The classic Clint Eastwood character Dirty Harry will be reborn on the next generation gaming consoles. While Mr.Eastwood keeps on collecting oscars for his most recent work, the brutal police detective is propably the character he is most memorable from.
The Dirty Harry series begun back in the 1971 with the self titled "Dirty Harry", and was finished with the "The Dead Pool" in the late 80's. In the upcoming console version Mr. Eastwoods intends to deliver the classic movie character for the younger generations, so the game will somewhat related to the original films.
In a prepared statement, Mr. Eastwood said the games, "will also introduce this memorable film character to new generations on a medium they appreciate." The game will include characters and settings from the five-film franchise, which began with "Dirty Harry" in 1971 and ended with "The Dead Pool" in 1988. But the story line will be original. "We are not retelling the stories that have already been told," said Jason Hall, senior vice president of Warner Brothers Interactive.
So far very little information is available about the project, and even the game genre remains a secret. Personally I would be a little disappointed if Harry turns into a regular console shooting gallery. If you think about the original Dirty Harry -movie, it was not the amount of shooting and killing that made it such a thrilling experience. It was the anticipation, and growing intensity of the film, which was boosted by bits of brutal violence here are there -- but not constantly. How to achieve the same atmosphere in a video game? Anyway, the releases are expected for Xbox2 and PS3 in 2005 and 2006.
The market for online legal music downloads is strong enough to take a price hike according to major record labels. Several major record labels are apparently in talks with online music stores to get them to increase music download prices, according to the FT. In the United States, online stores typical sell music downloads for about 99c per track. The wholesale cost of these tracks (that the shops pay) is about 65c.
The labels want the wholesale cost of the music to increase. Universal and Sony BMG are not so keen to put prices up and EMI and Time Warner wouldn't comment on the FT story. Some people are concerned that any sort of price hike on legal music downloads may push consumers back to P2P networks where they can find music for free that contains no DRM protection and usually is in the MP3 format.
Also the music industry is getting unhappy with Apple's dominance of the market apparently. Apple currently sells about 65% of all legal music downloads and now with cheaper iPods available, that figure may increase. Apple wouldn't comment on the FT story but apparently Steve Jobs is very unhappy about any talks concerning price hikes.
We reported yesterday that Fraud claims were circulating about (former) LokiTorrent owner Ed Webber. Many people began questioning whether the LokiTorrent lawsuit was real. But a blog entry at Joegratz tells a different story. Here is the entry pasted below.
There’s a Slashdot story today linking to a claim that the recent lawsuit against LokiTorrent is a hoax. The author bases his claim on the fact that the current LokiTorrent page is hosted by the defendant, not by the MPAA, and claims to have searched court records and found nothing.
Three minutes on PACER and the "mystery" is solved. It’s case number 3:04-cv-02642 in the Northern District of Texas. Yes, that’s the signature of the MPAA’s lawyer on the Complaint filed with the court. And yes, that’s United States District Judge David C. Godbey’s signature on the order approving the parties’ settlement and entering a permanent injunction against Webber.
Webber may be a scammer, having seemingly run off with the contributions to his legal defense fund after an immediate capitulation to the MPAA, but he’s not making the whole thing up.
So the controversy continues. It would be nice to hear some actual quotes from Webber, the only one who could cast some proper light on the situation.
More details about the LokiTorrent vs. MPAA case are being spread across the Internet and at the very least; they are quite disturbing for the P2P community. There is an interesting post on Earth Reactor that claims to expose the truth about this case. Below I have pasted much of the content from the original post.
LOKI TORRENT LAWSUIT :: A HOAX Written by: SharePro
As unknown facts continue to reveal themselves in the MPAA vs. LokiTorrent case, we feel a need to update the community with the following facts.
Please note: Attributing to the confusion surrounding this case, we have established that Ed Webber was not sued directly by the MPAA, rather was sued by individual media corporations such as Columbia, Disney, & Fox. Since the "MPAA" (Motion Picture Association of America) does not appear anywhere in the actual court filing, any search query for "MPAA" via the Texas Court Search Engine came up empty. In other words, the MPAA did not officially sue Ed Webber, rather the individual media companies, in a joint case, sued Ed Webber. We apologize for any confusion.
1) In several p2p interviews and on Lokitorrent.com website, Ed Webber accepted a responsibility to fight the MPAA in court on behalf of both his website(s) and the p2p community. By accepting such a task and responsibility, Ed Webber received not only the trust of millions of p2pr's worldwide, but also tens of thousands of dollars monthly to support legal fee's.
The EU is to investigate the pricing of the music downloads in Apple's iTunes music store. The UK music store offers over 700,000 tracks for download to UK customers at a cost of 79p a track. While 79p might look like it's not a bad price for a DRM-restricted digital download, it is actually about $1.51 in U.S. currency. UK consumer groups find this price unfair as other European music stores offer downloads for 99c (in Euro) per track, which is about $1.31 in U.S. currency.
The iTunes music store has also been under fire in the EU for not allowing customers to buy music from stores located in other EU states other than their own. For example, a British downloader could not go to the French iTunes store and purchase a track for 99c. There are similar problems across the Atlantic also, as downloads cost 99c in the U.S. and just 80c in Canada.
The EU however maintains that this is an informal investigation and they have only requested information from Apple.
The Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) has filed more lawsuits against P2P users it alleges to have traded illegal copies of major motion pictures and TV shows online through P2P networks. These new set of lawsuits come just days before this years Oscars, which Hollywood is using to spread it's anti-piracy message around. The MPAA claims that lost sales due to piracy will stop film-makers from working on movie projects or new TV shows.
Once again the MPAA didn't say how many people have been sued, or whether the material they allegedly shared with each other were DVD-Rip copies, Telesyncs, Telecines, DVD Screeners for Academy Awards purposes etc... They just said the usual comments. "When rampant online theft occurs, these films become that much harder to finance...we cannot and will not let that happen," MPAA Chief Executive Dan Glickman said in a telephone conference call with reporters.
China has expressed doubts it can win a battle against rampant piracy in the country. The infringement of Intellectual Property has been rampant in China for many years and the problem has grown much too big for the Chinese legal system alone. "China cannot win the anti-piracy battle if it relies only on government crackdowns and judicial punishment,"Yan Xiaohong, vice director of the National Copyright Administration, told the official Xinhua news agency.
"Despite the government's pledge and enhanced efforts to stamp out piracy, intellectual property infringement is rampant." he added. The government is considering freeing up regulations that will allow copyright holders to organize and begin policing for violations of their property rights and file lawsuits. At present, only the Music Copyright Society, has been formally established under China's stringent non-governmental organization rules.
85 million pirated publications were confiscated by copyright administrations across China last year. By the end of 2004, police in China had busted more than 200 illegal production lines which were capable of making billions of pirated discs every year Chinese are also engaged in the widespread manufacture and sale of brand-name clothing, pharmaceuticals and other items. The US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance estimates that US companies alone lost $2.6 billion to Chinese piracy in 2003 alone.
Russia’s Culture and Mass Communication Minister has announced that the losses incurred by U.S. software, film, and music companies as a result of pirated materials distributed in Russia grossed at $1.7 million last year. Culture Minister Alexander Sokolov signed a cooperation agreement on Tuesday, with a number of social organizations working towards protecting intellectual property rights. "In the sphere of intellectual property rights we are dealing with a well thought-out system of evading the law," Russia’s RBC news agency quoted Sokolov as saying after the signing.
He called for social organisations to join in an effort to defeat piracy in Russia. Macrovision claims that the loses to International DVD Producers globally as a result of Russian Piracy is about $4 billion. It's wonderful how companies like Macrovision who make their money from "protecting content" like to point the finger occasionally at countries worldwide and blame them for billions of dollars in losses. Would the fact that Macrovision is seen as a reliable protector of content in the entertainment industries eyes influence Macrovision to make these claims to scare that industry and perhaps generate more business?
He then explains that the MPAA use lost revenues as an excuse to sue file-sharers who have traded copies of movies online. He gives an example first of the movie Hero, which was delayed in the U.S. by Miramax and how he managed to get his hands on a copy of the European release of the movie before it's U.S. theatrical opening. He enjoyed the movie so much that he went on to drag friends on three separate occasions to theatres to see the U.S. cut of the movie because he enjoyed it so much himself.
So his argument there is that the MPAA lost no revenue from him, in fact, they gained revenue from his friends also. The next example he gives involves the movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. A friend of his refused to go to see the movie in theatres until he saw a downloaded copy of it (perhaps in lesser quality) then went to see it on the big screen after enjoying the downloaded copy so much.
When most people are asked to name places in the world where piracy is known to be most rampant, most people would say China as one of their first guesses, and they wouldn't be wrong. For years, counterfeit music CD's, books, DVDs etc.. have been selling in huge numbers on China and now Warner Home Video has decided to take a different approach to challenging it. Instead of pushing the Chinese government's hand to start war on pirates, they will compete with the pirates with reasonably priced DVDs.
These DVDs will be available very soon after their theatrical releases but will contain no extras like audio commentary or features on the making of the movie. The will sell for about 22 Yuan (US$2.65) which is not much more than 8 Yuan (US$1.80) which is the price the pirates offer. The quality of the DVDs offered by the pirates that early is often quite low (see Asian Silvers), and Warner believes that improved quality that consumers can rely on will help it defeat the DVD pirates.
Despite massive crackdowns on piracy in China and throughout Asia, piracy still remains rampant. If the most copyrighted works sold in any country were pirated, it wouldn't be strange for the general public to get used to it and see nothing wrong with it, especially since the pirates can offer much lower prices than the entertainment industry would be willing to offer for legitimate products. It is estimated that piracy in China alone costs Western companies about $16 billion annually in lost sales.
Competition in the music player market is heating, as Apple uses it's market leader muscle to drop the prices. At $199 the iPod mini should be at par or cheaper than the lesser known copetitors. This is a significant price cut of about 25%. Analysts suggest that with more aggressive pricing, Apple is going to hold it's dominant position in this field for quite some time.
"They're at war with the world," said Enderle. "All [competitors] have to do is collectively take 15 percent to 20 percent of the market, and investors would react dramatically to that kind of drop. Consumers are fickle."
Still, analysts lauded Apple for dropping its prices and leaving competitors struggling for some kind of edge against a company that's put its marketing might into keeping consumers hooked on its hot product and the music that goes into it.
The success of Apple's music store, iTunes, also is a direct result of the spread of the iPod.
I have to point out here that, personally I have never understood why I should carry yet another gadget in my pocket just for music? Modern cellular phones have been able to act as an MP3 or AAC audio player for years, not to mention the PDAs..
A new "movie:" operator has been announced on Google's official blog. Used correctly, Google claims that it can bring up truck loads of information on movies, including titles, actors, directors, reviews on new movies etc... Can't remember the name of that film where Tom Hanks made friends with a volleyball? Search for "movie: Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball" and Google will tell you: it was Cast Away. Useful eh? Well it can also track showtimes in the United States.
A search for "movie: Mountain View, CA", for example, will show you what's playing near the Googleplex. There are also movie "home-pages"like this one which show you all reviews AND calculate the total score based on the number of stars from the reviews. It is interesting also to mention that there are no ads on these pages. The question has to be asked however, is this just another small useful feature from Google or is it planning to expand it even more, perhaps a nice rival for IMDB sometime?
At the Texas Gaming Festival in Dallas this weekend, gamers will be allowed to preview the worlds first 512MB gaming card and one lucky gamer will go home with one. The specifics of the card itself however are not mentioned in the press release. Along with three days of top-notch gaming, the event will also include an overclocking demonstration and a PC modding event.
"Participating in events like this gives us the opportunity to find out what gamers want and need for competitive gaming," said Rich Heye, Vice President and GM, Desktop Discrete Products, ATI. "And to say thanks for supporting ATI, we are giving attendees at this event an opportunity to check out the world's first 512MB gaming cards before we send them out to our software partners for development of next-generation games."
It is not yet known when the new card will officially go on sale.
Yahoo Japan Corp. and Sony Corp. affiliate Label Gate Co. Ltd. to launch a Japanese music download service the company has said. The service will be based on the current Mora download service. It will offer about 73,000 songs from 39 domestic record companies. The files will be encoded in Sony's ATRAC3 data compression format, and will be compatible with some portable music players along with some mobile phone devices and also the new Playstation Portable.
The songs will cost between ¥158 and ¥368 (US$1.50 and $3.50), said Nozomi Yamaguchi, a spokeswoman for Label Gate in Tokyo. Yahoo Japan attracts around 39 million visitors a month and is ranked as the countries No.1 visited website. Label Gate began operations in 2000 with support from a handful of record companies and has steadily attracted the support of additional companies. It relaunched its own Web-based download service under the Mora name in April 2004 and in October launched a second service, called Music Drop that provides music in the Windows Media format.
It will be interesting to see how the store gets on with online music sales, as more and more competition keeps arising in the market. Apple's iTunes music service is currently the world’s most popular digital music store having sold over 200 million downloads.
Apple has expanded its iPod family of products. A new iPod mini can now hold 6GB instead of the previous 4GB storage. The company also said that it's gold coloured version of the mini would be dropped. There has also been the addition of the 30GB version of the iPod photo. Previous iPod photo models could store 20GB. All new models also have extended battery life and costs have dropped by an average of £40. The iPod took an early and quick lead in the portable digital music player market.
25 million portable music players were sold in 2004, which includes 10 million iPods. The success has been mostly due to the iTunes music store which currently has about 70% of the digital music download market. Mike McGuire, a research director at analyst Gartner said Apple had done a good job in "sealing off the market from competition" so far. "They have created a very seamless package which I think is the idea of the product - the design, function and the software are very impressive," he said.
However, there is always the threat of competition. "Creative, other Microsoft-partnered devices, Real, Sony and so on, are racketing up the marketing message and advertising," McGuire said. "Creative was very upbeat about how many of its Creative Zen players it had shipped by the end of last year", he said.
Jayanti Amarishi Buhecha has been sent to prison for three years accused of being a major distributor of pirated DVDs of Bollywood films. He was found guilty of two trademark offences last month, and sentenced at Harrow Crown Court, London, on Tuesday. He was called one of the biggest Bollywood pirates in the UK by the Judge commenting on the £26,000 per month he made from the illegal trade. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) worked for two years on the case.
Fake DVDs were manufactured in Pakistan and Malaysia and sold on wholesale to shops by Buhecha, who traded in counterfeit DVDs in 2002 and 2003. An operating was launched against Buhecha in 2002 following complaints about his illegal activities. The Judge in the case said that a heavy penalty was needed because of the enormous amount of financial damage he had done to legitimate business.
In December 2002 he was caught with 1,000 pirated DVDs in his car. Despite being arrested and bailed he was caught yet again in 2003. At his home and a lock-up, 18,000 pirated DVDs were discovered along with faked inlay cards. Buhecha was once a legitimate distributor of Bollywood movies but was suspended and sued by his employers for dealing in illegal copies of Bollywood classic Mohabbatein.
A Russian MP3 site, allofmp3.com is under criminal investigation, accused of copyright abuse by selling digital audio tracks in the MP3 format to consumers for just pennies. The site appears to charge per MB of download, about 2 cents a MB. The group sells music from bands like the Beatles and others who have not authorised digital distribution yet. The Russian site claimed it had licenses to do so from a local clearing house, but record labels have maintained that the licenses weren't valid.
The Moscow City Police Computer Crimes division completed an investigation into allofmp3.com and recommended that the prosecutor charge the site's operators for criminal copyright infringement. "We have consistently said that AllofMP3.com is not licensed to distribute our members' repertoire in Russia or anywhere else,"Igor Pozhitkov, regional director of IFPI Moscow said in a statement. "We are pleased that the police are bringing this important case to the attention of the prosecutor."
This is good news for the entertainment industry as it can be seen as a step forward for copyright holders in Russia. The music industry has had some problems in the past trying to convince Russian authorities to deal with piracy cases. The music market in Russia is ranked No. 12 in the world, which was about $326 million in 2003. The IFPI claim however that 64% of music consumed in the country has been pirated. The Moscow City Prosecutor's office has until March 7 to decide whether to act on the police department's recommendation.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that regulators have overstepped their authority by imposing a rule they say would limit TV piracy on the Internet. "You crossed the line," Judge Harry Edwards told a lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) during arguments before a three-judge panel. "Selling televisions is not what the FCC is in the business of," Edwards said. The decision sides with critics who claim rule dictates how computers and other devices should operate.
Under the FCC rule, manufacturers of TV sets and other devices would have to build in systems to recognise a "broadcast flag" that would tell the device when content has to be protected against unauthorized copying. The rule stated that all new devices must contain such a system by July 1st this year. Critics claim that if the FCC rule was to go ahead, it could set a bad precedent by allowing broadcasters to dictate how computers and other devices should be built.
However, the judges also questioned about whether the American Library Association and other opponents had legal standing to challenge the rule in court so it's unclear whether the court will decide to would strike down the FCC's 2003 rule.
During the last three months, our servers have been constantly crashing, due to various reasons -- most notably due to the enormous growth of our forum database that now contains almost one million posts (including Finnish and English forums) and due to healthy growth in terms of daily users. This has resulted to "bad user experience", servers not responding during the peak hours, etc.
We've spent the last two months planning for a new server setup and now the first steps towards this goal have been taken. We switched all of our sites yesterday to use the new database server which has already proven to stabilize the system quite a lot. Today, our forums were transferred over to the new server cluster and we continue to monitor them for the next couple of days to see if any unexpected (well, more likely "expected" :-) problems occur because of the switch.
We apologize for the inconvenience and hope that you report back to us if you find anything weird during the transition phase. Our main site will get transferred to the new server cluster shortly, most likely on next week or so.
We reported yesterday that the new 50 Cent album, The Massacre had shown up online, about two weeks before its retail release date. If you recall the case of the Eminem - Encore album, Interscope held some urgent meetings to discuss the release date following an early Internet leak and ended up releasing it a matter of weeks before intended. Well as we predicted yesterday, Interscope decided again this time around to bring forward the release date of the 50 Cent album to avoid more lost sales.
The album will now be released on March 3rd, which is only 5 days before its intended release. With all the fuss around lately about BitTorrent sites and the "super fast" speeds that users can download and share files with it, labels are starting to monitor Internet leaks more closely. Most new albums now appear on the Internet available for free downloading before you can legally purchase them.
Not surprisingly, Nero is the first to announce support for the DVD-R (minus) Dual Layer recording. Here is the press release:
Nero, leaders in digital media technology, announced today that their award-winning digital media suite, Nero 6, is the first consumer digital media software to support DVD-R dual-layer (DL) recording.
DVD-R DL recording allows the user to store up to 8.5Gbytes of data or up to 8 hours of DVD video on one side of the disc. “Next-generation DVD recording technology is here, and Nero has already provided users with the tools to operate it,” said Jim Corbett, Executive Director of Nero AG. “Dual-layer recording has raised DVD recording technology to new levels, and gives users access to a new and exciting format that was previously available only to professionals.”
The recent update to Nero 6 provides users with enhanced Dual-Layer Recording tools including DVD-R DL disc support for 8.5GB data storage or 120 min playback time (SP) for DVD-Video. Nero BackItUp’s extensive back up features takes full advantage of the increased disc space of DL discs. Nero Express 6 and Nero Burning Rom allows users to burn standard data and digital audio discs with up to 8.5 GB in size. Also included in Nero 6 are the powerful DVD and digital video playback software, Nero ShowTime 2, the standard packet writing application, InCD 4 and the label creator, Nero Cover Designer. Each application can be accessed with a single click via the one-of-a-kind application launcher Nero StartSmart, providing users with an at-a-glance overview of what DVD drives have to offer.
The legal director of digital-rights advocacy group Public Knowledge, Mike Godwin, is challenging the new proposals to stop TV piracy and the claims that are being made by the entertainment industry about TV show downloading on the Internet. He is a fan of the series Huff but unfortunately he missed the season finale episode. So he had a look around the net and found himself a resource to download the episode. It took 7 hours to get the episode using his high speed connection.
As well as taking 7 hours to download the single episode, the quality was also far from perfect. Nevertheless he enjoyed viewing it. "It's a great show," he said. However, he said the low quality, slow download indicated that the rampant piracy of digitized broadcast programs, a threat Hollywood has long warned against, was hardly imminent. The Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) believe that this early TV series downloading stage should be stopped before it can start.
The debate will be presented in oral arguments this week before the District of Columbia Circuit for the United States Court of Appeals in a lawsuit brought by Public Knowledge and others against the FCC, challenging a new regulation that intends to stop TV shows from leaking onto the Internet for everyone to download and share with each other. Public Knowledge maintains that the FCC does not have the power to tell hardware manufacturers how they should build their products.
Well, it has happened again (and nobody is one bit surprised). We all saw the media attention surrounding the leak of the Eminem - Encore album several weeks before its release date. Interscope got so worried about the Internet leak that they brought the release date forward a couple of weeks fearing that Internet piracy would hit the albums sales hard. After that we also saw the latest U2 album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb arrive first, not in stores, but all over the Internet.
Now the latest album to surface weeks before its release is 50 Cent's new album The Massacre. The album is set to be released on March 8th 2005, but there is already a retail copy of the 22 track album available online for download. Apparently another copy has been available for a matter of days but at much lower quality. This copy is ripped straight from a retail CD into high quality MP3 files.
The runtime of the album is approximately 1h 17min. It's encoded as VBR MP3 audio which produces much higher quality than CBR 128kb/s mp3 which is mainly found on P2P networks like Kazaa (usually MP3 rips that have been around since Napster). The album is currently appearing on the Internets biggest P2P networks, IRC and of course BitTorrent sites.
What a convenient timing - few days after we publish articles about the quality issues on the DVD recordable media market, RiDisc promises to start delivering premium quality. They use strong words in describing their new RiDisc Xtreme products - "Grade AAA+ RITEK G05" and "zero tolerance quality control".
The good folks at CDRInfo.com have interviewed the marketing manager Tim Smith, so here are a few quotes.
The overall quality dived as Ritek struggled to meet demand for increased volumes while still maintaining consistency.
...
The original success of the Ritek dye (proliferated by the success of RiDisc) wasn't unnoticed by competitors, and other brands started to jump on the bandwagon. Very soon Ritek DVD of every grade possibly was flooding into the market. Media of B quality, C quality, and even worse, was all being sold as Grade A Ritek media.
...
It didn't help that even Ritek themselves knowingly sold discs of lesser quality (even with their own brands) into the market to customers that didn't care about quality just as long as they made money.
The European Parliament has unanimously rejected the implementation of software patents despite heavy pressure from some of the worlds leading corporate software companies including Microsoft. If the request is approved by the European Commission, the proposal will be sent back to the EU for initial review, effectively restarting the legislative process. Software patents proposals have been met with opposition in the EU from member states and protesters.
Polish representatives twice rejected its adoption, while Spain and the Netherlands have supported a restart. In Brussels on Thursday, hundreds of protesters showed up to try to convince the lawmakers to drop the proposal entirely. Major software companies such as Microsoft make a habit out of filing enormous amounts of software patents in the U.S. to ensure they can keep themselves at the top of the software industry. If the European Commission withdraws the bill, it cannot be reintroduced for two years.
TiVo has announced it now has 3 million subscribers. It had passed the 3 million customer mark at the end of January, adding 251,000 TiVo-only customers and 447,000 DirecTV customers. "Last year, we launched an aggressive growth plan that included increasing our subscription acquisition spending to grow our base, strengthen our market position, and fuel our recurring revenue model," said Mike Ramsay, TiVo's Chairman and CEO. "We accomplished our goal of doubling our sub base to over 3 million subscriptions."
TiVo has been put under increased pressure in recent months as the company must show that it can survive without DirecTV at its side. DirecTV announced their own DVR device at CES 2005 which only fuelled more speculation that the two companies partnership may in fact be nearing its end. Also TiVo CEO Mike Ramsay and President Marty Yudkovitz both announced their resignation within weeks of each other in January.
If all that isn't enough, now TiVo subscribers are also coming forward announcing numerous glitches in the latest software updates. Despite TiVo's optimism, Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox doesn't expect the situation to improve. "According to Jupiter Research forecasts, satellite-based DVRs have the greatest installed base, with cable-based DVR expected to snatch the lead in a few years. While the market consolidates around cable- and satellite-based DVR, standalone unit install base will decline steadily over the next five years," Wilcox stated.
Not long after Archos added Digital Video capabilities to their products they are now showing that they have the ability to challenge the market by announcing a new portable video player with a 100GB HDD. The company announced on Friday its Pocket Video Recorder AV4100, as well as $50 price cuts to other devices in its AV400 series. The AV4100 is expected to retail at about $800, whilst the AV420 retails at $500 and the AV480 costs $750.
The new device joins a nice product list of devices capable of playing back digital audio (WAV, WMV and MP3 audio formats are supported) and video files as well as having support for still images also. Consumers will be able to schedule shows to be recorded by picking a time and channel or by synchronizing online with Yahoo TV Guide to get a line-up of shows to choose from.
The AV4100 will come with a cradle that connects to a video source like a set-top box or a television over a USB 2.0 cable. It will have an external speaker and built-in CompactFlash reader. It comes with a 100GB 2.5 inch hard disk and a 3.6 inch colour screen display.
Movie rental giant Blockbuster has been hit by a fraud lawsuit in New Jersey. New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey sued Blockbuster Inc. Friday, claiming the video rental chain is deceiving customers with its new "No More Late Fees" rental policy. Blockbuster is accused of violating the states consumer fraud laws with its new policy. "Blockbuster boldly announced its 'No More Late Fees' policy, but has not told customers about the big fees they are charged if they keep videos or games for more than a week after they are due," the attorney general said.
"There is no question about it, there is a violation of New Jersey's consumer fraud act," he added. Under the new policy consumers can keep a movie for a week over its due return date but after that, a consumer would be charged a restocking fee of $1.25. If a consumer keeps a rented movie for more than 30 days after its due return date, then Blockbuster will charge the consumer the full retail price of the item.
"The fact is there are no longer late fees at Blockbuster," the company said. "We're disappointed he took this action, because we believe our end-of-late fees program is a terrific program and we've received tremendous feedback from both our customers and employees." The company was surprised that he did not even try to contact them to get an explanation of the new policy first. The Attorney General said that investigation began as soon as the policy was implemented. "Our principal goal is restitution to the consumer," he said.
As Television stations and production companies are quickly realising what they call a new problem with TV piracy, the analysts are rushing to give the world some details on the amount of TV shows that are being pirated around the world on the Internet. According to research, UK internet users illegally download the most TV shows from the net. In some cases with American series, British TV viewers have to wait from weeks to months to see the latest episodes of a certain series.
About 18% of the total downloader’s tracked are from the UK according to Envisional. They also claim that TV show downloading increased by 150% in the last year. About 70% of those downloads were from BitTorrent sites. "It's now as easy to download a pirate TV show as it is to programme a VCR," said Ben Coppin from Envisional. A typical episode of 24 was downloaded by about 100,000 people globally, said the report, and an estimated 20,000 of those were from within the UK.
Personal Video Recorders (PVR) like TiVo boxes and Sky+ are being blamed for helping to set this "new" trend of sharing. One of the most worrying things to TV stations is that the downloads usually come with the advertisements completely cut out. Because of the length difference between full length movies and episodes of tv shows, they can appear online much quicker. The most popular would be HDTV (High Definition TV) downloads which offer very high quality.
Japanese electronics giant Sony has said that it will release a new portable digital audio player later this year that it is confident can dethrone the iPod. Sony is responsible for the Walkman, a device which changed the way the world listened to music. "We are confident of being able to offer by the end of the year a product that is much more competitive than the iPod," Sony president Kunitake Ando said. He said the success of the iPod was simply due to the fact that Apple made it easy to use.
"We have to develop software that makes use of our products more intuitive and simple," he told reporters. Apple's iPod device can store thousands of songs and recently versions of it have added support for photo storage also. The iPod is becoming increasingly popular, and also driving more customers to Apple's iTunes music store where they can purchase digital tracks that can be stored on an iPod.
Rumours were circulating that Sony were to buy Apple, but Ando dismissed these rumours saying it has become too expensive due to the success of the iPod. "We have put in place a very aggressive plan to become number one again in portable music", said Nobuyuki Idei, Sony chairman and chief executive officer.
Recent studies are showing that American consumers are purchasing MP3 players in huge numbers. It is estimated that 1 in 10 adults owns an iPod or another portable digital audio player. Survey results offered by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (PIP) showa that some 22 million of those aged 18 and older own MP3 players. It shows that 1 in 5 people under the age of 30 own a portable digital audio device, while 14% of those ages 30 to 39 have them, as do 14% of those aged 40 to 48.
The most purchases are made by those in the upscale income brackets, 24% of those in households earning more than $75,000 have the players, while just 6 percent of those earning less than $30,000 have them. A primary reason for the success of the players so far is down to Internet Access growing, especially broadband connections. "When any technology reaches the 10 percent saturation rate, it is no longer occupying a niche, it is on the way to mainstream," PIP director Lee Rainie said.
However, while this seems to be excellent for the music industry in ways, it's not so good in other ways. For example, copy protecting digital content has proven to be a hard task so far for the entertainment industry. While 32% of owners get their music from legal online music stores, predictably, more get their music from P2P networks; approximately 58% of them. This is understandable as younger owners, especially teens, would be more inclined to use P2P networks to get their audio than to use pay-par-download services.
Napster has officially denied rumours that its music has been hacked. A posting on Engadget.com detailed how a user could get music from the Napster To Go service and convert the protected WMV files to WAV files which can then be burned to CD. The Napster to go service allows you to download all the music you want for $15 a month but does not allow you to burn the music to CD, because if you stop paying the subscription fee, you will lose all your downloaded music.
"It has come to our attention that there are a number of inaccurate statements posted by various sources on the Internet regarding the security of Napster and Napster To Go,"Bill Pence, Napster's chief technology officer, said in the statement released Wednesday. "As Napster's CTO, I would like to officially state that neither Napster To Go, Napster, nor Windows Media DRM have been hacked."
According to the Engadget post, a user could install Winamp and the Output Stacker plug-in, which they could then use to record the DRM protected files to unprotected digital WAV streams. While this method does in fact work, it doesn't mean that there was any cracking in the process. This is similar to recording a song from the radio to a cassette tape. Napster claims that this hole doesn’t just exist in Napsters music, but in all music from all digital music stores currently.
German radio station MotorFM is determined to transform radio in Germany by using MP3 downloads and streaming music to cell phones. On Feb 1st the station abandoned on-air advertisements and hopes to get its funding from MP3 downloads and targeted sponsoring of its programming. Now they hope next to stream audio directly to 3G cell phones and let listeners purchase music MP3 downloads using a simple text message. MotorFM came from the Motor record label which introduced Germany to Eminem and the world to Rammstein.
The station focuses mainly on hip alternative rock music and electronic music. It was originally founded by three former music executives. Tim Renner and Markus Kuehn worked with Universal Music and Mona Rübenstein founded MTV Germany. "We left because Universal and MTV don't support any good music anymore. They're boring," said Kuehn, "In the short term, we don't think that the downloads will be able to finance the station, maybe in two or three years, but that's why we have sponsors,"
Currently the number of songs that can be offered is quite small and includes mainly unsigned and independent artists. They hope to be able to offer much more music soon. Media analyst Tim Crook at the University of London said MotorFM's proposal is "an interesting and alternative way to fund radio broadcasting, the internet streaming could fund the analog music output, but this is only feasible if the music with an anticipated demand is only available on a pay-to-listen basis."
Macrovision has developed a new, stronger DVD copy protection that it says will make it more difficult to rip protected DVDs. RipGuard will thwart most of the DVD ripping software currently on the market.
According to Macrovision RipGuard protected DVDs will play in "nearly all" current DVD players. The company, however, failed to be more specific about the number of players the discs do not work with.
"RipGuard is designed to... reduce DVD ripping and the resulting supply of illegal peer to peer," said the firm.
Recently the movie industry has followed the path taken earlier by the music industry -- "stronger" copy protection and lawsuits agaisnt alleged pirates.
Both the music and movie industry fail to realize that the only ones affected by the new copy protections, which are little more than non-standard discs, are the legitimate customers. Pirates and hackers will always find a way around the protections. And the copies spread in P2P networks do not originate from private individuals. They always originate from (semi) professional pirate groups.
It's been fun buying 10-15 movies per month. I guess it'll come to an end once the movies stop working with my players.
The competition on the DVD recordable media market has driven media suppliers to use questionable methods in order to gain competitive advantage. Consumers are lured to low quality products with rock bottom pricing, or even faked media identifier codes. We started tackling this issue a short while ago in our article 'DVD-R market plagued by fake media and inconsistent quality' and we continue to dig deeper with a new editorial.
This time our focus is on RITEK, which definitely is one of the leading DVD media manufacturers in the world. For quite some time RITEKs has been considered as products of good price / quality ratio. The problem is that the quality seems to vary a lot. It goes as far as totally unusable discs carrying RITEK's media identifier are being sold to consumers -- discs that have visible defects, and simply will not play in any device. How can this be, and who is to blame?
Jazz composer Maria Schneider probably sent some shockwaves through the recording industry last weekend when she won a Grammy for her album "Concert in the Garden" without having a deal with a record label or distributor and without selling a single copy of her album in traditional record stores.
Her album was financed through a service called ArtistShare that allows fans to help finance the whole production. The album cost $87,000 to make and by selling 9,000 copies to people who pre-ordered it via the website and an additional 1,000 via a Net auction. She says that several other artists have contacted her to know more about her approach to the record financing and Net distribution.
Now, we're just waiting for the first-ever album to win a Grammy that will only get released in digital format (and without a DRM, that would be something..)..
Hell just froze over: the long-time rivals, world's largest mobile phone company, Finnish Nokia and the software giant Microsoft have teamed up in order to deliver Microsoft's Windows Media platform to Nokia's upcoming phones.
This means that future Nokia handsets will be able to play music and videos wrapped in Microsoft's WMA and WMV formats -- with and without DRM restrictions. The obvious aim is to deliver a "universal" platform that would allow users of WMA-enabled online music stores, such as Napster, to transfer the tracks they've purchased to their mobile phones.
The deal also puts Microsoft's earlier ambitions to put its own Windows Mobile operating system to major manufacturers' handsets in a new light, as the WMA support is planned to implement over Nokia's preferred operating system, Symbian.
The biggest loser in this game is obviously RealNetworks, which has enjoyed a pre-installed monopoly on most Symbian-based phones, providing the only near-universal a/v platform available on phones. Now that is about to change and it is unclear whether Real's applications will be bundled with future Nokia handsets at all. In 2004, Nokia shipped over 10 million phones with an integrated a/v capabilities and that figure is about to rise dramatically over the next few years as the a/v features get common on even very basic phones.
Our recent article 'DVD-R market plagued by fake media and inconsistent quality' has raised quite a bit of interest. First media manufacturer to comment was 3A Media, which we suspected of manufacturing discs with fake media identifier codes (MID).
Frank Chachulski, The QC-Manager of 3A Media Produktion und Handel GmbH, approached us with an email today, making a strong statement about the production of 3A Media:
"The truth is that SINCE beginning of 2003 most manufacturers are using false MID´s in order to get more compatible. Some drive manufacturers even ask for money in order to implement new MIDs into their drives. We are talking of several 10 thousands dollar per manufacturer or MID.
But 3A Media had never and will never produce discs with wrong MIDs! That question is not at issue."
As we can learn from Frank's statement, the motivation to use an incorrect MID can vary. The drive manufacturers have a role to play in this as well.
The new CD-RW.ORG editorial discusses the current DVD recordable media market situation. Competitive market has benefited the customer by reduced prices, but some companies are using questionable methods in order to survive the competition.
In the article we have a look at some fake Taiyo Yuden media, and discuss the current quality of RITEK products. Is the quality of Verbatim affected by the fact that they are now outsourcing production to CMC, and Moser Bayer?
It is all too common that the customer is not aware what DVD recordable media he is actually buying. The brand printed on the disc or the packaging may tell nothing about the manufacturer. Every recordable DVD has a media identifier code, but even that doesn't give you certainty of the product you have purchased. Too often trial and error is needed in order to find good and compatible media.
Sony announced today that it plans to launch four movie titles in UMD format, used by the Sony's hand-held PSP console and one additional movie to be bundled with the PSP console once it will be released in the United States.
The movie line-up includes titles produced by Sony's movie unit, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Movies that are about to be released on 19th of April are Hellboy, XXX, Resident Evil 2 and Once Upon A Time in Mexico. The movie that will ship bundled with the American version of the PSP will be Spider-Man 2.
Sony will use AVC as its video encoding format for the movies and all movies will use 16:9 aspect ratio. Unfortunately the movies will use "advanced copy protection mechanism" in order to block unauthorized copying of the movies. Pricing of the movies remains a mystery, but Sony has promised to start selling UMD movies also in Japan in April with Europe to follow later.
Norway is proposing new copyright laws that would make it illegal for CD owners to copy their music to MP3 files to portable music players. The strange thing however, is that the law would allow you to copy a DVD or CD to the same medium. "For example, a CD's (security code) could be cracked to play a recording on a car stereo, since a CD-player would be seen as an appropriate medium," the news release said. "But the security code could not be cracked to copy the recording onto an MP3 player, since such a device would not be seen as an appropriate for a CD."
Not appropriate? OK, I see what this is all about. If you have, let’s say an old Metallica CD at home and a brand new iPod, you want the Metallica songs on your iPod so you decide to rip it with Exact Audio Copy to MP3 format right? WRONG! These new laws would make that illegal so instead you would have to run along to iTunes and purchase that same music all over again. That’s a Win/Win situation for the music industry but a very unfair one for consumers.
Gisle Hannemyr, of the University of Oslo's Department of Informatics, said the law was unclear and unenforceable. "We are going to be a nation of lawbreakers if this law is passed in its current form," he said on the state radio network NRK. For his part, Hannemyr said he has already copied an appropriate song for his own MP3 player: Radiohead's "Hail to the Thief." The Movie and Music Industry however, applauded this proposal.
BitTorrent trading site, LokiTorrent.com has been shut down by the Motion Picture Association of America. LokiTorrent was gathering a legal fee to battle an MPAA lawsuit and gathered about $40,000. The MPAA obtained a $1-million judgment against LokiTorrent. The owner of the site Edward Webber agreed to pay the MPAA a substantial fine, shut down the site and also agreed to hand over any logs of illegal user activity on the site.
"You can click but you can't hide" is the new title on the LokitTorrent.com homepage. Head of the MPAA's anti-piracy effort, John G. Malcolm was delighted with the result, especially that the MPAA were to obtain any logs of activity. "These records could lead investigators to tens of thousands of people who distributed and downloaded unauthorized copies of digital goods," he said. He claimed the site had more than 750,000 registered users and helped distribute more than 35,000 movies, songs and other items. The homepage of LokiTorrent goes on to spread more MPAA propaganda...
This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures. The illegal downloading of motion pictures robs thousands of honest, hard-working people of their livelihood, and stifles creativity. Illegally downloading movies from sites such as these without proper authorization violates the law, is theft, and is not anonymous. Stealing movies leaves a trail. The only way not to get caught is to stop.
The owner of the site has been under scrutiny since news circulated that the site was put up for sale. Webber later claimed this was just an experiment to find out just how much the site would be worth to somebody. However an experiment like this seems like the wrong kind of experiment to try when you are asking for donations in the first place.
While DVD-R versus DVD+R recording format war gets all the attention, DVD-RAM is mostly forgotten, even though it is the oldest DVD recording format. The catch is that DVD-RAM is not compatible with regular DVD video discs, so it has been primarily utilized for data storing and backups. The format has some technical advantages, even over the newer -RW and +RW formats.
But now Panasonic attempts to push DVD-RAM back to the scene. A promotion group RAMPRG, RAM Promotion Group, has been formed to support the spreading of DVD-RAM. The group consist of major players, like Hitatchi-LG, LG-Electronics, Matsushita, Samsung, TEAC, Toshiba and JVC. Based on this list of companies, we can presume that some -RAM utilizing PVRs and PC drives are on their way.
On 26th November 2004 I wrote a news article about TV series downloading becoming more popular, and the MPAA calling it a serious threat. I then asked if next we will hear complaints about Documentaries appearing on P2P networks. Well this has sort of happened now as the BBC have made some comments, and the BBC's excellent documentaries seem to be amongst the most shared educational material online, with the exception maybe of eBooks.
TV Stations and studios fear that the Internet has now become many people's person PVR delivering TV shows to them quickly. Production companies are becoming increasingly aware that the Internet is taking their audience. Many BitTorrent sites allow users to download and share episodes of TV shows quickly within hours of their broadcast. The BBC it appears, is not very happy about this situation.
"It's a big issue across the industry at the moment. We're not going to ignore it, especially if it's quite widespread," said Debbie Manners, the head of rights and business affairs at the BBC. When asked if the BBC would go after distributors of it's material, she said, "I'm not aware that we are. That would depend on the extent of it." I seem to remember the MPAA saying it had no plans to sue filesharers not so long ago.
Sony is set to unveil its PlayStation 3 (PS3) console ahead of the E3 games show in Las Angeles on 17th May. The implication of the Sony staffers' comments, made to US news site GameSpot, is that PS3's outing will come much sooner. Sony often holds launch events just a few days ahead of E3. Just yesterday the Cell processor which will power the PS3 was unveiled by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. The Cell chip is not just going to be used in the PS3, but is planned to be used in everything from mobile phones to PCs.
The possibility that the event might come much sooner than just ahead of E3 was signalled by Sony itself at its annual analysts' day. However, the console is more than likely over a year away from shipping, so nothing much to be overly-excited about just yet. Also Amazon has put back the release date of the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) console to April 29th, which adds fuel to speculation that the products European Launch will be delayed by a month.
The US launch of the Sony PSP has been set for March 24th. It will be up against the Nintendo DS handheld consoles. Sony also released a list of games that will be launched in the same week as the Sony U.S. PSP launch.
As AfterDawn reported last week, former MP3.com CEO Michael Robertsonannounced an upcoming DRM-less MP3 music download service called MP3Tunes. MP3Tunes has opened its doors and has delivered exactly what it promised, DRM-free MP3 audio. This means that if you purchase a track there, technically you can do whatever you want with the file, including distributing it over P2P networks (which im sure is against the companies AUP) and storing it on portable MP3 players. Whilst major record labels are less likely to add their music to the store, it still opened with 300,000 tracks from smaller independent labels.
Not only has this store beaten its competitors by not using any DRM software, it also requires no extra software to download or play the music. It is completely compatible with all browsers and it sells single tracks for 88c (albums for $8.88) compared to iTunes, which sells tracks for 99c (albums for $9.99). The fact that major record labels are reluctant to license music to services that don't use any DRM protection hasn't bothered Robertson however.
The new personal video recorder by Pioneer boasts features. Hefty 160 gigabyte HDD and high speed copying make it a tempting device. PVRs are still a bit pricey, but clearly it can be seen that the prices are going down and the features up. However the fundamental problem is that, re-compression of the video material affects the quality, and quite a few customers were disappointed to find that out in the 1st generation DVD-R/PVR devices.
Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. announced today the availability of the PRV-9200 professional DVD recorder. Boasting a 160-gigabyte built-in hard disk drive (HDD) and 48X high-speed copying, the PRV-9200 offers speedy, simplified and convenient creation of compliant DVD-Video discs without the need for a computer or authoring software. This professional DVD recorder is available for recording and playback in NTSC and PAL standards for a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $1,025.
"When archiving video content to DVD, the PRV-9200 can quickly copy files directly from the hard drive without any loss of video quality, drastically reducing recording times, saving valuable time and money," said Linda Toleno, vice president for Industrial Video and Mass Storage at Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. "Unique features such as high-speed copying, combined with ease-of-use and the targeted price point of the PRV-9200 make it a natural extension of Pioneer's powerful line of professional DVD Recorders," she added.
Digitally Imported Radio founded by Ari Shohat grew from operating in a dorm room in Binghamton U to an office in Manhattan. At any time, anywhere from 15,000 to 30,000 listeners would be tuned in to the station. The network is run mostly by part time staff and dozens of music fanatics and DJ's program the site's channels voluntarily. di.fm was ranked the top independent web-radio site by Webcast Metrics. Ari is a European Native and saw the need to share electronic news with Americans.
"Listeners write in, wanting to be a part of uniting this large, fragmented culture of electronic-crazed listeners," Ari says. "There are also companies and people that donate bandwidth to Digitally Imported Radio so that the music can reach more listeners. You’d be surprised at how many young CEOs and Executives are addicted to trance and house music". U.S. cities usually have about two designated electronic radio stations.
These one or two designated electronic radio stations, are limited to mainstream electronic favourites. The DJ's that make up the industry are often independent DJ's who perform at clubs and venues around the country. "As we expose different sub-genres of electronic music DJs are being discovered by labels and other industry giants." Ari says. "Listeners look forward to the live shows on our different channels each day. This leads to people writing in with ideas and requests to help, which fuels our growth and popularity."
Sony, Toshiba and IBM have unveiled the new Cell processor which they are calling a "supercomputer in a chip". The chip is so small it could power anything from video games consoles to mobile phones. It tops clock speeds of greater than 4GHz, the companies claimed. The new chip is expected to power Sony's upcoming Playstation 3 console. Toshiba plans to incorporate it into high-end televisions and IBM has said it will sell a workstation with the chip starting later this year. The developers claim the chip can deliver 10 times the performance of today’s best processors.
Cell is comprised of several cores. A core based on IBM's Power architecture controls eight synergistic processing centres. In all, they can simultaneously carry out 10 instruction sequences, compared with two for today's Intel chips. It can also run multiple operating systems simultaneously and multiple programs and still ensure that each has enough resources to run properly.
"It's very flexible," said Jim Kahle, IBM Director of Technology for Cell Technology. "We support many operating systems with our virtualization technology so we can run multiple operating systems at the same time, doing different jobs on the system."Intel is expected to release its multicore chips later this year. The will also increase the number of instructions that can be executed at once.
The Inquirer has written an interesting article about Half Life 2. Firstly the article points out that on the Half Life 2 box an Internet Connection is down as a System Requirement (under "other") but the German Consumer Association finds it misleading. They claim that the mere listing of an Internet Connection as a "System Requirement" did not explain the extent of the Internet-tie with the game and ordered Vivendi to amend the packaging and untie Steam from HL2 or face a hefty fine.
It goes on to point out that consumers who purchase a copy of the game where their CD Key may have been stolen or hacked previously, are left in a very bad position. Most game store will not take back a game that has been opened and if you request a new CD Key from Sierra/Vivendi you will to wait about two weeks for it. However, the Inquirer has quoted from UK's Office of Fair Trading site to explain to gamers that a store that doesn't take back the game is breaking the law...
[The goods must be] fit for their purposes, including any particular purpose mentioned by you to the seller – for example, if you are buying a computer game and you explain you want one that can be played on a particular machine, the seller must not give you a game that cannot be played on that machine.
In the case of Half Life 2, if you don't have a constant Internet connection (like if you have time limits etc...) or if your CD Key has been hacked already, then technically you cannot play the game the way you should be able to. This entitles you to a full refund of your game for the gaming store that sold it to you. The article also goes on to explain another problem with users who want to transfer their game.
The Inquirer is reporting a rumour that Microsoft may pick the old fashioned DVD format for their new Xbox 2 (Xenon, Xbox 360, whatever...). In a very humorous new article, The Inquirer speaks of how their "spy" dropped a "brown envelope" through their letterbox claiming that Microsoft may choose the traditional DVD format to keep the cost of their consoles and their games down. Well, if it's true, isn't it very considerate of Microsoft to think of the potential price an Xbox 2 game will cost us.
Seriously though if it is true then it's very strange as Microsoft's new console is expected to feature the HD-DVD format. Let’s not forget also that if the new Xbox 2 uses the traditional DVD format, that it leaves the console even more vulnerable to mass piracy. Almost every new pre-built PC sold today has a DVD burner as a CD burner is kind of now thought of as the stone age of digital media amongst us geeks.
Of course, Microsoft's new Xbox 2 console will probably have some hardware protections against copied games but just think of all those modchip companies, they are going to destroy hundreds of next generation consoles putting all sorts of chips and boot discs to the test, how long will it take to compromise it? This is all just a rumour still however, so once again, I say, lets just sit back, wait and see.
Napster has been awarded the Super Bore title for it's advertisement during the Super Bowl by viewers. Napster claims that its new Napster-To-Go service allows unlimited downloads for a monthly subscription of $14.99. However, these "unlimited downloads" are not what they seem, in fact they will "disappear" as soon as you stop paying your monthly fees. Napster’s ad claimed that it would cost anybody $10,000 to fill their iPod up with music tracks and only $14.99 a month with Napster.
Napster's service does have one good feature however; it will allow you to transfer your music to a number of Napster-compatible portable music players. But a claim that it takes $10,000 to fill an iPod just has the consumers laughing. The most music found on iPods comes straight from an owners CD collection or MP3 they already have stored on their computer (maybe MP3 they downloaded from Napster years ago eh?). Napster vowed to spend $30 million promoting its "music rental" service; maybe they should rethink that idea.
During the Super Bowl companies paid about $2.4m for a 30 second advertisement spot and of all 55 spots, Napster trailed in last. Music rental services don't sound so appealing to consumers; because it makes you think of a future where you have to pay royalties for every time you burn a track, transfer to a portable device and even for playing it. But don't worry eh? Even if you just listen to 1 second of the track, you'll only be charged for that second. Let's hope Digital Rights Management software and music industry greed will never lead to that.
Apple has teamed up with Universal to offer rare Chinese music tracks on the iTunes music download service. Now that a lot of worlds biggest online download services have gotten the most popular content from the major record labels, the rush now seems to be offering music downloads of less popular and more rare music. For example a new download service called CrimsonBaylaunched recently to offer only Indian music tracks for download.
Apple's move could potentially be seen as a sign of the future for digital music retail, as online operators and music firms explore back catalogue and off-territory opportunities in the warehouse-cost-free new music market. P2P services have one major advantage over legal stores, and that's that you can find very rare music on P2P networks. A few years down the line it will be interesting to see the size of the catalogues the music download stores will have as the recording industry tries to get as much money out of the services as it can.
This new service is especially good for Chinese people in countries where it is hard to find Chinese music. They would havbe to go to music stores that specialise in foreign music to get it. Now that the music is availible via a legal music download service, the recording industries argument would be that there's no excuse now for using P2P networks to download and share it.
The new Nintendo DS is set to be released soon in Europe and will feature some very sophisticated anti-piracy protection, especially protecting the content during multi-player gaming, which is when it could be very vulnerable. The software, called RSA BSAFE, ensures that when users wirelessly share a game during a multiplayer gaming session, there is no permanent copy made to the other console. The software locks content so it cannot be illegally copied from the original cartridge or disk. Game software downloaded during a multiplayer session will be erased as soon as its closed.
"This protects Nintendo and our games development partners from piracy. It does not have any adverse effect on consumers, nor on the play experience. The player with a DS version of Super Mario, for example, simply loads the cartridge into the console and then seeks other DS users in the neighbourhood to join the game. They come along and decide to play, tap into it, and then play against each other," a Nintendo Australia spokeswoman said. "As soon as they shut their machine, they don't have the game any more. It's securely held on the cartridge owned by the first player."
MSN music is countering Apple's iTunes service's Pepsi promotion by offering MSN music customers a free song in the run up to the Grammy Awards. Apple and Pepsi currently have a free track promotion for anyone who gets a winning Pepsi bottle cap, which they hope will lead to more than 200 million track give-aways. The major difference however is that iTunes will allow you to select whatever song you want for free when you have a winning cap, whereas the free MSN music will be picked by the MSN music team.
"This is also an excellent opportunity for people to discover songs they might not have tried before - so pop fans can check out an outstanding country song, or rock fans can discover some of the year's best hip-hop,"Rob Bennett, senior director of MSN Entertainment said. The picks will come from the following categories: Feb. 8, Best Male Pop Vocal Performance/Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; Feb. 9, Best Rock Song; Feb. 10, Best Rap Song; Feb. 11, Best R&B Song; and Feb. 12, Best Country Song.
Somehow, the Apple iTunes/Pepsi promotion sounds a bit better to me. It seems like MSN music is hoping to pick songs to feed to their customers hoping they will like the artist they hear and go purchase more from the music store. However, they would probably pick the artists best work so I can imagine a lot of MSN music customers being disappointed after purchasing extra. Still though, it's nice to see competition is still rampant in the online legal music download market.
Analysts have warned the movie industry that movie downloading is still in its infancy. They said the movie studios have to offer much more digital movies online for sale to deter people from downloading movies illegally. Forrester said that of the 5% of the online population, who have downloaded a movie, one in three have downloaded at least three movies in the last three months.
"The profile of movie downloaders is similar to that of the early music downloaders, so it's time to ring the alarm bells," the analyst firm stated. They recommended that the movie industries go after the P2P networks and the illicit services that offer movies illegally and work on an alternative for consumers to purchase DRM-protected movies over the Internet.
Forrester warns that developments in digital video technology, like the DivX and XviD codecs, and developments in Peer-to-Peer technology like BitTorrent are set to fuel further movie downloading. The movies industry likely see's some of the problems in offering movie content to users, for example the sheer size of good quality downloads. A decent quality DivX download could be 700MB and would fit nicely on a CD-R. If they got millions of customers, they would require a massive amount of bandwidth and a huge system that would probably take a long time to piece together.
So far in the Kazaa trial, Sharman Networks and Altnet have been claiming they are two separate companies and have nothing really to do with each other. Sharman also claim that they cannot control what Kazaa users share, and have no way of filtering their network. However, important documents disclosed today tell a different story. In fact, instead of Sharman appearing to have no control over the network, they appear to have complete control
Logs of discussions between parent company Sharman and the Estonian developer of the Kazaa Media Desktop were revealed and have some pretty startling quotes in them. It appears that Sharman can log user activity. To make it worse, they were aware that this logging could lead to legal troubles with the entertainment industry and would cause some privacy concerns. Kazaa has already got a failing reputation due to spyware they pack with KMD.
Here are just some of the amazing quotes you can take from the logs of discussion...
Reporting will make Kazaa look like spyware, as soon as it becomes evident we record downloads and playbacks, users will flee to competitive networks
Not much can be said about the above; only that it supports the recording industries claims that technically the network can be monitored.
AfterDawn reported in 2003 that Disney were to start selling self-destructing DVDs. Basically you could watch these discs for 48 hours after you buy them, but the discs coating reacts with oxygen and turns black and unreadable after that time. Disney marketed it as a rental that you never had to remember to bring back to avoid late fees. The disc was called EZ-D by its developer Flexplay. However, Disney has now decided to drop the self-destructing DVDs, but that doesn't necessarily mean the technology is dead just yet.
Flexplay has been sold to Atlanta-based Convex Group, who now plan to release content in this format. "We believe wholeheartedly in the platform," said Dawn Whaley, executive vice president of the Convex Group. "I don't think we would have acquired a company if we didn't think it would be successful." The discs have been attacked by environmentalists who say it will lead to unnecessary waste in landfills.
Convex Group released an independent film, Noel, during the holidays. It now says it is talking with retail partners and content providers, and plans to roll out additional titles later in 2005. A spokesman for Buena Vista Home Entertainment, the division of Disney that released the films, confirmed that its disposable DVD pilot program is over. He said they are now evaluating what they want to do next.
Bram Cohen, the creator of a revolutionary piece of software called BitTorrent, has to defend himself against claims from Hollywood. Cohen was always a smart kid, while other kids played outside, he was in his home learning programming languages. By the time he was in Junior High, Cohen could solve a Rubik's Cube in a few minutes. He was a college drop-out who then went on to co-found a hacker convention in San Francisco, "I was always really weird," he said.
At age 27, while studying psychological conditions, he determined that he suffered from Asperger syndrome, a mild form of Autism, which explained his social difficulties and seemed tied to his obsession with puzzles. He admits he can have trouble censoring thoughts or even making eye contact but has learned to control it using behavioural psychology. Now the Hollywood movie industry claims that his software, BitTorrent poses a severe threat to the financial stability of the movie industry.
BitTorrent is unlike P2P networks. On P2P networks, users select folders and files to share, which can be uploaded to other users, and they can also search for files to download from other users. The problems are obvious, if someone has a file that 10,000 users want, then they are going to be hammering that person’s client trying to download it. Also let's not forget that not all P2P users actually upload like they are supposed to. Some use hacked clients or other methods (like limiting their bandwidth) to stop uploading to other users.
In the past year or so, we have read many stories about University students and downloading music. In my opinion, it seems the entertainment Industry cannot make up it’s Mind about University students. This news article is written in light of the entertainment industries plans to sue students at top Universities to set an example to other students around the country. So from the oldest to the newest, this is what we’ve seen in the past year.
RIAA includes students in its sue-em-all campaign on P2P users:
Ever since the RIAA crackdown began one major target was students. It is unclear exactly how many students the RIAA has sued but in it’s latest set of lawsuits, filed in December 2004, the RIAA claims it sued 68 students at 23 universities. Later on, news sources began reporting that the entertainment industry is planning to sue students at elite Universities.
Vivendi’s new anti-piracy tool:
Vivendi launched a new tool to help Campuses monitor network traffic better and attempt to squash illegal filesharing. This software is called Automated Copyright Notice System (or ACNS). The system basically tries to automate the DMCA (American copyright legislation) process -- the ACNS-compliant DMCA complaint notifications will contain XML tags that will automatically launch the ACNS process, using network admins parameters and possibly blocking the infringing IP address from using P2P services or the whole network.
Rome Finance Police have seized about 20,000 items in total including pirated DVDs, music CDs, Console games including Playstation games, PC's and other items. From the news source which doesn't have very good English, it appears that eighteen individuals are known so far to be responsible and were handed over to the Police.
The operation came from an investigation that used surveillance such as phone taps which lead the Finance police to a Villa in Villanova di Guidonia. When they entered the Villa they found a network of PCs connected with about 50 CD/DVD writers and some printers which were used to make the unauthorized copies.
In the past couple of years there has been an increasing number of such raids worldwide turning up thousands of pirated goods. The world's entertainment industry looks upon these police operations as important for the stability of the major industries.
However, instead of the entertainment industry focusing on this type of piracy, we have been reading more in our news headlines about lawsuits against music downloader’s and sharers than the guys you see walking around your neighbourhood trying to sell bootleg DVD's. The attention of piracy should be focused more on these individuals than on BitTorrent trackers and P2P networks.
A Georgia man was arrested at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport this week while delivering bootlegged copies of movies to Fort Smith. An airport employee found two boxes of DVDs containing titles are currently only in movie theatre's such as Coach Carter, Meet the Fockers and The Polar Express. It also contained other DVDs and a lot of music CDs.
Terrick Haynes, 24, of Riverdale, Ga cooperated with authorities and claimed that he was delivering the pirated DVDs and CDs to two barbershops in Fort Smith, for a man named Mohammed.
He claimed that he did not know the people he was supposed to be delivering to. Airline records showed the boxes had been checked as baggage in Atlanta on Jan. 29 by Haynes, who had been bumped from the flight. Haynes was unable to fly to Northwest Arkansas until Wednesday; and, when he arrived, he was arrested by the airport's police department.
550 DVDs of 44 different titles were seized as well as 121 CDs of 17 different titles. Haynes was booked on felony charges of unauthorized copying or sale of recordings.
Engadget claim they have a source who has worked on both the Xbox and "Xbox 2" who says that the next console will be called Xbox 360. There have been several name rumours flying around about what the next Xbox console is going to be called but Microsoft has been reluctant to confirm a name, probably loving the confusion they are causing amongst the gaming community.
This is not the first time the name Xbox 360 has been around either, a marketing firm conducted a survey last year where they asked people whether they thought Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or Nintendo N5 sounded more "next-gen".
With the next generation consoles just around the corner, it will be an interesting battle between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Sony is set to soon reveal details on the Cell processor that will power the Sony PS3. Sony Computer Entertainment America has also recently announced the launch of the PSP console in the United States for March 24th 2005 and has also confirmed the initial game releases.
Online music download stores are becoming more popularly by the day now with most of the worlds record labels licensing their content to services such as iTunes and Napster, now a new service, CrimsonBay, aims to offer Indian music to the download market. Initially the store will offer a catalogue of tracks that is nowhere near the worlds biggest download services but still managing to hit 40,000. Currently the store is offering memorable songs from films such as "Umrao Jaan", "Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge", "Aradhana" and artists such as Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Bally Sagoo and Rishi Rich.
The store has a very user-friendly interface which is vital to gather customers and make sure that they will come back. "We envision CrimsonBay initially establishing itself as the premier online marketplace for Indian music similar to iTunes, and subsequently becoming the leading provider of digital downloads for all digital content from India-music, music videos, ring tones and films." said Sunil K. Singh, a member of the board of directors of CrimsonBay Inc, "We foresee tremendous potential in this space, driven by the popularity of portable devices such as MP3 players and Portable Media Centres. Service providers such as CrimsonBay will play an increasingly important and influential role in helping deliver this content to consumers."
We reported a few days ago that the new Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) was set for release in the United States on March 24th 2005. However on that article we did not have a list of the initial game released that will be offered for the new handheld console as they hadn't been released. So for your convenience, here are the games that will be released in the first week.
Ape Escape: On the Loose (SCEA)
ATV Offroad Fury: Blazin' Trails (SCEA)
Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (Capcom)
Dynasty Warriors (Koei)
FIFA 2005 (Electronic Arts)
Gretzky NHL (SCEA)
Lumines (Ubisoft)
Metal Gear Acid (Konami)
MLB (SCEA)
MVP Baseball (Electronic Arts)
NBA (SCEA)
NBA Street Showdown (Electronic Arts)
Need for Speed Underground Rivals (Electronic Arts)
NFL Street 2 Unleashed (Electronic Arts)
Rengoku: Tower of Purgatory (Konami)
Ridge Racers (Namco)
Smartbomb (Eidos Interactive)
Spider-Man 2 (Activision)
Tiger Woods PGA Tour (Electronic Arts)
Tony Hawk's Underground 2 Remix (Activision)
Twisted Metal: Head On (SCEA)
Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade (Sony Online Entertainment)
WipeOut Pure (SCEA)
World Tour Soccer (SCEA)
The release date for the Sony PSP in Europe has not been announced as it appears Sony may be forced to delay the European and Asian launches.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has said it was very pleased with the French ruling earlier this week that forced a French school teacher to pay €10,200 for sharing music on P2P networks. The man was accused of making 30GB of illegal MP3 files available for download, which they some how translate into 10,000 songs or 614 albums. The man also was forced to cover the costs of publishing the judgement in two French broadsheets, Liberation and Le Parisien.
However, while all this was going on a group of French artists, politicians and intellects made their opposition to these lawsuits known. The campaign is the first in it's kind in Europe to unite artists and consumers against recording industry action. "We denounce this repressive and disproportionate policy, whose victims are just a few scapegoats," said signatories of the campaign, led by weekly Le Nouvel Observateur in its edition published Thursday. "Like at least 8 million other French people, we also have downloaded music online and are also potential criminals," the open letter said. "We demand a stop to these ridiculous legal pursuits."
The Cell processor that will power Sony's upcoming Playstation 3 is set to be unveiled at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco on Monday, but Tom Halfhill of the Microprocessor Report has an idea of what to expect. He has studied patents and documents relating to Cell and sees a number of chip breakthroughs that dramatically boost computing power in everything from game consoles to mobile phones. Current multicore chips typically chop a single computing task into parts, which are distributed among processing units. Cell's processing units called software cells can handle completely separate jobs.
"The software cells are designed to be kind of self-contained, they can kind of roam around," Halfhill said. Cells are also capable of roaming over a network, allowing the processor to perform a type of distributed or grid computing. So technically a PS3 could borrow processing power from another PS3 console on a network. "The Cell architecture is designed to make grid computing almost universal," Halfhill said. "It makes distributed processing part of the design. If you have several of these machines on a network, the work can be spread across a network."
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) have both in the past launched lawsuit campaigns against P2P users it alleges to be trading copyrighted music and movies. Now it seems that some media executives wish to go after students at top universities to set an example. The RIAA has sued 68 students at 23 institutions in the United States, including Harvard and Georgetown universities. RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said the new round of lawsuits are part of a larger effort by the recording industry to enforce copyright protection on college campuses.
"In a world that is becoming more and more connected through the wonders of digital technology, students need to understand that just because someone else's property or creations can be obtained easily and freely without anyone seemingly knowing, there are consequences because it is stealing," RIAA General Counsel Steven Marks said in a press release. BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland says the entertainment giants want to make an example out of some students. "It's really chilling," Garland said. "They're looking to find examples at all the big schools, the one unlucky kid who gets held up for everyone else to look at."
In January the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed it's latest set of lawsuits against 717 P2P users. However, one of these alleged copyright infringers was a little different from the rest. The RIAA claimed that 83-year old Gertrude Walton shared over 700 pop, rap and rock songs on a P2P network, using smittenedkitten as her nickname. What the RIAA didn't know, is that this woman died in December 2004. Her daughter, Robin Chianumba lived with her for 17 years and said that her mother wouldn't even allow a computer in the house.
The RIAA now admit that it is very unlikely that Ms. Walton was actually smittenedkitten and have blamed the lawsuit on the time it takes gather information on illicit file swappers. "Our evidence gathering and our subsequent legal actions all were initiated weeks and even months ago," said RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy. "We will now, of course, obviously dismiss this case." Well if they decided not to dismiss the case, I wonder they would plan on winning it.
This case is an example how flawed the RIAA's campaign is. It is claimed that the RIAA most of the time don't exactly have solid evidence against people they sue but the people still prefer to settle than to face the Recording Industry lawyers. "I believe that if music companies are going to set examples they need to do it to appropriate people and not dead people," Chianumba said. "I am pretty sure she is not going to leave Greenwood Memorial Park to attend the hearing."
Does hundreds of movies on just one optical disc sound interesting to you? Well a group known as the Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance want to do just that. Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics are two of six companies, who have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which they say can be used to put 1TB of data onto just one disc. The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's, and transfer data at speeds 40 times that of DVD, about 1GB per second. HVD technology is probably still years off however.
HVD is seen more as a possible successor to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray technologies. Blu-Ray single layer discs can hold about 25GB of data but a Dual Layer Blu Ray disc could hold about 50GB of data. Meanwhile, single layer DVD discs can only hold about 4.7GB. The HVD alliance plans to pitch HVD technology at the entertainment industry and corporations. The technology behind HVD is based on holography technology from Japan's Optware, one of the six founders of the consortium.
Sony unveiled a home server with 1TB of storage for the Japanese market last year and advertised it as being able to record six television channels for five and half days straight, while only using half the full capacity. The organisation first wants to work on discs with lower capacity however, but still is talking about recordable discs that can hold up to 200GB of data. They are also talking about a read-only disc capable of holding 100GB of data.
Music video's have long been seen as a promotional tool of the music industry, but now the suited men and women over at Universal Music Group intend to turn this promotional tool into a profit tool by charging Internet companies and Satellite services for streaming their music videos. The other major record labels are expected to follow which means this will be a major change for the entertainment industry and a nuisance for some Internet based companies. AOL music and Yahoo's Launch are two examples of services that were setup around streaming free music videos to Internet users.
In the early 1980's the major record labels made a decision to basically allow MTV completely free access to their music videos. However, now Universal see the increasing number of Satellite companies and Internet music companies as a new form of an on-demand medium and are determined to make sure the labels profit from it. Software giant Microsoft has already agreed to pay Universal to use their music videos. "The digital music and video market is still in its infancy, and the business models are continuing to evolve,"Rob Bennett, senior director of MSN Entertainment, said in a statement. "As an industry we are all figuring this out together, and it's our job at MSN Music to provide a great platform to bring content owners together with consumers."
Sony Computer Entertainment America has finally confirmed a date for the American release of its PSP (Playstation Portable) console. The console will be released on March 24th 2005 and will include a 32MB Memory Stick Duo, Headphones, Soft case, sample disc and screen cleaning cloth in the value pack, which is the same as the Japanese release. The value pack will cost $249.99 US. Also, the first one million Value packs will include the feature film Spiderman 2 in UMD format. There has been no official game release line-up unveiled just yet however but it is expected very soon.
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe still has not set any official date for the European release of the PSP console. However, the U.S. retail price of $249.99 has some gamers worried about the price of the console in Europe. The rumoured price to expect in the UK will be £180. With the console being launched so late in March it is very unlikely that the European release date will be set for March also.
The European Parliament's committee on Legal Affairs has voted for a restart of the legislative process of the directive on computer implemented inventions. Anti-patent campaigners are delighted with the result claiming it is a huge boost to their cause. Many campaigners are worried that the European Union will end up doing the same as the United States in granting patents on pure software inventions. Director of the No Software Patents movement, Florian Muller, is happy with the result but says the battle is still a long way from being over. "We have to keep pushing. In our case, for years to come," he said.
Now there either has to be a re-submit of the original proposal or a whole new proposal by the European Commission. Whichever it is will go to Parliament for a First Reading. The bill's new rapporteur, MEP Michel Rocard, will shepherd the new proposal through the process all over again. MEPs made several amendments at the original First Reading, considerably limiting the scope of the Commission's proposal. Later most of the MEP's changes were removed prompting accusations of undemocratic processes, and secret deals behind closed doors. The Council's version was informally adopted as the parliament's common position in May last year. Groups like FFII and No Software Patents have waged a campaign against the directive.
The United States Senate approved a package of copyright bills on Tuesday that would make it a federal crime to camcord a movie and would protect the manufacturers of players that edit out purportedly offensive content from movies. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act (FECA) of 2005 also would make it easier for Law Enforcement to crack down on illegal filesharing of copyrighted music and movie files on P2P networks and tackle the problem of new release movies, music and games appearing and being traded on the Internet before their official release date. Although this is the first time the 109th congress passed the legislation, it was already passed twice in the 108th congress but died in the end in a squabble over unrelated legislation.
"This important, bipartisan legislation will crack down on what has become a growth industry in this era of rapid technological development: the theft and distribution of copyrighted material. I appreciate my colleagues moving this bill so quickly and urge our friends in the House to do the same," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. Sens. Cornyn and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., were the key boosters of the legislation in the Senate. Approval in the House however, could be more problematic even though the House approved different versions of the bill, according to industry sources. A dispute between Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz and Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, over boxing-reform legislation became the reason why the House failed to approve the bill last year. Industry officials hope the hangover from that fight and some resentment of the industry will not bring the current bill to a similar fate.
Software giant Microsoft has teamed up with Macrovision to make their media protection systems work together to keep restriction on content transfered from one device to another. In short, this means that restrictions will remain even if a downloaded protected file was recorded over an analog connection. Another example would be a movie protected by Macrovision technology would remain protected when transfeed to a computer that uses Microsoft technology. The deal was announced yesterday and is aimed at making movie studios a little bit more comfortable licensing their content to online download services, on-demand movie services and other venues.
These restrictions do not only prevent any copying of the movies, but they also can impose limits on how they are used, such as a time limit on the playback of the file. Although it's main purpose is to prevent copying, the companies claim that the technology will allow consumers to transfer their protected content from device to device while still keeping the restrictions imposed by the content owners. Macrovision specialise in protecting movies stores on DVD's and VHS whereas Microsoft's DRM technology protects digital content on personal computers and related devices. No financial terms were disclosed at this time but Macrovision apparently has licensed some of its patented technology to Microsoft for their use and for use by software developers who build programs to run on Microsoft's Windows operating system.
The war of words going on between Microsoft and the Open Source community has heated up, as Linus Torvalds, Linux founder led an attack on software patents. Mr Torvalds said that patents are a big problem for the open source movement. Chairman of the Mozilla foundation, Mitchell Kapor, fears that Microsoft will one day lead a campaign of patent lawsuits. Linux is a freely available alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating system. A community of programmers develop Linux based on open source principles, which means other user's are allowed to make their own modifications without having to pay any license fee's.
IBM has already made 500 of its patents freely available and more companies are expected to do the same. In the United States alone there are anywhere from 150,000 to 300,000 software patents, many of which should have never been granted, open source developers claim. "Some of the patents have dubious validity and are being wielded by some big companies to force smaller companies to buy licenses in the knowledge that they can't afford to take them to court," said Dr Jeremy Philpott of the UK Patent Office. Others prefer to call these patents, WMD's. "If totally pushed to the wall - because their business model no longer holds up in an era in which open source is an economically superior way to produce software...of course they're going to unleash the WMDs," Mr Kapor is reported as saying.
Napster has unveiled a new portable version of its music subscription service, which takes aim at Apple Computer's portable iPod music player. The company are backing their new service with a $30 million ad campaign. The campaign includes a Super Bowl television spot that urges consumers to compare spending $10,000 for 10,000 songs to fill their iPods or paying a $15 a month fee to carry songs from a catalogue of over a million tracks on Napster-compatible players. This $30 million campaign came as a shock to some analysts as $30 million accounts 70% of what Napster were expected to spend on a full year of marketing.
While $30 million sounds like a massive amount of money to spend on promoting their new service and slamming the iPod, Apple has already spent a lot more. "Apple has spent roughly a hundred million dollars or possibly twice that much to market iTunes and iPods. Now, Napster is stepping up to the plate," said analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group. If there is one part of music download services that is discouraging to consumers it's the lack of ability to store your purchased music on a portable digital music player. Customers who have purchased an iPod can store songs purchased from the Apple iTunes music store on their iPods however, but is it really fair that if you purchase an iTunes track for 99c that you must get an iPod to be able to carry it around with you?
A French teacher has been fined €10,200 for sharing music online. This is France's first big case aimed at deterring people from using P2P networks to share music. €10,200 is not so bad when you take into account that the companies involved demanded €28,400. So he got off with less than half of the original demand but also was ordered to take out advertisements in two newspapers to publicise the verdict. He is alleged to have transferred 30GB of music files which the recording industry claims accounts for about 10,000 songs, or 614 albums. Needless to say all those files are now gone as his computer was confiscated.
The judgement came the eve of an appeal by 70 musicians, academics and politicians calling for an end to legal action against individuals who download for their own use. "Like at least eight million other French people, we have also downloaded music online and are thus part of a growing number of 'criminals'. We ask that these absurd lawsuits stop," the petition, to be published in the Nouvel Observateur newsmagazine Thursday, said. They would prefer that the music industry finds a way to adapt to this new technology instead.
Microsoft and Apple may be head to head in many different areas including operating systems and their online music services. However, it appears that an estimated 80% of Microsoft employees who own a portable music player, own an iPod. The sight of people walking past with the Apple white headphones on is increasing, especially on Microsoft's leafy corporate campus in Redmond, Washington. "About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said an anonymous high-level manager. "It's pretty staggering."
So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use. And why does this all seem so strange? Well, because several companies that produce portable music players use Microsoft software including Creative Technology, Rio and Sony and it's WMA audio format is used by several major online music download stores including Napster, Musicmatch and Wal-Mart. Apple's iPod has 65% of the portable player market, and its online iTunes Music Store has 70% of online music sales.
"These guys are really quite scared," said the source of Microsoft's management. "It shows how their backs are against the wall.... Even though it's Microsoft, no one is interested in what we have to offer, even our own employees." Aw poor Microsoft. You spend so long on top of the market I bet it feel's horrible to be beaten in even just one area? Better luck next time eh?
Lindows founder and former MP3.com CEO, Michael Robertson, is going to announce a new, DRM-less online music store next week called MP3tunes. The advantages of a music store selling DRM free MP3 files include the customers not having to download special music players to play the format and also have no restrictions on copying the files or burning them to CD etc... But could such a music store actually work? The major record labels would seem the most unlikely to license their music to a service that uses no DRM protection on their files.
Robertson is also no stranger to legal troubles, being the founder of MP3.com and recently involved in a legal mess with Microsoft over the "Lindows" operating system. He accuses the other major online music services such as iTunes, Napster and Sony Connect or attempting to push consumers away from the MP3 format and toward proprietary systems, which force consumers to only use certain music players to play the files. While a DRM free online music store does sound more appealing than iTunes or Napster, it will be interesting to see if the service can build a big enough database of music to compete.
The next generation Xbox console, also known with a code name Xenon, is now expected to be previewed in May 2005. It was speculated earlier that the first preview would be held at Game Developers Conference in March, but a Microsoft spokeswoman has confirmed that this is not the case. Therefore the it is now expected that Xenon will be unveiled at the E3 expo in May, which takes place in Los Angeles.
The next Xbox console is expected to go on sale at the end of the year, but very few details about it have been released.
It is thought that the machine may be unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, which takes place in May, according to a Reuters news agency report.
...
Gamers are looking forward to the next generation of machines because they will have much more processing and graphical power.
They are also likely to pack in more features and technologies that make them more central as entertainment and communications hubs.
Although details of PlayStation 3, Xenon, and Nintendo's so-called Revolution, are yet to be finalised, developers are already working on titles.
There is a rumour circulating that Windows Media DRM10 has been cracked. We found the following on a blog, but are not sure if the rumour is true or not just yet...
So, the "word" is that a popular internet magazine in Japan has posted information on how to crack the protected files. It appears that you still need a license for the content to start with, that's kind of a big thing. I'm sure there will be more information about this later.
The software has the file names of "DrmDbg.exe" and "DRM2WMV". DrmDbg.exe is supposed to get the KID and the Seed from memory when a DRM-enabled file is being decrypted/played. That spits out a .key file and DRM2WMV is supposed to take that .key and unprotect the WMV. This would leave you with a WMV file that is entirely unprotected and playable in anything that supports WMV playback.
While this may seem like it's great for fair-use and all, many content owners are upset with the matter. Microsoft has not commented on the issue publicly yet.
I also found this while searching some groups....
After all I got no response from MSFT... :-(
As far as I survey at this time some popular DRM Protected Video
Providers's contents were cracked...
Many many unlocked video files were distributiong with no payment...
Verizon Wireless and Warner Music Group have launched the first music video download service in the United States. The service runs on Verizon Wireless' Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO) network. The service has been called V Cast and because it uses EV-DO it will be available in more than 30 major metropolitan markets and covers more than 75 million people. It will cost about $15.00 a month for access to the service. It will be added to customers Verizon Wireless calling plan. It will get them access to more than 300 daily updated video clips from news, entertainment, weather and sports from leading content providers.
As for music videos and other premium content, an extra charge of about $3.99 will be added. There are no additional airtime charges to download and watch WMG music videos and other V CAST basic content. The LG VX8000 is available to Verizon Wireless customers for $199.99 after $70 rebate with a two-year customer agreement. Samsung a890 is $249.99 after a $70 rebate with a two-year customer agreement, and the CDM8940 from UTStarcom Personal Communications priced at $229.99 after a $70 rebate with a two-year customer agreement.
Reports indicate that Denmark is to join Poland in opposition to the EU directive on software patents. Poland has blocked the formal adoption of the common position twice already. It is likely that the vote on the directive will be put back on the agenda list as an A-item. Denmark now says it will also oppose such a move, prior to the country's elections on 8 February, according to Groklaw. "The question of software patents was on the agenda during the meeting of the European subcommittee Friday, where minister of foreign affairs Per Stig Møller insured [sic] that Denmark will block acceptance of the directive prior to the Danish Parliament election.", appeared in a Danish article.
Denmark is a soft opponent of the directive. During the council meeting in May, which saw the Irish presidency's draft become the informal common position, Denmark expressed reservations about the draft, but voted in its favour. It is possible however that the Danish Government is just trying to limit EU activity in the run-up to the election, or may be trying to score political points at home. Either way, its opposition will mean further delay for the final vote on formal adoption of the common position on software patents. The JURI committee, responsible for legal affairs, will meet on 2 February to decide whether or not to restart the whole process.
The classic Clint Eastwood character Dirty Harry will be reborn on the next generation gaming consoles. While Mr.Eastwood keeps on collecting oscars for his most recent work, the brutal police detective is propably the character he is most memorable from.
The market for online legal music downloads is strong enough to take a price hike according to major record labels. Several major record labels are apparently in talks with online music stores to get them to increase music download prices, according to the FT. In the United States, online stores typical sell music downloads for about 99c per track. The wholesale cost of these tracks (that the shops pay) is about 65c.
We reported yesterday that Fraud claims were circulating about (former) LokiTorrent owner Ed Webber. Many people began questioning whether the LokiTorrent lawsuit was real. But a blog entry at Joegratz tells a different story. Here is the entry pasted below.
