Kazaa is resurrected, but why?

How appropriate: The day that Rdio goes live, Kazaa comes back from the dead.

Rdio is the new music streaming service from Janus Friis with Niklas Zennström, the entrepreneurs who brought the Kazaa file-sharing software to market as the music industry was suing the original Napster out of existence. Kazaa eventually ran into the same legal buzzsaw, ultimately settling the lawsuit brought by the major labels and studios for more than $115 million. (Friis and Zennström had already exited by then.) The current owners of the Kazaa brand -- Brilliant Digital Entertainment -- announced the launch of the beta version of the new, non-file-sharing Kazaa service Tuesday, about the same time that Rdio made its offering available to the public.

I haven't had much time to explore Kazaa, but my first impression is that the Web-based service is miles behind the competition. It's as if the company locked its technologists in a room four years ago and they've just now emerged, having missed the growth of social networks, the explosion in smartphone usage and the death of music DRM. The service costs $15 a month -- 50% more than Rdio, MOG or Rhapsody -- and doesn't have a mobile app. Instead, it offers unlimited streams and tethered downloads (that is, songs wrapped in electronic locks to deter copying) that can be played only by Kazaa's proprietary plugin for Windows Media Player. 

It also has only rudimentary social-media features, most notably the ability to play other users' playlists and to watch a continuously updated list of what other users are playing. And although there are a handful of "editor's picks," there's no preference engine to recommend tracks based on a user's tastes -- a major handicap when it comes to discovering music. Essentially, users are left to search for tracks or artists they already know, or take unguided tours through the library's eight genres.

There are some nice touches, such as the ability to find songs by searching through a database of lyrics. I also liked the ability to find user playlists containing particular songs or artists, which could be a useful form of crowd curation. On the whole, though, the service struck me as being very much a work in progress, with a much smaller library of tracks (1.8 million vs. 8 million on MOG).

The press release from Kazaa put the best possible spin on the offering, saying "Kazaa’s beta offering of our cloud based download music application and everything that comes with it signals our commitment to continue developing new product offerings and services at full speed." Judging by the beta, Kazaa needs to go even faster.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Another win for the RIAA, this time over file-sharing company LimeWire

A federal judge ruled this week that the company behind the LimeWire file-sharing network was liable for infringing the major record companies' copyrights, exposing the company and its former CEO, Mark Gorton, to potentially enormous financial penalties.

The ruling didn't come as a huge surprise; LimeWire is similar to other second-generation file-sharing networks (Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster) that the courts had previously held secondarily liable for infringement. Its distributor, LimeWire LLC, has long known it was in the music industry's cross hairs, but it didn't try to protect copyrighted works to the degree that, say, BitTorrent Inc. has done.

What's most interesting about the ruling is the route that U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood took to find LimeWire and Gorton liable...

Facebook announces support for Docs.com, Pandora

Facebook has partnered with Microsoft and music-streaming service Pandora to help its users do more through their social profiles, the company announced at its F8 Conference on Wednesday.

Microsoft has launched Docs.com, a site that allows users to create Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations. Although the site is currently in limited beta, which means Microsoft is only allowing a certain number of users, it also boasts a social-sharing feature. That tool helps Facebook users create and share documents with their Facebook friends on Docs.com. Facebook friends are automatically integrated into the Docs.com interface to share content.

According to Facebook, the service is opt-in, so users who don't want to share Docs.com content with Facebook friends won't be required to do so.

Aside from Microsoft, Facebook has also partnered with Pandora to make it easy for the online-music service's users to share songs with friends, as well as listen to tracks others like.

Going forward, those who opt in to the Pandora integration will be able to share all their favorite songs on their Facebook profiles. Users can also "like" songs on Facebook and receive station suggestions from Pandora based on those preferences. And since friends are integrated into the music service, users will be able to see what songs or stations their Facebook friends liked.

In order to use the new Pandora feature, Facebook users who also have Pandora accounts need to confirm that they intend to link the two sites. Those that opt out will not have their information shared with either site.

Both Microsoft's Docs.com service and Facebook's Pandora integration are live now.

-- Don Reisinger

twitter.com/donreisinger

A screen capture of Docs.com in action. Credit: Don Reisinger

Hollywood wins another lawsuit against a search engine

Chalk up another legal victory for the Motion Picture Assn. of America in its battle against websites that make it easier for people to find and download bootlegged Hollywood movies. Monday, a judge in London's High Court of Justice ruled that Newzbin -- a site that indexed files posted to Usenet newsgroups -- had violated the studios' copyrights by helping members who paid a monthly fee stitch together complete movie files from the hundreds of segments posted to Usenet binaries.

In fact, the judge's ruling went to an unusual extent in finding that the defendant not only encouraged users to infringe, but actually authorized the illegal activity and made bootlegs available to its members. And while the court stopped short of banning the technology used by Newzbin, it appears poised to require the company to filter its search results to exclude the studios' movies.

Like the Torrent search sites that the MPAA has sued, Newzbin claimed it was simply doing for Usenet what Google has done for the Web. But it struck some of the most telling blows against that argument itself, submitting evidence that Justice David Kitchin dismissed as fake.

Fighting intensifies over how to enforce intellectual property laws [UPDATED]

Barack Obama may be the country's most tech-friendly president ever, as comfortable discussing Net neutrality as Swiss neutrality. But his administration is caught in at least three pitched battles over intellectual property that could leave tech advocates wondering why they were so optimistic about his presidency.

One fight stems from the secretive negotiations over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which began under President George W. Bush. Copyright holders have pressed for provisions that could force Internet Service Providers to do more to combat online piracy, such as cutting off broadband accounts that are used repeatedly for infringement. Such three-strikes provisions are anathema to tech advocacy groups, which also fear that the agreement would make it harder for them to bring some fair-use balance to the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

A second battle concerns the Federal Communications Commission's proposed Net neutrality rules, which Obama's former Harvard Law School chum (and now FCC Chairman) Julius Genachowski has championed. Copyright holders and performing artists are pressing the commission to drop a proposed requirement that ISPs not discriminate against any type of traffic. They argue that content providers should be able to strike deals with ISPs that would help distinguish the flow of legitimate movies and music online from bootlegs. But such groups as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge have argued forcefully against turning Net neutrality rules into tools for copyright enforcement.

The newly minted White House Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator triggered a third dust-up last month when it asked for public comments on its strategic plan for, well, intellectual property enforcement. Seven groups representing copyright owners and performers, including the RIAA, MPAA and the Screen Actors Guild, filed their wish list Wednesday (download your copy here), and it's a doozy.

Stanza e-book app maker says Apple nixed USB transfer [Updated]

Users of the popular Stanza e-book reading app for iPhone can no longer move books to their PC with a USB cable.

In an updated version to its Stanza app, Amazon Inc.-owned developer Lexcycle said Apple required the company to remove a function that allowed USB file transfer.

Lexcycle, which was acquired by Amazon.com Inc. last year, has become one of the iPhone's biggest e-reading applications, with more than 2 million downloads of its application and 12 million book downloads, according to the company.  With the announcement of Apple's new iBookstore, Amazon and Apple are newly at odds in the burgeoning e-book market.

The new version of Stanza "removed the ability to share books via USB as required by Apple," according to the app's update page.

As described in the Stanza FAQ here, previous versions allowed users to move e-books from an iPhone to a computer and back via USB cable.  But that type of transfer also required the use of a third-party program called iPhone Explorer, which allows users to copy files easily off of their iPhone.

Apple has long restricted the ways that owners of its mobile devices can move files around. The easiest way to move files from iPhones and iPods to a computer is through Apple's proprietary iTunes program, which only allows the devices to transfer files to a single computer.  The Stanza app circumvented that protection -- a move Apple may not have liked.

Apple responds below.

Stanza users can still move files to a PC running Stanza's desktop application but only if both the iPhone and the computer are on the same WiFi connection.

Update #3, 4:36 p.m: In an upcoming iPhone OS release, Apple may be planning to give developers access to multi-use storage space, so apps like Stanza can maintain USB-transferable files, writes Chris Foresman of Ars Technica.

Update #2, 2:04 p.m.:  Apple confirms Devor's guess.  The company's statement reads, "We requested Stanza remove the USB functionality in their app as it was a simple case of the developer using private APIs in violation of the developer agreement."

Update #1, 1:07 p.m.: Chris Devor of myPod Apps, which built the iPhone Explorer program Stanza used for USB file transfer, had this to say about why Apple might've objected to Stanza's approach to USB file transfer (emphasis added):

From an iPhone app development standpoint, you get access to two directories: (1) your app's sandbox folder and (2) the DCIM directory for access to pictures and such. On a non-jailbroken iPhone, iPhone Explorer can access the DCIM directory, but not the apps sandbox. So we made a subfolder in the DCIM directory a common ground or shared folder for the two programs.

At the time we began doing this we figured that we were in the iPhone app development "gray zone" and this was something that Apple hadn't officially made a stance upon. Once Good Reader topped the charts around the world, it drew a bunch of attention from people and Apple figured we were up to no good. After a series of e-mails back and forth between the iPhone app developers and an Apple correspondent, the conclusion was as follows: (1) the iPhone apps must remove access to the DCIM directory (Apple claims this is in violation of the iPhone App Developer Agreement), and (2) the developers should not blame (point the finger at) Apple for being forced to remove access to the folder (hence the lack of explanation from Stanza).

-- David Sarno

A clear but limited win for Hollywood over isoHunt

A U.S. District Court judge has ruled against another BitTorrent index site, and this time the case wasn't clouded by the defendant's misconduct. Instead, the site, isoHunt, appears to be a victim of its own bad facts (or incredibly ineffective lawyering). But the court narrowed its ruling against isoHunt in ways that could limit its application to other torrent search sites. In fact, the ruling ducks the fundamental question of whether such sites are by their nature infringing. (Hat tips to Ars Technica and Michael Geist for the links to the ruling.)

The judge in the case was none other than Stephen V. Wilson, who went out on a legal limb in 2003 to declare Grokster and Morpheus legal before the Supreme Court discovered a previously overlooked form of secondary liability for copyright infringement ("inducing" people to infringe). Both companies are now in the dustbin of history, and that appears to be isoHunt's destination too.

That's not to say Hollywood's victory over isoHunt will reduce online piracy. Instead, it's yet another blow to companies and investors that try to monetize the public's insatiable appetite for illegal downloads. And that's an important part of the Motion Picture Assn. of America's strategy: stopping commercial capital from flowing into businesses that encourage bootlegging.

Like TorrentSpy and the Pirate Bay, isoHunt argued that it was no different from Google: It provided a generic search tool, one that was indifferent to the nature of the files people were searching for. Under the Supreme Court's Grokster decision, truly neutral search technologies, business models and companies should be immune to infringement claims because they don't promote piracy. But Wilson ruled that the MPAA had presented credible evidence that isoHunt and its owner, Gary Fung, had encouraged illegal downloads, and that the defense had presented little or no evidence in rebuttal. "Generally, defendants rest their case on legal arguments and meritless evidentiary objections, and offer little of their own evidence that directly addressed Plaintiffs’ factual assertions," Wilson wrote. In that light, he declared, there was no reason to go to trial. 

Significantly, Wilson found isoHunt to be an evolved version of Grokster, not Google. He also concluded that Fung encouraged users, directly or indirectly, to upload and download copyrighted content. It wasn't a close call: "[T]he Court determines that evidence of Defendants’ intent to induce infringement is overwhelming and beyond reasonable dispute." In addition to the overt messages encouraging infringement, Wilson wrote, the site's search capabilities were optimized for finding material that was obviously bootlegged. That's an important difference between isoHunt and Google, which also enables users to find torrent files. 

Equally significant was Wilson's decision not to address the MPAA's argument that isoHunt was liable because it either (a) knew about specific infringing files that were available and refused to take simple steps to prevent them from being copied, or (b) profited from infringements that it had the authority to limit. The MPAA's arguments against isoHunt on those issues could be applied to any torrent site, so a ruling on them by Wilson could lay the foundation for an important precedent. Similarly, Wilson found that isoHunt did not qualify for the infringement defense that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act created for search engines, but based that decision largely on the inducements to infringe and Fung's activities as a downloader. Still, Wilson suggested that any torrent site that offers a list of most popular downloads -- as these sites routinely do -- would have a tough time qualifying for the DMCA safe harbor because the list would alert them to users' infringements.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

MOG joins the subscription-music fray

There must be something compelling about the subscription-music business model that the public just hasn't grasped yet. No matter how many companies give up on it because they can't attract enough subscribers, new ones always arrive to try to make it work.

The latest is MOG, which launched a $5-per-month version today. I've lost count, but I think we're now on the fourth iteration of MOG -- it started as a music-blogging outpost, then added music videos, then integrated Rhapsody to allow a limited number of free songs on demand. Now, after a long delay (the all-too-familiar cause: licensing issues with the major labels), MOG is rolling out a subscription layer that adds unlimited streams on demand, personalized radio and a rich trove of user-generated playlists.

The price puts it in line with Napster's listen-only offering, although Napster also lets users download an MP3 for every dollar they spend on subscription fees. In other words, Napster treats the streams as a free throw-in to an eMusic-like subscription downloading service. (Another good analogy: Netflix.) Armed with a library that's similar to its competitors, MOG is betting on the strength of the content generated by its staff and users, which turn the site into a one-stop shop for music news, reviews, commentary, social networking *and* listening. The integration of crowd-sourced playlists and blogs give MOG more powerful music-discovery tools than other services provide as well as more (and more unique) content than its rivals.

Yet the question lingers: Are people willing to pay for access to music, especially when there's so much available free (e.g., Grooveshark, Imeem, MySpace Music, Lala, Slacker -- and that's not counting  unauthorized sources)? I've been a fan of subscription services for a long time. On the other hand, I'm a voracious consumer of music -- especially when it's being created by someone I've never heard of before. That makes me well-suited for a service like Napster or the new MOG, but not terribly representative of most consumers. Said consumers tend to have one giant problem with subscription services, aside from the sense of getting nothing permanent in return for their money: They don't work on iPods. (Rhapsody, at least, works on an iPhone.) All the same, MOG's announcement reinforces Napster's bet that $5 a month is the new price point for subscriptions, not $13 to 15 (a la Rhapsody or Zune Pass). And that's much less of a leap for consumers to take, even if their musical appetites aren't as large as mine.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Pogoplug: A new device for new lifestyles?

The new Pogoplug. Credit: Cloud Engines.

One way to score a big hit in technology is to come up with not just a new gadget, but a new category. Of course, that is also a recipe for failure, because there's a risk that consumers don't think they need what you're selling.

That's the risk for Cloud Engines, a San Francisco company that makes something called the Pogoplug. They're calling it a "multimedia sharing device," in the hopes that people are looking for an easier way to share all the videos, photos and music that are now defining their digital lives.

The Pogoplug sells for $129. You plug it into your router, and then you plug a storage device -- like an external hard drive or a flash drive -- into it. You have then created what company Chief Executive Daniel Putterman calls "your personal cloud." Given the way the "cloud computing" buzzword reached the stratosphere this year, he may be onto something.

The sharing part comes in letting you give anyone access to your stuff without your ever having to upload it or e-mail it.

Engadget liked an earlier version of the product but wished it had Wi-Fi and ports for extra devices. Today the company announces the extra ports, but still no Wi-Fi.

And I can report that photos and material shared with me from a Pogoplug device worked seamlessly, like looking at any website.

-- Dan Fost

Does more broadband mean more piracy?

In the $787-billion economic stimulus package enacted in February, Congress told the Federal Communications Commission to create a plan for extending broadband service to all Americans and increasing broadband speeds. It's an apple-pie, chicken-in-every-pot goal -- at least until people see the price tag. Nevertheless, there are plenty of disagreements over the details of the plan. One is a battle between copyright holders and consumer advocates over what to do about all the content that broadband users download or stream illegally. The former want Internet service providers to use technology to filter out unauthorized content flowing over their networks; the latter argue that filters won't work as advertised and will inflict an unacceptable amount of collateral damage on lawful Internet uses. I sympathize with the copyright holders' concerns about rampant unauthorized copying, but I'm not persuaded that filtering is the solution -- or that this proceeding is the place to have that debate.

Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, laid out the case against filters ...