News written by Petteri Pyyny (April, 2005)

The world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, Finnish Nokia, announced yesterday its latest phone, Nokia N91 which takes its aim at Apple's iPod and other portable audio players.

The phone features a 4GB harddrive and a standard stereo headset jack. Additionally the phone includes an integrated wireless LAN adapter, which allows the phone to access Internet via WLAN networks, and allows easy-to-use wireless transfer of audio tracks from desktop computers. The phone can be also synchronized by connecting it to a regular USB 2.0 port.

N91's audio player supports MP3, M4A, AAC and WMA formats and the 4GB HDD is capable of storing upto 12.5 hours of music using the latest audio codecs. Th device is a so-called 3G phone and should be available worldwide by the end of the year. Pricing details were not announced yet.

Nokia's idea is clear -- people are now carrying tons of gadgets with them, typically a PDA, a phone and a portable digital music player. By combining all of these into one unit might prove to be a successful concept.

Guys at Nero sent us a guide for encoding video files for Sony PSP console, using Nero Recode. The guide itself is pretty easy to follow and allows converting virtually all types of video files to H.264 video format that Sony PSP uses as its native video format.

Guide can be found from here:

https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/encode_files_for_psp_nero_recode.cfm

Yesterday we finished one of the last pieces in our server puzzle by transferring our main site, www.afterdawn.com, to our new server cluster. Previously we've already moved most of our other sites, including our discussion forums, to this new server setup.

The new cluster has already proven to be much more reliable and faster than the previous system we used. Obviously transferring such a huge and complex site as ours involves inevitable bugs and hiccups, but all of those seem to be sorted by now. However, we wish that our users notify us via our feedback form (found under "About us" tab) if they find any weird problems with the site.

-Petteri Pyyny
AfterDawn.com

Often better-known as the "mother of all RIAAs", the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers, has extended its on-going holy war against the P2P networks to several new countries. Yesterday, IFPI filed total of 963 lawsuits around the world. Countries where lawsuits were filed included Finland, Japan, Ireland, Netherlands and Iceland.

According to the IFPI, the example that RIAA has set in the U.S. by sueing thousands of individuals, seems to work and it is determined to extend that method to the European and Asian countries now and in the future.

According to several IFPI's local operations, including Finnish ÄKT, the lawsuits were targeted to P2P users who were considered as "heavy file uploaders", people who share thousands, maybe tens of thousands of files via P2P networks. It should be remembered that downloading from P2P networks is perfectly legal in most of the European countries. The lawsuits weren't targeted to any particular P2P network, but instead included users of eMule, eDonkey, Kazaa, BitTorrent, DirectConnect, DC++, etc.

The quick breakdown for each targeted country:

• Austria - 50 criminal and civil cases
• Denmark - appx. 200 cases
• Finland - 28 cases
• France - 60 cases
• Germany - 401 cases
• Iceland - 23 cases (all using Direct Connect or DC++)
• Ireland - 17 civil cases
• Italy - 26 cases
• Japan - 44 cases
• Netherlands - 50 cases
• United Kingdom - 31 cases

Ever since Germany adopted its current draconian copyright legislation, several news stories about software companies moving away from the German market have emerged. However, linking to such material from third party websites has been grey area until now. German district court ruled last week that German website Heise.de has violated country's copyright legislation by linking to SlySoft's website. SlySoft is the maker of AnyDVD, a software product that allows cracking the copyright protection found on most DVD-Video discs, and CloneCD, a tool that allows backing up virtually all of the copy protected audio CDs.

Website defended itself by pointing out to the freedom of speech that is defined in German constitution, but the first-instance district court of Munich I ruled that the protection on intellectual property goes before the freedom of speech. Court also ignored the claims that anyone could have simply entered the software product's name to a search engine and found the product anyway. Apparently, court decided that direct linking made finding the product much easier and thus increased the danger of copyright violations significantly.

Cuban AfterDawn Holdings Inc, the sole owner of the Finnish website AfterDawn.com, announced today its plans to launch the world's first legal, fully DRM-less movie download service.

AfterDawn aims to provide unlimited downloads of DVD-quality movies with a monthly subscription fee of $29.95, thus competing directly against the movie industry heavy-weights such as Blockbuster and Hollywood -backed movie download services such as Movielink. However, AfterDawn's service differs from its competitors in several ways -- downloaded files wont contain any usage restrictions and all files are transferred to users utilizing modern P2P technologies.

"As Cuba's Internet connections aren't suitable for delivering DVD-quality movies to thousands of users directly, we've decided to use BitTorrent network as our main method of delivering the movies, thus cutting down the bandwidth costs by up to 90 percent compared to our competitors. This helps us to deliver the savings directly to our customers," said Jari Ketola, AfterDawn's CTO in a phone interview.

According to AfterDawn's CTO, company had to decide which format they would use with their upcoming service. "After considering our options, we felt that it would serve our customers best if we would deliver the movies using the old, but reliable MPEG-2 video encoding instead of more modern solutions, such as MPEG-4. This also eases the process of transferring the movies to the Net, as the movies don't need any re-encoding when they're transferred from DVD-Video discs to DVD images. Users will also benefit from our solution, because the files can be easily burned to blank DVDR discs and watched on a regular DVD player rather than with a desktop computer", says Mr. Ketola.