Content-filtering company Audible Magic announced on Friday that they have struck a deal with Sony Music. Sony will provide Audible Magic with digital fingerprints of their music, which will be used to improve Audible Magic's antipiracy technology. The technology identifies and blocks songs transferred online illegally.
Sony will also license Audible Magic's software for internal use. The companies will, in addition, work together on an antipiracy program targeted at universities.
Two Hollywood studios, Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, have sued an American online retailer, Technology One, claiming that it violated the court order issued against the DVD ripping products of 321 Studios by selling a version of 321 Studios' DVD X Copy that allows decrypting the CSS encryption found on most commercial DVD-Video discs.
Two separate federal courts, one in New York and one in California, have ruled that 321 Studios must stop selling a so-called "ripper version" of its product DVD X Copy. Company has itself taken steps to fulfill the court requirements and sells only a version of DVD X Copy that doesn't contain the CSS decrypter.
The lawsuit against the retailer seeks a court order that would bar the company selling the ripper-equipped version of the software and also seeks for damages, including the profits from previous sales.
It seems that the game console leader Sony is not the first in goal in the "next generation" console race. As Xbox 2 and GameCube 2 are expected in 2005, the PlayStation 3 will be here in 2006, earliest. According to the source, the release is depending when the new processor technology is ready for show time, as PS3 will be the first implementation of the new chips.
Will the head start that Sony seems to be giving to the competitors have a significant influence on the market? I personally doubt it. Actually, I think that the consumers may wait and see the PS3 before making purchasing decisions, so it may have a stalling effect on Xbox2 and GC2 sales. But this is just speculation, of course.
it has been indirectly confirmed that Sony plan to launch the PS3 in March 2006. During its E3 Conference, Nonuyeki Idei - Chairman of Sony - had announced that the new CELL processor technology would be in action by that point in time. It is now definite that the next-gen Playstation will be the first manifestation of this new chip. Therefore, it can safely be assumed that this indicates the official PS3 release date.
Roxio's legal online music service, Napster, has started rapidly expanding to new territories. After launching its service in the UK last week, Napster was launched in Canada this week's Wednesday.
The service's pricing structure is identical in Canada to the services previously launched in the States and in the UK, but obviously adjusted to match the "consumer friendly" price tags in each country. In Canada's case, this means that the optional monthly subscription fee is 9.95 Canadian dollars (appx. 7.31 U.S. dollars or 3.99 UK pounds) that allows unlimited listening of music on-demand. Downloads will cost CDN$1.00 (US$0.73, £0.40) per song. The pricing compared to the American version's pricing of US$9.95 per month or US$0.99 is rather cheap and even cheaper when compared to the well overpriced British version where monthly subscription costs £9.95 (US$17.82) and downloaded tracks cost £1.09 (US$1.95).
Nintendo has suggested that they might unveil the successor to the GameCube gaming console in the next year's E3 video game trade show. The release of a new GameCube would not come as a surprise, because both Sony and Microsoft are also expected to unveil their new consoles next year.
The GameCube has not been a huge success, and the sales have been quite disappointing. In the US GameCube makes up only 17% of the market.
The next GameCube will most likely interact closely with the recently announced Nintendo DS dual-screen handheld console. DS, which is equiped with wireless LAN, will start shipping in Japan this Christmas.
"Rather than offering a new edition of the same thing, we want to offer new ways of game playing," said Nintendo's Yoshihiro Mori.
With the recent unveiling of PlayStation Portable, the mobile gaming seems to be truly getting underway. The current mobile gaming market is dominated by Nintendo's GameBoy, which has sold over 190 units wold wide. Mobile phone giant Nokia has tried entering the market with N-Gage and N-Gage QD, but so far the attempt has been a failure. Judging on the technical specifications and technology demos of both Sony PSP and Nintendo DS, Nokia N-Gage will have a tough time making it on the market.
It's neither a Walkman or a Watchman, but it carries the Vaio model name better known from the laptops. But the specs look really promising as the Vaio HMP-21 comes with 20 gigabyte HD, with MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video support. Most pleasing detail is that it also supports the MP3 audio format instead of the Sony ATRAC. Still images can also be viewed with the new Vaio It runs with batteries and can be charged with an AC adaptor or by connecting it to an USB 2.0 equipped computer.
The second model, the HMP-A1, contains a 20GB hard drive, the contents of which are listed on a front-mounted 3.5in, 320 x 240 colour LCD - larger than the VGF-AP1's 2.2in display. The new unit is larger, too, and heavier: it's 13 x 7.6 x 2.2cm to the first model's 11.5 x 6.3 x 1.7cm. The two machines weight 250g and 195g, respectively.
The HMP-A1 plays back MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 files. Its software allows it to handle MPEG 1, AVI, WMV and DVR-MS, but these are converted to one of the MPEG video formats when they're downloaded from a host PC to the player.
The U.S. Senate is preparing to vote on a proposal, that could send the government after peer-to-peer pirates. The so called Pirate Act would let federal prosecutors file civil lawsuits against suspected copyright infringers. Up until now the lawsuits have had to be filed by copyright holders under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act law.
Obviously the proposal has raised concerns among copyright lawyers and several peer-to-peer lobbyist groups and companies. They feel that the Pirate Act is a product of RIAA's lobbying, and that its sole purpose is to make the taxpayer pay for the expensive lawsuits instead of the copyright holders. In addition the proposal is vague, and doesn't rule out the possibility that a person sued under the Pirate Act could also be sued under, for example, the DMCA. The possibility is against the ne bis in idem, or the double jeopardy doctrine.
RIAA and senators supporting the act say that federal prosecutors would be suing P2P pirates if they only had the tools, that is an appropriate law, to do so.
"We view this as a key component of an enforcement package," RIAA lobbyist Mitch Glazier said Tuesday. "If you're going to try to make sure that you have effective deterrence, then one of the tools you'll need is to make sure that prosecutors have flexibility."
World's largest fast-food chain, McDonald's, has announced that it will start offering rental DVDs through its restaurants in metropolitan area of Denver.
The DVD rentals are made through a vending machine that charges customer's credit card for the rental. Each rental will cost $1 a day plus local sales tax. The machines will be available in all McDonald's restaurants throughout the Denver area and each one will be open 24 hours a day. Each machine will contain appx. 350 movies and new titles will be added to machines on weekly basis. Some of the machines have already been installed and others will be rolled out during the June. McDonald's has 104 restaurants in the area.
Even though this is an obvious threat to world's largest movie rental chain, Blockbuster, company doesn't seem to be worried. "We're about as concerned as they would be if we announced we were selling hamburgers in our stores," said Randy Hargrove, a spokesman for Blockbuster.
The cell phones equipped with cameras (aka cam phones) are getting more and more popular, pioneered by Nokia 7650 -model couple of years back. Now the manufacturers are releasing their 2nd generation cam phones with improved resolutions of 1M pixels and up. I have personally seen the results of the upcoming Nokia 1M pixel model and I can assure you that the quality improvement is dramatic.
But as expected, the progress doesn't end here. According to the source auto focusing optics are on they way to cam phones. This is good news, since after the resolution upgrade the non-existing optics is the bottle neck in the picture quality.
And it gets better. On their way are also digital signal processors with more imaging power. Digitimes report that the Atsana J2211 processor is able to perform MPEG-4 video compression as well as the auto-focus feature. The MPEG-4 playback is already announced to be featured in cell phones, but the video recording to MPEG-4 format with a higher resolution and auto-focusing optics should provide a great improvement to the low quality cam phone video recordings.
Recording Industry Association of America continues its holy war against the P2P users and has sued yet another 493 P2P network users in the United States.
Latest lawsuit pile puts the total figure of sued individuals close to 3,000 since September, 2003. RIAA has been forced to sue the individual as "John Does" since it lost its court case and couldn't threaten ISPs to hand out personal details of their users without sueing them first.
Organization also said that it has filed 24 lawsuits where it knows the personality of the file-sharer and said that all of those personally named have denied to settle their cases out of court.
Sharman Networks will be using a copyright ruling from 1899 as a leverage when trying to explain the position of the company to the court.
Boosey vs Whight (1899) involved copyright charges arising over the production of pianola rolls, in which the court found that the reproduction of the perforated pianola rolls did not infringe the English copyright act protecting sheets of music.
Lawyers in the 1899 case forged their defence on the argument that "to play an instrument from a sheet of music which appears to the eye is one thing; to play an instrument with a perforated sheet which itself forms part of the mechanism which produces the music is quite another thing."
Sharman is going to present a similar defence in Australia, where they have to defend against accusations made by Universal Music Australia and its affiliates. Sharman will try to convince the court that a copy of a song on computer hard disk is not a copy at all because an "infringing copy has to be a sound recording". The claim is vague at best.
Earlier this year Australian Music Industry Piracy Investigationsraided Kazaa offices and confiscated documents and other evicende of alleged copyright violations. Sharman appealed the ruling that granted the search warrant, and insisted that the gathered evidence can not be used against the company. The evicence is currently being held by an independent solicitor. The faith of the evidence will be determined in the ongoing legal procedings. Either Universal or Sharman will be granted access to the evidence.
Open source projects put commercial products into shame in the recent 128kbps multi format listening test. The surprise winner of the test is an up-tuned version of the OGG Vorbis codec. The result clearly shows that the format has potential, if someone just bothers to have a good look at it. Musepack continues to show impressive performance, even though it is considered perform optimally when slightly higher bitrates are used.
Apple iTunes is possibly the best AAC implementation available, but LAME MP3 encoder still managed to give a hard time in the competition! This shows that MP3 as a format is far from being outdated and that the LAME project has been doing some excellent work in pushing the old codec further.
Atrac3 by the consumer electronic giant Sony was just crushed in this comparison. Sony has originally developed the Atrac codecs for the MiniDisc players. Microsoft's WMA scored the second lowest points in this test and one has to wonder why anyone should use this format.
One of the Britain's biggest charities, Oxfam, has launched a legal online music store together with British OD2. OD2 is the Britain's largest online music service provider and has partnered with several European portals to create similar joint ventures like the one now created with Oxfam.
The new service, BigNoise.com, will offer downloads ranging from £0.75 to £0.99 (that's appx. $1.34 - $1.77 or 1.12 - 1.48). Out of that, £0.10 (0.15; $0.18) for each song will be donated to the Oxfam charity. The music library of the service contains approximately 300,000 songs including the music catalogs of all five big record labels. The service is due to launch on 26th of May.
The peer-to-peer service turned music store Napster launched its service in the United Kingdom on Thursday. Roxio, the owner of Napster, had earlier announced that the launch would take place by the end of summer.
Songs for the UK consumers are priced at £1.09 ($1.95) each or £9.95 ($17.82) per album. For a monthly subscription fee of £9.95 users can listen to an unlimited number of songs at up to three different PCs. Burning the songs on a CD or transferring them on a portable device, costs £0.99 ($1.77) per song, or £9.95 per album. A ten percent discount is offered to subscribers purchasing multiple tracks simultaneously.
Currently Napster has over 500,000 tracks in its selection. The service also offers, for instane, the Official UK Charts archive organised by genre, year and season.
Napster is offering a free, seven day trial period. You can register for the trial period until May 27th.
Roxio managed to beat Apple's iTunes to the UK market. It would be pretty safe to bet on Apple hastening its entrance to the Old Continent.
Problems with the AfterDawn.com main server, which also hosts Dawnload.net, CD-RW.org and MP3Lizard.com to name just few, have been solved. The problem caused occasional server software restarts and general sluggish performance.
We're truly sorry about the inconvenience, and hope you find the site more pleasant to use in the future!
Macrovision has won an injunction against the sale of 321 Studio's very popular DVD X Copy software. Macrovision, the industry leader in content protection, is not however suing 321 for circumventing their protection schemes -- their interests are in the duplication of their patented copy protection methods.
Macrovision Corporation (Nasdaq: MVSN), the world leader in content protection technologies, announced that it has won a preliminary injunction against the sale of widely-distributed DVD cloning products sold by 321 Studios (321) under the name "DVD X Copy". Judge Richard Owen of the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York issued the injunction on May 11, 2004 prohibiting 321 from selling various versions of its DVD copying software and their functional equivalents.
Unlike other lawsuits that have been brought against 321 Studios by content providers, whose primary weapon in the fight against piracy has been the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), Macrovision's suit used two complementary approaches of attack by asserting both the DMCA and claims for patent infringement, which cover content protection technologies that are found on most of DVD players sold worldwide. "The vast majority of Hollywood DVDs are protected by software flags that trigger the patented anti-copy methods within DVD players," explained Macrovisions attorney Robert Becker of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. "When those flags are copied by DVD X Copy, the patented methods are triggered and performed without license from Macrovision. A patent infringement results. When the software flags are removed, the anti-copy mechanism is circumvented, resulting in a violation of the DMCA." Macrovision was granted a preliminary injunction barring 321 Studios from selling the various versions of its DVD copying software, including DVD X Copy Platinum, DVD X Copy Gold, DVD X Copy Xpress, and their functional equivalents. The Court issued the preliminary injunction after determining the software had violated federal law.
Dutch company DVDstream promises to deliver streaming DVDs to its customers at a fixed price of 12.42 euros (or $14.89) per month. The movies are streamed at a resolution of 768x576 via a broadband Internet connection and viewed on TV or computer.
The system utilizes a device called PalmButler 600, which is basically a long s-video + audio cable combined with a serial port IR receiver bundled with a software and an IR transmitter. The PalmButler needs a TV-card with s-video output to operate.
To keep the prices low DVDstream has come up with an ingenious scheme -- each customer purchases the movie they wish to view at a pre-defined price, which is then streamed to the user by DVDstream. In theory the customer purchases a DVD and makes a copy of it for personal use, which is perfectly legal in the Netherlands. When the user is done watching the movie, he or she can sell it back to DVDstream. So in the end the consumer ends up paying only the monthly fee -- the payments for movies are just temporary deposits.
Obviously there are several legal aspects that are not too clear at all. For instance, is it legal for a third party (ie. DVDstream) to make a "personal copy" of a movie on behalf of the end user? DVDstream states that for each DVDstream copy there is an original DVD, so at least in theory they are not selling the same copy several times.
The DL drives are quickly made available by hardware manufacturers. Lite-On IT, which has had a heavy impact on the CD-R market, now has a strong presence in the emerging next generation DVD recording market as well. The Taiwanese company offers competitive products with DVD-R(W) DL already implemented, and the price tag seems reasonable as well.
According to Gish chairman Garry Chen, a few local makers already claim to offer 8x DVD+RW DL burner models, but Lite-ON ITs 8x DVD Dual DL is also compatible with the RW format, and will sell at prices of US$229-239 per burner. Lite-On IT also recently began selling the 12x DVD Dual burners in Japan, Chen indicated.
According to the source, Sony has been able to develop a multi-purpose optical head for recorders. The new combo optics is able to read and record on CDs, DVDs and of course Blu-rays. This is the first 'triple format' implementation of a next generation recording technology. Earlier NEC announced a combo mechanics for HD-DVD and DVD compatible recorders.
The proliferation of high-definition televisions is expected to spur demand for video recorders using blue lasers, since the recording capacity of next-generation DVDs is almost four times that of existing discs.
Sony is part of a consortium that includes some of the world's biggest consumer electronics makers, such as Philips and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, maker of Panasonic products, to back a technology called Blu-ray.
FBI has launched a nationwide probe into child porn trafficking over the P2P networks in the United States and so far FBI has investigated over 1,000 cases and have arrested already more than 65 people.
FBI's actions indicate that pedophiles have moved from Net's chat rooms, discussion forums and private web servers to the seemignly anonymous P2P networks. Seemingly because none of the P2P networks have managed to create truly anonymous file sharing service as of yet, which is easy to prove by investigating the lists of individuals who have been sued previously by the RIAA.
The probe, which is a co-operation between various American law enforcement agencies, has resulted to arrests related to distribution of child porn and in some cases sexual abuse of children.
"No one should be able to avoid prosecution for contributing to the abuse and exploitation of the nations children," Attorney General John Ashcroft said.
A phenomenom-in-waiting, Personal Video Recorders, have finally -- after five years in market -- gained significant popularity. The latest stats from In-Stat/MDR reveal that the global sales of PVR units more than tripled in 2003 compared to 2002.
PVR units (sometimes also known as DVR units) are basically just modern video recorders that replace old dusty VHS tapes with big harddrives and store the content in MPEG-2 format to the HDD. Most of the PVR units have a built-in MPEG-2 encoder/decoder and they simply encode the incoming analog signal to MPEG-2 format and store that to the HDD. Some, although still quite rarely, units are designed to work directly with digital TV transmissions and they don't do any further encoding to the video, but simply store the digital TV's MPEG-2 stream as it is to the HDD, thus keeping the broadcast quality intact.
The wave of DVD recorders that incorporate PVR functionality within the device were the major force behind the sales boom. The other significant factor was the rise of satellite TV set-top boxes that included PVR capabilities -- for example the Britain's main digital TV provider, Sky Digital, has persuaded thousands of users to pay slightly more on monthly basis for its Sky+ service that is basically just the set-top box with big hard drive.
Since the last Rarewares multiformat 128kbps audio quality test, there has been some progress in the audio encoding field. Apple has launched the iTunes for Windows, tuned OGG Vorbis variants have emerged and LAME has taken steps forward as well. The fact that AAC format has been adopted by some commercial music providers, such as iTunes, gives this quality comparison additonal importance. Also featured is the Sony's ATRAC3, which is now used for other than MiniDisc purposes too.
The project is now maintained and owned by Anand Babu, and has been renamed from PlayFair to hymn. Free Software Foundation of India (FSF)provides legal support to the project.
Babu states at the project home page: "Since we're no longer using the mp4v2 library to copy the meta data from the protected AAC file, it is left fully intact, including the apple ID of the user who bought the song. This proves that our purpose is for fair use and not for "piracy" and should help us in our legal battles."
You can download the latest version of the software (0.6.1) at the project homepage. A pre-compiled binary version is available for both Mac OS X and Windows, although the Windows version is currently command-line only. Of course the source code is available for all platforms.
Sony yesterday unveiled their PlayStation Portable (PSP) which brings, according to Sony's promises, PlayStation 2 visuals on a cool looking handheld device.
The device has a 4.3" 16:9 display with a resolution of 480x272 and 32bit colors. The controls are PlayStation standard -- a four-way directional pad, four action buttons (square, triangle, x and circle), two trigger buttons and a thumb pad.
PSP uses small but high-capacity UMD (Universal Media Disc) optical disc to store games, music and other data. The disc, while only 60mm in diameter, can store up to 1.8GB of data. The device also includes an USB 2.0 interface, 802.11b wireless LAN, built-in stereo speakers, and a headphone connector.
Definitely an interesting product in every aspect. PSP will be available in Japan later this year, and in Europe and the US during Spring 2005. The price of the unit was not yet announced.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded a patent to Apple for its iTunes online music store's interface.
The company most likely hopes to avoid clones of its unique interface to appear on competitors' products, as the legal music service game is heating rapidly all over the world. Apple declined to comment on its granted patents, but company is one of the major IT patent holders nowadays. Even the iTunes service is already protected with several patents, ranging from the above-mentioned interface patent to a patent that covers its ability to stream music over the network to another copy of the iTunes program.
Sony has licensed its music catalog to British online music service Wippit. The deal is already third major record label contract for small British online music company as the company has signed similar deals with BMG and EMI earlier this year.
The deal covers distribution rights in Ireland and the UK for now. Sony has already licensed its content to various other European music services, including the British OD2, and indicates that record labels are willing to bet on Europe's online music growth which is expected to grow rapidly once Roxio's Napster and Apple's iTunes enter into the continent's market.
A new proposed legislation change, called Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, is about to get a Congress hearing tomorrow. The proposed bill has already made maajor Hollywood studios, record labels and other copyright owners nervous.
The bill, which is sponsored by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va) would force record labels to add labels on CDs that don't comply with strict audio CD standards, because they've been intentionally "broken" in order to make them impossible to read with computers.
Various other consumer-protecting minor proposals are in the bill, but the most significant one is the amendment to the notorious DMCA legislation. The new proposed law text states: "It shall not be a violation of this title to manufacture, distribute, or make noninfringing use of a hardware or software product capable of enabling significant noninfringing use of a copyrighted work."
This would mean that tools that circumvent copy protection, such as DeCSS and similar DVD rippers, would be legal as they assist consumers to enjoy their legal rights to make backups of the content that they own whether it has been copy protected or not.
Richoh has made serious claims against major optical storage players Lite-ON IT and CMC Magnetics, which are both Taiwan-based companies. According to the source, Ricoh claims that six of its optical storage patents have been infringed.
Ricoh sued CMC Magnetics Corp, Taiwan's top maker of optical compact discs, saying the company had violated three of its patents including one covering a technology that gives discs the ability to tell a machine which recording power to use.
It also filed suit against Lite-On Information Technology (IT) Corp, a supplier of optical disc drives, claiming the firm infringed three of its patents including one concerning a method for assuring recording quality through laser control.
Isamu Kaneko, an assistant researcher at Tokyo University, has been arrested by the Japanese police. Kaneko, the developer of the popular Winny P2P application, is accused of breaking Japanese copyright laws.
According to the police Winny helps and promotes copyright infringement and piracy. Winny, which provides its users with anonymity, became a focus of concern for Japanese authorities last month, when police and military documents were spread on the network.
Kaneko was arrested because Winny allowed people to download games and movies from the Internet in violation of the Japanese Copyright Law.
Kaneko is one of the first file sharing software developers in the world to be arrested. He has affirmed the allegations, and admitted that he expected the arrest, because Winny clashes with the copyright law.
It will be interesting to see whether or not Japanese law can shift the responsibility from the users of the software to the developer.
A professor and a graduate student from th University of Tulsa have been awarded a patent for a method for spoofing peer-to-peer networks. The software shares tons of bogus files on P2P networks, which look like pirated content, but are actually just noise.
"It's built off the basic idea of injecting alternative content or decoy media into peer-to-peer networks as a way of hiding pirated media that's being shared illegally," said professor John Hale -- one of the people behind the idea. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack."
The software will obviously spoof only songs of selected artists and titles, so those artists who actually want to distribute their content over a P2P network, can do so.
Companies such as Overpeer and MediaDefender have already products on the market that flood P2P networks.
While their intentions are clearly good, the companies should bear in mind that intentional hampering of digital communications can be, and often is, illegal.
MTV, the world's most popular music TV channel, is expected to partner with MusicNet to provide an online music service later this year.
MTV and its parent company Viacom have previously expressed their desire to enter the online music business, but haven't done so yet. Now, as the business is booming due the success of Apple's iTunes, it seems that MTV -- just like virtually everybody else in the online world -- is ready to capitalize their strong brand in online music market.
MusicNet acts as a business service provider for various online music stores and the company itself is owned by three major record labels and RealNetworks. Its customers include AOL, Real itself and Virgin.
Apple has denied the rumors that they've been forced to hike the prices on iTunes songs from the current levels of $0.99 to $1.25. Earlier today, New York Post reported about the upcoming price hikes, stating that "big five" record labels have forced Apple to push up the prices of single downloads in its service by 26 percent.
"These rumors aren't true," said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Sequeira. "We have multiyear agreements with the labels and our prices remain 99 cents a track."
However, many album prices at the service have been pushed up -- originally virtually all albums were sold at $9.99, but nowadays some albums are priced at $16.99, which makes them more expensive than the physical CD equivalents in the United States.
The history repeats itself again. The so called 'MP3 revolution' that occurred in the 90's has evolved into booming movie downloads. This is of course made possible by the increasing coverage of broadband connection networks and the suitable compression methods.
The phenomena started few years back with VideoCD and DivX formats and the trend has been towards higher quality of the downloaded video. Divx (or other MPEG-4 variant) video is combined with multi channel sound, or perhaps SVCD MPEG-2 format has been used. The increasing connection speeds and booming DVD-R drive market have made DVD copies very popular on the Internet.
The BBC reports that the number illegal movie or TV files downloads have tripled last year. But the DVD sales seem to develop quite nicely too..
An estimated 1.67 million people download illegal film or TV files, compared to 570,000 last year, the British Video Association (BVA) found.
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The average film or TV downloader was identified as under 35 years old and male.
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"As long as we can continue to make our traditional product attractive and future online offers affordable and easy, we hope to avoid the worst of the damage."
Virtually all major P2P networks, including Kazaa and the P2P United(a political lobby organization of several P2P networks, including Morpheus and Bearshare), have announced that they will or already are working together with FBI and other law enforcement organizations in order to bust people who use P2P networks to distribute child pornography online.
The discussion about child pornography in P2P networks was launched by five U.S. senators who have urged FTC to investigate P2P networks to see whether those are used as means to distribute child pornography online. P2P companies have been quick to respond to allegations and Kazaa has said that it already works together with FBI to track down people who distribute child porn online. But P2P United's director also said that "We are happy to do more than our fair share, but to call this a P2P-induced problem is dishonest."
Roxio's legal online music service, Napster, is preparing for its anticipated end-of-summer launch in Europe and has announced a partnership deal with UK's largest high street PC store chain, Dixons.
According to their press release, Dixons will promote Napster's service and related products in its UK stores. Dixons' chains in the UK include Currys, The Link and PC World. Napster's software will be pre-installed to all in-house brand computers sold in Dixons' stores. Additionally various Napster branded products, such as CD-R discs, will be sold in stores.
Taiwanese manufacturers, including Ritek and CMC Magnetics, have announced that they plan to start the production of double-layer DVD±R discs this summer. Several manufacturers have already announced plans to release double-layer drives in May.
Ritek is currently doing trial production of dual-layer discs for quality certification, and expects to begin volume production by the end of June. The licensing terms for dual-layer discs are more strict than those of single layer DVD±R discs. That will result in smaller manufacturers having more difficulties with starting mass production, which in turn will reflect on the price of media.
It is quite likely that the prices for double-layer discs will not fall as rapidly as the single layer prices fell. The prices for Taiwanese double-layer discs will in any case be 20-30% lower than those of their Japanese counterparts.
Sony has launched its long anticipated Sony Connect online music download service in the United States. Like Sony announced early this year, the service features 500,000 songs from $0.99 per track, or $9.99 per album.
The songs at Sony Connect are sold in Sony's own ATRAC3 format, which is compatible with Sony's audio devices. While Apple has done a great job with iPod and iTunes, Sony feels that they can offer the consumers a broader line of devices.
It is quite obvious, that with Connect Sony wishes to boost the sales of its audio products. Devices such as MiniDisc Hi-MD Walkman, NetMD Walkmans, ATRAC CD Walkman, and Network Walkman players will all play content downloaded via Connect. Aiwa (a brand of Sony's) will also soon be releasing Giga Pavit, a hard-disk player similar to Apple iPod Mini.
Apart from a wider range of portable devices supported, the Sony Connect seems to have little edge over its rivals. It will be interesting to see how the markets are going to develop with Connect around. Sony is by far the largest player on the current online music market, with amazing potential to market and push its products to the consumers.
Intervideo's InstantON turns a regular PC into a remotely controllable multimedia device, with an user interface resembling typical consumer electronics products. The Linux based software should boot in a matter of seconds and the new multi-boot feature enables installations simultaneously with other OS's..
InterVideo InstantON is a modular solution that is a new concept in PC/CE convergence. InstantON delivers TV, radio, music, videos and burning to DVD with the fast, CE-like access and the remote control consumers expect. With InstantON, systems instantly spring to life with a push of the button. People can watch DVDs and home VCDs, browse photo albums, and listen to rich surround sound music or watch TV. With the advanced PVR capabilities, InstantON can be used for time-shifting TV programs so users can pause and replay live TV as well as record favorite shows for later viewing. The software is enhanced with basic editing and DVD burning tools that allow users to cut, merge and split recorded TV programs and videos. Edited videos can be quickly burned directly to a DVD disc for viewing in their living room, on their laptop or shared with family and friends.
The Tennessee Board of Regents has rejected a proposal that would have imposed a mandatory Napster fee on all the students in the 45 schools represented by the board. The fee would have kept RIAA from suing the students, but at a staggeringly high price -- $9.99 per student per month.
According to calculations made by The Register, Tennessee students would have paid $1.8 per month for using Napster. Even though schools like Penn State and the University of Rochester have been able to reach financially lucrative deals with Napster, other schools can expect to pay alot more for the services.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) will be launching a pilot project later this month which allows viewers to download TV programmes on a home PC. The downloaded content can be viewed on a computer screen or burned on a DVD. Content for PDA computers will also be made available.
"If we don't enter this market, then exactly what happened to the music industry could happen to us, where we ignore it, keep our heads in the sand and everybody starts posting the content up there and ripping us off," said Ashley Highfield, director of new media and technology at the BBC.
The Internet Media Player (iMP) pilot will be tested on BBC staff, who will be given PDAs and access to a range of BBC programmes.
"We might get an over-positive response because I think a lot of BBC staff would love to be able to catch up on the programmes they missed last night on the bus or on the train," Mr Highfield said. "The quality is staggeringly good. It's slightly better than you get on the seat-backs if you are in a plane, although PDAs have a slightly smaller screen."
An extended trial will be launched later on with 1,000 selected broadband subscribes from AOL, British Telecom and Tiscali.
Once again the target is to provide piracy proof content protection, but as we all know the reality tends to be something else. The project 'Janus' is well past its original release date, as it was expected to hit the market over a year ago. It has been promoted as a method for the subscription music services (Real Rhapsody, Napster, etc.) to move to the portable MP3 players. The future will show if 'Janus' is actually a usable solution, or shall we just drop the 'J'...
The software giant said that companies including AOL, Dell, Disney, Napster and Freescale, a subsidiary of Motorola, have agreed to adopt the new technology.
Microsoft is betting that the steady release of new content protection technology will help its audio and video formats become standard ways of distributing digital music and films, in turn, keeping people purchasing and using the Windows operating system and associated products.
Content-filtering company Audible Magic announced on Friday that they have struck a deal with Sony Music. Sony will provide Audible Magic with digital fingerprints of their music, which will be used to improve Audible Magic's antipiracy technology. The technology identifies and blocks songs transferred online illegally.
Two Hollywood studios, Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, have sued an American online retailer, Technology One, claiming that it violated the court order issued against the DVD ripping products of 321 Studios by selling a version of 321 Studios' DVD X Copy that allows decrypting the 
It seems that the game console leader Sony is not the first in goal in the "next generation" console race. As Xbox 2 and GameCube 2 are expected in 2005, the PlayStation 3 will be here in 2006, earliest. According to the source, the release is depending when the new processor technology is ready for show time, as PS3 will be the first implementation of the new chips.
