News written by Petteri Pyyny (September, 2004)

MPA's (MPA is the movie studios' international association, in which, the American MPAA is also member of) Icelandic arm, called SMAIS, has raided 12 major P2P users in the small Nordic country. According to SMAIS's press release, some of the raided users had over 2.5 terabytes (1T == 1,024 gigabytes) of pirated material in their possession when busted.

Iceland, a country with population of just over 290,000, has the highest percentage of Net-connected households in the world -- 79% of homes are connected to the Internet. But as isolated as the country is, the P2P raids seem to have sent immediate shockwaves across the country: according to SMAIS's announcement, country's total Internet traffic dropped by a whopping 40 percent after the raids.

In its raids, movie industry targeted only users using extremely popular DC++/Direct Connect file sharing network. Users' computers and various DVD-R/CD-R media were confiscated in the raids.

More information:

The Register
SMAIS

Last night our servers served the 25,000,000th software download ever made from our site, marking yet another milestone in our site's history. The last major software download milestone, of 20 million downloads, was achieved back in April this year, so it took just over five months to serve yet another five million downloads to our users.

We are especially proud of the achievement considering that our software selection is strictly focused on audio and video tools. Obviously this couldn't have happened without our large, loyal userbase who get their software updates via our site and obviously the developers of these tools who have allowed distribution of their products via third party sites.

-Petteri Pyyny
AfterDawn Ltd

British consumer group Consumers' Association has raised its voice over the iTunes' pricing in the United Kingdom. Most notably, its anger is aimed towards the different pricing model Apple uses for its online music store in European countries. In other European countries where iTunes operates (France, Germany), a downloaded song from iTunes costs €0.99 -- equivalent of appx. £0.67 -- while Brits pay £0.79 per song.

Consumers' Association says that iTunes pricing model could be against European Union rules and asks Apple to stop "ripping off" British consumers. But Apple defended its UK pricing by stating that "underlying economic model in each country has an impact on how we price our track downloads. ... We believe the real comparison to be made is with the price of other track downloads in the UK."

Then again, CD and DVD prices vary wildly between countries -- just like average salaries, rental prices, car prices, etc do.

Source: BBC

Internet giant Yahoo! extended its reach in Net's growing multimedia market today when it announced the deal to acquire media player software house MusicMatch. The deal also puts Yahoo competing directly with likes of Apple and Microsoft in rapidly-growing legal online music business, as MusicMatch is one of the few large media player developers who have integrated their own online music store into a successful media player software, in similar fashion to the Apple's iTunes.

MusicMatch's main product is the MusicMatch Jukebox media player and the player works also as the frontend to MusicMatch's online music store that boasts a selection of 700,000 songs for $0.99 a piece. It also provides subscription service, similar to that offered by a rival online music store, Napster, for $8 a month and has already 225,000 subscribers.

Yahoo agreed to pay $160 million for the privately held MusicMatch and pays the full amount in cash. Several analysts welcomed the Yahoo's move and company's stock price in Nasdaq surged more than 5 percent after the announcement.

Source: Forbes

Microsoft hasn't buried its old TV ambitions, but has instead revamped the whole concept into something that it calls as IPTV. Company's idea is to provide a service for telecom companies where they could offer their DSL (and other types of broadband services, naturally, even though cable companies aren't probably too interested of the concept..) subscribers a set-top box that would connect to their TVs and broadband Net connection instead of traditional cable network, and stream TV content over the IP networks.

Microsoft just announced a deal with Telecom Italy to run trials of the IPTV in Italy to selected group of Telecom Italy's customers. Thomson has developed the set-top boxes used in the service and will start distributing the units under two of its brand names -- Thomson and RCA. Boxes support variety of video codecs, including the traditional MPEG-2 alongside with Microsoft's own WMV9 and MPEG-4 (advanced profile and H-264).

Several technology companies, led by group of mobile phone manufacturers, including Nokia and Motorola, have teamed up to develop standards for upcoming mobile TV. Several companies have already announced their phones that support European DVB-T's mobile extension, DVB-H, but now companies try to find standards for other problems surrounding the inevitable adoption of TV-on-cell-phone concept.

Several phone manufacturers and operators hope that once so-called third generation mobile phone networks develop, the video and simulcasted TV content will become one of the driving forces behind the consumers' acceptance for the new technology. First commercial, large-scale mobile phone TV services are about to start in Japan this year and after years of testing, they are aimed to launch in Europe in 2005 as well.

Source: InfoSync World

Napster announced yesterday that it is testing a new subscription service model that would add portable devices to the list of its subscription service's supported devices. The idea is basically to rent unlimited number of tracks for users with a monthly fee.

Napster's current subscription model allows users to download unlimited number of music tracks to their desktop PC and those tracks are playable as long as the user pays his/her monthly subscription fee of $9.95. The nag is that those tracks can't be burned to a CD or transferred to any other device -- for that privilege each song has to be purchased separately as a permanent download. But the new Napster To Go service allows users to transfer those subscription-tied files to their portable audio players as well, as long as the device supports Microsoft's new DRM scheme, dubbed as Janus -- and only two devices support it so far.

The service is planned to go live later this year and will costs $14.95 a month.

Source: Internet Week

United States' Copyright Office has finished a new draft version of so-called Induce Act legislation proposal, which tries to address some of the problems with the original proposal, but according to various parties, seems to fail as miserabely as its predecessor.

Induce Act is basically a proposal for a new law in United States that would make P2P networks illegal by making it illegal to "induce" a person to violate copyright legislation. The new version, which is not the version ultimately going to be proposed as a new legislation, but rather a mid-way-through draft version, adds a definition for "inducing": "affirmative, overt acts that are reasonably expected to cause or persuade another person or persons". By adding this wording, Copyright Office tries to shrug off the criticism that the original version would have outlawed iPod and other digital players that support non-DRM file formats, such as MP3, and thus "induce" people to break the copyright laws.

But according to ISPs, such as Verizon, the draft of the proposal still has major flaws -- in one section, the text states that companies who "actively interfere" with a copyright owner's efforts to identify pirates could be sued. This could mean that if RIAA asks an ISP to hand over all of the personal details of all of its users, without giving further reason for doing so, the ISP could be sued for "interfering" RIAA's P2P jihad.