Now I’ve used the word ‘music industry’ here to encompass anything connected to digital music stuff, music 2.0, social media, whatever you want to call it. Truth is, the keyword today is convergence.

But if you’re struggling to come to terms with new terminology, new technology and new services I did a comprehensive scan of resources you can print out on PDF that’ll really set you up with an information boost if you’re playing catch up and haven’t got the time to dig around.

There’s some fantastic resources out there and some inspirational writers like Seth Godin, Andrew Dubber, Gerd Leonhard, Derek Sivers and even digital distributors Tunecore all offer some brilliant insight and the best news is its all out there for you to grab free as a bird. And legal too!

Promotion

Music Industry Survival Guide. This compact guide from digital distributor Tunecore crams a lot into its 30 pages covering college radio promotion, iTunes promotion, street marketing, music discovery, mp3 blogs and press and media tips. Some people actually charge for this stuff. There’s seven PDF guides from Tunecore including a vinyl 101 for bands/artists wanting to press up vinyl records.

Their other guides cover mastering, publishing, copyright and mixing.

Mastering The Music Website Cycle.  EasyB.com make e-commerce software for artists to sell music direct from their own websites. The handy 36 page guide goes into some detail on how to make and manage a successful music download website. They draw up a checklist of plans for structure, content and design. Again, some great pointers for many who may find the task a little daunting.

The Leading Question-Voice Of The Fans. This survey undertaken by UK digital music industry company Musically was aired at Midem this January. 1300 music fans were questioned across the USA, UK and France.

(more…)

I mentioned the free music as viral marketing thing in an earlier post and thought I’d expand on it here.

I’ve just uploaded a bunch of some of the earlier versions of the 99th Floor Elevators, ‘Hooked’ for free download via MiniNova distribution. Think of it as an experiment to see if this has any effect on raising the profile of the 99th Floor Elevators in expectation of new material later this year and newer remixes of ‘Hooked’ also coming from Suesse Records.

Its all packaged as a Torrent and you’ll get five remixes and the original promotional video of ‘Hooked’ that was broadcast on MTV way back when. You can see the video on YouTube (see Elevators blog post here).

The audio files are all 192kbps MP3′s and the mixes included are:

Hooked Classic Remixes

Tony deVit Classic Trade Remix. This was the one that really made things fly for the 99th Floor Elevators, taking the humble white label original mix and stretching it into a near ten minute arms in the air club monster. Much credit must be given to Tony’s low profile engineer/co-producer Simon Parkes.

Originally a national top 30 hit in the UK before being re-issued as part of a Tripoli Trax double twelve inch remix package.

KillerHurts Remix.  DJ James Nardi and production partner Julian Dwyer, took chunks of inspiration from the OD404 and Pete Wardman remixes, added their own nails and came up with probably the perfect hard-house mix ever. Available on one sided 12 inch too if you’re lucky enough to find one.

Paul King Remix. Paul basically re-invents/updates the TDV mix for the 21st century with a monster synth riff from the Gods 2.30 minutes in that’ll have arms reaching for the sky. Previously available only as a very hard to find one sided 12inch white. Over nine minutes long.

OD404 Remix. Possibly my personal favorite mix and one I never tire of. Managed to take a Euro house gay anthem and turn it into the Prodigy with kick drums. Awesome.

Phlash Pop Edit. Only ever seen on a very limited release Tripoli Trax white label vinyl 12 and later on a CD single. Phlash! were ex-Tripoli A&R guy and DJ Steve Hill and engineer Mick Shiner (aka Nylon) and if you like your dance bouncy and radio friendly this is the version for you. Infectious stuff.

If you prefer the traditional route of MP3 download then you can grab each MP3 on my Drop.io page where you can either stream or download each track before deciding on the Torrent option.

I use and recommend UTorrent for my Torrents. Its less than half a meg download and spyware free. Install if you don’t already have a Torrent client.

Go to the ‘Hooked’ Torrent download link here. It’ll automatically open your Torrent client and you’ll get a pop up box so you can select which mixes you want and which you don’t want, if you don’t want the whole bunch. Click OK when you’re done and that’s it.

The files are very well seeded (well over 100 seeds as I write) so it’ll take something like 15 minutes to download the whole 74mb collection, depending on your connection speed. There’s a U Torrent beginners guide here and details on MiniNova Torrent distribution here if you’re considering getting some of your own tracks out and about ultra quick.

I uploaded the Hooked files to Mininova lunch time yesterday, by the time I’d left work five hours later Google had already indexed ’99th Floor Elevators Torrent’ and it was being seeded by users. A day later the package has over 100 seeders which means excellent download speed and availability.

Related Links

Mininova Content Distribution (Mininova.org)
Hey Content Producers, Get In The P2P Torrent Cloud (Lx7.ca)
Embracing The Torrent Of Online Video (BBC)
Thoughts On BitTorrent Distribution For A Public Broadcaster (NRKBeta)
Why You Must and How to Implement a Free Song Strategy (UnsprungMedia.com)

I wrote about some more ‘leftfield’ music marketing ideas earlier this week and continue here with some more brain storming that may give you some leads.

99th Floor Elevators-'Hooked'

One thing that has really taken off in the last year or so with artists is free album downloads, with high profile artists like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails getting the most column inches.

NIN’s album ‘Ghosts l-lV’ was Amazon’s best selling album of 2008 despite the fact that the album was legally available as a free download on filesharing networks.

It was significant also in that it was released totally free of record label shackles, Trent Reznor instead choosing to use digital music distributor Tunecore to make the 36 tracks available for download.

The band are said to have made close to two million dollars in a week from selling high-end limited edition versions of the album. The follow up album, ‘The Slip’ uses a similar marketing tactic.

Now obviously anyone reading this isn’t going to have that kind of following but artists can still use the same principles on a smaller scale. I’m trying it myself by giving away some of the original dance mixes of 99th Floor Elevators ‘Hooked’ here. A package that includes five different mixes and even the original promo video which you can see just above.

You can get individual mixes (as 192kbps MP3 files) or the whole package as a zipped download. There’s even a Bit Torrent link here. Download and seed.

Does this devalue my old mixes? Well no, its a ‘risk free’ introduction that will hopefully grab some new listeners who’ll be stimulated enough to be interested in the forthcoming newer mixes and also helps keep the name floating around the web in between new material coming out later in the year. People can also head to Amazon to buy other material on CD and download.

I used UTorrent to make the Torrent, instructions you can find here and here. I used Drop.io to host the MP3 downloads, a great straight forward service with no sign up required and no waiting through crappy ad loops that you find on free file hosts like Zshare.com

The message here? Speculate to accumulate to put it simply. Despite lots of negative press CDs are alive and well, vinyl is having a revival, fans ARE still willing to pay for quality music in premium packaging. Ex-Strangler Hugh Cornwall is the latest ‘name’ artist to try this route with his album ‘Hooverdamn’. Where, besides the free MP3 version you can grab the album on various vinyl, CD and DVD packages.

Download the 99th Floor Elevators ‘Hooked’ original remixes and promo video here or here. Or via BitTorrent here.

Contd tomorrow………

Related Research
How To Create A Torrent (Torrent Freak)
A Beginners Guide To Bit Torrent (BitTorrent.com)
How To Make A Torrent (UTorrent.com)
More Bands Oasis, Jamiroquai To Follow Radiohead (Daily Telegraph)
Steal Throwdown’s Music Please (Mashable.com)
Free Music Initiative Has Sparked 119% Rise In Sales (Mashable.com)
Why We’re Releasing Our Latest Album For Free On The Internet (HarveyDanger.com)
Band Recognizes Free, Unencumbered Downloads Are Part Of A Publicity Campaign (Techdirt.com)
Radiohead Shocks Record Industry With Free Download Of New Album (Zeropaid.com)

The Bit Torrent protocol has been well documented. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the whole of the corresponding costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources.

So, filesharing in the truest sense if you like, where downloaders also upload as they download (if you follow). The more bandwidth and upload stream you share the faster your download (in theory).

Going against that whole equal sharing thing comes a new ratio cheating program called appropriately, ‘Greedy Torrent’. The India based software author Alex NJ calls his app “the survival kit for a leech” . What the freeware program promises to do in a nutshell is boost your bittorrent upload ratio.

GreedyTorrent promises to help you survive on trackers that enforce a minimum 1:1 trading ratio, and can keep you from getting banned for not uploading. It modifies the conversation between your bittorrent client and the tracker, suppressing the actual upload amount.
via Zero Paid

Related Reading

How To Cheat BitTorrent Ratio By Spoofing (Raymond.cc)
RatioMaster (Moofdev.org)
Is BitTorrent Share Ratio Enforcement Really Necessary? (Zeropaid.com)

Back in May we wrote about some useful GMail hacks, including the GMail Drive shell extension, which basically enabled you to use the allocated 2GB+ of storage space at Google as a mini hard drive, even going as far as sitting a little hard drive icon in Start>My Computer on your PC for you to drag files too.

Latest GMail hack is the G2G Exchange which basically enables GMail users to swop files that are stored on their GMail accounts. Google has a 20mb email limit so bigger files have to compressed or split as multiple files. G2G apparently will recognize these files and display them as one complete file.

More GMail Hacks

Roam Drive (Roamdrive.com)
Ten Cool Gmail Hacks (Makezine.com)
GMail Tools and Plugins (Igniq.com)
gDisk (Sourceforge.net)

We covered early developments on the forthcoming legal P2P services, from Mashboxx and Snocap back in November of last year. Napster (MK 1) founder Shaun Fanning’s new legal P2P (ie:major label friendly) service Snocap had agreed a deal with the Universal Music Group to distribute the major labels content using the digital fingerprinting software being adapted from a Philips blueprint.

At the same time Sony/BMG had been in talks with Mashboxx boss, ex-Grokster and Blubster president, Wayne Rosso.

Snocaps talks with the EMI Group began almost six months ago and an official deal with the UK major was announced to the press yesterday.

David Munns, Chairman and CEO for EMI Music, North America said in a statement, “This deal with Snocap underscores EMI’s commitment to developing legitimate ways to deliver our music in more ways to more fans, including peer-to-peer distribution models that ensure creators are compensated for their works.”

He continued, “This sends a signal to music industry critics who claim we are technophobic. If anything, we are embracing technologies like Snocap, which allow the P2P community to share music legally. It’s a big step forward for fans, artists and copyright owners.”

Mashboxx, who are going to be using the Snocap technology for their own P2P service started signing up beta testers on their website today, for the yet to be seen music delivery service.

Snocap is a technology embedded in a P2P network to block sharing of unauthorized works, including unlicensed music and pornography and facilitate commercial transactions. Audio fingerprinting provides the digital ‘fingerprint’ of an audio recording by deriving unique features that can be used to identify the music by comparing it with reference fingerprints stored in a central database.

That fingerprinting tool could be integrated into the file-swapping software itself in several different ways. Once an identification is made, the download could be blocked, unless the computer user pays a fee, as if they were downloading a song from iTunes or another digital song store.

Mashboxx’s P2P app will use Fanning’s technology to reveal which shared songs are being monitored on behalf of Snocap’s label customers. Download a track that is, and Mashboxx’s software slips in a DRM-protected version that invites you to pay, to listen, to burn or whatever usage the copyright holder permits.

Background Reading

EMI Signs Up For ‘Authorised’ Online Music Sharing [Reuters]
Mashboxx Opens Beta Test Scheme [theRegister.com]
EMI Signs on With Snocap [Slyck.com]
Content Identification:Audio Fingerprinting [Philips Research]
Napster Founder in Major Label P2P Talks [Buzzsonic News]
EMI Records Join the Snocap Queue [Buzzsonic News]
Napster Guru Fanning Breaks Snocap Silence [Buzzsonic News]
Grokster [Wikipedia]
The Major Labels [PBS Frontline]
Wayne Rosso on File-Sharing Frontiers [TechNewsWorld.com]

Primal Scream are the latest in a long line of artists to be ‘honoured’ by getting some of their best known music hacked and rehashed by a group of Mash-up bootleg remixers.
The Beatles, the Beastie Boys, the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, Blur and the Clash have all recently been given the unofficial remix treatment by DJ ‘Mashers’.

Primal Screams classic 1991 UK indie-dance crossover album ‘Screamadelica’ was hailed by NME writers as one of the top albums of all time in 2003. The original album boasted production credits from UK club legend Andy Weatherall, the Orb and veteran Rolling Stones producer, Jimmy Miller.

The remade opus, ‘Screamadelica-Primal Scream Remixed’ was reworked by some of the main players in the UK bootleg / remix community including Mark Vidler (who produced the albums bonus track, ‘Screamadelica’), Soundhog, Tone 396, FakeID, Dunproofin and Cry On My Console, amongst others.

Like all the best made projects in this vein, the album is available for download as a BitTorrent file. The makers are eager to confess, “ We don’t pretend to think this comes close to the Scream’s masterpiece, but then nothing else does. So what primalscreamremixed.com offers is a different spin, moving from chill through dub via glitch to drum & bass. Not a million miles away from the eclecticism of the source.”

Thanks to Beatmixed.com

Related Links

Get Your Bootleg On [GYBO]
Culture Deluxe [CultureDeluxe.com]
Bootie San Francisco [BootieSF.com]
Twenty Questions [TwentyQ.Blogspot]
BitTorrent FAQ and Guide [Dessent.net]
Bastard Pop [Wikipedia.org]
Boom Selection [Boomselection.info]

P2P software pioneer Ian Clarke, creator of the Open Source P2P platforms Freenet and more recently Dijjer has this week quietly unveiled his latest project, Indy.

Speaking to P2PNet Clarke promised that Indy, “does for freely available independent music what Google does for the world wide web.” Indy uses collaborative filtering, a system similar to that used by Amazon to recommend books, etc, to prospective buyers, to learn about your musical preferences in relation to other Indy users.

“Everything it plays is from online indie music freely available on the web and you can rate each piece at between one and five stars. Using that as feedback, Indy will find and download music that’s keyed to what you like as opposed to what you don’t like.”

“We were concerned that even with all of the advancements with online media in the past few years, it was still pretty difficult just to find new independent music that you liked.”

According to Clarke, Indy is inspired by iRate, another collaborative music filtering set-up. As users rate music in iRate it automatically finds more free music that you’ll like by finding people with similar music tastes. Indy is said to have a much cleaner and simpler user interface and it is freely available for Windows OS initially with other platforms in development.

Submit Music to Indy

Related Links

iRate Radio [iRateRadio.com]
Freenet Creator Unveils Dijjer P2P [Buzzsonic News]
Dijjer [Dijjer.org]
The Free Network Project [Sourceforge]
Mobster [Sourceforge]
Collaborative Filtering Research Papers [JamesThornton.com]
Collaborative Filtering Comes To Independent Music Makers [MasterNewMedia.org]
The Music Business and the Big Flip [Shirky.com]
InDiscover [InDiscover.net]

We ran a report on the uber-fast Internet2 college broadband network back in November last year. At the time the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) were said to be in tentative talks with the administrators of Internet2, hoping both to test next-generation video delivery projects and to monitor peer-to-peer piracy on the ultra high-speed network.

No great surprise that today the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed lawsuits against 405 students at 18 colleges in the U.S. , alleging that they are using the private-research network to trade pirated songs. According to the RIAA, students with access to Internet2 are increasingly using a file-sharing application called i2hub to “steal copyrighted songs and other works on a massive scale,” the organization said in a statement released yesterday.

“Students find i2hub especially appealing because they mistakenly believe their illegal file-sharing activities can’t be detected in the closed environment of the Internet2 network,” it continued.

To connect to this extremely fast network students need to download a free client from Direct Connect who’s website states, “Unlike other impersonal, server-driven file-sharing networks, Direct Connect offers a community-oriented, open, user-controlled network.”

Internet2 is part of the Abilene network and is essentially a vastly faster version of the Internet, a proving ground for high-bandwidth technologies. Speaking to Tech Republic last year Steve Corbato, the director of backbone network infrastructure for Internet2 said, “Abilene has become a necessity for research universities,and it’s not just about building a really fast network. University members rely on it to collaborate with colleagues and students around the world.”

The network used by Internet2 was launched in 1998 by a nonprofit consortium of 206 universities, 70 corporate partners (including IBM and Microsoft) and a number of government agencies, including the Library of Congress, to develop the next generation of Internet technologies.

The RIAA has sued more than 9,000 people for distributing songs using peer-to-peer software like Grokster and Morpheus in the past two years.

In a seperate action announced yesterday the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the world governing body for the international music industry said they were launching the biggest wave of legal actions against internet music file-sharers yet. New cases were launched against 963 individuals in 11 countries across Europe and Asia. Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, Iceland and Japan pursued illegal song-swappers for the first time

Related Links

RIAA Targets New Piracy Epidemic On Special High-Speed Campus Network [RIAA]
High-Speed US Net ‘Pirates’ Sued [BBC News]
RIAA Sues More Than 400 College Students Over Internet2 Downloads [MTV]
New Wave of Lawsuits to Hit ‘Illegal File Swappers’ [the Register]
Music File Sharers Face Biggest Round of Legal Actions Yet [IFPI]
Internet 2: 2004 And Beyond [Tech Republic]
MPAA Eyes Internet2 P2P Traffic [Buzzsonic News]

The much vaunted arrival of the eXeem P2P software application was unveiled yesterday. The software that some peer-to-peer advocates are hyping as “download of the year”, Exeem is said to merge the speedy “swarmed ‘ downloads of BitTorrent with the powerful global search capabilities of Kazaa.

Andrej “Sloncek” Preston, Swarm Systems spokesman-the Caribbean registered company behind Exeem-told CNet News, “We have not created BitTorrent, but a totally new P2P, which is a lot different from BitTorrent.” ‘Sloncek’, who operated the now-defunct SuprNova site added, “I think it’s a fresh approach. Only time will tell if it’s going to work.”

The hype seems to have been working with 120,000+ downloads of the new P2P app in little over 24 hours though like many other file-swapping programs, eXeem comes bundled with several pieces of advertising spyware, including the Cydoor Technologies adware utility and the LookSmart toolbar, which plugs into Internet Explorer.

The software isn’t meeting with universally good reviews around the Net. Some users have already complained about the addition of the advertising software. Needless to say an unofficial spyware free version of eXeem, called eXeem Lite has already appeared online as a pre-emptive strike for file sharers wary of spyware laden P2P software like the underfire KaZaa.

Users looking forward to the ‘decentralised BitTorrent’ claims of eXeem will maybe paying attention to the claims of peer-to-peer tracking company BayTSP, who track illegal downloads for major film studios and record companies. BayTSP said it has long provided information on BitTorrent users, including specific files shared and IP addresses, to its clients. It will likely do the same with eXeem, its executives said.

“We can still identify all the BitTorrent users,” BayTSP Chief Executive Mark Ishikawa told CNet. “Everyone who uses it still has the same issues of getting caught that they’ve always had.”

Related Reading

Exeem Opens New File Swapping Doors [CNet News]
eXeem Decentralises BitTorrent Sharing [BetaNews.com]
Exeem Released [Slyck.com]
Why eXeem Shouldn’t be Replacing our BitTorrent Clients [P2P Consortium]
eXeem Lite Launched [Slyck.com]
More On The Exeem P2P App [MusicbizNews24.com]
Bit Torrent Meets Kazaa? Exeem P2P Arrival Imminent [MusicbizNews24.com]
BayTSP Provides Automatic DMCA Notices [Slashdot.org]

New York based ‘culture meets technology’ activists IPac are , according to their website, dedicated to preserving individual freedom through balanced intellectual property policy. Their latest project is Jailed For A Song which looks at the US Congress’s brushes with copyright law in 2004 and examines several of the craziest items on Big Content’s wish list.

Being Jailed For A Song is what a proposed law would allow. “Skipping commercials is stealing? That’s what some copyright holders think. And spending millions of taxpayer dollars to hunt down file-sharers? Congress nearly passed not one, but two bills that would have done just that in 2004.”

Included in some of the scary looking all encompassing law’s was, S.B. 3021. The bill (passed by the U.S. Senate on November 20, 2004 though still not passed as law due to procedural problems) specifically said that sharing a single pre-release work (song, movie, etc.) carried a possible five-year prison term for even first-time offenders. The two others we all read about last year were ‘The Piracy Deterrence and Education Act’ (PDEA, H.R. 4077) and ‘the PIRATE Act ‘(S.2237) which would have diverted law enforcement agencies to the pursuit of file-sharers at a time when the RIAA’s suits are paying for themselves.

“Copyright infringement is a problem, but the radical political agenda of copyright holders is far beyond what normal Americans want. We need constructive proposals for how to pay artists, protect technical innovation, and end the record & movie companies’ crazy litigation campaign. Congress isn’t listening to the public, and we need to be loud if we want to be heard over the Hollywood lobbyists and record label flunkies.” Points out the site. IPac are urging supporters to get involved and make a stand in the 665 days leading into the next federal election and make every day count.

Related Links

Electronic Frontier Foundation [EFF.org]
Banned Music [BannedMusic.org]
Downhill Battle [DownhillBattle.org]

There’s a more indepth look at the much talked about Beta release of the Exeem P2P client on French file sharing magazine/website Ratiatum , revealed today. Screen shots aplenty and some insight into the functions which include searching for specific files ala Kazaa , though as mentioned before the software is built around the ‘swarming’ concept used by BitTorrent and uses a BT client authored by Swedish software engineer Arvid Norberg called LibTorrent.

Rather than being the ‘replacement’ for the Suprnova BitTorrent site it seems that Exeem is owned by an offshore development company much like Kazaa and will be using Suprnova owner Sloncek as its ‘spokeperson’ and official PR front. Anxious fans of the now defunct Suprnova site will be alarmed to hear that Exeem is to be shackled with adware and be closed source rather than the Open Source BitTorrent. A public beta outside of the closed circle of 5000 testers will be released later this month.

Related Reading

Exeem “Successor” to Suprnova Announced [Slashdot.org]
Bit Torrent Meets Kazaa? Exeem P2P Arrival Imminent [MusicbizNews24.com]
The BitTorrent P2P File Sharing System [the Register]

The P2P underground is buzzing this week with further news on the imminent appearance of Exeem, the new file sharing app from the people behind the popular outlawed Bit Torrent site Suprnova.org. Suprnova.org, deemed a Universal BitTorrent source, was a web site which distributed descriptor files for various music and video files, computer programs and games. Many of these torrents described could potentially have been used for copyright infringement.

Although the Slovenian based site didn’t actually host any illegal files, but links to Torrents, the owners pulled the plug on the site December 19th 2004 after various legal threats from, in particular the MPAA after a protracted worldwide clampdown on movie file sharing from the film industry body and various copyright and legal bodies.

In an interview conducted by net radio station NovaStream.org yesterday (December 30th) spokesman Sloncek explained that eXeem is “like Kazaa and BitTorrent,” though unlike the Bit Torrent tracker sites Exeem is decentralized. The software is being developed by an anonymous (so far) company called Swarm Systems Inc., registered on the Caribbean islands of Saint Kitts and Nevis an ‘offshore ruse’ used to good effect more recently by the under fire Kazaa.

Cynics and critics have already expressed disappointment in the much hyped file sharing application with its proposed use of adware to finance development and the possibility of it being just another decentralised P2P network like Kazaa. There’s an early Beta test review here and latest screenshots here and you can download the Beta software for Exeem here.

Related Reading

Sloncek Announces Upcoming Arrival of eXeem [Slyck.com]
Is Suprnova Exeem For Real? [P2PNet.net]
Novastream Radio Sloncek Interview [Novastream.org]
Decentralizing Bit Torrent [Slashdot.org]
TorrentBits.org and Suprnova.org Go Dark [Slashdot.org]
Suprnova.org Wikipedia [Wikipedia.org]
BitTorrent Operator Bites Back at MPAA [InternetNews.com]
The Bit Torrent Effect [WiredMag.com]
BitTorrent Plus Kazaa Equals… Exeem? [ExtremeTech.com]
Interview with Sloncek of SuprNova [Slyck.com]
The BitTorrent P2P File-sharing System [the Register]

Everybody who knows a little about P2P file applications will be aware of BitTorrent, the fact that it has long been the most popular P2P measured by the amount of data transferred between users and that it was created three years ago in the Python programming language by Bram Cohen.

More importantly, BitTorrent uses a file sharing system known as ‘swarming’ . It works by breaking a file into lots of little packets, distributing those packets around to computers that have downloaded the file, and randomly requesting those packets from whoever has them. Most notably, the system allows many people to download the same file without slowing down everyone else’s download effectively making more efficient useage of bandwidth.

Though BitTorrent is the P2P app gaining all the column inches in the worldwide press due to recent litigation from the MPAA the first peer-to-peer content delivery system to use the term “Swarming Downloads” was Swarmcast, invented by Justin Chapweske and bought by open source P2P developer OpenCola back in 2001.

Chapweske’s latest project from his Onion Networks outfit, SwarmStream –software algorithms that will let users stream video and audio data more rapidly– was unveiled this week . “If people are impressed by Bittorrent, they’re going to be absolutely blown away by swarmstreaming and how far we’ve taken swarming since its humble beginnings five years ago,” promises the software author.

This third generation swarming technology greatly enhances swarming by allowing streaming or progressive playback of media files. This means that users can watch videos while they are still being downloaded. “Swarming is mathematically provable as the fastest way to download data,” says Chapweske, founder and CEO of Onion Networks. “Whether it’s a web page, a pdf or a video file, computers are now going to be able to stream it.”

“The technology improves swarming by ensuring that the bytes that the user wants next are scheduled to be received next. So if they’re playing back a video file, the bytes from the front of the file will be received first. If the user (or application) skips forward to the middle of the file, the bytes at the middle of the file will be prioritized. Thus, unlike first generation swarming systems like Swarmcast or Bittorrent, you don’t have to wait for the entire file to download to do something useful with it!.”

The technique of downloading a single file in pieces from multiple sources is also used in peer-to-peer systems
derived from Gnutella such as BearShare and LimeWire.

Related Reading

Data Swarms to Speed Net Streaming [NewScientist.com]
Swarmblog [Chapweske.com]
Brian’s BitTorrent FAQ and Guide [Dessent.net]
Has Hollywood Met its Napster? [Wired.com]
P2P Makes its Business Case [InternetNews.com]
Open Cola:Swarming Folders [OpenP2P.com]
OpenCola Creates Collaborative Computing Solutions for Content Communities [EContentMag.com]
Dissecting BitTorrent: Five Months in a Torrent’s Lifetime [Pam2004.org] 12pg PDF

The Record Industry Association of America unleashed another barrage of lawsuits at file-sharers illegally trading in music using P2P software this afternoon. The 754 new lawsuits were filed in federal district courts across the USA, including 20 alleged file-traders using university computer networks.

With the latest round of legal action, the RIAA has now sued more than 7,700 alleged file-traders since September 2003, including more than 3,000 lawsuits since Oct. 1 of this year.

As in previous cases, the new lawsuits were filed against “John Doe” defendants identified only by their numeric Internet protocol addresses. Music company lawyers must obtain the identity of defendants by issuing subpoenas to Internet access providers. Last month the recording industry body issued suits against 761 alleged illegal file sharers.

RIAA President Cary Sherman, said in a statement that: “With legal online retailers still forced to compete against illegal free networks, the playing field remains decidedly unbalanced, That’s why continued enforcement against individuals stealing and distributing music illegally is essential, as is holding accountable the businesses that intentionally promote and profit from this theft.”

Despite increasingly high profile suits from both the RIAA and the film industry association the MPAA, recent studies measuring the effect of the legal action suggest that it has had little or no deterrent in stemming the actions of file sharers using P2P networks.

Latest figures from P2P monitor Big Champagne reveal that in November, the average number of people simultaneously logged on to the P2P file sharing networks at any given moment increased significantly from 6,255,986 in October to 7,452,184. The number of users on P2P networks in the US went up from 4,435,395 in October to 5,445,275 in November.

“While these increases are consistent with the trend we’ve observed in Q4 in previous years, strong growth in the USA in particular has yielded an active (logged-on) P2P user base that’s more than one-third greater than it was in the fourth quarter of last year,” Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland told news site P2PNet earlier this month.

Related Reading

Record Industry Sues 754 for Internet Song Swaps [Reuters.com]
Computer Users Sued for Swopping Music [SiliconValley.com]
Chilling Effects Clearinghouse [ChillingEffects.org]
File Share Top 10 [P2PNet.net]
New Survey Indicates Musicians Split On File Sharing [MusicbizNews24.com]
Big Music P2P Stats Dont Tally [P2PNet.net]
How File Sharing Works [HowStuffWorks.com]
Big Champagne’s Burst Bubble [bIPlog]
New P2P File Sharing Stats [P2PNet.net]

Major Hollywood studios, through the US. film trade industry body the MPAA ( a conglomerate of Universal Studios, Disney, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, MGM, 20th CenturyFox and Paramount ) stepped up their anti piracy action against online distributors of illegally copied feature films today with the announcement that 100 individuals had been targetted in a new international campaign targeting the BitTorrent, Direct Connect and eDonkey file-swapping networks, technologies widely used to trade movies online and designed specifically to speed downloads of very large files.

The MPAA said that people who download copyrighted movie files were not the targets of its latest legal actions. Instead, the group is working with law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe to target and arrest individuals who provide key roles in the functioning of each type of network. The BitTorrent and eDonkey P2P programs differ from traditional file-sharing programs like Kazaa and Grokster in that they use what has been called a “swarming, scatter and gather” file transfer protocol in which files such as movies and songs aren’t transferred in one piece from one person’s hard drive to another. Rather, small bits of a file are pulled from many user’s hard drives and reassembled by the program on the requester’s computer. The Direct Connect network is widely used across the high speed i2Hub college P2P network in the USA.

“The operators of these servers exercise total control over which files are included on their servers and even determine if some kinds of files aren’t allowed,” said John Malcolm, the MPAA’s Senior Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations.

“For instance, some operators won’t post pornography on their systems, but they have no compunction allowing illegal files of copyrighted movies and TV shows to flow through their servers. We are moving to stop that. The message today is clear: if you illegally trade movies online, we can find you and we will hold you accountable.”

“These kinds of P2P networks rely on servers to index and efficiently deliver files of all kinds. The operators being targeted by these actions have helped online pirates steal hundreds of millions of illegal copies of movies and TV programs.” The MPAA and local rights-holder organizations are also sending cease-and-desist letters
to Internet service providers worldwide that host eDonkey servers and DirectConnect hubs.

According to Net monitoring firm BayTSP, eDonkey recently passed up Kazaa as the most popular file-swapping network in the world, measured by number of users. Other network monitors have said that BitTorrent has long been the most popular measured by the amount of data transferred between users. BitTorrent is distributed freely under an open source license and was created three years ago in the Python programming language by Bram Cohen who came up with the idea while working on an open source content-distribution project called Mojo Nation.

Since September 2003, recording industry lawyers have sued more than 6,100 people suspected of stealing copyrighted music. The film industry held off on suing individual downloaders until last month, when the MPAA announced that the major Hollywood studios would sue about 200 people as the first wave of a legal blitz modeled on the music industry campaign.

Official MPAA press release (PDF)

Related Reading

Studios Step up Fight Against Online Piracy [Washington Post]
MPAA to Serve Lawsuits on BitTorrent Servers [the Register]
Hollywood Fights Illegal Downloads by Targeting Servers [Reuters.com]
MPAA Targets Core BitTorrent, eDonkey Users [ZDNet.com]
Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead [Wired.com]
BitTorrent Gives Hollywood a Headache [Newsday.com]
MPAA Eyes Internet2 P2P Traffic [MusicbizNews24.com]
Music Downloads Overtaken by Movies [MusicbizNews24.com]
MPAA Enters P2P Wars; Is BitTorrent In Trouble? [Copyfutures]
How-To: BroadCatching using RSS + BitTorrent to Automatically Download TV Shows [Engadget.com]
File Sharing Thrives Under Radar [Wired.com]
P2P Traffic Analysis [Cachelogic.com]
BitTorrent Accounts for 35% of Traffic [Slashdot.org]
Bram Cohen on BitTorrent [NWFusion.com]
A Comparison with BitTorrent [Konspire2B]
Is BayTSP a Cyber Trespasser? [Freedom-to-Tinker.com]
MPAA:Meet BitTorrent, the File-sharing Network that makes Trading Movies a Breeze [MSN-Slate]

A German television development company is planning to launch free viewing on the internet with the help of a revolutionary Web service that aims to give viewers access to any programme they want from almost anywhere in the world. Viewers will need little more than a television connected to a computer. The computer will be set up to upload a chosen television programme on to the internet, where other viewers will be able to download and broadcast it on their own sets almost instantaneously.

Cybersky hopes to do for live television programming what Napster and Kazaa did for music and movies. Television software engineer Guido Ciburski teamed up with Petra Bauersachs, his partner at their small TV technology company in the southern German town of Koblenz and has been developing the service for three years. At the end of January, the company, TC Unterhaltungselektronic, will unveil the service which will, says Ciburski, enable broadband users to distribute video programmes free, and exchange them with others on a platform similar to the peer-to-peer file sharing of Grokster and Kazaa.

Cybersky could shake up the television industry in the same way Kazaa and Grokster shook up the music and film industry. The legal departments of German broadcasters are already monitoring the software’s progress and legal analysts say Cybersky’s potential for trading licensed programming could open up another front line in the court battles that have dogged file-sharing software since the days of Napster.

In an interview with the Independent newspaper in the UK Mr. Ciburski refused to divulge how he developed the technology: “That would be giving away the vital secret,” he said. “All I can say is that without broadband it would have been difficult.” In practice, cyberspace should allow fans of programmes such as The Office to go on holiday in Hawaii and still get the show fed live into their hotel bedside laptop with only a five-to 10-second delay.

Mr Ciburski says he circumvented the overload problems that have affected video-streaming applications by developing software that relies on what is called “peer-to-peer networking” technology. He adds: “Instead of using our own servers to distribute programmes, we will be giving the job to the computers of Cybersky’s subscribers.”

After downloading Cybersky software, users, with the help of a TV card or Webcam, a DSL connection and a connector between their television and computer, will be able to upload the programming they are watching onto a sharing platform. It sounds like a cross between Tivo and BitTorrent and the prospect of anybody with a PC being able to redistribute “The Simpsons” and “Sex in the City” is going to give television executives nightmares, certainly in the light of recent MPAA activity.

Related Reading
P2P Television? [We-Make-Money-Not-Art.com]
Global TV Shakes up Industry [DW-World.de]
Coming to Your Home Soon: Free Television Shows via the Internet [the Independent]
Peoples Television [MSNBC]
CyberSky FAQ [TVToon.de]
P2P Internet Television or Bit Torrent Copycat? [Unmediated.org]
Atzio P2P Television [Atzio.com]
P2P+RSS Are the Future of TV Broadcasting [MasterNewMedia.org]
P2P TV [PortlandPhoenix.com]
Anybody Can Be TV: How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News [Planetwork Journal]

New findings from Tempo, research firm Ipsos-Insight’s quarterly study of digital music behaviors reveal that in summer 2004, American downloaders aged 12 and older were equally as likely to be aware of Napster and Apple’s iTunes on a top-of-mind basis (20% each) amongst American fee-based digital music stores. However, when prompted with brand names, more than four out of five (79%) downloaders recognize the Napster brand, while only half (46%) are aware of iTunes.

“Over the course of the past year, we’ve witnessed the high profile introductions of numerous legitimate online music services. This data indicates that while consumers may be well aware of many of these services,
iTunes and Napster have emerged as top-of-mind brand leaders. It’s particularly interesting to note that Apple’s iTunes MusicStore, although introduced only 18 months ago, demonstrates consumer top-of-mind awareness equal to that of the Napster brand, which was established in the late ’90s.” said Matt Kleinschmit, author of the Tempo research study.

The report goes on to say that those who have downloaded music are most likely to place importance on good sound quality, low prices, a broad music selection, and perceptions of a good value. Less importance is placed on perceptions of a hip or cool site. Brand awareness for the other ‘major players’ in the US. download market, RealPlayer, WalMart, MusicMatch and MTV stores was less than half that of Napster, which although now a well established paid outlet (though trailing in the wake of iTunes in terms of market share) gained notoriety in the late 90s when teenager Shawn Fanning wrote the original mass popularity P2P app, before it was shuttered under a mountain of music industry litigation and brought back to life last year by Roxio after an aborted takeover by BMG.

Related Links

Napster And iTunes Most Recognized Brands…[Ipsos-NA.com]
Apple iTunes Remains Dominant in Paid Digital Music Downloads [NPD.com]
Apple Launches iTunes in Canada [NewsFactor.com]
Lowdown on Downloads: Load up on Pros, Cons of Music Services [Earthlink.net]
Real in Online Music Price War [BBC News]
Downloads Fuel Music Recovery [BBC News]
Rival Targets Apple’s iTune Customers [Forbes.com]
iTunes5 Napster1 1st Week Sales Figures [Mp3Newswire.net]
iTunes is Bogus Napster Sucks Edition [DownhillBattle.org]

Musicians believe the internet is an essential tool to help create and market their work, but at the same time more than half of artists say file sharing of unauthorized copies of music should be illegal, according to a new report. The study titled, “Artists, Musicians and the Internet,” by US. researchers suggests that musicians do not wholeheartedly agree with the tactics adopted by the music industry against file-sharing, artists are divided on the issue but not deeply concerned. 60% said they did not think the lawsuits against song swappers would benefit musicians and songwriters.

In Spring of this year, the not-for-profit Future of Music Coalition and the nonprofit, non-partisan think tank the Pew Internet & American Life Project worked with an array of other musician and songwriter organizations including Just Plain Folks, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, CD Baby, the Nashville Songwriters Association, Garageband.com, and the American Federation of Musicians. to conduct an online survey to gauge musicians’ opinions of copyright and the internet in general. Over 2700 musicians completed the survey, the results of which were revealed yesterday.

“Even successful artists don’t think the lawsuits will benefit musicians.” “We looked at more of the independent musicians, rather than the rockstars of this industry but that reflects more accurately the state of the music industry,” research specialist and author of the report Mary Madden told the BBC News website.

52% of all artists and 55% of Paid Artists believe it should be illegal for internet users to share unauthorized copies of music and movies over file-sharing networks, compared to 37% of all artists and 35% of Paid Artists who say it should be legal.

Songwriters Eric Lowen & Dan Navarro, who wrote the Pat Benatar hit “We Belong” said free file sharing can have tremendous promotional value, but artists should be able to decide if they want to give away their music. “I want the ability to choose whether it goes out there for free or not,” Navarro told Wired. “When people start taking (the music for free), it takes the control away from us. I don’t think that’s fair.”

Makers of file-sharing software like Kazaa and Grokster may be unnerved to learn that nearly two-thirds said such services should be held responsible for illegal file-swapping; only 15 percent held individual users responsible.

The report continues to say that 87% of the musician respondents say they promote, advertise or display their music online, and 83% provide free samples or previews of their music on the internet. 69% of the respondents say they sell their music online. 63% say that they sell their music online someplace other than their own Web site.

56% sell CDs through online stores like Amazon.com or CDBaby, 28% sell downloadable files through digital stores like iTunes, and 18% sell their music someplace else online.

“Some in the policy community and in media companies have feared that the internet would bring financial Armageddon to musicians and other artists,” said report author Madden, “What we hear from a wide spectrum of artists is that, despite the real challenges of protecting work online, the internet has opened up new ways for them to exercise their imaginations and sell their creations. To many, this feels like a new Digital Renaissance rather than the end of the world.”

For independent musicians, in particular, this newfound ability to bypass traditional distribution outlets and geographic boundaries has been a watershed. One musician explained that having the ability to sell music online was the most significant impact of the internet.

“A huge positive benefit is being able to have my music available for sale to anyone in the world who wants it. Ten years ago there was absolutely no way to sell your CD except through major distribution deals or at your own shows.”

The survey found that musicians were overwhelmingly positive about the internet, rather than seeing it as a threat to their livelihood. Almost all of them used the net for ideas and inspiration, with nine out of 10 going online to promote, advertise and post their music on the web.

The survey is the first large-scale snapshot of what the people who actually produce the music that downloaders seek (and that the industry jealously guards) think about the Internet and file-sharing. The Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the major music labels, declined to comment on the study.

Download the 61page PDF. report.
‘Artists, Musicians & the Internet’

Related Reading

Study:Musicians Dig the Net [Wired.com]
Musicians ‘Upbeat’ About the Net [BBC News]
Pew File Sharing Survey Gives a Voice to Artists [NYTimes.com-reg. req.]
How do Musicians Feel About File Sharing? [USAToday.com]

Further Reading

The WIRED CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.[CreativeCommons.org]
File-Sharing Getting Bad Rap? [Rolling Stone] April 2004
Download This! Chuck D Interview [CBCNews.ca] March 2004
Grey Album Fans Protest Clampdown [Wired.com]
Killing the Music [CommonDreams.org] Feb. 2004
An Eagle Almost Gets it [A Networked World blog]
Musicians United for Strong Internet Copyright [MusicUnited.net]
RIAA Radar [Magnetbox.com]
Downhill Battle-Music Activism
[DownhillBattle.org]
Feeding the Mouth that Bites [ChrisVreeland.com]
Let the Music Play [EFF.org]
Recording Industry Association of America [Wikipedia.org]
Model & History of File Sharing [InfoAnarchy.org]
Tracking the Downloading Revolution [BigChampagne.com] PDF
Privacy & Piracy: The Paradox of Illegal File Sharing on Peer-to-Peer Networks and the Impact of Technology on the Entertainment Industry [US.Senate Study] 169pg PDF
Rappers in Disharmony on P2P [Wired.com] Oct. 2003
Changing Industry:Moby [Moby.com] Sept. 2003
Moby on File Sharing [Moby.com] Aug. 2003
the Internet Debacle-An Alternative View [JanisIan.com] May 2002
Lars Ulrich’s Death Wish: Metallica v their Fans [Disinfo.com] Oct 2000
Chuck D: Gotta Share the Tunes [Wired.com] Oct 1999
Downloading the Future. The MP3 Revolution & the End of the Industry as We Know It [LAWeekly] March 1999
Negativland and the RIAA
[Negativland.com] 1998

The expected three week long trial of Kazaa continued in Sydney, Australia with the music industry seemingly holding the upper hand by the end of the week. Major record labels, Universal Music Australia, EMI, Sony/BMG, Warner, Festival Mushroom and 25 additional applicants are suing Sharman Networks and associated parties–including Altnet, which delivers so-called “piggyback” technology with Kazaa, Altnet associated Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Sharman CEO Nikki Hemming and Altnet chief executive officer Kevin Bermeister and two technology directors–over alleged music copyright infringement made using the Kazaa software.

The labels hope to stop illegal P2P file sharing and to recover compensation for past infringements, says Michael Speck, general manager of the Music Industry Piracy Investigations unit of the Australian Record Industry Association.

The best coverage of the trial has come from Garth Montgomery’s lighthearted daily blog at Australia Personal Computer Mag where complete transcripts of the days proceeding are made available as PDF downloads as well as the writers rants and what he calls “anti-journalism’ pokes at applicants and respondants alike. He also deserves the credit for coining the term Kazaagate .

Music industry attorney Tony Bannon told Australian Justice Murray Wilcox that ownership of Sharman, which has been kept secret through its registration on the tax haven island of Vanuatu, is in fact controlled by Kevin Bermeister, CEO of Kazaa partner Altnet. Bannon said there is “ready inference that Kevin Bermeister is in fact the ultimate controller of Sharman,” ZDNet reported.

The music industry presented a number of key witnesses in effort to prove that Kazaa could indeed filter out copyrighted material despite denials to the contrary. Nigel Carson, a computer forensics investigator from KPMG, testified that it is possible to locate the physical computer and user of the machine by tracing the IP address. Carson said that if a company like Sharman Networks wants to trace a specific user who shared unlicensed music files, it would need to store the date and time that the transaction was done.

More potentially damning was the evidence given by Tom Mizzone, vice president of data services at New York-based MediaSentry who had been hired by the RIAA in March 2003 to search Kazaa for users located in Australia and download evidence they were swapping copyrighted material. Up to 600 scanners were turned to the task, and the internet addresses of the users recorded and checked against a database of internet service providers in Australia.

The court also heard that the major record labels were engaged in a program of actively disrupting the file-sharing network by bombarding it with billions of decoys and spoofs that pose as song files. The success of the spoof war meant as few as 7 per cent of a given artist’s tracks found on the network were usable, according to record industry memos.

Mizzone said that MediaSentry is also able to detect the copyright-infringing music files made available for download in the Kazaa system’s shared folders. He told the court that his company is doing what any ordinary user of the Kazaa system is able to do. Aside from detecting files, he said, they can also communicate with the users via the applications built in instant messaging.

Kazaa’a main defence inevitably seemed to rest on the previous legal precedent set in the 1980s. The much used Sony Corp. vs. Universal City Studios ‘Betamax case’ ruling in 1984 which said electronics giant Sony wasn’t liable when people used its Betamax videocassette recorder to copy movies illegally because the technology had significant uses that did not violate copyrights.

Federal Court Justice Murray Wilcox dumped 12 of the 14 of the respondents’ affidavits for the civil trial, saying they were not relevant to the case about copyright infringement. The rejected affidavits contained details of how Kazaa could be used to exchange legitimate materials. Wilcox said he agreed that Kazaa could be used for the sharing of licensed materials and that court time should not be wasted discussing the issue.

Judge Wilcox set aside Sharmans objections on Friday against more potentially damaging alegations in an affidavit containing a report from Dr. George Barker, director of the Australian National University’s Center for Law and Economics, Intellectual Property and Copyright.

According to the report, the Kazaa system is a “marketplace” that brings together people who have copyrighted works and people who want to make unauthorized copies of those works. The report adds that Kazaa “designs the rules, facilitates the ‘market’ for exchange of copyright works, and enforces or has the capacity to enforce the rules of that market.”

US. technical experts were due in Sydney over the weekend to debate whether its song files could be filtered to restrict the illegal flow of music on Kazaa’s “peer-to-peer” network on the Internet, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper said on Saturday. The trial continues on Tuesday.

Further Coverage

Daily Despatch-KazaaGate [APCMag.com]
ZDNet Australia:Hot Topic, Sharman [ZDNet.com.au]
Report Asserts Kazaa Makes the Rules [CNet News]
Sharman Counter Attacks [MacWorld.co.uk]
US. Experts to Examine Filtering Web Songs [SignOnSanDiego.com]
Trial to Unmask Kazaa Owners [Wired.com]
Kazaa Faces Allegations in Copyright Trial [NewsFactor.com]
Witness Assaults Kazaa Filter Claims [CNet Asia]

Related Reading

Appeals Court Holds Grokster Not Liable [PCWorld Australia] August 2004
Digital Piracy – Definitive P2P Piracy Figures for Year 2003 [ITIC.ca]
RIAA, MPAA Appeal Against ‘Grokster is Legal’ Ruling [the Register] August 2003
Judge:File Swopping Tools Are Legal [CNet News] April 2003
File Swapper Eluding Pursuers [Washington Post] Dec 2002
Napster vs. the Music Industry [HK-Lawyer.com] June 2001
RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. [Gigalaw.com] June 1999
RIAA, Diamond Sweep Away Suit [Wired.com]
Enforcement Bots-Who Does the Dirty Work? [No-ip.org]
CBS Songs Ltd. v. Amstrad Consumer Electronics 1988 [Xenoclast.org]

After months of quiet background development and some (mainly) unsubstantiated stories more recently, ex-Napster founder and P2P poster boy Shawn Fanning finally broke the veil of silent mystery surrounding his new P2P start-up Snocap today with the official launch of the company with a press release and the unveiling of the company website which filled in some of the blanks about their proposed plans for the much talked about new venture.

Fanning and major record labels are hoping that the peer-to-peer filtering software that his company have been developing will legitimize the revolution Napster started back in 1999. Snocap claims to be the first music licensing platform that will allow music download services and P2P networks alike to allow any track to be delivered or shared in the knowledge that the copyright holder gets paid. The software works by attaching a digital fingerprint to media that determines whether it can be shared and at what price.

Snocap has developed a proprietary content identification service system using technology licensed from Philips Research Labs which uses audio fingerprinting and scans downloads as they pass through the Snocap system and compares them to music in the company’s database. If there’s a match, the royalty rate is decided and usage rights applied. Philips have been working on the fingerprinting technology for a number of years and it is already in use by mobile music specialist Musiwave and music recognition database Gracenote.

“There are some good authorized online music services but they have limited content and a comparatively small number of users. There are unauthorized services that have content and users orders of magnitude higher, but the service they provide is inferior and they are at odds with rights holders. Snocap is the means to bridge that divide for the consumer.” said Fanning.

The company also confirmed rumours that it has signed a landmark agreement with Universal Music Group to provide technology and database services for the online distribution of the company’s entire catalogue. Universal has already begun to register its catalogue with Snocap. EMI and Sony BMG are reportedly in active negotiations.

Snocap received a $10 million round of financing led by WaldenVC, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that has a strong focus on digital media companies, and Morgenthaler Ventures, a leading national venture capital firm focused on information technology, internet services and life sciences. According to WaldenVC General Partner Art Berliner, “Snocap represents the future of online music. We are excited to work with Shawn Fanning and his team in greatly expanding the boundaries of the digital media universe.”

The Snocap team is comprised of three of the old coding team from the Napster days, Fanning himself, Ali Ayder and Jordan Mendelson and headed up by venture capitalist veteran Ron Conway, who also invested in the original Napster.

The Snocap system will incorporate its technology into various P2P clients, In order for it to work, peer-to-peer networks must agree to build Snocap’s technology into their software, wether that will include current market leaders like Kazaa, Grokster, eDonkey and Morpheus depends on those companies agreeing to dumping their old ‘revenue model’ of free. So far the first P2P application using Snocap technology is expected to be Mashboxx, with an early 2005 launch date.

‘Rival’ P2P filter Audible Magic CEO Vance Ikezoye told the L.A. Times, “There will be peer-to-peers that are able to make that transition and compete, but technology is not the problem; it’s the business model, how do you convert somebody who’s getting something for free?”

Related Stories

Shawn Fanning’s Snocap Touts Vision of P2P Heaven [the Register]
Napster Founder Goes Legit [MercuryNews.com]
Napster Founder Basks in Funding, Label Support [CNet News]
Shawn Fanning’s New Tune:Snocap [BusinessWeek.com]
Napster Creator Touts Legal File Sharing [Forbes.com]
Napster Creator Reveals Next Step [BBC News]
SNOCAP Melts Barriers to Growth in the Digital Music Marketplace [BusinessWire.com-Official Press Release]
EMI Records Join the Snocap Queue [MusicbizNews24.com]
Napster Founder in Major Label Talks [MusicbizNews24.com]
Paid P2P Options Gain More Traction [MusicbizNews24.com]
Content Identification Audio Fingerprinting Technology [Philips Research]
A Highly Robust Audio Fingerprinting System [Philips Research] 9pg PDF

Napster Background

Napsters Back, What Did Silicon Valley Learn? (Oct 2003)
the Download on Napster (August 2003) [Alwayson-Network.com]
Napster Becomes Dot-goner After Sale Blocked (Sept 2002) [MercuryNews.com]
Napsters CEO Splits on Sour Note (May 2002) [BusinessWeek.com]
Inside Napster (August 2000) [BusinessWeek.com]
It’s a Rad, Rad Napster World [Darkridge.com]
All the Rave : The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster [JosephMenn.com]

The long running saga of the music industry’s copyright battle against the worlds most popular peer to peer file sharing software Kazaa moved to Australia today as case number NSD 110, Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Sharman License Holdings Ltd got underway in the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney.

At the start of a trial over the legality of Kazaa software, the court was told today that Kazaa had 100 million users worldwide, sharing three billion music files a month. Five major Australian record companies-Universal, EMI, Sony BMG, Warner Music, Festival/Mushroom and 25 other North American, European and Australian record companies -are suing Sharman Networks, which develops and distributes the software, for copyright infringement.

The labels contend that Sharman was fully aware of how the software was used and did nothing to stop copyright infringements. Lawyers for Australia’s recording industry branded the popular Kazaa file-swapping network “an engine of copyright piracy to a degree of magnitude never before seen”. Kazaa’s owners, Sharman insist that while they urge users not to commit music piracy, they have no control over what people do with the popular “peer-to-peer” software they provide.

Tony Bannon, representing Australia’s major record labels dismissed Sharman’s defense, saying Kazaa’s owners actively take steps allowing users to filter certain files from the network such as those that could contain viruses or pornography but not the files containing copyrighted songs. Bannon said the owners of the P2P software were seeking to get rich from advertising revenue based on the volume of traffic on the Kazaa network, while painting themselves as crusaders for music fans. Mr Bannon said Sharman’s actions were “all a charade” because it was interested only in making money from the copyright-infringing behavior of its users.

Each file traded on Kazaa has a unique digital fingerprint in the form of an MD5 hash a mathematical signature produced by running an algorithm across the contents of a file. This signature allows Kazaa to identify how many users are sharing the same file so that it can be downloaded from many places at once with complete integrity. If Kazaa were really trying to become a legitimate service, an obvious first step would be to block the MD5 hashes for known pirated files, argues the music industry. The reliability of P2P filtering technologies are still conclusively unproven however and are still under constant development.

Kazaa already has one major court victory under its belt, with the Dutch Supreme Court ruling in December 2003 that Kazaa’s then Swedish owners could not be held liable for copyright infringement. A possible difference in the Australian case is the recording industry’s invocation of the controversial, Anton Pillar Law that allows litigants in civil copyright cases to gather evidence. An Anton Piller order is granted when a judge is persuaded that there are reasonable grounds evidence may be destroyed if advance notice is given.

In February, after a six-month inquiry by the Music Industry Piracy Investigation unit of the Australian Record Industry Association, the record labels, organized under a cloak of absolute secrecy secured the Anton Piller order permitting a surprise search of Kazaa premises, to avoid any potential loss or destruction of evidence and legal authority to gather evidence without police being present. The information gathered has yet to be revealed.

The true owners of Sharman remain a mystery. Although it has offices in Australia, Sharman was formed in the island state of Vanuatu, a no-tax haven where the secrecy of private companies is sacred, improper disclosure of financial information to others is subject to criminal prosecution and tax information is not shared with any outside jurisdiction.

The Federal Court case, before judge Murray Wilcox, is expected to stretch over three weeks.

Related Reading

Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Sharman License Holdings Ltd (March-Copyright Suit) [Federal Court of Australia]
Anton Pillar Order [Wikipedia.org]
Kazaa Trial [Google News]
Trial to Unmask Kazaa Owners [Wired.com]
Net Music Swop Firm a ‘Pirate’ [the Australian]
Australian Music Industry Decries Kazaa [ABCNews]
Huge Music Piracy Encouraged [HeraldSun.com]
Kazaa Gears for Next Showdown [News.com.au]
Kazaa Heads to Court for File Swop Trial [CNet.com]
Hide and Seek (July) [APCMag.com]
Sharman Fails to Deliver Evidence Again:MIPI (May) [ZDNet Australia]
Kazaa Tripped up in Aussie Court (March) [Wired.com]
Telstra Attaks Music Industry Raids (Feb) [ZDNet Australia]
Kazaa Fights Court Order (Feb) [PCWorld]
Record Industry Commences Court Proceedings Against Kazaa for Breach of Copyright (Feb)[IFPI press release]
Inside the Kazaa Raid (Feb) [APCMag.com]

PC Magazine called QNext the “swiss army knife” of P2P when they reviewed the ‘Beta’ version released back in August. Though it isn’t a stand alone P2P application, QText is more a universal Instant Messenging client which can trade messages with any of the other leading clients, including AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo. It is also a secure P2P communications suite that offers video conferencing, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), file transfer, file sharing, group text chat, online games, photo sharing, and remote PC access.

If you’re already using AIM, ICQ, MSN, or Yahoo, Qnext will automatically import your existing buddy list, your friends and colleagues needn’t be running Qnext to trade messages with you.

According to the Canadian company behind the software QNext incorporates all the best features of apps like Trillian, Skype, Grouper, P2P Photo & File Sharing networks, GoToMyPC and FTP clients and puts them all together. The hefty 22mb Java based software is currently free and available for Windows and Linux systems. There’s an as-yet unpriced premium version in the pipeline that could be out sometime next Spring.

QNext Download

Related Links

Category Bursting P2P Client [P2PNet.net]
PC Mag QNext Review
Sun Showcases QNext on Java.com [GlobeTechnology.com]
Music Activists Secure P2P [MusicbizNews24.com]
Wirehog. P2P Meets Social Networking [MusicbizNews24.com]