[JackSpratts]

The World's Top-Earning Models
Kiri Blakeley

In 1990, supermodel Linda Evangelista uttered what has become the most famous quote in modeling history: "We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day."

She was referring to herself and fellow supermodel Christy Turlington, both of whom were a core part of the handful of models shaking up the industry by being as famous and powerful as celebrities.

Models did talk shows. They landed movie roles. They inspired franchises (the ill-fated "Fashion Café," which was part-owned by supermodels Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell and Elle MacPherson). They dated or married movie stars (Linda Evangelista and Kyle MacLachlan; Christy Turlington and Ed Burns; Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere). And, of course, they made millions.

Some still do. Gisele Bundchen tops Forbes.com's 2007 list of The Top Earning Models in the World, raking in $33 million, more than triple the $9 million banked by Kate Moss, who came in second. The 15 models on our list were ranked primarily according to estimated earnings over the past 12 months.

Where necessary, the "relevancy" of the model--determined by recent campaigns, editorials, fashion magazine covers and the opinion of those in the industry-- were taken into account. Household names Heidi Klum ($8 million), Adriana Lima ($6 million) and Alessandra Ambrosio ($6 million) round out the top five slots.

Gisele Bundchen is a workhorse who leads the pack by far: While most models on the list have one major contract in addition to three or four seasonal campaigns, Bundchen juggles almost 20 campaigns. She also brings in at least $6 million a year by licensing her name to a Brazilian shoe company, Grendene. But watch for Bundchen's fortunes to possibly decline next year: In December, her record-breaking $5 million a year deal with Victoria's Secret expires.

For most other models, things are different. Top models like those on our list still bank millions, but only once a multiyear contract is secured. The days of $10,000 runway fees are over. Top models don't even do runway. It's considered an internship process for the hundreds of anonymous 15- and 16-year-old foreign girls who swarm the runways of New York, Paris and Milan each season. They do 70 shows in six weeks and are paid about $250 an hour their first season.

A good hardworking model can make $200,000 a season. But chances are that model, once the season is over, will never be seen or heard from again.

In the supermodel heyday, most of the top models were homegrown--Cindy Crawford from Illinois, Tyra Banks and Christy Turlington from California. Their American accents made for a fairly easy transition to stardom. Then the fashion industry, which thrives on change, began to prefer foreigners.

Five years ago, it was the Brazilians, out of which rose Bundchen, Lima and Ambrosio. This new trinity, with their Victoria's Secret contracts, became well known, but with their foreign accents, they were unable to cross over into the world of TV, movies and talk shows as easily as their predecessors did. And with the exception of Bundchen, who dated Leonardo DiCaprio on and off for several years, they kept their private lives private.

A few seasons later came the Eastern Europeans: anonymous, pale, barely into their teens and bordering on anorexic. They were too young to become movie stars or date celebrities; too skeletal to bag Victoria's Secret contracts; and a lack of English didn't bode well for a broad media career.

Natalia Vodianova of Russia, who worked at a fruit stand from the time she was 11, rose out of this pack and into the protective arms of Calvin Klein. The vast majority were sent back to where they came from. Vodianova may be a star in the industry, but try to find a teenager in a Midwestern mall who would line up to get a glimpse of her the way she would have ten years ago for Tyra Banks or Cindy Crawford.

Meanwhile, the rise of celebrity culture relegated many models to anonymity. Cosmetic companies almost exclusively sign celebrities for their campaigns, as do designers. Scarlett Johansson is the face of Louis Vuitton; Eva Longoria represents L'Oreal; Jessica Alba pouts for Revlon; the list goes on and on.

Even more devastating to the industry's ability to create supermodels was that the fashion magazines followed suit. A decade ago, models graced 10 of the 12 covers of American Vogue. Last year, only one model made the cover, and that was Linda Evangelista--she of the famous $10,000-a-day quote--as if Vogue had a hankering for the time when models proudly proclaimed their celebrity status.

But it wasn't just celebrities knocking models out of the limelight. The designers--Marc Jacobs, Tommy Hilfiger, Miuccia Prada--became more famous than their mannequins. Isaac Mizrahi hosted the Golden Globe pre-show for the E! network. Donatella Versace is regularly skewered on Saturday Night Live. A decade ago, a top model might have made $100,000 on a single print campaign for a designer. Now, she will more likely get a small stipend fee, some free clothes, and the honor of an "association" with the famous designer.

But if opportunities for superstardom were waning in the modeling world, the ones who did make it could stay there longer than ever thanks to the advent of retouching. "It's completely stopped the aging process," says Elite agent Richard Habberley, who represents Victoria's Secret model Alessandra Ambrosio (who, at 26, need not worry about that just yet).

Eighties ubermodel Christie Brinkley, at 52, reclaimed her Cover Girl contract and appears none the worse for 20 years having passed. Christy Turlington, 38, and Linda Evangelista, 42, are also bagging new contracts, and look in advertisements almost exactly as they did back in their supermodel glory.

Ivan Bart, a top agent at IMG Models, which represents Gisele Bundchen and Heidi Klum, among others, adds that revenue streams are more plentiful these days: "There are new markets like Asia and China. The world is more global than ever." In March, IMG started a traveling Fashion Week, bringing the runway and top models like Gemma Ward and Naomi Campbell to towns like San Francisco and Houston.

But the fashion world is about nothing if not trends. And trends are cyclical. Already the editorials of Vogue are turning away from the scary skinny models of Eastern Europe towards a healthier-looking and more Americanized standard. Hilary Rhoda is probably the best example of this.

The new face of Estée Lauder grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and played lacrosse and field hockey in high school. Unlike the size zero waifs that have taken over the runway, Rhoda wears a size four or six.

Cosmetics companies could start launching new faces again. In L'Oreal's latest ad campaign, Dutch model Doutzen Kroes is prominently featured next to Eva Longoria.

Models might even be making a comeback as cover girls. Vogue's May issue showcased 10 of the hottest new faces, including three models on our list: Hilary Rhoda, Doutzen Kroes and Jessica Stam. Natalia Vodianova had the July cover to herself. "It was time for Vogue to do a model again," says Patrick O'Connell, a rep for Vogue editor Anna Wintour. "Models are important."

One consistency throughout the past decade has been Victoria's Secret's modeling machine. The $5 billion lingerie giant (part of publicly traded Limited Brands) has launched the careers of dozens of supermodels over the years, including Gisele Bundchen and Heidi Klum and newer bikini babes Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio and Karolina Kurkova.

It has also steadfastly refused to follow the celebrity trend. "Most celebrities are about five foot two inches," says Edward Razek, the company's chief marketing officer, explaining why he turns down at least one celebrity a month begging to model the brand.

Victoria's Secret takes a similar role in nourishing talent to stardom in the way that Hollywood studios did with actresses back in the 1930s and '40s. A model starts out doing some runway, then advances to catalog, and, provided her professionalism and personality impresses enough people, she might eventually end up with the Academy Award of modeling gigs--a multiyear, multimillion dollar contract as a Victoria's Secret "angel." The company invests time and money into making their angels celebrities--the girls are given speech lessons and media training and booked on talk shows.

If the girls are lucky, they break into supermodel stardom and then, like Victoria's Secret alums Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks, become media moguls. This season, Victoria's Secret even began branding their beauty products with the girls' names and likenesses. "We don't subscribe to that nameless, faceless model routine," says Razek.
http://www.forbes.com/media/2007/07/...topmodels.html





Strikes Cast Shadow on Showbiz Jobs Outlook
Carl DiOrio

A regional economic forecast update boosts previous projections for job declines from potential Hollywood labor strife.

Even without a strike by writers, actors or directors, entertainment industry employment will decline 1.9% next year to 161,300 jobs, according to Wednesday report from the L.A. County Economic Development Corp. The midyear forecast also said that accelerated film and TV activity at the start of Hollywood contract talks will produce a modest 0.9% increase in entertainment employment this year, for a total 164,500 industry jobs.

In a February report, the agency had forecast an '08 decline of 1.4% and a more robust '07 jobs growth of 4.5% (HR 2/21).

LAEDC chief economist Jack Kyser attributed the short-term job growth and longer-term decline on studios' stockpiling of film and TV materials in anticipation of a possible strike by Hollywood writers or others. The WGA is in negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers for a new film and TV contract, and actors and directors are expected to commence similar talks sometime early next year.

"We have built in some sort of labor disruption for 2008," Kyser said. "Even if there is no strike and everything is hugs and kisses, you have a slowdown. That's because you already have product sitting on the shelf, so to speak. ... With TV series, you see extra episodes going into production (and) on the film side, people are rushing to line up actors and directors, with the rule of thumb being to try to get two films done (per actor) before anything might happen."

The regional economist recalled first noting evidence of film and TV stockpiling in February, when the LAEDC issued its earlier forecast.

"There was a lot of pooh-poohing of that from the Writers Guild back then," he said. "Well, you can't pooh-pooh it now. It's there."

A central issue in the WGA-AMPTP talks, which began Monday, is whether writers deserve boosted compensation for film and TV content reused over the Internet or over mobile platforms.

It's an issue that could defy easy resolution, in part because the technology on which studios are trying to base new business models are still developing, Kyser said. Indeed, studios want writers to delay their demand for boosted Internet compensation until new-media businesses mature and profits stabilize.

"It's going to be really difficult," Kyser said. "They're saying you can get an episode of 'Ugly Betty' on your telephone, but I'd be happy getting my phone calls through without experiencing dropped calls. So I think you're a way away from any sort of profitability."

The LAEDC economist said California would do well to offer tax credits or other production incentives similar to those in dozens of other states, but added, "I'm not holding my breath on that."

The usual budgetary woes ultimately will dash hopes of passing incentive bills circulating in Sacramento, Kyser predicted. That's unfortunate, he said, as the incentives of other states, including a particularly aggressive recent push by New Mexico, are causing a flight of projects and jobs from California.

Kyser said he cringes whenever former New Mexico governor and presidential hopeful Bill Richardson comes to Los Angeles. "He's supposedly campaigning, but you know he's working the phones" to bring film projects to his home state, he said.

"People think the big studios are really rolling in dough, but people forget that studios are part of big conglomerates and have to be mindful of the bottom line," Kyser said. "And if there are incentives offered, they are going to take advantage of those."

The LAEDC report forecast for other industry segments was rosier than for entertainment, whose prospects it gave a "C" grade. For instance, technology is rated "A-" and is expected to mark a 12.1% employment increase to 241,100 jobs in '07 and post another 2.7% uptick to 247,700 jobs in '08.

Statewide, the LAEDC report found that growth will slow in California in '07. In '08, economic growth in the state will pick up a little speed (and) a modest acceleration is expected in 2009.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...d6c8b74c568947





The Actualizer
Mark Oppenheimer

Giovanni Ribisi called me. Burt Reynolds asked me to call him at home. The director Joel Schumacher called me from Romania between takes for his next movie. Anne Archer and I played phone tag for two weeks. A-list, B-list, stars of stage, stars of screen, they were all eager to talk. The Tony winners John Glover and Tyne Daly. Edie McClurg, the dippy secretary in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” David Carradine.

Put the word on the street that you’re writing about Milton Katselas, and every student he has ever had will want to tell you about the best acting teacher in the world, the man who took them from fresh-faced, straight-off-the-plane-at-LAX ingénues looking for work — commercials; God willing, someday a sitcom — to being real artists. They’ll tell you about how he saved them from the failings of the artist’s personality, like narcissism and drug addiction, and set them aright. They were born with the talent, but he gave them careers.

But there are dissenters too. Students have left Katselas’s school, the Beverly Hills Playhouse, because of the unspoken pressure they felt to join the Church of Scientology, the controversial religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s. Nobody ever told them to join, but they could not ignore how many of their classmates and teachers were Scientologists. Or the fact that Milton Katselas, the master himself, credits Hubbard for much of his success in life. And the assorted weirdness: one of Katselas’s students works a day job at the Scientology Celebrity Centre, where Tom Cruise and John Travolta study, and one zealous television star left the playhouse because she said she believed that Katselas wasn’t committed enough to Scientology.

Before trying to metabolize this strange cocktail of Hollywood, dreams both deferred and achieved, and Scientology, consider the very sincere professions of faith in a bearded, baritone septuagenarian with a Mediterranean temper who began as a student of Lee Strasberg and became the teacher of Ribisi, Daly and Carradine; of Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Selleck, Tony Danza, Priscilla Presley, Patrick Swayze, Cheryl Ladd and hundreds more.

Richard Lawson, a Katselas student and occasional Scientologist, who now teaches at the playhouse, says that Katselas’s teaching helped him cheat death in 1992 when his plane from LaGuardia crashed in Flushing Bay and he was submerged underwater. “I just got this inspiration to overcome it, to fight with everything I had to get out,” Lawson told a reporter in 1998. “One of the things I attribute that to is the teachings of Milton.” Anne Archer, who discovered Scientology at the playhouse nearly 30 years ago, says, “I have seen performances sometimes in that class that are so brilliant that they’re better than anything I have seen on the stage or film.” Her husband, the producer Terry Jastrow — also a Scientologist — says that Katselas changed the texture of his daily existence: “I go out in the world and look at human behavior now. I see a woman or man interacting with a saleslady, and I see the artistry in it. Life is an endless unspooling of art, of acting, of painting, of architecture. And where did I learn that? From Milton.”

Most people in the Los Angeles acting community believe that the Beverly Hills Playhouse is a serious conservatory where actors train with a master teacher, while others think it’s a recruitment center for Scientology. I wondered if it might be both. What if the playhouse was a serious conservatory, and Katselas a master teacher, not in spite of Scientology but because of it?

I first attended Katselas’s weekly master class on a Saturday morning in April. I took my seat in his small theater on South Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills well before the 9:30 start time. I was stargazing — Justina Machado from “Six Feet Under” was there; Beth Grant from “Little Miss Sunshine” was there — when promptly at 9:30 the class rose to its feet in a standing ovation. Katselas had entered by the door near stage left, and he was proceeding slowly, with the shuffle of a man vigorous but in his 70s, to his chair on a landing a few rows up from stage right, offering small, regal waves as he went. Nobody sat until he did.

“What is this, Easter?” he asked.

“Passover,” several students answered at once.

“What is this class, 82 percent Jewish — the rest goyim?” People laughed, and at that the lights dimmed, then came up, and a scene began.

And one thing very quickly became clear: Milton Katselas is an uncommonly good teacher.

In the first scene, Jack Betts, whom I later placed as the judge in “Office Space,” played the actor John Barrymore, from the one-man show “Barrymore,” made famous on Broadway by Christopher Plummer. I thought that Betts captured both the dissolution and the grandeur of a great man in his pickled decline, but after the scene, when Betts sat at the edge of the stage to receive his critique, Katselas made clear how much better the performance could have been.

A Katselas critique is a respectful dialogue; he is never mean, but he is challenging. Katselas wanted Betts to find the quieter notes in Barrymore. One place to start, he thought, might be in the song with which the scene begins: Barrymore singing “I’ve Got a Girl in Kalamazoo.” As Betts had sung it, the song was brassy, vaudevillelike: “A! B! C! D! E! F! G! H! I got a gal in KAL-amazoo!” Katselas had him sing it over again, several times, suggesting that he turn the final syllable, the zoo, into a drunken, slurred, tossed-off note of disdain. After several more takes of the song, Katselas wasn’t satisfied, but it seemed that Betts was getting there. The Barrymore that emerged at the end of 45 minutes was stranger, sadder, perhaps a bit louche, less of a stereotype and altogether more believable than what Betts had delivered at the beginning of class.

In many ways Katselas embodies what we expect from the acting pedagogue. He has a sexual, dangerous edge — I wasn’t shocked when he confessed that he had dated several of his students. He looks unkempt, but deliberately so, very bohemian. He swears a lot, as if perpetually burdened by his inability to wring better performances from his students. But although he believes in sex and danger and anger, Katselas never sounds like a Freudian in search of those emotions, and in this regard he breaks the stereotype.

The great American acting teachers, like Strasberg and Stella Adler, have typically insisted that there is a role for an actor’s emotional history in his or her performance. In various versions of Strasberg’s “Method,” the actor uses “sense memory” or “affective memory” to relive actual experiences — the death of a parent, an episode of sexual violence, the birth of a child — to summon tears, horror, elation or some other emotion for the character. Acting classes can thus resemble talk therapy, as actors, lost in the moment, weep, scream or cackle. But Katselas is adamant that he doesn’t care what his students have been through. Digging into the past might work for some students, and as an avowed pragmatist Katselas tells actors to use whatever works. But he mostly gives actors bits of physical direction rather than asking probing questions about their motivation. In one scene, he had two lovers touch their foreheads together, injecting a note of true intimacy into what had been pure farce; in another, he told an angry junkie to clench his hair in his fists and yank, and all of a sudden the actor found the rage that had been missing from his performance.

“The purpose of the acting art is not to bring about therapy,” Katselas told me later. “One taps their own experience of love or violence and tries to pull from it whatever is possible in terms of an association or understanding, but there is also the imagination and the character and the writing. The personal thing is always very strong and can be created, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you go into the traumas of your life in order to get it.”

Is this teaching Scientology? Not at all. But it happens to be quite consonant with Scientology, which is famous for its opposition to psychiatry and psychotherapy. (A group founded by the Church of Scientology operates a museum in Hollywood called Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.) The only time I heard Katselas quote L. Ron Hubbard, the Scientology founder, in class, he was oblique about it. Four students had just performed a scene in which two college students, about to have a one-night stand, are suddenly, in an absurdist, “Oleanna”-like twist, interrupted by lawyers who want them to agree in advance how far their petting may go. In his critique of the scene, Katselas railed against the legal profession: he wanted the actors to understand that this was more than a funny scene; it was also an indictment of how litigiousness, as well as the fear of it, separates us from our desires. Lawyers are just one group to whom Americans give over their autonomy, and these undergrads, having let the lawyers in, needed to push them back out and take responsibility for their own actions. It is not therapy that reunites us with our authentic selves but willpower, properly directed. “A cat that I study says you are responsible for the condition you are in,” Katselas told the room. “Period.”

That “cat” is Hubbard. But Katselas never says so, and it’s not clear that he ought to. In the context of the scene critique, Hubbard’s seems a germane aphorism, one that might help the actors get a better feel for the shifting alliances onstage. In other arts, it’s easy to gauge proficiency, if not genius. We know what technically correct music sounds like, and writers have rules of grammar and syntax to follow or to tactfully violate. But what makes a good acting performance? How do you disappear into a character? In addition to being the most ineffable of arts, acting depends on extraneous accidents of fate, like the right look. And it’s the only art that you can’t master alone; there’s not much market for soliloquies. With all those uncertainties, a fine performance, let alone a paycheck for it, can seem terrifyingly elusive. It must be the rare actor who can dismiss supernatural aids, whether Scientology or superstitious incantations like “Break a leg,” without a slight loss of nerve.

When David Carradine met Milton Katselas at an audition in the mid-1960s, there were 50 people sitting in the back rows of the theater, just watching Katselas watch actors. “He already had a cult fame, these followers who were like disciples,” Carradine says. “He was the hot young director. I read the play, and I really hated it, but I went to the audition anyway.” Katselas was barely 30 years old.

Born to Greek immigrants in Pittsburgh in 1933, Katselas moved to New York straight after graduating from the Carnegie Institute (now Carnegie Mellon). There was no period of ignominy, no nights of waiting tables. He had seeded the town for his arrival. “I told the guy at Carnegie that within a week, I’d be working with Kazan and I’d be studying with Strasberg,” Katselas told me last spring when we met at his house in West Hollywood. “Prior to that, when I was still in university, I was walking in the streets of New York, just visiting over holiday, and I saw Kazan, and I said to a guy, ‘Is that Kazan?’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’ ” Elia Kazan was fast becoming a legend. He directed “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1951; “On the Waterfront” would come in 1954 and “East of Eden” the year after. “I ran after him; I lost him; I found him; he went up in a building,” Katselas said. “I had my back to the building, looking away from the building. Then this guy taps me on the back, says, ‘What do you want?’ It’s Kazan. He went up, knew that I was chasing him. We spoke a little bit in Greek. I told him I was in university. He says: ‘When you come from university, look me up. I’ll give you a job.’ ” When Katselas arrived in New York, Kazan kept his promise and hired him as his gofer during the Broadway run of “Tea and Sympathy.”

The charmed life got more charmed. Strasberg let Katselas into his class at the Actors Studio. Kazan sent his young Turk — or, rather, Greek — to the stage director Joseph Anthony, who hired him. Katselas talked himself into a job with Joshua Logan, the great director of movies like “Picnic” and “Bus Stop.” Katselas began teaching and directing, and in 1960, at Edward Albee’s request, he directed the American premiere of “The Zoo Story” for the Provincetown Playhouse. His greatest success, though, was “Butterflies Are Free,” a timely play about a blind Manhattanite who falls for a free-spirited hippie, which opened in 1969 and ran for more than 1,000 performances. Blythe Danner won a Tony for her performance, and Katselas was nominated for his direction. In the early 1970s, Katselas moved to California to direct “40 Carats” with Liv Ullmann and the film version of “Butterflies Are Free,” in which Goldie Hawn took Danner’s role.

Katselas never made it back to New York to live. In his telling, his migration sounds like an inevitable progression: Hollywood beckoned; he began teaching in California; it agreed with him. The truth is somewhat more complicated: New York was where Katselas succumbed to, then defeated, an addiction to methamphetamines; it’s where his first marriage, to an alcoholic, began to fail. California must have represented an escape and a fresh start. In 1983, he returned East to direct “Private Lives” with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton but was fired during the tryouts before the show reached New York. “I got along great with Burton, and he told me I was one of the few directors he ever accepted notes from,” Katselas says. “But I didn’t get along with Elizabeth, and I’d rather not go into why.” He never worked on the East Coast again.

In California, Katselas met L. Ron Hubbard, the science-fiction writer and amateur scientist whose teachings form the basis of Scientology. Scientology promises its adherents the ability to become “clear,” ridding themselves of negative memories, or “engrams,” that retard their abilities. After becoming clear, they can proceed up “the bridge to total freedom,” realizing their full potential as “thetans,” spirits trapped in bodies. One mechanism of advancement is “auditing,” in which the Scientologist, in conversation with a church “auditor” and hooked up to a machine called an “E-meter,” deletes engrams; there are also church classes like “Personal Efficiency” and “Life Repair.” As a Scientologist proceeds “up the bridge,” he can gain access to esoteric knowledge, like how we thetans got here. Scientology, it has been widely reported, teaches that 75 million years ago the evil alien Xenu solved galactic overpopulation by dumping 13.5 trillion beings in volcanoes on Earth, where they were vaporized, scattering their souls. (John Carmichael, the president of the Church of Scientology of New York, told me, “That’s not what we believe.” He refused to discuss the church’s esoteric teachings, though he did claim that Scientology’s beliefs about the origins of the universe and mankind “follow the much older tradition of Eastern religion dating back to the Vedic hymns.”)

What most Americans know of Scientology is the alien myth, parodied on a famous “South Park” episode; or the German government’s view that Scientology is less a religion than a cult with totalitarian overtones; or the church’s winning fight for tax-exempt status despite the fees it charges, which for many courses are thousands of dollars; or reports in The Times and elsewhere that while battling with the I.R.S., church lawyers hired private investigators to find dirt on federal employees. Millions are also aware of the religion’s celebrity practitioners, like John Travolta, Isaac Hayes and Beck. But for most people who dabble in Scientology, including dozens of Beverly Hills Playhouse students, the religion boils down to two rather prosaic practices. There is the auditing, which, despite Scientologists’ angry denials, is a lot like the psychotherapy they abhor, and there are the classroom teachings. In class, Scientologists learn Hubbard wisdom like “What’s true is what’s true for you” and “Understanding is composed of affinity, reality and communication,” as well as practical advice about the importance of working hard, not blaming others and communicating clearly. Scientology is a quintessentially American mix of prosperity gospel, grandiose hopes for technology, bizarre New Age mythology and useful self-help nostrums.

Katselas was introduced to Scientology in 1965 and has been studying it, off and on, ever since. He has achieved the state of clear, and gone well beyond it; he is, he told me, an Operating Thetan, Level 5, or O.T. V. According to “What Is Scientology?” published by the church, being an Operating Thetan means that you “can handle things and exist without physical support and assistance. . . . It doesn’t mean one becomes God. It means one becomes wholly oneself.” But despite his advanced level of Scientology training, only “on five or six occasions,” Katselas says, has he urged a student to explore Scientology.

Others confirmed that Katselas does not proselytize. “I didn’t know he was a Scientologist until four days ago,” says Burt Reynolds, who has been a guest teacher at the playhouse. “The Scientologists I know, the actors I know, practically want to drag me there. He’s never brought it up.” Katselas’s devotion to Hubbard notwithstanding — he keeps a picture of L.R.H., as Scientologists call him, on a table in his office — he makes rather modest claims for Scientology. “It certainly helped me,” he says. “It helped me as a painter. I started doing a lot of painting, did the Scientology, and it opened up my visual sense. And it helped me in communication, endlessly, and that’s a vital thing in teaching or directing.”

It was in precisely those two areas, painting and communication, in which I thought I could divine Scientology’s influence. Katselas thinks highly of himself as a visual artist. He maintains his own studio, employs a full-time assistant who helps with his sculpture and mixed-media works and has had a handful of shows (three in a gallery that he owns). And although he has no architectural training, he has collaborated with a local architect, offering ideas for the design of two houses in the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles; one of the houses, it so happens, was purchased by Apl.de.Ap, one of the singers for the Black Eyed Peas. Katselas does not do the blueprints for the houses he “designs,” just as he does not do all the technical work for his art. Katselas has no reputation among critics of painting or architecture. But he seems to have a strong belief in the multifarious nature of his genius — he eagerly showed me the houses he has helped build and gave me a long tour of his art studio — and that is typical of Scientologists, who are taught to think of their potential as limitless.

As for communication, Katselas is, like Hubbard, fairly obsessed with the idea that if only people communicated better, the world’s problems would disappear. Katselas told me that if he sat down the warring parties in Israel, he could broker a truce — a comment that nicely marries Scientology’s human-potential hubris and its faith in communication as the greatest virtue. Katselas also shares Scientologists’ admirable habit of looking words up in dictionaries. Every teacher at the playhouse has a dictionary handy and has actors learn words they don’t know, and Katselas uses numerous dictionary definitions in “Dreams Into Action,” the self-help book he published in 1996 and hawked on “Oprah.” The book acknowledges Hubbard “for his wisdom, writings and inspiration” and carries blurbs from, incongruously, Mario Cuomo and Molly Yard, the former president of the National Organization for Women.

It might seem odd, then, that Katselas and the Scientologists have been somewhat at odds. I asked Katselas if it was true that the actress Jenna Elfman left the playhouse because she found him insufficiently committed to the church. He confirmed the rumor, hesitantly. “In a certain way, yes,” he said. “I don’t know what really occurred there. She was going to be fully involved with Scientology at a certain point in her life. I don’t know if that crept back in.” (Gary Grossman, who has worked at the playhouse for more than 20 years, also said he thought that Elfman wanted to move Katselas “up the bridge” in Scientology, though he added that “the only ones that would know would be Milton and Jenna.” Elfman never returned calls that I made to her publicist.) “But I’ve got to do what I’m going to do,” Katselas continued, “and I’m not going to do it because somebody tells me I should do it, and it doesn’t matter what somebody else thinks is right.”

Katselas’s stubbornness, and his sheer ego, are the keys to understanding his relationship to Scientology. He takes what he can from the teachings, but he can be rather contemptuous of the church. “I know [Hubbard] made a statement once that Scientology is not the people in it,” Katselas said. “Scientology is a technology that he’s developed that is really powerful, and these artists respond to it because it cleans up certain things that they’ve looking to or that they’re dealing with, and that helps them in their quest or in their way, and there’s no doubt of that.” But, he added: “I don’t go to parties, I don’t go to Scientology events. I just don’t do it. And they’re not enthralled with me because of that.” Katselas agreed that some Scientologists were “zealots,” by which he might have meant that for them Scientology was primary, whereas for Katselas Scientology is instrumental. This is a man, after all, who had the chutzpah to chase down Elia Kazan on the street and ask for a job. Scientology didn’t convince Milton that he had unlimited potential; it just confirmed what he already suspected.

Katselas was born with the ego and the talent, but Adam Donshik wasn’t. Donshik, who first told me about Katselas three summers ago, is an old high-school classmate of mine. We were part of the small theater crowd, and we acted together in “Guys and Dolls” and “Gypsy.” He had a lovely voice and was always cast in the musicals, but he was an indifferent actor. We hadn’t spoken for more than 10 years when in 2003 I flipped to the ABC drama “Threat Matrix” and saw him playing a terrorist. Eight months later, I was in Beverly Hills on an assignment, and we met for a drink. His hair was a little thinner, but he looked great, all tan and muscled. The West Coast suited him. The career was going great, he said. Life was going great. “You want to know why?” he asked. “Scientology. I’ve become a Scientologist!” He smiled as if to acknowledge the improbability of this Jewish kid from New England finding Scientology. He had gotten involved through friends at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, where he studied.

Donshik now works for the playhouse as an admission interviewer, acting in TV series on the side. Of a total playhouse payroll of about a dozen teachers, interviewers and assistants, nearly all, I discovered, had at least dabbled in Scientology. Some, like Allen Barton, who is executive director of the school, are committed Scientologists; others, like Rick Podell and Gary Grossman (who starred with Tom Hanks in “Bachelor Party”), have taken just one class and do not consider themselves Scientologists. Jocelyn Jones and Gary Imhoff, former faculty members, are Scientologists, as is Jeffrey Tambor, an actor best known as the imprisoned patriarch George Bluth Sr. on “Arrested Development” and who was Katselas’s heir apparent until he abruptly quit the faculty several years ago. (Katselas blamed Tambor’s wife: “I think she felt there was a tension between her and me and the school, and I think Jeffrey was caught in the middle of it.”)

Of the students, I easily located a dozen who are Scientologists, and based on interviews, I concluded there are probably several dozen more in the current student body of 500. Like their teachers, some students are devout while others indulge a mild curiosity and then drop off. “I went down and took a couple of classes,” David Carradine said. “I’m no kind of Scientologist, but I’ve been around it enough to know it’s a very intelligent thing.” This being Hollywood, some students, like Giovanni Ribisi, were Scientologists before they came to the playhouse.

Of course, other students worry less about how Scientology will help their acting than how it will help their careers; there’s a widespread perception in Hollywood that Scientology is a networking tool. People notice that, say, two stars of “My Name Is Earl,” Jason Lee and Ethan Suplee, are Scientologists; that the Scientologist Kirstie Alley did a guest appearance on Elfman’s “Dharma and Greg”; that Ribisi has popped up on “My Name Is Earl.” “I knew someone at the playhouse who joined Scientology because she thought it would help her career,” one agent told me. “She thought Jenna Elfman would be her best friend.” And actors who study at the Celebrity Centre on Franklin Avenue do bump into the stars, chat with them, even have lunch with them at the restaurant. How bad could that be for a career?

All religious communities can be networks for business contacts, but Scientology makes a special pitch to celebrities, and church literature is filled with testimonials from Tom Cruise, John Travolta and other stars. According to a pamphlet I was given at the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood (there are eight Celebrity Centres, in cities from Paris to Munich to Nashville), the center was founded in 1969 “to take care of those who entertain, fashion and take care of the world . . . the artists, the leaders of industry, politicians, sports figures and the like.” As a very successful hack sci-fi writer, Hubbard was something of a junior-varsity celebrity himself, and he had great esteem for his betters. “Hollywood makes a picture which strikes the public fancy, and tomorrow we have girls made up like a star walking along the streets of the small towns of America,” Hubbard once wrote. “A culture is only as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamed by artists.”

Of course, the majority of those who study at Celebrity Centres are not actual celebrities, and for many of them the chance to be valued for their art alongside more successful peers, the Cruises and the Travoltas, must be salubrious for the ego. At the centers, the agent can join the same exclusive club as his client, the editor as his writer. And all of them can bask in a theology that holds, again to quote Hubbard, that “one of the greatest single moves which could be made to advance and vitalize a culture such as America would be to free, completely, the artist from all taxes and similar oppressions.”

But if a few students have appreciated the playhouse for its connections to Scientology, others have left alienated. “I have clients who left there because of all the Scientology,” one longtime Hollywood agent told me. Terrell Clayton, who had a recurring role on “Six Feet Under” and studied at the playhouse for five years, says that the pressure to study Scientology is subtle. “It’s not like while you’re being critiqued they say you need to join Scientology,” he says. “It’s small conversations you might have with colleagues or fellow students.” He now studies with Ivana Chubbuck, a highly regarded teacher who wrote “The Power of the Actor.” Chubbuck has kind words for Katselas. “It seems when people come from his studio to work with me, they seem to be pretty good actors, so he must be doing something right,” she says. “In terms of how he operates as a Scientologist or a human being, I would be remiss in saying something based on rumor or hearsay.”

And then Chubbuck told me something unexpected and clarifying: “If he’s putting something else he does in his teaching, if it works, it works.” In other words, even if he were dispensing Scientology-flavored pedagogy, even if his example did lead some young actors to the Celebrity Centre to spend their dollars — earned at union scale, working bit parts in Lifetime movies — on classes meant to bring about a state of clear, that might not be a bad thing, not if it helped their art.

Katselas is adamant that he does not want a cult around himself. “It worries me,” he said when I mentioned that his students seem to worship him. But he collects disciples. His personal chef, art assistant and longtime girlfriend are all students or former students (the latter two have studied Scientology). He knows what’s best for others too: he threatened to fire his art assistant, Richard Shirley, unless Shirley lost weight. (“He’s in my life; it’s very much my business,” Katselas said. “Everything is everybody’s business. Our fellows are our responsibility.”) And he cultivates the image of a man with almost magical powers. “Dreams Into Action,” his motivational book, is full of promises for future greatness, if only people would heed his words. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. He has style: he drove me around in a restored vintage Mercedes. He’s an entrepreneur, a real estate investor, even a partner in Skylight Books, one of L.A.’s best independent bookstores. He once got drunk with the sculptor David Smith. He has the wit of Thurber, the charm of Zorba. According to one Scientology text, man “is not only able to solve his own problems, accomplish his goals and gain lasting happiness, but also to achieve new states of awareness he may never have dreamed possible.” Katselas seems to have achieved such a state — what student could be blamed for wanting to drink his elixir?

On my last day in Los Angeles, I saw Adam Donshik play Hamlet in class. It was the scene in which he kills Polonius and fights with his mother. Katselas wasn’t impressed — his critique was barbed — but Adam was worlds better than in high school. Even accounting for age and maturity, something else had intervened. An unusual teacher had given Adam both a religion and a talent for acting. If the two were somehow inseparable, it might not pay to try to pull them apart. I could mock Adam for following the man or for following the faith. But perhaps it would be wiser to simply watch him act.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/ma...atselas-t.html





Chief of Universal Finds Success at the Back of the Pack
Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes

The hilltop theme park outside the 14th floor office of Ron Meyer, president of the Universal Studios Group, anchored by past glories like its “Jurassic Park” and “Backdraft” rides, could stand a makeover.

An attraction based on “Transformers,” the smash hit from Universal’s former ally, DreamWorks SKG, might add a little pizazz. But “Transformers” went to Paramount in a deal made many months ago, and DreamWorks soon followed.

Meanwhile, Mr. Meyer, 62 years old and the longest-serving chief of a major movie company, had to rent a hit with his recent deal to feature Warner Brothers’ “Harry Potter” series in Universal’s Florida park.

So it goes at Hollywood’s sixth-place studio. Though profitable for the last nine years, Universal has been noticeably short on blockbusters to call its own.

That is largely by design. In a strategy that is starkly different from other top film studios, Mr. Meyer has determined that Universal should stay well behind the leaders, allowing the flashiest and most expensive projects — and typically the biggest payoffs — to go elsewhere.

“We gauge ourselves to be in the middle,” Mr. Meyer said. Universal currently ranks last among major studios at the domestic box office and hasn’t placed higher than third in the last seven years.

This approach appears to have put Universal on a permanent second tier, a strategy that could concede the future to a few “superstudios” like, for instance, the higher volume distributor Warner Brothers. Warner has routinely invested much more than the amount that Universal spends — less than $1 billion — on production each year.

Fox, following another tack, has been less prolific, but is plunging into 3-D with an expensive but possibly transforming production of “Avatar,” a science-fiction thriller from the filmmaker James Cameron.

In Hollywood’s go-for-broke culture, hewing to the center may bring perils of its own: A willingness to spend handsomely on so-called franchise films may ultimately bring returns to support a bold stroke like Disney’s acquisition of Pixar Animations Studios, or may help it get the first shot at the most promising talent.

“You gain stature and bragging rights by having big budgets,” said Harold Vogel, an entertainment industry analyst who runs Vogel Capital Management. “Not too many up-and-coming filmmakers are motivated by saying, ‘Gee, I just did a modestly budgeted picture for Universal.’ ”

Mr. Meyer’s bosses, however, do not consider Mr. Meyer’s approach the slightest bit risky. “We’ve been very, very pleased to be right in the middle of the pack of market share and have strong growth in profitability,” said Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal, of which Universal Studios is a unit. “People mistake market share for profitability. We’re interested in running a very sound business and having discipline in doing so.”

And General Electric, which acquired a majority interest in the studio more than three years ago, backed Mr. Zucker’s decision last month to renew Mr. Meyer’s contract two years before it expired, giving the executive the prospect of an unusually long 17-year run in charge of a company he joined in 1995.

Mr. Meyer, a talent agent turned studio chief and known for his consummate people skills, has held Universal together through corporate transitions that might easily have damaged the company. But old-style Hollywood charm has gone only so far. While margins remain strong and the unit has overcome losses that plagued it in the 1990s — last year Universal contributed about 30 percent to NBC Universal’s 2006 operating profit, or $850 million, on revenue of $5 billion — the company has suffered some setbacks of late.

Despite a business relationship with Universal that yielded movies like “Seabiscuit,” DreamWorks arranged to make “Transformers” with Paramount, then sold itself to that studio. Making the situation worse, DreamWorks then recruited Mr. Meyer’s top movie executive, Stacey Snider.

Most recently, Universal has stumbled with “Evan Almighty,” which became the most expensive comedy in Hollywood history after its budget ballooned to more than $175 million. The movie, poorly received when it opened last month, will lose money for both Universal and its financing partner, Gun Hill II, though not a large amount, Mr. Meyer said. The investment fund is expected to be involved with nine pictures a year at the studio.

Mr. Meyer’s longevity at Universal despite its turbulent performance has prompted Hollywood to cast him as something of a Teflon executive. He is one of the industry’s most compelling characters. Dropping out of high school at 15, Mr. Meyer joined the Marine Corps at 17, and began his movie career at 19 as a messenger at a talent agency. He eventually joined William Morris as a television agent, ultimately leaving to co-found the Creative Artists Agency with Michael S. Ovitz and Bill Haber.

His preference for relatively safe, lower-cost productions like “Knocked Up,” “Inside Man” and “The Break-Up,” all of which clicked at the box office, or “United 93,” “Because I Said So” and “The Good Shepherd,” which largely did not, would seem at odds with his personal style. For example, over the years he had a strong interest in high-stakes card games, which he said he has now put aside.

“Chronic gambling is an illness and has a lot of stupidity that goes along with it,” Mr. Meyer said. He decided to give up gambling when G.E. acquired the bulk of Universal from the French conglomerate Vivendi. “That made my decision for me,” he said, alluding to the visibility and management rigor that ownership by the conglomerate would bring with it.

First hired at Universal by an earlier owner, Seagram, and its chairman, Edgar Bronfman Jr., Mr. Meyer was initially given financing to match any of his competitors. But he squandered much of it on a string of flops that included “Babe: Pig in the City,” “Meet Joe Black” and a “Psycho” remake.

“I had huge financial support from Edgar and failed miserably. I mean really failed,” Mr. Meyer said. Mr. Bronfman slashed the studio’s production pool to $600 million, significantly less than what others were spending at a time when Warner was first establishing its “Harry Potter” franchise and Sony was getting the “Spider-Man” series under way.

The reduced spending meant smaller films, most of which stopped short of top-level success even when “The Bourne Identity” or “The Mummy” did well and spawned a sequel or two. (“King Kong,” a rare big-budget bet in 2005, cost more than $200 million, but ultimately became a winner.) For Mr. Meyer, it also brought a new focus on profit, which was helped along, he said, by some schooling from the business guru Ram Charan, a ubiquitous corporate consultant and the author of self-help books including “Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning.”

“It got everybody their bonus. It kept my owners happy. It kept them from coming in and meddling with our business. And it kept me employed,” Mr. Meyer said. Having one executive at the helm during the studio’s years of bouncing among corporate owners has created a comfortable association for some of Hollywood’s best production companies, including Working Title Films (“United 93,” “Pride & Prejudice”), Imagine Entertainment (“Inside Man,” “A Beautiful Mind”) and Tom Hanks’s Playtone (“Charlie Wilson’s War” and “Mamma Mia,” both on the way). All three recently renewed deals with Universal.

“His undying loyalty to us causes us to have the same feeling toward him,” Brian Grazer, the co-chairman of Imagine, said. The producer said he had considered going elsewhere, but ultimately felt bound by the studio chief’s willingness to back unconventional films like “Friday Night Lights” or “8 Mile.”

Mr. Meyer has clearly preferred continuity to adventure. When Stacey Snider left to join DreamWorks, for instance, the executive found her replacements inside the family: He divided her job between Marc Shmuger, a marketing veteran who was then the studio’s vice chairman, and David Linde, who had been co-president of its Focus Features specialty division.

Though he continues to have lunch with Ms. Snyder and all three of the DreamWorks co-founders — David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg — the executive was stung by their abrupt departures. During a wide-ranging session in his paneled office last week, he spoke of his disappointment at having failed to mobilize Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, quickly enough behind a counteroffer that might have kept DreamWorks at Universal in the face of a $1.6 billion bid from Paramount, owned by Viacom.

Not long afterward, Mr. Meyer forced Ms. Snyder into deciding whether to remain with Universal after discovering on a Sunday morning that she had been talking to DreamWorks. The studio chairwoman was told she must declare her intention to stay at a Monday staff meeting, or lose her job. Come Monday morning, she did not show up. A spokesman for Ms. Snyder declined to comment.

Despite the tumult, Mr. Zucker said that Universal is on track to deliver “strong, steady growth,” particularly internationally. At a recent presentation to Wall Street, Mr. Zucker positioned the studio as a bright spot helping to offset continued weakness at the NBC broadcast network.

Mr. Meyer says he believes much of the division’s growth will come from the company’s theme parks,.

That expansion will happen partly through arrangements to license the Universal name and attractions to parks in Dubai, Singapore and elsewhere. Attendance will perk up, he says, through deals under which Universal will tap Warner for “Harry Potter” for its Orlando park and Fox for a “Simpsons” attraction at Universal City.

“We don’t have to own it,” Mr. Meyer said, in speaking of the cinematic extravaganzas that will give birth to future attractions. “It costs us a little more money to license it. But I’m thrilled to pay for something special.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/bu...a/16meyer.html





Summer Cinema’s One-Week Wonders
David M. Halbfinger

After its superstrong $182 million opening week in May, “Spider-Man 3” plunged at the box office by 61 percent the next week. “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” sank like a stone in its second week, dropping 66 percent. And when the box office gross for “Transformers” fell by only 47 percent after a week in theaters, Hollywood marveled at the movie’s strength.

The movie business has been heading this way for years, but this summer is proving the apotheosis of the one-week blockbuster. The blur of big-budget films may have left moviegoers with whiplash, given how quickly each film announces itself in television ads and then disappears from marquees, yet few in Hollywood are complaining. Far from it, since the steep drop-offs are largely fueled by a run of blockbusters from every major studio, and Hollywood has a chance of breaking 2004’s summer box office record.
“It’s about the best you can hope for without being on an island,” Jeff Blake, vice chairman of Sony Pictures, said.

For audiences, the summer’s ultrawide releases have made it easier than ever to get into blockbusters on opening weekend and more dangerous than ever for lesser films to open at the same time as these so-called tent poles. Moviegoers who made “Knocked Up” a hit, meanwhile, can expect plenty of knockoffs in the next few years, until its formula of raunchy comedy grows tired.

The blockbuster onslaught has been driven partly by a shift in the way studios and theater chains divide up box office receipts. Until several years ago, most of the grosses went to the studios initially, but theaters benefited more the longer a film played. As a result, megaplex owners had a financial disincentive to play a new movie on too many screens.

Now studios and theater chains typically agree on a flat percentage split, no matter how long a movie plays. So “Pirates,” “Spider-Man 3” and “Shrek the Third,” for example, each opened on more than 10,000 screens in May.

“We don’t care anymore whether we generate revenue in the first week, the third or the fifth,” said Mike Campbell, chief executive of Regal Cinemas, the nation’s biggest theater chain.

With cinemas freed to put each week’s new blockbuster on enough screens to offer show times every 20 minutes, the pressure on studios to deliver huge opening weeks has reached new proportions. It’s little surprise, then, that a film like “Transformers,” originally set for a Wednesday release, sped up its debut to a Monday night, and that more films than ever are sneaking into theaters the night before their scheduled releases.

Though there is little data to prove it, studio executives are convinced that the week-in, week-out blockbuster bombardment has also further eroded the repeat business that made these movies so tantalizing to studios. For movies like those big May “threequels,” which have each exceeded $300 million in domestic box office grosses but not yet equaled their franchise records, that is a shortcoming that huge worldwide grosses will more than offset.

But for films that are not part of such franchises or did not quite work the way they were intended to, the crowded schedule has created a cruel, cruel world.

“If you do come up with a movie that doesn’t hit, the consequences are as dire, if not more dire, than they’ve ever been,” said Adam Fogelson, president of marketing at Universal Pictures, which experienced those dire results with “Evan Almighty” after succeeding with the modestly budgeted “Knocked Up.”

The jampacked summer schedule has had other repercussions. Smaller studio movies can no longer count on picking up the spillover audiences, said Rob Moore, president of worldwide marketing, distribution and operations at Paramount. Warner Brothers, he noted, opened the romantic comedy “Lucky You” against “Spider-Man 3” to disastrous results.

“In the past, people who couldn’t get into the big blockbuster would see something else and then come back the next week,” he said. “But theaters and multiplexes can give you so many seats on opening day that it’s incredibly rare that somebody can’t get in within an hour of when they walk up.”

And Mr. Campbell, of Regal, said this year’s May offerings might have left audiences hung over a little bit in June, traditionally a gangbusters month. (Witness the underwhelming results of Warner Brothers’ “Ocean’s Thirteen” and Sony’s “Surf’s Up.”)

This summer’s scorecard, according to film executives, shows that originality (and not merely sequels) can work, though Hollywood’s ideas about what constitutes originality can be a bit mind-bending. “Transformers,” after all, is considered an original franchise for Paramount and DreamWorks, though it was based on a decades-old toy line and an animated series and movie. And with Hollywood simply in thrall to Judd Apatow, the writer-director-producer of “Knocked Up,” his originality is already spawning untold imitations.

Before the June lull, Hollywood had high hopes for breaking the 2004 summer box office record of $3.95 billion. As of Sunday, this year’s box office gross had reached $2.587 billion. On the strength of big July hits like “Transformers” and “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” and with “The Simpsons” coming on July 27, expectations of record breaking continue to mount.

What will determine the outcome, said the box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian of Media by Numbers, could be whether August proves to be the new June, packed as it will be with franchise installments like Universal’s “Bourne Ultimatum” and New Line’s “Rush Hour 3,” as well as another Apatow-branded comedy, Sony’s “Superbad.”

The summer of 2008, by the way, looks as intensely competitive and crowded as this one. The comic-book adaptation “Iron Man” is scheduled to open on May 2, followed by the Wachowski brothers’ “Speed Racer” from Warner Brothers; the next installment of the “Narnia” series from Disney; the new “Indiana Jones” sequel; and a comedy produced by Mr. Apatow, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”

And the jockeying for prime position has already extended to 2009. Disney has claimed May 1 for the third “Narnia,” and two 3-D extravaganzas — James Cameron’s “Avatar” for 20th Century Fox and DreamWorks Animation’s “Monsters vs. Aliens” — so far look to duke it out on May 22.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/movies/18stud.html





With 5th Film, Harry Potter Masters the Box Office Race
Brooks Barnes

As Harry Potter’s wizardry skills keep growing, so do his box office powers.

In its first five days of release, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” the fifth film based on the J. K. Rowling books, sold an estimated $140 million in tickets at American theaters. That was enough to break several records, including biggest opening on a Wednesday and biggest five-day nonholiday total. The tally marks the strongest five-day performance in the movie franchise’s history, according to Box Office Mojo, an online tracking service. The second highest belongs to the fourth film, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” which earned $119.7 million in its first five days in 2005.

“The Order of the Phoenix” had a three-day weekend total of $77.4 million. It also opened to robust receipts internationally, with about $190 million. Warner Brothers said the movie outperformed its predecessors in most countries and broke a handful of sales records.

Hype surrounding the forthcoming release, on Saturday, of the final book of the Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” surely helped. Warner Brothers, which is owned by Time Warner, also tried a different distribution strategy with the latest picture, rolling out “Order of the Phoenix” on a Wednesday in the middle of summer. The previous four movies were all released on Fridays (one of the films in June, the others in November).

“To see the movie franchise continue to grow is an indication that original fans are staying with us, and new ones are coming,” said Dan Fellman, Warner Brothers’ president for domestic distribution.

“Transformers,” from DreamWorks and Paramount, dropped 49 percent at the weekend box office, a steep decline for most movies but a respectable showing for the toy-theme release given its enormous opening last week. As the No. 2 film it sold an estimated $36 million in tickets over the weekend. Rounding out the top five were “Ratatouille” with $18 million, “Live Free or Die Hard” with $10.9 million and “License to Wed” with $7.4 million.

Of note was the dismal performance of “Captivity,” an entry in the “torture porn” horror genre that had tried to capture attention with a contentious ad campaign. Billboards for the release chronicled a young woman’s torment, leading to a rare censure by the Motion Picture Association of America in the spring.

“Captivity’s” take was estimated at nearly $1.6 million in 1,050 theaters for a poor per-screen average of $1,476. That reinforces the slump that R-rated horror films have experienced lately in an oversaturated marketplace after the success of movies like “Saw” and “Hostel.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/movies/16box.html





The Voice of Harry Potter Can Keep a Secret
Motoko Rich

Jim Dale is either one of the luckiest men in America or one of the most tortured.

A little less than two months ago, Mr. Dale, the veteran Broadway actor turned voice of Harry Potter, finished recording the audio version of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final installment in the colossally successful series by J. K. Rowling.

So that means that he knows how it ends.

His grandchildren, who visited from England after he completed the recording, literally twisted his arms trying to get him to divulge a clue. His wife is still in the dark. Everywhere he goes, people want to know What He Knows.

“It’s a surprise ending,” he said on Friday, during an interview in his Park Avenue co-op. “Let’s say that.”

Gee, thanks.

It is not quite four days until Harry Potter’s legions of fans can procure a copy of “Deathly Hallows” — in hardcover, CD or cassette — and find out for themselves exactly who does what to whom. Mr. Dale signed a confidentiality agreement so that he will not breathe a word of the plot.

But after spending eight years creating more than 200 voices for all the characters in the “Harry Potter” books, Mr. Dale really believes that readers — and listeners — should discover the end for themselves.

“For those people who say, ‘C’mon, Jim, how does it end?,’ it’s like parents who say: ‘There’s a surprise gift for you in the next room. It’s a bicycle,’ ” said Mr. Dale, whose apartment could easily make a Hogwarts professor feel at home with its eclectic collections of Victorian cake decorations, pewter plates and Persian swords. “Let the child find out for himself by opening this gift.”

Mr. Dale, 71, was born in central England and has had a long and storied career as a stand-up comedian, a pop singer and an actor in everything from the British “Carry On” series of films and Shakespeare at the National Theater in London to Broadway productions of “Joe Egg” and “Barnum,” for which he won a Tony Award.

Serendipity landed Mr. Dale the part of reading “Harry Potter.” Back in 1999, Listening Library, then an independent company, acquired the United States audiobook rights to “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first book in the series, for just $15,000. Timothy Ditlow, the son of the company’s founders, was at a dinner party with a group of avid theatergoers who recommended Mr. Dale. (In Britain the audiobooks are produced by Bloomsbury, and Stephen Fry, the actor, author and comedian, reads them.)
Mr. Ditlow recalled Mr. Dale’s performance in “Barnum” and a few other Broadway shows. Although Mr. Dale had recorded only one audiobook, which was never released, Mr. Ditlow offered him the job. “I think it’s just one of those combination factors of luck and just going by your gut,” Mr. Ditlow said.

Since he first went into the recording studio in the summer of 1999, Mr. Dale has recorded every single word of the “Harry Potter” series, amounting to 117 hours and 4 minutes of reading time across the seven books — or a lot of long car rides. Including sales of CDs, cassettes and digital downloads, the audiobooks have sold more than 5.7 million copies, according to the Random House Audio Publishing Group, which now owns Listening Library.

For his work on the “Harry Potter” series, Mr. Dale has won a Grammy Award and holds the record for creating the most voices in an audiobook in the Guinness Book of World Records.

“Deathly Hallows,” which runs to 784 pages in the ink-and-paper version, took about two and a half weeks, working six-and-a-half-hour days, recording about 18 to 20 pages an hour, to finish. As with the other books, Mr. Dale received the manuscript only two or three days before he was scheduled to begin recording.

“That makes it impossible for me to actually read it before recording it,” said Mr. Dale, who does not possess the 13-year-old megafan’s ability to inhale the book in a weekend.

So he read about 100 pages ahead, and noted all the different voices he needed for the first few days of recording. The benefit of reading in chunks, Mr. Dale said, is that: “I don’t ever know how the book is going to end so I can’t unconsciously lead you in the direction that the book is going. I don’t know who the villain is because I am just reading 100 pages at a time.”

By now the publisher has digital files of all the voices he has used for long-running characters like Hermione Granger, one of Harry’s sidekicks, as well as more minor recurring characters like the Death Eaters, so that Mr. Dale can recreate those voices for the latest book. He takes into account the aging of the main characters, who started out as 10 and 11 in “Sorcerer’s Stone” and are now 17 and 18 in “Deathly Hallows.”

For new characters Mr. Dale uses an old-fashioned cassette recorder and tapes one or two sentences in the new voice and notes the place in the text. Then, when he shows up in the studio and starts to read, he will go to his tape recorder, rewind until he finds the right voice, and play it back to refresh his memory before recording the text. To create the range of voices, he calls on his knowledge of dozens of accents from across the British Isles and imitates the voices of friends and relatives.

For Peeves, the poltergeist, he used the voice of an old comedian friend. For Prof. Minerva McGonagall, Mr. Dale chose the voice of an aunt on his wife’s side, who, perhaps fortunately, did not live to hear herself commemorated that way.

As with the earlier books, Ms. Rowling (whom Mr. Dale said he has met twice) sent along a list of new words and character names and their corresponding pronunciations. Whenever he stumbled on a word not on the author’s list, Mr. Dale would record it in context in several ways to account for every possible pronunciation.

The producers are sticklers for absolute fidelity to the text. “If she says ‘someone laughs, ha, ha, ha,’ and I do four ‘ha’s,’ I am stopped and told, ‘Just do three,’ ” Mr. Dale said.

This Friday night, in the run-up to the release of “Deathly Hallows” at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, Mr. Dale will appear at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square in Manhattan, where he will invite children onto the stage to do impressions of his voices. After the book is released, he will do a tour of Houston, Washington, Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C.

Since attracting a fan base for his “Harry Potter” readings, Mr. Dale has been recording other children’s classics, like “A Christmas Carol,” “Peter Pan” and “Around the World in 80 Days.”

“So if we can encourage the children who follow Jim Dale to listen to other books he records,” Mr. Dale said, “then we are really encouraging them to read or listen to other books that they may never find on their own.”

This fall fans will also be able to hear Mr. Dale’s voice as the narrator of “Pushing Daisies,” a new television series from Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of “Men in Black.”

But it is his role as the aural embodiment of Harry Potter that has brought Mr. Dale a chance at the kind of immortality that many performers crave.

“We have been part of history — big, big history,” Mr. Dale said. “It’s like the people who were connected with Lewis Carroll or the people connected with J. M. Barrie when ‘Peter Pan’ came up. It has been marvelous. Now my voice can be heard in hundreds of years’ time. We all need to leave something behind, and I am leaving behind a legacy of the ‘Harry Potter’ audiobooks.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/books/17dale.html





Harry Potter Finale Allegedly Leaked Online
Kevin Griffin

A 33-year-old Vancouverite has downloaded what appears to be about 60% of the seventh and final Harry Potter book -- even though the children's novel isn't supposed to be officially released until midnight Saturday.

The discovery of what appears to be major portions of the novel on a European website is part of the continuing hype over the imminent release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It also follows on the heels of the recent release of the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Byron Ng said he started his search for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Monday after reading a newspaper account of the heightened security around release of the book -- including using measures such as GPS technology to track the trucks delivering the books to retailers.

Oddly enough, Ng doesn't consider himself a big Harry Potter fan.

"I know the basics and I've watched some of the movies but I don't really pay attention to it," he said. "This is a high value release so I looked at it for fun."

Ng said he went online and found what appeared to be the novel's first few paragraphs mentioned in an article that appeared Sunday in The Guardian, based in the U.K. He used that information to Google and find the rest of the novel.

He found that someone had posted what appeared to be first 495 pages of the 794-page book on a peer-to-peer sharing website where directions to pirated movies and other material are located. So he downloaded it too.

"It is not an e-book or Word file, which is what people would normally do," he said. "What some guy did was take pictures of it, 500 little files, each with a picture of a page. Someone took the trouble to do that."

Jamie Broadhurst, director of marketing for Raincoast Books, said that in the "runup to a new Harry Potter, there's lot of speculation, there's lots of rumours.

"There's lot of content that's purporting to be the authentic book. What I can say is that we can't possibly verify any of those rumours.

"We would encourage people to wait until July 21 and share in the secret together -- at one minute past midnight."

On the information downloaded by Ng, most of the text is legible but some pages have been photographed at an angle, making them difficult to read. On each pdf, you can also see the knuckles and partial fingers of someone holding the book open on a carpeted floor.

What Ng said was unusual about the file is that no one can claim bragging rights because the posting on the European website is anonymous and doesn't even have a fictitious name.

As of Monday afternoon, the file allegedly containing the latest Harry Potter novel had been downloaded 507 times.

Ng said he doesn't think the posting was an example of guerrilla marketing -- anonymously using the Internet to build interest in a company or brand.

"I think it's a deliberate leak," he said. "Someone somewhere has taken the trouble to do this -- who knows who it is."

Raincoast Books has published 10 million copies of the Harry Potter books.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/n...46e7b8&k=22091





New Potter Book May Have Made Its Way to Web
Motoko Rich



Frustrating perhaps the most elaborately orchestrated marketing machine ever mobilized for a book, photographs of what appeared to be every single page of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the breathlessly awaited seventh and final installment in the series by J. K. Rowling, were circulating on the Web yesterday.

To the publishers of Harry Potter, there is no time or date more sacred than what they are calling “midnight magic,” 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. Then, and only then, can readers buy their copies of “Deathly Hallows.” Both Bloomsbury, the British publisher, and Scholastic, the publisher in the United States, have gone to great lengths to safeguard the book’s content and release date, ordering booksellers not to sell a single book a minute earlier than the official time.

But those less mindful of the publishers’ wishes could go onto various file-sharing Web sites yesterday to look at amateur-seeming photographs of what appeared to be each pair of facing pages of a copy of the book. The pictures, which could be downloaded through sites like the Pirate Bay and MediaFire, showed the book laid out on a green-and-red-flecked beige looped carpet, with fingers holding the pages open. Some of the photos made the text difficult to read, but the fiercely protected ending was definitely legible.

Lisa Holton, president of Scholastic’s trade and book fairs division, said the company was asking various Web site hosts to take the photos down. “We’re not confirming if anything is real,” she said. “But in the spirit of getting to midnight magic without a lot of hoo-ha, can you just take some of this stuff down.”

The company’s lawyers were also pursuing the identity of the person who posted the pictures.

On Monday, the company issued a subpoena to Gaia Online, a social networking and gaming site, ordering it to take down a link to some photos purporting to be “Deathly Hallows” pages posted by a user. Bill Danon, a Gaia spokesman, said that within hours of the subpoena, Gaia removed the photos and banned the user for 14 days.

Some fans were convinced that the images posted around the Web were authentic. Emerson Spartz, the founder and Web master of MuggleNet.com, one of the biggest Harry Potter fan sites, said he thought the photos were the real deal.

“I read enough of it to where I could tell,” he said. Although he did not read to the end, he said: “I’m not even really hopeful that it won’t get spoiled for me. I’m just expecting it anytime I log on to check e-mail.”

Doris Herrmann, an English teacher in Clear Lake, Tex., who is also a project coordinator for the Leaky Cauldron (leakynews.com), another big fan site, said: “I hate to say it, but it really does look authentic.” She said that while it was possible to work wonders with Photoshop or other programs, it would be difficult to write a whole manuscript, typeset it like the originals and then photograph the whole thing.

Tens of thousands of people downloaded the files yesterday, according to BigChampagne, a research firm that tracks file-sharing. By midday, many of the Web links were no longer working.

On the link-sharing site Digg yesterday, a person using the name TocsinFilms appeared to take credit for uploading the images, then said he was simply “one of the first” to do so. He wrote on Digg in May that he had obtained a copy of the book from “someone who works for a Scholastic Distributing company for Waldenbooks” and had posted photos of its pages online. Those photos have since been taken down. This person did not respond to e-mail or telephone inquiries.

Some who say they have copies of the book or knowledge of the plot have been posting snippets and scans of supposed manuscript pages for weeks. Ms. Holton acknowledged that some of the photos looked genuine. But, she added, “it’s a bunch of people who are going to extraordinary lengths to make it look like they have the authentic book.”

There were also six photos posted on Flickr, the picture-sharing site, by a user named hermionepotter77, a reference to one of Harry’s best friends. Over the caption “Here ya go kids, the Deathly Hallows ending!” one appeared to show the first page of the final chapter; others showed the table of contents and more pages. This material was almost entirely different from what appeared in the images of the full book, meaning one or both had to be fake.

“This happens with every book, and there are a lot of them out there, and we appeal to everybody not to put them up,” said Sarah Beal, a spokeswoman for Bloomsbury in London. “It’s amazing how creative people can be. It may look real, but it doesn’t mean they are.”

Hype and frenzy have been building for weeks as readers anticipate the release of this final Harry Potter book. Ms. Rowling has hinted that two or more characters are likely to die, leading to speculation from many fans that Harry may not survive his own series. Fans have been hypothesizing about other important plot points, too, like who will end up with whom and whether Prof. Severus Snape, a character whose moral character has been in question, is genuinely evil.

Despite the possible leak, bookstores across the country continued to gear up for festivities on Friday night, expecting long lines of readers at midnight. Scholastic is publishing a record 12 million copies, and Ms. Holton said the company had no plans to move up the release date.

“If in fact the book is posted online or the ending is revealed prior to midnight on Friday, it will not result in us selling a single less copy of the book,” said Steve Riggio, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, which has 1.3 million orders for “Deathly Hallows.” As far as Mr. Riggio is concerned, the press coverage generated by potential spoilers just increases advance orders.

Judy Bulow, children’s book buyer for the three Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, said she doubted that Web spoilers would deter readers from buying the book or attending the midnight parties.

“I think kids are still wanting the great big book,” she said. Tattered Cover is planning parties at two locations and will raffle off the chance to be first in line to buy a copy.

David F. Gallagher contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/us/18potter.html?hp





A 'Harry' Night Out

Fans camp out to be first in line to get new Harry Potter book
Mark Langlois

Danni, Ally, and Ashley began camping out in front of Barnes & Noble Booksellers at 12:30 p.m. Thursday to make sure they're the first ones to buy "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" at midnight tonight.

"It's very suspenseful waiting for the book to come out," said Danni Mandra, 20, who attends Hartwick College in New York, studying philosophy.

Their wait in line will end at 6 p.m. today when the three women from North Salem will be given arm bands by the store employees. The bands will be numbered to say the order of patrons waiting in line for books.

"The plan is to be the first in line, and we'll camp out tonight to make that happen," said Ally Mandra, 17, a senior at North Salem High School.

Sisters Ally and Danni were waiting with Ashley Nussbaum, 16, also a senior at North Salem High School.

They may eat dinner, which will likely be from Sinapi's Pizza in the Danbury Square Mall, and have dessert, which will likely be from Cold Stone Creamery nearby.

But they aren't going to give up their place in line. One of the girls will remain while the other two go pick up food.

All three are avid Harry Potter fans who expect to spend Saturday and Sunday, if necessary, reading the 700-page book. The previous book in the series, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," broke publishing records for the most sales in its first three days of publication, and this book is expected to outsell the "Prince."

The trio are not worried about "spoilers," who are people who spoil the ending of the book by shouting it to people waiting in line to buy it. Spoilers learn how the book ends by reading snippets on the Internet. Whole copies of the book have been pirated and reprinted on the Web.

To avoid spoilers, people wear earplugs or listen to music while waiting in line.

"That's why I brought my i-Pod," Ally Mandra said.

"Our house stopped going online entirely yesterday," Danni Mandra said.

In a somewhat belated effort to halt the flood of Harry Potter rumors and possible truth from harming the book's release, author J.K. Rowling sent a plea from her Web site to spoilers.

"I'd like to ask everyone who calls themselves a Potter fan to help preserve the secrecy of the plot for all those who are looking forward to reading the book at the same time on publication day."

The book is being kept in its boxes worldwide until a few minutes before midnight, although The New York Times published a review of the book in its Thursday editions.

"I'm not looking," Danni Mandra said. "J.K. Rowling never lets us down. The books have matured with the audience. If you started reading them at age 10, and you've had a 10-year wait for the last book, you're 20. They're enjoyable for a 20-year-old to read."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/st...rce=big_barker





Long Lines and Wide Smiles Greet the Final Volume of ‘Harry Potter’
Motoko Rich


New York


London


Danbury!

There has never been anything quite like it, and nobody knows whether there ever will be again.

The Harry Potter phenomenon reached its tumultuous climax this morning as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final installment in the hugely popular series by J. K. Rowling went on sale at 12:01 a.m.

Parties to herald the arrival proliferated around the city and across the country. At the Barnes & Noble in Union Square in Manhattan, lines snaked around the block as police officers ordered fans off the street. Downtown in SoHo at the McNally Robinson Bookstore, an adults-only group swilled “magic punch.” And at the Borders at Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle, fans who had been given numbered wristbands earlier in the day thronged around the front of the store at midnight. “Are we ready for Harry Potter?” yelled the manager. “Yea!” the crowd screamed back.

Pilyoung Yoo, 41, won a raffle for the first place in line. “It’s so amazing,” she said. After snagging their copy, her son Ted Yoo, 9, opened it to page 705. He wanted to find out how it ends.

In London, where the book went on sale five hours before New Yorkers could get their hands on a copy, Tineke Dijkstra, a 15-year-old fan from the Netherlands, had waited in line outside the Waterstone’s in Piccadilly Circus for two days to ensure that she was one of the first ones to buy the book. “I slept three hours in the last two days in the rain,” she said after emerging from the store with her copy. “I’m going to go and read one chapter and then go to sleep.”

Throughout the day in New York and elsewhere, booksellers readied for their biggest party of the year by putting the finishing touches on cauldrons, replicas of series locales like Diagon Alley, and Potter-themed snacks and drinks like “golden snitch” balls and butterbeer.

It was a day when fans lined up for hours, dressed up as their favorite characters, and braced for all-night reading sessions of the final volume in the series that has chronicled the magical adventures of the boy wizard, his education at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and his epic battles against the evil Lord Voldemort.

In London, nearly 500 fans wrapped around several city blocks by 8 p.m., waiting to get into Waterstone’s, many eating pizza and chanting, “Good will prevail!” By 11:30, the mob had worked into a pandemonium of excitement, shouting, “Only half an hour to go!” and singing, “J.K., J.K., thank you!” The street outside the store was so clogged with revelers that cars and buses could only pass through one lane.

In SoHo in Manhattan, Chelsea Logan, 17, and Leah Wickman, 18, two recent high school graduates from Santa Rosa, Calif., arrived at 7:30 a.m. yesterday to sit on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets, up the block from the headquarters of Scholastic, the United States publisher of the series, to mark their places as first in line to buy their copies of “Deathly Hallows.”

“We were terrified that we were going to get here and there would be, like, this line,” said Ms. Wickman, sporting a T-shirt with the crest of Gryffindor, the Hogwarts house where Harry and his closest friends have lived for most of the series.

Two years after the sixth book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” set sales records, the publishers were expecting “Deathly Hallows” to do it again. Scholastic, the United States publisher (Bloomsbury publishes it in Britain), has printed 12 million copies, and Barnes & Noble and Borders each had pre-orders of 1.5 million copies; on Amazon.com, nearly 2.3 million copies had been ordered worldwide.

Over the decade since the first book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” appeared in Britain (as “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”), the series has become a publishing sensation. More than 325 million copies have sold around the world, spawning movies, collectible figurines, souvenir candies and most of all, a passionate fan base that is about to conclude what for many of them has been the greatest reading experience of their lives.

“I am quite bereft at the fact that it’s over,” said Lauren Calihman as she waited for a wristband that would give her a priority place in line at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square in Manhattan. “I began reading when I was in fifth grade, and now I’m a sophomore in college, so it’s been a lifelong friendship.”

Ms. Calihman, 19, was decked out in Potter regalia, with owlish glasses and her version of a Hogwarts uniform: a button-down shirt, gray sweater dress and necktie. During a week in which spoilers leaked across the Internet, photos of the entire book appeared on file-sharing sites, and some newspapers, including The New York Times, published early reviews, Ms. Calihman studiously avoided any blogs or news reports that featured spoilers about the book. “I cover my ears when people talk about it,” she said.

But down at “Harry Potter Place,” a cobblestone stretch of Mercer Street in SoHo that Scholastic had turned into a street fair with jugglers, face painting and a huge model of the Whomping Willow, Renesandy Diaz, 15, confessed that he had read the ending of “Deathly Hallows” online earlier this week and learned who died. “I was upset, because I know how hard J. K. Rowling’s worked and it’s disappointing to see pirates put the book online,” he said. He still planned to buy a copy and read it through “until I drop.”

The “Harry Potter” books have not only transported a generation of children, but charmed adults, too, who got into the spirit of the Friday-night parties. In Peninsula, Ohio, where the entire town had transformed itself into a Potter-themed village, Stacy Sadar, 39, an executive recruiter from Richfield, Ohio, dressed up as Lord Voldemort and brought her horse, Moonshine, costumed as Voldemort’s snake sidekick, the Basilisk.

So what did Ms. Sadar think would happen to her character in “Deathly Hallows?” “Oh, I’m going to die,” she said. “I’m not even going to live through the night. I’m very upset about that.”

On the West Coast of the United States, the Pacific time zone was working against readers who wanted to remain in the dark on the plot (“Deathly Hallows” went on sale there three hours after its debut in New York). At Cover to Cover, an independent bookstore in San Francisco, Mark Ezarik, the owner, said most fans were trying to figure out how to avoid spoilers. “Fans are trying to stay away from the Internet,” he said. “They don’t even want to talk to anyone. Everyone is terrified about learning what happens even before they have the book.”

For booksellers, the new “Harry Potter” is clearly the biggest release of the year. But because of major discounting, many will not make a huge profit on the book. But while margins on “Harry Potter” are thin, “it brings a whole lot of people into the store,” said George L. Jones, the chief executive of Borders Group, as staff members at the chain’s Time Warner Center store prepared for its huge shindig. “It entices them to buy something else.”

With the series drawing to its much-heralded close, it was clear that future generations will come to the books without the hoopla that has defined them since 2000, when the publishers first set a midnight release for the fourth installment, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”

“I think there is something that is extremely special about having lived through the first wave,” said Arthur A. Levine, the Scholastic editor who first bought the United States rights to “Sorcerer’s Stone” in 1997 for $105,000. “But when I read Jane Austen for the first time, I didn’t feel like ‘Darn, I wish I’d been there when Jane was out there letting them go for the first time.’ ” At the end of the day, he said, a reader’s “experience is a special, one-on-one intimate experience whenever you have it.”

Melena Ryzik and Emilyn Sosa contributed reporting from New York, Sarah Lyall and Ariana Green from London, Christopher Maag from Cleveland, Dan Frosch from Denver and Carolyn Marshall from San Francisco.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/books/21pott.html





Muggles!
Motoko Rich

A customer told the [bookstore] owner, Christine Onorati, that the last time she went to a “Harry Potter” party, a 6-year-old flipped to the end of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and screamed, “Snape xxxxxx Dumbledore!” So Ms. Onorati decided to hold an adults-only party. She’ll be serving sangria in a cauldron, running a trivia contest and giving away “Harry Potter” pens and notebooks. The store’s event space is being transformed into a dungeon, but Ms. Onorati insists that the adults-only theme extends only to the alcohol.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/books/20pott.html





Islamic Creationist and a Book Sent Round the World
Cornelia Dean

In the United States, opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools has largely been fueled by the religious right, particularly Protestant fundamentalism.

Now another voice is entering the debate, in dramatic fashion.

It is the voice of Adnan Oktar of Turkey, who, under the name Harun Yahya, has produced numerous books, videos and DVDs on science and faith, in particular what he calls the “deceit” inherent in the theory of evolution. One of his books, “Atlas of Creation,” is turning up, unsolicited, in mailboxes of scientists around the country and members of Congress, and at science museums in places like Queens and Bemidji, Minn.

At 11 x 17 inches and 12 pounds, with a bright red cover and almost 800 glossy pages, most of them lavishly illustrated, “Atlas of Creation” is probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin’s theory, which Mr. Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran.

In bowing to Scripture, Mr. Yahya resembles some fundamentalist creationists in the United States. But he is not among those who assert that Earth is only a few thousand years old. The principal argument of “Atlas of Creation,” advanced in page after page of stunning photographs of fossil plants, insects and animals, is that creatures living today are just like creatures that lived in the fossil past. Ergo, Mr. Yahya writes, evolution must be impossible, illusory, a lie, a deception or “a theory in crisis.”

In fact, there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth.

The book caused a stir earlier this year when a French translation materialized at high schools, universities and museums in France. Until then, creationist literature was relatively rare in France, according to Armand de Ricqles, a professor of historical biology and evolutionism at the College de France. Scientists spoke out against the book, he said in an e-mail message, and “thanks to the highly centralized public school system in France, it was possible to organize that the books sent to lycées would not be made available to children.”

So far, no similar response is emerging in the United States. “In our country we are used to nonsense like this,” said Kevin Padian, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who, like colleagues there, found a copy in his mailbox.

He said people who had received copies were “just astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a load of crap it is.

“If he sees a picture of an old fossil crab or something, he says, ‘See, it looks just like a regular crab, there’s no evolution,’ ” Dr. Padian said. “Extinction does not seem to bother him. He does not really have any sense of what we know about how things change through time.”

Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, said he and his colleagues in the life sciences had all received copies. When he called friends at the University of Colorado and the University of Chicago, they had the books too, he said. Scientists at Brigham Young University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Georgia and others have also received them.

“I think he must have sent it to every full professor in the medical school,” said Kathryn L. Calame, a microbiologist at the Columbia University medical school who received a copy. “The genetics department, the biochem department, micro — everybody I talked to had it.”

While they said they were unimpressed with the book’s content, recipients marveled at its apparent cost. “If you went into a bookstore and saw a book like this, it would be at least $100,” said Dr. Miller, an author of conventional biology texts. “The production costs alone are astronomical. We are talking millions of dollars.”

And then there’s postage. Dr. Padian said his copy was shipped by a company called SDS Worldwide, which has an office in Illinois. Calls and e-mail messages to the company were not returned, but Dr. Padian said he spoke to someone there who told him SDS had received a cargo-container-size shipment of books, “with everything prepaid and labeled. It just went all over the country.”

Fatih Sen, who heads the United States office of Global Impex, a company that markets Islamic books, gifts and other products, including “Atlas,” would not comment on its distribution, except to describe the book as “great” and refer questions to the publisher, Global Publishing of Istanbul. Repeated attempts by telephone and e-mail to reach the concern, or Mr. Yahya, were unsuccessful.

In the book and on his Web site (www.harunyahya.com), Mr. Yahya says he was born in Ankara in 1956, and grew up and was educated in Turkey. He says he seeks to unmask what the book calls “the imposture of evolutionists” and the links between their scientific views and modern evils like fascism, communism and terrorism. He says he hopes to encourage readers “to open their minds and hearts and guide them to become more devoted servants of God.”

He adds that he seeks “no material gain” from his publications, most of which are available free or at relatively low cost.

Who finances these efforts is “a big question that no one knows the answer to,” said another recipient, Taner Edis, a physicist at Truman State University in Missouri who studies issues of science and religion, particularly Islam. Dr. Edis grew up in a secular household in Turkey and has lived in the United States since enrolling in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where he earned his doctorate in 1994. He said Mr. Yahya’s activities were usually described in the Turkish press as financed by donations. “But what that can mean is anybody’s guess,” he said.

The effort seems particularly odd given the mailing list. Both Dr. Padian and Dr. Miller testified for the plaintiffs in the Dover, Penn., lawsuit that successfully challenged the teaching of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, in schools there. Other recipients include Steve Rissing, a biologist at Ohio State University who has been active on behalf of school board candidates who support the teaching of evolution and science museums that accept evolution as the foundation for modern biology.

“I don’t know what to make of it, quite honestly,” said Laddie Elwell, the director of the Headwaters Science Center in Bemidji, Minn., which she said received a dozen copies. Chuck Deeter, a staff member, said he and his colleagues might use the books’ fossil photographs in their programs on Darwin, which he said can be a hard sell in a region where many people are fundamentalist Christians with creationist beliefs.

Support for creationism is also widespread among Muslims, said Dr. Edis, whose book “An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam” was published by Prometheus Books this spring.

“Taken at face value, the Koran is a creationist text,” he said, adding that it would be difficult to find a scholar of Islam “who is going to be gung-ho about Darwin.”

Perhaps as a result, he said, Mr. Yahya’s books and other publications have won him attention in Islamic areas. “This is a guy with some influence,” Dr. Edis said, “unfortunately for mainstream science.”

Dr. Miller agreed. He said he regularly received e-mail messages from people questioning evolution, with an increasing number coming from Turkey, Lebanon and other areas in the Middle East, most citing Mr. Yahya’s work.

That’s troubling, he said, because Mr. Yahya’s ideas “cast evolution as part of the corrupting influence of the West on Islamic culture, and that promotes a profound anti-science attitude that is certainly not going to help the Islamic world catch up to the West.”

As the scientists ponder what to do with the book — for many, it is too beautiful for the trash bin but too erroneous for their shelves — they also speculate about the motives of its distributors.

“My hypothesis is, like all creationists, they believe that they have a startling truth that the public has been shielded from, and that if they present the facts, in quotation marks, that the scales will fall from the eyes and the charade of evolution will be revealed,” said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, which fights the teaching of creationism in public schools. “These people are really serious about this.”

That may be, Dr. Miller said, but it’s also possible “that Harun Yahya and his people have decided that there are plenty of Muslim people in the United States who need to hear this message.”

In his e-mail message, Dr. de Ricqles said some worried that the book was directed at the Muslim population of France as a strategy to “destabilize” poor, predominantly immigrant suburbs “where a large population of youngsters of Moslem faith would be an ideal target for propaganda.”

But despite its wide distribution, Dr. Padian predicted that the book would have little impact in the United States. “We are used to books that are totally wrongheaded about science and confuse science and religion,” he said. “That’s politics.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/17book.html





The Open Library Project

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply "free to the people," as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it's more important than ever to be open.

So let us do just that: let us build the Open Library.

Earlier this year, a small group of people gathered at Internet Archive's San Francisco office to discuss whether this was possible. Could we build something so grand? We concluded that we could. We located a copy of the Library of Congress card catalog, phoned publishers and asked them for their data, created a brand new database infrastructure for handling millions of dynamic records, wrote a new type of wiki that lets users enter structured data, set up a search engine to look through it all, and made the resulting site look good.

We hooked it up to the Internet Archive's book scanning project, so that you can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they've made available. And we hope to add a print-on-demand feature, so that you can get nice paper copies of these scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so you can fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book you've always loved.

But we can only do so much on our own. Hopefully we've done enough to make it clear that this project is for real—not simply another pie-in-the-sky idea—but we need your help to make it a reality. So we're opening up the demo we've built so far, opening up the source code, opening up the mailing lists, and hoping you'll join us in building Open Library. It sure is going to be a fun ride.

—Aaron Swartz and the Open Library team, 16 July 2007

http://demo.openlibrary.org/about





C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success
Harriet Rubin

Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist who built a personal $1.5 billion fortune discovering the likes of Google, YouTube, Yahoo and PayPal, and taking them public, may seem preternaturally in tune with new media. But it is the imprint of old media — books by the thousands sprawling through his Bay Area house — that occupies his mind.

“My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books,” Mr. Moritz said in an interview. “As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment.”

Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.

Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private. Few Nike colleagues, for example, ever saw the personal library of the founder, Phil Knight, a room behind his formal office. To enter, one had to remove one’s shoes and bow: the ceilings were low, the space intimate, the degree of reverence demanded for these volumes on Asian history, art and poetry greater than any the self-effacing Mr. Knight, who is no longer chief executive, demanded for himself.

The Knight collection remains in the Nike headquarters. “Of course the library still exists,” Mr. Knight said in an interview. “I’m always learning.”

Until recently when Steven P. Jobs of Apple sold his collection, he reportedly had an “inexhaustible interest” in the books of William Blake — the mad visionary 18th-century mystic poet and artist. Perhaps future historians will track down Mr. Jobs’s Blake library to trace the inspiration for Pixar and the grail-like appeal of the iPhone.

If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: “Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentors’ mentors,” suggests David Leach, chief executive of the American Medical Association’s accreditation division. Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle.

Forget finding the business best-seller list in these libraries. “I try to vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction,” Mr. Moritz said. “I rarely read business books, except for Andy Grove’s ‘Swimming Across,’ which has nothing to do with business but describes the emotional foundation of a remarkable man. I re-read from time to time T. E. Lawrence’s ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom,’ an exquisite lyric of derring-do, the navigation of strange places and the imaginative ruses of a peculiar character. It has to be the best book ever written about leading people from atop a camel.” Students of power should take note that C.E.O.’s are starting to collect books on climate change and global warming, not Al Gore’s tomes but books from the 15th century about the weather, Egyptian droughts, even replicas of Sumerian tablets recording extraordinary changes in climate, according to John Windle, the owner of John Windle Antiquarian Booksellers in San Francisco.

Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was priced at a few thousand dollars in the 1950s. “Then DNA became the scientific rage,” said Mr. Windle. “Now copies are selling for $250,000. But the desire to own a piece of Darwin’s mind is coming to an end. I have a customer who collects diaries of people of no importance at all. The entries say, ‘It was 63 degrees and raining this morning.’ Once the big boys amass libraries of weather patterns, everyone will want these works.”

C.E.O. libraries typically lack a Dewey Decimal or even org-chart order. “My books are organized by topic and interest but in a manner that would make a librarian weep,” Mr. Moritz said. Is there something “Da Vinci Code”-like about mixing books up in an otherwise ordered life?

Could it be possible to read Phil Knight’s books in the order in which Mr. Knight read them — like following a recipe — and gain the mojo to see a future global entertainment company in something as modest as a sneaker? The great gourmand of libraries, the writer Jorge Luis Borges, analyzed the quest for knowledge that causes people to accumulate books: “There must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest.”

Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power. The empire-loving Elizabeth I surrounded herself with the Roman historians, many of whom she translated, and kept one book under lock and key in her bedroom, in a French translation she alone of her court could read: Machiavelli’s treatise on how to overthrow republics, “The Prince.” Churchill retreated to his library to heal his wounds after being voted out of power in 1945 — and after reading for six years came back to power.

Over the years, the philanthropist and junk-bond king Michael R. Milken has collected biographies, plays, novels and papers on Galileo, the renegade who was jailed in his time but redeemed by history.

It took Dee Hock, father of the credit card and founder of Visa, a thousand books to find The One. Mr. Hock walked away from business life in 1984 and looked back only from his library’s walls. He built a dream 2,000-square-foot wing for his books in a pink stucco mansion atop a hill in Pescadero, Calif. He sat among the great philosophers and the novelists of Western life like Steinbeck and Stegner and dreamed up a word for what Visa is: “chaordic” — complex systems that blend order and chaos.

In his library, Mr. Hock found the book that contained the thoughts of all of them. Visitors can see opened on his library table for daily consulting, Omar Khayyam’s “Rubáiyát,” the Persian poem that warns of the dangers of greatness and the instability of fortune.

Poetry speaks to many C.E.O.’s. “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports. Mr. Harman maintains a library in each of his three homes, in Washington, Los Angeles and Aspen, Colo. “Poets are our original systems thinkers,” he said. “They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”

He never could find a poet who was willing to be a manager. So Mr. Harman became his own de facto poet, quoting from his volumes of Shakespeare, Tennyson, and the poetry he found in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and Camus’s “Stranger” to help him define the dignity of working life — a poetry he made real in his worker-friendly factories.

Mr. Harman reads books the way writers write books, methodically over time. For two years Mr. Harman would take down from the shelf “The City of God” by E. L. Doctorow read the novel slowly, return it to the shelves, and then take it down again for his next trip. “Almost everything I have read has been useful to me — science, poetry, politics, novels. I have a lifelong interest in epistemology and learning. My books have helped me develop a way of thinking critically in business and in golf — a fabulous metaphor for the most interesting stuff in life. My library is full of things I might go back to.”

It was the empty library room and its floor-to-ceiling ladder that made Shelly Lazarus, the chairwoman and chief executive of Ogilvy & Mather, fall in love with her house in the Berkshires, which was built in 1740. “When my husband and I moved in, we said, ‘We’re never going to fill this room,’ and just last week I realized we needed to build an addition to the library. Once I’ve read a book I keep it. It becomes a part of me.

“As head of a global company, everything attracts me as a reader, books about different cultures, countries, problems. I read for pleasure and to find other perspectives on how to think or solve a problem, like Jerome Groopman’s ‘How to Think Like a Doctor’; John Cornwall’s autobiography, ‘Seminary Boy’; ‘The Wife,’ a novel by Meg Wolitzer; and before that, ‘Team of Rivals.’

“David Ogilvy said advertising is a great field, anything prepares you for it,” she said. “That gives me license to read everything.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/bu...libraries.html





Houghton Mifflin to Buy Harcourt Units
Michael J. de la Merced

Houghton Mifflin, the publishing company, said yesterday that it would acquire the Harcourt unit of a rival, Reed Elsevier, for $4 billion in cash and stock, uniting two of the biggest names in educational publishing.

Houghton Mifflin said in a statement that it would buy the unit, which includes Harcourt Education, Harcourt Trade and Greenwood-Heinemann, for $3.7 billion in cash and $300 million in stock.

As part of the agreement, Reed Elsevier will hold about 11.8 percent in Houghton Mifflin’s parent company, the Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group. The combined company will be run by Anthony Lucki, the chairman and chief executive of Houghton Mifflin and the former head of Harcourt.

Houghton Mifflin, with annual revenue of more than $1 billion, is the fourth-largest United States educational publisher, after McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Harcourt.

The sale is the latest transaction in educational publishing this year, though this is seen more as a strategic merger.

In May Thomson said that it sold its education unit to two private equity firms as it prepared to merge with Reuters. Houghton Mifflin itself was sold last year by its owners — Bain Capital, Thomas H. Lee Partners and the Blackstone Group — to Riverdeep, based in Ireland, the maker of programs like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and the Oregon Trail, for $3.4 billion including debt.

The deal is expected to close late this year or early next year, subject to regulatory review. Reed Elsevier is expected to return the education unit proceeds to shareholders by way of a special dividend.

Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers and Citigroup, which advised Houghton Mifflin, have committed to financing the debt portion of the deal, while existing Houghton Mifflin investors, including J & E Davy, a brokerage house in Dublin, will provide $235 million in equity financing.

Reed Elsevier was advised by UBS.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/bu...7harcourt.html





Former Spammer: 'I Know I'm Going to Hell'

A retired spammer predicts the problem will only get worse, aided by consumers who still buy products and faster broadband speeds
Jeremy Kirk

"Ed," a retired spammer, built a considerable fortune sending e-mails that promoted pills, porn and casinos. At the peak of his power, Ed says he pulled in US$10,000 to US$15,000 a week, storing the money in US$20 bills in stacks of boxes.

It was a life of greed and excess, one that preyed especially on vulnerable people hoping to score drugs or win money gambling on the Internet. From when he was expelled from high school at 17 until he quit his spam career at 22, Ed -- who does not reveal his full name but sometimes goes by SpammerX -- was part of an electronic underworld profiting from the Internet via spam.

"Yes, I know I'm going to hell," said Ed, who spoke in London on Wednesday at an event hosted by IronPort Systems, a security vendor now owned by Cisco Systems "I'm actually a really nice guy. Trust me."

A quick-witted and affable guy who wears an earring and casual clothes, there was a time when Ed wasn't so nice. He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to gambling Web sites. He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam.

In short, Ed said he was "basically what people hate about the Internet."

He spent 10 hours a day, seven days a week studying how to send spam and avoid filtering technologies in security software designed to weed out garbage e-mail. Most spam filters are effective 99 percent of the time; he aimed for that remaining window, using tricks such as including slightly different images in his spam, which can fool filters into thinking the e-mail is legitimate.

"The better I got at spam, the more money I made," Ed said.

He would start a spam run by finding an online merchant who wanted to sell a product. Then he'd acquire a list of e-mail addresses -- another commodity that has spawned its own market in the world of spam. He'd also set up a domain name, included as a link in a spam message, that, if clicked, would redirect the recipient to the merchant's Web site, enabling Ed to get credit for the referral.

The spam would then be sent from a network of hacker-controlled computers, called botnets. Those machines are often consumer PCs infected with malicious software that a hacker can control. Ed would "rent" time on those computers from another group of hackers that specialized in creating botnets.

If one of the spam recipients bought something, Ed would get a percentage of the sale. For pharmaceuticals the commission was around 50 percent, he said.

Response rates to spam tend to be a fraction of 1 percent. But Ed said he once got a 30 percent response rate for a campaign. The product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons.

To track the money, merchants set up a "referral sales page" where spammers can see how much they make from a spam run. Ed would log in frequently, watching the money increase. He was paid into electronic payment transfer accounts, such as e-gold or PayPal, or into his debit card account, which he could cash out in US$20 bills.

That became problematic when the cash became voluminous. He says he made US$480,000 his last year of spamming. But the lifestyle of being a spammer was taking a toll. In essence, he had no life.

It's hard to go into a bar and explain your job to a woman by saying "I advertise penis enlargement pills online," Ed said. "It doesn't go down very well."

He rationalized his actions by saying spamming is not like robbing someone, although the lurid impact of spam was clear. Some nine million Americans have some dependence on prescription drugs, Ed said, and he noticed that the same people were buying different drugs each month. "These were addicts," he said.

Additionally, "the product is always counterfeit to some degree. If you're lucky, sometimes it's a diluted version of the real thing," he said. Viagra is cut with amphetamines, and homemade pills are common from sketchy labs in countries such as China, India and Fiji, Ed said.

So Ed got out of the business. He's written a book, "Inside the Spam Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side," which he said has had some take-up in law enforcement circles eager to learn more about the spam business, which he projects will only get worse.

As broadband speeds increase, spammers will increasingly look to market goods by making VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls or sending out videos, Ed said. The ultimate unsolvable problem is users, who continue to buy products marketed by spam, making the industry possible.

"I think in 10 years we'll still get spam," Ed said. "Be prepared to be bombarded."
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...42;fp;2;fpid;1





Iran's New Game: `Rescue Nuke Scientist'
Ali Akbar Dareini

An Iranian hard-line student group unveiled a new video game Monday that simulates an attempt to rescue two Iranian nuclear experts kidnapped by the U.S. military and held in Iraq and Israel.

The "Rescue the Nuke Scientist" video game, designed by the Union of Students Islamic Association, was described by its creators as a response to a U.S.-based company's "Assault on Iran" game, which depicts an American attack on an Iranian nuclear facility.

"This is our defense against the enemy's cultural onslaught," Mohammad Taqi Fakhrian, a leader of the student group, told reporters Monday.

Iran and the U.S. have been in a standoff over Iran's nuclear program, which Washington alleges is a cover for developing atomic weapons. Tehran denies the charges and says its nuclear projects have peaceful purposes.

Tensions also have escalated over the detention of five Iranians in Iraq. U.S. authorities have said the five include members of Iran's elite Quds Force, which is accused of arming and training Iraqi militants. Iran has denied the allegations and insists the five are merely diplomats.

In "Rescue the Nuke Scientist," U.S. troops capture a husband-and-wife team of nuclear engineers during a pilgrimage to Karbala, a holy site for Shiite Muslims, in central Iraq. Game players take on the role of Iranian security forces carrying out a mission code-named "The Special Operation," which involves penetrating fortified locations to free the nuclear scientists, who are moved from Iraq to Israel.

To complete the game successfully, players have to enter Israel to rescue the nuclear scientists, kill U.S. and Israeli troops and seize their laptops containing secret information.

If players fail a mission, a message pops up saying: "With resistance, you can battle the enemy." Iran's red, white and green flag flutters in the top right corner throughout the game.

"We tried to promote the idea of defense, sacrifice and martyrdom in this game," Fakhrian said.

Fakhrian said his group was trying to market the video game first in Iran and other Muslim countries. But the group also has plans to bring the game, which comes on a CD for computers, to Western countries, he said.

The game comes from the same student group that was behind the infamous "World Without Zionism" conference in 2005 where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

Ali Reza Masaeli, leader of the group that designed the new game, said it took three years for his technical team to produce it. The team was based in Isfahan, a city in central Iran that houses a nuclear site.

"It is an entirely Iranian product in response to the U.S. cyber war against Iran," Masaeli said.

This game follows the free "Assault on Iran" online series from New York-based Kuma Reality Games. That game simulates U.S. Special Forces destroying the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran. A message left with Kuma's public relations agency was not immediately returned.
http://www.physorg.com/news103819918.html





Multi-Gigabit Wireless "Within Three Years"
Vidura Panditaratne

Multi-gigabit wireless technology using of extremely high radio frequencies (RF) to achieve broad bandwidth and high data transmission rates over short distances will be ready within three years making wired computers and peripherals obsolete, a team of Georgia Tech scientists announced today.

Scientists at the institute's Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) expressed confidence that this approach could result in a range of personal area network (PAN) applications, including next generation home multimedia and wireless data connections able to transfer an entire DVD in seconds.

The research focuses on RF frequencies around the currently unlicenced free-for-all 60 gigahertz (GHz) range.

GEDC team have already achieved wireless data-transfer rates of 15 gigabits per second (Gbps) at a distance of 1 meter, 10 Gbps at 2 meters and 5 Gbps at 5 meters.

“The goal here is to maximize data throughput to make possible a host of new wireless applications for home and office connectivity,” said Prof. Joy Laskar, GEDC director and lead researcher on the project along with Stephane Pinel.

Pinel is confident that Very high speed, p2p data connections could be available potentially in less than two years.

The research could lead to devices such as external hard drives, laptop computers, MP-3 players, cell phones, commercial kiosks and others could transfer huge amounts of data in seconds while data centers could install racks of servers without the customary jumble of wires.

“Our work represents a huge leap in available throughput,” Pinel said. “At 10 Gbps, you could download a DVD from a kiosk to your cell phone in five seconds, or you could quickly synchronize two laptops or two iPods.”

Pinel added that users of multi-gigabit technology could wirelessly connect to any device that currently uses Firewire or USB.

Wireless high-definition video could also be a major application of this technology as users could keep a DVD player by their side while transmitting wirelessly to a screen 5 or 10 meters away.

The biggest challenge for the team is to further increase data rates and decrease the already-low power consumption, as they aim to double current transmission rates by next year.

The Georgia Tech team is seeking to preserve backward compatibility with the WiFi standard used in most wireless LANs today.

GEDC researchers are pursuing this goal by modifying the system architecture to increase intelligence and effectiveness in the CMOS RF integrated circuits that transmit the data using CAD tools and testbed equipment to recalibrate system models and achieve the desired improvements in speed and functionality.

Investigators are placing special emphasis on implementing an RF concept called single-input-single-output (SISO) / multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), which enables ultra-high data throughput while preserving backward compatibility with WLAN 802.11, the WiFi standard used in most wireless LANs today.

“We are pursuing a combination of system design and circuit design, employing both analog and digital techniques,” Pinel said. “It's definitely a very exciting mixed-signal problem that you have to solve.”

Pinel is quick to point out that a multi-gigabit wireless system would present no health concerns as the transmitted power is extremely low, in the vicinity of 10 milliwatts or less and the 60 GHz frequency is stopped by human skin and cannot penetrate the body.

The team admits that the fact that multi-gigabit transmission is easily stopped means that line-of-sight is essential, and this could be a stumbling block in practical settings.

According Laskar, representatives of the ECMA International computer-standards organization met at GEDC in February to discuss a new international 60 GHz standard and again in October to finalize the technical decisions.

The IEEE, the leading international association of electrical engineers, is also weighing a 60 GHz standard, to be called 802.15.3C.

“The promise of multi-gigabit wireless is tremendous,” Laskar said. “The combination of short-range functionality and enormous bandwidth makes possible a whole range of consumer and business applications that promise great utility.”
http://pressesc.com/01184858412_multi_gigabit_wireless





A PC That Uses Less Energy, but Charges a Monthly Fee
John Markoff

Subscription-based personal computers are not a new idea — and never popular — but Grégoire Gentil and Alain Rossmann have devised a green twist.

This summer the pair will begin selling a simplified Linux-based PC for $99 and a $12.95 monthly subscription charge. They say that the deal is better than it looks because the 15-watt PC can save up to $10 a month in electricity compared with a standard 200-watt PC.

Their company is Zonbu, and the Zonbu computer will be sold through its Web site, zonbu.com. The founders said that the PC had received the highest certification possible from the Green Electronics Council, a nonprofit group that has created a product classification standard known as Epeat (for Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool).

The designation is meant to help consumers make educated choices when buying computer-related equipment and encourage electronics makers to build products that are more energy efficient and have a lower impact on the environment.

Zonbu said that it would be the first desktop computer for consumers to receive the gold rating.

The computer is the size of a cigar box and uses a low-power Intel-compatible microprocessor from VIA Technologies of Taiwan. It comes with four gigabytes of flash memory instead of a disk drive, a spinning mechanical part that uses much of a PC’s power. It also lacks a fan, another big energy user.

The Zonbu PC also uses a Gentoo version of the Linux operating system and will come with a range of software applications like the Mozilla Firefox browser, Skype voice-over-Internet service, OpenOffice software suite and many games. An additional 25 gigabytes of free online storage is available, with more offered for purchase.

Mr. Gentil, the chief executive and a Stanford-educated computer engineer, said that the idea for Zonbu came to him in his frustration over providing extensive computer support to his family in Paris and their various PCs.

“My father was crashing his Windows machine all the time,” Mr. Gentil said. That led him and Mr. Rossmann, a former Apple executive who has started many Silicon Valley companies, to pursue the possibility of creating an appliancelike computer tailored to consumers who have no computer expertise.

The two men think they can sell the PC the same way that cellphones are sold, subsidizing the cost of the hardware with the revenue from the monthly service charge.

“The market we want to target is the second PC in the home,” Mr. Gentil said. “If you want to give a PC to your kids or put it in the kitchen, this is a good candidate.”

Zonbu is based in Menlo Park, Calif. The system will lack a keyboard, mouse and monitor, which the company will sell as options. It plans to sell a version without a service fee to Linux software developers for $250, so that they will create more applications for the Zonbu PC.

The Linux operating system, once the province of computer enthusiasts, has now matured to the point where it could be a commercial rival to Windows and Macintosh, Mr. Gentil said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/te...y/16cheap.html





$298 Wal-Mart PC Features OpenOffice.org, No Crapware
Eric Bangeman

Looking to get a jump on the lucrative back-to-school shopping season, Wal-Mart has begun selling a sub-$300 PC. The Everex IMPACT GC3502 comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and OpenOffice.org 2.2 installed on a system that includes a 1.5GHz VIA C7 CPU, 1GB of DDR-2 SDRAM, an 80GB hard drive, a DVD burner, and integrated graphics, as well as a keyboard, mouse, and speakers.

The Everex machine will be competing for Wal-Mart shelf space with the low-cost Dells recently introduced to the world of brick-and-mortar sales. The retail giant currently sells the Dell Dimension E521 for $498 alone or bundled with a 19" LCD monitor and slightly faster Athlon 64 X2 CPU for $200 more.

Cost aside, the two centerpieces of the Everex offering are the inclusion of OpenOffice.org 2.2 and the absence of crapware typically bundled with low-cost PCs. Including OO.org instead of Microsoft Office or even Microsoft Works allowed the PC manufacturer to shave a few additional dollars off of the PC's price, and according to OO.org marketing project lead John McCreesh, the open-source office suite passed all of Everex's tests "with flying colors."

Users accustomed to being bombarded with trialware offers and seeing their would-be pristine Windows desktops littered with shortcuts to AOL and other applications will likely be pleased at their absence from the GC3502. "In creating the eco-friendly GC3602, our main focus was to build a no-compromise, back-to-school PC with all the software applications a typical student would require, without resorting to bundling frivolous trial versions or increasing prices 30 percent," said Everex product manager Eugene Chang.

While the price may be right for budget-conscious shoppers, the replacement of familiar brands like Intel, AMD, and Microsoft with VIA and OpenOffice.org may give some would-be buyers pause. And as the price and specs indicate, the machine is going to find itself on the very low end of the performance spectrum. That said, for basic word processing, e-mailing, listening to music, watching video, and web surfing, the machine should be adequate, and Windows Vista Home Basic doesn't have the graphical overhead of the other versions.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-crapware.html





Magnetic "Wobbles" Cause Disk Failure
Rene Millman

New research could lead to more reliable hard disks

Scientists have discovered one of the major causes of hard disk failure.

According to researchers working at the University of California and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, understanding certain types of disk drive failures, called magnetic avalanches, could help disk drive manufacturers produce more reliable storage.

Magnetic avalanches occur when a magnetic head hovers over a patch of disk drive causing the polarity of that part of the drive to change its alignment or spin. The patch's polarity in many magnetic materials changes in a haphazard series of large and small jumps that physicists liken to an avalanche - though the scientist's research showed it often behaves more like an explosion or runaway fire. These avalanches can cause sections of hard drive to lose data.

Research was carried by Joshua Deutsch, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Andreas Berger, who did the research while at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Deutsch said that the research paper, published in 13 July edition of Physical Review Letters, that the findings advanced knowledge of magnetic spin in drives.

"The big advance in this paper is that in previous models of avalanches, the spin just flips from up to down as soon as they apply a magnetic field, and they're done. But that's not the way spin behaves in the real world," Deutsch said.

The scientists said that previous models overlooked an effect called "spin precession", which each magnetic field exerts on its neighbours. The scientists likened each individual bit of information on a platter to a "tiny pincushion bristling with individual magnetic fields."

As the head of the drive nears, each pin wobbles in a widening circle - pointing neither up or down but somewhere in between - before it settles on its new polarity. They called that wobbling "precession" and said it resembled the way a spinning top draws out circles as it rotates.

"It takes around a few nanoseconds for a precession to die down," said Deutsch. "That's not that fast compared to computers today. It's not as fast as the timescale you get for a transistor to switch." During that brief time, each magnetic field contributes forces that affect the precession of neighbouring fields.

Combining all those wobbles adds up to a lot of energy that changes the polarity of neighbouring bits and spreads across the surface, causing sections of disk drive to be wiped out.

The researchers suggested that the reason these avalanches die out is that the magnetic material can dampen the wobbles. They said that materials that good damping abilities would make candidates for use in hard drives.

"Obviously, disk drive makers have already learned by an enormous amount of ingenuity and trial and error what materials make good disks," Deutsch said. "But now we understand a lot better one of the reasons why - because the materials are good at damping, and we can quantify how damping will stop runaway avalanches. We still can't calculate their damping, but at least we can measure it."
http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/120196/m...k-failure.html





Perfect for Lava lamps



Chameleon Liquid Could Outshine LCDs
Belle Dumé

A liquid that changes colour when exposed to a magnetic field could cheaply replace the colour components in conventional LCD monitors, claim US researchers.

The liquid contains tiny iron oxide particles coated with plastic. It is cheap and easy to make, and could also be used in flexible, rewritable, electronic paper, the researchers say.

Yadong Yin and colleagues at the Department of Chemistry at University of California, Riverside, US, created the liquid by coating particles of iron oxide – each about 100 nanometres in diameter – with a polymer and suspending the mixture in water.

The plastic coating means that each particle has a highly charged surface.

And, because the individual particles have the same charge, they repel each other in the solution. However, since iron oxide is also magnetic the particles will come together when exposed to a magnetic field.

Light fantastic

The opposing forces of electrostatic repulsion and magnetic attraction result in the particles arranging themselves into an ordered structure, known as a colloidal "photonic crystal".

The colloidal crystal reflects light because the spacing between neighbouring particles in the structure is equivalent to the wavelength of light. Also, tuning the spacing slightly alters the exact wavelength, or colour, of light that is reflected. This can easily be done by varying the strength of the magnetic field applied to the crystal.

The researchers did this in experiments simply by moving a magnet further away from, or closer to, the liquid. The crystal reflects brilliant colours from red to violet as the magnetic field strength increases. But, when the field is switched off, the crystal reverts back to its original brownish colour.

Better outdoors

"This is the first report of a photonic crystal that is fully tuneable in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum," says Yin.

"We see applications in various areas, including sensors, optical switches and flexible colour displays," he told New Scientist. "For example, the system can be used to make extra-large displays or posters to replace expensive LCD monitors. And, because the colour is based on reflection, it is better for outdoor applications than current LCD displays that perform poorly in direct sunlight."

A colour display would contain millions of small pixels made from the photonic crystals, explains Yin, with each pixel being assigned a different colour using a distinct magnetic field.

The crystals could also be sandwiched between two plastic sheets to form rewritable paper with a magnetic field acting as the "pen", he adds.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...hine-lcds.html





Podcasting Real Estate in Europe and Asia
Beth Gardiner

House and apartment listings that are read aloud so they can be loaded onto an iPod player for the morning commute; video tours of faraway villas, accessible with the click of a mouse. Video and audio file-sharing, technologies already so popular for entertainment and communications, are giving real estate buyers and sellers a variety of new tools for finding and marketing properties.

It is in American real estate that the sharing of audio and video files over the Internet has caught on most quickly — with video tours of homes now widely available — but property markets in the rest of the world also are beginning to embrace the idea.

The popularity of Apple’s iPod and other digital media players now has consumers comfortable with the idea of carrying their favorite audio — and, more recently, video — selections wherever they go. At the same time, the growth of Web sites like YouTube and of Internet podcasts of radio, television and online content has made uploading and downloading files routine for many people.

Real estate professionals say it is only natural that those selling and buying property — an activity that places a premium on obtaining and distributing information — are making use of new ways to reach out.

“You’re able to impart quite a lot of information in a podcast, and when it comes to property you need to do your research,” said Felicity Quigley of the British Web site buyassociation.co.uk. “It’s a very personal medium, it’s like radio, you can listen to it while you’re doing something else; you feel like they’re talking to you.”

The sluggishness of the American real estate market may be one reason why agents Stateside have embraced Internet video so enthusiastically, Ms. Quigley said. In markets like Britain, where sales are still flourishing, few see the need for an additional marketing tool, she said.

Also, the U.S. Multiple Listings system, which gives lots of agents access to the same properties, means that promotional videos will reach wider audiences there, making the investment worthwhile.

In Europe, Ms. Quigley predicted, “I think we’re going to see an explosion in the next 18 months of podcasting, videocasting.” She added, “People are going to become much more aware of online and using it as a tool, to see it as another way of marketing themselves, because that’s where things are going.”

Already, sites like BuyAssociation and the British-based nubricks.com offer downloadable, radio-style discussions of issues like the booming London housing market, buying retirement property overseas and “fly-to-let,” the purchase of faraway homes for vacation use and rental. In segments generally about a half-hour long, experts and journalists discuss the markets in places like Spain, Turkey, Morocco and Thailand for those who are thinking of buying there or are just curious.

In London and its suburbs, the Foxtons real estate agency offers daily audio downloads of an automated voice reading new listings, so would-be buyers can save themselves the trouble of trolling the company’s Web site at their desks.

And in many markets, agents and private sellers are offering video tours of properties for sale or rent, helping potential buyers and tenants to narrow down which homes they want to visit, to get a good idea of the housing stock in remote locations and even to share images with family or friends who cannot view the places in person.

Salespeople or owners trying to snag long-distance buyers use Internet video to promote entire regions, towns or neighborhoods, posting short clips designed, for example, to inform those in Europe about the advantages of investing in a particular part of Latin America.

A Place in the Sun, a Web site (a-place-in-the-sun.com) that offers homes for sale or rent in France, charges 500 euros, or $657, for a professionally made video, or allows owners or agents to post their own free of charge. Steve Carroll, a programmer for the site, says that customers love the online tours, and that homes with video tours in their listings usually sell or rent more quickly than others.

“There are so many rental properties available that you have to use something interesting to stand out a little bit,” he said. “The video, it stays in people’s minds.”

Mark Jones, of Staffordshire, in central England, was so impressed with a video on Countryside International’s Web site two years ago that he bought a vacation home in Orlando, Fla., through the international real estate agency without ever visiting the place.

Soon afterward, he set up his own Web-based business to help fellow Florida homeowners rent their properties, and he plans to start posting podcasts.

He said he and his wife had wanted to buy overseas but “weren’t really sure where, when and how to go about it.”

“We found it really useful to actually hear somebody talking about what we were thinking about doing,” he added.

The technical hurdles for getting started with podcasting are low. Adam Samuel, managing director of nubricks.com, said that once a would-be podcaster has a computer and an Internet connection, all that is needed to make audio shows is a microphone and headphone set, available for as little as $40, along with editing software that can be downloaded free.

At the other end of the spectrum, making sophisticated videos can require technical expertise and thousands of dollars in equipment and production programs. Some, like Mr. Jones, contract out such work to professionals.

Podcasting is most popular among the young, but enthusiasts say they have had little trouble introducing the technology to consumers over 35 — who are more likely to be buying and selling real estate.

“People who are pretty switched-on computerwise” are the ones finding podcasts on their own, said Graham Pyle, managing director of Countryside International. “But others see it if they’re pointed towards it.”

“Once you explain it,” he added, “even the middle-aged and older people become a little bit savvy, they like the idea.”

Still, not everyone is sold on the technology.

Leo Lapworth, Web manager at Foxtons in London, said he had heard a lot of unjustified hype about video tours, which his company is not planning to add as part of imminent improvements to its site.

“If I’m a buyer,” he said, “I don’t really need to see someone opening a cupboard door. What I need to see is the floor plan, the room-by-room descriptions, and that’s what’s going to help me decide whether I want to see the property or not.”

One region where podcasting has yet to catch on is Asia, which is often ahead of the rest of the world in embracing new technologies.

Most Hong Kong customers still prefer more traditional sources of real estate information, like newspapers, magazines and visits or phone calls to agents’ offices, said Gordon Tse of the Midland Realty agency in the city. Many buyers think personal contact might help them get a bargain, and a large network of agency offices encourages personal visits, he said.

Also, many Hong Kong people believe in the Chinese concept of feng shui, the harmonious arrangement of space, so they want to see the actual property rather than just video, Mr. Tse said.

The South China Morning Post, an English-language paper in Hong Kong, has just added a weekly property podcast to its Web site, but it is one of only a handful of outlets in the region to use the format. The paper’s technology editor, Michael Logan, said the podcast would most likely include video tours of particularly impressive homes and segments in which experts answer readers’ property questions.

Mr. Logan said there was a wealth of property information available in Hong Kong, with one source being cable television channels. So property video already exists, he said; “it just doesn’t exist on the Internet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/re...gh-london.html





Democracy Player is Dead, Long Live Miro
Steve O'Hear

Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) is an open-source Internet TV application that combines a media player and library, content guide, video search engine, as well as podcast and BitTorrent clients. Developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, Miro aims to make online video “as easy as watching TV”, while at the same time ensuring that the new medium remains accessible to everyone, through its support for open standards. Described by some as the “Firefox of media apps”, the resulting effort is a slick looking and easy-to-use application — not a mean feat when dealing in open-source methodology — that gives Apple’s iTunes (the default media player and video podcast client for many) a genuine run for its money.

At first glance, Miro’s appearance is similar to iTunes, in part because the application is very Mac-like (including the Windows and Linux versions). But also because both applications have a lot of overlap in terms of functionality. On the left hand-side column are buttons that give you access to the Miro guide (a directory of channels which you can subscribe to); online video search; your local video library; new content which has completed downloading but which you haven’t yet watched; and a view of what’s currently being downloaded.

Just below these options are any “channels” that you’re subscribed to. Channels are Miro’s name for RSS 2.0 feeds which utilize media enclosures, the format commonly used by video podcasts. In addition to the Miro player, the Participatory Culture Foundation also provides software and a website designed to make it easy to publish Miro-compatible channels.

When you first install the application, a number of examples channels are already setup, grouped into folders, such as “News and Tech”. Folders not only provide a way of keeping things organized, but they also enable you to aggregate a group of channels so that new videos play back one after the other. Playlists can also be created manually, based on any videos in your library.

At the bottom of the screen are Miro’s player controls, with the usual play/pause, stop, and skip, as well as the option to go full-screen.

Miro guide

Miro’s content guide is far better than the equivalent video podcast directory in iTunes. Not only does Miro list over 1,500 channels but it’s also better organized, with content filtered by popularity, editor picks, genre, tags, and language. There’s even a section dedicated to HD video.

Subscribing to a channel is a one-click affair, from which new content is downloaded automatically. You’re also given the option — via a simple drop-down menu — to grab all episodes listed in a channel (not just the most recent), or to switch off auto-download altogether — that way you can handpick certain videos, rather than downloading every future episode of a show.

Video search

Miro has a built-in search function which accesses content from YouTube, Veoh, Google Video, Blogdigger, Revver, DailyMotion, and Blip.tv. Videos that it appear in search results can then be downloaded but not streamed, which I found a little frustrating as it means waiting to view a YouTube video, for example. However, downloading makes a lot more sense in the context of this next feature: the ability to create a new channel based on a specific search result.

As an example, I created a new channel based on the latest videos from YouTube that have been tagged “iPhone”. By dowloading rather than streaming, videos remain viewable even if they are subsequently pulled from the originating site, and the user experience consistent with regular channels. However, a better solution might be to offer users both options in which previews are streamed, and videos from saved search results are downloaded.

Library

Miro’s “library” is where you can access any videos that have been downloaded, either manually or as part of a channel subscription. Additionally, the application can be used to manage virtually any video you have stored on your computer — Miro is compatible with most common video file types: DivX, Xvid, QuickTime, WMV, AVI etc — and you even have the option (found in “preferences”) to have Miro monitor particular folders on your hard drive, for any newly added videos.

BitTorrent support

As already mentioned, Miro has a built-in BitTorrent client so that you can subscribe to channels that use the peer-to-peer technology to lower the cost of distribution. (Evidence of the Participatory Culture Foundation’s mission to help create a level playing field for content producers.) It also means that Miro can be used to automatically download and watch television shows from file-sharing sites, which although not always legitimate, is useful none the less.

No iPod/AppleTV support

Unlike iTunes, Miro isn’t able to sync compatible video podcasts with an iPod, nor can it sync or stream content to the AppleTV (which is a real shame considering the application’s strong focus on HD content). Were Apple to open up its set-top-box to third party software developers, then a version of Miro that works with the AppleTV would make a lot of sense.

Verdict

Miro is quite possibly the best video “podcast” client and player out there. Its multi-format support, coupled with a very well thought out user interface, extensive content directory, and support for a number of popular video sharing sites, makes it a formidable Internet TV application.

What next?

The project currently has four full time and two part time developers, and the Participatory Culture Foundation recently received a donation from the Mozilla Foundation (makers of Firefox), bringing their total funding to just over 1.3 million dollars. A source close to the project told me that one new feature being considered is support for third-party plug-ins (ala Firefox), and this could be the key to Miro supporting hardware beyond the PC, such as set-top-boxes and media extenders (think Tivo, PS3 or XBox360) and portable media players (iPod or Zune).

Why the name change?

When Democracy Player launched back in February 2006, the feedback received was that the name evoked different, yet equally negative responses. For many Americans it conjured up an image of yet another left wing media project, and to the rest of the world it was, rather bizarrely, being associated with the policies of the Bush administration. In contrast, the new name is purposely abstract.
http://www.last100.com/2007/07/17/de...ong-live-miro/





Copyright Board Gives Go Ahead to iPod Levy
Michael Geist

The Copyright Board of Canada has released its decision on a series of motions contesting the latest attempt by the Canadian Private Copyright Collective to apply the private copying levy to iPods and removable memory storage cards. The proposed levy was challenged by the Canadian Storage Media Alliance and the Retail Council of Canada, who argued that the Federal Court had already struck down a previous levy on iPods (or more accurately digital audio recorders) as outside the Copyright Act. The CSMA and RCC argued that the Board had no jurisdiction to consider or approve the levy or alternatively that the CPCC should be prevented from proposing it.

The Board conducted hearings on the motions last month and has responded quickly with an emphatic rejection of the CSMA and RCC. Siding consistently with the CPCC, the Board has left little doubt that it believes that the earlier decision has not foreclosed the possibility of a levy on devices such as the iPod. In fact, the Board provides the clearest statement yet that it believes that the levy could be applied to any device, including cellphones and computers. At paragraph 70, the decision states:
CSMA expressed misgivings about the possibility that cellular phones and computers might end up being leviable. We see no inherent problem with this scenario. A thing that is ordinarily used by individual consumers to make private copies should not be excluded from the private copying regime for the sole reason that it has other uses. Indeed, all media that are currently subject to the levy can be used for purposes other than private copying."

The decision continues by stating that this interpretation is consistent with the intent of the Copyright Act and Parliament, concluding that "to rule that digital recorders are not audio recording media does not serve the purpose of the Act or that of Part VIII [the private copying provisions]. It instantly makes the conduct of millions of Canadians illegal, and even possibly criminal."

Today's decision will likely be appealed, though assuming it stands it will lead to new hearings on the private copying levy. Moreover, given the Board's view that the levy potentially applies to any device, including personal computers, it also provides further confirmation that peer-to-peer downloading is covered by the private copying levy. As I argued earlier this year (parts one and two), a levy to address P2P may make sense, yet the current approach, which could lead to levies on SD cards, doesn't work. If we're going to make P2P legal through a levy system, the system must (1) address both downloading and uploading; (2) consider addressing non-commercial use of content; (3) cover audio and video; and (4) more closely link the copying to those paying the levy. The government has yet to play its hand on this issue, but with the prospect of an unpopular levy and mounting pressure for a Canadian fair use provision, it will have to take a stand sometime soon.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2112/125/





The Harm Being Caused by DRM, and Those with their Heads in the Sand
Defective By Design

Using Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to lock down citizens is simply unethical. It strips us of our freedom to control the devices and computers we own. DRM sets a dangerous precedent for electronic monitoring of our society, and takes away the traditional rights we have had with the music and video we own.

We don't want these handcuffs on our society!

We have seen time and time again that DRM schemes just don't work as advertised. We are told that DRM will stop counterfeiting, but the organized crime rings responsible, continue to be unaffected by DRM. Citizens who do hand over money to purchase music and video from Big Media are the only ones penalized by DRM. Yet despite all the evidence of how quickly DRM schemes like HD-DVD and BluRay are cracked - these individuals from the technology, media, and entertainment industries still hold out hope of putting bigger handcuffs on us, or devising more complex big brother monitoring schemes. This is why they lobby for copyright extension, and legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that makes circumventing a DRM scheme - to be in control of your computer - a crime.

DRM hucksters keep on selling them on the idea that DRM is the answer, and because the alternative - accepting that DRM is unethical and broken, doesn't fit their desires to keep us locked to their channel, they, like the proverbial ostrich, just stick their heads in the sand and continue to lead themselves and society astray.

But what if there was a way to guarantee that you could lock down citizens - that you could build an impregnable DRM scheme to control and monitor what we do with digital files? That all our computers could be owned by the entertainment industry. Would they do it? What about the cost to society? Would they care?

Take Action Now: You emails will go straight to the source...
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/act...eir_heads_sand





ISPs Now Have A Cost-Effective Solution To Eliminate P2P Piracy and Reduce Bandwidth Consumption
Press Release

SafeMedia provides the only solution on the market guaranteed by a hold harmless agreement from any lawsuits related to copyright infringement on a network where their products are properly installed," said Pasquale Giordano, President & COO, SafeMedia Corp., Boca Raton, Fl.

Hollywood, Calif, & Boca Raton, Fla. (Billboard Publicity Wire/PRWEB ) July 17, 2007 -- Recent court action and the nation's largest ISP provider brings the spotlight on one of the country's only business solution to prevent piracy. A recent Judge's ruling holding a Belgium ISP responsible for installing a technical solution to block or filter Illegal P2P networks and the announcement by AT&T that they will police copyrighted materials distributed over illegal P2P networks, brings more attention to the need for SafeMedia's P2P Disaggregator (P2PD) solution to stop P2P Piracy.

"ISPs are now recognizing the potential legal liability in addition to the enormous cost of excessive bandwidth usage from P2P file sharing networks and that they require a solution that addresses both complete protection and bandwidth reduction," said Pasquale Giordano president & COO, SafeMedia Corporation. "Only our solutions stop contaminated P2P file sharing, protect user privacy, reduce bandwidth consumption from contaminated P2P networks and provide a network that is safe for the legal distribution of media."

SafeMedia's portable solutions safely drop all contaminated P2P network traffic rendering the contaminated P2P network useless. It does this without reading the content of files and without violating user privacy. The company maintains the world's largest dictionary of P2P software characteristics and updates their installed solutions every three hours to reflect changing protocols or signatures of contaminated P2P networks.

SafeMedia provides the only solution on the market guaranteed by a hold harmless agreement from any lawsuits related to copyright infringement on a network where SafeMedia's products are properly installed.

"We believe that stopping the illegal sharing of copyrighted files is crucial and can only be accomplished at the network level by isolating contaminated P2P networks at the source of their content. Those companies that attempt to "read" user transmissions are prying into the personal and business data of users which might result in further legal liability for invasion of privacy," said Pasquale Giordano, President of SafeMedia Corporation.

Giordano also noted that, "Solutions that attempt to read files are easily circumvented via encryption which is wildly used in P2P applications in addition to negatively impacting the performance of a network. Our solution is effective with encrypted and non encrypted transmissions and never affects the performance of the network or the user."

P2P Disaggregator Product Line

P2P Disaggregator was designed with maximum portability enabling deployment across the broadest variety of end-user sites, either integrated into network devices installed in user locations such as DSL and cable edge routers/modems, or subnet edge routers and concentrators, or as an independent network appliance.

Product Deployment Connectivity

SafeDSL Integrated on chip xDSL
SafeCABLE Integrated on chip Cable Modem
SafeNET Integrated on chip T1 to OC198 Network
Clouseau Network appliance T1 to 10 Gig Network

SafeDSL
With SafeDSL, P2PD technology has been successfully integrated into DSL/ADSL/SDSL network devices installed in end-user edge routers and modems. SafeDSL significantly reduces residential DSL provider Internet traffic as much as 65% by preventing user upload and download to P2P networks which contains illegal copyrighted files. SafeDSL is compatible across all manufacturers of these devices, and with all DSL service providers.

SafeCABLE
SafeCABLE is the integration of SafeMedia Corporation’s Peer to Peer Disaggregator technologies into cable network devices installed in end-user edge routers and modems. SafeDSL significantly reduces residential cable modem provider Internet traffic as much as 65% by preventing user upload and download to P2P networks which contains illegal copyrighted files. SafeCABLE is compatible across all manufacturers of these devices, and with all cable modem broadband service providers.

SafeNET
With SafeNET, P2PD technology is integrated into network devices supporting T1 and higher network capacities, and manufactured by companies such as Cisco, D-Link, Foundry Networks, Q com Technology Inc., Fujian Star-net Communication Ltd, and Aztech Systems Ltd. SafeNET reduces network traffic as much as 65-80%, depending on location, by preventing user uploads and downloads to P2P networks that contain illegal copyrighted files. SafeNET is compatible across all network devices.

CLOUSEAU
CLOUSEAU is the integration of SafeMedia Corporation’s P2PD into network appliances deployed on end-user subnets. CLOUSEAU connects to any subnet no matter how the network is configured, and supports wired or wireless, fiber or gigabit subnets. CLOUSEAU is available at three different price and performance levels to accommodate the widest variety of customer bandwidth-level needs ranging from CLOUSEAU 10 appropriate for small enterprises with up to 20 users, 100Mbit (10/100 Ethernet) networks and T1 connectivity; to CLOUSEAU 500 appropriate for enterprises with up to 100 users with 1-2 Gigabit (10/100/1000) Ethernet lines; to CLOUSEAU 1000 for large enterprises where 10 Gigabit network throughputs are required. CLOUSEAU significantly reduces network Internet traffic by as much as 65-80% by preventing user file upload and download participation in contaminated P2P networks.

Copyright Holders Solution to Internet Privacy

Dream weavers, heart breakers, magic makers, you’re the people who transform us. Because of you, we have something to sing about in our showers, spend hours blasting aliens, and laugh ‘til it hurts in darkened rooms. What you do is not easy. Magic never is. It takes time and money and missed dinners with your significant other and running out of excuses. It takes talent and skill. It takes something out of you. And you need and deserve to be compensated and rewarded for the magic you do. Even wizards need to eat. And eat well if they’re really good wizards.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who think stealing your work is OK. Stealing their work is not OK. Just stealing yours. And they’ve cut a hole in your pocket and its leaking money. Your money. Money for you. Money for your significant other. Money for your kids. Your money.

And the best solution, until now, has been the prosecution of a very small number of all the thieves out there. And that’s the best that you can do. You are never going to catch and prosecute them all just like you’re never going to catch and prosecute all the litter bugs, speeders and jaywalkers. And these thieves, even if they once in a while have a little twinge of conscience, think of what they’re doing as no more harmful than crossing in the middle of the block or throwing a gum wrapper on the sidewalk.

Laws don’t help. Not much anyway. Warnings help even less. And prosecution? Well, catch me if you can. That’s it. Until now.

Now we have the perfect solution "Clouseau™". The technology makes it impossible to transmit copyright protected material on the Internet via P2P. Impossible. Not unlikely. Not improbable. Impossible.

Clouseau™ is what’s known as a ‘network appliance’ and it gets plugged into a computer system exactly like the one you’d find in a college. Before you plug it in…illegal P2P. After you plug it in…no P2P.

And, in techie terms, its ‘bulletproof’. You cannot hack it or destroy it. It cannot censor anything. It can only discriminate between legal and illegal. It cannot violate anyone’s privacy. And no First Amendment issues.

What You Can Do

So how do you get the technology deployed into computer systems? How do you stop the thieves? How do you force compliance?

Speak out. Make yourself heard. Call the RIAA and the MPAA. Call your union steward. Call your agent. Call the media. Call your Congress person. You’re a wizard. People listen to wizards. They really do.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/7/prweb540305.htm





Internet Phone Company Halts Operations
Matt Richtel

SunRocket, an Internet telephone company, has ceased operations and is moving its customers to one or more other companies, according to a person briefed on its status.

A recording on SunRocket’s customer service line said the company “is no longer taking customer service or sales calls.” Executives of SunRocket, which was founded in 2004 and is based in Vienna, Va., could not be reached for comment.

Telecommunications industry analysts said the development highlights the struggles of start-ups trying to offer telephone service over the Internet.

These start-ups face enormous competitive pressure from the biggest players in the telecommunications industry, both cable and traditional telephone companies. The cable companies in particular have made a strong push into the telephone market by offering the service as part of a product bundle with television and Internet access.

The start-ups, like SunRocket and Vonage, the best known of the group, tend to offer a single product, and they do not have the same power as the larger companies to control quality of service because they do not operate their own telecommunications lines, said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at Pali Research in New York.

In April, SunRocket announced that it had reached 200,000 subscribers and said the milestone was a testament to consumers’ embrace of Internet telephony, which allows telephone calls to be transmitted as data over the Internet. One of SunRocket’s main pitches to potential customers was its offer of $199 for a year of unlimited calling to the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.

Vonage, which went public last year, was a pioneer in the commercialization of the technology. But its fortunes have floundered too, along with its stock, which has been on a steady slide over the last year, closing Wednesday at $2.95.

Alan Bezoza, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., said Vonage had continued to add subscribers, but the cost of attracting them had put the company deep into the red. He said that in its first quarter this year, Vonage added 166,000 customers, but lost $73 million. The start-ups “are going up against the marketing muscle of very large companies, like cable and telecom companies,” Mr. Bezoza said.

Mr. Bezoza said that he believed that stand-alone Internet telephone companies could wind up as successful niche players in the market, but their investors would have to be willing to endure a substantial period of losses before they built enough of a customer base to be profitable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/bu...rocket.html?hp





Truphone Lands a Hefty Blow for VoIP
Andrew Lim

Making cheap calls over the Internet using your mobile phone and VoIP software is Truphone's business, and while most UK network operators don't object to people blabbering over Truphone's service, this wasn't possible on the T-Mobile network. Truphone subsequently took T-Mobile to court, accusing the network of "preventing the launch of the Truphone service" and "abusing its dominant position" by not routing calls to Truphone users.

In an unexpected interim judgement, Deputy High Court Judge Robin Knowles QC yesterday instructed T-Mobile to route calls to Truphone numbers by Monday 23 July, so it can provide its service while the case is heard. According to Truphone, this is the first time interim relief has been awarded against a mobile network operator under the Competition Act.

The implications of this ruling could have a profound effect, as Truphone CEO James Tagg pointed out in a press release. "The injunction is good news not only for Truphone but for every company trying to develop Internet-era services and for every consumer wanting freedom of choice and lower prices. We are determined to bring better-value mobile calls, text messages and other innovative services to mobile phone users, and it's right that we should not be prevented from doing so."

It's important to point out that this isn't a final ruling and although the first battle has been won, the war is far from over. Truphone now has to take T-Mobile to court for a full hearing of the case and if Truphone loses, the injuction would be lifted and it would probably be blocked once more. Of course, you might be wondering, does it matter if only one network blocks Truphone? Well, yes it does.

If VoIP services on mobile phones are going to succeed and we're all going to be calling each other for free, the networks have to allow it. If one network is allowed to say no, then the service becomes almost pointless, as you won't be able to contact anyone on that particular network. More importantly, all the other networks will be able to prevent VoIP applications as well -- none of them want to allow VoIP, but they have been wary of banning it. So the ruling in this case could be a landmark one, as it will potentially create a legal precedent regarding VoIP services on mobile networks. Definitely something to keep an eye on if you value cheap mobile calls.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/0,39...9291657,00.htm





Charting the $480 Billion US Spectrum Giveaway
Nate Anderson

Critics of US spectrum policy will have plenty of ammunition for their howitzers after reading the new working paper from J.H. Snider of the New America Foundation. Snider heads up the Wireless Future Program at New America, and his paper offers an inside look at the sometimes-dirty world of spectrum lobbying, which Snider characterizes as responsible for a $480 billion giveaway from the public treasury.

The giveaway in question comes after Congress passed legislation in 1993 requiring the FCC to hold auctions for future spectrum licenses, a move that was itself prompted by a massive giveaway of prime spectrum in the late 1980s. Using the high end of his estimate (which ranges from $140 to $480 billion), Snider observes that the giveaway in question amounted to "more than 90 percent of the value of spectrum usage rights [the government] has assigned from 1993 through the present."

The giveaway that Snider's talking about isn't a massive grant of free spectrum to corporate interests; instead, it's something much more subtle and far more difficult for the public to understand. To understand why Snider considers this a "giveaway," let's first look at the difference between the amount of money the government has actually received for licenses since 1993 and the amount of money that such licenses are worth.

The FCC has taken in no more than $40 billion from auction licenses in the last 15 years, but Snider digs into SEC filings from the companies that own such licenses. These companies are required to estimate the value of these assets each year; in 2006, the major television and radio broadcasters, along with the major local phone companies, estimated that the value of their spectrum was $177 billion for the licenses in question (and this may be low, given Snider's own calculations). Where did the $140 billion difference come from? Snider argues that it did not come from the "changing conditions of supply and demand." Instead, it tended to come from the ways that licenses were modified after they were issued, almost always in favor of the license owner.

This is where spectrum lobbyists enter the picture. They generally follow a four-step program to secure lucrative rights to spectrum: 1) create a problem, 2) outline a solution complete with a "public interest" promise, 3) secure a license and increased negotiating power against the government, and 4) exploit that enhanced power to renegotiate the terms of the license. The "public interest" pitches are predictable, usually involving variations on the terms "public safety," "free TV," "universal broadband," "educational programming," etc.

Snider doesn't say it, but this sounds a bit like the current pitch for reduced-price 700MHz spectrum by Frontline Wireless, which is itself backed by a former FCC Commissioner and wants to help serve "public safety."

Once a company has a license in hand, it's difficult for the federal government to get it back and easier for the company to convince the FCC to broaden the initial terms of the license without requiring any more money. Snider outlines a whole host of strategies that lobbyists use—the spilled milk strategy, the technobabble strategy, the go-slow strategy, the Louisiana Purchase strategy—and this part of the report actually makes the most interesting reading (it also contains the best titles).

Even if the giveaway numbers are less than Snider's lowest estimate, he points out that they would still be huge. "If Representative Jefferson can be indicted for accepting bribes of less than $1 million," he writes, "and an average citizen can be thrown in jail for attempting to walk out of a government building with a decrepit chair worth five dollars, then surely a giveaway of public assets of at least $10 billion deserves careful public scrutiny to ensure that the conditions that cause it do not persist."

There are a host of things that can be done to clean up the situation. New rules to track changes to spectrum rights can help, as can rules that would limit the revolving door between the FCC and industry. Such reforms "will be very difficult and require leadership at the highest levels," Snider says, and he ends the report by calling for leaders "with the vision and courage to make it happen." Any takers up in Washington?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-giveaway.html





Google's Gargantuan Wireless Bid Puts FCC on the Spot
Scott Moritz

Google is flexing its muscle in the mobile broadband business.

The company said Friday it would bid for $4.6 billion worth of wireless spectrum at a coming federal airwave auction -- but only if the Federal Communications Commission adopts so-called open standards for a speedy wireless broadband alternative to existing phone and cable Internet connections.

A key point of Google's proposal would involve a so-called open devices licensing condition, under which the FCC would mandate that consumers be enabled to use any wireless device on any company's network. The telcos who run the big existing networks oppose this concept.

Google's bold move comes just a day after the Mountain View, Calif., Net giant disappointed Wall Street with mixed second-quarter numbers. Google shares tumbled 7% in late trading Thursday and were maintaining that level Friday morning, down $36.10 to $512.40.

Google has been very interested in the 700MHz air waves, which are being vacated by analog UHF TV broadcasters who have been forced to move to digital signals. The newly available spectrum offers a prime swath of wireless real estate where the frequencies are particularly conducive to data transmission and can travel through walls.

The Federal Communications Commission is overseeing the auction and Chairman Kevin Martin has called the 700MHz band an opportunity for a "third pipe" and a "national wireless broadband alternative."

In recent months, Google has been busy trying to guide the FCC's policies on the auction and on the use of the spectrum. Google says its analysis suggests that conventional wireless players like AT&T and Verizon have a big advantage in the auction and the imperative to consolidate the new spectrum.

In a letter to the FCC on July 9, Google attorney Richard Whitt stressed that the company was interested in the new wireless opportunities the radio waves could open up.

"The 700 MHz auction may well be the FCC's most important wireless-related action for many years, because it could lead to the introduction of new facilities-based providers of broadband services, wielding new business models," Whitt wrote.

On Friday, Google reiterated its interest in the auction but said it will bid only if the FCC adopts four types of "open" platforms as part of the license conditions, including one that would allow consumers to choose a device and use it on any network.

One way or another, Google is planning on getting involved with the so-called fourth generation wireless or 4G business. If Google acquires a slice of the radio waves it will likely push an open platform approach and act as a wholesaler allowing other companies to resell a variety of services.

"Whether we ultimately bid, and do so successfully, we are also considering various post-auction business arrangements, such as joint partnerships and anchor tenancy," Whitt wrote.

A pricey dive into the wireless auction could put more pressure on expenses and further hurt the stock, says one money manager who is short the stock. By some estimates, if Google won spectrum, it would face as much as $6 billion in additional expenses as it builds a national wireless network infrastructure.
http://www.thestreet.com/s/googles-w...l?puc=googlefi





AT&T Softens Position on Open Access Spectrum

Company's new interpretation of what the FCC auction rules would allow riles some, pleases others
Grant Gross

AT&T Inc. has backed away from earlier complaints about proposed open-access rules on parts of the 700MHz spectrum to be auctioned by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission by early next year.

Draft auction rules floated by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin have "struck an interesting and creative balance between the competing interests" that are lobbying the commission, AT&T said of its understanding of those rules in a statement Wednesday.

Just last Thursday, AT&T Vice President Robert Quinn had written the FCC saying the so-called Google plan for open-access rules for part of the auctioned spectrum "would turn the clock back on a decade of bipartisan consensus on the proper approach to wireless deregulation."

In addition, open-access rules could expose the FCC "to a reversal in the courts," with lawsuits delaying the auction winner from using the spectrum, Quinn wrote on July 12. The open-access proposals would diminish the value of the spectrum and amount to "corporate welfare," AT&T said.

Since then, AT&T has gained a better understanding of Martin's draft auction rules proposal, AT&T said Wednesday. Martin's proposal, as AT&T now understands it, would "allow" the auction winner to experiment with some open access rules, Jim Cicconi, AT&T's senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs, said in a statement.

"The plan would enable the introduction of an alternative wireless business model without requiring changes in the business models of AT&T and others in what is a highly competitive wireless industry," Cicconi added.

Google Inc. and several consumer groups have called for open-access rules on a portion of the 60MHz of spectrum to be auctioned. Under open-access rules, auction winners would be prohibited from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors, and they would have to connect to any wireless devices customers wanted. In addition, under open-access rules proposed by Public Knowledge and other groups, the auction winner would have to sell spectrum access to competitors at wholesale prices.

Open-access rules are needed to encourage a third national broadband competitor to the large cable and telecom carriers, the groups have said.

"We urged the commission not to rely on a status quo approach to the upcoming auction," wrote Richard Whitt, Google's telecom and media counsel, in a letter to the FCC July 9. "Rather, the agency must do what is necessary to bring about robust forms of ... broadband competition."

Public Knowledge, a digital rights group, has said Martin's draft rules don't go far enough. While Martin wants device portability and no blocking of Web applications, he hasn't called for wholesale access to the spectrum. Without wholesale access, it's unlikely a third broadband service could challenge cable and telecom services, Public Knowledge has said.

Art Brodsky, communications director for Public Knowledge, called the new AT&T position a "remarkable turnaround."

But Randolph May, president of the conservative think tank, The Free State Foundation, said he disagrees with AT&T's interpretation of what the auction rules would allow.

"My impression (perhaps erroneously) had been that Chairman Martin's proposal would mandate an open access ... regime in the one block [of the spectrum]," May wrote in an e-mail. "There is a significant difference between 'allowing' and 'mandating.' My understanding is that absent a mandate, nothing at all in any existing or proposed FCC rule would prevent the winning bidder from voluntarily adopting an open access business model."
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/...osition_1.html





Broadband Data Improvement Act Clears Senate Commerce Committee
Nate Anderson

Congress has at last taken an interest in a seemingly arcane debate over the metrics used by the FCC and is moving on the issue with surprising speed. For years, geeks have criticized the way that the agency collects broadband information, focusing especially on the fact that the bar for "broadband" is set laughably low (200Kbps) and that if one person in a ZIP code has access, then the entire ZIP code is considered "served." The Broadband Data Improvement Act hopes to remedy some of these problems, and it has just unanimously cleared the Senate Commerce Committee.

The bill, should it pass the broader Senate and House, would force the FCC to make a couple of major changes to the way that it puts together its broadband information. For one thing, the agency is directed to come up with a new metric for "second generation broadband," defined as being the minimum speed needed to stream full-motion, high-definition video.

The FCC also needs to get far more granular with its reporting, switching from the use of simple ZIP codes to the far more specific ZIP+4 codes. That may still not appease everyone, but it will greatly increase the quality of data from large, yet sparsely populated areas that might share a zip, but not the full ZIP+4. Arguably, it is these areas that need study the most.

The idea is that, unless policymakers have good data to work with, they are likely to end up making poor policy. Passage of the bill out of committee has already drawn praise from Free Press, one of the groups that has lobbied hard for the bill and has appeared at committee hearings where it was discussed.

Free Press policy director Ben Scott said, "For too long, policymakers have been forced to operate in the dark, relying on misleading and sometimes inaccurate information about the U.S. broadband market. By providing detailed information about the deployment, availability and use of broadband services in this country, the Broadband Data Improvement Act promises to bring us one step closer to our shared goal of universal, affordable broadband."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...committee.html





MPAA to FCC: Net Neutrality Could Kill a Cornucopia of Content (Monitoring)
Nate Anderson

We pointed out yesterday that the FCC's Notice of Inquiry regarding network neutrality has attracted nearly 27,000 comments, most from individuals and small businesses. But plenty of major players submitted comments, too, including a host of organizations that don't deal directly with Internet routing issues at all. Case in point: the Motion Picture Association of America, whose comments have appeared online at the FCC's site today.

The MPAA is concerned that network neutrality rules might bring an end to such beloved technologies as digital watermarking, deep packet inspection, acoustic fingerprinting, and content filtering of all kinds. The group is careful to state that it does not have a formal position on the broader network neutrality debate, but it does want to ensure that promising filtering technologies are not made illegal as a side effect of any regulation.

For those confused by the astonishing range of discussions all grouped beneath the "network neutrality" umbrella, take heart: the MPAA can't define it, either. In fact, they admit in a footnote that their restraint on the issue is "in part due to the difficulty of understanding exactly what is meant by the term; different participants start from different premises, and there is no agreed-upon set of definitions."

The MPAA's concern is not with winning any sort of broad ideological ground in the debate over how the Internet should work, but to make sure that ISPs can "manage their networks to protect intellectual property in order to best serve the interests of content creators and the content-consuming public." Actually, the last five words of that sentence could just be left off with no damage to accuracy, but at least the MPAA is paying lip service to consumer concerns.

They're certainly right to be worried about the potential impact of any network neutrality regulations on things like deep packet inspection (look for our feature next week on the topic and how it ties into the network neutrality debate), though again everything depends upon exactly what is meant by "network neutrality." Going beyond the specific technologies listed above, the MPAA believes that ISPs need to have the right to control traffic shaping, quality of service guarantees, latency, and bandwidth hogging—all of special concern when it comes to regulating P2P traffic.

In the end, the group concludes that "it would be Pyrrhic indeed to adopt a set of principles asserting that consumers have a right to a cornucopia of excellent content, but fail to provide an environment in which such content can actually exist." A neutral network, it seems, might not be such a place. Sure, this is FUD—no evidence is presented that content owners and a neutral net can't coexist, and iTunes has been serving up plenty of content for years—but it sounds pretty dire.

But the MPAA rightly notes that piracy on the Internet is alive and well. When it comes to actively stopping such piracy, Solveig Singleton of the Progress & Freedom Foundation agrees with the MPAA; network neutrality "may hamper efforts to control piracy like spam [i.e., in the manner that spam is controlled], by impeding traffic carried by or through disreputable ports of call."

Perhaps, to illustrate these points, the MPAA should get the message out in a more effective way. Maybe a feature film? Network Neutrality: Conqueror of Cornucopias of Content and General Destroyer of Worlds should clean up nicely at the summer box office.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...f-content.html





Does Comcast Hate Macs?
David Cassel

They're the largest ISP in America. And they hate Macs. And the Firefox browser. At least, that's the impression you get from Comcast's installation procedure — and clues scattered across their home page.

Last month Dave Winer noted that Comcast's installation procedures require the use of Internet Explorer. Another Comcast user makes the same complaint. "They helpfully provide you with a CD that has a custom Comcast-branded version of IE5 for the Mac, because Apple hasn't shipped a Mac in quite a few years that has IE5 on it by default."

Even Comcast's web page shows an apparent bias against Mac users — or anyone not using Internet Explorer. When you click the page's "Games" hyperlink, an error message pops up, warning that the site "is not optimized for Firefox browsers or Macs."

"Our site is optimized for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher, on Windows Operating System."

The web contains other stories — including one from a user group for Apple fans. One Mac owner reports he'd called Comcast to troubleshoot his cable modem. Comcast's technician told him he knew "nothing about *&@#$ing Macs,"eventually disappearing into his truck. By the time the technican returned, the customer had repaired the cable modem himself with a phone call to Comcast's support line.Now I'm afraid to ask how Comcast handles Linux….
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...ast-hate-macs/





Police Excuse Angry Computer User for Outburst

A German man who startled his neighbors when he hurled his computer out of the window in the middle of the night, was let off for disturbing the peace by police who sympathized with his technical frustrations.

Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday.

Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was.

Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer.

"Who hasn't felt like doing that?" said a police spokesman.

While escaping any official sanction the man was made to clear up the debris.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...74877020070717





The Mini-Penis Scandal

US Publisher Turns away from Cartoon Nudity
Franziska Bossy and Elke Schmitter

The drawings are harmless really. But a US publisher has decided not to publish a series by children's book author Rotraut Susanne Berner. The problem? Cartoon breasts and a half-millimeter-long willy.

It is rare that a German book generates any interest in the United States. And children's books are usually completely off the radar. The delight was thus all the greater at the Hildesheimer Gerstenberg publishing house when a query came in from the American children's book purveyor Boyds Mills Press for a series by Rotraut Susanne Berner.

"It was really a sensation," Berner told SPIEGEL ONLINE. At first. As it turned out, there were a couple of changes that had to be made before the books could be unleashed on the America public. First off, smokers had to be removed from the illustrations. But that wasn't all.



One image shows a scene from an art gallery -- and for realism's sake, there is a cartoonish nude hanging on the wall along with a tiny, seven-millimeter-tall statue of a naked man on a pedestal.

American kiddies, obviously, could never be expected to handle such a depiction of the human body. The US publisher, somewhat awkwardly, asked if they could be removed.

The author, not surprisingly, considers the request to be absurd. The statue's mini-willy, the author points out, is hardly even a half-millimeter long. And the naked woman hanging on the wall? Hardly a realistic depiction of the female anatomy. The US publisher, says Berner, was embarrassed to ask for the changes, but they were even more afraid of how American mommies and daddies might react if junior were exposed to such pornography.

For the author, any kind of self-censorship was completely out of the question. She said she could maybe have lived with putting black bars in front of the problem spots, but "invisible censorship" was out. "If you're going to censor something, then the reader should be aware of it," she told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

But the US publisher would have none of it -- after all, one hardly wants to call attention to one's own deletions. Meaning, that the Hildesheimer publishing house will have to forego the honor of being published in the US -- and American children are safe from shocking German sensibilities.

Many children in the rest of the world, however, have already been exposed. Berner is one of the best-known contemporary children's book authors. And the series, which playfully follows the daily life of children and adults through the four seasons, is already a bestseller in 13 countries from Japan to the Faroe Islands. So far, no other country has been overly concerned about the cartoon boobies and mini-penis, Berner said.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...493856,00.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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