News written by Jari Ketola (October, 2000)

Got a tape deck or a walkman lying around somewhere and you can't figure out what to do with it now that everything has gone digital? Worry no more! The Duo-MP3 player is here.

Duo is a digital music player that looks exactly like an audio casette. It works pretty much like a tape-adapter for a CD-player does - you download the music from a computer and stick the casette into a casette deck and hit play. Of course, when you leave home you just pick up the casette from the deck, connect the headphones to the device and slip it in your pocket, and you're set to go!

The versatile Duo from Digisette is one of the lightest MP3-players on the market, and costs $249, which includes a 32MB flash memory card, a battery, and a plug-in charger. There's also an expansion slot available for a second flash memory card.

Check out Digisette web site for more information! The gadget seems to be spot-on for everyone looking to playback MP3s on their existing stereo system without too much hassle.

MP3.com posted a quarterly loss of nine cents a share (or $6.1 million) before charges on Thursday beating the forecast of twelve cents. The pending copyright ligitation by Seagram kept the analysts cautious, though.

MP3.com has already settled with four of the five major recording labels which sued it for copyright infingements. However the company could still face up to $250 million in damages from the Seagram-lawsuit. The damage award will be determined in November.

Source:
Yahoo! News

MP3.com has reached a preliminary settlement with the National Music Publishers' Association Inc.. The settlement will make more than 1 million songs available through MP3.com's My.MP3.com -service.

The three-year deal will cost MP3.com up to $30 million in licensing costs. The settlement also means that NMPA will drop the lawsuit they presented in March against MP3.com.

Shares of MP3.com rose 66 cents to $3.41 in trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Web file-swapping company Scour on Thursday said it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the latest setback for the Internet start-up backed by Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz.

Scour was sued in July by the motion picture and recording industries, which alleged widespread copyright violations from Scour's Scour Exchange file-sharing software. The costly lawsuit eventually led to the company laying off sixty of it's seventy employees.

Scour's services will remain available to consumers. The company added it filed for bankruptcy protection "in the face of burdensome lawsuits."

Source:
CNET News.com

As suspected, the Regional Code Enhancement (RCE) from Warner Brothers is turning out to be little more than a minor annoyance. In their recent review the DVDFile staff tested The Patriot DVD with a region free player. Indeed, the disc would not play, if the player was set to accept all regions, but worked flawlessly when the player was set to region 1 exclusively -- just as I suspected earlier on.

So if your player is not hardwired to an "all-region" -mode, you can keep buying them region 1 DVDs without worries.

Related links:
DVDFile.com editorial on RCE
Anti-region-free DVDs?

According to a potential jury pool survey released today, things are looking rather good for Napster before the jury hearing in the lawsuit brought by the RIAA.

As much as 41.5 percent of one thousand men and women over 18 who participated in the survey think that taking music from the Internet for personal use should be free. Only 19 percent think the music should be free for commercial use as well. The survey was published by National Law Journal and made by DecisionQuest.

"These data should be music to Napster's ears," said DecisionQuest vice president David Davis in a statement. "It is very difficult to win a case by attempting to change jurors' preexisting attitudes. Add to this that judge's instructions are often ignored, and we have a scenario where the barrier to persuading a unanimous jury to find against an alleged Internet 'pirate' may be a note that is too high to reach."

Source:
Newsbytes.com

According to DVD Debate Warner Brothers is about to bring out new region protection scheme which would prevent the playback of Warner Home Video region 1 DVDs on so called region-free or zoneless DVD-players.

The Regional Code Enhancement (RCE) program is a response to the groving sales of unathorized region-free DVD-players. Apparently the RCE-enabled discs check if the player accepts more than one region code, and refuses to play if it does. With most region free DVD-players this shouldn't present a problem, since the region code is usually set exclusively to a single region at time.

Atleast two upcoming movies, WHV's The Perfect Storm and Columbia Tristar's The Patriot, are known to feature RCE. According to my own test's also Rushmore from Criterion Collection has a similar "protection" -- it plays back with my DVD-player set to region 1, but refuses to play when set to region "all".

I'll get back to the topic after I have received my copy of The Patriot.

Source:
DVDDebate.com

Fighting the legal battles might turn out to be impossible for Napster to cope with alone. Indeed, rumors about two ISPs negotiating to purchase Napster's assets.

President of the Atlanta-based ISP EarthLink Inc. Mike McQuary has confirmed that discussions have been held between EarthLink and Napster. McQuary obviously wasn't willing to provide detailed information about the discussions, but stated that they covered "various digital music scenarios."

Napster's CEO Hank Berry has denied that any discussions what so ever with EarthLink have taken place.

"It never happened," Barry said. "We will always maximize value for our shareholders, but Napster is not about to be acquired by anyone. Napster is happy to talk with anyone who has a sincere interest in working with us."

In any case, with all the legal battles Napster is facing buying it would mean taking a big risk. On the other hand Napster has a user base of over 30 million -- a number which to many Internet companies might make the risk worth taking.

Source:
LocalBusiness.com

Only three and a half years after the introduction of the format, DVD-player sales have broken all records as the 10 millionth player was shipped. No other consumer electronics product has managed to reach the 10 million level in such a short period of time (including VCR and Compact Disc).

Fueling this growth is the enthusiastic support of movie studios and record labels, which are releasing more than 250 new DVD-Video titles each month. In response, DVD replicators have increased their capacity by more than 150 percent for the second half of 2000 over the same period last year in preparation for the extraordinary anticipated growth throughout the holiday selling season.

"The milestone of shipping 10 million DVD-Video players is regarded as an indicator of mass market acceptance," said Emiel N. Petrone, chairman, DVD Entertainment Group and executive vice president, Philips Entertainment Group, Worldwide. "We know that shortly we will achieve 10 percent household penetration - a benchmark of success for any consumer electronics product."

Now if only we could get rid of the moronic region coding scheme. That would really boost the DVD-player sales outside the North American region.