Monday, July 15, 2002

Tauzin sets September deadline for agreement in digital TV battle. The chairman of the House Commerce Committee has set a September deadline for agreement between the technology and entertainment industries on how to deliver the crisper pictures and interactive features of digital television. AP via New Jersey Online Jul 15 2002 6:04PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

Apple releases QuickTime 6. The company makes public the final version of its digital media software, marking a stand-down in a dispute over licensing fees. [CNET News.com]

Licensing decision ends MPEG-4 tiff. The group of patent holders governing MPEG-4 finalizes licensing terms for the media delivery standard, bowing to market pressure for manageable royalty rates. [CNET News.com]

Tech execs: Hands off P2P. CEOs from Microsoft, Intel and others say theyíre ready to discuss anti-piracy issues with Hollywood--but only if the studios agree that technology can't solve all their problems. [CNET News.com]

Can Newspapers Save Local Music? "Roblimo has posted a great piece over at NewsForge about how the Washington Post and other newspapers are hosting MP3 download sites for local musicians and how the sites are actually very popular. An interesting read." [Slashdot: Index]

Start-ups try to dupe file-swappers. False versions of songs are turning up in file-swapping networks, thanks to new technologies designed to frustrate song-traders until they just log off. [CNET News.com]

This site (Eldred v. Ashcroft) collects material related to the constitutional challenge of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended by 20 years both existing copyrights and future copyrights. Also, good copyright links on their links page.

The EFF has published a great paper that summarizes the Unintended Consequences of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). It is available as a PDF file or as a Googled HTML document. [Lisa Rein]

Microsoft's Palladium is really a global money-flow tax. Never mind  that Microsoftís Palladium computer security initiative offers digital rights management (DRM) capabilities for the entertainment industry. That someone else will control what you can and cannot run on your computer is just a minor side benefit. Never mind that even though Mario Juarez, Palladiumís product manager, acknowledges the technology has built-in back doors. Back doors that governments can use to monitor and disrupt the information flows of citizens. Back doors that corporations can use to monitor and control employee behavior. Both are just minor side benefits. Nice, but not crucial. The real purpose of Microsoftís Palladium, according to Robert X. Cringelyís latest article, ìA Hollywood ending: Does Microsoft really care about protecting the entertainment industry?î, is to control and tax the global flow of money. The DRM bits of Palladium are, according to Cringely, a red herring to draw our attention away from Palladiumís real purpose. After all, Cringely reminds us, ìIn 2001, the PC business was more than 12 times the size of the movie business and more than eight times the size of the movie and television businesses combined.î [ARTS & FARCES internet]

Welcome to etree.org, the award-winning leader in lossless digital audio distribution on the Internet! We are a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. We do not distribute MP3 due to its lossy compression scheme which greatly degrades the quality of the audio. If you trade a CD-R's from MP3 audio, you are polluting the CD-R trading community.

Reading up a bit on peercast. The slashdot mention got lots of interest. I've been running the app on my windows machine for a few days now and it really works. According to their foum, the peercast network is intended to be infrastructure and can route not just mp3 streams, but any kind of data. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Microsoft to unveil media format's name. The software giant on Monday will announce its crown digital media technology, code-named Corona, officially will be called Windows Media 9 Series. [CNET News.com]

Springsteen Protects His New CD's Online in an Old-Fashioned Way. Bruce Springsteen has thwarted prerelease of his music on the Internet not through digital protection or online policing, but with an old-fashioned lock-and-key approach. By Chris Nelson. [New York Times: Arts]

HDTV Battle Wages On. Digital television isn't quite here yet, but when it comes, it may be little use to anyone if a new copy protection scheme goes into effect. By Brad King. [Wired News]

Record this: A TiVo-like toy for the Mac?. A Macintosh software company plans to launch Monday the first consumer personal video recorder for Mac aficionados. [CNET News.com]