If this is a P&D it is the most silent one I have ever witnessed. Not a peep from the company and suddenly it is a pump and dump...
interesting. I suppose LU, TXN, IBM, INTC, Lanier, et.al have
been scammed as well. What a masterful job EDIG has done. Well,
my hats off to 'em!!! Gotta respect that. LOL!
On a more serious note, here is an article of interest from webnoize.
New EFF Consortium to Meet; SDMI Specs Could Discourage MP3 Use
Participants in the May 25 inaugural meeting of an organization formed to guard civil liberties relevant to digital audio will discuss what they consider to be potentially harmful effects of current music industry plans for secure Internet music distribution.
Formed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Consortium for Audiovisual Free Expression (CAFE) will hold its first meeting in San Francisco tomorrow.
The EFF is a San Francisco-based, non-profit, non-partisan organization that works to protect privacy and freedom of expression rights with respect to computers and the Internet.
The EFF has released a policy statement regarding digital audio. "Some representatives of the music recording industry...would be happy to pass legislation to criminalize open Internet distribution of audio, and to mandate the adoption of locked technology -- one that would effectively obliterate the freedom to distribute audio entirely," the statement reads in part. "This group of 'record companies' seems to be attempting to abolish or obsolete all open formats, eliminating competition and user choice in the market."
The organization is likely concerned about a plan now part of the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), a collaborative project involving music, technology and consumer electronics companies to establish specifications for secure Internet music distribution. The plan calls for implementation of technology in SDMI-approved software and hardware music players that detects whether a music file is SDMI-approved, and which prevents playback of non-SDMI-approved files, including open standards such as MP3.
According to the plan, the technology will exist in SDMI-approved hardware and software before the end of this year, but the mechanism will not be activated until the music industry decides to do so.
"If indeed this is the case, then the music business has made a business decision, that curtailing piracy is a significantly greater concern than certain sorts of functionality," said Eric Scheirer, an audio researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also participates in the Motion Picture Experts Group, or MPEG, the consortium that determines open standards for multimedia.
The "trigger" technology was originally part of a specification designed for video in 1997 by the Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG), composed of movie studios and computer and consumer-electronics manufacturers.
Major music companies are behind the SDMI plan; on June 15 a group of major music companies will jointly announce that they will use such a system, according to a source familiar with the proceedings. Reportedly, some major labels hope to use SDMI-compliant watermarking systems by the end of this summer.
Major labels have arranged partnerships that hint at Internet music distribution plans.
Early this month, Sony Music Entertainment partnered with Microsoft Corporation to use that company's secure music download technology for music sales, marketing, promotion and streaming media event hosting [see 5.12.99 Microsoft and Sony Pair for Downloads, Promotions].
Also this month, Universal Music Group announced it had signed a long-term agreement with InterTrust Technologies Corporation to use that company's security technology as part of a system for downloadable music sales UMG plans to use by the end of the year [see 5.4.99 Universal Taps InterTrust for Digital Music Sales].
While the SDMI had planned to settle on specifications for portable digital audio devices by June 30, and said it would meet the rest of its goals by March 2000, SDMI Executive Director Leonardo Chiariglione has said that the majority of the initiative's work could be completed by the June deadline.
The EFF legal team is scheduled to speak at Tuesday's meeting about precedents and legal issues surrounding digital audio; others will comment on digital audio "architecture as policy," and ways to consider the societal implications of a closed standards process.
The EFF legal team recently grabbed headlines when the organization sponsored a court case in which Daniel J. Bernstein, a Ph.D. student in Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, sued several government agencies, including the Commerce Department, for restraining his freedom of speech. Bernstein had written a computer program for data encryption that the State Department forbade Bernstein to post on an Internet newsgroup, for review and scrutiny by his peers.
In December of last year, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government's restrictions were unconstitutional.
The EFF was founded in 1990, and in addition to San Francisco, has offices in Washington D.C., and New York City. |
