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The war over digital copyright protection intensified in late July, when the American">http://www.aclu.org">American Civil Liberties Union launched a legal attack against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Almost simultaneously, a congressman from Southern California introduced a bill that would give copyright holders the right to hack computers owned by suspected copyright violators.

Once again, audiophiles can help themselves and others at the same time by participating in The Cable Company's seventh annual "Summer Against Hunger" campaign. The">http://www.fatwyre.com">The Cable Company, and several suppliers (listed below) have set up a program by which up to 10% of the Cable Company's August sales are donated to CAREhttp://www.care.org">CARE; and the International">http://www.intrescom.org">International Rescue Committee, with contributions to be used to assist the worldwide disaster relief efforts of those humanitarian organizations.

We start our survey of small speakers with Robert J. Reina's review of the Paradigm">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/628/">Paradigm Reference Studio/20 loudspeaker. "Impressive right out of the box" is how Reina charaterizes the two-way design, which gets an in-depth review and also a May 2002 followup from Robert Deutsch.

Many audiophiles eager to try their new high-resolution disc players have been disappointed to discover skimpy offerings of Super Audio CDs and DVD-A recordings at their local music marts. Fortunately, several online sources stock such discs, and are constantly updating their inventories.

US Senator Joseph Biden has introduced a bill that would give law-enforcement agencies stronger tools to pursue copyright violators, and would give copyright holders stronger grounds for suing pirates.

Alan Lomax, the folklorist and musicologist whose work spurred the folk music revival of the 1950s and '60s, died on Friday, July 19 at a nursing home in Safety Harbor, FL. He was 87.

Love it or hate it, MP3 users are a huge new market, as yet untapped by the music industry. Portable digital compressed-audio players, whether employing Flash memory or compact hard drives à la Apple's iPod, are estimated to begin reaching critical-mass sales numbers around 2006, with an installed base of 24 million units by 2007. Most observers agree that this dramatic growth has been driven, in large part, by the vast quantity of no-fee music that is available in the format, as well as the players' ease of use and flexibility.