Robbie Williams’ manager has hailed the digital audio market and defended the singer’s outspoken views on music piracy. Tim Clark has spoken out as the star launches a new mobile phone which links to his online music and video.

Williams has irritated the music industry in the past by defending illegal downloading of music. He reportedly once called it a “great idea”.

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People downloading to podcasts are still in a minority, despite the hype surrounding them, research suggests. The number of US households listening to podcasts will increase to just 12 million by 2010, a Forrester Research report has found.

Tech savvy, young males are most likely to listen to take away audio it said.

But a survey by research firm BMRB found that nearly eight million Britons will go in search of a podcast in the next six months.

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Although the central and local governments have made a great effort to tackle the scourge, piracy has stunted the healthy growth of the film and VCD/DVD product industry.

Film fans in many Chinese cities can easily purchase pirated editions of the latest domestic and Hollywood blockbusters with loose change. This has caused a sharp drop in cinema revenue as well as in sales of original video products.

Film production has received strong support from foreign investors, and with the success of blockbusters such as “House of Flying Daggers” (Shimian Maifu) and “Kung Fu Hustle” (Gongfu), signs of winning the battle against piracy have appeared.

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We’ve gone over the numerous ways that movie studios can compete against things like movie downloads, but what about counterfeit DVDs sold on the street? In many cases, these DVDs sell because there’s really no alternative. That’s why it seemed to make sense for studios to try releasing movies on DVD at the same time they’re released in the theaters. However, Aaron deOliveira points us to a fascinating experiment by Universal Pictures over in Russia, where counterfeit DVDs are seen as a very big issue for the movie industry. Rather than sending out their own fake police force to rough up street vendors, they’re actually competing by selling “Cheap’n'early DVDs”. These are DVDs that come out much sooner (four weeks) after the movie is released, but the quality (and the price) are much lower.

A few months later, the studio comes out with the full version of the DVD release — much higher quality with lots of extras. In other words, the cheap and early DVDs are clearly just to compete against the counterfeit DVDs on the street. It’s still not entirely clear why they need the separate release windows rather than just giving people a choice, but it does seem like an interesting experiment.

The public prosecutor of the German district Karlsruhe fears getting crushed under the workload of (future) P2P-prosecutions presented to him by the German gaming industry:

“20,000 announcements are said to have been received against game downloaders, which take the work time of five lawyers and three particularly policemen turned off for the sifting. The processing of the document mountains will [take] at least six months to take up. “the treatment of heavier offenses could suffer in the future under this substantial additional expenditure”

The German gaming industry is using the Swiss firm Logistep, which says to registrate “which contents during which period and with which IP address” users downloaded. At least in the Netherlands this kind of outsourcing of P2P-police work to a non-EU third-party has been deemed unacceptable.

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When the US Supreme Court ruled last year that two popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks had knowingly facilitated mass copyright infringement, digital rights advocacy groups predicted the stifling of innovation, while Hollywood moguls cheered the decision as a victory for artists and the fatal blow to piracy.How things can change in a few months. Today, P2P has an enormous user base using it for entirely legitimate purposes - and names from the entertainment industry such as Sky, NTL and Warner Brothers are rolling out services that rely solely on P2P technology.

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Mark Klein is a true American hero,” says the EFF.
“He has bravely come forward with information critical for proving AT&T’s involvement with the government’s invasive surveillance program.”
The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) last week filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in its class-action lawsuit against AT&T. It said the company had to be prevented from “dragnet surveillance” which would violate the law and privacy of its customers by, “disclosing to the government the contents of its customers’ communications, as part of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications”.

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A Swedish prosecutor says Big Six studio efforts to nail a man they say shared a movie online may have effectively slammed the door in their faces.
A Swedish appeal court yesterday ruled it couldn’t hear a case against a 27-year-old man who’d been fined the equivalent of 80 days’ salary by Sollentuna district court for breaking copyright laws, says The Local.
“He admitted making the Swedish action film ‘The Third Wave’ accessible to others through a file sharing programme.”

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This week the world rejoiced. Mac users could run Windows XP or OSX and switch between them with the newly released Boot Camp. Not the best solution (you have to restart the system to switch to the other OS) but better than software emulation and hey, it’s a start.Now the bad news. It looks like Intel has embedded “Trusted Computing” DRM protection in its Infineon chip and forgot to tell people. If you remember the Sony rootkit uproar, you know this is not small news.

The basic idea of Trusted Computing is that security on a computer is obtained via hardware, through a specific chip dedicated exclusively to this task and called Trusted Platform Module (TPM). It’s a very controversial project, as I wrote four years ago. Originally sold as a beneficial security system for users (which is partially true), trusted Computing and Palladium risk to open the doors to inviolable copy-protection systems and to censorship and surveillance issues to unprecedented levels. The analysis by Electronic Frontier Foundation is inexorable and rigorous; although also the IBM refutation is worth reading. Source: Masternewmedia

What is Palladium?

The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), formerly known as Palladium, is a software architecture designed by Microsoft which is expected to implement controversial parts of their “Trustworthy Computing” concept on future versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Microsoft’s stated aim for NGSCB is to increase the security and privacy of computer users[1], but critics assert that the technology will not only fail to solve the majority of contemporary IT security problems, but also result in an increase in vendor lock-in and a resulting reduction in competition in the IT marketplace. Source: Wikipedia

TorrentSpy, as its name suggests, is a BitTorrent indexing site. Considering much of the terminology associated with file-sharing is rooted in little more than colloquialisms, the exact function of a “BitTorrent indexing site” is generally considered a “catalog” of available files - including movies. An indexer shouldn’t be confused with a tracker, which hosts the actual torrent file, coordinates the file swarm and directs BitTorrent traffic.

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Illegitimate Patent Chills Distance Learning and University Education

San Francisco - An extremely broad patent claiming to cover almost all methods of online testing is coming under fire today.

Test.com has used this illegitimate patent to demand payments from universities with distance education programs that give tests online. However, a patent reexamination application filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today shows that Test.com wasn’t the first to come up with this testing method.

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That’s basically what Charter Communications told me in a letter I received today. Why? Because HBO has been watching. Then they went and tattled on me to Charter.

The download at issue is the second episode of the latest season of The Sopranos. All 359 megabytes of it. The people representing HBO recommended that Charter terminate my service. Charter basically said not to do it again or else they “will have no choice but to terminate” my account. Click the thumbnails to the left to view each page of the notice Charter mailed me.

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A Swedish appeal court decided on Wednesday not to hear the case against a man who illegally shared a film via the internet. The prosecutor said that the decision effectively puts an end to the hunt for private file sharers in Sweden.

“I interpret this as a clear decision that individual file sharers, if they don’t earn money from file sharing, won’t get anything more than a fine. That means we can’t trace IP addresses, which means that we can’t trace private file sharers,” said prosecutor Håkan Roswall to TV4.

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During the past two weeks the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN forced 6 (small) torrent sites to stop their services. Brein is known for its intimidating techniques, and is successful in taking down sites, mostly set up by hobbyists.

Among BREIN’s newest victims are weblog.nl, movieget.nl, and torrents4you.com.

BREIN claims to have taken down 50% of all Bittorrent sites in the Netherlands.

Brein often threatens the site owners to admit they are infringing copyright and asks them to give BREIN all the information about their members or we will sue. These threatening and intimidating talk seems to work, although Brein has no legal power, they do have the money to sue.

Do games and music fall in the same arena? We have never heard anyone getting sued by a games developer.

Answer

Here is some info regarding P2P software and filesharing. If people would just take the time to read the fine print - and on some sites it is hidden well - the whole “is LimeWire legal” argument would be old news.

I’ve visited the websites of a few popular filesharing software distributors and looked for disclaimers, TOS, End User Licenses, etc. I have only quoted bits of relevent information to give you an idea of what to expect. For more detailed info follow the links I’ve provided or visit the sites yourself for the full text. Continue reading to see what I found.

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