Among the biggest successes were efforts to shut down illicit commercial disc replicators. In the first six months of 2003, authorities seized approximately 2.5 million counterfeit discs or pirated CD-Rs, up 18.1% from the 2.1 million seizures reported at mid-year 2002. According to the New York Police Department, it seized 125,000 counterfeit discs in the first six…
search
Over the past year, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has made significant headway in its multi-front war against commercial piracy, according to a detailed report issued by the trade group October 21.
The US Senate has gotten serious about going after file sharers. On Friday, June 25, senators approved legislation that would allow the Justice Department to impose heavy civil penalties on people found to have shared and/or downloaded copyrighted material over the Internet.
The PIRATE Act (Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act) passed on a unanimous voice vote, according to reports from Washington. If approved by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Bush, the legislation would move the legal battle against file sharing from criminal to civil…
Both Macrovision and Sunncomm have been releasing technologies aimed at restricting how consumers can use their legally purchased music and movies. Add Dynamic Media Solutions to the pack.
The Israeli company announced last week that it has developed a "novel technology" that, it claims, will provide a "far-reaching copy protection solution for current and next-generation optical media, which include CD/DVD, CD/DVD recordable, and DVD-Video media." DMS says its approach is "fully compatible with today's CD/DVD players and drivers, and is extremely cost effective." The company also says that…
Tube fans might want to get their passports in order. We've received word that the European Triode Festival 2004 (ETF.04) will take place in Langenargen, Germany in December. The festival, which describes itself as "a gathering of tube audio hobbyists and professionals," says it will host participants from all over the world.
The European Triode Festival (formerly Århus Triode Festival) claims to be Europe's leading event for do-it-yourselfers in audio, and notes that last year's show saw participants from around the planet, including Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, Poland, the…
And then there were four: Sony's music division and German media company Bertelsmann, parent of the BMG record label, have decided that they've got a better chance under one roof. Last week, the two companies revealed that they will merge their music divisions into a new company called Sony BMG.
The merger follows the resignation last month of Bertelsmann board chairman Gerd Schulte-Hillen, who opposed the deal. The Sony BMG announcement also comes nine days after Edgar M. Bronfman and his son Edgar Bronfman, Jr. officially resigned from Vivendi Universal's board of directors following an…
Blaming a falloff in CD sales on the popularity of CD burners, BMG Germany recently issued approximately 100,000 copy-protected discs in an attempt to thwart the problem—and had to take a substantial portion of them back because consumers said the discs wouldn't perform in car players and in some home audio systems.
The discs were put out for sale in German music stores the last week of January, and about 4% of them bounced back almost immediately, with complaints from customers. "The consumers started getting back saying it doesn't play on car CD players and several types of normal…
Brian Damkroger finds that, while struggling unsuccessfully to fit the Conrad-Johnson Premier 17LS line-stage preamplifier into his preconceived notions of the company and its products, a paradigm shift in his thinking occurred. Damkroger explains that "it was only during a marathon session of listening and comparing the C-J to a couple of other preamps that the truth dawned on me . . . I went back and forth between the C-J and the other units several times over the course of the next week, and one evening it hit me." The truth awaits.
John Atkinson celebrates 15 years at the helm of…
Little noted by the mainstream media, technology companies are pushing ahead with research and development programs for high-resolution audio. Two announcements in late April indicate that neither DVD-Audio nor the Super Audio CD is a passing fancy.
On April 24, Novato, CA–based Sonic Solutions announced a partnership with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (MEI) that will integrate a DVD-Audio authoring system developed by Matsushita into Sonic Solution's DVD production system. Panasonic's parent company, Matsushita is one of the founding members of the DVD Forum and helped develop…
Karmazin joins Sirius: The satellite radio service gained some serious traction in its recent acquisition of former Viacom, Inc. president Mel Karmazin. Just one month after signing "shock jock" Howard Stern to a multimillion-dollar contract, Sirius signed Karmazin to a five-year contract, bringing him in as its new chief executive officer. Joseph Clayton will relinquish the CEO title but remain chairman of the board. Karmazin departed Viacom in June and began discussions in earnest with Sirius after the satellite service landed Stern, in a move Karmazin described as "brilliant." Karmazin…
A move by RealNetworks to cut the umbilical cord between Apple's iPod and the company's iTunes Music Store has raised the ire of some execs in Cupertino. The computer pioneer is threatening legal and technical retaliation against its Seattle rival in the wake of a late July launch of a digital music technology called Harmony that enables the iPod to work with downloads from RealNetworks' music store.
In a press release, Apple claimed that RealNetworks may have violated provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by reverse-engineering the iPod to make it compatible with…