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Internet, music firms in court over digital music

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Former allies in the fight against music piracy — Internet access providers and the recording industry — are now headed to court in a dispute over how to target individuals who swap copyrighted material online.

The recording industry wants telecommunications giant Verizon Communications to reveal the name of a customer it believes is "a hub for significant music piracy" as it pursues the Internet song-swappers it blames for declining CD sales.

Verizon has refused, saying that such a move would violate customer privacy and force Internet providers to serve as the music industry's online policeman.

At issue is a 1998 digital-copyright law that protects Internet providers from legal liability in piracy cases if they cooperate with the industry's enforcement efforts.

The recording industry contends that the law requires Verizon to cooperate, while Verizon says the law only requires it to take down Web sites that host offending material, not monitor its customers' Internet use.

"We viewed ourselves as a partner with the content community," said Sarah Deutsch, Verizon's general counsel. "There's no other industry that has assisted them in this manner with their copyrights, but they've crossed the line here."

Now headed to trial, the dispute looks to be the next big battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley as interest groups have picked sides.

The motion-picture industry filed a brief supporting the record labels last Friday, while a group of 300 other Internet providers backed Verizon last night. Online civil-liberties groups have told the court they support Verizon as well.

Napster complicates copyright law

Verizon and other Internet providers maintain that they do not support copyright violations, and the two industries have worked closely over the past four years to locate and take down thousands of Web sites and other unauthorized hubs of copyrighted material.

But the advent of "peer to peer" services such as Napster and Kazaa complicated the arrangement, as users were able to search for digital music on each others' hard drives rather than Web sites.

The recording industry was able to shut Napster down in July 2001, but has been unable so far to close the services that sprung up in its place.

Instead, the industry has begun to target individual users, hoping that lawsuits or sternly worded warnings will lead to a decline in use.

"We need to make it abundantly clear to people that they are engaging in illegal activity when they are offering their personal music collection, which they don't own copyrights in, for others to take," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Copyright violators could face penalties of between $200 and $150,000 per count, Sherman said.

While the RIAA is able to determine the numerical Internet address of computers trading copyrighted songs, it cannot find the name of the user without the cooperation of Internet providers, Sherman said.

The association asked Verizon over the summer to match a numerical address with a customer name, but Verizon said it would not cooperate.

Instead, the RIAA should sue the user directly and compel Verizon to provide the customer's name, Deutsch said.

"They can't just launch a mass-scale war on consumers without following the right legal process," she said.

Sherman said such an approach would be too burdensome as it would require the industry to file suit against music fans who might be persuaded to stop by a simple warning letter.

The RIAA's approach has other flaws, other Internet providers say. Wireless networks, public terminals in libraries and coffeepots, and pre-paid Internet access cards mean that numerical Internet addresses often do not point to the copyright violator, said David McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association.

"Even in a person's home, you don't know if it's that person, or someone related to that person, or one of Johnny's friends who's on the computer doing this," McClure said.

Music Internet

New music format coming - Tiny ‘DataPlay’ discs to foil pirates

Consumers will soon see a new digital music format in their local stores. Called DataPlay digital media, these news discs are smaller than CDs and represent the music industry’s latest attempt to distribute music in a copy-protected format.

While this new media is physically small, it is supported by large industry forces. Three of the top five record companies — Universal Music, EMI Group and BMG — have already signed on. The list of artists expected to re-release successful albums in the DataPlay format includes Carlos Santana, ’N Sync , Britney Spears, Sarah McLachlan and Pink.

The discs themselves are contained in a transparent plastic shell, and are small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. Consumers will be able to buy blank, recordable DataPlay discs as well as prerecorded, copy-protected discs.

Competing against CDs is a formidable challenge — recent reports estimate that there are 1.5 billion CD players. But DataPlay has features that might allow it to gain a toehold.

These include games and extensive photo galleries, music videos and artist interviews. Next generation DataPlay players might be equipped with video screens.

Additionally, both the media and its player are so small – though still offering CD-quality sound — that they can be easily transported. And users can download music from the Internet and burn it onto DataPlay discs.

The cost of DataPlay media is causing scepticism among music industry observers. Blank media costs US$5 per disc when purchased as part of a 10-pack. In contrast, traditional CD media costs less then 50 cents per disc and has 150 megabytes more storage capacity. An album released on DataPlay will retail in the US$18 to $22 range.
The DataPlay player-burner units are also more expensive than traditional CD recorders. The only player-burner currently available, the iDP-100 by iRiver America, costs US$350.

Yankee Group media and entertainment analyst Ryan Jones told NewsFactor that the DataPlay format “is going to meet considerable struggle in the marketplace.” He said the music industry thought that DataPlay’s major label support would give it a decisive edge, but support of this kind is not enough.

But, Jones pointed out, “consumer electronics manufacturers will be under increasing pressure to integrate some kind of copy protection into their devices.” And DataPlay might be the solution they adopt — unless Sony and Philips choose one of their own proprietary solutions.

Further complicating matters is the fact that there is a great deal of competition for shelf space in the media market right now.

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Fight over digital music file-sharing keeps getting weirder

PALO ALTO, Calif. — The first LP I bought was Grin's 1+1. Paid $4.12 in a store called Grant's. And — gasp! — I had no way to copy it and share it with 1,000 of my closest friends. Can you imagine? No cassette decks. No CD burners. No MP3s.
But these days, how does a boomer keep up with the many ways to infringe on copyrights and suck the life out of record companies? The latest thing is called KaZaA. Do you know about KaZaA? At first, I thought it was maybe the national booze of Kazakhstan — a syrupy liquid that sets fire to your esophagus. Like slivovitz. But, well, no. Turns out KaZaA is a digital music file-sharing technology, and a version out this week is giving the recording industry a new round of the willies. In fact, the whole smackdown between record companies and digital music technology is getting weirder than a CatDog cartoon. Most of the time, normal people really don't want to know about, say, the courtroom twists involving the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or about legal oddities such as the technicality that says if you burn music onto a blank audio CD, it's legal. But if you burn music onto a data CD, you could wind up in jail, perhaps sharing a cell with a kindly former CEO. But because the legal maneuverings could have a huge impact on one of life's great pleasures, I thought I'd try to sort out the latest news. To help, I paid a visit to Andrew Bridges, Silicon Valley's foremost digital music lawyer. Here are some developments we discussed:

· KaZaA. There's a lot of weirdness going on here. Niklas Zennstrom and Janis Friis, who live in the Netherlands, wrote software called FastTrack. The software lets people share music files for free over the Net — à la Napster — yet maintains no central control. Napster had a computer server that connected users to each other, like a switchboard. FastTrack resides on each user's computer and goes out on the Net to find other users to link up to. It works more like people meeting randomly at a party. The music industry sued Napster and shut it down by shutting down the service's central server. There's no similar way to stop FastTrack. Anyway, Zennstrom and Friis used FastTrack to start a company, KaZaA. It distributed millions of downloads of the software. The music industry reacted like a homeowner finding carpenter ants. It set out to squish them before they did much damage. The music industry sued KaZaA. So in February, Zennstrom and Friis dumped KaZaA into a company called Sharman Networks. Sharman is officially based in Vanuatu, a Pacific island tax haven headed by Father John Bani. Its chief export is kava, an herb that allegedly helps relieve stress. Music execs would have a hard time filing suit in Vanuatu. Since then, Zennstrom and Friis have created a company, Blastoise, which also goes by Joltid. Blastoise/Joltid has licensed the FastTrack software that powers KaZaA to Los Angeles-based Brilliant Digital Entertainment. Bizarre, huh? KaZaA's founders hired Bridges to defend the company in court, but then KaZaA ran out of money to pay him, so he resigned. Meanwhile, as a pre-emptive strike, the record industry hired specialized software companies to flood the Internet with glitch-filled versions of songs as a way to frustrate would-be KaZaA file sharers. In reaction, the KaZaA service this week introduced updated software that rates files so users can avoid corrupted versions. The two sides meet in court Dec. 2, at which point they probably will have devolved into giving each other wedgies.

· Verizon Communications. Digital music swappers' new hero is, believe it or not, a big boring phone company full of people who are about as hip as Dick Cheney. The Recording Industry Association of America, monitoring the Internet, detected that a Verizon DSL customer had loaded hundreds of songs onto his or her PC and was a major source of music files flying around the Net. The RIAA asked Verizon for the customer's name. Verizon said no. Earlier this month, both sides filed briefs in court. What's the big deal? The RIAA is about to try the highway patrol method of enforcement. The police can't catch all the speeders — but they can catch the worst offenders and maybe set an example that will slow the rest of us. Similarly, the RIAA "is getting ready to go after uploaders," lawyer Bridges says. It will aim at the worst offenders. "Part of the getting ready is getting names," he says. What if the abuser ends up being a 13-year-old with braces and acne? The music industry will win a lot of fans by suing such a menace to society.

· Morpheus. This is another outfit that works a lot like KaZaA, and it is a co-defendant with KaZaA in the case that Bridges quit because he couldn't get paid. Morpheus argues that it just produces technology and can't be held responsible for what its users do with it. The music industry says that Morpheus must include controls that won't let users illegally share music. The outcome could have a wider effect on technology, Bridges notes. It's like saying cars should have devices preventing them from surpassing the speed limit. Or that chief financial officers should be forced to use spreadsheet software loaded with fraud sensors. At the extreme, any technology that could be used for evil could be ordered to add protection — a nasty burden on tech innovation. "There are massive political and civil liberties issues at stake," Bridges says of the recent music cases. "We're lucky they're being played out in entertainment, where it can do less damage." Although, the cost to society seems pretty high to me. The rush of music technology and lawsuits is making a whole generation — people who first knew music when it was trapped on vinyl — feel awfully old.


Kevin Maney covers technology for USA TODAY. His Technology column appears Wednesdays. E-mail Kevin at kmaney@usatoday.com.

Music Internet

Web Radio Could Get Respite

Congress considers freezing fees sought by music labels, which threaten small Web-only stations.
https://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,...x100102a,00.asp

Music Internet

Web Music Keeps Streaming--For Now

Music labels, Webcasters reach compromise that won't kill small online stations with stiff fees.
https://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,...x100802a,00.asp

Internet Music

FCC approves plan for radio stations to go digital

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal regulators gave the go-ahead Thursday for digital radio, approving a plan to modernize the medium with better sound and new features for personalized programming.

The Federal Communications Commission voted 4-0 to adopt digital radio technology created by iBiquity Digital, a company backed by large broadcasters including ABC and Viacom.

The commissioners enthusiastically endorsed the technology, saying it will benefit the industry and consumers.

"We don't get many items where it's a win-win for everyone. There's no down side," Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy said.

Radio has changed little for decades. FCC Chairman Michael Powell said he's heartened that such a dramatic leap forward in technology is in store.

"I'm thrilled and excited to see the radio wagon train finally get to the other side," he said.

The approval allows radio stations to immediately begin broadcasting digital signals, though it probably will take a few months for the first stations to start.

Manufacturers plan to sell digital receivers for car stereos and high-end audio systems starting next year, adding about $100 to the price of a traditional unit. It's unclear how soon digital technology will be included in portable radios.

The iBiquity technology allows broadcasters to use their existing airwaves to simultaneously send digital and analog signals. Listeners won't have to buy a new radio to continue listening to their favorite stations, but can if they want better sound and other options.

Supporters say the new technology will bring CD-quality sound to FM broadcasts, an end to static for AM and new data features.

Radio One, which owns and operates 65 stations and primarily targets black listeners, already has ordered digital transmitters, said John Mathews, the company's director of engineering. He said the Lanham, Md.-based company plans to start digital broadcasts within three months in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Detroit and Los Angeles.

"We wanted to be in the front on this," he said. "The quality improvement is just phenomenal. It's analogous to the transition between cassettes and CDs."

Some digital car stereos will have small screens, displaying news or advertising or pictures of the artist whose song is playing. Others will allow listeners to choose when to hear reports on stocks, sports, weather and traffic.

The digital broadcasts will be free, unlike the subscriber services offered by Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio Holdings, which beam music and talk to radios from satellites.

Digital broadcasts use the same language as computers — a series of on and off electronic pulses. Broadcasts with the proposed technology won't increase a radio station's range, but digital signals can be cleaned up, removing garble and uneven reception.

Edited: bwren on 18th Jan, 2006 - 1:33am

Internet Music

Reading through this topic has reminded me of all the different approaches that the music industry has taken in order to stop downloading music illegally from the internet. Despite all of their efforts there are still many companies out there that are able to do this without talk of being shutdown. There are a few fewer amount of companies to choose from now however their problem has not yet stopped.

In the USA I have not seen a smaller form of music media take any hold on the market. We experienced a short fad for mini-discs which is the closest resemblance to dataplay that I can think of but it never got past the price to replace everyone's exiequipmentptment.

Now however I-tunes is the boom in popularity dropping cd sales nationwide as many Ipod owners choose the songs they want and buy direct from the web. This however has not stopped the sharing music issues.

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Internet music revolution a mixed blessing

Music services such as iTunes, Spotify and YouTube might not be piracy, but some have accused them of highway robbery. As New Zealand Music Month approaches, Olivia Wannan asked musicians if technology had revolutionised - or ruined - their industry. Ref. Source 4