Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 30th, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"I don't think that, you know, we have made any particular crusade of the 'Howard Stern Show' or you." –Michael Powell, FCC chairman


"Yeah, OK, Michael, that's why I've received the largest fines in history." – Howard Stern


"Why would a consumer want to buy something that has more restrictions and less functionality for more money than current solutions?" – Charlie Demerjian


"We felt those municipal and cooperative power companies are a terrific market because many of those areas are underserved by D.S.L. and cable." – Bill Grealis


"The current system of copyright can be antiquated and user unfriendly, and its enforcement can be discriminatory." – Hillary Rosen


"This web app is a beautiful machine. Over the next 2-3 years I will try to make more beautiful machines. I'd really like to make a better living, but that's secondary." - Lucas Gonze


"The internet is our saviour. Without it, we wouldn't be what we are today. It's really turned the business around. [Musicians] can make money through the Web. They're not living in million-pound mansions. But they are earning a living." - Lucy Jordache, manager of the Rock band Marillion


"Aren't there any terrorists out there?" - Pufferbelly toy store owner Stephanie Cox
















File Sharers Win More Protection
Katie Dean

Alleged file sharers must be given a notice explaining their legal rights before their internet service provider hands over any personal information to the music labels, a Pennsylvania judge ruled, making it still harder for the music industry to use the courts to intimidate people suspected of piracy.

Privacy advocates called the Oct. 12 order by U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe a positive step in protecting the privacy and due process rights of accused copyright infringers.

The Recording Industry Association of America has filed thousands of so-called "John Doe" lawsuits, where the industry's trade association sues people based on their internet protocol addresses without knowing their names. The RIAA must first obtain an order from a judge to subpoena the internet service providers for the name of the defendant. With Rufe's order, now ISPs in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania must provide a detailed notice to their customer advising them of their rights, before they hand over their customers' names to the music companies' lawyers.

"It's another step in the evolution of protections for people who are accused by the record labels of file sharing, but may have a defense and may want to protect their anonymity," said Wendy Seltzer, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case. "It puts some procedural safeguards into the process."

"We have always encouraged ISPs to inform their subscribers of pending subpoenas. This action by the court is consistent with that," Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA, wrote in an e-mail. "Additionally, it should be noted that nothing in the court's directive absolves an illegal file sharer from liability under the copyright laws."

The order includes clear-cut information on how to challenge the subpoena if the defendant chooses and a list of attorneys who can help defendants weigh their legal options.

"To maintain a lawsuit against you in the District Court in Philadelphia, the record companies must establish jurisdiction over you in Pennsylvania," the notice reads. "If you do not live or work in Pennsylvania, or visit the state regularly, you may be able to challenge the Pennsylvania court's jurisdiction over you."

Paul Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen, which also filed a friend-of-the court brief, said that such information is important to convey to defendants because it is very likely that some of the ISP customers live in other states, even though their ISP is located in Pennsylvania.

"(The judge has) treated each defendant as an individual, so each can make their own individual decision about what's best for them in first responding to the subpoena and then the lawsuit," Levy said. "We are certainly going to be urging judges in other parts of the country to grant similar notices."

Meanwhile, the RIAA sued another 750 "John Doe" defendants on Thursday, including 25 who are accused of using university networks to share copyright music. The 13 schools targeted include Grinnell College, Hamilton College, Indiana State University, Iowa University and the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, among others.

The music labels also filed an additional 213 lawsuits against named defendants who had been identified during the legal process. Those defendants either refused or ignored the music companies offers to settle the case before proceeding, according to a RIAA statement.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0...w=wn_tophead_3


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Expert Witness Embarrassed On The Stand In Cooper Copyright Case
Abby Dinham

An expert witness in the copyright infringement case against retired police officer Stephen Cooper, was embarrassed on the stand yesterday when the defence counsel showed images of the professor's own Web site linking to copyright material.

Professor Leon Sterling, the witness for the Universal Music party, was clearly uncomfortable when lawyer for the defence, Quentin Cregan, asked Sterling to visit his own Web site using a laptop that was projected onto a large screen in the court room.

Sterling was then lost for words when he clicked on a link to one of his students Web sites – from the University of Melbourne – that featured a copyright 'Dilbert' cartoon and a link to the Web site for the peer-to-peer file sharing software Kazaa.

The owner and distributor of Kazaa, Sharman Networks, is also awaiting trial for copyright infringement charges.

Sterling responded to the discovery by stating that the student was in the wrong and would be reprimanded.

Non-profit national organisation for Internet users, Electronic Frontiers Australia, (EFA) said it's "standing by" its initial statement on the case, maintaining the case may have "major implications for freedom of speech on the internet".

EFA board member, Dale Clapperton, told ZDNet Australia yesterday that "hyperlinking" – the practice of providing a link to another Web site – does not infringe on copyright legislation.

"That is all he was doing in this case, he was only providing links to other sites," said Clapperton.

According to Clapperton, hyperlinking "as a concept" does not incriminate the author of the Web site providing the link, as he said "you don’t have any control over what the other Web site does".

Clapperton also responded to comments made by general manager of the Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) Michael Speck on the stand earlier this week, contending that "links were a natural extension of the Web site".

"Trying to argue that you're publishing something when all you're doing is linking to it is ridiculous," he said.

The EFA condemned the raids on Cooper's premises in October 2003 as "heavy-handed tactics". Clapperton stated at the time that "the use of an Anton Piller order [civil search warrant order] against Mr Cooper and his ISP smacks of intimidation and is an unreasonable and unwarranted action".

Clapperton also added the implication of Cooper's internet service provider, Com-Cen, in the proceedings goes against the amendments made to the Copyright Act last year, which he said "were designed to prevent this very type of claim against Internet Service Providers".

"Holding Internet publishers and hosting companies legally liable for the content of other sites that they link to threatens to chill the speech of all Internet users. This case should be of major concern to all Australian Internet users," he said.

The Cooper trial continues today.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/busines...9164756,00.htm


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Pay-O-La

New York State Attorney General Reportedly Targeting Record Labels
Jeff Leeds

Eliot Spitzer, the New York State attorney general, has recently taken on a procession of corporate powers from Wall Street analysts to mutual funds to insurance brokers. Now he is casting his eyes on the music industry, particularly its practices for influencing what songs are heard on the public airwaves.

According to several people involved, investigators in Mr. Spitzer's office have served subpoenas on the four major record corporations - the Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the EMI Group and the Warner Music Group - seeking copies of contracts, billing records and other information detailing their ties to independent middlemen who pitch new songs to radio programmers in New York State.

The inquiry encompasses all the major radio formats and is not aiming at any individual record promoter, these people said. Mr. Spitzer and representatives for the record companies declined to comment.

The major record labels have paid middlemen for decades, though the practice has long been derided as a way to skirt a federal statute - known as the payola law - outlawing bribes to radio broadcasters.

Broadcasters are prohibited from taking cash or anything of value in exchange for playing a specific song, unless they disclose the transaction to listeners. But in a practice that is common in the industry, independent promoters pay radio stations annual fees - often exceeding $100,000 - not, they say, to play specific songs, but to obtain advance copies of the stations' playlists. The promoters then bill record labels for each new song that is played; the total tab costs the record industry tens of millions of dollars each year.

The new scrutiny comes at an inconvenient time for the major record companies, which have been pressing federal and state law enforcement officials to shut pirate CD manufacturers and the unimpeded flow of copyrighted music online.

The statute involved is a federal one and the case would not seem to fit neatly into Mr. Spitzer's jurisdiction, but state attorneys general typically have wide latitude to investigate issues involving consumers and businesses in their states.

In this instance, Mr. Spitzer might proceed on the ground that broadcasters' dealings with middlemen severely limit the opportunities available to those artists who cannot afford to hire them.

These promoters flourished throughout the 1980's and most of the 1990's, but their influence began to weaken after Congress deregulated the radio industry in 1996, allowing for an extensive consolidation that tilted the balance of power to a handful of newly created broadcasting mammoths.

With their newfound power, some big chains, including Clear Channel Communications, at first tried to tap a bigger share of the labels' promotional dollars, and designated specific independent promoters to be the exclusive representatives for particular stations.

Promotion prices continued to rise, but at the same time the consultants had less influence over airplay, record executives say.

In 2002, the industry's lobbying organization, the Recording Industry Association of America, called on the government to strengthen anti-payola laws and examine questionable practices, including independent promotion. (Association officials are considering whether to provide new comments and information to the Federal Communications Commission as part of that agency's review of radio promotion, people in the music industry have said.)

Cox Radio, and later Clear Channel, said they would not renew their contracts with any promoters.

Since the big companies severed their ties to the practice, record labels - suffering from piracy and other financial woes - have sharply scaled back payments to the middlemen, and by some estimates pay them as little as $30 million annually.

One promoter, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Mr. Spitzer's investigators "are not going to find anything; they're 20 years too late."

But questionable practices persist in a variety of markets and music formats.

In the late 1990's, the Justice Department began a broad investigation of payola that eventually encompassed dozens of Latin and urban- music radio stations across the nation. It won convictions against two top executives at Fonovisa, the biggest independent record label in the Spanish-language market, and a top radio executive. No cases have been brought in the urban-music category. Unlike the promoters in the rock and pop fields who receive payments as stations add a song to their playlist, many urban-music consultants receive initial lump sums to finance the marketing of a new single, and distribute the money as they see fit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/22/bu...tml?oref=login


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Howard Stern Criticizes FCC Chairman
AP

Shock jock Howard Stern made a surprise call to a radio station during an interview of the Federal Communications Commission head, claiming the chairman only got his job because his father is Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Stern called in to KGO-AM radio in San Francisco during a live interview Tuesday with FCC Chairman Michael Powell. After claiming Powell consistently avoids him, Stern began to question his credentials.

"How did you get your job? It is apparent to most of us in broadcasting that your father got you your job, and you kind of sit there and you're the judge, you're the arbiter, you're the one who tells us what we can and can't say on the air," Stern said. "And yet I really don't even think you're qualified to be the head of the commission."

Powell, a Republican, was appointed to the commission by President Clinton in 1997 and became chairman when President Bush (news - web sites) took office in 2001. Powell denied Stern's charge and listed his qualifications, saying he is an attorney and was chief of staff of the Justice Department (news - web sites)'s Antitrust Division.

"I think it's a cheap shot to say just because my father is famous, I don't belong in my position," Powell said.

Stern, who battled for years with the FCC and conservative critics over his salacious show's content, is moving his show to Sirius satellite radio when his contract with Infinity Broadcasting Corp. expires in 2006.

Stern's show was dropped by media conglomerate Clear Channel Communications in April after the FCC proposed a $495,000 fine against it for comments made by Stern. Clear Channel reached a record $1.75 million settlement with the FCC in June to settle complaints against Stern and other radio personalities.

"I don't think that, you know, we have made any particular crusade of the 'Howard Stern Show' or you," Powell said during the 20-minute interview.

"Yeah, OK, Michael," Stern replied. "That's why I've received the largest fines in history."

After Stern was off the air, Powell said Stern's argument was that there should be no limits on what he is able to do on the radio. "If there are going to be limits, someone's going to have to define them and someone is going to have to enforce them."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ople_stern_fcc


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Online Music Site Settles Copyright Suit
Alex Veiga

The operators of a Spanish-based Web site that sold music downloads have agreed to pay $10.5 million to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by several recording companies.

Sakfield Holding Company S.L., which ran Puretunes.com, agreed to pay the record companies $10 million, the Recording Industry Association of America said Monday.

Four individuals identified in court documents as the site's operators - Daniel Rung, Michael Rung, Matthew Rung and Wayne Rosso - also agreed to pay a combined $500,000.

Under the terms of the settlement, which were approved Monday by U.S. District Court Royce C. Lamberth, Sakfield and Puretunes' operators agreed not to engage in any activity that would violate music company copyrights.

"Puretunes.com duped consumers by claiming it was a legitimate online music retailer when, in fact, it was no such thing," RIAA president Cary Sherman said in a statement.

Puretunes went off-line in mid-June 2003, less than two months after its launch. A month later, the top five recording companies and their labels sued Sakfield.

The suit alleged the company unlawfully copied and distributed thousands of songs from artists such as U2, Elvis Presley and Britney Spears through the Web site. Puretunes charged users for access to the music files, misleading consumers into believing they were buying music from a licensed online retailer, the companies claimed.

When Puretunes launched, Sakfield claimed it had obtained licenses from Spanish trade associations representing publishers and musicians, enough to comply with Spanish copyright laws.

But the record companies asserted that no such loophole in Spanish law exists and that Sakfield was liable.

Calls to Sakfield attorney Ralph Lotkin were not immediately returned Monday. Phone numbers for the Rungs were not listed.

Rosso, the former head of the Grokster online file-sharing service and an outspoken defender of the industry, said the company's operators acted properly.

"The owners of Puretunes, of which I never was, would never have launched a service without the proper licenses in place," Rosso said. "Once they found out that the licenses were not in order as they were led to believe by their attorneys, they immediately shut it down."

He declined to elaborate on details of the settlement.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct25.html


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Lexmark Loss Good for Consumers
Katie Dean

Until earlier this week, some electronics companies were wielding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- a law that tries to curtail piracy of music and movies -- as a shield to protect their businesses from competition. But a couple of recent court rulings are taking away that protection.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court said printer maker Lexmark cannot prevent Static Control Components from manufacturing printer toner cartridges that operate with its printers. Lexmark had sued the competitor, arguing that Static Control had no right under the DMCA to circumvent electronics that prevented Lexmark printers from using anything other than Lexmark ink cartridges.

And in August, a U.S. appeals court shot down a similar attempt by garage door manufacturer Chamberlain Group to use the DMCA to stop Skylink Technologies from manufacturing a universal garage door opener.

Critics of the DMCA and consumer groups had argued that the law presented a danger because it would prevent competition and force consumers to pay artificially higher prices. But the recent rulings are narrowing the scope of the DMCA, preventing companies from using it to shut out competition.

"We should make clear that in the future companies like Lexmark cannot use the DMCA in conjunction with copyright law to create monopolies of manufactured goods for themselves just by tweaking the facts of this case," wrote (.pdf) Judge Gilbert Merritt of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. "Congress did not intend to allow the DMCA to be used offensively in this manner, but rather only sought to reach those who circumvented protective measures 'for the purpose' of pirating works protected by the copyright statute."

A U.S. District Court in Kentucky had issued a preliminary injunction barring Static Control from selling its toner cartridge chips, but Tuesday's ruling by the panel lifts the injunction and sends the case back to the lower court for review.

Lexmark officials were still reviewing the case Wednesday but issued a statement saying that "Lexmark will continue to vigorously protect its intellectual property rights in this litigation and in any other instance where Lexmark believes that its intellectual property rights are violated."

Dave Djavaherian, counsel to Skylink in the Chamberlain case, called Merritt's concurring opinion "perhaps the most direct and strong statement on consumer harms" associated with the interpretation of the DMCA by plaintiffs like Lexmark and Chamberlain.

"The court expressed its concern that Lexmark's true interest was protecting the aftermarket for supplies for its printers, not protecting against (copyright) infringement," Djavaherian said.

"The court ruled in favor of competition," said Kenneth DeGraff, policy advocate for Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports. "In general we've been skeptical of (the quality of) third-party cartridges but we support their right to exist in the marketplace."

Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, said the decision helps rein in an overly broad and poorly written law.

"More and more we're going to see consumer products that have some sort of software in them -- from cars to vacuum cleaners to stereos," Schultz said. "This ruling says that the manufacturer of the product can't use the DMCA to stop other companies from offering competing replacement and component parts."
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,65494,00.html


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Shiver Me Timbers! Brazil Full of PC Pirates

Brazil should end the year at the top of the list of countries with the highest rate of pirated personal computers in its market, outranking China for the first time, according to a study released on Thursday.

The number of non-brand computers sold in Brazil using black market or illegal components should rise to 74.5 percent this year, up from 70 percent in 2003 and 59 percent in 1999, the study by market research group IDC showed.

China, on the other hand, has been trimming its black market for PCs so that they accounted for 73 percent of computers sold last year, down from 85 percent in 1999. IDC did not give a projection for China in 2004, but did say Brazil would dash ahead of it in the ranking.

The pirated PCs use computer components that have been doctored or illegally imported into Brazil. They are then assembled in the South American country by unregistered companies that can outsell their formal competitors by not charging taxes.

Formal computer makers charge on average 3,080 reais, or about $1,074 for a mid-range PC. The black market version costs about 1,000 reais less, IDC said.

Last year alone, the pirate PC market cost the Brazilian government 1.5 billion reais in tax revenue, the research group added.

The United States has repeatedly urged Brazil to crack down on black market goods, threatening to suspend trade benefits if it does not adequately address the problem.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...il-piracy.html


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The Rise And Fall (?) Of P2P Music Downloading
Eric J. Sinrod

Is peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet file-sharing dying on the vine in the face of lawsuits filed by members of the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA)? Or is P2P alive and well, operating off below the radar screen?

A recent study titled "Is P2P Dying or Just Hiding?," conducted by Professors Thomas Karagiannis and Michalis Faloutos of the University of California at Riverside, and Professors Andre Broido, Nevil Brownlee and kc claffy of the University of California at San Diego, concludes that P2P activity in fact has not decreased, notwithstanding threats of copyright lawsuits and fines. Indeed, the study advises that "P2P traffic represents a significant amount of Internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow in the future."

The study begins by noting that the media recently has reported a supposed sharp decline in P2P traffic over the course of the last year. To drive this point home, the media apparently has reported that the P2P user population has dropped by one- half over this time period. The media is said to have attributed this decline to copyright infringement lawsuits filed by RIAA members.

An attack is mounted against these reports in the study, as the study states that measurements of P2P traffic are "problematic." The study first points out that measurement methodologies usually are not disclosed. Next, the study argues that measurements usually are limited to a small set of two or three traditional file sharing networks; such limited sampling measurements are said to be improperly extrapolated to P2P file-sharing networking as a whole.

The study is quick to explain that current file-sharing networks, which include private P2P networks, afford a number of options to users. Perhaps even more significant, the study states that a growing number of P2P networks "intentionally camouflage their traffic." More recent versions of P2P protocols are said to have the flexibility of using any port number, which is different than earlier P2P traffic, which could be "easily classified due to its use of well-defined port numbers."

The study goes on to develop a framework and heuristics to measure hidden P2P traffic. It also estimates the percentage of P2P traffic with respect to non-specified ports for eight separate P2P protocols.

The results "shed doubt on the claim that P2P traffic is declining." The results show that "P2P traffic volume has not dropped since 2003." The authors conclude that "P2P is here to stay," given that "P2P traffic is at least comparable to last year's levels, if it hasn't increased." With respect to the latter point, the study notes that another study has revealed that P2P traffic actually has increased over the same time period.

Thus, while lawsuits by the RIAA probably have chilled flagrant P2P activities, it appears that covert P2P file sharing continues at least somewhat unabated. Plainly, without the legal actions by the RIAA, P2P file sharing would be more rampant, but these actions have not served as a P2P-buster.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columni...7-sinrod_x.htm


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A Billion Served

RIAA Files 750 New File-Trading Lawsuits
Grant Gross

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Thursday announced it has filed 750 new lawsuits against alleged file-traders using peer-to-peer software.

The 750 new lawsuits were against "John Doe" defendants not yet identified by the RIAA. In addition to those new lawsuits, the RIAA filed another 213 lawsuits against named defendants who declined or ignored RIAA efforts to settle their cases.

Among the 750 new lawsuits were 25 peer-to-peer users on 13 university campuses. The lawsuits were filed against users of P2P software such as Kazaa, Grokster and LimeWire.

The new round of RIAA lawsuits follow 762 lawsuits filed Sept. 30. The RIAA has filed more than 6,200 lawsuits against alleged file traders since September 2003.

RIAA estimates that 58 million music tracks have been downloaded from a licensed music service in the first half of 2004. "In order for legitimate services to continue their growth, we cannot ignore those who take and distribute music illegally," Cary Sherman, RIAA's president, said in a statement. "There must be consequences to breaking the law or illegal downloading will cripple the music community's ability to support itself now or invest in the future."

Lawsuits against named defendants were filed in federal district courts in California, Illinois, Arizona, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, Michigan and Washington.
http://www.nwfusion.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi


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Radio Operators OK Rules On Net Over Power Lines
Jim Hu

Amateur radio operators expressed cautious optimism about new rules for the transmission of broadband Internet access over power lines.

The American Radio Relay League (ARRL), which has been the loudest critic against broadband over power lines, or BPL, on Friday said recent decisions on the technology by the Federal Communications Commission were a step in the right direction. Ham radio operators have complained that BPL services disrupt their own signals as well as those of public safety organizations.

In trying to address this issue, the FCC on Thursday outlined rules to prevent power-line access from disrupting important signals. These rules include barring BPL from certain frequencies commonly used by airplanes and excluding services from zones near Coast Guard and radio astronomy stations.

BPL providers must provide a public database of complaints from organizations whose signals were corrupted.

"We'll remain concerned about pollution interference," said ARRL spokesman Alan Pitts. "But the glass is both half-full and half-empty."

Thursday's decisions highlight the FCC's push to someday make BPL a broadband alternative to DSL (digital subscriber line) and cable modem technology, which are controlled by the Baby Bells and the cable industry, respectively. Energy companies such as Cinergy and Progress Energy have launched or tested BPL services in their areas of coverage. Internet service providers such as EarthLink and AT&T have joined some of these tests.

For now, BPL remains more fantasy than reality. The FCC has batted around the idea for many years, and other companies such as Nortel Networks have failed in trying to launch BPL services. Energy companies will have to shift their mentality as well, because the business of delivering broadband service is different than reading meters.

"Not only are (energy companies) deploying new technology, they're getting into a new business," said Yankee Group analyst Patrick Mahoney.

BPL technology provider Current Communications Group, which powers a joint venture with Cinergy in Cincinnati, lauded the FCC rules, which aim to both encourage the development of BPL and address technology concerns.

"I think the rules are a very good balance between giving protection to licensed radio systems while not restricting BPL technology," said Jay Birnbaum, a Current Communications spokesman.

Ham radio operators are waiting to get their hands on a more detailed report on the rules before giving a confident thumbs up. Until then, enthusiasts can only hope their concerns were solved.

"The devil is in the details," said ARRL's Pitts.
http://news.com.com/Radio+operators+...3-5412115.html


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How it works

Plugging Into the Net, Through the Humble Wall Outlet
Tom McNichol

HIGH-speed Internet access usually comes to homes through one of two wires: a telephone line for D.S.L. subscribers, or a coaxial cable for cable modem users. But an emerging technology known as broadband over power lines, or B.P.L., may soon offer a third wire into homes, channeling high-speed data through a somewhat improbable conduit: an ordinary electrical outlet.

B.P.L. is the ultimate in plug-and-play. Users plug a small power line modem into any wall outlet and then connect the modem to a computer with a U.S.B. or Ethernet cable, or through a wireless Wi-Fi connection. The appeal of B.P.L. is that most of the wiring for the network is in place. Although data must be carefully routed over the electric grid to prevent interference and signal degradation, there is no need to dig up streets or rewire homes.

Two weeks ago the Federal Communications Commission adopted rule changes to encourage the technology in the hope of making broadband more widely available and fostering greater competition among high-speed Internet providers.

Internet service over power lines is probably a year or more away from becoming widely available, but the F.C.C.'s ruling is expected to spur investment in B.P.L. by utilities.

"Three or four years ago, the technology was not ready for prime time, but now we know it is," said Jay Birnbaum, vice president and general counsel for Current Communications of Germantown, Md., which makes B.P.L. equipment. "And we've gotten the cost down, so it's competitive with other broadband services."

The idea of using electric power lines to send data is not new; companies have been working on it for a decade. The major technical challenge has been how to send bursts of radio frequency energy over power lines without interfering with other radio signals, particularly ham radio and public safety frequencies.

The recent F.C.C. ruling establishes frequency bands that B.P.L. signals must avoid to protect aeronautical and Coast Guard communications, and sets up a publicly available database for resolving claims of harmful interference from private radio operators.

B.P.L. has been tested in small field trials for several years, involving about 5,000 customers in 18 states. Cinergy, a power company in the Midwest, recently began offering B.P.L. to homes in the Cincinnati area for $30 to $50 a month, depending on connection speed. The company says it hopes to have B.P.L. equipment in more than 50,000 homes by the end of the year.

Cinergy is also marketing B.P.L. to smaller municipal and cooperative power companies, particularly in rural areas.

"We felt those municipal and cooperative power companies are a terrific market because many of those areas are underserved by D.S.L. and cable," said Bill Grealis, a Cinergy executive vice president.

Adding a data channel to the power lines also has potential benefits for the utilities themselves. By reserving a sliver of the B.P.L. data channel for themselves, power companies can use the network to identify problems and accomplish troubleshooting remotely, rather than sending out a crew.

Down the road, utilities could install Internet-enabled meters and switches to offer automated meter reading, power demand management and time-of-day pricing.

"Our main interest in B.P.L. is using it to better manage our utility," said Bob Dobkin, a spokesman for Pepco, which is based in Washington. Pepco has a pilot B.P.L. program in about 500 homes in Potomac, Md. "It enables you to identify problems without having to send someone out."

While B.P.L. holds promise, there are unanswered questions about the technology. One F.C.C. commissioner, Michael J. Copps, dissented in part with the commission's recent action, saying the agency had failed to address issues such as whether electricity customers pay higher monthly bills to subsidize their utility's foray into broadband.

"We're great on technology, but not so good on working out the rules of the road," Mr. Copps said. "Nearly all of the industrialized nations except the U.S. have national plans for broadband. We don't have any comprehensive strategy."

Mr. Copps and others note that the United States has lately become a broadband laggard; it ranks 13th in the world in broadband penetration, behind countries such as Japan, Korea, Denmark and Iceland. Many believe one main reason is cost. While Americans typically pay $40 to $50 monthly for a D.S.L. or cable modem connection, the Japanese, for example, pay $10 to $15 a month for even faster connections.

American broadband consumers, in short, get less bit for the buck.

Will B.P.L. bring down the cost of broadband?

Mr. Grealis of Cinergy will say only that the cost of a B.P.L. connection will be competitive with D.S.L., cable and wireless. It remains to be seen whether the third wire into the home turns out to be a cheaper alternative or more like the third gas station on a corner, battling the competition at remarkably similar prices.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/te...ts/28howw.html


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New Supercomputer Claimed To Be World's Fastest
Matthew Fordahl

The builders of a new NASA supercomputer claim the 10,240-processor machine is the fastest in the world - an exciting prospect for researchers even if the speed title has yet to be officially bestowed.

Project Columbia, named for the space shuttle that was destroyed in early 2003, was built in less than 120 days at NASA's Ames Research Center. The cluster of 20 computers working as one will be used to speed up spacecraft design, environmental prediction and other research.

At the $50 million machine's public unveiling Tuesday, the science shared the stage with claims of record-setting performance from system-builder Silicon Graphics Inc., processor-provider Intel Corp. and NASA.

It's been a sore issue for the U.S. technology industry since June 2002, when a system built outside the United States topped a list of supercomputers compiled by an independent group that verifies performance claims. Japan's Earth Simulator has led the race ever since.

That could change next month, when the Top500 Project releases its twice-yearly rankings at a supercomputer conference in Pittsburgh.

Using just 16 of Project Columbia's 20 installed systems, the computer achieved a sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second, or teraflops.

"If you could do one calculation per second by hand, it would take you a million years to do what this machine does in a single second," said G. Scott Hubbard, Ames' director.

By comparison, Earth Simulator's sustained performance is 35.86 teraflops.

The competition for the top spot will be fierce. Last month, IBM announced the results of its Blue Gene supercomputer, which claimed its sustained performance was 36.01 teraflops. Because the machine is not yet finished, it could still come up on top.

An IBM spokesman did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

There may also be some improvement for Project Columbia. Its numbers were achieved using only four-fifths of its processors. Officials declined to comment on what the sustained performance might be when all 10,240 Itanium 2 processors are deployed.

But NASA officials, while touting Project Columbia's performance, said the system - even if it's not officially the fastest - will have a major impact on scientific and engineering research around the nation. Such work has already started, they added.

On Tuesday, an experiment was being run to determine if the extra computing horsepower could be harnessed quickly to respond to a simulated space shuttle problem.

Previously, it took as long as three months to run the calculations, Hubbard said.

The new supercomputer also is being used to process global climate data from satellites to improve hurricane landfall forecasts. It also will help design space vehicles, model the behavior of interplanetary radiation and the help find life beyond Earth.

"We're going to have an impact that will be nationwide, if not worldwide, on weather, engineering design, on astronomy, on earth science, and we're going to see enormous, incredible results," Hubbard said.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...0021175.htm?1c


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Newest iPod From Apple Holds Photos and Music
John Markoff

Apple Computer introduced on Tuesday its next generation iPod music player, which has the ability to display digital images as well as play songs.

The new iPod Photo, priced at $499 and $599, will be able to store up to 25,000 wallet-size digital images and display them on a television via a cable. It comes with 40-gigabyte or 60-gigabyte disk storage, capable of storing up to 15,000 songs.

At a news conference held in a theater here, Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, demonstrated how the iPod Photo, which will be available in Apple stores this week, could create slide shows and set them to music. The slogan Mr. Jobs chose for the new device was "all of your songs and photos in your pocket."

In focusing on still pictures, Mr. Jobs showed he was moving in a direction different from competitors in the consumer electronics industry, which have been adding video capabilities to hand-held devices. Mr. Jobs disagreed that video was a must-have feature in new devices. "Our competitors are saying it's video," he said, "but they're too big to fit in your pocket."

Apple also introduced a special $349 black edition of the iPod, which has the signatures of members of the rock band U2. The company said it would begin selling a complete collection of U2's music for $149 next month from the iTunes Internet music store. Mr. Jobs was joined on stage at the event by Bono and The Edge, two members of U2.

Although there are a growing number of competitors in the digital music business, Mr. Jobs seemed confident that Apple can continue to dominate the market. The company sold two million iPods during the most recent quarter.

"The iPod has become a cultural phenomenon," Mr. Jobs said.

Mr. Jobs also deflected questions about the incompatibility of protected-format songs sold by iTunes and its online music competitors like RealNetworks, Microsoft and Sony.

Apple's competitors have been talking about the consumer's ability to choose, he said, but they are actually unhappy with the choice that consumers are making.

Apple got a strong endorsement from Bono, who said the band would cooperate with Apple on a variety of future projects.

"It's kind of extraordinary that it wasn't a music company that cracked the problem of piracy," he said, referring to Apple. He noted that music industry executives still refer to themselves as record industry executives when "we don't even make records anymore."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/te...ple.html?8hpib


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Interview with Lucas Gonze of Webjay
Richard MacManus

Welcome to the first in a very special series of Web 2.0 interviews I'm conducting on Read/Write Web. My goal is to interview at least half a dozen people in the Web community who are building or shaping Web 2.0 - i.e. the Web as Platform.

My first guest is Lucas Gonze, creator of the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) web application Webjay. Lucas was an early developer of P2P applications and back in 2000 he created a peer-to-peer start-up called World OS. Although it subsequently "morphed into a dot-bomb" (in his own words!), it sowed the seeds for his current project Webjay - a P2P music-sharing website that has had plenty of coverage in The New York Times and other media publications.

It was an absolute pleasure to conduct this email interview with Lucas - I learned a lot about P2P and the "decentralization of taste". So in the immortal words of The Velvet Underground: settle back, pull up your cushions (whatever else you have with you). Here we go...

About World OS

Richard: The World OS website is no longer on the air, but from what I could gather on the Wayback Machine archive of it, you were developing a P2P and decentralized network product called Goa. Can you give me an overview of what you were attempting to build and why - in semi- layman's terms if possible ;-)

Lucas: WorldOS was the company, Goa was the product. WorldOS was similar enough in both goals and technology to Jxta, which it preceded by about a year, that I'd leave the details to documentation on Jxta. In brief this was infrastructure for P2P applications.

Richard: What kind of "P2P applications" was World OS aiming for - music? business files? any and everything? What were the main types of files being distributed (or you wanted to distribute) via World OS and who was your target user?

Lucas: Business files. The idea was that this was a P2P toolkit in the shape of a J2EE component. It was in Java, the interface was almost exactly like a servlet, there was authentication, things like that.

Internet as Platform

Richard: There has been a lot of talk recently about the "Internet as Platform", meaning decentralized web services and the "network effects" that come of that. The lock-in strategy to gain users is based on data and content services, rather than software or operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows. Google, Amazon and Flickr are some notable examples of this theory. Was World OS trying to do a similar thing? I'm interested in why you chose the name "WorldOS"...

Lucas: Google, Amazon and Flickr are only elements of a larger thing with a coherent identity if you zoom way out. At that scale, the internet should, assuming the viewpoint is correct, exist within something like the Gaia hypothesis. The internet OS idea is a Gaia hypothesis for the internet.

The world OS idea is a Gaia hypothesis for all information processing entities, not just computers. For example, traffic conditions probably have an impact on internet weather, and so I prefer a view of information ecology that incorporates real world systems like rush hour traffic.

The operating environment at internet scale is a different kind of animal than an operating system. You don't build it, you observe it, and you don't write to an API, you try to take advantage of your observations. So my software was not ever intended to build an internet OS but rather to work well in the context of the existing internet OS.

Richard: How did World OS fit into this Gaia system?

Lucas: Goa was intended to be radically flexible and lightweight, which seemed to me to be the defining characteristics of successful software in that environment.

How Goa Worked

Richard: Napster was a centralized database P2P service. I admit I have a scratchy knowledge of P2P systems, but didn't decentralized file lists such as Gnutella win out in the end? BitTorrent is the P2P system that I hear most about these days (given I don't specifically follow P2P technologies). Where did World OS fit into all this?

Lucas: WorldOS routed via flooding, which is like Gnutella. However it used preferential flooding, meaning that it used reputation to learn the most likely paths over time.

Richard: Can you give me an example of how this worked in practice?

Lucas: I only have a hypothetical example, since we never managed to sell the software.

Let's say you have a hundred people in an office and one of them, Michael, wants to get a spreadsheet that his group is working on. The first time he does this his query is sent by flooding. He has two co- workers, Jesse and Brian. Jesse's desktop has a lot of spare capacity, Brian's laptop does not, so during the first flood it is Jesse's machine that returns the query. The next time Michael wants to get a file, Jesse's machine will be tried first, so that the extra cost of sending a message to Brian's machine will be saved.

How Webjay Works

Richard: This question leads on from the previous... You've said on the Webjay website that you don't consider Webjay to be a file sharing network. It seems like a very grey area. I guess I think of it as a link- sharing network that just happens to have media files on the end of each link. But then every time I click on a Webjay link, the media files - mostly songs - are automatically downloaded to my computer (to the 'My Music' folder on my Windows PC). So essentially I'm downloading files, whether I mean to or not. So I'm confused :-) Where does WebJay fit into the 'P2P system ecosystem', in your opinion?

Lucas: Webjay decentralizes taste. This seemed to me to be the next frontier after decentralized network connectivity was fully colonized by the filesharing people, because the decentralization of network connectivity created more centralization of taste, not less.

The first reason is that you traverse filesharing networks by search -- search-driven navigation relies on memorable identifiers to search for, for an identifier to become memorable requires marketing, and marketing is a tool only available to large centralized entities like major labels. The second reason is that, when demand drives supply as it does on filesharing networks, being known is a condition of becoming more known. The expense to break into this system is currently covered by marketing dollars.


To decentralize taste I needed to break that cycle. I chose to stick strictly to above ground networks because unauthorized material is cleaned out by DMCA requests and lack of bandwidth for consumer ISP accounts. The more marketing dollars are going into an artist, the more DMCA takedowns are issued and the more downloads there are to blow through upload bandwidth. If a rights holder has a problem with a URL, I don't want the URL, so it's convenient that such rights holders will knock down those URLs for me. Everything I do is out in the open because open networks are, for now, naturally inhospitable to centralized taste.

Development path from World OS to Webjay

Richard: In the Wayback archives, you describe how the World OS project began and how eventually you stopped development on Goa and moved into P2P consulting instead:

"Writing now six months later, while the P2P hype balloon has been growing, the dot-com hype balloon has been shrinking. In that time we grew to eight people, released a steady stream of updates, worked an unbelievable number of hours and talked to more investors than I can count. We had serious deals on the table, but never one with plausible terms.

[...]

We are dropping development of the Goa product and moving full time into P2P consulting."

That's from January 2001. Looking at it now, 3.5 years later, is Webjay a natural progression for you from World OS - i.e. is it on the same developmental path you started down with World OS, a path which has thrown up legal and money obstacles for everyone?

Lucas: At the time the legal issues made a big difference because they scared away investors and customers. My colleagues in other companies doing P2P for business will tell you the same thing -- the RIAA successfully irradiated that turf, at least for a few years.

So what's the developmental path from WorldOS to Webjay?

WorldOS' budget was ridiculous. Webjay is ultra lean -- one guy, me, plus a lot of help from my friends. All it takes for Webjay to exist is a server and my rent money.

WorldOS was all vegetables and no dessert. Webjay has very little delayed gratification, it gets straight to dessert without stopping for dinner. The concept is that, where you normally have to download and listen to songs one by one, with Webjay you do it all with one click. It's about saving clicks.

What about the legal issues that Webjay is designed to finesse? Honestly, if I wanted to go for unauthorized music it would be no problem as long as I was willing to live in an underground style. Put the server in Russia, get a PO Box in Jenin, you're all set. But that's not the point -- authorized (but freely downloadable) music has compelling advantages.

Some P2P History and Decentralization Theory

Lucas: But let's go back a bit, change the question a little, ask things differently, because I have better stories than these to tell. Specifically I want to say how it is that the idea of decentralization is now so common.

It's New Years, 2000. I'm running a little web consulting company and we're doing well. I've got the money to do something else for a while, so I let the main contract lapse without renewal, let the subcontractors go off to fend for themselves, and sit down to do my thing. I'm just fooling around on the code that's going to be Goa, though it's not that well defined. In early March Gnutella appears. I get interested in it as a solution to the problem of ad-hoc discovery. I start working on a clone, in Java, which gets incorporated into the rest of my code. The Napster/ Gnutella/Seti@home thing starts to break big. On June 2 I posted an announcement of a pre-alpha Goa release, along with a tarball of source:

"WorldOS is a framework for distributed applications similar to Freenet or Gnutella. The recent announcement of a portal based on Gnutella, Infrasearch, shows that there are a number of useful tools that can be created using this new technology. This framework enables the creation of many more such tools."

I get invited to talk about my related work at an academic conference called Twist 2000, which is at UC Irvine. The UC Irvine guys are mainly W3C affiliates; WebDAV and REST (the thesis, not necessarily the concept) are from there. This is July 2000. About ten days before the conference the P2P term took off via a column by Lee Gomes in the WSJ, so there is now a word.

There's a colloquium on what this new stuff is about. Now, back in those days we were calling this new stuff distributed computing, not decentralized. The question came up: what's the difference between this new thing and DNS? Somebody, I don't remember who, suggested that this new thing was decentralized.

I came home from the conference. To follow up on the conversations there I founded a mailing list called "decentralization" on eGroups, the topic of which was this new stuff. The list became a community center for people interested in peer to peer. It took off with the punditocracy and pretty soon that word become the conventional wisdom as to the value of P2P:

"All this was envisioned by our common teacher, Tim Berners-Lee, who was willing to design a system built on links that can break. This is the key philosophy to decentralization, a lovely term brought to us by Lucas Gonze. Don't wait for the chaos to end, embrace it, move on and do it again. The world will take care of itself."

On the Legal Hassles of P2P

Richard: With Webjay (and I think with World OS too?) you've been careful to avoid any of the legal trouble that plagued the likes of Napster and Kazaa. On the Webjay website you say that Webjay is "specifically crafted for both legality and common courtesy in a crazy environment" and you are at pains to encourage your users to "stick to authorized music". Is this strictly a business decision for you, in that you don't want lawyers to come down on you like a ton of bricks. Or were there other factors in the 'play it safe' strategy? e.g. a moral duty??

Lucas: It's true that I can't afford to go to court. Webjay will be history the instant somebody sues, no matter how stupid and wrong the suit is. Obviously.

But it's more important that the music I want to promote is music that I can share (whether through a URL or a direct copy). Webjay is ultimately a promotional tool -- it fills the same kind of role as the radio. I don't want to promote unauthorized music because it forces me to choose between the golden rule and the law. I don't listen to unauthorized music, so I need Webjay to find stuff to listen to.

I don't believe there is a moral duty to stick to authorized music. I do believe that politeness is the only path to a political solution. If somebody wants me to stand on my head while listening to their music, I will either stand on my head or find other music. If somebody wants me to listen to their music, they will have to make it available under terms that I can accept.

Politeness is a winner tactic. It forces the crappy businessmen in the recording industry to stop hiding behind piracy. It makes the good guys smell serious. It's a dignified way of living. It helps musicians who respect listeners get popular at the expense of musicians who don't. The sole problem with politeness is that the technology and culture to filter up the best music libre is still immature.

The Future of Webjay

Richard: Lastly, what's the future of Webjay do you think? Given your experience with World OS and the lessons you learned from that, where would you like to go with Webjay in the next 2-3 years?

Lucas: Webjay will probably take on new features via spinoff projects, so that I don't break the existing community. The site does need a major makeover for usability and attractiveness; I don't know yet whether I'll call that new version Webjay or something else.

This web app is a beautiful machine. Over the next 2-3 years I will try to make more beautiful machines. I'd really like to make a better living, but that's secondary.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/002378.php


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Today's Pop Stars In It For The URLs

LONDON: By one measure of their success, chart-topping rockers The Darkness have sold enough song downloads, T-shirts and thongs on their official website http:// www.TheDarknessRock.com to nearly finance their next recording.

Rock band Marillion has gone a step further. Since striking off on its own in 2000, the band has used its online site, http://marillion.com, to raise over 500,000 pounds from fans to finance its last two albums and support its first North American tour since 1995.

"The internet is our saviour. Without it, we wouldn't be what we are today. It's really turned the business around," said Lucy Jordache, the band's marketing manager.

In what is believed to be a web first, Marillion has twice raised the money needed to record a studio album by convincing devoted fans to buy the album up front – in both cases shelling out money a year before they could hear it.

The strategy has paid off. For the latest album Marbles, the band has scored three singles in European music charts. The last time Marillion cracked the Top 40 was 1985 when it was signed to EMI, one of the world's largest music labels.

CALL IT A COMEBACK

Formed in the early 1980s, the band attracted a cult-like global fan base who bought 14 million albums before parting ways with EMI in 1995. Thanks to the web, the band has made a full-fledged comeback.

No serious band could function these days without a web strategy. The website, once considered a vanity plate for the geekiest of pop stars, is essential to promote new releases, sell concert tickets and songs, and even fight off negative publicity.

Within hours of Ashlee Simpson walking off stage mid-performance during the October 23 Saturday Night Live, Simpson herself, along with some sympathetic fans, jumped to her defence on message boards at http:// www.ashleesimpsonmusic.com.

In this celebrity-obsessed age, an unfiltered forum between an artist and fans can douse a scandal before it impacts a career.

"It's inconceivable to imagine even the half-serious artists without a website these days," said Ajax Scott, editor-in-chief of Music Week in London.

"It gives the completely unknown artist a voice. You can publicise gigs on the local circuit, sell the odd T-shirt. And, it gives the musician the opportunity to either post positive information about yourself or conduct damage control," Scott said.

Unfortunately, for the 18-year-old Simpson, the same message boards on her site also carried harsh critiques and elaborate theories on her ability to sing live.

CA-CHING

In the last few years, artists have seen websites become a serious money-maker. And with that, comes a new twist to the burning question: Will the internet forever change the music industry?

With most mega-star musicians holding exclusive rights to whatever is sold on their sites, the more wily ones have big plans for their URLs.

"Ultimately, bands want to reach fans and maximize revenues without a huge chunk disappearing into the labels. This is definitely a new business model," said Russel Coultart, co-founder of http:// www.Recordstore.co.uk, a technology firm that operates the websites of over 150 artists including The Darkness and Robbie Williams.

"I'm certainly not convinced the major labels are over, but their roles will change," Coultart added.

Universal Music, the world's top music label, has begun signing untested acts such as pop artist Derek McDonald to a "digital rights" contract before committing serious money to his career.

The label starts the riskier acts with a website, and if enough fan interest is generated online, Universal inks them to an old-fashioned record contract.

"It acts as an incubation label, if you will," said Rob Wells, director of new media services at Universal Music UK. "It's the Marillion concept."

In beginning the unscientific process of "breaking" the young musician, Universal started with a Web site for McDonald (http://www.derek-mcdonald.com), selling ringtones and offering alerts on upcoming concerts.

"I believe the future for all artist Web sites is to make them fully commercial," Wells said. A successful Web site may even draw fans away from file-sharing networks, the scourge of the industry, he said.

Meanwhile, middle-aged rockers Marillion have discovered a second life via a website that serves as its label, through its fund-raising function, and its busiest record shop.

"You can make money through the Web. None of them can retire tomorrow. They're not living in million-pound mansions. But they are earning a living," Marillion's Jordache said.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,...1a1860,00.html

[JackSpratts]

Rant of the Week

Prepare To Get Screwed By Digital Rights Management

It's not good for capitalism
Charlie Demerjian

A FEW MONTHS AGO, ironically on July 4th, I ranted a bit about Sony, and how it was shooting themselves in the foot with the ATRAC garbage it was trying to foist off on unsuspecting consumers. I got a bunch of letters from a bunch of different sources, from burned consumers to a member of the Digital Home Working Group (DHWG) a consortium of 'over 160 member companies, with more being added daily'.

Before I get too deep into this, let me start out with a letter I got in the middle of June. It was the catalyst for all of this, both the Sony rant, this one and the ones that will inevitably follow. Nothing has been edited, only the names have been removed.

Read your review about AnyDVD. Sounds great, but here's my problem:

I purchased a $2,000 Gateway Media Center PC a few months ago for the express purpose of 1) recording my favorite HBO shows (Sopranos, Six Feet Under, etc.) and burning DVD's for my private collection; and 2) converting my home videos to DVD. All has been going fine, until 2 nights ago.

I recorded Six Feet Under and then opened up Sonic MyDVD, as usual, to import the video, edit out the beginning and ending junk, and burn a DVD for my personal use.

I got a message saying it couldn't be done because the file was copy protected! Huh?

Turns out that a couple of days ago, HBO started encrypting all of its programs with CGMS-A. They allow you to "copy" a program that you record from their signal once. The trouble is that they consider that one- time copy to be recording the program onto your hard drive, not taking it from the hard drive to a DVD. THAT SUCKS OUT LOUD and I am extremely angry, as you can imagine. The files are HUGE and, even though I have a 200 gb hard drive, I can't keep them there forever. MediaCenter records tv shows with a dvr.ms extension.

DO YOU KNOW OF ANY SOFTWARE THAT WOULD GET AROUND THE CGMS-A so that the programs can be burned onto a DVD from the hard drive?? I just want to burn copies for my own use. I don't loan them out, I don't sell them. I think HBO's scheme is a total rip-off and if I weren't so addicted to The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, I would tell them to put their service in a location where the sun would never find it.

THANKS in advance for any info. you might be able to share.

This got me thinking, and reading, and the more I researched, the more I realised that the record companies, and all content providers for that matter, are greedy, arrogant and stupid. They don't care about anything other than squeezing the most money they can possibly get out of you, everything else be damned. If your rights have to be trampled through the use of large bribes (called political contributions nowadays) to get laws changed in their favor, so be it.

The DHWG is trying to be a mediator here, making the walled gardens of the content providers interoperable. It is for your benefit, really, and what is worse, they will tell you that with a straight face. Needless to say, they are wrong, and all they are doing is window dressing. None of the '160+' companies have anything resembling a spine, balls, or guts. They are caving in, screwing you, and pretending to be on your side. I think I prefer the naked greed.

One very important thing to note, nothing in the above letter mentions piracy, selling, depriving the precious content providers of money, or anything else that is not completely legal under fair use laws. If the letter writer attempts to get around the copy protection to burn the things he recorded to his own DVDs for his own personal use, under the DMCA, he is a criminal. So, HBO in one fell swoop pissed off its customers by screwing them, potentially made them criminals, and saved themselves nothing. Brilliant plan, eh?

So, what is this person to do? I told him about Overnet/EDonkey, and now the P2P service has another happy customer, and he has his shows, burned to his personal DVDs for his personal use. This may fall under fair use, it may be a criminal act, and with insanity like the INDUCE act moving forward, it sure as hell will be criminal to so much as think about it in the near future.

If this person had done exactly the same thing on a VCR without Microsoft's , Gateway and Sonic's tender attentions, it would have worked, and HBO would most likely have one more customer. Now it is borderline criminal. Any reasonable person would tell you that it is completely OK to do this, legal or not. RIAA and MPAA lawyers however would love to crush you under their heel and dance about on the bloody stain that you become. Which outcome embodies freedom and democracy again? Which outcome involves bags of cash and campaign managers? Which do you think will win?

Enter the digital music rights companies of the world. Not only do these weasels want to screw you with the 'protection' schemes they are hatching, they want to use them to control all other content providers. That is why I kept going back to the walled gardens theme, Sony is trying to build them, as is Apple, Real, MS and everyone else. If you put any execs from these, and many other companies in a closed room, and get them talking about user screwing, err, content protection schemes, they stand a fair chance of drowning in their own drool thinking of the money. The world would win that one, but they are smarter than that, but not wiser.

Enter the DHWG, or the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) (here) as they are now known. They are composed of the biggest companies in the industry, everyone is there, and a presentation I was sent came from one of the 'big boys' of the bunch. While it was meant to help me understand their point of view, all it did was scare the hell out of me, and convince me that they are collectively doomed to failure. The sad thing is that you and I will pay the price for it while they flail their way into the grave.

I will not name this company, mainly because it is nothing it is doing in particular. It is simply promoting the spineless, myopic 'vision' of the consortium in a sheeplike fashion. The whole group is either actively evil, stupid, or a combination of the two. There is nothing that they are doing that will benefit you and I, but just about everything will hurt us.

The DLNA does not understand the fundamental problem, and how it directly conflicts with capitalism and consumer interests. What they are doing is making a single content protection standard that will be compatible across all members. You plug in your DVR to your TV and it works and that can stream to your wireless laptop in the bathroom just as easily. Everyone is happy, and the consumer benefits while the rights of the content providers are preserved.

No one can argue with that right? I mean the poor multi-billion dollar consortia are only out to keep from getting ripped off so they can line the pockets of their execs and coked out talentless dancers that masquerade as stars nowadays.

Really, what they are doing is trying to take the same old walled gardens, and make them into one walled garden that only the current members can play in. Instead of screwing you and each other, they have started to realise that they will only be able to screw you if they want to get away with anything at all. For them, this is 'fair'.

The fundamental question is simply this. Why would a consumer want to buy something that has more restrictions and less functionality for more money than current solutions? I have asked this question to junior members of the companies to the very top CxOs, and from people on the street to fellow journalists. No-one can give me an answer.

The only answer is greed. They don't give a rat's ass about you, what you think, care or do, as long as they get your money. If you don't want to give them your money, they will take it, and make resistance a crime.

Several execs used me as a sounding board, some because they knew I was an asshole and would give the answers they didn't want to hear, and others because they were oblivious. I would always ask them the question, and none would give me an answer. No one of them could give me a single reason why DRM was a benefit to the consumer. Think about this. You have 160+ companies all sitting in a room discussing you like you are dumb sheep. The sad thing is that they probably have the consumer sized up perfectly.

They can't answer the benefit part because there is no benefit. Some execs tried valiantly and used excuses like 'well, interoperability is better than many different incompatible DRM schemes'. Nice try, but answer the question. The execs either have the proverbial clue-proof coating applied way too thick, or they don't get the idea. I don't know which frightens me more, but I do know at least one electronics exec I talked to is clue-proof, and the other is in the rapacious greed category. Let's just assume it depends on the mustelid involved.

Hands up everyone who thinks the RIAA threatening to sue 12 year old girls and octogenarians made them buy more records? Hmm, I see no hands out there. OK, here's an easier one for you. Hands up everyone who feels the poor underpaid RIAA members would starve to death peddling $18 CDs laden with crap if they couldn't trample your rights? Nope, no hands there either.

Now, how about this one. Hands up everyone who would buy more CDs if they actually worked in your car without having to use illegal programs to rip them? Wow, lots of hands there. How about if they were forced to put out good music you wanted rather than what they want you to buy? Wow, more hands. Think it means something? If you are a record exec, or a DLNA member, it means the thieves are barking at your door. Call the lawyers, start the lawsuits

If the foisted, crippling, unwanted, unloved DRM isn't bad enough, it gets worse. One of the key bullet points in an industry presentation I was given said 'IP must be licensed under reasonable, non-discriminatory terms'. On the surface that is a fair sounding proposal because everyone get the same things at the same price. The world is a happy, controlled, interoperable walled garden. The execs get their money, and drive around in large cars. What more could you want?

Well, if you run Linux, the ability to play the DVD you just bought might be useful. The terms reasonable and non-discriminatory are the same ones Microsoft used to shut Linux out of several other markets. Now the entire consumer electronics industry, hardware, software and content providers, are all getting together and slamming the door on Linux, and probably anyone else who dares fly the banner of the consumer. They can and will shut you down, and if they can't do it legally, they can spend you into the ground in court.

That brings us back to the whole question of what the DLNA does for you. The short answer is nothing that would be considered good by anyone who does not actively talk to their shoes and to an occasional wall. It does allow DLNA members to control what you do, how you do it, and how you will pay them for the privilege. Comforting thoughts, don't you think?

Let me put a personal spin on this. I have not bought a CD since 1998. When the record companies sued Napster, I sat back and said 'this is wrong'. I thought I would wait it out, and not give them my money until a decision was reached. If the record companies prevailed, I would never buy another CD or give any RIAA member my money. If Napster won, I would go back to buying more than the CD or two I bought every week.

Fast forward. The RIAA won and lost. They spent Napster into the ground, and while I think the fight is far from over, Napster is gone. Sticking to my morals, I have not bought a CD since then, and I have the dubious honor of being able to say the last CD I ever bought was Kid Rock's Devil Without a Cause. The sad part is that I downloaded most of the album from Napster before I bought it, and said 'hey, this isn't bad'. I then bought the album. God, I need to bathe.

Overall, with the new wave of DRM infected consumer electronics breaking over us, you stand to lose what few rights you have that are not currently criminalised. The problem is a simple one. The DLNA will not allow itself to admit that the only thing that matters is giving consumers more for their money. Charging them more so you can screw them harder does not work under capitalism, so they are attempting to change the system.

Until they can answer the question, they are doomed to failure. Can anyone in the DLNA answer it?

Here it is again: "Why would a consumer want to buy something that has more restrictions and less functionality for more money than current solutions?"

I just wish one of you spineless but very rich companies had the balls to stand up and do the right thing for the consumer. Fat chance, but I thought I'd ask.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19246


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Don't Bite on Fresh Bagle, Security Experts Warn
Susan B. Shor

F-Secure gave the worm a Level 2 threat warning, its second-highest level. Symantec, which calls the virus Bagle-AV, rated it category 3, or a moderate risk. The worm can also spread itself through peer-to-peer networks. It hunts for folders with a "shar" substring and copies files into the folders.

Users of Windows operating systems have another e-mail worm to worry about today, as the latest variant of Bagle, Bagle-AU (W32/Bagle-AU), wends its way around the Web.

Antivirus companies say that Bagle, which has been around since January, has been reported in more than 30 countries so far today.

Antivirus protection companies have been rating the worm a medium to high risk.

"This seems to be mostly the initial seeding of the virus, which is done by the virus writers by spamming the virus around," Mikko Hyppönen, director of antivirus research at F-Secure, told TechNewsWorld.

Middling Risk Level

F-Secure gave the worm a Level 2 threat warning, its second-highest level. Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC) , which calls the virus Bagle-AV, rated it category 3, or a moderate risk.

The tainted e-mail may show up with different subjects -- such as "Re: Hello," "Re: Hi," "Re: Thanks " or "Re: Thank you!" -- and contain executable file attachments with names like "Price," "Joke" or "Runme" and the extensions .exe, .scr, .com or .cpl.

If opened, the worm will take over the computer and try to spread itself to other computers.

"Most likely this is done to turn it into a spam robot. It's unlikely to delete anything, as that would just blow the cover of the virus," Hyppönen said.

Update Your Definitions

Like earlier variants, the worm -- also known as I-Worm.Bagle.at, WORM_BAGLE.AT and W32/Bagle.bb@MM -- will disable antivirus software if antivirus definitions are not up to date. It then sends itself to e-mail addresses found on the infected computer using its own e-mailing engine, drops more malware and downloads code from the Internet.

The worm can also spread itself through peer-to-peer networks. It hunts for folders with a "shar" substring and copies files into the folders.

Gregg Mastoras, senior security analyst at Sophos , said if it spreads widely enough, Bagle-AU can slow down or otherwise impair e-mail systems. Sophos puts the threat at medium-high on its temperature gauge.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/D...arn-37717.html


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Bands Debut Dual - Sided CD / DVD Hybrid
AP

A new hybrid CD format that offers standard CD audio on one side and the enhanced media capabilities of a DVD on the other made its nationwide debut this week.

The first new albums in the DualDisc format were released Tuesday by Warner Music Group rock bands The Donnas and Simple Plan.

Several DualDisc versions of existing albums were issued as part of a test in two cities earlier this year.

The DualDisc was designed to be compatible with most devices, including game consoles and personal computers.

Simple Plan's ``Still Not Getting Any ...'' features 20 minutes of behind the scenes footage of the band recording the album, photos of the band, lyrics and other content.

The DVD side of The Donnas' ``Gold Medal'' also includes a music video, behind the scenes footage and lyrics.

Retailers are generally offering the new hybrid formats at prices comparable to standard audio CDs.

Both Simple Plan and The Donnas' DualDisc versions were selling as low as $9.99.

The company plans to release DualDisc-format albums by the Grateful Dead and the band Trapt next month. Other recording companies are expected to issue DualDisc-format releases in coming weeks.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/tech...its-CDDVD.html


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Sony BMG, Grokster Join Forces

In an unusual alliance, the record giant will offer free and paid music via the file-sharing network.
Jon Healey

Breaking from the rest of the entertainment industry, record giant Sony BMG is cooperating with the Grokster file-sharing network on a venture that combines free music sampling with paid downloads.

Dubbed "Mashboxx," the venture marks a surprising alliance between a major record label and an online network that the entertainment industry has blamed for rampant piracy.

The initiative reflects the growing interest among record labels and movie studios to harness — rather than fight — the popularity of file sharing.

The effort drew a skeptical response from some file-sharing advocates, however, who said Sony BMG wasn't really embracing the "peer to peer" technology that millions of people use every day to copy music for free.

Although many of the details are still in flux, people familiar with Mashboxx said that it would probably work like this: When users search for a Sony BMG track, the system will allow them to download only authorized versions of the song.

In some cases, these could be free promotional tracks that come with an offer to buy higher-quality renditions of the music. Mashboxx hasn't set any prices. Many online music stores sell songs for 99 cents each.

The idea behind the venture is to let people continue to use file sharing to discover music at no charge, while encouraging them to pay for the songs they want to keep.

Some of the technology for Mashboxx probably will come from Snocap Inc., a start-up launched by Shawn Fanning — the college dropout who created the pioneering Napster file-sharing network. Mashboxx is being run by Wayne Rosso, a file-sharing firebrand given to rhetorical flourishes about ignorance and evil in the entertainment industry.

Rosso and executives at Sony BMG, Grokster Ltd. and Snocap all declined to comment. Sony BMG was created last summer by the merger of the music divisions of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann.

Music industry insiders noted that Mashboxx was one of several new efforts to convert file sharing into legal downloading.

"There's a lot of serious effort on the label side of the table to try to make this work, more than you would have ever expected to see," said one record company executive who asked not to be named. "There's some heavy lifting, but everybody's really talking through the possibilities."

At the same time, though, the Recording Industry Assn. of America continues to fight illegal downloads. The trade group said Thursday that it had filed lawsuits alleging copyright infringement against 750 users of file-sharing networks, pushing the total sued to more than 6,000.

At least one other file-sharing company has agreed to embrace Mashboxx, a music-industry source said. Executives at several others said they wouldn't participate but were encouraged by the cooperation between their industry and the corporations that supply the content.

"That's great that they're at least trying to experiment," said Michael Weiss, chief of Streamcast Networks Inc., which distributes Morpheus. "I'd like to see more experimentation and find out what really does work."

The difficulty, said Weiss and executives at two other file-sharing companies, is that users are likely to abandon any file-sharing network that restricts their downloading in favor of the many networks that don't. "I think the right approach is to take consumers' behavior as it is and try to leverage that," he said.

The entertainment industry and file-sharing companies have been at each others' throats since Fanning rolled out the original Napster in 1999. But both sides say they're now engaged in extensive discussions about working together.

A file-sharing trade group is proposing to compensate copyright holders through advertising revenue, subscription fees and paid downloads. Like Mashboxx, the Distributed Computing Industry Assn.'s approach relies on technology that can identify files and set rules for how they can be shared.

The impetus for the Mashboxx project, sources said, comes from Sony BMG Chief Executive Andrew Lack, a cost-cutting former NBC and CBS executive whom Sony hired in 2003 to right its listing music division. Hoping to broaden the appeal of Mashboxx, Lack has urged leaders of other record firms to join him in supporting the initiative.

Some crucial issues remain, including pricing and what form the promotional tracks should take. Another thorny issue is what to do about files from other companies' catalogs — for example, whether users would be free to share a movie or a video game.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...lines-business


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Blalock Goes Nuts at Night

Fans are talking today about a talk show appearance by Enterprise star Jolene Blalock last night on CBS' Late Late Show. Apparently Blalock's brain is still wandering around the Expanse because it looked like she wasn't all there. The actress didn't seem to even know where she was. Fans are debating whether or not this was the celebrity flake-out that finally beat the infamous Farrah Fawcett appearance with David Letterman some years ago. The clip has been making the rounds on the file sharing systems. I'd like to say it was entertaining but it was more disturbing than anything else. Watch the scandal sheets for impending news of Blalock's trip to rehab...
http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/561/561279p1.html


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Laree ‘n’ Hillree sittin’ in a tree…

How I Learned to Love Larry
Hilary Rosen

She was the champion of the music industry. He was the voice of the people. It was a deathmatch made in heaven - but they found common ground.

It was three months after I'd left my job as CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, where I'd worked for 17 years. After spending the summer decompressing in Italy with my family, I found myself last fall in Los Angeles at USC anticipating a public duel with Lawrence Lessig, the noted Stanford Law School professor. Lessig and I were longtime rivals in the ongoing debate over copyright and technology. To present a balanced program on the issue, USC was paying us a tidy sum to spend two days disagreeing with one another in front of a lot of people. Despite my intention to leave my old competitive juices at the bottom of the Mediterranean, they were flowing again.

On the first night, the university's Bovard Auditorium was packed. Lessig started with a tortured and sarcastic history of copyright protection. He railed against such public laws as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which created a US leadership role in protecting digital works against technologies designed to circumvent copyright protection. (That's not how Lessig described the DMCA; that's my view, of course. I had been instrumental in persuading Congress to pass the law in 1998.) When it was my turn, I pointed out the value of laws that kept pace with technology, rather than those that were usurped by it. Lessig also complained about the Copyright Term Extension Act, which adds several years to the terms of protected works. I countered: Farmers can leave their property to their children; why shouldn't songwriters be able to leave their songs to their children?

So the debate was familiar for the first half hour. The old rhythms set in. Lessig was the fiery populist arguing against the monied interests. I insisted that it was important to protect creative works and the investments that made them possible. In a contest of greed versus theft, I suppose I chose greed as the morally superior position.

When he heaped praise on me and my friend Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Picture Association of America, saying how powerful and good we were at our jobs, so powerful in fact that our respective industries were further ahead in this policy area than anyone really knew - I perked up. Now he is making sense, I thought. I knew it was a backhanded compliment. But it worked for me.

I was warming to Lessig. He wasn't defending theft; in fact, he was against it. That's why he had helped found the nonprofit Creative Commons. If the essence of copyright law is to allow creators to have control, he argued, then there are ways to maintain ownership of copyrighted works and still make it possible for the average person to license the use of those works. After all, what's wrong with a licensing system that makes music more accessible to more people?

Until that moment, I had dismissed Creative Commons as a sleight-of-hand maneuver, a way to mouth platitudes about the benefits of copyright while in fact joining ranks with the Everything for Free Foundation. But Lessig was making a persuasive case. This is going in the wrong direction, I remember thinking. Had I lost my edge?

Hardly. I'm still cynical about its origins, but I've come to love Creative Commons. The organization seeks to calm some of music's roiling waters, from unlawful sampling to file-sharing. As the RIAA continues to use the courts to discourage the illegal, widespread distribution of songs through peer-to-peer systems, there has been a chilling effect on other, legitimate uses. Many musicians and consumers fear reusing pieces of others' songs - even for noncommercial purposes. Nobody wants to get caught in the crosshairs of industry lawyers.

Licenses from Creative Commons allow musicians to dictate how their music will be used - even if they sign with a record label (as long as the CC terms are part of the contract). Some artists want their music distributed as widely as possible, with no payment or control requirements; for them, an unlimited CC license is a way to declare these intentions.

For all its promise, there are challenges CC can't address. The biggest problem in commercial sampling isn't that artists don't know how to give away pieces of their work; it's that they and their producers want to get paid more - a lot more - for smaller bits of their songs. Think George Clinton, not Gilberto Gil. And unlike a book, where an accessible, online version often whets a reader's appetite for the paper version, there is little appetite for another copy of the same song - most music sold online is in song format. There's no point in assuming you can sell copies of the same recording you're giving away. Will it whet a listener's appetite for a concert ticket? Sure, but those who benefit from the sale of concert tickets rarely invest in the recording.

Meanwhile, as I have long predicted, the music industry is slowly restructuring itself. Artist contracts are for shorter duration, and every facet of an artist's output is up for negotiation. Indeed, artists have more control than ever before, giving rise to, in some cases, business models with the artists as the central business unit, in effect buying the services of middlemen to execute promotion, recording, and distribution. Increasingly, free use and access are employed to stimulate sales. Prince signed a one-record deal with Sony Music that made sure he could give a copy of his CD to every fan who bought a concert ticket. Pearl Jam left its longtime label to release a live album through its fan club. It has also authorized multiple releases through a bootleg program. The band hires services from the labels, as needed. Given these changes, the industry ought to embrace Creative Commons as an agile partner providing tools for new ways to do business.

But let's not go too far into dreamland. Yes, the current system of copyright can be antiquated and user unfriendly, and its enforcement can be discriminatory, but it has created a lot of wealth for individual artists, not just corporations. More important, it has created a vast body of art for the public. Let's not dismiss it wholesale.

After the debate that evening, Lessig and I strolled beneath the sycamore trees on the USC campus. We talked of his dream for Creative Commons and how artists and fans would benefit if the rules were clearer and if we all could enjoy more walks in the commons. Our debate on the second night would not have much disagreeable fervor.


Creative Freedom for All

Done right, copyrights can inspire the next digital revolution.
Lawrence Lessig

"Get a license or do not sample." So held the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in September, in a case that asked whether there is any right of fair use in musical recordings. There is not, the court ruled. Sampling is piracy, and the law bans piracy.

You may think that's OK for pop stars. But forget about them for a moment. Think about your kids. After they get bored downloading all the music they can find, they're going to discover the power - practically bundled into the machine if it's a Mac - to remix the culture they've collected. They could add a bass track to a violin concerto. They could make a home movie and sync Tom Petty to the images. They could splice together a politician's speeches to prove she's a waffler. These activities will become second nature to the iGeneration and could well represent the next great digital revolution - exploding demand for machines, bandwidth, and software.

Yet these ordinary uses of these extraordinary technologies are all presumptively illegal today. Digital devices copy to create; to copy copyrighted content requires permission from its owner. And while the tradition of fair use with text is fairly mature, that tradition is much weaker with film, photographs, and sound. In the Sixth Circuit, at least with sound recordings, there is apparently no tradition at all.

There are a growing number who believe that this regime doesn't make much sense. If John Coltrane didn't need a lawyer to create his immortal version of The Sound of Music's "My Favorite Things," why should our kids? And while many of these people don't necessarily want to change existing law, they do want a way to make its burdens easier to overcome. They seek, as the Sixth Circuit proposes, a license to sample.

This is the aim of Creative Commons - to help artists and authors give others the freedom to build upon their creativity, without calling a lawyer first. Copyrights protect important values. They are essential to creativity, even in a digital age. Yet the current version of copyright law was not written for a world of digital creativity. As applied to these technologies, it often restricts more than it inspires. Creators who use the CC licenses are saying: We have built upon the work of others. Let others build upon ours. Consistent with the law, we can enable this next great revolution.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...w=wn_tophead_4


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High-Profile Litigator Has Wild Ride
Mark Thompson

Michael Page's 13-year legal career as an intellectual property litigator hit high and low points in rapid succession over the summer.

The nadir came in early August when one of Page's clients, a company in St. Charles, Mo., that manufactured and sold DVD copying software, announced that it was going out of business. The company, 321 Studios, had already been effectively shut down by three preliminary injunctions resulting from a barrage of copyright-infringement lawsuits brought by Hollywood movie studios and other plaintiffs.

But that was followed by the zenith just 15 days later, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a ruling in favor of another one of Page's clients, Grokster Inc., a distributor of peer-to-peer file-sharing software. Page, a partner at San Francisco's litigation boutique Keker & Van Nest, describes the Grokster ruling as his most significant legal victory ever.

You might think that would have relieved some of the sting of the defeat that he suffered in the 321 Studios case. Instead, Grokster's triumph only made it worse. That's because Page interpreted the Grokster ruling as a sign that 321 Studios would also have ultimately prevailed if only it had been able to carry on the fight.

"Losing a case that I thought we should have won, just not being able to see it through to the appeals court, having to basically quit while you're down -- I would say that's the biggest disappointment," says Page. "There were some really important issues of law but unfortunately [the company] could not survive long enough to get them to an appellate court."

The two cases illustrate a specialty area of IP law that Page and others at his firm have carved out for themselves in recent years -- defending companies against suits claiming violations of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In an era in which digital copies of music, movies and other forms of entertainment content are easily -- and freely -- traded across the Internet, movie studios, record companies and other entertainment producers and copyright owners have increasingly relied on the new copyright law in trying to put the brakes on digital swapping.
http://www.nylawyer.com/news/04/10/102804j.html


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Online Extra: Skype Is "What Evolution Is All About"

Co-founder Niklas Zennström explains the technology behind peer-to-peer networks and their market implications

Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström achieved notoriety in 2000 when he and his Danish buddy Jonas Friis launched an Internet file-sharing service called KaZaA that quickly overtook Napster as the leading venue for swapping music files. They eventually sold KaZaA to Sharman Networks and went underground to fight off lawsuits by the recording industry.

But in 2003, Zennström and Friis reemerged with another radical concept: Free phone calls over the Internet using the same peer-to-peer networking technology that KaZaA employed.

The telecom industry has been no more welcoming of the incursion, but the duo's new venture, called Skype (as in "hype") has struck a cord with the digital set. More than 28 million copies of the software that powers Skype on PCs, Macs, Pocket PCs, and Linux machines have been downloaded in the last 14 months -- making it the fastest- growing Internet application in history. Nearly 13 million people have registered to use the service.

On Oct. 20, Skype announced two new milestones: More than 2 billion minutes of talk time have been logged on Skype since it went live in late August, 2003. And for the first time ever that week, it handled more than a million simultaneous conversations.

Zennström spoke by phone (on a conventional line) in July with BusinessWeek's Paris-based European technology correspondent, Andy Reinhardt about peer-to-peer networks, telecom regulation, and European innovation. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Q: A lot of people think peer-to-peer (P2P) is about illegal trading of copyrighted materials. But clearly, you've seen another opportunity with Skype. What is the potential of P2P?
A: It may be a bit boring, but peer-to-peer is just a term for a computer network architecture. Either you have peer-to-peer or client/server. What happened was that file sharing was the first consumer media application that took advantage of large-scale peer-to-peer technology. If you asked any computer scientist, he would tell you that they were doing peer-to-peer networks 20 years ago. Basically, you're just connecting two computers.

Peer-to-peer has nothing to do with copyrighted songs, or MP3s, or MPEG. It's just an architecture -- and it's the best architecture, in my mind -- for widespread networking, where you can locate addresses and transfer large amounts of data. It's very generic.

What that means is you can find a file, a document, a music file, a movie, whatever, and then download it. With voice, you're doing exactly the same thing: You're locating an individual, and then you're transferring is a stream of data, which happens to be voice communication.

That's why the same underlying peer-to-peer architecture can be used for both of these things. Obviously, it could be used for a whole lot of other things, too.

Q: I guess P2P has the potential to make a lot of new things possible?
A: Precisely. It opens up the door to a whole range of opportunities that we could never do before. It has very interesting economical implications. A peer-to-peer architecture affords zero marginal cost to transfer large amounts of data. It's more interesting now than it was 10 years ago because now we have a worldwide broadband Internet infrastructure, which basically is a pure pipe.

But there are still huge problems with the Internet. You can't just address people easily by IP [Internet protocol] addresses because they're behind firewalls. So you need to have some kind of smart mechanism to search for and locate people, in order to send them data. That's what KaZaA used to locate files, and now Skype uses it for people.

Q: Where else could this go, beyond files and people?
A: It could be other resources -- you know, storage, video streams. But this really works on two levels. First there's the peer network, and I've been stressing that because it's the enabler for everything. But then there are the applications. We could not have foreseen -- wow! -- all the things that could be developed on top of P2P.

For instance, when we first used peer-to-peer technology, we didn't foresee that we could do voice. It became obvious to us after some time, but when we started we didn't know what the applications would be. But when we applied the technology to various industries, we realized we could create a sustainable competitive advantage.

That's because, in the normal system you have a marginal cost for every unit you add. If your network is client/server-based, you have to add a new network card for each new Web server, central switch, and so on. But in a peer-to-peer network, you're reusing the system resources in the network, so the marginal cost of producing a phone call or a file transfer or something else is zero.

That's why it's a great enabler, because now we can have free voice communication. It's possible because the world has already made investment in the broadband Internet, and consumers are paying for broadband connections. This allows them to take more advantage of the investment they've made.

Q: Are the opportunities to pursue your vision greater in Europe than in the U.S. because of potential legislative or regulatory issues there?
A: I don't think there's any regulator who would even dream about regulating peer-to-peer, per se. That would be devastating for the evolution of technology. But they might try to regulate applications of it, like file sharing or telecommunications.

Q: But even though the underlying technology is unregulated, there seems to be a backlash against stuff happening at the application level when the implications of P2P begin to hit various industries. They circle the wagons.
A: This is nothing more than a technological evolution. Maybe it's a disruptive technology, which means the evolution takes a leapfrog. But that means you can do something better than you could before because you do it completely differently. That's what evolution is all about.

If you try to kill these kinds of breakthroughs with regulation, you're going to set back technological evolution and set back society. Especially when it comes to communication, which is what this is all about. Communication is the infrastructure that makes economies stronger. You're not doing your country a favor by trying to regulate this. These technologies are having an impact on legacy industries, like telecom or media distribution.

And whenever there's disruptive technology, the default reaction among the incumbents in an industry is fear and trying to stop it, rather than embracing it and working with it. They try to lobby and legislate against it.

Q: Is there any difference, as far as you tell, in how far those efforts are getting in the U.S. vs. in Europe?
A: In Europe telecom regulators are pretty much saying the same thing, which is that they want to have a hands-off approach and don't think it should be regulated. But other voices want to apply regulations. They're saying this is a technology that allows people to talk to each other, and since we have existing regulations for the telephony network, let's apply them to this completely different technology because people can talk with it. That's not a good thing to do.

There are reasons why we have regulation, and one is that telecom is an industry that was historically heavily monopolized but has recently been opened up to more competition. The former monopolies had an unfair advantage because they had the network and all the customers. So you needed the regulators to open up the network and allow competitors to tap into it on a fair basis. But obviously, voice-over- IP [VOIP] -- or any of these new technologies -- aren't monopolies.

The telephony industry is subject to regulations about emergency calls. There are some people who say that, if you're using an application over the Internet that's for voice communication, it should be subject to the same requirement to provide emergency service.

But that's a bit narrow-minded. Nowadays, people communicate in so many different ways. Why not make sure that emergency centers can accept communications from a variety of different sources, so that you could send a text message instead of making a phone call? If there's a burglar in my house, I don't want to pick up the phone: I want to send a text message because it's quiet. Q: What it is about the Internet, technologically or culturally, that has made possible the emergence of technologies as disruptive as VOIP?
A: The Internet is simply a network built to take a packet of data from one place to another. There are no services on the Internet itself: It's just a carrier of data. And it's completely open, which means you're allowing anyone in the world to innovate new services and applications. There are no barriers, because you don't have to manufacture big machines or switches. And you can innovate anywhere in the world -- in India, Estonia, the U.S., or France -- and you just upload the application to a Web server, and it's available worldwide. It's the perfect open and free market, without trade barriers.

The great thing about the Internet is that it allows for open innovation. The speed of innovation is growing exponentially. What we've seen in the last five years is the same level of innovation we saw in maybe 20 to 50 years before that. It's possible because of the aggregation of technology and interconnected networks. So, the Internet is, in some senses, the fundamental infrastructure for speeding innovation.

Q: What about innovation in Europe? There's a huge amount of technical talent here, and Europe has produced lots of world-changing inventions. But there are negatives: The level of financial support for R&D by governments and corporations is low. So what are the advantages and disadvantages for you of being based in Europe?
A: The advantage of being in Europe is that you're in neither of the huge markets. You're not in the U.S., which is very large and homogeneous. It's such a big market. If you make it in Sweden, that doesn't mean you'll make it in France. They have very different cultures and languages, and different ways of selling things. Europe is very fragmented. It's a fiction that the European Union has created a single market.

Q: That affects entrepreneurs in good ways and bad. It means they have small domestic markets, but they also have to learn how to be global sooner than American companies, which can grow up completely in a single domestic market.
A: Take somebody like me, from a small country like Sweden with 9.5 million inhabitants. It could be an interesting market for some kinds of businesses, but not for the kind I'm doing. So you're forced to look outside your home country. People learn foreign languages early and know they have to do business elsewhere. There are a lot of very successful Swedish multinationals that have figured that out, like Ikea, H&M, Volvo, Ericsson.

American companies don't have to look outside. That's the advantage of Europe -- most of all for people in the smaller countries like Sweden or the Netherlands.

The disadvantage is that the environment in Europe is very bad for entrepreneurs to create businesses. There's too much regulation, too many taxes. And I think people in Europe are far less entrepreneurial than people in the U.S. or China.

Q: People say that the nature of innovation itself is changing, especially for big corporations. Things are getting so complex and expensive that many companies can't afford to go it alone. Could this prove to be an asset for Europe, given its long experience in collaborative ventures?
A: The world is getting more complex, and with the speed of innovation you cannot do everything. In the old days, when we had poorer communication and access to information, big corporations had advantages because they could do everything in-house. Now, it's so easy to get information that you don't need to be big anymore. You could even say that today, being big is a disadvantage. It's no longer the big that beat the small. It's the fast that beat the slow. And big companies tend to be slower.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...6090_mz063.htm


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Order Out Of Chaos: The Peer–to–Peer Paradigm
Bryn Loban

The aim of the first part of this paper is to provide an overview of information retrieval in Peer–to–Peer (P2P) information systems in the file–sharing domain. Starting with a general overview of the concept of P2P information systems, the paper then focuses on five desktop–accessible P2P information systems: Napster with its clones OpenNap and eDonkey, and Gnutella and FastTrack (i.e., Kazaa). A detailed description is given of the attributes and properties of each P2P file–sharing information system, followed by an evaluation of the respective P2P file–sharing applications, taking each in turn and examining their respective strengths and weaknesses. This paper concludes with a critical comparative analysis and gives some suggestions for further investigation.
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/is...ban/index.html

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Your tax dollars at work

Attorney General Warns Students Of Consequences

Getting the word on intellectual theft from the top
Monte Reel

Many of them had heard the lectures from authority figures before: Don't illegally download songs and games from the Internet because people make their livings selling those products, stealing is a crime, every crime has unseen consequences, and so on.

But this time, the person giving the lecture was U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, and he was painting an especially harrowing picture for about 100 area high school students.

"When you download stolen songs or movies or computer games posted on the Internet, you're stealing," he told them.

He talked of songwriters and film production workers who suddenly found themselves jobless because of revenue stolen from their companies by Internet pirates. He told of a young man who plugged his cell phone into a charger at night, then woke to find his desk and computer in flames -- the malfunctioning battery he used was a knockoff of a name brand, which Ashcroft described as another form of intellectual property theft. Then there was the tale of the Long Island boy who suffered grave medical reactions after he was mistakenly given a knockoff prescription medicine after a liver transplant.

"You may not think a theft online is as consequential as stealing something from a store, but even stealing a song is serious," Ashcroft told them. "I think you can see how stealing intellectual property puts at risk the very lives and well-beings of these people."

The students were at the Justice Department's Great Hall yesterday for a day-long student forum on intellectual property theft. Ashcroft's speech -- along with question-and-answer sessions with songwriters and convicted intellectual property thieves -- resulted from a partnership between the government and Court TV. Students came from Howard D. Woodson Senior High School in Washington; Thomas Edison School of Technology in Silver Spring; Friendly High School in Fort Washington; and Hayfield Secondary School in Alexandria.

The event will be aired in about a month on Court TV as part of its public affairs program "Choices and Consequences," according to network officials. Tapes of the event also will be included in materials distributed to 4,000 to 5,000 schools as part of a nationwide education drive.

Gerrod Wilson, 17, was one of the students chosen to participate who had a special interest in the subject. He and the other students enrolled in Friendly High School's Applied Law class -- many of whom are interested in law enforcement careers, he said -- were among those taking part in the workshops and discussions.

Wilson said he has downloaded music from the Internet a few times -- but not anymore.

"I don't think kids are aware of how much of a crime they've committed," said Wilson, who hopes to become a defense lawyer.

Edward Kendrick, 18, of Gaithersburg said downloading music and games "is pretty much common practice" among high school students, but he said he's never done it.

"My father works with a tech support center, so he'll know if I download anything illegally," said the Thomas Edison senior. "I'd get in more trouble with him than anyone else."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct20.html


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

See Jane’s browser get blocked

See Dick's P2P

NSW Schools Trial New Porn Filter

THE NSW education department is trialling a new internet filtering system, as three high school students were suspended for looking up pornographic images on school computers.

The three 14-year-old Year 8 students from Elderslie High School at Narellan, in Sydney's south west, were given a "short term" suspension on Friday after a teacher caught them accessing pornographic websites in the school's computer room.

"The students were caught by teachers who were apparently monitoring what was going on and saw all the kids crowding around the computer and sprung them," an education department spokesman said.

"I guess it probably happens from time to time but this is the first one I have heard of for a while.

"And bear in mind the number of kids we have got in our schools, it is quite a minority."

The spokesman said a centralised filtering system was in place in NSW schools but the blocks did not necessarily filter out all overseas web sites.

He said a new superior system was currently being trialled as part of an $84 million plan to tighten internet security.

The new system involves giving students an individual electronic learning account with their own email address.

The education department spokesman said increased security would ensure that inappropriate internet sites were blocked, bad language use stopped and teachers could monitor chat rooms.

"The e-learning accounts have been trialled in a couple of schools and they are to be rolled out statewide," he said.

The date for the completed rollout was not yet available, the spokesman said.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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Landmark Music Download Case In Court
Brisbane

Downloading music from the internet could get even tougher following a landmark copyright case due to begin in the Federal Court next week.

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) hopes the $500 million lawsuit by Australian and international record companies against a man who ran a song-sharing website will help end music piracy.

Brisbane man Stephen Cooper, whose internet site provided links to download music from around the world, has been accused by ARIA of being one of the biggest copyright law infringers in the world.

His website, set up in 1998, was shut down late last year following raids on his Brisbane home and the offices of his internet service provider.

ARIA piracy investigations manager Michael Speck said the case would allow Australian courts to "once and forever" define the difference between legitimate online services and those which take other people's music for their own profit.

"It's an opportunity for the Australian courts to rule definitively on the impact of copyright law on the internet and thereby effectively deal with the mythology of the internet that allows people to make vast fortunes from other people's property," he said.

He said the myth centred on the belief some people had that if they downloaded songs from other internet users they were doing nothing wrong.

Speck said the court action against Cooper and his Sydney-based internet provider ComCem was part of ARIA's anti-piracy operations and if the decision favoured ARIA it would mean the end of the internet myth.

Cooper told Brisbane's The Courier-Mail newspaper he would never have started the website if he had known he was doing anything wrong and did not have the money to defend the case.

"There are no millions of dollars stashed away anywhere, no secret garages full of Porsches and Ferraris," he said.

The case against Cooper, of Bellbowrie in Brisbane, is due to get under way in Sydney next Monday.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...?oneclick=true


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Shootin’ the breeze

Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell heirs threaten Project Gutenberg

Heirs of Margaret Mitchell have threatened the U.S.-based Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg of Australia--charging infringement of copyright.

The Stephens Mitchell Trusts wants Australian Gutenberg volunteers either to remove Gone With the Wind from their servers or else take steps to prevent downloads in countries where copyright law bans unauthorized distribution of the 1936 classic.

Otherwise, a lawyer for the heirs says in email and a certified letter, "we will take all appropriate steps to protect and enforce our clients' rights."

Special interest law vs. American culture

Welcome to the world of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which corrupted U.S. copyright law at the request of the Hollywood elite, other entertainment moguls and rich heirs. Over time, the term extensions will cost society billions and harm valuable cultural activities.

Had the special-interest legislation not been passed, cash- strapped Gutenberg would not be facing this threat since the classic would be legal to download by now.

And yet U.S. politicians of both parties, fat with campaign donations from Hollywood, generally refuse to speak out against the Bono Act. The Kerry-Edwards campaign has been deaf to Bono-related pleas from me and others despite some possible progress on other copyright matters. Meanwhile U.S. media blithely report on entertainment-industry donations to candidates without a word of Hollywood-bought laws like Bono.

Estate: Gutenberg set up Australian PG for illegal downloads

In using the Bonoized copyright law to harass Gutenberg, New York lawyer Thomas Selz wrote:

"It appears to us that Project Gutenberg established PGA to permit the illegal downloading of works that are still subject to copyright protection in the U.S. and elsewhere. Project Gutenberg’s and PGA’s willful, knowing and unauthorized distribution of GWTW to users in the U.S. and elsewhere where copyright protection remains available is a blatant violation of our client’s rights under applicable statutes and common law."

Let's hope that the likes of Larry Lessig and the Electronic Frontier Foundation can slap down this harassment immediately. Could they even threaten a countersuit? If the estate successfully sued, Gutenberg-style organizations throughout the world might have to adhere to the strictest copyright laws in the cosmos or risk situations such as the one with Gone With the Wind. Hollywood can well end up buying off the legislators of certain Third World countries.

There are also implications if INDUCE-style proposals are revived, since lawyers might have more legal ammunition in their claims that the U.S. Gutenberg is inducing infringement by Americans able to download Gone With the Wind.

Two legal traps

Meanwhile the Gutenberg volunteers face a possible legal trap--in fact, two. If the Australian Gutenberg takes down the novel without a request from the American PG even though Australian law does not require this, Margaret Mitchell's estate may just say the two groups are in cahoots with each other. The estate might claim that the Australians were trying to protect the Americans. If the U.S. Gutenberg asks for a take-down, the estate might also claim a close relationship.

A related argument might be trademark. The estate lawyers may use this as further evidence of an actual tie.

The good news is that the Mitchell estate is already a laughingstock among many in U.S. legal circles for its silly suit against an author for a parody of Gone With the Wind (too bad that Houghton Mifflin felt compelled to settle, given the absurdity of the suit). That outrage is itself a textbook case of the need for a robust public domain, so that image-fixated heirs can do minimal damage to still-productive authors and publishers. Last I knew, Margaret Mitchell hadn't written any new works lately. Isn't copyright law supposed to encourage the arts and sciences, including, presumably, literature? And yet, with or without Bono, Miss Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind.

Significantly, Margaret Mitchell died in on August 16, 1949. Without the Bono Act, the book's copyright would have expired in 1999. Now, however, in the States, the book apparently won't enter the public domain until 2019. With this situation in mind, it is high time that Congress either repealed Bono or at least mitigated it--lest greedy heirs and Doberman lawyers shut down worthwhile efforts like Gutenberg.

Meanwhile Australia, which appears on the cusp of increasing copyright terms past the 50-year mark, would do well to consider the repercussions before letting wealthy American heirs and donation-crazed U.S. politicians dictate law to them. The expected changes in Australian copyright law would not have come out without U.S. pressure by way of a trade agreement.

Yet other issues arise. Given the threat from black suits, I am reluctant even to provide a link to Project Gutenberg of Australia, much less to the the e-text of Gone With the Wind.

If you cherish culture and freedom to link, speak up now to your favorite presidential candidates and your local Congress members. Guess what other work is free in Australia but not in the Bonoized United States. Nineteen Eighty Four. In curbing our freedom of speech with onerous copyright laws, our politicians have done Big Brother proud.

/////////////////////////////

Below, in its entirety, is material that went out over the gutvol-d mailing list.

From: dlainson@sympatico.ca
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 4:03 PM
Subject: [gutvol-d] [Fwd] Copyright Infringement of Gone With the Wind



Hello

Here's a letter (which I'm apparently breaking some US law by forwarding, but I'll take the risk) which I find disturbing. Seems that "Project Gutenberg established PGA to permit the illegal downloading of works". Of this I wasn't aware. As a big contributor to PGA it concerns me personally, as well as setting a very dangerous precedent.

Does one country have the right to dictate to another what a website can contain when it falls within the law of the host country, and can they force some sort of restrictions on the downloading of material?

Don.

------- Forwarded message follows -------
From: "Col Choat"
To: "Don Lainson"
Subject: FW: Copyright Infringement of Gone With the Wind
Date sent: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 09:36:48 +1000





From: Gonzalez, Dalgis [mailto:dgonzalez@fkkslaw.com]On Behalf Of
Selz, Thomas
Sent: Tuesday, 26 October 2004 6:29 AM
To: colc@gutenberg.net.au
Cc: Paul Anderson Sr. (E-mail); Paul Anderson Jr. (E-mail); Thomas
Hal Clarke (E-mail); Thomas Hal Clarke (E-mail 2); Selz, Thomas
Subject: Copyright Infringement of Gone With the Wind

October 25, 2004


Certified Mail-
Return receipt Requested

Project Gutenberg
405 West Elm Street
Urbana, IL 61801

By e-mail (colc@gutenberg.net.au)

Project Gutenberg of Australia


Re: Copyright
Infringement of Gone With the Wind

To Whom It May Concern:

We represent the Stephens Mitchell Trusts (the “Trusts”), the owner of the copyright to the book, Gone With The Wind (“GWTW”). There are copyright provisions around the world, including, without limitation, the United States Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §101 et. seq, which grant the Trusts, as copyright owner, the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute GWTW in the United States and elsewhere.

It has come to our attention that Project Gutenberg’s affiliate, Project Gutenberg of Australia (“PGA”), is publishing GWTW in electronic book form on its web site located at www.gutenberg.net.au (the “Web Site”). The Web Site states that PGA “produces etexts in accordance with Australian law” and that the books available on its site are in the public domain in Australia. While the Web Site warns that some of its ebooks may still be protected by copyright in the U.S. and suggests that U.S. users check U.S. copyright laws or visit Project Gutenberg’s U.S. web site for its list of public domain works, there is nothing to prevent any U.S. user from simply downloading GWTW from the Web Site. Indeed, we were able to do so easily.

It appears to us that Project Gutenberg established PGA to permit the illegal downloading of works that are still subject to copyright protection in the U.S. and elsewhere. Project Gutenberg’s and PGA’s willful, knowing and unauthorized distribution of GWTW to users in the U.S. and elsewhere where copyright protection remains available is a blatant violation of our client’s rights under applicable statutes and common law. Please be advised that Project Gutenberg and PGA are subject to U.S. copyright law and to jurisdiction in the U.S. for their infringing activities through applicable jurisdiction statutes governing the commission of acts of infringement that either occur in the U.S. or have an effect in the U.S.

On behalf of the Trusts, we hereby demand that Project Gutenberg and/or PGA confirm to us within five (5) days of receipt of this letter that you have removed GWTW from the Web Site entirely or that you have taken all necessary steps to prevent the downloading of GWTW in all places in which it is protected by copyright.

Please be advised that if we have not received confirmation of your willingness to comply with the foregoing demands, we will take all appropriate steps to protect and enforce our clients’ rights.

This demand is without prejudice to all of the Trusts’ rights and remedies in this matter, both legal and equitable, all of which are specifically and expressly reserved.

Very truly yours,


Thomas D. Selz

cc:Paul H. Anderson, Sr., Esq.
Paul Anderson, Jr., Esq.
Thomas Hal Clarke, Jr., Esq.
Dalgis E. Gonzalez
FrankfurtKurnit Klein & Selz, PC
488 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10022
Tel: (212) 980-0120 x6735
Fax: (212) 593-9175
E-mail: dgonzalez@fkkslaw.com

This e-mail and any attached files are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which this mail is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. Any use, disclosure, copying or distribution of this e-mail or the attached files by anyone other than the intended recipient is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender by reply e- mail or collect call to (212) 980-0120 and delete this e-mail and attached files from your system. Thank you.

------- End of forwarded message -------

Don Lainson
dlainson@sympatico.ca

//////////////////////

Update, 6:34 a.m., October 27: We've just been Slashdotted--the Mitchell outrage made the top of the home page. Meanwhile check out an old Dan Gillmor article about the estate's war against the Gone with the Wind parody. Among the tidbits there:

In 1790, copyright terms lasted 14 years, with a 14-year
renewal period. But in this century of big and powerful media companies, Congress has turned the idea of "limited'' into something perversely long, with repeated extensions...

When Mitchell wrote the book, the maximum term was 56 years, said Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford University. In other words, the copyright should have expired in 1992, and Scarlett O'Hara and her cohorts should have entered the public domain, where any author could do anything he or she pleased with the work.

So speak up to politicians! Remember, Jack Valenti, until recently
boss of the MPAA and more than a little friendly with top pols, favors eternal copyright short of a day. But isn't it better instead to worry about compensation for living writers rather than their obnoxious heirs? I can understand concern over wives, children, and so on, but pre-Bono terms were sufficient.

Needless to say, a TeleRead-style national digital library system could send money in the direction of publishers, writers and other content-providers and indirectly help wives and children in and here and now. Given that most copyrighted books go out of print after a few years, this approach would be far fairer to the creative community than a legalistic one.

The Bono mess is symptomatic of a sick publishing industry under treatment by well credentialed quacks who, to quote one definition of quackery, "sell false hopes to the gullible." I'm convinced that certain attorneys and software companies (no names given here) are actually bigger threats to publishers and writers than pirates are. If conned publishers were not so keen on Draconian DRM and accompanying laws--which scare the devil out of consumers eager to own e-books for real--the e-book industry by now would far larger today. Global sales are perhaps $40 million annually, less than what Tom Clancy alone makes in a good year. See why "quack" is just right, if you're talking about competence at helping e-books take off and getting Americans interested again in serious reading? Improved access to books and education in general is the real way to grow publishing. But too many attorneys and software companies lack the vision to care. Profit-minded publishers should worry less about the "protection" and more about revenue--often two wildly contradictory things. In this context, obscenely stretched copyright terms are counter productive. I'm pro-copyright, pro-profit, but let's have balance. The young people reading Gone with the Wind just might go on to buy more modern e-books. By the way, at least at Amazon.com, I don't see a listing for an e-book version of GWTW, not even in DRMed form.

Update, 5:01 p.m., October 27 Turns out that even without Bono, Gone With The Wind still wouldn't be in the public domain today. But it is part of a nasty pattern of extensions and does delay for 20 years when GWTW will be available, thus increasing for Gutenberg possibility of legal harassment.
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2004_10...82938565501362


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GWhiz

Utility Turns E-Mail Storage Into a Cubbyhole for Files
Sandeep Junnarkar

It did not take users long to discover other uses for the gigabyte of disk space provided by Google's free e-mail service, Gmail.

A free new software utility for Windows XP called GMail Drive creates a virtual Web-based storage drive by harnessing a Gmail account. Much like an external hard drive or a U.S.B. memory device, Gmail storage appears as a drive under the "My Computer" folder and allows you to transfer, store or retrieve files by simply dragging and dropping them.

Many Web storage companies charge $16 a month and higher for one gigabyte of space but include added features.

Bjarke Viksoe, a Danish software developer, created GMail Drive for Windows XP (www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm). Earlier, Richard Jones, an Australian software engineer, developed a similar tool for Linux-based systems called GmailFS (at richard.jones.name). While there is no Mac version yet, one is likely to surface soon.

Both utilities are early versions and may have a few glitches. Gmail itself is still in the testing phase. Google said that it was aware of the utilities but was "politely looking the other way" as long as they were not being sold commercially or stressing its servers. The company does not guarantee that files stored in this manner will be accessible in the future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/te...ts/28goog.html


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For Radio Programs When You Want Them, Plug In a Fin
Thomas J. Fitzgerald

For those who would like more control over when and how they listen to radio shows, whether Don Imus in the afternoon or a baseball game at midnight, there is a new option from Griffin Technology: the RadioShark.

The $70 device, which is available at griffintechnology.com and from Apple (store.apple.com), is about 7¼ inches tall and shaped like a shark fin. It connects to a U.S.B. port on a PC or Mac, providing AM and FM radio. Griffin software included with the RadioShark lets users preset stations, adjust bass and treble with an equalizer and listen to music and programming using time-shifting and recording.

In time-shifting, live broadcasts are recorded continuously to a buffer; you can pause the program and then resume it where it broke off. You can also scroll back to replay a segment while RadioShark continues to record the ongoing broadcast; you can then fast-forward through missed segments until you catch up to the live program.

Radio broadcasts can also be recorded and saved to the computer's hard disk, either while listening or on a schedule. On Macintosh computers they can be automatically saved to a playlist within

Apple's iTunes program and thus synchronized to an iPod for mobile listening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/te...ts/28shar.html


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

A Typo That Won't Make The New Yorker

The ever-tasteful New Yorker Magazine has spotted many amusing typos in mere newspapers. But here is one that you presumably won't see there:

BEIJING, Oct. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office now shits their attention to the music industry, particularly its practices for influencing what songs are heard on the public airwaves.

This gem--corrected by now?--made the home page of Google News.
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2004_10...82938565501362


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

Homeland Security Agents Visit Toy Store
AP

So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn't been passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating obscure clauses in the Patriot Act.

So she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.

"I was shaking in my shoes," Cox said of the September phone call. "My first thought was the government can shut your business down on a whim, in my opinion. If I'm closed even for a day that would cause undue stress."

When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time.

He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that Rubik's Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy's trademark.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency's intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C.

"One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications," she said.

Six weeks after her brush with Homeland Security, Cox told The Oregonian she is still bewildered by the experience.

"Aren't there any terrorists out there?" she said.
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/oct...04toystore.htm


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

Would President Kerry Defang The DMCA?
Declan McCullagh

John Kerry finally has hinted at a position that would mark one of the first real differences from his Republican rival.

In a barely noticed remark on Thursday, the Democratic senator said he might support defanging the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)--the unpopular law that has prompted take-to-the-street protests from the geek community.

If Kerry is serious, that would be a remarkable metamorphosis on a law that the Senate approved without one dissenting vote. It would also be remarkable because, contrary to what Kerry and President Bush tell you, few differences exist between the two White House hopefuls on nearly any topic imaginable.

Both supported the invasion of Iraq, both applauded the Patriot Act, and both agreed with sweeping expansions of federal spending on education. Neither politician has the moxie to say in public that he agrees with gay marriage, neither will end the war on drugs, and neither would countenance full privatization of Social Security.

Poor Jim Lehrer of PBS, who moderated the first presidential debate, was left scratching his head about what actually differentiated the two men who would be president. Was it Kerry's pledge to undertake two-party talks with North Korea versus Bush's preference for six-party talks?

On technology topics as well, as I wrote in a column in June, there tend to be distinctions without differences. The Democratic and Republican candidates have been singing in two-party harmony about technological innovation, broadband, Wi-Fi, spectrum auctions, and their mutual love for the research and development tax credit.

Still, a few divergences became clear last week with the release of a set of answers that the Bush and Kerry campaigns provided to a dozen questions posed by the nonpartisan Computing Technology Industry Association.

Inalienable right to make backups

Kerry's campaign said the senator might support rewriting U.S. copyright law to let Americans make backup copies of digital media they've purchased.

Pay attention, folks: In the tech world, this maybe-or-maybe-not pusillanimity counts as headline-grabbing news. Right now, under the DMCA, it's unlawful to make a backup copy of copy-protected DVDs or computer programs. The 1998 DMCA broadly bans "circumventing" anticopying schemes, and selling software that can do so is a criminal offense.

Kerry's survey response said he is "open to examining" whether to change current law "to ensure that a person who lawfully obtains or receives a transmission of a digital work may back up a copy of it for archival purposes" or transfer it to another device. CompTIA's open-ended question had merely asked "What should federal policy be toward protecting intellectual property on the Internet?"--without mentioning backup copies.

This is no theoretical debate. 321 Studios was forced to shut its doors in August, after a federal judge blocked the small company from selling its DVD backup software. 321 Studios' utility, the judge said, ran afoul of the DMCA's anticircumvention restrictions.

Kerry's answer appears to be a tentative attempt to side with consumers and electronics makers over the entertainment industry--a rare display of political independence by a prominent Democrat. (Hollywood firms hand money to Democrats over Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin.)

How serious are these guys?

It's not clear, though, how serious Kerry truly is. Reps. Rick Boucher and John Doolittle introduced their bill to defang the DMCA more than two years ago and have been searching in vain for a Senate sponsor. Kerry, a member of the committee overseeing e-commerce, could have lent a hand but never did. If the senator had time last year to announce two bills dealing with tariffs on imported "pouch tuna" from Indonesia, he surely had time to help Boucher and Doolittle.

The Bush administration's stand, on the other hand, is entirely clear: defend the DMCA at any cost. Bush's reply to CompTIA said: "I strongly support efforts to protect intellectual property and will continue to work with Congress to ensure all intellectual property is properly protected."

Buttressing this stand is a report released this month by Bush's Department of Justice. It insists that the DMCA remain intact, saying U.S. law must prohibit "deliberate and unauthorized circumvention." Meanwhile, Bush's trade negotiators have been busy exporting the DMCA to Australia, Chile and Singapore, and Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the DMCA when trying to imprison Russian programmer Dmitri Sklyarov.

Two other modest differences arose in the candidates' responses to CompTIA's questions about voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and spam. In both cases, Bush was far more explicit about what he would do if Americans pick him on Election Day.

On VoIP, Bush praised the technology and suggested that regulators treat it like e-mail--that is, take a laissez-faire approach--instead of weighing it down with the raft of rules that apply to the telephone network. On unsolicited bulk e-mail, Bush predictably touted the Can-Spam Act, which he signed into law last December.

Oddly, Kerry ducked both questions. In both cases, he said only that he's "open" to considering any approach.

That might work for a small-town lawyer running for election as a state legislator. But it's unseemly when coming from a guy who's been in the Senate for two decades and is a senior member on the only two subcommittees that oversee, well, VoIP and spam. It's also important because the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 along party lines in February to exempt "pure" VoIP companies from traditional telecommunications regulations. The two Democratic commissioners opposed that move. What side would a President Kerry take?

Unfortunately, both major-party candidates are savvy enough to realize that Americans don't pick presidents based on their telecommunications policies. The problem is that there are so few substantial distinctions in other areas. Just ask Jim Lehrer.
http://news.com.com/Would+President+...tag=html.alert


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



















Tuesday, November 2nd Is Election Day.

Now More Than Ever, Don’t Forget To


















Until next week,

- js.














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

Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

October 23rd, October 16th , October 9th, October 2nd

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


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black

[DeadMan]

Hey where did you get that Jolene Blalock clip? Filename? I can't find it on eDonkey or Kazaa

[multi]

Mr Cooper's lawyer, Tony Morris, QC, accused former policeman Mr Speck of "abusing" the court case for publicity and timing a raid on Mr Cooper's home to take place a week before the ARIA awards last year, after a 10-month investigation.

"The Anton Pillar order and the raid on my client's home was a publicity stunt, wasn't it?" Mr Morris asked the witness.

"To raise the profile of your organisation and its role in fighting so-called internet piracy."

Mr Morris also accused Mr Speck of starting the litigation process so he could bring music piracy to the attention of the media.

"You're using it as a platform to go to the media and push the viewpoint of the people who pay your salary," he said.

Mr Speck denied the accusations but admitted he did not find any MP3 files on Mr Cooper's website when asked by Mr Morris.

"The site that we're talking about is the site with the URL mp3s4free.net," the lawyer said.

"There was no MP3 file at any time to your knowledge located within the site defined by that URL."


from