News written by Jari Ketola (September, 2003)

RIAA announced that it has so far settled 52 of the 261 lawsuits filed against P2P file sharers earlier this month. The exact settlement amounts were not specified, but experts estimate payments ranging from $2,500 to $7,500 each, which would add up to $250,000.

"The music community's efforts have triggered a national conversation, especially between parents and kids, about what's legal and illegal when it comes to music on the Internet," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "In the end it will be decided not in the courtrooms, but at kitchen tables across the country."

A dozen P2P users who might have been sued by RIAA have also agreed to pay settlements to avoid a lawsuit.

Hundreds of more lawsuits are planned for October by RIAA.

Source:
San Mateo County Times

RIAA has dismissed a lawsuit it had filed against Sarah Ward, a 65-year-old grandmother. Mrs. Ward was charged with downloading and sharing rock and hip-hop music using Kazaa.

The problem was that she listens to classical music and uses a Macintosh, for which there is no official Kazaa client available. There are, of course, several alternative clients available, such as giFT.

"The Sarah Ward case demonstrates the reckless, frightening nature of the recording industry's campaign against ordinary Americans," said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legal director Cindy Cohn.

"These record labels violated her privacy, sued her for potentially millions of dollars, and forced her to hire a defense lawyer before finally recognizing that they had no case against her."

RIAA stated that the lawsuit was withdrawn as a gesture of good faith.

Source:
Internet Magazine

Sharman Networks, the makers of the file sharing application Kazaa, have sued RIAA for copyright infrigement. RIAA is distributing versions of Kazaa Lite with embedded warning messages to potential infringers.

Sharman feels that RIAA has no right to mangle its software and calls the RIAA's actions "monopolistic and cospiratorial". Quite rightly so. Then again, who would? I'm sure Jasc wouldn't like it if someone started spreading a copy of Paint Shop Pro with "It's illegal to print pictures you don't have rights to" -warnings.

Source:
The Register

Audio technology company Dolby Laboratories has purchased the digital rights management company Cinea. Cinea consists of many of the engineers behind the Divx pay-per view DVDs sold by Circuit City in the late 90's.

Cinea is currently developing content-protection technology for digital movie theatres to prevent people from making cam copies of movies. The technology would be invisible to the naked eye, but introduce distortion on the video captured by a video camera.

Digital content delivery would give the movie studios much more control over the distribution of the movies than current film copies do. They could, for example, digitally limit the number of screenings per copy. Movie theatres haven't been too keen to switch to digital projection technology, which is alot more expensive than traditional film projectors. The projected life-span of a digital projector is also much shorter than that of a film projector.

Source:
News.com

We have just finished a small and quick review on DVD-lab, an inexpensive yet fully featured DVD authoring software.

The combination of digital video cameras and inexpensive recordable DVD drives has led to a growing demand for DVD authoring software. The majority of the software available on the market is based on wizard interfaces offering little, if any, room for customization. Even though intended and priced for home use, DVD-lab offers features and flexibility that have only been available in professional DVD authoring software.

Feedback on the article, as well as the software is more than welcome! Please note that the article isn't intended to be a tutorial -- just a glimpse at some of the main features of the software.

The street advertisement campaign for the Napster 2.0 music store has gained both praise and criticism from advertising profesionals. The campaign, running in six U.S. cities, consists of realistic posters defaced with stickers of the well known Napster kitty logo. The impression is very realistic indeed.

Lucian James, a San Francisco marketer, isn't a big fan of the campaign. "Telling people something is cool, or trying to appropriate cool things like graffiti, is usually the best way to kill something with cool potential," James said.

Co-founder of street art organization Wooster Collective, Mark Schiller, on the other hand considers the campaign very well executed. "In my personal opinion, Napster's is probably the best one (sniping campaign) even though it isn't the first," Schiller said. "If this is going to be the trend, then Napster's done a much better job than others who have tried this."

For photos of the campaign, click the link below.

Source:
Wired News

Even though universities have had strict anti-piracy policies for ages, the recent RIAA lawsuits have forced universities to remind their students about the illegal nature of file-sharing.

One of these universities is UCLA, where piracy is handled at zero tolerance. However the university doesn't monitor the network traffic in any way, so the initiative for removing copyrighted material from the university network has to come from the likes of RIAA and MPAA.

When UCLA is notified, it provides a first notification to the offender, asking that person to stop. However, if that person is performing "massive" amounts of copying, subpoenas may be issued and that person may be subject to external law enforcement.

UCLA has informed their students about copyright issues via email, as well as univeristy newsletter and TV-channel last year. The same process will be repeated in the beginning of October. Many students had been looking forward to using the fast university Internet connections to download content, but have to re-think whether or not to risk it.

"It kind of sucks because I don't have a fast (Internet) connection at home and I was planning on downloading here," said first-year biology student Jennifer Tran. "But then all the lawsuit stuff happened over summer."

Australian independent record laebl 301 Records, and Sharman Networks, the makers of peer-to-peer file sharing software Kazaa Media Desktop, announced a digital promotion deal on Wednesday. With the deal 301 Records promotes one of their bands through Kazaa.

The content from the band, The Honey Palace will be made available for purchase through Sharman's affiliate partner Altnet. Kazaa users can sample the video and audio content through Kazaa Media Desktop, and purchase songs for just US25 cents per track.

Altnet offers a secure way to offer content via a P2P network. The Altnet files appear as gold icon files in the Kazaa Media Desktop search results and can be easily purchased using Altnet's seamless payment gateway.

Michael Browning, Managing Director of 301 Records, said: "We're always looking for innovative ways to launch artists into both local and international markets. Peer to peer technology provides artists and distributors with a low cost, high impact way of reaching millions of global music fans."

Source:
301 Records Press Release

Peer-to-peer company Grokster has filed a reponse to the appeal made by RIAA looking to overturn the earlier ruling, which found Grokster, as a software, legal.

In the ruling Judge Wilson compared Grokster to a video recorder. Both have illegal uses, but also substantial legitimate uses as well. The manufacturer of the product cannot be held liable for possible illegal uses.

Grokster president Wayne Rosso feels that instead of pursuing their rights through courts, RIAA should instead focus on licensing legitimate content to P2P users. "Five bucks a month from each of 60 million file sharers beats the hell out of filing a federal case to get $2,000 from a 12 year-old girl" Mr. Rosso was quoted commenting.

Source:
vnunet

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is taking the RIAA vs. Verizon case back to court to hear Verizon's appeal on the ruling, which opened to P2P subpoena floodgates earlier this year. RIAA used the turbocharged subpoena procedure of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to force Verizon to hand out details of a suspected P2P user.

Regular subpoenas require a claim of a crime, whereas DMCA subpoena can be issued by a court clerk, as long as the subpoena form is filled out properly.

Many interpret the DMCA law to apply only to material physically stored on ISPs servers and not the actions of their modem, DSL or cable subscribers.

A panel of three judges is taking a look at the case, and examining the minutiae of the DMCA to figure out what the Congress' intentions where when issuing the law. They will also try to decide whether permitting subpoenas when no lawsuit has been filed, agrees with the U.S. Constitution. So far the panel has not commented on Verizon's arguments about DMCA subpoenas endangering privacy and free speech.

Source:
News.com

A British court has sentenced Richard Durose to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to selling pirated music. His wife, who also pleaded guilty, was sentenced to nine months in prison, suspended for two years. They will also have to pay the court costs of £14,000.

The couple had been manufacturing pirated CD-R copies of albums in MP3 format, and selling them by mail order and at computer fairs. They had been selling up to 2,000 CDs a month before they were caught and sentenced.

Source:
Music Industry News Network

The guys at VCDQuality have noticed that strange markings have started to appear on some recent movies. The dots are most likely used by MPAA to track the source of illegal movie copies spread on the Internet.

Many of the first copies of movies appearing on the Net are so called "cam" copies, which are shot using a camcorder in a movie theatre. By inserting unique identifying tags to a couple of frames in a movie, the copyright holders can narrow down the origin of the pirated copy, and possibyly even track down the offender.

Removing the markings is possible, but laborious. I'd bet MPAA has other methods for identifying the copies as well. It remains to be seen if MPAA will be engaging in a high profile pirate hunt similar to RIAA's.

Links:
An example frame with the markings (T shaped dots)
More information at VCDQuality.com

Several colleges in the United States will be featuring freshman orientation programs that educate about their P2P policies. The recent RIAA lawsuits have most likely been the greatest motivation in the decision.

Orientations will be held at several universities, including American University in Washington, D.C., and many University of California campuses. Students at University of Denver, University of Rochester and serveral others will be instructed via e-posted campus P2P policies.

Will the recent lawsuits and education of the policies be enough to stop the students from sharing and prevent further subpoenas addressed to colleges? Probably not.

Source:
EURWeb

"This Is Not a Love Song", a movie from the film writer Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty") was, at least according to UK Film Council, the first ever "major" movie to premiere on the Internet when it began screening on Friday.

However the huge media attention received by the movie caused the download website at ThisIsNotaLoveSong.com to overload, and the downloads have temporarily been suspended. It should be available to the public again in a couple of days.

The movie costs £2-3 (pounds sterling), and can only be downloaded and viewed on a PC equiped with Windows operating system and Windows Media Player 9. It is also only available to UK residents.

Source:
Reuters

Sony has introduced CoCoon CSV-EX11, a 500GB hard disk Digital Video Recorder in Japan. At lowest quality the DVR can record up to 342 hours (or two weeks) of video non-stop. The recording time reaches 114 hours even at the highest quality mode.

Recorded video can be transfered via ethernet to a Sony Vaio computer running Sony's "Click to DVD" software. The video can then be edited further, and burned on DVD. Other computer models are not supported for the transfer, and also the "Click to DVD" software is required.

The Linux-based CoCoon CSV-EX11 will be available with two 250GB drives, or with just a single 250GB drive. The units will be priced at $1380 and $1035 respectively. Unfortunately Sony still doesn't plan to sell CoCoon outside of Japan.

Source:
PCWorld.com
CoCoon CSV-EX11 specifications (in Japanese, Babel Fish English translation)

A study by market research firm Forrester Research suggest that immaterial distribution channels, such as iTunes, will completely replace any physical media.

According to the study already 20 percent of Americans download music in some form or another. Fifty percent of those say to be buying less CDs. The report estimates that in five years third of music sales revenue will come from download services. Almost 15 percent of movie rental business is estimated to be in on-demand online services.

The key to success is flexibility. Offering the consumers services without too many limitations is a sure key to success.

Source:
CNET News

The DVD+RW Alliance has officially announced the specifications for 8X DVD+R. Unlike 4X DVD+R, 8X DVD+R is burned at variable speed starting from 6X at the inside and finishing at 8X on the outer track. This leads to a total burning time of around 10 minutes for a full 4.37GB disc.

Also today NEC announced an upcoming ND-2300A DVD -burner supporting both 8X DVD+R and 8X DVD-R recording. The drive will be available by Christmas.

Several manufacturers have already announced 8X certified media.

Source:
CDR-Info