response 157 of 183:

Jul 28 07:27 UTC 2000

Two opposing pundit views on the aftermath of the Napster injunction:
 
The Washington Post says that the precedent of the Napster injunction
is a powerful tool which leaves the RIAA and copyright holders in
the driver's seat on the distribution of intellectual property on the 
web.  In particular, the Post author thinks even small-time operators
of Gnutella directories will be sued.

  http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56246-2000Jul27.html
 
Salon says that the RIAA has won the battle but lost the war.
Napster the company was an entity which the record labels could have 
made deals with; Napster the phenomenon, as represented by the 20
million users eager to exchange free music, isn't going anywhere, and 
now it will be much less controllable.

  http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/07/27/napster_shutdown/index.html

response 159 of 183:

Jul 29 03:29 UTC 2000

  Most people will have heard this by now (at least if the news coverage
  I encountered was typical) but the appeals court has issued an order
  staying the Wednesday injunction which ordered Napster to shut down by
  the end of the day.

  To put it more plainly, it appears Napster will be allowed to operate
  while the trial is conducted (unless the appeals court's ruling is itself
  reversed.)

response 161 of 183:

Aug 3 17:24 UTC 2000

  Interesting article at:

   http://www.latimes.com/news/state/updates/lat_needle000801.htm

  Apparently the music and video industires aren't the only ones terrified
  about what unauthorized digital distribution is going to do to their 
  industry.  The latest front in the raging intellectual property war is
  (wait for it..):  needlepoint

  Apparently, overly frugal needlepoint fans are exchanging patterns with
  one another [don't they know how dangerous it is to share needle(points)?]
  The article reads almost, but not quite, like an Onion parody story on
  the Napster issue [Onion Quotient, or OQ, of 85%] complete with quotes like:

       "I'm promoting the designers," said Shawna Dooley, a 25-year-old
       housewife from Alberta, Canada. "We're just sampling the
       patterns. If you like one pattern, you're going to be more
       likely to go out and buy a pattern by that artist next time..."

  and

       ..paying $6 for an entire pattern book is outrageous, said Carole
       Nutter, particularly if a person wants just one or two of the
       dozen designs listed...  "It's like the CD. There's one song you
       want, but you still have to buy the whole thing," said Nutter,
       54, who lives in Bellgrave, Mont., a town of 3,000.  "Why can't
       [the industry] let us pay for what we want, not what they want
       to sell us?"

  and

       ..designer Leavitt-Imblum has ordered her attorney to start
       collecting evidence so she can sue those who exchange copies of
       her patterns, people whom she describes as the "scourge of all
       that is decent and right."

response 163 of 183:

Aug 8 20:46 UTC 2000

Napster is the cover story on the August 14 Business Week magazine.
The material is on the web at http://www.businessweek.com

response 165 of 183:

Aug 21 23:22 UTC 2000

Many net news sources cover the brief Napster filed on Friday
with the appeals court.  This is where the RIAA seeks to reinstate
the injunction shutting down Napster, while the company seeks a 
permanent stay.  It's not clear to me that Napster is going to make any 
headway with calling the judge "naive."  It's also not clear to me 
that they will many any headway with their argument that since it is 
impossible for them to distinguish between legal and illegal file 
trading, therefore they must be allowed to operate.
 
----------
 
http://www.upside.com/News/39a1a15c0.html
 
mp3board.com is being sued for linking to illicit MP3 sites.
mp3board has now sued AOL and Time Warner; mp3board argues that AOL,
and Time Warner if the marriage comes off, should indemnify mp3board
if any of mp3board's activities with Gnutella are found to be 
infringing copyrights.  They argue that since Gnutella was developed
by the staff of an AOL division, that the prospective company AOL-Time-
Warner should not be able to collect damages for the use of a 
product they developed.

response 167 of 183:

Aug 28 23:42 UTC 2000

Speaking of AOL's about-face:  http://www.inside.com has a piece today
on how the author of Gnutella has disappeared and seems not too happy
to have sold Winamp to AOL.

-----

News item:
 http://www.inside.com/story/Story_Cached/0,2770,8823_9_12_1,00.html

MP3.com, in the copyright case over My.MP3.Com, was able to reach  
settlements with all but one of the major labels.  Universal held out 
and so the trial now moves into a stage to determine damages. 
Universal does not budge: they want billions.  They want MP3.com  
destroyed (KRJ interpretation)   From the inside.com story: 
 
   "According to its filings, Universal is not only trying to get  
    even with MP3.com, but it is also seeking 'deterrence' -- 
    that is, to send a shrill message to Napster, Scour and the like. 
    In one brief, Universal asks Judge Jed Rakoff to 'give notice 
    to other prospective Internet billionaires that violation of the 
    law is not an acceptable business strategy.'" 
 
The article goes on to outline possible MP3.com legal defense  
strategies.

response 169 of 183:

Sep 7 04:26 UTC 2000

Continuing from resp:167 ::  Wired, and most other media, report that the
court has found that mp3.com's infringements of the Universal
Music copyrights was "willful," and it set damages at $25,000
per CD copied into the MyMp3.Com service.  Wired guesstimates
the total bill at around $118 million, which is not enough to 
put mp3.com out of business.
 
mp3.com plans to continue challenges to some of the Universal
copyrights.

response 171 of 183:

Sep 7 04:58 UTC 2000

mp3.com's stock will tank bigtime tomorrow
they wont survive on their own, will need to get bought out

response 173 of 183:

Oct 9 20:54 UTC 2000

Lengthy interview with Napster's lead attorney David Boies, in which 
he lays out Napster's four main legal arguments:
 
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.10/boies.html

response 175 of 183:

Oct 11 21:36 UTC 2000

Interesting.  And it would be doubly interesting to see how much damage a
"cover charge" like that would do to the size of Napster's user base.

response 177 of 183:

Oct 15 23:54 UTC 2000

  Interesting "is not / is too" accusations are flying between Salon 
  Magazine (www.salon.com) and Leonardo Chiariglione, head of the 
  industry-sponsored Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI)

  Salon, citing anonymous SDMI insiders, claims that *all* of the 
  watermarking, encryption, and other security technologies proposed
  as possible standards by the SDMI have already been cracked in record
  time since the SDMI began their "Hack SDMI" challenge (which invites
  would-be hackers to try for $10,000 by breaking SDMI's security schemes.)

  Chiariglione, quoted in [Inside] magazine (www.inside.com) claims that
  nobody knows the results of the contest yet and that none of the 450
  submissions have been properly examined to see whether they're successful
  cracks or not.

response 179 of 183:

Dec 8 00:26 UTC 2000

  It gets worse than that..  I order to prevent people from borrowing
  a copy of a CD to prove that they own it, the my.mp3.com service will
  apparently now require listeners to insert the CDs at random intervals
  to prove they still have them.  If you have to keep the CD media handy
  so you can prove you're not a thief whenever you want to listen to
  something, what exactly is the benefit of the storage locker concept?
  Lower fidelity?  High bandwidth usage?  Limited selection?

  I probably never would have gone for the original service in a big way
  but I think MP3.com got reamed while trying to do the right thing --
  all they were trying to do was provide a digital repository for content
  to which people already had access, even making good-faith efforts to
  ensure they weren't delivering music to people who didn't already have
  a copy..