Zomba Recording has settled it's copyright infringement lawsuits with MP3.com. The exact details of the settlement were not disclosed, but as a part of it Zomba has licenced it's catalog for use with the My.MP3.com -service.
Zomba, whose lineup includes artists like Britney Spears, NSync, and the Backstreet Boys, sued MP3.com last year. With the settlement MP3.com avoided going to court for damage assesment.
Source:
Webnoize
According to a study by G2, a subsidiary of the Gartner Group, on-line users are quite unlikely to purchase digital music on the Web. The survey of the purchasing plans and habits of 4000 online adults showed that only half of them use their computer to listen to AudioCDs, and only a quarter listens to downloaded digital music.
``Digital distribution needs to be brain-dead simple for consumers, and any digital rights management solution deployed should work with all music software and hardware,´´ said analyst P J McNealy from G2. ``The percentage of Internet music buyers is not likely to increase with new Internet services being developed by the big five music companies unless they make their copyright protection systems more flexible to entice consumers.´´
It is rather unlikely that the on-line music sales will be a success unless the customers can listen to the music they've purchased not only on their computer, but also on their home stereo etc.
Fight that will ultimately choose which "next generation" audio format is going to survive, took a yet another step today, when world's biggest record label, Vivendi's Universal Music Group, announced that it will release its titles in SACD format.
SACD, jointly developed by Sony and Philips, competes with DVD-A (DVD-Audio), developed by a consortium of consumer electronics companies, including also Sony and Philips. Warner is currently the only major record label supporting DVD-A, but it is rumoured that BMG is also going to support DVD-A. Meanwhile, Sony, has alreay released hundreds of titles in SACD format, priced around $20 - $25 in the U.S.
Both formats offer better audio quality than regular CDs -- most of new DVD players support DVD-A format, but SACD players require a separate SACD/CD player.
Korean court ordered "Korean Napster", Soribada, to day 98 million won (appx. $75,000) to two Korean record labels for violating their copyrights.
World Music Entertainment and Most Best Music had sued Seoul-based Internet Empire in November for three times that amount for operating a website that allowed users to share songs and music videos.
CenterSpan Communications, owner of Scour Exchange's heritage, today acquired a digital music distribution company Supertracks for $750k. CenterSpan plans to add Supertracks BridgePort streaming technology to its C-Star P2P platform. CenterSpan hopes to be able to license its P2P platform for various portals, although its newly-opened legal version of Scour Exchange didn't receive very well reviews in spring when company launched it for beta testing.
Excellent study about FastTrack P2P platform and its legal issues was published today by one of the leading digital multimedia analyst companies, Webnoize. Study opens interesting questions, focusing mostly on the most popular application using FastTrack's technology, MusicCity's Morpheus.
FastTrack, in this case Morpheus, is extremely problematic for copyright owners as Webnoize's study found. While MusicCity controls the access to Morpheus' discussion boards and chat rooms, it doesn't have control over P2P network which is built little bit like Gnutella network (only much, much more cleverly, adding "supernodes" to the network that speed up query times and overall performance), meaning that it doesn't rely on central servers like Napster did. And when company doesn't control the network, can it be sued? Tough question that no one seems to know the answer for.
Read the full study from here (unfortunately requires subscription when the article is archived)
You can also download MusicCity Morpheus from here.
Yahoo who recently acquired digital music company Launch Media has announced that it will cut up to 29% of Launch's staff by end of this year. Cuts will include 50 employees, if last week's pink slips are included to the number.
Yahoo says that cuts are made to eliminate redundancies between Yahoo Music and Launch Media. Launch will be merged to Yahoo Music in this year -- Yahoo Music is one of the distribution partners of Pressplay subscription service scheduled to launch this fall.
It's the same old story re-visited. Fifty-two independent artists represented by Copyright.net have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against MP3.com. As before, the lawsuit accuses MP3.com of distributing copyrighted music through their My.MP3.com service which was shut down ages ago. The lawsuit identifies about 1,000 songs, and the plaintiffs are seeking damages of $25,000 per infringed song.
According to the lawsuit streaming songs from the My.MP3.com service were easy to record on hard-disk and then share the songs on P2P services like Napster. But in order to stream the songs from the services the user had to own the actual CD. The last time I checked, it is actually much easier to use a CDDA extractor to convert a CD to MP3 format instead of going through the laborious process of recording "live" streams off the Net.
The motive behind the lawsuit is most likely the fact that having been acquired by Vivendi Universal, MP3.com is more capable, and perhaps also more likely to pay damages to whoever seeks them.
Bertelsmann-owned CD manufacturer Sonopress has inked deals with copy-protection developers SunnComm and Macrovision to include their technology into company's range of CD products.
Sonopress is one of the biggest CD manufacturer in the world and holds the number 1 position in Europe in game CD-ROM manufacturing. Company plans to implement copy-protection technology in its manufacturing facilities in the UK and Spain within a month.
In surprising announcement yesterday, five out of seven major movie studios announced that they have formed a joint on-demand movie service that will launch within 6 months or so. Service is meant for broadband PC users, who can download a movie to their computers and watch it after paying a fee. Pricing is going to be competitive with pay-per-view services, around $3 - $5 for a movie.
Movie studios involved with the service are MGM, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios (owned by Vivendi), Paramount (owned by Viacom) and Warner Bros (owned by AOL TimeWarner). Only two major studios left out are Disney and 20th Century Fox (owned by News Corp) -- Disney has told to press that it will launch a similiar service through its Movies.com web site later this year.
Technology behind the service was developed by Sony during last 2 years in a project dubbed as Moviefly. Some analysts are guessing that this new joint venture might get in serious trouble from lawmakers -- European Commission and U.S. government are currently investigating similiar music services, Pressplay and Musicnet trying to decide do they limit competition. It would also be interesting to know how studios are going to limit the access for the service so that users outside the U.S. wont have the access to these movies (in many cases the movies are released on DVD in States when they arrive to theatres in Europe).
MediaForce, anti-piracy company, released their latest "charts" of most pirated movies in July. Charts have some widespread all-time favourites like Matrix and some new releases as well.
1.Dude, Where's My Car (Twentieth Century Fox)
2.There's Something About Mary (Twentieth Century Fox)
3.Charlie's Angels (Columbia Pictures)
4.Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Paramount Pictures)
5.She's All That (Miramax)
6.The Devil's Advocate (Warner Brothers)
7.The Matrix (Warner Brothers)
8.Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Sony Pictures Classics)
9.Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke (Paramount Pictures)
10.The Emperor's New Groove (Walt Disney Pictures)
Company also released a separate chart of movies that are not available for home distribution yet. Top 5 charts for those is here:
1.The Fast and the Furious (Universal Pictures)
2.Hannibal (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)
3.Shrek (Dreamworks SKG)
4.Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Paramount Pictures)
5.Pearl Harbor (Touchstone Pictures)
MediaForce compiles the chart from various newsgroups, P2P networks and websites.
Now when we're in the dawn of the 3G networks and hi-speed mobile connections, it's time to ask does the mobile broadband really change our life. Digital entertainment industry analyst company, Webnoize, has published to study that proofs that it really does.
Webnoize estimates that American mobile entertainment market will be valued appx. $7 billion in 2006. And if you compare these figures to low percentage of mobile users in the U.S. and high figures (70 - 90% in certain countries) in rest of the world, the value of global mobile entertainment industry is going to be huge within next few years.
Read more from Webnoize (subscription only)
Extremely popular Korean song-swapping service, Soribada ("sea of sound"), is in deep trouble. Two South Korean brothers, Yang Jung-hwan and Yang Il-hwan, who built the application, are charged for copyright violations and might face up to 5 years in jail.
South Korea has extremely high percentage of people who have access to the Net and access to broadband connections -- country has over 20 million Internet users. Soribada was launched in last year and was an instant success. Guys claim that they just wanted to make "South Korea's version of Napster" -- and they succeeded to do that and also succeeded to get themselves in trouble as well.
RIAK (yeah, I know you guessed this one -- Recording Industry Association of Korea) which represents over 100 labels, claims that Soribada has caused labels to lose over $154 million in last year. Although their claims seem pretty weird as South Korea's album sales rised from $292 million in 1999 to $315 million in 2000.
Soribada's technology resembles the architecture of Gnutella and other modern P2P networks, meaning that it doesn't rely on any central server like Napster did -- and therefor the service is basically unstoppable even that they throw the creators in prison.
District court judge Jerome Simandle asked both parties, Video Pipeline and Buena Vista to submit additional documents for the case. Judge tries to decide whether or not to grant a preliminary injunction against Video Pipeline.
Buena Vista sued Video Pipeline earlier this year claiming that Video Pipeline violates Buena Vista's copyrights by providing movie trailers to various retailers in online and offline world. Company has been distributing movie trailers since 1985 and in 1998 company began streaming content for online movie retailers.
Parties have to file the documents before end of this month -- judge tries to decide soon after that about the injunction.
Year 2001 has been a really bad year for memory manufacturers, prices have been falling for many months now due oversupply. Same also goes for flash memory prices -- and what is bad for manufacturers is normally good for consumers.
Sony recently cut their Memory Stick prices for second time this year and other flash memory manufacturers have followed. And this has resulted higher than expected portable MP3 player sales according to News.com. In last year, flash memory used to cost appx. $2 / 1MB and now the price is around $0.40 / 1MB and its expected to fall even further.
Napster filed its legal briefs to appeal an injunction that would require it to block 100 percent of works identified by recording companies as copyrighted. Decision was made by federal court judge Marilyn Patel, but was stayed by appeals court.
Napster also complains about court-appointed technical advisor that judge Marilyn Patel ordered to oversee Napster's copyright-filter development in last spring. Company claims that technical advisor, A.J.Nichols, basically took over CTO's role in the company, involving himself in all technical decisions in the company.
Recording industry is so confident about Napster's case that it wants to avoid full-length trial and filed a request for summary judgment in Tueday asking court to rule that Napster had direct knowledge of the copyright infringement aided by its network of users.
"Napster's Web site advertised the piratical nature of the system by bragging that, `With Napster, you'll never come up empty handed when searching for your favorite music again'," attorneys for the recording industry wrote in their brief.
Napster's attorneys declined to comment.
This morning at around 11AM the one millionth software item was downloaded from AfterDawn.com. Quite fittingly the number 1,000,000 was the DeCSS DVD ripper.
The AfterDawn.com would like to thank all our users for their continuing support. Please do keep visiting our site in the future as well for more interesting software reviews and downloads!
U.S. Justice Department is following the path of European Commission and has began its own investigations focusing on major record label-owned digital music subscription services MusicNet and Pressplay. Justice Department wants to find out if label-owned services violate U.S. competition rules putting other similiar services into impossible position in terms of competition.
MusicNet is owned by RealNetworks, AOL TimeWarner, EMI and BMG and Pressplay is a joint venture between Sony and Vivendi. Small digital music companies have been complaining that labels don't grant licenses to them or price them so that smaller companies can't afford to license the music.
If you have followed the digital music industry in past couple of years, you've noticed many, many court fights between new Internet companies and copyright owners. But now there aren't very many easy targets, maybe Aimster and FastTrack left. But the thing is that digital multimedia as an industry is still very new and doesn't have regulations and therefor copyright owners like RIAA and MPAA want to set the rules so that they can benefit the most from new medium.
Federal court ruled Thursday that traditional radio stations that webcast the same program as they do over the radio frequencies (process is called simulcasting), must pay a separate fee for their webcasting rights in the U.S.. Currently radio stations pay over $300 million annual royalty fees to copyright owners like RIAA. By blocking radio stations from transmitting over the Net, RIAA and court basically hurt many local artists with this ruling, who normally get their only exposure through local radio stations -- and now when these local radio stations have webcasts, possibility that their music is heard also in other cities, increases.
RIAA hasn't told any solid reasons for its request to charge another fee for webcasting (except greed of course), but it seems very likely that it has one very good reason to do so; stations that operate only through Net. Webcasters are currently negotiating with RIAA and Copyright Office to set a national webcasting royalty rate for U.S. webcasters. And RIAA wants to charge much more from webcasters than traditional radio stations pay -- if this would continue, maybe Launch and other webcasters would consider setting up a small local radio stations and just simulcasting that stream as their default stream to avoid higher charges.
Although Napster is beginning to seem like yesterday's news, the recording industry, or the online music businesses for that matter, have little time to rest. A new generation of media sharing applications is rising, and it'll definitely get real big real soon.
According to a recent study by the digital music research firm Webnoize, a popular new file-sharing service FastTrack counted an average 425,000 simultaneous users in July. That accounted for an 89% increase from the 225,000 user average in June. At this rate FastTrack would have an average number of one million simultaneous users in the network by September.
FastTrack's network-client -structure is utilized by eg. KaZaA and MusicCity Morpheus, and the files shared using each of these clients is visible to every user on the FastTrack network. Currently there are over 550,000 users on the network sharing 309,320GB in music, videos, pictures, and software applications.
You can find out more about the advanced features of the FastTrack network at the FastTrack homepage.
Yesterday's announcement from MusicCity.com was something that most of the people just ignored, but when you actually stop and think about it, the announcement was pretty huge. MusicCity.com announced that 24/7 Media will represent MusicCity.com's Morpheus P2P client's ad sales exclusively.
Thing is that Morpheus is clearly illegal if you determine their application by same terms as Napster was measured -- it allows users to share copyrighted music, movies, games, etc.. And in other hand, 24/7 Media is one of the biggest online advertising companies in the world -- this announcement makes Morpheus to look like very legal service. Pretty bold move from 24/7..
MP3.com announced that it has achieved positive pro forma earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) for the first time -- the company posted EBITDA of $662,000. The second quarter revenues decreased by 13% from last year and were $17.5 million. The company was able to cut its pro forma net loss 27% to $1.6 million ($.02 per share). The company net loss was $11.6 million, down 93% from net loss of $177.1 in the second quarter of 2000.
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