Microsoft continues its push towards consumers' living rooms by releasing a new version of its Windows XP Media Center operating system, dubbed as Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004.
Company has so far failed to lure consumers to switch to Media Center "revolution" and now tries to put more pressure behind the concept of "living room media center" by adding new features, such as CD ripping, more flexible audio streaming and ability to print photos via system's remote control.
So-called HTPC(home theatre PC) boom has been growing quite rapidly during the last year or so, but consumers have so far opted to use cheap Mini-ITX boxes equipped with either Linux or more traditional versions of Windows. Most of the analysts consider this to be simply because of high cost of Media Center PCs compared to self-built projects.
Now Microsoft has signed new names to its support list, including Sony and Dell and also cheapest Media Center devices come now with price tag less than $1000.
RIAA announced that it has so far settled 52 of the 261 lawsuits filed against P2P file sharers earlier this month. The exact settlement amounts were not specified, but experts estimate payments ranging from $2,500 to $7,500 each, which would add up to $250,000.
"The music community's efforts have triggered a national conversation, especially between parents and kids, about what's legal and illegal when it comes to music on the Internet," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "In the end it will be decided not in the courtrooms, but at kitchen tables across the country."
A dozen P2P users who might have been sued by RIAA have also agreed to pay settlements to avoid a lawsuit.
Hundreds of more lawsuits are planned for October by RIAA.
Disney has launched through its subsdiary, Buena Vista Datacasting, a new pay-per-view (or video-on-demand, whatever you wish to call it) service in the U.S. The new service targets heavy DVD renters by offering ability to download movies to a set-top box and watch them any number of times during the 24 hour rental period.
Unlike movie studios' joint venture MovieLink(that Disney didn't participate at first, but now offers movies to), MovieBeam doesn't use PC at all, but uses its own custom-made set-top box instead.
Service costs $6.99 a month for the device rental fee and each movie costs between $2.49 and $3.99, depending on the movie. At any time, system promises, there will be 100 movies available and out of those 100, at least 10 will be new releases (how new -- that they don't disclose). Basically the service aims to offer somewhat hybrid of a traditional cableTV pay-per-view and DVD rental service by offering more chances to watch the movie (as many times as user wants to, during the 24hr period), without pre-defined timeslots, but with no need to worry about late rental fees or picking up and returning the movie to your local Blockbuster.
The European backup software vendors are struggling with the new laws that about to be taken in to action within the EU. The CloneCD being sold to SlySoft is the best known example of the consequences of the new laws.
With MovieJack, legal issues have been solved conveniently. Almost too conveniently. An Austrian website jackxxl.com is offering a patch for MovieJack, re-enabling the software to copy CSS protected DVDs.
This issue has a couple of interesting details. The jackxxl.com is a nice choice for a domain name, as the authors of MovieJack (Engelmann Media GmbH) are affiliated with the developers of ClonyXXL (the well known disc scanner and protection analyzer). Also, in the WHOIS information of jackxxl.com we can find something most of us have seen before.
Domain name- JACKXXL.COM
Thomas Weber (root@cdrsoft.cc)
+1.+43.9997458
FAX- +43.+43.
Salzburgerstrasse 11
Wien, 1010
AT
MusicMatch launched today its own clone of highly successful Apple's iTunes service. MusicMatch's service can be seen as the first real "clone" of iTunes as it uses, just like iTunes, the desktop application to deliver and sell the songs instead of traditional website front-end.
MusicMatch has relatively good chances of succeeding as it claims to have delivered over 40M copies of its media player software, MusicMatch Jukebox, to Windows users. Definitely the funniest thing about the whole situation is the fact that MusicMatch Jukebox ships as a standard application with Apple's iPod, portable digital music player, for Windows users.
MusicMatch's store operates on same principles that Apple's does -- each song costs $0.99, can be burned to a CDR and transferred to portable digital music players. This is a sharp contrast to Buy.com's web-based music store that was launched earlier, which has severe restrictions on purchased tracks and pricing of tracks varies based on the record labels' decisions.
According to rumours, Dell is planning to launch its consumer electronics and digital music products by simply re-branding various products -- Dell will most likely use now-launched MusicMatch Jukebox as the Dell re-branded frontend to its own music store and its first digital music player seems to be re-branded version of Creative's portable MP3 player.
New version of TMPGEnc has been released. The new version, TMPGEnc v2.521 is basically just a bugfix release to one of the world's best MPEG-1/MPEG-2 encoders.
The full changelog since v2.520 is here:
Improved: In the project wizzard, for the setting concerning the bitrate, the file size in MB will be shown instead of the duration for "CD-R 74min (VCD/SVCD)" and for"CD-R 80min (VCD/SVCD)".
Improved: When error occurs during "Prefetch Video", the details will be shown.
Improved: When using "DirectShow Multimedia Reader", from now on only Linear PCM, 8/16 bit, 1/2 will be accepted for the audio input.
Fixed: Problem occuring when using an external MP2/MP3 encoder. For certain settings, the CRC value or the error protection could be changed.
Fixed: When the audio was re-sampled in high quality mode, if the input was monoral, errors could occur.
Fixed: During the encoding, some "Drag and drop" files could be accepted from the Explorer.
RIAA has dismissed a lawsuit it had filed against Sarah Ward, a 65-year-old grandmother. Mrs. Ward was charged with downloading and sharing rock and hip-hop music using Kazaa.
The problem was that she listens to classical music and uses a Macintosh, for which there is no official Kazaa client available. There are, of course, several alternative clients available, such as giFT.
"The Sarah Ward case demonstrates the reckless, frightening nature of the recording industry's campaign against ordinary Americans," said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legal director Cindy Cohn.
"These record labels violated her privacy, sued her for potentially millions of dollars, and forced her to hire a defense lawyer before finally recognizing that they had no case against her."
RIAA stated that the lawsuit was withdrawn as a gesture of good faith.
The staff of Hydrogen Audio visited the IBC2003 in Amsterdam. They have now published a nice report about the event, naturally concentrating on Ahead Software and the Nero Digital MPEG-4 codec.
Interesting little detail is that their report partially confirms the rumors that we published recently about the licensing problems.
If no further delays take place, Nero Digital will probably hit the public in the beginning of October, included in the new Nero Recode DVD backup utility. Because of the licensing reasons (ViaLicensing especially), Nero Digital playback filters will have some restrictions regarding the audio playback. However, Ahead is planning to support several popular media players, and of course users can use 3rd party filters for playback (for example ffdshow with 3ivx mp4 splitter and FAAD2 based CoreAAC direcshow aac/he-filter) and get rid of any playback restrictions due to filter licenses what so ever. Also I heard from elsewhere that it shouldn't be at all hard to make CoreAAC filter compatible with the Nero MP4 splitter, thus removing all audio restrictions there is.
Dell has announced that it will enter into consumer electronics markets with series of entertainment products.
Company will start selling LCD TVs and various other items -- but the most inetersting part is Dell's announcement to start manufacturing and selling portable digital audio devices. This added with the fact that company is going to launch its own digital audio store by the end of the year means definitely that one of the biggest PC makers is taking the path that Apple has chosen earlier.
Yesterday we published a rumor indicating that Ahead Software might have licensing problems with VIA Licensing by Dolby. Today we received a response from Ahead Software.
Ahead Software’s spokesman doesn’t confirm or deny the rumors about licensing problem. On the other hand he refuses to make any statement of the issue.
We have a great relationship with Via.
…
Very soon there will be a new update of Recode which will feature Nero Digital strongly in both the video and encoding modes. (so DVD Re-author directly to Nero Digital MPEG-4:-). So for instance 5:1 AC3 transcoding to 5:1 He AAC, etc. (plus many other things), will be a reality.
…
The first application to feature Nero Digital will be Recode coming in a couple ofweeks. So timing wise, it looks like being the beginning of Q4 rather than the end of Q3
So it appears that the Digital will be released, even though slightly delayed. Ahead’s response however leaves some room for speculations about the licensing issues, as they refuse to comment.
Sharman Networks, the makers of the file sharing application Kazaa, have sued RIAA for copyright infrigement. RIAA is distributing versions of Kazaa Lite with embedded warning messages to potential infringers.
Sharman feels that RIAA has no right to mangle its software and calls the RIAA's actions "monopolistic and cospiratorial". Quite rightly so. Then again, who would? I'm sure Jasc wouldn't like it if someone started spreading a copy of Paint Shop Pro with "It's illegal to print pictures you don't have rights to" -warnings.
European Parliament voted today on the latest technoligical hot potato, software patents. Previously, there has been no universal rule for software patents within the European Union(or there actually has been one that has stated that software can't be patented, but it has never been seriously enforced) and the fears were high that EU ends up having same kind of patent legislation that U.S. and Japan currently have.
In the U.S., it is perfectly legal to patent even very basic programming techniques if there's no "prior art" existing before the "invention". Anyway, now European Parliament approved software patents within the EU. But it seems that rather radical grass-roots movement within open source community in Europe, has managed to do something about the issue and Parliament approved the legislation only with some major amendments to the original proposal.
New approved legislation outlaws patenting algorithms, business logic (such as Amazon.com's "one-click shopping" patent in the U.S.). The specific text stated that "Inventions involving computer programs which implement business, mathematical or other methods and do not produce any technical effect beyond the normal physical interactions between a program and the computer, network or other programmable apparatus in which it is run, shall not be patentable".
Nero Digital is the upcoming audio/video codec by Ahead Software, the makers of Nero Burning ROM. It has been pre-marketed as an alternative to the well known DivX codec and therefore there has been quite a lot of anticipation. One of Nero Digital’s highlight features is the ability to use high quality MPEG-4 AAC compression for the audio track. Nero Digital will be in the Nero Burning ROM 6 retail package.
But the Digital seems to have been delayed. As announced on the Nero Digital website, the release has been promised in Q3 of the year 2003. It seems that Ahead will have a busy week if they wish to stick to their time table.
Licensing problems with Dolby?
As the Digital seems to have been delayed, rumors have emerged about the potential reasons for the situation. We underline that the information we have received is not based on rock solid facts, so we are hoping that Ahead Software will clarify the situation for the public in the near future.
The rumors indicate that Ahead Software would have licensing problems with VIA Licensing by Dolby. According to the rumors, Dolby / VIA might oppose that the HE AAC audio codec would be used in Nero Recode. The Recode is the DVD video transcoding tool used for backing up DVD video and could potentially be used for copyright violations
Audio technology company Dolby Laboratories has purchased the digital rights management company Cinea. Cinea consists of many of the engineers behind the Divx pay-per view DVDs sold by Circuit City in the late 90's.
Cinea is currently developing content-protection technology for digital movie theatres to prevent people from making cam copies of movies. The technology would be invisible to the naked eye, but introduce distortion on the video captured by a video camera.
Digital content delivery would give the movie studios much more control over the distribution of the movies than current film copies do. They could, for example, digitally limit the number of screenings per copy. Movie theatres haven't been too keen to switch to digital projection technology, which is alot more expensive than traditional film projectors. The projected life-span of a digital projector is also much shorter than that of a film projector.
DivXNetworks and AMD announced today that AMD will license DivXNetworks' Dr. DivX software and plans to provide it for a limited time for users who purchase AMD's new 64-bit CPU, Athlon64.
DivXNetworks will also develop an optimized version of its DivX video codec and Dr.DivX encoding application for Athlon64. According to companies' press release, the new version will offer significant speed enhancements over the 32-bit version.
A new study by In-Stat/MDR finds that market value of video subscriptions will grow from the current annual (global) level of $991 million to $4.5 billion in 2007. A whopping 350% increase can be explained by the growing adoption of broadband connections globally and developing streaming technologies.
Currently the only real big scale video subscription service is operated by RealNetworks which has over one million subscribers in its RealOne SuperPass service that offers sports, news and entertainment in streaming audio and video formats.
Hollywood has taken its first baby-steps into online distribution during the last year as well, when major studios launched their joint venture, Movielink. In-Stat/MDR study predicts that consumers will shift from current pay-per-view method used in services like Movielink, to a monthly subscription method because of its easiness and cost predictability.
Study didn't analyze whether this development will affect traditional cable channels and DVD sales, but we think that it is highly likely that companies like European cable TV channels that focus on American TV series, etc will suffer. This is based on the fact that if major media companies start offering their latest productions directly over the TCP/IP, the current situation where European countries get American TV shows, etc traditionally 1-3 years later available to local markets, can't really survive. And cable TV channels normally push particularly these "easy-to-predict" cash cow shows to their channels. If this happens -- obviously there are issues like with some European countries where most of the TV shows are dubbed, etc -- it might mean that local TV production is the key for local companies to survive. But also the opportunities for distributing local content globally is going to get much easier when the Net is used as the distribution channel. It's not going to be a revolution -- everybody predicted that online music distribution would change the habits and kill the easy-to-listen-and-even-easier-to-sell music, but it never happened; everybody is still buying/downloading/listening the same music that they would've been even without the Net.
We have just finished a small and quick review on DVD-lab, an inexpensive yet fully featured DVD authoring software.
The combination of digital video cameras and inexpensive recordable DVD drives has led to a growing demand for DVD authoring software. The majority of the software available on the market is based on wizard interfaces offering little, if any, room for customization. Even though intended and priced for home use, DVD-lab offers features and flexibility that have only been available in professional DVD authoring software.
Feedback on the article, as well as the software is more than welcome! Please note that the article isn't intended to be a tutorial -- just a glimpse at some of the main features of the software.
These updates fix a critical bug which is present in both existing versions of Nero Burning ROM. The bug involves the recent Plextor PX-708A DVD recorder, which did not finalize DVD sessions properly when using Nero.
The street advertisement campaign for the Napster 2.0 music store has gained both praise and criticism from advertising profesionals. The campaign, running in six U.S. cities, consists of realistic posters defaced with stickers of the well known Napster kitty logo. The impression is very realistic indeed.
Lucian James, a San Francisco marketer, isn't a big fan of the campaign. "Telling people something is cool, or trying to appropriate cool things like graffiti, is usually the best way to kill something with cool potential," James said.
Co-founder of street art organization Wooster Collective, Mark Schiller, on the other hand considers the campaign very well executed. "In my personal opinion, Napster's is probably the best one (sniping campaign) even though it isn't the first," Schiller said. "If this is going to be the trend, then Napster's done a much better job than others who have tried this."
According to DigiTimes article, it seems likely that Taiwanese optical media manufacturers will start mass production of 8x DVD-R and DVD+R blank media in next month.
Major DVDR drive manufacturers have announced their 8x writers during the last couple of weeks, but lack of suitable media for such drives is currently the major obstacle for the next step in drive speeds. According to Taiwanese manufacturers, such as Ritek, they have postponed bigger volume manufacturing of 8x discs because their local drive manufacturers haven't been able to release 8x drives yet.
8x discs will cost appx. between $1.30 and $1.50 per disc, compared to a price bracket of $1.00-$1.20 for 4x discs. For those of you, who aren't aware of the DVDR writing speeds, with 4x it takes appx. 15mins to burn one DVD±R disc (of 4.38GB).
Even though universities have had strict anti-piracy policies for ages, the recent RIAA lawsuits have forced universities to remind their students about the illegal nature of file-sharing.
One of these universities is UCLA, where piracy is handled at zero tolerance. However the university doesn't monitor the network traffic in any way, so the initiative for removing copyrighted material from the university network has to come from the likes of RIAA and MPAA.
When UCLA is notified, it provides a first notification to the offender, asking that person to stop. However, if that person is performing "massive" amounts of copying, subpoenas may be issued and that person may be subject to external law enforcement.
UCLA has informed their students about copyright issues via email, as well as univeristy newsletter and TV-channel last year. The same process will be repeated in the beginning of October. Many students had been looking forward to using the fast university Internet connections to download content, but have to re-think whether or not to risk it.
"It kind of sucks because I don't have a fast (Internet) connection at home and I was planning on downloading here," said first-year biology student Jennifer Tran. "But then all the lawsuit stuff happened over summer."
Marketing slogans of WMA and MP3Pro appear to be nothing but marketing hype. RareWares has published the results of their recent public 64kbps compressed audio listening test and once again interesting conclusions can be drawn.
The modern low bitrate audio compressors were challenged by LAME MP3 Encoder with optimal 128kbps settings. The motivation of this was to show how well do the modern compressors live up to their marketing slogans. Most notably MP3Pro and WMA have been advertised to be able to deliver the ‘same audio quality with half the file size’. These test results indicate that this is not the case, as LAME MP3 is the clear winner of this test.
Also this test seems to prove the high quality of the Nero HE AAC profile (High Efficiency AAC, a.k.a. AAC+), being the highest rated of the 64kbps codecs tested. OGG Vorbis and MP3Pro are competitive, but the big boys Microsoft WMA, Apple QuickTime AAC and Real Audio still have some work to do.
We just wanted to announce that yesterday we reached one of those big milestones that we've set for ourselves and now we have more than 250,000 forum messages in our discussion forums.
We launched our discussion forums in their current form back in February, 2001 and since then, they've grown and grown to reach the current state where we get total of over 700 messages a day to our three main discussion forum areas, English forums, Finnish forums and DVDXCopy forums.
Our main English forums have appx. 150,000 messages now and other two forums have 50,000 messages each. Forums have currently 84,000 registered members and over 50,000 discussion threads.
Thanks for you, our users -- without you, we wouldn't have achieved this!
The Wall Street Journal reports that video rental giant Blockbuster and United States' largest direct-market retailer of DVDs and videos, Columbia House are considering a merger.
Both companies deny commenting on rumors, but according to analysts, such merger would make sense and would help Blockbuster to capitalize the growing DVD market better. Blockbuster's worldwide revenues for year 2002 were over $5.5 billion (of which appx. 80 percent were generated in the U.S.). Columbia House's annual sales are appx. $1 billion.
Blockbuster currently sells most of its for-sale DVDs (sales are increasing their percentage within Blockbuster's revenues) at average $21.99 while most retailers sell their movies at $19.99. Analysts predict that Blockbuster could lower its prices without lowering its profit margins if it would be able to combine its purchase power with another retailer, such as Columbia House.
Blockbuster's majority owner, with 80 percent stake, is Viacom(company who also owns CBS, MTV, Paramount, VH1, etc).
RIAA has decided to sue iMesh, one of the oldest, if not the oldest, remaining large P2P software company. iMesh is based in Israel, but maintains corporate ties in the U.S. and states clearly on its website that all litigation against it should be done in New York.
iMesh has evolved over the years quite dramatically and company has switched network technologies more often than anyone else in the business. As far as we know, currently iMesh uses a hybrid solution -- part of their own, iMesh-specific, protocol and big part of FastTrack(same P2P network that powers Kazaa and Grokster).
The case is going to be very interesting, since this time RIAA has one major defeat in its track-record: RIAA lost its case against Grokster and Sharman Networks in April this year. And both of the P2P operators that were acting as defendants in that case were sued because of their use of FastTrack network, the very same that iMesh bases most (if not nowadays all) of their traffic. Since the case was filed, Sharman has since switched to use Gnutella network instead in its Morpheus P2P software.
Two Hollywood studios, Paramount Pictures(owned by Viacom) and 20th Century Fox(owned by News Corp), have sued several small software developers and distributors in the U.S. for selling tools that allow backing up copy-protected DVD-Video discs.
Studios have filed suits against Tritton Technologies, QOJ, World Reach and Proto Ventures and studios are seeking a premilinary injunction in order to stop the sales of their tools and unspecified amount of damages under the controversial DMCA law.
DMCA outlaws tools that allow circumventing copy-protection technologies, such as CSS. Previously studios have attacked against distributors of freeware tool DeCSS and against the 321 Studios, the creators of DVDXCopy.
Most of the companies now sued are simply selling DVD backup products via their websites and according to various sources, some of them simply sell packages made out of freeware tools. At least one of the companies in question, QOJ, has managed to get itself into virtually all known spam blacklists in the world with their domain copiesanything.com. Tritton is the only one of the companies now sued that has brick-and-mortar distribution deals with major retailers in the U.S.
Plextor is facing a huge challenge as the optical data storing industry is quite rapidly switching from CD-RW technology to the higher capacity DVD-RW standard. Extremely high quality products earned Plextor a very good reputation in the CD-RW market and quality paid back as loyal customers. But now Plextor is facing a lot of heat in the new market. Currently many consider Pioneer as the top DVD-RW drive manufacturer. Can Plextor achieve the same in DVD-RW as in the CD-RW?
CDR-Info has now finished their review of the PX-708A, which is the first dual format drive by Plextor.
Apart from the issue of one DVD recording format dominating over another, the highest currently offered recording speed is definitely of a primary interest to most end users. BenQ / Philips, Pioneer, NEC and other manufacturers have announced their upcoming 8x DVD recorders. However, it is Plextor who is the first to make this aggressive step forward by launching this fall the PX-708A, the first 8x DVD+R recorder in the market.
The successor of the PX-504A model is a dual DVD writer, capable of 8x writing for DVD+R, 4x for DVD+RW/-R, and 2x for DVD-RW. In addition, the drive is also a fast 40/24/40 CD-RW writer.
Australian independent record laebl 301 Records, and Sharman Networks, the makers of peer-to-peer file sharing software Kazaa Media Desktop, announced a digital promotion deal on Wednesday. With the deal 301 Records promotes one of their bands through Kazaa.
The content from the band, The Honey Palace will be made available for purchase through Sharman's affiliate partner Altnet. Kazaa users can sample the video and audio content through Kazaa Media Desktop, and purchase songs for just US25 cents per track.
Altnet offers a secure way to offer content via a P2P network. The Altnet files appear as gold icon files in the Kazaa Media Desktop search results and can be easily purchased using Altnet's seamless payment gateway.
Michael Browning, Managing Director of 301 Records, said: "We're always looking for innovative ways to launch artists into both local and international markets. Peer to peer technology provides artists and distributors with a low cost, high impact way of reaching millions of global music fans."
Ulead Systems has announced that it will license DivX technology from DivXNetworks in order to use the MPEG-4 based video codec in its upcoming video editing products.
Ulead will promote DivX technology to its OEM customers and will also distribute DivXNetworks' products using its worldwide distribution channels.
Ulead is famous of its video editing products, such as Ulead VideoStudio and its DVD tools, such as Ulead DVD MovieFactory.
Peer-to-peer company Grokster has filed a reponse to the appeal made by RIAA looking to overturn the earlier ruling, which found Grokster, as a software, legal.
In the ruling Judge Wilson compared Grokster to a video recorder. Both have illegal uses, but also substantial legitimate uses as well. The manufacturer of the product cannot be held liable for possible illegal uses.
Grokster president Wayne Rosso feels that instead of pursuing their rights through courts, RIAA should instead focus on licensing legitimate content to P2P users. "Five bucks a month from each of 60 million file sharers beats the hell out of filing a federal case to get $2,000 from a 12 year-old girl" Mr. Rosso was quoted commenting.
The next generation portable gaming console and cell phone / personal communicator Nokia N-Gage is now available for pre-ordering at various sources. Eurogamer reports that the O2 network operator is offering N-Gage for £99 with their one year contract.
Also according to the source the stand-alone retail packages of N-Gage are available from £229.99 and up, depending on the number of bundled games.
So it looks like that the N-Gage will hit slightly above the €300 mark, as several market analysts have predicted. The common opinion is that Nokia can’t go higher than that because of the youngish target audience. Previously we have seen top of the line Nokia products to enter the market with premium pricing, but declining rather rapidly after the product has matured for a while.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is taking the RIAA vs. Verizon case back to court to hear Verizon's appeal on the ruling, which opened to P2P subpoena floodgates earlier this year. RIAA used the turbocharged subpoena procedure of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to force Verizon to hand out details of a suspected P2P user.
Regular subpoenas require a claim of a crime, whereas DMCA subpoena can be issued by a court clerk, as long as the subpoena form is filled out properly.
Many interpret the DMCA law to apply only to material physically stored on ISPs servers and not the actions of their modem, DSL or cable subscribers.
A panel of three judges is taking a look at the case, and examining the minutiae of the DMCA to figure out what the Congress' intentions where when issuing the law. They will also try to decide whether permitting subpoenas when no lawsuit has been filed, agrees with the U.S. Constitution. So far the panel has not commented on Verizon's arguments about DMCA subpoenas endangering privacy and free speech.
SBC Communications, the 2nd largest "Baby Bell" (regional phone operator, Verizon being the biggest "Baby Bell") in the U.S., has refused to hand out its subscribers' personal details to the RIAA.
Despite Verizonlosing its similiar case in June, SBC has announced that it will fight every single one of the subpoenas in court if necessary or until the court decides that they have to hand out the details for every subpoena request they receive.
SBC has sued the RIAA over the subpoena demands in California. SBC is the biggest broadband provider in the U.S. with over three million broadband subscribers. It is also the only ISP since Verizon lost its case in June that has refused to co-operate with RIAA. RIAA has quickly responded to SBC's statements pointing out to a recent SBC's print advertisement that said, in part: "Download all the music you like. And all the music you sort of, kind of, maybe even a little bit like. Go MP3 crazy. Try new music. Build a song library. Whatever." and claimed the SBC's only motivation to protect its customers against RIAA is pure greed. According to SBC, last time the ad was run was in January 2002 and it is totally "irrelevant to the current issue of consumer privacy and protection".
A recent study published by the AT&T Labs revealed that most of the illegal copies of movies available on P2P networks have been "leaked" by the movie industry insiders, not by movie enthusiasts armed with digital camcorders.
Almost 80 percent of 300 copies of different movies found by the researchers on P2P networks, were apparently leaked to the Net by people working within the movie industry. According to AT&T Labs, this is the first study that tries to identify the sources of leaks for popular Hollywood movies. Nearly all of the movies in the study were found on the Net before their official U.S. DVD release date, some of them even before their movie theater release.
"Our conclusion is that the distributors really need to take a hard look at their own internal processes and look at how they can stop the insider leaks of their movies" before taking measures that might hamstring consumers' technologies and rights, said Lorrie Cranor, a researcher at AT&T Labs and lead author of the study.
This study sheds a very, very different light over DVD backup tools that movie industry is trying to outlaw all over the world (and have done so successfully in various countries already).
A British court has sentenced Richard Durose to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to selling pirated music. His wife, who also pleaded guilty, was sentenced to nine months in prison, suspended for two years. They will also have to pay the court costs of £14,000.
The couple had been manufacturing pirated CD-R copies of albums in MP3 format, and selling them by mail order and at computer fairs. They had been selling up to 2,000 CDs a month before they were caught and sentenced.
Apple Corps, the corporation owned by The Beatles, announced today that they have sued Apple Computer over its iTunes service and violation against companies' previous agreement on trademark use.
Apple Corps was founded back in 1968 and handles virtually all Beatles' business issues. Companies have fought over the trademarks earlier as well, back in 1989 the lawsuit was settled out of court by Apple Computers paying $27 million to Apple Corps and agreeing not to enter the music business.
Now, since Apple Computers has been very much in the music business during the last couple of years with its iPod digital audio player and its mega-successful iTunes music store, Apple Corps' opinion is that Apple Computers has violated against the contract they signed in 1989.
Our friends at CDRINFO have finished another good hardware review.
24x Slim CD-RW Combo Roundup Vol.1
ASUS SCB-2408-D and LiteOn LSC-24081MX are 4-in-1 external slim combo drives supporting 24x CD-R, 12x CD-RW, 24x CD-ROM, and 8x DVD-ROM.
Featuring lightweight design and high-speed interfaces, the drives mainly address the needs of notebook users, capable, however, of replacing your internal ATAPI combo in your desktop PC.
Elaborate Bytes, the company behind CloneCD announced last night that they will sell the rights of CloneCD to an antiguan company, because developing tools such as CloneCD is virtually impossible in European Union after the EUCD legislation has been put in place in EU countries.
This is ElBy's press release:
Cham, 2003-09-11 - As a reaction to the new Copyright Law in Europe, Elaborate Bytes AG has to stop the distribution of CloneCD. The new law, which will come into force in Germany in the next days, will prohibit to copy protected media - even for private use.
CloneCD will neither be available as a boxed version in the big stores nor as an online version from Switzerland. Bilateral contracts between Switzerland and most of the European countries prohibit the sale from Switzerland to the respective countries.
Elaborate Bytes AG will sell the rights of CloneCD to SlySoft, a company located on Antigua. Only the online version of CloneCD will be available for sale on the Internet. The price will approximately stay the same and the clients of Elaborate Bytes will keep their one-year free update rights.
DVD-R writer. The number puts the company in clear lead in recordable DVD market.
Company's DVD writers have been included in many OEM machines, such as those from Apple. Pioneer has so far put all of its bets behind the DVD-R format, but released this year its first multiformat drive (that supports also DVD+R and DVD+RW), Pioneer A06 and has now announced that it will start shipping its next dual-format recorder, A07, in late 2003.
Pioneer's push towards DVD-R has also paid off, according to Santa Clara Consulting Group, DVD-R has gathered 54.9 percent of this years blank media sales (and the remaining portion of media sales is divided by the other four formats, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM).
RareWares has launched yet another public audio listening test. This time the test concentrates on low bitrate audio compression at 64kbps bit streams. One interesting feature of the test is that the 64kbps files are challenged by LAME MP3 at 128kbps. The reason for this are the marketing slogans (MP3Pro, WMA) that promise "MP3 quality at half the bitrate".
The encoders tested and parameters used:
Ahead/Nero 6.0.0.15 HE AAC VBR profile Streaming :: Medium, high quality
Ogg Vorbis post-1.0 CVS -q 0
MP3pro (from Adobe Audition 1.0) VBR quality 40, Current Codec, allow M/S and IS, allow narrowing, no CRC
Real Audio Gecko (from Real Producer 9.0.1 64kbps
Windows Media Audio v9 VBR quality 50
QuickTime 6.3 AAC LC 64kbps, Best Quality
Lame MP3 encoder 3.90.3 --alt-preset 128 --scale 1. high anchor
FhG MP3 encoder (from Adobe Audition 1.0) 64kbps CBR, Current codec, allow M/S, no I/S, allow narrowing, no CRC. bottom anchor
The guys at VCDQuality have noticed that strange markings have started to appear on some recent movies. The dots are most likely used by MPAA to track the source of illegal movie copies spread on the Internet.
Many of the first copies of movies appearing on the Net are so called "cam" copies, which are shot using a camcorder in a movie theatre. By inserting unique identifying tags to a couple of frames in a movie, the copyright holders can narrow down the origin of the pirated copy, and possibyly even track down the offender.
Removing the markings is possible, but laborious. I'd bet MPAA has other methods for identifying the copies as well. It remains to be seen if MPAA will be engaging in a high profile pirate hunt similar to RIAA's.
Links:
An example frame with the markings (T shaped dots)
More information at VCDQuality.com
The news story that we published yesterday, where RIAA sued a 12-year-old girl for illegal file sharing, has evolved since.
Girl's mother has now settled the case with RIAA, in order to avoid costly legal process and has agreed to pay $2,000 in damages to the RIAA. After the settlement was published, a file-sharing companies' lobby group,
P2P United, has stepped into the limelight and promised to pay the little girl's RIAA bill.
"We do not condone copyright infringement, but someone has to draw the line to call attention to a system that permits multinational corporations with phenomenal financial and political resources to strong-arm 12-year-olds and their families in public housing the way this sorry episode dramatizes," said Adam Eisgrau, the executive director of P2P United. According to him, the group has no intention of paying for other file-swapper's legal fees.
According to newspaper sources, Brianna Lahara is a 12-year-old schoolgirl who lives with her mother in public housing in New York City. She was one of the targets of RIAA's latest witch hunt in which the association sued over 250 individuals across the Unites States.
Multi function and multimedia, the two keywords in the software industry at the moment. Now the makers of the well known PowerDVD software DVD player are joining the party, but frankly quite late. According to the source their new Media Carneval is targeted towards the OEM market, but the competition is quite tough as Ahead Software recently expanded their Nero package to the video market niche as well.
CyberLink Media Carnival is a collection of CyberLink's well-known products:
PowerDVD - to playback DVD
PowerVCR - to record TV
PowerDirector Pro - to edit videos
PowerProducer - to create movies and photos on CDs or DVDs
Medi@Show - to create multimedia slideshows
Plus two new applications:
Power2Go - to burn data and music; and
InstantBurn - for packet writing.
The applications are integrated together in a Media Launcher bar that resides on the desktop for easy access.
Tailored for the OEM bundling markets, CyberLink Media Carnival is designed to be completely flexible so that each customer can include any combination of the software mentioned above.
Benefits of CyberLink Media Carnival
* Enhance Hardware Value:
Media Carnival can be customized to meet OEM customers' specific hardware needs and enhance PC hardware selling power.
Disney begun its first commercial trials with disposable DVDs yesterday in the United States.
DVDs that aim to challenge the rental discs, are wrapped in air-tight packaging and once opened, the disc will become unreadable after 48 hrs. The idea behind this environmental catastrophe is the fact that such discs can be sold virtually anywhere without worrying about returning them back to the store after viewing. By using these discs, local grocery stores can compete against likes of Blockbuster and the discs would benefit people who are simply too lazy to return their movies back to the store on time.
Discs will carry a suggested price of $6.99 and are available in Austin, Texas; Peoria/Bloomington, Illinois; Charleston, South Carolina; and Kansas City, Missouri. The technology behind the concept is developed by a company called Flexplay and the format is called as EZ-D and is claimed to be 100% compliant with current DVD-Video specs.
In its latest witch hunt, RIAA has managed to sue a 12-year-old girl from New York City, accusing her for illegal file sharing.
Brianna LaHara says she thought that downloading music was fun and legal since her mom had paid $29.99 subscription fee to Kazaa's premium service three months earlier.
"My daughter was on the verge of tears when she found out about this," her mother, Sylvia Torres, said.
RIAA's recent rumoured offer for amnesty doesn't apply to people who have been already sued. In related "news", userfriendly.org has an excellent draft model of the RIAA's amnesty form..
Several colleges in the United States will be featuring freshman orientation programs that educate about their P2P policies. The recent RIAA lawsuits have most likely been the greatest motivation in the decision.
Orientations will be held at several universities, including American University in Washington, D.C., and many University of California campuses. Students at University of Denver, University of Rochester and serveral others will be instructed via e-posted campus P2P policies.
Will the recent lawsuits and education of the policies be enough to stop the students from sharing and prevent further subpoenas addressed to colleges? Probably not.
"We really wanted to think of a way for companies to use Windows Media 9 without ever having to contact Microsoft," said Jonathan Usher, Director of Microsoft's Windows digital media division.
Microsoft is working hard to make Windows Media the standard format for distributing video material on the Internet. Currently it’s primary competitors include Rea Media and Apple QuickTime.
With open standards, other software companies could create applications that use Microsoft's video-encoding technology, although they would have to pay a license fee, which Usher said would be "low-cost and straightforward."
Hardware makers could create digital video cameras that use the technology, for example, he said.
The hardware application market shows a lot of promise for the video format developers since digital cameras, and other portable video imaging devices are quickly becoming more and more popular. Cell phones with built in cameras are one special platform that requires efficient video compression due to the very limited storage capacity. For example the current Nokia phones utilize Real Video format for the video recording.
Apple announced today that its music store, iTunes, has now sold over 10 million songs. Apple launched its store in May and the service is only available to American Mac users, which makes the 10M sound even bigger figure.
To squeeze everything out from the Apple-worshipping music market, company launched yet another version of its culture icon, iPod digital audio player. The new model has 40GB of storage space and comes with a price tag of $499.
Company still promises to deliver a Windows version of its iTunes application later this year. Plans to expand the service outside U.S. market are still unknown.
The first wave of lawsuits by RIAA (Recording Industry Association America) has landed upon the chosen 261 Peer-To-Peer file swappers. The worst case scenario is that thousands of more lawsuits will follow in the coming months.
"Our goal is not to be vindictive or punitive," said RIAA President Cary Sherman. "It is simply to get peer-to-peer users to stop offering music that does not belong to them."
It is quite certain that RIAA cannot remove the P2P "issue" by filing law suits one by one. After all, we are talking about a world wide megatrend that millions and millions of people are taking advantage of. But the more aggressive strategy might have some positive side effects, from RIAA's point of view.
The campaign is getting some media attention and this makes people more aware of the legal problems in P2P file sharing. Most importantly RIAA will quite certainly be heard by the companies and corporations and more attention will be directed towards the Internet usage of the employees. Especially larger corporations are now beginning to realize the threat that P2P file sharing creates for them, as they could be a delicious target for the RIAA’s lawyers.
"This Is Not a Love Song", a movie from the film writer Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty") was, at least according to UK Film Council, the first ever "major" movie to premiere on the Internet when it began screening on Friday.
However the huge media attention received by the movie caused the download website at ThisIsNotaLoveSong.com to overload, and the downloads have temporarily been suspended. It should be available to the public again in a couple of days.
The movie costs £2-3 (pounds sterling), and can only be downloaded and viewed on a PC equiped with Windows operating system and Windows Media Player 9. It is also only available to UK residents.
It is believed that the RIAA is considering an "amnesty plan" for alleged P2P users. The plan would let P2P pirates off the hook if they change their habits.
RIAA has refused officially to comment the alleged plan, but according to various news sites, P2P users who have been "caught" by RIAA would be able to get off hook if they destroy all the copied material they own, including copies on harddrives, CDs, etc, agree not to participate in illegal file sharing ever again and to submit a photocopy of their ID to RIAA.
Users who wish to apply for the amnesty would have to sign a notarized contract where they agree to the rules laid out before and send that contract alongside with the photocopy of their ID to RIAA. If they get caught on violating the contract, they would be sued for committing a willful copyright infringement.
Consumer electronics giant Sony announced today that it will launch its own online music service, similiar to those available from Apple and soon from Microsoft.
The service, currently only dubbed as "Net Music Download" will launch in Japan during the upcoming winter and in Europe and in States at next spring. Sony didn't announce any details on pricing or technology, but it will definitely enter into a very crowded market, as virtually all entertainment and Net companies are planning to launch similiar services, inspired by Apple's iTunes' whopping success in the US.
But Sony has several aspects that make it very well-equipped for challenging the existing players in the digital download market. Sony has covered pretty much the whole consumer entertainment market already, has a dominant market share in game consoles, has variety of car and home stereos, portable audio players, PCs, PDAs, etc and also owns one of the world's largest record labels, Sony Music. This unique position might put the company in a position where it can compete pretty well against the IT companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.com.
China's Ministry of Information Industry finalized a deal with DVD technology licensing body 3C Alliance on this week so that Chinese DVD player manufacturers can pay lower royalty fees than previously agreed.
Original deal was signed a year ago when all major Chinese DVD manufacturers agreed to actually pay anything to license holders and the rate was then set to $5 per player. At the time of the deal, the current "reduced payment system" was also introduced, but it took a year of royalty compliance from DVD player manufacturers to get to join to the scheme.
Under the new system, manufacturers pay $3.50 per each sold player, but also pay $0.50 additional fee to compensate the royalties they didn't pay before September 2002. Now manufacturers and Chinese government are negotiating with other DVD technology patent owners, namely with 1C Alliance and 6C Alliance, to get similiar deal done with them as well.
Sony has introduced CoCoon CSV-EX11, a 500GB hard disk Digital Video Recorder in Japan. At lowest quality the DVR can record up to 342 hours (or two weeks) of video non-stop. The recording time reaches 114 hours even at the highest quality mode.
Recorded video can be transfered via ethernet to a Sony Vaio computer running Sony's "Click to DVD" software. The video can then be edited further, and burned on DVD. Other computer models are not supported for the transfer, and also the "Click to DVD" software is required.
The Linux-based CoCoon CSV-EX11 will be available with two 250GB drives, or with just a single 250GB drive. The units will be priced at $1380 and $1035 respectively. Unfortunately Sony still doesn't plan to sell CoCoon outside of Japan.
The online movie venture, jointly owned by five major Hollywood studios, the Movielink, released today a new upgraded service and plans to grow more aggressively during the next couple of months.
Previously the media desktop application that Movielink users used to watch the movies, didn't allow pausing the playback and deleted the movie immediately after the viewing, forcing the user to download the clip again in case he/she wanted to "rent" it again. Also the pausing is now possible and the computer can be turned off as well and the playback continues from the position it was left when the playback is resumed.
Movielink now also plans to launch an aggressive marketing campaign that very first time uses also "traditional" media such as newspapers and tries to get college students interested of the service. Logic behind this is clear: very big chunk of illegal movie swapping is done utilizing college Net connections -- and also the very same connections are fast enough to make services such as Movielink, pleasurable to use as the download times would be shrinked down to a minimum thanks to fast campus networks.
Movielink also announced that Disney, who doesn't own any part of the service, will start offering its non-animated movies on Movielink. Titles from Disney will include Gangs of New York and Shanghai Knights.
Sony has today laid out an announcement that should please the existing Sony game console owners. The PS3 will continue the trend started by PS2 and will be backwards compatible with the older PlayStation generations.
Sony spokesman confirms that the backwards compatibility of PS2 vs. PSOne was one of the keys to the console’s success, as expectable. This also means that the PSOne game titles will have a product life cycle unseen before in the gaming industry. It is now confirmed that you can still enjoy the PSOne classics in the years to come, without the need of the original game console.
"PSone runs on the PlayStation 2 through emulation rather than actual hardware. PlayStation 3 will offer the same compatibility for PS2 software and the format will continue forever," he explained.
As it seems that the so called 2nd generation consoles (PS2, Xbox, GameCube) will have a shorter life cycle than the original Playstation, also similar compatibility support is expected and hoped from Microsoft Xbox 2. Microsoft however is replacing the NVidia graphics hardware with ones manufactured by ATI and some believe this can be a problem.
"ATI's hardware runs the same sort of pixel shaders and so on that the NVIDIA chipset does," one graphics programmer working on Xbox games explained to us, "but getting the hardware to exactly mimic the behaviour of an NVIDIA part could be very tricky...
The legal fight between 321 Studios and the major Hollywood studios has expanded to Europe. Warner Home Video(part of AOL TimeWarner media giant) has decided to sue 321 Studios' European arm, 321 Studios Europe, in the UK.
Warner (being supported and pushed by the MPAA) is seeking an injunction against HRC Distribution Limited and 321 Studios Europe to prevent the sale and distribution of 321 Studios' products, such as DVD X Copy and DVD X Copy XPRESS, that allow backing up DVD-Video discs to DVD-/+R discs.
This is the first major case in the EU that involves DVD decrypting tools and its timing is somewhat weird, since the EUCD law, which would clearly make any distribution of DVD decrypting tools, is not implemented in most European countries yet.
A study by market research firm Forrester Research suggest that immaterial distribution channels, such as iTunes, will completely replace any physical media.
According to the study already 20 percent of Americans download music in some form or another. Fifty percent of those say to be buying less CDs. The report estimates that in five years third of music sales revenue will come from download services. Almost 15 percent of movie rental business is estimated to be in on-demand online services.
The key to success is flexibility. Offering the consumers services without too many limitations is a sure key to success.
The DVD+RW Alliance has officially announced the specifications for 8X DVD+R. Unlike 4X DVD+R, 8X DVD+R is burned at variable speed starting from 6X at the inside and finishing at 8X on the outer track. This leads to a total burning time of around 10 minutes for a full 4.37GB disc.
Also today NEC announced an upcoming ND-2300A DVD -burner supporting both 8X DVD+R and 8X DVD-R recording. The drive will be available by Christmas.
Several manufacturers have already announced 8X certified media.
RIAA announced that it has so far settled 52 of the 261 lawsuits filed against P2P file sharers earlier this month. The exact settlement amounts were not specified, but experts estimate payments ranging from $2,500 to $7,500 each, which would add up to $250,000.
Disney has launched through its subsdiary, Buena Vista Datacasting, a new pay-per-view (or video-on-demand, whatever you wish to call it) service in the U.S. The new service targets heavy DVD renters by offering ability to download movies to a set-top box and watch them any number of times during the 24 hour rental period.
