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Old 13-06-07, 09:33 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 16th, '07

Since 2002


































"They tried to scare me. They told me, ‘You’re a pirate!’ I said, ‘C’mon, guys, pirates are all at sea. I just work in a parking lot.’" – Caesar Borrayo


"AT&T is going to act like the copyright police, and that is going to make customers angry." – Gigi B. Sohn


"Now when customers come in, I'm like, 'Just buy it and leave.'" – Todd Clifford


"Theatrical revenue in Europe in 2006 matched 2004's record year of $2.1 billion, with significant gains in three smaller markets -- Italy (up 25%), Russia (67%) and Sweden (38%). The Asia Pacific region, Latin America and the Middle East and Africa also enjoyed double-digit growth for theatrical releases." – MPA confidential report


"So, congratulations to mininova, and I expect we will see the 3 billionth download by the end of summer." – Ernesto


"Windows XP doesn't bog down the rest of your Mac programs the way Windows Vista does." – David Pogue


"Q: Let's get political briefly. In 2000, you sang at the Republican National Convention."

A:"I'm trying to forget that."
– Chaka Khan



































June 16th, 2007







Copyright Coalition: Piracy More Serious Than Burglary, Fraud, Bank Robbery
Ken Fisher

For the more than nine years that Ars Technica has been publishing online, we've been outspoken when it comes to the lack of balance between the threat of piracy (which is always overstated) and the "solutions" to piracy (which are often draconian) that some copyright holders demand. Whether it's laws that would turn the possession of software into a crime, completely baked piracy reports, or yet another law meant to criminalize civil infractions, we've cast a critical eye on an industry that defines solipsism.

And, everyone once and while, we're accused of hyperbole, of exaggerating our objections. That's why it's with both a grin and a lonely tear that I report to you the latest ridiculous claim from the copyright-trumps-all brigade.

NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year." Cotton's comments come in Paul Stweeting's report on Hollywood's latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

There are two obvious rejoinders to such a ridiculous statement. The first is that "hundreds of billions of dollars a year" is a myth. The MPAA's own cherry-picked study from Smith Barney in 2005 put their annual loss at less than $6 billion, and while the music and software industries also like to publish trumped-up claims, the figures are nowhere near hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

The second objection, of course, is that the traditional crimes Cotton describes often involve the destruction of people's lives along with property. Burglaries can result in homicide, as can fraud (ask the preacher's wife), while bank robbery is without a doubt a dangerous game. Those crimes also typically involve real property. For better or for worse, real property should not be confused with intellectual property, which is not subject to the same rules of scarcity. Stopping a bank heist is, without a doubt, a far more important matter than stopping the bootlegging of Gigli or Spiderman 3.

Chances are you would prefer that the cops spend their efforts protecting people from rampant home burglaries than chasing down kids with pirated music on their iPods.

Regardless, Cotton and his Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy are seeking to change federal law enforcement emphasis so that intellectual property crimes are given priority over other kinds of crime... a realignment, to play off Cotton's statement. Battling organized crime is hardly objectionable, and we hope the coalition sees success in taking down the profiteers of piracy. Offending the public with yet more lies and hyperbole isn't going to curry much favor, however.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...k-robbery.html





MPA Study: Brighter Picture for Movie Industry

All-media revenue from pics up 8% to $42.6 bil
Hy Hollinger

The motion picture industry is back on course.

After a disappointing 2005, the six major companies have received official confirmation from the MPA that their all-media revenue from filmed entertainment -- comprising money from home video, television, theatrical and pay TV -- expanded by 8% in 2006 to reach $42.6 billion.

The MPA confidential report sent to industry executives discloses that all-media sales in the U.S. grew by 10%, while the international market (top 25 markets) showed a 5% advance. Of the $42.6 billion, the U.S. contributed $24.3 billion and international $18.3 billion.

In 2005, all-media revenue tumbled 8.2% from $42.9 billion 2004, with the U.S. segment off 10% and international down 5.8%.

More good news for executive eyes indicated "positive growth" for all segments of the business last year, with revenue from worldwide theatrical exposure showing the biggest year-over-year hike at 21%.

The annual revenue summary covers the top 25 international markets, ranging from the U.K. at No. 1 to Ireland at No. 25. These markets, which comprise 39% of all worldwide all-media revenue, grew 4% in 2006, according to the MPA. Canada, covered as a foreign market by the MPA as opposed to studio positioning as domestic, showed the biggest international growth in terms of dollars in 2006 by adding $341 million, a jump of 23%.

Advancing at a sizzling pace since getting out of the communist yoke, Russia moved up two spots to become the 13th-ranked purchaser of U.S. filmed entertainment, showing a 50% hike year-over-year. All-media revenue from Russia amounted to $88.7 million in 2002, climbing to $124.3 million in 2003, $160.4 million in 2004, $196.6 million in 2005 and $295.7 million last year.

Theatrical revenue in Europe in 2006 matched 2004's record year of $2.1 billion, with significant gains in three smaller markets -- Italy (up 25%), Russia (67%) and Sweden (38%). The Asia Pacific region, Latin America and the Middle East and Africa also enjoyed double-digit growth for theatrical releases.

As part of the all-media mix, home video again recorded the biggest market share but continued to show signs of slippage as it fell three percentage points to 45%. The demise of the VHS format appears to be getting closer; the videocassette represented only 1% of the overall all-media market share in 2006, dropping 86% in Europe against DVD's slide of 5% in the region.

Home video lost ground in Europe for a second straight year, with drops in the U.K., Germany, France, Spain and Italy most noticeable, while the smaller markets of Belgium, Norway and Denmark displayed sizable increases. Home video sales also declined in the Asia Pacific region but showed an "upward trend" in Latin America and the Middle East and Africa, the MPA said.

Television revenue from Europe rose 18% in 2006, marked by the U.K. pickup of four market-share points. Asia Pacific showed a 5% increment as South Korea's 59% TV revenue boost stole market share from the region's two top buyers, Japan and Australia. Latin America, ending a four-year decline in television buys, grew by 4%. The Middle East and Africa, led by South Africa's 73% increase to $31 million, showed "strong growth" in program acquisitions.

Revenue from pay TV in Europe fell 7% in 2006 but remained above 2005 levels, with an 8% loss in traditional pay TV offset by a slight increase in pay-per-view, the MPA reported. Overall revenue from the Asia Pacific region dipped for a second year in a row, falling 7% as Japan's 16% loss contributed to the region's pay TV decline. Latin American rebounded a bit thanks to gains in the region's two largest markets, Brazil (18%) and Mexico (2%). The Middle East and Africa continued to move ahead in welcoming pay TV, moving up 13% as South Africa led the charge with a 23% hike.

The survey covers all-media revenue recorded by its six member companies -- the Walt Disney Co., Paramount Pictures Corp., Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox Film Corp., Universal City Studios and Warner Bros. Entertainment.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/..._display/news/





Which ISPs Are Spying on You?
Ryan Singel

The few souls that attempt to read and understand website privacy policies know they are almost universally unintelligible and shot through with clever loopholes. But one of the most important policies to know is your internet service provider's -- the company that ferries all your traffic to and from the internet, from search queries to BitTorrent uploads, flirty IMs to porn.

Wired News, with help from some readers, attempted to get real answers from the largest United States-based ISPs about what information they gather on their customers' use of the internet, and how long they retain records like IP addresses, e-mail and real-time browsing activity. Most importantly, we asked what they require from law-enforcement agencies before coughing up the data, and whether they sell your data to marketers.

Only four of the eight largest ISPs responded to the 10-question survey, despite being contacted repeatedly over the course of two months. Some ISPs wouldn't talk to us, but gave answers to customers responding to a call for reader help on Wired's Threat Level blog.

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says ISPs should be more circumspect about keeping user data. Maintaining detailed data for long periods of time makes any internet company a huge target for law enforcement fishing expeditions.

"From a user perspective, the best practice would be for ISPs to delete data as soon as possible," Rotenberg said. "(The government) will treat ISPs as one-stop shops for subpoenas unless there is a solid policy on data destruction," Rotenberg said.

The results:

AOL, AT&T, Cox and Qwest all responded to the survey, with a mix of timeliness and transparency.

But only Cox answered the question, "How long do you retain records of the IP addresses assigned to customers."

These records can be used to trace an internet posting, website visit or an e-mail back to an ISP's customers. The records are useful to police tracking down child-porn providers, and music-industry groups use them to sue file sharers. Companies have also used the records to track down anonymous posters who write unflattering comments in stock-trading boards.

Cox's answer: six months. AOL says "limited period of time," while AT&T says it varies across its internet-access offerings but that the time limits are all "within industry standards."

Comcast, EarthLink, Verizon and Time Warner didn't respond.

Some of the most sensitive information sent across an ISP's network are the URLs of the websites that people visit. This so-called clickstream data includes every URL a customer visits, including URLs from search engines, which generally include the search term.

AOL, AT&T and Cox all say they don't store these URLs at all, while Qwest dodged the question. Comcast, EarthLink, Verizon and Time Warner didn't respond.

When asked if they allow marketers to see anonymized or partially-anonymized clickstream data, AOL, AT&T and Cox said they did not, while Qwest gave a muddled answer and declined to answer a follow-up question. Comcast, EarthLink, Verizon and Time Warner didn't respond.

This question was prompted by hints at a web-data conference last March that ISPs were peddling their customer's anonymized clickstream data to web marketers. Anonymization of data such as URLs and search histories is not, however, a perfect science. This became clear last summer when AOL employees attempted to provide the search-research community with a large body of queries that researchers could mine to improve search algorithms. AOL researchers replaced IP addresses with different unique numbers, but news organizations quickly were able to find individuals based on the content of their queries.

Wired News also asked the companies if they have been in contact or discussions with the government about how long they should be keeping data. The Justice Department, along with some members of Congress, are pushing for European Union-style data-retention rules that would require ISPs to store customer information for months or years -- a measure law enforcement says is necessary to prosecute computer crimes, such as trading in child pornography.

ISPs were nearly universally reluctant to talk about any conversations or meetings they have had with federal officials. AOL had no comment, Qwest dodged the question, AT&T wouldn't say, but noted it would broach the issue with the government as part of an industry-wide discussion. For its part, Cox says it has not been contacted.

As for whether they oppose data retention: Qwest said that the market should decide how long data is kept, while Cox was "studying the issue"; AOL is working with the industry and Congress, and AT&T is "ready to work with all parties."

Internet surveillance recently got easier, as the deadline passed last week for ISPs to equip their networks to federal specifications for real-time surveillance of a target's e-mails, VOIP calls and internet usage -- as well as data like IP address assignment and web URLs. While law enforcement currently prefers to ask for stored internet records rather than get real-time surveillance, that balance may shift once the nation's networks are wired to government surveillance standards.
http://www.wired.com/politics/online...05/isp_privacy





AT&T to Target Pirated Content

It joins Hollywood in trying to keep bootleg material off its network.
James S. Granelli

AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.

The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president.

The nation's largest telephone and Internet service provider also operates the biggest cross-country system for handling Internet traffic for its customers and those of other providers.

As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said in an interview Tuesday. The company's top leaders recently decided to help Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content.

"We do recognize that a lot of our future business depends on exciting and interesting content," he said.

But critics say the company is going to be fighting a losing battle and angering its own customers, and it should focus instead on developing incentives for users to pay for all the content they want.

Few doubt that piracy is a significant problem. The major U.S. studios lost $2.3 billion last year to online piracy and an additional $3.8 billion to bootleg DVDs, according to industry statistics. AT&T can help only with the online losses, which the industry said were growing faster than those from counterfeit DVDs.

Cicconi is in Los Angeles to talk at the Digital Hollywood Summit conference in Santa Monica this morning and hopes to discuss the initiative there.

Last week, about 20 technology executives from Viacom Inc., its Paramount movie studio and other Hollywood companies met at AT&T headquarters to start devising a technology that would stem piracy but not violate privacy laws or Internet freedoms espoused by the Federal Communications Commission.

Cicconi said that once a technology was chosen, the company would look at privacy and other legal issues.

"We are pleased that AT&T has decided to take such a strong, proactive position in protecting copyrights," Viacom said in a prepared statement. "AT&T's support of strong anti-piracy efforts will be instrumental in developing a growing and vibrant digital marketplace and will help ensure that they have a steady stream of great creative content to deliver to their consumers."

But public interest groups are wary.

"The risk AT&T faces is fighting the last war by spending money and energy plugging an old hole in the wall when new ones are breaking out," said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation. The San Francisco digital-rights organization has sued AT&T, alleging it illegally released customers' phone data to the federal government.

Technology is putting unlimited copying power in the hands of consumers, Von Lohmann said, so the answer to piracy can't be trying to stop them from making copies.

"The answer should be to figure out how to turn them into paying customers," he said.

AT&T's decision surprised Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group.

"AT&T is going to act like the copyright police, and that is going to make customers angry," she said. "The good news for AT&T is that there's so little competition that where else are the customers going to go?"

Verizon Communications Inc., which has fiercely guarded the privacy of its customers, has refused so far to offer a network anti-piracy tool. It defeated in court the recording industry's demands to reveal names of those allegedly involved in downloading pirated songs.

In mid-March, executives at Viacom and the Motion Picture Assn. of America separately approached Cicconi with the idea of a partnership. Content providers have long looked for a network solution to piracy, but no operator had been willing to join with them.

Efforts to date have focused on filtering and other technologies at the end of uploads and downloads of pirated material, but those have largely failed.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America has engendered a barrage of criticism for its efforts at suing people who download copyrighted songs illegally and who trade in bootleg music CDs.

"They've tried the whack-a-mole approach, and I don't think they're winning," Cicconi said.
http://www.latimes.com/business/prin...es-pe-business





Time Warner Officially Announces Packet Shaping for All Road Runner Users

From Time Warner's Help Desk

TIME WARNER ANNOUNCES INTRODUCTION OF PACKET SHAPING TECHNOLOGY NATIONWIDE

Time Warner today implemented a network management tool to improve the operation of the network for all subscribers. As a result, a small minority of users may experience slower speeds during peak hours when using certain applications that consume lots of bandwidth. You can address this situation by reducing your use of bandwidth-intensive applications during peak hours. "Peak hours" are generally in the evenings.

"Packet shaping" technology has been implemented for newsgroup applications, regardless of the provider, and all peer-to-peer networks and certain other high bandwidth applications not necessarily limited to audio, video, and voice over IP telephony. Road Runner reserves the right to implement network management tools for other applications in the future.

Customers are reminded of the terms of our Acceptable Use Policy at »help.rr.com/aup:

• The Road Runner service may not be used to engage in any conduct that interferes with Road Runner's ability to provide service to others, including the use of excessive bandwidth.

• The Road Runner service may not be used to breach or attempt to breach the security, the computer, the software or the data of any person or entity, including Road Runner, to circumvent the user authentication features or security of any host, network or account, to use or distribute tools designed to compromise security, or to interfere with another's use of the Road Runner service through the posting or transmitting of a virus or other harmful item or to deliberately overload or flood that entity's system.

Customers are further advised that efforts designed to circumvent our network management tools may be in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy and may result in account suspension without warning.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,18468495





Yet another reason to call and write your congress critters

Make Sure They Support NET NEUTRALITY !!!!

This is a good idea in any case, but actually isn't directly related to this. It's more important to contact TW management and complain about packet shaping impacting your user experience.
Dampier

What bemuses me about some of the earlier comments from those who seem pro-packet shaping is the short sighted thinking they have used to come to support this kind of activity.

I'm not for Bill up the street running his bittorrent client all day and night and slowing down the neighborhood either, but I am strongly against pitting user against user and worrying about what someone else in the neighborhood might be doing. I am worried about my broadband provider implementing technology that forestalls the necessary network investments that are going to be required to meet the growing bandwidth demands of customers in the future.

As someone who has reported on this industry since the 1980s, this is a pattern I've seen before. Management implements restrictions and punitive measures against customers who respond to their endless marketing campaigns promising "unlimited" usage, "blazing speeds"/"the fastest Internet in city x", and marketing campaigns that even wink wink at illegal online activities (especially peer-2-peer traffic), and then when users utilitze those services, they get all huffy.

Restrictions are sold in press releases as "improvements to the customer's user experience," and there are always some shortsighted folks out there who misunderstand the implications and accept that reasoning (if not applaud it because they now think their specific problems with their provider are solved because it was sold as entirely the fault of some kid up the street downloading adult videos).

But in the end it's always the same - those network management tools start to creep into other high bandwidth applications. Remember, RR itself says explicitly their priority is rendering web pages. So if you didn't care when p-2-p stuff got throttled because you don't use it, and you never bother with newsgroups, this is not relevant to you right now, but wait.

But when it expands to slow your iTunes downloads, restricts your ability to use legal movie or TV download services, makes Joost unusable, or whatever other future online applications that are bandwidth intensive, then you'll probably join the chorus, but by then management will have cemented the mentality that handicapping their network is more cost-effective than actually maintaining it to the standards that are going to be required to meet the demands of these services.

Yes, competition can play an important role in limiting one player from getting away with too much restrictive access, but most cities in this country face just one other choice - copper wire DSL, which has been having trouble competing with Road Runner for speed. FIOS is a great product that is either years away for many of us, or will never be available in our area, and is a unique offering from Verizon that some stockholders are upset is being offered at all.

I'd fight against packet shaping like this even if it only applied to peer to peer networks which I don't even use, because some applications rely on this technology to deliver their broadband content even if you don't realize it.

One example: In the UK right now, Channel 4 has discovered their efforts to deliver video on demand services to broadband customers have run right into packet shaping and usage caps imposed by many British ISPs, rendering the service totally useless for large numbers of people. It relies on a peer to peer distribution model.

I continue to encourage people to look beyond pitting user against user and instead focus on pressuring Time Warner to make the smarter choice for everyone on the network - take some of the enormous profits that TW earns from their cable division and invest them into building a broadband network that can easily meet the growing needs of broadband applications either now available or soon will be, some of which are being built in-house by TW itself. Then you won't need to spend money to implement technology which only reduces the customer's user experience.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/rema...9999~start=100





Net Neutrality Comment Period Closing Friday
Ryan Singel

Friday marks the final day for citizens, corporations, and paid spinmeisters alike to file comments with government regulators on Net Neutrality, a principle that ISPs should treat internet traffic equally. As ISPs like Comcast and AT&T increasingly offer and bundle internet video and voice services, internet activists want rules to prevent the carriers from making their services run faster on their own network than external companies.

ISPs counter that packets are doing just fine, rules will prevent them from building really fast networks and the market will sort it all out. It's not the simplest battle, since one may be in favor of having all packets (or all kinds of similar packets like video, email, and IM) treated in the same manner, without believing that Congress should be writing rules. The market might be good enough, or maybe strong principles from government regulators who are willing to make examples of scoflaws is enough. Or maybe even ISPs should be filtering the internet on behalf of copyright holders.

The Federal Communications Commission wants to hear by Friday:
Whether network platform providers and others favor or disfavor particular content, how consumers are affected by these policies, and whether consumer choice of broadband providers is sufficient to ensure that all such policies ultimately benefit consumer [and] specific examples of beneficial or harmful behavior, and we ask whether any regulatory intervention is necessary.

And remember if nothing else, the net neutrality debate did bring us the Series of Tubes. Repeat after me, "the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.

Send your "internet" to the gov regulators through this tube.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...utrality_.html





CellCarriers Fear Mobile VoIP Planet
Om Malik

Why is T-Mobile UK blocking calls to mobile VoIP start-up Truphone?

Mobile carriers are scared of one thing: becoming dumb pipes whose only utility is to carry voice and text. And it is one of the reasons why they are fighting tooth and nail with the mobile VoIP providers, using all sorts of tactics to make mobile VoIP a non-starter. (See video below the fold!)

The company bearing the brunt of this scorched-earth policy is Truphone, a UK-based start-up that has developed a mobile VoIP client that makes it easy to make cheap calls (cheaper than mobile minutes that is) over dual mode phone, like Nokia N95 and Nokia E-Series phones. Once again, the company finds itself in the cross hairs of a behemoth that wishes to see Truphone go away.

T-Mobile UK is refusing to interconnect with mobile VoIP provider Truphone. T-Mobile customers making a call to Truphone’s number range (07978 8xxxxx) will not be connected. T-Mobile told Truphone, that as a result of a policy decision, they don’t connect to VoIP-based low cost calling services. T-Mobile UK’s decision to block Truphone might have come as a response to the new and radically better Truphone 3.0 client that allows you to send Free SMS messages and allows VoIP calls over 3G. According to M:Metrics, nearly 86% of UK mobile users are heavy SMS users, and that means it is a cash cow that carriers like T-Mobile can’t afford to be slaughtered by IP-based SMS services. (Jesse Kopelman had discussed the impact of Mobile VoIP in his excellent post here.)

On the issue of Voice calls, Truphone CEO James Tagg says, “This affects every new entrant into mobile telecommunications because the only company that can facilitate interconnection with T-Mobile is T-Mobile. It amounts to T-Mobile being able to veto a new entrant into the market. This would put telephony back 100 years, to a time when interconnections were not assured.”

T-Mobile is offering to pay Truphone 0.21 pennies per minute, even though it charges its customers 35p per minute. Truphone claims that its call termination costs are 9p a minute. “T-Mobile is blocking our numbers unless we accept this loss-making offer and, since T-Mobile is the only company that can route calls from its customers it has a complete veto on the Truphone service,” Tagg says.

This is not the first time Tagg is fighting the big guys. A few months ago, the company got into trouble with Orange and Vodafone, which had prevented Truphone from working on devices that carried their own version of the operating system.

Since then, Vodafone has introduced a new policy which makes it more expensive to use data plans for anything other than browsing and email, a move that is designed to blunt the uptake of Mobile VoIP, especially over fast 3G connections.Fighting the incumbents is not the only challenge Truphone faces –Vonage and countless other VoIP providers have learnt the hard way that fighting the cheap minutes battle is an unviable strategy in the long term.
http://gigaom.com/2007/06/15/tmobile-truphone/





Opera Mini Beta Advances Mobile Web Browsing; Verizon Wireless Blocks it at the Door
Larry Dignan

Opera’s beta of its latest Mini browser is a vast improvement on mobile browsing. For starters, it renders a complete Web page as its meant to be viewed and fits it to your screen.

Opera’s latest mobile browser, which hits public beta June 19, could even get me to browse more on my dreaded Motorola Q. I wouldn’t need WAP addresses, URLs with “m” in them and navigation where you feel like an ant on an elephant. The latest Opera Mini replicates the browsing experience as you see it on a PC in many respects and advances the ball for sure. The browser also uses compression technology on the backend so all phones can browse the Web–even the kind that aren’t considered smart.

Unfortunately, Verizon Wireless won’t let me download the Opera browser even though it’s light years ahead of the mobile version of IE. Turns out U.S. carriers get into this walled garden thing where some third party apps are shut out. On Verizon, the Opera Mini is one of the applications blocked at the door. I just hate it when you get access to a private beta and your carrier shoots it down.

I’m currently using the latest Opera Mini on a loaned Cingular handset.

A Verizon Wireless tech support representative said the carrier doesn’t support third party applications. If it isn’t on your Q already Verizon doesn’t want to hear about it. She suggested I call Motorola. But it’s fairly obvious that this is a Verizon Wireless issue. The Opera Mini site notes that its browser isn’t available on Verizon Wireless.

Tatsuki Tomita, Opera’s vice president of business development in Asia Pacific who is relocating to Silicon Valley, says Opera runs into this a lot in the U.S. “In Europe and other places the operators are all on the same playing field,” says Tomita. “In the U.S. every carrier has its own standards.”

But Opera has wound up on other carriers. AT&T’s Cingular and T-Mobile are notable. Verizon Wireless is the hold out.

Why? It’s a race for dollars. Verizon wants to control the experience and profit from it. The rub: It would get more usage with a better browser. Of course, Verizon may be trying to limit data usage. All I know is not being able to try out this browser on my own phone is annoying.

After meeting with Opera executives in CNET’s New York offices my game plan was to review the browser a bit and see if someone like me–who absolutely hates browsing on a mobile phone–could get into the mini Web. I’m convinced I’d be more sold on mobile browsing with a better browser.

Globally, Opera’s baby browser is doing swell. It has 15 million downloads and has converts in Africa, Japan and a bunch of other locales.

Let’s hope U.S. carriers–notably Verizon Wireless–get a clue soon.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5383





Is copper cable at the end of its line?

Critics Say Verizon Is Focusing Too Hard On Fiber Optics

The company is looking for lower phone service restoration standards as its infrastructure of copper lines is aging.
Chris Flores

Verizon's front-line employees say its old copper network in Virginia that much of the state's population relies on is "deteriorating badly" and "stretched to the limits."

The workers say they are being told to apply Band-Aid repairs to major problems or can't get them fixed at all. The preventative maintenance program has been abandoned. All the investment is going into a new fiber optics system going into select areas in Hampton Roads and elsewhere.

The testimony in a case before state regulators by Verizon's union is a blow to the company's quest to free itself from some state price controls. The criticism also comes as Verizon is arguing in a separate case that the state should lower its standards on restoring lost phone service.

Verizon has complained for years that competition has drastically changed the communications playing field. Even as the state's largest phone company is losing customers in droves, it still faces much more stringent regulations than its competitors who are taking the customers.

In response to losing consumers, especially to cable companies, Verizon is building an expensive new fiber network. But diverting that investment from the old copper system to deal with its competitors is putting Verizon into a vise where it is now drawing new regulatory attention just as it is trying to shed the oversight.

If Verizon isn't held to the historic regulatory standards, the customers still relying on the old copper phone network will face serious problems, the union said in written testimony.

"The condition to which it has deteriorated is no accident but a conscious business decision, since the examples we have given are not isolated problems, but hold true all over the commonwealth," testified Charles Buttiglieri, who runs the Communications Workers of America region that includes Virginia.

A System In Disrepair

The union represents 7,000 Verizon employees in Virginia who do maintenance work on the system and deal with customers. The union asked its members in May to pass along information about the current state of the Virginia network.

The CWA supports the new fiber efforts and is involved, said the union, but it doesn't want to abandon its customers on the old network and fears losing them to competitors. The union also objects to Verizon's strategy of only building fiber in certain profitable areas in each locality.

One Fredericksburg technician said that Verizon won't fix lines in some areas that have chronic problems, and permanently have noise on their line. The technicians say that fixes that were meant to be temporary in the past are now becoming permanent.

In some cases, the actual tools or cable needed to fix problems aren't even available, nor is the equipment to diagnose or prevent problems. The workers say the lack of supplies is because of the fiber optic initiative.

The union also said Verizon still will not provide DSL high-speed internet service to many rural areas of the state, even though it is the only option. In Surry County, for example, the phone system has deteriorated and the company says it is not profitable to sell DSL.

Verizon spokesman Harry Mitchell said the company is shifting investment to fiber, but it tries to carefully balance that investment with the needs of the old system.

"In a competitive marketplace, service is one of the factors we win or lose on," said Mitchell.

Lowering Standards

Virginia state regulators made new rules for a minimum level of service in November 2005 for phone companies. One rule said a company must restore service within a day to 80 percent of the customers who lose it, but the state does not routinely check compliance.

If complaints rise to some undefined unacceptable level, the State Corporation Commission requires a company to file reports detailing how long it takes to restore service. Verizon had already been in violation of the prior rule, so it was reporting its service restoration numbers to the state.

The number of complaints about Verizon started to escalate in May 2006, and kept rising through September - when it was taking a week or two to do repairs. The complaints dropped back to historical levels by November.

It is not known how many complaints there have been or what is considered the historical level. The state and Verizon have agreed the information - resident complaints to a government agency - is considered a confidential trade secret.

Regardless of the complaint level, Verizon has been in constant violation of the 80 percent rule. The SCC finally filed its own complaint in May and proposed a fine. On the same day, Verizon filed for a waiver to the rule - saying that the minimum level of service is too high.

Verizon said there isn't a clear link between the number of SCC complaints and the 80 percent rule. The company wants a rule that more closely links the time it has historically taken to repair lost service to the number of complaints the state receives.

But do most customers know who to complain to, or how?

When the SCC opened a case recently on Verizon phone book errors, it was based on a relatively small number of complaints. But after the case was publicized, the SCC was flooded with stories of people who had problems and said they didn't know where to complain.

"The more we let people know we were doing the investigation, the more complaints we got," said SCC spokesman Ken Schrad.

Even though the company acknowledges that it signed off on the new standards in 2005, Verizon officials still believe there shouldn't be a set level at all because disgruntled customers can leave. That's the same basic point it is making in the price case.

"We're not the only game in town, and that's the whole point," said Mitchell.
http://www.dailypress.com/business/l...ess-localheads





Goodnight Irene

Massive Network Outage for AT&T-SBC
Posted by George Ou

1:00 AM, I’m working late night here in Silicon Valley and the Internet Naming service has gone dark which means I can’t get to the Internet. Not a single DNS server on the AT&T-SBC network functions which tells me it’s a bigger issue than just a DNS server problem. I even fired up my own test Windows Server 2003 virtual machine that has a full fledged DNS server installed and even that wouldn’t function. That means access to the Root DNS servers from the AT&T SBC network is being blocked.

2:30 AM, I finally get through to first tier tech support and they tell me that DNS is down for all of California. That of course doesn’t mean that DNS is down, just that none of California can get to main AT&T SBC DNS servers. Since my virtual server can’t even resolve names, that means access to most of the Internet and the Root DNS servers on the Internet are severed.

2:50 AM, I get forwarded to second tier tech support and the tech explains to me that the Pleasanton CA POP (Point of Presence) is undergoing “scheduled maintenance” from 12:00 AM till 6:00 AM central time and that there are outages throughout AT&T’s network as well as other ISPs that use AT&T’s network. If your network went down and you use AT&T as a carrier for part or all of your network, now you know why and who to “thank”.

If it’s scheduled, I guess AT&T saw fit to schedule 6 hours of outages without notifying its customers. But according to the technician, this isn’t actually an “outage”. But if this is scheduled, the network traffic could have been rerouted ahead of time but I guess AT&T figures we don’t need the service and nor do we even need to be notified. It sure looks like an outage to me since I had to do an hour or more of troubleshooting to track down the problem and waste all that time and spend another hour or more on the phone with tech support. ASI (Advanced Solutions Inc) which is a subsidiary of ATT is in charge of that network and they brought the entire network down by working on the routing infrastructure with no backup route in place. Those of us that are unfortunate to not have redundant BGP (Border Gate Protocol) paths are just out of luck but hey, 6 hours of downtime isn’t really an “outage”.

We can all “thank” AT&T SBC and ASI for having the customer in mind. We’ve been declared a “maintenance” zone which really isn’t an “outage”. We can also “thank” them for the fact that they felt that there was no need to alert and alarm anyone.

The only reason I can post this now is because my virtual server was able to figure out the IP address of CNET’s servers and I hacked my hosts file to be able to manually get here without the help of DNS.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=504





Inside a VRAD Box
Jack

Video tour of the typical Uverse system cabinet now appearing in neighborhoods served by ATT.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1o-1MkvzK4





Internet2 Network Deployment Reaches Major Milestone
Aviran Mordo

Internet2 today announced that the first East to West Coast span on its new nationwide 100 gigabit per second network has been completed and is providing production IP and circuit services. This deployment marks another major milestone in bringing leading- edge networking resources to the research and education community in the United States.

Since beginning its aggressive network build out plans in fall 2006, Internet2 has worked with Level 3 Communications, the Global Research Network Operations Center (GRNOC) at Indiana University, and the regional network connectors to rapidly deploy the enhanced optical and packet network platform. In April 2007, Internet2 announced that the first major phase of the deployment was complete which included nodes in the Northeast and Midwest regions.

With today’s announcement, Internet2 and Level 3 have now completed deployment of important nodes across the northern span of the network including those in Washington DC, Chicago, IL, Kansas City, MO, Salt Lake City, UT, and Seattle, WA. Additionally, network rings have been completed from the Washington DC to Atlanta as well as from Kansas City to Atlanta.
http://www.aviransplace.com/2007/06/...jor-milestone/





Broadband Spreads Across Globe
Richard Wray

Almost 300 million people worldwide are now accessing the internet using fast broadband connections, fuelling the growth of social networking services like MySpace and generating thousands of hours of video through websites such as YouTube.

There are more than 1.1 billion of the world's estimated 6.6 billion people online and almost a third of those are now accessing the internet on high speed lines.

According to internet consultancy Point Topic, 298 million people had broadband at the end of March and that is already estimated to have shot over 300 million. The statistics, however, paint a picture of a divided digital world.

While there are high levels of broadband penetration in Western Europe, North America and high-tech economies like South Korea, usage in developing countries and especially in Africa is pitiful.

Many of these emerging economies lack telephone services in many areas, let alone the sort of broadband internet access that has, in recent years, become available to every household in Europe.

In terms of total broadband users, the US leads the pack with over 60 million broadband subscribers. But second-placed China is fast closing the gap. From 41 million broadband users a year ago, China now has more than 56 million and based on its current growth looks set to over-take America as the world's largest broadband market later this year.

"What amazed me when compiling these figures, is that China has leapt ahead and actually had more people sign up to broadband in the first three months of this year than in any other earlier quarter," said Katja Mueller, research director at Point Topic.
China's rampant growth is a result of economic changes and government intervention. The country's economic boom has helped create an affluent urban middle class clamouring for the social aspects of internet access like chat rooms, while the government has been driving the roll-out of internet access in rural areas.

Next year's Olympics, to be held in Beijing, has already provided a fillip to the market with the government demanding that every household in the capital has high-speed internet access in time for the games.

Japan ranked third in the report, with 26.5 million broadband users as at the end of March this year, while Germany is fourth at more than 16 million. France scored the highest growth - 9% - in take-up among the top 10 broadband nations to leapfrog South Korea - at 14.1 million - to take the fifth spot with 15.3 million.

The UK came in sixth with just under 14 million broadband users at the end of March, up 6.4%. Demand in the UK market has been driven by fierce competition from satellite broadcaster Sky, which launched its broadband service last year, and the introduction of 'free' broadband offers from companies such as TalkTalk.

But in terms of broadband usage as a percentage of households, the UK's position in the global rankings slips to number 17, with 55.5% of households connecting to the internet at high speed.

Based on broadband penetration, South Korea is by far the world's top broadband user with nearly 90% of households online. Several small, economically vibrant and densely populated states are also high on the list such as Hong Kong, Monaco and Macau. The US - with broadband penetration at just under 53% - is in 24th place. Penetration in China, meanwhile, is 14.35% while in India - often mentioned in the same breath as China in discussions of emerging markets - broadband penetration stands at just 1.15% of the country's estimated 200 million households.

Penetration levels in Eastern Europe, meanwhile, may be low, but the region scored the highest overall level of growth in take-up, becoming the only geographic area to show growth of over 10%.

The region's economic rehabilitation, in part thanks to the inclusion of several states in an expanded EU, is driving take-up, according to Point Topic. Poland saw growth in new broadband connections of 9% in the first quarter, with Hungary at 10.38%, Bulgaria at 10.94%, Ukraine at nearly 15% and Croatia at a staggering 25%.

"Penetration of broadband in Eastern Europe was really low, but it is starting to catch up with Europe and we expect Eastern Europe to continue to grow," said Ms Mueller.

In fact, Indonesia scored the highest growth across the world in the first quarter - at almost 28%, but from a very low base. Greece, meanwhile was second with growth of over 26% due to the rather late introduction of broadband by incumbent operator OTE.
The figures, however, show just has large the gap is between the digital haves and have nots. Many Sub-Saharan African states do not register in the figures at all: only South Africa, Sudan, Senegal and Gabon make it onto the list, with household broadband penetration running from 1.79% in South Africa - with 215,000 users at the end of March - to just 0.05% in Sudan - with a mere 3,000. North African states fare slightly better with Morocco scoring 6.78% penetration with 418,000 users and Egypt at 1.55% or 240,000.

Many African states are now looking to the mobile phone companies to provide their populations with access to the internet, as they struggle to find a place at the digital table.
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2102304,00.html





Wireless Internet Not Yet Flawless

Annapolis goal remains elusive
Bradley Olson

Every few days, Phil McQuade's cell phone rings, and an eager caller asks: "When, already, will your free Internet service be available at my house?"

He isn't sure, he tells them. Maybe soon, maybe never.

More than a year after McQuade joined state and local officials to celebrate his intention to blanket Maryland's capital with a free citywide wireless network, his company has barely managed to cover the downtown area.

Although McQuade is bucking one industry trend by actually making money, the promise of free, advertising-supported Internet service all over the city might be dead.

"I don't know that we were ever fully prepared to go citywide," said McQuade, president of Annapolis Wireless Internet. "The whole idea of free Wi-Fi is great, but somebody, at the end of the day, has got to pay for it."

Paying for it has become a problem for several cities that have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to build wireless networks, then found themselves struggling with low subscription rates and technical problems.

Portland, Ore., for example, has set out to cover 90 percent of the city, but community activists recently found frequent connection problems in the pilot area. Lompoc, Calif., spent $3 million on a network to boost economic development after cutbacks at area military bases but only gained a few hundred subscribers, far fewer than the 4,000 needed to finance the project.

"None of these networks really live up to the expectations - those of their business sponsors or the elected officials who are trying to sell them to the public," said Marc Kilmer, an analyst with the Buckeye Institute, a pro-free-market think tank in Ohio. "The technology isn't all that great - it's not all that reliable."

Still, nearly 400 jurisdictions - including Baltimore City and Baltimore County - are planning or developing wireless networks, spending $460 million in 2007 alone, according to industry Web site MuniWireless. Some say the networks will enhance economic development programs and provide more residents with cheap Internet access. Others expect to enhance police and fire communications.

For those jurisdictions, the Annapolis experience is a cautionary tale about the big promises, and sometimes small rewards, of new technology.

A municipal Wi-Fi network works through low-power radio transceivers, called "access points" or "hotspots," that can be hung from utility poles or installed all over a city. They link a central Internet service provider with personal computers that are equipped with wireless network adapters.

While this technology works well in small, controlled settings such as homes, coffee shops, hotels and airports, deploying it throughout a city has posed challenges.

Some free networks become overloaded with users and bog down. Elsewhere, because Wi-Fi signals have trouble penetrating buildings, home users get spotty reception and have to buy extra equipment to connect.

Kilmer noted problems in Portland, Ore. The city commissioned a company called MetroFi to build a network strong enough to allow users to connect within 500 feet of an access point. But when the first phase of the rollout was tested, community activists said they were able to connect only 31 out of 53 times. MetroFi disputes the findings.

In San Francisco, bureaucratic wrangling has tied up a joint Wi-Fi network proposal from Google and EarthLink for two years. The debate has included some bewildering requests from residents - such requiring Google to shuttle children back and forth to the zoo on buses.

Much of the excitement behind the proposal for annapoliswire less.com was its novelty. By generating revenue from advertising displayed on a Web page when users connected to the network, McQuade originally predicted that he could generate enough revenue to spread access points across the city - free of charge to users.

But early on, he said, he and business partner Vic DeLeon realized that extending access points to residential neighborhoods wouldn't increase use of the network enough to justify the cost.

"The rate of growth was slower than we originally thought," DeLeon said in an interview at the company's small office in Eastport. "Going into the residential market, we had to ask ourselves: What is the value of 1.5 users per household versus a $1,500 equipment cost?"

They decided to take the business in another direction, working out agreements with marinas, where Wi-Fi is popular among boaters, and a few of the city's new mixed-use developments.

Initially, they had trouble lining up local advertisers.

"A lot of people are skeptical about Internet advertising. I think they're just used to print ads or TV and radio," said McQuade, 34, who shares a background in computer engineering with his partner. "Internet advertising, in my opinion, is more quantitative, but a lot of people still have misgivings about it."

He said he has won over local businesses - restaurants, bookstores, car and yacht dealers and even plastic surgeons - by sharing data about their Web site traffic - including the number of unique users, how long they stay, and how many times their ads are viewed.

So far, he says, the model has been succeeding. Annapolis Wireless charges local businesses a flat fee of about $250 per month. With 50 to 60 customers, McQuade says, the business generates about $13,750 a month in revenue. McQuade has set a goal of 100 regular advertisers.

Although McQuade says he has made money in a market where others have failed, many analysts have cast doubt on the long-term viability of free, ad-based Wi-Fi networks.

According to a consumer survey published in August by JupiterResearch, just 27 percent of free wireless "hotspot" users - in coffee shops and airports - said they would log on to an advertising-based network. But because the majority of users want Wi-Fi to be free, advertising models still stand a chance, the analysts concluded.

"I think the jury's still out," said Barry Parr, a media analyst who contributed to the Jupiter report. "Part of the challenge is that it's a fairly small market, so the question is how to expose people to advertising without being intrusive."

McQuade still holds out hope for expansion. Last week, Annapolis Wireless unveiled new software technology at a Wi-Fi conference in Massachusetts that can help municipalities manage fledgling Wi-Fi networks at prices ranging from $9,000 to $19,000.

McQuade said the company has already made two sales of the product - dubbed WiDirect - to Greenville, N.C., and Sioux Falls, S.D.

They are also seeking a partnership with a firm that has developed software to target ads based on users' Web browsing habits and physical location - a product they believe will broaden the company's reach.

If that works, Annapolis Wireless might yet live up to the expectations it generated last year.

"This is the model's proving ground," McQuade said. "It has zero impact on the taxpayer and zero municipal involvement. It works.

"And the great thing about the free model is, if it comes down to it, when someone says, 'I don't get coverage, and I think I should,' they're not paying for it. I can always give them their money back."
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/loc...ocal-headlines





Frontline Wireless Pitches Plan to Build "Third Pipe" Using 700 MHz Spectrum
Nate Anderson

84 MHz in and around the 700 MHz band are up for reassignment as analog television stations are replaced by digital broadcasts in 2009. The Senate Commerce Committee held hearings today on how best to make use of the spectrum, and the most positive thing to emerge from the hearings was that members of the committee actually understood what is at stake: the possible creation of a third broadband pipe. But they're also big on creating a nationwide, interoperable public safety communications network. A company called Frontline says it has a novel way to accomplish both goals.

Currently, the FCC has marked off 24 MHz for public safety use, leaving the remaining 60 MHz for auction to private companies. The agency is currently finalizing its auction rules, which are the subject of intense debate by incumbent carriers (like AT&T and Verizon) and consumer groups (like the US Public Interest Research Group and the New America Foundation). The consumer groups worry that the FCC will simply auction all of the spectrum off to the highest bidder, almost guaranteeing that it will end up in the hands of the deep-pocketed incumbents. Such incumbents might have little incentive to create a truly innovative, nationwide wireless network, but committee chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) pointed out that the auction should be "a means to an end, not an end itself." Making money, he said, isn't the ultimate goal of the auction; serving the public interest is.

The hearing centered on a proposal by a new firm called Frontline Wireless, whose boss James Barksdale argued that his plan offered the government the best way of bringing wireless broadband both to consumers and to public safety workers. Under Frontline's proposal, the FCC would auction off 10 MHz from the commercially available spectrum and offer that to the highest bidder. The winner would also be given (free) 12 MHz out of the 24 MHz currently allotted to public safety.

The new network would have to be built to public safety standards, which are more rigorous than the carrier grade standards used in commercial cellular networks (more robust power supplies and backup systems would be needed, along with better coverage and reliability). It would have to be made available for public safety use at favorable rates, and public safety organizations would have the right to use as much of the bandwidth on the network as they need in an emergency. Network bandwidth would also be sold wholesale to any company that wanted to offer wireless services.

Frontline pledges to build out its system in 10 years and promises to reach 99 percent of all Americans. The company would spend at least $12 billion of private money building the network and would lease to public safety organizations at cost. The system would be "open access," meaning that Frontline would simply maintain the network but would not care how it is used by the resellers.

Several of those testifying today pointed out that state governments across the US have come up with plans to build a next-generation, interoperable public safety networks, but few have done so because of cost. A public/private system like the one proposed by Frontline would use private money to fund the up-front costs of building such network.

The proposal itself isn't new, but this is the first time the senators really had a chance to interact with it. It met with resistance from Ted Stevens (R-AK), who had a long and testy interchange with Barksdale over the company's plan. He seemed to be zeroing on criticisms that the Frontline proposal was simply a way for a new company to get a huge discount on a prime chunk of spectrum by playing the "public safety" card. Frontline is certainly a well-connected group with a former FCC chairman on board, but several committee members showed clear skepticism toward the plan and wondered if it would make sense to simply build a public safety network controlled and operated by the government.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-spectrum.html





YouTube to Test Video ID with Time Warner, Disney

Top online video service YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co.

The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc., will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner's permission, YouTube legal, marketing and strategy executives said in an interview on Monday.

The so-called video fingerprinting tools will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said.

YouTube has come under fire from some traditional media companies, who say it has dragged its heels in offering reliable ways to identify video clips uploaded by regular users without permission.

MTV Networks-owner Viacom Inc. sued Google and YouTube for over $1 billion in March, charging the company with "massive intentional copyright infringement" after demanding the removal of clips of its popular shows "Colbert Report" and "Daily Show," hosted by comedian Jon Stewart.

Initially, YouTube said last year such tools would be made available to test by the end of 2006. But executives have said the reliable identification of content was a complex task that required it to develop its own technology tools.

Chris Maxcy, YouTube partner development director, said other media companies planned to test the technology, but he declined to name the other parties. "There are a couple. There are more that we can't talk about right now," Maxcy said.

YouTube has also been testing technology to help identify the audio tracks of video clips with major record labels using technology provided by privately held Audible Magic as early as the first two months of 2007, the company said.

These tools will be made available to all content owners later this year, YouTube executives said on Monday.

"It's typically not something we talk about," Maxcy said, adding, however: "We wanted to clear the air."
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...EN871820070612





Hollywood Balks at Apple Online Movie Rentals
Bob Tourtellotte

Apple Inc.'s plans to enter the nascent online movie rental business drew skepticism on Monday from Hollywood executives who questioned pricing, copy protection and the timing of a possible launch.
Sources inside and outside the major movie studios confirmed news reports the maker of computers and iPods is considering online film rentals to complement digital movie downloads that are already sold at Apple's iTunes web site.

But the sources, who declined to be named because film licensing talks are preliminary, questioned Apple's desire to fight copy piracy and the reported $2.99 price per rental.

Some said that, because the film download market remains small, the studios do not need to rush into a deal with Apple. Several companies already rent digital movies to Web customers, including CinemaNow, Movielink and Amazon.com Inc..

"It just feels like the ball is in our court," said one source.

Apple declined to comment.

Two publications recently reported Apple was talking to all the major studios about licensing films for a rental service and the service could launch as early as this fall with movies available for a 30-day period at a cost of $2.99.

But that price raises questions for the studios because it would significantly undercut what consumers now pay for online rentals of new releases, which can cost up to $4.99. Moreover, the price might cannibalize pay-per-view revenues the studios already receive from cable and satellite TV.

Among several issues involving copy protection, some movie executives expressed concern that Apple's digital rights management software would not adequately protect against unauthorized copies made for the video iPod and other devices.

Given Apple's history, however, several sources said entering the movie rental market was likely just a matter of time, although autumn 2007 was too soon.

At iTunes, consumers already download and buy movies made by The Walt Disney Co. and Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures. Rentals would complement that service.

More important, Apple is now launching a digital set-top box for televisions, called Apple TV, which allows consumers to download and play movies, TV shows and other video content on television sets more easily. Being able to buy and rent movies at iTunes could help spur sales of Apple TV.

Early in the evolution of the iPod, the popular music listening device, Apple employed much the same strategy when it began offering downloads of songs at iTunes.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...18759320070611





Behind-Scenes Action Led to Camcording Bill
Michael Geist

When Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda and Industry Minister Maxime Bernier stepped up to the podium on Parliament Hill 10 days ago to introduce new movie piracy legislation, the scene had an unmistakable Hollywood feel. Surrounded by movie posters and attendees munching on popcorn, the ministers were given a standing ovation from the assembled industry reps for their performance.

While the press conference had a few uncomfortable moments – Oda was forced to admit that the government had not conducted any independent research on the scope of the movie piracy problem and she implausibly told reporters that public pressure from U.S. politicians such as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and U.S. ambassador to Canada David Wilkins had nothing to do with the new bill – the intended storyline was of ministers pleased to support the film industry and of an industry grateful for government action.

As with any Hollywood production, however, not everything took place while the cameras were rolling. According to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act and reported here for the first time, Oda held a private meeting in Ottawa with Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association president Douglas Frith one year earlier, at which Frith provided the government with draft legislation – legislation that the lobby group itself had crafted – that likely served as the basis for what is now Bill C-59.

Moreover, a briefing note prepared by department officials for Oda in advance of the CMPDA meeting help explain the barrage of lobby pressure on the camcording issue as the minister was advised that there was little evidence the industry's proposal would prove more effective than current Canadian law.

The CMPDA meeting focused on several issues, including counterfeiting and signal theft, yet it was a movie piracy amendment to the Criminal Code that was clearly top of mind. An advance CMPDA briefing document claimed that legislative reforms were needed to address the growth of unauthorized camcording in Canadian movie theatres.

Much like Bill C-59, which contains a maximum jail term of five years for the recording of a movie in a theatre for the purposes of commercial distribution without the consent of the theatre owner, the CMPDA draft bill similarly envisioned a maximum of five years imprisonment for "any person who knowingly operates the audiovisual recording function of any device in a public place while a cinematographic work is being exhibited."

In fact, the CMPDA bill arguably went even further than Bill C-59, as the industry also sought maximum penalties of $1 million per recording and an unspecified minimum penalty. Furthermore, it criminalized movie recording in any public place (C-59 only covers movie theatres) and did not require commercial distribution to invoke the toughest penalties (C-59 includes a lesser maximum sentence of two years in jail for movie recording without commercial distribution).

Department officials were not persuaded by the proposal, however, warning in the ministerial briefing note that the penalty provisions in the Copyright Act are already criminal offences and that "it is unclear how these measures would prove more efficient." That conclusion is consistent with comments from Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, who in February rejected the calls for movie piracy legislation by noting that "the country is not completely bereft of laws in this area."

In light of the tepid response, the industry went on the offensive, threatening to delay the release of movies to Canadian theatres, canceling Canadian pre-screenings, enlisting the support of U.S. officials and floating inconsistent claims of Canadian responsibility for global camcording that ranged from 20 to 70 per cent (the Oda briefing note stated that Montreal alone was responsible for 40 per cent of unauthorized film reproductions in the world market, twice what CMPDA now claims for all of Canada).

The industry's lobby efforts were clearly successful. Ignoring the inconsistent claims, the absence of evidence that Canadian films are being affected, the contrary internal advice, and the bracing reality that Hollywood has acknowledged that the U.S. is by far the largest source of illegal camcording worldwide notwithstanding its movie piracy legislation, Bill C-59 is expected to sail through Parliament.

In doing so, Ottawa is sending Canadians two messages. The first is what drew the industry standing ovation – unauthorized camcording will not be tolerated in Canada even if it means diverting law enforcement resources from health and safety issues to movie theatres.

The second is that private meetings, foreign pressures and lobbyist drafted bills is how law gets made in Canada.
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/223795





Music Industry Puts Troops in the Streets

Quasi-legal squads raid street vendors
Ben Sullivan

Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black "raid" vests the unit members wore. The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read "RIAA" instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.

The Recording Industry Association of America is taking it to the streets.

Even as it suffers setbacks in the courtroom, the RIAA has over the last 18 months built up a national staff of ex-cops to crack down on people making and selling illegal CDs in the hood.

The result has been a growing number of scenes like the one played out in Silver Lake just before Christmas, during an industry blitz to combat music piracy.

Borrayo attends to a parking lot next to the landmark El 7 Mares fish-taco stand on Sunset Boulevard. To supplement his buck-a-car income, he began, in 2003, selling records and videos from a makeshift stand in front of the lot.

In a good week, Borrayo said, he might unload five or 10 albums and a couple DVDs at $5 apiece. Paying a distributor about half that up-front, he thought he’d lucked into a nice side business.

The RIAA saw it differently. Figuring the discs were bootlegs, a four-man RIAA squad descended on his stand a few days before Christmas and persuaded the 4-foot-11 Borrayo to hand over voluntarily a total of 78 discs. It wasn’t a tough sell.

"They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they’d take me away in handcuffs," he said through an interpreter. Borrayo says he has no way of knowing if the records, with titles like Como Te Extraño Vol. IV — Musica de los 70’s y 80’s, are illegal, but he thought better of arguing the point.

The RIAA acknowledges it all — except the notion that its staff presents itself as police. Yes, they may all be ex-P.D. Yes, they wear cop-style clothes and carry official-looking IDs. But if they leave people like Borrayo with the impression that they’re actual law enforcement, that’s a mistake.

"We want to be very clear who we are and what we’re doing," says John Langley, Western regional coordinator for the RIAA Anti-Piracy Unit. "First and foremost, we’re professionals."

Langley, based in Los Alamitos, California, oversees five staff investigators and around 20 contractors who sniff out bootleg discs west of the Rockies. The former Royal Canadian Mountie said his unit’s on-the-streets approach has been a big success, netting more than 100,000 pieces of unauthorized merchandise during the recent Christmas retail blitz.

With all the trappings of a police team, including pink incident reports that, among other things, record a vendor’s height, weight, hair and eye color, the RIAA squad can give those busted the distinct impression they’re tangling with minions of Johnny Law instead of David Geffen. And that raises some potential legal questions.

Contacted for this article, the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union said it needed more information on the practices to know if specific civil liberties were at risk.

But if an anti-piracy team crossed the line between looking like cops and implying or telling vendors that they are cops, the Los Angeles Police Department would take a pretty dim view, said LAPD spokesman Jason Lee.

"I will not say it’s okay to be [selling] illegal stuff," Lee said. "That’s a violation of penal codes.

"But it doesn’t really matter what your status is. If that person feels he was wrongly interrogated or under the false pretense that these people were cops, they should contact their local police station as a victim. We’ll sort it all out."

For its part, the RIAA maintains that the up-close-and-personal techniques are nothing new. RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy says its investigators do not represent themselves as police, and that the incident reports vendors are asked to sign, in which they agree to hand over their discs, explicitly state that the forfeiture is voluntary.

Lamy and the RIAA are unapologetic about taking the fight against music piracy to the streets. Though the association has suffered a few high-profile legal setbacks in recent months — most notably when a three-judge panel ruled that Internet service providers do not have to squeal on their file-swapping customers — community action is extremely effective.

Langley says the anti-piracy teams have about an 80 percent success rate in persuading vendors to hand over their merchandise voluntarily for destruction.

"We notify them that continued sale would be a violation of civil and criminal codes. If they’d like to voluntarily turn the product over to us, we’ll destroy it, and we agree we won’t sue," he explained.

The pink incident sheets and photos that Langley’s teams take of vendors are meant to establish a paper trail, particularly for repeat offenders.

"A large percentage [of the vendors] are of a Hispanic nature," Langley said. "Today he’s Jose Rodriguez, tomorrow he’s Raul something or other, and tomorrow after that he’s something else. These people change their identity all the time. A picture’s worth a thousand words."

Though Langley says he doesn’t know what tack his new boss will take, the recent hiring of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Director Bradley Buckles to head the anti-piracy unit has some RIAA watchers holding their breath.

On its face, the move looks like a shift toward even more in-your-face enforcement. But don’t expect all RIAA critics to rally to the side of Borrayo and other sellers.

"The process of confiscating bootleg CDs from street vendors is exactly what the RIAA should be doing," said Jason Schultz, a staff attorney for the San Francisco–based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The EFF has frequently crossed swords with the record industry over its strategy of suing ISPs and individual listeners accused of downloading tunes from the Internet. A champion of copyright "fair use," the EFF says Buckles could bring a more balanced approach to the RIAA’s anti-piracy efforts. The more time the association spends rousting vendors, the thinking goes, the less it will spend subpoenaing KaZaa and BearShare aficionados.

Meanwhile, Borrayo will have to keep his eyes open for another source of income. Though he says he still sees nothing wrong with what he did, the guy who once supplied him records hasn’t been around in a couple months.

"They tried to scare me," Borrayo said. "They told me, ‘You’re a pirate!’ I said, ‘C’mon, guys, pirates are all at sea. I just work in a parking lot.’ "
http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/mu...-streets/2111/





RIAA Uses Local Cops in Oregon Bust
p2pnet.net

Fake cops employed by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the venal members of the Big 4 organised music cartel, started acting like real police officers quite a while ago, one of the earliest examples showing up in Los Angeles in 2004.

"Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black 'raid' vests the unit members wore," said a feature in the LA Weekly.

"The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read 'RIAA' instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo."

But it's also SOP for the so-called music industry 'trade' outfit to tout genuine officers paid for entirely from citizen taxes as copyright cops.

Police were used in an RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) inspired raid at two flea markets in Beaverton, Oregon.

"Sgt. Paul Wandell, Beaverton police spokesman, said officers seized more than 50,000 items worth about $758,000," says The Oregonian.

The emphasis is wholly on product produced by the Big 4 members of the organised music cartel, although also included were, "knockoff designer purses, sunglasses and clothing, and counterfeit brand-name toys," the story quotes Sgt Paul Wandell as saying.

Wandell said Beaverton police, "got a tip about counterfeit items being sold at a Beaverton market in December, and the investigation led them to the Hillsboro flea markets".

No prizes for guessing where the tip came from, and about "20 recording and movie industry investigators" arrived from California to "help" police identify counterfeit items, says the story.

But this is merely the tiny tip of an iceberg of absolutely mind-boggling dimensions. Under it, police forces across the United States are routinely used in purely commercial activities.

GrayZone says it provides "investigative, paralegal and research services" to members of the entertainment community, including the labels.

In an April, 2006, report slugged RIAA Anti-Piracy Seizure Information, for New York alone it lists:

New York

April 25, 2006 - The New York Police Department's 30th Precinct, assisted by the RIAA, executed a search warrant at a burner lab in New York City. As a result, five suspects were arrested and two towers containing five CD/DVD burners, 1,150 piratical CD-Rs, and 307 counterfeit music DVD-Rs were seized.

April 14, 2006 - The New York Police Department's 67th Precinct, assisted by the RIAA, executed a search warrant at a CD burner lab located on Church Avenue in Brooklyn. The enforcement action resulted in the arrest of three suspects and the seizure of eight CD-R burners, 10,396 piratical CD-Rs, 204 counterfeit CD-Rs, and 210 counterfeit movie DVDs.

April 13, 2006 - The New York Police Department, Midtown South, assisted by the RIAA, conducted enforcement action at a distribution location on West 39 Street in New York City. Seized in connection to the enforcement action were a total of 8,900 counterfeit/piratical CD-Rs and 7,400 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs.

April 6, 2006 - The New York Police Department's Midtown South Precinct, assisted by the RIAA investigators conducted enforcement action at a distribution location on West 35th Street in New York City. As a result, two suspects were arrested and 11,120 counterfeit/piratical CD-Rs and 5,750 counterfeit DVD-Rs were seized.

April 6, 2006 - Also on this date, the New York Police Department's 1st Precinct, assisted by the RIAA, executed a search warrant at a distribution location on Canal Street in New York City and arrested two suspects. Seized as a result were 6,880 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs.

April 13, 2006 - The New York Police Department's 40th Precinct, assisted by RIAA investigators, executed a search warrant at a burner lab located on West 146 Street in New York City. Resulting from the enforcement action were one arrest and the seizure of two DVD/CD towers containing 14 CD-R burners, 785 piratical CD-Rs, 1,518 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs, 100 master CDs, and raw materials.

April 3, 2006 - As part of an ongoing investigation into "Operation Deceitful Wares" the New York Police Department's Organized Crimes Investigations Division, along with the United States Secret Service ECTF, executed seven state search warrants at a building on Broadway in New York City. As a result, eight suspects were arrested and charged. Seized in total as a result of the enforcement actions were a total of 20,800 counterfeit CD-Rs, 71,428 counterfeit movie DVDs, 5,597 counterfeit handbags, 2,866 counterfeit sneakers, 900 counterfeit wallets, 770 counterfeit sunglasses, 206 counterfeit boots, 176 counterfeit shoes and $9,898 in US currency. Several of the trademarks violated included Coach, Louis Vitton, Kate Spade, Prada, Gucci, Fendi, Nike and Timberland.

April 2, 2006 - RIAA investigators assisted the New York Police Department's 13th Precinct in enforcement action on West 28th Street in New York City that resulted in one arrest and the seizure of 16,600 counterfeit/piratical CD-Rs and 4,000 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs.

March 16, 2006 -The Spring Valley Police Department, along with the RIAA, executed a search warrant at a burner lab located on North Main Street resulting in one arrest and the seizure of five towers consisting of 11 CD-R burners, two printers, assorted raw material, 1,300 piratical CDs, 1,200 pirated CD-Rs and 500 counterfeit CDs.

March 16, 2006 - At another location, also on this date, the Spring Valley Police Department along with the RIAA, executed a search warrant at a burner lab also located on North Main Street resulting in one arrest and the seizure of one tower consisting of eight CD-R burners, 1,245 piratical CD-Rs, and various raw materials.

March 14, 2006 - The 67th Precinct of the New York Police Department, along with the RIAA, executed a search warrant at a CD-R burner lab located on Church Street in Brooklyn resulting in two arrests and the seizure of seven towers containing 46 CD-R burners, 3,200 piratical CD-R, three computers, two laptops, one mirage printer, one laser printer and a loaded 9mm handgun.

March 13, 2006 - RIAA investigators assisted the New York police with enforcement on West 37th Street in New York City. This action resulted in two arrests and the seizure of 12,600 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs and 4,300 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs.

March 10, 2006 - The 70th Precinct of the New York Police Department conducted enforcement action at a retail store in Brooklyn. This resulted in one arrest and the seizure of 56 CD-R burners, 1,300 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs and 450 movie DVD-Rs.

March 9, 2006 - RIAA investigators assisted the Bronx District Attorneys Squad in the execution of a search warrant at a burner lab on Morris Avenue. This warrant resulted in one arrest and the seizure of 25 CD-R burners, 900 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs, 100 counterfeit music DVDs and 2,600 counterfeit movie DVDs.

March 9, 2006 - The New York Police Department's 25th Precinct, assisted by the RIAA, executed a search warrant at a storage unit acting as a distribution location on Park Avenue in New York City. Seized as a result were 4,000 counterfeit CD-Rs, 4,800 piratical CD-Rs and 2,800 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs.

March 8, 2006 - RIAA investigators assisted the Brooklyn District Attorneys Squad in the execution of a search warrant at a burner lab on Patchen Avenue. The warrant resulted in one arrest and the seizure of 80 CD- R burners, 5,850 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs, one rimage printer, 5,000 insert labels and 1,980 counterfeit movie DVDs.

March 8, 2006 - At a separate location, RIAA investigators assisted the Brooklyn District Attorneys Squad in the execution of a search warrant at a distributor location on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. This warrant resulted in the seizure of 5,600 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs, 2,600 counterfeit music DVDs and 14,500 counterfeit movie DVDs.

March 7, 2006 - RIAA investigators received information from the Suffolk County District Attorney's Rackets Bureau that a Queen's man pled guilty to a felony and was sentenced to 1 1/2 years in state prison. The suspect was arrested in August of 2003 with 725 counterfeit CD-Rs in his possession and again in July of 2004 with 48 counterfeit CD-Rs and 225 piratical CD-Rs.

March 2, 2006 - The New York Police Department's Organized Crimes Investigations Division, along with RIAA and MPAA investigators, conducted multiple search warrants in Brooklyn. This first enforcement action on Vernon Avenue resulted in the arrest of three suspects and the seizure of 69 CD-R burners, 1,200 piratical DJ mix CD-Rs, 1,606 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs, a laptop computer, one printer and several boxes of raw materials.

March 2, 2006 - A second operation was led on Fulton Street. This action resulted in the arrest of one suspect and the seizure of 28 CD-R burners, 16,900 piratical DJ mix CD- Rs, 1,900 music DVD-Rs, 9,909 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs and boxes of various raw materials. Also on Fulton Street, a further warrant led to the arrest of another suspect and the seizure of seven burners and 5,100 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs. A seizure at a third location on Fulton Street resulted in the seizure of 35 burners, 10,300 piratical DJ mix CD-Rs, 1,400 music DVD-Rs and 7,105 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs.

March 2006 - The enforcement actions in the state of New York resulted in the seizure of more than 70,895 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs, 56,350 counterfeit movie DVDs and 365 CD / DVD Burners.

February 20, 2006 - The Suffolk County Police Department's 1st Precinct Crime Section, along with the RIAA, executed a search warrant at a burner lab located at 325 Merritt Ave in Wyandanch, resulting in the arrest of one suspect who is known to be a gang member. Seized from the lab were five CD-R burners, 1,050 piratical CD-Rs, 255 counterfeit music DVDs, two printers, 111 master CDs, 200 blank CD-Rs, $20,000 in US currency and 140 counterfeit movie DVDs as well as other trademarks that included Duracell Batteries, Nike and Reebok.

February 16, 2006 - The New York Police Department's Organized Crimes Investigations Division Unit executed a search warrant on Broadway in New York City. As a result of this enforcement action, one suspect was arrested and 6,300 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs, 600 counterfeit music DVDs and 7,004 counterfeit movie DVDs were seized.

February 15, 2006 - The New York Police Department's 28th Precinct, assisted by the RIAA, executed a search warrant at a CD burner lab and a distribution operation located on 7th Avenue in New York City. As a result of these enforcement actions, three suspects were apprehended and seven towers containing 44 (52X) CD burners were seized. Also confiscated during the search were 16,000 counterfeit CD-Rs, 11,800 piratical CD-Rs, a printer, one shrink wrap machine, one heat gun, two boxes of raw materials, inserts and one box of CD Masters.

February 13, 2006 - RIAA investigators assisted the New York Police Department's 13th Precinct in the execution of a search warrant on West 29th St in New York City. This action resulted in the seizure of 12,200 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs and 4,000 counterfeit movie DVDs.

February 9, 2006 - The United States Probation and Parole Department, while conducting a search on a supervised parolee, observed an active burner lab resulting in the arrest of one suspect and the seizure of 20 CD-R burners, 307 counterfeit music DVDs, 54 counterfeit CD-Rs, 74 piratical CD-Rs, 304 counterfeit movie DVDs, one computer, one printer and various raw material.

February 9, 2006 - The New York Police Department's 13th Precinct executed a search warrant on 5th Avenue in New York City that resulted in the seizure of 7,938 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs and 5,450 counterfeit movie DVDs.

February 8, 2006 - RIAA investigators assisted the New York Police Department's Organized Crimes Investigations Division execute a search warrant at 247 West 35th Street in New York City. This action resulted in one arrest and the seizure of 8,300 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs and 8,300 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs.

January 26, 2006 - The New York City Police Department Organized Crimes Investigations Division Unit with the United States Secret Service and assisted by the RIAA and MPAA, executed four search warrants on Broadway in New York City. As a result, three suspects were arrested and the seizure of 23,000 counterfeit CD-Rs and 32,000 counterfeit movie DVD-Rs.

January 18, 2006 - RIAA investigators assisted the New York Police Department's 79th Precinct in executing a search warrant at a retail record store on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. This action resulted in the arrest of 3 subjects and the seizure of 30,408 piratical and counterfeit CD-Rs. January 17, 2006 - RIAA investigators assisted the New York Police Department's 63rd precinct with the execution of a search warrant on Church Street in Brooklyn. This action resulted in the arrest of two suspects and the seizure of 4,734 piratical CD-Rs. It was later discovered that one of the offenders admitted to making the CD-Rs in the basement of his apartment. After giving consent to search his residence, 44 CD-R burners and other raw materials were seized.

January 10, 2006 - RIAA investigators assisted the New York Police Department's Organized Crimes Investigations Division Unit in the execution of a search warrant on West 27th St in New York City. Seized were a total of 8,100 counterfeit / piratical CD-Rs and 4,300 counterfeit movie DVDs.

January 5, 2006 - The New York Police Department's 13th Precinct assisted by the RIAA, executed a search warrant at a sandwich shop in New York City. The enforcement resulted in one arrest and the seizure of 13,000 counterfeit / pirated CD-Rs and 6,505 counterfeit movie DVDs. An additional search on 8th Avenue resulted in five additional arrests and the seizure of 33,600 counterfeit CD-Rs and 19,104 counterfeit movie DVDs.

January 3, 2006 - RIAA investigators assisted the New York Police Department's Organized Crimes Investigations Division Unit in the execution of a search warrant on Rosedale Avenue in the Bronx. The enforcement resulted in one arrest and the seizure of eight towers containing 74 CD-R burners (52x), 3,400 counterfeit / piratical CD-Rs and 2,304 counterfeit movie DVDs. A separate search warrant executed on West 36th Street in New York City resulted in the seizure of 12,400 counterfeit and piratical CD-Rs and 12,960 counterfeit movie DVDs.

The cost to New York taxpayers must have been, and no doubt still is, phenomenal, not to mention the fact they'd undoubtedly have been better employed serving and protecting New York citizens, not corporate music industry profits.
http://p2pnet.net/story/12469





Peer-to-Peer Software Vendors Face Criminal, Civil Charges In French Copyright Test Case
Geoffrey Ramos

Three popular peer-to-peer software vendors have been sued by music companies in France for violations of the country's copyright law, which was recently amended to punish companies that create software designed for illicit use.

Creators of peer-to-peer software Azureus, Shareaza and Morpheus face a lawsuit filed by the French music industry group, Societe des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF). If convicted, the defendants face up to three years in prison and fines of up to $400,000.

The SPPF lawsuit is a test case for the newly-introduced "Vivendi Amendments" in France. The amendments, which was sponsored by then Minister of Interior and now current French President Nicolas Sarkozy, puts criminal and civil liabilities on companies that produce software that are used for illegal activities.

Critics claim that the new law does not distinguish a software that can either be used legally and illegally at the same time, such as peer-to-peer software, among others. The law puts pressure on software publishers to put in place mechanisms that will prevent users from using the software for illegal activities.
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7007626280





Warner Puts The Brakes on Imeem

Another week, another Hollywood lawsuit against a web sharing site. This time it's Warner Music and Imeem.

Imeem has attracted a lot of visitors for its user-content sharing service. It claims a user base of 16 million people. The success has attracted the notice of entertainment companies and Warner Music in particular.

The company says that it both warns users against using copyrighted content and promptly takes it down when notified.

Warner says that unauthorized music and video are rampant on the site and calls Imeem "no innocent infringer." In its claim Warner writes that Imeem encourages "millions of users to flock to its website to copy, adapt, distribute and perform unlicensed sound recordings and music videos."
http://www.p2p-weblog.com/50226711/w...s_on_imeem.php





No Plans to Block File Sharing
Zachary Posner

More than 70 universities around the nation currently use a technology to block or monitor peer-to-peer sharing of copyrighted material. The University of Texas at Austin is not one of those institutions and has no related changes planned for the near future, said William Green, UT's director of networking for Information Technology Services.

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology held hearings last week to discuss the widespread problem of peer-to-peer file sharing on college campuses. One of the hearing's main focuses was to discuss CopySense Appliance, a program aimed to detect when students are sharing copyrighted material. File sharing, through the use of popular applications such as Gnutella and BitTorrent, has become as easy as point and click.

At the congressional hearings, testimonies were given for and against the effectiveness of CopySense. Representatives from Arizona State University backed the program, stating in their official testimony that it was easy to adopt, has worked effectively and has not caused any disturbance to their network.

Countering their argument was a representative from the University of Chicago, who, in their official testimony, said that network-based anti-infringement technologies fail within high performance networks and eventually will fail more generally. The University of Chicago representative stated that it may be easy for users to get through the system undetected, and in the future it will become increasingly difficult to differentiate between what is and is not copyright material.

UT discourages any illegal file sharing on campus. At orientation, new students are required to sign a document which outlines what constitutes piracy. Every time a student logs into UT Direct or UT's public network they are complying with UT's Acceptable Use Policy. There are also signs on library and dorm walls, as well as on University computer screen savers, that warn against illegal sharing and downloading.

This is as far as UT will currently go to curb file sharing on the campus network, Green said.

"At this point, the University's policy is that we don't monitor for content," he said. "That is not to say that the University couldn't change their policy."

Green, like representatives from the University of Chicago, expressed his doubts on whether the technology would actually work.

"While many of these programs are extremely clever and are evolving quickly, so are the programs to get around them," he said. "I am just not sure there is anything that can really be done."
http://media.www.dailytexanonline.co...-2914627.shtml





Boston University Student Challenges RIAA
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes

"A Boston University student identified only as one of the 21 'John Does' in Arista v. Does 1-21 has challenged the RIAA's alleged right to get his or her identity from the school, bringing a motion to vacate the ex parte discovery order obtained by the RIAA, and to quash the subpoena served on the university. John Doe's court papers argue, among other things, that the RIAA's papers are 'based on a flawed theory that having copyrighted music files on an individual's computer or on an assigned folder on Boston University's server is a "distribution" of such copyrighted music files, where such folder is merely accessible by others.'"
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/14/1625258





Swedish Man Fined $2,843 for Sharing 4 Songs Over the Internet

A Swedish court of appeals on Tuesday upheld the country's first conviction for sharing music files over the Internet without paying in what the recording industry hailed as a victory.

The Appellate Court backed a verdict by a lower court in October last year that saw 45-year-old Jimmy Sjostrom fined 20,000 Swedish crowns ($2,843) for infringing intellectual property rights by sharing four music files.

The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) hailed the conviction as a boost for intellectual property protection and said it could act as a deterrent. "The verdict only concerns four songs and it costs the one sentenced about 20,000 crowns in fines -- that is 5,000 crowns per song," IFPI said in a statement.

"Illegal file-sharing is thus expensive when there are legal and cheap alternatives available over the Internet today."

The legal action is part of a carrot-and-stick approach by the industry, which is pushing cases against illegal file-sharers while promoting legal music services such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes.

Sweden made downloading movie and music files from the Internet illegal only in 2005 after having been singled out for criticism by Hollywood. But the Pirate Party, a political group that wants Sweden to re-legalise file-sharing, also claimed the verdict as a success -- saying it meant Swedish police would have a hard time finding file-sharers since they could only access Internet records for a crime that carries a jail sentence.

"The verdict confirms that the penalty for file-sharing in Sweden today is a fine," it said in a statement. "For trifling crimes such as file-sharing, they are instead obligated to uphold their customer's right to anonymity."
http://www.eitb24.com/new/en/B24_530...3-for-sharing/





Eddie Money: “If you truly like music, don’t steal it.”
Press Release

“Internet piracy of music and movies can be the kiss of death for both industries,” Actor Timothy Woodward Jr., “Grand Strand”

Rock legend Eddie Money has joined with other musicians and stars of the new teen music TV drama, “Grand Strand,” in a campaign against illegal Internet filesharing of music and movies.

Studies show that more than $2 billion worth of music and more than $20 billion worth of movie content was downloaded illegally last year.

"Music piracy is illegal and extremely detrimental to all of those who make a living creating original musical works," said Money, whose new Warrior Records CD, “Wanna Go Back,” was released in March. "If you truly like music, don't steal it. Support the industry by downloading your music legally."

Money is currently on tour promoting his new CD.

“Downloading or distribution of unauthorized copies of intellectual property such as movies, television, music, games and software programs via the Internet is costing production companies millions of dollars,” said Actor Timothy Woodward Jr., co-star of “Grand Strand,” being filmed in Wilmington, N.C., this summer and marketed by Reveille International – which produces hit shows such as “Ugly Betty” and “House.”

SafeMedia Corporation, based in Boca Raton, Fla., has developed technology -- “SafeMedia’s ‘Clouseau®’” -- that makes it impossible to send or receive illegal Peer-2-Peer transmissions or file sharing.

SafeMedia CEO & President Safwat Fahmy, who created “Clouseau,” has submitted testimony to Congress describing his company’s global “P2P Disaggregator” (P2PD) technology, which examines incoming and outgoing packets of information and destroys illegal P2P, while allowing legal P2P to reach its intended destination.

“The technology moves through multi-layered encryptions, analyzes network patterns and updates itself frequently,” said Fahmy. “The packet examinations are noninvasive and foolproof. Clouseau prevents the illegal back and forth flow of copyrighted files like you would find through LimeWire, Morpheus or eMule.”

The technology is offered globally in support of a variety of local, national and international bandwidth and customer requirements.

IFPI, an umbrella organization representing the international recording industry, has estimated that 20 billion songs were illegally swapped or downloaded in 2005. The market research firm NDP Group reported that illegal music downloads jumped 47 percent between 2005 and 2006.

Movie piracy costs U.S. industries $20.5 billion per year, thwarts the creation of 140,000 jobs and accounts for more than $800 million in lost tax revenue, the Institute for Policy Innovation reported in 2006.
http://www.prlog.org/10019898-eddie-...-steal-it.html





Germany's Copyright Levy
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

Based on the recommendation of its Patent Office and following fierce lobbying by VG Wort, an association of German composers, authors and publishers, Germany enforced a three years old law and imposed a copyright levy of $13 plus 16 percent in value added tax per new computer sold in the country.

The money will be used to reimburse copyright holders - artists, performers, recording companies, publishers and movie studios - for unauthorized copying thought to adversely weigh on sales.

This was the nonbinding outcome of a one year mediation effort by the Patent Office between VG Wort, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Germany's largest computer manufacturer and other makers. VG Wort initially sought a levy of $33 per unit sold.

But Fujitsu and the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (Bitkom) - including Microsoft, IBM, Alcatel, Nokia, Siemens and 1300 other member firms - intend to challenge even the more modest fee in court.

They claim that it will add close to $80 million to the cost of purchasing computers without conferring real benefits on the levy's intended beneficiaries. They repeated similar assertions in a letter they have recently dispatched to the European Commission.

The problems of peer-to-peer file sharing, file swapping, the cracking and hacking of software, music and, lately, even e-books - are serious. Bundesverband Phono, Germany's recording industry trade association, reported that music sales plunged for the fifth consecutive year - this time, by more than by 11 percent.

According to figures offered by the, admittedly biased, group, 55 percent of the 486 million blank CDs sold in Germany last year - c. 267 million - were used for illicit purposes. For every "legal" music CD sold - there are 1.7 "illegal" ones.

Efforts by the industries effected are underway to extend the levy to computer peripherals and, where not yet implemented, photocopying machines. Similar charges are applied today by many European countries to other types of equipment: tape recorders, photocopiers, video-cassettes and scanners, for instance. Blank magnetic and optical media, especially recordable CDs, are - or were - taxed in more than 40 countries, including Canada and the United States.

Nor is Germany alone in this attempt to ameliorate the pernicious effects of piracy by taxing the hardware used to affect it.

The European Union's Directive on the Harmonisation of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society, passed in 2001, is strenuous, though not prescriptive. It demands that member states ensure "fair compensation" to copyright holders for copies made by means of digital equipment - but fails to specify or proscribe how. It has been incorporated into local law only by Greece and Denmark hitherto.

In Austria, Literar-Mechana, the copyright fees collection agency, negotiated with hardware manufacturers and importers the introduction of a levy on personal computers and printers. The Swiss are pushing through an amendment to the copyright law to collect a levy on PCs sold within their territory. The Belgian, Finnish, Spanish and French authorities are still debating the issue. So do Luxemburg and Norway.

According to Wired, the Canadian Private Copying Collective, the music industry trade group, has proposed "new levies to be applied to any device that can store music, such as removable hard drives, recordable DVDs, Compact Flash memory cards and MP3 players".

Precedent is hardly encouraging.

The aforementioned Canadian Collective has yet to distribute to its members even one tax dollar of the tens of millions it inexplicably hoards. In Greece, a 2 percent levy on all manner of computer equipment provoked a hail of legal challenges, still to be sorted out in the courts. The amounts collected hardly cover the government's legal expenses hitherto.

The United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden and Denmark are against the levy, claiming, correctly, that hardware is used for purposes other than pilfering intellectual property digitally. The Italians, Portuguese and Dutch haven't even considered the option.

Hardware manufacturers are livid. In a buyers' market, their razor-thin profit margins on the commoditized goods they are peddling are bound to be erased by a copyright levy. The European Information and Communications Trade Association (EICTA) implausibly threatens to pass on such extra costs to consumers and recommends to stick to technological means of prevention, collectively known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, or to novel CD copy protection measures.

Moreover, the fuzzy nature of the surcharge leaves a lot to be desired. Peter Suber, a prominent advocate of free online scholarship, analyzed the various post-levy scenarios in his FOS blog:

"What I can't tell is whether the copyright levy on hardware will come with universal permission to copy. If so, that's a big gain for a small cost... If the levy does not imply permission to copy, then which copying does it cover? If it covers copying without prior permission, then users will simply stop asking for permission, and convert all copying to pre-paid copying. If it covers copying without pre-payment, then that begs the question: what does the levy pre-pay? (It's not clear) how the plan would continue to distinguish authorized from unauthorized copying."

Yet, at this stage, it is difficult to see how to avoid the kind of rough justice meted out by Germany. Even the most advanced DRM systems lack a reliable model of remunerating copyright holders. Hence the conspicuous absence of DRM in the EU's Copyright Directive.

Suber raises some practical concerns, though he broadly supports a copyright levy on hardware:

"To make the system fair, we would need reasonably accurate measurements of the amount of copying. Otherwise we wouldn't know whether to bump up the price of a computer $35 or $350 or whether to give Elsevier 1% or 10%. Download counters wouldn't catch the peer-to-peer traffic. So would you put up with packet sniffers or other eavesdropping technologies to take random samples of the copy traffic, as long as your identity was not recorded?"

Even what constitutes copyrighted work is not entirely clear. The European Court of Justice heard arguments last week in a case pitting two American companies, IMS Health and NDCHealth, against each other. IMS Health vends aggregated German data pertaining to the sales of pharmaceuticals.

NDCHealth tried to emulate an organizational element of the IMS Health database. The Court is faced with seemingly intractable questions: Can IMS Health be compelled to license its database to a potential competitor? Is the structure of the database - the way Germany is divided to 1860 reporting zones - protected in any way?

In essence, copyright is a temporary monopoly on creative work granted to the authors, publishers and distributors of such products. It is intended to compensate them for their efforts and to encourage them to continue to originate in future. Yet, the disintermediation brought on by digital technologies threatens to link author and public directly, cutting out traditional content brokers such as record companies or publishers.

This is the crux of the battle royal. The middlemen are attempting - in vain - to sustain their dying and increasingly parasitic industries and refusing to adapt and re-invent themselves. Everyone else watches in amazement and dismay the consequences of this grand folly: innovation is thwarted, consumers penalized, access to works of art, literature and research constrained.
http://globalpolitician.com/articled...6&cid=3&sid=75





Big Radio Makes a Grab for Internet Listeners
Jeff Leeds

Last week a radio D.J. known as Vibegrrl, who works the midday shift on Hot 99.5, a Washington pop station, offered her listeners the chance to receive tickets to see the rock band Hinder.

But to win, they had to do more than dial in at the right moment. They first had to visit Hot 99.5’s Web site and identify the woman wearing a thong, as shown from behind, and then call the studio. (Unsurprisingly the answer was Britney Spears.)

“Everybody’s on the Internet all day,” said Vibegrrl, whose real name is Lara Dua. “It would be just kind of not smart if we weren’t making that part of what we do.” Interaction with listeners used to be “very limited,” she added. Now, though, “I’m chatting and blogging and doing research and answering phones all at the same time.”

After ceding ground (and potential advertising dollars) for years to an army of autonomous Internet radio stations, some of which are run from basements and spare bedrooms, the nation’s biggest broadcasters are now marching online, determined to corral the next generation of listeners. The result may be a showdown to define the future of the medium.

Confronted by a slow erosion of listeners who are turning to iPods, podcasts and other sources for entertainment, the radio corporations are trying to merge their over-the-air music and D.J. chatter with the Web, adding online streams of their broadcasts and features already found on many independent Web-based stations. These include live chat rooms, blogs and MySpace-style social networking features.

Late last month, CBS said it had paid $280 million to acquire Last FM (last.fm), a popular Web radio service where listeners can customize stations based on their personal taste, and also explore other users’ playlists. And Clear Channel, the biggest radio corporation, with a stable of more than 800 stations, has built miniature social networks into the Web sites of Hot 99.5 (hot995.com) and 7 other pop-music stations in major markets in the latest step in an ambitious digital initiative.

All of this comes at an inopportune moment for small, Internet-based radio stations, which are facing a sharp increase in the royalties they must pay to record labels (and artists) for playing their music. The online stations had previously paid a percentage of their revenue for music streamed to United States listeners, — in effect ensuring that their costs would not exceed whatever sales they received. But a federal panel, the Copyright Royalty Board, has set new rates effective July 15 that alter that structure so the Internet radio stations are charged a fee each time a user listens to a song.

Soma FM (somafm.com), a San Francisco-based Web site housing 11 stations specializing in genres like rootsy Americana and spy-movie themes, owed about $20,000 for 2006 under the previous rate structure, said the site’s founder, Rusty Hodge. But Mr. Hodge, who said the stations combined generally attracted a peak audience of 12,000 at any given moment, figures that the rates would translate to a bill of $600,000 for the same year.

Broadcasters of various sizes have been rallying support in Congress to supersede the panel’s decision. “If it stands, then we’re all done for,” said Ted Leibowitz, a software engineer and founder of BAGeL Radio (bagelradio.com), an online service specializing in indie rock that he runs from a bedroom in his San Francisco apartment. For listeners, he said, the loss of potential choices would be akin to what satellite TV subscribers would face if their satellite crashed. “What people will be offered will be one one-thousandth of what they’re offered today,” he said.

The cost of playing music online could become a deterrent for the traditional radio broadcasters too as more of them stream music on the Web. But it’s a price they may not be able to avoid; advertisers are flocking online. For the first time marketers are spending more money to advertise online than on the radio, according to TNS Media Intelligence, which tracks ad spending. Internet sites accounted for 7.7 percent of ad spending for the first quarter of the year, compared with radio’s 6.6 percent, TNS said.

Broadcast radio still commands a massive audience: An estimated 230 million people tune in each week. The trick for the big radio corporations, though, is that pursuing listeners online may mean developing a wholly different approach to programming.

Many Internet-based stations say their medium allows them to offer an abundance of genres far outside the boundaries of traditional over-the-air music stations, often with playlists that can be tailored to the taste of the individual listener. Pandora (pandora.com), one of the most popular Internet radio services with roughly seven million users, creates personalized stations based on the characteristics of users’ favorite songs. Live 365 (live365.com), which says it has four million listeners a month, is a searchable portal to thousands of tiny stations playing genres ranging from neo-soul to Christian blues.

Given the proliferation of wireless Internet access, many of the fledgling radio services hope that fans will soon be able to flip on an online radio stream while driving to work instead of tuning into the local morning radio D.J. “It’s just a matter of time before you can get Internet streams wherever you are,” said Tim Westergren, a co-founder of Pandora.

How far the traditional radio broadcasters will, or can, go to match the diversity of music found on independent Internet stations is far from clear. One effort at Clear Channel involves letting fans choose to hear songs posted by unsigned or other emerging artists, and company executives say some will be considered for on-air exposure.

The bigger focus is on developing features that can be rapidly promoted using the chains’ mass and reach. Clear Channel’s Hot 99.5 in Washington has said it would distribute $10,000 to listeners when its nascent social network (the “Hot Spot”) reached 10,000 members. On the company’s Z100 in New York, tickets to see a performance by Beyoncé were recently being given away in the station’s chat room. Fans could also join the pop station’s social network, the “Z-Zone.”

In the works are similar networks for rock and sports stations, said Evan Harrison, a former America Online executive who has overseen Clear Channel’s digital efforts since 2004.

“If we weren’t offering our listeners an opportunity to interact, they would simply choose somewhere else to go for it,” Mr. Harrison said.

The next battlefront may open in the mobile world: Clear Channel and Pandora have each begun to offer interactive features though cellular phones. Listeners of certain Clear Channel stations can receive notices alerting them before a specific song plays, for example, while users of Sprint phones can go online and build a unique Pandora station around their personal taste.

Nonetheless there is still a sense among some Internet broadcasters that the untamed online frontier where they have cultivated listeners is coming to a close — or at least becoming more crowded.

Mr. Hodge of Soma FM had been musing about creating a new online station catering to fans of laid-back 1970’s oldies, featuring artists like Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Doobie Brothers. But then a couple of weeks ago he heard that the same mellow music would be broadcast on a radio station in San Francisco, KFRC-FM, which is owned by CBS, and streamed on the station’s Web site.

Mr. Hodge said he decided to shelve his idea for the moment, figuring that CBS would grab many of his potential listeners. Still, “I don’t think most of us are intimidated” by the big radio companies’ push online, he said. “If you ask me again in two years, am I going to be worried, that’s probably going to be a different answer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/12/ar...c/12RADIO.html





Large Webcasters Ask Congress For Help In Royalty Battle
FMQB

Four of the largest webcasters have sent a letter to every member of Congress, asking for their help in the ongoing battle over Internet radio royalty rates. The CEOs of Yahoo! (Jerry Yang), RealNetworks (Rob Glaser), Live365 (Mark Lam) and Pandora (Joe Kennedy) have all signed off on a letter on behalf of the Internet radio industry, asking that Congress take a close look at the results of the Copyright Royalty Board's decision.

The letter notes that the CRB decision "shocked the industry and neutral analysts" and says that "the CRB-imposed royalties will cause immediate bankruptcy of the majority of the Internet radio industry when it becomes effective July 15, and will actually reduce royalties to record companies and artists as services go dark and royalties are never paid."

They also note the new rates are 300 percent more for large webcasters and 1200 percent more for smaller ones, with another $500 per channel fee on top of that. "As interpreted by SoundExchange just this fee would cost only three companies well over $1 billion combined annually (and the CRB decision states that retroactive royalties are due immediately, so the July 15 invoice for just three services would exceed $2 billion)."

The companies add that "the CRB has taken [webcasters' business license] away by setting royalty rates that are not merely unprofitable, but will eliminate much if not all of the industry." They continue, "Internet radio competes against satellite and broadcast radio, but the competitive landscape is tilted by differing royalties rates among these platforms. For example, cable radio pays royalties of 7.25 percent of revenue, satellite radio less than five percent but Internet radio, which now pays approximately 30 percent of industry-wide revenues will be forced to pay between 60 and 300 percent of revenue plus $1 billion in administrative fees."

The letter continues, "Internet radio technology empowers consumers, artists and independent record labels by enabling more new music to be introduced to more fans than any preexisting medium. Internet radio is a marketplace solution to media consolidation and programming diversity concerns, but only if the Congress acts by July 15."

They conclude, "As a result of the CRB’s decision, the future of music, of technology and innovation, of small artists and independent labels and millions of music-loving consumers is at stake. While process is important, we submit that the end result, which threatens the viability of the smallest, most innovative, most artist- and consumer-friendly promotional radio industry, is most significant. We ask you for your help to restore balance and fairness so that this new industry can survive and continue to pay artists reasonable royalties."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=420496





Grass Roots Roared and Immigration Plan Collapsed
Julia Preston

The undoing of the immigration bill in the Senate this week had many players, but none more effective than angry voters like Monique Thibodeaux, who joined a nationwide campaign to derail it.

Mrs. Thibodeaux, an office manager at a towing company here in suburban Detroit, became politically active as she never had before. Guided by conservative Internet organizations, she made calls and sent e-mail messages to senators across the country and pushed her friends to do the same.

“These people came in the wrong way, so they don’t belong here, period,” Mrs. Thibodeaux, a Republican, said of some 12 million illegal immigrants who would have been granted a path to citizenship under the Senate bill.

“In my heart I knew it was wrong for our country,” she said of the measure.

Supporters of the legislation defended it as an imperfect but pragmatic solution to the difficult problem of illegal immigration. Public opinion polls, including a New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted last month, showed broad support among Americans for the bill’s major provisions.

But the legislation sparked a furious rebellion among many Republican and even some Democratic voters, who were linked by the Internet and encouraged by radio talk show hosts. Their outrage and activism surged to full force after Senator Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican who was an author of the bill, suggested early this week that support for the measure seemed to be growing. The assault on lawmakers in Washington was relentless. In a crucial vote Thursday night, the bill’s supporters, including President Bush, fell short by 15 votes. While there is a possibility the legislation could be revived later this year, there was a glow of victory among opponents on Friday.

“Technologically enhanced grass-roots activism is what turned this around, people empowered by the Internet and talk radio,” said Colin A. Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, a conservative group.

Mr. Hanna suggested the passion and commitment were on the side of the opponents.

“The opposition to the amnesty plan is so much more intense than the intensity of the supporters,” said Mr. Hanna, speaking of the bill’s provisions to grant legal status to qualifying illegal immigrants, which the authors of the legislation insisted was not amnesty.

In the end, supporters conceded that they were outmaneuvered by opponents who boiled down their complaints to that single hot-button word, repeated often and viscerally on talk radio programs and blogs.

“It’s a lot easier to yell one word, ‘amnesty,’ and it takes a little more to explain, ‘No, it’s not, and if you don’t do anything you have a silent amnesty,’ ” said Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, a Democrat who backed the measure.

Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, which follows Hispanic immigration, described the bill as “born an orphan in terms of popular support.”

“You got the sense of a deafening silence from the supporters, and the roar of the opposition,” Mr. Sabatini said.

For Mrs. Thibodeaux and others on her side, the immigration debate was a battle for the soul of the nation because it seemed to divert taxpayer-financed resources to cater to foreigners who had not come to this country by legal means.

“This hit home with me because I knew it was taking away from our people,” said Mrs. Thibodeaux, 50, who works at Ruehle’s Auto Transport. “What happened to taking care of our own people first?”

Rosemary Jenks, a policy advocate at NumbersUSA, which calls for curbing immigration, said that 7,000 new members signed up for the organization in a single day last week. Other groups reported a similar outpouring as proponents of the Senate bill claimed to be gaining momentum.

“We had way more response than we could handle,” said Stephen Elliott, president of Grassfire.org, a conservative Internet group that called for volunteers for a petition drive and instructed people how to barrage lawmakers with telephone calls and e-mail.

The group gathered more than 700,000 signatures on petitions opposing the bill, delivering them this week to senators in Washington and in their home states.

Organizers described a new Internet-linked national constituency that emerged among Republicans, much like the one that Democrats pioneered during the presidential candidacy in 2004 of Howard Dean. But many of these Republicans are enraged at their party leaders, including Mr. Kyl and Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, who supported the bill, and they feel betrayed by Mr. Bush.

Opposition to the Senate bill brought together many Americans in states where immigration was not traditionally a fervor-inspiring issue, but where illegal immigration has become more visible in recent years.

“Every state is now a border state,” said Susan Tully, the national field director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which has long supported a crackdown on illegal immigration. The bill’s opponents also objected to how it was handled, with the huge measure negotiated behind closed doors between White House and Senate lawmakers, without any hearings or other public input.

“Ordinary people like me rose up and put a stop to it,” said William Murphy, a retired policeman from Evansville, Wis., one of the Grassfire.org volunteers who delivered petitions to his senators. On Thursday before the vote, he said, he put in new calls to 15 senators.

Mr. Murphy said he felt strongly about the bill because he believed it would degrade the value of American citizenship.

“If I come from Mexico, I can jump the fence and get all those American benefits,” he said. “It’s outrageous when you can buy your citizenship for $5,000,” he said, referring to the fines that illegal immigrants would pay under the bill to become legal permanent residents.

When asked about Mr. Bush’s support for the bill, Mr. Murphy, a longtime Republican, had to pause to temper his words.

“I was stunned, really,” he said. Mr. Bush “has always been a person who stood for some basic human values, and now he’s going to give away the country?”

In Virginia, Allen Price, another Grassfire.org member who was formerly a talk show host in Richmond, decried the Senate bill as an attempt by corporate business to secure cheap labor.

“I called up everybody I knew and told them to make calls,” said Mr. Price, also a Republican. He delivered 15,000 petitions to the offices of his senators, John W. Warner, a Republican, and Jim Webb, a first-term Democrat, both of whom voted against closing debate on the bill on Thursday night.

In California, a challenge was started by “The John & Ken Show,” a popular talk radio show critical of the bill, for 30,000 opposition calls to Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, who supported the measure. All of Ms. Feinstein’s phone lines were clogged, with calls from opponents of the bill and from supporters seeking to undermine the challenge.

Here in Michigan, speaking at her neatly maintained home under hickory trees in Washington, a town north of Detroit that has been battered by auto company layoffs, Mrs. Thibodeaux said the immigration bill worried her like no other political issue. She believed it would reward undeserving immigrants who do not speak English and would soon become a burden on public services that Americans need in a time of economic uncertainty.

“A lot of our American people in Detroit are hurting,” Mrs. Thibodeaux said, noting that she has often done volunteer work in poor neighborhoods here. “It’s just not right.”

Her strong feelings about the immigration issue came gradually, she said. A nephew who works as a house painter had trouble finding high-paying work because of competition from illegal immigrants. Some Mexican teenagers hassled her on the street, seeming to mock her because she walks with a cane. She spotted immigrants shopping with food stamps at the grocery store.

Mrs. Thibodeaux said she favored orderly legal immigration, but did not think illegal immigrants should benefit from American generosity.

“I have a very hard time with illegal,” she said. She proposes that all illegal immigrants be given a 90-day period to leave voluntarily. After that, immigration agents, local police and the National Guard, if necessary, should be mobilized to deport them, she said.

Republican voters and organizers said they were ready for a long fight on the immigration issue, even if the debate is reopened in Congress.

“This bill represented something so big that people noticed,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a research group. He said the Senate debate was not “just stirring up the hornet’s nest, but is actually changing the dynamics of this issue for the future.”

Mrs. Thibodeaux agreed. If the immigration issue comes before Congress again, she said, “I’m going to get a microphone and start yelling.”

Randal C. Archibold contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/wa.../10oppose.html





Senate Leaders Agree to Revive Immigration Bill
Robert Pear and Jeff Zeleny

President Bush and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, pledged today to work for passage of the suddenly revived immigration bill, with Mr. Reid saying Senate Democrats would sacrifice their Fourth of July break, if necessary.

“Each day our nation fails to act, the problem only grows worse,” Mr. Bush said at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast here. “I will continue to work closely with members of both parties to get past our differences and pass a bill I can sign this year.”

Mr. Reid, speaking the day after he and his Republican counterpart announced an agreement on bringing the bill back to the Senate floor, said: “We hope the president will work with us, and that Congressional Republicans will not stall our efforts to strengthen our national security and economy. If they do, Democrats are prepared to work through the weekends and the July 4 district work period to accomplish our goals.”

The term “district work period” is a euphemism for “recess,” and Mr. Reid’s willingness to sacrifice it is a reflection of his desire not to squander an opportunity to gain passage of comprehensive immigration legislation.

Mr. Reid and the Republican minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said on Thursday evening that they expected the bill to return to the floor before the Fourth of July recess.

In a joint statement, Mr. Reid and Mr. McConnell said: “We met this evening with several of the senators involved in the immigration bill negotiations. Based on that discussion, the immigration bill will return to the Senate floor after completion of the energy bill.”

The immigration bill, ardently sought by President Bush, would make the biggest changes in immigration law and policy in more than 20 years.

It would increase border security, crack down on companies that employ illegal immigrants, establish a guest worker program and offer legal status to most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

The agreement does not guarantee that the bill will be approved by the Senate. And even if immigration legislation is approved by the Senate, it will die unless the House also approves a bill and the two chambers can reconcile their differences. Supporters of the bipartisan Senate bill predict that some conservative Republicans will try to block a vote on final passage, because of concerns about the legalization program.

Predicting “procedural barriers,” Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership team, said on Thursday, “Three or four senators will try to block every amendment.”

Mr. Reid said today he had insisted on a process “to prevent endless debate and get the bill through the Senate.”

The House has held many hearings on immigration this year. House Democratic leaders, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have expressed concerns about major provisions of the Senate bill, including one that would give less weight to family ties in deciding who can immigrate to the United States.

A White House spokesman, Scott M. Stanzel, said, “We are encouraged by the announcement from Senate leaders that comprehensive immigration reform will be brought back up for consideration.”

President Bush, in his remarks to the prayer breakfast today, went out of his way to praise two senators who have worked hard on the immigration bill, Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida.

Mr. Bush said, as he has many times, that immigration legislation must secure the country’s borders; create a lawful way for foreign workers to fill jobs that Americans are not doing, and resolve the status of illegal aliens in the United States “without amnesty and without animosity.”

The bill stalled on June 7, when supporters garnered just 45 of the 60 votes needed to end debate. Republican senators said that they had not been allowed to offer enough amendments.

Under the agreement reached on Thursday, the Senate will consider about 22 amendments, half from Republicans and half from Democrats.

Earlier in the day, trying to start the bill moving again in the Senate, Mr. Bush called for an immediate burst of $4.4 billion in spending to show that the government was committed to “securing this border once and for all.”

Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia, described the call for $4.4 billion as “a good start.” But Mr. Isakson said Mr. Bush needed to do more to secure the border and to show that he was serious about enforcing immigration laws.

Comments by Republican senators on Thursday suggested that they were feeling the heat from conservative critics of the bill, who object to provisions offering legal status. The Republican whip, Trent Lott of Mississippi, who supports the bill, said: “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

At some point, Mr. Lott said, Senate Republican leaders may try to rein in “younger guys who are huffing and puffing against the bill.”

Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, welcomed the president’s support for more spending on border security, but said, “There’s no reason why we should be forced to tie amnesty to it.”

Mr. Bush said the $4.4 billion would “come from the fines and penalties that we collect from those who have come to our country illegally” and apply for legal status.

Representative Duncan Hunter of California, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, scorned such linkage.

“The idea that we will have border security only if it’s paid for by illegal immigrants is unacceptable,” Mr. Hunter said.

Matthew A. Towery, a political analyst in Atlanta who was once a campaign chairman for Newt Gingrich and is now chief executive of a polling firm, Insider Advantage, said: “Having George W. Bush come out and speak in favor of the immigration bill does not do any good for Republican senators. He just irritates the conservative base of the Republican Party, which has abandoned him on this issue.”

A new proposal floated on Thursday in an effort to deter the hiring of illegal immigrants would put biometric identifiers into Social Security cards. That change would make the cards more difficult to forge and counterfeit, Mr. Schumer said.

David Stout contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/wa...-immig.html?hp





StealthNet 0.8 Build 2007.6.7.1 is Out Now
Posted by toni66

It is a great pleasure for us to present you the first release of StealthNet, a client for the anonymous RShare network.

1. Kudos

First off I will start with the kudos. They fly out to

- Lars, because without this guy neither the RShare network nor the StealthNet client would exist. He created the RShare client as well as the protocol for the RShare network and deserves our full respect Cool

- without a highly engaged developer team StealthNet would never have been born and for this reason a huge "thanks!" goes out to this guys. I am glad to be part of such a great team and want and want to let you know that it is a great pleasure for me to be involved in the StealthNet development process

- the Beta team. Without these guys a lot of bugs would never have been found and fixed and I can assure that they are great bug hunters Smiley

- our design department who created the new StealthNet splash screen and the StealthNet icon

2. New features

StealthNet 0.8 has a lot of new and funky features in comparison with RShare Chamäleon 0.7.1.5:

- Download Resuming (allows resuming of interrupted downloads)

- Optimized bandwidth allocation when upload/download limit is activated

- Shared files and directories are now added or removed in real time

- Redundant downloads from multiple sources have been removed

- Multilanguage support (as of now Englisch and German is supported, French and Spanish will follow)

- Search filter for file types

- Pre-defined search for file extensions

The most important feature in particular is download resuming. From now on interrupted downloads can be resumed once a file source is available in the RShare network.

3. Future prospects

There are already a lot of further enhancements in the pipeline which I can´t talk about at the moment. However, I can assure that the RShare network is growing day by day and with language support for French and Spanish we expect even more new users.

4. Feedback

Due to the first release of StealthNet 0.8 it is very likely that this version contains some bugs. To give us some feedback you can use this thread. Do not hesitate to post error reports or suggestions there.

5. Download

Aware of the Planet Peer download section (for registered users only!) there are some other mirrors which provides free downloads of StealthNet without any registration.

http://www.stealthnet.de/download/stealthnet_setup.exe
http://www.stealthnet.de/download/St....7.1_Linux.zip

http://home.arcor.de/eroli/StealthNe...hnet_setup.exe
http://home.arcor.de/eroli/StealthNe....7.1_Linux.zip

http://www.screamingfist.de/download...hnet_setup.exe
http://www.screamingfist.de/download....7.1_Linux.zip

Important: If you got StealthNet from a source other then the ones above I highly recommend to compare the SHA-1 hashes for the StealthNet setup program and the archive with StealthNet for Linux!

SHA1 Hash: 55BF97D293A2BF57DF9295DDC5BFF70C55C4499D stealthnet_setup.exe
SHA1 Hash: 52EEB27227CCF072D89F41392D998E88B937B87B stealthnet2007.6.7.1_linux.zip
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=24026
http://board.planetpeer.de/index.php...topic=2 922.0




Mininova Breaks 2 Billion Downloads Barrier
Ernesto

Mininova, one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines, experiences a massive growth in the first half of 2007, and today they served the 2 billionth .torrent download.

In January, when mininova celebrated its second anniversary, they passed the 1 billion download mark. It wasn’t really a surprise that getting to 2 billion wouldn’t take another 2 years, but not many expected that it would happen this fast.

Niek, the founder of mininova is excited about reaching this milestone, and hopes to continue serving torrents at this rate. One of the factors that contributed to mininova’s continued success is the redesign of the front- and back end last December, that dramatically improved the search and browse speed.

In a response to the great news Niek told TorrentFreak:

“I never expected mininova to reach 2 billion downloads this fast. We’ve grown very fast over the past months, in users as well as downloaded torrents. At the moment we have approximately 2 million users, and 10 million pageviews every day.”

So, congratulations to mininova, and I expect we will see the 3 billionth download by the end of summer.
http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-bre...loads-barrier/





TorrentSpy Ruling a 'Weapon of Mass Discovery'
Greg Sandoval

It was a pro-copyright ruling that stunned nearly everyone dealing with the issue of online piracy. In a decision reported late Friday by CNET News.com, a federal judge in Los Angeles found (PDF) that a computer server's RAM, or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit.

If allowed to stand, the groundbreaking ruling may mean that anyone defending themselves in a civil suit could be required to turn over information in their computer's RAM hardware, which could force companies and individuals to store vast amounts of data, say technology experts. Roaming the Web anonymously was already nearly impossible. This ruling, which brings up serious privacy issues, could make it a lot harder.

"I think that people's fears about a potential invasion of privacy are quite warranted," said Ken Withers, director of judicial education at The Sedona Conference, an independent research group. "The fear is that we're putting in the hands of private citizens and particularly well-financed corporations the same tools that heretofore were exclusively in the hands of criminal prosecutors, but without the sort of safeguards that criminal prosecutors have to meet, such as applying for search warrants."

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Chooljian issued the decision while presiding over a court fight between the film industry and TorrentSpy, which is accused of copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed last year by the Motion Picture Association of America. Following her decision, Chooljian ordered TorrentSpy to begin logging user information and allowed the company to mask the Internet Protocol addresses belonging to visitors of the Web site. TorrentSpy must then turn the data over to the MPAA. The judge stayed the order pending an appeal, which the company filed on Tuesday. It's not clear when the appeal will be heard.

The question now, of course, is whether Chooljian's ruling will hold up legally or technically. From a legal standpoint, Withers said he feared the judge's decision may mean a "tremendous expansion" of the scope of discovery in civil litigation. The trend in the courts lately has been to create what Withers called "weapons of mass discovery." Discovery is the legal process by which lawyers obtain documents and other materials to help defend their case.

He also said that the judge's order for a defendant (TorrentSpy) to create logs of user activity so they can be turned over to a plaintiff (MPAA) is unprecedented.

"There's never been a requirement that (defendants) must create documents that they wouldn't ordinarily maintain for the purpose of satisfying some (plaintiff's) discovery requests," said Withers.

But on the technical side, Dean McCarron, principle analyst at Mercury Research, said the judge erred by defining volatile computer memory as "electronically stored information."

RAM is a computer's ephemeral and temporary memory that helps it access data quickly. Think of RAM as the yellow post-it notes that people keep to remind themselves of tasks. Once completed, the note is tossed out. Data in a computer's hard drive is stored permanently and is more like filing documents away in a cabinet.

"RAM is the working storage of a computer and designed to be impermanent," McCarron said. "Potentially your RAM is being modified up to several billions of times a second. The judge's order simply reveals to me a lack of technical understanding."

A "tap" can be installed in a server, McCarron offered. But that means keeping a running log of IP addresses and other information. A tap would also require a company to store enormous amounts of data, an expensive process, he said.

But lawyers who represent copyright holders cheered Chooljian's decision.

"Unfortunately for TorrentSpy, Judge Chooljian's decision may herald the end of an era," Richard Charnley, a Los Angeles-based attorney, said in a statement. "The process, if affirmed, will expose TorrentSpy's viewer-users and, in turn, will allow the MPAA to close another avenue of intellectual property abuse."

Lauren Nguyen, an MPAA attorney, maintains that because TorrentSpy is allowed to redact IP addresses, nobody's privacy is in jeopardy. "The user privacy argument is simply a red herring," Nguyen said. She also said that the judge "broke no new ground in the case." The courts have long considered computer RAM as "electronically stored information," she said.

To understand the significance of the decision, one must consider that many Web sites promise to keep users' information private. Some, like TorrentSpy, do this by switching off their servers' logging function, which typically records visitors' IP addresses as well as their activity on the site.

While protecting its users' privacy, TorrentSpy also makes it easier for those who download pirated material to work in the shadows, MPAA's attorneys argued. The MPAA has estimated that the illegal downloading of copyright movies costs the six largest U.S. studios more than $2 billion annually.

To prove that TorrentSpy was making it easier to share files, the studios told Chooljian that it was necessary that they obtain records of user activity. They convinced her that the only way to do this was to obtain the data from RAM.

Ultimately, pulling user information off a server's RAM might be a bigger privacy problem than it's worth, said one file sharer, who asked to remain anonymous.

"To imagine my information being disseminated without my written or verbal consent is unnerving," she said. "Then again, if I'm doing something I know is illegal, can I protest?"
http://news.zdnet.com/2102-9588_22-6190900.html





On The Download
Peter Lauria

In a move designed to upend the traditional record label business model, Downtown Records and Internet entrepreneur Peter Rojas plan to launch an online-only record label that will offer its music for free and generate revenue only through advertising and sponsorships, The Post has learned.

Dubbed RCRD LBL and targeted for launch this fall, the venture aims to merge free, exclusive music with niche blog content to offer advertisers highly targeted sponsorship opportunities. Or, to put it another way, the label marries Downtown's ability to identify cutting-edge artists - the label's roster includes blog-beloved bands like Gnarls Barkley and Cold War Kids - with the architecture of Rojas' weblogs to create a next-generation online music company.

One source familiar with the project described it as a "curated YouTube or MySpace for music with an editorially driven filter."

This source said RCRD LBL would feature a central destination site from which content for various genres of music from rock to electronica to urban can be accessed by consumers and branded or sponsored by advertisers.

"There's an urgency in the industry to find new ways to monetize content," said one source familiar with the project, "and the economics of the Internet facilitate this model because it allows for a leaner organization while letting fans dictate the process."

While the industry has been taking baby steps towards generating ancillary revenue through advertising, RCRD LBL is betting the house on a media-centric model that gives away its core product in return for being fully subsidized by advertising.

According to a preliminary business outline obtained by The Post, the venture offers advertisers three different levels of sponsorship packages that feature a combination of contest, podcast and "single of the week" sponsorships as well as advertising plug-ins that run over the course of several months.

Sources said the idea seems to have a lot of traction judging by initial conversations with Madison Avenue.

While these sources declined to provide revenue projections for the venture, they did say that they were "confident that the Web site will generate significant revenue early on."

The venture, which is being funded entirely by Downtown Records and Rojas, is so nascent that it has yet to negotiate contracts for artists to participate.

In employing a business model similar to broadcast television, RCRD LBL is trying to counter the continuing decline in physical music sales by capitalizing on the swelling flow of advertising dollars online as well as the enormous traffic on peer-to-peer Web sites.

With more than 5 billion songs swapped on file-sharing Web sites last year, finding a way to generate legal income from the trading of music has been the holy grail re cord labels have been in pursuit of for years.

"We live in a world in which kids are sharing music, so peer-to-peer Web sites aren't going away anytime soon," said one source. "But with this model you can use your copyright to monetize the traffic on these Web sites by generating advertising revenue."
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06112007...ter_lauria.htm





Bon Jovi Bundles iTunes Album with Ticketmaster Sales

In what's being billed as a first, Bon Jovi is bundling a digital iTunes copy of the band's upcoming album, Lost Highway, with advance tickets for October concerts in Newark, N.J.

The stand, which begins October 25 and may be expanded beyond the initial five shows, will open the new Prudential Center in Newark.

The online presale program will be available exclusively to American Express cardholders beginning June 12 through June 14, and to the general public from June 15 through June 22. Tickets without the digital-album download will then be available for purchase by the general public beginning June 23.

Fans who purchase the Lost Highway Ticket Package will receive a code from Ticketmaster that enables them to download Lost Highway from iTunes beginning on its June 19 release. The ticket-album package will cost $9.99--the price of the album on iTunes--more than tickets later sold on their own. Album sales in the bundle will count toward the album's Billboard chart position, whose sales source is Nielsen SoundScan.

For those fans who have already preordered Lost Highway from Bon Jovi's Web site or iTunes, Bon Jovi and Ticketmaster have arranged for iTunes to provide a passcode that will enable them to purchase a single presale ticket for $9.99 less without adding the digital album.

The program is similar in concept to previous Ticketmaster initiatives with acts such as Bob Dylan, Maroon 5 and Daddy Yankee. The difference is that the other programs offered albums and tickets in two separate sales via two separate sites.

The Bon Jovi deal is the first "all-in" presale that bundles together a ticket and a digital album as a single transaction sold via Ticketmaster's Web site. In this way, the promotion is more a digital version of Prince's 2005 Musicology tour, which included with the ticket price a physical version of his new album, to be picked up at the venue.

The $375 million, 18,000-capacity Prudential Center will be managed by Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) and booked by its live entertainment division, AEG Live Events.
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...36834120070612





Amid the Shirts and Socks, a Concert Can Break Out
Craig R. Whitney

What do you do if you buy a famous downtown department store and find an organ with 28,482 pipes occupying thousands of square feet of perfectly good retail space?

If you’re Macy’s, you let devotees of the instrument put in 61 more pipes and give them thousands more square feet to set up an organ repair shop.

Diapasons, it would seem, are as much music to Macy’s as cash registers, coin counters and customers at its Center City store here, a Philadelphia institution that was originally a Wanamaker’s. So the company let the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, a private group of aficionados who have been helping to maintain the instrument for years, install another stop and set up a repair shop after Macy’s took over the store.

“Every lunchtime, people hear the organ and feel good — and people are in a mind to shop when they’re feeling good,” explained James Kenny, the store manager. “It’s the ultimate feel-good experience.”

The organ, the world’s largest operating musical instrument, has never sounded better, according to the store’s staff organist, Peter Richard Conte, who has been here 20 years and fills the place with warm waves of sound at noon and in the evening, daily except Sunday.

“In 1995 it was down to about 20 percent of the pipes being playable, maybe,” and only two keyboards working instead of six, Mr. Conte said. “Now it sounds loved again.”

With money from private donors and more than $100,000 from Macy’s this year, the staff curator, L. Curt Mangel III, with his assistant, the Friends and numerous organ groupies, now have 95 percent of the organ playing again. Next year they expect to have it all up and running for the first time in decades.

Today Mr. Conte and the Friends have the run of the store for the annual Wanamaker Organ Day, and Mr. Conte will play something new: his own transcription of Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations (Op. 36), at 11:30 a.m. Shoppers are welcome.

He has been working feverishly on the Elgar for weeks, with all-night practice sessions, alone in the store except for a guard. “It’s probably the most difficult piece I’ve ever done,” he said before trying out several movements at a Wednesday evening concert, his fingers slinking from keyboard to keyboard and darting restlessly over the 729 stop-control tablets as phrase seamlessly followed phrase and crescendo climaxed and faded into descrescendo.

The Elgar sounds impressively orchestral on this organ, with its 462 sets of pipes, including stops named for orchestral violins, cellos, flutes, orchestral oboes, clarinets, French horns, tubas and trombones. It has just about everything else imaginable — chimes and even a kitchen sink (for the curators to wash their hands) — in a forest of pipes ranging from 32 feet to less than an inch long, spread over both ends and multiple rooms and floors off the store’s Grand Court.

Next year a long, muffled section of 2,000 more pipes, now being cleaned and restored, will rejoin the rest in a more audible spot, and Mr. Conte expects to luxuriate in its liberated sounds, including three more French horn stops made by the Kimball Organ Company of Chicago.

“I love the sound of French horns and I will probably use them a lot,” he said.

The instrument started life at the St. Louis International Exposition of 1904, when the Los Angeles Art Organ Company built it along orchestral lines, rather than according to the baroque organ ideal, as Bach and Buxtehude knew it.

It was a smash hit at the fair, but bankrupted the company. Then it languished in storage until 1909, when John Wanamaker bought it for the Philadelphia store that he was planning to open two years later.

His son, Lewis Rodman Wanamaker, saw the vast, 149-foot-high Grand Court center space in the building Daniel Hudson Burnham had designed for them as the ideal place for “the finest organ in the world,” and 40,000 people and President William Howard Taft came to the dedication ceremonies on Dec. 30, 1911.

Until his death in 1928, Lewis Rodman Wanamaker oversaw successive expansions of the organ in the store’s own organ shop on the building’s roof. The changes were so extensive that the instrument’s “string” section finally had more pipes than most large organs do altogether.

Famous organists flocked to play it over the years, and both Marcel Dupré and Virgil Fox developed signature pieces on the organ, but when Lewis Rodman Wanamaker died, the organ’s importance faded. Wanamaker’s itself was sold to Woodward & Lothrop in 1986; then it became a Hecht’s; and in 1997 a Lord & Taylor store. Macy’s took it over last year.

Each of the owners recognized the unique historical value of the organ, and Lord & Taylor hired Mr. Mangel as curator in 2002. The difference now, as Mr. Conte sees things, is that “Macy’s gets it — it understands how to use this instrument and market it to the public.”

Martine Reardon, the Macy’s national headquarters executive overseeing holiday events, including now the annual Christmas organ and light show in the Philadelphia store, said, “The Wanamaker Organ’s legacy is as legendary as the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Fourth of July fireworks.”

Next year, Macy’s 150th anniversary, the store hopes to get the Philadelphia Orchestra to come and play Joseph Jongen’s “Symphonie Concertante,” a work for organ and orchestra commissioned by Wanamaker’s in 1928 but never performed at the store.

And the Friends, with a $150,000 donation from the Phoebe Haas Charitable Trust, have set up a spacious repair and organ-building training center on an unused floor of the store. Early this year the additional 61 new pipes, a rank of singing vox humana stops, joined nine others in a chamber rebuilt especially for them and brought the total to 28,543. To many their vibrato tones call to mind a choir of angels.

Mr. Conte patted the huge console that controls the pipes and said, nodding at Mr. Mangel, “Baby hasn’t been given such care and tending since John Wanamaker.” But he still hopes Baby will throw no tantrums at today’s performance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/ar...ic/09orga.html





T. Bone Walker Blues Fest Offers Some of the Best of Blues
Anthony Davis

Wes Jeans, Dan Sanchez and the Kings of Pleasure, Betty Lewis and the Executives, Diddley Squat, Buddy Flett and the Bluebirds are the first scratches on the rough surface of sounds setting the tone and flavor of the 2nd Annual T-Bone Walker Blues Fest set for June 15-16 at Music City Texas. The Linden, Texas, piney-hills hideout for stars burning bright and some just now twinkling will be aglow with two days and nights of nearly-constant entertainment by about two dozen proven blues musicians. Jeans has evolved from the teen gunslinger guitarist with national credentials earned before most kids are dating by getting his hands on the International Jimi Hendrix Guitar Competition in 1996. That honor, handed over by Hendrix’s father, Al, was accepted by a youngster who had picked up a guitar only nine months previous to the contest. He continues to be a dogged performer in venues across the South with his truly “electric” string-stretching command of his instrument, a natural.

Sanchez and the Kings are individually accomplished musicians who have found a blues groove with smatterings of jazz, swing and rock sensibilities. Sanchez plays a stylized and technically pure guitar, revealing evidence of his Left Coast musical education at the Los Angeles equivalent of Julliard. The Kings of Pleasure support Sanchez’s approach with a jive-tight rhythm section and a brilliant keyboardist. The band was hailed by the International Blues Festival in Memphis, Tenn. as best newcomers on the block last year. Another regional band with a big following and a first-class stage act is Diddley Squat. These guys look and sound the part of funky old blues cats trapped in a time warp, but they generally leave an audience wanting more.

Not much more can be said of the Bluebirds and slide blues guitarist Buddy Flett that hasn’t appeared in recent news. Buddy has a just-released solo CD, “Mississippi Sea” and it’s being enjoyed worldwide if initial airplay and sales are an indication. When your music is on the radio in New Zealand and Europe, you’re pleasing a lot of listeners. The bands and singers performing at this year’s T-Bone Walker Blues Fest are literally too many to detail the accomplishments of each, and this is just a sample of the regional talent—Bugs Henderson and the Shuffle Kings, T. Graham Band, Kesler Brothers, Gary “Whitey Johnson” Nicholson and more. And it’s safe bet you won’t be disappointed by any of them.

Festival-goers can expect a total experience of the jam, as each performer will take a turn at the Music City Texas Theater stage indoors and the Legion Field stage outside. Ticket-holders may venture in and out at will, but the opposite is not the case for the Woodstock types. Tickets for outdoor events are $20 per day. Theater seats are $50 per day or $90 for both days. For reservations and information call 903-756-9934.
http://www.texarkanagazette.com/news...of_blues.ph p





Controversy Dogs 40th Anniversary of Monterey Pop
Adam Tanner

Some bands that played Monterey Pop 40 years ago will return in July to the site of the first great rock festival, but the original promoter and others say the spirit of the Summer of Love is a long time gone.

The event at the County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California south of San Francisco, on June 16-18, 1967, helped boost the careers of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who and others and showcased 1960s counterculture to the world.

This year promoter Andrew Hernandez, who was 11 in 1967, is organizing a "Monterey Summer of Love Festival" on July 28 and 29, to include some of the original acts such as Jefferson Starship, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company and tribute bands filling in for Hendrix and others.

"I wasn't old enough to be a hippie and by the time I was, disco had kicked in and it was a big letdown," Hernandez said. This year "it's going to be magical because that arena in Monterey was the same as it was 40 years ago."

His reunion plan has ruffled some feathers.

"If he pulls it off and there is any resemblance to the International Pop Festival that we did, I think it's bad," said Lou Adler, who co-produced the original 1967 festival. "I don't think it will come close to what the Monterey Pop Festival was."

"He's doing it because he is wanting to make money."

Sam Andrew, guitarist for Big Brother and the Holding Company, which played Monterey in 1967 with Joplin, is slated to play the reunion concert. He said even in the fabled "Summer of Love" planning was not conflict-free.

"These bands from San Francisco all felt that they were going to be taken advantage of and they were," he said in an interview. "They all thought these really slick guys from Los Angeles, Lou Adler and Alan Pariser, there was this definite hustler vibe."

"LA came up to San Francisco and said ... 'hey, we'll show them how. We're going to hire them for nothing and have them come down to Monterey.'"

Shy About Filming

The now legendary bands did play for free -- with the exception of sitarist Ravi Shankar, who received $3,000 -- because the promoters made the event a fund-raiser.

Michelle Phillips, who closed the 1967 festival with The Mamas & The Papas, a band well known at the time for hits such as "California Dreamin'" and "Monday, Monday," defended the original producers and won't be taking part in the revival.

"If there was some mistrust about the slick producers from LA, well, the slick producers from LA did an awful lot for the bands that decided to come to Monterey," said Phillips, the band's last surviving original member, whose then husband John co-produced the event. "They all got great exposure, they had a great time, they ate well."

Suspicion about exploitation prompted a number of bands to refuse to be in the movie about the concert. Joplin and Big Brother realized that was a mistake after playing earlier in the festival, so they added a second performance for the film that helped rocket their reputation.

"We were known in San Francisco only -- barely known in Los Angeles," Andrew said in an interview.

The band that opened the show, Moby Grape, declined to be in the movie, and never achieved the fame of some of those seen on the big screen. Band guitarist Peter Lewis said he would not participate in the July concert even if his bandmates do.

"The specter of it after being at the original Monterey Pop thing was kind of weighty," he said, saying he was put off by the idea of it being "whoever was left alive while the spirits of our dead comrades would be hovering over the stage like a black cloud."

"When you're 21 and you're good looking, that's where rock and roll is at," said Lewis, 61. "If you are out there bouncing around with the excess weight, it doesn't look the same as when you were 21."

The passage of time is on the minds of others too.

"It's kind of bittersweet. You know we're all like 65 now. It's all these people that say, 'Oh, you're still alive,'" said Andrew, who will be playing with a younger stand-in for the long-dead Janis Joplin.

He said the reunion concert is mostly about money.

"Probably the crass commercial part is maybe 80 percent," he said. "But we all need a job so we are glad to go and play the gig. But when we get there that 20 percent is genuine feeling about seeing everybody and this is great."
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...21510820070612





Paul McCartney is a Man on the Run

He has a new album, a new record label, new living arrangements and even a new plan about putting the Beatles' music catalog online this year.
By Kim Murphy

HE noticed it when his cellphone, stuffed with too many text messages, voicemails and phone numbers, started flashing at him: "Memory almost full." It was remarkably like his own brain, weighted down with half-written songs, daughter Bea's schedule, the lyrics to old Beatles B-sides, the blurring faces of long-buried loves and friends.

Delete? Re-record? Which parts go, and which — the carpets of bluebells outside Liverpool in spring, sitting on twin beds in a hotel room with John Lennon writing "She Loves You" — stay locked in the hard drive of time?

"Your memory is always almost full these days. There's so much going on, so I thought it was a poetic way to sum up modern life. Just overload, information overload," Paul McCartney says of his 21st solo album, "Memory Almost Full," which explores the persistence of memory, preparing for the settling of scores and a life too full to hold it all.

"It's been pointed out to me that since the album is heavy on retrospective stuff, there's a sort of finality about it. 'Memory almost full,' any second now it will be full, and, 'Goodbye cruel world.' It's not what I meant about it at all, but I can see that meaning, and I like, you know, people to have different interpretations. "Abbey Road" to us was a crossing outside the studio. I'm sure to some people, it meant Monastery Lane, and we liked that sort of quasi-religious feel of it too."

The album (out Tuesday) marks the 64-year-old McCartney's plunge into another kind of digital age. Ending his relationship with Capitol Records/EMI that began in 1962, McCartney has hooked up with Starbucks' new Hear Music Label and unlocks the new album (along with the rest of his solo catalog) for online downloads. McCartney also says the Beatles catalog is on deck for online release near the end of the year, although EMI has not announced a date.

The video for "Dance Tonight," the party-tune, mandolin-laced foot-tapper that opens the record, made its world premiere on YouTube, in a bid to charm a third generation with the kind of winsome songs their grandmother should know.

"I was bored with the old record company's jaded view," McCartney says, plopped on a sofa in the large, comfortable farmhouse that doubles as a rehearsal studio here in the rolling, tree-studded hills of rural East Sussex. Outside, there is an old windmill, and in the near distance, the hazy blue carpet of the English Channel.

"They're very confused, and they will admit it themselves: that this is a new world, and they're a little bit at a loss as to what to do. So they've got millions of dollars and X budget … for them to come up with boring ways — because they've been at it for so long — to what they call 'market' it. And I find that all a bit disturbing.

"I write it, I play it, I record it, and that's all fun. And you go to the record company, and it gets very boring. You sit around in rooms with people, and you're almost falling asleep" — he rolls his head down midchest —"and they're almost falling asleep.

"My record producer [David Kahne] said the major record labels these days are like dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid. They know it's going to hit. They don't know when, they don't know where it's coming from. But it's sort of hit already. With iTunes, and all of that."

McCartney heard that Starbucks' content development guy, Alan Mintz, loved his music; better, he was a bass player. They arranged to meet in New York, along with Howard Schultz, the chief executive who turned Starbucks from a high-fallutin' bean roaster in Seattle into a multibillion-dollar global purveyor of expensive coffee drinks and cool ambience.

The vision from Starbucks and its Concord Music Group partner in Hear Music: Roll out "Memory Almost Full" across time zones on the in-store music systems at more than 10,000 coffeehouses in 29 countries (copies available as you pay for your latte, and at dinosaur record stores too, of course). That means an estimated 6 million people get a listen on the first day.

"We felt we were in a unique position to really transform the way music is discovered and delivered to the music consumer," said Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment in Los Angeles.

"When we heard the album, we just knew it was really a landmark in a number of ways. Musically, it's the most personal and revealing album that Paul's created in his solo career. Thematically, many of the songs are a reflection of his life, his career, his jobs and the tragedies, a reflection of the remarkable journey his life has been."

McCartney had the same reaction to Apple founder Steve Jobs — with whose company Apple records was locked in trademark litigation for years — as he had to Schultz. "He too is very cool, very passionate, they really care about working with your music.

"I just thought, right, I'm going to put a package together on that side of things that will keep me and my producer excited. And that's what we've done. So we're working with websites, Internet things, young kids. Just people who are hungry. People who come up with ideas rather than people who've been at it too long and are frightened for their jobs."

Contrary to British media reports, he said, longtime Apple Corps chief Neil Aspinall's departure in April had nothing to do with clearing the way to the online music market.

"He wanted to retire. Simple as that. I've known Neil longer than I've known anyone in the music business, including all the Beatles. Neil was at school with me when we were 11, he was in my class. But he just wanted to retire. He's 65. So he did. So we have a new guy now [Jeff Jones], he's very good. Nobody considers he's going to replace Neil, you know, emotionally, because we grew up with Neil…. But there are new sorts of things, new openings, the online thing is a huge opening, and so it's a new chapter now."

McCartney and the band are rehearsing for an upcoming trio of "surprise" live gigs in the U.K., New York and Los Angeles, and there is a definite bachelor air around the place, now that wife Heather has split in the messiest divorce to hit the London tabloids since Chelsea soccer team owner Roman Abramovich dumped his wife for leggy young "Dasha" Zhukova.

The band is playing with enough volume these days that they're annoying daughter Bea, a frequent visitor. "We play a bit loud, just because we can," McCartney says with a sly smile. "We're allowed to, there's no grown-ups around. We're allowed to turn our amps up, you see?"

The off-limits topic

WHAT he won't talk about are Heather Mills McCartney's allegations about what went on during their four-year marriage: that McCartney slashed her arm with a broken wine glass, ordered her not to breastfeed Beatrice because "I don't want a mouthful of breast milk," and refused to let her keep a chamber pot in the bedroom, forcing her, because she is missing a leg, to crawl to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

"I don't like to talk about it, because we're still in the middle of a divorce," he says. "A somewhat public divorce. And you know we have a 3 1/2 year-old daughter. So I'm trying to make every effort to say as little as possible about it. I'm moving through it, hopefully with some kind of dignity."

It's hard not to find a hint of Heather and the apparent pride McCartney once must have felt in his determined and ambitious young wife in "See Your Sunshine" from the new album: "Step out in front of me baby / They want you in the front line / They want to see your sunshine."

But many of the songs were written even before 2005's Grammy-nominated "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard," and the memory files they plumb go deep into a boy's lush and lovely summers (on the exquisite "Tell Me"), McCartney's days as a Boy Scout, beaning his friends on the head with chestnuts. Then, less-ancient files: the Beatles "sweating cobwebs" and playing the Cavern Club in Liverpool. In a final, five-song suite similar in form to the "Abbey Road" medley but progressing through the milestones of a life, McCartney reaches the surreal and unsettling "House of Wax," where "poets spill out on the street / To set alight the incomplete / Remainders of the future."

And there is the "End of the End" — a swan song so McCartney in its essential optimism: "It's the start of a journey to a much better place / And a much better place would have to be special," he reassures. "No reason to cry."

He has buried Linda McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison. By now, he is surely accustomed to partings. Yet he seems to remember, like the bluebell forests of England (that once formed the backdrop to a frolic in "Help"), the tender times, the days when it was easy to bend over a guitar with Lennon on the other rumpled bed and work magic on cue.

"We were writing 'She Loves You' because we'd been told by our manager that we needed a single. And we were just, 'OK.' It was great. We just responded well to direction. They'd say, 'You're going into studio next week, so you'll need to write the album.' And we'd go, 'OK.' Ha! Never once do I remember us going, 'A whole album in a week?' Which, you know, we should've thought.

"But we go, 'Yeah, great, OK.' We were just so innocent and enthusiastic. So yeah, that's what we did all the time. We wrote just under 300 songs, and that was done in about 300 sessions. We never had a dry session."

How could that be?

"Because we were bloody brilliant. Pure genius, that's all. 'We were very good,' he said modestly,' " and he smiles for his failure to conjure up the requisite humility. "The good thing is, now you can say that. People used to say, 'Don't you think you're a bit conceited?' And I'd say, 'I know what you mean, you could say it's conceited, but I really do know we're good. I can feel it every time we write a song.' Because John and I were very good collaborators. We really helped each other massively and admired each other greatly."

He thinks for a moment. "It was a joy," he says.

He trips into the rustic farm kitchen, where the band is swallowing whole a spread of mozzarella sandwiches and samosas before heading back to the studio. He cuts a few roses from the garden and rummages for a glass to put them in water, singing the trippy chorus of "The things I think I did / I di-i-di-i did" from "Ever Present Past" under his breath.

Almost time for the imperious and charming Bea to show up. Time to play "very, very, very quietly," he says.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,1265126.story





Paul McCartney Plays a ‘Secret’ Show
Ben Ratliff

“I love you, Paul,” someone shouted, halfway through Paul McCartney’s “secret” set at the Highline Ballroom on Wednesday night. Well, more than one: A lot of people were shouting that. They couldn’t help themselves. He was right in front of them.

“I love you, too,” Mr. McCartney answered, but almost as a defensive block: he put on a Tony Soprano accent, and he kept a straight face. “It’s the beauty of these intimate shows, you know,” he followed, dryly. “You get to have intimate conversations with the audience. ‘How ya doin’?’ ‘You’re the man!’ ‘Naw, you’re the man!’ “

Cheery, but essentially trying to get his work done, Mr. McCartney struck a formal facsimile of intimacy: 90 minutes on stage in a 700-capacity room full of reporters, assorted V.I.P.s, contest winners and stand-in-line-for-a-long-timers who heard about the show only a day or two before.

The gig was a promotion for his new album, “Memory Almost Full” (Hear Music), and he put on the same show at the Electric Ballroom, a slightly larger club in London, last week. (He has not announced plans for a proper tour.)

It’s not unusual these days for big acts to play a promotional show at a club they’ve outgrown. The same night in New York, Franz Ferdinand played a “secret” gig at the Bowery Ballroom, and likewise with Interpol last week.

For Mr. McCartney, however, who can sell out stadiums at hundreds of dollars a ticket, this was unusual. He used no pyrotechnics or video backdrop, and the audience stood close enough to its hero that it could hold non-conversations with him. He played beautifully, in tight control of his voice (even in high range) and his musicianship, through a clutch of new songs and some of the oldest Beatles repertory.

But much of what was special about hearing someone like Mr. McCartney in a place like this was counteracted by the glibness of his touring band, almost the same crew that backed him on his stadium tour last year. These musicians—two guitarists, a keyboards and drums — were accurate, reliable, in the pocket and kind of flavorless.

Mr. McCartney is a fascinating alloy of raw and slick, eccentricity and efficiency. When you hear the tracks on “Memory Almost Full” in which he plays all the instruments — his drumming one step ahead of primitive, his bass lines so melodically inventive they’re almost evil — you wish he could just multiply himself for performances.

When the band replicated old parts, touching on the tiniest details of Beatles songs like “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “Lady Madonna,” and “Hey Jude,” the show felt something like an homage to composition and production, rather than the great thing that performances can be: two-way rituals between band and audience.

But something about the joy and simplicity of the new songs made the set more special. There were five of them, including “Dance Tonight,” a naively sweet call for fun, with Mr. McCartney’s mandolin-strumming as the through-line; “Nod Your Head,” a slow, chugging rock song; and “That Was Me,” full of spry astonishment at looking back on a strange and notable life. (It went over big in the V.I.P. section, where people may be prone to similar thoughts.)

The onlooker’s stupid reflex, after decades of Beatlesology and Paul-versus-John studies, is to scrutinize Mr. McCartney for honesty, whatever that is. But all he had to do was play a few songs alone with guitar—”Blackbird” and “I’ll Follow the Sun”— and he seemed as guileless as the next guy. Later, alone at the piano, he sang “Here Today,” an elegiac song he wrote after John Lennon’s death, and dedicated it to “our fallen heroes: John, George and Linda.”

When he finished, he stopped the flow of his own efficiency, and thought out loud. “It’s good to play that song in the town John loved,” he said. “And where Linda was born in. And where we played the Ed Sullivan show.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/ar...aulcnd.html?hp





Beatles Online Deal Seen for 2008: Harrison Widow
Dean Goodman

Beatles fans will probably have to wait until next year before they can buy the Fab Four's tunes from online retailers such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes store, George Harrison's widow said on Friday.

A recent settlement to a lengthy trademark dispute between Apple and the Beatles' company, Apple Corps Ltd., has cleared the way for the band to distribute its catalog in cyberspace.

But Olivia Harrison told Reuters, "We just have a few things to work out elsewhere."

Specifically, all the Beatles CDs have been remastered -- good news for fans who have long complained about the poor sound quality -- and the organization wants to get the artwork ready for the physical packages.

Asked if the catalog would be available online by the end of next year, she said, "Oh God, yeah. Hope so ... I don't know if it would be the end of this year, but it would be nice. Imminent, let's put it that way."

Paul McCartney, who has adopted an aggressive digital marketing strategy for the release next week of his solo album, "Memory Almost Full," told trade publication Billboard last month that an online deal for the Beatles catalog was "virtually settled." But he, too, shied away from saying that anything would happen in the short term.

The Beatles are the highest-profile omission from digital retailers. While the dispute with Apple did not help, the band's organization has traditionally adopted a conservative approach to new technology, including CDs.

"I think we're a little bit behind," Harrison said, noting that it was "ridiculous" that properly remastered CDs of the band's catalog were not yet available.

"We (the band's members and widows) all agree. It's been done. It's just trying to now get it out there."

She said that Neil Aspinall, the recently retired businessman who oversaw the group's complex business affairs, had been busy in recent years on the remastering project.

"That's a big job. That means you have to go back through all the archives and find great photographs and really give a nice package to the fans."

Aspinall retired in April and was replaced by Jeff Jones, an American music industry executive who specializes in deluxe reissues of classic albums. Harrison said Aspinall's departure was voluntary, dispelling fan speculation to the contrary.

But she said Jones would "pick up the pace" now that the most recent project, a Beatle-inspired Cirque du Soleil stage show in Las Vegas, was underway after years of preparation initiated by her husband before he died in 2001.
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...33885220070604





Bill Pushed by Pacino, Ono, Others Would Protect Dead Celebs

The names and faces of famous New Yorkers including Mickey Mantle, Judy Garland and Malcolm X would be protected from advertising and promotion not authorized by their estates under a measure pushed by Al Pacino and Yoko Ono.

New York law already protects the unauthorized use of celebrities’ faces and names while they are alive, but there is no safeguard after they die despite a high concentration of entertainment, political and sports legends in and around New York City. The group said New York is among the last states to try to protect the famous dead from exploitation.

"I feel like one’s likeness and image should be protected in some way and not abused or denigrated for the sake of profit," Pacino wrote to legislators after the estate of Lee Strasberg started talking to him.

The effort follows a May U.S. District Court decision in New York City in which Marilyn Monroe’s estate lost it fight over unauthorized images of the actress on T-shirts.

The federal court ruled a 1994 law in Indiana, where the T-shirt retail company was based, did not protect Marilyn Monroe’s identity after her death. The Marilyn Monroe LLC, which brought the suit, is headed by Anna Strasberg, the wife of Monroe’s producer, Lee Strasberg, who received the bulk of the starlet’s estate. He died in 1982.

Other testimonials in support of the bill announced Monday came from other famous New Yorkers including Ono, on behalf of herself and her deceased husband, the ex-Beatle John Lennon; the estate of musician Jimi Hendrix; and relatives of baseball greats Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig and Mantle.

"This is not an abstract or theoretical problem," wrote Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, widow of tennis great and activist Arthur Ashe, citing several court challenges by estates dismissed in court. "Let me emphatically state that this statute is meant to in no way affect the inherent and explicit rights of others to make unauthorized biographies, art pieces and myriad other works protected by the First Amendment.

"I do, however, support the New York state Legislature enacting this statute ensuring that a celebrity’s unique character, persona and brand be protected from commercial exploitation," she wrote.

The bill has the support of veteran lawmakers in the Republican-led Senate and in the Assembly’s Democratic majority.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1056463





Singer Chaka Khan Embraces Funk, not GOP
James B. Kelleher

Pop diva Chaka Khan doesn't have a lot of regrets -- and little wonder with eight Grammy Awards on her mantle.

The 54-year-old singer, who has a wide-ranging catalog of recordings to her credit, including her smash hit "I'm Every Woman," is releasing a new album this fall with the tentative title "I-Khan Funk."

But when the Chicago native spoke to Reuters recently she acknowledged she does regret her appearance at the 2000 Republican convention, where she sang what was described as "a rousing finale" after George Bush captured the party's presidential nomination:

Q: Your catalog is fairly broad -- funk, R&B, jazz, soft soul -- but your new album is tentatively called "Funk." Does that say it all?

A: "It says it all. It's a funky album. But it's also eclectic. I covered, for instance, a Joni Mitchell. I funked up 'Ladies' Man.'... We did an equal amount of covers and an equal amount of original material. And I did some obscure songs like 'Foolish Fool,' which was done by Dee Dee Warwick in 1960 something. That was a song I sort of had to get out of my system. But it's a great song."

Q: Your last Grammy was in 2003, when you won with The Funk Brothers for "What's Going On?" Now I don't want to jinx you anything, but what's feeling around "I-Khan Funk?"

A: "You can't jinx me. A Grammy doesn't define me. It's nice to get a Grammy. It's beautiful to be appreciated by anybody. I'm honored. But that's not what I do what I do. For a Grammy."

Q: But has it got it?

A: "It's got amazing Grammy potential and American Music Award potential. It's got amazing potential. If done properly. It's got to get out there. People have got to hear it."

Q: Technology has transformed the business of selling records. You must have seen these changes?

A: "Yes, I have. (Over) 30 years. And I'm telling you it's the end of the big label, the end of the big pimp, you know, I'm so happy to see that."

Q: You feel empowered?

A: "Oh yeah. They had us tied up like cattle. It wasn't pretty. Look at Elvis Presley even. He had a lifetime contract. That's unheard of in the business world outside of music. It just wouldn't fly."

Q: Let's get political briefly. In 2000, you sang at the Republican National Convention.

A: "I'm trying to forget that."

Q: That was my question. In the intervening years, a lot of people have become disillusioned with the president the candidate and ultimately the president that emerged.

A: "Does that answer your question? I did it for my foundation for autism education. I did it to bring some attention to that."

Q: Did it at least do that?

A: "Possibly. It might have done more damage than good, for me anyway, for my spirit."
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...39556020070602





Chartz n Grafs

7 Nights of Bright Eyes (in as Many Colors)



BY nature rock bloggers are an obsessive bunch, but few take their fixations as far as the artist Andrew Kuo. On the blog earlboykins.blogspot.com Mr. Kuo meticulously dissects indie rock and hip-hop records and shows and then transforms the data into complicated, brightly colored charts and diagrams. The joke is, the more banal the information or sweeping the generalization, the more complex the graphics. “It’s a comment on fans’ short attention spans,” he said. “You think you can glance at a pie chart and decide whether or not to buy a record, but then you’re forced to work to figure it out.”

Mr. Kuo, 29, is a fan of the sensitive, folkie singer-songwriter Bright Eyes, a k a Conor Oberst, at left. To test his devotion, The New York Times sent him (alone!) to see all seven recent Bright Eyes shows at Town Hall in Manhattan, where Mr. Oberst performed with a mini-orchestra. There was plenty of spectacle to digest, from an elaborate video backdrop to two drummers to the band’s white outfits to a surprise special guest every night (Lou Reed, Norah Jones, etc).

Not only did Mr. Kuo pass the endurance test, he said he also came to look forward to each night as a “strange, romantic ritual.” A few days later he was spinning Bright Eyes songs at an East Village bar. “I’m listening to Bright Eyes more than ever now,” he confessed. “I know it’s crazy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/ar...ic/10boyk.html





Digital Music Will Renew Global Market Growth
David H. Deans

The following blog post is from an independent writer and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.com.

Following six years of decline from a high of $39.7 billion in 2000 to just $32.1 billion in 2006, the value of the global music market is set to reverse and grow again -- back to $38.8 by 2011, according to a new market study by Portio Research.

In 2006 the major mobile handset manufacturers (Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, LG and others) have been shipping MP3 enabled handsets in some volumes. At the same time, many mobile network operators (MNOs) have started to distribute MP3 enabled phones and launch OTA (over-the-air) music download services (Vodafone, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, Cingular, DoCoMo, SKT, O2, Orange and many more) thus creating a new digital consumption market.

Worldwide, the mobile services market dwarfs the music industry in revenue terms, and Portio believes that the music companies need to be taking a very, very serious look at mobile operators as they may possibly become one of the future's biggest channels to market.

In the portable digital music device market, Apple has continued to produce new models of its highly successful iPod, and while the iPod leads the market, alternative MP3 players have continued to proliferate world wide.

In November 2006, Microsoft launched its rival digital music player -- the Zune. Sales so far have not been outstanding, but this signifies a major move by a very major player, and this has brought further interest to the digital music player market. Portio expects to see in excess of 1 billion mobile handsets shipped worldwide in 2007, and almost half of these will be MP3-enabled.

With so many devices shipping out to consumers the MP3 player market will soon be totally dominated by the mobile handset vendors. On the Internet, the growth of social networking sites has been astronomical, and two of the most interesting new sites where new artists could promote their songs and videos were bought by global brands.

Analysts could not initially understand why News Corporation bought MySpace for $560m in 2005. However, this looked positively cheap compared to the $1.65bn that Google paid for YouTube in October 2006. Almost every major development in the global music industry in recent years has been with digital music.

As huge brand names -- music companies, consumer electronics manufacturers, mobile network operators, mobile handset vendors and of course all manner of advertisers -- meet and compete in this growing market, these players are positioned to build themselves presence in the digital music market over the next five years.

No doubt there will be winners and losers in this battle, but Portio says that the overall effect of the interest of so many major global corporations will be renewed market growth.
http://dhdeans.blogspot.com/2007/06/...al-market.html





Warner Shareholders Opposed To Upping Bid For EMI
FMQB

Shareholders in Warner Music Group (WMG) are opposed to chief executive Edgar Bronfman's plans to make a renewed offer for the EMI Music Group, according to the U.K.'s Sunday Times. Investors Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee are reportedly unwilling to back WMG in making a higher bid than the £3.7 billion deal that is already on the table from private equity group Terra Firma. However, WMG confirmed today in a statement that it continues to consider an offer for EMI Group.

"Such an offer would be pre-conditional on appropriate anti-trust clearances being obtained (or the pre-conditions waived) but not subject to any other pre-condition," reads the statement. "A further announcement will be made in due course. This announcement does not amount to a firm intention to make an offer or pre-conditional offer and accordingly there can be no certainty that any offer or pre-conditional offer will be made."

Terra Firma had previously offered EMI £2.4 billion, but then upped its bid to £3.7 billion in the face of competition from other potential buyers - a move that was seen by some as an aggressive stance to scare off other bidders such as WMG and other private equity firms.

The Sunday Times says that Bain and Thomas H. Lee believe that Warner will need to offer more than 300 pence a share to persuade EMI shareholders to move away from the deal with Terra Firma, especially since a sale to another music company would bring on tons of regulatory scrutiny form European anti-trust officials.

Previously, on May 31, Terra Firma set a June deadline for any counter-bids for EMI.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=421485





Viacom to Sell Famous Music to Sony/ATV
Yinka Adegoke

Viacom Inc. said on Wednesday it will sell its Famous Music publishing unit to Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the song-music catalog co-owned by pop star Michael Jackson.

The deal is estimated to be worth $370 million in cash, according to sources familiar with the talks.

Famous Music's catalog of more than 125,000 songs and sound cues includes music by Eminem and Shakira as well as movie soundtracks from "The Godfather" and "Mission: Impossible." Famous was founded as a unit to publish songs from movies.

The deal is the first major move by recently appointed Sony/ATV Chief Executive Martin Bandier, the former head of EMI Music Publishing, who left EMI earlier this year.

As part of the deal, Sony/ATV will be entering the production music business through the Famous Extreme division.

Sony/ATV is jointly owned by Sony Corp. and Jackson. Its catalog includes songs by The Beatles, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, making it the fourth-largest music publisher.

Bandier, who oversaw the growth of EMI Music Publishing from No. 4 publisher to the largest when he left, said he was appointed to expand the business through a mix of acquisitions and the addition of songwriters.

"We're in the hunt for great artists and people to build the team," said Bandier in an interview with Reuters.

"This deal announces that we're in the game. Our strategy is to become one of the more meaningful players in the publishing business," he added.

Sony/ATV bought the Leiber Stoller songs catalog last month in a deal industry experts valued at around $50 million. The songs, by iconic songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, include "Hound Dog," "Jailhouse Rock," Stand By Me" and Love Potion #9."

Music publishing has become one of the more coveted segments of the music industry as recorded music has been severely hit by piracy. It has been affected by the relatively slow transition of consumers to buying digital songs to make up for the downturn in sales of CDs.

Publishing is less vulnerable to the vagaries of music retailing as it generates revenue by licensing songs to a variety of sources, including television, advertising, radio and live performances.

Earlier this month, French media giant Vivendi SA's Universal Music Publishing Group unit became the world's largest music publisher after it bought BMG Music Publishing in a $2.19 billion deal.

Other music companies have also said they intend to expand their publishing catalog, including Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment.
http://www.reuters.com/article/indus...40712720070601





Boy-Band Mogul's Memorabilia Auctioned
Travis Reed

Platinum and gold records, autographed posters and even a key to the city all went "Bye Bye Bye" at an auction as creditors liquidated the assets of boy-band impresario Lou Pearlman.

Hundreds of bidders packed a downtown building Tuesday for the Chapter 11 bankruptcy sale. The auction was populated mostly by middle-aged men, not the screaming young girls who drove Pearlman's bands to multi-platinum success.

Pearlman's assets included memorabilia from the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, the two boy bands he created in the '90s that made him famous, and several of his lesser-known acts.

Pearlman allegedly defrauded about 1,000 investors of more than $315 million by selling for years a bogus savings account plan, then using their money to cover his losses in other businesses. Banks are hounding him and his companies for more than $120 million, according to court documents.

He also is being investigated by the FBI, IRS and state authorities.

Pearlman's whereabouts are unknown. He hasn't been seen or heard from in months, nor has he responded to multiple subpoenas.

Pearlman doesn't have an attorney in either bankruptcy case against him or his companies.

Everything he left behind was on the block Tuesday, from the ordinary (first aid kits for $12.50 apiece) to the opulent ($18,000 for a five-piece Chihuly glass art series).

Stacey Karatzas, an Orlando jewelry designer, attended for the glass pieces but did not buy them. She was disappointed there was not more big-ticket art.

"It's less than I would have expected," she said.

Dozens of bidders stood elbow-to-elbow in the office where Pearlman used to court aspiring stars. They sweated while an auctioneer shilled.

"Eighty dollars, eighty dollars, gold record," the man said.

A man wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers shirt paid $2,200 for a wall hanging commemorating the Backstreet Boys selling 7 million copies. He declined to be interviewed, but said he was still deciding whether to sell it.

The key to Orlando sold for $1,400 _ a big raise from the $300 bidding start.

Proceeds from the sale were to pay off Pearlman's considerable debt, though authorities are still trying to put the whole picture together.

Pearlman's home in a posh Orlando suburb was also to be sold, and listed for $8.5 million.

Pearlman already lost control of several companies in February, when a judge appointed receiver Jerry McHale to take over the books.

Four banks filed the involuntary federal bankruptcy cases against Pearlman and his Trans Continental companies at the beginning of March.

McHale has discovered few assets and considerable debt, but still doesn't know how deep it goes. McHale told the court Pearlman's former employees trashed and shredded mounds of documents in late 2006 or early 2007, when they believed investigators were closing in.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061300477.html





L.A. Indie Music Retailers Closing Their Doors
Todd Martens

The past few years have been bittersweet for music retail in Los Angeles. The opening of Amoeba Records in 2001 gave the city one of the stronger music outlets in America, but was followed soon by the closings of Aron's Records and Rhino Records.

Yet indie music fans not wanting to brave the Hollywood traffic to hit Amoeba had an outpost near downtown in Sea Level Records, run by Todd Clifford, merchandise man for the rock band Silversun Pickups. The store arrived as the city's Echo Park neighborhood was undergoing a revitalization, and stocked a heavily curated catalog (top sellers this month include Silversun Pickups, adventurous guitar rock act Electrelane and avant-folk duo CocoRosie). Yet come the end of this month, the 32-year-old Clifford will close up shop for good.

And across town in Santa Monica, Philip Smith will shut the doors of his collectors-focused House of Records, which bills itself as the oldest record store in the city. Smith has run the store since 1991, when he purchased it from owner Jane Hill, who opened the retailer in 1952 as a seller of 78s. She soon added 45s, with a portion of the store's sales generated by supplying music to customers of Hill's husband, who owned a jukebox rental company.

Entrepreneur's Burnout

Yet it's neither the advent of downloading -- nor the arrival of an indie superstore in Amoeba -- that Clifford and Smith cite as the reason for their closing. Clifford's store, in fact, is having a better sales year than last year, when sales were up over those of 2005. In reality, both owners are simply exhausted.

"Obviously, if I would have had tons more sales, I would have had employees and not have to be here all the time and wouldn't be burned out," Clifford said. "I wanted to close this a while ago, but I was torn because it should be here. And it should be here, but that doesn't mean I have to do it."

Clifford recently spent two months on the road with Silversun Pickups. He said he expected to come back feeling refreshed. Instead, within 15 minutes of walking back into his store, he "hated being here."

Clifford said that when he opened shop in 2001 he used to love customers. "Now when customers come in, I'm like, 'Just buy it and leave,"' he said. "This isn't a job where I should wake up and say, 'I don't want to go to work."'

Clifford has two friends who want to open a shop in the Sea Level model, but it will likely have to be in a different part of town. He's been told his $2,900-per-month rent will be raised to nearly $5,000 once he vacates the premises. "That's quite a lot of CDs to sell," Clifford said.

Smith, who didn't stock new product -- unless it was in the form of used advance copies -- admitted that sales are down in 2007. On top of that, he started to lack the drive to keep improving the long-beloved store.

"There's a Best Buy down the street, so we couldn't compete in new product," Smith said. "We were used, which is, in general, a strong market. Even when people are buying stuff online and burning, you can come here and buy a CD for $6 to $10. We noticed that sales were trailing off, but we were doing fine. There are just a lot of things working against the small business owner."

Smith's list of those things includes rent, electricity and insurance for employees, as well as his inability to raise CD prices without generating an outcry from consumers. He'll be selling stock at 50 percent off through the month of June at his store and online, and leaving the record retail biz to those who are better at "being a hustler," he said.

"You need to be good at marketing, promotion and PR, and making your store a hangout," he said. "It can't just be a shop. Some of the things might have to be gimmicky, but the business isn't going to walk in the door anymore. It has to be pursued."
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...39836120070613





CDs are Still Kicking and Screaming
Tony Sachs

Every time I read another article about the death of the compact disc and the end of brick-and-mortar music retail, I start to feel old and crotchety. I mean, what is it with these young record industry whippersnappers? You may have your iThis and iThat and your uploads and downloads, but you've also got a memory about as long as the average dung beetle. It's not like this sort of thing hasn't happened before. For Pete's sake, doesn't anyone around here remember Jack Kapp?

The troubles the record business had back in 1933, when Kapp was working at Brunswick Records, make today's troubles seem like a walk in the park. That year was the low point of an 11-year slide that erased more than 90 percent of the industry's total sales. During that time, radio had emerged as the hot entertainment medium, and the new technology had many convinced that the record as a viable commodity was doomed. After all, who would pay for music when you could hear it for free?

Sound familiar?

The Great Depression made the situation even worse. As a result, the major labels consolidated -- by '33 there were only two still standing. And in the face of declining demand, they steadfastly refused to lower prices.

Sound familiar?

Enter Jack Kapp. A former music retailer and record company A & R man, Kapp was the Ahmet Ertegun of his time, searching the dark corners of the United States to find blues singers, jazz acts, or hillbilly combos to record. In the worst possible climate for the record business, Kapp had the crazy notion to start his own label, Decca Records. He signed up friends from his A & R days -- obscure country and blues acts as well as big stars like Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers -- and sold their records for up to a third less than the major labels were charging, while promoting the bejesus out of them with heavy advertising.

Following Kapp's lead, other labels began to cut their prices, which dovetailed with a slow, fitful improvement in the economy, so more people could afford to buy records. The swing craze also exploded in the middle of the 1930s, which made people excited about buying records again. By 1941, with Decca leading the way, record sales had risen fifteen-fold to a new high.

Sales in 2007 aren't nearly as bad as they were 75 years ago. The economy is in relatively good shape. But there's no equivalent of swing that's galvanizing music lovers and getting them excited about buying music again, and hasn't been for years. CD prices have come down, but too little too late. People are now accustomed to getting their music for free -- whether from copying their friends' CDs or going to illegal file-sharing sites -- so expensive packaging or other innovations will be necessary to keep physical music viable.

But the biggest thing we're missing today is a Jack Kapp-type of visionary: that one person who's got good ideas, the money to implement them, and the guts to risk that money in order to save the industry. Both the pundits in the press and the record label execs are busy asking "What's the point in trying to sell CDs anymore?" when they should be asking "How can we get more people interested in buying CDs again?" Nobody's pretending that the revenue from paid downloads and ringtones will make up for the lost revenue from declining CD sales anytime soon. But rather than trying to save the CD, industry insiders are trying to bury it while it's still kicking and screaming.

Who knows if one maverick could ride into town and fix what the major labels and the RIAA have been screwing up for the last decade? But it's sad that we're not getting the opportunity to find out. While pundits and insiders line up to shed crocodile tears on the grave of the record industry, the ghost of Jack Kapp looms over the proceedings with a knowing smile.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-s...d_b_51731.html





The Bunny In Lala Land

What a difference a year makes.

It was only 12 months ago when record labels viewed used CD-trading company Lala.com as one big infringement machine, with some label execs refusing to even consider doing some kind of business deal with the upstart.

"This is a nudge-nudge, wink-wink way to get around the law," EMI's senior VP of digital development Ted Cohen told the Los Angeles Times in June 2006. "It makes it easier for people to copy CDs and steal music. Why would the music industry do anything to encourage a company like that?"

The Lala concept is simple enough. Users list CDs they already own as well as the discs they would like to acquire while Lala works the back end by hooking up those who have with those who want. For every used disc a member sends to the Lala brethren, a desired CD is sent in return.

So it was no surprise that record labels wanting to sell new CDs were ticked off about a Web site enabling people to trade used CDs. After all, it's hardly a stretch to imagine CDs being traded, ripped and then traded again.

But the recent news that Lala announced an "agreement in principle" with Warner Music Group to sell unprotected music downloads did catch a few people off guard. What's more, this isn't your typical online music store scenario.

First of all, Lala members can have any song covered under the agreement streamed to their computers at no charge. Lala picks up the tab by paying the label a penny for each song streamed.

Then there's the downloading part of the agreement. Instead of selling individual tracks for downloading to computer hard drives, Lala is selling only CDs, dynamically priced mostly between $6.50 and $13.50. Furthermore, those downloads bypass hard drives by loading directly from Lala's servers to iPods.

The philosophy behind direct-to-iPod is that, by cutting out the hard drive middle ground, the DRM-free Lala downloads will not contribute to music piracy. That's because most pirated tracks originate on hard drives and the iPod is supposed to be a one-way street where songs are only transferred to the music player, not from the player to a computer. However, there are plenty of third-party utilities that will transfer iPod files to computers.

But it's not the iPod factor that's picking up media traction. It's the concept that the labels need to give music away in order to boost sales that has everyone talking.

"The music industry is so desperate for new ways to make money that a Silicon Valley startup is trying a counterintuitive approach; giving the music away as a way to jump sales," said the Wall Street Journal, describing Lala's latest feature as a "music subscription service, but without the monthly subscription fee."

However, streaming Warner Music Group tunes and selling direct-to-iPod downloads was only part of Lala's busy week. The company also announced several other features, including online lockers where iTunes users can not only upload their libraries and then access the music from different locations, but also load music to their iPods from those lockers.

"The iPod is the greatest portable music device ever invented, and as avid iPod fans we wanted to create a service that blends the convenience of the Web with the portability and functionality of a truly universal platform," said Lala founder Bill Nguyen. "Lala unleashes the Web's power for playing music and safely sharing songs without the threat of PC viruses, spyware and other risks that are present on illegal P2P sites."
http://www.pollstar.com/news/viewnews.pl?NewsID=8009





Apple Takes on Microsoft with Windows Web Browser
Scott Hillis

Apple Inc. is introducing a version of its Safari Internet browser for Windows, Chief Executive Steve Jobs said on Monday, taking on Microsoft Corp. in its key stronghold of Web access software.

The move by Apple, which has expanded beyond its Macintosh computer core with iPod media players and the upcoming iPhone, could let the company control how large numbers of people use the Web at a time when services and programs are increasingly Internet-based.

Jobs also said Apple would let outside developers create applications for the iPhone by tapping Safari, softening the company's previous position that the device would not support other software due to security concerns.

But investors were disappointed that Jobs -- known for his surprise announcements -- did not have bigger news to unveil -- and Apple shares sank nearly 3.5 percent, their biggest one-day fall in about four months.

"Apple always hits a home run, and when they hit a triple, it's a disappointment," said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. who has an "outperform" rating on Apple stock.

Consumers and investors have been particularly hungry for any iPhone news ahead of the product's June 29 launch for use on AT&T's wireless network.

Apple shares fell $4.30 to close at $120.19 on Nasdaq. The stock has doubled over the past year and has risen 10 percent in the last month.

Speaking at Apple's annual developers' conference in San Francisco, Jobs put Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer browser squarely in his sights, saying that test versions of the new Safari 3 were twice as fast at loading Web pages.

"We would love for Safari's market share to grow substantially," Jobs said. Safari has 5 percent of the browser market compared to 78 percent for Internet Explorer.

A free test version of Safari 3 is available to the public now as a download and the final version will be available as a free download to users of both Mac OS X and Windows in October, the company said.

The focus on Safari sets the stage for a new browser war nearly a decade after Microsoft knocked off pioneering rival Netscape by including Internet Explorer for free in Windows.

Analysts said Apple clearly hopes to replicate its success in making a Windows version of its iTunes media program, a move that helped drive sales of its iPod media players as well as Mac computers.

Soleil Equity Research analyst Shannon Cross said the availability of Safari on Windows would boost popularity of the software and encourage Web site creators to make their sites compatible with the browser.

"It should also help increase Apple's exposure to the Windows community and potentially attract a larger audience of switchers," Cross wrote in a research note.

Addressing concerns that the iPhone would not support programs not created by Apple, Jobs said independent developers could write application software for Safari, which is included in the multimedia device.

"It's an innovative new way to create apps for mobile devices ... and it gives us tremendous capability, more than has ever been in a mobile device," Jobs said.

ThinkEquity analyst Jonathan Hoopes said developers writing applications to run on Safari could have their software run on either a Mac or Windows-based computer. "That same app should be able to run on the iPhone," he said.

The bulk of Jobs' speech was dedicated to showing off new bells and whistles in the updated operating system, such as the inclusion of a program to let Mac users run Windows.

"It helps with market share and helps with customers that are on the fence trying to move to the Mac," Phil Schiller, head of Apple's product marketing, said in an interview.

After the event, Goldman Sachs raised its 12-month price target on Apple stock to $135 from $120, saying the company was poised to outperform expectations.

"Software remains Apple's biggest competitive advantage," analyst David Bailey said in a report.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...49365920070611





Apple Safari On Windows Broken On First Day
An anonymous reader writes

"David Maynor, infamous for the Apple Wi-Fi hack, has discovered bugs in the Windows version of Safari mere hours after it was released. He notes in the blog that his company does not report vulnerabilities to Apple. His claimed catch for 'an afternoon of idle futzing': 4 DoS bugs and 2 remote execution vulnerabilities."
Separately, within 2 hours Thor Larholm found a URL protocol handler command injection vulnerability that allows remote command execution.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl.../06/12/0120230





Apple Reports 1 Million Safari for Windows Downloads
Jim Dalrymple

It took Apple just two days to reach 1 million downloads of its newest Safari Web browser for Windows. A beta of the newest version was released during Steve Jobs’ Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on Monday.

Apple said that Safari performed an iBench HTML performance suite test twice as fast as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — 2.2 seconds to IE’s 4.6 seconds. The Apple-built browser turned in similar performance on iBench’s Javascript test, completing the suite in less than a second compared to IE’s 2.4-second time.

Earlier today Apple released an update to Safari for Windows that addressed some security issues.

Analysts believe Apple decision to move Safari onto the Windows platform was driven by a desire to improve the browsers market share and to introduce Windows developers to the technology so they could write applications for the iPhone.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/06...ridl/index.php





Breaking Down the Walls Between Mac OS X and Windows
David Pogue

I'm a bi-platform kinda guy. Not just because I need to be conversant in both Mac OS X and Windows for my job, but also because my life revolves around certain Mac programs and certain Windows programs.

On trips, I literally used to pack two laptops: a Mac for creative stuff, and a Windows machine for the speech-recognition program I use to write books, Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

A year ago, that all changed. Apple started building its Macs around Intel chips. Using Apple's free Boot Camp utility, you can start up the one laptop in either Windows or Mac OS X (Windows not included).

There's a huge problem with that, of course: the business about restarting every time you want to switch. That's time-consuming, and you can't copy and paste between Mac and Windows programs, or refer to one while you're working in the other.

One solution is a program called Parallels Desktop for Mac ($80, Parallels.com). It lets you run Windows *in a window*, right on top of Mac OS X, so you don't have to restart when you want to run a Windows program. You can copy and paste between Mac and Windows programs, and you save a lot of time. Parallels can run any version of Windows back to version 3.1 (and even DOS, Solaris and so on), and it's about 90 percent as fast as running a dedicated Windows PC.

I reviewed Parallels in the Times last year. Today, however, the company has released version 3.0 -- a $40 upgrade -- that breaks down the walls between the two operating systems even further.

* You can drag and drop files from the Windows desktop to the Mac desktop, or vice versa. You can also right-click a document in either universe (a Word file, JPEG, PDF or whatever); the Open With pop-up menu, which lists programs that can open it, now lists both Mac and Windows programs. So if you're working on the Mac, you can right-click a Word document and have it open in Word for Windows.

* A feature called Coherence mode hides the Windows desktop and other trappings. Instead, each Windows program behaves exactly like a Mac program, floating right there in its own window among your other Mac program windows. (Coherence debuted in Parallels 2.5; in 3.0, it's been refined. For example, you can now specify when you want Windows programs' icons to appear in the Macintosh Dock while they're running.)

* A Mac program called Parallels Explorer lets you manipulate the contents of your virtual Windows "hard drive" even when Parallels isn't running.

* You can now set up shared folders in either direction. That is, you can plunk the icon of a Macintosh-world folder right there in your Windows world, for easy opening, or vice-versa.

* If you sometimes use Apple's Boot Camp program, Parallels can use the same copy of Windows, so you don't have to install Windows twice. In 3.0, this great, space-saving feature also applies to installed copies of Windows Vista, not just XP.

* Shared Networking. I love this one a lot. In Parallels 3.0, Windows "hides" behind the Mac's networking; it's completely invisible to hacks, pings and bots on the Internet looking to infect you. Your "Windows PC" is therefore much less likely to wind up becoming a "zombie" or "bot" that does the bidding of spammers behind your back.

* 3-D graphics. This is a huge one for gamers. People used to say that Parallels was great -- but that it couldn't handle the 3-D games. The new version, however, works with both DirectX and OpenGL 3D, underlying technologies that drive games like World of Warcraft, Half-Life 2, and Unreal Tournament. All of these are now playable on the Mac running Windows. (I haven't tested them, though.)

This feature also assists with 3-D drafting programs like 3DMark and video and sound editing software like Sony Vegas.

* Transporter. This utility can bring over your entire world -- programs, documents, settings, and all -- from a real Windows PC, or from an old Mac running Microsoft Virtual PC, either over the network or using a FireWire cable.

* USB 2. Parallels 3.0 does much better with high-speed connections to printers, scanners, flash drives, external hard drives, BlackBerrys and other smartphones -- and headsets.

That last improvement should mean that I can finally run my speech-recognition program on the Mac without having to restart in Windows. (In previous versions of Parallels, the computer recognized only bits and pieces of what I said, and with horrible accuracy.)

First I thought I would try the built-in speech recognition in Windows Vista. Unfortunately, it was a disaster. Words were dropped, words were misrecognized, and the whole thing was slow as molasses.

So I tried NaturallySpeaking -- and I got exactly the same results. No matter what I tried, I just could not get speech recognition working in Windows Vista.

My contact at Parallels told me that he had heard from a number of customers who were successfully using NaturallySpeaking on their Macs -- in Windows XP. (Nuance, the company that makes Dragon NaturallySpeaking, doesn't officially support its use on Macs no matter how you're running Windows. It has, however, received many requests and is exploring the possibilities.)

Fortunately, the cool thing about Parallels is that you can create as many "virtual machines" as you want, each one running a different operating system on your Mac. (Web designers in particular enjoy this feature, because it lets them test a certain Web design in every conceivable browser and operating system.)

So off I went to create another virtual machine, this time one that ran Windows XP -- and presto! I had true-blue speech recognition running on my Mac, complete with the ability to copy and paste my transcribed utterances into my Mac e-mail program, word processor or whatever.

Better yet, Windows XP doesn't bog down the rest of your Mac programs the way Windows Vista does. On a 2-gig Mac like my MacBook, Parallels is much, much happier running XP than Vista.

Remember, you're running two operating systems at once. Windows Vista, on my 2-gigabyte laptop, took a minute and a half to start up, and introduced serious sluggishness whenever I tried to switch from one Mac program to another. That's a sure sign that I've run out of real RAM and am forcing the Mac's virtual memory system to swap what's in memory to and from the hard drive in a frantic attempt to keep everything alive.

I recommend Parallels highly. Whether you're a Mac person or a Windows person, the point is that you can now run 100 percent of the world's computer software on a single machine, faster and more easily than ever.

(P.S.-- Parallels will soon have competition from programs like VMWare Fusion and CrossOver. I'll review them when they're available in final form.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/te...gue-email.html





At Creative Artists, a Bit of Blushing After a Corporate Kiss-Off
Michael Cieply

For the powers at the Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood’s pre-eminent talent representative, the coming blockbuster “Transformers” has already brought a lesson in the cold-hearted ways of corporate entertainment.

The outsize robot adventure movie was born when the talent agency connected Hasbro — a client, and owner of the Transformers toy line — with DreamWorks, Paramount and another longtime associate, Steven Spielberg, among others. As the project grew, at least 10 Creative Artists clients picked up credits, including the writers, several stars and both Mr. Spielberg and Brian Goldner, Hasbro’s chief operating officer, who are executive producers.

But a scant month before the picture’s release on July 4, Hasbro decided to jettison Creative Artists and jump to the rival William Morris, which represents the director of “Transformers,” Michael Bay.

So it goes in the new Hollywood. Loyalty stops at the bottom line, and even the most powerful of agencies is finding it can be tougher to meet the needs of a corporate customer than to baby-sit for a temperamental star.

Wayne Charness, Hasbro’s senior vice president for corporate communications, credited Creative Artists for its “invaluable assistance” in hooking it up with DreamWorks and Paramount. “For that, we’ll certainly be eternally grateful.”

But, in explaining the corporate kiss-off, Mr. Charness added, “William Morris, from an entertainment point of view, is best able to deliver something for us now.”

For Creative Artists, the loss of Hasbro is hardly a show-stopper. But the embarrassment comes just as it is trying to prove that it can mirror, if not exactly match, the intricacy and reach of the media conglomerates and consumer and technology companies that have come to define the entertainment world.

In recent years, the agency has been quietly shifting its center of balance. It is fighting to protect core movie, television and music businesses that are confronted by changing technology and consolidation among buyers, even while adding new divisions that are meant — if they keep their footing — to ease the company and its clients toward the uncertain future.

Nested since January in a new glass-sheathed Century City tower, Creative Artists has doubled in size in the last five years to about 300 agents and executives, and roughly 700 employees over all. In that time, it not only raided competitors for agents and talent in the movie and television businesses, but began representing athletes and added dozens of marketers and licensing operatives who are supposed to keep pace with the likes of Coca-Cola, Delta, eBay and, until lately, Hasbro.

Whether brokering exclusive entertainment for Delta flights or setting up “lifestyle” tours on the skateboard circuit, the agency’s new businesses mostly involve transactions between talent or mainstream entertainment companies and a widening ring of customers.

To outsiders, the logic of that push has not always been clear. Competitors complain privately of what they often see as a simple urge for dominance. And the expansion has created new pressures within the 32-year-old agency, which is scrambling to keep its growing list of more than 2,000 clients employed and happy as it seeks to master new worlds.

In recent weeks, agency watchers have been intrigued by some belt-tightening at Creative Artists, which ordered agents to refrain from extras like first-class plane tickets. That measure, reported by the Deadline Hollywood blog, was widely viewed as a response to the added cost of the new quarters and the need to pay $1-million-plus salaries to agents snatched from William Morris, Endeavor, International Creative Management or the United Talent Agency.

Yet the agency’s basic challenges are no different from those of major competitors, who have been similarly reaching for the next rung, if not always on so grand a scale. And its success or failure is likely to tell whether talents as varied as Will Ferrell, Tom Cruise, Jerry Bruckheimer, Derek Jeter or Norah Jones — Creative Artists clients all — will maintain their leverage against evolving media giants like the News Corporation and Viacom or make new fortunes from the nonentertainment companies that are looking to Hollywood.

Citing a longstanding policy against public discussion of their affairs, the agency’s executives declined to comment for this article. Richard Lovett, its president, has joined fellow managing partners Kevin Huvane, Rob Light, Bryan Lourd, Rick Nicita and David O’Connor in maintaining official silence about the company’s inner workings since the late 1990s. (A rare public glimpse of ownership came in 2002, when a filing in Mr. Huvane’s divorce showed his stake at the time to be 7.9121 percent.) They were only a bit more talkative last decade, as they weathered a storm of agent and client defections in the wake of their 1995 purchase of Creative Artists from its co-founders: Michael S. Ovitz, Ron Meyer and Bill Haber.

Their adviser in the buyout was the mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer Martin Lipton. He has since helped to engineer a growth strategy meant to give Creative Artists a command over the talent world complete enough that clients, in theory, would find internal support for virtually any interest, while anyone approaching the entertainment business would find dealing with the agency an inevitability.

(A recent Web video, “The Wrath of CAAA,” catches the spirit: It is about a screenwriter whose assignment, mate, apartment, mother and dog are usurped by an all-powerful agency.)

Mr. Lipton’s counsel to the partners, he said in a recent e-mail exchange, was “to follow their instincts and engage in related areas that benefit from the great expertise that they have perfected in their basic business.”

Creative Artist’s new strategy, which superseded Mr. Ovitz’s earlier and limited foray into advertising, pushed the notion that corporations, talent and new technology would combine to create growth even as the recording industry faltered, television networks fractured and studios clamped down on costs.

Some of the initiative’s successes have been as obvious as the Coke cups in the hands of the “American Idol” judges. In one of its more triumphant gambits, Creative Artists’s marketers helped assemble the hit show for the producer and client Simon Fuller by lining up Coca-Cola, another client, as a backer even before the Fox network became involved.

In other forays, the agency’s marketers joined the music department to organize shopping mall concerts promoting Abercrombie & Fitch’s Hollister brand, and helped Delta reclaim its image as an upscale air carrier by associating it with “Project Runway.” More recently, Creative Artists took on Joost, the Internet entertainment provider, as a client, and connected Mr. Ferrell and his partner Adam McKay with backers from Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, to start FunnyOrDie.com, a comedy site.

Years ago, after rejecting a possible merger with United Talent as being too complex, Creative Artists instead undertook a buildup in the more traditional areas of Hollywood talent, picking off clients including Mr. Ferrell, Kate Winslet, Matthew McConaughey and Jim Carrey. Once smaller than William Morris and International Creative Management, Creative Artists now counts slightly more film and television clients than either, according to lists culled from Baseline StudioSystems, a data service owned by The New York Times Company. (None of the three agencies disclose exact client counts.)

At least some evidence indicates that less grandiose agencies are occasionally better able to find work for some clients. An assessment by TVtracker.com, for instance, found that during the 2006-7 television season, Endeavor had the most clients at work on broadcast and cable shows, with a total of 737, to the bigger agency’s second-ranked 667.

Yet a talent agency’s revenue comes overwhelmingly from its big earners, and Creative Artists has an abundance of those in all of its main businesses, including sports, where a rapid expansion over the last year brought Mr. Jeter from baseball, Peyton Manning from football and the basketball star Allen Iverson, along with about 350 others, into the fold.

Operatives who represent the agency’s huge list are for the most part layered into eight floors of its Gensler-designed headquarters, which is being called “the building with a hole in it,” for the 100-foot space between its bridged wings. (Outlying offices have spread to New York; Nashville; Kansas City, Mo.; St. Louis; London; Beijing; Stockholm; and Calgary, Alberta, and Creative Artists has an ownership stake in Shepardson, Stern & Kaminsky, a New York-based marketing company.)

Interiors veer from the cold pallor of assistants’ rows outside the agents’ quarters to the day camp warmth of a patio where lowly players in red company T-shirts have been known to hand out treats at a midafternoon ice cream social.

And the inner sanctum is a vast, high-gloss and ultracorporate conference room.

Yet the contretemps with Hasbro points to some vulnerabilities that come with being the mightiest talent agency in Hollywood, not the least of them the difficulty of minding what has become a very large store.

According to Mr. Charness of Hasbro, the company initially came to Creative Artists for help in connecting its games and toys with a wide range of promotions. As things fell out, however, it did not always need the agency’s guidance in navigating worlds it had mastered on its own. When striking a deal for a mobile phone game based on the “Transformers” film, for instance, Glu Mobile dealt directly with the toymaker, without relying on Creative Artists’s gaming expertise. “We had a longstanding relationship,” said Jill Braff, Glu Mobile’s general manager of the Americas.

Mr. Bay’s agents at William Morris, meanwhile, detected Hasbro’s hunger for more movies. So they began shaking down clients — the agency term of art is “packaging within” — for ideas that are likely to surface as half a dozen projects for the toy company in the next couple of months.

In short, Hasbro wanted to go Hollywood. And Creative Artists, apparently, had become too busy — or too fancy — to make that happen. “We’re moving to William Morris as an entertainment client,” Mr. Charness said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/bu...dia/11caa.html





Moore Fears Film Seizure after Cuba Trip
Michelle Nichols

Filmmaker Michael Moore has stashed a copy of his latest documentary in Canada because he fears the U.S. government will try to confiscate it after part of it was filmed during an unauthorized trip to Cuba.

The U.S. Treasury Department is investigating Moore's trip to communist Cuba in March to film part of his documentary, "SiCKO," which takes a swipe at the U.S. health-care system and is due to be released in U.S. theaters on June 29.

U.S. citizens are generally barred from going to Cuba, unless approved by the government under a broad trade embargo imposed since 1962. But Moore says he has not broken any laws because he traveled to Cuba for a "journalistic endeavor."

"We brought back 15 minutes of the movie and we're concerned about any possible confiscation efforts," Moore told a news conference in New York.

"We took measures a few weeks ago to place a master copy of this film in Canada so if they did take our negative we would have a duplicate negative of this film in Canada."

Moore -- whose 2004 anti-Bush film "Fahrenheit 9/11" ranks as the most successful U.S. documentary -- and lawyer David Boies accused President George W. Bush's administration of discriminating against the controversial filmmaker.

Molly Millerwise, spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, declined to comment, saying in an e-mail that the department does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations.

Moore traveled to Cuba with three volunteers who worked in the ruins of New York's World Trade Center after the September 11, 2001, attacks. He said the volunteers were now suffering health problems after working at Ground Zero and struggling to get appropriate treatment under the U.S. health-care system.

Moore said that he took them by boat to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where Washington is holding foreign terrorism suspects, to see if they could get the same free health coverage as the detainees.

After they were refused, he said they decided to see what kind of health care they could get in Cuba.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...19539820070611





Every Movie Marketer's Worst Nightmare Becomes Grim Reality for Weinstein Company
Claude Brodesser-Akner

Michael Moore's new documentary "Sicko" has been pirated and is now widely available for download on peer-to-peer content sites like www.thepiratebay.org.

Canada stash
Last week, the Oscar winning director announced that he'd decided to stash a copy of "Sicko" in Canada, in case the federal government decided to impound it over an apparently unauthorized trip to Cuba made during its filming. As it turns out, the hard part won't be getting the film released, but getting audiences to pay to see it now that its available for free.

If the breach is as wide as it appears -- and this reporter downloaded a copy and watched it late Thursday night with ease -- Mr. Moore and his distributor, Weinstein Co., have a every film maker's worst marketing nightmare on their hands -- how to persuade people to go to the theater to see a show that's available free on the Internet. (Officials at the Weinstein Company were unavailable for comment late Thursday evening.)

Al Gore steps in
Mr. Moore had recently hired Al Gore attorney David Boies, who has said he believes Mr. Moore is being unfairly harassed by the U.S. Treasury Dept. over his trip to Cuba because he'd criticized the current Administration in his penultimate documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

While it remains to be seen if that is simply Moore's famous showmanship and posturing, or actually true, what is clear is that the blogosphere isn't reacting to the leak with anything approaching apolitical neutrality: One pirate link encouraged potential downloaders to view the film online saying," Watch this free copy and keep $ out of that fat f---s hands."

"Sicko's" general release date is June 29.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=117350





Film Maker’s Nightmare? Hardly
Jack

Michael Moore's postion on the free file-sharing of his work is clear: He “doesn’t have a problem with people downloading and sharing it.” Not only that, but as long as pirates aren’t making and selling copies for profit he’s actually “happy it happens.”

It may be that the giant MPAA distribution companies have very dfferent opinions on torrents, file-trading and free P2P but Moore’s attitude is as refreshing as it is realistic. He’s basically saying go for it, “information and art should be shared.”

For a brief interview of Moore on file-sharing see this.





In Pennsylvania Hamlet, Much Ado About Goo
Franz Lidz

THIS July, as they have for the past seven, fright freaks will swarm into Phoenixville, Pa., a flyspeck steel town at the junction of French Creek and the Schuylkill River. It was here in a nearby field that a movie legend was born. After oozing from a meteorite, an amorphous alien — looking like the love child of a lava lamp and a Gummy Bear — attached itself to dogs, hermits and groping teenagers, literally sucking the life out of them.

Bloated with the blood of its victims, the mass grew larger and larger, and redder and redder. It crawled ... it crept ... it ate you alive! Or so said the taglines for “The Blob,” the creature classic from 1958 that chronicled the adventures of film’s most notorious slime ball.

On July 13 — a Friday, no less — the Blob makes a homecoming of sorts at BlobFest, a two-day rolling carnival of horror in downtown Phoenixville, where part of the movie was filmed. With about 5,000 people expected this year, attendance keeps swelling, much as the Blob once did.

The party will kick off at the Colonial Theater, the setting for the film’s most infamous scene. At the end of “The Blob,” the Blob seeps into the crowded movie house, whose marquee trumpets “Daughter of Horror” with Bela Lugosi.

As the unsuspecting audience gapes at Lugosi, the Blob squishes out of the projection booth and feast on some of the patrons. The rest scream and flee in terror. “We call that the running out,” said Shane Stone, a local Blobologist who is also a child psychologist.

Opening-night festivities begin with a re-enactment of the running out. Dressed in mad-scientist whites, Mr. Stone will take the stage of the Colonial and introduce the M.C., a chained guy in a gorilla suit. Then, as he does every year, the gorilla will break loose and rampage down the aisles, inspiring hundreds of BlobFesters to burst out of their seats shrieking and bolt through the frosted-glass doors onto Bridge Street.

To maintain the mood between screenings, enthusiasts are invited to face off in a scream contest, compete in a tinfoil hat showdown and enter their chimeras and bogeymen in a costume competition.

There’s also a fire extinguisher parade, which Mr. Stone calls a “tribute to the device that saved us all.” Nearly a half-century ago townsfolk stopped the Blob by training the extinguishers on it. As it turned out, the gooey interloper had an aversion to cold.

Among the luminaries scheduled to appear at BlobFest VIII will be members of the film’s cast and crew; its producer, Jack Harris; and Kyra Schon, the zombie girl who murdered her mother with a garden spade and then devoured her in “Night of Living Dead.” “The Blob” was the brainchild of Irving Millgate, a Northwestern University humanities professor. Mr. Millgate told his idea to Mr. Harris, a Philadelphia film distributor with a desire to produce, who then pitched the concept to Good Times Films, an independent company in the Philadelphia suburbs that specialized in pictures with religious and social messages. The studio’s resident director, Irvin Shortess Yeaworth, known as Shorty, saw “The Blob” as biblical parable.

“To Shorty it was about God’s wrath upon evildoers,” Mr. Harris, 88, said. “To me it was an investment.” A $130,000 investment that turned a $10 million profit, he added.

Mr. Harris rejects the popular notion that “The Blob” was intended as a cold war metaphor for creeping Communism. “Hogwash,” he said. “Then again, maybe that’s why it never played Russia.”

Mr. Harris said the working title was “The Meteor Monster,” which begat “The Molten Meteor,” which begat “The Night of the Creeping Dead,” which begat “The Glob That Girdled the Globe,” which begat “The Glob”.

“I suggested ‘The Glob,’ ” said Kate Phillips, who was paid $125 to collaborate on the script. At 93, she teaches screenwriting at Keene State College in New Hampshire. “I was looking for a word to describe an object that had no form.”

But “The Glob” was already the title of a children’s book illustrated by Walt Kelly of “Pogo” fame. So Mr. Harris substituted other letters in the alphabet. “I thought, “The Alob” doesn’t sound frightening,” he says. “On the other hand, ‘The Blob’. ...”

Mr. Harris said the name accounts for much of the film’s enduring appeal. “That and the catchy theme song,” he said.

Composed by the songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, “Beware of the Blob!” featured the evocative lyrics “It creeps and leaps and glides and slides across the floor/Right through the door and all around the wall/A splotch, a blotch. ...”

Somewhat grudgingly Mr. Harris also gives some of the credit to Steve McQueen. “The Blob” was the first star turn for Mr. McQueen, who, at 27, played a teenager who alerts skeptical adults to the gelatinous threat.

According to movie lore Mr. Harris offered McQueen $3,000 or a lesser sum and 10 percent of the profits. Figuring “The Blob” would bomb, the actor took the money.

“Nonsense,” Mr. Harris snapped. “McQueen got scale. He was an unknown who couldn’t get himself arrested. He’s lucky I gave him a job.” Mr. Stone said he believed that the Blob still resonates with moviegoers because it taps into their fear of the uncontrollable. “You could ward off Dracula with garlic,” he reasoned, “and Frankenstein was so slow, you figured you’d be able to outrun him. But the Blob is this jelly thing, and when it gets on you, you can’t get it off. You’re trapped. You’re smothered. You suffocate.”

Blobophiles will recall that the Blob was freeze-dried and shipped to a polar ice cap at the film’s conclusion.

But it is actually in the care of Wes Shank, a movie memorabilia collector who first saw the film at a Saturday matinee in 1965 at the Suburban Theater in Ardmore on the Main Line, outside Philadelphia.

During the closing credits he realized that the studio — renamed Valley Forge Films — was nearby. “When I got there, a man showed me around a bunch of old barns that had been converted into soundstages,” he says. “Before we entered Stage C, the man said, “The Blob is in there.’ ”

The man turned out to be Shorty Yeaworth. Mr. Shank asked him if the Blob was for sale. Mr. Yeaworth, who died in 2004, said, “Maybe.” After a few months of haggling, they agreed on a price, which even now Mr. Shank declines to divulge. “The Blob is priceless,” he said firmly. “Real, live movie monsters from the ’50s are impossible to find these days.”

The Blob still reposes in its original container, a five-gallon metal bucket that bears the label: “Union Carbide, Silicone Division, Sistersville, W. Virginia.” The can is only half-full. “Some of the Blob was wasted in production,” Mr. Shank lamented.

What remains is hard and tacky and the color of ripe cranberries. And it gives off a faintly musty odor. “If you lived in a can for 50 years,” Mr. Stone said, “you might too.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/movies/10lidz.html





A Bloody Cut Above Your Everyday Zombie Film
Jason Zinoman

HORROR movies have always provided a safe haven for indulging anxieties, whether they are about giving birth (“It’s Alive”), buying a home (“The Amityville Horror”) or having sex (almost all of them). So it’s probably no coincidence that teenagers who grew up with terrorist alerts and photos of war are flocking in large numbers to increasingly graphic, torture-filled films that make Freddy Krueger look like a sweetie pie.

In the 1980s and ’90s most horror films had become cartoonish, with endless sequels about unbelievably clever serial killers slicing up their incredibly dim victims in increasingly preposterous ways. These films often treated murder as an adrenaline rush. “It is that pact with the devil that we’ve made, that we’ll watch violence, but we will have fun with it and make it seem kind of inconsequential,” said Wes Craven, the dark, fertile mind behind “The Hills Have Eyes” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

But in the last few years films like “Hostel” and “Saw” have challenged audiences with the reality of extreme violence, and it has paid off in huge box office numbers. “We’re in a moment that is a real resurgence of the horror genre,” said David Schwartz, chief curator of the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. The museum (movingimage.us) will play its part beginning next Saturday when it presents a horror fan’s dream festival, “It’s Only a Movie: Horror Films From the 1970s and Today,” a selection of 33 features and shorts that will run for six weekends, through July 22.

The retrospective is based on the idea that the renaissance of scary movies, sometimes called torture porn, has been inspired by the golden age of horror, when mainstream directors like Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick made some of their finest work and genre masters like Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and Mr. Craven (all of whom are represented in the festival) got their start.

“The new films are very similar to those in the 1970s in that they are merciless with the audience,” Mr. Craven said. “I think they are a cultural way of coming to terms with the horrible realities of everyday life.”

The festival emphasizes parallels between the two periods, made explicit in a tripleheader on July 7 that juxtaposes Vietnam War veteran zombies with Iraq war veteran zombies. It begins with Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” George A. Romero’s 1978 sendup of consumer society, followed by “Dead of Night,” Bob Clark’s antiwar film from 1974 that tells the story of an American soldier who returns home seeking revenge on his family and other townsfolk.

The last in the trio is the liberal fantasy “Homecoming,” with its similar conceit: undead soldiers return. But this time the director, Joe Dante, ignores the family and concentrates his anger at the ruling party. Originally broadcast in 2005 as part of Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” series, the movie imagines American veterans lurching home from Iraq to voting booths to kick Republicans out of office.

The festival’s title paraphrases the advertising slogan used in Mr. Craven’s debut, “The Last House on the Left” (July 22),which advised audiences: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating: It’s only a movie.” Released in 1972, this influential film, inspired by bloody newsreel footage of the Vietnam War, brought a gritty tone to horror that was a departure from the monster movies of old.

“Last House” was ignored or denounced by most critics, though Roger Ebert did call it a “guilty pleasure.” That shunning was the fate of most low-budget horror films of its day, and few broke out to a mass audience. The reception started to change with “Halloween,” Mr. Carpenter’s 1978 movie, about a bogeyman murdering teenage girls.

It was made on a budget of around $300,000 and became one of the highest-grossing independent films of all time, and one of the most imitated. The formula — which featured murderous psychopaths and teenagers who had sex at their peril — solidified through the 1980s when audiences were on a first-name basis with killers like Jason, Chucky and Freddy, who became less scary and more ridiculous with each sequel.

Horror had a brief revival in the 1990s when Mr. Craven turned the staleness of the form to his advantage, satirizing slashers in films like the “Scream” trilogy. These were smart satires, but to horror purists blurring the lines between horror and comedy got old fast. “Horror and comedy have nothing to do with one another,” said Rob Zombie, director of the remake of “Halloween,” which is scheduled to open Aug. 31. “It’s like saying, ‘How about a children’s movie — but with hard-core sex?’ ”

In the last few years Mr. Zombie and directors like Alexandre Aja (“High Tension”), James Wan (“Saw”) and Eli Roth (“Hostel”) have ushered in a deadly serious brand of horror that is too busy ripping out eyeballs to wink at the audience. The new films return the genre to the feral, relentless energy of the ’70s. But the difference is that these directors don’t need to make films on the cheap. While the early movies often seemed like snuff films made by maniacs, these new, slicker enterprises look like the work of maniacs — who’ve been to film school.

You only need to examine the lineup of films at the Museum of the Moving Image festival to see the reach of the genre today. The caving disaster film “The Descent” (July 22) and the slasher “High Tension” (June 24) come from Britain and France, respectively. Perhaps the most activity (and brutality) is in the Asian scene, including the Japanese exercise in sadomasochism “Ichi the Killer” (July 15).

As they see more and more horror films, audiences are increasingly difficult to shock. After you blow up someone’s head, rip people in two or burn off their faces, where do you go from there?

Mr. Roth isn’t worried. “They say there is more than one way to skin a cat,” he said. “Well, there are many ways to skin a human.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/movies/10zino.html





Hard to Find Good Help? Not in This Little Town
Manohla Dargis

Much like zombies, zombie movies show no sign of rolling over and staying dead, really, truly, most sincerely dead. In recent years, they have run speedily amok in Danny Boyle’s spine-tingler “28 Days Later” and its sequel, “28 Weeks Later” (where the virus-stricken creatures are more zomboid than true zombies), as well as in the remake of George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.” Ever the classicist, Mr. Romero keeps his zombies moving slow but steady in his rollicking “Land of the Dead,” the 2005 chapter in the zombie epic that shuddered into existence with his 1968 masterwork, “Night of the Living Dead.”

In the ticklishly amusing satire “Fido,” the undead stagger along like stunned toddlers. With their shuffling, uncertain gait, their limbs slowed by the onslaught of rigor mortis, these zombies are thoroughly, satisfyingly old school. Lost in a twilight zone between life and death, gripped by a hunger that can only be satisfied with a mouthful of warm human flesh, they live, in a manner of speaking, to eat. The good news for their would-be snacks and treats, meaning everyone who’s nominally alive, is that these zombies are also in the grip of remote-controlled obedience collars that keep them as harmless as a neutered Rottweiler on a very short leash. One zap and they’re mewling like kittens or at least growling more quietly.

Directed by Andrew Currie, who wrote the guffaw-splattered, lightly bloody, bit too modest screenplay with Robert Chomiak and Dennis Heaton, the film takes place in the 1950s, or some freaky-fantasy variation on the same, in a small town washed in muted colors and occasionally rocked by a blast of angry red. In this perky Pleasantville, where father knows best except when he loses his head, zombies don’t feast on the living; they serve them. They mow the lawns, guard the crosswalks and deliver the daily paper. Every so often, they also dispense a little something extra, like the teenage zombie, Tammy (Sonja Bennett), whose tight curves and scarily chattering teeth keep her owner, Mr. Theopolis (Tim Blake Nelson, a hoot), dementedly smiling.

Like his slower-moving characters, Mr. Currie exhibits distinct cannibalistic tendencies, starting with the clever black-and-white educational reel that opens “Fido” and lays out the back story (“the zombie wars” and what followed). Watching morosely from the last row in class is little Timmy (K’Sun Ray), the only, crushingly lonely child of Helen and Bill Robinson (Carrie-Anne Moss and Dylan Baker). With his wide-pooling eyes, Timmy looks straight out of central casting, if also seriously ill at ease when squeezing off rounds during zombie-target practice. He’s not much of a shot, one of the few in the class who doesn’t raise a hand when a visiting containment expert, Mr. Bottoms (Henry Czerny, excellent), asks: “How many of you have ever had to kill a zombie?”

Timmy would rather play catch, which he does soon after Helen decides to elevate her social standing by bringing a collared and apparently tamed zombie home. (Everyone else in the neighborhood has one, she whines.) Named Fido — and played by a wonderfully expressive, nearly mute Billy Connolly — the Robinson zombie soon becomes a mostly cherished member of the family, with Bill the sole dissenter. As Bill nervously twitches and Helen basks in the glow of consumer satisfaction, Timmy and Fido bond, first over a baseball and mitt, then over a little accidental bloodletting and later during one wittily shot scene in a sweeping field that summons up every boy-and-dog story that brought a tear to the eye.

Mr. Currie and his collaborators don’t push their slave-master allegory far; unlike Mr. Romero or the zombie comedy “Shaun of the Dead,” where the living are so zombie-like they don’t initially notice the undead, the filmmakers remain content to graze and to nibble, skimming the surface rather than sinking in deep. They set up a divide between the light-skinned humans and the dark-skinned zombies that they never fully engage, shying away from anything heavy or dangerously downbeat. Mr. Currie and company are happy to make you laugh, which they do easily enough, especially with a beautifully slow-to-build joke that demands a familiarity with the typical story arc and climactic dialogue from the old “Lassie” television series. It won’t make you bleed, just howl.

“Fido” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). In spite of some gnawed-off limbs and bloodied necks, the gore quotient is surprisingly modest.

FIDO

Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed by Andrew Currie; written by Robert Chomiak, Mr. Currie and Dennis Heaton, based on an original story by Mr. Heaton; director of photography, Jan Kiesser; edited by Roger Mattiussi; music by Don Macdonald; production designer, Rob Gray; produced by Blake Corbet and Mary Anne Waterhouse; released by Lionsgate. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 91 minutes.

WITH: Carrie-Anne Moss (Helen), Billy Connolly (Fido), Dylan Baker (Bill), K’Sun Ray (Timmy), Henry Czerny (Mr. Bottoms), Sonja Bennett (Tammy) and Tim Blake Nelson (Mr. Theopolis).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/06/1...es/15fido.html





Box Office for Horror Movies Is Weak, Verging on Horrible
Michael Cieply

Moviegoers put a nail in the coffin of a dying horror boom this weekend, as “Hostel: Part II” opened to just $8.8 million in ticket sales, far behind the crime caper “Ocean’s Thirteen” in a three-day period of relatively soft box office performance.

“Ocean’s Thirteen,” with a cast of stars led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt, ranked first with $37.1 million, slightly underperforming its predecessor, “Ocean’s Twelve.” That film took in about $39.2 million when Warner Brothers released it in December 2004 and went on to collect more than $125.5 million in domestic ticket sales.

Meanwhile “Hostel: Part II,” a torture-theme thriller from the director Eli Roth, placed No. 6 for the weekend and did less than half the opening business of the original “Hostel.” That movie made about $19.6 million in its first weekend when Lionsgate released it in January of last year and helped feed a wave of horror releases that have often come up short.

In the last few months the Weinstein Company’s “Grindhouse” failed its own hype as a hip event, Fox Atomic’s higher-browed zombie film “28 Weeks Later” undershot its predecessor, and a long string of less ambitious horror pictures sputtered as the audience for bigger, family-friendly pictures like “Spider-Man 3,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” and “Shrek the Third” led a broad surge in ticket sales.

Lionsgate, although it releases films in a variety of genres, had done especially well with relatively low-budget horror in the recent past. Its “Saw III,” for instance, took in about $165 million at the worldwide box office last year, while the original “Hostel” had about $81 million in ticket sales around the world.

“It’s kind of like that Mark Twain quote, ‘Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,’ ” said Mark Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate. “Everything takes a breather.”

Mr. Burns attributed the weakening performance of horror to a marketplace glut rather than to any growing revulsion to the genre’s excesses or a backlash against violence in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings, as some have suggested. He said his studio, which is co-releasing “Captivity” with After Dark Films in July and has a fourth “Saw” scheduled for October, had already de-emphasized its reliance on the genre because of too much competition.

Total business for the weekend’s Top 12 films was down 9.1 percent from the comparable weekend last year, when Disney’s “Cars” opened, according to the box-office reporting firm Media by Numbers. Disney’s “Pirates” fell 52 percent to finish second with $21.3 million for the weekend and a total of $253.6 million; Universal’s “Knocked Up” was third with $20 million, down 35 percent, and a total of $66.2 million; “Surf’s Up,” a new release from Sony Pictures, was fourth with $18 million; and “Shrek the Third,” from DreamWorks and Paramount, was fifth with $15.8 million, for a total of $281.9 million.

“We did our share,” said Dan Fellman, Warner Brothers’ president for theatrical distribution, noting that the year-to-date box office remains “very strong.” Revenue, thanks in part to higher ticket prices, is up about 5 percent — a significant amount — to almost $4 billion so far. Attendance meanwhile is up about 1 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/movies/11hostel.html





Susan Buice and Arin Crumley - Web Film Pioneers Become Youtube's First Feature Filmmakers
Nicol Wistreich

There are few poster-stars of the web-led film evolution quite like Susan Buice and Arin Crumley. The NY duo - who James MacGregor sourced for a Shooting People interview, and then for an interview for the new funding book (republished here) - have just seen their credit-card funded Four Eyed Monsters became the first feature film to be made available on YouTube (films are normally capped at 10 mins).

There's lots of things you can say about Arin and Susan - how the couple met online and agreed to communicate initialy without speaking, and then went on to turn their art into an expose of their relationship as feature film, how they built up a huge online audience with an ongoing series of video podcasts, and self-distributed their feature film in US cinemas (with DRM-free distribution on the small-screen), who use the latest software, tech, social networks and web services as ways to talk about their feelings. At times I wonder if they were dreamt up by a marketing executive at Apploogletubesoftabox, so brilliantly do they use potentially soulless tools to create something something at once both very personal and universal.

It's this, perhaps, that's their greatest achievement - they've laid their life and love bare, shaping it into a form a world of reality-tv-junkies can gorge on, but in a form altogether more tender, honest, delicate and just plain nakedly human than anything a big media machine could ever create.

The first time I watched the Four Eyed Monsters video-casts I collapsed on my bedroom floor in tears. I have not cried like that in a long time. In fact I wasn't sure I could get up, the films had managed to kick me right back to the most terrifying moments of a broken heart, and the (handwritten) creative explosions around that. It was only a bird, peering in at my window and chirping which made me get up and go for a recovering walk by the river. But it was the honesty of the video-casts which sent me there, and judging by their huge and growing fanbase - I"m not alone.

Its an interesting experience comparing the video episodes with the feature as it says much about the cross roads the world of moving image is at right now. There's the traditional(ish) feature, created with scripts and dollys and lights and actors; and the video-log, capturing life unfolding, framed with whatever artistry and technique suited the plot at that time. The difference between a celebrity, playing a part, pretending to love another celebrity, playing a part - and two lovers, playing themselves, with nothing to lose but their privacy and intimacy, which they've chosen to share with us. As well as the 'permission to be human' idea of Cluetrain, it reminded me of something poet Simon Armitage once wrote when reviewing 32 Short Films About Glen Gould: "the inevitableness of a lie, compared with the extravagance and endless possibility of real life".

Anyway, enough of my ramblings (there can be too much human sometimes), and on with an exert from James MacGregor's interview, which can be found in our new funding book.

Four Eyed Monsters Grow Their Own Audience : Romancing – and Distributing - the Web

James MacGregor interviews Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, creators of Four Eyed Monsters. The pair made a movie about the development of their real-life relationship, podcast it on the web to win a massive following and used their audience to decide which local theatres to screen the movie in. They did it on credit cards, racking up an $80K debt.

How did you meet up and decide to start the project and when did you realise your Four Eyed Monsters was going to have a life of its own, through the web?
As presented in episode 1 of our video Podcast (see below) and as portrayed in our film, we met through an online dating website. Our relationship began as sort of an experiment in dating and in communication. We decided to meet up almost immediately but created the rule that we would not speak to each other but could communicate with one another in any other format. We created hand written notes, drawings, and played music for one another. At certain point we began creating videos for each other. After 4 months of this lifestyle we finally began speaking. We were really inspired by the experiences we had during our non-speaking courtship. We wanted to turn our communication experiment outward and expand our audience from just one another to more people so we created the film to tell the story. The video podcast is a continuation of the same story and the video podcast just so happens to be in a format that can easily spread and be subscribed to.

The focus is on your relationship and how it grows and changes over time, but does it really reflect your real relationship? Is it art imitating life, or has it somehow become a case of art almost dictating life for the two of you?
Everyone who has watched the entire video podcast series to date is aware that it is a depiction of our real lives. Even though we are using a medium and style that is normally associated with fiction, the story we’re telling is true. To be fair it’s a highly expressive project so when the audience is looking at something that is very obviously constructed, it is an expression of our real experiences. The film works the same way but the film has an even more narrative feel because there is very little real life footage. What we are interested in is working on projects about real relationships; Making stuff up wouldn’t provide valuable insights to ourselves or anyone else.

No bust-ups over which way to go or which way to play things??
During the process of making stuff we, of course, disagree all the time but we always agree on the final outcome that becomes public.

There are a lot of people involved creatively – how many exactly?
Who we work with is always changing but we usually work very closely with one other person and for the duration of that time that person is an equal collaborator. The individuals we work with at any given time depends on what the project needs in that moment.

Are they all volunteers or have you had to pay for some things you needed?
We’ve had volunteers who have worked on basic things but for the most part everyone we have worked with has been a collaborator, some of them close friends and some we’ve met through working on the project. Other than certain stipends most people have worked in exchange for credit on the project.

Totting up the bills, what were the costs in time and money setting all this up for the web?
We don’t really distinguish between the video podcast and the film in terms of financial costs or time costs. The Web hosting of our videos has been donated by Cache Fly and the cost of our website is very little. What has been expensive is time. We’ve been working on the entire project for the past 3 years full-time and we’ve racked up a huge credit card debt on living expenses. Our debt to date is somewhere around $80,000.

When you decided you would go for a feature length movie as well as podcasts, how did that work exactly - did you edit pre-existing material together, shoot new stuff; how did you give FEMonsters followers a new and fresh experience?
The film was created first and most of the film is shot fresh, though much of it was based on old footage we had from early in our relationship. The video podcast is a continuation of the same story and it is all new content. Most of the video podcast is documentary footage, but every now and then will shoot something , animate or illustrate something and even use found footage to convey certain aspects of the story we’re telling. The video podcast is usually how people find out about the film since we’ve never had a distributor to release and market the film.

We hear about zero budgets, but we all have to spend on tape, bus fares, pencils and yellow pads… what did you lay out to get from web podcasts to a feature you could screen in theaters?
We owned almost all the equipment we needed for the film: camera, lights, Macs and Final Cut Pro for editing. We did rent a track at one point and for 2 days we rented a space to shoot a restaurant scene. Besides that we bought a lot of mini DV tape. The hard costs of the film totalled to less than $10,000 but like I said before, we worked full time on the project so we put our rent and the cost of food on credit cards, which is how we racked up so much debt.

How did you convince theatre owners that they should let your film into their program and did you have to pay hire charges or do a “house split” – how did that work?
On our website we allow people to request our film which means they give us their email and zip code and by doing this they are requesting that we screen our film in their area and that if we do we are free to contact them. Using this information we were able to see where there were people who wanted to see our film. We felt like if 150 people had requested the film in a given area it would be lucrative enough endeavour for us to propose and convince a theatre to arrange a screening. When we called the theatre we explained the request system and explained that we would contact all the requestors and let them know about the screenings and encourage a wider audience to go through our videos on our podcast. In the cities we were going for, we would sometimes hit resistance with a theatre. In that case we would call other theatres until we found the one that wanted to take a chance with us. With most theatres we arranged a 50/50 split of ticket sales. In a couple of cases we were able to negotiate a low four walling fee and all the ticket sales from those venues went straight to us.

You have just had (Dec 2006) a NYC opening week at Cinema Village – how did that go and what sort of box office did you manage to generate?
We opened on split screen with 2 other films. We weren’t playing at every slot on every day. Our box office was fairly weak. We did, however, end up the # 5 opening film in New York City that week and got reviewed in the New York Times, Village Voice as well as a slew of other press. We also lead a grassroots campaign using our New York supporters and distributed 4000 stickers, 500 posters, 5000 postcards, and 200 free DVDs which was a cool way to get to know people who have been watching our podcast for a long time. We also held interactive discussions every night after our 7 PM screenings on various topics ranging from net neutrality, to life logging, to internet dating.

Where do you take Four Eyed Monsters from here? I mean has it now got a life all of its own and could go on as pure fiction, or will it have to continue as episodic, waiting for developments in your own relationship?
Well we still have some story left untold which is what we’re currently editing into the next few episodes. As for continuing to follow our relationship in an auto-biographical way, we’re not going to necessarily continue doing that. We’re still interested in discovering things about real relationships, how we go about making those discoveries is something we’re currently navigating.

Does it ever feel strange that people you meet seem to know all about you in almost intimate detail, yet they are total strangers. Do you ever feel you have over-exposed yourselves? Are you completely cool about it?
We rarely get recognized in the street so we don’t interact with our audience in real life that often, but when we do it’s usually pretty cool because some of the introduction bullshit is out of the way. In meeting new people, you have to spend so much time making your first impression and nothing really gets communicated during that first interaction beyond surface things, such as ‘well this person seems on the ball’ or ‘what an idiot,’ but when we meet people who have seen the podcast we can quickly get to a point where we’re communicating with more depth. Because they know a lot about us, that’s less that we have to convey in a less articulate way by talking and they in turn are more apt to be less guarded and reveal things about themselves.

What advice can you give to anyone thinking of attempting the podcasts to features route – is it a good way to find an audience and is it sustainable long term.
If you’re releasing good compelling video on the web for free you will build an audience. If that is your only goal you are set. If your goal is to get that audience to do something else, that becomes challenging. We’ve been able to get our audience to petition for screenings of our film, come out to theatres and pay money to see the film and to help us promote it. At the centre of all this interaction is a community that we are building. The centre of that community is our video podcast. How financially sustainable this will be for us is the next chapter of this experiment. Our prediction is that having a dedicated community around a project has tremendous value that can be creatively leveraged into getting out of debt and lining up a budget for the next project.

In a world that churns out endless half-truths, spun and packaged as entertainment products, the honesty with which Susan Buice and Arin Crumley of FourEyedMonsters have offered their story to millions of web watchers is quite a gift. The simplest way to repay the pair - whose film is now free online (for a lowfi version at least) - is to sign up on Spout.com - who will pay them $1 for every signup.
http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/content/view/1210/267/





Screener Ban Rare Loss for the Winning Valenti
Gregg Kilday

Leave it to Jack Valenti to have the last word. The longtime steward of the MPAA passed away April 26, but Harmony Books has just published his memoir, "This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood."

A born raconteur and a man who clearly enjoyed the power of language, the Texas-born Valenti looks back over his life -- his stint as an Air Force B-25 pilot in World War II, his right-hand-man role as a special assistant to President Johnson -- before taking up the subject of the MPAA, whose chairman he became in 1966. His tenure saw the creation of the voluntary ratings system, with Sumner Redstone, then an exhibitor heading the National Association of Theatre Owners, proving a key ally in its creation. He writes of opening up foreign countries to American movies and of his long-running battle to postpone the repeal of the Fyn-Syn Rules that kept networks from entering production.

But inevitably, he comes to the great screener war. The MPAA's attempt to ban screeners ignited an uproar in September 2003, when Valenti announced the new policy. Resolved in a matter of months, it actually represented just a blip in his 38 years at the organization. But clearly, as he sat down to write his memoirs, the painful memories still rankled.

As Valenti reconstructs the controversy, he became galvanized when he learned in August 2003 that half of the 68 titles distributed via screeners in 2002 had given rise to illegal DVDs. He vowed to stop their distribution.

But because awards season was fast approaching, Valenti announced the new policy in September, having consulted only with studio heads. In retrospect, he admits, by not having spent more time consulting with the industry at large in advance of the change, he violated one of the basic tenants he'd learned from LBJ, "Never surprise your friends and allies."

Valenti had stepped on a tripwire. Filmmakers rose up to complain that without screeners, smaller movies wouldn't enjoy an equal playing field. On Oct. 10, more than 100 directors signed an open letter to Valenti opposing the new policy. "To say I was pained is to undershoot the mark," Valenti acknowledges. "I was sick at heart."

With the help of Frank Pierson, then president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Valenti tried to forge a compromise that would have seen screeners go just to members of the Academy. But the uproar continued. Valenti recalls a phone call with Harvey Weinstein, then of Miramax Films, along with Sony Picture Classics' Michael Barker and Focus Features' James Schamus, who all opposed the ban. Although the participants agreed to keep the conversation private, it was leaked to the New York Times the next day. Valenti blamed Weinstein, though Weinstein denied being the source of the leak.

Fearing an anti-trust lawsuit that ultimately did materialize, Valenti called another meeting of studio chiefs in November. He urged a new plan that would have seen a restricted number of screeners go to the Academy and several other groups. But by then, Valenti could not persuade the chiefs to reverse course.

Finally, the case went before a federal district court judge. Valenti contends that the judge did not appreciate the central issue he advanced -- the protection of creative property. The MPAA lost the case.

"To me, the whole enterprise was a sad piece of business," Valenti recalls about one of his rare defeats. "The only good news was that I was damn glad it was over. It was a bitch."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...9cf6967841df85





BitTorrent, Australia and TV Networks
Peter Wells

"It is better to be a pirate than to join the navy", said Steve Jobs, when rallying the troops who originally designed the first Macintosh. Twenty years later it seems odd that the same Mr. Jobs has done more to stem the flow of pirated material over the Internet than any single person. Apple and the iTunes Music Store dragged the record industry into the new market of the Internet. Before iTunes, music on the Internet was "shared" illegally through peer-to-peer networks such as Kazza and Limewire. Nobody believed that people would buy music on the net when the same files were available free of charge. One Billion songs later and iTunes is a word synonymous with success.

Now, a new network called BitTorrent has become the online pirates favourite weapon of choice. Its favourite download? Television shows.

Television networks see this as pure theft. They argue that shows downloaded illegally are hurting ratings in Australia and are responsible for lost revenue in advertising. They also claim that people will not download television at a price when free versions exist all over the web. Hmmm, doesn't that sound familiar?

First, some history. BitTorrent was created by Bram Cohen, as a way of distributing large files over the Internet, without burdening the original host with bandwidth costs. BitTorrent works by dividing the files into small chunks, where every user is simultaneously downloading a file while they upload to other users. This software was originally created to help distribute Linux builds, but quickly became overcome by "pirates" searching for TV shows, games, movies and all manner of digital wares.

BitTorrent was first considered to be a threat to the movie industry. In an excellent Wired interview in 2005 with the BitTorrent's creator, this threat was highlighted by the Motion Picture Association of America, who began suing individuals downloading movies, in order to, as the MPAA's anti-piracy chief John Malcolm put it, "avoid the fate of the music industry." But the reality is that most movies available on BitTorrent are usually bad quality, they are shot on low definition cameras at a cinema, and include people walking in front of the lens, talking and generally being annoying etc. Shows broadcast on television on the other hand are generally ripped from a Tivo like device, are easily comparable with broadcast images, are ad free, and available almost immediately.

When Wired Magazine asked Bram Cohen if he would use BitTorrent if he hadn't invented it, he replied "I don't know. There's upholding the principle. And there's being the only knuckle-head left who's upholding the principle." Asked later if he thought his invention will lead to the downfall of cinema and television, he replied: "Take this new platform and mine it for gold... Hollywood, which squawked about VHS, figured out how to make billions off video rentals." Traditional media shareholders are always scared of new forms of distribution which threaten their stranglehold on an established market. It's why the RIAA sued people who used file sharing networks to download songs. Its also why the MPAA started suing BitTorrent users. But creators of content need to realise that suing their customers is not the answer. For some reason, customers don't like being sued.

To take John Malcolm's analogy further, I would hope the television industry will "avoid the fate of the music industry", by not waiting till they have turned a generation into pirates before offering other options for free to air TV fans to watch the shows they love. Treat people like thieves and that's what they'll become.

A Nation of Pirates
BitTorrent usage in Australia is the worst kept secret on the Internet. Technology and television forums across Australia are filled with posts about “watching the latest episode of (insert show here) on a recent trip to America." My ISP says BitTorrent accounts for about 45% of its Internet traffic. Channel BT, as it is known, is the new reality.

Even The Bleeding Edge, Fairfax newspaper’s technology blog, has written many guides for setting up BitTorrent for the downloading of "Linux distributions". Fairfax, as a content producer and a major media player, can not be seen as supporting piracy. Yet they have even skirted the issue by suggesting "a friend of theirs" has used BitTorrent to catch up on missed episodes of Desperate Housewives. Missed episodes? Or new episodes that haven't aired in Australia?

According to piracy tracking site Envisional’s recent studies, Australians are the greatest BitTorrent users per capita in the world. Despite making up only 0.3 % of the world’s population, Australians account for 20% of BitTorrent traffic. This is only set to increase as more and more Australians begin to use broadband. In 2005 only 30% of Australians connected to the Internet had a broadband connection, by 2006, it was 51%. Critical mass of broadband has been achieved. This point is crucial in understanding "Channel BitTorrent's" sudden rise in Australia. An hour long television show is roughly 350MB, which would take around 14 hours to download on a dial up connection. A standard MP3 is about 3MB, or 12 minutes. It is for this simple reason, the size of the files in question, that music was the first battleground of Internet piracy. High speed Internet means television is the next major battleground.

While there is no other option available, could it be that illegal downloading of television will only increase? In 2006, with broadband adoption growing Australia, piracy was blamed for the drop in viewers of the early episodes of the two hit imports of 2005, Lost, and Desperate Housewives. Yet by the end of 2006, Desperate Housewives was actually rating better than it had in 2005. What can be gleaned from the implications of these ratings? Its hard to say, because comprehensive research has not been made in Australia that addresses BitTorrent's effect on ratings. My guess would be that the drop in ratings at the start of 2006 were from fans of the the show who had already downloaded the new episodes that Channel Seven were showing. The later peak in viewership could be due to the buzz the downloaders (and new fans) of the show had created. Is it possible that for every viewer the networks lose to BitTorrent, they gain three more from the 'water cooler" effect?

Channel BT
It sounds far fetched, but is it really? Battlestar Galactica is the show that defined BitTorrent. Battlestar debuted in the U.K. in October 2004, but was delayed in the U.S. by the Sci Fi Network until January 2005. That didn't stop the geeks in U.K hitting the Internet and proclaiming Battlestar as the best new show in a decade, and uploading Battlestar on the relatively new network. When it finally debuted in the US, the word of mouth created by those who had BitTorrented the show meant that Battlestar became the most watched show in The Sci Fi Channel’s history. This is a fascinating example because usually Americans, as the world largest producer of television, are normally the first audience in the world to watch new programs.

It seems that consumers downloading episodes of a series via BitTorrent create demand and are extremely loyal viewers. Downloading a torrent takes a bit of effort, first to discover new shows, then to locate the files and join a swarm. It is not something most people with small download limits and low Internet speeds can do on a whim. It also seems to me that BitTorrent increases sales of a series on DVD. How many people do you know with DVD box sets of Arrested Development, Firefly, The Sopranos, or Lost? Ok, now how many of those people discovered these shows via television or via the Internet?

Where BitTorrent is having major effects is on the serialised television shows, such as Prison Break, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica, that reward loyal viewers with in-jokes and gradual plot development. Show like Law and Order and CSI are safer, because it really doesn’t matter if you miss an episode. Miss an episode of Battlestar Galactica, Prison Break, or Lost, and you could quickly find yourself, well, lost.

We are entering a new phase in television where TV and the Internet converge. America, as one of the strongest producers of television content in the world, has been able to embrace the new albeit slowly, embrace this new reality. The major US networks offer downloads of their most popular shows the day after they have screened, at a small price through iTunes or Xbox Live, or free through streaming (ads included) on their websites. Neither service is available outside of the U.S.

The question is, would the average punter be prepared to pay a nominal fee for an episode that is guaranteed to be downloaded at the highest speed possible, or use a free BitTorrent service whose speed is subject to the activity of "the swarm", and could contain viruses. The US iTunes store suggests the answer is yes. Also, if a new method like iTunes becomes adopted by the majority, it will actually hurt Internet piracy by removing people from the "swarm", therefore slowing down torrent speeds. Sure, there will always be piracy on the Internet, because there was always piracy before the Internet. It is human nature. But iTunes has proven over a billion times around the world that when you give people the opportunity to do the right thing, more often than not they will.

Silly Season
So what can be done in Australia? Australian TV needs to adopt the current situation that is proving successful in the US, where episodes are available for streaming immediately after they have screened, or downloaded commercial free for a small price through iTunes. This would obviously require new contracts to be written between our local networks and the US studios to include the Australian rights to stream video on the Internet along with free to air broadcast rights. Tougher still would be working out who was entitled to any profits from sales made through iTunes, the Australia rights holders, or the US producers, or both. I don't pretend to know the deals that could be made, this is something for the lawyers to work out. Either way, this can only happen when Australian TV starts airing episodes as close to there original air dates as possible, and it is in the interest of our networks to make this happen as soon as possible.

Australian television networks need to embrace the new reality of the global market, to understand that consumers are no longer prepared to wait months on end for their favourite shows to be screened, when they don't have to. We are sick of finding out who killed Laura Palmer or who shot Mr. Burns months before we finally see the episode screened on free to air. Who in Australia would be prepared to wait for a new episode of Prison Break to appear on Yahoo7, if it was freely available 9 months earlier on channel BT? Fans of a show called Prison Break probably have a looser ethical compass than most!

Australian television networks could never "catch up" with the US schedule, because the US launches most shows in September, and traditionally Australia's Low Ratings period starts in November. So What? Most US shows reach a mid season climax for the November sweeps, then take a 'hiatus' over the Christmas season, only to return by mid February. That seems to coincide nicely with the Australian Summer, doesn't it? Another argument was that Australians benefit from the delay it takes imported shows to reach our shores, because it allows our commercial networks to screen a full series without these long interruptions. Anyone swayed by this argument needs to look at any Green Guide to read fans angry with our networks cutting up a series, playing episodes out of order, playing weeks of repeats of hit shows to 'stretch out' a season, playing 'fake' season cliff-hangers. The list goes on...

The truth, as these complaints show, is Australian Commercial television has little respect for its viewers. Seven, Nine And Ten have turned exploitation into an art form. They all rely heavily on expensive US hits that are cheaper to import than locally produced drama. Waiting months on end to debut a show allows them get a clear idea what imports will win or lose, so they can decide what to spend there marketing dollars on. Local content regulations (which ensures that 55% of prime time television is locally produced) are seen as a commercial burden, rather than important to the culture of Australia. The locally produced "hits" in this county are generally cheaper imitations of international reality formats, such as Big Brother, Australian Idol and The Biggest Loser. This cosy situation has made Australian television the most profitable in the world. But how much longer can this go on?

Hollywood had to deal with this global reality a few years earlier. Traditionally Hollywood films have had a ‘staggered’ release around the globe. For example, a blockbuster film released in the U.S. for the Thanksgiving weekend (America’s highest grossing box office weekend) would be delayed in Australia until Boxing Day (our biggest movie going day). Online piracy destroyed this model, as pirated copies of films were distributed to eager fans who chose instant gratification over image quality. By 2003, all major Hollywood films were released simultaneously across the globe. Hollywood realised that giving consumers what they want, when they want, was better than holding out for the traditional schedules that had worked so long in the pre-Internet era. Again, doesn't this sound familiar?

Lets look at BitTorrent's numbers again. The U.S, with a population of 300 million people, account for 7% of BitTorrent traffic. Australia, with only 20 million people, accounts for 20% of all traffic. Is this really a surprise, when U.S audiences are offered a legal option to watch their favourite TV shows via the Internet. CBS recently announced that the shows they offered as downloads or via streaming, had better ratings and more loyal fans. Surely the remarkable rise in ratings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report can be attributed to their cult status on YouTube.

This doesn't just effect TV from the US. Tony Martin joked that the ABC delayed screening Ricky Gervias' Extras, because they wanted to wait until everyone who wanted to watch the show had either downloaded the series or bought the DVDs. Funnily enough, I heard this on the podcast of Get This. Why? Because I hate the music and advertisements Triple M plays, and I would rather download a Nickleback free version of the show than to listen to it live. In fact, I doubt I would have ever heard Get This had it not been released as a podcast. I think Tony Martin is Australia's greatest comedian, but I never listened to him while he was only available via Triple M. Even Roy and H.G., who are on a network whose music I enjoy, I still download as a podcast rather than listen to live. Why? Because I prefer to listen to them on Monday morning than Sunday afternoon. It is the simple fact that the Internet generation expects time shifting. Despite this, Get This is able to wrap their podcasts in sponsorship. And I am happy to hear their advertisements if it means I can listen to Tony Martin whenever I want.

Channel Ten seems to understand this new reality, screening new episodes of the O.C and Jericho soon after they have screened in the USA. They have also started selling episodes of locally produced “David Tench” and “Tripping Over” through Bigpond.com, for those who may have missed an episode. It is interesting to note that Channel Ten targets a younger audience, those who are Internet savvy, and may be willing to source their favourite shows through “non-traditional” channels. Ten have also released "best bits" podcasts of Thank God You're Here and The Ronnie Johns Half Hour, and rather than hurt the ratings, Thank God Your Here has actually been the highest rating show of 2006. Channel Seven can fill its schedule with "Encore Presentations" of Lost or Desperate Housewives, but that's really not the answer. What are the people that miss the encore presentation going to do? Or those who miss the first four episodes?

The key here is iTunes. Apple's juggernaut now owns 88% of the legal download market worldwide, thanks to the success of the iPod. If legal television downloads are to overtake BitTorrent usage in Australia, those shows need to be available through iTunes. It is, to date, the only successful business model that is cross platform.

The End of The World As We Know It
I really don't believe that BitTorrent will negatively effect Australian TV network ratings any time soon. In fact, for the time being I think us geeks will actually help network television by providing shows like Heroes a word of mouth buzz that no slick marketing campaign could ever hope to create. But television networks need to think closely about their long term future. Every angry fan that turns to channel BitTorrent for their latest fix of Lost will be much harder to coax back to free to air television down the track. The longer a viewer becomes used to BitTorrent - free to watch, on demand and without ads, they will be harder to convince that what they are doing is wrong. And every time a network representative defends this situation with word like "anyone using BitTorrent is simply impatient or a thief" offends a massive group of extremely loyal television fans. When BitTorrent finally starts to negatively effect network television ratings, it maybe too late. Treat people like thieves and that's what they become.
http://forums.mactalk.com.au/showthread.php?t=32403





Measuring U.S. Mobile Media Consumption
David H. Deans

The Nielsen Company will begin measuring mobile phone users through a new service called Nielsen Wireless. This service will measure how many people use content services such as mobile Internet and mobile video and what impact this has on established media behavior.

Nielsen Wireless is designed specifically for the wireless industry and also complements Nielsen's Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2) initiative, which will measure television usage on all television and video platforms, including personal video devices such as mobile phones.

Nielsen already supports the wireless industry through customer segmentation, ringtone sales tracking (Nielsen RingScan), attitudinal and behavioral surveys and mobile polling. Nielsen Wireless will work in tandem with these existing Nielsen services.

Nielsen Wireless' first product -- Mobile Vector -- will launch in the U.S. in July 2007. It will use information culled from Nielsen's existing "National People Meter TV" sample to report on media behavior and audience demographics segmented by wireless carrier.

Later this year, Nielsen will expand Nielsen Mobile Vector to include a survey of mobile phone users that will provide information about their consumption of mobile media content. Through continued collaboration with wireless industry stakeholders, Nielsen's ultimate goal is to develop a system that will support a market-wide view of mobile media consumption.

I believe that this new service might provide valuable supplemental data to complement the research that exposed the issues that have led to the under-performing adoption within the U.S. market thus far -- such as walled-gardens that restrict usage, limited content, poorly designed media portals and of course, the perceived high price of mobile media-related services.

The Nielsen service is intended to provide the following benefits:

- Help wireless carriers develop more efficient advertising campaigns to reach their most valuable subscribers, while helping mobile content producers decide which mobile content distributor will be most effective in extending their brand.

- Help the mobile media industry establish competitive positioning and differentiation.

- Identify how the subscribers of different wireless carriers consume media in the home (i.e. TV viewing preferences, video gaming activity, media technology adoption).
http://dhdeans.blogspot.com/2007/06/...nsumption.html





TiVo Frets Over GPLv3, Torvalds Still Unconvinced

In its annual report filed with the SEC in April, PVR (personal video recorder) pioneer TiVo cautioned that, "If the currently proposed version of GPLv3 is widely adopted, we may be unable to incorporate future enhancements to the GNU/Linux operating system into our software, which could adversely affect our business."

TiVo's concerns revolve around an "anti-tivoization" provision in the final draft of the GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3), which is nearing its end-of-June ship date.

Anti-tivoization?

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), which maintains the GPL licenses, is attempting to address the issue of "tivoization" of code covered by the GPL.

The problem arises from the fact that code in TiVo's popular Linux-powered DVRs performs signature checks in hardware to prevent anyone from modifying the device's software, and therefore its operation. Many device makers do not want customers to modify the operation of their devices, due to concerns over quality control, customer support, or legal liabilities.

Since a fundamental principle of the GPL is the right to read, modify, and re-use GPL'd code, the FSF reasons, such code-locking techniques fly in the face of the GPL's intent. Hence, the FSF has designed anti-tivoization language and included it in the final draft of the GPLv3.

Fortunately for TiVo, however, Linux founder Linus Torvalds currently sees little to recommend the controversial GPLv3 license for the Linux kernel, and does not consider tivoization to be a problem.

Torvalds's latest comments on the GPLv3

In an exchange on the Linux kernel mailing list (LKML), the Linux originator called GPLv2, the license that currently governs the Linux kernel and much other Linux-related software, "simply the better license," while still suggesting two situations in which he might reconsider.

The first involves the Linux kernel adopting a dual license policy, which would be "technically quite hard" but at least within the realm of possibility -- though unlikely -- Torvalds's posts suggest.

As for the second, Torvalds writes, "If Sun really _is_ going to release OpenSolaris under GPLv3 [story], that _may_ be a good reason. I don't think the GPLv3 is as good a license as v2, but on the other hand, I'm pragmatic, and if we can avoid having two kernels with two different licenses and the friction that causes, I at least see the _reason_ for GPLv3. As it is, I don't really see a reason at all."

In the LKML exchange, Torvalds also questions concerns regarding tivoization, "which I expressly think is ok," he writes. Additionally he objects to "overblown" and "panicked worries" regarding the recent Novell/Microsoft deal.

GPL-related statements in TiVo's annual report

In its annual report filed with the SEC in April, Tivo, one of the first device vendors to adopt Linux, listed the GPLv3 alongside SCO among the potential risks to its business. The statement reads, in part:

We could be prevented from selling or developing our TiVo software if the GNU General Public License governing the GNU/Linux operating system and Linux kernel and similar licenses under which our product is developed and licensed is not enforceable or changed substantially.

Regarding pending "anti-tivoization" changes to the GPL in the final draft of the GPLv3, TiVo's annual report cautions:

In addition, the GNU Public License is subject to occasional revision. A proposal for changing the license from its current form (GPLv2) into a newer, more restrictive version called GPLv3 has been proposed and is currently undergoing community review. If the currently proposed version of GPLv3 is widely adopted, we may be unable to incorporate future enhancements to the GNU/Linux operating system into our software, which could adversely affect our business.

With respect to SCO's challenges to Linux, the annual report adds:

Our TiVo software includes parts of the Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux operating system. The Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux operating system have been developed and licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 and similar open source licenses. These licenses state that any program licensed under them may be liberally copied, modified, and distributed. The GNU General Public license is a subject of litigation in the case of The SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp., pending in the United States District Court for the District of Utah. SCO Group, Inc., or SCO, has publicly alleged that certain versions of the Linux kernel contain unauthorized UNIX code or derivative works of UNIX code. Uncertainty concerning SCO's allegations, regardless of their merit, could adversely affect our manufacturing and other customer and supplier relationships. It is possible that a court would hold these open source licenses to be unenforceable in that litigation or that someone could assert a claim for proprietary rights in our TiVo software that runs on a GNU/Linux-based operating system. Any ruling by a court that these licenses are not enforceable, or that GNU/Linux-based operating systems, or significant portions of them, may not be liberally copied, modified or distributed, would have the effect of preventing us from selling or developing our TiVo software and would adversely affect our business.

The complete text of Tivo's Form 10K filing can be found here.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5304340445.html





Media Innovations, Leaping From Lab to Screen
Denise Caruso

ONCE upon a time, before “the convergence” — of computer power with telecommunications and media — companies generally knew where their market stopped and someone else’s began.

But the flood of technology has effectively washed away those boundaries.

Today, I watch “Lost” on my laptop and “Veronica Mars” on my iPod, not on the TV for which they were first intended. I can browse the Web on TV or on a game console, instead of on my computer. I can Skype my friend in Sweden from my computer, and never touch my phone. Instead, I use it to listen to music, take pictures and read e-mail during meetings. And almost every day, there is new stuff vying for what is left of my attention — new media, new devices, new functions on old devices — that might inspire me to abandon whatever I was watching or using, yesterday.

As a result, running a media or entertainment company in the 21st century is not for the faint of heart. The change is relentless, the learning curve sharp, and the competition both fierce and seemingly infinite.

“Every day, there’s another set of revelations about who is doing what to keep up — how they’re handling games or broadband video, what’s their mobile strategy,” said Nick DeMartino, the senior vice president for media and technology at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

Mr. DeMartino opened the institute’s first computer lab in 1991 and has had a bird’s-eye view of the industry changes ever since.

“It’s fascinating as a spectator sport,” he says. But for the players, the question is this: “When it comes to innovation and new technologies, how do companies inform the decision-making process, so they can feel like they have some solid ground under their feet?”

While some go it alone, many of the best-known media brands turn to the institute’s Digital Content Lab for help. For nearly 10 years, the lab (once called the Enhanced Television Workshop) has provided companies with an opportunity to participate in a powerful research and development process that uses their own creative assets.

To date, participants include Animal Planet, America Online, Bravo, the Cartoon Network, the Disney Channel, MTV, NBC, National Geographic, Nickelodeon, PBS, Showtime and Turner Broadcasting System, as well as several small interactive and independent media production companies.

To begin, a company picks one of its media properties and applies to the lab, describing a problem it would like to solve. If selected, that property becomes the focus of a six-month, intensive collaboration. The institute chooses a group of consultants from the most innovative design, technology and production firms in the digital media industry, and teams them with professionals from television, films and games.

At the end of the six months, each team delivers a working prototype to the media company, which owns it outright and can use it in any way it chooses.

In the most recent round of prototypes, completed in late 2006, Cartoon Network New Media walked away with a prototype based on “Ben 10,” one of its top three series.

The Cartoon Network was aiming to expand its library of more than 150 games — which correspond to its TV cartoons — beyond computers and into game consoles, without spending a fortune rewriting all its software, said Suzanne Stefanac, a journalist, and longtime A.F.I. mentor who was recently named director of the Digital Content Lab. (Ms. Stefanac and I once worked together at ZDTV.)

In response, its team delivered a technical feat: a “build once, broadcast everywhere” game engine that allows the same application to run on a PC or on a PlayStation 3 and that players can navigate with a mouse, a keyboard or a game controller.

The Ben 10 prototype, the first game to use the PlayStation 3’s built-in browser, was such a hit that the network expects to commercialize the technology, which it calls a “megaseries,” for some yet-unnamed assets by year-end. “We look at this as an amazing new content window for distribution,” said Ross Cox, senior director for entertainment products at Cartoon Network New Media.

A New York documentary company, kontent real, presented its A.F.I. team with a very different problem. PBS had picked up its series on sustainable design, called “design: e2.” “But because we don’t have national distribution on PBS, the series airs at different times, on different dates and in different markets,” said Midori Willoughby, strategic entertainment producer at kontent real. As word spread, a following began to evolve around the series that included “a lot of people who became aware of ‘e2’ via different vehicles.”

Its video podcasts were quickly tagged as “new and notable” by iTunes, for example, and people began to find them on the Web as well. So kontent real asked its team to develop an interface and tools that would help these users manage and gain access to information across multiple devices.

The team took its suggestions even further, resulting in a sophisticated application that lets users upload and exchange information about “green” buildings and services, as well as events, by using the Web, TiVo, the G.P.S. functions and cameras of mobile phones and Blu-ray optical discs.

Ms. Stefanac said new teams are now working on the next cycle of projects. For example, Bravo has come to the table with its “Top Chef” series, looking for a technical solution to a problem that is plaguing the television and advertising industries: the fact that people with DVRs can speed past advertising. So far, viewers have strongly opposed any attempts by broadcasters to block this capability. “They know they can’t stop people from doing it, but they would like to figure out what the right solution is,” Ms. Stefanac said.

One of the most promising projects under way does not involve working with an existing property but with a new media genre called “machinima,” a mash-up of “machine cinema.” Today, machinima is allowing people to cobble together crude movies using 3-D games and creating their own soundtracks. Making a machinima environment from scratch “could save producers a lot of money, since you could repurpose them” for different projects, Ms. Stefanac said.

Digital Content Lab’s process to stimulate such creative problem solving has several noteworthy features. For one, the media owners do not pay to bring their properties into a project. A.F.I. is a nonprofit group, and all the work of the lab is sponsored by corporate donations.

And all consultants who work on the project, who are called “mentors,” donate their time. Sometimes the mentors and content owners are competitors in the outside world, but work together on project teams at the lab, an unusual détente in an industry where ideas are the coin of the realm and intellectual property is jealously guarded.

“The lab is a unique entity,” Ms. Stefanac said. “It’s allowed to be a kind of Switzerland, where even competitors will come together on the same team to work toward a goal and really share their expertise.”

MS. STEFANAC says the system works because her team selects problems for which the solutions do not benefit one company alone. “These projects are sponsored and the mentors donate their time because they are contributing to the greater good of the industry,” she said. “Our mentors come back year after year, project after project, because they get to address these larger issues.”

One such mentor is Dale Herigstad, chief creative officer at Schematic, a digital design firm based in Los Angeles. He has been steadily mentoring content owners at A.F.I. for several years.

“It’s a small industry but the collaborative spirit at A.F.I. has given a certain spirit to the business over all,” he said. “I’ve always liked the phrase, ‘Leave your guns at the door.’ That’s been the value, and one of the underlying directives of the lab. It’s still a new business, and a new industry that’s out there. And what A.F.I. has done has really affected that, and created a common sensibility for moving forward.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/bu...y/10frame.html





MySpace Mini-Episodes, Courtesy of Honda
Stuart Elliott

YEARS after Volkswagen challenged drivers to “Think small,” another automaker, Honda, plans to run smaller commercials for a smaller car in smaller versions of television series.

Honda will be the sole sponsor of what Sony Pictures Television is calling the Minisode Network, which is scheduled to begin next week. Visitors to the MySpace Web site (my space.com) will be able to watch episodes of 15 vintage Sony series like “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Facts of Life,” “Fantasy Island” and “Who’s the Boss,” edited from their original lengths of 30 or 60 minutes each to an Internet-friendly 4 to 6 minutes.

To mirror the pared-down programming, Honda and its longtime agency, RPA, have agreed to run only eight seconds of commercials with each episode, appearing before the shortened show starts.

First, there will be an onscreen billboard lasting three seconds, declaring, “The Minisode Network, brought to you by Honda.” The billboard will be followed by a five-second commercial for the Honda Fit, the minicar that American Honda introduced last year, and its Web site (fit.honda.com).

“Minisodes are right up the Fit’s alley, so to speak,” said Tom Peyton, senior manager for advertising at the American Honda Motor Company in Torrance, Calif., which is part of Honda Motor of Japan.



The sponsorship, estimated in six figures, is indicative of the intensifying interest in online video among marketers. As broadband penetration increases, making it easier to watch video clips online, online video is becoming a significant advertising medium.

“As the Net becomes its own media channel, we continue to look for the right opportunities to access consumers and the right media formats,” Mr. Peyton said.

Shortening TV series to lengths more appropriate for watching on a PC “is a very innovative use of existing content,” he added, “and it’s another way to leverage MySpace,” the social networking Web site owned by the News Corporation.

The minisodes will appear exclusively on MySpace through the end of August. Initially, there will be three episodes of each series, with new episodes to be added each week. Sony Pictures Television announced the idea in April, describing it as a way to repurpose for the new media programming that was originally produced for the traditional media.

Other series that will be boiled down for minisodes include “Diff’rent Strokes,” “The Partridge Family,” “Police Woman,” “Silver Spoons” and “What’s Happening!!”

The minisodes are not intended as pastiches or excerpts; they are edited carefully so the plots can be followed from beginning to end. (It helps that many of the series are formulaic sitcoms or police dramas.)

The concept is comparable to the Condensed Books once sold by Reader’s Digest, which promised to provide readers with the essence of the original, longer versions.

“The new forms of media make lots of things possible,” said Amy Carney, president for advertiser sales at Sony Pictures Television in New York, part of the Sony Corporation of America division of the Sony Corporation of Japan.

For those who watched the full-length episodes of the series, “you’ll feel like your life is flashing before your eyes,” she added, laughing.

After the exclusivity with My Space ends, Ms. Carney said, the goal is for the minisodes to come to other Web sites while remaining on my space.com. Sony Pictures Television is looking at sites like aol.com, yahoo .com and youtube.com, she added, as well as posting them on a microsite, a special site of their own.

Plans call for the contents of the Minisode Network to eventually be available on mobile devices like cellphones, Ms. Carney said.

“As we roll out the minisodes to other distribution platforms,” she added, Honda “has the right of first refusal” on sponsorship.

Lauren Mehl, associate media director at RPA in Santa Monica, Calif., said the agency would evaluate the subsequent sponsorship opportunities based on how the commercials perform their run on MySpace.

The five-second Fit commercials that will appear before each episode are among several produced last year by RPA to herald the car’s arrival in the United States. Fit is a member of a class of smaller imports that also includes the Nissan Versa and the Toyota Yaris.

Honda said it sold 27,934 Fits from its introduction in spring 2006 through the end of the year. Through the first five months of 2007, sales totaled 18,156.

“We’re working on additional supply and expanding the car in the U.S.,” Mr. Peyton said.



Fit and minisodes are among examples of a trend that is gaining favor on Madison Avenue to reprise “Think small,” which was created almost five decades ago for Volkswagen by the old Doyle Dane Bernbach agency.

For example, the CW network, owned by CBS and Time Warner, plans to sell five-second commercials during the 2007-8 season that starts in September. Unilever makes a concentrated version of its All detergent, named All Small and Mighty, which comes in a smaller bottle.

And the July issue of Cosmopolitan, published by the Hearst Magazines division of the Hearst Corporation, carries a tiny brochure for the O. B. line of feminine hygiene products sold by the McNeil-P.P.C. unit of Johnson & Johnson.

The minibooklet, “The Book of Mighty Small,” urges women to “discover how little can be big” and promotes a Web site, mightysmall.com.

That would have made a nice Web address for the Minisode Network.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/bu...ia/15adco.html
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