Microsoft cheered today when an industry body DVD Forum made a decision to support Microsoft's Windows Media 9 format in upcoming HD-DVD standard.
Based on the decision, all HD-DVD players will have to support three different types of video encoding -- MPEG-2(the one that current DVD-Video discs and digital TV use), H.264(latest standardized video encoding layer of MPEG-4) and VC-9 (the video technology behind the Windows Media 9 format).
Decision is obviously a huge boost to Microsoft's efforts to get into big boys' movie business. DVD Forum also approved a near-ready specs for rewritable HD-DVD discs -- it has previously already approved specs for read-only discs.
HD-DVD is based on blue-laser technology and competes directly against the other blue-laser optical technology, Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray is supported by virtually all the consumer electronics companies and there are already Blu-Ray discs and devices available in Japanese markets, so the fight over the next generation of optical storage format is only beginning..
Now, California Court of Appeals Sixth Appellate District overturned the original injunction handed out in 1999 against Andrew Bunner and several other individuals. Back then, DVD-CCA argued that distributing the DeCSS code in California violated against state's trade secrets legislation. Court overturned the decision because DVD-CCA failed to provide evidence that the CSS, a copy protection mechanism found on many DVD-Video discs, is still a trade secret.
"We are thrilled that the Court of Appeal has recognized that the injunction restricting Mr. Bunner's freedom of speech is not justified," said Staff Attorney Gwen Hinze. "Today's Court ruling that there is no evidence that CSS was still a trade secret when Mr. Bunner posted DeCSS vindicates what we have long said; DeCSS has been available on thousands of websites around the world for many years."
Sony owners get a nice little bonus as Sony has accelerated the DRU-530 to 8x recording with the new firmware release. The update is offered for free to all customers.
Firmware Upgrade 2.0A Improvements: Improves reading and writing performance on DVD-R. Improves reliability and recognition on certain DVD-R's.
Enhancements: This free firmware upgrade will allow Sony DRU-530A and DRX-530UL drives to be able to record at 8X maximum on DVD-R media, and 4X maximum on DVD-RW media. Appropriate speed rated media is required.
Compatibility: This firmware upgrade is for Sony-branded DRU-530A and DRX-530UL drives only. It will not upgrade any other Sony drive models and could cause non-compatible drives to become non-functional if this firmware is flashed to them.
Movie and entertainment giant Walt Disney, Co. and world's largest software company Microsoft will join DVD Forum, the Tokyo-based industry group announced.
DVD Forum is a non-profit group consisting of more than two hundred member companies. The members get to decide and vote on the future of the DVD format. At the moment the group is debating on which format to choose as the medium for next-generation DVDs. Two of the strongest candidates are Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba and NEC's HD DVD. It is believed that the new members may improve support for the HD DVD format.
"With Disney and Microsoft joining, maybe the balance of voting power will be improved in favor of Toshiba's HD-DVD format" said Takutoshi Fujiwara of Fujiwara-Rothchild Ltd. "Then it will become much easier for the HD-DVD specification to be admitted by the forum." Fujiwara-Rothchild Ltd. is a technology consultancy advising both Sony and Toshiba.
The current home video markets in the U.S. generate a revenue of over $20 billion, so it's not surprising that everyone wants to have a say in the format that will eventually replace current DVDs.
CDNow, a division of the record label Bertelsmann, and Net company SightSound Technologies have settled their patent dispute out of court. CDNow agreed to pay $3.3 million to SightSound for dropping the lawsuit.
SightSound, who claims to own patents to the process of selling digital downloadable music over the Internet, sees the agreement as a victory. The company is likely to approach other companies with similar demands asking them to license SightSound's technology in order to avoid a lawsuit.
CDNow has been powered by Amazon.com since December 2002. Amazon takes care of order fulfillment, inventory, content and customer service for CDNow's site.
Flash memory maker M-System has recently announced a contract for providing storing solutions for the next generation X-Box. This, and the fact that Microsoft has also planned data storing abilities to Xbox Live, has raised speculations that the next Xbox would not feature a hard drive.
Jay Srivatsa, a senior analyst at research firm iSuppli, said the Xbox hard drive so far has been used mainly for ancillary functions like saving progress in a game, not to improve the way games work. Sacrificing the hard drive could be a relatively painless way to trim $10 or $20 per unit from production costs. "I can see why they'd attempt to do that--the hard disk usage on the current Xbox has been pretty minimal," he said. "At some point, this has got to be a profitable business for Microsoft. They have to draw some lines; look at what can they take out."
After months of programming and investigating, we've finally managed to isolate the login problems that caused headache to our users, specially those with AOL. The old authentication method has been scrapped now and replaced with a new one that, according to user reports received today, solves the problems that related to non-standard proxy servers. So, from now on, AOL users should also be able to login to our site and post news comments and forum posts.
Also, we've improved our news page rather dramatically. The layout has been improved and the old archive-style has been moved to a separate archive page. Also, the new layout includes a direct form for news search that should be significantly better for searching specific news headlines than our regular, more generic search.
We have various other stuff coming up in upcoming months, but the biggest problem at the moment is not really related to the site's functionality itself, but to the stability -- or lack of it -- of our current web server setup that has caused our traffic to plummet by as much as 10% during the last 5-6 weeks. We're in process of switching our application server to a more stable one within next week or so and we hope -- we truly, truly hope -- that this will solve the stability problem for good.
Our little sidekick project, MP3Lizard.com, achieved one of its significant milestones last night when the 5,000th MP3 was uploaded to the service.
MP3Lizard.com, which is operated by AfterDawn, is a free service for independent artists who wish to distribute their songs on the Net for free. Service was originally part of the AfterDawn.com, but was moved to its own domain in January, 2001.
We've never really promoted the service heavily, but it has its die-hard fans, as we've tried to keep the layout and the structure of the site as clean and simple as possible.
So, if you wish to fill your iPod with legal, free music, simply visit the site and download as much as you want -- and don't forget to vote for tracks as well!
Napster 2.0, owned by Roxio, announced that since its launch in October, 2003, it has sold over five million songs through its legal online music service.
Napster has managed to secure several rather lucrative deals with various institutions, most notably with universities, such as Penn State and University of Rochester. Company didn't disclose whether these part-of-the-tuition-fee packages were counted into the five million figure or not.
Despite being a pretty impressive number, Napster still lacks well behind the Apple's iTunes, which already reported that it had hit 30 million sales in last month since its launch in April, 2003.
P2P United, an alliance that represents several commercial P2P operators, has delivered a letter to the RIAA, demanding that the recording industry lobby group proves its claims that the filtering technology RIAA demonstrated to the U.S. Congress actually works in live P2P environment.
The technology, developed by a company called Audible Magic, was used when RIAA demonstrated to the Congress that filtering of illegal material in P2P networks can be done. P2P companies have claimed that such technology is impossible to develop that would 100 percent accurately manage to filter out unwanted -- in this case, illegal -- material without removing legitimate content from the network.
P2P United's claim is rather valid, as the only P2P operator so far that has tried to filter out illegal material from its network -- Napster -- failed, at least according to the recording industry back in 2001.
P2P United also asks RIAA to stop characterizing the Audible Magic technology as a "filter", as it would ultimately change the whole idea of modern decentralized P2P networks, as the material transferred between users -- or "peers" -- would have to pass through a separate server that would inspect the materials legitimity.
ES5 has always been suspicious in every way and now an article by Slyck.com seems to confirm the suspicions. ES5 is not as secured as it claims to be. It also appears to contain some backdoor code allowing file access. And it gets better as journalists have been unable to track down the location of this company, which is claimed to be in Palestine.
Several months ago, Random Nut, spearhead of Kazaa Lite, discovered a malicious backdoor code within the ES5 program. The code could be remotely activated to delete any shared file. Legitimate programmers we spoke to stated that they would never "accidentally" leave such a portion of code in their work. The ES5 administration generally responded with a "whoops, how'd that get in there?"
Lite-On has released an interesting piece of information about their upcoming LVW-5005 DVD recorder. According to the source, this top-set device can also record to a CD-R(W) media. However, it is not released at this time what format does the Lite-On utilize for the recording.
Lite-On IT, one of the top producers of optical disc drives in Taiwan, recently announced the LVW-5005, claimed by the company to be the world’s first DVD recorder model capable of writing CD-R/RW discs.
Currently available DVD recorder models can only write to recordable DVD discs – specifically +R/RW, -R/RW or both – according to Lite-On IT.
Philips Semiconductors and Taiwanese MediaTek expect to start offering dual-layer DVD+R drives in the second quarter of 2004 at earliest.
Philips will be offering a downloadable firmware upgrade to allow system makers to upgrade existing DVD+RW drives to support dual-layer recording. It has not, however, been announced which models can be upgraded by a simple firmware flash.
MediaTek produces chips to equipment manufacturers. Lite-On IT expects that mass production of drives should begin in the second quarter.
Philips and Mitsubishi Kagaku Mediaannounced the dual-layer DVD+R technology in October, 2003.
After eight months of waiting, San Fransisco federal judge Susan Illston delivered her ruling on high-profile case where Hollywood studios have sued an American company, 321 Studios, that develops tools that allow breaking the copy protection mechanisms found on DVD movie discs.
Judge ruled against 321 Studios' arguments that DVD rippers, as the copy-protection cracking tools are called, help people to use their legal right to backup movies that they own. She said that the copyright law, namely the DMCA legislation, makes it clearly illegal to sell or distribute tools in the United States that allow breaking technical copy protection mechanisms.
"It is the technology itself at issue, not the uses to which the copyrighted material may be put," she wrote. "Legal downstream use of the copyrighted material by customers is not a defense to the software manufacturer's violation of the provisions (of copyright law)."
The ruled that 321 Studios has to stop selling the software, DVD X Copy, within seven days in the United States. Company has the choice of replacing the product with a similar tool that doesn't include the ripper, the part that allows breaking the copy protection mechanism called CSS.
But ISPs, especially a company called Shaw, are reluctant to do so without a court order, as they fear that such action would violate their subscribers privacy and would obviously be bad business as well. Also, CRIA is learning the hard way that identifying the correct users by IP numbers and P2P nicknames is bit tricky -- according to one of the accused ISPs, one of the three names they have been asked to hand over to CRIA didn't even have an account with the company during the alleged uploading infringement.
CRIA seeks in court a permission to force ISPs to hand over subscriber details without having to sue the alleged file sharers as "John Does" first. "Our message is for all Canadians. You've got to go off the illegal sites and stop uploading music. Everyone recognises this sort of distribution is illegal under Canadian law," CRIA's lawyer said to the press outside the courtroom today.
Trade groups representing movie, game and music publishers announced today that all new CDs, DVDs and games sold in the United States will shortly feature an FBI warning label warning about serious consequences that unauthorized copying might cause to the person violating copyright laws.
The label will replace the old variety of labels already shown in most of the media products and will also be significantly more visible on the product cover. The new warning says "The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000."
Trade groups behind the initiative were MPAA, RIAA and ESA(Entertainment Software Association that represent video game publishers).
The second AAC/MP4 comparison takes place due to the rapid developement of the codec technology.
Since the last AAC at 128kbps listening test, there has been a lot of development in the AAC codec market. Ahead/Nero got much better tuned, iTunes was released for Windows, Compaact! was launched, FAAC also got much better, according to reports, and Real Networks started offering the CodingTechnologies AAC encoder as part of their Real Producer application.
This test's purpose is to find what encoder performs best encoding AAC at an average bitrate of 128kbps.
The encoders and parameters tested are:
Ahead/Nero AACenc v 2.6.2.0 -internet profile, high quality, LC
Apple iTunes 4.2 (Apple/QuickTime) 128kbps
Compaact! 1.2beta3 (zPlane/HHI) VBR 5, high quality, LC
FAAC 1.23.5 -q 115
Real Producer 10 beta (CodingTechnologies) 128kbps
A woman from New Jersey, Michele Scimeca, has decided to fight against a lawsuit filed against her by the RIAA and has countersued the organization. Scimeca accuses RIAA of violating United States' anti-racketeering legislation and claims that RIAA uses extortion as one of its main weapons against individual users.
The basis of the claims is the fact that RIAA's tactics include a settlement process that it offers to virtually every single P2P user it has sued or accused of illegal activity. And now Michele Scimeca claims that most of the people who have been sued, are simply overwhelmed by the idea of fighting a multi-billion dollar organization in court rooms, that they rather decide to settle the case, however weak the case is against them. "These types of scare tactics are not permissible and amount to extortion," Scimeca's attorney wrote in the documents filed to the New Jersey federal court.
Some clever guy has set up a website with pictures and detailed instructions on how to check whether the Pepsi bottle you're about to buy has a iTunes winning number in its cap or not.
Trick is rather simple, one needs to twist the bottle in certain angle and then take a look underneath the cap. The winning code can't be seen, but in bottles that don't have the winning code, parts of the "apology", namely the text "again" (as in something like "you didn't win, please try again") can be seen.
Now, we're just waiting whether this guy can be sued under DMCA legislation or trade secrets laws...
The famous optical drive vendor has teamed up the the Divx Networks to deliver the world’s first hardware Divx video encoder.
San Diego and Fremont, Calif. – February 17, 2004 – DivXNetworks, Inc., the company that created the revolutionary, patent-pending DivX® video compression technology, and Plextor® Corp., a leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance CD-RW and RDVD disk drives and digital video converters, today announced a partnership to enable consumers to easily encode and edit high-quality video content. The two companies also announced that the Plextor ConvertX™ Digital Video Converter is the first official DivX Certified™ hardware encoding and editing device to hit the market.
ConvertX allows users to convert video from a wide variety of sources to high-quality DivX video in real time using a Windows-based PC. The hardware device is used for consumer and business video applications. Before certifying ConvertX, the DivXNetworks expert team of video engineers subjected the device to a rigorous testing process to ensure high performance and interoperability with all versions of DivX video. The ConvertX Model PX-M402U is available today for $159 at www.divx.com/hardware.
Apple announced today that it has so far received over 100,000 pre-orders for its upcoming new portable digital audio player, iPod Mini. iPod Mini will go on sale on Friday in States and costs $249 in the U.S. and €249 in Europe (appx. $320).
The device is Apple's response to cheaper flash-based devices that provide less storage space than original iPods, but cost significantly less. Even that the product isn't exactly cheapest possible on the market, it still seems to fit a niche that wants to have iPod's style but not the price tag that goes up to $499. Obviously the other factor that boosts iPod Mini's sales is the size of the device -- it should offer the identical award-winning user interface that "big iPods" have, but the size of the iPod Mini is only 3.6 x 2 x 0.5 inches (9.1x5.1x1.2cm) and it weights 3.6 ounces (102g).
iPod Mini has a storage capacity of 4GB and comes in variety of colors (unlike the original iPods that come only is "Apple white").
RIAA continued its manhunt that it launched last summer against individual P2P users by suing 531 more P2P users in States.
RIAA was forced to change its DMCA-based subpoena tactics in January, when the federal appeals court ruled that ISPs don't need to hand out subscriber details to RIAA without a lawsuit. That decision meant that RIAA had to make sure that the users they're targeting were indeed violating copyright laws and then RIAA has to sue the users using their IP addresses, P2P usernames and online time details to file a "John Doe" lawsuit against the users.
RIAA used the new method first time in January 2004 when it sued 532 P2P users. The latest lawsuits were filed in federal courts of Philadelphia, Atlanta, Orlando and Trenton.
Australian IT retailer Conexus has been forced by the country's anti-piracy organization, Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft(AFACT, an ally of American MPAA), to pull off the shelves a DVD backup product DVD X Copy.
"The letter advised Conexus that, according to AFACT’s interpretation, the product was infringing Australian copyright law," a spokesperson for the company said. "They were told that legal action would follow if they continued to distribute it."
Product, which is developed by American 321 Studios, has sparked already six lawsuits against its developers -- four in States and two in the UK.
After the note from AFACT, Conexus pulled the product and contacted 321 Studios, who replaced the software with a version that ships without an internal DVD ripper. Buyers of the ripper-free version can make the software work exactly like the original that came with the ripper by installing some of the freeware DVD ripping tools that integrate with the Windows, such as DVD43.
Sony in co-operation with Mitsubishi plastics have developed a new material that is non-flammable and friendly for the environment. This new material is corn-based and claimed to be as strong as ABS-plastic. The new material will be used in the front panels of Sony stand-alone players and it should have a number of other potential applications too.
Sony Corp has announced the development of a flame-resistant plastic made mainly of corn-based polylactide which it has jointly developed with Mitsubishi Plastics in Japan.
The manufacturer of electronics equipment says the new plastic will be used for the front panels of its new digital disc players, which are due to be launched in the third quarter of this year.
Sony claims that the new plastic is as strong as ABS resin, which is widely used in the electronics industry. The company says that the plastic could also have a wide range of other applications in a host of other industries.
The free trade agreement between the United States and Australia, which was finalized in early February, imposes many American copyright standards on Australia. The Australian copyright laws had been quite flexible before the agreement was drafted. Now many aspects of laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) will be implemented in Australia as well.
The factsheet from United States Trade Representative lists the details included in the trade agreement. The agreement, for example, "establishes strong anti-circumvention provisions to prohibit tampering with technologies (like embedded codes on discs) that are designed to prevent piracy and unauthorized distribution over the Internet" and "establishes that only authors, composers and other copyright owners have the right to make their work available on-line".
It is quite obvious that the recent raids in Australia, that were conducted by the anti piracy branch of Australian music industry, MIPI, were related to the newly crafted trade agreement. It remains to be seen how the agreement affects, for example, the status of mod chips in Australia. Last August Australian Federal Court ruled that it's legal to modify a Playstation console to play imported and pirated games.
DVD Copy Control Association has sued 321 Studios, the company behind DVD X Copy products that allow backing up DVD movies, over alleged patent infringements.
The lawsuit is fourth one that has been filed against 321 Studios in the United States -- company has been sued in New York and in California by group of movie studios and just recently, by Macrovision.
DVD CCA is the organization that owns the patents for copy protection mechanism called CSS, which is used on virtually all commercial DVD-Video discs.
"In taking this legal action, DVD CCA is turning its focus toward those who produce and broadly distribute products in the marketplace that facilitate the widespread infringement of the copyrights on motion pictures that CSS was designed to protect," DVD CCA's attorney Steven Reiss said in a statement. "DVD CCA believes that halting the mass marketing of these illegal products is the most important and effective step toward protecting its property from theft and misuse in a changing marketplace."
321 Studios recently expanded their product line to include game backup software, Games X Copy. Company hasn't responded to the latest lawsuit yet, but issued a separate press release today, responding to Macrovision's lawsuit and claiming it to be completely baseless.
RIAA's Canadian counterpart, Canadian Recording Industry Association(CRIA), has started an American-style legal war against alleged P2P file swappers.
CRIA has sent letters to five Canadian ISPs -- Shaw Communications, Sympatico, Videotron, Rogers Cable and Telus Corp -- demanding the names and other personal details of 29 Canadian customers that it claims have distributed illegal copies of music online via P2P networks. Only one of the ISPs, Shaw Communications, has decided to challenge the demands in court.
"Our customers' right to privacy is very dear to us," said Shaw Communications president Peter Bissonnette.
Shaw's opinion is in clear contrast to the opinion of Videotron, that's owned by a company called Quebecor that also sells music. Videotron stated that they consider file sharing to be "theft" and stated that they will comply with all the court orders and will co-operate eagerly with copyright owners to resolve all issues regarding to P2P use in their network.
Shaw Communications' case will go to court next Monday in Toronto.
A decision that is supposed to end a long legal fight over the webcasting (for average consumers that's Net radio) royalty rates was agreed by the major webcasters and the recording industry.
According to the agreement reached by the SoundExchange, a former RIAA subsdiary that was spun off to a separate organization last year, and DiMA that represents large webcasters such as AOL and Yahoo!, the new royalty rates for free, advertisement supported webcasts are $0.00076 per performance or $0.0117 per aggregate hour.
U.S. Copyright Office, who rubber-stamped the rates also nominated SoundExchange to be the sole designated agent to collect and distribute the royalties from webcasts.
Sharman Networks, the owner of Kazaa peer-to-peer network claims that the raid to its office last week was not legal. The search warrant, an Anton Pillar order, which granted the Music Industry Piracy Investigations, MIPI the right to conduct the search was not granted based on all the facts, Sharman says.
An Anton Pillar order is used in software piracy cases, and gives the right to conduct a raid without prior notice to the suspect. According to Sharman the judge who gave the order was not presented with all the relevant facts to the case and therefore the order should be set aside.
Sharman's complaint will be heard on February 20. Until then MIPI cannot access the seized documents, the company says.
The launch of MyCokeMusic, by The Coca-Cola Company, has boosted the online music sales in the United Kingdom with over 50.000 songs sold. According to the source, legal music downloads are now more common purchases than a DVD, vinyl record or a cassette tape. The CD single still is the dominant media though.
Last month, over 150,000 downloads were sold in the UK - measures as downloads from UK URLs to known UK IP addresses - with the launch of MyCokeMusic alone generating 50,000 sales in its first week online, outstripping vinyl, cassette and DVD sales, although CD singles still dominate the sales breakdown.
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The news comes at a point of mixed fortunes for the British music industry. While album sales in the UK continue to grow, downloads, both illegal and legal, have taken a bite out of the singles market. In 2003, unit shipments were down 30.7 per cent to 36.4 million and value was down 33.6 per cent to £64.4 million compared with 2002.
British company called AudioBooksForFree has developed an interesting concept of something that they call an AK-MP3. It is a 20GB HDD-based portable MP3 player that is built into an ammunition clip of world's (most likely) best known assault rifle, AK-47.
Kalashnikov AK-47 is favoured by various guerilla organizations, Iraqi soldiers and pretty much by everybody (including kids, women, etc in various occassions :-) outside western countries. Anyway, the AK-MP3 can be actually attached to an AK-47 in place of its original ammo clip. The player costs $350 and weights around 450g with lithium-ion battery.
"This is our bit for World Peace," jokes one of the partners behind ABFF, Russian ex-rock-star Andrey Koltakov, "Hopefully, from now on many Militants and Terrorists will use their AK47s to listen to music and audio books... They need to chill out and take it easy."
We apologize for posting such old article as we didn't realize that this product made the headlines already last year, but apparently as the product launch date approaches, various news agencies have picked up the story again.
Disney and Microsoft announced today that Disney has agreed to license Microsoft's DRM technology in order to distribute its huge content selection to cell phones, PDAs and upcoming breed of personal media players.
Disney already uses Microsoft's DRM technology via third party; the movie service Movielink delivers the online movie "rentals" using Microsoft's DRM and Windows Media format.
Disney, which has struggled financially during the last couple of years, signed the multi-year non-exclusive deal with Microsoft in order to wider its audience base and to monetize from growing trend of portable media. Portable video has become an ever-increasing selling point for devices such as PDAs that are powered with 400MHz+ XScale CPUs and can boast storage capability of sevaral gigabytes by using compact flash or SD memory cards.
Philips is the first to double the recording capacity of the DVD+R technology. Their new DVDRW 885K drive supports the dual layer technology, writing the top layer at 8x speed and the bottom layer at 2.4x. Single layer discs are recorded at 4x speed, while DVD-R(W) are supported in read only. The new drive will be demonstrated in the CeBIT 2004 expo. The retail price is not known yet, but the drive should hit the store shelves on July. Source: PCWelt.de (In German only)
The European Parliament is set to debate a draft law that would weed out mass piracy of digital products, such as music and movies. There is a chance, however, that the proposed law might be stretched to include peer-to-peer file sharing as well.
The changes would create a situation similar to the one in USA, where ISPs and RIAA have been arguing whether or not the Digital Millennium Copyright Act grants copyright holders to obtain personal details of individual customers if they are suspected of P2P piracy.
"The balance between privacy of subscribers and the duty to cooperate with right holders seeking to protect their intellectual property that was reached in the e-commerce directive could be changed by this directive," said Tilmann Kupfer, British Telecommunication PLC's (BT's) European regulatory manager.
World Trade Organization (WTO) rules urge WTO members to impose criminal sanctions for people who counterfeit goods for commercial gain. That was exactly what the original draft of the law sought. European Motion Picture Association (EMPA), however, didn't feel that the proposal was enough.
"The Commission's proposal fell short of international requirements agreed at the World Trade Organization," said Ted Shapiro, director of the EMPA.
The anti-piracy subsdiary of Australian Recording Industry Association, called Music Industry Piracy Investigations(MIPI), has raided several companies and universities in Australia, trying to find documents that would prove that they have violated Australia's copyright laws.
Raid were launched after Australian court granted MIPI a search warrant, so-called Anton Pillar order, that allows copyright owners to search premises to find evidence of alleged copyright violations. Raid targeted Sharman Networks(the owner of Kazaa), Telstra(Australia's largest ISP) and several major universities.
MIPI plans to use any documents seized in raids in its court proceedings against the companies it has found violating Australian copyright laws. Regarding to the raid to Sharman's offices MIPI's chief, Michael Speck said "Kazaa has built a large international business through encouraging and authorising the illegal copying of music users of its network. It authorises this copying without seeking the licence or permission of the owners and creators of the music, nor does it pay any royalties to either the owners or creators of the music."
University of Rochester in U.S. has followed the footsteps of Penn State university by signing a deal with Napster to allow its dorm residents to use the legal online music service for free ("free" is bit exaggeration as the cost will be added to tuition fees or dorm rents anyway).
Terms of the contract allow dorm residents to stream and download unlimited number of tracks from Napster's (owned by Roxio) music catalog that includes over 500,000 tracks. Catch? Downloaded music can't be burned to a CD or transferred to other devices (such as portable digital audio players) for free, but such right costs $0.99 per track or $9.95 per album for students.
University also plans to extend the deal to cover all of its students later this year and plans to introduce discounted pricing for its staff to the service as well.
Roberto Amorim of RareWares has published the results of the public MP3 at 128kbps listening test with interesting results. As we can see, the latest LAME 3.95 achieves the best quality, which is yet another great achievement by this open source project. GoGo is a speed optimized variant of LAME and is clearly worse than the original. Xing performs much better than expected.
According to News.com, portal giant Yahoo! is following the footsteps of pretty much AOL, Apple and Microsoft(and everybody else as well :-) and has plans to launch its own mediaplayer software which would include a frontend to a legal music store.
Yahoo! bought a small start-up called Mediacode in December, 2003 that includes two founding members of Nullsoft(the company that developed WinAMP) in its team and now Mediacode is apparently developing a mediaplayer for Yahoo! that would allow it to compete against iTunes and other iTunes clones.
Yahoo is also rumoured to have had talks with various existing players in the legal music downloads sector, including Roxio(the owner of the p2p-turned-into-legal-music-store Napster) and MusicMatch. Company declines to comment on any of the rumours.
The representatives for both the entertainment industry, and the P2P companies Grokster and Streamcast Networks gave their statements in the landmark P2P case. The arguments were presented before a three-judge panel for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California.
The entertainment industry called for blocks and filters to be implemented in P2P software limiting the sharing of copyrighted material.
"They can be ordered by this court to do something to control the use of their software, said Russell Frackman, attorney for copyright holders represented by movie and music industry groups. "Filters and blockers can be put into place that will limit the (copyright) infringement."
The lawyers for both Grokster and Morpheus said that such filters would effectively shut them down. They also repeated their view on software manufacturers not being responsible for possible illegal uses of their products.
Morpheus attorney Fred Von Lohmann commented after the hearing, that the filters aren't exactly what the entertainment industry is after. "In reality, they want to shut us down, and this is not the job of the courts," Von Lohmaan said.
Pegasys-Inc is working on a major update for their low cost MPEG encoder. The new version promises to utilize the features of Pentium 4 processors.
Pegasys-Inc announces the support of the New Intel Pentium4 (codename Prescott) Streaming SIMD Extension 3 in its next generation main software TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress due to be released for Summer 2004.
The Intel Streaming SIMD Extension 3 (SSE3) is a set of multimedia extension instructions included in the new HT technology Intel Pentium4 (codename Prescott) produced with 90 nm techniques. Compared to previous versions, software optimized for the SSE3 realize better process performances and efficiency.
The new TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress currently in development (first release planned for Summer 2004) is optimized for the latest Intel Pentium 4 processor with HT Technology and also the previous Pentium4.
Read Pegasys website for more information, including benchmarking comparisons.
According to research group Forrester music services from Internet portals, such as MSN and Tiscali, will be able to get a head start to European music download markets before Napster and Apple announce their own services. In addition to having the possibility to advertise their services throughout existing networks of sites, ISPs will have existing methods for billing their customers directly.
Over time, however, Apple's iTunes service will be able to overtake many of the smaller portals thanks to it's strong brand name and ease of use -- especially with portable iPod-player -- Forrester predicts. Several portal services in Europe are offering content provided by On Demand Distribution, OD2.
The year 2004 has been predicted as a breakthrough year for music download services in Europe.
"In 2004, a combination of legal action by the music industry and expansion of legitimate services will cause a watershed in the download market," said Rebecca Jennings, Senior Analyst for Forrester Research.
StreamCast Networks have made a bold move in the development of their Morpheus file sharing software. The latest version offers connectivity to most major Peer-To-Peer networks, such as Kazaa and eDonkey. This should multiply the search results delivered by the client. The company also claims that the new version respects the users privacy and does not include any spyware components.The statement is bit questionable though, since the client does popup web browser windows with advertising content.
StreamCast Networks on Tuesday released Morpheus 4, a update to the peer-to-peer software that's meant to be a hub for wide range of file-sharing networks.
Morpheus 4 provides direct connectivity to users of other peer-to-peer clients including Kazaa, iMesh, eDonkey, Overnet, Grokster, Gnutella, LimeWire and G2, StreamCast said. The software is available for downloading at no cost.
Quotes from: News.com.
Download Morpheus from Morpheus.com
On the 30th of January Freedb has announced support for the Unicode (UTF-8) character set. This improves the multi-lingual functionality of the service significantly. Applications utilizing need to be updated in order to add the UTF-8 functionality.
Finally it's done! freedb supports Unicode (UTF-8) characters while at the same time staying backwards compatible with old applications! This opens freedb for CDs from large parts of the world, which could not be submitted properly before, since the charset was limited to Latin1.
In order to take advantage of the Unicode support, applications need to be updated to support the new protocol level 6. Developers are encouraged to implement Unicode-support in their applications and can find the required documentation in the developers section.
Another important improvement of our new server software is that fact, that submitters now always get an e-mail response if their submission was not included in the database. Previously that was not the case for some sorts of problems.
Big thanks go out to Edmund Grimley Evans, who laid the foundation of the UTF-8 support in freedb, and to Jon F. Zahornacky, who stayed the course in difficult times. Without them, the new server software release would not exist!
One of the most important P2P cases returns to court on Tuesday. The lawyers for both the entertainment industry and the P2P operators Grokster and StreamCast Networks (Morpheus) will be making their case in the Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California.
In April 2003, U.S. district court in Los Angeles ruled that Grokster and StreamCast Networks cannot be held liable for the copyright infringements that are taking place using their software. The entertainment industry disagrees. The plaintiffs, including movie studios, record labels, RIAA, and NMPA hope to convince the appeals court to reverse the earlier ruling.
Both parties will have 30 minutes in which to make their case. Obviously the subsequent ruling will have a huge impact on either the entertainment industry or software developers in general.
"The services are profiting to the tune of millions of dollars from music that is written by songwriters who are not getting a dime from the use of their music on these services," said Carey Ramos, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. "We believe that the (lower court's) conclusion is fundamentally unjust."
According to movie industry publication Screen Daily, Italy manages to top the chart for the highest level of movie piracy in a Western country. According to the magazine, the commercial black market for pirated videos and DVDs is worth approximately 30 percent of country's movie market.
Italy's legal DVD and video sales were worth €417M in 2003, but the pirate film market was worth €250M, according to Italy's anti-piracy watchdog FAPAV. Last year alone, over 300,000 illegal DVDs were seized in police raids across the country, but it is estimated that there are over 4 million pirated (commercial piracy alone, not including the home-burned movies) movies still in circulation.
Video-on-demand provider Movielink announced a new service on Monday that allows its customers to extend the viewing period of rented movies in 24 hour increments. Using the MultiPlay feature the viewing period can be extended for up to 30 days after the initial download.
Usually the additional viewing periods are priced lower than the initial rental price. For example "The Hulk" costs $3.99 to rent, and $0.99 to view again.
One has to wonder why the service hasn't existed since day one. Once the movie has been downloaded and viewed once, offering a second viewing opportunity at a lucrative price makes perfect sense.
The P2P-turned-legal-musicstore service Napster, which is owned by Roxio, announced last week that it has increased the number of portable digital audio players that its service supports from just one to 60 devices.
All of the devices are capable of playing Microsoft's DRM-equipped WMA audio format, the format of choice that is used by Napster. With the portable device support, the Napster 2.0 application that acts as the front-end to the online music store, can recognize the authorized device when it is connected to PC's USB port and based on the unique identifier that the portable device sends to the PC, can allow transferring the purchased tracks to the device. System works pretty much like Apple's iTunes that allows transferring tracks to Apple's own iPod audio player. Of course, the problem that Napster faces is the fact that iPod has managed to achieve a status of a culture icon -- specially in the States -- rather than a nice piece of consumer electronics, and Napster doesn't support iPod (as iPod doesn't support WMA files).
Napster also added a possibility to get discounted download prices for users who are willing to buy in bulk. Napster users can now buy packs of 15, 25 or 50 tracks, priced at $13.95, $21.95 or $39.95. All downloaded tracks can be burned to an audio CD or transferred to a portable device.
Despite the fact that 
Sony owners get a nice little bonus as Sony has accelerated the DRU-530 to 8x recording with the new firmware release. The update is offered for free to all customers.
