21 new of 143 responses total.
((David, Vivendi Universal might be of particular interest to you because they control the biggest chunk of major-label classical catalog. London/Decca, Angel, Deutsche Gramophon, Philips are just a few of the brand labels & catalogs which Vivendi Universal has ended up with.))
re #118: You're probably talking about UCITA, which has been adopted in several states and is being heavily lobbied in the rest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/22/technology/22MUSI.html analysis: "Vivendi Deal for MP3.com Highlights Trend" "The upshot, industry analysts say, is that the five major record companies could wind up actually consolidating their power in an Internet age that some analysts thought would shake the labels to their core." We mentioned this before; the major music companies now seem to be on the verge of tightening their stranglehold on the distribution of music. ---------- http://www.latimes.com/business/20010521/t000042593.html "Net Music Services in Royal Bind" Best summary I've seen of the controversy between the music publishers and the online music business. In today's world, music publishers get a "performance" royalty when a song is broadcast on the radio, or else they get a "reproduction" royalty when a physical disc or tape is sold. On the net, these neat categories get blurred, and according to this article the music publishers feel they should get both performance and reproduction royalties for music downloads.
Another story about how the big labels now own most of the online
music cards:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may2001/nf20010522_934.htm
quote: "As the dust settles on the online-music landscape, there appears
to be little left that the big labels haven't bought -- or broken.
Napster traffic is plummeting as the court-mandated filtering
systems have made it significantly harder to find
music that consumers want. Among the top-10 music sites only two
don't belong to the big labels, according to traffic measurements
by online-research firm Jupiter Media Metrix."
And according to the article, only one of those two is a true independent,
launch.com; the other unnamed site is owned by a unnamed large corporation.
Here's a very interesting review of what looks to be a very interesting book: DIGITAL COPYRIGHT, by Jessica Litman. http://slashdot.org/books/01/03/28/0121209.shtml
News item from everywhere: the RIAA has sued Aimster, the encrypted file exchange system built on top of AOL Instant Message. Aimster has also lost a contest for their domain name; AOL claims "aimster" is a trademark infringement.
From what I've read, Aimster has nothing to do with AOL Instant Messenger, but rather is named after its creator's daughter. That people (including me, before I read an article about it a week or two ago) are confused by the name and think it has something do with AIM is pretty much the legal test for trademark infringement, if I understand trademark law correctly.
Wasn't AIM a single-board computer kit related to the KIM?
Yes. I used to actually used to have an AIM-65. I even had the BASIC interpreter in ROM.
Two items today from http://www.sfgate.com , the website of the
San Francisco Chronicle:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2001/06/05/financial1
539EDT0235.DTL
(sorry about the wrapped URL) is an AP story reporting that Napster is
close to concluding licensing deals with the major labels in the
MusicNet coalition, which are AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann & EMI.
There are caveats that the labels are still not satisfied with Napster's
protections against copyright infringements.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/06/05/BU111061.DTL
"Battle over digital music moves to recordable CD drives."
EMI has acquired a partial stake in Roxio. Roxio, the maker of the
software program Easy CD Creator, was recently spun off from Adaptec.
"EMI Music, one of the big five record labels, plans to announce
a deal with Roxio Inc. of Milpitas today to develop technology designed
to control the burning ((of CDs by consumers)). Roxio makes CD-burning
software that is shipped with about 70 percent of the estimated 100
million recordable CD units in the marketplace.
"How that technology will work or exactly what it
will do is unclear, although executives at the two companies
said one example might be to program CD burners to prohibit
copying of a song unless the user pays a fee."
An executive of Roxio says the interest is not in controlling what is
done today with CDs, but what will be done in the future with downloaded
music files.
Analysts suggest that consumers will not put up with restrictions on
what they can do with their CD burners, or with downloaded files they have
paid for.
How lucky that we have analysts to tell us that.. :-p
Here's a more detailed article about the EMI/Roxio proposal to put controls into CD burning software: http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/depth/roxio060501.htm Emi's idea is that the consumer would buy a license to burn the downloaded music file; they think one in four CD sales could be done this way in five years. They say they view this as a new channel for sales. And here are two articles on the shape of the new for-pay Napster service: http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=32416&pod_id=13 http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,44322,00.html The inside.com article, by Charles C. Mann, is better, but unless Salon picks it up, the link will be broken in a day or three. Napster is going to charge for one level of access for downloading music from independent labels, and for another level of access to get to music from their three major-label partners in the RealNet alliance. The publishers are still a huge stumbling block in Napster's path towards a July re-launch as a centralized downloading service; the technical challenges are also seen as formidable, since no one has ever attempted to stream as much music as Napster is expected to dish out from a few central servers. The description of how the two-tier Napster will work -- with two separate pieces of user software, initially -- sound like another flop in the making.
A Cnet story about how ISP's are being pressured into helping copyright holders hunt down their customers: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6221068.html?tag=st.mu.1652424.ncnet.1 005-200-6221068 ISPs argue that the DMCA covers having the ISP remove infringing material from the ISP's machines, but it does not cover terminating customers who are infringing copyrights from their own machines. The ISPs are worried that they will be found liable for their customers' copyright infringements by courts in Europe; ISPs are generally protected from such liability by US law.
That's like prosecuting telcos for their customers' harassing phone calls.
Telcos have clear protection in the law due to their status as "common carriers," who are obligated to carry the traffic of all comers. ISPs have not generally been recognized as "common carriers" since by Internet custom there are some activities of their users which they are expected to police, such as vandalism of other systems and sending lots of spam e-mail. ISPs had considerable & realistic liability worries until the DMCA granted them protection in the early 1990s. However, the protections of the DMCA cover American courts only, and many jurisdictions are now interested in extending extraterritoriality in Internet cases. My understanding of the trend in Europe is that European courts have been much more willing to bring ISPs into cases; at a minimum there are the two cases where Germany prosecuted CompuServe for transmitting pornography, and where France has pursued action against Yahoo over American-based sales of Nazi memorabilia. So if I ran a Napster clone on my PC and offered up copies of material of European origin, or offered them so they could be downloaded in Europe, the European rights holder would want to take action against my American ISP in European courts. (I'm tired and babbling...)
What jurisdiction would an EU court have over an American ISP? Even the French Nazi/Yahoo Auction thing is being reviewed because of jurisdictional concerns.
Another summary article on recent developments with the big record companies seizing control: http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=656204 Note that the Universal/Sony "Duet" vaporware online service has now been renamed "pressplay." Quote on how the legitimate download systems may still produce a substantial revenue squeeze for the labels: "Even at $20-$30 a month, for unlimited downloads, the record companies could expect a steep drop in revenues per track: consumers in America now pay over $1 per track on a CD album, which will often contain songs they would never choose to pay for."
As someone mentioned in party recently, Audiogalaxy is where it's at. Here's a Cnet article summarizing recent developments in the music file trading scene for those of us who are technological Luddites: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6282002.html?tag=tp_pr The quick summary: Napster may be fading away but new services are seeing explosive growth.
Yes, making it easy to download tracks probably causes people to download more of them. That's a deceptive measurement, though, since it's the initial production, not each downloaded copy, that costs the record companies significant amounts of money. It seems to me that the real question in terms of whether the record companies would gain or lose revenue from a $30 per month unlimited subscription service is whether the typical customer of that service would otherwise be spending $30 per month on CDs.
Eric in resp:138, on international jurisdiction over American ISPs: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5093109,00.html?chkpt=zdnn_tp_ This ZDnet story is about The Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgements, a proposed treaty. "'In a nutshell, it will strangle the Internet with a suffocating blanket of overlapping jurisdictional claims, expose every Web page publisher to liabilities for libel, defamation and other speech offenses from virtually any country, (and) effectively strip Internet service providers of protections from litigation over the content they carry," Jamie Love, director of Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology (CPT), wrote in a report after the meeting." ... "The Hague treaty differs... it is much broader, requiring participants to agree to enforce each others' laws on a variety of topics. As it stands, the treaty would require courts to enforce the commercial laws of the convention's 52 member nations, even if they prohibit actions that are legal under local laws." "Delegates did not soften speech laws to provide for countries that value the exchange of information. In addition, they strengthened some intellectual property provisions--over the objections of consumer groups. "'The bottom line is that it didn't go well,' said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union... He said that although American delegates listened to free-speech worries, most others did not. "CPT's Love agreed. "We got our ass kicked," he said. 'It was a bad two weeks for us.' "Free-speech advocates fear US citizens could lose many of their rights if all web sites have to ensure they are following the narrowest laws, such as those of, say, China or Morocco."
I have a suspicion there are a lot of communists in China.
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