News archive (9 / 2000)

More than half of U.S. Internet users say that downloading music is not stealing, according to survey results released Thursday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

In the study, 53% of the users said that downloading music off the Net without paying for it, is not a theft. Only 31% considered it as a theft.

Also, accorind to the study, over 22% of all Internet users in States, have downloaded music from the Net.

Maybe this study gives something to think about for RIAA and other major music publishing organizations and their members.

Major music sites gained nice amount of traffic and advertising money because of Napster's legal trouble in July when the service was almost closed, says Media Metrix raport released today.

People poured in when traditional media started to have headlines about Napster, MP3s and music sites overall. And of course, the advertising money came in at the same time.

Biggest jump was right after the ruling that was about to shut down the service -- people started looking to other ways to get free music to their hands. But the boom ended pretty quickly when appeals court stayed judge Patel's order to shut down the service. Basically there was 4 day hit parade in major music sites.

U.S. Representative Rick Boucher, a Democrat from Virginia, on Monday introduced in the House of Representatives a bill that would essentially make MP3.com's My.MP3.com -service untouchable. The bill, Music Owners' Listening Right Act (H.R. 5225), would ammend the copyright section of U.S. law so that it would be legal for consumers to store and listen to music tracks over the Internet provided that the user proves he/she legally owns the music in question.

"We believe that the technology which gives rise to this new convenience should be encouraged," Boucher says, "and our legislation will remove legacy copyright restrictions which were written for a different era and that threaten to strangle the technology in its infancy."

My.MP3.com was a service that allowed consumers to listen to the CDs they had bought without actually uploading it to the service first. The service was sued by major record labels earlier this year.

Although it's unlikely that the digital media & Internet -issues will be resolved anytime soon, it's good to see efforts being made in the right direction. And more importantly the efforts seem to be made in favour of us, the customers, and not the major record labels.

Federal appeal court has selected three judges who will work on Napster's case when it goes to appeals court in October.

Judges Robert Beezer, Richard Paez, and Mary Schroeder are going to hear the oral arguments in case of Napster vs RIAA in October 2nd in San Fransisco.

Launch.com has made an agreement with OmniSky to deliver music related content to their service.

OmniSky is a wireless operator that offers Palm V and Vx owners a possibility to have "always-on" Internet connection through AT&T's PocketNet network. Service requires OmniSky modem installed to Palm V / Vx device.

OmniSky uses AvantGo's browser to deliver PDA formatted HTML pages to Palm users. They have recently added some selected Handspring Visor models to those who can get the OmniSky modem installed.

Remember also, our own AfterDawn.com was the world's first website to offer MP3 & DVD news to PDAs through AvantGo's service. We were also the first MP3 news site to offer our content to WAP compatible cell phones.

More info:

OmniSky
Launch.com

We have just implemented a new skin-voting system here at AfterDawn.com. You can now vote for each of your favourite skins at the skin listings!

Please note that in orderd to prevent fraudulent results we have limited the votes-per-IP to one per week. The point-rating isn't displayed until there are enough votes for that skin.

So go make your vote count, and keep your eyes peeled for other new features coming up soon!

Offspring announced today that they wont be offering their upcoming album, Conspiracy of One, for free over the Internet -- at least not until the retail CD is in the stores.

Sources close to the band say that this was a decision that was made when band made an agreement with their record label, Sony, about their promotion ways, etc..

Good thing is that band's first single, Original Prankster, is still going to be free -- it's going to be released in 29th September.

Sony obviously doesn't want Offspring to prove that spreading music for free could increase the number of sold CDs. This would be against everything Sony and other guys of RIAA have fought for in past year or so..

Justin Frankel, the man who caused quite a stirr at AOL after creating and publishing Gnutella, the distributed media sharing engine, is at it again.


This time he has created AIMazing, a visualization plug-in for Winamp, which renders graphics on the AOL Instant Messenger display. What makes it somewhat controversial is the fact that it actually draws on the space reserved for advertisements on the AIM-window. AOL doesn't really seem to mind it, though, since they don't have any paid ads on the space.


You can download AIMazing here at AfterDawn.com.

LoudEye, a company dedicated to convert audio and video to Internet formats, announced that it has made a deal with Universal Music Group for creating 60sec music preview clips of their content.

Preview clips are then licensed to third parties who want to start online webradios, subscription models, etc and giving them an ability to offer huge amount of music samples.

Financial terms weren't disclosed. LoudEye says that they have 150TB server waiting for audio and video content to fill it up.

Our pick for "Artist of the month" goes this time to EMS-Project. EMS-Project is one-man band of Finnish guy, Eero Muhonen.

The songs of the EMS-Project are rich and full of ambience. Excellent listening for these cold and windy autumn nights.

Our "recommended track" is Ballad of Silence.

You find his website from this address:

http://music.mp3lizard.com/emspro/

The lawyer for Metallica and Dr.Dre, Howard King, has asked several top universities to ban Napster usage from their networks.

But at least MIT and Stanford University have stated that they will allow their students to use Napster freely -- in the name of censorship-free network. It's expected that this list grows later on - at least Harvard is expected to give similiar statement next week.

Iomega, best known of their ZIP and JAZ drives, steps into MP3 markets with their new HipZip MP3 player.

Player uses Iomega's Click! disks, now renamed as PocketZip disks. Player itself comes with two 40MB disks, costing totally $299. Additional 40MB disks cost appx. $10 each, making this as one of the cheapest ways to "upgrade" (not actually upgrading, just carrying more disks with you) your MP3 player's memory.

Player supports multiple formats, including MP3, WMA and AAC (wow!). Iomega has also signed promotional contracts with EMI and other music providers.

Very interesting device in deed, check out Iomega's homesite for more information.

Listen.com acquired WiredPlanet, a streaming company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Listen.com is one of the leading websites offering digital audio downloads, selling MP3s, promoting artists, etc.. WiredPlanet gives them a strong technological knowledge of streaming technologies.

Listen.com syndicates also their content to some of the major players in the Internet, including such names as Yahoo!, Lycos and AltaVista.

"WiredPlanet is a perfect fit for Listen.com," Rob Reid, Listen.com's CEO said in an interview. "Together, we will be able to offer our customers the tools to quickly and easily develop streaming entertainment systems customized specifically for their own audiences."

We have just finished testing our real-time WAP services with WAP 1.2 compatible mobile phones. We're happy to announce that everything seemed to work flawlessly!

You can now view the latest AfterDawn.com news via a WAP enabled device or a PDA equipped with AvantGo browser. AfterDawn.com was the first ever MP3 news-site to offer their content via AvantGo and WAP.

Read more about the AvantGo and WAP services, and instructions for their use, by clicking the links.

We added a cool new feature today to our site. feature allows you to get a short email everytime a software that you're interested in, is updated.

This is really simple procedure - under the each download link, teher's a link to enable this feature for that specific software.

If you're not logged in with your username, you'll be prompted to do so, or to create a new account.

Email will be about 3 lines, telling the software name, saying that it's updated and it also has the link directly to the software, so you just click it and you're there.

Excellent way to keep you on the track what's going on in the software development -- get informed when WinAMP is updated, etc.

Some other new features are on their way, just stay tuned..

MP3.com said today that it will expand its operations to Europe, by opening a site in France, Germany and in Spain covering most of the non-English speaking western countries.

"In most countries, 50 percent or more of the music that's listened to is localized", said Robertson, MP3.com's CEO, in an interview. "You'll get a lot more French bands signing up if they see there are more French consumers listening."

This is a bad sign for newly-formed alliance between European MP3.* sites trying to achieve similiar status in Europe as MP3.com has already in States.

The new sites will open without My.MP3.com service -- this time MP3.com wants to take it carefully.

According to WAPForum officials, the next major generation of WAP protocol (which itself is a superset of protocols, including WML language) will support MP3 audio and MPEG video streaming.

This all should happen in next year -- of course devices who will support these features, will require broadband connectivity, dubbed as 3G (==third generation) which will be available in Scandinavia and Japan in next year.

Offspring has been probably the loudest and most known band to officially support Napster. They even started selling Napster promotion stuff through their website earlier this year.

And now band kicks their record label's a** again -- their latest single, "Original Prankster", is available for free download through band's website, Offspring.com.

And that's not all -- band will give $1 million to one of the downloaders. And this money doesn't come from the record label, nuh-uh -- band gives that $1M from their own pockets.

"This money came directly to us from our fans," says Offspring frontman Dexter Holland, in a statement. "We feel it would be cool to redirect it back to them. We are trying to launch our album with promotions that are fan supportive rather than fan exploitative. We feel that giving them our music and letting them have back some of their money is a great way to show how much they mean to us."

The winner of the contest will be announced 14th of November on MTV.

"Original Prankster" is a single from band's forthcoming album Conspiracy of One -- band is going to publish the whole album on the Internet for free. But they have this funny twist -- which you can pretty much compare to Stephen King's honor payment method -- those fans who actually "bother" to buy the physical CD as well, will get bunch of joys other than the music -- owners of the original CD get the access to The Offspring Nation website which offers chats, fan material and more exclusive free MP3 downloads.

Yes indeed. You read it right. One would think that there would be no connection between the anti-DeCSS ruling against 2600.com and MP3 tracks posted on MP3.com. It seems, however, that in today's insane world everything is possible!

MP3.com has removed a song by Joseph Wecker. In the song Wecker sings a version of the DeCSS code. Apparently MP3.com has decided to play it safe, and decided to remove the song. In their email letter to Wecker MP3.com stated that "Your song has either a song title or lyrics that are offensive or otherwise inappropriate."

Wecker himself said he wanted to attract attention to the issue with the song. "It's gone one step too far," Wecker said. "It's illegal to photocopy a copyrighted poem. But now it's like it has become illegal to tell someone how the Xerox works."

Source: Yahoo! Daily News

Teraoptix, a Dallas based company, is offering a rather cool looking Terapin CD audio & video recorder. The product is capable of recording VideoCD compatible CD-Rs and CD-RWs from a live, full-motion video source. The device has digital coax and optical, analog composite input and S-Video inputs and outputs.

Priced at $599 the CD Audio Video Recorder is not a toy suitable for everyone's budget. Then again, buying a video capture card, a cd-rw recorder and suitable video editing software could easily add up to $600 -- or even more -- so I'm sure there could be demand for a product like this.

Related links:
CD Audio Video recorder product features

We've been hunting bugs last couple of days since we launched our new layout in Saturday. Some bad ones were found and hopefully all the issues are now resolved. Now, actually Finnish version works as well, it had way too much bugs when launched.

We're also rolling out some new features within next week or so, but more about those later..

Anyone would have guessed this -- after judge found MP3.com violated Universal's copyrights wilfully, other beasts come to take their share out of MP3.com.

Zomba Music Publishing and Zomba Recording sued MP3.com over its My.MP3.com service today. Zomba companies are part of one of the biggest group represeting independent artists, Zomba Group of Companies.

Yes, you probably noticed it when you entered to our site -- totally new layout is here. We changed the layout in September 9th around 23:45.

We've been working on rebuilding our site past 6 months and finally the layout and new dynamic core is finished. It has taken more manpower than any other task so far, so we really hope you love it :-)

New layout allows people to use various sized browsers, it's modem-friendly and much easier to navigate. I know that it probably is a huge disappointment for some users, who loved our previous layout. Don't worry -- I personally loved it more than anything, but there were several problems with that layout (dynamic content updating required updates on graphics, search engines didn't understand frames/tables, etc).

But I really hope you can adjust your mind using this new layout. There might occur some problems -- nobody ever creates bugfree version at first time. But if something comes up, just use the feedback form, link is located at the top of each page.

List of major changes/improvements:

• layout/graphics, the obvious
  
• Finnish version has own URLs totally
  
• artist sign-up and controlling artist accounts is __MUCH__ easier now
  
• main page (the index page) is now a collection of most important topics and it's built dynamically each time you refresh it
  
• navigation - now you see where you are in the top of each page and those "paths" work as links also
  
• login - now cookies are "forever" until you logout (for registered users)
  
• links - now the ranking is based on a comparision how much sites send to us and how much we send to them
  
• friendlier overall, most of the more complicated pages explain a lot to you (specially artist signup, etc)
  
• discussion board - removed due lack of disucssions
  

Warner Music will announce their plans for digital music sales online, sources near Warner say. Warner will launch this service in November according to these sources.

Warner is the last of "Big Five" to announce this kind of plans -- all other four major record labels have announced their digital distribution plans in past couple of months.

RealNetworks and Streambox Inc. have settled a lawsuit in which Real accused Streambox of copyright infringement and unfair competition.
Streambox had a number of products that allowed consumers to record and convert Real's video and audio formats. Real argued that Streambox was violating both RealNetworks and it's customers' copyrights. Streambox in turn said that it was merely producing a VCR that could time-shift live Real audio and video streams.
The settlement means that in the future Streambox will develop it's products using RealNetworks' development tools and copyright protections.
You can still find Strembox VCR and Streambox Ripper from our software area.

MP3.com's shares fell today over 20% after yesterday's ruling where judge ruled MP3.com to pay up to $250 million in damages to Seagram's Universal Music Group.

Despite the ruling, MP3.com plans to reopen their service My.MP3.com soon -- they didn't specify do they have some methods so that Universal's music can't be submitted to their service.

Whole legal issue started earlier this year around MP3.com's My.MP3.com service, because MP3.com "saved time" and stored 80,000 music albums to their servers and allowed people who can prove that they own the original CD to listen it through MP3.com's service.

SoundsGood Inc. is about to start shipping their 64MB MP3 player extension for Visor PDAs in October. Device itself sounds very nice and finally takes back some of the gap between PocketPC's and PalmOS's multimedia features. But the price, oh my...

Device will be priced at $269 -- costing over 100 dollars more than Visor PDA itself and way more than regular portable MP3 players. By that money, you could buy Philips eXpanium MP3/CD player and tons of blank CDs.

But if you definately want to have PalmOS PDA and MP3 player in one device, go check their website:

http://www.good.com

Judge Rikoff ruled today that MP3.com willfully violated Universal Music Group's copyrights when they created their 80,000 album digital database to support their My.MP3.com.

Universal asked in yesterday's closings penalties of $450M, $45,000 per CD -- Universal claims that 10,000 of MP3.com's CDs are copyrighted material of Universal. MP3.com asked judge to rule that MP3.com didn't willfully violate Universal's copyrights and asked the penalties to be set in $500 per CD. MP3.com also claimed that only 4,700 of their albums are from Universal.

Now judge ruled the damages to be $25,000 per CD -- a clear victory for Seagram's UMG. But of course MP3.com will appeal.

In today's closing arguments, Universal Music Group (part of Seagram), asked judge to award it up to $450 million in damages in its case against MP3.com.

Tomorrow U.S. District judge Rikoff will decide did or didn't MP3.com violate Universal's copyrights "willfully" -- meaning did they understand that they're breaking the law when they created their massive audio archive to back up their My.MP3.com service.

Universal accuses that MP3.com has 10,000 recordings in its database that violate UMG's copyrights. They ask judge to punish MP3.com by $45,000 per each CD.

MP3.com asked judge to rule that they didn't break copyrights "willfully" and therefor lower the damages to $500 per CD. MP3.com also claims that only 4,700 of its CDs are copyrighted material of UMG. This would lower the number to $2.4 million.

All other RIAA main members have already settled their lawsuits against MP3.com -- MP3.com has spent $150M to legal expenses or at least that's the amount what they informed to shareholders they would use from their "warchest".

Scour, a company that is currently under fire from MPAA, fired 52 of their 64 employees yesterday. Only the executives and senior engineers were left, everybody else had to go.

Scour is a old company in web history and their Scour.net service has been very famous for a long time. But they got under massive lawsuit threat after they launched their SX Scour Exchange service in April that works almost as Napster, but allowing users to share also pictures, movies, etc..

MPAA sued Scour little after the launch and Scour has hired a "legal dream team" to defend itself in court.