News archive (3 / 2001)

Three major record labels are said to be negotiating with RealNetworks to license their music for Real's MusicNet subscription service.

This seems to be a slap in the face for Napster who is desperately seeking to gain licensing deals with major record labels in order to be able to offer wide scale of music when they open their legal service in summer.

What makes the situation weird is that one of the labels said to be in negotiations with Real is BMG who also owns part of Napster. Other two labels reported are AOL TimeWarner and EMI. And to add to the confusion, AOL is planning to open their subscription service as well.

How ever weird these issues sound, the future seems to be in subscription services -- no one just knows how well they will actually work, because large scale subscription services are currently just big plans -- there's not a single serious service available at the moment.

It is also said that Real is offering a possibility for record labels to own a share of its MusicNet service.

RIAA filed its briefs in Tuesday at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco claiming that Napster's screening process is ineffective. Metallica and Dr.Dre filed similiar briefs to the same court which earlier ruled that Napster has to screen the files copyright owners deliver to it.

"There is no effective filtering out of copyrighted works operating now within Napster. We believe it is willful," RIAA President Hilary Rosen told a telephone news conference.

Napster President and CEO Hank Barry issued a statement rejecting the RIAA's accusation as "an attempt to change the subject rather than cooperate with Napster as the injunction specifies."

Metallica and Dr.Dre have their separate suits and legal processes going on, because these artists are those few high-profile artists who actually own their copyrights totally and don't have any record label holding the licences.

Napster's screening is based on filenames and RIAA claims the method to be "archaic" and says it doesn't fulfill the court order. RIAA demands Napster to use some other type of recognition, such as digital fingerprints or in extreme case, just to allow selected tracks to be spread through the service.

Napster has licenced a database of file and artist names from Gracenote and has intentions to use this in order to filter tracks better, since the Gracenote database (CDDB) has tons of typo'd artist, track and file names in it for each and every artist.

Iomega and SonicBlue have announced an agreement that SonicBlue's legendaric Rio MP3 player series will support Iomega's upcoming 100MB PocketZip disks.

Iomega released their own MP3 player last year which used their 40MB PocketZip disks as a storage. Advantage of these disks is the price -- 40MB disks cost appx. $15 each and now Iomega has announced that it will keep the price on same level for their upcoming 100MB disks as well.

We have spent last few weeks in order to create discussion forums for our site that would use the existing registration scheme we have here in AfterDawn.com. (that and the flexibility are the reasons why we don't use UBB or similiar product)

Now the forums are empty, of course, because we just launched them. But we hope that you will find the time and the interest to post your comments, questions and thoughts there, so we can finally get this "community" thing working a bit better :-)

And remember -- forums are in beta phase; tons of features are missing, you might find occassional bugs, etc. Just feel free to send your feedback to us about all the issues you notice and we'll try to fix them as soon as possible.

And the address is:

http://forums.afterdawn.com

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster

CenterSpan Communications, company that bought Scour's technological assets in bankruptcy court earlier this year, has relaunched the Scour Exchange service for a limited number of beta testers.

Major difference in the service is the fact that now it's possible to download only legal content. Company uses now Microsoft's digital media rights management software which secures the transferred downloads.

Company has made several content providing deals with names such as EMusic, Crush Media and TVParty.com.

Scour Exchange used to be the best place to get videos, images and other material that Napster doesn't support without tweaking. But because of wide-spread illegal file sharing through the service, Scour got into legal troubles from RIAA and MPAA and therefor filed a bankruptcy in last year.

MTV has introduced its new net strategy which will merge MTV, MTV2 and MTV.com more closely together. New program, dubbed MTV360, will offer for-fee music downloads, instant messaging among MTV.com users and will also promote high-speed connections in order to get users to use MTV's multimedia offerings more efficiently.

MTV says it's in negotiations with major record labels in order to get licenses for music downloads it will offer later this year through its websites.

Napster announced on Friday that company is considering a possibility to buy some of the assets of Gigabeat, a music indexing company based in California.

Napster's spokeswoman said discussions with Gigabeat are ongoing. She cited a footnote in the company's latest compliance report, filed with the court on Wednesday, that said, "Napster has separately entered into an agreement whereby it may in the future acquire certain assets of Gigabeat."

Gigabeat basically has a system which recommends music for users based on their existing music choices -- something slightly similiar what you see in MP3.com, but not quite (in MP3.com the "if you like this artist you like us" informations are mostly entered in the db by the artists themselves and because of that, it doesn't give very good picture of the selection afterall).

Possible asset acquisiton is yet another sign that Napster is desperately trying to find the way to build a legitimate business after it has filtered illegal files out of its system.

Vitaminic, online music site which promotes unsigned artists and is very strong MP3.com's competitor specially in Europe, has acquired IUMA.com from EMusic in order to build Vitaminic's brand better in the States.

Vitaminic will pay $400,000 in cash and $500,000 in company stock for IUMA to EMusic, which acquired the site back in 1999 for 448,000 shares of its common stock. EMusic which has been really badly beaten by markets in recent months stopped funding the IUMA site earlier this year.

This is the second acquisition of Vitaminic within a month; two weeks ago Vitaminic acquired Eurekan Multimedia which runs two French music sites, FranceMP3.com and MP3France.com.

Now, when you take a look at our news offerings in past couple of days, you might start to wonder if these guys are totally shifting their focus on wireless technologies. But no, we're not - it's just that the wireless development and multimedia are currently the bundle that makes the most interesting digimedia news nowadays.

Anyways, RealNetworks released their latest product in Tuesday -- Mobile RealPlayer, the crown jewel of the development contract Real and Nokia made in last summer.

Mobile RealPlayer is the wireless version of highly popular RealPlayer and this first version is going to be shipped with Nokia's upcoming model, 9210, later in this year.

Mobile RealPlayer brings Real's audio and video formats available for wireless world for the first time. Nokia's 9210 uses Symbian operating system (which is based on Psion's EPOC32 operating system), has color screen and is combination of cell phone and PDA -- just like it's predecessors 9110 and 9000 (both often dubbed as "communicator").

Mobile telephone manufacturer Nokia unveiled three new mobile phones at CeBIT on Wednesday. The piece of equipment that cought our attention was, however, not one of the phones but the Nokia Music Player.

The Nokia Music Player is a combined MP3 and AAC player with a built-in radio. It works not only with Nokia 3310, 3330, 8210, 8250 and 8850 mobiles phones, but also as a stand alone device powered by an AAA battery. Naturally the device doubles as an hands-free headset as well.

It's only a matter of time before we see built-in digital audio players in mobile phones.

The Nokia Music Player will be available during Q3 2001.

PacketVideo, technology provider, and Symbian, wireless operating system vendor, have made a contract that puts PacketVideo's wireless video technology into Symbian's wireless platform.

Symbian is a company owned by all major cell phone manufacturers, including Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola. Company also licenses its platform for other manufacturers and Symbian is considered to be the biggest pain in Microsoft's butt, when they're trying to push their new "wireless Windows" to cell phone markets.

Symbian is a platform that is meant for next generation cell phones, dubbed often as 3G that provide high-speed data connectivity.

MP3Board.com, one of the biggest MP3 sites in the world, and RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America, are going to go to court in late May in New York.

MP3Board and RIAA have sued each other over MP3Board's website and the links users have posted to the website. These links are linking mostly to illegal MP3 files, but since they're not stored on MP3Board's servers and are not submitted by MP3Board staff, they think that they're not violating DMCA.

A hearing will be held this week on summary judgment motions; depending on how he proceeds with the motions, Judge Sidney Stein could push the trial date back further.

(source: webnoize)

MP3.com is going to end their hugely popular Paypack for Playback program by end of this month. Payback for Playback program is a program where artists have received certain percent of advertising income of their MP3.com site and music.

Instead, they're launching a new Premium Artist Service which is basically the exact same program that Payback is now, with one exception. Now artists have to pay $19.99 a month to participate to this program. Move basically means that bulk of the artists are not going to make any money out of MP3.com anymore. Most of the bands and artists are not even making that $20/month although there are some artists, such as Offspring, who make thousands of dollars each month.

MP3.com says that their advertising income has declined after the dot-com crash and that their fraud blocking system and other expenses have increased too much.

It's interesting to see when MP3.com decides to set up a fee for artists just to have their site on MP3.com..

Number of file shared through Napster has dropped almost 60% since Napster installed their filtering system to prevent illegal music distribution through the service.

"Napster is successfully filtering many songs from its system," said analyst Matt Bailey of the Cambridge, Mass.-based firm Webnoize. "It is not just the number of files available that has fallen sharply. The number of downloads per user has dropped by half."

Webnoize said that prior to Napster's latest filtering effort, which took effect at about 9 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, Napster users were sharing an average of 172 song files each. With the new filter, the number of songs made available for sharing fell to 71 per user, down 59 percent.

source: Reuters

Just when you thought that website acquisitions are over, Vitaminic has announced their plans to acquire FranceMP3.com.

Vitaminic, strong competitor for MP3.com, has already expanded their reach all over Europe and acquisition of FranceMP3.com which has over 3 million page impressions monthly, is a nice addition to their musicsite pool.

We've been implementing lots and lots of small features to the site in last couple of weeks in order to increase user satisfaction (and page imps, obviously ;-).

One neat feature we just recently added, is the possibility to send news articles to friends via email. Similiar functionality will be added very shortly to the software items as well.

Basically the system asks you to enter 1-6 emails of your friends that you want to send the page for. And then just submit and that's it.

These email addresses wont be used for any commercial purposes whatsoever, so you can use it freely without the fear of spam.

Some bigger projects are just about to go to the beta test phase, so you'll see some interesting features within next couple of months, that's for sure.

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
http://AfterDawn.com

File sharing firm Aimster on Wednesday said it has removed the Pig Encoder at the request of Napster.

The Pig Encoder enables users to get around court-ordered restrictions imposed on Napster using a simple, yet efective, pig Latin "scrambling". The decision to remove the software was done out of respect for Napster's efforts to maintain it's service.

But not to worry. Even though Aimster decided to remove the encoder we at AfterDawn.com are determined to offer our users the right to choose.

Click here to download the Aimster Pig Encoder

Napster announced that it will work with Gracenote Inc., in order to be able to screen the music swapped through its service.

Gracenote is a maker of a music recognition software that would allow Napster to screen illegal files just by using Gracenote's mispelled filename lists when trying to fight against smart-a** users who try to fool their filename filters with programs like Aimster Pig Encoder.

Gracenote's huge library of "typo-ed" artist and filenames is based on their subsdiary's, CDDB's, database. CDDB is a huge database of album and artist information and it's entirely user submitted, so they have basically all the common mistyped variations already.

Terms of the agreement with Gracenote were not disclosed.

Once again we have chosen the Artist of the month -- this "honour" goes to Mukelo.

Short copy/paste from our mainpage just to give you the idea:

"Mukelo is a Finnish musician whose music is heavily influenced by C=64 and Amiga scene songs. He's been composing for eight years and his music ranges from minimal to maximal and robots to humans."

You can access Mukelo's homepage by clicking this link:

http://music.mp3lizard.com/mukelo/

In an apparent effort to gain market share and capitalize on the current state of turmoil surrounding Napster, EMusic.com announced a special limited-time give-away promotion for former Napster users and other digital music fans. Starting today for one week only, music fans can download any MP3 album -- or up to 15 MP3 singles -- from EMusic's downloadable music catalog, without charge or commitment.

EMusic initiated the unique promotion in an effort to communicate to digital music fans and the music industry that there are viable, legal alternatives to unauthorized file-sharing that do not require cumbersome digital rights management technologies. The online marketing campaign to promote EMusic's offer features the tag line "MP3 is Not a Dirty Word".

Well then.. Drop the lawsuit, will you?

RIAA has given a list of 135,000 songs Napster has to remove from its service by Wednesday, RIAA spokeswoman said Sunday.

Amy Weiss, spokeswoman for RIAA, said the list was e-mailed to Napster late Friday.

Yes, that's right. A company called 3ECS is actually paying you to share your files on their service. For each file that is downloaded from you they pay you $0.02. The catch is that each download costs $0.05, so the company profits $0.03 for every single transfer made on the system.

Sounds to me like 3ECS might be on to something here, but this kind of a sharing scheme is bound to attract RIAA, MPAA and other intellectual property organizations sooner or later. And since the company clearly aims to profit on the sharing, I'd bet it's pretty darn soon.

Anyways, check out their site at www.3ECS.com where you can pre-register for the service. There's no indication when the service will actually be launched, but we'll keep an eye on it.

Napster has been finally beaten by American justice system and of course other, much weaker opponents than RIAA, are willing to take their bucks out of Napster.

EMusic, almost-out-of-nasdaq pennystock Internet music retailer, filed a lawsuit against Napster today for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and unfair competition.

"For over six months, Napster Inc. has flatly rejected our requests to filter out and effectively block EMusic tracks from being traded on their system without our permission," EMusic CEO whined in his statement.

"Napster's ability to quickly implement such a filtering system over this past weekend shows the company's true motive — to unfairly build a business upon the copyrighted works of others," he added.

Other vulture, called NARAS, company which helds annual Grammy awards, filed their own lawsuit against Napster because their much-hyped upcoming live recording of this year's Grammy gala "is threatened" by Napster because fans could download the audiotracks almost immediately after the gala from the service. Of course this is a big deal for them, because everybody's speaking about the Sir Elton John & Eminem performance.

Otherwise I wouldn't complain about these lawsuits that much, but their timing shows nothing but extreme calculation and need to benefit from other similiar lawsuits. Someone spills a coffee over himself and gets $1M from McDonald's, suddenly everybody are spilling their coffees at Mac... Weird, isn't it?

Two members of the MIT Student Information Processing Board introduced probably the shortest version of CSS decrypting code ever written -- seven lines of Perl code!

The code was introduced for a seminar on "Decrypting DVDs" held at MIT in January/February.

Now, of course, these guys might face legal threats from MPAA using the DMCA law as weapon. We'll see what happens.

(source: Slashdot)

MP3.com suffered a double blow on Tuesday. First they lost the copyright battle with independent record label TeeVee Toons Inc., which means more damages to pay for copyright infringements.

The secold blow came from one of MP3.com's insurers seeking a ruling it doesn't have to cover MP3.com's losses caused by copyright infringement claims.

Westport Insurance Corp. said MP3.com had demanded coverage for losses caused by the My.MP3.com service. Westport denied coverage because, according to them, MP3.com misrepresented its business practices and entered into settlements without Westport's consent.

MP3.com's stock fell 14 percent on Nasdaq.

A federal judge has issued an injunction ordering Napster to remove all copyrighted tracks from its system, RIAA said today.

A spokeswoman for the RIAA said their received the long-awaited injunction late on Monday night.

The injunction goes into effect immediately and requires the major labels who are still suing Napster (all except BMG) for copyright infringement to provide lists of the material they wish removed from the system.

Napster will begin blocking access to more than one million copyrighted songs this weekend. With this action Napster tries to anticipate the new legal injuction coming their way any day now.

Lawyers for the popular online song-swap service made their last-ditch bid for corporate survival in a hearing Friday before U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who is drafting the injunction which many fans fear could unplug Napster for good.

``I think Napster will still be the best music service out there, (but) it will not be the same,'' David Boies, lead attorney for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company, said after the hearing.

Desperate users have been flooding the Napster for last minute fills to their music collection. At the very moment there are over ten thousand users on a single Napster server sharing two million songs.

I don't see much future for Napster with such a drastic cut to the amount of selection offered. Time for Gnutella and Aimster to take over.

Wow. I remember that only few months ago I wrote similiar article when we hit the 200,000 software download limit and now it's over 500k. You guys are crazy, crazy people.

Currently we get around 75k software downloads each month and our bandwidth (which of course includes pageloads, skins, MP3s, etc) is around 100GB/month plus our mirrored software titles add another 200GB to that number.

Heck, nothing more to add, just keep up the good work guys :-)

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
http://AfterDawn.com/