"The agenda for last week’s Digital Media Hollywood Summit reads like a self-help guide for the content industry. Sessions on the economics of media convergence and ‘embracing the connected consumer’ are indicative of an industry dealing with changes in technology and consumer behavior. Panels discussed technologies that package digital content in new ways.

"Using technology protections for copyright instead of legislation to protect copyright is a worthwhile public policy discussion. Indeed, going forward, technology, and not legislation, should be the primary means for defining the consumer experience.

"Why? Technology applications - if not the result of a government mandate - represent a market solution that can help reward artists and provide consumers with innovative content."

Braden Cox and Clyde Wayne Crews. Helping Hollywood Help Itself - Protecting Digital Property Without New Legislation. Competitive Enterprise Institute. Feb. 15, 2005.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"A competitor is running a search engine ad with your trademarked brand name. Another has copied your web site without permission. You suspect another of driving up your advertising costs through click fraud. What are your legal options?

"What can you do to protect your site from these online thieves? At the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, a panel of experts explored a wide range of issues related to search engines and legal protection."

Grant Crowell. Search Engines and Legal Issues. SearchEngineWatch. Feb. 23, 2005.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"A Russian digital-music site offering high-quality song downloads for just pennies apiece is the target of a criminal copyright investigation by the local police, recording industry groups said Tuesday.

"AllofMP3.com has been operating for several years, asking consumers to pay just 2 cents per megabyte of downloads–usually between 4 cents and 10 cents per song. Alongside the catalogue available at traditional stores like Apple Computer’s iTunes, the site offered access to songs from the Beatles and other groups that haven’t yet authorized digital distribution.

"The Russian site claimed it had licenses to do so from a local clearing house, but record labels have maintained that the licenses weren’t valid. After long-standing complaints, the Moscow City Police Computer Crimes division completed an investigation earlier this month and recommended that prosecutors charge the site’s operators with criminal copyright infringement."

John Borland. MP3s for Pennies? Russian Cops Say No. News.com. Feb. 22, 2005.

See also:
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Recording industry Welcomes Police Investigation of Allofmp3.com. (Press Release.) Feb. 22, 2005.

John Leyden. Russian Police Probe Cheap Downloads Site. The Register. Feb. 22, 2005.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"’People think I’m this poseur guy from MTV, but I don’t care,’ says Adam Curry, the former VJ whose long blond locks once mesmerized teenyboppers across the globe. ‘I’ve always had this total dual life as a geek and a celebrity.’

"Curry, 40, is the brains behind iPodder, a tiny application that he believes has the power to challenge commercial radio. iPodder is the bastard offspring of the blog and the Apple MP3 player. It combines the hyperactive talkiness of blogs and the hipness of iPods into something utterly new: the podcast. iPodder uses the blog syndication tool RSS to automatically download homebrew radio shows, podcasts, directly into a portable MP3 player.

"Welcome to podcasting, the medium that promises a future where anyone can make radio, instead of just listen to it. The biggest podcast audiences now number in the mere tens of thousands. Yet real radio, the kind with bona fide mass audiences, is starting to use the technology to make its shows available for download.

"The podcasting scene is reminiscent of the early, heady days of blogging, circa 2001, a time before Wonkette made the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Like bloggers in the good old days, podcasters are obsessively internecine and gloriously, honestly unprofessional."

Annalee Newitz. Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star. Wired. March 2005.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"Mike Godwin, the legal director for Public Knowledge, a digital-rights advocacy group in Washington, is a fan of Showtime’s new drama series ‘Huff.’ So three weeks ago, when he missed the season finale, he decided to download it to his personal computer.

"To Mr. Godwin, the time-consuming download (and the file’s poor quality) indicated that the rampant piracy of digitized broadcast programs - a threat Hollywood has long warned against - was hardly imminent. But to the Federal Communications Commission and the Motion Picture Association of America, cases like this one suggest a future of widespread illegal file-sharing that must be stopped before it begins."

"The debate will be presented in oral arguments tomorrow before the District of Columbia Circuit for the United States Court of Appeals in a lawsuit brought by Public Knowledge and others against the F.C.C., challenging a new regulation that is intended to prevent such bleeding of television content onto the Internet."

Tom Zeller Jr. Federal Effort to Head Off TV Piracy Is Challenged. News.com. Feb. 21, 2005.

See also:
Ed Felton. Broadcast Flag in Court. Freedom to Tinker. Feb. 21, 2005.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. Broadcast Flag "Just As Important As Grokster". Deep Links. Feb. 18, 2005.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF’s HDTV-PVR Cookbook. No date

Update: Declan McCullagh. Court Questions FCC’s Broadcast Flag Rules. News.com. Feb. 22, 2005. (A federal appeals court questions whether the FCC has authority to undertake such sweeping regulation.)

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"Officials at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency want to bar the public from viewing the agency’s aeronautical and navigational data and publications, a decision that has upset many who use that information. Some librarians, commercial mapmakers and public-interest group members say they will launch a campaign to retain access.

"Without seeking public comment, NGA officials announced plans in November 2004 to stop selling and distributing the aeronautical and navigational data because of copyright concerns and worries about terrorist attacks. Last December, however, they said they would seek comments before making a final decision.

"Jim Mohan, an NGA spokesman, said the agency is considering the action partly because an increasing number of foreign source providers are claiming intellectual property rights or warning agency officials that they intend to copyright their source material."

Frank Tiboni. A Publishing Dilemma. FCW. Feb. 7, 2005.

See also:
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. NGA Invites Public Comment on Proposal to Remove Aeronautical Information from Public Sale and Distribution. (.pdf) (Press Release.) Dec. 3, 2004.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"Movie industry representatives at RSA 2005 in San Francisco today called on the IT industry for help in thwarting illegal file sharing before the problem threatened its revenues. But they were told that they must recognise the limitations of digital rights management in their fight against digital piracy.

"Speaking on the RSA conference panel Hollywood’s Last Chance - Getting it Right on Digital Piracy, Carter Laren, security architect at Cryptographic Research, noted that cryptography is ‘good at some problems, such as transmitting data so it can’t be eavesdropped or even authentication, but it can’t solve the content protection problem. If people have legitimate access to content, then you can’t stop them misusing it.

"’Anyone designing content protection should design for failure and if it fails update it,’ he added."

John Leyden. Cryptographers to Hollywood: Prepare to Fail on DRM. The Register. Feb. 17, 2005.

See also:
Cryptography Research. Cryptography Research Security Experts to Speak at RSA Conference 2005. (Press Release.) Feb. 14, 2005.

Michael A. Einhorn and Bill Rosenblatt. Peer-to-Peer Networking and Digital Rights Management: How Market Tools Can Solve Copyright Problems. (.pdf) Cato Institute. Feb. 17, 2005.

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