Recording industry giant continues to invest in audio CD protection schemes. It’s quite hard to see what’s the point or return on their investment since protections so far have had a minimal impact in online music piracy. Only conventional and legal home copying is affected, which insults consumers rights for the fair use of the product.
SunnComm Technologies, Inc.announced today it has entered into a strategic worldwide licensing agreement and revenue deal with BMG, the worldwide music division of Bertelsmann AG, to provide copy management technology to reduce piracy and the unauthorized duplication of music. The agreement between the two companies will enable the use of SunnComm's newest proprietary compact disc enhancement and copy-management system known as MediaMax(TM) CD-3 Technology.
According to a thread on 3ivx.com the version of Apple Quicktime (6.4d37) bundled with WWDC Panther, has options for decoding 5.0 and 5.1 multi-channel AAC audio.
Indeed our sources have confirmed that the upcoming QuickTime will have multi-channel AAC support. Taking a look at the screenshot accompanied in the thread, there are three different channel profiles for both 5.0 and 5.1 audio (the difference being that 5.1 includes the LFE, or Low Frequency Encoding channel).
The different 5.1 configurations are:
· L R C LFE Ls Rs
· L R Ls Rs C LFE
· L C R Ls Rs LFE
The 5.0 configurations are the same excluding the LFE-channel. It is unknown whether or not the decoder will be able to detect the channel configuration automatically. It would be obviously quite frustrating finding out through trial and error, which configuration is correct for a specific video. Of course it's easy to notice if you've got the wrong profile active.
We just finished our first DVD Shrink guide and put it online. The guide goes through how to back up a DVD-9 movie, including all the menus and extras, to a single DVD-/+R disc.
DVD Shrink is the first freeware compressed domain transcoding tool and can compete pretty well with its commercial counterparts and we believe that this guide is useful for quite many of our users. We'd like to thank our user Oriphus for providing the original draft and ideas for the guide.
Although technically quite advanced and versatile, Nullsoft's Winamp 3 never gained the popularity of it's predecessor, Winamp 2. Winamp 3 was supposed to be as quick as the earlier version, but instead turned out to be quite bloated and slow. Many Winamp 2 users never switched to version 3. Some sticked to the old version while many started using eg. Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
AOL, the online giant which acquired Nullsoft in 1999, has discontinued supporting Winamp 3 Wasabi-plugins. According to the plan announced in March, Winamp 2 and Winamp 3 will merge in Winamp 5 (2+3=5), due out this summer.
It is obviously in AOL's intrest to produce an in-house multimedia application capable of providing an alternative to Windows Media Player, Apple Quicktime, and RealNetworks' RealOne.
PC manufacturer Gateway has launched several non-PC products during the last couple of months, trying desperately to turn the company profitable again. The company's latest consumer electronics product is a stand-alone DVD player that includes 802.11b compatible WLAN access.
Through 802.11b connection, the player can retrieve MP3s and images from the local wireless network, i.e. from desktop PC's shared directories. Unfortunately the current wireless technology makes the connection bit too slow for video usage and therefore the device doesn't contain an option to watch DVDs that are stored within the local network over the wireless connection. For MPEG-4, the 11Mbps (actually more like 5Mbps) that 802.11b provides, would be suitable, but the device doesn't have an MPEG-4 decoder (and those higher bitrate MPEG-4 movies wouldn't be able to stream realtime anyway if the network would have other traffic taking the bandwidth or have other performance issues).
I've personally promoted the fact that wireless Net connectivity will change virtually everything in the multimedia within next couple of years and see this device as a first baby-step towards "dummy devices" that simply connect to Net wherever user happens to be and streams the video or audio as it would come from radio or TV, just with global selection and without time schedules.
Kerry Gonzales has admitted of leaking the new blockbuster movie "Hulk" to the Internet two weeks before its U.S. premiere.
The New Jersey man can now face up to 3 years in prison and $250,000 fine -- although such penalties are highly unlikely to happen. Once the movie leaked to the Net, film's producer Vivendi Universal took quite rare steps to catch the source of the leaked movie and invited FBI to the investigation.
Gonzales obtained so-called screener copy of the movie in advance through his friend who works in the advertising company related to the movie's promotion process. He copied the movie to his computer and shared it with his IRC channel friends. He will by sentenced September 26th.
321 Studios has released a new version of DVD X Copy XPRESS, which addresses the following issues:
·Chapter issue which caused many players like the Toshiba 2800 to not function properly.
·Improved the reading, this should decrease the occurrence of Error reading sectors and may help prevent the audio skipping seen with many apex players.
·Fixed issues with the audio language Ask Me option.
·Fixed a bug that caused only the first letter to be used as the volume label for the backed up disc.
·Fixed a bug that caused the subtitle selection screen to have no text.
·Fixed a bug that caused all the dialogs to contain no text if you installed 2.5.2 over top of 2.5.0, you can now install over top previous versions as intended.
The RIAA is look to file hundreds of lawsuits against individuals within the next 8-10 weeks. Their announcement has already had an impact on P2P network usage, but representatives of P2P application providers believe that the decrease will be temporary. The RIAA executive threatens that tens of millions of P2P users are taking the "real risk of facing the music".
The Recording Industry Association of America, citing significant sales declines, said it would begin searching Internet file-sharing networks Thursday to identify music fans who offer "substantial" collections of MP3 song files for downloading. It urged users to remove popular music-sharing software or adjust program settings to prevent such downloads.
Livephish is a Pay-Per-Download service that offers live show recordings. Livephish has now adopted their premium service downloads to use the lossless open source FLAC audio format. This means that the downloadable files are of 44.1kHz/16bit CD audio quality.
For fans who desire higher fidelity, we also offer a premium format. FLAC is a "lossless" compression which means that the source audio file is compressed, but without sacrificing any of the audio information contained in the master recording. An extracted FLAC file sounds identical to the original source (44.1 kHz, 16 bit stereo). The hi-fi FLAC files are much larger files and will take longer to download. These files are for audiophiles who want the best sound quality. FLAC files may be burned directly to CD on a PC running Nero CD Burning software with the FLAC plugin, while Mac OS X users must extract () FLAC to AIFF files to burn CDs or to listen to the files.You may listen to FLAC files with a special plug-in for Winamp (PC). Be sure to check compatibility with your favorite software or portable player.
The Nero FLAC plugin is brought to you by Mausau and CD-RW.ORG - download Nero audio plugins (13 different audio formats) from HERE.
The largest Peer-To-Peer service and software providing companies are uniting and making a presence in Washington. According to the source Grokster, LimeWire and a number of unidentified P2P providers are launching a lobbying campaign to watch their interests in the U.S. Congress. The goal is to convince the decision makers about their legitimacy.
The coalition, which plans to launch in the next 60 days, has not announced its name or hired a lobbyist. The group probably will work out of the office of whatever representative or lobby firm it hires, Rosso said.
It also is honing what its message and core values will be, but the primary aim is to dispel the belief that online file sharing is at best seedy and at worst illegal.
"The problem is that legislators have just been pumped full of so much misinformation,"
Yahoo! has launched today customized European versions of its online music service Launch. Launch, originally an independent company that Yahoo! acquired in June, 2001, operates as Yahoo's music portal, offering music videos, interviews, fan pages and music news.
Yahoo's mission is to "become an MTV of the online world". Launch debuts in Europe with five different localized versions: UK/ROI, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Company re-opened the Launch last year after a major revamp and, according to analysts and Yahoo's spokesperson, is making "good money" for the Net giant -- mostly by allowing record labels to promote their artists via various methods utilising multimedia content.
Online DVD rental service Netflix has been granted a patent covering their entire process of renting movies online. The patent also covers music, video games and books.
The patent might cause problems to Wal-Mart, who recently introduced it's own service at prices lower than Netflix's. Netflix hasn't commented whether or not they are going to summon a lawsuit against Wal-Mart.
If you're a lawyer or plan to become one, you might enjoy reading the patent.
Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. has made a strategic decision to partially withdraw from the CD-R and DVD-R manufacturing arena. Computer Support Italcard s.r.l. (CSI) of Italy, has agreed to acquire the majority stake in Mitsui Advanced Media, Inc..
CSI of Milan Italy, is a leader in the production of CD-R, DVD-R, micro floppy disc, paper products, CD-Rom and CD-Audio. CSI was created in 1997 through a fusion between two companies, Computer Support Italy and Italcard. Italcard was a market leader in the production of listing forms for printers, born in 1975. CSI operates a 150,000 sq. ft. facility at Milan, Italy. Last summer CSI also acquired majority control of Mitsui Advanced Media, SA in France, now Manufacturing Advanced Media Europe, SA (MAM-E). Since then, CSI has installed DVD-R and additional CD-R capacity in the MAM-E facility. With the acquisitions of MAM-E and Mitsui Advanced Media, Inc., CSI will command approximately $130 million in annual sales.
Mitsui Advanced Media, Inc. will change it's name to MAM-A Inc.. MAM-A will still be able to draw on the resources of CSI and Mitsui Chemicals to better serve the customer base. The new alliance between CSI and MAM-A will also enable the company to offer new products in the near future.
Mitsui CD-R’s have been one of the best, if not the best, choice for Compact Disc recording for years. It will be interesting to see will this deal affect the quality of their products. It seems that the premium quality media manufacturers are struggling, as we have already seen Kodak retiring from the industry some time ago.
Ahead Software MPEG-4 developer Menno Bakker has announced that the next version of the open source AAC audio decoder FAAD will include SBR decoder source from Ahead Software.
HE AAC is the next generation equivalent to MP3Pro. In other words it’s an optimized audio compression mode for low bitrates, such as portable player or internet usage. It is sometimes referred as AAC SBR or AAC+. The SBR stands for Spectral Bandwidth Replication. It is an audio enhancement technology designed especially for low bitrate audio and speech codecs.
This open source code release is a marketing move from Ahead Software, which is preparing for the Nero Digital launch as a part of Nero Burning ROM v6. Many audio player softwares have AAC support based on the FAAD decoder, so with this release Ahead is extending the support for their upcoming encoder in a snap.
A new anti-piracy bill called Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2003 was introduced in Congress on Thursday. The bill would drag FBI into the fight against P2P piracy by instructing them to develop a program to deter online traffic of copyrighted material. They would also have to come up with a FBI warning for copyright holders to issue to suspected violators. Last but not least the bureau would encourage sharing of information on suspected copyright violations among law enforcement, copyright owners and ISPs.
Especially the fact that FBI could encourage (in other words tell) ISPs to hand out subscriber details is troubling. We've already seen that DMCA is a very powerful weapon for the RIAA. Passing the bill would be like handing an M16 to a trigger-happy lunatic holding a shotgun.
Additionally the bill calls for the Department of Justice to hire agents who are familiar with intellectual-property issues as well as computer hacking.
Despite the whopping success of Apple's iTunes online music store, some popular artists have refused to sell their music in single track format.
Artists claim that the "get only what you want" model undermines their art, in this case, the concept of a full album (order of the songs and the "full picture" all the tracks on the album together create) and are also worried about the fact that selling all the material in single track format might have a negative effect on their album sales.
The monetary issue is, IMHO, rather ridiculous for most artists, since (as far as we've understood) they get almost the same amount for selling two tracks through iTunes as they would get for selling a one physical copy of their album. Anyway, some artists, such as Linkin Park, have pulled their single track selection from iTunes, but continue to offer full album downloads through the service.
Other artists with similiar issues include Madonna and Green Day among others.
DVD movie rentals overtook VHS in numbers units rented last week. Three months ago DVD rental revenues surpassed VHS, but it took a while longer to do the same in units. Last week 28.2 million DVDs were rented against 27.3 million VHS tapes.
It's no wonder really. VHS is slowly, but surely, fading away. Especially in rental business VHS tapes are clumsy, and the picture and audio quality falls with each viewing. And I'm sure no-one likes rewinding tapes before returning them. DVD media has also made services like Netflix possible.
It took DVD only six years to outpace the 25-year-old VHS format.
The High Court of Hong Kong decided that a Hong Kong-based mail order company Lik-Sang to stop immediately selling devices that could be used to make backups of NintendoGame Boy's console games.
The devices and tools, called Flash Cards and Flash Linkers, were used, according to Nintendo, to copy the game ROM images to PC and distrubute the ROM files over the Net and copy them to blank game cartridges, therefor causing monetary damages to Nintendo (who, as all console manufacturers nowadays, gets a share of each game sold to its console platforms) and its game publisher partners.
Court awarded preliminary damages of HK$5 million to Nintendo. Lik-Sang also needs to pay Nintendo's legal bills. Lik-Sang dropped selling these devices in September 2002 when a lower court issued an injunction against the company.
Now once the EUCD legislation is starting to get implemented in various different European Union countries, people are beginning to wake up and oppose the changes. Unfortunately this is too late now. The EUCD, European Union Copyright Directive was approved by the EU parliament already in 2001 without virtually anyone noticing it.
EUCD simply states that all European Union member countries (and those joining to EU next year) need to implement the directive into their national laws. The original deadline for doing so was in December, 2002 but as always, all countries missed the deadline. Now, the EUCD legislation is active in handful of EU member countries -- and once again, most of those living in these countries don't even know about it. Some of the countries that have -- as far as we know -- implemented the legislation already are Germany and Denmark.
So, what EUCD requires? It very clearly states that all tools and software that allow circumventing copy protection mechanisms (whether built by programming or by mechanical means) will be banned within the European Union. The directive doesn't specifically make it illegal to use such tools, but makes it illegal to distribute, sell and advertise such tools. Prime example of such tools are DVD rippers. So, if a site is located within the European Union, it can't distribute DVD rippers (if its national country has already implemented the EUCD).
According to leading market information company The NPD GroupDVD-RAM -based DVD-recorders hold a 70 percent share of the stand-alone recorder market in the United States.
DVD-RAM -based units are capable of offering digital video recorder types of functions, such as on-disc editing and pausing live TV. DVD+RW based recorders lack these functions. On the other hand recordings made on DVD-RAM recorders cannot be viewed on standard DVD-players.
Ahead Software, the makers of famous Nero product line, sent us the details of the up coming version 6.0. The CD/DVD recording software is evolving into a real Swiss army knife of multimedia storaging. The 6.0 will also include the much anticipated MPEG-4 audio/video codec, the Nero Digital.
Nero 6.0 Ultra Edition to Include the Most Comprehensive Set of CD and DVD Recording Tools Ever Seen
With the imminent release of Nero 6.0, Ahead Software is addressing all aspects of the optical recording process by its inclusion of advanced video editing and authoring, DVD playback, all-embracing backup, MPEG-4 Nero Digital, and a whole new array of features and functionality never previously seen in any other CD/DVD recording suite.
Featuring an intelligent and customizable StartSmart application launcher, any user -- beginner or advanced -- will always be in complete control of all recording projects.
The Nero 6.0 Ultra-Edition includes NeroVision Express 2.0, a complete solution for VCD/SVCD and DVD authoring with full video editing, Nero ShowTime, a DVD software DVD player for the most vibrant picture viewing of DVD movies and your own projects, along with MPEG-4 (Nero Digital) compatibility, Nero BackItUp, with full, incremental, update, and differential control of your data, and disc spanning, InCD 4.0 for true drag and drop and save within application, CD/DVD writing, Wave Editor 2.0 and Nero Soundtrax, for multi-track audio editing and mixing, and MPEG-4 video and audio (high efficiency AAC), using Nero Digital, the new standard in audio/video compression. The Nero Toolkit featuring CD/DVD Speed - the de facto industry standard for critical media and drive analysis and used by drive manufacturers Worldwide is also a major part of the Nero suite.
According to a survey released by 321 Studios, the maker of the DVDXCopy and XPRESS backup tools, found that most of the consumers hate the idea of self-destructing DVDs that Disney is planning to start selling in the U.S.
Disney's plan is to replace a middleman in the DVD renting business (==Blockbuster) by offering an option where user simply gets the DVD from any store for same price as Blockbuster charges for two-day rental, but don't have to return the disc ever since it becomes unusable after two days. However, according to the study 76 percent of respondents stated that they would not be interested in "renting" a self-destructing DVD.
Most of the people who took the survey, were also extremely worried about the environmental damage such idea would cause.
RIAA has sued 18 American retailers, most of them small businesses, claiming that they were selling pirated CDs.
The businesses named in the suit included gas stations, small music stores and convenience stores. RIAA started its campaign against businesses selling pirated CDs "on the side" in December and sent notices to many companies asking them to agree with RIAA's terms for dropping the lawsuits. The 18 now named in the suit didn't comply with the request.
As much as most consumers disagree with some of the RIAA's ideas, I personally think that people who make pirated CDs to sell them for profit should be prosecuted. Not that artists would notice much of a difference in their salaries, but anyway..
We suffered an outage of a couple of hours on Tuesday (from around 4PM to 5:40PM EDT) . The outage was limited to the main pages - forums did not seem to be affected.
The outage was caused by a database problem which was located and fixed. Everything should run smoothly again.
Sony has been the only major record label that hasn't been selling its music in digital format over the Net in Europe. Now this has changed since Sony licensed its music catalogue to British online music firm OD2.
Through OD2, which was founded by Peter Gabriel, Sony's music will be available through various British websites, including BT, Freeserve and MTV UK. OD2 is the only company in Europe who has managed to get music licenses from all five major record labels. But the deal with Sony has one big nag -- unlike rest of the labels, Sony wont allow distributing its material EU-wide, but insist limiting the distribution only to the UK. This might prove impossible, since AFAIK everything that is sold in any EU country over the Net, has to be available to other EU countries as well.
Recently the RareWares published an open AAC / MP4 audio encoder listening test and now the results are ready for you to review.
The encoders and parameters tested were:
Psytel AACenc 2.15 -br 128
Ahead/Nero 5.5.10.35 128kbps CBR, high quality
Sorenson Squeeze 3.5 (FhG Pro) 128kbps
Apple QuickTime 6.3 (Dolby) 128kbps high quality
FAAC 1.17b -a 64 (64kbps/channel)
What we can learn from the results is that the Apple QuickTime encoder, which is of higher quality than the codec used in iTunes, is the best of the pack. It is also quite clear that the free FAAC encoder still needs some work. The rest of the participants were quite even, which is partially suprising as Nero AAC is actually an updated version of the PsyTEL. One must also take into account that the test was conducted with 128kbps CBR (Constant BitRate) settings and the more efficient VBR (Variable BitRate) modes were not used.
Read the full test results and some commentary at RareWares.
According to a market research by IDC, the worldwide market for (compressed) digital audio players (or as they're better-known, "MP3 players") might become one of the most successful areas for personal technology during the next couple of years.
IDC predicts that such market for MP3 players will be worth a whopping $44 billion by 2007. The figure seems awfully high, but it seems that IDC has included every single stand-alone device type in the world (excluding PCs, etc) that can play compressed audio formats, such as most modern DVD players.
Anyway, the prediction begs to ask what will happen to CDs if consumers have seriously adopted truly digital audio (CD contains digital audio as well, but is associated to the physical plastic product as well) and consider it to be their number one choice when planning to buy a new audio equipment.
Aopen has released an interesting combo drive, featuring CD-RW and flash memory card technology. The drive can also be operated with a re-chargeable battery, is USB connected and support 6 types of flash media.
Technical specifications:
24x CD-R writing speed
10x CD-RW rewriting speed
One-button copying with or without error checking
USB 2.0 compatible
Can be operated via the Li-Ion rechargeable battery
MusicNet has announced it will be offering its entire music library in Microsoft Windows Media 9 -format. The service currently has a selection of over 350,000 songs available for permanent download, and CD burning in various formats.
It seems Real Networks' 40 percent share of the company did little to keep Microsoft out from MusicNet. Both MusicNet and Microsoft representatives praised the streaming capabilities of WMP9. According to Dave Fisher, general manager of the Windows Digital Media Division at Microsoft, WMP9 "offers consumers near instantaneous playback".
Pioneer has signed a licensing agreement with TiVo to use TiVo's DVR (digital video recorder) technology in its products. TiVo's set-top boxes are basically units that use harddrives as storage media and can act as a VCR replacements or "freeze" live TV picture (i.e. the unit will start recording the TV channel immediately the TV is "paused" and once user hits play again, the playback continues from beginning of the recording while the unit is still recording the rest of the show).
Pioneer is the latest major video equipment manufacturer to sign a such contract -- other licensees include Sony and Toshiba. Pioneer is expected to roll out first TiVo-equipped units, most likely stand-alone DVD recorders, by end of the year.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Tuesday announced it will be cutting prices on their DVD rental service. The new price for two DVD rentals at a time is $15.54 per month (down 18% from $18.86/m). The fees for three and four DVDs at a time are $18.78/month and $21.94/month respectively.
With the new pricing Wal-Mart might turn out to be a noteworthy competitor to on-line DVD renter Netflix, even though Netflix currently holds a 95 percent share of the market. With stores practically everywhere, Wal-Mart can promote the rental service in volume and gain market share with competitive prices.
One of the most interesting open source video technologies (as MPEG-4 -based codecs such as XviD have their possible problems with licenses), Ogg Theora, has reached alpha 2 milestone.
Compared to the previous alpha 1, this milestone fixes virtually all bugs found in previous versions and includes various new features. Xiph.org that controls the Theora project, seems to have dropped the development of their other video codec, a wavelet-based Ogg Tarkin, in order to concentrate their efforts to Theora. This is kinda pity, since Theora is based on rather old VP3 codec from On2 and can't really compete with widespread MPEG-4 -based codecs, such as XviD and DivX.
Japanese electronics giant Matsushita(better known by its brand names, such as Panasonic) is trialing a DVD rental system that should be "pirate-proof". The technology combines physical DVD disc and file downloads from the Net.
The concept doesn't sound very user-friendly. The technology, which is developed by Matshushita and four other Japanese companies, forces (as far as we've understood) users to use their PCs to watch the movies instead of their existing stand-alone DVD players.
In trials, one of the participating companies, InterPia, will hand out "teaser" DVD discs that contain movie previews and trailers. Users can then purchase a full movie by inserting the disc to their PCs and downloading the movie from Net and paying for it. After the movie has been watched, it will delete itself -- viewing the movie again means that it has to be downloaded and paid again.
So, basically it sounds -- despite its "sexy" branding as "pirate-proof DVD" -- just like any other Net-based movie rental system, such as Movielink.
The MPAA is sending rather aggressive emails in order to capture domain names that have a trademark on. The owner of ratednc-17.com received some heavy text from the MPAA.
"If you have registered the domain name in bad faith, your actions may subject you to the loss of your domain name as well as to civil penalties of up to $100,000 under the recently adopted Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999. If you actually operate a website which offers any goods, services, or information, your actions will constitute trademark infringement and/or dilution under the Trademark Act of 1946."
The funny thing here is that the owner of the domain is not using it for business. He registered the domain as it is his Quake alias and he wanted to dedicate a domain to.
In legal terms the MPAA does have a case here. They do have a trademark "NC-17" registered in 1999. On the other hand, this really makes one wonder the business ethics and morale of the organization.
Our little project, called AfterDawn.com, is now four years old. On 10th of June, 1999 our site went public for the very first time.
Since then, we've grown quite a bit. I was slightly shocked, when I yesterday took a look at my last year's birthday post and noticed that we've tripled our traffic within the last year.
For those of you, who are interested of this kind of stuff, here are some specs about our site. Our site contains three domains -- AfterDawn.com, Dawnload.net and MP3Lizard.com. Under these three domains we have various "sub-sites" -- all of the sites are available in English and in Finnish (all of our site's admins and owners are Finns). AfterDawn.com contains the main site itself, Finnish version of the main site, English and Finnish discussion forums and official DVDXCopy support forums.
Anyway, as a whole, our site has now 70,000 registered members and on monthly basis we have over 3 million visits to our site which generates appx. 10 million page impressions each month (and if you're stuck with the good olde 1990s thinking of "hits", this converts to around 150 million hits a month). People download over half a million tools and utilities from our site each month and the downloads and pages generate traffic of over 2 terabytes each month.
Apple has confirmed that it has held a private briefing to some 150 representatives of independent record labels. Apple is seeking to increase the selection of music available at iTunes. So far only music from the five major record labels has been available.
According to Derek Sivers', founder of independent record distributor CD Baby, notes Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed at the briefing that Apple would not start offering a "pay-to-play" scheme to record labels. Instead they have an editorial staff that decides which music gets featured in the store.
The BBC has published some impressive Apple iTunes figures, which they claim to be leaked information from a closed doors Apple meeting.
Based on these figures the success of iTunes is a blast. 3.500.000 songs sold since the launch and now they are scoring 500.000 sales per week.
The iTunes e-store features more than 200.000 songs from various artists, including many front line names. The recording industry was worried that online track-by-track sales would reduce the sales because now the customers don’t have to buy the entire CD. This makes one wonder why most CDs have 2-4 good songs and while the rest are just BS? Even so, according to the source 45% of the sold tracks are still actually sold as a part of a full album.
No wonder that all the sudden there is all this hype around the online music business, but why on earth it took so long to get this this point while the technology and the demand (Napster, remember?) has been there for years?
Our buddies at RareWares are running a public AAC audio listening test:
In the last few months/weeks, AAC has been receiving some media coverage thanks to the efforts of companies like Apple and AOL to push the format forward. Since there are several available AAC encoders, both free and commercial ones, interest for a comparision was raised by concerned users. Then this test was created.
It's purpose is to find what encoder performs best encoding AAC at 128kbps.
Verizon lost its case (or at least the major part of it)against RIAA couple of days ago when appeals court decided that it wont intervene to district court's ruling that Verizon has to hand out the names and personal details of its subscribers, that RIAA accuses of piracy, immediately to RIAA.
Despite the fact that now Verizon must give the names immediately, the case is still heading to appeals court's hearing in September. Obviously this wont do any good to the subscribers in question when their details have to be in RIAA's hands well before that deadline and RIAA can launch a legal action against these individuals meanwhile. Obviously Verizon's intention is to take the case as high as possible in the court system to prevent this happening again.
The whole case began when RIAA demanded, based on the controversial DMCA law, Verizon to hand out names and other personal details of four of its Internet customers to RIAA. RIAA claims that these people have distributed illegal music files over the P2P networks. Verizon agrees that it might have been the case, but Verizon's point is that RIAA should get the court order for each case before Verizon has to act, since otherwise -- Verizon and many other ISPs say -- RIAA gets a personal detail automaton that requires RIAA only to accuse someone of doing something illegal and wont have to prove it in any way.
Business Software Alliance has launched an anti-piracy campaigns which is targeted towards the Asia-Pacific region. According to the source BSA is sniffing for websites and users of P2P file sharing software in the region, in order to find illegally distributed software. The source reports that BSA is using a web crawling software for the campaign.
So far, software-swapping Web sites have been found in Singapore, Korea, Australia, Taiwan, Japan and China, he said.
Many of these Web sites discovered by the crawler have been shut down by the Internet service providers (ISPs) still hosting them after being served with a legal letter called a "notice of take-down" by the BSA.
World's third largest record label, British EMI, has sued German media giant Bertelsmann, the owner of world's fifth largest record label BMG. The suit follows the similiar lawsuit filed earlier this year by group of independent music publishers and later by world's largest record label, UMG(owned by French Vivendi).
The legal fight that includes all the parties mentioned, is seeking for more than $17 billion from Bertelsmann. UMG, BMG and the independent publishers have filed the lawsuit because they consider that Bertelsmann was deeply involved with large-scale copyright infringements by investing over $100M to now-defunct Napster, the mother of all P2P tools.
EMI's suit was filed, just like UMG's was, in District Court in New York. Previously these two record labels (UMG and EMI) have already sued the original Napster's investors, the venture capitalist company Hummer Winblad Venture Partners for same reasons that they're now suing Bertelsmann.
Remaining two of the Big Five record labels, Japanese Sony and the only major American label owner AOL TimeWarner, haven't commented whether they will be joining the lawsuit party in near future.
Recently Sony announced the upcoming PS2 upgrade named PSX. Now it is rumoured that the challenger Microsoft Xbox is getting a facelift too.
No technical details of the "Xbox 1.5" is available, but according to the source it would be significantly smaller than the initial version. Indeed the first generation Xbox is quite big, and definitely not very good looking or stylish. As game consoles are turning into media centers and used in peoples’ living rooms, the design issues are more and more important.
Personally I think there is no doubt that the 1.5 will also have technical improvements, since Microsoft can’t afford to lag behind Sony in it’s struggle to grab a significant market share in the gaming industry.
Recording industry has filed a new copyright infringement suit against Streamcast Networks, the makers of Morpheus file sharing application.
The new suit competes for the title of Most Ridiculous Lawsuit Ever. Streamcast had been preparing to launch a streaming radio service, but the service was never launched. However the company did buy thousands of CDs and transfered them to a database. Now the record labels are suing Streamcast Networks for copyright infringement, because they didn't have permissions from the copyright owners.
"This is another step in our ongoing litigation against Streamcast, a company that we believe is responsible for widespread copyright infringement," the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said.
In other words RIAA is trying to exhaust Streamcst Network's assets in frivolous lawsuits. Earlier this year RIAA lost its previous copyright lawsuit against Streamcast Networks, which lead Streamcast CEO Michael Weiss to call recording companies "sore losers" for pulling a stunt like this.
In a long fight over the royalty rates for webcasting (or audio streaming, however you want to call it) in the U.S., it finally seems that all parties have reached an agreement. Final obstacle was with the non-commercial college radio stations and they have now reached an agreement with RIAA.
Under the agreement, college radio stations pay a flat fee of $250 a year, applied retroactively from 1998. The fee will remain on this level until end of 2004 when the royalty rates need to be negotiated again. Other non-commercial Net radio stations reached an agreement earlier, paying $400 a year -- also retroactively from 1998 and until end of 2004.
The royalty rate debate has been a hot potatoe to the rather new industry, specially when the royalty rates originally were proposed. The original rates, stations said, would have killed virtually all hobbyist from the industry. Since then, there have been rulings, overrulings, back-stabbing, secret private deals and finally something that looks like a consensus over the rates.
Small, commercial webcasters pay a flat fee of $500 a year for their streaming rights and the bigger players pay appx. $0.01 per hour per listener.
DVD-player software maker InterVideo Inc. has set pricing terms for an initial public offering. The company is planning to sell up to 2.65 million shares at $11-13 per share, which adds up to $34 million.
InterVideo withdrew its IPO last January, and now filed them again under new auditors -- KPMG LLP. American City Business Journals sees InterVideos move as a sign of the recovering IPO market. In year 2000 the markets suffered what is known as "dotcom crash" when investors realized that there's actually no profit to be made in, say, chatrooms. Internet companies could get no more funding through IPO and hundreds, if not thousands of sites went out of business, and tens of thousands of people lost their jobs. It has taken the investors years to turn their eyes back on the Net.
The creator of WinAmp, GNUTella and most recently WASTE, has made an announcement that he is about to leave Nullsoft - a company owned by America Online.
For me, coding is a form of self-expression.
It's probably the form I'm most effective at.
Everything I code is arguably owned by the company.
The company controls what I do with my code [in the past, it seemed I had
freedom, but it turns out all of that was not really the case--rather, I
was somehow avoiding the control illicitly (for 4 years)]
The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have.
This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leav.
I don't know when it will be, but I'm not going to last much longer.
I have nothing but respect for the company--I've just come to realize that
it is time to do something different.
Justin made a name for himself by creating the world’s most famous audio player software the WinAmp. He was quickly recognized as an icon of the MP3 revolution and the whole e-boom that has had such an influence in most parts of the world. He even managed to write a book about MP3s few years ago. Justin also was able to significantly benefit financially when his company Nullsoft was aquired by America Online.
Nokia and Warner Music today announced a marketing collaboration, which brings emerging artists to the upcoming Nokia 3300 music device.
The Nokia 3300 music device / mobile phone will include a 64MB MMC memory card with music clips, True tone ring tones, multimedia message templates, and color wallpapers from three Warner Music artists: A (www.a-communication.com), Harry (www.h-a-r-r-y.com) and Krezip (www.krezip.com). All the artists are clearly chosen with Nokia's target audience (youth) for 3300 in mind.
Nokia 3300 music device will operate on GSM 900/1800 bands, and will include: an MP3/AAC player, a stereo FM radio, a digital recorder, advanced ringtones, and MMS messaging. The phone is based on the Series 40 platform, so it will also support Java midlets. The sales package will include an USB cable for transfering digital music from the PC as well as an audio cable for recording from analog sources.
KaZaa and it’s associates are once again very innovative in their efforts to turn P2P into business and good use. They are now utilizing the network for distributing authorized content, such as freely distributable promotional songs. According to the source their clients include names like Microsoft (WMA promotions), rap-artist Ice-T and Atari.
But the cake here is that rewards and bonuses are planned for the distributors of authorized content.
Lawsuits are the stick approach, this is the carrot.
..
The idea, says Altnet CEO Kevin Bermeister, is to harness the computing resources of the tens of millions of Kazaa users to distribute authorized files such as games, songs and movies. Giving people an incentive to host and trade paid files could create a powerful medium for distributing authorized content and could diminish file-trading networks' role as hubs of online piracy, he said.
The representatives of DVD-CCA and Andrew Bunner presented their oral arguments at California's Supreme Court on Thursday. DVD-CCA repeated their point of view on DeCSS -- they see it as a tool designed for a specific task, and hence cannot be treated as pure speech, which would give it full protection under the First Amendment.
David Greene, representing Bunner on behalf of the non-profit First Amendment Project argued that computer programs, even though written in a language unfamiliar to most people, is still speech.
How is a computer program diffenret from, say, a detailed engineering manual. Let's say I have a manual which describes how to assemble a bookshelf. I write a program for a robot that will put the bookshelf together automatically, using just the manual I have as a reference. What's the difference between the manual and the program?
But DVD-CCA argues also that DeCSS used protected trade secrets, which means that I would have had to steal the manual from Ikea to begin with. However in Norway one is allowed to look for the manual more intensely than in the US.
Ahead Software MPEG-4 developer Menno Bakker has announced that the next version of the open source AAC audio decoder FAAD will include SBR decoder source from Ahead Software.
