News written by Petteri Pyyny (July, 2003)

Group of American universities and colleges have decided to oppose the way RIAA is trying to get their P2P-using students' identities revealed by using the DMCA law's subpoena clause.

Schools, that include MIT and Boston College, refuse to reveal their students' personal details to RIAA because according to them, federal law states that schools can't reveal their students' personal details without giving a "reasonable notice period" to the students' themselves.

"We are opposing the subpoenas, not in an effort to protect students from the consequences of copyright infringement, but rather to establish the proper procedures to be followed in the future," Boston College's director of public affairs, Jack Dunn, said.

Source: Wired

One of the only freeware DVD-to-DVD-R backup tools, DVDFab, has been sold. The author of DVDFab announced recently that he will stop developing the software because of the German implementation of the EUCD legislation,

The author of the DVDFab, Joerg Plenert, has sold the software to Fengtao Software, a company that develops DVD-related tools such as DVD Region-Free and DVDIdle. Fengtao plans to add support for season DVDs, integrate a DVD ripper to the DVDFab and integrated DVD-/+R burning.

It is most likely that DVDFab will become a commercial product very shortly, but the current -- first version released by the Fengtao .. version is still free and can be downloaded from its website.

Source: DVDFab homepage

Buy.com launched its music download service BuyMusic.com today, starting the race to offer the iTunes-like services for Windows users.

Buy.com sounds good on a paper: there are over 300,000 songs to choose from, which is 100k more than what Apple has in its iTunes service; album prices start from $7.95, which is $2 less than what iTunes charges; single track downloads cost $0.79, $0.20 less than what iTunes charges.

But there's always the catch.. It seems that Buy.com just wanted to be "the first" to exploit the Windows userbase after iTunes' whopping success (Apple says that they deliver over 100,000 paid downloads each week), at any cost. What does this mean? Buy.com didn't have time or willingness to negotiate and pressure record labels to hand out free licensing deals, but instead every label can set their own terms for the DRM protection the songs have. So, labels can make the songs so that they cannot be transferred to portable digital audio players or burnt on CDs or transferred to other PCs -- Apple's iTunes allows free burning to CDs, transfers to its iPod player, etc without asking questions from the labels whether they want this or not.

Group of indie labels that represent almost 200 artists worldwide have attacked openly against RIAA's new war against file-sharing.

Chuck Paugh, a promotions director of Dust Traxx, a house and trance music label, claims that he has spoken to more than 20 other companies similar to his and all are agreed that the RIAA's campaign will backfire: 'the industry as a whole is against these lawsuits' he says.

Dusk Traxx, says Paugh, 'are not opposed to peer-to-peer trading of music. We feel that the dinosaurs in the industry need to catch up with technology and consumer demands instead of trying to stomp on consumers..'

According to him, the users of P2P networks are mostly teenagers who simply can't afford to buy music, but if you give them the option to explore music, once they're adults with disposable income, they will buy the music that they like if you don't alienate them from the music industry as a whole.

Source: PCPro.co.uk

RIAA claimed during the weekend that is has managed to win already 871 subpoenas against individual American P2P users. With subpoenas, RIAA forces ISPs, universities and other Net service providers to hand out individual users' personal details so that the trade group can use those details in order to sue the users.

According to Associated Press's informations, RIAA doesn't even bother checking the volumes of file trading -- in some subpoenas there are only five copyrighted songs listed that users have shared through the P2P networks.

RIAA says that it will try to negotiate with most of the individuals in order to get the cases settled outside court and expects to see damages between $750 and $150,000 for each song that has been distributed by the users over the P2P networks.

While RIAA's tactics are getting harder, users are fighting back as well. Tools such as PeerGuardian are getting more and more popular as they block well-known RIAA's, MPAA's and various other copyright holders' and FBI's IP addresses from accessing their computers. Also, anonymity in P2P networks seems to be the Holy Grail that all the P2P networks are trying to achieve as RIAA and other copyright holders are declaring an open war against file-sharing.

Many in the digital multimedia world saw the Billboard magazine's decision to start an official download music chart a sign that finally the digital music industry had matured to a point when it can be considered as a real alternative to traditional music distribution. But by looking at the numbers, it doesn't require very much to get into top 10.

According to the stats Billboard collected for the week ending at 19th of July, 2003, the top song in paid music downloads category was "Crazy in Love" by Beyoncé with Jay-Z. But that song only received 1,500 paid downloads. And the chart number 10 only got 500 paid downloads. So, in theory, any artist that's featured on any of the source sites for the chart (iTunes, Pressplay, etc) could easily buy themselves a top position in the charts. To put the figures in comparision, Beyoncé's new album sold over 317,000 copies during the same week, just in the U.S.

But another interesting fact is that Apple claims to serve over 500,000 paid downloads a week through its iTunes service. If this figure is correct and in line with the figures it provides to Billboard magazine, it means that people are listening and paying for huge variety of different kinds of music. Could it be true that online digital music stores are finally demolishing the "manufactured music"'s position, even if in very small scale?

Los Angeles federal court has sped up the appeals process for the case where movie and recording industry (represented by their lobby groups, MPAA and RIAA) are against two FastTrack licensees: Grokster and Streamcast's Morpheus (although Morpheus doesn't use FastTrack anymore).

In surprise decision, district court ruled in favor of P2P software developers in April and now the appeals process speed-up means that the new trial will begin most likely before end of this year.

Briefs for the record labels and movies studios are due August 18, with reply briefs for the file-swapping companies due on Sept. 17.

Source: News.com

Development of one of the most popular freeware DVD backup tools, DVDFab, that allows backing up DVD-9 discs to two blank DVD-Rs, has been stopped.

The creator of the software, Joerg Plenert, announced that he wont take any chances with the new German copyright law, that's based on the EUCD requirements. Even though the software doesn't crack the CSS copy protection found on DVD-Video discs, it however allows circumventing Macromedia's copy protection mechanism, region locks and UOPs (User Operation Prohibition) found on discs. And as by strict implementation, these actions are against the new law as well, he decided to drop the development of the software.

Software will be available through his website for limited period of time and by end of this month, the website will be closed.

More information:

DVDFab.de
Allesfertig.de

Major Hollywood studios have launched their first legal actions against pirates in mainland China. The MPA (international sibling of the MPAA) took action last September against several video pirates in China -- some of these cases have been since settled, some of them will go to court.

Under the settlement with two Chinese companies, companies agreed to pay $30,200 in damages, apologized and have agreed to destroy all illegal copies of MPA's member companies' products.

The pending law suits are against three companies and MPA has already tried to settle with the companies, but according to its spokesman, settlement in these cases is very unlikely to happen.

Source: Reuters

The streaming patents that a rather unknown company called Acacia Research holds, gained their first seal of approval by a Californian district court.

Acacia claims to own patents that cover virtually all core technologies that are used in providing streaming audio or video online. Company has sued several small companies, mostly adult entertainment companies, accusing them of using patented technology without valid licenses.

If Acacia's patents actually hold water once they start attacking major players on the Net, it would mean that virtually every single website that provides multimedia content in any form, would be liable of paying licensing fees to Acacia.

Court awarded Acacia a temporary injunction against five adult entertainment companies. The injunction bans the sites from using any streaming audio or video material on their websites and also bans them from linking to any site that provides such content.

The named five companies failed to defend themselves or show up in the court hearing, so the case isn't exactly the best possible case study to prove Acacia's patents perfectly valid.

Net retailer Buy.com plans to launch its own music store on next week's Tuesday, aimed at Windows users with pretty similiar pricing structure as Apple's hugely successful iTunes (which is not available for Windows users yet) has, i.e. user pays $0.99 per song download and no subscription fees, etc.

Buy.com tries to emulate Apple's success, although its business will be based on a website-based store front rather than a stand-alone application, like Apple's iTunes is. Even the service name of Buy.com's music store sounds somehow familiar -- iMusic. And obviously to stir the soup a bit more, there is a well-established site called iMusic.com already, owned by the ArtistDirect Network.

It is not known yet what format Buy.com will eventually use, but odds are in favour of WMA added with Microsoft's DRM stuff. It is interesting to see whether Buy.com's tracks can be burned on audio CDs or converted to unrestricted MP3s.

Source: SiliconValley.com

Grokster, the second biggest P2P software developer that uses solely FastTrack (same network that the biggest one, Kazaa, uses) for its traffic, has released a "pro" version of its software.

The new software costs $19.99 and comes without any advertisements or spyware whatsoever. According to Grokster, there has been a huge demand from the user base to provide a version of the software that would be free of annoying additional components, such as "spyware" and "adware" components (that track user's web behaviour and pop up advertisements even on websites that don't carry any advertisements).

"We can offer the user a better experience at a reasonable price that still allows us to pay our bills," Grokster President Wayne Rosso said in a statement.

Obviously some people are eager to point out that there are already ad-free versions of Kazaa available on the Internet, but unfortunately these tools are illegal as they violate Kazaa's copyrights (which, again, some people might find rather hilarious ;-).

The adware-bundled version of Grokster will remain free. Obviously the big question is: how long it will be until the Grokster Pro can be downloaded from Grokster..

One of the servers has been now down for two hours. Our ISP is trying to solve the issue -- seems to be the HDD of that box -- as soon as they can.

During this time, some parts of the site will be down -- most notably Dawnload.net, cd-rw.org and our ad serving. While ad serving is down, it will also slow down the whole site. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to get this resolved as quickly as possible.

Friday, 11th of July, was truly a sad day for Europe, free speech and fair use rights. The largest European Union member country, Germany, passed its own implementation of draconian DMCA-like law called as European Union Copyright Directive.

The law, that is now in effect in five member states (Germany, Austria, Greece, Denmark and Italy) makes it illegal to distribute (even for free), sell, manufacture, develope or advertise tools or software utilities that allow circumventing copy protections. This applies to all copy protection mechanisms, including cracking the CSS that's found on most DVD-Video discs, circumventing audio CD copy protections, etc.

German implementation of the law went even further than what the EUCD itself required -- German version of the EUCD implementation makes it illegal to even discuss about circumventing copy protections in public (as on Net pages).

The chilling effects of the German law can already be seen here and there -- most obvious is the fate of the Linux DVD ripper, dvd::rip. The new versions of the software don't include settings for cracking the CSS code at all as the software is being hosted and developed in Germany.

Bertelsmann, the media giant and former owner of the notorious P2P software Napster, is going to court trying to get lawsuits filed against it, dismissed.

Company has been sued by several small-scale music publishers, British record label EMI and also by the world's largest record label, Universal. These parties are seeking damages worth of over $17 billion, claiming that Bertelsmann assisted in large-scale copyright infgringement case by supporting Napster financially.

According to Bertelsmann, Universal also tried to buy Napster at the time it was negotiating with the small startup -- Universal's deal fell through when the price got too high.

Source: The Register

According to Nielsen Net Ratings, company that provides the traffic statistics to virtually all major websites and other Net services, shows that Kazaa's file sharing volumes dropped by a pretty whopping 15 percent in the week that ended July 6th.

In week before that, RIAA announced that it will start suing individual P2P users if they share music through the network. Also, other P2P networks saw similiar drops -- iMesh, which uses both, FastTrack (same as Kazaa) and its own proprietary network, saw a drop of 16 percent during the same period and Morpheus which uses Gnutella network, had also a drop of 15 percent in its traffic.

Obviously U.S. Independence Day had some effect on the traffic, but it normally isn't even near this kind of figures.

Source: CNN

Japanese NEC demonstrated today world's first 3G (acronym meaning third generation hi-speed mobile phone networks and equipment) mobile phone that comes bundled with a digital TV tuner.

The exact specs for the phone are still slightly vague, but it comes with a quite small resolution screen with 120x160 pixels. The demonstration streams were delivered using MPEG-2 TS (a sort of a wrapper/container format, used in digital TV broadcasting) as a container, including MPEG-4 video at 160kbps bitrate and MPEG-2 AAC audio at 48kbps, mono.

Japanese terrestrial digital TV system has one of the 13 frequency segments reserved purely for mobile reception, so the low bitrate MPEG-4 will be sent out using that channel while the "actual" digital TV aimed for digital TVs and set-top boxes, will be sent out at much higher bitrates (and as far as we know, the video will be in MPEG-2 format rather than MPEG-4).

RIAA has sued a company that owns the Spanish website, Puretunes. According to RIAA, the site that launched in May this year, sold unauthorized copies of music but claimed it had acquired licenses for the music it sold.

Puretunes sold unrestricted music downloads with various kinds of pricing arrangements -- most popular ones were 8 hours worth of downloading for $3.99 and 48 hours of downloading for $9.99. Site disappeared in June and hasn't been heard of since. At the time of it's was launched, the company claimed that it had acquired full licensing rights to all of the tracks it offered on its website through various Spanish licensing houses.

Now, according to RIAA, this simply wasn't the case. RIAA spokesperson said: "It's bad enough that Puretunes was selling music illegally--it's even worse that they tried to perpetrate a fraud on the public by claiming that they were a legitimate business."

RIAA is seeking damages for copyright infringements made during Puretunes' short window of operation. Also, some customers who paid the downloading fees in advance were left without refunds or any replies from the company whatsoever.

Source: News.com

British study by Music Programming Ltd (MPL), suggests that P2P users buy more music.

MPL said that 87% of its respondents who downloaded music admitted they bought albums after hearing tracks through the internet.

Company's spokesperson said: "Downloading is actually a 'try before you buy' tool for a significant amount of people. It allows people to sample new music and decide whether or not to buy it - it is not necessarily a replacement for purchase."

British equivalent to the RIAA, called BPI (British Phonographic Industry), unsurprisingly disagrees with the study: "We did a survey in April that asked people the reasons why they downloaded, and 65% said because it was free."

Source: BBC

French media giant Vivendi continues to scrap its media assets in order to reduce its massive debt levels. The owner of world's largest record label, one of the biggest movie studios and tons of other media outlets, has decided to shut down the European operations of MP3.com.

Vivendi bought MP3.com in 2001 for $372 million and now company is planning to sell the American main operations of MP3.com as well. Analysts are sceptical whether there is enough interest to gather even a small percentage of the original buying price -- or will there be any bidders who would want to buy MP3.com as a whole.

According to Leanne Sharman, the vice president of sales and marketing at MP3.com Europe, the European operations had just started to see significant revenue streams, but the decision to shut down the European operations was mostly done because of "corporate strategic reasons".

Source: Guardian

U.S. assistant secretary of commerce for market access and compliance, William Lash, has criticized Malaysia's plans to curb enormous entertainment piracy by forcing publishers to lower prices claiming that only way to curb piracy is to impose tougher penalties, such as prison sentences, for pirates.

Malaysia's minister for domestic trade and consumer affairs, Muhyiddin Yassin, has urged consumers to shy away from highly priced foreign movies and music in order to force the movie and recording industries to lower prices. According to him, Malaysian domestic movie releases are prices at around $2.50 and piracy for those titles is virtually non-existent, but for foreign releases that cost $8 or more (VCD is de facto standard for original movies in Malaysia) are the ones that get pirated.

Mr. Lash flew to Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, to pressure Malaysian government to drop its idea to get the entertainment prices down. He said that the American business losses in Malaysia due piracy were down from 2001 figures of $316M to $242M in 2002, mostly due harder policy towards piracy. He called for prison sentences to professional pirates and more active role from Malaysian government in fight against piracy.

District judge Stephen Wilson has dismissed a lawsuit brought up by the owner of the file-sharing application Kazaa against the major record labels. In suit, Sharman Networks claimed that record labels violated the Sherman Act by not licensing their content to Sharman Networks.

In its lawsuit, Sharman claimed that it and its partner, Altnet, tried repeatedly to gain licenses from record labels in order to sell digital music content through Kazaa. However, Altnet was not part of the lawsuit. Judge concluded that "Altnet, not Sharman, is the primary target of the conduct alleged and would suffer the principal injury. Accordingly, Altnet has the greatest motivation to enforce the antitrust laws in the form of a private claim, thereby further diminishing any justification for allowing Sharman to do so."

Source: News.com

One of the best-known music institutions, the Billboard magazine, has started tracking Net music downloads alongside traditional music charts. Yesterday the magazine introduced "Hot on the Web" charts to its publications.

The music charts include virtually all the major legal music services: AOLMusic, Radio@AOL, GraceNote, Launch (of Yahoo!), Liquid Audio, LoudEye, Lycos, mp3.com, Muze, NextRadio, UBL.com and WindowsMedia.com (of Microsoft). The data is supplied to Billboard by Nielsen SoundScan which is also the source for the traditional music charts available on Billboard.

The system will only report permanent (or, well, semi-permanent DRM-enabled ones as well), paid downloads, not streamed tracks. Only noticeable gap seems to be the fact that Apple's iTunes is not included in the list of sources.

More information:

Billboard.com
News.com