Camera Phones Plaza

On Wednesday, the court acquitted MediaServices of copyright infringement charges.
The company, lead by Denis Kvasov, owns the music download website allofmp3.com.
Disputes with the music companies started because the charges for the tracks were to little compared with what was specified in the distribution contracts.

Allofmp3.com was accused also for copyright infringement.
Based on a Russian law, lawyers managed to exculpate Kvasov for the charges of breaching the law.

The Recording Industry Association of America criticizes the court’s decision with vehemence, pin-pointing the Russian law flaws.

"It is unfortunate that the court could have misconstrued the law so as to fail to understand the criminality of the defendant's conduct," declared Neil Turkewitz, RIAA’s executive VP.
"There is no better evidence of the need for immediate and fundamental reform of Russia's legal system in the area of the protection of intellectual property".

He believes that customers were deceived, the website taking advantage of the artists and copyright owners, and that Russia’s laws are "incompatible with international standards."

Turkewitz mentioned the fact that Russia must comply with the agreement for advancing to the World Trade Organization and with the requirements of the 2006 U.S.-Russia IPR Agreement.

He concluded with: "We hope that today's setback reinvigorates the determination of the Russian government to take the necessary actions to reform its practices, to secure compliance with last year's agreement, and to demonstrate to the world its commitment to the rule of law and compliance with international norms".

While I was in school, I didn't enjoy painting classes at all, but when I have the chance to play with a computer software that is usually used to create digital paintings. Well, it's harder to create really good works with a mouse and no talent, but if you want to have some fun, Twisted Brush is one of the best choices around!


Setup

As I write this, the latest version of the program is 13.7, and its price is 39.95$ (6 months license, and 6 months of free updates), but a limited trial version is available to play with for 15 days. The setup package has only 12.3MB in size, and I say "only" because there's a lot to discover inside this program, as you'll see a bit later, but for now, check these shots taken during the installation of the program. As you can see, no problem with this part, so let's move on!

Interface

TwistedBrush has an interface that looks dusty, with black and white icons on the toolbar and that gives me the feeling of a program from the end of the 1990s. Anyway, don't think that this means you'll have problems using it, because this is not the truth. The tools are much better than the looks, so let's move on and talk about them a little...


Features

The first place to look when opening the program is the tools panel to the left of the main window. Here, you can gain quick access to an incredible amount of brushes and presets. Layers are also supported, and the concept of the sketchbook used in TwistedBrush is a really interesting one. So...what is this sketchbook concept?

When creating a new document in this program, you are not having only a page at your disposal, but the first page of a sketchbook that can go on and on for thousands of pages (I can't guarantee you that, because I didn't have the time or inspiration to test this limit).



To draw the line, TwistedBrush has only two major limits: your imagination and skill, because most of the features that you get from other professional graphics applications, such as layers or filters, are here.


The Good

TwistedBrush is not hungry when talking about the system resources used, and not even when thinking about its price, but the best part is that an impressive amount of built in presets and templates is available, and even better, it has support for PSD files!

The Bad

The interface needs to get into this millenium and catch up with the rest of the program, because it's really a shame for TwistedBrush to lose the market share it deserves because of this.

Conclusion

Despite its tough competition, Pixarra's product is an excellent graphics tool for Windows users, and you really don't have to be an artist to create some nice works with it. Just hit the download link, install it and have fun!

Developer: Pixarra
Price: 39.95$(6 months)/169.95$(unlimited)
Trial Link: Download

LimeWire is planning to become legitimate by changing the method in which it offers audio files for its users.

The creator of this file-sharing program, Lime Wire LLC, announced its intentions to create a website where people could buy songs or albums from.
This music download service will consist of an online store, a stand-alone one at first, which will be accessible from links in LimeWire software.

In the future it will evolve and the users will have the possibility to browse and purchase songs directly from the program.
Tracks will have the MP3 file format and will be available also as part of a monthly subscription plan.

LimeWire is known as a peer-to-peer networking service, founded in 2000, and used by many people around the world.

In present, the illegitimate factor lead the company into a dispute with Recording Industry Association of America which wants LimeWire to be fined with 150,000 US dollars for every song downloaded using the file-sharing program.

On its way on becoming legitimate, Lime Wire LLC is signing up partners for the new project and the first two companies listed are Nettwerk Productions and IRIS Distribution, which will provide songs for the new service.

Jesse Rubenfeld, the Lime Wire Chief Financial Officer, declared: "We are delighted to collaborate with these forward-thinking music companies and sell their authorized content through LimeWire".

Activated Content Corp. from Seattle, a leader in the audio watermarking field, believes that file-sharing on the Internet might become legal.

The audio watermarking technology consists of digital manipulating a song in such a way that the person can’t hear the audio pattern that is detectable only by the right software.
"You can't hear it, so you don't know it's there," said Eric Silberstein, CEO of Activated Content.

The watermark is part of the audio is very difficult to be removed.
An example would be the ID3 metadata tags embedded by iTunes in songs.
Silberstein said that it could be cracked though but only with a Cray supercomputer in a month and a half.

Audio experts say that an audio watermark can even be rerecorded using an analog cassette deck with a low-fidelity microphone.

The popularity of this technology grew over copy protection and other DRM methods.

According to Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne LLC, an online media research firm, the bad aspects of using this technology are its high costs and the fact that that audio watermarking, while it has enabled record companies to gather evidences of consumers illegally file-sharing music, doesn't overcome the fundamental problem of the big and strong negative reaction that would be generated by suing pirating customers on a mass scale.

Many record companies are giving licenses for audio watermarking from Activated in trials and that allows customers to download unprotected music and movies that have the content and advertising tracked by audio watermarks.

Sony Music and Universal Music are listed among these kinds of companies as users of Activated and others are operating under nondisclosure agreements.

Eric Silberstein highlighted the fact that the tracking technology allows advertisers to collect information about the customers and the effectiveness of the ad.
This kind of data is very valuable so that advertisers are willing to pay 5 to 10 times rate of a regular as for an ad: "What content owners have been afraid would reduce their income is now an opportunity to increase their income".

Activated announced on Wednesday that it will license audio watermarks developed by Microsoft’s Research section.

Silberstein’s opinion is that this technology is the key because it creates simpler watermarks that can be decoded by MP3 players in smart phones too, besides PCs.
The phones that will be able to detect Activated watermarks will appear next year.

Activated earns from selling the software to record labels, broadcasters and advertisers, but also from charging per transaction.

An Internet Protocol address, widely known as "IP address" is, for most of us, a number that makes our computer an entity on the Internet or on a local network. What some people don't know is that this number can reveal a lot of information about us, like location, ISP name, and sometimes even phisical address, depending on the settings made by our ISP. As long as you want privacy and security on the Internet just like inside your own house, hiding your real IP address is an excellent choice, and one of the tools that can help you accomplish this task is Hide My IP 2007, a small and useful software application .


Setup

The last stable version of this program is 2.09, and was released about 3 months ago. The setup package is a little larger than 1MB, and installing it is a piece of cake, as you can see in the screenshots below...

Interface
Once you start the program, the window that you can see in the screenshot to the left appears. Until you'll decide to purchase the program, you have 3 days to try Hide My IP 2007, and during this period you'll miss some features of the full version. Most of the time, the main window of this program will stay hidden, because once you set the options, there's no need to keep the main window in sight.


Features

The main purpose of this program is really simple - to hide your IP, revealing a different one to sites or users that try to get this information. For example, after installing the program and choosing to hide my IP, different websites located me in USA, based on the IP assigned by the program, while my real location is a few thousand miles away...

While the full version can change your IP every 5 minutes, the trial one is limited to using a single one. Hide My IP is fully compatible with IE, Firefox, Opera and Netscape browsers, and the premium services can add even more to your online security. Other than the above, there's nothing much to say. This program really works, and it's so easy to use, that everybody should be able to use it, even without understanding much about all the technical mumbo-jumbo. Just check the screenshots and you'll understand it all!

The Good

Hide My IP 2007 does exactly what its name says, quick and easy. The full version allows you to use a single fake IP, which can be very useful for a lot of things, when an ever-changing IP can lead to unwanted results.

The Bad

I think that 29.95$ is simply too much for this program, especially as long as the premium service is available for an extra charge.

Conclusion

If you worry about exposing your identity on the Internet, Hide My IP 2007 is an excellent medicine that will help you sleep well at night. If the price will be lowered to a better one, this program can become the best choice for all of us, beginners or experts.

Developer: My Privacy Tools Inc
Price: 29.95$
Trial Link: Download