News archive (4 / 2001)

One of the best-known court fights is going to continue tomorrow. The case between website 2600 and MPAA (Movie Picture Association of America) continues at 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York when both sides present their oral arguments within 20 minutes to the court.

The case is the first serious test for controversial DMCA law (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) that was made to restrict digital copyright violations. The whole story is that MPAA sued bunch of websites back in 1999 that were posting DeCSS code (a program that decrypts CSS, the encryption format used on DVD discs) -- all but one website removed the code and avoided the legal problems. The one website that didn't remove the code was 2600 and MPAA sued the site for violating DMCA.

In the first round MPAA won -- New York Federal District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that 2600 was violating DMCA law and was guilty on charges. EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) which is representing the 2600, appealed the ruling in January 2001 arguing that the ruling violates the First Amendment (the very basic law in the U.S. that allows free speech for everyone).

Judge Marilyn Patel has issued a memorandum for RIAA, not for Napster, about the file screening process that is going on with Napster. She said that the record industry has misinterpreted a key appellate ruling in the case against Napster.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Napster to remove all copyright-violating tracks from its system, but only after record labels have specifically listed the exact tracks that Napster has to remove from its system -- RIAA's attitude in recent weeks has been that they're only required to provide name of the artist to Napster and after that Napster should remove automatically all tracks from specified artist.

InterTrust, a digital rights management company, sued Microsoft on Thursday, saying the Microsoft's Media Player infringes its patent rights.

InterTrust was awarded a patent for secure delivery and control of digital media files. The patent, which was awarded in February, contains 131 claims. After comparing the information Microsoft has provided about their digital rights management with their patent claims InterTrust decided that Microsoft was infringing the claims.

InterTrust is asking a federal court in Northern California District to issue an injunction against Microsofts infringing activities. They are also seeking monetary damages.

This could be a hard blow on the Microsoft Media Player and Microsoft's digital rights management schemes - something Microsoft has eagerly advertised as a huge advantage over e.g. MP3.

Princeton professor, Edward Felten, had to give up his plans to release SDMI cracking directions in conference in Pittsburgh. Professor issued a statement this morning saying that threats of litigation against Felten's research team, their employers and the conference forced the withdrawal.

The SDMI Foundation sent a strongly-worded letter to Felten 9th of April. The letter advised him not to reveal information that might assist others in cracking proposed copy-protection technologies, including the Verance watermark.

Professor's research team broke the SDMI copy-protection schema when SDMI Foundation held an open competition for anyone to crack it -- professor's team just didn't participate to the contest and didn't have to sign NDA.

But now the problem is once again with DMCA law -- SDMI Foundation threats to use controversial law against professor and his team if he publishes the description how to crack SDMI. Professor says he will continue his fight for the right to publish his papers.

Digital Club Network, a New York-based streaming company, is going to provide live concerts to NTT DoCoMo's high-speed wireless devices in Japan.

Digital Club Network signed a syndication contract with Gaga Communications which also provides short films and movie trailers for NTT's service.

Digital Club Network has deals with many indie labels to stream their artists gigs over the Net -- company streams club concerts from over 50 clubs all around the States.

Spinner.com, part of AOL Music, and AudioBasket have launched a service that allows Spinner.com's users to listen audio news "on-demand".

Spinner.com has now featured news content from various news providers, including CNN, Wall Street Journal and BBC.

AudioBasket has developed the system for the service that allows users to determine keywords in order to pick the news they want to hear.

Spinner.com is one of the leading Internet broadcasting sites, featuring over 150 channels of online music. Spinner.com was bought by AOL in 1999.

Spinner.com

Napster announced on Friday that it will implement Relatable's music fingerprinting technology to its current filters. RIAA and court have pushed Napster to use something else than filename based filters to better screen the illegal files from its system.

"This is the first time a fingerprinting solution has been implemented on such a (large) scale and we have to refine and optimize it to the Napster network. There are many technological challenges.", said Pat Breslin, CEO of Relatable.

"We are now working closely with Relatable's engineers to coordinate their technology with our file filtering systems. We hope they will be a substantial part of our overall filtering solution,", commented Hank Barry, CEO of Napster, the decision to use Relatable's technology.

Liquid Audio announced that it has signed contracts with six independent record labels to encode, host and distribute their music catalogs on the Web.

Liquid Audio offers distributed content through variety of online retailers, including CDNow and TowerRecords.com.

Record labels that signed the contract are Bar/None Records, Emperor Norton Records, Kung-Fu Records, Milan Entertainment, Oh Boy/Blue Plate Music/Red Pajamas Records and Om Records.

MPAA has taken first action against P2P network, Gnutella -- dubbed often as "impossible to stop". Gnutella is a peer-2-peer network, pretty much like Napster and co with one big difference -- there's no company behind it and it doesn't have any central servers at all.

So, because of these reasons MPAA and other copyright owners can't sue any company or individual behind the whole scene. Instead, MPAA has tracked few major movie spreading "traders" that use Gnutella as a way to distribute the content.

MPAA has sent out requests for ISPs to stop these users as soon as possible and at least Excite@Home has taken some action and has sent out 20 letters and emails asking users to stop trading movies via Gnutella or their broadband accounts will be shut down.

MPAA doesn't have any big worries yet, because most of the users on the Net still use regular 56k or ISDN connections and downloading movie, even in DivX ;-) format, is a pain -- one average quality full-length DivX ;-) movie takes appx. 600 megs and downloading that with 56k would take days.

Playmedia systems has filed a complaint against AOL and it's AOL 6.0 package which contains modified version of WinAMP. Playmedia is seeking damages up to $47 million and asks AOL to stop using the package's MP3 features.

Back in March 1999, Playmedia filed a similiar suit against Nullsoft, the creator of WinAMP, saying that the player violates Playmedia's copyrights to its AMP MP3 decoder. Two months later Nullsoft agreed to pay a licensing fee to Playmedia and was acquired by AOL few days later.

Now Playmedia claims that the license it granted for Nullsoft to use AMP decoder in WinAMP doesn't cover the use in AOL's Internet package.

LoudEnergy has bought online assets of Riffage.com. Both companies are focused on independent artist promotion, pretty much like Vitaminic, MP3.com, etc.. Riffage had closed its operations in December 2000 after failing to find funding or merger partners.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Riffage had spent $20 million to develop its online assets. Just before its closing it tried to diversify its operations by purchasing San Fransisco's Great American Music Hall and an indie record label, 1500 Records.

AudioRamp, a manufacturer of "Internet enabled stereo equipments" and Live365.com, a streaming provider that allows users to create their own radio stations for free, had signed a contract which will bring Live365's all 30,000 radio stations available for AudioRamp stereo equipment owners.

AudioRamp hasn't yet informed when users of its equipment will be able to listen Live265's content.

source: webnoize

Lawyers of Napster and RIAA held a conference call with court-appointed technology expert in Friday. Purpose of this conference call was to resolve disputes over Napster's compliance with an injunction barring the trading of copyrighted songs on the service.

Both sides declined to comment after the conference call and it's said that judge Patel has orderedthe transcript of the call sealed.

RIAA and Napster have been fighting over the technology Napster uses to block the copyrighted songs from its service -- Napster's current method is based on the file names of the songs and RIAA argues that those names with typos are still available through the service and that the users of the service know this and find songs just as easily as before the blocks.

Yet another failure in digital music business. Musicbank has ceased their operations after failing to find financing in current dotcom situation.

Musicbank offered a "locker" service where users could store their music in digital format -- pretty similiar what My.MP3.com is.

Musicbank's investors included Bertelsmann and UMG. Company also had licensing deals with Warner, EMI and Sony.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Marilyn Hall Patel doesn't think Napster is doing a good job filtering out copyrighted recordings from their service. Instead she appointed a neutral technical expert to see if Napster could improve the filtering efforts.

According to Napster the original court ruling states that record labels have to hand out exact names of the artists and songs they want removed. Judge Patel, and the record labels, on the other hand feel that the name of the artist and the album should be sufficient.

The issue is now pretty much in the hands of the neutral technical expert A.J. Nichols, who will present his initial findings this Friday.

Source:
webnoize

Site was down for 90 minutes today because of an annoying bug that we didn't notice right away.

Thanks for those of you who sent email to us notifying about this issue.

We're sorry if this caused any trouble for you.

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster

Israel-based iMesh has announced that it will begin blocking copyrighted songs from its service. iMesh received a request from RIAA to remove copyrighted material from its service.

"Following RIAA's request, iMesh is currently in the process of disabling the downloads of files protected by the copyright law," the note in the service said. "Those files will appear in the search results list with a © sign, and their download will not be possible."

iMesh is one of the very few remaining independent (read: non Gnutella-based) file-swapping services left after Napster's long court process reached its end.

Download iMesh v2.01 beta 120

It appears that the MP3.com jury, who ordered MP3.com to pay $300,000 in damages to TVT, could have used a calculator when determining the exact amount.

The jury was put up to a challenge when they had to award the amounts per album instead of a one single amount. It was only after the members of the jury read the press reports they realized that they had made a mistake.

Two jurors have contacted U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff and said that the figures were too small by ten-fold. Rakoff summoned jurors to an hearing to interview them, but this hearing was not open to the public.

It remains to be seen whether or not the judge re-opens the case. If he does, I'd suggest they put the jury to a maths test before proceeding further. Obviously the first jury should still be at school studying addition and multiplication.

Universal Music Group has agreed to acquire EMusic for $25 million. EMusic has been in financial troubles in past few months, laying off employees, selling parts of its business (IUMA) and facing the threat of de-listing from Nasdaq.

With the deal UMG gets a proven platform for its digital music service Duet it's about to open in co-operation with Sony Music.

Listen.com, an online digital music directory and recommendation service, has acquired TuneTo.com, a company focused on streaming technology.

Initially TuneTo.com's technology will be used to improve Listen.com's own streaming capabilities, but eventually they have plans to use the acquired technology for providing music-on-demand type of services and possibly some wireless music solutions.

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Listen.com's investors include all the major record labels.

In Friday, a New York -based jury ordered MP3.com to pay damages of $300,000 to independent record label TVT Records.

TVT filed its lawsuit against MP3.com about a year ago claiming that MP3.com's My.MP3.com service violated its copyrights. In similiar case, MP3.com was forced to pay $133 million in damages to end its legal problems with five major record labels.

TVT is obviously angry because of court's order and is going to appeal -- they were seeking for $8.5 million.

American National Association of Broadcasters is getting really nervous and has filed a motion to intervene in a Canadian copyright proceeding.

The cause of this trouble is a company called JumpTV which retransmits Canadian and specially American TV signals over the web. Question is now that is it legal to do that -- cable and satellite TV operators are allowed to do that as long as they pay the retransmission fees for the broadcasters.

Now, the argument NAB uses is that local broadcasters suffer from this practice. But nuh-uh.. That's not the problem -- I'm absolutely certain that the problem is in the fact that web is international.

The thing is that American TV producers make nice amount of money by selling the rights for broadcasting their TV series, etc in other countries. And in typical case, let's say here in the UK, TV shows are aired appx. 12 to 18 months later than in the U.S. And there are several TV shows that are never aired in the Europe.

And as it goes -- some say unfortunately -- most of the TV shows the world watches are American. And if you have a possibility to see new episodes of, let's say X-Files or Dark Angel, on very same day that they are broadcasted in the U.S. -- who the heck would want to watch those same shows maybe two years later? Maybe some. But it's still not the same -- and advertisers don't like to advertise on shows that are already familiar and don't have that "hype" on them anymore. And TV producers can't charge huge fees for selling the shows to the UK, Germany, Finland, etc...

Alanis Morissette and Eagles frontman Don Henley have both testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings on the future on on-line entertainment.

During the hearing in Washington, D.C., Morissette and Henley both talked about how artists tend to be dissed by the big labels when it comes to Web-based music. Both singers also voiced their support for Napster and urged Congress to heed artists' concerns if they decide to write any laws regarding the future of the recording industry.

"Though I cannot speak for every artist, my initial resistance to the new services created online was based on the debate having been framed in terms of piracy. Being labeled as such by the record companies, it understandably sent a ripple effect of panic throughout the artistic community. But what I have since come to realize is that for the majority of artists, this so-called 'piracy' may have actually been working in their favor," Morissette told the committee.

The singer acknowledged that Napster has actually benefited many artists by giving them a direct link to their audience, as well as helping them sell concert tickets and promotional merchandise.

As we know, Napster is looking for a licensing deal similar to what currently exists for radio stations. It remains to be seen whether or not the opinions of the artists have an effect on the legislators.

Hacker website 2600 which posted DeCSS source code on its pages and is in middle of on-going legal battle against the MPAA because of this got a strong addition to its legal team.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that is handling 2600's defence in court, announced Monday that Stanford Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan will argue before the U.S. 2nd District Court of Appeals on behalf of 2600.

MPAA won the "first round" of this legal battle in August when the district court ruled that 2600 was violating the DMCA (digital millennium copyright act) by posting the DeCSS code on its website. DeCSS allows users to break the CSS copyright protection scheme found on DVD discs. Now the case is in court of appeals and first oral arguments will be heard in 1st of May in New York.

Just few days after Real had announced its licensing contracts with EMI, AOL/TimeWarner and BMG, Microsoft launches its counter-attack in order to fight against RealPlayer's dominant position on Internet media player markets.

MSN Music launches today allowing users to stream music in WMA format to their Windows MediaPlayers from large selection of music. MSN Music allows users to pick music based on their "mood" or genres.

MSN Music doesn't allow music downloads, being just one big streaming station with Microsoft's money, knowledge and marketing power.

Today's launch is not "official launch" but public beta launch instead. But timing is critical and MS had to push the product out to the public before Real's MusicNet gains too much popularity.

Vitaminic, Italian based digital music distribution company which has appearances in 10 countries, reported its numbers for fiscal year 2000. It's revenues were only $1.66M and its net loss was $22M.

Company expects to break even in fiscal year 2002. Vitaminic has acquired three websites in last couple of months; two in France and one in U.S. As of 31st of December 2000, company had $24.4M in net cash.

Napster users will be able to download a new single from artist-formerly-known-as-Prince-and-now-known-as-Prince-again called "The Work - Pt. 1" from his new album The Rainbow Children.

Track will be available on Friday. Prince has worked without a major label contract since 1994 after a contract dispute with Warner Music.