News written by Jari Ketola (June, 2001)

MP3.com has asked Federal Judge Jed Rakoff to approve its bid for an appeal in the copyright infringement suit filed agaist MP3.com by the independent record label TVT Records.

Last week judge Rakoff declared a mistrial in the MP3.com vs. TVT case after the jury had awarded TVT $300,000 in damages when they had actually intended an award of $3 million.

Should Rakoff refuse MP3.coms appeal, the company could appeal to a higher court. MP3.com will, of course, wait for Rakoff's decision before concidering further action.

The full U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to re-hear Napster about their appeal of the injunction that requires Napster to filter out copyrighted music from their service. With the appeal Napster wanted to overturn the injunction and also wanted the appeals court to reconsider the ruling that Napster is liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.

The appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was concidered a long shot by legal experts. The only remaining alternative for Napster is to appeal to the U.S. Supreme court.

MP3.com has launched a Copyright Wizard service designed to help emerging artists claim copyrights on their work. The Wizard helps artists to register their songs with the U.S. Copyright Office by filling out the necessary forms, creating the CD, and submitting the registration.

The forms are, of course, also available via the U.S. Copyright Office home page. If the artist wishes to submit the registration forms himself, the Copyright Office charges a nonrefundable filing fee of $30. For the full serice MP3.com charges $59.95 from Premium Artist Service members, and $69.95 from non-members.

This is a very practical way indeed for independent artists to claim copyright on their work without much hassle.

The European Commission has begun preliminary antitrust investigations into MusicNet and PressPlay. Both MusicNet and PressPlay are upcoming music services backed by the big boys of the recording industry. MusicNet is backed by RealNetworks, Warner Music Group, EMI Recorded Music, and BMG Entertainment. PressPlay, which until today was known as Duet, is backed by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.

According to European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti "there are potentially a number of issues which merit close examination." What these issues might be is yet unknown. European antitrust-laws have been more than a small annoyance in the recent media mergers. It is said that the EMI -Warner/Bertelsmann mergers failed due to these laws.

Napster announced today that it has struck a deal with Loudeye Technologies to aid in Napster's struggle to filter out songs. Napster intends to use audio fingerprints provided by Loudeye to filter and track files shared on the Napster network. Loudeye is not the author behind the fingerprinting technology Napster is using, but instead Loudeye's purpose is to do the actual fingerprinting using Relatable's technology. Napster made a deal with Relatable earlier this year.

The audio fingerprint is created by reading audio frequencies at several points in a song, and creating an identifier based on the frequency data. This identifier can then be used to look up a song from a database. Napster has already begun to receive fingerprint data from Loudeye, and is constanty adding the data to its filtering efforts.

The hacker magazine 2600 and major movie studios filed their answers last week to a federal appeals court. The court has been asked whether or not computer code is covered by the First Amendment's right of free speech.

Last August a district court ruled that 2600 could not distribute or link to the source code or the compiled program file of DeCSS, the infamous DVD decrypter. Now judges will determine if the injunction was too harsh or even legitimate. Should they decide that computer code is covered by the First Amendment, it would also mean that a part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is unconstitutional.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group representing Eric Corley, publisher of the 2600 magazine, argued in its answers that DeCSS has to be concidered speech because it expreses ideas, and can be read by a trained person just like any other language.

The movie studios in turn argue that computer code is just a tool, and DeCSS is a tool whose sole purpose is to illegally remove DVD encryption. Therefore it is not speech, and doesn't carry a message.