Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 16th, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"The recording industry may not agree, but the U.S. Supreme Court thinks personal privacy is far more important that music piracy." – Red Herring


"Consumers don't want or need the ultimate device. They don't want to pay for the ultimate device; they don't trust the ultimate device; and, they don't want to deal with the complexity of the ultimate device." – Sean Baenen


"They could be proposing here the greatest mass criminalization of conduct by otherwise law-abiding citizens since Prohibition. Congress should think long and hard before they treat noncommercial infringement by ordinary citizens...the same as prosecutions of organized crime." – Phil Corwin


"It never occurred to me to push the limits of the public domain." – Zina davis













British Music Industry Wins Round in P2P Fight
Ed Raymond

The British music industry has scored a legal victory with a High Court ruling that requires Internet service providers to provide names and addresses of British citizens who share copyrighted music over peer-to-peer computer networks.

Two music industry trade associations in the United Kingdom have won a court case that clears the way for them to force Internet service providers to turn over the names of people who use peer-to-peer music trading Web sites.

The British High Court ruled that ISPs must hand over names and addresses of British residents suspected of posting and downloading songs on such sites as Kazaa and eDonkey.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) association and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry -- the organizations that filed the suit -- say they are giving the providers 14 days to comply. Currently, 28 Brits are in their legal sights.

Just this past week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the Recording Industry Association of America , letting stand a lower court's ruling that the RIAA must follow the guidelines of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act in obtaining subpoenas to dig up names of suspected copyright violators.
http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml...story_id=27626


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Feds Target Alternative Media Web Site
John Borland

An alternative media network called the Independent Media Center said Friday that federal law enforcement authorities confiscated several of its Web servers, shutting down many of its independently run sites.

The group said in a statement on its Web site that federal authorities issued a court order requesting the computer equipment Thursday morning to United States-based Web hosting provider Rackspace. The hosting company subsequently handed over the Web servers, located in its London facility, to authorities, Independent Media Center (IMC) said.

Rackspace issued a terse comment on the issue, saying it responded to a subpoena in an investigation that did not originate in the United States.

"Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities," the company's statement read. "The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter."

A spokeswoman for IMC said the group had not been told why it was the subject of an investigation.

"We don't know why it happened," said Hep Sano, a member of the IMC organization in San Francisco. "We did not receive a copy of the subpoena. Right now, we're trying to organize legal help to figure out what the procedure is."

She added that the group thinks the issue might be related to recent requests by the FBI asking that the site remove photos posted by IMC's Nantes affiliate, purportedly depicting Swiss undercover police.

An FBI representative in Texas, where Rackspace is based, did not return calls for comment.

The IMC site said the loss of the Web servers affected local independent media sites serving Ambazonia, Uruguay, Andorra, Poland, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes, Lilles, Marseille (all France), Euskal Herria (Basque Country), Liege, East and West Vlaanderen, Antwerpen (all Belgium), Belgrade, Portugal, Prague, Galiza, Italy, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Germany.
http://news.com.com/Feds+target+alte...3-5404073.html


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U.S. Funds Chat-Room Surveillance Study
Michael Hill

Amid the torrent of jabber in Internet chat rooms - flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks - are terrorists plotting their next move?

The government certainly isn't discounting the possibility. It's taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism program.

A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor hopes to develop mathematical models that can uncover structure within the scattershot traffic of online public forums.

Chat rooms are the highly popular and freewheeling areas on the Internet where people with self-created nicknames discuss just about anything: teachers, Kafka, cute boys, politics, love, root canal. They are also places where malicious hackers have been known to trade software tools, stolen passwords and credit card numbers. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that 28 million Americans have visited Internet chat rooms.

Trying to monitor the sea of traffic on all the chat channels would be like assigning a police officer to listen in on every conversation on the sidewalk - virtually impossible.

Instead of rummaging through megabytes of messages, RPI professor Bulent Yener will use mathematical models in search of patterns in the chatter. Downloading data from selected chat rooms, Yener will track the times that messages were sent, creating a statistical profile of the traffic.

If, for instance, RatBoi and bowler1 consistently send messages within seconds of each other in a crowded chat room, you could infer that they were speaking to one another amid the "noise" of the chat room.

"For us, the challenge is to be able to determine, without reading the messages, who is talking to whom," Yener said.

In search of "hidden communities," Yener also wants to check messages for certain keywords that could reveal something about what's being discussed in groups.

The $157,673 grant comes from the National Science Foundation's Approaches to Combat Terrorism program. It was selected in coordination with the nation's intelligence agencies.

The NSF's Leland Jameson said the foundation judged the proposal strictly on its broader scientific merit, leaving it to the intelligence community to determine its national security value. Neither the CIA nor the FBI would comment on the grant, with a CIA spokeswoman citing the confidentiality of sources and methods.

Security officials know al-Qaida and other terrorist groups use the Internet for everything from propaganda to offering tips on kidnapping. But it's not clear if terrorists rely much on chat rooms for planning and coordination.

Michael Vatis, founding director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center and now a consultant, said he had heard of terrorists using chat rooms, which he said offer some security as long as code phrases are used. Other cybersecurity experts doubted chat rooms' usefulness to terrorists given the other current options, from Web mail to hiding messages on designated Web pages that can only be seen by those who know where to look.

"In a world in which you can embed your message in a pixel on a picture on a home page about tea cozies, I don't know whether if you're any better if you think chat would be any particular magnet," Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet scholar at Harvard Law School.

Since they are focusing on public chat rooms, authorities are not violating constitutional rights to privacy when they keep an eye on the traffic, experts said. Law enforcement agents have trolled chat rooms for years in search of pedophiles, sometimes adopting profiles making it look like they are young teens.

But the idea of the government reviewing massive amounts of public communications still raises some concerns.

Mark Rasch, a former head of the Justice Department's computer crimes unit, said such a system would bring the country one step closer to the Pentagon's much-maligned Terrorism Information Awareness program.

Research on that massive data-mining project was halted after an uproar over its impact on privacy.

"It's the ability to gather and analyze massive amounts of data that creates the privacy problem," Rasch said, "even though no individual bit of data is particularly private."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ws/9894237.htm


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Equal to war on terror

United States Justice Dept Wants Sweeping New Antipiracy Powers
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Justice Department recommended a sweeping transformation of the nation's intellectual-property laws, saying peer-to-peer piracy is a "widespread" problem that can be addressed only through more spending, more FBI agents and more power for prosecutors.

In an extensive report released Tuesday, senior department officials endorsed a pair of controversial copyright bills strongly favored by the entertainment industry that would criminalize "passive sharing" on file-swapping networks and permit lawsuits against companies that sell products that "induce" copyright infringement.

"The department is prepared to build the strongest, most aggressive legal assault against intellectual-property crime in our nation's history," Attorney General John Ashcroft, who created the task force in March, said at a press conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon.

In an example of the Justice Department's hunger for new copyright-related police powers, the report asks Congress to introduce legislation that would permit wiretaps to be used in investigating serious intellectual-property offenses and that would create a new crime of the "importation" of pirated products. It also suggests stationing FBI agents and prosecutors in Hong Kong and Budapest, Hungary, to aid local officials and "develop training programs on intellectual-property enforcement."

The Recording Industry Association of America applauded the report, saying that "for those who work in the community of record labels, songwriters and artists, the commitment of focus, energy and resources outlined in this report is music to our ears." The Motion Picture Association of America joined the applause, thanking the Justice Department for "defending our country's economy against pernicious IP pirates."

Phil Corwin, a lobbyist for Sharman Networks, distributor of the popular Kazaa file-sharing software, said the Justice Department seems "to be endorsing a war on copyright infringement modeled in large part on the war on drugs. That should invite very close scrutiny of the recommendations."

"They could be proposing here the greatest mass criminalization of conduct by otherwise law-abiding citizens since Prohibition," Corwin said. "Congress should think long and hard before they treat noncommercial infringement by ordinary citizens...the same as prosecutions of organized crime."

Tuesday's report was not focused exclusively on Internet piracy: It also included recommendations about responses to trademark infringements, trade secret violations and fake pharmaceuticals. But the Internet-related bills it endorses are at the heart of the ongoing political battle pitting Hollywood and the music industry against the computer industry, "fair use" advocates and librarians.

By backing the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act--which criminalizes common uses of file-swapping products--and the Induce Act, the report lends the authority and prestige of the nation's largest law enforcement agency to the pitched battles taking place in Congress this year. While the Induce Act enjoys support from the MPAA and RIAA, it has been savaged by technology firms including CNET Networks (publisher of News.com), BellSouth, EarthLink, Google, MCI, RadioShack, Panasonic, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Verizon Communications and Yahoo.

The report also opposes legislative efforts to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which broadly restricts hardware or software that can "circumvent" copy protection mechanisms. The 1998 law should stay intact, the Justice Department says, arguing that the law should prevent "deliberate and unauthorized circumvention."

Among the report's authors: Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel; Kevin Ryan, the U.S. Attorney for Northern California; and no fewer than five assistant attorneys general at the Justice Department.

In an unusual twist, one section of the report that was being considered in August seems to have vanished in the final draft.

Hewitt Pate, assistant attorney general for antitrust and a task force member, indicated at a conference in Aspen, Colo., that the report would oppose a bill to let the Justice Department sue pirates in civil court. But no discussion of the so-called Pirate Act--approved by the Senate in June--appears in the final report.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5406654.html


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Subpoenas Snubbed In File-Sharing Fight

Privacy trumps piracy as the Supreme Court throws out an appeal from the RIAA.

The recording industry may not agree, but the U.S. Supreme Court thinks personal privacy is far more important that music piracy.

On Tuesday, the high court refused to entertain an appeal of a unanimous 2003 decision by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals that held that copyright holders cannot force Internet providers to identify file sharers using a mere subpoena.

Industry watchers see this as yet another blow that the recording industry has taken in its fight against online file sharing - a fight it is slowly losing.

The lawsuits in question were between New York’s Verizon Internet Services and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), headquartered in Washington, D.C.

“This was nothing more than a massive fishing expedition by the RIAA, and would have affected thousands, maybe millions, of Internet users,” said Sarah Deutsch, Associate General Counsel at Verizon, which has 3 million Internet subscribers. “Instead of pursuing the due process route, the recording industry was trying to take a huge shortcut.”

Since the Supreme Court threw out RIAA’s appeal on Tuesday, the association will have to continue with a costly and time-consuming “John Doe” process of legal action. Under this process the RIAA has to individually file a lawsuit against each unidentified file sharer.

While the RIAA would not disclose the amount of money it spends on legal fees, Ms. Deutsch said it’s worth it for the sake of preserving personal privacy and safety.

If the RIAA had its way, according to Ms. Deutsch, the law would make it possible for anyone to walk into a courthouse and issue a subpoena against Internet providers, forcing them to provide names and other personal details of their subscribers on the basis of a simple allegation of file sharing.

But the RIAA seems undaunted by the setback.

“Today’s decision will not deter our ongoing anti-piracy efforts,” said Stanley Pierre-Louis, senior vice president of Legal Affairs at RIAA, in a statement. “The John Doe litigation process we have successfully utilized this year continues to be an effective legal tool.”

The RIAA had been pushing to extend a provision of 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which provided for the issue of subpoenas to identify alleged infringers, to file sharing. But with Tuesday’s decision, the RIAA’s struggle against file sharing grows murkier and more futile.

In September 2003, the RIAA sued 261 individuals, among them a 12-year-old girl, under the John Doe method. Since then, it has sued over 5,000 people.

Missing the mark

According to Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a public interest group in Washington, D.C., that deals with technology policy, there are two reasons why the subpoena method was a bad idea: the difficulty in ascertaining whether the files being traded are legitimate, and the inaccuracy in tracing file sharers through their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

“The RIAA has these software robots implanted in file-sharing software that track users by their IP addresses,” she said. “But these addresses change frequently.”

Ms. Sohn also said that tracing the correct IP address is no guarantee that the correct user will be identified.

“We had the case in Massachusetts where this grandmother who listens to Celtic music was issued a ‘cease and desist’ letter for trading hip-hop files,” she said. “It later turned out that it was her teenage grandson who was sharing the files.”

File sharing is an issue that obviously cannot be ignored. According to research firm Forrester, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, illegal downloads accounted for $700 million in losses for the recording industry in 2003, a third of the $2-billion total that the industry lost last year.

Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester, said that while file sharing has been damaging to the recording industry, the RIAA should attempt to join the file sharers, rather than try to beat them.

Mr. Bernoff cited the success of iTunes as an example of the potential that the phenomenon of legal music downloads has.

Apple recently announced it had sold 125 million paid music downloads since April 2003, which was when the iTunes store first opened. Forrester research reported that digital downloads will bring in $3.1 billion in revenues in 2008, nearly a quarter of the music industry’s revenues of $13.8 billion.

“The genie’s out of the bottle now,” he said. “And you obviously can’t put it back in. Maybe the RIAA should concentrate less on stamping out file sharing and more on how to profit from it.”
http://www.redherring.com/Article.as...ctor=Americas#


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High Court Bounces Latest RIAA Effort
Roy Mark

The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected the music industry's effort to revive a controversial practice that briefly forced ISPs (define) to reveal the identities of thousands of accused peer-to-peer (P2P) music pirates with no notice to the alleged infringers.

In denying a writ of certiorari to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the court upheld a December 2003 decision by an appeals court that reversed a lower court ruling ordering ISPs (ISPs) to comply with the subpoena provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Under the DMCA, a subpoena can be issued by a court clerk who only checks to make sure the subpoena form is properly filled out. This differs from a standard subpoena, which requires some underlying claim of a crime.

On the basis of the lower court ruling, the RIAA issued more than 3,000 subpoena requests to ISPs and filed almost 400 copyright infringement actions.

Verizon initially resisted complying with the DMCA subpoena requests filed by the RIAA. A district court ruled in favor of the RIAA, but Verizon ultimately prevailed. The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the DMCA did not authorize copyright holders to obtain a subpoena requiring the release of the name, address and telephone number of any Internet user based solely upon the filing of a one-page form that had not been reviewed by a judge.

"Today, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the personal privacy, First Amendment rights to free speech and free association, and the safety of every Internet user in this country," Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate counsel for Verizon, said in a statement.

Deutsch, who argued Verizon's case before the appeals court, added, "The Supreme Court's action is a victory for consumers, for the Internet and its continued growth, and it marks the end of a dangerous and illegal subpoena campaign that threatened the constitutional rights of all Americans."

The RIAA responded with an e-mail comment from Stanley Pierre-Louis, senior vice president of Legal Affairs.

"Today's decision will not deter our ongoing anti-piracy efforts. The 'John Doe' litigation process we have successfully utilized this year continues to be an effective legal tool."

Verizon originally argued that the DMCA subpoena only applied in cases where an ISP stored the copyrighted material on its servers. Because people using P2P networks store the material on their own hard drives, Verizon said it was exempt from the DMCA subpoena. Verizon subsequently questioned the actual constitutionality of the DMCA subpoena, privacy rights violations, the potential dangers of the subpoena being misused by non-copyright holders and even the future growth of the Internet.

"This decision means copyright holders and their representatives -- or identity thieves and stalkers posing as copyright holders -- will not be allowed to obtain personal information about Internet users by simply filing a one-page form with a court clerk," Deutsch said.

"The Supreme Court has now finally shut a door that was otherwise left wide open to false accusations, negligent mistakes, as well as to identity thieves and stalkers, who could use the cursory subpoena process to obtain the name, address, and telephone number of any Internet user in the country -- without the user even knowing about it."

The December 2003 appeals court decision forced the RIAA to use the more conventional "John Doe" subpoena request that requires a judge's consent. Using the John Doe subpoenas, the RIAA has continued to sue thousands of alleged P2P file-swappers.

"This decision reaffirms the fact that a legitimate process for legal recourse already exists -- the John Doe lawsuit -- and that the RIAA should follow it. We are pleased that the RIAA has already changed its copyright enforcement and business practices to conform to this recognized approach, which ensures that due process is protected before an Internet user's personal information can be obtained by anyone who seeks it," Deutsch said.

The Supreme Court also handed Verizon and the other Baby Bells another legal victory Tuesday when it refused to hear several appeals to force the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to permit long distance and competitive local exchange carriers to lease Bell lines at a discount.

A lower court ruling earlier this year rejected the FCC's effort to force line sharing on the Bells.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3420681


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Supremes Quietly Change Piracy Debate
Cynthia L. Webb

The Supreme Court handed Internet services providers and privacy advocates a crucial victory yesterday when it decided to pass on an important Internet piracy case.

The morning papers, however, missed the boat on reporting the significance of the case, with most newspapers skipping the development all together or running wire copy on their sites.

In refusing to hear the case, the justices rebuffed an effort by the recording industry to establish once and for all that Internet service providers should have to hand over the identities of suspected file-swappers who subscribe to their networks. They also tacitly rejected the notion that the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a legitimate tool for tracking down Internet pirates.

It's one of the biggest setbacks yet to the entertainment industry's legal maneuverings (replete with lawsuits, subpoenas and courtroom drama) to fight digital piracy, but to get a clear picture of what the court did, readers had to turn to the trade publications and wire service reports.

"The recording industry may not agree, but the U.S. Supreme Court thinks personal privacy is far more important that music piracy," Red Herring reported. "On Tuesday, the high court refused to entertain an appeal of a unanimous 2003 decision by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals that held that copyright holders cannot force Internet providers to identify file sharers using a mere subpoena. Industry watchers see this as yet another blow that the recording industry has taken in its fight against online file sharing -- a fight it is slowly losing. The lawsuits in question were between New York's Verizon Internet Services and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), headquartered in Washington, D.C."

Bloomberg noted that the Supreme Court "refused to make it easier for the recording industry to force Verizon Communications Inc. and other Internet service providers to identify subscribers who share copyrighted songs online." Wired News said the court's action is "effectively stopping one of the legal tactics of the music business as it tries to stamp out piracy."

The Associated Press, however, reported that yesterday's decision does not signal the end of the road for the Verizon-RIAA case. "The Supreme Court on Tuesday sidestepped a dispute over whether Internet providers can be forced to identify subscribers illegally swapping music and movies online. The subject, however, may be back at the court soon. The Bush administration agrees with recording and movie companies which want to use a 1998 law to get information about Internet users, but the administration also had encouraged the Supreme Court to wait to settle the issue. The recording industry had sought court intervention now, arguing that more than 2.6 billion music files are illegally downloaded each month and that the law is needed to identify culprits," the AP said.

• Red Herring: Subpoenas Snubbed In File-Sharing Fight
• The Associated Press via The Washington Post: Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Internet Piracy Case (Registration required)
• Bloomberg via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Verizon Wins Court Appeal
• Wired News: Music Industry Spurned By Court

Verizon, in a statement lauding yesterday's action -- or inaction -- by the Supreme Court, called it "an important victory for the personal privacy, free expression rights and safety of the more than 100 million Internet users in the U.S." The company reminded people that "the Court of Appeals decision, written by Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg and handed down on Dec. 19, 2003, held that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) did not authorize copyright holders and their agents to obtain a subpoena requiring the release of the name, address and telephone number of any Internet user based upon the filing of a one-page form with the clerk of the district court."

InternetNews.com quoted Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate counsel for Verizon, who said, "The Supreme Court's action is a victory for consumers, for the Internet and its continued growth, and it marks the end of a dangerous and illegal subpoena campaign that threatened the constitutional rights of all Americans."

Reuters said the development yesterday is not likely to seriously affect the recording industry's legal campaign, as RIAA investigators have sued roughly 5,000 individuals using the John Doe process." The John Doe process is required by the lower court's ruling, which requires a lawsuit to be filed to reveal the identity of suspected file- swappers, Reuters explained. "Today's decision will not deter our anti-piracy efforts. The 'John Doe' litigation process we have successfully utilized this year continues to be an effective legal tool," said Stanley Pierre-Louis, RIAA's senior vice president for legal affairs, as quoted by Reuters.

• InternetNews.com: High Court Bounces Latest RIAA Effort
• Reuters: Supreme Court Won't Weigh Net Music Tactics

Bloomberg, in its coverage of the news yesterday, gave a rundown of the RIAA's legal trail so far. "The Recording Industry Association of America is trying to stop Internet users from swapping copyrighted music for free on peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and Grokster instead of paying for it through online music stores such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes. The industry has filed more than 5,400 lawsuits against online users swapping copyrighted music for free since September 2003."

Recall that just last week entertainment industry trade groups filed a plea to the Supreme Court to overturn a separate lower court ruling and decide if "peer-to-peer" networks are liable for illegal swaps made by customers. They said lawsuits can't compensate for the "multibillion-harm" caused by infringement by P2P sites Grokster and StreamCast. The Supreme Court has yet to decide on the request.

But buried in its story covering yesterday's action, Dow Jones Newswires said: "The Supreme Court's decision to leave the lower court ruling untouched could impact other pending copyright litigation efforts by the music industry."

• Dow Jones Newswires via the Wall Street Journal: Supreme Court Rejects Music Industry's Appeal (Subscription required)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct13.html


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Kazaa No Longer King Of P2P
John Borland

Kazaa, once a top nemesis of record companies and movie studios, appears to have lost its role as the world's most popular file-swapping software, network watchers said on Monday.

According to BayTSP, a California firm that monitors file-swapping networks on behalf of entertainment companies, Kazaa rival eDonkey was the most widely used peer-to- peer application last month.

Kazaa's lead on rivals has been sliding for more than a year - at least since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) started filing lawsuits against individual file swappers, with a focus on the Kazaa network. But many observers say Kazaa simply hasn't kept up with the technological times.

BayTSP Chief Executive Mark Ishikawa said: "We've known that trend was coming. It was just a matter of time. eDonkey is a much better protocol for large files."

Kazaa's slide, along with eDonkey's rise, has marked a slow generational shift in the file-swapping world, analogous to the explosion of Napster alternatives when that original song-trading service went offline.

The spread of broadband networks, DVD burners and increasingly powerful compression technology has helped boost online demand for videos, including full- length movies. Previously, the vast majority of file-swapping traffic had been focused on MP3-formatted music.

Several of the new file-trading software packages, including eDonkey, have created their technology in order to speed the transfer of large files of this kind. Kazaa's core technology, by contrast, is now several years old.

Another video-friendly technology, called BitTorrent, also has quickly gained users but does not have a simple way of measuring how many people are online at any given time. Net-monitoring company CacheLogic found last summer that Kazaa had fallen far behind BitTorrent in terms of bulk traffic sent over the internet.

According to BayTSP, eDonkey averaged 2.54 million users a day in September, while Kazaa averaged 2.48 million users a day. Those figures have fluctuated for weeks, but this was the first month-long sample in which eDonkey had retained the lead, Ishikawa said.

A US spokesman for Australia-based Sharman Networks, Kazaa's parent, had no immediate comment on the news.
http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch...9124899,00.htm


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India: Need For A Balanced View On Intellectual Property Rights

Government today said that a balanced view has to be taken on intellectual property rights as phenomenal technological advancement is a double-edged weapon posing both opportunity and serious challenges.

"The main issue remains how to balance the interest of creator in the society and that of the need of the society at large in an optimum way in this digital environment," HRD Minister Arjun Singh said inaugurating a three day symposium on "Emerging issues of Copyright Protection in the Digital Environment".

An ideal regime of intellectual property rights should therefore strike a balance between the private incentives for the innovators and the public interest at large by maximising access to the fruit of creation, he said.

Ten years ago, India was groping in the dark as "we did not know where to begin and where to end" in bringing about a law on the issue. "Today I can say with a sense of satisfaction that India was able to bring into the statute book a law which was fairly modern and an effort to maintain equilibrium".

Singh said that because of the trans-border nature of the technology, new norms have to be evolved to see that innovativeness and creativity was duly rewarded and all other stakeholders also got their due reward. PTI
http://www.123bharath.com/news/index...lnews&id=28584


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Mais oui

Fair Use in France
p2pnet.net News

Is downloading hundreds of DVDs or copying hundreds of friends' movies fair use?

In France, the answer seems to be "yes".

The criminal court of Rodez (south of France) has freed a 22-year-old Internet user who'd copied 488 movies from the Internet and from DVDs loaned to him by some of his friends.

During a non-related investigation in February 2003, the French police found hundreds of movies and the man appeared before the court on August 4 for copyright infringement.

On Wednesday, the court acquitted him.

Although details of the judgment haven't yet been made public, we're guessing the judge relied on France's private copying provisions which allow "the copy and reproduction of works strictly restricted to the private use of the copyist and not intended for collective use".
http://p2pnet.net/story/2714


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Newest Netsky Is Pesky
TechWeb News

The newest Netsky worm, which first appeared earlier this week, gathered steam on Thursday and caused security firms to upgrade their alerts to users.

Dubbed Netsky.ag by most anti-virus vendors, the worm remains concentrated in Brazil and Argentina, where it first appeared Wednesday, but copies have escaped South America to end up on machines around the globe.

The worm is relatively easy to spot by English speakers, since the subject headings used by this mass mailer are written in Brazilian Portuguese. Among the headings spotted are ones such as "Abra rapido isso!!!!" (open this now!) and "receitas de bolo" (cake recipes).

Netsky.ag spreads by sending itself to e-mail addresses it harvests from compromised machines, as well as through shared network folders and peer-to-peer networks.

If the attached file -- which comes in .pif, .com, .scr, .bat, or .zip -- is run, a dialog box pops up with text reading, "File corrupted replace this!"

McAfee raised its warning for Netsky.ag Thursday from Low to Medium because of a higher-than-usual number of copies submitted by customers and trapped by its e-mail snares.
http://www.techweb.com/wire/security/50500131


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Redefining Television
Mark Pesce

I have been attached to the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. I was invited there as a consultant, with a brief that allowed me to redesign the curriculum of a venerable film school, and place it squarely into the middle of the 21st century. Note, I did not say the start of the 21st century - that wouldn't be very interesting, or very helpful. Students at AFTRS will be practitioners well into the middle of the 21st century - certainly through to 2030 or 2040. So it's my job to look forward a bit, and incorporate that forward view into my teaching…

In the earliest days of television, writers like George Orwell in 1984 and Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 projected television as the instrumentality of a totalitarian future - a monolithic entity dispensing propaganda. And, if any of you occasionally watch Fox News, you can see they weren't that far off the mark. But here's the thing: the monolithic days of television are numbered. Actually, they've already passed - though, as yet, very few people realize this.

To understand why, we need to go back to first principles. What is television? Here's a functional definition:

Television is the capture, encoding, transmission, reception, decoding and display of moving images.

This definition applies to the Golden Age of television, and to the present era. Yet the definition of every word in the definition of television has changed, because of the introduction of digital production, encoding, transmission, reception, decoding and display technologies.

First, let's talk about image capture: the means of production have changed. A decade ago you'd need a million dollars of camera, sound editing and broadcast production equipment to create television programming. Today you can capture DTV broadcast-quality content with a $6000 HD camera from Panasonic, which you can then bring into Final Cut Pro and edit on your $5000 Dual G5 PowerMac. For a little more than ten thousand dollars, you can create television programming that would be absolutely indistinguishable from anything created by Warner Brothers or Fox.

Just because you can produce television programming on the cheap doesn't imply you'll be any good at it. You're still going to need a cinematographer who knows how to handle a camera, a location sound recorder who can give you something intelligible to listen to, a sound designer and sound editor, a film editor, a set designer, a broadcast titles designer, and so forth. If you don't have these practitioners, you'll simply create programming that looks as cheap as the equipment it's been produced on. Although equipment has gotten cheap, film and television production remains a craft tradition, and this means that the AFTRS and institutions like it, which teach the craft of film and television production, will continue to have an important role to play.

Next, encoding. Australia and Europe use PAL; North America uses NTSC (which evidentially is an abbreviation for Never The Same Color). Both are analog standards for the transmission of moving images. Analog television of either variety is like the vinyl album - something which you've no doubt heard of - and perhaps even seen a DJ use in a set - but many of you won't have handled them, at least not often. (Here I am at age 41 and I feel like I hail from the era of steam locomotives and buggy whips.)

CDs came along in 1982 and digitized audio, quantized it, turning a continuous waveform into a discrete stream of zeroes and ones. The same thing has happened to television with the advent of digital TV. ATSC - (an abbreviation for Another Television Standards Catastrophe) -specifies the transmission format for television signals in the USA, while DVB is the standard in the UK and Australia. These standards are very similar, though not interoperable. (This represents a missed opportunity which will have grave consequences for broadcasters.) The moving images themselves are encoded in MPEG-2 format. This means that the encoded data stream for digital television is identical to the standard used on DVDs, in almost every respect.

This encoded digital TV signal can be transmitted in any number of ways, and that's where the definition of the word transmitted has changed radically. You can beam it through the air using ATSC or DVB - as they do in the USA, the UK, and here in Australia. So you can buy a digital TV set - an HDTV set, as they're more commonly known - and connect it to your antenna, and receive broadcasts in standard definition - 720x576 for PAL, 720x480 for NTSC, but the signal can go all the way up to 1280x960 - which is very high-definition indeed! A digital television broadcaster can choose to allocate this digital signal bandwidth any way they see fit; they can send you four channels of Standard Definition programming, or a single high-definition stream - each requires the same amount of broadcast bandwidth. The broadcaster could eschew video altogether, and they can transmit a stream of data - pictures, text, sounds, etc. - in place of a video stream. Because the stream is digital, it's got all the flexibility and programmability we've come to expect from digital technologies.

Because it is a digital stream, the MPEG-2 video encoded within the ATSC/DVB digital TV signal can be copied and reproduced faithfully, an infinite number of times, with no loss in quality. We'll come back to this point, but just for the moment let it linger in your minds - and think of all the MP3s you have sitting on your hard disks, iPods, etc. And keep in mind that MP3 is another subset of the same MPEG standards used for digital television.

Ok, so we're halfway there. We've gotten moving images encoded and transmitted. Well, sort of. We conceive of television signal transmission as radio waves moving through the ether, but bits are bits are bits. They could be sent over the air, or they could be a stream of bits on a digital cable system, as with FOXTEL Digital in Australia or any of the major cable systems in the US, or the AUSTAR or DirectTV satellite broadcasting services.

But I overlook the obvious. Yes, I could get my transmission over the airwaves, or over a digital cable hookup, but this ignores the fact that I already have a very high-speed digital data stream coming into my house - broadband internet. Back in Los Angeles I had 1.5 megabits of ADSL, for which I paid the princely sum of $72 a month. (In Sydney I have 1 megabit of wireless broadband in my home, from BigAir, for which I pay $100 AUD a month - about the same amount in "real" dollars.) Back in 1987, when I was working full-time in data communications, that much bandwidth would cost a business $10,000 a month. Minimum. So I guess we could say that the same thing has happened to bandwidth costs that happened to computer costs; we've gotten more and more for less and less.

And that brings us to the discussion of the receiver. The definition of the television receiver has changed as well. If you go to an electronics retailer and buy an HD television set you're paying for two things - one of them is the oversized high-resolution display, and the other is a sophisticated computer, inside the set, which decodes the received digital television data stream and puts it onto the display.

[A side note: the price point of HD television sets is about to plummet because of some chips introduced by Intel earlier this year. It's expected that by Christmas 2004, they'll be selling for under a thousand US dollars. HD sets are already outselling analog sets, in dollar volume (because they cost a lot more than analog sets) but in 2005 or 2006 they'll begin to outsell analog sets both in the USA, in raw numbers of sets sold.]

An HD set is just one alternative if I want to receive digital TV. A few weeks after I arrived in Australia, I purchased a $300 card for my PC (DigiTV PCI) that plugs into a $15 pair of rabbit ears I bought at Woolworth's, and which gaffer taped to the top of my monitor. (It makes for a very pretty picture, let me tell you, because everything old is new again.) With this card I can now receive the five free-to-air digital terrestrial broadcasters in Australia: ABC, SBS, 7, 9 and 10. If I've got the antenna adjusted just so, I get crystal clear moving images on my 17" computer monitor, with incredibly rich stereo sound. My little home experiment in geekdom - more about that in a moment - proves an important point: an HD set really is very closely akin to a modern PC.

Because this DTV tuner card is in my PC, and because my PC has a fairly large array of hard disks - about 300 GB, all told, with about 35 GB reserved for my MP3 collection - I can use my digital television tuner like a VCR, and record the digital stream to my PC's hard disk. (These digital recorders are more commonly known as personal video recorders, or PVRs.) Because the signal is digital from reception to storage, there is no loss in quality, ever. When I record "The Sopranos" - which is transmitted in high-definition on Channel 9 - I can play back in the same high-resolution image transmitted by Channel 9. It is, in fact, the same image, bit for bit.

Even better - and here's where it gets a little worrying, if you're a producer or broadcaster - I can burn a DVD of that episode of "The Sopranos" and it will look as good as if I'd bought the DVD from HBO. There is no difference - the video on HBO's DVD contains the same bits as were transmitted by Channel 9 and recorded by my PC.

This fact is in fact so worrying to the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, that they've lobbied for the inclusion of a "broadcast flag" which will be sent within the DTV signal and which all DTV hardware must read and honor. When the hardware reads the broadcast flag, it must refuse to share that DTV stream across the Internet. (Whether the broadcast flag will forbid burning to a DVD is another question altogether - an open one.) The USA's FCC threw the MPAA this little bone, but it's being contested by public interest groups and is currently spiraling its way through the American court system. (You all know what that means.)

The trouble here is that the MPAA is the motion picture association of America. They have no control over what happens in Australia, Europe, or, rather more significantly, in China. The broadcast flag must be in all DTV receivers purchased in the United States after April 2005. But plenty of people - such as myself - are buying DTV receiver cards well in advance of that date. Those cards won't see or acknowledge any broadcast flag. I'll never have to obey the dictates of the MPAA, in America or not - unless the MPAA manages to convince the WIPO to make the possession and use of these cards illegal - which, given the current state of affairs in the war over digital copyright, isn't entirely unthinkable. After all, they could be used to promote terrorism. Or something.

So while the MPAA is trying very hard to put its thumb in the dike of digital television, the rest of the world will do as it pleases - at least until Free Trade Agreements ties all of us so closely to the USA that we're bound by the same copyright law that rules America.

For now, in Australia, I can do as I please. I can record my favorite programs on my PC. That PC is connected into my home network. When my iBook is at home, it's on the same network. There's also an old Sony laptop at home, running Linux, which serves as the home firewall, gateway and web server. That machine is my interface to the internet, and it utilizes the Windows file sharing on my PC to gain access to the recordings on my PC-based digital television - which it then makes available over the web for everyone else to see - if they know the URL.

Right now those files are so big - about 2 GB per hour for a DTV broadcast in Standard Definition - that it's unlikely anyone would bother to download them. But there's more than one way to skin a cat, and more than MPEG-2 can be used to encode video programming. If I used Windows Media 9 Series, for example - an excellent compression standard for video - I could compress an episode of "The Sopranos" into about 150 MB. It wouldn't look quite as nice, mind you, but with the bandwidth I have at home - and the bandwidth I have at the office - I could watch any of my recorded television shows from my desk at the Australian Film Television and Radio school.

If I didn't mind sacrificing a bit more quality, I could probably get the whole hour of television down to a tidy 50 or 60 MB. Hardly anything at all, these days - it could easily fit onto one of those key-chain sized USB drives. At AFTRS, I'd be able to download the program from my home web server in about seven minutes. That means I'd be doing better than real-time: it means that wherever I go, my TV can follow.

And that brings us to another aspect of the redefinition of TV. If a digital TV is simply a computer that is capable of receiving, decoding and displaying a DTV signal, isn't my computer on my desk at AFTRS a TV too? It doesn't have the card that allows it to receive and decode free-to-air DTV broadcasts, but it can certainly receive a DTV signal that's being transmitted by my web server.

Wait a minute. Wait just a minute. Doesn't that mean, in the context of the definition that we've been tossing around, that I've become a television broadcaster?

Now you start to see where I'm going. Every computer - from the desktop PC at work to my lovely Macintosh iBook, to a handheld 3G mobile phone, to the just-announced Sony PSP handheld gaming and video platform - every one of these devices is potentially a DTV receiver. All they need is the proper software to decode the proper data stream.

Now that I know that I'm a television broadcaster, I've decided make it easier to get to my recorded DTV programming. So, in my vanishingly brief moments of free time, I'm working to string together a suite of open- source software which automatically takes all of the DTV programming I've recorded and makes it available at a variety of resolutions, on my web server, so that anyone can access it, at any time, from anywhere in the world.

Ok, I may be a bit of a geek, in that I'm going to roll-my-own, but that's only because I want to have a thorough understanding of how these pieces work together. You can buy off-the-shelf software for Windows that does all of this. (SnapStream is just one of the many programs in this fast-growing segment of home "media server" software. The transcode package is its Linux equivalent.) You can do it today. You don't need to be a computer geek. You just need to spend a few hours learning how to configure everything to your own satisfaction. And then, you too can be a television broadcaster.

The first thing that flows from recognition of the reconfigured nature of broadcasting in the age of digital television - the thing the became clear to me as I workshopped these ideas with a group of film producing students at AFTRS back in March - is that I have disintermediated the terrestrial broadcast networks. They're simply not needed any more.

Why would I tune my DTV receiver to Channel 9 to record "The Sopranos," when it's simpler and more efficient for me to grab the program stream from the HBO web server or download it from one of my friends who has been to visit the HBO web server?

Once the broadcast networks moved to digital, they became entirely obsolete, because I can get a stream of bits from anywhere in the world that I can get a high-speed connection to the internet - and that means most everywhere in the world. Since I only care about the program, not about the broadcaster, I'll abandon the broadcaster as quickly as I possibly can.

I'm not telling you broadcasting is going to be obsolete. I'm telling you that it's already obsolete. It's a done deal. We've seen the lightning strike, and all we're doing now is waiting for the thunderclap. The only thing holding broadcasting together today is inertia, marketing, and copy protection. Once a programming producer figures out that they can distribute their programming via broadband, it's all over.

Well, guess what: AOL has already started distributing Everwood, a Warner Brothers TV series, via broadband. And the BBC has just announced a test of "flexible TV" - which will allow broadband users in the UK to watch BBC programming when they want, wherever they want to watch it, over the Internet.

That's not to say that I think the broadcast networks have no future whatsoever. But that future is radically different, because, when we redefine television, we create a need to redefine broadcasting. Here are three basic ideas that I've had - which are by no means intended to be exhaustive - about the future of broadcasting as a business. These are the some of the new rules for broadcasting in the age of digital television.

Rule One: Live Rules

Beyond anything else, television is a live medium. Whether it's a footy game, Big Brother Up All Night, the Academy Awards, or the latest terrorist tragedy, TV performs an irreplaceable function as reporter of events-as- they-happen. And although the viewer can and should be able to watch the digital television data stream from any compatible receiver, the broadcaster is, in this case, the producer, creating value by producing the live event. As drama, comedy and factual programming become freely available for download, the broadcaster will transform into the producer of choice for live event coverage. Channel 7 in Australia tried to do this as they switched to a mix of mostly sport programming; but they were a bit too far ahead of the curve - and they didn't make their broadcast content available over broadband.

Rule Two: Aggregate the Advertisers

Historically, broadcasters have functioned as aggregators of eyeballs for advertisers. There's no reason they can't continue to do that. After all, a program's producer will still need to get paid for the programming they create, and they're going to be at a bit of a loss in this brave new world where the broadcasters have all vaporized in a puff of bits. Broadcasters should shift their focus from being aggregators of eyeballs to becoming aggregators of advertisers - they can get Fox together with Ford, for example, to sponsor a series like "24". There's a problem, however: global advertising agencies already do this. Today's broadcaster is going to begin to look more and more like an ad agency, and will be working within that much more competitive market. That said, the inside advantage that a local broadcaster can bring to a global product like "The Sopranos" or "24" is the precise mix of advertising that needs to be cut into a particular package of programming. If Fox or HBO are going to make their programming available, free for download, they're going to want to ensure that they maximize their revenue streams by precisely targeting advertising sales for every potential viewing market. That's a job that the local broadcasters are uniquely suited for.

Some of you might be asking: without audience aggregation, how will we know what to watch? That's what the broadcasters will ask, and will point out that you'll have to winnow through a lot of chaff to get to the grain. (Obviously they haven't been watching their own programs.)

There is an answer to this as well. More and more, the internet functions as a high-quality filter to help us find what we want; I see something and I email my friends, and they email their friends, and on and on and on. The rise of "social software" such as Friendster and Orkut means that it has become increasingly easy to disseminate my likes and dislikes among my circle of friends (who will tell their friends, and so on, and so on). A TV producer can still do a press tour and raise awareness of upcoming programming, but even in the absence of PR junkets, social software ensures that television viewers will have little trouble finding the best of the best. Social software, directed toward media choice, that's something I want to call peercasting.

How does a producer realize revenue in this new world of digital television? When you've got bits on a disk, you can fast-forward through the commercials at the touch of a button. Or perhaps one of your friends will edit them out before he posts the program to his server - and only one person on Earth needs to do this for everyone to have access to a commercial-free version of the program. So commercials will need to change radically. We're already seeing the more advanced advertisers, such as Procter & Gamble and BMW, offering up short films by major directors as a new advertising vehicle. The commercials will need to be more interesting than the programming, or they'll be left on the digital cutting-room floor. Product placement - which is used extensively in "24" and "Survivor" - is another possibility. The road ahead for the producer is unclear - and that means it's prime time to be inventive, creating new forms of revenue generation for television producers.

Rule Three: Respect the Audience

With the advent of the PVR and store-and-forward television viewing, the program schedule is freed from the tyranny of the programmer, empowering the viewer. PVR owners watch 71% more television, on average, because they're watching programs which they're most interested by - not just the programs screening at a particular moment. (They also watch 35% less advertising.) But a program schedule is only useful to the PVR insofar as it is adhered to by the broadcaster. And, sadly, this is absolutely not the case in Australia. I've been asking everyone I know why television programmers here do not begin their programs at their scheduled times - why "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" can run fifteen minutes into the scheduled start time for "Sex in the City", for example - because this cavalier attitude toward television schedules makes it nearly impossible for a VCR or PVR to be used to record programming. This is going to become a more pressing problem when the FOXTEL Digital PVR is rolled out later on this year. (Unless that PVR can adapt to the sudden changes in program schedules - which is not impossible, and given the attitude of Australian television programmers, probably necessary.)

If promptness is a virtue - and it is, in my book - Australian commercial broadcasters (it's curious that all three commercial broadcasters do this regularly, while the two public broadcasters do this only rarely) have been doing little except anger their audiences. When the audience didn't have any alternatives, the broadcasters could get away with it. But now, in the new era of television redefined, they have an alternative. When broadcasters upset their audiences, they'll drive those audiences into alternate forms of delivery - and they'll be cutting their own throats. Respect is more than a nice idea - it's going to be the only way that broadcasters will be able to maintain an audience in the age of digital television.

All of this can be summed up in a very neat phrase: as broadband succeeds, broadcasting will fail. And nothing, short of the economic collapse of Western civilization, is going to impede the uptake of broadband. It will continue to transform our culture, and the delivery of our cultural products. That's very good news, because it opens up a world of possibilities which have nothing to do with the politics and economics of broadcast licenses, and everything to do with creativity.
http://www.mindjack.com/feature/redefiningtv.html


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F.C.C.'s Chief Turns Into Pitchman for Converting Nation to Digital TV
Matt Richtel

The legendary consumer electronics salesman Crazy Eddie is no longer around. But the job of hawking televisions has been taken over in recent weeks by a new TV personality: Michael K. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Some of his critics are arguing that Mr. Powell and the F.C.C. have no place spending tax dollars promoting $2,000 consumer electronics devices.

The commission is taking the lead on a new consumer education campaign called "DTV - Get It!" But the commission is not just going to ask consumers to buy TV's: it has started a Web site, www.dtv.gov, that gives shopping and programming tips along with advice for setting up digital television.

"The F.C.C. wants to be a partner in helping consumers understand what it will actually take once they bring home their beautiful new high-definition sets to really get it online," Mr. Powell said in Washington on Oct. 1.

Three days later, he appeared on "Monday Night Football'' on ABC to promote the virtues of digital television to the technology's core audience: sports fans.

A spokeswoman for the F.C.C. defended Mr. Powell's push for digital television. But a nonprofit group called Commercial Alert sent a letter late last week to 160 members of Congress, urging them to withdraw financing from the campaign.

"Do you really believe that with all the troubles facing our nation, the federal government should be on a crusade to encourage people to buy costly new television sets?" the letter read in part.

In an interview, Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, reacted even more strongly to Mr. Powell's appearances, saying, "What's Powell going to do next, give Sharp and Sony seats on the F.C.C.?"

The F.C.C. wants television signals to be broadcast digitally within five years so that analog airwaves can be used by the government for public service and safety messages, among other things. But that cannot happen until more Americans have the digital sets able to receive programming and advertising - a potential boon to the television makers, who envision selling DTV's into every American living room.

In the view of Mr. Powell, the digital upgrading harks back to another time when the country was at crossroads: "the transformation from black-and-white to color,'' he said last week.

So come on down, America, and get yourself a digital TV. Tell 'em Crazy Mikey sent you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/technology/11fcc.html


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Microsoft’s Latest Plan for TV
Saul Hansell

TELEVISION has been something of a great white whale for the Microsoft Corporation. The company has tried to sell WebTV and build software for TV's and cable boxes. It has even invested billions in cable systems. So far, these efforts have been expensive and have not yet put Microsoft into the position it covets: the maker of the software behind every glowing screen.

Tomorrow, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, ventures into Hollywood to announce a renewed assault on a different front in his war of the tube, one that builds on Microsoft's greatest strength: Windows.

Mr. Gates will unveil a new version of the Windows XP Media Center, software that combined with specially configured personal computers from dozens of manufacturers, turns the PC into a photo album, jukebox, DVD player and, most important, a TV set with a built-in recorder.

The first two editions of the software have been slow to gain acceptance in the market, representing about 3 percent of home computers sold. But, Microsoft hopes to turn that around with the latest version, which will add a few features and improve the technical quality of the television picture and the video recorder; both at times have been spotty.

More importantly, say industry executives, demand will be spurred by a series of new hardware devices using the Windows software that will be introduced tomorrow. Several manufacturers, including Linksys, a unit of Cisco Systems, and Hewlett-Packard, are expected to introduce versions of a product Microsoft announced last January called the Media Center Extender, a device that allows a television signal to be sent from a Media Center computer to a television in another room, by way of a wireless network .

And perhaps most significant, some of the new Media Center computers will have prices below $1,000, about half that of the first models.

Still, it is an open question whether people want to watch television on their computers. "Convergence solves a problem consumers don't have," said Sean Baenen, a managing director of Odyssey, a consumer research firm. He said that simpler, single-purpose machines are easier to use.

So far, the record of Media Center PC's is mixed. Since they were introduced in 2002, computers using the first two versions of this software have been slow sellers. IDC, which had forecast sales of 1.5 million of them this year, now sees sales at 550,000 units for all of 2004.

Roger Kay, a vice president of IDC, says sales of Media Center PC's have lagged because they are buggy, too hard to use, and often too noisy to put in a living room. And even among the small group of users, they haven't developed the fanatical following of TiVo, the stand-alone video recorder.

"I haven't been in some placid home where the people who use Media Center PC's think it is great and a part of their life," Mr. Kay said.

Brad Brooks, the marketing manger for Windows, said that Mr. Kay had undercounted the software's sales and had overstated its flaws.

"We're pretty happy where we are after only 22 months in the market," he said. "We have grown past 3 percent of the market." He said that over the next few years, Media Center machines would represent 10 percent to 20 percent of the market.

Mr. Brooks said this growth would be driven by the new software to be introduced tomorrow - along with a series of related new products by hardware makers. He declined to say what specific changes would be in the new version, but press accounts and industry executives say they include a modest set of new features and improvements to the user interface.

"We are going into Version 3 of the Media Center edition, and everyone says that Version 3 is Microsoft's sweet spot."

Stephen Baker, the director of industry analysis at the NPD Group, a research firm, is skeptical even of the existing sales of Media Center PC's. "A lot of their sales have been accidental," he said. "Someone wants to buy the best PC out there, and this is the one with all the bells and whistles"

That isn't such a bad thing, Mr. Brooks said. "Our partners say that the media center is their highest-margin PC."

Microsoft, too, gets higher margins. Industry analysts say that PC makers pay a premium of $20 to $40 over the roughly $50 a computer that Microsoft gets for the basic edition of Windows.

Regardless of how they get Media Center computers, Mr. Brooks said people like them when they get them home. Microsoft's surveys, he said, found that more than 90 percent of the owners of the Media Center computers are satisfied with them, far more than the percentage of basic PC owners. Eight out of nine, he said, would recommend the product to a friend.

But research by both Microsoft and computer makers found that most of the initial users of the machines were using them on their computer monitors, presumably on their desks. Only a small minority use the highly promoted ability of the computers to link to TV sets and sound systems for use in family rooms. (The machines come with remote controls and software with very large type so that they can be used by people sitting on the couch across the room from a big TV set.)

One reason, perhaps, is that video-recording functions and picture quality have not been as good as on a device like TiVo. A survey by Forrester Research found that people who recorded video on their computers were less satisfied than users of specialized recorders. Microsoft says new hardware and software will help fix these problems.

Microsoft and other researchers have been surprised that many initial Media Center users use it more for managing digital photographs than for watching television.

The media extender device may give Microsoft its desired beachhead in the living room. But those devices are emerging technology and have an initial price tag of about $250. A recorder from TiVo, by contrast, can be bought for less than $100 after rebates, although it has a fee of $12.95 a month, which the Windows system does not.

Sony has sold a similar system for several years to link its Vaio PC to a computer in another room, but sales were modest. More than half the Vaio desktops have TV tuners, but most do not use the Windows Media Center software. Todd Titera, the product manager for Vaio, said Sony's customers liked to watch television and especially to edit their home movies on their computers. But rather than using its product to send the pictures to their family room TV's, they used a simpler method. They burned DVD's of movies and then walked them to their DVD player.

Hewlett-Packard is also trying another approach to sneak into the living room: building a computer that is the size and appearance of a large DVD player that can be stacked alongside other home theater devices. Like a fancy receiver, it has all sorts of jacks for sound and video coming in and out on the back. The front has a drive for DVD's and CD's, a jack to hook up a video camera, and a slot for an extra hard drive. The device is a full Windows computer, but it is meant to be used with a television rather a monitor.

It also has a price tag close to $2,000. John Romano, Hewlett's senior vice president for consumer products, says this version is "not already for the mainstream market yet." But as with all technology, he said, prices will fall. And Hewlett has high hopes for new versions of its regular Media Center PC's that will sell for less than $1,000.

But even as prices fall, many researchers wonder whether people want a single machine to handle their television, music and photos.

"Consumers don't want or need the ultimate device," said Mr. Baenen from Odyssey. "They don't want to pay for the ultimate device; they don't trust the ultimate device; and, they don't want to deal with the complexity of the ultimate device."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/te...microsoft.html


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TV Group to Show Anti- Kerry Film on 62 Stations
Jim Rutenberg

Up to 62 television stations owned or managed by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group - many of them in swing states - will show a documentary highly critical of Senator John Kerry's antiwar activities 30 years ago within the next two weeks, Sinclair officials said yesterday.

Those officials said the documentary would pre-empt regular night programming, including prime time, on its stations, which include affiliates for all six of the major broadcast networks in the swing states of Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Called "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," the documentary features Vietnam veterans who say their Vietnamese captors used Mr. Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony, in which he recounted stories of American atrocities, prolonging their torture and betraying and demoralizing them. Similar claims were made by prisoners of war in a commercial that ran during the summer from an anti-Kerry veterans group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Two of the former prisoners who appeared in the Swift Boat advertisement were interviewed for the movie, including Ken Cordier, who had to resign as a volunteer in the Bush campaign after the advertisement came out.

Sinclair's plan to show the documentary was first made public by The Los Angeles Times on Saturday.

Mark Hyman, Sinclair's vice president for corporate relations, who doubles as a conservative commentator on its news stations, said the film would be shown because Sinclair deemed it newsworthy.

"Clearly John Kerry has made his Vietnam service the foundation of his presidential run; this is an issue that is certainly topical," he said. Asked what defined something as newsworthy, Mr. Hyman said, "In that it hasn't been out in the marketplace, and the news marketplace."

Because Sinclair is defining the documentary - which will run commercial free - as news, it is unclear if it will be required by federal regulations to provide Mr. Kerry's campaign with equal time to respond.

But acknowledging that news standards call for fairness, Mr. Hyman said an invitation has been extended to Mr. Kerry to respond after the documentary is shown. "There are certainly serious allegations that are leveled; we would very much like to get his response," he said.

Asked if Sinclair would consider running a documentary of similar length either lauding Mr. Kerry, responding to the charges in "Stolen Honor" or criticizing Mr. Bush, Mr. Hyman said, "We'd just have to take a look at it."

Aides to Mr. Kerry said he would not accept Sinclair's invitation.

"It's hard to take an offer seriously from a group that is hellbent on doing anything to help elect President Bush even if that means violating basic journalism standards," said Chad Clanton, a Kerry spokesman.

Sinclair's plans put Mr. Kerry's campaign in an awkward position similar to the one in which it found itself in August, when the Swift Boat group first began running commercials against him containing unsubstantiated charges that he lied to get his war medals. Mr. Kerry's aides at first held back from responding, so as not to give the group and its charges more attention - a decision that some Kerry aides now acknowledge cost him in public opinion polls.

Mr. Clanton said Mr. Kerry's campaign would call on supporters to stage advertiser boycotts and demonstrations against Sinclair's stations.

A group of Democratic senators, including Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Dianne Feinstein of California, readied a letter calling for the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the move, arguing that the documentary was not news but a prolonged political advertisement from Mr. Bush and, as such, violated fairness rules.

Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project, an advocacy group promoting greater media regulation, said he did not think the film would qualify for a news exemption. And, he said, even if it did fall under equal time provisions, those are based on candidate appearances and in this case, since it is Mr. Kerry who appears, "albeit disparagingly," stations would be required to show Mr. Bush or possibly the independent candidate Ralph Nader, if they requested it.

Sinclair was already a galvanizing force for Democrats. The political donations of its executives have gone overwhelmingly to Republicans, according to a review of donations on Politicalmoneyline.com. In April Sinclair refused to run an episode of "Nightline" on its stations in which the anchor Ted Koppel spent the entire program reading the names of American soldiers killed in Iraq.

"Stolen Honor" was produced by Carlton Sherwood, formerly a reporter with The Washington Times. His Web site says he received no money from any political party or campaign but got initial funding from Pennsylvania veterans.

The documentary has been distributed by mail order and via streaming Internet connections. Mr. Hyman said Sinclair was not paying for the right to broadcast it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/po... tner=homepage


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Nature Loves A Copy


Thousands of olive ridley sea turtles arriving at La Escobilla Beach in Oaxaca, Mexico, to lay their eggs.
Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Sea Turtles Defy Oblivion

Olive ridley sea turtles are making a comeback, largely because of Mexican conservation efforts.


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Phone Line Alchemy: Copper Into Fiber
Ken Belson

Rick Montey and his two-worker crew want to present a new image of the local phone company: prompt, friendly and hands-on helpful.

At the home of T. J. Smith here in this Fort Worth suburb, Mr. Montey helped choose an inconspicuous spot to bore a small hole through the side of the house for the fiber optic line that would enable Mr. Smith's son to download big computer files quickly for his graphic-design work and let his granddaughter pull video clips off the Internet.

Three hours later, only after the Smiths knew how to use the new system, Mr. Montey and his crew pulled away in their Verizon Communications truck. The family paid nothing for the installation, beyond the $34.95 monthly fee for the high-speed fiber optic service - which they can drop at any time.

The new offering is part of a multibillion-dollar bet by Verizon and the other Bell companies. They are gambling that by going door to door to replace century-old copper wire technology with high-speed fiber optic lines, they can hang onto their most valuable asset: a direct line into the home of each customer.

Verizon and the other regional Bell companies are losing customers by the millions as people drop their old phone lines in favor of cellphones, e-mail and ever cheaper phone services from cable companies.

To battle back, the phone companies are trying to outdo their archrivals, the cable companies, by installing a network of fiber optic lines to reach tens of millions of American homes - lines able to carry not only phone calls but television programming and Internet connections at six times the speed of cable company lines.

In the process, the Bells hope to become a counterweight to cable companies that often operate as monopolies in their specific regions.

"Without fiber, their customer base will evaporate," said Michael Render, president of Render, Vanderslice & Associates, a market research firm in Tulsa, Okla., that tracks fiber optic networks. "The world is changing too rapidly. Building fiber networks is a must-do."

Though the service is available now only in this small town and a few other cities nationally, Verizon expects to make its fiber connections available to a million homes in parts of nine states by the end of the year.

For all the billions of dollars Verizon and the other Bells plan to spend, success is far from assured and failure could be catastrophically expensive. Cable providers, with lines into 73 million homes, are a formidable opponent, particularly with their new Internet phone services. And it is not certain either that the Bells will be able to offer fiber-based services compelling enough to get customers to sign up, or whether future technologies will render all that expensive fiber obsolete.

Still, if the Bells need any reminder of why they need to act now, they have only to look at AT&T. The old Ma Bell spun off the regional Bell companies more than 20 years ago to pursue a seemingly unfettered communications future, but it has fallen on such hard times that this summer AT&T decided to retreat almost entirely from the residential phone market.

Despite the urgency, it will take years, if not decades, to wire every home with fiber. The Bells are starting first in suburbs and new communities, where access is easier. In cities like New York, the Bells are likely to bring fiber only to the basements of multi-story buildings, not all the way to each individual apartment, and then use existing copper lines to bridge the gap.

As the telephone companies embark on this most ambitious rewiring of America since the old Bell System strung copper lines from telephone poles early last century, they know that today's competitive market will not let them approach their job as the regulated monopolists of yore.

They have to keep appointments, rather than expecting consumers to wait home all day for the phone truck to drive up. They no longer mail customers Internet-access gear and expect them to figure out how to install it, as the Bells have often done in recent years with their high-speed D.S.L. service. And in this hotly competitive era, they are not charging an installation fee - even though the job, in equipment and labor, can easily cost $1,000 or more a home.

"I've never thought of myself as a salesman," said Mr. Montey, a 25-year Verizon veteran, "It's the biggest challenge in my career."

Within weeks of AT&T's decision to back away from the household market, Verizon, the biggest Bell company, began offering its first residential fiber service to customers here in Keller, a town of 30,000 people 15 miles north of Fort Worth. From April to August, Verizon contractors dug up Keller's neatly laid streets and buried fiber optic cables that connect to the Verizon central switching station in town.

Customers like Jim and Margaret Archer are the types of Keller residents that give Verizon hope. The Archers struggled for years to send e-mail and search the Web with their pokey Internet connection through a dial-up modem and a regular phone line. Their house was too far from Verizon's central switching office to get a faster digital subscriber line.

So when Verizon began burying fiber cable in their neighborhood, the Archers jumped to order the service. "Now we've got the good stuff," said Mrs. Archer, 61, a part- time paralegal. Next year, they hope to dump their satellite dish when Verizon begins selling TV programming via the fiber network to compete with the local cable TV provider.

Fiber, which carries digital information as pulses of light rather than electric current, is not new. For years, phone carriers have been laying fiber between their municipal switching stations, on long-distance routes and across oceans. But only now are the regional Bell companies, having lost 16.3 percent of their local-line customers in just the last four years, laying fiber to residences.

Nationwide, only 146,500 homes have been connected to fiber, said Mr. Render, the market researcher. That number is up from 64,700 homes in September 2003, Mr. Render said.

The numbers should continue growing. Verizon plans to spend $3 billion to offer fiber service to three million homes nationally by the end of 2005. SBC, dominant in the Southwest and the Midwest, and BellSouth, big in the Southeast, have also been installing fiber to homes in newly built neighborhoods in their regions. In older areas, they are taking fiber to switching stations or to the curb, and relying on old copper lines to reach the house, a strategy that may reduce connection speeds.

To build a nationwide fiber network comparable to the cable industry's, the Bells would have to spend at least $100 billion, or $1,000 a home, experts say. But so far, the companies have committed themselves to spending only about $10 billion, before determining whether further outlays make sense. And even that amount has raised alarm bells on Wall Street, where investors remain wary of costly projects.

Still, the experience of running fiber cable past every home in Keller and selling services to consumers has given Verizon a taste of what may follow. Early indications are that customers like the price: as little as $34.95 for one of the fastest Internet lines, a price comparable to what cable companies charge for considerably slower connections.

Getting the service to consumers is another matter. In Texas and other states with flat expanses, workers typically bury the fiber using boring machines that often lay the lines near the older copper cables. In places where the terrain is hilly or rocky, lines are strung from poles, a faster, cheaper process, although one that leaves the fiber line susceptible to storms.

After a customer puts in an order, Verizon sends a crew to connect the main fiber line to the side of the customer's home. Then another installation crew, like the one led by Mr. Montey, connects the fiber to equipment inside and outside the house.

This is a new kind of work for Mr. Montey. For decades, phone companies have operated as stodgy utilities, with little need to improve customer service. With fiber, they have to turn themselves into retailers. Phone workers, accustomed to splicing lines and hanging from phone poles, are now spending hours teaching customers about their broadband connections, even becoming PC advisers because so many home computers are riddled with viruses.

The company said it was too early to say how many homes in Keller had subscribed to the service, although it said it had received up to 80 orders a day.

Verizon is now laying fiber in Dallas County, Tex.; Huntington Beach, Calif.; Tampa, Fla.; and in parts of six other states. The company has not announced the additional six states, but said most are in the Northeast. Analysts have said the list includes New York and New Jersey.

Because it has been swallowing the installation costs, Verizon is eager to use the fiber to start selling television programming, which analysts say will be comparable in price to many basic cable packages. To do so, Verizon and the other phone companies are having to negotiate contracts with networks, buy the equivalent of cable TV franchises from municipalities and sell advertising to fill their air time.

Despite its high installation costs, fiber could be a money-saver in the long run. Unlike copper cables, glass fibers do not rust, and require less electricity and maintenance. By 2008, Verizon's fiber network could save the company about $1 billion annually in operating costs, according to analysts.

SBC, which is running fiber cable only to newly built homes and neighborhood switching stops in older areas, will get only 70 percent of the savings that Verizon's network is expected to achieve, but it will spend only half as much time and money on the project, according to Ernie Carey, the chief of SBC's $6 billion fiber installation project.

The continued reliance on copper for the final link to the homes of consumers makes sense to some experts, who say improvements in software compression and Internet connection technology make to-the-home fiber unnecessary. They point to companies in Japan and South Korea that are already selling high-speed Internet connections and video over copper networks.

No matter how much fiber they bury, the Bells cannot be complacent because the cable companies will continue to market their own services.

"The cable guys are not going to wait three or four years" for the Bell companies to catch up, said Jeffrey Halpern, an industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. "The Bells need a revolutionary change, not an evolutionary change."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/te...y/11fiber.html


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Movie industry pressure

France May Allow Cell Phone Jammers

PARIS (AP) -- Watch a movie or make a mobile phone call. Soon, in France, you might not be able to do both at once.

The government's industry minister has approved a decision to let cinemas, concert halls and theaters install cell phone jammers -- on condition that emergency calls can still get through, officials said Monday.

Jean Labbe, president of the National Federation of French Cinemas, said the measure was a response to ``a long-standing request'' from cinemas of all sizes.

Cinemas have invested heavily to improve comfort, and ``the authorization of jammers is the cherry on the cake,'' he told France Info radio.

Industry Minister Patrick Devedjian gave the go-ahead Friday, backing a decision by the Telecommunications Regulation Authority to allow jammers, his ministry said in a statement.

Devedjian specified however that emergency calls and calls made outside theaters and other performance spaces must not be affected.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/inte...g-Mobiles.html


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Spyware Cases Filed
AP

The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday filed the first case in the country against software companies accused of infecting computers with intrusive "spyware" and then trying to sell people the solution.

The commission accused the companies of infecting computers with unsolicited software, showering computer screens with pop-up ads and then trying to get consumers to pay $30 to fix it. It is seeking an injunction to get the companies, owned by the same person, to stop and to offer restitution to consumers.

The agency requested a temporary restraining order from the Federal District Court for New Hampshire against Seismic Entertainment Productions, Smartbot.Net and Sanford Wallace.

This week, the House passed two bills that would outlaw spyware.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/technology/08spy.html


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Taking a SpotCode to a Destination

The Intel lab in Cambridge, England, has been working on applications for a technology it calls SpotCodes, which can be used like bar codes to provide information or instructions to suitably equipped camera cellphones. Bango, a Cambridge-based company working on ways to commercialize SpotCodes, provided this sample, which works with camera phones using the Symbian Series 60 operating system.

Most of the new systems work on the same basic principle: software converts a camera phone's built-in lens into a scanner, similar to a bar-code reader's. When the lens is pointed at a recognizable symbol, the phone's display becomes a real-time viewfinder. In the case of SpotCodes, for example, once the lens detects the symbol, red cross hairs appear. Clicking then initiates a given service, like loading a Web page or transmitting an e-mail address.

A list of compatible phones and instructions for downloading the necessary software to your phone are at bango.net/spot.

Once a phone is equipped, go to the Bango Spot reader icon on the phone's menu page. Pointing to the code shown here and pressing any button when prompted should direct the phone's browser to www.nytimes.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/te...iosk-side.html


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CDs To Come In Three Classes
Hannah Cleaver

German music fans no longer willing to pay full price for CDs which they can copy or download for practically nothing are being wooed back to the shops with a three-class system of CD pricing.

Music and media giant Bertelsmann, or BMG, is next month launching the scheme while Sony is thought to be preparing its own version for the autumn.

Under the system, customers will have the option of buying a basic version of a new release for €9.99 - it will come without a cover, simply with the information printed on the disc, much like a home-burned one.

The "normal" version, with full cover and notes, will cost €12.99, down from the current average price of €16.99 and there will also be a luxury, often limited, edition priced at €17.99 that will have a DVD component and remixes as extras.

Despite the immense interest in the digital download systems such as iTunes, the music industry is in a transitional phase during which it needs to keep customers buying music - and this means CDs - rather than losing them to illegal or free sources.

Maarten Steinkamp, head of BMG Germany, says that although it has sold 20 times more digital music than expected, the online music business is still very much in its infancy and nothing is being taken for granted.

"The online business is developing splendidly… [but] everything we earn from downloads is a bonus," he told German magazine Der Spiegel.

The dire state of the compact disc market is illustrated by German figures for the week before last, which show approximately 330,000 online songs being sold, against just 312,000 single CDs.

Meanwhile, annual sales have dropped from 52m CD singles in Germany in 1997 to 24m last year while the album CD market has shrunk from sales of 197m in 1997 to just 134m last year.

"We must finally become customer friendly and offer music fans a broad choice. The music industry has sat motionless on its backside for far too long," said Mr Steinkamp. "The cheap version will be similar to a self- burned CD, with no cover and just the title printed directly on to the disc.

"That is our anti-pirate CD."

He hopes to increase CD sales by a quarter with the new strategy, although says that he is prepared to take a risk on profits. "We are in no way certain of success," he said.

"We might even lose money. But we have to finely tailor what we offer to the demand and try something new."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/mai...06/ixcity.html


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Indymedia to U.S., U.K., Swiss and Italian Authorities: "Hands Off Our Websites"

Evidence is beginning to mount that the authorities of at least four countries (Switzerland, Italy, U.K. and U.S.A.) are involved in last week's seizure of two of Indymedia's servers that brought down more than 20 of the Indymedia network's web sites and several internet radio streams. Indymedia has yet to receive any official statement or information about what the order entailed or why it was issued.

An FBI spokesperson, Joe Parris, confirmed to Agence France-Presse that the FBI issued a subpoena to the provider who hosted the Indymedia servers in the U.K., but that it was "on behalf of a third country." (1) Daniel Zapelli, senior federal prosecutor for Geneva (Switzerland), confirmed that he has opened a criminal investigation into Indymedia coverage of the 2003 G8 Summit in Evian. (2) Zapelli will provide details of that investigation at a press conference on Tuesday.

Federal prosecutor of Bologna (Italy) Marina Plazzi stated that she is investigating Italy Indymedia because it may "support terrorism." (3) Plazzi says she will provide more information on Thursday, October 14th.

Meanwhile international journalist associations have come forward in support of Indymedia. "We have witnessed an intolerable and intrusive international police operation against a network specialising in independent journalism," said Aidan White IFJ General Secretary. (4)

Indymedia is consulting with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on how to retrieve its servers and prevent further government attacks on free speech. "EFF is deeply concerned about the grave implications of this seizure for free speech and privacy, and we are exploring all avenues to hold the government accountable for this improper and unconstitutional silencing of independent media.," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. (5)

As of Monday, October 11, five of the downed websites have been restored, including Brasil, Euskal Herria, Poland, UK and Nice. Indymedia volunteers are working around the clock to restore the remaining sites, however at least four of them - Uruguay, Italy, Western Massachusetts and Nantes - have suffered data loss as a result of the governments' action.

"This FBI operation gives us even more reason to continue with what we have been doing for several years," says an activist from Italy Indymedia.

"Uruguay has a long history of media repression. We don't have the money to pay for web hosting, and so we rely on the solidarity of other countries. Actions like the seizure of the servers make the whole world insecure for free media," says Libertinus, an Indymedia volunteer from Uruguay, one of many Indymedia web sites that was caught in the FBI actions as a bystander. "Uruguay's national elections will take place on October 31st. It's a bad time for this to happen."
http://www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml


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Finnish Software Eliminates Dangers Of The Internet

A Finnish company has launched a product that can be used to prevent children and young people from visiting adult pages on the Internet.

In addition to pages in Finnish, the Block! software of the company Hitback.fi Oy also identifies offensive European pages. ”The problem with other than Finnish software is that it blocks access to, e.g., the pages of the Finnish municipality Pornainen or the OKO Bank of Pornainen,” states Mr Kimmo Junttila, the company’s managing director.

The software is aimed at companies whose employees might surf illegal web sites during their working hours. In addition to this, Block! identifies 143 different Peer-to-Peer networks, i.e. file sharing programs, which can easily be blocked. According to Hitback.fi Oy, P2P networks operated by a few users have become a problem on many housing companies’ shared broadband connections.

Tekes, the National Technology Agency of Finland, has provided funding for the company’s product development.
http://www.innovations-report.com/ht...ort-34710.html

[JackSpratts]

Escalation In P2P War
Barry Willis

The entertainment industry is going the last mile in its war against file sharing. On Friday, October 8, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) appealed to the US Supreme Court to overturn a lower court's ruling earlier this year that peer-to-peer (P2P) file-trading networks can't be held liable for copyright infringement.

Hoping to have the case heard in the current session, the plaintiffs filed a 46-page petition seeking the reversal of a finding by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals that affirmed a previous ruling by a lower court that peer-to-peer networks Grokster and StreamCast Networks, operator of the Morpheus service, could not be held responsible for copyright violations by users of their services. In the early 1980s, Walt Disney Company and its allies pursued Sony Corporation all the way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to suppress the burgeoning market for videocassette recorders. As in the fight against P2Ps, the plaintiffs charged that making and marketing the devices enabled copyright violations.

The Court ruled against Disney in 1984, after the defendants successfully argued that there were many valid uses for VCRs. The technology that the industry fought so hard to suppress became one of its dominant revenue streams. Video rentals and sales now account for 60% of Hollywood's revenue, according to industry analysts. In a similar vein, authors of the MGM v. Grokster appeals court ruling astutely noted, "New technologies are always disruptive to old markets."

At the core of the lower court's ruling in favor of P2Ps was the premise that there are many legitimate uses for file sharing, and simply because a technology can be used to circumvent the law doesn't mean it should be illegal. Telephone companies were long ago exonerated from responsibility for plans that criminals make using their services. The entertainment industry has consistently maintained that P2Ps are fundamentally different, created intentionally to help people violate copyrights. Businesses such as Grokster and StreamCast were created "to avoid all legal liability with the full knowledge that over 90% of the material traversing their applications belongs to someone else," stated MPAA president and CEO Dan Glickman.

The entertainment industry's petition accuses the defendants of inflicting "catastrophic, multibillion-dollar harm" on their businesses. The Supreme Court has a month to decide if it will hear the case. Passing over it would let the appeals court ruling stand.

Elsewhere on the copyright front, the so-called "Induce Act" sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) died in committee after representatives of the tech sector and the entertainment industry failed to reach agreement on the proper response to digital copyright violations. Hatch's controversial bill would have increased the potential punishment for large-scale file sharing to three years in prison. At present, punishments for convicted violators are limited to fines.

To date, the RIAA has issued approximately 5000 subpoenas against suspected file-sharers in the US, and has wrung payments out of many who decided it was cheaper to settle than to proceed to court. In early October, the music industry expanded its legal campaign in Europe, where the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) launched lawsuits against 459 alleged copyright violators in six European countries: Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

The move brings the number of subpoenas that have been issued against European music fans to approximately 650, and is the first time that such suits have been brought in France and Britain. The UK cases are being pursued in civil courts, stated an announcement on the BPI website. Worldwide, pirated music was a $4.5 billion business last year, with 1.1 billion unauthorized discs sold, according to figures published by the IFPI.
http://www.stereophile.com/news/101104copyright/


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Slyck Questions BPI
Michael Ingram

Since March, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) have been running a media campaign to warn users that if they do not stop file sharing, they will have to face the consequences. File sharing has since continued unabated.

"We have resisted legal action as long as we could," says Jamieson, BPI chairman. "We have done everything we can to raise awareness of this problem. We have encouraged legal services and launched an Official Download Chart. We would be derelict in our duty to protect and promote British music were we not to take action to demonstrate that this activity is illegal and harmful to every aspect of the creative British music industry. We believe we have no alternative other than to enforce our rights through the courts."

Many knew the announcement was coming, but it was no easier to hear.

Slyck contacted Matt Philips, BPI spokesperson, to question the wisdom of the decision to sue file sharers.

Right from the onset, Phillips wanted to make it clear that whichever way it is looked at, stealing is wrong.

“Anyone looking at file sharing can see that it is illegal,” he argued. “The price of downloads is 79p. That is the price of a bottle of coke. Excuses are frankly running thin.”

The reasons for file sharing appeared a good as place as any to start the questions, but only a brief discussion was held. Phillips described the assertion that Data Rights Management (DRM) is only punishment to those using legitimate services as “utter rubbish.” Differing standpoints on the ability of DRM to reduce piracy will prove a sticking point. Philips believes DRM is an effective tool against file sharers, and so argues users should sympathize with the industry’s choice to use it.

A few other questions were asked and answered, but it was a distraction from discovering the value of lawsuits to the BPI and music lovers.

Slyck: Perceptions are that the RIAA has seen a collapse in their public relations, with large news corporations questioning the RIAA’s motives. This is very different to the luxury the BPI have of full media support in the UK.

Further to this, CD prices, and now MP3 prices, are one of the main focuses of people who believe in Rip-Off-Britain.

Are you concerned that lawsuits will lose media support and further damage public relations?

Phillips: The most important thing for us is to raise awareness here. We’re not anti p2p per-se, but we do have a problem with the hundreds of millions of files that are being illegally uploaded to the internet by p2p users for others to steal. We don’t expect everyone to understand what a record company does, but we need to protect the investment our members make in new music. That’s our priority.

As for the price of music, Phillips maintained that higher prices are the cost of living in the UK, not the fault of the BPI. He illustrated by pointing to higher transport costs, although he too is unhappy that the Paris Metro costs less than the London Underground. He did not comment specifically on consumer groups asking for an enquiry to discover if iTunes charging above the odds in the UK is against EU regulations.

Slyck: The BPI recently made a press release, which congratulated the music industry on putting out some high quality artists and making CDs better value for money. The net result was increased sales. BMG have also introduced cheaper CDs and all but admitted that lagging CD sales are a self inflicted problem

Mr. Steinkamp, head of BMG Germany said, “We must become customer friendly and offer music fans a broad choice. The music industry has sat motionless on its backside for far too long…. The cheap version [of the CDs] will be similar to a self- burned CD, with no cover and just the title printed directly on to the disk. That is our anti-pirate CD.”

Should the industry not continue to look inward, rather than lashing out at consumers who use file sharing networks?

Phillips: Don’t forget that the music industry is not a content delivery service. It is a business. Consumers are people who buy things, not people who steal things and then share them with millions of others. It is our role to continue creating music for people to buy; technology provides us with the opportunity to do that better than ever before, and the 30 legal sites show we are using it. What we seek to stop is people uploading files to the internet without permission. It’s illegal. We’ve put legal alternatives in place. We’ve warned repeatedly that we’ll sue if people don’t stop – but clearly that’s not been enough.

Slyck: Lawsuits have yet to see any success in America. IT Innovations and Concepts have reported a continuing rise in P2P traffic. File sharers have merely moved to other areas to share files, leaving only people who do not know any better to get sued.

Why would lawsuits in the UK be any more successful?

Phillips: You’re right that p2p traffic is up. But the number of infringing music files on p2p networks fell from 1 billion in June 2003 to 700 million in June 2004; while broadband penetration has been increasing. In other words, much of this increasing p2p traffic is porn, movies and god knows what else. What’s more, awareness of the illegality is a lot higher; 68% of UK consumers are now aware that unauthorized file-sharing is illegal. Given that the purpose of litigation was to a) raise awareness and b) reduce the number of files being uploaded, you’re wrong to say that lawsuits have not worked.

Philips denied that usage figures were taken directly from Kazaa Media Desktop, which are produced as an estimate, and only for the FastTrack network.

Slyck: Evidence from a complex and in depth study by California and Harvard Universities shows that file sharing does not affect CD sales. Although the BPI and CRIA have published counteracting evidence, few people would disagree the Harvard study was superior in quality. Would it not be prudent to wait and make sure that we are not running into a bloodier version of the UK Betamax equivalent, which saw the BPI attempt to ban the Amstrad tape-to-tape recorder, contending it would destroy the industry?

Phillips: Firstly the “Harvard Study”, as it’s become known, was so complex that the analysts misinterpreted what their own flawed analysis was telling them. Though widely reported, and held up by file-sharing apologists as “the truth”, this report was subsequently dismissed in its academic peer review, which concluded that the research “could at best be taken to be inconclusive”.

What is true, however, is that respected research outfits such as Forrester, TNS, Enders, Ipsos-Reid, Inform, Edison and Jupiter have all demonstrated that any promotional effects of illegal file-sharing are more than outweighed by the vast numbers of people that simply don’t buy music anymore.

The results of the peer review can be seen here

Despite the claims by Philips that suing is the right course of action, it is difficult to imagine a mass exodus from file sharing to paid services.

However, the BPI is unwilling to wait for online services to increase in popularity as they reap the rewards of the press coverage, and the content available improves in both quantity and quality.

RISK

If all files sharers were equally at risk, according to statistics from the BPI press release, the chance of getting caught is 0.0004%.

However, there also needs to be consideration that the only targets are Gnutella, Fasttrack and The WinMX Peer Network. If you are using any of these, you are running a fractionally higher risk.

However, not all file sharers on these networks are equal. Philips compares the chances of getting caught like those of getting fined for speeding. File sharing on any of the targeted networks is akin to traveling on the motorway, which has a 70mph speed limit. A commuter traveling at 80mph has a very low chance of being pulled over, if any. In comparison, the police would not hesitate to issue a fine to anyone caught traveling at 100mph.

Likewise, the BPI is targeting those who are offering a vast amount of copyright material for download. The less offered, the less chance of receiving a lawsuit, but there is no trigger point. When asked if 30 files could trigger a lawsuit, Philips compared the question to asking a policeman if driving at 80mph is acceptable, and so had to respond that it is not.

As a result of speed enforcement, speeding is minimized rather than eliminated. The BPI plans the same result. This is to stop users offering excessive amounts of material, rather than to stop file sharing completely.

To discover the number of infringing files being shared, it is highly likely that the industry will be using the built in search functions on the file sharing software, which can be used to browse through all the files a particular user is sharing.

However, the various Kazaa Lite clients do not allowing browsing of shared folders. Instead, users have to search for a specific term to find if a user has any files which match. To discover if a user is a “prolific sharer,” the industry would need to check the response of thousands of queries. This would be wasteful considering the ease of “find more” and catching those using Kazaa Media Desktop.

Those using WinMX do not have so much choice.

When questioned if this theory has any basis, Phillips simply replied, “You can’t hide.”

With an array of networks and tools, it is quite clear that educated file sharers can hide. It is likely that only a small level of protection is required, such as hiding the shared folder from general queries, or using IP blocking software. For more security, users can change networks. In the longer term, this may be to anonymising networks.

The large networks are cherry trees of uneducated users who are easy to target. Nothing more is required to attract media attention and scare file sharers.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=581


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Subpoenaing students is crazy

Uni Prof Says Lawsuits Won't Solve RIAA Problems
Justin Boulmay

A professor at Appalachian State University said upcoming lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are not the way for the music industry to solve its problems with online file sharing.

Dr. Donald L. Amoroso, department chair for information technology and operations management, said subpoenaing students is crazy, and the music industry needs to find a way to adjust to the idea of file sharing.

The RIAA announced last week it would issue subpoenas to the university for the names of three users that supposedly downloaded copyrighted material. More subpoenas could be forthcoming, according to an Oct. 1 letter from the RIAA to Chancellor Kenneth E. Peacock.

Amoroso said the industry is already changing.

“This whole industry’s in flux. The music industry, they don’t know what they want to be,” Amoroso said.

One of the changes has been the consumers’ attitude.

“People don’t want to purchase a packaged CD anymore,” Amoroso said. “Young students are saying they don’t want to buy like that.”

Also changing is the way artists distribute themselves. Instead of going through a record label to reach their fan base, musicians and groups are distributing MP3’s of their music over the Internet.

This strategy has helped make bands such as Linkin Park so popular, Amoroso said. The band put their works online before their first album, “Hybrid Theory,” hit stores.

“Almost the whole thing went platinum immediately,” Amoroso said. “A lot of bands follow that now.”

The industry risks becoming irrelevant if it does not realize that file sharing won’t go away, Amoroso said.

“As long as the digitization of music is high quality, then this is here to stay,” he said.

Amoroso said the opportunity for people to share files emerged almost ten years ago.

“The Internet, as we know it today, is only 10 years old,” Amoroso said. “It only came into effect in 1995, 1996, when the infrastructure upgraded, when computer processing speed became faster, when wireless came in recently in the last five years or so.”

Before peer-to-peer (P2P) programs emerged, files could be shared using an operating system (OS) and a file transfer protocol (FTP). A user could get a file from another computer without becoming part of a server.

P2P programs such as Napster and Kazaa Media Desktop put users on a server where everyone could see what files everyone else had on their computers. Even if someone downloaded the program but did not use it, they could still be seen on the server and be liable for a lawsuit, Amoroso said.

The RIAA identifies certain users when they search the server for particular songs.

Associate Professor Dr. Scott Schneberger said there is no central registry now for P2P programs. Instead, when a user makes a request for a certain file, six connections are made with other users’ computers to see if that file is available.

If it’s not found, those six computers make connections with six other computers until the file is found, Schneberger said.

Amoroso said more of the same can be expected in the future, not only for music but also for concert and event planning, and possibly even DVDs.
http://www.theapp.appstate.edu/archi...0-12/news.html


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Local news

Coincidence Sets Off Storm Over Erotic Work
William Yardley

WEST HARTFORD, Conn., Oct. 11 - Some people saw it as outright censorship when the University of Hartford abruptly removed a painting by Damian Loeb from "The Charged Image," a sexually explicit exhibition of 39 works in a campus gallery.

The university's Hartford Art School quietly took down the work last month after an influential family took offense at the artist's appropriation of a photographic image of three smiling young boys in blazers. In the background, in his blatantly provocative hyperrealis style, Mr. Loeb depicts a young girl performing oral sex on a fourth boy; the 1999 work is titled in part "Three Little Boys" in parentheses, preceded by a description of a sexual act.

It seems that the three boys in blazers, photographed by the artist Tina Barney in 1990 but now grown, are the sons of Scott Harrison Smith, a wealthy local businessman and art collector with links to the school. Neither the show's curator nor the university would confirm that the Smith boys are depicted in the painting or say whether the family played a role in having the painting removed.

But staff and faculty members, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the boys' identity and their links with the university. And Douglas S. Cramer, the collector who lent the works for the show, said the university had informed him that the boys' family was distressed by the painting.

Mr. Smith and his wife, Jerilyn, the boys' parents, have declined to comment. A woman approached by a reporter at the family's secluded home in the wooded ridges of nearby Washington, Conn., demanded that the reporter leave.

Some critics have accused the school of bowing to pressure from a patron and parent. The Hartford Courant, which first reported the removal of the painting, ran a commentary last week by Steven Holmes, a curator at an art center in Hartford, criticizing the university for not explaining its actions more fully. But by every account, from the curator to Mr. Cramer to Mr. Loeb, the painting's removal was less a clear censorship case than it was one of copyright and surprising coincidence.

Several intellectual property lawyers said in interviews that Mr. Loeb's painting might have violated laws by appropriating Ms. Barney's image, and left the university vulnerable to charges of copyright infringement for displaying the image of the boys without permission.

"We were made aware that there was a possible copyright permission issue with this painting," said David Isgur, a spokesman for the university. "With that, it was deemed that the most appropriate action to take was to remove the painting from the exhibit while that issue hung over."

In response to questions, Mr. Isgur said that Mr. Smith once served on the art school's board of corporators, a largely ceremonial role. He has also served on the board of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. In addition to his links to the art school, at least two of the sons, Matthew and Hamilton, attended the University of Hartford last year, according to the 2003-4 directory; both were scheduled to graduate in 2006.

The school would not confirm whether the boys were still students there.

Signs promoting "The Charged Image," which initially included a cropped image of the painting, are found throughout campus. One art school staff member, Matt Weber, an adjunct professor in three-dimensional design, noted that, if any of the boys are on campus, "they probably would have seen themselves on the banner on the way to the library."

Mr. Loeb expressed regret that the family was offended by the image. "I am saddened by the effect it has had on the subjects used in the painting, and I am embarrassed by the inconvenience it has caused the people involved in curating the show," he said.

But he also defended his work. "I do not, however, regret the images I created, or the way in which they were made," he wrote in response to an e-mail query. "When we as a society lose the ability to comment on what we see and to have an opinion on what we are exposed to, then we have all lost what makes us unique on this planet."

Ms. Barney is weighing whether to take legal action against Mr. Loeb for using her work without seeking permission, said her New York dealer, Janet Borden.

"She's mortified," Ms. Borden said in an interview at her gallery in Manhattan. "She feels the trust between her and her sitter has been broken, and she didn't do it."

If the copyright argument wins out, it may well be the first and last public viewing of the painting, which was exhibited for nine days, from Sept. 7 to 16. "The Charged Image" closes on Sunday.

Although lawsuits in this domain are steadily accumulating, several lawyers said that the appropriation of copyrighted images and music for the sake of art or social and political commentary remains evolving legal territory. "We have to ask ourselves, What are we going to do with new forms of art?" said Steven Wilf, a professor of art law and intellectual property law at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

From rap sampling to realist painting, "we've had more and more of these cases," he said, adding: "We know that the line hasn't been properly drawn. How do you know when something's truly transformative?"

Mr. Loeb, who has settled a suit brought against him by a photographer in a similar case, borrowed this depiction from a 1997 book of photographs by Ms. Barney titled "Theater of Manners," in which the image was called "The Boys." Ms. Barney, who has made a career of photographing quasi-candid family scenes, often of what appear to be affluent New Englanders, took the photograph of the young Smiths - Hamilton, Patrick and Matthew - in a garden in Watch Hill, R.I., in 1990.

In 1999 Mr. Loeb, who was born in New Haven, was preparing to exhibit his paintings at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York. In his e-mail message, he described the period as emotionally tumultuous, a time when he was confronting feelings rooted in worries for his young daughter, with whom he had lost contact for several years.

"I felt that the images used for the painting were particularly appropriate as the boys looked like the kids I grew up with in Connecticut and they looked like I did when I was their age," Mr. Loeb wrote.

He would not identify his source for the image of oral sex. "That is probably not a question that would be wise for me to answer at this point," he wrote.The painting ultimately was not included in the show at the Mary Boone Gallery, he said. ."

At about the same time, Mr. Cramer, a television producer and avid collector of paintings by artists ranging from Roy Lichtenstein to Ellsworth Kelly to Jasper Johns, was becoming interested in the sexually confrontational figurative art of the 1980's and 1990's.

After losing the chance to buy a different painting by Mr. Loeb, he visited his studio and saw the painting that included the three boys.

"I thought it was very well painted," Mr. Cramer, who produced "The Love Boat" d several other shows, said in a phone interview. He said he was struck by the work's "social and sexual commentary."

"I knew Damian worked in appropriated images," he said. "I didn't ask, you know, what the image was. Would you ask Jasper Johns which flag he worked from?"

Mr. Cramer, 73, lives in Roxbury, Conn., less than five miles from the Smiths. He said he did not know the boys or their parents.

"I'd love to get to the kids," Mr. Cramer said of the controversy. "I'd love to somehow cut through the fodder and ask the kids how they really feel about it."

Mr. Cramer and Ms. Borden, the gallery owner who represents Ms. Barney, the photographer, said they did not think the Smiths knew the painting by Mr. Loeb existed before it was exhibited at the art school.

Zina Davis, director of the Joseloff Gallery at the art school, said she approached Mr. Cramer about creating an exhibition from his collection of roughly 600 works. The result, "The Charged Image," was intended to "create a dialogue for discussion" about how artists portray the body and sexual subjects, she said.

"It never occurred to me to push the limits of the public domain," Ms. Davis said.

She added that those who had cried censorship were missing the point and that the issue was strictly whether the painting violated copyright law. "For us," she said, "it's not a freedom-of-expression issue."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/ar...gn/12loeb.html


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Virgin to Unveil Portable Music Player
AP

The consumer electronics arm of the Virgin Group is introducing a new 5-gigabyte hard-disk portable music player, bringing a powerful brand name in music to the increasingly crowded product space.

Virgin Electronics hopes its slim Virgin Player, which debuts Tuesday and is smaller than a deck of cards, will rise as a lead competitor to Apple Computer Inc.'s wildly popular iPod players. Apple dominates the portable player market that is filled also with choices from Rio Audio, Sony Corp., Samsung Electronics, and Creative Labs Inc., among others.

But few of the rivals have introduced a direct challenge to the iPod Mini model, which has a 4-gigabyte capacity. And that's the segment San Jose-based Virgin Electronics is pursuing -- people who may want to tote about 1,000 songs in their pocketable devices but don't necessarily need the whopping 20-gigabyte-or-more capacity of audio players offered by Apple, Sony, Samsung and others.

``No one else has the same sort of brand energy that Apple or Virgin has. Plus, our heritage is music,'' said Greg Woock, chief executive of Virgin Electronics. ``Apple is dominating, yes, but the market share that it has today is not going to last.''

The Virgin Player has 20 percent more storage capacity than the iPod Mini. It is slightly larger but is a half-ounce lighter at 3.1 ounces. Virgin claims it has eight hours of continuous playback time on its rechargeable lithium ion battery -- the same as the iPod Mini.

The player will be available for $249 at the end of October.

Unlike the iPod, the Virgin Player includes an FM tuner. But it has another notable difference: while the Virgin Player is fully integrated with its sister online music store, Virgin Digital, it also plays tunes purchased from other online music services that use the Windows Media Audio or MP3 formats.

That's a more agnostic approach compared to Apple's iPod, which works with downloaded songs only from the Apple iTunes Music Store in the Advanced Audio Coding format or songs ripped from CDs in the MP3 format.

Virgin also sides with the set of music providers, such as Napster and RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody, which believe online subscription services will one day become more lucrative than the basic pay-per-download model that Apple helped pioneer.

The Virgin Player supports Microsoft Corp.'s new copy-protection technology that allows online music subscribers to listen to vast catalogs of songs on their portable players.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/tech...ic-Player.html


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UCLA File Swappers in Quarantine
Katie Dean

UCLA has developed a new process of identifying and disciplining copyright infringers on peer-to-peer networks, providing schools with another tool to crack down on illegal file sharing.

Jim Davis, the university's associate vice chancellor of information technology, testified last week about the UCLA Quarantine project before the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. The subcommittee called the hearing to get an update on how universities are addressing the piracy problem.

Entertainment and higher-education officials have been working together toward two objectives: to bring low-cost music download services to campuses to give students an alternative to P2P networks, and to develop technological measures to stem the tide of copyright violations occurring over file-trading networks.

UCLA Quarantine focuses on the second issue: The school developed a system that automatically alerts students to copyright violations. Since it debuted in the spring, the system has been successful, according to Davis.

When a person is flagged for a copyright infringement violation by a copyright holder, like a music label or movie studio, their IP address is automatically cut off from all network access except university resources, ending the student's ability to swap files.

Students are able to get themselves out of quarantine quickly by visiting a web page, agreeing to the school's acceptable-use policy and removing the copyright material. After a student takes these steps, their computer is automatically taken out of quarantine, and full network services are restored within a day. The school stores data about the students, who are identified by IP address, in case of a future offense.

Kent Wada, UCLA's director of IT policy, said the school approached the problem as a student-life issue rather than a technology issue.

"We spent a lot of time thinking about what we can automate and what requires human judgment. That first notification for us is a teachable moment," Wada said. "The goal is to try and change behavior. We're not looking at it as a punishment."

Wada said students who receive the notices tend not to repeat the offense. Davis reported there have been no second offenders since Quarantine went into place. But if a student feels he has been mistakenly targeted, he can talk to the dean of students. In case of a repeat offender, the student is also referred to the dean.

The system is in place throughout UCLA's residence halls, which house 7,500 students, or 20 percent of the student population. Those living off-campus use their own internet service providers, so the Quarantine system does not apply.

In developing Quarantine, UCLA worked with Universal Studios, which built its own efficient tool for sending out copyright-infringement notices: the Automated Copyright Notice System, or ACNS. Universal's system sends notices in XML format, as well as a legal document, to make it easier to process the claim.

"That way, ISPs and universities have a standard way to read infringement notices," said Aaron Markham, director of internet anti-piracy for Universal.

Given the massive volume of notices -- Universal sends out 1,000 to 4,000 per day -- the ACNS makes the process smoother. The entertainment companies get a faster response to their complaints, and the universities and ISPs can more effectively enforce their policies, Markham said.

The Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America and its member companies are all using ACNS. Markham said the tool is available for universities and ISPs to use for free.

UCLA isn't the only school with a system in place for curbing P2P. Some have attempted to block access to P2P networks altogether. Last year, the University of Florida unveiled its Icarus project, which automatically disables network access if a person is sharing files.

The University of California at Berkeley has already agreed to launch Quarantine on its campus, and other UC schools will be evaluating the tool as well, according to Abby Lunardini, a spokeswoman for the UC Office of the President. UC is also working to bring affordable online music and movie services to its campuses, and will send out a request for proposals next month.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,65227,00.html


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Fewer People Paying For Music Downloads

Apple Computer's iTunes remains the leader in paid digital music downloads, but the number of paying customers for this sector overall has decreased since April, research firm NPD said yesterday. The New York-based market information company said the number of consumers paying for downloads fell to nearly one million users per month in May, June and July from a peak of 1.3 million in April 2004. NPD said the downturn coincides with the end of promotions and trial price incentives offered by several services. From December 2003 to July 2004, iTunes remained the dominant destination, commanding nearly 70% of music files downloaded legally, while Napster's share for that period was 11%.MusicMatch, RealNetworks and Wal-Mart Stores each reached a 6% share. Napster is a unit of Roxio, while MusicMatch recently agreed to be acquired by Yahoo.

"Our research suggests that at this stage of the business it is not so much about building share as it is about creating demand for paid downloads universally," said Russ Crupnick, VP of the NPD Group. "We have seen that promotion works, but its had a short-term effect so far, which is typical for traditional consumer goods. The trick is in phasing promotions, so that there is a cumulative positive effect on the target market," he said.

Meanwhile, NPD cited no slowdown in the number of households with a member using peer-to-peer (P2P) sites to download music for free, with 6.4 million tallied in July 2004, compared with 5.1 million in August 2003. The numbers rise and fall incrementally month to month.
http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/inte...p?A=HOME&O=FPW


Apple iTunes Remains Dominant in Paid Digital Music Downloads; NPD Also Notes Ancillary Increase in P2P Downloads over the Past Few Months

More and more companies are working to gain a foothold in the paid music download category; however, according to new data released today by The NPD Group, Inc., early entry Apple iTunes continues to dominate this market. Nearly 70 percent of music files downloaded legally between December 2003 and July 2004 were downloaded from iTunes. Napster's share for the same time period was 11 percent, while MusicMatch, RealNetworks and Wal-Mart each reached a six percent share.

The number of consumers paying for downloads reached a peak of 1.3 million in April 2004. Said Crupnick, "over the 18 months since iTunes launched, paid music download services have been hoping for huge increases in paying customers; however, the number actually doing so has declined to about one million users per month." According to NPD, this statistical downturn coincides with the end of promotional periods offered by several of these services, in which consumers were offered trial price incentives.

"Building demand for paid music download services requires even greater investment in consumer promotion, as well as broadening partnerships with traditional music retailers and consumer goods companies," said Crupnick. "We've seen that promotion works, but it's had a short-term effect so far, which is typical for traditional consumer goods. The trick is in phasing promotions, so that there is a cumulative positive effect on the target market."

Over the past twelve months, households with a member using a peer-to-peer (P2P) site to download music for free has ranged from 4.7 million to 6.4 million per month, although NPD has noted generally higher levels since March 2004. The recent rise in P2P usage mirrors an overall increase in various digital music activities.

Compared to the end of 2003, NPD has noted more digital music activity in a number of areas. For example, consumers are more likely to rip music to their computers (9 percent in July versus 7 percent in December) and to burn music to CDs (14 percent versus 10 percent).

"Consumers who have used paid music services tell NPD that they appreciate the ability to conveniently purchase individual songs," Crupnick said. "They also see benefits in quality and security compared to free peer-to-peer (P2P) alternatives."

Methodology Note: NPD MusicWatch Digital information is collected continuously from the PCs of 40,000 NPD online panelists, balanced to represent the online population of PC users. NPDMusicLab Surveys are conducted bi-monthly among a group of approximately 5,000 respondents aged 13 years and older; results are balanced to represent the U.S. population.
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...&newsLang =en


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STATE OF THE ART



Putting Your PC in a Pocket
David Pogue

In the last few years, the biggest breakthroughs in personal computing haven’t had much to do with personal computers. Instead, many of the most exciting and popular inventions have been designed to let you carry a copy of the data that’s on the PC you already have.

What’s an iPod, for example, but a $300 portable hard drive containing a copy of your PC’s music files? What’s a Palm or PocketPC but a $300 data bucket for carrying away a copy of the PC’s calendar and address book? And what’s a BlackBerry but a $400 mirror image of the PC’s e-mail?

Of course, the unstated assumption behind all of these developments is that your pocket isn’t big enough for the computer itself. But for a couple of former Apple laptop designers, that assumption is obsolete.

Thanks to some of the very advances in miniaturization that make hand-held gadgets possible (bright indoor-outdoor screens, two-inch hard drives), these guys have devised an entire Windows XP computer that’s only 4.9 by 3.4 inches and less than an inch thick. They pose an intriguing question: Why would you buy a bunch of gadgets designed to liberate the data from your PC if you could just shove the entire PC into your pocket?

What they’ve come up with is an amazing little 14-ounce computer. It’s called the OQO (pronounced OH-cue-oh), not to be confused with AT&T’s instant-messaging device (Ogo), a wind instrument (oboe) or John Lennon’s widow (Yoko Ono).

The best way to appreciate the OQO’s benefits and tradeoffs is to consider each of its components individually, just as you would when buying any new computer.

KEYBOARD With a gentle push, the screen and body slide halfway apart like the two slices of bread on a jelly sandwich. You’ve just exposed a thumb keyboard. It’s like the one on a BlackBerry, except that this one even has arrow keys, modifier keys (like Ctrl and Alt), and a separate number pad. (Weirdly, though, the number keypad is upside down. That is, the top row includes 1, 2 and 3, cellphone-style, instead of 7, 8 and 9, computer-style.) You can also attach a full-size U.S.B. keyboard when you’re not computing on the run.

MOUSE OQO has dreamed up a bizarre but perfectly workable mouse-replacement solution. Between the letter and number keys sits a pea-sized, immovable circle of stubbly black stuff. Your first instinct might be to scrape it away, assuming that it must be a bit of dried airline food.

Instead, you’re supposed to push against it in the direction you want the arrow cursor to move, much like the little red nubbin on I.B.M. laptop keyboards. To click, you press a button on the OQO keyboard’s left edge. Mousing is now a two-handed operation, but why not? Your non-mouse hand is usually left to twiddle its thumb during PC mousing anyway.

Of course, you can’t very well draw or sketch by pushing against that black textured blob, so the OQO is also equipped with a stylus and a touch screen. (Only a special stylus works on this screen, which prevents accidental clicks but also means you can’t use a retracted pen or a fingernail in a pinch.)

And because neither a mouse-click key nor a stylus is ideal for scrolling through documents, Web pages and lists, the OQO even has a thumbwheel on its bottom edge. With these three input devices, you won’t miss the mouse for an instant. If anything, you’ll wish that your bigger computer had them.

SCREEN The screen is readable both in sunshine and indoors; in fact, a sensor makes it brighten automatically in bright light. The resolution is 800 by 480 pixels, shrunk down to the size of an index card. The result, as you’d imagine, is crisper than crisp.

But the problem isn’t crispness; it’s legibility. Text that appears as 10-point italic on a real PC becomes one-point indecipherable on this screen.

Because pocket electron microscopes are not yet commercially available, you’ll have to rely on software to bail you out. For example, the OQO’s factory-installed Windows desktop theme enlarges the type size of window names and icon labels. You can enlarge any Web page using the View menu in Internet Explorer. And in Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook, pressing Ctrl while turning the thumb wheel neatly enlarges or shrinks the text of whatever document is on the screen.

But in dialog boxes, menu commands and error messages, the type is just tiny, and that’s that. It’s about the size of the fine print on a consumer-electronics rebate form.

GUTS There’s no room for the usual cooling system (fan, ventilation holes, chimney effect), which rules out processors like the lava-hot Pentium. What saves the day is a cool-running one-gigahertz Transmeta chip.

This processor isn’t what you’d call blazingly fast; dictation software, video editing and 3-D shoot-’em-up games are pretty much out of the question. But there’s plenty of speed for any kind of Internet activity (Web, e-mail, and so on), graphic design, music and video playback, Microsoft Office, databases, less action-intense games, and so on.

Memory-hungry programs like Photoshop aren’t very usable, either, because the OQO has only 256 non-expandable megabytes of memory. The hard drive isn’t what you’d call capacious, either: 20 gigabytes is all you get.

Of course, most real-world new PC’s have at least twice that amount of memory and disk space. Clearly, OQO hopes that you’ll think, “Wow, this little guy is a heck of a lot more powerful than any palmtop,” and not “Jeez Louise, the Dell I had in sixth grade had more horsepower than this puppy.”

EXPANSION The OQO’s edges offer a microphone, a headphone jack, a FireWire connector (for attaching hard drives and camcorders) and a U.S.B. port (version 1.1, alas, not the faster 2.0 type). Better yet, it’s a wireless powerhouse; it contains both a WiFi antenna (for connecting to wireless networks) and a Bluetooth transmitter (for dialing a Bluetooth cellphone, exchanging files with laptops and palmtops and so on). Both wireless features work superbly.

When you’re back at the office, you can slip the OQO into its accompanying dock, whose cable accommodates a full-size monitor (up to 1280 by 1024 resolution), another U.S.B. and FireWire jack, an Ethernet connector for high-speed networking, and an audio output. The idea, of course, is that you can leave your printer, scanner, keyboard, mouse, monitor and network cable permanently attached to the dock, so that when you’re not out and about, the OQO is a no-compromise (well, low-compromise) everyday PC.

You don’t even have to shut down the OQO or put it to sleep first — you just slip it into the dock and watch with satisfaction as your desktop monitor blinks to life. That bit of elegance saves you a lot of time and hassle (and reminds you of the creators’ Apple heritage).

THE DRIVE The OQO has no built-in CD or DVD drive. Barring an amendment to the laws of physics, there would be no way to fit one.

Here, at last, is the OQO’s Achilles’ heel. In fact, it’s probably Achilles’ entire leg up to just above the knee. How the heck are you supposed to install commercial software or watch DVD’s without a drive?

The company has no suggestions except to buy an external U.S.B. or FireWire drive, which will set you back about $75.

THE UPSHOT OQO the company has big plans for OQO the computer. It claims to have generated wide interest in industries like insurance, field sales, public safety, manufacturing and health care. For example, doctors and nurses could call up patient records at home, on the road or, over a wireless network, anywhere in the hospital.

But if you can get over the lack of a CD drive, there’s a lot to be said for the OQO even for individuals. When your digital camera’s memory card gets full, no worries; just offload the photos to the PC in your purse or pocket and keep shooting. You don’t have to transfer your videos from your PC to one of those $500 video players for your train ride, because you’ll have the PC itself with you. And forget about printing out your Mapquest driving directions or your Travelocity travel itinerary from your PC. Why bother, when you can open the original electronic document at any time?

OQO’s claim that you could use the OQO as your sole computer is a tad far-fetched; its limited memory, speed and storage would probably put a crimp in your computing style. It’s not cheap, either, although it’s in line with laptop prices: $1,900 with Windows XP Home Edition installed, $2,000 for XP Professional. And the battery life is disappointing: about 2.5 hours per charge. At least the battery is removable, so you can swap in a fully charged spare.

Otherwise, though, OQO is the most elegant, versatile, solidly build miniature PC possible with current technology. Its creators have blown the concept of the digital hub to smithereens, and given whole new meaning to the term pocket PC.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/te...CND-STATE.html


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Software Piracy Swoop Nets $2.2m
Alorie Gilbert

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) - a trade group supported by Apple, Intuit, Microsoft and about 20 others - has collected $2.2m in out-of-court settlements in its annual software piracy sweep.

The group targets companies that violate software licensing and copyright rules. The BSA claims that 22 per cent of all commercial software licences used in the US alone have not been paid for, costing the industry more than $6.5bn annually.

The group's latest piracy sweep led to settlements with 25 companies. The BSA plans to use the proceeds to fund educational initiatives, such as its campaign to discourage kids from using peer-to-peer networks to swap software, games, music and other copyrighted material.
http://software.silicon.com/applicat...9124938,00.htm


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Leader: File-Sharing Suits Out Of Tune With Music Market

File-sharing is illegal. Musicians know that, record labels know that and file-sharers are more than well aware of that. So the news today that industry body The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is suing 28 file-sharers comes as no surprise.

While the rights and wrongs are pretty clear-cut in the law's eyes – it's illegal; if you do it, you're likely to get into trouble – the BPI's policy seems a little confused.

Unlike its US equivalent, the RIAA, the BPI has gone for suing uploaders rather than downloaders to "cut the problem off at its source". It leaves a huge swathe of downloaders operating in safety and the thought of 28 out of the whole uploading community being sued isn't exactly going to give many people sleepless nights.

At least the RIAA tried to hit big – most recently, they filed suits against more than 700 file-sharers in one go.

Illegal music uploading is dropping and not in small measures either – according to a BPI spokesman, by hundreds of millions. Is the campaign to get litigious getting results? Possibly. But it's certainly no coincidence that the as the amount of legal downloads has boomed, the number of illegal downloads has fallen significantly.

The BPI, like others before it, makes a decent case for legal action – along the lines of 'if we don't keep the record labels ticking over now, there's no incentive to for them to keep putting money into new bands.'

But when those same record labels are reportedly creaming off a huge proportion of the profits from legal online music and leaving song-shops with a paltry four per cent, it does look a little like shooting yourself in the foot and a lot like 'one rule for us, one rule for them'.

For music fans, legal downloading is a real boon – most don't fancy being on the wrong side of the law and with tracks at 29p and upwards, pocket-money prices are helping to knock the financial incentive that encourages piracy on the head.

But while the mainstream is amply catered for, a lot of smaller record labels and more niche styles are still by and large neglected in the digital realm, giving some downloaders what they see as little alternative but to turn to the song-swappers.

Perhaps the BPI would have better spent its lawyers' fees on nurturing the legal market instead of cracking down on the illegal one.
http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch...9124816,00.htm


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Music Industry Ditches Hardcore Copyright For 'Free Love' Tunes
Jo Best

Stranglehold copyright could be going the way of the dinosaur, it seems, with both the big names and independent organisations moving towards a more open copyright structure.

In a strategy volte-face, Sony has decided to bin its copy-protected CDs in Japan. The CDs only allowed their owners to burn music once to a PC for free – any more copies and there's a charge, paid over the internet.

From 17 November onwards, Sony's CDs will be a bit more liberal but any copy- protected CDs on the market won't be recalled.

The CDs, while theoretically meant to scupper the pirates, weren't popular with the average music fan, as the copy-prevention mechanism stopped the CDs playing in car stereos and other players.

Sony's Japanese copy-protected CDs have been dumped after two years on the market, according to the company, because piracy is no longer a huge worry in the country. Record companies in Europe, however, still seems to be worried about the prospect - Bertelsmann BMG, the world's fifth-largest record label, recently launched CDs in three formats including luxury and no-frills version to deter unauthorised copying.

While Sony is moving away from keeping such a tight rein on its copyright, others would like to see the music world move further.

silicon.com Agenda Setter Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons project is one such group hoping for music without the digital handcuffs.

The project has been up and running in the US and will be coming to the UK as of next month. The not-for-profit foundation has created a simple licence that tunesmiths can use to let others remix, sample or alter their music without having to contact the musician or their record label for approval first.

Creative Commons has been attracting some high-profile friends. The Beeb is in talks with the group over how to license its soon-to-be-released archives and a CD featuring bands including the Beastie Boys and David Byrne will be available with next month's Wired, with all the songs released under the Creative Commons licence.

Stelios Haji-Iannou's soon-to-be-unveiled easyMusic download service is also planning to include a section of "copyleft" music, where song-shoppers can download and distribute music for free, alongside a traditional pay-per-track model.
http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch...9124759,00.htm


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Compliance Laws Helping To Combat Software Piracy
Andy McCue

New compliance and accounting regulations are helping to drive down the number of firms who use unlicensed and counterfeit software, according to Microsoft.

In an interview with silicon.com, Microsoft UK MD and European VP Alistair Baker said the tightening of company audits is forcing businesses to be more accurate and transparent about the software they use.

"Governance is changing the way companies think about software as an asset and how they account for it with auditors," he said. "If somebody has unlicensed software, that is a liability."

Baker said Microsoft has seen an increase in the number of companies asking it to conduct a software audit as a direct response to new accounting requirements.

However, while licensing compliance is getting better at the top, Baker said there is still are still problem at the small and medium-sized business end of the market and with dodgy resellers who do hard-disk loading and sell counterfeit products.

"With enterprise and middle market customers governance requirements are now very tight," he said. "In small business there are millions of customers so therefore there is a higher percentage of piracy."

But Baker argued that new protection measures have helped drive down piracy of Office 2003, particularly in the consumer and small business market.

Research from anti-piracy body the Business Software Alliance in July claimed software piracy is costing UK businesses £860m, with almost a third of software across all organisations being unlicensed.
http://www.silicon.com/research/spec...9124256,00.htm


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The P2P Dilemma - A Problem Without Solution?
AlecWest

Four years before the original Napster client was even born, the music-CD cartel began a policy called MAP (short for minimum advertised pricing). The Federal Trade Commission concluded that this policy should be known by another name ... illegal price-fixing. The FTC claimed this policy ripped off music consumers to the tune of $400,000,000. Unfortunately for the consumer, the Lanham Act only gives the FTC investigative powers ... and they could not mete out any form of punishment for this crime in the criminal court system. In theory, that should have been the job of the Justice Department and Attorney General John Ashcroft who, at the time, must have been busying himself on more important matters ... one would hope.

Still, there was the multi-state antitrust lawsuit in civil court, spearheaded by NY State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer. But again, unfortunately for the consumer, only about one-third of the stolen booty was recovered. This left $256,000,000 in the industry's coffers. In May, 2003, CPAN's Washington Journal program invited two guests to the show ... Gigi Sohn, co- founder of the Public Knowledge advocacy group, and Mitch Glazer, a representative of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). They invited callers to call in their own questions and I was fortunate enough to complete my call. Below is a link (or reference) to a 150k RealVideo file where I ask my question. View the video to see me ask Glazer, "Where's the $256,000,000?" and see Glazer sidestep the question.

A lot of water has passed under many bridges since MAP. Napster was born and quickly became the number-one target of the music industry, claiming that Napster and its users were ripping them off. My favorite analogy of this is that the cartel had been flipping an unfriendly hand gesture toward their consumers for years (MAP). All Napster did was put a tool in the hands of consumers allowing them to flip the same unfriendly hand gesture back in the cartel's direction. And, the file-sharing community has done this in spades. While I admit it's wrong under criminal justice to steal, stealing from a thief who has already stolen from you does invoke a certain poetic justice I can appreciate ... even though I may not agree with it as a proper solution to the problem. But the original Napster client's death was not a solution either.

The death of the original Napster client spawned a plethora of copycat utilities, all of which do not repeat the error they made in tying downloads to a centralized server. And though they're appealing the decision in U.S. District Court that holds peer-to-peer providers harmless, the industry has been forced to mount a series of John/Jane Doe lawsuits targeting people they assume are guilty of ripping them off. Unfortunately for the industry, all this has accomplished for them is to give them a group of "poster boys" or "poster girls" to hold up ... and say to a disbelieving public, "See, we're winning the war against piracy!" Meanwhile, file-sharers have simply gone underground - using encrypted utilities such as Filetopia and the enigmatic EarthStation5 to get what they're looking for. Some have gone even further underground to private networks or alt.binaries USENET newsgroups. And those are only the bigger full-time file-sharers. The "little guys" ... the people who only download a song here and there ... know they're off the radar screen for lawsuits and continue to use Kazaa, eMule, and LimeWire. And so far, with the exception of AllOfMP3.com and other offshore entities, no legal online music entity has offered a service that includes DRM-free lossless downloads at a price people are willing to pay.

So far, a final solution to the problem of file-sharing eludes us. And, I'm not a music-world insider who knows enough about the industry to propose one. But, I do know this. When confronted with a problem, fixing it is best done by going to its source and working from there. And, we all know what that source is. The Justice Department needs to bring the industry into criminal court. The $256,000,000 needs to be recovered as well as punitive damages assessed for the crime. And, the architects of the industry's MAP policy need to be cooling their heels behind bars in a Federal prison. Normally, the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" should apply to those who download music illegally via P2P file-sharing networks. But that phrase assumes the existence of an authority that will provide redress for victims. And so far, that authority has been sitting on its ... laurels. In the absence of that authority, electronic vigilanteism may not be right ... but it is understandable.
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comm...d=6426_0_5_0_C


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Grads Create File Sharing Program
Eduardo E. Santacana

Just one week after its deployment, nearly 127 million computer users have downloaded a new file-sharing program developed by three Harvard alumni while they were undergraduates.

Now available through Morpheus 4.5, NEOnet—created by Gitika Srivastava ’01, Ben B. Wilken ’01 and Francis H.R. Crick ’03—speeds up download time by drastically cutting back the number of computers an individual must search across to locate a particular file.

According to its creators, most file-sharing programs require users to jump across an average of 18 computers to find the file they are looking for. With NEOnet, however, there is a maximum of three jumps for any search.

“[Using NEOnet], any particular computer is actually responsible for keeping a piece of the database,” said Crick, whose grandfather and namesake won the Nobel Prize in 1962 with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for discovering the double helix structure of DNA.

“There is an amount of redundancy between computers so if one computer is down, you still have a complete database,” Crick added.

NEOnet is the product of SKYRIS Networks, a company Wilken and Srivastava created during their senior year at Harvard. Crick joined them a year later.

SKYRIS eventually sold the technology to Streamcast Networks, the parent company of Morpheus, and Crick and Wilken began to work for Morpheus full-time. Srivastava stayed on as head of SKYRIS under Stirling Bridge, which owns Streamcast.

While the creators declined to comment on how much they sold the program for, Srivastava said Don King, the boxing promoter, offered to buy the company in 2002 for millions in order to distribute online boxing videos.

Srivastava said she believes that with their technology, Morpheus will be the most downloaded file-sharing program in the country within a few months.

“We were able to take this technology and send it out in the worst of economic times,” she said. “I was able to get companies offering cash because they believed in it so much.”

When it started, the SKYRIS team was influenced by the explosion of file-sharing programs after Napster’s rise to popularity and the failures of early peer-to-peer programs like Gnutella.

Wilken said that the searches on these file-sharing programs did not span the entire network and had limited downloading speed because they only had a few possible hosts.

“I envisioned a world where there wouldn’t be centralized servers and that was just a few years ago,” Crick said.

Within a few years, the three created their own technology and began marketing it to media distribution companies like Sony and Lycos.

Although SKYRIS was the first to fully develop a radically new approach to file-sharing, the idea for the technology was widespread by 2001.

“We were kicking around these ideas on how to organize a peer-to-peer network and these papers started coming out that were exploring similar ideas,” Wilken said. “It’s interesting that our work was going on parallel to other companies.”

Srivastava, now a tutor in Leverett House, said that she hopes future students will follow in the footsteps of SKYRIS.

“I’m extremely interested in encouraging other students in going into their own line of entrepreneurship and starting their own companies,” she said. “I work with a lot of MIT students doing this, but I haven’t seen a lot of Harvard students doing it.”
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503804


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CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK



Blackface Master Echoes in Hip-Hop
Margo Jefferson

We're still on the boundary between two centuries. Old ways cling to us. New ways entice and threaten. Future generations will watch our struggle: our first experiments with electronic music and video art; our furious efforts to keep up with how language and thinking change.

That's why the innovators at the start of the last century are so interesting. They struggled with all the things we take for granted. Movies still clung to fine art and stage pictures. Victorian language shadowed the terse rhythms and clear imagery of modern writers. Theater's fascination with the speech of blacks and immigrants kept veering from naturalism to caricature.

Vaudeville and musical theater were the popular entertainments. They weren't just talent variety shows, they were ethnic variety shows. There was the Irish comedy of Harrigan and Hart, the "Dutch" or Jewish comedy of Weber and Fields, the "Afro-American" comedy of Williams and Walker. (Afro-American was Walker's term, though he and Williams also used the word "darky." It's an unpalatable word now; black entertainers used it then as hip-hop musicians use "nigga.") Never has black speech been more influential in American or global culture than it is now. Hip-hop is the ruling form. But black rhythms, tones and slang have always been essential to American talk and performance.

The black vaudevillian Bert Williams was one of the early masters. He wasn't just ahead of his time; he's in the vanguard of ours. Theater historians have long acknowledged Williams as a great comic artist. Now we can hear his innovations firsthand, thanks to Archeophone, a company devoted to preserving early popular American music. Archeophone (www.archeophone.com) has issued a complete three-disc set of Williams recordings from the first two decades of the 20th century.

Like so many vaudeville artists, Williams made few film appearances. We might also know his work better if he hadn't spent most of his career performing in blackface. Blackface has become theater's equivalent of the mark of Cain. It's a hard tradition to live with: there's so much cruelty and shame there. But blackface comedy produced some superb artists. Art is always a struggle against limits, and those imposed by others are infuriating. But they can't stop us from enjoying the work itself and learning from it.

Williams entered show business in the 1890's, began recording in 1901 and died in 1922. He was an actor, mime, dancer, singer and songwriter. Born in the Bahamas, he grew up in California. His characters were based on careful study of the blacks, mostly Southern, whom he met as he toured. There was nothing natural about his work: it was a product of craft and respect for his subject. In a 1918 essay on humor for The American Magazine he wrote: "It was not until I was able to see myself as another person that my sense of humor developed. For I do not believe there is any such thing as innate humor. It has to be developed by hard work and study, just as every other human quality."

Onstage he subverted decades of the one-note "ain't Ah a dummy!" jokes that kept fans believing blacks were dummies in real life, too. Offstage he endured threats of violence, discrimination in hotels and restaurants, and professional snubs. (When he joined the Ziegfeld Follies, a number of white stars threatened to quit.) In the words of his friend W. C. Fields, "Bert Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew."

That blend of comedy and grief fueled his performances. The comedy encompassed slapstick, parody and the goofy wordplay. The pathos was bitter, sweet and every note in between.

His version of "Woodman, Woodman Spare That Tree" (an early Irving Berlin song) turns that lachrymose poem into a domestic complaint from a husband who likes to hide from his wife in that sturdy old oak. Williams plays the husband's self-absorption against the poem's inflated emotion. His voice moves from vibrato grandeur to fussing and grumbling. The spoken song "Never Mo' " (which Williams wrote with his friend Alex Rogers) sends up "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. Who can resist the rhyme and meter of that poem? They are both hypnotic and preposterous.

The classic Williams narrator always competes with somebody for top honors in the hard luck category. What better target than Mr. "Once Upon a Midnight Dreary"? So, he declares:

If that old crow with his "Never Mo' "
Had been through what I have,
I'm sure he would quote much more than, 'Never Mo.'
If Crow did know some things I know
That's all he'd say: "Never Mo,' "
And then some Mo'.

Putting anything that smacks of high culture in the mouth of a blackface "Negro" is the oldest trick in the minstrel book. Williams turns the trick around. The poem is the butt of the joke, not the Negro who reduces it to dialect. Williams shows us that Poe's verse is poetic dialect, and beats the master at the gloom and pity game.

Williams's signature song was a bad-luck ballad called "Nobody." He wrote it with Rogers and soon grew sick and tired of having to perform it night after night. But it is a masterpiece. The song begins with the dignified and melancholy, "When life seems full of clouds and rain/ And I am full of nothin' but pain/ Who soothes my thumpin', bumpin' brain?"

"Nobody," he chants mournfully.

Then it heads into absurdity: "When I was in that railroad wreck/ And thought I'd cashed in my last check,/ Who took that engine off my neck?"

"Not a soul," he snaps out crisply.

We call this speech-song, the Germans call it Sprechstimme: call it what you want, but nobody does it better than Williams. His voice moves across bar lines and around the beat. He can stretch a sentence or word out, then break it with percussive exclamations and syllables; imitate a trombone; move up and down octaves as he speaks. But never at the expense of the story he is telling. He never shows off when he takes on the voice of a new character in one of his monologues. The variety and subtlety amaze.

Williams knew all the dimensions of the human voice, how it reveals not only class and ethnicity but our fantasies about them, too. Nor did he ever sacrifice the small truthful details, the pauses and shifts of tone that say everything about an individual character.

If I were a hip-hop musician, I'd be listening very hard. (Hip-hop is the ethnic vaudeville of our day, and it doesn't hesitate to stage minstrel shows, either.) I'd be listening if I were doing solo performance, spoken-word poetry or stand-up comedy. So many voices so many identities and styles: Williams is a perfect artist for our times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/ar...aud.html?8hpib


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5 Arrested For Auctioning Pirated Anime Online

TOYAMA -- Five people have been arrested for selling pirated editions of popular animated movies on the Internet in two separate incidents, prefectural police said.

Arrested for violating the Copyright Law were Masao Takahashi, 50, his son, 28-year-old Miyabi, Okutaro Kojima, 38, his 36-year-old wife, Mie, and his 34-year- old brother, Chotaro.

Takahashi conspired with Miyabi to sell some 4,500 pirated DVDs of a popular animated film, "Doraemon," on an Internet auction site, netting approximately 6.2 million yen, according to investigators.

The elder Takahashi has admitted to the allegations during questioning. "I did it because my family business faced financial crisis," he was quoted as telling investigators.

Kojima conspired with his wife and brother to sell pirated DVD copies of an animated film, "Dragon Ball," on the Internet, netting about 20 million yen, prefectural police said.
http://www12.mainichi.co.jp/news/mdn...anime-0-1.html


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ILN News Letter

South Africa Close To Enacting Tough New Child Porn Laws

South African President Thabo Mbeki this month will sign into law new child pornography measures that government says will have implications for computer technicians, ISPs, and cyber cafés. The amendments will be made to the Film and Publications Act, and will compel all citizens to report anyone involved in the production and selling, or in possession of child pornography. The minimum sentence for anyone found guilty will be increased from five to 10 years.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200410120781.html

Ontario Looks To ISPS In Fight Against Child Pornography

The Ontario Attorney-General has said that his government is prepared to force ISPs to blow the whistle on child pornography sites. The government says it will considering legislative changes, including amendments to privacy legislation, if needed.
http://ontarioisps.notlong.com/


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UKChildren's Hospital May Sue Disney
Graham Jones

An unlikely feud is seeing the film empire that built its name on cartoons for children -- the giant Disney corporation -- at odds with Britain's most famous hospital for sick children.

And it is all over another legendary children's favorite -- Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.

In what the New York Post billed this week as "Sick kids vs. Disney in Peter Pan dust up," Great Ormond Street hospital for children in London is consulting lawyers over a book published by a Disney subsidiary in the United States.

"Peter and the Starcatchers" by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson and published by Disney's Hyperion Books is billed as a prequel to the children's classic, "Peter Pan."

Great Ormond Street was left the royalties to Peter Pan in 1929 by the author, J.M. Barrie -- and million of pounds earned from copyright fees have gone towards treating sick children in Britain ever since.

This weekend sees the UK premiere of a film about Barrie's life, "Finding Neverland" -- starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet and Dustin Hoffman. The hospital will receive royalties from book excerpts portrayed in the film.

But the hospital charity says is getting nothing from "Peter and the Starcatchers" -- which has been on the New York Times best seller lists, has had an extensive author tour and has its own Web site. They say the book has been published without its permission.

A spokesman for the hospital told CNN that Great Ormond Street held the copyright to Peter Pan in the United States until 2023 -- although it runs out in EU countries in 2007 -- and said: "We are considering our options."

Disney, meanwhile, has insisted that Peter Pan is out of copyright in the United States.

"The copyright to the J.M. Barrie stories expired in the U.S. prior to 1998, the effective date of the U.S. Copyright Extension Act, and thus were ineligible for any extension of their term," Disney said in a statement to the Daily Telegraph.

Great Ormond Street argues that it could cost millions which would otherwise go towards helping sick children. It says it may not be able to afford a costly court case in the United States.

The spokesman says: "J.M. Barrie gave the copyright in Peter Pan to the hospital in 1929 and since then the royalties have been a significant but confidential source of income for the hospital. J.M. Barrie died in 1937 so copyright in the EU runs until 2007 and until 2023 in the U.S."

Copyright in the U.S. was extended from 2007 to 2023 because of the U.S. Copyright Extension Act, he said.

Lawyers

He added that the hospital had engaged leading London media lawyers, Simkins, to act on its behalf.

The Web site for "Peter and the Starcatchers" by Barry, a Pulitzer prize winning humorist, and Pearson, an American crime writer, tells of "a fast paced adventure on the high seas and a faraway island." It stars an orphan boy called Peter and the action involves a boat called "Never Land."

"Award-winning authors Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson have turned back the clock and revealed a wonderful story that precedes J.M. Barrie's beloved Peter Pan."

The launch of the book came as the hospital themselves are hoping to cash in on "Peter Pan" authorship.

They are inviting authors to compete for the chance to write the "official" sequel to Peter Pan for publishing in the autumn of next year -- thereby extending the royalties.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/...an/index.html#


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Universal Tries To Expose Kazaa Backers
Abby Dinham

Recording titan Universal Music is pressing on with its legal battle in Australia to try to force Sharman Networks - Kazaa's parent company - to reveal details of its owners as part of a collusion claim

Lawyers for Universal Music put the hard word on Sharman Networks -- the company responsible for popular peer-to-peer application Kazaa -- in the Federal Court today, attempting to force the company to reveal its corporate structure and anonymous director. The Universal Music parties' senior counsel, John Nicholas, claimed the company has purposely been set up with no visible line of command to "resist a claim like this".

Sharman was accused of music copyright infringement over its peer-to-peer file sharing software Kazaa, in a move which saw Sharman and affiliated companies' premises raided last February.

The parties are still in the discovery process related to evidence taken in the raids, which is being held by an independent third party. However, Universal has claimed that it is essential to the case to reveal the respondents' ownership and corporate structure.

Nicholas contends that directions were made by presiding Justice Murray Wilcox on 27 July for discovery of Sharman's ownership. However he said "we havent been given the information on control, we have been given a list of nominee companies."

"They won't give us the one-line document that your honour requested," he said.

Wilcox described the issue as "absurd", but acting chief counsel for the Sharman parties, Tony Meagher, said the group had identified the directors and the shareholders, and beyond that it "is not relevant to any issue in the proceeding."

However, Nicholas argued that revealing Sharman's owners was important to establish the exact relationship between Sharman and subsequent respondent to the charges AltNet -- a subsidiary of Brilliant Digital Entertainment as he said the two companies may have colluded to create an anonymous structure for purposeful deception.

"This dichotomy has been created for the purpose of resisting a claim like this. It's part of an arrangement made in 2002 when Mr Burmeister [BDE executive] decided that P2P could be commercially exploited," he said. "This dichotomy was brought about by careful planning and advice."

"The relationship between the Sharman and Alt entities is quite importanttwo tech companies brought together...one inference is that BDE together with Ms Hemming have incorporated in 2002 Sharman Networks in a way that seeks to conceal the ultimate relationship," said Nicholas. "They are intertwined at a relevant corporate level, they are one and the same."

"At all levels Ms Hemming is doing the beckoning of Mr Burmeister," he said.

A company called Worldwide Nominee has been named as the proprietor of the Sharman group, with Geoffrey R. Gee listed as its director. However, when questioned by Wilcox as to his identity, Meagher replied that "he is a lawyer who lives in the Republic of Vanuatu".

Wilcox concluded that "Mr Nicholas is entitled to get to the bottom of exactly who the client is" adding that he is "in principle" prepared to uphold the request.

AltNet senior counsel, Steven Finch, addressed the charges against the company, stating that it supplied a very different technology to the Sharman product and that "they are not related".

According to Finch, files are not made available on the AltNet file sharing database until an agreement is made with the rights holder of the works and the file is then "wrapped" with digital rights management (DRM) clauses so that down-loaders must agree to a terms of access condition before they are able to open the file.

"Material does not get onto AltNet without the permission of the artist," he said. "Our technology is not used by Kazaa. There is confusion because the database search brings up results from both Kazaa and AltNet."

The parties were directed to sort the issue out away from court.

Additionally Wilcox ordered that all affidavits to be used in the case must be submitted by 20 October in response to Sharman claims that Universal lawyers have been tardy with their submissions and that each party must provide the other with a list of objections intended to be made against the affidavits by 19 November.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/041014/152/f4jx8.html


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Oz

New Groups Join Kazaa Battle
Chris Jenkins

THE battle between Kazaa owner Sharman Networks and the record industry has taken a new turn, with three consumer and privacy groups seeking to join the hearings.

A group including the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties (NSWCCL), Electronic Frontiers Foundation and the Australian Consumer Association would seek leave to appear at the Sydney hearings on an amicus basis, as a "friend of the court", NSWCCL president Cameron Murphy said.

The three had formed a working group some time ago and had drafted affidavits to be submitted to the court, he said.

Sharman Networks has been involved in disputes with recording industry bodies in both Australia and the US over its Kazaa file sharing software, which the record companies allege is means of obtaining their intellectual property illegally.

In February, the Federal Court authorised raids which seized documents from Sharman's Sydney offices and the homes of some of its executives.

"We decided to come together because there are serious public interest issues at stake," Mr Murphy said. He said the group felt it could assist the court in evaluating public interest issues that may not have been represented otherwise. The case could have potentially been heard solely on technical arguments, without taking public interest issues into account, he said.

While conceding that peer to peer software such as Kazaa was used to illegally download music, "it is not the right response to be banning peer to peer software because there are many other public interest uses that negate that," Mr Murphy said.

Examples of legitimate uses of peer to peer file sharing included the distribution of information by community organisations he said. Amnesty International and the Free East Timor Association were examples of groups that had used peer to peer file sharing in such a manner, he said.

"The main purpose of this software isn’t music piracy. It is there to distribute legitimate information which serves the public interest," Mr Murphy said.

The argument that file sharing software should be banned in order to defeat piracy "is as ludicrous in my view as banning blank CDs or blank DVDs, or banning the computers themselves," Mr Murphy said.
http://www.news.com.au/common/printp...071500,00.html


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F.C.C. Clears Internet Access by Power Lines
Stephen LaBaton

Clearing the way for homes and businesses to receive high-speed Internet services through their electrical outlets, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules on Thursday that would enable the utility companies to offer an alternative to the broadband communications services now provided by cable and phone companies.

As a further spur to the rollout of broadband Internet services, the F.C.C. also ruled that the regional Bell companies do not have to give competitors access to fiber optic lines that reach into consumers' home - a decision that prompted two of the Bells, SBC Communications and BellSouth, to announce that they would move quickly to build new fiber optic networks in residential neighborhoods. The ruling was criticized by rivals of the Bells and consumer groups, which called it anticompetitive and said it would lead to higher prices.

For the electric companies' part, broadband Internet service is more than a year away from becoming widely available. But the agency's ruling is expected to increase significantly the level of investment and interest by the utilities, which had been stymied in previous attempts to offer new services over power lines. They reach more American homes than either telephone lines or television cables.

So far, the technology has been limited mainly to experiments around the country, although a commercial version recently became available in some communities near Cincinnati.

"Today is a banner day, and I think years from now we will look back and see it as an historical day for us,'' said Michael K. Powell, the F.C.C. chairman. "This is groundbreaking stuff.''

Known as broadband over power lines, or B.P.L., the technology uses a special modem that plugs into electrical outlets. So far, it has been offered at speeds of 1 to 3 megabits a second, which is comparable to broadband service over cable modems or conventional phone lines - though not as fast as the 5 megabits a second achievable through the residential fiber optic lines just now being introduced by the Bell companies.

An obstacle to the use of power lines to carry communications traffic has been the electromagnetic interference the technology can cause to various types of radio signals. The commission ruled that it would tolerate a small amount of radio interference in certain areas by the new service in exchange for making the broadband market more competitive.

Amateur radio operators and public safety officials had asked the commission to move slowly in the area because of the interference created by the service. The agency responded by setting up a system to monitor interference and restricting the service in areas where it could jeopardize public safety, like areas around airports and near Coast Guard stations.

Officials noted that there have already been field tests in 18 states of the B.P.L. technology. One company, Current Communications, has recently begun to offer broadband service near Cincinnati in a joint venture with Cinergy, the Midwest power and energy company. The service is priced at $29.95 to $49.95 a month, depending on the speed.

While some regulatory and technical issues remain, the technology offers enormous promise because the power grid is ubiquitous. The costs to the industry to offer the new service would be comparatively small, and the possible returns on those investments could be high. If the utility companies do begin to offer the broadband service more widely, they would also be likely to enter the telephone business by offering phone services over the Internet, just as phone and cable companies have begun to do.

Mr. Powell, the F.C.C. chairman, said that the new technology would not only offer greater competition in the broadband market, but would also allow consumers to easily create networks in their home through electrical outlets. And adding communications abilities to power lines would permit electric companies to better manage the power grid, he said.

Mr. Powell and three other commissioners voted to approve the rules. The fifth commissioner, Michael J. Copps, dissented in part. He noted that the agency had pushed aside a number of vital issues for another day, including questions of whether utility companies would have to contribute to the telephone industry's universal service fund and provide access to people with disabilities, and whether measures would be put in place to ensure market competition.

He also said that regulators would need to determine whether it would be fair for electricity customers to pay higher bills "to subsidize an electric company's foray into broadband.''

"We just have to get to the big picture and confront the challenges I have mentioned if B.P.L. is going to have a shot at realizing its full potential,'' Mr. Copps said.

But industry executives praised the decision.

"This is one of the defining moments for the widespread adoption of broadband by Americans,'' said William Berkman, chairman of Current Communications, a private company in Germantown, Md., which hopes to have in place a B.P.L. Internet network passing by 50,000 homes by the end of the year. The future also grew brighter for the regional Bell companies with the F.C.C.'s decision to grant BellSouth's request to exempt the Bells from any requirement that they lease their new fiber lines to the home to rivals at low costs.

Mr. Powell said that the exemption would "restore the marketplace incentives of carriers to invest in new networks.''

Prompted by the decision, the Bells said they would move more rapidly to build fiber networks to homes. So far, the nation's biggest Bell, Verizon Communications, has been the most active in building residential fiber networks. But on Thursday, SBC said it now planned to provide 18 million households higher speed Internet services in two to three years, rather than five years as previously announced.

"The shovel is in the ground, and we are ready to go," said SBC's chairman and chief executive, Edward E. Whitacre Jr.

But rivals, consumer groups and Mr. Copps criticized the decision as anticompetitive.

The F.C.C. majority seems unable to restrain its preference for monopoly over America's consumers, business users, and investment, said Len Cali, a vice president for AT&T.

Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America, said the decision would tighten the already powerful grip that the telephone and cable companies have on broadband services.

"This stranglehold will stifle innovation as these duopolies discriminate against unaffiliated applications and services that in the past have driven the growth of the Internet and the boom in information technology,'' Mr. Cooper said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/te...y/15power.html


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Milestones: Moore’s Law Over, Intel Ends Speed Race - 3.8 Gigahertz End Of Line For Now

Walking On The Sun

By Daniel Sorid

Intel Corp. on Thursday canceled plans to introduce its highest-speed desktop computer chip, ending for now a 25-year run that has seen the speeds of Intel's microprocessors increase by more than 750 times.

The unexpected move also adds to a string of product changes, cancellations and recalls that has roiled the world's largest chip maker this year. Intel shares fell 2.3 percent.

Both Intel and its arch-rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., have shifted their focus from increasing clock speed -- a measure of how fast a chip can crunch numbers -- to a less quantitative goal of performance encompassing multi-tasking, security, and multimedia.

Intel will shift engineers and other resources to its dual-core project, which envisions chips that have the power of two microprocessors in a single package, spokesman Chuck Mulloy said. Intel has plans to sell dual-core chips for mobile, desktop and server computers next year.

Intel President Paul Otellini, who is expected to take over the company next year, has spoken often about the advantages of multiple-core chips in an era when computers are tasked with handling more than one task at once, such as playing music and making a home video.

Since the introduction of the 5-megahertz 8088 processor in 1979, Intel has cranked up the clock speed of its PC chips with remarkable consistency, until now. Intel's 3.8 gigahertz Pentium 4 chip -- which is equivalent to 3,800 megahertz -- will be the fastest on the market for the foreseeable future.

It was the second time that Intel has announced problems with its plan to boost the Pentium 4 chip to a speed of 4 gigahertz. In July, the chip maker said it would miss its year-end deadline on the part.

Intel could not produce the chip in high enough volumes without additional engineering resources, which it determined would be better spent on a new line of chips to be introduced next year, Mulloy said.

"It's not an easy decision to walk away from four gigahertz because we had a public position, but in our view for Intel and for our customers it's the right decision," Mulloy said.

The product cancellation adds to an already bumpy year for Intel, which delayed a new line of notebook computer chips in January, recalled a desktop computer chip in June and pushed back another notebook chip in July.

Chief Executive Craig Barrett sent a stern memo to Intel's 80,000 employees in July after the setbacks -- weeks before another delay, of a chip for rear-projection televisions.

Cranking up the speed of its Pentium 4 chips to four gigahertz, or billions of cycles per second, has been an elusive goal for Intel. When the latest rendition of the Pentium 4 was introduced in February, Intel said it would reach the 4 gigahertz speed by the end of the year.

In July, citing concerns about having enough supply to meet customer demand, Intel delayed plans for four gigahertz until the end of March 2005. Thursday's announcement puts an end to the goal entirely, at least for the current generation of processors.

The chip industry's own technologists have long predicted engineers would face bigger and bigger hurdles as they cranked up chip speeds. Intel Chief Technology Officer Patrick Gelsinger has famously said that without a fundamental change in chip design, within a decade PC chips operating at much higher speeds would become as hot as the surface of the sun.

Shares of Intel fell 48 cents to $20.51 on Nasdaq.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=6506690














Until next week,

- js.














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