover." For classics he visits Project Gutenberg, a vast legal repository of mostly older works for which no copyright is in effect; he uses news groups to download current publications still protected by copyright. "These groups offer opportunity to read books not always available," he said. "I have yet to find a library or bookstore so well stocked." Mr. Audette estimates that about 70 percent of the works he downloads are still under copyright. He said he has uploaded only a few books. Envisional, a company based in Britain that tracks Internet piracy, estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 pirated titles are available on the Web. The vast majority are English-language titles, although pirated German, Spanish and French books are also plentiful. An estimate of how many people are actually downloading the books is harder to come by, however, said David Price, a researcher at Envisional. Mr. Price said that although researchers are able to track the number of people using file-sharing applications, it is difficult to tell exactly what they are downloading. And the problem with news groups and Internet Relay Chat channels, he said, is that once users have established initial public contact, they tend to carry out their transactions privately. "Most studies show that music piracy is by far the most popular, followed by film and movie piracy," Mr. Price said. "Book piracy is certainly not at those levels, but it is popular enough for publishers to be concerned about it." Indeed, publishing houses are taking notice. "We monitor the World Wide Web very closely and take this issue very seriously because we take any violation of our authors' copyrights very seriously," said Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House. "We have sent a number of take-down notices to such sites and have received immediate compliance." The Association of American Publishers, the book industry's main trade association, has also pressed I.R.C. administrators to block channels focused on book trading. The association succeeded in shuttering a popular channel known as #bookwarez last year but concedes that the group may well have reconstituted itself on a different I.R.C. server or under a new name. "We have detected more of the piracy activity in the peer-to-peer networks, which to us is the most threatening because I.R.C. rooms are a little difficult to use," said Edward McCoyd, the director of digital policy for the publishers' association. "You have to be a little technically savvy in most cases to trade in those rooms, whereas peer-to-peer is so intuitive and people have already been introduced to the technology through music sharing." Some members of the association have felt the sting of the illegal activity. "A few publishers have seen the sales of some books falling off from sales in previous years, based on how much trading was going on," Mr. McCoyd said. Nonetheless, electronic book piracy appears to have little impact on the industry's bottom line, according to publishers. Federal law enforcement officials have far higher priorities today but had begun to take notice of the piracy phenomenon before terrorism became a top concern in September 2001. The arrest of an encryption expert earlier that year for promoting a program that could crack the security protection for Adobe's eBooks format led to the prosecution of his employer, the Russian software company ElcomSoft, on charges of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But a United States District Court jury in San Jose acquitted the company of the charges in 2002, raising concern that future prosecutions might also be unsuccessful. Mr. McCoyd said the publishers' association was unaware of any new federal investigations involving book piracy on the Internet. Yet the limits of the technology available for reading digitized books may be working in the industry's favor. Sitting in front of a big computer screen is not like curling up with a book on the sofa, and hand-held devices tend to strain the eyes after 10 minutes or so of steady reading. "The same reasons that legal E-books have been slow to catch on are the same reasons that illegal downloading of book files is nothing more than a concern rather than a critical stage for us," Mr. Applebaum said. Still, technologists believe that gadgets will eventually emerge to make the reading experience similar to that of cracking open a book. "And as technology gets better and devices on which you can read books get more and more popular, people will look for ways to obtain books freely," Mr. Price of Envisional said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/te...rtne r=GOOGLE ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Uncanny Connections and DVD's to Trade Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell Did you ever think about someone you'd lost touch with, and then unexpectedly get a call from that person? Or have a feeling that someone was about to e-mail you, and soon find a message in your in-box? Call it coincidence, but Rupert Sheldrake suspects telepathy. Dr. Sheldrake, an author and natural scientist with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, is a proponent of the theory that unexplained abilities like premonition are biologically based, which is gaining particular prominence in Britain, where he lives. His site details experiments (www.sheldrake.org/experiments) that people can use to investigate phenomena like telepathic phone calls (which he has described as "one of the commonest kinds of psychic experience in the modern world"). His newest experiment is focused on e-mail telepathy. It can be conducted entirely online by registering yourself and several e-mail correspondents with the site, as I did. At a specific date and time, your group logs on to the site. The correspondents then are randomly asked to e- mail you, and you must guess who sent messages spaced a minute apart. I have never considered myself particularly telepathic, but I managed to guess correctly 4 times out of 10. Chance would dictate a correct response 2.5 percent of the time. I forgot to tell my correspondents to think of me before sending their messages, so I may be lucky rather than psychic. Dr. Sheldrake hopes to use the online experiment to help identify people who should undergo more detailed tests, preferably offline. "In a controversial area like telepathy, you have to be very rigorous in your data," he explained. "Offline we can do things like videotape subjects to insure against cheating." DVD's to Trade I probably have more equity in VHS tapes than in my house, but my DVD collection is catching up quickly. Soon I will have to ask the children to move out to make room for more discs. Dan Robinson, however, thinks trading movies with other DVD owners on the Web is better than hoarding them. Mr. Robinson is the founder and chief executive of peerflix.com, a new site that seeks to blend two trends: online DVD rental sites like Netflix and music-file-sharing services like Kazaa. Peerflix users maintain a list of DVD's they want and post a list of movies they own that they are willing to trade. Once a member makes a commitment to send a disc to a fellow user in a Peerflix prepaid shipping envelope, that member will receive a disc or discs from other members. (Some DVD's are worth more than others, based on factors like popularity and retail price.) As in a file-sharing network, Peerflix manages the flow of content; traders do not select their partners. "Your movies are doing nothing for you on the shelf," Mr. Robinson noted. Peerflix charges members $10 a month or $2 a trade (there is a 15-day free trial). It plans to add video game trading in the fall. The service has been in test mode for several months and has made a few adjustments. Some members, it seems, find it hard to part with their own DVD's yet still want to take part. So as part of its monthly membership plan, Peerflix will provide them with company-owned discs with which they can start trading. Simple Charity Rory Blyth, a 26-year-old software developer in Portland, Ore., is something of a middleman. His blog, www.neopoleon.com, offers several free services that deliver information from other Web sites directly to users through a technology called R.S.S., or really simple syndication. R.S.S. is becoming a popular way to "subscribe" to Web logs and other frequently updated sites. It requires a reader that attaches to your browser or e-mail program; most readers are free. Mr. Blyth's R.S.S. feed from the Louvre, for instance, highlights a different artwork each day. But his real innovation may be using R.S.S. for charity. His R.S.S. for Charity feed delivers customized information on new products available at Amazon.com. If a subscriber buys a product by way of his link, he receives a small commission from Amazon that he donates to a charitable organization. The service reports about 12,000 page views a month and has nearly 500 subscribers. So far the proceeds have been low (Mr. Blyth would not specify how much) but have enabled him to sponsor a Filipino child through Children International. "I consider this a nerd's version 1.0 attempt at doing something for charity," he said. Ian White of Sunnyvale, Calif., has purchased at least seven items through the feed and has asked Mr. Blyth to allow subscriptions to Amazon wish lists. "That way, not only do I get things I really want, but we're still giving that kickback to charity," he explained by e-mail. On the Radar Paint onscreen by using images from live Webcams courtesy of Daniel Rozin, a digital artist (fargo.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~danny/Paint-Cam.html). Meta-Efficient (www.reactual.com) bills itself as a guide to the most efficient products and techniques. Turn the pages of some of the world's oldest and most beautiful books at a British Library site (www.bl.uk/collections/ treasures/digitisation1.html). http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/te...ts/03diar.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ For High-Definition Sets, Channels to Match David Pogue LET'S face it: those $5,000 plasma screens are popular not just because they're high-definition TV sets but also because they're status symbols. Look at Gateway's 42-inch $3,000 plasma screen, a runaway hit even though it can't actually display images in high definition. At this rate, someone will surely come up with a $200 plasma screen that doesn't even turn on. It would just hang on the wall and look cool. But however cool the screens, as the nine million people who have bought HDTV's have quickly discovered, the high-definition age is not yet fully upon us. If you buy an HDTV receiver connected to an antenna on your roof, you can enjoy a few hours of prime-time HDTV broadcasts each night on ABC, CBS and so on - if you're within about 50 miles of a big city. If you have cable or satellite, you can upgrade your plan to include a handful of high-def channels, like HBO HDTV and ESPN HD. Otherwise, what you'll mostly watch is low-definition shows, either stretched to fit your wide-screen set or with black bars on the sides. It will be years before the networks, cable and satellite outfits broadcast all HD, all the time. The executives at Voom, a new satellite service controlled by Cablevision and offered throughout the continental United States, don't think you can wait that long. Started in January, Voom already offers 39 HDTV channels, many more than you can get from any other source. Now, HDTV aficionados may already be furrowing their brows. "Thirty-nine high-def channels?" they're saying. "There aren't 39 high-def channels in the world!" Actually, there are now. For starters, Voom gives you those prime-time over-the-air network broadcasts, because Voom's installers put not one but two antennas on your roof: one satellite dish and one that picks up NBC, CBS, ABC and so on. (If you live in an apartment, check on your building's restrictions.) The basic $40-a-month package also includes Voom's 21 homegrown proprietary channels. All programs on those channels are filmed and broadcast in a high- definition format known as 1080i; they look and sound spectacular, and - apart from Voom promos - are commercial-free. For example, Rush is an extreme-sports channel that specializes in colorful hot-air balloons, gleaming kayaks and hang gliders in bright sunshine. The Gallery channel is like an art history class that never ends: all close-ups of paintings, presented continuously. The Auction channel is nonstop descriptions of collectibles. Then there's the MOOV channel, a 24-hour screen saver; it features weird kaleidoscopic "motion art" segments set to music and created by broadcast designers. (Video art is, as Voom puts it, "ambient television, not appointment television." You're meant to leave it playing on the wall as you do other things around the house, not gather the family in the living room for half an hour of "iMovie Effects Gone Nuts.") All of these channel topics were obviously selected because they show off the stunning visual qualities of HDTV. Their looks are their sole reason for existence; most would die a quick death in any other forum. Not all, however. HD's wider screen and sharper video make a big difference to Voom's news and WorldSport channels. And on Voom's Rave channel, featuring rock concerts filmed live in HD, something about that wide screen and the intimacy of the cameras makes the experience thrilling and immersive. Rounding out the 21 Voom Originals, as the company calls its proprietary channels, are a dozen 24-hour movie channels. Most show the same movie all day, over and over. Unfortunately, their motto may as well be, "Not just bad movies - high-definition bad movies." Among this week's selections are the 1962 classic "Rider on a Dead Horse," 1986's unforgettable "Troll" and 1962's immortal "Slaughter of the Vampires." Voom admits that the movies are so far on the lame side, but points out that you'd be hard pressed to find 12 commercial-free movie channels - let alone high- definition ones - in the basic $40 package from any other cable or satellite provider. Voom also says that by the end of the year, those channels will repeat less and gain thematic personalities: one channel each for action movies, chick flicks, westerns, documentaries, gay and lesbian movies, and so on. Finally, for $15 each, you can add "plus packs": one each for HBO, Showtime, Cinemax and Starz. Each includes one high-def channel and eight spinoffs (HBO East, HBO West, and so on). (If you're a movie-holic, you may as well save money by subscribing to the Va Va Voom plan: $80 a month for all of the above.) Each Voom basic package also includes 84 standard-definition cable channels like CNN, TNT and Disney. (You can inspect the complete list at www.voom.com, along with a "what's on right now" grid.) Voom's best feature is its smooth integration of network broadcasts, cable channels and Voom's own homemade channels into a single set-top box, controlled with an expertly designed illuminated remote, and displayed on a unified onscreen TV guide. As a result, Voom simulates channel-surfing in, say, 2015, when every channel from every source will be in high definition. The colors are breathtaking, the clarity puts standard TV to shame, and the rectangular, much wider picture fills your field of view the way a screen in a movie theater does. It all sounds good, too, because Voom transmits in five-channel Dolby surround sound. The company has come a long way since its rocky start in January, when the installers didn't know what they were doing, the Motorola set-top box required frequent rebooting, and ESPN wasn't on board. (An HDTV service without sports? Heresy!) Even so, Voom is still a startup. The listings grid routinely chops off the second line of each show's description, the box takes several seconds to change channels and the channel grid always appears at channel 100, rather than the channel you're already watching. And Voom's customer service department is still, ahem, evolving. (It took eight days to get a reply to an e-mailed question to Voom tech support, which promises a response in 24 hours.) At the moment, Voom fills an important niche. But as the world goes all-HDTV in the coming years, you might reasonably wonder how long Voom will be around. Voom acknowledges that its window of opportunity is finite but maintains that it will remain open for much longer than people imagine. Voom has room for expansion; by the end of next year, it will have satellite capacity for 94 high-def channels and 368 standard ones, the company says. (A single HDTV channel, according to Voom, requires as much bandwidth as eight standard-definition channels.) The company maintains that finding the bandwidth for a total switch to high- def will be far more difficult for its cable and satellite rivals. In the meantime, through July 5, Voom is making an irresistible offer. The company will install the box and the two antennas at no charge. In addition to the service fee, you pay $9.50 a month to rent the equipment, and you can cancel at any time with no penalty. (Exploiting this offer - rather than buying the box outright for $500 - is even a good idea if you intend to stick with Voom, because this fall the company plans to offer a new set-top box adding the TiVo-like ability to pause, rewind, record and play back high-def shows.) If you're a TV nut, you could consider supplementing your current service with Voom to add HD channels worthy of your screen. If you're anyone else, you could even replace your current service with Voom; $40 a month, or $55 with nine HBO channels, is somewhat more expensive than a basic cable or satellite plan, but, of course, includes those 12 movie channels and much more in high-def. Either way, Voom is clearly an infant service still finding its way. But upgrade by upgrade, channel by channel, Voom intends to become a major player, capitalizing on its satellite capacity and advanced equipment to surge past its more established rivals in the age of high definition. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/te...ts/03stat.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Just Like High-Definition TV, but With Higher Definition Douglas Heingartner HIGH-DEFINITION television may be only just beginning to catch on, but researchers at the Japanese national broadcaster NHK are already working on a successor. The format, called Ultra High Definition Video, or UHDV, has a resolution 16 times greater than plain-old HDTV, and its stated goal is to achieve a level of sensory immersion that approximates actually being there. At a picture size of 7,680 by 4,320 pixels - that works out to 32 million pixels - UHDV's resolution trounces even high-end digital still cameras. HDTV, by comparison, has about two million pixels, and normal TV about 200,000 (and only 480 lines of horizontal resolution versus 4,000 with UHDV). Add to that UHDV's beefed-up refresh rate of 60 frames per second (twice that of conventional video), projected onto a 450-inch diagonal screen with more than 20 channels of audio, and you've got an impressive home theater on your hands. Of course, UHDV's current dimensions make it impractical for most homes. The NHK researchers are investigating how to squeeze all those pixels onto smaller screens. But the project aims to do more than just make home entertainment more realistic. The UHDV standard may someday find applications in museums, hospitals, shopping malls or other places where a keener representation of detail might be desirable. All of that is a long way off, however, because the standard is still in the early stages of development. UHDV "will take many years," said Fumio Okano, a researcher with the network. But NHK is familiar with long-term projects: it began developing the HDTV standard in 1964, and the first high-definition content arrived only in 1982. The pixel count of UHDV may be impressive, but as anyone who has tried to watch TV on a sunny beach knows, pixels are not the whole picture. "Resolution is only one of the key measurements," said John Lowry of Lowry Digital Images, a company in Burbank, Calif., that digitizes films at the highest possible quality for archival purposes. Perhaps even more important than pixels, he said, is the dynamic range of an image, which is measured in terms of contrast ratio. The eye can perceive contrasts between the brightest white and the darkest black of roughly 100,000 to one, whereas today's best projectors can only muster levels of about 4,000 to one. To achieve truly realistic images, Mr. Lowry said, "the blacks have to be really black, while still seeing the glint off a diamond." So while current projection technology cannot meet the demands of UHDV, the standard excels in other crucial areas, for example breadth of view. While both UHDV and HDTV use the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio (standard TV uses 4:3), HDTV offers only a 30-degree field of view horizontally, whereas UHDV's massive screen size expands this to about 100 degrees, said Mr. Okano, who said his research indicates that this angle is where "immersive sensation" peaks. In developing UHDV, NHK has also focused on sound. The standard calls for 22.2 sound: 10 speakers at ear level, 9 above and 3 below, with another 2 for low frequency effects. It is a setup that is well beyond the level of the multichannel systems currently in vogue, like the 5.1 surround system. All those sound channels and all those image pixels add up to a lot of data. In test, an 18-minute UHDV video gobbled up 3.5 terabytes of storage (equivalent to about 750 DVD's). The data was transmitted over 16 channels at a total rate of 24 gigabits per second, thousands of times faster than a typical D.S.L. connection. The realism creates other complications. The NHK is studying the physical and psychological effects of UHDV on audiences. One concern is a kind of motion sickness, which researchers attribute to a combination of the wide viewing angle, the massive image and the on-screen motion. There are other reasons to shy away from maximum reality, some of them aesthetic. "There is a very common practice," Mr. Lowry said, "of putting a filter on a camera just to soften the image, to reduce the resolution." Movie stars are now learning the hard way that high-definition is hard on human imperfections: blemishes and bad makeup invisible to conventional TV suddenly jump to the fore when filmed in high-definition format; how will aging celebrities fare with UHDV? But UHDV's developers do not intend the standard exclusively as a vehicle for Hollywood, or even for sports or news, where HDTV has flourished. They point to potentially useful applications in medicine, education, or art appreciation. The new format has also been designed to be compatible with other standards - unlike, for example, IMAX, a 70-millimeter film format that has unsurpassed quality but a unique infrastructure that limits its mass-market potential. Are audiences even warming up to high-definition television? While sales of HDTV sets are gradually increasing, the growth remains less than spectacular. With only 15 million to 18 million HDTV sets currently in the United States, "we haven't even scraped the tip of the iceberg yet," said Vamsi Sistla, an analyst with the research firm Allied Business Intelligence. Navigating the jungle of standards and terminology remains confusing, and a complete high-definition set (including tuner) costs several thousand dollars. Consumers, Mr. Sistla said, "are not too keen on the nitty-gritty. They're looking at the price point, at sexy flat screens.'' The NHK is still years from having to worry about how to sell UHDV to consumers. Perhaps the format will always be out of reach for most consumers. However, while it took 40 years, HDTV eventually gained a foothold. "I applaud them," Mr. Lowry said of the NHK. "They are reaching off into what a lot of people might call never-never land at the moment. But why not?" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/te...ts/03next.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Will Copyright Reform Chill Use Of Web? Copyright proposal upsets the balance Michael Geist In hindsight, the fall of 1998 may be remembered as the shining hour of Canadian Internet policy development. Led by then-Industry Minister John Manley, Canada played host to an OECD ministerial meeting on e-commerce, tabled new privacy legislation, unveiled several e-commerce policy initiatives, and committed to providing every Canadian school with Internet access. Unfortunately, our low point may have occurred earlier this month when a Canadian Heritage parliamentary committee chaired by Toronto-area MP Sarmite Bulte presented a vision of copyright that would transform the Internet from the incredible open source of information that it is into a predominantly commercial medium available primarily to those willing to open up their cheque books. It foresees, among other things, schools being required to pay for using, as course materials, Web-based information that is made publicly available often with the poster's intention of reaching as wide an audience as possible and with no expectation of payment. Few technology law issues have proven as divisive in recent years as copyright reform. Proponents of stronger protections fear that the Internet and digital technologies will eviscerate traditional copyright protections. They have therefore actively lobbied for new powers to block unauthorized access to copyrighted material as well as for new compensation schemes to pay for new technological uses of old work. Opponents of stronger protection, pointing to the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision involving legal publications, argue that Canadian copyright law must adopt a balanced approach in which the interests of creators are considered in parallel with the needs of users and the larger public interest. The unexpected consequences of copyright reform in other jurisdictions such things as jailed software developers and copyright litigation over technologies such as garage door openers have led opponents to argue that Canada must navigate a balanced approach that avoids the mistakes made elsewhere. While the notion of balance in copyright law has proven contentious in some quarters, it is in fact a well-established principle under Canadian intellectual property law. For example, under Canadian patent law, inventors receive a limited monopoly over their invention that grants them exclusive authority over how that invention is used. In return, the patent expires after a prescribed period at which time anyone may use the invention without prior authorization. Moreover, obtaining patent protection also requires inventors to fully disclose and describe their invention so that the public obtains the immediate benefit of that knowledge. The Canadian Supreme Court has affirmed a similar balance in copyright. Creators enjoy a basket of exclusive rights such as the sole right to reproduce or perform the work. In return, the term of copyright protection is limited so that expired work becomes part of the public domain and may be used by anyone without permission or payment. Furthermore, the Copyright Act establishes a series of "user rights," known as exceptions, that allow users to freely use portions of copyrighted work for such things as research, private study, news reporting, and criticism. While Bulte recently expressed concern that these exceptions lead to "freebies," in fact it is these exceptions that ensure that the Copyright Act retains the balance needed to give creators their exclusive rights. Bulte's committee held hearings for several weeks in March and April, quickly generating nine key copyright reform recommendations, made in a pre-election interim report. The plan, whose status may be affected by the election, largely neglects the user side of the balance equation by focusing chiefly on the compensation and protection afforded to creators. The committee's recommendation for swift ratification of the controversial World Intellectual Property Organization's Internet treaties and increased liability for Internet service providers will rightly garner much attention. It is its approach to educational uses of the Internet, however, that are a particular cause for concern given the current financial strain on our schools. Canada's Copyright Act already provides educators and students with a user right in copyrighted work for research and study purposes. The Supreme Court has ruled that this right is to be interpreted in a liberal fashion such that copying full articles may be lawful in certain circumstances. The use of those works in the classroom is not covered, however, forcing teachers to sort through the rights attached to materials before using them in courses. The Canadian educational community has proposed what would appear to be a balanced solution in the form of establishing a limited educational user right to publicly available work on the Internet. In keeping with longstanding and widely accepted practices on the Internet, publicly available work would include materials that are not technologically or password protected that is, information the author would appear to want to make widely available. Bulte's committee surprisingly rejected the education community's proposal, opting instead for a new license to cover Internet based works. This new license would require schools to pay yet another fee (the education community already hands over millions in license fees each year for content) for works found on the Internet. How the payments are calculated, collected and forwarded to those entitled to receive them presents another set of problems that would have to be resolved in a manner that assures all stakeholders that payments are not made for work that the Supreme Court has already declared subject to a user right and therefore available without compensation. Although it acknowledges that some work on the Internet is intended to be freely available, the committee recommends the adoption of the narrowest possible definition of publicly available. Its vision of publicly-available includes only those works that are not technologically or password protected and contain an explicit notice that the material can be used without prior payment or permission. Rather than adopting an approach that facilitates the use of the Internet, Bulte's committee has called for the creation of a restrictive regime in which nothing is allowed unless expressly permitted. The result will be an Internet in which schools will be required to pay to use Internet materials contrary to the expectations of many creators. A far more balanced approach, and one that would be more in line with Canadian values, would be to permit all uses unless specifically prohibited. This could be easily achieved in a manner that respects copyright by establishing a publicly available definition that includes works not technologically or password protected and for which the copyright holder has not expressly asserted limitations on the use of the work. Canada displayed foresight in the late 1990s in identifying the potential for the Internet and new digital technologies to benefit all Canadians. In order to fulfill that vision, we need to reconsider the Bulte committee's recent recommendation so that the balance that is so critical to creators, users, and the broader public interest is preserved. http://www.torontostar.com/NASApp/cs...l=969048863851 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Whose Data Is It, Anyway? Jeffrey Selingo WHEN Tomm Purnell's uncle, Keith Cochran, died last year, Mr. Purnell's mother received two of Mr. Cochran's computers. One of them, a laptop, is password-protected, and even though Mr. Purnell considers himself somewhat of a computer geek, "the really obvious passwords," he said, like the names of Mr. Cochran's cats and combinations of his Social Security number, have failed. "I guess he assumed that whoever came in would figure it out," said Mr. Purnell, a physics student at Colorado State University. "I have no clue what's on there, but I'd like to find out." While terminally ill, Mr. Cochran, a programmer, left a full list of passwords for his work files with his employer, Mr. Purnell said. But he failed to do the same thing with the personal files, so they are now inaccessible. With home computers largely replacing filing cabinets as the secure storage place for financial records, tax returns and even sentimental pictures, the problem confronting Mr. Purnell may become more common. Since most people do not leave a list of passwords before they die, their relatives and lawyers must often figure out how to break into the computer themselves or hire someone to do it. Mr. Purnell said he intended to keep trying to unlock his uncle's laptop. But for some survivors, the effort of gaining access to a loved one's data is not worth the time. In many cases, they simply erase the hard drive and get rid of the computer without ever knowing what was on it. "We're probably wiping away a lot of memories," said George Ehrlich, manager of Machaven, a computer-repair service near Washington, who is asked every few months to erase a hard drive of someone who has died. "Most people want to give the computer away without worrying about someone else getting access to personal information. When they bring it in, they don't know what's on it and they don't seem to care." Sometimes, too, relatives realize that there may be things left on the hard drive - embarrassing e-mail messages in particular - that they would rather not see. Gaining access to a person's data if the person is no longer living raises legal issues as well. Small mom-and-pop computer services may break into a machine without asking for any proof of death. But large companies like America Online require at least a death certificate before sharing e-mail messages or data stored on their servers with survivors. Once survivors gain access to the data, questions may also arise about who actually owns it. If a person saved a book manuscript on a hard drive and left the machine to a friend, for instance, the friend might try to claim ownership of the manuscript as well. While no case law exists in this area, several lawyers who are experts on estate planning and probate matters generally agreed that anything stored on a computer is considered "intangible" property, meaning that like a stock certificate or a rare baseball card, it is probably worth more than the piece of tangible property it occupies, in this case, disk space on a computer. As a result, they say, the manuscript would not automatically become the property of the friend who received the computer. The manuscript itself would have had to have been bequeathed to the friend. To avoid such a predicament, executors should go though the computer files of the deceased, print out important documents and then delete everything else, said Dennis I. Belcher, a lawyer with McGuireWoods, a firm in Richmond, Va. "In the end, the executor needs to make sure the computer is completely clean before giving it up." One worry for Mr. Belcher is the growing trend of keeping work-related documents on home computers. If those files remained on a machine that was given away after the owner died and ended up in the wrong hands, the executor of the estate could be held responsible. "Even if the executor disseminated that proprietary information unknowingly, they could still be held liable," Mr. Belcher said. For Mr. Belcher and other lawyers, the issue of what happens to data on a computer when its owner dies remains largely uncharted territory. After all, they say, many people who die now are not routine computer users. But as the baby-boom generation ages, "lawyers will probably deal with these questions all the time," said Edward F. Koren, a lawyer at Holland & Knight in Tampa, Fla., and an expert on estate planning and probate matters. "The entire lives of some people are on their computers," he said, "and they forget all about that when planning for death." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/te...ts/03data.html Until next week, - js. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Current Week In Review.  Recent WiRs - May 29th, May 22nd, May 15th, May 8th, May 1st, April 24th, April 17th Jack Spratt's Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC. |
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