News written by Jari Ketola (January, 2004)

According to a report by market research firm iSuppli, the Chinese Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) will be facing quite a few obstacles before turning into a high definition format to be reckon with.

Competing HD formats, such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, are about to enter the market -- both of which will probably prove to be worthy players in the field. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are both backed by consumer electronics giants while EVD has no such backing. Then again EVD can easily survive on domestic markets alone.

Another problem EVD will face is obtaining a subtantial catalog of movies to offer to the markets. It's quite difficult selling players to a market with little content. It is also uncertain whether or not EVD players will support HD-TV output. A high definition format without HD output would be quite silly.

Source: News.com

Jon Lech Johansen who was acquitted of all charges twice by Norwegian courts is now looking for compensation from the economic crime unit of Norwegian police, Økokrim. For his four year endeavour with the lawsuit, Johansen is asking a compensation of almost NOK 150,000 ($21,800).

The implications of the case must have been huge on Johansen's life and future, so the demands are absolutely reasonable. Økokrim has not yet commented on the demands.

Source: Aftenposten

Sharman Networks, the company behind Kazaa P2P software, and Altnet can go ahead suing US entertainment industry, after Judge Stephen Wilson refused to dismiss Sharman's antitrust claims. Last summer Judge Wilsom dismissed Sharman's antitrust claims.

In his ruling, Judge Wilson acknowledged that Sharman Networks has every right to pursue its claims that the record label and motion picture plaintiffs in the lawsuit have infringed Sharman's copyrights. Unlike the plaintiffs' claims that third parties are infringing their copyrights, the court has ruled that Sharman may pursue its claim that these plaintiffs directly and through their agents infringed Sharman's copyrights. In addition, Sharman Networks can now also pursue its claims that the industry plaintiffs breached the End User License Agreement (EULA) for the Kazaa software by:

• Using the Kazaa software to transmit and download spoofed or corrupted files.
  
• Violating state and federal personal privacy laws and the rights of individual computer users by hacking and exploring files located on their computers.
  
• Using the Kazaa Software's instant messenger functionality to send threatening messages to other users of Kazaa software.

We have just finished updating our DVD Shrink guide to match the current development stage. No major changes have been made, but the text and screenshots correspond to what you see in version 3.1.

You can read the entire guide at:

https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd9_to_dvdr_with_dvd_shrink.cfm

Comments and feedback are always welcome! If you wish to help us out, and provide us with a guide, you can use our guide submission tool to do that! Everyone who submits a guide that gets posted on our site will receive an amazingly cool AfterDawn T-shirt absolutely free!

Service provider America Online and video-on-demand service Movielink have teamed up, and are promoting a "Winter Movie Special", a five week program that lets AOL for Broadband members exclusively download and rent some of the year's biggest movie titles for as little as 99 cents or less for each title.

Among the special priced items are movies like Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The movies are offered to AOL Broadband Members at 80 percent off the regular prices, $3.95 to $4.99, which means that the prices will fall between 79 and 99 cents.

The downloadable Movielink movies can be stored on hard disk for 30 days. After the movie is first viewed, it can be watched as many times as wanted during a 24-hour period.

Source: Press release

The DVD Copy Control Association has unexpectedly asked California Supreme Court to dismiss the case against Andrew Bunner. Bunner was sued by DVD-CCA for distributing the source code to DeCSS on his website.

DeCSS, the software that decrypts scrambled DVDs, has been in the headlines for well over four years now. Hackers were able to create DeCSS thanks to the fact that Xing Technology Corporation neglected to encrypt the CSS decryption key in their DVD player software. DeCSS opened a whole can of worms, and some of the lawsuits that emerged have drawn to a close only very recently (see related articles below).

Bunner's attorneys were obviously pleased by the surprising decision.

"I think that they are sick of losing," said Allonn Levy, one of several attorneys who had worked on the case on Bunner's behalf. "I think they have finally reached the conclusion that it is not a fight that they can win."

The case against Bunner was the last major DeCSS-related lawsuit still unsettled. The case against DeCSS author Jon Lech Johansen ended in January, when the Economic Crime Unit of the Norwegian police decided to drop the case.

Online retailer CD Wow has settled with the British Phonographic Institute (BPI) to stop importing cheap Audio CDs from Asia. The company was able to offer cheaper CDs to its customers thanks to price differences between different regions -- CDs cost significantly less in Asia than in Western Europe.

Until now CD Wow has charged £8.99 for CDs, but the prices will be increased by £2. There's little doubt that this will hurt the company's sales quite severely.

In essence music labels are enforcing a policy similar to DVD region coding -- Europeans are willing to pay more for CDs than Asian consumers, so they are charged more. By using restrictive distribution contracts, record labels have managed to keep cheap imports from appearing in stores.

Source: The Register

Even though the sales figures of On Demand Distribution, or OD2 are nowhere near those of iTunes and likes, a sales record of three million sold song downloads for 2003 is nothing to be ashamed of.

OD2's concept is different from those of its American counterparts, since it is only licensing its technology to third parties, who promote and sell the content on their pages. OD2 currently has 30 retail partners in Europe, including HMV and MSN.

European digital music market will change radically in 2004 as both Apple iTunes and Roxio Napster2 are expected to launch services in Europe by summer.

Source: News.com

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has confirmed that it is investigating the case of DVD screener copies sent to Academy Award members being leaked and pirated.

Four films, "Something's Gotta Give," "The Last Samurai," "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" and "thirteen" are being looked into. According to studio sources the leaked movies have been traced to actor Carmine Caridi. Caridi is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the institution that hands out the Oscar awards.

FBI has only confirmed that they are looking into the case, but has not disclosed further details.

MPAA has wanted to ban screeners altogether, but later agreed to lift the ban on Oscar screeners, but maintained the ban on other awards. After being sued over the ban, a federal court ruled in December that MPAA cannot stop its members from distributing screener copies. Later MPAA announced it would appeal the ruling.

After an appeals court ruled that RIAA cannot get subscriber details from internet service providers without filing a lawsuit first, RIAA has been forced to look alternative means to fight piracy.

The organization has contacted ISPs asking them to issue warnings to users who are engaged in infringing activity. The service providers would not have to hand out subscriber details to RIAA -- just send a warning email to the subscriber using an IP address that RIAA provides.

"Specifically, when we determine the IP address of an infringer, we would like to send you the IP address along with a Notice of Infringement that you would forward directly to the subscriber matching that address," the RIAA wrote. "You would not identify the subscriber to us. However, we believe if you forward the Notice to them it will dramatically increase awareness and effectively discourage continued infringement."

It seems, however, that RIAA doesn't have too many friends among the ISPs, since not a single ISP has replied to RIAA's proposal. That is not to say that the ISPs will not respond, but obviously they are interested in exploring other alternatives as well.

Music publishers and songwriters have begun demanding double royalty payments for copy protected music CDs, that contain the audio tracks in two formats -- in crippled pseudo Audio-CD format and in compressed digital format. The reasoning behind the demands is quite simple -- since two copies of the song are being sold, the royalty payments should also be made for two copies.

"From a legal standpoint, the position of the music publishers is that these discs contain two separate (copies of each song)," said Cary Ramos, an attorney representing the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA). "The fact that they are the same recording doesn't mean that we should treat it as one."

NMPA is making a valid point, since even by RIAA's standards, an Audio CD and a digital MP3/WMA file are two separate products, even if the consumer owns the Audio CD in question. RIAA argued and pursued this point years ago in, for instance, the My.MP3.com case.

New digital distribution channels could mean greater revenue shares for recording artists, but they will have to make their case early, and make it strong.

Source: News.com

A spin off company from Vivendi called TruSonic has acquired the 1.5 million song MP3.com music archive. However the music will not be made available to the general public.

TruSonic sells piped music to hotels, restaurants and other businesses. The 1.5 million MP3.com song archive is available only to the customers of TruSonic.

MP3.com has been a piece on the board of Internet music game for quite some time now. After being acquired by Vivendi Universal, the My.MP3.com service was used as a platform for PressPlay music store. It was the My.MP3.com service that run MP3.com into trouble in the first place, since RIAA decided to sue MP3.com over the Beam-IT service at My.MP3.com. Using Beam-IT MP3.com users were able to access their CDs online without actually encoding them to MP3 format and transferring them to the service.

After Roxio acquired the assets of both Napster and Pressplay, along with MP3.com back end technology, there was little interest for Vivendi to maintain the service. In November, 2003 Vivendi sold MP3.com domain name to CNET Networks. On December 2nd, 2003 MP3.com ceased to exist.

Consumer electronics giant Sony Electronics has announced that it will be opening an online music service in United States during the spring 2004. The specifications of the service sound quite familiar -- half a million songs at 99 cents per song, $9.99 per album.

The Connect online service will at first work only with Sony portable devices, such as the Mini Disc player. The songs will be available in Sony's ATRAC3 format. Support for devices by other manufacturers will be introduced later on.

In addition to Connect, Sony also unveiled a new high-capacity Mini Disc player Hi-MD Walkman. The Hi-MD discs allow a capacity of up to 45 hours per disc. Sony also plans to introduce several products with "combined functionality". For example a home theatre system connected to the Connect -service.

"Our role is to create new and exciting markets and whereas other companies are playing up the commoditization of products and driving cost, we think there are new ways to create entertainment experiences," said Tim Baxter, head of home entertainment products for Sony Electronics USA.

Source: Reuters

According to a survey by Pew Internet and American Life Project the number of Americans downloading music over the internet has dropped by over 50 per cent in six months. In May, 2003 29 per cent of Americans were downloading music from the net. In December, the number had dropped to 14 per cent.

"We have never seen another internet activity drop off to this degree," said Lee Rainie, director of Pew. "The drop-off was just striking, particularly since overall internet activity goes up and up."

Of course the truth is that the number of people who lie has increased by 50 per cent. No one in their right mind would admit to downloading music with RIAA pointing a shotgun at everyone whistling a top ten tune.

Source:
Financial Times

The Economic Crime Unit of the Norwegian police, Økokrim confirmed Monday that it will not appeal the recent ruling in favor of Jon Lech Johansen.

Økokrim, backed by MPAA, has been after Johansen for years, seeking a ruling that would convict him of copyright infringement. According to Økokrim and MPAA DeCSS software, which Johansen helped to develop, made it possible to pirate DVD movies. However they failed twice to convince the Norwegian courts who ruled that Johansen cannot be held responsible for the possible illegal applications of DeCSS.

While the decision to drop the case was not expected, it wasn't all that surprising either. After failing to change the ruling in appeals court, it was highly unlikely that Økokrim would be able to come up with new evidence or arguments against Johansen.

Source:
Aftenposten

AfterDawn.com, forums.AfterDawn.com, and cd-rw.org have been relocated on our new server cluster. You should see the change as a considerable decrease in the loading time of the pages. Also the database related problems that have haunted us since the launch of v3 should now be gone.

Other domains, including DVD X Copy discussion forums, our Finnish site, MP3Lizard.com, Dawnload.net etc. will be moved later on.

In the process of relocating our servers we did much more than just move them to another ISP -- most of the backend structure of the site has been renewed. We're currently using five P4-2.8GHz servers to run the site. Actually right now we are occupying servers on three ISPs, and using a total of ten separate machines to power various parts of our sites. But by the time we are finished relocating our domains, everything will run on the five P4 servers.

Glitches and small problems are, of course, possible, and even probable. Please bear with us while we iron out the bugs! If you do spot a problem, we would be glad if you could notify us via our feedback form.

Petteri Pyyny & Jari Ketola
AfterDawn.com

Happy new year from the AfterDawn.com staff! What better way to start the year than by announcing the winners from our v3 launch draw.

Without further ado, here are the winners: Eza, hoppers, j2huggar, rosedog, Greengo1, OAKside24, Idis, cdcoaster, angus1953, and Sam42. Congratulations everyone!

All winners have been contacted via email with further details on how to receive the shirt. If you see your name up there but haven't received the email, we don't have your correct email address on file. In that case, please check your details, and then send me a private message.

If you didn't win this time, don't worry. You will definitely get a chance to win something atleast almost as cool as an AfterDawn.com T-shirt!

Again, have a good 2004 everyone!