News archive (1 / 2002)

DivXNetworks, a creator of DivX4 video compression technology (note, the four, not any of the earlier versions which are based on hacked Microsoft WMV codec), has announced that it has signed yet another deal with content providers.

The Jim Henson Co., who owns the legendary The Muppet Show TV series is going to use DivXNetworks' DivX video technology in its upcoming Muppets' 25th anniversary campaign. Company will offer promotional CDs that contain Muppet clips encoded with DivX4 technology.

The Japanese music industry is facing the same problem as it's counterparts in the U.S. and Europe -- on-line music swapping. As always, the increased number of broadband internet subscribers, the introduction of song-swapping services, and a decline in record sales has forced the Japan Phonograph Record Association to consider countermeasures to get things under control.

The measures considered are familiar to everyone following the events in the U.S. -- suing the song-swapping service vendors, issuing copy-protected CDs, and offering pay-per-download music services.

A Japanese version of a service called File Rogue was launched last November and has since reached a user base of over 45,000. The fact that users can now fetch songs in Japanese has caused a turmoil in the Japanese music industry.

President of MMO Japan Ltd., the company behind File Rogue, Michihito Matsuda commented on the topic, "We are asking our subscribers not to violate copyrights. If our service itself is called illegal, then, it is also illegal to sell cars which can run at a speed of 180 kilometers per hour."

The successful lawsuits against Napster and other file-sharing services in the U.S. has encouraged the Japan Phonograph Record Association to study civil and criminal lawsuits against makers of sharing software and service providers. It's probably just a matter of time before we see actual lawsuits in Japan as well.

According to CNet, the major movie studio-owned online movie service Movielink has appointed a new CEO to run its operations towards launch that is expected to happen in latter half of year 2002.

New CEO, Jim Ramo, a former executive of DirecTV, says that company will focus on building the infrastructure and brand required to launch the service successfully.

Movielink, formerly known as MovieFly, is backed by five major movie studios; Sony Pictures, Viacom's Paramount, MGM, AOL Time Warner's Warner Bros. and Vivendi Universal. Service will offer movies from all five studios to consumers to download to their PCs instead of streaming them. The decision to offer movies as downloads instead of streams is extremely good -- who wants to sacrifice quality of the video because of network glitches or even get the movie cut off when network connection dies.

Company still has to decide what will be the format of the online video -- analysts are already placing bets to ISO-compliant MPEG-4 with certain security additions.

BMG became the first of major record labels to sign a distribution agreement with RioPort who has been developing a technology that would allow users to purchase music from the Net to be used in consumer electronics devices instead of regular PCs.

RioPort says also that it is about to sign deals with other four major record labels "shortly". RioPorts d2d (direct-2-device) technology is going to be implemented to various consumer electronics products such as portable digital audio players, car stereos and mobile phones. Manufacturers supporting RioPort's technology include Samsung, Texas Instruments and SONICBlue.

RioPort's technology obeys rules set by content owner, such as how many times one track can be downloaded before it is destroyed and has to be purchased again. RioPort says that at least 22,000 BMG songs will be available to its service when it's about to launch in March 2002 and more will be added later.

Pressplay, a music subscription service onwed jointly by Sony and Vivendi, has signed three new contracts today in order to improve its service in technological and content areas.

First deal that was announced was with MediaUnbound -- company develops customization services and Pressplay's deal means that now Pressplay users can receive musical recommendations from the service based on their listening habits.

Other deals were related to actual content itself -- deal with Broadcast Music Inc. (American performing rights organization) gives Pressplay users an access to appx. 4.5M recorded live performances from various artists.

Other content deal was made with TVT Records to use label's music in Pressplay's service. TVT's artists include such names as Nine Inch Nails and XTC.

Aimster, a P2P software maker that piggybacks with AOL's Instant Messenger, has changed its name to Madster and gave the rights to the name Aimster to AOL.

Change of name was made because of a lawsuit that AOL filed against Aimster in last year. AOL complained to an arbitration panel that found in May, 2001 that Aimster's name violates AOL's AIM trademark and that Aimster has to give up the name.

Aimster is still in trouble, because of the lawsuit recording industry and movie industry filed against it in last year.

Recording industry and Napster jointly asked and were granted a 30-day stay in their copyright infrigement case. Two record labels, EMI's Capitol Records and Virgin Records opted out from the stay request.

According to an order issued by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, the case will not resume until February 17th. Request for stay can be understood as a sign that both parties are near of settlement in their case that was launched in 1999 by labels against Napster.

Napster which operated hugely popular P2P network was shut down in July 2001 and launched its new legal subscription service for beta testers in this month. Company is desperate to seek a closure to its on-going lawsuits and also to get license agreements with major record labels to use their material in its legal service.

Vivendi-owned digital music site MP3.com launched its own version of Pressplay subscription service today. So, MP3.com is now fourth site to distribute Pressplay's service through its website -- others are MSN, Yahoo and Roxio.

Pressplay is owned by Vivendi and Sony and has music from both record labels and also from various indie labels and from EMI which is also the only major record label to distribute music to both services, Pressplay and MusicNet.

Yesterday P2P software developer KaZaA announced that it has sold its website, software, program code, FastTrack license and trademarks to an Australian company called Sharman Networks.

KaZaA suspended its software downloads last week, but yesterday, shortly after the announcement, the software was again available for download -- and according to KaZaA's software download counter, the P2P client was downloaded 2 times every second in yesterday afternoon :-)

KaZaA suspended distribution of its P2P client last week, due to an on-going legal battle with Dutch recording industry associations. Buma/Stemra, a Dutch recording industry association, sued KaZaA last year, and Dutch court ordered KaZaA to filter out illegal files from its system. The problem with the ruling was that KaZaA is a non-centralized network that cannot be controlled.

KaZaA's main owners are the same people who also own FastTrack, the company who has developed the network-architecture behind KaZaA, Morpheus and Grokster.

Both Sharman Networks and KaZaA declined to give comments about the deal or disclose any financial details.

Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia and Finnish telco Elisa Communications have jointly developed a service where customers can buy secure music downloads to their cellphones.

Service is available for Nokia 5510 cell phones that have bundled digital music player and to other models with Nokia Music Player HDR-1 extension module.

Customers can pay their downloads by credit card, using their online banking accounts or by adding the payments to their monthly cellphone bills.

Tracks are first downloaded to users' computer and trasferred to cellphone from there using a cable provided with 5510 and HDR-1. Sound quality matches with regular MP3 tracks.

Service is available at Emma.fm and is available for Finnish customers only.

Stanford University bowed under pressure from Motion Picture Association of America and shut down their dorm's Gnutella server that students have been using to trade files over the P2P network.

Stanford University received a letter from MPAA's CEO Jack Valenti in December where he expressed his concern about the server and Stanford's attitude towards online piracy.

Stanford maintains its original attitude that Gnutella network itself is not illegal, but what users use it for might violate certain copyright holders' rights.

According to News.com article, Pressplay hopes to develop a Mac version of its subscription service sometime this year, although company doesn't make any promises yet.

Both major record label backed subscription services, MusicNet and Pressplay, are now available only for Windows users.

Dutch P2P service provider KaZaa has removed download links to its software from its website. Move comes while KaZaa is still in middle of court fight and negotiations with Dutch record labels and their representative groups. This message was posted on KaZaa's site:

Download of the KaZaA Media Desktop software is temporarily and voluntarily suspended pending Dutch court decision on January 31. We apologise for the inconvenience. Please check back at www.kazaa.com for more information.

KaZaa was sued by music industry in November and Dutch judge ordered KaZaa to shut down in December -- KaZaa continues to operate as usual, but now company just doesn't allow new downloads for its software.

KaZaa is based on FastTrack's P2P technology which is also used by MusicCity's Morpheus and Grokster. FastTrack's technology is server-independent which means that even if courts order all the service providers to shut down, the network will live.

Jupiter Media Metrix cut its five-year forecast for the size of the online music industry by 11.3%. In last summer, JMM predicted that online music market will be worth of $6.2 billion by 2006 and now their estimate is that by 2006 the market is worth of $5.5 billion.

Out of $5.5 billion, JMM estimates that subscription services will account appx. $1 billion and one-off music downloads appx. $600M. Rest of the amount comes from sales of more traditional CDs (and their future alternatives like SACDs and DVD-Audio discs) through websites and online services.

Jupiter cut its forecast mainly because of the weak economy and because it predicted earlier that major record label -backed subscription services MusicNet and Pressplay would have been launched by summer/fall 2001 -- and they were launched in December 2001.

Listen.com became a first non-record label -backed service to offer music downloads from three major record labels when it signed deals in last week with BMG and EMI and today with Sony to include companies' music catalogs into its Rhapsody subscription service.

EMI is now the only record label to license its music to all three big subscription services; Rhapsody, MusicNet and Pressplay.

Ok, now probably everybody knows that Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager, might end up spending two years in jail because Norwegian authorities are about to sue him because of DeCSS. DeCSS is a program that allows decrypting CSS encryption found on DVD-Video discs.

It is commonly told "fact" that Johansen was the author who created DeCSS program and that's why he is being sued. But if you read this article written in November, 1999 you find out that he really wasn't the guy who cracked the CSS encryption.

Two mathematics professors, Akram Aldroubi and Karlheinz Aldroubi, claim that their new theory could, if implemented, change the world of digital "lossy" encoding upside down.

"Our theory -- which is based on a lot of beautiful new mathematics -- can produce more accurate digital representations of all kinds of samples, including those that classical methods handle poorly or cannot handle at all," Aldroubi was quoted as saying. "It generates algorithms that are fast, efficient, stable, and robust."

Definately a very interesting -- lossy compression that is based on new thinking and focusing on new methods of digital representation.

Full story from NewsFactor.

Roxio, maker of Easy CD Creator - one of the most popular CD writer tools, has threatened to sue Finnish Poikosoft who develops and sells one of the best CD ripping applications Easy CDDA Extractor.

Issue is with the fact that both products have pretty similiar names and their functionalities overlap slightly as Easy CD Creator also allows MP3 burning and ripping.

Mr. Poikolainen who owns Poikosoft, told CD-RW.org 'Basicly I told them to go **** theirselves'.

You can read both letters Roxio sent to Poikosoft from CD-RW.org.

Norwegian author of DeCSS program, Jon Johansen, might face upto 2 years in prison, it emerged yesterday. He was originally arrested in 1999 because of the DeCSS program, but nobody couldn't figure out what law he was exactly breaking by writing a software that decrypts the CSS copy-protection found from DVD-Video discs (no, Norway doesn't have DMCA or anything similiar).

Now, under extreme pressure from Hollywood studios, someone has finally figured out how they can sue Johansen -- Norway's economic crime unit accuses that he tried to break through a security system to gain access to material he's not entitled to, in this case a movie on DVD. This law is originally meant for hackers who break into bank's computer systems and steal information -- but all the DVDs that Johansen used were his own and now they're saying that he's not entitled to the content of those discs?

"It did come as quite a surprise," said Robin Gross, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF has been helping Johansen with the case since 1999.

And of course we all remember that DeCSS itself doesn't even work for movies released after January 2000.

Microsoft signed a multi-year partnership contract with Sonic Solutions today that focuses on Sonic's AuthorScript technology that is been widely used as a DVD authoring solution among DVD-R drive owners.

Analysts assume that Microsoft will bundle DVD recording and authoring capabilities to XP very soon -- rival Apple introduced DVD burning bundled with OSX in last year and Microsoft's WinXP only has CD recording capabilities, licensed from Roxio.

Napster's CEO Konrad Hilbers told on Monday to musicians, lawyers and music industry executives that Congress should force major record labels to license their music catalogs to smaller independent music firms with a mandatory per song rate if labels don't agree to license their music otherwise.

Napster, which is trying to implement it's upcoming legal music service, is struggling because so far it hasn't signed any licensing deals with major record labels. And opening a music service without major record label content isn't something that's going to work very well.

In their never-ending battle for market share, both RealNetworks and Microsoft have made significant steps towards your livingroom. Both companies have made technological partnership announcements during this week.

Microsoft announced yesterday that few DVD manufacturers, including Matsushita (who manufactures brands such as Panasonic), Apex Digital and Toshiba, will support Microsoft's WMA audio format in their upcoming players alongside with MP3 -- yet another small victory for Microsoft on its mission to try to kill MP3 as the most popular audio format.

RealNetworks also announced slightly similiar deals today. Upcoming TiVo models will include Real's RealOne player capabilities and consumers can subscribe to RealOne's $9.95 a month service and use their TiVo to stream music and webcasts from the service. Real also followed Microsoft's path when it announced deals with chipmakers, including Hitachi and Philips, to include support for Real's audio and video formats in their DVD decoding chipsets. Microsoft announced similiar deal for Windows Media Audio and Video formats in last month with chipmakers such as STMicroelectronics, Zoran and Cirrus Logic.

Rep. Rick Boucher said on Monday that he plans to introduce a bill that would remove section 1201 from controversial DMCA law. Section 1201 currently makes it illegal to circumvent a copy-protection, even for personal, legal use. This is also the exact same section that is being used against websites that distributed DeCSS program in late 1990's in the U.S. -- DeCSS breaks copy-protection found on DVD-Video discs.

"I'm very concerned about the DMCA," Boucher said. "There's an increasing number of instances in which unjust results are reached."

Last week he sent out letters to major record labels questioning whether copy-protected audio CDs violate AHRA law that allows personal copies of music CDs.

...our readers in the U.S., start sending supporting letters to this guy, he obviously understands something :-)

AfterDawn.com congratulates Juhani (Che, our DVD review guy) and his girlfriend Nina, who became daddy and mommy today. It looks like we have to start our own day nursery for our staff :-)

Today Rep. Rick Boucher sent a letter to recording industry executives asking if the copy-protected CDs violate Audio Home Recording Act from year 1992 that allows consumers to make personal copies of the CDs that they've purchased -- in return recording industry receives few cents for each blank CD and cassette that are sold in U.S.

This is the first time when this issue is raised by a House Representative and will definately make the issue of copy-protected CDs more public. All the major record labels have already experienced with copy-protected CDs either in the U.S. or in Europe and Universal was the first one to openly publish a copy-protected CD in the U.S. in December.

RioPort, a service provider spun off from S3, will release its new product range on next week that would allow commercial content services such as MusicNet and Pressplay to set rules how users can transfer music they've downloaded from the services to their portable music players.

Currently one of the major problems with both major record label-backed music subscription services is the fact that files users download from the service can't be transferred to portable music players. This has been done because once you allow users to transfer the music, you take the risk that the files can be transferred to unauthorized third party.

Now RioPort claims that its new service alongside with a code libraries for portable device manufacturers will solve this problem, making music transfers secure and reliable to portable devices as well.

Read more from here.

In its commentary for News.com, Gartner analysts predict that P2P as a business tool will be split into three segments and that P2P software developers will have to find their niche to fill within these three segments. The segments, according to Gartner, are:

• File sharing and distribution of digital content.
• Enterprise computing architecture.
• Massively distributed computer processing.

...first one is probably the most traditional method, but as a business application there are really few players in this area. Some skinning web sites have been beta testing distributed content distribution in order to cut costs, but that's pretty much it so far. Also, the third one probably everyone knows at least on some level -- SETI@Home is probably the world's best-known distributed "computer".

Anyway, read the full commentary from here.

World's best search engine Google published its annual Zeitgeist charts today. Charts reveal the most popular search terms in various categories. Obviously the most interesting category for us is the Top 10 MP3 Music Services chart. Here goes:

1. morpheus
2. napster
3. gnutella
4. kazaa
5. audiogalaxy
6. imesh
7. limewire
8. bearshare
9. aimster
10. mp3pro

...pretty impressive, 9 P2P services made it to the top 10 and only non-P2P service is the Thomson/Fraunhofer's new MP3 standard, mp3pro.

Source: Google