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. <A HREF="http://www.fatwyre.com">The Cable Company</A>, 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 <A HREF="http://www.care.org">CARE</A&gt; and the <A HREF="http://www.intrescom.org">International Rescue Committee</A>, with contributions to be used to assist the worldwide disaster relief efforts of those humanitarian organizations.

The war over digital copyright protection intensified in late July, when the <A HREF="http://www.aclu.org">American Civil Liberties Union</A> 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.

Like most of the record business, classical music is having a tough time finding a new audience in the digital download world. And in line with the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11391/">recent moves</A> by record labels to market popular music online, classical music fans in the UK will soon have another bona fide incentive for locating and legally purchasing works via the Internet.

The <A HREF="http://www.nab.org">National Association of Broadcasters</A> (NAB) has initiated its planned appeal of a ruling by the Librarian of Congress that establishes a royalty rate for all Webcasters, including traditional radio stations that stream their programming on the Internet.

Taking the measure of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/624/">Chord Electronics DAC64 D/A processor</A>, John Atkinson finds nice things can come in strange packages. "Such is the pace of development in digital technology these days that it is hard not to become convinced that digital playback is a solved problem." But, as JA discovers, not all solutions are identical.

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 &#224; 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.

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.

It's a sobering thought: it was the computer manufacturers and software developers, not the consumer electronics industry, who enabled the biggest audio format since the CD to become popular. The format, which hasn't done much to impress audiophiles, but has greatly enhanced the portability of music, is MP3 and CE manufacturers are only now trying to catch up with products that take advantage of its widespread use.

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.