[JackSpratts]

"This isn't about $10 million going between this movie star and that movie star, and wiretapping. It's about little people being pushed around." – Linda Doucett


"Hollywood has to stop making movies out of television shows. They need to take more risks, people want more stories — and they need to make movies for all of us." – Jeffrey Frank


"Right now, people are doing all sorts of things on the Internet for the good of the community — it's like volunteering. The question is, In what ways will [cash] change the willingness of people to help? In this way I actually worry." – Dan Ariely


"If it's just about some ancillary reward, you're introducing an externality that degrades the value of the [Internet] community itself. It undermines that whole model." – Robert J. Markey


"Many users who hope to make a lot of money creating [Internet] content will probably be disappointed. All content is not created equally." – Chris Charron


"The $14.95 D.S.L. product is so slow that it shouldn't be legal to call it broadband." – Thomas M. Rutledge


"Hey, if you lose this land-based phone the person who finds it will never return it because he can get free television." – Seo Young Bae


"We're also into educating people about the consequences of piracy. We're teaching them how to do it." – Brokep


"You always have to buy some new software to make it juicier. What kind of juice would I be getting out of it? Nothing." – Grace Puente


"It shouldn't surprise you that a system that is designed to be manufactured as cheaply as possible is designed with no security constraints whatsoever." – Peter Neumann

















Twisted Flix

The Justice department announced the arrests this week of a couple of dozen people on child pornography charges. The accused allegedly swapped movies of kids engaged in activities with other kids as well as with adults. In a bit of a twist it seems that some of the kids made the movies themselves, getting an early start on their own budding porn careers apparently, although in other cases the adults handled the cameras. According to officials the content was traded on instant messaging platforms, and on "peer-to-peer" networks. Because these nets are transparent I’ve always been suspicious of claims they were hot-beds of kiddie-porn, still, according to the New York Times the perpetrators used encryption and other means to shield themselves from investigators. Well whatever they used it didn’t work, and I’m confident there isn’t that much activity of this sort on file-sharing networks - this bizarre example not withstanding. If anything, by it’s unusual nature the bust reaffirms my conviction that P2P networks are essentially free of child pornography and remain safe and vibrant vehicles for sharing and socializing.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is dancing it’s annual twist about diminishing movie receipts, down now for three years and counting, and as usual they’re trying to finger file-sharers or anyone and everything but their own tired products. They want more laws of course and I’d laugh…but it isn’t funny. What’s different this time are the reactions from theater owners. They’re not whining about piracy and kids recording movies with portable video cameras, known as "Cams" on file-trading networks and infamous for their rock-bottom quality. No siree, the owners want better product from Hollywood. Wow, there’s a radical idea. If all they can sell at the evening show are four tickets, they know better than most that the other 296 potential attendees aren’t skipping a glorious theatrical production for some dinky downloads at home. Something else is going on.

Now I for one wouldn’t mind if the kids at the local bijou cammed my flicks. Far from threatening, I’d find it kind of flattering, all these junior cinéastes dragging themselves to the movies to surreptitiously scan my stuff, and maybe piecing it together in radical new ways, but regardless of one’s position on the issue there is an essential disparity of justice when movie executives hijack the political process for the creation of entirely new felonies, simply to divert attention from their flawed management practices.

This is in essence a distraction, a cover-up of the real problem (which is years of bad production decisions) and it's wrong.

If staring at a shaky Cam with murky images and garbled audio on a diminutive home PC screen actually threatens today’s high tech movie industry with it’s Dolby digital 7.1 surround-sound and it’s dense, high-definition film stocks, then clearly the fundamental problem of diminishing theater attendance goes way beyond piracy. When the explosive Big-Screen Experience has become so irrelevant they have to pass laws to get their ambivalent audiences inside their auditoriums, they need to back up and figure out where they went off the road. Banning cell-phone cameras in cinemas won’t fix it, indeed, it ignores it, and in so doing encourages the situation to deteriorate further. Ultimately this helps no one.

Politicians should not be in collusion with movie executives supporting the negligent practices of a myopic industry, especially when it's at the expense of the people they are elected to represent.
















Enjoy,

Jack




















March 18th, ’06





DRM kills the video stars

Sony Postpones PlayStation 3 Release
Yuri Kageyama

Sony will put off the release of its much awaited PlayStation 3 console until November from its planned spring debut because of delays in finalizing its next-generation optical disc technology, the company said Wednesday.

Ken Kutaragi, the head Sony's video games division, made the announcement at a hastily called news conference after reports of the delay surfaced in the business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun and other papers.

The PlayStation 3 is critical for Sony Corp.'s profits and brand image, so the delay is a major setback for the Japanese electronics and entertainment company as it struggles to mount a recovery after several years of poor earnings.

The reports sent Sony's stock tumbling 1.8 percent to 5,470 yen ($46) Wednesday. Kutaragi announced the decision after the close of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

The new timeline means that the PlayStation 3 will still hit store shelves simultaneously in Japan, North America and Europe, just in time for Christmas.

Kutaragi said Sony is still trying to finalize the copyright protection technology and other standards for the Blu-ray DVD disc, the format for PlayStation 3, and next-generation video for the company's electronics gadgets in the works.

"I'd like to apologize for the delay," Kutaragi said at a Tokyo hotel. "I have been cautious because many people in various areas are banking on the potential of the next-generation DVD."

Blu-ray preparations were initially to have been completed by last September, but now won't be finalized until next month, he said.

The delay comes at a time when competition in next-generation game consoles is heating up with U.S. software maker Microsoft Corp. already putting the Xbox 360 on sale last year. Nintendo Co., the Japanese manufacture of Game Boy machines and Pokemon and Super Mario game software, is also planning its version called Revolution later this year.

The PlayStation series is now the dominant brand for home consoles, helping support Sony's bottom line in recent years, and controlling about 60 percent of the global market, according to Kutaragi. Sony has shipped nearly 204 million machines worldwide when combining shipments for the original PlayStation and its upgrade PlayStation 2.

Toshiaki Nishimura, analyst for Yasuda Asset Management Co., said the delay is likely to hurt game revenue for Sony, but the announcement wasn't a big surprise for the market, which had anticipated a delay. Speculation about a possible delay had been growing in the last few months.

But further delays that could force Sony to miss Christmas entirely would be detrimental, he said.

"Sony is merely at the starting point of a race," Nishimura said, adding that more time is needed to assess PlayStation 3 and the advanced gadgets that will run on the same computer chip called "cell" that Sony is developing with Toshiba Corp. and IBM Corp.

"We are even a bit relieved that Sony has definitely said it's coming out with the PS3 because that's so critical for its cell business," he said.

The PlayStation 3 console can be used as a Blu-ray DVD player, but will also read previously released PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games, Kutaragi said. It will also have a hard disk drive, broadband and wireless Internet connections, and support high-definition televisions.

The company is expecting monthly production of 1 million machines, and targeting production of 6 million units for the fiscal year through March 2007, Kutaragi said.

Any setback in the PlayStation business could deal a big blow to Sony, which had just announced in January that it will post a profit of 70 billion yen ($592 million) for the fiscal year through March, instead of sinking into a 10 billion yen ($85 million) loss, as projected earlier.

For decades, Sony symbolized Japan's manufacturing power exemplified by the original Walkman. But in recent years, the company, which also has movie and music businesses, was battered by declining electronics prices.

Sony's core electronics division has lost money for two straight fiscal years. Since Welsh-born Howard Stringer took over last year as the first foreigner to head the company, Sony has been trying to achieve a turnaround.

It's only been in recent months Sony has made a comeback in flat-panel TVs using liquid crystal displays manufactured in a joint venture with South Korean rival Samsung Electronics Co. It has also come out with Walkman MP3 digital music players to catch up with the hit iPod from Apple Computer Inc.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





DRM outfit’s protection racket

Starforce Linking to Illegal Torrents?
Paul Krevs

As most of us here at Neowin are aware, Stardock published their highly anticipated, turn-based strategy game "Galactic Civilizations 2" last week to rave reviews from most of the major gaming sites. Stardock decided not to include any copy protection scheme with the release, much to the surprise of the gaming community at large. No Starforce, SafeDisc or SecuROM to hinder any sort of unauthorized distribution.

We get a report today that the folks over at the Starforce camp have taken notice of the game and its apparent retail success without employing a copy protection scheme. In a thread over on the Starforce forums, a member posted a link entitled "Game published without copy protection isn't commercial disaster", clearly trying to evoke some sort of reply from the copy protection powers that be. A member of the Starforce admin staff immediately posted a link to a well known torrent site hosting illegal copies of GalCiv II, in an effort to show how many sales are being lost by not using copy protection. We caught up with Brad Wardell of Stardock this weekend for some reaction to this rather humorous turn of events:

"I don't claim to be incredibly informed on warez. I don't pirate stuff so I am not familiar with sites that people go to in order to find, amongst other things, warez. I was not familiar with the site they linked to. I suspect I'm not alone. We cannot understand why they felt the need to provide an actual URL rather than state the obvious -- that like all software, ours is being pirated at some level.

We obviously don't want people to pirate our software. Every time someone pirates it who might have possibly bought it we feel the pinch. We're a small company so every sale counts. We simply think there are other ways to go about it than to inconvenience customers with CD-based copy protection."

Our question is fairly simple: Why would a company that invests so heavily in preventing software theft from occurring, choose to point people directly at a site which promotes the exact opposite?
http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=32501





Both High-Def Disc Formats Debate Tech Issues as HD DVD Faces New Delays
Scott M. Fulton, III

Technical issues that may concern the arrangement of content of both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, are impacting studios supporting both formats, with the result being that HD DVD titles - which were due to be released sooner - could face delays. News of such delays comes from an official of Warner Home Video, in a Hollywood Reporter story picked up by Reuters this morning.

These delays come as major retailers prepare for a spring rollout of HD DVD, which was supposed to include a whirlwind tour of the US by Toshiba representatives. Now, Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart and other stores nationwide may face the prospect of having to premiere Toshiba's HD-A1 ($499) and HD-XA1 ($799) players without any movies available to sell with them.

The precise nature of the technical problems facing Warner were not disclosed, perhaps because the question itself may not have been asked. TG Daily has contacted spokespersons for Warner Home Video, and as the day is young, may yet get a response. However, at the same time and perhaps not by coincidence, technical concerns about the implementation of a key feature of the Advanced Access Copy System (AACS), which will play a role in the copy protection schemes of both Blu-ray and HD DVD, have provoked studios to abandon their support for this feature. On 1 March, at a technology forum it sponsored, Sony announced it had no plans to utilize, in its Blu-ray movies, the so-called Image Constraint Token (ICT), which would force analog displays to accept downconverted video at 540 lines of resolution. 20th Century-Fox had already expressed its opposition to using ICT for its Blu-ray titles. But since that time, Paramount and Disney stated they are joining Sony and Fox in opposing ICT in Blu-ray titles, according to a Consumer Electronics Daily journalist writing for the AVS Forum.

The move by Disney and Paramount came as a complete surprise to video industry observers, who had noted they had previously stood with Warner in support of ICT. The argument in favor of ICT is that it would disable intermediate devices from being able to siphon a digital stream from a home entertainment network, presumably to make copies of that stream, in its native resolution. But opponents had noted that first-generation HDTV players, with 720 lines of analog resolution, would be forced to view degraded images, with only slightly higher resolution than standard television.

Fox, a vocal advocate of standards in digital media but a late Blu-ray supporter, went on record early in opposition to ICT, stating its opinion that consumers' experience should not be downgraded, even in the interests of preventing piracy. Its message may be winning over supporters; but it's interesting to note that, for now, opposition to ICT appears to be centered on its implementation in Blu-ray. Sony and Fox have been firmly in the Blu-ray camp for some time; Paramount opted to support both formats last October, with Disney announcing its additional support for HD DVD only yesterday. Universal, a firm HD DVD proponent, has signaled its support of ICT in the past. This leaves Warner, which also joined the Blu-ray Disc Association last October after having been a firm HD DVD proponent, as the remaining major studio not to revise and extend its public stand on ICT.

Up to this point, with Blu-ray movie titles expected to be released in the fall while HD DVDs premiere this spring, there hasn't been time for studios to debate the issue of how the just-completed 1.0 specification for AACS, apparently including ICT, would impact HD DVD. While studios with Blu-ray titles in the works still have time to make a stand, perhaps the only way for HD DVD-supporting studios to have time to revisit the issue is if it becomes, if you will, a technical concern likely to postpone release dates.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/14/bl...hnical_issues/





Feelin' The Vibe at Intel's Viiv Launch
Asher Moses

Intel, accompanied by a trickle of launch partners, today unleashed Viiv (rhymes with "five") on the Australian market. More of a platform than a product, Intel is hoping that Viiv will do for the lounge room PC what its Centrino brand has done for Wi-Fi notebooks.

What is Viiv?
Based around Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition operating system, Viiv-certified computers (read: machines with a Viiv sticker) will incorporate hardware components that Intel has certified as being fully capable of performing typical media centre tasks.

Viiv-based machines are designed to sit in your living room and be operated from your couch, so their core functions include storing, searching and sharing digital media files, as well as recording directly from a TV broadcast. The Media Center Edition interface enables these tasks to be carried out intuitively with a remote, as opposed to a keyboard and mouse.

The criteria that vendors must fulfil in order to have their products Viiv-certified revolves around Intel technologies, naturally. Systems must feature an Intel processor (Pentium D or Pentium Extreme Edition for desktops; Core Duo for notebooks), an Intel motherboard chipset, an Intel LAN chip and an Intel High Definition Audio processor. The audio processor must allow for at least 5.1 channel analog surround sound, or boast a digital SPDIF connector for hooking the PC up to a home theatre sound system. A remote control is optional.

Another requirement for all Viiv-enabled machines is that they support Intel's "Quick Resume" technology. Similar technologies have existed in the notebook space for quite some time now, and it's basically Intel's version of instant- on functionality. Instant-on is a boon for lounge room PC applications, since it enables users to gain speedy access to multimedia files without completely booting into the operating system.

As far as the next-generation DVD format war goes, Viiv is agnostic and will support both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray standards.

Curiously absent from Intel's Viiv requirements are a TV tuner card and a decent video card, both of which are considered mandatory inclusions for any home entertainment PC. Thus, just because a machine has a Viiv sticker, don't assume that it's great for gaming or TV viewing.

At the launch event today, Dell, HP, Acer, NEC, Optima and Pioneer Computers -- among other smaller vendors such as Alloys Australia, Altech Computers, Claritas Technology, Computer Alliance and MiTAC -- all put their hats into the ring, declaring support for Viiv. The first-up Viiv-badged designs vary between vendors, but range from all-in-one hybrid PCs that look like televisions, thin book-size form factors that resemble traditional home theatre components, and the standard tower designs seen on most conventional desktop machines.

Coming Soon
While not present in the current iteration, Intel hopes to soon introduce the ability to stream content directly to handheld devices and networked PCs. According to the press release, it's planning to "add additional software features to ... simplify the set-up of certain devices in a home network, and the ability to transfer entertainment from the ... PC to verified networked devices including digital TVs, DVD players, set-top boxes and wireless routers."

Interestingly, the Viiv software will also be able to transcode and scale video files on the fly in order to cater to a variety of external devices, many of which require file formats and resolutions that differ from the default specifications used by Viiv.

In order to make this a seamless process with minimal user configuration, Intel is currently certifying a range of handhelds, displays, networking devices, DVD players and audio systems for use with Viiv-enabled machines.

Yet that doesn't mean that in order to take full advantage of Viiv's streaming capabilities, users will have to purchase new networking and home theatre equipment or go through the painful process of updating the software of their existing components. Rather, Don MacDonald, Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Digital Home Group told CNET.com.au that updates with device drivers will be delivered over the Internet directly to Viiv machines, and users won't have to install any software or firmware updates themselves.

Streaming of media to external devices will be handled by a separate piece of hardware called a "digital media adapter". These aren't yet available locally, but MacDonald told CNET.com.au that they'll be released sometime during the "second half of this year".

Content Partnerships
Local partnerships with content providers will be essential for Viiv to take off in Australia, and it must be easily accessible from within the Windows Media Center Edition interface.

In Australia, Intel has secured Adobe, Destra Music, Muvee, Telstra Bigpond, Quickflix and Ubisoft as partners.

All of the above services have been integrated into the Windows Media Center menu system, so users can download and view movies, music and games from their couch using a remote control. Once new services are added, the menu will automatically be updated to incorporate them. However, this could be a time-consuming process, as Clive Mayhew, General Manager of Destra Music told CNET.com.au that potential content providers must go through an extensive certification process with Intel and Microsoft before being integrated into the Media Center menu system.

Intel acknowledges that this list of content providers is currently quite sparse, but Phil Cronin, General Manager of Intel Australia promises that Viiv "will in time allow you to access a whole range of content" from global sources.

"It’s just a matter of time though.... Don't be impatient," says MacDonald. "You’re dealing with business models that have been established for over half a century," he added, noting that issues such as distribution rights are currently slowing down the expansion of content available to Viiv systems.

Digital Rights Management
According to Don MacDonald, Intel's stance surrounding Digital Rights Management (DRM) is that consumers should be able to do whatever they like with legally purchased content. That means backing it up to external drives and streaming it to other devices such as handhelds and networked machines.

As such, Intel is encouraging Viiv content providers to allow users to pass their media to other devices -- a factor that's critical to the success of the Viiv concept. We were unable to confirm whether or not the current selection of content could be streamed seamlessly to external devices, but as mentioned above, this feature won't be widely available until the digital media adapters hit our shores later this year anyway.

Interestingly, MacDonald also told CNET.com.au that Viiv won't be testing to see if the content being played is pirated from networks such as BitTorrent. He believes that it's not Intel's job to be policing downloads and that it's wrong to assume that "all consumers are criminals". As such, Viiv won't test for "watermarks" or other red flags that reveal pirated content, allowing any type of media to be played.

Ultimately, though, MacDonald is confident that piracy won't be a significant issue for Viiv, as Intel promises to "make content easier to buy than it is to pirate".
http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/pcs/...0061064,00.htm





Newzbin.com Closes Forums
Thomas Mennecke

Administering an indexing server or website is becoming an increasingly stressful job, especially for those residing in the United States. Outside of the jurisdiction of the powerful entertainment lobby the job is less risky, yet the potential for copyright enforcement action nevertheless exists.

DutchNova learned this lesson two days ago, when BREIN pressured the BitTorrent indexer offline. BREIN, which functions as the Netherlands’ copyright enforcement organization, has been busy targeting small scale indexing sites. Most large scale indexers left the country several months back as news of a potential copyright enforcement sweep surfaced. Those remaining - mostly small, fledgling communities - have garnered BREIN criticism for targeting the small fish while allowing the big ones to get away.

The increased pressure placed on indexing sites spilled over to include Usenet. Last month, the MPAA surprised many in the file-sharing and technology community when they decided to file lawsuits against NZB-Zone.com, BinNews.com and DVDRs.net - all Usenet indexing sites.

The news came as a surprise, considering Usenet (or the Newsgroups) was considered a minor player compared to BitTorrent or eDonkey2000. However the increasing simplicity associated with obtaining files from Usenet compelled the MPAA to launch their preemptive strike.

Although only affecting those sites based in the United States, it appears Newzbin.com, which is based in the United Kingdom, is taking no chances. Newzbin.com is very similar in nature to NZB-Zone.com, BinNews.com and DVDRs.net, as it too is an Usenet indexing site. To facilitate the search for information residing on Usenet, Newzbin.com indexes NZB files. Often times, these NZB files reference material which is inconsistent with authorized doctrine. And many times this questionable material is discussed on the Newzbin.com forums.

In an effort to mitigate any potential legal action, Newzbin.com has eradicated its user forums per the advice of legal council. From the Newzbin.com forum:

Official Newzbin Forums - Now Closed. Following recent legal advice, the Newzbin Administration have decided to discontinue the official Newzbin forums. To replace them, unofficial forums, not run by Newzbin, will appear shortly. They will not be run on Newzbin servers nor will the Newzbin Administration have any control over them.

Whether the move will deter any future legal action is unclear. Totally eliminating the forums may distance the administration from their users and eliminate evidence, but it’s dubious whether simply replacing one forum with a third party will achieve the same result.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1128





Alarm Bells Ring As Music Downloads Go Mobile

With wireless song sharing on the horizon, the record industry is keen to avoid the tracks of its internet tears and cash in this time
Natalie Hanman

It's enough to leave record-label executives trembling: researchers in Sweden are developing an application that could allow music to be sent wirelessly from one mobile device to another. It's a concept that threatens content owners' rights and, especially, revenue, just as illicit internet file sharing does.

The Push!Music prototype being developed at the Future Applications Lab at the Viktoria Institute in Sweden is a mobile, peer-to-peer (P2P) music- listening and sharing application that runs on Wi-Fi- enabled devices. It allows users to "push" music to others in the area. In effect, you are opening your mobile music collection to others. It's a digital rights management migraine in the making. "There is no reason why P2P will not exist on mobiles - it existed on the internet," says Thomas Husson, a mobile analyst at Jupiter Research.

Bluetooth, which allows content such as music to be wirelessly exchanged, is already a popular mobile- phone function with many uses, some less savoury than others. Happy slapping - when a person or group hits an unsuspecting victim as an accomplice films it - has been virally passed between mobiles using Bluetooth.

The speed and ease with which such content spreads is astounding. Yet mobile operators claim they are not responsible for what their customers exchange. "There is good technology [but] some are using it for criminal purposes," says Simon Dyson, senior analyst at Informa. "I don't think there's anything mobile companies can do to prevent it. Because Bluetooth has so many uses, and so many applications use Bluetooth, it's not feasible to stop shipping handsets that use it."

While Push!Music insists the project's aim is not to create an illegal way to share files, the mobile and music industries risk missing out on a lucrative market if they are not prepared for wireless song- swapping. "They want to get it right from the start to avoid the problems with file sharing," says Dyson. "They see it as a real money maker."

However, as the Mobile Music 2005 report by the analysts Informa Telecoms and Media concludes, getting the process right is proving a challenge. In just seven years, mobile music - from ringtones to full-track downloads - has grown into a business worth $5.5bn (£3.2bn). Many analysts believe that within five years, the mobile could replace the iPod as the most popular digital music device. But that can happen only if issues such as compatibility, licensing, pricing and digital rights management are resolved.

The runaway success has been ringtones, which accounted for 89% of global mobile music revenues last year. By contrast, full-length music downloads contributed 1%; that's $4,912.7m from ringtones and just $65.1m from full-track downloads.

Hot competition

Competition to be the best in providing full-track mobile downloads is hotting up, as talent, trusted branding and technology combine to create the most popular device, such as SonyEricsson's Walkman phone and the Rokr mobile from Motorola and Apple. Operators have been busy, too: Vodafone launched full-track downloads in November 2004 as a flagship element of its 3G services, boasting 1m downloads by the end of February 2005.

So the industry is ready, but is the public? Why should they bother buying mobile music when internet downloads are faster, cheaper and easier to navigate? Mobile music does offer some advantages. First, it satisfies the impulse buyer. A consumer could hear a song they like, use their handset to identify it through technology provided by companies such as Shazam and buy the song immediately.

Second, music downloads offer the opportunity for bundling offers, allowing consumers to buy a ringtone, wallpaper, ringback tone and video tone along with a full-track purchase; teenagers, a target market, love the mobile's element of personalisation and bundles provide this in one easy, mobile move.

Third, "dual download" systems could capitalise on the popularity of ringtones: if you buy a full-track download on your mobile, you also get it sent to your email or online account. "The two aren't going to be separate," says Dyson. "The internet has taken off in terms of music but the mobile is catching up. In Japan, mobile downloads are more popular than internet downloads."

There's no need to worry about your mobile signal cutting out in a tunnel: if you have downloaded the track to your mobile, it will work like an MP3 player. Only streaming will be affected by a lack of reception or if you lose reception while downloading.

But even if consumers start downloading songs to their mobiles en masse, how do you prevent them sharing them illegally? After all, it only takes one person with a PC and a Bluetooth-enabled MP3- playing phone to start a P2P nightmare. Record labels have suffered a huge loss of revenue because of their tardy reaction to file sharing. Since the first monophonic ringtones in 1998, DRM has been applied to ensure files cannot be spontaneously copied as easily as on the internet.

Reward offers

The Open Mobile Alliance has released two sets of DRM specifications, the second of which, OMA DRM 2.0, came out in February 2004. But it is so complex, manufacturers are still testing it. When ready, it will allow sophisticated subscription and streaming models; the ability to prevent a track being forwarded to another device; and "superdistribution", a viral marketing tool that allows users to send a track to a friend, who can play a 30- second clip. If the friend buys a licence for the full track, the original user is rewarded.

Orange looks as though it will be first to launch OMA2 in handsets in the UK later this year. Francis Keeling, the commercial director of new media and digital services at the record label Universal Music UK, praises the format's superior security: "Mobile piracy is a threat but the big difference between the P2P threat now and five years ago is there are many legitimate services providing good browse-and-buy alternatives across PC and mobile."

EMI hopes to deter mobile music users from acting illegally by promoting legal downloads. It recently undertook a trial with Nokia in Finland where, in the controlled environment of a coffee shop, consumers could stream songs and music-related content. In the UK, it promoted Coldplay's album X&Y by offering streaming content at railway stations.

But content isn't the only component of success. Apple's success with the iPod and the iTunes Music Store lies in its style and simplicity. The mobile music industry needs to make the legal experience of Bluetoothing music user-friendly and fairly priced, so those seeking music won't try to do it illegally. But as Torsti Tenhunen, the head of sales and marketing at Nokia Ventures Organisation, concedes: "If a user is transferring a song that is not DRM- protected, then there is nothing we can do."

Instead, content holders must accept a certain amount of revenue is always going to be lost. "Most handset manufacturers are aware users rip their CD collection from the PC to the phone and share it," says Husson. "The question here is more, 'how long are mobile operators going to subsidise those phones?' The answer is: 'As long as the mobile remains an acquisition tool'. And the number of music phones sold is increasing dramatically."
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...731403,00.html





A walk in the park

T-Mobile First to Bridge 3G, EDGE, GPRS, and WiFi
Staff Writer

Nortel Networks Corp has announced that it has been chosen to expand T-Mobile's wireless core network with new capabilities, designed to bridge the operator's commercial UMTS wireless network with WiFi networks to provide seamless communications for subscribers.

The expanded service is claimed to be the first commercial deployment that supports seamless broadband mobility across 3G, EDGE, GPRS, and WiFi networks in Europe, and the companies will demonstrate the technology at CeBit 2006 in Hanover this week.

T-Mobile will offer the new service to customers using laptops and dual mode PDAs, such as the T-Mobile MDA Pro, beginning in summer 2006. It said that with the new service, enterprise customers will be able to enjoy "Always Best Connected" access to new data and multimedia/SIP-based services beyond voice, including video calling, video conferencing, short messaging service, instant messaging, email, and web access all from one device and with one phone number with no interruption to their communication session.

T-Mobile said it will also enable it to better manage customer billing information across networks so that end users can receive a single, consolidated bill.

Nortel said it was able to provide T-Mobile with the new service thanks to integration of Nortel's existing Gateway GPRS Support Node with Azaire Networks' IP Converged Network Platform. Azaire's IP-CNP provides an integrated hybrid network by extending the services from the existing 3G and GSM core network investments over new access technologies like WiFi and WiMax, Nortel said.

Nortel has been a supplier of GPRS and third-generation wireless networking equipment for T-Mobile's Pan-European network since 2002, and supplies packet core networking equipment in Germany, the UK, Czech Republic, The Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria.
http://www.cbronline.com/article_new...9-0F30F14C3884





South Koreans Clearly See Mobile TV
Su Hyun Lee

Since January, cellphone users in Seoul have been able to watch television on their cellphones through a government-subsidized technology called Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, or D.M.B.

South Koreans have become the first to be able to watch — free — mobile TV around the clock. While Americans and Japanese consumers can also watch TV on their cellphones, the images are not as clear.

So far, the first consumer reviews in Seoul suggest that the images are free of jerky motion.

"I can see the movements of the individual skaters clearly, even though they are only half a centimeter tall," said Ko Pyeong Cheon, 24, who watched the short-track skating competition in Turin on his cellphone. "But I am not sure if I will feel the same when I watch the upcoming World Cup soccer games."

Experts say that the screen technology makes the images actually look sharper on screens that are smaller than seven inches.

"It's just like watching regular TV," said Lee Jin Kook, 25. There are still drawbacks. Images disappear when the reception is bad, for instance. Digital Multimedia Broadcasting takes current satellite radio technology and adds a technology to deliver video and data content, like news about the weather.

While a paid satellite-based D.M.B. service has been available nationwide since last May, the new free land-based version is currently available only in the Seoul area.

But the government plans to improve reception and expand the service to other regions and to the subways. The Electronic Technology Research Institute, a government-financed organization, expects that two million Koreans will use mobile TV this year, with the number growing to nearly 15 million, or about 30 percent of the population, by 2010. Strategic Analytics, a research company based in Boston, forecasts that TV phone revenues worldwide may exceed $30 billion a year by 2010.

So far since January, there are only 40,000 land-based phone users, but since May, about 440,000 subscribers have signed up for satellite-based D.M.B. phone service. D.M.B. phones are slightly more expensive than ordinary cellphones. Users can rotate the liquid-crystal display screen horizontally so that it looks more like a television set.

"Hey, if you lose this land-based phone," said Seo Young Bae, 32, referring to his cellphone, "the person who finds it will never return it because he can get free television."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/bu.../16mobile.html





_appy Birthda_ T_ Yo_!

No one knows the real copyright status of "Happy Birthday," and no one can afford to litigate against AOL Time Warner for it
Bruce George Wingate

Copyright law is not sexy. Aaron Spelling has never done a show about hot lawyers who lounge around in skimpy outfits, fall in and out of comas and litigate copyright infringement cases. Perhaps it's because even in the outlandish conventions of nighttime soap operas, many copyright laws just wouldn't seem believable.

The following scenario is presented only as satire, and in no way represents the opinions of, or characters created by, Aaron Spelling. It exists only to make a recognizable metaphor about copyright, through the magic of television.

A character portrayed by Heather Locklear is at the bedside of her former lover. Let's call him "Time Warner." He awakens from a coma, and they passionately kiss.

Time: How long have I been squandering my earning potential?

Heather: We have to talk.

Time: I just remembered, I own the rights to the song "Happy Birthday to You."

Heather: You bastard!

They passionately kiss.

As Beverly Hills 90210 begat The OC , pop culture eternally mines itself for farce, for profit and sometimes just by coincidence. Expanding upon a pre-existing theme is as basic to the fine arts as it is to both folk and rap music. There's an old axiom that states that most pop songs have already been written. If you learn the three chords to "Louie, Louie," you've essentially also learned "Wild Thing," (and several Ramones songs).

The melody to "Happy Birthday to You" was lifted from a song called "Good Morning to All," which was published in a songbook called Song Stories for Kindergarten in 1893. The original was written by two sisters from Kentucky, Patty and Mildred Hill. The lyrics, (credited to Patty) are as follows:

Good morning to you,

Good morning to you,

Good morning, dear children,

Good morning to all.

Another variant of the song added the line "good morning, dear teacher," but no one is sure who first wrote down the familiar birthday lyrics. In the organic nature of regional folk music, authorship is not easily credited. This did not stop several people from publishing songbooks of their own, which married the new lyrics with Mildred's tune.

It wasn't until 1935 that yet another Hill sister, Jessica, was able to copyright "Happy Birthday to You" based upon its resemblance to Mildred and Patty's previous composition. There is only a one-note difference in the melody, to accommodate the extra syllable in "happy." To further add to the unsexy confusion, two songs from 1858, "Happy Greetings to All" and "Good Night to You All," both pre-date the Hills' song.

Through a series of acquisitions, the 1935 publishing rights eventually became the property of AOL Time Warner Inc. (Actually, this part does sound like something that would happen on an Aaron Spelling nighttime drama.) However, the melody remains in the public domain.

Fred Von Lohmann is a senior staff attorney with The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting your digital rights. Von Lohmann took a moment out of his busy schedule to weigh in with his expert legal opinion.

"The copyright status of "Happy Birthday' is the Devil's Triangle of copyright law. I lost an intern last summer to this bottomless pit.

"No one knows the real status of "Happy Birthday,' and no one can afford to litigate against AOL Time Warner for it. The truth is buried in the mists of time..."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helped the ACLU successfully argue against provisions of the Patriot Act that were ruled unconstitutional. If even these hotshots don't know the legal status of "Happy Birthday," who does?

Could an off-key rendition at the local Chili's result in jail time? Should we eat our cake first? What about the people who don't really sing, and just move their lips?

While the jackbooted thugs at AOL Time Warner have yet to kick in the door of your favorite local restaurant and confiscate the pointy hats, "Happy Birthday to You" has been an issue regarding the film, Eyes on the Prize . The documentary series, which originally aired on PBS in 1987, has been hailed as the most succinct account of the civil rights movement of the '60s. Due to restrictions on the licensing of archival footage, the film is unable to be re-released.

One of the copyrights in question is footage of people singing "Happy Birthday" to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
http://fairfieldweekly.com/gbase/Mus...oid=oid:136317





Why The Web Is Hitting A Wall

U.S. Internet growth is stalling. And it's not just the old or poor who are living offline
Roger O. Crockett

These days, getting answers to most questions seems like a no-brainer. For everything from who won an Olympic speed skating race to when to plant tomatoes, most people turn to Google or one of its rivals.

Not John W. Rogers Jr. The CEO of Ariel Capital Management LLC doesn't use the Internet at work or at home. The 47-year-old Princeton University grad thinks the Net is largely a waste of time. Assistants print out e-mails for him and researchers give him paper copies of Wall Street analysts reports from the Web. He prefers to spend his time reading, talking directly with his staff, working out at the gym, or spending time with his teenage daughter. "If you're spending all your time on e-mail, you're not listening and reading," says Rogers, who rarely took lecture notes while he was a student so he could listen more intently. "I listen and read; e-mail is a huge distraction."

It's a sentiment that many Americans find hard to imagine. Plowing through e-mail has become part of the daily routine, like brushing your teeth or walking the dog. But Rogers isn't as much of an oddity as it might seem. Despite its popularity among teens and techies, and its use in most offices, the Internet is far from ubiquitous. In fact, 39 million American households still do not have Internet access. That means only 64% of households are connected, according to a recent survey of 1,000 people by Dallas researcher Parks Associates. An even bigger surprise is that the growth of the Internet in the U.S. has stalled. Despite cheaper prices and faster speeds, analysts expect uptake to creep just one percentage point this year, to 65%, and to only 67% by 2009.

Many people are non-Netizens for obvious reasons. They can't afford service or live in remote areas without hope of affordable connections. And some are past the age when they want to adopt new technology. Says Jeanette Lamar, 92: "I'm too old to start that stuff." But the spectrum of naysayers also includes millions of well-off, educated, and younger professionals. Of the survey respondents who say they don't use the Web, 24% make more than $50,000. Some 39% of the Netphobes attended or graduated college or have at least some associate degree training. And 29% are 44 years old or younger. "It's not just everyone's grandmother who is avoiding the Internet," says John C. Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates.

"IT'S A HASSLE"
Why are people saying no? Some worry, after hearing about online scams and digital viruses, that the Net isn't safe. Others swear that, for all the brouhaha about the Net's ability to enhance communication, e-mail and instant-message chats break down social interaction. But the broader issue is that -- despite innovations that make it possible for people to call up their bank accounts with a few clicks of the mouse, watch the latest episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on a PC, and play online games against competitors in Korea, France, and South Africa -- the Internet remains too complicated and costly for a huge swath of American society. Doreen Pappas, a 39-year-old who works in the finance industry in New York City, isn't willing to go through the headache of picking out a computer, having it delivered, and setting up an online connection. "It's a hassle and it's expensive," Pappas says. "I would rather spend the money on fun things."

Other consumer electronics gear is much more widely adopted: Nearly 100% of U.S. households have a TV, 83% have a DVD player, and 78% have a cell phone. Despite their particular drawbacks, all these technologies are easier to use than an Internet-connected computer. Yet, while the tech industry has vowed to make its products simpler, companies keep stuffing online services, PCs, and other devices with complicated new features. That's why predictions of a few years ago that 75% of American households would be online by now have fallen short. "Innovation is rarely seen as taking things away or making them simpler," says Steve Jones, a senior research fellow for the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington. "We've had so much time to come up with a computer and Internet that are easier to use and work better, but we haven't done it."

It's little wonder that millions of people don't like or trust the Internet. Take Sylvia Goodwin, a 57-year-old assistant attorney general in Tucson. She has a PC at home but no Net service. That puts her among the 31% of households that say they will not subscribe to an Internet service because access at work is sufficient. To Goodwin, the Web is a 21st century manifestation of the world depicted in George Orwell's 1984. As a prosecutor, Goodwin knows how easy it is for Big Brother to gain access to personal information. To her, giving out addresses, telephone numbers, and credit-card information online seems like a surefire way to lose control of your privacy. "If you do everything on the Internet, someone can go in and pick it up," she says.

For others, the Internet is an example of what author Neil Postman called "the surrender of culture to technology." From Silicon Valley engineers to teenage geeks, tech enthusiasts see only what the Net can do, not what it might undo. But James J. Mitchell, a retired banking executive from suburban Chicago, believes the Web dismantles face-to-face communication. He's part of the 18% of households that, according to the Parks survey, have a computer but aren't interested in "anything" on the Internet. Though Mitchell oversaw his company's tech strategy a few years ago, he never used e-mail at work. Instead he watched people become enslaved to it. Mitchell says most messages were trivial and undermined the more intimate forms of communication he favors -- in person or on the phone. "If you want to talk to me, you should do it personally," he says. "I don't need to sit and read every idle thought you rattle off."

For Chicago flower shop owner Grace Puente, it's less a frivolity than a disruption of the simple life. After a day spent arranging blooms and logging deliveries, the 50-year-old is content to go home, sit back, and watch King of Queens or Boston Legal on TV. She doesn't think the benefits outweigh the technical headaches or possible security problems. Instead, she feels people create difficulties for themselves by shopping online or paying bills over the Internet.

Puente doesn't even have a computer at home. That would mean spending close to $1,000, plus an additional $15 to $20 a month for Internet service, not to mention the inevitable upgrades. "You always have to buy some new software to make it juicier," she says. "What kind of juice would I be getting out of it? Nothing."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...ign_id=bier_tc






Not Kansas anymore

Most Australian ISPs to Limit P2P Traffic
Tim Lohman

Up to 90 percent of fixed-line and 100 percent of wireless ISPs could be limiting peer to peer traffic by the end of the year, said network traffic optimisation vendor Allot Communications.

Its A/NZ sales manager, Jonathon Gordon, has said Allot is experiencing a boom in sales as a result of the current rush to control peer to peer traffic.

“In fixed-line or cable ISPs there have been early adopters and about 20 to 30 percent are currently using peer to peer limiting,” he said. "But by the end of the year, 80 to 90 percent will be using it."

Around 80 to 90 percent of wireless providers were currently limiting peer to peer traffic, with the remaining 10 to 20 percent also expected to adopt the technology by year’s end, Gordon said.

“Typically 50 to 85 percent of an ISP’s bandwidth is used up by peer to peer traffic and that’s done by only five to 10 percent of subscribers,” he said.

“There is no other viable solution for ISPs in Australia but to limit peer to peer traffic.”

With subscription rates heading toward three million, or 20 percent of the available market, another driver behind the desire to curb peer to peer traffic was the growing maturity of the local market, Gordon said.

“This market in the last three months has really gone through the roof and part of the reason is that the Australian market is looking at maturity very soon,” he said.

“ISPs are changing from growing market share to cutting costs, and the easiest way to cut costs is to limit the bandwidth they use. They also don’t want to sell under cost just to get customers on board anymore so prices are also beginning to go the other way and are starting to rise.”

Unwired CTO, Eric Hamilton said the company’s priority is to ensure the best network performance for its “eye ball traffic” as opposed to peer to peer traffic.

“In some circumstances, particularly during high network usage times, Unwired may reduce the priority of peer-to-peer traffic in turn reducing the effective peer-to-peer traffic throughput,” he said. “This occurs very occasionally and does not impact regular browsing, email, or downloading from the internet.”

Pacific Internet’s IT operations manager, Jason Sinclair, said the ISP used traffic prioritisation, not to limit traffic, but to guarantee deliver of latency sensitive apps such as VoIP and Citrix.

“ISPs could use these techniques to provide higher levels of service or to limit traffic,” he said. “But Pacific Internet doesn’t actually restrict P2P traffic ... due to the fact that businesses generally require unrestricted network access.”

This was more a feature of residential–focused ISPs, Sinclair said, and hence bandwidth management products were more likely to be adopted by these players.

Aiming to capitalise on the trend, Allot has also launched a management software product, NetXplorer, designed to add additional control over its traffic optimisation product, NetEnforcer.
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=30821





Internet Blows CIA Cover

It's easy to track America's covert operatives. All you need to know is how to navigate the Internet.
John Crewdson

She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.

Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.

The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.

When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.

Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery that is said to have "horrified" CIA Director Porter Goss.

"Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age," said the CIA's chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Dyck. "There are things that worked previously that no longer work. Director Goss is committed to modernizing the way the agency does cover in order to protect our officers who are doing dangerous work."

Dyck declined to detail the remedies "since we don't want the bad guys to know what we're fixing."

Several "front companies" set up to provide cover for CIA operatives and the agency's small fleet of aircraft recently began disappearing from the Internet, following the Tribune's disclosures that some of the planes were used to transport suspected terrorists to countries where they claimed to have been tortured.

Although finding and repairing the vulnerabilities in the CIA's cover system was not a priority under Goss' predecessor, George Tenet, one senior U.S. official observed that "the Internet age didn't get here in 2004," the year Goss took over at the CIA.

CIA names not disclosed

The Tribune is not disclosing the identities of any of the CIA employees uncovered in its database searches, the searching techniques used or other details that might put agency employees or operatives at risk. The CIA apparently was unaware of the extent to which its employees were in the public domain until being provided with a partial list of names by the Tribune.

At a minimum, the CIA's seeming inability to keep its own secrets invites questions about whether the Bush administration is doing enough to shield its covert CIA operations from public scrutiny, even as the Justice Department focuses resources on a two-year investigation into whether someone in the administration broke the law by disclosing to reporters the identity of clandestine CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Not all of the 2,653 employees whose names were produced by the Tribune search are supposed to be working under cover. More than 160 are intelligence analysts, an occupation that is not considered a covert position, and senior CIA executives such as Tenet are included on the list.

Covert employees discovered

But an undisclosed number of those on the list--the CIA would not say how many--are covert employees, and some are known to hold jobs that could make them terrorist targets.

Other potential targets include at least some of the two dozen CIA facilities uncovered by the Tribune search. Most are in northern Virginia, within a few miles of the agency's headquarters. Several are in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington state. There is one in Chicago.

Some are heavily guarded. Others appear to be unguarded private residences that bear no outward indication of any affiliation with the CIA.

A senior U.S. official, reacting to the computer searches that produced the names and addresses, said, "I don't know whether Al Qaeda could do this, but the Chinese could."

Down on `The Farm'

For decades the CIA's training facility at Camp Peary, Va., near historic Williamsburg, remained the deepest of secrets. Even after former CIA personnel confirmed its existence in the 1980s the agency never acknowledged the facility publicly, and CIA personnel persisted in referring to it in conversation only as "The Farm."

But an online search for the term "Camp Peary" produced the names and other details of 26 individuals who according to the data are employed there. Searching aviation databases for flights landing or taking off from Camp Peary's small airstrip revealed 17 aircraft whose ownership and flight histories could also be traced.

Although the Tribune's initial search for "Central Intelligence Agency" employees turned up only work-related addresses and phone numbers, other Internet-based services provide, usually for a fee but sometimes for free, the home addresses and telephone numbers of U.S. residents, as well as satellite photographs of the locations where they live and work.

Asked how so many personal details of CIA employees had found their way into the public domain, the senior U.S. intelligence official replied that "I don't have a great explanation, quite frankly."

The official noted, however, that the CIA's credo has always been that "individuals are the first person responsible for their cover. If they can't keep their cover, then it's hard for anyone else to keep it. If someone filled out a credit report and put that down, that's just stupid."

One senior U.S. official used a barnyard epithet to describe the agency's traditional system of providing many of its foreign operatives with easily decipherable covers that include little more than a post office box for an address and a non-existent company as an employer.

Coverts especially important

And yet, experts say, covert operatives who pose as something other than diplomats are becoming increasingly important in the global war on terror.

"In certain areas you just can't collect the kind of information you need in the 21st Century by working out of the embassy. They're just not going to meet the kind of people they need to meet," said Melvin Goodman, who was a senior Soviet affairs analyst at the CIA for more than 20 years before he retired.

The problem, Goodman said, is that transforming a CIA officer who has worked under "diplomatic cover" into a "non-official cover" operator, or NOC--as was attempted with Valerie Plame--creates vulnerabilities that are not difficult to spot later on.

The CIA's challenge, in Goodman's view, is, "How do you establish a cover for them in a day and age when you can Google a name . . . and find out all sorts of holes?"

In Plame's case, online computer searches would have turned up her tenure as a junior diplomat in the U.S. Embassy in Athens even after she began passing herself off as a privately employed "energy consultant."

The solution, Goodman suggested, is to create NOCs at the very outset of their careers, "taking risks with younger people, worrying about the reputation of people before they have one. Or create one."

Shortage of `mentors'

But that approach also has a downside, in that "you're getting into the problem of very junior, inexperienced people, which a lot of veteran CIA people feel now is part of the problem. Porter Goss has to double the number of operational people in an environment where there are no mentors. Who's going to train these people?"

In addition to stepping up recruiting, Goss has ordered a "top-down" review of the agency's "tradecraft" following the disclosure that several supposedly covert operatives involved in the 2003 abduction of a radical Muslim preacher in Milan, Italy, had registered at hotels under their true names and committed other amateurish procedural violations that made it relatively easy for the Italian police to identify them and for Italian prosecutors to charge them with kidnapping.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...ck=1&cset=true





Online Auteurs Hardly Need to Be Famous
Richard Siklos

On his computer screen, Jake R. Sanowski scrutinizes a short video of a baby eating its first pickle. Next is a skit of a woman getting drunker over the course of a meal at which, it turns out, her dining companion is a dog. That is followed by a clip of a band playing a song, but the lighting is so dim that the screen is nearly black. "I feel really bad for it," Mr. Sanowski said.

Mr. Sanowski, 24, who recently moved to Los Angeles from Minnesota, is an editor at iFilm, a company that displays short-form videos, movie trailers and music videos on its Web site (www.iFilm.com) He wades through many of the nearly 500 video submissions that the site receives each day from average Joes and Janes seeking fame — and now cash and prizes — via the Internet.

Many of the contributors are happy just to have their clips posted on the site for all to see. But the number of postings has jumped in the last few weeks since the company introduced a contest with the cable channel VH1 called "Show Us Your Junk" that will feature the best submissions on the television program "WebJunk20" and reward winners with digital gadgetry and flat-screen TV's.

Increasingly, the new, new thing in media is getting paid for the homemade. Reflecting the surge in the popularity of user-created material, both online and traditional media companies are opening their wallets to make sure that the best of it finds its way onto their television shows and Web sites.

Even Yahoo, the nation's most-visited Web site, has signaled a change in its strategy by moving away from creating its own professional content in favor of user-generated material — and it appears willing to pay for anything its users deem worthy.

All this is part of a trend seeking to turn conventional media business models on their heads in the digital age. Typically, media content was either paid for by consumers in the form of subscription fees or by marketers through advertising. In offering to pay users for creating content, companies like Yahoo are not looking to turn every amateur into a professional so much as acknowledging the growing appeal of homemade material to audiences and hence its value to media businesses.

"At some point in the next six to nine months, this will become competitive," said Michael Hirschorn, executive vice president for original programming at VH1, which, like iFilm, is owned by Viacom.

Already the money is starting to flow, mostly in the form of contests. YouTube.com, another Web site for sharing clips, is soliciting people to create a music video for a band from Seattle called Pretty Girls Make Graves. Aspiring auteurs can download the band's song "Nocturnal House," create a video and submit it; the winner gets $1,000 and a trip to New York to hang out with the band.

A similar Web site, Metacafe, is offering $2,000 for the best short video shot at Mardi Gras, as determined from the feedback of people coming to the site to watch them.

On Current, a cable television channel spearheaded by former Vice President Al Gore that began operating in August, short videos are selected for broadcast by the votes of an Internet audience; successful entrants are paid $250 to $1,000 apiece.

Several networks have shows in the works featuring both found and original online material, including pilots from Bravo and NBC, the latter's starring the television host Carson Daly.

The USA Network, which is also part of NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, is developing a pilot for a user-generated show based on another popular site, eBaum's World. In October, the Web site, named after its founder, Eric Bauman, began offering monthly prizes up to $1,000 for the best submissions, which can be jokes, audio files, flash animation or homemade video games as well as clips.

There is no scarcity of material as high-speed connections grow, cellphone cameras proliferate and more people become adept at editing video and creating flash animation. But user-generated content is much more. Think of it as anything not professionally conceived: it could be blogs or short videos, a salsa recipe on a bulletin board, a Web page created for a school class, a book review on Amazon.com or a withering comment posted on a magazine's Web site. According to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project released in January, half of all teenagers in the United States have created material for the Web.

Of course, much of what finds its way onto Web sites is not ready for prime time or can seem like "America's Funniest Home Videos" with cybergloss. Mr. Sanowski and his colleagues at iFilm, for instance, marvel at the number of recent video creations that consist of young men dancing and lip-syncing music.

Still, user-created material increasingly competes for the audiences of traditional media companies and holds some appealing qualities as a business model. For one thing, it is cheap. And it taps into the social aspect of interactive media that has fueled the advance of the Internet.

It also represents an attempt to improve the quality of material online as people's desire to not only surf the Internet but also contribute to it rises at a breakneck pace. For example, the research firm Technorati estimates that in January there were 27 million blogs, and that number is doubling every 5.5 months, with 75,000 blogs created daily.

The notion of money flowing to people who generate the best material has been gathering steam. Google, the Web search leader, and Yahoo already run services that automatically place advertisements on other Web sites — allowing people who create their own Web pages and blogs to share in the growth of online advertising revenue without ever making a sales call.

Now Yahoo plans to begin offering cash prizes to people who generate the highest-rated responses to other people's questions on a Web service it introduced in December, Yahoo Answers. "Get rewarded for your best answers with cash," Yahoo Answers promised in a notice on the site that the company took down last week after three months because it had not decided just how the payments would work or when they would begin.

The head of Yahoo's programming operations said early this month that company was retreating from a strategy of creating original content for its sites in favor of attracting and highlighting the best user-generated content.

Jerry Yang, a Yahoo co-founder, said in an interview recently: "I think ultimately we're trying to field a community where people feel comfortable and productive, and that with every investment on Yahoo, they're getting more back. How we reward, and how we implement that, I think, is still very early."

Although it is a relatively new phenomenon, the spread of financial incentives should not come as a shock in an industry whose biggest players have been given valuations in the many billions of dollars by Wall Street. Microsoft, for instance, is offering cash and prizes in a contest intended to get people to use its MSN search service over those of Google and Yahoo.

One question is whether the use of financial incentives will put a damper on the spirit of unfettered self-expression and generosity that has infused much of the growth of user-created material. "Right now, people are doing all sorts of things on the Internet for the good of the community — it's like volunteering," said Dan Ariely, a professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab. "The question is, In what ways will it change the willingness of people to help? In this way I actually worry."

On the Web site eBaum's World, the winner of the latest $1,000 prize is a faux trailer for the 1995 horror movie "Seven," starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. With the addition of schmaltzy music and a voice-over narrator, the movie is re-edited to look like a buddy movie turned love story between the two actors.

"I'm positively absolutely amazed at some of the things that people will do for $1,000," said Neil Bauman, who is chief financial officer for the Web site that his son Eric, now 25, founded as a junior in high school.

In its infancy, at least, it seems that financial gain is likely to be seen as a bonus, but not the main reason for creating content. For example, Anirudh Koul, 20, a computer science student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is among the highest-rated participants in Yahoo Answers. The Web site is a competitor to sites like Google Answers and About.com (owned by The New York Times Company), where people can access information from experts in specific fields, rather than just cull the most relevant results from a broad search.

The best answers are given rating points by people who visit the Web site, and it is here that Mr. Koul has answered more than 1,100 questions since the site began operating in December, including "Who did invent the Internet?" and "Can I download episodes of 'Kitchen Confidential?' " For now, Mr. Koul says, he enjoys interacting with others from his dormitory room and being recognized as the smartest guy in a digital room. "The only incentive one gets is the satisfaction in sharing some useful knowledge," he said in an e-mail message.

But since Yahoo makes money either by directly putting ads on its sites or indirectly by keeping Web surfers in its network, it is willing to share the spoils with people like Mr. Koul, just as it might pay an entertainment company for access to its content.

The idea of pay for content has been around in a small way for years in publishing; for instance, those who take part in surveys for the Zagat restaurant review books receive a free book. Robert J. Markey, a consultant specializing in consumer loyalty at Bain & Company, said that companies like Yahoo must be careful not to let financial incentives become the only reason for people to contribute material.

"If it's just about some ancillary reward," he said, "you're introducing an externality that degrades the value of the community itself. It undermines that whole model."

But while user-generated content can attract lots of attention, so far it has not been regarded as a winning format for major advertisers. A prominent example of this is the Web site Myspace.com, which was purchased by the News Corporation last year. While MySpace is adding as many as a million registered users each week who create or peruse Web pages of other members, sharing photos, blogs and such, it has so far attracted little advertising revenue relative to its audience size.

Viacom's chief executive, Tom Freston, while promising to expand its ventures in such social networking, said recently, "It's like inserting the advertising into a conversation between two people, and there are still a lot of questions about advertisers supporting user-created content."

Chris Charron, an analyst at Forrester Research, said people should not be left with the impression that they can make small fortunes sitting in their underwear at home surfing the Web.

"Many users who hope to make a lot of money creating content will probably be disappointed," Mr. Charron said. "All content is not created equally."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/bu...user.html?8dpc





Hungry Media Companies Find a Meager Menu of Web Sites to Buy
Matt Richtel

Media companies are still hungry. Is there much left for them to consume that they'll find satisfying?

NBC Universal's $600 million acquisition of iVillage, an early Internet company catering to women, highlights the continuing interest by media companies in adding new Web sites to reach and connect with consumers, hobbyists, parents, investors, car buyers, Scrabble players and virtually every other niche audience.

To that end, digital-era media companies like Yahoo and Google, as well as traditional media companies, including those with deep roots in television and print, continue to scour the Internet for emerging content and technology companies. But the pickings of obvious acquisition candidates, while hardly exhausted, are slimming, according to financiers, entrepreneurs and industry analysts who follow the sector.

That leaves the media companies trying to figure out — as they did with far less discipline during the dot-com boom — which of the emerging generation of Web sites have lasting business models or, at least, can continue to build traffic.

"There was a point last year where we thought the midlevel Internet deals were over," said Rafat Ali, editor of paidContent.org, a site that follows the business of digital media, referring to acquisitions valued at several hundred million dollars. But the iVillage deal last week "means that some of the midsize properties are still in play."

Mr. Ali said media companies would also like to acquire smaller companies — up-and-coming content sites that might cost tens of millions — but that there were few proven sites left to buy. A lot of smaller "good sites have gone," he said. Media companies "are looking at the new sites coming out of Silicon Valley" to determine what to buy next.

Media companies appear to be focusing their acquisition interest on sites that cater to niches but that have the potential for broad appeal. High on their shopping list are community networking Web sites like Myspace.com, which the News Corporation bought last year for $580 million.

Also of interest are sites that allow people to play casual interactive games; store, send, manipulate and print photos; build and store blogs; and research and shop for big-ticket items like cars. Also eliciting interest are "next generation" Web sites, like those focused on allowing people to search the universe of blogs more effectively.

The media companies' interest has to do with the continuing shift in the ways Americans consume entertainment and shop. Just as the advent of cable television carved up a once-concentrated block of network TV viewers, so has the Internet — with its literally millions of Web sites — created highly fragmented niche audiences.

For big companies, the key is to build or buy Web sites that attract those niche audiences, but in substantial numbers. For a Web site to pique the interest of mass-market advertisers, it needs to have at least a million unique visitors a month; to be considered a major takeover candidate, it needs to have five million unique visitors, said Sharon Wienbar, a managing director with BA Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture firm that invests in Internet content companies.

In the case of iVillage, the company had 13.4 million unique visitors from the United States in February 2006, though that was down from 16.6 million in the same period a year ago, according to comScore Media Metrix, which measures Web traffic.

When the media companies guess right, the payoff has been growing, said Mark Pincus, chairman of Tribe Networks, which operates a social networking site. Mr. Pincus said the prices that advertisers were paying to reach large, specific audiences had been increasing, and looked as if they would continue to do so.

Mr. Pincus noted that to reach a narrowly defined audience, the cost for having an advertisement seen 1,000 times, an advertising industry standard measure, was $20 to $50. An example, he said, would be visitors to a major portal's finance page.

He said that to reach broader audiences with specific interests — like the people who visit a job search site — ads command $4 to $10 per thousand impressions, a "huge jump" from $1 or $2 just two years ago.

To reach general audiences, like the masses who use Myspace.com on a regular basis, he said the price has jumped to $1 or $2 per thousand impressions, from pennies.

Mr. Pincus's site, Tribe.net, has been among the privately held social networking properties sometimes mentioned as acquisition candidates. Others in the category that are eliciting interest include Xanga.com, a community of online diaries that had 7.2 million visitors in February, comScore said, as well as Facebook.com and Hi5.com. In December 2005, Yahoo bought Del.icio.us, a company that makes software for bloggers and writers of online diaries, but did not disclose terms of the deal.

Perhaps the site most discussed and analyzed as a potential major takeover is Cnet Networks, the operator of News.com, a site focusing on business and technology news. The price tag for Cnet, which is publicly traded, with a market value of around $2 billion, would be $2.5 billion to $3 billion, said Mark May, an analyst for Needham & Company who covers Internet services and digital media.

Cnet is "too expensive" to be a ready takeover candidate, Mr. May said.

Other analysts said that Cnet had prompted much debate among major media companies, which had been unable to determine how lucrative the Cnet audience could become.

And in contrast with a public company like Cnet, putting a value on a privately held Internet company is even less of a science. While bigger companies are priced on a multiple of their revenue (based on comparable companies), smaller companies are based simply on what the market will bear, said Ms. Wienbar of BA Venture Partners.

"There's no magic in valuing a prerevenue company," she said. "It's what somebody is willing to pay."

Ms. Wienbar said that the founders of many of the smallest content companies — those with less than $10 million in capital — appeared to be looking at acquisition, not a public offering, as a primary exit strategy.

Mr. May said public companies that might attract interest from major media companies included WebMD, a health information site with a market capitalization of about $2.2 billion; Bankrate.com, a financial news and information site whose stock is worth around $560 million; and Hollywood Media, a $160 million company that operates MovieTickets.com, a ticket-purchase site. ( Autobytel, a public automobile research and advertising site, hired bankers to look for an acquirer, but in recent weeks changed its mind and decided to go it alone, Ms. Wienbar said).

Industry analysts said another midsize company that had generated interest was PlanetOut.com, which has a market capitalization of about $170 million. The site caters to gay and lesbian interests and had 727,000 visitors from the United States in February, comScore reported. There is also TheKnot.com, a wedding site that had 1.9 million visitors from the United States in February and has a market capitalization of $350 million.

Mr. Ali of paidContent.org said another potential takeover candidate was InfoSpace, an Internet and mobile search company, whose stock was worth $730 million. A potential acquirer of InfoSpace could be Google, according to one Internet industry analyst who was granted anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his own sources of information.

Media companies may also show interest in privately held casual gaming sites, like Bigfishgames.com, iWin.com, Oberongames.com and AtomEntertainment.com, Ms. Wienbar said. The sites are interesting to media companies, she said, because they "reach middle-aged women."

Mr. Ali said another group eliciting interest was companies that make games for mobile phones, including Mforma, Glu Mobile and Digital Chocolate. Analysts said several popular photo sites include PhotoBucket.com and Smugmug.com. Early last year, Yahoo bought Flickr, a photo-sharing site, for an undisclosed sum.

Some "next generation" search engines, like Technorati.com and Feedster.com, which focus on searching the blogging world, could be acquisition targets, said Konstantin Guericke, founder of LinkedIncom, a networking site for professionals based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Mr. Guericke said that the major media companies would like, above all, to find ways of reaching the younger audience that is spending more and more time online, in increasingly engaged social activities. Explaining that group's appeal to advertisers, he said: "They're open to trying new things, and they have more time on their hands."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/bu...dia/13net.html





Those Bell Mergers Are Giving Cable Companies Even More to Worry About
Ken Belson and Geraldine Fabrikant

In the chess game between the cable companies and their nemeses, the Bell phone companies, the Bells may be gaining ground. Phone mergers — including AT&T's recent proposal to take over BellSouth — could give the Bells more power to cut prices, move faster into television and expand their advantage in the wireless market.

Sheer size also helps the Bells throw their weight around in Washington. Last week, lawmakers began drafting a bill to make it easier for the Bell companies to acquire local television franchises, a move that would help speed up their push to sell TV programming over high-speed lines around the country.

"The playing field is being leveled, and it's Comcast's mountain that is getting leveled more than AT&T's," said Leo Hindery Jr., a former cable executive and a partner at the private equity firm InterMedia Partners. "The cable guys are boxed in, and I don't think there's a Hail Mary pass."

The AT&T-BellSouth deal, which is likely to take at least a year to be approved, will significantly alter the competitive landscape for the fragmented cable industry, if not immediately then certainly over the next few years as the Bells offer more — and cheaper — video and Internet services.

For Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, and other cable providers, the longer term presents some difficult business choices for countering the Bells' strategies.

AT&T and Verizon are both spending billions of dollars to build out fiber optic networks to deliver TV programming to rival the cable providers' offerings.

If Congress approves the proposed national franchise legislation, they could offer those services in hundreds of cities years ahead of schedule.

BellSouth, which has not yet announced any plans to offer TV programming, is expected to adopt AT&T's television strategy in the nine Southern states where it operates.

That could force cable providers in those states to drop their prices, which Charter Communications did last year in Texas when Verizon introduced its new television service in some parts of that state.

"The cable companies are now going to face off against a stronger, bigger competitor with a stated strategy of doing television, and I don't see that as a positive," said Richard S. Greenfield, a cable and media analyst at Pali Research.

The Bells may also expand their promotional deals for D.S.L. broadband connections, which are in many cases half the price of cable broadband. That move could force cable companies to drop prices even on higher-speed Internet connections. (Many of the cheaper D.S.L. connections are slower than cable broadband.)

In the past year, AT&T and Verizon have cut their introductory broadband prices to $14.95. The low-cost strategy has worked: in 2005, the Bells added more broadband customers than the cable companies for the first time, according to the Leichtman Research Group.

But at least for now, cable companies are not budging.

"The $14.95 D.S.L. product is so slow that it shouldn't be legal to call it broadband," said Thomas M. Rutledge, Cablevision's chief operating officer. "Cable has already built a network throughout the United States that is vastly superior to what the phone companies can build in a reasonable time."

This heightened competition comes at a bad time for the cable companies. Together, they have spent about $85 billion during the past decade to expand their networks so they can handle more digital and high-definition TV programming, as well as faster broadband connections and Internet phone services.

Under pressure from Wall Street to recoup that investment, the cable industry has tried to avoid price wars with DirecTV and EchoStar, two satellite companies that were dismissed as upstarts 10 years ago. Now they are the second- and third-largest pay-TV providers in the United States, after Comcast.

By 2010, the Bells are expected to add six million video customers for a 5 percent share of the pay-television market, according to Kagan Research. While that is just one-tenth the number of cable subscribers, the Bells' additions will come at cable's expense, Kagan estimates showed.

Cable companies will face different adversaries depending on where they operate. For instance, all of Cablevision's subscribers are in the New York metropolitan area, where Verizon is the primary rival, so the AT&T-BellSouth merger will not affect them. Time Warner Cable, however, has 2.7 million basic cable subscribers on Verizon's turf and 6.7 million in AT&T and BellSouth territory, so it must grapple with two Bell giants, according to Pali Research.

Of course, the cable companies have plenty of firepower to aim at the Bells. In just two years, they and start-ups like Vonage have signed up four million Internet phone customers, and that number should double in 2006, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, a brokerage firm.

Comcast, Cox and others have also been giving consumers hundreds of hours of on-demand movies and TV shows without charge, adding high-definition programming and leasing more advanced digital video recorders, including some that include DVD recorders. They are also starting to sell more telecommunications services to businesses.

The cable providers say these advances will allow them to fend off competition from the Bells, something investors have not fully understood in their rush to sell cable stocks during the past two years.

"When one of your major competitors gets bigger, we have to notice," said Stephen B. Burke, the chief operating officer at Comcast. "But we're so far ahead of them. What is going to be fun is to prove that the market is wrong by putting great numbers on the board."

In addition to the Bell threat, there are other clouds on the horizon. The cable companies are under pressure from consumer advocates to start selling TV channels à la carte.

That would be a setback, particularly for cable companies that also own cable networks, like Time Warner. À la carte sales could make it harder for cable programmers to create new networks, which may not be able to attract big audiences quickly enough to win advertisers.

If channels were sold individually, cable programmers argue that it would be prohibitively expensive for networks to market themselves to every home in America. For cable operators, the possibility that consumers would be allowed to pay for only the channels they want is just one more reason to fret about their future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/business/13cable.html





The Oscar for Best Banned Picture
David Barboza

Shanghai

AFTER Ang Lee accepted his Oscar as best director for "Brokeback Mountain," he was hailed by fellow Chinese in Hong Kong and his native Taiwan. Here in mainland China, the government-controlled English-language daily newspaper went so far as to call him the "pride of Chinese people all over the world" and the "glory of Chinese cinematic talent."

Never mind that the fruit of that cinematic talent — a movie about gay cowboys in love — has not been and probably won't be approved for showing on the mainland. Or that Mr. Lee's Academy Award acceptance speech, though televised here, was censored by the authorities, who omitted references to gays and Taiwan.

Film is like most everything else in China: nothing comes easy. Only a few dozen foreign films a year are approved for showing here, although those that aren't are widely watched on pirated DVD's. American movies, legally or illegally obtained, are particularly popular. The official inclusion of four Hollywood blockbusters last year led to record box office figures in 2005, although the top-grossing movie was a government-financed Chinese film — watched but also ridiculed by the public.

Mr. Lee, the first filmmaker born in greater China to win the Oscar for best director, is in good company. Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li, two of China's best-known actresses, are also the pride of the nation. And this year, they will suffer a similar fate at home. Their Hollywood film, "Memoirs of a Geisha," was supposed to reach cinemas here on Feb. 9.

But the film was essentially banned late in January, apparently because of concerns that showing Chinese stars playing Japanese geisha could provoke public anger at a time when anti-Japanese sentiment in China is running high; just as official China views homosexuality as deviant, the Chinese view geisha as prostitutes, and for some, the film evoked memories of the Rape of Nanking. (The Chinese ban their own movies, too, usually for anti-government themes but sometimes for sexual ones. The most famous case involved the 2001 film "Lan Yu," which, like "Brokeback Mountain," featured a long-term gay affair using straight actors and was admired by Ang Lee.)

So the biggest year in film here was also one of the oddest: the Chinese public can't see (in the cinemas, at least) films featuring the most-talked-about Chinese actors and directors who went West to make films, but they are allowed to see "King Kong" and "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire."

So what's hot in China these days? The top-grossing movie last year, Chen Kaige's martial arts fantasy epic, "The Promise" — at $35 million the most expensive film ever made in China — has so far grossed a record $22 million in China alone. The film was partly financed by the government, and naturally it had blockbuster marketing.

Zhang Yimou, perhaps China's most acclaimed filmmaker, also released a movie late last year, a small-budget film called "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles," the story of a Japanese fisherman who travels to southwest China on a personal journey to understand his ailing son. Few people saw it, but those who did enjoyed it.

Hong Kong films often do well in mainland China, and last year was no exception. Jackie Chan's "Myth" pulled in about $12 million. "Seven Swords," about supreme swordsmen who band together to fight evil, grossed $10 million. And something called "Seoul Raiders," the story of a Chinese detective who works as a Japanese secret agent in Tokyo and pursues bad guys all the way to Seoul, earned $5 million.

A Japanese and Hong Kong joint production, "Initial D," also fared well, largely because of the popularity of the lead actor, Jay Chou, 27, one of Taiwan's hottest young singers.

For all the restrictions on what can be shown in China, American films did relatively well in 2005. "Harry Potter," "Star Wars: Episode III," "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "War of the Worlds" proved popular, grossing a combined $35 million even in a market prone to film piracy.

Helped by the American films, the box office gross was $260 million in 2005, up 45 percent from 2004. (In the United States, a single film, like "Harry Potter," can earn more.) Indeed, the popularity of Hollywood's products is one reason the Chinese place restrictions on foreign films; just as in the car and electronics industry, they want to establish their own leading brands.

But a look at the top 10 Chinese films last year shows seven from Hong Kong or Taiwan, not mainland China. And "The Promise," though directed by one of the country's leading filmmakers (Mr. Chen, who directed "Farewell My Concubine"), features only one mainland actor in a starring role. The other leads were played by a Korean, a Japanese and two Hong Kong actors. Of course, more than 1,500 Chinese-born extras appeared the battle scenes.

So while China has a talented crop of young actors and directors, like Xu Jinglei ("A Letter From an Unknown Woman"), Wang Xiaoshuai ("Shanghai Dreams"), Jia Zhangke ("The World") and Gu Changwei ("Peacock"), people here prefer foreign films, mostly the Hollywood type.

"Brokeback Mountain" and "Memoirs of a Geisha" may never make it to Chinese cinemas, but young Internet surfers are downloading high-quality bootleg copies and sharing them online, often free.

It should come as no surprise, then, that China is looking to counterattack. Why not export to Hollywood? After all, Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," a martial arts film set in China and starring Ms. Zhang, was the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history. And Mr. Zhang's martial arts epics, "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," together grossed about $65 million in the United States, far more than they earned in China, according to China eCapital, a research firm in Beijing. Then, too, China has only about 6,000 movie screens, or one for every 214,000 people. The United States has 36,000.

This year, in time for the Oscar race for foreign-language films, Feng Xiaogang, a filmmaker who usually spins domestic comedies, will release "The Banquet," a highly anticipated loose adaptation of "Hamlet," set in China and filled with flying kicks and gorgeous sets. In an interview a few weeks ago in Beijing, he made clear he wants the film to reach the American market.

"My earlier movies were not exported because they weren't made for the foreign market," he said. "But I'm hoping that will change."

The fight scenes for "The Banquet" will be choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping, who is best known for his work on "The Matrix" and the "Kill Bill" series. No question it will pass censors, on both continents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/we...12barboza.html





Upset 'Brokeback' Fans Advertise Their Feelings
Stuart Elliott

Fans of the film "L.A. Confidential" did not take out advertisements in entertainment publications after it lost the best picture Academy Award to "Titanic." It did not happen when "Goodfellas" lost to "Dances With Wolves" or even when "Citizen Kane" lost to "How Green Was My Valley."

But after "Brokeback Mountain" lost the best picture Oscar to "Crash," more than 800 fans — participants in an online discussion group known as the Ultimate Brokeback Forum — chipped in more than $24,000 to buy a full-page ad in Daily Variety. The ad, which ran Friday, thanked the makers of the movie "for transforming countless lives through the most honored film of the year."

"I felt we had to do something," said Dave Cullen, a journalist in Denver who bought the ad after setting up several Brokeback sites, at addresses including brokeback.davecullen.com. "People were distraught, upset, angry; they couldn't believe it."

A poster who goes by Texas Girl suggested buying the ad, he said, and after some discussion that they protest the "Crash" victory, the forum participants decided to run "a positive ad."

Charles C. Koones, president and publisher of Daily Variety and Variety, owned by Reed Elsevier, said, " 'Brokeback' really touched a chord with certain audiences. There are those in Hollywood who feel it was robbed." Although his publications have run fan group ads in the past, they typically urged networks not to cancel favorite TV series.

Mr. Cullen said that the Daily Variety ad cost $15,435, adding that contributors were discussing what to do with the leftover money.

Mr. Koones offered this advice: "You need another ad."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/bu...brokeback.html





Digital Cinema May Not Be Ready To Roll
Gina Keating

After years of haggling, Hollywood's movie studios and theater owners agreed in 2005 to replace old film projectors with new digital systems, but some say the equipment is not ready for use.

The battle involves potentially billions of dollars, pits industry players against each other, and will be a major topic next week at ShoWest, a key industry event in Las Vegas where the studios, theater owners and equipment vendors gather.

New digital cinema projection systems are expected to bring clearer images and three-dimensional movies to audiences, as well as new revenue opportunities to theater owners who can use them to screen live sports, concerts and teleconferences.

Many in the movie industry hope digital cinema will help revive theater attendance, which fell 9 percent in 2005 in the United States.

The studios stand to save about $1 billion a year in print distribution costs because they will be shipping digital movies via computer hard drives, satellite and broadband cable, versus old celluloid canisters.

But digital deployment is expensive at about $100,000 per screen, and while the studios agreed to foot most of the bill, current equipment does not meet all the technology standards set by the industry.

"Digital cinema isn't ready for prime time," said Kurt Hall, president of National Cinemedia, a group of exhibitors led by the No. 1 U.S. chain, Regal Entertainment Group.

He said National Cinemedia would delay any full-scale adoption until at least 2007.

Exhibitors have been inching toward digital cinema since the late 1990s, but currently only about 300 of 36,000 U.S. movie screens have digital projection systems, according to the National Association of Theater Owners.

Ready? Or Not?

French media company Thomson and U.S.-based Access Integrated Technologies Inc., or AccessIT, are leading backers, albeit with different approaches. Thomson believes in testing now and deploying later. AccessIT thinks the launch time is now, and systems can be upgraded easily later.

Through its Technicolor Digital Cinema business, Thomson signed Century Theatres Inc. to install 90 to 120 screens in the second quarter of 2006, but those systems are built by various manufacturers and will be tested throughout the year.

John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, said experimentation is needed to protect exhibitors. "We've had several years of prototype equipment," he said. "What we haven't had is fully integrated systems. That's what needs to be tested to make sure files can flow correctly and the pieces all work together."

Universal Studios, the nation's No. 3 movie distributor, also is in a wait-and-see mode before making its first digital movies widely available, said Michael Joe, head of its digital conversion. "We want to support the real roll-out of DCI cinema," Joe said. "There are certain aspects that are not DCI ready, but will be within a number of months."

DCI is the acronym for a working group, Digital Cinema Initiatives, that was formed by the studios to set digital technology standards. It completed its work last year, but early systems don't yet meet all the DCI recommendations.

On With The Show

Still, many companies like AccessIT say enough systems have been successfully deployed to prove the technology is ready, and the systems in use now can be upgraded in the future.

Julian Levin, president of digital cinema for News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox studio, said the conversion has reached a stage where it should get rolling at a rate of 4,000 to 5,000 screens a year and finish in six to eight years.

"It's been many, many years to get to the top of the hill and now we're at the top," Levin said.

Texas Instruments Inc is set to announce next week that its computer chips have been deployed in 1,000 digital systems worldwide that are as reliable as film projectors.

"We have been in movie theaters ... since 1999 showing movies to paying audiences," said TI's Doug Darrow. "I think that's a fairly good track record of technology."

Dolby Laboratories has installed 150 systems, and while they do not use a DCI-approved decoding language now, they can be upgraded. Knowing that, the Walt Disney Co. put Dolby systems in 84 theaters last fall for a 3-D "Chicken Little," its first fully computer-animated film.

Moreover, Carmike Cinemas Inc., the No. 3 U.S. theater chain, began installing digital systems on all its 2,300 screens after receiving assurances from Christie/AIX, a venture of AccessIT and projector maker Christie Systems, that non-compliant components will be upgraded.
http://today.reuters.com/business/ne...DC.XML&src=cms





High-Def DVD Costs Out of Reach of Independents?

As the studios prepare their first high-def offerings for the eventual launch of the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats -- the usual mixture of big- budget action spectaculars and well-known blockbusters -- it begs the question: why aren't independent labels getting in on the ground floor of the new format launch?

Recent comments made by Image Entertainment president and CEO Martin Greenwald may hold a clue. Home Media Retailing reports that Greenwald spoke yesterday at an investors meeting, where he revealed some of the costs involved in producing high-def discs, and it turns out they're pretty dang steep.

Greenwald said mastering a single hi-def title would cost $40,000, compared to $2,000 for a standard DVD (Ouch!). Pressing costs per Blu-Ray doubled that of standard DVD, at $2 compared to $1 per disc.

“We have to wait until that price point comes down to a level that actually works for us,” said Greenwald.

We certainly can't blame Greenwald -- for an indie distributor like Image, whose titles often only sell in the lower thousands of units, costs like this would break the piggy bank. Which means high-def DVD fans hungering for top indie films from labels like Image and Criterion are likely to have to settle for 'The Matrix' trilogy in the meantime.
http://www.panandscan.com/news/show/...dependents/444





Former Blockbuster Exec Launches New Online DVD Trading Service

Hoping to tap into the growing DVD resale market, one former Blockbuster executive today oficially launched moviebandits.com, billed as the first online service that lets consumers trade in their used discs for credit to purchase other used and new DVDs.

Here's how it works: customers log into the service and enter the DVDs they have for trade. They then send those discs to Movie Bandits' warehouse, where their account is credited an amount based on the service's calculation of the current trade value of a title. Customers can then use their credits to purchase new and used DVDs direct from Movie Bandits.

Unlike Peerflix, a peer-to-peer DVD trading service that relies on a kind of honor code between traders, Movie Bandits serves as the middle-man between trades, assuring reliable delivery and technical quality of the discs between the two parties. The company says it screens, cleans, and sometimes repairs all DVDs traded in before the purchasing customer receives them.

Founded by former Blockbuster Online VP Dave Perkovich, the company's site has been in Beta testing since January, and claims to already have 10,000 members; it expects to reach an average of 5,000 trades per month by May 2006.

A quick poke around the Movie Bandits site shows that their selection, which the company claims is now over 250,000 titles, is indeed quite healthy. On the surface, it sure seems to beat dragging a big box with all our used DVDs down to the local used record store.

If you've used the service, please drop us a line and let us know about your experience -- we'll post your responses. And yes, self-serve comments are on the way.
http://www.panandscan.com/news/show/..._Serv ice/446





When Moviegoers Vote With Their Feet
Sharon Waxman

In a loud corner of the Bally's hotel convention floor, a dozen beefy, bare-chested men wearing chicken masks and black Lycra tights leapt from a wrestling ring onto the exhibition floor. It was a welcome distraction at the annual ShoWest convention this week, where the aim is to whip up enthusiasm among movie theater owners for the coming summer blockbusters.

Deftly stepping to avoid a flying wrestler (part of the promotion for the June release of a new Jack Black movie, "Nacho Libre"), Frank J. Rimkus, the chief executive of Galaxy Theaters, based in Sherman Oaks, Calif., mused on the subject preoccupying most convention attendees, namely, the future of American moviegoing.

"There is a general recognition that the world of entertainment is opening up in ways that we can't imagine today, we are launching into a whole new era," he said. He added, with a note of self-confession: "We are trying to understand what the public wants. And Galaxy does not yet have a handle on it."

The slide in American moviegoing was an open wound at the ShoWest convention, and was addressed with unusual directness by John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, and Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, in their speeches here.

The decline in attendance for three consecutive years "is a trend that must be reversed," Mr. Glickman declared in his address Tuesday; he still called himself "bullish about the moviegoing experience." A former secretary of agriculture, Mr. Glickman suggested that the film industry undertake something similar to the "Got Milk" campaign that promoted the dairy industry as a whole.

For his part, Mr. Fithian defended the idea of maintaining the interval between a movie's initial release in theaters and its later release on DVD and video. Most studios, he said, had come out in favor of maintaining the delay.

With the rising popularity of flat-screen, surround-sound home entertainment systems, the competition to theaters is stiffer than ever, a challenge at least as great as the arrival of television in the 1940's, and the videocassette recorder in the 1980's.

For the film industry, the trend of rising costs may also be tapering off as the entertainment landscape changes. Mr. Glickman cited association statistics that showed the average cost to make and market a film in 2005 dipped slightly, to $96.2 million last year. The same study noted that the studios, which make up the association, spent more on advertising on network television and Internet sites and less on newspapers and local television.

Given the rapidly growing entertainment options for consumers, at least some companies spoke about short-term alternatives, like limiting investment in new theaters to maintain positive cash flow.

As a longer-term proposition, many exhibitors are looking to digital projection — the next technical leap that would do away with movie reels — to help catapult them past the current slump. But the arrival of digital projection, which had been delayed by a now resolved argument between studios and theater chains over who would pay for the new equipment, is still two to three years away, experts say.

The future of the industry, many here seemed to agree, lies with understanding consumer behavior toward what has been a leading entertainment choice for almost a century. "That's the real question: What do you do to stir attendance, to get people in theaters?" asked Peter C. Brown, chairman of AMC Entertainment, which has 4,400 screens across the country.

His company, which is based in Kansas City, Mo., is toying with lowering ticket prices for off-peak hours — something he nervously referred to as "a slippery slope" — and is looking to digital projectors to allow more flexibility in swapping films among theaters, according to changing audience demand.

"The movie industry needs to take a big leap forward to market itself," said Jeffrey Frank, president of Drexel Theaters Group, a company based in Columbus, Ohio, that primarily operates art houses. For several years, Mr. Frank has held parties for those on line for popular midnight movies, had Oscar night parties at his theaters and instituted concierge services with reserved seating for his patrons.

Mr. Rimkus, whose Galaxy Theaters owns 101 screens in California, Washington and Texas, said that some of the company's theaters were being used, during down- time, for church services and college classes. But he also recalled a heyday of moviegoing in the 1920's and 30's when, he said, theaters were central to American communal life.

"We'll always be tied to the studios," he said, "but we need to serve the community as entertainment value, and educational value."

What about the movies themselves? The summer promises the usual blockbusters including "Mission: Impossible III," and the Pixar computer-animated "Cars." On that, Mr. Frank was clear. "Hollywood has to stop making movies out of television shows," he said. "They need to take more risks, people want more stories — and they need to make movies for all of us."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/movies/16show.html





SXSW to MPAA: STFU
Just A Thought From 15 March 2006

One of the most interesting panels at SXSW Interactive 2006 was The Future of Darknets, moderated by JD Lasica. And while the concept of Darknets - communities using private subnetworks to communicate and collaborate out of view of the larger internet - is indeed fascinating, the panel was not interesting because of the intended topic. In fact, we never actually got to hear much about DarkNets, much to my disappointment, because the panel was hijacked the moment one panelist said, "Hello, my name is Kori Bernards, and I'm from the Motion Picture Association of America."

What followed was an hour-long firing squad as one audience member after another directed angry questions her way. The feeling of pent-up frustrations with the movie biz was palpable, especially as her claims of flexibility and excitement within the MPAA to find "creative new solutions" to the problems raised by the audience rang more and more hollow, the more times she repeated them.

A couple times I almost felt sorry for her. And there were times when the cries of freedom coming from the crowd sounded like little more than selfish little privileged kids wanting to do what they want, when they wanted.

And then I remembered all those awful anti-piracy trailers they make us watch before the movies we paid to see, the total unabashed lie of their "we just wanna protect artists" line, and the way they want to make us pay over and over for the same content in multiple formats, and all my sympathy for the MPAA evaporated.

Think about this: I can go to the store and buy a five inch reflective disc that holds digital media. If that disc is a music CD, I can pop it in my computer, encode it, put it on my iPod, and listen to it whenever I like. But if that disc is a movie DVD, I cannot, even though the same iPod is perfectly capable of playing the same digital content that I own just the same. (Oh, and by the way, Apple created a billion dollar industry in legal song downloading because of this. Where's the Apple Movie Store? Ask the MPAA.)

Now, being the geek I am, I know I can encode movies and do what I just described. But I've got to use one of a handful of quasi-legal programs. The MPAA doesn't want me to do that, and they've threatened legal action against those that do. Plus, there's no way to do it using the same tools that came with my computer and iPod (namely iTunes) because of that same legal threat.

The audience was filled with other examples of an industry gone crazy. One guy moved to the UK and all his DVDs stopped working because they were region-encoded (as most are). Her answer? That was in the contract you agreed to when you bought the DVD. Another guy asked why he can't just download the Sopranos. After all, he's a HBO subscriber, so he paid for it, he just happened to miss the last episode. Her answer, again, was that the time is part of the contract. My answer: Give it a couple years and HBO will be doing this, or they'll be out of business.

Another audience member said she worked at a small film studio, doing clearances for copyrighted works to appear in movies (simply having a movie on in the background of another movie requires a release, at least according to the MPAA) and most of the time the artists involved all said it was fine - it was the studio lawyers who stood in the way.

And that's really the problem, isn't it? There are these industries of middlemen - RIAA, MPAA - that claim to "protect artists" but what they're really protecting is themselves. Artists (and I include myself in that word) need to rise up and tell these people to go get stuffed. We can decide when a mashup is perfectly fine with us. We can decide to embrace file traders to build awareness of our work. We don't need you anymore. You're just holding us back.

After all, when we allow these industry groups to frame the debate about the internet and file trading as artists versus pirates, it's a false dichotomy. No one in that angry audience in Austin wants to dupe a movie to sell it on the street. That's piracy. We just want to put movies on our hard drives and iPods, share our mix CDs with each other (just like we used to do with tapes), and mash that funny video with that cool song to produce something new, something we'll give away for free.

All these acts are illegal, or at least under threat by industry groups. Meanwhile, real pirates are on the streets selling bootleg DVDs. What are these industry groups doing about that very real threat? If only they realized that artist geeks like us are exactly the kind of people who could come up with some really interesting ways to attack the real piracy problem, if only they let us do what we want with the media we buy?

Until we (users, industry groups, lawyers, and politicians) finally make a clear legal and procedural distinction between copying a work for noncommercial creation of new works (like mashups or backups) and wholesale piracy for profit (like duplicating a work for the purpose of resale), we're just going to keep shouting at each other in conference rooms and newspapers, and real innovation will never get made.


UPDATE: You can listen in to the whole panel thanks to SXSW's MP3 Podcast and even watch some video clips from the panel.
http://server1.sxsw.com/2006/coverag...OfDarknets.mp3





MTV's Man Behind the Series
Lola Ogunnaike

Tony DiSanto stood in his sun-drenched corner office on the 23rd floor of MTV's headquarters in Times Square, staring intently at his supersize flat-screen television. He was watching "The Andy Milonakis Show," an MTV2 series about the bizarre antics of Mr. Milonakis, a chubby, hyperactive comic who looks nearly two decades younger than his 30 years. It didn't take long for Mr. DiSanto, 37, to burst into boyish giggles as Mr. Milonakis chewed through his sidekick's legs with diamond-encrusted false teeth (you had to be there). "The 'Andy' show is not for everybody," Mr. DiSanto said happily. "But it certainly works for me."

And if it works for Mr. DiSanto chances are it will work for MTV Networks, where he is the executive vice president of series development and animation. He is the man behind a slew of MTV's major hits, including "Say What? Karaoke" and the hormonal screamathon "Total Request Live." In recent years, he has done well in the reality-show realm with programs like "Made," a Pygmalionesque makeover series; "Run's House," which follows Run, the rapper turned reverend, and his family; and "Laguna Beach," the nighttime drama about rich teenagers in Southern California. "Laguna" has done so well that in May, MTV will begin broadcasting a spin-off, "The Hills."

The key to Mr. DiSanto's success, said the comedian Jimmy Kimmel, one of the producers of "The Andy Milonakis Show" and a close friend of Mr. DiSanto, is that he is in touch with his inner teenager. "He's an adult man in his 30's, but he has the taste of a juvenile delinquent," Mr. Kimmel joked, "and he also knows exactly what 15-year-old girls will want to watch."

Robert Thompson, professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University, says he believed that Mr. DiSanto would soon join the ranks of a group he called "reality auteurs." "He will be right there with Mark Burnett, Bunim-Murray and Allen Funt," Mr. Thompson said, referring to the creator of "Survivor," the production company behind "The Real World," and the creator "Candid Camera," respectively.

Last week MTV began broadcasting yet another series about beauties and the beach, "8th & Ocean," which turns the camera on 10 fledgling models (four guys and six girls) living together in a sleek Miami condominium. Among the catwalkers, there are Britt, the wide-eyed wallflower fresh from being home-schooled in Kansas; Sean, an Adonis with rock-hard abs; and Sabrina and Kelly, identical twins with an intense sibling rivalry. ("Kelly, you just don't understand," Sabrina, the less photogenic of the pair, wails during the season opener. "Everything just comes so easy for you.") By day they perfect their pouts and work on conveying emotion with their eyes; by night they party at South Beach's hottest clubs. Warm weather and bikinis, catfights and bed-hopping: it's a proven formula for the network, and it looks to be working again. The show's debut last Tuesday night pulled in 2.4 million viewers.

Will the series be another feather in Mr. DiSanto's cap? "I tend not to think too much about whether a show is going to be a hit, because that will drive you crazy and possibly cloud your judgment," he said. "I go by my gut. If I think it's cool and I get excited about it, then I can get my team excited about it, and the better shot we have of making a great TV show."

Mr. DiSanto oversees a staff of 50, but works closely with a creative team of eight. Shows are often generated from their discussions, but he is open to ideas from the outside. "The Shop," a reality series set in a barbershop in Queens, for example, was the brainchild of the music mogul Tommy Mottola and the R&B producer Corey Rooney.

"I like to gamble and try things out," said Mr. DiSanto, who in his off hours enjoys the occasional game of blackjack. "I'm almost anti-formula to a degree. If something works, I'm more inclined to take a left turn next time around, to go from a 'Laguna' to an 'Andy Milonakis.' It makes our jobs more fun." As a result, he said, he tends to stay clear of MTV's extensive research department: "I don't want to have too much data coming into my brain during the creative process, because I can see myself getting too overanalytical, dissecting things beyond recognition."

Like "Laguna," "8th & Ocean" has an I-can't-believe-it's-not-scripted quality. "No, it's not written," Mr. DiSanto said, as if anticipating the question. "These are real people, these are their real lives and this is exactly what they'd be doing if the cameras weren't there. But I don't think our viewers really care if something is scripted or not. For them the big things are: is this show going to be cool, will it hook me in and are the characters cool."

Perched on his black leather couch, a coffee table covered in vintage hand-held video games before him, Mr. DiSanto appeared uncomfortable speaking about himself and his impressive track record. "I got lucky with a couple of shows," he said modestly. But as he played segments from several coming projects, including an animated series that pokes fun at celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, he loosened up considerably. "You've got to see the trailer for 'The Hills,' " he said, sounding like a kid eager to show off his newest toy. "It's so cool."

Actually, movies, not television, really get Mr. DiSanto going. He is a "Star Wars" fanatic (note the life-size light saber in his office), and many of his series borrow from movies. " 'Made' was modeled after 'Election,' " he said, referring to the 1999 movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick. The style guide for "Laguna Beach," he said, "was 'Sunday Bloody Sunday,' while '8th & Ocean' was inspired by latter-day Soderbergh stuff. The cameras aren't perfect; they're moving. It feels more like you're peering in on a conversation."

Growing up on Long Island, in Manhasset, the son of a trumpet player turned architect and a homemaker, Mr. DiSanto whiled away many an afternoon and evening watching everything from "Raging Bull" to "Dawn of the Dead." His parents were liberal about his viewing choices. "I was about 5 or 6 when I saw 'Godfather,' " he said, "and I can remember being really young and seeing 'The Exorcist' with my dad at a drive-in theater." Carson Daly, the nighttime talk-show host, who like Mr. Kimmel, considers Mr. DiSanto a friend, said: "Tony is the only guy I know who still has a laser disc collection. He has Japanese horror flicks that were never released here. It's crazy."

Mr. DiSanto studied film at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (the only school he applied to) and during his freshman year he scammed his way into an internship at MTV by forging a letter from N.Y.U. guaranteeing that he would receive academic credit. "I was so psyched about getting the internship and I didn't want to lose the opportunity, and it really didn't seem that bad," he said.

During his early years at MTV, he worked in production on series like "Totally Pauly," starring Pauly Shore, and "Headbangers Ball," a heavy-metal show. With "Total Request Live," for which he was a co-creator, his career began to take off. "That really changed things for both of us," said Mr. Daly, who was the host of that show for five years.

Along the way there have been some misses, Mr. DiSanto said. "Dirt Squirrel," which starred David Arquette as a crime-fighting squirrel, "didn't go over well in-house," he admitted. "It was like 'Pee-wee's Playhouse' on acid and I loved it, but it was really out there. I knew it was a big gamble." It never made it past the pilot stage.

Mr. DiSanto said he would like to direct a feature film. "It'd be nice to tell a longer story on a broader canvas," he said. Not that he minds his smaller canvas. "I get paid to watch and make TV," he said. "It's not a bad job at all."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/ar...on/13tony.html





Even When It's Not Piracy's Fault, It's Piracy's Fault
from the head-in-the-sand dept

The MPAA says that international box-office revenues fell nine percent last year, and as usual, piracy gets portrayed as the biggest villain, with camcorders singled out this time. MPAA boss Dan Glickman (who apparently really likes to sing) urged the attendees of a movie theater trade show to petition their local governments to strengthen anti-piracy measures -- perhaps hoping to get them to emulate California and make it a crime to bring a camcorder into a theater -- rather than really encouraging them to do things that might actually help, like changing the way they do business. Of course, the theaters themselves aren't blameless, either, and in some ways have as bad a case of denial as the studios about why people don't want to go to the movies any more. It's still easier to just blame people downloading movies for the industry's decline, rather than try to figure out why people are downloading movies instead of paying outrageous costs to watch bad films.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060314/1253225.shtml





A Blog Writes the Obituary of TV
Dan Mitchell

ONE recent week, the video blog Rocketboom drew an average of 200,000 people a day to watch its short daily news reports on technology, the arts and other topics.

"The Abrams Report" on MSNBC, meanwhile, drew 215,000 viewers to its weekday hourlong show about legal issues.

Does this anecdote — that an unpopular cable news show and a wildly popular Web site draw similarly sized audiences — prove that the Internet is upending the economics of the television business? It does for Prince Campbell, a former media executive who runs the Chartreuse (BETA) blog.

Mr. Campbell wields superlatives in a particularly bloggish manner at chartreuse.wordpress.com. "Broadcast television is dead," he declares. "Just like the Internet killed the music industry, it's about to do the same thing to broadcast TV."

Never mind that "American Idol" draws about 30 million viewers, that MSNBC is a cable, not a broadcast, network, and that, while the music business may be wounded, it is far from dead. Still, despite the bluster, Mr. Campbell's underlying point is true enough.

A staff of two produces Rocketboom.com/vlog. "How many people do you think it takes to produce 'The Abrams Report' on MSNBC?" Mr. Campbell asks.

Good question.

But "what about the length of the show?" counters Heather Green in Blogspotting, a Business Week blog. "Is reaching roughly the same audience that's around for 3 minutes as valuable as reaching an audience that watches" for an hour?

Another good question.

Having declared that TV is dead, Mr. Campbell says broadcast television stays afloat because "the public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old."

"But I wouldn't worry too much about that," he adds. "Because their business is next."

When Rocketboom sold a week's worth of ads for $40,000 last month, it proved that while there are some advertisers who get it (those who bid for space on Rocketboom), most still do not, according to the blogger Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com.

Those advertisers "should have been falling over themselves to grab this unique bargain," Mr. Jarvis wrote. "And they should be slinking off with their long tails between their legs now."

ONLINE MUSIC The TechWeb site personaltechpipeline.com offers a fairly thorough guide to online music-subscription services, which, unlike iTunes, offer music for "rent" in return for a monthly fee. Users can listen to their downloaded music all they want, but only if they remain paid subscribers. Each also offers an option to buy downloaded music that can be played indefinitely or burned to CD's.

The business is growing ever more complicated, with numerous services, all with different policies and pricing plans for renting or buying music, digital-rights management plans, and options for playing music on various devices. While TechWeb leaves out some of the smaller services, it serves as a handy primer on the bigger ones, like AOL Music and Rhapsody.

THE ART OF THE BEG Last month, Tom Locke wrote letters to 100 consumer-product and food companies, begging for free samples. Mr. Locke is posting the results — and the letters — at the39dollarexperiment.com. So far, his $39 investment in postage has yielded $75 in freebies.

He got four free cans of compressed air from Fellowes when he wrote: "I can't begin to tell you how much I love your Air Duster product. Sure, I dust my keyboard with it — but I dust my furniture and my dog with it, too! Yes, my dog!"

He begged Wrigley for "free samples of any and every single gum flavor you have and can send me."

The result: "Rejected! Told me to buy my own gum — and where to buy it!"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/te...in&oref=slogin





As Internet TV Aims at Niche Audiences, the Slivercast Is Born
Saul Hansell

ANDY STEWARD, a successful London computer consultant and sailboat racer, became exasperated when trying to watch his favorite sport on television. There were a few half-hour recaps of some major sailing races, but they were always shown late at night.

Mr. Steward looked into creating a sailing channel on the Sky satellite service in Britain, but his idea was soon dead in the water. He would have had to pay £85,000 (nearly $150,000) to start the channel and £40,000 a month (nearly $70,000), as well as the production costs. That was a lot of money for an untested concept.

But in January, he did introduce a sailing channel, one that is rapidly filling with sailing talk shows, product reviews, programs on sailing techniques and, most important, intense coverage of the sort of smaller races that don't make it onto traditional television.

His new channel, however, will not be available over the air. And it won't be found on cable or even on satellite, at least not yet. The channel, called Sail.tv, is broadcast only on the Internet, which enables video to reach a much larger worldwide audience at a much lower initial cost than a satellite channel. Because "we didn't have any idea how big the audience would be," Mr. Steward said, he wanted to keep his expenses as low as possible. "Internet television is an investment we can grow into," he said.

In the last six months, major media companies have received much attention for starting to move their own programming online, whether downloads for video iPods or streaming programs that can be watched over high-speed Internet connections.

Perhaps more interesting — and, arguably, more important — are the thousands of producers whose programming would never make it into prime time but who have very dedicated small audiences. It's a phenomenon that could be called slivercasting.

In 2004, Wired magazine popularized the phrase "the long tail" to refer to the large number of specialized offerings that in themselves appeal to a small number of people, but cumulatively represent a large market that can be easily aggregated on the Internet. Plotted on a graph along with best sellers, these specialized products trail off like a long tail that never reaches zero.

Indeed, the Internet's ability to offer an almost infinite selection is part of what makes it so appealing: people can find things that don't sell well enough to warrant shelf space in a neighborhood music store or video rental shop — think of the obscure books on Amazon.com. The ease of digital video production and the ubiquity of high- speed Internet connections are sending the long tail of video into the living rooms of the world, live and in color.

"The next wave of media is to unleash the power of serving people's special interests," said John Hendricks, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, which is developing a series of specialized video services. "Every time I walk into a Borders bookstore, I spend a lot of time looking at the magazine rack — because staring at you are all the passions of America. The bride who is about to get married, there is a magazine for her. And for the person who is a little older, there are wonderful travel and leisure magazines."

Already, there are specialized video services serving hundreds of specialties, including poker, bicycling, lacrosse, photography, vegetarian cooking, fine wine, horror films, obscure sitcoms and Japanese anime. There is also a growing market for Webcasts of local news and entertainment from every country and in every language, aimed at expatriates.

"We're adding two or three new channels a week," said Iolo Jones, the chief executive of NarrowStep, a company in London that provides technology and support for specialized Webcasts. Among his clients is Sail.tv, which says it attracted 70,000 viewers in its first month.

NEARLY 15 years ago, when the advent of digital cable offered the possibility of 500 channels, many people were skeptical that there would be enough programs to fill them. But then came specialized broadcasters — including the Speed Channel (for auto racing fans), the Military Channel and Home and Garden Television — and now cable and satellite systems are largely full.

"It has become almost impossible for a channel to increase its distribution the old way," said Lauren Zalaznick, the president of Bravo and Trio, two cable channels owned by NBC Universal. "To get distribution it takes a lot of effort and negotiation. You have to give up a lot to get very little."

Indeed, after DirecTV dropped Trio, a channel devoted to pop culture, among other things, Ms. Zalaznick decided to move it from pay-TV systems to the Internet. "To survive we had to find a new way," she said. The new way, she quickly realized, could also help Trio resolve its identity crisis. The cable channel mixed documentaries about pop culture, original music programming, reruns of obscure television shows and a fair bit of programming aimed at gay and lesbian viewers.

Moving to the Internet allowed her to break Trio into three distinct sites; they will be introduced over the rest of this year. One, called TrioTV.com, will have the music and pop culture programming. Another, BrilliantButCancelled.com, will have the old TV shows. And the third, OutZone.com, will have gay and lesbian programming created in conjunction with PlanetOut, a media and entertainment company focused on that audience.

Other big media companies are also creating narrower Internet extensions of their channels. Scripps Networks, which runs the HGTV network, for example, created HGTVPro, with programming aimed at contractors and builders.

Discovery Communications, which has been a master of the current system, creating 15 different cable channels including Animal Planet and Discovery Health, is now exploring even more specialized services over the Internet. One will be introduced tomorrow for $9.95 a month. It will offer 30,000 video clips excerpted from its library of documentaries and other educational programs to help grade school and high school students with their homework. In the future, other services will offer content focused on narrow topics in travel, science and health.

Discovery, Mr. Hendricks says, is in a good position to create such services because of its large archive. "We have a wealth of programming just related to cancer, just related to Alaska and so on," he said.

In addition to offering Internet distribution, Discovery will start to broadcast some of these programs late at night on its regular channels and encourage people to record them, he said.

To be sure, there are doubters. "I've never been a believer that we should create channels for all these niches like beach volleyball," said John Skipper, a senior vice president of ESPN, a unit of the Walt Disney Company. "They just don't pencil out. Because if you have 12,000 people, you can't afford to do it. And if you can't afford to do it, you can't make any money on it."

One reason that ESPN has shied away from this sort of niche programming, he said, is that its brand stands for a level of high-quality visual production that would be difficult for small channels to afford. Indeed, ESPN has been investing millions of dollars to produce programs in high-definition formats.

But reticence by some big media companies is making room for independent programmers to explore all sorts of niches.

Marie Oser, a vegetarian cooking writer and food promoter, has been creating television programs for cable networks for several years. She is now working on developing a site, VegTV.com, which features 160 clips, mainly cooking demonstrations, as well as coverage of events like the Tofu Festival in Los Angeles and interviews about vegetarianism with celebrities including Jane Goodall and Daryl Hannah. The most popular viewing times, perhaps not surprisingly, are at lunch time and just before dinner.

Viewers call up about 1,000 videos each day, Ms. Oser said. "That's not huge," she said, "but it's growing." She makes money promoting her books, the food products she creates and the products of paying sponsors.

She offers her video by way of the Roo Group, a New York company that handles the technology for storing and sending the video to users; it also sells advertising on behalf of VegTV and a stable of other specialized sites. In the past, Roo has brought American Express, Honda and other national advertisers to Ms. Oser's site, although no major campaigns are running now. Roo also provides links to her programming from some other sites it works with, including Local10.com, the site of WPLG, a Miami television station, which supplements clips from its local news with additional video from Roo.

Another Roo-based slivercaster is Yuks TV (www.yuks.com), started by Dailey Pike, a Los Angeles comedian who earns most of his money these days warming up studio audiences for sitcoms. Mr. Pike said he was outraged when he saw a Comedy Central poll asking viewers to rate the 100 best comedians of all time. "Bob Hope was well below Bill Maher," he said.

He decided to create programming around clips from classic comedy television shows that have fallen into the public domain, including routines by Jack Benny, Red Skelton and George Burns with Gracie Allen. Mr. Pike also has some exuberant classic commercials, like ones featuring the dancing Lucky Strike cigarettes and the skydiver who delivered a can of Colt 45.

At first, he, too, made a program for late-night cable television, but in 2004 he switched to the Internet. The site has had as many as 200,000 visitors in a month, he said, but only if he buys advertising to attract them. "I can't make enough money to cover my costs at this point," he said. But he hopes that this will change, he said, as Roo builds up its advertising sales prowess.

Robert Petty, Roo's chief executive, has been trying to build an Internet broadcast system for years, but the idea has attracted attention only recently. "In the last few weeks, we've had a lot of people in saying they want to build out five TV stations for broadband," said Mr. Petty, a former executive at Telstra, the Australian telephone company. "We went for a lot of years without any attention at all. We're really enjoying it now."

He added that viewers were quickly warming up to Internet video. "Now we are talking about three- to five-minute videos," he said, "but there's no question that in a year's time we are talking about 22-minute to one-hour videos." Roo works with 100 sites, which show 40 million videos a month, Mr. Petty said.

While advertising on small video sites has been sporadic so far, many companies, including Roo and NarrowStep, say they see an opportunity to match video commercials to specialized audiences, as Google does with Internet searches and Web pages.

"The real analogy here is not with television but with magazine publishing," said Mr. Jones of NarrowStep. "Narrow publications can get very high rates."

In any case, companies that have thrived largely by selling specialized DVD's, often through obscure mail-order dealers, are now turning to the Internet as well. One company, Brain Damage Films, which produces and distributes horror films too obscure to show in theaters, has started renting its movies through Akimbo, a service that uses the Internet to distribute video programming. (Brain Damage's biggest hit so far has been "Death Factory," which involves an accident in a chemical plant and a worker who starts to mutate.) Akimbo can send programs either to a specialized set-top box that it sells for $69 or to a PC with Microsoft Media Center software.

Darrin G. Ramage, the chief executive of Maxim Media Marketing, which runs Brain Damage, says the company has no choice but to move to online distribution. "The bottom line is that for independent horror movie fans — people from 18 to 25 — the Internet is where they are," he said. "Anything they want to know about, they go on the Internet. If they want a movie, they go on the Internet."

Online distribution now accounts for 10 percent of Brain Damage's revenue, he said, and the company plans to start selling downloadable versions of its films directly from its Web site.

Kostas Metaxas is also shifting his video production online, although he serves an older audience more interested in diamonds than blood. Mr. Metaxas runs Exero, an Australian company that produces interviews with jewelers, fashion designers, chefs and others who cater to the preoccupations of the rich. "It's eyeball candy, basically," he explained.

He has accumulated 500 such interviews and packaged them for cable networks, DVD sales and in-flight viewing on Malaysia Airlines. Exero, too, is now finding a new audience through Akimbo, offering some programs free and selling others.

Instructional videos are also becoming available on the Web. TotalVid, which is owned by Landmark Communications, the parent of the Weather Channel, offers 2,300 programs for download, many of them videos teaching everything from how to play a guitar to the best techniques in tae kwon do. "There is a huge group of men who aspire to do martial arts," said Karl B. Quist, TotalVid's president. "They are not going to take lessons at a dojo, but they will watch a 60-minute video."

Viewers can pay for limited-time access to individual TotalVid programs, which include videos on extreme sports, music, parenting and travel, or they can pay $9.95 a month for a subscription that allows unlimited viewing of its films.

"I offered to help my son's basketball team, and I wound up as head coach," said Michael Katz, a marketing consultant in Hopkinton, Mass. A friend recommended TotalVid, and Mr. Katz used it to find a 45-minute video about how to coach youth basketball.

"The production quality wasn't great, but I could actually see the demonstrations of how to do the drills," he said, boasting that his team finished third in its league.

Looming over all of the smaller companies that distribute specialized video is the question of Google's ultimate role. Google's early video service was criticized as hard to use, but it is nonetheless attracting a lot of programming from major networks as well as independents — and of course, it has a huge traffic flow that no independent site can match. Google allows programmers to offer video free, to rent it or to sell copies that viewers download to their computers; Google gets a commission for videos that are sold and rented. Eventually, it plans to sell advertising on some videos as well, sharing the revenue with the producers.

Mr. Quist, for one, says he plans to deal with Google as a partner rather than as a competitor by making much of the TotalVid's accumulated content available for rent through Google Video. Some producers who license programs to TotalVid can cut out the middleman, of course, and deal with Google directly. Mr. Quist said he hoped to help these producers market their programming on Google as well as on Apple's iTunes and other online video stores.

Among the niche audiences that are considered both large and attractive to Internet broadcasters are immigrants and expatriates seeking news and entertainment from their home countries. But arranging cross-border deals, especially those in less-developed countries, can be difficult, complex and sometimes harrowing.

Kaleil Isaza Tuzman was reminded of this last month when someone stole his watch while he was taking a shower in a shared bathroom at his hotel in Khartoum, Sudan. Still, Mr. Tuzman said he considered the trip a success because he was able to secure the rights to broadcast Sudan TV, the national television station, on JumpTV, the company he runs.

JumpTV, which is based in Toronto, has evolved into a service that offers live Internet transmission of television station broadcasts from more than 60 countries to expatriates around the world. Among its channels are VTV4 from Vietnam, Channel 10 from Greece, Amazon Sat from Brazil and, perhaps most notably, the original Arabic-language version of Al Jazeera, the news channel based in Qatar.

This service has made a great difference to Joe Wityk, 83, of Calgary, an immigrant from Ukraine.

His son, Steve Wityk, said, "My dad has been bugging me for 20 years to get TV from the Ukraine." The younger Mr. Wityk did not want to buy a receiver to get the specialized satellite channels, which could have cost as much as $1,000, he said. So he was delighted to find that he could subscribe to TV5 from Ukraine through JumpTV. He installed an inexpensive computer in his home that he connected through a hole he drilled in his ceiling to the television set of his father, who lives above him.

"He had subscribed to Ukrainian newsletters but by the time the news got to him it was old," the son said. "The TV is much better."

MR. TUZMAN travels the world to manage relationships with television stations and oversee construction of the global network of satellite receivers and Internet servers needed to operate the system. He declined to say how many subscribers he had, but each typically pays $9.95 a month for a single channel, or up to $26 a month for a package of related channels.

Mr. Tuzman — a founder of GovWorks.com during the dot-com boom, allowing people to pay parking tickets and otherwise deal online with local governments — faces competition from cable and satellite services. That is especially the case in the United States, where there is already much programming for the largest ethnic groups. So he focuses on smaller groups.

"The Bengali community in the U.S. is not the size of Dominicans'," he said. "But guess what? They can't watch Bengali TV anywhere else." Moreover, the audience for the Internet is worldwide.

"If you are a Mexican in North America, you are much better served by cable and satellite than if you are a Moroccan in Europe," he said. "Our company is a very exciting company because we aggregate a lot of different audiences, but any one of those audiences is a very small niche."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/bu.../12sliver.html





Slick little unit

Video Downloader for YouTube, Google etc
Jack

Copy & paste the video address into the toolbar, hit enter and choose your video format. That's it.





A Studio Boss and a Private Eye Star in a Bitter Hollywood Tale
David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner

The phone rang in Linda Doucett's desert ranch house here in the late spring of 1998. It was her ex-fiancé, the comedian Garry Shandling, calling. Again.

Mr. Shandling had called several times that year to talk about his lawsuit accusing Brad Grey, his longtime manager and friend, of enriching himself at his expense. Now he was asking Ms. Doucett to testify for him.

Then, Ms. Doucett recalled in an interview, Mr. Shandling brought up something he had never told her before, about how Mr. Grey had responded to another suit, which Ms. Doucett had filed against Mr. Shandling and Mr. Grey's company for sexual harassment and wrongful termination two years earlier.

"He was going to use Pellicano," Mr. Shandling said.

"Who's that?" she asked.

"He's this guy Brad worked with," Ms. Doucett recalled Mr. Shandling as saying.

She said he added that Mr. Grey "was going to hire this really bad guy to say bad things about you — but I didn't want to do it."

The guy in question is Anthony Pellicano, the celebrity private detective who is at the center of a mushrooming federal investigation that has consumed Hollywood for months, and who was indicted on wiretapping and conspiracy charges last month. And her recollection suggests that Mr. Grey, now the chairman of Paramount Pictures, had dealings with Mr. Pellicano as early as 1996 — at least three years earlier than has so far been detailed publicly.

Her account is backed by another person's grand jury testimony, according to someone close to the investigation who insisted on anonymity for fear of angering prosecutors. The grand jury witness, this person said, gave an independent account that substantially agreed with Ms. Doucett's.

Hiring a private investigator is common practice for wealthy people in contentious lawsuits, and Mr. Pellicano, a tough-talking transplant from Chicago who cultivated an image of menace, had many clients. Many of the rich and powerful in Hollywood who used him say they were unaware he was committing crimes. But prosecutors are skeptical, and they are trying to determine which of Mr. Pellicano's clients knew about the acts that have led to his indictment.

Clout Will Tell

In any event, no case, perhaps, better demonstrates how Hollywood movers and shakers appear to have used Mr. Pellicano in disputes with those who had less clout than the drawn-out saga of Mr. Shandling, Mr. Grey and Ms. Doucett.

Mr. Grey, one of the most influential players in television and talent management, rose to an even higher perch in Hollywood a year ago, when he was named to head Paramount. He has been interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and testified before the grand jury investigating Mr. Pellicano. His lawyer has said Mr. Grey has been repeatedly assured that he was not a subject or a target of the investigation.

Mr. Grey declined numerous requests to be interviewed for this article, or to have his lawyer be interviewed. On Sunday afternoon his spokeswoman, Janet Hill, issued a terse reply from Mr. Grey to five written questions submitted by The New York Times.

"As I've said in the past, I was casually acquainted with Anthony Pellicano," Mr. Grey said in the statement. "I had no 'relationship' with Mr. Pellicano until my attorney, Bert Fields, hired him in the Garry Shandling lawsuit. The fact remains that I had no knowledge of any illegal activity he may have conducted."

Mr. Fields, one of Hollywood's most sought-after litigators, also has denied knowing of Mr. Pellicano's illicit activities.

The Doucett-Shandling episode is only one of more than a dozen situations detailed in a federal indictment of Mr. Pellicano in which an influential insider, represented by a top entertainment lawyer who in turn hired Mr. Pellicano, sought to exert his or her will over a much weaker industry outsider. In each case, prosecutors say, Mr. Pellicano set out to maintain that imbalance of power through extralegal means.

When Mr. Pellicao was working on behalf of the former superagent Michael Ovitz, lawyers in the case say, his targets were Mr. Ovitz's ex-underlings, minor industry players and bothersome reporters. When Mr. Pellicano worked on behalf of the billionaire MGM mogul Kirk Kerkorian, it was against a woman to whom Mr. Kerkorian was briefly married. When he worked on behalf of the Canadian media heiress and aspiring actress Taylor Thomson, it was against Ms. Thomson's former nanny.

The Shandling-Grey case can be seen between the lines of the federal wiretapping and conspiracy indictment of Mr. Pellicano. Prosecutors charge that from January to March 1999 Mr. Pellicano had a police source do unauthorized background checks or otherwise illegally gain information about Mr. Shandling; Ms. Doucett; Mr. Shandling's personal assistant, Mariana Grant; his business manager, Warren Grant; his friend and fellow client at Brillstein-Grey Entertainment the actor Kevin Nealon; Mr. Nealon's wife; and his friend Gavin de Becker, a security consultant. The names of Ms. Doucett, Ms. Grant, Mr. de Becker and Mr. Grant were all on a witness list in Mr. Shandling's lawsuit against Mr. Grey at the time, lawyers and people involved in the case have confirmed.

To Ms. Doucett, the federal investigation gets at the core of something that has long infected Hollywood. "This isn't about $10 million going between this movie star and that movie star, and wiretapping," she said in her first extensive interview on the subject. She refused to comment on matters she had agreed to keep confidential but was forthcoming on other aspects of her relationships with Mr. Shandling and Mr. Grey.

"It's about little people being pushed around," she said.

A Lucky Meeting

Linda Doucett was a 33-year-old former model and struggling actress when she met Garry Shandling at a friend's birthday party in the spring of 1987. He soon came to see her act in an out-of-the-way play in Burbank, and before long the two were living together for all practical purposes. Mr. Shandling had a program on Showtime, and Ms. Doucett, a Hollywood unknown, soon found herself riding in limousines and socializing with Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and Mr. Shandling's longtime manager, Brad Grey.

By 1992, Mr. Shandling, who had been courted to be a late-night talk-show host, instead began a new spoof of the genre for HBO: "The Larry Sanders Show." Mr. Grey was the show's executive producer and agreed to split any profits 50-50 with Mr. Shandling. Ms. Doucett played Darlene, the accommodating assistant to Jeffrey Tambor's Hank, the Sanders sidekick.

During the show's second season, Ms. Doucett slipped on a freshly waxed soundstage floor, herniating three discs in her neck. Urged by a friend to sue the show to pay her surgical bills, Ms. Doucett refrained after Mr. Shandling told her that "Brad asked me to ask you not to do it," she said later in a sworn statement.

But that, Ms. Doucett added under oath, was the beginning of "some kind of mistrust for everybody."

In 1993, Ms. Doucett, then 39, began pressing Mr. Shandling, with whom she was building an estate in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, to marry her and start a family. The two set, and broke, at least two wedding dates that year, before moving into the Brentwood home in January 1994. A few months later, Ms. Doucett said in the interview, she concluded that Mr. Shandling would only agree to marry and have a baby if she threatened to leave him. But Mr. Shandling instead chose to break up and sent Ms. Doucett "a stack of papers" to sign, she said.

Under the terms of a secret Aug. 31, 1994, settlement, obtained by The Times, Ms. Doucett agreed not to sue Mr. Shandling or her employer, Brillstein-Grey; in return, Mr. Shandling, by now a cable television star, agreed to buy Ms. Doucett a $365,000 condominium. Asked why she had so readily signed away her rights, she said, "I just wanted to keep my job."

But in January 1995, Ms. Doucett learned from her agent that she would not be invited back for the fourth season of "The Larry Sanders Show." When she tried to call Mr. Shandling, she swore later, she learned he had changed his phone number. A year later, Ms. Doucett hired a lawyer and sued Mr. Shandling, Brillstein-Grey, and the Shandling-Grey partnership that owned the show.

Soon after, Mr. Grey asked her to come to his office, where, she said in the interview, he "beat me up emotionally."

"He asked why I included him in the lawsuit," Ms. Doucett testified under oath, and she replied it was because he was her employer. But she expressed regret to Mr. Grey, saying that "the whole situation is excruciatingly uncomfortable and painful." In the interview, she added that she believed at the time that Mr. Grey "was trying to get me to admit to something" while she was in his office.

After months of legal wrangling, Mr. Shandling called Ms. Doucett to settle the case. She refused to discuss the terms, citing a nondisclosure agreement, but a copy of their Jan. 31, 1997, pact, obtained by The Times, shows that Ms. Doucett was paid $1 million — $675,000 up front to drop her lawsuit and state that she had never been sexually harassed, and $325,000 over the next three years.

By that August, a rift was opening between Mr. Shandling and Mr. Grey, who had become his manager in 1980, just out of college, and who by now was representing Hollywood A-listers like Brad Pitt, Courteney Cox and Adam Sandler. For the first time, Mr. Shandling got an outside review of his financial dealings with Mr. Grey, and he did not like what he was told: that Mr. Grey had been reaping millions of dollars behind his back.

Mr. Grey, who received a 10-percent manager's fee on Mr. Shandling's earnings and $45,000 per episode of "The Larry Sanders Show," had also taken for himself the 50-percent share of the show's eventual profits — "triple-dipping," as Mr. Shandling's lawyers would put it. While Mr. Shandling had agreed to these terms, Mr. Grey had discouraged him from getting independent advice beforehand, Mr. Shandling's lawyers said.

Mr. Grey returned $1.2 million in excess commissions unearthed by the review, Mr. Shadling's lawyers said, but Mr. Shandling contended he was owed substantially more. As the atmosphere grew more contentious, Mr. Grey dropped Mr. Shandling as a client in November 1997, and Mr. Shandling sued in January for $100 million in damages. The lawsuit questioned whether managers who are also producers have an inherent conflict of interest.

Mr. Grey and his allies fired back. First, Dan Klores, the publicist the two men shared, announced he was dropping Mr. Shandling and called him "illogical and irrational." Then, in March 1998, Mr. Grey hit Mr. Shandling with a headline-grabbing countersuit, claiming he had "acted erratically, irrationally, and at times abusively," all at great cost to the "Larry Sanders" partnership.

On the sidelines now was Ms. Doucett, who had just married another man and had become pregnant, but who, in light of her seven-year relationship with Mr. Shandling, could be of great value as a witness in the suit. Then her phone started ringing.

"All of a sudden, Brad and Garry love me," Ms. Doucett said. "People I hadn't spoken to in years."

Mr. Grey, she testified later, called one day to let her know that she might be called as a witness. He then made an offer that seemed heavy-handed, she recalled in an interview: "He said, 'Are you ready for your own series?' " Mr. Grey, who would go on to produce "The Sopranos" a year later, also assured Ms. Doucett, "You're like family to me," she recalled. Ms. Doucett's recitation of this exchange was corroborated by the person close to the investigation who was informed of the conversation at the time.

But Ms. Doucett made clear where she would stand, telling Mr. Grey she remained "protective" of Mr. Shandling," she later swore.

Ms. Doucett immediately informed Mr. Shandling of the call, she testified, and the two took a long walk on the set of his show. "He felt that he'd been wrongly represented and basically was nervous to talk about anything," Ms. Doucett later recounted under oath. And Mr. Shandling said he would try not to involve her in the lawsuit.

In his written statement Sunday, Mr. Grey called "ridiculous" any suggestion that he "tried to influence any witness testimony" in his litigation with Mr. Shandling.

Not long afterward, Ms. Doucett appeared in the final episode of "The Larry Sanders Show," shown May 31, 1998. A few weeks later, she said, she got another call from Mr. Shandling to discuss her future testimony. It was in this conversation, she said in the interview, that Mr. Shandling revealed his knowledge of Mr. Grey's past association with Mr. Pellicano.

Throughout her pregnancy, she and Mr. Shandling continued to talk — often, according to both Ms. Doucett and the person close to the investigation, wondering aloud if their telephones were being tapped.

Key Witnesses Speak

By the spring of 1999, the Shandling-Grey lawsuit was immersed in a contentious discovery battle, including the depositions of key witnesses, many of whom, prosecutors charge, were checked out by Mr. Pellicano. Mr. Grey, whose lawyer was Mr. Fields, endured four days of questioning by Mr. Shandling's lawyers, led by the high-profile Washington trial lawyer David Boies.

Next to testify was Ms. Doucett. Over more than five hours, she bluntly rejected many of Mr. Grey's assertions about Mr. Shandling: that he had routinely walked off the set, been late to work, caused HBO to miss air dates, shirked his promotional duties and unilaterally hired and fired writers.

"I thought Brad and Garry made the decisions on everything," she testified.

Finally, Mr. Grey's lawyers got to the heart of what Mr. Grey's lawsuit had hinted broadly at: they asked her if she had ever seen Mr. Shandling take drugs. Under oath, she replied that she had not, but quickly corrected herself: she had seen Mr. Shandling take sleeping pills — after getting them from Mr. Grey.

Ms. Doucett described Mr. Shandling's calling Mr. Grey to ask for the pills and then riding with him to Mr. Grey's house to pick them up. "He took them out of the mailbox, and we drove away," she testified.

Mr. Grey, asked in writing if he had ever provided sleeping pills to Mr. Shandling, said in his statement Sunday that "to suggest that I regularly or in any way inappropriately gave any kind of medication to Garry Shandling" was "ridiculous."

Ms. Doucett, asked about her deposition, refused to discuss her testimony. But she recalled that before it began, Mr. Grey took her aside, out of hearing range of her lawyers, and whispered in her ear. "Can you help me out on this?" he said, according to Ms. Doucett. "Whatever you want. Me and you can work this out."

After the deposition, Mr. Shandling thanked Ms. Doucett profusely. "I heard you were so great," he told her, she recalled proudly.

Indeed, Mr. Boies, in an interview, said that Ms. Doucett's testimony had been "very favorable" to Mr. Shandling. "After that deposition," he said, Mr. Grey's "counterclaim was effectively over."

On July 2, 1999, on the eve of trial, and after a judge's surprise ruling had greatly bolstered Mr. Shandling's case, Mr. Boies and Mr. Fields reached a settlement in which Mr. Grey agreed to pay Mr. Shandling more than $10 million, according to Mr. Boies.

Ms. Doucett said she did not hear from Mr. Shandling again for years — not until he called her to say the F.B.I. was asking questions about Mr. Grey's dealings with Mr. Pellicano.

It was the fall of 2003, she said, a year after Mr. Pellicano had been arrested, his office raided and a trove of computerized recordings and secret dossiers hauled off by F.B.I. agents.

After Mr. Shandling told her he had been interviewed by an F.B.I., Stan Ornellas, Ms. Doucett said she got a call from Mr. Ornellas as well.

According to Ms. Doucett, the agent told her, "When we went into Pellicano's offices, your name came up," and described unearthing a closetful of recordings and dossiers. Mr. Ornellas, the lead agent on the Pellicano investigation, did not return repeated phone calls for this article.

Mr. Shandling, who refused to be interviewed, told The Times in November 2003 that an F.B.I. agent had asked him about wiretapping. "The F.B.I. was interested in my lawsuit in regards to Brad Grey, and the circumstances of the press campaign mounted against me," he said.

Less than a month after her meeting with the F.B.I. agent, Ms. Doucett said, she received a phone call from a man who did not identify himself, and whose voice she did not recognize. "Linda," he said, "if you keep talking to your friend Stan, your child" — the man named Ms. Doucett's young son — "won't be going to" the private school where the boy was enrolled.

Ms. Doucett tried to brush off the threat as a joke.

"This is not a joke," the man said.

The F.B.I.'s investigation of the threat led to a suspect but no prosecution, Ms. Doucett said. To this day, she said, she does not know who the man was or who put him up to calling her.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/mo... tner=homepage





Reporters Exempt From Eavesdropping Bill
Katherine Shrader

Reporters who write about government surveillance could be prosecuted under proposed legislation that would solidify the administration's eavesdropping authority, according to some legal analysts who are concerned about dramatic changes in U.S. law.

But an aide to the bill's chief author, Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, said that is not the intention of the legislation.

"It in no way applies to reporters _ in any way, shape or form," said Mike Dawson, a senior policy adviser to DeWine, responding to an inquiry Friday afternoon. "If a technical fix is necessary, it will be made."

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the draft of the legislation, which could be introduced as soon as next week.

The draft would add to the criminal penalties for anyone who "intentionally discloses information identifying or describing" the Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program or any other eavesdropping program conducted under a 1978 surveillance law.

Under the boosted penalties, those found guilty could face fines of up to $1 million, 15 years in jail or both.

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the measure is broader than any existing laws. She said, for example, the language does not specify that the information has to be harmful to national security or classified.

"The bill would make it a crime to tell the American people that the president is breaking the law, and the bill could make it a crime for the newspapers to publish that fact," said Martin, a civil liberties advocate.

DeWine is co-sponsoring the bill with Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. The White House and Republican Senate leaders have indicated general support, but the bill could face changes as it works its way through Congress.

Existing U.S. law makes it a crime to disclose classified information to an unauthorized person, generally putting the burden on government officials to protect the information.

But a special provision exists to provide added protections for highly classified electronic _ or "signals" _ intelligence. That would include U.S. intelligence codes or systems used to break them.

David Tomlin, the AP's assistant general counsel, said government officials with security clearances would be potential targets under DeWine's bill.

"But so would anyone else who received an illegal disclosure under the proposed act, knew what it was and deliberately disclosed it to others. That's what some reporters do, often to great public benefit," he said.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the language would allow anyone _ "if you read a story in the paper and pass it along to your brother-in-law" _ to be prosecuted.

"As a practical matter, would they use this to try to punish any newspaper or any broadcast? It essentially makes coverage of any of these surveillance programs illegal," she said. "I'm sorry, that's just not constitutional."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031001677.html





Analysis: States Steadily Restricting Info
Robert Tanner

States have steadily limited the public's access to government information since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a new Associated Press analysis of laws in all 50 states has found. Legislatures have passed more than 1,000 laws changing access to information, approving more than twice as many measures that restrict information as laws that open government books.

Some things your government doesn't have to tell you about:

- The safety plan at your child's school, if you live in Iowa.

- Medication errors at your grandparent's nursing home in North Carolina.

- Disciplinary actions against Indiana state employees.

The horror of the attacks spurred a wholesale re-examination of information that could put the country in danger, and the state actions roughly mirror those on the federal level. Federal agencies responded by shutting down Web sites, pulling telephone directories and rethinking everything from dam blueprints to historical records.

In statehouse battles, the issue has pitted advocates of government openness - including journalists and civil liberties groups - against lawmakers and others who worry that public information could be misused, whether it's by terrorists or by computer hackers hoping to use your credit cards. Security concerns typically won out.

The AP discovered a clear trend from the Sept. 11 attacks through legislative work that ended last year: States passed 616 laws that restricted access - to government records, databases, meetings and more - and 284 laws that loosened access. Another 123 laws had either a neutral or mixed effect, the AP found.

"What these open government laws do is break down that wall of government secrecy so that everybody knows what's going on," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "A democracy can only function if we have information. You can only have oversight of government if you have information."

Associated Press reporters in every state, often with help from their local press associations, tracked the government access bills introduced since the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon were hit by hijacked planes.

In every state, reporters tallied bills that were proposed each year, and then examined the laws that passed. They assessed the impact of each new measure and rated it as loosening existing limits on public access to government information, restricting the limits, or neutral.

While fear of another terrorist attack drove many new proposals, it wasn't the only motivator. Concerns about identity theft, medical privacy and the vulnerability of computerized records have sparked many pieces of legislation, too.

Lawmakers say they are recalibrating the balance between information that could be used against society and what society at large needs to know.

"Since Sept. 11, we're looking at information like plans for our nuclear plants, the records of our bridges and transportation systems. All of the critical information that is out there that we don't necessarily want to put in the hands of a terrorist," said New York state Sen. Nick Spano, a Republican who had proposed tightening legislation soon after the attacks.

"It's a very difficult balance between the public's right to know and the public's right to security," Spano said. A different security measure ultimately became law, limiting access to information about infrastructure from airports to cellular phone systems. Last year, Spano authored a law that strengthened public access by setting a strict deadline for state agencies to respond to requests for information.

The give and take of a legislature usually forces changes to such bills - like a measure proposed last year in Oklahoma, where freshman state Sen. Charles Wyrick, a Democrat, sought to completely exempt the state's new Department of Homeland Security from the Open Meetings Act and Open Records Act.

"I don't know why all of a sudden the holy grail of security and safety is now closing records," Mark Thomas, head of the Oklahoma Press Association, said after the bill was introduced. "It seems to me we would be more secure if we knew what was going on around us. ... Apparently there are those in government who want to close all these records and say, 'We'll keep you safe, trust us.'"

Negotiations brought a compromise. The law that passed allowed the department to keep communications between the agency and the federal government confidential, along with security plans for private businesses.

"We had to fight that out, and basically it ended up being an equal distribution of unhappiness," Thomas said.

Still, the numerical data shows which side got more out of negotiations overall: The AP analysis of 1,023 new laws dealing with public access to government information found that more than 60 percent closed access. Just over a quarter created new avenues of access. The rest had a neutral effect, often through technical changes to existing laws.

Those laws emerged from just over 3,500 bills. Often, several legislators interested in a topic will each introduce a bill knowing that only one is likely to pass. In some states, the same legislation is introduced in both House and Senate chambers to speed action and build support.

Across more than four years, 36 states passed more restrictive laws than laws that loosened access; seven states passed more laws that eased barriers to access; seven states passed equal numbers. The analysis did not attempt to quantify the impact of larger, sweeping laws versus smaller modifications.

The AP analysis also did not study legislation prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, though observers say the changes have been obvious.

"What we see nationwide is states really backing away from their open access laws," said Fred H. Cate, an Indiana University law professor who studies privacy and technology. Security threats are real - but some lawmakers are just "taking advantage of the public security tide," he said.

The law in Iowa requires that schools draft emergency response plans, but bars them from the public. In Indiana, legislators agreed to keep disciplinary actions against state employees secret - except when they are suspended, demoted or discharged.

In North Carolina, new advisory committees set up to examine medication errors in nursing homes keep their meetings and records confidential, though the medication error rates found in separate home inspections that exceed a higher, federal standard can be accessed through the federal government.

North Carolina, like other places, also took steps to open access, requiring local and state governments to more quickly provide details about government incentive packages to lure business.

Elsewhere, Oregon opened records on child abuse in cases involving a child who is killed or seriously hurt; South Carolina lawmakers required the governor to open his cabinet meetings; California voters approved an amendment to the state constitution requiring that the state's laws on open meetings and open records be broadly interpreted. After the amendment passed, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made public his appointment calendar and those of two of his top aides.

Lately, privacy worries are starting to trump security fears.

"The great trend out there - that sweeps across any record - is privacy," said Charles Davis at the Freedom of Information Center in Missouri. "There's a push by government that every time Joe Citizen's name is mentioned in a government document, it's an inherent threat to Joe Citizen's privacy if that document is released."

Just this month, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced a new government- wide effort to target identity theft, barring access to driver's licenses, phone records and Social Security numbers. No longer, the governor said, should there be a presumption that government information is public. "That's backwards," he said.

Open government advocates disagree. The way they see it, if Pawlenty is successful, information that used to be public in Minnesota will soon be unnecessarily locked away.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/nation...hine_Week.html





McAfee 4715 DAT False Positive Deletion Reports Follow-up
Patrick Nolan

Friday we started receiving reports of file deletion problems from admins using McAfee AV, scans that were using the 4715 DAT's issued Friday were incorrectly identifying many executables as as W95/CTX virus. Portions of the information submitted are excerpted below, and we thank all of the admins who reported the problems which allowed us to get the early problem alert out. Your reports and the Diary warning McAfee/NAI rolls bad pattern helped many admins.

Update: 21:37 UTC - One of our readers, JD, tells us that McAfee has devleoped a tool that will restore files that were quarantined by DAT 4715. Customers are encouraged to contact their technical assistance manager. The tool may be posted on the McAfee website at some point (though it doesn't appear to be there for public download at the moment). --JAC

Update 2: 02:43 UTC 2006-03-13 - McAfee has release a list of (supposedly) all the files affected by DAT 4715. It includes some other interesting ones in addition to excel.exe, like setup.exe, uninstall.exe, shutdown.exe, and reg.exe to name just a few, but is clearly incomplete since it doesn't include any of the Oracle binaries that have been reported to be affected by some of our readers. The list can be found here. --JAC

McAfee DAT 4716 corrects the problem, references W95/CTX and says;
"Users who have moved detected files to quarantine should restore them to their original location. Windows users who have had files deleted should restore files from backup or use System Restore .

Virusscan Online users can restore the falsely detected file from the Manage Quarantined Files.."


ISC participants report excerpts;
"The 4715 dat files are incorrectly identifying multiple different files as being infected with W95/CTX when scanned with the on-demand scanner with the following products:

VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i
VirusScan Enterprise 7.1
VirusScan Enterprise 7.0
Managed VirusScan 4.0
Managed VirusScan 3.5
VirusScan Online 11
VirusScan Online 10
LinuxShield
VirusScan 7.03 (consumer)

At this time you should cancel any scheduled on-demand scans until the release of the 4716 DATs."

"Some example files are graph9.exe and excel.exe from office 2000" "....3700 files have been quarantined on over 100 pcs."

"We think McAfee's latest DAT file may be bad. They improved the detection for several variants of the W95/CTX virus, and now our scanners are detecting supposedly infected executables all over our network, including on an original Microsoft Office 11 CD. Our guess is that this is a false positive. If so, and your readers have quarantine or delete set as the default action, the Virusscan will do more damage than a real virus would."


"attempted to remove files such as Dell OpenManage, Cygwin, perl, Sysinternals pstools suite."

"anything that was in the PATH environment variable was targeted."

"Not only did it attempt to remove files in the %ORACLE_HOME%\bin directory, but also in the .patch_storage folder - so as far as oracle files, this was not limited to the PATH environment variable."

"This was also capable of navigating mapped drives, so if you had a file server setup as a common install location, if filesystem permissions permitted modification of such files, you'll want to refresh the installation files from the downloaded, compressed source file."


"[removed] ShavlikPro (commandline4.exe) and the entire SuperCACLs suite from trustedsystems.com"


"I started getting reports that looked lke a virus outbreak so I forced scans on all the network machines. This turned out to make matters worse because hundreds of files per machine were incorrctly identified as virus infected and quarantined. Many hours will be spent restoring these files from quarantine. Thankfully it was not set to delete the files."

"We had over 3700 quarantine events. I counted 297 individual file names."
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1184