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Old 10-06-04, 08:49 PM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – June 12th, '04

Quotes Of The Week

"The long-term strategic threat to the entertainment industry is that people will get in the habit of creating and making as much as watching and listening, and all of a sudden the label applied to people at leisure, 50 years in the making — consumer — could wither away." – Jonathan Zittrain

"We think Neely has crafted an as of yet unnamed new art form, one everyone should experience for themselves. – Carrie McLaren, Illegal-art.org

"We've set a precedent with the first case. There'll be more cases." – Gerd Gebhardt, president of the German Phono Federation

"Sharing files does not stifle creativity any more than playing an artist's music on radio does. If it really did reduce the financial rewards for manufactured boy-bands and made-for-TV pop idols this would be a strong point in its favour." - William Heath




Refried Wizards

I’m not a huge fan of Harry Potter – the movies anyway, although I thought the first book was aces. Since that one came out I’ve read them all. The porky follow-ups fell back on themselves derivatively and in spite of the tender age of the intended audience, left them shortchanged on plot development and imagination. To wit: Harry has a horrible vacation. Harry goes back to school in a funny way. Harry must do the impossible which almost gets him expelled (and killed). The bad guy gets away. The end. The stories are interesting if workmanlike and can occasionally reach novel heights but in the end they’re just not in same league as say Philip Pullman’s shattering “His Dark Materials” trilogy. That’s a mind blowing series. Staring with The Golden Compass it’s a trilogy that takes its’ rightful place alongside Tolkien and other children’s fantasy works of the first order. Harry is well, kids’ stuff in comparison, and the first movie acknowledged as much with it’s liberal use of cartoonish 3-D CGI and live characters that were buffoonish and two dimensional. Not that any of this hurts sales. The books and DVD’s fly off the shelves and into the hearts of adoring fans and a new movie opening seems to be a worldwide happening. Still one gets the feeling that if the filmmakers had just stepped back a bit from the Warner’s corporate play book the movies could have been magnificent, such is the wealth of raw material conjured up by Rowling. But they are what they are and ordinarily that would be that.

Not anymore.

There’s nothing ordinary about the interconnectedness of today’s internet and the ease with which artists can assemble, create and distribute their work. That’s just what’s happened to Potter the Movie. Not satisfied with the scope of the first film, Brad Neely a 27-year-old comic book artist from Austin Texas essentially gave it a different voice and put it up on the net as a new soundtrack. He calls it "Wizard People, Dear Reader," and after downloading the two files (68 & 72 megs respectively) and burning to disc, you simply run the picture, cue up the new audio and play it simultaneously. Faster than you can spurt “Alcazan!” you’ve got a “brand new” movie. The result is getting high marks and lots of laughs. When I heard they were short of bandwidth I put the files up too (complete with artwork) on zer0share, the little Waste open network devoted to contemporary and historic works in the public domain - and I got in touch with another host, Carrie McLaren of Illegal-art.org, a site devoted to exploring the tension between traditional media and technological advances. So the word – and the work – is getting around. Legally the new audio should fall under the “fair use” protections insulating it and the author (and me as one of the distributors) from suits by Rowling and Warners. Unlike “The Wind Done Gone,” the follow-up to “Gone With The Wind” told from the slaves point of view which the courts ruled was legal to sell, this type of digital prestidigitation has yet to be tested in law, and tested it will be at some point. Maybe not Neely’s “Wizard People, Dear Reader," but something like it created and distributed in this novel way. A boundary’s been crossed and we’re all getting closer to a point we can rework our favorite entertainments. But unlike making up new words while singing in the shower, this new style of media manipulation can be shared with the world at large on a whim – for better or for worse. The media megaliths will take note. If they can’t co-opt it they may settle for killing it - making another huge mistake on their part. It would be a shame if we let that happen.

As of this writing I haven’t experienced Neely's new combination of Hollywood image and Texas humor so I’ll leave to others the critical judgment of the work itself. For now I’m happy enough helping him bring it out of Austin.











Enjoy,

Jack.










MONOLITH
Sourceforge

Monolith is a simple tool that takes two arbitrary binary files (called a Basis file and an Element file) and "munges" them together to produce a Mono binary file (with a .mono extension). Monolith can also reconstruct an Element file from a Basis file and a Mono file.

In most cases, the resulting Mono file will not be statistically related to either file. If you compare the Mono file to the Element file, the Mono file will contain none of the information present in the Element file. In other words, the Mono file by itself tells you nothing at all about the data in the Element file. Only when combined with the Basis file will the Mono file provide information about the Element file.

Monolith can be used for exploring the boundaries of digital copyright, and the rest of this website is devoted to such an exploration. The core questions: What happens when we use Monolith to munge copyrighted files? What is the copyright status of the resulting .mono file? These questions are considered in depth below.

Things get interesting when you apply Monolith to copyrighted files. For example, munging two copyrighted files will produce a completely new file that, in most cases, contains no information from either file. In other words, the resulting Mono file is not "owned" by the original copyright holders (if owned at all, it would be owned by the person who did the munging). Given that the Mono file can be combined with either of the original, copyrighted files to reconstruct the other copyrighted file, this lack of Mono ownership may be seem hard to believe.

Consider this simple fact: for a given Element file and any other file of the same length (call it fileA), it is possible to choose a Basis file that, when munged with the Element, will produce fileA as the resulting Mono file. Therefore, if a copyright holder claims that she owns the information in all Mono files that are munged from her work, she is also claiming copyright over all possible binary files that are the same length as her work. For example, suppose that fileA is an MP3 of a Beatles song, and the Element file is an MP3 of a Britney Spears song copyrighted by Jive Records. It is possible to find a Basis file that, when munged with the Spears song, will produce the Beatles song as the Mono file. Jive Records certainly cannot claim copyright over the Beatles song (which is copyrighted by Apple Records), nor can they claim copyright over any other Mono files munged from MP3s of their songs.

What does this mean? This means that Mono files can be freely distributed.

So what? Mono files are useless without their corresponding Basis files, right? And the Basis files are copyrighted too, so they cannot be freely distributed, right? There is one more twist to this idea. What happens when we use Basis files that are freely distributable? For example, we could use a Basis file that is in the public domain or one that is licensed for free distribution. Now we are getting somewhere.

None of the aforementioned properties of Mono files change when we use freely distributable Basis files, since the same arguments hold. Mono files are still not copyrighted by the people who hold the copyrights over the corresponding Element files. Now we can freely distribute Mono files and Basis files.

Interesting? Not really. But what you can do with these files, in the privacy of your own home, might be interesting, depending on your proclivities. For example, you can use the Mono files and the Basis files to reconstruct the Element files.

Bring Taping Home

The Internet, despite all of the intellectual freedoms that it bestowed upon us, had an odd side-effect: it moved the "Copyright vs. Home Taping" clash into the public sphere. Home Taping used to be a private issue, since the act itself (the Taping) happened in the privacy of one's home. There were laws forbidding Home Taping, but they were unenforceable laws. The Copyright holders got their "blank media" taxes passed and otherwise gave up on their crusade to stop Home Taping. However, with the Internet, Home Taping has moved into the public realm, and the laws forbidding such Taping are suddenly enforceable. Now we have a royal mess: a public that is fond of Home Taping is butting heads with Copyright holders who are trying to enforce laws that have never been enforced before.

Monolith moves Home Taping back into the private sphere. There are laws that forbid combining a Basis file with a Mono file to produce a copyrighted Element file, but since such combining happens in private, those laws are unenforceable.

To best explain the logic behind Monolith, we need to explore the odd properties of digital information.

So read on… -js.


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Justice Department Ends Antitrust Review Of Movielink Venture

The government said Thursday it is closing an antitrust investigation into a video-on-demand service called Movielink, saying there was no evidence the joint venture was anticompetitive.

The Justice Department began the review in August 2001 after the service was created by Sony Pictures, Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, Warner Bros. and Universal Studios.

Critics worried that the service would encourage illegal collusion among the companies to push up prices. But the studios behind Movielink said they would not offer films to their joint venture on an exclusive basis. Several also signed deals with other video-on-demand companies.

``The evidence does not support a conclusion that the structure of the joint venture increased prices or otherwise reduced competition in the retail markets,'' the department's antitrust division said in a statement.

Video on demand provides access to films at any time and gives viewers the ability to pause, reverse and fast-forward. The films are either delivered over a cable television system or over high-speed Internet lines to a computer.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/8830638.htm


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Careless Coders Tempting Legal Troubles?
Michael Parsons

Most software developers regard "code-borrowing"--reusing existing software in their own work--as an acceptable practice, despite the legal minefield it could create for their employers, according to research due to be published later this week.

The anonymous online survey of more than 3,000 developers found that almost 70 percent of respondents keep a personal library of code that they freely carry from employer to employer. Such code is generally used without the lawful owner's knowledge or permission, according to Out-law.com, a site that provides legal advice on information technology and e-commerce.

"Reusing or copying code, though in some ways unlawful, I believe is common practice in software development," said one freelance developer who participated. "Most developers that I come in contact with (including myself) reuse, copy or even reverse-engineer code to make it work better or to include it in an application that we are programming."

According to Susan McKiernan, an IT lawyer with Masons, the law firm behind Out-law.com, the survey showed that there was a widespread acceptance of the practice of reusing and "borrowing" code.

McKiernan said the fundamental issue involved was whether a substantial part of the code had been copied.

"The problem lies in figuring out what is a substantial part of a software program," McKiernan said.

The courts say that you cannot define substantiality in terms of percentages of code, McKiernan said.

"You need to consider the skill and labor in design and coding which went into the specific bits of allegedly copied code," she said.

McKiernan points to one case in which a party copied only 2 percent or 3 percent of the total code, yet was found to have infringed copyright. In another successful infringement action, the developer had made considerable modifications and additions to the original software--making it visually very different and more user-friendly--but had nonetheless used the original software to take shortcuts.

The survey also revealed that developers do not realize that software does not need to be identical for copyright infringement to arise. Almost 90 percent said they would reproduce the way another piece of software functions, without copying any code.

"By consulting the original code and program, however, a developer could still be found to have copied a substantial part," said McKiernan.

Software companies also face a threat because the development work force tends to change jobs frequently, which increases the chances of employees and contractors introducing materials from previous employers, clients or elsewhere.

"The Internet adds a further risk, with the availability of software from anywhere in the world and the potential for code-sharing through forums and bulletin boards," said McKiernan.

And so does the pride that developers take in their software. Writing code is hard, and developers like to show off their work.

"I haven't met a developer who wants to hide his or her code," said one developer. "Developers are proud of their code and want other developers to see its brilliance (and feel proud if others use it). It's companies and managers who care about copyrighting code."
http://news.com.com/2100-1008-5226035.html


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McDonald's: Would You Like A Song With That?

McDonald's and Sony are teaming up to offer free music downloads, in a step that analysts said raises questions about fast food chain's long-standing relationship with Walt Disney.

McDonald's will launch a U.S. promotion on June 8, offering customers who buy a Big Mac Extra Value meal an access code worth one free song download at Sony Connect music store. The so- called Big Mac Meal Tracks promotion, which will run for six to 10 weeks, will later expand to Europe, McDonald's said.

The Sony alliance could represent a way for McDonald's to tap in to pop culture without relying on movie tie-ins with Disney. McDonald's still has about two years left on a 10-year promotional agreement with Disney.

Like competing services, Sony Connect lets customers buy songs and download them to portable music players. Customers can also listen to songs that have been copied, or "ripped," from CDs.

McDonald's and Sony were scheduled to announce their partnership on Thursday at a news conference in Los Angeles.

"I think McDonald's is trying to escape what I call the kiddyland box," said Jack Trout, a marketing consultant who heads Connecticut-based Trout & Partners. "I think Disney undermines their strategy for moving to the older set."

Disney said the two deals were completely separate.

"We have an ongoing relationship with McDonald's, and this has nothing to do with our agreement with them," said Disney spokesman John Spelich.

Nearly every major online music store--from Apple Computer's iTunes, RealNetworks' Rhapsody to Roxio's Napster--are forming joint ventures with consumer brands ranging from PepsiCo's Pepsi to UAL's United Airlines.

Apple's iTunes was the first to clinch such a deal, providing Pepsi drinkers with free downloads if they got a bottle cap containing numerical codes.

To date, iTunes has also partnered with Target and Ben & Jerry's, while Sony Connect has partnered with United Airlines.

Since late last year, McDonald's has been trying to revitalize its image with young adults. Its "I'm Lovin' It" global ad campaign, for example, incorporates hip-hop music in its television spots.

"The whole 'I'm Lovin' It' campaign appeals to a different age group," said Bob Goldin, an executive vice president with restaurant market research firm Technomic, stressing that Disney's appeal is more targeted to preteens. "They (McDonald's) needs to find marketing partners that appeal to that."

The Disney deal was reportedly worth $10 million when it was struck in 1996. It was considered a boon to Disney, giving the entertainment company access to customers in McDonald's 13,000 U.S. hamburger stores.

During its annual meeting two weeks ago, Larry Light, McDonald's global chief marketing officer, said that McDonald's and Disney were in discussions about the structure of the remaining portion of the contract.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5225854.html


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Study: CD Prices Sing The Blues
CNET News.com Staff

The average retail price of full-length CDs fell to $13.29 in the first quarter of 2004--a decline of 4 percent from the same period a year ago, according to a new study.

The top 50 CD sellers nationwide sold discs for an average price of $13.36, a drop of 3.1 percent versus a year ago, said a survey released Thursday by the NPD Group. Meanwhile, catalog CDs- -comprised of titles that are 18-months-old or more--dropped below the $13 threshold to $12.99.

NPD President Russ Crupnick attributed the decline in part to a changing market due to the file-sharing boom. In addition, competition for entertainment dollars has become tougher for the recording industry in an environment that saw DVDs and video games growing at double-digit rates, he said.

Universal Music Group slashed retail prices of its titles by 5 percent between the first quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2004. However, a study by Harvard University researchers who tracked music downloads said file sharing does not affect CD sales.

NPD Group earlier had said that digital song and subscription site consumers were buying up to 80 percent more CDs than those who did not subscribe.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5225657.html


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South Korea

Clean Internet Campaign Begins

A nationwide campaign will start this week to promote a healthier Internet environment as part of a government drive against Internet addiction, cyber-pornography and unsolicited e-mail messages.

The Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) on Friday reported that the campaign is aimed at preventing children from becoming addicted to the Internet, which can happen through chat rooms, online gambling or pornography.

Pop culture idols will be named as public ambassadors to advertise the campaign. They will play a key role in the state-sponsored public advertisement to promote the ``clean Internet’’ campaign on TV networks this month, it added.

A new Web site will be launched to conduct research on and treatment and counseling for addiction to the Internet, an MIC official said.

Korea has a high rate of Internet use. More than two- thirds of all homes, or 11.5 million subscribers, have high-speed Internet connections.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/biz/...8232711890.htm


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Reed Allows Academics Free Web Access

200,000 articles may be available on the net but competitors accuse publisher of making token effort
Richard Wray

Reed Elsevier is allowing academics to put papers that have been accepted for publication in its print and online journals on to the internet, breaking with years of tradition and reigniting the debate over open access to academic thinking.

Until now the world's largest academic publisher has been a staunch opponent of open access, saying it poses a threat to the quality of academic research.

But it is now letting academics put a text version of their accepted articles on to their own websites, or sites operated by their institutions.

The move could make the 200,000 articles Reed Elsevier publishes every year freely available on the internet.

Karen Hunter, Elsevier senior vice-president, strategy, explained: "There was a desire in the market from many authors and many institutions to have an official record of their institution's intellectual output. We have listened and we have responded."

But rival publishers who have fully embraced the open access model and charge academics to publish their papers and then make them freely available to all over the internet, described the move as a cynical piece of public relations as Reed tries to defend its lucrative business.

Reed Elsevier has come under fire recently for the high subscriptions it charges universities and libraries for its 1,800 journals.

In March, chief executive Crispin Davies was forced to defend the firm's subscriptions in the face of critical questioning from the Commons science and technology committee.

Deborah Cockerill, assistant publisher at rival open access publisher BioMed Central, said Reed's move "merely scratches the surface of the fundamental problem with the traditional publishing model which is based on controlling access".

"They are offering a series of limited forms of access - so partial compared with open access so that it won't threaten the subscription model."

BioMed Central, in contrast, produces 110 journals in the fields of biology and medicine. It charges academics to publish their articles but access to the journal itself is free to everyone.

Reed, which has spent millions of pounds developing an online database of its journals known as Science Direct, is allowing authors to post only a text version of their published articles on the internet.

In addition each posting must include a link to the journal's home page - which operates almost as free advertising. Crucially, academics will not be allowed to put links to their papers in central academic databases, making it very difficult for anyone else to find the paper.

Ms Cockerill said these restrictions would counteract any potential benefit to the wider research community from Reed's decision.

"This kind of archiving is in many ways useless to the majority of scientists, mainly because no one will know the copies exist at all or where to find them," she said. In fact, Ms Hunter said, Reed does not expect the move to hit revenues.

"Science Direct is the official archive and the official source for the final article. That's the place that researchers should go."

Reed's change of heart was warmly welcomed by Stevan Harnad, professor of cognitive science at the University of Southampton and a leading proponent of open access.

"There will be the predictable cavils from the pedants and those who have never understood the real meaning and nature of open access: 'It's only the final refereed draft, not the publisher's PDF; It does not include republishing rights; Elsevier is still not an open access publisher.'

"I, for one, am prepared to stoutly defend Elsevier on all these counts, and to say that one could not have asked for more, and that the full benefits of open access require not one bit more - from the publisher."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/new...230217,00.html

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Nigeria Government May Scan Emails
Maputo
AFP

Nigeria plans to launch software that would help catch fraudsters who send scam letters via email, known as the 419 advance fee fraud, a meeting on the sidelines of Africa's World Economic Forum has heard.

The new technology, which would identify key words used in such letters, is likely to be made available to Internet service providers and government departments, Mustafa Bello, executive secretary of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission said.

"The introduction of new software, currently under discussion within the Nigerian parliament, will scan emails originating in Nigeria to look for keywords commonly found, especially relating to banking and the country's petroleum industry," Bello said late on Wednesday after a discussion on the issue on the sidelines of the conference.

"This will then be removed from the system and even traced back to where it originated, (to) allow police to arrest the culprit," he said.

The email scams, often from "the widow of and African dictator" or a "bank offcial", promise untold wealth in return for helping to transfer millions of dollars out of Africa. Many originate in Nigeria.

Victims of the scam have lost tens of thousands of dollars, and in some cases been attacked and robbed. They frequently fail to report their losses to the police out of shame and because they have been planning to act illegally.

South African Interpol spokeswoman Mary Martins-Engelbrecht said last year that in South Africa alone some 60 cases of advance fee fraud were reported every day.

The message from the "widow" or the "official" will ask for a name, address, bank details, passport and telephone numbers and a promise that in exchange, a major cut from the deal will be received.

The 419 scam - named after the section in Nigeria's criminal code on fraud - works on a simple principle: the victim is kept on the hook for as long as possible, paying money, with the carrot of a huge return at the end.

The cash never materialises and the scammer eventually disappears into thin air. In some cases, victims are lured into a trap, kidnapped and held hostage for ransom.

Bello said however that Nigeria was also trying to address the underlying cause of the advance fee fraud which was "not greed but poverty," Bello said.
http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/0...203598788.html


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And I own one

Linksys Wi-Fi Router Vulnerability Discovered
Marguerite Reardon

Cisco Systems has issued a patch for a security flaw in one of its Linksys routers that could give hackers access to consumers' home networks.

Alan Rateliff II, an independent security consultant, on Friday said he discovered a vulnerability in the Linksys WRTS54G 802.11g wireless router. The flaw gives hackers a free pass into the Web-based configuration page of the router when the firewall function is turned off.

When Rateliff originally tested the devices in March, he discovered that this vulnerability existed on two Linksys routers straight from the store. The default configuration on the products he tested used version 2.02.7 of the firmware, and they enabled access to the configuration page via ports 80 and 443.

When he tested new Linksys routers, using both firmware versions 2.02.7 and 2.02.2 earlier this week, he did not find the same flaw on routers that use the standard configuration settings. But he noticed that when the firewall is turned off on the devices, ports 80 and 443 are still open, allowing the configuration page to be easily accessed.

Allowing easy access to configuration settings on a router is a security risk. Hackers could change settings of the router to launch spam and virus attacks, without the victim ever realizing what is going on. Attackers could also gain access to devices attached to the router, such as laptops and PCs. With an open door into the network, attackers could target unprotected individual machines and infect them with worms and viruses.

"It's like giving a hacker a key to a locked door," Rateliff said. "There's no telling what he will do once he's inside. The scenarios are only limited by what we can imagine."

Rateliff added that broadband users on large national Internet service providers, such as America Online, could be the most vulnerable, because hackers tend to scan these DSL (digital subscriber line) and cable modem connections, looking for vulnerable targets.

"The larger the network, the larger the exposure to hackers," he said.

For the most part, this problem exists only when the firewall function is turned off. Considering that most people concerned about security would keep the firewall turned on, this may not be such a big threat. But Rateliff warned that people should check to make sure that their settings are correct when they install the Linksys routers. "You just have to be careful," he said. "There's no telling if someone else has changed the settings and then returned the product to
the store. When you get it home, you have no way to know that the firewall has been turned off and that you're now exposed to this other problem."

The Linksys home networking gear is among the most popular on the consumer market. The brand has more than 20 percent market share in the home and small-business Wi-Fi market, according to Synergy Research.

Cisco posted a beta version of the new firmware on the Linksys Web site on Thursday night. The company said customers using this version of firmware should not experience the problem even when the firewall is turned off. Rateliff said he has not tested the beta version of firmware yet.
http://news.com.com/2100-7349-5226918.html


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RA Joins File Sharing War
p2pnet.net

If having Big Music's breath on your neck isn't bad enough, the Recording Academy is, "strategically increasing its visibility and participation on Capitol Hill," it says in a statement issued after its Spring Trustees Meeting.

This new initiative will include:

Being a partner in the recently announced Recording Arts and Sciences Congressional Caucus;
Actively participating in Arts Advocacy Day;
The creation of an Academy Advocacy Committee;
And, in the next month or so, the Academy will be launching avenues through which our members can contact their Congresspersons directly through www.grammy.com.

Also, "after successfully launching Phase I of the Academy's public education campaign regarding the value of paying for music, 'What's The Download,' Phase II will launch this summer. Campaign tactics will include grassroots initiatives, radio and TV PSA outreach, and a new national initiative that will be announced at the end of summer."

What this boils down to is the above-mentioned congresspersons will be cosseted and stroked by entertainment industry celebrities and biggies, all of whom will be whispering hypnotically, over and over again, 'File sharing is devastating the music industry!' 'File sharing is devastating the music industry!'

Expect to see:

More righteous congress anger and press releases centering on the villainous file sharers
More proposals for 'stern new laws' to help remedy the desperate plight of copyright owners
who "have been left alone to fend for themselves, defending their rights only where they can afford to do so".
More entertainment industry school educational programs and efforts such as FastLink.

Stay tuned.
http://p2pnet.net/story/1611


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General Accounting Office Delivers a Report on Campus File Sharing to Congress
Brock Read

In a report sent to Congress last week, auditors from the U.S. General Accounting Office outlined some of the steps colleges and universities are taking to prevent illegal file sharing. The document contains few surprises, and it is unclear whether it will prompt lawmakers to alter existing federal policies.

The report, "File Sharing: Selected Universities Report Taking Action to Reduce Copyright Infringement," also discusses the role federal agencies play in cracking down on online copyright infringement.

The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Chronicle, is dated May 28 and has not been released to the public. The report collects the results of a study commissioned last year by members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations and the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce. Research for the project began in May 2003 and was completed in April of this year.

Auditors for the accounting office, which is the investigative arm of Congress, surveyed technology officers at 13 "major universities," and concluded that most computer administrators are aware of substantial file sharing on their campus networks. All of the administrators interviewed for the study said they had used or planned to use both technological controls and campus-wide education campaigns to try to curtail file swapping.

The study goes on to describe Operation Fastlink and Operation Buccaneer, a pair of federal law-enforcement programs created to combat online piracy of music, movies, and software. The programs have focused on the prosecution of organized, large-scale piracy networks, not on individual students, according to the report.

Ted Stevens, a Republican Senator from Alaska, and Harry Reid, a Democratic Senator from Nevada, were among the legislators who requested the study. Spokeswomen for both senators said they had little information about the report and did not know whether it would be used as evidence in any forthcoming committee hearings.

The report may have been commissioned at the urging of movie and record companies, said John C. Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities. "The entertainment industry is trying to deal with copyright infringement on all fronts, both local and federal," he said. "I think they likely went to the committees and asked for a GAO report."

Together with the industry's recent lawsuits against people accused of piracy on campus networks, the study's focus on college file sharing has left some college administrators feeling singled out, according to Mr. Vaughn. "Some universities started to get paranoid: 'Why focus on us? It's happening all over,'" he said. "I think part of the reason for that is that we are a describable universe in a way the Internet at large isn't."
http://chronicle.com/free/2004/06/2004060204n.htm


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UMass Dartmouth Engineers Invent Wireless Music System
Deborah Allard-Bernardi

Anyone looking for a little musical enthusiasm to get going on the treadmill at the local gym knows that headphones with dangling wires can be a real nuisance.

They get twisted, caught under elbows and between fingers, and, when trying to fix the wiry mess, the headphones are almost always knocked off the runner’s head.

Adam Carvalho, 22, of Swansea, likes a good workout, but got frustrated with headphones that posed a distraction, and he didn’t want to listen to the music chosen by the gym and pumped out of its speakers.

What to do?

Being a computer engineering major at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, who graduated last week, he and three engineering buddies decided to invent a new way to listen to music at the gym.

"We kept snowballing the idea," said Carvalho. And eventually, they had it.

Their invention, called Air2Ear, is a unique blend of advanced wireless technology with the added convenience of having all of your favorite songs at your fingertips. The wireless headphones can be loaded with the user’s favorite music and pumped into their ears at the gym. The design is patent-pending.

Carvalho, and his teammates -- Joel McNamee of Salem, Steven Mooney of East Providence, R.I., and Christopher Yafrate of Raynham -- won second place for their invention at the fourth annual Student Design Contest for the northeast region held at the Rochester Institute of Technology in May. Their win also came with a $2,000 prize, which they split.

Carvalho said that going into the contest, "we were kind of intimidated." While UMass students worked out their invention with just $550, some of the colleges had $2,000 budgets or more. But, once they saw the other inventions, "we knew we had a shot."

They came in only behind the host team of Rochester Institute of Technology, which won first place for its new method of packaging transistors. Their design was privately funded and had no budget limitations.

"We received a lot of high praise," said Carvalho. "I’d like to see it in the gym someday."

If UMass gets the patent for Air2Ear, it will likely be sold to a company that can actually manufacture the headphones and sell them to gyms. Proceeds from the sale would be split between the university and the winning team members.

Basically, Air2Ear would either work as a free service or for a rental fee in gyms. The facility would be set up with the headphones, access points and a Web site.

Club members would be able to download their own personal music tastes on the Web site from home. Then, at the gym, the selected tunes would be ready to go. To start hearing the music, it would only take a press of the play button on the gym’s wireless headphones.

Hong Liu, an engineering professor and the team’s technical adviser, said the idea was entirely the team’s. After hearing their plan, Liu said she was confident they could pull it off. When they did, she said she entered them in the design competition. It was the first time Liu ever entered her students in such a competition in her 14 years as a professor at UMass.

"I’m so thrilled to see that they are our future generation," said Liu. "This group of students, they are so hardworking."

Carvalho, when designing the technology, said they needed to consider what club members would really want. They came up with a way for members to download some 250 songs. Music could be added and deleted as needed.

Plus, since the music is downloaded from personal compact disks or music file sharing sites, "it’s personalized" and there’s no commercials to listen to.

Now a graduate, Carvalho has applied to several positions in the computer engineering field. He is the son of James and Barbara Carvalho of Swansea, and the brother of Josh Carvalho.

"I’m ready to move on," said Carvalho.
http://www.heraldnews.com/site/news....=99784&rfi= 6


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Finding Free Computer Games On-line
Michael Klappenbach

The video game industry raked in more that $10 billion last year in revenues. With games going for $40+ per title it may be worth downloading free demos or reading reviews before buying anything. 99% of all new video games have their own website dedicated to keeping users updated on the latest news, updates, and possible sequels. On top of this the majority also offer free downloadable demos so you can try out a few scenarios of the game or a specific "mission". It's a great way to try out the latest titles before for you fork over your money.

Most web portals such as Yahoo, MSN, BBC, Excite, etc..., offer a wide variety of free games, both puzzle games and action games alike. Just go to the home page and search for "games" or "free games". Other sites such as MSN's Gaming Zone offers a good number of free multiplayer- capable games, while providing free multiplayer environment for store bought games such as Age of Empires, Galactic Battlegrounds, and much more.

If you're searching for that old computer game that you once had but now have lost, try doing a search on google or another search engine and you'll most likely be able to find it or some variation. I recently found the game Populous and Bard Tales, online. Both are a little dated but still good to revive some old fun.

There is one website out there where you can download your favorite classic video game and play it, all for free. www.classicgaming.com offers hundreds of classic video games to download for free from just about every game system that has been in existence. These games require you first to download an emulator and then the game. Once both have been downloaded you should be able to play the game in with it's original code though the emulator. I'll take you through a sample download that worked for me and has provided me with one of my favorite video games of all time, Galaga. Click on the following link to go to Classic Gaming's Vault. This page has specific instructions on how to download and play each of the classics, but for now, follow my tutorial and click on the following link to download an arcade emulator.

The following link has a complete list of emulators http:// www.classicgaming.com/vault/ arcademu.shtml the best and recommended one to download is the MAME which stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. There are different versions, so make sure to click on the one that applies to your machine. Once you've downloaded this emulator (we'll use the win95 version for this example) unzip to a newly created directory on your hard drive called /mame32. When completed, you're ready to download some classic arcade games.

Open up Classic Gaming's Vault screen again and scroll down until you see the list of classic video game systems and the alphabetical list of games offered under each system. Click on D-G under "Arcade Games" and scroll down until you see all of the different versions of Galaga. There are quite a few, and I only downloaded the Namco one, but the others should work. To the right, you'll notice the size and then the word MAME meaning that this particular download works for the emulator you just installed on your hard drive. Click on the first Galaga (Namco) to proceed to the download page.(yes it's only 22kb!!). The download screen should have two links, always try the BoraNet, Korea mirror first but be warned that it doesn't always work and has slow download times, and sometimes does not always included all of the files. WHat I do is first try the BoraNet, download it, if available and then try it out. If, the BoraNet does not work you're going to have to download by clicking on the first link. From this link you are taken to Fileplanet/Gamespy's downloads and after clicking "download" you are taken to a list of servers. They have fast downloads but they only have a few free servers so you may have to end up waiting in line before you can begin the download. It is very user friendly and tells you your place in line and the estimated wait time. If you can't or don't want to wait you can pay a fee to subscribe to GameSpy and have access to their dedicated servers. Once the download completes all you have to do is move/save it in the / mame32/rom directory and the run the emulator, select the game, and play. It's that easy.

I've spent the last few weeks downloading all different types of games all of them use the original code run through the emulator, and include classics such as Joust, Track & Field, 720 Degrees, Donkey Kong, and many more. They even include options or "Dip Switches" in which you can change certain game settings. This includes the number of lives, number of credits, bonus life, etc... Now instead of playing a 2 hour game of Age of Empires, I find myself more and more playing Galaga or 720 for hours on end!


My final bit on finding free games is a little risky and NOT recommended, but I'll tell you a little about it because most people know it's out there. Peer to peer file sharing has exploded over the last couple years and with the death of Napster, there were soon other programs to replace it such as Morpheus and Kazaa. Both Morpheus and Kazaa offer the ability to search for software files, and yes if you were to type in a current title you most likely would get some results from your search. The reason I don't recommend this is because of the following points:

1. There are a large number of viruses with peer-to-peer file sharing.

2. Files are not always complete and can sometimes take hours or even days to download and you're not guaranteed to get a complete download.

3. A lot of the searches from peer to peer come up with the correct names of games but have the wrong, sometimes harmful files in them.

4. It's illegal copyright infringement.
http://compactiongames.about.com/lib.../aa082502a.htm


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First Man Jailed Over Pirate DVDs

A MAN jailed today for selling pirate DVDs was the first Australian to be imprisoned under the Copyright Act.

Justice and Customs Minister Chris Ellison said Sydney Grant Priscott, 53, was sentenced today to nine months imprisonment with three months to serve and a $1,500 five year conditional good behaviour bond.

Priscott was found guilty by the Brisbane Magistrates Court of 28 charges relating to importing, possessing and exposing for sale counterfeit DVDs.

The conviction followed the discovery last year by Brisbane Customs officers of about 800 counterfeit DVDs concealed in a shipment of audio speaker stands.

Senator Ellison said the shipment of DVDs had been sent from Malaysia and was found at an address in the suburb of Coopers Plains.

Priscott was arrested and charged and released on bail but was later found selling the DVDs at the Eumundi markets on the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

"The sentence handed down by the court today is the first time that an Australian has received a prison term for offences against the Copyright Act," Senator Ellison said.

"This sends a clear message that attempts to flout Australia's copyright laws will be detected and punished."
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...5E1702,00.html


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Why the FCC Should Die
Declan McCullagh

It's time to abolish the Federal Communications Commission.

The reason is simple. The venerable FCC, created in 1934, is no longer necessary.

Its justification for existence was weak 70 years ago, but advances in technology since then have eliminated whatever arguments remained. Central planning didn't work for the Soviet Union, and it's not working for us. The FCC is now an agency that does more harm than good.

Consider some examples of bureaucratic malfeasance that the FCC, with the complicity of the U.S. Congress, has committed. The FCC rejected long-distance telephone service competition in 1968, banned Americans from buying their own non-Bell telephones in 1956, dragged its feet in the 1970s when considering whether video telephones would be allowed and did not grant modern cellular telephone licenses until 1981--about four decades after Bell Labs invented the technology. Along the way, the FCC has preserved monopolistic practices that would have otherwise been illegal under antitrust law.

These technologically backward decisions have cost Americans tens of billions of dollars.

More recently, the FCC has experienced a string of embarrassing losses, when its grand telecommunications plans were repeatedly vetoed by the courts. A majority of the commissioners want to force local phone companies to pay government-mandated rates when long-distance providers like AT&T and MCI use their phone lines. A federal appeals court recently shot down that scheme and gave the Bush administration until June 15 to appeal to the Supreme Court. There's already talk about higher telephone bills becoming a campaign issue this fall.

Meanwhile, the FCC is hard at work, trying to figure out how to muzzle Howard Stern and make a national example of Janet Jackson's right breast. Commissioners are planning how to order voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) companies to comply with arguably unlawful wiretapping requests from the FBI. In a sop to Hollywood, the FCC has decided that any device capable of receiving digital television signals must follow a complicated set of "broadcast flag" regulations. When those rules take effect in mid-2005, they will put some PC tuner card makers out of business.

These signs warn of an agency that is overreaching. If the FCC had been in charge of overseeing the Internet, we'd likely be waiting for the Mosaic Web browser to receive preliminary approval from the Wireline Competition Bureau. Instead, the Internet has transformed from a research curiosity into a mainstay of the world's economy--in less time than it took the FCC to approve the first cell phone licenses.

Even ardent supporters of the FCC should admit that there's less justification for its existence after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which removed some barriers to competition. Local phone customers don't need to worry about the Bells' monopolistic practices, because they effectively aren't monopolies anymore. Cable customers don't need to worry much about monopolistic practices because of satellite TV. Eventually, fiber connections will transport every kind of data.

The original justification for existence of the FCC was to rein in an unruly marketplace. That thinking dates back to the 1920s, when Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, an engineer by training, was worried about the unregulated new industry of broadcasting. Hundreds of radio stations had been launched, and the only requirement was that they register with the Commerce Department.

Conflicts began to arise. The Navy complained of the "turbulent condition of radio communication." But courts were already undertaking the slow but careful common-law method of crafting a set of rules for the new medium. An Illinois state court decided in 1926, for instance, that Chicago broadcaster WGN had the right to a disputed slice of spectrum, because "priority of time creates a superiority in right."

But Hoover and Congress didn't give the courts a chance. The Radio Act of 1927, followed by the Communications Act of 1934, gave the FCC unlimited power to assign frequencies, approve broadcasters' power levels and revoke licenses on a whim. The FCC already enjoyed the power to regulate telephone lines and eventually would accumulate the authority to regulate cable as well.

Abolishing the FCC does not mean airwave anarchy. What it means is returning to bottom-up law rather than the top-down process that has characterized telecommunications for the last 80 years.

In his excellent 1997 book "Law and Disorder in Cyberspace," Manhattan Institute fellow Peter Huber describes how the privatization process could work. Huber proposes that the government sell off standard units of spectrum--10kHz for AM radio, 6MHz for television, 25MHz for cellular, 40MHz for PCS--using existing geographical contours for each type of frequency.

"Once the standard parcels are defined, they can be sold to the highest bidders," Huber writes. "To keep for how long? Forever. Just like land." If just one UHF (ultrahigh frequency) television station in Los Angeles were permitted to transfer its spectrum to a third cellular provider, Huber estimates, "the overall public gain would be about $1 billion, or so the government itself estimated in 1992." Wireless technologies would be huge winners, if the spectrum were privatized.

What if disputes over spectrum arose? The answer is simple. Whoever owned the rights to that slice of virtual real estate would locate the illicit broadcaster, march into the local courthouse and get a restraining order to pull the plug on the transmitter. Trespass is hardly a new idea, and courts are well-equipped to deal with it.

One fear is that some predatory monopolist, a Microsoft of the airwaves, would end up owning all of the spectrum. That won't happen. First, the market value of the spectrum would approach $1 trillion, out of the reach of any individual corporation. Second, antitrust laws would remain on the books. The Department of Justice could wield the Sherman Antitrust Act to challenge unlawful conduct and block mergers.

Now is the perfect time to ask whether the FCC should continue to exist. Congress is considering revisions to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and some courageous politicians are wondering out loud whether the hundreds of pages of legalese are still necessary. At a hearing last month, Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., asked whether "perhaps we should declare victory" and ditch the FCC. Beyond the economic cost of missed opportunities caused by regulation, it would also immediately save taxpayers $300 million a year.

It's true that imagining a telecommunications world without the FCC is not easy. But imagining a telecommunications world not dominated by Ma Bell was difficult two decades ago, and it was not easy for the Eastern European countries to imagine life without the Soviet Union.

Since then, those formerly communist nations have privatized resources formerly owned by their governments, with remarkable results. Estonia is Europe's new economic wonder: revenue from state-owned property is a smaller percentage of the economy than it is in the United States, and its economy is growing more than twice as fast as ours.

That should be a lesson. It's time for the FCC to go.
http://news.com.com/2010-1028-5226979.html


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Cities Say No to the Patriot Act
Kim Zetter

Forget drug-free and nuclear-free zones. A growing grassroots movement seeks to make the United States a Patriot Act-free zone, one city at a time.

Or, at the very least, the people behind the movement hope to make their cities constitutional safe zones.

In the past two years, more than 300 cities and four states have passed resolutions calling on Congress to repeal or change parts of the USA Patriot Act that, activists say, violate constitutional rights such as free speech and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

Barring that, the resolutions declare that their communities will uphold the constitutional rights of their residents should federal law enforcement agents come knocking on the door of local authorities for assistance in tracking residents. This means local authorities will insist on complying with federal orders only in ways that do not violate constitutional rights. The resolutions are not binding, however, and do not affect the federal government's actions.

The national movement was launched in 2001 by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, an organization led by activist Nancy Talanian. Talanian first lobbied her community -- Northhampton, Massachusetts, a town of 30,000 people -- to stand against the act in November 2001, when few people had heard about the legislation.

Talanian and fellow activists urged newspaper editors to write about the legislation and hosted a public forum attended by 400 people, including Northampton's mayor and chief of police. Word spread quickly to other communities, four of which passed their own resolutions before Northampton passed its declaration the following May.

Two years later, 322 municipalities and four states -- Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont -- have Patriot Act resolutions.

Congress passed the USA Patriot Act swiftly in October 2001, 45 days after the Sept. 11 attacks, easing restrictions on the government's ability to dig up personal information about citizens and non-citizens, and obtain wiretaps and search warrants. Only one senator, Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), and 61 House of Representative members voted against the legislation.

Under the act, federal investigators can obtain individuals' library, financial, health and education records from cities while barring municipal workers from letting anyone know authorities have seized the documents. Officials can also monitor the activities of people who have not been identified as suspects and search a home or office without prior notice.

The municipal resolutions, crafted individually by each community, vary in language. They affirm, for the most part, that city employees aiding federal authorities in national security investigations will not violate the rights of people under investigation, such as monitoring political and religious gatherings where people are engaging in activities protected by the First Amendment.

Hawaii was the first to pass a statewide resolution, citing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as a motivating factor.

Talanian said fewer than five municipalities rejected resolutions brought before them. These included Boston and Petaluma, California, a small town north of San Francisco.

Fred Hemmings, a Republican state senator in Hawaii who voted against a resolution passed in his state, called the resolution a political play by leftists bent on criticizing the government.

"There are constitutional zealots that somehow believe, especially in times of war, that some of our adversaries should be protected by rights given to us by the Constitution," he said. "But the people on the left are forgetting that we're fighting a war against a nationless enemy. It has to be fought on completely new terms."

He said although he has not read the Patriot Act in detail, he believes "it does provide for adequate judicial oversight of any intrusion into a person's personal life."

But Councilwoman Kathy Lantry from St. Paul, Minnesota, where a resolution passed 6-to-1, took issue with the interpretation that only liberals are behind the movement.

"There are many conservative councilors around the country who have stated emphatically that there are many portions of the Patriot Act that are in direct violation to the way that many of us thought we do things in America," she said. "It's an easy out to say it's just a liberal issue."

Talanian said the community movements, which act independently of her national group and draft their own resolutions, consist of coalitions of disparate groups, from conservative libertarians to liberal civil rights activists.

"It's been very nonpartisan," she said. "There have been mixtures of political parties, as well as peace and veterans groups and student and faculty groups, working together."

Although the resolutions don't carry official weight, the communities say they hope to send a message to Congress to change or repeal parts of the act.

"Resolutions are powerful in that a city council can tell employees in their jurisdiction how they will behave," said Talanian. "They can say we don't want law enforcement to engage in certain activities even if authorized by certain legislation."

Although the resolutions don't prevent federal agents from monitoring or arresting citizens on their own, Talanian said federal authorities would be less likely to pursue surveillance without probable cause, since they don't have the resources to pursue every person who interests them without the cooperation of local law enforcement.

"It might create some checks and balance by reason of logistics or budget priorities for the FBI," she said.

Councilwoman Lantry said no one should underestimate the power local communities can have over how the federal government does its work.

"Maybe one tiny little city council in St. Paul, Minnesota, isn't going to change the way this country does business, but as others join in that cause, it will give pause to those passing policy that perhaps they didn't think about, and need to think about, the negative impact (of the legislation)," she said. "That idea -- that because we can't have a direct impact we shouldn't say anything -- is not the way our country works."

Talanian said the community groups don't oppose all of the Patriot Act's provisions. "We're not saying the entire Patriot Act should be repealed but that certain sections need to be debated to make sure people's rights are being protected."

She pointed to the recent case involving Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, who was arrested by the FBI after it mistakenly matched Mayfield's fingerprint to one found on a bag related to the train bombing in Madrid.

"Brandon Mayfield illustrates what can happen if there are laws that are so elastic that they allow people to be picked up and detained and have their houses searched and their careers harmed using ways that are not effective for catching terrorists," Talanian said.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,63702,00.html


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Massive UK censorship

BT Puts Block On Child Porn Sites
Martin Bright

British Telecom has taken the unprecedented step of blocking all illegal child pornography websites in a crackdown on abuse online. The decision by Britain's largest high-speed internet provider will lead to the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy.

The move, previously thought to be at the limits of technical possibilities of the internet and prohibitively expensive, was given the personal backing of BT chairman Sir Christopher Bland at a board meeting last month after intense pressure from children's charities.

Known as Cleanfeed, the project has been developed in consultation with the Home Office and will go live by the end of the month, The Observer can reveal. Other major players in the internet market, such as Energis and Thus, which owns rival Demon Internet, are said to be preparing to block banned sites.

Subscribers to British Telecom's internet services such as BTYahoo and BTInternet who attempt to access illegal sites will receive an error message as if the page was unavailable. BT will register the number of attempts but will not be able to record details of those accessing the sites.

A list of illegal sites compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation, the industry's watchdog, has been available for some time, but until now there has been no way to prevent people accessing them because most are based outside the UK.

The initiative would not have been possible a year ago, but improvements in computer processing speeds means that the company is now able to block websites, offensive pages and even individual images of abuse.

The move is the brainchild of John Carr, internet adviser to children's charity NCH, who wrote to Home Office Minister Paul Goggins last July urging action on paedophile websites after a successful campaign to block internet newsgroups (electronic message boards which paedophiles used to share images of children). Goggins approached internet providers last September to ask them to investigate if it would be possible. At first they were resistant, but BT came back to the Home Office last month to announce early tests of Cleanfeed had been successful.

Blocking websites is highly controversial and until now has been associated only with oppressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia and China, which have censored sites associated with dissidents. But many in the field of child protection believe that the explosion of paedophile sites justifies the crackdown.

'British Telecom deserve to be congratulated on this bold move,' Carr said. 'I expect every other service provider will now look at what they are doing to see if they can achieve a similar result.'

Pierre Danon, chief executive of BT Retail, added: 'You are always caught between the desire to tackle child pornography and freedom of information. But I was fed up with not acting on this and always being told that it was techically impossible.'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_ne...232422,00.html


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Iran

New Wave of Crack-Down on ISPs

A dozen of small and medium-sized Iranian ISPs have been shut down over the last couple of weeks for providing VoIP Termination services, or failing to filter blacklisted websites, etc.

Based on a report by Labour News Agency (ILNA), Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran prosecuter, has told the ISP association representative that that they've been studying for six months to catch those ISPs who do not filter as intense as they should. Even Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran unpopular prosecutor, has particularly said that he "won't let the Imam Hossein's dearests to be insulted" by some Iranian websites.

Apparently, in the recent crack down, both IT Ministry and Judiciary have been involved: the minsitery to stop the VoIP that has terribly reduced its revenue, and the Judiciary to prevent people from accessing some radical anti-religious and anti-regime websites that are there in Persian.
http://stop.censoring.us/archives/010957..php


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Sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ radio

Move to Stiffen Decency Rules Is Losing Steam in Washington
Jacques Steinberg

After awards-show expletives and Super Bowl breast-baring, federal lawmakers began lining up to attach their names to election-year legislation to rid the airwaves of material they considered indecent.

The House of Representatives even passed a bill in March, on a vote of 391 to 22, that would greatly increase the financial penalties on broadcasters found to have violated so-called standards of decency.

But for all the legislative posturing, the prospects for such a measure reaching President Bush's desk before the November election appear far less assured than they did a few months ago.

In the Senate, a measure approved by the Commerce Committee in March has yet to be scheduled for discussion by the full body. The delay in bringing the Senate bill to the floor is tied partly to the broader politics of the Senate, where Republicans, who hold a slim 51-seat majority, have had difficulty passing major bills. But for the senators themselves, there is also the peril of investing too much political capital in a divisive issue, which has pitted some social conservatives and child- advocacy groups against big broadcasters and civil rights advocates.

In addition, the Senate version contains other controversial provisions - including one that would seek to curb violent content on television, not just sex and swearing - that the House bill explicitly avoided.

"This looks like a cheap date to me,'' said Charles Cook, the editor of The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan political newsletter. "You come out for motherhood, apple pie and 'decency,' and you know it's not going anywhere.''

Moreover, in recent weeks, the issue of the war in Iraq - particularly the prisoner abuse scandal - has moved to the forefront of the national political agenda in a way that was not the case on Super Bowl Sunday, when the exposing of Janet Jackson's right breast during the halftime show caused such a stir. Politicians who push too hard on the decency issue may risk appearing to have their priorities out of whack.

The legislative push began earlier this year, at a time when the Federal Communications Commission, which administers the standards that radio and television broadcasters must follow, was beginning to move aggressively in response to complaints against broadcasters.

In April, for example, the commission proposed fining six Clear Channel radio stations a total of $495,000 for broadcasting a 20-minute segment of the Howard Stern radio program last year that largely dealt with anal sex. (In a departure from previous judgments, the proposed fine against Clear Channel - the $27,500 maximum that the law currently allows - was multiplied by the number of stations and the number of utterances found to be in violation.)

In March, the commission, reversing an earlier ruling, found that NBC had violated decency standards by broadcasting a single vulgarity uttered by Bono, the lead singer of U2, when he excitedly accepted an award during the Golden Globes in 2003.

The number of such complaints generally rises in election years, as do the public promises of politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, to address the concerns of the most vocal.

But this election year has been different. In response to the Stern and Bono decisions, some broadcasters have hewed to such a narrow line in recent weeks - tossing songs like "The Bitch is Back'' by Elton John off the radio, and carefully editing programs like the critically acclaimed "Prime Suspect'' by PBS - that fresh concerns have been raised, by civil rights groups among others, that self-censorship has gone too far.

The House bill was sponsored by Representative Fred Upton, a moderate Republican from southwestern Michigan. He said that mail from constituents offended by broadcaster behavior - particularly Bono's adjectival expletive - ran as high over the winter as mail on any other issue, including the Iraq war. At its core, the House bill would raise the maximum fine on a radio or television station found to have violated decency standards to $500,000 for each violation, from the current $27,500 cap.

Mr. Upton said that the penalties had not been increased in decades, and were considered such a slap on the wrist that they had proved of little use as a deterrent.

"These are the public airwaves,'' Mr. Upton said. "Every F.C.C. commissioner, regardless of whether Republican or Democrat, has called for higher fines, as over- the-air broadcasters have clearly skirted the line on decency.''

The Senate bill, sponsored by Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, would raise the maximum penalty on a sliding scale - $275,000 for a single violation for the first offense, $375,000 for the second. The maximum penalty for subsequent offenses would be $500,000.

The Senate Commerce Committee, which unanimously approved the measure in March, narrowly defeated an amendment proposed by Senator John Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, that would have extended to basic cable channels (including MTV and Comedy Central) the same indecency standards applied to the broadcast networks.

Some senators were concerned that the provision would lose a court challenge. The Supreme Court has generally held that, because viewers pay to receive cable stations, they should be held to less restrictive standards of decency and obscenity.

But unlike the House measure, the Senate version of the bill does wade into the subject of violence on television and its effect on children. The House explicitly avoided the issue of violence, in part because it would require drafting standards on what should be considered violent.

The Senate bill would also seek to roll back, at least temporarily, rules passed by the commission last year that would permit media conglomerates to own newspapers in markets where they already own radio and television stations.

The Bush administration has supported media companies in their desire to get bigger, and the House bill has no provisions that would thwart those ambitions. (The commission's proposed rules are being challenged in federal court, and have yet to take effect.)

"All players would confess that if the Senate media ownership provision remained in the bill, then it would not move,'' Representative Upton said.

If the Senate and House are able to forge common ground, the result is likely to involve some attempt - probably in a broader, unrelated bill, - to raise the penalties on broadcasters - though by how much is unclear. An additional complication is that broadcasters have long criticized the commission's guidelines about what it considers indecent, saying they are too vague. Neither the House nor the Senate bill requires the commission to clarify its guidelines.

"How do you know what's covered?'' said Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. "And if you don't know what's covered, how do you know what words to avoid?''
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/07/bu...07decency.html


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Clear Channel Is Said to Settle Accusations of Indecency
Jacques Steinberg

Clear Channel Communications, one of the nation's largest owners of radio stations, has reached an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission to pay more than $1.7 million in penalties to settle a series of indecency complaints, three people briefed on the negotiations said last night.

Barring a last-minute breakdown, the total fine that Clear Channel has agreed to pay - an estimated $1.75 million - would represent the largest ever negotiated between a broadcaster and the commission.

The largest penalty previously secured by the commission against a broadcaster involved Infinity Broadcasting, which agreed in 1995 to pay $1.7 million to the commission to settle complaints against Howard Stern.

Clear Channel's agreement with the F.C.C. also involves, in part, Mr. Stern's actions on the airwaves. The company is expected to admit that some of the material that it broadcast on its stations - including several segments of a Stern radio show during which anal sex was discussed - was indecent, according to one person close to the negotiations. That admission could prove a problem for Infinity, a unit of Viacom. The company has maintained that however offensive Mr. Stern's comments may be to some people, they do not meet the legal definition of indecent speech, and are thus protected by the First Amendment.

The agreement between Clear Channel and the commission would in effect settle any listener complaints made against its stations. Among the complaints are those concerning a 20-minute segment of the Stern show, much of it about anal sex, that Clear Channel broadcast last year on six of its stations; in April, the commission proposed fining the company $495,000 over that segment. (At the time, commission officials said that they had begun to examine whether it should penalize Infinity, which is Mr. Stern's employer and which broadcast the same segment on 18 of its stations.) The agreement also covers other listener complaints against Clear Channel, many of them yet to be made public by the commission. For Clear Channel - which suspended Mr. Stern's show on its stations in February and stopped carrying it permanently in April - the agreement represents an opportunity for political, as well as financial, finality on the issue, in an election year in which Janet Jackson's Super Bowl breast-baring has pushed such matters to the fore.

The proposed $1.75 million in fines would be on top of the $755,000 penalty that Clear Channel agreed to pay in March because of graphic and sexually explicit material broadcast in Florida on the "Bubba the Love Sponge" program, whose host, Todd Clem, has since been dismissed.

For the commission, and its chairman, Michael K. Powell, the agreement represents something of a trophy. Not only would the fines be the highest in F.C.C. history, but Clear Channel would admit that it had broadcast indecent material.

Clear Channel has also pledged not to go to court to challenge any of the complaints - including those that Clear Channel believes involved material that would not meet the legal definition of indecency.

A Clear Channel spokeswoman, Lisa Dollinger, did not respond to a message left last night seeking comment. A spokesman for Mr. Powell, David Fiske, declined to comment.

The agreement between Clear Channel and the commission, which could be announced as soon as this week, comes as the F.C.C. has been taking a more aggressive posture toward curbing sexual content and profanity on the nation's airwaves.

In March, the commission reversed an earlier ruling and found that NBC had violated decency standards by broadcasting a single vulgarity uttered by Bono, the lead singer of U2. That occurred while he was accepting an award during the Golden Globes ceremony in 2003.

Congress has also sought to be heard on the overall issue.

In March, the House of Representatives, by an overwhelming margin, passed a bill that would toughen the penalties for broadcasting material deemed to be indecent. A similar bill that includes a provision that would seek to rein in violence on television has been approved by the Senate Commerce Committee, though it has not yet been scheduled for discussion by the full Senate.

In the midst of the government's stepped-up interest in the decency issue, some producers and civil rights advocates have complained that the pendulum of what broadcasters consider appropriate has swung too far in the direction of self-censorship.

This year, for example, an Indianapolis radio station owned by Emmis Communications used its so-called "dump button" - an electronic delay device - to pre-empt the words "urinate," "damn" and "orgy" from being heard by listeners during its broadcast of Rush Limbaugh's radio show.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/bu...a/09radio.html


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Telstra ADSL Scrutiny Continues
AAP

THE competition watchdog today vowed to continue scrutinising Telstra's cut price broadband services until it was sure they were not anti-competitive.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission slapped a competition notice on Telstra in March after saying its decision to slash broadband prices was anti-competitive.

Rival internet service providers were outraged when Telstra in February slashed its retail broadband internet prices to $29.95 after making a deal with Optus and other parts of the industry to sell broadband capacity to them at $36.

If Telstra is taken to court under the competition notice and found guilty of anti- competitive behaviour, it faces fines of up to $10 million.

Telstra made two concessions on pricing under ACCC pressure. The first was rejected by the watchdog but the second, which gave ISP customers a choice between two pricing models, was initially welcomed.

However Telstra's offer was later criticised by ISPs who said accepting the low-end pricing offer, which would allow them to profitably compete with the $29.95 retail price, would make it difficult to move customers up to more expensive plans while maintaining profit margins, effectively forcing them to choose only one segment of the broadband market.

Some ISPs floated the idea of creating a subsidiary to specialise in cheap broadband, but Telstra expressly forbade ISPs from using such tactics to use both wholesale pricing models.

The ACCC engaged a law firm to collect statements from ISPs about the viability of Telstra's latest offer.

ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel today told a Senate Committee said the investigation into Telstra's broadband prices was far from over.

"It (the competition notice) will be removed only when we are satisfied that anti- competitive conduct has ceased," he said.

"We will continue that investigation over the next short while to ensure that Telstra doesn't continue to engage in anti-competitive conduct."
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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UK ISPs cutting back your bandwidth

Net to Net Tackles P2P

Net to Net Technologies the leading provider of IP DSL Solutions has announced new technology support in their IP DSLAMS to stop unauthorised Peer-to-Peer traffic from degrading the performance of DSL based networks.

An increasingly high profile issue for Service Providers is the problem of users downloading large volumes of music and video over the Internet on a fixed price link. The growth of Peer-to-Peer applications such as eMule and Kazaa hog bandwidth on shared networks and create dissatisfaction with network performance from other users which can lead to increased customer churn from valuable business customers who require a quality network service.

“Service Providers are increasingly using monitoring and manual cut off techniques to try to control this problem,” said Keith Hoult Managing Director Net to Net Technologies, “but this is in itself creating an Operating overhead and customer dissatisfaction as users feel they are being restricted unfairly.”

Net to Net Technologies' solution provides the Service Provider with tools to automatically limit the user to the bandwidth they have been allocated. The solution allows Providers to meet customer expectations and deliver on their service level agreements.

Rate Limiting technologies are common in high end switching and corporate networks but this is the first time such technology has been provided to ISPs using low cost DSL equipment. The system is based on IP Quality of Service prioritisation technology provided by Net to Net Technologies to help deliver real- time video and audio in applications such as CCTV and Video Conferencing.
http://www.lightreading.com/document...m&doc_id=54015


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ISPs Deluged by Peer-to-Peer Traffic, P-Cube Reports
Bill St. Arnaud

As much as two-thirds of the traffic that ISPs carry today is from peer-to-peer Web sites, and most of that traffic is caused by users downloading massive DVD files.

That's the assessment of ISP traffic patterns offered by Yuval Shahar, CEO of P- Cube. P-Cube is a venture-funded start-up that sells network devices to help ISPs throttle back peer-to-peer traffic.

Shahar says peer-to-peer traffic is shifting from users swapping small MP-3 music files to users simultaneously downloading multiple movies. "Napster was about swapping MP-3 files. Now it's mostly DVD movies, and the typical file is over 700M- byte. Users will set up 10 or 20 of those downloads in the background," Shahar says.

These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Canarie board or management.
http://www.boardwatch.com/document.asp?doc_id=53867


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Complimentary Wi-Fi access catching on

Where Entrepreneurs Go and the Internet Is Free
Matt Richtel

Linda Branagan would seem to be the ideal customer for entrepreneurs and telecommunications companies looking to make money selling wireless Internet connections. But, like thousands of business road warriors, Ms. Branagan often does not pay for the service because she gets it free.

At cafes, malls and downtown business districts, there has been an explosion of Internet access points, or Wi-Fi hot spots, that let computer users log on to the Internet for free. That growth is a fundamental reason - though not the only one - that technology start-ups, investors and industry analysts who had high hopes for Wi-Fi are scrambling to find sustainable business models.

Ms. Branagan, a director of a medical device research company, pays T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, $6 an hour for a wireless Internet connection when she is in airports if there are no free access points. But it is another matter when she is working outside the office in San Francisco.

"The Internet is free here," she said, as she sat doing research at The Canvas, an art gallery with a lounge and cafe setting in San Francisco's Sunset district. "Why would I pay T-Mobile?" she asked, when the cafe owners provide free Internet access to attract patrons.

The number of Wi-Fi hot spots has grown rapidly in the last year, with as many as 15,000 in operation in public locations, according to the Yankee Group, a market research firm.

But the difficulty of making a profit was made evident last month with the demise of Cometa Networks, a well-heeled Wi-Fi start-up backed by I.B.M., the Intel Corporation and the AT&T Corporation. Cometa, founded in 2002 to build a network of access points at retail outlets, announced on May 19 that it would suspend operations because it was not providing a suitable return to investors. Verizon Wireless, which said last year that it would build 1,000 Wi-Fi hot spots in Manhattan, has cut that number to around 500.

Meanwhile, thousands of free hot spots have been established by public agencies, mom-and-pop businesses hoping to attract customers and individuals working to build a grass-roots based network. A handful of city governments, some in cooperation with local businesses, are deploying free Wi-Fi networks in parts of Jacksonville, Fla., lower Manhattan and Portland, Ore., among other places.

"It's going to be hard for commercial carriers to make a profit," said Dewayne Hendricks, the chief executive of Dandin Group, a wireless Internet service provider based in Silicon Valley, who serves as technical adviser to the Federal Communications Commission on wireless Internet issues.

Mr. Hendricks said the remarkable spread of free networks was forcing commercial carriers to rethink their strategies.

"The infrastructure is being built from the bottom up," Mr. Hendricks said, referring to a municipal and grass-roots effort to deploy wireless connections. "How that plays out is potentially monumental," he said in affecting the way Internet access is provided.

Each Wi-Fi hot spot has a radio transmitter and receiver that is connected to the Internet through a broadband connection like a digital subscriber line, or D.S.L. The transmitter communicates with personal computers and enables them to send information to, and receive information from, the Internet. The transmitters typically have a range of 150 to 1,000 feet, though there is new technology emerging that could send a signal over several miles.

Because transmitters can be on different networks, a dozen or more hot spots can operate simultaneously in any given area, providing overlapping coverage. The connections do not interfere with each other because they are working on different radio channels. For users in big metropolitan areas like New York City and San Francisco, a free connection can almost always be found on blocks where hot spots are dense.

Even so, not all companies selling Wi-Fi service are struggling. T-Mobile, for one, has a well-established and profitable business model, said Roberta Wiggins, an analyst with the Yankee Group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/07/te...gy/07wifi.html
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Hijacking Harry Potter, Quidditch Broom and All
Bill Werde

On Friday night "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" sold out theaters all over the globe. But in a makeshift screening room in a Brooklyn warehouse, more than 75 filmgoers paid $7 each to watch the first film in the series, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." Sort of.

On the screen "The Sorcerer's Stone" played as it was released by Warner Brothers. But the original soundtrack, dialogue and all, was turned down and replaced by an alternate version created by a 27-year-old comic book artist from Austin, Tex., named Brad Neely. He calls his soundtrack "Wizard People, Dear Reader," and it is one more breach of the media industry's control of its products.

With Mr. Neely's gravelly narration, the movie's tone shifts into darkly comic, pop-culture-savvy territory. Hagrid, Harry Potter's giant, hairy friend, becomes Hagar, the Horrible, and Harry's fat cousin becomes Roast Beefy. As imagined by Mr. Neely, the three main characters are child alcoholics with a penchant for cognac, the magical ballgame Quidditch takes on homoerotic overtones, and Harry is prone to delivering hyper-dramatic monologues. "I am a destroyer of worlds," bellows Mr. Neely at one point, sending laughter reverberating through the warehouse Friday night. "I am Harry" expletive "Potter!"

Mr. Neely, a fan of the series, created his alternate soundtrack last summer after joking about the notion with friends in an Austin nightspot. "Usually those kinds of jokes just die in the bar," he said. This time Mr. Neely burned his creation to CD, sent copies to friends and gave some to local video rental stores; several bundled his soundtrack with rentals of "The Sorcerer's Stone."

The alternate soundtrack did not receive much attention until March, when it was shown at the New York Underground Film Festival. The festival's director, Kendra Gaeta, received a gift from her boyfriend weeks before the festival: a painting by Mr. Neely, who threw in a CD of his Potter narration. "It was just so funny," she said.

Among those attending that festival was Carrie McLaren, whose Web site, Illegal-art.org, functions as an online museum for copyright-infringing art.

Ms. McLaren has since offered the huge digital file of "Wizard People" for download and raved about the soundtrack on her site.

"We think Neely has crafted an as of yet unnamed new art form," she wrote, "one everyone should experience for themselves."

There is a brief history, at least, to alternative soundtracks. Woody Allen's 1966 movie "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" substituted Mr. Allen's comic dialogue and descriptions for the soundtrack of a bad Japanese spy movie. But while Mr. Allen bought the rights to the original film and distributed his new version in theaters, subsequent ventures in the digital era, like Mr. Neely's, have taken liberties without permission and let the Web take care of distribution.

In 2001, for example, an anonymous "Star Wars" fan was so displeased with the helium-voiced character Jar Jar Binks in "Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace" that he recut the film, removing the character, a stunt that became known as "the Phantom edit."

George Lucas, the creator of "Star Wars," initially was intrigued by the alternative version of the film. But when bootleg copies began selling at comic book conventions, and other edited versions began to trade online, his firm, Lucasfilm, sent letters to the news media indicating that it viewed such projects as copyright infringement.

A spokewoman at Warner Brothers said that the studio was unaware of "Wizard People, Dear Reader" and declined to comment further.

It is not clear that Mr. Neely's soundtrack violates the studio's copyright. Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said that while the copyright holder retains the rights to derivative works, it was possible "Wizard People" was protected under the rules that allow "fair use" of copyrighted works for purposes like criticism, comment and news reporting.

"The long-term strategic threat to the entertainment industry is that people will get in the habit of creating and making as much as watching and listening, and all of a sudden the label applied to people at leisure, 50 years in the making — consumer — could wither away," he said. "But it would be a shame if Hollywood just said no. It could very possibly be in the interest of publishers to see a market in providing raw material along with finished product."

Mr. Neely has not let the lack of legal clarity stop him from making plans to perform the "Wizard People" soundtrack live at an Austin theater July 23 through 25, as well as one night each in Seattle, Portland and Olympia, Wash., in August.

He is also working on his next project, a similar concept with a different style. The films need to have a lot of action, he said. "I'm thinking maybe `Jurassic Park.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/07/movies/07POTT.html


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Music Industry Readies Fresh Wave of Net Lawsuits
Bernhard Warner

A new wave of lawsuits is being prepared against the most prolific Internet song-swappers as part of an expanding global crackdown on Internet piracy, music industry officials said on Tuesday.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said it will sue 24 individuals in Denmark for trading music files online and it warned Britain, France and Sweden that they could be added to the list of target countries.

"It's inevitable," said Jay Berman, IFPI CEO, when asked of the likelihood those countries would be included. He added that Japan, the world's second largest music market, is also a strong candidate for lawsuits as recorded music sales there continue to slide.

The music industry has already sued 2,947 people in the United States and has announced more than 230 suits in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Canada.

"On the strength of the developments in Denmark, Germany and Italy, we can confirm there will be more legal actions in other countries in the near future," Berman said.

Carrot-And-Stick

The industry blames the extensive online trade of free music for contributing to a massive slide in recorded music sales.

A year ago it launched a multi-pronged effort to promote sanctioned online music stores such as Apple Computer Corp's iTunes while suing those who share their music collection with others on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as Kazaa and WinMX.

Berman said the carrot-and-stick strategy is showing signs of paying off with the number of infringed music files on P2P sites in decline, and awareness growing among consumers that file-sharing is a criminal activity.

The number of infringing music files available on file-sharing networks fell to 700 million this month, down 30 percent from the all-time peak of 1 billion in June, 2003, the trade group said.

And, according to an IFPI survey, 70 percent of those polled in France, Germany, Denmark and the UK were aware that the unauthorized trade of copyrighted music is illegal.

Despite the successes, the trade group intends to turn up the heat on lawsuits.

"You will continue to see that countries that were part of the first wave of announcements will continue to bring cases," Berman said.

The IFPI said it scored a recent victory in the German courts against a 23-year-old man caught with a collection of 6,000 pirated MP3 files on his computer hard drive and 70 CDs containing further files. The man had agreed to pay 8,000 euros ($9,855) in compensation.

In Italy, 30 individuals charged by a public prosecutor with copyright infringement are awaiting trial.

And 88 individuals in Denmark have either paid or agreed to pay compensation averaging 3,000 euros each for file-sharing. Another 23 Danes are negotiating levels of compensation, the IFPI said.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=5369388


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Song-Swappers Settle Out Of Court
BBC

Eighteen file-sharers in Europe have so far settled out of court as part of the music industry's legal action against 200 illegal song- swappers.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) began prosecuting in March.

Seventeen Danes and one German have settled at a cost of several thousand euros each.

In Italy 30 criminal cases are being brought against individuals by public prosecutors, the IFPI said.

An IFPI spokeswoman said that of the 88 Danish cases, another 23 were currently negotiating with authorities.

Cases are expected to start against the Italian defendants in the next couple of months, she said.

More litigation

Litigation had also been launched in Canada in March, but was currently on hold because of legal wrangles, she said.

More litigation against people who have downloaded or uploaded tracks were also announced on Tuesday, the first time since March.

"Individual countries have already said it is likely," she said. "France has already said it is more than likely, as had the UK."

The IFPI also said campaigns against illegal file-sharing had raised the awareness of people about the legality of sharing songs over the internet.

In a survey it said that 70% of people were now aware that it was illegal to download tracks unless it was from a legitimate music site such as iTunes or Napster.

It also cited the use of instant messaging software - which people use to chat in real time over the internet - as an important step in getting its message across.

More than 23 million messages have been sent out to instant messenger users in nine countries, with 175,000 sent out in the UK, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said on Tuesday.

The number of legal music downloads recently passed the 500,000 mark for 2004.

At the same time, the IFPI has said the amount of illegal music files swapped over the internet has dropped to 700 million a month - a 30% drop compared to this time last year.

"Today's results show that litigation, combined with the rollout of new legal online music services, is having a real impact on people's attitudes to illegal file-sharing," IFPI chairman Jay Berman said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3786547.stm


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Music Industry Launches Illegal Downloading Blitz
DPA

Germany's music industry has launched a blitz on illicit downloading with a German already fined and ordered to pay damages for illegal file sharing.

Police who raided his home found 6,000 MP3 files on his computer, which was connected to the KaZaa peer-to-peer network worldwide. The 23-year-old trainee was convicted in the eastern city of Cottbus early last month, but the case was not publicized till this week.

Analysts say peer-to-peer networks are characterized by many takers and few givers, and the recording industry hopes to destroy them by homing in on the givers in selected countries.

Officials in Cottbus confirmed the man had been slapped with a EUR 400 fine and had agreed in an out-of-court settlement to pay EUR 8,000 in damages plus court costs.

The German Phono Federation said police first picked up the accused's mother from work and made her open the apartment. He arrived home to find police searching his hard disk and checking his collection of 100 self- compiled CDs with 1,000 songs on them.

He was summarily convicted in the afternoon of the same day. Court officials said the modest nature of the fine was because he earned very little. He was identified after police approached his internet service provider to explain who was behind his IP address.

Every online device has an internet protocol address, but unlike domain names, IP addresses often shift within minutes or hours and can only be linked to users by using the log files on big servers.

Some US providers have refused to disclose customers' identities to Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) investigators, but in Germany, public prosecutors can require a provider to disclose such information.

The phono industry federation has filed official police complaints against 68 suspected copyright breachers in Germany.

It said Monday that two computers were seized last week from the home of a 57-year-old schoolteacher in the Stuttgart area of southern Germany.

On the drives were thousands of music files although the man only owned 25 shop-sold CDs which he could have legally copied for private purposes. He admitted downloading the other music illegally.

"We've set a precedent with the first case. There'll be more cases said Gerd Gebhardt, president of the federation.

He said surveys showed that most Germans knew that obtaining digital music from KaZaa and other peer-to-peer networks was mostly illegal. Surveys showed awareness of this at 79 percent, the highest in Europe.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the Germans, with their penchant for inventing and organising, are major contributors to the internet for better and for worse. Last month a German trade-school student was arrested for devising and releasing the Sasser virus on the Internet.

Web users who have signed up for high-speed DSL links by the hundreds of thousands routinely chat about how they have downloaded movies illegally and sales of blank CDs and DVDs to receive them have risen fast in Germany. The blanks are sold in most supermarkets.

The recording industry estimates 600 million songs were illegally downloaded in Germany in 2003 from the Internet.

While the industry maintains that downloaders are skinflints who refuse to spend money in music stores, many downloaders portray themselves as tasters who often listen to a song just once, find they do not like it but leave it on their computers for others to try.
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_...&story_id=8327


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Not all it seems

File Sharers Deserting Kazaa's FastTrack Protocol
John P. Mello Jr.

FastTrack, once the darling of online file-sharers, appears to be losing its popularity.

Reports in recent weeks -- as well as data gathered by Internet traffic tracker Alexa -- show a marked decline in files swapped on networks like Kazaa that use the FastTrack protocol.

According to information posted at the Web site of IT Innovations and Concepts (ITIC), a Canadian piracy-monitoring outfit, during the month of May the FastTrack platform was deserted by more than 16 percent of its active users.

Precipitous Drop

New favorites among online file-sharers are Overnet and eDonkey, ITIC said.

The ITIC findings are similar to those in a study released at the end of May by Canadian network-monitoring company Sandvine. That study showed Kazaa's share of traffic in the United States had dropped to 20 percent from 90 percent and in Europe had fallen to 20 percent from 70 percent.

In addition, Alexa shows Kazaa's traffic ranking dropping significantly in the last three months. The network's average ranking during that period was 2,835, while today it is 3,539.

P2P Pasha

Alexa also reports that Kazaa's reach -- the number of Internet users per million who use Kazaa -- has dropped 36 percent in the last three months.

Despite these apparent trends, FastTrack is still the pasha of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking , according to the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), an industry group located in Arlington, Virginia.

"Our data suggests that P2P usage is continuing to expand globally," DCIA CEO Martin C. Lafferty told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "While interim market-share adjustments clearly occur in response to specific promotions, new software releases, and other factors, there are no signs of seismic shifts in the overall industry structure."

Plagued with Problems

"FastTrack," Lafferty said, "continues to have the largest overall market share, and Gnutella and others comprise a strong and growing second entrant category."

According to industry insiders, though, Kazaa is plagued by several problems that are trashing its traffic numbers.

"I hear that the user experience has really degenerated," Wayne Rosso, former CEO of Optisoft, a P2P software maker located in Madrid, Spain, told TechNewsWorld via e-mail.

Too Greedy

"The network has been corrupted beyond belief," Rosso maintained. "It's become rife with garbage files and has slowed tremendously."

He noted that spyware packaged with Kazaa continues to be a sore point with users of the service.

"Kazaa has built a reputation for being full of bundled software," Greg Bildson, COO of LimeWire, a P2P software maker in New York City, told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "It seems like they became a little too greedy."

Technology Snags

Kazaa also has problems as a technology, Bildson asserted.

Its technology has been stagnating since its founders moved on to developing software for Internet phone calls, he contended.

"Kazaa has not done much in the way of innovation," he said. "At the same time, alternative file-sharing networks, such as Gnutella, have made major strides."

Closed System

According to Bildson, Kazaa, because it is a closed protocol, simply might be suffering an inevitable decline. "Open protocols are what tend to survive and thrive over the long term on the Internet," he argued.

"Open protocols benefit consumers by giving them more choice and not locking them in to one company that might insist that they install spyware," he explained.

Open protocols also entice developers from all over the world to participate in their evolution, which leads to greater innovation, he added.

Sue You Campaign

Of course, Kazaa also is afflicted with something else that competing networks have largely avoided. "FastTrack users have clearly been targeted by the RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] Sue You campaign," observed Rosso.

"We believe that our legal efforts have had a significant impact," RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "Awareness that unauthorized downloading is against the law has doubled and the legal online music marketplace is beginning to take off.

"Additionally," he said, "according to many third-party analyses, traffic on pirate P2P networks has declined, at least in the U.S."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/34305.html


Ed: The very latest Fasttrack user statistics, measured today, suggest a vastly different scenario. Both users and shared-content remain decidedly elevated even by historic standards – with numbers close to the all time high recorded in July 2003. – Jack.


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Global P2P Jihad Claims Success
John Oates

The number of music tracks available through file-sharing networks has fallen 27 per cent compared to the same period last year.

The figures from the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) show there are 800m illegally copied songs or files available compared to 1.1bn in June last year. The research claims the number of infringing music files available on peer-to-peer networks has fallen to 700m in January 2004, compared to 1bn in June 2003.


The IFPI claims the fall in numbers is due to the success of legal download sites like Napster and increasing public understanding of the legal position of file-sharing. The IFPI sues individual file sharers and has taken action against 200 people in Denmark, Germany and Italy. It is taking legal action against another 24 people in Denmark. It claims seven out of ten Europeans now know file-sharing is illegal.

Jay Berman, chief executive of IFPI said: "Today's results show that litigation, combined with the rollout of new legal online music services, is having a real impact on people's attitudes to illegal file-sharing, and this in turn is affecting levels of file-sharing activity. We are not claiming victory yet, but we are encouraged by the way the market is developing, and by the shift we see in public opinion."

But not all observers are convinced that the figures smell of victory. It would take a large pile of CDs to store 800m songs. It is not clear if IFPI is looking at all file-sharing networks or just the big names like Kazaa which has been losing members in recent months.

Canadian researchers IT Innovations and Concepts point out that some users are blocking access to shared files because of fears of legal action. ITIC also ask how legal download sites, which they estimate as making up 0.1 per cent of illegal downloads, could absorb nearly a third of files. They estimate that the number of file sharers fell 3 per cent but that would not account for a 27 per cent fall in file numbers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/09/fileshare_ifpi/


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He’s out, he’s in, he’s out…

Wayne Rosso leaves Optisoft
p2pnet.net News

Wayne Rosso, former president of Grokster, is now also the former president of Spain's Optisoft.

Rosso resigned after he and Optisoft founder Pablo Soto had major disagreements over strategic decisions, the direction in which the company's Blubster and Piolet p2p file sharing applications should go, "and other issues," he told p2pnet.

Rosso turned Grokster into a major presence in the commercial p2p file sharing arena, leaving the company last October to run Opstisoft.

One of the p2p industry's more flamboyant characters, he says he's now involved in a new p2p venture and is, "in the midst of putting it together".

He told p2pnet he couldn't go into detail because of a number of confidentiality agreements but, "this will change the entire p2p landscape in a new and positive way".

He and his new partners "are very high on this," he says, adding:

"We have our eye on some technology and concepts that'll reach far beyond the file sharing that we have
today."

A music and technology industry veteran, Rosso was a founding member of P2P United, the trade association for the peer to peer technology community.
http://p2pnet.net/story/1630


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History Of The Internet: Origins Of The Web

The world wide web is now a part of our everyday lives, but do you know who first thought of it, and how it became the revolutionary technology it is today?
Webactive staff, vnunet.com

What is the greatest British invention of all time? The steam engine, electric motor, the television? Each of these has made an enormous impact on our everyday lives, but nothing has had quite the same instant global impact as the web.

The internet set about changing things almost immediately ... for everyone. Businesses depend on it, communication networks are built on it, and thousands of terabytes of vital information are shared over it every day.

The word 'revolution' is bandied about perhaps a little too often these days, but there are few words strong enough to describe the effect that the internet has had on our world, and the relative speed with which it has made itself indispensable.

Curiously, the origins of such a monumental invention are a little difficult to pin down. When we think of the birth of flight, we remember the Wright Brothers, while the discovery of the theory of evolution is attributed to Charles Darwin.

But what about the web? Well, many people would probably name Tim Berners- Lee - recently knighted and still more directly involved in the development of the web than he originally planned.

But even Sir Tim points out in his book, Weaving the Web, that much of the hard work had already been done before he even showed up. And, although everyone remembers his groundbreaking work, there are plenty of others whose crucial contributions are already being forgotten.

Definitions
What exactly is the world wide web? This is not the dumb question it first appears - the average web user will probably find it fairly hard to define exactly what the web is, how it works or what it does. Even Tim Berners-Lee paints it in somewhat vague terms as "an abstract space of information".

This, however, is the way it was intended. When we turn on the TV, most of us have no idea how many elements, both in and out of the box, come together to produce the picture we see - all that matters is that it works. So it is with the web. It brings you the information you seek, while hiding how it does so extremely effectively.

In the simplest terms possible, the web is a vast collection of data files and resources, coded in its own Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) and transferred using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (the 'http' that's mentioned at the start of most web addresses). When you click on a link, your client (or browser) accesses the web server (host computer) where that page is stored, but to reach you the data has to ride the complex series of gateways, nodes and addresses that make up the internet.

The web as we know it today is a much more user-friendly version of a network that has been in operation for decades. Before the web, you needed a degree in computing to do almost anything online - now you can start clicking and trust your mouse to guide you. That's why it's so hard to define and so easy to use.

The web today
By current estimates, the internet contains at least four billion pages of information, pumped out by around 50 million hosts to nearly a billion users worldwide. It has created massive new brands (Amazon and eBay to name but two), and the net shows no signs of slowing down.

Could the web ever sprawl out of control? It's a difficult beast to tame but, although it's largely left to its own devices, there are web watchdogs of a sort; laws controlling what you can and cannot do online (although enforcing them is a different matter), and bold new initiatives to wipe out some of the most obvious problems.

Only recenntly Bill Gates vowed to eradicate spam within two years, although how much this will cost the consumer remains to be seen. And, at the very top of the tree, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been around since 1995, examining ways it could run better and faster. Fittingly, it is here that you can still find the web's creator.

Nevertheless, some might argue that the net has turned out nothing like Tim Berners-Lee originally intended. For something that was meant to be a free, global databank, unrestrained by big business, large parts of it are now devoted to sleaze, while much of the respectable bits are being tamed by corporate forces intent on using the web as another in a long line of marketing tools and a way of generating more profit.

So how did it get this way? Let's delve back into the past to find out.

The internet: the early years
The science of computing began well over a century ago, but took off in the 1940s, primarily for defence and intelligence purposes. Telecoms, meanwhile, has roots dating back to the mid-19th century and was more about sharing than concealing information. It was only when these two technologies got together that anything resembling a world wide web could happen - and this took a lot longer than you might imagine.

From the 1960s the US government, in partnership with some key universities, began exploring the potential of networking computers. There were half a dozen of these networks by the late 70s, all talking to different users and often in deliberately different languages. After all, what was the value in making something like Arpanet - designed to protect Western intelligence against a Soviet nuclear strike - available to the wider world?

It took people with vision, prepared to work hard for almost no reward, to change these attitudes.

One example of this is Project Gutenberg, the brainchild of a computer operator named Michael Hart, who decided in 1971 that the best use of Xerox's million- dollar mainframe was not to do number-crunching for its clients, but to type in the US Declaration of Independence and make it available to anyone who wanted it.

To its credit, Xerox not only accepted the argument but the project is still around today, publishing a new e-book daily, totally free of charge. It typifies the new attitude to knowledge that developed as the Cold War ended.

But there were technical obstacles, too. The only way the networks of the 1970s could communicate with each other on a wider scale was if someone devised a new language capable of talking to them all. And in 1979 someone did - a key breakthrough that Berners-Lee himself stresses: "If you are looking for fathers of the internet, try Vint Cerf and Bob Khan who defined the 'Internet Protocol' (IP) by which packets are sent on from one computer to another until they reach their destination."

Thanks to Cerf and Kahn, by 1983 the internet - the global network itself - was up and running, after which the big ideas came thick and fast. In the mid 1980s the University of Minnesota started a text-based information server known as Gopher, while File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the forerunner of today's peer-to- peer culture, arrived just a few months before a chap called Tim Berners-Lee uploaded data to the very first web server in August 1991. At the time, few were hailing it as a revolution.

"I didn't find lots of people willing to get excited about the idea of the web," recalls Berners-Lee. "They quite reasonably asked to know why it was different from past, or other hypertext systems."

But different it most certainly was - in effect, this was the moment that the web was born. All in all, the transition from the internet to the web as we know it today took place in the decade from 1982-1992.

Unfortunately, not even the web's biggest fans can claim it has been an unmitigated success. Yes, it has given us access to billions of pages of information and a 24/7 digital culture, but it has also given us unfortunate side effects, such as cyberstalking and grooming, and has become an effective platform for viruses, hackers, scammers and spam.

And although it has provided business with profitable new opportunities, it also created expensive new headaches. Cybersquatters and hackers need to be prevented, while online piracy threatens to eat into profits, and consumers face mounting problems with credit card fraud and identity theft.

And the influence of the web must not be underestimated. A recent report by the National Children's Society, for example, suggests that what certain people see and do online might directly affect how they behave in the real world. We are only beginning to learn what its true long-term effects might be.

Whatever next?
Most people will admit that the world is a much better place with the web than without it. And the beauty of it is that the web is constantly evolving. New applications arrive all the time, and new technologies help to make them run faster and better.

Where once there was only one 'language of the web' (namely HTML), now there are Java, Shockwave and XML. Similarly, where once there was only email, now we have quicker ways of communicating, such as instant messaging and P2P.

So despite its problems, the web is, thankfully, here to stay ... at least until something better comes along. Scarily, at current growth levels there are apparently only enough URLs (unique web addresses) to last us until just past 2050. But with billions now invested in making the web work, there is little enthusiasm to reinvent the wheel and do it all over again.

But by then the highly adaptable web will have undoubtedly evolved to cope.
http://www.vnunet.com/features/1155696


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History Of The Internet: 1812-Present

From the earliest 'computer' to the knighthood of Tim Berners-Lee, our timeline covers the milestones of the history of the internet.
Webactive staff, vnunet.com

1812
Charles Babbage designs (but never builds) a mechanical calculating machine that becomes the blueprint for all computers.

1876
Alexander Graham Bell patents (but does not invent) the telephone. It was actually Antonio Meucci, 20 years previously.

1927
First transatlantic telephone service between New York and London.

1958
US responds to the launch of Sputnik by forming the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa).

1959
Robert Noyce designs the first integrated circuit. He later co-founds Intel.

1962
AT&T launches the first commercial modem, with a speed of 300 bits per second. J Licklider of MIT proposes the idea of a 'galactic network'.

1968
First sighting of the computer mouse.

1969
Arpanet launched to share research data between four university nodes.

1972
The first email message arrives.

1973
The first big network crash occurs on Christmas day.

1979
The Usenet creates online newsgroups and bulletin boards.

1983
TCP/IP leads to the rise of the Internet. Microsoft launches Windows.

1990
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) makes it easier to exchange files online.

1991
The web is launched, and begins to spread via universities.

1993
Mosaic, the first commercial browser.

1994
E-shopping arrives. The web is still only the second most popular internet application after FTP.

1995
The 'browser wars': Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator. Explorer wins.

1998
First murder directly linked to the web.

2004
The web reaches one billion users. Tim Berners-Lee knighted.

http://www.vnunet.com/features/1155695


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New Service by TiVo Will Build Bridges From Internet to the TV
John Markoff

The Internet, in jumping past the personal computer and into the living room television set, is starting to give viewers the possibility of bypassing traditional cable and satellite services.

TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room.

The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs.

"This is the fourth electronic video service, and it is an alternative to cable, satellite and broadcast television," said Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Bernstein Investment Research and Management. Those traditional services, Mr. Wolzien said, "have been the monster gatekeepers, but this is a way for content providers to get past them."

In the new world of Internet-connected television, viewers will not have to worry about when a show is scheduled or from where it comes.

"We're fully committed to developing an entertainment experience you can't get over normal broadcast television," said Michael Ramsay, chairman and chief executive of TiVo. "This is what we think the future of television is."

A timetable for introducing the video service has not been set, nor has its price.

TiVo sustained a big blow Tuesday when DirecTV, the satellite television provider and the biggest source of new subscribers for the TiVo service, said it had sold its entire equity stake of 3.4 million shares in TiVo. Shares of TiVo dropped more than 14 percent to close at $6.41.

There is some speculation in the industry that DirecTV is moving toward developing its own digital video recorder. Several analysts suggested TiVo is moving toward Internet downloading as a way to insulate itself against potential competition from DirecTV.

Last year TiVo, which has 1.6 million subscribers who use its digital video recorder with cable or DirecTV, acquired Strangeberry, a small Silicon Valley start-up that had developed a new technology to view Internet video streams. TiVo is now developing that technology and plans to integrate it into the TiVo system next year. Video distributors like Netflix, RealNetworks and Blockbuster are also starting to explore the possibility of delivering feature-length movies via the Internet to users for viewing later.

"We're no longer in a world where innovation is stopped because somebody is the only game in town," said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, a Seattle-based company that now streams audio and video to computer users through the Internet.

The idea of downloading and storing video for conventional television viewing has until now been pioneered by a small group of technology companies like Akimbo, a maker of an Internet digital video recorder that is based in San Mateo, Calif.

Because most Internet connections do not yet reliably support data speeds needed to view television-quality video as it is streamed, a number of the Internet video services require that programs first be downloaded and stored on a hard drive before viewing.

Now, as broadband Internet becomes widely available in homes and new wireless video networks make it simpler to move video data and streams inside the home, bigger players are starting to emerge.

For example, Microsoft demonstrated a service called IPTV at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this year. The company believes that it is possible to deliver television to rival today's cable programming by using commonly available standard telephone lines, as part of what are called digital subscriber line, or D.S.L., services. It is running two small trials of the technology in Canada and Switzerland, and sees a broad potential.

"We sort of expect that TV will shift to where everyone will watch what they want when they want," said Peter T. Barrett, chief technology officer for Microsoft TV.

Microsoft executives argue that the technology would be a boon to telephone companies who are now searching for new revenue streams in the face of increasing pressure on their traditional voice-calling businesses. "Every single phone company has to be thinking about video," said Lynne Elander, general manager of marketing for Microsoft TV.

But executives at telephone companies said they were not moving quickly to deploy the Microsoft technology.

Both Verizon and SBC are engaged in trials and deployment of fiber optic networks, which offer significantly higher speeds than existing D.S.L. services. "The jury is still out on IPTV, we have to see how it works," said Eric Rabe, a spokesman for Verizon.

Smaller firms, however, are not waiting for competition to grow in this field. On Monday, Broadband Networks Inc., a start-up based in Los Gatos, Calif., introduced a service it called TimeshiftTV. The new service, using a $299 digital video recorder, will initially focus on offering video programs in eight foreign languages when it is available in December.

Broadband's chief executive, Bob Burke, said the company would try to license its technology to other companies.

The main challenge facing Internet video distribution is that streaming DVD and HDTV-quality video will require data rates above 5 megabits a second. That is far beyond most D.S.L. network speeds today, which generally range from 300 kilobits to 1.5 megabits.

Indeed, even downloading and storing high-definition video for later viewing at most D.S.L. speeds may not be economical. Sending the data stored on a DVD disk over the Internet at those speeds might take several days, making it a poor competitor for "sneaker-net" services like Blockbuster, which require the viewer to walk or drive to the store.

But for standard video quality, the economics may already work, according to a recent Bernstein Research report. It costs just 15 cents an hour to stream standard video across a D.S.L. connection, Mr. Wolzien said, and those costs are falling.

Whether Internet delivery of programming will be a serious threat in the near future to traditional broadcasters remains a matter for debate among industry executives. In any event, they also expect to capitalize on the new technology. As Steve Burke, president of Comcast Cable, the nation's largest cable operator, said recently in a phone interview, "We're big believers that the Internet is the future."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/te.../09net.html?hp


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WIPO: Day 1

Submitted by davidt

Broadcasting

The 11th Meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights kicked off with a discussion of a WIPO Database Treaty, and then moved on to the main event: the draft broadcast treaty.

EFF and UPD collaborated on these blow-by-blow notes, written in the same document at the same time using wi-fi, Rendezvous, and SubEthaEdit.
http://www.public-domain.org/?q=node/view/39


Day 2

Cory Doctorow, David Tannenbaum

Public-domain dedication:

On June 8, 2004, Cory Doctorow, Wendy Seltzer and David Tannebaum (The Authors) dedicated to the public domain the work "Notes from the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting, day 2, 8 June 2004." Before making the dedication, the Authors represented that they owned all copyrights in the work. By making the dedication, the Authors made an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in "Notes from the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting, day 2, 8 June 2004."

The Authors understand that such relinquishment of all rights includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.

The Authors recognize that, once placed in the public domain, "Notes from the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting, day 2, 8 June 2004" may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001597.php#001597


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European Launch Set For iTunes

Apple Computer will announce next week the European version of the iTunes online music store, according to sources.

The announcement will be made June 15, said sources familiar with the necessary licensing negotiations between Apple and music labels.

An Apple representative in Holland declined to comment. However, Apple issued a statement Monday that it will host a press conference in London on June 15. Apple billed the event: "The biggest story in music is about to get even bigger."

Traditionally when Apple announces a new product or service, it is available immediately, which means the service may go live next week.

Apple launched iTunes in the United States over a year ago, capturing a commanding lead in the nascent market for music downloads.

At its peak, Apple sold 3.3 million downloads in a single week and more than 70 million in its first year. In contrast, a collection of legal download services in Britain sold 500,000 between January and mid-May.

Unlike the United States, where Apple pioneered and effectively defined Internet music retailing, in Europe it will be entering a brutally competitive market, which was opened up by Microsoft over the past two years.

In addition, Roxio launched Napster in Britain last month, and Sony said it will launch its Connect store in Britain, Germany and France by the end of June.

Apple will also face Europe's most established download provider, OD2, which has three dozen retail partners including Microsoft's MSN and Coca-Cola.

Analysts, however, expect Apple to catch rivals quickly in Europe.

"iPods are just selling through the roof. To launch on top of that, I should think it will do well for them over here," said Simon Dyson, an analyst with London-based Informa Media.

The iPod is the only available portable music player that plays songs from the iTunes music store.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5227553.html


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Beatles Catalog Headed For Digital Distribution?
John Borland

Talks have begun that could finally make the songs of The Beatles available for sale online, sources familiar with the situation said.

Representatives for The Beatles have spoken with numerous online music providers, ranging from small companies to Microsoft, which is planning to open an Internet music store this year. The Beatles' side is asking for a considerable sum in return for providing exclusive online distribution rights, perhaps for as long as a year or more.

"They are looking for someone to come up with the ideal way to put The Beatles online," one digital music executive told CNET News.com.

That interest could lead to a milestone in the short history of digital music. Online music services are struggling to prove they can offer more music than a brick-and-mortar store, and the lack of songs by rock and roll's premier group has been an oft-cited gap in their appeal.

The Beatles broke up more than three decades ago, but their music continues to sell in high volumes.

"One of the things that has held back digital music online has been lack of availability of very popular artists, notably among them The Beatles," said Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg. "If they are able to come to some sort of licensing terms, it bodes very well for the online model and would probably pave the way for some of the other holdouts to come online."

But it may be some time before "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Let it Be" are sold on Apple Computer's iTunes or on Napster. One idea being considered is a Beatles-branded store that would be the only place online where the group's music, videos and other multimedia products would be sold, sources said. The store could be operated by one of the existing online music services.

Some other marquee bands have pursued this strategy, but it has not been adopted widely. Musician Dave Matthews maintains an exclusive online store on a site operated by MusicToday, a company associated with his manager.

Other big-name artists still waiting on the digital sidelines, to one degree or another, include Led Zeppelin and Madonna.

The current round of discussions is being led by The Beatles' representatives rather than the group's record label, EMI, sources said. EMI owns The Beatles' master recordings but has sought the artists' permission before putting the songs online.

"We've had several discussions with them, because we think it would be terrific to make all The Beatles' work available in digital services," said EMI spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer. "We would be delighted if they made that decision."

In an earlier technology shift, and another example of a cautious approach, The Beatles catalog appeared on CD well after most of the music world had already made the transition.

Any exclusive deal--especially if the music is distributed in a proprietary copy-protected format from a company such as Apple or Microsoft--could spotlight the growing problem of the lack of interoperability between services, digital music formats and portable devices, analysts said.

The Apple factor
If The Beatles songs were to appear in Microsoft's format, they would not be directly playable on Apple's iPod, which does not support Windows Media. If the tunes were to appear in Apple's copy-protected format, they couldn't be played directly on any digital music device other than the iPod, since Apple has not licensed use of its FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) tools to rivals.

The long shadow of The Beatles has already touched the world of digital music. Apple Corps--the company formed by The Beatles in 1968 to manage their business interests--sued Apple Computer in a dispute over the use of the Apple name and logo after last year's release of the iTunes song store.

The two companies had tussled once before, in 1989, when Apple Corps objected to Apple Computer's name and logo after the computer maker's expansion into music- related products such as digital music software. Apple Computer settled the case for $27 million and agreed to avoid using the similar trademarks in most music-related contexts.

In a statement released after The Beatles' company brought suit last year, Apple Computer said "Apple and Apple Corps now have differing interpretations of this agreement and will need to ask a court to resolve this dispute."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5228914.html


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1st Circuit Issues Copyright Statutory Damages Decision
ILN News Letter

The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a decision that involves an analysis on the appropriate method of calculating statutory damages for copyright infringement. The court ruled that damages should be assessed by infringed work, rather than infringing copies. Case name is Venegas-Hernandez v. Sonolux Records.

Decision at http://laws.findlaw.com/1st/032014.html


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Net needs Law Enforcement, Author Says
Grant Gross

The Internet is a "god-awful mess," but few U.S. government officials are willing to take action against virus writers, spammers and other scammers, author Bruce Sterling said at the Gartner IT Security Summit on Tuesday in the US.

Disorder and corruption are winning on the Internet, and computer users need the U.S. government to crack down on the thieves preying on the Internet, said Sterling, author of futuristic novels "Heavy Weather" and "Islands in the Net" and the nonfiction book "The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier."

"We had a digital revolution in the 1990s -- now we've slid into digital terror," Sterling said during his hour-long critique on the state of cybersecurity. "Today's Internet is a dirty mess -- it's revolution failed. E-commerce was extremely inventive for a while, but the financing model was corrupt. There was poor governance in the financial systems, there was worse industrial policy; the upshot was a spectacular industry-wrecking boom and bust."

Most of the advancements in Internet commerce since the dot-com bust have been illegal, Sterling noted, including spamming, identity theft, and "phishing," which is theft of credit card numbers or other personal information by directing customers to bogus Web sites to change their account settings. "If you advance into mayhem, that's not advancement, that's driving into a ditch," he added.

Sterling offered what he called a little good news about cybersecurity, the recent arrests of a handful of virus or worm writers, including the arrest in May of the 18-year-old German man who allegedly wrote the Sasser worm. "The world is never going to run out of disaffected teenagers," he said.

But Sterling said he's not overly worried about bored 18-year-old worm writers who are unsophisticated enough to get caught; instead he's concerned about the authors of such malicious code as Slammer, Code Red, and Witty because they haven't been caught.

The authors of the Witty worm targeted users of Internet Security Systems Inc.'s products, while the Bagel and Mydoom virus authors attempted to turn infected computers into spam-sending machines, Sterling said. "Bagel and Mydoom are the future of virus-writing because they have a business model," he said. "Those are organized crime activities. ... These are crooks."

Virus and worm writing will grow as a weapon for terrorists and warring nations, he predicted. Terrorists operating in places with little central government control will begin to see cyberterrorism as an effective weapon because of a lack of international cooperation on cybersecurity enforcement, he said. He listed a dozen such countries, including Somalia, Bosnia and the Philippines.

"This is the birth of a genuine, no-kidding, for-profit ... multinational criminal underworld," he said. "I don't see any way it can't happen. We're going to end up getting pushed around by bands of international electronic thieves in a very similar way to the way we've been pushed around by gangs of international Mafia and international Mujahideen terrorists."

The new tools of terrorists and criminals will be "oil, narcotics, guns and broadband," he said.

With cyberthreats likely to rise, the U.S. government needs to focus on enforcement of existing laws, including antifraud laws, Sterling said. He praised New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who prosecuted Buffalo spammer Howard Carmack earlier this year, as well as other white collar criminals. Although virus writers and many spammers break existing laws, most prosecutors seem reluctant to take on computer cases, Sterling said

"In my opinion, we need a thousand guys like (Spitzer)," Sterling said."We've got a ridiculous amount of computer laws."

Efforts such as the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, passed by Congress in late 2003, are "phoney-baloney gestures," Sterling said.

Instead of weak laws, the U.S. government needs to sponsor a multistate computer crime task force that enforces existing laws, he said. He also recommended that the U.S. post names of spammers and other Internet scammers on a Web site for everyone to see.

Sterling also praised parts of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, released by the Bush administration in February 2003, calling it "modest and feasible." The document recommended that nations work together to combat cyberthreats, and such cooperation is needed to fight borderless cyberterrorism, Sterling said. But the strategy is likely to go nowhere after former Bush cybersecurity chief Richard Clarke criticized his former boss' counterterrorism efforts in a book released earlier this year, Sterling said.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...5;fp;16;fpid;0


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Breaks even faster

New Self-Destructing DVD Launched
Jan Libbenga

A French company has developed a disposable DVD, or DVD-D, which self-destructs after a few hours. Like the classic DVD, DVD-D is made of polycarbonate, but it contains an extra layer of coating that reacts to an oxidisation process which begins as soon as the disc is exposed to air. The self-destruct process can be pre-set to occur between eight and 24 hours.

It is not the world's first suicidal DVD. Last year, Flexplay Technologies, based in New York, announced a DVD with a 48-hour viewing window. Like the DVD-D, a Flexplay- enabled DVD works in all players, DVD drives and gaming systems designed to accept a standard DVD. The makers of the DVD-D claim their product is much cheaper to produce. The company also says there are no ways to repair the disc after the weathering process has made it unreadable. Solutions to repair the disc would be extremely complex.

Both DVD-D and EZ-D target the home entertainment rental market. The products would give consumers easy access to recently released titles, both movies and music, without worrying about returns, late fees or scratched discs.

Buena Vista Home Entertainment last year released some products on EZ-D - the first movie to be available on DVD-D will be Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, which won two prizes in Cannes 2003 and the 2004 Oscar of the Best foreign film. Seven hundred other movies will also soon be available on DVD-D.

Despite the growing interest from big film studios, disposable DVDs haven't been much of a success. According to some reports, demand for EZ-D has fallen completely flat, and the retail chains carrying the discs have decided to stop stocking the format.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06...structing_dvd/


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Welcome to HALLOWEEN, ALASKA.

Work has commenced a new disc. We like to think it'll be out in September. Meanwhile, reviews and features on the self-titled debut disc (released in December of 2003) can be found in Amplifier, OpusZine, City Pages, Splendid, MusicEmissions, Pulse, and on Minnesota Public Radio's "State of the Arts" (the Halloween, Alaska segment begins at 20:25). You're also welcome to read our own amorphous list of sometime role models.

Anything else, just ask.

Download and share these tracks as you wish. More music will be added in the coming months.
http://www.halloweenalaska.com/mp3s.htm


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WinMX MP3 Music Sharing Software Review

From Paul Gil,Your Guide to Internet for Beginners.
Joanna Gurnitsky

1) Overview of the WinMX software: This product is designed to trade songs and videos across the Internet using "peer to peer" (P2P) networking.

It works like this: thousands of users install WinMX on their PCs, and willingly open their hard drives to each other. As these thousands of people log on to the Net using WinMX, the pool of available WinMX hard drives changes moment-to-moment. Every WinMX user is empowered to search for songs and movies, and then begin downloading and uploading music files to each other. Equitable sharing of music and movies is promoted, and people will often share gigabytes of files with their fellow WinMX users.

This WinMX P2P network system employs its own custom file sharing client software, created by FrontCode Technologies. The current version of WinMX is 3.31, and is free to download here: http://www.winmx.com/

2) Warning: WinMX is a highly controversial software because of copyright laws, and WinMX users do risk possible fines and lawsuits.

3) What You Need to Run WinMX (System Requirements)" : Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / XP. Pentium166 with 64MB of RAM or better recommended. MacIntosh "grey-market" versions are available for around $50USD.

3) Why WinMX is a Good P2P Software: WinMX is simple to install, easy to use, available for free, and is the only no-cost P2P software that is free of malignant spyware. In short, if you choose to participate in P2P file sharing, WinMX is the friendliest and cheapest choice available.

4) The Downsides of WinMX: Other than in Canada, it is a copyright infringement in most countries to share music and movie files. WinMX users risk being fined or even sued everytime they trade music files.

Next: The Legalities of Using WinMX Music-Sharing Software:

Related article: Canadians can legally download music!

Part 2: Legalities and Technicalities

6) The Legalities of Using WinMX Music-Sharing Software:

True WinMX software is FREE, but you must decide if you will risk being sued for copyright infringement. The only country that legally sanctions Internet music- and video-sharing is Canada. If you are in the USA, the UK, Mexico, Australia, or elsewhere, you do run a risk of being caught and fined for sharing music.

Example of an American User Being Fined: On May 6th, 2004, a woman from Connecticut was fined six thousand dollars for downloading copyright-protected music from the Internet, and was barred from downloading, uploading or distributing copyrighted songs over the Internet. (Article here)

7) Warning About a Consumer Scam: some P2P networks will unethically sell you paid versions of various file sharing software, including WinMX, and claim that this paid software absolves you of copyright responsibility. This is a lie. While the software itself may be legal (you paid for it), the copyright aspect is not addressed by these surchages.

These unethical scammers will obscure the issue with hazy statements like: “Due to the nature of peer-to-peer software, we are unable to monitor or control the types of files shared within the peer-to-peer communities”. In the end, despite what these unethical vendors will tell you, you are still liable for music sharing copyright regardless if you pay for the software or not

8) Technical Concerns for Using WinMX P2P Software:

a. Always check your files with a good anti-virus program.

b. If you are behind a router-firewall and are curious how to set up your file sharing, go here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j.bucha...l?routers.html

This website contains detailed information you can use to “open up” certain ports on your router to allow the “in” and “out” file sharing traffic.

c. Personal comment: I would highly recommend that you get acquainted with some tips and tricks that will make your WinMX-life easier. These tips include: how to avoid downloading fake files, and what to do if the movie you just downloaded refuses play on your computer. You can also find a lot of information about the fine-tuning of your transfer speeds and other WinMX expert features here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/candyst...llingWinMX.htm

Related Link: US copyright law: http://www.copyright.gov/

9. Final Comments:

If you are willing to assume the risk of copyright infringement, then I highly recommend WinMX over its competitors. The software is free, it is quite stable, it is free of malignant spyware, and the interface is quite friendly.
http://netforbeginners.about.com/cs/...nmx_review.htm


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Adobe Unveils File-Sharing Products

San Francisco, June 9: Adobe Systems Inc, known for its Acrobat document- sharing software, on Tuesday introduced a new set of products aimed at making corporate document sharing quicker and more secure.

The San Jose, California-based company said the new products would help companies automate the flow of digital documents in its Portable Document Format between staff, customers and suppliers.

Security features in the "intelligent document" software offering are also intended to prevent document tampering after the files have been stored, Adobe said.

Another product, called Document Control and Security service, is intended to give companies more power to control access to information, create audit trails of usage records and certify document authenticity with digital signatures.

Pricing for the document security software, which runs on computer servers and is available now, starts at $50,000 per microprocessor, a standard pricing arrangement in the software industry.

"It's not just a question of how to store things efficiently, but how do I assure that people can't change documents once they've been stored," said Eugene Lee, vice president of Adobe's product marketing, about the new products.

Adobe bought Canadian-based Accelio Corp in 2002 as part of a strategy to capitalize on the growing use of electronic forms by corporations and governments.

New laws passed in recent years have required companies to strengthen internal controls that protect consumers' personal information.

Health-care companies, for example, will have to ensure by April 2005 that electronic patient data is stored in a confidential and secure manner, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

Banks and other financial-services groups face similar demands under the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=32322


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All Multiple P2p Network File Sharing Software Are Not The Same: TrustyFiles 2.2 update adds Bit Torrent access and delivers the fastest and most results and download sources with 100% native code.
Press Release

RazorPop, Inc. announced the release of TrustyFiles 2.2 Personal File Sharing software at http://www.TrustyFiles.com. The performance-driven update cements TrustyFile’s position as the leader in Multi-P2P network software. TrustyFiles 2.2 features 100% native code and adds Bit Torrent network support. TrustyFiles continues to be FREE with NO spyware and NO additional bundled software.

RazorPop announced the release of TrustyFiles 2.2 Personal File Sharing software at http:/ /www.TrustyFiles.com. The performance-driven update cements TrustyFile’s position as the leader in Multi-P2P network software. TrustyFiles 2.2 features 100% native code and adds Bit Torrent network support. TrustyFiles continues to be FREE with NO spyware and NO additional bundled software.

TrustyFiles now searches and shares files with the Kazaa, Gnutella, Gnutella 2, and Bit Torrent file sharing networks. The TrustyFiles 2.2 update provides more search results, more download sources, greater stability, and more features than the previous version.

"File sharing software is quickly evolving," said RazorPop founder and CEO Marc Freedman. “In the post-Napster era, the first leader was Morpheus and Gnutella. Then it was Kazaa. Now there’s a host of networks, each with its own strengths and diehard users. The latest generation of P2P software is the multi-network client. File sharers are no longer forced to use just one network. Now they can combine results and download files from multiple networks. They can take advantage of a much larger pool of users and files being shared.

"Of course there's a catch. It’s not easy. Adding each new network is like developing and integrating a new software application. There are several developers offering multi-P2P network clients with Kazaa and Gnutella. But they all use the same generic open source software. Only TrustyFiles features its own 100% native code. We wrote it. We tuned it. We optimized it. Unlike everyone else we didn’t take the easy way out. Writing the software ourselves was the only way to guarantee high performance.

"It's all about results. We challenge P2P users to compare TrustyFiles with any other product. They'll absolutely see the difference. TrustyFiles generates thousands of search results … with multiple download sources … in only a few seconds … from all our networks."

TrustyFiles is three products in one. With Public File Sharing, search and download hundreds of millions of files from TrustyFiles, Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus, Limewire, Bearshare, Shareaza, and other Fast Track, Gnutella, Gnutella2 and Bit Torrent network users.
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/6/emw131700.htm


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Dual Bills In Congress Target File Sharing

If passed, civil charges could be levied against copyright infringement
Nancy Su

College students may soon feel pressure from more than the recording industry to stop illegal file sharing as Congress considers two bills that would extend the federal government's authority to prosecute copyright violators.

The proposed Piracy Deterrence and Educational Act of 2004, is the pairing of two bills, one now in the Senate, which would allow the Justice Department to bring civil charges against illegal file sharers. Under current law, the attorney general can only file criminal copyright charges against illegal file sharers, which require a high standard of proof.

The Piracy Act would allow the federal government to file claims that could include damages and restitution without criminal penalties.

The bill in the House, provides for educational programs about copyright violations and would also lower the standard required to prove copyright violators guilty of criminal crimes.

Under the act, criminal infringement can be defined as copyright violations by distributing copyrighted work with "reckless disregard of the risk for further infringement." Reckless disregard can be proven if more than $10,000 worth of copyrighted material is shared, 1,000 copies of one or more copyrighted works are made, or if copyrighted pre-release works are distributed.

Currently prosecutors have to show that suspects acted "willfully" by intending to profit from their actions despite knowing their conduct is illegal.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, co-sponsored the bill. Leahy said the Piracy Act is just one step in solving the challenges presented by the digital age, which includes protecting intellectual property while not impeding the development of technology and digital content.

Leahy added that the bill allows the government to take action "to ensure that more creative works are made available online, that those works are more affordable, and that the people who work to bring them to us are paid for their efforts."

While the recording industry has offered support for the bills, opponents have expressed concerns regarding funding for the anti-piracy effort. Under the Piracy Act, the Justice Department would get $2 million to handle copyright infringement cases.

"Tax dollars will go to protect an industry that already has a great deal of money," said Annalee Newitz, policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that educates the public about civil liberties issues related to technology.

Newitz said consumers who are already having difficulties making personal copies of music or playing DVDs on their personal computers will end up paying for the copyright lawsuits.

"Taxpayers will have to pay for their own torture," she said.

Some students seem to think the bills will not have a large effect on file sharing.

Xiu Fang Lou, a first-year undeclared student who stopped downloading songs when the record industry started to sue copyright violators, said though the bill's intentions are good, they do not address the fundamental reason why students download files illegally.

"(The Piracy Act) is actually a pretty good idea because singers will not earn any money if everyone downloads and no one buys the CD. But at the same time, the reason why people download is because CDs are too expensive," Lou said.

Second-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student Joyce Wu, who said she does not download music illegally, also said she thinks the bills would probably not stop people from continuing to download illegally.

"It's pretty hard to enforce. I'm pretty sure they don't have enough money to prosecute every teenager. The people who aren't afraid of being sued (by the Recording Industry Association of America) will probably not be afraid of being sued by the government," Wu said.
http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/...s.asp?id=29449


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Spaminator

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Wed, 09 Jun 2004 21:36:42 -0800

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http://www.filesharetoday.com/ref3.html


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They get letters

File-Sharing Does Not Stifle Creativity
William Heath

Sir, David Munns (Letters, June 8) is an expert running EMI while I am just a punter who in the past signed two recording contracts. But anyone can see that the headline "Stealing music online is just like shoplifting" is wrong. You can share music at home at midnight. It is far more convenient than shoplifting.

When you share music online, you do not delete the original file (whereas the shoplifter leaves a tell-tale gap on the shelf). You can explore and experiment with a hugely diverse choice. If you like what you hear you can buy CDs, concert tickets or tee-shirts. If you don't like it, you can delete it.

We are taught from an early age that it is good to share. If we love particular recording artists or songwriters it is a pleasure to reward them with our money. File-sharing may be proved incontrovertibly illegal, and if so we must accept it is defined as theft. But lending books, and copying - not for profit within fair use provisions - is, I believe, not illegal, and perhaps file-sharing is not.

Sharing files does not stifle creativity any more than playing an artist's music on radio does. If it really did reduce the financial rewards for manufactured boy-bands and made-for-TV pop idols this would be a strong point in its favour, but I doubt it does. Sharing their files today does nothing to diminish the creativity of Jimi Hendrix or Count Basie.

If innovation is insufficiently rewarded that is a problem created by the recording industry. Little Richard may have got rich, but he made many others far richer. If this is all about creativity would David Munns stand back happily and see artists rewarded directly by punters online, without the tedious overhead of having to pay EMI and others?
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentSe...=1086445559081


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Microsoft's New Media Player: Paranoia, Pop-Ups and Horticulture
Allen Voivod

Microsoft released a technical beta of Windows Media Player 10 for "enthusiasts," Wired Magazine's umbrella jargon for white-, grey - and black-hat hackers. Said hackers are eager to preview the privacy, piracy and security concerns they'll be facing when the final version of the player debuts this fall.

Microsoft's R&D Department, code-named "Apple," laid the groundwork for the WMP 10 beta, which until now has been known by its alpha version code name, "iTunes."

Speaking via videoconference from a Wi-Fi-shielded bunker, Microsoft founder Bill Gates hailed the release by stating, "It's not reverse engineering if you invested $150 million in the company, right?" At that, a nearby lawyer stepped forward and pulled Gates down from the podium by the earlobe.

Of particular note is WMP 10's new digital rights management technology, code-named "Janus." Rumors from disgruntled Microsoft employees border on the megalomaniacal, but the general picture that emerges is of a piracy solution that encourages file-sharing on the one hand, but tracks and transmits all such activity on the other.

The code, buried in a bundled adware executable, sends the data to a hardened Unix server farm, which resides in the 72-story building that houses the Legal Department of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Also integrated into the beta is a first look at Microsoft's "Digital Media Mall" concept. Designed to replicate the authentic experience of shopping in a Sam Goody or Suncoast Motion Picture Company store, users will find themselves assaulted with pop-ups for licensed merchandise related to any DVD or CD viewed in WMP 10's browser window. Help functions for this feature will be comprised of surly Goth-attired teenagers giving monosyllabic answers in streaming video.

Early reviews of the technical beta have been mixed, but the most positive review came from High Times magazine's technology columnist Detlef Burr. Mr. Burr reports that the new visualizations offered in WMP 10 are trippier than those in version 9, even when the user "is bummin' 'cause all you got's the seedy bud in your disaster stash."
http://www.deadbrain.com/news/articl...06_06_4548.php

















Until next week,

- js.














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