Apple originally licensed the name from Apple Records, agreeing not to include sound on their computers and to stay away from the music industry. Look in the system folder on your Mac, you’ll see (and hear) a sound effect called “Sosumi”. This has been included on every Apple computer since sound was first introduced. Wanna know where that name comes from? So, sue me.

-Ian.

—– http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/09/11/applemusic/ index.php?redirect63293387000

By Jim Dalrymple jdalrymple [at] maccentral [dot] com September 11, 2003 6:00 pm ET

Apple Computer Inc. is being sued by Apple Corps. The parent company for music legends, The Beatles, has begun legal proceedings against Apple Computer, citing breach of contract for the suit, according to Fox News .

Apparently when Apple Computer first started, The Beatles sued them for the use of the corporate name. In addition to a hefty cash settlement, Apple agreed to only use the corporate name for computer products and not enter the music markeplace.

Years later, The Beatles sued and won another lawsuit when Apple shipped computers that allowed music to be played through attachable speakers. That lawsuit charged breach of a trademark agreement since Apple had agreed to steer clear of the music business. Fox News estimates Apple has paid US$50 million in the lost suits so far.

The latest round of legal proceedings surround Apple’s popular MP3 player, the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, which just sold its 10 millionth song online.

“When it first happened with the iPod, we said, “What could they be thinking?” said a Beatles legal insider, who agreed that posters announcing the iPod from “AppleMusic” were among the most egregious violations. “They knew we had the agreement, and that we’d won a lot of money from them already.”

An Apple representative was not immediately available for comment.

Give people choice and freedom and they’ll pay. Try to sue your own frickin’ customers into oblivion and we’ll see you in bankruptcy.

-Ian.

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/washpost/20030909/ tc_washpost/a47297_2003sep9&e=1 RIAA vs. the People Tue Sep 9,11:06 AM ET

By Cynthia L. Webb, washingtonpost.com Staff Writer

The Recording Industry Association of America ( news -web sites )made good on its promise to prosecute Americans who engage in the illegal downloading and trading of pirated music, filing 261 copyright violation suits yesterday.

“Legal actions have been taken on a sporadic basis against operators of pirate servers or sites, but ordinary computer users have never before been at serious risk of liability for widespread behavior. The RIAA said that’s the point it’s underlining with the unprecedented legal action,” CNET’s News.com reported.

But in an editorial today, the San Jose Mercury News said the RIAA’s legal campaign is bad policy: “Suing your customers, as a long-term strategy, is dumb — even if they bring misfortune upon themselves. … The suits are the unfortunate, but predictable response of an industry that failed to see the Internet until it stared it in the face. Since Napster ( news -web sites ) first appeared four years ago and declared the death of the compact disc, music CD sales have fallen more than 25 percent. A generation of music fans don’t think twice about copyrights, which they associate with overpriced CDs and parasitic studio execs.”

According to the Mercury News editorial board, the music labels “won’t win back many of those customers until they make their full catalog of tunes easily accessible over the Internet, in formats that people want, at prices they’re willing to pay. That’s starting to happen — Apple Computer ‘s iTunes Music Store and BuyMusic.com are offering songs from 49 cents to $1 — but the offerings are limited. The music studios are still dragging their feet. For now, the big labels hope to scare people straight, particularly parents, since copyright owners can sue children for theft.”

The New York Times pointed out an even larger implication of the RIAA suits: “With the club of lawsuits and the olive branch of an amnesty program, the music industry is waging a campaign against online piracy that relies on both public relations and economics to attack the idea that everything in cyberspace can be free,” the article said. “That will not be easy. The Internet sprang from a research culture where information of all kinds was freely shared. That mentality still resonates with the millions of Internet users who routinely download music onto their computers. But the emphatic message of the music industry’s two-step program announced yesterday is that the days of plucking copyrighted songs off the Internet without paying for them are numbered.”

An Escalating Fight Against Ordinary People

Thousands more lawsuits against fileswappers are expected in the coming months as the RIAA looks to make examples of the worst digital pirates: People accused of downloading and sharing on average more than 1,000 illegally downloaded songs, thanks to Gnutella ( news -web sites ),Kazaa ,Grokster and other popular file-trading services.

The Washington Post said the “legal offensive aims to stem the tide of online song sharing launched by Napster in the late 1990s, and it is likely to strike fear into the hearts of parents who have not closely monitored their teenagers’ computer habits. That’s because the lawsuits were filed against the holders of Internet service accounts, regardless of who in the household was responsible for swapping the songs.”

The Los Angeles Times said the “cases — the first of thousands the labels expect to file in federal courts — mark a turning point in the music industry’s four-year battle against rampant piracy on the Internet. For the first time, the recording industry is training its considerable legal firepower on individuals, not the companies profiting from the public’s hunger for free music,” The Los Angeles Times said. “One quirk in the process, though, is that the defendants named aren’t necessarily the people using file-sharing networks. That’s because the Recording Industry Assn. of America’s investigation identified only the people whose Internet access accounts were being used to share files. They might be the parents, roommates or spouses of the alleged pirates.”

The RIAA suits hit the young and old and stretched across economic lines too. Among those sued is the Bassett family from Northern California. ” Scott Bassett said neither he nor his wife used the family PC in Redwood City, Calif., for music, but their teenagers and dozens of their friends do. Had he known what was going on, he said, ‘I would have pulled the plug,'” The Los Angeles Times reported, quoting the former junkyard operator who, like other targets of the suits, was confused about what to do. “Do I really need to hire a lawyer? Can I just call them up and say I’m sorry and give them back all the music that was downloaded? I’m just a little guy,” Bassett told the paper.

The Bassetts were darlings of the media yesterday, appearing in a number of articles, perhaps since they illustrated so nicely the ironic twist of the suits, which can target people who own the ISP accounts, not necessarily the file-swappers themselves. “I can’t believe this,” Vonnie Bassett , mother of a 17-year-old file-swapper, told The San Jose Mercury News. “To think I might actually have to pay money to these people. I think it’s the stupidest thing that the recording industry would do this.”

Lisa Schamis , a 26-year-old New Yorker, “said her Internet provider warned her two months ago that record industry lawyers had asked for her name and address, but she said she had no idea she might be sued. She acknowledged downloading ‘lots’ of music over file-sharing networks,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. “This is ridiculous,” Schamis said. “People like me who did this, I didn’t understand it was illegal.” Neither did Nancy Davis , a Sanol, Calif. schoolbus driver. “From what I understood — and I’m not the most computer-savvy person in the world — I thought it was becoming legal,” Davis told The San Francisco Chronicle. “I’m completely shocked by the whole thing,” Heather McGough , a single mom of two children from Santa Clarita, Calif., told The Los Angeles Times. She “figured that the music-sharing services that survived after Napster was shut down must be legal. She said she let a friend install a program for the Kazaa file-sharing network on her computer so that she could listen to music — songs she already owned on CDs — while she worked.”

Paying the Piper

So what’s in store for those snared in the RIAA lawsuits? “The RIAA suits seek an injunction to stop the defendants’ file sharing, as well as damages and court costs. Copyright law allows for damages of up to $150,000 per infringement — in other words, per swapped song,” The Washington Post noted. More from The Boston Globe: “Accusing the defendants of copyright infringement, the music association is requesting statutory damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song, bringing the potential liability of some file-sharers into the millions of dollars.”

“Individuals, I’m sure no matter who they are, simply don’t have that kind of money,” Atlanta attorney Doug Isenberg , who specializes in Internet law, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And there’s no way possible the RIAA can sue even a meaningful number of people, because there are tens of millions of potential defendants.”

Perhaps some good news for those being sued: The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the “RIAA has been settling for less: Yesterday, it announced $3,000 agreements with fewer than 10 people whose Internet service providers had received subpoenas.”

RIAA President Cary Sherman told The Los Angeles Times “he would welcome cases going to trial because it would help establish for the public that file sharing is illegal. The proceeds from any trials or settlements will be kept by the RIAA to cover the cost of its anti-piracy campaigns, he said, rather than being used to compensate labels and artists. Several lawyers warned that the RIAA’s amnesty offer may be a bad deal. Those who apply for amnesty from the RIAA must confess their past transgressions, but that won’t protect them from being pursued by music publishers, independent labels or even federal prosecutors.” The RIAA is offering amnesty to those who admitted to file-swapping, erase their digital libraries of songs and sign a notarized promise not to do it again.

Criticism From the Usual Suspects

Critics of the RIAA’s move were vocal in their objections to yesterday’s developments. The Electronic Frontier Foundation clearly hates the idea of the lawsuits. “Does anyone think that suing 60 million American file-sharers is going to motivate them to buy more CDs?,” EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer asked in a statement . “File sharing networks represent the greatest library of music in history, and music fans would be happy to pay for access to it, if only the recording industry would let them.”

Bill Evans , founder of Boycott-RIAA.com , told The Baltimore Sun that the lawsuits amount to a witch hunt. “They are trying to intimidate people and to stop file-sharing because they can’t control it,” Evans said. “If that’s the case, we believe they should take over a portion of the market and make it more affordable to people.”

Elan Oren , chief executive of file-sharing site iMesh , told The New York Times that “rather than filing huge lawsuits, record labels should work with file-sharing services to devise a method of compensation in exchange for legally distributing their music over the peer-to-peer networks. But record companies say creating a compensation system for file sharing — for instance, imposing a tax that could be redistributed to copyright holders — would be extremely difficult.”

“Michael McGuire , research director at the GartnerG2 research firm, said the threat of legal action needs to be just one part of a more widespread effort by the recording industry to deal with illegal Internet music swapping,” The Chicago Tribune said. “Are hard-core traders going to see the light and see the error of their ways?” McGuire told the paper. “I don’t think so.”

RIAA Strategy Paying Off

The music industry’s tactics, while controversial, have made a dent to some file-swapping. “Still, there is little agreement about whether the industry’s tactics are having much impact on music piracy. The recording industry has cited data from research firm NPD Group that estimated the number of households downloading music from the Internet declined 28% to 10.4 million in June from 14.5 million in April, around the time music companies began publicizing a campaign to target individual file sharers. Music companies have also been trying to wean music fans off file-sharing programs by licensing their songs to commercial music sites like Apple Computer Inc.’s Music Store,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “But services like Morpheus, LimeWire and Grokster all report that usage of their services has grown, especially as students have returned from vacation.”

But the music industry has a long way to go before it stamps out piracy. “From the rise of Napster until today, tens of millions of people have started trading songs, movies and software online through services such as Kazaa with little thought for the legality of their actions,” News.com noted. “Even as the threat of Monday’s lawsuits loomed, more than 2.8 million copies of the Kazaa software were downloaded last week, according to Download.com , a software aggregation site operated by CNET News.com publisher CNET Networks . Indeed, a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 67 percent of people downloading music said they did not care whether the music was copyrighted or not.”

The Future of E-Music?

Apple’s iTunes is being held up as a successful, legal alternative to secret file-swapping. The pay-for-play service has been a hit with music fans and everyone from Sony to Microsoft is looking for a comparable match to compete with the service. Apple’s service has sold 10 million songs since its launch in May. “Legally selling 10 million songs online in just four months is a historic milestone for the music industry, musicians and music lovers everywhere,” Apple head Steve Jobs ( news -web sites )said, according to BBC News Online, which noted (how ironic, in light of the complications of the RIAA’s legal suits) that the 10 millionth song sold on the service was “Complicated,” by Avril Lavigne .

Question: Why does my monitor need to be on 802.11?

-Ian.

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncidX2&e=8&cidX2&u=/nm/ 20030312/wr_nm/tech_intel_wifi_dc

Intel Wireless Computer Push Sparks Industry Rush Tue Mar 11, 9:22 PM ET Add Technology – Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

By Elinor Mills Abreu and Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO/HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) – Flexing its muscles as the world’s largest chipmaker, Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC – news) on Wednesday will show how its industry arm-twisting could make connecting to the Internet via wireless networks a standard feature on mobile computers within a year.

At news conferences from Sydney to Beijing, from Tokyo to New York, Intel will finally unveil its much-ballyhooed set of chips known as Centrino that it hopes will become the wireless computer counterpart of its established Pentium chip line.

Analysts think Intel’s push could be one bright spot in an otherwise dismal market for new technology this year.

But by marshaling top notebook computer makers, retailers such as McDonald’s Corp. and U.S. bookseller Borders, and mobile telephone providers around the globe, Intel is giving the biggest boost yet to a technology sometimes seen as a spoiler for the emerging generation of mobile Internet phones.

Intel is lending support to a grass-roots technology that for years suffered from fragmented industry support and disparate names such as Wi-Fi, WLAN (wireless local area network) and 802.11, by transforming a patchwork of local and regional efforts into a worldwide grid for wireless computing.

NOTEBOOK MAKERS SIGN ON

Despite initial resistance to the idea, top-ranked notebook computer suppliers have signed on, including Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HWP – news), Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq:DELL – news), International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM – news), Toshiba Corp. (6502.T) and Sony Corp (news – web sites). (6758.T) Gateway Inc. (NYSE:GTW – news), the No. 3 U.S. PC maker, is also introducing Centrino-based laptops.

“Every notebook vendor is launching and announcing products with us on Wednesday,” Don Macdonald, Intel’s director of mobile product marketing, said of top computer makers in an interview with Reuters ahead of the product unveiling.

By putting the functions of wireless networks inside the brains of an off-the-shelf laptop, rather than computer users having to configure add-in cards, Intel could set off a veritable tsunami to help propel Wi-Fi into wide use, analysts are predicting. Widespread wireless computer connections could create a sea change in the way computers are used, they say.

Analyst Steve Kleynhans of META Group predicts that by the end of 2003 Centrino will be at the core of up to 80 percent of the new laptops bought by companies, allowing office workers to walk from desk to conference room untethered. Up to half of consumer laptops could be equipped with it this year.

“You’ll find that virtually all notebooks sold into the corporate markets, and by extension, most notebooks sold into the consumer markets, will end up wireless,” Kleynhans said.

PUSH COMES TO SHOVE

Intel’s technology marketing machine looks set to succeed where prior industry prodding has fallen short.

In the late 1990s Apple Computer Inc. jump-started consumer support for the technology by offering a home radio unit known as Airport, while in 2001 Microsoft’s XP operating system simplified the way Wi-Fi worked for Windows users.

Apple, analysts say, has been out in front in creating wireless networking technologies that are fairly easy to set up. The iconic computer maker’s chief executive and co-founder Steve Jobs (news – web sites) has dubbed 2003 the “year of the notebook.”

Wi-Fi provides high-speed Internet access from fixed-position phone or cable television network lines.

Users of properly equipped laptops can gain access to the Internet, or potentially their own corporate network, if they are within 100 meters (328 feet) of a Wi-Fi access point.

Already Wi-Fi is popular among home computer enthusiasts who can install a small antenna box in their house to create a local network linking PCs and other home electronics. The trend is catching on in offices, but security concerns are a snag.

Centrino is intended to be used only in laptops and notebooks, which will be priced competitively with Pentium models. “They’re priced for the mass market,” Macdonald said.

Intel said in a statement on Tuesday that laptops will cost as little as $1,399, comparable to today’s notebook computers.

The microprocessor portion of Centrino is available at clock speeds ranging from 1.30 gigahertz to 1.60 gigahertz, and the price of the chips includes the chipset and the network connection device, Intel said.

The 1.60 GHz Pentium M costs $720; the 1.50 GHz processor costs $506; the 1.40 GHz chip $377; and the 1.3 GHz costs $324, all in quantities of 1,000, Intel said. There are also two low-voltage processors available, running at 1.10 GHZ and 900 megahertz, costing $345 and $324, respectively.

Intel’s push into the wireless computing market is helping prod other major electronics makers to create built-in wireless connections in their own products.

Philips Electronics (PHG.AS) Chief Executive Gerard Kleisterlee said on Tuesday his company is planning to offer a full line-up of consumer electronics products with built-in wireless connections, including computer monitors, portable music and video players, sound speakers and televisions.

JOINING THE PARADE

Intel’s move encourages not just consumers and companies to install wireless networks, but also telecoms carriers and independent operators.

Public wireless computer locations are known as “hotspots.” They have the potential to create a Web of wireless connections in heavily traveled locations like hotels and airports serving business travelers, Starbucks cafes, and even public plazas.

Hilton Hotels said on Tuesday it plans to make Wi-Fi available in 50 of its North American hotels this month. By 2007, some 25,000 hotels globally will offer Wi-Fi, up from just 1,000 in 2002, according to a recent estimate published by market forecasters Pyramid Research. “Wi-Fi will become as free as the soap in the rooms,” the report predicts.

In Japan and South Korea (news – web sites) key operators have aggressively built Wi-Fi networks, even though they will eat into some of their other wireless services, such as mobile phone traffic.

Every Wi-Fi hotspot that sprouts up at the local coffee shop or airport represents one less potential revenue-earning area for cash-starved mobile operators that have invested billions building these new phone networks.

Nonetheless, mobile phone companies across Scandinavia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom are lining up to supply Wi-Fi services on the theory that if anyone is going to skim their revenues, it had best be themselves.

“I think that both technologies complement each other extremely well,” Rudolf Groeger, chief executive of O2 Germany (OOM.L), the country’s fourth largest wireless operator.