The rivalry between the competing high definition formats, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is about to get the first major turn as three Hollywood studios are expected to announce their support for the NEC & Toshiba backed HD-DVD format. Warner Bros, Universal and Paramount are expected to announce their plans to adopt HD-DVD format by the end of 2005 in the near future.
When ever the announcement is made, the deal will most likely not be exclusive -- i.e. the studios will keep the option to support Sony's Blu-Ray format as well. There are also still many aspects that the studios want to be cleared before any movies are released in HD format. One of the most pressing matters is the implementation of adequate DRM protection. In Hollywood terms adequate is probably equal to unbreakable.
UK digital music firm Wippit are calling upon the music industry to boycott major firms it accuses of fueling illegal P2P services by paying the services for advertisement. On Wippit's list include well known names such as Vodafone, O2, NTL, Renault, MSN subsidiaries Expedia and bCentral, First Direct, Halifax and Natwest. Many of these companies have claimed that their advertisements appearances on P2P related sites and services was a mistake and caused by human error. Services related to the eDonkey network were the most common.
Wippit CEO, Paul Myers stated that these companies give "financial oxygen" to "pirate services" and "copyright violators". "If you're supporting a company that is not supporting you, or they are supporting a business that aims to put you out of business by giving your property away for free, follow me by dumping them until they change their ways." he said in an open letter addressing the music industry.
Developing and running P2P services for now is still legal in most countries and it is legal for major companies to pay these services for advertisement. However, when you remember that most of the companies listed above use music from major record labels for their TV advertisements, you can predict their reactions to this claim made by Wippit.
The Recording Industry Association of America filed another 750 suits against alleged illegal song swappers on Thursday. This brings the total number of suits to 6,191. The suits filed Thursday include students from 13 different universities. This action appears to be a response by the RIAA to the facts disclosed recently that showed overall P2P traffic was not negatively affected by their legal actions. "In order for legitimate services to continue their growth, we cannot ignore those who take and distribute music illegally," RIAA President Cary Sherman said. "There must be consequences to breaking the law, or illegal downloading will cripple the music community's ability to support itself now or invest in the future."
While use of networks such as Fasttrack is dropping, the eDonkey network is increasing in users daily. Also, BitTorrent is being used to swap large files but not small files generally, such as MP3 files. As the RIAA keep victimizing P2P users as opposed to accepting P2P as a new technology and finding out ways to co-exist with it, new ambitious projects are underway. New P2P networks such as ANts P2P and Mute claim they can offer P2P users anonymity, mainly by changing the search results systems to show a HASH code of a user instead of an IP address and routing file transfers so that the real distributor and the real receiver are hiding their identities from each other. Of course, that begs the question; can I be sued for routing a file from the distributor to the receiver?
The iriver PMP series offers a striking design, 3.5" colour screen, a Linux-based operating system and support for all standard video and audio formats.
iriver, the leading provider of innovative portable audio and video solutions in the digital entertainment segment, has launched its new Portable Media Player (PMP). The perfect travelling companion, the iriver PMP is the most versatile entertainment device available on the market today, with the ability to watch movies, listen to music, check out the latest news headlines on the radio and even view your latest snapshots, since shots taken on a digital camera can be downloaded to the PMP in seconds. Available in 20 and 40GB versions, the Linux®-based operating system sets the iriver PMP apart from the personal media centres (PMCs) currently on the market by offering the ability to play MP3, ASF, WMA and WAV audio files, as well as numerous video formats, including AVI in MPEG4, DivX and XviD.
The iriver PMP offers a market leading array of features and functions including: a built-in FM tuner; microphone; USB on-the-go function for direct data transfer from other mobile products; and a line-in to record straight from external audio sources. The 3.5" display shows up to 260,000 colours and displays films, photos or e books in crystal-clear resolution. Users also have the option of watching movies or viewing photo slideshows on a TV screen (with no loss of resolution) via a TV output channel (NTSC or PAL).
According to DivX Networks' president, Shahi Gharman, the company which makes the video codec so often associated with online movie piracy, is about to sign deals with two major movie studios by the end of the year to offer their content in DivX-encoded format for on-demand online video service.
According to Gharman, movie studios are interested of the technology, which is already available in 20M non-PC devices worldwide, as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows Media platform.
DivX Networks, even though its reputation as a codec of choice for movie pirates (well, at least earlier on, before XviD and eventually DVDR took over), has actually worked on digital rights management system for quite some time now and it is obvious that studios are looking for DRM-locked solutions rather than non-restricted video formats to deliver their content for users.
Company also promised to deliver its upcoming version, DivX v6.0, by the end of this year, promising 33 percent better video compression rate than MPEG-4's most recent widely approved form, H.264. It is unclear how this affects on the fact that so far DivX 5.x series has been mostly MPEG-4 compliant and whether that will be the case in the future.
A new car has been unveiled in Italy that can apparently download MP3s from special petrol pumps. Along with that strange feature, the car can also be unlocked via SMS and displays PC screens on its windows. La Mia 500 is a customized Fiat 500 responds, informing the user that the car is open and whether it needs petrol, or air or water. The car is one of four projects at the Festival of Science in Genoa, Italy, run by the Italian digital design college Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
The cars windows act as screens and allow passengers to sketch, or write SMS messages and emails and send them using wireless GPRS connections. The car also features a host of more small features that are really pushing technology to its limits; you are advised to visit the source for more information. It will be interesting to see a price tag on a car like this.
Today Apple introduced the new iPod Photo. The new devices can hold 40GB or 60GB of data and are advertised as being capable of holding up to 25,000 digital photos and up to 10,000 or 15,000 songs. It also includes a new screen with a higher resolution to view high quality pictures. The devices will allow you to make slideshows of photos with songs playing as their background music. Owners will be able to listen to music for up to 15 hours or view 5 hours of slideshows with the new extended battery life.
“Having both your entire photo and music collections with you wherever you go is the next big thing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Everyone has a digital camera and wants to enjoy and share their growing library of digital photos wherever they are. Unlike video content, photo content is free and abundant, and there are no copyright issues to deal with.”
The device can also easily download photos from Mac's or Windows machines through firewire or USB. The devices are now being shipped and come with a recommended retail price of $499 and $599. Another useful feature that users would find interesting is the ability to connect your iPod to a TV to view pictures and slideshows on a bigger screen.
Today nine eurozone countries (counrties using euro as their currency) have joined the Apple's iTunes bandwagon when iTunes music store opened its doors in Finland, Austria, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Only eurozone country still without an access to iTunes is Ireland.
Songs in euro countries will cost the same as they cost in existing iTunes -supported countries using euro -- €0.99 per song and albums starting from €9.99 each. iTunes also extended its European music selection when it launched in new countries today, taking the total available collection in Europe to 700,000 tracks.
Additionally, Apple announced that it will launch Canadian version of its music store in November. Now Apple can claim that its service reaches already almost 70 percent of global music market.
Spanish company Puretunes.com, which briefly offered music in MP3 format for a very low price, has reached a legal settlement with RIAA. The company will pay $500,00 in damages, while the holding company that was responsible for the operations will pay $10 million.
Puretunes.com offered what it thought were legal MP3 downloads at just pennies. The company acquired the rights for the songs from an overseas licensing authorities, but according to RIAA the licences were not legal, and sued Puretunes.
"Puretunes.com duped consumers by claiming it was a legitimate online music retailer when, in fact, it was no such thing," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "It's essential for the integrity and security of the legitimate online music marketplace that imposters like Puretunes.com are held accountable."
Several similar MP3 sites are still in operation, One of the best known is Russian ALLOFMP3.com.
Finally, Ahead Software has release the Nero 6.6.0.1 Reloaded, and it is now mirrored to our server. In this release all of the major components are upgraded and new features are included.
Some highlights of the new features:
Short Lead Outs - save recording time and adds 12mb storage capacity
Function to verify the media for errors after the burning process.
Nero Vision Express 3
Nero PhotoSnap - a new tool for creating slide shows.
New SmartStart 2 quick launch bar
Nero MediaHome, a media server software
Download Nero Burning ROM 6.6.0.1 from our mirror here or visit Nero.com for more details and additional components.
As the shift towards open source tools is already a major force in audio/video software world, we've decided to comply with various open source licensing requirements and have opened a separate site section for open source projects' source code downloads.
From this section you can download source codes for tools like DC++ and VirtualDub.
We're still probably missing few source code packs from our listings, but we'll add the missing ones shortly. Please note that we only list separate source codes for tools that we host in binary format as well. Also, some open source tools have the source code stored inside the binary distribution package itself.
Napster, once-P2P-now-legal-online-music-store, and PayPal announced today that they've made a deal that makes it possible for Napster's customers to pay for their monthly subscription fees and download fees via PayPal instead of traditional credit card.
PayPal is the one of the Net's largest payment handling companies, owned nowadays by eBay. Its popularity was partly sparked by the fact that direct account-to-account bank transactions weren't commonplace or free in United States when the dotcom boom started back in late 1990s and PayPal tapped to that need.
Napster will continue to support its other payment methods as well, which include credit and debit cards and pre-paid payment cards.
What better way to celebrate the holiday season than by littering your neighborhood with disposable DVDs! At least that's what Atlanta company Convex Group seems to have in mind. They will be releasing a low-budget movie Noel simultaneously on disposable DVD and in cinema,
The 48-hour self-destructing FlexPlay DVDs will be available at Amazon.com on November 17th at $4.99.
FlexPlay, which was bought by Convex in September, has provided it's EZ-D technology to other companies as well, such as Walt Disney, Co., who has run limited trials on FlexPlay discs for over a year now.
While Disney's trials have been a sort of a substitute for rentals, Convex has a different approach. The movie, Noel, is a low-budget film that will open in only 10 cities around the US. Those who want to see the movie, but can't find it in their city, can purchase the movie from Amazon on a FlexPlay disc, and watch it at home. If they like it, they may even buy the fully featured DVD once it's released.
Valve have decided to add an extra feature to the installation of their Half Life 2 game. Users will be required to sign up for a free online account to play the game. Once the account is created, the user will be able to play single player and LAN games without an internet connection. This comes after several big title games including Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas leaked onto the Internet before their official release.
Last year, there was a major security breach at a Valve network and hackers managed to download a huge chunk of the Half Life 2 source code and some other material. Just days after the theft, the source code appeared online and eventually a working beta of the game. This resulted in a delay of the official release of the game of almost 12 months.
It would seem that in future more gaming companies will take approaches like this to attempt to stomp out rampant piracy.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has long being claiming that its campaign of lawsuits against filesharers is helping to reduce filesharing activity in the United States. Big Champagne is a market research and marketing consulting firm specializing in P2P technology and their statistics tell a completely different story. Below are the figures for the U.S.
At a hearing yesterday, Peterborough magistrates told 34-year-old, David Brady they had considered sending him to prison for the crimes. Trading Standards officers and police swooped on Brady's home in last September, after getting a tip-off about his actions. More than 570 counterfeit CDs and 133 DVDs were found at his home. Also found was a range of carrying cases, a price list, and order forms listing 3,000 CD titles.
Brady was ordered to pay £250 court costs and forfeit his computer equipment and blank CDs and DVDs to police and was told he must work 100 hours to benefit the community. It is estimated that his actions may have cost the entertainment industry up to £53,000. Brady told the court that his actions were to help him with his hobby of collecting music. The court heard that it would have cost him about 80p to make an illegal copy of CD, which could be sold on for as much as £16. Head of investigations and inquiries at Cambridgeshire Trading Standards, Leon Livermore said, "The amount seized would have been a very profitable hobby for him. The illegal counterfeiting of DVDs and CDs has strong links with organized crime and terrorism as well as having a major detrimental effect on the entertainment industry."
Famous for his notorious clashes against the biggest names in the business world, including the major insurance companies, financial institutions and mafia, New York's Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, is now targeting against the major record labels (that were previously known as "Big Five", but since BMG's and Sony's merger, just "Big Four"..).
Mr, Spitzer has served subpoenas to EMI, Sony BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music, asking them to hand over all contracts, invoices and documents that relate to the question behind the subpoenas: how do songs make their way to radio stations' playlists.
As getting airtime on radio stations is crucial for new artists and their songs, Spitzer's aim is to find out whether major record labels pay their artists' way to the stations' playlists. According to The New York Times, most labels circumvent legislation that prevents them to pay for radio stations, by employing third party promoters who pay fees for stations. Labels claim that promoters only pay the fees to get advance copies of their upcoming playlists, not for getting stations to play certain songs.
The official CD sales figures in the Unites States showed that the slump in CD sales that has laster for five years now, has finally ended. The CD sales figures for the first half of year 2004 were 10.2 percent higher than they were in first half of 2003.
Despite the jump, the sales figures were still down 4.3 percent compared to the first half of year 2001, according to the statistics released by the RIAA. Music industry analysts said that the rise in CD sales is down the fact that people are once again being more interested about the music, mostly due the iPod phenomenom in the US and also because music industry has finally started improving its products, by offering more music outside traditional "top 40 -format". This can also be found out from the fact that by comparing the top 50 CDs of year 2003's first half to the top 50 CDs in 2004's first half, the sales figures were down by 16.7 percent -- a clear indication that while people buy more CDs, they buy from wider selection than before.
Also, the sales of DVD music videos jumped by whopping 100 percent, from 5.6 million units in 2003 to 11.2 million units this year.
Doom 3, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, and now GTA: San Andreas. All of these are among the most expected game titles supposed to hit the stores before Christmas, and all of these have leaked to the Internet before the release. The game developers and distributors are naturally furious about the illegal copies. On the other hand, the software leaks are making big headlines and increasing the hype over the titles.
"The proper authorities are investigating the theft and are continuing to investigate all possible leads to ensure there is no further dissemination of our creative content," said the company.
"Downloading, possession and distribution of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, including making the game available on the internet, is theft.
Two UK members of the DrinkOrDie piracy group have denied charges of conspiracy to defraud. DrinkOrDie was one of the groups that were busted in the major anti-piracy raid in 2001. Steven Dowd, 39, and Alex Bell, 29, are both alleged to be part of DoD.
Prosecutor Bruce Houlder said that both men were a part of international conspiracy that involved cracking protection expensive software which allowed the products to be made available for download on the Internet."They do not do what they do for money. They do it for street wise credibility. They may see themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but in reality it is a cover for fraud. Computers are their universe. They live and breathe a world of computer software," Houlder said.
Last month Australian officials decided that an Australian member of DoD will be extradited to the United States to be tried there. The man, Hew Raymond Griffiths is accused of being the ring leader of DoD.
Better late than never? The legendary CD-R(W) drive manufacturer finally enters the Dual Layer market, being among the last of the major industry players. As the market already is reaching maturity, Plextor is certainly facing a challenge. Can they still dominate by releasing products of quality above the competition?
Plextor, one of the leading companies for the development and production of reliable, high quality CD/DVD peripherals is expanding its range with its first external Double layer Dual Format drive. The PX-716UF writes at 16X for DVD+R, 16X for DVD-R and 4X for DVD+R DL (Double Layer). The drive rewrites 8X DVD+RW and 4X DVD-RW. The PX-716UF reads CD-ROMs at 48X and DVD-ROMs at 16X.
The PX-716UF is an external drive with a Tray load mechanism.
The Retail package includes: PX-716UF (DVD Recorder), USB cable, IEEE 1394 (FireWire) cable, power cable, power adapter, Plextor CD/DVD Utility Software (PlexTools Professional), 16-language manual, attractive software from: Ahead, Pinnacle, Cyberlink, Sonic and Ulead (full and trial versions).
The PX-716UF is supported by a Fast Warranty Service by Plextor, by which any inconveniences resulting from a defect are reduced to a minimum. The firmware is stored in FlashROM which makes it possible to quickly and easily upgrade to the latest version. CD TEXT is also completely supported.
The owner and webmaster of MP3s4free.net, Stephen Cooper, faces a lawsuit of AU$500m ($364m) from the world's record companies. The site, which the ex-policeman ran since 1998 until he was raided in October 2003, provided links to MP3 files hosted on various servers around the Internet.
Cooper says that he never thought that there was anything illegal about the site, and ran it merely as a hobby. Some claim that he made up to AU$65,000 ($37,400) a month from the site, but Cooper denies such allegations. "There are no millions of dollars stashed away anywhere, no secret garages full of Porsches and Ferraris," he said. He also stated that he thinks that the whole lawsuit is ridiculous, and he can't afford the legal fees to fight the case in the Federal Court.
In addition to suing Cooper, the recording industry has also suedComcen, the ISP hosting MP3s4free.net while it was still online.
The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) fails to see the ridiculous aspects of their $500m claims. They are seeking full damages -- regardless of whether Cooper and ComCen are capable of paying for them. But more importantly, they are trying to seek a ruling that criminalize even linking to pirated content.
Robbie Williams' new Greatest Hits album will be released not only on audio CD, but on flash memory card as well. EMI Music UK and The Carphone Warehouse have signed a deal that will make the album the first ever to be released on Multi Media Card (MMC).
Little technical specifications is available on the format used to store the songs, but the card will include the entire album in "quality comparable to that of a CD" plus some video content. Priced at £29.99 the card will be available at 600 Carphone Warehouse stores across the UK from November.
The product is apparently aimed at mobile phone and PDA users, but I personally see little market for this type of a physical media for storing music. I would much rather use my existing MMC/SD/CF/whatever card to store the music I want, and purchase the songs some other way. Of course there is no way of purchasing songs from the DRM crippled online music stores for playback on a "third party" mobile device -- such as my mobile phone or my iPAQ PDA.
American traditional radio stations, through their lobby organization Radio Music License Committee, have reached a deal with American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers that would give radio stations rights to broadcast their radio shows over the Internet as well as over the traditional airwaves.
Deal was made to take effect retroactively from year 2001 and lasts until 2009 and is worth of $1.7 billion in total fees to ASCAP. The deal was made to separate radio broadcasters' online fees from the traditional broadasting fees they pay for ASCAP.
RMLC represents 12,000 radio stations across the United States and the deal is limited strictly to radio stations and their online simulcasts, so it doesn't make difference for Net-only broadcasters who have made a separate deal with the RIAA in previous years. The Net broadcasters' deal with RIAA is set to expire by end of this year.
Invented in the early 90's, reshaping the whole industry - The MPEG-1 Layer III, a.k.a. "MP3". According to a recent study, the dominating lossy compressed audio format is finally experiencing a slight decline in popularity. The source only mentions Microsoft's WMA (..I wonder why..) as one of the rising formats, but it is reasonable to believe that AAC (Advaneced Audio Compression) will be the successor of MP3. The AAC has been promoted by Apple and Ahead Software (Nero Burning ROM) and is widely adopted by the mobile phone industry already.
MP3 is still the overwhelming favourite of file traders, but the once-universal format's popularity has been going quietly but steadily down in personal music collections for the last year. According to researchers at The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives, the percentage of MP3-formatted songs in digital-music collections has slid steadily in recent months, down to about 72 percent of people's collections from about 82 percent a year ago.
Apple celebrated yesterday when it announced that they have sold now more than 150 million songs via their iTunes Music Store. Despite some reports that overall traffic to online music stores has dropped, Apple's announcement means that its own sales have increased rather dramatically. Their current pace means that they're selling more 4 million songs a week, more than 200 million songs a year.
It took Apple 17 months to sell 150 million songs and now it seems that they're speeding ahead of their competition quite rapidly, specially when the all-important holiday season is approaching. Obviously iTunes also benefited from the fact that it is now available in three European countries as well as in the United States -- and Apple has vowed to launch its pan-European service within next few weeks that would bring in millions of potential new customers.
Even more crucial to the company is the success of its portable audio player, iPod, which is the only player that Apple's iTunes songs support. And Apple announced this week that it sold over 2 million iPods during its past financial quarter (three month period). iPods are the money-making machine for Apple, while iTunes doesn't really generate any profits whatsoever to the company, but instead help it maintain its iPod sales levels.
According to the founder and CEO of Netflix, the world's largest online DVD rental company, the online giant Amazon.com plans to enter to the online DVD rental business as well. "We started hearing rumors about two weeks ago, and we were able to confirm them," Netflix's CEO, Reed Hastings, said during the company's earnings call. Amazon.com denied to confirm the rumors about its upcoming DVD rental service.
In addition to the possible future threat from Amazon.com, Netflix is facing increasing pressure from its archrival Blockbuster and also from America's largest supermarket chain, Wal-Mart. To maintain its market-leading status, Netflix announced that it will cut its monthly charges from $21.99 to $17.99. Blockbuster responded immediately to Netflix's price cuts and decided to cut its monthly subscription charges from $19.99 to $17.49.
Napster, the biggest rival of Apple's iTunes, has released prepaid online music payment cards in the UK, in order to reach the under-18s. Teenagers are lucrative market for online music stores, but their payment options are limited as in most countries it is illegal for minor to get a credit card, which is normally required in order to use the stores.
Napster UK's prepaid online music purchase cards will be sold via Dixons, country's largest consumer electronics retailer. Napster launched similar prepay card mechanism in the United States last year.
British Phonographic Industry, the UK equivalent of the RIAA, has won the first court round in its fight against British P2P users, when British courts granted a court order against 28 P2P users BPI raided earlier this month. The court order means that users' ISPs have to hand over users' personal details (names and addresses) within 14 days to the BPI.
BPI has announced that it will offer out-of-court settlement deals for all sued users, but if they wont settle, it will press charges against them in courts. According to BPI's claims, all of the users now sued are so-called "heavy uploaders", people who cotribute to P2P networks by sharing vast amounts of music rather, rather than downloading tracks.
One of the years most eagerly awaited games Halo 2, leaked onto the net last night. It is thought to have first shown up on Usenet in the form of a French DVD ISO and is labeled something like, "Halo.2.DVD9.PAL.XBOXDVD-DiFFUSiON". Microsoft has vowed to "aggressively pursue" whoever leaked the game. "We are currently investigating the source of this leak with the appropriate authorities," Microsoft said in a statement, "Microsoft takes the integrity of its intellectual property extremely seriously, and we are aggressively pursuing the source of this illegal act. We consider downloading this code or making it available for others to download as theft."
Halo 2 will still ship around the world in the second week of November. Last year, the source code of Half Life 2 by Valve and subsequently a working beta of the game surfaced on the net, causing the official release date to be pushed back by as much as 12 months. Also, in the past year, Microsoft was shocked to discover that their NT/2000 source code had leaked onto the Internet.
Latest study by The NPD Group found that Apple's iTunes has managed to maintain its dominant position in legal online music market, by selling almost 70 percent of all tracks sold between December 2003 and July 2004. Napster cme as distant second, with 11 percent share of the market, followed by numerous smaller rivals, including MusicMatch and Real.
But more worryingly, an another study that focused on traffic that online music stores generated, by The Port Washington, found that online music store's total number of monthly visitors dropped from the peak month of April. In April, music stores gathered 1.3 million unique visitors, but managed to get only 1M users per month in May, June and July this year. Also, P2P traffic doesn't seem to drop at all, despite series of online music stores opened virtually on weekly basis and RIAA bombarding American P2P users constantly.
Not exactly a regular DVD recorder you may already find at state of the art livingrooms, but something with more functionality instead. The DVDirect offers PC-like features, in a PC-less environment.
An interesting and a neat concept, in an extremely geeky way, but is it just me or why am I missing the point and purpose of this device? See for your selves..
The drive can also be connected to a camcorder or VCR for tape-to-disc recording real time. However, while the machine will encode video in MPEG 2 format - automatically creating new chapters every five, ten or 15 minutes, if you wish - it only supports DVD+R single- and dual-layer discs, which potentially limits discs' playback on domestic DVD players.
The RIAA has been running a campaign against online music filesharing now for over a year. The RIAA were using a 1998 law to force ISP's to hand over subscriber information on individuals suspected of sharing copyrighted music through P2P networks. Verizon challenged this saying that the RIAA needed to file a formal lawsuit to get customer information and a U.S. appeals court agreed. It ruled that the RIAA must first launch an anonymous "John Doe" lawsuit in order to get customer details.
The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected an appeal by the RIAA without giving any comment on it. It is likely that this will not affect the RIAA's action on illegal filesharing as they have sued more than 3000 P2P users since the appeals court ruling. The sad fact is that the RIAA are not alone now. The IFPI has also begun suing European P2P users, claiming they have done everything they can without legal action to try to deter filesharing. That is very strange as I have not seen even one ad on TV or anything about filesharing, except for Sky News reporting on the lawsuits and a Discovery documentary on movie downloading. It just appears that the recording industry is very quick to the trigger when they see another problem that is going to destroy the music industry, like the recording songs from the radio epidemic, if you can remember it.
After the recent raid in Iceland, the local branch of MPA, SMAIS, has made various statements that are either highly exaggerated or completely false. They have, for instance, stated that: "[On this 100 person Direct Connect hub] we estimate our loss to be around $4,5 million."
Hagstofan, the national statistical institute of Iceland, has gathered detailed consumer statistics for years, and their records show that while the cinema attendance and video rentals decreased slightly, the sale of both VHS and DVD movies has grown. In addition there was a record breaking increase in the sales of domestic CDs.
The Hagstofan specialist states that "Downloads on the Internet don't have a noticeable effect on the sales or attendance," and that "Those that claim that decrease is due to Internet downloading, should do so very carefully."
There is growing concern in Iceland about the legal issues surrounding the raid. It's uncertain if the police had the right to execute surveillance and wiretapping for two years, and if the measures taken in general were excessive.
The Microsoft continues their attempts to conquer our living rooms as well -- we all know they already got our offices. The Media Center turns PCs in to multi media entertainment centers. So far the market penetration of the product has been slow, but Microsoft is pushing further.
The first two versions of Windows XP Media Center were slow to penetrate the market.
One reason was that these early versions had some annoying faults. For example, to burn a song to a CD, consumers had to use software that was not designed to be managed with a remote control. Also, there were problems with TV picture quality.
Windows XP Media Center 2005 addresses these faults and adds some new features.
We have added an interview with ShareReactor.com owner Simon Moon (Christian Riesen) to the articles (also guides) section. For those not familiar with ShareReactor, it was an eD2K (eDonkey / eMule) link site that was closed down by Swiss authorities several months ago on suspicion of Copyright and Trademark infringements. Since then, Simon has opened another site called RespectP2P to keep ShareReactor users up to date about the investigations and to provide a forum to discuss P2P related issues.
The interview was conducted as a conversation and not as a questionnaire so it should be fully read by users, instead of picking and choosing questions. It covers four main areas which are general questions about ShareReactor, questions about P2P legal situations, questions about the on-going investigations and some extra questions for Simon himself. Simon provided some very detailed answers and didn’t even complain about the length of the interview which went on for more than four hours in total. For example...
Q. Dela: And what was taken on the day? Have you had anything returned since?
A new iPod will feature not only a Toshiba 60GB HDD, but the capability to store digital photos. It will also have audio/video out capabilities. The product is currently only in production in Asia. Toshiba began shipping their new drives to Apple in September and iPod manufacturer Inventec has already begun building the new iPod. It is expected to look much the same as the current 4G iPods, only about 2mm thicker and slightly heavier. The 2 inch LCD screen will have a much higher resolution for quality photo viewing.
The video out feature means anybody would be able to connect their iPod to a TV and view all their pictures on a big screen instead of the iPods small LCD screen. The iPod will not be capable of editing any photos, nor will it have any built-in flash memory stick slots to download digital photos from digital cameras. Apple will market the new iPod as being capable of storing 20,000 music tracks and 25,000 photos and album artwork will be shown on screen to owners when they are playing music with the device.
The new iPod will become available within the next few months and is expected to cost around $499.
Just some days ago, Steve Ballmer referred to iPods as being "full of stolen music". Ged Carrol, who was offended by these comments, went to the Microsoft web site and used their feedback feature to demand an apology, and he got one. The apology went like this, "We would like to assure you that when Steve Ballmer implied that most of the music on iPods were stolen, he absolutely did not intend to single out iPod owners for criticism. In fact, given that they have access to their very own - and very popular - online music store, they are likely among the most law-abiding consumers of digital music. Microsoft Windows Media digital rights management (DRM) is a great way to limit piracy, and the main point Steve was trying to convey was that it requires a coordinated effort among many industry partners to do it right. More information on this platform is found on this page: http://www dot microsoft dot com/windows/windowsmedia/drm/faq.aspx"
If you read the apology it seems that it implies that only iPod users have access to the online music store, and doesn't mention that there is a fully working Windows version of it. Ballmer made his original comments about the iPod because it supports MP3, which is the most popular digital music format. Maybe Microsoft just hate it when they have serious competition? Also I don't see how DRM protection is a great way to limit piracy, just remember software Afterdawn has reported in the past that allows such protections to be bypassed. If anything DRM only limits music and is completely unfair to consumers. Oh and let's not forget that using DRM technology only tells your consumers one thing; you think they are all pirates.
Hollywood movie studios and record companies have asked the United States Supreme Court to overturn an earlier ruling which found file sharing companies not liable for copyright infringements carried out by using their software.
Both MPAA and RIAA signed the petition in which they said that if the ruling remains, the value of copyrighted work will be badly undermined.
"This is one of the most important copyright cases ever to reach this court," the groups said in papers filed with the court. "Resolution of the question presented here will largely determine the value, indeed the very significance, of copyright in the digital era."
Centralized P2P services, such as Napster, have been forced to shut down by the recording industry before, but in August a federal appeals court upheld a ruling from April 2003 stated that Grokster Ltd, Streamcast Networks Inc (Morpheus). and Sharman Networks Ltd (Kazaa) are fundamentally different from, for example, Napster. By manufacturing a software that enables people to exchange files doesn't make them liable for the copyright infringements carried out by the users.
Australian appeals court has rejected Sharman Networks' (the owner of Kazaa P2P software)appeal against the raids made to its offices in February this year. Sharman claims that the raids were illegal and that the material seized in raids should not be used in pending lawsuit against it in Australia.
Australian federal court ruled already in March that raids were legal under so-called Anton Piller order.
Judges decided that as the material seized in the raids was in custody of a third party (read: not with music industry, who was behind the lawsuit against the company), it is therefor not "insecure or vulnerable in any way" and that "..we do not see this as amounting to substantial injustice".
Next hearing in the case related to the legality of the raids is scheduled for 14th of October and it seems that the case itself, where the Australian music industry's association MIPI has sued Sharman over alleged copyright infringements, is set to continue on 29th of November.
The well known networking component manufacturer has sent out a press release of their product extending to wireless media applications.
D-Link launches new wireless media player across Europe
D-Link, the true leading global manufacturer of broadband, wireless, and networking hardware for Home and Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) environments today announced the D-Link Wireless Media Player that distributes digital music, video and photos stored on PCs to play and view on a television and/or stereo system.
The Wireless Media Player (DSM-320) enhances the usability of both a home network and a home entertainment centre by creating a seamless connection between computers and consumer electronics. The DSM-320 is a product for the digital home; a product segment that D-Link believes is set to grow rapidly in the next few years. D-Link's media player supports all the most widely used standards, such as MP3, JPEG, MPEG, Xvid and QuickTime, for streaming video and audio on home networks.
"The new wireless media player gives consumers access to more content than ever before in the area where they congregate the most, the living room," said Kevin Wen, European President of D-Link. "Now a family can view a catalogued library of digital photos on their TV or listen to pre-set configured MP3s in surround sound stereo, all of which represent the next step in the evolution and convergence of the CE and PC for the digital home. The look and functionality of the media player is coherent with that of other entertainment devices such as DVD players and therefore removes technology barriers for the customer,” concludes Wen.
Music industry has taken its first major steps within Europe to clamp down the illegal music sharing over the P2P networks and 459 individuals have been sued across six European countries in raids today. Officials targeted British, Austrian, German, Italian, Danish and French P2P users. Music industry claims that they didn't target against casual downloaders, but instead the users who share (as opposed to download) major amounts of music across P2P networks. Users of Kazaa, eDonkey/eMule and Gnutella were amongst the users raided today.
The attack against individuals users comes after months of warnings from music industry's international organization, IFPI and its local counterparts, such as British BPI. "We are taking this action as a last resort and we are doing it after a very long public awareness campaign," said IFPI chairman Jay Berman. IFPI also stated that according to their statistics, 15 percent of P2P users are responsible of sharing over 75 percent of files available in P2P networks.
Danish P2P users were hit hardest this time -- 174 Danish P2P users were sued today. In Germany and Austria, 100 P2P users were sued in both countries.
The "Big Mommah" of all public broadcasting companies in the world, British BBC, announced today that it is developing its own video codec and plans to release a beta version of it in 2005. Corporation claims that the codec, dubbed as Dirac(named after physicist Paul Dirac), delivers the same video quality that MPEG-2 does but using using half of its bitrate.
Most interesting part of the announcement was about its licensing model; BBC plans to launch the whole project under Mozilla license, which doesn't mean that it has anything to do with the web browser, but it means that all code developed in the project will be free to everybody, forever. BBC also stated that they have gone the extra mile investigating prior art and making sure that there will be no surprise patents from third party companies distrupting the development and licensing the codec. Corporation has also patented several parts of the codec and has given these patents to the project, meaning that those patents can't be used, as per licensing terms state, against anyone using the code, ever.
Morpheus plans to release an update of its P2P software that will use new P2P technology to make the network stronger. Such technology is already in use by such networks as the eDonkey network, so you have to question what is actually new about it. Morpheus is planning to use a new network it calls Neonet which was written by a couple of former Harvard students. Dubbed "distributed hash tables,"Neonet's technology transforms the way that searches happen on peer-to-peer networks. This will make it faster and easier to find the rarest of files.
The eDonkey2000 network uses similar technology thgat has proven to pay off as it seems to be on the verge of over-taking Kazaa as the most widely used P2P network. "Peer-to-peer technology to date is not good enough yet," said Michael Weiss, StreamCast's chief executive officer. "People ask, does the world really need another peer-to-peer network? I think the answer is, yes we do, because nobody's gotten it right yet."
Filesharing has become a fairly dangerous task for some sharers of copyrighted materials in many countries. RIAA lawsuits might scare some people but the overall P2P usage is still on the rise. P2P technology has evolved over time, starting with networks like Napster. Napster worked with one central major server that worked as a man-in-the-middle connecting peer to peer to complete file transfers. However, Napster was ruled illegal as it helped mass copyright infringement with its servers. More networks then came along like KaZaa which does not use one central server but uses different technologies to perform searches. Search requests are passed from computer to computer until files are found, then the information is relayed to the user. These networks were found to be legal. The third generation of P2P is already coming and the rise of eDonkey2000 is proof, it will be interesting to see Morpheus's technology in action.
This is the new logo that will appear on CDs provided by Indie label !K7. This is an unusual approach to Copy Protection as other major and indie labels look for new copy protections to prevent P2P piracy. "Copy protection kills customer relationships," the label says on its website. The basic idea is to show customers that they are respected and not treated as potential music pirates. "Only those to whom respect is given show respect themselves," the label notes.
This is not the first case of this backwards approach however, other companies and music labels are realizing the fact that their customers may feel they are being treated unfairly and may stray from buying their products. Sony Music Entertainment and fellow Japanese label Avex both earlier announced their plan to stop using CD lock-down technologies. !K7 believe that the average P2P download is not a lost sale, as the average P2P user is a casual music listener who wouldn't have bought the CD anyway.
This does not mean that the company is happy with the file-sharing situations. The logo "makes it clear that you've bought a CD and you can use it however you want. It's also clear, therefore, that good music has a prerogative - it has a right to be treated with respect," it says, pointing to the quid pro quo: if we agree not to lock-down CDs, we expect you not to abuse it. It will be interesting to see how many more follow in this direction.
The message against illegally copying CDs for uses such as in file-sharing over the Internet has widely sunk in, said the company in it's recent announcement to drop the Copy-Control program. Only a small part of the population illegally copy CDs, continues spokeswoman Kimiko Ohashi.
Sony Corporation has been revising it's digital music strategies recently. A while ago they announced the addition of the MP3 to the supported format of their audio players.
Sony Corp.'s music unit is abandoning its CDs that use built-in technology that limits copying them, after pushing the program for two years.
Such CDs let users copy their music once for free onto a personal computer, but use the Internet to charge a fee for subsequent copying of the same disk.
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The music giant recently started adapting its strategy due to the proliferation of MP3 computer files, used to store music in audio players such as Apple's iPod, which are rapidly becoming a global music industry phenomenon.
American mobile phone operator AT&T has launched its own legal online music store, aimed for mobile phones rather than PCs. Well, that is at least what AT&T wishes users to believe -- but it is not as neat as it sounds, but instead the service, powered by Loudeye's existing licensing deals with record labels and Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format, functions as a mobile frontend to a music store.
The tracks are purchased via a phone, but they can't be downloaded to the phone, but have to be downloaded to customer's PC at later stage instead. The idea of fully-functional "mobile iTunes-clone" sounds like something that would find its following, but according to the AT&T's typical-$0.99-per-song-but-buy-via-phone -service's specs, this one doesn't live up to its expectations.
Only relatively unique feature in service is its co-operation with song-recognition service Music ID that recognizes the song playing when it "hears" even just few seconds of the track. So, AT&T is hoping that its users would launch the Music ID service everytime they walk on a street and make the service to recognize the song playing and allow them to purchase the track and download it at home PC later.
As Sony PS3 will be supporting the Blu Ray, providing the new format with a large number of supporting playback devices, NEC and Toshiba have their eyes at the Microsoft Xbox 2. The fact that PS3 will support Blu-Ray, will give the format significant edge on the market, and therefore this is a clearly a direct counter measure by the HD-DVD camp.
There's been some concern that pricing for systems that make use of these next generation storage formats would be too high given the expected arrival time of Blue Ray and HD-DVD. At CEATEC, NEC revealed that it plans to push HD-DVD as a storage format for the PC by placing HD-DVD drives in its own computers and selling drives to other computer manufacturers. The company aims at making computers with HD-DVD drives available in the latter half of 2005, and aims for drive prices to drop to 300 dollars within half a year of inclusion.
One of our servers has suffered a harddisk failure, and will be taken down for repairs. The maintenance may affect the site and cause pages to load slowly -- or not at all.
The disk in question holds the primary mirror for software and MP3 downloads. Those downloads may cause errors depending on the state of your DNS server. Taking the server down can also affect the loading of images if your DNS server hasn't updated yet.
We are very sorry about the inconvenience, and hope to restore normal operations as soon as possible.
After last few years filled with public outcry from consumer associations, end-users, in some instances from governments and obviously also from Philips(who is the patent and trademark owner of the CD), at least one major record label has woken up. Well, not quite, but at least Sony's Japanese music subdiary Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) has announced that it will stop using technical copy-protection mechanisms in audio CDs it sells in Japan.
From 17th of November, all Sony's audio CDs sold in Japan will be free of any technical copy protection mechanism. Sony's official line for the reasons behind the move is that now Japanese consumers have learned important issues about piracy and legality of music copying and also that now the country's legislation is tougher towards piracy than what it was when the copy protection mechanisms were introduced. But all the signs indicate that the real reasoning is simply that Sony doesn't want to anger its consumers -- at least not in its own home market..
Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg, the inventor of the MP3 audio format, has given a statement regarding the music e-tailing industry's DRM (Digital Rights Management) schemes. Brandenburg sees the swarm of non-compatible protection methods as a threat for the industry, potentially driving paying customers back to the file sharing services.
"It has slowed the download business for sure, and it's doing the same for the gadget makers," said Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of electronic media technologies at the Fraunhofer Institut in Ilemenau, Germany.
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"They didn't listen. Maybe they thought it made commercial sense not to have a standard. It's very strange," he told Reuters on the sidelines of the Popkomm music conference.
The rivalry between the competing high definition formats, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is about to get the first major turn as three Hollywood studios are expected to announce their support for the NEC & Toshiba backed HD-DVD format. Warner Bros, Universal and Paramount are expected to announce their plans to adopt HD-DVD format by the end of 2005 in the near future.
UK digital music firm Wippit are calling upon the music industry to boycott major firms it accuses of fueling illegal P2P services by paying the services for advertisement. On Wippit's list include well known names such as Vodafone, O2, NTL, Renault, MSN subsidiaries Expedia and bCentral, First Direct, Halifax and Natwest. Many of these companies have claimed that their advertisements appearances on P2P related sites and services was a mistake and caused by human error. Services related to the eDonkey network were the most common.
The Recording Industry Association of America filed another 750 suits against alleged illegal song swappers on Thursday. This brings the total number of suits to 6,191. The suits filed Thursday include students from 13 different universities. This action appears to be a response by the RIAA to the facts disclosed recently that showed overall P2P traffic was not negatively affected by their legal actions. "In order for legitimate services to continue their growth, we cannot ignore those who take and distribute music illegally," RIAA President Cary Sherman said. "There must be consequences to breaking the law, or illegal downloading will cripple the music community's ability to support itself now or invest in the future."
