News written by Petteri Pyyny (July, 2004)

In rather surprising decision, a Manhattan -based U.S. federal judge Denny Chin, decided against an earlier ruling by Washington D.C. appeals court. Judge Chin decided that Cablevision, an ISP that operates in New York, New Jersey and Conneticut, has to provide personal details of its subscriber to RIAA even before RIAA has sued the individual for copyright infringements.

The earlier decision in December forced RIAA to sue P2P users as "John Does". It meant that RIAA had to drag the P2P users, who it suspected to violate copyright laws, to court before it could even know their names. Before that decision, RIAA was able to use DMCA legislation to force ISPs to hand out personal details of their subscribers, whether RIAA eventually decided to sue them or not.

However, there were some good aspects in recent ruling as well; court recognized that RIAA (and other copyright holders as well, who opt to use DMCA against individual users) had to have solid case against the user before it could force ISP to hand out the identification details of the user.

Source: ZDNet

Motorola, the world's second largest mobile phone manufacturer, has signed a deal with Apple to deliver iTunea compatibility to cell phones.

Under the terms of the deal, Apple will develop a new version of its iTunes player for mobile phones and Motorola will bundle that application to its next generation phones. Users will also be able to transfer files from PC or Mac iTunes to their phones and vice versa -- and the DRM scheme used in iTunes music store is supported by the phone player as well, so all tracks purchased via the music store will be playable on Motorola's new phones as well. Tracks can be transferred over specific connection cable or over standard Bluetooth connections.

Source: VNUNet

British High Court has ruled that selling, advertising, possession for commercial use and even use of PS2 mod chips is illegal in the UK. The ruling was based on UK's implementation of the notorious EUCD legislation that UK implemented to its national legislation, virtually without consumer friendly amendments, back in October 2003. The European Union Copyright Directive legislation makes it illegal to sell or distribute tools that allow circumventing technical copy protection mechanisms.

The ruling was made against a Briton, David Ball, who sold 1,500 Messiah 2 PS2 mod chips in the UK. Mod chips are basically hardware modifications to games consoles that allow playing imported games, game backups, self-made software and, obviously, pirated games. Many Linux distributions and media player tools require mod chips to be installed in order to run the software.

Source: The Register

Dolby has added its patents for the High Efficiency AAC audio encoding format to the MPEG-4 licensing pool, which is controlled by the MPEG LA. The decision means that now companies can add HE AAC (which is also known as AAC Plus) to the technologies they license via MPEG LA. MPEG LA's function is to provide a one-stop licensing shop for all the MPEG audio and video patents.

HE AAC is a more advanced form of AAC audio encoding that is used by various companies, probably most notably by Apple in its iPod audio player. HE AAC has been recently approved by the DVD Forum to be used in DVD-Video disc's "ROM zone", a standardized computer-compatible section found on upcoming DVDs.

Source: The Register

Once again the great, open sourced video decoder FFDSHOW, has been updated to a new version. The new version, FFDSHOW 2004-07-18, contains massive changelog, just as always with FFDSHOW. The changelog is here:

• matrix mixer supports more sample formats (untested)
• VC6 compilation fixed (very likely VC6 support will be dropped after VS.NET 2005 will be released)
• templatized matrix mixer
• DivX 5.2 DirectShow decoder fitler has extremly high merit - raised ffdshow's to be higher by one
• noise shaping and dithering when converting from float to integer samples
• selectable output audio sample format
• optimized mixer matrix multiplication
• warnings fixes, SSE denoise3d compilation disablen on MSVC 6 in release mode, mixer crash fixed
• working on mixer filter
• use libavcodec audio resampling functions
• reserve few bytes at the end of input audio buffer
• subtitle lines split fix, compilation fixes
• working on audio upsampling
• float raw audio samples fix
• mixer order can be changed
• volume filter handles more sample formats
• AVIS audio input (DirectShow) accepts more sample formats
• accept floating point uncompressed audio
• more bit depth conversions
• working on audio sample bit depth conversion
• decss audio input pin (copied from Media Player Classis)
• better handle audio format changes during playback
• check for new sample creation success
• don't trust supplied ac3 channel number info
• merging optimized routines from mplayer's liba52
• luma offset fix by Andy
• clear input buffer when decoding audio using libavcodec
• better keyboard handling in codecs and keys pages
• mmx2 HQ denoise3d works in release more only
• few fixes and mmx2 HQ denoise3d (currently disabled) by Andy
• possibility to create "core" and "addons" instalation packages
• fixed aac decoding, imported faad2 library
• better ac3 support
• working on liba52 integration
• multithreaded encoding using libavcodec
• connect to WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE
• updated mp3lib and postproc
• split long subtitle lines
• updated libavcodec - h.264 decoding fix, support for AVC1 FOURCC - official FOURCC for mpeg4 avc video
• MSS2 support in VFW
• logoaway processes chroma planes¨

Sony plans to extend the reach of its recently launched Connect online music store service to digitally downloaded videos as well.

Sony has the luxury of owning one of the biggest movie studios, Sony Pictures Entertainment, that also produces several TV shows. It is unclear however, whether Sony plans to launch a competitor to Movielink (in which Sony is one of the main partners), or does the company aim to focus the content to portable devices and short movie clips.

The move, which is expected "within next 12 months", is also seen as an attempt to gain some ground in online video distribution before Connect's main rival, iTunes, extends its reach to videos as well.

Source: Financial Times

Samsung and Audible announced today a partnership, which means that Samsung's new digital audio players will support Audible's spoken audio format and Audible's audible.com online store.

At first, the "AudibleReady" label will be added to Samsung's line of HDD-based portable digital audio players. Audible offers a wide variety of audio books, spoken versions of newspapers and variety of other content in spoken form. Buyers of new Samsung devices will get a free trial to Audible's online services.

Source: Press release

Apple's highly popular digital audio player iPod mini will be launched outside the United States on 24th of July. The expected UK retail price for the device is £179 ($332, €268), but Apple has warned that it most likely can't meet the expected high demand until September which might tempt retailers to push the prices higher at least temporarily.

iPod mini is essentially a smaller and cheaper version of the original iPod, with smaller HDD storage space. iPod mini has 4GB storage space, while the top "big" iPod model has 40GB HDD in it. The device is compatible with songs purchased from Apple's iTunes music store that launched in the UK, Germany and France 15th of June.

The global launch of the iPod mini was delayed earlier this year because Hitachi, who makes the mini HDDs for the device, couldn't meet the high demand. The device has been a hit in the States and is expected to become one of the most popular digital appliances in other countries as well.

Source: BBC

Probably the most controversial movie director at the moment, Michael Moore, has told to press that he doesn't have any problem whatsoever with people sharing his latest movie, Fahrenheit 9/11 illegally over the P2P networks.

"I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that," Moore said. "I do well enough already and I made this film because I want the world to change. The more people who see it the better, so I’m happy this is happening."

"Is it wrong for someone who’s bought a film on DVD to let a friend watch it for free? Of course it’s not. It never has been and never will be. I think information, art and ideas should be shared."

It is also interesting to notice that the company distributing Moore's latest movie, Lions Gate Films, seems to share his views on piracy as well, as the company has stated it doesn't oppose the practice of people sharing the movie over the P2P networks for free. Obviously company hasn't released any public press statements about its views as it has to maintain good relations with the MPAA and the other movie industry establisments.

Recording Industry Association of America announced this week that it will add the legal digital download statistics to its "gold" and "platinum" sales certifications.

In near future, gold award will be awarded to a song that has been sold for more than 100,000 times and platinum award for tracks sold for more than 200,000 times. Multi-platinum is awarded to every 200,000th times the song is sold after the first platinum limit is reached. The digital download certifications will be launched in August this year.

Source: News.com

One of the most legendaric computer manufacturers of all time, if not the most legendaric of them all, Commodore, is back. Well, it is not entirely true. There wont be a new Commodore computers available, at least not in foreseeable future, but the Dutch company called Tulip who purchased the Commodore brand back in 1997 after the once-giant computer maker had went bust, plans to launch a line of digital audio players in August that carry the name of Commodore.

The names of the players are straight from the history books (with a modern twist, of course): the most interesting device seems to the e-Vic (as in Vic-20) which has 20GB HDD, 128x64 pixel screen and it supports MP3s, WMAs and WAVs. Other devices are called m-Pet and f-Pet and are based on flash memory and can have storage space of 128MB or 256MB.

Source: The Register