News written by Jari Ketola (May, 2004)

Content-filtering company Audible Magic announced on Friday that they have struck a deal with Sony Music. Sony will provide Audible Magic with digital fingerprints of their music, which will be used to improve Audible Magic's antipiracy technology. The technology identifies and blocks songs transferred online illegally.

Sony will also license Audible Magic's software for internal use. The companies will, in addition, work together on an antipiracy program targeted at universities.

Source: News.com

Nintendo has suggested that they might unveil the successor to the GameCube gaming console in the next year's E3 video game trade show. The release of a new GameCube would not come as a surprise, because both Sony and Microsoft are also expected to unveil their new consoles next year.

The GameCube has not been a huge success, and the sales have been quite disappointing. In the US GameCube makes up only 17% of the market.

The next GameCube will most likely interact closely with the recently announced Nintendo DS dual-screen handheld console. DS, which is equiped with wireless LAN, will start shipping in Japan this Christmas.

"Rather than offering a new edition of the same thing, we want to offer new ways of game playing," said Nintendo's Yoshihiro Mori.

With the recent unveiling of PlayStation Portable, the mobile gaming seems to be truly getting underway. The current mobile gaming market is dominated by Nintendo's GameBoy, which has sold over 190 units wold wide. Mobile phone giant Nokia has tried entering the market with N-Gage and N-Gage QD, but so far the attempt has been a failure. Judging on the technical specifications and technology demos of both Sony PSP and Nintendo DS, Nokia N-Gage will have a tough time making it on the market.

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The U.S. Senate is preparing to vote on a proposal, that could send the government after peer-to-peer pirates. The so called Pirate Act would let federal prosecutors file civil lawsuits against suspected copyright infringers. Up until now the lawsuits have had to be filed by copyright holders under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act law.

Obviously the proposal has raised concerns among copyright lawyers and several peer-to-peer lobbyist groups and companies. They feel that the Pirate Act is a product of RIAA's lobbying, and that its sole purpose is to make the taxpayer pay for the expensive lawsuits instead of the copyright holders. In addition the proposal is vague, and doesn't rule out the possibility that a person sued under the Pirate Act could also be sued under, for example, the DMCA. The possibility is against the ne bis in idem, or the double jeopardy doctrine.

RIAA and senators supporting the act say that federal prosecutors would be suing P2P pirates if they only had the tools, that is an appropriate law, to do so.

"We view this as a key component of an enforcement package," RIAA lobbyist Mitch Glazier said Tuesday. "If you're going to try to make sure that you have effective deterrence, then one of the tools you'll need is to make sure that prosecutors have flexibility."

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Sharman Networks will be using a copyright ruling from 1899 as a leverage when trying to explain the position of the company to the court.

Boosey vs Whight (1899) involved copyright charges arising over the production of pianola rolls, in which the court found that the reproduction of the perforated pianola rolls did not infringe the English copyright act protecting sheets of music.

Lawyers in the 1899 case forged their defence on the argument that "to play an instrument from a sheet of music which appears to the eye is one thing; to play an instrument with a perforated sheet which itself forms part of the mechanism which produces the music is quite another thing."

Sharman is going to present a similar defence in Australia, where they have to defend against accusations made by Universal Music Australia and its affiliates. Sharman will try to convince the court that a copy of a song on computer hard disk is not a copy at all because an "infringing copy has to be a sound recording". The claim is vague at best.

Earlier this year Australian Music Industry Piracy Investigations raided Kazaa offices and confiscated documents and other evicende of alleged copyright violations. Sharman appealed the ruling that granted the search warrant, and insisted that the gathered evidence can not be used against the company. The evicence is currently being held by an independent solicitor. The faith of the evidence will be determined in the ongoing legal procedings. Either Universal or Sharman will be granted access to the evidence.

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The peer-to-peer service turned music store Napster launched its service in the United Kingdom on Thursday. Roxio, the owner of Napster, had earlier announced that the launch would take place by the end of summer.

Songs for the UK consumers are priced at £1.09 ($1.95) each or £9.95 ($17.82) per album. For a monthly subscription fee of £9.95 users can listen to an unlimited number of songs at up to three different PCs. Burning the songs on a CD or transferring them on a portable device, costs £0.99 ($1.77) per song, or £9.95 per album. A ten percent discount is offered to subscribers purchasing multiple tracks simultaneously.

Currently Napster has over 500,000 tracks in its selection. The service also offers, for instane, the Official UK Charts archive organised by genre, year and season.

Napster is offering a free, seven day trial period. You can register for the trial period until May 27th.

Roxio managed to beat Apple's iTunes to the UK market. It would be pretty safe to bet on Apple hastening its entrance to the Old Continent.

Source: NewsFactor

Problems with the AfterDawn.com main server, which also hosts Dawnload.net, CD-RW.org and MP3Lizard.com to name just few, have been solved. The problem caused occasional server software restarts and general sluggish performance.

We're truly sorry about the inconvenience, and hope you find the site more pleasant to use in the future!

Dutch company DVDstream promises to deliver streaming DVDs to its customers at a fixed price of 12.42 euros (or $14.89) per month. The movies are streamed at a resolution of 768x576 via a broadband Internet connection and viewed on TV or computer.

The system utilizes a device called PalmButler 600, which is basically a long s-video + audio cable combined with a serial port IR receiver bundled with a software and an IR transmitter. The PalmButler needs a TV-card with s-video output to operate.

To keep the prices low DVDstream has come up with an ingenious scheme -- each customer purchases the movie they wish to view at a pre-defined price, which is then streamed to the user by DVDstream. In theory the customer purchases a DVD and makes a copy of it for personal use, which is perfectly legal in the Netherlands. When the user is done watching the movie, he or she can sell it back to DVDstream. So in the end the consumer ends up paying only the monthly fee -- the payments for movies are just temporary deposits.

Obviously there are several legal aspects that are not too clear at all. For instance, is it legal for a third party (ie. DVDstream) to make a "personal copy" of a movie on behalf of the end user? DVDstream states that for each DVDstream copy there is an original DVD, so at least in theory they are not selling the same copy several times.

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PlayFair, the Apple iTunes decrypting software developed by Jon Johansen is once again available. The software was first removed from SourceForge and later from SourceForge's Indian counterpart, Sarovar, as well.

The project is now maintained and owned by Anand Babu, and has been renamed from PlayFair to hymn. Free Software Foundation of India (FSF)provides legal support to the project.

Babu states at the project home page: "Since we're no longer using the mp4v2 library to copy the meta data from the protected AAC file, it is left fully intact, including the apple ID of the user who bought the song. This proves that our purpose is for fair use and not for "piracy" and should help us in our legal battles."

You can download the latest version of the software (0.6.1) at the project homepage. A pre-compiled binary version is available for both Mac OS X and Windows, although the Windows version is currently command-line only. Of course the source code is available for all platforms.

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Sony yesterday unveiled their PlayStation Portable (PSP) which brings, according to Sony's promises, PlayStation 2 visuals on a cool looking handheld device.

The device has a 4.3" 16:9 display with a resolution of 480x272 and 32bit colors. The controls are PlayStation standard -- a four-way directional pad, four action buttons (square, triangle, x and circle), two trigger buttons and a thumb pad.

PSP uses small but high-capacity UMD (Universal Media Disc) optical disc to store games, music and other data. The disc, while only 60mm in diameter, can store up to 1.8GB of data. The device also includes an USB 2.0 interface, 802.11b wireless LAN, built-in stereo speakers, and a headphone connector.



Definitely an interesting product in every aspect. PSP will be available in Japan later this year, and in Europe and the US during Spring 2005. The price of the unit was not yet announced.

Source: Sony press release

Isamu Kaneko, an assistant researcher at Tokyo University, has been arrested by the Japanese police. Kaneko, the developer of the popular Winny P2P application, is accused of breaking Japanese copyright laws.

According to the police Winny helps and promotes copyright infringement and piracy. Winny, which provides its users with anonymity, became a focus of concern for Japanese authorities last month, when police and military documents were spread on the network.

Kaneko was arrested because Winny allowed people to download games and movies from the Internet in violation of the Japanese Copyright Law.

Kaneko is one of the first file sharing software developers in the world to be arrested. He has affirmed the allegations, and admitted that he expected the arrest, because Winny clashes with the copyright law.

It will be interesting to see whether or not Japanese law can shift the responsibility from the users of the software to the developer.

Source: Mainichi Interactive

A professor and a graduate student from th University of Tulsa have been awarded a patent for a method for spoofing peer-to-peer networks. The software shares tons of bogus files on P2P networks, which look like pirated content, but are actually just noise.

"It's built off the basic idea of injecting alternative content or decoy media into peer-to-peer networks as a way of hiding pirated media that's being shared illegally," said professor John Hale -- one of the people behind the idea. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack."

The software will obviously spoof only songs of selected artists and titles, so those artists who actually want to distribute their content over a P2P network, can do so.

Companies such as Overpeer and MediaDefender have already products on the market that flood P2P networks.

While their intentions are clearly good, the companies should bear in mind that intentional hampering of digital communications can be, and often is, illegal.

Source: Wired

Taiwanese manufacturers, including Ritek and CMC Magnetics, have announced that they plan to start the production of double-layer DVD±R discs this summer. Several manufacturers have already announced plans to release double-layer drives in May.

Ritek is currently doing trial production of dual-layer discs for quality certification, and expects to begin volume production by the end of June. The licensing terms for dual-layer discs are more strict than those of single layer DVD±R discs. That will result in smaller manufacturers having more difficulties with starting mass production, which in turn will reflect on the price of media.

It is quite likely that the prices for double-layer discs will not fall as rapidly as the single layer prices fell. The prices for Taiwanese double-layer discs will in any case be 20-30% lower than those of their Japanese counterparts.

Source: Digitimes.com

Sony has launched its long anticipated Sony Connect online music download service in the United States. Like Sony announced early this year, the service features 500,000 songs from $0.99 per track, or $9.99 per album.

The songs at Sony Connect are sold in Sony's own ATRAC3 format, which is compatible with Sony's audio devices. While Apple has done a great job with iPod and iTunes, Sony feels that they can offer the consumers a broader line of devices.

It is quite obvious, that with Connect Sony wishes to boost the sales of its audio products. Devices such as MiniDisc Hi-MD Walkman, NetMD Walkmans, ATRAC CD Walkman, and Network Walkman players will all play content downloaded via Connect. Aiwa (a brand of Sony's) will also soon be releasing Giga Pavit, a hard-disk player similar to Apple iPod Mini.

Apart from a wider range of portable devices supported, the Sony Connect seems to have little edge over its rivals. It will be interesting to see how the markets are going to develop with Connect around. Sony is by far the largest player on the current online music market, with amazing potential to market and push its products to the consumers.

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The Tennessee Board of Regents has rejected a proposal that would have imposed a mandatory Napster fee on all the students in the 45 schools represented by the board. The fee would have kept RIAA from suing the students, but at a staggeringly high price -- $9.99 per student per month.

According to calculations made by The Register, Tennessee students would have paid $1.8 per month for using Napster. Even though schools like Penn State and the University of Rochester have been able to reach financially lucrative deals with Napster, other schools can expect to pay alot more for the services.

Source: The Register

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) will be launching a pilot project later this month which allows viewers to download TV programmes on a home PC. The downloaded content can be viewed on a computer screen or burned on a DVD. Content for PDA computers will also be made available.

"If we don't enter this market, then exactly what happened to the music industry could happen to us, where we ignore it, keep our heads in the sand and everybody starts posting the content up there and ripping us off," said Ashley Highfield, director of new media and technology at the BBC.

The Internet Media Player (iMP) pilot will be tested on BBC staff, who will be given PDAs and access to a range of BBC programmes.

"We might get an over-positive response because I think a lot of BBC staff would love to be able to catch up on the programmes they missed last night on the bus or on the train," Mr Highfield said. "The quality is staggeringly good. It's slightly better than you get on the seat-backs if you are in a plane, although PDAs have a slightly smaller screen."

An extended trial will be launched later on with 1,000 selected broadband subscribes from AOL, British Telecom and Tiscali.

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AfterDawn.com congratulates Petteri (dRD, our fantastic CEO) and Aretta on the birth of their second child today at 01:05 EET (6:05 PM EDT)!