Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 23rd, ’05

[JackSpratts]

"MP3 turns 10 years old." – ecoustics


"There are still more people using some variety of file sharing tools than there were in the heyday of Napster." – Eric Garland


"Thanks to statutory damages, a single iPod filled with infringing songs could give rise to more than half a billion dollars in damages." – Fred von Lohmann


"We haven't really altered our direction as a result of the judgment. We have a strict open-source goal now, and that really frees us up from a lot of responsibility. We're not trying to make revenue, so it's hard to try to sue us." – Jonathan Nilson


"There's no way to stop people from getting digital content illegally. People will always be able to get this stuff illegally. If you want to do a legal service, then you have to add value to it." – David Goldberg


"We are moving from a text-based culture -- where people have been allowed to borrow and take snippets from books and magazines and journals -- into a visual culture. Those same kind of rights, to quote from a movie or TV show and annotate it or comment on it, have been stripped away." – J.D. Lasica


"Why can't she slither out through the window like everyone else?" – Kelefa Sanneh



















July 23rd, 2005




MP3 Turns 10 Years Old
Posted by Admin

Happy Birthday MP3!

On July 14th, the name "MP3" celebrates its tenth anniversary. On this day back in 1995, the researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS decided to use ".mp3" as the file name extension for their new audio coding technology. Soon MP3 became the generally accepted acronym for the ISO standard IS 11172-3 "MPEG Audio Layer 3".

.mp3 emerged as the unanimous winner of an internal poll at Fraunhofer IIS. In an email dated July 14th 1995, the new file extension was proclaimed:

quote:

Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 12:29:49 +0200

Subject: Layer3 file extension: .mp3

Hi all,

this is the overwhelming result of our poll: everyone voted for .mp3 as extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3! As a consequence, everyone please mind that for WWW pages, shareware, demos, and so on, the .bit extension is not to be used anymore. There is a reason for that, believe me :-)

Juergen Zeller

(translated from German)

This naming can be seen as the conclusion of years of research and development in a team of up to 40 engineers. The format's international standardization in 1992 ensured worldwide compatibility - this fact and the public MP3 source code guarantee that billions of existing MP3 files can still be played by generations of audiophiles to come.

In 1992 MP3 was in fact so far ahead of its times, that the industry considered the technology far too complex for practical application. It turned out, however, that its development was the bottom line advancement in audio coding - no other coding method so far could uncrown MP3 as the standard for digital music on the computer and on the Internet.

With the MP3 player, a brand new market was created. In 2004 more than 3 million MP3 players were sold in Germany alone. And the success story will continue: the prognosis for 2006 estimates over 80 million MP3 players to be sold worldwide.
http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messag...81/147931.html





Big Champagne CEO Talks Up the Digital Revolution
Jennifer LeClaire

The equation is simple and not mysterious at all. The MP3 has become over the past few years the de facto consumer standard, like a compact disc or a cassette tape. This is a form of storage medium that is compatible with everybody's life. Because MP3 has become such a consumer standard, people know it works.

More than 2 billion people around the world own or use mobile phones. And increasingly, people are using their mobile phones for multimedia -- not just for communication, but also for entertainment, news, and information services. Click here to find out more about Nokia's developments with Mobile TV!

Long after Napster, mainstream software giants like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) are beginning to get into the online music fray with file-sharing applications, and Internet giants like Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) are moving to subscription models for digital downloads.

While we've not quite seen a digital revolution yet, file-sharing pundits say we're inching closer to what was promised several years ago. Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, a firm that tracks Internet file sharing, has been watching the drama unfold for the past five years and says the best is yet to come.

TechNewsWorld caught up with Garland to discuss the impact of recording industry lawsuits on file sharing, the key drivers behind the phenomenon, and emerging trends surrounding the technology.

TechNewsWorld: File sharing has come a long way over the past few years. No one can forget the Napster controversy. Now it seems a digital revolution is impending. Did you see this coming?

Eric Garland: I would be lying if I didn't admit that I absolutely did see it coming. We all left otherwise productive careers and took this tremendous left turn to start our company at that time. The only thing that we got completely wrong in our estimation or prognostication was the timing. I did not think that six or seven years after the start of Napster that we would still be stuck in second gear.

For instance, we predicted that there would be a period of awkward adolescence with intense litigation and legislation. We saw that happen when Napster got sued and we said that there would be more of this. But we thought after a few years there would be a radical shift and a great opportunity to champion these new tools and this social phenomenon. But here we are today in many ways in the same place we were in 2002 with similar court battles. We never anticipated widespread litigation against parents and kids and average folks.

We also underestimated how much pain the entertainment industry would feel. I never thought that what were 5 percent and 10 percent annual declines for the recording industry starting in 2000-2001 would turn into a condition of the business . Every year we are looking at increasing double-digit declines. I have watched almost everyone I worked with in the entertainment businesses go on to do something else with their lives. Thousands of people have been laid off. They are high school teachers and real estate agents and entrepreneurs now because there are no jobs out there. We had never guessed any of that.

We thought Napster would be a hugely disruptive force and that over the course of a few years we would see digital music take a seat alongside compact discs. We thought it would be a coup but largely a bloodless coup. We thought the industry would figure out a way to embrace and work with new technologies. There were moments when it looked like it would go that way, like when Bertelsmann actually invested in Napster. There were 11th-hour negotiations that almost saw the recording industry take Napster in house. It is fascinating to think what might have been if the recording industry had tweaked Napster as a licensed distribution platform while all of us were experimenting with it.

TNW: How are record industry lawsuits impacting file sharing?

Garland: We can quantify the effect it's had on file sharing as a behavior. But then you have to talk qualitatively in softer terms about an even more interesting thread: the enormous impact it has had on the popular consciousness; our attitudes, our thinking and our understanding about all these previously mysterious issues, like intellectual property and online copyright and what constitutes infringement.

I think the record industry would be quick to claim a win. They think they have inhibited the growth of file sharing. But they haven't reversed the trend. There are still people using these tools. There are more people using these tools and more media on these networks than there were prior to litigation campaigns. But the recording industry would point out that maybe there would be even more of it today if it hadn't started litigating. In other words, maybe the rate of growth has been slowed.

Depending on which reports you read, NPD Group says that from March of 2004 to March of 2005 file sharing activity is up 25 percent. Our view of the same phenomenon puts it somewhere closer to 20 percent growth. But it's significant growth. There are still more people using some variety of file sharing tools than there were in the heyday of Napster.

TNW: There seems to be a discrepancy in the data on file sharing. Why do different firms have such different numbers?

Garland: A lot has been made of this apparent discrepancy. In my view it is not a discrepancy. There are many different ways of taking the tape measure to a phenomenon like this. I think that most of the different researchers are expressing the same story in different terms.

TNW: What is driving the growth?

Garland: In many ways we created a mystery where there doesn't have to be one. The entertainment industry has agonized over this presumed magic formula. The record industry is asking, "Why is it so popular? Why do they keep taking our music despite all of these very well intended efforts to offer them the alternatives?" It has little to do with P2P, per say. People don't know what's under the hood of their computer music tools any more than they know what is under the hood of their cars. People don't care about peer to peer as architecture. That is the domain of geek developers and programmers.

The equation is simple and not mysterious at all. The MP3 has become over the past few years the de facto consumer standard, like a compact disc or a cassette tape. This is a form of storage medium that is compatible with everybody's life. Because MP3 has become such a consumer standard, people know it works. That leads to simplicity, usability , and compatibility, and no restrictions on use. Restriction on use is a layer of complexity that is unfamiliar to music buyers who have for generations bought a piece of recorded music done whatever they wanted to do with it.

A peer-to-peer network offers you ease of use in the MP3 format, unlimited selection, no complicated fine print, and, of course, last but not the least the price is right it. It's free. The entertainment industry has a tough time providing that consumer wish list. The entertainment industry doesn't like the MP3 file format because it doesn't adequately protect their content. They can't provide an unlimited selection because of copyright laws. Then there's all the fine print with running a subscription service. File sharing is simple and it works for everybody and all the good stuff is there.

TNW: Are legitimate music swapping sites making a positive impact on the market?

Garland: That is a tough question to answer. On one hand these businesses are really nascent. They started from nothing about 18 months ago. Before Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes there was nothing on the horizon in terms of paid download services. We all caught the bug and everybody bought an iPod. The problem is the iTunes music store didn't do the kind of volume that everybody thought it would.

Apple has sold more than 12 million iPods but only about 500 million songs. Even though it holds 10,000 songs, people are only spending $25 over the year. That's about the price of two CDs. It is not like a digital music revolution that accounts for half of music revenues. So the problem is now there is an expectation in the industry that .99 cents isn't enough. You might as well be giving away music for free.

Now they are scrambling to raise the price. How do you think the users will feel about this now that they have gotten used to .99 a song? So they are talking about bundling songs. If you want one song you can't buy it individually. You have to buy it as a three-pack. But that could kill the golden goose because in an attempt to raise the price you might drive them away.

Another approach is the subscription model. Every man, woman and child pays $20 a month to rent music. That's a good deal because they are spending over $200 a year. The recording industry is hoping the subscription model will catch fire. Consumers in focus groups we've hosted have said it is an appealing model, but they still want to be able to swap files so they can listen to it and then build a permanent collection of MP3s.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/44617.html





Firefox Marketing Site Hacked
Joris Evers

SpreadFirefox.com, the community marketing Web site for the open-source Firefox Web browser, was hacked earlier this week, potentially exposing user data.

Attackers broke into the Web site by exploiting an unpatched security vulnerability in the software that runs SpreadFirefox.com, the Mozilla Foundation said in an e-mail alert to registered users of the site late Thursday. Mozilla coordinates Firefox development and marketing. The authenticity of the e-mail was confirmed Friday by a Mozilla representative.

The attack actually occurred on Sunday but was not discovered until Tuesday, according to the e-mail alert. The SpreadFirefox.com was subsequently taken down for a few days to investigate the attack, according to a notice posted on the site.

The necessary patches have now been applied to the software that runs SpreadFirefox.com, Mozilla said. According to its e-mail, the group has also "reviewed our security plan to determine why we didn't previously apply those fixes in this case, and have modified that plan to ensure we do so in the future." The exploited flaw was a vulnerability in PHP, the language in which Drupal, the content management system that Spread Firefox uses, is written.

Mozilla believes the machine was hacked to use it to send spam, according to the e-mail. However, it is possible that attackers obtained usernames and passwords and any other information people may have provided to the site, such as e-mail and home addresses, birth dates and instant- messaging names, Mozilla said.

The hack is an embarrassment to Mozilla, which uses security as the main selling point for the Firefox Web browser.

SpreadFirefox is the online Firefox marketing hub. Mozilla has successfully used the site to mobilize volunteers to popularize the browser through free marketing techniques such as Web site buttons and by collecting money for an ad in The New York Times.

As a result of the attack, Mozilla is urging the estimated 100,000 SpreadFirefox users to change their passwords. If those people use the same passwords for other Web sites, they should be changed there too, Mozilla advises.
http://news.com.com/Firefox+marketin...3-5790030.html





Hollywood, Tech Still Sparring Over Grokster
Roy Mark

Almost a month after the Supreme Court ruled that peer-to-peer (P2P) developers are liable for copyright violations if they actively induce piracy with their technology, Hollywood and the Silicon Valley continue to snipe over the meaning of the decision.

"The court said if you build a business plan based on inducement, you're going to be held responsible for that," Don Verilli, who argued Hollywood's case before the high court, told a noon luncheon briefing today for congressional staff members.

Verilli added, "It's not about technology, it's about how businesses use it."

The unanimous MGM v. Grokster, ruling held that technology itself was not an issue. Instead, it upheld the high court's 20-year-old Sony Betamax ruling about video recorders that established the principle that technology is neutral, even if some use the technology for illegal purposes.

Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the influential digital rights group that supported the P2P companies, told the overflow crowd he was glad the court upheld the Betamax case. But the justices "did not answer many of the hard questions."

First and foremost, von Lohmann contended, the ruling left technology companies and their legal staffs to "pick their way" through a dangerous legal minefield when it comes to inducement.

"If your lawyer guesses wrong, you're finished," von Lohmann said. "That's an effective ban on technology. Technology executives don't want to make that decision and venture capitalists don’t want to make that decision. It's called uncertainty."

He also pointed out secondary liability in copyright cases can bring "apocalyptic" results for developers through mandatory statutory damages. In addition, content owners can pierce the corporate veil and individually sue corporate officers, directors and investors.

"Thanks to statutory damages, a single iPod filled with infringing songs could give rise to more than half a billion dollars in damages," von Lohmann said. "These risks raise the stakes for both innovators and investors in legitimate, multi-purpose digital products."

Verilli dryly noted that developers need to be "more careful" in drafting business plans.

"Grokster sought to attract individuals who had previously utilized the Napster file-sharing service," Verilli said. "They made no efforts to curtail the massive amount of infringing conduct occurring on its system and they profited from the infringing use of its system."

Or, as the Supreme Court said in its decision," the unlawful objective was unmistakable."

Not surprisingly, Verilli said no further action from Congress, such as last year's battle over Sen. Orin Hatch's Inducement Act, is needed. "The lower courts can get at impermissible conduct and protect creative products. It's not time for intervention by Congress."

Equally unsurprising, von Lohmann wants Congress to abolish statutory damages for secondary copyright claims.

"This would leave copyright owners actual damages and injunctive remedies, putting them in no worse a position than litigants in most other areas of civil law," he said. "Technology companies and investors, meanwhile, would be able to make reasonable business decisions about manageable levels of legal risk, rather than face the prospect of crushing statutory damages based on unpredictable legal standards."

Ultimately, through, von Lohmann said the solution for Hollywood and the P2Ps to make peace.

"Congress needs to clear the way for collective licensing of P2P file sharing, allowing P2P users to pay a reasonable fee to 'get ligit,'" von Lohmann said. "Today, one in five American Internet users are downloading from P2P networks, despite more than 12,000 lawsuits filed by the entertainment industry. More lawsuits will not resolve the P2P dilemma."
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news...le.php/3521421





Digital Media Execs Debate Content at AlwaysOn
Matt Hicks

Though 350 miles away, Hollywood was in the air as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, executives and venture capitalists predicted the direction of digital media.

But the two industry centers appeared half a world away in the discussions at the AlwaysOn Summit being held here this week.

To a panel of multimedia leaders, the major entertainment and media companies are continuing to miss the fundamental shifts that are giving consumers more power and dismantling traditional approaches to creating, distributing and marketing everything from music and movies to radio programs.

"[The entertainment industry] lost when the Internet was created, because the Internet was created to resist control, and as more people are on broadband you're just not going to have that control and you need to adapt your business model to that reality," said Michael Weiss, the CEO of StreamCast Networks Inc., which makes the Morpheus P2P file-sharing application.

While panelists shared skepticism about traditional media and entertainment companies, they disagreed on whether technology and Internet companies should go so far as to tackle the creative side of creating content themselves.

Internet and technology companies already have focused widely on distribution of digital media through software and services ranging from peer-to-peer networks and online music stores. New online marketing and mobile approaches also are emerging.

To Mike Homer, chairman and co- founder of Kontiki Inc., focusing more on the creation of content should be the next step.

"If you have all these new distribution opportunities and marketing opportunities and mobile opportunities, then why not think of new digital content to sell [consumers]?" said Homer, whose company makes software for distributing digital media and has created a site called Open Media Network for user-generated digital content. He added that content has to be "targeted to a narrow audience."

The emergence of Weblogs and podcasting, among other trends, has led to more user-generated content.

But Mark Cuban, the co-founder and chairman of high-definition television network HDNet, warned against focusing exclusively on the Internet and digitally distributed content.

While a certain amount of specialized content might make sense for Internet-only distribution, companies wanting to reach a broad, mainstream audience must deliver content the way consumers want it.

For a movie, such as the first release out of Cuban's HDNet Movies offshoot, that means movie theaters and DVDs along with video on demand and the Internet, Cuban said.

"The problem is where digital and the Internet meets brick and mortar," Cuban said. "Where the two connect is where things are falling down, and where we're all looking for a holy grail."

For example, Cuban said, a consumer can't go into a store today and burn a DVD on demand because the economics don't match the demand.

Other executives were dismissive of the idea of moving into content creation, noting that Silicon Valley's specialty is technology innovation and not the creative side of content.

"To get involved in the creation of content is a good way to lose money fast," said Jordan Greenhall, founder and CEO of DivX Inc., the company behind the DivX video compression format and video software.

One area where Hollywood is making its presence felt is on the legal side, the panelists said. In particular, the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in the case between MGM and Grokster is drawing more attention to the potential liability software makers could face if users infringe on a copyright.

When asked how much time they spend on legal issues related to copyrights, all the panelists said they spend at least one-third, if not a half or more, of their time on legal issues.

David Goldberg, Yahoo Inc.'s vice president and general manager of Yahoo Music, said that ultimately the legal battle is futile in ending digital-media piracy, even if the movie studios and recording companies win court cases.

"There's no way to stop people from getting digital content illegally," Goldberg said. "People will always be able to get this stuff illegally. If you want to do a legal service, then you have to add value to it."

The AlwaysOn panel drew criticism from one audience member, a former attorney for a traditional entertainment company, who said that a representative of Hollywood should have been included on the panel.
http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1895,1839357,00.asp





Time For Lawmakers To Act On Grokster?
Anne Broache

Does Congress need to lay down new laws after last month's landmark Supreme Court decision on file swapping? Depends on whom you ask.

A spectrum of outlooks came from lawyers who squared off at a panel discussion hosted Tuesday by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.

The debate focused on the unanimous Supreme Court ruling last month that file-swapping companies that actively promote their products' copyright infringement capabilities (in legal terms, "active inducement") can be held liable for their users' illicit activities. The case now heads back to lower courts for another look.

Justice Stephen Breyer in his concurring opinion on the MGM v. Grokster case noted that "the legislative option remains available." But so far, members of Congress have applauded the court's unanimous opinion and indicated they plan to leave rule-making to the lower courts for now.

And that's the way it should be, said Don Verrilli, who argued the high court case on behalf of the entertainment industry.

"This is not the time for intervention by Congress," Verrilli said, because the Supreme Court set a "common sense standard" that gives the lower courts sufficient fodder to tackle illicit behavior. "I think (the) court has done a good job in striking the balance with the standard of inducement that it has set forth here."

Not so, countered Fred von Lohmann, a senior intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who represented StreamCast Networks in the suit. The Supreme Court left too many unanswered questions, von Lohmann said, adding, "I don't believe that uncertainty is balance."

"We need clear, bright-line rules so that technology companies can know in advance what they are and are not allowed to build," von Lohmann said.

He suggested two possible legislative routes: First, Congress should implement a "collective licensing" system for peer-to-peer file sharing, wherein users would pay a "reasonable fee," which would in turn be passed on to the copyright holders. Second, lawmakers should scrap the idea of statutory damages--that is, money awarded to copyright owners because of provisions in the law--but leave open the option of awarding actual damages and injunctions through the court action.

"We shouldn't have a remedial system where, if Microsoft or Apple or Slingbox bet wrong, they go out of business," von Lohmann said.

But he acknowledged that the legislative route would not be easy, as the "technology and content industries are still rather far apart" on the issues in question.

Patent lawyer Andrew Greenberg echoed those sentiments at the panel, saying, "The technology industry and the music industry have both been absolutely incapable of working together to articulate credibly, clearly and understandably what the rules of the road are."

As for legislation, Greenberg took a more moderate stance. Before deciding whether to take action, "Congress should monitor carefully" what the lower courts do, Greenberg said, adding, "I think it's time to wait and see."
http://news.com.com/Time+for+lawmake...3-5795314.html





Legal Peer-to-Peer Emerges from the Grokster Fire
Libe Goad

The fallout of the recent Grokster v. MGM Supreme Court decision hasn't meant much to the wellspring of new legally minded peer-to-peer companies who are looking to turn a pirate's territory into a legitimate delivery system for music, movies and video games.

While Grokster and StreamCast face more time in court, legal P2P software companies like Peer Impact, Weed and Mercora make strides into turning their file-sharing services into a legitimate industry with the potential for plenty of profit to spread to music labels, musicians and in some cases, to the users. ADVERTISEMENT

Peer Impact has been working to create a legal peer-to-peer download platform that allows music lovers to search for music, pay for it and then download it from other Peer Impact users.

The company has also instilled a recommendation feature that can pay off for active consumers.

Users can e-mail 30-second clips of music to friends as a recommendation. If the friend buys the track, then 5 percent of that profit goes to the sender.

Aside from loading its software with various user- friendly features, Peer Impact has spent a large amount of time earning the approval of the music industry.

CEO Greg Kerber and CTO Kirk Feathers said they spent many hours in front of music executives' doorsteps negotiating deals, which they have now done with the Big Four labels, e.g. Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI.

This week, the company announced its deal with Trymedia Systems, a digital distribution service for PC video games.

Kerber and Feathers have also taken their business plan to the RIAA to prove its legitimacy as a legal online music distribution system.

Based on history of the organization with file-sharing services like Napster and Grokster, this seemed to be less of a harrowing experience than expected.

"The salt and pepper in our hair probably helped a little," Kerber quipped. Overall, he said the RIAA has been "very cooperative."

"We've had hundreds of meetings with them, and every time we're there, [RIAA members] say 'we are not luddites; we are not against technology; we just want artists to get paid for their work," he said. "They have really taken the brunt of some bad PR."

In the meantime, the group is in talks with "every major content provider out there," and is looking to sign similar deals with the film and TV industry.

Mercora is another legal peer-to-peer service on the rise. Instead of relying on the more-traditional music download service, the company allows users to search for specific songs from a large network of peers and then stream them over the Internet.

CEO Srivats Sampath said the peer-to-peer aspect of the company makes it different—and superior—to regular Internet radio services, saying the users can listen to up to 6 million tracks on any given day.

"People come onto network and bring content in," he said. "It's different because it's not just for downloading streamed songs for listeners; they're streaming songs to other people and other people come in and listen."

Much like Peer Impact, Sampath said their company also has a very cordial relationship with the RIAA.

"When we first came out a year ago, they were very curious about how we've done it legally," Sampath said. "We explained that this is what we do and [the RIAA] realized that we've put a tremendous amount of effort into making this legal."

Both companies do not seem to think that the recent Grokster ruling will have any impact on the business, especially since the ruling seem to be hinged on the company's "intent" to promote piracy, rather than just being a file-sharing service.

Kerber said that the ruling will enable the second generation of peer-to-peer companies to play a part in entertainment distribution and that it will help consumers feel safe when downloading files from a peer-to-peer service.

"If we induce our customers to steal, then we are responsible for it," he said. "Inducing our customers to steal is never something we would have put in our model – if the system does get hacked, we will make every measure to protect the people that have entrusted us to deliver our core business."

Sampath also said they were "very happy" with the way the court ruled – in that it ruled more on intent than on technology that happens to have non-infringing uses.

"The ruling never bothered us because if you look at the law, and look at the application, it's 100 percent compliant with the law," he said. "It definitively does send a strong message with the P2P guys and opens opportunities for new models to evolve."

Gartner research director Mike McGuire says that he can't predict if any peer-to-peer services, even legal ones, will really be in the clear until Grokster and others receive a final verdict in the lower courts.

With the increasing popularity of other online music sites and radio stations, will peer-to-peer be able to shake off its bad reputation enough to appeal to the average consumer?

McGuire says that if it's done right, consumers won't be able to tell the difference between peer-to-peer services and regular direct-download music stores like iTunes.

"Consumers are not really going to care either way," he said. "Consumers care about searching, finding and getting the stuff they want."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1835324,00.asp




Open-Source P2P Projects Keep Swapping
John Borland

The ripples of anxiety from last month's landmark Supreme Court ruling on peer-to-peer software haven't quite made it to Jonathan Nilson's home in Tallahassee, Fla.

Nilson, a programmer who has been working on peer-to-peer software called Shareaza for several years, says the loose band of developers who share responsibility for the open-source project haven't been dissuaded from their work by the court ruling, which is casting a dark legal cloud over the future of companies such as Grokster and LimeWire.

Nilson cautions that neither he nor anyone else can speak with authority on behalf of the project as a whole. For the most part, that's exactly why he and the others feel sheltered. As is the case with many loosely organized, open-source programming projects, there is no central entity, no "Shareaza" company or organization that issues paychecks or answers lawyers' telephone calls.

"We haven't really altered our direction as a result of the judgment," Nilson said. "We have a strict open-source goal now, and that really frees us up from a lot of responsibility. We're not trying to make revenue, so it's hard to try to sue us."

Indeed, as the dust settles over the post-Supreme Court landscape, a decided split is emerging in the peer-to-peer development community.

The legal threat facing many of the most popular file-swapping software companies may well radically change their operation and strategies. Yet open-source projects like Shareaza, which create software of similar function and popularity, are continuing unabated.

That optimism threatens to mute the court ruling's effect on the file-swapping world, because millions of people a week are already downloading and using those independent programs.

Of course, the open-source developers' confidence may not be justified. Jeffrey D. Neuburger, an intellectual property attorney at Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner in New York, said they risk drawing legal attention if they make even a small slip over the line of piracy "inducement."

"I think individuals behind it could be liable," Neuburger said. "They have to be very careful about how they position themselves. They have to release the software out there and not say anything about it."

Split decision
For now, the ruling's admonition that software companies that encourage copyright infringement by their users could be liable for that piracy has put commercial file- swapping developers in a very nervous mood.

The defendants in the Supreme Court case, Grokster and StreamCast Networks, are headed back to federal court in Los Angeles, where movie studio and record label lawyers will ask a judge to end the case in their favor. A hearing date has not been set.

Companies that haven't been sued, such as LimeWire and eDonkey parent MetaMachine, are anxious as well. Lawyers for the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have made it clear that they view those companies as potential lawsuit targets.

"We are evaluating all our options," said MetaMachine CEO Sam Yagen. "There are things we can do to reduce the likelihood of a lawsuit. We're going to do our best to figure out what's best for the company."

In the noncommercial, open-source world, programmers have discussed the court case, but few appear ready to abandon their projects. Some are taking extra precautions not to appear as though they are advocating copyright infringement, going so far as to ban users who discuss piracy from online forums.

Development and distribution of the file-swapping software itself continues, however.

"My impression is that people aren't that worried about it," said Ian Clarke, the British founder of the Freenet project and a longtime stalwart of the open-source community. "The primary impact is likely to be on commercial developers of P2P software. Even then, the impact is really to make them more careful about what they say both within their companies and externally about aspirations for their software."

An RIAA spokesman declined to comment specifically on the open-source projects.

Walking a fine line
Open-source peer-to-peer software development takes many forms, ranging from obscure hobbyist projects with only a few users to software programs that have been downloaded tens of millions of times. Many of the most influential peer-to-peer ideas, such as the hydra-headed decentralization of Gnutella or the speedy "swarming" downloads of BitTorrent, have come from this community.

At one end of the spectrum are projects like Shareaza, which are wholly decentralized, without a controlling entity at all that bears legal or financial responsibility. On the other are companies like LimeWire and MetaMachine, both of which have open-source development products, but have revenue-generating businesses based on selling software and associated products.

Somewhere in the middle are younger companies such as Aelitis, the French company recently formed by developers of the Azureus BitTorrent client, the most popular piece of software tracked by Sourceforge, a well-trafficked open-source software development hub. According to that site, Azureus has been downloaded more than 78 million times, and more than 2.4 million times in the last week alone.

"The open-source guys are always going to be there. I don't think anyone expects that to go away completely."
--Jeffrey D. Neuburger, attorney, Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner
BitTorrent, a file-distribution technology developed in 2002, is widely used to swap copyrighted works such as movies and games. But it's also increasingly used for authorized purposes such as distributing open-source operating system files and was even recently built into Opera Software's Web browser.

Olivier Chalouhi, the founder of the Azureus project, said his team has made few changes since the ruling and will continue to develop and distribute the core swapping technology.

"The ruling never said that P2P technologies were bad or should be avoided," Chalouhi said. "As software developers, and as technology makers, we've not changed anything."

The company has taken some precautions, however. Chalouhi said its programmers had readied a range of "extensions"--essentially add-ons that would add new features to the program--when the ruling was released. In order to be wholly safe, he has decided not to release several of those.

Nilson noted that Shareaza warns people about copyright and intellectual property issues when the program starts up, and that the project asks people not to discuss any illegal activities. Chalouhi said he actively bans users from the Azureus forums who talk about piracy, and he's not about to shutter his work.

"The Grokster (court decision) gives content companies another arrow in their quiver in challenging commercial infringers, the people making profit and selling ads," said the lawyer Neuburger. "But the open-source guys are always going to be there. I don't think anyone expects that to go away completely."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5789087.html





Cracking down on file-sharing

Universities May Offer Legal Services For A Price
Kathryn Balint

The University of California and California State University systems are paving the way for their campuses to offer legal music and movie downloads in an effort to curb illegal file sharing.

On Monday, the two systems signed an agreement with Cdigix, an Englewood, Colo., company that provides legal music and movie downloads to two dozen college campuses.

Under the agreement, the 13 University of California campuses and the 23 Cal State campuses will each decide whether to offer the service to students. Students would pay a fee for the service.

San Diego State University, Cal State San Marcos and the University of California San Diego said yesterday they are looking into the idea. None of the three has committed to offer such a service.

Illegal file sharing not only clogs the computer network, but puts students who are sharing the files at risk of being sued by the record or movie companies.

Universities typically don't monitor every file sent on their computer networks, so it's difficult for them to quantify how many illegal downloads there are.

The Recording Industry Association of America says that music theft – the illegal sharing of songs without paying for them – is an epidemic on college campuses. The music trade group for the largest music labels says that students who use a college or university computer network are among the most frequent users of illegal file-sharing sites.

In April, the RIAA filed federal lawsuits against 405 students at 18 universities, including 25 at UCSD. In May, the group filed suit against 91 students at 20 universities, including two at UCSD.

More than 50 colleges and universities across the country have made deals to offer legal music services to their students in an effort to curb the illegal downloads.

The UC and CSU systems are negotiating with other providers, including Napster, Sony and Mindawn, so that their campuses will have a choice of offerings.

The biggest question is whether students would pay for a music and video service, especially when illegal downloads are still available.

"It remains to be seen whether this will help reduce the number of illegal downloads that are shared," said Anthony Wood, director of academic computing services at UCSD. "Other campuses that have offered the service say the take rate hasn't been very high."

Cdigix spokeswoman Laurie Rubenstein acknowledges that stopping illegal downloading will not be "an overnight change."

Wood said UCSD is exploring the idea of offering music and video downloads to students for the school year that begins in September.

But he said the university still has some questions that must be answered. Among them: What would students have to pay for the service? Would the university have to install new network equipment? Would some students prefer to subscribe to a service on their own rather than through the university?

Perhaps his biggest concern is that Apple's iTunes is not on the list of services the university can make available to students.

"ITunes is not one of the vendors, yet from my observation, the iPod is an extremely prevalent device here," Wood said. "I'd think we might be wasting our effort if we don't include a program that includes iTunes for the future."

SDSU and UCSD also said they need more time to evaluate the service before determining whether they'll offer it.

"We just have to have some time to look at the parameters of the deal," said Rick Moore, spokesman for Cal State San Marcos. "I'm not sure we're headed down the road to doing it at all. We need to study it more."

Each campus would negotiate its own deal with a service provider.

Cdigix typically charges $3 a month for all the music a subscriber wants to listen to from the company's database of 1.5 million songs. The songs are available to the user as long as the subscription is up-to-date. Other online music companies generally charge about $10 a month for such a subscription service.

Cdigix also allows subscribers to purchase songs for 89 cents each.

Pay-per-view movies range from $1.99 to $3.99 each. A monthly subscription of television shows costs $5.99.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/b...1b20music.html





iTunes Downloads Top 500 Million Mark
CNET News.com Staff

Music downloads from Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store topped 500 million, the company said Monday. Amy Greer of Lafayette, Ind., purchased Faith Hill's "Mississippi Girl" as the 500 millionth song sold from the online music store. The milestone download has won her 10 iPods, a gift card for 10,000 songs and an all-paid trip for four to a concert by Coldplay, which is on a world tour.

The store crossed the 250 million mark six months ago. Launched two years ago, iTunes took 11 months to sell the first 50 million songs. The downloads picked up subsequently, hitting the 200 million mark by last December.
http://news.com.com/iTunes+downloads...3-5792960.html





Men Arrested For Internet Pirating Appear In Court

A federal magistrate in San Jose issued a bench warrant today for a Connecticut man authorities claim was the operator of an illegal Web site where pirated movies, games and software could be downloaded.

David Fish, 24, was one of four men scheduled to be arraigned this morning on multiple felony charges related to Internet piracy. He failed to appear in U.S. District Court in San Jose and Magistrate Harold Lloyd issued a warrant for his arrest but stayed it for 24 hours in the event of a reasonable explanation for the failure to appear. U.S. attorney's office spokesman Luke Macaulay would not comment on whether authorities believe Fish, of Watertown, Conn., has fled.

The other three men, Fremont resident Chirayu Patel, 23, William Veyna, 34, from Chatsworth in Southern California and Colorado resident Nathaniel Lovell, 22, all appeared before Lloyd this morning and were arraigned.

The four men were arrested in June as part of Operation Copycat, which itself is part of a larger international law enforcement Internet piracy crackdown known as Operation Site Down. A federal grand jury indicted the men on multiple felony charges on Wednesday.

Operation Copycat targeted "warez" groups, which prosecutors say are the source of the majority of pirated movies, music and software distributed and downloaded on the Internet. Once a warez release group prepares a stolen work for distribution, the material is distributed in minutes to secure servers throughout the world. From there, within a matter of hours, the pirated works are distributed globally, filtering down to peer-to-peer and other public file-sharing networks accessible to anyone with Internet access, according to federal authorities.

Directory lists from computer servers used in the undercover operation revealed that more than 750 copyrighted movies, including recently opened movies such as "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith," "Batman Begins" and "Bewitched," had allegedly been uploaded by the warez groups, some within hours of theatrical release.

The lists also contained more than 1,250 pirated computer games and more than 180 software titles allegedly pirated from companies including Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Microsoft and Symantec.

Conservative estimates of the value of the works seized by authorities reach more than $50 million, according to the U.S. attorney's office.
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/news/071405_nw_fed_bust.html





Overseas MP3s

For Pennies A Tune, You Can Build A Primo Music Library And Support Free Enterprise In Russia
Jason Bracelin

When the Supreme Court ruled against internet sites that enable peer-to-peer file-sharing last month, it did music downloaders a favor. As anyone who's ever visited P2P sites like Grokster and Morpheus can attest, sound quality is maddeningly dodgy and the catalogue is hopelessly disorganized. The imminent shutdown of these sites should provide the kick in the pants you need to find a better alternative.

Russia is where it's at. Benefiting from lax copyright laws, Russian mp.3 sites offer a wide array of music to download at a nominal fee. The music isn't free, but it's close. And because the sites are run as businesses rather than loose collectives, they're much more user- friendly.

With so many Russian sites to choose from, we decided to share a few of our favorites. Of course, the biggest concern in using foreign mp.3 sites is giving your credit-card number -- you don't want some dude named Boris buying new rims for his Lada 110 on your dime. But with all the sites below, you can use PayPal for secure internet payments or call a toll-free number and have the charges added to your telephone bill. So get your wish list together and join us online.

Site: Allofmp3.com (5 to 10 cents per song)
Selection: A solid blend of the latest hot releases (R. Kelly, Missy Elliott) with a back catalogue deeper than Lake Erie. One of the rare sites to have the complete works of artists like Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, and hundreds of others. There are also plenty of rare finds, like Rage Against the Machine's Bombtrack EP. It's among the most comprehensive collections of music on the web.
Why you should try it: By allowing you to listen to everything for free before you buy, this is an ideal site to help you build up a library of music. It's easy to navigate, and you can download complete albums instead of assembling discs song-by-song.

Site: club.mp3search.ru (10 cents per song)
Selection: Heavy on the rarities and out-of-print discs, from Mountain to Sugar Ray. Doesn't have as many contemporary hits as some other sites, but where else are you going to find that elusive Milli Vanilli remix LP? Also has a vast selection of audio books and ringtones.
Why you should try it: It's nicely interactive and informative. There's a message board where you can request specific songs and albums, and the site operators will do their best to get them for you. Moreover, when you select an album by a given artist, the site gives you a full discography of the performer, a rating of the discs, and a ranking of the most popular songs -- like iTunes, but without the 99- cent fee. Log on and learn more about Ace of Base than you ever wanted to know.

Site: mp3spy.ru (10 cents per song)
Selection: A huge collection of electronica that spans everything from the latest Deep Dish LP to a vast array of European singles and compilation discs. You can get some albums before their official release, like the hotly anticipated new disc from Swedish metal group Arch Enemy.
Why you should try it: The site may be lacking in older material, and it's weak on hip-hop (virtually no Public Enemy, De La Soul, N.W.A., etc.), but it's great for dance music and material only available overseas. Aspiring DJs can build entire sets here.

Site: 3mp3.ru ($9.95 for 200 songs or $29.95 a month)
Selection: All the current hits, plus a huge selection of bootlegs and live albums ranging from Metallica to Miles Davis. For completists, this site has tons of rare and unofficial releases, without the high prices associated with nonsanctioned discs -- meaning you no longer have to pay top dollar for a demo version of "Enter Sandman."
Why you should try it: It's one of the best values on the web. If you upload two albums that the site doesn't have, you get a week's worth of free downloads. By offering unlimited downloads for a low monthly fee, the site allows you to compile a massive catalogue in weeks. A great place to start building your collection.
http://www.clevescene.com/Issues/200...oundbites.html





European Commission Criticises Czech Republic Copyright Law

The European Commission has sent a warning letter to the Czech Republic in which it voiced surprise at the method for enacting European Union directives on copyright law from 2001. The letter sought further clarification from Czech leaders.

This is the first stage of legal action against the Czech Republic for violation of EU legislation, which could end up at the European Court. The Czech Republic must react to the warning within two months.

Czech Culture Ministry spokeswoman Katerina Besserova told CTK that the problems pointed out by the commission should be resolved by an amendment to the nation's copyright law.

She said the ministry will review the letter from the commission and will react to it.

The EC requires EU countries to enact sanctions against "hackers" and computer pirates into their legislation and ensure the protection of works published in electronic form.

The letter said that although the Czech Republic has placed the EU directive into law there are doubts about application of the law.

According to a Czech diplomatic source, existing Czech legislation does not include all the elements of the EU directive, and the national copyright law will have to be amended.

Besserova said an amendment has already been drafted that has passed the comments stage and the government should discuss it at one of its next meetings. It is one of 40 bills and draft amendments the government has prioritized and intends to discuss by the year's end.
http://www.praguemonitor.com/ctk/?id...-copyright-law





China Attempts To Sink MP3 Pirates

The move by Baidu.com to delete thousands of links to pirated music is a response to requests from R2G, a Chinese digital rights management company, which is currently preparing for a U.S. initial public offering expected to raise around $55 million.

Baidu.com, China's answer to Google , has announced that it is to delete thousands of links to Internet sites offering pirated music.

The move is a response to requests from R2G, a Chinese digital rights management company, which is currently preparing for a U.S. initial public offering expected to raise around $55 million.

But most analysts have suggested that the move is a sticking plaster treatment for a growing problem rather than a cure.

Salman Momen, director at Capgemini's media and technology division, said: "Baidu maintained weblinks to music files much like the original Napster maintained a central register of MP3 locations for file sharing.

"Removing the links makes it harder to find the files, but history shows that the centralized model of peer-to-peer sharing was soon replaced by decentralized and distributed applications such as BitTorrent."

Lee Myall, media services director at European telco Interoute, maintained that China's piracy problem needed to be targeted at source.

"The best way to limit damage is to stop the content being copied/pirated in the first place," he said. "Step one is at the pre-release stage where content is at its most desirable and likely to spread most virulently."

But ironically the music industry may never be profitable in China until it finds a legitimate way of online distribution.

"The problem for the music industry in a country such as China is its sheer size, and it is unlikely that any retailer could cover every single region," said Momen.

"Until retail outlets/channels of legitimate products are made more universally available and accessible, it may simply be easier to buy an illegal copy."
http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=37390





Korea

Music Labels to Sue 4,000 Internet Users

SEOUL (Yonhap) _ Sixty domestic music labels are preparing for a collective suit against 4,000 Internet users who illegally distributed or used music files, the companies said Tuesday.

The move would mark the first action taken by the recording industry against netizens after a revised copyrights law recognizing expanded transmission rights to creative digital contents took effect in January.

The government threatened to clamp down on those who illegally upload or download copyrighted digital contents starting in July, after a six-month grace period ended.

The revised law grants rights to transmit music files to music players and recording companies, which were previously limited to copyright holders like composers and lyric writers.

``We demanded Naver force its personal blog service users to delete music files they illegally uploaded on their blogs,’’ a representative from the labels told reporters. ``But Naver passively reacted to our demands, and we decided to file a lawsuit against 4,000 Internet users for violating copyright law.’’

Naver, one of the country's largest Internet portals, said it has posted a notice about the planned suit on its site last month at the request of the 60 labels.

The message asked Naver's bloggers to voluntarily delete any unauthorized music files on their blogs or face the risk of legal action. The warning was ignored by most of the bloggers, Naver said.

``We intend to prevent recurrence of copyright infringement by giving warnings to online service providers rather than seeking certain payment or legally punishing individual bloggers,’’ the companies said.

They said other leading portal service providers would be the next lawsuit target.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/cult...1321011680.htm





Bush Creates High-Level Anti-Piracy Post

Senior position to target global piracy and counterfeiting, which costs US companies billions.

President Bush has created a new senior-level position to fight global intellectual- property piracy and counterfeiting that cost American companies billions of dollars each year, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said Friday.

"Intellectual-property theft is a major problem around the world. We believe that it is costing U.S. businesses about $250 billion in lost sales," Gutierrez told Reuters in an interview with reporters and editors.

Bush has tapped Chris Israel, currently deputy chief of staff for Gutierrez, to head up the administration's anti-piracy efforts. China -- where 90 percent of music and movies are pirate copies -- will be a chief priority, Gutierrez said.

"Frankly, our goal is to reduce (China's piracy levels) to zero," Gutierrez said. He declined to specify a timetable, but acknowledged it could be a lengthy effort.

Gutierrez got a personal glimpse of rampant piracy in China during a visit earlier this month, when he was offered the chance to buy a pirated copy of the newest Star Wars movie for $1 dollar, an aide said.

The United States will closely monitor a long list of anti-piracy pledges China made at this month's high-level Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade meeting, including a promise to increase criminal prosecutions, Gutierrez said.

The skyrocketing U.S. trade deficit -- which reached a record $618 billion last year -- has compounded U.S. concerns about piracy and counterfeiting. Companies that produce movies, music and software and other intellectual property account for a growing share of what the United States has to sell to the rest of the world.

U.S. manufacturers of products ranging from shampoo to auto-safety glass also complain that they often have to compete with counterfeit versions of their own products in China and other markets around the world.

The Commerce Department estimates nearly 7 percent of the goods in the global market are counterfeit.

Israel was a public policy executive at Time Warner (Research), a media company with strong interests in intellectual property rights protection, before joining the Commerce Department. He also has worked in Congress as a legislative aide.

Time Warner is the parent company of CNN/Money.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/07/22/news...reut/index.htm





At the Podcast Party, More Guests Arrive
Alex Mindlin

On June 29, Apple released a new version of its popular iTunes software that allows users to download podcasts, which are audio files that can be automatically loaded onto computers and devices like iPods.

In the two days after the software's release, Apple said users signed up for more than a million podcast subscriptions (the company would not release the exact number), a figure far greater than the total number of podcast users in 2004, as estimated by the Diffusion Group, a research firm.

Each new subscription collected by Apple does not necessarily represent a new podcast user, but even by conservative estimates, it seems likely that Apple is causing an explosion in the number of podcast devotees.

"The reality is coming in even faster than we expected," said Marc Freedman, an analyst with the Diffusion Group, who wrote a report estimating that there would be 56.8 million podcast users by the end of the decade.

When people suggest his predictions are too high, he said, "all I have to do is point them to iTunes."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/te...y/18drill.html





Pirate radio

Record Internet Radio with Radio2MP3. Discover new music without using peer-to- peer (P2P) networks.
Gene Lursky

Press Release - The fallout of the recent RIAA lawsuits and shut down of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, download music fans turn to a more legal way of downloading new music tunes. Using new streaming recorder software called Radio2MP3. Have you used your cassette recorder to record a favorite song off of the radio? Or a VCR to record a show you regularly watch? Now you can do the same thing with streaming Internet radio on your home computer!

Radio2MP3 records internet radio stations, burns music files to a CD, converts media to different format and splits songs into individual MP3s. The software also tags each file with the artist, title, genre and album.

"It's is a new way to capture streaming music as individual MP3 files," says Radio2MP3 founder Gene Kursky . "Simply listen to your favorite online radio station and let Radio2MP3 do all the work. Now music fans can avoid RIAA lawsuits without using peer-to-peer networks. It's a great way to discover new music."

Radio2MP3 allows you to choose what genre of music you would like to record. You can then search the Internet for radio stations and setup schedule recordings when you are out. Walk away and return later to find dozens, even hundreds of your favorite songs neatly stored on your computer as MP3 files.


Features of Radio2Mp3 streaming music recorder:
- Record Internet radio songs or talk shows as MP3 files
- Play on your computer with Audio Player
- Burn a compilation CD to play in your car or CD player
- Duplicate file remover automatically removes duplicate songs.
- Add your own stations manually.
- Split large files into individual tracks.
- Schedule to record a favorite radio station at a certain time of the day
- Record up to 30 Internet radio stations at one time

- Convert to various file formats (MP3, WAV, WMA)


Radio2MP3 is available for instant download online at http://www.radio2mp3.com.
http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messag...81/148181.html





As Clear Channel Enters the Fray, Online Radio Looks to Be Coming of Age
Bob Tedeschi

AFTER giving its Internet competitors a huge head start, Clear Channel is ready to play catch-up.

The radio industry's dominant company, with more than 1,200 stations, has begun introducing its first meaningful online strategy after what could be the most protracted example of Internet indifference among major media businesses. At long last, Clear Channel is building more original programming and other features into its stations' Web sites to lure listeners and, it hopes, a new stable of advertisers.

"This is an easy way for Clear Channel to increase their stations' midday audiences, by making the stations available to office workers who have either no radio or bad reception in their offices," said Kurt Hanson, publisher of the Radio and Internet Newsletter. "And it opens up a whole new set of advertising opportunities."

Competitors and industry analysts say they welcome Clear Channel's initiatives, because online radio has just begun to attract the attention of listeners and advertisers. And they lay odds that the company will succeed despite its late start.

Clear Channel Radio, which is owned by Clear Channel Communications of San Antonio, has been going through the motions online for years. The company's stations have dedicated Web sites, but they offer little more than pages cluttered with advertisements, song lists, entertainment news and pictures of D.J.'s.

This month Clear Channel began replacing those Web sites with simplified sites, featuring fewer ads and highlighting original programming, live Webcasts and other elements meant to keep visitors engaged.

The relative dearth of ads makes it easy for visitors to find "Stripped" and "Sneak Peek," two new online-only features introduced in recent weeks. "Stripped" is Clear Channel's version of MTV's "Unplugged" series: a live performance that visitors can either watch or listen to as a straight audio feed.

"Sneak Peek" offers Clear Channel's online visitors the chance to listen to tracks from albums that have not been released. Last month, 375,000 people logged on to the company's sites to hear a new album from the Backstreet Boys four days before its debut in stores.

Given the pedigree of the man leading Clear Channel's new online radio strategy, such changes are not necessarily surprising. Evan Harrison, Clear Channel's executive vice president of online music and radio, was lured away from AOL last year; while there, he oversaw the company's highly successful Radio@AOL division.

Mr. Harrison said that when Clear Channel Radio's chief executive, John Hogan, hired him, "he made it clear it was time to do something serious."

Offline, Clear Channel Radio reaches about 110 million people each week. Online, the Clear Channel's Web sites reach eight million each month. Mr. Harrison said he expected that the new online-only features would help the company's Web sites "quickly compete with all the online entertainment destinations." He added, "After we build the audience, we'll be able to bring in our advertising partners."

Clear Channel is also cashing in on the podcasting trend. Podcasts, or downloadable audio files, have generated considerable interest in recent months, partly because they allow professionals and amateurs alike to create miniature radio programs and distribute them freely.

Music companies are still trying to determine how to allow for widespread distribution of songs within podcasts while complying with copyright laws. In the meantime, though, Clear Channel and its chief offline rival, Infinity Broadcasting from Viacom, have found early success with nonmusic podcasts.

In May, Infinity, which owns many of the country's most popular news stations, introduced in San Francisco a Web site, KYourRadio.com, and converted a station, KYCY-AM, to exclusively feature podcast content submitted by listeners. And this month, Infinity began offering podcasts of news, weather and other clips to listeners of its biggest news stations.

Clear Channel last month countered with free podcasts of "Phone Taps," a daily prank call featured on Z100 FM in New York. As of last week, more than 500,000 people had downloaded at least one episode of "Phone Taps," and Clear Channel had begun working on delivering 15-second ads with each podcast.

Overall Internet radio usage, while growing, remains comparatively small, according to Arbitron. In a January survey, 22 percent of Americans had watched or listened to Internet radio broadcasts in the previous month, compared with 10 percent in January 2000.

Yahoo claims the biggest online radio audience, with about 2.8 million weekly visitors in March, according to an Arbitron/comScore Media Metrix survey. AOL was second, with 1.8 million listeners, while MSN and Live365 also attracted sizable audiences.

As Clear Channel vies for more online visitors, the competition is hardly standing still. In May, Yahoo started a $5-a-month subscription service, Music Unlimited, which offers commercial-free radio, personalized playlists and a feature that lets people transfer music tracks to portable devices.

AOL, meanwhile, last month began allowing nonsubscribers to listen to its 200 radio stations on AOL.com around the clock, as part of the company's overall strategy of attracting more non-AOL members to its free Web site. Previously, nonmembers could listen for two hours daily, according to Bill Wilson, AOL's senior vice president of programming.

Last week, AOL announced that later this month it would begin carrying 20 stations from XM Satellite Radio on AOL.com's radio service.

A handful of major advertisers, including Nestlé and Cingular, have signed on for significant online radio campaigns, but for the most part, marketing dollars continue to flow elsewhere. Mr. Hanson of the Radio and Internet Newsletter estimated that online radio advertising revenues would amount to about $25 million this year.

Karim Sanjabi, executive vice president of marketing innovation for Carat Interactive, an advertising agency based in San Francisco, said: "Definitely the audience is there, but we haven't seen the excitement from clients yet, which is strange, because online radio is a very good option. It feels like there hasn't been a champion of Internet radio - someone who's really pushed it out there."

If any company fits that description, it is Ronning Lipset Radio, a New York advertising sales firm that last year created an online radio network composed of AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Live365 and Windows Media, and began selling ads across those sites to national marketers.

Ronning Lipset's stable of 60 advertisers includes RadioShack, NBC and Nestlé. According to Eric Ronning, one of the company's principals, the firm's advertising fees have quadrupled, reaching prices that are competitive with offline radio. "It's truly normalized," he said. "We're not getting bought because we're cheaper than the other guys."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/te...gy/18ecom.html





Cumulative Shipments of Portable Multimedia Players to Top 13 Million Units by 2010

Barriers such as High Price and a Lack of Compelling Video Content to Slow Adoption
Press Release

High prices and limited video content will inhibit demand for HDD (hard disk drive) portable multimedia players (PMPs), which will reach only 17% of U.S. online households by 2010, according to Parks Associates’ Portable Multimedia Players: Analysis and Forecasts.

Competition from existing devices such as portable DVD players and mobile phones with multimedia functions will also limit adoption of HDD-based PMPs, as reported in this new study, which estimates the cumulative U.S. shipments of these devices will reach 13 million units by 2010.

“The PMP market will not experience the rapid growth typical of portable MP3 players,” said Harry Wang, research analyst at Parks Associates. “We anticipate a flatter adoption curve and lukewarm demand over the next two years, with meaningful increases in consumer interest by late 2007 or early 2008.”

Although the forecast for PMPs is not as upbeat as hoped, manufacturers could stimulate interest to some extent, according to Wang, by bundling unique video content with the device or by raising product awareness among consumers who are receptive to the concept of multimedia content on the go.

Portable Multimedia Players: Analysis and Forecasts probes market demand for PMPs, evaluates product and pricing strategies, analyzes market drivers and barriers, and estimates adoption rates and market potential over the next five years. Moreover, the report profiles key players in emerging market segments and features consumer data from the recently completed survey Mobile Entertainment Platforms and Services.
http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messag...81/145343.html





How To…

Never Miss An Episode With Bittorrent And RSS

In this post you will learn how you can never miss an episode of your favorite shows ever again. This will be accomplished through the magic of BitTorrent and RSS.

I’m bad at watching TV. I always miss my favorite shows like The West Wing and Enterprise. I can never remember when they’re on and when I do, they’re already three-quarters through. My solution thus far has been to go to TorrentSpy and download the torrent. This, of course, requires that I remember that to do that, and then I have to wait three hours. Wouldn’t it be better if the morning after the show aired a high quality copy of the show sat sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to watch it? The answer is yes, yes it would.

The are many solutions to this problem, but this is how I do it. Basically what’s happening is that the BT client checks an RSS feed for torrents that match certain criteria. When it detects those criteria, it begins to download the torrent. The result is something like TiVo, but free.

The how-to:

You will need to use Azureus. It’s a pretty good BT client and I’d recommend using it anyway. It is a Java application and works on most platforms.

You will also need the RSS Import plugin for Azureus. Installing it is a matter of dragging the unzipped folder into the plugins folder in your Azureus directory and restarting Azureus.

In Azureus, go into the preferences and expand the plugins tab. Choose RSS Importer.

Check the Activate RSS Importer Plugin box.

Enter http://www.tvtorrents.net/rss.php as the RSS Channel to import. You can also enter http:// www.btefnet.com/backend.php, each some shows that the other doesn’t. The BT-EFNet one, for instance, has The Daily Show. Chacun a son goût.

In the next text box, Filter …, enter a regular expression that matches the name of torrent of the the show you want to download. A quick guide to the kinds of regular expressions that are expected here is provided on the RSS Import page. For The West Wing, for example, I put in west.wing.hdtv — which means download any file that include the letters west, followed by any single character, followed by the letters wing, followed by any number of characters, followed by the letters hdtv, to make sure I get the HDTV version and not the VCD version. For multiple shows, separate them with a semi-colon, so west.wing.hdtv;enterprise.*hdtv would download The West Wing and Enterprise.

Under Recheck channels… I would recommend putting in 60, so as not to bombard the TV Torrents server with more requests than necessary.

And you’re set. Don’t worry about the other options. Now you just have to wait for the next episode to air. Depending on your download speed, you should have it in your downloads folder after a couple of hours.

Now all you have to do is watch them.
http://pealco.net/archives/2004/11/0...orrent_and_rss





Darknet Casts Hollywood as Heavy
Jason Silverman

Hollywood is terrified of your computer. Movie industry bigwigs know your PC can help you create your own movies, or, worse, copy and tweak theirs. So, like a jealous lover, the entertainment industry worries: Is your computer offering you the fulfillment we can't? Are you going to buy fewer of our movie tickets, DVDs and CDs?

Author J.D. Lasica says Hollywood is waging battles on several fronts to make sure that doesn't happen. In his comprehensive, sometimes chilling new book, Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, Lasica details the entertainment industry's strategies for maintaining control of content in the rip-mix-burn age.

Darknet paints a picture of a culture war that pits Hollywood, which wants to lock down every byte of content, against its technologically empowered audience, which enjoys manipulating and sharing digital info.

While researching the book, Lasica interviewed hundreds of experts, including industry executives, lobbyists, lawyers and Silicon Valley insiders. He visited "darknets," the illegal file-sharing networks that have turned pirating Hollywood movies into a global sport, and checked in with regular folks who just want to pull a Disney film clip for their home videos.

Lasica spoke with a sprawling cast of characters. Jack Valenti, the silver-tongued former head of the Motion Picture Association of America, helped frame battles over content flow as being solely about piracy. The pseudonymous "Rev. John" uses pirated movies in his weekly sermons. Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala, two Mississippi kids, spent seven years making a feature-length tribute to Raiders of the Lost Ark in their backyards. And David Clayton created the MovieMask software to snip out R-rated content from Hollywood films.

The software provided by MovieMask and its rival, ClearPlay, quickly came under attack by Hollywood, which argued that even in the privacy of their own homes, consumers don't have the right to mess with trademarked films. Though Congress came down on the side of ClearPlay (the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, passed last April, kept scene-scrubbing software legal), Hollywood's aggressiveness surprised even Lasica.

"(Hollywood's) view still is in the vein of, 'We are the artists. We are the creative professionals. You are the audience, and you don't have the right to change anything that we do in any small way,'" he said. "But that's just a holdover. It's 20th-century analog thinking -- that there isn't a place for the audience in the movie-viewing experience, that we are just passive receptacles for the artists. That won't work in the digital age."

Turf wars between the entertainment and technology industries are nothing new. Music companies sued to thwart the player piano in 1908. AM radio broadcasters marshaled their forces against the coming of FM. VCRs very nearly went extinct in 1984 until a 5-4 Supreme Court vote (with Sandra Day O'Connor passing the tiebreaker) kept them legal.

But the stakes have never seemed quite this high or the entertainment industry this proactive. Members of the public are learning to personalize, create and share their media. Hollywood, meanwhile, has all its chips invested in a top-down model of information and entertainment distribution.

"We are moving from a text-based culture -- where people have been allowed to borrow and take snippets from books and magazines and journals -- into a visual culture," Lasica said. "Those same kind of rights, to quote from a movie or TV show and annotate it or comment on it, have been stripped away."

Darknet outlines Hollywood's multi-pronged strategy for locking down content. The tactics include using technological advances (DVD encryption is one example) and strong-arming or co-opting tech companies.

Lasica finds that Hollywood also wields huge influence in Congress. In the book, he describes the 1998 passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which makes cracking encryption a federal offense. The DMCA, Lasica argues, overwrites fair-use laws, which protect scholars and artists who appropriate materials for purposes of education and political expression.

"That's a good example of how the public doesn't realize how their rights are being whittled away," Lasica said. "I'm pretty sure that even members of Congress aren't fully aware of what they were passing."

Lasica is confident that what he describes as the "digital rights" of consumers will eventually carry the day. Until then, Hollywood will resist. And finally, if history is any measure, Hollywood will prosper.

"The entertainment industry has always fought new technologies, and the technologies have eventually won out," Lasica said. "And then Hollywood benefits. Today, they think peer-to-peer technologies are a huge threat. In fact, it is more likely an unparalleled opportunity for the industry to expand its market share, to get movies and music in everybody's hands."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,68048,00.html

[JackSpratts]

Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster
Matt Richtel and John Markoff

Add personal computers to the list of throwaways in the disposable society.

On a recent Sunday morning when Lew Tucker's Dell desktop computer was overrun by spyware and adware - stealth software that delivers intrusive advertising messages and even gathers data from the user's machine - he did not simply get rid of the offending programs. He threw out the whole computer.

Mr. Tucker, an Internet industry executive who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, decided that rather than take the time to remove the offending software, he would spend $400 on a new machine.

He is not alone in his surrender in the face of growing legions of digital pests, not only adware and spyware but computer viruses and other Internet-borne infections as well. Many PC owners are simply replacing embattled machines rather than fixing them.

"I was spending time every week trying to keep the machine free of viruses and worms," said Mr. Tucker, a vice president of Salesforce.com, a Web services firm based here. "I was losing the battle. It was cheaper and faster to go to the store and buy a low-end PC."

In the face of a constant stream of pop-up ads, malfunctioning programs and performance slowed to a crawl or a crash - the hallmarks of spyware and adware - throwing out a computer "is a rational response," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a Washington-based research group that studies the Internet's social impact.

While no figures are available on the ranks of those jettisoning their PC's, the scourge of unwanted software is widely felt. This month the Pew group published a study in which 43 percent of the 2,001 adult Internet users polled said they had been confronted with spyware or adware, collectively known as malware. Forty-eight percent said they had stopped visiting Web sites that might deposit unwanted programs on their PC's.

Moreover, 68 percent said they had had computer trouble in the last year consistent with the problems caused by spyware or adware, though 60 percent of those were unsure of the problems' origins. Twenty percent of those who tried to fix the problem said it had not been solved; among those who spent money seeking a remedy, the average outlay was $129.

By comparison, it is possible to buy a new computer, including a monitor, for less than $500, though more powerful systems can cost considerably more.

Meantime, the threats from infection continue to rise, and "the arms race seems to have tilted toward the bad guys," Mr. Rainie said.

The number of viruses has more than doubled in just the last six months, while the number of adware and spyware programs has roughly quadrupled during the same period, said Vincent Weafer, a senior director at Symantec, which makes the Norton computer security programs. One reason for the explosion, Symantec executives say, is the growth of high-speed Internet access, which allows people to stay connected to the Internet constantly but creates more opportunity for malicious programs to find their way onto machines.

Mr. Weafer said an area of particular concern was infections adept at burying themselves in a computer system so that the cleansing programs had trouble finding them. The removal of these programs must often be done manually, requiring greater technical expertise.

There are methods of protecting computers from infection through antivirus and spyware-removal software and digital barriers called firewalls, but those tools are far from being completely effective.

"Things are spinning out of control," said David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale.

Mr. Gelernter said his own family's computer became so badly infected that he bought a new one this week. He said his two teenage sons were balking at spending the hours needed to scrub the old one clean of viruses, worms and adware.

Mr. Gelernter blames the software industry for the morass, noting that people are increasingly unwilling to take out their "software tweezers" to clean their machines.

Microsoft executives say they decided to enter the anti-spyware business earlier this year after realizing the extent of the problem.

"We saw that a significant percentage of crashes and other problems were being caused by this," said Paul Bryan, an executive in the company's security business unit. Windows XP Service Pack 2, an upgrade to the latest Windows operating system that has been distributed to more than 200 million computers, includes an automated malware removal program that has been used 800 million times this year, he said.

At least another 10 million copies of a test version of the company's spyware removal program have been downloaded. Yet Microsoft executives acknowledged that they were not providing protection for people who have earlier versions of the company's operating system. And that provides little comfort for those who must navigate the perils of cyberspace.

Terrelea Wong's old computer now sits beside her sofa in the living room, unused, except as a makeshift table that holds a box of tissues.

Ms. Wong, a physician at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in South San Francisco, started getting a relentless stream of pop-up ads a year ago on her four-year-old Hewlett-Packard desktop computer. Often her entire screen would turn blue and urge her to "hit any key to continue." Sometimes the computer would freeze altogether.

After putting up with the problem for months, Ms. Wong said she decided last November that rather than fix her PC, she would buy a new one. Succumbing to the seduction of all the new bells and whistles, she spent $3,000 on a new Apple laptop.

She is instituting new rules to keep her home computer virus-free.

"I've modified my behavior. I'm not letting my friends borrow my computer," she said, after speculating that the indiscriminate use of the Internet by her and her friends had led to the infection problems.

Peter Randol, 45, a stockbroker for Charles Schwab in Denver, is at his wits' end, too. His family's four-year-old Dell computer has not been the same since last year when they got a digital subscriber line for high-speed Internet access. Mr. Randol said the PC's performance has slowed, a result he attributes to dozens of malicious programs he has discovered on the computer.

He has eliminated some of the programs, but error messages continue to pop up on his screen, and the computer can be agonizingly slow.

"I may have no choice but to buy a new one," he said, noting that he hopes that by starting over, he can get a computer that will be more impervious to infection.

Buying a new computer is not always an antidote. Bora Ozturk, 33, who manages bank branches in San Francisco, bought a $900 Hewlett-Packard computer last year only to have it nearly paralyzed three months ago with infections that he believes he got from visiting Turkish news sites.

He debated throwing the PC out, but it had pictures of his newborn son and all of his music files. He decided to fix it himself, spending 15 hours learning what to do, then saving all his pictures and music to a disk and then wiping the hard drive clean - the equivalent of starting over.

For his part, Mr. Tucker, the Salesforce.com executive, said the first piece of software he installed on the new machine two weeks ago was antivirus software. He does not want a replay of his frustrations the last month, when the attacks on his old machine became relentless.

"It came down to the simple human fact that maintaining the old computer didn't pay," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17spy.html





Adware Tries to Clean Up Its Image
Eric Hellweg

Don't look now, but the adware industry is trying to shed its pariah status -- the lowly image it has among not only consumers and privacy advocates, but also some investors.

The first move came as WhenU.com, a leading adware company, announced last week that it closed a $15 million round of
venture capital funding, led by Trident Capital. That announcement came a week after the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft was in talks to purchase Claria, another leading adware provider, which, in an effort to gain traction in more traditional markets, said it would stop distributing its software on the Kazaa file-sharing network. Meanwhile, adware firm 180solutions announced it was alerting consumers that have its software installed and offering them specific instructions on how to remove it.

Of course, such initiatives didn't come as a result of the adware industry finding digital religion. Instead, these developments signal that the industry is making an effort to repair its seriously damaged reputation -- and thereby grow its share of the multi- billion dollar online ad industry.

Adware's growth has risen almost in tandem with peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, since, until recently, many adware software companies paid to have their software coupled with these programs. Adware companies would send pop-up ads to users whether they were using the P2P network or not, and would track their online behavior, targeting them with ads relevant to the sites they visited.

But consumers have become more vocal in their opposition to dubious adware and spyware practices. A survey released on July 6 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that nine out of ten Internet users said they've changed their online habits to avoid spyware. Furthermore, Download.com, a leading site for downloading programs, tightened its software policy in April -- no adware or spyware is now allowed on any program distributed through its site

The U.S. government also has gotten involved, with a Senate anti-spyware bill, the SPY BLOCK (Software Principles Yielding Better Levels of Consumer Knowledge) Act (S. 2145), currently in committee, and a correlating anti-spyware bill, H.R. 2929, making its way through the House.

It's not simply consumer angst and political pressure, however, that have forced adware companies to make an about-face. Much of this decision is being driven by the bottom line. Adware companies have seen a negative business impact as a result of image issues. Claria, for instance, had to withdraw its planned IPO last year when the market gave the company a chilly reception, in large part due to adware backlash.

What's more, many consumer privacy advocates are unconvinced by the industry's efforts and remain determined to fight adware.

"I don't think the right way to view recent events is as any substantial resurgence for adware companies," says Ben Edelman, a noted spyware critic and consumer advocate. "These companies are PR masters, but the fact is, users hate their software."

For years, privacy advocates and consumers' rights organizations have raised several concerns with the adware industry. Consumers are often unaware that they've downloaded adware
onto their systems, since it's packaged among other programs. Also, it's often difficult to remove adware. And there's the often murky or non-existent disclosure of what information is tracked and to whom it is sent.

"I remain skeptical of this industry," says Chris Hoofnagle, director and senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Most of the changes they have made focus on PR
rather than substantive privacy reform."

Bill Day, WhenU.com's CEO, says he was well aware of consumer and privacy concerns when he joined the company in October 2004. Like most adware companies, it attaches its adware to free downloadable games and other consumer-focused software. Since then, he says he's worked hard to address these issues and to change the way his company operates.

"Installation is now very clear," Day says. "Branding that the ads are from us is now very clear. It's very easy to uninstall now." (Historically, one of the major consumer complaints against adware companies is that they have not included "uninstall" files with the program, and hidden the program on a user's hard drive, making it very difficult to find and erase the program.)

Each application now has an 800 number on it, which consumers can call if they have complaints about the ad or want to get rid of the software.

"We're only getting 10-20 calls per day on that line," Day says.

Trevor Hughes, executive director of The Network Advertising Initiative, a trade association for traditional, banner-based Internet advertisers, lauds the adware industry's recent initiatives, but also says much more is needed before the industry sheds its negative image.

"These companies need to distinguish themselves more clearly from spyware firms," Hughes says. "The entire industry needs to put down its competitive nature and define some best practices and standards...They need to put some teeth into those standards and then take them out to the world."

Day agrees that strict best practices are needed across the industry if adware companies are to continue their recent momentum. Even with the continued pressure from privacy advocates and consumer groups, though, he's bullish about WhenU and the industry's prospects. "The company has gone through a lot of scrutiny recently, and we've survived," he says.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...205hellweg.asp





A DVD Standoff in Hollywood
Ken Belson

The Hollywood studio executives who gathered here late last month at an annual home entertainment conference in Century City were all chuckles and backslaps. In front of several hundred industry managers, analysts and reporters, they talked breezily about hit movies, DVD sales and prospects for the holiday season.

Then, with a few minutes left in the session, the moderator asked the question everyone was waiting for: Can the studios break the deadlock between the rival camps developing the next generation of digital video discs, players and recorders?

The question was not academic. Hollywood has not been able to unite around one of the two new formats, called Blu-ray and HD DVD. As a result, tens of billions of dollars in potential sales hang in the balance.

Before anyone could answer, Thomas Lesinski, president of home entertainment at Paramount Pictures, jumped in and said it would not benefit the studios to discuss the issue in public while behind-the-scenes negotiations were going on.

Stunned by the curt response, the audience offered nervous laughter and the other executives fell silent.

Mr. Lesinski's testy reaction was a sign of how touchy the debate over the competing formats has become. To everyone's regret, the studios are split over which group to support. Sony's studio and Disney, with 39 percent of the DVD market, back the Blu-ray group that includes Sony, Panasonic, Hewlett-Packard and others. Warner, Universal and Paramount, with 43 percent of the market, support the HD-DVD standard developed by Toshiba and NEC.

Fox, MGM, Lions Gate and others, which control the remaining 18 percent of the market, have yet to declare their allegiance definitively.

Yet the result is the same: Hollywood has been unable to throw its weight behind one format, and because the rival discs are largely incompatible, the studios have been unable to persuade the manufacturers to reach a compromise or to get one side to withdraw.

Compounding matters, many Hollywood executives have staked their reputations - both corporate and personal - on one technology or the other, making it politically difficult for them to switch sides.

Yet the studios, retailers and makers of electronics, computers and video games are still gearing up for a format war over the new technology, which promises high- definition video, enhanced audio and a slew of interactive features.

Starting this Christmas, consumers will start seeing high-definition DVD players and movies in stores. But because there is no foreseeable end to the format fight, shoppers are expected to shy away from buying the machines and discs. After all, the equipment could quickly become obsolete, just as the Sony Betamax home machines faded in the 1980's after losing out to VHS.

With no great pleasure, Mr. Lesinski said in an interview that if both sides release competing discs and machines, the companies involved will probably generate half the revenue they would with only one format. Other industry analysts are even more pessimistic.

"Both sides have so much vested in their technology that no one wants to blink, given the potential upside," said Mr. Lesinski, whose studio, Paramount, is a division of Viacom. Paramount, along with Warner Home Video and Universal Studios Home Video, will release 89 movies this year in the HD-DVD format.

The three studios have backed the HD-DVD format because the technology is essentially an upgrade of existing DVD technology, so it requires less investment and time to produce. Toshiba says it can make the discs now for a few pennies more than the current generation of discs.

Yet, as Blu-ray advocates love to point out, their discs hold more data, and thus can offer better-quality video. The technology also gives the studios and game makers room to develop new, interactive features. These extra goodies, they say, will make Blu-ray more attractive to consumers, who will have to pay about $1,000 for the first machines.

"The way to do it is to have discs chock full of benefits," said Bob Chapek, the president of the home entertainment division of Buena Vista, a unit of Disney. "Some of these things chew up a lot of capacity."

But to get all that, the Blu-ray group companies are creating entirely new production techniques that require a lot more money and time. Though Sony, Panasonic and others now sell Blu-ray recorders and rewriteable discs in Japan, they are still testing the read-only discs that the Hollywood studios need.

Indeed, 20 miles south of Hollywood, in Torrance, Calif., Panasonic, a division of Matsushita, has built a pilot production line to show that Blu-ray read-only discs can be made cheaply and quickly. To do this, Panasonic is developing a new way of coating discs with their all-important protective layer.

The test line in a clean room at the factory now spits out a disc every 4.5 seconds, and Shinya Abe, who runs Panasonic's replication task force for producing read-only Blu-ray discs, said he expected that rate to fall to one every 3.5 seconds.

"We want to show Hollywood we can make read-only discs," he said.

Yet Mr. Abe and other Panasonic executives sidestepped questions about how many of the discs were usable for commercial purposes, saying it was up to the mass- market manufacturers to determine.

The issues of cost and time to market would matter less if sales of the current generation of DVD equipment were booming. But there are plenty of signs that they are not.

The studios know that the percentage of American homes with a DVD player is nearing 80 percent, or the saturation point, and that the latest converts typically buy fewer discs.

Indeed, while sales of discs are expected to rise 13 percent this year in the United States, the salad days of 20 to 30 percent annual growth are a memory. Most movie libraries are now out on DVD, and stores like Wal-Mart are slashing disc prices, which means less profit for studios.

To jump-start growth, the studios are turning to their television archives for new material. But those sales are expected to slow, too.

This is particularly bad news for studios, which rely more and more heavily on DVD sales as the video rental business shrinks and income from theaters flattens. For example, Americans spent $9.1 billion on feature movies on DVD last year, 47.9 percent of the money studios made from those films.

That's up from 28.7 percent in 1996, when videotapes still dominated.

The power of DVD sales was also apparent earlier this month, when shares of Pixar Animation Studios Inc. tumbled after the company said it expected fewer DVD sales of its film "The Incredibles."

Hollywood studio chiefs who are responsible for making five-year plans see the writing on the wall for the current generation of DVD's, and know they need something new to sell consumers. Most Hollywood executives who attended the conference here remained optimistic that ultimately they could reach a consensus and use their collective weight to persuade hardware makers to devise a hybrid solution.

"We're at the worst part of the storm now," said Mike Dunn, president of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. But "this will get worked out in the back room."

Correction: July 16, 2005, Saturday:

A picture caption in Business Day on Monday with an article about the rival formats emerging for high-definition DVD’s — HD-DVD and Bluray — misspelled the names of two directors of Panasonic’s Blu-ray laboratory in Torrance, Calif. They are Keisuke Suetsugi, not Suetsujgi, and Yoshihiro Mori, not Yoshiichiro.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/te...dvd.html?8hpib






A Pass on Privacy?
Christopher Caldwell

Anyone making long drives this summer will notice a new dimension to contemporary inequality: a widening gap between the users of automatic toll-paying devices and those who pay cash. The E-ZPass system, as it is called on the East Coast, seemed like idle gadgetry when it was introduced a decade ago. Drivers who acquired the passes had to nose their way across traffic to reach specially equipped tollbooths -- and slow to a crawl while the machinery worked its magic. But now the sensors are sophisticated enough for you to whiz past them. As more lanes are dedicated to E-ZPass, lines lengthen for the saps paying cash.

E-ZPass is one of many innovations that give you the option of trading a bit of privacy for a load of convenience. You can get deep discounts by ordering your books from Amazon.com or joining a supermarket ''club.'' In return, you surrender information about your purchasing habits. Some people see a bait-and-switch here. Over time, the data you are required to hand over become more and more personal, and such handovers cease to be optional. Neato data gathering is making society less free and less human. The people who issue such warnings -- whether you call them paranoids or libertarians -- are among those you see stuck in the rippling heat, 73 cars away from the ''Cash Only'' sign at the Tappan Zee Bridge.

Paying your tolls electronically raises two worries. The first is that personal information will be used illegitimately. The computer system to which you have surrendered your payment information also records data about your movements and habits. It can be hacked into. Earlier this year, as many as half a million customers had their identities ''compromised'' by cyber-break-ins at Seisint and ChoicePoint, two companies that gather consumer records.

The second worry is that personal information will be used legitimately -- that the government will expand its reach into your life without passing any law, and without even meaning you any harm. Recent debate in Britain over a proposed ''national road-charging scheme'' -- which was a national preoccupation until the London Tube bombings -- shows how this might work. Alistair Darling, the transport secretary, wants to ease traffic and substitute user fees for excise and gas taxes. Excellent goals, all. But Darling plans to achieve them by tracking, to the last meter, every journey made by every car in the country. It seems that this can readily be done by marrying global positioning systems (with which many new cars are fitted) with tollbooth scanners. The potential applications multiply: what if state policemen in the United States rigged E-ZPass machines to calculate average highway speeds between toll plazas -- something easily doable with today's machinery -- and to automatically ticket cars that exceed 65 m.p.h.?

There is a case to be made that only a citizenry of spoiled brats would fret over such things. Come on, this argument runs, anyone who owns an anti-car-theft device -- LoJack in the United States or NavTrak in Britain -- is using radio tracking to make a privileged claim on government services. If your LoJack-equipped Porsche is stolen, you can call the local police department and say, in effect, ''Go fetch.'' Stolen cars with such devices are almost always recovered. Car theft has fallen precipitously, which benefits us all.

For some time, the United States has required commercial trucks to register their mileage and routes. Last year, Germany initiated a new, more efficient G.P.S.-based truck-tracking system that seems intrusion-proof. Authorities discard the records after three months, which means they can't use them to arrest criminal truckers or dun deadbeat ones. Can such forbearance last?

In Germany, where history makes lax surveillance seem the lesser evil, yes. But not in the United States. Since the Warren Court, voters have, again and again, risen up against any libertarian trammeling of government in its fight against crime. People waver on whether to trade privacy for convenience, but they're pretty untroubled about trading privacy for security. On occasion, E-ZPass records have been used to track down criminal suspects.

When such crime-fighting aids are available, people clamor for them. In October, the F.D.A. approved, for medical use, the VeriChip, a device the size of a grain of rice. It can be implanted under a patient's skin and activated to permit emergency personnel to gain access to personal medical records. It's extremely useful when patients are unconscious, but there is a suspicion that the real application lies elsewhere. Similar devices can easily be fitted with other types of transmitters. ''Active'' implants are already being put to other uses: to trace livestock and lost pets and, in Latin America, to discourage kidnappings. Those who can put two and two together will find this VeriUnsettling. Monitoring can quickly change from convenience to need. Would you support a chip-based security system for nuclear power plant employees? If you were in the Army Special Forces, wouldn't you want a transmitter embedded in you?

In more and more walks of life, if what you want to do is not trackable, you can't do it. Most consumers have had the experience of trying to buy something negligible -- a pack of gum, say -- and being told by a cashier that it's impossible because ''the computer is down.'' It now seems quaint that after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Congress argued over whether ''taggants'' should be required in explosives to make them traceable. Today everything is traceable. Altered plant DNA is embedded in textiles to identify them as American. Man-made particles with spectroscopic ''signatures'' can be used, for example, as ''security tags'' for jewels. The information collected about consumers is the most sophisticated and confusing taggant of all. It is a marvelous tool, a real timesaver and a kind of electronic bracelet that turns the entire world into a place where we are living under house arrest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17WWLN.html




Google's Growth Prompts Privacy Concerns

Google is at once a powerful search engine and a growing e-mail provider. It runs a blogging service, makes software to speed Web traffic and has ambitions to become a digital library. And it is developing a payments service.

Although many Internet users eagerly await each new technology from Google Inc., its rapid expansion is also prompting concerns that the company may know too much: what you read, where you surf and travel, whom you write.

"This is a lot of personal information in a single basket," said Chris Hoofnagle, senior counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Google is becoming one of the largest privacy risks on the Internet."

Not that Hoofnagle is suggesting that Google has strayed from its mantra of making money "without doing evil."

Rather, some privacy advocates worry about the potential: The data's very existence - conveniently all under a single digital roof - makes Google a prime target for abuse by overzealous law enforcers and criminals alike.

Through hacking or with the assistance of rogue employees, they say, criminals could steal data for blackmail or identity theft. Recent high- profile privacy breaches elsewhere underscore the vulnerability of even those systems where thoughtful security measures are taken.

Law enforcement, meanwhile, could obtain information that later becomes public, in court filings or otherwise, about people who are not even targets of a particular investigation.

Though Google's privacy protection is generally comparable to - even better than - those at Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and a host of other Internet giants, "I don't think any of the others have the scope of personal information that Google does," Hoofnagle said.

Plus, Google's practices may influence rivals given its dominance in search and the fierce competition.

"Google is perhaps the most noteworthy right now by the simple fact that they are the 800-pound gorilla," said Lauren Weinstein, a veteran computer scientist and privacy advocate. "What they do tends to set a pattern and precedent."

The concerns reflect Google's growing heft. As startups get bigger and more powerful, scrutiny often follows.

Google says it takes privacy seriously.

"In general, as a company, we look at privacy from design all the way (through) launch," said Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel at Google.

That means product managers, engineers and executives - not just lawyers - consider the privacy implications as new technologies are developed and new services offered, Wong said.

She also said that Google regularly seeks feedback from civil liberties groups such as the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both of which credit Google for listening even if it doesn't always agree.

Google's privacy statements specify that only some of its employees have access to personal data - on a need-to-know basis - and such access is logged to deter abuse.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt says a tradeoff exists between privacy and functionality, and the company believes in making fully optional - and seeking permission beforehand - any services that require personally identifiable information.

"There are always options to not use that set of technology and remain anonymous," Schmidt told reporters in May.

But what is meant by personally identifiable information is subject to debate.

Google automatically keeps records of what search terms people use and when, attaching the information to a user's numeric Internet address and a unique ID number stored in a Web browser "cookie" file that Google uploads to computers unless users reconfigure their browsers to reject them.

Like most Internet companies, Google says it doesn't consider the data personally identifiable. But Internet addresses can often be traced to a specific user.

Here's just some of the ways Google can collect data on its users:

_One of Gmail's selling points is its ability to retain e-mail messages "forever."

_Google's program for scanning library books sometimes requires usernames to protect copyrights.

_The company is testing software for making Web pages load more quickly; the application routes all Web requests through its servers.

_Google also provides driving directions, photo sharing and instant messaging, and it is developing a payments service that critics say could add billing information to user profiles.

Because storage is cheap, data from these services can be retained practically forever, and Google won't specify how long it keeps such information.

Without elaborating, Google says it "may share" data across such services as e-mail and search. It also provides information to outside parties serving as Google's agents - though they must first agree to uphold Google's privacy policies.

Much of the concern, though, stems from a fear of the unknown.

"Everybody gets worried about what they (Google) could do but what they have done to date has not seemed to violate any privacy that anyone has documented," said Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter Search Engine Watch.

Eric Goldman, a cyberlaw professor at Marquette University, believes the focus ought to be on the underlying problem: access by hackers and law enforcement.

"We still need to have good technology to inhibit the hackers. We still need laws that make hacking criminal. We still need restraints on government surveillance," Goldman said. "Google's database doesn't change any of that."

Anne Rubin, 20, a New York University junior who uses Google's search, Gmail and Blogger services, says quality overrides any privacy concerns, and she doesn't mind that profiles are built on her in order to make the ads she sees more relevant.

"I see it as a tradeoff. They give services for free," she said. "I have a vague assumption that things I do (online) aren't entirely private. It doesn't faze me."

Larry Ponemon, a privacy adviser, says research by his Ponemon Institute found Google consistently getting high marks for trust.

By contrast, Microsoft, whose software sometimes crashes and regularly gets violated by hackers, didn't fare as well despite what Ponemon and others acknowledge are improvements in its approach to privacy.

"People confuse customer service with obligations to maintain privacy," Ponemon said. "Google has a product that seems to work. It gets almost like a free ride on privacy."

That's changing.

Google, a perennially secretive company, may share some of the blame. It goes out of its way to strip its privacy statements of legalese so they are easier to read. But the statements remain vague on how long the company keeps data.

In an interview, Wong said Google had no set time limits on data retention; such determinations are left to individual product teams. She said the information helps Google know how well it is doing - for instance, are users getting the results they want in the first five, 10 or 100 hits?

"We keep data that's collected from our services for as long as we think it's useful," she said.

Google says it releases data when required by law, but its privacy statements offer few details. Wong said Google doesn't surrender data without a subpoena, court order or warrant. But she would not offer any details on how many requests it gets, or how often, and federal law bars Google from disclosing requests related to national security.

For civil lawsuits, Wong said, Google warns users before it complies so they can file objections with a court - a fact the company doesn't publicize.

Mark Rasch, who was a Justice Department prosecutor in the 1980s and has since advised companies on getting data from Internet companies, says electronic records will only become more relevant for investigators searching for evidence of intent and knowledge.

"As Google becomes more involved in parts of your lives including chats and blog, then it's going to get lots more subpoenas," he said. "It's a lot more than just a search tool."
http://www.forbes.com/business/manuf...ap2141974.html





Large Volume of F.B.I. Files Alarms U.S. Activist Groups
Eric Lichtblau

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups in what the groups charge is an attempt to stifle political opposition to the Bush administration.

The F.B.I. has in its files 1,173 pages of internal documents on the American Civil Liberties Union, the leading critic of the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies, and 2,383 pages on Greenpeace, an environmental group that has led acts of civil disobedience in protest over the administration's policies, the Justice Department disclosed in a court filing this month in a federal court in Washington.

The filing came as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act brought by the A.C.L.U. and other groups that maintain that the F.B.I. has engaged in a pattern of political surveillance against critics of the Bush administration. A smaller batch of documents already turned over by the government sheds light on the interest of F.B.I. counterterrorism officials in protests surrounding the Iraq war and last year's Republican National Convention.

F.B.I. and Justice Department officials declined to say what was in the A.C.L.U. and Greenpeace files, citing the pending lawsuit. But they stressed that as a matter of both policy and practice, they have not sought to monitor the political activities of any activist groups and that any intelligence-gathering activities related to political protests are intended to prevent disruptive and criminal activity at demonstrations, not to quell free speech. They said there might be an innocuous explanation for the large volume of files on the A.C.L.U. and Greenpeace, like preserving requests from or complaints about the groups in agency files.

But officials at the two groups said they were troubled by the disclosure.

"I'm still somewhat shocked by the size of the file on us," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U. "Why would the F.B.I. collect almost 1,200 pages on a civil rights organization engaged in lawful activity? What justification could there be, other than political surveillance of lawful First Amendment activities?"

Protest groups charge that F.B.I. counterterrorism officials have used their expanded powers since the Sept. 11 attacks to blur the line between legitimate civil disobedience and violent or terrorist activity in what they liken to F.B.I. political surveillance of the 1960's. The debate became particularly heated during protests over the war in Iraq and the run-up to the Republican National Convention in New York City last year, with the disclosures that the F.B.I. had collected extensive information on plans for protests.

In all, the A.C.L.U. is seeking F.B.I. records since 2001 or earlier on some 150 groups that have been critical of the Bush administration's policies on the Iraq war and other matters.

The Justice Department is opposing the A.C.L.U.'s request to expedite the review of material it is seeking under the Freedom of Information Act, saying it does not involve a matter of urgent public interest, and department lawyers say the sheer volume of material, in the thousands of pages, will take them 8 to 11 months to process for Greenpeace and the A.C.L.U alone. The A.C.L.U., which went to court in a separate case to obtain some 60,000 pages of records on the government's detention and interrogation practices, said the F.B.I. records on the dozens of protest groups could total tens of thousands of pages by the time the request is completed.

The much smaller files that the F.B.I. has already turned over in recent weeks center on two other groups that were involved in political protests in the last few years, and those files point to previously undisclosed communications by bureau counterterrorism officials regarding activity at protests.

Six pages of internal F.B.I. documents on a group called United for Peace and Justice, which led wide-scale protests over the Iraq war, discuss the group's role in 2003 in preparing protests for the Republican National Convention.

A memorandum by counterterrorism personnel in the F.B.I.'s Los Angeles office circulated to other counterterrorism officials in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Washington makes passing reference to possible anarchist connections of some protesters and the prospect for disruptions but also quotes at much greater length from more benign statements protesters had released on the Internet and elsewhere to prepare for the Republican convention.

One section of the F.B.I. memo, for instance, quotes from a statement put out by protesters to rally support for convention protests: "Imagine: A million people on the street, representing the diversity of New York, and the multiplicity of this nation - community organizers, black radicals, unions, anarchists, church groups, queers, grandmas for peace, AIDS activists, youth organizers, environmentalists, people of color contingents, global justice organizers, those united for peace and justice, veterans, and everyone who is maligned by Bush's malicious agenda - on the street - en masse."

A second file turned over by the F.B.I. on the American Indian Movement of Colorado includes seven pages of internal documents and press clippings related to protests and possible disruptions in the Denver area in connection with Columbus Day. In that case, a 2002 memorandum distributed to F.B.I. counterterrorism officials from agents in Denver said that "although the majority of demonstrators at the Columbus Day events will be peaceful, a small fraction of individuals intent on causing violence and property damage can be expected."

An agent in Denver requested that the F.B.I. open a preliminary investigation "to allow for identification and investigation of individuals planning criminal activity during Columbus Day, October 2002," the memorandum said. The file does not indicate what came of the request.

The documents are similar in tone to a controversial bulletin distributed among F.B.I. counterterrorism officials in October 2003 that analyzed the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators who were then planning protests in Washington and San Francisco.

The 2003 memo led to an internal Justice Department inquiry after an F.B.I. employee charged that it improperly blurred the line between lawfully protected speech and illegal activity. But the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel found that the bulletin raised no legal problems and that any First Amendment impact posed by the F.B.I.'s monitoring of the political protests was negligible and constitutional.

Still, the debate over the F.B.I.'s practices intensified last year during the presidential campaign. The F.B.I. questioned numerous political protesters, and issued subpoenas for some to appear before grand juries, in an effort to head off what officials said they feared could be violent and disruptive convention protests. And the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation and subpoenaed records regarding Internet messages posted by critics of the Bush administration that listed the names of delegates to the Republican convention.

Leslie Cagan, the national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of more than 1,000 antiwar groups, said she was particularly concerned that the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism division was discussing the coalition's operations. "We always assumed the F.B.I. was monitoring us, but to see the counterterrorism people looking at us like this is pretty jarring," she said.

At Greenpeace, which has protested both the Bush administration's environmental record and its policies in Iraq, John Passacantando, executive director of the group's United States operation, said he too was troubled by what he had learned.

"If the F.B.I. has taken the time to gather 2,400 pages of information on an organization that has a perfect record of peaceful activity for 34 years, it suggests they're just attempting to stifle the voices of their critics," Mr. Passacantando said.

Greenpeace was indicted as an organization by the Justice Department in a highly unusual prosecution in 2003 after two of its protesters went aboard a cargo ship to try to unfurl a protest banner. A federal judge in Miami threw out the case last year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/po...18protest.html





Museum Shows Power of the Printing Press
Jay Lindsay

It took about 500 years for Johannes Gutenberg's ideas about printing to become obsolete, but Gardner LePoer worried the artifacts of Gutenberg's legacy would be gone far sooner.

To LePoer, a newspaper editor turned printer, the printing press wasn't just a machine, but a driver of human history, empowering the masses by spreading the written word across cultures and classes.

In 1979, at the start of a computer age that finally replaced the traditional printing press, he and some friends incorporated The Museum of Printing to preserve the machines.

Today, the museum holds a wide collection of presses, and traces the development of a craft that LePoer also considers an art.

"Printing gives longevity to language," said LePoer, the museum's executive director. "When you do that well, it's art."

In 1440, Gutenberg invented replaceable wooden or metal letters used in printing, making the mass production of documents possible.

That "relief" printing, in which the documents are produced by pressing them onto a hard, raised surface, remained the standard until the mid-20th century, though with various refinements and updates.

One of them, the linotype machine, was named after its ability to set entire "lines of type" by keyboard, rather than by hand. The linotype made books commonplace and revolutionized the newspaper business by speeding up the process by which the news made it to print.

Before then, it took so long for printers to set stories by hand that some simply didn't make it into the paper.

"A lot of stuff in the paper wasn't news," LePoer said. "It was stories and poems that you could set ahead of time and pluck into the hole."

The museum boasts an 1885 prototype of the first linotype machine, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. It also has an original plate from Page One of The New York Times the day after the moon landings, which reads (backwards): "MEN WALK ON MOON; Astronauts Land on Plain, Collect Rocks, Plant Flag."

Other machines demonstrate "intaglio" printing, in which an engraved copper plate is pressed by manually turning large wheels, for extra pressure, to produce a document which captures fine lines better than other printers.

A lithograph machine uses a flat stone and crayon which absorbs ink but sheds waters. Artists used the crayon on the stone to draw pictures, which could then be reproduced. In an advance that greatly speeded up lithography, called offset lithography, ink from a lithographic plate is pressed to a curved rubber surface, which can be rolled for quick production.

LePoer said the history of printing is the history of the spread of information. If one understands that past, the importance for society of staying on the vanguard of modern digital technology is clear, he said.

Catherine Tuttle, a teacher from Concord, N.H., visited the museum to learn more about printing and the use of text in art, but she said the link between the machines and cultural advance became plain.

"The machines preceded the literacy," she said. "The technology here shows you the progress of humankind."

Her husband, Peter Tuttle, added, "It gives you a sense of the chronology of where we all began and where we are."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050717/...rinting_museum





Media companies continue to battle online piracy, but...

File-Sharing Seems Set To Stay
Eugene Wee

THE US Supreme Court has spoken.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) network companies Grokster and StreamCast Networks may be liable for copyright infringement as they actively encouraged their users to share copyrighted material.

But does this mean that movie studios and record companies can stop worrying about the Internet piracy perpetuated by P2P software?

Experts say this is unlikely.

Industry insiders say the Supreme Court decision will do little to stop illegal file-swapping from continuing.

That's because in the majority of cases, P2P networks don't require the support or aid of any commercial venture to flourish.

Miss Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer with US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has represented StreamCast Networks, told CNet News that if both Grokster and StreamCast were to be shut down, their P2P networks will still continue to be operational.

''It operates in a decentralised way,'' she said. ''It doesn't need to call into a home base; it doesn't need product updates from any place. What's out there continues to be out there.''

And recent history seems to support Miss Seltzer's view.

Napster Shut Down

In 2001, the music industry managed to shut down Napster, the pioneer P2P network for music.

However, new software developers came up with next-generation P2P software, which led to an even bigger wave of P2P network users.

Kazaa, which is now owned by Sydney-based Sharman Networks, later became the most downloaded software in Internet history.

File-swapping activities have also been proceeding unabated despite the Supreme Court ruling.

Internet traffic tracker BigChampagne reported that the day after the ruling, the average number of people in the US using file-sharing networks remained unchanged at between 5.2 million and 5.4 million.

While the upcoming lawsuit against Grokster and StreamCast could shut them down for good, others will spring up in their place.

Experts said new P2P networks will continue to pop up as network operators are seldom in it for the money.

Many do it simply to prove it can be done. Others will pitch their file-sharing networks for legitimate uses, such as legal distribition of copyright movies to paying customers.

Also, the ruling affects only companies in the US. Those who want to provide P2P software need only set up shop overseas.

Already, Kazaa has been superceded by BitTorrent, the latest file-sharing system that allows much bigger files, such as movies, to be shared.

So no matter how many P2P companies are put out of business, the technology itself is likely to stay - for better or worse.
http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/tech/st...,91732,00.html





Judge Dismisses Navy SEAL Suit Against AP
Gary Gentile

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against The Associated Press and one of its reporters that alleged the news organization violated privacy and copyright laws by publishing photos of Navy SEALs posing with Iraqi prisoners.

The lawsuit was filed after the AP distributed photographs that reporter Seth Hettena found posted on a commercial photo-sharing Web site, Smugmug.com, by the wife of one of the SEALs.

All four counts of the lawsuit were dismissed Tuesday in San Diego by U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Miller, who concluded that the claims lacked merit and that the AP did not violate any law by distributing the photos.

While Miller dismissed a claim of copyright infringement, he did leave open the possibility that the plaintiffs could clarify and refile those allegations. A lawyer for the plaintiffs said later that he would refile the copyright claims.

The photos, distributed worldwide with a Dec. 3 story by Hettena, appear to show the servicemen in Iraq sitting on hooded and handcuffed detainees and also what appear to be bloodied prisoners _ one with a gun to his head.

The story said the Navy had launched a formal investigation into the photographs after being shown them by an AP reporter, adding the photos did not necessarily depict any illegal activities.

The AP later reported that the Navy's preliminary findings showed most of the 15 photos transmitted by the agency were taken for legitimate intelligence-gathering purposes and showed commandos using approved procedures.

Miller dismissed three counts claiming that the AP invaded the privacy of the SEALs, noting that the SEALs were "active duty military members conducting wartime operations in full uniform who chose to allow their activities to be photographed and placed on the Internet."

He also agreed with the AP's legal response citing a California law intended to allow quick dismissal of meritless cases aimed at stifling free speech, meaning the news agency is entitled to recover its legal expense from the plaintiffs.

The judge's ruling said it would not be reasonable "for anyone to expect the images to remain private."

The plaintiffs had claimed that the AP should obscure the faces of the SEALs and that the lives of the servicemen were placed in danger as a result of the photos being distributed worldwide. But Miller said the expressions on the faces of some of the SEALs, some of whom were smiling as they posed with prisoners, "form an integral part of the story about potential mistreatment of captives."

"The Associated Press merely distributed a truthful story, with photos that depict a topic of great public interest," Miller wrote.

Dave Tomlin, the news cooperative's assistant general counsel, hailed the decision.

"The judge said repeatedly in his ruling that the AP and our reporter were only doing their jobs," Tomlin said. "We're very happy the court has affirmed what we said from the start about this groundless suit."

James Huston, the plaintiffs' lawyer, said he intends to appeal the decision, as well as refile the copyright claims.

"There appear to be facts in the opinion and on which the opinion is based that are not in the record," Huston said. He said no evidence had been presented about who took the photos. He also said the servicemen did not give permission to the SEAL wife to post the photos on the Internet.

The lawsuit had said the wife believed the nearly 1,800 photos she posted on the Internet site were protected from access by unauthorized users and required a password to view. The initial AP story, however, noted that the photos were found using the search engine Google, and were not password-protected until after the reporter purchased copies online and began inquiries.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...071401361.html





In Canada: Cache A Page, Go To Jail?
Elinor Mills

A bill before Canada's Parliament could make it illegal for search engines to cache Web pages, critics say, opening the door to unwarranted lawsuits and potentially hindering public access to information.

The legislation in question, Bill C-60, is designed to amend Canada's Copyright Act by implementing parts of the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization treaty, the treaty that led to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S.

Set for debate and an initial vote in the House of Commons after Parliament's summer break, C-60 addresses things such as file-sharing, anticopying devices and the liability of Internet service providers and would tighten the Copyright Act in ways favorable to record labels and movie studios.

But according to Howard Knopf, a copyright attorney at the Ottawa firm of Macera & Jarzyna, a brief passage in the bill could mean trouble for search engines and other companies that archive or cache Web content.

"The way it reads, arguably what they're saying is that the very act of making a reproduction by way of caching is illegal," Knopf said.

Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E- Commerce Law, agreed.

"Anyone with content on the Web could sue," and anyone caching content on the Internet could be sued, said Geist, who wrote about perils with C- 60 when it was introduced. "Somebody with an ax to grind, or business competitors, could start using the system to try to get content removed." The bill provides no deterrent to making false copyright-infringement claims, he said.

Such copyright issues remain a hot topic in the United States, where search engines have found themselves subjected to a litany of infringement complaints, particularly as they expand the types of content they make searchable on the Web.

Google has pulled links to Web sites that the controversial and litigious Church of Scientology claimed infringed copyright. The search giant was also forced recently to remove copyright video content users had uploaded and has also come under fire for its plan to digitize library collections. Amazon.com was recently sued by an adult magazine over photos in its images database, and Google was sued by the same company.

The concern over C-60 involves a section of the bill that deals with remedies open to copyright holders. That section contains the following language: "...the owner of copyright in a work or other subject-matter is not entitled to any remedy other than an injunction against a provider of information location tools who infringes that copyright by making or caching a reproduction of the work or other subject matter."

A government official from one of the departments that wrote C-60 said the section is meant to provide more protection for search engines. Under current Canadian law, copyright holders can sue companies they believe are reproducing their material without authorization. Though common practice is to send the alleged copyright infringer a cease-and-desist notice, such a warning is not now required under law, said Albert Cloutier, acting director of the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate at Industry Canada.

Under Bill C-60, copyright holders could sue for monetary damages only after giving notice. Before such notification, they'd be limited to seeking an injunction. The bill does not change the circumstances or terms for establishing copyright infringement, Cloutier said.

"We're saying that in cases where there is copyright infringement there is a safe harbor," Cloutier said.

Knopf said he believed the intent of the search engine provisions was to provide a partial safe harbor, but he said that due to "drafting issues"--in other words, careless language--he's concerned the effect may be the opposite, muddling one of the Web's prime paradigms.

"If you put stuff freely on the Internet and don't take available steps to control archiving...you have to expect that people are going to browse, print or save it and that Google is going to cache it and archive.org is going to archive it," Knopf said.

Existing law is unclear as to whether people who post information on the Internet have given implied permission to search engines for caching purposes, Cloutier said.

So far, there have been no cases in Canada of search engines being sued for copyright infringement, Cloutier and the lawyers said. However, "theoretically (they) could be liable for infringement. We don't know how the Canadian courts will treat the activity under current law," Geist said.

Regardless, even a provision like that in Bill C-60 wouldn't necessarily put search engines out of business in Canada; they could tailor their services to meet the law, as they do with legislation in other countries. For instance, Google has excluded illegal pro-Nazi content in Germany.

Besides, C-60 remains a bill, and the wording that worries Knopf and Geist could be changed in committee, Cloutier said. After the first vote in the House of Commons, the bill goes to committee for debate and revision before being sent back to the House for a final vote and, if it passes, to the Senate.

Both attorneys are hopeful corrections or clarification can be made before the bill becomes law. Otherwise, Knopf said, a can of worms could open--not just for major search engines such as Google and Yahoo but also for smaller sites such as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a searchable repository of old versions of Web sites created as a nonprofit public service.

"It could be a problem if it goes into law in a vague way and causes search engines to think there is a risk (and)...to cut back on their activities," said Wendy Seltzer, founder of the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a nonprofit legal-information project involving the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Harvard University and others. "The public as a whole loses if we lose the ability to see what's being made available online."
http://news.com.com/In+Canada+Cache+...3-5793659.html





Microsoft In $720k Piracy Win

MICROSFT has won settlements totalling $720,000 from a Queensland reseller and its former directors over the use of illegal copies of Microsoft software.

Microsoft said that since 1998 it had been in contact several times with Cross Link Marketing Group (CMG), which trades as Magic Computers, over the practice known as hard disk loading.

After receiving another tip-off in 2002 via its anti-piracy hotline, Microsoft gained agreement from CMG director Kell Walker that his company would no longer load PCs with unauthorised copies of Microsoft software

Microsoft filed civil proceedings in the federal court last year after a further tip-off received via its hotline.

Microsoft said that Mr Walker had agreed to pay $360,000 in damages, with former directors Rosalind Sumner (also known as Pee Loo Tan) and Wayne David Sumner consenting to a court order to pay the same amount.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html





Harry Potter and the Right to Read
Michael Geist

Appeared in the Toronto Star, July 18, 2005 as Harry Potter and the Amazing Injunction

Along with millions worldwide who scooped up the latest Harry Potter tome over the weekend, the 41 schools that make up Manitoba’s Frontier School Division no doubt purchased several copies for their students.

The link that connects Harry Potter and the school division that serves northern Manitoba extends beyond a mutual interest in children’s books. Both were at the centre of situations last week that illustrate how good news culture and heritage stories can easily be transformed when copyright law goes awry.

The Harry Potter incident is widely known since it generated global attention. A grocery store in Coquitlam, British Columbia inadvertently sold 14 copies of the new Harry Potter book prior to its official sale date of July 16, 2005. Reports indicate that Raincoast Books, the Canadian publisher, mistakenly failed to include a notice on the shipping box that the books were not to be sold in advance.

When Raincoast was informed of the sales, it joined with author J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury Publishing, the British publisher, to seek a court order from the British Columbia Supreme Court to keep the book and its contents under wraps.

Had Raincoast limited the requested order to stopping Canadian booksellers from selling the book, the issue would have attracted little attention. Rather than adopting that approach, however, Raincoast also directly targeted the 14 purchasers who had lawfully purchased copies of the book.

The order compelled anyone with a copy of the book to return it to the publisher along with any notes and other descriptions of its contents. Moreover, it prohibited Canadians from reading or discussing any aspect of the book.

This bears repeating. In a free and democratic society, a book publisher sought and obtained a court order banning reading and discussion of a children’s book. In fact, Raincoast had asked the court to go even further, by compelling purchasers to disclose the names, addresses, and other contact information of any other person with whom they discussed the book’s contents.

After the public objected to the order (including at least one call for a Harry Potter boycott), Raincoast issued a public explanation that cited copyright and trade secret law as the legal basis for its actions.

The copyright law claim was particularly puzzling. While copyright law does provide copyright owners with a basket of exclusive rights, the right to prohibit reading is not among them. In fact, copyright law has very little to say about what people can do with a book once they have purchased it. As far as the law is concerned, they are permitted to read it, resell it, or use it as a door stop if they wish. Attempts to use copyright law to create a new form of end-user license that establishes restrictions on the permitted uses of a book is at odds with longstanding legal principles.

While Raincoast was embroiled in the Harry Potter controversy, the Manitoba Frontier School Division was facing a similarly troubling situation. Last year, the Stark Museum in Orange, Texas donated four reproductions of paintings by Paul Kane, one of Canada’s leading artists during the 1800s. The paintings were seen as a homecoming of sorts since one of the portraits features the only known likeness of aboriginal elder Ogemawwah Chack, “The Spirit Chief,” who is a direct ancestor of many local residents.

To help educate their students about this period in Canadian history, the school district wanted a photograph of Kane to accompany the display of the paintings. When it discovered that the National Gallery of Canada had such a photograph, it asked for a copy.

The National Gallery sought $150 to complete the request, more than ten times the fee charged by the National Archives for a similar service. Moreover, the Gallery claimed the right to see and approve final design proofs for the use of this public domain image.

Officials from the school division were stunned since they had purchased hundreds of copies of archival photographs and never paid more than the cost of reproduction. They wrote to Liza Frulla, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, who recently told the House of Commons that she “does not need advice on protecting Canadian culture” given that “it is the story of her life”.

If protecting Canadian culture means putting it under a pricey lock and key, she is correct. Minister Frulla’s office declined to intervene, despite the fact that the museum is part of her mandate.

Last week, officials from the school division went public with their concerns, as they sought to call attention to the misuse of copyright law to restrict access to Canadian culture. While their story did not match Harry Potter for front page headlines, it nevertheless offers a vivid demonstration of the potential damage that can result from overbroad application of copyright laws.

Stories of this sort are not limited to Canada. As the Harry Potter and Manitoba events were unfolding, in the United Kingdom classical music producers criticized the BBC for offering free downloads of Beethoven symphonies, while in the United States, the Internet Archive, a remarkable resource of archived Internet content, was sued for copyright infringement.

Sadly, there is every indication that these cases represent only the tip of the iceberg in Canada. Bill C- 60, the federal government’s proposed copyright bill, envisions ever more limitations on the ability for individual Canadians to interact with their culture, while doing precious little to facilitate access in our libraries, schools and homes.

The Minister of Canadian Heritage or a judge on the British Columbia Supreme Court may be unwilling to stand up for cultural issues, but surely someone must be willing to do so. When copyright law is used to stop children from reading or learning about their cultural heritage, it is clear that something has gone wrong.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php...sk=view&id=896





Banjo on my knee

Voters Approve Citywide Fiber Project
Marguerite Reardon

Voters in Lafayette, La., on Saturday approved a bond offering to fund a citywide fiber-optic project, an issue that was the source of considerable friction during the past year.

Voters approved the measure 12,290 to 7,507, or 62 percent to 38 percent, according to the Lafayette Daily Advertiser.

The city of 116,000 residents known for its vibrant Cajun culture has been planning to build its own fiber-optic network for more than a year. But local phone company BellSouth and cable operator Cox Communications challenged the city-owned utility, which plans to build and operate the network.

After a legal tussle earlier this year, a special election was called to decide whether the city could issue $125 million worth of bonds to fund the project.

Fiber 411, the citizens group that opposed the project, characterized the loss as a victory.

"I think we won," Tim Supple of Fiber 411 told the Lafayette Daily Advertiser. "We started off wanting to get people the right to vote. We accomplished that. We tried to get people to understand the issue. We accomplished that, I hope. We won."

Lafayette's approval of the project could help rally citizens in the 14 states where municipal networks have already been banned or limited, said Joey Durel, president of Lafayette Parish.

"What the cable and phone companies do a lot better than provide service to customers is work politicians," he said. "Unless towns like Lafayette get moving, I'm afraid that more states could pass laws limiting these kinds of networks. If this referendum passes here in Lafayette, I think we'll start to see some states undoing those laws."

Lafayette isn't the only city that has faced resistance from incumbent phone and cable providers when it wanted to build its own communications network. City officials across the country including some in Provo, Utah; Palo Alto, Calif.; and Philadelphia also have faced strong opposition from local phone and cable companies when they proposed building their own networks.

These cities view building their own network as a way to bring their citizens faster broadband connections at cheaper rates, narrowing the so-called digital divide. But the Bell phone companies and cable operators argue that government intervention in their business is not justified and say they are far better equipped to operate complex and far-flung data networks.

"We believe Lafayette is already well-served by Cox and BellSouth," said David Grabert, a spokesman for Cox.

Millions of dollars have been spent lobbying state legislators and fighting court battles on both sides of the debate.

The issue has become so heated in recent months that two separate bills have been introduced at the federal level. U.S. Sens. John McCain, R- Ariz., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., have introduced a bill that would guarantee cities the right to build municipal communications networks.

On the other side of the debate, U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, recently introduced a bill that would ban cities from running communications networks that compete against private-sector telecom companies. Sessions, a former SBC executive, argues that local governments should not compete with private companies.
http://news.com.com/Voters+approve+c...3-5792387.html





These Musical Genres Are Made for Mashing
Kelefa Sanneh

When it came time to pick a single to go with the movie adaptation of "The Dukes of Hazzard," the producers evidently faced a difficult choice. Did they want a raucous country song? A Britney Spears-style club track? An old hit that everybody knows? Something by the beloved veteran Willie Nelson, who appears in the film as Uncle Jesse? Something by the teen-pop-star-turned-reality-TV-star Jessica Simpson, who plays Daisy Duke?

Fortunately for listeners who enjoy a big-budget mash-up, the answer was yes.

That yes came in the form of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin' " (Columbia), a jumbled-up cover of the old Nancy Sinatra hit. The singer is Ms. Simpson, who delivers many of the rewritten lyrics in the heavy-breathing style usually associated with Ms. Spears. She is joined by Mr. Nelson, who sounds as if he's amused by his garish surroundings. The song gets a staccato dancehall-reggae beat, interspersed with snippets of guitar and harmonica, with an aim toward pleasing both the country and dance-pop constituencies.

In short, this is a song put together not only for a blockbuster film but also like one: carefully (and expensively) assembled with an eye toward capturing the attention of a few target demographics. Many analysts - including, recently, Edward Jay Epstein, author of "The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood," and Tom Shone, author of "Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer" - have written about how this hunger for blockbusters has changed our experience of movies. But "These Boots Are Made for Walkin' " is an example of how strange the results can be when this formula is applied to music.

It has been three years since Eve and Gwen Stefani won the first Grammy Award for best rap/sung collaboration, and the new category was a testament (a few years late, of course) to the rising popularity of mix-and-match hits. A few years later, unexpected collaborations between big-name acts are more commonplace than ever, whether it's Jay-Z teaming with Linkin Park (for the hit CD "Collision Course") or Nelly joining forces with Tim McGraw to conquer both BET and CMT.

In mainstream music, unlike mainstream movies, genre still counts for a lot, which is part of the reason "These Boots" sounds so odd: you don't expect to hear those performers and those genres all colliding, those fiddles sawing away over that electronic beat, that honky-tonk chorus giving way to a rap section that evokes Ms. Stefani. Ms. Simpson has a much bigger voice than Ms. Spears, so it's odd to hear her hide it in order to pant the words in the verse. (By the time the first chorus arrives, she relents and gives us a bit of vibrato and melisma.) And Mr. Nelson seems to be ignoring the dancehall reggae beat altogether, delivering his lines under his breath, so quiet you can barely hear him. (This isn't Mr. Nelson's only recent foray into reggae: he has just released a reggae album, "Countryman.")

Of course, this song was a strange pop confection from the start, written by the great and weird singer-songwriter Lee Hazlewood for Ms. Sinatra, who needed a hit and got one that might have been bigger than she wanted. The original lyrics delivered an oddly equivocal response to a no-good man: "You keep samin' when you oughta be changin'," she famously purred, but the refrain both announces payback and defers it. "One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you" - but not, it would seem, today.

The new version has new verses that turn a scorned woman's vow into something not quite so dire: now the song is about how to beat a speeding ticket. "You believe you stopped me for a reason," she sings. "And I'm pretending my bending's just for fun."

Unfortunately, the music video doesn't re-enact this scenario, although it does just about everything else. That familiar orange car, the General Lee, pulls up, and Ms. Simpson does something contrary to the spirit of the original show: she opens the door. (Why can't she slither out through the window like everyone else?) The rest of the video unfolds in a rowdy bar, evoking everything from "Coyote Ugly" (her bar-top dance) to "Kill Bill" (an army of slinky but possibly deadly line dancers). For viewers worried that Ms. Simpson's short shirt and shorter shorts leave too much to the imagination, there's a climactic scene where she washes the General Lee - not very thoroughly, from the looks of things - while wearing a bikini. It just might be an homage to the infamous recent Carl's Jr. commercial starring Paris Hilton.

Given her ability to belt out ballads, it's odd that Ms. Simpson's career as a celebrity has had so little to do with music. By now she's much better known for her reality TV series, "Newlyweds," than for any of her albums; it's hard to think of another pop star who's so recognizable despite having so few recognizable hits. And because of her biography - she's Texan, and she has served as grand marshal at a Nascar race - she has become a de facto country star, even though she hasn't yet recorded a country album. (It seems inevitable, doesn't it?)

You can't have genre-scrambling pop songs if you don't have genres, and that's the paradox of "These Boots," which gets its charge from the fact that there are genre lines to blur. Which is to say that anyone repulsed by the success of this song should take heart: songs like this just might be helping to make themselves obsolete.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/21/ar...ann.html?8hpib

















Until next week,

- js.





















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