Webcasters, RIAA Agree on Fees 

The recording industry and operators of educational and noncommercial websites have settled on royalty rates for broadcasting music over the Internet, circumventing a looming arbitration battle, the recording industry said Tuesday.

The agreement spares the industry and webcasters a costly arbitration with the U.S. Copyright Office, which was scheduled to start at the end of the month, the Recording Industry Association of America said in a statement.

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The deal covers six years, 1998 to 2004, and sets the range of annual minimum fees webcasters must pay to broadcast copyright music over the Internet. Depending on the year, how many broadcast channels a webcaster transmits on and the type of website, the noncommercial webcasters will have to pay from $200 to $500 annually.

A 1998 law required that organizations broadcasting music and other radio content over the Internet pay fees to record companies to compensate artists and music labels for use of their songs.

Initial attempts by the industry and webcasters to agree on fees failed and the dispute fell to the Copyright Office. The office set fees per song, drawing complaints from large and small webcasters. A new round of arbitration was scheduled, but the agreements now make that unnecessary.

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CIA software to scour photos: The CIA is bankrolling efforts to improve technology designed to scour millions of digital photos or video clips for particular cars or street signs or even, some day, human faces.

The innovative software from fledgling PiXlogic promises to help analysts make better use of the CIA's enormous electronic archives. Analysts also could be alerted whenever a helicopter or other targeted item appeared in a live video broadcast. PiXlogic plans to announce that the CIA's venture-capital organization, In-Q-Tel, has invested an unspecified amount to help the company improve the software.

"There was a great deal of interest in these capabilities," In-Q-Tel's president said of the picture-monitoring effort. "Because more and more of what is on the Internet is in visual form, the ability to search on those materials is important and getting more important all the time."

PiXlogic said the company is probably one year from adding effective, face-recognition features to its software to help the CIA track photographs or videos of specific people. The cloak-and-dagger software presently has only rudimentary ability to recognize a person's face and then find other photos and video footage of that person.

PiXlogic executives hope to work through other companies to bring a version of the technology to consumers who have digital cameras and need help organizing their libraries.

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Entering the Matrix hype: Video game publisher Atari said it had sold more than a million copies of its Enter the Matrix video game in 18 days, defying negative reviews and making it the company's fastest-selling game ever in North America.

The hotly hyped game was widely expected to sell well, since it was written by the Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed the movie The Matrix Reloaded, the sequel to The Matrix, which had the second-largest opening weekend ever for a movie.

Atari's game included an hour of extra footage with the movie's actors, but a gaming magazine and a game-ranking service gave it only moderately positive reviews, raising questions over whether sales of Enter the Matrix could be sustained.

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Microsoft delivers authentication: Microsoft announced two deals with authentication-service providers that will allow users to digitally sign and seal electronic documents.

Companies are increasingly turning to digital authentication as a way to verify the origins, author and details of electronic documents, instead of shuffling paper documents that need official approval.

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