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A "digital rights management" (DRM) company has been awarded a patent for its "tickets" to Internet-based entertainment. Bethesda, MD–based ContentGuard">http://www.contentguard.com">ContentGuard Holdings, Inc. announced July 27 that it has been granted a patent for its "digital ticket" system, which allows users access to digital entertainment—music, video, graphics, and e-books—from any Internet-connected device.

Audiophiles on a budget will be pleased to learn that not everything on display at Alexis Park requires a second mortgage. We were particularly impressed by the Audes model 037 loudspeaker, of similar size and sound to Revel's excellent Performa F-30. At $1200/pair, the Audes offers extraordinary value. All the company's products, including the drivers, are made in Estonia for export to North and South America, Western (and parts of Eastern) Europe, and Asia. The company has yet to establish a dealer network in nearby Russia because of economic uncertainties there, according to an Audes executive, who cited Russian prejudice against Eastern European products as another discouraging factor.

One area where DVD-Audio so far has an advantage over SACD is on the computer. To date there are no SACD-compatible personal computers on the consumer market, allowing the playback of a single-layer stereo or multichannel DSD format disc. One can, however, play a DVD-Audio disc on a PC using, for example, a Sound">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11454/">Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card.

Copy protection efforts currently being initiated by national lawmakers at the behest of the entertainment industry are based on a model of Internet use that will soon become obsolete, according to Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig.

During copyright protection hearings in Washington the last week of February, South Carolina Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings labored mightily to please patrons Michael Eisner, CEO of Walt Disney Company, and Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA). Hollings' questioning of panelists from concerned industries was generally even-handed, according to several reports, except for his treatment of Intel executive vice president Leslie Vadasz, whose opposition to government-mandated copy control provoked an especially vindictive outpouring of vitriol from the 80-year-old Senator.

Although some record labels have scaled back plans to add restricted-use technology to all CD releases, efforts continue to find the protection formula that consumers, and in particular record labels, will accept.

Blaming a falloff in CD sales on the popularity of CD burners, BMG">http://www.bmg.de/">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.

In what is intended to have the biggest impact yet on the thriving "rip, mix, burn" lifestyle, Macrovisionhttp://www.macrovision.com">Macrovision; has revealed that several record labels have been secretly putting its copy protection system onto new CD releases since around March of this year (see previous">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10985/">previous report). The process, called SafeAudio, is a Macrovision registered trademark and is intended to prevent the copying of CDs, or tracks from CDs, onto CD-R discs and computer hard drives. The technology was developed jointly by Macrovision and TTR">http://www.ttrtech.com">TTR Technologies.

On November 22, the Librarian of Congress issued a—take a deep breath— declaration">http://www.copyright.gov/1201/">declaration of exemption from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. In other words, the LOC decreed that six classes of "non-infringing rights" were exempt from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which criminalized "production and dissemination of technology whose primary purpose is to circumvent measures taken to protect copyright."

It seems that all of the forces in the music industry have lately been conspiring against the music lover and audiophile. The record labels and their hired gun, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), have so far blocked digital outputs on high-resolution audio players, insisted that watermarks be inserted into both high- and low-resolution audio data, and have even started to restricthttp://www.stereophile.com/news/11178/">restrict; consumer's fair use of compact discs and digital downloads.