Barry Willis

No one knows what online music services may ultimately look like, but new models continue to pop up for consumers to test-drive.

American media companies and electronics manufacturers may be adversaries in the conflict over digital copy protection, but their French counterparts have decided to make love, not war.

As normally conceived, loudspeakers use electrodynamic forces to control the movements of their diaphragms, which in turn move air. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. has come up with an interesting twist on this principle, one in which air pressure itself ("aerodynamic-drive technology") is used to control the diaphragm. The result is a transparent panel speaker called the "Sound Window," announced by the Japanese industrial giant March 27.

In a never-ending quest to control what it believes is an epidemic of piracy, the music industry in recent years has gone after Internet file-sharing startups, fly-by-night CD duplicators, foreign pirates operating on an industrial scale, college kids with too much time on their hands, and street-corner vendors hawking badly-duped cassettes. At times the anti-piracy campaign has reached the fervor of a witch hunt, with blame laid on the innocent as well as the guilty.

Andy Warhol's famous dictum—that eventually, everyone will enjoy 15 minutes of fame—could apply equally to Internet startups.

If Senator "Fritz" Hollings has his way, coming generations of electronic products will monitor their users' behavior and report possible copyright violations to some governmental regulatory agency. That's one of the more ominous provisions in Hollings' Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), introduced for consideration by the US Senate the third week of March. The bill goes far beyond the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998.

<A HREF="http://www.emigroup.com">EMI Group PLC</A> has gotten serious about surviving in a depressed market. In the wake of a disastrous multimillion-dollar <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11265/">payout</A&gt; to pop singer Mariah Carey, the UK music label has announced sweeping cutbacks in its workforce&mdash;including many American executives&mdash;and in its roster of artists.