News written by Jari Ketola (September, 2000)

U.S. Representative Rick Boucher, a Democrat from Virginia, on Monday introduced in the House of Representatives a bill that would essentially make MP3.com's My.MP3.com -service untouchable. The bill, Music Owners' Listening Right Act (H.R. 5225), would ammend the copyright section of U.S. law so that it would be legal for consumers to store and listen to music tracks over the Internet provided that the user proves he/she legally owns the music in question.

"We believe that the technology which gives rise to this new convenience should be encouraged," Boucher says, "and our legislation will remove legacy copyright restrictions which were written for a different era and that threaten to strangle the technology in its infancy."

My.MP3.com was a service that allowed consumers to listen to the CDs they had bought without actually uploading it to the service first. The service was sued by major record labels earlier this year.

Although it's unlikely that the digital media & Internet -issues will be resolved anytime soon, it's good to see efforts being made in the right direction. And more importantly the efforts seem to be made in favour of us, the customers, and not the major record labels.

We have just implemented a new skin-voting system here at AfterDawn.com. You can now vote for each of your favourite skins at the skin listings!

Please note that in orderd to prevent fraudulent results we have limited the votes-per-IP to one per week. The point-rating isn't displayed until there are enough votes for that skin.

So go make your vote count, and keep your eyes peeled for other new features coming up soon!

Justin Frankel, the man who caused quite a stirr at AOL after creating and publishing Gnutella, the distributed media sharing engine, is at it again.


This time he has created AIMazing, a visualization plug-in for Winamp, which renders graphics on the AOL Instant Messenger display. What makes it somewhat controversial is the fact that it actually draws on the space reserved for advertisements on the AIM-window. AOL doesn't really seem to mind it, though, since they don't have any paid ads on the space.


You can download AIMazing here at AfterDawn.com.

We have just finished testing our real-time WAP services with WAP 1.2 compatible mobile phones. We're happy to announce that everything seemed to work flawlessly!

You can now view the latest AfterDawn.com news via a WAP enabled device or a PDA equipped with AvantGo browser. AfterDawn.com was the first ever MP3 news-site to offer their content via AvantGo and WAP.

Read more about the AvantGo and WAP services, and instructions for their use, by clicking the links.

Yes indeed. You read it right. One would think that there would be no connection between the anti-DeCSS ruling against 2600.com and MP3 tracks posted on MP3.com. It seems, however, that in today's insane world everything is possible!

MP3.com has removed a song by Joseph Wecker. In the song Wecker sings a version of the DeCSS code. Apparently MP3.com has decided to play it safe, and decided to remove the song. In their email letter to Wecker MP3.com stated that "Your song has either a song title or lyrics that are offensive or otherwise inappropriate."

Wecker himself said he wanted to attract attention to the issue with the song. "It's gone one step too far," Wecker said. "It's illegal to photocopy a copyrighted poem. But now it's like it has become illegal to tell someone how the Xerox works."

Source: Yahoo! Daily News

Teraoptix, a Dallas based company, is offering a rather cool looking Terapin CD audio & video recorder. The product is capable of recording VideoCD compatible CD-Rs and CD-RWs from a live, full-motion video source. The device has digital coax and optical, analog composite input and S-Video inputs and outputs.

Priced at $599 the CD Audio Video Recorder is not a toy suitable for everyone's budget. Then again, buying a video capture card, a cd-rw recorder and suitable video editing software could easily add up to $600 -- or even more -- so I'm sure there could be demand for a product like this.

Related links:
CD Audio Video recorder product features

RealNetworks and Streambox Inc. have settled a lawsuit in which Real accused Streambox of copyright infringement and unfair competition.
Streambox had a number of products that allowed consumers to record and convert Real's video and audio formats. Real argued that Streambox was violating both RealNetworks and it's customers' copyrights. Streambox in turn said that it was merely producing a VCR that could time-shift live Real audio and video streams.
The settlement means that in the future Streambox will develop it's products using RealNetworks' development tools and copyright protections.
You can still find Strembox VCR and Streambox Ripper from our software area.