Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – March 1st, '03

[JackSpratts]

Anti-piracy efforts could increase iPod, MP3 player prices
Dennis Sellers

If the Canadian Copyright Board anti-piracy plan goes through, the price of iPods would increase by 33 percent, according to a BusinessWeek Online article. The board is considering a plan to raise the levy on every CD-R sold from 21 cents to 59 cents, as well place a levy on the hard drives found in MP3 players. Twenty-five other countries, including most of the European Union (news - web sites), have introduced similar plans.

The Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) (RIAA) blames a two-year plummet in CD sales on music piracy involving the downloading of music and "burn your own" CDs. The RIAA says that CD sales slid 7.2 percent in the first half of 2002, an ongoing trend.

However, not everyone agrees. In fact, some even hold the view that the RIAA is presenting a misleading view of CD sales trends to bolster its ongoing war against music pirates. For instance, George Ziemann, a musician and the owner of the MacWizards Music production company, reasons that sales may be down because the music industry released 27,000 new titles in 2001, a 25 percent drop from the high of 38,900 in 1999.

However, the RIAA claims it hasn't released an official tally of annual new releases since 1999. On the other hand, the research firm Nielsen SoundScan said new releases in 2001 totaled around 31,734, still a 20.3 percent drop, BusinessWeek Online reports.

The article adds that other factors may also be contributing to the CD sales slump. From 1999 to 2001, the average price of a CD rose 7.2 percent, from $13.04 to $14.19; during the same time consumer inflation was virtually flat. And the hefty sales of DVD players and discs offers competition to CDs, especially when you consider that the cost for DVD disc with a movie and soundtrack isn't substantially higher than that for a soundtrack-only CD.

Internet piracy is "undoubtedly" affecting the music business, but "it seems irresponsible for music-industry officials to present these sales statistics as proof that piracy is overwhelmingly responsible for the industry's woes while conveniently ignoring the economic and technological context that puts those numbers in perspective," BusinessWeek Online concludes.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp..._player_prices

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Portable OGG Player Soon
Emmett Plant
Press Release

Hey, folks! I just got back from Chicago, where I signed an agreement with Digital Innovations, creators and producers of the Neuros Digital Audio Computer.

What does this mean?

It means Vorbis support for a portable player. It means Linux interoperability for a portable player that's supported by the manufacturer, not an after-market hack supported by some guy in Johannesburg with a dialup connection and a copy of emacs. It means that you'll be able to go out and buy a portable audio device that will play Vorbis and support Linux at your local CompUSA.
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/portables.html

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Bertelsmann, in the dock over Napster investment, may have to sue itself.

Bertelsmann, the German media giant, has been slapped with a E16bn (USD17bn) lawsuit that claims the company’s funding of defunct P2P file-swapping music service Napster means it has aided music piracy.

According to Reuters, the suit has been issued by both music publishers and songwriters, including songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller who wrote such mega-hits as ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Stand By Me’. The plaintiffs are seeking class action status for their lawsuit, which would enable members of Harry Fox Agency, the rights organisation representing 27,000 music publishers, to join the action.

The plaintiffs claim that Bertelsmann’s investment in Napster, which amounted to E103m in the form of a secured loan, extended the life of P2P service, making Bertelsmann guilty of “willful participation ... in the widespread infringement of copyrighted music works."

A potential ironic twist in the lawsuit underlines the madness of the current digital rights saga. BMG, one of the world’s top five music companies, is owned by Bertelsmann - yet is also a member of the Harry Fox Agency and would theoretically join the lawsuit if the case became a class action. Under US law, BMG would have the opportunity to opt out of suing its parent company. However, lawyers familiar with such cases have speculated that this would make BMG vulnerable to separate lawsuits issued by its own songwriters.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=15054

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French postal service to become ISP

La Poste, the French post office and the second largest postal service company in Europe, is to launch its
broadband internet products March 17.

At the European level, La Poste is fairly late to the game, as many European postal services already offer broadband internet access – in particular, Deutsche Post, with its T-ISDN xxl product range long since having been introduced to the German market.

The state-owned postal company enters a tough and highly competitive market. La Poste will offer high and low broadband (512 Kbits at E44/month and 1024 Kbits at E72/month). More than 13 other intenet providers already offer similar, and sometimes cheaper, ADSL products.

La Poste is launching its service on ‘internet festival day’ - a nation-wide event to promote the use of new technologies and the internet.

La Poste aims in particular to attract users of its already existing internet products (free e-mail, financial services).
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=15085

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Lexmark wins injunction in DMCA case
David Becker

Printer maker Lexmark International Group won a preliminary injunction Thursday in efforts to prevent a company from selling computer chips that allow toner cartridges to be recycled.

Judge Karl Forester of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky issued the pretrial injunction against Static Control Components, a small Sanford, N.C.- based company that sells printer parts and other business supplies.

The order prohibits the company from selling its Smartek chip. When installed in compatible Lexmark printers, the chips allow the printers to use cheaper recycled toner cartridges that would otherwise be rejected by the printer's sensors

Lexmark filed the suit late last year, alleging the Smartek chip violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the dismantling of devices intended to protect intellectual property rights.

Printer makers have employed a variety of technological means in recent years to undercut the market for recycled toner and ink cartridges, which typically sell for much less than original items. Most printer makers sell their printers at or near cost, making their profit from sales of supplies.

Lexmark is the No. 2 seller of printers in the United States, behind Hewlett-Packard, and manufactures printers under the Dell Computer brand.

Anti-circumvention language in the DMCA has been a foundation for a number of recent copyright actions, including the Justice Department's crackdown earlier this week on a site distributing "mod chips" for Microsoft's Xbox video game console.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-990501.html?tag=fd_top

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"We never contemplated" cases such as Lexmark's when the DMCA was written, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys) said last week at a Silicon Valley panel.
Media Copyright Law Put to Unexpected Uses
Companies are using legislation meant to restrain Web piracy to try to shut down rivals.
David Streitfeld

Under pressure from the entertainment industry, Congress passed a bill in 1998 to restrain Internet piracy. The law made it illegal to break the digital locks shielding a piece of intellectual property -- an electronic book, say, or a CD or DVD.

Just as Congress hoped, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is proving a potent weapon. The recording industry, for example, is successfully using the law to force an Internet service provider to surrender the name of an alleged pirate.

But Hollywood isn't the only industry that can wield this sword. Companies that have nothing to do with the entertainment world have discovered the law's broad reach.

Dow Chemical Co. used the DMCA to shut down a Web site that attacked the company. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other retailers invoked it to remove the details of forthcoming sales from a site for bargain hunters.

Apple Computer Inc. cited the DMCA to stop one of its dealers from producing and selling software that allowed Apple's new DVD-burning technology to be used on earlier models of its Macintosh computers. Apple didn't explain its motivation, but commentators noted that upgraded older machines meant fewer sales of new Macs.

"The DMCA started with the noblest of intentions, but it is becoming the bright shiny new toy of enterprises looking for a way to stifle competition and to control what they might consider unfavorable information," said Mike McGuire, a policy analyst with research firm GartnerG2.

If the DMCA isn't modified, intellectual property experts warn, companies could claim violations when competitors made compatible products that linked up with their own. The result, they say, would encourage monopolies and severely curtail consumer choice.

"We never contemplated" cases such as Lexmark's when the DMCA was written, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys) said last week at a Silicon Valley panel that examined the law.

Another panelist, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), took a more critical view of Lexmark, saying she didn't intend to buy any of its printers. "There is a marketplace role in this," Lofgren said, suggesting consumers "march with their feet."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,4074563.story

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Studios hot to plug that analog hole
At issue is how to save anti-copying signals when they are converted from digital to analog.
Jon Healey

Trying to plug another potential hole in the anti-piracy dike, Hollywood studios have started a new round of private meetings with high-tech companies and consumer-electronics manufacturers to explore ways to stop unauthorized recordings.

This time, the issue is how to preserve anti-copying signals on a digital television show, online video or DVD when converted from digital to analog.

That kind of conversion, which has to happen before a digital program can be sent to the vast majority of TV sets, is inherently fatal to digital copy- protection techniques.

Years from now, when consumers have digital TVs that connect digitally to set-top boxes and recorders, the potential problem goes away. In the meantime, the studios' fear is that the mixture of analog and digital devices in homes will allow their movies and premium TV programs to be copied digitally and distributed freely via the Internet.

If that happens on a global scale, as it has in the music industry, the studios worry that they would lose the ability to sell programs to syndicators, overseas broadcasters and DVD buyers -- in other words, much of what they collect from a program after its first airing.

Some participants in the group, whose co-chairmen are from Philips Electronics, Microsoft Corp. and AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. unit, scoff at such dire predictions, arguing that today's Internet connections are too slow to enable widespread video piracy.

Nevertheless, there's no shortage of movies and TV shows already available for free online to those who know where to look for them. For example, numerous episodes from the first two seasons of HBO's "Six Feet Under" and a copy of the unreleased DVD version of "The Hours" are up for grabs from online sites that cater to video pirates.

"For those people who do suggest that audio-visual files are impractical to send over the Internet because of the size of the file and the speed of current Internet connections, here is a cautionary tale," said Andrew G. Setos, president of engineering at News Corp.'s Fox Group. "Ten years ago it took eight hours to download a song. Now it takes seconds."

The Analog Reconversion Discussion Group, as the inter-industry collective is called, says its purpose is simply to identify technological tools that may be relevant to the piracy issue. It's not supposed to select or even recommend any technologies, and it won't address such thorny policy questions as which programs can be protected and how severe the limits on copying can be.

Nor is the group operating under any timetable. Nonetheless, the studios are eager for results, and they warn that the group risks being irrelevant if it doesn't act promptly -- particularly with some members of Congress eager to legislate on piracy and digital TV.

Other participants, meanwhile, are wary of how Hollywood might use whatever findings come out of the group. Representatives of consumer groups and the computer industry, in particular, don't want the studios to characterize the group's work as setting the stage for the government to mandate anti- piracy technology in a sweeping array of devices.

Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Federation, a group that advocates civil liberties online, said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act puts the burden on Hollywood to protect its programs. But the studios' anti-piracy initiatives would shift the burden onto manufacturers so that "whenever you make anything technical, you have to go and ask them, 'How do I design this so that it protects your interests?' "
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...2Dt echnology

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Microsoft backs DVD rewritable group
Richard Shim

Microsoft is taking a more active role in developing one of the formats in the heated DVD rewritable debate.

The DVD+RW Alliance announced late Monday that Microsoft had joined its ranks, adding that the software giant will also have a seat on its policy-setting team with representatives from Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi Chemical/Verbatim, Philips, Ricoh, Sony, Thomson and Yamaha. The DVD+RW Alliance is a group of companies that promotes and develops the DVD+RW format.

The rival DVD Forum, which includes Apple Computer, Hitachi, NEC, Pioneer, Samsung and Sharp, advocates the DVD-RAM, DVD-R and DVD-RW formats. The two sides have been competing against one another to push their formats as the dominant ones in the market.

The move by Microsoft is not exactly a big surprise. Last year, Microsoft demonstrated software at its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference that supported the DVD+RW format in its next version of Windows. Microsoft also supports DVD-RAM in Windows.

Microsoft's more active role in the DVD+RW format could prove important in determining the dominant format in a long-running battle for market share.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-985787.html

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A secret war
Spike in "spyware" accelerates arms race

EarthLink's technical support staff handles a variety of problems: broken networks, corrupted files, coffee spills--and, increasingly over the past few months, bitter complaints from subscribers about "spyware" and "adware."

Those persistent types of programs, frequently operating on computers without owners' knowledge, have spread quickly in the last year, evolving as rapidly as anti-spyware software has been able to find them. EarthLink executives estimate that 40 percent to 50 percent of the Internet service provider's subscribers have running on their machines some kind of advertising or more-malicious program, which often monitors their behavior and sends the data back to the software's parent company.

The level of complaints has risen high enough that EarthLink says it's finally looking for an official spyware-killer to distribute to its angry customers.

"That's usually not what they've originally called to report, but when they find out (the source of their problem), that's what causes the most emotional reaction," said Jim Anderson, EarthLink's vice president for product development. "They feel that their trust has been broken."

EarthLink's move toward spyware-hunting marks just one new front in a bitter war over programs that sneak onto hard drives. Security companies say that the incidence of so-called spyware, adware, sneakware and other varieties of surreptitious software is climbing dramatically, adding that the most irritating of the bunch are becoming even more difficult to stop--or even identify.

These types of programs had been available for years but became more common as free file- swapping services such as Kazaa and Imesh began bundling these ad-supported programs with their software to help pay their bills. Today, many programs are automatically installed when a person views an unsolicited HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) e-mail or visits Web pages that activate a "drive-by download."
http://news.com.com/2009-1023-985524.html

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Promise of intelligent networks, radio peering
Mark Ward
US researchers are working on ways to make wireless computer networks organise themselves and manage data traffic levels without any human intervention.

Computer scientists at Intel are developing mesh networking technologies that can automatically work out the best route for data as demand changes or devices join and leave the system. The researchers believe such automatic networking systems will be needed as the numbers of devices that can communicate wirelessly proliferate. If the research proves fruitful, homes could soon be studded with small, smart wireless relays that shuffle data around at very high speeds. The ease with which wireless networks can be set up stands in dramatic contrast to the time and trouble it can take to set up computer networks with old-fashioned cables.

There are going to be tens of millions of computers out there with these capabilities and it's going to change the world But welcome as this move to wireless is, researchers at Intel think that we have yet to exploit the full potential of these untethered networks. "The first generation of wireless networks have just tried to replace the wires," said Mike Witteman, head of Intel's network architecture lab.

Mr Witteman said many companies were giving every wireless access points serving a cluster of PCs a direct connection to the corporate backbone. Far better, he said, would be to use outlying wireless access points as relays to pipe traffic from far-flung groups of PCs back in a series of hops to a small number of hubs cabled in to the core network.

Mr Witteman said his group at Intel and others outside the company, were working on so-called mesh network systems that can work out the best way to link all the devices they are in contact with, and find the ideal route for the data the devices are swapping. He said the mesh networking protocols would be of tremendous use in homes or workplaces of the future which would have many different devices all of which can swap data via radio.

"There are going to be tens of millions of computers out there with these capabilities and it's going to change the world," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2787953.stm

Operating systems will soon be obsolete
Robin 'Roblimo' Miller

Linux, Windows, Mac. All have their place, and before long that place will be in history books. The seeds of a new style of computing device have been sown, and as they grow they will inevitably lead to a world where the computer operating system as we know it today is as dead as the planetary transmission that drove the Model T Ford.

Right now, we don't have much in the way of "peer to peer" since we rely on connections through big companies to reach our "peers." when my (wireless) computer talks directly to yours, 300 meters away, and yours can talk to another one 300 meters in the other direction and pass messages back and forth, we'll have real peer to peer networking.

There have been a few stabs in this direction, but none of them have gone very far yet. One device allowed kids to SMS each other directly. It was promoted with a bang a year or so ago, but I haven't heard even a whimper from that vendor since. The technology is here, just not available in consumer form. It will come. It is inevitable. It will also be fought by "content producers" (RIAA, MPAA et al) like mad, because the devices will inevitably be hacked to remove any digital rights management built into them at the factory, and if they can talk directly to each other there will be no way to control files they pass back and forth the way there is now with ISPs and other network operators.

The other big deals that are going to revolutionize computing are improved input and output devices. Right now, the biggest laptop/handheld size bottlenecks are displays and keyboards. Replace our current displays with "eyeglass" LCDs or holographic projections, and replace keyboards with gesturing systems or voice recognition (or both), and we'll see some devices that bring new excitement to the computer industry.
http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/02...23.shtml?tid=1

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AMD Debuts New High-End Athlon Chip

Calling its new release "the world's highest-performing desktop PC processor," chipmaker AMD has unveiled a new Athlon XP 3000+ processor. Featuring the company's new Barton processor core, the 3000+ outperforms competing desktop processors by up to 17 percent in benchmark tests, according to AMD.

"The Barton 3000+ will probably represent one of the better values in the market," Giga Information Group analyst Rob Enderle told NewsFactor. However, he said, because the market was expecting something else -- AMD's next-generation Athlon 64 -- "this won't do for them what it otherwise would have done."

For his part, Aberdeen Group analyst Russ Craig noted that the new chip "is important for [AMD] because it gives them a functionality at the top of the line." He also told NewsFactor that the 3000+ should provide AMD with "a very favorable impact on their bottom line."
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/20710.html

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MusicNet Music Service Launches on AOL
Sue Zeidler

America Online on Tuesday said it would offer MusicNet to its 27 million U.S. subscribers, the broadest appeal yet to a mainstream audience by an online commercial music service.

America Online's entry into the music subscription race is viewed by analysts and even competitors as a positive development for online music services, which have struggled to gain a foothold in an area dominated by file-swapping.

MusicNet is owned by EMI Group Plc, Bertelsmann AG and Warner Music, which, like America Online, is owned by AOL Time Warner, three of the world's largest music companies.

By sending out an invitation to AOL's massive online audience, the hope is that people who have subscribed to AOL, many of which have may not even dabbled with peer-to-peer services like Napster, will sign up, executives said.

"This is the biggest digital music guinea pig to date. The entire music industry is going to watch this one closely for the next six months," said GartnerG2 analyst P.J. McNealy.

"Over the past year, AOL has led the way in making online music mainstream, and we've designed MusicNet service to be easy and convenient," said Kevin Conroy, senior vice president and general manager, AOL Entertainment, a unit of AOL Time Warner .

Music executives and analysts say the industry is in need of a fix as its very foundation of selling CDs is eroding fast due to free song-swapping services like Kazaa.

As of mid-February, sales of U.S. albums were down over 10 percent to date, on the back of a decline in 2002. By contrast, sales of blank CDs jumped 40 percent in 2002.

Job cuts and losses have piled up at many of the large labels, with merger speculation becoming a common topic in the press and around water coolers.

"Peer-to-peer services still thrive, but having AOL come into the picture helps elevate the knowledge of paid services in the marketplace," said Lee Black, analyst with Jupiter Research.

So far, MusicNet and Presslay, another major label-backed service owned by Vivendi Universal and Sony Corp, have lured only an estimated half a million users to date since launching on a variety of other distribution channels late last year. By contrast, Kazaa users number more than 60 million.

Launching with more than 250,000 songs and with new additions each week, MusicNet includes music from all five major labels and exclusive content from some AOL music programs. It lets subscribers find and listen to music, manage their music library and burn CDs.
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle....toryID=2288171


Top 20 Downloads - music

BigChampange


Battling Piracy: Business Students Suggest If You Can’t Beat Them, Do It Better
Penn St. Wins USC Marshall International Case Competition

Recording and movie publishers cannot defeat Internet intellectual property theft by peer-to-peer networks such as KaZaA and other Napster successors, but they can beat them at their own game. Business students from around the globe who took part in a contest examining the entertainment industry’s piracy crisis suggest fighting back with marketing mechanisms that offer greater personalization and convenience.

Eighty business undergraduates representing 20 top schools from 13 countries and four continents competed at the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business as part of the sixth annual Marshall International Case Competition, held February 19-22.

Their challenge: to argue new business models the entertainment industry can use to manage copyrighted works profitably and curb piracy in the new era of the Internet and other digital technologies.

Motion Picture Association co-COO and Executive VP William Murray led a panel of 24 judges comprised of consultants, attorneys and media executives, as well as business, law and communication scholars.

Nearly every team concluded that media publishers needed to break with traditional business models, embrace the new technologies and recognize that consumers want to customize the content they access. They recommended the industry ally and focus efforts on producing higher quality, more differentiated products to migrate consumers away from the often problematic, peer-to-peer networks.

Pennsylvania State University edged out other teams to win the Marshall Cup. Joel Frisch, Andrew Shingle, Jeff Drobish and Heather McGinnis urged building better customer relationships through enhanced content -- emphasizing extra features, product tie-ins and loyalty programs that leverage the collective power of copyright holders.

The common argument: people will pay for something they would otherwise get for free if it were delivered fast, securely and with added value. Penn State students used the example of consumer willingness to pay for pricey bottled water and Starbucks coffee.

Another recommendation suggested bundling anti-piracy software with anti-virus and security enhancing programs.
http://www1.internetwire.com/iwire/r...lease_id=51462

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Microsoft shows no shame with blocking tool
Robert Faletra

The role of all companies is to offer quality products or services and get paid for them in as many ways as possible. Diversification is always good in the business world. When one division is facing tough times, others can pick up the slack. This is just sound management.

This is why we talk about the need for value-add resellers to move into new areas of technology early so they can build expertise. It's also important because higher margins are available early in a new technology cycle.

But what if you developed and sold a product that encouraged a particular behaviour that some could argue has the potential to break some rules, and then attempted to make money at the other end? Before I lose you, let's consider an example. What would we think if tobacco firms diversified by creating lung cancer treatment centres? Or if firearms manufacturers opened trauma units for gunshot wounds?

Microsoft recently announced that it is developing a tool - Windows Media 9 DRM - to help music producers block users' ability to copy songs. But hold on. Isn't this the firm that supplies software to help me manage music on my PC, make copies of CDs or mix and match to create my own?

Interesting business model, don't you think? You seed the market with software that allows users to create CDs by burning songs from their collection or, God forbid, by downloading them from the net. Then, once the practice becomes widespread, you launch software to help music firms block it. Either way, Microsoft makes money. To me, this highlights the problem of when one company has too much control.

This has held true for recording firms for years. In fact, the business models of software developers and music producers are very similar. The recording companies have been able to keep the cost of music artificially high because they have a monopoly on music distribution. Thankfully, the internet has changed this - at least for a while.

I think we all know that the record firms will win this fight. They will twist enough arms and hire enough lawyers so you won't be able to buy and copy a music CD for personal use without paying again somehow.

But by playing both sides, Microsoft doesn't have to worry about who wins. You have to hand it to them on this one.
http://www.vnunet.com/Analysis/1138847

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Internet Rating Service Restates Numbers
Anick Jesdanun

A leading Internet traffic-measuring service says it underestimated workplace Web site audiences by several million visitors and is reissuing numbers for a three-month period.

ComScore Media Metrix sought Monday to portray the revisions as an improvement rather than a correction. But ComScore's main rival, Nielsen/NetRatings, said the change was more extensive than anyone in the business had done.

Such Internet traffic measurements are used, among other things, by advertisers in deciding where to place their ads and by Web sites for bragging rights. News organizations also cite the numbers.

Many analysts and even Web sites have long questioned their accuracy, but they are the best methods currently available for tracking the popularity of individual sites.

The extent of ComScore's revisions varied.

For instance, AOL Time Warner sites saw traffic for December adjusted to 111 million unique U.S. visitors, an increase of 3 percent from 108 million. Google's numbers became 49 million, a 14 percent jump from 43 million.

WeatherBug also lost bragging rights to what one press release described as "the number one source for weather information on the Web." Instead, the honor returns to rival Weather.com.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/techno...opheds%2Dhe d

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Report: AOL in talks to sell music stake

Media giant AOL Time Warner is in preliminary talks about selling a majority stake in its Warner Music Group business to music company EMI Group in a deal likely to be valued at $3 billion to $4 billion, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Sources close to both companies said last month that EMI had been holding "informal talks" with Warner Music about joining forces after a previous attempt to merge three years ago ran afoul of European regulators.
http://news.com.com/2110-1023-985642.html

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SHARES OF SONIC SOLUTIONS SOAR ON AOL PACT

Shares of Sonic Solutions rose as much as 24 percent yesterday after America Online agreed to license Sonic's technology for creating compact discs and DVD's. AOL is the world's biggest Internet service, with 27 million customers in the United States. MusicNet on AOL, a music-subscription service that AOL introduced yesterday, will include Sonic's AuthorScript program, which burns CD's. MusicNet subscribers will be asked to pay as much as $17.95 a month for access to 250,000 songs by performers from all five of the world's biggest music companies. People who buy tracks will be able to burn them directly to a CD. Shares of Sonic rose 53 cents, or 13 percent, to $4.63. The stock had dropped 31 percent in the last year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/business/27TBRF1.html

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Microsoft Gives P2P a Chance with SDK
Thor Olavsrud
Moving to add support for decentralized applications to Windows XP, Microsoft (Quote, Company Info) Wednesday unveiled a beta of its Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Software Development Kit (SDK).

The SDK features updated Windows XP application programming interfaces (APIs) and enhancements to the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) networking stack, intended to help developers leverage P2P infrastructure to create decentralized applications and services, like collaboration and data sharing features, for business and customer scenarios.

"By supporting both decentralized and centralized models of computing and information sharing, Microsoft can best address the high-level needs of its business customers, who need to be more agile, more flexible and more responsive to customer needs," said Jack Ozzie, vice president of developer services at desktop collaboration software maker Groove Networks. "the enhanced peer-to-peer support for Windows XP will enable developers to more easily build decentralized applications."

The APIs add support for scalable P2P name resolution, efficient multipoint communication, the creation and management of persistent P2P groups, and distributed data management. Microsoft said that the APIs described by the SDK will allow developers to focus on applications and not low-level plumbing required to support most P2P scenarios.

The IPv6 enhancements include support for Network Address Translation (NAT) traversal and an IPv6 firewall.

The SDK and the associated Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Networking Update capitalize on the capabilities of IPv6 to provide support for automatic tunneling, which allows IPv6 communication over existing IPv4 networks. It also allows NAT devices -- which are typically used in a home where a single public IPv4 address is shared among multiple computers with private IP addresses -- to communicate with each other without forcing the users to manually configure them.

The SDK is available for download http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...winxppeer.asp. The company said it expects to make the final release of the SDK and the Peer-to-Peer Networking Update later in the year.
http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/1609241

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Over half of American teenagers file-share, report

The figures are not going to be welcomed by the music industry – across the Atlantic, a study has found that over
half of American teenagers had downloaded audio material from peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, such as Kazaa, by the end of 2002.

According to the survey from global marketing firm Ipsos, nearly one-tenth (9 per cent) of US teens had downloaded MP3 and other audio files over the past 30 days. Ands it’s not only the imagination of adolescents that has been caught by digital downloading – almost one-fifth of all the Americans over 12 years old had used file- sharing services, translating to about 40m people.

The news will come as a dispiriting blow to the record industry which has recently been stepping-up its campaign to curb downloading from unlicensed sources. Despite legal campaigns against the largest internet-enabled corporations, ISPs, individual consumers and file-sharing services, the war against ‘piracy’ would seem to have been waged to little effect.

As well as file-sharing, the Ipsos study revealed record levels of CD-burning. One-quarter of all Americans aged 12 and older currently own a PC-based CD recorder/burner with more than one in ten Americans admitting to burning a pre-recorded CD from someone else. Over the past year, sales of blank CD-Rs have also overtaken pre-recorded CDs for the first time.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=15128

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House Panel Criticizes FCC Over New Telephone Rules
Lawmakers say regulations on Net access and local network leasing conflict.
Jube Shiver Jr.

Members of a House panel lashed out Wednesday at the Federal Communications Commission for approving telephone regulations that some lawmakers blasted as confusing and anti-competitive.

In their second grilling on Capitol Hill in six weeks, the five commissioners faced nearly five hours of questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee's telecommunications subcommittee.

Some lawmakers were upset with the FCC's 3-2 vote Feb. 20 to deregulate the market for high- speed Internet access while maintaining a requirement that the regional Bell companies lease parts of their local networks to competitors such as AT&T Corp. and WorldCom Inc. at deep discounts.

Singled out for criticism was Republican Commissioner Kevin J. Martin, who voted with the commission's two Democrats to defeat a competing proposal by FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell.

Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.) questioned Martin's party loyalty and his adherence to conservative, free-market principles. Tauzin asked why the FCC handed control over local phone policy to the states.

"You've said you want limited government, and yet you've taken a deregulatory commission and you've given that authority to 51 regulatory-minded commissions," he said.

Martin responded that he believed that only state regulators were in a position to assess competition in local phone markets.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...s%2Dtechnology

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Great article: Artificial stupidity

The saga of Hugh Loebner and his search for an intelligent bot has almost everything: Sex, lawsuits and feuding computer scientists. There's only one thing missing: Smart machines.
John Sundman

All Hugh Loebner wanted to do was become world famous, eliminate all human toil, and get laid a lot. And he was willing to put up lots of good money to do so. He's a generous, fun-loving soul who likes to laugh, especially at himself. So why does everybody dislike him so much? Why does everybody give him such a hard time?

Actually, not everybody does dislike him. He is beloved among sex workers, of whose rights he is a tireless advocate. Loebner also has friends, or at least people willing to hang out with him for short intervals, among the eccentric group of self-tutored hackers and robot builders who participate in the annual competition for the Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence.

Since 1989 Loebner has spent, by his account, more than $200,000 and a thousand hours of unpaid time to hasten the arrival of intelligent machines. He has set aside a gold medal and $100,000 in cash for the creator of the first machine that can pass for human. In the meantime he gives out annual prizes for programs that come closest to a long-sought holy grail in the artificial intelligence community: passing the Turing test.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...one/index.html

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Congress targets P2P campus pirates
Declan McCullagh

Key politicians chided universities on Wednesday for not doing enough to limit peer-to- peer piracy, calling unauthorized copying a federal crime that should be punished appropriately.

Members of the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees copyright law said at a hearing that peer-to-peer piracy was a crime under a 1997 federal law, but universities continued to treat file-swapping as a minor infraction of campus disciplinary codes.

"If on your campus you had an assault and battery or a murder, you'd go down to the district attorney's office and deal with it that way," said Rep. William Jenkins, R-Tenn.

"While I'm sympathetic to the young people, they're breaking the law," warned Rep. Maxine Waters, D- Calif. "Until the university or this committee is going to do something about it, we're wasting everyone's time."

The hearing illustrated the importance that the new chairman of the panel, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, places on addressing Internet piracy. Wednesday's gathering, which included testimony from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and two university administrators, was the first subcommittee meeting on courts, the Internet and intellectual property since last year and marked Smith's inaugural hearing as chairman.

Under a 1997 law called the No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act), it is a federal crime to willfully share copies of copyrighted products such as software, movies or music with anyone if the value of the work exceeds $1,000 or if the person hopes to receive files in return. Violations are punishable by one year in prison, or if the value tops $2,500, "not more than five years" in prison.

So far the Justice Department has not tried to use the NET Act to imprison peer-to-peer pirates. Last August, however, 19 members of Congress wrote to Attorney General John Ashcroft asking him "to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass-copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks."

On Wednesday, members of the committee expressed frustration that no criminal prosecutions had taken place yet and universities have not been sufficiently aggressive. "We are reaching the end of our ropes. There is a consensus that has emerged," said Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y. "Virtual unanimity should be a message to those testifying today that we are reaching a point at a bipartisan level that we want to stop this illegal activity."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-986160.html

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I’m Not Making This Up…

NetAccountability is a Christ-centered, 501.c3 non-profit organization, built and maintained by a team of Christian men that have come together in an effort to provide the first line of defense against online temptation. The ministry is rapidly becoming a central knowledge base for information and resources on the topics of purity and accountability.
Press Release

NetAccountability announces today Version 2.0 of the popular Internet accountability software.

NetAccountability provides a software service that facilitates real, human accountability between two or more people regarding Internet usage. This robust, patented solution, found at www.netaccountability.com, provides a highly secure software application designed to help men, women, families and ministry leaders enable purity and accountability.

The NetAccountability solution is a secure software application that resides on a user’s computer and monitors Internet traffic. If the software detects that a user visits an inappropriate website (i.e. pornographic content), it keeps a secure record of the site with a time, date and URL stamp. Then, the user’s NetAccountability partner accesses a secure online report of their Internet usage.

Chuck Swindoll of Insight For Living says, “NetAccountability represents the best approach I’ve come across for people who are interested in building personal character and making healthy decisions when it comes to their Internet use.”

The list of leading Christian ministries partnering with NetAccountability grows each week. Salem Broadcasting, New Life Ministry, Every Man’s Ministries, Saddleback Church, Wisdom Works, Joe Dallas, the National Coalition for Protection of Children and Families and Dallas Theological Seminary are all working with NetAccountability to help spread the word.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Pornography is a $10 billion industry in the US. The industry grows exponentially through Internet Pornography. The anonymous and available nature of Internet Pornography is too tempting to avoid for some users. Many who seek electronic solutions to this problem find frustration in the spotty performance of Internet filters due to “black lists” that pornographers outsmart routinely.

NetAccountability is not a filter. NetAccountability believes filters are especially useful for small children. The real difference lies in NetAccountability’s real-time algorithm that rates web content “on the fly” creating real-time “permanent history” of sites with questionable content.

“We do not block sites. Rather, we provide accountability partners a list of permanent surfing records. The goal is not avoidance of bad content. The Internet is a great place to explore, but just like rock-climbing or white water rafting, it is important to have a buddy with you to ensure safe adventure,” says CEO, Scott Covington.

Says Ministry Partner Director, Lance Loveland, “We have created a safer way to surf by building an effective software tool that provides relationship-based accountability for online behavior. It will assist in healthy life-change and lead people to view more appropriate content on the Internet.”

Version 2.0 will add new functionality to the tool that debuted in October of 2001 when Chuck Swindoll conducted a 10- minute announcement of the software release. The new features will include: advanced reporting, accountability question lists, scheduled reminders, user customizable set-up, expanded group sign-up and additional tamper-proof features including uninstall alerts. Future software will include features for expanded monitoring for: chat, instant messaging, NNTP, peer-to-peer file sharing.
http://www1.internetwire.com/iwire/r...lease_id=51495

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Wednesday in Congress. SENATE: Committees: Judiciary -- 10 a.m. Courts, the Internet and intellectual property subc. Peer-to-peer piracy on college campuses. 2141 RHOB. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Feb25.html

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California congresswoman Maxine Waters wants file sharers jailed - implies racism
Penn State president leads group against pirating

Lawmakers urged university leaders Wednesday to crack down on students who illegally download music and movies from the Internet, and suggested the so-called "P2P pirates" should face criminal penalties.

Peer-to-peer files, like KaZaA, AudioGalaxy and the now-defunct Napster, allow copyrighted CDs and DVDs to be shared and recorded for free off the Web. The entertainment industry has lost millions of dollars as a result of the estimated 2.5 billion unauthorized P2P files downloaded each month, lawmakers said.

Sixteen percent of all P2P files are downloaded by university Internet accounts, said Rep. Lamar Smith, who chaired the hearing in front of the House Judiciary subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property.

"It's unlikely that this amount of file-sharing activity is in furtherance of class assignments," Smith said dryly.

But Penn State University president Graham B. Spanier, who led a discussion among academics over how to curb P2P piracy, resisted suggestions that students who illegally download copyrighted material should be turned over to police.

Spanier likened the piracy to cheating, and said Penn State students are given three warnings to stop downloading large files off the Web before they face expulsion.

Mindful of students' privacy rights, Penn State does not examine the contents of downloaded files, but instead limits the size of material pulled from the Internet _ and large files generally consist of P2P material, Spanier said.

He said he did not know of any Penn State students who have been expelled for downloading P2P files.

"We have told them it's wrong for them to be doing what they are doing," Spanier said. "A lot of students will cheat if they're in the classroom and nobody cares whether they're cheating, and I think we have a little bit of that kind of phenomena here. It is something they can get away with, and therefore they do."

That did not placate lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle who said that P2P pirates should be treated like any other person who steals.

"If it's against the law, it's against the law," said Rep. Melissa Hart, R-Pa.

Added Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.: "If this was taking place in an inner-city, where kids were basically stealing other people's intellectual property, you'd see some movement. ... They're breaking the law. And it's a double standard."

Sales of DVDs and CDs dropped by an estimated 20 percent between 2001 and 2002 _ a decline that began in 1999, before the slump in the national economy, said Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif. The loss most hurts struggling artists who depend on the royalties they earn off sales, said Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.

"These are not the Britney Spears of the world," Weiner said, taking a jab at the pop goddess. "These are the people who help Britney Spears write her ... I guess they're called songs."
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?n...465812&rfi= 6

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Virtual' War Protest Ties Up Senate Phones
Alan Elsner, Reuters

Hundreds of thousands of opponents of war against Iraq called and faxed U.S. leaders on Wednesday in a "virtual march on Washington," jamming the White House switchboard and many congressional telephone lines for several hours.

Coordinated by the Win Without War Coalition, an umbrella protest group, the action aimed to direct at least one telephone call and fax to every U.S. senator every minute throughout the day. Organizers said they were far exceeding that goal.

The White House switchboard was also flooded and most callers heard a message that "all circuits are busy."

Tom Andrews, a former Democratic representative from Maine who is running the organization, said more than 500,000 people had signed up on the Internet to take part and a half a million more were also expected to participate without registering on the group's Web site (Moveon.org).

"We have hundreds of thousands of calls and faxes that we know are going in. It's a first-of-its-kind protest and a tremendous success already," he said. "People are making their voices heard loud and clear -- don't invade and don't occupy Iraq."

The Web site had a running total of what it said was the number of calls placed. As of 5 p.m. EST the number was almost 400,000. The Web site was flashing the names of individual protesters above a map of the United States with quotes from e- mails sent to the headquarters and to lawmakers. Each comment included the name and hometown of the protester.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2294501

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Hollywood, software firms aim at pirates
Stefanie Olsen

Two major trade groups filed on Thursday a slew of civil lawsuits against people they claim were selling pirated copies of films and software via online auction sites.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Hollywood's chief trade association, brought 12 cases against individuals who were allegedly auctioning pirated editions of popular films including "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" and "Die Another Day." The Business Software Alliance (BSA), whose members include Adobe and Apple, filed a handful of similar cases against people it said were selling stolen or illegally copied pieces of software.

Cases were filed in cities across the United States, including New York, Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles.

The MPAA's charges are part of the group's "Tactics for Auction Piracy" (TAP) initiative, a response to what the MPAA estimates was a near doubling last year in the number of auction sales devoted to pirated films. In December, the trade group kicked off the campaign by filing at least nine similar cases in cities around the country; a representative for the trade group said these cases were progressing well.

"It is an unfortunate reality that consumers may be sorely disappointed, finding that the DVD or video that they paid for is not a bargain at all, and that it is, in fact, of a much lower quality than what they expected," MPAA president and CEO Jack Valenti said in a statement. "It is my hope that the TAP II initiative will serve to help protect unsuspecting customers."

Similarly, the BSA is aiming to staunch lost sales from stolen copies of software. It says mail-order piracy is one of the growing contributors to an annual loss of $11 billion in sales to software publishers globally.

To catch the alleged offenders, the groups purchased advertised products in auctions and examined them to see if they were illegal copies. The MPAA said that in its suits it had targeted people it claimed were repeat offenders.

"Consumers...need to watch out for spam offers and online vendors at otherwise reputable Internet sites such as eBay," said Bob Kruger, vice president of enforcement for BSA. "The actions...are aimed at signaling to vendors that selling pirated software online is asking for a lawsuit."

The groups urged consumers to avoid buying pirated copies of software and films by watching for titles that are "too new to be true,"--or too recent to be legitimately offered for wide public sale yet--and by carefully reading labels.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-990489.html

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Feds Shut Down Piracy Website

The Justice Department said Wednesday it has seized a Web site used to sell modification, or "mod" chips used to sidestep copyright protections built into game consoles, such as Microsoft's Xbox and Sony Playstation 2, giving users unlimited play time on pirated games. The department said David M. Rocci, 22, of Blacksburg, Va., sold approximately 450 Enigmah mod chips, making about $28,000, through his iSONEWS.com Web site. The chips were imported illegally from the United Kingdom and were designed specifically to be used for the Xbox console, the DOJ said. On Dec. 21, Rocci pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to import, market and sell the mod chips. He reached an agreement with the government to surrender the Web site. As of this week, visitors to the site are greeted by DOJ and U.S. Customs seals. "The domain and Web site were surrendered to U.S. law enforcement pursuant to a federal prosecution and felony plea agreement for conspiracy to violate criminal copyright laws," the message on the site says. "The Department of Justice and federal law enforcement will continue to investigate and prosecute individuals and groups that violate the federal criminal copyright laws at home and abroad," it warns. Sentencing is set for March 7, and Rocci could face up to five years in prison and a $500,000 fine, the department said.
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=...7-084053-9070r

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P2P 'soldier's radio' bridging gaps
Dan Caterinicchia

While Defense Department and industry officials are developing the Joint tactical Radio System (JTRS) over the next few years, battlefield personnel are using the "soldier's radio," developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to communicate and enhance situational awareness.

JTRS uses software-centric radios that can be programmed to patch users into various radio frequencies. Initial production is expected in 2005, according the prime contractor, Boeing Co.

But while DOD users are waiting for JTRS to move from the drawing board to the battlefield, soldiers are using DARPA's Small Unit Operations: Situational Awareness System (SUOSAS), said A. Michael Andrews II, the Army's deputy assistant secretary for research and technology. He made his remarks Feb. 26 here at the Association of the U.S. Army's winter symposium.

The DARPA networking project has been designed to establish secure, reliable wireless communication for soldiers on the battlefield while keeping overhead low for real-time communication. The system uses mobile peer-to-peer nodes as intermediaries across long distances to coordinate voice and data communications.

SUOSAS is intended to improve communications among soldiers in restrictive environments, such as urban areas or mountainous regions. Each soldier wears a self-powered computer/communications device that serves as a peer-to-peer node.

Combined with mobile relay/router/beacons and tactical sensors, the result is a self-configuring, distributed information network. And because less power is needed for node-to-node communications, the system is less susceptible to detection and jamming than existing communications systems, according to DARPA.

DARPA Director Anthony Tether said SUOSAS helps meet DOD's goal of establishing robust, self-forming networks on the battlefield that enable commanders and soldiers to know where everyone is.

The DARPA solution is far less likely to be jammed than the heavily used Global Positioning System, which enables a person to determine his or her precise location on the Earth via devices that receive signals from a constellation of 24 satellites, said Philip Brandler, director of the Natick, Mass., Soldier Center at the Army's Soldier and Biological Chemical Command.
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2003...s-02-27-03.asp

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Cyber-Blackbeards Beware
Cynthia L. Webb

Uncle Sam is getting serious about piracy. No, not the parrot-toting knaves of the high seas, but their modern-day broadband namesakes. The latest development: The Justice Department this week seized a domain name and Web site that traded tips and products about copyrighted movies and games. Officials are using the case to warn other potential pirates about the risks of swapping illegal files and copyrighted products on the Internet.

The www.isonews.com site -- described by the U.S. government as dedicated to online copyright piracy -- now links to a message from the Justice Department with information on the case and this ominous message: "ISO News is now the property of the U.S. government." The domain's transfer to government control is part of a plea agreement with the site's 22-year-old owner, David M. Rocci of Blacksburg, Va. Rocci pleaded guilty in December to conspiring with others to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by importing, marketing and selling modification, or "mod," computer chips. The chips can bypass copyright protection mechanisms in Xbox and other online gaming devices.

According to federal officials, Rocci sold 450 Enigmah Mod Chips, taking in $28,000. "Because the Web site was 'facilitating' the crime and because Justice Department officials wanted to send a message to other violators, they came up with the idea of seizing the site. Officials said this could be a harbinger of enforcement actions," The Washington Post reported.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Feb27.html

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They don’t like “Free”
Singingfish Multimedia Search Engine Launches Paid Inclusion
Press Release

Singingfish, the search engine that holds a Google-like dominance in providing multimedia searching to audio-visual players, is launching a paid inclusion program this week.

You may not have heard of Singingfish, but if you've ever searched for streaming audio or video files using the Real Player or Microsoft's Windows Media Player, you've used their services. The company handles over more than a million multimedia queries per day, in large part thanks to distribution deals with these two streaming media giants.

Unlike many of the popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems like Kazaa, Singingfish searches only for legitimate, legal streaming media files. The company estimates that about 10% of all websites host at least one streaming media file. And Alexa Research estimates that the amount of streaming media on the Internet grows by more than 10 fold every six months.

Singingfish's paid inclusion program is designed for the growing number of web sites offering streaming media files, to help make their content more easily found found by searchers.

Similar to the paid inclusion programs offered by AltaVista, FAST, and other major text-based search engines, Singingfish's program not only offers a greater level of control over submissions, but also overcomes problems inherent in the web crawlers that are used to find online content.

Singingfish's crawler works in much the same way as text-based search engine crawlers. However, it is tuned to scour the web for audio and video files, largely ignoring text. This single-minded focus on streaming media presents a problem, however: While standard crawlers have no difficulty finding and indexing text on web page, Singingfish's crawler can't "see" or "hear" the contents of multimedia files.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...ngingfish.html

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Let’s see: the RIAA says P2Ps made pop sales drop 9%. So then P2Ps must’ve made country sales go up 12%!

With country records flying off the shelves, Music Row executives say Nashville has earned more attention than it's gotten from the industry's leading advocate.

They've invited representatives from the Recording Industry Association of America to town next week to discuss policy and get to know country and Christian label executives.

The idea is to create a direct line from Nashville to the RIAA, which is headquartered in Washington, said Fletcher Foster, senior vice president of marketing for Capitol Nashville. Most decisions that affect Nashville labels and artists are made by corporate parents in New York and Los Angeles, and Music Row doesn't want to be overlooked, he said.

Last year, when overall album sales were down almost 9%, country sales rose 12.2%, and Christian and gospel music held steady.

Among those coming to Nashville next Thursday are RIAA president Cary Sherman and Joel Flatow, head of its West Coast office.

The RIAA, music's leading trade group, is waging aggressive legal and political battles against copyright infringement and digital downloading, including the federal court fight that shut down the online free music sharing sites Napster and Aimster.
http://www.tennessean.com/business/a...nt_ID=29389423

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Digital Wrongs
Sonia Arrison

Silicon Valley's movers and shakers gathered in Santa Clara last week to debate intellectual property issues and demonstrate how laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) stifle innovation in the technology sector.

The "digital rights summit," hosted by Intel, the AEA, and Digitalconsumer.org, brought together a diverse group of high-profile tech executives, lawyers, and activists. "This isn't just about music and movies," said Joe Krause, co-founder of Digitalconsumer.org, "it affects the entire technology industry."

Krause put together a compelling panel of executives and venture capitalists to tell their stories of how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has put a chill - or, worse, a stop - to their business plans. Perhaps most memorable was the case of Static Control Components, a producer of replacement toner cartridges for a number of printers, including Lexmark.

Static Control Components reverse engineered the code that instructs Lexmark's printers to print only with Lexmark cartridges so that Static Control's replacement cartridges would work. Lexmark filed a lawsuit claiming that this violates the DMCA because it "circumvents the technological measure" that the printer uses to verify the cartridge is from Lexmark.

The DMCA was meant to protect music and movies from being stolen, but as William London, Static Control's general counsel, complains, "this has nothing to do with movies or music, but solely to do with interoperability of hardware." Indeed, this case has attracted attention from many quarters, including the automotive parts industry where DMCA-protected chips could easily multiply and these types of suits could become commonplace.

Other speakers at the summit discussed how investment in new technologies often disappears because of legal fears. Hank Berry, former Napster CEO and partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, said that because of the potential vulnerabilities under the DMCA, his firm recently refused to fund a new technology that would allow music streaming for cell phones. But the stories didn't stop there.

During the break, many of the attendees recounted similar tales, creating a frenetic atmosphere that harkened back to the days of the technology boom. Only this time, the energy won't go into creating new products, it will be spent fighting the unintended consequences of a law that stifles innovation in a sector that's critical for America's success. And it's not only the tech industry that suffers.

The entire economy is experiencing losses as a result of the DMCA chill. As SonicBlue's CEO Greg Ballard noted, the $3 million his company spends every quarter to defend itself against the movie studios and television companies could have been used to hire 120 new employees or make investments for new innovations. So what's the answer?
http://www.techcentralstation.com/10...D=1051-022703A

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They think they’ve seen evil of a kind. It’s like Bible Belters in the face of the sexual revolution. It’s the end of civilization. It’s everyone’s reason for being that’s under attack. It really isn’t just business.
Stop, Thief!
Michael Wolff

There’s an extraordinary, almost frightening passion in the way film and music executives talk about people downloading their products for free. It’s a moral position. Their fervor is genuine. These normally pretty bland, very business-languagey guys—suits—become incredibly intense and bent out of shape on the file-sharing issue. The ferocity of their counter-offensive—in lawsuits, in government lobbying, in semi-demented technological-protection schemes—also seems as personal.
This is real pain—and real fury.

The disconnect here occurs on several levels. For one thing, it is very strange to have entertainment executives —generally regarded as among the most amoral, conniving, and venal of all businessmen—taking the high ground. And yet here they are delivering heartfelt defenses of artists, and even art itself—they see the very essence of the nation’s cultural patrimony at risk. And you really don’t sense a phony or opportunistic note. Rather, these guys actually seem to be losing sleep over this. It’s right and wrong they’re arguing about here. Good character versus a virtual barbarian deluge. They believe, with feeling, that bad or sadly misguided people do this digital pilfering. Every time I get buttonholed—Peter Chernin, the COO of News Corp., gave me a very convincing what-for not long ago—I find myself feeling incredibly guilty and resolve to have a word with my children about this whole downloading issue.

The other odd thing is that these guys who have built their careers and their industry on trying to give an audience exactly what it wants—no matter how low and valueless and embarrassing—are now standing with a high-church rectitude against the meretricious desires of this same audience. It is a bizarrely out-of-character role: holding the line. Censuring the public. Suing the public! Indeed, branding the great American mass-media audience as a craven and outlaw group.

They don’t see file sharing as just a change in the nature of the transaction: a fundamental, but not unfamiliar, discrepancy between the ask price and the bid price.
But here’s the merciless trend (which obviously has big and heartbreaking implications for weakened media conglomerates): The price of content keeps falling.
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/...ialife/n_8384/

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Good Luck Pals
Opening People's Ears
Press release

People like music for many different and varied reasons. These are often social, habitual, historical or emotional.

But why do we really like the music that we like?

Well, much of what attracts us to a particular song is found in the basic structure of the music. Particular rhythms, changes in key and certain melodic patterns

Polyphonic HMI has developed proprietary music analysis technologies capable of identifying music preferences of a user or the whole current recorded music market and intelligently selecting music to recommend to the user or to release as a single.

Our technology not only allows similarities to be identified between existing successful music and unreleased or unsigned music, but can also use that data to identify emerging trends as the music landscape changes.
http://www.polyphonichmi.com/

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Fans of Classic Amps Find Nirvana in a Chip
Roger Van Bakel

THERE are days when Jeff Slingluff, a sound engineer, feels like a musical archivist, a bit like a latter-day Alan Lomax. The difference is that Mr. Lomax made recordings of vanishing American songs and music styles, whereas Mr. Slingluff seeks to preserve the sounds of vintage guitar amplifiers and fine guitars.

"Many guitar amps that are classics are now 40, 50 years old, and they may not be around in another generation," Mr. Slingluff explained. "Spare parts and replacement vacuum tubes are getting harder to find, and they're not necessarily made to the original specs. So gradually, the authentic sounds of a '65 Vox AC-30 or a '59 Fender Bassman amp will be lost unless we capture them."

And capture them he does, in the sound lab at Line 6, a company in Thousand Oaks, Calif., that pours those sonic particulars into silicon and sells them to guitarists worldwide.

Line 6 uses a technology called modeling to measure the characteristics of a particular vintage amp, from the distortion of its original tubes to the resonance of its speaker cabinet. The company has developed a way to reproduce those measurements in a powerful D.S.P., or digital signal processing, chip that contains models of dozens of classic amps.

That chip is at the heart of Line 6's Pod series of amp simulators.

Pods, which sell for $250 to $400 depending on the version, are burgundy-colored, kidney-bean-shaped boxes that have become many a guitarist's favorite tool for live performance and recording. Players can jack in their instrument, run a cable to a studio mixing board or a live sound system, and have an arsenal of amps at their disposal with the twist of a knob.

Collecting the actual amps can be taxing on the back, the ears and the wallet. Prices of classic amplifiers and replacement tubes have risen sharply in recent years. Even if a musician owned a large assortment of vintage tube gear, keeping the equipment in top shape and transporting it from gig to gig is nobody's idea of fun.

But another advantage of the Pod is that it produces the sought-after creamy distortion of tubes even at neighbor-friendly sound levels.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/te...ts/27guit.html

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University president visits Congress to discuss file sharing
Jeremy R. Cooke

In its push to end online piracy, the entertainment industry should not forget that peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing promises to have valid educational uses as well, Penn State President Graham Spanier told a congressional panel in Washington, D.C., yesterday.

"A technology may exist or be created that can block P2P transactions, but we would be reluctant to embrace technology that would block both legitimate and illegitimate uses indiscriminately," Spanier said.

Universities share with the music and movie industries a concern for the protection of intellectual property, Spanier said. But he said colleges want to guard against restrictions to "the free and open exchange of information that underpins the creativity, vigor and productivity of our education and research programs."
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive...03dnews-01.asp

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Blue collar pay for Gold record sales
The world of finance according to record companies

A look at a mythical rock band's earnings, with actual figures compiled from industry sources:

New York City's hottest new band is Grunthead, a four-piece hard rock group from Maspeth. Because they've got buzz, the band gets a 15% royalty rate, a few points above the usual amount for a new artist.

Its debut, "Gruntastic," goes gold – only 128 of more than 30,000 records reached that level in 2002.

The Gold Record Gross: 500,000 albums sell at $16.98 = $8,490,000 The Grunts' royalty is 15% of retail. That's $1,273,500.

But the Contract calls for "packaging deductions" of 25%, so the gross drops to $6,367,500. Then there's promotional albums and giveaways the labels give to wholesalers, retailers, radio and the press. That's a "free goods" charge of 15%, so the gross drops another to $5,094,000. So, the band's royalty is actually: $764,100. The record company keeps the packaging and "free goods" funds. After collecting a $9.99 wholesale price, it also reaps an additional $829,900. The $3,500,000 balance goes to retailers, assuming they sell the record for list price.

Because the band was hot, they got an advance from the record company of $300,000. They spent $200,000 of that recording the album, which included a $50,000 advance to the producer. They pocketed the remaining $100,000. Additionally, the label spent $100,000 making the band's first video, which got them played on MTV2. The band owes all of this money back to the label.

So the royalty drops to $364,100.

But the band's producer also earned a 4% royalty of $203,760, of which he already received $50,000. So the band has to pay him an additional $153,760, reducing their royalty to $210,340.

After pocketing $310,340 (which includes the remaining $100,000 of the advance), the band has to pay their manager 15%, or $46,551, and give 2% of the total deal, or $101,880, to the power lawyer who got them the deal in the first place. That takes the band down to $161,909.

That's not bad money, but it's split four ways, or $40,477.25 each, about the same as a city sanitation worker with two years' experience, without health benefits, vacation and retirement fund. But with, of course, groupies.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...1p-57008c.html







Until next week,

- js.






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Current Week In Review


Recent WIRs -

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=15292 Feb. 22nd
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=15219 Feb. 15th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=15128 Feb. 8th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=15063 Feb. 1st



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