News archive (9 / 2002)

One of the oldest digital music companies still around, Liquid Audio, has been in serious financial problems over the last year or so and company has been seen as a very probable Chapter 11 candidate for some time now. Today Liquid Audio announced that it sold its DRM and secure file-transaction patents to Microsoft for $7 million in cash.

Now Liquid Audio says that once the deal is finished, it will focus on selling and licensing its existing digital distribution technology to content providers and online retailers. Company has also voted about merger with Alliance Entertainment and vote's results should be ready by Friday. Liquid Audio has operated since 1996 and has developed secure online music distribution tools, payment methods, etc which never really took off because of various things, including major record labels' unattractive licensing policies and P2P networks.

PC Magazine has now said it out loud what many of us may have been wondering privately. According to their article, a justified price for a Compact Disc Audio would be around $1.4. I am sure that the music industry can answer to this with all kinds of figures but statistics, but according to my common sense – and apparently many others too – the price of an audio CD is seriously and artificially bloated.

Price fixing. The music industry began to act like a monopolist. With the advent of the CD, it found that it could continue to gouge its customers. While the industry lectures the public on illegal copying, it gets busted for price fixing. So much for the morality argument.

When Edison first released his prerecorded cylinders, they sold for $4 each. With mass production, he eventually brought the price down to 35 cents, nearly a 90 percent reduction. If the same ratio held true with $16 CDs, the cost of which has been perpetually propped up by price fixing, they would cost $1.40. Since it costs less than 25 cents to mass-produce a CD, $1.40 is reasonable and profitable.

PC Magazine

Napster's unsecured creditors' attorney said today that the group has analyzed the bids they have received for Napster's assets and have signed an agreement with one of the companies. They hope to finish the deal as early as on next week.

Attorney, Rick Antonoff, also expects that U.S. bankruptcy court will rule on Monday that Napster can keep its Chapter 11 bankruptcy status and avoids Chapter 7 liquidation, which would mean splitting up the company's assets and auction them to highest paying parties.

Source: News.com

Nokia today annouced their first WCDMA 3G mobile telephone. Although 3G networks are still under development in most countries, it is crucial for the operators to have products on the market to both gain credibility for the third generation networks as well as boost the general intrest for the new technology.

The key features of the Nokia 6650 mobile phone are:

·Video recording and playback at 128x96 resolution (subQCIF): up to 20 seconds, including sound
·Person-to-person multimedia messaging, including video & audio clips, to another MMS-capable device and/or email address
·PC Suite for storage and basic editing of video clips
·Connectivity via USB or Bluetooth including audio and infrared
·Illuminated high-contrast, active-matrix, full-graphics color display The phone also offers MIDP Java 1.0 support for downloading additional applications, a WAP 1.21 browser for using mobile Internet services, and a wallet application for mobile transactions with SWIM and WKPI support.

The screen has a 128x160 pixel resolution, and it can display 4096 colors simultaneously. Using the WCDMA network, the phone can download at 128kbps and upload at 64kbps. That is adequate for streaming live video at the 128x96 resolution.

Major record labels have funded a big advertising campaign in the U.S. to "educate" consumers that downloading music from the P2P networks is illegal.

Campaign that will run for the next couple of months, will feature artists such as Britney Spears and Missy Elliott. Adverts will be shown at Congress' hearing on online piracy today before they will be rolled out to public. TV campaign is also boosted with national newspaper campaign launched earlier this week, featuring same names as the TV ads and also additional artists, such as Eminem and Madonna.

Basically artists will be telling American audiences how downloading music from the P2P networks is stealing and morally wrong. IMHO, it kinda strikes me to use artists who earn millions from their recording deals, in these ads and trying to convince how their living is under threat by P2P networks. Meanwhile various studies have proved how downloading music actually boosts record sales. Ah well, its better that they spend record labels' money this way than suing individuals over downloading MP3s..

Source: BBC

As we reported several months ago, Sanyo has been working on a 1,4GB CD-R format that utilizes regular CD-R media. Now Sanyo annouces it's HD-Burn technology. Very interesting concept, but somehow I feel that it has a hard time finding potential market as the DVD recordable technology gets cheaper every day.

SANYO Electric Co., Ltd. has developed the high density recording technology "HD-BURN" which doubles the recording capacity (1.4GB) on conventional CD-R media (700MB). "HD-BURN" will be sequentially employed for our Super Combination Drives. In addition , SANYO has formulated the standard recording format and started product licensing.

CD-R media is rapidly becoming popular because of its reasonable price and superior compatibility, and used by a wide range of users. Currently , recording of large volumes of data such as video are increasing, resulting in the increasingly popularity of DVD media (4.7GB).

As a result, need for intermediate range capacity between CD-R and DVD is steadily increasing as users demand an easy to use and affordable type of large volume media."HD-BURN" technology meets these needs and realizes the recording of large volume data at a moderate price.

Finnish Soprano Oyj today announced their Soprano MobileTV -service, which provies streaming TV programmes to multimedia mobile phones. The service has been developed in co-operation with Oplayon, FS Film, and Nokia.

At first the service will provide commercial film services from FS Film as well as free national TV news broadcasts. The selection is expected to grow rapidly.

Small online venture, Intertainer, who offers pay-per-view movies over broadband Net connections to users' PCs or their digital cable boxes, has sued three major Hollywood studios and their owners.

Lawsuit has been filed against AOL TimeWarner, Sony and Vivendi Universal. Suit claims that these three movie studios have set up a conspiracy by not allowing Intertainer to license their content in order to use it in its service. According to Intertainer, this has been done to buy more time for Movielink, which is similiar venture as Intertainer, but is owned by major Hollywood studios -- including those three named in the lawsuit.

Source: News.com

Pioneer has managed to capture a major portion of the cosumer DVD recorder market. Now AVLAND has published the specs of upcoming A05 model.


Pioneer DVR-A05 4x DVD Burner Picture

-Plays pre-recorded DVD's & CD's
-Records on DVD-RW, DVD-R, CD-R & CD-RW Blank Media
-Makes discs that will play in most existing DVD players
-Uses the single layer 4.7GB DVD-RW (ReWritable) & Once only DVD-R System
-CD-R & CD-RW recoding & playback
-4x DVD-R and 2xDVD-RW speeds
-16x CD-R writing with 8x CD-RW writing
-Internal IDE drive
-Bundled with a full software pack

Specifications:

DVD Write speeds: 4x DVD-R (On 4x media), 2xDVD-RW
DVD ROM Read Speed: 12x, 6x with 4x DVD-R media (6x for 2x DVD-RW media) 2x with older DVD-R/W media
CD Write Speed: 16x CD-R, 8x CD-RW *Using hi-speed media"
CD-ROM Read Speed: 32xCD-ROM, 10x Audio
Playback: DVD-ROM and DVD Video, CD-ROM and CD-ROM XA, CD-DA and CD TEXT, Photo CD, Video CD, CD Extra
Buffer: 2MB
Dimensions: Width 148mm, Height 42.3mm, Depth 198mm
Weight: Approximately 1,100g
Compatible OS: Windows 98SE, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows 2000 (all with Above Pentium III 500MHz, 256MB Ram recommendation)

World's most popular P2P software provider, KaZaA (owned by Sharman Networks), has released a new major version, v2.0, today. Company has also made a deal with major European ISP, Tiscali, to promote Tiscali's broadband service through Kazaa's network.

New version of Kazaa introduces various enhancements to the service, including a possibility to "bundle" files, such as full albums, into download lists, so users can download full albums more easily. Other new improvement is an introduction of web search which allows users to search through WWW in order to find music, movies, etc from there.

The deal with Tiscali proves that the company tries to make its public appearance more legit. The agreement allows Tiscali to promote its broadband services through Kazaa's desktop client and if a new user signs up to Tiscali's broadband service, Kazaa will get a slice -- a marketing method called CPA (cost per action) advertising.

Source: PCWorld

Group represeting Malaysian artists, Karyawan, has asked Malaysian government to introduce mandatory whipping and jail terms for VCD and audio CD pirates.

According to the group, current legislation and present punishment levels haven't had enough effect on piracy -- Malaysia is one of the top countries in terms of software, audio and video piracy in the world.

"Malaysia must take the cue from Singapore (which has introduced mandatory jail terms) which has practically eradicated trading in pirated VCDs and CDs as a deterrent to the pirates.", the group said.

Source: TheStar

Warner Music Group (WMG) and RioPort today announced that Warner Music Group will make available for sale, via RioPort's digital distribution infrastructure, more than 30,000 music singles to consumers. The downloaded music can be played on PCs, burned to CDs or transfered to secure portable devices. The prices will start from 99 cents per song, and be distributed using RioPorts service by numerous retailers, such as BestBuy.com and Musicland Group, as well as MTV.com, SonicBlue.com and HP.com.

Source:
Yahoo! Finance

We just added support for Region 4 (Australian only at the moment) DVD releases to our "DVD-5 or DVD-9" tool. Tool was designed to ease the DVD to DVD-R copying in order to provide information about DVD releases, such as their layer infos, etc.

The tool which was launched two months ago, has become pretty damn successful so far. We currently have almost 6,000 movies in our database and over hundred users have bothered commenting movies so far, sharing their ripping tips with rest of the users.

We also added support to VOB IDs in the database as a new field, so those who want to contribute to the list, can now also submit this important piece of information about the DVD release as well.

You can find the tool from this URL:

https://www.afterdawn.com/dvd/dvd_layer.cfm

Apparently the DVD-R drive heating problems Pioneer refers to in its press release have nothing to do with mechanical heating. Instead the heat problems are caused by the laser of the drive.

The problems occur when people try to use high-speed media not supported by the drive (eg. 4x DVD-R or 2x DVD-RW discs). The high speed media causes the laser to overheat the drive, which in turn can lock up the drive or even break it. So the warning is not about the known overheating problems with the A03 drives after all.

Also, there's a slight problem with this patch when it comes down to Apple's SuperDrives as well -- even though those drives are Pioneer A03/A04 drives, they use Apple's own firmware and hence cannot be patched using Pioneer's patch. So, Apple users need to wait until Apple issues a separate patch for their drives.

European VOD (video-on-demand) operator, Moviesystems announced yesterday that they will employ Microsoft's Windows Media 9 technology into VOD delivery systems.

Moviesystem's platform, called NetCine, has business relationships with major European movie producers, such as Luc Besson's ("Fifth Element", etc..) Europa Corp. Service will be one of the first ones to offer high-quality streaming video on Net directly to consumers.

Source: Kaleva

The DVD+RW Alliance and the DVD Forum sat down and had a long discussion. The result: both groups still refuse to work together to find a single-format solution. But there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Intel, as well as other electronics companies are getting involved in the debate, and are speaking with both the DVD+R as well as the DVD-R -party. Obviously Intel and others would like to see DVD-writers becoming popular in desktop computers as well as stand-alone devices, but that's not going to happen as long as there are two different formats, and four different types of media at the market.

Read more at:
CNET News

We spent today 8 hours to transfer our software database to use a new database engine. This caused some glitches in the system, such as forums being unavailable for about 90mins.

We're sorry if this has caused problems to you. From now on, the whole site performance should be much better since the major part of our database, software items, use a new, separate db engine and that should speed up the existing db, that still contains our user db and other stuff, as well.

Instead of suing everybody and trying to scare people away from piracy, Island Records and Bon Jovi are offering added value for everyone who buys Bon Jovi's new album Bounce.

A unique registration code is included with every CD, and with that code you can register at Bon Jovi's website for the AmericanXS-service. The registered members can access exclusive content such as unreleased music, and a chance to win Bon Jovi concert tickets in select cities in the States, Canada, and Europe.

Check out the AmericanXS site, although there's not much to see unless you've bought the album. ;-)

More than a dozen interested parties have placed their bids for now-bankrupt Napster's assets, including its trademarks, P2P technology, domain name, etc.

Bidding will end tonight and so far only public bid has come from Spanish porn company who is willing to buy Napster's trademarks and its website.

Source: News.com

DVD writer marketleader Pioneer announced a warning about its drives over-heating problems. Some of us -- including myself -- have experienced these problems already, but now Pioneer itself has admitted the problems and has also released a fix to these problems.

Fix is merely a firmware upgrade that prevents DVD-R drives to overheat when burning a high-speed media, including 2x and 4x discs. Drives that are effected:

Pioneer DVR-104 and DVR-A04
Pioneer DVR-103 and DVR-A03
Pioneer DVR-7000 (pro drive)
Pioneer PRV-9000 (pro drive)

And just to clarify; Mac's "SuperDrive"s are either Pioneer A03 or Pioneer A04 models.

Pioneer announcement and firmware patch

DivXNetworks, the developers of DivX4 and DivX5, have joined forces with unknown company called BroadQ, and have developed a player software for Sony's Playstation 2 that will allow PS2 users to watch DivX, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 videos and MP3 tracks.

Software, called QCast Tuner, can be bought through BroadQ's website and costs $49.95 (plus sales taxes).

The big problem comes when you read through the specs.. This requires PC or Mac and according to the very badly-written specs. It also requires Ethernet adapter on PS2, cables between your PC and PS2 and it seems that it requires PC to "stream" the videos to PS2 which then just interacts with PC. All videos need to be stored on your PC. So, this just merely makes PS2 a TV-out replacement to your PC and nothing else. So, don't get excited. *sigh*

More info:
QCast specs
DivXNetworks' Press release

According to Philips, several Chinese DVD player manufacturers have agreed to pay licensing fees for DVD technology that they've previously refused to do.

Based on the press release, Sony and Philips, the main patent holders, also had to bow a little bit in order to get the manufacturers to agree on their rules. All DVD players that are manufactured and sold inside China and exempted from licensing fees until end of this year. Also all manufacturers who join now, can also apply to a "DVD Player Compliance Reward Program" that reduces the licensing fees from $5.00 per player to $3.50 per player.

Source: Philips

There's an on-going campaign for a single HD-DVD format at DVDSite.org. There are currently four candidate specifications for the HD-DVD format. Obviously it would be very inconvenient for us, the consumers, if there was more than one HD-DVD standard around. Remember VHS and Betamax (and the fact that the inferior standard, VHS, came out as the winner).

The purpose of the HD-DVD: One Format Only! Campaign is to convey what we believe is a very important message, on behalf of DVD consumers everywhere, to the Hollywood movie studios, the consumer electronics manufacturers and all the members of the DVD Forum. That message is simple:

We believe that in order for any high-definition video disc format to be successful, all of the various parties involved MUST agree upon a SINGLE, unified format before making any such format available to consumers.

Check out their site at:
http://www.dvdsite.org/

Epic Records has taken a desperate methods in use in fight against piracy. Group's latest promotional CDs are delivered to radio stations, record stores and reviewers inside portable CD players that are glued shut.

A spokeswoman for Epic said: "Obviously we have a problem with piracy and this is one of the ways we're trying to address it. We're trying lots of things."

UK-based consumer group, Campaign for Digital Rights, says that these kind of methods show how desperate recording industry is to prevent piracy. "I think its time for them to start rethinking their business model because it's getting ridiculous." their spokesman said in an interview.

Source: NewScientist

University of Southern California sent out a friendly reminder to its students that if student is caught of using P2P networks or other means in order to distribute or download copyrighted movies or music, their Net access will be cut off.

"We want to alert you to the fact that many of you are risking complete loss of access to the USC computer system and both disciplinary and legal action," wrote USC dean of libraries Jerry Campbell and vice president of student affairs Michael Jackson in the e-mail.

Source: Wired (thanks to anonymous news submitter for the tip)

RIAA, MPAA, and NMPA seek summary judgement in the case against P2P "giants" Kazaa, Grokster, and MusicCity. The three organizations charge that the massive “vicarious and contributory copyright infringement” facilitated by the Kazaa, Grokster and MusicCity services is abundantly clear and an accelerated ruling on the merits of the case is warranted. The initial lawsuit was filed last October. With the summary judgement they seek to close down the networks before even going to trial.

According to the music and movie groups Kazaa & others have developed a network to emulate Napster in almost every respect, and "are earning millions of dollars from the service."

Read the full press release at RIAA.org.

Los Angeles - Attorneys for StreamCast Networks, developers of the popular Morpheus peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software, filed briefs in federal court on Monday seeking a ruling that distribution of the software does not violate copyright law.

Morpheus is the world's most popular file-sharing software based on the decentralized Gnutella P2P networking protocol.

In their briefs seeking summary judgment, attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the law firm of Brobeck, Phleger and Harrison argued that distribution of the software is legal because the product is capable of substantial noninfringing uses and because StreamCast cannot control the various uses of the software.

Supporting StreamCast in the motion is nine time Grammy nominee, Janis Ian, who believes that peer-to-peer software represents important new opportunities for artists.

On October 2, 2001, twenty-eight of the world's largest entertainment companies sued Streamcast for the allegedly infringing actions of users of its product (MGM et al v. Grokster et al, Case No. 01-CV-8541 SVW).

Additional briefs will be filed in the months to come, with oral arguments set for December 2, 2002, before U.S. Federal District Court Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles.

Spanish adult entertainment company, Private Media Group, has made an offer to buy now-defunct Napster's trademarks and domain name Napster.com.

According to Private Media, it plans to use Napster's trademark and the domain name to offer a swapping place for adult content and also to offer "top quality adult content at a reasonable price". Private Media also claims that it has the largest copyrighted catalog of porn content in the world.

Private Media has offered to purchase the assets with one million of its own stock, valued at around $2.4M -- Private Media's common stock is listed in American technology stock market, Nasdaq.

Source: Reuters

Company called Intersil who develops laser controller chips found inside various DVD and CD players and writers, has announced the availability of first Blu-Ray laser controllers.

Otherwise totally useless news blurp for Joe Average, but this is anyway a clear sign that the industry is preparing to ship first Blu-Ray devices in beginning of 2003 as promised. Blu-Ray, which uses blue-laser technology instead of red-laser technology (which is used with DVDs and CDs), can store 27GB of data per side on regular 12cm disc (yes, for imperial measurement users out there, 12cm is the size of a regular CD or DVD disc).

Blu-Ray will face tough obstacles on its way to be adopted as a next-generation storage media -- DVD Forum hasn't yet decided whether they will develop HD-DVD using blue-laser technology and MPEG-2 or do they stick with current red-laser DVD technology and start using MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2. To add the possible confusion, NEC and Toshiba jointly announced a competing blue-laser technology in last month. Exactly the scenario everybody has been scared of.

Just one of these short updates. Our software download counters show now that we've served over 5,000,000 software downloads during the last three and a half years.

The number of downloads per day is increasing nicely, this time it took only few days over two months to get from four million to five million -- this translates into a fact that we serve one software download every five seconds or so.

Anyway, once again, I must thank you, our loyal users. You've made this possible and I really hope to see you again in the future as well.

P.S. Not a good day to even consider celebrating, as the hearts of the world are in the events of September, 2001. But this is not the right place, site or forum to discuss about that.

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
AfterDawn.com

Yahoo and group of American ISPs filed an amicus brief to support Verizon in its court case against RIAA. In this case, RIAA has taken Verizon to court in order to ask court to force Verizon to hand out customer details of one of its customers.

RIAA says that one of Verizon's customers has distributed copyrighted MP3s through various P2P networks and now wants Verizon to reveal this customer's name and contact details.

Verizon has said that it supports RIAA's and other copyright owners' rights to take an individual -- a 'John Doe' case -- to court and make court to reveal the identity of the customer. But Verizon opposes the fact that RIAA wants to have full access to its customer details based on their allegations, not on court orders.

"What the RIAA is really seeking, at the end of the day, is to shift the burden of copyright enforcement from its own members--who apparently would prefer not to alienate potential customers by suing them outright--to an ISP that does nothing more than provide an Internet connection to the customer," the brief says.

We've been busy during the last couple of weeks upgrading our forum software to meet the growing demands from our users.

Several new features have been rolled out, but one that has been requested several times, private messages, is now ready. As usual, if you experience anything really weird with that, please inform us immediately and we'll fix the problems a.s.a.p.

Visit our forums:

http://forums.afterdawn.com/

Online movie service CinemaNow has signed a deal with AOL TimeWarner-owned Warner Bros. to bring Warner's movies to the Net through its existing online service.

Deal includes new hit movies, such as Harry Potter and several old-time favourites. Prices for CinemaNow's service vary between $2.99 to $3.99 a movie. Service has its own DRM system and delivers movies to broadband users within couple of hours, depending on user's connection speed. Service, which currently includes movies from various indie film makers, claims that it has one million unique users a month and that it delivers over 2 million movies each month.

Warner Bros. is also about to launch its own similiar service by end of this year, a joint venture between major movie studios, dubbed as MovieLink.