News written by Jari Ketola (July, 2003)

Some parties still don't accept the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) methods in tracking down Internet pirates. Internet service provider SBC Communications has filed a complaint in a U.S. district court saying that many of the RIAA subpoenas have been done improperly.

Like Verizon earlier, SBC also fears that the turbo charged DMCA subpoena process might be unconstitutional. "Misapplication of DMCA subpoena power raises serious constitutional questions that need to be decided by the courts, not by private companies which operate without duty of due diligence or judicial oversight," a spokesperson for SBC said.

RIAA has also grouped demands for information of multiple file-sharers under one subpoena.

RIAA's methods have also been put under scrutiny by sen. Norm Coleman on Thursday. He has begun an inquiry into the lawsuits, saying the tactics used by RIAA might ensnare innocent people.

While Coleman understands the concerns of the music industry, he feels that the ends don't always justify the means. "The industry seems to have adopted a 'shotgun' approach that could potentially cause injury and harm to innocent people who may have simply been victims of circumstance, or possessing a lack of knowledge of the rules related to digital sharing of files," Coleman said.

The implementation of EUCD will have staggering consequences to Swedish computer users. Not only will it limit the consumers' rights to make copies of CDs and DVDs for personal use, but it will also criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing.

The Swedish government is proposing a law which would require the permission from the copyright owner before any music, video, photo or text material can be spread on the net. P2P software, such as Kazaa will be outright outlawed, as will software intended for bypassing copy protection on movies and audio CDs.

Also the right to make personal copies will be further limited, but it will still be legal to make copies for personal use.

According to the minister of justice Thomas Bodström the new legislation doesn't radically change the current attitude towards copyrights.

"The new law has not been tailored to satisfy the needs of large record companies. Essentially it retains the earlier views on copyrights. As technology develops, the legislation must also be kept up to date," Bodström commented.

Distributing or downloading illegal copies on P2P networks can lead to a sentence of up to two years in prison. Usually only those sharing illegal files have been made liable in court. The Swedish law will also prohibit downloading.

Despite the increasing popularity of legal music download services, such as iTunes, the online sales won't make up for the losses generated by piracy, according to a study by Jupiter Media.

The research firm estimates online music sales will be $800M this year in the United States. Earlier estimates of $5.1B revenues by 2007 have now been reduced to $3.3B by 2008.

"The industry is suffering from competition for entertainment dollars, changing demographics, the end of the CD upgrade cycle and piracy" said Lee Black, analyst for Jupiter Research.

According to the research, digital sales will account for 7% of the US market this year.

Source:
Guardian

The desktop PC and home entertainment system are seldom located next to each other, or even in the same room. Yet it would be nice to deliver PC content, such as pictures or music, to the living room. Wireless-B Media Adapter from Linksys sheds some light on what the future might bring.

The adapter connects to the TV and amplifier with standard S-video connector and RCA connectors composite video, and stereo audio. It's powered by Intel XScale PXA250 processor, which is widely used on modern PDAs, and supports common picture formats and playing back digital music files. The connection to the desktop PC is made using either Wi-Fi or standard wired Ethernet. All the content is displayed by accessing simple menus on the TV screen using a remote control.

As the processing power of mobile processors increases, we're bound to see a device with enough torque to compress an MPEG video in real time.

Source:
The Register

The once famous peer-to-peer service Napster will return -- but only as a brand.

Roxio, which bought the rights to Napster's name last November, will lauch Napster 2.0 online music store by the end of the year. According to the company, the service will feature half-a-million songs, personalized internet radio, artist interviews, and exclusive tracks from indie-labels. They are also negotiating with record labels to provide more liberal downloads allowing the tracks to be burned on CDs and played on other devices.

The service will probably be based on the technology from Pressplay, which was purchased by Roxio in May. Napster 2.0 will face tough competition from Aplle's iTunes, Buy.com's BuyMusic, and others.

Source:
Guardian

Obviously embarrassed by the numerous successfull hacking attacks made against their website, RIAA has recently upgraded their Web servers to stop it from happening again.

According to Netcraft RIAA first upgraded to Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0 in June, then quickly masked the operating system to "unknown", and finally, earlier this week, changed their Web server to "TST-SECURE-OS", which The Register suspects is just a modified IIS 6.0.

It'll be interesting to see how long RIAA manages to keep hackers away this time. It has, after all, been a school holiday season.

Source:
The Register

German court decided on Friday to postpone the lawsuit against the record label Bertelsmann. The decision was made because the Federal Constitutional Court was worried the lawsuit might violate Bertelsmann's constitutional rights in Germany.

"If lawsuits in (foreign) courts are obviously misused to bend a market player to one's will by way of media pressure and the risk of a court order, this could violate the German constitution," the court said in a statement late on Friday.

Bertelsmann was sued by major music labels for $17 billion for funding Napster's operation in 2000 and 2001. According to the lawsuit Bertelsmann kept Napster running by investing more than $100 million in the company, and hence prolonged it's existence.

The tempoary ruling will be upheld untill the court can review the case more closely and determine whether or not constitutional rights are in fact in jeopardy. The decision means only that the lawsuit could possibly not be delivered in Germany. Bertelsmann has also been sued in the US.

Source:
Reuters

A new bill introduced Thursday would introduce parental discretion to peer-to-peer networks by requiring the services to get parental permission for minors before letting them use the services.

The Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act, or P4 bill would require Federal Trade Commission to requlate the P2P networks to make sure minors aren't accidentally coming across porn. The bill is rather vague, and suggests the use of technologies that haven't even been developed. In any case, the bill would mean more work for the companies behind peer-to-peer networks.

Source:
CNET News.com

RIAA has tasted the sweet nectar of suing individuals and found it so good they just can't get enough. When earlier it took a considerable amount of shared music to trigger a RIAA subpoena, it now takes merely a handful of songs to get the ball rolling. This way the number of subpoena requests will increase from 75 per week to 300 per week.

The ISP's receiving the most subpoena requests are: Comcast Cable (formerly AT&T Broadband), Road Runner, Verizon Communications, Earthlink, and AOL.

It is also worth mentioning that using an IP blocking software (eg. Peer Guardian) will probably not stop RIAA from finding out the IP address of the offender, because it's unlikely they are doing the scans from any of their known address spaces.

Source:
Zeropaid.com

The last major film-studio without a download-on-demand service, Walt Disney Co., has signed a distribution deal with on-line movie service Movielink.

Movielink, which was founded by Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, MGM, and Sony eight months ago, will have a selection of 400 titles when the Disney titles have been added. Movies such as Chicago, and Gangs of New York will be made available to the consumers.

All the major Hollywood studios now offer on-demand downloads of their movies. Even though 20th Century Fox already has a distribution deal with CinemaNow on-line service, Movielink CEO Jim Ramo would like them to be included with Movielink as well. "We have been and continue to talk with all the other studios and have reason to be hopeful," Ramo said. "We'd like to add everybody."

Source:
Reuters

We are updating our server structure today and tomorrow, so there might be occasional glitches at cd-rw.org, neroplugins.cd-rw.org, and dawnload.net.

Please bear with us. =)

Jari Ketola
CTO, AfterDawn.com

News.com has published an interesting e-mail debate between Ian Clarke, the inventor of Freenet, and Matt Oppenheim, the senior vice president of business and legal affairs at RIAA.

Freenet is a peer-to-peer network utilizing both heavy encryption and decentralized structure, which is, by nature, very difficult to censor or monitor. The debate circles around the question of privacy -- is a user, who knowingly and willingly shares files on the Internet be entitled to maintain anonymity.

When asked about the possibility for a technology to guarantee anonymous online activity for a user Mr. Clarke replies: " It is a cost-benefit decision. One must make the cost of circumventing someone's anonymity significantly higher than the benefit of doing so. Freenet is designed to achieve this in environments such as China and Saudi Arabia and easily achieves this in environments such as the United States."

Mr. Oppenheim refers to the Madster ruling in which the Court of Appeals stated that trying to cover the identity of a copyright infringer by means of technology is the same as engaging directly in copyright infringement. So even though Oppenheim sees that no technology is going to stop them from finding infringers, he doesn't feel it's even an issue.

InterVideo has juiced up their DVD backup software DVD Copy. It is now capable of compressing a DVD-9 on a single DVD-5. With Intervideo's Bitrate Balance Profile the bitrate of the backup follows the original bitrate, so you'll get the highest bitrates in the places it's most needed.

Of course the product still has support for other formats as well, so you can do DVD to DVD, DVD to (S)VCD, DVD to DivX CD or DVD to MPEG-1/2 or DivX on hard drive backups.

More information available on the InterVideo web-site.

Electronic Frontier Foundation has unveiled a campaign named "Let the Music Play" supporting legitimate peer-to-peer file swapping. The campaign is counter-reaction to RIAA's intentions to file lawsuits against people sharing music on peer-to-peer networks.

"Today, more U.S. citizens use file-sharing software than voted for President Bush," Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for EFF commented. "Congress needs to spend less time listening to record industry lobbyists and more time listening to the more than 60 million Americans who use file-sharing software today."

EFF will be running advertisements in major publications calling for more productive means for RIAA and record labels to pursue their intrests.

"Copyright law is out of step with the views of the American public and the reality of music distribution online," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "Rather than trying to sue people into submission, we need to find a better alternative that gets artists paid while making file sharing legal."

Visit the campaign Web site for more information.

Source:
Hollywood Reporter

A U.S. appeals court upheld the injunction against the peer-to-peer service Madster (formely known as Aimster). According to the court not Madster nor it's owner John Deep cannot escape liability simply by claiming that the traffic on the network could not be monitored due to, for example, encryption.

RIAA was pleased by the decision, and sees that it puts the previous decision in the case against Grokster and Morpheus in a new light. In April a motion for summary judgement was denied on the basis that both services have legitimate, non-infringing uses. There's little doubt that RIAA will be using this ruling as an argument when demanding the District Court to re-consider RIAA's motion.

However mr. Deep also concidered the ruling a victory, since it outlined a series of tests the service should meet in order to continue. One of those tests, for instance, was to prove that people use the service for legitimate purposes, like exchanging non-copyrighted music files.