News written by Petteri Pyyny (May, 2004)

Two Hollywood studios, Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, have sued an American online retailer, Technology One, claiming that it violated the court order issued against the DVD ripping products of 321 Studios by selling a version of 321 Studios' DVD X Copy that allows decrypting the CSS encryption found on most commercial DVD-Video discs.

Two separate federal courts, one in New York and one in California, have ruled that 321 Studios must stop selling a so-called "ripper version" of its product DVD X Copy. Company has itself taken steps to fulfill the court requirements and sells only a version of DVD X Copy that doesn't contain the CSS decrypter.

The lawsuit against the retailer seeks a court order that would bar the company selling the ripper-equipped version of the software and also seeks for damages, including the profits from previous sales.

Source: ABC 7 News

Roxio's legal online music service, Napster, has started rapidly expanding to new territories. After launching its service in the UK last week, Napster was launched in Canada this week's Wednesday.

The service's pricing structure is identical in Canada to the services previously launched in the States and in the UK, but obviously adjusted to match the "consumer friendly" price tags in each country. In Canada's case, this means that the optional monthly subscription fee is 9.95 Canadian dollars (appx. 7.31 U.S. dollars or 3.99 UK pounds) that allows unlimited listening of music on-demand. Downloads will cost CDN$1.00 (US$0.73, £0.40) per song. The pricing compared to the American version's pricing of US$9.95 per month or US$0.99 is rather cheap and even cheaper when compared to the well overpriced British version where monthly subscription costs £9.95 (US$17.82) and downloaded tracks cost £1.09 (US$1.95).

Source: LinuxInsider

World's largest fast-food chain, McDonald's, has announced that it will start offering rental DVDs through its restaurants in metropolitan area of Denver.

The DVD rentals are made through a vending machine that charges customer's credit card for the rental. Each rental will cost $1 a day plus local sales tax. The machines will be available in all McDonald's restaurants throughout the Denver area and each one will be open 24 hours a day. Each machine will contain appx. 350 movies and new titles will be added to machines on weekly basis. Some of the machines have already been installed and others will be rolled out during the June. McDonald's has 104 restaurants in the area.

Even though this is an obvious threat to world's largest movie rental chain, Blockbuster, company doesn't seem to be worried. "We're about as concerned as they would be if we announced we were selling hamburgers in our stores," said Randy Hargrove, a spokesman for Blockbuster.

Source: Denver Post

Recording Industry Association of America continues its holy war against the P2P users and has sued yet another 493 P2P network users in the United States.

Latest lawsuit pile puts the total figure of sued individuals close to 3,000 since September, 2003. RIAA has been forced to sue the individual as "John Does" since it lost its court case and couldn't threaten ISPs to hand out personal details of their users without sueing them first.

Organization also said that it has filed 24 lawsuits where it knows the personality of the file-sharer and said that all of those personally named have denied to settle their cases out of court.

Source: MSNBC

One of the Britain's biggest charities, Oxfam, has launched a legal online music store together with British OD2. OD2 is the Britain's largest online music service provider and has partnered with several European portals to create similar joint ventures like the one now created with Oxfam.

The new service, BigNoise.com, will offer downloads ranging from £0.75 to £0.99 (that's appx. $1.34 - $1.77 or €1.12 - €1.48). Out of that, £0.10 (€0.15; $0.18) for each song will be donated to the Oxfam charity. The music library of the service contains approximately 300,000 songs including the music catalogs of all five big record labels. The service is due to launch on 26th of May.

Source: Reuters

FBI has launched a nationwide probe into child porn trafficking over the P2P networks in the United States and so far FBI has investigated over 1,000 cases and have arrested already more than 65 people.

FBI's actions indicate that pedophiles have moved from Net's chat rooms, discussion forums and private web servers to the seemignly anonymous P2P networks. Seemingly because none of the P2P networks have managed to create truly anonymous file sharing service as of yet, which is easy to prove by investigating the lists of individuals who have been sued previously by the RIAA.

The probe, which is a co-operation between various American law enforcement agencies, has resulted to arrests related to distribution of child porn and in some cases sexual abuse of children.

"No one should be able to avoid prosecution for contributing to the abuse and exploitation of the nation’s children," Attorney General John Ashcroft said.

Source: Associated Press via MSN

A phenomenom-in-waiting, Personal Video Recorders, have finally -- after five years in market -- gained significant popularity. The latest stats from In-Stat/MDR reveal that the global sales of PVR units more than tripled in 2003 compared to 2002.

PVR units (sometimes also known as DVR units) are basically just modern video recorders that replace old dusty VHS tapes with big harddrives and store the content in MPEG-2 format to the HDD. Most of the PVR units have a built-in MPEG-2 encoder/decoder and they simply encode the incoming analog signal to MPEG-2 format and store that to the HDD. Some, although still quite rarely, units are designed to work directly with digital TV transmissions and they don't do any further encoding to the video, but simply store the digital TV's MPEG-2 stream as it is to the HDD, thus keeping the broadcast quality intact.

The wave of DVD recorders that incorporate PVR functionality within the device were the major force behind the sales boom. The other significant factor was the rise of satellite TV set-top boxes that included PVR capabilities -- for example the Britain's main digital TV provider, Sky Digital, has persuaded thousands of users to pay slightly more on monthly basis for its Sky+ service that is basically just the set-top box with big hard drive.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded a patent to Apple for its iTunes online music store's interface.

The company most likely hopes to avoid clones of its unique interface to appear on competitors' products, as the legal music service game is heating rapidly all over the world. Apple declined to comment on its granted patents, but company is one of the major IT patent holders nowadays. Even the iTunes service is already protected with several patents, ranging from the above-mentioned interface patent to a patent that covers its ability to stream music over the network to another copy of the iTunes program.

Source: ZDNet

Sony has licensed its music catalog to British online music service Wippit. The deal is already third major record label contract for small British online music company as the company has signed similar deals with BMG and EMI earlier this year.

The deal covers distribution rights in Ireland and the UK for now. Sony has already licensed its content to various other European music services, including the British OD2, and indicates that record labels are willing to bet on Europe's online music growth which is expected to grow rapidly once Roxio's Napster and Apple's iTunes enter into the continent's market.

Source: Reuters via Forbes

A new proposed legislation change, called Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, is about to get a Congress hearing tomorrow. The proposed bill has already made maajor Hollywood studios, record labels and other copyright owners nervous.

The bill, which is sponsored by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va) would force record labels to add labels on CDs that don't comply with strict audio CD standards, because they've been intentionally "broken" in order to make them impossible to read with computers.

Various other consumer-protecting minor proposals are in the bill, but the most significant one is the amendment to the notorious DMCA legislation. The new proposed law text states: "It shall not be a violation of this title to manufacture, distribute, or make noninfringing use of a hardware or software product capable of enabling significant noninfringing use of a copyrighted work."

This would mean that tools that circumvent copy protection, such as DeCSS and similar DVD rippers, would be legal as they assist consumers to enjoy their legal rights to make backups of the content that they own whether it has been copy protected or not.

More information:

FoxNews
Library of Congress

MTV, the world's most popular music TV channel, is expected to partner with MusicNet to provide an online music service later this year.

MTV and its parent company Viacom have previously expressed their desire to enter the online music business, but haven't done so yet. Now, as the business is booming due the success of Apple's iTunes, it seems that MTV -- just like virtually everybody else in the online world -- is ready to capitalize their strong brand in online music market.

MusicNet acts as a business service provider for various online music stores and the company itself is owned by three major record labels and RealNetworks. Its customers include AOL, Real itself and Virgin.

Source: Reuters

Apple has denied the rumors that they've been forced to hike the prices on iTunes songs from the current levels of $0.99 to $1.25. Earlier today, New York Post reported about the upcoming price hikes, stating that "big five" record labels have forced Apple to push up the prices of single downloads in its service by 26 percent.

"These rumors aren't true," said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Sequeira. "We have multiyear agreements with the labels and our prices remain 99 cents a track."

However, many album prices at the service have been pushed up -- originally virtually all albums were sold at $9.99, but nowadays some albums are priced at $16.99, which makes them more expensive than the physical CD equivalents in the United States.

More information:

Reuters via Forbes
NY Post

Virtually all major P2P networks, including Kazaa and the P2P United (a political lobby organization of several P2P networks, including Morpheus and Bearshare), have announced that they will or already are working together with FBI and other law enforcement organizations in order to bust people who use P2P networks to distribute child pornography online.

The discussion about child pornography in P2P networks was launched by five U.S. senators who have urged FTC to investigate P2P networks to see whether those are used as means to distribute child pornography online. P2P companies have been quick to respond to allegations and Kazaa has said that it already works together with FBI to track down people who distribute child porn online. But P2P United's director also said that "We are happy to do more than our fair share, but to call this a P2P-induced problem is dishonest."

Source: TechNewsWorld

Roxio's legal online music service, Napster, is preparing for its anticipated end-of-summer launch in Europe and has announced a partnership deal with UK's largest high street PC store chain, Dixons.

According to their press release, Dixons will promote Napster's service and related products in its UK stores. Dixons' chains in the UK include Currys, The Link and PC World. Napster's software will be pre-installed to all in-house brand computers sold in Dixons' stores. Additionally various Napster branded products, such as CD-R discs, will be sold in stores.

Source: Official press release