Some parties still don't accept the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) methods in tracking down Internet pirates. Internet service provider SBC Communications has filed a complaint in a U.S. district court saying that many of the RIAA subpoenas have been done improperly.
Like Verizon earlier, SBC also fears that the turbo charged DMCA subpoena process might be unconstitutional. "Misapplication of DMCA subpoena power raises serious constitutional questions that need to be decided by the courts, not by private companies which operate without duty of due diligence or judicial oversight," a spokesperson for SBC said.
RIAA has also grouped demands for information of multiple file-sharers under one subpoena.
RIAA's methods have also been put under scrutiny by sen. Norm Coleman on Thursday. He has begun an inquiry into the lawsuits, saying the tactics used by RIAA might ensnare innocent people.
While Coleman understands the concerns of the music industry, he feels that the ends don't always justify the means. "The industry seems to have adopted a 'shotgun' approach that could potentially cause injury and harm to innocent people who may have simply been victims of circumstance, or possessing a lack of knowledge of the rules related to digital sharing of files," Coleman said.
The implementation of EUCD will have staggering consequences to Swedish computer users. Not only will it limit the consumers' rights to make copies of CDs and DVDs for personal use, but it will also criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing.
The Swedish government is proposing a law which would require the permission from the copyright owner before any music, video, photo or text material can be spread on the net. P2P software, such as Kazaa will be outright outlawed, as will software intended for bypassing copy protection on movies and audio CDs.
Also the right to make personal copies will be further limited, but it will still be legal to make copies for personal use.
According to the minister of justice Thomas Bodström the new legislation doesn't radically change the current attitude towards copyrights.
"The new law has not been tailored to satisfy the needs of large record companies. Essentially it retains the earlier views on copyrights. As technology develops, the legislation must also be kept up to date," Bodström commented.
Distributing or downloading illegal copies on P2P networks can lead to a sentence of up to two years in prison. Usually only those sharing illegal files have been made liable in court. The Swedish law will also prohibit downloading.
Despite the increasing popularity of legal music download services, such as iTunes, the online sales won't make up for the losses generated by piracy, according to a study by Jupiter Media.
The research firm estimates online music sales will be $800M this year in the United States. Earlier estimates of $5.1B revenues by 2007 have now been reduced to $3.3B by 2008.
"The industry is suffering from competition for entertainment dollars, changing demographics, the end of the CD upgrade cycle and piracy" said Lee Black, analyst for Jupiter Research.
According to the research, digital sales will account for 7% of the US market this year.
The desktop PC and home entertainment system are seldom located next to each other, or even in the same room. Yet it would be nice to deliver PC content, such as pictures or music, to the living room. Wireless-B Media Adapter from Linksys sheds some light on what the future might bring.
The adapter connects to the TV and amplifier with standard S-video connector and RCA connectors composite video, and stereo audio. It's powered by Intel XScale PXA250 processor, which is widely used on modern PDAs, and supports common picture formats and playing back digital music files. The connection to the desktop PC is made using either Wi-Fi or standard wired Ethernet. All the content is displayed by accessing simple menus on the TV screen using a remote control.
As the processing power of mobile processors increases, we're bound to see a device with enough torque to compress an MPEG video in real time.
The HE AAC (High Efficiency) AAC audio compression provides huge sound quality improvements for low bitrate applications, for example to be used in portable players. With HE AAC one can achieve pleasant sound quality with extremely low bitrates (<96kbps).
The first HE AAC encoder is included with the Nero 6 retail version, by Ahead Software. Today Audiocoding.com has released the source code of a HE AAC capable decoder, and it is likely that HE AAC enabled audio players will emerge soon.
As the Nokia N-Gage, the portable gaming console with cell phone functionality, is about to be released before the end of this year, Sony has released more information about Playstation Portable.
Not surprisingly, the PSP will also have wireless functions for communicating with other devices and for multiplayer abilities. According to the source, the PSP will utilize WLAN or Bluetooth technology and infra link, which is rather obsolete technology when compared to the first two.
Ken Kutaragi told the meeting of developers and publishers that the device will be able to access the Internet wirelessly through local area networks - suggesting that the system will use either 802.11 wireless networking technology, or possibly Bluetooth.
The Nokia N-Gage utilizes Bluetooth as well as GSM and GPRS cell phone technology and is Interned enabled for email (IMAP, POP, etc.) and WAP. As Sony won’t be the first to market, they need are expected to match or outperform the N-Gage.
The most interesting part in the source article is that Sony PSP might not be just a game console with connectivity, but a multipurpose next generation hand held with also a lot of useful tool-like purposes.
"I want to make it the ultimate mobile device," Kutaragi told the meeting. "I need your support for that." What he seems to be aiming for, however, is a mobile technology equivalent of the Swiss Army knife - a flexible and powerful piece of equipment capable of fulfilling an extraordinarily wide range of roles depending on what software and hardware it's loaded out with.
Making the PSP as a PDA like multi purpose tool would be an interesting move by Sony, that would separate PSP a lot from the old Playstation product line, which are sole gaming and entertainment devices. On the other hand, all this talk about the potential features reveals how much work to do the electronics giant still has before the launch.
The number one in CD-R technology is adapting to the market situation and pushing out next generation recording devices.
Plextor, one of the leading companies for the development and production of CD-ROM drives, CD-Recorders and CD-ReWriters is expanding its range with its first Dual Format drive: PX-708A, which writes DVD's at 8-speed, rewrites at 4-speed using the DVD plus format. With the DVD minus format, this drive writes at 4x and rewrites at 2x.
The PX-708A reads DVD-ROMs at 12x.
The PX-708A comes in internal version with a Tray load mechanism.
The Retail package includes: PX-708A (DVD Recorder), E-IDE (ATAPI) cable, Plextor CD/DVD Utility Software (PlexTools Professional), Nero 5.5 and InCD recording software, Pinnacle Studio 8 software, PowerDVD software, 16-language manual.
The PX-708A is supported by a unique two-year On-Site Collect & Return** guarantee by Plextor, by which any inconveniences resulting from a defect are reduced to a minimum. The firmware is stored in FlashROM which makes it possible to quickly and easily upgrade to the latest version. CD TEXT is also completely supported.
With the PX-708A, the user has a perfect all-in-one product for creating own home videos, back-ups, composition of photograph collections, saving music...
MusicMatch Jukebox is one of the most popular and well known all-in-one audio applications. It has been available for years and has always been attracting a good number of newbies.
According to the source MusicMatch is now implementing pay-per-download music purchasing features to their services, much like the Apple iTunes. The iTunes has been a great success and many companies are now adopting the same business model to their services. The supply is quickly increasing, so now the question is that how big actually is the demand?
MusicMatch, which already offers a subscription-based service, the $7-a-month MusicMatch MX, said it has struck deals with nine big-name labels to offer a casual purchase-oriented download service for Windows PCs.
Among the labels are 'big five' players EMI, Universal and BMG, but both Warner and Sony are notable by their absence, which automatically puts MusicMatch's service at a disadvantage to both Apple and BuyMusic.
MusicMatch didn't reveal much in the way of details about the service, so it's going to be interesting to see if they offer the same sub-licensing terms that BuyMusic offers.
The once famous peer-to-peer service Napster will return -- but only as a brand.
Roxio, which bought the rights to Napster's name last November, will lauch Napster 2.0 online music store by the end of the year. According to the company, the service will feature half-a-million songs, personalized internet radio, artist interviews, and exclusive tracks from indie-labels. They are also negotiating with record labels to provide more liberal downloads allowing the tracks to be burned on CDs and played on other devices.
The service will probably be based on the technology from Pressplay, which was purchased by Roxio in May. Napster 2.0 will face tough competition from Aplle's iTunes, Buy.com's BuyMusic, and others.
Obviously embarrassed by the numerous successfull hacking attacks made against their website, RIAA has recently upgraded their Web servers to stop it from happening again.
According to Netcraft RIAA first upgraded to Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0 in June, then quickly masked the operating system to "unknown", and finally, earlier this week, changed their Web server to "TST-SECURE-OS", which The Register suspects is just a modified IIS 6.0.
It'll be interesting to see how long RIAA manages to keep hackers away this time. It has, after all, been a school holiday season.
German court decided on Friday to postpone the lawsuit against the record label Bertelsmann. The decision was made because the Federal Constitutional Court was worried the lawsuit might violate Bertelsmann's constitutional rights in Germany.
"If lawsuits in (foreign) courts are obviously misused to bend a market player to one's will by way of media pressure and the risk of a court order, this could violate the German constitution," the court said in a statement late on Friday.
Bertelsmann was sued by major music labels for $17 billion for funding Napster's operation in 2000 and 2001. According to the lawsuit Bertelsmann kept Napster running by investing more than $100 million in the company, and hence prolonged it's existence.
The tempoary ruling will be upheld untill the court can review the case more closely and determine whether or not constitutional rights are in fact in jeopardy. The decision means only that the lawsuit could possibly not be delivered in Germany. Bertelsmann has also been sued in the US.
Ahead Software has released the demo version of their newest multimedia/digital storing suite. Also announce by Ahead is that Nero 6 will include Nero Recode, a DVD 9 to 5 compression module. Also the website here.
Download Nero 6.0.0.9 from our official mirror.
Note that the Nero 6.0.0.9 contains only the core components of the software package. You can find upgrades to Vision Express and other modules at Nero.com.
A new bill introduced Thursday would introduce parental discretion to peer-to-peer networks by requiring the services to get parental permission for minors before letting them use the services.
The Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act, or P4 bill would require Federal Trade Commission to requlate the P2P networks to make sure minors aren't accidentally coming across porn. The bill is rather vague, and suggests the use of technologies that haven't even been developed. In any case, the bill would mean more work for the companies behind peer-to-peer networks.
RIAA has tasted the sweet nectar of suing individuals and found it so good they just can't get enough. When earlier it took a considerable amount of shared music to trigger a RIAA subpoena, it now takes merely a handful of songs to get the ball rolling. This way the number of subpoena requests will increase from 75 per week to 300 per week.
The ISP's receiving the most subpoena requests are: Comcast Cable (formerly AT&T Broadband), Road Runner, Verizon Communications, Earthlink, and AOL.
It is also worth mentioning that using an IP blocking software (eg. Peer Guardian) will probably not stop RIAA from finding out the IP address of the offender, because it's unlikely they are doing the scans from any of their known address spaces.
The last major film-studio without a download-on-demand service, Walt Disney Co., has signed a distribution deal with on-line movie service Movielink.
Movielink, which was founded by Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, MGM, and Sony eight months ago, will have a selection of 400 titles when the Disney titles have been added. Movies such as Chicago, and Gangs of New York will be made available to the consumers.
All the major Hollywood studios now offer on-demand downloads of their movies. Even though 20th Century Fox already has a distribution deal with CinemaNow on-line service, Movielink CEO Jim Ramo would like them to be included with Movielink as well. "We have been and continue to talk with all the other studios and have reason to be hopeful," Ramo said. "We'd like to add everybody."
According to the source CMC is aggressively adding DVD recordable disc production capacity in the near future. The company is aiming to take the lead in the next generation of optical storing media.
CMC plans to expand its monthly blank recordable DVD disc capacity to 16 million units in July and 30 million units by year-end, Wong said. The new plan is much more aggressive than the company’s original plan. Earlier, the company said it would expand monthly capacity to about 10 million units in the fourth quarter from six million in the second quarter.
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Taiwan-based Ritek, the current leader among recordable DVD disc manufacturers, said it would expand its monthly recordable DVD disc capacity to 20 million units by year-end, as previously scheduled.
Unfortunately CMC magnetics in the CD-R field are infamous of their poor and inconsistent quality. It will be interesting to see how they do in the DVD-R field in terms of quality.
Source: Digitimes Visit our forums for CD-R/DVD-R media discussions and purchasing recommendations.
No, the Xbox is not capturing the market. The reduced sales figures are a typical market phenomena as most people who were interested in the so called second generation consoles mostly have already purchased one. Sony is stil the king of the game console hill, as they have sold about five times more units than Microsoft or Nintendo (Game Cube).
"It will start to slow naturally," said Adrian Drozd, managing analyst at Datamonitor. "Most people who want a games console already have one."
But he said Sony should not be worried by the latest figures as the PS2 is still the undisputed king of the console market.
Sony has said the console shipments are in line with expectations.
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Console sales
Schools, that include MIT and Boston College, refuse to reveal their students' personal details to RIAA because according to them, federal law states that schools can't reveal their students' personal details without giving a "reasonable notice period" to the students' themselves.
"We are opposing the subpoenas, not in an effort to protect students from the consequences of copyright infringement, but rather to establish the proper procedures to be followed in the future," Boston College's director of public affairs, Jack Dunn, said.
The RareWares are continuing their series of extensive listening comparison of lossy audio codecs.
Building on the AAC at 128kbps test results, this test is meant to compare the AAC winner (QuickTime) against other popular compression formats: Musepack, Vorbis, WMA Pro and MP3
It's purpose is to find what encoder outputs the best quality on bitrates around 128kbps
The encoders and parameters tested are:
Apple QuickTime 6.3 MP4 encoder 128kbps high quality
LAME MP3 Encoder 3.90.3 --alt-preset 128
Musepack 1.14 --quality 4 --xlevel
Ogg Vorbis 1.0 post-CVS -q 4.25
Windows Media Audio v9 PRO bitrate-managed 2-pass VBR 128kbps
One of the only freeware DVD-to-DVD-R backup tools, DVDFab, has been sold. The author of DVDFab announced recently that he will stop developing the software because of the German implementation of the EUCD legislation,
The author of the DVDFab, Joerg Plenert, has sold the software to Fengtao Software, a company that develops DVD-related tools such as DVD Region-Free and DVDIdle. Fengtao plans to add support for season DVDs, integrate a DVD ripper to the DVDFab and integrated DVD-/+R burning.
It is most likely that DVDFab will become a commercial product very shortly, but the current -- first version released by the Fengtao .. version is still free and can be downloaded from its website.
Buy.com launched its music download service BuyMusic.com today, starting the race to offer the iTunes-like services for Windows users.
Buy.com sounds good on a paper: there are over 300,000 songs to choose from, which is 100k more than what Apple has in its iTunes service; album prices start from $7.95, which is $2 less than what iTunes charges; single track downloads cost $0.79, $0.20 less than what iTunes charges.
But there's always the catch.. It seems that Buy.com just wanted to be "the first" to exploit the Windows userbase after iTunes' whopping success (Apple says that they deliver over 100,000 paid downloads each week), at any cost. What does this mean? Buy.com didn't have time or willingness to negotiate and pressure record labels to hand out free licensing deals, but instead every label can set their own terms for the DRM protection the songs have. So, labels can make the songs so that they cannot be transferred to portable digital audio players or burnt on CDs or transferred to other PCs -- Apple's iTunes allows free burning to CDs, transfers to its iPod player, etc without asking questions from the labels whether they want this or not.
New warning messages are about to hit the big screen, trying to convince the consumers not to obtain illegal copies of movies from the Internet.
The MPAA is increasingly worried that its movies will be swapped via the Internet among millions of people who haven't paid for copies, as software tools and faster broadband connections make it easier to do so. As a result, the industry is stepping up its efforts to warn and crack down on people who might be interested in swapping movies online.
MPAA will also be campaigning on cable TV channels and via Junior Achievement Organization. They are also launcing a RespectCopyrights.org website to support the campaign.
Group of indie labels that represent almost 200 artists worldwide have attacked openly against RIAA's new war against file-sharing.
Chuck Paugh, a promotions director of Dust Traxx, a house and trance music label, claims that he has spoken to more than 20 other companies similar to his and all are agreed that the RIAA's campaign will backfire: 'the industry as a whole is against these lawsuits' he says.
Dusk Traxx, says Paugh, 'are not opposed to peer-to-peer trading of music. We feel that the dinosaurs in the industry need to catch up with technology and consumer demands instead of trying to stomp on consumers..'
According to him, the users of P2P networks are mostly teenagers who simply can't afford to buy music, but if you give them the option to explore music, once they're adults with disposable income, they will buy the music that they like if you don't alienate them from the music industry as a whole.
RIAA claimed during the weekend that is has managed to win already 871 subpoenas against individual American P2P users. With subpoenas, RIAA forces ISPs, universities and other Net service providers to hand out individual users' personal details so that the trade group can use those details in order to sue the users.
According to Associated Press's informations, RIAA doesn't even bother checking the volumes of file trading -- in some subpoenas there are only five copyrighted songs listed that users have shared through the P2P networks.
RIAA says that it will try to negotiate with most of the individuals in order to get the cases settled outside court and expects to see damages between $750 and $150,000 for each song that has been distributed by the users over the P2P networks.
While RIAA's tactics are getting harder, users are fighting back as well. Tools such as PeerGuardian are getting more and more popular as they block well-known RIAA's, MPAA's and various other copyright holders' and FBI's IP addresses from accessing their computers. Also, anonymity in P2P networks seems to be the Holy Grail that all the P2P networks are trying to achieve as RIAA and other copyright holders are declaring an open war against file-sharing.
Many in the digital multimedia world saw the Billboard magazine's decision to start an official download music chart a sign that finally the digital music industry had matured to a point when it can be considered as a real alternative to traditional music distribution. But by looking at the numbers, it doesn't require very much to get into top 10.
According to the stats Billboard collected for the week ending at 19th of July, 2003, the top song in paid music downloads category was "Crazy in Love" by Beyoncé with Jay-Z. But that song only received 1,500 paid downloads. And the chart number 10 only got 500 paid downloads. So, in theory, any artist that's featured on any of the source sites for the chart (iTunes, Pressplay, etc) could easily buy themselves a top position in the charts. To put the figures in comparision, Beyoncé's new album sold over 317,000 copies during the same week, just in the U.S.
But another interesting fact is that Apple claims to serve over 500,000 paid downloads a week through its iTunes service. If this figure is correct and in line with the figures it provides to Billboard magazine, it means that people are listening and paying for huge variety of different kinds of music. Could it be true that online digital music stores are finally demolishing the "manufactured music"'s position, even if in very small scale?
The download edition of Nero 6 has been delayed to the 25th of July, even though the Ultra Edition retail pack is released in the U.S. as planned.
According to Ahead Software, the delay is due to more feature additions. According to Ahead the Nero 6 will include a "Nero Recode" component, but gave no information what that actually is.
However, we do know that the Vision Express is improved on the version we reviewed earlier. Based on our feedback the updated version will include an option to use external video encoders, such as CCE or TMPGEnc.
..the very latest update in a few days because it contains 'smart encoding' and many other things (slide show transitions etc). Its just I noticed your comment on re-encoding the MPEG files, so the user will have a choice now if he uses other MPEG-2 encoders such as CCE or TMPEG
Los Angeles federal court has sped up the appeals process for the case where movie and recording industry (represented by their lobby groups, MPAA and RIAA) are against two FastTrack licensees: Grokster and Streamcast's Morpheus(although Morpheus doesn't use FastTrack anymore).
Development of one of the most popular freeware DVD backup tools, DVDFab, that allows backing up DVD-9 discs to two blank DVD-Rs, has been stopped.
The creator of the software, Joerg Plenert, announced that he wont take any chances with the new German copyright law, that's based on the EUCD requirements. Even though the software doesn't crack the CSS copy protection found on DVD-Video discs, it however allows circumventing Macromedia's copy protection mechanism, region locks and UOPs (User Operation Prohibition) found on discs. And as by strict implementation, these actions are against the new law as well, he decided to drop the development of the software.
Software will be available through his website for limited period of time and by end of this month, the website will be closed.
Major Hollywood studios have launched their first legal actions against pirates in mainland China. The MPA(international sibling of the MPAA) took action last September against several video pirates in China -- some of these cases have been since settled, some of them will go to court.
Under the settlement with two Chinese companies, companies agreed to pay $30,200 in damages, apologized and have agreed to destroy all illegal copies of MPA's member companies' products.
The pending law suits are against three companies and MPA has already tried to settle with the companies, but according to its spokesman, settlement in these cases is very unlikely to happen.
The streaming patents that a rather unknown company called Acacia Research holds, gained their first seal of approval by a Californian district court.
Acacia claims to own patents that cover virtually all core technologies that are used in providing streaming audio or video online. Company has sued several small companies, mostly adult entertainment companies, accusing them of using patented technology without valid licenses.
If Acacia's patents actually hold water once they start attacking major players on the Net, it would mean that virtually every single website that provides multimedia content in any form, would be liable of paying licensing fees to Acacia.
Court awarded Acacia a temporary injunction against five adult entertainment companies. The injunction bans the sites from using any streaming audio or video material on their websites and also bans them from linking to any site that provides such content.
The named five companies failed to defend themselves or show up in the court hearing, so the case isn't exactly the best possible case study to prove Acacia's patents perfectly valid.
The DivX Networks are working hard to make their MPEG-4 video compression codec an industry standard. They have now signed a deal with India based Ittiam corp., in order to produce DivX compliant portable devices using a Texas Instruments platform. The planned DivX supporting products include digital cameras and video cameras as well as other portable devices.
BANGALORE, INDIA and SAN DIEGO, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 06/26/2003 -- Ittiam Systems and DivXNetworks, Inc., the company that created the revolutionary, patent-pending DivX® video compression technology, today announced a partnership to deliver solutions that will enable DivX Certified digital still camera (DSC), digital video camera (DVC) and portable products in time for the 2003 holiday season. The target platform for this range of digital video products is the TMS320DM270 from Texas Instruments, an official DivX Certified partner company. In the future, solutions will be available on a wider range of platforms depending on the application and market demand.
Net retailer Buy.com plans to launch its own music store on next week's Tuesday, aimed at Windows users with pretty similiar pricing structure as Apple's hugely successful iTunes(which is not available for Windows users yet) has, i.e. user pays $0.99 per song download and no subscription fees, etc.
Buy.com tries to emulate Apple's success, although its business will be based on a website-based store front rather than a stand-alone application, like Apple's iTunes is. Even the service name of Buy.com's music store sounds somehow familiar -- iMusic. And obviously to stir the soup a bit more, there is a well-established site called iMusic.com already, owned by the ArtistDirect Network.
It is not known yet what format Buy.com will eventually use, but odds are in favour of WMA added with Microsoft's DRM stuff. It is interesting to see whether Buy.com's tracks can be burned on audio CDs or converted to unrestricted MP3s.
A Canadien company has studied P2P software usage in corporate networks and according to the study 77% of companies have a P2P software installed in their network. Companies with over 500+ employees had at least one P2P installation within the company. The study was targeted to companies with more than 10 employees.
In addition to the copyright violation issues, P2P software are also a significant security risks. There are a number cases where empleyees have been sharing valuable corporate data in the P2P network.
The results highlight the potential risks that corporations and individuals run, as the record industry prepares to file potentially thousands of lawsuits against individuals who offer copyrighted materials online.
"Corporations are frantic about how to rein in some control over this," said AssetMetrix President Paul Bodnoff. "Like with software licenses, most companies want to be on the right side of the law. The challenge is how they do that."
Grokster, the second biggest P2P software developer that uses solely FastTrack(same network that the biggest one, Kazaa, uses) for its traffic, has released a "pro" version of its software.
The new software costs $19.99 and comes without any advertisements or spyware whatsoever. According to Grokster, there has been a huge demand from the user base to provide a version of the software that would be free of annoying additional components, such as "spyware" and "adware" components (that track user's web behaviour and pop up advertisements even on websites that don't carry any advertisements).
"We can offer the user a better experience at a reasonable price that still allows us to pay our bills," Grokster President Wayne Rosso said in a statement.
Obviously some people are eager to point out that there are already ad-free versions of Kazaa available on the Internet, but unfortunately these tools are illegal as they violate Kazaa's copyrights (which, again, some people might find rather hilarious ;-).
The adware-bundled version of Grokster will remain free. Obviously the big question is: how long it will be until the Grokster Pro can be downloaded from Grokster..
Philips has started a new licensing program for multi-session audio discs.
License program for Non-Standard Multi-Session CD-Audio Discs: An increasing number of audio CDs are being published as multi-session discs.
The first session of these discs contains audio that can be played back by a consumer CD-Audio player and the second session contains music, video, and/or other data that can be played back by the CD-ROM drive of a PC.
The manufacture of these multi-session discs is not licensed by Philips and Sony under the CD Disc Patent License Agreement. The multi-session discs, however, necessarily use a number of Philips and Sony patents on the multi-session and CD-ROM technologies. The expiration of these patents is still many years away, contrary to the patents on CD-Audio which have expired in many countries. Philips and Sony have created a license program for these new disc types, under a new license agreement, called "Patent License Agreement for the Manufacture of Non-Standard Multi-Session CD-Audio Discs".
Not a CD-Extra disc
These new types of multi-session discs differ significantly from the CD discs for which Philips and Sony offer patent licenses (e.g. CD-Audio, CD-ROM, and CD-Extra).
The CD Disc Patent License Agreement comprising the essential patents of Philips and Sony defines a.o. the CD-Extra disc, which is also a multi-session disc. The new types of multi-session discs, however, do not conform to the mandatory features of the CD Extra standard as defined in the "Enhanced Music CD Standard Specifications", such as the mandatory presence of certain directories and files. Hence, these new discs cannot be called CD-Extra discs.
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Short name: Multi-session Audio Disc
One of the servers has been now down for two hours. Our ISP is trying to solve the issue -- seems to be the HDD of that box -- as soon as they can.
During this time, some parts of the site will be down -- most notably Dawnload.net, cd-rw.org and our ad serving. While ad serving is down, it will also slow down the whole site. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to get this resolved as quickly as possible.
Friday, 11th of July, was truly a sad day for Europe, free speech and fair use rights. The largest European Union member country, Germany, passed its own implementation of draconian DMCA-like law called as European Union Copyright Directive.
The law, that is now in effect in five member states (Germany, Austria, Greece, Denmark and Italy) makes it illegal to distribute (even for free), sell, manufacture, develope or advertise tools or software utilities that allow circumventing copy protections. This applies to all copy protection mechanisms, including cracking the CSS that's found on most DVD-Video discs, circumventing audio CD copy protections, etc.
German implementation of the law went even further than what the EUCD itself required -- German version of the EUCD implementation makes it illegal to even discuss about circumventing copy protections in public (as on Net pages).
The chilling effects of the German law can already be seen here and there -- most obvious is the fate of the Linux DVD ripper, dvd::rip. The new versions of the software don't include settings for cracking the CSS code at all as the software is being hosted and developed in Germany.
Bertelsmann, the media giant and former owner of the notorious P2P software Napster, is going to court trying to get lawsuits filed against it, dismissed.
According to Bertelsmann, Universal also tried to buy Napster at the time it was negotiating with the small startup -- Universal's deal fell through when the price got too high.
According to Nielsen Net Ratings, company that provides the traffic statistics to virtually all major websites and other Net services, shows that Kazaa's file sharing volumes dropped by a pretty whopping 15 percent in the week that ended July 6th.
In week before that, RIAA announced that it will start suing individual P2P users if they share music through the network. Also, other P2P networks saw similiar drops -- iMesh, which uses both, FastTrack(same as Kazaa) and its own proprietary network, saw a drop of 16 percent during the same period and Morpheus which uses Gnutella network, had also a drop of 15 percent in its traffic.
Obviously U.S. Independence Day had some effect on the traffic, but it normally isn't even near this kind of figures.
BBC has interviewed the man behind the MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer III) audio format, Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg. Even though Dr.Brandenburg was able to develope the complex lossy compression technology for the format, he failed to predict what would be the results. He however dreamed that his inventions could be useful to millions of people. MP3 certainly did became very useful, but not in the way that Dr.Branderburg would have wanted it to.
"People should have easier access to music," he says. "They should be able to listen to it wherever they are and still pay for it.
"My sympathy is always with the artists and even with the record labels. They should get paid for the work they do.
"I don't like the Napster idea that all music should be free to everybody."
But Dr.Brandenburg also realises the stupidity of the strategy that the music industry has chosen
Instead Dr Brandenburg argues that the record labels need to look at ways of using the technology, rather than fighting it.
"There are so many new opportunities for the music industry if they catch on and use the technology."
Japanese NEC demonstrated today world's first 3G (acronym meaning third generation hi-speed mobile phone networks and equipment) mobile phone that comes bundled with a digital TV tuner.
The exact specs for the phone are still slightly vague, but it comes with a quite small resolution screen with 120x160 pixels. The demonstration streams were delivered using MPEG-2 TS (a sort of a wrapper/container format, used in digital TV broadcasting) as a container, including MPEG-4 video at 160kbps bitrate and MPEG-2 AAC audio at 48kbps, mono.
Japanese terrestrial digital TV system has one of the 13 frequency segments reserved purely for mobile reception, so the low bitrate MPEG-4 will be sent out using that channel while the "actual" digital TV aimed for digital TVs and set-top boxes, will be sent out at much higher bitrates (and as far as we know, the video will be in MPEG-2 format rather than MPEG-4).
RIAA has sued a company that owns the Spanish website, Puretunes. According to RIAA, the site that launched in May this year, sold unauthorized copies of music but claimed it had acquired licenses for the music it sold.
Puretunes sold unrestricted music downloads with various kinds of pricing arrangements -- most popular ones were 8 hours worth of downloading for $3.99 and 48 hours of downloading for $9.99. Site disappeared in June and hasn't been heard of since. At the time of it's was launched, the company claimed that it had acquired full licensing rights to all of the tracks it offered on its website through various Spanish licensing houses.
Now, according to RIAA, this simply wasn't the case. RIAA spokesperson said: "It's bad enough that Puretunes was selling music illegally--it's even worse that they tried to perpetrate a fraud on the public by claiming that they were a legitimate business."
RIAA is seeking damages for copyright infringements made during Puretunes' short window of operation. Also, some customers who paid the downloading fees in advance were left without refunds or any replies from the company whatsoever.
British study by Music Programming Ltd(MPL), suggests that P2P users buy more music.
MPL said that 87% of its respondents who downloaded music admitted they bought albums after hearing tracks through the internet.
Company's spokesperson said: "Downloading is actually a 'try before you buy' tool for a significant amount of people. It allows people to sample new music and decide whether or not to buy it - it is not necessarily a replacement for purchase."
British equivalent to the RIAA, called BPI(British Phonographic Industry), unsurprisingly disagrees with the study: "We did a survey in April that asked people the reasons why they downloaded, and 65% said because it was free."
French media giant Vivendi continues to scrap its media assets in order to reduce its massive debt levels. The owner of world's largest record label, one of the biggest movie studios and tons of other media outlets, has decided to shut down the European operations of MP3.com.
Vivendi bought MP3.com in 2001 for $372 million and now company is planning to sell the American main operations of MP3.com as well. Analysts are sceptical whether there is enough interest to gather even a small percentage of the original buying price -- or will there be any bidders who would want to buy MP3.com as a whole.
According to Leanne Sharman, the vice president of sales and marketing at MP3.com Europe, the European operations had just started to see significant revenue streams, but the decision to shut down the European operations was mostly done because of "corporate strategic reasons".
MAC, a.k.a. MPEG Audio Collection, has been the best audio file cataloger and organizer software for years and it has always been offered as freeware. Unfortunately the developer didn’t have time to update it too much recently.
This is now about to change as MAC source code has been opened and the a SourceForge project started for the purpose of developing this great software further. At the same time a new (minor update) version has been released.
Click here to download the latest MAC now! A must have for music collectors.
Malaysia's minister for domestic trade and consumer affairs, Muhyiddin Yassin, has urged consumers to shy away from highly priced foreign movies and music in order to force the movie and recording industries to lower prices. According to him, Malaysian domestic movie releases are prices at around $2.50 and piracy for those titles is virtually non-existent, but for foreign releases that cost $8 or more (VCD is de facto standard for original movies in Malaysia) are the ones that get pirated.
Mr. Lash flew to Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, to pressure Malaysian government to drop its idea to get the entertainment prices down. He said that the American business losses in Malaysia due piracy were down from 2001 figures of $316M to $242M in 2002, mostly due harder policy towards piracy. He called for prison sentences to professional pirates and more active role from Malaysian government in fight against piracy.
News.com has published an interesting e-mail debate between Ian Clarke, the inventor of Freenet, and Matt Oppenheim, the senior vice president of business and legal affairs at RIAA.
Freenet is a peer-to-peer network utilizing both heavy encryption and decentralized structure, which is, by nature, very difficult to censor or monitor. The debate circles around the question of privacy -- is a user, who knowingly and willingly shares files on the Internet be entitled to maintain anonymity.
When asked about the possibility for a technology to guarantee anonymous online activity for a user Mr. Clarke replies: " It is a cost-benefit decision. One must make the cost of circumventing someone's anonymity significantly higher than the benefit of doing so. Freenet is designed to achieve this in environments such as China and Saudi Arabia and easily achieves this in environments such as the United States."
Mr. Oppenheim refers to the Madster ruling in which the Court of Appeals stated that trying to cover the identity of a copyright infringer by means of technology is the same as engaging directly in copyright infringement. So even though Oppenheim sees that no technology is going to stop them from finding infringers, he doesn't feel it's even an issue.
District judge Stephen Wilson has dismissed a lawsuit brought up by the owner of the file-sharing application Kazaa against the major record labels. In suit, Sharman Networks claimed that record labels violated the Sherman Act by not licensing their content to Sharman Networks.
In its lawsuit, Sharman claimed that it and its partner, Altnet, tried repeatedly to gain licenses from record labels in order to sell digital music content through Kazaa. However, Altnet was not part of the lawsuit. Judge concluded that "Altnet, not Sharman, is the primary target of the conduct alleged and would suffer the principal injury. Accordingly, Altnet has the greatest motivation to enforce the antitrust laws in the form of a private claim, thereby further diminishing any justification for allowing Sharman to do so."
A bit of information regarding the new gaming products of the home electronics giant.
The Playstation Portable, which will challenge old-timer Nintendo GBA and newcomer Nokia N-Gage, will ship to retailers late 2004. This sounds a bit late indeed, as Nokia NGage seems to get a good head start as it is in beta series production and quite close to launch. On the other hand, Sony gives hints about a consumer friendly price tag.
Our portable console PSP will ship to European retailers late next year. Aside from games, it will be able to play back music and movies. As for pricing, it will certainly be less than portable DVD players and likely more comparable to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance.
In the same article a Sony spokesman tells us that the tuned up PS2 version, the PSX, will hit the stores in late 2003. However, it seems that the luxury product will get a luxury price. Nothing new about the added features.
It will be equipped with a variety of components including a hard-drive, DVD writing capability, TV tuner and more. It will go on sale in Japan later this year, but we expect it to appeal only to technophiles.
There has been all kinds of rumors about the Playstation 3 as well as Microsoft Xbox 2. It has been rumoured that the next generation consoles would roll out rather soon, leaving the life-span of PS2 and the Xbox rather short. According to this statement the PS3 will not be launched during the next year.
All I can really say [about the PlayStation 3] is that it definitely won't launch in 2004.
InterVideo has juiced up their DVD backup software DVD Copy. It is now capable of compressing a DVD-9 on a single DVD-5. With Intervideo's Bitrate Balance Profile the bitrate of the backup follows the original bitrate, so you'll get the highest bitrates in the places it's most needed.
Of course the product still has support for other formats as well, so you can do DVD to DVD, DVD to (S)VCD, DVD to DivX CD or DVD to MPEG-1/2 or DivX on hard drive backups.
As usual, Ahead Software releases the Nero changelog few days after the actual software release. Nothing huge in this one as Ahead Software is preparing for the Nero 6 launch - more about that soon.
Bug Fixes:
The calculation of free capacity of written DVD+RW discs was corrected
Solved a problem with DVD-R multi-session, after continuing a multi-session only data from previous session was shown
Improvement in case of ejecting DVD+R/RW between write and verification
The default language for Hong Kong and Macau changed to CHT
New:
Added several new recorders
More information is shown in the burn status during burning an image
One of the best-known music institutions, the Billboard magazine, has started tracking Net music downloads alongside traditional music charts. Yesterday the magazine introduced "Hot on the Web" charts to its publications.
The music charts include virtually all the major legal music services: AOLMusic, Radio@AOL, GraceNote, Launch(of Yahoo!), Liquid Audio, LoudEye, Lycos, mp3.com, Muze, NextRadio, UBL.com and WindowsMedia.com(of Microsoft). The data is supplied to Billboard by Nielsen SoundScan which is also the source for the traditional music charts available on Billboard.
The system will only report permanent (or, well, semi-permanent DRM-enabled ones as well), paid downloads, not streamed tracks. Only noticeable gap seems to be the fact that Apple's iTunes is not included in the list of sources.
Electronic Frontier Foundation has unveiled a campaign named "Let the Music Play" supporting legitimate peer-to-peer file swapping. The campaign is counter-reaction to RIAA's intentions to file lawsuits against people sharing music on peer-to-peer networks.
"Today, more U.S. citizens use file-sharing software than voted for President Bush," Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for EFF commented. "Congress needs to spend less time listening to record industry lobbyists and more time listening to the more than 60 million Americans who use file-sharing software today."
EFF will be running advertisements in major publications calling for more productive means for RIAA and record labels to pursue their intrests.
"Copyright law is out of step with the views of the American public and the reality of music distribution online," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "Rather than trying to sue people into submission, we need to find a better alternative that gets artists paid while making file sharing legal."
P2P-industry is more and more organized, in order to counter the legal pressure from RIAA and other copyright organizations.
The association hopes to attract peer-to-peer network providers, software makers and Internet service providers as members. It also aims to draft content providers such as the movie studios and record labels. Ideally, members will be optimistic about the business opportunities presented by peer-to-peer technologies, but will also believe that copyright owners should be compensated for their work, according a DCIA white paper.
History knows many cases where unions have made all the difference. The recording and movie industry are organized behind the powerful RIAA and MPAA, so it's very positive to see the P2P companies also taking their stand.
Apple iTunes has received all the media attention in the online music distribution field, but also the Spanish pioneering company Listen.com can put some impressive figures on the table.
According to the source Listen.com Rhapsody is streaming a stunning 350.000 songs per day. Rhapsody is selling songs on a per-burn basis, which means that they’ll charge $0.79 per a song burned to a CD.
Rhapsody would not disclose how many tracks were actually burned in June, but it said that on-demand streaming has increased 45 percent to more than 11 million songs, or more than 350,000 songs per day, in June.
A U.S. appeals court upheld the injunction against the peer-to-peer service Madster (formely known as Aimster). According to the court not Madster nor it's owner John Deep cannot escape liability simply by claiming that the traffic on the network could not be monitored due to, for example, encryption.
RIAA was pleased by the decision, and sees that it puts the previous decision in the case against Grokster and Morpheus in a new light. In April a motion for summary judgement was denied on the basis that both services have legitimate, non-infringing uses. There's little doubt that RIAA will be using this ruling as an argument when demanding the District Court to re-consider RIAA's motion.
However mr. Deep also concidered the ruling a victory, since it outlined a series of tests the service should meet in order to continue. One of those tests, for instance, was to prove that people use the service for legitimate purposes, like exchanging non-copyrighted music files.
Some parties still don't accept the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) methods in tracking down Internet pirates. Internet service provider SBC Communications has filed a complaint in a U.S. district court saying that many of the RIAA subpoenas have been done improperly.
Despite the increasing popularity of legal music download services, such as iTunes, the online sales won't make up for the losses generated by piracy, according to a study by Jupiter Media.
