News archive (6 / 2001)

CenterSpan Communications, current owner of Scour Exchange P2P service and brand, has just closed an additional round of funding getting $1M from undisclosed investors. This brings its latest round to total sum of $6.4M in investments.

Analysts have been pointing out that specially Microsoft has been very interested on company, specially because it is the only high-profile gated P2P service at the moment that uses Microsoft's DRM (Digital Rights Management) service and Microsoft's Windows Media format in its service. And in other hand Microsoft has been in bumpy road in last few months when it has tried to convince record labels that it doesn't want world dominance in this particular area as well (although everybody knows it wants just that, the thing is - how much of the power it's willing to leave for the labels).

RealNetworks announced today that it has allied with Symbian, a consortium that develops wireless device operating system and is owned by Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, Panasonic/Matsushita and Psion.

Real provides RealPlayer Mobile application for the Symbian platform; software allows wireless users to download or stream RealVideo and RealAudio clips. First Symbian-based device with RealPlayer Mobile is from Finnish cell phone manufacturer, Nokia -- their recently released "communicator" (combination of PDA and cell phone) Nokia 9210 is sold in Europe.

Yahoo! has agreed to acquire digital music website operator Launch Media for $12M inb cash, Launch announced today. Yahoo pays 92 cents for each share, giving 59% premium for shareholders (Launch's share price was $0.58 yesterday) and expects to complete the acquisition in Q3/2001.

As part of the deal, Yahoo extended its $3 million loan to Launch, in addition to a $2 million loan it provided Launch late last month. Launch media operations will continue to be based in Santa Monica, California, and its co-founders, Chief Executive Officer David Goldberg and President Bob Roback, will remain with Launch following the acquisition.

Additionally Launch settled its copyright dispute with four major record labels (all major ones except AOL TimeWarner) and will very likely remove interactive components from its Launchcast service that launched the lawsuit in May.

MP3.com has asked Federal Judge Jed Rakoff to approve its bid for an appeal in the copyright infringement suit filed agaist MP3.com by the independent record label TVT Records.

Last week judge Rakoff declared a mistrial in the MP3.com vs. TVT case after the jury had awarded TVT $300,000 in damages when they had actually intended an award of $3 million.

Should Rakoff refuse MP3.coms appeal, the company could appeal to a higher court. MP3.com will, of course, wait for Rakoff's decision before concidering further action.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Kahn on Friday denied to dismiss a lawsuit against RIAA and 17 music companies filed by Aimster. He also refused to move the case from Albany, NY to Manhattan, where 36 companies filed two subsequent copyright-infringement suits against Aimster.

In the lawsuit filed Aimster is seeking a declaratory judgement that it doesn't violate recording copyrights by allowing music files to be shared over its P2P service.

Napster has taken yet another step towards legal subscription-based service by inking deals with more than 150 European indie labels to use their content in Napster's up-coming subscription service.

Deals with UK-based Association of Independent Music, Belgium-based Impala and other trade bodies of independent labels give Napster access to artists like Tom Jones and Moby. The deal, however, doesn't cover third-party publishing rights, which Napster must still negotiate in order to offer the music as part of its service.

The full U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to re-hear Napster about their appeal of the injunction that requires Napster to filter out copyrighted music from their service. With the appeal Napster wanted to overturn the injunction and also wanted the appeals court to reconsider the ruling that Napster is liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.

The appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was concidered a long shot by legal experts. The only remaining alternative for Napster is to appeal to the U.S. Supreme court.

Napster has lifted some of its file sharing blocks, specially those that are filename based, allowing independent artists to distribute their content more easily.

Napster began implementing court-ordered blocks in this spring, first using blocks that recognized certain words and phrases and excluded those songs from the network. This caused real problems, because many perfectly legal songs from independent artists also disappeared, because they had some of the words or phrases that Napster blocked, in their song names.

Later this spring Napster began using also Relatable's digital audio fingerprints. Now company is obviously so comfortable with audio fingerprints that it feels its allowed to lift the (at least some of the) blocks that are based on filenames.

source: News.com / AP

CD software developer Roxio, a spin-off of Adaptec, has countersued Gracenote, owner of the CDDB service a month after Gracenote sued Roxio. Gracenote sued Roxio in May claiming that Roxio uses a CD information database in its new Easy CD Creator that violates Gracenote's patents.

Roxio didn't extend its contract with Gracenote to use Gracenote's CDDB database, but instead changed its CD products to use open-source service called FreeDB. Now Roxio sued Gracenote claiming that Gracenote fraudulently got their database patent and their CDDB trademark by failing to disclose key information to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

AOL TimeWarner has sued Aimster claiming that Aimster violates AOL's trademarks, particularly its AIM trademark (AIM stands for AOL Instant Messenger, world's most popular IM program). Suit follows AOL's previous lawsuit against Aimster where National Arbitration Forum panel found a month ago that Aimster has to give its domain name to AOL, because its domain name (aimster.com) violates AOL's rights to that name. Aimster has appealled in this case.

Aimster feels that both lawsuits are just RIAA's extended attempts to shut down its P2P service -- RIAA has sued Aimster over copyright violations and AOL TimeWarner, owner of Warner Music, is one of the top five record labels in this suit.

MP3.com has launched a Copyright Wizard service designed to help emerging artists claim copyrights on their work. The Wizard helps artists to register their songs with the U.S. Copyright Office by filling out the necessary forms, creating the CD, and submitting the registration.

The forms are, of course, also available via the U.S. Copyright Office home page. If the artist wishes to submit the registration forms himself, the Copyright Office charges a nonrefundable filing fee of $30. For the full serice MP3.com charges $59.95 from Premium Artist Service members, and $69.95 from non-members.

This is a very practical way indeed for independent artists to claim copyright on their work without much hassle.

RealNetworks launched a product yesterday that allows content owners to sell their products on the web and to limit the usage and distribution of their products. RealSystem Media Commerce Suite is going to be the key part of the upcoming MusicNet service Real is going to launch later this year with three major record labels.

Real faces strong competition specially from Microsoft who has already taken major steps into direction to include content rights management as part of its all media products, including Windows and Window Media Player. Microsoft's only problem is currently that it doesn't have any licensing agreements from record labels -- thing that prevents it currently to become a industry leader in content distribution. Many people also see mid-90s too clearly in Microsoft's current plans -- to include key part of the service within its Windows operating system and use that to prevent other players, particularly Real, to compete with it.

A U.S. District Court judge declared a mistrial Tuesday in a case of MP3.com versus TVT. TVT sued MP3.com over copyright violations -- on same basis as other record companies did.

The reason for mistrial is funny -- bad math :-) Jury found MP3.com guilty to charges in April and awarded TVT less than $300,000. Jury actually meant to award near $3M to TVT - one juror apparently made an error while calculating the damages on her Palm. Other jurors did not notice the mistake until they saw media reports on the case later in the day.

"The American jury system may yield countless benefits, but in this case it produced an uncounted, and unaccountable, result," wrote Judge Rakoff, in an opinion issued late Tuesday.

P2P company, Aimster, has setup an Amazon.com honor donation system on its website in order to collect money to help it in its legal battle against RIAA.

Aimster, a P2P program that piggybacks on AOL's Instant Messenger program and allows users to share files within their "buddylists" and also to share and download music from Napster and Gnutella networks, is sued by RIAA who is accusing that software violates its copyrights just like Napster does.

Aimster has also other problem -- a panel that decides over trademarks and domainnames in the U.S., recently decided that Aimster has to give its domainname to AOL.

Ok, our server has been successfully transferred to a new host -- the actual change happened in last week, but during last few days we've been fixing codes that were effected because of this transition. Few notes:

-email addresses were cut off for a while in last week, so there might be cases where we didn't receive your emails

-feedback has been down, because we simply forgot to change it to use new server -- all feedback sent in last 5 days or so, is lost. Sorry.

-bugs -- there have been bugs and oddities, specially in MP3Lizard.com, but hopefully these issues are now solved.

-band email addresses - some of our oldest bands had their @afterdawn.com addresses. Unfortunately we lost these, because we don't have facilities nor interest to continue our SMTP forward service we offered for our artists.

...if you find anything weird, please don't hesitate to send feedback to us (yes, now it works ;-).

CenterSpan Communications, current owner of once-troubled Scour Exchange P2P software and brand, announced that it has secured $5.4M in equity financing from undisclosed investors. Investors bought company shares for $11.21 each. Investors also have an option to purchase more shares for $18.68 per share within 3 years.

CenterSpan bought Scour's assets after it filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in last year after MPAA filed a lawsuit against the company accusing it for copyright violations. CenterSpan launched a legal version of Scour Exchange in this spring, offering legal downloads from various sources, mostly from EMusic.

(source: webnoize)

Launch Media has reinstated its Launchcast web streaming service again, but without the four major label's content (all except AOL TimeWarner).

Launch was sued by four major record labels in last month because labels feel that Launch's streaming service Launchcast violates its current streaming licenses being too interactive, allowing users to vote the songs that they hear from the service and service creates new playlists based on these votes.

The ultimate goal for labels is to block Launch and similiar services from participating to webcast royalty arbitration proceeding that will set a rate for non-interactive webcasting claiming that Launch doesn't qualify to this. Labels want to charge more or even prevent webcasters to offer anything else than a regular radio service broadcasted over the Net.

Launch wasn't sued by AOL TimeWarner, because companies have a separate deal that allows Launch to have interactive elements in its service -- now Launchcast contains music from various independent labels and from AOL TimeWarner, total selection of 25,000 songs.

California-based Archos Technology began shipping its prtable MP3 product today. Product is the first MP3 player that also supports on-the-fly MP3 recording and has 6GB of storage space.

Player is priced $350, making it lucrative for those who have been watching Nomad Jukebox, also 6GB portable MP3 player but which doesn't have recording capabilities.

Quality of its recording capabilities is something that we don't know yet -- it's of course obvious that the quality what you can achieve with line-in recording doesn't compare to direct CDDA conversions. But I would guess that this player has possibilities in companies (audio memos of meetings), among students (recording those boring lectures), etc..

Read more from their website.

Okay, we've seen dozens of competing audio formats to come and go in past few years, trying to beat MP3 in popularity. Of course, all of these other formats like Windows Media, OGG, AAC, etc offer better quality in smaller file sizes. But the thing is -- they are not MP3s :-)

As funny as it might sound, that's the reason. MP3 has become a synonym for online audio (and for free illegal music as well) and it's not likely to die. Now original researchers behind the MP3 format, also known as MPEG-1 audio layer III, Thomson Multimedia and Fraunhofer have released a "new version of MP3" called MP3Pro and companies claim it achieves 128kbps MP3's quality with just 64kbps, making it half of the size of regular MP3.

Ok, but why this is so special then? Thomson says that all existing MP3 players are able to play these files without any modifications, including software and hardware players. And this is something that other formats can't do, meaning that your good old Rio player can play files that fit into half of the size -- you can have double the music with same quality stored in your MP3 player.

Of course, the reality of MP3Pro's quality will be known much later, after companies have improved their MP3Pro encoding routines, "golden ear" hifi freaks have compared files to those created with LAME encoder, etc.

Buena Vista, Disney-owned movie company, has sued Video Pipeline accusing the company for violating Buena Vista's copyrights by distributing their movie trailers.

Video Pipeline provides movie trailers as part of their promotional streaming service aimed for retailer use. Lawsuit is pretty weird because movie trailers are specifically meant for promoting upcoming movie releases -- they are advertisements -- and the value of the trailers for movie studio would be that as many user as possible has a possibility to see them.

But anyway, case is going on and we'll see how it ends -- there are tons of websites in the world that are focused solely on movie trailer distribution.

Ok, switching servers was pretty painless task to do, but unfortunately some users might experience problems with their DNS entries and might end up in a situation that their computers don't find our servers. This is temporary problem and it should be solved within two days.

Yesterday we were down for appx. 15 hours and today we had to shut the services for 90 minutes in order to synchronize databases, etc.

All these changes have effected all of our sites (AfterDawn.com, MP3Lizard.com, Dawnload.net and few others). Some minor problems might still come up -- if you experience anything weird, please send mail to webmaster@afterdawn.com.

But damn, it's a fast server ;-)

AfterDawn.com and all sites involved with it, are being changed to a different ISP and therefor some problems might occur during next few days.

Today we experienced almost 15hour server down time, which was very unfortunate, but I'm not going to go into details with that one.

Anyway, new server gives us more speed (faster CPU and more memory), latest version of application server we're using, more HDD and cheaper bandwidth if/when we grow bigger.

The European Commission has begun preliminary antitrust investigations into MusicNet and PressPlay. Both MusicNet and PressPlay are upcoming music services backed by the big boys of the recording industry. MusicNet is backed by RealNetworks, Warner Music Group, EMI Recorded Music, and BMG Entertainment. PressPlay, which until today was known as Duet, is backed by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.

According to European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti "there are potentially a number of issues which merit close examination." What these issues might be is yet unknown. European antitrust-laws have been more than a small annoyance in the recent media mergers. It is said that the EMI -Warner/Bertelsmann mergers failed due to these laws.

Listen.com announced that it will remove interactive elements from its streaming service and at the same time agreed to withdraw from lawsuit against RIAA.

This issue has been in the news in last weeks, because of different views of webcasters and RIAA. RIAA thinks that webcasters violate their existing streaming music licenses by offering too much interactivity for users. Webcasters in other hand see this as their main purpose in order to separate themselves from traditional radio broadcasters.

Of course in the end it's all about the money, RIAA wants to charge more from those webcasters who offer interactive elements that can effect to playlists. And webcasters obviously don't want to pay more. This -- as so many other issues -- problem is caused by unspecified laws in the U.S. Streaming agreement restricts webcasters to have interactive services, but it doesn't define what interactive means.

According to Financial Times, European Commission sent letters today to major American movie studios asking why world has been divided into eight different DVD region zones.

Inquiry comes after many complaints from consumers about DVD pricing -- most of the movies sold in the U.S. are much cheaper than those in the European Union. DVD purchased from U.S. (region 1) doesn't work in regular European (region 2) DVD player and vice versa.

According to movie industry's earlier comments about the region zones, it has been built because they want to make sure that local versions are shown in the movie theatres before the DVD version is out (in some cases U.S. DVD release date is before European movie theatre release date).

Now, when we're almost seeing light in the end of the tunnel in many digital media court cases, including MP3.com's, Napster's and 2600's, there are plenty of court cases coming up..

Legal issue over webcasting royalty fees was risen in May when RIAA sued Launch Media, because RIAA thinks that Launch's LaunchCast streaming service violates Launch'ex existing streaming contract because its "too interactive".

After Launch was sued, webcasters joined their forces and attacked RIAA seeking court decision over this issue (what level of interactivity violates streaming royalty system's limits for user interactivity) and sued RIAA. Team that sued RIAA included MusicMatch, MTVi Group, Xact and DiMA (alliance of webcasters).

And of course this backfired -- in Friday, RIAA filed countersuit against webcaster's trade union, DiMA. Three webcasters were mentioned in lawsuit; MusicMatch, MTVi and Xact Radio.

In a statement, MusicMatch called the recording industry suit "unnecessary" and said it was confident the court would find that its service was eligible for the kind of statutory licensing that covers other broadcasters.

Italian-based online music giant Vitaminic continues buying smaller digital music sites. This time Vitaminic announced that it has purchased UK-based PeopleSound.com in an all-stock deal valued at $28.8M.

Vitaminic runs 10 country-specific sites in Western Europe and in the U.S. In March it acquired two French MP3 sites and American IUMA. Vitaminic has been very strong competitor to MP3.com, specially in Europe, where MP3.com doesn't have that much localized versions of its site as Vitaminic has.

Vitaminic's board and Peoplesound.com's principal investors have already approved the deal and companies hope to finish the acquisition within 45 days.

Napster announced today that it has struck a deal with Loudeye Technologies to aid in Napster's struggle to filter out songs. Napster intends to use audio fingerprints provided by Loudeye to filter and track files shared on the Napster network. Loudeye is not the author behind the fingerprinting technology Napster is using, but instead Loudeye's purpose is to do the actual fingerprinting using Relatable's technology. Napster made a deal with Relatable earlier this year.

The audio fingerprint is created by reading audio frequencies at several points in a song, and creating an identifier based on the frequency data. This identifier can then be used to look up a song from a database. Napster has already begun to receive fingerprint data from Loudeye, and is constanty adding the data to its filtering efforts.

Princeton University researcher Edward Felten and the organizers of USENIX security conference have sued RIAA, SDMI and Verance over the rights to publish Felten's findings how to crack the SDMI music copyright protection schema.

Backed by EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation, same instance that backs also website 2600 in its case with MPAA) Felten and USENIX have sued these parties and U.S. Department of Justice. RIAA and SDMI threatened to sue Felten if he would publish his findings on SDMI copyright protection which includes one watermarking technology developed by Verance.

Felten and his research team were forced to pull their presentation from USENIX conference and now he seeks a decision from court how DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) limits, if it limits, researchers to publish their work. This same issue might apply to other similiar cases, let's say researchers publishing their instructions how to break the CSS (copy protection used in DVD movies) -- it depends totally on court, do they want to rule their decision to specifically to SDMI case or do they want to take a broad view on issue.

According to reports, Napster is close to ink a deal with MusicNet service to provide MusicNet's content via its upcoming legal service. According to proposed deal, MusicNet would be the exclusive content provider for "legal Napster" for an undisclosed period of time.

MusicNet is an online subscription-based venture that has licenses from three major record labels, and its owned by RealNetworks. Major record labels that have licensed their content for MusicNet are BMG, EMI and Warner Music. AOL TimeWarner has already agreed to offer services based on MusicNet.

The proposed deal between Napster and MusicNet does not affect the legal process that's going on between Napster and the record labels. Deal would also allow MusicNet's label partners to back out of the deal if Napster doesn't meet certain security standards.

The hacker magazine 2600 and major movie studios filed their answers last week to a federal appeals court. The court has been asked whether or not computer code is covered by the First Amendment's right of free speech.

Last August a district court ruled that 2600 could not distribute or link to the source code or the compiled program file of DeCSS, the infamous DVD decrypter. Now judges will determine if the injunction was too harsh or even legitimate. Should they decide that computer code is covered by the First Amendment, it would also mean that a part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is unconstitutional.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group representing Eric Corley, publisher of the 2600 magazine, argued in its answers that DeCSS has to be concidered speech because it expreses ideas, and can be read by a trained person just like any other language.

The movie studios in turn argue that computer code is just a tool, and DeCSS is a tool whose sole purpose is to illegally remove DVD encryption. Therefore it is not speech, and doesn't carry a message.

Music.com, site that has definately the best domain name anyone can think of in digital music industry, has proven that just having an excellent domain name doesn't make it excellent business. New York-based, Filipino owned company that operates the site has called it quits and is selling all its assets, including the domain name.

Currently the site sells music, has news and features and operates city-specific content for several American cities. Music Corporation, the owner of the site, will provide Music.com with as much as $300,000 to remain in the business until the site finds a buyer for its assets.

Launch Media, MTVi Group, MusicMatch, Listen.com, Digital Media Association and Xact Radio filed a lawsuit against recording industry today in a San Fransisco federal court demanding clarification in a webcast licensing dispute.

The whole dispute was launched by RIAA who sued Launch Media in last week because RIAA thinks that Launch's LaunchCast webcast service violates Launch's existing webcast licenses, because it allows level of interactivity that RIAA thinks its not a pure webcasting station.

Suit was also filed in response to a recent request by RIAA, which asked the U.S. Copyright Office to disqualify certain Webcasters that offer consumer-influenced Internet radio services from a royalty arbitration.

"Our only remaining option is to ask a court to interpret the Digital Millennium Copyright Act so that media companies, technology developers, and investors can gain needed clarification of the statute," Jonathan Potter, Digital Media Association's executive director, said.