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Finally, a Fair Fight with Big Music
Telecom giant Verizon is battling the industry's bid to make it name a file-sharing subscriber. It's also defending your right to privacy
On July 24, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) made an unprecedented request of Verizon Communications (VZ ). The music industry's trade association served the telecom with a subpoena, seeking the identity of a Verizon subscriber who had allegedly illegally traded digital songs by artists including Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, and "boy band" N'Sync. The RIAA didn't specify why it wanted to know who the user was or what it would do with the information.
Perhaps Verizon's "John Doe" should be charged with bad taste in music -- but not with anything else. Verizon refused to comply with the subpoena, asking instead that the RIAA let a judge decide if there was enough proof of illicit activity to warrant handing over the subscriber's personal information.
The RIAA, in turn, claimed that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the very fact that it had suspicion of illegal activity should be enough to have the subscriber's identity unmasked. In August, it filed a motion to compel Verizon to comply with its subpoena. This week, legal wrangling moved into high gear as both sides filed court briefs. The oral arguments could be heard later this month.
SHARP LAWYERS. What does this have to do with your privacy? After all, you're a law-abiding citizen, right? The answer is everything. At the heart of the battle between the RIAA and Verizon is the right to be anonymous online. If the RIAA wins this legal skirmish, as it has so many others over the last three years, the Net will fundamentally change. It will be less free, less innovative, and less private.
The good news is that, unlike past legal battles, the RIAA is picking on someone its own size. The defendant isn't some underfunded, inexperienced dot-com but a telecommunications giant. And the outcome will affect all ISPs, from AOL (AOL ) and EarthLink (ELNK ) to SBC (SBC ) and AT&T (T ). That means sharp lawyers will be fighting hard to ensure that copyright holders -- or anyone else -- aren't given access to identifying information without a judge's approval.
Technically, the ISPs appear to have a strong case. Most copyrighted songs are traded over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which means that files are swapped directly from one user's hard drive to another's. This is important because the infringing material is not located on the ISP's network but on the user's PC. The ISPs claim that it's not their job -- or their place -- to police what files customers have on their private hard drives.
WHERE'S THE PROOF? In a Sept. 10 "friend of the court" brief filed by the U.S. Internet Industry Assn., the ISPs argue that "what the RIAA is really seeking, at the end of the day, is to shift the burden of copyright enforcement from its own members -- who apparently would prefer not to alienate potential customers by suing them outright -- to an ISP that does nothing more than provide an Internet connection to the customer."
The case also has a constitutional dimension. The RIAA claims that federal law requires ISPs to answer subpoenas based on its allegations of copyright infringement. But why should an Internet user's anonymity be unmasked without any proof of misconduct? In defamation and trademark-infringement cases, a judge is asked to weigh the evidence of illegal activity against the constitutionally protected right to anonymous speech.
"The RIAA alleging copyright infringement and evidence of copyright infringement are two different things," says Megan Gray, a Washington (D.C.) privacy attorney who filed a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of an alliance of privacy advocate groups. "We just want to make sure that somebody other than the RIAA makes decisions about a constitutional right to anonymous speech."
BOT SQUAD. Moreover, the ease with which the RIAA can generate subpoenas worries privacy advocates. Under the DMCA's provision that allows copyright holders to require ISPs to remove allegedly infringing material from their networks, the RIAA and sister organization, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), have automated the process.
The two organizations use software called "bots" that speed across the information superhighway, reviewing all available file names. If the bot finds a suspicious title, like "Beatles" or even "Beetles," they mark the location and automatically generate form notices that are sent to ISPs. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the MPAA sent 54,000 bot-generated letters last year. That number is expected to grow to between 80,000 and 100,000 in 2002.
The bots' efficiency puts individual privacy at stake. After all, the invasion of privacy is supposed to be overseen by the judicial system, not by a bot. Moreover, like humans, bots make mistakes. Typos often exist in IP addresses, the string of numbers that identify a computer hooked up to the Internet. And the bot can't identify who was using a computer, only where the computer is located.
So, if a 13-year-old uses his parent's computer for illegal music-sharing, the family could face losing its Net access. "Based on what may be a computer-generated whim, the RIAA wants us to violate subscriber agreements and terminate access," says David McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Assn.
CRUSHING P2P. To be fair, the RIAA's goal isn't simply trying to unmask little people, like you and me, for downloading a song or two from friends. Rather, music insiders say the RIAA's strategy is the same as it was in the Napster case: to crack down on the nexus of illegal file-trading services, weakening them to such a degree that they're rendered useless. In a peer-to-peer network, the nexus are the "supernodes," computers with fast bandwidth that act as a dynamic index of who has what songs, much the way Napster's central servers did.
The RIAA and the music labels believe that if they can fry the big fish -- or at least scare them into not supporting the P2P networks -- resilient services such as KaZaA and Morpheus will share Napster's fate. More important, it hopes that crushing P2P file-trading will stem declining music CD sales. On Aug. 26, the RIAA reported a 7% drop in music shipments for the first six months of 2002. That's on top of a 5.3% falloff in 2001.
Copyright violators shouldn't be protected. Nor should music thieves hide behind the right to anonymous speech to protect their illegal activity. But the RIAA and all other copyright holders cannot be allowed to make an end run around the constitutionally protected right to free and open speech. If the recording industry has a valid claim, it should have no fear of going before a judge to make its case. That would protect everyone's privacy. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2002/tc20020912_9326.htm
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Sentinel-thanks-good info!!-beats the banter on RB/
Convergence advances on view at Intel's developer shindig
Margot Suydam, Technology Editor -- CommVerge, 9/11/2002
Attendees at this week’s Intel Developer Forum in San Jose are enjoying several sneak previews relating to mobile devices, including not only hardware and software building blocks but also end-user product concepts.
For its part, the host of the party introduced a trio of technologies for its StrataFlash and XScale product lines: Wireless MMX technology, Persistent Storage Manager, and Flash Data Integrator. The overall aim, Intel says, is to bring the richness of PC applications to wireless and handheld products that use the Intel Personal Internet Client Architecture (PCA).
Wireless MMX technology is a set of multimedia instructions enabling developers to bring a 64-bit, parallel, multimedia architecture to future processors based on the Intel XScale architecture. According to the company, this allows PC application developers already familiar with Intel's PC-centric MMX technology to easily port their multimedia-rich software to PCA.
And for those creating applications specifically for the wireless and handheld market segments, MMX provides a general-purpose set of multimedia instructions that will help product teams deliver advanced multimedia and security applications such as 2D and 3D gaming, MPEG-4 streaming video, wireless encryption/decryption, voice recognition, and digital editing.
Such applications place significant demands on memory and storage resources in handheld devices. So to help flash subsystems support these applications, Intel has delivered the first memory subsystem for Intel PCA with the latest versions of its Persistent Storage Manager (PSM) and Flash Data Integrator (FDI) software.
Optimized for Intel's StrataFlash memory, PSM and FDI allow wireless applications to run directly out of flash memory via a process called "execute-in-place," which uses less power, improves performance, and protects against data loss, the company says.
Meanwhile, hardware and software developers are using the IDF stage to spotlight offerings that run the gamut from enabling technologies to product-development efforts.
For example, Silicon Wave, which supplies silicon for wireless PANs (personal area networks), announced that it is working with Intel to develop technology that enables the simultaneous operation of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b) in notebook PCs. Silicon Wave's Bluetooth implementation will be based on its SiW1700 series chipset, which is qualified under version 1.1 of the Bluetooth specification.
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are complementary wireless technologies that share the same 2.4-GHz ISM band; simultaneous operation of the two is tricky because of interference issues (for background, see "Ruining interference ,"April2002). Silicon Wave's coexistence effort aims to ensure that end users experience optimal data throughput, range, and responsiveness on wireless LANs while maintaining connectivity with other Bluetooth-enabled PCs or peripherals such as phones, keyboards, mice, printers, PDAs, cameras, and smartphones.
Meanwhile, wireless delivery of applications to mobile devices is a hot-button issue these days, and Insignia Solutions used the show to demonstrate its Insignia Secure System Provisioning. The system uses Java technology to enable wireless operators to not only upgrade the system software on their subscriber’s handsets but also send new capabilities over the air. This enables wireless operators to solve customer-care issues with firmware-level updates and to support new gaming, rich-media, and messaging services.
Turning to video applications, SONICblue announced that it is working with Intel to develop the ReplayTV Portable Video Player (PVP). Combining Intel's XScale processors with SONICblue's ReplayTV PVR (personal video recorder) platform, the pocket-sized device will allow users to watch time-shifted television programs transferred from a home ReplayTV unit, as well as play video, audio, and photos transferred from a PC.
According to the companies, Intel will provide XScale processors, advanced video codecs developed by its Emerging Platforms Lab, and a reference implementation of a PVP device. SONICblue will contribute its digital-entertainment knowledge to the device, which will use a hard disk for storage.
http://www.e-insite.net/commvergemag/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA243485&pubdate=9/1...
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Fonix Natural User Speech Interface Supports New Intel Wireless MMX Media Enhancement Technology
New Instruction Set for Intel XScale(TM) Processors Increases Multimedia Performance on Mobile Devices; Technology Enhances Fonix Speech Technologies
Wednesday September 11, 1:35 pm ET
SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 11, 2002-- Fonix® Corporation (OTCBB:FONX - News), a leading provider of natural-user interface technology, today announced its support for Intel's new XScale(TM) technology with Wireless MMX(TM) instructions, a major advancement in mobile computing technology. Via Intel's new technology, announced September 10th at the Fall Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, California, Fonix products for mobile devices will achieve a new level of performance and convenience.
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Fonix speech technologies and solutions provide a natural human speech interface for a broad range of applications used with PDAs, smartphones, handheld and notebook PCs, and other wireless-enabled mobile products. Because it uses less power while increasing data processing efficiency, Intel® XScale(TM) technology with Wireless MMX will enable Fonix products to increase their user-interface capabilities in both ASR and TTS.
"The new Wireless MMX instructions for Intel® XScale(TM) processors provides enhanced capabilities to Fonix speech interface solutions," said Lynn Shepherd, Vice President of Product Development for Fonix's Mobile and Wireless products. "Intel's Wireless MMX instructions will benefit users by allowing much larger vocabularies to be used for speech recognition providing a more natural speech interface, so that users can speak to their wireless and mobile devices using natural phrases and sentences."
Leading Embedded Technology
Fonix speech-enabled applications and services meet the unique needs of mobile and wireless devices in a number of diverse products and markets. Fonix speech interface solutions, a leader in speech technology for embedded platforms, provides a high quality speech interface in the smallest footprint possible. Fonix DECtalk®, another award-winning speech technology, provides the best human sounding voice with the highest level of speech intelligibility available in the industry for memory sensitive applications. DECtalk is the smallest, fully-featured, speech synthesizer offered in the world.
Intel® XScale(TM) processors will, in the future, incorporate Wireless MMX(TM) technology to enhance a wide range of multimedia applications such as those offered by Fonix. Wireless MMX technology includes the Intel® 64-bit Data Pipeline, which offers a 2-4X media performance increase over the previous Intel® XScale(TM) technology by processing more data at once in fewer instructions. Wireless MMX technology also offers Intel® Multi-Sample Technology, which can calculate multiple outputs at once reusing register data to accelerate audio/video performance.
Additional information about Fonix speech interface solutions and technologies can be found at www.fonix.com.
About Intel
Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom.
About Fonix Corporation
Fonix Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: FONX - News) is a leading provider of natural-user interface technology solutions for wireless and mobile devices, Internet and telephony systems, and vehicle telematics. Leading chip manufacturers, independent software and hardware vendors, and Internet content and service providers incorporate Fonix technology to provide their customers with an easier and more convenient user experience. Fonix products, including Text-To-Speech (TTS), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and Handwriting Recognition (HWR), provide the most natural communication solutions available. For additional information, visit www.fonix.com, or contact a Fonix representative at (801) 553-6600.
Investor Contact, Michelle Aamodt, (801) 328-0161, invrel@fonix.com.
Note: The statements released by Fonix Corporation that are not purely historical are forward-looking within the meaning of the "Safe Harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, include statements regarding the Company's expectations, hopes, intentions, and strategies for the future. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties that may affect the Company's business prospects and performance. It is important to note that the Company's actual results could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. Risk factors include general economic, competitive, governmental, and technological factors as discussed in the Company's filings with the SEC on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K. The Company does not undertake any responsibility to update the forward-looking statements contained in this release.
Fonix and DECtalk are registered trademarks, and soManager is a servicemark, of Fonix Corporation. Intel, XScale and MMX are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Intel Corp. In the United States and/or other countries. All other product or services names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.
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Sonicblue Considering Making Intel's Video Player
September 10, 2002
By: Mark Hachman
Just days after Sonicblue said it would lay off a quarter of its workforce, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said it would probably produce Intel's portable video media player.
Sonicblue is formally evaluating the media player, which Intel calls the Personal Video Player, or PVP. If it does decide to manufacture the PVP sometime in 2003, a Sonicblue spokeswoman said, the company will brand the product as part of its ReplayTV line of personal video players.
Intel announced the PVP design in late July.
"Let's face it—the video (content) on the PC right now isn't that great. But the stuff on TV is," said Richard Bullwinkle, the senior product manager in charge of the device, part of the Connected Home Products (CHP) division. "The idea is to easily let consumers record and transfer video files (onto the PVP) and take it with them on the road." (Hearing this, one wag at the press conference called it "porn in a pocket".)
While the specifications for the ReplayTV device haven't been finalized, the Sonicblue company spokeswoman said that the device will likely include a 40-Gbyte hard drive. The device will also probably include 1 4-inch LCD and use USB 2.0 and Ethernet for connectivity, said Nikhil Balram, vice-president in charge of the CHP at Sonicblue.
Intel developed the PVP to work with other companies to help drive digital lifestyles, said Bob Hills, director of business development at Intel's Emerging Platforms Laboratory. The device was designed to use Intel's Xscale embedded processor. Intel's prototype measured 5" x 3" x ¾",weighing less than 12 ounces with the battery installed.
A possible reason that Sonicblue hasn't formally committed to the device may be due to pending layoffs. Last Friday, Sonicblue said that it would lay off about 25 percent of its workforce including Roger Hackett, senior vice president of sales, and Andy Wolfe, the company's chief technology officer. In addition, the company's Scottsdale, Ariz.-based operations and the audio business currently located in Tigard, Ore. will be consolidated into the Santa Clara facility, the company said.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,524191,00.asp
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ot-Let the Gaming Begin
By Eric Ransdell, Sep 10 2002
It may not be long before mobile phones are perceived to be the greatest form of thumb chandy - thanks to wireless gaming.
(4 recommendations)
It is a little known fact, but there are currently more than half a million alien fish breeders living in Europe and the United States. With the earth’s environment degraded and its oceans plundered, they have chosen to become inter-planetary fish farmers on the second Jovian moon of Europa. To the rest of us they appear as ordinary human beings – bankers, high school students, nurses, even policemen – but in their spare time they are breeding exotic species of extraterrestrial fish such as Siamese Catfish, Drummen Bass and Atomic Eels (which have a frightening tendency to explode) so that people here on earth may continue to enjoy the freshest sushi and sashimi in the galaxy.
The game they are playing is UK-based nGame Ltd.’s Alien Fish Exchange - a WAP-based game that was launched in 1999 and has since gone on to become one of the most popular wireless games on this planet. Yet for the future of wireless gaming, Alien Fish Exchange is only a preview of things to come. With Sun’s Java and Qualcomm’s BREW development platforms promising to enable arcade-style, multiplayer games over 2.5 and 3G handsets, mobile gaming has the potential to become one of the biggest stars in the ever-expanding wireless universe.
“It’s going to be massive,” says Jithma Beneragama, International Business Development Manager for Shanghai-based Linktone, a mobile service provider, “because the phones are already there in the hands of hundreds of millions of people around the world. So it’s not like you have to get these people to go out and buy an entirely new system like an XBox, they’ve already got the hardware, they’re using it every day and they’ve been conditioned to upgrade when it’s technologically justified. Now it’s just a question of ramping up the infrastructure and the content so these people realize this thing they carry around in their pockets is as useful for gaming as it is for communicating.”
Analysts agree that the potential market is huge. Datamonitor Technology predicts that by 2005 wireless gaming revenues in Europe and the United States will reach $6 billion. The Gartner Group estimates that by 2004 there will be 13 million wireless gamers in the U.S., 40 million in Japan, 102 million in Europe, and 177 million worldwide. Though no one is predicting that wireless gaming will surpass PC or console-based games any time soon, the fact remains, as the Yankee Group pointed out in a report, that with 1 billion mobile phone users worldwide, wireless gaming has far and away the biggest installed base of any existing gaming system.
For now, the question is how to take advantage of that installed base. One of the main reasons SMS became such an overwhelming success was because it utilized a single protocol that could be deployed across different networks and handset models around the world. But from EMS to WAP, standards have only gotten more complicated without a corresponding increase in the quality of graphics, animation and game play that would warrant operators and consumers paying to upgrade.
Coffee Clash
What Java and BREW represent is the wireless industry’s first real opportunity to bring a level of gameplay to handsets that can compete with other gaming platforms in the consumer market. “The big thing about Java and BREW is you’re not only dealing with one sense any more, you’ve got pictures going, animation, movement, sound - it’s like a proper computer game,” says Linktone’s Beneregama. “If you look at the people who want to play games, whether those are computer, console or online games, they have a certain expectation of how those games should look and feel and both Java and BREW have the potential of meeting those expectations.”
But many problems must be overcome before that potential can be realized. Particularly with Java, which is expected to be the development platform of choice for the world’s GSM networks with 29.7 million Java-enabled handsets already in use. “Java is just not standardized,” says Henry T. Yeh, chief operating officer of Com2Us Corp., one of the world’s foremost wireless game developers with operations in Japan, Korea, Europe and the US. “If you look at Sun's website, there are over 50 versions of J2ME right now mostly due to different screen sizes, sounds, vibrations, lights and APIs.”
That represents a huge challenge for the wireless industry because games written for phones running one variation of Java won’t be able to play on handsets using a different form of Java. Unless the industry settles upon a Java standard, the situation could become analogous to the current status quo where developers, manufacturers and operators are dealing with dozens of different protocols and no clear winner is emerging.
“We have games on more than 20 wireless platforms at last count,” says Yeh of Com2US. “It’s a pain but it’s one of our competitive advantages. And the fact is it is bad for the industry. We do want a standard so only the quality and game play will determine the winner, not the one with the most developers to port into myriads of phones.”
Because of the problems with Java, many industry analysts believe BREW has a real competitive advantage. Not only has it been designed to be both 3G and backward-compatible, but it’s standardized because Qualcomm controls its deployment in its CDMA chipsets. Not surprisingly, it is BREW that predominates the world’s only operational 3G networks in Japan and Korea.
But for BREW to become the dominant wireless gaming platform, the majority of the world’s networks would have to switch from GSM to CDMA, an event that is as unlikely to happen as Apple’s operating system overtaking Microsoft’s Windows. So for now, despite its disadvantages, the industry is anticipating that Java will ultimately become the dominant gaming platform if a common standard can be agreed upon. To that end, Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and Siemens have established the Mobile Games Interoperability Forum in an effort to develop a wireless gaming standard.
Battle of the Titans
But the industry’s biggest players aren’t going to wait for a standard to be settled upon before making their moves into what they anticipate will be a huge wireless gaming market. The last 24 months have seen a flurry of partnerships between wireless operators, manufacturers and mainline game companies.
On the operator side in the US, for example, AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS have all partnered with New York-based Unplugged Games to provide multiplayer games to their customers. On the handset manufacturing side, Motorola has a deal with Japan’s Sega Corporation and Nokia has a host of partnerships with third-party game developers such as Supedo, Kuju Entertainment and iomo.
Beyond that, console and PC-based game developers such as Electronic Arts and Konami are all entering the fray with their own wireless offerings. And companies such as Disney and Warner Brothers are exploring the possibility of porting their content into the wireless gaming space.
One of the most interesting developments is happening in Japan, where Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. has partnered with NTT DoCoMo to bring its Playstation games to its i-Mode phones. With DoCoMo exporting i-Mode to Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands this year, and England’s Vodaphone in a similar agreement with Sony, Playstation could become as ubiquitous on mobile handsets as it is in the world’s family rooms and college dormitories.
And, of course, there is Microsoft, which has made no secret of its desire to impose itself on the wireless world in much the same way it dominates the world’s desktops. Microsoft’s wireless platform uses some of the same code that is in its XBox gaming console and the Redmond-based behemoth is mounting a furious campaign to encourage manufacturers and developers to adopt its standard rather than that of its arch-enemy, Sun Microsystems. Microsoft has also formed Wireless Knowledge, a joint venture with Qualcomm to create next-generation mobile games. In addition, the Microsoft Network has been exploring the idea of a wireless MSN offering which will include gaming.
So is wireless gaming really going to be the next big thing? Already in Japan, the world’s most mobile nation, games and entertainment account for 52.5 percent of total mobile phone use. Europe and America still have a long way to go before games account for more than half of all mobile usage. But with everyone from Sony and Disney to small garage-band development shops setting their sights on this new frontier, it may not be long before people stop thinking of their handsets as telephones, but as the world’s latest and greatest form of thumb candy.
Eric Ransdell is the former Silicon Valley Bureau Chief for US News and World Report magazine. Now living in Shanghai, he covers mobile technology in Asia.
http://www.thefeature.com/index.jsp?url=frontpage.jsp
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OT-EGasStation Launched In Asia, To Integrate Pete Devices
Tuesday September 10, 6:52 am ET
SINGAPORE -(Dow Jones)- A new technology launched in Asia Tuesday is expected to lower service station owners' operational costs and increase revenues through the integration of petroleum devices.
Called eGasStation, the automation and e-business solution promises to help service station owners integrate existing petroleum devices such as fuel dispensers and point of sale systems.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. (NasdaqNM:SUNW - News) , U.S.-based Cyberonix and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young will collaborate to make the technology available in Asia, the companies said at a news conference Tuesday.
"In Asia Pacific, there are more than 200,000 gas stations, each containing an average of 25 discrete devices that do not work together and are not connected back to central offices," said T. Mohandoss, Sun Microsystem's director of industry development in Asia South.
"eGasStation leverages the power of Java (a software language), to help oil retail operations to increase their operational efficiencies and provides them with the opportunity to cut costs and increase revenue," he said.
For consumers, the technology will mean that pulling up at a service station could well be for other purposes instead of just filling the car with gasoline.
Internet-based services such as video and music downloads to automobiles could be made available by petroleum retailers once the eGasStation infrastructure is in place, Sun Microsystems said.
The eGasStation architecture will specify a platform for real-time remote monitoring and control, data logging and alarming of retail service station operating assets, Sun said. The technology was first announced late last year in the U.S.
The cost of installing the technology in each service station will depend on the features the station owner selects. However, the technology doesn't require changing existing devices and can be put in place overnight, according to a press release from the companies.
Financial returns of retail service stations currently face constraints in mature markets due to low fuel margins, minimal fuel volume growth and large fixed investment, said Jonathan Horn, vice president of energy and utilities for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. Yields of below 10% for return on capital employed for service stations are common, with some close to zero, he added.
With the e-business solution, return on capital can be increased by several percentage points through management action based on data collected through the eGasStation technology, he said.
For example, the eGasStation technology enables accurate fuel inventory control. This will help limit losses that not only translate to lost revenue, but that can lead to environmental damage and potential financial penalties, said Sun's Mohandoss.
Service stations can lose fuel through leaks in their storage tanks.
A service station's fuel losses can be halved through this fuel management system, said Russell Chang, Cyberonix's vice president of sales and marketing in Asia Pacific.
The technology will also help in terms of detecting failing equipment, providing maintenance alerts, and capturing real-time retail data to enable smooth inventory management.
A pilot of the eGasStation technology at six BP PLC (BP) stations in the U.K. has been completed, and the implementation of the eGasStation technology for 200 sites in the U.K. started this month at a rate of 10 sites a week, Chang said.
Going forward, the companies hope to finalize a contract in Asia this month, with a pilot expected by October. The first eGasStation in Asia could be fully deployed as soon as the first quarter of next year, Chang said.
Cyberonix Inc., headquartered in Oakland, California, is an engineering and software development firm
http://biz.yahoo.com/djus/020910/0652000266_2.html
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When the Music Stopped
When the Rolling Stones visited the Chess records studio early in their career, they were delighted to see one of their favorite performers, blues great Muddy Waters—but perplexed to find him painting the studio’s roof. Keith Richards of the Stones, who knew that Waters’ records were selling slowly at the time, says the message was clear: “Welcome to the music business.”
In Sonic Boom: Napster, MP3, and the New Pioneers of Music, John Alderman says the record companies are trying desperately to preserve the system that let them stick a paint brush in Waters’ hand and send him up a ladder. The problem, as Alderman shows, is that the world has changed. Many young people think of “songs” as titles on a computer screen and assume one of their inalienable rights is the ability to exchange music with friends electronically, at no charge.
The record companies inveigh against piracy and argue that they have to protect the rights of artists. But consumers, while feeling an affinity for their favorite performers, have heard enough stories like Richards’ that they believe the companies are in this for themselves. The companies also have bungled attempts to have consumers subscribe to online music services and to use technology to prevent illicit copying.
The only thing that has worked thus far is lawsuits. Those carry a heavy price because they anger the customers that the companies are courting, and have hardly stopped the electronic exchange of music. As Alderman says in the excerpt that follows: The suits seem to be merely postponing the recording studios’ day of reckoning.
If the successive waves of online music pioneers included many who were pushing the technological, social, and legal limits for a mixture of aesthetic hopes and utopian dreams, what pushed MP3.com founder Michael Robertson was something different. He hadn’t cared very much about music since ending a brief stint playing clarinet in his high-school band. But Robertson was a natural-born capitalist.
“Well, you know, I grew up really poor,” Robertson said once in an unguarded moment. “I think that has a way of motivating people.”
Blond, boyish-looking, and with the constantly upbeat manner of a salesman or a preacher, Robertson grew up in San Diego in a very religious family with modest means. Not interested in more of the same for himself and his kids, Robertson jumped into the world of high tech by starting two software companies after receiving his B.A. in cognitive science from University of California, San Diego. His enthusiasm faded for one, and the second wasn’t very successful. So, not yet 30, he launched a third enterprise, run out of his garage, that enabled different types of Internet searches.
While looking at logs of his site’s traffic, he noticed that the term “MP3” was incredibly popular. A little research and a thousand bucks later he had bought the MP3.com domain. In November 1997, Robertson launched the MP3.com Web site.
MP3.com—largely because of its domain name—soon became the gathering post for people interested in online music.
In February 1998, Robertson tossed around an idea with some new friends online about hosting a small gathering to promote and discuss MP3. The event was to be just “some kind of slumber party where you order a pizza” and talk with a few other enthusiasts, Robertson said. He announced the event on the MP3.com site—and was stunned by the response. The number who signed up to attend quickly reached 500. Record-industry and high-tech big shots, and even a member of Congress, said they would come. Hasty plans were made to host the event at the University of California, San Diego.
The conference was a heady moment for those who had latched on to the promising new way of getting music over the Internet. For years, Webheads had speculated about being able to get music at the touch of a button over the Internet, and now the moment they’d been waiting for seemed at hand. One of the organizers described feeling “like a Scotsman in Braveheart.”
Robertson leaped onto the college auditorium stage; he was riding high on the excitement. He praised MP3 as a “collective effort, from kids in high school to men in business.”
Perhaps it was just the shock of instantly becoming players in a business that had seemed so far out of reach, but the hacker developers of the MP3 revolution displayed a remarkable amount of respect and empathy for the record industry. Rather than gloating over newfound power, most of the speakers bent over backward to suggest ways for record labels to make money, for instance by using MP3 to sell their back catalog.
The record labels, though, did not reciprocate. In three weeks’ time, Robertson would find himself the outsider at a music industry panel discussion hosted by the Los Angeles chapter of the Recording Academy. From the outset it was clear that this was not your typical Internet event: Instead of a Spartan college campus, the posh Hotel Nikko in Hollywood was the site for the discussion. Perfume wafted heavily through the room, and there wasn’t a software T-shirt in sight. A huge golden gramophone was perched at the side of the stage, lest anyone forget that the Recording Academy was the group that awards the Grammies.
Michael Green, president and CEO of the academy, started the evening by saying that, with downloadable music, “the stakes are incredibly high.” He should have known: The discrepancy between his position with the “nonprofit” academy and his income was a frequent subject for the Los Angeles Times, which reported that he “drives a Mercedes-Benz, enjoys a membership at the Bel-Air Country Club, and makes $1.3 million a year—all at the expense of the academy and its charitable arms.”
Mike Farrace, vice president of Tower Records [www.towerrecords.com], summarized the panel’s message when he warned that the freedom the Internet offered didn’t exempt anyone from financial responsibilities. “It’s time that we show people that, if you want the free goodies, you’re going to have to pay!” he said. The spirit was there, even if the precise logic wasn’t.
When the floor opened for questions, the panelists steeled themselves against an onslaught. Among the first to speak was music attorney Ken Hertz, whose laid-back beachcomber appearance belied his power as deal maker for Hollywood stars such as Will Smith, Alanis Morissette, and Courtney Love. How, he asked the panel, did these company men get off saying that they were so interested in preserving artists’ profits? Everyone with a record contract knows that artists make almost no money from selling records. Industry opposition to the Internet, he suggested, was motivated by greed, and cloaking it as concern for artists’ rights wouldn’t fly.
When Robertson rose to the microphone it seemed like less than half of the panelists knew who he was. Those who did viewed him as riffraff—Robertson told a San Diego newspaper, “Some of my contacts up in L.A. say, ‘Michael, you know they think you’re Satan, right?’ I say ‘I’m blond. I can’t be Satan.’” (He would take pains to preserve that blond, angelic look and could sometimes be seen in quiet moments before conferences spritzing his hair in the shadow of his limousine.)
Robertson told the panel that the software industry had learned to deal with piracy; the music industry, he suggested, should do the same. When told by the moderator to ask a question and not make speeches, Robertson said the music industry should stop seeing the Internet community as a threat. “We’re here to embrace you,” he said, arms outreached, smiling beatifically.
“That may be so,” responded the representative from the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry’s main trade group [www.riaa.com]. The RIAA man was much older than everyone else on the panel and had spoken that night with a bitter aloofness that suggested he had much better things to be doing. “But we’re not interested in embracing just anyone,” he said with a look of distaste. The evening ended on that sour note.
As a group, the major labels treated technology such as CDs and Minidiscs as gifts that were theirs to dole out, in measured doses, with each shot giving just enough of a lift to fuel a consumer spending spree. A nice, even progression was the key to longevity, especially at large corporations that were kept afloat in bad times through the selling and repackaging of back catalogs.
In the world before the Web, consumers might have gone along with the slow drip of new technologies the industry had in mind for them. But after a decade of tech-industry hype, beginning with Apple Computer Inc.’s [www.apple.com] famous Orwellian 1984 Super Bowl ad, in which the personal computer was presented as a force against Big Brother, consumers took to heart the urgings toward self-liberation. If a technology was moving too slowly, or its restrictions seemed overbearing, the tools to fix the problem were in easy reach: many sat on everyone’s desktop. Whether building an MP3 player that did just what was wanted, or making another format that did more than MP3 offered, tinkering with the system to make it fit specific needs and desires was the order of the day.
Through the mid-1990s, the RIAA saw minimal threat from copyright violations on the Internet. But that changed drastically in the late ’90s. Because fan sites made no effort to hide—they were aching to spread the word about the music they loved—these were the first to come under the gun.
Dealings with Oasis fans typified the shut-them-all-down approach. In May 1997, Sarah Frederikson, an employee of the band’s management, sent an e-mail to nearly all Oasis fan sites, insisting that they take down all copyrighted materials: photos, song clips, and lyrics. The letter was evidently following a lead by Sony Corp. [www.sony.com], though Oasis management would later claim full responsibility. A small carrot was dangled: Those who cooperated would be included in the official Oasis “fan page links” section. Otherwise, the letter said, “We will be forced to take appropriate action.” By the time a 30-day deadline had arrived, the vast majority of fan pages had closed.
The same year, Sony Records itself shut down a fan site dedicated to Oasis. An English fan, Derek Gorman, had been serving up clips of songs from a coming Oasis album, which he’d downloaded from an official Sony site. While the clips were not full-length songs, and served to whet appetites for more music, Sony wanted full control and contacted Gorman’s service provider, which turned off the offending site.
This was the typical pattern for the labels, and it left a long trail of disillusioned, embittered online fans. Their first contact with the music industry—which made its billions nurturing devotion and involvement—was one of threats, finger-pointing, and legal action.
For a brief time after going public in 1999, MP3.com carried a valuation of $6.9 billion, exceeding EMI’s valuation of $6.4 billion [www.emigroup.com], but the stock soon tumbled, and Robertson was itching to prove that the stock market had been correct in regarding MP3.com so highly. But how could he top Napster Inc., which offered access to nearly every musical piece a person could want? He decided to play an entirely different game: He would give users what they already had!
The idea was sound: Let anyone who owns a CD have access to that music over the Web, no matter where the original disc was. Other companies were offering something similar that let users copy their CDs and upload them to a private locker that they could access anywhere. But getting all that music into the locker was an enormous chore. By contrast, Robertson’s Beam-it would merely verify that users actually had a CD in their computers, and then, instead of ripping and uploading all the songs, it would just note in the records that the particular user owned the album. To stream back the album, Beam-it would pull from a digital library ripped from more than 40,000 disks that the company had bought. After all, it didn’t matter whether what was being streamed came from the consumer’s CD or MP3.com’s, as long as the recording was the same.
The service was launched Jan. 12, 2000. On Jan. 21, the RIAA sued.
“Simply put, it is not legal to compile a vast database of our members’ sound recordings with no permission and no license,” the RIAA wrote to Robertson. There were precedents that established that you could make a duplicate of a copyrighted work for your own use, but it wasn’t legal for a company to do that for you.
The RIAA asked for a summary judgment to shut down the service, and on April 28 Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District Court of New York complied. The judge later set a penalty of $25,000 a song, an enormous amount when you consider that the company had digitized as many as 40,000 CDs—and contracts specify that all such payments go to the record companies, not the artists.
Even though he was shut down, in the aftermath of the suit Robertson made a haunting point: “If you don’t give people who buy the music the right to listen to it, you remove the incentive to buy the music!”
From the book, Sonic Boom: Napster, MP3, and the New Pioneers of Music, by John Alderman. Copyright ©2001. Reprinted by arrangement with Perseus Publishing. All rights reserved.
http://www.contextmag.com/magazine/setMagazineMain.asp
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Airport kiosks to offer movie downloads
By Will Knight
Air travellers will be able to download feature films and computer games to a handheld computer using a service to be launched first at US airports this summer.
Customers will be able to insert their computer's removable memory card or chip into slots in the kiosks, to download films, music, games, electronic books and newspapers. "Each location can choose what content they would like," says a spokesman for nREACH, the US company behind the idea.
The service will be available for handheld computers running Microsoft Pocket PC or Palm operating systems. A range of memory cards and chips, including Flash memory cards, Sony's Memory Stick and IBM's Microdrive, could be used in the kiosks. Video for Pocket PC devices will play through Microsoft's Windows Media Player. On Palm computers, it will play through the Generic Media gMovie Player.
A typical feature film will take less than three minutes to download, and one megabyte of memory will store a minute of film, says Pocket PC Films, the company that will supply the movies in a compressed format. Games and books will have a much quicker download time.
Pocket PC Films currently sells feature films and other video content on CD-ROMs. These cost between $9.99 and $49.99, but movies will cost slightly less through the new kiosks, nREACH says. Similar kiosks will also be installed in shopping malls and other retail outlets.
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/tech/article.jsp?id=99992428&sub=Transport%20and%20Energy
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Ruling Spells Doom for Aimster
By Brad King
3:30 p.m. Sep. 4, 2002 PDT
It's been a bad week for the vanguards of file trading.
A Chicago federal court judge granted the recording industry's request for an injunction to shutter the file-trading network originally known as Aimster, almost certainly ending the company's short life. The decision came down on the same day Napster quietly closed its doors for good, posting only a series of rotating animations on its website's front door.
Napster was forced to shutter its file-trading network in July 2000 after federal judge Marilyn Hall Patel granted a similar injunction to the recording industry. As the Aimster ruling came down, the Napster home page was replaced with a black screen with the Napster logo in the middle, and the words: "Napster was here."
"This decision helps to support the continued development of the legitimate online music market for fans, which is, of course, our goal in all of our online enforcement activities," said Hilary Rose, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The trade group has brought several lawsuits against file-trading companies over the last three years.
The Aimster injunction will close the book on one of the more interesting file-trading companies.
When he launched the service in August 2000, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Johnny Deep created quite a buzz by using pictures of his then-16-year-old daughter in seductive poses to garner attention. Aimster enabled AOL Instant Messenger users to trade music files.
But trouble was brewing. Napster had already been forced offline, and Napter's CEO at the time, Hank Barry, warned Deep that he couldn't beat the RIAA. Still, Deep pressed forward, hiring expensive public relations firms to push his company, and piling up tremendous debt.
Unfortunately for Deep, the National Arbitration Panel got its hands on him first. A three-judge panel ruled that his company's name infringed on AOL's trademark, so Aimster became Madster.
Facing a legal landslide, Deep turned to the law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP -- the firm that unsuccessfully defended Napster. Soon afterward, the RIAA filed suit for copyright infringement, setting the stage for Wednesday's ruling.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54950,00.html
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Hollywood, Tech Piracy Efforts May Curtail Choices
Entertainment: Meeting the demand for secure content could limit consumers' use of TV shows, movies and songs.
By JOSEPH MENN and JON HEALEY, TIMES STAFF WRITERS
REDMOND, Wash. -- As the entertainment and technology industries publicly are locking horns over electronic piracy, they privately are moving closer to a consensus that consumer advocates fear may limit how people watch or listen to movies and music.
The fight focuses on how entertainment will be distributed in the future, particularly the digital transmission of movies and music to homes by broadcast and the Internet.
Studios and record labels want their products protected from the widespread thievery popularized by services such as Napster. Spurred by the threat of federal legislation, technology companies such as Microsoft Corp. and RealNetworks Inc. are scrambling to prove that their systems do more than the other fellow's to keep content under lock and key.
Microsoft has been particularly aggressive, launching a number of efforts to satisfy entertainment moguls' hunger for security in a digital age when content can be perfectly reproduced millions of times. Other companies are making similar efforts, chasing what they see as lucrative business at a time of flagging technology sales.
But Microsoft, which faces its own considerable battle against pirates, would give copyright owners unprecedented power.
"I was looking at their new innovation, and I was very much impressed," Motion Picture Assn. of America President Jack Valenti said after a trip to Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters. "Some of the plans they had certainly could include my [member] companies."
Those plans center on three efforts, including Microsoft's latest Media Player, to be unveiled Wednesday in Los Angeles by company founder Bill Gates.
* Media Player 9, like competing offerings from RealNetworks and Apple Computer Inc., is designed to make Internet video look more like a TV broadcast, with less delay and crisper quality.
Behind the scenes, it also will improve content owners' ability to manage the rules they set for users, so that a song or clip can be downloaded but not copied, or can be made to disappear from a computer after a day or a week.
"Giving the content owners flexibility in how they assign rights and bring content to consumers has been a huge focus of ours," said Will Poole, Microsoft corporate vice president for new media.
Movielink, the fledgling multi-studio effort to offer films online, is expected to use the Windows Media format, movie executives said, though it may also use software from RealNetworks.
Pressplay, one of the two major record label-owned music services, already uses Windows Media.
* Today, Hewlett-Packard Co. will announce a new type of home computer based on Microsoft's Windows XP operating system and aimed at the living room, a top unclaimed prize for Microsoft.
At a cost of $1,500 to $2,000, the XP Media Center Edition allows viewers to surf the Web and watch cable or broadcast TV programming and record that material on a high-capacity hard drive or DVD--but not copy it, play it back on the bedroom television or e-mail it.
"In the abstract, that certainly works for us," said Andy Setos, president of engineering for Fox Group.
"From a consumer perspective, it is obviously not optimal" to prevent TV shows from being played back on other DVD players or computers, said Mark Bony, product manager for HP's Pavilion line of home PCs. But "this is a feature that Microsoft felt very strongly about."
* Microsoft's Palladium design initiative, begun with both content protection and security in mind, would bar computer users from doing some things in a walled-off part of their machines.
The multiyear Palladium plan knits hardware and software to create a virtual vault that would be protected from hackers. But a key attraction for Microsoft is that it would encourage consumer deals with trusted third parties--a bank, for example, or Blockbuster, which could lend a video over the Internet for a day on condition that it could check in the vault and delete unapproved content.
In process for years, Palladium gathered momentum recently in response to film industry feedback.
"Microsoft has finally admitted that what it really needs to do is Palladium," Fox's Setos said. The implication, he said, is that "everything before Palladium is really not as secure as they'd like, and we agree with them."
A number of privacy and consumer activists are concerned. More ominous for some are things Microsoft hasn't announced, such as changes in its small-type licensing agreements with those who downloaded a security patch for Media Player in the last month.
Those agreements give Microsoft the authority to disable bootlegged content or software Microsoft doesn't like--such as a peer-to-peer file-swapping application or copying mechanism--on consumers' machines.
That provision has made entertainment executives very happy, a Microsoft strategist said.
Virtually all of the proposals could be used to limit what consumers do, potentially eroding what generally has been considered the fair use of songs, television shows and movies.
No law or court ruling has required companies to make it easy--or even possible--for consumers to copy or customize copyrighted works for personal use. That means it's up to tech companies to figure out how to help consumers do that.
A Microsoft lobbyist said without firm legal guidance on fair use, the decisions belong in the marketplace. "If consumers are demanding the right to make one copy, that's going to be something you have to work out with your consumers," she said.
Poole said the new entertainment arrangements will be good for consumers, whatever restrictions are attached.
"If we continue to do as good a job as we think we're doing, consumers are going to get much more than they could get before," he said, citing out-of-syndication television series and older recorded music as examples.
But it may not sit well with the audience, who ultimately will decide with their wallets where the balance lies between security and freedom.
The record companies have learned that too many restrictions make their services uncompetitive with pirated offerings. Their efforts to peddle downloadable music that can't be copied or moved to portable devices have been a near-total failure. Consumers instead flock to unauthorized sites offering unfettered music for free.
Indeed, consumers may well reject the upcoming Microsoft entertainment offerings, preferring to stay with DVDs or pirated content until restrictions are eased. The longer it takes for entertainment and technology companies to come up with a formula that consumers embrace, the more difficult it may be to transform the Internet from a pirates' haven into a legitimate distribution pipeline.
"I don't think Microsoft wants a world where digital rights management technology controlled by Hollywood essentially rules the roost. But if they sense that's the way the wind is blowing, of course they are going to be the No. 1 vendor," said Joe Kraus, co-founder of the Web portal Excite and advocacy group DigitalConsumer.org
The biggest spur to the intensified negotiations between Hollywood and technology companies is legislation. For example, a bill by Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) would require government-approved anti-piracy devices in computers and consumer electronics.
Another motivator is economics. Computer makers are mired in a slump, and many believe only high-quality media content will drive consumers to buy more machines and pay for broadband access to the Internet.
In its dealings with the entertainment industry, Microsoft in some respects is coming from behind.
Apple has focused more closely and for longer on media consumers and producers, and its tools are popular with entertainment companies.
Apple also has made friendly business-model overtures, making its iPod digital music player incapable of transferring songs from one computer to another.
But Apple has gotten "nothing concrete" in return, Chief Executive Steve Jobs said. Entertainment executives said Apple has been less accommodating than Microsoft and even schizophrenic, urging consumers in one ad to "rip, mix, burn" their own CDs, which is legal to do.
We're trying to walk a middle path, helping copyright owners but allowing users the rights they are entitled to," Jobs said.
RealNetworks also has been offering content companies greater flexibility, which is the main thing studios lately are seeking, said Brad Hefta-Gaub, a vice president for product development.
Although the original rights-management technologies were used mainly to give consumers a free sample for a limited time, he said, entertainment companies now want to use those technologies to create rental businesses, flat-rate subscription services and a variety of hybrids.
The studios also have been seeking better sound and picture quality from all three companies. Until the quality and convenience match what consumers get from TV, Setos said, there's no point in offering movies over the Net.
Microsoft has been playing catch-up to Real in providing entertainment to accompany its media player.
When it unveils the latest version of Windows Media Player on Wednesday, Microsoft is expected to announce more music and video content deals.
Microsoft can offer more direct access to more computer users than Apple or Real, and its digital rights technology already has the benefit of $250 million worth of research and development.
Another factor in Microsoft's favor is a shared attitude about piracy. Microsoft says 25% of its software used in the United States is unauthorized, and the proportion is vastly higher in other parts of the world.
"There is much more similarity between Microsoft and Hollywood than is generally recognized," said Andy Bechtolscheim, a Cisco Systems Inc. vice president who has been promoting an open distribution format that would require device users to seek electronic permission from content owners for each viewing.
But even some of Microsoft's closest allies in the computing world, top chip maker Intel Corp. and Cisco, the biggest manufacturer of specialized machines for routing Internet traffic, take issue with the unbridled nature of Microsoft's Hollywood come-ons.
"I don't think it's a tenable position to say we're just going to put technology out there and sure, it will step on consumer fair use," said Don Whiteside, Intel vice president of legal and government affairs.
Cisco's Bechtolscheim agreed. "Just because people have been able to play it however they want, doesn't mean they will continue to be able to," he said. "This ought to get people riled up."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-microwood3sep03.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dtechnology
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Labels loosening up on CD copy locks
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
September 3, 2002, 4:00 AM PT
Fearful of consumer backlash, major record labels in the United States have slowed controversial plans for making CDs more difficult to copy, even as tension over online music piracy mounts.
Read more about CD copy locks
Last year, news that record companies were planning to add technology to CDs that would block people from making copies or MP3 files--and in many cases might even prevent playback on computers--sparked considerable controversy online, and even lawsuits.
Now major record labels themselves have put the brakes on the drive for copy protection, at least in the United States, even as record stores lobby for the locks to be added as soon as possible.
"From our perspective, CD copy protection is unfortunately not as good as we'd all like it to be," said Christa Haussler, vice president of new technology at music label BMG Entertainment.
Though the labels are slowing their drive for the technological locks, their desire for them has not diminished. Earlier this week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reported that CD shipments dropped 7 percent during the first half of 2002 compared with the previous year. The organization blamed the drop on music downloading and CD copying.
Overseas adoption of CD copy-protection technology is growing, moreover. Israel-based Midbar Tech, which makes the Cactus Data Shield product used by Universal Music Group and other labels, said Monday that more than 30 million discs worldwide have been released with its anti-piracy protection built in. Ten million of those discs were released in Japan, where labels began using Midbar tools only this year.
But in the United States, the largest consumer market in the world, the silence on the issue is increasingly conspicuous. Universal Music, whose executives led the industry last year by saying they would copy-protect a significant proportion of their discs by this summer, has had only three relatively small releases.
Universal declines to discuss its strategy in detail, other than to provide a stock statement noting it is still investigating the technology.
"The integration of copy-protection technology into some of our CDs is a first step in measuring its effectiveness in a quickly evolving marketplace," the company's statement says. "We have not finalized our plans for 2002, nor have we made a commitment to put copy protection on all of our CD releases."
Others, such as BMG, are more blunt. Labels are leery of the consumer backlash that met even the first whispers of copy protection. Headlines since have not been friendly; reports have focused on cases where copy-protected CDs couldn't be played in PCs, in DVD players and PlayStation game machines and on suggestions they might even damage Apple Computer products.
So far, European consumers have been slower to take up playing CDs in computers, as opposed to in conventional CD players, Haussler said. That's made it easier for labels to introduce copy-protection technology without as much fear of a backlash, although growing PC penetration in Europe is now making the markets more similar, she added.
In the United States, "it's actually a really big political and legislative issue," Haussler said.
Push and pull
Their own sales figures aren't the only force pushing labels in the direction of protection. Many retailers, which are bearing much of the brunt of declining music sales, are blunt about their dissatisfaction about the slowdowns.
"They're trying to complicate the issues," said John Sullivan, executive vice president of Transworld Entertainment, one of the nation's biggest owners of retail music stores. "We think they should just get it done. We'll take care of consumer complaints."
The response from consumers has been overblown, despite the considerable controversy in headlines and online, Sullivan said. His stores saw no consumer backlash to Universal's protected release of the "More Fast and Furious" CD, he said.
But reaction has come in more areas than simple sales, at least in the United States. Two lawsuits have been filed over protected CDs, even before they were widely distributed. The first to be identified, a small release of country singer Charley Pride's most recent album, drew the first suit, alleging that customers were being misled about the contents of their purchase. It has since been settled.
Experienced class-action firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach followed that lawsuit up with another against all five major labels, charging that the big music companies were selling defective CDs without notifying consumers. That suit, filed in June, has yet to make significant progress.
In Washington, Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., has led a campaign questioning the legality of copy protection, asking whether the technology would violate consumers' "fair use" rights to the music they've purchased.
Meanwhile, the technologies themselves have occasionally run into trouble. Anti-copying technology from Sony and Midbar each proved to be easily disarmed using only a felt-tip pen. Compatibility problems with Macintosh computers led Apple to warn people that problems resulting from playing nonstandard CDs wouldn't be covered under standard warranties.
No miracle lock
The companies producing the technology say they're close to working out most of these issues. But there is no silver bullet, they say.
Record companies would like to have perfect playability along with perfect protection. That's impossible, says Noam Zur, vice president of sales and marketing for Midbar. However, an acceptable compromise between playability and protection has been reached, he says.
"The number of complaints we get is negligible," Zur said. "I think the products are mature."
Macrovision, the U.S. company that is expanding from protecting videotapes and DVDs into music copy protection, says that consumers have to be given benefits along with the copy-blocking. Like its rivals, it is creating ways to put digital music files on CDs in a format that can be transferred to computers or MP3 players, along with video files, Web links or other add-ons.
Once these files are routinely put on CDs, criticism of the locks will be muted, the company believes.
"What we and the labels have been spending a great deal of time on is developing the capacity to make it easy to use music on PCs and portable devices," said Brian McPhail, vice president of Macrovision's consumer software division. Once those additions are in place, he said, "I think all the objections will go away, except those from ideologically inspired organizations."
If the push toward copy protection on CDs has slowed, then, it appears that it's not forever. A new generation of technology could persuade the record companies to pick up the pace again.
"The record labels in this country are very sensitive to consumer tastes," said Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA. "They are looking very carefully at the technology as it improves, but the technology needs to be more consumer-friendly."
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956069.html?tag=fd_lede
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more dataplay in ny times-More Tech Toys for Digital Music Fans
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
T first glance, the new DataPlay music players look like another tech-tune toy in the already crowded field of MP3 devices. But similarities are only skin (or plastic) deep.
The first DataPlay player on the market was the iRiver iDP-100, made by iRiver America in San Jose, Calif. Costing $350, it resembles a frozen hamburger sandwiched between two sheets of iMac-like plastic.
Advertisement
Appearances aside, the iDP-100 plays flawlessly, with no hint of skipping or hiccuping when vigorously shaken. Sound quality is comparable to that of high-end digital audio players, even at head-splitting volume. The iDP-100 also has a relatively large L.C.D. view screen that actually displays useful information besides artist names and song titles, like technical data about the recording.
The button placement is not as thoughtful, however, with buttons and dials arranged over the face and edges of the players with no discernable logic.
The other DataPlay entry, the recently released DP-200 Classic by EMI Global, sells for $320. Like the iDP-100, the DP-200 is lightweight and pocket-size. The face of this sleek rectangular device is a simple set of well-marked buttons. Its L.C.D. screen and type are smaller than the iRiver player's but display similar information.
The DP-200 is similarly shock resistant on playback, but appears to have a slightly richer and brighter sound than the iRiver player, with stronger bass signals.
Both players use a lithium-ion rechargeable battery and get 11 to 12 hours of continuous play on a charge. Both also connect to personal computers with U.S.B. cords. Once the included Future Player software is installed on a PC, the players can play DataPlay music over the PC's sound system.
For anyone who has ever burned a CD, transferring digital music or data is relatively easy.
Both devices can also play a variety of extras to be included on prerecorded DataPlay discs, including music videos and photo galleries that can be viewed when the player is connected to a PC — a new attraction for digital music mavens.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/29/technology/circuits/29PLAY.html
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The Even-More-Compact Disc
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
HERE'S the proposition: The record industry wants you to buy your music on a new kind of disc. Unlike a CD, the format will greatly restrict your ability to make digital copies. It will cost more than a prerecorded CD. And it will require you to invest a few hundred dollars in a new player.
If the appeal isn't immediately apparent, you have some idea of the salesmanship task ahead.
The newly released portable music format, called DataPlay digital media, is the latest technology joining a cornucopia of choices for consumers to play their favorite tunes through headphones connected to palm-size devices. The discs, contained in a clear plastic shell, are about the size of the ring in the center of a CD, or about one-fourth the size of a minidisc. They will be available in blank, recordable form as well as prerecorded, copy-protected albums.
Because of that last feature, DataPlay is being embraced by major record labels. So far BMG, Universal Music and EMI Group have signed on, say officials for DataPlay, which developed the technology.
The first DataPlay music player-recorders went on sale recently, and waves of prerecorded DataPlay discs will soon wash into record stores, starting with re-releases of top-selling albums by the likes of Britney Spears, 'N Sync, Pink, Usher, OutKast, Sarah McLachlan and Brooks & Dunn, BMG record executives say. Some musicians, including Carlos Santana, are scheduled to have new albums released simultaneously on CD and DataPlay.
Ads for DataPlay blank discs started showing up this month with a tag line reading, "This thing is huge." But for the millions of music enthusiasts who have mounted the MP3 revolution, downloading music or copying it from CD's onto hard drives and then to portable players, what's the motivation to switch?
The selling points borrow a page from the DVD playbook, the success story of the video marketplace. The prerecorded versions will also incorporate features like digital photo galleries and music videos that can be viewed when the player is connected to a PC, and even interviews, extended liner notes and music-related games. Future players may well include color L.C.D. screens to play music videos.
In addition, the DataPlay disc is far more compact than a compact disc while offering comparable sound quality. And the players can record music or data — yes, even MP3 files — from a hard drive onto blank discs that are easy to carry or swap.
"We're excited," said Aahmek Richards, who is in charge of new media for Arista Records, which is part of BMG. "Technology should allow the business to change and grow in so many ways it never had an opportunity to do."
Indeed. But DataPlay technology raises as many questions as it does expectations among its makers and early supporters. Chief among them, consumer electronics analysts say, is whether the arrival of DataPlay comes too late and offers too little to attract music consumers, especially those of college age.
Todd Oseth, vice president for marketing and business development at DataPlay, said that while the format promised greater content security than CD's, it also offered more flexibility and convenience to reflect listeners' emerging habits, accommodating prerecorded, downloaded or copied music. Ultimately, he suggested, record company support and the marketplace will decide its success. "Money is what ends up driving everything," he said.
DataPlay, a privately held company in Boulder, Colo., was founded in 1998 by Steve Volk, its chairman, president and chief executive. Initially, his interest in developing smaller optical discs and micro drivers was to use them as storage media in digital cameras. But in time, a DataPlay spokeswoman said, Mr. Volk realized that the tiny, digitally secure discs and drivers were a natural fit for the music industry, which was searching for new ways to protect and distribute recorded music.
Oddly, the record industry has become a victim of its own dizzying success with the CD, which was introduced in Europe and Japan in 1982 and in America the following year. In less than a decade, CD's rendered vinyl records practically obsolete, and now threaten the same fate for cassette tapes. Recent estimates indicate that there are more than 1.5 billion CD players. Almost every computer made today can play CD's, and stand-alone CD players have become so inexpensive that some are displayed near supermarket checkouts as shrink-wrapped impulse buys.
But when Klass Compaan, a physicist for Philips Research, conceived the CD in 1969, few people, if anyone, could have imagined the personal computing revolution that would three decades later let consumers raid the content of CD's to make perfect digital copies, compress them and then store them on their own CD's, hard drives, file-sharing Internet sites and a variety of removable media.
"Even though CD's have been good to it, the music industry would like CD's to go away," said Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst for Forrester Research, a technology consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. "They're too easy to rip."
He and other analysts note that attempts to retrofit CD's to discourage copying and pirating have proved problematic. For example, Arista has copy-protected some of its music CD's only to discover that they will not play in many car- and computer-based CD players.
So enters DataPlay, its content encrypted like Pentagon secrets, casting the long shadows of some of the world's biggest record companies.
"We are very committed to it," Kevin Clement, senior director of new media operations for BMG, said of DataPlay. "Awareness and education are two of the biggest challenges we have going forward."
"Our goal is to continue to release top titles," Mr. Clement said, noting that he has been impressed with DataPlay's "versatility and incredibly small size." BMG will not only be able to add photos and music videos to the discs, he said, but also encrypt extra songs, even entire previously released albums, to which consumers could get access after they paid online for a special content key.
"I don't think the CD is going away anytime soon," he said. "There's too much hardware in the marketplace, but clearly we love to see people enjoy the extra content we can put on a DataPlay disc."
Mr. Richards, who is also director of online marketing for Arista, said DataPlay is part of a larger strategy to recapture consumers who are comfortable getting their music and music information online.
Under his direction, Arista is starting a number of subscription-based fan Web sites at $25 a year. The first features Boyz II Men and offers exclusive material, which could include live concert footage, interviews and pictures, all ideally suited for downloading and playback on DataPlay.
"The real fans will appreciate a site that is dedicated just to them, and they don't mind paying for it," Mr. Richards said, adding that DataPlay can open new vistas for the recording industry. "All of this kind of plays in together. It's going to work. I believe in it."
But overall costs of DataPlay players and media may present an early stumbling block to widespread acceptance, some consumer electronics retailers warn. Prerecorded DataPlay discs will basically be priced more like a DVD than a CD, from $18 to $22, Mr. Richards said. (Some new releases, however, will be priced comparably to CD's: the new Carlos Santana album, "Shaman," will list for $18 on CD and $19 on DataPlay, he said.)
For consumers who want to make their own, the price of the raw material for CD burning — CD-R discs — has dropped to only pennies a disc when the discs are bought in bulk. DataPlay discs, which have 500 megabytes of storage capacity, or 150 megabytes less than 74-minute CD-R discs, cost $5 apiece if bought in packages of 10. And the first DataPlay music player and burner, the iDP-100 by iRiver America, is relatively expensive at $350; MP3 players with 20 gigabytes of memory, or 40 times the capacity of a DataPlay disc, are available for as little as $300.
Steve Koenig, senior analyst for NPDTechworld, a market tracking group in Port Washington, N.Y., said DataPlay could face the same sort of limited adoption that Sony's MiniDisc faced for years in North America. "I think this will probably remain a niche product for the time being until it gets some kind of large catalog of music selection in place," he said.
And Mr. Bernoff of Forrester Research said the era of discs of any kind, whether they are five-inch or one-inch, may be coming to a close.
"Maybe the time for physical media is past," he said. "The problem is not with the CD, but with anything that is physical."
The long-term future of music distribution, Mr. Bernoff said, is in packets of notes, rhythms and lyrics winding through the air to be captured and played on wireless devices. "The format of the future," he said, "is no media at all."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/29/technology/circuits/29RECO.html
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Broadband could boost economy by $500 billion
Matthew Miller, Managing Editor -- CommVerge, 8/28/2002
How well might investment in broadband infrastructure pay off for the United States? How about a cool half a trillion dollars? That's how much the country's GDP (gross domestic product) could grow annually if government and industry worked to make broadband more pervasive, at least according to research outfit Gartner Dataquest.
The estimate is based on ubiquitous deployment of what Dataquest terms "true" broadband, defined as aggregate downstream capacity of at least 10 Mbits/sec—10 or more times faster than today's typical consumer broadband services. To estimate the economic boon that would result from broadband penetration, Dataquest modeled its study on work done by the International Telecommunications Union, which tracks the relationship between the penetration of phone service and per-capita GDP growth.
Solving the bottleneck in the "last 200 meters" would open the gates for high-bandwidth applications, which would in turn spark continuous upgrades for backbone equipment, as well as demand for end-user devices, according to Dataquest. However, attaining the payoff would require a concerted, cooperative effort among public- and private-sector entities, Dataquest states. The research firm calls for the government to evaluate existing regulation and develop targets and incentives that could help drive the transition. The report is titled Telecom Regulation Has Failed, Now What?
Meanwhile, In-Stat/MDR—a corporate relative of CommVerge—is providing its two cents on an application that should generate big bucks in the next few years. In-Stat sees a bright future for Internet-protocol-based VPN (virtual private network) services. In a report titled IP VPN Services: Virtually Unstoppable , the research firm states that IP VPN revenues should enjoy a compound annual growth rate of 33 percent from 2001 through 2006. Moreover, such revenues are already growing healthily in 2002, with service providers expecting to see growth of anywhere from 15 percent to 100 percent over 2001's results, In-Stat says.
http://www.e-insite.net/commvergemag/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA241204&pubdate=8/2...
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Pump Up the Volume
By Peggy Anne Salz, Aug 26 2002
Combine music with lifestyle services, viral marketing and a new twist on an old technology and you’ve got a real showstopper. Starting this year mobile music is not only going to rock the industry, it's going to send tremors through the mobile value chain.
(1 recommendations)
Peggy Anne Salz
Experience shows that the most successful mobile services are actually based on what users do in their "fixed" lives. Users read newspapers and magazines - and so they are comfortable with scanning news and sports snippets on their handsets. They communicate by email - and so they have eagerly embraced SMS, and given the mobile industry its first, and so far only, "killer app." But consumers, youth in particular, also like to listen to, talk about, look like and dream about music artists. Music isn't just about songs; it's a billion-dollar lifestyle industry ranging from fan magazines to fashion. More important, it's a passionate and personal interest around which communities congregate. So why isn't mobile music a hit?
One reason could be the industry's preoccupation with gadgets. Despite all the lip service paid to criteria such as simplicity and usability, the industry still isn't quite over its love affair with technology. The temptation to create an "all-in-one" dedicated device is great, but many observers suggest that this new breed of mobile devices will be too clunky and costly to compete with existing technology and methods such as CD burners and file-sharing.
To complicate matters, the ability to download and playback music files over a mobile phone is an embryonic and uncertain market. Against this backdrop, it's best to build services with the technology and tools that exist. As Dario Betti, an analyst with Ovum in the UK, puts it: "The new devices aren't the market opportunity. The money is in harnessing the power of music to enhance existing services."
Express Yourself, Baby
The advent of polyphonic ringtones, which incorporate 16 tones rather than one, will drive revenues and allow operators to build new business models around musical content, according to Ovum. It estimates that the market for personalization through ringtones, logos and screensavers in Italy, Germany and the UK alone will be worth $673 million in 2002, and receive a considerable boost when more handset makers can support them. One company in this space is Musiwave, Europe's leading provider of mobile music services and the first to enable downloadable ringtones with original music.
The company, which distributes its music services and platform through customers including T-Mobile in the UK and Germany, Orange in France and Optimus in Portugal, recently teamed up with Telefonica Moviles to launch a similar service in Spain. In addition to ringtones, the company supplies a turnkey solution that includes games, contests, SMS alerts and an assortment of other value-added services focussed on music artists. It also offers "Musimail," a dedication service allowing users to text a tune to a friend together with their own recorded message.
Musiwave, which has a partnership with handset manufacturer Sagem, is close to Nokia and "expects to announce relationships with at least two other manufacturers by the end of 2003,"according to Guillaume Decugis, Musiwave VP, Technology & Operations. "Music and mobile are a perfect fit. But software modifications are necessary so that the user can just turn on the phone and use [these] music services." Musiwave also cooperates with music labels to reduce some of the red tape around digital rights issues. To this end Musiwave recently sealed a deal with BMG to make its music catalogue available through Musiwave's services. BMG, which belongs to German media giant Bertelsmann, owns more than 200 record labels worldwide.
The Power of Love
Tj.net, a Bertelsmann wholly-owned subsidiary based in Italy, is determined to be the wireless equivalent of MTV. Rather than focus on technology, tj.net has quietly and quickly built up an interactive music service based on simple IVR (interactive voice response) that counts over 1.6 million registered users in Italy making it Europe's largest mobile music service. "We want users to play with the music rather than just play music," says Paolo Roatta, tj.net CEO.
The service, which works like a remote control, allows users to interact with music by pressing a number on the keypad. They can send a song to a friend by pressing 8; they can buy the CD of the artist they are listening to by pressing 3; they can vote for the music by pressing 9. And so on... "Kids don't only want to listen to music, they want to share it, they want to send it to a boyfriend or girlfriend and say 'hey, I'm thinking about you,' or 'hey, I know you're having a bad day so here's something to cheer you up,'" Roatta says. "It's just another way to call and say 'I love you.' "
An "unexpected success" is the community that has grown up around a new service users can access by pressing 7. The idea was to allow users a chance to not only comment on the music, but also reply to other user's comments about music. When this happens, the user who left the original message gets an SMS alert and can call in to hear what others are saying. The service, which is growing virally, is "more like a talk show than a chat room," Raotta explains. Tj.net, which launches a new service every two weeks, plans to extend its reach to other countries and operators across Europe.
They're Playing our Song
A new kid on the block is Shazam Entertainment, a UK company with a unique proposition. It's developed the world's first-ever ubiquitous song identification service available to mobile operators. "We thought it would be great if there were a service that could identify a song at the exact moment you hear it," notes Chris Barton, Shazam Business Development Director. "Since there wasn't one we decided to build it."
Shazam's technology is able to match a noisy audio sample (15 seconds in length) captured over a mobile phone against a database of more than two million songs in a fraction of a second. The search works even with background noise such as people talking or street noise. When a user hears a song he likes, he dials a four-digit number from the mobile and holds hold up the phone to capture 15 seconds of music. The service then compares this "fingerprint" against Shazam's own database. Once the matching segment of the matching song is found the service responds with an SMS to the user's phone that not only identifies the song, but the artist and the CD as well. The user can then interact with the song in three ways.
The so-called "Tag" feature allows users to identify a song and tag it, both through an SMS and via a personalized web site with a list of identified songs. This web site allows the user to track the songs he has requested and purchase the CDs via the Internet through affiliates such as Amazon.com. The service's "Send" feature let users forward a song clip to a friend. This is sent via a free text message with a link to the IVR short dial, which is charged at a premium rate. Finally, the "Buy" feature allows user to purchase the CD - a transaction involving Shazam partner on the site.
Looking ahead, Barton envisions a service that will "be a bit like instant messaging." The service would link users to their buddies with the best taste in music. "It would allow you to get the same cool song your buddy gets or recommends - and the 'follow-me' aspect of the service means it would market itself." The service could also be expanded to let users get the picks and tips that their favorite club and radio DJs recommend.
Last Friday, Shazam officially launched with four UK operators. The company is also "in conversations" with three German operators and involved in more "concrete negotiations" with Japan's three mobile operators as well as "one of the major trading houses in Japan," Barton reveals. Other players in the mobile space, including tj.net, have also confided that they would be interested in partnering with Shazam to complete their music offerings. "We like the technology a lot, and music recognition is definitely a service that music lovers would appreciate, but we wouldn't want to invest the money to develop it (the technology) on our own," Roatta commented.
P(l)ay that Tune
While mobile music has what it takes to be a killer app, it's important to remember that it's an emerging market where many players risk being sidelined. Unlike most other wireless content, operators and providers actually have little ownership and control over music content. This lies in the hands of record companies and a handful of rebels who create and distribute their own music compositions. Music is also not the kind of content that operators can tuck their own rather dull and mainstream branding campaigns and logos. The user is loyal to the artist - not the operator.
And, while music companies are all aware they should harness the mobile channel to market their stockpile of content, they are also know they deserve top billing. Indeed, EMI recently drew the line and told ringtone providers some of its biggest chart hits were off-limits. This has sparked speculation that it plans to launch its own ringtone service. To further complicate matters, the issue of digital rights management (DRM), licensing and copyright will require the value chain to make plenty of room for a slew of content aggregators and legal middlemen who will also want their share of the revenues.
But that shouldn't intimidate providers. Mobile music is not a new market, but it does require a totally new approach that builds on personalization, community and communication. Companies in this space shouldn't dwell on tough topics such as devices, downloads and DRM. They should get down to the business of testing and developing music services that integrate existing technologies and applications. They should also start partnering with content owners and teaming up with the artists for access to exclusive content. Otherwise, providers may find themselves peddling, the cheap seats, the bootleg CDs and the (un)official memorabilia. And that's an offer music fans can definitely refuse.
Peggy Anne Salz is a freelance author who likes to go beyond the day-to-day developments in the mobile space to grapple with the toughest issue: where the industry is going.Her work has appeared in a number of publications including Time, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal Europe, as well as Communications Week International, where she is one of the editors.
http://www.thefeature.com/index.jsp?url=frontpage.jsp
culater
LOL-"His most spectacular investment, he said, happened in 1997. He bought 4,100 shares of EDigital, a flash memory card manufacturer, with a $2,000 investment. The stock price was 48 cents a share, but within a week it had grown to $14 a share. He sold his EDigital holdings for $57,000, posted a $55,000 capital gain for the year and paid about $18,000 in capital gains taxes at the 30-percent level. That left a $37,000 profit, making it his best investment to date."
...
"DiRenzo does the research on his stock picks on a combination of ETRADE.com, the finance page of Yahoo, an Internet message board called RagingBull.com and the CNBC network. He also quizzes store clerks in Comp USA and Circuit City on the most reliable equipment and the most frequently repaired items."
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1672&dept_id=32092&newsid=5143015&PAG=461&rfi...
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File sharing: Guilty as charged?
New numbers on declining music sales could mean that MP3 trading really is hurting CD sales. But that still doesn't mean we should lock up the pirates.
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By Damien Cave
Aug. 23, 2002 / Does MP3 file trading hurt the music industry?
It's a question that has caused heated debate ever since Napster exploded on the scene in 1999. And as sales of recorded music have declined over the past two years, it's a question that has taken on ever-greater importance -- for the music business, Congress and music fans.
Up until recently, there has been little hard data to support anyone's claims that file trading is hurting -- or helping -- music sales. But at least one researcher, University of Dallas economist Stan Liebowitz, author of an upcoming book (set for publication Sept. 7) titled "Rethinking the Network Economy," is digging hard for quantitative answers.
In May, Liebowitz published a paper suggesting that the record industry would soon be seriously harmed by MP3s. But in June, by the time Salon caught up with him, he was questioning his own conclusions after having examined the numbers and finding little solid proof that file sharing was hurting CD sales.
Two months later, he's changed his mind again. Sort of. In an insightful, yet-to-be published paper that analyzes 30 years of record sales figures, Liebowitz argues that MP3s are in fact having a significant negative effect on the CD market. He acknowledges that new data could once again lead to new conclusions, but for now, Liebowitz says, "I've moved somewhat closer to the record company position."
Salon called Liebowitz at his home in Dallas to discuss his findings.
When we last spoke, you said you had yet to find proof of harm from MP3s. What's changed?
The one big piece of evidence that I didn't have when we talked before was a half-year year 2002 number [that appears to indicate a 9.8 percent decrease in album sales.] There has to be a caveat in here, which is that I don't know if this number is correct. It's a half-year number that I saw in USA Today, from SoundScan.
If it were the case that there was a 9.8 percent drop on albums, when you look at the historical record of the ups and downs of the CD industry, [that's] a bigger decline than we've seen in 30 years. It starts to look unusual.
How much bigger is the decline? Is it a significant drop or a slight depression?
I haven't figured out the percentage but it's definitely bigger than the other ones. Now, let me add another point. When we last spoke, we were talking about a 5 percent decline in sales and I said, Look, if this is a recession then a 5 percent decline isn't so unusual. At that time, I had assumed that record sales moved with income; during a recession, you could expect fewer records to be sold. When I actually ran the numbers, with income as a variable, it had a very small impact. It was what is known as statistically significant but it was so small that you could ignore it. So in fact, you couldn't conclude that because we're having a recession, you might expect a 5 percent reduction in record sales. That's the other prop I was leaning on [to show that MP3s are having an effect.] There's evidence that something different is going on.
But assuming SoundScan's figures are correct, your paper seems to hang on a matter of degree. If 2002 sales are down 9.8 percent, you argue, and if this continues, the decline will be the biggest in 30 years. But aren't there other possible reasons for the decline?
I mention that there are these supposed instances of doldrums in musical creativity and you read about them from time to time. But it's a hard thing, at the moment, to measure that.
But isn't it possible that the intersection of several other unprecedented factors wholly independent of MP3s could be causing the decline in sales?
That's right. It is certainly not conclusive, by any means, that there's real damage going on from MP3s. It could be that we're having a bit of doldrums in terms of taste; it could be that we're all using CDs now and nothing else so since they're a little more durable than other formats that could be part of it. But it is at least beginning to look like there is damage being caused. But remember, the original story was that there's so much MP3 downloading going on so we should see a really big impact fairly easy. And now we're seeing a medium impact, which still could be explained by other things -- but we can't discount the MP3 possibility.
If the record industry is somehow not able to stop the downloading, I think we'll know by 2003. We'll get the end of the 2002 year numbers when December's over. We'll see what actually happened. And I expect that by 2003, whatever's going to happen will have happened. This is a great experiment for people who are curious about issues like this. We'll eventually find out. So while it's premature to say this is the smoking gun that shows that harm is there, it is certainly more indicative of harm than what had been there with just the 2001 numbers.
In your paper you argue that MP3s will create a 20 percent decline in sales. How did you get this figure?
I may be going out on a limb in trying to do that but what I'm saying is, let's throw out the fact that cassettes are dying, because that seems to be happening on its own. If we remove that, and assume that half the computer owners have CD burners -- a number that I've seen -- you just double the decline that's already occurred. It should be less than that because the people who would be doing the most burning would be the ones who already have the burners. So that's where I come up with that number. That's not the death of the industry, but it's a severe decline.
Is this decline significant enough to justify new laws, like the Berman bill, which would give copyright owners the power to hack into people's computers to stop copying and trading?
In my own mind, I don't think a 20 percent decline warrants letting them override the other laws we have out there saying that you're not supposed to tamper with people's computers. That's my own view.
If [file-trading] was going to kill the record industry, you could understand why the record industry would be willing to go to any lengths to get [the Berman bill] passed. They also might be willing to do that for 20 percent if they're not paying the costs. But is society willing to impose a law like this on the public to protect the industry from a 20 percent decline?
If the industry wants to prosecute 18-year-old kids, they can make that decision. But I suspect I wouldn't be in favor of that if the government is going to be prosecuting 18-year-old kids. You don't want to, in my mind, create a situation in which we're saying that a large proportion of our population are criminals unless you think that there's some really strong reason to do that.
People can debate whether, say, criminalizing marijuana and making so many people violate the law is good or bad, but at least you have to understand what the costs and benefits are. And at least the people who are in favor of criminalizing it think it's a terrible, terrible thing. If you're going to do that [with file-trading], you have to ask if in fact there's a terrible thing going on. Is a 20 percent decline enough of a problem to say that we should go after these kids? If the record industry wants to foot the bill, because they think the benefits are greater than the costs, fine. But I don't want my district attorney spending my money going after 18-year-old kids who are downloading if it's only going to cause a 20 percent decline in sales for the industry.
When we last spoke, you said that a key historical sign would come from whether the introduction of audiocassettes had a negative effect on music sales. Your analysis here argues that tapes had no effect on sales, and if anything, sales went up when cassettes were introduced. What makes you think MP3s will be different?
The net effect of tapes was positive. But it doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been more positive if people weren't making more copies. [What is clear is that] there's no evidence in the data that the tapes caused a decline.
MP3s wouldn't do the same thing. The reason cassettes led to growth was that before cassettes existed, you didn't have portable music. You couldn't play recorded music in your car, and you couldn't play it walking around, in a Walkman. It was the little cassette that basically allowed you to do that. To be technically correct, there were 8-track players prior to cassettes. But they didn't have quite the same penetration. My theory as to what went on is that [the rise in cassettes] coincides almost perfectly with the penetration rate of the portable, Walkman-type of thing. So it opened up this whole new market, which overwhelmed any copying that went on.
You mention that price doesn't matter because album prices have tracked with inflation for the last 30 years: A 10-song recording today costs as much as it did in the '70s. This runs counter to the public perception that CDs are wildly over-priced, and I'm wondering if people think CDs are expensive because other musical components such as CD players have decreased in price, while CDs have not ...
It's possible, but the technology in creating stereos is not necessarily related to the technology used to create CDs. If you take a look at the book "Entertainment Industry Economics," the author goes through the cost of a CD, and in his older editions, he goes through the cost of an LP or a cassette. And the majority of the cost is not the production of the actual physical item. That may go down, but the majority of the costs are the other costs: publicizing albums, finding talent. There's no reason to think that those are going down because they're not technology-based. The small part, technology, is 15 percent of the item and that may be going down, but it doesn't have much of an impact. It's really amazing how prices have tracked so closely with inflation. It's almost as if the industry just bumps up prices with the inflation rate.
You also point out in your paper that there's been no differentiation in price when it comes to music, which is radically different from most markets for other products, such as TVs, for example, which come in a variety of sizes and prices. Do you think the industry needs to abandon this business model? Could this be a solution to the problem of MP3s?
I don't know if that's necessary but one of the things that the entertainment industry has always been really good at is differentiating products. With movies, you have the theater, the tapes, the pay-per-view, the HBO, then the TV. To me, the interesting thing is that historically, the record industry hasn't done much differentiation. What you might have expected was, say, a CD that was half the price of current high-quality CDs that just has a lower sampling rate. With MP3s, for example, when you rip a CD, you have a choice about whether you want to have CD-quality or near-CD quality or FM-radio-quality. When you're playing music on low-quality stereos, you wouldn't really hear the difference. So one of the things the industry could do with their downloads is have different prices. People with high-quality stereos aren't going to want to put the low quality material on, and the people who have lower quality stereos, with speakers that are incapable of producing the frequencies that let you hear the difference, then they'll buy the cheap ones. That would a way to broaden the market and increase their revenues. In a way it's surprising that the industry hasn't done that. And as they are trying to figure out their models for online sales, that would be one way of doing it.
How willing do you think the industry is to make such changes?
That depends on the individuals involved. But the fact of the matter is that if they're too rigid, they'll get replaced by some start-up that's not. That much is certain. You can't be terribly inefficient, terribly rigid and hang on.
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About the writer
Damien Cave is a senior writer for Salon
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/23/liebowitz_redux/index.html
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ot-Sigma Unleashes Source Code For MPEG-4 Codec
By Mark Long -- e-inSITE, 8/23/2002
Sigma Designs has released the source code behind its free MPEG-4 video codec, which was released earlier this summer. The codec is designed to work as a plug-in under Windows to enable PC platforms to encode digitized video content into ISO-compatible MPEG-4 video files. To support developers wishing to enhance the MPEG-4 encoding, the complete source code is available for download free of charge, through Sigma's website at www.sigmadesigns.com.
"We are pleased to provide the development community with an open source MPEG-4 CODEC, and anticipate that this will accelerate technical improvements and enhance the proliferation of MPEG-4 content," stated vice president Ken Lowe in a prepared statement.
Sigma's MPEG-4 software encoder/decoder is also designed to be fully compatible with Windows 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 or Athlon CPUs, allowing them to function as an authoring system for encoding MPEG-4 content. In addition, the codec features single-pass encoding, in which the encoding takes place at a rate that Sigma claims will exceed what other available encoders now offer.
Sigma Designs has also developed a single-chip MPEG-2/MPEG-4 DVD decoder for deployment in consumer DVD players. The EM8500 integrates an internal 150-MIPS RISC CPU, system interfaces, busses and control ports in support of the implementation of a complete DVD player.
The EM8500 integrates an internal 150-MIPS RISC CPU, system interfaces, busses and control ports in support of the implementation of a complete DVD player. The chip also offers both IDE and DVD loader interfaces for use of either standard or lower cost proprietary devices. In addition, a memory controller has been built into the device to provide a direct interface of up to 16MB of SDRAM and 4MB of Flash. Additional interfaces include I2S, I2C, UART, 16 GPIO pins and front panel control.
The EM8500 features the ability to play MPEG4-based movies as well as video libraries that have been downloaded or encoded from the users own sources and stored on a CD. According to the company, PC users equipped with this chip and built-in DVD drives can watch movies and images in the progressive scan format that have been scaled to high-definition for display on HDTV-ready TV screens. In addition, the chip is designed to enable users to listen to MP3 or Windows Media Audio (WMA) based music or view PcitureCD-based digital photographs that have been stored on a CD in a high-defnition format.
http://www.e-insite.net/commvergemag/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA240112&spacedesc=n...
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ot-Paying for Patents and Moving to Paid
By Janice Brand
August 21, 2002 — Two meaty issues, not entirely unrelated: who should own the intellectual property created by and for the Web, and who should foot the bill?
Paying for Patents
Todd Datz’s interview with Lawrence Lessig, Who Should Own What? hit raw nerves.
Innovation will likely sprout everywhere else, where the US can't enforce its stifling regulations. Remember when Detroit was the motorcar world’s capital?
US will seal its own economic demise primarily because of greed. It chooses to BLOCK innovation and competition.
Darwin, and Lessig, are helping to maintain the status quo, corporate thefts, by discussing extremes and ignoring the fundamental question, "How do inventors eat? How does invention prosper?"
Getting software developers to acknowledge that another might have come up with the idea first is not a personality trait of the profession. In fact, it is this very lack of willingness to recognize, build on, and operate synergistically within the industry that causes me to question the professionalism of the entire field.
The most important step must be for all governments to define that the grant of a patent is followed up with the full force of the defence of that patent by that government. Any infringer will know from the outset that any attempt to infringe without any recourse to negotiate a fair and reasonable royalty payment will result in court action by the government in question with the full force of that government. Turning to the main article; it is clear that standards of thinking are very low at the academic level. Patents are simply a way of preventing infringment so that the originator has time to establish new jobs. After the initial period of time, anyone can infringe with impunity.
Moving to Paid
Jon Surmacz’s Reload column This Price is Right takes a clear-eyed look at the trend toward paying-for-content. Would that our readers were as clear-eyed.
I already pay my ISP. I WILL NOT pay for content! There are too many places/sites to get the same information for free, it just takes a little looking.
Some thought it’s an idea whose time is coming, but is not here yet.:
I think we are on the verge of receiving personalized content that really provides "value added". … We've already [got] some of this for automobiles. I agree that today with few exceptions there's not enough "value added."
And one reader sees the light. Do you think the research, writing, editing, posting and site maintenance is done by gremlins?
Some folks just don't get it: the era of free quality Web content is ending. … Valuable information has always had a price. It won't be long before Web users will either pay for valuable Web services or they will do without them. Advertising and other revenue may pay for some Web content, but the most valuable information and services online are going to COST. Get used to it.
http://www.darwinmag.com/read/answering/index.html
culater
ot-Creativity, reliability to drive telematics
By Paul Leroux
Special to ZDNet
August 20, 2002, 5:39 AM PT
COMMENTARY--Do you ever notice how car commercials stress style over substance? Brand X, we are assured, builds excitement. Brand Y makes you want to tear off your necktie and play hookey. And Brand Z is so sporty looking that young women love to run their hands along its, ahem, spoiler.
Of course, it often makes marketing sense to “sell the sizzle, not the steak.” But as it turns out, automakers have little choice. Competing brands of automobiles can have so much in common that, in many cases, a car’s styling really is the only differentiator worth flaunting.
Imagine, then, if a technology could help automakers add real--and distinctive--value to their products. Such is the promise of in-vehicle telematics. Daimler-Chrysler certainly sees the potential: they’ve recently unveiled a hands-free telematics system that allows drivers to operate a cellphone using natural voice commands. This one feature makes communicating from your car both safer and more convenient--not a bad differentiator.
The Chrysler system is only the beginning. The same push for product differentiation that engendered this product is driving other automakers to combine cellular technology, Internet access, GPS, and dynamic navigation into their own unique in-car systems. In fact, it’s estimated that over 20 million telematics-enabled cars and light trucks will be on the road in the United States by 2006
This convergence of technologies could change driving dramatically. Lost your car key? Just dial a number on your cellphone, enter a password, and, presto, your door lock opens. Accident? An onboard computer could immediately dial 911 and provide the dispatcher with your exact GPS coordinates. Engine trouble? The same computer could automatically locate the nearest service center and, if you’d like, book a service appointment (after it has checked the scheduler on your PDA, of course). Are there multiple drivers in your family? Your virtual dashboard could change “skins” and reconfigure itself to each person’s preferences.
All these features mean one thing: the software deployed in cars is going to get very complex. More sophisticated, in fact, than many of the applications on your desktop PC. Problem is, the software will also have to be a lot more reliable. Think about it: What do you do when your desktop OS crashes? You might curse a blue streak, but you’ll probably still buy the next version of the OS. But if your dashboard crashes? I don’t know about you, but my brand loyalty would take a dive. That’s a huge issue in the auto industry, where it takes an average of 18 years to win a customer back.
Of course, automakers will be extremely careful about software testing; safety and regulatory issues give them no choice. Unfortunately, once software gets complex enough, no amount of testing can eliminate every bug--a problem when the software may be deployed in thousands of vehicles. More to the point, a car offers a relatively hostile environment. Desktop PCs are rarely exposed to excessive radio frequency or electromagnetic interference, but, within the car, stray interference near powerlines or transformers can affect hardware to the point that a software driver will fail.
Automakers must do two things: a) Assume such problems may occur; and b) design their systems to recover quickly and automatically — without affecting the car’s occupants in any way. A tall order! In effect, they need to deploy high availability (HA) systems. By this, I don’t mean conventional HA designs, which typically recover from software failures by using redundant backup systems. That isn’t an option in the car market, where the cost of every bolt counts. So, rather than use redundant hardware, HA for automobiles has to implemented where most problems can occur in the first place: the software.
What does this mean? Virtually any software process must be able to fail without affecting services provided by other processes. Moreover, the system should be able to restart any process automatically. For example, if a media player faults, the system would restart it instantly, without the driver even knowing there was a problem. Mind you, this fault-tolerance can’t apply only to applications. It has go deeper, right down to the device drivers and protocol stacks at the heart of any telematics system.
Can automakers really do this? Definitely, provided they use the right operating system (OS) technology. They need to look closely at the OS they choose and ensure that it can provide memory protection not just for applications (the desktop approach), but for every software driver, file system, and protocol. The OS must also offer a high availability framework that can automate software recovery, without the need for a reboot. Otherwise, the phrase “car crash” may take on a whole new meaning.
It remains to be seen just how much consumers will embrace this brave new era of talking, thinking cars. But one thing is certain. Without high availability OS technology, it won’t get past the starting line.
Paul Leroux is a technology analyst at QNX Software Systems Ltd.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-954488.html
culater
NY Tinmes article links to this e.digital page:
http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp?userID=culater33&h=QhDmSws/...
culater
DataPlay Roll Out Unaffected By Layoffs
By Doug Olenick
TWICE
8/13/2002 12:20:00 PM
Printer-Friendly version
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Boulder, Colo. - DataPlay reported today that the round of layoffs the company experienced three weeks ago would not negatively impact the roll out of DataPlay based hardware and media.
DataPlay quietly let go about 120 employees in July slashing the company’s payroll by 50 percent, a company spokeswoman said. The company was forced to make the reduction in order to due to financial constraints caused by the very tight venture capital market. The cuts were made across the board and no additional moves are planned.
'The reality is the financial markets are tight and we needed to do this to sustain our operation,' said Todd Oseth, DataPlay’s senior vice president for marketing and business development.
Oseth added that DataPlay will ship the same number of DataPlay drive engines this year as originally planned, but will cut back on the amount of internal, in-depth research. In addition, the company will lean on its partners like Imation and Toshiba to pick up some of the financial slack, he said.
Oseth said the iRiver brand DataPlay hardware devices are rolling out to a variety of retailers across the country, including CompUSA and J&R. Another model selling under the Classic brand will ship in a week, about three weeks later then scheduled.
'I see this problem as short term. We believe that the DataPlay engine and media are a compelling technology and part of our focus is to show our customers and the consumer electronics industry that iRiver can develop leading edge products and deliver new technology to the market quickly,' said Jonathan Sasse, iRiver's marketing director.
Evolution, the third firm that had committed to rolling out a DataPlay device this summer, is taking a more cautious approach. The company originally was to be the first on the market with a model, but Brad Deifer, Evolution’s CEO, said he has pulled back and now intends to see how DataPlay’s current situation shakes out before introducing any product.
'We have a unit ready to go, but there were so many things with DataPlay that did not happen that we want to see where it goes first,' he said, adding the company might make enter the market in October. The model in question would be branded with the MTV logo through a licensing deal the company has with the music video network. The company markets several portable audio products in conjunction with MTV.
Deifer added that the MTV have proven so popular that Evolution must focus its efforts in this area at the expense of DataPlay.
The pre-recorded music from BMG, EMI and Zomba are expected to start this fall. BMG's schedule has its first 11 DataPlay releases coming out on Sept. 24. These will include Sara Mclachlin, NSYNC, Britney Spears, and Brooks & Dunn.
http://www.tvinsite.com/twice/index.asp?layout=story&doc_id=98512&display=breakingNews
culater
ot-Ultrawideband Squeezes In
By Erika Jonietz September 2002
A newly approved radio technology promises wireless home electronics and positioning systems accurate to the centimeter. But opponents say it could also mean dead cell phones, thwarted satellite reception—even plane wrecks.
Robert Fontana disappears into a hallway. Seconds later, a small reddish blob of pixels appears and moves around a field of blue and green on a computer monitor hooked up to a shoebox-sized device. The splotch tracks Fontana’s position in the building, even through the two walls between him and the technology he’s showing off: a tracking and collision avoidance system that can “see” through barriers like walls (or trees) and measure a target’s position, bearing and speed. Fontana, president of Germantown, MD-based Multispectral Solutions, says what’s inside his shoebox can one day help keep helicopters, cars and other vehicles from ramming into obstacles like power lines or people.
Behind the device is a radio technology called ultrawideband that for decades was the province of military labs. But in the last few years, startups, information technology companies and consumer electronics giants have begun pushing ultrawideband beyond the radarlike systems the military pioneered and into applications that could transform the home. Sony and newcomer XtremeSpectrum in Vienna, VA, for instance, are both pursuing the possibility of using ultrawideband transmission to wirelessly link DVD players, stereos and TVs in home entertainment systems. In the future, ultrawideband links could distribute extremely information-rich content, endowing a home or office with high-resolution 3-D virtual-reality simulation. Ultrawideband can also zap data between computing devices up to 10 times faster than today’s rat’s nests of wired links.
Other potential applications include tracking objects and people to centimeter accuracy (even through walls) and ultrasensitive detectors for everything from home security systems to virtual pet enclosures. Ultrawideband tags could let robotic lawn mowers or vacuum cleaners go about their tasks without ever hitting a tree or a sofa. “We’ve got the most feasible technology for the George Jetson-like homes of the future,” says Bruce Watkins, president of Pulse-Link, an ultrawideband startup in San Diego.
Ultrawideband, proponents say, will deliver all of this via cheap, low-power radios. And, they contend—albeit over vigorous disagreement from skeptics—it won’t suffer from the interference problems that plague many existing wireless devices. “It’s a tremendous new technology,” says Geoffrey Anderson, vice president of Sony Electronics’ Advanced Wireless Technology Group. “Ultrawideband could really be a huge benefit to the consumer market.”
But the same qualities that enable such an array of applications also make ultrawideband divisive. In February, the Federal Communications Commission gave limited approval to the technology, opening the door to its commercialization, if only a crack. The FCC process generated almost 1,000 public comments—many more than most proposals elicit. And while much of the feedback was supportive, cell phone makers and service providers, Global Positioning System companies, satellite radio firms, airlines, and a slew of civilian and military government agencies all objected to the FCC’s plans to approve ultrawideband. Their beef: ultrawideband transmissions would interfere with the radio frequencies they rely on. These groups cited consequences ranging from the inconvenience of dropped cell phone calls to the frightening scenarios of foiled guidance systems preventing planes from landing in poor weather and wayward bombs that hit civilians. “The price of that interference is going to be very severe if a bomb is misdropped,” says Badri Younes, assistant secretary of defense and director of the U.S. Defense Department’s office of spectrum management.
For now, with few systems around for testing, discussions of ultrawideband’s promise and peril are largely theoretical. Although the FCC and other agencies have done some testing of the technology, the trials have mostly been conducted using lab devices—whose ultrawideband signals may be stronger, or weaker, or otherwise very different from those that will be produced by real-world devices.
With the new regulatory backing, companies will finally bring the technology to market over the next few years, and the practical answers needed to resolve the technical and political uncertainties about ultrawideband’s potential should emerge. Then we’ll see whether ultrawideband will transform the wireless world—or bring it crashing down.
Pulses of Power
Ultrawideband was born in the military labs of the 1960s. Looking for a way to let radar “see” through trees, researchers came up with the idea of using extremely short pulses of radio energy. Fundamental physics dictates that ultrashort pulses occupy a wide swath of the radio frequency spectrum; at least some of these frequencies, the theory went, were sure to penetrate leaves and branches.
Familiar wireless devices ranging from FM radios to cell phones to wireless computer networks using the increasingly common 802.11b standard all transmit continuous signals on narrow frequencies within the radio spectrum. Digital cell phones on the Sprint PCS network, for example, operate at around 1.9 gigahertz; 802.11b networks (and newer cordless phones) operate at 2.4 gigahertz. These transmissions occupy a thin slice of the spectrum and so generally do not interfere with other systems that depend on radio wave transmissions.
Ultrawideband radios, however, work in a fundamentally different way, emitting extremely short bursts of radio waves—just billionths or trillionths of a second long. Each pulse covers up to several gigahertz of radio spectrum. Information is transmitted by modulating the timing, amplitude, polarity or some other aspect of the pulses. An object’s location can be inferred by methods like those used in traditional radar systems, such as “listening” for the echo of a directional signal and timing how long it takes to return, or triangulating on a target with multiple transceivers. The extremely short pulses used in ultrawideband make the position information highly accurate, down to the centimeter scale—unlike GPS, which is typically accurate only to tens of meters.
Sending information in pulses makes the radios much simpler, and therefore cheaper, to build than typical transmitters. That’s because conventional narrowband radios require, among other design complexities, multiple analog components to tune the frequencies they emit. An ultrawideband transmitter, however, works like a tuning fork. Striking a tuning fork causes it to vibrate, sending out sound waves at a particular frequency. A semiconductor chip in an ultrawideband radio “hits” an antenna with carefully timed electrical pulses; the antenna responds by generating radio waves at every frequency possible. “Ultrawideband systems are just brain-dead simpler to build,” says Carl Howe, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, MA.
Simpler circuit designs and the pulsed nature of the transmissions also allow ultrawideband radios to transmit at much lower power than other wireless technologies. This gives ultrawideband an edge when it comes to battery-powered devices, since other high-bandwidth technologies require multiple power-consuming components (see “How Ultrawideband Stacks Up”). And the wide swath of frequencies that ultrawideband transmissions occupy helps them travel through walls; even if one frequency is distorted or doesn’t make it through, others still carry the signal.
Ultrawideband Comes Through
An ultrawideband box could transmit different cable channels to TVs throughout a home. Although walls block some of the frequencies used, enough penetrate to reconstruct the signal.
Another advantage of ultrawideband is its relative immunity to so-called multipath interference. When radio waves encounter obstacles, they bounce off them; echoes that arrive at the receiver out of phase with the original signal can cancel it out. A cordless-phone user walking away from the phone’s base station in his or her home experiences this phenomenon as the fading of the caller’s voice. But with ultrawideband’s extremely short pulses, the original signal reaches the receiver in its entirety before the first echo arrives. Today’s microchips are sophisticated enough to tell the difference between the two—or even to add them together to make the signal stronger. So ultrawideband can operate well in echo-prone places where conventional wireless systems suffer, such as living rooms or crowded cities.
How Ultrawideband Stacks Up
Technology Range (meters) Data rate (megabits/
second) Power (milliwatts) Best suited for Commercial availability
Ultrawideband 10 100 200 (peak) Short-range, high-speed data transfer (such as wireless video and audio) 2003 (estimated)
802.11a 50 30 1,000-2,000 High-speed wireless computer networks Now
802.11b 100 6 500 Computer networking and Internet access Now
Bluetooth 10 1 30 Connecting computing devices over short distances for text transfer Now
Home without Wires
The FCC’s February decision allows the commercialization of ultrawideband on an unlicensed basis—the same arrangement under which technologies like cordless phones and wireless data networks such as Bluetooth and 802.11b operate. The good news here for companies deploying ultrawideband systems is that they will not have to pay for the spectrum their technology uses. The bad news is that to assuage licensed service providers (like cell phone companies) who fear that ultrawideband might interfere with their slices of the radio spectrum, the FCC put strict limits on the new technology. Consumer ultrawideband radios are permitted to transmit only very feeble signals, at one-thousandth the power that personal computers are allowed to radiate just by being on, and only in specific frequency ranges: below 960 megahertz, between 3.1 and 10.6 gigahertz, and between 22 and 29 gigahertz. Practically, this means that the new radios will be limited in either the distance they can transmit or the data rates they can achieve..
But even within those constraints, one of the technology’s most promising applications might well have room to blossom. Ultrawideband could serve as a near ideal medium for short-range
“personal-area networks” that connect electronic devices. This concept is already embodied in the communications standard known as Bluetooth. But ultrawideband radios will be like “Bluetooth on steroids,” says Martin Rofheart, XtremeSpectrum’s cofounder and CEO.
For one thing, ultrawideband will be a lot faster than its rival—capable initially of transmitting 100 megabits per second across a distance of 10 meters, or about 100 times Bluetooth’s speed. That makes ultrawideband suitable for connecting devices like camcorders and TVs or computers and peripherals—applications requiring more bandwidth than Bluetooth can deliver. XtremeSpectrum, for example, has built a prototype that simultaneously sends DVD-quality audio and video across a room from player to TV. The system, cited as “best wireless technology of 2002” at the Wireless Systems Design conference in San Jose, CA, sends data from as many as four players to four television sets. Such a hookup could potentially distribute different cable television signals to multiple TVs in a home. That’s an application that has lured AT&T into studying the technology as well. “There are a lot of benefits,” says wireless researcher Saeed Ghassemzadeh of AT&T Labs-Research—not least of which would be the elimination of the cost of materials and labor to wire multiple access points around a house or apartment.
The same broadband-data capabilities could also make ultrawideband a wireless replacement for the cables that connect computers with peripherals like printers and scanners. Intel began an ultrawideband research project about two years ago and is considering the technology’s potential to replace the newest version of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard, which transmits data at 480 megabits per second via cables. Both XtremeSpectrum and another ultrawideband company, Time Domain of Huntsville, AL, aim to reach data rates of 400 to 500 megabits per second within the next year. And Pulse-Link’s Watkins says that by year’s end his company hopes to be making prototypes that approach speeds of one gigabit per second for distances up to 10 meters—faster than Ethernet and other current wired connections. Within three to five years, Watkins adds, Pulse-Link will build devices that transmit data much farther—50 to 100 meters—and at speeds 10 to 50 times faster than today’s 802.11a and 802.11b wireless networking technologies.
Pinpoint Positioning
But the technology’s real strengths go beyond wireless data transfer. Walter Hirt, ultrawideband-project leader at IBM’s research lab in Zürich, says ultrawideband is exciting because it offers the ability to combine data transmissions with location information in a way other wireless technologies cannot.
Three ultrawideband outfits, for example—Æther Wire and Location in Nicasio, CA, Israeli company Pulsicom and Multispectral Solutions—are developing systems of extremely high precision to track people and objects in real time. Small transceivers attached to merchandise would allow stores to accurately track, retrieve and catalogue inventory in warehouses and storerooms; the tracking systems would also monitor against theft. Multispectral Solutions has already built a system for the navy that it hopes to apply to retail shipping and warehousing problems. Hospitals, meanwhile, could use the technology to quickly run down equipment and people in emergencies.
Æther Wire also hopes to combine GPS receivers with ultrawideband for positioning systems. GPS, which works best outdoors, would locate an object to within a few meters; then a local ultrawideband infrastructure would pinpoint location to within a few centimeters—even indoors. In the short term, pager-sized versions of the technology could be used for public safety applications like tracking firefighters in a burning building; such devices could transmit temperature, oxygen levels and vital signs to the fire marshals outside. “In an emergency situation, you need to know where people are,” says Æther Wire cofounder Robert Fleming. “When you have guys in buildings, you can’t see where people are. Your own guy could be six inches away, across the next wall.” Ultimately, the company envisions systems so cheap that parents could slap sticky ultrawideband tags on their kids to keep tabs on them in malls or theme parks.
Collision avoidance radars—like the one built by Fontana’s Multispectral Solutions—are another ultrawideband strength. Initially built to sense the proximity of obstacles to unmanned aerial vehicles, such systems could serve as backup sensors in cars. DaimlerChrysler has already built a prototype car that couples an ultrawideband-based collision avoidance radar with controllers that gently engage the brakes if the vehicle appears to be heading for a crash. “It’s extraordinary driving it, because as your foot is on the gas and you’re backing up towards a pole, even though your foot is on the gas, the car comes to a gradual stop,” says Tim McBride, who helped DaimlerChrysler push for FCC approval of ultrawideband as the company’s vice president of Washington affairs. McBride says that, with the necessary approvals, cars incorporating the system could be on the road within the next few years.
Ultrawideband companies hope to establish markets for both types of applications quickly. This year, both Time Domain and XtremeSpectrum released their first ultrawideband chips, which electronics makers like Sony (a Time Domain investor) could incorporate into consumer products like TVs, camcorders, computers and stereos. XtremeSpectrum’s Rofheart expects to see ultrawideband radios in high-end consumer electronics (like plasma screen TVs) by late 2003. He says that the wireless links may start appearing in mass-market products a year later.
Running Interference
Despite ultrawideband’s promise, attempts to deploy the technology face significant obstacles. The most immediate barrier is the FCC rules, which are designed to mitigate ultrawideband’s potential to interfere with virtually every existing radio frequency service. “With the rules the commission enacted, you’ll be lucky to get a signal across a room,” says Dewayne Hendricks, founder of the Fremont, CA, wireless engineering firm the Dandin Group and a technical advisor to the FCC on new wireless technologies.
Ultrawideband’s unique nature made the FCC’s approval process especially contentious. The proposed short-range applications would use very low power pulses, which ordinarily would lessen their potential to cause interference. But ultrawideband signals overlay large parts of the radio spectrum. Although many proponents say these broadband pulses look like harmless “noise” to other radios, the signals could, in theory at least, disrupt a host of wireless applications—from TV to cell phones to GPS—that have paid big money for their slices of the spectrum. And if large numbers of ultrawideband transmitters come into use, the cumulative effects might inflict even greater interference. Many of the comments to the FCC on ultrawideband constitute a “yes it does, no it doesn’t” back and forth on the interference question—even in the interpretation of data from technical studies. “As usual with studies,” says Hendricks, “you can get credible scientists on both sides of the story.”
Sprint PCS, for example, conducted tests indicating that ultrawideband signals could lead to more dropped calls and even lower the number of calls the network could handle, meaning more busy signals. Satellite radio companies Sirius and XM Radio are concerned about potential interference with their services. And tests performed by the National Telecommunications Information Administration showed that ultrawideband signals could make it more difficult for GPS receivers to lock onto satellite signals—and could also reduce their accuracy. That prospect would be especially troubling for the air traffic control system, which in coming years will rely increasingly on GPS.
The FCC’s prohibition on ultrawideband emissions at certain frequencies was designed specifically to prevent potential interference with such systems. But those limitations are not enough, say some in the affected industries. Preliminary tests by NASA’s Langley Research Center using ultrawideband emitters placed inside and outside United Airlines planes show that even at frequencies that the FCC is permitting, ultrawideband interference could compromise the instrument landing system pilots use to land in bad weather. James Miller, program manager of flight operations technology at United, says that ultrawideband noise could additionally affect voice communications between air traffic controllers and pilots, the radars air traffic controllers use to track aircraft, and the collision avoidance system designed to prevent planes from crashing in midair. Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration adamantly oppose permitting ultrawideband to operate in any frequency used by airlines; even a single ultrawideband radio could cause problems with these critical systems. “The question is not whether there’s interference, the question is how much interference can flight crews tolerate,” says Miller—and he says the airline industry’s position is zero tolerance. “Any interference injected into the cockpit is a bad idea.”
Many ultrawideband proponents contend that improper testing exaggerates the technology’s interference effects. “A lot of the stuff put up for testing purposes with the FCC—you can’t build efficient systems that way,” says Pulse-Link’s Watkins. Others suggest that the approval process became highly politicized. “Science wasn’t really part of the debate anymore after a time—it became politics,” says the Dandin Group’s Hendricks.
Makers of ultrawideband systems hope that working commercial products will demonstrate that the radios do not cause interference. In fact, some devices under development—like Æther Wire’s systems combining GPS and ultrawideband—would not work if ultrawideband caused as much interference as critics say it will. Indeed, says XtremeSpectrum’s Rofheart, avoidance of interference-caused “radio fratricide” is key to future applications that would mingle cell phone, GPS and ultrawideband radios.
Ultrawideband proponents also worry about the trouble other radio technologies might cause them. Because conventional narrowband systems, like cordless phones, operate at much higher power than ultrawideband radios, their transmissions could overwhelm nearby ultrawideband devices. Designing ultrawideband receivers so that they block certain frequencies could solve the problem—but also make the radios more complex and costly.
Setting the Standard
In the long run, the interest of major players like Intel, IBM and Sony could well give ultrawideband the push it needs to become as ubiquitous as cell phones. But first, its adherents will have to resolve the present multitude of proprietary approaches into a single standard, like the wireless networking standards 802.11a and 802.11b. Without standardization, one brand of DVD player, for instance, might not be able to send ultrawideband data to a TV from a different maker. Rofheart predicts that by early next year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers will endorse an “802” standard for personal-area networks that incorporates ultrawideband. That, he says, will go a long way toward securing a market for the technology.
European and Asian adoption of regulations similar to the FCC’s could help the technology even more, by creating a worldwide regulatory framework that would finally allow wireless devices to work in any country. “Because we’re not dealing with frequencies that have been assigned differently in different countries, we have the first possibility of creating a global interoperable standard,” says Pulse-Link president Watkins. IBM’s Hirt says that the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations plans to formulate an ultrawideband policy by the end of 2003 and seems to be leaning toward mirroring the FCC regulations.
The action that would most benefit ultrawideband would be for the FCC to allow transmissions with higher power and at lower frequencies. And indeed, the commission is scheduled to revisit its ultrawideband regulations within six to 12 months and has signaled an intent to relax its restrictions. That could result in even simpler-to-design systems that might, among other things, solve the expensive “last-mile” problem by transmitting data from high-speed fiber-optic Internet networks to homes. Such hookups would provide connections tens of times faster than those offered by telephone and cable companies.
Some skeptics think it will be years before ultrawideband takes off at all. Kevin Kahn, who heads Intel’s efforts, believes a practical data transmission product is at least three to five years away. Ken Dulaney, a mobile-computing analyst at the consulting firm Gartner, is even more conservative, estimating that it may take seven years for the technology to gain the kind of consumer acceptance 802.11b networks enjoy—if it ever does. Ultrawideband, he says, is “really an engineering experiment that now at least has a legal backing.”
But whether ultrawideband matures in two to three years or unfolds over the course of a decade, Multispectral Solutions president Fontana is confident that the technology will eventually succeed. “When the FCC opens up over nine gigahertz of spectrum, even if these companies don’t survive—including us—there will be other companies that will take advantage of that,” he says. And when they do, the world may be a giant step closer to living like the Jetsons.
Erika Jonietz is an associate editor at Technology Review.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/jonietz0902.asp
culater
On March 25, 2002, the Company entered into a supply agreement with Digitalway Co., Ltd., one of its contract manufacturers, and has agreed in good faith to purchase a minimum of approximately $5.96 million of product in the twelve-month period from initial order date. http://www.pinksheets.com/quote/filings.jsp?url=%2Fredirect.asp%3Ffilename%3D0001169232%252D02%252D0...
culater
ot-The media titans still don't get it
Corporate America lost billions on the Net. That doesn't mean the medium has no value -- but the moguls remain clueless about where it lies.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Scott Rosenberg
Aug. 13, 2002 / You'd think that, in summer 2002, with the red ink of a thousand bankrupt dot-coms still bleeding across the stock charts, everyone could agree on what happened to the Internet. Big money poured in; a few got rich, many lost their shirts. Trend became gold rush became bubble. Pop -- end of story. Now, everyone, back to work!
That, at any rate, is how much of the commercial media world views the Internet saga. New technology thing came along. Couldn't figure it out. Seemed important. Threw a lot of money at it. Down a hole. It's over now, thank God.
And that would be the story's end, if it weren't for one stubborn fact that refuses to vanish -- instead it just sits there, center stage, after the curtain has dropped behind it, thumbing its nose at the booing crowd: The Internet itself hasn't gone away. Hundreds of millions of people around the world continue to bend it to their own ends, in chaotic, unstable and unpredictable ways. As a generator of instant wealth, the Net may now be a big bust; as a generator of instant ideas, it keeps thrumming along.
This is a difficult fact for our media culture to digest. The media cover technology on a predictable cycle -- a rhythm of hype and scorn that you can follow like clockwork each time a new wave of innovation sweeps the high-tech landscape. For nearly a decade, the Internet story has followed this arc; by all rights, it should be over by now.
According to "Bamboozled at the Revolution," a new book chronicling "how big media lost billions in the battle for the Internet," it is. After 300 grueling pages recording stunningly stupid corporate boardroom struggles, author John Motavalli concludes that "Web content is dead," "digital dreams have been deferred for 'broadband,'" and "AOL Time Warner will dominate."
In the narrow circles of New York media mogul-dom that are Motavalli's subject -- the same people who blew those billions because they never figured out what the Internet is -- his conclusions are the conventional wisdom (though AOL Time Warner continues to take a beating). With the Internet cycle over, who knows when the Next Big Thing to throw money at will come along? In the meantime, let's play golf.
But the same people who got the Internet business so wrong got the Internet story wrong, too. IPOs and e-commerce and "network effect" growth rates were dazzling ephemera. But while magazine editors' eyes were transfixed by the business's convulsions, big things were happening under their noses: E-mail was transforming the workplace and the social landscape. Personal Web sites became "advertisements for myself" for the masses. "Communities of interest" -- devotees of certain obscure handicrafts; critics of certain large companies; followers of certain public policy debates -- formed and splintered and reformed in numbers too great to compile. New galaxies of communication coalesced, far off the familiar big-media grid.
It's this story that's addressed by "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" -- an odd but wonderful series of essays by David Weinberger about how profoundly the Net is changing our lives. "Bamboozled at the Revolution" is trade-magazine reporting; "Small Pieces" is armchair philosophy. Still, you can learn far more about why and how the media lost their way online from Weinberger's musings on the nature of Web reality than from Motavalli's chronicles of boardroom chaos.
The crucial difference between these two books is that Weinberger focuses on people who actually use the Net -- whereas Motavalli concentrates on people who didn't, and probably still don't.
To paraphrase James Carville: It's the users, stupid!
"Bamboozled at the Revolution" promises to explain just how the lords of New York's media universe got blindsided by the Internet. Its central focus is on the Time Warner empire, whose decade-long flirtation with the high-tech future never bore the fruit that chairman Gerald Levin envisioned in the early days of the corporation's futile experiments with interactive television. While the book offers occasional side-trips to other companies, including Disney, Hachette Filipacchi and the TV networks, for Motavalli, Time Warner is where the action was -- or, rather, wasn't.
For those who participated in the madness of that time, "Bamboozled's" review of the sorry histories of media misfires on the Net -- iGuide, the New Century Network, MSN's 1977 TV-style lunacy, Go, Snap, NBCi and of course Time Warner's Pathfinder debacle -- will offer moments of bitter nostalgia. Overconfident media bosses were unnerved by the Net and became "convinced that there was some kind of special mojo zeitgeist Internet know-how out there, if only they could find it." One might feel sympathy with such confusion -- but laughing feels better, and besides, virtually every one of them walked off with some sort of golden parachute.
"Bamboozled" doesn't find much black comedy in the subject, alas. Motavalli asks us to hang out for an entire book with a bunch of executives who didn't get the Net at first and never really caught on. That's pointless and stultifying.
Motavalli's East-Coast-centric account concentrates on the drabbest aspects of the Net revolution -- the bureaucratic struggles within the Time Warner mothership, the "who reports to whom" battles that must have meant a lot to the participants at the time but that today read like dynastic struggles within a dead kingdom. A better writer might have transformed this material into a drama of corporate arrogance and folly -- but Motavalli is the sort of author whose idea of color is to introduce each figure by briefly mentioning the hue of his or her hair.
In any case, the timing of news about AOL Time Warner has dealt a cruel blow to Motavalli's account. "Bamboozled" concludes with AOL's crown prince Robert Pittman triumphant -- and the Time Warner leadership, who'd sold off their proud inheritance for a mess of new-media pottage, still wondering what hit them. In the intervening weeks, of course, AOL has been humbled, Pittman has resigned, and the Time Warner old guard is back in charge -- with Don Logan, the veteran Time executive most famous in Internet circles for having said of Pathfinder in 1995 that it "gives a whole new meaning to the scientific term 'black hole,'" now AOL's overlord. The only part of Motavalli's conclusion that still applies is that, any way you look at it, the big merger remains a disaster.
So we know who got bamboozled. But who did the bamboozling? There really are no culprits -- aside from one sad account of software hustlers actually defrauding the folks at the Hollywood talent agency CAA. Mostly, the media barons bamboozled themselves; the fear of losing turf to a new generation of technology, and later, the lure of quick Internet riches, motivated them to make costly decisions out of ignorance -- to invest in Web ventures that any observer who actually used the Internet could see were poorly conceived and doomed to fail.
And that, really, was the problem. In the mid-'90s, as the New York media world woke up to the Net's rise, I always assumed that reports of media leaders' online virginity were highly exaggerated. I mean, how hard was it to install an AOL disk? But Motavalli's account leaves it quite clear that, yes, many of these guys who were getting their companies on the Net really hadn't ever used it themselves.
"If you're not an online user, it's very difficult to understand the medium," says Warner exec Jim Moloshok. Well, duh. But somehow this elementary principle eluded media leaders for years. In one embarrassing anecdote culled from an Industry Standard article about the aftermath of the winter 2000 Time Warner/AOL merger, Time Warner CFO Richard Bressler hears about plans to promote Time magazines on AOL and asks, "What are these pop-ups? How big are they? Can you send me some information on them?" AOL's legendary deal-maker, David Colburn, responds, "Rich, why don't you invest $21.95 in an AOL subscription and consider it due diligence?" Ouch.
What might have been due diligence for a corporate exec was already a way of life for tens of millions of people. Motavalli contrasts the New York media honchos' cluelessness with the insight of AOL's Ted Leonsis that, online, it's "user experience" that counts. For AOL the key experience was getting new users online painlessly: It has always offered the simplest, most idiot-proof onramp to the Internet. AOL solved a vexing problem for millions of people; that, more than any "content strategy" or insight into online behavior, secured its dominance.
But once those people got online, they almost immediately started behaving in unpredictable ways. They didn't wait for a media corporation to tell them what to do; they began writing pages and posting comments and building sites and contributing reviews and arguing and inventing identities. This unplanned behavior was made possible because of design decisions made by the engineers who established the Internet long before the media world ever heard of it. As Doc Searls summarizes these principles, "Nobody owns it; everyone can use it; anyone can improve it."
This activity continues unabated, oblivious to the Web industry's flameout. "We -- the great mass of Web users -- knew that there was more to the story than how the money was being made and, later, lost," David Weinberger writes in "Small Pieces Loosely Joined." Weinberger -- one of the writers behind "The Cluetrain Manifesto" -- tries to analyze the rest of the story: How the peculiar, unique traits of the Net are shaping a new kind of human discourse.
The argument is abstract -- and, in places, abstruse -- but at its heart is a simple insight: That most of what's on the Web is there because someone is interested in it, cares about it passionately enough to put it in front of the rest of the world. And, Weinberger proposes, it's precisely because the Web is powered by our interests, "the world's collective passion," that it is so distracting, so conducive to quick hops and interruptions. He doesn't see this as necessarily bad: "Perhaps the Web isn't shortening our attention span. Perhaps the world is just getting more interesting."
That glass-half-full view may be a little too rosy, but it's a provocative challenge to conventional wisdom. Similarly, Weinberger views the Web's perennial technical problems and "under construction" imperfections as a healthy antidote to sterile professionalism and a key to the Web's phenomenal fertility: "The designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity, and perfection lost. The Web is broken on purpose ... Remove the controls and we'll have to put up with a lot of broken links and awful information, but in return we'll get a vibrant new world, accessible to everyone and constantly in the throes of self-invention."
Weinberger's Web is not just a giant marketplace or an "information resource" -- it's a social commons on which the interests of a mass of individuals are splayed in universally accessible detail and trumpeted in an effectively infinite array of personal voices. That concept is almost unfathomable to media pros whose business is "aggregating eyeballs" to sell to advertisers.
Everyone understands that the Web will not, as its most wild-eyed prophets might once have imagined, somehow preempt or eclipse the media of eyeballs and ads. TV is still there. Magazines aren't going away. AOL Time Warner is still a vast company whose biggest profits come from "old" media.
But if media companies are going to continue to participate in the Web world -- and they are -- then they could learn a lot from Weinberger's analysis. How does the tradition of professionally created journalism and entertainment fit into the dynamics of a wide-open Web? No one has a definitive answer to that question, and that includes us here at Salon. But "Sit around and wait for the Web to just go away" is one answer, still popular in some media circles, that we should rule out.
Motavalli, lamenting the post-bubble state of the industry, asks the quintessential media-insider question about the Web: "There are billions of Web sites, but how many of them matter?"
Excuse me -- matter? To whom, exactly? To the Manhattan lunch crowd? To the Beltway lobbyist? To the person searching Google for "Anna Nicole Smith" -- or "expansion joints"?
What Weinberger reminds us is that every Web site, every Internet posting matters to the person who created it -- and maybe to that person's circle of site visitors, whether they number 10 million or just 10. Sure, some 11-year-old's book review on Amazon may be full of grammatical errors. OK, the world may not need any more Britney Spears fan sites. But lord, here's the quark machine some imaginative scientists built in 1997! Here's the complete lyrics of Bob Dylan! And here's everything you ever wanted to know about repairing your old Volkswagen!
Individually, these contributions may be crude, untrustworthy, unnoteworthy. Collectively, they represent the largest and most widely accessible pool of information and entertainment in human history. And it's still growing.
In this context, statements like "Web content is dead" or "AOL Time Warner will dominate" aren't so much wrong as irrelevant. Web content is everywhere. No one can dominate the Internet. And the Web belongs to its users. That's not the end of a story, it's the beginning.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/13/media_titans/index.html
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Here's an incredibly bright idea-lol-
TVs in steering wheels raise safety concerns
By Earle Eldridge, USA TODAY
Professional athletes, rap artists and urban youths are installing TVs throughout their luxury cars — including in the middle of steering wheels. It's a way to have the most talked-about and eye-catching car in the 'hood, providing a dizzying display at night when all the monitors are on. But TVs that can be seen by drivers raise safety concerns and are illegal in most states. Federal safety officials think 20%-30% of accidents involve distracted drivers. And putting a TV in the steering wheel requires removing the air bag.
An air bag was removed in rapper Kaleidaskope's Mercedes to make room for a TV.
Unique Autosports
"This is a big problem from the safety point of view," says Susan Ferguson, vice president of research for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. "On the one hand, you are removing a clearly proven safety device that will save a life, and you are putting something in its place that could be distracting."
"People should realize that the No. 1 cause of death for young people is motor vehicle crashes," says Tim Hurd, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration spokesman. "If you put something distracting in the car, it's not only dangerous for the driver but dangerous for passengers, other motorists and pedestrians."
NHTSA's jurisdiction is limited to new vehicles. States police modifications, and 38 have made it illegal to have a TV monitor visible to the driver.
As with seatbelts, tickets may be handed out when a driver is stopped for another violation. "You might get a ticket if you're pulled over for something else and the officer knows about the law," says Matt Swanston, Consumer Electronics Association spokesman.
Although no one tracks installation, the trend's been building about two years, says Mateo Mulcare, publisher of Plush, a magazine dedicated to urban street custom cars. Owners spend thousands to put monitors in headrests, sun visors, dashboards, ceilings, rearview mirrors and steering wheels.
"They are still expensive and a big wow factor," Swanston says. "Because it is not a terribly practical application, it will not likely take off in huge numbers."
Installation policies vary. Los Angeles customizer Dornell Griffin of 310 Motoring won't remove an air bag to install a TV. Will Castro of Unique Autosports in Uniondale, N.Y., requires a customer to sign a waiver saying the car will be used only for auto shows.
"I am actually against removing the air bag to put in a TV screen, but we are getting a lot more calls to install them," Castro says.
Rap singer Kaleidaskope says removing the air bag to install a TV in the steering wheel of his Mercedes-Benz CL 55 "was all for show" and that he rarely drives the car outside his Long Island neighborhood. "It makes a statement. It says you're either a ballplayer, a rapper or making some serious cheddar (money)."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2002-08-12-cartv_x.htm
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Chained melodies
Copyright-holding corporations are pushing new laws and computer-crippling technologies in their war on piracy. But can anything keep geeks from copying the music and movies they crave?
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By Damien Cave
March 13, 2002 / A sense of panic, instead of anticipation, coursed through Brian Cianessi when he bought the "More Fast and Furious" movie soundtrack just before Christmas. He had heard that the CD was one of the first to be copy-protected for sale in the U.S. market. He feared his days of music ripping would soon be over; Universal Studios had allegedly found a way to keep listeners from making MP3s out of the album's nu-metal gems.
Cianessi, a 24-year-old Los Angeles computer programmer, wasn't interested in posting the songs to KaZaa, Gnutella or any of the other file-sharing networks that have sprung up in Napster's wake. He had no desire to be a pirate. But he did want to play songs from the album on his MP3 player. "I was just worried that I wouldn't be able to rip the tracks, and subsequently transfer them to my car stereo, which has no CD player, only hard drives," he says.
At first, his worries proved justified. When he put the CD in his computer and fired up AudioGrabber, a software program that converts CD tracks into MP3s, the CD locked up the program. But after rebooting his computer, he discovered that the protection was easy to thwart. The copy protection worked by introducing a false value for the start time of the CD -- Cianessi used a function of AudioGrabber to reset that start time to zero, and then was able to encode the music without a glitch.
"My original plan was to buy the CD and then cause a fuss at the store and demand they refund my money when I couldn't play it on my car stereo," he says. "But it turned out to be such a trivial workaround I didn't even bother."
Cianessi's trick turns out to be far from the only way to defeat the various forms of copy protection currently debuting on CDs all over the world. (Running a digital output cord from a CD player to a computer, for instance, is also becoming a popular form of circumvention.) But even as crackers continue to prove how easy it is to set information free, the backlash against intellectual property violation is continuing to swell.
Hollywood is on the march. Adding copy protection to CDs is just one tactic in a comprehensive onslaught. Media behemoths like Disney, Sony and AOL Time Warner are seeking full control of all methods of entertainment distribution; if their vision is realized, digital television sets, hard drives, personal video-recorders and wireless devices will all have some form of copy protection. In the most dire incarnation of the digital entertainment future, consumers of music and movies won't be able to make any copies at all without explicit permission; you might not even be able to move, for example, a recorded version of "The Simpsons" from the digital VCR in your den to the one in your bedroom.
Many critics are convinced that copy-protection technologies are doomed to failure. No system is perfectly secure, and anything that works too well is bound to annoy consumers. Veterans of the consumer industry recall the late 1980s, when many software manufacturers abandoned various copy-protection schemes as bad for business. That cycle, they argue, is set to repeat itself.
But there are signs that the digital future will not resemble the past. Not only do the content companies enjoy access to much more sophisticated technology, but they also have a new tool at their disposal: Congress. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 makes it illegal to distribute or even discuss anything that circumvents digital copyright control. And last month, Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C., threatened to launch another bill -- the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) -- that will mandate the inclusion of copy-protection technology in all digital devices.
Computer-savvy geeks will likely find a way around every technological advance delivered by state-of-the-art copy protection. But what happens when the law of the land is in direct opposition to mainstream consumer behavior and desires? As the content companies accelerate the deployment of every legal, political and technological weapon in their arsenal, that is precisely the showdown that looms.
Consumers of entertainment have long taken advantage of whatever technology is at hand to make copies of their favorite obsessions. Likewise, content creators have long struggled to resist this tendency. Copyright law, originally intended to balance the needs of both consumers and producers, existed in a middle ground between the two sides. But the advent of the Internet, which makes copying anything digital, anywhere, absurdly easy, vastly increased the stakes of the struggle. In response, the content companies have used their lobbying clout to aggressively redefine copyright law in their own interest.
"Over the past 10 years, many have come around to the view that, in a networked digital world, limitations on copyright owners' control of their works are no longer desirable," writes Wayne State law professor Jessica Litman in her book "Digital Copyright." Intellectual property laws, she adds, have taken on a new meaning. No longer a balance between public and corporate rights, "Copyright is now seen as a tool for copyright owners to use to extract all the potential commercial value from works of authorship, even if that means that uses that have been long deemed legal are now brought within the copyright owners' control," she writes.
As a result, if the content companies continue to have their way, the once-freewheeling Net will be reduced to a glorified form of top-down broadcasting: "a digital multiplex and shopping mall," in Litman's words; "cable television on speed," as Lawrence Lessig phrased it in "The Future of Ideas."
Hollings' bill, whether or not it passes, will likely accelerate the pace of change. Some of the world's biggest technology companies are already scrambling to come up with forms of protection that keep content safe. The industry dwarfs Hollywood in size -- domestic spending on technology goods and services totaled $600 billion in 2000, according to government figures, while Hollywood receipts equaled $35 billion -- but companies such as Intel are still wary of letting Congress dictate their hardware designs.
They're developing technology out of "a fear of legislation," says David Touretzky, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and frequent critic of the DMCA. "Better to negotiate something they can live with than have something imposed on them unilaterally by clueless senators" in Hollywood's thrall.
Other factors are also in play: Broadband providers and consumer electronics companies are worried that without copy protection they won't have access to the kind of entertainment that would drive consumer adoption of new technologies. Software industry titans such as Microsoft stand to benefit both from enhanced protection of their own products, and from the sale of security services.
It appears unquestionable that hard-wired copy protection is on the way. But will any of it work the way its backers want? Touretzky notes that in the 1980s, copy protection "really pissed off customers, who found they couldn't make backups, or recover easily after a disk crash." Will the new push for protection be any different?
Hollywood will get what it wants, says Talal Shamoon, executive vice president of InterTrust, one of the first companies to pioneer copy-protection strategies for digital audio and video. Cable television, he notes, prevents consumers from accessing content they haven't paid for; the future of digital entertainment will be equally secure. Get ready for what is increasingly being called "trusted computing."
Several different approaches are in the works. The "broken media" method discovered by Cianessi on his "More Fast and Furious" CD is one example. Watermarking -- incorporating a kind of digital label in a song or TV show or movie that uniquely identifies the copy -- is another. There's also the idea of "protection bits," a tool currently used in digital audiotapes, which only permits users to make a copy of an original, and not of another copy.
The leading lockdown candidate combines several of these older software fixes with emerging technologies that focus on hardware. The Copy Protection Working Group (CPTWG), a Hollywood high-tech body charged with developing protection for digital television and other forms of video distribution, wants to make it possible for a broadcaster to physically stop users from sending a digital stream of, say, "Star Wars" to a VCR.
"There are two technologies that create secure connection devices," says Shamoon. "One is called 5C," named after the five companies that created it -- Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita, Sony and Toshiba. "Then there's another technology from Thomson Multimedia called "SmartRight."
Both work by embedding a chip that has the power to shut down specific functions in a given entertainment device; such a chip would be able to instruct the device that sending digital output to another device is forbidden.
"Digital rights management" software takes over from there. "There will be something called a broadcast flag, which will be embedded in the digital signal," says Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has attended several CPTWG meetings. "It will identify the content as copy once, copy always, copy never. TV receivers or set-top boxes will read the flag and comply. So if it says 'copy never' it will turn off our digital outputs."
Media players in a personal computer could also be set to read similar "flags," both for audio and video. And, says Touretzky, everything will likely be encrypted. "For example, instead of sending analog signals to your speakers, you send an encrypted stream of digital data, and the decryption is done in a sealed module built right into the speaker," he says. "Video is done the same way: Encryption is done in a sealed module built right into the monitor, so you can't bypass the encryption by tapping into the monitor cables. Disk drive encryption is built into the drive itself, etc., etc."
There are advantages for both consumers and owners with this scheme, says Shamoon. "It supports the copy/no copy commands but it also lets you buy the movie you just watched at the end, or send it to 10 friends," he says.
The new techniques, promises Shamoon, will be both secure and painless. "Having been around the block a few times, we've learned a lot," says Shamoon, who once worked for the Secure Digital Music Initiative, creators of a vaunted protection scheme that was defeated in October 2000. "Our new products are as easy as buying something on Amazon, except you don't have to wait for UPS to show up."
But just as Shamoon overestimated the strength of SDMI, some experts argue, Hollywood and the digital rights management industry have failed to realize that the search for secure content is a Sisyphean exercise.
Today's copy-protection technologies are less frustrating than those of the past, but they still threaten to enrage and alienate consumers. Take the case of Microsoft Office XP. The copy-protected software is full of problems, says Tom Cramer, 21, a server technician for Compaq in Colorado Springs, Colo.
"I have a licensed copy and I've had to call Microsoft to reactivate it several times," he says. "When I reformatted my laptop, it didn't pick up that it was the same machine. I've since changed laptops; and the license says that I can have it on one laptop and one desktop but when I bought a new laptop, I had to call again."
"If this is the kind of protection that gets into a digital device, I'm going to be upset," he adds. "If I have to call a record label to say, hey, my MP3 player broke, give me another license, I'm not going to buy the device."
Even the tightest and smoothest forms of protection promise to be not just annoying, but also beatable, say experts. History is on the hackers' and crackers' side. Every attempt to handcuff content -- even cable and satellite TV -- has failed. And the reason is simple: If you can see or hear the content once, you can find a way to copy it. Episodes of "South Park" may originally only be legally available to cable television subscribers, but they're also easily available via the Net. One digitized, uploaded copy opens Pandora's box.
If users can't decrypt the stream, reset the index of the CD or recode the television to allow for digital output, they'll simply record another way, notes Touretzky. "People don't care all that much about the superior quality of digital content, compared to price and convenience issues," he says, pointing out that MP3s became popular even though they sound worse than CDs. "So, if people can't grab the digital data stream, they'll just set up a microphone next to their speakers and take the one-time analog quality hit in order to rerecord the data in an unprotected format. Granted, this is a lot less convenient than ripping CDs is now, but they'll do whatever it takes."
Ultimately, Touretzky and others argue, copy protection and the Net are technologically at odds, magnets repelling each other in opposite directions. "It's the nature of the Net to pass information from anywhere to anywhere," says Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who was threatened with legal action by the Recording Industry Association of America for planning to give a paper on how to reverse-engineer SDMI. "It's the same with PCs: They can handle and process information in any way that you like. Copyright protection is the opposite."
Society must either give up on copy protection or the general-purpose PC and the Net, says Felten. And no matter how hard Hollywood tries, Felten argues, society will eventually choose the latter because "the sheer value of the Net and computers is so much greater than any value that copy protection can provide."
Not even Hollings' Security Systems Standards and Certification Act will keep Hollywood's content safe, some argue.
"Congress may as well legislate that water has to run uphill," says Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University. "All the legislation in the world can't change the fact that you have this content and if you listen to it or see it, then you can copy it."
"[New technologies and laws] won't work any better than the Federal Prohibition Bureau for curbing illegal alcohol use during prohibition," says Cianessi. "Society will continue to slowly evolve around legislative obstacles, just as it always has."
But if the technology that Hollywood favors is defeatable, why are people like Wallach and Cianessi so worried? Why are geeks fighting so passionately against the shift toward copy protection?
The technology is not what bothers them -- it's the criminalization of the act of copying, and even worse, of the act of discussing copying, that critics find most alarming. Is it really in the public interest to continually increase the level of corporate ownership of ideas and expression? Who should Congress serve?
The DMCA -- which has already been used to threaten Felten and to prevent Web magazines from linking to at least one program deemed illegal by Hollywood -- and the so-called Sonny Bono Act, which extended the length of copyright protection by 20 years, forcing some Internet publishers to take down content that was once available in the public domain, are the leading legal offenders.
Both laws, say legal scholars, show how willing Congress is to comply with entertainment industry demands.
"In the 1970s and the 1980s, there were a substantial number of members of Congress who responded with skepticism when the movie or record business insisted that the threat of widespread unlicensed copying required new laws, and copyright owners who sought the legislation needed to draft it narrowly and make a persuasive case it was actually necessary," Litman says. "That's why, despite [MPAA chairman] Jack Valenti's claim that VCRs spelled the end of the U.S. movie industry, Congress did not enact any of the videotape-recorder/copy-protection bills introduced in the 1980s.
"Twenty years later, thanks in large part to the massive increase in lobbying money spent by the entertainment industries, most members of Congress would agree that more copyright protection is always better than less," says Litman.
The SSSCA fits squarely within this trend. The bill has yet to be introduced, but the draft that leaked to the Net last year would make it illegal "to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies."
Hollings, who has received $264,534 in campaign contributions from the TV, music and movie industries since 1997, has attempted to argue that standardized copy protection is the key to encouraging the continuing rollout of broadband Net connectivity. According to this theory, customers won't sign up for DSL or cable Internet access if they can't get top-notch entertainment via their computers. But Hollywood won't make that content available unless it is confident it won't be pirated.
"This is what he sees as one of the critical problems -- the piracy of digital content," says Andy Davis, a Hollings spokesman. "And this is the method he sees as a solution for that."
But by outlawing any device that doesn't comply, the SSSCA would potentially make, for example, software that moved your hard drive's contents to a remote computer illegal. It would also make possession of devices and software already on sale a punishable offense.
Furthermore, argues Litman, the theory that broadband adoption is dependent on copy protection just doesn't hold water. The entertainment and information industries made the same argument in the early '90s as part of their lobbying for the DMCA, she notes, pointing out that they were wrong then, and are wrong now.
"In 1993, the White House was interested in developing what it first called the Information Superhighway and then the National Information Infrastructure," says Litman. "Entertainment and information industries argued that unless they were given stronger copyright protection, they'd refuse to make their content available over the NII, and therefore nobody would want to use it, so nobody would build the network. The administration actually endorsed this position in 1994 and 1995 reports, and introduced legislation designed to respond to it. Meanwhile, of course, the Internet was growing by leaps and bounds. Despite the absence of Hollywood movies, Random House books and BMG records, the Internet enjoyed the steepest adoption trajectory of any comparable technological innovation, becoming common in the majority of U.S. households within a decade."
Contrary to Hollywood's claims, the battle is not over broadband -- it's over business models. Though VCRs, DVDs and other new technologies have all added to Hollywood's bottom line, Hollywood is convinced that the world of digital downloads and streams will cost more than it brings in to corporate coffers. And so it has turned once again to Congress.
The legislature's willingness to listen cuts across political lines. The debate doesn't fit neatly into a liberal/conservative framework, says Lessig. It's "controlled vs. free," he writes in "The Future of Ideas," or "old vs. new."
Even Shamoon admits that we're in the midst of an "ugly transition period." Everyone is dreaming of a time "when content exists in the air and follows you around," he says. "I want to be able to walk into a hotel room and have it realize it's me and let me watch my movies from home."
But that ideal seems a long way off, and in the meantime, despite Congress' eagerness to do Hollywood's bidding, there's no clear sign yet as to who is going to win the intellectual-property wars.
Brian Cianessi figures that his CD will end up looking like some sort of omen -- perhaps the thin end of the wedge that marks the end of the golden age of Net file-trading. But he's not sure what will emerge.
"We currently exist during a turning point that will be considered historically significant to coming generations," he says. "I can only hope that when they look back to this time they can see the stand we took on copyright as the fulcrum for the shift of power back to the people and away from big corporations."
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/13/copy_protection/index.html
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Rhapsody's Five-Part Harmony
CEO Sean Ryan explains what it means now that online-music service's deal with Universal lets it offer all the big labels' catalogs
One year to the day after online file-sharing service Napster shut down, another digital-music service is hitting the big time. On July 1, Listen.com announced that its Rhapsody music-subscription service had secured a much-sought-after licensing deal with Universal Music. The agreement anoints Rhapsody as the first online service to offer songs from the five major music labels: Universal, Warner Bros., Sony, BMG, and EMI. Together, that group controls more than 85% of the $13 billion U.S. music market.
Rhapsody, which many reviewers regard as the best online-music service to date, now offers its subscribers unlimited streaming access to more than 175,000 tracks and 14,000 albums (see BW Online, 11/30/01, "Rhapsody in Green?" and 12/28/01, "Pay-to-Play Music: Lots of Missed Notes"). Subscribers can already download and burn classical tracks to a CD. Rhapsody hopes to offer the same ability across its library by fall.
But the deal says as much about the music labels as it does about Listen.com. For three years, record executives have taken divergent approaches to online music, seeing it first as something to be ignored, then something to be stamped out. Universal's decision to catch the online-music wave by licensing its repertoire to Listen.com demonstrates that the tide is turning. On June 28, Listen.com CEO Sean Ryan spoke to BusinessWeek Online's Jane Black about what the deal heralds for Listen.com and the online-music business. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:
Q: Why is this such an important announcement for Listen.com?
A: The deal not only brings Universal's 30% market share to Rhapsody but it also improves [the service's] usefulness to the consumer by an infinite amount. It removes [the lack of] content as an issue. And that has been the overriding problem in digital music.
Q: What does it say about the record labels' view of digital music?
A: The labels' thought process has been changing for three years. Three years ago, they saw the Internet and wished it would go away. It had no benefits to their business, and it was causing changes to their plans. Two years ago, they saw the Internet was not going to go away, but they saw that it was primarily used for copyright theft. And it was in those days.
What this announcement shows is that the tune is starting to change to: "Hey, the Internet still can be used for copyright theft, but let's take a look at it as another distribution channel." That's especially important because their physical business is under such assault. Now, they're saying, "Let's use the Net as a way to increase revenue and get additional content out to new people."
Just the way video rentals and pay-per view have helped the movie business by expanding the overall revenue pie, digital music is going to help the labels.
Q: Isn't it also possible that the labels are just tipping their hat to the Justice Dept., which for months has been investigating whether they were colluding to exclude independent digital-music services like Rhapsody?
A: Make no mistake: I think they're doing this out of self-interest. There are three components. One is to have a legitimate alternative to piracy. Two is to look for alternative sources of revenue beyond the physical retail, which is taking a beating right now. And three, there's no question, there's a Justice Dept. investigation going on to make sure there's a level playing field, and that's putting pressure on them. But I don't think it's solely that latter one. It's a mixture.
Q: It has taken a long time to get deals with all the labels. What were the main bones of contention?
A: The Universal negotiations took 16 months. And the majority of the negotiations with the other labels took 9 to 12. Of course, there were discussions over financials. But more important, there were negotiations over what rights are inherent from a device perspective. We all see in the next two to three years that music will move away from the PC into stereos, into televisions, into cell phones and cars. And it's a setting up parameters and descriptions of what those rights entail.
So first, we've argued for rights to [the music labels'] entire catalog -- none of these partial-catalog deals. Second, we wanted the ability to offer unlimited access. We think it's crucial that you put no limits on the amount of times people want to listen to music -- just like HBO doesn't limit the number of programs you can watch. And third, we felt that it was important to take it into account wireless devices.
It took time because, as I mentioned earlier, this has been a period of time when the labels have been evolving and getting used to digital-music services in general. For us, it has been a period of time when they were coming to terms with our unique all-you-can-eat streaming proposition, which is quite different than limited, tethered downloads that other services [such as label-backed MusicNet and pressplay] offer. We're moving past that.
Now, the conversations are mostly about how we can clear more content and how can we promote artists -- as opposed to the last 12 months when they seemed to focus on how we could yell and scream at each other. That's what's exciting about this change. We're now talking about ways to work together rather than trying to explain why we don't cannibalize their business. There are plenty of illegal services that are cannibalizing their business.
Q: Could Listen's deal undermine popular music file-sharing services such as KaZaA and Morpheus?
A: I believe that a combination of factors will erode usage of the file-sharing services. On the positive side, our getting all the content will give people incentives to switch to an easier-to-use, well-priced service. On the negative side, we've begun to see the file-sharing services put everything from popup ads to spyware onto their services. Users are also at risk of computer viruses.
More important, you're starting to see the beginnings of decoy-style efforts, where people are putting false files into the networks that appear to be popular songs but are not.
What we've found from personal usage and our survey of users is that the P2P [peer-to-peer systems such as Morpheus] networks are starting to get harder to use. It doesn't mean that if you're really dedicated and you want to spend time rooting through people's hard drives, you can't. Piracy is going to be with us for a long time to come. But a mainstream enthusiast consumer who won't spend two hours trying to save $5 or $10 will start switching over to Rhapsody, which has all the music and is easy to use.
It's similar to how AOL throughout the boom period fought off the free ISPs. Everyone wondered why anyone would go to AOL when you could get it free. But they went to AOL because it was a better service, and it was priced correctly.
Q: So if this is Online Music 2.0, what can we expect and when?
A: Well, starting July 1, you'll see us with all the music. And people talk about features and benefits a lot, but when we survey our consumers, they want the music. If you don't have the music, it doesn't matter how many features and benefits you have. Having all the music will take care of the audience that listens to music primarily through the computer.
However, to push this into the mainstream, there's no question that we have to increase portability and ownership aspects. So what I believe you'll see, starting in at the end of the third quarter, [is] much more widespread CD burning at a lower cost. Those kinds of contracts are sitting on our desks right now. And you'll see announcements as early as next week.
By the fourth quarter, you'll see our first wireless offering. You'll be able to subscribe to Rhapsody through the PC, but you'll be able to take your music with you and listen to it on your phone. You'll simply take your playlist off Rhapsody and be able to walk down the street and play it on your phone -- assuming you live where there's an advanced network and you have a sophisticated phone.
In 2003, we'll see the big push into the mainstream.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2002/tc2002071_7533.htm
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So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star
The Web is making it easier than ever for independent musicians to find an audience -- and cut out middlemen
David Nevue, 36, has been a solo pianist for more than 15 years, spending his nights and weekends playing at coffee shops, special events, and malls around Springfield, Ore., a town of 51,700. During the day, he worked for online-security company Symantec. No matter what he tried, however, his music career wouldn't catch fire. His first album, self-published in 1992, gathered dust at local shops.
Then along came the Internet. Around 1995, Nevue created his first Web page, www.DavidNevue.com. In 1996, he launched a site for piano enthusiasts, featuring music reviews and links to other sites, plus information on everything from sheet music to the history of the piano.
Nevue also promoted his own, New Age CDs online (soon, he'll have seven of them). As a result, he now sells $1,000 worth of CDs a month and distributes his music digitally through MP3.com. He recently ranked No. 13 on its charts, ahead of international stars like Alanis Morissette. Last fall, Nevue achieved every artist's dream: He quit his job at Symantec to do music full time -- a luxury he's able to afford thanks to online sales of his CDs and a book he wrote in 1997 on marketing music online.
HEADS ROLL. More musicians could soon be walking the same path. The music industry is in its worst shape since World War II, when it curtailed record production to conserve materials for the war effort. Terry Currier, president of Music Millennium record stores in Portland, Ore., blames this year's double-digit decline in CD sales partly on Web distribution of music. And in fact, a recent survey by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the music industry's lobbying group, showed that 23% of consumers bought fewer albums this year because they could get the music on the Web free.
Whatever the reasons, the major labels have laid off up to 20% of their employees, cut advances offered to artists, and trimmed their roster of performers: A few months ago, EMI axed pop diva Mariah Carey (she later signed with Universal). Veteran pop star David Bowie has also ended his relationship with EMI, and songstress Tori Amos left Atlantic Records last year.
Over the next two years, major labels could cut the number of acts they support by another 20%, believes Kembrew McLeod, a University of Iowa professor and producer of the film documentary Money for Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music. Those who survive could receive less money, says Bart Day, an entertainment lawyer in Portland, Ore.
DEBT BURDEN. As a result, more musicians are likely to try producing and selling music on the Web. "Artists are seeing this as a possibility for change, and they're taking more risks," says Jenny Toomey, executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, a digital-music lobbying group in Washington, D.C.
For many musicians, the result could be positive. Without the middlemen -- the labels, publicists, and professional-artists' organizations -- many musicians could end up making more money than they did via deals with major labels, say industry insiders. Take 1960s and 1970s star Janis Ian, for example. In her column in Performing Songwriter magazine, she recently estimated that after recording more than 25 albums, she still owed her label money for distributing and promoting her work.
Ian's story is typical: Most artists owe their labels up to $1 million for producing and promoting their music, estimates McLeod. They're supposed to pay off that debt with record sales. But 18 out of 19 records fail, and most deals leave artists in debt.
DIY STUDIOS. By contrast, artists who sell their work independently usually garner $8 on a CD retailing for $16, instead of $3 or less when they record for a label, estimates Danny Goldberg, chairman and CEO of New York-based independent label Artemis Records, which has produced hits like Who Let The Dogs Out.
There are other reasons for this fatter payoff: Recording equipment has become cheaper and better -- now allowing artists to record quality CDs at home. Plus, when distributing tracks digitally, artists no longer need to worry about economies of scale, a prime concern when it comes to mass-marketing CDs, says Toomey.
By 2007, nearly one-third of music purchases will move online, according to a July 23 estimate by market researcher Jupiter Research. Jupiter estimates that digital-music sales should reach $1.75 billion by then, up from about $40 million today.
DIRECT CONNECTION. Promotion on the Web is also cheap -- and can be very effective. Ian, for instance, has discovered that free downloads have increased sales on her site, www.JanisIan.com. That's ironic, given the music industry's complaint that free music on the Web is causing its current troubles. But Ian found that when now-defunct free music service Napster offered downloads of some of her songs, record sales on her site jumped by $2,700 a month. She believes that people who never heard her music before listened to the free tracks, liked them, and came to her site for more.
For artists who might have trouble getting airplay, Internet radio offers an opportunity as well. Starting Aug. 1, Artemis began a one-year test that allows Internet-radio sites to play its music for free. Currently, these stations must pay royalties to record companies of 70 cents per 1,000 listeners. "It made sense for us to wave those fees," says Artemis CEO Goldberg. "Our short-term marketing considerations outweigh any of these fees. I thought that would be good for our artists."
In fact, the Web might be one of the most direct ways for musicians to connect with their fans. For instance, since members of the band Radiohead began letting their fans instant message their Web site for tour dates and trivia, their fan base has skyrocketed, says Stacey Herron, an analyst with Jupiter. Rock band Weezer has allowed music lovers to download its work-in-progress -- and claims to have benefited from the early feedback. Such efforts can pay off in higher sales. Thus, the Dave Matthews Band, which released its latest CD after fans had already exchanged digital copies of the music for a year, saw the record catapult to the top of the charts.
SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO. Independent musicians may find that the loyal fan base they gained on their own will help get them a better record deal, says Christopher Knab, a music consultant in Seattle. For instance, one of North America's largest independent labels, KOCH Entertainment, allows established musicians, like singer Carole King, to retain rights to their songs. It might also consider giving the artists a higher split of revenues, as well as letting the musicians participate in decisions on how to market and promote their music, says CEO Michael Koch. By comparison, major labels usually only pay artists 5% to 10% of the retail price of their CDs in royalties. And musicians usually lose all rights to their songs.
Of course, making it on your own in the music business is tough. A major label might spend $200,000 or more on recording a CD, estimates entertainment lawyer Day -- plus up to $1 million on promoting an artist. Considering that about 400 new records come out each week and only 1% of them get radio play, getting the music in front of an audience is a long shot, says consultant Knab.
Whenever a beginner asks for advice on how to get a major record deal, Nevue shrugs: "Why would you want that life? Watch VH1's Behind the Music [a show on artists' lives]. These people are unhappy." Independent musicians can rarely reach the sky. "Only certain artists are going to be the Britney Spears of the world," says Knab. Thanks to the Web, though, performers may no longer have to reach Britney's level of stardom to make their living with music.
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By Olga Kharif in Portland, Ore.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2002/tc20020812_0153.htm
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ot-Music Clubs' Newfound Clout
By mining customer data and putting the Web to good use, the discount sellers can make stars and reap the rewards of boosting labels' sales
The biggest breakout artist in 2001 was R&B crooner Alicia Keys. Her album, Songs in A Minor, sold more than 5 million copies, and the 20-year-old artist took home five Grammys, including ones for song of the year and best new artist.
Her success came as no surprise to industry veterans. After all, Keys is the protégée of J Records' Clive J. Davis, who launched such stars as Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and Whitney Houston. But Davis doesn't deserve all the credit. Keys had another big booster: The Columbia House Music Club. That's right, that King of UnCool, the 12 CDs-for-nothing (as long as you agree to buy five more at full price) music club, played a part in launching one of the year's hottest new acts.
CO-MARKETING. Usually, Columbia House doesn't advertise new stars, let alone unknowns like Keys. Disadvantageous licensing deals prohibit the music clubs from marketing the latest-hit performers for as long as six months. Global stars such as Madonna hold out for up to a year to keep their albums from being sold at a discount. But in a revolutionary co-marketing deal, Columbia House promoted Keys's album, sending out 2 million e-mails and 6 million flyers to customers it knows are R&B fans. Columbia House sales have accounted for between 3% and 6% of Keys's sales.
Since then, Columbia House has cut deals with at least 10 other labels, including Universal (which boasts No. 1 rapper Nelly), Arista, Columbia, and Epic. "We were key to broadening awareness," says Columbia House CEO Scott Flanders -- no pun intended. "We've entered a new era of cooperation [with the labels]."
Such innovative programs are just one way that Columbia House and rival BMG Music Service are reinventing themselves in the Digital Age. The two clubs are sitting on mountains of untapped customer data, which could be crucial to labels that are struggling to introduce new acts, not to mention stem falling sales and battle online piracy. Columbia House alone has 25 full-time statisticians poring over customer data to craft promotions.
Historically, the labels have had little interest in understanding their customers. Their raison d'etre was nurturing and developing new acts. But as the Internet has started to undermine traditional business models, the clubs have begun to leverage their direct-marketing expertise to help support the labels, the nascent business of selling music over the Web -- and themselves.
PAST THEIR PRIME. That the record clubs are in need of revival is beyond question. Both Columbia House and BMG peaked in the mid-1990s, when their members accounted for 15% of album sales in the U.S. Though both clubs claim they are profitable (BMG is owned by private media conglomerate Bertelsmann, and Columbia House was purchased in June by private investment bank The Blackstone Group), club sales now account for less than 10% of industry sales.
To boost revenues -- and attract the right kind of customer -- BMG is experimenting with streamlined versions of the club that appeal to younger, hipper music fans. One example is the Preferred Buyers Club at Bertelsmann's online music retailer CDNOW. Customers who register and buy one of several selected club titles receive $5 off any future purchase, regardless of whether it's a club selection.
The program, launched Mar. 19, is already a success, BMG says. CDNOW shoppers who are Preferred Buyers Club members spend 15% more on retail products than before they joined. That's a boon for the labels, since they reap higher fees on retail titles than on club titles. "The traditional club has a lot of smoke and mirrors," says Stuart Goldfarb, CEO of Bertelsmann's direct-sales music division, BeMusic. "This is very simple. It has a low commitment. The result is that people are spending more money on music."
TAILORED PLAY LIST. Moreover, 15% of BeMusic's revenue comes from Internet ventures including CDNOW and MyPlay, a so-called Web locker service that lets surfers store, organize, and listen to their music online. Though Goldfarb has been careful not to bet the farm on the Internet -- doing so cost former Berteslmann CEO Thomas Middelhoff his job -- he clearly believes the clubs can be a bridge between the physical and digital worlds.
"The labels are notoriously unsophisticated about using [customer] data," he says. "We can sell a certain artist to someone we know has already bought their music. We can tailor music to their taste or craft offers based on their buying habits."
To that end, in October BMG will launch a new program that expose Club members to new artists. Based on members' past purchases, the Club will bundle a free CD with the regular monthly selection. By successfully targeting customers' tastes, BMG hopes build the club's reputation as a trustworthy source of music recommendations, not to mention selling more music. BMG Music can introduce customers to new artists they might like.
Columbia House, meanwhile, is eying digital music. Though it won't build its own service, it plans to integrate one of the new digital music services such as MusicNet, pressplay, or Rhapsody into its offerings -- as soon as those services have a compelling offer for consumers, says Flanders. "There's no question retailers and [the clubs] have clout they haven't used," says Aram Sinnreich, an independent music analyst. "They could turn digital music into a multimillion dollar market overnight if they worked aggressively."
NEW FRONTIER. Such moves are a giant leap in securing a new role for music clubs. Yet there's still some doubt as to whether the clubs will succeed in transforming themselves into trendsetters at a time when the music industry is under siege. According to Nielsen SoundScan, for instance, CD sales through Aug. 3 were down 12.8% so far this year -- on top of a 10% decline in 2001.
The hard times have stirred rumors that instead of evolving, the two clubs will merge and continue doing business as usual. "Two record clubs simply cannot be profitable in the same country. Commercial logic dictates that they are brought together or that one will exit the business," says Columbia House's Flanders. In fact, the two held long-running though fruitless merger negotiations before the Blackstone Group purchased Columbia House in June. A Bertelsmann spokesman denies that any serious merger discussions continue.
Bertelsmann's new CEO, Gunther Thielen, will undoubtedly be careful about jumping head-first into more Internet ventures. But the company is equally as unlikely to divest itself of its club interests. The $20 billion media behemoth was built on the book- and music-club business, which now count 40 million subscribers worldwide.
BACK TO ITS ROOTS. Together or apart, the clubs now have a prime opportunity to prove that they can shine again. They can use their mountains of data to help promote new artists, boost slack CD sales, or help to sell digital subscription services that are run by the music companies.
"People say the Digital Age is going to change the industry. But the use of data and recommendations really sends it back to its roots," says BMG's Goldfarb. "It's the club business all over again." And that's a game BMG and Columbia House know how to play.
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By Jane Black in New York
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2002/tc20020812_2049.htm
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The Labels Start Turning up the Volume
The recording industry beat Napster and continues battling free file-sharers. But in slow steps, it's learning to dance to an online beat
In June, three of the five major music labels -- Universal, Sony, and Warner Music -- announced that they would make thousands of songs available for download over the Internet at the discount price of 99 cents each. Better yet, in a major about-face Warner Music agreed to let buyers of many of the songs, by both new artists and established acts such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alanis Morissette, copy or transfer them to portable MP3 players. Sony and Universal's music was released in copy-protected format.
Industry analysts hailed those moves as a giant step forward -- a sign, at last, that the music establishment is beginning to "get it" when it comes to cashing in on the Internet as a distribution vehicle for music. No question, the labels' decision represented their first realistic effort to create a viable alternative to popular but illegal file-sharing networks such as KaZaA and Morpheus (heirs to Napster, now languishing in a fog of uncertainty about its future), where savvy Net surfers can download millions of individual songs without buying a whole album -- and all for free.
"In the past, fear of cannibalization" would have ruled out the 99-cent solution, says Larry Kenswil, president of Universal Music Group eLabs, the label's new media arm. "If consumers could get the single, why buy the album" the music industry worried. "That's still a concern," Kenswil confirms, "but right now, anyone can get any song for free" -- which makes getting at least some Web revenue look like a reasonable alternative to getting none.
End of story, right? Not exactly. It turns out that major retailers -- the companies that actually sell music to the public -- haven't yet signed up to promote the 99-cent downloads, either in-store or online. The reason, according to sources close to the negotiations between music companies and retailers, is the labels' onerous demands. In exchange for offering up popular songs cheap, the music companies want retailers and resellers to hand over valuable customer data -- or even let the labels handle the online transaction in its entirety.
DINOSAURS' WALTZ. That way, customers who think they're purchasing from Best Buy(BBY ) or Amazon(AMZN ) would really be buying direct from Universal or Sony Music. To the retailers, introducing their customers to the music companies would be a recipe for extinction. "It's a question of kill me now or kill me later," says Pam Horowitz, president of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, the trade group for music stores.
The stalemate demonstrates how far the music establishment still has to go in dealing with the new realities of its marketplace -- and also how far it has come. Music executives still can't restrain themselves from waging what are probably quixotic battles over who gets access to their products, and under what circumstances. As long as that continues, what has suddenly become a moribund music industry could remain stuck in neutral -- to the detriment of the labels, retailers, recording artists, and music lovers.
Yet the industry's latest move is also a sign that music executives, who, even six months ago, regarded the Internet as more a menace than an opportunity, now realize that they can't avoid embracing the digital future. Indeed, independent digital-music services such as Listen.com's Rhapsody and FullAudio, plus label-backed services such as pressplay and MusicNet, all are predicting that, within 18 months, they'll be able to offer the labels' full song catalogs online -- along with the right for consumers to burn songs onto CDs and move them to portable devices.
SLIPPED DISKS. What may be in store, in other words, is the most fundamental change in the way music is sold since Paleolithic disc jockeys of the 1920s first started playing songs on the radio. "Once we move past this period of acrimony, we'll emerge with amazing new ways to promote and market entertainment that we couldn't have dreamed of before," says Ted Cohen, vice-president of new media for EMI.
The epiphany that may lead to all this has come less from a sudden understanding of online music's potential than the dizzying decline in sales of music CDs -- which, according to Nielsen SoundScan, have fallen 12.8% this year through Aug. 3, vs. a year earlier. And that's on top of a 10% decline for 2001. Sales of singles have plummeted 65.4% this year, clearly one motivation behind the labels' 99-cent offer.
The sales slide, it's important to note, isn't wholly attributable to online music piracy. True, the rise of Napster in 1999 taught a generation of young listeners that music could be free for the taking. But the crisis in the music industry results from a confluence of factors -- including the end of the repurchasing cycle in which millions of adults bought CD versions of albums they already had on LP or cassette, plus the tail end, for now, of the bubblegum pop craze, that saw acts such as Britney Spears and the Spice Girls sold more than 10 million albums a piece.
SHOCK OF THE NEW. The industry's crisis is also one of identity -- as described in the 16th century by Niccolo Machiavelli in "The Prince." Machiavelli wrote: "Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime. And only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new. Their support is indifferent, partly from fear and partly because they are generally incredulous, never really trusting new things unless they have tested them by experience."
In other words, no one wants to go on record as backing a new idea until it's a proven winner. Indeed, with subscribers to paid digital-music services totaling at most 100,000 according to industry insiders -- 400,000 if you include free online radio services and pay satellite radio -- it isn't yet clear when the online music market will mature to the point of producing a return on investment.
The danger of switching business models too quickly is dramatized by what has happened to corporate execs who hitched their star to online businesses. Just the past month has witnessed the departure of AOL Time Warner's chief operating officer, Bob Pittman, who spun grand visions of the convergence of old media and new; the firing of Jean Marie Messier, the architect of Vivendi's multibillion dollar transformation from a water utility to entertainment giant; and the dismissal of Thomas Middelhoff, CEO of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, who had championed ill-fated online ventures such as Napster to the bitter end.
"NO STAKE IN DIGITAL." All three were punished because the Internet failed to deliver the dazzling riches they expected -- at least according to the timetable they predicted. In that environment, notes one well-placed music executive, no media baron "wants to be the one who tells Wall Street that he's betting the farm on the Internet."
The foot-dragging isn't only at the top. The record labels' distribution arms also are objecting to a wholesale embrace of digital delivery, according to industry insiders. The distributors, which sell CDs to retailers on behalf of the disparate labels in each music conglomerate, take 10% to 15% of CD revenues. If selling tunes online for 99 cents apiece causes the physical product to disappear, so will their piece of the pie. "These are very powerful people with no stake in digital distribution. They need to be part of it," says James Glicker, president of digital-music service FullAudio and former senior vice-president of BMG's Classics.
Even as the various factions inside the music companies vie for control, the industry is struggling to present itself in a more flattering light to millions of alienated consumers. That's a tall order, as illustrated by the widely repeated joke that the terrorist group Al Qaeda has better PR than the music industry. The reason: The face of the industry is its powerful lobbying group, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
ALLIES ON THE HILL. The RIAA is an odd choice for the job, given that, for the past two years, it has tried to crush the free online music services with one legal assault after another. In March, for instance, industry representatives testified on Capitol Hill in support of the Consumer Broadband & Digital Television Promotion Act, which would limit consumers' ability to mix and copy music by requiring that copyright-protection software be embedded in PCs, handheld computers, and CD players. (See BW Online 4/18/02, "High Tech vs. Hollywood on Capitol Hill"). In July, 2002, a bill was introduced by Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) which, in essence, that would permit music and film companies to hack into the computers of customers they suspect of illegally trading copyrighted work. (See BW Online 7/31/02, "Taking the Piracy Fight Too Far"). And on Aug. 9, 19 members of Congress sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft imploring him to prosecute users of peer-to-peer file-sharing systems.
The RIAA has an won an impressive string of victories in the courts, but at a high price: Many music fans, especially in the critical 18-and-under age group, interpret the industry's aggressiveness as a call to arms -- and swear to react in kind. For four days beginning on July 26, for example, the RIAA Web site was rendered inaccessible by a denial-of-service attack, in which hundreds of computers overwhelm a server with requests. "This is only the beginning," says one hacker, who denies taking part in the actual attack. "We're going to bring them down."
Such talk drives execs such as Steve Vining, president of the Savoy Jazz and Denon Classics label, to see measures such as the Berman Bill as essential to fight music piracy. But even he concedes that the industry is suffering from a public-relations disaster. "We've done a miserable job of making the case that this is stealing," he says. "What we should have is an ombudsman...a warm, kindly grandfatherly type who can talk in calm tones about how, if this continues, music as we know it will disappear."
STEAL THIS SONG. To that end, the industry is beginning to enlist a a new generation of tech-savvy executives to make its case, rather than relying on RIAA President Hilary Rosen, whose image is that of a musical Conan the Barbarian. One of most oft-seen on the talk circuit is EMI's Ted Cohen, a certified technophile, who before joining the labels worked as a consultant at a host of music and technology companies including Napster. Cohen makes a compelling case why consumers should feel sorry for the music industry, not resent it. One of his favorite anecdotes is the story of a seller on eBay who offered up a digital jukebox stocked with top-10 hits from the last 25 years, all presumably downloaded from the Internet. The price: $400.
Giving the industry a new public face couldn't come at a more crucial time. The music industry's new online strategy needs credibility if it's to attract consumers to the labels' new and improved digital services. On July 1, one year to the day that Napster was shut down, Listen.com's Rhapsody service announced that it had secured a long-sought licensing deal with Universal Music.
The agreement anointed Rhapsody as the first independent online service to offer songs from the five major music labels: Universal, Warner Bros., Sony, BMG, and EMI. With 175,000 tunes now available, the deal eliminated one of the key issues plaguing sanctioned online services: having enough music to compete with free music-sharing networks. (See BW Online, 7/1/02, "Rhapsody's Five Part Harmony" Listen also signed two deals to distribute music via DirecTV DSL and Time Warner's RoadRunner broadband service.
FREE VS. FEE. A month later, the label-backed service pressplay launched a new version. "We think [version] 2.0 signifies the first time a service is making available everything that the consumer has asked for," says Mike Bebel, CEO of pressplay. Essentially, he's right. Though pressplay lacks music from Warner and BMG, it allows subscribers to stream or download music to their heart's content for $9.95. For $17.95, they can also burn up to 10 songs per month onto CDs or transfer them to portable players. Moreover, the new service has dropped onerous restrictions. If you want to burn more than 10 songs, you can purchase download packs of five, 10, or 20. Extra songs cost just 99 cents a piece.
Even as the Establishment services improve, the file-sharing networks are becoming increasingly difficult to use. The RIAA's lawsuits have forced the most intuitive services -- Napster and AudioGalaxy -- out of business. The surviving networks, KaZaA and Morpheus, are both slower to use and riddled with low-quality files, spoofs (allegedly placed there by the record companies themselves), and computer viruses. The sites still get plenty of traffic -- the KaZaA homepage boasts that its software was downloaded almost three million times the week of Aug. 5 alone. Tech-whiz teenagers or a determined fan in search of a lost track won't be put off. But music buffs with more money than time are becoming increasingly disenchanted. "We're reaching the tipping point," says Listen.com CEO Sean Ryan.
That said, the online music biz has yet to create true harmony from the music Establishment's chorus of voices. "We're building the foundation for a long-term sustainable business," declares Alan McGlade, CEO of the music industry's second official site, MusicNet. Still, he adds: "It's an evolutionary process that will go on for years."
ONLINE GOLD? He's right on both counts. Acquiring the right to stream and burn music from still-stubborn labels and technophobic superstars such as Madonna remains a challenge for the music industry's nascent digital services. Bricks-and-mortar retailers and the labels have yet to negotiate a deal that determines which one will own the customer. And experiments aimed at finding ways to promote digital music from within retail stores are just beginning. "Ultimately, it's going to be a mix of physical and digital delivery" that makes the music business thrive again, says Aram Sinnreich, an independent music analyst. "That blending necessitates better cooperation between suppliers and distributors than we've seen in the past. It's a long and winding road."
There are still a lot of curves to be negotiated. The good news is that executives at the labels, retailers, and technology companies are now focused on the path ahead. Relationships are less antagonistic. Instead of fighting each other, players are realizing that what's good for the goose is also good for the gander. And they're all praying that digital music will be the golden egg they're searching for.
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By Jane Black in New York
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2002/tc20020812_4809.htm
culater
ot-Rip, Mix, Burn: The Politics of Peer to Peer and Copyright Law by Kathy Bowrey and Matthew Rimmer
Whereas Lessig's recent work engages with questions of culture and creativity in society, this paper looks at the role of culture and creativity in the law. The paper evaluates the Napster, DeCSS, Felten and Sklyarov litigation in terms of the new social, legal, economic and cultural relations being produced. This involves a deep discussion of law's economic relations, and the implications of this for litigation strategy. The paper concludes with a critique of recent attempts to define copyright law in terms of first amendment rights and communicative freedom.
Contents
The Story So Far
A Different Kind of Politics
Part One - Peer To Peer: The Napster Experience
Part Two - The DMCA Litigation: DeCSS and Beyond
Part Three - Dmitry, the Con and the Constitution
Part Four - Some Questions about Law, Politics, and the Politics Of Law
The Story So Far
One thing that the Napster phenomenon brought unambiguously to the fore was the question of the politics of copyright law. Media sources publicised the complaints of defiant Napster users, supported by prominent "alternative" musicians. Copyright law disempowered creative talent and led to the ripping off of artists and fans alike, it was argued. The law entrenched corporate greed.
"Napster = piracy", claimed other musicians, music and film studios and labels. Copyright is the main way of encouraging investment in new artists, and simply allocates what is justly deserved. Digital piracy sponsored by unauthorised file sharing technologies forestalls the development of new media services, preventing consumers from getting the best possible legitimate access to digital media as well as damaging the income potential of past and future artists and the corporations that support them.
The battle was cast in oppositional terms. There is much slippage between positions, but the issue has been interpreted by academics and other interested commentators in terms of Users v Owners [1]; Decentralized v Centralized Internet architecture [2]; Peer to Peer v Client/Server relations [3]; New Economy v Status Quo [4]. Copyright law, through regulation of content, had a role in managing the relationship between these parties or perspectives of the digital agenda. However copyright has not been a neutral or disinterested mediator.
In the first round, copyright, through the courts, seemed to defeat legions of Napster users [5]. In finding Napster responsible for the copyright infringements mediated via its databases, copyright took a stand not just against Napster and its free-riding users, but against the presumption of a technology standing outside of legal control. The law had a productive role to play in the development of the digital economy, and a disciplinary role with regard to unruly digital practices.
However this attempt at affirmation of legal authority was soon to be challenged by new bolder technologies - Aimster, FreeNet, Morpehus, Grokster, KazaA - that rose in popularity to take Napster's place. These new technology makers were "copyright aware" and, having learnt from the Napster experience, presented a very different kind of legal challenge. Technological innovation, it was hoped, would stay ahead of the law and avoid copyright's clutches through the development of more decentralised and anonymous, globally disseminated, file distribution technologies. Neither national law nor any one organization could manage to control these chaotic networks for sharing files.
The legislature had already anticipated the need for more development of copyright law to keep pace with digital reproduction techniques. Using new anti-circumvention provisions [6] owners soon embarked on actions they hoped would eventually prevent the circulation of "unauthorised" computer codes, that is any code potentially capable of supporting copyright infringing practices. In these current rounds of litigation the new provisions appear to have some bite [7]. Owners are taking the upper hand. The anti-circumvention provisions seem to give owners the ability to police access to information about, as well as access to, the tools capable of distributing digital content. They will control the terms and conditions under which any user accesses "their" files.
In defence, peer to peer advocates have more than technical savvy in their armoury. The new hope is that the constitutional right to free speech will trump this interpretation of the anti-circumvention provisions, and draw copyright into supporting a more technologically neutral line [8]. As Lawrence Lessig sees it "the future of ideas" is at stake.
His latest book The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World [9] considers the state of innovation and creativity in these "reactionary" times. In a key statement Lessig considers the subtext of the advertisements from Apple Computer urging that consumers should "Rip, mix, burn", because "After all, it's your music". He seeks to explain the power of this commercial:
"Apple, of course, wants to sell computers. Yet its ad touches an ideal that runs very deep in our history. For the technology that they (and of course others) sell could enable this generation to do with our culture what generations have done from the very beginning of human society: to take what is our culture; to "rip" it - meaning to copy it; to "mix" it - meaning to reform it however the user wants; and finally, and most important, "burn" it - to publish it in a way that others can see and hear. Digital technology could enable an extraordinary range of ordinary people to become part of a creative process" [10].
However, Lessig seizes on the irony that the very same machines that Apple sets to "rip, mix, [and] burn" music are programmed to make it impossible for ordinary users to "rip, mix, [and] burn" Hollywood's movies [11]. The problem is that software protects this content, and Apple's machine protects this code. Furthermore, Lessig considers the backlash against the notion that consumers should be able to "Rip, mix, burn". He observes:
"But just as the cusp of this future, at the same time that we are being pushed to the world where anyone can "rip, mix, [and] burn," a counter-movement is raging all around. To ordinary people, this slogan from Apple seems benign enough; to lawyers in the content industry, it is high treason. To lawyers who prosecute the laws of copyright, the very idea that the music on "your" CD is "your music" is absurd ... [12].
You have no "right" to rip it, or to mix it, or especially to burn it. You may have, the lawyers will insist permission to do these things. But don't confuse Hollywood's grace with your rights. These parts of our culture, these lawyers will tell you, are the property of the few [13]."
Lessig casts the conflict as one between "genuine" culture and passive consumerism, with the corruption of copyright law and its social objectives at stake. Perhaps a superior body of law, with more noble political aspirations, can save the day, and copyright law?
And so the battle goes on, with copyright law as the prize. However this is a prize never fully won. It is a protean creature, an uncertain character capable of fluctuating under pressure. For the winners, victories are small and incremental, and subject to the next technological assault. For the losers, there is always the possibility of another legal strategy, a different judge and court, and a new technical and legal issue. The politics of the law is always subject to dispute. The copyright battle may never end.
A Different Kind of Politics
This paper critiques the way copyright law and lawyers have engaged with peer to peer technologies, identifying three distinct phases of development - Part One: Peer to peer. The Napster experience; Part Two: The DMCA litigation. DeCSS and Beyond; and, Part Three: Dmitry, the con and the Constitution.
The writing is sympathetic to analyses that fear the social costs of recent developments in copyright law [14]. Predictions include a diminishing of the space for creative cultural exchanges and free scientific communications, greater surveillance of our cultural consumption, a stifling of technological innovation and the retardation of the digital economy. However the methodology takes a different view of the politics of the dispute, out of concern for the way in which the law's critics, in confronting the politics of the issue, are constructing the relationship between law and society.
Peer to peer supporters believe that they are engaged in a different kind of political practice to owner's organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The latter's agenda is one of instrumentally using the legislature and the U.S. courts to advance their own, sectional interests. Their politics is a dirty, unwelcome intrusion onto the legal terrain. The academics, on the other hand, are not so engaged. They are speaking in defence, and are merely seeking a restoration of the historically established legal order. In justification of their stance supporters often acknowledge the philosophy expressed in the intellectual property provisions of the American Constitution:
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8. The Congress shall have the power ... to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
This clause, as subsequently elaborated in case law, legitimates the interpretation of copyright as a limited and socially responsible property right [15], that is one that "balances" owner's and user's interests [16]. In this sense it is wrong to read their battle as one of "owners v users". Critics do not merely provide a voice for marginalised user interests. More importantly they speak as guardians of the spirit of copyright law, as it has been historically and judicially grounded [17].
There are strategic reasons for asserting the endorsement of constitutional framers and "key" decisions of the judiciary. However in broader terms, the stance involves a very problematic use of history and politics in the law.
The origins and purpose of intellectual property laws are cited in an attempt to put aside any questioning of their particular contemporary interpretation of the politics of the law. History and principle are on my side. This suggests that any position contrary to mine is subjective and destabilising. This strategy singularizes legal history. It "rips" the foundational principle from its historical context, compressing it into a simple, generalized ideal, emptied of the original political content. The politics behind the eighteenth century constitutional provision - seeking intellectual property rights that further an Enlightenment understanding of truth and progress - becomes a much less specific demand, such as "to promote Learning" [18]. This movement is permitted because the American Enlightenment condition [19] itself authorised a forward looking, and utilitarian interpretation [20]. The point of the reference back is thus merely to authorise the new "mix", that is, whatever values related to "progress" that the user desires. Perversely, a clause once rooted in the politics of the American Enlightenment now authorizes a copyright balance that serves, amongst other things, a culture of postmodern appropriation.
This formulation endorses references to history and principle in the name of communicative freedom. But the purpose is actually to endorse one contemporary interpretation of copyright law and to disempower those with contrary views about its direction. The attempt is both to silence owners and attack the legitimacy of the unwelcome reforms by the legislature.
Twentieth century expansion of copyright law, justified in terms of keeping pace with technological change, is characterised as making too many ad hoc concessions to owners, with an improper level of attention to user rights [21]. The legislative agenda has been captured by Hollywood and other media interests, resulting in a lack of balance in deliberations. The solution to this "corruption" is really to try and assert the superiority of common law over the Legislature. The common law, as represented by their particular reading of the founders' philosophy and judgements that favour a "fair use" perspective, is less affected by money and politics. It is thus represented as a purer source of copyright law.
In jurisprudential terms this approach perpetuates myths about the order of the law, its politics and its relationship with society. The suggestion is that it is possible to accommodate copyright's proper balance, refine and redefine this over the centuries as is required, and at the end of the day achieve a coherent, internally consistent and rationally ordered body of law, that raises it above "dirty politics". This presents the values endorsed by the judiciary as somehow less "political" than those of the legislature.
Further in order to find "order" amongst the various paths available, it is necessary to disregard or discard provisions and decisions that fail to fit the chosen schema. Copyright only looks (potentially) ordered and principled, because it has been flattened into this particular shape. This suppresses the reality of discontinuities in approach from the eighteenth century onwards. It has the potential to reduce the true complexity of the problems that copyright must manage, obscure the range of approaches that are available, as well as overstate the dimensions of any particular perceived problem. It is not the case that the future of the law has been set by the past, and that this destiny is imperilled by any particular decision.
Part of the reason law is so disorderly and difficult is because citizens make challenging legal subjects. Some are ignorant about legal matters, some disinterested, some are "too interested" and wanting to test legal limits, and use legal venues to gain some strategic advantage. Others act in apparent defiance of perceived legal commands. What is represented in litigation is only a snapshot of the broader legal landscape, and this representativeness needs to be accounted for.
In copyright law the capacity for disorder is great, as the law has self consciously struggled to accommodate legal demands that have accompanied the development of different technologies. As Maureen Cain suggests, law works imaginatively, as "lawyers invent relationships" [22] to serve their client's needs:
"They invent categories and these categories are constitutive of the practices and institutions within which their clients achieve their objectives" [23].
New cultural forms, such as the Internet, suggest the arrival of new sources of capital anxious for deployment in furtherance of our cultural "needs". If only copyright would protect digital goods "appropriately". Here capital is presented as pre-existing legal relations, as if it were already out there, an endangered species, slipping away because of legal inattention.
The legislature is expected to engage this capital. Copyright is supposed to provide "economic incentives" for cultural production. But in keeping with this broad justification the legislature is instructed to balance owner and user interests, in furtherance of the best interests of the development of the new cultural medium and access to the media. However the legislature is without the benefit of an established way of reading the cultural and economic dimensions associated with such new practices. In this context it is unsurprising that imaginative representations of the threat to capital in the form of visions of digital pirates or of an unenterprising colossus, flesh out the picture. Lawyers and legislators love to rescue the "victim".
The cultural specificity of the representation advanced is not necessarily obvious to those who advocate it, and to those wielding legal power, who engage with it:
"Gramsci argued that organic intellectuals maintain institutionalized or regular relationships with a particular social class, such that they are integral members of it and have regular experiential knowledge of that class and its problems. These are also their own experiences and their own problems demanding a solution ... they are creative. They develop new forms of relationship, new practices and, of course, new names for them and ways of thinking about them. They literally think the advance of the class they are related to" [24].
Endorsing a particular view of the situation is not necessarily the result of "corruption", though it is problematic [25].
If those whose views were ignored were "downsiders" with few institutions supporting them, the new "status quo" can quickly find roots. The copyright reform is uncontroversial and law seems to passively "reflect" the social order it helps construct. However when the "disenfranchised" are backed by a strong competing claim to capital, the juridical attempt to resolve the attendant problem is soon plagued with problems of legitimation that lead to legal instability.
New provisions were drafted to "save" a source of capital. However as soon as they start to be utilised, the action begins to frustrate those with claims to a competing asset. These players are resourceful and lawyered-up. They are not willingly going to give away "their capital". So there is litigation, more litigation, other kinds of challenges and "public education". The refinement of the dispute leads to more specialist approaches - new categories, new exceptions, redrafting of principles. The end result is increased complexity in copyright law and disarray.
Over time a tumultuous episode in this history might be forgotten, particularly as the alternative claims to capital dissipate. In these circumstances the law can resume its appearance of good, rational order and harmonious social relations. But that order is always a facade that hides many alternate stories, conflicts and other paths.
In keeping with the above criticisms, the point of this paper is to bring to life the real complexity and messiness of the law, as it negotiates the peer to peer disputes and engages with conflicting views and cultures. The motivation is that of understanding how copyright law has managed its "representativeness" and the practical implications of the mismanagement of social diversity.
The methodology is one of looking at the law creatively, that is to try and identify the social, economic and legal relations that copyright law produces. It is not presumed that there is or will be any end to this creative engagement with the law. It is not the property of any one side nor exhausted at any stage. In this light though the saga below progresses in three parts. What is interesting is how the copyright story has already been transformed, and how much it has remained the same.
Part One - Peer To Peer: The Napster Experience
Peer To Peer Networks
Peer to peer is a class of computer applications that turn Internet-connected PCs into resources other Internet-connected PCs can access. Before peer to peer, if you wanted to serve files from your PC you needed a permanent IP address, domain name, registration with DNS servers and properly configured Web server software on the PC. With peer to peer technology your computer storage, cycles and content are made available because the PC via modem becomes a node that operates outside the DNS system, having significant autonomy from central servers with the ability to be accessed by other users [26]. It is file sharing on the Internet that occurs outside of the traditional forms of file transfer -- http and ftp. There is some centralisation that allows the network to function, however applications differ in this regard. At its simplest peer to peer creates an alternate file trading channel to the Web or a black market where what is traded is "free" but users of the network are subjected to shared codes of conduct.
Historical explanations for its development point to the Internet's militaristic origins - the desire to create a decentralised communications network for a post-apocalyptic world where any localised failure can be overcome by removing reliance on an intermediary server [27]. More current sociological explanations of peer to peer's popularity point to frustration at the way PC use has come to be controlled by plodding IT nerds at work, at universities and via ISPs. These IT experts decide the terms of your engagement with technology and other users, motivated by their own interest in an easy life and pleasing the CEO with the stability and security of their unadventurous IT systems [28]. Peer to peer can cut such intermediaries out of the technological loop.
The legal interest in peer to peer revolves around a question of law's service to economics - old commerce and e-commerce. As Larry Lessig explains:
"The Hollywood lawyers have noticed something about the Internet: it conflicts with something they value. That is control over music, films and other form of intellectual property" [29].
In the most notable, well publicised U.S. cases concerning copyright and the Internet, the law has protected the investments of the established media owners.
Napster
The Napster technology, as a peer to peer system, avoided the problems of a corporation centrally storing and serving files. With Napster's software MusicShare, users connect to a Napster central server and the server catalogues the user's MP3 files, making the names of the files available to other Napster users. Desired files can be downloaded from a host user's PC by using the MusicShare search capabilities and requesting the selected file to be transferred. There was originally no technological or other checking of the legitimacy of files moved through the network.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed suit against Napster Inc., operators of the Web site Napster.com, accusing them of violating federal and state laws through contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. The complaint describes the case as follows:
"Napster is a commercial enterprise that enables and encourages Internet users to connect to Napster's computer servers in order to make copies of plaintiff's copyrighted sound recordings available to other Napster users for unlawful copying and distribution. Napster has thus misused and is misusing the remarkable potential of the Internet, essentially running an online bazaar devoted to the pirating of music" [30].
They also named a number of anonymous Jane Does - individual consumers who have been using Napster. Not only did the recording companies bring legal action against Napster, but they also brought legal action against Yale University, the University of Southern California, and Indiana University, alleging that they are complicit in music piracy. Press releases by artists such as Metallica and Dr Dre augmented the legal action against Napster.
In addition to complaint about direct lost sales and royalties attributable to potential consumers downloading MP3 files for free using Napster, it was alleged that Napster was undermining the future of the recording industry. Recording companies support music production and distribution through their investment of substantial sums of money, time, effort and creative talent:
"Plaintiffs and their recording artists are compensated for their creative efforts and monetary investments largely from the sale of phonorecords to the public and from license fees for the reproduction, distribution, digital performance, or other exploitation of such phonorecords. Absent such compensation, profits and motivation are siphoned away from artists and record companies that record, manufacture, promote, and distribute those works. The pool of resources available for finding and promoting new artists shrinks, and sound quality and recording integrity are diluted and corrupted" [31].
"Legitimate" entrepreneurial development of commercial digital downloading markets is unsustainable in face of easy access to free download services:
"Napster is not developing a business around legitimate MP3 music files, but has chosen to build its business on large-scale piracy. Napster seeks to profit by encouraging and facilitating the distribution and reproduction of millions of infringing MP3 files. Moreover, by deliberately refusing to maintain any information about its users in order to make copyright enforcement next to impossible, Napster has created a virtual sanctuary where music piracy can and does flourish on a monumental scale."
In the complaint references to "pirates" and the "bazaar" frame the role of law [32]. The bazaar as a foreign, unknowable and hence potentially dangerous creation, is contrasted with the potential of the "remarkable" Internet. But what exactly is remarkable about an entity whose future seems to have been already fully mapped? The Internet will have commercial music markets for MP3 downloads, developed in consultation with existing recording companies and their artists and available on their licensing terms. This future is apparently so close to being here that only a "virtual sanctuary" stands in the way. Here "virtual" refers to both Internet space and Napster's business practices such as the wilful "refusal to maintain" data the competitors desire. Law's role is cast as making the virtual concrete - making what we already know about the Internet fully arrive, forcing the competitor to conform in its business practices to those of the "real world" and transforming a mere market projection into something more secure. Were law to act otherwise, law would be conspiring in an "illegitimate" future, in the sense that it would constitute misuse of an established nexus between capital and copyright law.
In granting the plaintiff's motion for an injunction Justice Patel found that Napster was liable [33]. She accepted evidence that the defendant had actual or constructive knowledge that third parties were engaging in direct copyright infringement by downloading MP3 files using the Napster service.
In making her interpretations of fact and law Justice Patel adopted the characterisation of the issue very closely to the position as outlined in the original complaint. For example, the complaint:
"Plaintiffs have invested and continue to invest substantial sums of money, as well as time, effort, and creative talent, to discover and develop recording artists ... [34]"
is reproduced in the judgement as:
"The record company plaintiff's sound recordings also result from a substantial investment of money, time, manpower, and creativity ... In contrast, defendant invests nothing in the content of the music which means that, compared with plaintiffs, it incurs virtually no costs in providing a wide array of music to satisfy consumer demand" [35].
And
"The record company plaintiffs have invested substantial time, effort, and funds in actual or planned entry into the digital downloading market" [36].
The defendant had sought to "take over, or at least threaten, plaintiff's role in the promotion and distribution of music" [37]. Napster has raised "barriers to plaintiff's entry into the market for the digital downloading of music" [38]. Napster's own investment in digital download technologies and distribution models is completely discounted as a relevant contribution to the music industry. It was not the "right kind" of contribution. The judicial view is that copyright law should serve a particular culture of expectation: the established industry's plans for development of the market.
Justice Patel found that the defendants had not established or met their burden of proving that they were entitled to the affirmative defence of fair use [39]. Most of the files moved through MusicShare software were infringing copies and Napster was well aware of that fact. Napster was a means for distributing pirated copies, not a mechanism for exercising fair use rights. Sampling, (whereby users try before they buy, akin to accessing an in-store CD listening post), space-shifting, (where, for sake of convenience, users would retrieve copies of songs they already own for use on more portable media) and listening to authorised (as opposed to infringing) new works were judged not substantial non-infringing uses of Napster. Justice Patel also dismissed arguments about Napster users merely exercising home recording rights. The scale of usage suggest it went beyond that permitted under the U.S. Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 and suggested users were overwhelmingly avoiding paying for songs that otherwise they would not have been able to access for free [40]. She disagreed that Napster was a mere Internet service provider entitled to "safe harbour" protection. Napster provided more than a "mere conduit" for transfer of files [41]. Documents showed that the defendant's executives knew "we are not just making pirated music available but also pushing demand" [42]. She also rejected the notion that competition principles should limit the enforcement of intellectual property rights, noting that most relevant case law dealt with impermissibly restricted licenses being granted to defendants, and not the case of unlicensed dealings in works [43].
Napster's defence, crafted by David Boies, the legal counsel who was successful in the Microsoft anti-trust case, sought to broaden the terms of this debate. He answered RIAA press releases with his own media interventions, complementing court defences [44]. Drawing upon his experience and involvement with the case of Microsoft, David Boies alleged that the RIAA were engaging in collusion in breach of United States anti-trust:
"Microsoft certainly has created more value. Microsoft built monopoly power, but it did so by creating and developing. There isn't any product innovation in having multiple companies get together and decide jointly what they're going to do. The monopoly power of the RIAA comes purely from collusion" [45].
David Boies alleged that the record companies were guilty of copyright misuse:
"The 9th Circuit has made it clear that if copyright holders use their copyrights for anticompetitive purposes - to try to gain control over something they do not control directly through their copyrights - that's copyright misuse. It is clear that the RIAA has set out to control the Napster media. They have written documents saying that they want to shut Napster down and then take over the technology. The RIAA's members are acting in concert. They have pooled, according to their own statistics, 90 percent of the copyrights on music. All of those kinds of activities constitute copyright misuse. And if they are engaged in copyright misuse, they cannot enforce their copyrights" [46].
David Boies rejected the claim that the role of copyright law was to protect established commercial expectations:
"The law is designed to strike a balance between the interests of copyright holders on the one hand and the interests of consumers on the other. With music, Congress has struck a balance to say that if there is commercial copying, the copyright holder controls it, and if there is non-commercial copyright, the copyright holder does not control it. Is that the right balance? I think it's a pretty good balance ... We never would have passed copyright laws in this country unless we believed they helped consumers by generating creative activity. We know there needs to be a fair return to do that but we don't want excessive return, because the ultimate beneficiary is designed to be the consumer" [47].
His analysis interprets copyright law in line with broad cultural objectives, as well as economic ones. This perspective was bolstered by academic support from copyright academics.
The amicus brief of copyright professors, lead by Professor Jessica Litman, sought to frame the dispute in light of the historical practice of copyright law and the objectives of the Constitution. Radio, television, photocopiers, analog radio and video tape recorders, cable television, fax, communications satellites, computers, digital audio, digital video and the Internet had all permitted new methods of copyright infringement and piracy. Nonetheless copyright law permitted these to develop:
"Courts responded cautiously to the claims that new technologies should be shut down because they facilitate copyright infringement and rightly so. The Constitution empowers Congress to enact copyright laws in order 'to promote the Progress of Science and useful arts' ... Outlawing a useful technology merely because many people use it as a tool for infringement will rarely promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Only when the technology is not capable of legitimate uses does it make sense to outlaw it" [48].
In enforcing rights the pre-eminent historical concern has been a social one- maintaining openness with regard to new technological developments: "the balance rests on the side of permitting new technology, not stifling it" [49]. Fair use, as elaborated in Sony Corporation Of America v University City Studios Inc. [50] makes a space for new, potentially infringing, technologies. A technology should be permitted so long as it is capable of sustaining substantial non-infringing uses. Napster was capable of a number of non-infringing, non-commercial uses: listening to authorised works; sampling, which it was argued had the potential to increase CD sales; and space-shifting, such as downloading MP3 files at the office, of music you already own at home. Napster was ignorant of the content moved via its system, and should not be required to change the technology to aid the recording company's enforcement of rights.
Defence of Napster pursued a broader interpretation of copyright law, and whilst agreeing the law should encourage the development of new markets for creative and useful works, demanded that legal power be exercised in a technologically neutral way. Historically this goal was of greater importance than protection of any individual rights.
The Court of Appeal sees its role as determining whether the court employed the appropriate legal standards:
"As long as the district court got the law right, "it will not be reversed simply because the appellate court would have arrived at a different result if it had applied the law to the facts of the case"" [51].
This jurisprudential responsibility was interpreted narrowly. The court reviewed legal principle within the framework chosen by Justice Patel, and without any direct address to this choice of politics. The exercise was one of checking for continuity in application of legal principle. That is, was her interpretation of fair use (§107) clearly erroneous, in the sense that it was not clearly supported by precedent? They found her interpretations of §107 were not clearly erroneous. It was agreed that Napster was liable for contributory copyright infringement. That precedent may have also supported alternate readings and approaches to the issue was not addressed.
The only concession made to defence politics related to application of the Sony test, that where equipment was capable of infringing and substantial non-infringing uses, defendants should not be liable for contributory infringement. Justice Patel had failed to consider that Napster's architecture was capable of being used in non-infringing way, even though current use was improper [52]. Here Napster's executives clearly knew of their user's infringement of plaintiff's copyrights and they were still liable for that conduct, however the terms of the injunction granted were varied. Napster would not be shut down. It would be obliged to keep infringing material out of the system, to prevent viral distribution of these works. As the current architecture did not read the content of files moved through MusicShare, liability to remove access to infringing files depended upon reasonable notice being given of the existence of these files [53]. Compliance with this ruling has been subject to ongoing litigation [54].
Only at the end did the Court of Appeals briefly address the defence's broader concerns. In response to the argument about abuse of market power it found: "There is no evidence here that plaintiffs seek to control areas outside of their grant of monopoly. Rather plaintiff's seek to control reproduction and distribution of copyrighted works, exclusive rights of copyright holders" [55]. These exclusive rights were read in microcosm - without reference to copyright's macro objectives, "balance" and commercial/non-commercial demarcations. Justice Patel's interpretation of §107 and related arguments were simply presumed to incorporate the broad principles of copyright law, without there being any contextual discussion of them. First Amendment concerns were also briefly addressed so that it "was not reasserted on remand". The Court stressed: "We note that First Amendment concerns in copyright are allayed by the presence of the fair use doctrine" [56].
In practical terms the Court of Appeal decision could be read as a victory for Napster. Napster was given the opportunity to "evolve" into a legitimate peer to peer system. However it was not widely read as such, because of the narrowness of the legal reasoning. The Court of Appeal persistently disengaged from elaborating a view about the politics of copyright law. The reality was that both Justice Patel's and Boies et al's approaches had historical support. However as both positions were arguable, legal authority could only endorse one, by not honestly engaging with the other. A legalistic approach was sought to provide closure to the reality of multifaceted legal and social relations. Here legal authority is vested in singularity.
This approach energised many technological challenges to legal authority. Developers would seek to outsmart overbearing and unsympathetic regulation. Gnutella, Madster/Aimster, Grokster, Morpheus, KazaA, FreeNet and numerous other peer to peer systems provide different technological frameworks and legal issues. For some the desire was to render law irrelevant and redundant through technological innovation. In an interview for Spin magazine Freenet's creator, Ian Clarke, explained his motivations:
"Milner: You've called Freenet "a near perfect form of anarchy". Given how enormous the Internet has become, is online anarchy such a good idea?
Clarke: By "perfect" I mean a well-planned, decentralized system. There are a lot of people now who have a stake in trying to control the Internet, so it's important to build systems that have no central control. If you look at Napster, for example, there are people who have central control, which means legal action can be taken against them. The owners of Napster could be bribed into selling it to the music industry. In order to make Freenet immune to that, I designed it so that it doesn't depend on any one person or computer. I don't control it. If somebody put a gun to my head and said: "Shut down the system", I'd be unable to do it" [57].
Here regulation of any form is seen as bad. Regulation hinders innovation because it "knows best" by seeking to control the development, and furthering some interests at the expense of others. Developers think they know best, and if they're right, users will rush to take up the technology.
For others investing in peer to peer, the desire is more entrepreneurial:
"John Borland: What made you decide to buy Kazaa? What are your plans for Sharman?
Nikki Hemming: ... my investors had been looking at opportunities in the Internet field. ... The company was actually started for the purpose of investment in Internet opportunities ...
Q: Were you able to shield yourself legally when you bought the original assets? You're not being sued at this point.
A: ... obviously we were extremely pleased in March when the Dutch courts ruled that the KMD (software), which we owned, and the way that software functioned, was not infringing on copyrights in any way.
Yes, there is a risky profile, and I think that is the reality check of a new paradigm. If you are operating on the frontier, and you're operating as a driver in changes in technology, consumer behavior, and in what the commercial model looks like, then there are always inherent risks ..." [58].
The RIAA has threatened or initiated legal actions against many peer to peer developers, anarchist and entrepreneurial alike [59].
What is disturbing is the way the courts have permitted the RIAA to use law in a strategic fashion to control developments. Though given the opportunity to take control by judging peer to peer technologies in terms of the broad foundations or objectives of copyright law, the courts have declined that challenge. Judicial passivity has played into the RIAA's hands, forestalling "unauthorised" peer to peer development, bankrupting companies backing them, and helping maintain the technologies as tools of the hacking underground. It is worth noting that the plaintiff's commercial peer to peer systems, much lauded by Justice Patel, are still not operating in any significant fashion.
Nonetheless, Jessica Litman anticipates that the public will continue to ignore and resist the legal regulation of their online practices:
"People don't obey laws they don't believe in. Governments find it difficult to enforce laws that only a handful of people obey. Laws that people don't obey and that governments don't enforce are not much use to interests that persuaded Congress to enact them. If a law is bad enough, even its proponents might be willing to abandon it in favor of a different law that seems more legitimate to the people it is intended to command" [60].
The glut of copyright lawsuits coupled with a submissive judiciary will only encourage more civil disobedience. Burdensome prescriptions and draconian penalties will harm the legitimacy of copyright law, and will foster non-compliance amongst large numbers of the population.
Part Two - The DMCA Litigation: DeCSS and Beyond
In the United States, Australia and elsewhere copyright owners were successful in creating new copyright offences - related to circumventing technological protection (anti-circumvention provisions) [61] and disseminating decryption tools that could disable or avoid technical protection measures (anti-trafficking provisions) [62]. The provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) have been soundly criticised for a lack of balance:
"... by colorful use of high rhetoric and forceful lobbying, Hollywood and its allies were successful in persuading Congress to adopt the broad anti-circumvention legislation they favoured ...
Had the Administration sought to broker a fairer compromise between the interests of Hollywood and its allies and the interests of Silicon Valley and its allies, this process would almost certainly have produced better legislation than the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA" [63].
It is argued that the provisions exceeded WIPO requirements, were at odds with the broader stated policy of devising laws that foster a "predictable, minimalist, consistent, and simple" e-commerce environment [64] and facilitated a "certain established but frightened copyright industries'" control over the design and manufacture of information technologies that can process digital information [65].
The anti-circumvention provisions can certainly be explained in terms of the wielding of political influence at the U.S. Congressional level. However beyond that kind of political explanation of the law, there is the politics played out in the way that copyright law has engaged with the new legal category and associated rights and restrictions. "Hollywood" couched the need for reform in terms of saving capital from seeping away through leaky digital pipelines:
"The protection of America's creative works is as "old as the Constitution." Valenti noted that a simple way to protect creative works is to "deploy technology protection shields ... on the World Wide Web. Technology provides a coded lock on the door to which entry is allowed only when permission is granted by the copyright owner." ... He cautioned that if intellectual property is "vulnerable to poachers, through unauthorized entry or copying, if they are not protected by simple, firm, clearly stated rules of the game, then ... we will laugh loudly at our folly in the years to come" [66].
However the reforms did far more than simply provide for "locks" to protect content from "poachers". It transformed the nature of copyright existing in relation to copy-protected content. It created entirely new legal relations with respect to this subject matter, at odds with established rights and limitations. This can been seen in some of the high profile litigation enforcing the new rights.
2600 Case
In the 2600 case [67] eight U.S motion picture studios sued the defendants to prevent them electronically linking their site to others where the DeCSS code could be obtained. DeCSS is designed to decrypt the CSS encryption system on DVD players and allows a copy of the DVD file to be stored.
Rather than sue the offshore creator of the DeCSS code, the litigation targeted a few of many hundreds who had published information about the cracked code. The main defendant was eventually settled as Eric Corley. He was relatively well known in hacker communities by his Orwellian pseudonym, Emmanuel Goldstein. His profile stemmed from his ongoing involvement with the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly founded in 1984, and the related Web site [68]. 2600 Enterprises Inc was also joined as a defendant. The choice of 2600 as a litigant was not accidental. As many commentators liked to explain, the name 2600 was derived from the fact that hackers in the 1960's found that the transmission of a 2600 hertz tone over a long distance trunk connection gained access to "operator" mode and allowed the user to explore aspects of the telephone system that were not otherwise accessible. 2600 had published articles on such topics as how to steal an Internet domain name, access other people's e-mail, intercept cellular phone calls, and break into the computer systems at Costco stores and Federal Express. The eight U.S. motion pictures wanted a high-profile target to test the rules regarding anti-circumvention devices. They also sought to tap into public discourse about hackers as copyright pirates, criminals, and spreaders of computer viruses [69].
At the District Court Justice Kaplan found that, by first publishing the code on the 2600 site and also by hyperlinking from the 2600 site to other sites where it could be downloaded, 2600 was responsible for "trafficking" in copyright circumvention devices. He rejected the arguments of the defendants that the posting was legitimate in order to facilitate exercise of fair use rights, for example to facilitate the making of Linux compatible DVD players. First Amendment objections were also rejected [70]. These findings were affirmed on appeal [71].
Prior to the DMCA the dominion granted owners can be represented as follows:
Figure 1: Copyright relationships pre-DMCA
Illustration by L. Sharp
Copyright locates legal rights to cultural production within a system of interdependencies. It is not really the case that copyright creates two competing domains - private and public. There is no private "domain" in a closed sense. The boundaries that exist are permeable. This is because ownership is determined by overlapping cultural limitations that express the realities of that copyrightable work's genesis, and enable similar relations with other cultural producers to the benefit of cultural production generally. For example, fair use, taking of insubstantial parts, taking ideas but not the expression, and limits to the duration of protection all interrupt the owner's "domain". There are no "walls" around the copyrightable work in that property sense.
Nonetheless, in explaining the new rights under the DMCA, the courts make reference to the need to "target the circumvention of digital walls" [72]. This implies that the effect of the DMCA is to harden the membrane surrounding the copyrightable work, that is, to make an impenetrable wall. However this metaphor really oversimplifies the relations the DMCA creates.
Figure 2: Copyright relationships post-DMCA
Illustration by L. Sharp
The work itself remains defined in copyright terms in the same manner as previously, and it is not that work's boundary that is changed by the DMCA. Rather under the DMCA the copyrightable work, once encrypted, is housed within a protective cocoon. It is the cocoon that does not allow for fair use in the ordinary sense [73], or other forms of dealings with the work, where decryption is required to enable access. "Defence" of the copyrightable work has led to the creation of an ancillary set of legal relations to do with the encryption process as a separate entity, unrelated to dealings with the encrypted content in the conventional infringing sense.
The owner's encryption code is actually protected functionally distinct from its relation with the copyrightable work. Through the new provisions, part of the owner's dominion now relates to controlling the ability of anyone to develop and disseminate code that is functionally equivalent to the owner's own decryption code, whether or not that decryption code infringes the owner's code in its expression, and regardless of the reason for the development or use of this "original" code. Thus the effect of the provisions is to create a monopoly that relates to the function of the owner's code [74]. This is radically at odds with copyright principles as historically established where, especially in relation to computer code, courts have strived to limit owner's rights to the expression and avoid monopolisation of the idea or function of the program. Under the DMCA encryption codes stand apart from any other code, because of their usefulness to owners.
Further in interpreting a hyperlink to decryption code as encapsulating a form of "trafficking", the owner's dominion now extends far beyond any form of dealing with the protected content or the copyright work that is the encryption code. The provision restrains broader communications about this form of useful code. It thus entails a prohibition with respect to an area of discourse where that involves technical specificity about encryption codes. In this context, it is unsurprising that on appeal the discussion focussed on First Amendment arguments.
The appeal was supported by eight amicae briefs. In support of this strategy there was also a rise in the circulation of academic arguments about software as a form of expressive speech or dialogue, in an attempt to disrupt the current legal approach that sees technology as a functional tool or instrument in the service of a particular interest to found more a more permissive attitude to technological development and communications [75].
However, the courts were reluctant to accept such academic arguments. Justice Kaplan denied that the DMCA should be read in the context of constitutional arguments about freedom of speech. He offered this stinging rebuke:
"Society must be able to regulate the use and dissemination of code in appropriate circumstances. The Constitution, after all, is a framework for building a just and democratic society. It is not a suicide pact" [76].
On appeal, Justice Newman showed a greater delicacy in disposing of the constitutional arguments about the First Amendment. His Honour stressed that the Court faced an unpalatable, inescapable choice:
"This reality obliges courts considering First Amendment claims in the context of the pending case to choose between two unattractive alternatives: either tolerate some impairment of communication in order to permit Congress to prohibit decryption that may lawfully be prevented, or tolerate some decryption in order to avoid some impairment of communication" [77].
In the end, Justice Newman stressed that the issues of public policy were best left to be solved by legislative response. His Honour was reluctant to consider whether the injunction was inconsistent with the limitations of the First Amendment.
Neither Justices Kaplan and Newman took up the issue of the relation between §1201 and copyright law generally. The cultural considerations associated with copyright and assumed in its principles and logic, were only addressed in terms of a brief discussion of the relation between §107 and §1201, and then suspended. Justice Kaplan found:
"The policy concerns raised by defendants were considered by Congress. Having considered them, Congress crafted a statute that, so far as the applicability of the fair use defense to Section 1201(a) claims is concerned, is crystal clear. In such circumstances, courts may not undo what Congress so plainly has done by "construing" the words of a statute to accomplish a result that Congress rejected ... " [78].
Justice Newman argued Congress had taken a "balanced approach" to fair use [79]. He also concluded "We need not explore the extent to which fair use might have constitutional protection ... such matters are far beyond the scope of this lawsuit" [80]. He found deficiencies in the defendant's claims and evidence justified his lack of consideration of further issues.
Thus Congress has determined the national priority as generally favouring protection over access rights, despite conceding some limited exceptions. This is taken as dispensing with the "management" of the cultural agenda of copyright. There is no perceived need to relate the new section to the body of law within which it is situated. Reasoning techniques such as references to inadequate evidence being brought by the defendant, or references to the alleged problem not arising in this factual situation, or technical issues of matters being in footnotes of the amicus brief, are used to "manage" the inconsistency.
There is thus continuity in judicial approach to that outlined regarding the Napster case. The "national" concern for "piracy" provides the narrative and justification for the decision to the extent to which these are elaborated. There is really only an external justification for the new provisions enacted by Congress. However this politics materializes in a new internal rationalisation for copyright law. In the treatment of "owner's rights" coherent legal definition is substituted by reference to metaphor. The historical reality of copyright as a limited and interdependent right is cast out by reference to a newly reified version - the "walled" work. This metaphor suffices as the new inner logic of the law. Law can "get by" with this sketchy analysis, by drawing upon both the expectation and experience of legal reasoning acting in the service of capital, the "terror" of piracy erasing the possibility of a real competing claim.
The creative reinvention of the owner's domain creates a kind of monopoly in certain prized codes previously unknown to copyright and extends the owner's reach to activities far beyond direct or indirect dealings with protected content or distribution of infringing works. But scrutiny of the awkward fit of these new relations within the body of copyright law is averted by narrowing the judicial focus to particular technical matters, not requiring reference to the broader purposes, aims of principles of copyright law.
It can be argued that it is necessary to avoid this kind of legal inquiry in deference to the superior will of Congress. However even if that is so, that political reasoning will lose its relevance to the law with time. At that stage what will be referred to as the new jurisprudential grounding of these provisions? Will it mean copyright comes to have two conflicting paths - one set of legal relations defining non-encrypted content, and entirely different ones where encryption is involved? Judicial unwillingness to engage with the broader issues underlying the 2600 case could be explained in terms of judicial uncertainty about the future paths of the law. Who would want to claim authorship over a fractured body of law?
The Sony Hacker Challenge
That owners see their protected domain as including communications of a particular subject matter, and no longer in terms of works per se, can be seen from Ed Felten's case. Ed Felten took part in a Sony-sponsored hacker challenge, where a $US10,000 prize was on offer to anyone who could successfully document how to break the Secure Digital Music Initiative code (SDMI) [81]. Felten, Professor of Computing Science at Princeton University, succeeded, but he was not happy with the conditions of accepting the prize money, especially the confidentiality clause. As an academic he wished to discuss the code and his experience in breaking it. He proposed to give a paper on the subject at a conference. Under threat of legal action by the RIAA he elected not to give the paper, but sued the RIAA seeking a declaration that he was entitled to submit his paper to an academic conference without violating the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.
Unlike the 2600 case, here the affected party was a middle aged respectable academic seeking to participate in regular academic life in accordance with the established scientific practices of peer review and debate. It was argued that encryption experts and teachers needed to be free to discuss their skills and codes in order for better tools to be invented. Corporations are likely to sell "secure" packages but will never publicly disclose weaknesses. There is no reason to believe that the products will always perform as claimed in advertisements, or offer the best solution that is currently available. The public will end up being deceived and ignorantly trust insecure technologies in the absence of appropriate scientific review of such technologies.
The RIAA sought to have the action dismissed, arguing that it had no problem with Felten's paper. It had a strategic interest in stopping this action, because of the strong free speech concerns. Justice Garrett Brown of the District Court of New Jersey dismissed the action: "The plaintiffs liken themselves to modern Galileos persecuted by authorities. I fear that a more apt analogy would be to modern day Don Quixotes feeling threatened by windmills that they perceive as giants" [82]. His Honour stressed that the defendants should pursue their "political, rather than a legal concern" in the legislature [83].
Citing assurances from the government, the recording industry, and a federal court that the threats against his research team were ill-conceived and will not be repeated, Edward Felten and his research team decided not to appeal the November dismissal of their case by a New Jersey Federal Court [84]. The government stated in documents filed with the court in November 2001 that "scientists attempting to study access control technologies" are not subject to the DMCA [85]. The RIAA echoed this, stating "we felt Felten should publish his findings, because everyone benefits from research into the vulnerabilities of security mechanisms" [86]. Princeton Professor Ed Felten said, "Although we would have preferred an enforceable court ruling, our research team decided to take the government and industry at their word that they will never again threaten publishers of scientific research that exposes vulnerabilities in security systems for copyrighted works" [87].
§1201(g) permits encryption research aimed at identifying flaws in encryption technology if the research is conducted to advance the state of knowledge in the field. It is not yet clear whether those seeking to rely on the provision only have to fulfil a "genuine purpose" test, or whether the provision is also "status driven". Does research that "advance(s) the state of knowledge of the field" have to come from an acknowledged research institute? Felten, as a reputable researcher with established links with an elite educational institution had no problem passing either genuine purpose or status tests. It seems more doubtful that contributors to 2600, where postings expose flaws in encryption, would be entitled to the same protection under §1201(g), because of the different social relations their communications enable [88]. If this is correct, then it seems the fair use exception establishes the majority as non-persons with regard to fair use, but privileges the few that limit their communications and activities to a "recognized" forum. You have to be a card-carrying member of the establishment, and confine your talk to those circles, if you want to break the code.
Taking heed of the advice of the courts, copyright users have pressed the Congress with their political concerns. Democrat Congressman Rick Boucher has proven to be sympathetic to the plight of Professor Felten [89]. He has called for a revision and rewriting of the DMCA. Boucher maintains that the defence of fair use should apply notwithstanding the technological measures provisions [90]. The Congressman also believes that Congress should reaffirm the principles of fair use in other specific areas - such as parallel importation, musical sampling, space-shifting, and making back-up copies of copyrighted data. However such reforms have thus far been disregarded and disdained.
Part Three - Dmitry, the Con and the Constitution
In the wake of the DMCA, copyright owners have not been content to rest upon their laurels. Senior Democrat Congressman Fritz Hollings has introduced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act of 2002 into Congress [91]. Essentially, the bill would prohibit the sale or distribution of any technology unless it featured copy-protection standards set by the U.S. government [92]. Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America supports the Hollings Bill, calling it "a measure that will serve the long-term interests of consumers by calling upon the Information Technology, Consumer Electronics and Copyright industries to negotiate in good faith to find solutions to digital piracy" [93]. The bill seeks to force manufacturers to embed technological measures in software and consumer electronics. In other words, it is a renewal of the battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, as noted by Pamela Samuelson [94].
The Hollings Bill has been greeted with some scepticism. The Bush administration has been quiet about the plan [95]. Copyright users are slowly becoming roused. As Declan McCullagh observes: "America's programmers, engineers and sundry bit-heads have not yet figured out how much a new copyright bill will affect their livelihood. When they do, watch for an angry Million Geek March to storm Capital Hill" [96].
In the meantime, copyright owners have continued to rely upon the DMCA in concerted legal action. The pattern of litigation is not accidental. Copyright owners have been targeting hackers on purpose because they are pushing a wider public agenda about stopping piracy. Furthermore, they are confident that their opponents have limited scope to make arguments about freedom of speech. The long-term strategy is for copyright owners to win favourable interpretations of the DMCA, which they can later assert against more formidable opponents - such as the computer software and consumer electronics industries.
A recent decision denying a motion to dismiss the indictment of Elcom Ltd. [97], the Russian-based employer of computer programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, for offences against §1201, demonstrates continuity with the 2600 jurisprudence, and a refinement of that approach. Rather than acknowledge the creativity inherent in the provisions of the DMCA and the radical impact on existing jurisprudence, the court projects a facade of continuity with pre-DMCA law.
This legal action was initiated when Dmitry Sklyarov came to the U.S. to give a paper at "Defcon 9", an annual hacking convention. Sklyarov was author of the Advanced eBook Processor code (AEBPR), which was software that decrypted Adobe eBook files, turning them into standard PDF format files, free of eBook licence restrictions. Whilst the AEBPR software was legal in Russia, it could be purchased online and thereby was available to consumers in the United States. Sklyarov speech was about the poor security utilised in protecting electronic books and documents. He was arrested in the United States and has the dubious honour of being the first person indicted under the trafficking provisions of §1201. Later Sklyarov was released from custody and allowed to return to Russia in exchange for testimony in proceedings against Elcom Ltd. The lawsuit is continuing with Elcom Ltd as the main defendant.
The constitutional challenge to the indictment highlighted concerns about the effect of the trafficking provision §1201(b) on fair use. The ban with respect to circumvention tools went too far, it was argued, because the section prevented any access to circumvention devices making it impossible to exercise traditional fair use rights. Fair uses are being treated by the legislation as if they were all infringing uses. It was argued that the provision was bad because it was unconstitutionally vague, constituted a content-based restriction on speech not sufficiently tailored to serve a compelling government interest, and that Congress exceeded constitutional power in enacting the DMCA [98].
In rejected these complaints Justice Whyte argued that §1201(b) deliberately targeted trafficking, and not the use of circumvention tools per se, and this was a concession to protect fair use rights:
"Congress did not prohibit the act of circumvention because it sought to preserve the fair use rights of person who had lawfully acquired a work" [99].
He acknowledged that "engaging in certain fair uses of digital works may be made more difficult if tools to circumvent use restrictions cannot be readily obtained" [100]. However he argued the provision was not vague in relation to what tools were banned.
Justice Whyte recognised computer code as speech under the First Amendment, but found that §1201(b) did not target speech. It targeted devices: "Congress sought to ban the code not because of what the code says, but rather because of what the code does" [101]. He rejected the notion that it was impossible to regulate the functional aspects of the code without regulating the expressive (constitutionally protected) content of the code because:
"Divorcing the function from the message, however, is precisely what the courts have done in other contexts, for example, in determining what portions of code are protectable by copyright and what uses of that same code are permitted as fair uses" [102].
The test of constitutionality was not "strict", because the code had both functional and expressive components, and the restrictions promoted a substantial government interest. It was a legitimate governmental interest to protect the "thriving electronic marketplace" from "the plague of digital piracy" [103].
That the provisions did not burden speech more than is necessary was evident from the existence of the statutory exceptions. Further broader fair uses than those contained in the exceptions remained, because fair use itself was not banned, only devices that might enable it:
"Nothing prevents anyone from quoting from a work or comparing texts for purpose of study or criticism. It may be that from a technological perspective, the fair user m(a)y find it more difficult to do so - quoting may have to occur the old fashioned way, by hand or by re-typing, rather than by "cutting and pasting" from existing digital media. Nevertheless, the fair use is still available. Defendant has cited no authority which guarantees a fair user the right to the most technologically convenient way to engage in fair use" [104].
Further public domain works are not affected by the DMCA even though, via encryption, rights to control a digital copy of such an unprotected work might arise. Public domain works, copyrighted works and fair use all exist with the same legal status as previously.
This characterisation is a con. Whilst legal relations continue as previously when rights and categories are viewed abstractly and independently, the DMCA disrupts the interrelationships copyright has traditionally maintained. That on paper the old categories of exclusive rights (§106) and fair use (§107) still exist with the same legal definition does not mean that they are the "same" rights, when viewed in the context of the interrelation between legal categories. Via the protection §1201 confers, §106 rights are enhanced, because §107 rights cannot be meaningfully exercised without access to the locks that stand between works and prospective users.
It is possible to recreate a digital quotation of a literary work, but it is not so obvious how one is to reproduce more digitally sophisticated forms of expression such as artistic works, sound recordings or films. Fair use did not traditionally require "re-creation" of an original effort, although this process was certainly permitted. Fair use permitted duplication of certain portions for appropriate purposes. Duplication is now denied, regardless of the amount taken or reason for the taking, unless the user falls within one of the "special status" exceptions. Thus the problem for ordinary fair users, especially in relation to works other than literary works, is much greater than one of the DMCA creating mere technological inconvenience making the exercise of their fair use rights "more difficult".
It is a further ruse to deflect criticism of the concern for burdening the expressive content of code by reference to the copyright practice of "divorcing the function from the message". It is true that copyright law has established a distinction between the (unprotected) function of the code and the (copyrightable) expression. However as discussed above, the code in issue here - encryption code - was explicitly excluded from these kinds of relations. The point of §1201 was to catch functional code, but not for the usual copyright case of keeping access to function free of copyright. Thus whether jurisprudence about not protecting functional code provides any guidance in identifying and protecting "expressive code" is highly questionable. The existing jurisprudence simply does not illustrate how expressive code remains free under §1201(b).
So far, even when responding to constitutional arguments, the courts have elided discussion of the politics of digital copyright law, except through referral to Congress. The creative invention of new relations of "protection", out of step with the existing jurisprudence, has been largely denied. The courts have consistently rejected the notion that there are any significant "internal" housekeeping matters to consider, and close the possibility of reconciling the old law with the new provisions.
In the cases discussed it is widely anticipated that the "thriving electronic marketplace" will blossom due to the thoughtfulness of Congress and the usefulness of the DMCA provisions. Perhaps the fancy (or fantasy) is of suspending any practical discussion of status of the old rights and hiding the incoherency the DMCA has produced, in expectation that hard copies and unencrypted versions will soon be replaced by certified, secure, protected copies [105]. Then a new copyright logic can emerge and supplant the older, "lesser" rights and confounding limitations on the owner's dominion.
In face of the current judicial intransigence, a move towards constitutional arguments to defeat the politics of the court, such as the assertion of fair use as a constitutional right, is understandable. However to date, so far as the DMCA provisions are concerned, the courts have also ignored the essence of that challenge.
It is worth noting that the courts have been happier to engage the emerging constitutional jurisprudence in relation to "cultural" arguments [106]. It could be argued that, in spite of the much vaunted ideal of technological neutrality, the courts are discriminating between different forms of media. Judges are relatively comfortable in considering matters of freedom of speech in the context of the act of publishing recognised literary works. However, they display a much greater degree of hesitancy in applying constitutional notions of freedom of speech to exclusively digital media and modes of distribution - reflecting deep seated doubts as to whether computer code is equivalent to "literary" expression.
There may be something to "owner" calculation of the weaknesses of the free speech defences. In touting free speech as a superior body of law to the DMCA, and in developing the notion of free speech as an interior cultural motivation underpinning copyright, an analysis of the status of more conventional copyright principles seem to have fallen by the wayside. Incontestable copyright concerns such as for the idea/expression dichotomy, substantial part, limited terms and fair use, can, of course, be related to a free speech story. However they need not be. The apparent removal of these from current jurisprudence requires judicial account. Academic lawyers should be mindful of this conventional jurisprudential detail, and not allow it to be lost in the intellectual excitement of leading "emerging" jurisprudence, in a highly charged litigation context. Resistance to the new copyright status quo is particularly difficult, given law's deference to the service of capital. An overemphasis on "free speech", where there are doubts about the character of the "speech", pitches a weak notion of "culture" against a strong, established but "vulnerable" notion of economy. Law can step in, in the service of the economy, to prevent "oppressive" and "unproductive" economic activity, but here "culture" runs interference in identifying the source of real economic oppression.
Part Four - Some Questions about Law, Politics, and the Politics Of Law
To date the authoritative story of peer to peer and the DMCA has shown:
reliance on legal authority vested in a singular perspective of the issues (the Napster experience);
refusal to engage with the implications of digital protection, outside of a one-sided preoccupation with the "culture" of "piracy" (The 2600 case); and,
a misleading assertion of jurisprudential continuity under the DMCA (Elcom Ltd).
Challenging this politics requires exposure of the law's mismanagement of cultural diversity and technological change. But in working towards this goal and the dislodging of the "new" legal status quo, it would be helpful not to repeat the same mistake of "ripping, mixing and burning" the jurisprudence.
The "continuity" and "coherence" needs of copyright law can be approached in the spirit of keeping the same questions alive, rather than pretending to invoke the authority of past answers. Answers for these times can be tested in light of their implications for diverse cultures. This differs from U.S. Congressional politics, in that there is a guardianship role for lawyers, committed to understanding past legal wisdom and not abandoning this wisdom too lightly, hearing all sides of the debate. That views on what is wise, and what is surplus, to law will differ is to be expected, and not feared, as currently, as a source of failure for law. The best that can ever be expected of law is an honest and reasoned engagement with what was, and what is, at stake.
At present, some of the better academic literature seems to pursue this kind of legal politics. Further the "end game" behind the current constitutional challenges to copyright law could be read in terms of a desire for a more open jurisprudence than is currently experienced. However when the arguments are readied for court, at face value they are more commonly expressed in terms of a closed and flattened jurisprudence. Perhaps this is because it is the language that the court system craves. However if this is the case, academic focus needs to move far beyond a questioning the politics of the U.S. Congress, peer to peer and the DMCA, and more firmly direct critical attention to the chosen jurisprudence of the courts.
About the Authors
Dr. Kathy Bowrey is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
E-mail: kbowrey@unsw.edu.au
Dr. Matthew Rimmer is a Lecturer at the Australian Centre for Intellectual Property in Agriculture at the Faculty of Law at the Australian National University.
E-mail: RimmerM@law.anu.edu.au
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Valerie Kerruish and Lloyd Sharp for their insights and support.
Notes
1. Jessica Litman, 2001. Digital Copyright. New York: Prometheus.
2. Lawrence Lessig, 2001. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House.
3. Andy Oram (editor), 2001. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Benefits of a Disruptive Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: O'Reilly.
4. John Perry Barlow, 2000. "The Next Economy Of Ideas: Will Copyright Survive The Napster Bomb?" Wired, volume 8, number 10 (October), p. 240.
5. See Part 1.
6. Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, s1201 (U.S.). See also Copyright Treaty 1996, Art. 11 (WIPO); Copyright Act 1968, s 116a, (Aust.); Copyright Act 1994, s 226(2)(a) (N.Z.); Copyright, Design And Patents Act 1988, s 297A, (U.K.).
7. See Part 2 below.
8. See Part 3 below.
9. Above note 2.
10. Ibid. at 9.
11. Ibid. at 11.
12. Ibid. at 10.
13. Ibid. at 11.
14. See Litman, above note 1; Lessig, above note 2; Oram, above note 3, Pamela Saumelson, 2001. "Anti-Circumvention Rules Threaten Science," Science, volume 293 (14 September), p. 2028; Pamela Samuelson and Randall Davis, 2000. "The Digital Dilemma: A Perspective on Intellectual Property in the Information Age" at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers.html.
15. As discussed by Pamela Samuelson, 2000. "Economic And Constitutional Influences On Copyright Law In The United States," In: Chris Marsden (editor). Regulating The Global Information Society. New York: Routledge; also at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/Sweet&Maxwell_1.htm.
16. See, for example, Litman, above note 1 at 15.
17. See Lessig, note 2 at pp. 105-110; 197ff. and especially at 199: "The freedom to build upon and create new works is increasingly, and almost perpetually, restricted under existing law. To a degree unimaginable by the Framers of our Constitution that law has been concentrated in the hands of the holders of copyrights - increasingly, large media companies."
18. Litman above note 1 at 17.
19. For a discussion of this and the connections with the culture of writing see Robert A. Ferguson, 1997. "Finding the Revolution," In: The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
20. Samuelson above note 14.
21. See Litman, "The Art of Making Copyright Laws" above note 1 at pp. 22-34.
22. Maureen Cain, 1994. "The Symbol Traders," In: M. Cain and C. Harrington (editors). Lawyers in a Postmodern World: Translation and Transgression. Buckingham: Open University Press, p. 33; emphasis in original.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid. at 39.
25. It should be noted that copyright experts habitually represent large media owners, and the old economy allegiances with the U.S. Congress and other legislative bodies are historical, whilst user representatives are usually members of powerful user institutions like universities, and new economy allegiances are embyronic.
26. C. Shirky, "What is P2P and What Isn't," O'Reilly Network at http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/11/24/shirky1-whatisp2p.html.
27. Damien Riehl, 2001. "Peer to Peer Distribution Systems: Will Napster, Gnutella and Freenet create a Nirvana or Gehenna?" William Mitchell Law Review, volume 27, p. 1761.
28. C. Shirky, "Smuggled in Under Cover of Darkness," O'Reilly Network at http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/02/14/clay_darkness.html.
29. D. Sims, "Lessig: Fight for Your Right to Innovate," O'Reilly Network at http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/02/16/lessig.html.
30. A&M Records Inc and others v Napster Inc and Does 1-100, Case No 99-5183-MHP, Complaint for Contributory and Vicarious Copyright Infringement, Violations of California Civil Code Section 980(a)(2), and Unfair Competition. (N.D. Cal. 2000) at #1, p. 2; our italics.
31. Ibid., at #30 p. 8.
32. The emotive use of terms such as "piracy" to describe activities that may well be legitimate under copyright law has been discussed elsewhere. See Litman, above note 1 at 85.
33. A&M Records Inc v Napster Inc, 114 F. Supp. 2d 896 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 11862 (N.D. Cal. 2000).
34. A&M Records Inc and others v Napster Inc and Does 1-100, above note 30 at # 30 p. 7.
35. A&M Records Inc v Napster Inc, above note 33 at 908.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid. at 903.
38. Ibid. at 913.
39. 17 U.S.C. §107.
40. A&M Records Inc v Napster Inc, above note 33 at 914.
41. Ibid. at 919.
42. Ibid. at 903.
43. Ibid. at 923.
44. John Heilemann, 2000. "David Boies: The Wired Interview," Wired, volume 8, number 10 (October), p. 253, and at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.10/boies.html.
45. Ibid. at 259.
46. Ibid. at 256.
47. Ibid. at 257.
48. Amended Brief Amicus Curiae of Copyright Law Professors in Support of Reversal. Appeal Nos.00-16401 and 00-16403 United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Napster Inc v A&M Records, at 2.
49. Ibid. at 8.
50. Sony Corporation Of America v University City Studios Inc. (1984) 78 L Ed 2d 574.
51. A&M Records Inc v Napster Inc, 239 F.3d 1004; 2001 U.S. App. LEXIS 5446 (9th Cir. 2001) at 1013.
52. Ibid. at 1021.
53. Ibid. at 1027.
54. See for example, In Re Napster, Inc. Copyright Litigation 2002 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2963. (N.D. Cal. 2002).
55. Ibid. at 1027.
56. Ibid. at 1028.
57. Greg Milner, 2000. "Anarchy from the U.K.," Spin (September), p. 165.
58. J. Borland, 2002. "CNET sits down with Sharman Networks' CEO: The Brains behind Kazaa," Gnutella News (23 April), at http://www.gnutellanews.com/article/4751.
59. See "RIAA: What We're Doing" at http://www.riaa.org/Protect-Campaign-5.cfm.
60. Litman, above note 1 at 195.
61. §1201(a)(1).
62. §1201(a)(2), (b)(1).
63. Pamela Samuelson, 1999. "Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy: Why the Anti Circumvention Regulations Need to be Revised," Berkeley Technology Law Journal, volume 14, p. 519 at 523.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid. at 533.
66. Jack Valenti (President and CEO Motion Picture Association of America), 1998. "Valenti Calls for End to "INVASION OF COPYRIGHT SNATCHERS"," (16 July), at http://www.mpaa.org/jack/.
67. Universal City Studios v Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d 294, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 11949 (S.D.N.Y. 2000). Universal City Studios v Corley, 273 F.3d 429;2001 U.S.App.LEXIS 25330.
68. http://www.2600.com/.
69. Amanda Chandler, 1996. "The Changing Definition and Image of Hackers in Popular Discourse," International Journal Of The Sociology Of Law, volume 24, pp. 229-251.
70. Universal City Studios v Reimerdes, above note 67.
71. Universal City Studios v Corley, above note 67.
72. Ibid. at 443.
73. There are statutory exceptions, including reverse engineering, security testing, good faith encryption research, and certain uses by nonprofit libraries, archives and educational institutions. §1201(d), (f), (g), (j).
74. This is discussed by Justice Kaplan in Universal City Studios v Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d 294 at 318.
75. For example see Brian Fitzgerald, 2001. "Intellectual Property Rights in Digital Architecture (including Software): The Question of Digital Diversity," European Intellectual Property Review, volume 23, number 3, p. 121 and, Brian Fitzgerald, 2000. "Software as Discourse: The Power of Intellectual Property in Digital Architecture," Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, volume 18, p. 201.
76. Universal City Studios v Reimerdes, above note 67 at 305.
77. Universal City Studios v Corley, above note 67 at 457-8.
78. Universal City Studios v Reimerdes, above note 67 at 324.
79. Universal City Studios v Corley, above note 67 at 443n13.
80. Ibid. at 458-9.
81. See the archives on the Electronic Frontier Foundation Web site at http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Elcomsoft/.
82. Felten and others v RIAA (unreported, United States District Court of New Jersey, 28 November 2001), at http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/Felten_v_RIAA/20011128_hearing_transcript.html.
83. Ibid.
84. EFF, 2002. "Security Researchers Drop Scientific Censorship Case Government, Industry Claim DMCA Not a Threat to Science" (6 February), at http://www.eff.org/Cases/Felten_v_RIAA/20020206_eff_felten_pr.html.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. The other exceptions also seem to be "status" driven, eg. fair use by officials employed by libraries, educational establishments etc. In line with this, the reverse engineering exception presumably involves employ by a known and reputable proprietary software producer.
89. Congressman Rick Boucher, 2002. "Congressman Boucher's New American Foundation Speech On Fair Use Rights," (10 May), at http://www.house.gov/boucher/internet.htm.
90. Congressman Rick Boucher, 2001. "Congressman Rick Boucher Urges Reaffirmation Of Fair Use Rights," (25 July), at http://www.house.gov/boucher/docs/fairuse.htm.
91. Senator Ernest Hollings, 2002. "Statement on the Introduction of The Consumer Broadband And Digital Television Act of 2002," (21 March), at http://www.senate.gov/~hollings/press/2002613820.html.
92. D. McCullagh, 2002. "What Hollings' Bill Would Do," Wired News (22 March); and, Catherine Olanich Raymond, 2002. "The Consumer Broadband And Digital Television Promotion Act - A Closer Look," Linux and Main, at http://linuxandmain.com/essay/craymond.html.
93. Jack Valenti, 2002. "Statement By Jack Valenti On S. 2048," (21 March).
94. See Samuelson, above note 14.
95. D. McCullagh, 2002. "White House Cool To Hollings' Act," Wired News (27 April).
96. D. McCullagh, 2002. "Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders," Wired News (22 March).
97. United States of America v Elcom Ltd and Dmitry Sklyarov 2002 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 9161; 62 U.S.P.Q.2D (BNA) 1736.
98. Ibid. at 14-15.
99. Ibid. at 10.
100. Ibid. at 25.
101. Ibid. at 35.
102. Ibid. at 36.
103. Ibid. at 37.
104. Ibid. at 44.
105. Security Systems Standards And Certification Act of 2001; see also Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act of 2002.
106. See Eldred v Reno (2001) 239 Fd. 3d 372; 2001 US App Lexis 2335; Eldred v Ashcroft (2001) 255 F.3d 849; and, Suntrust Bank, as Trustee of the Stephens Mitchell trusts v Houghton Mifflin Company (2001) 268 F 3d 1257; US Appeal Lexis 21690.
Editorial history
Paper received 9 July 2002; accepted 22 July 2002.
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/current_issue/bowrey/index.html
culater
ot-A match for flash?
Jun 20th 2002
From The Economist print edition
Memory chips: Four new storage technologies promise cheaper and better alternatives to the pricey memory chips used in most gizmos today. But old memories, especially embedded ones, tend to linger on
MAKING memory chips has always been a cut-throat business. Even at the best of times, the margins have been wafer-thin. Meanwhile, a brutal cycle of capital investment can bleed semiconductor firms dry as they upgrade their costly fabrication (“fab”) plants to keep pace with the remorseless doubling that takes place every 18 months in the number of transistors crammed on to a sliver of silicon. But bad as these ups and downs have been for chip makers, they have been good for innovation. The competition has forced semiconductor firms to find novel ways of giving their products a competitive edge. Here, the sudden proliferation of portable devices—from mobile phones and personal digital assistants to digital cameras, mini-camcorders and digital music players—has been a godsend.
Of necessity, such gizmos rely on memory chips that use little juice while storing megabytes of digital information. But even those storage capacities will seem modest once users start downloading video clips wirelessly from the Internet, instead of mere audio files and voice messages. The storage capacities needed in those handheld gadgets will then be measured in tens of gigabytes rather than mere megabytes. Moreover, the speed with which data can be written to and read from memory devices means that size will have to increase significantly if bulky multimedia files are to be played without fits and starts.
The leading semiconductor firms in America, South Korea and Japan have been pouring millions into developing mobile memory devices that take advantage of new wrinkles in conventional “flash” technology. To hold information when they are switched off or when their batteries are flat, today's mobile gadgets rely on a “non-volatile” form of memory chip that traps tiny electric charges in “wells” on its surface as a way of storing bits of data. Intel's latest flash memory device, which was designed specifically for web-enabled wireless phones, can transfer data four times faster than its predecessor, while cutting power consumption by no less than 60%.
But there is a limit to how far flash technology can be pushed. The hunt is therefore on for other forms of non-volatile memories that are also fast and cheap. Four promising technologies—magnetic RAM (MRAM), ferroelectric memory (FeRAM), polymer memory, and chalcogenides—are emerging from semiconductor laboratories around the world.
The technology for making MRAM has been around since the 1970s, when IBM developed the first “magnetic-tunnel junction” as a way of switching memory cells on and off quickly. Such a device relied on wires that were sandwiched together in a criss-cross fashion on a silicon base. The filling of the sandwich was an insulating layer (usually aluminium oxide) that was only a few molecules thick. At every point where the wires intersected, electrons could “tunnel” through the insulating middle layer, generating in the process a tiny electrical current. The IBM researchers found that the amount of current depended on whether the wires at the top and bottom were magnetically polarised in the same or opposite directions. Thus, by altering the polarisation, a “bit” of information (represented by the size of the current) could be electrically manipulated.
“Where most forms of flash memory can be read from or written to only 1m or so times, ovonics memory can be addressed up to 10 trillion times.”
In many ways, MRAM fits the bill for mobile memory perfectly. Experiments show that the read/write speed on an MRAM chip can be as low as a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second). That is ten or more times faster than the best flash chips in use today. Even the fastest DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) chips used in computers look sluggish by comparison, and they consume up to 20 times the electrical power. So, a rosy future for MRAM? Unfortunately, there are tricky fabrication problems to lick. The main one is how to position the wire-and-insulator sandwich on the silicon with precision. Applying a layer of material that is only one billionth of a metre thick evenly across a wafer of silicon that is eight centimetres in diameter is no easy task.
Other chip designers are trying to side-step the problem. Alex Ignatiev of the Texas Centre for Superconductivity and Advanced Materials in Houston suggests that, rather than use the conventional “transistor logic”—as all MRAMs since IBM's original magnetic-tunnel junction have done—makers should try using “resistor logic” instead. By Dr Ignatiev's reckoning, thin films made of manganites (regularly-shaped crystals of manganese hydroxide) would provide excellent electrically programmable devices. The key is that the resistance of the manganite crystals can be electrically manipulated and easily measured. That means it is possible to generate bits of data simply by altering the material's resistance, giving rise to a class of memory devices known as resistance RAM (RRAM). The American research arm of Sharp, a Japanese electronics firm, has licensed Dr Ignatiev's innovation. Sheng Hsu, who directs Sharp's chip research programme, says that RRAM is only two or three years away from production.
Magnetic attraction
Another related approach is to use the “ferroelectric” effect. Certain materials that contain miniature magnets inside them can be polarised so their magnetic fields point either “up” or “down” simply by applying a voltage. This turns them, in effect, into switches that can then be used to store bits of data. Devices built from such elements are known as ferroelectric RAM chips.
The two leading suppliers of such devices, Ramtron and Symetrix, both located in Colorado, use different types of perovskite (a ferroelectric material found in certain basaltic rocks) to achieve the same effect. Ramtron uses a form of perovskite called lead zirconate titanate, because it is widely available. By contrast, Symetrix uses barium strontium titanate, a layered form of perovskite, because of the problems that semiconductor fabs have in processing lead. Both manufacturers claim that FeRAM is poised to enter volume production. But they first need to show that they can reliably produce chips requiring only one transistor and capacitor per bit. Until recently, they have needed two transistors and two capacitors to do the job.
The largest chip maker of all, Intel, has joined the race to commercialise another sort of FeRAM. The interesting thing in Intel's project is that its ferroelectric substance is not a mineral but a polymer. Certain sorts of polymer can be engineered to be “bistable”—ie, have two different molecular architectures that are both stable. It is then possible to switch a bistable polymer between its two different structural forms simply by applying an electric current. And anything that can switch between two states can always act as a memory cell for storing a bit of data. The first to realise that memory chips could be made from bistable polymers was Thin Film Electronics, a device maker in Linkoping, Sweden. Today, Intel has a licensing agreement with Opticom, the owner of Thin Film Electronics.
Despite its unconventional material, polymer RAM resembles other memory sandwiches. An ultra-thin coat of polymer is laid between two arrays of electrodes at right angles to each other. The points where the electrode lines of one array intersect with the other become cells for storing memory bits. The advantage of using a bistable polymer, as opposed to a crystalline material such as perovskite, is that it can be stacked many layers high. With each extra stratum comes more memory. Thus, to increase a polymer chip's storage capacity, there is no need to increase the device's footprint or the density of components crammed on its surface. All that has to be done is to increase its thickness by adding more layers.
There is a price, of course. Adding extra layers means more time and extra process steps in the fab. Even so, the cost of such chips looks like coming out ahead of conventional DRAM devices. That is because, for a given number of fabrication steps, a polymer chip could contain eight times more memory than its silicon equivalent.
But the technology that has really caught Intel's eye comes from the consumer-electronics industry. In collaboration with Ovonyx of Santa Clara, California, Intel wants to take advantage of the chalcogenide alloys (mixtures of germanium, tin and tungsten) used to coat rewritable DVDs and CDs.
The great thing about chalcogenides is that they have two states: a crystalline phase which conducts electricity, and an amorphous, disordered phase which works like an insulator. While CD“burners” and players found in personal computers these days use a laser beam to manipulate this material optically, an “ovonics” system switches between the two states electrically. Small transistors that control the flow of electrical current to the material's crystalline surface are used to apply a tiny amount of heat to individual crystals, modifying their state and thus their electrical resistance. Toggling back and forth between the two states electrically allows bits of information to be stored far closer together than is possible with the optical methods used for rewritable DVDs.
In terms of resilience, an “ovonics unified memory” (OUM) promises to be vastly better than any other memory chip. Where most forms of flash memory can be read from or written to only 1m or so times before errors creep in, studies show that OUM memory states can be addressed up to 10 trillion times. At 100 nanoseconds, the device's write speed is slower than MRAM's, but it is fast enough for most mobile applications. Recently, Intel and Ovonyx announced that they have fabricated an OUM chip capable of storing four megabits of data. Once the bugs are shaken out of the manufacturing process, Intel will ramp up the chip's storage capacity considerably.
One per cent solution
Which technology will grab the biggest slice of the portable market? Steve Cullen of In-stat/MDR, a market-research firm based in Scottsdale, Arizona, forecasts that the market for new memory technologies will reach $250m by 2006, but points out that the total memory-chip market will be about 100 times larger than this. Ferroelectric RAM, MRAM and chalcogenide look promising, since such chips may be able to do the jobs of two of today's chips in mobile devices.
But the semiconductor industry would do well to heed the lessons learned when flash memory was being introduced. Despite its “non-volatility”—a huge advantage over “volatile” chips such as DRAM, which lose their data if not continually refreshed—it still took flash a decade to achieve a modicum of success in the marketplace. And that only happened because a “killer application” (the mobile phone) rescued it from obscurity. By the same token, it could take a decade or more for polymer or chalcogenide chips to supplant flash. In digital equipment, as in people, old memories take a long time to forget.
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1176222
culater
ot-Audio Enhancements For Handheld Product Apps
By Mark Long -- e-inSITE, 8/12/2002
Handheld product developers who are looking for a way to enhance the audio performance of portable audio players, mobile phones, and PDAs can now make use of new technologies on the OMAP platform from Texas Instruments that promise to deliver robust, panoramic sound images with enhanced bass as well as improved clarity of the high frequencies.
SRS Labs' WOW technology, which is now available on TI's new OMAP5910 device, is specifically targeted at devices with one speaker, two speakers, headphones or ear-buds. SRS Labs unveiled its latest WOW implementation at TI's Developer Conference in Houston last week, where the company demonstrated its audio enhancing capabilities on TI's OMAP1510 as well as on the TMS320C54x family of DSP.
SRS also showed off its Voice Intelligibility Processor (VIP), which has been designed to improve the intelligibility of voice in cell phone applications to enable calls in noisy environments. The technology reportedly can be applied to mobile phones, PDA devices, hands-free telematic devices in cars and other voice-related product markets. Both VIP and WOW are eXpressDSP compliant on the TMSC320C54x and C55x platforms from Texas Instruments as well as TI's OMAP platform.
In addition, SRS Labs a multichannel decoder technology called Circle Surround II that is capable of delivering up to 6.1 channels of audio from any mono, stereo and matrix surround encoded audio content. The technology, which was run during the conference on TI's TMSC320C67x platform, also incorporates patented techniques to improve the clarity of center channel dialog and provide bass enhancement, claims the company.
http://www.e-insite.net/commvergemag/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA238395&spacedesc=n...
culater
IRiver iDP-100 DataPlay Player
This is the first digital audio player to use the long-awaited DataPlay media. Is it too late?
Watch tomorrow at 8:30 p.m. and Monday 8/12 at 9:30 a.m., 4 p.m. Eastern.
By James Kim
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In the relatively short history of portable audio devices, the major technological limitation has been memory size. So when the quarter-size DataPlay media was introduced a couple of years ago, it seemed to be everyone's removable-media Holy Grail. (It won a TechTV Best of CES award in 2001.) Costing between $5 and $10 apiece, the tiny optical disc promised to hold 500MB (250MB per side) and aimed to obliterate its competition, which included expensive SmartMedia, CompactFlash, and other solid state media.
Waiting is the hardest part
Now, nearly two years after the DataPlay was introduced, the new iRiver iDP-100 is the first shipping player to use DataPlay disc media. We were amped to take our review unit for a spin.
Physically, the firmware-upgradeable iDP-100 is an odd bird. If Boba Fett were to sport an MP3 player, this would be it. It's compact, eye-catching, and simple to use, but beware: The four plastic corners jut out and tend to poke. This futuristic "throwing star" features a 1-inch by 2-inch backlit LCD and a simplified button system highlighted by a scroll navigator wheel. It has got 8MB of buffer RAM (hardly a skip) and even supports 35 languages.
Powered by a surprisingly strong lithium-ion rechargeable battery, the iDP-100 can play for about eight hours per charge -- pretty impressive for what's essentially a mini optical drive. By listening with the supplied Sennheiser earbuds and applying a variety of EQ presets, we were able to really enjoy the player's sound (mostly 160-Kbps MP3 and WMA files). And like any good modern player, it shows up as a drive in Windows, so it can be used to store nonmusic data.
The big but
Timing being everything, DataPlay has been surpassed by cheaper, larger-capacity Flash players and sleeker hard-drive players such as the posh Apple iPod. Looking at the current state of portable players, it's clear that the delay hurt DataPlay. While the iRiver costs about $350 (with 500MB of removable memory), the 5GB iPod costs $300. They take up the same space (the iRiver is fatter) and run between 8 hours and 10 hours per charge. But the iPod and other players are better choices, primarily because they're better values, but also because they are easier to use and look more stylish.
Let's compare the iDP-100 to what is considered by many to be the best MP3 player available, Apple's now Windows-compatible iPod.
Player
Apple iPod
iRiver iDP-100
Memory
5GB
500MB/disc
Price
$300
$350
Formats
MP3
MP3/WMA/AAC
Batt. Life
10 hours
8 hours
Interface
FireWire
USB
With size and battery life on equal footing, two things stand out: the price per megabyte and the transfer interface. The iPod costs 6 centers per megabyte while the iDP-100 costs 70 cents per megabyte. Of course, you've got to consider the cost per DataPlay disc. But the DataPlay disc costs $5 a pop -- or an extra $45 to reach the 5GB mark -- and it's a write-once disc.
I'd rather have a single, contained music center than a jukebox with a pocketful of discs (although they can withstand some punishment). It doesn't help that the discs don't eject all the way, and you've got to scratch like a kitty to get the darned thing out. Plus, while 235 songs took about 20 minutes to transfer over USB, the iPod transferred the songs in under five minutes.
The Windows-only DataPlay software is bizarre. It combines a jukebox and "recorder," which wraps a tiny protective package around your digital music as it's transferred over USB. You'll be listening to CKMP3, CKWMA, and CKAAC tracks, meaning that you can't transfer these songs off the player. (The iPod is similarly proprietary.) Also, the transfer interface looks like a Windows 95 GIF file, and you press a record button to transfer tracks, which is confusing.
DataPlay discs with prerecorded music will soon be available from the labels (the first that comes to mind is BMG) this fall. The company also expects to someday ship discs with video and other data. Will it become the next MiniDisc (a commercial failure in the United States) or the media of the future? That's easy to tell. Although it's removable and flexible (that's good), we think that the day of removable media for music players has passed.
Good try, DataPlay. The player would have been great a year ago. Unfortunately for you, the iPod has arrived since then.
Summary: The first DataPlay-enabled digital audio player to hit the market. It's a good player that makes its case as a great value solution. The problem: It's too late.
Pros: Excellent sound quality; cheap media; good battery life.
Cons: Expensive; write-once media; difficult to eject media; mediocre software.
Company: iRiver
Price: $350; $5-$10 per 50MB DataPlay disc
Available: Now
Category: Digital audio
Platform: Windows
Specs: Bitrate: 8 Kbps to 320 Kbps; Dimensions: 3 inches by 3.2 inches by 1.35 inches; Weight: 7 ounces.
Posted August 9, 2002
http://www.techtv.com/news/computing/story/0,24195,3395445,00.html
culater
ot-Tired of Negativism, Bob Looks Into the Future and Sees Ubiquitous Computing That Not Even Microsoft Can Control
By Robert X. Cringely
What the high-tech world needs this week is some good news, and I am determined to provide that. It is in the nature of the news business, I suppose, to dwell on the negative. Just read the newspaper and it is filled with death, crime, accidents, and almost nothing positive. Read the business section, too, and there is little but gloom. But high-tech, in contrast, is constructed almost entirely from optimistic vibes, otherwise these businesses would never have been started. So let's dwell, then, on some positive news.
First, there is the ubiquity of 802.11 WiFi networking. This was a long time coming, but with Intel's departure last week from the HomeRF business, it is evident that 802.11 is not only the dominant wireless networking technology, but that it will soon be everywhere. A year from now, I think it will be rare for a new computer to be shipped without a built-in WiFi adapter, enabling ad hoc wireless networking to become the norm for homes and perhaps even for businesses.
This is great news! It is great news because standardization leads to lower cost leads to larger markets leads to new applications leads to better business. Just the decision to build WiFi into every computer will grow the industry and lead to dramatic changes in network services. The question will not be "Is your home networked?" but "How fast is your home network?" Bring a WiFi device into your home, and it will just plain work. Forget about pulling cable forever.
My home, by the way, finally has complete WiFi coverage. I was never able to make a single access point do the job because of the looming influence of a large, stainless steel KitchenAid refrigerator in my kitchen. The fridge cast an RF shadow that kept me from doing what every nerd wants to do -- e-mail from bed. Well, this week I installed a pair of Linksys PLEBR10 powerline bridges to extend my network over the electrical wiring to a second access point in my kitchen. It works beautifully, though I had to return one of the bridges that was DOA and get one that worked.
More good news: XtremeSpectrum has started shipping samples of its UltraWideBand (UWB) chipset with full production slated for early next year. You'll recall I wrote several months ago about UWB, which is an unlicensed high speed data service that is purely digital with no analog components at all. This means that UWB -- unlike even WiFi -- can take full advantage of Moore's Law. Over time, just changing to new semiconductor manufacturing processes will make UWB faster, cheaper, and consuming less power. The XtremeSpectrum chip, which is the first UWB product to ship aimed at customers like you and me, carries 100 megabits-per-second for a distance up to 10 meters. Think of this as Bluetooth on steroids. Better still, think of it as the eventual Bluetooth killer.
UWB will do for home entertainment what WiFi is about to do for home computer networking. Computers are simple compared to wiring up your stereo system or home theater. When we talk about computer network cabling it means CAT5 and almost nothing else. But a look behind my AV receiver shows RCA plugs, optical plugs, DIN plugs, mini stereo plugs, and others that I can't even identify because they are hidden behind a tumbleweed of twisted speaker wire.
But UWB will change all that. Buy a new component, plug it in, and it will discover the rest of the entertainment network and simply install itself. Look behind your AV receiver and all you'll find is a powerstrip and surge protector. Of course this will take time. The XtremeSpectrum chip costs $19.95 in volume and you need one for each device, so it is still too expensive for true mass consumption. But then it takes time to design new components that have this capability. If Moore's Law holds true, three years from new UWB will be down to less than five dollars, and will be included in just about every device. The eventual elimination of all those plugs can save that much per device in reduced manufacturing cost alone.
Of course, UWB means having to buy all new stuff, which is why it is good news to consumer electronics manufacturers. And to folks like me who just LOVE to buy new stuff.
There is a probable intersection of these two happy story lines -- WiFi and UWB. Three years from now, UWB will be running at 400 megabits-per-second or better with a low cost that might make it a WiFi successor. There is the issue of range, sure, but we are likely to see higher range UWB products that XtremeSpectum's current 10 meters. And as WiFi gets faster, its range is getting shorter, too. My guess is that the ultimate home network will be a UWB mesh. Perhaps the individual device range will be still limited to 10 meters, but there will be enough bandwidth available for every UWB node to act as a repeater, extending the network wherever people are in the house. Video, audio and data will go everywhere, with every device simply finding its place on the Net.
Mesh networking is another source of good news with application far beyond out UWB home networks. I predict mesh will be the big networking story for the second half of this decade. For those who aren't familiar with the concept, a mesh network turns every node into a router and repeater, and data more or less finds its way from where it is kept to where it is needed. Mesh networks form spontaneously and adjust as nodes come and go. Mesh networks are not only powerful, they are resilient, and they make very efficient use of bandwidth. My favorite mesh software this week is MobileMesh, an Open Source project you can find in the "I Like It" links.
Where mesh networking will really explode is when it reaches critical mass and mesh software embraces a variety of media types (MobileMesh is nearly there already). That's when we will be able to extend the concept of an ad hoc network until it literally becomes the Internet. Let me explain. A major limitation of current networking technology is that it can only use resources it knows about, but a heterogeneous mesh network goes further. Through a process called Border Discovery, a mesh network can find more efficient paths to remote resources. So rather than being limited to your home network, the mesh can reach out over the Internet (or whatever we'll call it then) to remote resources that won't appear remote at all. This is done by creating tunnels that are really more like wormholes, cutting seamlessly from UWB to DSL to Wifi and back, and making your brother's CD collection in New Jersey into an extension of your own.
With a fully-realized mesh network, non-private data (this column, a Nat King Cole CD, or a copy of "Debbie Does Dallas") resides where it resides and the issue becomes less one of location than ownership. This is the Digital Rights Management endgame that all the current industry players are missing. In their determination to not only control all the money, but to also administer a centralized distribution system, they don't see the power of leaving data where it lies. With five or five thousand or five million copies of an audio file or a movie already on the network, why do I have to get my copy from Warner Brothers, rather than from my neighbor? The issue finally comes down to compensation, and turning Warner Brothers from a distribution empire with hundreds of employees to a royalty acceptance web site with no employees means that royalties could drop by an order of magnitude and profits could stay the same.
Think of it this way. I just bought a "Lord of the Rings" DVD at Fry's Electronics for $16.95. That $16.95 has to support not only the movie production, but also an immense manufacturing, distribution, and marketing organization that at the end of the day probably yields two dollars or less in pure profit to the intellectual property owner. So why not cut out that manufacturing, distribution, and marketing operation -- and its associated administrative overhead -- and instead just hurl a copy of the movie onto the Net, let it propagate as demand dictates, with that same two dollars making its way back to the film makers from every subsequent owner?
That's where we are headed, to a system where Microsoft doesn't control access to media as much as content controls its own use, and only the content creators get paid. And when it all comes together a decade from now, we'll see that for the very reasons I just described it was inevitable.
And that's good news.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020808.html
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Bluetooth And Wi-Fi technologies to revolutionize automotive landscape, according to new ABI report
According to the findings of a new report from Allied Business Intelligence Inc (ABI), the use of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (a.k.a. 802.11) wireless technologies in the automobile will dramatically alter the face of the automotive environment in and out of the vehicle. (8/9/2002)
Future Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-based automotive applications will deliver new opportunities to all aspects of the industry, from silicon vendors and hardware manufacturers, to automakers and gasoline retailers.
Due out later this year, Chrysler's UConnect Bluetooth hands-free car kit will mark Bluetooth's introduction into a production vehicle. But while telephony may be Bluetooth's key automotive market driver, Wi-Fi's principal driver stems from the FCC's allocation of the 5.850-5.925 GHz band for DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications). This will spur the introduction of interoperable, Wi-Fi based automotive services, such as toll collection, mobile commerce, and entertainment. However, hurdles still need to be overcome, including high silicon costs, power consumption, and a lack of roadside infrastructure.
Although it may be another couple of years before vehicles come off the assembly line with 802.11 hardware, Bluetooth-enabled equipment will be embedded in several new American, Japanese, and European vehicles beginning in 2003. According to report findings, nearly 20% of all new vehicles will feature embedded Bluetooth hardware by 2007, while almost 12% will contain embedded 802.11 hardware.
"Hands-free telephony will be just the beginning. The introduction of Bluetooth and 802.11 into the automotive environment promises to enable a slew of new and sophisticated automotive applications," said Frank Viquez, ABI Senior Analyst and report author. He also noted that a partial list of such applications include remote vehicle diagnostics, compelling and less expensive telematics services, highly advanced automotive safety systems, and remote audio and video downloads into the vehicle.
The new report, "Automotive Wireless Networks: Examining The Proliferation of WLAN and PAN Technologies Into The Automotive Platform," provides a comprehensive analysis of current and future automotive Bluetooth and 802.11 applications. The report also supplies projections for Bluetooth and 802.11 automotive node and device shipments, and provides analyses of key market participants
http://www.telematicsupdate.com/homepage2.asp?news=30877
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