News written by Petteri Pyyny (February, 2001)

Amazon, Internet retail giant, has launched a service where users can download music tracks for free. Most of the tracks are encrypted with Liquid Audio format and their sole purpose is to promote the band's album sales in Amazon.

But interesting point is that Amazon also offers music from indie artists for free and users can tip artists via Amazon's payment system if they want to -- of course Amazon takes a slice, thirty per cent to be exact.

Swedish hacker got into unsecured server of Indiana University and deleted the data of 3100 graduate students in order to get more free space to store his MP3s and video files.

It looks like he didn't use the data (which included social security numbers, etc) in any way, but just simply needed space to store the audio and video files. University police is looking into the case.

Maybe someone should have mentioned something about FreeSpace.com, XDrive.com, etc to him...?

MPAA sued 2600 website in last year for spreading DeCSS code and won the first round when NY court decided in August that 2600 had broken the DMCA law when posting the DeCSS code on its website.

After that EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, took the case to U.S. Court of Appeals. EFF filed its briefs in January. In Tuesday, movie industry reiterated its case arguments.

Case goes on..

After the court order in last week, Napster is desperate to find a solution to get it out of the situation where its only possibility is to shut down the service.

Napster on Tuesday offered to pay record labels Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI and Universal $150 million annually for five years in exchange for dropping their copyright infringement lawsuit. An additional $50 million would go to independent labels in each of those five years.

The money would come at the cost of free music. Napster envisions paying the record companies by implementing monthly subscription fees ranging from $2.95 to $9.95, a structure company officials said could be in place by July.

But the offer is not very likely to get labels to drop their legal processes.

"I think it would take a small miracle to get all five labels to agree to this," said Gartner analyst P.J. McNealy. "Some of these companies have other issues than just distributing the music."

Let's see how this saga ends..

MyPlay, a company which was expected to be the major competitor for MP3.com in last year, has announced that it will cut 41% of its staff and will focus to subscription services only.

The refocus is a result of decreased advertising rates and the increased need for subscription services. "Creating subscription services or variations on them is where you'll see the most money flow into the music industry in the next five years," said Mark Mooradian, an analyst at market research company Jupiter Research.

Legendaric Rio MP3 player series goes on, the latest addition to this family is Rio 800 Extreme. Player's details sound really good -- finally some of the usual complains of MP3 players have been addressed and fixed.

Memory is the most important factor compared to other similiar (excludes CD-R based MP3 players) players -- Rio 800 Extreme has whopping 384MB of memory! Player supports WMA and MP3 formats, has extended playback time of 12hours and looks really good.

Only problem is the price -- $599. But if you have enough cash and really want to have this one, go for it -- on technological sense it sounds nice.

For more information, use this link.

Parliament of European Union voted yesterday and decided to allow digital music and video downloads for personal use, even when the user doesn't have the original copy.

471 members voted for the law, 53 against it and 23 members didn't vote at all. Now the suggestion goes to next level in EU and if EU ministers agree on the suggestion as well, it will become as a law in all EU member countries.

This is a great day for common sense, I think -- distributing copyrighted files is illegal, but regular users who download those, are not breaking the law.

Bertelsmann spokesman told yesterday that Napster service will transform to a legal service by mid-2001, based on subscription fees and possible deals with major record labels.

Analysts guess that this sounds about right - possible labels to make a deal with Napster are EMI and AOL/TimeWarner, they say. EMI is the most likely one, because of its ongoing discussions to merge with Bertelsmann, the only label with a deal with Napster. And AOL/TW because AOL is about to launch their own subscription service in this year and having a two-way deal with BMG to distribute content through both channels would be a smart move.

But we'll see. And of course, there are still good file-sharing tools available -- eDonkey and Gnutella are excellent tools for file-swapping.

As news came in yesterday about Napster's ruling (see the news), stocks of digital music companies soared in Wall Street.

EMusic.com gained over 69% and MP3.com also gained over 8% when investors wanted to believe that now when Napster is (hopefully not) gone, there would be business opportunities in other forms of digital audio distribution.

Ok, we've seen this before. Important court date is coming up for Napster, Inc. -- users flood to the service and trade as there's no tomorrow.

Today Napster will be in front of 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court was set to rule on an injunction issued last year by a lower court, but it was put on hold and taken under submission by a three-judge panel. Today's ruling could ultimately shut down the service immediately.

Last night, peak hours showed over 2.2 million files being shared through Napster - almost 13,000 users logged in. In just one server..

Today's decision might ultimately be one of those written in the books of digital history and to be remembered years from now. But ah well, we'll see what happens.

Sony Music put a legal pressure to Napster to get the Manic Street Preacher's new album away from the Napster "distribution". Sony also requested Napster to remove all users spreading this album, and yesterday Napster finished this action.

Sony seems to be protective even now when all the signs show that this war should end -- spreading MP3s increases music sales. And another funny fact about this case was the fact that this time Napster removed users and files from their system much faster than in Metallica's case -- influence of Bertelsmann is here..

MP3.com announced yesterday the launch of its Asian division. The new division is expected to combine local language sites with digital music content and services specific to Asian markets.

The MP3.com Asia division will focus on providing locally relevant services through technology, content and marketing partnerships throughout Asian countries.

MP3.com

EarthRamp.Com today announced the launch of Silentfiles.com, an anonymous file transfer and file sharing system that enables web surfers to download virtually any type of file anonymously from shared servers.

Launch of the service is scheduled weirdly, because we remember that FreeDiskSpace had to shut down their public folder feature couple of weeks ago -- various groups and authorities were suggesting that those folders were used for spreading child porn and illegal MP3s.