Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 2nd, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"You've purposely destroyed P2P networks with bogus files--ones that, once downloaded on a user's machine, search out other copyrighted files on the hard drive and destroy them." – Michael Weiss, Streamcast


"That has nothing to do with us. We make it difficult for people to access that file without paying for it." – Marc Morgenstern, Overpeer


"You destroy the music; just admit it." – Lee Jaffe, Altnet


"They all had big advances from record companies. They were all stoned. They all said, 'We've got to have one of these.' " – Trevor Pinch


"If I have to, I will lock up all of the key parties in a room until they come out with an acceptable bill that stops the bad actors and preserves technological innovation." – Republican senator Orrin Hatch


"But there's another side to file-sharing. It's about the only way that an independent band can get national exposure. This promotion is essential to groups that aren't signed by a major record label." - Kris Sosa, concert organizer




















Judge Strikes Down Anti-Bootleg Law
Erin McClam

A federal judge Friday struck down a 1994 law banning the sale of bootleg recordings of live music, ruling the law unfairly grants "seemingly perpetual protection" to the original performances.

U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. dismissed a federal indictment of Jean Martignon, who runs a Manhattan mail-order and Internet business that sells bootleg recordings.

Baer found the bootleg law was written by Congress in the spirit of federal copyright law, which protects writing for a fixed period of time — typically for the life of the author and 70 years after the author's death.

But the judge said the bootleg law, which was passed "primarily to cloak artists with copyright protection," could not stand because it places no time limit on the ban.

Baer also noted that copyright law protects "fixed" works — such as books or recorded music releases — while bootlegs, by definition, are of live performances.

A federal grand jury indicted Martignon in October 2003 for selling "unauthorized recordings of live performances by certain musical artists through his business."

The business, Midnight Records, once had a store in Manhattan but now operates solely by mail and Internet. It sells hundreds of recordings, specializing in rock artists, from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin.

An e-mail message to Martignon from The Associated Press was not immediately returned Friday, and a phone number could not immediately be located.

Megan Gaffney, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney, said federal prosecutors were "reviewing the decision and will evaluate what steps ought to be taken going forward."

The Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that fights piracy and bootlegging, also disagreed with the ruling.

The decision "stands in marked contrast to existing law and prior decisions that have determined that Congress was well within its constitutional authority to adopt legislation that prevented trafficking in copies of unauthorized recordings of live performances," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA.

The bootleg law calls for prison terms of up to five years for first offenders and 10 years for second offenders, plus fines. It requires courts to order the destruction of any bootlegs created in violation of the law.

The law did not apply to piracy, which is the unauthorized copying or sale of recorded music, such as albums.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...mu/bootleg_law


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Judge Strikes Down Section of Patriot Act Allowing Secret Subpoenas of Internet Data
Julia Preston

A federal judge struck down an important surveillance provision of the antiterrorism legislation known as the USA Patriot Act yesterday, ruling that it broadly violated the Constitution by giving the federal authorities unchecked powers to obtain private information.

The ruling, by Judge Victor Marrero of Federal District Court in Manhattan, was the first to uphold a challenge to the surveillance sections of the act, which was adopted in October 2001 to expand the powers of the federal government in national security investigations.

The ruling invalidated one piece of the law, finding that it violated both free speech guarantees and protection against unreasonable searches. It is thought likely to provide fuel for other court challenges.

The ruling came in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against a kind of subpoena created under the act, known as a national security letter. Such letters could be used in terrorism investigations to require Internet service companies to provide personal information about subscribers and would bar them from disclosing to anyone that they had received a subpoena.

Such a subpoena could be issued without court review, under provisions that seemed to bar the recipient from discussing it with a lawyer.

Judge Marrero vehemently rejected that provision, saying that it was unique in American law in its "all-inclusive sweep" and had "no place in our open society."

He ordered that his ruling would not take effect for 90 days, to give the Bush administration time to appeal.

Anthony Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., called the ruling a "stunning victory against John Ashcroft's Justice Department." He said it would reinforce arguments the group had made in a separate challenge in Michigan to another surveillance section of the act.

The ruling does not affect many sections of the act, which is more than 350 pages long, that give the government enhanced powers to control immigration, conduct searches and investigate financial support for terrorism. It comes as Congress is debating additions to the Patriot Act.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/na...30patriot.html


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3 years in jail for a shared folder

House Votes To Target P2P Pirates
Declan McCullagh

In a move that takes aim at file-swapping networks, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to boost penalties for online piracy and increase federal police powers against Net copyright infringement.

By voice vote, politicians on Tuesday approved a sweeping copyright bill that would make it easier for the FBI and federal prosecutors to investigate and convict file swappers. Other sections criminalize unauthorized recordings made in movie theaters and encourage the Justice Department to target Internet copyright infringement.

"Millions of pirated movies, music, software, game and other copyrighted files are now available for free download from suspect peer-to-peer networks," said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who heads a copyright subcommittee. "This piracy harms everyone, from those looking for legitimate sources of content to those who create it." The bill enjoys the strong support of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Opponents had mounted an unsuccessful, last-ditch campaign earlier in the day to urge House leaders to remove the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act from the floor schedule.

Letters signed by groups including four library associations, the American Conservative Union, the National Taxpayers Union, and Public Knowledge argued that the measure would "radically expand the scope" of copyright liability and divert $15 million in federal funds from the war on terror to "protecting Hollywood's and Big Music's parochial interests."

The most controversial section of the bill punishes Internet users who offer "for distribution to the public" $1,000 or more in copyrighted materials with prison terms of up to three years and fines of up to $250,000. If it became law, prosecutors would not have to prove that $1,000 in copyrighted materials were actually downloaded; they would need to show only that those files had been publicly accessible in a shared folder.

An existing law called the No Electronic Theft Act already permits federal prosecutors to bring criminal charges against individual copyright infringers, though no such prosecutions have taken place so far. About the closest the government has come to that politically charged possibility is the announcement last month that a specific file- swapping group called the Underground Network is being investigated.

With Tuesday's vote, the legislation now goes to the Senate, which has not yet held hearings on it.
http://news.com.com/House+votes+to+t...3-5387682.html


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Senate Weighs Bill Targeting P2P Sites

Passage would make it easier for studios to sue
Andy Sullivan

After weeks of negotiations, the U.S. Senate could take action this week on a bill that would make it easier to sue "peer-to-peer" networks like Kazaa and LimeWire that allow users to copy music and movies over the Internet.

The bill would give a boost to recording companies and movie studios, which so far have been unable to shut down the online file- trading networks in court.

But it must overcome fierce opposition from copyright activists and technology companies, which worry that makers of iPods and photocopiers could be held liable as well.

"This is absolutely critical, it threatens the survival of our industry," said Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association.

Only a few short weeks remain in the legislative session but Shapiro and opponents worry that the measure's powerful backers, who include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Minority Leader Tom Daschle, could slip it into one of the giant spending bills that Congress must approve before it adjourns.

The Senate Judiciary Committee could take up the bill on Thursday, a committee spokeswoman said.

The Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act would hold liable anyone who "induces" others to reproduce copyrighted material.

The recording industry over the past year has sued thousands of people for distributing songs through peer-to-peer networks.

The industry has had less luck against the networks themselves, which claim their decentralized architecture prevents them from controlling user behavior.

U.S. courts have held that the networks cannot be held liable because, like VCR makers, they do not commit copyright infringement but merely make it possible.

Thus, while teenage music enthusiasts empty their bank accounts to settle copyright suits the companies that profit from their behavior get away scot-free, a recording-industry official said.

"We don't want them having American kids doing the dirty work for them," said Mitch Glazier, senior vice president of government relations for the Recording Industry Association of America.

Consumer-electronics makers have nothing to fear because the behavior in question must be intentional, he said.

A new version of the bill released after months of negotiation also contains carve-outs for venture-capital investors, advertisers, reviewers, and nonprofits.

Still, the new version seemed to win few converts.

"Although this new draft may appear on the surface to be more friendly to technology and innovation than were past drafts, in fact it is not," said Gigi Sohn, president of the nonprofit policy group Public Knowledge.

"The stakes here are chilling what drives America's economy, which is technical innovation, both in the marketplace of products and the marketplace of ideas," said Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a trade group for several peer-to-peer networks.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6117166/


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New Induce Act Prompts Old Complaints
Roy Mark

A fourth rewrite of the Induce Act is proving as controversial as its much-maligned predecessors. The Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004 (S. 2560) would permit individuals or corporations to be held liable for infringing acts that "they intend to induce."

Written by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the committee's ranking Democrat, the bill, the authors say, is aimed at the rampant music piracy on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Critics, however, contend the legislation goes far beyond targeting the file swapping networks to include consumer electronics manufacturers and Internet service providers that induce copyright theft.

Groups opposed to the legislation fear that the bill would allow content owners to sue companies such as Apple with its popular iPod for making equipment that encourages users to engage in copyright infringement.

Hatch and Leahy's latest rewrite includes exceptions for manufacturers "so long as such use is private and noncommercial, such use is not for financial gain and any copies of phonorecords resulting from such use are not made publicly available."

"Although this new draft may appear on the surface to be more friendly to technology and innovation than were past drafts, in fact it is not," Gigi B. Sohn, president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge, said in a statement.

As currently drafted, the bill states, "Whoever intentionally induces [copyright violation], by manufacturing, offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking in any product or service, any violation . . . shall be liable as an infringer." The legislation says the inducement must be "intentional" and defines that as "conscious and deliberate affirmative acts which a reasonable person would expect to result in widespread violations."

Yahoo (Quote, Chart), Google (Quote, Chart), SBC (Quote, Chart) and Verizon (Quote, Chart) and a number of other organizations including the Consumer Electronics Association, TechNet and the U.S. Internet Industry Association have also aligned themselves against the latest working draft of the bill, which is scheduled to be heard Thursday at a Judiciary Committee meeting.

The allied groups said in a Monday letter that even though Hatch and Leahy have "recognized and attempted to address many of our concerns, [the new draft] underscores the fact that adding any new cause of action to the Copyright Act is a daunting undertaking that requires carefully nuanced drafting to prevent adverse impacts on the many sectors of the economy that copyright law reaches."

Public Knowledge further contends if the Induce Act is implemented as an amendment to the Copyright Act, "this bill would constitute the greatest threat, to date, to the innovation processes that the copyright and patent laws were intended to promote."

Of greatest concern to Public Knowledge is that Induce Act would undermine the landmark 1984 U.S. Supreme Court Betamax decision, which found that the manufacturer of a technology, in that case a VCR, could not be held liable for infringing uses of a product as long as the product also has non-infringing use.

In August, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco used the technology neutral principles established in the Betamax case in deciding that P2P networks such as Kazaa, Grokster and StreamCast Networks (owners of Morpheus) were not liable for the copyright infringements of their users.

"[The Induce Act] would seem to subject all who invest, manufacture, or 'traffic' in legitimate home, personal recording and Internet products to a new and unquantifiable risk of litigation," the Monday industry letter to Hatch and Leahy states. "There seems a substantial likelihood that staple hardware and software products that are considered legal today would be found illegal tomorrow. "

At a July hearing on the bill, Hatch said, "Just as the Sony Court never intended to allow the substantial-non-infringing-use rule to be misused as a license to enter the copyright piracy business, I do not intend to allow S. 2560 to be misused against legitimate distributors of copying devices."

The Senate Judiciary Committee did not respond to a Tuesday inquiry about the legislation.
http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3414241


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UCLA To Stop Short Of P2P Snooping
Stefanie Olsen

The University of California at Los Angeles is using technology to discourage Net piracy of films or music, but it's holding off on playing campus snoop, a school official said Monday at the Digital Hollywood conference here.

As previously reported, UCLA has implemented a technology system to give notice and warnings to students who have been fingered by Hollywood studios or record labels as perpetrators of digital copyright theft.

An implementation of the Automated Copyright Notice System, or ACNS--an open-source notification software--the system lets UCLA instantly send notices of copyright infringement to students by e-mail and restrict their network access until they have removed the offending file.

Meanwhile, other universities and content providers are increasingly embracing technology from Audible Magic and others to attach digital fingerprints to copyrighted works and keep tabs on students' file-swapping--technology backed by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

"That technology is not attractive to us, because what students are doing is private. But we're encouraging a behavioral shift," said Jonathan Curtiss, of UCLA Student Services, at a panel of educators and technologists discussing entertainment and IT in the university.

Still, Curtiss said UCLA's student surveys during the first month of classes this year revealed that students would rather continue to find a way to steal copyrighted content, because the cost of movies and music is still too high.

Despite efforts by Hollywood to curtail peer-to-peer file-swapping at universities, some IT administrators are excited by file-sharing technology. For example, the University of Southern California, also in Los Angeles, is testing a music file-sharing portal that lets students remix or loop music on a shared network; and the school can do this legally under a creative commons license, according to Todd Richmond, managing director for the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC.

"We're very interested in peer-to-peer technology and the ability of individual computers to seamlessly transfer data around--in a legal way," said Richmond.

Universities are testing several video-on-demand services for their students. Cflix and Ruckus are just two of the companies courting schools with VOD services. USC is also testing a program with Hollywood studio-backed Movielink to make some free downloadable movies available to students in the dorms, Richmond said.

Other technology initiatives at colleges include Duke University's giveaway of Apple Computer iPods to 1,650 freshman, who have access to their class schedules on the devices. USC has also developed a technical specification for allowing students and educators to share information on events with the use of Really Simple Syndication, or RSS.

USC's Richmond also said that next semester the university plans to make wireless access available to classrooms to encourage more participation with Internet access. He said that educators have complained that Internet access has disrupted the classroom experience because students will mindlessly surf the Web and ignore discussion. But he said USC's strategy going forward is to encourage students to log on wirelessly during class and use Google or another search engine to research what professors say and bring more questions to the debate.

"We want wireless uniformity because then someone can Google what the professor says and question it. And this opens a dialogue in class," said Richmond, who added that "professors don't like the idea."

"This is the future and we want to poke people with sharp sticks," Richmond said.
http://news.com.com/UCLA+to+stop+sho...3-5387859.html


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Conservative Group Savages Anti-P2P Bill
Declan McCullagh

The nation's oldest conservative group has become the latest and most vocal critic of an anti- file-swapping bill that foes say could target products like Apple Computer's iPod.
The American Conservative Union (ACU), which holds influential Republican activists and former senators on its board of directors, is running newspaper and magazine advertisements that take a humorous jab at the so-called Induce Act--and slams some conservative politicians for supporting it.

"This is the Hollywood liberals trying to crush innovation," said ACU deputy director Stacie Rumenap. "What's sad is that they've got Republicans on their side." A Senate committee vote on the bill is scheduled for Thursday.

The original version of the Induce Act said that anyone who induces any violation of copyright law could be legally responsible, a phrase that has alarmed Silicon Valley manufacturers and led Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, to say he would consider less sweeping alternatives. A version that Hatch's office privately circulated on Friday afternoon, seen by CNET News.com, clarifies that a company must engage in "conscious and deliberate affirmative acts" of inducement to be found liable.

But technology companies were skeptical that it would eliminate their concerns. "The problem is that it doesn't look like they're willing to preserve the Sony Betamax standard for the cause of action of inducement," said Markham Erickson, associate general counsel for NetCoalition, which represents companies including Google, Yahoo, and CNET Networks, publisher of News.com.

In the 1984 Supreme Court decision referred to as the Betamax ruling, the court said VCRs were legal to sell because they were "capable of substantial noninfringing uses." Technology companies worry that by targeting operators of peer-to-peer networks, the Induce Act could erode the legal protections that shield other hardware and software makers from legal liability.

Mitch Glazier, the chief lobbyist for the Recording Industry Association of America, said in a recent interview that the concerns about the iPod being imperiled were unfounded: "The original Induce Act focused on the totality of the circumstances. There's no way that a company that produces great digital rights management for a licensed product is ever going to be shown to want to profit from piracy."

The ACU's advertisement claims the Induce Act "attacks consumers' right to use technologies" and enriches "Hollywood fat cats." It is running in conservative-leaning publications including the Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times and National Review.

On Monday, it will be joined by an ad from NetCoalition that says "Don't Let Congress Make Him Your Next Portable Music Player" alongside a photograph of a traveling musician outfitted with an absurd amount of musical gear. It will run in the political publication Roll Call and then local newspapers.

Republican supporters of the Induce Act include Hatch and Tennessee Sens. Bill Frist and Lamar Alexander.
http://news.com.com/Conservative+gro...3-5381593.html


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Illegal File-Sharing Blocker Hits Europe
Claire Woffenden

Technology that can block the spread of illegal copyrighted material on peer-to- peer networks is coming to Europe.

Overpeer's technology helps copyright holders flood popular P2P networks with spoof files that mimic genuine music tracks, games and software files.

Digital media company Loudeye, which owns Overpeer and European music firm OD2, said it currently protects more than 60,000 digital entertainment titles and blocks hundreds of millions of attempted downloads each month.

Marc Morgenstern, vice president of Loudeye's asset protection and promotion business, said: “Our proprietary systems and technology are designed to interdict illegal peer-to-peer traffic, blocking illegal transmission of copyrighted material and helping content owners take control of piracy.”

“These systems have been highly effective for our customers in the US and Asia. We're pleased that we can launch these services in Europe with our OD2 partners.”

OD2 has digital music distribution rights to more than one million licensed tracks from 70 label partners including the five major labels and many independents. It powers popular music sites including Coca Cola, MTV, MSN, Virgin, Tiscali, Wanadoo and HMV.

Charles Grimsdale, OD2 co-founder, said: "We look forward to working with European content owners to protect their content from rampant piracy and provide valuable data on the usage of their content across peer-to-peer networks.”
http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/news.php?id=58442


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Digital Hollywood Erupts Over File-Sharing
Stefanie Olsen

At the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, California, the debate over peer-to-peer technology is raging--literally.

On Wednesday, executives from P2P software companies, along with audience members from a panel at the Digital Hollywood conference, openly argued--Jerry Springer-style--about whether sharing and downloading copyrighted film and music files over distributed file networks is legal.

Panel members--from companies including P2P technology makers Altnet and Morpheus, software giant Microsoft and copyright-protector Overpeer--even fired off insults at one another during more heated moments.

"You've purposely destroyed P2P networks with bogus files--ones that, once downloaded on a user's machine, search out other copyrighted files on the hard drive and destroy them," said Michael Weiss, CEO of Morpheus-owner StreamCast Networks, to co-panelist Marc Morgenstern, vice president and general manager of Overpeer, whose technology helps protect record labels' copyrights.

Morgenstern replied: "That has nothing to do with us. We make it difficult for people to access that file without paying for it."

Yet Lee Jaffe, president of Altnet, persisted: "You destroy the music; just admit it." And an audience member added to the tension by directly asking Morgenstern whether his company spoofs the hashes, or encryption techniques, on Altnet files to limit the copying of copyrighted music.

"This is a discreet activity authorised by the content owners," Morgenstern said, without answering directly. "We're engaged in legal activity."

P2P technology was the topic of several discussions during the three-day Digital Hollywood conference because of its immense potential to promote artists' work, disseminate content to consumers economically via a distributed network, and foster new business models for technology and copyright holders, according to industry executives. But peer-to-peer technologies still carry a stigma in Hollywood for their ability to allow what the industry considers massive theft of copyrighted songs and films through users sharing digital files.

Hollywood has fought the P2P networks with lawsuits, charging that makers of file-swapping technologies are liable for copyright theft perpetrated on their networks. In one such case, the court ruled in favor of Morpheus.

The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America are also backing bills that would criminalise some forms of file swapping. One such bill, known as the Induce Act, is expected to face a Senate committee vote this week.

Nevertheless, new P2P services are emerging with business models that seem to take advantage of the distributed medium without offending copyright holders. iMesh, an Israeli-based peer-to-peer company that settled copyright lawsuits for US$4.1 million, plans to launch a new service that will give content owners a means of collecting money, according to panelists. Fox executive Ron Wheeler said Tuesday the studio is in talks with iMesh over potentially working together.

Although no executive on the panel disputed the potential P2P technology holds for new-media distribution, they all questioned how to make money from the services and ensure that artists and rights holders get paid for the downloading of copyrighted works.

So-called digital rights management (DRM) tools are deemed essential for assuaging Hollywood's fears about P2P piracy. DRM is considered crucial for new digital-entertainment services, giving studios, record labels and others powerful tools for protecting their copyrighted works and laying the groundwork for profitable new ways to sell their products.

"Kids today find new music on P2P networks, and we need to find a way to monetise that," said Elizabeth Brooks, executive vice president of Buy Music.

Andy Moss, Microsoft's director of technical policy, said artists and record labels are beginning to think about how to use P2P networks, and companies such as Intent are using blanket digital rights management technology to wrest money for downloaded films on P2P networks. Ronald Gertz, CEO of Music Reports, said there needs to be compulsory licensing pools that ensure that money from downloaded or shared files turns into royalties for artists.

"P2P is a digital archive, and it's a door to the Information Age," said StreamCast's Weiss.

Still, the group openly argued about whether P2P file swapping is legal, given that no final decision came from the courts in the Recording Industry Association of America v. Napster case.

"Taking and sharing are two different things," Jaffe said. "Sharing is not piracy. No one has ever challenged the RIAA lawsuits."

In reply, someone from the audience yelled, "Give me that jacket! We need to share it."

Richard Doherty, president of research firm Envisioneering Group and moderator of the panel, weighed in by saying that Western copyright law establishes that making unlimited copies of copyrighted works for the purposes of sharing with strangers is unlawful.

StreamCast's Weiss said with regard to consumer behavior on P2P networks that "the toothpaste is out of the tube" and that the industry has to develop a working business model to take advantage of consumer demand, which would probably include offering some content free, some paid--with a compulsory license that creates a monetary pool for artist royalties.

Weiss said Morpheus has experimented with a company called Weed to give people limited access to songs from the rock band Heart before requesting that the file swapper buy the music. Money from the purchases is then given to the band.

Weiss also said Morpheus plans next week to launch a third generation of its P2P software, called Neopet, which will improve users' ability to find files on a network of millions of users.

Still, before there's a detente between Hollywood and P2P companies, the entertainment industry wants to see networks like Morpheus filter out copyrighted works. Executives from Fox and Sony Entertainment at panels on Tuesday echoed this idea. But Weiss said that because it's network is distributed among millions of users--and doesn't run on a centralised server--filtering is not possible.

Still, Weiss said that in the next year, he'd like to have sealed a deal with a major entertainment company and see the Induce Act quashed. Jaffe said that within six months, he'd like to see P2P turned into the radio model, where content is sponsored by advertisers but kept free.

"We've got to separate peer-to-peer distribution technology from the bad actors," Gertz said.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/0,39023165,39161203,00.htm


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762 Song Swappers Sued
Andy Sullivan

A recording-industry trade group says it has filed a new round of lawsuits against 762 people it suspects of distributing its songs for free over Internet "peer to peer" networks like Kazaa and eDonkey.

The Recording Industry Association of America has now sued roughly 5,400 people over the past year in an effort to discourage the online song copying that it believes has cut into CD sales.

"We want music fans to enjoy music online, but in a fashion that compensates everyone who worked to create that music," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement on Thursday.

Among those sued were students at 26 different colleges and universities, where the prevalence of high- speed networks and cash-poor music fans has led to an explosion of peer-to-peer traffic.

Under pressure from the RIAA, many schools have taken steps to limit file sharing and at least 20 schools give students free access to industry-sanctioned download services like Roxio's Napster.

The RIAA does not yet know the names of those it has sued, only the numerical addresses used by their computers. The trade group typically finds out suspects' identities from their Internet service providers during the legal proceedings.

In addition to those sued anonymously, the RIAA said it had sued 68 defendants whose identities had been discovered and who had declined offers to settle.

The RIAA typically settles copyright-infringement suits for around $5,000 each.

Though the recording industry has successfully sued thousands of individuals, it has had less luck with the peer-to-peer networks themselves.

Courts so far have held that networks cannot be held liable because, like VCR makers, they do not commit copyright infringement but merely make it possible.

The RIAA has pushed Congress to lower that standard. A bill currently being considered in the Senate would hold liable anyone who "induces" others to reproduce copyrighted material.

Objections by librarians, conservative groups and the technology industry have prevented the bill from advancing so far, but Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said earlier Thursday that he would take it up again next week.

The RIAA represents the world's largest record labels, such as Warner Music, EMI Group and the music arms of Bertelsmann, Sony. and Vivendi Universal.
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle...section= news


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Welcome to the party pal

UK Swappers Next
Tony Smith

The UK music industry has been threatening local file-sharers with Recording Industry Ass. of America-style lawsuits since late last year (http:// http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12...swap_lawsuits/), but it finally seems to be gearing up to take action.

Industry sourced cited by today's Times newspaper claim that the writs will start to fly within the next month as the UK's answer to the RIAA, the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) targets "the most flagrant users of peer-to-peer Internet file- sharing sites", as the paper puts it.

It's hard to see what's taken the music biz so long, given how much time its members have bemoaned the alleged P2P-driven downturn in world music sales. "Benign neglect", is how one unnamed industry executive described the business' policy here. Certainly, the UK music industry has been hit far less than other nations' recording business. Possibly they were waiting to see how the situation turned out in the US.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) today said that the decline was slowing. World music sales totalled $13.9bn in the first six months of 2004, just 1.3 per cent down on the H1 2003 total, $14.1bn. H1 2003, by contrast, was 10.7 per cent down on H1 2002. Shipments were up 1.7 per cent between those two periods, to 1.22bn units.

In other words, people are buying more music these days, not less. The revenue dip is almost certainly the result of falling unit prices, which is one of the likely motors for rising shipments.

Has the RIAA's litigious behaviour helped? Certainly, US music sales were up 3.9 per cent between H1 2003 and H1 2004. Japan and the UK, the world's next two biggest music markets saw sales dip by very low sub-percentage figures. Germany and France showed were IFPI and co. should be turning their attention, perhaps: sales were down 5.2 per cent and 21.9 per cent, respectively. Sales in Spain were down 11 per cent.

The IFPI has brought action against file-sharers in continental Europe (http:// http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03...kes_p2p_jihad/), though the scale of its efforts here has been dwarfed by the volume of lawsuits instigated out by the RIAA, which has targeted thousands of named and unnamed alleged music sharers since commencing such action in September 2003.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10...music_pirates/


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Accused Uploaders Turn To Bankruptcy
Peter Shinkle

Eddie Nicholson, a school bus driver, has made ends meet in recent years by serving as a disc jockey at parties. He calls the business Fast Eddie's Karaoke & DJ Show.

He got some ominous financial news in June, when a sheriff's deputy delivered a summons to Nicholson's trailer home in Marion, Ill. BMG, a music industry giant, was suing him in federal court for downloading music over the Internet. Representing BMG was Bryan Cave LLP, a large law firm based in St. Louis.

Nicholson turned to attorney Bradley Olson, a solo practitioner in Carterville, Ill. Olson filed a bankruptcy case on Nicholson's behalf two weeks later, a move that automatically blocked BMG's suit.

Then Olson asked a bankruptcy judge to bar BMG from collecting the $5,435 claim. BMG filed no response, and on Sept. 8, Judge Kenneth Meyers dismissed the case in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in East St. Louis.

This is the latest, and perhaps grittiest, phase of the music industry's campaign to stamp out what it says is an epidemic of illegal copying of recorded music over the Internet. The Recording Industry Association of America has announced waves of lawsuits against alleged copyright violators. But once the cases hit the courts, music industry attorneys sometimes run into tough battles.

Still, the recording industry group suggests it is winning the war. Since September last year, music companies have sued 4,679 alleged music downloaders, according to the Washington-based association. So far, 1,024 people have settled their cases, it said.

In St. Louis, BMG, Sony and other music giants have sued 603 alleged downloaders.

The broad effect of the campaign has been to dissuade consumers from downloading music illegally, the industry association says. Instead, recorded CD sales are rising after a four-year decline, and legitimate online music sites are thriving, it says.

Nicholson said he considers the industry's tactics unfair. He said he had nothing to do with downloading music, as a neighborhood child had downloaded the music for Nicholson's daughter.

BMG's suit showed that the big company had concluded Nicholson was guilty without even talking to him, he said. BMG sent him a letter threatening to make him pay as much as $350,000, he said.

The experience has left him bitter and angry, he said. "This is not the land of the free any more. It's the land of - how much can you pay?"

He said he bought all of the CDs for his business legally, but now he's been forced to hire a lawyer, file for bankruptcy and make payments to work out his bankruptcy plan.

Consumers aren't the only ones who have resisted the lawsuits. The industry also has clashed repeatedly with someone its own size - Charter Communications Inc., a cable television and Internet service provider based in Town and Country.

Last year, the recording industry group issued subpoenas seeking identifying information on about 200 Charter customers. The association knew them only by the Internet Protocol numbers that identified their computers on the Internet. The subpoenas were used to put names and addresses with those numbers.

The association issued the subpoenas to Charter under the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Charter resisted, saying the subpoenas violated its customers' privacy. The dispute is pending in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

After another federal appeals court ruled in December that such subpoenas were illegal, the industry changed its strategy. Individual companies began filing suits against "John Doe" defendants identified only by the Internet Protocol number. Under federal court Rule 45, the filing of the suits first legitimized the use of subpoenas.

Charter has had little choice but to comply. Its senior vice president and associate general counsel, Tom Hearity, said, "Where we have grounds to oppose a Rule 45 subpoena, we will do so, but that generally isn't the case." Hearity said Charter tells targeted customers first.

With identifying information now flowing, the music companies have filed suits against 334 named defendants nationwide since May, according to the industry association. Those include just six in the court's eastern Missouri district, and one in Southern Illinois.

Nicholson, the defendant in court at East St. Louis, is not the only one to file for bankruptcy. Victoria Summers, a car dealership employee who lives in Cape Girardeau, Mo., was sued July 20 by Sony Music Entertainment Inc. and other music companies. They claim she downloaded music, or made it available for downloading by others, in violation of the copyrights.

On Aug. 12, Summers filed for bankruptcy. She reported earning $1,887 per month, noting she is divorced and has two children. The filing led to an automatic stay of the lawsuit.

Summers could not be reached for comment. Her attorney, Benjamin Lewis, declined comment.

Not all defendants turn to bankruptcy. Mark Kelly, of Chesterfield, has not responded to a lawsuit BMG and other companies filed against him July 20. In a telephone interview, Kelly said, "It's a situation where I didn't even know this was going on, and my children were involved in it, and I can't figure how the kids were doing what they did."

He said his children were 15 and 17 years old at the time of the suspected activity. He referred other questions to a lawyer, who could not be reached.

On Sept. 20, attorneys for BMG and the other music companies filed a motion seeking a default judgment for damages, noting that Kelly had failed to respond. They are seeking $7,500.

A judge has yet to rule on the request for damages.
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/new...to+bankruptcy+


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PassAlong Jump-Starts eBay Music Effort
Matt Hines

Online auction giant eBay is entering the music download business with a service that will market content from major record labels.

The digital music service, which is powered by start-up PassAlong Networks, officially debuted Thursday. PassAlong, which also launched Thursday, is the first company to peddle songs from major labels on eBay's nascent music storefront.

PassAlong has the rights to sell downloads of the entire music catalogs of top-tier recording companies EMI Group, Sony, BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. The company, based in Franklin, Tenn., will offer the music files through both its own Web site and a newly created section on eBay.

As of late Thursday, PassAlong had only posted an auction for a promotion offering a phone conversation with singer Avril Lavigne. But the company's chief executive, Dave Jaworski, said that some 200,000 songs will be made available through both sites by the end of the week. Jaworski said PassAlong has plans to offer more than 500,000 tracks for sale.

"The eBay community has come to expect a reliable, safe environment for doing business, and we're hoping to offer the same kind of quality for music downloads," Jaworski said. "This effort with eBay will offer consumers an opposite of unprotected and illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing networks."

PassAlong differs from many other music download sites in that it allows its paying customers to share music files with others and offers rewards, such as discounts on further downloads, to those who successfully encourage additional people to pay for its content.

The PassAlong debut on eBay marks the first significant step in bringing the auctioneer's emerging digital-music plans to life. eBay's current beta test of its online download marketplace has remained largely unused since its launch in mid-July, causing some industry watchers to wonder where the project stood.

Up until now, eBay's Digital Downloads section has only offered auctions hosted by Warner Bros. Records for cell phone ring tones based on music by the band Green Day, and only one independent musician has been selling his work on that part of the site.

eBay is allowing a select group of pre-approved companies and musicians to sell downloads as part of its initial entry into the online-music space.

"This is part of our ongoing pilot program to test whether the eBay community sees (eBay) as a viable marketplace for the buying and selling of digital music downloads," said Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman.

The PassAlong announcement comes after weeks of speculation that eBay was planning to join the red-hot digital music download space. The company, based in San Jose, Calif., is hoping to compete with established players such as Apple Computer's iTunes, which has already sold more than 125 million songs, and Microsoft, which launched a test version of its MSN Music service earlier this month. A number of other companies have rushed to get their own music download services on the market, including Napster, Sony, RealNetworks and Yahoo.

Digital music profits muted
eBay's cautious approach to the download market speaks volumes about digital music's profit potential. Despite selling such a staggering number of downloads, typically for 99 cents per song, Apple has indicated that iTunes is not a major source of revenue. For companies like Sony and Apple, the idea is to spur sales of hardware, such as Apple's iPod device, that are used to listen to digital content.

Microsoft and RealNetworks sell media software, but the ability for retailers to make money by selling digital music singles alone--each of which may have only a few pennies of profit--remains uncertain.

According to Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, eBay faces plenty of competition, but its community of more than 150 million users worldwide represents a significant opportunity. Bernoff said that while it seems as if every major IT company has expressed some interest in digital music, eBay's situation is unique.

"eBay's biggest asset remains its community of users," Bernoff said. "Attracting people is the first step, and they've already got a sizable audience to work with."

Bernoff believes that eBay can become a major download center if its policies allow sellers to make enough money off the transactions to make their businesses feasible. The analyst said that many of the other companies hoping to join the music download market may face more significant challenges.

"The atmosphere is similar to the early e-commerce days, with everyone trying to grab a piece of the action," Bernoff said. "When the dust settles, there will likely be three or four successful services, not a dozen. eBay is in a position where they don't want to be left out, but it will still be hard to profit immensely off of 99-cent deals."
http://news.com.com/PassAlong+jump-s...3-5379801.html


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It’s only been 5 years

Sony Embraces MP3 in Ploy To Please Public
Jay Lyman

Although a number of different formats -- Microsoft's WMA, Apple's ACC, Sony's Altrac and others -- compete in a variety of digital music devices, support for MP3 is becoming a required ingredient for any successful portable player. Some would argue Apple's iPod is an exception, but the proprietary-format player is likely to see more competition from MP3-capable devices.

HP Mobility Solutions remove the obstacles to successful mobile deployment. Our mobility solutions are scalable, secure, offer lower costs and integrate seamlessly into your existing IT environment. So when you're ready for proven wireless solutions, HP is your best choice.

Sony Electronics, maker of the first portable music device in the Walkman cassette player, has switched course on the format of its latest digital players, which will now support the consumer format of choice: MP3 .

Sony's MP3 move is a departure from supporting only its own Atrac format, which is among a number of proprietary alternatives that, while technically superior in some respects, do not offer MP3's portability between home, auto, mobile and other music devices.

At the same time Sony announced it was going to build support for both its own Atrac and the more universal MP3 format, industry researcher IDC reported that MP3 player sales are booming, reinforcing analysts' opinion that MP3's ability to deliver the same digital content on different devices makes it the favorite format of consumers.

Sony's Slow Switch

"MP3 is the ultimate in terms of inter-device compatibility," Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman told TechNewsWorld. "One of the most important things for consumers is portability and transferability and you are lacking in any of those areas with the proprietary formats."

Analysts agreed that Sony made a major mistake by previously announcing it would only support its own, proprietary format. The electronics giant is now indicating that its players will be supporting MP3 from now on.

Goodman said the switch in strategy is Sony's effort to find the fastest and easiest way to meet consumers' demands for interoperability.

"It should have been done from the start," Goodman said. "When you look at a typical user's collection, the vast majority [of files] are MP3."

Gartner research director Mike McGuire said the MP3 support from Sony was an acknowledgement of the popularity of the music format, but added it was "fairly late in coming."

"Really, all it does is get them to some level of parity with the rest of the world," McGuire told TechNewsWorld.

De Facto Default

Although a number of different formats -- Microsoft's WMA, Apple's ACC, Sony's Altrac and others -- compete in a variety of digital music devices, support for MP3 is becoming a required ingredient for any successful portable player.

Some would argue Apple's iPod is an exception, but the proprietary-format player is likely to see more competition from MP3- capable devices, according to analysts.

McGuire said that although MP3 is also a format that is popular on peer-to- peer (P2P) networks and is vilified by some copyright owners such as the Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA), it is the most likely candidate to be a standard format.

"There are so many file formats out there," McGuire said. "MP3 is probably going to be the default for a lot of people. This is something content companies are just going to have to live with. The market is going to force interoperability."

Transfer Trumps Tech

Yankee's Goodman said that while other, proprietary formats feature better compression and copyright protection technology , the portability of MP3 is more important to the people who buy players.

Sony's move "just re-affirms the support customers have for MP3," Goodman said. "All the others have better compression, but MP3 offers one thing those formats don't offer and that's cross- device compatibility."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/S...lic-36889.html


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Twister 2.5.8

Added by: A^C^E
Platform: Windows
Category: File Sharing

Twister is a free program for finding and downloading MP3s and other music files on the Internet. Twister doesn't use a peer-to-peer network such as Gnutella, Kazaa, or WinMX. Instead, it uses the best search engines available on the Internet.

Just enter the name of an artist or song and then click the Search button. In just a few seconds the found MP3 files will appear on your screen and the verification process will start. All files marked with a green dot can easily be downloaded with the integrated download manager. In the playlist you can play, rename, and delete your music files.

Twister is fully compatible with all major music players, such as Windows Media Player and Winamp. Version 2.3.2 reflects a recent change in some major search engines and therefore brings you more search results. It also has enhanced parsing and better presentation of search results.
http://addict3d.org/index.php?page=downloadfile&ID=2577


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Get In Sync At Home And In The Office
Nicky Blackburn

When entrepreneurs Tal Barnoach and Sharon Carmel decided to set up a company together, they were looking for a simple and effective product that would prompt users to say "Wow, why didn't anyone think of that before?" Two years later, they believe they have done just that.

In August, their Tel Aviv start-up BeInSync released the first version of its product of the same name that ensures files, documents, and e-mails are always synchronized between different computers shared by the same end user.

In today's world, this is an important tool. How many times have you left the office, planning to continue working at home only to discover that you left a vital piece of data on the office PC?

How many times, too, have you spent valuable time sending off e-mails of your files to your laptop or your home PC, or using USB memory keys?

BeInSync does away with all that by enabling you to create a personal peer-to-peer (P2P) network between two or three computers, automatically synchronizing whatever you specify, be it text files, e-mails, pictures, calendar info, or Internet favorites. Every time a file is opened, updated, or deleted, the changes will automatically be reflected on all your other computers as well. The program, which was designed to be simple to install and use, creates a secure, coded P2P connection via the Internet. If changes are made offline, the software simply synchronizes the files the moment the user logs back online. The updates are carried out in the background, and do not interfere with the user's work.

In addition, the software, which is designed for home users or small businesses, enables users to get secure access to their data using remote Web access; and also allows users to share synchronized files with colleagues, partners, or friends.

"The idea is very simple," says Barnoach, the CEO of BeInSync, formerly DataPod. "Once you have downloaded the software, you don't need to do anything. There are no buttons to press, you do not have to configure anything.

As soon as you make any changes, these will be automatically synchronized on your other computers."

Barnoach and Carmel first met each other in April 2000, when Barnoach, the chairman of Orca Interactive, a specialist in developing applications for interactive TV, sold the company to Emblaze Systems for $33m.

Carmel was a founder of Emblaze. At the start of 2002, both men had recently left their jobs and Carmel suggested that they work together to create a new start-up of their own. They spent the next few months thinking of ideas, and in August 2002 finally set up BeInSync.

Two years later the first version of BeInSync was released. At present the software, which can be downloaded from the company's Web site, is free, but from the end of November the company will start charging customers $5.99 a month. This charge is for all the computers used on the P2P network, says Barnoach, adding that rival remote access solutions charge customers $20 a month per computer.

In addition, the company intends to continue offering a free version, which will offer a more limited service.

The company, which employs 20, now plans to begin an aggressive marketing campaign, advertising on all the major Internet sites such as Google and Yahoo. In addition, it is negotiating OEM agreements with Internet Service Providers and large telecom companies, which plan to offer the technology to subscribers under their own brand name.

The company is now in advanced negotiations with players in the US and Europe, and Barnoach says he expects revenue sharing agreements to be signed by the end of November.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...=1095914101729


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Interview

BitTorrent Creator Bram Cohen
Ratiatum.com/p2pnet.net News

Ratiatum.com: Although everyone seems to agree that BitTorrent is the most efficient P2P protocol ever created, you've already begun to work on its successor, BitTorrent 2. What are the weaknesses of BT that you expect to address with this new protocol?

Cohen: Fairly technical things. Mostly, the amount of bandwidth used by the trackers can be dramatically reduced.

Ratiatum.com: What do you think of alternative BT clients such as Azureus, BitComet, or ABC?

Cohen: ABC is basically mainline with a fancy UI slapped on it. I don't know much about BitComet. Azureus is a completely different codebase, and doesn't have as good a core, but has a fancier interface than mainline.

The next release of mainline is going to have a lot of the advanced features people want, by the way.

Ratiatum.com: Before BitTorrent became what it is, you worked on Mojo Nation, a p2p network with very smart concepts to encourage file sharing. Unfortunately it quickly vanished. Is it something you would like to revive?

Cohen: No. Mojo Nation had a huge number of technical problems.

Ratiatum.com: According to your own words, "Mojo Nation incorporated many interesting cryptographic techniques". Do you plan on adding cryptotography mechanisms to protect privacy with BT 2?

BC: There might be some minimal encryption, but there hasn't been any call for it, and the kind of threat model which could possibly be defended against is kind of lame.

Ratiatum.com: You have been hired by Valve Software (Half-Life's creators). What can you tell us about this collaboration?

Cohen: I was working on steam, which is improving.

Ratiatum.com: Have other companies approached you to create their own content distribution system?

Cohen: A few have asked vaguely, but in general I just tell people that they can use BitTorrent.

Ratiatum.com: BitTorrent is exclusively used to distribute files, but p2p architectures are now used in many other domains, such as VoIP or network gaming. Do you have any project involving these kinds of data distribution?

Cohen: No.

Ratiatum.com: How do you see the development of p2p in the future, both under technical and policy points of view?

Cohen: It's always hard to predict what's coming up next. My main guess is that content creators will increasingly start using BitTorrent to distribute their own work directly.

Ratiatum.com: Finally, will you demonstrate your juggling skills at CodeCon 4.0? :-) (CodeCon is "a technical conference for peer to peer hackers and cypherpunks" organised by Bram Cohen)

Cohen: If asked, I did juggle during the opening comments at an earlier one.
http://p2pnet.net/story/2548


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Music Sites Ask, 'Why Buy If You Can Rent?'
Saul Hansell

Long before Sir Richard Branson dreamed of becoming the latest billionaire with a reality TV show, before he started his cellphone company, his airline and his record label, he sold music from the Virgin Record Shop on Oxford Street in London. When he began in 1971, of course, music was presented as grooves pressed into a vinyl disk.

Today, Sir Richard starts a new music store, VirginDigital.com, this time selling music as streams of bits to be downloaded from the Internet. Virgin, a unit of the Virgin Group, becomes the first major music retailer to enter the download market, which has been dominated by Apple Computer and other technology companies.

What's interesting is that Virgin is putting its biggest emphasis on its subscription service, rather than on selling songs one at time for 99 cents a track, as Apple and Microsoft do. It is betting that new customers will join its Virgin Music Club for a $7.99 monthly fee to listen to an unlimited amount of music from Virgin's one-million- track library on their computers.

A premium subscription service that will allow those tracks to be moved to a portable music player, for a slightly higher monthly fee, will be introduced soon.

Several years ago, subscription services were seen as the music industry's best response to illegal song downloading, and several services were introduced, including RealNetworks' Rhapsody; MusicNet on America Online, which is owned by Time Warner; and a legal revival of Roxio's controversial file-sharing service, Napster. But Apple's simple à la carte store where customers can buy single songs has proved to be far more popular with consumers.

Jupiter Research estimates that 2.1 million people pay for music subscription services, including the cheaper Internet radio services. By contrast, 8.5 million people have paid to download a music file. (All of that is still dwarfed by the 23.4 million people who said they downloaded files free from sharing services like Kazaa in the month of July, according to a survey by the NPD Group.)

That track record does not scare Zack Zalon, the president of Virgin Digital. "Two or three years out, subscriptions will overtake à la carte because it is a much more interesting proposition," Mr. Zalon said. "It has just been difficult to articulate to consumers what it is."

Of course, the difficulty of explaining subscription plans to consumers is exactly why Apple chose the path it did. "Consumers have been buying music for 50 years," said Eddy Cue, the vice president of Apple in charge of its iTunes online music store. "They want to replicate that experience online."

Mr. Cue said that Apple might consider a subscription service in the future, but it has no plans to do so now. "Customers are speaking loudly with their wallets."

Though that may be true, it is far more profitable for online companies to offer subscription services. Typically, an online store pays 65 or 70 cents to the record companies for each 99-cent track sold. But with subscription services, the online services split the fees 50-50 with the record labels after deducting certain expenses.

That fee-splitting cost structure is leading to what may turn into a price war among music subscription services, which generally cost just under $10 a month. AOL offers a subscription service to its members for $8.95 a month. Now Virgin is $1 cheaper than that.

And in the next few months, several other subscription services will be introduced at prices as low as $5 a month, said Ellie Hirschhorn, the chief operating officer of MusicNet, a company that provides the technology and music licenses for the subscription services of AOL, Virgin and, soon, several other companies.

Mr. Zalon said that Virgin did not plan to compete mainly on price. For example, it is selling tracks at 99 cents, not matching Wal-Mart's online music store which sells songs for 88 cents. Rather, he said, Virgin seeks to differentiate its online store and subscription service with content and merchandising.

Virgin will emphasize less popular genres like jazz, blues and classical music, he said. And it will provide features like "ask the expert" to give users the old-fashioned experience of talking to a veteran record store employee. Site users can send questions by e-mail and get responses from staff members hired away from Virgin Megastores.

One big question for Virgin and others is how to set prices for subscription services that allow users to move songs from their personal computers to their portable music players. Until now, the only legal way to put most songs from major record labels on a portable player has been to buy them from stores like iTunes or to convert them into MP3 format from CD's.

New technology from Microsoft, which is being adopted by most major electronics makers like Samsung, Rio and iRiver (though not by Apple) will allow devices to play songs downloaded in a special format from subscription services.

The songs will be programmed to expire on a set date, but that date is automatically extended when users connect their players back to the music software on their computers. If the user does not continue paying the monthly subscription bill, the songs will not play.

The music industry has argued that the price for being able to download songs - even temporarily - from subscription services should be substantially higher than simply listening to the song on a computer.

"There is an increased functionality and there should be an increased value to that," said Ted Cohen, a senior vice president for digital development and distribution with the EMI Group.

He said that while the music industry initially felt the best way to fight piracy was through subscription services, it had been pleasantly surprised at the popularity of download sales.

Currently, the only subscription service with the ability to allow songs to be downloaded to portable devices is a test version of a Napster service called Napster To Go, which uses the Microsoft technology. (A new legal subscription service bought the Napster name after courts shut down the original.) It costs $14.95, compared with $9.95 for the regular Napster subscription service.

Chris Gorog, the chief executive of Napster, said the record industry is pushing for a price closer to $20 a month. But he argues that the record industry will be well served by keeping the price affordable.

"The portable subscription is the single greatest defense against piracy because it most replicates the illegal experience of unlimited access to music," Mr. Gorog said. Moreover, he said research showed that the average revenue to record labels from an active CD buyer was $4.82 per month, less than they would receive from a subscription service sold to consumers at $15 a month.

Then again, as with the first version of subscription services, consumers may not find these new portable services as attractive as the specialists think they will.

Sean Baenen, a managing director of the consumer research firm Odyssey, said surveys show that people are wary of subscription services for music because they are angry at the music industry for charging so much for CD's.

"I already think I am paying too much and getting too little, and I don't want to subscribe to something," Mr. Baenen said, referring to what might be a typical consumer response. "I want to buy the single I am looking for, then get out."

Others in the industry point out that surveys a decade ago said that cable subscribers preferred pay-per-view movies to subscription channels like HBO, but the channels turned out to be far more popular.

Moreover, Richard Wolpert, the chief strategy officer of RealNetworks, which offers the Rhapsody subscription service, says the idea that people buy music once and own it forever has not held true over the last few decades.

"I bought the Eagles 'Hotel California' on vinyl," he said. "Then I bought it on 8-Track, really, then on a CD, and now I've bought it as a download."

"What I really wanted," Mr. Wolpert added, "was to be able to listen to the album wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/27/te...usic.html?8dpc


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3 Myths About the Recording Industry Debunked
Alec Hanley Bemis

When emotion drove stock-market prices to absurd new highs during the ’90s tech boom, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan famously said the financial markets were going through a period of “irrational exuberance.” The flip side of this is periods of groundless pessimism. Right now, the music industry is at the tail end of one of those periods.

The media haven’t helped. Since 1999, there has been an unyielding stream of stories talking about the music industry’s ill health — “Burn, Baby, Burn” (Time, May 20, 2002); “Fight Back or Death Rattle?” (The Economist, March 31, 2004); “iTunes and Lawsuits: The Labels Still Don’t Get It” (Newsweek, May 3, 2004). These stories have given many people the impression that the industry is in a death spiral.

Yet the business has been restructuring itself in insanely positive ways. Here are a few myths about today’s record business:

MYTH NO. 1: The prevalence of file-trading services and free music on the Internet indicates that recorded music may no longer be an economically viable business.

FACT: Among the only long-term truths we know about downloadable music is that people have such an instinctual desire for it that file trading spread before there was an infrastructure to support it. The major labels have been trotting out p2p file sharing as the rationale for their difficulties for years now, but no one believes it. In April, two business-school professors — Harvard’s Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf from the University of North Carolina — even released a study showing there was no statistical relationship between file sharing and subsequent dips in sales.

Another thing we know is that music is one of a trio of forms that’s expanded quickly across the Web — the others being pornography and games. This raises a question: If free downloading damages the music industry’s ability to make money on music, why doesn’t all the free pornography on the Web have the adult industry up in arms? What’s the difference between rock & roll, pervy movies and Tetris?

The difference is public relations. In a pre-Web world, music was already the most visible (or audible) form of entertainment. When p2p file trading arose, music’s former associations with street parties and boomboxes lost ground to associations with obscure computer programs like BearShare, BitTorrent and Kazaa v2.6.3. Overnight, music went from being a cool, highly visible medium to a type of surreptitious computer file hoarded by tech geeks.

By contrast, pornography went mainstream. Where it was previously the reserve of video-store back rooms, scrambled TV channels and the high shelf at the local magazine shop, now you could check the history tab on a Web browser and learn that your boyfriend, your dad and even your priests enjoyed JPEGs of girl-on-girl action.

This might lead you to believe that porn was growing ubiquitous while music was receding from the public’s imagination, but the truth is more tricky than that. The adult entertainment industry’s effort to go mainstream has been well served by highlighting its Web-borne popularity. It’s lent porn stars like Jenna Jameson the respectability to pen a best-selling autobiography. It gave the porn industry the credibility it needed so that even The New York Times magazine parroted its $10-billion-to-$14-billion-a-year revenue estimates in a 2001 story (later disputed by Forbes). By contrast, the music industry has been well served by making a lot of noise about its struggles, which has allowed it to gain leverage with regulators and legislators, cry wolf during a period of receding sales and prime the pump to make even more money down the line.

MYTH NO. 2: Record sales are down. The situation is only growing worse.

FACT: The music-industry lobby would have you believe that sales are down and sinking — as would the general tenor of the media’s industry coverage. But this just isn’t true. In 2004, record sales plainly seem to be rising. Soundscan has registered 252 million records sold in 2004 to date. Compare this with 235 million sold in the same period of 2003, and that’s an increase of over 26 million units, or 6.35 percent.

The RIAA might argue that this is direct result of the 1,500 lawsuits they’ve brought against file traders since September 2003. There’s some basis for that. In January, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results of a survey that said 17 million fewer Americans admitted to downloading from file-sharing services than did so in a similar poll conducted in 2003. However, it seems unlikely that those former downloaders are responsible for the 26 million additional CD sales we’ve seen in 2004. Most likely the increase in record sales is due to 26 million people wanting new releases by Norah Jones, the Beastie Boys and Prince that weren’t available the year before.

MYTH NO. 3: Musicians no longer need the record industry. The Internet and other new technologies make this a new era of “do it yourself.”

FACT: There are more opportunities than ever for musicians to find a niche in the industry, but “doing it yourself” — through the Internet or any other means — is harder than ever.

Technically, some things have gotten easier for artists over the past decade. Digital recording makes it more possible than ever to produce high-quality recordings on the cheap. The Internet makes it easier than ever to publicize music of any stripe. And judgment-blind yet heavily trafficked outlets like CDBaby.com enable literally anyone to distribute their work.

Unfortunately, all this really means is that now there’s an infrastructure to support everyone’s delusions of stardom. As any episode of American Idol will tell you, there are many people who want to be heard. If all 100,000 of your fellow artists can now make and market records, the main thing that’s been created is a lot more competition and noise. If you analyze things from a businessman’s perspective, it’s hard to see how artists are gaining much from the newfound ability to cut bad records, erect a Web site and put their crap on sale. Does anyone really care about Dan J. Schulte’s new release, Halloween Returns to Haddonfield: The Official Halloween 25th Anniversary Convention soundtrack, available now on CDBaby? Does anyone even know it exists?

Sure, it’s a lot easier nowadays for artists with a fan base to market their wares. Teen-pop has-beens Hanson, crooner Michael Bolton and earnest folkie Natalie Merchant each declined major-label deals in the past year to release their own records. But it’s safe to say these are not the kinds of artists punks were thinking of when they popularized the term “DIY.” It’s an outmoded notion in 2004; a better one is “Who should I associate myself with?”

Community is important to cut through the noise, and like it or not, those communities are often organized around the industry trying to make money off music — record labels, clubs, promoters, magazines et al. While artists know best how to make art, businesspeople know best how to build relationships and gain leverage. So unless you’re an artist with an already robust career or an admiration for the marketing savvy of P. Diddy and Malcolm McLaren, it’s more important than ever to figure out how to interact with the music biz.
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/44/features-bemis2.php


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E-mail Turns To P2P Technology
BBC

Peer-to-peer technology has been used to create an e-mail network said to be free of spam, viruses and snoopers.

The .safe e-mail service is the idea of a Leeds-based start-up, with users paying an annual fee to use it.

Jeftel says it keeps messages away from the net's usual e-mail infrastructure, protecting them from spammers, malicious hackers and prying eyes.

Initially the service is aimed at legal and financial firms keen to keep client messages confidential.

Community checks

The idea for the service emerged while Jeftel was doing work for high-profile law firm Mishcon de Reya, said Robert Barr, the company's head of development.

"We were doing some work on Voice Over IP and developed the whole idea of using the same transport technology for e-mail," he told BBC News Online.

Anyone paying the annual £25 fee must download a small program before they can send messages to other members of the Jeftel network. The downloaded program works alongside Microsoft's popular Outlook e-mail program.

He said Jeftel had worked hard to make its e-mail service easy to use and install as many other encryption and security systems for mail were too tricky for most people to get to grips with.

Users of the service get an e-mail address ending with .safe.

Mr Barr said the Jeftel service lets users create small communities that can exchange messages that will not be plagued by the problems suffered by e-mail sent via the net.

"Most people only communicate with 25-30 people on a regular basis," he said, answering the charge that it is only going to be useful once a lot of people have adopted it.

"If you want communication between you and these people you are not worried about the rest of the world."

Instead of messages travelling through numerous e-mail post offices as they cross the net, Jeftel messages go direct to their intended recipient and no copies are made.

Mr Barr said a future version will allow people to keep copies of messages to let legal and financial firms comply with regulatory guidelines.

He added that to stop abuse of the e-mail system both parties to a message were authenticated before the e-mail travels.

"Normal e-mail travels by the motorway," he said. "But we have a private railway that carries your e-mail and no-one else can get on it."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/3694974.stm


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I.B.M. Supercomputer Sets World Record for Speed
John Markoff

An I.B.M. machine has reclaimed the title of world's fastest supercomputer, overtaking a Japanese computer that had caused shock waves at United States government agencies when it set a computing speed record in 2002.

Supercomputing technologies were widely viewed as indicators of national industrial prowess in the 1980's and 1990's. They are used extensively in weapons design.

More recently, federal officials have become concerned that lagging investment in high-performance computing could leave the United States vulnerable to competition in industries ranging from biotechnology to materials science.

The International Business Machines computer is based on a computing technology, called BlueGene/L, that takes an approach radically different from that used by the Japanese supercomputer, called the Earth Simulator.

The Japanese machine, which was built to analyze climate change patterns, uses fewer processors than the I.B.M. machine, but they are specialized and faster.

The I.B.M. supercomputer has surpassed the Earth Simulator, built by the NEC Corporation, in running the Linpack benchmark, a test program that solves a dense system of mathematical equations. I.B.M. announced yesterday that the Blue Gene/L system had attained a sustained performance of 36.01 trillion calculations per second, or teraflops, eclipsing the top mark of 35.86 teraflops reached in 2002 by the Earth Simulator in Yokohama. The new speed was reached during internal testing at I.B.M.'s production center in Rochester, Minn.

"This is notable because of the fixation everyone has had on the Earth Simulator," said Dave Turek, I.B.M.'s vice president for the high-performance computing division.

The new system is notable because it packs its computing power much more densely than other large-scale computing systems. BlueGene/L is one-hundredth the physical size of the Earth Simulator and consumes one twenty-eighth the power per computation, the company said.

The BlueGene/L will have wide commercial applications, first in the petroleum and biotechnology industries, Mr. Turek said.

A large-capacity version of the BlueGene/L system is scheduled to be installed early next year at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. That machine will have about 130,000 processors, compared to the 16,000-processor prototype that set the speed record.

Computer scientists said that increases in speed like that provided by the BlueGene/L would probably have a significant impact on science.

"It's again an exciting time to be involved in high-performance computing," said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who tracks the 500 fastest computers in a biannual ranking. "For some computational scientists, it's like a Hubble telescope."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/29/te...9computer.html


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Academics Release P2P Source Code

Plans for secure, high-powered, peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing technology for academia has come one big step closer to fruition when today Penn State and Internet2(R) announced the release of open source code for their collaborative software project, LionShare.

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, LionShare merges electronic file-exchange capabilities with information gathering tools into one dynamic application.

Gary Augustson, Penn State's vice provost for information technology said, “This is a technology that promises to significantly improve the way institutions collaborate and support each other's academic endeavors, while simultaneously ensuring a secure authenticated computing environment for researchers who use its file-sharing capabilities."

This week's LionShare source code release will provide all interested programmers and developers with the opportunity to contribute valuable feedback and suggestions. At the same time, Lionshare partners including: Internet2, Simon Fraser University of Canada; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will continue to fine-tune the project software which is slated for official beta release for universities and institutions this upcoming January.

"We knew we had something special here, but there was no way we could have anticipated the enthusiasm that LionShare has generated,” commented Michael Halm, the project's lead architect and manager. "Organizations from around the world have contacted us with questions about the technology and requests for the open source code release date, and many groups have expressed interest in collaboration. We're pleased that the code is now available."

Several educational and research institutions have expressed interest in Lionshare’s unique capabilities for resource exchange - including its ability to transfer audio, video, scientific simulations, text, documents, research papers, Web resources and a variety of other learning activities.

“LionShare has enormous potential," remarked Loukas Kalisperis, professor of architecture at Penn State. "With this single application, collaborating faculty can build digital repositories such as 3-D architectural image collections, Web-based video archives and art collections. Faculty will also have a range of tools at their fingertips for managing and exchanging their own personal collections, in addition to having access to large-scale data repositories throughout the United States and Europe."
http://www.lightreading.com/document...g&doc_id=60137

[JackSpratts]

Satan's Little Helper Drinks Diet Coke
Michael Kanellos

Michael Robertson--founder of MP3.com, Linspire and SIPphone, which specializes in Internet telephony--has been embroiled in a lot of controversies.

The music format MP3, which MP3.com helped popularize, gave "the devil a name" for the record labels, musician Thomas Dolby Robertson once said. Others have said that MP3.com engaged in "shoddy" business practices. (Disclosure: My employer, CNET Networks, bought the name and other elements of MP3.com earlier this year from earlier acquirer Vivendi Universal.)

Desktop Linux maker Linspire has also met with controversy. The company earlier this year pulled its initial public offering, but only after revealing in Securities and Exchange Commission documents that it had culled $2 million in revenue and $4 million in losses in 2003. And a deal to put Linspire software on Dell desktop computers turned out to be far less revolutionary than the company's press release indicated.

Next, Robertson may try to popularize downloading movies and video--an idea that makes studio execs reach for their lawyers.

"I'm a big believer in the MPEG-4 format," Robertson said. "The only medium out there that has yet to be exploited is video."

The fireworks aside, Robertson does have a track record for ferreting out, and profiting from, emerging trends

With that kind of background, you'd expect Robertson to be a bit antagonistic, like Howard Dean with a Don King hairdo. Instead, he came across at an early morning meeting recently like a regional sales manager trying to keep his accounts happy. He even drinks Diet Coke in the morning--these days, it's the beverage of choice for many (such as Cisco CEO John Chambers) who spend several hours a day in meetings. He's not interested in trouble, he said. It just happens.

"When you're going to change an industry, you are going to make some enemies," is how Robertson summed up his career. Call it corporate combat casual.

The fireworks aside, Robertson does have a track record for ferreting out, and profiting from, emerging trends. Vivendi Universal bought MP3.com for $372 million. Sony meanwhile, has decided to adopt MP3, cementing the format's primacy. Linux and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) are climbing in popularity.

All of this lends credibility to Robertson's view of the business. In our meeting, he shared some of his thoughts.

The customer is always right, and usually surly

Consumer search patterns led to the creation of MP3.com. Back in 1996, Robertson was at Filez.com, a search engine company. One day, the term "MP3" began to appear in the list of top search terms, but no one at Filez.com knew what it meant. Robertson looked it up, downloaded a Dave Brubeck tune and decided to get into music.

"If people are searching for it, there must be an opportunity in it," he recalls thinking.

The Web address for MP3.com was owned at the time by an individual whose initials were M and P. "I bought it for 1,000 bucks," Robertson said. "We got 10,000 hits the first day."

Then the complaints began. The site was initially a news site about MP3s. It didn't offer songs for download. "Customers said, 'You suck because you're a music site and you don't have music,'" he recalled. Later, the company linked to band sites with downloads--usually obscure acts like Swedish jazz bands. Customers said the selection sucked. When they got enough artists, customers said the download times stunk. After downloads began running smoothly, artists and recording companies complained, Robertson said.

Don't be afraid of lawsuits

Once the company had created an avenue for people to download music, publishers and others filed suits against the business. MP3.com went 0 for 37 in the courts, by Robertson's estimation. Still, the company won financially in its sale to Vivendi.

Similarly, before it became Linspire, Lindows drew the wrath of Microsoft over the similarities between its product and Windows. After a few months of hearings and motions in a trademark dispute, Microsoft paid the company $20 million to surrender the name "Lindows."

Lawsuits, however, can be personally draining. Evidence that came up during one of MP3.com's lawsuits showed that recording companies had hired private detectives to follow Robertson around, he asserted.

Desktop Linux could take a while

Substituting Linux for Windows on desktops could shave about $100 of the cost of a PC. While the savings are attractive, it will take time to catch on because of training needs, habit and fears about compatibility.

"You will see a much steeper growth curve on VoIP than Linux," Robertson said. "With Linux, you need to get OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), retailers and customers on board."

Still, a movement toward desktop Linux has begun. About 350 local manufacturers and dealers now carry Linspire's software. Northgate, a tier-two manufacturer in Orange County, has begun to load the software on its PCs, as has Elektra, a large electronics retailer in Mexico.

Robertson expects Microsoft to aggressively campaign against it. "Microsoft is going to do everything in their power to stop this," he said. "Every day they delay desktop Linux, it is $30 million in profit."

Free may work

Robertson correctly asserts that the recording companies that have attacked music downloads aren't exactly saintly. "Artists were getting screwed before MP3.com," he said.

We've moved into an era where the public--or at least a good portion of it--seems to disregard, and even resent, paying for products based on intellectual property. VoIP is attractive simply because it drops the price of phone calls. The MP3 format became popular because it didn't come with digital rights management safeguards. Ditto for Linux.

Some say this will hurt inventors and artists. On the other hand, radio and broadcast TV shows are free, and those companies make money, so free downloads may just be the harbinger of a new, and ultimately profitable, era in entertainment.

"When you make things more accessible, people buy more," Robertson said. "If you put a taco stand in someone's house, chances are they will eat more tacos."
http://news.com.com/Satans+little+he...3-5388801.html


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And Now, a Few Words From the Urinal
Jonathan Miller

RICHARD DEUTSCH, an electrical engineer and former chiropractor, has come up with an invention that looks like a hockey puck with mesh wings, is sensitive to changes in light and has a tendency to go off with even the slightest bit of movement, which can prompt red flashing lights, crunchy guitar chords and a commercial announcement.

The most notable detail, however, is its intended placement: in the urinals of public restrooms.

Dr. Deutsch's marketing creation, the Wizmark, which he calls an "interactive urinal communicator," is one of several new technologies to have intruded into the men's room.

At the National Basketball Association finals in Detroit this year, liquid-activated urinal mats proclaimed "Beat L.A." One Minneapolis-based firm, AllOver Media, has installed 15-inch liquid-crystal-display screens above urinals in Minneapolis and Indianapolis, and plans to do so soon in Manhattan.

In a media-saturated world, advertisers have apparently seized one of the last frontiers. Once the advertising pitch begins, "let's face it, there's no place to go," Dr. Deutsch said in an interview at his house and workshop here. "You literally have a captive audience."

Dr. Deutsch has enlisted two major customers for his creation: Viacom, which plans to deploy the devices in bars in the next few weeks to promote Country Music Television, and Molson, the Canadian brewer, which is using them in several cities in Quebec.

Still, the product leaves potential advertisers with a serious conundrum. "I can't see someone wanting their brand name urinated on," said Tony Jacobson, a pioneer of restroom advertising and the president of AllOver Media, the company behind the L.C.D. screens above urinals. But some companies disagree with that notion.

"The truth of the matter is, you can't take yourself too seriously with this," said James A. Hitchcock, vice president for marketing at Country Music Television. "And we see this as unapologetic and good-humored. It has this wink-and-smile mentality to it."

But still, aren't these things annoying? "Asynchronously, if three or four go off, it's cacophonous," Dr. Deutsch acknowledged. And yet, this talking, flashing, squawking invention will be so insidious, he reasoned, that it cannot be ignored.

As the founder and director of Healthquest Technologies, Dr. Deutsch, 58, has invented products like a battery-powered hand-held massager and a rotating plant hanger (the latter provides "uniform sunlight exposure").

There were several obstacles to overcome before the Wizmark came to market. First, he had manufacturing problems in China, where standards, he said, are slack. Then the speakers were too loud, so he had to create a thicker plastic casing. And then there was the splash factor, an issue better left unexplained.

As for any danger of electrical shock from the device, which is powered by two AA batteries, he said: "At three volts? I don't think so."

Looking ahead, Dr. Deutsch is exploring ways to make his creation read chips on ID badges. "It'll be able to say, 'Good day, John, how are you doing?' "

Dr. Deutsch is also working on a version that will fit inside a toilet bowl. The details aren't all worked out, but he remains confident. "I can promise you, it's coming for women," he said. "Like it or not."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/te...ts/30talk.html


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Panel Considers Copyright Bill
Tom Zeller Jr.

Just over a year ago, the recording industry unleashed its first barrage of lawsuits against people who share music online - a move that appeared to curtail illegal file swapping briefly. But in the months since, activity on file-sharing networks has recovered and grown, prompting the music and movie industries to try legislating the file- sharing beast into submission.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is now considering a bill that stands at the center of the file-sharing debate - the Induce Act, or the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004. It joins a torrent of other bills introduced in Congress and in state legislatures to address piracy of copyrighted materials. Negotiations on the bill's language are expected to continue today. A vote could come as early as next week.

Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California signed a bill that would charge file swappers in the state with a misdemeanor if they fail to include a valid e-mail address with the files they trade. On Tuesday, the United States House of Representatives passed the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, which would provide stiff penalties for copyright violators, including up to three years in prison. A similar measure passed the Senate in June.

Unlike other bills, however, the Induce Act is aimed at the makers of peer-to-peer file-sharing software, rather than at those who use it. Supporters of the bill say it is needed to curb abuses of intellectual property rights. Opponents contend that its broad language will stifle innovation.

The fight has brought together some unusual alliances. The American Conservative Union, for example, has joined with advocacy groups, like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to challenge the Induce Act. The group has begun running ads, citing what it sees as a potential tsunami of lawsuits that would follow should it be signed into law. "Compromising property rights and encouraging predatory, costly litigation is not a conservative position," the ads say.

In a letter sent to the Senate this month, the National Taxpayers Union called the Induce Act "the legislative equivalent of trying to rid a house of termites by burning it to the ground." And the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group, produced its own study of peer-to-peer file sharing last month, concluding in part that this kind of legislation might well threaten "a huge range of legitimate activities."

Months of haggling have yielded alternate drafts, yet little in the way of middle ground. Still, critics and supporters appear to agree on at least one point: regardless of whether this particular version of the bill is passed, distributors of file-swapping software like Kazaa may not be able to escape legislation for long.

Whether this or any law can ultimately stymie illegal peer-to-peer networking, however, remains an open question. After all, at any given moment, roughly seven million people are exchanging digital content on peer-to-peer networks, according to industry trackers. Much of it is pornography, most of it is music, and nearly all of it is illegally shared.

At its heart, the Induce Act is the music and film industries' response to a court victory won by two peer-to-peer software companies, StreamCast Networks, the maker of Morpheus software, and Grokster. A federal appeals court in August upheld the notion that a technology capable of legal uses cannot be held liable simply because some - or even most - of its users deploy it to violate a copyright. That decision relied heavily on the principles of a 1984 Supreme Court decision popularly known as the Sony- Betamax case, which gave makers of electronic devices crucial legal protection against claims of copyright infringement.

The Induce Act, said Markham Erickson, the director of federal policy for NetCoalition, an Internet policy watchdog group, "would make Sony-Betamax irrelevant."

The language of the bill would hold liable anyone who "intentionally aids, abets, induces or procures" copyright infringement. The bill was introduced by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and is supported by a bipartisan coalition of 10 senators, including Democrats like Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barbara Boxer of California, as well as Republicans like Bill Frist of Tennessee and Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina.

Supporters contend that in the absence of tough legislation, commercial enterprises like Kazaa and Grokster will continue to reap profits from rampant illegal behavior on the peer-to-peer networks.

"Music, movies, books and software contribute well over half a trillion dollars to the U.S. economy each year, and support 4.7 million workers," Senator Frist said in remarks supporting the bill's introduction in June. "When our copyright laws are blatantly ignored or threatened, an enormous sector of our economy and creative culture is threatened."

Mitch Bainwol, Senator Frist's former chief of staff and now chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, which is leading the charge on the Induce Act and the thousands of lawsuits that have been filed against individual users, puts it more plainly.

"Napster was shut down because it had a centralized server," he said, referring to the father of peer-to-peer file sharing that was forced to shut down in 2001, and later reopened as a pay service. Soon after Napster's initial collapse came the decentralized peer-to-peer networks that are now at the center of the debate. "These decentralized systems exploit a loophole. They make money on advertising and their business model is based on theft."

While that may be true, opponents of the Induce Act say that the bill's language is so sweeping that many other technologies may be in danger of being caught in its grasp. They argue that innovations as common as the VCR - or Xerox machines or the iPod - would never have come about if their inventors had toiled under the threat that some users might misuse the technology.

"This is not just closing loopholes," said Susan Crawford, a professor of Internet law at the Cardozo School of Law in New York. "They're creating nooses."

That concern has generated a frenzy of activity among trade groups and Internet advocates on one side, and the recording industry and their supporters in Congress on the other. Several drafts of the bill were generated and discussed by the groups, including versions from the federal copyright office, which has supported the bill, and the Consumer Electronics Association, a trade group that sought to codify the principles of the Sony-Betamax decision and minimize the bill's repercussions by focusing the language squarely on peer-to-peer technologies.

While supporters of the bill have characterized the negotiations and language-tweaking over the last several months as free and open, opponents say the process has done little to address their concerns.

"We said, 'If you're going after the peer-to-peer networks, then you define it that way,' " said Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association. "So we gave them a piece of legislation and it was totally ignored."

"We're intensely paranoid about this," he added.

Other opponents point out that peer-to-peer technology is not something that can be successfully constrained by new laws. A company can be prevented from making commercial gains with a product that uses peer-to-peer networking, but how would a law stop the tinkerers and programmers who know how to create peer-to-peer software and willingly share their innovations on the Internet?

"You might as well ask yourself, 'Why couldn't the World Wide Web ever just go away?' " said Adam Toll, a co-founder of BigChampagne, a company that tracks peer- to-peer usage. "It would take a totalitarian concentration of resources to make such a thing happen, and you'd have to take away the thinking that resides in millions of brains around the world."

Eric Garland, the chief executive of BigChampagne, predicts this battle will be a blip in the evolution of the music and film industries. "This is really not so different from what happened with radio over 70 years ago," he said.

The current legislative and legal battles, Mr. Garland said, are merely the desperate attempts by the content industries to hold on to an old business model that affords them a remarkable amount of control over how and when their products are consumed. Once they accept the new paradigm, "these types of technologies are eventually going to make people in the creative chain a lot of money," Mr. Garland said.

Perhaps so, but Mr. Bainwol of the recording industry suggests that the illegal file sharers need to be dealt with first. "There's no way to have a vibrant peer-to-peer market place so long as you have a rampant illegal market place," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/te...gy/30peer.html


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It’s important to copy

Grants Will Preserve Paperless Bits of History
Katie Hafner

THE Library of Congress is giving $15 million to eight institutions to preserve a range of electronic material, including Web sites relating to the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, digital maps, sound recordings and decades' worth of social science data.

The grants, to be announced today, are part of a $100 million multiyear program, established by Congress and administered by the library, aimed at archiving resources that are increasingly born digital - that is, as a Web site or an electronic database.

"This is material that is of critical importance to our cultural heritage or public policy," said Laura Campbell, associate librarian for strategic initiatives at the Library of Congress.

Ms. Campbell said the material to be preserved includes not just Web sites but also digitally rendered cartographic data and census material. Public opinion polling data that currently exists only on punch cards will be digitally preserved.

The eight recipients will match the awards with cash, hardware, software or consulting services. The University of Michigan, for example, will work with partners to preserve social science data, including opinion surveys on politics, aging, health care, race relations, women's rights and employment.

Myron P. Gutmann, a history professor at the University of Michigan and director of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the university's Institute for Social Research, said much of this data has not been properly archived. It resides on the computers of individual researchers and research institutions, on Web sites, and even in storage boxes filled with punch cards.

"Without aggressive activities to locate and preserve it, it will disappear for good," Dr. Gutmann said. "Our goal is to assure that the material remains accessible, complete, uncorrupted and usable over time."

For the punch card data, that will mean converting it to an electronic form first.

"We'll be buying a punch card reader," said Amy Pienta, acquisitions director of the consortium.

Emory University in Atlanta, with several partners, will preserve digitized documents and other information relating to the Civil War, the civil rights movement and slavery.

North Carolina State University in Raleigh will collect and preserve digital cartographic material, such as tax assessment and zoning maps, from counties across the nation.

"These are things that we used to have in tangible form, on paper," Ms. Campbell said of the maps. "Now they are generated digitally and we don't have the analog equivalent."

Steve Morris, head of digital library initiatives at North Carolina State, likened the digital map project to the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, a collection dating to the mid- 19th century and depicting the commercial, industrial and residential sections of some 12,000 cities and towns in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

"We're looking at these as being a current analogue to those," Mr. Morris said. "Someone wanting to do research down the road would want to get to this data to see where things were."

The problem of preserving digital collections is complex. Merely archiving digital material isn't enough; the Library of Congress and its partners are wrestling with the problem of finding an effective means of preserving it.

Digital archives can be more vulnerable than their acid-free-paper counterparts, because computer hardware and software quickly become obsolete, and the durability of magnetic storage media like tapes and disks is limited.

Web-based documents that are filled with links pose yet another preservation problem because keeping a Web site vital means keeping its links accessible.

The University of California, for instance, will preserve Web sites connected to the 2003 gubernatorial election in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will lead an effort to preserve digitized sound recordings, many of which reside at the National Gallery of the Spoken Word, an online database of spoken word collections that span the 20th century. The collection includes some of Orson Welles's performances, early recordings of John Philip Sousa and Raymond Massey's reading of Lincoln's Gettysburg address.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/te...ts/30arch.html


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Desktop Linux A Vehicle For Pirating Windows
Michael Kanellos

PCs running Linux are growing in popularity in part because they can be loaded with a pirated copy of Windows, according to a study from analyst Gartner.

The consulting firm issued a report on Wednesday stating that about 40 percent of Linux PCs will be modified to run an illegal copy of Windows, a bait-and-switch maneuver that lowers the cost of obtaining a Windows PC.

In emerging markets, where desktop Linux enjoys wider popularity, the trend is even starker. Around 80 percent of the time, Linux will be removed for a pirated copy of Windows. Pirated copies sell for around $1 in the streets of Shanghai and other cities in Asia and Eastern Europe, but can also be bought in stores selling brand name PCs.

As a result, the number of desktop Linux PCs that ship will exceed the actual percentage of Linux machines that get installed in the real world. Desktop Linux will account for about 5 percent of desktops shipped in 2004, according to Gartner, with 10.5 percent of the desktops in Asia shipping with Linux this year. However, the installed base of Linux will come to only 1.3 percent.

In 2008, Linux will account for 7.5 percent of PCs shipped, but only 2.6 percent of the installed base, about the same that Apple's installed base will be then.

A comparable lack of drivers, training costs and migration headaches will also retard desktop Linux growth.

"Linux on the desktop may be generating a lot of publicity, but there are very few large-scale dedicated Linux deployments," the firm stated. "Governments in several European countries have announced plans to migrate to Linux, but most of these projects are in the evaluation phase."

Price, of course, is a huge motivator in piracy. All of the components inside PCs have dropped in price in the past several years, except Windows. Windows accounted for around 5 percent to 6 percent of the cost of building a "professional"-level PC in 1996. Now, the operating system accounts for 12 percent to 15 percent of the cost.

Still, the growing acceptance of Linux has prompted Microsoft to hatch plans for releasing an inexpensive version of Windows, called Windows XP Starter Edition in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia and India.

"It is likely that Microsoft would prefer the initial OS on a new PC to be a Windows variant rather than Linux, even if piracy were to continue," the report stated. "This would reduce the amount of interest that Linux is generating because of its increasing presence on new PCs."

Gartner is a tough audience these days. In August, Gartner wrote a report criticizing Windows XP Starter Edition, claiming that it lacked some features and would "likely increase software piracy."
http://news.com.com/Desktop+Linux+a+...3-5388863.html


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Download, Peel and Stick, and All the World's a Gallery
Samantha Storey

TWO years ago, a sticker depicting Che Guevara as a "Star Wars"-style storm trooper began cropping up around Los Angeles, pasted to the backs of mailboxes and street signs. Inspired partly by the popular duotone Che portrait marketed on T-shirts and posters, the image seemed an amalgam of two of the most iconic images of the last half-century.

The sticker's creators, Derek Fridman and Heather Alexander, who run the site www.urbanmedium.com, initially intended the character, called Chetrooper, as "a commentary about how trendy/pop the whole Che concept was," Mr. Fridman said by e-mail. "So many people were wearing his image on a T-shirt without really knowing who he was and what he did." They posted it on the Web for downloading and passed the stickers out at clubs.

Using military colors, they went on to create a multi-hued Chetrooper series styled after Andy Warhol's silk-screen "Marilyn" paintings. Soon they were receiving e-mail messages from people in Japan and Australia who had spotted Chetrooper on telephone poles in Kyoto or Melbourne. A phenomenon was born. "Once we started pasting and sticking the image," Mr. Fridman said, "it took on a life of its own."

Inspired by graffiti, posters and the communal culture of the Web, stickers are gaining wide attention as an artistic phenomenon, academics and practitioners say. Hand- drawn, stenciled or screen-printed, the images float on the Internet, available for downloading, printing and pasting in ways that the creators could only have imagined. And as they make their way around the globe, from one e-mail in-box to the next, one cultural context to another, their meaning tends to morph.

Now that broadband users can send large graphics files in an instant, stickers are a very fast-moving medium. A sticker can be created Monday morning in New York, e- mailed to a stranger in Paris and affixed to the back of a trash receptacle on the Champs-Élysées in the early afternoon.

"It works particularly well in walking cities," said Alice Twemlow, who organizes shows about visual culture as program director at the American Institute of Graphic Arts. "Walking brings intimate encounters with the stickers that could not be experienced while driving. There is also an immediacy with which people can respond."

Scott Rettberg, a scholar in new media, attributes the resurgence of stickers to low-cost inkjet printers and "the ubiquity of the global network." "Cheap printers give artists the ability to mass-produce work intended for public consumption," he said, "and stickers are easier to place than traditional graffiti."

Many sticker artists cite the mainstreaming of skateboard culture as a turning point in their movement. "Kids want to have cool high-quality stickers, especially more subversive ones from underground artists," said Zarathustra James, who runs the sticker site www.bomit.com. "They'll actually fistfight for free stickers at skate demos."

Initially skateboarders used them to decorate the bottoms of their skate decks, but eventually they made their way onto more visible urban signposts. "If there is a graffiti tag or sticker or stencil on that electrical box/pole/sign, it looks more aesthetically pleasing than the plain box," Mr. James said by e-mail. "And it makes you think."

Because the stickers are exposed to the elements as well as to sanitation crews, Web sites have sprung up with the goal of simply documenting a transient art form. In 2002, Marc and Sara Schiller of Manhattan founded www.woostercollective.com, a site dedicated to street art.

"There was a real great need for artists who are putting art on the street to connect with each other," Ms. Schiller said. "The site offers everyone the ability to cross continents, ages, generations."

Many sticker artists trace the origins of the current movement to Shepard Fairey, who created a sticker of Andre the Giant, the professional wrestling star, in the early 1990's and posted it at the Web site www.obeygiant.com. Soon he was shipping the stickers to people all over the world. What began as a prank to market something that had no meaning led many people to rethink the potential of such images.

Colby Woodland, who exhibits street art at www.20mg.com, describes stickering as a form of "visual narcotics." But whereas "the media's bombardment of images is intended to make you feel and act a certain way," he said, "stickering can confront the viewer in situations when they least expect it." Most of his stickers are subversive in that they seek to create an awareness of the dulling effect that the conventional mass media have on the senses.

Paul Burgess of Brighton, England, who photographs stickers on the street and posts them at www.streetstickers.co.uk, agreed that the art could be visually addictive. "You develop a kind of `sticker sense,' " he said, "and you spot more and more."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/ar...pagewanted=all


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Does the Patent System Need an Overhaul?
Sabra Chartrand

SINCE 1793, the federal government has issued patents to inventors, giving them exclusive ownership of an idea as well as the right to prevent others from using it. Now some experts argue that achieving those rights stifles innovation.

Two professors conclude in a new book that a couple of unrelated and seemingly innocuous administrative reforms of the patent system have caused a shift away from encouraging innovation in favor of exploiting patents largely for lawsuits.

Josh Lerner and Adam B. Jaffe have written a book with a title: "Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What To Do About It," to be published in November by Princeton University Press.

Mr. Lerner, a professor of investment banking at the Harvard Business School, and Mr. Jaffe, a professor of economics at Brandeis University, trace this breakdown to the early 1980's, when a single federal appeals court was established to hear patent lawsuits, replacing 12 regional courts of appeal.

Then in the early 1990's, Congress changed the patent office's financing, so the agency could pay for itself with user fees.

From his home outside Boston, Mr. Lerner last week described the patent system, 20 years after the reforms, as mired in "the land of unintended consequences."

"Again and again in the patent system, we see people set out to do reforms with one thing in mind, but that have quite an unintended effect," he said. "The easier it became to get patents, the more people wanted to apply for them, and that led to a situation where examiners grappled with more patents to review, which led to them being pressed to do quicker reviews and a degradation in quality of patents issued."

The patent agency has often struggled to keep up with the times. In recent years, the agency has confronted entirely new areas like biotechnology, software-related inventions, financial and business methods, Internet-based inventions and other information-technology innovations.

Some of the changes designed to deal with these occurred amid extensive public debate. Others got little attention because they seemed like innocuous administrative reforms - like the ones that made patents easier to get, Mr. Lerner said.

But many of those patents caused a secondary reaction, he added.

"The ability to litigate and expect to get substantial award from litigation increased," Mr. Lerner said. "So as a result we've got somewhat of a vicious cycle. Once you get one firm in an industry beginning a strategy of aggressive patent enforcement, it creates an almost inevitable response - an almost arms-race dynamic - where everyone else in the industry says, 'We better be doing the same thing.' "

He suggested that these changes for the worse occurred because "there's a relatively small group of people in the D.C. patent bar, and they have a very powerful influence on how patent policy gets decided. There is a powerful incentive for them to keep a patent system that is complicated, and one that involves protracted, costly litigation."

Also, Mr. Lerner said, businesses often fail to understand the importance of subtle changes in patent law.

"It is perhaps because of the complexity of patent issues, and because there is no long tradition of work by economists in this area, because a lot of corporations see it as second order relative to tax policy changes, for example, which directly affect their bottom line," he explained. "Patent policy has an indirect affect."

The book lays out a strategy. "Our idea is that three things will potentially make a big difference," Mr. Lerner said. "First of all, this idea which may well have made sense in 19th century of a patent examiner being able to sit and in few hours figure out what a relevant technology is, and then go out and make a decision as to whether a patent should be granted or not, that really doesn't make sense in an era like today.

"Second, to see the patent review process as 'one size fits all' is again a mistake. There has to be way to figure out how to devote more resources to those patent applications which are really the important ones, and less to the unimportant ones."

The two professors say one solution is to get more information into the hands of patent examiners.

"Our recommendation is that we create very real incentives to third parties to contribute information to the patent-examining process," Mr. Lerner said. "There should be one level of review before and after the patent is issued, but within the patent office."

The authors' third remedy is to reverse the trend toward jury trials for patent lawsuits.

"Over the last 30 to 40 years, there has been real replacing of judges by juries," Mr. Lerner said. "Patent disputes by and large tend to be highly technical disputes, and in many cases a lay person without much training in the area is hardly an expert."

The Federal Circuit Court has already divided patent cases into two areas: the interpretation of claims and questions of validity. Judges handle the former, while juries can settle the latter.

"Our argument is that there is no difference between the two, so no clear reason why both questions couldn't be decided by judges," Mr. Lerner said.

But even with these remedies, he said "dramatic change is unlikely until corporations start understanding how some features of the patent system today really affect them."

"And not just understanding from an assistant general counsel in charge of intellectual property, but until it really gets to be an issue at the C.E.O. level," Mr. Lerner added.

"Last year, the Federal Trade Commission came out with a report that raised many of these same issues, but as good as the F.T.C. report was, I can't imagine that a lot of C.E.O.'s are going to be plodding through all the footnotes."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/27/te...pagewanted=all


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The Moog Synthesizer Makes a Comeback
David Bernstein


Robert Moog with a modern version of his synthesizer. Chris Keane for The New York Times

Robert Moog, the eccentric electronic pioneer whose name is practically synonymous with the synthesizer - and hence with rock music's psychedelic era - is back in vogue.

In this decidedly digital age, more and more contemporary musicians and rockers are rediscovering the space-age, analog sounds of the Moog synthesizer.

Techno enthusiasts, who generally like to experiment with sounds and manufacture original noises, have reignited interest in the Moog (rhymes with rogue), which can synthesize any sound imaginable. A growing number of hip-hop musicians and producers have also fueled the phenomenon, trying to recapture the rich grooves of Stevie Wonder, Parliament-Funkadelic and other soul and funk masters. Some of today's critically lauded rock bands, like Wilco, are also part of this Moog revival.

"The instrument crosses all kinds of music," said Money Mark, a turntablist who tours with the Beastie Boys. "There's no color boundary or genre boundary with the Moog."

So it is timely that a new documentary, "Moog," opened Friday in New York (at the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village) and Seattle. A wider release for the documentary, which is distributed by Plexifilm, is scheduled for later this fall, and a soundtrack featuring new songs by Stereolab and They Might Be Giants, among other artists, was issued Sept. 14 by Hollywood Records.

Hans Fjellestad, 36, the film's director, said Mr. Moog helped start a musical revolution. "I'd put him right up there with Les Paul and Leo Fender, definitely," Mr. Fjellestad said, referring to the founding fathers of the electric guitar. "He embodies that sort of visionary, maverick spirit and that inventor mythology."

Mr. Fjellestad, whose first feature-length documentary, "Frontier Life" (2002), explored the cultural identity and electronic dance scene of Tijuana, Mexico, said his new documentary tracks more than the life and work of Mr. Moog.

"It's not really a biography," he said. "I was more interested in focusing on Bob's ideas about creativity, about the interactivity of man and machine, and about his spiritual beliefs, which may or may not be related to music specifically."

Mr. Moog started building electronic instruments at the age of 14. In 1954, Mr. Moog, then 19, and his father, George, formed their own company, R. A. Moog, and sold mail-order kits for theremins, the earliest kind of electronic instruments, out of their bungalow in Flushing, Queens.

"I didn't know what the hell I was doing," Mr. Moog recalled in an interview. "I was doing this thing to have a good time, then all of a sudden someone's saying to me, 'I'll take one of those and two of that.' That's how I got into business."

Mr. Moog introduced his synthesizer in 1964. Though it quickly caught on with experimental and avant-garde musicians and makers of science-fiction movies, it was not until the psychedelic rock movement in the late 1960's that mainstream musicians embraced it. Then, Mr. Moog was building instruments for some of the biggest musical acts of the day, including the Doors, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

Artists and experts said that he understood better than other electronics pioneers that musicians make emotional connections with their instruments, and that Mr. Moog sought out the players' feedback and responded to their needs.

"Arguably, before the Moog synthesizer, you'd have to go back to the invention of the saxophone by Adolphe Sax in the 1840's for an instrument of similar impact," said Trevor Pinch, co-author of "Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer."

"In the psychedelic era, the Moog was just what these musicians were looking for," Mr. Pinch said. "They were searching for new forms of sounds, weird effects. They all had big advances from record companies. They were all stoned. They all said, 'We've got to have one of these.' "

But it was a classical music recording that brought Mr. Moog's synthesizer to the masses. Wendy Carlos's 1968 album "Switched-On Bach," a collection of synthesized interpretations of Bach classics, was the synthesizer's first commercial success, selling more than 1 million copies and spawning a flood of copycat albums.

If Ms. Carlos helped introduce the sounds of circuitry to listeners' record players, Keith Emerson, the former keyboardist for the progressive rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer, showed musicians and music fans that the synthesizer was more than an odd studio instrument; it could be an exciting performance instrument.

Mr. Emerson's towering, 10-foot-tall, 550-pound "Monster Moog," as he called it, was an indispensable part of the group's concerts, even though it was often unreliable and difficult to play. He said he had to tune it repeatedly as he played and sometimes had to cover it with tinfoil because it picked up police radio traffic during performances.

By the early 1970's, interest in exploring electronic sound waned among mainstream musicians. What's more, a second generation of more user-friendly synthesizers offered by ARP Instruments and Electronic Music Studios came to dominate the market, replacing the classic Moog.

"Suddenly we went from a nine-month or a year backlog to having no backlog and no orders," Mr. Moog said. "I ran out of money at the beginning of 1971."

Mr. Moog sold a controlling interest in his struggling company and, more important, rights to the Moog Music name to a venture capitalist, who sold it a few years later to the now-defunct Norlin Music. In 1978, he moved to Asheville, N.C., and started a new company, Big Briar, building custom instruments and sound-effect boxes. After a lengthy legal battle, Mr. Moog reclaimed the rights to the Moog brand last year and began selling instruments bearing his name for the first time in more than two decades.

Mr. Moog, who turned 70 this year, is still inventing. The company, renamed Moog Music, offers a variety of new products: an anniversary-edition Minimoog Voyager; various types of analog sound-effect boxes, called Moogerfoogers, used with guitars, basses or keyboards; and the Piano Bar, a device that turns ordinary acoustic pianos into electronic keyboards. And he continues to build theremins, his "first love."

Sales are strong, Mr. Moog said, adding that revenues have grown to $3 million from $1 million in the last two years. Pieces of his new and vintage equipment are fetching large sums on eBay.

Mr. Moog has even gone digital, sort of. Last year, Moog Music and Arturia, a French company that specializes in digital sound software, released software that emulates the analog sounds of Mr. Moog's synthesizers on computers.

Meanwhile, Mr. Emerson, the musician, says his son Aaron, 34, now plays a vintage synthesizer. "The wheel has turned full circle," Mr. Emerson said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/29/ar...ic/29moog.html


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The Technologist Who Has Michael Powell's Ear
Declan McCullagh

The Federal Communications Commission is, for better or worse, at the heart of some of the most important technology disputes of our era.

How strictly the FCC decides to regulate emerging technology promises to have a lasting impact on areas as disparate as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), fiber to the home, instant messaging and even digital video recorders.

Robert Pepper is the FCC's chief of policy development, which requires him to be a kind of government futurist, advising Chairman Michael Powell on which regulations are wise and which would be harmful. He's also co-chairman of the FCC's Internet Policy Working Group. Previously, Pepper directed the Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies.

CNET News.com spoke with Pepper about topics, including VoIP, broadband over power lines, wiretapping Internet phone calls and what would happen if John Kerry is elected.

Q. Tell me what you do for at the FCC.
A. I'm chief of policy development for the commission, which is analogous to the chief economist. But what I do is focus on issues that are essentially the next set of issues. It's a broad policy perspective looking at the intersection of technology and policy (and) new technologies.

Does that make you a kind of chief futurist for the FCC?
I don't know if I'm the chief futurist, but I try to meld technology and policy and the financial markets, and look a little bit around the corner (at) what's next. I spend a pretty good amount of my time trying to understand what the financial community thinks we're up to, because we want to understand the financial community's perceptions. Right or wrong, their perceptions determine when they open a checkbook and invest.

Last month, the FCC ruled on wiretapping requirements for Internet telephone calls, indicating that VoIP services that did not touch the public switched telephone network would be immune from the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). Is that your interpretation, too?
That is my interpretation; I agree. We had received a petition from the Department of Justice and the FBI that we now put up for comment, and we have a proceeding looking at the CALEA issues more broadly. What we said was, "Until we complete that proceeding, the voice over IP services that do not touch the (public phone network)--other people refer to them as the peer-to-peer services; Free World Dialup and so on--are not subject to CALEA. That might change in some respect, but we have not made a determination.

Didn't the commissioners make statements indicating that their mind has been made up?
It is complicated, because all the commissioners and I think most people agree that in today's world, there is a legitimate role for law enforcement to catch the bad guys...What is complicated when you move into the voice over IP world is that the ability to achieve that goal is more difficult and complicated as a technical matter. And therefore, the question is how you implement the goal without overwhelming the system, or how you do it in a way that is not counterproductive--and that is hard, technically.

You didn't give the Justice Department and the FBI everything that they had proposed. They had wanted at least CALEA to cover peer-to-peer VoIP networks. What made the FCC stop where it did?
We didn't think that actually applied under the statutory definition.

Can you see this opinion changing? Or would it take an act of Congress to alter CALEA for it to extend to peer-to-peer networks?
I am very reluctant to speak for my five bosses, the commissioners. (But given the way the law is written), I think it would be difficult to conclude that peer-to-peer VoIP services are subject to CALEA. If they are, then you would also, I believe, be bringing in things like Xbox Live and Yahoo's instant messaging with voice. There are lots of peer-to-peer communications like services, IM and games that in fact today are not subject to CALEA. Personally, I don't think it makes sense to apply CALEA.

I don't want to prejudge what the commissioners will conclude, but I think that the burden is on those who want to make all of those peer-to-peer services or peer-to-peer activities come under CALEA. By the way, just because these things are not subject to CALEA, it doesn't mean that law enforcement is not capable of getting access under court order to information that they need.

Police have been able to conduct Internet wiretaps for at least a decade. So if the FBI wants to eavesdrop on someone, why don't they just serve a wiretap order on that person's Internet provider instead of lobbying for CALEA regulations?
Where they do it depends upon the particulars of the service and configuration and architecture. But the intent of CALEA, back when Congress passed it, was to essentially enlist the traditional carriers to make it technically easier to get the information that law enforcement needs when it has the court order to do so.

Back in those days, there was far less of the kind of electronic communications than we have today. Going to an ISP and getting an e-mail record is very different than being able to listen in on a conversation where (at) the end of the conversation, there is no record...In the early days, yes, it could be done, but it was difficult. Today, it's even more difficult.

Isn't that why the FBI developed Carnivore? Could it be upgraded to handle VoIP protocols in addition to ones it can already understand, like HTTP, FTP, SMTP and so on?
That could be one of the ways in which you can achieve the goal. But this is one of the issues that people have raised--clearly, the law enforcement community believes that it is not sufficient to be able to do what they need to do for very legitimate law enforcement purposes.

Let's talk about the broadcast flag for a moment, and the FCC's recent ruling saying TiVo could offer its forthcoming service. Do you foresee a world where the FCC becomes the arbiter of what technologies may or may not exist?
Only as it applies to the broadcast world.

We approved about a dozen different technologies, and that's part of our obligation under the statute. The important thing about the TiVo decision is that we (took a very pragmatic approach). We do not want, nor does the TiVo approach permit, indiscriminate distribution of copyrighted material. It defines the limitation in a nongeographic way, which we believe is both consumer-friendly and protective of fundamental intellectual-property rights.

I recall that in the FCC's broadcast flag ruling last fall, the commission didn't answer whether software-defined radio should be covered. Should it?
If you fundamentally believe in copyright protection, and I do, then whether the device is bent iron and wires or hardware combined with software really doesn't make any difference. So, in the future, as more devices incorporate software, you are going to see that as part of the consideration. TiVo and a lot of these other devices that we approved already incorporate a lot of software as part of the device.

Might the FCC ever be in the position of saying a software program that is mirrored on thousands of sites around the world is no longer legal to distribute in the United States because it might violate our broadcast flag rules?
I haven't thought about that, but I think it's hypothetical. I don't see us getting into that. But at the moment, that's not the case.

Let's talk about VoIP again for a moment. There's a lot of action in Congress--what do you think is going to happen?
I leave that to congressional watchers. I think that the important point is that voice over Internet Protocol is a fundamental change in the architecture, the service and the costs underlying traditional telephony. As a result, you have to question whether or not the traditional regulation and regulatory structure applies. So voice over IP really puts a nail in the notion that we have a distance-sensitive network. What does that mean for things like federal jurisdiction or state jurisdiction, interstate versus intrastate? What does that mean (for) the whole superstructure of taxes, fees, subsidies that are built around the old legacy network?

Do the same universal service assumptions make sense today for VoIP?
In a world where your local calling area is the United States, I don't think so. I think that we have to find new mechanisms to support the goal. The goal does not change. We want affordable phone service for everybody.

What might these new mechanisms be?
There are several that already have been proposed here at the FCC...Of the two proposals that are on the table, No. 1 is to base a contribution or a fee based on your connection. So, if you have a dial-up connection, you will pay one fee. If you have a higher-capacity connection such as a T1 or DS3 or whatever, you pay a higher fee. It's not based upon whether it's local or long-distance. It's based upon the size of the pipe.

A second proposal is based upon phone numbers. If you have a phone number, you pay a fee, and the concept there is technology-neutral. So if you are a traditional phone company or you get service from a traditional phone company, you have a phone number, you pay. If you have a voice over IP service from your cable company, you pay. If you have a wireless service, but you have a phone number, you pay.

Is broadband over power lines going to hit regulatory walls from state and local officials?
I don't know, but I have seen a number of the broadband over power line experiments, and the technology appears to work. There are obviously people who are concerned about interference. What people have to understand is that there is already radio interference that comes from existing power lines. The broadband over power line technologies that I have seen actually limit the unwanted emissions from the power line. If there is interference of particular channels, they can be filtered out. Our Office of Engineering and Technology is working to make sure that broadband over power line does not create unacceptable radio interference issues.

I've talked to some state regulators who are very bullish on this, because they see it as a way to reduce the cost of operation, begin to cap cost increases and begin to manage the need for new electric generation plans to meet spikes in demand. When we were in California in July, we took a look at the trial that AT&T and PG&E are running. Some of the PG&E people were talking about possibly doing real-time pricing down to neighborhoods if they have broadband over power line...If your dishwasher had an IP address and you could set it so that when the price of electricity drops--if they have a sale--it drops by 60 percent or 80 percent. That's when you run your dishwasher. Maybe that happens at 3:30 in the morning.

Is there anything that the FCC needs to do to help local wireless neighborhood or regional wireless Internet service providers along?
Wireless ISPs--WISPs--are some of the most exciting companies and developments that I've seen in a long time. You have a lot of little companies--we estimate somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500. They are providing broadband service in urban and also rural areas without subsidy. They are being deployed very rapidly at a low cost. They break even with relatively low penetration rates. They can operate on mountaintops. They can operate in inner cities and neighborhoods. This is very exciting.

What, if anything, can we do to help? We have had several workshops, forums, roundtables. We have a wireless broadband task force that's looking precisely at that question. They are working on a report that I expect is going to be released sometime this fall. A couple of things, however, we already know. First, we do need more spectrum available-- both licensed and unlicensed--for these operators. Second, we already have a proceeding asking the question of whether there is something that we can do, in terms of our power limitations and interference rules in rural areas, that will enable these operators to go longer distances in order to reach even lower-density areas.

Should cable companies offering voice communications be subject to the same rules as traditional telephone companies?
In some ways, they are today. What Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable and CableVision are doing is certifying that when they provide telephone service, they are doing so as competitive local carriers. The question is: If we have a world where you know everybody is migrating to an IP-based voice service and there is a lot more competition, what rules, if any, should apply?

The wireless industry provides a very nice model for a light-touch regulatory regime. They are still subject to certain things: CALEA, disabilities access, Universal Service contribution and 911--the social policies. But they are not subject to the traditional economic regulation, and they are not subject to state certification, and that has worked really well.

Let's say that John Kerry is elected, and the FCC shifts to a Democratic majority with a Democratic chairman. How might that affect the commission's position on technology-related topics?
Well, that's just speculation that I don't really want to (explore). What I will say is that I have been serving essentially as policy adviser to the chairman since the end of 1989, for five chairmen in three administrations. All of the chairmen that I have worked for understand that technology is fundamentally changing the legacy world and that the old rules are no longer sustainable.

Out of the modern chairmen, Michael Powell is the most technologically sophisticated. He absolutely understands the power of technology. He is invested in technology at the FCC--we hired new engineers, we revitalized the technology side of the FCC.

If new technologies might make some of the FCC's regulatory responsibilities less vital, are there good arguments for either radically visiting the idea of the FCC or even abolishing it eventually? You're a smart guy who will always be able to find a job.

Civil servants should not be worried about jobs. We should be worried about what the right thing to do is. In an ideal world, we are going to have a very competitive market and communication services that are going to be over wires, wireless and all kinds of new technologies. If we can reach that point, then I think the need for a traditional regulatory agency is very different than what we have had in the past. So we have to ask not what the role of the FCC is, but rather what an appropriate role for government is, right?

Right.
I think that there will still need to be technical capability or spectrum management, in terms of understanding and identifying the technologies and the bands, and making sure that the rules are compatible with the new technologies. But we shouldn't be in the old command-and-control (style of) spectrum management.
http://news.com.com/The+technologist...3-5388746.html


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Public 'Left Out' As Governments Plot Internet Regulation
Graeme Wearden

Individual Internet users are being frozen out of a key debate on the future governance of the Internet, Web visionary Esther Dyson warned on Friday.

Dyson -- a founder chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- told a debate in London that the United Nations is taking the wrong approach to Internet regulation.

"I feel the process is going off the rails," Dyson told the audience at the debate organised by the Oxford Internet Institute and the Internet Society UK.

The UN recently announced that its members had agreed that the Internet was a global 'facility' whose management should be 'multilateral, transparent and democratic'. To this end, the UN has set up the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) to spend 12 months consulting and reporting on the way ahead.

According to Dyson, WGIG is not the right way to address the problems facing the Internet.

"When you concentrate power, whether it's the low-rent, measly power ICANN had, or full-blown global governmental power, that focus of power attracts the wrong people," Dyson said.

"People who are self-appointed to represent other people are there, governments are there, the private sector is there, but the world at large isn't."

Marcus Kummer, who chaired the negotiating group that agreed the UN's text and is now leading the WGIG, defended the UN's work.

"There is room for cooperation, there is room for the exchange of views, and there is a role for the UN," he responded.

But Adam Peake, representing the Centre for Global Communications, a research institute based in Japan, agreed that there is a risk that some members of the global Internet community could be disenfranchised from the WGIG process.

"Not everyone can go to Magnus' meetings in Geneva," Peake pointed out.

"Everyone must be able to participate, if not in person than remotely or through submitted comments, and that should be in their local language," said Peake, pointing out that languages such as Japanese and German were not 'official' UN languages.

Dyson also argued that it was a mistake to seriously consider centralising the global regulation of the Internet.

"The question of how we stop spam is much different from the question of how we allocate domain names," she said. "We need to address these problems separately."

WGIG is planning to produce a report on Internet governance by next July. This process should involve consultation worldwide. Kummer suggested that this would be a mammoth job, when he said that WGIG was "definitely a travelling roadshow, if not a flying circus".
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/leg...9167851,00.htm


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Development Needs 'Override Intellectual Property Protection'
Frances Williams

Five hundred scientists, academics, legal experts and consumer advocates, including two Nobel laureates, called yesterday for a change of course at the World Intellectual Property Organisation to put development concerns ahead of stronger intellectual property rights.

The signatories of the so-called Geneva declaration on the future of Wipo include Sir John Sulston, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for medicine, and Burton Richter, the 1976 physics laureate. The declaration also has the support of development groups such as Oxfam and ActionAid.

"A 'one size fits all' approach that embraces the highest levels of intellectual property protection for everyone leads to unjust and burdensome outcomes for countries that are struggling to meet the most basic needs of their citizens," it says.

The declaration was launched ahead of a debate today at Wipo's annual assembly on a proposal by Brazil and Argentina for a Wipo "development agenda".

Their proposal includes the negotiation of a Wipo treaty to promote developing-country access to knowledge and technology, and work on how collaborative information- sharing mechanisms - exemplified by the worldwide web and the human genome project - can stimulate innovation.

Although the two members have support from developing countries in Latin America and Africa, the proposal is opposed by industrialised nations, which argue that Wipo is already responding to development needs.

Wipo was established in 1967 to promote intellectual property protection but in 1974, when it became a United Nations agency, the organisation's mission was expanded to include "appropriate action to promote creative intellectual activity" and the facilitation of technology transfer to poor countries.

However, supporters of a "development agenda" claim that, under pressure from industrialised nations, Wipo continues to give undue weight to strengthening intellectual property rights such as patents, trademarks and copyright, at the expense of the public interest and other means of fostering innovation and creativity.

Developing countries complain that excessive intellectual property protection denies them access to new technologies and research findings, while many scientists and researchers argue that stringent intellectual property rights threaten to become a drag on scientific and cultural advance. www.wipo.org
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/87d93e54-12...00e2511c8.html


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Oz

Family First Seeks Net Gag
Simon Hayes

CONSERVATIVE political newcomer Family First wants an annual levy of $7 to $10 on all internet users to fund a $45 million mandatory national internet filtering scheme aimed at blocking pornographic and offensive content at server level.

The party, which holds a state seat in South Australia, is considered a strong candidate for a Senate spot after concluding preference deals with all the major parties except the Greens.

The party locked in a deal with John Howard last week to direct preferences to the Coalition in most lower house seats.

Family First, closely linked with the Pentecostal Assemblies of God movement, backs a range of conservative policies, including joint custody for children of divorced parents and tax deductions for school fees.

The party wants the internet filtered at server level, warning that children exposed to online pornography could exhibit "disturbed, aggressive or sexualised behaviour".

The current system of optional filtering had a poor take-up rate, the party said.

"As a society, we have acknowledged the need to regulate other media and prevent porn peddlers from accessing children and adolescents," the Family First policy reads.

"Why is the internet industry allowed to avoid responsibilities on this?"

Family First admitted the cost of the filtering scheme could be prohibitive for small ISPs, but said the scheme should proceed regardless.

"This may have the result of putting cost pressures on some of the smaller ISPs, but there are arguably too many of these at the moment, and adequate competition could be maintained with 30 ISPs rather than the hundreds in existence now," it said.

"This cost is a small price to pay to protect children."

The policy cites a recent study by the Australia Institute that found many teenagers had been exposed to internet pornography, and questioned the effectiveness of the existing system of internet regulation.

It cited a Newspoll commissioned by the institute, in which 93 per cent of parents of teenagers would support automatic filtering as providing "a clear mandate to go ahead with (the) proposal to implement filtering at the ISP level".
http://aunettaxforfilters.notlong.com/


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Is Suing Your Customers a Good Idea?
Fred von Lohmann

Four thousand two hundred and eighty lawsuits and counting.

That's how many lawsuits have been brought by the major record labels against music fans for using peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software (like Kazaa or Morpheus) to swap music over the Internet. This month marks the one-year anniversary of the recording industry's unprecedented litigation campaign against its own customers. The campaign appears to have hit its stride, with the Recording Industry Association of America announcing roughly 500 new suits each month.

Suing large numbers of "regular folks" is relatively unprecedented in the annals of intellectual property law. But we could be watching the makings of a new trend. DirecTV, for example, has in the last three years sent more than 170,000 demand letters to individuals who are allegedly "stealing" satellite TV. The letters deliver an ultimatum: pay $3,500 or face a lawsuit. So far, DirecTV has filed more than 24,000 suits against people who have called their bluff.

So it looks like the recording industry may be lifting a page from DirecTV's playbook. But have the lawsuits worked for the recording industry?

As a matter of win-loss percentages, the lawsuit campaign has been wildly successful. Record industry lawyers have found that the defendants tend not to defend the suits at all, opting instead to settle for amounts ranging between $3,000 and $11,000. Many other defendants default. After all, hiring counsel to defend costs more than settling, even setting aside the hassles of litigation and chances of losing. Reliable sources tell me that the recording industry is breaking even on the litigation costs, as well, with settlements from each round of suits paying the costs of the next.

Of course, for the recording industry, the lawsuits are not simply about batting average and covering the lawyers' bills. The campaign, coordinated by the RIAA, was a last-resort maneuver by the industry to stem the tide of P2P file-sharing, which had reached mammoth proportions. In fact, some estimates put the number of American music swappers at 60 million -- that's 9 million more than voted for President Bush.

Unfortunately, the evidence thus far suggests that the RIAA litigation campaign has had little, if any, effect on P2P file-sharing. Companies like Big Champagne and BayTSP that track the online P2P population have found that the number of U.S. file-sharers continues to grow. The global file-sharing population, moreover, is skyrocketing. A survey of Internet users undertaken by the Pew Internet and American Life Project did show a marked decline in file-sharing in the months following the highly- publicized first rounds of RIAA lawsuits, but Pew's follow-up reports have documented a rebound in the months since.

In the face of evidence suggesting that the lawsuits have been ineffective at curbing P2P music- swapping, the RIAA responded that "lawsuits are an important part of the larger strategy to educate file- sharers about the law." Well, the "education by lawsuit" of American music fans is also off to a rocky start. Awareness of copyright law is certainly up. For example, an April 2004 survey revealed that 88 percent of children between 8 and 18 years of age understood that P2P music-downloading is illegal. Unfortunately, the survey also discovered that 56 percent of the children surveyed continue to download music anyway. So while many music fans are aware of the "stick" of lawsuits, they seem relatively unintimidated by it.

So what about the "carrot" of authorized music services like Apple's iTunes Music Store? In the words of the RIAA, the lawsuits are also intended to "encourage music fans to turn to these legitimate services." Well, the news there is not terribly encouraging, either. While the authorized music services are attracting a modest number of customers, it is also clear that they together account for a trivial percentage of the total number of digital music files being downloaded today. In fact, it is fair to say that all of the authorized music services together do not yet amount to a drop in the digital music- downloading bucket. Apple, the most successful of all the authorized music services, sold a total of 100 million downloads in its first 15 months of operation. This sounds impressive until it is held up against the 5 billion files that move across the Kazaa network every month.

So if the RIAA lawsuit campaign is not working, what can the music industry do about P2P?

More and more observers are coming to the same conclusion -- the music industry needs to give up its dreams of controlling distribution in favor of collecting fair compensation. In other words, we need a mechanism that collects a pot of money from file-sharers and divides it up among artists and copyright owners. Some (most notably Harvard Law School's Professor William Fisher) advocate a broad levy on Internet access and technologies, with proceeds payable to the copyright industries.

But there is a better way, one that keeps the government out of it. Known as "voluntary collective licensing," the concept is simple: the music industry forms one or more collecting society, which in turn offer file-sharing music fans the opportunity to "get legit" in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway -- share the music they love using whatever software they like on whatever computer platform they prefer -- without fear of lawsuits. The money collected gets divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music.

In exchange, file-sharing music fans who pay (or have their ISP or other intermediary pay on their behalf) will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software works best for them. The more people share, the more money goes to rights-holders. The more competition in file-sharing software, the more rapid the innovation and improvement. The more freedom to fans to share their favorite music, the deeper the global catalog of available music.

This has been successfully done before. Voluntarily creating collecting societies like ASCAP, BMI and SESAC was how songwriters brought broadcast radio in from the copyright cold in the first half of the 20th century. Some lawsuits would still be necessary, the same way that spot checks on the subway are necessary in cities that rely on an "honor system" for mass transit. But the lawsuits will no longer be aimed at singling out music fans for multi-thousand dollar punishments in order to "make an example" of them.

Perhaps most importantly, such a system would reinforce the rule of law -- by giving fans the chance to pay a small monthly fee for P2P file-sharing, it creates a way for them to "do the right thing" in a way that is painless enough that the majority should realistically be able to live up to the letter of the law.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1095434496352


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6th Circuit Clamps Down on 'Sampling'
Gary Young

A recent ruling that was meant to bring clarity to the copyright status of digital "sampling" already has some segments of the music industry warning of disaster.

In a case of first impression, a panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Sept. 7 that a musician who copies any part -- even as little as two seconds -- of an existing recording without permission of the person who owns the copyright to the recording is in violation of the law. Bridgeport Music Inc. v. Dimension Films, No. 02- 6521.

While earlier decisions have addressed the copyright implications of sampling, they dealt with copyrights to an underlying song (often held by a songwriter or music publisher), not copyrights to the embodiment of a song in a particular recording (often held by a performer or recording company), according to attorney Robert H. Kohn.

Kohn, the CEO of comedy recording company Laugh.com, is co-author with his father Al Kohn of the treatise "Kohn on Music Licensing," a work quoted at length by the 6th Circuit panel.

DEATH KNELL FOR HIP-HOP?

The panel said that its "bright-line rule" was dictated by federal statute and predicted that it would not "stifl[e] creativity in any significant way" and would reduce disputes over sampling.

Others see it differently.

"The decision will kill off the art form of hip-hop," asserted Lawrence E. Feldman of Jenkintown, Pa.'s Feldman & Associates, who represents hip-hop musician Jazzy Jeff and other recording artists.

"[T]he panel's 'solution' will cause difficulties far more substantial than any problem it is purportedly addressing," wrote the Recording Industry Association of America in a Sept. 21 amicus brief filed on its behalf by Paul M. Smith of the Washington office of Jenner & Block.

The brief, which asks the 6th Circuit to reconsider the issue en banc, warns of a torrent of lawsuits: "For more than a decade, the music industry has conformed its conduct to the existing rules-obtaining licenses for sampling when appropriate, and relying on de minimus and fair use principles if and where they apply. The panel's abrupt and dramatic change in the law ... creates retroactive liability for anyone who may have properly relied on the previously existing rules."

While the industry may have long assumed that minor or "de minimus" sampling was acceptable, it is debatable whether there were any "previously existing rules" to that effect. What is clear is that de minimus borrowing does not violate the copyright to an underlying song. But it has been an open question whether the same is true of sound recording copyrights, according to Kohn.

Kohn said that record companies have probably been reluctant to litigate the issue because they realize that their own artists make extensive use of sampling.

Kohn said there are good reasons for the 6th Circuit's interpretation, both in the text of the Copyright Act and in considerations of policy. The sound recording copyright is so weak that it would be a virtual nullity without control over de minimus sampling, he said. To illustrate its weakness, he noted that the holder of such a copyright can't prevent a copycat from making an identical-sounding recording as long as it is a re-creation and not a direct copy.

The RIAA, on the other hand, argued that another copyright expert supported its position. Its brief quoted David Nimmer, author of Nimmer on Copyright, as saying that the "practice of digitally sampling prior music to use in a new composition should not be subject to any special analysis."

Nimmer, of counsel at Los Angeles' Irell & Manella, declined to comment.

Richard S. Busch of Nashville, Tenn.'s King & Ballow dismissed the warnings of disaster, noting that "each of the major record companies have clearance departments" and that licensing has become common.

Busch represents plaintiff Westbound Records Inc., which claimed that defendant No Limit Films violated its sound recording copyright in the version of Get Off Your Ass and Jam recorded by George Clinton and the Funkadelics. A two-second guitar riff from that song was used on a No Limit Films soundtrack.

No Limit's attorney, Robert L. Sullivan of the Nashville office of Loeb & Loeb, filed a petition for rehearing on Sept. 20. He declined to comment.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1096473910640


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MP3 Creator Warns Tech Impasse Dooming Downloads

Rival technologies that baffle consumers will run more companies out of business in the nascent music download market than will head-to-head competition, one of the lead creators of MP3 playback technology warned Wednesday.

"It has slowed the download business for sure, and it's doing the same for the gadget makers," said Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of electronic media technologies at the Fraunhofer Institute in Ilemenau, Germany.

Consumers nowadays can store thousands of songs in a pocket-size device, play music and videos on their mobile phones, and buy albums at the click of a button.

But to their chagrin, a bewildering number of competing playback compression technologies and antipiracy software options determine which songs play on which devices.

Apple Computer, RealNetworks and Sony each have developed proprietary playback and DRM (digital rights management) antipiracy technologies. Songs bought on Apple's iTunes music store can play only on Apple iPods. Ditto for Sony.

The alphabet soup of technologies is meant to prevent fans from rampantly duplicating and transferring songs to others.

Brandenburg said he twice warned manufacturers and music labels that they risk alienating fans and driving them to unsanctioned file-sharing networks, where the songs are free and encoded in the unprotected MP3 format.

"They didn't listen. Maybe they thought it made commercial sense not to have a standard. It's very strange," he said.

Brandenburg was granted a lucrative patent in 1986 for developing the MP3. He and the Fraunhofer Institute collect royalties on the sale of MP3 players including the iPod.

"Blank MP3s is the only standard. It is supported by all," he said. "This has been good news for Fraunhofer. And, I consider myself a wealthy man as well."
http://news.com.com/MP3+creator+warn...3-5388724.html


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Senate Panel Delays Induce Act Vote Again
Roy Mark

For the third time in three weeks, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee decided to take no action on the controversial Induce Act aimed at illegal file swapping on peer-to-peer (define) networks.

Written by Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and the committee's ranking Democrat, Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004 (S. 2560) would permit individuals or corporations to be held liable for infringing acts that "they intend to induce."

Critics of the legislation contend the Induce Act goes far beyond the intended P2P network targets to include consumer electronics manufacturers and Internet service providers (ISPs). Opponents claim the bill would allow content owners to sue makers of digital media players on the grounds that the players encourage copyright infringement. ISPs could possibly face litigation under the provisions of the bill for allowing P2P networks to operate on their systems.

The legislation has gone through four rewrites since Hatch introduced the bill in July and promised "to get something done" about the widespread copyright infringement on P2P networks. The bill was scheduled for a markup in Thursday's Judiciary Committee meeting.

"While I do not contemplate action on this bill at today's markup, negotiations will continue this afternoon to perfect language that will bring an end to the rampant abuse of copyrighted material, for example, by some file sharing programs," Hatch said. "At the same time, we must protect the rights of legitimate technology firms to develop faster and better products."

Hatch said he hoped to bring the bill up again at next week's judiciary markup, which will likely be the committee's last meeting before Congress adjourns for the national elections on Oct. 8.

"If I have to, I will lock up all of the key parties in a room until they come out with an acceptable bill that stops the bad actors and preserves technological innovation," Hatch said.

As currently drafted, the bill states, "Whoever intentionally induces [copyright violation], by manufacturing, offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking in any product or service, any violation ... shall be liable as an infringer."

The legislation says the inducement must be "intentional" and defines that as "conscious and deliberate affirmative acts which a reasonable person would expect to result in widespread violations."

The Competitive Enterprise Institute recently argued in an article that, "While the bill requires an actual copyright violation for an 'inducer' to be held liable, one cannot prove a copyright violation without going to court. That opens wide the door to legal actions designed to chill technological and economic activities a court might construe as inducing a copyright violation."

Yahoo (Quote, Chart), Google (Quote, Chart), SBC (Quote, Chart) and Verizon (Quote, Chart), as well as a number of other organizations including the Consumer Electronics Association, TechNet and the U.S. Internet Industry Association, have also aligned themselves against the latest working draft of the bill.
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3415551


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Local news

Bands Will Play To Save Online File-Sharing
Kym Reinstadler

Music that rocks can shrivel and die if there is no way to share it.

That's why a Kris Sosa, a sophomore at West Ottawa High School, is organizing a concert to raise money for the nonprofit organization Downhill Battle that's fighting to keep peer-to-peer online file sharing legal.

Fifteen Michigan and Ohio bands are lined up to perform Oct. 9 in the "Fight the RIAA Benefit Concert" at a banquet center between Holland and Grand Haven.

The RIAA is the Record Industry Association of America.

Sosa, a guitarist with the recently disbanded pop-punk group Sweet Something Else, says that as a musician, he understands both sides of the file-sharing controversy.

"Producing our one CD was a ton of work," Sosa said. "I'd be mad if someone stole it and sold it to make money for themselves.

"But there's another side to file-sharing," he said. "It's about the only way that an independent band can get national exposure. This promotion is essential to groups that aren't signed by a major record label."

Sweet Something Else posted cuts from their CD on a Web site where up- and-coming bands can share files.

Sosa said the band developed the beginnings of a worldwide following among surfers of that site, selling their CD, stickers and T-shirts to fans on both U.S. coasts and in Europe.

Without peer-to-peer file sharing, Sweet Something Else would have remained unknown outside of West Michigan, Sosa said.

He supports Downhill Battle's position that the RIAA has created an environment that stifles diversity of musical expression by allowing major labels to pay radio stations to play their songs.

The practice is illegal, but the organization contends the practice continues through third-party independent promoters.

Pay-for-play radio makes it next to impossible for independent labels to get mainstream air time.

The result, Sosa says, is that some of the most creative music being recorded is being marginalized by a monopoly on distribution.

"File-sharing helps level the playing field between bands that have recording contracts and those who don't," Sosa said.

"Success is all about being heard."

He knows of no one else who has organized a benefit concert to support the work of Downhill Battle, but thinks a lot of young people who like music that doesn't crack Billboard's Top 40 appreciate the organization's efforts.

Downhill Battle advises how to share files safely, advocates politically to keep the RIAA from stomping out file-sharing, and helps people who have been sued by major record labels for file-sharing to pay their fines.

This is the second benefit concert Sosa has helped organize.

Last February, Sosa pulled several local bands together for a concert to benefit the family of Sweet Something Else drummer Zach Harthun. His mother, Linda, was receiving out-of-state treatments for stomach cancer and her illness forced a hardship on the family, because Linda was the primary caregiver for a severely disabled daughter, Keri.

The concert raised about $2,000 to help the Harthuns hire help. Teens also brought sizable donations of food.

Linda Harthun died Aug. 31 at age 44.
http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/in...5501286560.xml


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Burn this disc

Edmonton Station Spinning Bootleg Idol Song
Jacob Hoggard

Canadian Idol Kalan Porter's first single hits stores next week, and is already being played on radio stations across the country. But an Edmonton radio station is playing another version of the song -- not Porter's.

The song, Awake in a Dream, was written in advance for the winner of this year's Canadian Idol competition. Porter, of Medicine Hat, Alta., won the contest a couple of weeks ago.

In order to ensure the song could be released as soon as possible, BMG Canada had the top three finalists record the song.

So, in addition to Porter's version, there were recordings of Awake in a Dream put to disc by Theresa Sokyrka of Saskatoon and Jacob Hoggard of Abbotsford, B.C.

The version done by Hoggard, who was wildly popular on the CTV show over the summer, somehow made it onto the Internet. An Edmonton radio station downloaded the song and has been playing it for listeners.

The station's deejay, known as B.J., defends airing of the bootleg.

"People who are Kalan fans are absolutely vehement that we shouldn't be playing Jacob's version of the song because Kalan is the Idol, it's his song don't play the Jacob version," B.J. told CFCN's Kirk Heuser. "And of course there are thousands of Jacob fans who are saying, thank you very much."

Because Hoggard's version was never supposed to be made public, BMG Canada is warning anyone who comes across it to destroy their copy. Canadian law forbids the distribution or broadcast of the song in any manner.

Hoggard issued a statement asking his fans to respect his wishes and stop distributing the song.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNew...96222927319_60


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Green Day Offers New Option To File-Sharing Fans

Five pre-printed CD-Rs give fans chance to burn more attractive CDs

The band Green Day has come up with a novel idea for making a bit more money off of its back catalog of music.

The band, in association with music label Warner Brothers, is selling pre-printed CD-Rs with the artwork of its last 4 major-label releases.

The $7.99 package includes five CD-Rs featuring artwork from Green Day albums "Dookie," "Nimrod," "Warning" and a new album, "American Idiot," as well one with a rare photo of the band. A coordinated color slimline case is included with each CD-R. The band's Web site says that fans should "burn responsibly. Download music legally and burn your own Green Day compilations." But fans who already have the music in digital form (legally or not) will appreciate the opportunity to own their own CDs, without being stuck with a handmade look. The Green Day CD-Rs are available at the band's website, GreenDayMusic.com.
http://www.channel3000.com/money/3766329/detail.html


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Now playing

Can't Wait Too Long

The Americana myth of Brian Wilson's Smile
Brian Doherty

Today, a pop album is released that was 38 years in the making. Some devotees—I'm one of them—will tell you that its quality and heft make it worth every minute of waiting.

The album is called Smile. In 1966-67 it was in the works as the Beach Boys' follow-up to their now- acknowledged classic Pet Sounds, and a further step into the abstract from their surf- and cars- and girls-rooted early successes. Beach Boys auteur Brian Wilson, who composed the album and worked with Van Dyke Parks on the lyrics, eventually decided to abandon the ambitious project, even though it was already widely praised in the burgeoning pop press at the time.

Some of the songs meant for Smile appeared on what became Pet Sounds' follow-up, the low-key and charmingly addled, but still beautiful and joyous, Smiley Smile. Other tracks appeared on later Beach Boys records or box sets, but much of Smile's wreckage was searchable only through hours of bootlegged session tapes that fed a stream of fanatical underground devotees, who in turn fed Smile's legend and awaited its return to claim its glory (usurped by the British Beatles' Sgt. Peppers) like clandestine squadrons of sixties-pop Jacobites.

Smile as a concept has been one of the most argued about works in popular music history, with entire books and reams of fanzine articles and Internet postings speculating endlessly on the mysterious song titles in the vault tapes, on the "link tracks," on what really constituted "the elements suite" (a part of the original Smile myth completely elided in this finished version), on what overarching concept ties together songs as disparate as the endlessly charming goof "Vegetables" and the almost disturbingly lilting "Cabinessence," and on what was the real reason Brian abandoned it. Was it that he really hated the music (as he sometimes asserted over the years), that he feared he'd never be able to top it, that the philistine objections of his reputedly art-hating, cash-hungry colleagues sapped his will, or that the decision was just made out of neurotic fear and then doggedly stuck to for decades. (That a Beach Boys band craving formulaic success released Smiley Smile, an even more uncommercial record than Smile would have been, to me has always put the lie to the notion that their perfidy killed the original work.)

Every once in a while for decades rumors would spread that either the Beach Boys, or the suits at Capitol who bankrolled Brian's months-long obsession with this project (and even printed up hundreds of thousands of record sleeves for the album he never delivered), would finally pick up all these glistening shards of melody and construct the album that would blow the world away and show, as patriotic lyricist Van Dyke Parks wanted, that even in the wake of a British invasion, American music and American voices and the spiritual history of America still mattered.

Now the myth is over and Smile exists, as a Brian Wilson solo project, not a Beach Boys album. And while the saga of Smile has its own fascinations even beyond the music—I've probably spent as much time over the years reading and talking about it as I have listening to its existing fragments, as have many fans—you'll forget the lore upon hearing the songs as presented here.

There are quibbles that any obsessive will have. For example, it wasn't the greatest idea to re-record "Good Vibrations" with its original, inferior lyrics. (The only thing they seem to have going for them, to some people, is that they aren't by Mike Love—now an estranged villain in the Smile saga for questioning Parks' avant-garde lyrics, although he gamely sang them, and very well, in the original sessions.) And a "Cabinessence" without Carl Wilson on lead seems a leaden thing indeed after years of being awed by the original Beach Boys version.

But tracks like "Wonderful" seem even more a thick swirl of pure love in the new version. Newly completed tracks like "Barnyard" and "Song for Children" brought this old fan to tears, and I believe it could do so even to those for whom the phrase "George Fell into his French Horn" is meaningless, not argument-starting. As someone who believes that the arranged voices of Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, and Al are about the most beautiful sounds imaginable, I do miss the Beach Boys' voices on this. But Brian and his current gang have done an impeccable job of making this sound glorious even without them.

How this was all able to happen is an interesting saga in how the machineries of pop production, both legal and illegal, work to create magic despite being bogged down, as an endless string of laments launched by the Byrds "So You Wanna Be A Rock n' Roll Star" attest, by motives sleazy and venal. Brian, as the fabulously successful leader of the Beach Boys, got money and support from Capitol Records—even while he was suing them for back royalties—to record the basics of his extreme vision in Smile. Then waves of bootleggers, profiteering off work the artists didn't want us to hear, kept afloat the Smile legend, and helped create Brian Wilson superfan Darian Sahanaja of the quirky L.A. pop revivalists Wondermints, who have formed the nucleus of Brian's touring band since 1999.

Upon first witnessing the Wondermints play his music at a Beach Boys cover charity show in 1995—I was there that night as well, and was as amazed as Mr. Wilson—Wilson famously declared that, if he'd had them at his disposal in 1967, he could have taken Smile on the road. In 2003 he did, and he did. He added final touch-ups and some material, some remembered by Wilson and Parks and some freshly conceived. With the supervision of Sahanaja, who knew more about this project then either of its creators at this far remove (he spent more time listening to and loving the bootleg tapes over the years than they did), they took that road show into the studio. The Time Warner imprint Nonesuch—famous for rescuing Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, another piece of pop art unwisely dismissed by studio suits at the band's label, Reprise—released it today.

The saga of Smile turned out as mythic-American as its music, an interesting side note and another part of the often fascinating webs with which modern plentitude embraces art. We can have endless fun fun fun, as Beach Boys fans have, not just with base works of culture, but with the equally endless discussions they engender.

But listening to this heartwarmingly gorgeous slab of vocal melody pop, the final processing of the ambitions of a young Southern California man with lots of money, lots of success, lots of ambition, and lots of love for the sound of American voices (particularly the voices of his brothers, cousin, and school chum) raised in song—from old work songs to western ballads to turn of the century pop to doo-wop —makes all the myths of genius ignored, thwarted, throttled by considerations of gross commerce, seem a whole lot less interesting than adding this music to your day.

The music was too good to die. Its relentless bootlegging and mythologizing helped bring it to the attention of Sahanaja, the godfather to its rebirth; all the machineries of pop production and pop mythology clicked and churned in ways as mysterious as those of the American history that parts of this album limn so lovingly: the rolling trains and chanting voices that took us west on the iron horse to make Grand Coulee dams and sail to Hawaii.

Smile makes something lilting out of tragedy ("Bicycle rider/see see what you've done/To the Church of the American Indian") and heavy out of love ("Lost and found a kiss below there/Constellations ebb and flow there") and while it is almost certainly a conceptual mess, that's more than fine: The best thing about it is, you don't need to know any of the history, believe any of the myth, take sides in any of the debates (art vs. commerce, America vs. Brit, artist intentions vs. fan desires) that dog Smile's history, to groove to this brilliantly unique and joyous work.
http://www.reason.com/links/links092804.shtml


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Winning or Losing the Lottery
David Calderwood

Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL), has frankly discussed using marijuana and cocaine during his youth. He credited an attitude adjustment with his choice to take a new direction.

I often wonder why no reporter asks the obvious question. "Mr. Obama, you obviously lucked out and didn’t get caught while you were getting stoned, while other young people who were not so lucky got a criminal record for doing what you did. Do you support the notion of law as lottery, or is law absolute and universal?

"If you commit murder or robbery and don’t get caught, shouldn’t you be punished no matter how long it takes to identify you? If politicians have passed laws against using pot or coke, and those laws are moral, shouldn’t you be jailed now, today, because you weren’t punished back when you committed the crimes?

"If you should not be jailed now, then why should anyone ever be jailed simply for doing today (and getting caught) what you did back then? Would jail time and a criminal record have enhanced your life, helped you get into Harvard law school, and improved your chances of being elected to the Senate?"

Which kids could have gone on to great things (no, I don’t include public office in this category) but for the fact that last night the cop noticed the bag under the back seat and pulled out the handcuffs?

Most readers of LRC recognize the obvious: The law is now a complete lottery where some people have better odds than others, but all face the same general risk of disobeying the 12th Commandment by getting caught. [The 11th Commandment is, of course, Keep a Low Profile, and if observed religiously, usually allows the observation of the 12th, too.]

Was it smoking pot? Drinking beer prior to that officially blessed 21st birthday? Exploring the biological sciences with a willing sweet young thing who’s not quite at that "consenting" age? Offering legal advice, medical care, shop services, disposal services, landscaping services, mail service, hair braiding, coloring, cutting, or styling services, taxi services, commercial trucking services, or just about anything else without first acquiring an official license?

Was it attaching a particular cosmetic part like a flash hider to a certain kind of rifle? [Sorry, I forgot, that was an immoral act but now is a moral act…it’s all in the date. Or perhaps I’m confused, as it never seemed immoral to me, and was only illegal, evidently a MAJOR distinction.] Was it accidentally spilling the wrong material into a waterway or filling dirt into the wrong low-lying area?

Was it selling a legal weed to a minor? Forgetting to eradicate ditch weed on the back forty? Saying anything other than "I don’t recall" to any government employee? Did you slip a Glock into your pocket because you were going to the ATM after dark for some cash?

Ah, and now we have a whole new class of crime: Intellectual Property Theft. Download a song, go to jail. Both the U.S. House and Senate have passed bills promising three years in the slammer for the abominable act of using a Peer-to-Peer network to download copyrighted material. All that stands between your teenager and Butch in cellblock 13 is a reconciliation committee and W’s signature (which is a given since he wouldn’t know a veto if one fell on his foot and broke his big toe).

We know that if everyone who smoked pot or quaffed a beer before 21 actually did time in the hoosegow, we’d need a whole lot more prisons. Heck, there’d be more prisons than there are bank branches and there are more of them now than gas stations. [In fact, the guards would probably have to be ex-prisoners, since there simply aren’t that many folks who didn’t take a hit or a pre-21 shot during their irresponsible years.] This same principle will clearly apply to downloaders as well.

Evolving technology virtually begs Peer-to-Peer network users to innovate, so content owners like the big movie studios will probably have the same success as the drug warriors. But how many more young people will lose the lottery? At the rate we’re going, what with Martha Stewart going to jail for lying to the Feds about something that wasn’t itself criminal, the stigma of being an ex-con is in danger of fading out completely. How can you shun someone who, in a tiny twist of fate, could just as easily have been you?

Perhaps life will be less uncertain when lawmakers (and their gutless, herding-animal constituents…i.e. our neighbors) have the cojones to face that question. Someday, perhaps our neighbors will see that the people they threaten with a life-ruining criminal record is their own next generation, their kids, doing exactly what mom and dad did when they were young – playing fast and loose with the rules. Until then, it seems that as science conquers the arbitrary dangers of nature, humans will replace nature’s horrors like polio and periodic starvation with man-made alternatives. As we know, the institution best constituted to breathe life into these lunatic fantasies is government.

Thanks guys. Thanks a lot.

In the meantime, the best our community (the LRC community, that is) can do is to teach our kids the difference between nature’s law (morality) and statehouse law (the lottery). It’s wrong to murder, or rob, or cheat. It’s just hazardous to do any of the literally millions of other things that are technically now crimes. Just remember, son, to play the odds.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/calderwood5.html
















Until next week,

- js.














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"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

[multi]

that moog doco looks great, had a mini moog for 2 years in 1980's

exellent instruments

korg ms-20 were great too..