News written by Jari Ketola (July, 2000)

RIAA got what they were looking for. On Wednesday a federal judge issued an order shutting down Napster Inc.. According to the judge, evidence indicated Napster's popular song-swapping service could be a cover for piracy.
``When the infringing is of such a wholesale magnitude, the plaintiffs are entitled to enforce their copyrights,'' U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel said after a two-hour hearing in San Francisco court.
Napster is instructed to cease trade in copyright-covered material by midnight on Friday.
``We are pleased with the court's decision. The decision will pave the way for the future of online music,'' said Cary Sherman, a lawyer representing the RIAA.
Napster, of course, disagrees with the ruling, and will continue to work hard to allow Napster users to continue to use their service by preparing for the Court of Appeals.

If Napster does infact get shut down on Friday night, it's good to know there's a whole bunch of alternative software available.
CuteMX has a rather strong user base, and is capable of sharing more than just MP3 files.
Scour Exchange, although in beta phase, has an impressive amount of users and media shared.
The idea behind Gnutella is appealing. Since it's fully distributed it will be hard to shut down.
iMesh is also rather nice, although not quite as popular as its counterparts.
And then there are of course numerous Open Source Napster clients that are not dependant on the Napster Inc. servers.

We all know that there are several problems with the MP3 format not the smallest of which is the patent rights enforced by Fraunhofer. Basically, if you want to handle MP3s in any way, you have to pay license fees to Fraunhofer. Also the sound quality is far from perfect with all the phasing problems etc.
But are we stuck with MP3 then? Probably yeah, but that shouldn't keep the curious mind from exploring alternatives to the format. Luckily there's a very promising audio encoding and streaming technology out called Ogg Vorbis.
Quote from the Vorbis site: The Ogg Vorbis format is intended for unrestricted private and public, non-profit and commercial use. There are no bitstream royalties and the reference software, including full source, is free--- forever. The encoders, decoders, plugins, and tools at vorbis.com are under the GPL (GNU Public License) and the libraries are under the business-friendly LGPL (Lesser/Library GNU Public License).
Sounds good so far? Well it just keeps getting better! Even though smaller in size than regular MP3s, the Ogg files actually sound a bit better than MP3s! Check them out yourself!
To get started you'll probably need OGG plug-ins for Sonique, WinAmp, XMMS (Linux) and BeOS. When you'll eventually want to encode OGGs yourself the Windows, Linux, and BeOS encoders will come in handy. For extended ease-of-use, you'll probably want to get the CD-DA X-Tractor with built-in support for Ogg Vorbis!

Digital Software Inc. is working on a plan to include some form of advertising in MP3 files as a solution for the problems with profiting from digital media distribution.
The advertisements could be in forms of banners, advertisement web sites etc.
Source: Dimension Music

Napster CEO Hank Berry told Billboard Bulletin yesterday (July 5) that the music file-sharing company has held "preliminary discussions" regarding a settlement in its legal war with RIAA member labels. "We feel comfortable with our [legal] position," he said, "but we think there is common ground between us and the labels and hope we can come to an accommodation."
Read the full story on Billboard.com.

Philips is "giving away" 50 units of their new MP3-CD player, the Expanium, to a lucky few as a part of their beta test. The player itself is due out in August, but it's quite difficult to see how they could pull off a two-month beta test period in time before the release. I'm pretty sure the current beta test program is more of a publicity stunt.
Of course the beta test program is open to residents of the United States only. If you are from the USA, you can sign up and cross your fingers and wait. The rest of us can take a look at the Expanium homepage and wait for the release of the $200 player.
Source: Dimension Music.

Napster attorneys today said that finding and downloading copyrighted songs for free is legal as long as no money is made from these recordings.
The brief cited an earlier case where noncommercial copying was decided to be protected by law.
David Boies, the high-profile antitrust lawyer hired by Napster, cited internal documents he says show the record labels have abused their power to prevent music from being spread using alternative channels. "If you use a copyright to achieve an anti-competitive purpose, you lose the rights to them," Boies said.
Source: CNET News.com