MediaDefender, a division of Laguna Beach-based OnSystems Inc., hs developed a software that blocks the access to copyrighted songs and other media shared on peer-to-peer networks.
The software works by scanning various peer-to-peer networks for copyrighted songs and then hammering the people offering the files with numerous requests. Since the peer-to-peer clients are designed for a few simultaneous connections, more than 100 requests will choke up the stream and prevent anyone else from getting the file. MediaDefender doesn't actually transfer the files it requests, so it doesn't consume any extra bandwidth from the client it blocks.
Another method used by MediaDefender is known as 'spoofing'. It offers files that look like the material the user is looking for, but contain no real data.
So far MediaDefender has only a few clients, but they have a firm belief in their service. They see it as a solution to the problem law isn't capable of containing.
There's little doubt that should MediaDefender become the method of choice among the record and movie industry, there will be some sort of counter action by the "hacker community".
RIAA is asking federal court to reverse the decision to take the legal action against Aimster in Albany, NY instead of Manhattan. Decision to move the case to Albany was made because "Aimster got there first", Aimster sued RIAA in Albany asking federal court to decide that Aimster is a legal P2P service. And as RIAA countersued Aimster later, federal judge decided to bundle cases and handle both of them in Albany. RIAA also asks court to dismiss Aimster's case against RIAA because RIAA claims that it was filed purely to get ahead of RIAA in legal actions.
One would think that there's no difference where the case is fought, but obviously there seems to be. Maybe RIAA wants to handle all its cases in Manhattan where it and MPAA have already won some major cases.
Having beaten Napster to the brink of death, RIAA is ready to settle its copyright infringement lawsuit against the once-file-sharing service.
RIAA sees that since the court has already ordered Napster to filter out and block all copyrighted music from its service, there is no longer need to pursue their own lawsuit.
The recording industry filed its lawsuit against Napster in December 1999 and the case has been on and off the courts since. In July 2000 Napster was issued an injunction ordering them to block all copyrighted songs, but the order was immediately stayed by a higher court deeming the injuction unreasonable. Six months later, though, the same higher court allowed the injuction requiring only a few clarifications by the lower-court judge.
Napster welcomes the good news as it's preparing to launch it's new, legitimate subscription service. The old Napster service has been down since the beginning of July, 2001.
Some kind of solution is looming over the fight between webcasters and recording industry. Both parties are going to represent their arguments in before of Copyright Office's arbitration panel that should ultimately decide how much webcasters have to pay to recording industry for their licenses.
RIAA is suggesting rate of $0.004 for each streamed hour of music or 15% of the revenues of webcaster. In other hand webcasters -- including MTVi Group, Spinner and Launch Media -- are suggesting a rate of $0.0015 per each streamed hour of music.
Recording industry has been critized because many analysts feel that recording industry is forcing digital music companies to license music with ridiculously expensive deals in order to stay legal and stay in business. Many digital music companies are facing NASDAQ delisting or have already ceased their operations.
Buena Vista, a Disney -owned movie studio, asked yesterday from federal judge to give a permission for the MPAA to file "friend of the court" brief on its behalf.
Buena Vista is asking a court to grant an injunction that would prevent Video Pipeline to stream company's trailers to various web retailers. Buena Vista sued Video Pipeline in June and case has raised more than few eyebrows, because traditionally movie trailers are considered as advertisements and wide distribution of advertisement is normally considered to be a good thing for the movie.
In U.S. various copyright owners, most notably MPAA and RIAA, have been putting pressure on various high-speed internet service providers to remove individual users' accounts because of alleged P2P file sharing. Movie studios and record labels understand that bulk of the material available via "post-Napster" file sharing communities like Gnutella, iMesh and eDonkey2000 comes from broadband (DSL, cable modem, etc) users. And when these networks don't have centralized servers to shut down, studios and labels are forced to attack individual users.
Many American broadband ISPs say that the number of complaints from copyright owners has increased dramatically over last few weeks. Most of the ISPs have bowed under the legal pressure, but some major players like Verizon have refused to remove accounts without further investigation. Also number of letters from various anti-piracy companies has increased -- some of the best-known "bounty hunters" are MediaForce and Copyright.net.
Napster named former Bertelsmann executive Konrad Hilbers its new CEO yesterday succeeding Hank Barry. Barry, who joined Napster as interim chief executive in May 2000, will remain on its board of directors -- Barry has made it clear earlier that he is looking for a successor.
Hilbers left his job as vice president of BMG Entertainment in June and he was personally appointed by Barry. Naming a former Bertelsmann executive as a new CEO clearly signals Napster's strong relationship with its current partner/owner.
The DVD Forum, which controls the licensing of the DVD standard, is playing it tough with the Chinese and Taiwanese player manufacturers. The players, such as the Apex AD600a are infamous for the ease of bypassing the region encoding.
To be allowed the license to manufacture DVD-players, and use the DVD logo, manufacturers must agree to support the region encoding restriction. The Far Eastern manufacturers, however, usually implement a rather haphazard restriction which is often very easy to bypass using the unit's own remote controller.
What DVD Forum is doing now is enforcing a ban on unofficial DVD products. To beat the ban the manufacturers must get a certification for their players before October 1st. After that no player without a certification can be shipped with the DVD logo.
It remains to be seen whether or not the Far Eastern manufacturers will bow to the demands. If they don't, we might see alot of "Digital Video Players" or "DVD-compatible MP3-players" in the future.
Independent record label Zomba Recording joined to MusicNet digital music service today. Zomba is one of the highest profile independent labels in the world -- their artists include Britney Spears, N*Sync and Backstreet Boys.
Zomba's music catalog will be available through MusicNet. While announcing a licensing agreement, Zomba also became a minor stakeholder of MusicNet investing an undisclosed amount of cash into company. MusicNet's owners, before Zomba's investment, are RealNetworks(40% stake), AOL TimeWarner(20%), EMI(20%) and BMG(20%).
Vivendi Universal that owns 50% of Pressplay is confident that the service will launch "within first two weeks of September". Pressplay is a 50/50 joint digital music venture between Sony and Vivendi Universal and it recently selected MP3.com to provide the technology to power it (Vivendi is buying MP3.com, so the choice was obvious).
Service should start with 75,000 tracks that subscribers can stream. Later service should also allow music downloads.
Media giant AOL TimeWarner announced two new music services for consumers. Services are Artist Discovery Network and Radio@AOL.
Artist Discovery Network basically hits to MP3.com's and Vitaminic's markets promoting "undiscovered" new and independent artists. Of course their main focus will be in promoting Warner Music's new artists (Warner Music is a subsdiary of AOL TimeWarner).
Radio@AOL will bundle 45 radio channels from AOL's existing radio service, Spinner, and add numerous other channels to package as well. This service is then available only for AOL users -- meanwhile Spinner is going to stay as a free service for all web users.
According to Media Metrix, AOL Music was the number 1 music destination on the web in June 2001.
Guys at CooWAPsiteoftheday.com seem to love us. We were nominated as their Cool WAP site of the day in this week (18th of July, 2001). This was a second time we got this award and we are extremely proud of this nomination and like to thank their staff for excellent review.
If you want to read both of their reviews, use these links:
http://www.coolwapsiteoftheday.com/071100.phtml http://www.coolwapsiteoftheday.com/071801.phtml
And you can check our WAP site with your mobile at wap.afterdawn.com>.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit granted Napster's request for a stay from a lower-court judge's order one week ago that it remain shut down. Last Wednesday Judge Marilyn Patel ordered Napster to stay offline until it can prove that its song-screening technology doesn't have any holes, asking Napster to provide 100% bullet-proof screening technology.
Napster went offline in beginning of July, not because of court order, but because they had to shut down the servers for a maintenance. And before company could restart the service, court made its order.
Appeals court can still rule against Napster -- Napster has to file its briefs to court before August 9th and after Napster has filed its briefs, RIAA has 28 days time to file its own briefs.
In not-so surprising announcement, Pressplay told that service will use MP3.com as content delivery and subscription management technology. Pressplay is a joint venture of Sony and Vivendi Universal and Vivendi agreed to acquire MP3.com in May.
MP3.com's shareholder are going to vote on Vivendi acquisition August 29th. Vivendi agreed to acquire company for $372M in cash and stock.
Two college students who operate Ontario, Canada -based OpenNap server (independent clone of Napster's server) are pushing Canadian copyright laws. They and their ISP received few weeks ago a letter from CRIA(Canadian Recording Industry Association, counterpart of RIAA) that insisted ISP to shut down the service that allows users to swap copyrighted songs just like Napster did. Letter also referenced to U.S. court order against Napster.
Twist in the case is that Canadian copyright law is not the same as American law -- Canadian law doesn't have terms like "contributory infringement" or "vicarious copyright liability". So, the Fairtunes OpenNap server decided not to shut down. Canada is about to upgrade their copyright laws, but this wont happen until 2003. And now these two college guys, who say that they're "making a political statement" with this issue, are planning to move their server to Sealand, independent """"country"""" right outside UK, located in international waters (not technically, but when this "country" declared its independence it was outside UK waters, although UK has expanded their borders since, but they declared independence before that, so it doesn't count).
According to Macrovision, company who built the copy-protection technology for videos that is widely used in video tapes and DVDs, company has provided to several record labels technology that allows them to copy-protect audio CDs in similiar way. Company doesn't want to disclose what titles are copy-protected it says that in last six months labels have sold over 100,000 copies of copy-protected CDs.
Macrovision's CD copy-protection technology was originally acquired from Israeli company called TTR Technologies and it allows regular CD players to play CDs normally, but when digitally copied with CD-ROM drives, it produces "pops and clicks" into audio stream. Protection sounds exactly the replica of Macrovision's video copy-protection that allows VCRs to play tapes, but when tried to copy to other VCR, picture doesn't have colors or is otherwise ruined.
According to Macrovision there are no peaks in returned CDs, so obviously regular consumers haven't had any problems with this protection when played on regular CD player -- previous attempts to create similiar copy-proctection systems have failed because CDs haven't played in certain CD players.
Only real problem with this technology is the fact that in most countries law allows users to make copies for their own use. In other hand, at least in U.S., law doesn't require labels to make CDs copyable -- it just doesn't allow labels to sue people who copy for their own use. But in some European countries these laws are more strict and when you have a master copy that you can copy, game is over -- P2P networks distribute music over the Net within minutes. And of course, all music can be recorded via analog methods -- just simply plug a cable to your soundcard and connect it to your regular CD player.
U.S. Copyright Office declined RIAA's request not to allow certain webcasters to participate in rate-setting negotiations for future royalties webcasters have to pay to content owners, most notably RIAA.
Whole dispute began in May when RIAA sued Launch Media claiming Launch's LaunchCast webcasting service to be "too interactive" to fit within DMCA rules. As a counter-attack, group of webcasters sued RIAA trying to force the court to decide what means "too interactive" webcasting.
The Copyright Office, said in its order that "excluding these services...would run counter" to the Office's "determination that interactivity raises factual questions that 'must be made on a case-by-base basis after the development of a full evidentiary record.'"
Scour.com, the company known from the promising peer-to-peer application Scour Exchange, brought down by numerous lawsuits, has turned its focus to Internet radio.
Scour will launch three Internet radio stations today in association with RadioCentral. The stations will be offering music for hip hop, electronic, and rock music listeners.
Scour shut down it's file-sharing service last November and was acquired by CenterSpan in December. With the Internet radio service Scour tries to recover from the legal troubles it ran into with Scour Exchange, and aims attract more customers.
Under the terms of the deal Scour will pay RadioCentral a monthly fee for the development and operation of its online radio services. The analysts see the deal beneficial for both parties.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set a deadline of Aug 9th for Napster to file an emergency emergency federal appeals court brief that would give Napster a possibility to resume its service.
Napster went offline 2nd of July when company experienced problems with their song-blocking database and even that they got the bug fixed, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel ordered Napster to stay offline until company can provide bullet-proof song-screening solution. Napster argued that it can provide 99.4% efficiency with its current screening technology (used to block illegal song from the service), but court insisted that company has to achieve 100% success rate.
After (if they file them) Napster has filed their briefs to appeals court, RIAA has 28 days to respond to Napster's brief.
MusicMatch has settled its lawsuit with RIAA. Suit was filed over webcasting dispute where RIAA claimed that MusicMatch's radio service violated its existing webcasting license allowing users to have more "interactive" service than they're supposed to get based on MusicMatch's licenses.
Fight between RIAA and several webcasters began in May when RIAA sued Launch because it offered "too interactive" webcasting service. After this, bunch of major webcasters, including MusicMatch and MTVi sued RIAA asking court to decide if their services fit within DMCA's description of webcast service.
Media Enforcer released a free software today that allows Internet service providers (ISPs) to monitor their networks for P2P application users.
Travis Hill, President of Media Enforcer LLC, said: "Network operators have a daunting responsibility to ensure appropriate use of computing resources, especially with the advent of P2P applications. Whether for bandwidth, legal, policy, or security reasons- it helps to know where and when these types of applications are being run."
Software currently recognizes following P2P applications and their clones: Napster, Gnutella(including LimeWire, BearShare, etc..), Aimster and Kazaa(including MusicCity Morpheus). More P2P services can be added to the list after they've recognized.
This might cause some major problems for users of broadband connections who tend to be the major contributors of various P2P networks.
The once popular song-swapping service Napster has selected PlayMedia Systems to provide secure digital music player in its upcoming membership service. In addition to that PlayMedia will also be consulting Napster on file security technology.
PlayMedia has developed customized playback, encryption, decryption, and security technologies. Using these technologies Napster will be able to encode, recognize, and playback protected multimedia files on the Napster membership service.
``Napster is at the forefront of using some extremely advanced rights management and security technologies in a file-sharing environment,'' said Napster's interim CEO Hank Barry. ``PlayMedia's technologies and consulting services for playback and advanced file security have been instrumental in helping us build a new Napster service that will give our users a satisfying experience for discovering and listening to new music.''
Napster also renewed its license for PlayMedia's AMP® technology. AMP technology is probably best known from powering the popular Winamp MP3 player.
Our MP3Lizard.com staff has selected a new "artist of the month" (tends to change every 2 months or so ;-). New artist of the month is Orgasmatron, here's a copy/paste from our hype text shown on front page:
"The Orgasmatron started as a project in 1999. SuMo, the head of this one-man band, presented some of his early work at www.mp3.com and wanted a band name that would lure visitors to his page. Later he discovered that Orgasmatron is also the name of a Mötorhead song.
To compose his music SuMo uses a computer, various software, a bass and a Fender Rhodes seventythree. He uses a lot of loops. Either selfmade ones from real instruments or sampled from other artists.
A few years ago he did mostly techno and similar music. Now he hasswitched mostly to acid jazz and trip-hop.
His aim is to make music that is good for lounging. He doesn't care much for lyrics and melody -- groove is imperative.
Listening to his songs you can hear that he has definitely achieved what he has been aiming for -- music that is easy and enjoyable to listen to."
Just as an afterthought for court's this week's decision to keep Napster shut down until they can prove their filterin technology is 100% flawless.. According to RIAA, so far they've found 174 songs that have slipped through Napster's filters. Just think about that figure a moment -- that's only 0.02% of their song-blocking database. And now court is saying that this effectiveness is not enough for Napster.
There are absolutely no way to provide 100% bullet-proof system, whatever the system is -- web server, operating system, car or even P2P song-filtering technology. Even if Napster would trim their technology so it allows only one song through filters every other day, it would bring their percentage below 100%. Heck, even condoms have way much smaller success percent of preventing accidents (less than 90% actually :-).
One of the most legendary lawsuits in digital music world has closed now when Napster settled its lawsuits with Metallica and Dr. Dre. Both artists sued Napster in spring 2000 over copyright violations (both artists are rarities among the music world because they own all rights to their music -- normally copyrights are owned by record labels) and especially Metallica has received a lot of attention from media, varying from MTV News to various anti-Metallica websites.
Terms of the settlement were not disclosed and according to Napster's spokesperson this settlement doesn't have anything to do with yesterday's court order to keep Napster shut until company can provide 100% song-screening technology. Both Metallica and Dr. Dre, who are represented by the same lawyer, have agreed to share some of their songs through the up-coming legal version of Napster.
As predicted earlier, Microsoft and Pressplay(joint digital music venture of Sony and Vivendi Universal), inked a distribution deal. Microsoft will promote service through its MSN Music service and Pressplay in other hand will be using Microsoft's Windows Media format and Microsoft's digital rights management technology.
It seems that working together with MusicNet(joint digital music venture of EMI, AOL TimeWarner and BMG) just got much harder, because RealNetworks is the technology provider of MusicNet service and Microsoft is not the technology provider of Pressplay -- and everybody knows that these two companies are the current software business' "major enemies" now after Microsoft crushed Netscape in late '90s. But dividing customers in two separate camps without offering full scale of music from all five major record labels might be the ultimate flaw in labels' digital music plan.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel yesterday ordered Napster to stay offline until it can provide 100% effectiveness in its song-screening technology. Napster told judge that it can provide over 99% effectiveness, but this didn't do any good, since judge demanded zero-tolerance.
"The Court's ruling today that Napster must block all file transfers threatens all peer-to-peer file sharing over the Internet and is at direct odds with the 9th Circuit's ruling," Hank Barry, Napster CEO, said.
"While we are disappointed by this ruling, we will work with the technical expert to enable file transfers as soon as possible and we are continuing full steam ahead toward the launch of our new service later this summer."
Napster has been offline since 2nd of July after it experienced technical problems with its song-screening database.
Annual digital audio conference, organized by MP3.com, MP3 Summit 2001, begins tomorrow. Summit, first held in 1998 which gathered couple of hundred participants, is held in San Diego and lasts for two days.
This year's theme is "Mobilizing your music", offering device and service vendors a possibility to demonstrate their products for digital audio -oriented audience. In heart of the summit is, of course, MP3.com's own mobile application set.
One aspect that makes this year's show more interesting, is the fact that now MP3.com is acquired by Vivendi Universal -- old music world rebel is now owned by world's biggest record company (and European one, just to mention). It's remoured that his year's conference might be the last summit -- it's hard to see the interest for this kind of conference after Vivendi has completed its acquisition of MP3.com.
Bertelsmann's music services arm, BeMusic, has been restructured to get ready for the launch of new legal Napster in this summer. Bertelsmann announced few personnel transfers within its different departments.
Bertelsmann plans to bring all its direct consumer sections under BeMusic, including online retailer CDNow, its recently acquired online music storage service MyPlay, its music club division BMG Direct and its alliance with Napster.
Formed earlier this month, bringing 23 million subscribers and customers under the umbrella of Bertelsmann's eCommerce group, BeMusic will be split into three divisions: BeMusic Direct, BeMusic Services and BeMusic Digital.
Jukebox application developer, Musicmatch, has laid off 25% of its employees - totally 40 full-time employees. Company announced that all departments were affected, but company doesn't plan any further layoffs.
Company's main product, Musicmatch Jukebox, competes directly with RealNetworks' RealPlayer and Microsoft's Windows Media.
Digital media newswatch, Webnoize, raported today that sources familiar with the situation are suggesting that Microsoft and Pressplay(formerly known as Duet, a joint digital music venture of Sony and Vivendi Universal) are closer to ink a deal that would put Microsoft to market Pressplay service through its channels.
Pressplay signed a similiar deal with Yahoo in April. Pressplay is competing with MusicNet service, backed by three other major record labels and RealNetworks.
MPEG LA, a company that currently grants joint licenses for MPEG-2 format (format used in DVD and SuperVCD movies as well as in most Digital TV broadcasts), announced that 19 companies holding essential licenses for MPEG-4 have made substantial progress on their way to develop a joint patent licensing for MPEG-4 format.
The problem currently blocking legal use of MPEG-4 video format is the number of companies holding patents of the technology -- one who wishes to develop an application utilizing MPEG-4 has to apply for separate patent licenses from various companies. Same case was with MPEG-2, but MPEG LA consortium managed to create a joint patent licensing and began granting licenses for MPEG-2 developers in 1997.
DivX ;-) "format" is probably the best known MPEG-4 variation, based on hacked Microsoft MPEG-4 CODEC (basically DivX ;-) as a ""format"" -- it's not a real format -- is illegal) forcing it to bundle with MPEG-1 audio layer III (better known as MP3).
Dutch-based electronics giant Philips announced last week that it will start shipping its new mini stereo system that supports also MP3 format and Internet radio channels.
A product, called FW-i1000, is connected to Net via DSL or cable modem and it uses a tuning service that's licensed from iM Networks. Unit is expected to cost $500 in the U.S. and it will be available in Europe in 2002.
Napster shut down their service because of maintenance work earlier this week and their system is still down. Company says that the reason of the offline time is with their song recognition database that contains information and fingerprints of appx. 800,000 songs that record companies have supplied to company in order to screen those files from the service.
Napster's traffic has dropped to appx. 0,5% of what it was in its peak in February 2001, average user now sharing less than 2 files.
You would think that getting sued by RIAA is bad enough, right? Well, Aimster is in way much bigger trouble than that. Last Wednesday Movie Picture Association of America sued Aimster over copyright violations and is seeking maximum damages, $150,000 for each distributed illegal movie copy.
And yesterday music publishers and songwriters joined to the lawsuit madness against Aimster filing their own lawsuit in Manhattan Federal Court.
"We are extremely disappointed that before the ink was even dry on Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' opinion concluding that Napster was engaging in massive copyright infringement, another Internet music service would seek with impunity to supplant Napster and expect to get away with it," said Edward Murphy, president and chief executive officer of National Music Publishers' Association(NMPA).
Terra Lycos has laid off most of the employees of its Sonique subsdiary just before the team was about to complete much-awaited Sonique 2 MP3 player. Terra Lycos didn't confirm rumours that the team was cut down to just two employees.
Lycos acquired Sonique in August 1999 for 1.1 million Lycos shares, back then those shares were worth of $38.8M. Lycos still plans to continue distributing the Sonique v1.x, but wont develop 2.x any further.
This move basically kills the final technological competition against Nullsoft and their up-coming WinAMP 3 player. Sonique 2 was supposed to have very intelligent new features, like new interface language. Ah well, maybe they find jobs at Nullsoft ;-)
Recording Industry Association of Japan has submitted a list of 3,000 songs that trade group wants to remove from Napster, to IFPI(international equivalent of RIAJ and RIAA).
RIAJ announced also in its press release that it investigates a possibility to sue individual users who trade copyrighted Japanese songs.
Neither Napster nor ISPI have commented on case yet.
Media Enforcer released a free software today that allows Internet service providers (ISPs) to monitor their networks for P2P application users.
