News written by Jari Ketola (August, 2004)

As you might have already noticed, Dela has joined the AfterDawn.com editor team. In addition to writing news articles, Dela will also be posting guides, and updating other content on the AfterDawn.com site.

I'm sure you will be a lot of quality content provided by him! By distributing some of the maintenance work we (me and dRD) can hopefully focus more on the administrative side of things.

You can always use our news submit form to let us know of interesting events!

--AfterDawn.com staff
Petteri Pyyny
Jari Ketola

More colleges are signing up for legal music services to keep their students from getting sued by RIAA. Marietta College, Ohio University, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the University of Denver, Wake Forest and Yale University have made an arrangement with Cdigix which allows educational institutions to provide their students with legal downloadable access to more than 800,000 songs through MusicNet, as well as broadcast-quality video from leading film and TV content providers.

The Ctrax music service will be available to the students starting this fall at a monthly rate of $2.99. The monthly fee allows an unlimited number of tethered downloads. Permanent downloads cost 89 cents per track. Cflix video-on-demand service will cost $9.99 per month or $3.99 per individual movie on a pay-per-view basis. The students will also have free access to Clabs, which gives them convenient access to video and audio media content required to fulfill their coursework via their own computer versus making a trip to the central campus Audio/Video lab.

Also on Friday the Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee) announced that it has signed a deal with Napster to allow students to buy music at discount prices. The service, known as VUmix, will be available from October 1st, and will cost $16 per academic year for the students, and $6.95 per month for faculty members. Earlier this year the Tennessee Board of Regents rejected the Napster deal as too costly for the students.

A federal appeals court has ruled that file sharing companies are not liable for copyright infringements carried out using their software products. The U.S. Senate is preparing the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act, which is based on the exact opposite of the court's ruling.

The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit finds r Grokster Ltd, Streamcast Networks Inc. and Sharman Networks Ltd fundamentally different from for example (the now late) Napster in the sense that the services do not have a central server. According to Judge Sidney R. Thomas "The technology has numerous other uses, significantly reducing the distribution costs of public domain and permissively shared art and speech, as well as reducing the centralized control of that distribution."

In their appeal the P2P companies relied on the Betamax legal doctrine. In 1984 the Supreme Court ruled that Sony was not liable for copyright infringements taking place using their VCRs. The same doctrine applies to CD- and DVD-recordable drives and media, recording software etc.

RealNetworks' campaign against Apple's protectionist attitude towards FairPlay DRM used in iTunes and iPod has backfired in a way that was only to be expected. Apple and Mac enthusiasts have attacked Real's FreedomOfMusicChoice.org campaign site by posting anything but supportive comments.

At first the "Don't break my iPod" -petition was filled with negative or critical comments. A poster by the name of MacUser wrote: "I choose to use a Macintosh. Why won't Real support me? Rhapsody doesn't work on the Mac. So even if I was interested in buying music from Real, I can't do it." Real soon replaced the petition with one that did not allow posting comments. That petition started filling up with signatures such as 'Real Sucks'. Now the petition only shows the total number of signatures.

Of course that did not stop the comments. Now the blog entries are filling up with insightful comments like "Real Player is garbage."

It's not all bad, though. One comment in particular captures the essence of the whole issue. "You already have 'freedom of music choice' so why don't you quit whining," the poster called Funksaw writes and continues: "The problem isn't the iPod, it's your DRM scheme." Indeed. Un-cripple the music and you un-cripple the players.

In an attempt to seek publicity in its campaign against Apple's policy in protecting the iPod DRM technology, RealNetworks today announced a huge sale in its RealPlayer Music Store. For a limited time Real is offering all songs at 49 cents per track. Most albums are available for $4.99.

Last month Real announced the Harmony technology which allows consumers to transcode and transcrypt DRM protected music from one format to another -- including Apple's FairPlay, which it uses to encrypt songs purchased from iTunes. Until Harmony was announced the only place to purchase music online for the iPod player was iTunes. Apple soon claimed that Real had illegally cracked their code, and threatened that future iPod versions would not work with Harmony.

Along with the campaign Real also launched FreedomOfMusicChoice.org -- a blog site promoting Real and its demands for Apple to allow others to provide DRM protected content to the hugely popular iPod portable music player.

Once again Real's campaign has a lot of similarities with Protect Fair Use -- a campaign sponsored by 321 Studios.

Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen, who is known for his work with DeCSS and PlayFair, is continuing his efforts to un-cripple DRM crippled hardware and software.

Johansen has released a software called JustePort, which lets owners of Apple's AirPort Express to stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to the device from any source -- not just iTunes. Since iTunes is only available to Windows and Mac users, JustePort gives for instance Linux users the opportunity to take advantage of AirPort.

JustePort itself supports only MPEG4 Apple Lossless (.m4a) files as input, but since the RSA encryption key used is now available, it is easy to develop full-featured third-party streaming clients for AirPort.

Earlier this year Johansen developed PlayFair (now known as Hymn), which removed the DRM wrapping from songs sold at the iTunes Music Store. Last month he released FairKeys, which lets iTMS users to extract FairPlay keys from Apple's servers. The keys are required to authenticate computers to play songs purchased from iTMS.

MPAA has announced that it has reached a settlement with the late DVD backup software vendor 321 Studios, which ceased all operations last week.

With the agreement 321 Studios will make a substantial payment to movie industry's anti piracy campaign. The settlement also demands 321 Studios to stop selling its software -- which it already did.

"321 Studios built its business on the flawed premise that it could profit from violating the motion picture studios' copyrights," MPAA CEO Jack Valenti says in a prepared statement. "This is not the end of the story in our massive fight against piracy."

The exact amount of the settlement was not announced.

Source: PCWorld

Software company turned music business Roxio on Monday announced that it would sell its consumer software division for $80 million and put all focus on the Napster online digital music store.

Roxio, known for software titles such as Easy Media Creator and Toast, plans to change its name to Napster. Less than a year ago Roxio was still best known for its recording solutions. Now it seems they want to dissociate themselves from the image and avoid confusion by changing the name altogether.

"With the successful completion of the transaction, Napster will emerge as a well-positioned pure-play in the fast-growing digital music sector with a substantially enhanced balance sheet that will support our growth plans," said Chris Gorog, Roxio's chairman and chief executive officer.

The software division will be sold to Sonic Solutions. Under the terms of the deal, Sonic will purchase essentially the entire Roxio software operation including Roxio's CD and DVD recording, authoring, photo and video editing application products including Easy Media Creator, PhotoSuite, VideoWave, Easy DVD Copy and Toast. Sonic expects to retain most of the current employees of the Roxio organization. Sonic intends to continue the Roxio brands, and current distribution and OEM relationships.

United States attorneys general from 47 states and territories have sent an open letter to peer-to-peer vendors. In the letter the AGs demand that P2P companies should do a better job in warning users of the dangers of trading illegal files.

The demand is much in the lines of "Warning! Hot coffee is hot!" and "Warning! Smoking endangers your health." Some companies have already warned their users about the possible consequences of sharing illegal content, but that's not enough. "However, more needs to be done by your companies to warn your P2P users as to the specific legal and personal risks they face when they use P2P technology for the illegal ends of disseminating pornography and 'sharing' copyrighted music, movies and software," the letter says.

The letter demands, for example, that centralized filtering systems should be implemented to remove illegal content from the networks. P2P trade group P2P United CEO Adam Eisgrau said, that implementing filters is against the nature of P2P software. "That cannot be done without radically changing the innovative nature of this software," Eisgrau said.

According to MPAA and RIAA the entertainment industry loses billions of dollars each year to piracy. However instead of trying to take advantage of the possibilities offered by P2P, the industry has adopted the way of trying to intimidate everyone away from their P2P sharing habits.

The Recording Industry Association of America keeps demonstrating its fine ethics by suing more P2P pirates who destroy the entire music industry and cause malnutrition to artists. It seems that someone has told the recording industry that "there's no such thing as bad publicity." Sadly that's not the case.

Last month RIAA sued 90 named and 500 unnamed "John Doe" defendants. One of the named defendants is a couple from Iowa, who had no clue that their children, teenagers of 18 and 15, were downloading music off the Internet. Sandy and Richard Nauman are both completely computer illiterate -- according to Sandy Nauman neither of them could retrieve a song from the Internet to save their lives,

A lawyer has adviced the Naumans to settle with RIAA out of court. The settlements have been around $3,000.

"To me, it's very ridiculous," Sandy Nauman said. "To be honest with you, I was more worried about other things they're getting off the Internet other than songs."

Amen to that.

So far RIAA has sued more than 3,500 individuals. Luckily they still have millions of users more left to target.

Source: USA Today

321 Studios, the makers of the well known X Copy backup and authoring solutions has shut down its operations.

The company, which was the first to offer software for backing up DVDs, was the target of the movie industry from day one. After fighting, and losing, several lawsuits the company eventually ran out of resources and was forced to cease its operations.

The statement posted on 321 Studios' website states that "Despite 321 Studios’ best efforts to remain in business, injunctions entered against 321 Studios by three US Federal courts earlier this year has resulted in 321 Studios no longer being able to continue operating the business." The company can no longer offer any kind of support what so ever: "Unfortunately, 321 Studios can no longer offer phone, email or live chat support for any of its products."

Also the DVDXCopy website is currently closed.

The DVDXCopy forums hosted by AfterDawn.com are still up and running, and will not be closed. You might also find valuable information in our other discussion forums.