On February 22, Judge Marilyn Patel of Federal District Court in Northern California wrote that she "found reason for concern" that the industry's five major labels had colluded to create a virtual monopoly of the burgeoning online music business. "If Napster is correct, these…
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Napster may have finally won a round in court. The Federal District judge in the music industry's ongoing case against the file-sharing service has allowed for the possibility that the plaintiffs may have abused their own copyright privileges in the launch of their online music services, MusicNet and pressplay.
Last year's media darling may be this year's has-been. Napster, the music file-sharing service that shook the music industry's foundations, remains shut down after US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled that it cannot resume operations until it can prove that no copyrighted songs can slip through its filter. In a closed session on Wednesday, July 11, Patel ordered Napster to stay offline until she authorizes it to do otherwise.
The 99.4% blockage rate that Napster has been able to achieve is insufficient, Patel stated. "We are approaching a system that has a zero rate of error,"…
In 1984, George Orwell's chilling tale of life in a totalitarian society, good citizens are expected to master the art of "doublethink," the ability to embrace two contradictory ideas at the same time. As evidenced by legal actions undertaken by their organization in late May, executives of the Recording Industry Association of America would make excellent role models in an Orwellian state.
Emboldened by courtroom victories over Napster, the Internet's most notorious free music service, the RIAA began action against Aimster, a service with a similar operating model. On May 24, RIAA…
Last week, JBL Consumer Products (a unit of the Harman Consumer Systems Group) and Korea's L.G. Electronics (manufacturers of Gold Star and L.G. Electronics brand products) announced that they have entered into a strategic alliance to jointly develop and market a "broad range of new consumer electronics products." The companies say that the partnership "builds upon the respective strengths of both manufacturers" and will enable both companies to expand their offerings into areas outside their traditional product categories.
Harman's Sidney Harman explains that "the partnership of JBL and…
Is there a future for high-resolution audio? Will the music industry survive as a packaged-goods business? The answer to both of these questions is "Yes, probably . . ." if the DualDisc follows test market indications and become next year's must-have entertainment format.
"Yes, probably ... . " is also the assessment of producer/engineer Elliot Mazer, who took time away from his latest project on August 6 to discuss the issue with me, thanks to an introduction from Richard Schram of Parasound. A combination product that literally bonds a CD back-to-back with a DVD, the DualDisc was test-…
According to figures just released by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), revenues from manufacturer-to-dealer sales of audio products in December 1999 totaled nearly $568 million, a 6.3% increase over the previous December. CEA reports that the strong month's sales pushed year-end revenue totals to their highest mark in four years: total audio shipment revenues in 1999 surpassed the $8 billion mark for the first time since 1995, growing by 2% over 1998.
In the Separate Components category, the figures reveal that home speaker revenues increased by 17% in December. The highlight…
To balance or not to balance? That is the audio question that Martin Colloms sets out to answer in Balance: Benefit or Bluff? Although balanced capability is a fashionable feature in many expensive audio products, Colloms writes that "the High End could be paying dangerous, costly lip service to the received wisdom that balanced operation is the goal for an audio system."
George Reisch opines that there are three topics to set the sparks flying at the audiophile dinner table: sex, religion, and speaker cables. Reisch decides to tackle that last contentious item in Illuminated Cables &…
DVD-Audio proponents, ranging from record labels execs and mastering engineers to CE manufacturers, staged a press event on August 9 at Dolby Labs in Los Angeles in the hopes of rekindling interest in their format, which has been quietly trying to launch for the last year or so. Warner Bros Records has gone so far as to call this current effort a "re-launch", but after spending over four hours with the DVD-A folks, this reporter thinks there's a good chance we may be seeing yet another official launch once most of the current issues (detailed below) are sorted out.
Curiously, there was no…
Could this be a record executive's dream come true and the end of the need for watermarking as we know it? CantaMetrix has announced the further development of a new technology, MusicDNA, that the company claims is capable of identifying and tracking the billions of existing as well as new MP3 files on the Internet and providing an exact accounting for the copyright, "thus enabling legal file sharing and linking value-added data to songs."
CantaMetrix also announced that, in order to develop MusicDNA, it has secured its second round of financing from two European venture capital groups,…
In his review of the Cary Audio Design CAD-572SE monoblock power amplifier, Martin Colloms explains, "It's no accident that low- and zero-feedback triode technology is now the mainstay of the Cary amplifier line." MC then reports on whether or not this approach has succeeded. RObert Deutsch adds some further thoughts.
From January 2004, Keith Howard describes in The Law of Averages, how to squeeze high-resolution sound into a low-resolution carrier like the compact disc. As KH notes, "The best in CD sound quality has improved sufficiently for some to question whether we need the new media…