Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized

iMesh Pays Out, Changes Business Model

iMesh.com have just paid out US$4.1 million (€3.34 million) in compensation to the US music industry to settle a lawsuit on their P2P software. The iMesh client software was accused of helping internet users to download music illegally, and so record companies pursued them for US$150,000 (€122,400) per song plus legal fees.

iMesh are now operating under Bridgemar Services and have promised to introduce a new, non-infringing, service. No details are forthcoming on what the service might be, though. Their website simply states: “Don’t worry — we are not going anywhere. We have been doing this for a very long time and are very good at what we do. So, we anticipate no gaps in service while we transition to the new model. The new model will launch later this year.”

The company is upbeat about settling the case, however: “iMesh views this as a historic opportunity. We agreed to settle in order to ensure our ability to provide you with more content and better technology than any of our competitors. Under the New iMesh model, which will launch later this year, you will be able to find and share the content you want without fear of being sued.”

There’s the issue: there’s nothing to prevent the RIAA now suing the music sharers and downloaders who used the iMesh service.

Whether iMesh will be successful in relaunching itself as a legitimate P2P service, much like Napster’s moderately successful reinvention, remains to be seen.

iMesh

U2 Album Goes Missing … Turns Up on P2P Networks

U2 have called in the police after a CD featuring unfinished tracks from their forthcoming album was stolen at a photo shoot in France. The new album, their first since 2000, is likely to be called Vertigo, and the tracks on the CD have already started appearing on P2P networks such as Overnet.

Edge said on the U2.com website: “A large slice of two years’ work lifted via a piece of round plastic. It doesn’t seem credible but that’s what’s just happened to us… and it was my CD.” Should have kept an eye on it then.

“This matter is of great concern to us.” said Lucian Grainge, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group UK. “As the missing CD is our property, we’re very keen find it as soon as possible and the French Police are being extremely helpful in this regard.”

Having tracks available, even in unfinished form, so far in advance of the album’s release is likely to tempt many fans who would not normally lift music from P2P networks. However, even though many people will undoubtedly download the tracks using file sharing programs, it is unlikely that this alone will result in lost sales.
If the disk finds its way to a CD pressing plant, then they’ll have a problem.U2.com

CacheLogic Survey: P2P Accounts for 10 Petabytes of Data

CacheLogic, the P2P technology company has conducted a survey of global internet traffic using network monitoring tools to find out more about the size of the file sharing community.

In June, an average of 8 million P2P users were online at any one moment, with 1 petabyte of data available to share.

The growth of broadband means that users are now downloading larger files than before, so movie downloads are becoming a more attractive proposition to those of that inclination. Separately, the OECD has announced that video has just passed music as the most popular download, echoing this. Indeed, BayTSP report that “The Day After Tomorrow” was the top downloaded film of June, and Digital Lifestyles predicts that “Spiderman 2” will be July’s most popular pirate victim.

For some bizarre reason “The Passion of the Christ” was the second most ripped-off film in June – which doesn’t strike me as very Christian.

CacheLogic

Senate Moves to Outlaw P2P Applications

Orrin Hatch, Senate Judiciary Committee chair has moved his focus to P2P applications, claiming that they encourage children and teenagers to infringe copyright.

In a recent statement, he said: “It is illegal and immoral to induce or encourage children to commit crimes. Tragically, some corporations now seem to think that they can legally profit by inducing children to steal. Some think they can legally lure children into breaking the law with false promises of ‘free music.'”

Fairly emotive language. Given that FTP software and email are much more popular ways to distribute potentially infringing content, will legislation curbing those applications be next? Who makes the decision on what is an appropriate program? Clearly the legislation can be misused to stifle the development of legitimate applications and businesses.

The bill is backed by the RIAA and co-sponsored by Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

Hatch has argued that the new bill will not make devices such as iPods and CD recorders illegal – indeed the freedom to make non-infringing copies goes all the way 1984 Sony Betamax case where the US Supreme Court ruled that VCRs and similar copying devices were legal. Hatch asserts that the bill only targets companies that “intentionally induce” consumers to infringe copyrights – but the law is vague enough to allow it to be targeted at many common devices, say P2P groups such as P2P United.

The RIAA regard the legislation as tightly focussed, and RIAA chair and CEO Mitch Bainwol praised it in a statement this week: “This bill places the spotlight squarely on the bad actors who have hijacked a promising technology for illicit means and ignoble profits. Legitimate uses of peer-to-peer are upheld, while those who intentionally lure consumers into breaking the law are held to account. Under this legislation, the path to legitimacy remains clear: Respect the law and block the exchange of works the copyright owner has not authorized.”

The sponsors of this bill are being blinkered into a view that is entirely concerned with the profits of one group – the music industry. The backers of the Induce act are rallying towards just one group at the moment, because that’s where the money is.

What about all of the legitimate applications for P2P software? P2P technology has a promising, legal, future ahead of it if it does not get hobbled by these misinformed people.

Take, for example, the BBC’s Interactive Media Player project. The only way to distribute this content economically is to rely on a P2P network – yet all content will covered by a digital rights management system.

Of course, the bill will only outlaw the production of P2P applications within the US – it has no teeth elsewhere, and will not apply to programs developed abroad. Using a P2P application is not illegal – he will have to outlaw the possession of such a program to have any real effect. And they wouldn’t do that, would they? Don’t bet on it – remember it was Hatch who suggested the development of software to destroy the computers of people who downloaded illegal music files.

More details on BBC iMP

Microsoft Patents Method for Transmitting Data Using the Human Body

Microsoft this week patented a technique describing the “method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body”. Basically, they intend to use live bodies as a data bus for transmitting data to local devices – your watch, for example.

The network requires “a body of a living creature for coupling the first device to the second device and for conducting the electrical signal” in order to operate.The envisaged system is intended to reduce much of the redundancy between the devices you carry around with you today – your PDA, phone and MP3 player all require battery power, plus much of the gear you have on you at any one time has a speaker or a display or its own keyboard. Microsoft want to take out this duplication and distribute it around you, with devices communicating by sending electrical signals, well, there no nice way of putting this: through your living flesh.

I hope they nail down the security on this far tighter than they do on their operating systems because it could could bring a whole new meaning to “port sniffing” if hackers managed to get into it.

I think I’ll stick to Bluetooth for the time being, thank you – at least if I suffer a seizure when my mobile rings, it’s only because it’s Simon chasing an article.

The patent

Copy-protected CD Reaches Top of US Chart

A copy-protected CD has reached the top of the US album charts for the first time. Velvet Revolver’s “Contraband”, published by BMG uses the MediaMax copy protection system from SunnComm.

BMG have stated that they intend to release more protected CDs over the year, but is carefully choosing which ones get the treatment. So far, the label has released 12 DRM-protected disks, with about 2.5 million units out in the wild.

The disk stops PCs ripping the audio part of the disk to MP3s, but has copy-managed WMA format versions of the music on another section of the disk. This of course means that consumers are getting a lower fidelity product because the full capacity of the disk is not used to store the original music. The Windows Media files also tend to be encoded at a lower bit rate than audiophiles usually prefer. Because of the mixed format, these disks are no longer strictly CDs because they don’t adhere to Phillips’ Redbook standard for Compact Disks.

The WMA/copy protection scheme used by MediaMax makes it all but impossible to transfer music you have legally acquired to an iPod, as Apple’s music player will not play Windows Media Files. Given that it’s the most popular music player out there, SunnComm are working with Apple to provide a solution, though this seems to be centred around petitioning Apple to incorporate other formats into the iPod rather than getting their own house in order.

You can of course circumvent the whole copy protection scheme by simply holding down the Shift key when inserting the CD. This technically means that American readers will be breaking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and could end up in prison.

SunnComm

Euro iTunes – The Next Day

There are, I’m told, 700,000 tracks available in iTunes. That certainly does sound like a lot. What are they, though? I must confess, my first few searches came up blank. There I was, yesterday, having just subscribed, thinking “I’m 35. Technologically savvy. iPod owner. Credit card. I AM the physically embodiment of the demographic that iTunes is aimed at.”

But I couldn’t find any of my favourite artists. Later on in the day, my friend Neil happily told me what the problem was: I listen to weird stuff that no-one is going to put in a music store launch.

That’ll be it then. No Autechre. No God Speed You Black Emperor. Certainly no Plaid. Oh well.

But plenty of the Darkness and the Corrs. But where’s The The? Only four tracks from Brian Eno?

Anyway, on with the shopping. I adjusted my expectations that iTunes would offer me every track I’d ever wanted and started to treat it like a mid-sized branch of Fopp.

And suddenly it became a lot better.

Signing up was a little random – I entered my details on no less than three separate occasions during the day, seemingly without a hitch. But after the service was finally happy that it really did have my credit card details, I was off to hit Mastercard for lots of multiples of 79p.

Perhaps Apple would care to explain why British subscribers pay 79p (€1.19) for a track and our European neighbours pay €0.99? Is it a reward because they’re better at football, or is it because British music execs have more expensive lunches to pay for?

Navigating through the iTunes store is incredibly easy – and a handy breadcrumb trail will lead you back down each level, from track to artist to genre to home. You can’t get lost, and this has to be the easiest music store navigation out there. Compare it to MyCokeMusic, which had me punching my TFT before I gave up and wrote the rest of my £10 off.

Celebrity play lists are a great idea – featured artists list a CD’s worth of tracks and they’re right there to buy – though there are only five playlists at the moment, and one of those is from Moby.

And that’s it, really – that’s all you can say about it: it works fantastically well and it’s easy. Click on the track you want and it’s downloaded. Then it’s on your iPod and you’re listening to it on the bus.

I suppose it’s expected with a catalogue this size, but there are a few howlers in the track information – weren’t they given the info directly from the labels, or did some work experience person at Apple US shuffle 70,000 CDs into a PC? Even the most casual scout through the store throws up listing errors frequently – my personal favourite being the David Sylvian track “Taking the Evil”. It is, in fact, called “Taking the Veil”, and is about a completely different thing altogether. Freudian slip?

In short, if your music tastes are similar to 95% of the nation then you’ll get along just fine here – iTunes really is an amazing achievement. If you normally buy your music in a petrol station, then you’ll be laughing. You know who you are, Dido fans.

If you’d had an iPod since day one, then suddenly it all makes sense.

Definitely the best and cheapest (but not by enough) music store out there.

Apple iTunes

OD2 Launch Pay Per Play Jukebox Sonic Selector

OD2 think that streaming music to PCs, rather than downloading tracks, is the way forward: “Most of the music our users listen to on their PCs will be streamed,” Charles Grimsdale, chief executive of the company said.

Consequently, OD2 have launched their Sonic Selector service – allowing customers in France, Germany, Italy and the UK to stream any track from the company’s 350,000 track catalogue. As the streams are Windows Media encoded, you’ll need you’ll need Version 9 of Microsoft’s player.

OD2 already offered a similar feature on their download sites such as the shudder-inducing MyCokeMusic, where users can stream some tracks for one of their credits, as opposed to buying the track for 99 credits. Napster also offer a streaming service, but only with their UK£9.99 (€15) subscription.

OD2 evidently hope that a pay-as-you-go system will entice more users to buy music in a market where increased competition every day means that punters are less willing to lock themselves into a particular vendor with a subscription: “The pay-as-you-go system also allows the users to spend as little or as much as they wish each month, without the burden of a fixed rate subscription” commented Grimsdale.

Sonic Selector is in fact a proprietary plug in for Windows Media Player, created by OD2, but is a little more interesting that just a streaming gadget. Every day, the Sonic Selector team pick through new releases, chart hits and exclusives to offer their recommended picks, with featured artists in key genres. If you really like a track, then you can buy it and keep it.

Sonic Selector marks another small shift to consumers not owning music, instead paying for each play – it’ll be interesting to see how iTunes reacts to this at launch.

Sonic Selector

RIAA Is Lobbying For DAB Radio Copy Protection

The Recording Industry Association of America is lobbying for digital rights management features to be incorporated in digital radio, and Mitch Bainwol, CEO, intends to make the issue the focus of the forthcoming Congressional Hearing on Digital Copyrights on 16th June.

“We’re in favour of HD radio,” Bainwol said, referring to Digital Radio, “It offers great benefits for consumers and everyone involved, but we’re not blind to several concerns. Someone could cherry-pick songs off a broadcast and fill up a personal library and then post it on Kazaa.”

Therefore, to prevent this evil, the RIAA are keen to have a copy protection scheme in place to prevent digital copies of digital radio broadcasts. The Consumer Association are not pleased, however.

Many are concerned that the RIAA are trying to removing another freedom from the consumer. Besides, no DRM scheme will currently stop people from making high quality analogue copies of music and then re-digitising them. The RIAA, in it’s fervour to prevent perfect digital copies of music seem to have forgotten one thing: digital radio is compressed, it’s not possible to create a “perfect” copy. On top of this the act recompressing to make an MP3 or Windows Media file, transcoding, generally makes audio and video quality even worse. A digital radio copy will never have the same quality as a CD recording.

The technology behind digital radio broadcasting in the US comes from iBiquity, who are obviously willing to build in a copy protection scheme if it brings them more revenue, but even they can’t see the point … at the moment: “If there’s a consensus among the groups, we’re willing to go along,” said Jeff Jury, COO of the Baltimore-based company, “But given the state of the technology, it’s premature to worry about this.”

By imposing a DRM system on digital radio, the RIAA can remove the consumer’s ability to time shift or archive radio programmes. Also, it some feel that it marks a shift towards preventing consumers owning music, instead they will have to rent it, paying time and again to hear tracks.

Michael Petricone, technology vice president at the Consumer Electronics Association commented: “Our position on this is that there has been no demonstration that there’s a problem. It’s not clear what the RIAA is talking about. Do they want a broadcast flag or some limit on recording material? We regard a consumer’s ability to record off the radio as a pretty fundamental right. They’ve sold a half-million digital radios in Great Britain over the past five years, and this problem hasn’t come up. It’s premature to ask the FCC for restrictions on devices for a problem that might not exist.”

RIAA

Mobile Peer to Peer File Sharing with PDAs

Simedia, a small software publisher in Bucharest, has ported a clone of Apple’s Rendezvous application to PocketPC and teamed it with a web server. The result? A mobile P2P file sharing program.

The application discovers other devices on the same WiFi network and allows people to share files and documents. And of course, music.

Simedia themselves give various uses for the application, including using it to “share your music collection with passers-by or listen to their collections whilst sharing a ride on the bus”. Features like these will no doubt have music execs jumping out of windows, whilst RIAA lawyers will be lighting cigars with $100 bills.

The software will be available from 16 June in two versions: a free version, and a paid version with corporate functionality.

Simedia already have a history for off-beat PDA products – they are well known for their SounderCover application which plays background noises (trains, the dentist, a errr, circus parade) over phone calls for those wishing to deceive spouses and employers that they somewhere different to their real location.

Simedia