A group representing Canadian songwriters has asked the Supreme Court to rule that Internet Service Providers have to pay them royalties for music files. The ISPs would have to pay an annual royalty regardles of the nature of the music files transferred through their systems.
Should the demands of Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) be agreed to by the court, it could result in increase in Internet service fees paid by Canadian consumers. It would also open the door for other copyright holders, like movie studios and software manufacturers, to demand similar royalty payments to compensate on piracy.
The fees proposed by SOCAN are 25 cents per subscriber per year plus 10 per cent of any gross profit made by ISPs through the sale of advertising.
"This is the big case for the Internet. This will set the position on how we are going to treat Internet service providers, whether they are going to be seen as people who are responsible in some way for content that goes through their services," said Mark Perry, a professor of law and a professor of computer science at the University of Western Ontario.
PlayStation 2 opens the new market, despite of piracy. Nearly four years after it’s initial release in Japan, the PS2 will finally be available in China. Previously the console makers have stayed out of the country because of the uncontrolled piracy that hurts the game market. Sony couldn’t resist the already huge and rapidly developing market any longer an decided to release the product for the Chinese.
The machine, which debuted in Japan in early 2000 and in the United States later that year, will hit Chinese shelves December 20 with a price tag of 1,988 yuan ($240). That compares with $179 in the United States.
"We have to realize the reality, that piracy cannot be controlled 100 percent, not only in China but also in other parts of the world," Sony China Chairman Hiroshi Shoda told reporters in an upscale Beijing cinema. "We have to be courageous, to face the reality." He declined to give sales projections.
Motion Picture Association of America delivered its response in a lawsuit brought against it by fourteen independent film companies over the MPAA's decision to ban so-called screener tapes and DVDs from other movie award organizations other than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences(which hands out the Oscars).
Indie movie studios had to take the action against the MPAA since without the screeners, people who vote for various awards couldn't see all of the nominated movies as movie theatres normally focus on showing the big-money blockbusters rather than "art" movies. However, most of the indie studios are either subsdiaries of bigger movie studios or distribute movies using bigger studios' distribution networks.
MPAA's lawyers argued that the association "has no control over the studios". The claim was greeted with scepticism by the judge, who replied: "Well, if that's the case, your client has no objection to withdrawing this ban."
MPAA has time until next week to come up with a defense in the case and after that the judge will decide whether to force MPAA to drop the ban or not.
Sony staff is not superstitious. They have today announced that the turbo charged version of the PS2, known as the PSX, will hit the stores as early as December the 13th of the year 2003. It seems that Sony didn’t want to miss out the Christmas sales with their high end product. Unfortunately, the western part of the world has to wait a little bit further as the December release is targeted to Japan only.
In case one didn’t know, the PSX is the new high end device by Sony, which is based on the PS2 hardware. It features a digital TV tuner, DVD recordable drive, a hard drive (various size options) and DVR (Digital Video Recorder) abilities.
A PSX with a 160-gigabyte HDD will sell for 79,800 yen ($731) and be able to record up to 204 hours of television, the company said. It will also sell a 250-gigabyte version for 99,800 yen.
According to rather surprising study by Ipsos-Insight, 10 million Americans paid for at least some of the songs they downloaded from the Net during the second quarter of 2003.
This is a rather whopping figure, since it represents over 16 percent of all Americans who downloaded music during this period. The age breakdowns of the study are also rather interesting. Logically, the teenage group, 12-17 year-olds, favored the good olde P2P networks over legal music, as only 4 percent of this age group users purchased music during the second quarter of 2003.
But the group between 18 and 24 were the biggest fans of legal music services, as 22 percent of them had purchased legal music downloads during this period. Other age groups, even the pensioners, favored more the traditional P2P downloading than legal music stores, which strikes a huge contrast between the reality and the fictional picture RIAA & co are painting.
In the format fight that hardly anyone understands anymore, DVD Forum's steering committee has decided to adopt a proposal from Toshiba and NEC as its draft for so-called HD-DVD format.
A month ago it seemed that DVD Forum had abandoned the idea of larger storage space on DVDs, but the latest decision (although as far as we know, not an ultimate decision yet) to adopt NEC-Toshiba disc, which is often also dubbed as AOD, as the HD-DVD base, overturns this decision again. HD-DVD would be able to store 15-20GB of data per disc side and according to various reports, should be backwards compatible with current DVD format. The backwards compatibility is something that AOD/HD-DVD's main competitor, Blu-Ray, lacks.
Specifications for the HD-DVD are very vague and the rival camp of Blu-Ray supporters is likely to go ahead with their own format -- which is already available in the Japanese markets -- and pressure from China isn't exactly helping things. Lets just hope that industry manages to figure out the direction before widespread adoption of new technologies, so that we can avoid a new "Beta vs VHS war".
Overall sales of the gaming consoles have started to decline. The PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube are reaching their maturity in the market. The sales of the Xbox and GameCube are predicted to increase, but as the largest provider Sony is shipping a reducing amount of PSOnes and PS2s, the over figures are dropping.
The next generation of gaming consoles is naturally the next booster of the gaming industry. They are expected to hit the market in the second quarter of 2005.
A group of more than a dozen small film companies sued the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) yesterday over the DVD screener ban imposed by MPAA. The ban prohibits MPAA members from distributing review DVDs or VHS tapes, or so called screeners, to anyone else besides the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars.
The small studios feel that the ban will limit the chances of smaller films receiving nominations or awards. That in turn will result in decreased funding for smaller studios. MPAA imposed the ban because it considers screeners to be one of the top sources for illegal movie copies. Small budget films, however, are rarely pirated, and could hence be distributed as DVD screeners in the future. But the ban doesn't make a difference between big budget blockbuster movies and small budget independent movies.
The lawsuit seeks at least $25 million in damages, and asks the court to rule that MPAA is using its position to restrict trade through unlawful and unreasonable agreements with its members.
Recently Ahead Software announced the key features of the Nero Recode v2, the movie backup tool of the Nero 6 package. As many of us know, the DVD-to-DVD-R transcoding abilities of the software originate from DVDShrink. This is due to the developer of DVDShrink working for Ahead Software.
As announced, the Recode v2 will incorporate some key features of the DVDShrink v3 beta. This includes the Deep Analyze –function, that aims to increase the quality of the transcoded copy. However, our sources have verified that the transcoding engine of Recode v2 has evolved significantly. Our sources refuse to go into details and retain a level of secrecy of the upcoming product, but it seems that Recode v2 will have more to offer in transcoding than its freeware 'mother' DVDShrink, not to mention all the other features such as MPEG-4 support.
Ahead Software has a good chance of taking the lead in the transcoder market.
Internet service provider SBC Communications and RIAA have attended a hearing to debate the legitimacy of subpoenas handed out by RIAA. RIAA asked the court to dismiss SBC's case entirely, while SBC requested a summary judgement, which would give them a victory in the case without going to a full trial.
This time, however, the situation is somewhat different, because there's now factual evidence on how RIAA has used (or abused) the DMCA subpoena system.
Judge Susan Illston heard both sides, but did not make a ruling immediately. She did, however, make a statement that could be seen to favour RIAA. Illston might not let SBC to try their case in California, but transfer the case to Washington D.C., where Verizon lost its case against RIAA.
A study named The Global Music Industry from Informa Media Group predicts that music industry revenues will keep dropping for a year before picking up and reaching $32bn by the year 2008.
A somewhat surprising assessment in the study is that the now promising online music sales will not be the driving force behind the growth. The growth will be based on better copy protection schemes and getting a handle on online file-sharing piracy.
Informa does believe that online music sales will grow, but it estimates that by 2008 only 5.7 per cent of all music sales will consist of digital sales. Online sales in total would represent a total of 12 per cent.
"The music industry is in a bad way at the moment but the continued fall in the value of music sales is certainly not irreversible. The success of the new download services proves there is a viable market for legitimate digital sales, but the music companies must act decisively to stop the growth of the illegal services and the widespread copying of CDs," author of the report, Simon Dyson, said in a statement.
Jon Lech Johansen has released an open source software for saving DRM locked iTunes files to decrypted format. The software does not decrypt the DRM itself, but rather dumps the decrypted stream from memory while it's being played in iTunes. The program is called QuickTime for Windows AAC memory dumper.
This "security hole" is well known and can be used to bypass any type of protection, since data has to be in fully decrypted form before it is passed on to the sound output. These types of holes are known as the analog hole -- no matter what you do, it's always there. If everything else fails, you can always record the analog output signal from the computer.
It remains to be seen whether or not Apple will start releasing new versions of iTunes that requires for the memory dumper to be updated each time.
Jon Lech Johansen, aka DVD Jon is best known for his work with DeCSS, which allowed Linux users to view CSS protected DVDs.
America Online announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Singingfish, a company providing technology for searching video and audio content on the Internet.
AOL will incorporate Singingfish to their AOL search to allow their users to do searches for audio and video. With the number of broadband subscribers increasing, there's alot of demand for multimedia content.
In addition to being able to provide more interesting content, AOL will be able to boost its advertising income with Singingfish. For example keyword based advertisement spots on multimedia search engines are something entertainment stores are interested in. Singingfish technology is also lisenced to, for instance, Microsoft and RealNetworks.
Ahead Softwares video backup software is evolving to the second generation. They have now announced the details of the v2, and set the release date to be in a couple of weeks.
Nero Recode is a DVD-to-DVD-R transcoding tool, originally based on the DVDShrink. But the v2 adds a whole lot more functionality. It seems that the deep analyze function from the DVDShrink v3 has been added to improve transcoding quality. It will also support Nero Digital, the MPEG-4 A/V codec for low bit rate Divx-like compression with simplicity.
Interesting usability features have also been included. The press release promises a Watch while you burn-mode while compressing, with full screen video and surround audio. Direct burn-technology should reduce the processing times by performing on-the-fly recording.
Nero Recode and Nero Digital are included in the Nero 6 retail license.
Today China released the final specs of its competitor to DVD-Video disc. China calculated the timing of this week's major technological announcement very well. Currently DVD Forum is trying to solve locked situation where it has to choose either HD-DVD which is based on AOD disc, developed by Toshiba and NEC, and BD-ROM, which is based on Blu-Ray disc, developed by various consumer electronics companies, including Sony, Pioneer and Philips.
China's own digital video disc format is called Enhanced Video Disc or EVD. Format uses blue-laser discs, just like AOD and Blu-Ray do, but the exact capacity is not known at the moment. The most interesting part of the disc's specifications is in its video compression method. EVD uses proprietary video codecs developed by American On2 Technologies, called VP5 and VP6 that deliver significantly better video quality with lower bitrate levels than the MPEG-2 used in DVD-Video discs (and in proposed BD-ROM format) does and competes well (and according to various tests, also beats it at least in some cases) against MPEG-4's latest video compression method, called H.264 that proposed HD-DVD plans to use. EVD will be able to use HDTV resolution natively, which should also boost the plans to launch a nationwide HDTV service in China in near future.
Even though the music industry has little to gain from P2P piracy, there's still some aspects to it they find worth paying for. One of them is P2P search and download statistics.
Major labels, such as Warner Bros., Disney and Atlantic Records buy P2P usage statistics from BigChampagne, a company that has been monitoring for instance Kazaa since 2000. BigChampagne monitors, for instance, how many times their customers' artists show up on search strings, how often their songs are shared and how many times they are downloaded. The record labels can use the statistics for instance to determine which artists are popular in certain areas, and direct their marketing accordingly.
BigChampagne doesn't record the user names of people sharing files, but does use the IP addresses to analyze the geographic location of the users. Gathering statistics always involves the question of privacy, but P2P users sharing and downloading copyrighted material are hardly in the position to complain.
The makers of the famous MP3 compression recently announced their MPEG-4 software for public evaluation.
On the following pages you can download free evaluation versions of the Fraunhofer IIS MPEG-4 player and the Fraunhofer IIS MPEG-4 encoder and server. These evaluation versions are for personal and non-commercial use and are intended to promote the MPEG-4 standard and to demonstrate the MPEG-4 technologies available at Fraunhofer IIS.
The use of the software is only allowed for personal and non-commercial purposes. For other use cases please contact us directly. The evaluation period will expire on the 31st of December 2003 because of licencing terms not under control of the Fraunhofer IIS. After this date, selected features of the software will be disabled while still allowing basic operation.
Microsoft's spokeswoman told yesterday at Comdex to reporters that Microsoft plans to launch an online digital music store in 2004 to compete with existing services, such as Apple's iTunes and Roxio's recently-opened Napster.
Company is also looking for a "senior level marketing candidate" for the new Microsoft Music Download Service, according to their website. Site states that "the first duty of this candidate will be to finalize the business plan for the Microsoft Music Download Service".
It is interesting to see whether Microsoft will attract yet another antitrust lawsuit and integrate the music store within its Windows Media Player..
MPAA announced today that its plan to ban screener (meaning DVD or VHS copies of movies that haven't been released on DVD/VHS yet and are sent out to movie industry people, critics, etc) tapes and DVDs stands. Only exception will be the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, i.e. the institution that hands out annual Academy Awards a.k.a. Oscars.
MPAA came under pressure to relax its screener ban decision it made in September after it negotiated a separate deal with Academy in October that granted Academy members an access to screeners. Many independent production houses wanted to include Hollywood Foreign Press Association(which hands out Golden Globe awards) and other institutions that have movie industry awards to the same deal MPAA made with the Academy. But now MPAA announced that it has made up its mind -- the only people who can get their hands on movie screeners are the Academy members.
"The HFPA is extremely disappointed that the MPAA has unfairly decided to continue the screener ban on organizations outside of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences," HFPA president Lorenzo Soria said.
Recently Microsoft announced that it will drop the Intel-based concept of the Xbox and use an IBM CPU in the Xbox 2. The Sony PS3 will also feature an IBM processor. Nintendo’s GameCube already is equipped with IBM, an Nintendo will continue to do so in the next generation console as well.
But things just get more interesting! Nintendo has signed the well known 3D graphics card developer ATI as the GPU provider for their up coming console. Since Xbox and the next Nintendo are both based on IBM+ATI, it raises a lot of questions.
Nintendo is working on future successors to the GameCube and the GameBoy Advance. It is expected to announce the former next May at the E3 show. Curiously, with GameCube development partners IBM and ATI now confirmed as Xbox 2 developers, speculation is mounting that the new Nintendo and Xbox 2 may be one and the same thing, with the two firms essentially offering two, individual products both derived from a common platform.
Indeed, ATI has already been named by Nintendo as its future graphics partner - despite being signed by Microsoft, nominally Nintendo's rival. It's hard to imagine to competitors being happy to share one key component supplier, let alone two, such is the risk that commercially sensitive information might be exposed to a rival. No, the only way they would happily allow this situation to exist is if they are working on the same console platform.
Our buddies at CDRInfo have spent their weeked publishing new reviews. This time they have a look at a 4x Tosh.
The new SD-R5112 drive is the answer of Toshiba to 4x DVD burner competition. With DVD/CD playback and recording capabilities in a single unit, SD-R5112 drive enables users to store and share home movies, music and photo files with greater efficiency and performance. For consumers interested in updating their existing desktop computers, the SD-R5112 drive is also available as an upgrade kit, which includes all the tools (drive, software, cables and media) needed for the "do-it-yourself" installation. With DVD recording speeds of 4x, the SD-R5112 makes it virtually effortless to transfer home videos, photos and other digital files from the computer to the living room DVD player.
CDRInfo has done a comprehensive report of the Philips DVDR824P DVD+RW. Previously Philips has had a strong presense in the consumer electronics market, but it seems like they are pushing more and more to the information technology field as well.
The DVD recording market welcomes the new Philips DVDR824P DVD+RW recorder. After Plextor PX-708A, Philips increases the burning speed at 8x for DVD+R media. The drive supports 4x writing speed for DVD+RW and it is also a CD-R/RW recorder at 24x and 10x respectively. On the reading part the new Philips drive reads DVD±R/RW disc at 8x, DVD-ROM at 12x and CD-R/RW at 40x.
According to I.T. Vibe and others, MP3.com has sent email to its customers stating that CNET Networks has acquired certain assets of MP3.com, and as of December 2nd, 2003 MP3.com website will no longer be available in its current form.
Here's the email in full:
CNET Networks, Inc announced today that it has acquired certain assets of MP3.com, Inc. Please be advised that on Tuesday, December 2, 2003 at 12:00 PM PST the MP3.com website will no longer be accessible in its current form.
CNET Networks, Inc. plans to introduce a new MP3 music service in the near future. If you would like to receive email updates on this service, including an invitation to a special members-only preview, please sign up here. MP3.com is not transferring your personal information to CNET Networks, Inc. or any other third party.
On behalf of all of us at MP3.com we thank you for your patronage and continued support. It has been a privilege to host one of the largest and most diverse collections of music in the world. MP3.com wishes to express its sincere thanks to each of you for making us your premier destination for music online.
Sincerely,
MP3.com
Although no official press release has been made yet by either MP3.com or CNET, this definitely is a major move. Is CNET planning on opening a music store of their own or are they perhaps going for a different kind of MP3 music service. Time will tell.
The case around mp3s4free.net, the Australian web site linking to MP3 files, escalates, as the record labels involved in the lawsuit are expanding the case to involve three people from ISP Com-Cen -- two directors, and an employee.
The employee, Chris Takoushis, arranged the deal between Com-Cen and the Web site. "An employee of a company can be brought into proceedings if they knew what the company was doing was illegal," said Michael Speck, General Manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations.
The claims and demands made by the industry are outright ridiculous. Can you sue someone for renting an apartment for a music pirate? Hell no! The music industry needs to get a grip on reality, and stop shooting their lawsuit shotgun in public.
According to industry sources, MPAA's president of 38 years, 82-year-old Jack Valenti plans to leave his $1M-a-year job in January.
He has already hinted that he wants to find a successor for his post and according to people familiar with the issue, best candidate at the moment would be a Republican congressman, 60-year-old W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.).
Valenti would most likely continue as a chairman of the movie industry's most powerful lobbying organization and would also continue to oversee the movie ratings system.
Researchers from Princeton University, New Jersey, and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, have managed to develop a polymer-based memory unit, which can potentially be turned in to an inexpensive, plastic memory chip, which could store a megabit of data per square millimetre.
The invention is based on a known, conducting polymer called PEDOT, which is already used in anti-static coating of camera film. The researchers noticed, however, that when subject to high currencies, PEDOT turns into an insulator. In essence, when you have a material whose electrical properties can be altered with a current, you have a potential memory chip at hand.
"The beauty of the device is that it combines the best of silicon technology - diodes - with the capability to form a fuse, which does not exist in silicon," says Vladimir Bulovic, who works on organic electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When PEDOT turns into an insulator, it cannot be turned back to conducting material. That makes it a Write Once, Read Many (WORM) memory. PEDOT memory devices would hence be writeable only once, just like CD-Rs. Polymer based devices are easy and inexpensive to manufacture, so the fact that the memory cannot be re-used, should be irrelevant. A possible application for such a device would be, for example, a "permanent" digital film for digital cameras. Instead of transferring data on your PC and removing them from your camera, you would just swap the memory card to a new, blank one.
A bill introduced in the U.S. Senate today would send P2P pirates, who swap movie and music files ahead of release date, to jail for up to five years. The bill was sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and John Cornyn (R-Texas).
The bill is aimed at stopping distribution of pirated copies of movies and CDs, before the movie has opened in theatres or the CD hit the store shelves. By turning the offences to felonies with five-year maximun sentence for first time offenders, the supporters of the bill hope to make people think more than twice, before they share such material. In addition to the jail sentence, offenders would, of course, have to pay for damages as well.
Sharman Networks has announced that a new "Bollywood" feature film will be available via its P2P software, Kazaa, legally for people who are interested of purchasing it.
For a long time now, Kazaa has pursued selling legal content in its massive P2P network in addition to day-to-day swapping of copyrighted material between users. It has done so via its partner, AltNet, which has managed to get this deal to Kazaa as well.
Hindi-language film, "Supari", will cost $2.99 and will also feature songs from the movie soundtrack for $0.90 and trailers and various promotional downloads for free.
Supari will be the first full-length movie ever offered through Kazaa/AltNet partnership.
American college student, Bill Zeller, has developed an application called MyTunes that "enhances" the user experience of iTunes' Windows version. Software adds a possibility to download non-copy protected music (such as MP3s) from other iTunes users' playlists.
Software doesn't break the copy protection found on iTunes' AAC audio files, but simply allows downloading other types of music, such as P2P-downloaded MP3s, that other iTunes users have in their shared playlists.
"I would like to think they would go after those infringing copyrights and not those abiding by them," Zeller says. "However, although MyTunes can be used for legal ends, I understand how [Apple and/or the RIAA] might have a problem with the software. I would like to think the responsibility to act in accordance with the law is on the user. Authors of software should not have to babysit the user in order to ensure legal compliance."
Now-defunct P2P company Madster last week appealed earlier court decision to U.S. Supreme Court and also asked for a stay in its case until the Supreme Court decides whether it will review Madster's appeal.
As Madster as a company has shrinked downed to its owner and founder, Johnny Deep, the case is really just Mr. Deep vs RIAA. Now the U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has made a decision not to grant a stay for him. Stay would have meant that the injunction against him, granted by the lower court, would have been blocked until the Supreme Court makes up its mind whether to take his case for hearing or not. This would have meant that he could have opened Madster again while waiting for the decision and to collect some advertising revenue for his company.
Buy DVD X Copy now and get a LiteON DVD+/-R for 20$. Yes, sounds crazy but this tempting bundle by the 321 Studios is for real. And it just gets better: For each bundle sold, 321 Studios will donate $25 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
DVD backup software vendor 321 Studios today announced it will donate as much as $1 million over the next year to online civil liberties organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). 321 Studios hopes to support EFF's work in advocating for digital copyright law responsive to consumer needs and to educate its customers about these issues.
The company will donate $25 toward EFF's efforts for each sale of a Lite-On DVD burner and DVD X Copy Platinum software bundle through the 321 Studios website or at the 321 Studios Touch Point Customer Service Center in the St. Louis Galleria Mall.
"We are very pleased that 321 Studios has chosen to recognize the important work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation with a generous financial contribution over the next year," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "321 Studios knows firsthand the importance of advocating for copyright law that preserves the balance among content-creators, innovators, and the public."
Sharman Networks, the company which owns Kazaa p2p application, is planning to launch a big scale "offline" advertising campaign next week, running ads in traditional print media.
With the ads, Sharman tries to encourage P2P users and other netizens to defend their rights to use P2P networks (which itself are not illegal, but when a user distributes -- i.e. puts the file in his/her shared folder for people to download -- copyrighted material, that is considered to be illegal in most of the countries) and to also get the decision makers and record labels to understand the message Sharman has been trying to persuade: put it there with reasonable price and people will pay for it.
Sharman and other P2P networks have called lawmakers to change the current entertainment licensing laws in a way that it would force content owners to license their material with fixed price to anyone who's willing to distribute it. It seems that forcing media companies to do this is the only way P2P networks will ever get into legal music and movie distribution business with the major record labels and movie studios.
Sharman's print campaign is scheduled to begin on November 19th in United States.
Philips Research has demonstrated DVD+R recording at 16X speed in a laboratory environment. It is the first time such recording speeds have been obtained, and the recording speed is close to theoretical maximum for polycarbonate discs. When writing at 16X speeds the disc is rotating at 10800 rpm, which translates to linear velocity of 200kmph (125mph). As one can imagine, vibrations at those speeds are serious, to say the least.
A bald guy adjusting laser optics
A key aspect in realizing higher recording speeds is the development of a suitable 'writing strategy' - the timing and power of the laser pulses in such a way that marks (representing digital zeros and ones) of the correct length are created in the organic dye that forms the active layer of recordable DVDs. Doing this well becomes increasingly difficult at higher recording speeds, because the available time to heat up and cool down the dye at the position of a mark becomes ever shorter. Especially avoiding that post-heating partly erases a written mark when a neighbouring mark is written is a challenging task. Philips has developed an efficient write strategy that not only results in accurate recording results, but in addition needs only a limited number of parameters to realize it, allowing disc-drive manufacturers to implement the algorithm in a straightforward manner.
Pioneer Electronics has announced the DVR-A07 DVD/CD writer with support for both -R and +R DVD recordable formats.
The DVR-A07 is the world's first 8x8 dual format writer, meaning it is capable of writing at 8x speed on DVD-R discs whose standard is being ratified in the DVD Forum and +R discs that are designed for this recording speed. The new drive also records high-speed DVD-RW and +RW discs at up to 4x speed, and CD-R and CD-RW discs at up to 24x speed. By supporting the DVD Forum's DVD-R and DVD-RW disc formats as well as the +R and +RW formats, Pioneer is helping to eliminate format confusion, which has become a growing problem for potential buyers.
"With the launch of the industry's first "8x8" dual format writer, Pioneer is once again putting the needs of the user at the top of our priority list," said Andy Parsons, senior vice president of industrial video and mass storage sales and marketing at Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. "The DVR-A07 will save users valuable time by writing DVD and CD discs as fast as recordable DVD technology allows at this point. It also lets users focus on writing DVDs instead of worrying about which disc format they need to buy."
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents most of the world's local music industry lobby groups and collection agencies, including RIAA, announced today that they have developed a so-called "global" webcasting license for Net radio stations.
Previously, at least in theory, if a Net radio station wanted to broadcast to multiple countries, it had to obtain licensing agreement from each individual country. Not that anyone actually did that -- you can listen American or European webcasts from anywhere and normally the webcasters simply ignore the licenses outside their own region. But the very few big players who have wanted to actually physically operate in all of those countries as well, had the legal situation somewhat painful as each country used to have (and still has) their own licensing requirements, etc.
The new initiative for global, one-stop licensing agreement through IFPI is expected to be approved by more than 30 countries' local collection and licensing agencies, including most of the European and American countries agencies.
But there's still a catch: the fee structure wont change and each webcaster would still have to pay licensing fees for the music to each individual country they wish to stream to (again, in theory -- in real life, to all countries where they have an actual physical presence), based on that country's licensing body's fee structure.
So far the DVR market has been dominated by Philips and Panasonic. While the prices of their product has decreased slowly, they are still considered rather expensive. There is an increasing demand for the high quality video recording, due to the digital television broadcasting’s raising popularity. So welcome Gateway’s new model, priced only at $349.
The AR-230 DVD Recorder replaces the VCR, allowing customers to record TV programs, store movies and playback digital video and other multimedia content. It can record up to six hours of video on a 4.7GB disc. Offering superior quality and longevity over VHS tape, DVD discs maintain recordings up to 100 years versus the three to five years of the average VHS tape. DVD discs also take up significantly less space than bulky VHS cassettes. The Gateway DVD Recorder supports both DVD+RW and DVD+R discs in which Gateway will offer as additional items with the DVD Recorder.
Using the Gateway AR-230 DVD Recorder, consumers can record favorite TV shows, movies and sports events onto a single DVD with the touch of a button, unlike the multiple steps required to program a VCR. Also, RCA input enables consumers to transfer taped copies of home videos from a VCR onto non-degradable DVD discs.
Largest American broadband provider, Comcast, has signed a deal with RealNetworks to promote media company's online digital music store, Rhapsody through its services and directly to its customers.
Comcast also plans to launch a nationwide TV advertising campaign for Comcast's Rhapsody offering. This is considered to be very good news for the whole emerging digital music "industry" as it educates people about the fact that there really are legal online alternatives to tradtional CDs.
Sony Music is about to introduce copy protection technology that attepmts to be less irritating for the end user. According to the source, their new multi session disc contains a digitally compressed version of the music, that the user can copy to the PC or portable Sony device. Also Sony includes "value adding" extra content on the disc.
The new technology will pilot in Germany, before wider distribution.
But Sony thinks it has an appealing approach: Give customers added incentives to buy copy-protected CDs.
On Monday, Sony will release rhythm & blues group Naturally Seven's new CD in Germany with a so-called "second session." The disc can be played on almost any device conventionally, said Sony Music Chief Technology Officer Phil Wiser.
It also contains a compressed digital copy of the music that can be quickly copied onto any computer. From the computer, users can copy that music onto Sony portable digital music players.
The CD's also allow users to connect to Web sites with exclusive features such as bonus songs and concert tickets. The features are only available if you have the original CD.
According to McDonald's, such deal was "pure speculation" and that there's no deal with Apple. However, company also stated that it "continues to aggressively pursue bold new initiatives in the areas of music, sports, fashion and entertainment to connect with our customers in fresh and relevant ways...You can expect news from McDonald's on a variety of fronts in the coming weeks and months."
The long-running legal case between RIAA and now de-funct P2P company Madster(which was formerly known as Aimster) seems to be headed to U.S. Supreme Court.
Madster eventually complained to the Appeals Court, but Appeals Court upheld the lower court decision, even that the court made some very valid points about non-infringing uses of P2P networks in its decision.
Apple announced a month ago a deal with Pepsi to hand out 100 million iTunes songs for Pepsi's promotional campaign. Now the fast-food giant McDonald's has made a similar deal, but bigger; according to New York Post, McDonald's will give away one billion iTunes songs in its recently-launched global "I'm loving it" advertising campaign.
According to sources, both Pepsi and McDonald's are paying full retail price of $0.99 to Apple for the songs, so theoretically Apple has managed to boost iTunes' revenues by $1.1bn with these two deals. Obviously the reality will be slightly lower as many of the promotion winners wont be using their coupons at all.
So far it is still unclear how McDonald's will spend the purchased free downloads and company refuses to comment the deal at all. Pepsi's campaign will include 300 million specially marked Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist bottles -- every third of the bottles will include a single song coupon to iTunes.
Napster online music store and Pennsylvania State University have announced a deal that allows university students to access the Napster service for free. The deal is a part of the ongoing efforts by universities to find legal alternatives to Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services.
In the first stage about 18,000 students will have access to a limiter Napster service, where they can listen to streaming music or download tethered music files, ie. files protected with DRM so that they can only be played back on a limited number of computers, and for limited time. In order to burn music on CDs, students will have to pay the full price of 99 cents per song. Later the service will be expanded to cover all students and staff. The service will be funded through the existing, $160 per semester IT fee the students must pay.
Napster, as well as the entire music industry hopes, that by introducing students to legal methods of acquiring music they will carry on the habit when they leave their universities, and continue purchasing songs online instead of downloading them. Then again, by the time current students graduate, the online music scene might be completely different from what is is today.
Digital video recorder company TiVo has reached a customer base of one million with help from DirecTV. DirecTV provides satellite TV receivers with built in TiVo technology. Other manufacturers, such as Pioneer and Toshiba have also bundled some of their DVD player models with TiVo.
TiVO allows users to pause live TV and digitally record TV shows on a hard disk drive. Digital video recorders, or DVRs are gaining in popularity as consumers are finding the added value services interesting and worth paying for.
You can find discussions related to DVR, PVR (Personal Video Recorder), and other interesting topics at our Digital TV discussion forum. We've also just opened a Home Theater PC forum, so if you're interested in making a HTPC of your own, you might find it also worth checking out!
According to research group NPD more than a million households deleted all digital music files on their PCs in August. NPD says that the increased "intrest" in deleting files is mostly thanks to RIAA's anti-piracy campaign.
NPD has tracked deletions since May 2003. Back then 606,000 households deleted files, when in August the number of households reached 1,4 million.
Another study by NPD showed, as could be expected, that the public image of the recording industry has suffered from aggressive methods used by the RIAA in hunting down private file sharers.
One could, however, question the numbers shown in the study. Would you admit to having pirated files on your computer, if a stranger, allegedly from a research company, called you up and asked about them? Especially with all the publicity around the RIAA lawsuits. Doubtfully.
Sony revealed some details about its upcoming handheld game machine, dubbed as PSP or Playstation Portable.
Current design version, which may or may not look like the final version due by the end of the year 2004, uses storage media dubbed as UMD(Universal Media Disc) which holds appx. 1.8GB of storage space. Each disc will carry a region coding, copy-protection mechanism and each disc will have its own individual identification number as well.
Device will include two processors, both based on MIPS R4000 core. PSP will support Dolby 7.1 surround audio, AAC, MP3 and Sony's own ATRAC3 as audio formats and will also support MPEG-4 H.264 for video.
Launch, the music site of Yahoo!, announced last weekend that it has delivered now over one billion music videos over the Net since the beginning of 2003.
This means nearly a 300% increase since 2002 and, according to Yahoo, proves that Net as an on-demand streaming medium has been widely accepted by the music video enthusiasts.
Launch uses Microsoft's WMV format to deliver the music videos. All of its music videos are free to watch online.
Federal Communications Commission approved, as expected, the decision to introduce so-called "broadcast flag" to American digital TV broadcasts. The flag can be used to restrict recording and further distribution of recorded digital TV shows.
American TV companies and content owners have been reluctant to move to digital TV for various reasons -- one of the biggest reasons has been the fear of piracy that perfect-quality TV recordings would possibly spark. This is somewhat different route than that introduced in countries like Germany; city of Berlin switched off the analog TV signals totally in beginning of August this year and further German cities are expected to follow soon.
All American digital TV equipment have to comply with the broadcast flag rules by 1st of July, 2005. With the flag, content providers can decide what programs they wish to "protect" from recording and further distribution -- when the DTV equipment identifies a broadcast flag, it refuses to either play or record it, depending on the source and the flag type.
Better late than never? Ever since Apple launched it’s music service, there has been a gold rush for the wallets of the interned enabled music consumers. But the late market entry doesn’t make things easy for the entrepreneurs. But what if someone with a gigantic marketing muscle would join the competition?
Indeed, the Music Television seems to have an ideal opportunity in this new business. It’s TV broadcasting services reaches the potential customer group very efficiently and it can promote their new e-brand efficiently and cost-efficiently. Only thing raising questions is that the MTV / Viacom has had problems conquering the new media with their previous e-concepts. Can they pull it away this time?
MTV Chief Executive Tom Freston described those plans on Monday at the Harris Nesbitt Gerard Playtime investor conference in New York City, saying the service would compete with iTunes, among others, according to a Reuters report.
Beyond confirming that it planned to launch the service in the first half of 2004, MTV declined to comment.
Thus far, Viacom has had limited success in translating its powerful MTV brand from television to the Internet.
The competition is heating up towards the Christmas season. Sony has announced yet another price drop for the PS2 is Japan. The new price settles approximately to $180. Also, the PS2 is offered in different colors for the holiday season and bundled with games.
The Sony PS2 was launched back in the year 2000 and clearly the console market of the "second generation" consoles (PS2, Xbox, GameCube) is beginning to show signs of maturity. Console makers are now pushing the aging products by lowering the price, while preparing the next generation machines that are expected to be launched in 2005.
MusicMatch, the makers of MusicMatch Jukebox, have instructed their users to remove Apple iTunes software completely.
iTunes makes itself the default application to use with Apple iPod, the portable music player. So far Apple has bundled MusicMatch's software with iPod for Windows users to use. That will probably change in the near future, after Apple has ironed out all the major glitches from the iTunes software, and is able to provide a Windows 9x -version as well.
MusicMatch justifies the instructions to remove iTunes by saying that "If you install iTunes, you will not be given a choice between Musicmatch Jukebox and iTunes - Apple makes this choice for you." MusicMatch also launched its own MP3 download service in September, and is in direct competition with Apple.
Apparently both MusicMatch and iTunes work on the same computer, but iTunes makes itself the default (and only) application for iPod.
Microsoft and IBM today announced that the next Xbox will use IBM's processors instead of Intel's. No exact details have been announced, but IBM PowerPC processor technology has been licensed for use in both Xbox consoles and services based around the console.
The next generation Xbox will now contain different graphics chip and CPU from the current unit -- this summer Microsoft and ATI inked a deal which makes ATI the provider for graphics chips on the next Xbox. The agreement was a huge blow on Nvidia, and this latest deal must be equally devastating to Intel.
"We plan to deliver unprecedented and unparalleled entertainment experiences to consumers while creating new engines of growth for the technology and entertainment industries," said Robbie Bach, senior vice-president of Microsoft's home and entertainment division.
It is more than likely that the new Xbox will be much more than just a gaming console. The same, however, can be said about the next Playstation as well.
Version:2.3.3.1003
Release Date: 2003/10/03
For Alcohol 120% Retail/Trial Version.
Added:
Teac CD-W522E
52X24X52 CD-RW
Samsung SN-308
PIONEER DVR-S606
Lite-On LDW-411S
Memorex DVD+/-RW Dual-X1
Sony DRU-530A
MSI DR4-A
MSI X48 CD-RW/DVD-ROM
MSI CR52 CD-RW
ASUS DRW-0804A
HP DVD Writer 200e
LG RW/DVD GCC-5241P
PIONEER DVR-SK12D
Samsung SM-352T
Samsung SR-252T
Samsung SR-W16B
Samsung SR-P80B
We sometimes modify some settings for some drives, we suggest all users have to upgrade your devsupp.dll file to latest version.Get it from Alcohol Software support forums.
MIT's idea to provide legal music to their students at low cost have failed. The LAMP (Library Access to Music Project) aimed to provide music to students without paying too much royalties while remaining a legal service. Music was delivered via analog cable TV and the songs played were selected in turn by the students. Labels are entitled to royalties in on-demand services only if the music is transferred digitally.
MIT relied on Loudeye to provide the content and licenses. It seems there was a mis-communication somewhere between the two parties, because Loudeye only has licenses to sell the encoded music files to its customers -- licenses for playing and delivering the content must be agreed on with the record labels and the final customer, which in this case was MIT.
MIT has removed songs from at least Vivendi Universal and Harry Fox Agency from the service which was opened on Monday. They are currently in the process of negotiating directly with record labels and publishers.
PlayStation 2 opens the new market, despite of piracy. Nearly four years after it’s initial release in Japan, the PS2 will finally be available in China. Previously the console makers have stayed out of the country because of the uncontrolled piracy that hurts the game market. Sony couldn’t resist the already huge and rapidly developing market any longer an decided to release the product for the Chinese.
Motion Picture Association of America delivered its response in a 
