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Technology Stocks : e.Digital Corporation(EDIG) - Embedded Digital Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jules Burke who wrote (3554)	5/3/1999 9:40:00 PM
From: bob	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18366

ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE, May 13, 1999. A Chat with Mr. MP3 Can this man save the music business? When the major players of the recording industry launched a group called the Secure Digital Music Initiative in December, partisans of the MP3 audio-format controversy greeted the move with hearty derision. With the ambitious goals of creating a technical standard for priacy-proof digital music files and enabling devices, like portable players, to translate the files into music, SDMI was seen by skeptics as a hopelessly belated response to the popular (and easily pirated) MP3, already entrenched s the Net's de facto audio standard. But then, in late February, Lionardo Chiariglione was put in charge of SDMI and the scoffing quieted considerably. Well regarded in high-geek circles, Chiariglione is perhaps best known as the longtime head of the Moving Picture Experts Group, from which emerged the MPEG1, Layer3 audio standard - otherwise known as MP3. With Chiariglione at the helm, an announced goal of having SDMI-approved gadgets on the shelves by Christmas 1999 (once widely dismissed as wishful thinking) now looms a possibility. You are more or less responsible for the invention of the MP3 format. Why are you - and the record industry - now working so hard to come up with a replacement for it? MP3 was released in 1992, at a time when very few people knew of the existence of the Internet and the Web, and PC's as powerful as the Pentium were a long, long way to come. So the problem has to do with two facts, basically. The first is that we have now a ubiquitous network connecting tens of millions of people around the world. the second is that the PC, starting from a couple of years ago, has achieved a degree of processing power that enables the real-time decoding of MP3-like files. These two elements created the reason for the success of MP3, because people say "OH, that's great - I rip off music from my CD, I bring it to my computer, I compress it, I send it to my friends, I post it on my private Web site, and people can download it." All this was not part of the original design parameters of MP3. In other words, what's missing is some form of built-in protection against unrestricted copying of the record labels' intellectual property? Absolutely. What SDMI is designing is a system whereby, yes, you buy the music - you buy it as a file contained in a physical form [like a disc] or downloaded from a Web site, so you have the ability to move that file from one player to another player. but when you make a copy, you disable the original. Because we want to avoid the fact that 1 million copies of a digital file can be made without any degradation of quality. What kinds of products will this system be built into? This Christmas there will be portable devices that people can use to download files, and they can ut them in their pockets and walk and enjoy the music. In the longer term, which means one year later, the idea is that consumers will be receiving digital music via cable, via broadcast over the air, or from a kiosk. But that's assuming consumers end up choosing the SDMI standard over MP3. What makes you so sure they'll prefer a copy-protected format over one that lets them do whatever they want with the music they buy? Consumers like simple things. If you take the average music consumer, this person likes to push a button and listen to the music, and nothing else. So ease of use is overriding design parameter of SDMI. If the ease of use in high and people can have the total freedom of finding and getting the music they want, for a price - which is what people do today when they buy compact discs in the shops - well, then, I tell you: People are going to adopt SDMI. - Julian Dibbell *LOOKS LIKE WE FIT THE BILL FOLKS.*