News written by Petteri Pyyny (April, 2004)

A new P2P boom has began to spread on the super-fast Internet2, the research network used by several universities around the world. The network can't be accessed directly by any of the regular ISPs, but is still available for most of the students who have broader Net access rights on universities with Internet2 connections.

The new form P2P seems to be growing around the mega-popular DC++ P2P software that is widely used in "traditional Internet" as well, but the difference is that all of the users are connecting to a hub that is located within the Internet2 -- a restricted zone from "outsiders", people who can access only the good old Net. Transfer speeds can, and often will, reach to levels where the HDD speed is the limiting factor, not the Net connection.

More information:

i2hub.com
News.com

Much hyped promotional deal between Pepsi and Apple that included 100 million free iTunes download codes hidden in Pepsi bottle caps seems to have failed rather miserabely. The promotional deal ends tomorrow and according to Apple, only 5 million free songs have been redeemed.

"We had hoped the redemptions would have been higher," said Katie Cotton, Apple's vice president of worldwide corporate communications. But she said that the promotion introduced iTunes to millions of new potential customers. Apple also announced that since its May, 2003 launch it has now sold over 70 million songs through its service and that figure excludes the 5 million songs from the Pepsi promo. They're now selling 2.7 million songs a week, a rate that indicates an annual sales of 140 million in the weekly sales figures don't change.

Apple has also announced a smaller giveaway together with Ben & Jerry's, one of the world's largest ice-cream makers. Ben & Jerry's will give 50,000 iTunes songs for customers who pledge to vote in the upcoming American presidential elections.

Source: News.com

Apple released a new major version of its popular iTunes software that allows purchases via iTMS music store, aiming to change the authentication method of iTunes' songs that was broken previously by hackers who wished to incorporate iTunes support to various applications. Now, just 24 hours after the release of new version, v4.5, the new authentication scheme seems to be cracked again.

The library, libopendaap, allows connecting to iTunes shares and streaming audio files and by using that library, developers can easily add a support for such features in their own tools. Legality of such library is another thing, but so far the site that hosts the files in Australia hasn't been harrassed by Apple.

Source: craz.net

TurboLinux, a Linux distribution which is very popular in Asia, has announced that their latest version of the operating system distribution, TurboLinux 10F, will support streaming of Microsoft's Windows Media audio and video formats. Company will pay license fees for the technology to Microsoft.

TurboLinux is media-centric in other aspects as well, it includes CyberLink's PowerDVD for Linux and also supports Apple's iPod players natively.

Product will be available in Japan on May 28th and will cost $149.

Source: TurboLinux press release

According to the latest RIAA survey, the DVD-Audio format seems to be gaining momentum among the American consumers, beating the competing high-quality audio format, SACD, with five times higher sales figures.

According to the survey, DVD-Audio's market share of all purchased music in the United States was 2.7 percent, compared to 0.5 percent market share for SACD. DVD-Audio is gaining popularity for various reasons, but most notably for its compatibility with DVD-Video players (although the higher audio quality is only achieved with "DVD Multi" players that support DVD-Audio natively) and with the fact that most DVD-Audio discs sold nowadays contain extras, such as music videos, interviews and artist commentaries.

Source: HighFidelityReview.com

Just wanted to mention that we launched today one of the most requested new features to our site. Now all of our registered users can review the software items that can be found from our site. Eventually we will phase out our own ratings for tools and instead use the user reviews as the way to rate the tools listed on our site. Or if you prefer not to say anything, you can still use the feature to submit your ratings for each tool (range of 1 to 5).

We encourage all of our users to contribute and review as many tools as possible. And try to be objective :-)

-Petteri Pyyny

International piracy crackdown operation, codenamed Operation Fastlink, was launched yesterday in several countries including United States, Sweden, Germany, Israel, Hungary, Denmark and France. The operation was aimed against major piracy groups, including Fairlight, APC and Project X.

Over 120 searches were executed in 11 countries and over 100 individuals have been identified and over 200 computers have been seized by the investigation to date. The groups that were targeted were amongst the major release groups (i.e. the teams that actually break the copy protections in software items in first place, get the screener copies of movies and make DVDR releases out of them, etc) of pirated computer games, software and movies. Computer seizures have included 30 private FTP servers.

Even though the P2P networks have made pirated software items more accessible to general public, the role of piracy groups hasn't changed over the last 20 years and they are still the original sources of most pirated material in the world that eventually finds its way from private FTP servers and IRC channels to public P2P networks.

Source: United States Department of Justice

Research company Ipsos-Insight's latest digital music behavior study dubbed as TEMPO found that American P2P users are getting more and more excited about movies and music videos than previously. According to the study, in the last quarter of 2003, 21 percent of American downloaders aged 12 years or more had downloaded at least one full-length movie from the Net.

The study, which is concluded quarterly, found that age group of 18-to-24 are, rather unsurprisingly, most interested in downloading movies -- 37 percent of them had downloaded a movie during the survey period of three months.

The movie industry has somewhat predicted the trend that is getting more and more popular as the people's available storage space and Net connection speeds improve. The industry has set up various Net-only distribution channels in the States, most notably the MovieLink service and hopes to avoid the same kind of situation that has faced the music industry. The music industry seems unable to find a decent source of income to replace the falling CD sales figures.

Source: mi2n

Recording Industry Association of America has announced that they have withdrawn their amnesty offer for P2P pirates who confess their "sins".

RIAA announced the amnesty offer back in September, 2003. The deal offered an amnesty from RIAA's prosecution if P2P pirates confessed to the RIAA their copyright infringements and also signed a contract where they promised not to participate in illegal file sharing ever again. However, the offer raised quite lot criticism from various organizations, namely from the EFF, as it didn't grant a full amnesty -- individual record labels were still allowed to sue the person who signed an amnesty deal even that the RIAA itself wouldn't sue them. Organization was also sued in California over the amnesty offer -- California resident sued the organization, claiming that the offer consituted as a fraudulent business practice as RIAA can't have powers where it could offer an actual amnesty in the courtrooms for people who signed amnesty contracts.

"The RIAA has concluded that the program is no longer necessary or appropriate, and has voluntarily withdrawn it," the RIAA's lawyers told. According to the RIAA, 1108 people opted for the amnesty deal and it plans to honor their contracts.

One of the most anticipated milestones in our site's life cycle has been reached, when the 100,000th user registered to our site today. Since we remove inactive user accounts on a regular basis, we actually do have one hundred thousand active users on our site!

As we are preparing for our 5th anniversary at AfterDawn.com, we would like to take the opportonity to thank loyal users for encouraging us to continue developing and updating our site on a daily basis. Hopefully we will be able to reach the 200,000 user milestone soon!

If you haven't got one yet, you can easily create yourself a free AfterDawn.com account. In addition to allowing you to comment on all of these fabulous news items, you can use your account to post to our forums, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and access all the software items on our site!

Thank you very much,

-Petteri Pyyny
AfterDawn.com

Music and movie industry, namely Vivendi's two subsdiaries Universal Music Group and Vivendi Universal Entertainment, have developed an open source software called Automated Copyright Notice System (or ACNS) that should allow administrators of campus networks to better monitor and restrict their traffic. The first ACNS system will be implemented at University of California at Los Angeles which has one of the largest number of students in the United States.

The system basically tries to automate the DMCA (American copyright legislation) process -- the ACNS-compliant DMCA complaint notifications will contain XML tags that will automatically launch the ACNS process, using network admins parameters and possibly blocking the infringing IP address from using P2P services or the whole network. For universities and other large organizations the system is tempting as according to the DMCA legislation they have to act within a rather short period of time -- and if they fail to do so, they're open to litigation themselves as well.

It is highly likely that the system will raise some serious privacy concerns and also "false positives", if the network admins simply allow the software to block users from the Net without bothering to check whether they did something wrong or not. Imagine spam emails with ACNS tags...

Sony and TOPPAN PRINTING have announced that they've managed to develop a Blu-Ray -compliant optical disc made out of paper. Companies plan to announce specific details at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference later this month.

The disc structure is 51 percent made out of paper and thus allows, according to TOPPAN, "high level of artistic label printing" and also is very easy to destroy as it can be cut exactly like normal, although slightly thicker, paper. A Blu-Ray disc can hold appx. 25 gigabytes on a single layer, single-sided disc and the format has been available already for over a year now. The format is backed by the major consumer electronics companies, but faces stiff competition from other emerging optical disc standards that also utilize blue-laser technology rather than the more traditional red laser technology used in CDs and DVDs.

Source: JCN Network

The mother of all publicly owned broadcasters, the British BBC, is planning and experimenting with the idea of offering their radio shows as downloadable MP3 files. BBC has so far offered an access to its shows via corporation's own streaming audio software that allowed listening upto a week old shows over the Net.

The first shows that BBC has set available in MP3 format are a series of lectures by a Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka -- not exactly something that you would call a smash hit among the general audience, but a sign that the BBC is serious about the online distribution. It is, however, very unclear whether the music industry allows BBC to start offering any concerts, etc in MP3 format -- not to mention the fact that BBC is planning to offer the content for free.

Source: DMEurope

Loudeye, a long-time digital music company, has set up a new service called IndieSource that basically acts as a middle-man between indie record labels and online music stores, such as íTunes. The demand is clear -- quarter of American music sales are for indie labels' artists and currently all of the online music stores have focused their attention to five major record labels, mostly ignoring the niche players. Already several indie labels have signed up to Loudeye's service and company seems to be optimistic about its outlook.

To ensure its position in upcoming global wave of online music services (iTunes and other services are mostly available to U.S. only), Loudeye also signed a contract with Indian company called Saregama that represents over half of India's recorded music. Under the terms of contract, Loudeye has rights to distribute Saregama's music to online music stores around the world.

Source: News.com

Man from Illinnois, U.S. has pleaded guilty to copyright infringement in Los Angeles court yesterday in so-called Oscar screener case. Russel Sprague, 51, distributed over 200 pirated movie copies, that he had made from screener tapes and DVDs, over the Internet. He got most of his movies from his friend, former actor Carmine Caridi.

The case was brought against these two men in January after copies of four movies sent out to Academy members as screener tapes were traced back to Caridi. Caridi stated that he didn't have any idea that Sprague intended to make copies of the movies, but claims instead that he thought Sprague was simply a big-time movie fan. Charges against Caridi were dropped, but he was kicked out of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that hands out the annual Oscars.

Screeners are pre-release video or DVD copies of new movies that are sent out to press, movie reviewers, rental chains and people who are eligible to vote for Oscars and other movie industry awards.

Source: Guardian

RCA has announced that it will start shipping DVD players in the United States that will automatically censor offensive language, nudity, violence and other "offensive" content from DVDs that are played with the device. Retail giants Wal-Mart and Kmart will sell the players for $79.

Technology is based on content censoring technology developed by an American company called Clearplay. They've developed a database that contains time/frame database of over 500 movies and flags that mark the offensive material for each of the DVD in the database. The player will recognize the movie and automatically skip or "bleep" over offensive material when played. It is not known whether the devices are capable of updating their movie databases via Net connection or by other means in order to censor the new movies as well.

Clearplay -- as well as several other censoring technology companies -- has been sued by major Hollywood studios and directors. Directors say that such methods where a device alters a movie that they've created, without director's permission, violates against their intellectual property rights and destroys the artistic vision the director has created to the movie. It is obviously time to ask whether it would make sense not to purchase movies that have rating other than G (general audiences) in the first place if the buyer is not prepared to see anything other than "G" rated material.

Apple has sent a DMCA camplaint to SourceForge.net, a very popular open source development site, asking the site to remove immediately the PlayFair software from their site.

PlayFair, as we reported couple of days ago, uses a so-called "analog hole" in order to make DRM-free copies of purchased iTunes tracks.

Apple complained to SourceForge that the software was in violation of DMCA's section 1201(a)(2) that makes it illegal to distribute tools that allow circumventing copy protection mechanism.

Source: Slashdot

Taiwan's government-sponsored digital video standard, FVD (forward versatile disc), has been released officially today by the country's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI).

The new format will add more confusion to the already crowded digital video standard jungle. The specifications of the new disc use traditional red laser, just like CDs and DVDs do, and the two released formats will feature storage space of 6GB for single-layer disc and 11GB for a dual-layer disc. Its difficult to understand what the format tries to achieve, as China has already released their blue laser -based EVD specs, DVD Forum is trying to figure out final pieces in their upcoming HD-DVD puzzle and Blu-Ray is already available in various markets as a blue laser product with storage capacity of 25GB and more. As a comparison, traditional single-layer DVDs hold 4.38GB of data, only appx. 1.6GB less than the Taiwanese standard does.

However, ITRI claims that it has a support of Microsoft for its standard and plans to roll out FVD-based players and other products to store shelves by the end of this year.

More information: Read more...