News archive (8 / 2000)

MP3.com announced today that they start promoting selected artists via email campaigns. Emails are targeted geographically and demographically.

First band whose track will be send out as an attachment, is Vast -- a band from Elektra Records. Email will contain one track from the band as an attachment, a link to a page that allows users to buy more music from the band and links to artist's and label's websites.

Elektra is a unit of AOL Time Warner's Warner Music Group.

MP3.com has spent this week in court with Seagram's Universal Music Group -- the court has to decide whether or not the MP3.com's executives understood that their My.MP3.com service is illegal and violates record companies copyrights.

So far the hearings have caused some major trouble for MP3.com's defence arguments. Today judge rejected MP3.com's claims that Universal wants to put MP3.com out of business because Universal has similiar business plans as MP3.com and it wants to kill the competition. Judge rejected the argument because it doesn't actually have anything to do with the hearings -- the sole and only purpose of these court dates going on currently, is to define did the MP3.com's understand that their service is illegal.

Yesterday Michael Robertson was under very heavy fire from UMG when he claimed that he thought that their service is legal before they launched it -- he didn't have any legal professional's opinion to back this decision back then. Judge also said that it seems to be ridicilous to claim that someone who is in this business, doesn't ask for legal opinion before his company launches something completely new.

The issue why MP3.com was found guilty in April is not because of their My.MP3.com service itself, but the fact that company "pre-loaded" their music library and purchased CDs worth of $1M and used those CDs in digital format to provide the service for customers instead of actually copying every time the data from the CD that customer sends to them for sale.

Federal appeals court has set a schedule for opening arguments in Napster's case. Arguments will be heard in first full week of October.

This is the same court that stayed judge Patel's order to shut down the service in end of July.

MP3.com and Universal Music Group, part of Seagram, headed to court today. The case is still the same old My.MP3.com case, but all the other record labels have already settled with MP3.com -- only Seagram is left.

MP3.com was already found guilty in April when judge ruled that the My.MP3.com service violated five major labels' copyrights. In this time, it's about the money -- court should decide by November what kind of fine MP3.com should get. This can be everything between $200 per CD and $150,000 per CD.

The amount of penalties depends how the court find MP3.com's actions -- did they violate copyrights in "willful" sense, when the they are going to face the worst-case-scenario, the 150k. But if court finds that MP3.com did "innocent infrigiment" meaning that they didn't really know that they're breaking the law, then the total sum drops.

Today's hearings included MP3.com's CEO, Michael Robertson who was questioned about the planning of My.MP3.com service and did the company consider all the legal responsibilities of the service.

Case goes on and is expected to be over in November if UMG and MP3.com don't find a way to settle before that.

MusicYouWant.com announced that it is going to make the world's largest collection of music available to music retail stores. The company has developed a database with over 2 million titles, which is unique in it's size and content.
MusicYouWant.com will market and distribute this collection of music to retailers globally focusing primarily on music retail stores in North America, Japan and Europe and to their walk-in customers.
The thought of being able to walk into a record store, choose my favourite songs, and get them burned on a CD - apparently also in MP3 format. It's just like Napster - only legal. Since there are virtually no distribution costs, the prices should also be very competitive indeed.
We'll get back to the topic when the company actually opens up their pages.

The Digital Bits has published an interview with DVD producer Charles de Lauzirika who is responsible for supervising the DVD release of some of Ridley Scott's biggest films. Among the titles are the long awaited Blade Runner Special Edition, Legend and Gladiator.
''Mike Arrick is still working on the restoration [of Blade Runner], and there are several elements that need to be in place before Ridley can really start to approve things that could possibly get added back in,'' de Lauzirika explains. ''Mike did come in to show Ridley some of the extra footage that's potentially available, so the three of us sat down and went through these little bits and pieces, including the infamous hospital scene with Deckard and Holden.''
The Blade Runner: SE is still very early in development, and no details have been announced yet. However it is expected to be a new cut with much of the footage mentioned earlier included.
Read the full interview on The Digital Bits.

Four major MP3.xx domains have joined their forces to develop European MP3 site, running under the domain MP3Eu.com. Four domains -- MP3.fr, MP3.it, MP3.de and MP3.es -- get already nice amount of traffic, biggest one of those is MP3.fr, by having over 12M users.

"We expect to be the biggest community of mp3 in the world, with a customer base of 400 million users," says MP3.fr General Manager Gilles Babinet.

Interesting to see if it's enough to have bunch of MP3.xx domains to achieve that goal. Although it was enough to get a huge boost for MP3.com back in 1997, but their business model was also something that was totally new and well designed.

Oh, yes -- MP3.fi is impossible to get, because it defines a name of a technology and Finnish domain name authority don't give out domains like that :-)

Ok, I know that this is not related to MP3s, DVDs, etc that much, but kind of anyway..

Intel released today their prototype for next generation PDA CPU -- XScale is based on existing RISC architecture, called StrongARM (and used in many PocketPCs). But this baby runs on 1GHz -- fastest available PDA currently is Compaq's iPaq which runs on 233MHz. And specially in RISC processors, the clock speed is almost identical to the actual speed of the CPU (in comparisions, I mean). XScale consumes 1,5 watts of power.

So, finally there's a chance to create a PDA that allows people similiar multimedia options as a regular desktop machine nowadays. This is a huge step towards the ideal situation where it actually doesn't matter what device you buy. Carry it with you, dock it in to keyboard and large screen -- why bother to buy a regular desktop if your PDA can do all the same tricks? Even in current PocketPCs, the video playback is very poor -- I have HP's 548 and SIF size MPEG1 runs only on 5-6fps..

Philips eXpanium is shipping currently. This is the first portable CD player that supports CD-ROMs full of MP3s as well. And it's very good news because (at least some of us) users are totally tired of having these stupid 64MB portable MP3 players.

Why to limit yourself to 64MB which barely can hold a one CD in good quality -- MP3s are overall here because you can stuck a HUGE bunch of them into small amount of storage space. But when the devices have even smaller amount of that storage available, the circle hasn't been broken..

Now when Philips brings this CD player in the markets, it also fixes one bad issue in the markets currently -- there actually _ARE_ bunch of portable MP3/CD players available, but the quality of this bargain brands is something that leaves a LOT of open questions..

Anyway, check out their website -- device is priced around $200.

MP3Board.com, one of the world's biggest MP3 search engines that was sued by RIAA for copyright violations earlier this year, has takes an another step.

They already countersued RIAA for shutting their site down by court order and now they add more bets -- they have sued AOL-Time Warner over the Gnutella technology.

Most popular search in MP3Board was absolutely their ability to make searches over the Gnutella network and show these results on the web site. And as most of us already know, the Gnutella technology was developed by AOL's subsdiary, Nullsoft -- even that the project was cancelled in the next day when it was officially launched. But the technology was there and its definately developed by AOL's programmers.

Now MP3Board says that if its found guilty, AOL should take their share of the judgement as well. Of course MP3Board still insists (as all of us do) that sharing links is not a violation against the copyrights, but they are just throwing this ball in manner of "in case of..".

And of course the funniest thing is that AOL-Time Warner is one member of the RIAA's "big five" who originally sued MP3Board.

Sony Music and MP3.com have settled their My.MP3.com lawsuit, companies announced today. Terms of the agreement weren't disclosed. MP3.com will pay undisclosed amount of money for Sony Corp to get the settlement. MP3.com also made a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Sony.

This is the fourth settlement over the My.MP3.com case, only the settlement with world's largest recording company, Seagram's UMG, is still missing.

MP3.com lost their case in April where RIAA sued MP3.com over its My.MP3.com service that allows users to copy their own purchased CDs to MP3.com's service and sell the CDs after that and access the copied music through MP3.com's service.

One day after the district court judge ruled against 2600.com in the case of MPAA vs. 2600.com, the other mega-famous copyright case is in the news again.

Napster filed their briefs late today to appeals court saying that swapping copyrighted music through its service for non-commercial (personal) use does not violate copyright laws of the U.S.

Judge Lewis Kaplan yesterday ruled against 2600 website in the case of MPAA against 2600's publisher, Emmanuel Goldstein.

Ruling means that posting CSS source code on the website is illegal and also, what seems to be totally unbelievable, linking to other websites that carry CSS decoding source is also illegal.

Sounds nuts? Think about it -- maybe some smart game company sues AltaVista for posting links to sites that contain cracks or copies of their games?!

Anyway, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit free-speech organization, which also paid 2600's legal bills for, is going to appeal the case.

Luckily our site does not operate in U.S. -- our members and authors of this website are Finnish citizens. Only our server is located physically in U.S. and if this case causes some serious problems later, that issue can be also changed easily.

Monday AOL gave their up-coming AOL 6.0 suite to test drive for bunch of analysts. In the press conference their spokeswoman Anne Bentley gave some information about their new "beefed-up version of WinAMP".

AOL 6.0 is about to be launched in end of the year and it will contain new version of WinAMP. According to this release above, new WinAMP is able to play audio and video (!!) and supports also streaming formats like MP3 and RealNetworks' format.

Nice, finally I can kick the Windows Mediaplayer to Recycle Bin... Only thing that I'm scared of, is the fact that by adding new features NullSoft might be creating a new "bloat-ware" -- a program, that is too huge, too difficult and too slow to use (check MS MediaPlayer 7...)

RealNetworks Inc. launched today a subscription service that offers exclusive concerts, videos, games, movie previews and other media content for about $10 / month.

"I see this as kind of like the early days of cable," James Higa, vice president of RealNework's consumer division, said in an interview.

"It started humble, and it became very, very big," Higa said. "The key thing is you are going to get not just content but a whole lot of things. You get a combination of not just content but services."

Interesting to see if the big players of RIAA finally figure out that they have to offer something similiar to make even a little amount of money out of the Internet revolution -- instead of fighting against wind-mills.

MP3.com has formed an alliance with The Outernet Inc. to distribute their independent music content offline. They are going to introduce custom CD machines that allow users to create their own custom CDs containing music from MP3.com's artists. These touch-screen devices are going to be available in 20 cities in mid-2001.

In this Friday, August 18th, Napster will return their brief to appeals court in their case against RIAA. After that, the RIAA has to give their briefs by 18th September.

After those documents are filed, the court will decide does it change the premiliminary injunction's current status to active again -- which means basically Napster's shut down until further legal decisions are made (like those that can be done in Supreme Court).

Since our official start in last November, AfterDawn.com just a minute ago reached 100,000th software download.

We have appx. 250 MP3 and DVD programs available in our site and most of the time the software archive is updated in daily basis. We just don't add software titles, but we also review them.

Almost all programs are located physically in our server's HDD -- this means that we don't have broken links or annoying download forms to fill.

Thank you guys for making this possible and let's hope that next 100,000 doesn't take 9 months to reach :-)

ID Software has posted music from Quake III in MP3 format on their FTP site. Now you can enjoy the music even when not playing - what an enchanting thought.

While the music and movie industries are strugling to get rid of Napster and other file-sharing utilities, the adult entertainment is actually looking forward to clips of their movies being shared on the Net.
''It could be a major benefit for us,'' says David Schlesinger, vice president for Internet marketing at Vivid Video, a leading maker of pornographic videos. ''If surfers find a snippet from a movie, it might entice them into buying the whole tape. We can actually turn these shared files into mini-infomercials.''
Read more at Inside.com

AOL, which is merging with media giant TimeWarner, closed their MP3 search engine today. Search engine, launched one month ago, was located in WinAMP.com's site.

Analysts guess that AOL closed the feature not because of legal threats, but because of its merger -- they want to keep their music division alive as well.

Lycos has also made some major changes to their MP3 search engine in past months -- most notable feature is the fact that they try to supply first legal tracks and websites before user is "allowed" to get his/her hand into illegal MP3s..

Both sides of the DeCSS case posted their final briefs in New York on Tuesday.
The defence brief argues that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act cannot limit the way individuals view their movies.
On the other hand, in their brief, the plaintiff movie studios state, that the spreading of DeCSS must be prohibited in order for them to preserve their intellectual property from piracy.
Visit Openlaw for more in-depth views on the case.

Panasonic is about to start shipping their stand-alone DVD-RAM device, which uses new 4.7GB DVD-RAM format and allows 240min to be recorded on one DVD-RAM disc.

Sounds nice, finally a really good digital media for videos...? Check the price tag first -- recorder is about to be priced around $3000-4000 and one DVD-RAM disc costs $30-40..

Still, it's a start -- I remember back in '96 when one CD-ROM used to cost $5 - $8.. And now you can get them for 10cents if they're in sale.

Anyway, all the freaks who really want DVD-RAM, can check out PC version with IDE port -- priced $550 from Panasonic.

Check out Panasonic website`

28 U.S. states today sued five biggest recording companies in the world for using their so-called MAP method to keep the CD prices up.

MAP stands for minimum advertised pricing and basically it means that reseller who guarantees that he doesn't sell the CD under that price, gets advertisement support and material from the record label.

Big five, the same crowd who has been the major force against the Napster trial, is : Sony, TimeWarner, Seagram, BMG, and EMI.

Along with the 28 states, other defendants were three major music retailing chains (Tower, MusicLand Stores and Trans World).

Lars Ulrich, the embodiment of everything anti-Napster, is going on-line himself.
Ulrich's music label, The Music Company went online hoping to promote their two managed bands better.
I wonder if they'll be offering free MP3 songs from the bands?
Read the full story on Yahoo! Daily News.

NetValue, a France-based internet traffic measurement company, has added up some facts of Napster and its usage.

In June, 2000 American (note, only American counted in here) users, 5.6M of them, used Napster to share totally over 11 million hours of music.. Nice amount of data, if you think that average minute of good quality MP3 music takes about a megabyte. That's about 645 terabytes of data... (correct me if I'm wrong in here)

Oh, just a thought; have you read MP3 news in so-called "real news sites" -- they keep dubbing Napster as a site: "Napster's site increased traffic that and that much", "Napster's site is going to be shut down", etc... Funny.

Symbian has licensed a product called Emblaze to its EPOC operating system. Emblaze is a MPEG4 video application that supports video-on-demand and video streaming over the wireless networks.

Emblaze supports existing 2G and 2,5G networks as well as up-coming 3G networks. Symbian's EPOC is an operating system meant for next generation cell phones and other wireless devices. Operating system is based on Psion's existing EPOC32 operating system and Psion also owns a share of the company. Other owners (and founders) include Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and (not a founder) Matsushita.

The DVD Copy Control Association has added Copyleft.com to the lawsuit against sites publishing the DeCSS code. Copyleft makes T-shirts with the full DeCSS code printed on them.
Tells quite a bit about the absurd lenghts the lawsuit has gone to.
Read the full story on ZDNet.com

I've been testing PocketPC devices few weeks now and of course I've been very interested to see how their much-hyped multimedia features work.

For you who don't already know, PocketPC is basically Microsoft Windows CE v3.0 operating system and those PDAs that use this OS are just referred as "PocketPCs". My recent device is HP548, a PDA that has 12-bit color screen, 32MB RAM and all the required applications installed in ROM (so these don't take any RAM from you).

This is just a brief summary of the multimedia features for now, I will write a full article by end of this month

Ok, PocketPC comes with Windows Media Player installed in ROM. Good -- player is nice-looking, supports skins, has basic playlist features, plays MP3s and WMAs, etc.. But why 'media' instead of 'music' -- this one does NOT allow you to watch any movies or videoclips.

HP548 has very good headphones with the package -- what else you can except when you pay over 500 dollars? Luckily, regular headphone plug is here -- no more Compaq's propietary plugs, etc.. Sound is very clear, volume level goes up enough, everything is ok with this one. Oh yeah, WMP plays also VBR encoded MP3s.

Battery life is appx. 8hours. After that you have to recharge the LiION battery in the cradle. 8hours meaning of course continuous MP3 playing (no backlight on). Device has USB cradle and regular serial cable. Serial cable is SSSLL-OOWWW.. And USB is also suprisingly slow.. Bit annoying.

Creative launched yesterday their 6GB Nomad Jukebox stand-alone MP3 player meant for home audio centers. Player is capable of storing 150 audio CDs in 128kbps MP3 format. Device is going to be available in stores by mid-August and it will be priced between $399 - $499..