News written by Petteri Pyyny (December, 2002)

The European Union Copyright Directive, EU's own little clone of notorious DMCA law, should be implemented by European Union member countries into their existing legislation by 22nd of December, 2002 -- this upcoming Sunday. But now it seems that none of the countries is ready to do so in schedule.

According to various sources, the only country who might be able to implement the required changes into its existing legislation is Denmark. Other countries seem to miss the deadline -- some of them, such as United Kingdom, badly.

The EUCD, once implemented, basically makes it illegal to sell or distribute any device or software that makes it possible to circumvent a technical copy-protection mechanism. Good example of such tool is DeCSS which allows circumventing the CSS copy-protection found on DVD-Video discs.

Each member country can have their own little alternatives of the law, but basically most of the countries seem to adapt the worst possible methods for implementation. Only handful of countries, including Finland where AfterDawn.com is located, have allowed the use of such tools in their draft laws-- even though distributing is still illegal. Finnish draft of the new copyright law makes a mentionable exception -- it states that DVD region codes are not considered as "effective technical copy-protection" and allows region-free DVD players and tools that circumvent the region coding.

According to a research concluded by In-Stat/MDR, the DVD player shipments grew by 61 percent in 2002 compared to the numbers in 2001. The growth was fuelled partly by super-cheap Chinese players and partly by increasing sales of DVD recorders.

According to numbers, the U.S. will remain the biggest market for DVD players until 2006 when China surpasses it and becomes the biggest single market in the world for DVDs. The growth rate in the European Union will surpass the rate in the U.S. through 2005.

Study also predicts that the prices of DVD recorders will drop under $300 (£187 or €300) by end of the year 2003. The sales growth of DVD players will stop in 2006 when all of the growth in the market is provided by the DVD recorders.

Source: InStat

The trial Norway vs Jon Johansen ended today with both sides delivering their closing arguments to the court. Prosecution is seeking $1,400 in court fees, three-month probation sentence and taking Johansen's computers away from him.

Johansen's attorney, Halvor Manshaus, said Johansen had to copy DVD movies to test the DeCSS software. Manshaus called copying a few bits of DVD data no different from copying parts of an encyclopedia for studying later.

Johansen said in his testimony that he owns almost 200 original DVDs, each costing appx. $35 in Norway and said that he has only used those movies that he owns to test the DeCSS software, that allows breaking the weak copy-protection found on DVD-Video discs, called CSS.

Manhaus also argued that the DVDs were copyprotected by technical methods, but not protected by Norwegian law. Johansen is accused of breaking into a computer system -- in this case, into a DVD that he owns.

The verdict in the case is expected in beginning of January, 2003.

Sources:

Aftenposten
Reuters/Yahoo!
Associated Press/Yahoo!

In very, very weird legal issue, the prosecution, representing the people of Norway, has presented amended charges against Jon Johansen in the case that's well-known as the "DeCSS case".

According to various Norwegian sources, the changes in the charges mostly add new aspects to the prosecution's case. Most notably, prosecution wanted to add charges that Johansen also cracked code that revealed a repository of protection keys.

At first, Johansen's defence opposed the changes, but because raising a formal objection would mean that the defence would also have to present fresh evidence against the new charges and that would delay the case, the defence counsel dropped the formal objections at this point.

The delays in the case, all of them caused by the prosecution, have pushed the case's closing arguments to be presented on next week's Monday instead of this week's Friday.

Source: Aftenposten

321Studios just released the latest version of their DVD to DVD-R (as well as DVD+R, DVD-RW or DVD+RW) software, DVDXCopy.

New version, DVDXCopy v1.3 has couple of much-requested enhancements, most notably a fully-integrated burning engine of Ahead NERO. The changelog is here:

• Full integration of the new, advanced burning engine
• New low calorie download: The full installation of DVDXCopy is now just over three megabytes.
• Advanced Options on the main screen lets you set Player compatibility mode to be either UDF/ISO or just UDF. Just UDF mode helps some players recognize DVD+RW discs as valid media (although UDF/ISO is the correct selection by DVD specs).
• New "no questions asked" mode for users who have separate DVD writer and DVD-ROM drives. You can now put the output disk in your writer and the source disk in your reader and check the "Output disk is ready" box and once the first disc is processed, it will start burning it immediately to the blank disc in writer drive. After that, program will continue by processing the disc 2. Now the checkbox is unselected again, but you can switch the burned disc 1 to a new blank disc and check the box again while the software processes disc 2 and it will do the 2nd burning automatically as well.
• DVDXCopy now remembers what drive was last used to burn, and will automatically attempt to use that drive again.

DVD CCA's (DVD Copy Control Association) president and COO, John Hoy, testified today in mockery of lawsuit that we know today as the case of Norway (government sponsored by MPAA) vs Jon Johansen. His testimony took the farce even further, since he was allowed to testify over the phone from the U.S. (mental note: if AfterDawn.com ever gets sued, I will make all my court appearances via email). He is one of the prosecutions main witnesses.

The case, which has history dating back from 1999, relates to a weak copy-protection mechanism found on DVD-Video discs called CSS and a program called DeCSS which allows users to crack this copy-protection. The prosecution claims that Jon Johansen has created this tool and has sued him for breaking into a third party data system, when he in fact has merely broken into a DVD-Video disc that he owns.

And as the DeCSS history tells us, Jon Johansen hasn't even cracked the code, he has merely bundled the original code into some other functional parts and created the package -- but he hasn't programmed the CSS cracking algorithms. And as the history tells us as well, the CSS was never actually cracked, but merely opened with codes

One of the world's biggest mobile phone operator's, Japan's NTT DoCoMo and Apple announced on this week series of 3G phones in Japan that use 3GPP, a mobile phone video standard based on MPEG-4. Apparently Apple's QuickTime core will act as a decoder in these phones.

While 3G hype has failed to materialize in most of the phone-crazed countries in the world -- Orange UK announced on last week that their 3G schedule will be delayed dramatically -- Japan seems to be pushing the technology ahead.

NTT DoCoMo will offer services that its customers can subscribe to such as watching news and sports clips in QuickTime. Customers can also watch movie trailers on their phone, find out where the movie is playing and then buy tickets. For Apple this is also an opportunity to make its QuickTime brand more widely known brand and get customers to associate it into multimedia content.

Source: Yahoo!

MPAA (Movie Picture Association of America) has sued several American eBay sellers for allegedly selling pirated DVDs through the auction site. Association claims that individuals, from eight different U.S. states, have sold totally over 1,000 pirated DVDs during the last 30 days.

Auction site eBay is not involved with the lawsuit, but according to its spokesperson, it is "delighted" that copyright owners have directly responded to illegal material sales in its service and have not dragged it into the process.

Most of the individuals named in the lawsuit have remained silent in the public, but some of them have come forward to the press and have claimed that they've been merely re-selling DVDs that they've purchased from so-called "eBay Power Sellers" that have claimed that their products are legal and official Asian releases of hit movies, not yet released in the States.

Source: OS Opinion

Liquid Audio, one of the online music pioneers, will disappear soon. Company's board of directors has voted to dissolve the company and return the remaining assets to company's shareholders.

Company has been known one of the first companies to develop legal methods of delivering and selling music online in digital format. Company sold its DRM technology to Microsoft earlier this year for $7M.

Source: News.com

321Studios has been busy over the last couple of days fixing some of the issues found in DVDXCopy v1.2 and in the v1.2.1 patch released after that.

Now they've released a latest version which fixes various installation problems that might effect on other software items installed on the same system. Latest version is DVDXCopy v1.2.2.

More info: DVDXCopy

RealNetworks will continue on its chosen open-source path on Monday when it will release Helix Producer, a streaming media producer, and its source code on public.

Company shocked the streaming media world earlier this year first announcing its plans to release much of its propietary software under open source license and when it delivered the Helix media player software for community couple of months ago.

Source: News.com

What we who live in Western countries consider to be the top-of-the-range in personal digital video, is getting pretty antique in Japan. Here in the UK Philips and others are pushing strongly stand-alone DVD-/+R/W recorders to the markets, but the devices are priced so that only early-adopters can afford them. Meanwhile in Japan, combined DVR (think of TiVo) and DVD-R devices are getting rapidly more popular.

Now, Toshiba has set a new storage capacity record for these type of devices, by releasing a 160GB DVR device that's combined with DVD-R/W recorder. Short blurp from their press release:

The RD-X3 offers home users a 160GB HDD, the largest drive of any HDD & DVD video recorder*1, capable of recording a maximum of 208 hours*2 *3 of programming. The recorder also supports a DVD-RAM/-R drive that can record up to 12 hours of video on a 9.4GB double-sided DVD-RAM disc.

A wide range of enhancement technologies supports superb image quality. A progressive scan video circuit delivers the impressive 540 horizontal line resolution that brings out the best of DVD images, while a Ghost Reduction Tuner (GRT) assures clearer, sharper picture reproduction. Other imaging technologies include Digital Noise Reduction (DNR), a 12bit 108MHz Video Digital to Analog Converter (DAC), and D1 terminal input that enables reception of high-quality images from other tuners. Read more...

Chicago federal judge Marvin Aspen issued a temporary restraining order against P2P operator Madster, demanding company to shut down all of its servers that are connected to the Internet.

The order came after RIAA complained to the court that Madster (formerly known as Aimster) is violating court's earlier order to cease all illegal activity in its network. Judge said that Madster should shut down the service because it is still violating copyright owners' rights with its service. Judge also said that if the company doesn't do it by itself, judge will grant a permission for RIAA to ask Madster's ISP to shut down the service.

The case against Madster is not over yet, but the temporary restraining order will stay in place until the court makes its final decision on the case. Court scheduled a hearing on December 19th to discuss whether Madster's owner, Johnny Deep, should be held in contempt of the original song-blocking order.

Source: News.com

In a surprise move, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson, delayed his decision on FastTrack P2P case where both parties -- RIAA and MPAA and two of the FastTrack P2P software vendors, Grokster and Streamcast (owner of the Morpheus) -- are seeking for summary judgment motions before the case goes to an actual trial.

The third FastTrack company, Sharman Networks, the owner of the Kazaa and the owner of the FastTrack technology, didn't attend to the court hearing, because the court still has to decide whether the U.S. court has jurisdiction over the company or not. Sharman Networks has headquarters at Australia, is incorporated in small island of Vanuatu and doesn't have any servers in the U.S. soil.

Basically in the hearing both parties referred to a famous P2P case of Napster -- copyright owners' lawyers stating that FastTrack operators are identical to that of Napster and "FastTrack companies" arguing that because they don't operate any central servers (unlike Napster did), the Napster ruling doesn't apply to them.

Judge basically stated after the hearing that he is not ready to issue summary judgments at this point and needed more time to determine if the case should go to trial or not. Also, he probably needs time to determine whether or not the Sharman Networks should be included to the case.

According to a blurp at Slashdot, there's finally a working DivX player for Sony Playstation 2 available.

The player obviously requires a modchip in order to work correctly (otherwise you can't load "homebrew" software items) and according to the Spanish site that hosts the software, it is capable of playing all flavors of DivX (DivX3.11alpha, DivX4.x and DivX5.x).

More info:

Slashdot
PS2Reality