Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – September 27th, '03

[JackSpratts]

Quotes of the week:

"In artist development, file sharing — it's not really hurting you. You want people to discover your artists. You're building for the future." - Chris Blackwell, record exec.

“It was pretty f**king bad. I wouldn’t pay $8.50 for that. I wouldn’t even rent it.” – Beth, “Hulk” downloader.



Kettles On The Boil

Peer-to-peer is something we here deal with on a daily basis. It’s been a regular part of our online lives for some time. We no longer think of it as exotic or even particularly unusual but rather view it as a necessary and normal way of harnessing the power of the Internet, in a fashion first predicted by the original computer futurists. Early forecasts of “Celestial Jukeboxes and “Unlimited Information,” breezily dismissed by doubters as pie in the sky wishful thinking have come to pass with such a resounding success they’ve startled even the most imaginative boosters. But in spite of the hundreds of millions of people throughout the world who come to the well and partake of the bounty there has always been an invisible divide between those who do - and understand - and who don’t, and remain unaware. While anyone using the power of these systems will quickly grasp their significance and their importance, the external debate, the actual process by which society decides how to regulate its own behavior, has been shaped in large part by those who linger steadfastly in that darkness, ignorant and resolutely so to the societal benefits of P2P and the worldwide importance of personal file sharing. Unsurprisingly the media reflects this attitude and amplifies it to the point where it seems the very people who know the very least about the subject and have the slightest amount of experience with it are the ones leading the debate. That this is so only underscores the reasons why file sharing developed and why it has exploded on the worldwide scene. We all need ways to talk to each other without the interventions of governments and oligarchies and institutions and P2P goes a long way in helping us find them. The media of course feels it has the most to lose if people no longer pay them for the distribution and the dissemination of ideas. Far from being objective we find them among the worst offenders when it comes to manipulating the facts to protect their own interests. In many cases their coverage of peer-to-peer and copyright developments has been so one sided and slanted in their favor as to be all but useless for informing the people they serve; the reporting is subjective and biased, with stories that are little more than polemics against file sharing masquerading as reasonable explorations of the issues and the various interests. I can think of few things more important than battling that and if for nothing else file sharing deserves its place in society.

When the overwhelming majority of its readers and viewers regularly engage in behavior the media disparages daily, the newspapers and news programs run the risk of becoming so thoroughly irrelevant as to be unnecessary or worse, despised. Then the thing they fear most occurs, the people turn their backs and move on to something else, something beyond their control and influence. While it’s true that the media pushes people around the distance they push cannot be infinite. Some in the media have recognized a limit has been reached, and we the people are resisting. Giving credit where it’s due the RIAA deserves its own perverse thanks for speeding up the process. By focusing the nations and the worlds attention on the dangers of allowing one greedy industry to call the tune for six billion people, even those uncomfortable with unfettered access to information have uneasy feelings about Big Medias power and its motives. As someone recently said, “If the RIAA had a switch that turned off the internet – they would use it”.

So it’s with some note that an interesting run of articles appeared this month at the nations newspaper of record. The New York Times, recently suffering it’s own crisis of confidence, has published a series of in depth looks at many of the issues surrounding file sharing, from the effects technology has had on the recording industry to the effect the morality debate is having on young children. Most of the articles have been written in a surprisingly objective fashion – for a media giant – which is to say more objective than most but certainly with the usual negative point of view still lurking in the background. It may only be that the papers own credibility problems have made it somewhat more sensitive to the importance of honesty and this string of articles doesn’t foretell a development with other media companies. On the other hand the Times is nothing if not aware of trends and it just may be that this time it’s Big Media itself that’s feeling the effects of being pushed around. And for once we’re the ones doing the pushing.

I’d like to think it’s the latter for we are the customers after all who support the whole shaky edifice. If Big Media won’t listen to us, their patrons, who’s left to write the checks? Perhaps it’s some combination of pressure from the people coinciding with a growing realization that file sharing isn’t just a business change but a profound and lasting societal one as well. We might be witnessing the slow boil of a long dormant conscience bubbling up from the usual TV greed and newspaper cynicism. Or maybe it’s just another slick marketing trick. I would hope it’s something authentic and enduring. Not necessarily for our sakes but for theirs. If history is written on the wind the tempests that brought us peer-to-peer have had their howl. Change isn’t coming. It’s come. It’s here. We’ve created and conquered a new era of cultural empowerment. I really wouldn’t mind if a few companies at least figured this out, and did something interesting with it.










Enjoy,

Jack.










U.S. Bill Would Restrict File Sharing
William Jackson

The House Government Reform Committee today approved a bill that would require agencies to develop policies protecting computer systems from threats posed by peer-to-peer networking.

“File sharing technology is not inherently bad, and it may turn out to have a variety of beneficial applications,” said co-sponsor Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.). But risks associated with file sharing need to be addressed, he said.

HR 3159, titled the Government Network Security Act of 2003, was introduced Wednesday by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). It would require each agency to develop and implement a plan to protect its systems, incorporating technology, policy and training, within six months of the bill’s enactment. The comptroller general would report to the House and Senate on the results of the plans within 18 months of enactment.

Peer-to-peer networking is a technology that lets users with common software share files on their computers over proprietary networks or the Internet, in effect turning each computer into a server. It has gained its greatest notoriety in the distribution of copyrighted music, but it can be used to share any type of digital material stored on a computer.

According to a statement from the Government Reform Committee, the legislation was spurred by a demonstration earlier this year in which staff members were able to access tax and medical records, and other sensitive data on government computers. Both the House and Senate have implemented their own plans to combat the security risks from this technology, spokesman David Marin said.

“They include everything from better technology, such as firewalls, to education and training,” Marin said. “Each committee has forged its own rules, from outright prohibition to enlightened use.”

The bill would not outlaw peer-to-peer file sharing, but would restrict its use.
http://gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/23674-1.html


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Amnesty trouble
Peter K. Yu

This past week, the Record Industry Association of America filed 261 lawsuits against individuals who downloaded music illegally via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, such as KaZaA, Grokster, iMesh and Gnutella. Unlike what the industry did a few months ago, it offered carrots in addition to sticks this time. Along with the lawsuits came a new amnesty program that allows individuals to avoid lawsuits from the RIAA if they remove all illegal music files from their computers and promise not to do so again. On its surface, the new program is quite attractive and creative. In reality, it represents another ineffective, costly and disturbing attempt to fight the copyright wars. The most egregious offenders would unlikely participate in the program. Many of them don't think what they are doing is illegal. Nor do they feel guilty about what they have done. The RIAA will end up with a list of only mild, and perhaps occasional, offenders. The list is far from what the industry wants. There are other problems as well. First, the music industry is not the only copyright holder out there that can go after illegal file swappers. There are other equally powerful industries, like the movie and software industries. The amnesty program also would not protect individuals from federal prosecutors, music publishers and independent labels not represented by the RIAA. A "clean slate" with the recording industry group is not very clean if many others can sue you the next day. Even worse from the perspectives of the file traders, by signing the affidavits, the traders will have admitted that they have traded copyrighted music illegally. If they commit any future infringement -- regardless of how serious and intentional that infringement is -- the affidavits will provide evidence for willful infringement. The affidavits also will create a blacklist of habitual offenders that the recording industry likely will monitor. It is not news that the industry has been tracking potential offenders using automated web-crawlers. In fact, the industry recently has created a widely publicized embarrassment when it sent a mistaken cease-and-desist letter to the astronomy and astrophysics department of Pennsylvania State University, because one of its retired professors has an acappella song about a gamma-ray satellite under his name in the departmental server. Finally, the promises made by amnesty participants are broad, arguably broader than what is prohibited under copyright law. The participants might have to give up rights that are available under current copyright law. To be fair, when the RIAA two years ago pursued MP3.com and Napster, critics asked the industry to leave technology alone and go after the offenders. The RIAA now has done so, but it is still being criticized. So far, the group has only targeted egregious offenders. Those named in the recent lawsuits have distributed on average more than 1,000 copyrighted songs via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Given the amount of music swapped and downloaded, these individuals won't be the industry's customers anyway. So what's wrong with going after shoplifters? First, copyright law is not as clear as laws against theft and shoplifting. There are a lot of "muddy" rules, like the fair use privilege, the first sale doctrine and various statutory exemptions that allow people to have limited sharing of copyrighted works. In addition, there are better alternatives. In Europe, many countries impose taxes on blank recording media and equipment to compensate composers and authors whose works have been copied without authorization. And proposals are on the table that call for a compulsory licensing scheme and campus-wide licenses in universities. Lawsuits are not necessarily the best and most effective way to deal with online piracy. In the meantime, file swappers might want to consult their lawyers and "plead the fifth."
http://www.detnews.com/2003/editoria...a13-269781.htm


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Finger Pointing Takes Center Stage At Senate Hearing
ILN

Top executives from the telecommunications and recording industries debated at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing yesterday, each attacking the other's handling of the growing problem of illegal Internet file sharing. The RIAA accused ISPs of doing nothing to educate consumers about the dangers of file sharing. Verizon General Counsel William Barr shot back that the recording industry has failed to embrace the Internet as a distribution medium, opting instead to fight piracy by declaring a "jihad against 12-year-old girls."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Sep17.html


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Felten Warns Copyright Protection May Cost Consumers
ILN

Princeton University Professor Edward Felten told the Senate Commerce Committee yesterday that some 45 million home DVD players could become outmoded if regulators adopt a so-called "digital flag" standard to prevent piracy of movies broadcast to digital televisions. The MPAA strongly backs the FCC's effort to require that electronic gear be capable of reading coding placed on copyrighted movies broadcast on digital television so that they cannot be redistributed on the Internet.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1...569100,00.html


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Music Industry Has A Lot Riding On Final-Stretch Sales
Edna Gundersen

Mired in the third year of a sales slump, the music industry is counting on a handful of chart titans to salvage 2003 in the final stretch.

The September-December season, which typically accounts for more than 40% of the year's retail action, is the most crucial period on the record business calendar. Like the film industry, the record business often saves its strongest offerings for the fourth quarter to entice holiday shoppers.

The stakes are high: With a good fall, the industry could reverse two years of decline.

But to inch ahead of 2002's year-end total of 681 million albums, consumers will have to buy an additional 299 million albums by late December. Based on recent sales patterns, a more likely figure is 254 million albums, or 40% of the year's estimated take. That would end the year 6.6% behind 2002 (currently the deficit is 8.6%).

Two much-touted industry initiatives — the RIAA's campaign to sue file sharers and Universal's unilateral price reductions — may have an effect on sales as the fall unfolds, but the key factor will be the appeal of new releases. This fall's lineup appears to be a mixed bag of likely winners, potential dark horses and big question marks, with no sure bets.

"If we look at last year as a template, I don't expect the gap to close significantly," says Billboard chart director Geoff Mayfield. "At the same time, I don't expect it to get a lot wider. The last two months will be when the record stores do a significant percentage of their business, but it's not fair to expect the big horses to sew up the gap."

The race intensifies with next Tuesday's bounty of new releases, including potential chart toppers by Outkast, Limp Bizkit, Nickelback and Dave Matthews. Britney Spears, Pink and American Idol champs Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard may be among hot sellers that provide a second wind during the last laps.

Fall sales as a percentage of each year's total have been falling slightly, from 42.6% in 1998 to 40.4% in 2002. The variations may be a result of such pre-fall whoppers as 'N Sync's Celebrity in August 2001 (1.9 million copies the first week) or The Eminem Show in June 2002 (2.4 million copies in three weeks).

This year has yielded very few blockbusters aside from 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin', the leader with 5.9 million copies sold since February. No album this year has sold more than 1 million copies in a single week. And none of the fourth-quarter releases seem poised to break that unhappy trend.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/n...17-music_x.htm


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Music File Sharers Keep Sharing
Amy Harmon with John Schwartz

Despite the lawsuits filed last week against 261 people accused of illicitly distributing music over the Internet, millions of others continue to copy and share songs without paying for them.

Last week, more than four million Americans used KaZaA, the most popular file-sharing software, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, only about 5 percent fewer than the week before the record industry's lawsuits became big news. One smaller service, iMesh, even experienced a slight uptick in users.

The sweeping legal campaign appears to be educating some file swappers who did not think they were breaking the law and scaring some of those who did. But the barrage of lawsuits has also highlighted a stark break between the legal status of file sharing in the United States and the apparent cultural consensus on its morality.

In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this week, only 36 percent of those responding said file swapping was never acceptable. That helps explain why the pop radio hit "Right Thurr," by Chingy, was available to download free from 3.5 million American personal computers last week, while two million file swappers in the United States shared songs from rock icons like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, according to the tracking company Big Champagne.

The persistent lack of guilt over online copying suggests that the record industry's antipiracy campaign, billed as a last-ditch effort to reverse a protracted sales slump, is only the beginning of the difficult process of persuading large numbers of people to buy music again.

Mitch Bainwol, the new chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, which brought the suits, said in an interview that the group had succeeded in communicating that file sharing is illegal and would have consequences. But he acknowledged that shifting attitudes would be the next battle in what he conceded was more an effort to contain file swapping than to wipe it out.

"It's a two-step process," he said. "I don't think anyone has an expectation that file-sharing becomes extinct. What we're trying to drive for is an environment in which legitimate online music can flourish."

The record industry argues that sharing songs online is just like stealing a CD from a record store. But to many Americans, file sharing seems more like taping a song off a radio. The truth, copyright experts say, may lie somewhere between.

And instead of significantly damping enthusiasm for file sharing, the record industry's lawsuits appear to be spurring increasingly sharp debates about how the balance between the rights of copyright holders and those of copyright users should be redefined for a digital age.

"Law, technology and ethics are not in sync right now," said Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican who has called a hearing on the subject for later this month. "I presume these lawsuits are having some impact, but they're not solving the problem."

Soli Shin of Manhattan is not waiting for lawmakers to act. She gave some thought to the ethics of file sharing after hearing of the lawsuits and took her own library of 1,094 songs offline, because she knew they were aimed at people who "share" their music files with others. But she saw no reason to stop getting new music for herself.

"It's really a great convenience," Ms. Shin, 13, said. "If I like what I download maybe I'll buy it."

According to The Times/CBS News poll, adults under 30 are more inclined to consider music sharing over the Internet to be acceptable: 29 percent of them say the practice is acceptable at all times, compared with 9 percent of people older than that.

But the file-sharing trend, which includes many school-age people, has spread across nearly every demographic group, with 27 percent of Internet users between the ages of 30 and 49 involved, according to a survey released in July by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Even 12 percent of those over the age of 50 participate in file sharing, the survey found.

Pew also found that among the 35 million adults that its survey indicated download music, 23 million said they did not much care about the copyright on the files they copied onto their computers. Among the 26 million who made files available for others to copy, 17 million did not care much about whether they were copyrighted.

In interviews last week, many file swappers said they were more wary of copying music since the wave of lawsuits was announced. But there was a strong current of defiance, even among those who said they had stopped.

Dr. Steve Vaughan, 35, a Manhattan physician who said he had downloaded about 2,000 songs over the Internet in recent years, said he stopped only because of the "fear factor" after hearing about the lawsuits. He said he might try one of the new legal online music services, though he doubted it would enable him to sample as wide a range of jazz, blues and folk to help him decide what to buy on CD.

Those options may be expanding. In addition to Apple Computer's iTunes and a new legal service called BuyMusic that recently began selling songs online for 99 cents, several competing online music stores are set to open this fall.

"If they give me a full selection, and I could sample what I want and it was well organized, I would love that," Dr. Vaughan said. "I'm not doing this to save money. I'm doing this because the music industry doesn't give me what I want."

At the root of the resistance for many — besides a perhaps decisive fondness for getting things free — is a complaint that the record industry is trying to take away the ability to make copies of music to use personally and to share with friends — a practice that Americans have long enjoyed.

Added to that is a deep-seated resentment of the big record labels, which music fans variously accuse of pricing CD's too high and producing too much bad music.

But Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of communications studies at New York University, said he told his students that distaste for record company practices was not a justification for making unauthorized copies of their music.

"If everyone would cool down the rhetoric we might actually have some helpful discussions," Professor Vaidhyanathan said.

"It would be nice to stop demonizing people who think they're doing reasonable legitimate things in their homes and stop demonizing people who are trying to make a living and recoup an investment," he added.

Society, Mr. Vaidhyanathan added, has to reconcile the desire to make personal copies with the new ability to make millions of perfect copies with the click of a mouse. "Suddenly we have this powerful copying technology in our own homes, and we haven't confronted exactly what it means."

The largest number of respondents to The Times/CBS News poll, 44 percent, said sharing music files over the Internet was sometimes acceptable, if a person shared music from a purchased CD with a limited number of friends or acquaintances. Conducted by telephone on Monday and Tuesday this week among 675 adults, the margin of sampling error in the poll was plus or minus four percentage points.

Lorraine Sullivan, a student at Hunter College in New York, paid $2,500 to the record industry association earlier this week to settle the lawsuit it filed against her. But she said she still saw nothing wrong with her use of file-sharing software. She downloaded Madonna songs that she already had on CD, for instance, so that she could have them on her computer and not have to change CD's while she cleaned her apartment.

"I still feel that if you use downloading to sample a CD or a song and you go buy the CD, it's O.K.," said Ms. Sullivan, who has set up her own Web site asking for donations to help pay her fine.

Fear of being sued or fined can help shape a new moral sensibility — as happened with sexual harassment laws, seat belt requirements and no- smoking laws — despite considerable initial public skepticism. Some legal experts and ethicists say the music industry's enforcement of copyright law against Internet file sharers may eventually catalyze a similar change in attitudes.

But many experts argue that legal prohibition alone is rarely effective in getting people to behave differently if it runs counter to strong societal beliefs.

"When efforts to ban behavior fail, like with the Prohibition, they may need to be changed," said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington.

Several legislators, including Senator Coleman, have called for a re-examination of the notion of "personal copying." Some critics have have suggested that Congress could force the record companies to license their material and find a way to tax Internet users to pay them, essentially legalizing file sharing.

The number of Americans using KaZaA, the leading file-sharing software, from home has dropped about 15 percent since late June, when the record industry announced its plans to sue suspected copyright violators, Nielsen/NetRatings said.

"This slide down over a short period of time coincides with the record industry's effort to lower the boom on its users," said Greg Bloom, a senior analyst with Nielsen. "But there are still a lot of people using these services."

Software like KaZaA, Morpheus, Grokster and iMesh lets Internet users find and retrieve files on one another's computers, rather than from a central Web site. To "share" songs on peer-to-peer networks, users put them into a folder on their computer that they open to others. Others searching for those titles can then download copies onto their PC's.

"The record industry needs to win back the hearts and minds of record buyers, because they can't win a technology war," said Eric Garland, Big Champagne's chief executive.

Meanwhile, many recalcitrant file swappers are simply sizing up the odds: "How many people are they suing?" asked Carlo Lutz, 13, a Bronx High School of Science student, who was listening to rap music he had uploaded to his MP3 player on the subway last Thursday.

"There are millions of us," he added. "It's only a drop in the bucket."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/te...gy/19TUNE.html


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RISC OS P2P Client Now With Upload Support
Chris Williams

Share and share alike on Gnutellanet

Cocognut, the RISC OS Gnutellanet client developed by Marc "AudioGalaxy" Warne, has reached version 1.10 this week. Cocognut was launched in April this year and brought true P2P (short for 'peer to peer') filesharing to RISC OS. P2P networking allows a large number of users to form a network of computers across the internet in order to share files over that network.

"The Gnutella network is based on the peer-to-peer organisation. In a nutshell, this means that there are no central machines on the network and anyone who joins the network becomes part of it", Marc explains in his announcement. "No-one owns the Gnutella network, which means that it cannot be shut down by hackers or government organisations, unlike networks such as the original Audiogalaxy system, where clients such as the Satellite client for RISC OS are no longer usable".

In this latest release, Cocognut now supports uploading so RISC OS users can share files online and properly contribute to the Gnutellanet network. The upload support is quite important because it means RISC OS users on Gnutellanet can send files to other users and participate fairly rather than just downloading files from everyone else, which is commonly known as 'leeching'. Other new features include the preserving of searches and downloads across sessions and various stability updates and bug fixes.
http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact818.html


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Estates' Rights In Canadian Copyright Re-Examined

MP seeks to strike controversial 'Lucy Maud Montgomery provision'
James Adams

Canadian Alliance MP Chuck Strahl is attempting to derail controversial clauses in a government bill that, if passed, would
extend copyright protection for unpublished works for possibly decades after the death of the writer.

The clauses, which Strahl filed a motion to delete late last week, are loosely referred to as "the Lucy Maud Montgomery provision." They were tucked into the middle of the 57 clauses of Bill C-36 by the Liberal government earlier this year. The primary purpose of the bill is to merge the National Library of Canada with the National Archives.

Under current copyright law, last amended in 1997, copyrights in published works by an author enter the public domain 50 years after the writer's death. For posthumous unpublished works, the Copyright Act limited protection to the author's estate for 50 years after the death of the writer, plus a six-year "window" for the estate to either publish or communicate its intention to publish the material. Before 1997 perpetual copyright was granted to an estate for posthumous unpublished writings.

The amendments proposed by the Liberals add anywhere from 14 years to 34 years of copyright to previously unpublished works of authors who died between Jan. 1, 1930 and Jan. 1, 1949.

It's called the "Lucy Maud Montgomery provision" because the creator of the popular (and lucrative) Anne of Green Gables novels died in 1942, and it is her heirs who wish to retain control over her unpublished writings. Marian Hebb, a lawyer for the Montgomery estate, said in June that "with respect to the Lucy Maud Montgomery diaries, there is material that would cause offence to living people, and that's why it hasn't been published."

However, opponents of the amendments say that, if passed, they would simply result in more money going to the Montgomery heirs in particular and writers' estates in general. Moreover, the amendments will restrict academic research, public accessibility and eliminate the possibility of widespread reproduction without permission. If there's a problem with defamation, they argue libel laws already exist to handle that.

An aide to Strahl, MP for Fraser Valley (B.C.) and the Alliance's member on the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, said late last week that the amendments, which have Heritage Minister Sheila Copps's backing, "amounts to special treatment for a small group of people . . . [who] want a quick little fix before the end of the year."

The aide also noted that since the Liberals are already committed to a major, systematic overhaul of the 1997 Copyright Act, the amendments "represent a piecemeal type of change."

Under current legislation, the Montgomery estate will lose copyright to the author's unpublished writings as of Jan. 1, 2004. This is why it has been vigorously pressing for the amendments to Bill C-36, which, en route to third and final reading, is expected to be reported tomorrow to the House of Commons by the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

Earlier this year, Liberal members of the committee agreed the copyright clauses did not belong to the National Archives-National Library amalgamation bill and agreed to drop the amendments. However, shortly after Parliament recessed for summer break, the committee convened without its opposition members, who had left Ottawa, and the bill progressed with amendments intact.

Other Canadian public figures whose unpublished work would fall under the amendments if passed include Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden (died 1937) and authors Frederick Philip Grove (died 1948) and Stephen Leacock (died 1944).
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/...030923/COPY23/


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Legislators Debate Digital Broadcast Content Protection Proposals

"The movie industry is suffering from a loss of some $3.5 billion annually from hard-goods piracy (DVD, VCD, videotape)," said Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and the problem of digital piracy is far more menacing. Valenti estimates that some 400,000 to 600,000 films are being pirated over the Internet each day. Speaking before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Valenti called on the FCC to develop technical mandates to create a "safe environment" for digital content. The MPAA is a pushing "Broadcast Flag" mandate to stop digital over-the-air broadcasts from being re-directed to the Internet.

The digital content protection scheme proposed by the MPAA won't work, would hurt consumers, and would impede innovation by consumer electronics makers, said Lawrence J. Blanford, president and CEO of Philips Consumer Electronics. Blanford said the MPAA proposal, which would require that all devices recognize a data bit in their digital TV signal and encrypt content using only industry authorized algorithms, would fail to stop the unauthorized redistribution of digital broadcast content over the Internet. The plan would also require consumers to replace (and the FCC to regulate) "virtually every single device in the home network." It would impinge on "fair use" provisions of copyright law, and, Blanford argued, it would give a small group companies the power to restrain competition in new digital consumer electronics. Philips is endorsing Digital Broadcast Content Protection legistlation introduced by Senator Brownback (R- KS), which would use "watermarks" rather than encryption to identify and protect digital content.
http://www.convergedigest.com/DSL/la...le.asp?ID=8746


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Entertainment Moguls Victimize Consumers
Bharath Parthasarathy

Robin Hood fought social inequality by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Evading attempts to stop his pilfering hands, he deftly evaded authorities until he achieved his goal of an equitable society.

In similar fashion, millions of individuals (the poor), angered by inflated media prices, stagnant musical choices and greedy executives, are constantly downloading music and movie files from giant media conglomerates (the rich) through peer-to-peer services like Kazaa and Morpheus.

To be clear, these individuals are stealing. In fact, the motion picture and recording industries state that these people are stealing 350,000 movies and more than a million songs a day.

While copyright laws should normally be upheld to protect these creative work products, in instances where an industry preys on its consumers for the sake of greed, customers should be allowed to opt out of their social compact with these companies and disobey laws until the industry once again respects them.

Consumers have such a case against the motion picture and recording industries.

First, these industries constantly victimize their consumers. The music companies just dropped 261 federal lawsuits on serious offenders of file-swapping. These include a 12-year-old girl, a 71-year-old grandfather and an unemployed worker. Any industry that muscles $12,000 to $15,000 settlement agreements out of preteens and grandparents as a form of deterrence deserves to be cut down to size.

Additionally, the companies' sappy ads proclaiming that piracy hurts regular non- artist industry workers are an affront to customers. While that argument holds some weight, it's hard to sympathize with the argument when artists are on MTV Cribs celebrating their gold-plated bidets and $100,000 "whips." If the industry is worried about its employees, it should reduce artists' royalty payments and give more to the employees.

Second, customers are often left paying the bills of the messes of the industry. If the companies stopped producing such nightmares as Mariah Carey's "Glitter" and Madonna's "Swept Away," then consumers wouldn't be left paying $18 for a CD and $20 for a DVD to help the companies recoup the millions they flushed down the toilet by green-lighting those projects.

Third, the industry remains hypocritical about file-sharing in general. As Mike McQuary noted at a Goizueta Business School panel discussion Sept. 8, the companies advocate the protection of artists' work products while also selling MP3 players and CD burners. Sure, these devices have legitimate uses, but every company is really just trying to have both hands in the profit cookie jar.

Not all is lost for these industries, however. If they honestly desire their consumers to purchase their wares once again, they must alter their business models and do so quickly.

First, the entertainment industry must immediately cease its disastrous strategy of assaulting teenagers and grandparents with federal lawsuits. Furthermore, it should immediately change the current public image of its most well-known stars, emphasizing their work products and not their astounding wealth.

Second, the industries must find ways to cut incidental costs in order to reduce the retail price of movies and music. Unnecessary marketing costs are driving up CD and DVD prices in an amazing way. Industries need to forgo the media blitz around new movies and albums and give the consumers a break in their wallets.

Third, the industry must enter the 21st century and embrace technology. Director of Film Studies David Cook told the Emory Report that the industries were once afraid of VCRs, much like they are of these file-sharing systems. Yet over time, they adapted their business model to take control of the medium and profit from it. It's time for the same sort of innovation to occur today.

Pay-for-play systems should be the future of the industry. Charge customers a small fee in order to get the same high quality, large selection and quick download times that attracted them to Napster over Tower Records.

The entertainment industry must regain the confidence of its consumers and shed its image as the Sheriff of Nottingham by adapting to changes in technology if it hopes to curtail the use of peer-to-peer systems across the bandwidth of America.

Without this adaptation, consumers should continue to stick it to the man and download away.
http://www.emorywheel.com/vnews/disp.../3f6b2bf09413a


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Harvard Symposium Debates Future Of Online File-Sharing
Theo Emery

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Ilan Hornstein used to download his favorite tunes from the Internet to his hard drive, but he stopped several years ago, cowed by threats from the recording industry to prosecute high-tech music lovers who swap files.

He's still infuriated that he can't download music with impunity as he once did, and that the industry has the weight of the law behind it. An outcry by music listeners would take away the industry's clout, he said, and put music back in the public domain -- and onto his hard drive.

"Why should the law protect the record industry?" said Hornstein, who works for Raytheon Co. "It seems a lot like the Mafia."

Hornstein, 27, was among about 100 scholars, industry representatives, music lovers and privacy advocates who gathered Thursday for a daylong symposium at Harvard Law School to discuss the future of digital media and online file-sharing, the Internet bugaboo that has delighted music fans and infuriated the music industry.

"There was a time that to make a copy, you needed a monk, and a desk, and months," said Charles Nessen of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a sponsor of the gathering.

"And then Sean Fanning hit the scene," he said, referring to the college dropout who founded the wildly popular music-trading Web site Napster, which was shut down in 2001 after battling the music industry over copyright infringement.

The rocket speed of digital media technology, which can put a pirated movie onto the Internet in hours, pirated CDs and DVDs on street corners around the world in days, and allows home computer users to swap music using "peer-to-peer" file-sharing software, is fundamentally changing the music and movie industry.

"Clearly, we need a solution to the issue. Everyone would agree to that," said Richard Colon, vice president of BMI, an organization that collects license fees for 300,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers whose music is played in public. "We have a big problem, in terms of peer- to-peer."

With millions of people reporting that they use filesharing to download music from the Internet, and with few apparently worried about getting caught, it will be impossible to stop music downloading, said Stan Liebowitz, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of "Re-Thinking the Network Economy."

"The peer-to-peer downloaders who are normal kids and adults, while they're not hardened criminals, they're not fighting for some ideology or cause," he said. "They're just trying to get something for nothing."

The Recording Industry Association of America recently went on the offensive, last week filing 261 federal lawsuits against those whom the organization described as "major offenders" illegally distributing on average more than 1,000 copyrighted music files each.

At the Harvard meeting, some of those present said they doubted that lawsuits will prevent file- sharing, given the popularity of the now-defunct Napster and other music sites like Kazaa, and Morpheus, and movie download sites like the recently unplugged Movie88.

"I don't think the lawsuits will work. I don't think the RIAA will be able to put the genie back in the bottle," Liebowitz said.

The meeting focused on five scenarios put forward by a working group from Gartner/G2, a research firm, and the Berkman Center. They range from preserving the status quo with copyrighting to a compulsory licensing scheme that would require the government to pay for lost music industry revenues with taxes.

The debate occasionally sparked strong reactions and outbursts of dismay from some participants, particularly to one proposal that the government treat the music industry like a public utility, and regulate it as such.

"Are you seriously considering the regulation of artists?" asked John P. Barlow, a Grateful Dead lyricist and a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That is so Orwellian. I'm astonished this is even on the screen."

Ivan Reidel, a student at Harvard Law School, said that he's studying ways to get rid of licensing organizations like BMI and ASCAP altogether, and instead create an organization of artists who would opt out of the licensing system and deal directly with consumers.

Asked what the odds are of sych a scenario coming to fruition, he said with a smile: "I'm working on that."
http://www.boston.com/news/local/mas..._file_sharing/


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Debating Digital Media's Future
Martin LaMonica

Digital media will force the entertainment industry to rethink current business models and perhaps usher in a special tax to compensate artists deprived of revenue from Internet media distribution, according to panelists at a conference Thursday.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and research firm Gartner assembled a group of legal, media and technology experts to discuss potential scenarios for overhauling the media and entertainment industries to accommodate rapid changes in technology.

Attendees at the conference, held at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., posed a number of scenarios to achieve the goal of extending consumer access to media through digital devices while respecting the copyrights of content creators and publishers. Talk focused primarily on the highly visible and controversial practice of downloading music over the Internet, but it touched on all types of electronic media.

Overall, attendees agreed that the entertainment industry has been slow to develop viable business models for the Internet. Meanwhile, unauthorized distribution of content on file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus has become commonplace.

"The legal and regulatory environment and the business models have not been able to keep up with this situation," said James Brancheau, a media analyst at Gartner. "This is a massive problem today."

The conference took place as the major record labels filed their first wave of lawsuits against alleged file swappers in a bid to stem peer-to-peer Internet piracy amid a global drop in music sales. The industry has painted the tactic as a last resort following an unprecedented period of unauthorized copying touched off by the advent of the Napster file-swapping service.

The suits offer the clearest indication yet that the industry is in crisis, a situation that some conference attendees said could open the door to unconventional solutions.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5079007.html


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Senator Coleman Tackles Recording Industry

Well-coifed and dressed in suit and tie, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman is a long way from the long-haired kid in 1970 who shouted to his fellow college students: ``Power to the people!''

But Coleman, 54, may have found an outlet for his old counterculture side: investigating the music recording industry.

Coleman, a freshman from Minnesota, will hold hearings on the Recording Industry Association of America's anti-piracy crackdown, starting on Sept. 30. He said he's worried the RIAA campaign is heavy-handed and could ensnare ``the little guy.''

That thinking is what prompted Coleman, as an undergraduate, to lead anti-war rallies and serve as Student Senate president. He was suspended for leading a sit-in at a faculty restaurant, and helped to organize a short student strike in 1970 after four anti-war demonstrators were killed at Kent State University in Ohio.

John Moreno, a college friend of Coleman at Hofstra University on Long Island, N.Y., wonders if the young college protester is peeking through the middle-aged senator.

``The idea of liberating music from the Web would probably have appealed to the 20-year-old Norm Coleman,'' said Moreno. ``The idea of liberating property for the people would have appealed to him.''

Coleman, who was once a roadie for the rock group Ten Years After, chuckled as he pondered this analysis.

``You'd have to talk to my therapist -- if I had one,'' he said.

Steve Schier, a political science professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., said that for a politician, ``The recording industry is as inviting a punching bag as tobacco companies. Politically, it's hard to see a downside for anyone who pummels the recording industry. You can easily be a white knight.''

The Washington-based RIAA, which represents the major record labels, has filed civil lawsuits against 261 people it accuses of illegally distributing music online. The trade group, which blames piracy for flagging music sales, promises thousands more lawsuits.

Coleman stressed that he is against the illegal downloading and sharing of copyrighted material. But he said he has several concerns about the recording industry crackdown.

He said innocent people who are sued might be cowed into settling with the RIAA, fearing they don't have the power to fight, and that the group's solution -- ``clubbing a few people over the head'' -- won't work.

Coleman also argued that the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives the RIAA too broad a power to obtain subpoenas to track and sue people who download songs (no judge's signature is required). And he said the legal penalties -- $750 to $150,000 for each song pirated -- are excessive.

Coleman said he planned to examine some of these issues in the hearings as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs' Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA, said the group is only going after ``proven, egregious offenders.'' He called the copyright law ``a painstaking, carefully crafted compromise.''

Another target of Coleman's hearing is the file-sharing industry, including businesses like Kazaa, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a trade group which represents the file-sharing industry (Kazaa is not a member), said he welcomed the hearing.

``We don't condone copyright infringement,'' Eisgrau said, adding that the technology can be used to share files other than music. ``This is a policy debate -- it doesn't belong in living rooms of 12-year-olds.''

The RIAA settled the first of its suits for $2,000 with the mother of a 12-year-old defendant, Brianna LaHara of New York, and P2P United agreed to pick up the tab. Brianna was accused of downloading more than 1,000 songs using Kazaa.

Coleman said he was worried about people getting caught in the middle.

``The RIAA has a problem, Kazaa has a problem, the technology folks have a problem,'' said Coleman, who has admitted he used to download music from the now-defunct Napster site. ``And yet right now, the focus is on the 12-year-old girl, or the grandfather or the mother. They're the ones being told to pay the price.''

With an estimated 60 million file sharers in the United States, the issue has generated a buzz for Coleman. He's been written about in both the entertainment press and general-interest newspapers.

``I've had more comments on the street on this issue than I've had on the war in Iraq in the last week,'' Coleman said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/6832795.htm


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We All Pay Hollywood's Price For DVD
Cory Doctorow

DVD as a technology is very tightly controlled. As 3-2-1 Studios, a vendor of DVD copying and backup software discovered, making any innovation in the DVD world without permission from the Hollywood companies (who thought that the VCR and ReplayTV were forms of insitutionalized theft) is an invitation to a punishing lawsuit. Well, who cares, right? After all, DVD is a "success" -- lots of people have DVD players.

But DVD players are frozen in amber. The features that the public demands have not been forthcoming -- rather, they've stayed pretty much at the level that they started out at in the mid-nineties. They got cheaper, but they didn't get cooler, or weirder, or more flexible.

Case in point: Kaleidescape, a company in Mountain View, has built a "legit" DVD jukebox with permission from Hollywood. This is pretty easy hardware: big-ass hard-drives, some user-interface, and a commodity optical drive. Should be cheap as hell.

It's not. By the time Kaleidescape pays its license fee to the Hollywood studios and calculates the price it can command without any competition in the field, it ends up fielding a box that holds thirty DVDs on its hard-drive and costs thirty-thousand dollars.

The idea that a 30-movie DVD-ripping jukebox -- which I can build "illegally" in my living room for a couple grand -- should retail for thirty thousand bucks is revolting. It's what we, as customers of the CE companies, pay for adopting a technology that is proprietary to the Hollywood companies that take the view that watching movies out of order, skipping commercials, time-shifting and home taping are theft. Shame on us, and what a shame. Link
http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_arc...92851663897715


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In DMCA War, A Fight Over Privacy
Declan McCullagh

On May 16, 2002, top executives from the Recording Industry Association of America gathered to celebrate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a controversial law that Congress enacted in hopes of curbing online piracy.

With glasses of champagne held high in the air, the RIAA, like-minded trade associations and friendly politicians--including at least one committee chairman--toasted the measure, one section of which permits copyright holders to unmask hundreds of suspected online pirates at a time.

Fifteen months later, the political terrain has noticeably shifted. On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate convened a hearing that explored the privacy problems with the DMCA's subpoena process, and one senator introduced a bill this week to repeal that section of the law.

"I support strong protections of intellectual property, and I will stand on my record in support of property rights against any challenge," said Sen. Sam Brownback, whose staff drafted the proposal. "But I cannot in good conscience support any tool such as the DMCA information subpoena that can be used by pornographers, and potentially even more distasteful actors, to collect the identifying information of Americans, especially our children."

Brownback, the Kansas Republican who chaired the Commerce Committee hearing, was talking about the attempts by gay porn producer Titan Media to rid the Internet of its copyrighted works, which are typically swapped on peer-to-peer networks with file names such as "Gay-Titan-Pumped_Up-B-rip-Divx-Complete.avi." Under the DMCA, any person who claims to be a copyright holder worried about alleged piracy can unmask the accused infringer without filing a lawsuit.

While Wednesday's hearing didn't precisely equate America's major record labels with the pornography industry, the RIAA nevertheless was thrown on the defensive--a rare position for the well-connected trade association to find itself in. Besides winning passage of the DMCA, the RIAA successfully lobbied Congress to enact the No Electronic Theft Act--which makes peer-to-peer piracy a federal felony--and the Copyright Term Extension Act. Two years ago, the RIAA retained Bob Dole, former senator and presidential candidate, and in July picked Mitch Bainwol, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, to be its new chairman.

On Wednesday, RIAA President Cary Sherman was forced to argue that the DMCA's turbocharged subpoenas cannot be easily exploited by snoops and stalkers. Those are "baseless and desperate arguments," Sherman said. "The RIAA, the copyright community as a whole--and, more importantly, the members of Congress who crafted the DMCA-- would never defend or embrace a procedure that makes it easy for criminals to find victims."

Even though Brownback and two other senators--Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Norm Coleman, R-Minn.--criticized the RIAA's shotgun use of the subpoenas, analysts caution that Washington's view of the law has not radically shifted.

Mike Godwin, technology counsel for the nonprofit group Public Knowledge, said that while the political landscape may have changed in terms of the DMCA, the criticism is still aimed at tweaking rather than rewriting the law. Also, Godwin noted, other members of the Commerce Committee appeared to be skeptical of reopening the DMCA. And last week, Senate Judiciary committee members signaled they were not in a hurry to revisit the law.

"The landscape has not changed so much that if you had a vote taken today, even with all the horror stories of RIAA subpoenas sent to grandmothers and honor students, the vote would come out in favor of seriously altering or removing" that section of the law, Godwin said. "I think what you are getting is some impulse, somewhat more strongly from the Republican side of the aisle, toward some slightly higher level of judicial review and some safeguards and remedies for misuse of process."

The ongoing controversy over the DMCA subpoenas comes at a crucial time for the trade association. Earlier this month, it filed lawsuits against 261 alleged file swappers, and a federal appeals court heard arguments Tuesday about whether the RIAA has abused the DMCA when gleaning subscriber names from Verizon Communications.

If the RIAA loses the suit and the decision is upheld on appeal--or if Brownback's legislation is enacted--the industry group could be forced to file thousands of "John Doe" lawsuits instead of sending bulk subpoenas. That would be a more expensive strategy that risks additional negative publicity, especially if a file-swapping defendant turns out to be a music industry executive or a relative of a member of Congress.

For its part, Verizon has been stressing the privacy implications of allowing the use of DMCA subpoenas to become more widespread. It's backing Brownback's bill, which requires that a lawsuit be filed before an Internet user be unmasked. (The exact language: "An Internet access service may not be compelled to make available to a manufacturer of a digital media product or its representative the identity or personal information of a subscriber or user of its service"--unless, that is, a civil lawsuit or criminal prosecution is pending.)

A DMCA subpoena "grants copyright holders or their agents the right to discover the name, address and telephone number of any Internet user in this country without filing a lawsuit or making any substantive showing at all to a federal judge," said William Barr, Verizon's general counsel, who also testified on Wednesday. "This accords truly breathtaking powers to anyone who can claim to be or represent a copyright owner--powers that Congress has not even bestowed on law enforcement and national security personnel."

Unlike the mostly left-of-center groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Consumers Union that have been agitating for years to defang the DMCA, Brownback is an unabashed conservative who in 2000 won a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union.

"Recently a federal court has held that copyright owners may use the subpoena to compel Internet service providers to disclose to them the names, addresses and phone numbers of their subscribers suspected of piracy," Brownback said. "This subpoena process includes no due process for the accused ISP subscribers."

Brownback's bill is not limited to amending the DMCA subpoena process. As previously reported by CNET News.com, it generally prohibits the Federal Communications Commission from imposing copy-protection requirements on electronic devices, requires prominent labeling of any "access-controlled digital media product," and preserves the right to resell digital media, provided the seller does not keep a copy.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5078609.html


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Dolby Buys Into Piracy-Fighting Tech
John Borland

Audio technology company Dolby Laboratories said Monday that it had purchased a small digital rights management company, hoping to cement its role in digital movie distribution.

San Francisco-based Dolby said it had purchased Cinea, a company formed by many of the same engineers behind the short-lived Divx copy-proof DVD technology backed by Circuit City.

Cinea made headlines late last year after winning a federal grant to help develop ways to block camcorder-toting movie pirates from recording film premieres and distributing them on the Internet. But they also offer more traditional encryption techniques to film studios that ultimately want to distribute films digitally to theaters instead of using film.

The company's camcorder-fighting technology is still under development. Its plan is to introduce distortions in the video that are captured by cameras, but are invisible to the human eye--a little like computer screens that display lines or bars when captured on video.

Dolby's entry into the content-protection market will bring it in competition with Microsoft, which is pushing hard to make its Windows Media and associated digital rights management technology standards in the nascent digital cinema business, as well as online. But Dolby says studios want to see more companies than Microsoft in the content protection business.

"The film industry has been very vociferous about the fact that they want content protection technology developed," Dolby Vice President Tim Partridge said. "But studios want multiple people providing it."

The digital cinema drive is providing a set of worries for studios already concerned about DVD copying and Internet file- swapping--as well as potential opportunities for new generations of technology companies like Cinea.

Hollywood studios want a fast move to all-digital distribution, which would relieve them of the burden of printing expensive film copies of every movie for distribution to theaters. But standards have been slow to emerge, and theaters themselves, which will have to bear the costs of installing new digital projectors, have not been quick to make the transition on their own.

Cinea's first technology would put digital locks on the files distributed to theaters, providing unique keys to unlock access to the content so that only intended recipients could unscramble them. The technology might also include usage rules based on contracts with studios, limiting theaters to showing the films for a certain number of screenings, or for a limited range of dates.

Cinea will operate independently as a Dolby subsidiary, remaining largely separate from its new parent company's business, Partridge said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5080381.html


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First File-Swap Bust Just A Blip, Four Years Later
Inara Verzemnieks

Before the tens of thousands of people snatching free music off the Internet, before the hundreds of lawsuits to make them stop, there was Jeff.

Jeff Levy, a 21-year-old planning and public-policy major at the University of Oregon, a follower of the Grateful Dead and Phish, a Massachusetts transplant with a sweet computer and an even sweeter university-supplied ethernet connection, who stepped out of the shower one day in 1999 to find FBI agents waiting at his front door.

Levy, it turned out, had been sharing music, as well as movies and computer software, over the Internet. Hundreds of files, said prosecutors, who slapped the college student with federal felony charges.

Ultimately, Levy pleaded guilty, reserving a place in history books and law reviews:

Jeffrey Gerard Levy, the first person in the nation convicted under the No Electronic Theft Act of illegally distributing copyright protected music over the Internet.

It was meant to be a cautionary tale.

"There is a cultural phenomenon here that this is not stealing, and it is particularly prevalent among young people," Roslyn Mazer, special counsel for intellectual property in the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, told a reporter for The Oregonian in 1999. "We hope this case will fire a shot across the bow."

But as 261 copyright lawsuits filed earlier this month by the Recording Industry Association of America indicate, swapping music over the Internet has become more entrenched in the years since Levy's case, with everyone from a 12-year-old girl to a Yale college professor ending up in the industry's dragnet.

"It was like my story had disappeared," said Levy, 26 now, working at a plant nursery and living in a one-bedroom Springfield cottage with posters of Ani DiFranco, Sarah McLachlan and a diagram of guitar chords tacked to the living room walls.

At the time of Levy's bust, swapping music over the Internet was in its nascent stages, nowhere as common as it is today; it took time and a certain amount of technological know-how to hunt down songs in the wilds of cyberspace.

But in the months after Levy's arrest, all that changed when a file-swapping program called Napster burst onto the scene, making it simple for even the most technologically challenged to find and trade digital music for free -- and to violate copyright law.

At the height of the Napster craze, 10,000 songs a second were traded, according to company estimates. Even his father, Levy said, turned to Napster to track down hard-to-find songs from his native France.

"It was like it wasn't as bad anymore, that the average Joe citizen was doing it," Levy said. "The attitude seemed to be: It was everyone now, so it was OK."

Looking back, Levy said, he never considered that what he was doing would land him in so much trouble, although he knew it was illegal. Maybe a letter or a phone call from the university computer folks reprimanding him. But never the FBI.

Even as agents were standing in his apartment, Levy was looking around, he recalled, racking his brain to figure out why they would be there. Then he saw his computer.

He thought what he was doing was like "collecting baseball cards," he said, snapping up as many copies of music, software, games and movies as he could, cataloging them, then arranging swaps with others he met through Internet Relay Chat. A lot of swaps. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Hoar, who prosecuted the case, placed the value of everything Levy gave away in the thousands of dollars.

So much traffic was streaming to and from Levy's site that it attracted UO system administrators' attention. And then the feds arrived at his door.

Levy pleaded guilty and received two years' probation. He couldn't have Internet access without a parole officer's permission; he couldn't have a CD burner. And a felony conviction would follow him forever.

For about two weeks, Levy said, the story of the first person convicted under the NET Act was everywhere: on the evening news and VH1. In Spin and Rolling Stone magazines. In every major newspaper. Chuck D talked about him on MTV.

"And then," he said, "it was over pretty quickly."

The story faded. Jeff Levy was forgotten. And file sharing, for everyone else, took off.

Quietly, Levy graduated from the UO, worked as a teacher at an outdoor school in California, then returned to Oregon and landed a job at a nursery. He has planted a lush garden -- foxgloves, dahlias, lavender, creeping Jennie -- outside the house he shares with his girlfriend.

A computer perches on a desk in a living room corner, but Levy said he doesn't use it often. He last checked his e-mail three weeks ago; he's just not much interested in computers anymore. "They lost their charm for me," he said.

So did downloading music. "It doesn't even occur to me now," he said. A 400-disc CD changer sits in the living room along with a turntable and a stack of vinyl. He hates the sound of MP3s, he said. "I can hear what's lost."

He got rid of his TV two years ago, but he has read about the RIAA lawsuits, how the recording industry is suing people of all ages all over the country.

"Smart," he said.

Because now, it's not just a story about one person. They've made people think, he said, that "they could be next."
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/orego...5978221820.xml


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Music's Struggle With Technology
John Schwartz

LIFE, like television, is full of reruns. And long-time watchers of technology trends say the entertainment industry's attack on peer-to-peer software - the technology at the heart of the song-swapping mania - follows a familiar pattern.

Every technology can, of course, be used for evil or good purposes. Cars can be used in bank robberies, and radiation can cure cancer. But many new technologies go through a stage of demonization, and communications technologies come in for an especially tough hit from people who feel threatened by them.

Long before girding against the Internet, for example, the entertainment industry objected to cassettes and videotapes because they would allow people to copy music and programming without making additional payments. Even FM radio was opposed by the record companies at the outset because the high fidelity broadcasts were free. The early defenders of the industry did not understand the ways that the power of the new communications tool would help them market their goods to a broader audience.

The current fight over peer-to-peer technology closely resembles a grand battle in the 1990's over encryption technology, which secures the contents of communications from prying eyes. In that case, the opponent was not the entertainment industry, but the Clinton administration and its law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which tried to restrict the use and spread of strong encryption ("crypto," in geekspeak). The technology was an essential tool for businesses and consumers who wanted to protect privacy; because of their resistance to the government crackdown, many encryption restrictions have been lifted.

But, at the time, government officials argued that crypto, if unrestricted, would bring disaster upon disaster. The Clinton administration encouraged the adoption of encryption products with a "backdoor" that government could unlock. "Uncrackable encryption will allow drug lords, terrorists and even violent gangs to communicate with impunity," Louis J. Freeh, then director of the F.B.I., testified before a Senate committee in 1997.

Similar accusations have been lodged against peer-to-peer - or P2P, as it is commonly known - which also has the potential to become a powerful tool for network communications and pooling computer resources. The entertainment industry has tried to portray the networks as hotbeds of crime and havens for child pornography. Yet many in the tech world say there are so many possible uses for P2P that "it's impossible to imagine them not being developed," said Lance Cottrell, the president and founder of a company that provides tools for enhancing privacy online. "Music was just the first killer app, but I think it will be the first of many."

Mr. Cottrell said that efforts to restrict access to P2P technology will not deter bad people but the efforts will hinder honest users. "People who really desire to steal will find ways of doing it," he said. But as with encryption, "restricting it means it is only available to the real bad guys."

The potential public benefits - like new computer networks that make worker collaboration easier, à la the entrepreneur Ray Ozzie's Groove Networks, or clusters of PC's linked to pool their power and resources - could be delayed in the P2P fight, just as the tug of war over cryptography hindered the ability of business to protect communications and databases from intruders, said Bruce Schneier, a security expert and author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World." "In both cases, a large well-funded organization is fighting the little guy."

The similarities do not stop there, Mr. Schneier said, because in both cases legal remedies have been sought "to solve an inherently technological problem." Those seeking to restrict the new technology are using "legal intimidation" to fight their battles, he said. And, he predicted, the ultimate outcome will be similar: "Strong crypto would inevitably be used. Digital files are inevitably copyable." The real goal of the pushback in both cases, he said, is to delay change.

A former government official who fought on the opposite side of the crypto battle from Mr. Schneier says the similarities between that fight and the battle over file sharing are striking - but so are the differences. Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency, said, "The N.S.A. had a lot of clout, but it didn't have political action committees." The entertainment industry's political influence has already manifested itself in such laws as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which made it easier to go after digital pirates.

But file trading has things going for it that encryption never did, Mr. Schneier said: ease of use and products that millions of average consumers crave. That popularity, he said, could eventually tip the balance in favor of the file traders. Federal lawmakers are questioning the industry's tactics, and he predicted that politicians at the state level - "where intellectual property interests just haven't been active" in making political contributions - would begin rising to the file traders' defense. When that happens, he said, the tide is likely to turn, because "people who have to buy their friends don't have any when it matters,'' he said.

"Money is nice, but voters matter," he added.

If Hollywood cares to learn from the crypto wars, the lesson might be that it is more realistic to adapt to powerful technology, rather than quixotically try to block it. "It's unstoppable," said Elan Oren, the chief executive of iMesh, a peer-to-peer file sharing company based in Israel.

Technologies can be stubborn. Efforts to knock them down can send them rebounding back with a new twist. In the case of encryption, the technology continued to grow more powerful and researchers poked holes in the government's weaker alternatives. In the case of peer-to-peer applications, the makers have found increasingly clever ways to help traders act anonymously, and without a centralized service that can be shut down. "That's where the behavior of the industry up to now actually got us," Mr. Oren said.

If pushed further, he said, the P2P makers will eventually offer complete anonymity for users. If that happens, he predicted, "we'll see something nobody wants, including the industry": a cumbersome and expensive system of high-tech copyright protection required by law. Mr. Oren said he believed that the industry could reshape itself to woo file traders, converting them to file payers and saving their businesses. "If we convert 10 to 20 percent, it's a huge success," he said.

But for now, Mr. Oren says, he sees only counterproductive delays, and an underlying attitude from industry that seems almost Luddite. "From 1999 to 2001, if you enabled the R.I.A.A. to have the plug of the Internet," he said, referring to the Recording Industry Association of America, "they would unplug it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/22/te...rtne r=GOOGLE


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Music Industry Eyes ‘Smart’ CDs
AP

Recording companies are cautiously eyeing a new generation of smart CDs that promise to stifle music fans’ ability to use file-swapping networks while still allowing them some freedom to make copies and share music. Recent advancements in copy-protection technology have made such a strategy more palatable to music companies reluctant to make any drastic changes to the 20-year-old CD format, particularly in the United States.

NEXT WEEK, BMG Entertainment’s new album by hip-hop singer Anthony Hamilton will be the first commercial release to use a technology that restricts copying yet lets buyers play protected CDs on computers and burn copies onto blank CDs. Fans can even send copies to friends over the Internet.

The music industry blames a three-year decline in CD sales on burners and peer-to-peer, file-swapping networks like Kazaa. The new technology could complement the recording companies’ legal efforts against operators of file-swapping networks and their users.

So far, the top five recording companies, concerned about the technology’s effectiveness and a backlash from fans, have largely released copy-protected CDs commercially only outside the United States.
Early copy-proofing efforts prompted complaints that in some cases users could no longer play legally bought CDs on computers, a way of listening the companies now recognize many fans have come to prefer.

BMG is seizing on the new copy-protection advancements by embedding “Comin’ From Where I’m From” with MediaMax CD-3 technology from Phoenix- based SunnComm Technologies Inc.

With MediaMax CD-3, each song is written onto the CD twice — once in a format readable by standard CD players and the other as a Windows media file playable on a computer.
BMG has set up the CD so fans can burn each track three times per computer. Songs can also be e-mailed to a limited number of people, who can then listen to the song up to 10 times apiece.

SunnComm says that most people, unless they are hackers or truly determined, won’t be able to circumvent the limits, including one that keeps songs locked so they can’t be played even if they circulate over file-sharing networks.

Peter Jacobs, SunnComm’s chief executive, considered his technology a moderate alternative to suing fans, as the industry did this month with nearly 300 federal lawsuits against users of file-sharing networks.

BMG, which signed a one-year deal with SunnComm in June, was still evaluating future releases with copy protection.

“We are quite hopeful that the technology that they’ve developed is a step in the right direction and is a step which we will hopefully start using more extensively commercially,” said Thomas Heffe, chief strategy officer for BMG in New York.

SunnComm rival Macrovision Inc., based in Santa Clara, has developed technology that also allows CD burning and listening on computers. The CDS-300, however, blocks other attempts to make copies or share music online.

Several labels have collectively shipped in overseas markets more than 150 million CDs with an earlier version of Macrovision’s copy protection system, said Adam Sexton, a Macrovision spokesman.

Macrovision is talking with several major labels about using the new technology in the United States.

“We want to be comfortable with a technology that does allow for some personal use and does respect the work and the copyright,” EMI spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer said.

Privately, some recording industry executives say they don’t believe the latest copy-protection technology is good enough yet and could be easily thwarted. One past effort faltered when someone defeated it simply by blotting out part of the CD with a marker.

Technology that respects fans’ desire to copy, share and hear songs in different ways is good in principle, but consumers’ legal rights could still be curbed by limits on copies permitted, said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“There is a conceptual problem with that approach,” Cohn said. “It is inconsistent with how fair use has always been applied.”

For now, recording labels will watch for fans’ reaction.

“What if they put copy protection in the disc and it doesn’t ... reverse the decline of CD sales?” asked Phil Leigh, an analyst at Inside Digital Media. “If it doesn’t help it’s likely to hurt by just annoying people.”
http://www.msnbc.com/news/969120.asp?cp1=1


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Upstart Labels See File Sharing as Ally, Not Foe
Chris Nelson

Four years ago, Rich Egan couldn't fathom the usefulness of Napster.

Mr. Egan, the co-owner and president of the independent music label Vagrant Records, had heard about the software — which let users trade songs over the Internet without paying artists or labels — and could not imagine how such a setup could benefit his business.

But as soon as Mr. Egan tried it, he was hooked. Today he says — seemingly counterintuitively — his label simply would not exist without file-sharing services like Napster and its successors KaZaA and Morpheus.

Even as the major labels of the music industry pursue file traders for copyright infringement through lawsuits and the court of public opinion, Vagrant and many other independent label owners cheer them on. File sharing, these owners say, helps their small companies compete against conglomerates with deeper pockets for advertising and greater access to radio programmers.

"Our music, by and large, when kids listen to it, they share it with their friends," Mr. Egan said. "Then they go buy the record; they take ownership of it."

As the music industry suffers through its third consecutive year of falling sales, a decline the major labels say is primarily a result of file sharing, Vagrant is one of many independent labels having some success. Of the 100 top-selling albums of 2003 through Sept. 14, six come from independent labels and collectively have sold six million copies, according to figures from Nielsen SoundScan. During all of 2002, only four independent releases made the Top 100 and together they sold 5.5 million copies.

And in an industry where the five major companies — the Universal Music Group, which is owned by Vivendi Universal; BMG, a unit of Bertelsmann; AOL Time Warner Inc.; the Sony Corporation; and the EMI Group — have more than 80 percent of sales, the independents have actually increased their market share this year by nearly a full percentage point.

By no means have the independents escaped the music business's three-year sales slump. In 2002, album sales dropped 17.3 percent, to 650 million units, from the year-end total of 785 million units in 2000. They are down another 8.6 percent for the first eight months of this year, compared with the period last year. "The industry's in a disastrous situation," said Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. File sharing, illegal CD burning, competition from other entertainment and the weak national economy are all cited as contributors to a downturn that has led to layoffs and budget cuts.

In January, one of the best-known independent labels, Artemis Records, laid off 15 people, 40 percent of its staff, said Danny Goldberg, its chief executive, who started the label in 1999 after running major labels like the Mercury Records Group, Warner Brothers Records and Atlantic Records. "It's a battle," added Alan Meltzer, chief executive of Wind-up Records. "We go to war every day fighting for our little piece of territory."

Nonetheless, the sense of worry that permeates the mainstream industry does not consume the independent labels to the same degree. Wind-up, which is distributed in the United States by BMG, is one of the more successful modern independents. "Fallen," by the rock band Evanescence, has been a staple of the Top 10 for the last six months and has sold more than two million copies. Creed's "Human Clay" (1999) has sold more than 11 million copies, making it the seventh-best-selling album since SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.

For some independent label executives, their confidence stems from subscribing to unconventional barometers of success. (For this article, an independent label is one that is majority-owned by a person or group outside of the five majors, although it may be distributed by a conglomerate. Because the independent companies surveyed are privately held, none would reveal annual earnings.) Success for Vagrant, Mr. Egan said, means bands can make a living from their music. Most Vagrant albums turn a profit after selling 25,000 copies. Some albums on the independent Minneapolis hip-hop label Rhymesayers Entertainment can be profitable after selling just 10,000 copies, according to Siddiq Ali, the label's co-owner and chief executive.

Financial success for a major label release often does not start until half a million copies are sold.

"None of us are buying Bentleys," Mr. Ali said, but the label's modest recording and promotion budgets are quickly recouped. The label's best-selling album, "God Loves Ugly" (2002) by Atmosphere, has sold 71,000 copies.

Jaime Meline, who co-owns the Definitive Jux hip-hop label and raps under the name El-P, counts his company fortunate because it has cash on hand to pay for six months' overhead and continues to split album earnings 50-50 with artists. (Major label artists often earn about 10 percent.) Definitive Jux's most popular disc, "Fantastic Damage" (2002) by El-P, has sold 48,000 copies.

In recent years, major labels, much like the movie industry, have depended increasingly on first-week sales to determine whether a release will be a hit. The cost of bringing a CD to the public, which often includes hiring a consultant to get a single on radio and a top director to shoot a video, not to mention the tab for recording, can run into millions of dollars.

If a CD does not show smash-hit potential immediately, a major label is likely to stop promoting it to concentrate on the next possible blockbuster, sometimes even dropping the band. Independent labels will often promote an album, single or tour a year after a CD's release. An informal survey of independent labels that vary in size from tiny (4 employees) to relatively large (50 employees), and in genre from rock to country to hip-hop, found executives crediting their successes to developing artists' careers over the long haul rather than the pursuit of immediate hits.

A prime example is Vagrant's rock band Dashboard Confessional. Their first album for Vagrant, "The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most" is also the label's most successful release, having sold 434,000 copies. But it took two and a half years to reach that total, Mr. Egan said.

That constant promotion continues to pay dividends. Dashboard Confessional's third album for Vagrant, "A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar," was No. 2 at its debut on Billboard magazine's album chart and has sold 256,000 copies in two months. The group is featured on the cover of the October Spin magazine and recently performed on "Late Night With David Letterman."

"An artist may make his or her best record three albums in, four albums in," Mr. Egan said. "We'd like to be there when they make that artistic statement."

Building an artist's career and building a fan base to support that career go hand in hand. As radio station playlists have shrunk in recent years, independent labels have turned to other avenues, including file-sharing software, to help listeners discover bands.

The unified response of the major labels has been an effort to shut the file-sharing programs, charging they foster piracy and, in turn, displace sales. On Sept. 8, the Recording Industry Association of America sued 261 file-sharers. The trade group represents the major labels and numerous independents.

Vagrant and Palm Pictures are among the independents that encourage file sharing. But even those who frown on it, like executives at Wind-up, Artemis and Definitive Jux, acknowledge that unauthorized downloading has been useful for exposing their artists to new audiences hungry for music.

"In artist development, file sharing — it's not really hurting you," said Chris Blackwell, the chief executive of Palm Pictures, an independent label manufactured and distributed by the Warner Music Group. Mr. Blackwell, who in 1959 founded the independent Island Records, the original home to Bob Marley and U2, likens file sharers not to shoplifters, as the major labels do, but to grass-roots promoters whose efforts eventually increase sales.

"You want people to discover your artists," Mr. Blackwell said. "You're building for the future."

That tack may prove dependable, but it is still a volatile time in the industry.

"That's the chess game," said Mr. Meline of Definitive Jux, "to be able to hold on to the company and to still continue to grow while the rest of the industry is just completely going down in flames."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/22/bu...rtne r=GOOGLE


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Uncovering the Napster Kitty Ads
Leander Kahney

On the eve of its relaunch, the infamous file-trading company Napster appears to be defacing other companies' billboards with stickers of its distinctive kitty logo.

The stickers -- showing a cat wearing headphones -- are appearing on street-level billboards, the kind that feature blocks of identical posters plastered to the sides of buildings or construction sites.

So many of the stickers have appeared it looks suspiciously like the company hired an army of guerrilla marketers to blanket billboards in the dead of night.

Hijacking billboards is a practice known as "sniping," and is more commonly associated with punk bands or culture jammers than with a software company like Roxio, which owns the Napster brand now.

Roxio plans to relaunch Napster before the end of the year as a legal music-downloading service.

"It's coming back," say the stickers -- meaning Napster, of course.

But the posters defaced by Napster's stickers aren't real. They are realistic, subtle parodies featuring companies like Gour-Mutt, a gourmet dog food company, or Drop 'n' Go, a child day-care center.

Contributing to the patina of realism, the stickers have been glued to the posters -- not printed on -- stuck over the heads of characters in the ad, as though they have kitty heads. Cleverly, only a few of the posters in any given matrix have a Napster sticker stuck to them.

So realistic is the illusion, the stickers are being ripped down as souvenirs. Napster's agency is dispatching people nightly to replace them, according to a source.

The faux street campaign in six U.S. cities, has drawn criticism from some, praise from others.

Lucian James, a San Francisco marketer who compiles the American Brandstand, a weekly list of product "shout- outs" in the Billboard Hot 100, said it reminds him of Nissan's Electric Moyo campaign earlier this year.

Like Napster, Nissan's sports car campaign used fake graffiti over billboard ads. Plastered all over cities like New York, the campaign drew the ire of groups like the Wooster Collective, a street art organization, for faking street culture.

"They (Nissan) were joining a club they had no right to join just to sell stuff," commented James. Likewise, Napster used to be cool but is now "just pretending" to be cool, James said.

"Telling people something is cool, or trying to appropriate cool things like graffiti, is usually the best way to kill something with cool potential," he said.

In a post to the Boing Boing weblog, artist Abe Burmeister said, "I'm getting great pleasure watching corporate America try its hardest to create 'street cred' for a brand that once was the hottest shit around without even a business plan."

Marc Schiller, co-founder of the Wooster Collective, said he really liked Napster's campaign.

"It's a matter of execution," said Schiller. "The problem with Nissan is they blanketed the town. You have to see (Napster's posters) two or three times before you connect the dots. When you realize what it is, it makes you smile."

Schiller, CEO of a marketing agency and a street art photographer, said he liked Napster's campaign because it is "camp." Instead of pretending to be a hip, billboard-defacement campaign, he feels it is campily making fun of hip, billboard-defacement campaigns.

Schiller compared it to Microsoft's plastering butterfly stickers all over New York last summer to promote MSN, or Radiohead stenciling the name of its latest album on the streets of London.

"In my personal opinion, Napster's is probably the best one (sniping campaign) even though it isn't the first," Schiller said. "If this is going to be the trend, then Napster's done a much better job than others who have tried this."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60525,00.html