News written by Jari Ketola (March, 2001)

Mobile telephone manufacturer Nokia unveiled three new mobile phones at CeBIT on Wednesday. The piece of equipment that cought our attention was, however, not one of the phones but the Nokia Music Player.

The Nokia Music Player is a combined MP3 and AAC player with a built-in radio. It works not only with Nokia 3310, 3330, 8210, 8250 and 8850 mobiles phones, but also as a stand alone device powered by an AAA battery. Naturally the device doubles as an hands-free headset as well.

It's only a matter of time before we see built-in digital audio players in mobile phones.

The Nokia Music Player will be available during Q3 2001.

File sharing firm Aimster on Wednesday said it has removed the Pig Encoder at the request of Napster.

The Pig Encoder enables users to get around court-ordered restrictions imposed on Napster using a simple, yet efective, pig Latin "scrambling". The decision to remove the software was done out of respect for Napster's efforts to maintain it's service.

But not to worry. Even though Aimster decided to remove the encoder we at AfterDawn.com are determined to offer our users the right to choose.

Click here to download the Aimster Pig Encoder

In an apparent effort to gain market share and capitalize on the current state of turmoil surrounding Napster, EMusic.com announced a special limited-time give-away promotion for former Napster users and other digital music fans. Starting today for one week only, music fans can download any MP3 album -- or up to 15 MP3 singles -- from EMusic's downloadable music catalog, without charge or commitment.

EMusic initiated the unique promotion in an effort to communicate to digital music fans and the music industry that there are viable, legal alternatives to unauthorized file-sharing that do not require cumbersome digital rights management technologies. The online marketing campaign to promote EMusic's offer features the tag line "MP3 is Not a Dirty Word".

Well then.. Drop the lawsuit, will you?

Yes, that's right. A company called 3ECS is actually paying you to share your files on their service. For each file that is downloaded from you they pay you $0.02. The catch is that each download costs $0.05, so the company profits $0.03 for every single transfer made on the system.

Sounds to me like 3ECS might be on to something here, but this kind of a sharing scheme is bound to attract RIAA, MPAA and other intellectual property organizations sooner or later. And since the company clearly aims to profit on the sharing, I'd bet it's pretty darn soon.

Anyways, check out their site at www.3ECS.com where you can pre-register for the service. There's no indication when the service will actually be launched, but we'll keep an eye on it.

MP3.com suffered a double blow on Tuesday. First they lost the copyright battle with independent record label TeeVee Toons Inc., which means more damages to pay for copyright infringements.

The secold blow came from one of MP3.com's insurers seeking a ruling it doesn't have to cover MP3.com's losses caused by copyright infringement claims.

Westport Insurance Corp. said MP3.com had demanded coverage for losses caused by the My.MP3.com service. Westport denied coverage because, according to them, MP3.com misrepresented its business practices and entered into settlements without Westport's consent.

MP3.com's stock fell 14 percent on Nasdaq.

Napster will begin blocking access to more than one million copyrighted songs this weekend. With this action Napster tries to anticipate the new legal injuction coming their way any day now.

Lawyers for the popular online song-swap service made their last-ditch bid for corporate survival in a hearing Friday before U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who is drafting the injunction which many fans fear could unplug Napster for good.

``I think Napster will still be the best music service out there, (but) it will not be the same,'' David Boies, lead attorney for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company, said after the hearing.

Desperate users have been flooding the Napster for last minute fills to their music collection. At the very moment there are over ten thousand users on a single Napster server sharing two million songs.

I don't see much future for Napster with such a drastic cut to the amount of selection offered. Time for Gnutella and Aimster to take over.