Few hours ago we reached the milestone of 250,000 registered members on our site. This gives us a striking reminder of the popularity of our site and also highlights our growth during the year 2004, as we announced in April, 2004 that we had just reached the milestone of 100,000 registered member. So, in just over 8 months, we've grown our userbase by 150,000 -- it took originally almost five years to reach the first 100,000. Amazing, simply amazing.
We would like to thank all of our users for making this site one of the most popular multimedia sites in the world and hope that we can "deliver" to your needs also in year 2005. We have several new ideas and developments coming up for year 2005 and we wish that we can continue to meet -- or exceed -- the needs of our loyal users, in terms of news reporting, guides, software selection and discussion forums.
I would personally also wish to thank all of our discussion forum moderators who have done excellent job by creating one of the most popular tech discussion forums in the world. Without moderators' work and determination, the forums would have collapsed into an anarchy years ago, but because of their hard work, our forums have built a reputation for the whole site as a place to be and a place to get your questions answered with ease.
The major semiconductor manufacturer ESS warned that their Q4 results would be below expectations. The company puts the blame on slowing demand of DVD and VCD players. Their announcement caused a 6 percent fall in their shares, and it was reflected to other chip makers' shares as well.
The warning came as little surprise to analysts. ESS had issued a similar pre-announcement before its third-quarter earnings release, in which it warned of a slowdown in demand for DVD players. See full story.
In the fourth quarter, growing inventories have combined with sharp price competition to hurt the company. Stanford Financial analyst Chris Chaney said MediaTek, a Taiwanese chipmaker, has been trying to take market share in the DVD player segment, which has resulted in lower prices.
Apex was one of the very first DVD/CD/MP3 hybrid players to hit the market, has retained it's position on the consumer electronics market ever since, especially in the USA. Being one of the first generation MP3 enabled player, the Apex got a lot of attention in the online publications and communities. But now the company seems to be in trouble, as the chairman David Ji has been recently arrested and other companies claim that Apex has some unpaid debts.
Chinese TV maker Sichuan Changhong Electric Appliance Co said on Tuesday that Apex owed it $US467.5 million and provisions against the debt would mean a big loss for 2004.
"The US Consulate-General in Chengdu has confirmed the arrest of David Longfen Ji," said a US embassy spokeswoman in Beijing. "Consular officials have requested and were allowed consular access to this US citizen."
She did not say why Ji, who was born in China, had been arrested. Police in Chengdu, in the south-western province of Sichuan, declined to comment.
The emerging leader in digital entertainment, iRiver, announced the H-10, a new MP3 portable HDD music player with 5GB of internal storage and an array of features. Since the device is much smaller and lighter than most other players, it can be put into the pocket-able jukebox category. It gives customers the option to use familiar folder navigation to sort through files more easily. It comes bundled with earphones, carrying case, USB 2.0 and AC adapter. Of all the new features, the most noticeable is the addiction of a new LCD colour display, and also allows you to listen to FM radio stations.
"This 5GB player is so feature packed, that it will also appeal to business users too as it can also be used as a voice recorder and hard disk storage drive. This makes the H-10 an ideal travel companion" said Dushyant Nagpal - Brand Manager for iRiver in UAE. "iRiver has done it once again. Delivering an outstanding product with such power features not yet seen in products currently prevailing in our region. This truly is a honour for us to be able to bring the H-10 to UAE where currently the sales of hard disk drive players is on the rise" said Ashok Daryanani - General Manager Sales and Marketing, Space Distribution, Dubai.
President of InternetMovies.com Inc, Michael Jay Rossi plans to ask the United States Supreme Court to review the case "Rossi vs. Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)" for the wrongful shutdown of his site in 2001. The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that good faith belief under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is subjective and not objective. In 2001 the MPAA claimed that InternetMovies.com had The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King available for download, which was not even finished production until 2003. The MPAA sent a cease and desist letter to the site's ISP demanding that it be shut down.
"MPAA communications with my ISP were unreasonable and outrageous and without just cause or excuse and beyond all bounds of decency -- violating the DMCA. The courts must have overlooked that I could not have made a movie downloadable 3 years in the future, which shows that the MPAA was not within the boundaries of decency and that the court should not have ruled in favor of the MPAA." said Rossi. First Amendment litigator James H. Fosbinder, who is representing Rossi, said InternetMovies.com never had the capacity to provide movie downloads and characterized the statements cited by the court as "hyperbole."
Who hasn't heard the term BitTorrent recently? First demonstrated back in 2002, the BitTorrent definitely was and is the P2P phenomena of the 2004. Recently it really started to make headlines in 'old school media', as .torrent serving web sites were being busted by the authorities. The Wired has published a long and interesting article about BitTorrent and it's author Bram Cohen - worth checking out.
Movie studios hate it. File-swappers love it. Bram Cohen's blazing-fast P2P software has turned the Internet into a universal TiVo. For free video-on-demand, just click here.
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Bram Cohen is the creator of BitTorrent, one of the most successful peer-to-peer programs ever. BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3. Analysts at CacheLogic, an Internet-traffic analysis firm in Cambridge, England, report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet. Cohen showed his code to the world at a hacker conference in 2002, as a free, open source project aimed at geeks who need a cheap way to swap Linux software online. But the real audience turns out to be TV and movie fanatics.
German court has decided in favor of Germany's recording industry's lobby group, the VG Wort, in a dispute that has been going on between it and the country's largest PC maker, Fujitsu Siemens. The decision means that Germany will become the first country in Europe to apply a copyright levy of €12 (appx. $16.33) on all new PCs sold.
Copyright levy as a concept is a rather widespread and widely accepted system across the western countries. Many countries allow home users slightly more copyrights, such as a permission to make limited number of copies of CDs or DVDs they've rented or loaned from their friends for their personal use. The copyright levy is then applied to the recordable storage medium -- originally on analog C cassettes, later to blank video tapes, then to blank CDRs and DVDRs -- and that paid levy is then paid to organizations representing artists, composers, etc compensating them for lost revenue. And now, German court has decided that all PCs are theoretically just multimedia storages and should be treated the same way as blank VHS tapes.
Fujitsu Siemens is considering to appeal the case. The decision, if it stays unchanged in higher courts as well, will apply to all new PCs sold in Germany. CEO of Fujitsu Siemens, Bernd Bischoff, called the copyright levy "a de facto tax on PCs".
The war between the Blu-Ray camp and the companies supporting the HD-DVD doesn't seem to take holidays. Just recently, the HD-DVD camp introduced a hybrid DVD/HD-DVD disc that could store both, standard "old-fashioned" DVD material (upto 4.38GB) and also 15GB of HD-DVD material on a separate HD-DVD layer and thus could be used also with current generation of DVD players.
Now, JVC has released a similar solution for Blu-Ray discs -- the new hybrid Blu-Ray/DVD disc takes a further step and provides a Blu-Ray layer that can be read with Blu-Ray players, but also two layers (equivalent of 8.5GB) for DVD storage, thus making it possible to store regular dual layer DVD to the DVD layers and a 25GB high-defition version of the movie to the Blu-Ray layer.
So, the fight for the crown of "the next generation DVD" is still heating up -- even when the most of the world doesn't even have HDTV -capable TV sets and only Blu-Ray camp has actual products already on store shelves (and only in Japan). Now, which camp will bring out a quad-layer discs that could store two layers of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD data and two layers of DVD data? And when we will see recordable versions of such discs? As both groups plan to bring out their products to consumers by end of 2005, next year will be very, very interesting in terms of digital video..
The AfterDawn.com team would like to wish all our users merry Christmas and a happy new year! The year 2004 has been absolutely amazing in terms of site growth, user growth and the positive feedback we've received throughout the year. Thank you!
Now it's time to take a little break, we'll be back after the holidays. We'd also like to remind our users to participate on our holiday competition before it closes on 31st of December.
Online movie rental war in the United States is heating up between the world's largest movie rental chain Blockbuster and the number one online movie rental service, Netflix. The race has been in the works for years now, but the last few months have been interesting, as both companies have discounted heavily their subscription prices.
Latest move was made by Blockbuster, who announced today that it will cut its cheapest monthly subscription price by $2.50 to $14.99 a month (€11.20) and guarantees the price until January, 2006. However, this time Netflix is not going to follow the suit; it announced quickly after Blockbuster's price cut that it will maintain its current pricing for all of its subscription services.
But Netflix's chief executive pointed out how desperate Blockbuster must feel right now and how committed they are to online rentals, as they seem to be prepared to sacrifice their traditional video store business in order to fight off the competition from Netflix, Wal-Mart and others. "In my view, Blockbuster just killed the video store by offering $15 pricing for online, but maintaining $25 a month for store-based subscriptions," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said. "They are telling their customers to go online."
The raids have definitely had an impact. The authorities have recently had their target on the sites offering BitTorrent links, busting down web sites around the globe. Since the MPAA raids last week, several major BitTorrent sites have been quick to shut down their operations. BitTorrent was the rising star in the P2P scene, but now it seems that in the future it will only be used what it was designed for - efficiently distributing legal content, and saving content provider bandwidth.
Nevertheless, the creator of the technology, Bram Cohen, said he's not surprised at the latest developments. BitTorrent was always designed for efficient distribution of big files, not underground file-swapping that has to keep a step ahead of the law, he said. Some of the same features that made it useful have rendered it deeply susceptible to the overnight crisis in which the file traders have now found themselves.
"It's weird that it hasn't happened sooner," Cohen said. "The main reason warez (a slang term for illegally distributed software) has become so big is that it hasn't been cracked down on. They've been getting away with being pretty flagrant."
Vital: Pias, a European dance music distribution company has signed a deal with Apple to provide the music catalogs of all of its dance record labels to iTunes Europe.
The deal is similar to the one that company had already in place with iTunes in the U.S., but now also provides its small labels an access to their core audience in Europe via iTunes as well. Some of the labels that Vital: Pias represents already had a deal in place with iTunes in Europe.
The labels that Vital: Pias represent include Domino, B-Unique and Global Undergound.
Music industry giants have agreed on a deal that aims to boost developement of new music distribution methods in the U.S. and Canada. The formats range from on-demand music videos, mobile phone ring tones, to two sided DualDisc CD/DVD hybrids.
Whenever new music products are developed, music publishers, which own the copyrights to the songs, and recorded music companies, which own the rights to the recordings, have to negotiate how to divvy up the proceeds.
"I think we've found a way to give everyone some comfort," Andrew Lack, SonyBMG's CEO, told The Post.
"It gives us a few years to get our feet wet. Everyone wants to be assured they are getting their fair share."
SonyBMG, which, depending on how it's doing in the charts in a given week, is either the first- or second-largest music company in the U.S., while EMI Music Publishing is the world's largest music publisher.
Martin Bandier, the chairman and CEO of EMI Music Publishing, said he hopes to sign agreements with other major record companies.
TRHR alerted us about Torrentbits closing down by using our news submission form. Aswell as Torrentbits, BitTorrent giant Suprnova.org has also decided to stop offering torrent files. The following is pasted from the Suprnova homepage.
Greetings everybody,
As you have probably noticed, we have often had downtimes. This was because it was so hard to keep this site up!
But now we are sorry to inform you all, that SuprNova is closing down for good in the way that we all know it.
We do not know if SuprNova is going to return, but it is certainly not going to be hosting any more torrent links.
We are very sorry for this, but there was no other way, we have tried everything.
Thank you all that helped us, by donating mirrors or something else, by uploading and seeding files, by helping people out on IRC and on forum, by spreading the word about SuprNova.org.
It is a sad day for all of us!
Please visit SuprNova.org every once in a while to get the latest news on what is happening and if there is anything new to report on.
As we wish to maintain the nice comunity that we created, we are kepping forums and irc servers open.
Thank you all and Goodbye!
sloncek & the rest of the SuprNova Team
The Recording Industry will soon ask the Red Cross to freeze a trust fund allegedly controlled by the owners of Sharman Networks, an Australian Software company that owns the Kazaa P2P client. The music industry maintains that Sharman, the maker of the Kazaa peer-to-peer software, is owned by several companies through a trust fund registered in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. The Red Cross is the only beneficiary specifically named in the trust, so the recording industry, which is suing Sharman, is asking the organization to voluntarily freeze the fund until a verdict is reached in the Australian Federal Court.
"We’re preparing our approach to the International Red Cross,” says Michael Speck of Australia’s Music Industry Piracy Investigations, which spearheads the prosecution of accused pirates. "I believe this whole thing will come as a complete surprise to them, and we’re only approaching them to stop them disposing of any funds." A lawyer acting in Sharman’s defense, Mary Still said that the approach the recording industry is taking to such a charitable organization is quite staggering. "It would be incredibly disappointing if we had to sue them," said Speck, a comment that should spark controversy.
The Recording Industry Association of America has continued its battle against file-sharing by suing yet another 754 U.S. file swappers it alleges to have distributed Copyrighted tracks through P2P networks. Among the 754 people are 20 students the RIAA accuses of using University networks to distribute MP3. This brings the total number sued to 7,704 since September 2003 when the RIAA first launched its campaign against unauthorized file sharing. European lawsuits did not follow until about a year later.
The RIAA is confident that this "sue em all" tactic is working and is slowing down file-sharing. However, latest studies have indicated that the RIAA's tactics have not effected P2P use overall, but that P2P use is growing at a huge rate. In order to issue a subpoena against the user's ISP, the RIAA first must gather evidence of the user's P2P activity. They can then retrieve the identity of user from the IP address that was being used for infringement from the ISP. In some cases in the U.S. the RIAA have to file a "john doe" lawsuit against the defendant before they will even learn the true identity of the user.
A Canadian judge today ruled that a levy imposed on MP3 players that would be distributed to record labels and other copyright holders to compensate for revenue lost due to P2P use was illegal. The case was brought before the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal after the Copyright Board of Canada began demanding that player manufacturers cough up $2 for each player with a capacity of less than 1GB, $15 for 1-10GB players and $25 for devices with storage of more than 10GB in December 2003. "While the Copyright Board of Canada is indeed permitted by Canada's Copyright Act to tax sales of blank media, the terms of the Act do not allow it to levy a similar fee from MP3 player makers,"Mr Justice Marc Noël said.
Judge Noël said he understood the Boards need to compensate artists and Copyright holders for potential lost revenue by distributing the levies it receives from sales of blank media, but the authority to impose a levy on an MP3 player still has to be found in the Act. The ruling will lead to the prices for mp3 players dropping dramatically. However it seems likely that organizations such as the Canadian Private Copying Collective, which distributes the proceeds of the levies to artists and recording companies, are pondering whether to take the case to Canada's Supreme Court in a bid to have Judge Noël's ruling overturned. At least, they will attempt to lobby the Canadian Government to amend the Copyright Act to take MP3 players and other such devices into account.
As you all have read or noticed by now; some of the biggest P2P sites in existence have been shut down. The most targeted sites have been BitTorrent sites and eDonkey2000 linking sites. The power behind the eDonkey2000 network is the eD2K linking resources, which provide links to real files. ShareReactor was long regarded as the best eD2K linking site until it was shut down by Swiss authorities in March 2004. After ShareReactor was closed, ShareConnector became the next favorite eD2K linking site, but on the 14th of December the news circulated that ShareConnector had been shutdown by Dutch authorities. Also shutdown by Dutch authorities was Releases4U, another linking site.
Another major site that had eD2K links as well as being a huge BitTorrent resource was Finreactor. The Administrators of the Finnish site has their computers seized by the National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi) after it received a request from Finnish copyright associations, including the BSA and Teosto (the Finnish equivalent of RIAA). Read about it here.
Apple's iTunes music store has now sold 200m songs the company has said. In October this year the company reported having sold 150m songs with its store, with an average of about 4m songs per week. This average has risen to 4.76m per week. Apple had forecasted it would reach the 200m mark by Christmas. Between now and Christmas there is plenty of time for users to download about 10m more songs. While telling you about the total number of music download sales, Apple always seems to leave out the total number of users for the iTunes music stores, a figure which could really shed some light on the actual success of the store and possibly on whether the future looks as good as its past.
For now, it seems the Gold is the big figure of sales in this very early time of digital downloads. Apple is also expected to sell 4 million iPod's this quarter, which gives them many more potential customers. iTunes continues to rule in the digital music download market, but competition is growing by the day with new online music stores being opened and existing music stores being improved. Only a few weeks ago, Napster reported that their total of songs available in the UK has reached over 1 million.
The Motion Pictures Association of America is to launch a legal attack on BitTorrent users who abuse the technology developed by Bram Cohen in 2001, to share illegal copies of movies. BitTorrent was developed to make a quicker way of spreading large files around a network. It breaks files up into little segments and users who are downloading the file are also uploading it to other users. This takes an enormous amount of pressure off a source server. A server known as a tracker keeps track of details among filesharers to help them get more sources for their file and keeps track of the amount of the file each user has.
Since BitTorrent appeared in 2001, more and more sites have popped up that allow users to share pirated files. Instead of operating like a P2P network, users download a .torrent file which contains details on the tracker and file information. The MPAA is very late in its action against BitTorrent trading. Files that are currently being shared tend to share very quickly; this has attracted millions of users to torrent sites. However, since BitTorrent sites don’t actually offer files, just torrent files, the legality of these sites is unknown.
Ahead Software is no more. The company that has gained recognition by developing the Nero Burning ROM product line. The name of their flagship product is a funny reference to the Roman emperor who became famous for burning his city. Now they want to celebrate the world's most famous pyromaniac as their new corporate identity as well.
“We have decided to change our name to Nero because it’s the name that our users and partners trust,” says CEO Richard Lesser. “We want to reinforce Nero’s tremendous achievements and brand name value to create an even stronger view of our products and goals.”
“With the enormous popularity and success of the Nero product in the Americas, it’s a logical evolution to adopt the highly recognized product name as our new corporate name” says Udo Eberlein, President of Ahead Inc.
"For the Asian markets, Nero is the symbol of industry excellence and leadership in digital media technology" says Charly Lippoth, President of Ahead KK. “The name change will strengthen this position even further.”
Nero’s award-winning and innovative products have received critical acclaim throughout the World. Nero’s digital media software occupies a unique leadership role in the industry, having entered into key strategic partnerships over the years with world-leading CD and DVD drive manufacturers, and PC OEMs, who all demand the best in digital media. With Nero Digital, the consumers are offered technical solutions to accelerate the coalescence between the IT and the CE market.
Finnish authorities have today seized the computers of the administrators of Finnish site Finreactor which was one of the largest sites in Finland listing links to copyrighted materials in BitTorrent network.
According to sources, National Bureau of Investigation(Keskusrikospoliisi) raided the admins' homes today and seized all the computer equipment and storage media for further investigation, but released the suspects shortly after the raid. The site itself has been down since early hours of today. Site had over 37,000 registered members and had links to more than 6,000 pirated releases on BitTorrent network. Additionally, the forums of the site boasted a large number of links to releases in other P2P networks, most notably in eDonkey network.
Apparently the NBI acted after it received a request from Finnish copyright associations, including the BSA and Teosto(the Finnish equivalent of RIAA).
According to USA Today, several American colleges are signing up with legal online music services and expect to launch the services for their students by January, 2005 rather than by next semester (September) due increased demand from students.
Previously the adoption of school-wide licensing deals with likes of Napster have been driven by campus administrators willing to cut down their bandwidth requirements as use of centralized, legal online music service is bound to reduce the enormous P2P traffic many dorms and campuses face. But since RIAA's jihad against P2P users in the United States seems to continue forever, many students have become to realize that having an option to download legal tracks with heavily subsidized prices doesn't sound too bad. Specially after many of the recent P2P lawsuits have been brought against students themselves.
One of the winners in this new mass-licensing game seems to be a company called Cdigix which, unlike its competitors, also provides educational material and movies via its service. One of the universities to sign up with Cdigiz is University of Michigan which will ask its students to cough up $2.50 a month in order to use the service.
UK Film Council, an association that represents British film industry and is backed by the British government, is urging the government to change the legislation in order to tackle an increasing movie piracy in the United Kingdom.
Organization's main targets are counterfeit DVDs that represent a direct threat to legal DVD sales and specifically wants to have new powers to crack down the so-called "car boot sale culture" for counterfeit DVD movies. According to the organization, UK has now the highest level of movie piracy in the western Europe, annual losses adding up to £500M (€723M, $963M).
Organization's proposals include banning camcorders from movie theatres, handing out rewards for people who help to crack down pirates and putting pressure on countries that have "too relaxed" copyright legislation (most notably selected Asian countries). Interestingly though, one of the organization's suggestions was to provide a legal ways to buy movies over the Net -- a market that is still lacking its own "iTunes for movies" service that would make purchasing movies online easy and with as little restrictions as possible.
Sony's answer to Nintendo's GameBoy line and to Nokia's NGage, a handheld PSP console went on sale in Japan today. Sony expects three million units to be sold by March 2005 and aims to take on the GameBoy DS, the latest handheld by Nintendo, which was released in November.
The console has already drawn a huge interest in Japan and thousands of shoppers were queueing to be the first ones to get the new console this morning, when an initial shipment of 200,000 units were released. PSP costs 19,800 yen in Japan ($188, €142) which is slightly more than its main rival's, GameBoy DS's price, which sells for appx. $150. Nintendo expects to ship more than 5 million units of its DS console by March 2005.
eBay's payment system, PayPal, can now be used by iTunes customers to purchase music downloads in the United States. Other music download services are already accepting PayPal payments for music downloads but the deal with the market-leading iTunes is seen as important. "This is a big win for our off-eBay business," PayPal's spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt said. PayPal gets 70% of business from eBay but continues to win new deals with more firms. In some cases, some online businesses only accept PayPal payments.
PayPal profits from taking a small percentage of a transaction is performs. It currently has around 56,000,000 registered users worldwide. PayPal sales reached $166m between July and September, a 56% increase on the same period in 2003. The service was acquired by online auction giant eBay in 2002. Since then it has received a lot of success but also has had its hiccups, including service failures in October following a software upgrade and accusations of overstating the level of protection it offered in the event of non-arrival of goods.
Martin Mullen, a 50 year old Canadian Man, has been jailed for 7 years after he admitted to being the leader of a sophisticated satellite TV piracy ring that sold hacked smart cards in Canada and the United States. He was also ordered to pay a sum of $24m to DirecTV and their smart card provider NDS Ltd. He pled guilty in a federal court in Tampa, Florida in September last year to conspiracy to violate anti-piracy laws and entering the United States illegally after being deported years earlier in an unrelated matter. Mullen has been called an expert at cracking smart cards that are issues to subscribers which allow them to view TV channels that they pay for.
Usually, when a subscriber inserts the card into the set top box, a satellite signal will then determine which channels this user is allowed to watch. This operation is based by a unique identification number that is coded into every issued smart card. Mullen apparently headed a network of over 100 individuals that sell thousands of hacked smart cards which allow access to all channels. "The severe sentence handed down by the court is clearly warranted in this case and we applaud the judge's decision," said Jim Whalen, senior director of DirecTV's Signal Integrity Department, in a statement. "This sentence serves as a stark reminder that the sale and distribution of signal theft devices has grave consequences."
United States Supreme Court has agreed to review the decision by the Appeals Court of 9th Circuit which found P2P operators Grokster and Streamcast were not liable for the copyright infringements that take place in their P2P networks.
Movie and music industry associations complained about the decision to Supreme Court and now the court has granted a new trial for the case. Whatever the Supreme Court's decision is, it will be final, as in the U.S., Supreme Court's decisions can't be overturned and they act as ultimate guidelines for lower courts on how to implement the existing legislation.
The new case is expected to open in spring 2005 and the ruling is expected by July, 2005.
The online retail giant Amazon has launched an online DVD rental service in the UK, trying to tap into country's growing shift towards online rentals and also aiming to steal a decent market size before the de facto online rental service Netflix launches its own British service.
However, Amazon's service has few nags compared to other similar services already in place in the UK -- its service has a monthly rental ceiling -- its cheapest service that costs £7.99 a month allows users to have two movies at home at any given time, but allows only four DVDs to be rented each month. To spice up its offer, Amazon also offers 10 percent off for DVD purchases made via its UK website for rental service customers.
Disney announced yesterday that it will support Blu-Ray as its choice for the next generation optical format, instead of the HD-DVD. Disney's announcement means basically that it is more and more unclear which "next generation" format will take over once DVD runs out of steam, as all the major Hollywood studios are almost equally split over the two competing blue-laser technologies.
After Disney's announcement, Blu-Ray camp includes virtually all the major consumer electronic companies, such as Sony, Pioneer and Philips and also some heavy-weight studios like Disney, Sony and MGM. Meanwhile, HD-DVD camp hasn't been resting either -- Toshiba just recently announced a hybrid DVD/HD-DVD disc format and its supporters include studios like Universal and Warner Bros.
As the confusion over the winning next generation optical disc format continues, it is obvious that the transition from DVDs to high-resolution blue-laser formats will begin next year, as HDTV-capable sets get more and more popular, specially in the United States and in Japan, and people will begin to look for content that supports the resolution the TV sets are capable of.
Lawyer for Sharman Networks, Mark Lemming, has accused University of Melbourne professor Leon Sterling of switching sides in the Kazaa trial currently taking place in Sydney Australia. He alleges that at one time Leon Sterling had offered to be an expert witness for Sharman Networks, but later emailed them withdrawing an offer to be an expert witness for Sharman during the civil trial, saying that writing a report requested by Sharman would be "stretching his expertise." During cross-examination, Lemming used the e-mail to question Sterling's expertise in the trial against the company, which makes the Kazaa peer-to-peer software. "Your lack of experience in P2P makes it difficult for you to tell the court of any feasibility for the propositions you mentioned," Lemming said.
Sterling claims that it was not possible for him to put together an expert report on how the Kazaa P2P network works because of the limited time he had to do it. Sterling added that he was not able to do a feasibility study on the proposals that he made and acknowledged that any filtering done in Sharman's Kazaa system would not be 100 percent efficient. However on Tuesday, Sterling made suggestions on how to filter and monitor the network, and he continues to back his suggestions, calling them "all plausible mechanisms" that can be added to the Kazaa system.
Halo 2 is by far one this years most anticipated games. It seems now that most gamers are getting increasingly interested in online gaming using their broadband service with their gaming consoles. It has been reported by network monitoring company Sandvine, that traffic on the Xbox live gaming network had increased fourfold on Halo 2's release date and is showing no signs of slowing down. Fears are that some networks may not be able to handle the amount of bandwidth that is now being demanded by gamers. But the surge in numbers and huge demands for bandwidth should be a wake-up call to the industry which must ensure that their networks can cope with the increases in traffic, said Sandvine's chief technology officer Marc Morin.
Since the demand for bandwidth has become very high these days, more and more service providers are implementing systems that make their networks more intelligent, and gather information on what bandwidth is being used for what purpose. With a network like this, ISP's could very easily prioritize or reserve bandwidth for online gaming through gaming consoles. However, if the hunger for bandwidth keeps rising it seems possible that more ISP's will move to a system of charging customers by the amount of bandwidth that they use.
Airtel, one of India’s largest mobile service providers will show the premiere of a movie called "Rok Sako To Rok Lo" ("Stop Me If You Can") right on customers handsets in ten major Indian cities including Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. This is all made possible by a third-generation cellular technology that delivers broadband-like data speeds to mobile devices called EDGE or Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution. Customers who have EDGE enabled handsets can tune into a live stream of the movie tomorrow at 3pm Indian standard time. "Airtel has become the first cellular service in the world to premiere a full-length movie on mobile,"Atul Bindal, Airtel's director for mobility, said in a statement.
Airtel have an entertainment portal called Airtel Live which is what the customers will be using to watch the streaming movie. The movie cannot be downloaded or copied so customers will have to make sure that they log on to Airtel live at the proper time. It will only take a matter of seconds after they click to view the movie for it to appear streaming live on their handset. Mobile phone companies have long being promoting these new types of systems to consumers. In the United States, the general public does not seem to be over enthusiastic about it, but in some countries, the demand is becoming quite high.
The Federal Trade Commission has sent a letter to Congress highlighting some efforts made by P2P software companies are making to disclose potential online risks. P2P has long been under fire from legislators because they believe it exposes users to spyware and pornography and also the possibility of lawsuits from the Recording Industry or Movie Industry. Just last month, Kazaa made it to the top of the spyware list, a list compiled of the programs that slow down your computer most by installing useless adware and registry entries. However, P2P software companies make a very good argument; you expose yourself to similar risks by just surfing the Internet.
However P2P companies have been working closely with the FTC to try to develop better consumer notification techniques. The FTC included several of those proposals with its letter to Congress, saying that when implemented, they would do a better job of warning consumers. "(Peer-to-peer) industry members have developed proposed risk disclosures that we believe would be a substantial improvement over current practices," FTC Chair Deborah Platt Majoras wrote in the letter. "We intend to monitor and report back to interested members of Congress on the extent to which P2P file-sharing program distributors implement these proposed risk disclosures."
We've seen the two sided CD/DVD format, but this next generation hybrid is a bit more sophisticated. The regular DVD and High Definition data are stored on the same side, but to different layers. This means that the top side is still available for coating and printing. The point of all this is of course to ease the transition away from DVDs to the new format.
The discs contain two layers, an upper DVD layer with a capacity of 4.7GB and a lower HD-DVD layer with a15GB capacity, says Masato Otsuka, general manager of Memory-Tech's engineering department.
Mass production will start in October or November next year, which is about the same time as the company plans to produce read-only HD-DVDs. The company has six lines that can each produce up to 700,000 of these kinds of discs per month.
In the Asia-Pacific, piracy has become big business. The Motion Pictures Association (MPA) estimated that every year, the U.S. movie industry loses around $718m in potential revenue. It blames the growth of criminal activity, the increasingly easy ways to copy optical discs illegally and the growth of ultra high speed Internet connections and the numbers of P2P networks that keep popping up on a daily basis. These factors have turned piracy in the Asia-Pacific into a multi million dollar market. In the past, piracy on this scale came usually from factories pirating thousands of CD's and DVD's. Now it gets harder as these factories have been replaced by numbers of individuals pirating material in their homes and selling the DVD's and CD's to the re-sellers.
This new form of mass piracy has made it harder to crack down on. The MPA investigated 10,660 cases of piracy in the first half of 2004 and also assisted law enforcement in over 4000 raids in the Asia-Pacific region. 11.8m illegal optical discs were seized and 2000 criminal legal actions were initiated. The top three Asia-Pacific markets for seizures of pirated VCD and DVD product were mainland China, Hong Kong and Malaysia whilst Australia and South Korea accounted for around 80 per cent of the recordable discs (DVD-Rs) seized in the region. The MPA also started an anti-piracy rewards program in the region, which led to many more raids and seizures than the first half of 2004, fueled by tips from members of the public. New anti-piracy ads have also hit theatre's there, once again reminding the viewers, that piracy is a crime.
..and we are not talking about software here. The Y! has extended the usage of their well known brand to consumer electronics hardware, namely DVD players and home theatre systems. The product line seems to focus in compact or portable devices, and the designs are quite radical and certainly differ from the mainstream.
Discover a DVD player in an entirely new way…full functionality meets true life style versatility. Watch and listen to all your favorite video and audio formats. View your favorite digital photos on any TV with an integrated card reader and USB port on selected models. The YDP-530 is DivX® certified which allows you to view content downloaded off the internet. Whether it’s an ultra compact design for use in any room in the house, or a unique form factor inspired by cutting edge convergence features, Yahoo! has a refreshingly new solution for you!
Apple has begun threatening the owner of the itunes.co.uk domain, accusing him of being a cybersquatter. They have taken him to UK registry Nominet looking for ownership of the domain name. The owner is Benjamin Cohen, who just happens to have a father who is a solicitor. Cohen registered the itunes.co.uk domain name on 7th November 2000, whereas Apple were only had the trademark for "iTunes" published in the Trade Marks Journal on 6 December 2000. It was granted a limited trademark that did not cover music products on 23 March 2001, and eventually went live with its iTunes offering in June 2004. Cohen says he had no idea Apple were planning to launch an iTunes service.
So now four years after Cohen registered the itunes.co.uk domain, Apple have decided to try taking the domain name. Two days after Cohen registered the domain he made use of it by forwarding it to a music search engine service at his CyberBritain site. Since November this year, numerous letters have been sent to CyberBritain from Apple, including an offer of a small sum of money for the domain. Now Apple has taken the issue to Nominet, where it will be put through the organization’s domain resolution process. Cohen admits however that if his father was not a solicitor and hadn't explained to him about the laws surrounding this issue, he would have given into pressure from Apple by now. He is confident however, that CyberBritain will win this battle.
Website MPC (MPEG Play Center) has published an interesting article about the technology used for the Oscar movie awards. The MPAA has been disappointed and annoyed by the fact that so many 'screening copies' released for Osacar nominate reviews ended up being copied and distributed on the Internet. According to the review, they used VHS tapes to prevent this from happening last year, but this year the solution is far more advanced. They are using a modified KiSS DVD player for increased security.
They actually distribute the movies on disk media but not DVD's. They are encrypted in totally different ways which they brought to us and we built a DVD player based on that and on the Dp-600 which meets the security requirements. You can say it's a DP-600 with a different drive.
I can say the player has been severely debugged for DVD playback.
When people see this platform they will be very satisfied.
The article also reveals some technology improvements by latest KiSS products, so check it out at MPEG-Playcenter.com
After a very successful year last year, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, has even more success to look forward to with the upcoming release of the Special Extended DVD Edition. The Extended DVD Edition has 50 extra minutes of scenes that were cut from the original theatrical version, including the last confrontation between Saruman and the Fellowship, a very important part of the Lord of the Rings story. However, days ago people could download the movie for free from the Internet when a 2GB XviD copy of the movie appeared online. Today, to follow the XviD copy is a much higher quality DVD release of this movie.
It's not a big thing anymore to see major releases like this leak onto the Internet. I decided to investigate a bit and see what the general attitude is towards the early leak of this movie is. The result is quite amazing, in almost all sites where downloader’s were allowed to comment, they either said they were going to download the movie and later buy the 4Disc DVD retail version or not download it and wait for its release date. The retail set will contain 4 DVD's packed full of bonus material, whereas the copy of it floating around online is only 2 DVD-5's, where the video has been re-encoded to shrink the overall size.
The UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT), has reported Apple's hugely successful iTunes music download store to the European Commission claiming that it infringes European Trade regulations. Apple seems to want to open single music stores for most European states, which goes against the laws which govern the free movement of goods and services between EU member states - the single market. In the UK, customers pay 79p per download, and in France customers pay 99c. At the current exchange rate 99c in euro is 68p. The problem is, Apple will not allow UK customers to purchase music from its French store.
Apple blames the fact that different states have different have different music licensing regimes and it's the terms of its licenses that prevent it from selling music from one store to a customer in a different state. The differential pricing is also a result of this licensing mess, and from differing tax regimes between EU member states. Earlier this year the European Commission told Union's various rights agencies to devise a standard, cross-border licensing scheme as it is already aware of the problem with the iTunes music store. The same problems put Napster off opening stores all over Europe in April, and they settled for a UK-only launch.
Recording industry brought in several witnesses today in closely watched trial that is taking place in Australia where the worldwide record labels have sued Sharman Networks, the parent company of the P2P network Kazaa. Witnesses were brought in to show that Sharman can, despite its claims, monitor its network and what material is shared through it.
The issue, whether Sharman is able to effectively control its network, is crucial for the outcome of the trial, as if judge finds that Sharman in deed can control its network, but has failed to do so, it might be considered that Sharman has infringed record labels' copyrights.
However, the witnesses brought in by the recording industry were focusing on the fact that various types of "sniffers" -- basically modified Kazaa clients that condone searches across the network for specified word, phrases and names -- can be used to find out whether users are sharing illegal material or not. The claim is obviously true, as anyone can go to the network and do searches, download the files found by the search and check whether the files are what they claimed to be in the filename. But does that mean that the network can be controlled by the Sharman or not? As such monitoring would rely purely on filename recognition and continuous external monitoring, it is hard to see whether this is the case.
Apple and the Band Aid charity have reached an agreement to sell the charity's single via iTunes UK for the same price as normal tracks are sold via the service. But to back the charity's cause, Apple has agreed to donate a further £0.70 to the charity for each song sold via iTunes.
Additionally, the original 1984 song is now also available via iTunes UK and all of its proceeds will go to the charity as well.
The new single contains a remake of the 1984 classic "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and is expected to become the fastest selling single in the UK for the year 2004.
Big time anti-piracy operation has been successfully executed in the high lands, reports the BBC. According to the source, illegal CDs, DVDs, software and games have been seized for a stunning value of 10 million pounds. The pirated material included some very fresh titles, such as movie The Incredibles. The 'Operation Vendura' has been quite successful.
Operation Vendura
28 arrests over five days
30 raids at 28 private addresses and two markets
£10m-plus worth of items seized
3,992 music CDs
2,979 videos and DVDs
1,452 porn and computer discs
21 high-speed PCs, burners, printers seized
15 suspects to be reported to fiscal on copyright and trademark charges
The operation began several months ago when officers from the Central Scotland Police Computer Crime Unit started gathering intelligence from local markets where the counterfeit trade is said to be rife.
Few hours ago we reached the milestone of 250,000 registered members on our site. This gives us a striking reminder of the popularity of our site and also highlights our growth during the year 2004, as we announced in April, 2004 that we had just reached the milestone of 100,000 registered member. So, in just over 8 months, we've grown our userbase by 150,000 -- it took originally almost five years to reach the first 100,000. Amazing, simply amazing.
The major semiconductor manufacturer ESS warned that their Q4 results would be below expectations. The company puts the blame on slowing demand of DVD and VCD players. Their announcement caused a 6 percent fall in their shares, and it was reflected to other chip makers' shares as well.
The emerging leader in digital entertainment, iRiver, announced the H-10, a new MP3 portable HDD music player with 5GB of internal storage and an array of features. Since the device is much smaller and lighter than most other players, it can be put into the pocket-able jukebox category. It gives customers the option to use familiar folder navigation to sort through files more easily. It comes bundled with earphones, carrying case, USB 2.0 and AC adapter. Of all the new features, the most noticeable is the addiction of a new LCD colour display, and also allows you to listen to FM radio stations.
