News written by James Delahunty (October, 2004)

UK digital music firm Wippit are calling upon the music industry to boycott major firms it accuses of fueling illegal P2P services by paying the services for advertisement. On Wippit's list include well known names such as Vodafone, O2, NTL, Renault, MSN subsidiaries Expedia and bCentral, First Direct, Halifax and Natwest. Many of these companies have claimed that their advertisements appearances on P2P related sites and services was a mistake and caused by human error. Services related to the eDonkey network were the most common.

Wippit CEO, Paul Myers stated that these companies give "financial oxygen" to "pirate services" and "copyright violators". "If you're supporting a company that is not supporting you, or they are supporting a business that aims to put you out of business by giving your property away for free, follow me by dumping them until they change their ways." he said in an open letter addressing the music industry.

Developing and running P2P services for now is still legal in most countries and it is legal for major companies to pay these services for advertisement. However, when you remember that most of the companies listed above use music from major record labels for their TV advertisements, you can predict their reactions to this claim made by Wippit.

The Recording Industry Association of America filed another 750 suits against alleged illegal song swappers on Thursday. This brings the total number of suits to 6,191. The suits filed Thursday include students from 13 different universities. This action appears to be a response by the RIAA to the facts disclosed recently that showed overall P2P traffic was not negatively affected by their legal actions. "In order for legitimate services to continue their growth, we cannot ignore those who take and distribute music illegally," RIAA President Cary Sherman said. "There must be consequences to breaking the law, or illegal downloading will cripple the music community's ability to support itself now or invest in the future."

While use of networks such as Fasttrack is dropping, the eDonkey network is increasing in users daily. Also, BitTorrent is being used to swap large files but not small files generally, such as MP3 files. As the RIAA keep victimizing P2P users as opposed to accepting P2P as a new technology and finding out ways to co-exist with it, new ambitious projects are underway. New P2P networks such as ANts P2P and Mute claim they can offer P2P users anonymity, mainly by changing the search results systems to show a HASH code of a user instead of an IP address and routing file transfers so that the real distributor and the real receiver are hiding their identities from each other. Of course, that begs the question; can I be sued for routing a file from the distributor to the receiver?

A new car has been unveiled in Italy that can apparently download MP3s from special petrol pumps. Along with that strange feature, the car can also be unlocked via SMS and displays PC screens on its windows. La Mia 500 is a customized Fiat 500 responds, informing the user that the car is open and whether it needs petrol, or air or water. The car is one of four projects at the Festival of Science in Genoa, Italy, run by the Italian digital design college Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

The cars windows act as screens and allow passengers to sketch, or write SMS messages and emails and send them using wireless GPRS connections. The car also features a host of more small features that are really pushing technology to its limits; you are advised to visit the source for more information. It will be interesting to see a price tag on a car like this.

Source:
Netimperative

Today Apple introduced the new iPod Photo. The new devices can hold 40GB or 60GB of data and are advertised as being capable of holding up to 25,000 digital photos and up to 10,000 or 15,000 songs. It also includes a new screen with a higher resolution to view high quality pictures. The devices will allow you to make slideshows of photos with songs playing as their background music. Owners will be able to listen to music for up to 15 hours or view 5 hours of slideshows with the new extended battery life.

“Having both your entire photo and music collections with you wherever you go is the next big thing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Everyone has a digital camera and wants to enjoy and share their growing library of digital photos wherever they are. Unlike video content, photo content is free and abundant, and there are no copyright issues to deal with.”

The device can also easily download photos from Mac's or Windows machines through firewire or USB. The devices are now being shipped and come with a recommended retail price of $499 and $599. Another useful feature that users would find interesting is the ability to connect your iPod to a TV to view pictures and slideshows on a bigger screen.

Valve have decided to add an extra feature to the installation of their Half Life 2 game. Users will be required to sign up for a free online account to play the game. Once the account is created, the user will be able to play single player and LAN games without an internet connection. This comes after several big title games including Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas leaked onto the Internet before their official release.

Last year, there was a major security breach at a Valve network and hackers managed to download a huge chunk of the Half Life 2 source code and some other material. Just days after the theft, the source code appeared online and eventually a working beta of the game. This resulted in a delay of the official release of the game of almost 12 months.

It would seem that in future more gaming companies will take approaches like this to attempt to stomp out rampant piracy.

Source:
Slyck.com

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has long being claiming that its campaign of lawsuits against filesharers is helping to reduce filesharing activity in the United States. Big Champagne is a market research and marketing consulting firm specializing in P2P technology and their statistics tell a completely different story. Below are the figures for the U.S.

August, 2003 - 2,630,960
September, 2003 - 2,891,645
October, 2003 - 3,764,032
November, 2003 - 2,498,431
December, 2003 - 3,239,298
January, 2004 - 3,528,419
February, 2004 - 4,039,989
March, 2004 - 4,603,571
April, 2004 - 4,688,988
May, 2004 - 4,589,255
June, 2004 - 4,583,920
July, 2004 - 4,584,111
August, 2004 - 4,549,801
September, 2004 - 4,687,536
October 15, 2004 - 4,771,060

So as you can see, P2P activity in the United States appears to be higher than ever. For those interested, below are the international figures.

August, 2003 - 3,847,565
September, 2003 - 4,319,182
October, 2003 - 6,142,507
November, 2003 - 4,392,816
December, 2003 - 5,602,384
January, 2004 - 6,046,998
February, 2004 - 6,831,366
March, 2004 - 7,370,644
April, 2004 - 7,639,479
May, 2004 - 7,286,377
June, 2004 - 7,401,431
July, 2004 - 7,115,975
August, 2004 - 6,822,312
September, 2004 6,784,574
October 15, 2004 - 6,729,430

At a hearing yesterday, Peterborough magistrates told 34-year-old, David Brady they had considered sending him to prison for the crimes. Trading Standards officers and police swooped on Brady's home in last September, after getting a tip-off about his actions. More than 570 counterfeit CDs and 133 DVDs were found at his home. Also found was a range of carrying cases, a price list, and order forms listing 3,000 CD titles.

Brady was ordered to pay £250 court costs and forfeit his computer equipment and blank CDs and DVDs to police and was told he must work 100 hours to benefit the community. It is estimated that his actions may have cost the entertainment industry up to £53,000. Brady told the court that his actions were to help him with his hobby of collecting music. The court heard that it would have cost him about 80p to make an illegal copy of CD, which could be sold on for as much as £16. Head of investigations and inquiries at Cambridgeshire Trading Standards, Leon Livermore said, "The amount seized would have been a very profitable hobby for him. The illegal counterfeiting of DVDs and CDs has strong links with organized crime and terrorism as well as having a major detrimental effect on the entertainment industry."

One of the years most eagerly awaited games Halo 2, leaked onto the net last night. It is thought to have first shown up on Usenet in the form of a French DVD ISO and is labeled something like, "Halo.2.DVD9.PAL.XBOXDVD-DiFFUSiON". Microsoft has vowed to "aggressively pursue" whoever leaked the game. "We are currently investigating the source of this leak with the appropriate authorities," Microsoft said in a statement, "Microsoft takes the integrity of its intellectual property extremely seriously, and we are aggressively pursuing the source of this illegal act. We consider downloading this code or making it available for others to download as theft."

Halo 2 will still ship around the world in the second week of November. Last year, the source code of Half Life 2 by Valve and subsequently a working beta of the game surfaced on the net, causing the official release date to be pushed back by as much as 12 months. Also, in the past year, Microsoft was shocked to discover that their NT/2000 source code had leaked onto the Internet.

Source:
The Register

The RIAA has been running a campaign against online music filesharing now for over a year. The RIAA were using a 1998 law to force ISP's to hand over subscriber information on individuals suspected of sharing copyrighted music through P2P networks. Verizon challenged this saying that the RIAA needed to file a formal lawsuit to get customer information and a U.S. appeals court agreed. It ruled that the RIAA must first launch an anonymous "John Doe" lawsuit in order to get customer details.

The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected an appeal by the RIAA without giving any comment on it. It is likely that this will not affect the RIAA's action on illegal filesharing as they have sued more than 3000 P2P users since the appeals court ruling. The sad fact is that the RIAA are not alone now. The IFPI has also begun suing European P2P users, claiming they have done everything they can without legal action to try to deter filesharing. That is very strange as I have not seen even one ad on TV or anything about filesharing, except for Sky News reporting on the lawsuits and a Discovery documentary on movie downloading. It just appears that the recording industry is very quick to the trigger when they see another problem that is going to destroy the music industry, like the recording songs from the radio epidemic, if you can remember it.

We have added an interview with ShareReactor.com owner Simon Moon (Christian Riesen) to the articles (also guides) section. For those not familiar with ShareReactor, it was an eD2K (eDonkey / eMule) link site that was closed down by Swiss authorities several months ago on suspicion of Copyright and Trademark infringements. Since then, Simon has opened another site called RespectP2P to keep ShareReactor users up to date about the investigations and to provide a forum to discuss P2P related issues.

The interview was conducted as a conversation and not as a questionnaire so it should be fully read by users, instead of picking and choosing questions. It covers four main areas which are general questions about ShareReactor, questions about P2P legal situations, questions about the on-going investigations and some extra questions for Simon himself. Simon provided some very detailed answers and didn’t even complain about the length of the interview which went on for more than four hours in total. For example...

Q. Dela: And what was taken on the day? Have you had anything returned since? Read more...

A new iPod will feature not only a Toshiba 60GB HDD, but the capability to store digital photos. It will also have audio/video out capabilities. The product is currently only in production in Asia. Toshiba began shipping their new drives to Apple in September and iPod manufacturer Inventec has already begun building the new iPod. It is expected to look much the same as the current 4G iPods, only about 2mm thicker and slightly heavier. The 2 inch LCD screen will have a much higher resolution for quality photo viewing.

The video out feature means anybody would be able to connect their iPod to a TV and view all their pictures on a big screen instead of the iPods small LCD screen. The iPod will not be capable of editing any photos, nor will it have any built-in flash memory stick slots to download digital photos from digital cameras. Apple will market the new iPod as being capable of storing 20,000 music tracks and 25,000 photos and album artwork will be shown on screen to owners when they are playing music with the device.


The new iPod will become available within the next few months and is expected to cost around $499.

Source:
Think Secret

Just some days ago, Steve Ballmer referred to iPods as being "full of stolen music". Ged Carrol, who was offended by these comments, went to the Microsoft web site and used their feedback feature to demand an apology, and he got one. The apology went like this, "We would like to assure you that when Steve Ballmer implied that most of the music on iPods were stolen, he absolutely did not intend to single out iPod owners for criticism. In fact, given that they have access to their very own - and very popular - online music store, they are likely among the most law-abiding consumers of digital music. Microsoft Windows Media digital rights management (DRM) is a great way to limit piracy, and the main point Steve was trying to convey was that it requires a coordinated effort among many industry partners to do it right. More information on this platform is found on this page: http://www dot microsoft dot com/windows/windowsmedia/drm/faq.aspx"

If you read the apology it seems that it implies that only iPod users have access to the online music store, and doesn't mention that there is a fully working Windows version of it. Ballmer made his original comments about the iPod because it supports MP3, which is the most popular digital music format. Maybe Microsoft just hate it when they have serious competition? Also I don't see how DRM protection is a great way to limit piracy, just remember software Afterdawn has reported in the past that allows such protections to be bypassed. If anything DRM only limits music and is completely unfair to consumers. Oh and let's not forget that using DRM technology only tells your consumers one thing; you think they are all pirates.

Morpheus plans to release an update of its P2P software that will use new P2P technology to make the network stronger. Such technology is already in use by such networks as the eDonkey network, so you have to question what is actually new about it. Morpheus is planning to use a new network it calls Neonet which was written by a couple of former Harvard students. Dubbed "distributed hash tables," Neonet's technology transforms the way that searches happen on peer-to-peer networks. This will make it faster and easier to find the rarest of files.

The eDonkey2000 network uses similar technology thgat has proven to pay off as it seems to be on the verge of over-taking Kazaa as the most widely used P2P network. "Peer-to-peer technology to date is not good enough yet," said Michael Weiss, StreamCast's chief executive officer. "People ask, does the world really need another peer-to-peer network? I think the answer is, yes we do, because nobody's gotten it right yet."

Filesharing has become a fairly dangerous task for some sharers of copyrighted materials in many countries. RIAA lawsuits might scare some people but the overall P2P usage is still on the rise. P2P technology has evolved over time, starting with networks like Napster. Napster worked with one central major server that worked as a man-in-the-middle connecting peer to peer to complete file transfers. However, Napster was ruled illegal as it helped mass copyright infringement with its servers. More networks then came along like KaZaa which does not use one central server but uses different technologies to perform searches. Search requests are passed from computer to computer until files are found, then the information is relayed to the user. These networks were found to be legal. The third generation of P2P is already coming and the rise of eDonkey2000 is proof, it will be interesting to see Morpheus's technology in action.

This is the new logo that will appear on CDs provided by Indie label !K7. This is an unusual approach to Copy Protection as other major and indie labels look for new copy protections to prevent P2P piracy. "Copy protection kills customer relationships," the label says on its website. The basic idea is to show customers that they are respected and not treated as potential music pirates. "Only those to whom respect is given show respect themselves," the label notes.

This is not the first case of this backwards approach however, other companies and music labels are realizing the fact that their customers may feel they are being treated unfairly and may stray from buying their products. Sony Music Entertainment and fellow Japanese label Avex both earlier announced their plan to stop using CD lock-down technologies. !K7 believe that the average P2P download is not a lost sale, as the average P2P user is a casual music listener who wouldn't have bought the CD anyway.

This does not mean that the company is happy with the file-sharing situations. The logo "makes it clear that you've bought a CD and you can use it however you want. It's also clear, therefore, that good music has a prerogative - it has a right to be treated with respect," it says, pointing to the quid pro quo: if we agree not to lock-down CDs, we expect you not to abuse it. It will be interesting to see how many more follow in this direction.