Search Results for: soft play

The recording industry and several high-tech groups battling over copyright laws declared a tentative truce on Tuesday and said they would try to hash out rules to govern how to protect digital movies and music from widespread bootlegging. The two sides hope to avoid a big lobbying battle this year in Congress over whether to enhance digital copyright protection or preserve the rights of users to make copies. They said they will try to settle their differences and devise rules to govern how movies and music may be used, instead of looking to Congress or the Federal Communications Commission. But… Read more »

A peace treaty announced Tuesday between the record business and Silicon Valley could reshape the debate over what role Capitol Hill should play in mandating antipiracy technology being sought by Hollywood, making it more difficult for the movie biz to pursue its legislative agenda. The landmark pact among the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA), the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and the Computer Systems Policy Project (CSPP) launches a new chapter in the music industry’s fight to recover from devastating levels of computer piracy. For its part, Silicon Valley will actively help the RIAA, the lobbying arm of the major… Read more »

The leading trade associations for the music and technology industries, which have been at loggerheads over consumers downloading songs on the Internet, have negotiated a compromise they contend will protect copyrights on movies and music without new government involvement. Lobbyists for some of the nation’s largest technology companies will argue under the new agreement against efforts in Congress to amend U.S. laws to broaden the rights of consumers, such as explicitly permitting viewers to make backup copies of DVDs for personal use or copy songs onto handheld listening devices. “How companies satisfy consumer expectations is a business decision that should… Read more »

If “DVD Jon” Lech Johansen, creator of the DeCSS DVD descrambling program, had been tried in a U.S. court instead of in Norway, he might have been found in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But a bill reintroduced in the U.S. Congress would allow consumers to defeat anticopying measures on digital content in some cases. The Digital Media Consumer Rights Acts, reintroduced Tuesday by Representative Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, and three other lawmakers, would trump the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention provisions, allowing consumers to break copy controls in order to do such things as make personal… Read more »

Instead of visiting a bounty on any single artist, the nominations announced Tuesday for the 45th Annual Grammy Awards were sprinkled around in an unusually equitable manner-eight musicians tied for the most nominations with sounds as diverse the elegiac rock of Bruce Springsteen, the gossamer, jazzy blends of newcomer Norah Jones and the whipsaw rhymes of Eminem. In year’s past, a glut of nominations would push as single artist such as Lauryn Hill or Carlos Santana above the fold, but this year the flattened field presented more subtle story lines amid the sprawl of 104 categories. Among those themes: The… Read more »

Sixty years after his birth, one of the most important artists ever to emerge from Seattle is – at least officially – almost invisible here. There’s no Jimi Hendrix Boulevard, no Hendrix Arena, no Hendrix Elementary School. The only thing the city has done to recognize the man many consider the world’s greatest guitar player is to give him a rock – in the African Savanna exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo. Biographer Charles Cross of Seattle, who has spent years researching Hendrix for an upcoming book, called the oversight “almost criminal.” “The Seattle city government has never given any… Read more »

The technology built into some CDs to stop people copying them is futile, according to a computer scientist who has put today’s antipiracy systems under the microscope. He believes the continual software and hardware upgrades issued by the makers of computer CD drives and audio CD players render copy protection systems pointless in the long run. John Halderman, a computer scientist from Princeton University in New Jersey, plans to show delegates at a digital copyright conference in Washington DC next week that the idea of CD copy-prevention is “fundamentally misguided”. In 2001, Princeton University scientists debunked the technology the music… Read more »

Faced with adverse publicity to copy protection on CDs, a year ago Bertelsmann Music Group bravely gave in and promised to replace a clutch of Natalie Imbruglia CDs which were protected by Midbar’s Cactus Data Shield. But a year is a long time, BMG is at it again, this time apparently set on applying copy protection to all its music products. Not, of course, that this should be surprising. The music companies are absolutely intent on copy-proofing their products, and although they’ll maybe retreat a little when irate consumers pelt them with ordure, they’ll be right back just as soon… Read more »

Audible Magic Corporation announced today it has entered into an agreement with EMI Recorded Music as its preferred vendor for audio fingerprinting technology. The agreement, the first between a major label and a provider of content-based identification (CBID) technology services, indicates a strong endorsement of Audible Magic and its range of solutions for identifying, monitoring and tracking multimedia content. The two companies anticipate implementing an initial project in Q4 utilizing Audible Magic systems, which can monitor and identify the delivery of digital audio content in all formats, including compressed audio such as MP3 files. Audible Magic will also provide EMI… Read more »

Sometimes success can be a double-edged sword. Just ask Crazy Town, the rap metal act that scored a major radio hit in 2000 with the lightweight pop song “Butterfly” and then suffered the consequences. “Drowning,” the first single from the band’s new album, Darkhorse (out November 12), was written on Ozzfest 2000, and at the time, Crazy Town felt as if they were underwater gasping for air. The group’s lineup was unstable, vocalists Brad “Epic” Mazur and Seth “Shifty” Binzer felt uncertain about the path they had taken and some metal audiences were greeting Crazy Town with showers of water… Read more »