RIAA has agreed to settle its lawsuit against optical media duplication giant Technicolor(which, for most of the people, is better known as the "Colors by Technicolor" statement in movie credits) for $2.3M.
RIAA sued Technicolor for $23M in last year, claiming that the company allowed pirated CD copies to be made in its factories. Technicolor agreed that the incident happened in its factory, but claimed that the incident was a random accident.
So, RIAA got 10 percent of what it wanted, but it also got an agreement with Technicolor that allows RIAA's inspectors to pop in to its factories at any given time without a notice to check the facilities. Agreement also included a clause that if RIAA will find something illegal, it will first inform Technicolor and parties try to reach a yet another settlement instead of going to court immediately.
Corporations are trying to solve the equation of turning the P2P file sharing boom into revenue streams. The Altnet, best known for the Kazaa file sharing software, now praises the network’s commercial potential and introduces plans for a dial-up based payment method as an alternative to a credit card driven financial transfers.
AUSTRALIANS could be paying for MP3 files over the telephone following the announcement of plans by peer-to-peer provider Altnet to use controversial internet dialer technology as a micropayments system.
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To encourage more sales, the system, owned by Australian-founded internet media company Brilliant Digital Entertainment, is pushing for alternatives to credit-card sales.
Los Angeles Police has arrested two teenagers for using a digital camcorder to videotape Star Trek: Nemesis in a movie theatre. The men were arrested as they exited the Paramount Los Angeles theatre.
Both men are charged under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and both the camcorder, and the tape with the movie were confiscated.
Illegal camcorder copies or "Cams" are often spread on the Internet even before the movie premiers. That's why the local Film & Video Security office is more than eager to assist in prosecuting the offenders. Film & Video Security Office is a part of the Motion Picture Association of America.
Arista Records, a subsdiary of BMG, plans to launch copy-protected CDs in American markets around May/June this year. This will be the first major push towards copy-protected CDs in the U.S. Rest of the world has been experiencing the "joys" of copy-protected CDs for well over 12months now.
Arista plans to use copy-protection technology from SunnComm Technologies to protect its CDs. CDs will most likely be unplayable with PC CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives as well as in big number of stand-alone DVD players (most notably "Chinese" DVD players that are based on PC hardware such as IDE drives) and car CD players.
To compensate the playback problems with PC drives, the discs contain copy-protected WMA versions of the tracks that can't be transferred to portable audio players or to other PCs.
The fight is impossible to win from consumer point of view: if the sales increase after the copy-protected CDs are being introduced, labels can claim that copy-protection works. If the sales drop, they can blame ever-increasing P2P piracy and justify adding copy-protection mechanisms to more and more CDs. Arista's artists include Pink and Santana.
News.com has much more details about the controversial "Super-DMCA" legislation discussion that took off this week in various news sites, including ours.
The proposed "super-DMCA" is not actually a federal law, but series of very punitive state laws instead, generally speaking all of them sponsored by the "almighty" MPAA.
MPAA has most likely learned its lessons that pushing forward a new law that would curb freedom of speech and "fair use" rights through the federal legislation is virtually impossible, because consumer groups such as EFF take notice of proposed federal bills very quickly. So, MPAA has pushed individual U.S. states to pass laws that restricts tons and tons of consumer rights.
In Maryland, such legislation is already in the state law, it passed in 2001 without no one even noticing. The law bans software that "can be used for converting a video or audio material transmitted over the Net to other format". So, you guys who live in Maryland and have DivX codecs or TMPGEnc installed on your computer, you're already breaking the law.
DivXNetworks is heading towards final release of the next "stable" version of their DivXMPEG-4codec. Now they've released a third beta for the 5.0.4 version.
The new version, officially dubbed as DivX v5.0.4 Schizo beta 3 contains these changes since the beta 2:
1 Pass and Nth Pass undersized file should be fixed
Certain dark sequences would produce a long period of frames using a Quantizer of 31
Psychovisual Enhancement field sometimes displayed "Custom" instead of Light when unselected
"Do not prompt with errors and warnings" would select itself when random characters were entered in the CLI after the "-key" option
When "-d 3" option was entered in the CLI field, "Source interlace" became blank
Max bitrate would not update at times
DirectShow decoder postprocessing slider became disabled with ATI radeon 9700 Graphics card
DirectShow decoder would "fast forward" when seeking backwards. This could cause synch issues when re-encoding DivX Files using the DivX Decoder Filter
The new version is available in this URL. Please remember that the beta version is restricted to 30 days period.
Sanyo has announced that it is developing next generation laser for optical storage that would double the storage capacity of 27GB per disc per side, currently available on Blu-Ray discs that use blue laser technology for recording (DVDs and CDs use red laser technology)
Sanyo's claims at this stage are extremely vague -- according to some news reporting, this would be a "dual layer" Blu-Ray and not a new technology, but this sounds highly unlikely to us, since we're talking about different laser wavelengths here. But Sanyo's plans are to demonstrate the first products by July this year and start mass production by end of the year.
This isn't exactly what world wanted at this point -- a new technology to stir the already-messed-up "next generation DVD" wars that are emerging between whopping four different formats. And all this is happening when the good olde DVD recordable markets are finally gaining ground despite format wars.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act clearly isn't enough for MPAA. ISPs have told MPAA that they can't always determine the activities of their customers. That's why MPAA is currently lobbying for a "super-DMCA", which would ban users from hiding their activities from the ISP (and MPAA).
Sounds fair enough? Think again. The proposed bill would outlaw for example firewalls, routers, and even email encryption. MPAAs wording on the proposed bill is so vague, that the results of a super-DMCA law being passed would be disastrous. Super-DMCA efforts seem to bee afoot atleast in Texas, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Tennessee, and Colorado.
FullAudio, one of the four "major" (not really major, none of them can currently really claim that their business model really, really works) online music subscription services, finally got its the missing licensing deal with Sony.
Now FullAudio's MusicNow service has licensing deals with all the five major record labels, just like all of its rivals do. Company also extended its licensing contract with BMG to include permanent music downloads and CD burning from the label's music catalog to its service.
FullAudio's MusicNow service is being sold via various channels, but most notably via radio giant Clear Channel's radio station websites.
Cirrus Logic Inc. announced that it has licensed the DivX video codec from DivX Networks for its high end and single-board DVD processor families. The deal means that DVD-players equiped with Cirrus Logic's chips and a price tag below $149 might hit the market by late 2003. Cirrus is hoping to be able to deliver streaming MPEG-4 video content over the internet to standalone players by early 2004.
There are already several MPEG-4 capable players available, and the format is gaining in popularity on the standalone player market. The variety of formats causes alot of problems though, and a 100% support is yet to be seen on any device. There are still numerous different MPEG-4 formats around -- DivX v3.11, DivX 4, DivX 5, XviD, and several others, such as the newcomer Nero Digital.
Movielink, an online movie service, a joint venture between major movie studios, has signed several deals with smaller movie publishers to feature their content on the service as well.
Deals include some of the major indie studios, such as Artisan Entertainment -- who was behind the hugely successful "The Blair Witch Project" -- but also smaller studios that create mostly short films and art movies.
Movielink has also plans to launch a multi-million dollar ad campaign to extend its audience -- venture is pretty much unknown outside digital video audiences. Company also revealed some interesting details about its customer base -- their typical customer is a male, between 25 and 49, instead of 18 and 25 that company itself expected before the launch. This could be due various reasons, P2P piracy and its popularity among teenagers being one of them.
321Studios has just released a new version of their DVD backup software DVD X Copy. Registered customers can download the update. Notice that the new version requires a reactivation.
New Gearworks drivers - additional DVD drives are supported. DVDXC
Internal Nero burn engine is disabled. All internal burns will be done with Gearworks engine.
External Nero burn support is still available.
DVDXCopy will no longer complain if the user attempts to back up an Archived DVD, DVDXCopy will simply ignore it and continue to look for an original DVD.
FULL and WIDE screen display for title set selection. Previously all title sets had shown [FULL] all the time, in the disk1 and disk2 list displays.
The "Copy Now" and "Burn Now" buttons now call attention to themselves.
Changes to the license activation system. Sorry folks, everyone will have to re-activate their copy of DVDXCopy.
The tutorial tab has been removed. The tutorial now resides behind a "help" button.
Madonna, arguably one of the best-known figures in the music world, has release her latest single, an anti-war song "American Life", as an unrestricted MP3.
The song costs $1.49 and can be bought from her homepage and paid with PayPal. She also released an affilate program that allowed fans to promote the single and if the song was bought via fans' links, the fan got a slice of the sale price that then can be turned into Madonna fan material. And because the single is 100% unrestricted, high-quality MP3, it can be copied to portable MP3 players as well as burned on CDR.
Madonna was one of the loudest opponents during the "Napster wars" back in late 1990s -- her back-then-yet-unreleased album, "Music", found its way to Napster before its release date.
Her single is also available via major online subscription services, such as Pressplay and MusicNet.
According to News.com, AOL is expected to drop its long-established tradition of using solely RealNetworks' streaming technology in its mainstream products.
According to the rumours, AOL will switch from Real's RealAudio to MPEG-4-based AAC in its narrow-band Radio@AOL service (the broadband version uses MP3 format). AOL has licensed the technology from Dolby Laboratories.
The DVD rental revenues overtook VHS rental revenues on the week ending 16 March 2003 in the United States. That's the first time in the history of the DVD-format. In numbers of units rented, VHS still beats DVD with its 54 percent share of the market.
According to Bo Andersen, President of Video Software Dealers Association, consumers have learned to appreciate the quality, convenience, and value-added features of DVDs.
The DVD-Video format was released only six years ago. It has been a huge success since the very beginning.
After a year of development, Speex has finally hit the big-time and gone to version 1.0. Speex is a CELP-based free and open audio compression codec specifically tuned to compress human speech at bitrates ranging from 2 to 44 kbps. The bitstream and API are now officially frozen.
Speex is optimized for compressing human voice. It delivers clear human vocals with low bitrate / bandwith usage. The primary use for Speex is naturally in VoIP (Voice over IP) applications. Software developers now have a open & free compression technology available for use in their projects.
Narrowband (8 kHz), wideband (16 kHz), and ultra-wideband (32 kHz) compression in the same bitstream
Intensity stereo encoding
Packet loss concealment
Variable bitrate operation (VBR)
Voice Activity Detection (VAD)
Discontinuous Transmission (DTX)
Xiph.org also announces that are now a legimate non-profit organization.
After about a million pages of documentation, a billion phonecalls and endless amounts of patience, the Xiph.Org Foundation has been recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Organization.
Divx Networks is pushing their codec to the general consumer market, in order to make it an accepted standard. Divx alredy is a very popular video compression format, but hasn't received much recognition from the major players of the PC-industry.
InterVideo and DivXNetworks Expand Comprehensive Licensing Agreement to Target Global PC OEM Market
Partnership Will Enable Large OEMs to Bundle InterVideo Software Tools Powered by DivX Technology
FREMONT, Calif.--March 19, 2003--DivXNetworks, Inc., the company that created the revolutionary patent-pending DivX® video compression technology, and InterVideo, a leading provider of DVD software, today announced an expansion of their existing licensing agreement to distribute DivX-powered InterVideo software products directly to hardware OEMs, including manufacturers of PCs, video cards, camcorders, disk drives and consumer electronics products.
Last year, InterVideo licensed the leading DivX video technology for use in its award-winning suite of retail video software products, including WinDVD, WinDVR, and WinProducer. The new agreement will enable major OEMs to bundle DivX-enabled InterVideo software directly with their hardware products. DivX video compression technology is a hugely popular video encoder / decoder that offers DVD-quality video at sizes 7-10 times smaller than MPEG-2 and ranks among the world's most popular video technologies, with over 75 million downloads and an average of over 2 million downloads per month.
There has been alot of debate on numerous aspects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ever since it was passed. Now the Library of Congress' Copyright Office will hold a series of public hearings to decide if changes should be made to the DMCA. Namely the section that prohibits bypassing copy-protection schemes.
The anticircumvention restrictions of the DMCA can prohibit users from accessing work they have purchased. E.g. reverse engineering the DVD CSS encryption is illegal, so DVDs can only be viewed under the platforms accepted by the DVD Consortium. Bypassing DVD region coding, backing up copy protected DVDs or CDs, or even skipping advertisements on DVDs is forbidden by the law.
According to the announcement from Copyright Office anyone who has something to say about DMCA can submit a request to be heard by April 1st. The hearings will be held in Washington D.C. on Apr. 11, Apr. 15, Apr. 30, and May 2. There will also be hearings in California, but the dates have not been set yet.
The Copyright Office is looking forward to hearing not only legal arguments, but also testimonies from people who can shed a light on more practical aspects of the problems caused by DMCA.
SonicBlue, the legendary MP3 player manufacturer that was once known as Diamond, has filed for a bankruptcy and has agreed to sell its ReplayTV and units.
Diamond was the company who brought the first mainstream MP3 player to the emerging MP3 markets and helped the MP3 phenomenom to grow alongside the other legends, Napster and WinAMP.
Company reported a loss of $33.4M for the fourth quarter on Wednesday, down from $52.7M losses a year ago. SonicBlue has been fighting against media giants virtually throughout its heydays -- the music industry tried to ban its portable MP3 players back in late 1990s, but SonicBlue won the case. Company's other famous product, ReplayTV that allows users to record TV shows digitally to harddrive-based settop box, has been hit by a lawsuit as well, TV stations and Hollywood trying to ban the product.
SonicBlue has agreed to sell the Rio and ReplayTV units to Japanese D&M Holdings that is better known as the owner of Marantz and Denon brands.
Recordable DVD technology is rapidly penetrating the market and replasing the CD-R as the primary file storage medium. According to the source, also stand-alone DVD-R Video Recorders are predicted a double or a triple digit growth.
According to Strategy Analytics, the number of DVD video recorder units sold in the US, Europe and Japan will rise from 2.7 million by the end of this year. This year's growth, notes Strategy, will represent a 108% jump over last year. Strategy predicts that DVD recorder unit sales will jump by 276% next year over this year.
Strategy believes that 42.1 million DVD recorder units will be sold in the US, Europe and Japan by 2008.
RIAA has sent letters to at least 300 American companies claiming that some of their employees have used companies' networks for trading illegal MP3 files in P2P networks.
In letter RIAA warns companies about possible fines and also lists ways of preventing P2P usage at workplace. The letter also contained a CD with full logs of shared material, dates and times and IP addresses of P2P users in question.
"In short, your computer network and resources are being used to illegally distribute copyrighted music on the Internet," the letter said. "We strongly urge you to take immediate steps to prevent the continued infringement of our members' sound recordings on your corporate network."
Altnet, the service that piggybacks with the mega-popular FastTrack-based P2P tool, Kazaa, claims that it has so far delivered over 75 million legal downloads through its service on Kazaa.
Altnet basically inserts advertiser-paid listings to Kazaa's search results. Often the files distributed by Altnet are either promotional type of content or "teasers" that require users to pay a fee to unlock the copy protection features in the files.
Kazaa's owner company, Sharman, uses Altnet as an example of legal P2P usage and will most likely use it as a very strong argument in its ongoing court case where it has been sued by the RIAA and the MPAA.
The MPEG-4 High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) proposal has been elevated to the final ballot stage, which will, hopefully, soon lead to a standard. The new encoding profile enhances the current AAC LC (Low Complexity) standard with the Spectral Bandwidth Replication (SBR). The group calls SBR "one of the most remarkable advancements in audio compression in many years". Thanks to coding options, decoders not equiped with SBR decoding functionalities can still play the AAC streams.
One of the upcoming software solutions on Windows-platform is the Nero Digital -codec, which was announced at CeBit last week.
Pioneer has released a new firmware for the mega-popular DVD-R drive Pioneer DVR-A05(also known as DVR-105).
The new firmware update has these changes since v1.21:
DVD-R/RW Writability Improvement (further improved from V1.21)
DVD-R/RW Playability Improvement (further improved from V1.21)
CD-R/RW Writability Improvement (further improved from V1.21)
CD-R/RW Playability Improvement
Supports 2X writing on New Prodisc DVD-R Media
But as many of us already know, you should be really, really careful when upgrading Pioneer's firmware. Pioneer has a legacy of issuing firmware upgrades that wont allow downgrading back to the previous version and that have introduced various limitations on media usage (Pioneer tends to block "unauthorized" blank media manufacturers' discs from burning on its drives). So, beware. Currently the best known firmware for Pioneer A05/105 is v1.20 -- the v1.21 introduced tons of limitations for media use; many x2 discs wont burn at 2x on v1.21, but only at 1x, etc.
"I became a fucking animal. I started fucking putting fucking heads on poles. Leaving fucking notes for the motherfuckers. Digging up fucking graves. I didn't give a fuck anymore. Y'know, I wanted—. They wanted a fucking hero, so I gave it to them. They wanted fucking body count, so I gave them body count."
—unnamed Vietnam Veteran, quoted in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York, 1994). Reprinted in An Intimate History of Killing.
British music industry and its main watchdog, British Phonographic Industry, claims that Britains largest ISP, former government telco monopoly, British Telecom is supporting illegal music swapping over P2P networks by not doing anything to stop it.
The only ISP in the UK so far who has taken some measures to prevent P2P file swapping, has been cable company ntl, who imposed a 1GB a day download limit to its broadband customers -- the cap has proven to be massively unpopular and has caused tons of users to switch to rival ISP Telewest, or to ADSL providers (to which all BT, who still controls the landline network, provides the "last mile" connection).
BT launched its own legal music service this month and now music industry claims it's being hypocritical about the music sales. According to BPI, BT's network contributes the majority towards ever-growing P2P file-swapping within the UK. BT maintains its opinion that blocking P2P networks without causing other problems to customers is impossible -- as everybody who knows how the Net works can confirm. BT also points out that using P2P networks is not illegal, but swapping illegal files is.
LiteOn, a relatively well-known Asian electronics brand, has released a MPEG-4 capable stand-alone DVD player at the CeBit expo in Hannover.
The player will compete against a similiar player from Danish Kiss, DP-450, which was released in last year. LiteOn's player, called LVD-2001, uses a MPEG-4 decoder chip from "notorious" Sigma Designs(the guys who violated XviD's GPL license). The chip used in the player is Sigma's EM8500. According to various sources, the player should be capable of playing pure MPEG-4 videos that are AVI wrapped (such as DivX v5.xx and XviD files) and also almost-MPEG-4 files such as DivX v3.11alpha and DivX v4.x files.
Pricing or the availability of the player is still unclear.
Nickname ‘Mausau’ has done some great work for Nero, making happen something that every audiphile (MusePack user) and open-source fan (OGG Vorbis) has been waiting for. On his project page there are compiled audio plug-ins for the popular Nero Burning ROM software.
The file sharing P2P-technology companies are struggling to turn their popularity into a good business. And of course there are the legal problems as well.
Personally I wonder when will the Direct Connect get more attention? It still seems that media focuses on Kazaa and perhpas GNUTella variants.
Outgoing executive Steve Griffin had headed the company throughout its years-long incarnation as one of the most popular file-trading software companies on the Net. The company's terse statement gave no indication as to why he was leaving, but said it would continue operating.
"StreamCast Networks is currently in the process of selecting the best candidate to take StreamCast and…Morpheus, to the next level," the company said in a statement. "In the interim, StreamCast's executive team is running the company operations and remains firmly committed to producing superior P2P software products like Morpheus."
It's amazing what dirt you can find on P2P networks, shared and distributed by people. In my opinion, this time the Congress is doing the right thing.
Pornographic material is protected by the copyright laws, just like any other artistic production. But some flavours of pornography are illegal by content - and just plain sick, if you ask me.
The U.S. Congress is targeting peer-to-peer networks again--and this time politicians aren't fretting over music and software piracy.
A pair of government reports scheduled to be released at a hearing on Thursday warn that file-swapping networks are exploding with pornography--much of which is legal, and some of which is not.
Searching for words such as "preteen," "underage" and "incest" on the Kazaa network resulted in a slew of images that qualify as child pornography, the General Accounting Office said in a 37-page report, one of two obtained by CNET News.com. The second report, prepared by staff from the House Government Reform Committee, concluded that current blocking technology has "no, or limited, ability to block access to pornography via file-sharing programs."
Leading PC, consumer electronics and digital imaging companies announced their support today for MPV(TM) (MusicPhotoVideo), a new open standard format to enhance the way consumers store and enjoy collections of personal music, photo and video content on storage media, such as data CDs and DVDs. Some companies will release the first MPV creation applications and players in the second half of 2003.
Companies announcing support for the MPV standard include Eastman Kodak Company, HP (NYSE:HPQ), LG Electronics Inc., Olympus Optical Co., Ltd., Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd, and Sony Corporation.
Also announcing implementation of the MPV format in future products are companies developing leading software and firmware applications for creating multimedia discs. These applications include ACD Systems ACDSee, Ahead Software's Nero, ArcSoft PhotoBase, HP Memories Disc Creator, Planetweb Digital Photo and Audio Managers, Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator, Sonic Solutions MyDVD and RecordNow Max.
The MPV control file provides a table of contents of the storage media such as CDs and DVDs which a MPV-enabled device can quickly recognize and use to navigate and access the multimedia content. Additions and edits to playlists and multimedia content can be made easily without rewriting the entire disc.
As we reported earlier, Ahead Software is about to release a MPEG-4 audio-video codec to the Nero product line. The codec is a competitor to Divx and other similar video compression solutions. Ahead has now gone public with the new product and here is their press release.
Ahead Software to preview complete MPEG-4 audio and video solution encompassing full ISO/14496-2/3 compatibility, and state of the art audio, High Efficiency AAC in MPEG (aacPlus).
Ahead Software, the makers of Nero, the technology leader in CD/DVD recording software, are set to preview at the forthcoming NAB exhibition, the most complete MPEG-4 audio and video compression technology available to date – Nero Digital.
Designed for optimum compatibility with the ISO/14496-2/3 MPEG-4 standard, the Nero Digital MP4 A/V codec’s will have the utmost quality video coding algorithms and full High Efficiency AAC in MPEG audio.
With DVD quality at only 20% of the space, Nero Digital video codec supports the most popular simple and advanced MPEG-4 visual profiles, and can decode DivX, Xvid, QuickTime, and other MPEG-4 implementations.
The Nero Digital audio codec is built on Ahead’s proven proficiency in AAC technology but goes much further with significant efficiency and quality enhancements. Now set to become a key core component of MPEG-4, High Efficiency AAC in MPEG audio, is an incomparable bandwidth extension technique allowing bit rates to be considerably reduced with no definable quality loss.
U.S. District Judge John Bates will be hearing the appeal from Internet service provider Verizon as well as the counter arguments from the Recording Industry Association of America on April 1st.
Earlier this year Bates ruled, that Verizon must disclose the identity of a Kazaa user under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Verizon sees that the DMCA subpoena procedure severely violates the users' privacy and demands that RIAA goes through the normal legal procedure to get the identity.
Ahead Software is about to drop the bomb at CeBIT. They will be expanding their product line even more to the DVD and video compression field.
New Nero products:
Nero Digital: The Digital is a new audio/video compression codec by Ahead Software. “The next standard in audio video compression - complete MPEG-4 solution encompassing ISO/14496-2/3 compatibility and state-of-the-art audio High Efficiency AAC in MPEG”.
Nero Digital will be a direct competitor to well known DivX codec and other similar products (like Xvid). According to our source inside Ahead, they have so far been very impressed in the codec’s performance. One strength of Nero Digital is that it will incorporate a high efficiency AAC audio compression built in.
"We're also really excited about the Nero Digital project, because there is no doubt the audio/video codec's will have immense appeal to people wanting high quality content (DVD movies etc) onto CDR (or using DVD/RW to put more than one movie on the same disc)".
Nero ShowTime: Ahead is also about to release a DVD player software. “Sharper pictures! Crisper sound! Get ready for the new digital experience ...it´s Nero ShowTime, the next generation software DVD player.”.
We had one of those days that you can't even imagine of when you have distributed server environment.
In early morning (GMT) our forum server was unavailable to various European countries due a network glitch at our ISP's end.
Later in evening (again, GMT) our main server has some dramatic problems connecting our database servers and the main site was down for good three hours.
Most of the services have been restored now, but there might be some occassional problems within next 24hrs until we get everything fixed (pretty much re-installed everything at the main server today, so something might be missing).
Sorry about the inconvenience this might have caused.
Former British monopoly, British Telecom, has launched its own legal music service together with artist Peter Gabriel's OD2 company. The new service, called Dotmusic.com, lists over 150,000 legal tracks in its catalog, but the service's main goal is to secure BT's position in country's emerging broadband markets.
BT's advertising claims of "unlimited music downloads" have already caused a British rival, Wippit, to complain to standards officers. In reality, the downloaded music can't be transferred to other computers and not even to portable audio devices. And when user ends his/her subscription, the downloaded tracks become unusable.
Service costs £10 a month (appx $17 or €16) and includes music from most of the major record labels -- except from Sony.
Japanese electronics giant Matsushita(better known by its consumer brand names, such as Panasonic) announced this week world's first video solution using the WLAN technology, compatible with IEEE802.11a and IEEE802.11e standards.
The signal processor that uses 5GHz frequency for wireless operations, transfers standard MPEG-TS stream (the MPEG stream wrapper used for digital TV, etc transfers). By installing the signal processor into, for example, a (digital-only, no analog input) DVD recorder and digiTV receiver box, could allow wireless operation between these devices, so that the digibox decrypts the broadcast and sends it to the DVD recorder which then unwraps the stream into regular MPEG-2 stream and records it to a blank DVD-R disc. And the DVD recorder could play later the stream through WLAN link to a MPEG-TS capable TV wirelessly.
Gracenote is well known for it’s CDDB compact disc identification service, which many CD softwares’ take advantage of. Quite surprisingly they are offering non-commercial software developers a free Software Development Toolkit with MP3/MP3Pro codecs, on a royalty-free basis.
Berkeley, CA (February 24, 2003) - Gracenote®, the worldwide leader in information services for digital music and media, today announced the beta release of the Gracenote Encode Software Development Toolkit (SDK) for non-commercial developers, on a royalty-free basis. This is the first version of the CDDB SDK to offer full mp3 encoding and decoding functionality, as well as mp3PRO decoding. This offering is a result of Gracenote's unique partnership with Thomson, the licensor of mp3 and mp3PRO technology, to provide music recognition services that are integrated with the world's most popular digital music codec.
The addition of encoding functionality provides non-commercial developers with everything needed to create fully functional mp3 jukeboxes that both create digital music files and utilize the Gracenote CDDB® music recognition service. Gracenote CDDB is an Internet-based service providing information for more than 1.8 million albums that enables developers to display artist, title, and track names and automatically label and categorize mp3 files as they are created. Over 8,000 non-commercial developers currently license Gracenote's non-commercial SDK to create software applications that access Gracenote CDDB.
According to various sources, Apple has managed to squeeze signatures from four record labels' execs to license their music to its upcoming legal music service. According to rumours, the new service is so simple to use that record labels simply love it.
Any details of the service are only guesses, but it is likely that the service will be tied together with the company's existing iTunes service and will allow copying the files easily to Apple's much-praised MP3 player, iPod. Obviously if this is the case, Apple needs to figure out a way to get a slice of the Windows' users spending as well, which might prove to be more difficult.
It seems that out of all major record labels, only Sony isn't interested of licensing its music to Apple -- (once again) rumours, say that Apple would like to allow CD burning in its upcoming service, but Sony objects this idea. In addition to all hype, Apple has licensed Amazon.com's 1-click payment system to ensure that the payments are handled quickly and without hassle.
According to Grokster, the only outside company who is still using the FastTrack's P2P network, the lawsuit that has been filed against it by the RIAA and the MPAA, has proven to be the key to success.
"Every time they attack file-sharing software in any way, users rush to download the program, just to see what's going on, and become hooked. As a result, we prosper and revenues grow", Grokster's president, Wayne Rosso, said.
He told that when the media industry sued the three P2P companies (Grokster, Kazaa and MusicCity), advertisers noticed the services and the enormous audiences they had. Grokster has now big roster of brand-name advertisers, including AT&T Wireless and Dell and has turned the business into a profit in last year.
According to a blurp at The Inquirer, Korean electronics giant LG is about to introduce its own version of multi-format DVD writer at the upcoming CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany.
Most interesting about the drive is the claim that it will support ALL of the existing DVD formats; DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW -- and the biggest surprise, also DVD-RAM.
Currently Sony has been pretty much the only player in this lucrative market, when NEC's multiformat drives are still pretty much a much-anticipated rumour and have been delayed many times so far.
The people behind the MovieJack sent us a little teaser about their CeBIT expo features. They seem to be heavily expanding their product line to different market areas, while developing technology in order to get bigger market shares.
Some very interesting software title names: DVDRWIN, Daemon Tools Pro...
Together with our publisher S.A.D. we have recently teamed up with DivX technologies, to develop the latest in both quality and speed of digital video conversion and recording. We are also very pleased to announce that Jérôme Rota (a.k.a. "Gej"), the mastermind behind DivX and the co-founder of DivX technologies, will be at our booth and is available for press meetings.
Catch up on the latest developments of our classics MovieJack and GameJack, but also on our brand-new software products:
The fastest MovieJack ever:
Learn more about the new update of MovieJack 2, which will turn the alreadyleading ripper into the by far fastest tool of its kind, creating Video Discs in almost real time. Ask for your special presentation.
Sony announced that it is to begin sales of the world's first Blu-ray based DVD-recorder next month. The recorder, BDZ-S77, which enables the consumers to record two hours of high-definition 1080i video at 24MBps on a blu-ray recordable disc, retails at around 450,000 yen ($3,800).
The product is aimed at consumers, who wish to record high-definition digital satellite broadcasts at the best possible quality. The release date in Japan is April 10th. So far no date has been given for an international release. It is unlikely that this particular product will ever hit shelves outside of Japan.
The drive is capable of reading Blu-Ray, DVD Video, DVD-R/RW, CD, and CD-R/RW discs. It can record on Blu-Ray discs at bitrates ranging from 4 to 24Mbps, which translates to 2 to 12 hours of recording capacity. There's only support for Blu-Ray recordables -- DVD-R/RWs cannot be written.
Check out the technical specifications at AV-Land.
Finally, after a long time of testing, our latest roundup with four new 52X/24X/52X recorders is posted. The latest drives from AOpen, Mitsumi, TEAC and WAITEC are tested with the latest version of our test methodology and the results are very interesting for buyers and existing users. The review is very big (20 pages) so take some time to relax and enjoy reading!
The on-line music scene keeps getting more and more complex every day. Just recently RealNetworks, the founding member of the MusicNet, invested in competing Listen.com's Rhapsody -service. Now Sony is rumoured to have provided funding to MusicNet, which competes with their own service, Pressplay.
So Real has a share of MusicNet and Rhapsody, and Sony has an influence in Pressplay and MusicNet, of which AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and EMI Group also own a share of. In November last year Sony licensed content to MusicNet.
The reasons behind these actions are quite clear. Since the on-line downloadable music business is still relatively small, the labels are trying to scrape up profits from wherever they can. The only way to make sure you won't fall behind of your competitors is to be part of every service around.
As suspected, the Jon Johansen DeCSS -case will go to appeals court. Earlier this year Norwegian court found the 19-year-old teenager not quilty to the charges he was facing.
MPAA filed the complaint against Johansen at the Norway's Economic Crime Unit.
"This case is about important principles, and we are very pleased that it will be tried again," said Rune Floisbonn, acting chief of the Economic Crime Unit's data department.
Johansen's lawyers, however, believe that the ruling will not change at the appeals court. The facts of the case remain the same -- Johansen copied only the DVD movies he had purchased.
"We have a victory behind us and we are confident with regard to the final outcome," Johansen's lawyer, Halvor Manshaus, said.
The new trial is expected to start after the summer.
The CD-RW.ORG, which is a part of the Afterdawn.com’s network of websites, has agreed to host a copy of the very popular Nero Burning ROM. What this means for the end user is that we will now always have the latest Nero versions downloadable from our high capacity servers, usually within 12 hours of the release.
RIAA has agreed to settle its lawsuit against optical media duplication giant Technicolor (which, for most of the people, is better known as the "Colors by Technicolor" statement in movie credits) for $2.3M.
Corporations are trying to solve the equation of turning the P2P file sharing boom into revenue streams. The Altnet, best known for the Kazaa file sharing software, now praises the network’s commercial potential and introduces plans for a dial-up based payment method as an alternative to a credit card driven financial transfers.
News.com has much more details about the controversial "Super-DMCA" legislation discussion that took off this week in various news sites, including ours.
