A Universal Copy-Protection System? - An alliance of Sony, Phillips, Samsung and Matsushita has been formed to deal with the continuing issue of downloading rights. They want to make sure that consumers are using only properly licensed video and music media. Their joint effort has been named Marlin Joint Development Association, and the idea is to create a copy-protection system that would work for everything from cell phones and digital music players to video recorders, rather than the several different and incompatible approaches used by different manufacturers at present. The alliance feels that the division among approaches to rights protection is weakening the success of securing digital entertainment. Interestingly, neither Apple nor Microsoft are involved in the talks; both have their own systems.
Threat to Rights/Privacy from New Technology - Something called HOTLLAMA Media has been launched with a four-DVD gaming agreement with 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. The HOTLLAMA player software interface technology offers an all-in-one, customizable multimedia player merging DVD video, Internet, high-end graphics, Flash content, games, promotions, marketing, and third party applications. And thru its backend data collection engine the new player also allows DVD producers to anonymously track the end user’s actual use of the features being accessed on both DVD and DVD-ROM - every single click and all in real time. Sound a bit scary? Not being a gamer myself I could care less, but if you expect to be playing The Day After Tomorrow or Alien vs. Predator in the near future be prepared to have a stranger watching your every move over your shoulder...
Sonos Digital Music System Now Shipping - The networked audio system allows users to play digital music files stored on any networked Mac, PC or other storage device. It consists of a Zone player connected to an Ethernet, Wi-Fi or Airport network, has a 50-watt built-in amp, and a wireless control pad with color screen giving the user access to the interface. The unit can play back AAC, MP3, WMA, WAV and Internet radio stations, and each Zone player can play different music if you wish. Two Zone players and one controller go for SRP: $1199.
Feb. 9, 2005 
