Slashdot has a short story about a project that would allow running a pirate radio without a real possibility for content owners to track the origin of the stream.
The project, which is explained in here, is based on P2P mechanism, so that each individual who listens the stream, will also rebroadcast the stream to other users. This method will reduce the bandwidth required from origin station to very minimum amount and also makes tracking the amount of listeners the station has, virtually impossible.
It looks like that the manufacturers of the latest generation of game consoles are very aggressive towards MOD-chip developers and manufacturers. They are of course protecting the interest of game developers because big game titles are one big factor in console’s success. On the other hand I dare to say that the amazing success story of the original Playstation was very much supported by the fact that MOD-chips and copied games were easily available.
One of the groups working on a mod chip for the Xbox has pulled the plug on its project following legal consultations. The group, Enigmah-X, had hoped to create the second XBox chip to go into circulation, following the release of the first working chip, the Xtender, for the system in May.
However, earlier this week their site was replaced with the following message: "After speaking to lawyers we feel that we must not do this project anymore. There are many other chips and methods for guys to play with anyway so have fun and good luck to everyone out there."
Microsoft is known to have looked into legal methods to shut down mod chip production in the past. However, only Sony has successfully taken on the creators of mod chips in court – the company forced Channel Technologies, the makers of the Messiah PS2 mod chip, to shut down its activities before the chip was commercially released.
New York -- Warner Music Group is lowering the suggested retail price (SRP) of its DVD-Audio titles by as much as 35 percent to make the releases a more attractive option for consumers.
A spokesperson for the label group told Medialine that its DVD-Audio SRPs will now largely range from $16.98 to $18.98, roughly in line with CD list prices of new releases.
Warner is maintaining its DVD-Audio release schedule of several titles per month in a variety of genres through the end of the year, the spokesperson added.
California congressman Howard Berman is currently preparing a bill that would ultimately allow copyright owners and their representative agencies, such as RIAA and MPAA, to block P2P networks by using technological weapons. Such weapons include denial-of-service attacks, flooding the networks with false files, jamming the networks by causing fake traffic peaks, etc.
Unsurprisingly, RIAA's spokesman already announced that they will support the concept of the bill. Tactics that the bill would allow copyright owners to use include sending fake download requests to file sharers and spoofing -- meaning that copyright owners would create fake files with desirable filenames and share those through P2P networks.
Internet giant Yahoo! announced today that it will scale down many of its streaming services, shutting down streaming video news service FinanceVision and Yahoo! Music.
Yahoo! began its streaming media experiments back in "crazy years" of late 1990s by purchasing Broadcast.com for a whopping $5 billion. Since then, company has acquired also one of the Net music pioneers, Launch.com, for much more moderate $12M back in 2001 and has spread its video streaming services to news, etc. Most of these business ventures have been supported by advertisements and as we (well, at least we who run websites) know, advertisements just don't pay the bills at the moment. Hence the shutdowns.
Yahoo! Radio rebroadcasted many traditional radio stations who don't have their own presence in the Net. Yahoo! said also that its Launch.com service wont be affected by the changes and also assured that Launch will stay its top priority in streaming markets.
According to a Red Herring's article, Microsoft has been developing a special version of XBox which would include Microsoft's UltimateTV.
UltimateTV has been one of the many not-so-successful Microsoft campaigns to conquer new market sectors. UltimateTV is ultimately :) a competitor for TiVo and ReplayTV. Also, the bundle would bring a static income flow to Microsoft from UltimateTV subscribers as well, since using UltimateTV costs $9.95 a month.
Anyway, Microsoft obviously sees this as a chance to boost both, not-as-successful-as-hoped products by bundling them into one unit. Let's see how it goes..
On2 Technologies has announced that it will open-source its multimedia player and server products in addition to its open-sourced VP3 video technology. Company will also hand over the development maintenance responsibility to Xiph.org Foundation, the same body who controls the development of OGG Vorbis audio compression format.
Basically On2 and Xiph.org are trying to develop a complete multimedia suite that would compete against MPEG-4 and RealNetworks' and Microsoft's multimedia delivery products. It also offers a free alternative to those formats mentioned -- specially to MPEG-4 which licensing model is still in middle of chaotic negotiations between various patent holders and companies willing to license the technology.
Xiph.org will be sponsored by On2, who obviously hopes that growing interest towards the new multimedia suite will eventually increase sales of company's proprietary solutions which include more advanced video codec, VP5. Xiph.org estimates that it will take a year before the OGG bitstream can include both, OGG Vorbis audio and VP3 video. But then we should see a rival to the technologies that are based on heavily patented MPEG-4 technology (such as DivX and XviD).
U.S. second largest consumer electronics retailer, Circuit City, is phasing out its VHS selection in many of its stores and plans to increase significantly the DVD selection instead, says Friday's Washington Post.
Move comes after American consumers have adopted the digital format as their number one choice. VCR sales have declined during the last year while DVD player penetration is currently at 30 per cent and is rising rapidly.
U.S. number one consumer electronics retailer, Best Buy, is not going to drop VHS yet, but is going to increase the DVD selection dramatically while keeping the current VHS offering at current level.
Librarian of Congress, James Billington, has set the new webcasting royalty rates and unfortunately it seems that the new webcasting rates are going to kill majority of independent web radio stations even that the rates were cut by half from those originally proposed by CARP(Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel).
Webcasters were hoping that LoC would have changed the royalty rates from flat fees to revenue percentage, which would have been more reasonable for small webcasters who now face a situation where their revenue is smaller than the royalty rates. New rates are set to $0.07 per performance per listener and those rates are applied retroactively from October, 1998 and first payments are due 20th of October, 2002. Same rates apply for Internet-only broadcasting and re-broadcasting of "real" radio stations. Various web broadcasters have already announced that they will shut down soon or have already shut down their broadcasts because of the rates.
U.S. Reps. Jay Inslee and Rick Boucher are seeking a legal action to change the outcome of the royalty fiasco where Librarian was forced to use "willing-buyer/willing-seller" method to determine the correct royalty rate without a possibility to consider that the current webcasting marketplace is already extremely flawed. Reps said in their joint press release: "We will be considering legislation to change the standard from "willing-buyer/willing-seller" for Internet radio to the traditional fair market formula used by other CARPs. In addition, we want to ensure that all future Carps must take into consideration small business concerns and allow effective participation of small, niche and noncommercial entities. We believe these standards will allow for the development of a viable Internet radio industry and ensure that artists, writers, and record labels are fairly compensated."
Name from the past, PlayMedia Systems, is here to haunt the MP3 community yet again. Company made its name well-known back in 1999, when it sued Nullsoft for using PlayMedia's code in their mega-popular MP3 player, WinAMP. This time, PlayMedia says that Napster can't be simply just sold to Bertelsmann, because it includes PlayMedia's technology.
Company filed documents to court on Tuesday, stating that PlayMedia created the MP3 playing technology used in original Napster client and also was partly responsible of the security features of still-under-development subscription service and its client. And according to PlayMedia, Napster's license doesn't allow Napster to sell its license to Bertelsmann.
So, to put it simply, company is trying to squeeze few bucks out of Big Boy, German media giant Bertelsmann.
RealNetworks has finally launched European version of its highly popular content subscription service, RealONE SuperPass. European content providers who have teamed with Real include BBC and UEFA(for our American readers: United European Football Association).
Monthly subscription fees are slightly higher than those in the U.S., ranging from $14.95 to $21.95 a month while American version costs $9.95 to $19.95. According to a News.com article on the subject, Real aims to target "countries where English is a dominant language, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Scandinavia". I'm just slightly interested to know where this mysterious English-speaking majority in Scandinavia lives or are they just hiding very, very well?-) Anyway, so their target audience is in the countries where virtually everybody understands English and where broadband connectivity is high. Real expects that sports will be the major force driving people to subscribe to its service, just like it has been in the U.S. where Real has various exclusive content deals with sports associations.
Philips has demonstrated the world’s first fully functional miniature optical disc drive using blue laser technology. Up to 1 Gbyte of data can be stored on a single-sided optical disc of just 3 cm in diameter, matching the size constraints of portable devices such as digital cameras, mobile phones, PDAs and portable Internet devices. This prototype illustrates Philips’ leadership in optical storage technology, which is driven by superb media robustness and the low cost per Mbyte of the storage medium, making it optimally suited for large-scale distribution of pre-recorded content.
Drastic size reduction
Recent advances in blue laser technology, and Philips innovations in the area of optical storage media and miniaturised opto-mechanics are the ideal ingredients for small form factor optical drives. The resulting high storage density can be exploited to reduce the disc size while still providing a high storage capacity (e.g. 1 Gbyte on a disc of 3 cm diameter, i.e. more than on a present CD ROM). To fulfil the stringent space requirements of portable devices, all dimensions need to be reduced, particularly the building-height. This issue is addressed by the drastically miniaturized optical system now demonstrated by Philips.
FullAudio announced yesterday that it has signed a deal with Bertelsmann Music Group in order to use BMG's music in its music subscription service MusicNow. Company also told that it has finalized its third round of funding and has raised $36M from investors so far.
FullAudio delivers music subscription services to radio giant Clear Channel's numerous websites and has now licensing deals with four major record labels (with all but Sony) just like its rival Listen.com has (Listen.com doesn't have licensing deal with Vivendi Universal yet).
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is tocrack-down on even more businesses using illegal software.
The BSA's decision to get tough with a "hard core of businesses" which think they are "beyond the law" follows hard on the heels of a report into the alleged global rise of software piracy.
In particular, the BSA wants to target those criminal organisations that are using increasingly sophisticated methods to distribute illegal software on the Internet.
Said Mike Newton, campaign manager for BSA in the UK: "This is a strong response from the European software industry, whose tolerance levels have been tested considerably with a growing piracy rate.
"Clearly ongoing education and public policy work is having an impact but we cannot ignore the fact that a hard core of businesses using pirated software believe they are beyond the law."
Last year the BSA undertook enforcement actions involving 6,500 European companies, but says this barely scratches the surface.
Last week the BSA claimed that global software piracy cost the industry almost $11 billion last year.
RIAA(Recording Industry Association of America) and NMPA(National Music Publishers' Association) announced yesterday that they have reached an out-of-court settlement with AudioGalaxy, a P2P company which owns AudioGalaxy Satellite P2P software and the network.
RIAA, NMPA and the Harry Fox Agency sued AudioGalaxy in May over copyright infringements. Under the settlement, AudioGalaxy is required to obtain a permission from copyright owners before it can allow users to distribute music through its network.
Basically the settlement makes AudioGalaxy useless for P2P users -- when the changes will come in effect, the network will become a clone of something that Napster is at the moment: a central-distributed indie music software with no users using it.
1982 marks the year that the audio CD was born. It was on August 17 of that year that PolyGram produced the world's first mass-produced audio CD containing classical music: Claudio Arrau's rendition on the piano of various waltzes by Frederic Chopin. The first pop music CD by the same producer was ABBA's album "The Visitors." Starting with 376,000 "silver discs" in the first year, Universal Music, which is the successor to PolyGram, has now produced more than 1.8 billion CDs
Bayer developed the technology for compact discs together with Philips and PolyGram. A customized Makrolon® polycarbonate was the plastic starting material, which to this day - having been modified a number of times - acts as a base material for many electronic storage media.
In 1982, Sony introduced the first CD player in Japan. The world's first audio CD was Billy Joel's album "52nd Street" (Sony Music). The audio CD took off as soon as it was launched: in the USA alone 30,000 CD players and 800,000 music CDs were sold in the first year.
The Red Book - World Standard for Audio CDs
Philips and Sony worked almost simultaneously and initially independently on their own CD projects. Both companies started off with their own individual development programs, but finally agreed upon a common CD standard, which stipulates norms and specifications on data storage, error correction, etc., in the so-called Red Book (IEC-908). This standard has enabled every CD player and every CD-ROM drive to be able to play any audio CD.
The five major record companies have been hit with a class-action lawsuit charging that new CDs designed to thwart Napster-style piracy are defective and should either be barred from sale or carry warning labels.
The suit was brought this week in Los Angeles Superior Court by class-action specialists at the law firm Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach on behalf of two Southern California consumers.
It marks the first legal challenge of CD copy-prevention technology to "tackle the issue on an industry-wide basis," Alan Mansfield, an attorney representing the two named plaintiffs in the complaint, said Friday.
It also follows criticism from some members of Congress and from Dutch consumer electronics maker Philips, co-creator of the compact disc, that the anti-piracy CDs are technically flawed and could impinge on consumers' rights to copy music for their own use.
The suit names all five of the major record companies--Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment and AOL Time Warner's Warner Music.
New Scientist has an interesting article which reveals that super-popular Harry Potter movie which was released on DVD in May, doesn't have Macrovision copy protection at all.
Macrovision's video protection can be found from virtually all DVD discs and commercial VHS tapes. Protection mechanism basically messes up with video sync signal and makes the video signal "unstable" so VCRs and DVD-recorders (stand-alone ones) can't record the video signal. And selling such VCRs in the U.S. which would circumvent this copy protection is illegal.
Now, since market is full of small "black boxes" that remove the Macrovision signal for you Warner has obviously thought that it might actually be cheaper not to include the Macrovision on the disc and see how it effects on piracy. Adding Macrovision copy protection costs appx. $0.05 a disc. Macrovision is removed at least from USA and UK release versions of the DVD.
Alliance Entertainment, a privately held company which provides various online services in music sector, has agreed to buy one of the best-known old online music companies, Liquid Audio.
The financial terms of the contract were not disclosed, but the information came only week after Liquid Audio's shareholders called the company to put itself up for sale. Company made revenue of $135,000 in its first quarter and meanwhile lost a whopping $4.9M.
Liquid Audio has developed its secure music format and DRM system for years -- it was a pioneering company in this emerging area of business back in 1990s. Company provides secure tracks from major record labels to online retailers such as Amazon.com.
We have previously reported about MP3 files as potential virus carriers and now another ‘safe’ format joins the group of potentially dangerous files. This time it’s the JPEG (.jpg) image format.
Antivirus companies warned on Thursday of a new virus that communicates through digital images, but security experts aren't sure how much of a threat this latest evolutionary branch of malicious code poses.
Dubbed the first "JPEG infector" by security company Network Associates, the W32/Perrun virus has two parts: infected JPEG images that contain the virus's payload and a viral program that extracts the code from the images and infects other JPEGs on the system as they are opened.
Because PCs have to be infected by the extractor virus before any code hidden in image files can affect them, the program is more a computer-science curiosity than a threat, said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of Network Associates' antivirus emergency response team.
"We are not saying that this is a problem," Gullotto said. "We gave it a low risk, but we haven't seen anything like this before." A digital image carrying code for W32/Perrun is easy to spot, he said, because the image is corrupted by the new code.
Two of the world's biggest record labels, Japanese Sony and French Vivendi Universal, are about to offer an alternative that music freaks have begged for a long time.
Two companies have finally understood, at least slightly, that they simply must offer a cheap and flexible alternative to P2P tools if they wish to fight Net piracy at all. Universal has announced that it has plans to launch a service in this summer which would offer single music tracks for download for $0.99 each and albums for $9.99 each.
Tracks will be sold through retailers like Amazon and Best Buy and according to Universal, certain tracks and albums will be released on the Net before they become available in CD format.
But definately the most encouraging fact is that the tracks will be in high quality and that Universal will allow users to burn the tracks to CD -- a practice that all the record labels have so far banned.
Sony has also announced that it will offer much more tracks for download and that those tracks can also be burned to CDs and that they will drop the price of one download to $1.49.
This is definately good news, it sounds like the companies have finally understood at least something how people want to get their music -- without stupid restrictions like banning the CD burning. Only problem is still the price; is $0.99 a pop low enough. But at least those -- and I know that there are many of those -- who want to get their music legally, can do so.
According to a study by IFPI, an international recording industry's lobbying group, professional CD piracy increased dramatically in 2001. Number of pirated CDs sold increased from 640 million in 2000 to 950 million in 2001.
IFPI claims that the main reason behind the trend is the fact that blank CDRs and fast CD burners have become cheaper and more widely available, so virtually anyone can setup a small CD manufacturing plant in their garage. IFPI estimates that the CD piracy is roughly split in half by professional CD manufacturing plants and "garage-piracy".
Owners of the $1,800 DVR-7000 device are experiencing a glitch, the company confirmed Tuesday. The problem doesn't affect the recording of discs, but it will prevent the players from functioning properly, according to Pioneer spokeswoman Amy Friend. Friend would not give further details on the nature of the glitch, but she said it could be corrected with a simple upgrade.
"The problem is not likely to impact the vast majority of customers...it could affect the playing of discs, but it's unlikely," Friend said. "It's a software programming issue and is corrected with an upgrade that we're distributing to dealers so they can get it to their customers."
Pioneer has sold 50,000 players in Japan and 9,000 elsewhere, mostly in Europe and North America, according to Friend. Sony's RDR-A1 recorders, which were manufactured by Pioneer, are also affected by the glitch. So far, Sony has only sold the player in Japan and has not set a ship date for the United States.
Friend added that for consumers who purchase the drive after June 10, the glitch in the players will already be fixed.
Net media giant Terra Lycos launched a co-branded version of Listen.com's Rhapsody service today, dubbed as Lycos Rhapsody.
Service offer is slightly different than the one what Listen.com currently offers -- you get a streaming radio version for free, you pay $5 a month for a version which has 50 commercial-free streaming radio stations and for $10 you get the same 50 channels, but also the ability to skip tracks and save tracks to your online "media library".
Lycos used to be a pioneering web portal in music biz back in last millennium and their Lycos Music service added with their web-based MP3 search engine and their acquired Sonique MP3 player made some nice features available to regular Net users a long time before other major service providers had anything similiar. Unfortunately Terra Lycos's financial problems virtually killed Sonique and lots of other creative features they used to have. But at least this deal will make sure that Listen.com has some major portal to back up their fight against major record label-backed subscription services, Pressplay and MusicNet.
Rhapsody currently has content from four major record labels and from various indie labels -- only major record label missing from its offering is currently Vivendi Universal.
Just wanted to post a little note to mention that it's been now three years since we opened our site to public in 1999. Since that we've seen Internet bubble to burst, tons of sites to disappear and digital multimedia to become an everyday thing for most of the Net users.
In three years, we've seen our site to grow from a small MP3 site to a quite a big digital multimedia portal. Currently we have appx. 3M page impressions a month, almost 20,000 registered members and we've served over 3.5M software downloads during the last three years.
Anyway, I would just like to thank all of you for making this site what it is today. Hopefully the next years will be as interesting as the last three years have been.
The brand new open source web browser Mozilla 1.0 did get quite a bit of attention from the media. Generally the feedback has been very positive.
The release of Mozilla 1.0 was reported by most tech news sites including BetaNews, CNET News.com, evolt.org, eWEEK, ExtremeTech, Geek.com Geek News, IDG.net, internetnews.com, Internet Week, LinuxMAX, Linux Today, MacSlash, MozillaNews, NeoWin.net, Slashdot, The Register, vnunet.com, WinInfo and ZDNet News. More mainstream news sites are also taking notice. BBC News has an article and smh.com.au (the online edition of The Sydney Morning Herald) reported on Mozilla a few days ago.
Taking a slightly different approach, PC Magazine marks the release with an interview with Mitchell Baker while ITBusiness.ca talks with Mike Shaver. Meanwhile, kuro5hin has an opinion piece about the release.
Mozilla 1.0 scored 7 out of 10 in CNET's review, which describes Mozilla as "the best free alternative to Microsoft IE." Meanwhile, eWEEK's analysis notes that "Mozilla makes it possible for any developer or company to customize the browser to be whatever they need it to be." NewsForge also discusses Mozilla's customizability. In addition, there's a Slashdot piece on the Mozilla 1.0 reviews.
SHEFAYIM, Israel, June 4, 2002 – Hexalock, Ltd., a leader in CD-ROM copy protection technology and digital rights management solutions announced today the release of version 2.0 of its CD-ROM Copy Protection Product Line. Introduced, as version 1.0 In September 2001, the product line has undergone extensive testing and utilization with key publishers which has resulted in this major product upgrade.
"Based on the excellent results and feedback from content owners and publishers, with version 1.0, we fine tuned the product to fully meet their needs, and significantly upgraded product functionality as well," said Eyal Cohen, Chief Technology Officer, HexaLock, Ltd. "Product testing with Version 2.0 has shown outstanding copy protection results against the latest copying/"cloning" software and hacking tools while at the same time providing excellent compatibility with all CD drives tested. Full test results can be found at our website www.hexalock.com."
HexaLock CD-ROM copy protection is easily implemented by publishers via the use of a Software Development Kit (SDK) or Auto Lock Utility and requires no hardware modifications or quality assurance procedure changes at Authorized Replicators. "It was essential that we maintain the ease of use and integration characteristics of our products as we upgraded these utilities to version 2.0," said John Stevens, Vice President, Business Development, HexaLock, Ltd. “We are pleased that we were able to accomplish these objectives while at the same time providing our customers with world-class copy protection."
It was good while it lasted -- and it didn't last too long this time. The movie site Film88 which we wrote about yesterday has already been taken down by MPAA's international arm, MPA.
Apparently the operation was run from Iran, but as Iran's net connections aren't really in the top league, the site was physically hosted in Netherlands. And MPA had already contacted site's Dutch ISP and asked them to close the site -- and they did.
So, now we're just waiting for the site's next reincarnation in some other physical location -- Sealand, anyone?
Our statistics server crashed last night and we decided to change to a new statistics software. Currently we're importing our old logs to the new system and because of this, our main site is performing extremely slowly -- within one month, we get appx. 2-3GB of log files (excluding images, downloads, etc).
We apologize for any incovenience this may have caused to you.
In slightly surprising move, Microsoft has posted an article on their website basically opposing MPAA's and RIAA's suggested hardware copy-protection mechanisms.
Microsoft says its worried about suggested copyright bill's (Fritz "MPAA's pet" Hollings' bill that is dubbed as Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act or CBDTPA) effects on consumers' privacy and also to future software and hardware development. This is quite a radical opinion from Microsoft, who has a long history of not-so-consumer-privacy-friendly decisions. But if the Beast is on our side against Even Bigger Beast, that's always a good thing :-)
Microsoft also goes so far in the article that they suggest recording and movie industries to actually offer a competitive digital distribution model to fight the Net piracy. This is something that most of the analysts have suggested for years, but for these companies this somehow doesn't seem to be an option.
But this is definately good news to "us", digital media freaks. Microsoft, despite having their own legal problems, still has huge amount of power within U.S. politics and its opinions simply cannot be ignored as it represents a huge portion of software industry.
The notorious website that was forced to shut down earlier this year, Movie88.com, is back. Guys have moved their servers from Taiwan to Iran to avoid MPAA and "dumb" American laws that prevented them from offering latest box office hits for $1 a piece.
Site has rebranded itself as Film88, but the content is still pretty much the same. You can stream all the latest movies using your broadband connection and paying $1 a pop. Movies available include Harry Potter movie, etc.
It is interesting to see how MPAA will try to shut down this site -- U.S. and Iran don't have too good relationships and American entertainment is generally viewed as one of the main sources that drive societies away from Islamic religion. And by blocking a whole country from the Internet because of one site shouldn't really be an option that anyone with commercial interests would be able to do.
Gracenote said yesterday that RealNetworks has agreed to implement Gracenote's CD recognition technology, CDDB, to its RealOne media player's all versions.
Earlier RealOne's Windows version had the Gracenote's technology in it, but the new deal extends the reach to PDAs (such as Nokia's 9210 Communicator), integrated devices such as car stereos and to Real's developer kits.
While rest of the world is way ahead in digital TV revolution, American consumers are still waiting. And will wait, if its up to Hollywood to decide. Well, now Hollywood and group of consumer electronics companies have finalized a proposal which would eventually cause DeCSS-like situations in States.
Proposal, made by Broadcast Protection Discussion Group(or BPDG.. Does anyone else have this weird feeling about these acronyms and how all the most complicated ones involve some satanic Hollywood/music industry plans to take over the world?-), suggests that government should force all electronics manufacturers to include a feature in their products that would store digital TV transmission in encrypted form once it hits consumers' TV receivers.
Hollywood hopes that this -- pretty insane, IMHO -- idea will prevent people from posting movies and TV series to Internet. The idea is to watermark all the content that is received from digital TV broadcast on-the-fly. This content would then be stored in encrypted format wherever consumer wants to move the content to -- TiVo, PC, etc. But it would be opened only by the TV set/digital receiver that received the original signal (at least that's how I understood the idea).
Napster has filed, as everyone already expected after it sold its assets to German Bertelsmann, for Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
The decision doesn't mean that company has vanished, but instead it gives company protection from its creditors until company restructures. Its assets were valued at $7.9M and it has liabilities of over $100M, including hefty bill to its attorneys caused by the lengthy war against RIAA and music companies which began in late 1999.
New Scientist has an interesting article which reveals that super-popular Harry Potter movie which was released on DVD in May, doesn't have Macrovision copy protection at all.
