EMusic announced that their talks with Napster have ended after Friday's appeal court decision that gave Napster a permission to continue their service.
EMusic has been in talks with Napster in the case of Napster's shut down. EMusic is very interested in Napster's userbase and email newsletters.
Napster hit the no. 1 spot in PC Data's traffic metrics in entertainment category. RealPlayer has been the dominant king of this category before last week, but court's order in Wednesday made Napster's service to face almost-impossible growth of 92% from previous week.
Also, other MP3 related sharing applications succeeded as well -- Gnutella's unofficial website raported that they got 4.7 million page views on Friday.
MP3.com and EMI have settled their legal issues related to My.MP3.com service.
MP3.com was sued by RIAA (which represents five major record labels) earlier this year and was found guilty in April by U.S. district court in New York.
Before this settlement, MP3.com has successfully settled with two other labels (Time-Warner and BMG). MP3.com is still in talks with Sony and Seagram to settle the law suit. If they don't succeed, MP3.com is going to face probably billions of dollars in court-imposed damages.
Temporary victory!
A federal appeals court on Friday granted a last minute reprieve to online music company Napster Inc., staying a judge's order that had directed it to pull the plug on its online song-swapping service by midnight Friday.
In a brief order, two judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Napster could remain in business pending a further resolution of the case, a landmark battle over copyright protection in cyberspace.
"The preliminary injunction issued by the district court in this matter is stayed pending further order of this court," the appellate judges said, noting that Napster's lawyers had raised "substantial questions" about the nature of copyright law as it applies to the Internet.
Reuters
GlobalScape announced yesterday that because of Napster's court case, they have shut down their CuteMX service. CuteMX is probably one of the best file sharing applications in the world, but unfortunately it works like Napster, with centralized servers, and therefor it can be easily shut down. Read their press release.
Now, there's only few server based file sharing apps left. One of those is Scour Exchange which we recommend currently. SX has also been sued, by MPAA, but the service is still up and running.
Also, peer-to-peer sharing applications are available -- most popular is probably Gnutella. These services can't be shut down, because they don't have any centralized server to connect with. There are several clients available for Gnutella, one of the alternative clients is GnOtella. Check them out.
And of course, good old web based MP3 search engines work still. Check out our own MP3Lizard.com.
Hopefully this crisis ends soon..
RIAA got what they were looking for. On Wednesday a federal judge issued an order shutting down Napster Inc.. According to the judge, evidence indicated Napster's popular song-swapping service could be a cover for piracy.
``When the infringing is of such a wholesale magnitude, the plaintiffs are entitled to enforce their copyrights,'' U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel said after a two-hour hearing in San Francisco court.
Napster is instructed to cease trade in copyright-covered material by midnight on Friday.
``We are pleased with the court's decision. The decision will pave the way for the future of online music,'' said Cary Sherman, a lawyer representing the RIAA.
Napster, of course, disagrees with the ruling, and will continue to work hard to allow Napster users to continue to use their service by preparing for the Court of Appeals.
If Napster does infact get shut down on Friday night, it's good to know there's a whole bunch of alternative software available.
CuteMX has a rather strong user base, and is capable of sharing more than just MP3 files.
Scour Exchange, although in beta phase, has an impressive amount of users and media shared.
The idea behind Gnutella is appealing. Since it's fully distributed it will be hard to shut down.
iMesh is also rather nice, although not quite as popular as its counterparts.
And then there are of course numerous Open Source Napster clients that are not dependant on the Napster Inc. servers.
MP3.com released their second quarter results today and they beat the analysts' expectations. MP3.com raised their net revenue in this quarter from $1.9 million in last year to $20.2 million.
They also posted their pro forma losses of $5.2 million or 8 cents per share in their second quarter. This beats analysts expectations for losses which were from 13 to 15 cents per share.
MP3Board.com, an MP3 search engine, was sued by RIAA and closed temporarily by court order earlier this year. But now they introduce a solution that they believe satisfies recording industry.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires service providers to remove illegal content by request of the copyright owner -- we all remember the bunch of paper Metallica provided for Napster.. Anyway, this system makes that process much faster and easier for copyright holders.
But let's see if this makes RIAA happy.. Even that we have to remember that RIAA lost their case against Lycos' MP3 search in last year..
As probably most of you already know (avoiding the fuzz is almost impossible in this case), super-popular horror writer Stephen King released his latest novel "The Plant" in Internet yesterday.
Interesting this is because of his method how to do it -- novel is splitted into 10 small parts, containing 20 pages each and users can download the first part from his web site for free if they want. King just expects people to pay in "honor" system -- if users really appreciate his work, they pay $1 for this first part.
He also has his hook how to make people to pay for him -- he says that he only releases first two parts if less than 75% of the users, who have downloaded the first two parts, pay for him. So, if you want this story to end, you pay him :-)
Interesting model overall, but probably just works for huge names like Mr. King. It would be nice to see, if musicians head to same direction...
Book is available only in PDF format, but basically all platforms have some sort of a PDF reader.
Oh, download the copy and pay him (please pay him, I want to read the story in full :-) through his website StephenKing.com.
Answer is actually pretty simple when you think about it. Think how movie distribution works in these days. Big movie studios get their money from the movies in a looooong cycle, deciding the format people are using and when they're using certain format.
When a movie is launched, it comes to American movie theaters first. Next step is to launch the movie (if it succeeded in U.S. markets) in Europe and in selected other countries - in theaters again.
After the movies are rolling in theater distribution, we just have to wait for the next cycle. Few months later, those movies start showing in U.S. pay-per-view channels. Not a major money-machine, this phase. But expected to grow when Internet and TV merge more closely.
Third phase is the DVD and VHS launch. Nowadays, rental and retail video versions are out appx. at the same time. This is a great time to make the big money, even if the movie was a flop in theater distribution phase. Now it's been 12-24 months since movie hit the big screen.
And the fourth and fifth phase are normally launched at the same time. Some big pay-tv channel, maybe HBO, gets the rights for cable distribution. And at the same time, studios get the last retail money from collectors, who want their "Collector Edition" DVDs -- even that they already bought the original DVD version. This special edition normally adds some special features, such as "this is how Mr. X.X.'s super-sounding farting was added in the last scene" -- total rip-off in most of the cases.
Friday Jupiter Communications Inc. released their study about Napster users' buying behaviours.
Study shows that users who use Napster are more likely to increase their CD buying than a regular consumer. And this is all set in the perspective that Napster users of course like music more, but despite that fact -- using Napster increases the CD buying of these music freaks as well.
This is against everything that RIAA has claimed so far..
Napster has doubled its userbase since late April. Now they have 20 million registered users in their system. Nice work RIAA for promoting their service :-)
Download Napster v2.0b7
"RIAA guys have all the fun, we just have this lousy 2600 case on our hands. Let's do something about it!"
MPAA sued Scour.com for copyright violations yesterday.
"Scour is Napster with movies," said Jack Valenti, the chairman and the CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America.
That's true -- finding movies in DivX ;-) format with Scour Exchange (dubbed as SX) is piece of cake. Some movies can also be found in VCD format (MPEG-1), etc.. And as always, all the releases are brand new and not meant for even video distribution yet (like X-Men, released last week in theaters in US).
Let's see what happens, probably Napster's case is going to draw the lines for this case as well..
Download Scour Exchange.
Huge pile of MP3 player, that is. I'm speaking now about Microsoft's Media Player 7, released today.
Ok, it offers some features that I've been looking for -- nothing for MP3 playback, but for video playback, most notable, the possibility to create video playlists on the fly and play those. (I've moved from MP3s to music videos..)
But overall, it's huge, it's heavy, it has zillion useless features and it's BIG. It has skin support which probably attracts bunch of people. It also supports basically all media formats available today and you can create nice playlists mixing different kind of files (videos & music). But still.. c'mon! Try to use it with less than Pentium-II 350 and you get pretty annoyed.
I loved the MediaPlayer 6.4 - it's the smallest, fastest and easiest play-em-all player available. And MP7 is everything else..
But anyway, give it a shot, I have this weird attitude against MS and huge proggies w/ useless features.
Download Microsoft Media Player 7
EMI Group starts offering digital downloads in Tuesday, reported Philadelphia Inquirer today. Distribution is going to be made through 50 different online retailers and content will contain 100 albums and over 200 singles.
Problem is the price -- price of the album is expected to be almost the same as in stores. Music will be available in Liquid Audio and WMA formats.
Much rumoured and planned co-operation between Yahoo! and MyPlay is now holded. Companies decided to go separate ways -- Yahoo didn't invest the pile of money that they were going to..
Maybe Yahoo! is waiting -- as rumoured continously -- that MP3.com settles its problems and is ready for some true co-operation or maybe ready for an acquisition.
Despite the settlement that MP3.com gained with two out of five Big Ones, the three record labels (Sony, EMI & UMG) will continue the legal battle against MP3.com.
Court date is set to be in July 28th in New York. RIAA agrees that there might be a possibility for the parties to settle before that.
Napster Inc. announced today that a former high-ranking music industry executive has changed from Universal Music Group to Napster.
Keith Bernstein, 34 years, was a senior director of operations in UMG and was working with music giant's digital download strategies. Now he's nominated as vice president of operations in Napster, starting in July 17.
Nice move from Napster :-)
CoolWAPsiteoftheday.com nominated us yesterday (11th July, 2000) as their daily pick for a cool WAP site. We're very proud of this honor -- and damn, the review was funny stuff to read :-)
Check their site out at http://www.coolwapsiteoftheday.com/.
Huge crowd of major names of MP3 and music business were testifying in front of Congress' committee that was set to investigate how present copyright laws fit into digital world with file sharing apps, etc.
Some interesting points were made -- Metallica's Lars Ulrich for example proved how little he knows about technology and Napster particulary; insisted that Napster as a company is the vendor who spreads their music all over the Internet.. :-)
Read very nice coverage from dMusic.com.
SpinRecords.com has adopted the business model that MP3.com introduced for the masses earlier in this year. Their subscription service works as monthly basis when users can listen and download music from SpinRecords' artists without any limits.
SpinRecords.com shares 60% of the subscription revenues for its artists.
Napster CEO Hank Barry and MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson are the true stars in Tuesday when they testify in front of Senate Judiciary Committee about digital music and copyright laws.
Comittee's purpose is to find out how present copyright laws work in digital world with no boundaries and where physical copy is useless.
Read more from here.
We all know that there are several problems with the MP3 format not the smallest of which is the patent rights enforced by Fraunhofer. Basically, if you want to handle MP3s in any way, you have to pay license fees to Fraunhofer. Also the sound quality is far from perfect with all the phasing problems etc.
But are we stuck with MP3 then? Probably yeah, but that shouldn't keep the curious mind from exploring alternatives to the format. Luckily there's a very promising audio encoding and streaming technology out called Ogg Vorbis.
Quote from the Vorbis site: The Ogg Vorbis format is intended for unrestricted private and public, non-profit and commercial use. There are no bitstream royalties and the reference software, including full source, is free--- forever. The encoders, decoders, plugins, and tools at vorbis.com are under the GPL (GNU Public License) and the libraries are under the business-friendly LGPL (Lesser/Library GNU Public License).
Sounds good so far? Well it just keeps getting better! Even though smaller in size than regular MP3s, the Ogg files actually sound a bit better than MP3s! Check them out yourself!
To get started you'll probably need OGG plug-ins for Sonique, WinAmp, XMMS (Linux) and BeOS. When you'll eventually want to encode OGGs yourself the Windows, Linux, and BeOS encoders will come in handy. For extended ease-of-use, you'll probably want to get the CD-DA X-Tractor with built-in support for Ogg Vorbis!
Digital Software Inc. is working on a plan to include some form of advertising in MP3 files as a solution for the problems with profiting from digital media distribution.
The advertisements could be in forms of banners, advertisement web sites etc.
Source: Dimension Music
Napster CEO Hank Berry told Billboard Bulletin yesterday (July 5) that the music file-sharing company has held "preliminary discussions" regarding a settlement in its legal war with RIAA member labels. "We feel comfortable with our [legal] position," he said, "but we think there is common ground between us and the labels and hope we can come to an accommodation."
Read the full story on Billboard.com.
Philips is "giving away" 50 units of their new MP3-CD player, the Expanium, to a lucky few as a part of their beta test. The player itself is due out in August, but it's quite difficult to see how they could pull off a two-month beta test period in time before the release. I'm pretty sure the current beta test program is more of a publicity stunt.
Of course the beta test program is open to residents of the United States only. If you are from the USA, you can sign up and cross your fingers and wait. The rest of us can take a look at the Expanium homepage and wait for the release of the $200 player.
Source: Dimension Music.
Napster attorneys today said that finding and downloading copyrighted songs for free is legal as long as no money is made from these recordings.
The brief cited an earlier case where noncommercial copying was decided to be protected by law.
David Boies, the high-profile antitrust lawyer hired by Napster, cited internal documents he says show the record labels have abused their power to prevent music from being spread using alternative channels. "If you use a copyright to achieve an anti-competitive purpose, you lose the rights to them," Boies said.
Source: CNET News.com
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