News written by James Delahunty (December, 2004)

The emerging leader in digital entertainment, iRiver, announced the H-10, a new MP3 portable HDD music player with 5GB of internal storage and an array of features. Since the device is much smaller and lighter than most other players, it can be put into the pocket-able jukebox category. It gives customers the option to use familiar folder navigation to sort through files more easily. It comes bundled with earphones, carrying case, USB 2.0 and AC adapter. Of all the new features, the most noticeable is the addiction of a new LCD colour display, and also allows you to listen to FM radio stations.

"This 5GB player is so feature packed, that it will also appeal to business users too as it can also be used as a voice recorder and hard disk storage drive. This makes the H-10 an ideal travel companion" said Dushyant Nagpal - Brand Manager for iRiver in UAE. "iRiver has done it once again. Delivering an outstanding product with such power features not yet seen in products currently prevailing in our region. This truly is a honour for us to be able to bring the H-10 to UAE where currently the sales of hard disk drive players is on the rise" said Ashok Daryanani - General Manager Sales and Marketing, Space Distribution, Dubai.

President of InternetMovies.com Inc, Michael Jay Rossi plans to ask the United States Supreme Court to review the case "Rossi vs. Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)" for the wrongful shutdown of his site in 2001. The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that good faith belief under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is subjective and not objective. In 2001 the MPAA claimed that InternetMovies.com had The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King available for download, which was not even finished production until 2003. The MPAA sent a cease and desist letter to the site's ISP demanding that it be shut down.

"MPAA communications with my ISP were unreasonable and outrageous and without just cause or excuse and beyond all bounds of decency -- violating the DMCA. The courts must have overlooked that I could not have made a movie downloadable 3 years in the future, which shows that the MPAA was not within the boundaries of decency and that the court should not have ruled in favor of the MPAA." said Rossi. First Amendment litigator James H. Fosbinder, who is representing Rossi, said InternetMovies.com never had the capacity to provide movie downloads and characterized the statements cited by the court as "hyperbole."

TRHR alerted us about Torrentbits closing down by using our news submission form. Aswell as Torrentbits, BitTorrent giant Suprnova.org has also decided to stop offering torrent files. The following is pasted from the Suprnova homepage.

Greetings everybody,

As you have probably noticed, we have often had downtimes. This was because it was so hard to keep this site up!
But now we are sorry to inform you all, that SuprNova is closing down for good in the way that we all know it.
We do not know if SuprNova is going to return, but it is certainly not going to be hosting any more torrent links.
We are very sorry for this, but there was no other way, we have tried everything.

Thank you all that helped us, by donating mirrors or something else, by uploading and seeding files, by helping people out on IRC and on forum, by spreading the word about SuprNova.org.
It is a sad day for all of us!

Please visit SuprNova.org every once in a while to get the latest news on what is happening and if there is anything new to report on.

As we wish to maintain the nice comunity that we created, we are kepping forums and irc servers open.

Thank you all and Goodbye!
sloncek & the rest of the SuprNova Team

The Recording Industry will soon ask the Red Cross to freeze a trust fund allegedly controlled by the owners of Sharman Networks, an Australian Software company that owns the Kazaa P2P client. The music industry maintains that Sharman, the maker of the Kazaa peer-to-peer software, is owned by several companies through a trust fund registered in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. The Red Cross is the only beneficiary specifically named in the trust, so the recording industry, which is suing Sharman, is asking the organization to voluntarily freeze the fund until a verdict is reached in the Australian Federal Court.

"We’re preparing our approach to the International Red Cross,” says Michael Speck of Australia’s Music Industry Piracy Investigations, which spearheads the prosecution of accused pirates. "I believe this whole thing will come as a complete surprise to them, and we’re only approaching them to stop them disposing of any funds." A lawyer acting in Sharman’s defense, Mary Still said that the approach the recording industry is taking to such a charitable organization is quite staggering. "It would be incredibly disappointing if we had to sue them," said Speck, a comment that should spark controversy.

The Recording Industry Association of America has continued its battle against file-sharing by suing yet another 754 U.S. file swappers it alleges to have distributed Copyrighted tracks through P2P networks. Among the 754 people are 20 students the RIAA accuses of using University networks to distribute MP3. This brings the total number sued to 7,704 since September 2003 when the RIAA first launched its campaign against unauthorized file sharing. European lawsuits did not follow until about a year later.

The RIAA is confident that this "sue em all" tactic is working and is slowing down file-sharing. However, latest studies have indicated that the RIAA's tactics have not effected P2P use overall, but that P2P use is growing at a huge rate. In order to issue a subpoena against the user's ISP, the RIAA first must gather evidence of the user's P2P activity. They can then retrieve the identity of user from the IP address that was being used for infringement from the ISP. In some cases in the U.S. the RIAA have to file a "john doe" lawsuit against the defendant before they will even learn the true identity of the user.

Source:
BBC News

A Canadian judge today ruled that a levy imposed on MP3 players that would be distributed to record labels and other copyright holders to compensate for revenue lost due to P2P use was illegal. The case was brought before the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal after the Copyright Board of Canada began demanding that player manufacturers cough up $2 for each player with a capacity of less than 1GB, $15 for 1-10GB players and $25 for devices with storage of more than 10GB in December 2003. "While the Copyright Board of Canada is indeed permitted by Canada's Copyright Act to tax sales of blank media, the terms of the Act do not allow it to levy a similar fee from MP3 player makers," Mr Justice Marc Noël said.

Judge Noël said he understood the Boards need to compensate artists and Copyright holders for potential lost revenue by distributing the levies it receives from sales of blank media, but the authority to impose a levy on an MP3 player still has to be found in the Act. The ruling will lead to the prices for mp3 players dropping dramatically. However it seems likely that organizations such as the Canadian Private Copying Collective, which distributes the proceeds of the levies to artists and recording companies, are pondering whether to take the case to Canada's Supreme Court in a bid to have Judge Noël's ruling overturned. At least, they will attempt to lobby the Canadian Government to amend the Copyright Act to take MP3 players and other such devices into account.

As you all have read or noticed by now; some of the biggest P2P sites in existence have been shut down. The most targeted sites have been BitTorrent sites and eDonkey2000 linking sites. The power behind the eDonkey2000 network is the eD2K linking resources, which provide links to real files. ShareReactor was long regarded as the best eD2K linking site until it was shut down by Swiss authorities in March 2004. After ShareReactor was closed, ShareConnector became the next favorite eD2K linking site, but on the 14th of December the news circulated that ShareConnector had been shutdown by Dutch authorities. Also shutdown by Dutch authorities was Releases4U, another linking site.

Another major site that had eD2K links as well as being a huge BitTorrent resource was Finreactor. The Administrators of the Finnish site has their computers seized by the National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi) after it received a request from Finnish copyright associations, including the BSA and Teosto (the Finnish equivalent of RIAA). Read about it here.

Apple's iTunes music store has now sold 200m songs the company has said. In October this year the company reported having sold 150m songs with its store, with an average of about 4m songs per week. This average has risen to 4.76m per week. Apple had forecasted it would reach the 200m mark by Christmas. Between now and Christmas there is plenty of time for users to download about 10m more songs. While telling you about the total number of music download sales, Apple always seems to leave out the total number of users for the iTunes music stores, a figure which could really shed some light on the actual success of the store and possibly on whether the future looks as good as its past.

For now, it seems the Gold is the big figure of sales in this very early time of digital downloads. Apple is also expected to sell 4 million iPod's this quarter, which gives them many more potential customers. iTunes continues to rule in the digital music download market, but competition is growing by the day with new online music stores being opened and existing music stores being improved. Only a few weeks ago, Napster reported that their total of songs available in the UK has reached over 1 million.

The Motion Pictures Association of America is to launch a legal attack on BitTorrent users who abuse the technology developed by Bram Cohen in 2001, to share illegal copies of movies. BitTorrent was developed to make a quicker way of spreading large files around a network. It breaks files up into little segments and users who are downloading the file are also uploading it to other users. This takes an enormous amount of pressure off a source server. A server known as a tracker keeps track of details among filesharers to help them get more sources for their file and keeps track of the amount of the file each user has.

Since BitTorrent appeared in 2001, more and more sites have popped up that allow users to share pirated files. Instead of operating like a P2P network, users download a .torrent file which contains details on the tracker and file information. The MPAA is very late in its action against BitTorrent trading. Files that are currently being shared tend to share very quickly; this has attracted millions of users to torrent sites. However, since BitTorrent sites don’t actually offer files, just torrent files, the legality of these sites is unknown.

eBay's payment system, PayPal, can now be used by iTunes customers to purchase music downloads in the United States. Other music download services are already accepting PayPal payments for music downloads but the deal with the market-leading iTunes is seen as important. "This is a big win for our off-eBay business," PayPal's spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt said. PayPal gets 70% of business from eBay but continues to win new deals with more firms. In some cases, some online businesses only accept PayPal payments.

PayPal profits from taking a small percentage of a transaction is performs. It currently has around 56,000,000 registered users worldwide. PayPal sales reached $166m between July and September, a 56% increase on the same period in 2003. The service was acquired by online auction giant eBay in 2002. Since then it has received a lot of success but also has had its hiccups, including service failures in October following a software upgrade and accusations of overstating the level of protection it offered in the event of non-arrival of goods.

Source:
BBC News

Martin Mullen, a 50 year old Canadian Man, has been jailed for 7 years after he admitted to being the leader of a sophisticated satellite TV piracy ring that sold hacked smart cards in Canada and the United States. He was also ordered to pay a sum of $24m to DirecTV and their smart card provider NDS Ltd. He pled guilty in a federal court in Tampa, Florida in September last year to conspiracy to violate anti-piracy laws and entering the United States illegally after being deported years earlier in an unrelated matter. Mullen has been called an expert at cracking smart cards that are issues to subscribers which allow them to view TV channels that they pay for.

Usually, when a subscriber inserts the card into the set top box, a satellite signal will then determine which channels this user is allowed to watch. This operation is based by a unique identification number that is coded into every issued smart card. Mullen apparently headed a network of over 100 individuals that sell thousands of hacked smart cards which allow access to all channels. "The severe sentence handed down by the court is clearly warranted in this case and we applaud the judge's decision," said Jim Whalen, senior director of DirecTV's Signal Integrity Department, in a statement. "This sentence serves as a stark reminder that the sale and distribution of signal theft devices has grave consequences."

Lawyer for Sharman Networks, Mark Lemming, has accused University of Melbourne professor Leon Sterling of switching sides in the Kazaa trial currently taking place in Sydney Australia. He alleges that at one time Leon Sterling had offered to be an expert witness for Sharman Networks, but later emailed them withdrawing an offer to be an expert witness for Sharman during the civil trial, saying that writing a report requested by Sharman would be "stretching his expertise." During cross-examination, Lemming used the e-mail to question Sterling's expertise in the trial against the company, which makes the Kazaa peer-to-peer software. "Your lack of experience in P2P makes it difficult for you to tell the court of any feasibility for the propositions you mentioned," Lemming said.

Sterling claims that it was not possible for him to put together an expert report on how the Kazaa P2P network works because of the limited time he had to do it. Sterling added that he was not able to do a feasibility study on the proposals that he made and acknowledged that any filtering done in Sharman's Kazaa system would not be 100 percent efficient. However on Tuesday, Sterling made suggestions on how to filter and monitor the network, and he continues to back his suggestions, calling them "all plausible mechanisms" that can be added to the Kazaa system.

Halo 2 is by far one this years most anticipated games. It seems now that most gamers are getting increasingly interested in online gaming using their broadband service with their gaming consoles. It has been reported by network monitoring company Sandvine, that traffic on the Xbox live gaming network had increased fourfold on Halo 2's release date and is showing no signs of slowing down. Fears are that some networks may not be able to handle the amount of bandwidth that is now being demanded by gamers. But the surge in numbers and huge demands for bandwidth should be a wake-up call to the industry which must ensure that their networks can cope with the increases in traffic, said Sandvine's chief technology officer Marc Morin.

Since the demand for bandwidth has become very high these days, more and more service providers are implementing systems that make their networks more intelligent, and gather information on what bandwidth is being used for what purpose. With a network like this, ISP's could very easily prioritize or reserve bandwidth for online gaming through gaming consoles. However, if the hunger for bandwidth keeps rising it seems possible that more ISP's will move to a system of charging customers by the amount of bandwidth that they use.

Airtel, one of India’s largest mobile service providers will show the premiere of a movie called "Rok Sako To Rok Lo" ("Stop Me If You Can") right on customers handsets in ten major Indian cities including Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. This is all made possible by a third-generation cellular technology that delivers broadband-like data speeds to mobile devices called EDGE or Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution. Customers who have EDGE enabled handsets can tune into a live stream of the movie tomorrow at 3pm Indian standard time. "Airtel has become the first cellular service in the world to premiere a full-length movie on mobile," Atul Bindal, Airtel's director for mobility, said in a statement.

Airtel have an entertainment portal called Airtel Live which is what the customers will be using to watch the streaming movie. The movie cannot be downloaded or copied so customers will have to make sure that they log on to Airtel live at the proper time. It will only take a matter of seconds after they click to view the movie for it to appear streaming live on their handset. Mobile phone companies have long being promoting these new types of systems to consumers. In the United States, the general public does not seem to be over enthusiastic about it, but in some countries, the demand is becoming quite high.

The Federal Trade Commission has sent a letter to Congress highlighting some efforts made by P2P software companies are making to disclose potential online risks. P2P has long been under fire from legislators because they believe it exposes users to spyware and pornography and also the possibility of lawsuits from the Recording Industry or Movie Industry. Just last month, Kazaa made it to the top of the spyware list, a list compiled of the programs that slow down your computer most by installing useless adware and registry entries. However, P2P software companies make a very good argument; you expose yourself to similar risks by just surfing the Internet.

However P2P companies have been working closely with the FTC to try to develop better consumer notification techniques. The FTC included several of those proposals with its letter to Congress, saying that when implemented, they would do a better job of warning consumers. "(Peer-to-peer) industry members have developed proposed risk disclosures that we believe would be a substantial improvement over current practices," FTC Chair Deborah Platt Majoras wrote in the letter. "We intend to monitor and report back to interested members of Congress on the extent to which P2P file-sharing program distributors implement these proposed risk disclosures."

In the Asia-Pacific, piracy has become big business. The Motion Pictures Association (MPA) estimated that every year, the U.S. movie industry loses around $718m in potential revenue. It blames the growth of criminal activity, the increasingly easy ways to copy optical discs illegally and the growth of ultra high speed Internet connections and the numbers of P2P networks that keep popping up on a daily basis. These factors have turned piracy in the Asia-Pacific into a multi million dollar market. In the past, piracy on this scale came usually from factories pirating thousands of CD's and DVD's. Now it gets harder as these factories have been replaced by numbers of individuals pirating material in their homes and selling the DVD's and CD's to the re-sellers.

This new form of mass piracy has made it harder to crack down on. The MPA investigated 10,660 cases of piracy in the first half of 2004 and also assisted law enforcement in over 4000 raids in the Asia-Pacific region. 11.8m illegal optical discs were seized and 2000 criminal legal actions were initiated. The top three Asia-Pacific markets for seizures of pirated VCD and DVD product were mainland China, Hong Kong and Malaysia whilst Australia and South Korea accounted for around 80 per cent of the recordable discs (DVD-Rs) seized in the region. The MPA also started an anti-piracy rewards program in the region, which led to many more raids and seizures than the first half of 2004, fueled by tips from members of the public. New anti-piracy ads have also hit theatre's there, once again reminding the viewers, that piracy is a crime.

Apple has begun threatening the owner of the itunes.co.uk domain, accusing him of being a cybersquatter. They have taken him to UK registry Nominet looking for ownership of the domain name. The owner is Benjamin Cohen, who just happens to have a father who is a solicitor. Cohen registered the itunes.co.uk domain name on 7th November 2000, whereas Apple were only had the trademark for "iTunes" published in the Trade Marks Journal on 6 December 2000. It was granted a limited trademark that did not cover music products on 23 March 2001, and eventually went live with its iTunes offering in June 2004. Cohen says he had no idea Apple were planning to launch an iTunes service.

So now four years after Cohen registered the itunes.co.uk domain, Apple have decided to try taking the domain name. Two days after Cohen registered the domain he made use of it by forwarding it to a music search engine service at his CyberBritain site. Since November this year, numerous letters have been sent to CyberBritain from Apple, including an offer of a small sum of money for the domain. Now Apple has taken the issue to Nominet, where it will be put through the organization’s domain resolution process. Cohen admits however that if his father was not a solicitor and hadn't explained to him about the laws surrounding this issue, he would have given into pressure from Apple by now. He is confident however, that CyberBritain will win this battle.

After a very successful year last year, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, has even more success to look forward to with the upcoming release of the Special Extended DVD Edition. The Extended DVD Edition has 50 extra minutes of scenes that were cut from the original theatrical version, including the last confrontation between Saruman and the Fellowship, a very important part of the Lord of the Rings story. However, days ago people could download the movie for free from the Internet when a 2GB XviD copy of the movie appeared online. Today, to follow the XviD copy is a much higher quality DVD release of this movie.

It's not a big thing anymore to see major releases like this leak onto the Internet. I decided to investigate a bit and see what the general attitude is towards the early leak of this movie is. The result is quite amazing, in almost all sites where downloader’s were allowed to comment, they either said they were going to download the movie and later buy the 4Disc DVD retail version or not download it and wait for its release date. The retail set will contain 4 DVD's packed full of bonus material, whereas the copy of it floating around online is only 2 DVD-5's, where the video has been re-encoded to shrink the overall size.

The UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT), has reported Apple's hugely successful iTunes music download store to the European Commission claiming that it infringes European Trade regulations. Apple seems to want to open single music stores for most European states, which goes against the laws which govern the free movement of goods and services between EU member states - the single market. In the UK, customers pay 79p per download, and in France customers pay 99c. At the current exchange rate 99c in euro is 68p. The problem is, Apple will not allow UK customers to purchase music from its French store.

Apple blames the fact that different states have different have different music licensing regimes and it's the terms of its licenses that prevent it from selling music from one store to a customer in a different state. The differential pricing is also a result of this licensing mess, and from differing tax regimes between EU member states. Earlier this year the European Commission told Union's various rights agencies to devise a standard, cross-border licensing scheme as it is already aware of the problem with the iTunes music store. The same problems put Napster off opening stores all over Europe in April, and they settled for a UK-only launch.