X-File -sharing could have enormous implications for the selling of content, culture and information online.
A series of new studies of Napster users suggests everything you've been reading about music file-sharing systems is baloney. You're not thieves and pirates, it turns out, but marketing pioneers and music lovers quite willing to pay for music. These new stats suggest that file-sharing could have enormous implications for the selling of content, culture and information online, none grasped by dunder-headed corporations like the record labels. They are also a reminder not always to believe what you read. (Read more).
ragingbull.lycos.com
slashdot.org
By Todd Spangler
Interactive Week
February 9, 2001 12:40 PM PT
Napster, the music-sharing service reviled by much of the music industry, is in discussions with InterTrust Technologies concerning the use of InterTrust's content-protection technology in the forthcoming version of its service.
David Ludvigson, president and chief operating officer of InterTrust, said his company is in talks with Napster and Bertelsmann - which is working with Napster to develop a "legitimate," subscription-based version of the service - about using the InterTrust technology.
InterTrust, based in Santa Clara, Calif., is one of the top suppliers of digital rights management - or DRM - tools to content producers and others. InterTrust's DRM technology allows content owners to place restrictions on how music, movies or other digital assets are distributed or played.
InterTrust already has a partnership in place with Bertelsmann, the German media company. Last year, Bertelsmann formed its own digital rights management company, Digital World Services, which uses InterTrust's digital rights management technology to provide "clearinghouse" functions for the distribution of digital content.
"We're not formally doing anything [with Napster], but we're talking to DWS, Bertelsmann and Napster about using our technology," Ludvigson said in an interview.
A Napster representative did not return phone calls requesting comment on which other DRM vendors Napster may be considering.
Last October, Bertelsmann made the stunning announcement that it would loan Napster $50 million to develop a copyright-friendly version of the service.
The media company also said it would drop its lawsuit against Napster if it successfully launched such a service that would compensate the music companies.
Since then, Napster has not disclosed how or when it plans to implement the secure version of the service, although it has floated a potential monthly subscription fee of $4.95. Napster executives have said that the company expects to maintain a free version - dubbed "Napster Classic" by some analysts - regardless of the nature of the fee-based counterpart.
Besides its arrangement with Bertelsmann, InterTrust also has licensing agreements with other companies, including America Online, Universal Music Group, Adobe Systems, and Nokia - which last week also invested $20 million in InterTrust.
zdnet.com
The Secret's Out: Napster and Bertelsmann Finally Reveal Blueprint for New Version of File-Swapping Service
Charles C. Mann
2/16/2001 12:12
At long last, Napster and Bertelsmann announced on Friday
how they would take the first steps toward restructuring the free, music-swapping network into the paid, membership-driven service promised by both companies last Halloween, when they revealed their accord. Their plan, at least in its initial form, is based on a file-sharing system like the one that the original Napster -- call it Napster I -- has made into an international phenomenon.
But the new Napster -- call it Napster II -- will use a proprietary form of digital-rights management to impose limitations on what members do with the files once they download them from other Napster members. The changes may occur as early as June, but Napster is not yet ready to provide a firm date.
The new system, which Napster has been presenting to the record labels and publishers with which it is in litigation, will be a first step toward accomplishing several major goals, according to the company. If all goes as planned, it will help create a way for the labels, publishers, artists and Napster itself to learn what is being traded on the service and be paid accordingly. And in theory, it will preserve many of the decentralized, file-sharing features that have made its service so popular, while avoiding most of the costs and technical pitfalls of a centralized, controlled-from-the-top music distribution network. But, as Napsteracknowledges, the restructuring of its architecture will not answer the demands by the recording industry that it block songs whose copyright holders do not want them to appear on the service. Company officials stress that the new service is still a work in progress with many questions, such as blocking, still to be resolved. Napster presented the new features as the initial moves in a series of alterations that will, company management hopes, ultimately transform the file-swapping service into a valuable -- and profitable -- part of the music industry.
In an official statement, Napster's interim CEO, Hank Barry, said, ''Today's announcement underscores one key fact: the real questions about Napster's future are economic, not technical or legal. Our alliance with Bertelsmann and the Bertelsmann eCommerce Group was our first important step toward a model that makes payments to artists, songwriters and other rights holders. This solution is further evidence of the seriousness of our effort to reach an agreement with the record companies that will keep Napster running, reliable and enjoyable.''
Napster II will be, in New Economy parlance, ''re-architected'' with special software put together by Napster, led by its chief engineer Edward Kessler, and Digital World Services, a new Bertelsmann subsidiary based in New York City and Hamburg that specializes in digital-rights management.
From the outside, Napster II should look very similar to Napster I. Users will still download the Napster ''client'' program from www.napster.com. Crucially, they will have to download a new, updated version; the old software eventually will not work with the new version (nor will, more than likely, the many open-source clones of Napster). Once they install and load the client, the software will, as before, send a list of users' song files to a central index in Napster's Silicon Valley headquarters. Users will continue to search that index for songs on other users' hard drives, clicking on titles to download tracks. But inside the client software, in ways that Napster believes will be mostly invisible to the average user, the system will be considerably changed.
Imagine a Napster II user who rips Jennifer Lopez's current hit CD, J. Lo. -- that is, translates its songs into MP3 files on a hard drive. In Napster II, as in Napster I, the J. Lo. MP3s will appear on the Napster index and be available for trading. ''The idea is to keep the MP3 files on the user's computer the same, and not mess with them,'' Barry said in an interview. ''We only change things when they send them to other people.'' When somebody wants to upload one of the songs, the song will, so to speak, go through the car wash on the way over. The Napster client software will encrypt the raw MP3 file on the fly, and then send the scrambled result to the person who requested it. That second member will have a unique software ''key'' that unlocks the encryption and permits the song to be played. And, depending on the type of membership that the second Napster user has paid for, he or she will be able to do other things with the song -- burn it onto a CD, for example.
Exactly what ''entitlements,'' as Napster calls them, would be possible, and under what circumstances, is still under discussion. But it is easy to imagine the outlines of such a system. Because Barry has, in the past, insisted that part of the Napster system would always remain free, nonpaying members might have keys that permitted them to play songs a few times, or that would not play the songs after a given date. Paying members might be allowed permanent rights to play the music. Other members might pay extra to obtain keys permitting them to burn music to CD-Rs or transfer songs to portable devices like Rio players.
Once a song goes through the wash, it is important to note, it will always stay ''clean'' -- it never turns back into a standard MP3. Instead it will remain in a special, scrambled format which can be played only by the recipient, who would be in sole possession of the decoding key. This coded song file would appear on the Napster index just like a regular MP3, although it might not have the familiar ''mp3'' suffix. When other Napsterians requested the song, the second user, just like the first, could upload the scrambled version to them. But then the Napster client would slightly alter the scrambling so that the song could be played only by those people. In turn, if those people uploaded the song to other users, their software would alter the scrambling yet again.
In Napster II, songs would fly around the service almost as freely as before, but any particular copy of a song would be usable only by a single Napster account. That is, if someone downloads a J. Lo. song and decides to e-mail it to a few thousand close personal friends, the friends will not be able to play the cut, because they wouldn't have the key. And the first J. Lo. fan wouldn't be able to accompany the song with the key, because Napster plans to hide the keys in encrypted form in its client software. Building the key invisibly into the Napster program spares users the nuisance of typing in the key to decode songs and makes it a little harder for people to cheat.
Napster's plan faces steep challenges. First and foremost, of course, is whether Judge Marilyn Hall Patel -- who fashioned the original injunction against Napster last fall that the appellate court told her on Monday to rewrite -- will produce a new order that allows Napster to function long enough to deploy the new, Bertelsmann-enhanced system. Any future version of the software would be subject to the court order.
If the other majors don't participate in the new system, then the new Napster will be limited to content approved by rights holders, mainly music labels that have a deal with Napster -- such as Bertelsmann, TVT and eDel -- and independent artists seeking wider distribution. But this may not be enough music for Napster to keep its audience. A ray of hope in this regard may be Judge Patel's comment, reported Friday in the San Francisco Chronicle, encouraging the parties to settle. ''I think they [Napster and the recording companies] should all work out something,'' she said. ''There's no such thing as a free lunch, but sometimes lunch is more expensive than it should be.''
But even if Napster is able to continue operating, the technical task of rewriting its software and implementing it on the huge, churning, multimillion-user Napster system is more than likely going to be exceedingly challenging. Napster has made the implementation of its system easier to some extent because the massive task of encrypting millions of songs will take place on users' PCs, rather than at Napster's central servers. But this extra step inevitably risks slowing down the transmission of files and making the user's experience more awkward.
Software of any sort, programmers say, has difficulties ''scaling'' on computer networks. Usually, programs on networks are developed for a small number of users. As the system grows larger, unexpected problems almost always emerge. A current example is Gnutella, which has slowed to a dysfunctional crawl as the number of users have increased, because the volume of queries is swamping the system. Napster's technicians have been able to scale its service with only intermittent crashes -- a remarkable performance, in the eyes of many software experts. Now the company will have to do it all over again, and success is not guaranteed.
And if the system can be deployed, it may not succeed in its goal of keeping the music under wraps. Digital-rights management systems of the sort envisioned by Napster and Bertelsmann are notoriously vulnerable to malicious programmers. As cryptographer Bruce Schneier, head of the Net-security firm Counterpane, has pointed out, every time a computer plays a song the music exists in decrypted form somewhere in its memory. In his view, it will always be possible to capture the stream of ''plaintext'' ones and zeroes and convert them back into an unprotected, unwrapped MP3 file. A Toronto company named High Criteria already sells a program, Total Recorder, that does just this; version 3.0 is available for $11.95 on the Internet. Other voices at digital-rights management firms concede the problem, but argue that such software is too hard to use for most home Web surfers.
A second issue, says Dan Farmer, an independent computer security consultant (who has worked for the RIAA), is that the encrypting part of the Napster II client will be a mixture of ''off-the-shelf,'' publicly available code and proprietary software.
This suggests that at least some of the client will not go through the process of peer review that has thus far produced the most unbreakable encryption methods. Farmer stresses that he has not seen Napster's proposed system, but says that in the past, private groups have not readily been able to create strong encryption methods, because they can't imagine and counter all the possible venues of attack.
For examples, one need not look past the Secure Digital Music Initiative, which is widely believed to have been cracked almost instantly, and the encryption on DVDs, which was apparently broken by a teenager without enormous computer skills. Producing a secure system without exposing it to the hammers of the avid community of cryptographers and ''cypherpunks'' will be, again, a challenge. ''Is there any system as big as Napster that uses DRM?'' says Farmer. ''To say that you're going to spring something into existence that has a full-fledged architecture that will work seamlessly is very ambitious. It's the kind of thing people fall flat on their face doing. It's really an enormous undertaking.''
Whatever technical challenges the system faces, of course, are small compared to the peril posed to Napster by the record labels -- in particular, AOL Time Warner, Universal Vivendi and Sony. These large companies have made no secret of their antipathy to Napster, and all of them have digital music plans of their own. According to Napster officials, the labels have adamantly refused to show interest in this potential new architecture, which Napster and Bertelsmann have been pitching since the fall. Now, with the threat of a system-busting blocking order from the courts, Napster's unveiling of its plans is one last effort to try and force the labels to the bargaining table.
inside.com
ragingbull.lycos.com
The State of Music Security
by Brad King
2:00 a.m. Feb. 20, 2001 PST
It's the systems, stupid.
Recently, the digital rights management crowd got a sharp lesson from the entertainment industry. No more proprietary systems and hard-to-use digital rights management systems that consumers can't understand.
ragingbull.lycos.com
26.5% is instiutional!!!
44% is insider owned!!!
That leaves a small float....
10,000 at the ask 11:17 am.eom |
