News written by Petteri Pyyny (October, 2004)

According to DivX Networks' president, Shahi Gharman, the company which makes the video codec so often associated with online movie piracy, is about to sign deals with two major movie studios by the end of the year to offer their content in DivX-encoded format for on-demand online video service.

According to Gharman, movie studios are interested of the technology, which is already available in 20M non-PC devices worldwide, as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows Media platform.

DivX Networks, even though its reputation as a codec of choice for movie pirates (well, at least earlier on, before XviD and eventually DVDR took over), has actually worked on digital rights management system for quite some time now and it is obvious that studios are looking for DRM-locked solutions rather than non-restricted video formats to deliver their content for users.

Company also promised to deliver its upcoming version, DivX v6.0, by the end of this year, promising 33 percent better video compression rate than MPEG-4's most recent widely approved form, H.264. It is unclear how this affects on the fact that so far DivX 5.x series has been mostly MPEG-4 compliant and whether that will be the case in the future.

Today nine eurozone countries (counrties using euro as their currency) have joined the Apple's iTunes bandwagon when iTunes music store opened its doors in Finland, Austria, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Only eurozone country still without an access to iTunes is Ireland.

Songs in euro countries will cost the same as they cost in existing iTunes -supported countries using euro -- €0.99 per song and albums starting from €9.99 each. iTunes also extended its European music selection when it launched in new countries today, taking the total available collection in Europe to 700,000 tracks.

Additionally, Apple announced that it will launch Canadian version of its music store in November. Now Apple can claim that its service reaches already almost 70 percent of global music market.

Source: Apple's press release

Spanish company Puretunes.com, which briefly offered music in MP3 format for a very low price, has reached a legal settlement with RIAA. The company will pay $500,00 in damages, while the holding company that was responsible for the operations will pay $10 million.

Puretunes.com offered what it thought were legal MP3 downloads at just pennies. The company acquired the rights for the songs from an overseas licensing authorities, but according to RIAA the licences were not legal, and sued Puretunes.

"Puretunes.com duped consumers by claiming it was a legitimate online music retailer when, in fact, it was no such thing," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "It's essential for the integrity and security of the legitimate online music marketplace that imposters like Puretunes.com are held accountable."

Several similar MP3 sites are still in operation, One of the best known is Russian ALLOFMP3.com.

Source: News.com

As the shift towards open source tools is already a major force in audio/video software world, we've decided to comply with various open source licensing requirements and have opened a separate site section for open source projects' source code downloads.

From this section you can download source codes for tools like DC++ and VirtualDub.

We're still probably missing few source code packs from our listings, but we'll add the missing ones shortly. Please note that we only list separate source codes for tools that we host in binary format as well. Also, some open source tools have the source code stored inside the binary distribution package itself.

You can find the source code listings from here:

https://www.afterdawn.com/software/source_codes/

-Petteri Pyyny
AfterDawn Ltd

Napster, once-P2P-now-legal-online-music-store, and PayPal announced today that they've made a deal that makes it possible for Napster's customers to pay for their monthly subscription fees and download fees via PayPal instead of traditional credit card.

PayPal is the one of the Net's largest payment handling companies, owned nowadays by eBay. Its popularity was partly sparked by the fact that direct account-to-account bank transactions weren't commonplace or free in United States when the dotcom boom started back in late 1990s and PayPal tapped to that need.

Napster will continue to support its other payment methods as well, which include credit and debit cards and pre-paid payment cards.

Source: CNet

Famous for his notorious clashes against the biggest names in the business world, including the major insurance companies, financial institutions and mafia, New York's Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, is now targeting against the major record labels (that were previously known as "Big Five", but since BMG's and Sony's merger, just "Big Four"..).

Mr, Spitzer has served subpoenas to EMI, Sony BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music, asking them to hand over all contracts, invoices and documents that relate to the question behind the subpoenas: how do songs make their way to radio stations' playlists.

As getting airtime on radio stations is crucial for new artists and their songs, Spitzer's aim is to find out whether major record labels pay their artists' way to the stations' playlists. According to The New York Times, most labels circumvent legislation that prevents them to pay for radio stations, by employing third party promoters who pay fees for stations. Labels claim that promoters only pay the fees to get advance copies of their upcoming playlists, not for getting stations to play certain songs.

Source: BBC

The official CD sales figures in the Unites States showed that the slump in CD sales that has laster for five years now, has finally ended. The CD sales figures for the first half of year 2004 were 10.2 percent higher than they were in first half of 2003.

Despite the jump, the sales figures were still down 4.3 percent compared to the first half of year 2001, according to the statistics released by the RIAA. Music industry analysts said that the rise in CD sales is down the fact that people are once again being more interested about the music, mostly due the iPod phenomenom in the US and also because music industry has finally started improving its products, by offering more music outside traditional "top 40 -format". This can also be found out from the fact that by comparing the top 50 CDs of year 2003's first half to the top 50 CDs in 2004's first half, the sales figures were down by 16.7 percent -- a clear indication that while people buy more CDs, they buy from wider selection than before.

Also, the sales of DVD music videos jumped by whopping 100 percent, from 5.6 million units in 2003 to 11.2 million units this year.

Source: LA Daily News

American traditional radio stations, through their lobby organization Radio Music License Committee, have reached a deal with American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers that would give radio stations rights to broadcast their radio shows over the Internet as well as over the traditional airwaves.

Deal was made to take effect retroactively from year 2001 and lasts until 2009 and is worth of $1.7 billion in total fees to ASCAP. The deal was made to separate radio broadcasters' online fees from the traditional broadasting fees they pay for ASCAP.

RMLC represents 12,000 radio stations across the United States and the deal is limited strictly to radio stations and their online simulcasts, so it doesn't make difference for Net-only broadcasters who have made a separate deal with the RIAA in previous years. The Net broadcasters' deal with RIAA is set to expire by end of this year.

Source: BusinessWire (press release)

Apple celebrated yesterday when it announced that they have sold now more than 150 million songs via their iTunes Music Store. Despite some reports that overall traffic to online music stores has dropped, Apple's announcement means that its own sales have increased rather dramatically. Their current pace means that they're selling more 4 million songs a week, more than 200 million songs a year.

It took Apple 17 months to sell 150 million songs and now it seems that they're speeding ahead of their competition quite rapidly, specially when the all-important holiday season is approaching. Obviously iTunes also benefited from the fact that it is now available in three European countries as well as in the United States -- and Apple has vowed to launch its pan-European service within next few weeks that would bring in millions of potential new customers.

Even more crucial to the company is the success of its portable audio player, iPod, which is the only player that Apple's iTunes songs support. And Apple announced this week that it sold over 2 million iPods during its past financial quarter (three month period). iPods are the money-making machine for Apple, while iTunes doesn't really generate any profits whatsoever to the company, but instead help it maintain its iPod sales levels.

According to the founder and CEO of Netflix, the world's largest online DVD rental company, the online giant Amazon.com plans to enter to the online DVD rental business as well. "We started hearing rumors about two weeks ago, and we were able to confirm them," Netflix's CEO, Reed Hastings, said during the company's earnings call. Amazon.com denied to confirm the rumors about its upcoming DVD rental service.

In addition to the possible future threat from Amazon.com, Netflix is facing increasing pressure from its archrival Blockbuster and also from America's largest supermarket chain, Wal-Mart. To maintain its market-leading status, Netflix announced that it will cut its monthly charges from $21.99 to $17.99. Blockbuster responded immediately to Netflix's price cuts and decided to cut its monthly subscription charges from $19.99 to $17.49.

More information:

Reuters
Washington Post

Napster, the biggest rival of Apple's iTunes, has released prepaid online music payment cards in the UK, in order to reach the under-18s. Teenagers are lucrative market for online music stores, but their payment options are limited as in most countries it is illegal for minor to get a credit card, which is normally required in order to use the stores.

Napster UK's prepaid online music purchase cards will be sold via Dixons, country's largest consumer electronics retailer. Napster launched similar prepay card mechanism in the United States last year.

Source: BBC

British Phonographic Industry, the UK equivalent of the RIAA, has won the first court round in its fight against British P2P users, when British courts granted a court order against 28 P2P users BPI raided earlier this month. The court order means that users' ISPs have to hand over users' personal details (names and addresses) within 14 days to the BPI.

BPI has announced that it will offer out-of-court settlement deals for all sued users, but if they wont settle, it will press charges against them in courts. According to BPI's claims, all of the users now sued are so-called "heavy uploaders", people who cotribute to P2P networks by sharing vast amounts of music rather, rather than downloading tracks.

Source: BBC

Latest study by The NPD Group found that Apple's iTunes has managed to maintain its dominant position in legal online music market, by selling almost 70 percent of all tracks sold between December 2003 and July 2004. Napster cme as distant second, with 11 percent share of the market, followed by numerous smaller rivals, including MusicMatch and Real.

But more worryingly, an another study that focused on traffic that online music stores generated, by The Port Washington, found that online music store's total number of monthly visitors dropped from the peak month of April. In April, music stores gathered 1.3 million unique visitors, but managed to get only 1M users per month in May, June and July this year. Also, P2P traffic doesn't seem to drop at all, despite series of online music stores opened virtually on weekly basis and RIAA bombarding American P2P users constantly.

Source: Mac Observer

Australian appeals court has rejected Sharman Networks' (the owner of Kazaa P2P software) appeal against the raids made to its offices in February this year. Sharman claims that the raids were illegal and that the material seized in raids should not be used in pending lawsuit against it in Australia.

Australian federal court ruled already in March that raids were legal under so-called Anton Piller order.

Judges decided that as the material seized in the raids was in custody of a third party (read: not with music industry, who was behind the lawsuit against the company), it is therefor not "insecure or vulnerable in any way" and that "..we do not see this as amounting to substantial injustice".

Next hearing in the case related to the legality of the raids is scheduled for 14th of October and it seems that the case itself, where the Australian music industry's association MIPI has sued Sharman over alleged copyright infringements, is set to continue on 29th of November.

Music industry has taken its first major steps within Europe to clamp down the illegal music sharing over the P2P networks and 459 individuals have been sued across six European countries in raids today. Officials targeted British, Austrian, German, Italian, Danish and French P2P users. Music industry claims that they didn't target against casual downloaders, but instead the users who share (as opposed to download) major amounts of music across P2P networks. Users of Kazaa, eDonkey/eMule and Gnutella were amongst the users raided today.

The attack against individuals users comes after months of warnings from music industry's international organization, IFPI and its local counterparts, such as British BPI. "We are taking this action as a last resort and we are doing it after a very long public awareness campaign," said IFPI chairman Jay Berman. IFPI also stated that according to their statistics, 15 percent of P2P users are responsible of sharing over 75 percent of files available in P2P networks.

Danish P2P users were hit hardest this time -- 174 Danish P2P users were sued today. In Germany and Austria, 100 P2P users were sued in both countries.

The "Big Mommah" of all public broadcasting companies in the world, British BBC, announced today that it is developing its own video codec and plans to release a beta version of it in 2005. Corporation claims that the codec, dubbed as Dirac (named after physicist Paul Dirac), delivers the same video quality that MPEG-2 does but using using half of its bitrate.

Most interesting part of the announcement was about its licensing model; BBC plans to launch the whole project under Mozilla license, which doesn't mean that it has anything to do with the web browser, but it means that all code developed in the project will be free to everybody, forever. BBC also stated that they have gone the extra mile investigating prior art and making sure that there will be no surprise patents from third party companies distrupting the development and licensing the codec. Corporation has also patented several parts of the codec and has given these patents to the project, meaning that those patents can't be used, as per licensing terms state, against anyone using the code, ever.

American mobile phone operator AT&T has launched its own legal online music store, aimed for mobile phones rather than PCs. Well, that is at least what AT&T wishes users to believe -- but it is not as neat as it sounds, but instead the service, powered by Loudeye's existing licensing deals with record labels and Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format, functions as a mobile frontend to a music store.

The tracks are purchased via a phone, but they can't be downloaded to the phone, but have to be downloaded to customer's PC at later stage instead. The idea of fully-functional "mobile iTunes-clone" sounds like something that would find its following, but according to the AT&T's typical-$0.99-per-song-but-buy-via-phone -service's specs, this one doesn't live up to its expectations.

Only relatively unique feature in service is its co-operation with song-recognition service Music ID that recognizes the song playing when it "hears" even just few seconds of the track. So, AT&T is hoping that its users would launch the Music ID service everytime they walk on a street and make the service to recognize the song playing and allow them to purchase the track and download it at home PC later.

After last few years filled with public outcry from consumer associations, end-users, in some instances from governments and obviously also from Philips (who is the patent and trademark owner of the CD), at least one major record label has woken up. Well, not quite, but at least Sony's Japanese music subdiary Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) has announced that it will stop using technical copy-protection mechanisms in audio CDs it sells in Japan.

From 17th of November, all Sony's audio CDs sold in Japan will be free of any technical copy protection mechanism. Sony's official line for the reasons behind the move is that now Japanese consumers have learned important issues about piracy and legality of music copying and also that now the country's legislation is tougher towards piracy than what it was when the copy protection mechanisms were introduced. But all the signs indicate that the real reasoning is simply that Sony doesn't want to anger its consumers -- at least not in its own home market..

Source: The Register