News archive (12 / 2000)

The AfterDawn staff would like to wish You, our beloved visitor, a happy, peaceful and joyous season. Be it Christmas or Chanukah, or some other occasion you are celebrating, we hope you'll enjoy it.

Most of our staff will be taking a break as well, so you will probably not see quite as many updates on the site. Since this the time of the year to wind down and take it easy, there's likely not much happening anyways - apart from the odd lawsuit from a metal rock band, but that's only to be expected.

We'll catch up on the weekend's happenings, if any, next week - be sure to keep your eyes peeled!

Happy holidays everyone!

On behalf of the AfterDawn.com staff
Jari Ketola

MP3.com Inc. has made a deal to provide marketing services to Time Warner Inc.'s Warmer Music Group. With the deal, MP3.com received a two-year non exclusive North American music and video license, as well as a three-year non-exclusive deal for providing marketing services for Warner's artists.

Earlier this year MP3.com lost the copyright infringement suit brought by Warner, and were held liable for an estimated $20 million in damages.

Source:
Yahoo! News

Here we go again. I suppose Emusic couldn't find a way to sue Napster, so they decided to sue MP3.com instead. We've all heard the excuse before - My.MP3.com. Emusic conciders that My.MP3.com infringes their copyrights by making their music available on the service.

Emusic sells music in the form of digital files, that can be downloaded from their site onto personal computers. Apparently Emusic conciders that the music has to be bought twice in order for the customer to have the right to decide where she wants to do her listening.

Joining the EMusic suit, which was filed in a U.S. District Court in New York, were six of the company's independent record label partners -- Fearless Records, Fuel 2000 Records, Gig Records, Invisible Records, SpinART Records and Victory Records.

``Although MP3.com has entered into settlement agreements with the five major record labels, they have chosen to ignore their infringing actions with respect to independent record labels,'' EMusic Chief Executive Gene Hoffman said in a statement.

Which, as I see it, means: We want our share, too!

Source:
Yahoo! News

Since Mondays seem to be awfully quiet, I decided to share a laugh with you. It seems I'm not the only one sick of all these music biz lawsuits.

C.W. Bennett writes at Dimension Music: After scathing attacks and costly legal wars from the likes of Napster, Scour and Mp3.com the Record Industry has thrown in the towel.

Read the rest of the story at Dimension Music. Just don't spill your coffee when you do ;-)

After Sony had some users banned from Napster for spreading the latest Rage Against the Machine album, the band took matters into their own hands. Instead of suing everyone they could lay hands on, RATM posted an official apology to all of their fans. Now they have taken one step further.

"We'd like to thank all of you for your patience in this matter," said Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine in an announcement at the band's website, "and to express our thanks, we have made all of this exclusive Rage audio and video available to you for free here on our website. Enjoy."

So please, do enjoy the fifteen previously unreleased songs (in MP3 format) as well as eight live video recordings at www.RATM.com.

Dimension Music has put up a review of the best portable MP3 CD-player available for less than $100 - Classic's CM 415.

Here's a snippet from the review:
You won’t find a better bang for your buck! For only $99, The Classic CM415 sports 105 seconds of and anti-skip protection for mp3-CD’s (45 seconds for regular audio CD’s), a 2 line LCD with id3 capability, great sound quality (plays 320 kbps despite specs saying 128kbps max.), and great search features all in a well-built package. There were a few little quirks (random skips every once in a while, no hold switch, and a worthless resume feature) but for $99, who cares!?

Read the full review at Dimension Music

If you thought Metallica suing Napster was silly, you'll probably get a laugh from this one as well.

Metallica, the metal band now more famous from "Sue 'Em All" than "Kill 'Em All", has sued - again. After the lawsuits against Napster and Victoria Secret, they have now sued a French perfume company Guerlain for using the name "Metallica" for one of their recently released frangnances.

Earlier this year Metallica sued Victoria's Secret after they released a lip pencil named "Metallica".

I'm sure that everyone now buying the vanilla-based scent for $175 per eight ounces is doing so because they associate the name with the band... Yeah, right. I'd rather see the perfume company suing Metallica for stinking so bad nowadays. But that's just me.

CenterSpan has acquired the assets of Scour, Inc. in federal bankruptcy court on Tuesday. Scour, Inc., the Internet search enigne company sued by the music and movie industries for copyright infringement, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early October.

CenterSpan's winning bid was $9 million consisting of $5.5 million cash and $3.5 million worth of stock, which outbid the rival bidders Liquid Audio Inc. and Listen.com.

According to an earlier statement from CentreSpan they are not going to open the Scour Exchange service. Their original plan was to shut down the service and re-launch it in Q1 of 2001 as a secure and legal digital distribution channel based on CenterSpan's technology.

So in essence - bad news for everyone who was hoping for a miracle rescue of the Scour Exchange. It's not going to happen...

Contrary to common belief, the MP3 format is not free. Altough the end-users do not have to pay directly for the use of the format, developers of MP3 software and hardware, as well as MP3 distributors, must pay patent royalties. Even in the case that the MP3 software (or hardware) is developed from scratch the author has to pay the royalties.

Even though MP3 is an established standard, there is an alternative in the works - Ogg Vorbis. The Ogg Vorbis project aims to create a digital audio format that would sound as good, or better, than the MP3 format but without any restricting license fees.

The Ogg Vorbis project suffered a little bump a couple of weeks ago when it's parent, the webcasting company iCast, decided to wind itself down. According to Vorbis developers, however, the death of iCast had little effect on the project.

"The project isn't affected all that much," said Christopher Montgomery, the programmer who leads the Vorbis effort. "We're sort of operating in battery mode right now."

Let's hope they won't run out of batteries before finding new sponsorship for the project.

Rage Against The Machine fans were outraged at Napster, Sony Music and the band after Sony instructed Napster to enforce bans on everyone sharing the new RATM album, 'Renegades'.

The ban, however, was not approved by the band, and are now asking Napster to stop banning people. They have also released an official apology to all fans that were banned. Very nice of them indeed. The announcement also includes instructions for getting back on Napster in case you were already banned.

"The move to take action against Rage fans was taken completely unilaterally by our new management," said Tom Morello, RATM's guitarist. "In their zeal to keep the record from getting out before the release date, they did not consult the band before instructing Sony Music Corp. to institute the Napster ban. As soon as I was made aware of this horrible mistake on their part, I immediately phoned our management and the record company to see what we could do to get our Napster-using fans reinstated as soon as possible. Per my instructions, no further notices will be sent out, and again, I apologize for this undermining of your right to hear our music."

Napster has announced that it will be hiring mr. Manus Cooney as the Vice President for Corporate and Policy Development. Cooney has worked as Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and has dealt with American Investors Protection Act as well as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Cooney's background might suggest that Napster is preparing for some major legal battles in the future. Cooney begins his work with Napster in January 2001.

MP3.com has officially re-opened their once controversial My.MP3.com service. As they announced earlier, the service is split into two plans - a free limited service, and a premier subscription service.

The free service allows the user to store up to 25 CD's in digital format on the My.MP3.com service and the costs are covered by advertising. The premier subscription is available at $49.95 a year, and allows the user to store up to 500 CD's on the service.

Any existing tracks users had before My.MP3.com was shut down, will be restored, and will not count towards the total number of discs stored on the account. If you had an My.MP3.com account before, you should login using your old password (instead of creating a new account).

Illustrating the explosive growth of the digital music space, the largest collection of free legal music on the Internet, MP3.com, just reached the 750,000-song mark. Less than a year after achieving the figure of a quarter-million songs and audio files, the milestone represents an average growth rate of more than 1,300 songs to the site per day. The song that set the milestone on MP3.com, "Outside Myself'' by pop/rock artist Annagrey, can be heard online at www.mp3.com/annagrey.

"The tripling of content on our site shows the incredible rate of growth in the digital music space during the last year,'' said Michael Robertson, chairman and chief executive officer of MP3.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: MPPP - news). "In illustration of that point, consider that we are adding an average of songs that amount to four and a half times real time--that is, for every minute of real time, our site gains four and half minutes of content. That's a truly phenomenal statistic. Artists are discovering that they can reach a potentially global audience by posting their music online.''

Visit our AvantGo channel to enter a contest from Good.com. By subscribing to their mailing list you are automatically entered to win 50 CDs of your choice. Prize(s) will be awarded as a $1000 Amazon.com gift certificate which allows for 50 CDs at an average price of $15 each and $250 in tax and shipping.

No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Deadline for entry is January 8, 2001.

Read more on how to subscribe to our AvantGo channel!

The launch of 3ivx, the next generation MPEG4 codec, is only two weeks away. The launch date is currently set on December 15th, 2000.

3ivx takes the MPEG4 coding, made familiar to general public mostly by Microsoft's ASF-format, and the hacked variation of it - DivX ;-). 3ivx's goal is to be smaller, and higher in quality than the current MPEG4 codecs. The codec is also aimed to be fully streamable, and it will be developed as open source, and thus have support on all platforms (Windows, MacOS, BeOS, Linux, Amiga etc.).

Read more about 3ivx at 3ivx.com