NEWS.com.au | File-swapping 'hobby' man in $500m lawsuit (October 18, 2004) : FOR six years, Stephen Cooper ran a song-sharing website from his modest brick home in Bellbowrie, in Brisbane's west, that attracted 190 million visitors a year and allegedly earned him up to $64,000 a month.

The website operated as a link to song files and Cooper said he rarely knew where they were stored on the Net. "Of course the artists have rights to protect their music, but all I was doing was connecting people to the music, I wasn't selling it," he said.

This is a landmark case, keep an eye on it. The key point here is that he was running a directory, not a music download service. He never served any files or sold them, he just pointed at them. Or rather the people who used his website pointed at them. There are similarities with the cases against Kazaa and Grokster but there's a crucial difference in that those bits of software do actually enable the download and sharing to take place while mp3s4free.net just said, "If you look over there, you'll find some free stuff".

This is the sort of thing that the discredited INDUCE act in the USA was attempting to control. Arguably his website was inducing people to break some legal restrictions even if it wasn't helping them to actually do it. That's a rocky road to go down, that has freedom of speech implications. But worst is that it acts as a severe damper on technological innovation.

But by far the most bizarre aspect of the whole case is the request for $500m in damages. Every download, of every song pointed at, is treated as a lost sale at full retail price. All that is then requested from somebody who threw a website together while between jobs and has only recently started making beer money from it. [from: JB Ecademy]

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Times Online - Newspaper Edition : BT's latest gig is payphones that masquerade as jukeboxes. Under plans now being drawn up, BT will offer a facility at payphones that allows users to download songs while on the move. The plan, aimed at curbing rapidly falling revenues in the group's payphone division, would see BT link up with Apple's iTunes or another content provider to transform phone boxes across Britain into music kiosks.

Let's say you have a network or public phone boxes that nobody wants any more due to the rise of the cellphone. but you have to keep them going as a public service. And you've started to convert some of them into public Internet access kiosks. What to do with them?

a) Convert them into WiFi Access points. Suggested to BT several times right here on Ecademy. Seems to be happening in NY. Not yet happening in the UK.
b) Turn them into music stores.

There's a certain logic to this. Except that I find it hard to imagine somebody waiting for their commuter train, and thinking "I absolutely must have that new single now". Then there's the danger. The infamous white eaphones of an iPod are already a mugger's magnet. What better way to increase the danger than to turn phone boxes into mugger's stations where the ipod is in plain view and connected to the kiosk with a cable.

Then there's the plain security aspects. Presumably enough control will be put in place so you can't just leach off the previous user's account if they forget to log off correctly.

Turning away from BT for a moment, this opens up a new requirement for Internet cafes and public access in places like the IoD. They ought to provide USB and Firewire ports from their PCs. And they and Apple need to sort out how to buy music and load it straight onto your iPod without going via an intermediate program. Which is going to make the DRM awkward.

Take this one further. I should be able to wander into Virgin or HMV with my iPod or similar and say "here's my credit card, fill her up".

No. It's not going to work, is it. [from: JB Ecademy]

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Microsoft sets aside $20bn to establish media software clout : MICROSOFT, the world%u2019s largest software company, has allocated more than $20 billion (£11.2 billion) to spend over the next six years in a drive to grab a share of the film and music entertainment market, The Times has learnt.

I have this persistent nightmare that Microsoft will buy one of the 4 remaining Music companies (Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, WEA, and EMI) and 1/4 of the world's music will only be available legally in WMP with Microsoft's DRM. Tie this in with the Microsoft push into phones and the convergence of phones and MP3 players.

But then maybe this is also a black hole that will swallow Microsoft. There's real problems with owning both the content source and the music players as Sony have discovered. And MP3 rippers are so common now that MP3 is hardly going to disappear.

MSN - Music : How can I get MSN Music downloads to play on my iPod?

The iPod does not currently support the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format and will not natively play any songs purchased from MSN Music, or any other Windows Media-based music service. If you are an iPod owner and would like to play MSN Music songs on your iPod, you can send feedback to Apple and ask them to change their policy and add support for the Windows Media format.

Bwahhahahhahahhahahhahahhhaaaa!

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Cool! My p2pnet article got a mention on The P2P weblog.

Some thoughts on all this podcasting stuff. Excuse the small amount of MS Win-centricity.

- Podcasting really needs a resident, local aggregator that runs all the time in the tray or as a service so that enclosures are collected in background as well as feeds.

- An aggregator with Podcasting really ought to support BitTorrent.

- If an aggregator with Podcasting has a BitTorrent client built in, it might as well be a full BT client handling any .torrent requests from the OS, not just enclosures.

- If it's running all the time, then it will act as a BT seed all the time as well.

So which Aggregators have followed that path and done all of it? This could really help BT with implementations. I think it may be feasible to also build this as a Firefox extension where BT is running whenever the browser is open.

Now looking at a sample of podcasting feeds, very few of them are using BitTorrent. I think there are two reasons for this.

1) Everyone can read MP3, not everyone can collect BT. This means that we need a way of recommending BT but offering MP3 as an alternative in the same feed with some marker to say that the end file is the same. I'm not sure how you would code this in RSS/Atom.

2) Creating a .torrent and getting it on a BT tracker is still too hard. I imagine a tracker service with a REST/XMLRPC/SOAP API where you told it the location of a file on the public net and it created the .torrent, created the tracker entry and then returned the details for inclusion in your feed. This might also be a service that something like Feedburner could meld into your RSS feed. There'd be an HTML UI for this as well. I haven't found anything like this. If you know of one, please say. Once the service exists with the API, this could be built into blogging systems so that it happens automatically when you post a blog entry with an enclosure.

- The other alternative is that a local BT publishing tool packaged the whole .torrent creation and registration process with one of the existing public trackers.

The goal in all this is to make BT ubiquitous but also to have it fade into the background where the end user doesn't need to know any more about it than they know about http.

The top box/backrest attachment. I drilled a small hole in the mounting plate, and added a bolt to attach the plate to. [from: Flikr Photos]

The finished article. The seat height is now about 26 1/2" The bucket I'm sitting in is also a lot more comfortable. The stock seat tends to slide you forwards the whole time. Now I'm wedged in. [from: Flikr Photos]

Kind of hard to see but this is the seat foam after cutting. I started with a hack saw blade and then finished it with the surform. The bits on top are what was removed. Then peel the seat cover back, use a staple gun to fix it on the inside and refit the seat. [from: Flikr Photos]

The view from the back showing how narrow the mirros and bars are now. Note the silly sticker! [from: Flikr Photos]

Is the Burger 400 suitable for turning into a more radical Feet Forwards bike? Seat height with the seat removed is 24" [from: Flikr Photos]

Here's what it looks like with the seat removed. That's as low as you can go as just underneath the panel is the EFI gubbins. [from: Flikr Photos]

Another view under the seat. You need to sit as far back as possible to get the leg room. Which means an uptilt at the back. [from: Flikr Photos]

I've removed the seat, removed the staples and peeled back the cover. Then removed the front half of the foam. You can clearly see you're limited on lowering the seat by the tilt up at the back. Seat height is now 25" [from: Flikr Photos]

Here's the foam. I'm going to attack it! Should be able to get about 1 1/2" lower. [from: Flikr Photos]

Here's the seat after marking up. [from: Flikr Photos]