RIAA emerged to be a winner in yet another lawsuit against P2P networks when federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against now-virtually-defunct P2P network, Madster(formerly known as Aimster).
According to RIAA's lawyers, Judge Marvin Aspen of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ordered last night Madster to implement filtering methods into its service that blocks all illegal music files from its network.
Aimster/Madster had to change its name in beginning of this year, when it lost a separate lawsuit that ruled that Aimster's name violated AOL's AIM trademark. Company was also well-known because of its founder's daughter, Aimee, who posed as company's official model :-)
According to DVDWriters.co.uk, it seems that blank DVD media prices are coming down -- rapidly. Well, at least this is the case in the UK, where cheapest blank DVD-R media sells for way less than 50 pence ($0.75) a piece.
The reason for the current price drops seems to be the fact that new multi-format drives, such as Sony DRU-500A, aren't very compatible with the existing media types -- neither "plus" or "minus" discs. And retailers are afraid of the upcoming flood of these multi-format writers that are about to hit the shores by Christmas -- if they're picky about the media they use, retailers can end up having thousands and thousands of discs in their stock that no one wants to buy.
Major movie studio -backed online movie service, Movielink, announced today that its upcoming service will use both, Microsoft and RealNetworks, as its technology providers.
Movielink has definately agreed that the race for the multimedia throne is currently pretty much tie between Microsoft and Real and wants to support both. Movielink will use both companies' DRM products and video codecs to deliver the movies to paying customers.
Movielink is an online venture, very much like Pressplay and MusicNet in audio world, that is owned by several major movie studios and will deliver full-length movies to consumers' PCs for a fee. Service is about to be launched by end of this year.
RealNetworks finally released the much-anticipated source code of its new media player, Helix DNA Client, which works on Windows, Linux, Symbian and Mac OSX.
New player was released as an open source product and under variety of licensing arrangements. For research and development for noncommercial use, the licensing is free of cost, but for commercial bundles that include RealNetworks' propietary codecs, licensing cost is $0.25 per player. For commercial products using Helix, but not Real's codecs, the first million players are free and cost $0.10 a piece after that.
"We actually are going to allow people to build essentially their own version of the RealOne Player," said Dan Sheeran, vice president of media systems at RealNetworks. "You can grab this code and port it to your platform as quickly as you want," he said.
The product will support "out of the box" MP3, MPEG-4, 3GPP (mobile phone video standard) and various other formats. By adding the Real's own codecs, software will automatically support also RealAudio and RealVideo.
Inclusion of DVD-Audio on Creative Technology's Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Soundcards Signals the High-Quality, Versatile Audio Format's Move Toward Widespread Adoption
Even though I am an old school audiophile, I have my doubts about the DVD-Audio standard, which should bring us improved audio quality and added functionality (multimedia etc).
Transition from C-Cassette and vinyl to Compact Discs made sense due to the outstanding features of the CD technology. Similarry DVD is much more handy and provides better quality than a VHS tape. But what does DVD audio give us? It doesn't seem to be anything revolutionary in any way - there is nothing we haven't seen so far. Also I am very sceptic about the 'audio quality improvements'. Does Joe Average hear a significant improvement? Can Joe Average afford a sound system required to properly benefit from the new higher resolution sound?
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 29, 2002-- Dolby Laboratories, the world leader in multichannel audio technologies, announced an important expansion of the DVD-Audio format with the recent introduction of Creative Technology Limited's Sound Blaster® Audigy(TM) 2, the first soundcard with technology to provide DVD-Audio playback on the personal computer platform. Dolby, which licenses DVD-Audio MLP Lossless(TM) technology, heralds this milestone as further reinforcement of growing acceptance of the DVD-Audio format as the next-generation replacement of the compact disc as well as the importance of Dolby® technologies in the transformation of the PC from a productivity device into a home entertainment gateway.
In UK, law enforcement officials made series of raids this morning in order to arrest more than 20 people associated to organized software and video game piracy.
According to officials, "Operation Andrew" was successful and officials seized almost 9,000 pirate master CDs.
Major copyright owners' associations, including the notorious RIAA and MPAA, have sent letters to thousand biggest publicly listed American companies, warning them about file-swapping at work.
According to the letter, companies risk of getting sued if they don't control how their employees use their Net connections. Many employees use companies', normally high-speed, Internet connections in order to share and download pirated movies and music.
Now this thing seems like the Swiss army knife of the portable players.
Sony Electronics is wrapping four devices into one portable package for the holidays.
The consumer-electronics giant's new MPD-AP20U player can play and record CDs as well as play DVDs and digital audio files, such as MP3s. Sony announced the device Monday, saying it will be available in November for less than $300.
"With the benefits of four products wrapped into one portable device, (the MPD-AP20U) can do a multitude of things for the business traveler or the savvy consumer," Sony spokesman Bob DeMoulin said.
As a standalone portable player, Sony's new gadget can play back CDs as well as MP3, WAV and WMA files that are stored on CDs, DVDs or the company's own Memory Stick cards.
When connected to a Windows or Macintosh computer, the device can serve as a CD-RW drive for recording digital content or backing up computer data. When connected to a television or PC, the device can also become a DVD player for watching movies.
Manufacturers have been trying to take advantage of the popularity of DVD playback to push sales of new devices. Adding the technology to gadgets is also becoming cheaper for manufacturers.
Ok, during the last two weeks the traffic during the peak hours (1600 - 2000 GMT) has been on levels that our dear old webserver has been choking to death under the load.
During the last two weeks we've upgraded the database engine and last night helpful guys of our ISP added yet another 512MB of memory to the server. So, let's hope that this will be enough to maintain the site up and running without any nasty surprises for a while (until we are finally forced to add another server and setup load balancing system).
In a bit old, but interesting article, High Fidelity Review discusses the DVD-AR, recordable DVD-Audio, specifications they received from Bike H. Suzuki, the chairman of DVD Forum WG-4.
With DVD-AR users can record, edit, and replay audio content on writable discs. The format can be used for various purposes thanks to a wide variety of lossless and lossy compression schemes. There are two lossless formats (linear PCM and packed PCM) and six lossy formats (Dolby Digital, DTS, MPEG-1/2 Layer II, ATRAC-3, MP3PRO, and MPEG-2 AAC). There's no need to have a lossless PCM track on a disc, so it is possible to store hours and hours of multichannel audio on a single disc. Users can also store still pictures and text on DVD-AR.
4C who developed the content protection scheme used on DVD-Audio discs is developing a compatible system for DVD-AR. Unlike DVD-Video, DVD-Audio copy protection is, as far as I know, yet to be cracked.
The DVD-AR -format is a welcome addition to the DVD standards family. The news article doesn't discuss the DVD-AR media, but I think it's safe to assume it will not be compatible with DVD+R(W) or DVD-R(W). The final standard should be available this month.
Listen.com's subscription-based online music service Rhapsody will finally allow users to burn music to CDRs. However, the possibility wont be included in Rhapsody's monthly fees, but consumers have to pay for each burned song separately.
Each song that user wants to burn on CDR, will cost 99 U.S. cents. So, one album will be normally only slightly cheaper bought via Rhapsody than by purchasing "the real thing" from the store.
The move anyway indicates that RIAA and its member companies are realizing that users want to have unrestricted music when they buy their music from online stores. Earlier Pressplay(owned by Sony and Vivendi) and FullAudio have got similiar licenses from record labels to allow consumers to burn limited number of songs to CDRs that they download from these services.
Mr.Ye Wang of Nokia Research Center has released his thesis 'Selected Advances in Audio Compression and Compressed Domain Processing' online via Afterdawn & cd-rw.org. Don't miss this opportunity to get scientific information about the principles used in audio compression
Introduction
In the past couple of years, an explosive growth in the use of the Internet and mobile telephones has been experienced. The convergence of these two technologies will open a wide range of new opportunities for the already flourishing multimedia market .
Wideband audio is an important element of multimedia. The Internet transmission of compressed digital audio, such as MP3, has already shown a profound effect on the traditional process of music distribution. With increasing channel capacity available in the new generation of mobile networks, it is logical to
envision an interesting scenario that would bring music to a mobile terminal via the Internet. For example, music or radio programs can be ordered for immediate or later listening; web-based services can be accessed via the mobile network; music can be distributed from peer to peer; and interactive audiorelated games can be played with friends. These applications can be implemented within the different technical requirements of the communication systems. Depending on the constraints on delay, three types of communication modes can be employed. These are non-real-time messaging, near real-time browsing, and two-way real-time rich call. Messaging does not have any constraint on delay. Browsing has some constraint on delay to the degree that is not very annoying to the customers. Two-way real-time rich call has the strictest constraint on delay, which should not exceed 250 ms
A Delaware bankruptcy judge has approved a $200,000 loan to Napster to keep the company alive till the sale of its assets has been completed. The company behind the loan is Napco Acquisition, who at the same time signed a letter of intent to buy some of Napster's assets.
There has been alot of interest in the assets of the former music-swapping site, and acording to Rick Antonoff, attorney for Napster's creditors commitee, a final agreement to sell the assets could be reached in two weeks.
Musepack is the lossy compressed audio format which is considered having highest audio quality, and therefore it's been praised by the audio files. Musepack (*.mpc) delivers amazing sound quality very reasonable bitrates. It currently outperforms MP3, OGG, AAC and any other format in high bitrate applications (above 160kbps).
Musepack contains some pantented technology from the MPEG-1 Layer 2 standard (*.mp2) and the encoder has so far been closed source, but according to this post by a forum admin at the Hydrogen Audio, things might be about to change.
I just got email from Andree Buschmann. He is now positive about going open source with MPC, infact he had been thinking about this for some weeks now. Andree is contacting Klemm via email as we speak!
Frank Klemm is under NDA regarding MPC encoder, so he needs Andree's permission for going open source. It has been my and other people's impression (got email about this few days ago from Frank) that Frank is willing to go fully open source if Andree shows the green light. Now it is the case!
So although this is totally unofficial, and we really must wait for the offical word, I believe it's highly likely that MPC will go open source!!
KiSS Technology was one of the first MP3/DVD hybrid player providers few years ago, based on the same technology as Raite, Yamakawa and few other clones. Now they are the first brand announcing DivX support.
In the MP3/DVD players the mainstream manufacturers like Philips, Pioneer and others followed the example of MP3/DVD players and added MP3 support to their players year or two after these smaller first-to-market companies. It will be interesting to see if the trend repeats itself in DivX support!
SAN DIEGO, CA and HOERSHOLM, DENMARK--(INTERNET WIRE)--Oct 22, 2002 -- DivXNetworks, Inc, the company that created the revolutionary patent-pending DivX ™ video compression technology, and KiSS Technology, a leading Scandinavian manufacturer of DVD products throughout the world, today announced that the DP-450 from KiSS Technology is the first DVD player to offer compatibility with certain versions of DivX video technology.
The KiSS DP-450, set for release in late October, will enable playback of videos encoded in DivX versions 4.xx and 5.xx. Additionally, the two companies are working closely together to develop future products that will be "DivX Certified" and offer full compatibility with all versions of DivX video. DivX video compression technology, often called the "MP3 of video," offers 7-10 times greater compression than MPEG-2 technology with no loss in visual quality. Hailed as a "revolutionary product" by Tom's Hardware Guide, DivX has been downloaded over 70 million times worldwide.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic) and Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a new technology they have co-developed that enables a dramatically improved method of storing, arranging and playing back personal digital photo, music and video collections on recordable discs such as CD-RW media. Called HighM.A.T. (TM) , which stands for High-performance Media Access Technology, this new technology is designed to significantly improve interoperability for digital media content between PCs and popular electronic devices such as CD players, car stereos and living room DVD devices. CDs created using the HighM.A.T. technology will be fully compatible with existing devices that play back recordable disc media. Panasonic, Microsoft and Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd. (Fujifilm) will adopt this new technology for use in their future products. The HighM.A.T. specification will also be available for easy licensing by other consumer electronics companies and software developers at http://www.HighMAT.com/.
"It's clear to us at Panasonic that PCs and consumer electronics products will continue to work more and more closely in the future. HighM.A.T. technology will set a new standard for exchanging digital media between such devices and will make it easier to play back personal music, photo and video collections in consumer AV products," said Fumio Ohtsubo, managing director of Matsushita Electric. "We are very pleased that Panasonic can contribute to realizing the dream of seamless digital convergence."
Our friends at DVDWriters.co.uk have released the world's first review of the upcoming Pioneer DVR-A05 DVD-burner. A05 takes the DVD-R(W) camp to a new level by offering a juicy 4x writing speed, at which you can burn a full 4.7GB DVD-R in 15 minutes. The drive also implements the new DVD forum standards.
"Pioneer has finally delivered on what we and most others wanted most in a DVD writer and that was an increase in DVD recording speeds. There is no disputing that the speed at which new DVD writers record to DVD-Rs at is light years ahead of the 1st generation drives - the A05 only needs 15mins to writes a whole 4.7GB of data.
We were slightly disappointed with the A05's CD writing ability, mainly its CD-R maximum writing speed of 16 X and its relatively slow re-write speed. It's interesting to note that the preliminary product specifications show that Pioneer had faster CD recordable features and higher DVD-ROM read speeds in mind but decided against implementing them.
We were pleased that Pioneer added support for writing in DAO-RAW mode - a useful feature used by Clone-CD for backing up games (in countries that permit it). This addition isn't all that it appears to be as its performance was so bad that it's pretty ineffective - it failed to backup any of our games and took long time to read them!"
Ok, just couple of minutes ago we completed major database restructure work and moved our discussion forums' database to use different database platform.
This should solve virtually all performance problems that have occured during the last couple of weeks, when our forum traffic increased from about 1M pageimps/month to almost double.
However, this MIGHT have caused some weird problems with the site -- if you find out anything that seems to be incorrect, please don't hesitate to send us feedback right away.
In slightly surprising move, according to insiders in music business, world's biggest record label, Universal Music Group(owned by French Vivendi) has increased the amount of royalties it pays to its artists from Internet downloads.
According to analysts, the higher royalty payments are an effort to match the increasing pressure from artists who have said for some time now, that they need to be compensated more fairly from Net downloads.
UMG's deal will be retroactive to January 1st this year. UMG will pay about 20 percent higher rate for songs that are included in artists' albums than those released only on singles. Royalty rates, in some cases, can be upto twice as much as they currently are for artists who work under contract with UMG.
With the new policy, an artist may now hypothetically get about 15 cents on a single downloaded for about one dollar, experts estimated. But this depends on each artist's individual contract.
Online movie distributor Intertainer will close down its service next week until they can work out a fair business model with the movie industry giants -- AOL Time Warner, Sony, and Universal.
Intertainer filed an anti-trust suit against the companies in Septembers claiming that they are deliberately hindering Intertainer's business by boycotting of licesing their movies to the online distributor. According to Intertainer CEO Jonathan Taplin the companies are just trying to buy time in launching their own, competing Movielink service.
"We promise to return when there is an environment in which the independent company such as ours is allowed to compete for your business," said Taplin. "Whether the current environment of increasing media concentration is good for our Democracy is of course, the ultimate question."
Lik-Sang, a Hong Kong-based mod chip and game console product retailer, who was forced to shut down in September, has re-opened its website.
The statement at company's website says:
At September 16th a lawsuit against Lik Sang International Limited and it's directors has been filed in the High Court of Hong Kong by the companies Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft on infringing on copyrighted material and selling Mod Chips or other development and backup devices for the Plaintiffs consoles.
At September 17th, the High Court of Hong Kong issued Orders and Injunctions against Lik Sang which prevented selling or advertising Mod Chips (and other products in questions). The details outlined in those Injunctions took Lik-Sang.com and the company with more than 20 full-time employees "down" - business was officially closed till today. Lik Sang and it's employees couldn't even speak about the case due to an injunction of the High Court.
Lik Sang International Limited has removed all the products in questions from it's website and started it's business operation again by Tuesday, October 15th. Un-shipped orders will be processed in due course and the first shipments are scheduled to dispatch by November 1st. Customers with unshipped orders will receive emails with shipping & or cancellation information in the meantime. New orders are welcome.
Pioneer is not a player in the CD-R scene, but they are really pioneerin in the rising DVD market. The new A05 may very well be one "killer application" helping the DVD recordable technology break through in the consumer field.
Pioneer, the market leader and chief innovator in the field of DVD technology, today launches its latest and fastest DVD-R/RW writer, the DVR-A05. Benefiting from the enhancements of previous generations, the DVR-A05 takes DVD writing to a new level by burning at twice the speed of the DVR-A04 to meet the new industry media standard² of a 4x write speed to DVD-R and 2x to DVD-RW, ahead of competing brands. The writer is also capable of writing CD-R media with a 16x write speed and CD-RW at 8x, combined with a higher read speed of 32x CD-ROM and 6x DVD-ROM.
"Pioneer is leading the way in the digital convergence between consumer electronics and IT, providing consumers with a fast, easy-to-use writing environment and the tools to conveniently create and store quality-enhanced media," says marketing communications manager, Pioneer Europe NV, Mark Grotefeld.
"The DVR-A05 meets new global standards set in August by the DVD Forum and allows users to maximise the new high-speed, write-once and re-writable media," continues Grotefeld. "It offers the highest write speeds available and the greatest degree of playback flexibility. Video written to DVD-R via the DVR-A05 can be read by almost all available DVD players and DVD-ROM drives."
Japanese consumer electronics giant, Toshiba, will release a 5GB harddrive in this week's Japanese electronics show that will connect to the host device, such as PDA, Symbian-based cell phone or a laptop using wireless Bluetooth connection.
Device is based on the Toshiba's 1.8 inch harddrive and is bundled with a Bluetooth device. The whole device weights around 180 grams (6.3 ounces for Americanos) which makes it pretty ideal PDA companion. With the latest Xscale-based PocketPC devices and device like this, PDA can actually work as a decent portable movie player.
Device will be launched for Japanese consumers in November and Toshiba doesn't have currently plans to sell the drive outside Japan. Retail price of the drive will be around $410.
Pressplay, a subscription-based online music service owned by French Vivendi Universal and Japanese Sony has signed a licensing deal with German BMG which allows Pressplay to offer BMG's music catalogue through its service.
This brings Pressplay on par with its rival MusicNet, which is owned by Bertelsmann(the owner of BMG), AOL TimeWarner, EMI and RealNetworks. Both services offer music from four major record labels out of five. Pressplay is currently negotiating with AOL TimeWarner's Warner Music to get all five record labels into its service. Meanwhile analysts say that MusicNet is very close to sign a deal with Vivendi-owned Universal Music Group and with Sony to fill its gap.
Both major record label-backed services are currently behind the independent Rhapsody, owned by Listen.com, which was also the first of these three services to open in December last year. Each service has different ways of delivering the music to consumers and different terms on what users can do with the music they download. But currently the trend has been towards more open service, where users can download and burn music to CD pretty freely, within their monthly restrictions. None of the services have released any public data about the numbers of customers they have attracted so far and how much music one user downloads during an average month.
International team, Joint Video Team, developing a new video compressing codec that will join the MPEG-4 format family, is currently very close to approving the codec, dubbed as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10.
As all of us, who have bothered to read around 5,000 pages of technical public docs that relate to MPEG-4 technology, know, MPEG-4 has multiple "levels" and subsets within its specifications -- pretty much like MPEG-1 had several types of audio encoding schemes included in it (best known of those is definately MPEG-1 audio layer III, also called as MP3 by well-known scientific researchers ;-). Currently the best-known MPEG-4 video compression methods are called as Simple Profile(SP) and Advanced Simple Profile(ASP).
To explain this a little bit -- or confuse you guys even more -- let's use the best-known MPEG-4 encoder in the world, DivX 5(yes, it is MPEG-4 encoder), as an example of various levels of MPEG-4 codecs. DivX 5's basic, free version can decode (==play) both, Advanced Simple Profile and Simple Profile-encoded MPEG-4 clips, but can't encode Advanced Simple Profile videos, only Simple Profile videos. And the commercial version, DivX 5 Pro can do the same tricks as DivX 5 Free, but can also encode Advanced Simple Profile videos.
One of the brains behind the now-defunct DIVX system (which was basically a pay-per-view version of DVD, not the DivX -- note the caps -- that we know nowadays), has set up a new company called Cinea that aims to block people from using camcorders in movie theaters.
The system is aimed towards digital cinema and it will control the digital cinema projectors in a way that when someone from the audience tries to capture the movie from the screen using camcorder -- whether digital or analog, it doesn't matter -- that is based on specific framerates, like everything nowadays is, he/she will only record blurry picture. Pretty much similiar effect will happen when you use camcorder to record something from the PC's monitor (distorted lines and off-synch effects).
The product, which is about to debut by end of this year or in early 2003, will play probably a kinda big role in order to convince studios and movie theater chains to switch to digital cinema. According to various figures, movie industry loses around $3 billion a year due movie piracy and most of the new pirated movie copies originate from camcorder copies made in movie theaters (also called "cams" in piracy scene).
Finnish government released today its proposal how it wants Finland to implement new European Union Copyright Directive that each EU member state has to implement into its local laws by 21st of December, 2002.
EUCD, which was approved by European Union in last year, restricts circumvention devices that bypass copy-protections on copyrighted media, such as CDs, DVDs, etc. As it is already approved, it can't be rejected anymore, but each member state can apply various restrictions and relieves to it when they implement the local versions of the law. Finland's original proposal was similiar to the UK's recent proposal -- those could be described by calling them pretty fascist. Finland's original proposal, drafted by the Education Ministry, didn't give virtually any rights to consumers, scientists or librarians at all. After a pretty heavy lobbying from various citizen rights' groups, they have amended the wording pretty much, but obviously there's only so much that a member state can do.
New proposal is slightly twisted, IMHO :-) It allows individuals to copy copy-protected material they own, for their own personal use, just as usual. Proposal also allows individuals to circumvent copy-protection mechanisms in order to backup their CDs, DVDs, eBooks, etc. But the proposal also outlaws distribution of circumvention tools, such as DVD rippers. So, if the proposal is accepted by Finnish parliament, Finnish consumers can legally rip their own movies as much as they want, but the sites who distribute DVD rippers violate the law :-)
MP3.com, one of the services that launched the digital music revolution in 1990s, is back in the headlines, once again. And the reason is the same as always -- company has been sued over copyright infringements.
Lawsuit was filed at Manhattan federal court by three artists, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan and James Taylor, who all work under Sony's record labels. The suit goes back in time to 1999 and early 2000, when MP3.com operated a controversial My.MP3.com service that allowed users to store their CDs to MP3.com's servers. The major problem came when MP3.com didn't require users to actually upload the albums to their servers, but instead just verified that users actually owned the CD and then MP3.com simply copied the files to users' personal "folders" from MP3.com's fileservers. This, however legal it sounds, raised a major lawsuit from major record labels and eventually ended up costing $175M to the company which was later on bought by one of the major record labels, French Vivendi Universal.
Details of the new lawsuit are still blurry and it is not clear on what basis artists are now sueing MP3.com's practices back in My.MP3.com era, since one would think that they were already represented in the original lawsuit, filed by Sony, their record label. But this is the case anyway, so we'll see what happens. As usual, all artists are claiming damages upto $150,000 per song that MP3.com used in the My.MP3.com service.
Listen.com has signed a yet another deal with an American ISP to distribute Listen.com's Rhapsody music service. Deal is with one of the biggest American ISPs, Verizon Communications, who will promote and sell Rhapsody to its customers.
Listen has earlier signed similiar deals with various broadband providers, including Roadrunner and DirecTV. It is also the only one of the big three music subscription services that offers music from all big five record labels.
European Commission approved a significant plan today that will allow TV and radio broadcasters to use their existing broadcasting licenses for simulcasting as well. Simulcasting is a webcasting method where a traditional radio or TV broadcasters streams the exactly same content over the Net that they transmit over the radiowaves.
Earlier, each broadcaster willing to simulcast their content, had to obtain licenses for each and every program, music track, sports event, etc for webcasting. Also, each country's own recording industry body or other copyright content owners' body, was the only place where that country's broadcasters could obtain licenses. This has lead to seriously weird situations -- worst example is probably our home country, Finland, where there isn't even a single commercial simulcasting station available anymore, due Finnish recording industry's bodies (Teosto and Gramex) intention to squeeze enormous amounts of money out of radio stations. In Finland, radio stations pay already full royalties for aerial transmissions (unlike in States where RIAA doesn't get a penny from radio stations) and copyright owners wanted basically to double that amount if broadcasters wanted to set up a simulcast.
Exciting news, since this new distribution should give you a hassle-free installation. MOD your Xbox, stuff in a CD and you should have yourself a working Linux workstation.
EUROPE -- October 07 2002 -- Today the Xbox Linux Project (http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/) announced that Xbox Linux Mandrake 9 has been released. This is the first complete Linux distribution for the Microsoft Xbox gaming console.
A 350 MB installation CD of Xbox Linux Mandrake 9 is available for download free of charge from the Xbox Linux website. It corresponds to a standard installation of the (free) 3 CD version of the well-known Mandrake Linux distribution (http://www.mandrake.com/), which has only been released a week ago, so it contains the graphical environments Gnome and KDE, as well as software packages such as OpenOffice.org, XMMS and Mozilla. Since Xbox Linux Mandrake 9 is 100% compatible with Mandrake Linux 9, all additional packages from the official Mandrake Linux 9 installation CDs or the Mandrake website can be installed into Xbox Mandrake Linux.
To be able to use Xbox Linux Mandrake 9, you need a "modded" Xbox and a USB keyboard and mouse connected to the Xbox by a Xbox-USB adaptor, which can be easily built by most users.
In a very surprising common sense victory today, U.S. House of Representatives voted to change the webcasting fees structure in order to save small webcasters from being pushed out of the business.
In June, Librarian of Congressset the royalty rates for webacsting industry, based on the original instructions from the Congress on how to deal with the issue. The results weren't good for webcasters -- royalty rates were set to be fixed fees based on the listeners and numbers of songs played. Fees also were applied retroactively, beginning from 1998. After the decision, several dozens of small webcasters told that the fees were higher than their annual revenues and shut their services down.
What's amazing, is the fact that handful of small webcasters united and presented their case to Congress and actually got their momentum and backing from several Reps. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wi) introduced a bill that would have postponed the payments for another six months in order to push both sides -- RIAA and webcasters -- to negotiate a new deal. Yesterday the negotiations finally got the breakthrough and new royalty rates were approved today by House.
Weblisten.com is a Spanish pioneer in online digital music sales & distribution. Their service package is also very appealing, offering a wide variety of popular music and reasonable pricing. Weblisten also appears as a seriously managed business with realistic stragies and goals, rather than a 'dot com wonder'.
Weblisten.com, a platform specializing in pay per listen services which is owned by Weblisten, S.A., has up to date disbursed an aggregate of more than €185,000 (182,580 US Dollar) as royalty payments to the copyright holders of the tracks used in its pay music services.
All amounts payable with respect to such rights are, in accordance with the applicable laws governing in Spain, paid to three the management companies which protect the rights of authors and editors (SGAE), artists and singers (AIE) and record labels (AGEDI).
Founded in late 1997, Weblisten.com has ever since respected intellectual property rights. Presently, demand for its services comes mainly from Europe. Spanish subscribers are the most active, representing 60% of all subscribers as compared to 20% from Northern European countries, 10% from Germany and 10% from Australia and the United States.
Wanted to mention that I just added a small, funny little feature to our site today. Now, at the bottom of each page, you can see how many simultaneous users there are browsing through our site.
Average seems to be now around 800, this figure includes our "AfterDawn.com Network" -- i.e. AfterDawn.com, forums, Dawnload.net and MP3Lizard.com. Some sort of a break-down of these figures will be added shortly as well for those of you who are interested of various weird statistics :-)
Two pretty similiar bills (proposals to become a law) have been presented this week to U.S. Congress. Both bills aim to remove and modify some controversial parts of the "evil" DMCA law to allow fair use rights for consumers.
First one that hit the Congress was introduced by "Silicon Valley" rep, Rep. Zoe Lofgren(D-Calif). Bill, dubbed as Digital Choice and Freedom Act of 2002 aims to modify the DMCA law so that consumers could bypass technical protections, such as DeCSS, on material that they have purchased in order to make backups and use those backups legally. Bill would also put in place specific restrictions on "shrink-wrap licenses", licenses that consumers can read only after they've already purchased the product, such as EULAs (end-user license agreement -- those "do you agree" things you get when you install virtually any software) in software and other products.
"Consumers need a voice in this debate," Lofgren said in her statement. "Right now, it is the entertainment industry versus the technology industry, and the consumers are watching from the sidelines."
Another bill was introduced yesterday by two well-known anti-DMCA reps, Rep. Rick Boucher(D-Va) and Rep. John Doolittle(R-Calif). Bill's ideology is pretty similiar to Lofgren's bill, but this one has been planned and coined more carefully. According to its mastermind, Boucher, he got the bill pretty much ready already two years ago, but he has gathered support and opinions during that time and waiting for a right moment to introduce the bill.
321 Studios are about to release a new package for DVD copying. Their first product, DVD Copy Plus was intended for copying DVDs on CDs. They are now about to lauch DVD X Copy, which claims to make bit-to-bit copies of DVDs with a regular recordable DVD-drive.
As we reported in April, 321 Studios asked a San Francisco court to rule on the legitimacy of their product. According to DMCA the package, intended solely for backing up DVDs owned by the consumer, is illegal, because it uses a copyright circumvention algorithm to descramble the CSS encryption used on DVDs. However 321 Studios argue that the DMCA in this case is unconstitutional, because it prevents the fair use of a product. Consumers are allowed to make copies of VHS movies for personal use, but thanks to DMCA, it is impossible to do legally with DVDs.
Major movie studios, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice have asked the Californian court to dismiss the case altogether. Clearly a ruling in the case would have noticeable consequences -- if the software is deemed legal, then DMCA is invalid, and if it's ruled to be illegal, the court, in essence, rules that DMCA takes precedence over the United States constitution.
Music biz heavyweights have finally agreed to try how well legal digital online music sells among the general public when offered for free. Company called OD2, backed by various UK portals and labels, launched today a campaign called DigitalDownloadDay.
Campaign, despite its name, lasts for a week and began today. Every British or Irish customer is entitled to receive 500 free "download credits" that are worth of £5 (around $7.50 or €7.70) and can be used to either stream or download music from the participating online services, converting roughly to ten full-length tracks that can be downloaded and -- surprise, surprise -- also burned to CD.
But the big thing about this experiment is the scale of it. The campaign offers a music catalog of 100,000 tracks from 6,000 artists. Obviously there are some nags in it -- getting the credits requires credit card or Switch (British debit card) and billing address has to be within UK or ROI. Participating music stores and portals include hmv.co.uk, msn.co.uk and tiscali.co.uk.
A well known mod chip dealer Lik Sang has been shut down by Microsoft. Lik Sang is a reliable operator with a good variety of gaming products, including mod chips for all consoles.
A representative in Microsoft's Australian subsidiary confirmed that the company has taken legal action against Hong Kong-based Lik Sang.
Lik Sang's Web site has been offline for nearly two weeks, with a notice on the site blaming a server outage.
Lik Sang representatives could not be reached for comment, and Microsoft attorneys were unavailable to explain the exact nature of the legal action.
Lik Sang was one of the top worldwide retailers of mod chips, devices that, once soldered to a game console's main circuit board, disable security components. The chips typically allow a game machine to play legally and illegally copied discs, run unauthorized software and play game discs intended for other geographic regions.
As Malaysian government has been taking a harder attitude towards CD and VCD piracy in country which has one of the biggest piracy problems in the world, professional pirates have come up with some clever ways to avoid getting caught.
According to one Malaysian law enforcement official, professional pirates have moved their production to large ships and the actual copying is done in international waters, where Malaysian police can't do anything. Then the pirates simply drop the packages to various ports for distribution.
DivXNetworks' PR department must be busy writing their press releases so that general public get excited, even aroused of the distant possibility to have DivX playback on their consoles/DVD players/fridges/etc. But as usual, this is one of those "aww, nothing for us" news once again. Anyway, DivXNetworks has joined with Factor 5 and released a DivX for Nintendo GameCube Software Developer's Kit which allows game developers to use DivX playback in their games, etc.
The SDK aims to overcome the fact that GameCube's game discs can hold only 1.3GB of data, limiting the amount of video available for games, etc to very minimum -- when compared to PS2 and XBox which both can use DVD discs, upto 8.5GB per side when using dual layer discs. Traditionally games use MPEG-2 encoded video, just like DVD-Video does, but by allowing developers to use MPEG-4 instead, the video bitrate can be significantly lower and still maintain decent video quality.
RIAA emerged to be a winner in yet another lawsuit against P2P networks when federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against now-virtually-defunct P2P network, Madster (formerly known as Aimster).
RealNetworks finally released the much-anticipated source code of its new media player, Helix DNA Client, which works on Windows, Linux, Symbian and Mac OSX.
