................................. To leave Commie, hyper to http://commie.oy.com/commie_leaving.html ................................. G O O D M O R N I N G S I L I C O N V A L L E Y Last updated: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2001, 8:30 AM Napster, has inked an agreement with Gracenote, a technology company specializing in music recognition, that will help it adhere to a court order requiring it to remove thousands of copyrighted songs from its file-sharing service. Napster plans to use Gracenote's database of song titles and their variations to thwart the efforts of users who have circumvented its song filters by intentionally altering the names of songs or the names of the artists. Napster CEO Hank Barry heralded the announcement as evidence of the company's due diligence in complying with the order." We've been exploring a partnership with Gracenote for months and the ability to quickly enlist their support in our file filtering efforts will greatly improve our effectiveness," Barry said. "We are leaving no stone unturned in our efforts to comply with the court's injunction." His words, however, appeared to fall upon death ears in the recording industry, which seems convinced that the company's efforts are disingenuous. "They're not trying hard enough" Howard King, attorney for Napster critic Metallica, told the Washington Post. http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/tech/033707.htm http://www.napcameback.com/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A872-2001Mar13.html Ironically, King's comments coincided with the release of the Recording Industry Association of America Consumer Profile, which seems to suggest that the advent of digital music sharing services may have helped to increase sales of recorded music, not hinder them. According to the RIAA's newest Consumer Profile, 10- to 19-year-olds -- an age group considered vital to the recording industry -- purchased slightly more CDs in 2000 than in the year prior. The RIAA spun this statistic as another indication of the injustices its suffered at the hands of Napster, explaining the number was one "just slightly above flat as the competition for young people's attention, specifically the Internet, continues to grow." Napster had a different take on the matter. "The RIAA justly celebrates that 1999's 'significant decline' in sales to young customers was reversed in 2000," Napster CEO Hank Barry told Newsbytes. "These are key Napster users - and the RIAA's own figures show they are buying more CDs now than they were before they had access to more music through Napster." http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/newsid_1190000/1190724.stm http://www.riaa.com/PR_story.cfm?id=389 http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/163117.html Dr. Dave Touretzky has made another addition to his "Gallery of CSS Descramblers" -- an archive of utilities capable of decoding a Content Scrambling System DVD file. This one is even smaller than qrpff, the seven-line Perl implementation unveiled last week by two MIT students. Christened efdtt by author Charles H. Hannum, the new utility is just 442 bytes, the smallest known C implemen- tation of the descrambling algorithm. As you may recall, the motion picture industry has taken great pains to prohibit, if not eradicate access to algorithms like these, despite its obvious lack of understanding of the technology and its uses. The MPAA is reportedly already investigating qrpff, and it will likely pursue efdtt as well. Still, as some observers already have noted, an effort to prevent the distribution of such a small piece of code would be difficult at best. "So what's the MPAA gonna do now?" Touretzky asked in the Register Tuesday. "This code is small enough to put on a cocktail napkin. Commit to memory. Knit into a scarf. Whatever. It cannot be suppressed." http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/qrpff.pl http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/hannum-efdtt-source.txt http://cryptome.org/cryptout.htm#DVD-DeCSS http://216.167.120.50/mpaa-v-2600-jvd.htm http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/17568.html I put Napster third on a list of uprisings of massive, uncoordinated civil disobedience in the last 100 years, after the 55 mph speed limit and Prohibition. -- Professor Clay Shirky, Partner for Technology and Product Strategy at the acceleratorgroup http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/13/1420210&mode=thread (c) 2001, SiliconValley.com.
