News written by Petteri Pyyny (March, 2003)

RIAA has agreed to settle its lawsuit against optical media duplication giant Technicolor (which, for most of the people, is better known as the "Colors by Technicolor" statement in movie credits) for $2.3M.

RIAA sued Technicolor for $23M in last year, claiming that the company allowed pirated CD copies to be made in its factories. Technicolor agreed that the incident happened in its factory, but claimed that the incident was a random accident.

So, RIAA got 10 percent of what it wanted, but it also got an agreement with Technicolor that allows RIAA's inspectors to pop in to its factories at any given time without a notice to check the facilities. Agreement also included a clause that if RIAA will find something illegal, it will first inform Technicolor and parties try to reach a yet another settlement instead of going to court immediately.

Source: Reuters/Forbes

Arista Records, a subsdiary of BMG, plans to launch copy-protected CDs in American markets around May/June this year. This will be the first major push towards copy-protected CDs in the U.S. Rest of the world has been experiencing the "joys" of copy-protected CDs for well over 12months now.

Arista plans to use copy-protection technology from SunnComm Technologies to protect its CDs. CDs will most likely be unplayable with PC CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives as well as in big number of stand-alone DVD players (most notably "Chinese" DVD players that are based on PC hardware such as IDE drives) and car CD players.

To compensate the playback problems with PC drives, the discs contain copy-protected WMA versions of the tracks that can't be transferred to portable audio players or to other PCs.

The fight is impossible to win from consumer point of view: if the sales increase after the copy-protected CDs are being introduced, labels can claim that copy-protection works. If the sales drop, they can blame ever-increasing P2P piracy and justify adding copy-protection mechanisms to more and more CDs. Arista's artists include Pink and Santana.

Read more...

News.com has much more details about the controversial "Super-DMCA" legislation discussion that took off this week in various news sites, including ours.

The proposed "super-DMCA" is not actually a federal law, but series of very punitive state laws instead, generally speaking all of them sponsored by the "almighty" MPAA.

MPAA has most likely learned its lessons that pushing forward a new law that would curb freedom of speech and "fair use" rights through the federal legislation is virtually impossible, because consumer groups such as EFF take notice of proposed federal bills very quickly. So, MPAA has pushed individual U.S. states to pass laws that restricts tons and tons of consumer rights.

In Maryland, such legislation is already in the state law, it passed in 2001 without no one even noticing. The law bans software that "can be used for converting a video or audio material transmitted over the Net to other format". So, you guys who live in Maryland and have DivX codecs or TMPGEnc installed on your computer, you're already breaking the law.

Source: News.com

DivXNetworks is heading towards final release of the next "stable" version of their DivX MPEG-4 codec. Now they've released a third beta for the 5.0.4 version.

The new version, officially dubbed as DivX v5.0.4 Schizo beta 3 contains these changes since the beta 2:

• 1 Pass and Nth Pass undersized file should be fixed
• Certain dark sequences would produce a long period of frames using a Quantizer of 31
• Psychovisual Enhancement field sometimes displayed "Custom" instead of Light when unselected
• "Do not prompt with errors and warnings" would select itself when random characters were entered in the CLI after the "-key" option
• When "-d 3" option was entered in the CLI field, "Source interlace" became blank
• Max bitrate would not update at times
• DirectShow decoder postprocessing slider became disabled with ATI radeon 9700 Graphics card
• DirectShow decoder would "fast forward" when seeking backwards. This could cause synch issues when re-encoding DivX Files using the DivX Decoder Filter

The new version is available in this URL. Please remember that the beta version is restricted to 30 days period.

Sanyo has announced that it is developing next generation laser for optical storage that would double the storage capacity of 27GB per disc per side, currently available on Blu-Ray discs that use blue laser technology for recording (DVDs and CDs use red laser technology)

Sanyo's claims at this stage are extremely vague -- according to some news reporting, this would be a "dual layer" Blu-Ray and not a new technology, but this sounds highly unlikely to us, since we're talking about different laser wavelengths here. But Sanyo's plans are to demonstrate the first products by July this year and start mass production by end of the year.

This isn't exactly what world wanted at this point -- a new technology to stir the already-messed-up "next generation DVD" wars that are emerging between whopping four different formats. And all this is happening when the good olde DVD recordable markets are finally gaining ground despite format wars.

Source: Digit-Life

FullAudio, one of the four "major" (not really major, none of them can currently really claim that their business model really, really works) online music subscription services, finally got its the missing licensing deal with Sony.

Now FullAudio's MusicNow service has licensing deals with all the five major record labels, just like all of its rivals do. Company also extended its licensing contract with BMG to include permanent music downloads and CD burning from the label's music catalog to its service.

FullAudio's MusicNow service is being sold via various channels, but most notably via radio giant Clear Channel's radio station websites.

Source: FullAudio Press Release

Movielink, an online movie service, a joint venture between major movie studios, has signed several deals with smaller movie publishers to feature their content on the service as well.

Deals include some of the major indie studios, such as Artisan Entertainment -- who was behind the hugely successful "The Blair Witch Project" -- but also smaller studios that create mostly short films and art movies.

Movielink has also plans to launch a multi-million dollar ad campaign to extend its audience -- venture is pretty much unknown outside digital video audiences. Company also revealed some interesting details about its customer base -- their typical customer is a male, between 25 and 49, instead of 18 and 25 that company itself expected before the launch. This could be due various reasons, P2P piracy and its popularity among teenagers being one of them.

Source: Reuters via CNet

Madonna, arguably one of the best-known figures in the music world, has release her latest single, an anti-war song "American Life", as an unrestricted MP3.

The song costs $1.49 and can be bought from her homepage and paid with PayPal. She also released an affilate program that allowed fans to promote the single and if the song was bought via fans' links, the fan got a slice of the sale price that then can be turned into Madonna fan material. And because the single is 100% unrestricted, high-quality MP3, it can be copied to portable MP3 players as well as burned on CDR.

Madonna was one of the loudest opponents during the "Napster wars" back in late 1990s -- her back-then-yet-unreleased album, "Music", found its way to Napster before its release date.

Her single is also available via major online subscription services, such as Pressplay and MusicNet.

Source: CNet

According to News.com, AOL is expected to drop its long-established tradition of using solely RealNetworks' streaming technology in its mainstream products.

According to the rumours, AOL will switch from Real's RealAudio to MPEG-4-based AAC in its narrow-band Radio@AOL service (the broadband version uses MP3 format). AOL has licensed the technology from Dolby Laboratories.

Source: News.com

SonicBlue, the legendary MP3 player manufacturer that was once known as Diamond, has filed for a bankruptcy and has agreed to sell its ReplayTV and units.

Diamond was the company who brought the first mainstream MP3 player to the emerging MP3 markets and helped the MP3 phenomenom to grow alongside the other legends, Napster and WinAMP.

Company reported a loss of $33.4M for the fourth quarter on Wednesday, down from $52.7M losses a year ago. SonicBlue has been fighting against media giants virtually throughout its heydays -- the music industry tried to ban its portable MP3 players back in late 1990s, but SonicBlue won the case. Company's other famous product, ReplayTV that allows users to record TV shows digitally to harddrive-based settop box, has been hit by a lawsuit as well, TV stations and Hollywood trying to ban the product.

SonicBlue has agreed to sell the Rio and ReplayTV units to Japanese D&M Holdings that is better known as the owner of Marantz and Denon brands.

More info: ZDNet UK

RIAA has sent letters to at least 300 American companies claiming that some of their employees have used companies' networks for trading illegal MP3 files in P2P networks.

In letter RIAA warns companies about possible fines and also lists ways of preventing P2P usage at workplace. The letter also contained a CD with full logs of shared material, dates and times and IP addresses of P2P users in question.

"In short, your computer network and resources are being used to illegally distribute copyrighted music on the Internet," the letter said. "We strongly urge you to take immediate steps to prevent the continued infringement of our members' sound recordings on your corporate network."

Source: Yahoo! / Reuters

Sony has released a firmware patch for its highly-popular dual format DVD recorder series.

The new firmware, v2.0e, has this changelog:

• Allows your Dual RW drive to record at 4X on 4X compatible DVD+R media.
• Improves reading and writing performance and reliability.
• Reduces vibration noise for the discs with unbalance or eccentricity.

The firmware patch is meant for Sony models DRU-500A, DRU-500AX, DRX-500UX and DRX-500ULX.

More information: Sony/StorageSupport

Altnet, the service that piggybacks with the mega-popular FastTrack-based P2P tool, Kazaa, claims that it has so far delivered over 75 million legal downloads through its service on Kazaa.

Altnet basically inserts advertiser-paid listings to Kazaa's search results. Often the files distributed by Altnet are either promotional type of content or "teasers" that require users to pay a fee to unlock the copy protection features in the files.

Kazaa's owner company, Sharman, uses Altnet as an example of legal P2P usage and will most likely use it as a very strong argument in its ongoing court case where it has been sued by the RIAA and the MPAA.

Source: News.com

Pioneer has released a new firmware for the mega-popular DVD-R drive Pioneer DVR-A05 (also known as DVR-105).

The new firmware update has these changes since v1.21:

• DVD-R/RW Writability Improvement (further improved from V1.21)
• DVD-R/RW Playability Improvement (further improved from V1.21)
• CD-R/RW Writability Improvement (further improved from V1.21)
• CD-R/RW Playability Improvement
• Supports 2X writing on New Prodisc DVD-R Media

But as many of us already know, you should be really, really careful when upgrading Pioneer's firmware. Pioneer has a legacy of issuing firmware upgrades that wont allow downgrading back to the previous version and that have introduced various limitations on media usage (Pioneer tends to block "unauthorized" blank media manufacturers' discs from burning on its drives). So, beware. Currently the best known firmware for Pioneer A05/105 is v1.20 -- the v1.21 introduced tons of limitations for media use; many x2 discs wont burn at 2x on v1.21, but only at 1x, etc.

More information: Pioneer Australia

British music industry and its main watchdog, British Phonographic Industry, claims that Britains largest ISP, former government telco monopoly, British Telecom is supporting illegal music swapping over P2P networks by not doing anything to stop it.

The only ISP in the UK so far who has taken some measures to prevent P2P file swapping, has been cable company ntl, who imposed a 1GB a day download limit to its broadband customers -- the cap has proven to be massively unpopular and has caused tons of users to switch to rival ISP Telewest, or to ADSL providers (to which all BT, who still controls the landline network, provides the "last mile" connection).

BT launched its own legal music service this month and now music industry claims it's being hypocritical about the music sales. According to BPI, BT's network contributes the majority towards ever-growing P2P file-swapping within the UK. BT maintains its opinion that blocking P2P networks without causing other problems to customers is impossible -- as everybody who knows how the Net works can confirm. BT also points out that using P2P networks is not illegal, but swapping illegal files is.

More info: BBC

LiteOn, a relatively well-known Asian electronics brand, has released a MPEG-4 capable stand-alone DVD player at the CeBit expo in Hannover.

The player will compete against a similiar player from Danish Kiss, DP-450, which was released in last year. LiteOn's player, called LVD-2001, uses a MPEG-4 decoder chip from "notorious" Sigma Designs (the guys who violated XviD's GPL license). The chip used in the player is Sigma's EM8500. According to various sources, the player should be capable of playing pure MPEG-4 videos that are AVI wrapped (such as DivX v5.xx and XviD files) and also almost-MPEG-4 files such as DivX v3.11alpha and DivX v4.x files.

Pricing or the availability of the player is still unclear.

More info: LiteOn

Yet another AfterDawn.com guide is available. This time we have produced a guide for making DivX backups with AC3 surround audio of your DVDs.

The guide uses excellent front-end called Gordian Knot to calculate the bitrates and control the overall encoding process. Guide is available here:

guide has been removed on 1st of January, 2006 due changes in copyright legislation

We had one of those days that you can't even imagine of when you have distributed server environment.

In early morning (GMT) our forum server was unavailable to various European countries due a network glitch at our ISP's end.

Later in evening (again, GMT) our main server has some dramatic problems connecting our database servers and the main site was down for good three hours.

Most of the services have been restored now, but there might be some occassional problems within next 24hrs until we get everything fixed (pretty much re-installed everything at the main server today, so something might be missing).

Sorry about the inconvenience this might have caused.

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster

Former British monopoly, British Telecom, has launched its own legal music service together with artist Peter Gabriel's OD2 company. The new service, called Dotmusic.com, lists over 150,000 legal tracks in its catalog, but the service's main goal is to secure BT's position in country's emerging broadband markets.

BT's advertising claims of "unlimited music downloads" have already caused a British rival, Wippit, to complain to standards officers. In reality, the downloaded music can't be transferred to other computers and not even to portable audio devices. And when user ends his/her subscription, the downloaded tracks become unusable.

Service costs £10 a month (appx $17 or €16) and includes music from most of the major record labels -- except from Sony.

More info:

CNet/Reuters
The Register

Japanese electronics giant Matsushita (better known by its consumer brand names, such as Panasonic) announced this week world's first video solution using the WLAN technology, compatible with IEEE802.11a and IEEE802.11e standards.

The signal processor that uses 5GHz frequency for wireless operations, transfers standard MPEG-TS stream (the MPEG stream wrapper used for digital TV, etc transfers). By installing the signal processor into, for example, a (digital-only, no analog input) DVD recorder and digiTV receiver box, could allow wireless operation between these devices, so that the digibox decrypts the broadcast and sends it to the DVD recorder which then unwraps the stream into regular MPEG-2 stream and records it to a blank DVD-R disc. And the DVD recorder could play later the stream through WLAN link to a MPEG-TS capable TV wirelessly.

Source: Unstrung

According to various sources, Apple has managed to squeeze signatures from four record labels' execs to license their music to its upcoming legal music service. According to rumours, the new service is so simple to use that record labels simply love it.

Any details of the service are only guesses, but it is likely that the service will be tied together with the company's existing iTunes service and will allow copying the files easily to Apple's much-praised MP3 player, iPod. Obviously if this is the case, Apple needs to figure out a way to get a slice of the Windows' users spending as well, which might prove to be more difficult.

It seems that out of all major record labels, only Sony isn't interested of licensing its music to Apple -- (once again) rumours, say that Apple would like to allow CD burning in its upcoming service, but Sony objects this idea. In addition to all hype, Apple has licensed Amazon.com's 1-click payment system to ensure that the payments are handled quickly and without hassle.

Sources:

LA Times (requires registration)
Seattle Times

According to Grokster, the only outside company who is still using the FastTrack's P2P network, the lawsuit that has been filed against it by the RIAA and the MPAA, has proven to be the key to success.

"Every time they attack file-sharing software in any way, users rush to download the program, just to see what's going on, and become hooked. As a result, we prosper and revenues grow", Grokster's president, Wayne Rosso, said.

He told that when the media industry sued the three P2P companies (Grokster, Kazaa and MusicCity), advertisers noticed the services and the enormous audiences they had. Grokster has now big roster of brand-name advertisers, including AT&T Wireless and Dell and has turned the business into a profit in last year.

Source: Reuters via News.com

According to a blurp at The Inquirer, Korean electronics giant LG is about to introduce its own version of multi-format DVD writer at the upcoming CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany.

Most interesting about the drive is the claim that it will support ALL of the existing DVD formats; DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW -- and the biggest surprise, also DVD-RAM.

Currently Sony has been pretty much the only player in this lucrative market, when NEC's multiformat drives are still pretty much a much-anticipated rumour and have been delayed many times so far.

Source: The Inquirer