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WASHINGTON (AP) — Earlier this week NASA safely landed a robotic rover on Mars about 150 million miles away. But on Thursday here on Earth, a test model planetary lander crashed and burned at Kennedy Space Center in Florida just seconds after liftoff. The spider-like spacecraft called Morpheus was on a test flight at Cape Canaveral when it tilted, crashed to the ground and erupted in flames. It got only a few feet up in the air, NASA said. ... Morpheus is a prototype for a cheap, environmentally friendly planetary lander. Thursday was the first time it had been tested...

Curiosity’s potential sucessor, Morpheus, explodes after hardware failure Vid NASA’s prototype landing craft of the future, Morpheus, has crashed and burned in its latest launch test. Morpheus is designed to become a general-purpose lander capable of setting down payloads wherever NASA wants them. The Moon, Mars and even asteroids are mentioned in its design brief. The craft has undergone several tests when suspended on a tether beneath a crane while its engines get a workout. Those tests have gone well, but a new test of the lander flying all by itself went rather badly, as can be seen in the...

Louise: "No these are not my songs." They are however downloaded right onto her computer. Louise:"I was embarrassed when they gave me a print out of these songs." She got this printout because of lawyers. She also got this letter telling her she was being sued for copyright infringement.Parents, there are other popular file sharing programs you need to know about: Morpheus: morpheus.com Kazaa: www.kazaa.com Bearshare: www.bearshare.com Limewire: www.limewire.com Louise: "I was in shock..I was stunned." The letter is part of a music industry crackdown.Singers, songwriters and music companies tired of people downloading and burning copies of music without paying....

Jan. 19, 2005 Justice Dept. gains first P2P piracy convictions By Brooks BoliekWASHINGTON -- The Justice Department on Tuesday notched its first-ever convictions for copyright piracy perpetrated on P2P networks as two suspects nabbed by the G-men in the department's "Operation Digital Gridlock" pleaded guilty to felony intellectual property crimes. William Trowbridge, 50, of Johnson City, N.Y., and Michael Chicoine, 47, of San Antonio each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit felony criminal copyright infringement before Judge Paul Friedman in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The men made available millions of dollars worth...

If you own a movie or record copyright, and someone else "induces" people to start infringing it, should you be able to sue the inducer? Senator Orrin Hatch thinks so, and it's possible his bad idea could become bad law. Granted, he's trying to address a real copyright problem. Music labels and movie studios are playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole, with new Internet file-sharing networks popping up faster than the recording industry can protest. The newest networks, including KaZaa and Morpheus, are run as for-profit piracy havens but have found ways to skirt copyright laws. They display advertising on...

WASHINGTON - A 12-year-old girl in New York who was among the first to be sued by the record industry for sharing music over the Internet is off the hook after her mother agreed Tuesday to pay $2,000 to settle the lawsuit, apologizing and admitting that her daughter's actions violated U.S. copyright laws. The hurried settlement involving Brianna LaHara, an honors student, was the first announced one day after the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) filed 261 such lawsuits across the country. Lawyers for the RIAA said Brianna's mother, Sylvia Torres, contacted them early Tuesday to...

Nervous music file-swappers who worry they may be on the list of 871 people targeted by recording industry subpoenas now have a Web site where their fears can be allayed -- or confirmed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group that fights for personal and privacy rights in cyberspace, has set up a Web site that lets users of file-sharing services check to see if their screen names have been targeted for legal action by the Recording Industry Association of America. According to information on the site, the data is gathered from electronic court records and may not be complete....

Music Labels Step Up Internet Piracy Hunt TED BRIDIS Associated PressWASHINGTON - The embattled music industry disclosed plans Wednesday for an unprecedented escalation in its fight against Internet piracy, threatening to sue hundreds of individual computer users who illegally share music files online. The Recording Industry Association of America, citing significant sales declines, said it will begin Thursday to search Internet file-sharing networks to identify music fans who offer "substantial" collections of MP3 song files for downloading. It expects to file at least several hundred lawsuits seeking financial damages within eight to 10 weeks. Executives for the RIAA, the Washington-based...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- It's time to buy, mix, and burn, according to Apple Computer Inc. The Silicon Valley company that angered the recording industry with its "Rip. Mix. Burn" ad campaign has won the support of all five major record labels for its new Music Store service, which makes more than 200,000 songs available online at 99 cents a download. The service announced Monday removes several limitations that have so far reduced legitimate online music distribution to a small niche in the entertainment industry. For example, consumers can buy songs and keep them for as long as they...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal court in Los Angeles rejected the recording industry's case against online song-swapping services Grokster and Morpheus on Friday, Grokster President Wayne Rosso said. "The case filed against us by the RIAA and the MPAA has been thrown out of court," said Rosso, referring to the trade groups for the recording and motion-picture industries that had asked the court to shut down the two services.The two services allow users to trade songs, movies and other material freely over the Internet. The Recording Industry Association of America has aggressively sought to knock such services offline, saying they...

A federal judge in Los Angeles has handed a stunning court victory to file-swapping services Streamcast Networks and Grokster, dismissing much of the record industry and movie studios' lawsuit against the two companies. In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast--parent of the Morpheus software--and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks, which has also been targeted by the entertainment industry. "Defendants distribute and support software, the...

<p>LONDON, Feb 13 — The recording industry directed its anti-piracy campaign at large companies in the United States, Europe and Asia on Thursday, warning them that employees are illegally downloading music on company time.</p> <p>The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a global trade group representing the major music labels, said it had begun issuing brochures to thousands of companies spelling out the legal and technological dangers of giving employees access to online file-sharing networks.</p>

The Matrix Makers One year, two sequels—and a revolution in moviemaking. An exclusive look behind the scenes of 2003’s hottest flicks Jan. 6 issue — The Warner Brothers studio lot in Burbank, Calif., is frenetic on most days, but on a Thursday in early November it was really humming. The company’s box-office Bigfoot for 2002, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” was set to open in eight days, and nearly every division of the studio was working furiously to get it ready. Until 2:30 p.m. That’s when everything stopped. For the next half hour, the boy wizard had to...

Record labels together with technology companies are meeting consumers' desire to access music online. Looking back over the past year, the legitimate marketplace has grown by leaps and bounds. Four different services now offer content from every major music company, and several others provide a rich array of music and listening options. Music fans can enjoy hundreds of thousands of tracks in many different ways. But what these services do not yet have is enough customers. No business can be expected to compete against an illegal service that is offering the same product for free. If the legitimate services are...

UNIVERSITY PARK - As electronic file-swapping keeps playing its illegal jingle, the recording industry is upping complaints against universities nationwide -- possibly including Penn State. Mike Negra, president of Mike's Video Inc. in State College, said compact-disc sales in college towns in 2002 are "probably down somewhere between 50 and 60 percent" from 1999. "Stores such as mine, and other stores in college markets across the country, were the first to see the potential impact of file-swapping," Negra said. "Business, generally, in that group of stores in the second half of 2000, was down about 40 percent," he said. Writing...

It's rampant. The new P2P systems, such as KaZaA and Morpheus, have picked up where Napster left off, and blank CDs now outsell prerecorded discs. The trend is clear: concern not for the law but for economics. This happens with disruptive technologies. If you had a machine that could make a new Lexus for $1,000, then why would you buy one from Toyota for $50,000? Because you had a moral obligation?You'd wonder why Toyota wouldn't use the same machine to make the car for $1,000. Where is the morality in keeping the price jacked up? Likewise, too many people are...

The music industry is calling out some of its heaviest hitters -- Madonna, Elton John, Eminem, Britney Spears, Nelly, India Arie, Ludacris and Sheryl Crow among them -- in an upcoming TV ad campaign to persuade young people to stop downloading music from the Internet. "Would you go into a CD store and steal a CD?" Spears asks in her spot, which first aired Thursday at a congressional hearing on music piracy legislation. "It's the same thing, people going into the computers and logging on and stealing our music," Spears declares. The multimillion-dollar campaign will hit TV screens in a...

<p>A California Democrat introduced a bill Thursday that would make sharing of copyrighted files illegal, and would indemnify copyright holders from taking whatever actions they chose to prevent the sharing of those files.</p> <p>The effect, if approved by Congress and signed into law, would be to virtually outlaw file-sharing as is commonly known. The bill was authored by and introduced by Rep. Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat representing the 26th Congressional District, which includes North Hollywood. Berman is the ranking member of the Congressional Committee on the Judiciary's subcommittee on courts, the Internet, and intellectual property.</p>

<p>Country music, that bastion of soulful, twangy Americana, was responsible for something very out of character this week. Steve Earle, an on-again, off-again alternative country star, hit an off-note by recording a sympathetic ballad about the travails of a certain young ex-Taliban soldier from Northern California.</p>

"...A MAN WITH SOUL SO DEAD..." : In a shocking turn of events, it appears that Steve Earle, whose new song "John Walker's Blues" is being hailed from Baghdad to Mogadishu, has also written a new version of his hit song, "I Ain't Ever Satisfied" : I Have Been Osamafied (Cat Stevens Earle) My arms sport some serious tracks And my brain's been fried by horse and crack Spent some hard time in the man's prison where I felt the pain of my brother Muslim Aie-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei I have been Osamafied Aie-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei-ei I have been Osamafied Now I know nothing about...