While most attention has been focused on the ease and frequency of downloading music or movie files, students who want a personal copy of their favorite TV shows as soon as possible are turning to BitTorrent in addition to the campus-only Direct Connect hub.

Neall, a junior journalism major, used BitTorrent, a worldwide peer-to-peer data transfer method, to follow the debut season of Dexter on Showtime.

He likes the convenience of downloading because he’s often busy when shows air for the first time.

The NBA Download Store is open for business and offering single game downloads for $2.99, full playoffs for $79.99, and individual series for $12.99. Games are not permitted to be burned onto a DVD, and may be downloaded to a maximum of 3 separate PCs or portable media player devices. For reasons unknown, it’s oddly available only to users in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico for the time being.

In addition, the NBA Download Store is not yet available to Mac users because the Windows Media DRM used to secure content from unauthorized usage is not yet supported on the Mac platform. The minimum requirements for the store are Windows Media 9 or higher, Windows XP OS, Internet Explorer 5.5 and above, and a broadband Internet connection.

According to Steve Grimes, who, as the league’s vice president of interactive services, oversees NBA.com, early sales have been “promising.”

“It’s not a big surprise: great games and surprising results have driven the most popular downloads,” Mr. Grimes said. For instance, he said, the hotly contested series between the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks has sold well, as has the final game from last year’s championship series between the Miami Heat and the Mavericks.

The download’s appeal will be augmented by the fact that they will be commercial and timeout free, offering nonstop action from start to finish.

Added appeal will be be an interesting new feature to debut some time in the near future that will allow users to search downloaded content using event tags. NBA techs will break down each game and tag events as they occur. Users will then be able to search for shots scored, assists, rebounds, etc., of each player and then quickly be able to find and view that segment of video footage.

There are about 500 such highlights in each game, and because only humans can log these events, the tagging process is labor intensive. Mr. Hellmuth said the league has about 40,000 games on tape in its archive, mostly from 1990 and later, and about 3,800 have been logged.

“We’re getting slowly to our older games, but we’ll be focused 100 percent on that this summer,” Mr. Hellmuth said. It will take about eight years before all 40,000 games are digitized and logged. Mr. Hellmuth declined to discuss the cost of the project. “We view this as a mission we have to execute for the fans,” he said. “The revenue side of it comes second.”

Added features like event searching are what will make or break the NBA Download Store. Users have a variety of options to acquire content for FREE on their own but, if the service is able to combine ad and timeout free content with a searchable event tag capability it just may win over users and make them customers of the new service.

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/NBA_offering_3_playoff_game_downloads’;

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The national telephone survey by the University of Richmond Intellectual Property Institute, sponsored by the National CyberEducation Project (law.richmond.edu/ipi/) showed three-quarters of the students understand free downloading is illegal, and 60 percent say it’s unethical.

Why do the law-breaking students do it? To save money. It’s a matter of economics over ethics, they say.

The survey shows 22 percent of the students believe downloading copyright-protected files without paying is legal and 39 percent think it should be.

“What we’re seeing here is an awareness of the legal and ethical implications of illegal downloading, which may result from the increased incidence of subpoenas,” Jim Gibson, professor at the University of Richmond Law School and director of the Intellectual Property Institute, said in a statement.

IT’S A FAMILIAR story line in Hollywood: An innovative high-tech company unveils a revolutionary new way to sell entertainment, only to be waylaid by giant retailers that don’t want to disturb the old ways. This kind of conflict delayed videotapes and DVDs, doomed CD-burning kiosks, slowed the development of downloadable music stores — and now it’s affecting the nascent downloadable movie business.

Apple Computer unveiled its long-awaited online movie store Sept. 12, offering for $10 to $15 feature films that could be played on a Mac, a PC or a video iPod (or all of the above). It also showed off a prototype of a TV converter box that would let viewers beam the films they buy from Apple from their computer to their TV set.

But despite the hype, the shelves at the iTunes store were relatively bare, offering only 75 movies, all from Disney and its subsidiaries. By contrast, when Apple launched its iTunes Music Store in April 2003, it had more than 200,000 songs from all five of the major record companies and top independent labels.

Where were the rest of the studios? Some reports blamed their absence on Wal-Mart and other big retailers, the partners that Hollywood can scarcely afford to alienate. It’s a symbiotic relationship: New DVD releases drive shoppers into the stores, and the resulting sales — with profit margins about 80% — drive up the studios’ revenues.

Tower will market the digital alternative across all media in tandem with the chain’s retail business, which comprises 89 stores in the United States.

Initially the store will offer a catalog of 1.2 million tracks priced at 99 cents each or $9.99 for an entire album. Artist information and other related material is provided by Muze.

Tower Records chief marketing officer Russ Eisenman said the digital store fit perfectly with Tower’s history of offering music in all formats that prevailed throughout its 45-year history.

I’m going to give you all some links to the new programs and the many new sections, over 10 in total. So go check them out and enjoy them because they are all freely available for review and download right here at the home of P2P – Zeropaid.

● Personal Firewall Section – Full of the latest and modern Firewall software!

● CD / DVD Tools Section – All the essential tools to make the most of your drive!

● Codecs Pack Section – Play all that downloaded media with the correct codecs!

● MP3 Tools Section – Harness the sweetness of MP3 with these helpful tools!

● Antivirus Section – Stop all those annoying intruders with these Antivirus programs!

● Compression Section – Open up those downloads with the compression tools!

● Disk Cleanup Section – Cleanup your computer with ease using this software!

● Internet Browser Section – Browse safely and securly in your browser of choice!

● Photo Editors Section – Its the new ages of images, explore and be as creative!

● Registry Section – One of the most important parts of your computer, keep it clean!

● RSS Readers Section – RSS Feeds are the future and here are some great choices!

The BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack and Multi-Network sections have also been updated as well as the other sections in the File Sharing, Tools and Audio & Video so go and check them all out!

If you have any new programs you would like to be advertised here and added to the site, please don’t hesitate to contact me with the programs information and I’ll gladly review it and add it to the site.

Contact me at ZP II Skype Me!

~ Auggie2k

In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Warner Music said the company has been named in 14 class-action lawsuits, most of which allege a “conspiracy among record companies to fix prices for downloads.”

“The company intends to defend against these lawsuits vigorously,” Warner Music said in its 10-Q statement filed Friday.

The accusations come three months after Elliott Spitzer, New York’s Attorney General, began investigating whether the music company agreed to fix download prices.

Warner Music reported in its filing that it expects the 14 lawsuits to be consolidated into one.