The RIAA is taking a more one-on-one approach in their anti-P2P efforts. According to the source, they are going to send warnings to P2P software, getting them caught in the act. The messages are delivered by an automated system.
Tapping into the chat functions built into software programs such as Kazaa and Grokster, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Tuesday started sending automatic messages to people who are providing copyrighted songs online, warning them that they're breaking the law.
Is Apple turning into a media house? The ever innovative Steven Jobs is sailing his company to totally new waters by entering the budding online music sales & distribution market.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Convention center here and pronounced a new era for digital music consumption, saying that other online music services are either illegal or unattractive.
"We were able to negotiate landmark deals with all of the major labels," he said of the company's newly launched iTunes Music Store. "There is no legal alternative that's worth beans."
Jobs is a respected visionary and his voice gets heard in the IT industry. It will be interesting to see what company is the next to follow this new trend. Micro$oft?
I significant court decision has been made, which may have quite an effect to the whole P2P file sharing industry.
federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast--parent of the Morpheus software--and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks, which has also been targeted by the entertainment industry.
The case is far from over though. An appeal from RIAA and the MPA is expected, naturally. Interesting about this ruling is that according to the source the ruling made a clear point that de-centralized P2P software, such as Gnutella, is legal
A U.S. district court upheld the earlier ruling and said that Verizon Communications must give up the identity of its Internet subscriber, who is accused of swapping music files on the Net. The company now has 14 days to disclose the identity, unless an appeals court puts the decision on hold again.
"Verizon cannot demonstrate that it has a substantial likelihood of prevailing...and has not shown that it will be irreparably harmed if a stay pending appeal is not granted," Judge John Bates wrote in his decision. According to him the DMCA law used by RIAA is not unconstitutional.
RIAA was obviously delighted about the ruling.
"Today's decision makes clear that these individuals cannot rely on their (Internet service providers) to shield them from accountability," Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, said. "If users of pirate peer-to-peer sites don't want to be identified, they should not break the law by illegally distributing music."
Verizon still sees that the decision will harm the rights and security of their customers, and will appeal again.
The record company EMI is launching their European online music download store. EMI is now boasting that their site is the largest music download service in Europe, by a record company.
EMI has teamed up with more that 20 outfits including Freeserve, BT, and Tiscali to flog its music online in Europe, the music giant announced today.
..
Once purchased, punters will be able to burn music onto CD-R or copy tracks to portable players. They will also be able to buy singles online as soon as the songs are played on the radio ahead of their full commercial CD launch.
There’s a clear shift in the attitude of music industry towards online music distribution, but what took them so long? Ever since Napster many people are now used to free and virtually unlimited music access on the Internet, even though illegal. Did the recording industry wait just a few years too long?
According to the sources, the summary judgement hearing in 321 Studios court case that was scheduled to take place tomorrow, has been postponed to next week.
The reason for the delay hasn't been announced. The case that was about to start tomorrow is a countersuit filed by the seven major movie studios. Studios claim that 321 Studios violate the controversial DMCA law with their DVD copying products, DVDXCopy and DVD Copy Plus. Both tools allow circumventing the CSS encryption found on most DVD-Video discs.
Australian police said on Thursday they had shut down an Internet music piracy site and arrested the three students who were running it. The site, known as MP3 WMA Land, offered free music files and video clips for download, many of which were hosted on university computers. The students running it were aged between 19 and 20. Two of them were Australians, and the third Malaysian. According to the police the site contained links to hundreds of music files.
"It [the shutdown] is a clear message to Internet pirates that they can no longer hide behind the mythology of the Internet. It's now revealed as nothing more than another form of theft," said Michael Speck, general manager of the Australian music industry's piracy investigations unit.
The defendants have been released on bail and will be appearing in court in mid-May. Australian penalties for copyright infringement include up to five years in jail or a $37,000 fine.
Artist Madonna launched her latest album with an anti-piracy campaign in P2P networks, distributing MP3 tracks that looked like actual songs from artist's latest album, but contained simply a voice of Madonna asking "What the fuck do you think you're doing?".
Well, some clever hackers who obviously got relatively angry about artist's attitude against P2P networks, managed to hack her official website, madonna.com, during the weekend and posting all the tracks from her album American Life for download.
The hacked website simply stated: "This is what the fuck I think I'm doing". After the hacking was noticed, Madonna's site went offline for good 15 hours.
RealNetworks has agreed to buy the only (semi-)independent online music subscription service provider, Listen.com, for about $36 million in cash and stock (of which $17.1 million is in cash). Real already owned a minority stake of the privately held company.
Real plans to bring the Listen.com's subscription service, Rhapsody, closer to its own subscription service, RealOne. However, the deal will most likely cause major shockwaves among the record labels, since Real has been -- and still is -- a big shareholder in Rhapsody's competitor, MusicNet, that is much more openly backed by major record labels (AOL TimeWarner, BMG and EMI). It also underscores partially the widening gap between AOL TimeWarner, whose online division AOL has started moving away from Real's server products and streaming solutions, and RealNetworks.
NeroPlugin's updated - adds RealAudio (.RM/.RA), Shorten (.SHN) support
Mausau, the developer of free Nero audio plugins, has been a busy bee. Recently the older plugins have been updated and new formats have been added. His latest work are the RealMedia / RealAudio plugin, based on the Real Helix SDK, and a plugin for the lossless Shorten audio compressor.
Currenly supported formats with Mausau's plugins:
AAC - based on libfacc/libfaad
AAC/MP4 - based on PsyTEL AAC
ASF - Windows Media
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
MP3 - LAME MP3 encoder / decoder
MPC - MusePack
OGG - OGG Vorbis
RA/RM - Real Media
SHN - SoftSound Shorten lossless compression
American government delivered a blow to Verizon, one of the largest ISPs in the U.S., as it tries to fight against the RIAA in a court fight that began in last September.
U.S. Department of Justice said that the controversial DMCA law that RIAA is using to get Verizon to reveal one of its customer's identity, doesn't violate free speech rights of individuals, because it targets only at people who have committed copyright violations or are suspected of doing so.
RIAA wants Verizon to reveal the customer's name, because RIAA claims that the user has distributed illegal music over the P2P networks by using Verizon as an ISP. Verizon lost its case in January in district court, but is currently appealing the decision.
Japanese Sumitomo Electric Industries has started to mass produce two inch low-dislocation gallium nitride (GaN) substrates. GaN semiconductors are used to produce the violet (405nm) laser used for reading and recording Blu-Ray, and other "blue laser" formats. Low-dislocation GaN substrate is superior to sapphire substrates, which suffer from high dislocation (crystal defects) and hence have a low yield.
Sumitomo is currently capable of producing 200 substrates a month, but will step up production to 500 by October.
Philips is pushing the DVD+RW technology to the general mass market, but also has updated their CD-R technology.
Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) today announced a manufacturing-ready six-channel DVD+R/+RW recorder reference design for the consumer market. By integrating Philips' Class-D amplifier family with Philips Nexperia DVD+R/+RW total turnkey system solution, manufacturers will be able to rapidly address the emerging DVD+R/+RW recorder market with AM/FM Radio, RDS, surround audio decoding and six-channel Class-D in time for the 2003 holiday sales season. The combination of these features will enable consumers to purchase a DVD-recorder based Home-Theater-in-a-Box (HTiB) which is a system currently based only on DVD players.
Korean consumer electronics giant, Samsung, released a new portable MP3 player on this week that supports so-called "surround sound simulation" -- decoding routines try '(although, most of the times don't manage) to make the stereo audio to sound just like the surround sound.
But despite this feature that sounds pretty much like a feature invented solely for the marketing guys, the player sounds nice enough anyway. Samsung claims that with one AAA-sized battery, the player, Yepp YP-55, can provide over 15 hours of continous playback. Player will also include MP3 recording option and SRS Labs' Trubass low-frequyency enhancement technology. Player will be available in South Korea on next week for $172 (128MB version) or $205 (256MB version). Company hasn't announced schedule for U.S. or European releases.
Video-on demand service Movielink and Hollywood.com have reached an agreement on providing a co-branded version of Movielink's movies-on-demand service at Hollywood.com. There will be a selection of new releases and classic films in the price range of $2.95-$4.99.
The deal helps Movielink gain a stronger foothold on the streaming movie market. Walt Disney Co. recently announced that it will start testing its own service later this year. America Online, on the other hand, hs licensed MovieFlix.com's movie library for use by AOL Broadband users.
Movielink is a company founded by several movie industry giant. It is an effort to provide users of high-speed Internet a legal channel for viewing movies on the net.
The previous attempt to sell SonicBlue's main assets, the ReplayTV and Rio brands, to Japanese D&M Holdings failed because the companies couldn't get their deal details ready before the court's deadline. But now the Rio and ReplayTV are finally sold to the D&M for $36.2 million.
The sale covers the intellectual property, inventory and capital equipment of the ReplayTV and Rio units. The price D&M paid in the backruptcy court auction was actually $5M cheaper than the deal it had negotiated with SonicBlue in March before the deadline was exceeded.
According to Emmett Plant's personal weblog, he has been voted out of the Xiph.org foundation by the board. He personally describes the issue on his personal weblog as personality conflicts.
Effective really-soon-now, I'll be stepping down as the CEO of the Xiph.org Foundation. It's not a decision I chose to make; It was made for me. The board of directors at Xiph have cited a 'personality conflict,' and I'm being pushed out. I've known for about a week now, and it's still sinking in.
Besides personality conflicts, the Xiph.org has had trouble delivering the results as well. Their first product was the free audio codec OGG Vorbis, which has been at the version 1.0 for quite some time. After the first stable release there hasn't been any developement, at least not public versions, and the the codec v1.0 is still far from optimized and outperformed by competitors especially at high bitrates. Xiph.org also has on going video codec projects, but there are no significant developements released.
The idea of open and free A/V codecs is of course wondeful - who wouldn't love the concept. Xiph.org has been able to raise quite a bit of media attention towards their projects, but so far it has been more hype than results.
A Chinese company called Hechuan Photoelectrics has developed, and patented their own version of the DVD-laser optical pickup used in every DVD-player to read data from disc. They will be investing more than $50 million in a factory to produce the parts.
This is great news for the Chinese DVD-market -- until now Chinese DVD-player manufacturers have had to rely on imported DVD-heads. Domestic manufacturing the key components of a DVD player will most definitely boost sales in China. And I'm sure we'll see the players marketed abroad as well.
AOL, the Net unit of AOL TimeWarner, has licensed the video encoding technology called TrueMotion and its versions VP5 and VP6 from company called On2. AOL plans to use the video encoding technology to deliver video content to its various web resources and its massive subscriber base.
AOL has declined to state how exactly it plans to use the video codec in future, but it has an existing licensing agreement for On2's previous video codec, VP3.2 that it uses in its WinAMP3 media player. According to analysts, AOL's licensing deal is yet another step towards an autonomous position in streaming market -- AOL has in the past been one of the biggest customer's of RealNetworks, but has launched several products and development plans this year that don't use Real as streaming platform anymore.
On2 became a relatively well-known name in last year when it donated its old video codec, VP3, to Xiph.org to develop an open-source competitor to MPEG-4 platform.
The PlayStation 2 gets it's first major update, after being on the market for about 3 years. The key issue in the update is the improved performance as a DVD player.
Whereas the current machine accepts only DVD-Video discs, at least officially, the new console adds support for the DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW recordable and rewritable formats. It doesn’t support DVD-RAM.
..
The new console can also output a progressive-scan video image, which should mean a better picture for users with a compatible television.
Other improvements include a better remote control device.
The interesting thing here is that will the update be affecting PS2 backups? Will the new version include new anti-MOD technology, making old MOD designs obsolete? Or the improved DVD drive performance could improve the drives ability to run backed up games from CD-Rs or DVD-Rs.
Rumour mill has been spinning wildly over the last couple of days around the world's largest record label, Universal Music Group(which is currently owned by French Vivendi). So far, the biggest names presented as potential buyers of the media giant are Microsoft and its arch-rival Apple.
Apple's position, according to rumours, is closer to an actual deal than that of Microsoft's. According to New York Post article, Microsoft has been "poking around, kicking the tires" and has had conversations with the Vivendi executives. Meanwhile, Apple's rumours seem to be more deep-rooted and there's even a alleged pricetag, $6 billion, that Apple would be ready to pay for the UMG.
Both companies have been extending their tentacles towards people's living rooms over the last couple of years and by acquiring the UMG, the reach would be in much, much bigger scale. WMA-only audio CDs, anyone?-)
The CD-RW.ORG had a look at some high quality cabling by BetterCables.com
It is more and more common that a computer acts as the media server instead of just being a workstation. Nowadays computers can be used as an audio and video source - possibly the only the source used in a household. Computers can carry huge amounts of compressed music or movies and they also serve well as DVD players. But the common problem is that computers aren't something we like to place to out living rooms, next to the audio system, TV or home theatre. This means extended cable length and low level video or audio signals need good carriers to deliver the signal without quality loss. A high quality cabling is needed.
Dutch consumer electronics giant Philips has added Net streaming capabilities to its so-called reference model.
The stand-alone reference DVD+R/RW recorder model will include LAN support and a video codec that will support MPEG-4 and its varieties, such as the recently standardized H.264 -- company also mentions specifically that the player will support DivXNetworks' MPEG-4 codec as well.
The idea behind the "reference models" is that the original manufacturer -- in this case, Philips -- develops fully equipped product that it then licenses as a specification or component-by-component or even exact full product, to third party manufacturers who wish to have their own entrance to the DVD player markets without the research and development required to build a DVD player from the scratch.
The specs don't exactly specify whether the player is capable of playing MPEG-4 videos from the CDs or DVDs, or just simply from the LAN connection.
According to figures released by Motion Picture Association of America to its member studios, the Hollywood movie industry earned a record total of $37.3 billion last year -- a staggering 18-percent increase from 2001. Much of the growth came from the 31 percent rise in DVD sales.
The British Internet cafe chain, easyInternet, wont challenge the High Court ruling that declared in January that its cafes violated copyright laws by allowing customers to use CDR burners.
Company was sued by the British Phonographic Industry(BPI), the British equivalent of the RIAA in 2002. The case seemed silly, but High Court disagreed -- and probably the defence the easyInternet chose to use wasn't exactly the best possible one. easyInternet didn't point out in their defence that they simply allowed their consumers to use normal part of the computer equipment that can be used (and most would claim that is normally used) for perfectly legal uses as well.
Anyway, in January, easyInternet was ordered to pay damages of £210,000 (appx. $320,000 or €310,000). But since then, easyInternet has, according to the BPI's press release, "provided new financial information that enabled BPI to assess the level of compensation that EasyInternet was liable to pay. EasyInternet also confirmed that it would not run unlicensed CD burning services in the future".
The international recording industry association, IFPI, released the sales figures for year 2002 and according to those numbers, the worldwide CD sales dropped appx. 7 percent compared to the 2001 figures.
In the United States, the drop was even bigger, 10 percent. Obviously the recording industry is pointing its finger at the worldwide music piracy, most notably the digital music piracy in form of P2P networks (and obviously they don't even suggest that the widespread use of copy-protection mechanisms that make CDs incompatible with thousands of CD and DVD players, would have anything to do with the drop). But they surprisingly do admit that movie and game businesses are eating the amount of money people are willing to spend on music.
This year's figures hold no surprises," said Jay Berman, chief executive officer of the IFPI. "Widespread use of illegal sites, made easier with the growth of broadband access in the major markets, is affecting an industry that is also having to compete with increased sales of other entertainment formats such as DVD films and new video game consoles."
Microsoft assigned InterVideo to port Windows Media technology to the Linux platform. But Microsoft is not targeting the consumer desktop users, but hardware vendors instead as Linux has gained ground as a operating system for stand-alone devices.
And hey, they are calling Linux stable - more stable than....?
We believe most of the major consumer electronics companies are looking at the Linux platform as a stable, low cost solution for multimedia functionality and InterVideo's superior technology and strong track record of multimedia innovation are an ideal fit," said InterVideo CEO, Steve Ro. "In addition, InterVideo will now be able to add support for the popular Windows Media Format for all of these devices.
It seems that there is a slight shift in the attitudes of record labes towards music distribution on the Internet. They have been fighting hard against the music sharing on the Internet, but perhaps they are now realising that resistance is futile. Therefore the industry has been starting to fill the hunger for downloadable music with various online offers - even free give aways.
Recently we've seen Madonna selling her latest single as a downloadable file on her website, and now major music labels are organizing a "Digital Download Day".
Recording label holdout Sony Music Entertainment has quietly joined rivals in agreeing to release selected songs by top artists such as Michael Jackson and Shakira for a European Internet download promotion beginning Wednesday.
Sony Music will participate in "Digital Download Day," an online music giveaway orchestrated by the major music labels, said Britain's OD2, one of the organizers. Sony’s music division is the last of the five major labels to work with OD2, a private technology firm co-founded by recording artist Peter Gabriel. It will make available songs from 14 artists spanning 50 albums, OD2 said.
Under quite peculiar circumstanses RIAA, along with Yahoo!, America Online, Microsoft and RealNetworks, has crafted a proposal for the online webcasting royalty fees.
What makes this proposal bizarre is the fact that RIAA agreed on the proposal with the Digital Media Association (DiMA), whose memberlist includes AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft -- none of which are in webcasting. The 25,000 or so webcasters are not included in the deal.
One might also wonder how AOL-TimeWarner can strike a deal with RIAA, since TimeWarners recording labels are all members of the RIAA. It's like right hand striking a deal with the left.
RIAA has busted four individual university students in three different U.S. universities, claiming that they've distributed thousands of illegal MP3 files using their dorms' Net connections and P2P networks. RIAA is seeking for a very moderate compensation, mere $150,000 per distributed song, for damages.
Otherwise the cases are pretty clear, some of the students sued in this instance, were running Direct Connect P2P clients, distributing the MP3s over the DC network. But at least one of the students was running a search engine that would allow users to search shared files within the campus network, not a P2P client. And as far as we know, running a search engine -- whatever it happens to find -- is perfectly legal, otherwise Google would've been busted for a long time ago.
RIAA's take on the issue is obviously somewhat different: "Differences are irrelevant from a copyright perspective," said RIAA Senior Vice President Matt Oppenheim. "All of these are networks created for one purpose and are being used for infringement."
In Japan they are innovative. According to the source, the Japanese division of the well known Yahoo! web portal has been able to negotiate a music distribution deal with the local copyright organization.
Interesting about this deal is that it is not essentially a 'give-away' contract, but Yahoo! is buying the music material instead. The figures are not published however. It would be interesting to know what kind of revenue stream plan Yahoo! has in this operation - how are they getting the return on their investement to the songs.
The Web portal has signed an agreement with the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) to distribute music from its Web site, according to a statement from Yahoo! Japan.
..
JASRAC, which controls music copyrights, will be paid an undisclosed sum for the rights. In addition, lyrics will be provided, Yahoo! said.
..
Other reports say that the songs will be encoded to prevent copying, but this could not be confirmed with the portal.
A survey carried out by 321 Studios, the company behind DVD X Copy DVD backup system listed Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Collectors Box Set as the top limited edition DVD.
Of the 1,009 respondents 45 percent chose the FOTR box set as the #1 limited edition set. The Matrix Platinum Limited Edition was the favourite out-of-print DVD for 30 percent, and Spider Man Limited Edition DVD Collector's Set for 13 percent of respondents.
"Limited edition DVDs are valuable investments and the treasured property of collectors. Consumers have a right to protect their irreplaceable DVDs. DVDs can easily get lost, stolen, scratched, broken or damaged by heat," said Robert Moore, president of 321 Studios. "In the event that these priceless pieces of their DVD libraries are harmed, backup copies can protect their investments."
Hewlett-Packard, the first major company that put CD-RW drives on computers, starts equiping its low-cost desktop and laptop PCs with DVD+R/RW burners.
The laptop, HP Pavilion ze5300 retails at $1,723 after a $100 rebate. It features 2.6GHz P4 processor, 15" display, 512MB DDR RAM, 40GB hard-disk drive, a DVD+R/RW drive, and 802.11b wireless networking. Apple, Sony and Toshiba have had laptop computers with DVD-R/RW drives for a long time though, and it will take quite a while before consumers can buy the ze5300 at retail stores. The supply for DVD+R/RW drives is tight, and HP states that the model will probably not be available before early June. And it might take a couple of months longer for larger supplies of the drives to be available.
Pavilion 735n desktop will retail at $899. It's the first HP DVD-burning model to retail at below $1,000, and will also feature the plus-family DVD-writer.
With the price difference between CD- and DVD-writers getting smaller and smaller, it is only a matter of time before DVD-writers will replace the CD-writers altogether. I just wish they could settle the matter between DVD+R and DVD-R, or just use multi-format drives, and let the consumers decide which way to go.
Ever wondered what a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death - the standard Windows crash screen) would look like on a huge cinema screen? According to the source, there is an increasing chance to experience this in a movie theatre near you.
Today Landmark Theatres and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT - News) announced that they are equipping 177 screens in all 53 Landmark Theatres across the United States with digital cinema playback systems based on Microsoft® Windows Media® 9 Series. This unprecedented agreement represents the largest digital cinema theater circuit installation to date in the United States.
..
This helps address the escalating costs of releasing theatrical films, which weighs heaviest on the independent sector, as it must pay the same costs to release a film as the major studios. The creation of a complete digital alternative represents a major breakthrough in these economies that will help guarantee greater diversity and access to the marketplace for independent filmmakers and distributors alike.
20th Century Fox, the last major movie studio that has stayed out of the online movie distribution business ever since its joint venture with Disney collapsed in last year, has signed a licensing agreement with CinemaNow.
CinemaNow competes against Movielink, a company owned by virtually all other major movie studios except Fox and Disney. Both services offer downloadabale versions of movies under pay-per-view model for broadband users. Studios have been cautious of entering into the business big time, fearing that the existing copy protection mechanisms available for such distribution, will be cracked and that would allow pirated copies to be made from movies distributed via online channels. CinemaNow has previous licensing agreements for movie catalogs from three other major movie studios -- MGM, French Vivendi's Universal Pictures and AOL TimeWarner's Warner Bros.
Probably two things have changed studios' way of thinking -- first of all, the DRM systems have improved a lot during the last year or so. And secondly, the movies they're so much protecting, are already available via P2P networks for free. 20th Century Fox is a unit of Australian News Corp..
The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) has released a MPEG-4 Content Protection specification for experts in network security, content protection and cryptography to review.
MPEG-4 hasn't achived wide support from the media industry, since it lacks proper Digital Rights Management (DRM). The new specification tries to remedy this problem. Once it clears the peer review, the DRM specification is expected to be finalized in June.
The new specification is based on National Institute of Standards & Technology's 128-bit AES encryption standard, which is already used in consumer products. "[It's] unencumbered by any additional royalty fees and intellectual property concerns and compatible with established Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specifications," ISMA president Tom Jacobs said.
SonicBlue, the company which is well-known of its mega-popular digital multimedia products such as Rio MP3 player and ReplayTV PVR devide, filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in last month, but said that it is prepared to sell its brands to Japanese D&M Holdings in order to save some of its shareholders' value. Now that deal has failed.
Bankruptcy court set a deadline for SonicBlue's reorganization arrangements, but SonicBlue failed to finalize the deal with D&M before the deadline. This means that company's main assets, Rio and ReplayTV, are to be auctioned on 15th of April. Company's other products, such as GoVideo line of dual-deck VCRs, will be auctioned at 4th of April. SonicBlue had more than $330M of debt in November last year.
These well known multimedia player softwares are used by many people, especially for Internet streaming. According to the source some fairly serius security issues have been discovered in these products.
The vulnerabilities have cropped up in RealNetworks' RealPlayer and Apple Computer's QuickTime. While unrelated, the weak spots could allow an intruder to execute damaging arbitrary code on a victim's computer. In both cases, updates are available to remedy the problem.
Security experts are increasingly concerned about hackers exploiting digital media players, which are designed to accept Web addresses and scripts--a key route for self-propagating, hostile code.
The vulnerabilities of RealPlayer are present in all versions above v8, on the Windows and Macintosh platforms. Also the RealOne player is affected, but the open-source Helix client is not. In QuickTime the issues are present in version 5.0 -> 6.0, but the fresh 6.1 promises to fix things.
Norwegian economics crime division said today that an appeals court has approved to handle the prosection's appeal in case against norwegian teenager, Jon Johansen.
The trial, dubbed as "the DeCSS case", will start in December. Johansen won his case early this year in lower court, leaving movie industry healing its wounds and preparing for the next attack.
Johansen is being accused of developing a software called DeCSS that allows users to crack the weak copy-protection mechanism called CSS found on most commercial DVD-Video discs. By cracking the encryption, users that don't have access to officially licensed DVD players (like Linux users) can watch DVD movies with their computers. As a side effect, the software also allows copying the DVD-Video disc to computers harddrive and distributing it over the Internet.
The most ridiculous thing in the whole process is the fact that Norway doesn't have any laws that would outlaw such activity and therefor Johansen is basically sued under laws that are meant for crackers who break into banks' computers and steal money. So, Johansen is being sued for breaking into his own, purchased DVDs.
The attempt to create a hybrid of DVD and CD has failed -- at least for now. The members of the international DVD Forum found in their tests that the playback of the discs manufactured by Warner isn't reliable enough for mass-market.
The hybrid discs were supposed to contain a CD layer of the usual 1.2 millimetre thickness, as well as a DVD layer at 0.6 mm. The test results on DVD players were quite discouraging -- half the DVD-Audio players played the Multi Format discs as plain Audio CDs, and a quarter of the players had even more serious problems. Nearly two-thirds of the DVD-Video players also played the discs as CDs, and a fifth of them had serious problems.
Panasonic spokesman Peter Weber told New Scientist: "It is premature to say that plans for a hybrid are dead. Work is continuing on other solutions."
The companies are now trying to create a two-sided hybrid disc. That might prove to be rather problematic, since the CD specifications require the clear plastic layer to be of certain thickness. Too thin layer would mean focusing problems for CD lasers. On the other hand too thick a disc would be incompatible with some players.
Another significant digital media software provider is entering the blooming DVD recordable market. Adobe, well known for it’s PhotoShop and many other professional publishing tools, is introducing their solution for DVD authoring. Not surprisingly, Adobe promises a strong integration with their other key products, which may well give them a serious competitive edge.
Adobe Encore DVD software takes DVD authoring to a new level of creativity for professional DVD production, including powerful menu design tools, full control over interactivity, and output to all recordable DVD formats. With its flexible interface and unparalleled integration with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, and Adobe After Effects software, Adobe Encore DVD gives professional videographers and independent producers the power to create sophisticated, multilanguage DVDs featuring interactive menus, multiple audio tracks, and subtitle tracks. And Adobe Encore DVD offers integrated transcoding of source files to MPEG-2 video and Dolby Digital audio, providing an efficient and streamlined DVD authoring workflow.
The RIAA is taking a more one-on-one approach in their anti-P2P efforts. According to the source, they are going to send warnings to P2P software, getting them caught in the act. The messages are delivered by an automated system.
A U.S. district court upheld the earlier ruling and said that Verizon Communications must give up the identity of its Internet subscriber, who is accused of swapping music files on the Net. The company now has 14 days to disclose the identity, unless an appeals court puts the decision on hold again.
