News written by Jari Ketola (October, 2004)

The rivalry between the competing high definition formats, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is about to get the first major turn as three Hollywood studios are expected to announce their support for the NEC & Toshiba backed HD-DVD format. Warner Bros, Universal and Paramount are expected to announce their plans to adopt HD-DVD format by the end of 2005 in the near future.

When ever the announcement is made, the deal will most likely not be exclusive -- i.e. the studios will keep the option to support Sony's Blu-Ray format as well. There are also still many aspects that the studios want to be cleared before any movies are released in HD format. One of the most pressing matters is the implementation of adequate DRM protection. In Hollywood terms adequate is probably equal to unbreakable.

Source: BusinessWeek

What better way to celebrate the holiday season than by littering your neighborhood with disposable DVDs! At least that's what Atlanta company Convex Group seems to have in mind. They will be releasing a low-budget movie Noel simultaneously on disposable DVD and in cinema,

The 48-hour self-destructing FlexPlay DVDs will be available at Amazon.com on November 17th at $4.99.

FlexPlay, which was bought by Convex in September, has provided it's EZ-D technology to other companies as well, such as Walt Disney, Co., who has run limited trials on FlexPlay discs for over a year now.

While Disney's trials have been a sort of a substitute for rentals, Convex has a different approach. The movie, Noel, is a low-budget film that will open in only 10 cities around the US. Those who want to see the movie, but can't find it in their city, can purchase the movie from Amazon on a FlexPlay disc, and watch it at home. If they like it, they may even buy the fully featured DVD once it's released.

Two UK members of the DrinkOrDie piracy group have denied charges of conspiracy to defraud. DrinkOrDie was one of the groups that were busted in the major anti-piracy raid in 2001. Steven Dowd, 39, and Alex Bell, 29, are both alleged to be part of DoD.

Prosecutor Bruce Houlder said that both men were a part of international conspiracy that involved cracking protection expensive software which allowed the products to be made available for download on the Internet."They do not do what they do for money. They do it for street wise credibility. They may see themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but in reality it is a cover for fraud. Computers are their universe. They live and breathe a world of computer software," Houlder said.

Last month Australian officials decided that an Australian member of DoD will be extradited to the United States to be tried there. The man, Hew Raymond Griffiths is accused of being the ring leader of DoD.

Source: BBC News

The owner and webmaster of MP3s4free.net, Stephen Cooper, faces a lawsuit of AU$500m ($364m) from the world's record companies. The site, which the ex-policeman ran since 1998 until he was raided in October 2003, provided links to MP3 files hosted on various servers around the Internet.

Cooper says that he never thought that there was anything illegal about the site, and ran it merely as a hobby. Some claim that he made up to AU$65,000 ($37,400) a month from the site, but Cooper denies such allegations. "There are no millions of dollars stashed away anywhere, no secret garages full of Porsches and Ferraris," he said. He also stated that he thinks that the whole lawsuit is ridiculous, and he can't afford the legal fees to fight the case in the Federal Court.

In addition to suing Cooper, the recording industry has also sued Comcen, the ISP hosting MP3s4free.net while it was still online.

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) fails to see the ridiculous aspects of their $500m claims. They are seeking full damages -- regardless of whether Cooper and ComCen are capable of paying for them. But more importantly, they are trying to seek a ruling that criminalize even linking to pirated content.

Robbie Williams' new Greatest Hits album will be released not only on audio CD, but on flash memory card as well. EMI Music UK and The Carphone Warehouse have signed a deal that will make the album the first ever to be released on Multi Media Card (MMC).

Little technical specifications is available on the format used to store the songs, but the card will include the entire album in "quality comparable to that of a CD" plus some video content. Priced at £29.99 the card will be available at 600 Carphone Warehouse stores across the UK from November.

The product is apparently aimed at mobile phone and PDA users, but I personally see little market for this type of a physical media for storing music. I would much rather use my existing MMC/SD/CF/whatever card to store the music I want, and purchase the songs some other way. Of course there is no way of purchasing songs from the DRM crippled online music stores for playback on a "third party" mobile device -- such as my mobile phone or my iPAQ PDA.

Sources:
Press release
BBC

After the recent raid in Iceland, the local branch of MPA, SMAIS, has made various statements that are either highly exaggerated or completely false. They have, for instance, stated that: "[On this 100 person Direct Connect hub] we estimate our loss to be around $4,5 million."

Hagstofan, the national statistical institute of Iceland, has gathered detailed consumer statistics for years, and their records show that while the cinema attendance and video rentals decreased slightly, the sale of both VHS and DVD movies has grown. In addition there was a record breaking increase in the sales of domestic CDs.

The Hagstofan specialist states that "Downloads on the Internet don't have a noticeable effect on the sales or attendance," and that "Those that claim that decrease is due to Internet downloading, should do so very carefully."

There is growing concern in Iceland about the legal issues surrounding the raid. It's uncertain if the police had the right to execute surveillance and wiretapping for two years, and if the measures taken in general were excessive.

Hollywood movie studios and record companies have asked the United States Supreme Court to overturn an earlier ruling which found file sharing companies not liable for copyright infringements carried out by using their software.

Both MPAA and RIAA signed the petition in which they said that if the ruling remains, the value of copyrighted work will be badly undermined.

"This is one of the most important copyright cases ever to reach this court," the groups said in papers filed with the court. "Resolution of the question presented here will largely determine the value, indeed the very significance, of copyright in the digital era."

Centralized P2P services, such as Napster, have been forced to shut down by the recording industry before, but in August a federal appeals court upheld a ruling from April 2003 stated that Grokster Ltd, Streamcast Networks Inc (Morpheus). and Sharman Networks Ltd (Kazaa) are fundamentally different from, for example, Napster. By manufacturing a software that enables people to exchange files doesn't make them liable for the copyright infringements carried out by the users.

One of our servers has suffered a harddisk failure, and will be taken down for repairs. The maintenance may affect the site and cause pages to load slowly -- or not at all.

The disk in question holds the primary mirror for software and MP3 downloads. Those downloads may cause errors depending on the state of your DNS server. Taking the server down can also affect the loading of images if your DNS server hasn't updated yet.

We are very sorry about the inconvenience, and hope to restore normal operations as soon as possible.

-Jari Ketola
CTO, AfterDawn.com