News archive (11 / 2000)

EMusic has demanded Napster to block 600 users who have supposedly been trading EMusic songs through Napster's file-swapping service. Requests for thousands of more blockades are coming.

Napster is yet to respond to EMusics demands, but these kinds of demands are no news to Napster. Earlier this year Napster blocked thousands of users from accessing their service after the heavy-metal group Metallica demanded users distributing their music to be banned from the service.

EMusic has gathered the list of names they want banned using the software they introduced last week. The program has so far identified 35,000 files suspected to offend EMusic's copyrights. Each offending person received an instant message through Napster suggesting to remove the offending files -- about a third of the persons complied to the demand.

Source:
Yahoo! News

While the court battles of Napster and MP3.com make the headlines just about every week, there are some legal battles on the digital-music front you don't hear about that often. A series of digital-music companies are asking for new revisions to the U.S. copyright laws. The revisions would tie up loose ends in the law, and spur the development of on-line digital music deployment.

"Two years ago, Congress wasn't prepared to deal with these issues," says Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Digital Media Association, which represents 70 companies that develop and utilize digital technologies to enable Webcasting and the sale of music and video over the Internet. "Online media and the digital-music industries were just getting under way."

The requests of companies such as RealNetworks, Launch, Myplay and MusicMatch were heard at a hearing coverned by U.S. Copyright Office and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The agencies expect to report back to Congress by February.

Source:
Yahoo! Finance

The Recording Industry Association of America, RIAA, announced a new online royalty payment organization that will collect performance fees for music webcasts.

The organization, called SoundExchange, will allow copyright holders, record companies and artists, to receive royalty payments from "noninteractive" webcasts such as Internet radio play, but not from MP3 downloads or customized streaming services, for which labels and Internet companies must reach their own licensing deals.

Source:
Yahoo! News

MP3.com has reached a licensing deal with David Bowie for streaming his music catalog over the My.MP3.com -service. David Bowie is one of the handful of artists who own copyrights to some of their recordings, even though they are represented by a major record label.

MP3.com still faces ligitation from some independent labels and artists, such as Tom Petty and the Eagles, but the settlements in these cases will be minimal compared to what MP3.com has paid earlier.

Source:
Yahoo! News

Hewlett-Packard has been fined $1.60 for each computer it has sold in Germany since February 1998. The fine was set by the German courts for HP's shipping of hardware capable of recording music CDs.

German law imposes a levy on equipment capable of recording music at home. The levy is a small compensation for the losses caused by music piracy, and it is shared among the artists.

In future, HP will have to pay $5.40 for every machine it ships equiped with a device capable of recording music.

Source:
The Register

We're proud to present our new featured artist of the month: Hugo Flores.

Hugo Flores is a 23-year-old Portuguese musician. He's been composing and recording his own material since he was 13, and has already produced and recorded three albums himself - in his own studio. His music, highly appreciated fellow musicians, covers styles from progressive rock to electronica.

Visit Hugo's artist page to download & listen to his tracks!

As suspected, Napster has warned EMusic from breaking their privacy rules.

Yesterday EMusic announced it will be scanning the music offered Napster network for their digital watermarks to determine whether songs bought from their service are offered for free download via Napster. Today, however, Napster stated that they don't concider EMusics 'acoustic fingerprint' technology feasible. Furthermore they are reviewing EMusic's interaction with the Napster system to determine whether or not it compiles with Napster's own privacy policy.

Unlike reported yesterday, the EMusic software doesn't contact the Napster administrators, but instead sends private instant messages directly to the Napster users sharing the offending files.

Source:
Yahoo! News

Pop singer Alanis Morissette intends to sell 70,000 shares of the Internet music-service MP3.com. The artist filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission giving notice of her plan to sell common stock valued at $433,090.

According to the SEC document she acquired the shares in April 1999, and during the last three months has sold nearly 200,000 shares valued at over $1.5 million.

Source:
Yahoo! News

Internet music company EMusic Inc. announced it will be taking into use a newly designed technology designed to make distribution of EMusics intellectual property on the music-sharing service Napster.

EMusic has designed a software that scans and analyzes the digital music files available on the Napster service. If a song downloaded from EMusic is found on Napster, it automatically sends message to Napster administration requesting rapid removal of the songs in question.

Although EMusic has every right to protect their property and artists, it will be interesting to see how Napster will react to this. The software is essentially a robot scanning the Napster servers. Napster's terms of use strictly prohibit use of any kinds of bots on the service. Will Napster ban EMusics robots from the network? That remains to be seen.

Source:
Yahoo! News

Dimension Music has posted a nice report from this years COMDEX exhibition. The exhibition was a heaven for everyone who get their kicks from gadgets (don't we all!?). Luckily for those of us who couldn't be at the exhibition Dimension Music also has tons of pictures of the gadgets on display!

Check out the following pages for details:
The COMDEX report
The photo galleries

MP3.com's legal troubles are far from being over - now company may face yet another legal action from four major record labels it already settled with earlier this fall.

Reason for this is the award Universal received from MP3.com - it's twice as much as other labels received from the company. So, now other labels are told to be pushing a legal actions against MP3.com to force it to raise the settlement prices.

The MP3.com Inc. shares rose 37 percent Thursday as investors highly appreciate the licensing deal between MP3.com Inc. and Universal Music.

Analysts are cautiously enthusiastic about the prospects for the company, cheered by the resolution of a 10-month old copyright infringement lawsuit, but anxious for the company to execute its business plan.

Shares closed at $8-1/2 on Thursday, up $2-5/16, or 37 percent, the day's largest percentage gainer on Nasdaq. They reached as high as $9-1/4, the highest level since August. Since the licensing deal was announced, the company has seen its market capitalization jump to $582 million from $273.9 million.

On Tuesday, the company agreed to pay Seagram Co's Universal Music $53.4 million in damages after a U.S. district court held that a database of 80,000 albums copied by MP3.com for their My.MP3.com service violated copyright law. After the agreement was reached MP3.com re-opened the My.MP3.com service.

Source:
Yahoo! News

Scour has closed their Scour Exchange file-sharing service for good. The service was closed after months of ligitation with the music and movie industries, a bankruptcy and a series of layoffs the company was forced to shut down the service.

Scour asked for and received the bankruptcy court's permission to shut down Scour Exchange to facilitate a resolution of the massive copyright infringement lawsuit pending against Scour, and to help ease the sale of Scour's technology and assets to a company that is willing to help them continue change the world with their media search technology.

Luckily there are clients similar to Scour available - such as the eDonkey2000.

MP3.com plans to restart it's My.MP3.com service by the end of November. However this time around MP3.com offers two different kinds of My.MP3.com services.

``One will be a free service that uses advertising to generate revenue, but it will have restrictions on the amount of music you can load in the service,'' MP3.com CEO Miachel Robertson said. ``And there will be a subscription version as well, without the intrusive advertising.''

Prices for the subscription service have not yet been set.

Source:
Yahoo! News

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff on Tuesday awarded $50 million in statutory damages and $3.4 million in legal fees to Universal in lawsuit involving MP3.com's My.MP3.com music service.

Universal made a statement after the case was closed that it will award approximately half of the sum directly to their artists.

UMG and MP3.com also agreed to licence that Universal will licence their music catalog to My.MP3.com service. Universal also will have a possibility to buy 5 percent of MP3.com's stocks.

Tomorrow MP3.com and UMG go back to court to start a process to determine the damages MP3.com should pay for UMG for copyright infrigiment.

In September Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that MP3.com's service My.MP3.com and the music archive company had built to support the service, violated UMG's copyrights.

Legal process was originally between RIAA and MP3.com, but MP3.com settled with other four major record labels in the summer. Only UMG continued the process.

MP3.com can face penalties up to $225 million, depending on the fact what court decides on the major issue -- how many of the CDs stored in MP3.com's archive, were actually copyrighted material of UMG.

In Friday, Bertelsmann Music Group and EMI announced that they're in talks of possible merger. This comes after EMI has called off its postponed merger with giant AOL-TimeWarner after the plan faced possible antitrust issues from European Union.

"BMG and EMI would be an odd combination," said Joe Smith, a former record executive who has worked with both EMI and Warner. "They're mirror images of each other. They both have strong international divisions and their own distribution. It's hard to see how they complement one another, other than to just make BMG bigger."

Both companies are members of so-called "big five" team, a bunch of record companies who basically share world's music markets and are the leading power behind organizations such as RIAA.

CMGI, major internet venture player, who owns AltaVista, etc. is rumoured to pull their investment off from the iCast, a webcasting company that CMGI owns a major stake.

"I've heard that iCast was going to be sold by CMGI or closed," one industry source said.

Many entertainment based web companies have suffered in past couple of months, even more than the average Internet industry which has also taken huge hits since last spring when Nasdaq index started to fall, specially on Net stocks.

For regular Joe Customer, the loss of iCast doesn't mean that much, but somehow it also does. I mean, iCast is one of the major sponsor's of OGG Vorbis project - a project that's been developing totally free alternative for MP3s with better quality and smaller filesizes.

SDMI has finished analyzing the hacking competition results. They claim that three out of total six technologies were protected against attacks and one of the remaining three technologies was pulled out of the contest before its end.

So, this leaves two technologies that have been successfully hacked. And SDMI claims that even the other of these two that were successfully cracked - the technology used to crack this other protection scheme, didn't work on any other music files than for the sample file provided for the competition.

Lately there has been alot of discussion in Usenet newsgroups as well as DVD-discussion forums about a phenomenon called DVD Rot. The effect is similar to what was known with Laserdiscs as Laser rot. Movies that play flawlessly when bought turn unplayable all of a sudden. The deterioration is probably caused a production flaw which in turn causes oxidation on the disc.

All the problem discs found so far have been so called RSDL (Reverse Spiral Dual Layer) discs and manufactured by WAMO (Warner Advanced Media Organization). Problems have occured atleast with region 1 and region 4 movies.

Some of the affected discs are:
-Casablanca
-Contact
-Deep Blue Sea
-From the Earth to the Moon
-The Maltese Falcon
-Message in a Bottle
-The Music Man
-My Fair Lady
-Pee-Wee's Big Adventure
-What Dreams May Come
-... and many others

The DVD rot effect appears as heavy MPEG pixellation and blockiness after the layer change, which is usually located about half-way through the movie.

Although there's no reason for panic, DVD rot is definitely something to worry about, because it's both consistent to WAMO-produced discs and affects discs fairly quickly (after only 4 or 5 viewings). Of course there has not been any official word from WAMO about the issue (and there probably never will be), and there's no guarantee that defective discs will be replaced. It's still probably a good idea checking your discs for signs of rot using the following two links as a guide.

Only a week after Sprint launched their mobile MP3 service MP3.com announced their wireless service. The service developed with FusionOne makes songs downloaded on a personal computer automatically visible on that person's mobile phone and other PDAs.

Like Sprint, MP3.com is looking to attract the young technology-frenzy customers who just can't keep their hands off of anything wireless.

Source:
Yahoo! News

Guided by Silicon Valley venture investor Ron Conway, the University of California at Los Angeles made a $25,000 investment in Napster in May.

The investment might turn very profitable indeed, since after striking a deal with BMG earlier this week, Napster is very likely to go public. Napster's huge existing user base should attract quite a lot of attention to the IPO.

Other known holders of Napster stock are the band Limp Bizkit, who acquired rights to 447,000 shares of Napster stock when the company sponsored their tour last summer.

Source:
Upside.com

Listen.com has agreed to buy assets of Scour Inc. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Deal would give Listen.com control to Scour's assets, but doesn't held Listen.com responsible of Scour's legal issues which were the main reason why company laid their staff off and filed a bankruptcy in October.

This is any ways doesn't mean that Listen.com has actually acquired Scour - deal is not on that level, yet(?).

But interesting to see, Listen.com would probably lead Scour Exchange to legal purposes -- Napster is going to the same direction with its deal with BMG. Two legal rivals? Maybe..

MP3.com has appointed former California Court of Appeals judge to their board of directors. Justice Howard Wiener, who has retired from his justicy duties, joins to MP3.com's board just in the middle of MP3.com's long fight against Universal Music Group over MP3.com's My.MP3.com service.

Sprint PCS launched it's wireless MP3 service today on Wednesday. The company is trying to establish a foothold on the developing MP3 storage market with a new, although expected, kind of a service.

The MP3 storage locker service Sprint has developed in conjunction with the Web company Hit Hive allows the users to store their CDs in MP3 format on the server. The songs can then be transferred from the storage to the user's portable wireless MP3 player.

Srpint will start selling a new hybrid MP3 player / mobile phone using which the users can take advantage of the service. Current mobile data transfer rates are way too low for obtaining acceptable transfer times between the storage server and the wireless MP3-player.

What Sprint PCS are doing is pioneering the market and trying to establish a strong foothold and experience with wireless content delivery. When the technology catches up with the demands of the market, Sprint will be ready with their already running service.