News written by Jari Ketola (July, 2002)

Independent recording label Artemis Records said on Monday it would waive fees charged to Internet radio stations provided they play music from their catalog for one year. Artemis Records is home to artists like country-rock singer Steve Earle and heavy metal group Kittie.

The announcement was obviously welcomed by the webcasters whose livelihood has been threatened by the royalty rates set by the Library of Congress in June. Other independent labels will probably follow Artemis' example to waive the fees. What better way to promote your artists than by making the catalog an appealing choise for web radio stations struggling to stay on-line.

Source: Reuters

Well not quite, but almost. Senator Joseph Biden, the head of Foreign Relation commitee, is on a mission to stop the theft of intellectual property. In February he released a report titled "Theft of American Intellectual Property: Fighting Crime Abroad and At Home" in which he describes counterfeit products as a major cause for loss of revenue for American software companies.

Shortly after ToAIP:FCAaAH (sounds like someone falling, doesn't it? "FCAaAH...!") was released, Biden introduced a bill titled "Anticounterfeiting Amendments of 2002". Originally the bill targeted physical counterfeiting, such as fake holograms and packages, but was later rewritten to cover digital rights management technologies as well.

In essence what the bill means is that it would be illegal to fake a DRM watermark and distributing the product, e.g. a song, with the fake watermark. Now why would anyone want to fake a watermark? There are several projects around, such as Microsoft's Palladium that will, eventually, embed operating systems, computers, and all sorts of gadgets with DRM modules -- whether you like it or not. Now if you have a perfectly legitimate MP3 of your own making, you wouldn't be able to listen to it with these devices, or operating systems, equipped with a DRM scheme of some sort. If there's a software available that would allow you to create a valid, but fake watermark for the song, it would be illegal to use it. The bill would make this type of action a federal felony, and you could end up in prison for the next five years after first scooping up up to $25,000 in civil penalties per offence.

The hacker magazine 2600 will withdraw it's appeal to the Supreme Court since they see the chances of them winning the right to post the DeCSS code were rather slim. They see they have made their point and cannot take the case any farther.

2600 was sued by eight motion picture studios in December 1999 for publishing the source code of the DeCSS software and linking to other sites providing DeCSS downloads.

DeCSS is a tool developed by Norwegian Jon Johansen for viewing DVD movies with unofficial players. DeCSS has enabled computer users to view their DVD movies on alternative platforms, such as Linux, on which licensed, commercial DVD software is not available. On the other hand DeCSS also allowed users to decrypt and copy the content of DVD-Video discs on their computer hard drives for further processing.

DeCSS did not, actually, break the DVD encryption. Rather it relied on using a decryption key from a well known DVD-player software. The DVD license dictates that this key should always be encrypted. However in this case, it was not. The key has since been labeled "untrusted" and most DVD movies cannot be viewed with the old DeCSS.

After suing the centralized song-swapping services such as Napster, rather successfully might I add, the music companies are now preparing an attack on the users of peer-to-peer sharing networks.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is planning on filing copyright lawsuits against the people sharing the most songs on song swapping services, such as KaZaA. The lawsuits would be a part of a larger scale campaign, which would include a public campaign encouraging music fans to respect the copyright laws.

So far the entertainment industry has avoided suing individuals -- mostly because of the negative publicity associated with giant corporations suing individual Internet users.

At the time of writing this there was over two million users on the KaZaA network. Finding and identifying the biggest filesharers from this haystack might prove out to be a bit more laborious than RIAA expects.

Source:
The Wall Street Journal