News written by Petteri Pyyny (October, 2002)

RIAA emerged to be a winner in yet another lawsuit against P2P networks when federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against now-virtually-defunct P2P network, Madster (formerly known as Aimster).

According to RIAA's lawyers, Judge Marvin Aspen of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ordered last night Madster to implement filtering methods into its service that blocks all illegal music files from its network.

Aimster/Madster had to change its name in beginning of this year, when it lost a separate lawsuit that ruled that Aimster's name violated AOL's AIM trademark. Company was also well-known because of its founder's daughter, Aimee, who posed as company's official model :-)

Source: Reuters via Yahoo!

According to DVDWriters.co.uk, it seems that blank DVD media prices are coming down -- rapidly. Well, at least this is the case in the UK, where cheapest blank DVD-R media sells for way less than 50 pence ($0.75) a piece.

The reason for the current price drops seems to be the fact that new multi-format drives, such as Sony DRU-500A, aren't very compatible with the existing media types -- neither "plus" or "minus" discs. And retailers are afraid of the upcoming flood of these multi-format writers that are about to hit the shores by Christmas -- if they're picky about the media they use, retailers can end up having thousands and thousands of discs in their stock that no one wants to buy.

Source: DVDWriters.co.uk

Major movie studio -backed online movie service, Movielink, announced today that its upcoming service will use both, Microsoft and RealNetworks, as its technology providers.

Movielink has definately agreed that the race for the multimedia throne is currently pretty much tie between Microsoft and Real and wants to support both. Movielink will use both companies' DRM products and video codecs to deliver the movies to paying customers.

Movielink is an online venture, very much like Pressplay and MusicNet in audio world, that is owned by several major movie studios and will deliver full-length movies to consumers' PCs for a fee. Service is about to be launched by end of this year.

Source: AtNewYork.com

RealNetworks finally released the much-anticipated source code of its new media player, Helix DNA Client, which works on Windows, Linux, Symbian and Mac OSX.

New player was released as an open source product and under variety of licensing arrangements. For research and development for noncommercial use, the licensing is free of cost, but for commercial bundles that include RealNetworks' propietary codecs, licensing cost is $0.25 per player. For commercial products using Helix, but not Real's codecs, the first million players are free and cost $0.10 a piece after that.

"We actually are going to allow people to build essentially their own version of the RealOne Player," said Dan Sheeran, vice president of media systems at RealNetworks. "You can grab this code and port it to your platform as quickly as you want," he said.

The product will support "out of the box" MP3, MPEG-4, 3GPP (mobile phone video standard) and various other formats. By adding the Real's own codecs, software will automatically support also RealAudio and RealVideo.

In UK, law enforcement officials made series of raids this morning in order to arrest more than 20 people associated to organized software and video game piracy.

According to officials, "Operation Andrew" was successful and officials seized almost 9,000 pirate master CDs.

Full story: TheRegister

Major copyright owners' associations, including the notorious RIAA and MPAA, have sent letters to thousand biggest publicly listed American companies, warning them about file-swapping at work.

According to the letter, companies risk of getting sued if they don't control how their employees use their Net connections. Many employees use companies', normally high-speed, Internet connections in order to share and download pirated movies and music.

Source: News.com

Ok, during the last two weeks the traffic during the peak hours (1600 - 2000 GMT) has been on levels that our dear old webserver has been choking to death under the load.

During the last two weeks we've upgraded the database engine and last night helpful guys of our ISP added yet another 512MB of memory to the server. So, let's hope that this will be enough to maintain the site up and running without any nasty surprises for a while (until we are finally forced to add another server and setup load balancing system).

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
http://AfterDawn.com/

Listen.com's subscription-based online music service Rhapsody will finally allow users to burn music to CDRs. However, the possibility wont be included in Rhapsody's monthly fees, but consumers have to pay for each burned song separately.

Each song that user wants to burn on CDR, will cost 99 U.S. cents. So, one album will be normally only slightly cheaper bought via Rhapsody than by purchasing "the real thing" from the store.

The move anyway indicates that RIAA and its member companies are realizing that users want to have unrestricted music when they buy their music from online stores. Earlier Pressplay (owned by Sony and Vivendi) and FullAudio have got similiar licenses from record labels to allow consumers to burn limited number of songs to CDRs that they download from these services.

Source: ZDNet UK

Ok, just couple of minutes ago we completed major database restructure work and moved our discussion forums' database to use different database platform.

This should solve virtually all performance problems that have occured during the last couple of weeks, when our forum traffic increased from about 1M pageimps/month to almost double.

However, this MIGHT have caused some weird problems with the site -- if you find out anything that seems to be incorrect, please don't hesitate to send us feedback right away.

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
AfterDawn.com

In slightly surprising move, according to insiders in music business, world's biggest record label, Universal Music Group (owned by French Vivendi) has increased the amount of royalties it pays to its artists from Internet downloads.

According to analysts, the higher royalty payments are an effort to match the increasing pressure from artists who have said for some time now, that they need to be compensated more fairly from Net downloads.

UMG's deal will be retroactive to January 1st this year. UMG will pay about 20 percent higher rate for songs that are included in artists' albums than those released only on singles. Royalty rates, in some cases, can be upto twice as much as they currently are for artists who work under contract with UMG.

With the new policy, an artist may now hypothetically get about 15 cents on a single downloaded for about one dollar, experts estimated. But this depends on each artist's individual contract.

Source: Reuters via Yahoo!

Lik-Sang, a Hong Kong-based mod chip and game console product retailer, who was forced to shut down in September, has re-opened its website.

The statement at company's website says:

At September 16th a lawsuit against Lik Sang International Limited and it's directors has been filed in the High Court of Hong Kong by the companies Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft on infringing on copyrighted material and selling Mod Chips or other development and backup devices for the Plaintiffs consoles.

At September 17th, the High Court of Hong Kong issued Orders and Injunctions against Lik Sang which prevented selling or advertising Mod Chips (and other products in questions). The details outlined in those Injunctions took Lik-Sang.com and the company with more than 20 full-time employees "down" - business was officially closed till today. Lik Sang and it's employees couldn't even speak about the case due to an injunction of the High Court.

Lik Sang International Limited has removed all the products in questions from it's website and started it's business operation again by Tuesday, October 15th. Un-shipped orders will be processed in due course and the first shipments are scheduled to dispatch by November 1st. Customers with unshipped orders will receive emails with shipping & or cancellation information in the meantime. New orders are welcome. Read more...

Japanese consumer electronics giant, Toshiba, will release a 5GB harddrive in this week's Japanese electronics show that will connect to the host device, such as PDA, Symbian-based cell phone or a laptop using wireless Bluetooth connection.

Device is based on the Toshiba's 1.8 inch harddrive and is bundled with a Bluetooth device. The whole device weights around 180 grams (6.3 ounces for Americanos) which makes it pretty ideal PDA companion. With the latest Xscale-based PocketPC devices and device like this, PDA can actually work as a decent portable movie player.

Device will be launched for Japanese consumers in November and Toshiba doesn't have currently plans to sell the drive outside Japan. Retail price of the drive will be around $410.

Sources:
Ananova
Yahoo!

Pressplay, a subscription-based online music service owned by French Vivendi Universal and Japanese Sony has signed a licensing deal with German BMG which allows Pressplay to offer BMG's music catalogue through its service.

This brings Pressplay on par with its rival MusicNet, which is owned by Bertelsmann (the owner of BMG), AOL TimeWarner, EMI and RealNetworks. Both services offer music from four major record labels out of five. Pressplay is currently negotiating with AOL TimeWarner's Warner Music to get all five record labels into its service. Meanwhile analysts say that MusicNet is very close to sign a deal with Vivendi-owned Universal Music Group and with Sony to fill its gap.

Both major record label-backed services are currently behind the independent Rhapsody, owned by Listen.com, which was also the first of these three services to open in December last year. Each service has different ways of delivering the music to consumers and different terms on what users can do with the music they download. But currently the trend has been towards more open service, where users can download and burn music to CD pretty freely, within their monthly restrictions. None of the services have released any public data about the numbers of customers they have attracted so far and how much music one user downloads during an average month.

International team, Joint Video Team, developing a new video compressing codec that will join the MPEG-4 format family, is currently very close to approving the codec, dubbed as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10.

As all of us, who have bothered to read around 5,000 pages of technical public docs that relate to MPEG-4 technology, know, MPEG-4 has multiple "levels" and subsets within its specifications -- pretty much like MPEG-1 had several types of audio encoding schemes included in it (best known of those is definately MPEG-1 audio layer III, also called as MP3 by well-known scientific researchers ;-). Currently the best-known MPEG-4 video compression methods are called as Simple Profile (SP) and Advanced Simple Profile (ASP).

To explain this a little bit -- or confuse you guys even more -- let's use the best-known MPEG-4 encoder in the world, DivX 5 (yes, it is MPEG-4 encoder), as an example of various levels of MPEG-4 codecs. DivX 5's basic, free version can decode (==play) both, Advanced Simple Profile and Simple Profile-encoded MPEG-4 clips, but can't encode Advanced Simple Profile videos, only Simple Profile videos. And the commercial version, DivX 5 Pro can do the same tricks as DivX 5 Free, but can also encode Advanced Simple Profile videos.

One of the brains behind the now-defunct DIVX system (which was basically a pay-per-view version of DVD, not the DivX -- note the caps -- that we know nowadays), has set up a new company called Cinea that aims to block people from using camcorders in movie theaters.

The system is aimed towards digital cinema and it will control the digital cinema projectors in a way that when someone from the audience tries to capture the movie from the screen using camcorder -- whether digital or analog, it doesn't matter -- that is based on specific framerates, like everything nowadays is, he/she will only record blurry picture. Pretty much similiar effect will happen when you use camcorder to record something from the PC's monitor (distorted lines and off-synch effects).

The product, which is about to debut by end of this year or in early 2003, will play probably a kinda big role in order to convince studios and movie theater chains to switch to digital cinema. According to various figures, movie industry loses around $3 billion a year due movie piracy and most of the new pirated movie copies originate from camcorder copies made in movie theaters (also called "cams" in piracy scene).

Finnish government released today its proposal how it wants Finland to implement new European Union Copyright Directive that each EU member state has to implement into its local laws by 21st of December, 2002.

EUCD, which was approved by European Union in last year, restricts circumvention devices that bypass copy-protections on copyrighted media, such as CDs, DVDs, etc. As it is already approved, it can't be rejected anymore, but each member state can apply various restrictions and relieves to it when they implement the local versions of the law. Finland's original proposal was similiar to the UK's recent proposal -- those could be described by calling them pretty fascist. Finland's original proposal, drafted by the Education Ministry, didn't give virtually any rights to consumers, scientists or librarians at all. After a pretty heavy lobbying from various citizen rights' groups, they have amended the wording pretty much, but obviously there's only so much that a member state can do.

New proposal is slightly twisted, IMHO :-) It allows individuals to copy copy-protected material they own, for their own personal use, just as usual. Proposal also allows individuals to circumvent copy-protection mechanisms in order to backup their CDs, DVDs, eBooks, etc. But the proposal also outlaws distribution of circumvention tools, such as DVD rippers. So, if the proposal is accepted by Finnish parliament, Finnish consumers can legally rip their own movies as much as they want, but the sites who distribute DVD rippers violate the law :-)

MP3.com, one of the services that launched the digital music revolution in 1990s, is back in the headlines, once again. And the reason is the same as always -- company has been sued over copyright infringements.

Lawsuit was filed at Manhattan federal court by three artists, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan and James Taylor, who all work under Sony's record labels. The suit goes back in time to 1999 and early 2000, when MP3.com operated a controversial My.MP3.com service that allowed users to store their CDs to MP3.com's servers. The major problem came when MP3.com didn't require users to actually upload the albums to their servers, but instead just verified that users actually owned the CD and then MP3.com simply copied the files to users' personal "folders" from MP3.com's fileservers. This, however legal it sounds, raised a major lawsuit from major record labels and eventually ended up costing $175M to the company which was later on bought by one of the major record labels, French Vivendi Universal.

Details of the new lawsuit are still blurry and it is not clear on what basis artists are now sueing MP3.com's practices back in My.MP3.com era, since one would think that they were already represented in the original lawsuit, filed by Sony, their record label. But this is the case anyway, so we'll see what happens. As usual, all artists are claiming damages upto $150,000 per song that MP3.com used in the My.MP3.com service.

Listen.com has signed a yet another deal with an American ISP to distribute Listen.com's Rhapsody music service. Deal is with one of the biggest American ISPs, Verizon Communications, who will promote and sell Rhapsody to its customers.

Listen has earlier signed similiar deals with various broadband providers, including Roadrunner and DirecTV. It is also the only one of the big three music subscription services that offers music from all big five record labels.

European Commission approved a significant plan today that will allow TV and radio broadcasters to use their existing broadcasting licenses for simulcasting as well. Simulcasting is a webcasting method where a traditional radio or TV broadcasters streams the exactly same content over the Net that they transmit over the radiowaves.

Earlier, each broadcaster willing to simulcast their content, had to obtain licenses for each and every program, music track, sports event, etc for webcasting. Also, each country's own recording industry body or other copyright content owners' body, was the only place where that country's broadcasters could obtain licenses. This has lead to seriously weird situations -- worst example is probably our home country, Finland, where there isn't even a single commercial simulcasting station available anymore, due Finnish recording industry's bodies (Teosto and Gramex) intention to squeeze enormous amounts of money out of radio stations. In Finland, radio stations pay already full royalties for aerial transmissions (unlike in States where RIAA doesn't get a penny from radio stations) and copyright owners wanted basically to double that amount if broadcasters wanted to set up a simulcast.

In a very surprising common sense victory today, U.S. House of Representatives voted to change the webcasting fees structure in order to save small webcasters from being pushed out of the business.

In June, Librarian of Congress set the royalty rates for webacsting industry, based on the original instructions from the Congress on how to deal with the issue. The results weren't good for webcasters -- royalty rates were set to be fixed fees based on the listeners and numbers of songs played. Fees also were applied retroactively, beginning from 1998. After the decision, several dozens of small webcasters told that the fees were higher than their annual revenues and shut their services down.

What's amazing, is the fact that handful of small webcasters united and presented their case to Congress and actually got their momentum and backing from several Reps. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wi) introduced a bill that would have postponed the payments for another six months in order to push both sides -- RIAA and webcasters -- to negotiate a new deal. Yesterday the negotiations finally got the breakthrough and new royalty rates were approved today by House.

Wanted to mention that I just added a small, funny little feature to our site today. Now, at the bottom of each page, you can see how many simultaneous users there are browsing through our site.

Average seems to be now around 800, this figure includes our "AfterDawn.com Network" -- i.e. AfterDawn.com, forums, Dawnload.net and MP3Lizard.com. Some sort of a break-down of these figures will be added shortly as well for those of you who are interested of various weird statistics :-)

Two pretty similiar bills (proposals to become a law) have been presented this week to U.S. Congress. Both bills aim to remove and modify some controversial parts of the "evil" DMCA law to allow fair use rights for consumers.

First one that hit the Congress was introduced by "Silicon Valley" rep, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif). Bill, dubbed as Digital Choice and Freedom Act of 2002 aims to modify the DMCA law so that consumers could bypass technical protections, such as DeCSS, on material that they have purchased in order to make backups and use those backups legally. Bill would also put in place specific restrictions on "shrink-wrap licenses", licenses that consumers can read only after they've already purchased the product, such as EULAs (end-user license agreement -- those "do you agree" things you get when you install virtually any software) in software and other products.

"Consumers need a voice in this debate," Lofgren said in her statement. "Right now, it is the entertainment industry versus the technology industry, and the consumers are watching from the sidelines."

Another bill was introduced yesterday by two well-known anti-DMCA reps, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va) and Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif). Bill's ideology is pretty similiar to Lofgren's bill, but this one has been planned and coined more carefully. According to its mastermind, Boucher, he got the bill pretty much ready already two years ago, but he has gathered support and opinions during that time and waiting for a right moment to introduce the bill.

Music biz heavyweights have finally agreed to try how well legal digital online music sells among the general public when offered for free. Company called OD2, backed by various UK portals and labels, launched today a campaign called DigitalDownloadDay.

Campaign, despite its name, lasts for a week and began today. Every British or Irish customer is entitled to receive 500 free "download credits" that are worth of £5 (around $7.50 or €7.70) and can be used to either stream or download music from the participating online services, converting roughly to ten full-length tracks that can be downloaded and -- surprise, surprise -- also burned to CD.

But the big thing about this experiment is the scale of it. The campaign offers a music catalog of 100,000 tracks from 6,000 artists. Obviously there are some nags in it -- getting the credits requires credit card or Switch (British debit card) and billing address has to be within UK or ROI. Participating music stores and portals include hmv.co.uk, msn.co.uk and tiscali.co.uk.

http://www.digitaldownloadday.com/

As Malaysian government has been taking a harder attitude towards CD and VCD piracy in country which has one of the biggest piracy problems in the world, professional pirates have come up with some clever ways to avoid getting caught.

According to one Malaysian law enforcement official, professional pirates have moved their production to large ships and the actual copying is done in international waters, where Malaysian police can't do anything. Then the pirates simply drop the packages to various ports for distribution.

Source: MalaysiaKini

DivXNetworks' PR department must be busy writing their press releases so that general public get excited, even aroused of the distant possibility to have DivX playback on their consoles/DVD players/fridges/etc. But as usual, this is one of those "aww, nothing for us" news once again. Anyway, DivXNetworks has joined with Factor 5 and released a DivX for Nintendo GameCube Software Developer's Kit which allows game developers to use DivX playback in their games, etc.

The SDK aims to overcome the fact that GameCube's game discs can hold only 1.3GB of data, limiting the amount of video available for games, etc to very minimum -- when compared to PS2 and XBox which both can use DVD discs, upto 8.5GB per side when using dual layer discs. Traditionally games use MPEG-2 encoded video, just like DVD-Video does, but by allowing developers to use MPEG-4 instead, the video bitrate can be significantly lower and still maintain decent video quality.

Source: DivXNetworks' press release