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Protection for the creative community or job security for lawyers? These are but two of many interpretations of the <A HREF="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d105:h.r.02281:">Digital Millennium Copyright Act</A>, which won approval by voice vote in the US House of Representatives August 4. The bill will implement into US law the treaties signed by 157 signatories at the World Intellectual Properties Organization conference in Geneva in December 1996. A separate version was passed by the Senate in May. Differences between the two must be ironed out before a final version can be signed into law by President Clinton.

News recently coming out of Cambridge, England promises yet another new revolutionary loudspeaker technology following in the footsteps of <A HREF="http://www.nxt.co.uk/">NXT</A>'s flat-panel speakers and <A HREF="http://www.atcsd.com/">ATC</A>'s <A HREF="http://www.atcsd.com/HTML/whitepaper.html">HyperSonic Sound</A> and <A HREF="http://www.atcsd.com/RELEASES/pr020998.html">Stratified Field Technology</A>. Engineering consultant Tony Hooley heads up a team of researchers who have created what they hope will be a breakthrough in small, lightweight, highly accurate-sounding arrays of digitally driven pressure transducers.

The Silverdale by the Bay Resort Hotel in Silverdale, WA, will be the site of the second annual Vacuum State of the Art Conference, scheduled for August 21-24. The conference will feature new and vintage equipment, tube electronics seminars, a used-gear swap meet, and demonstrations of audio creations by both amateur and professional designers.

New companies are springing up all around the web to provide songs for custom CD compilations. (See previous articles <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10185/">1</A&gt;, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10157/">2</A&gt;.) You go to the site, choose up to 70 minutes of music from their catalog, and the finished disc is mailed back to you in a couple of days for between 10 and 20 bucks. The challenge for these companies is to have an attractive catalog of artists and songs to choose from.

Frequently a hot topic in the hallowed pages of <I>Stereophile</I>, DVD-Audio will be among the agenda items at the third US DVD Conference on October 1-2, 1998, in San Francisco. Presented by the <A HREF="http://www.dvdforum.org/">DVD Forum</A>, the international association working to develop universal DVD formats, the event will take place at the Grand Peninsula Ballroom at the Hyatt Regency SF Airport.

In the children's fable, Chicken Little, the archetypal alarmist, induced fear and panic in his community by running amok and shouting, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" The hysterical fowl has many relatives among journalists and economists, who regularly issue dire warnings about the forthcoming Year 2000 problem.

It is often claimed that high-end audio is a rich person's pursuit, while others feel that prices are secondary to careful selection and the right attitude.