Audio/Video

Pity if you will the humble Hollywood film director, struggling to provide intellectually-challenging yet entertaining cinematic product on a mere $120 million while battling against studios, producers and heartless bean counters.

Then, having invested all of himself, all of the cash and a hefty two billion hours of CGI server time into a celluloid labour of love, he has to endure the further agony of seeing the whole opus trashed and ridiculed by the pizza-fuelled net pedants at www.moviemistakes.com.

Wasn't the Internet, this weightless kingdom of bits and bytes, supposed to make distribution costs just vanish? Apparently not.

At an Apple financial analyst conference on Wednesday CEO Steve Jobs admitted that Apple makes no revenue from the online download service, the iTunes Music Store, that he launched in April. As iTMS is the leading download service, with 80 per cent market share (or so Jobs claimed), where's your 99 cents per song going?

If you can get the words "sharing" and "network" into a project, you might make a splash with just about anything. That's essentially what's happened with a novel "music sharing" network pioneered at MIT. Being hailed by some journalists as the "answer" to P2P problems, the Library Access to Music Project (LAMP) has a few people forgetting what the point of digital music is. LAMP is, admittedly, a pretty cool project. Using the MIT cable TV network, songs from a databank of music are accessible by students and faculty via the TV, not unlike cable's "on-demand" features.

MP3 ISN'T EVERYTHING, BUT IT'S CLOSE: MP3 isn't the only compressed audio file format in town. Microsoft promotes its WMA format, Apple uses AAC for iTunes Music Store downloads, RealNetworks has RealAudio files. All three claim their format is best, and each one contains Digital Rights Management technology that can limit where, when or how you might use the files. Both MP3 and the open-source favorite Ogg Vorbis are unrestricted, meaning you can copy, play, and manipulate the files any way you choose.

Several Internet music services and a disc jockey have offered to reimburse a New York woman who paid $2,000 to settle charges that her 12-year-old daughter illegally copied music online.

A coalition of several "peer to peer" song-swapping networks said Thursday it was trying to locate Sylvia Torres so it could pay the legal settlement she reached with the Recording Industry Association of America on Tuesday.

Since 1999, CD unit sales have plunged 26 percent -- a decline of $2 billion -- thanks in part to file-sharing services and other forms of digital piracy. The record labels' frustration is so acute that the Recording Industry Association of America has begun suing hundreds of consumers who have exchanged music on peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa, Morpheus, and Gnutella.

But what technology giveth, can it taketh away?

The recording industry filed 261 lawsuits against individual Internet music file sharers Monday and announced an amnesty program for people who admit they illegally share music files through the Internet.

The federal lawsuits and amnesty program are the latest moves by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its fight against illegal music file trading on the Internet, which record companies blame for a 31 percent drop in compact disc sales since mid-2000.

The Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) will shortly offer an amnesty to individual copyright infringers, sparing alleged violators the threat of legal action if they delete all unauthorised copies of music they possess and publicly promise to be good in future.

So claim unnamed sources cited by Reuters - the RIAA itself has yet to comment on the matter.

In the 1950s, the revolution was all about rock 'n' roll. The 70s brought punk and disco. And sometime this decade, the rebellion shifted from the music genre to the digital domain.

Signaling a new era of media distribution, Forrester Research on Tuesday released a study predicting an even bigger drop in compact disc sales as Internet music file-sharing keeps gaining ground on the flagging CD.

Students arriving for fall classes at colleges across the country are facing technological hurdles and stern warnings aimed at ending swapping of music and movie files over high-speed campus Internet connections.

Several of the universities are responding to a recording industry campaign to control the rampant copying of files over peer-to-peer networks.

Among other things, campuses are distributing brochures, running ads in student newspapers and devoting school Web pages to information on copyright infringement.