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  • Want to Copy iTunes Music? Go Ahead, Apple Says By BRAD STONE January...

    • January 7, 2009

      SAN FRANCISCO — In moves that will help shape the online future of the music business, Apple said Tuesday that it would remove anticopying restrictions on all of the songs in its popular iTunes Store and allow record companies to set a range of prices for them.

      Beginning this week, three of the four major music labels — Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group — will begin selling music through iTunes without digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which controls the copying and use of digital files. The fourth, EMI, was already doing so.

      In return, Apple, whose dominance in online music sales gives it powerful leverage, agreed to a longstanding demand of the music labels and said it would move away from its insistence on pricing all individual song downloads on iTunes at 99 cents.

      Instead, the majority of songs will drop to 69 cents beginning in April, while the biggest hits and newest songs will go for $1.29. Others that are moderately popular will remain at 99 cents.

      The music companies are hoping that their eagerly awaited compromise with Apple will give a lift to digital downloads. They will be able to make more money on their best-selling songs and increase the appeal of older ones.

      And with the copying restrictions removed, people will be able to freely shift the songs they buy on iTunes among computers, phones and other digital devices.

      Technologically sophisticated fans of digital music complain that D.R.M. imposes unfair restrictions on what they can do with the tracks they have bought. For example, the protected files from iTunes do not work on portable players made by companies other than Apple.

      “I think the writing was on the wall, both for Apple and the labels, that basically consumers were not going to put up with D.R.M. anymore,” said Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, a market research company.

      Music industry watchers widely applauded the move and said it could help digital music sales, which have shown signs of slowing down just five years after Apple introduced iTunes.

      In particular, lower prices for some songs could spur consumers “to buy deeper into the catalog, and expand their relationship with digital music,” said Russ Crupnick, an analyst with the NPD Group.

      The music industry could use a lift. Sales of CDs fell 20 percent last year from 2007. About 2.4 billion songs were bought on iTunes in the last year, aided by Apple’s expansion into international markets. But that was not nearly enough to make up for losses in traditional retail stores.

      Industry pundits have long pointed to D.R.M. as one culprit for the music companies’ woes, saying it alienated some customers while doing little to slow piracy on file-sharing networks.

      Apple has been campaigning against D.R.M. at least since February 2007, when the chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, wrote an open letter criticizing the software. Apple reached a deal with EMI that year to offer music without the copying restrictions.

      But it could never reach the same agreement with EMI’s larger rivals. Sony, Warner and Universal allowed other online music services, like Amazon’s MP3 Store, to sell unprotected music, but they withheld it from Apple. Their goal, industry analysts say, was to try to strengthen online rivals to iTunes, which they viewed as having a dangerous level of control over their business.

      “Apple definitely wanted to remove D.R.M. from music, but the record labels would not allow them to renegotiate their licensing agreements, because they wanted to help competitors succeed against Apple in the market,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm.

      Apple, for its part, appeared to resist variable pricing, fearing it would amount to a price increase for the most popular tracks on iTunes, which constitute the bulk of sales on the service. It has also said the consistent 99-cent price made things simpler for buyers.

      It is not clear what broke the impasse, but the deteriorating economy may have put pressure on music companies.

      “For the major labels, it was clearly time for them to accelerate becoming digital music companies in a macroeconomic environment that is downright frightening,” said Greg Scholl, chief executive of The Orchard, a digital distributor of music from independent labels.

      The compromise gives the recording industry new leverage over their online music sales, Mr. Scholl added. They can start to sell new tracks at the higher price, then gradually drop prices to keep sales moving. Labels could also experiment with bundled packages of songs and even special editions at higher prices.

      Harry Wang, director of mobile product research at the consulting company Parks Associates, said, “They aren’t going to get a huge amount of money from this new arrangement, but in an ailing music industry, anything that can provide more money will be better than the status quo.”

      Apple said customers would be able to pay a one-time fee to strip copying restrictions from music they have already bought on iTunes, at 30 cents a song or 30 percent of the album price. ITunes customers can achieve the same effect by burning all of their music to a CD and then reimporting the music into the iTunes software, although this reduces sound quality somewhat.

      The company also said that its popular iPhone would be able to download songs from iTunes over wireless data networks like AT&T’s. Previously, iPhone owners had to either attach the phone to a computer or connect to a local Wi-Fi network.

      Apple reported the changes in iTunes at its keynote presentation at the annual Macworld conference in San Francisco, given by Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing.

      Mr. Jobs was not at the event, after disclosing this week that he had a treatable hormone problem that had resulted in significant weight loss over the last year.

      Ben Sisario and Jenna Wor-
      tham in New York contributed reporting.

       

  • B.C. Search engine head sues industry group over downloading Cassi...

    • Cassidy Olivier ,  Canwest News Service

      Published: Wednesday, September 10, 2008

      RICHMOND, B.C. - A Richmond man who runs an Internet search engine that allows users to find video and audio files online is suing the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) over "false" allegations of copyright infringement.

      In an unprecedented move, Gary Fung, the president of Isohunt Web Technologies Inc., launched last week in B.C. Supreme Court a pre-emptive strike against the CRIA stemming from the ongoing dispute with the association over alleged copyright violations.

      The action was in response to a cease and desist letter sent by the CRIA in May that claimed Fung's company contributes to a "staggering amount of illegal music uploading, downloading and file sharing."

      If Fung refused to take the site down, the CRIA said it would "seek court remedies" under the Copyright Act including legal costs, punitive damages, injunction relief and statutory damages of up to $20,000 for each sound recording infringed.

      However, contrary to claims made by the CRIA, Fung, 25, argued in the court papers that his site does not "infringe or violate in any way" the Copyright Act and as such deserves protection from the court.

      He claimed that Isohunt's search engine is merely a tool, much like Google or Yahoo, that allows users to locate the files (known as dot-torrents) that are widely available throughout the Internet.

      He noted that no copyrighted materials are posted on or pass through his website and after the search is completed the role of his website is "at an end."

      "If Isohunt is liable, so is Google and Yahoo," Fung said. "The legal issues are the same. We are simply suing them in self-defence."

      Fung said he is not opposed to copyright law and highlighted Isohunt's "notice and takedown process" whereby links to copyrighted material are removed from the search engine's database.

      Since this process started in 2003, he said Isohunt has removed an estimated 50,000 links at the request of software companies, movie studios and music recording companies.

      "Which goes to show how efficient our process is," he said.

      © Vancouver Province 2008 

  • Computing In The Cloud: Who Owns Your Files? by Laura Sydell ...

    • Computing In The Cloud: Who Owns Your Files?

      by Laura Sydell

      Computing on the cloud

      Life in the clouds: How much data do you have stored in the ether? iStockphoto.com

       “We're all kind of used to the idea that if you don't pay your telephone bill, you know they're not going to shut off your phone while you're off on vacation ... But [for] your cloud storage service, there's no rules.”
      Harry Lewis, professor of computer science
       
       All Things Considered, August 21, 2008 · Do you have a Yahoo e-mail account? Maybe a Gmail account? Do you put up pictures on Flickr? Perhaps you've started keeping your schedule online. If so, then you are using cloud computing — that's what tech companies call it when people work and store information on the Internet.

      Because it enables users to access their documents anywhere, cloud computing is very convenient. But it's also creating a whole new set of worries.

      Abel Habtegeorgis, 23, learned recently how it can all go wrong. Habtegeorgis is pretty typical for someone his age; he stores the most important documents of his life — from family photos to conversations with his mother — online using Gmail and Flickr.

      "It's easier in a lot of ways," says Habtegeorgis. "It's so amazing to have access to so many pictures and everything. Pretty much my life is up there."

      Until it wasn't: One day, Habtegeorgis typed in his password and found that it didn't work.

      "I type [the password] again and again and again, and I realize something is wrong with the company itself or the server or the e-mail account," he says.

      Habtegeorgis couldn't get to his photos of his nephew. He tried to reach someone at Google, but couldn't. Suddenly, he realized that he had no idea what kinds of rights he had over those e-mails, because he never did read that user agreement when he signed up.

      "Nobody reads the user agreements," he says with a laugh. "You don't read that 90-page document."

      (After NPR mentioned his problem to Google, Habtegeorgis finally got back into his account. The company says there was some sort of security issue.)

      Business On The Cloud

      Habtegeorgis isn't alone in his reliance on the cloud; Yahoo alone boasted 261 million active e-mail users in the month of June, and the company's photo sharing site, Flickr, reports that it hosts 2.5 billion photographs.

      Increasingly, Internet companies are offering online services that appeal not just to individuals, but also to businesses. Samantha Sullivan is part of Scary Cow, a small film company in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company can't afford its own offices, so everyone works from home with help from Google's growing number of Internet applications, including online schedules for setting up meetings, shared spreadsheets for budgets, and Google documents for script collaboration.

      The applications allow the employees to work together in real time. But despite the fact that her company stores crucial documents — including scripts, video footage and working documents — online, Sullivan laughingly admits to never having read the user agreement.

      Harry Lewis, a computer science professor at Harvard, says what's in those agreements may turn out to be no laughing matter. He warns that most online companies reserve the right to shut users down if they are accused of storing something illegal — whether or not the accusation is justified.

      "If it's easier for them to just kill your account than it is to fight back against this complaint ... they might just find it easier to make you go away," Lewis says.

      Lewis says that part of the problem is that there aren't any rules governing life on the cloud.

      "We're all kind of used to the idea that if you don't pay your telephone bill, you know they're not going to shut off your phone while you're off on vacation. There are laws about how quickly they can shut off your telephone service," he says. "But [for] your cloud storage service, there's no rules."

      The contents of the user agreement that most people don't read can be surprising. For example, when you put up your Facebook page, you pretty much give the company the right to do whatever they want with it. According to the user agreement, Facebook can "use, copy, publicly display, publicly perform, reformat, excerpt and distribute it."

      The March Toward The Cloud

      Despite potential problems, tech companies see consumers inevitably marching towards cloud computing. Several companies, including Hewlett Packard, are making cheap portable notebook computers with small hard drives that will rely on the cloud for storage. Microsoft, Amazon and Apple now all provide online services.

      Sam Schillace, part of the team designing online applications at Google, waxes on enthusiastically about the convenience it provides.

      "The data's always where you can find it," he says. "Your laptop crashes, the hard disc gets erased — your data's still fine."

      Life on the cloud can be wonderful — except when it's not. Recently, 20,000 paying customers of a small cloud storage company called Linkup lost large amounts of information when the company shut down. But for most companies, Schillace says, cloud computing is too important to mess up.

      "It's something we have to get right, or the model won't actually work," he says. "It's got to be your data that follows you around when you give your credentials to a Web site. You've got to be able to do what you want to do with your data on that Web site."

      As we turn on our BlackBerrys, iPhones and laptops and expect the convenience of having our information anywhere we are, cloud computing seems unstoppable. Just be sure to read that user agreement before you click the "accept" button.

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