DWA Publishes White Paper on P2P Copyright Issues

[via press release] "The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA), an international group of industry leading companies, recently announced a new white paper that discusses how digital watermarking can effectively address the copyright and content identification issues facing the peer-to-peer (P2P) and social networking communities.

The PDF white paper outlines how content owners can embed digital watermarks as content identifiers and digital media serial numbers into entertainment content to communicate the identity of copyrighted works. Because digital watermarks inherently survive the "ripping" process and format conversions, copyrighted songs, movies, TV or radio programming and images can be identified on P2P systems and online communities such as MySpace, YouTube, Google and Yahoo.

With technology that has been proven to be effective in billions of media objects, including music, TV, movies and digital images, P2P and online content sharing providers have the opportunity to work with content owners to deploy systems to detect digitally watermarked content as it is introduced into those systems and help ensure proper usage or compensation in accordance with rights."

Nationwide Survey of 1,000 Digital Music Users

Below are the key findings of a recent report commissioned by www.soundflavor.com and conducted by Insight Express via the Internet from June 8-12, 2006. Consumers are clearly frustrated trying to find new music online, but apparently, help is on the way...the answer is SOUNDFLAVOR DJ (powered by the Soundflavor Music Recommendation Engine) which is based on more than six years of research spanning nearly every music genre. In a nutshell, the new music software helps iTunes users quickly create great playlists, rediscover the songs in their library, and discover new music based on songs that they already like. If it works as advertised, this could turn out to be a very valuable tool to have...

- The average digital music collection is substantial: nearly half (49%) of digital music users have more than 500 songs stored on their computer or laptop.

- Digital music users are not listening to all of the songs that they like: 64% note that they have a lot of music that they like but forget to play.

- Digital music users have trouble finding new music online: 41% say they have a hard time finding new music that they like when shopping online.

- Retailers are missing out on a key opportunity to sell music: 84% of respondents would purchase more music if they found more of it that they liked.

- Digital music users want help building playlists and finding new music: 67% said that they would use a service that helps them shop for new music and create playlists based on music that they like.

DVD Jon Fairplays Apple

The Apple DRM solution has been reserve-engineered by "DVD Jon" and he's apparently going to license the solution to other companies who want their digital products on iPods, beyond MP3 quality..."Instead of breaking the DRM (something he’s already done), Jon has replicated it, andwants to license the technology to companies that want their content (music,movies, whatever) to play on Apple devices. This may not be good news foriTunes the store, but it could make the iPod even more popular."