MP3.com entered into WAP (or as known in U.S. 'Wireless Web') world. They launched a service that allows people to check out live event dates, informations and order tickets with their WAP-enabled devices (such as OmniSky PDAs and WAP enabled cell phones like Nokia 7100 series).
MP3.com announced today that it has formed a new music retail division that will bring music services to your local grocery, mall and restaurant.
Division will supply music services for that kind of businesses -- basically service allows companies to play "muzak" from MP3.com's music catalogs that contains currently over 424,000 tracks from 67,000 different artists. That includes also some major label artists -- the independent music is included in the contract, but playing major label music will be charged seprately. MP3.com avoids new conflicts with RIAA..
Sorry, we forgot to correct the EMusic / Nomad2 offer. Based on dMusic, the offer was taken down almost immediately, propably because it had some sort of an user limit, etc.. So, those lucky ones, who got the player, got it -- rest of us have to buy it for 200+ dollars from online shops.
Jark from Cybertropix.com has done a great job reviewing most of the MP3/file sharing applications available on the markets at the mo.
I really suggest that you check his article out, it gives a good perspective of this sector of software that's dubbed in many medias as the "killer app of 2000".
Cybetropix's file sharing apps review
Effective on Saturday morning, the users that appeared on the list that rapper Dr.Dre provided to Napster, have been banned from the system. This list contains 230,142 users. But as usual, users can complain about the decision, etc..
Time to list last week's most downloaded programs through our sites, AfterDawn.com and MP3Lizard.com..
1. DVD-Rip Pack by Bytefaker (390)
2. DVDRIP v1.15 (290)
3. DoD Speed Ripper v1.1 (211)
4. DeCSS v1.21b (187)
5. Power Ripper v1.65 (134)
6. DVD Genie v3.43 (92)
7. DVD2MPG Squeezer v1.16 (82)
8. CuteMX v1.6 (78)
9. Alternate CDFS.VXD (77)
10. PowerDVD v2.55 trial (63)
...let's see if CuteMX 2.x hits the old 1.6 off from the charts -- we're still going to keep two separate versions available because they use separate networks until 2.0 is released as final.
Third annual MP3 Summit will take place in 20-21 June at the University of California. The happening is orgnized by MP3.com and today they announced the list of keynote speakers:
· Pamela Samuelson - Co-director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology
· Ian Clarke - founder, Freenet
· Michael Robertson - CEO, MP3.com
· Dennis Mudd - CEO, MusicMatch
· Ken Hertz - Music attorney and digital-music expert
· Jim Griffin - Founder, OneHouse
· Stacie Seifrit - Sales and Marketing Director, KROQ-FM
· John Parres - Artist Management Group
(article from dmusic)
EMusic and Creative Labs started a joint promotional campaign to sell Creative's Nomad II MP3 player for $50 for EMusic customers. Every user that spends $50 for MP3s in EMusic between May 24th and June 30th will get Nomad II player for $50 and the price includes also shipping fees.
Players are restricted for U.S. residents only and available only one per customer.
Snoop Dogg's record label, TVT Records, filed a law suit against MP3.com's My.MP3.com service on Wednesday. This is pretty easy task for the recording company, since RIAA already won their case, so just using the same arguments the result is already clear.
MP3.com's CEO Robertson is not very worried about this case anyway, he says that it's much easier to negotiate with independent record labels than with multi-billion dollar organization like RIAA.
Two companies have released their visions for home-MP3-players. Diamond released their Rio Digital Audio Receiver which basically just streams music from the existing PC using phonelines as LAN cables.
But more interesting release is an MP3 player from a company called Request. Their player has 17GB harddrive which allows users to store huge amount of MP3 music in one device. Device is called as AudioRequest and it's priced pretty nicely, for $799..
Napster has announced that it has collected $15 million in venture capitals from Hummer Winblad company.
So, even that they're having a hard time in their law suits, etc some people still trust in their future.
We finally moved our service from so-called shared server to our own dedicated server. This means faster pageloads, more stable enviroment, etc.. And also, bunch of very neat things are coming up within next weeks, so stay tuned!
Metallica sent another list of names for Napster to block. This time list was sent in privacy through Internet, including over 300,000 names again. List was collected during one week period. And as usual, Napster has to go through the same process again..
Napster's websites traffic increased over 65% in the week after Metallica's press conference where they announced their lawsuit against Napster. Nice move -- almost 400,000 unique visitors more per week for Napster and propably most of them downloaded Napster their first time..
Samsung released an MP3 player with LCD screen that allows users to view still pictures, like album covers, etc.. This is a little neat feature added to regular MP3 player, but as always in these days -- this player sucks in memory, only 64MB in basic version.
Democratic group Progressive Policy Institute will ask congress to make some radical changes to Digital Millennium Copyright Act based on Napster's current case against Metallica.
DMCA does not require ISPs, which Napster is concidered to be in this case, to remove requested files and users within any given time limit. "Napster did it in hurry because of massive media publicity". Now this group wants to clear these and some other issues in this copyright law.
Our graphician, Teemu, contributed our site by adding three WinAMP skins with AfterDawn.com theme. Grab these beautiful skins right now!
Black Dawn
Blue Dawn
Red Dawn
Dr. Dre today delivered a list of 240,000 usernames from Napster databases to the company. Dr.Dre wants Napster to remove these people because he claims that they've violated his copyrights.
Maybe we'll see even more funnier episode with this case than with Metallica -- now everybody already knows that the artists are not going to sue users and users have the right to complain about their removal..
Due some various reasons, specially because one of our main search engines that MP3Lizard utilizes changed their policy for meta search engines, we've been having major problems in past week or so with our sites.
All these problems are related few different issues, mostly to MP3Lizard.com. But we changed our major FTP search engine provider from OTH.net to Lycos and this seems to be working. We're very sorry about all problems this may have caused to you.
Metallica has received 17,000 names from Napster so far -- those names are users who have complained that their accounts have been deleted without a reason. Napster says that at least 13,000 more will be added to that list within days.
Based on Digital Millennium Copyright Act Metallica has to sue those people within 10 days or they can get their accounts back. Metallica's lawyer, mr. King says that "its economically ridiculous" to even consider to sue 30,000 people.
Webnoize's recent research in New England's colleges (survey was made for almost 5000 students) shows that 73% of the students use Napster at lest monthly. Nice news for RIAA.. But the survey also shows a little light for recording industry -- over 50% of the students would be willing to pay $15 / month for usage of Napster. So, maybe this is one of the methods that will bring some cash back to recording industry in some day.
Alanis Morissette is going to sell MP3.com's stocks that she received from the company in last year. Not all of them, no, but worth of $1 million anyway. Reason is not known and many people are asking is this the correct time to sell those, since MP3.com seems to get over its legal problems eventually..
The guys at Camp Chaos have created a funny little Flash movie called Napster BAD! which, of course, tells a little story about Metallica, the Napster-user hunters.
Check it out!
ZDNet reported today about almost-legendary "DivX ;-)" format with very familiar warnings and notices. As most/some of us already are familiar with this great technology, we know what's it capable of.
ZDNet expects, as do I, to see 1997/98 kind of a boom in Internet piracy. In late 1997 mainstream audience finally noticed MP3 and its capabilities for storing, trading and spreading music over the Internet. Even then, MP3s were rather old format, but it took a while to make it a big hit. Now, about three years lates, propably mostly the same audience who back in 1996 already traded and encoded MP3s (remember L3Enc -- took 1 hour to encode one track into MP3 :-) are already doing DVD to DivX copies.
Oh, yes. You can find full DivX movies all around the web, just look around (specially if you know what you're looking for). And when the mainstream will catch up this format -- it might take a one total killer app that reduces the compression time from 12hrs to 1hr -- Hollywood is in the same position as RIAA is now.
ZDNet's article
When all these propietary formats (Microsoft WM, Apple Quicktime and Real's RealVideo) have their annoying limitations for users' and service providers' perspective, there is an open standard available for streaming video content over the Internet.
Now National Cable Television Association gave their partial support for MPEG4 format which is specifically designed for broadband video streaming and downloading. Problem for cable providers is clear -- they want to make WebTVs and having billions of video and audio codecs in the set-top boxes is not possible while it's very possible (and unfortunately almost a must) in PC world. They want a clear one solution for this problem and they have decided that MPEG4 is the one.
For our core audience, MPEG4 is propably already a well-known format, specially it's hacked version dubbed as "DivX ;-)" which uses MPEG4 video with MP3 (MPEG1 audio layer III) audio. With this format, you can easily fit a movie with very-good-SVHS-quality in one regular CD-ROM.
Rapper Chuck D will testify before a congressional committee this month on Napster and online music, a committee spokesperson said.
Chuck D and his band, Public Enemy, released three of their tracks in MP3 format last year when most of the music industry was fighting against the format. Now he wants to represent digital music revolution and tell to authorities the good sides of the MP3 era, specially its good sides for small record labels and artists.
Panasonic released two digital audio players for consumer markets. These players make a difference to regular players, because they use AAC format instead of MP3 -- AAC is part of MPEG2 standard and can produce much smaller files than MP3 with better sound quality (MP3 is part of MPEG1 standard (MPEG-1 audio layer III = MP3)).
Problem with the player is price -- over $400 for a player that uses Panasonic's own memory card standard (=expensive extra memory).
MP3.com announced today that it has blocked users access to content in its My.MP3.com service published by 'Big Five' record labels (Sony, EMI, etc..). This is one step in MP3.com's road to try to get a settlement with RIAA in its lawsuit.
What happens to the people who have sent their own CDs to MP3.com to convert them into MP3s from CDs published by major record labels -- it's unclear right now..
Napster removed all the users from their databases based on the list that Metallica provided to the company later in this month. So, if you have shared Metallica's tracks (uploaded or downloaded, either way) its very likely that your account is now deleted.
Napster still has a form in their website that allows people, who are sure that they are NOT pirated Metallica's tracks, to complain about their removal. Anyway, fill the form only if you're 100% sure that you haven't shared any Metallica files, since the disclaimer in the form says that the users who are shared those files and now fill out this form, might be prosecuted by Metallica.
Finally someone brought a dedicated MP3 player for cars. I know there has been many minor projects going on, based on Linux, etc. but this is finally a "mainstream" product from a big company. Player is made by Aiwa and you can check its very minimal specs from this link.
Player plays audio CDs and CD-R(W)s with MP3 files. Specific specs about the MP3 playback are not available yet, but hopefully soon.
In Friday, Californian court ruled the first round in case with RIAA vs Napster. Both parties claimed partial victory after ruling.
Napster claimed in the case that it's service is just a hub between users and the company is just providing efficient way to distribute multimedia without taking any part in the content what users are spreading through the service. This claim was rejected by court - judge ruled that company is responsible for the files that people swap through it.
In other hand, judge didn't totally knock down the idea that Napster would be protected by Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- this decision will be left for next level of justice system.
So, battle is not over, basically it's just starting..
CNET News.com discusses the effect the DVD cracking case has on free speech.
Earlier this year MPAA obtained a court order prohibiting Eric Corley and his New York company, 2600 Enterprises, from posting cracking code on the Internet. In addition to that they sought another ruling prohibiting Corley from linking to other sites carrying his code.
"To prevent a Web news organization such as 2600 Enterprises from linking to other news on the Web is an unprecedented restraint on speech," said Robin Gross, an EFF attorney.
Read the full story at CNET News.com
MP3.com, the Internet music company that was found by a federal judge to be violating copyrights, said it reached a licensing agreement with one of the two major U.S. organizations that collect music royalty payments.
The licensing agreement with Broadcast Music (BMI) lets MP3.com play BMI's 4.5 million compositions on its Web site. BMI represents more than 140,000 U.S. songwriters and composers and more than 60,000 U.S. publishers.
Philips has released a VCR that can record MPEG2 video digitally in special VHS cassettes (dubbed as DVHS). Of course it also plays regular VHS cassettes as well. Device has digital inputs and outputs and looks pretty cool, too...
Philips DVHS
(article from slashdot)
Because of this major holabaloo in media about MP3.com and Napster, these sites among others MP3 sites, pumped their traffic up in end of April. Napster's traffic increased over 20% and MP3.com's over 4% in last week of April 2000.
Just wanted to announce a little milestone in our long journey -- today we broke 10,000 limit in downloaded skins. Special thanks for our skin administrator, Krimu!
-webmaster
So called 'ILOVEYOU' virus hit today all across the world causing some major system shut downs. This virus was spread through email and it had a subject line "I love you" and an attachment that was named as "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs".
When an attachment was opened, virus started scanning hard drives and if it found .mp3 or .jpg files, it woul make a copy of them with .vbs extension and delete the original files. The .vbs files were corrupted copies of the originals.
According to security experts, this was the first known virus to attack MP3 files.
Judge explained today his ruling in case RIAA vs. MP3.com according to MP3.com's My.MP3.com service that he ruled to violate U.S. copyright laws.
Judge basically just rejected MP3.com's argument that there was no copyright violation because subscribers were required to prove that they already owned the CD version of a recording received via the Internet from MP3. In essence, MP3 was saying that it was merely storing subscribers' recordings for them, for replay anytime, anyplace.
"In actuality," the judge is reported to have written, "defendant is replaying for the subscribers' converted versions of the recordings it copies, without authorization from plaintiffs' copyrighted CDs."
WTF?, I just ask... Since when have people lost their right to the product that they've purchased with their own money. Maybe next car industry decides that we can't sell our pre-owned cars anymore?
RIAA and whole recording industry is now hoping for an encore for its victory against MP3.com in last week. RIAA expects to get ruling against song-swapping software company Napster in next few weeks.
Judgement in two different courts would make a clear point to other similiar MP3-related services, like CuteMX.
Napsters lawyer told today to press that the company will look through the list of users that Metallica provided for the company yesterday. If all the claims are correct, Napster will delete those 300,000 users from its database.
MP3.com launched today their subscription channel system. This system allows people to subscripe to MP3.com's classical channel with $9.99 / month. With that fee, users can download classical tracks, listen netradio with greatest names in classical music (Bach, etc..) and so on..
Microsoft announced today that they've made a contract with I-Jam to create a portable player that would only play Windows Media files. New device is dubbed as "Win-Jam".
Microsoft also released a new test version of its forth-coming Mediaplayer 7 today.
Metallica hired an online consulting firm, NetPD, to track down users who spread their music through Napster. They found over 300,000 users that spread Metallica's music and now Metallica says that they're going to bring that list of users to Napster to order the Napster to delete those users accounts from the database.
What's the use - anyone can make a new account - will be solved propably in near future. Until then, change into CuteMX instead of Napster...
Besides the judgment against MP3.com in Friday, MP3.com is still rocking hard.. Today they announced that they've signed a deal to offer exclusive music service's for LookSmart's new MP3 central. Core of the agreement is a co-branded My.MP3.com service -- just the same service that RIAA sued and court ruled as a copyright violating service...
MP3.com's top executive said on Monday that he is optimistic that they would get an arrangement with RIAA and the record labels that the organization represents.
"I would say that we have two very motivated parties. We've been in heavy negotiations for weeks. We're relatively close in my opinion," Michael Robertson, MP3.com's chief executive officer, said in a telephone interview.
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