O'Reilly Digital Media

I was suspicious that the “Crack SDMI” contest would lead to the very hackers that were helping the initiative to get stabbed in the back by the ruling forces of SDMI in an article I wrote for WebReview seven months ago. Imagine my surprise when I read that some researchers received legal threats before they could publish their findings.

Matthew Oppenheim, a lawyer representing SDMI, said the group doesn’t want to limit academic freedom or research, “but if somebody releases a paper that provides very specific information about how to attack that type of technology, it’s problematic.”

<rant>
I’ve never seen an industry so scared or short-sighted in my lifetime. If you didn’t want any secrets to get out about how to work around your format (which was a bad idea in the first place), don’t open up your code for open ridicule and cracking.

I laughed at the contest back then, now I’m just irritated at the audacity of the situation. Basically they are saying that hackers could do the work for the SDMI group, but not talk about their results openly. Does that mean the results of the research is now considered contraband?

I’m starting a new acronymn that the RIAA should take heed to: MIETP (Make It Easier Than Piracy). Deploy a subscription service that makes it easier for users to pay for songs then it would be to find and download a pirated copy. Then you might stop embarrasing yourselves with ideas like SDMI.
</rant>

Related link: http://www.sun.com/webcast/jxta-042501/;$sessionid$CMI2L5AAAEGSLAMTA1LU5YQ

If Bill Joy’s keynote at the O’Reilly P2P Conference left you unsure exactly what Sun’s Project Juxtapose is, you’ll definitely want to tune into the webcast of the JXTA launch. Joy and John Gage, Sun’s chief researcher, as well as a number of P2P innovators working with JXTA, will unveil the P2P framework Wednesday, April 25, at 11:00 am. After watching the webcast, head back to OpenP2P.com for our in-depth coverage and analysis of JXTA’s position.

I’m sure a lot of people were as put off as I am by Entertainment Network Inc.’s (the same guys who brought you such quality web sites as www.VoyeurDorm.com) attempt to webcast the execution of Timothy McVeigh. Then I stumbled across Messinger Mortuaries, who will stream your funeral for those who couldn’t make it to pay their respects. Note to anybody who might be involved in planning my eventual funeral: I may work in tech, but I’d prefer not to have my service remembered by those who couldn’t make it as a cloudy video image interrupted by network congestion.

Related link: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-5641576.html?tag=tp_pr

The Motion Picture Association of America has sent letters to the nation’s ISPs and universities, according to a c|net report, warning them that users are trading movies over Gnutella. Since Gnutella is a decentralized network, it’s obviously much more difficult to legally stop the system, as is happening with Napster, so ISPs are being conscripted into stopping the video trade. It’s not clear from c|net whether the MPAA is making any threats; the MPAA spokesman says they are “educating the population.”

Related link: http://www.eff.org/intellectual_property/P2P/Napster/

The EFF just sent out a fundraising letter, in which they say: “We believe it is only a matter of time before the RIAA sues individual developers of P2P
technologies in an attempt to hold them responsible for
copyright-infringing uses by users of those technologies. We also expect
that ISPs will begin receiving litigation threats and may even be included
in litigation themselves. We have begun meeting with P2P developers to
discuss the possible legal challenges they may face.” Their web site has some papers on the subject.

Related link: http://www.nextpage.com/news/pressroom/pr_041601.html

Related link: http://www.canoe.ca/MoneyWSJ/wsj2-dow.html

The WSJ reports that Microsoft and Real are working on schemes to limit the quality of MP3s to 56K, while offering high-quality, copy-controllable, proprietary alternatives. The recording industry is, um, supportive.

Related link: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-5520038.html?tag=tp_pr

It’ll be an uphill climb for widespread deployment of Bluetooth after the demo flop at CeBIT last week, and now the most popular operating system is turning it’s back on the technology.

After reading “Is P2P plunging off the deep end?”, which claims that P2P may be more of a passing fad than a legitimate new business niche, I had a thought. P2P is only in it’s infancy and hasn’t gotten much of a chance for the natural development of technologies. Up to now there hasn’t been much more than hype and Napster. P2P companies seem to be running into a similar problem that the dot-coms did: oversaturation of an overhyped technology results in a thinning of the market. Only in the case of P2P, there isn’t a market to take advantage of yet.

Yes, P2P may become the redefinition of the web, but we’re not to that stage yet. Have P2P companies become overly-eager, not seeing that we’re not close to the place that we would like to be? P2P outside of Napster is still relatively for techies only; there needs to be a reason for Joe and Josephine Public to use it. Sure, file-sharing is neat, but why would they care about distributed computation? P2P can only prove its worth if adopted and accepted by the general public. Because of this, P2P companies are failing because they are getting into the market too early. Ask Popular Power, whose CEO Marc Hedlund said “as the market has gotten tighter, it’s been harder to raise angel funding.” Investors are taking a wait and see approach, while P2P companies are taking the stance of “if we build it, they will come”. Well, the paths to P2P bliss aren’t there yet fellas, but keep building them, we’ll get there eventually, it’ll just take some more time.

Over the last week or so, AOL started blocking Jabber, gaim, and Fire clients from connecting to AIM servers. At first AOL was doing IP blocking of Jabber servers, but at a certain point the strategy switched, and AOL started targeting libfaim, a library used by all these clients to communicate with AIM. The result was a classic cat-and-mouse game where AOL changes their protocol to block libfaim and open source programmers alter the library.

Here’s one post from the jabber dev list from the middle of last week: “Top of tree gaim sources (at sourceforge.net) generally have the latest workarounds. You’ll have to dig into the oscar subtree, most likely. Last I
heard there was a new block added yesterday but as of this morning gaim had a workaround. This tit-for-tat cycle is likely to continue since AOL has
infinite resources to throw at it and no more reason to be interested in openness (courtesy of the FCC).”

By Thursday, March 29, AOL programmers were throwing even craftier firepower at the program, doing client checking in rather interesting ways. Eric Warmenhoven of Gaim documents the issue on the gaim site. The gist of it is that Gaim (and presumably Jabber and Fire) won’t connect to AIM unless you have aim.exe on your machine. According to Eric, currently obvious workarounds aren’t pretty.

“This is an incredibly clever hack by the AOL developers. If it didn’t really piss me off I would have to commend them on their ingenuity,” he writes.

On Friday, March 30, the Gaim site was reporting, “AOL is no longer requesting aim.exe. They are now requesting proto.ocm, a different file in an AIM installation. (Stunts like this make it difficult to have a server that provides “correct” values to use, and impossible to embed aim.exe, unforunately.)”

Messages on developer.jabber.org were suggesting virtual sit-ins of AOL, and flooding of AOL, etc.; that sort of talk likely led to this message on the Gaim home page: “Please do NOT flame AOL, or anyone that works for AOL. The Jabber team is trying very hard to have some sort of dialog and agreement with them. It is important, though, that AOL knows that people are upset that they are working against interoperability. But please, be polite when requesting that AOL representatives talk to people from Jabber.”

On Wednesday, April 25, 2001, Bill Joy and John Gage, of Sun
Microsystems, will unveil the project’s site and provide an
in-depth look at JXTA.

The webcast happens on Sun’s site. Need more background on JXTA? Check out our coverage of Joy’s announcement at the O’Reilly P2P conference, and my interview with Gene Kan and Mike Clary on the addition of InfraSearch to JXTA.

Back in January I wrote up an article about the state of streaming media, in which I pointed to an uncertain future for RealNetworks. Looks like they’ve decided that they want to become the cornerstone of all online media, signing agreements to broadcast Major League Baseball and the NBA, and now a major agreement to establish a new music subscription service online, which they’ve dubbed MusicNet.

Can both Real and Napster coexist using similar subscription models? With Real’s MusicNet you will presumably get access to the each labels catalog, but will be unable to download it to your computer. Napster on the other hand allows downloads, but will probably only have popular music available from their partner Bertelsmann, as the other labels continue to snub Napsters offers.

I’m making a not-so-bold prediction here…. they’ll both flop. Many who used Napster in the past have jumped ship to any number of the alternate file-sharing systems that have popped up over the past year. When their subscription model launches this summer, we’ll see just how faithful Napster users really are.

Real already has a few subscription based services which have yet to show any signs of taking off. Streaming media still has a ways to go before it gets to become an entirely enjoyable experience anyhow, nobody wants to pay for inferior product. Back to the old marriage adage: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free…..

Related link: http://judiciary.senate.gov/hr040301f.htm

It’s High Noon at the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, April 3, as Napster’s Hank Barry, RIAA’s Hilary Rosen, and of course, Ted Nugent testify at a hearing on online entertainment. Napster fans marching to the hearing from D.C.’s Union Station.

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/magazine/01WWLN.html

In the NY Times Mag, Rob Walker suggests the recording industry could cozy up to downloadable music the way book publishers did to paperbacks, or the movie moguls did to videos. Downloaded music could be paperback music — published six months after the album debuts on CD, without all that great packaging, and with MP3, not CD quality (they ain’t the same!). Would you pay $9 for a downloadable album instead of $18 for the real McCoy?

Related link: http://www.latimes.com/class/employ/showbiz/20010329/t000026934.html

As if to prove Lawrence Lessig’s contention that the copyright industry operates on two fronts — code plus law — comes this story from the LA Times that the RIAA is looking for Internet security firms to help them hack gnutella. There’s no shortage of companies willing to take Hollywood’s money, but can it be done?