A new copyright law based on the requirements of the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) went into effect in the United Kingdom on Friday. The implementation of EUCD is considered to be the Europe's toughest digital copyright law.
While some countries, such as Germany, have included fair use exceptions to their law to permit consumers to make copies of purchased CDs, United Kingdom has no such provisions in its law. Legal experts consider the law too broad, and poses threat to individual consumers. Even though the spokesman for UK patent office, which was responsible for drafting the law, claims, that the law is aimed at organized crime and not individual downloaders, the law regarding P2P is as ambiguous as it was before.
Six EU member countries, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy and United Kingdom, have adopted EUCD so far with nine countries still working on their new copyright law.
RIAA reported on Thursday having filed 80 new lawsuits against suspected file swappers. Earlier this month RIAA sent warning letters to users who were in danger of being sued.
In the first wave of lawsuits RIAA sent 261 subpoenas to users accused of sharing large numbers of copyrighted music online. This time RIAA sent 204 warning letters beforehand, and 124 of those lead to an out of court settlement. RIAA is pleased by both the publicity it has gained, and the fact that a majority of the new cases were settled without a trial.
There is some evidence that the controversial RIAA lawsuits against ordinary computer users are making a dent in the file-swapping world. According to Web analysis firm Nielsen/NetRatings, weekly usage of the Kazaa software in the United States plummeted from a high of 7 million people in early June to just 3.2 million people in late October.
However Download.com still reports 2.1 million weekly downloads for Kazaa software.
According to "inside sources" Yahoo is planning to stop selling its streaming video service as a standalone product. The service will be bundled in Yahoo Plus, a premium services bundle.
"Yahoo is committed to being a leader in providing broadband content," spokeswoman Joanna Stevens said. "How it's packaged, priced and presented will evolve over time."
Yahoo is also expected to add more free streaming video content to their site. One of Yahoo's major rivals, AOL, has also shifted its focus to providing video content to their subscribers.
As the number of broadband internet subscribers grows, service providers and portals are trying to find ways to satisfy their needs. Obviously broadband users wish to see high quality streaming video, but according to Forrester Research, less than 10 percent of them would be willing to pay for the service. Instead of selling individual video files, portals are providing free videos funded by advertisements as well as monthly subscription plans.
Napster 2.0, a legal online digital music store from Roxio, was launched officially today in the U.S. The new service follows the path of Apple's iTunes in its pricing and its DRM-capabilities.
As most of Napster's specs were announced earlier this month, bundled with massive hype and creative advertising, the launch itself didn't contain real surprises. Napster is, like iTunes, based on a separate application, not on a browser-UI like Buy.com's service. Singles cost $0.99 and full albums cost $9.95. Napster also features a $9.99 a month service level that allows unlimited listening of tracks, but doesn't contain download rights or CD burning rights.
Application itself includes integrated CD burning (not a big surprise, considering that they need to protect the files), audio player and all the usual bells and whistles -- official screenshots are available from here.
As of now, Napster 2 has an impressive music catalog, total of 500,000 titles, which gives it somewhat of an edge over most of the competitors in this rather crowded market. Files are encoded and protected using Microsoft's WMA format.
The U.S. Librarian of Congress has denied most of the major requests for exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and other organizations sought exemptions to DMCA to allow consumers, for instance, to play copy protected CDs on other devices.
The sought exceptions would have allowed consumers to legally view DVDs from other regions or skip "unskippable" commercials found on some DVDs. Four exceptions were, however, allowed: for decoding lists of Web pages or directories blocked by Internet filtering software, accessing e-books for which the publisher has disabled the read-aloud function, circumventing obsolete digital rights management devices that prevent access due to malfunction, and accessing computer programs and video games distributed in an obsolete format.
EFF Staff Attorney Gwen Hinze was disappointed by the fact that the Librarian of Congress failed to realize the impact the DMCA law has on fair use of legally purchased products.
We all know Apple iTunes and many of us have heard about the Nero Burning ROM. These are the two pieces of main stream software that are utilizing and promoting the MP4 AAC audio compression. Now a smaller player enters the new market with Compaact! audio compressor.
Germany is still the place to look for high quality audio encoders.
It started with the now worldwide-famous Fraunhofer institude (FhG)and it's IIS branch. They were the brains behind the development ofmost of the techniques in the ubiquituous MP3 audio compression format, and to this day their encoder implementations are still to be beaten in several aspects.
Then, an university student called Andree Buschmann developed a brand new format based on MP2 algorithms called Musepack. This is considered by enthusiasts and audiophiles to be the best format for those seeking transparency - AKA "CD quality"
Now, Germany shows the power of their tradition in audio processing with the introduction of the zPlane AAC encoder (zAAC), jointly developed by zPlane.development and the Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI, not surprisingly a branch of FhG).
World's largest mobile phone manufacturer, Finnish Nokia, released a new phone today in Nice, France, called Nokia 7700. Well, normally we don't do mobile phone news, but this one is pretty interesting in terms of digital video as well.
In addition of sporting 640x320 touchscreen, 65k colors, EDGE, 64MB internal memory, Symbian OS with Series 90 UI, FM radio, etc it has an ability, with an add-on, to receive DVB-H digital TV broadcasts. Phone also includes "Movie channel" concept, which delivers latest movie trailers on weekly basis to 7700.
Australian ISP ComCen has agreed not to re-post any contents to web site under the url www.mp3s4free.net. ComCen and record labels agreed on the arrangement on Tuesday in the Federal Court in Sydney.
The site, which offered links to pirated MP3 files, was removed from the Net yesterday by the site's owner, Stephen Cooper. According to Cooper he didn't have enough financial resources to fight the case to the end. ComCen had refused to take the site offline in spite of legal threats from the music industry.
Both Cooper and ComCen were sued last week by major labels alleging that www.mp3s4free.net violated their copyrights. The site, however, contained nothing but links to files -- none of the illegal files were hosted at ComCen or posted by Cooper. Both Cooper and ComCen insisted that the site was just a directory.
The nature of linking directly to third party files has been a matter of debate for ages. Is it illegal to provide links to pirated material? Would a database of user submitted URLs be illegal, if the only intention of the database was to gather links to copyrighted music? Morally the question is clear, but the legal aspects are far more complicated.
China has planned for years to develop its own alternative to DVD-Video format, in order to avoid paying patent royalties to Western electronics companies. Now it seems that they're finally getting the specs ready.
According to Chinese sources, China's Ministry of Information Industry will announce the final specifications of Enhanced Versatile Disc or EVD in November. Chinese government launched the EVD project in 1999 and the working group includes all major Chinese DVD player manufacturers and various other Chinese technology companies. China plans to submit the specifications to international standards committees as well, in order to get the standard more widely accepted outside China.
The technical specifications currently available are rather vague, but according to them the picture quality will be roughly 5 times better than in DVD-Video. EVD is supposed to be compatible with HDTV specifications and therefore it would make sense that its resolution would be compatible with HDTV resolutions, including those of 1920x1080 (compared to DVD-Video's max of 720x576 in PAL countries and 720x480 in NTSC countries).
First sales figures for the Nokia N-Gage have been released, and they seem quite impressive indeed. According to Nokia, 400.000 units have already been sold, which can be considered a good result for a product first of its kind. The N-Gage has been very visible at least in Scandinavia, were demo booths can be seen in markets and stores.
One key factor is now how well the games are selling. Content producers are likely to lose interest at some point if the N-Gage platform doesn't generate software sales as well. Are people just buying a cool phone, since N-Gage is relatively cheap for its features, or are the customers interested in it as gaming platform. One interesting factor is that will there be a method for copying N-Gage games and what kind of an Internet scene can it generate?
The Napster v2.0 online music store will start offering prepaid cards at retail outlets shortly after the service has been opened. Using the cards teenagers and other consumers, who don't have access to a credit card, purchase songs from the service.
The Napster Card will cost $14.85, and with one card the user can download 15 songs. By mid-November, the card will be available on 14,000 locations, such as Best Buy and Safeway. The Napster Card allows a huge new consumer base access to on-line music shopping. The youth/teenager market has so far been neglected by other services.
Roxio, who bought Napster's assets, will launch the Napster v2.0 service next Wednesday.
DVD Forum, the governing body of DVD specifications, including the DVD-Video specs, has apparently decided to stick with the current DVD disc capacity and technology with its new DVD-Video specs.
Most of the industry analysts were betting that DVD Forum would choose to use either existing 8.5GB red-laser discs with MPEG-4 video encoding or new 25GB blue-laser discs with existing MPEG-2 video encoding. But no. Instead the new DVD-Video specs, dubbed as 'Enhanced DVD', will use the same video encoding as current DVD-Video discs and the same disc size as current DVD-Video discs.
The only new data that will be added to the new specification over the old one relates to online content and authorization systems. Basically the next-generation 'Enhanced DVD'-capable DVD players would be able to connect directly to Internet and use online sites that the DVD disc relates to, to deliver further content to user. So, in theory, this is aimed to replace now-used DVD-ROM sections of DVD-Video discs, to allow stand-alone DVD players to access that kind of data as well. Other part most likely relates to online content as well: discs will be able to carry authentication data that can be, most likely, used to purchase content or movie-related products by using the DVD itself as an authentication device when accessing to beforementioned online content.
The University of Wisconsin Madison has file a suit agains Sony and Toshiba. They claim that PlayStation 2's Emotion Engine infringes an old university patent which has been filed back in 1986. Little information about the patent is available for us at the moment. The gameindustry.biz reports the following:
The PlayStation 2 is based on a MIPS processing core with custom extensions added to it to improve the efficiency of the console. This unit is known as the "EE Core" - while Emotion Engine is a term used to describe this component and several others which are integrated onto a single chip and form the heart of the console's processing power.
This is a very interesting case, since it's an academic institution vs. two consumer electronics giants. If the suit holds, it will be interesting to see how much money Sony is has to use for settling the case with the university.
CloneCD was recently acquired by SlySoft Inc. Now the new owners are about to release the first update to the CD duplicator software that has been lagging behind in development. And they have been able to make concrete improvements, as the next version is able to bypass Safedisc 2.9 protection. The AlienTech.it had the chance to preview the upcoming CloneCD release.
We can be very enthusiast of Slysoft's update to CloneCD: Virtual CloneDrive can be replaced with other utility as Daemon Tools until Slysoft's engineer will create one. The most important news is the ability to backup SafeDisc 2.9 protected cd. We still wait for the capability of bypass Securom New 4.8, but we are sure we don't have to wait a lot for it!
321 Studios, the company known for its DVD X Copy product family has submitted its response to legal actions taken against it in the United Kingdom. It is 321's intention to fight the lawsuit filed by Warner Home Video all the way.
The company is facing similar lawsuits from several major film studios in the United States. The studios argue that 321 Studios' products are tools for pirates to make copies of copy protected movies. 321 Studios, on the other hand, insists that consumers have the right to make backups of products they have purchased legally. Furthermore DVD X Copy tools cannot be used for pirating large volumes of movies practically. Each copy is digitally watermarked, and backups of backups are not allowed.
"We believe we have a solid argument, and that our customers have the right to make back-ups of legally purchased DVDs for their own personal use," said 321 Studios CEO Rob Semaan. "We will fight it all the way, and are certainly not prepared to take it lying down or shut up shop and go away."
For more information visit:
DVD X Copy support forums DVD X Copy home page Protect Fair Use
Two big intellectual property associations, RIAA and MPAA, have taken very different approaches to combat ever-growing online piracy. While RIAA keeps sueing its potential customers, MPAA tries to change people's attitudes (and trying to come up with watermarks, "creative" laws, etc).
MPAA's latest attempt to do something about P2P piracy is to educate schoolchildren about P2P and legal issues surrounding it. It has paid $100,000 (which seems ridiculously small amount compared to the size of the movie industry) to gets its anti-piracy ideas to 900,000 American schoolkids in grades 5 to 9. Organization called Junior Achievement will implement the campaign using volunteer teachers from the business sector.
In addition to scaring heck out of schoolkids by telling them that "if you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it", MPAA also has launched a nationwide campaign to show anti-piracy commercials in 5,000 movie theatres in the U.S.
Some copyright law experts are worried about the picture MPAA is trying to create for students, because U.S. copyright laws include "fair use" clauses that allow making copies for personal and educational use and this important exemption might (most likely will) get ignored when MPAA tells kids how the American copyright laws work (or should work from MPAA's point-of-view).
According to the deal, MPAA member studios wont send out any DVD screeners (screener is a DVD or VHS pre-release of a movie on DVD or VHS that hasn't been released for rental distribution yet), but will send out watermarked VHS screeners instead. These screeners will be sent out only to Academy members, i.e. for all of those eligible to vote for Oscars, but leaves out other award institutions, such as Golden Globes.
Each Academy member will have to sign a contract where he/she agrees that the screener wont be taken out of their homes and that the tape would be watermarked in a way that copies made from it could be tracked back to the individual who "leaked" the copy. If anyone gets caught of "leaking" a screener copy, they would get expelled from the Academy.
In addition to MPAA member companies, New Line Cinema and DreamWorks Pictures have agreed to arrangement. According to both, Academy and MPAA, this will be a one-year experiment to see what kind of effects it has on overall movie piracy.
Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has upheld Copyright Office's earlier decision that traditional radio stations have to pay royalties for streaming their traditional radio broadcasts over the Net (process is called simulcasting).
Historically, American radio stations have had weird exception from royalties -- they don't have to pay anything for artists or record labels (they pay for songwriters though) for playing their music on radio, unlike most other radio stations in the world. And to complicate this issue, American Net radio stations have to pay such royalties. Now, the court fight was about this exemption rule and about applying it to simulcasting. Radio stations argued that their material that they air through radio-waves, is exempt from royalties even if broadcasted over the Net. This obviously puts smaller, Net-only broadcasters in losing side as they need to cough up to RIAA every time they play music on their station, while benemoths such as Clear Channel(world's largest radio station owner) don't have such costs involved.
"The DMCA's silence on AM/FM webcasting gives us no affirmative grounds to believe that Congress intended to expand the protections contemplated," the Philadelphia appeals decision reads. "The exemptions the (DMCA) afforded to radio broadcasters were specifically intended to protect only traditional radio broadcasting, and did not contemplate protecting AM/FM webcasting."
Apple has released rather rapidly a new version of its iTunes for Windows multimedia player, after being publicly criticized for releasing a version with couple of major bugs in it.
The changelog includes fixes for problems that appeared using Windows 2000 Pro, where installing iTunes, in some occassions, caused computer to fail on restart. Also, problems with older third-party CD/DVD burning tools have been addressed.
Company already ships the improved version, iTunes for Windows v4.1.1, from its website and plans to notify users of the older version during the next week about the update.
Motorola and RealNetworks have partnered to create a mobile phone based on Linux-operating system, that will incorporate a software for streaming Real video and audio.
Both Motorola and RealNetworks have been quite active on supporting and utilizing Linux in their ventures. Real's Helix is an open-source technology for streaming media, developed by both RealNetworks, and independent developers. Motorola has already released a Linux-based smart phone, the A760, and sold its stake in Symbian earlier this year. The company is heavily committed on both open-source Linux-based products as well as Microsoft Windows Mobile (Smartphone) technology.
Motorola believes that an open-source platform leads to rapid application development, and hence quick deployment of new services. RealNetworks software will be delivered to people through Motorola's HelloMoto-service.
RealNetworks announced that it is planning to launch its digital music store, Rhapsody, in Europe during the second quarter of year 2004.
Currently, legal European digital music scene is rather empty, only major player in the arena is Peter Gabriel's OD2, but according to industry rumours, most of the major players, including Apple and Roxio, are in talks with record labels in order to launch their services in Europe next year.
According to Real's spokeswoman, company plans to follow its subscription-plus-fee-per-song pricing method that it uses in States, in Europe as well.
According to Digital Entertainment Group, American and Canadian have bought over 2 billion DVD-Video discs since format's launch back in 1997. This year alone, studios have sold over 640 million DVDs (three first quarters of the year 2003) and anticipate to reach nearly billion shipped movies this year alone. Last year, DVD sales exceeded 685 million units in North America.
DVD as a format has managed to break virtually all the records in the consumer electronics ever made. Currently it seems that over half of the U.S. households will have a DVD player by the end of this year, as currently there are over 73 million DVD players in the U.S.
Four Japanese major consumer electronics, Sony, Sharp, Pioneer and Kenwood, have developed a prototype of an A/V equipment that's directly connected to a online music store, with no need for PCs in between. Companies have set up a joint venture, called Any Music, to develop the concept.
Devices are supposed to become available in Japan by the early next year and they include a small LCD screen for navigation and an Ethernet port for Net connections. Music purchased from a Japanese online store LabelGate, can be copied from the stereo equipment to portable devices, minidiscs and other storage media,
Companies have no plans to launch the devices overseas, but according to Any Music CEO, their target is to create the system as a worldwide standard for seamless Net integration for home entertainment equipment.
Influential Los Angeles Film Critics Association has announced that they wont hold their annual awards this year at all, unless MPAA repeals its decision to ban movie screeners for critics and voters of Academy Awards.
"The ban on screeners seriously inhibits our ability to work as professionals and compromises the integrity and fairness of the evaluative process," the group said in a statement.
Group says that MPAA's decision to ban screeners (DVD or VHS releases of recently-released movies distributed to critics and Oscar voters) in fear of piracy, makes critics' work "almost physically impossible" due sheer amount of movie releases between mid-November and Christmas.
MPAA's decision has sparked tons of protests from influential Hollywood directors, actors, lobby groups and union reps. It is rumored that MPAA is holding private negotiations with major movie studios in order to solve the conflict.
Apple Computer announced on Monday that the Windows version of its iTunes software has already been downloaded one million times since its launch last Thursday. The release of the Windows version more than doubled the sales at iTunes -- since Thursday more than one million songs have been sold. Recently the weekly rate has been around half a million sold songs.
The software has been well received by Mac users, who enjoy the familiar user interface. There has been some problems, though, especially with Windows 2000 Professional, as we reported earlier.
Microsoft often gets complaints about the bugs in their software. Now it seems that Apple's start on the Win32 platform isn't much better. The "Best Windows software ever" is crashing PCs on system boot up.
The Windows market is a huge challenge for Apple. The market is full of all-in-one jukebox software, which have already reached huge user bases. Also there is an over-supply of free, albeit illegal, MP3 music via the networks (Kazaa, Direct Connect, etc). I'd say that Apple's main target is the non-techie PC user group -- releasing a buggy software doesn't help Apple to achieve their goals.
However, not everyone has been so happy with their iTunes experience on the PC. One of the most serious complaints came from a number of Windows 2000 Professional users, who said installing iTunes appeared to crash their machines.
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Apple recommended that those who have the problem boot their machine in Windows' "safe mode" by holding down the Shift key while restarting and temporarily uninstall iTunes. Some customers also reported having problems while restarting in safe mode, though.
DVD is quickly replacing old standards. It has already replaced VHS tapes in movie rentals, is currently replacing CD-Rs in data storing and now major home electronics manufacturers are pushing the Digital Video Recorders to replace our VCRs.
While Pioneer has been cutting edge in the computer DVD-R market, it enters the DVR niche quite late. At least Philips and Panasonic have been offering DVR technology for a long time.
The Pioneer DVR-5100H-S enters the market with DVR-R(W) support and a equipped with a mighty 80gb hard drive for temporary storing of video. The price tag reported by the source seems kinda high though, being a nasty £900. We’ve already seen the Philips and Panasonic costing about a half of that.
Pioneer announces its new DVD-R/RW recorder, the Pioneer DVR-5100H-S, providing consumers with the next generation of DVD technology. Pioneer is set to revolutionise the home entertainment market by introducing its first DVD recorder with an integrated hard disk drive (HDD), capable of storing a massive 102 hours of broadcast programmes, films and digital camera footage. Now there is no need to stay at home to keep up-to-date with the latest football score or soap opera – every TV fan can leave the house safe in the knowledge that all their favourite programmes are being recorded to the highest quality.
RIAA is preparing to launch its second wave of lawsuits very soon and has now sent out official warnings to 204 alleged P2P users, stating that they should either agree to settle their cases or get sued in near future.
RIAA launched its first wave of lawsuits in September, sueing 261 P2P users at that time. Now, RIAA has had some time to learn from its previous mistakes (that include sueing 12-year-olds, etc) and has propably raised the threshold a bit as well, focusing more on large-scale file sharers.
"In light of the comments we have heard, we want to go the extra mile and offer illegal file sharers an additional chance to work this out short of legal action," RIAA's president Cary Sharman said.
Letter that RIAA has sent to alleged P2P, simply reminds the recipients that "ignorance of the law is not a defense" and that destroying the MP3s from their HDDs would be considered as destroying the evidence, which is illegal as well. They also state that recipients should reply within 10 days or RIAA will proceed with legal actions.
Heavy machinery company Caterpillar has sued Disney to block its upcoming DVD cartoon sequel, George of the Jungle 2. Sounds weird? It gets better..
Apparently, according to Caterpillar, Disney uses Caterpillar's trademark without Caterpillar's permission in the movie and the whole movie portrays Caterpillar as an "evil attacking army" that tries to destroy the jungle.
Caterpillar wants to block the U.S. release of the movie, wants Disney to modify the movie in order to remove any links between the movie and Caterpillars and re-release the movie after those modifications have been done. Disney claims that movie has been released already in 12 countries outside U.S. and they haven't heard any single complain about the Caterpillar issue.
According to Disney, company has already sent out 2.2 million copies to over 35,000 retailers in the U.S. and recalling those copies would cost over a million dollars, plus an additional 9 million dollars for already-spent marketing dollars.
Chief U.S. District Judge Joe B. McDade is going to make his decision before movie's U.S. premiere on next week.
Federal Communications Commission, an American government organization that controls much of the broadcasting and telephone rules in the United States, is condidering so-called "broadcast flag" to digital TV broadcasts and requirements for computers and consumer electronics to obey such flag.
Basically, entertainment industry wants to make it impossible to simply copy digital TV broadcasting material -- that is normally being sent in MPEG-2 format that can be transferred pretty much directly to DVDRs -- in high quality capture to PC and then distributed over the Net. Therefor, industry wants FCC to rule that broadcasters could set a "flag" to those shows that they don't allow being copied and that all electronics manufacturers would have to implement features to their products that would make them to obey this flag.
In real life, this would mean that next generation "Tivos" wouldn't be able to record shows or movies that broadcasters think is too valuable for them to allow users to time-shift or record -- even for personal purposes. Obviously, technology companies oppose this ruling and claim -- very reasonably, actually -- that if, or when, someone hacks the copy protection, FCC would then require them to change their products again to implement further copy protection methods, until those get cracked as well. Consumer groups oppose the idea as well, since it kinda kills the idea of digital VCR totally -- system can't determine whether user is going to store the movie/show only for watching it after his/her holiday or does the user have plans to distribute the recording over the P2P networks.
Apple Computer has launched the Windows version of its popular iTunes music store. iTunes music jukebox software allows Windows users to access the service that has been available to Mac users since April, 2003.
The software is free, and offers the same catalogue at the same prices as the Macintosh version. It also has the same look and feel as the Mac version, and it supports both AAC with DRM, and MP3. Microsoft's Windos Media Audio format is not supported.
"This is not some baby version of iTunes or the music store," said Steve Jobs, Apple CEO. "This is the whole thing."
Making a "cripped" version of iTunes would have made little sense, since competing with services like Napster 2 requires the best of efforts from Apple.
With iTunes for Windows Apple has had to let go of some of their main principles. So far Apple has been proud of their Macintosh only -software. But the Windows market was just too big a possibility to waste to cockiness.
They already have the Vinyl CD-R in their product line and now Verbatim introduces recordable DVD media with the looks of a movie reel. Powered by high quality Mitsubishi azo dye and backed by a lifetime warranty, these make an attractive offer for a movie collector. But unfortunately the design, as always, comes with a price tag.
Verbatim DigitalMovie 4x DVD+R and DVD-R discs are based on MKM's Metal Azo recording dye technology which produces recordings with greater power margin and better sensitivity than earlier-generation 2x DVD recordable discs, ensuring the same accuracy achieved by other discs at 1-2.4x recording speeds. DigitalMovie DVD media are manufactured utilizing Ultra-Precise Molding(TM) (UPM(TM)) technology which produces very flat discs, guaranteeing stable, high-speed rotation during the reading and writing processes.
Pricing, Availability
Backed by a lifetime warranty, Verbatim DigitalMovie DVD-R and DVD+R media are expected to have a street price of about $11.99 per 3-pack and will be available through leading retailers, Internet resellers and distributors across the country in November.
The Apple iTunes music service has been a huge success. It has attracted a lot of users and generated online sales unseen in the music industry. Now iTunes is facing the real challenge, as it prepares to enter the PC / Windows market. How will the technically more aware Windows users respond to this new service? Can it seriously compete with various free Peer-To-Peer file sharing networks?
"They're going to have a serious problem with the Windows community," said Rob Enderle, principal of market research firm the Enderle Group. "If they could have gone there first, they could have carved out a beachhead."
Apple unveiled the iTunes service for the 3 percent of the PC market that uses Macintosh computers in April. Incorporated into its popular and easy-to-use iTunes software for managing digitized songs, the interface is simple, and songs cost 99 cents each to download.
The service took off, and the Cupertino, California, company has sold more than 10 million songs in the five months since launching the service, which has more than 200,000 songs for sale.
"The service has done great on the Mac side," Enderle said.
According to the president of WGA West, screeners have become an important method for small films to gain audience. And now MPAA's plan to ban screeners -- that are preview DVD or VHS versions of movies that haven't been officially released on DVD/VHS for retail channels yet -- in Academy Awards' promotions "tilts the playing field from small films to large".
Last week, several high-profile Hollywood authors signed a petition in opposition to the ban of screeners. MPAA's official opinion is that by banning screeners, they could be able to cut down the piracy, but many industry players think that only reason for such ban is to shift the power in Oscar votes from small, "semi-indie" films produced by major studios' subsdiaries, to large movie productions that typically gain financially more (not relatively, but in hard cash) from Oscar wins.
A study by Sandvine Incorporated shows that while FastTrack -based KaZaA is almost de facto P2P application in the United States, things are quite different in Europe. The diversity of P2P applications in Europe is larger, and eDonkey has quite a significant "market share" in many countries.
While KaZaA generates 76 percent of all the P2P traffic in the United States and Canada, for instance in Germany the percentage is only 44. The top P2P application in Germany is eDonkey, which generates 52% of file sharing traffic.
The study also discovered what many P2P users have known for quite a while now -- Gnutella is practically extinct.
Apple has announced that its new version of Mac OS X operating system, dubbed as Panther, will support also DVD+R format for data backup purposes.
Apple has previously shipped some of its computers equipped with Sony's dual-format recorder, but modified in such way that only DVD-R discs could be used with the drive. The recent change is, according to Apple, made because of consumer demand -- many users have non-Apple DVD burners and they wish to use those drives with OS X as well.
However, Panther will only support +R/+RW discs for data backup purposes, but it is not known yet whether Apple will add support for "plus" formats into its movie editing tools, such as iDVD.
Now virtually all the major consumer brands have accepted that neither, DVD-R or DVD+R, will win this "format war", but rather live side-by-side. Sony was originally the first major player to develop a drive that would allow burning both formats and after that, most of the manufacturers have followed.
Most likely outcome is that both formats will remain until the next generation of optical discs make both formats obsolete (and this time it wont take 15-20 years to replace the format like it did for CD) relatively soon.
Penn State University has received funding from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for developing legal file sharing technology.
The $1.1 million grant will enable the University to partner with the Internet2 consortium in the development of a technology called LionShare, an innovative tool that will facilitate legitimate file-sharing among institutions around the world through the use of authenticated Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks.
"It’s vital for higher education today to make a concerted effort to develop technologies that encourage responsible file sharing," said J. Gary Augustson, vice provost for information technology. "We believe that LionShare will lead the way in this effort by providing a model for the positive ways P2P technology can be used for legitimate educational purposes."
The unique structure of Peer-to-Peer, which allows a high level of bandwidth and computing power to be shared equally among a community of network users or "peers," will make it possible for participants to extract specific resources from fellow peer computers, while simultaneously ensuring that these interactions are secure. LionShare also will provide a means for users to access well-known, large-scale repositories that contain digital video, images and other data throughout the U.S., Europe and other locations.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is giving access to it’s massive archive of 4000 movie titles for the German ISP T-Online, which is a business unit of the Deutche Telekom. T-Online is about to launch their on-demand movie service. They have also inked a deal with a German movie distributor Constantin Film.
"This landmark agreement speaks to the promising future of video-on-demand worldwide," said Jim Griffiths, president of MGM Worldwide Television Distribution, in a statement.
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T-Online is due to launch its T-Online Vision on TV service, which will allow customers to download videos over the Internet and then watch it on their TV sets, by the end of the year.
The Pioneer is now pioneering with Microsoft's Windows Media Audio 9 Pro format. Their new home theatre amplifier supports WMA streams for multichannel surround sound. WMA 9 Pro also includes a Digital Rights Management technology.
Pioneer is an important ally for Microsoft. The company has a high profile in the home theatre industry, and its support of WMA gives Microsoft's attempts more credibility. Even though Pioneer is a respectable company in its field, it is significantly smaller than Sony or Philips, being more 'manageable' partner for Microsoft.
Microsoft and Pioneer Announce First High-Performance AV Multichannel Amplifier Featuring Windows Media Audio 9 Professional
New AV Amplifier Uses S/PDIF to Bring High-Fidelity, Windows Media Audio 9 Professional Content From a Windows-Based PC to the Living Room
TOKYO -- Oct. 8, 2003 -- Today at the 2003 Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies (CEATEC) show, Microsoft Corp. and Pioneer Corp. announced a new top-of-the-line AV amplifier model that supports Microsoft® Windows Media® Audio 9 Professional for the delivery of multichannel surround sound. The new amplifier model, VSA-AX10Ai-N, also uses Pioneer's Advanced Multichannel Acoustic Calibration system, which allows sound adjustments at the same professional level as the monitoring methods of recording studios. The unit is scheduled to be available in Japan in December 2003 and in North America as the receiver model VSX-59TXi in January 2004.
SunnComm Technologies, Inc. has stepped down from the lawsuit it was planning against a student for revealing how their copy protection can be circumvented.
Alex Halderman released his findings regarding MediaMax CD3 copy protection, and revealed, that it can be simply diverted by disabling Windows' autorun -feature, or just by pushing the shift-key when inserting the CD.
According to SunnComm CEO Peter Jacobs suing Halderman would do little good at this point -- the harm has already been done, and SunnComm doesn't want to scare computer scientists from studying copy-protection technologies in the future.
AOL and RealNetworks announced yesterday that they will extend their existing partnership further with upcoming AOL 9.0 package.
New version of AOL's online software bundle will a media player capable of playing latest RealVideo 9 video tracks that use high-quality MPEG-4 video compression.
Despite companies' long and well-established partnership, AOL has taken small steps away from Real's technology. AOL's multimedia unit Nullsoft has slowly implemented various features to its WinAMP media player and in March, AOL announced that it will switch to useDolby's AAC audio format instead of Real's RealAudio.
Despite various rumors in public during this week that MPAA's chief executive Jack Valenti had met various indie movie authors in order to negotiate about the screener ban for Oscars, it seems that the ban stands.
Indie movie producers, directors, etc that operate in major movie studios' "indie divisions" have expressed their concerns over the decision. MPAA and major movie studios decided on last week to ban so-called Oscar screeners. Screeners are DVDs and videotapes of movies that haven't been released officially on that medium yet, but are being sent in advance to specific viewer groups, such as critics -- and in this particular case, those who are eligible to vote for Academy Awards.
Studios fear that perfect-quality DVD copies of their recently released movies get leaked to Net from people who receive screener copies during the "Oscar season" and therefor decided that they wont be sending any screener copies this year. This obviously doesn't have any meaning whatsoever to studios that aren't affiliated with major movie studios, but causes problems for indie divisions of major movie studios -- chances of voters even seeing niche movies before they need to cast their votes, are rather slim if indie movie producers can't send those movies directly to voters.
Yet another prime example of this lovely New World Order: an American PhD student called Alex Halderman is being sued by copy-protection company SunnComm.
SunnComm and BMG released the first major copy-protected audio CD in the U.S. recently and Mr Halderman was studying the CD to find out how the copy-protection actually works. The disc can't be copied in Windows by normal means, SunnComm's press releases stated before the launch, and before Halderman's findings.
SunnComm's "advanced copy protection mechanism", called MediaMax CD3, actually simply had the autorun.ini added to the audio CD. This auto-ran then a small installer that installed a driver which claimed in its EULA text to be necessary in order to use the CD under Windows operating system. In reality, the driver itself was the entire copy protection.
So, Halderman's big finding was that the copy protection can be "bypassed" by holding down the shift-key when inserting the CD in a CD-ROM -drive. As most Windows-users already know, the shift-key instructs Windows to ignore the AutoRun feature found on the disc. When the autorun-feature is skipped, the driver installer never runs.
Online music service EMusic will no longer be offering unlimited download service to its subscribers. The 70,000 EMusic customers will have to settle for a maximum of 40 downloads per month for $9.99. Subscriptions for 65 and 300 downloads will be available at $14.99 and $50 respectively. Even at those prices EMusic is much cheaper than its alternatives -- at cheapest a single track costs only 17 cents to download, and even at the most expensive 40 tracks for $9.99 -scheme the cost-per-track is only 25 cents.
The move came soon after EMusic was acquired by Dimensional Associates, a digital music venture capital company. DA stated that the new terms are the result of the "intense financial, legal and technological pressure" the music industry is suffering from at the moment.
The service will continue to provide songs in DRM-free MP3 format, which enables the subscribers to use the downloaded music as they see fit. EMusic's service contains 250,000 songs from 900 independent labels around the world. The company will be adding new labels and features to the service over the coming months.
Samsung has announced a 20GB hard-drive digital audio player, YP-910GS, which is designed to operate with the upcoming Napster 2.0 service.
The player comes pre-loaded with songs from artists such as Liz Phair, Iggy Pop, and The Faint, in addition to which the buyer is entitled to downloading 20 free songs from the service.
In addition to playing music downloaded from Napster, the device includes a built-in FM-tuner, using which songs can be recorded on the device from the radio. Songs can also be transfered from a CD player without the use of a PC. And to complete the package, the 910GS includes a FM transmitter, using which music can be wirelessly transmitted to an FM radio or AV receiver for playback.
The Napster 2.0 service will be released by the end of the year, and it will include more than 500,000 songs.
Owner of P2P network Kazaa, Sharman Networks, and its affiliate company, Altnet, have founded an open, cross-industry "alliance" -- or "open discussion group" as they also describe it -- that has a rather interesting agenda: creating a legit P2P business together with record labels and other content owners.
The group, Distributed Computing Industry Alliance, is currently in its early stages and really functions only as Sharman's spokesgroup as it doesn't have any content provider members or any other big P2P players as members -- most of the big P2P networks are part of group called P2P United that has started lobbying for forced content licensing in the U.S.
DCIA estimates that if content owners would license their material to P2P networks, P2P networks could generate revenue of $900 million per month for record labels alone.
Sony has launched its first consumer electronics device in Japan that seriously tries to squeeze everything out from the fact that Sony's PS2 console is the world's most popular gaming device at the moment.
New device, dubbed as PSX, comes with a price tag of appx. $700 and will bundle within one device a PS2 unit, DVD recorder, satellite TV tuner and a HDD-based TV recorder (genre of HDD-based "VCR" devices is normally known as PVR). PSX comes in two varieties, only difference between two models is the size of the harddrive and obviously the price; cheaper option at appx. $720 has 160GB of HDD and the $880 unit has 250GB.
PSX has broadband connectivity, games (as well as the PVR options) can use the included harddrive, device has USB1.1 port, remote control and virtually all the goodies that regular PS2 users need to purchase separately to their units if they want to.
Recording to a DVD-R or DVD-RW is possible from unit's HDD and PSX also supports analog audio and video inputs, including s-video, which allows easy transfers from analog sources to DVD-R. Unfortunately device is only available in Japan and at least so far doesn't support digital TV or digital a/v sources.
The first portable gaming console representing the ‘next generation’ of mobile gaming is out. The portable phone giant boldly states out that the N-Gage is the biggest invention in gaming since the joystick.
The features of the N-Gage have raised a lot of anticipation. On the other hand, many of the analysts and so called experts are skeptic about the potential success of the N-Gage. It is true that pioneering in the gaming industry has been a tough task for a lot of companies – anyone remember the Atari Lynx? On the other hand Nokia has all the economical muscle it needs to support the new product, somewhat similar to Microsoft and Xbox. Still, the history has shown that there are a lot of total failures per every ‘playstation’.
Highly anticipated mobile device creates completely new market for game industry
When the clock strikes midnight tonight, gamers around the world will experience the biggest innovation in gaming since the joystick - mobility. Sales of the Nokia N-Gage game deck will start across several continents in over 60 countries, offering gamers both blockbuster game titles, as well as true game classics. October 7 marks the first global mobile connected game platform launch in the history of the games industry.
"There's going to be a lot of tired thumbs tonight!" said Ilkka Raiskinen, Senior Vice President, Entertainment and Media, Nokia Mobile Phones. "After months of anticipation and excitement, you can now walk into a store and begin playing games against anyone, anywhere. The Nokia N-Gage game deck opens up an amazing new mobile gaming experience to people around the world."
Gamers will also be able to start taking advantage of the N-GageTM Arena, the virtual home of the worldwide gamer community to share experiences and find other players for mobile online fun. The ability to play, share and compete over the air makes the N-Gage Arena unique in the game industry. N-Gage Arena services are initially offered free of charge to consumers for a trial period, although data traffic fees are payable according to operator tariffs.
New titles coming in time for the holiday season will include such bestsellers as NCAA Football 2004, Red Faction, a special N-Gage version of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, and more. Nokia N-Gage game deck devices and game titles will be available in over 30 000 major retail outlets, game-specific and video game retail outlets, as well as in regular mobile phone delivery channels in all major markets.
About N-Gage
The Nokia N-Gage game deck is an innovative mobile device that is creating an entirely new market for the games industry. Built for active and hardcore gamers, the Nokia N-Gage is the first mobile and connected game deck to feature online high-quality 3D multiplayer gameplay over Bluetooth wireless technology and GPRS. The Nokia N-Gage also offers unique online games services as well as a comprehensive and growing games catalogue from the leading game publishers. Nokia is the world leader in mobile communications. Nokia and N-Gage are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nokia Corporation. Bluetooth is a registered trademark of Bluetooth SIG, Inc.
University of Florida has implemented a monitoring system, that blocks users from the Internet if they are running a P2P sofware.
The monitoring sofware called "Integrated Computer Application for Recognizing User Services", or Icarus for short, also scans for security holes and backdoors in the computers, and automatically gives instructions on how to apply appropriate patches or disable offending programs.
Users sharing files will receive an automatic warning via email and pop-up window, and will be blocked from network for thirty minutes. The second violation cuts access for five days. Third-time offenders are subject to the school's judicial process, and will lose their network access indefinitely.
Universities across the US are looking for ways to prevent their students from engaging in illegal affairs, and possibilities for providing the students with legal ways of obtaining music. Florida's approach definitely addresses the first issue, but at the same time it automatically labels all P2P use illegal.
US Senator Norm Coleman has questioned the current legislation that makes it possible for RIAA to request for fines between $750 and $150,000 per song needs a dose of sanity.
According to senator Coleman the law forces people to settle with the plaintiff out of fear, and without challenge.
"The range of penalties was put in when downloading wasn't even thought of. I can tell you that $150,000 per song is not reasonable, and that's technically what you can put in front of somebody," Coleman said in a conference call with reporters. "That forces people to settle when they may want to fight, but they're thinking, 'Goodness, gracious, what am I going to face?' "
Instead of DMCA subpoenas being processed by clerks, Coleman would like to see the law changed so that some judicial review would be included. So far RIAA has filed lawsuits against a 12-year-old girl (settled out of court for $2,000) and a 65-year-old grandmother (RIAA dropped charges), so there's definitely room for critizism.
Philips and Mitsubishi Kagaku Media have managed to achieve something that most people who knew something about technical specifications of DVD discs had considered to be, not impossible, but too expensive and too complicated to develop.
Companies jointly announced today that they've managed to create a dual layer DVD+R disc and that its specifications should be ready by the end of the year. Companies said that the driving force behind the development was to create a dual layer disc that would be as much compatible as possible with existing stand-alone DVD players and DVD-ROM drives.
What does this mean then? It means basically that once these discs and burners supporting these discs hit the market -- with acceptable price tag, software tools meant for shrinking DVD-Video discs to fit on one single-layer DVDR disc become virtually useless. It means that any commercial DVD-Video disc, including DVD-9 discs, will fit to one blank disc without re-encoding the video or stripping out unwanted material from the disc. Couple of things have to be noted: current DVD+R recorders wont be able to burn dual layer discs and all existing DVD-ROM, DVD-R and DVD+R drives should be able to read these dual layer discs with no problems at all.
MPEG LA, a group representing companies that hold MPEG-4 audio and video patent rights, has asked DRM patent holders to submit their technologies for review. Suitable DRM methods will be gathered into a licensing pool by MPEG LA for all developers to license at one go.
By providing all essential technologies in one place, MPEG LA hopes to make it easier for software and hardware developers, who want to produce copy protected MPEG material, to gather the required licenses for DRM technologies. Until now developers have had to search for appropriate DRM patents themselves, which is extremely time consuming. One of the few alternatives has been Microsoft's products, but content providers are not too keen on giving Microsoft more control than it already has.
The Moving Picture Experts Group(MPEG) is developing a DRM standard of its own, but MPEG LA wants to act more quickly. A "semi-official" DRM standard crafted by MPEG LA might well serve as a guideline for the official MPEG standard as well.
Movielink, a joint online video rental venture owned by the major movie studios, and Road Runner, American broadband provider owned by AOL TimeWarner, announced today that they've signed a multiyear contract to promote Movielink to RR's customers.
Companies will create a co-branded version of Movielink that will be marketed to Road Runner's three million broadband subscribers. Companies didn't disclose financial terms of the deal.
Movielink is the first major online movie rental service backed by virtually all the major movie studios. Company offers a service where American brodband users can "rent" movies, download them to their PCs and watch them during a pre-defined time period (normally 24hrs) as many times as they want to.
Movielink has worked hard during the last couple of month, trying to create partnerships with various entertainment sites, broadband ISPs, etc. Its previous big achievement was unveiled just couple of days ago when Microsoft released its latest version of Windows XP Media Center that will include direct access to Movielink.
In the security corporation’s bi-annual Internet Threat Report, they claim that the number of Internet attacks exploiting Peer-To-Peer (Kazaa, Direct Connect, etc.) or Instant Messaging (ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc.) are increasing rapidly. This has been expectable for quite some time, but no serious P2P or IM worm has yet surfaced.
Also the report points criticizes several Microsoft products for vulnerabilities. At least Internet Explorer and the IIS are mentioned.
Security firm Symantec, which published its bi-annual Internet Threat Report on Wednesday, has found that the number of attacks over instant messaging and P2P systems quadrupled between January and June 2003.
…
The report criticised Microsoft's Internet Explorer, calling it a "serious danger" because of security lapses. Several vulnerabilities allow attackers to compromise client systems through Web pages containing embedded malicious code, while others can enable easy and almost undetectable installation of spyware, which could allow attackers to extract confidential data, the report said.
Microsoft IIS Web server was also picked out because it has been vulnerable to previous attacks such as Code Red and Nimda. Symantec expects the Web server to be targeted again by a "highly destructive malicious-code attack".
In fear of increasing movie piracy, MPAA(Motion Picture Association of America) has decided to ban Oscar screeners. Screeners are pre-release copies (but already full movies, not workprint copies) of movies that studios tend to send out to video rental chains, critics, etc before movie launches.
Screeners have been specially important in Academy Awards, also known as Oscars, as most of the people able to vote for the movies, actors, directors, etc don't actually go out to movie theatres to see every single movie that has been nominated (only foreign language movie category rules require that voters have seen all the nominated movies). So, to persuade voters to vote for their works, studios tend to send out DVD and video versions of movies to those eligible to vote (and number of people who are allowed to vote is rather whopping, so chances of having someone to "leak" the DVDR copy of the movie to Net are quite high).
Such decision taken by MPAA which is the main lobby group of all the major studios might affect the votings in future as smaller studios, who are not members of MPAA, can still send out screeners of their movies.
Obviously there are some sad things in such decision as well -- apart from pirates having harder time to find good-quality copies. Now small subsdiaries of major entertainment companies, who produce "indie films", but under a wing of megalomanic entertainment companies, can't send their movies to voters either, so chances of small-scale productions by such outlets to succeed in Academy Awards are rather slim.
According to a PDF file published by DVD-Recordable.org, Pioneer's upcoming DVR-A07 DVD recorder will be most likely the first recorder in the world to support 8x burning on both, DVD-R and DVD+R, main DVDR formats.
The leaked document doesn't disclose the estimated shipping date, but includes various technical details of the drive. Both 8x speed burning modes (+ and -) will use 6-8x Zone CLV speed, which means that inner circle of the disc will be burned at 6x, but as the laser reaches the outer circle of the disc, the spinning speed of the disc will remain the same, thus producing faster data burning to the outer area.
A07 drive seems to be very much identical to the existing A06 drive, but just faster writing speeds. 8x -R burning is a rather big surprise, specially if the drive starts shipping during the winter as most of the news publications have speculated that +R has now the edge over the writing speeds as there has been no announcements for 8x -R drives yet.
Sony upgrades the hardware and cuts the price. The improved DVD playback is the highlight of this hardware update, but the FireWire connectivity is gone.
DVD playback quality has been improved. The SCPH-50000 features surround sound decoder and purchasing of an additional remote controller is no longer required in order to access all of the DVD playback features. The FireWire connection has been stripped from the latest revision though. This is due to the fact that it was hardly at all used by game developers for multiplayer functionality.A tiny new detail is that the PS2 is now also available in ‘satin silver’ casing.
The SCHP-50000 is available in the U.K. during this week and the price has been shaved down to just £139.99
Sanyo Mavic Media has developed an optical disc labeled MildDisc. The disc is based on polylactic acid taken from corn.
It takes about 85 kernels of corn to make a CD. When discarded, the disc will be dissolved by bacteria to carbon dioxide, water, and inorganic substances in two to eight months.
The European Union has adopted directives, which require that all electronics devices sold within the union must be lead-free by June 2006.
Yet another driver update for the king of CD/DVD duplicators.
A new copyright law based on the requirements of the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) went into effect in the United Kingdom on Friday. The implementation of EUCD is considered to be the Europe's toughest digital copyright law.
Napster 2.0, a legal online digital music store from Roxio, was launched officially today in the U.S. The new service follows the path of Apple's iTunes in its pricing and its 
