News written by Petteri Pyyny (December, 2003)

Streaming media provider RealNetworks sued Microsoft on antitrust charges on Thursday. According to Real Microsoft is using its Windows monopoly to restrict PC manufacturers from installing alternative media players on pre-installed computers.

Real's General Counsel Bob Kimball estimates that the damages suffered by the company could exceed $1 billion in lost business. In addition to compensation to the damages the lawsuit also seeks an injunction against Microsoft to stop it from misusing its monopoly.

Microsoft downplayed Real's allegations and stated that the intense competition in the digital media marketplace shows that all parties have been successful. According to Microsoft Real's own growth figures in fact show that Real has thrived on Windows and other platforms.

Microsoft has faced several antitrust lawsuits in the past, and is currently under investigation by the European Union.

Source:
News.com

Washington D.C. appeals court delivered a major blow to RIAA's legal tactics yesterday by making a decision that RIAA can't force ISPs to hand out their subscribers' personal information before RIAA has officially sued those customers.

Original decision in this case, between Verizon and RIAA, was delivered by a district court judge in January, 2003 and it was heavily positive towards RIAA, allowing RIAA to squeeze personal details of ISPs' users without filing a lawsuit against those users first. Privacy groups, such as EFF have lobbied heavily against the original decision, stating that it makes it possible for any intellectual property owner to get anyone's personal details from ISPs without proving their claims of illegal activity of the user.

So, at least now it should be less of a possibility to get "randomly" sued or harassed by the RIAA. But it also means that there's no way of settling the lawsuits before they're filed, as RIAA will be required to file the lawsuits before they can get the contact details at all.

It is highly likely that all existing subpoena requests to ISPs will be "vaporized" and will be replaced by actual lawsuits later. RIAA says that it plans to launch yet another wave of lawsuits against P2P users in January, 2004.

Read more...

..there's not much in there. Ahead Software made some sort of site layout, added a little bit of information and an example trailer. Some time ago our sources indicated that Nero Digital would get a support community web site, but so far nothing has happened that support this. For those who do not know what the Nero Digital is:

Nero Digital is the premier
technology for audio and video compression standards available to date.

Compatible with MPEG-4 Video and MPEG-4 High Efficiency AAC, Nero Digital will offer you high quality surround sound and high definition images for your home entertainment theater.

Nerodigital.com

Our database server, which contains all the users, forum posts, news, software downloads, etc was wiped totally out by our friendly, very soon former, ISP today without notifying about the issue at all.

Big thanks to them, we have now lost couple of thousand messages, few news and over one thousand users as the latest database backup we had was from 20th of December which has been now put online.

So, if your account information is somewhat whacked or you wish to re-post your comments about our new layout (and enter into the T-shirt draw) or whatever, please re-enter the data/messages/comments again.

The database is currently running on a backup server and it's affecting the performance of the server quite dramatically. Especially the forums are suffering from the slowdown.

We're sorry about this and promise that we'll move rest of our five servers to some other ISP hopefully today.

-Petteri Pyyny
http://AfterDawn.com/

It has been a long time coming, but the new AfterDawn.com v3 (version 3) layout is now here! It has taken literally hundreds of hours of designing, coding, and testing to get to result you are seeing before your eyes. To celebrate the release, we are giving away ten AfterDawn.com T-shirts to our members! If you already entered the draw before December 22nd, please enter again!

A bit of background information

The pages have been designed from scratch by Teemu Pärssinen, our web designer (his home pages are only in Finnish, unfortunately). He has done an amazing job in turning our sometimes more than vague requests into reality.

After the layout was "locked", Petteri "dRD" Pyyny took over the pages and started transferring the old pages to the new layout. Many of the pages were actually re-coded to improve performance and functionality, and all of the pages were optimised and tweaked.

In addition to the new looks you'll find some new functionality from the site. But you can count on us adding nice little new features in the near future, as soon as we have ironed out the inevitable bugs and problems with the new page, and sat back for a while and taken a breath!

Read more...

According to IFPI's (The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, kinda "mother of all world's RIAAs") chairman, Jay Berman, European P2P users should expect same kind of treatment as their American counterparts have had from RIAA during the last year. This means that recording industry associations around the world and specially in Europe, are preparing to sue hundreds, probably thousands of individuals who distribute music illegally through P2P networks.

Just recently, Nielsen/NetRatings Internet traffic study found out that there are now more European users in Kazaa than American users. Europeans have already had the pole position in most of the other P2P networks, including eDonkey and DirectConnect. Recording industry considers this (number of American users in Kazaa dropped to half) to prove that RIAA's hard tactics in States have been successful.

Mr. Berman wouldn't comment on specific plans, but mentioned the lawsuits as one tool to combat against growing Net music piracy.

More information:

Guardian
IFPI

A small CD burning software developer company, Optima Technology, has sued one of the biggest CD/DVD software makers, Roxio. Optima claims that Roxio's bruning products violate its patent, number 5'666'531, which details a "recordable CD-ROM accessing system".

Optima wants Roxio to pay damages, unpaid royalties and lawyers fees. Optima's patent basically describes a situation where the CD or DVD burning software creates an "image" of the disc that's going to be burned, organizes it and allows user to make modifications to it before burning the disc. Company also stated that "Optima believes most every company in the CD burner industry may be infringing."

More information:

The Register
Reuters

World's largest movie rental chain, Blockbuster, has pledged for movie studios to drop the region coding system found on most of the commercial DVD-Video discs sold in the world.

According to Blockbuster's president and COO, Nigel Travis, the "extra time and windows created by regional coding is an opportunity that pirates exploit". Region codes were included to DVD-Video discs to allow movie distributors to fix the prices in different market areas and also to allow the typical delayed movie distribution chain to exist. With most of the Hollywood releases, the movie theater premiere is appx. 30 to 90 days in the U.S. before the same movie hits the big screens in Japan, Europe, Australia, etc. And when the movie is showing in movie theaters in Europe, there's already a DVD version released in the States of the same movie. And when the same movie is released on DVD in Europe/Australia/Japan/etc, the movie rights are already sold for pay-per-view TV channels in the U.S. and on it goes.

Now, this finely tuned money-maximizing effort has been spoiled by various countries, including most of the European Union countries, that consider it to be perfectly legal to sell hacked DVD players that allow playing movies from all the regions -- and this practice is legal and therefor virtually every single DVD player sold in, for example, the United Kingdom -- even when bought with manufacturer's warranty from a high street store -- is already region free.

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Flexplay Technologies, a company behind the environment-destroying EZ-D format, which is also known as "disposable DVD", says that it has managed to develop a dual layer version of its product. So far the EZ-D discs have been limited to DVD-5 size, i.e. 4.38GB per side, but with the new technology, each side can hold the same amount of data as a single DVD-9 disc can (appx. 8.5GB).

This makes it easier for movie studios to distribute their material in two different formats -- currently virtually all new DVD releases are released in DVD-9 format, but the current EZ-D format requires DVD-5 -sized, thus requiring a separate authoring and possibly encoding process for the material.

Only company which has tested EZ-D commercially, is Disney. Each movie disc costs between $5.99 and $6.99 and are packaged in air-tight wrapping. Once the wrapping is opened, the disc will develop a chemical process which makes the disc unreadable after 48 hours. After that, consumer simply throws the disc to a bin.

Source: Video Business Online (requires registration)

Apple's iTunes music store seems to continue to dominate the legal music download sector, despite ever-growing competition in the market. iTunes' director of marketing, Peter Lowe, told today in Music 2.0 event that Apple has now sold over 20 million music downloads through its service since its launch in April.

Interesting fact that he revealed was that 45 percent of all music purchases were made by purchasing a full album, putting in shame the loud complaints from various artists who don't want to see their music to be sold in single-track basis.

Apple also announced that its official goal is to sell over 100 million songs before next year's April. This would mean that the current sales levels would have to be increased quite dramatically. To help the company achieving this target, Apple has already signed various promotional deals with likes of AOL and Coca-Cola. Apple also has plans to launch a service in outside United States, but the schedule for such launch is not clear yet.

Source: MacWorld

MPAA lost the first round in court last week in so-called "screener case", where indie film makers sued the movie industry association over its decision to ban screener tapes and DVDs. Now MPAA has announced that it will appeal the district court's decision.

"From Day 1, the screener policy has been about one thing: preserving the future of our industry for filmmakers of all sizes by curtailing piracy. We know, without dispute, that in the past, screeners have been sources for pirated goods both domestically and overseas. We will appeal because the impact and growing threat of piracy is real and must be addressed wherever it appears," MPAA's boss, Jack Valenti, said in his statement.

Screeners are promotional copies of movies, sent out to critics and people eligible to vote for various movie awards, including the Oscars. After the original decision to ban all the screeners, MPAA made a separate deal with Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to make the organization, which hands out the Oscars, to be the only organization to receive screeners. This obviously angered various other organizations, including Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which hands out Golden Globe awards) and small film studios, who were afraid that without screeners, their movies wouldn't get any "airtime" with critics, etc.

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PayPal, the payment processing company, nowadays part of eBay, apparently wants to have its share of digital music download business. No, PayPal is not planning to launch a music store, but instead has introduced a payment processing plan that will most likely appeal to most of the stores selling legal digital music online.

As record labels typically charge between $0.65 and $0.80 per each downloadable music and the "industry standard" pricing structure has been set to $0.99 per song, the margins are already bit small (although compared to some other areas of IT business, 20 to 35 percent margins sound very good) for companies running the music stores. But the big problem is with payment processing, as most of the payment processing companies charge between $0.20 and $0.30 for each transaction plus appx 2 percent of the payment, profits seem to be virtually impossible to achieve for likes of iTunes. Some companies, most notably iTunes, "bundle" the customer purchases into bigger transactions to keep the fixed part of the payment processing costs as small as possible, but it usually means delaying the charges until the end of the business day and causes various other issues with payments.

Read more...

Now when everybody are already jumping to the online music bandwagon, HP has decided to do join the crowd. The PC giant is planning to launch its own online music service in January.

HP's service will most likely utilize some existing service, just like Dell's service uses MusicMatch's existing online music service. HP also plans to launch a string of consumer electronic products, including a portable digital music player and various LCD flat panel TVs in 2004.

Source: Reuters

Recording Industry Association of America told to press that it has sued yet another 41 P2P users over alleged copyright infringements.

RIAA started its latest manhunt against P2P network users in September and since sued almost 400 American P2P users.

"This is an ongoing strategy, and the way to let people know that there is a risk of consequences is to continue the program," RIAA President Cary Sherman said. "You don't set up a speed trap for one day and stop enforcement thereafter. It has to be consistent."

RIAA also stated that it has reached out-of-court settlements with 220 accused P2P users. This figure includes people who have settled with RIAA, whether they've have been sued or just threatened with RIAA's DMCA letters.

Source: News.com

Japanese P2P network, Winny, was based on super-secure Freenet network and was supposed to hide all marks of its users' IP addresses, making it impossible to crack down. But now it seems that this network has failed its promise as well. According to CNetAsia, two Japanese users of Winny have been arrested and home of the Winny's developer has been searched by Japanese police.

Creator of Freenet, British Ian Clarke, has stated that he doubts whether Winny used all the Freenet's identity-cloaking and cryptographic features, as these features should make the network truly anonymous.

Two arrested men, aged 41 and 19, are being sued by several companies for making available through P2P network various copyrighted items, including Hollywood movies and Nintendo's games.

Source: CNETAsia

Guys at HydrogenAudio have released first screenshots and details of new Nero Recode2. Nero Recode2 is a software that combines compressed domain MPEG-2 transcoder (i.e. quick MPEG-2 bitrate reducer, such as DVD Shrink, DVD X Copy XPRESS and DVD2One) together with a MPEG-4 encoder that uses Ahead's own MPEG-4 codec called Nero Digital that aims to compete against likes of DivX and XviD.

Based on the screenshots and the information available, Recode2 implements DVD backup features with well-polished user interface and very, very fast MPEG-4 encoding speed. Software also supports 5.1 audio, MP4 wrapper format, MP4-wrapped subtitles, etc.

More informtion and screenshots are available from here.

AfterDawn.com congratulates Hannu ('krimu', one of our admins) and his wife, Katja, who got their second child today!

One of the most famous legal cases is about to go to a retrial tomorrow. The case, filed by American movie industry lobby group MPAA, against Norwegian Jon Johansen, is about a tool called DeCSS that Jon helped to develop almost five years ago when he was 15. The tool allows decrypting the copy protection mechanism found on DVD-Video discs, called CSS.

Norwegian court decided in January, 2003 that Johansen is not guilty of "breaking into computer system" as the MPAA and Norwegian police accused. The trial is now going to Norway's appeals court and it is very likely that there wont be any new arguments from neither side, but simply extending the previous trial's arguments with new witnesses, etc.

Source: Aftenposten