[JackSpratts]

Intel Prototype May Herald a New Age of Processing
John Markoff

Intel will demonstrate on Monday an experimental computer chip with 80 separate processing engines, or cores, that company executives say provides a model for commercial chips that will be used widely in standard desktop, laptop and server computers within five years.

The new processor, which the company first described as a Teraflop Chip at a conference last year, will be detailed in a technical paper to be presented on the opening day of the International Solid States Circuits Conference, beginning here on Monday.

While the chip is not compatible with Intel’s current chips, the company said it had already begun design work on a commercial version that would essentially have dozens or even hundreds of Intel-compatible microprocessors laid out in a tiled pattern on a single chip.

The chip’s design is meant to exploit a new generation of manufacturing technology the company introduced last month. Intel said that it had changed the basic design of transistors in such a way that it would be able to continue to shrink them to smaller sizes — offering lower power and higher speeds — for at least a half-decade or more.

During a briefing on Thursday in a hotel room here, Nitin Borkar, one of the chip’s designers, showed an air-cooled computer based on the chip running a simple scientific calculation at speeds above one trillion mathematical calculations a second.

Such computing power matches the performance speed of the world’s fastest supercomputer of just a decade ago. However, Intel acknowledged that the experimental chip was not a complete system necessary to do real computing work.

During the demonstration, Justin R. Rattner, the company’s chief technology officer, showed several futuristic computing applications that he said the new chip design would help make possible. One of the applications was an automated video editing tool that would, for example, allow a computer to create a digital sports highlights video featuring a user’s favorite players.

A second demonstration showed motion capture technology — a technique widely used by the videogame industry to reproduce human forms in action — relying only on digital video cameras and computers. Conventional motion capture technology requires a complex array of sensors pinned to an actor’s body and face to record a digital video that can be used interactively.

In the future, Mr. Rattner said, it will be possible to blend synthesized and real-time video.

“Imagine learning to dance with a virtual instructor,” he said.

In leaping beyond the two- and four-core microprocessors that are being manufactured by Intel and its chief PC industry competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel is following a design trend that is sweeping the computing world.

Already, computer networking companies and the makers of PC graphics cards are moving to processor designs that have hundreds of computing engines, but only for special applications.

For example, Cisco Systems now uses a chip called Metro with 192 cores in its high-end network routers. Last November Nvidia introduced its most powerful graphics processor, the GeForce 8800, which has 128 cores. The Intel demonstration suggests that the technology may come to dominate mainstream computing in the future.

The shift toward systems with hundreds or even thousands of computing cores is both an opportunity and a potential crisis, computer scientists said, because no one has proved how to program such chips for many applications.

“If we can figure out how to program thousands of cores on a chip, the future looks rosy,” said David A. Patterson, a University of California, Berkeley computer scientist who is a co-author of one of the standard textbooks on microprocessor design. “If we can’t figure it out, then things look dark.”

Mr. Patterson is one of a group of Berkeley computer scientists who recently issued a challenge to the chip industry, demanding that companies like Intel begin designing processors with thousands of cores per chip.

In a white paper published last December, the scientists said that without a software breakthrough to take advantage of hundreds of cores, the industry, which is now pursuing a more incremental approach of increasing the number of cores on a computer chip, is likely to hit a wall of diminishing returns — where adding more cores does not offer a significant increase in performance.

During the briefing last week Mr. Rattner essentially endorsed the Berkeley view, saying that the company believed that its Teraflop chip was the best way to solve a set of computing problems he described as “recognition, mining and synthesis,” computing techniques that use artificial intelligence.

In addition to new kinds of computing applications, Mr. Rattner said that the so-called network-on-chip Teraflop processor would be ideal for the kind of heterogeneous computing that is increasingly common in the corporate world.

Large data centers now routinely use a software technique called virtualization to run many operating systems on a single processor in order to gain computing efficiency. Having hundreds or thousands of cores available would vastly increase the power of this style of computing.

One of the most impressive technical achievements made by the Intel researchers was the speed with which they are able to move data among the separate processors on the chip, Mr. Patterson said.

The Teraflop chip, which consumes just 62 watts at teraflop speeds and which is air-cooled, contains an internal data packet router in each processor tile. It is able to move data among tiles in as little as 1.25 nanoseconds, making it possible to transfer 80 billion bytes a second among the internal cores.

The chip also contains an interface capability that would make it possible for Intel, in the future, to package a memory chip stacked directly on top of the microprocessor. Such a design would make it possible to move data back and forth between memory and processor many times faster than today’s chips.

At the conference on Monday, both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices will describe new power-saving features that will make it possible for entire sections of future microprocessors to be shut down when they are not being used. The A.M.D. technology will be used in its four-core microprocessor, code-named Barcelona, which the company said would be commercially available by midyear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/te...gy/12chip.html





IBM Says New Technology Can Triple Data Storage: Report

IBM says it is developing new circuitry that could triple the data stored on a typical microprocessor, and thereby double the performance of computers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The computer maker's approach is based on exploiting the most widely used memory technology in a new way, the paper said.

IBM researchers will discuss their progress at a conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the paper said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...21979420070214





SanDisk Will Trim Work Force to Counter Falling Prices

SanDisk Corp said on Friday it will cut 10 percent of its work force and trim executive salaries to compensate for a recent collapse in prices for memory chips, sending its shares down 5 percent.

It was the second recent warning about over-supply in the volatile memory chip industry. Micron Technology Inc. (MU.N: Quote, Profile , Research) said last week that prices for memory chips used in consumer electronics would drop 30 percent to 40 percent this quarter.

SanDisk, which competes with Micron's Lexar division in making flash memory chips for devices like digital cameras and media players, said it expected to cut prices on many products by 30 percent to 40 percent in order to keep market share.

"Although we believe there will be strong pickup in demand for our products in the second half of the year, we do not have visibility as to when the current aggressive pricing cycle will run its full course," Chief Executive Eli Harari said in a statement.

SanDisk said industry-wide prices for NAND flash memory chips had fallen about 50 percent over the past two months due to excess supply and seasonally weak demand in the first part of the year.

Fears of an impending NAND memory glut have sent shares in its manufacturers sliding. Over the past month, Micron's stock has fallen 11.5 percent while SanDisk is down 9.6 percent.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...-Feb-2007+RTRS





New Cop For High-Speed Net?

Uncertain access: Agency may grill Internet service providers over download speed claims
Tom Abate

When the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission delivered an important speech last year about competition in cyberspace, she ended her remarks by focusing on an issue that directly affects the 65 million U.S. households that have broadband Internet service.

"We will continue our consumer protection work," FTC chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras said at a conference in Aspen, Colo., "by, for example, holding Internet service providers accountable for any false or deceptive representations to consumers concerning the nature of the Internet access provided."

What Majoras meant by that remark should start coming into focus later this week when the FTC convenes two days of workshops designed to expand its scrutiny of business practices in cyberspace.

Now, consumer advocates hope the FTC will take a hard look at how ISPs advertise broadband service by telling consumers that, for a certain monthly fee, they can access the Internet at speeds "up to" -- and then make a claim about speed.

Loretta Lynch, former president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said the problem with "up to" advertising is that it creates the expectation that a consumer is going to get the maximum, while the fine print in the terms of service makes no promise of any minimum. Anything between zero and the maximum qualifies as "up to," argued Lynch, now a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. The claims give consumers scant information about what they'll actually get and do not hold the company accountable to any standard of performance.

"Nobody knows what they get, and the consumer has no way of judging," said Mark Cooper with the Consumer Federation of America.

Without prejudging how the FTC will interpret Majoras' warning, Lisa Hone, assistant director of the commission's Division of Marketing Practices, said: "I think it is reasonable that speed will be one of the primary issues" raised under the consumer protection banner.

Specifically, Hone said, the FTC will be asking, "Are broadband providers providing what they say, and how can their subscribers and regulatory authorities determine whether or not they are providing what they say they are providing."

The Chronicle queried leading broadband providers -- AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and EarthLink -- on these issues. Asked how subscribers can determine what broadband speeds they are getting, AT&T and Verizon said they provide customers programs that can check connection speeds at any given time.

"AT&T is providing customers with a tool to measure their own broadband performance," said company spokesman John Britton.

Comcast, EarthLink and Time Warner Cable said their customers can use any of several independent test programs to check their speeds. (To find these, type "broadband speed test" into a search engine.)

All of the providers said that if customers suspect they're not getting the right speeds, they should call technical service. "They can immediately reach out to us to have the issue resolved," said Comcast spokesman Andrew Johnson.

But there is no way to know how well broadband providers are doing, in the aggregate, at delivering the "up to" speeds that they advertise. Despite the fact that 65 million homes are served by broadband, there appears to be no regulatory agency paying attention to the quality of the product being delivered.

Californians, for instance, might assume that their state Public Utilities Commission tracks the issue, but spokeswoman Terri Prosper replied to a Chronicle e-mail by saying: "Broadband is classified as an information service by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and subject to national rules developed by the FCC. So they would be the ones to ask about speed and advertising."

But FCC spokesman Clyde Ensslin wrote back: "The FCC does not regulate the Internet or Internet service providers (ISPs). You may contact your state consumer protection office or if there is possible fraud involved, you may contact the Federal Trade Commission."

The FTC, as Hone suggested, is just starting to consider the issue.

For now, therefore, people who suspect they aren't getting anything near their "up to" speeds may find the path to satisfaction just a bit more involved than a call to the ISP's help line.

Last summer, for instance, Jim Little of Silverton, Ore., noticed that his broadband service had become nearly as slow as his old-fashioned dial-up connection. He began calling his ISP, Charter Communications. When weeks passed without a change, Little, a 46-year-old attorney, placed an advertisement in the town paper asking folks in similar straits to join him in a class-action lawsuit.

That was around Thanksgiving. Little eventually got about 50 responses, and while he described his threat as "just a bluff," it got the attention of the City Council, which had granted Charter the franchise to deliver services to the town and used its contract clout to amplify Little's complaint.

Silverton City Manager Bryan Cosgrove said consumer protection language in the town's franchise agreement allowed him to argue that when Charter advertised speeds "up to" 3 megabits per second, that meant townspeople should consistently get something darn close. By late January, Charter had boosted the capacity of its service and offered customers rebates to make amends. A call to a Charter was not immediately returned.

The incident made Cosgrove leery of the "up to" claims.

"It is a very clever way of advertising," he said, adding, "I think it's extremely misleading."

But does one case of slow broadband suggest an epidemic? Not likely, wrote Karl Bode, an editor at DSLReports.com, in an e-mail. Bode, whose site rates ISP performance, said "a provider that consistently offers far less than they advertise because of a congested network will face public scrutiny for it until the problem is fixed."

But, he continued, "That said, the 'up to' phrasing is somewhat misleading" because it doesn't describe the speed that any given customer can really expect to get.

Why? Because networks are complex. Broadband speed at any given computer depends on everything from how far it is from the ISP's facilities, to how many people are downloading what, to how much spyware is on the PC.

So what could the FTC do if it decided broadband speed adverting is a problem?

Philip Weiser, a professor of law and telecommunications at the University of Colorado who will speak at this week's FTC workshops, suggested better disclosure. Network managers know what speeds they're actually delivering, on average, to the various parts of their service areas. But at this point they don't tell anyone.

"The first step is to come up with some understandable set of metrics, average speeds, not exact promises," Weiser said. Then, he said, the FTC "could give firms guidance" on how to explain their services so customers can better understand what they're buying.

Meanwhile this issue is starting to percolate into cyberspace. A headline on the Web site TechDirt.com asked: "Is using 'up to' speeds on your broadband promotion false advertising?" The item drew dozens of comments, including one that began, "Imagine (a) soda can (with) 'up to' 12 ounces."
How fast is fast?

Here are three Web sites that allow users to test the speed of their Internet connection:

reviews.cnet.com/7004-7254_7-0.html

www.dslreports.com/stest

www.speakeasy.net/speedtest

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...UGG3O194T1.DTL





FTC Urged to Step up Oversight of Telecom Companies Offering Net Access
AP

Consumer advocates on Tuesday said federal regulators need to increase oversight of telephone and cable companies that offer Internet access to ensure they aren't discriminating against certain providers of video and other Web content.

Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that focuses on communications law, said the Federal Trade Commission should also require more disclosure from telephone and cable companies about the Internet access speeds they promise to deliver to consumers.

Sohn spoke on the first of a two-day workshop convened by the FTC to discuss ``network neutrality'' issues. The phrase is shorthand for the concept that all online traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers.

The issue pits content providers such as Google Inc. against large telecommunications companies, such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. The latter group wants the option of charging customers more for transmitting certain content, including live video, faster or more reliably than other data.

Supporters of network neutrality argue that such differences in pricing could hinder Internet access for smaller, upstart companies by making it more expensive. Opponents, meanwhile, argue that barring telecom companies from charging more for providing additional services will reduce their incentive to invest more in their networks.

The FTC has formed an Internet access task force that is studying the issue and will issue a report for Congress and federal policymakers by this summer, said Maureen Ohlhausen, director of policy planning at the commission.

When it comes to tracking Internet access speeds more closely, consumer advocates say this is important strictly from a standpoint of truth in advertising.

In the area of net neutrality, Sohn said requiring greater disclosure by Internet service providers could help determine whether those companies are providing equal treatment to all Web traffic or whether they might be discriminating against other companies that provide competing video or voice services.

But Robert Pepper, an executive at networking equipment company Cisco Systems Inc., said such instances of unfair treatment rarely occur and can be addressed by the FTC under its existing authority.

``New, detailed...regulation would be counterproductive and instead the FTC should play a leadership role in protecting consumers and competition by exercising its authority ... on a case-by-case basis,'' he said.

Legislation to bar telecommunications carriers from discriminating among Internet content was debated last year in Congress but did not pass. Two senators, North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan and Maine Republican Olympia Snowe, reintroduced the legislation last month.

FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras first raised the subject of the commission's role in the net neutrality debate in a speech in August.

She said the agency would take steps against Internet providers that engaged in ``anticompetitive conduct.'' However, she said, ``the question ... is whether we should give the market a chance to work before stepping in to regulate this still nascent, dynamic industry,'' according to copy of her speech.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/16690795.htm





Wake Up to the 'Daylight-Saving' Bug

This year, daylight saving is starting early--a change that could cause Y2K-like headaches for IT professionals, and even for consumers.

Congress decided in 2005 to extend the period of daylight-saving time by three weeks in spring and one in the fall, reasoning that providing more daylight in the early evening would reduce energy use. However, the shift could cause trouble with software set to automatically advance its clock by an hour on the old date, the first Sunday in April, and not on the new date, the second Sunday in March.

"There has been a great deal of speculation of what the impact could be," said M3 Sweatt, chief of staff of Microsoft's customer service team. "For most people, the most apparent issue is that meetings and reminders may appear to be off by one hour."

But Microsoft may be downplaying the risk. Some say those companies that don't pay full attention to the issue are in for a rude awakening.

"We've been aware of the DST changes since late last year. But the tools and patches keep changing, or weren't available, which made it difficult to create a solid plan," said Warren Byle, a systems engineer at an insurance company. "This change might go smoothly for those who are prepared, but I think it will be the 'Y2K that wasn't' for the rest."

The move could impact time-sensitive applications other than calendaring, such as those that process sales orders or keep track of time cards. Gartner, for example, says the bug could lead to incorrect arrival and departure times in the travel industry and result in errors in bank transactions, causing late payments. In addition, trading applications might execute purchases and sales at the wrong time, and cell phone-billing software could charge peak rates at off-peak hours.

On top of that, the effect is expected to be felt around the world: Canada and Bermuda are conforming to the U.S.-mandated change, and time zone shifts have happened in other locales as well.

OS updates

Forrester Research's roundup of how the Daylight Saving Time change affects certain operating systems.

Operating system Update? Reboot?

Windows Vista; Suse 10 None needed No
Windows XP (SP2); Server 2003, 2003 (SP1) Automatic No
Apple OS X Automatic Yes
z/OS; HP-UX; Suse 8.9; Red Hat EL, Desktop Install patch No
Solaris 8, 9, & 10; Aix 5.3 Install patch Yes
Windows XP (SP1), 2000, NT Manual edit Yes
Source: Forrester Research

"It doesn't have to be Y2K to spell trouble for companies and governments," Phil Bond, chief executive of the Information Technology Association of America, said in a statement. "Organizations could face significant losses if they are not prepared."

The millennium bug cost cost the global economy billions of dollars, according to various reports. Analyst firm IDC predicted a price tag of $21 billion in the year 2000. The daylight-saving problem "is not Y2K scale," according to a recent Gartner report, but it could generate business procedure and IT system problems that can be somewhat disruptive, the research firm said.

Microsoft and other software makers have created patches to make their products ready for the switch and have filled Web pages with tips for customers. IT pros and consumers alike have to apply those updates. Otherwise, they will have to deal with electronic clocks that may be off by an hour, for three weeks starting March 11 and again for a week in the fall, when they go back on November 4 instead of October 28.

Dealing with the patches should be straightforward for most consumers. Microsoft released a daylight-saving fix for Windows XP Service Pack 2 on Tuesday, and it is pushing the patch out through the Automatic Updates feature in the operating system. An update is also available for Windows-based cell phones. However, the recently launched Windows Vista doesn't need a patch.

For businesses, getting ready is a different story. It isn't as straightforward to apply updates to Windows PCs and phones in a corporate environment, because of potential compatibility woes. Moreover, there are many other fixes that need to be applied, not just from Microsoft, but also from Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Hewlett-Packard and other software suppliers.

Companies using Microsoft's Exchange for e-mail, for example, face a real patch challenge. Microsoft has updates for the Outlook and Entourage mail clients, and for Windows Server and Exchange Server--all of which need to be applied in a specific order and in rapid succession.

Adding to the patch challenge, Microsoft also has fixes for its SharePoint and Live Meeting collaboration tools, its Dynamics customer relationship management software and its SQL Server notification services.

"There is a lot of work to implement the needed changes," said Stance Nixon, a network systems manager at Kushner, Smith, Joanou & Gregson, an accounting firm in Irvine, Calif. "The worst part is needing to touch every computer twice--the operating system and then Outlook. Even after that we will have to manually recheck every appointment."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9589_22-6159840.html





US Servers Now Use More Electricity Than Color TVs
Nate Anderson

Anyone paying attention to recent technology headlines knows that buying servers is just one part of the total cost. It costs power to run them, and power to cool them, and power costs money. AMD has just sponsored a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist Jonathan Koomey that tries to answer the question: just how much power do US servers slurp down each year?

Koomey, who is also a consulting professor at Stanford, claims that his analysis is the most comprehensive to date and is based on the best available data from IDC. He concludes that in 2005, the total power consumption of US servers was 0.6 percent of overall US electricity consumption. When cooling equipment is added, that number doubles to 1.2 percent—the same amount used by color televisions.

Between 2000 and 2005, server electricity use grew at a rate of 14 percent each year, meaning that it more than doubled in five years. The 2005 estimate shows that servers and associated equipment burned through 5 million kW of power, which cost US businesses roughly $2.7 billion.

Koomey notes that this represents the output of five 1 GW power plants. Or, to put it another way, it's 25 percent more than the total possible output from the Chernobyl plant, back when it was actually churning out power and not sitting there, radiating the area.

If current trends continue, server electricity usage will jump 40 percent by 2010, driven in part by the rise of cheap blade servers, which increase overall power use faster than larger ones. Virtualization and consolidation of servers will work against this trend, though, and it's difficult to predict what will happen as data centers increasingly standardize on power-efficient chips.

Server power usage has become a big enough issue to interest the Environmental Protection Agency. Andrew Fanara, who heads the team that develops the Energy Star specifications, applauded the new research and expressed hope that it would spur changes in the industry. "The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) applauds AMD and this latest benchmarking effort to better understand the global impact data centers have on energy consumption," he said. "We are looking forward to continuing our work with the IT industry to forge new, energy-efficient solutions that benefit both consumers and our global environment."

AMD hopes that these energy-efficient solutions will include their chips, and they now feature an entire line of efficient processors. They've even gone so far as to develop a ticker that shows the worldwide cost of not using AMD servers—an amount that currently stands at $1 billion.

Not that Intel has been sitting still. The rollout of the Core platform has shown what the chip giant can do when it sets its collective mind to dealing with power-per-watt concerns, and Intel has been aggressively trumpeting the efficiency of its chips in speeches and through whitepapers for more than a year.

It's hard to find any downside to the current focus on efficiency, unless you happen to be the CEO of Exelon. It's become so popular to "go green" (and save money) that the SPEC benchmarking consortium has even drawn up a metric for measuring power efficiency.

Saving money and lessening the Internet's environmental impact should please both baby seals and corporate suits, something that's tough to do, so more power to those working to use less.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070215-8854.html





The No-Name Brand Behind the Latest Flat-Panel Price War
Damon Darlin

If his Olevia line of televisions was ever going to get any attention from consumers, Vincent F. Sollitto Jr. would have to do something big, splashy and, in economic terms, just plain crazy.

On the day after Thanksgiving, Mr. Sollitto, the chairman and chief executive of Syntax-Brillian, had 32-inch Olevia liquid-crystal display TV sets selling at Circuit City for $475, almost half its regular price.

Syntax almost certainly lost money on the TVs. The flat screen that makes up about half the cost of an L.C.D. TV is about $350 on its own. But Mr. Sollitto could not have been more pleased. The Olevias outsold Sony and other brands while they lasted. That forced the premium brands to lower prices throughout the holiday season and take notice of the upstart from Tempe, Ariz.

“I think we are being annoying to those guys at the moment,” he said. “We are going to be on that radar screen soon if we aren’t there already.”

In the battle for market share in big-screen TVs, there is a lot of pain to go around as prices drop sharply. Circuit City, for instance, lured a lot of customers into its stores with the promotion. But last Thursday it said it would have to close about 70 stores because of slim profit margins on televisions and other products. Profits at almost all of the major TV makers are down.

The only ones not getting hurt are consumers, who enjoyed sliding prices on HDTVs in 2006. They are likely to see a rerun of the same action in 2007 as prices are expected to fall further by 40 percent or more. For that they can thank the low-price brands like Syntax’s Olevia.

“It does impact the business,” said Bruce Tripido, senior director of marketing for Sharp’s entertainment products. “They’ve accelerated the price compression and the reduction in profitability for everyone across the board.”

Of course, Olevia does not have the luxury of the name recognition enjoyed by Sharp and others. “A year ago we were nobody,” Mr. Sollitto said. “We were just trying to get people to hear our story.”

That is starting to change. Viewers of ESPN’s high-definition cable channels and its other media outlets are more familiar with the brand after a spate of advertising. Consumer Reports magazine recently rated an Olevia a best buy, along with a Sony.

Mr. Sollitto, a 21-year veteran of I.B.M. who later worked at a succession of other high-tech companies, predicted that Olevia would become a top-tier brand.

Jonathan Dorsheimer, vice president of equity research at Canaccord Adams, said this was “an achievable goal” for the company. He said Syntax had already garnered about 4 percent of the United States market, even though until late last year its sales were confined to regional electronics stores and online vendors, which make up only about 40 percent of the total market.

The company could increase its share to 7.5 percent of the United States market as it moves into the big stores, said John Vinh, a senior research analyst at C. E. Unterberg Towbin.

This year, Olevia TVs are in Circuit City, Office Depot and Kmart stores and will soon be in Target’s revamped electronics departments. Best Buy is experimenting with selling the brand online. The company expects to sell slightly more than a million TVs in the fiscal year.

There are about 80 brands in the crowded American market for L.C.D. televisions, most of them value-priced. Olevia’s competitors include Vizio, which has had success selling through Wal-Mart and Costco, and a number of brands recycled from yesteryear, when the United States still made televisions: Zenith, Emerson, Sylvania, Westinghouse and Magnavox

With the exception of Zenith, which has become the value brand of the Korean company LG, these brands are used by “virtual companies” that, like Syntax, contract with assemblers to build the TVs.

Syntax, though, has attracted the interest of investors because it is the only publicly traded TV-focused company in the United States. Its shares shot up from $2.02 in May to a 52-week-high of $11.70 in early January.

It has fallen since then and dropped 15 percent on Thursday after Mr. Sollitto issued a more conservative forecast for revenue growth — a tripling of revenue in its 2007 fiscal year ending June 30.

Mr. Vinh said investors’ expectations had run ahead of reality, and he brushed off the drop in price. He is forecasting that the shares, which closed at $8.11 on Friday, will go to $14 a share, and the handful of other analysts following the company remain optimistic. “The company is in hypergrowth mode,” Mr. Vinh said. “That’s a good problem to have.”

Mr. Sollitto is essentially taking a ride on the falling prices of flat panels, the main component in the TVs, and the drop has steepened because of a glut. It owns no factories, but buys the panels and has contracts with four manufacturers to assemble the televisions. This keeps costs down but is risky because the company does not control the supply of parts.

Right now that does not matter so much. While there is high demand for L.C.D. TVs and only eight suppliers of the flat panels that are the main component of L.C.D.’s, many of the independent factories in Taiwan are not running at full capacity. To reach greater efficiency and better economies of scale, they offer a lower price to anyone who commits to buying a lot of panels.

For example, the price of a 37-inch panel has fallen to $476, from $690 a year ago. Sweta Dash, an analyst who tracks panel prices for the market information company iSuppli, expects them to drop to $375 by June, presaging even bigger discounting at the retail level for those TVs in the next few months.

The three biggest names in the business, Sony, Sharp and Samsung, which hold about a third of the market, declined to comment on Olevia. Jonas Tanenbaum, Samsung’s vice president of visual display marketing, noted that “there has always been a disruptive force in the market.” Indeed, 15 years ago Samsung was the scrappy company building credibility.

“The off-brands are residing in a price band where we are simply not going to reside,” said Mr. Tripido of Sharp. His company has considered selling a value-priced TV, which would not carry the Sharp name.

Instead, Sharp’s strategy is to produce panels in its advanced plants in larger sizes, like 46, 52 and 65 inches, where the value brands cannot compete. (It also has a 108-inch TV coming.) Then it prices aggressively.

“The pricing was incredible right out of the chute” with the new sets, said Eric Haruki, an analyst with IDC, a market research company. “The big guys made pricing moves on their own.”

The result is a smaller price gap between the premium names and the value brands, creating a future risk for Syntax. Right now the average price of a 32-inch L.C.D. TV from a lesser-known brand like Olevia is $834, while a premium brand like Sharp sells for $1,217. Riddhi Patel, an analyst at iSuppli who tracks the overall market, predicts that by Christmas the prices will be more like $600 versus $850.

When the margin is only $150 to $200, Ms. Patel said, a shopper is more apt to shrug off the difference and choose the recognized brand name.

“We will be prepared for what’s coming, and that’s a very aggressive price reduction throughout the year,” Mr. Sollitto said.

As consumers develop a sweet spot for even bigger TVs, Olevia is pushing to sell 42-, 47- and 52-inch sets, some of them in the higher-resolution 1080p standard.

Mr. Sollitto said brand recognition becomes more important as the price difference between a top brand and his brand narrows. “The advertising makes a difference,” Mr. Sollitto said. “People are looking for a brand.” That explains why Olevia spent $2.4 million on advertising in the last three months, a tenfold increase in its ad budget.

Syntax has lined up three factories in China and Taiwan to assemble 1.3 million TVs in 2007. It also has a contract factory in Ontario, Calif., operated by Solar Link Technologies of Taiwan, to more quickly deliver to retailers in the United States. It is now seeking the capacity to produce 1.2 million more TVs. Mr. Sollitto has been racing to arrange financing for all this growth.

“Our biggest concern right now is, let’s not bite off more than we can chew,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/te.../12olevia.html





Beatles Ready for Legal Downloading Soon
Roger Friedman

The Beatles songs — all of them — will be offered for downloading soon. That’s what Neil Aspinall, the head of Apple Corps Ltd. and the man who’s protected the Beatles legacy for the last 40 years — told me over the weekend.

“All 13 core albums, the ones originally released on CD in 1987, have been remastered," Aspinall told me. "At some point they will all be released, probably at the same time.”

But the film “Let It Be” remains in DVD purgatory, Aspinall says. The reason? “The film was so controversial when it first came out. When we got halfway through restoring it, we looked at the outtakes and realized: This stuff is still controversial. It raised a lot of old issues.”

All rock groups — all musicians and artists — should have a protector as devoted or committed as Aspinall. He’s never sold the group or their legacy out, but instead been the fierce protector for nearly four decades.

Where others might have had the temptation to just cash out and take the billions of dollars being offered for one venture or another, Aspinall has proceeded with incredible care and caution.

John Lennon and George Harrison especially must be smiling at the thought of Aspinall keeping their names away from crass endeavors.

It was Aspinall who guided the Cirque du Soleil project, “Love,” which is not only a hit in Las Vegas, but is a bestselling CD as well. It’s the only album that EMI Music can claim as a hit from this past Christmas.

Aspinall did confirm for me that not everything from the show is on the CD. “A lot of the transitions wouldn’t fit,” he said. And there will not be a DVD of the magnificent show at the Mirage.

“The Mirage doesn’t want it,” he said. “They want people to come see it.”

Now that Aspinall has “won” his longstanding lawsuit with Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer), he says downloaded Beatle songs will be coming to us soon.

If you missed it, Apple Records sued Apple Computer in 2002 over trademark violations after signing a 1991 agreement — and Steve Jobs paying the Beatles about $43 million.

Jobs et al won, but the case went to appeal. Before the appeals court could make a ruling, a settlement was reached.

The settlement didn’t address downloading. But now Aspinall says that when the Beatles songs do get put on the Internet officially, “it will be on all the services, not just one.” So all the Beatles songs will be found on iTunes, Rhapsody, etc. That’s very “PC” of him!

And those 13 remastered albums? They will not include “Hey Jude,” a 1969 compilation album that Americans of a certain age fondly recall and keep in their collections on vinyl only.

Aspinall said he’d kind of forgotten about it.

“Do you know that Allen Klein” — who represented Lennon back then in the U.S. — “screwed that up!" Aspinall said. "He reversed the photos. The back picture was supposed to be the cover!”

Live 8 Part 2, Ready to Roll — With Police

The Police are announcing their world tour this morning, 11 a.m. PT in Hollywood at the Whisky a Go Go.

But don’t be surprised if part of their announcement includes a stop at Live 8, Part 2, or what’s being called 07-07-07. It’s seven concerts in seven cities on seven continents, all to bring awareness of global warming. The international event is tied to former Vice President Al Gore’s participation.

The 07-07-07 event is being produced by Harvey Goldsmith, the U.K. wonder who put together Live Aid in 1985 and Live 8 in 2005. But Bob Geldof is not involved, sources tell me.

Right now, organizers are trying to line up the Washington, D.C., mall for a mega concert that I’m told will feature the Police. If the mall is unavailable, second choice would be Shea Stadium, scene of the group’s great success in 1983.

Meantime, the Police really had a huge response at last night’s Grammys when they opened the show playing “Roxanne.”

The Grammys can probably account for the show at the Staples Center selling out in record time thanks to Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers. Nearly everyone in the place mentioned the reunion as their reason for being there.

Interestingly, the trio was offered at least two other spots on last night’s show, including a second song and the option to present Best Album. But they declined, the idea being that keeping things to a minimum was more “mysterious.”

The group, and spouses, spent much of the show bottled up in a backstage dressing suite where they watched the broadcast and entertained old friends like Stevie Wonder and Chris Botti.

One poignant moment occurred when Ian Copeland, Stewart’s brother, was shown during the In Memoriam segment. Applause broke out spontaneously, and Stewart was said to be very moved that NARAS included his brother.

Grammys Back to NYC; Record Execs Honored

The word last night is that the Grammys will head back to New York next year for a 50th anniversary celebration. They will likely go to Madison Square Garden.

What about the inclement weather? My advice: Hold them after, not before, the Oscars, during the first week of March.

Make it part of a package with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And have a tribute to the doo-wop groups that formed the basis of pop music. …

When I was a kid in the early 1970s, A&M Records was a stand alone company that represented the best in music. I can still recall buying albums with their logo because it meant quality and good music.

Last night after the Grammys, the Academy honored musician Herb Alpert — the A — and Jerry Moss — the M — at a special reception for industry icons. The Police showed up, as did will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas and Sergio Mendes — three generations of A&M artists. It was Mendes’ birthday, too.

Lou Adler, whose Ode Records released Carole King’s albums including "Tapestry" through A&M — was there, even though Carole wasn’t.

Other A&M artists include Sheryl Crow, Joan Armatrading, Procol Harum, Garland Jeffreys, Janet Jackson ("Control"), Cat Stevens, Lee Michaels, Free and my beloved Squeeze.

Don Henley never recorded for A&M but he came by anyway. Joan Baez, whose only hit album — "Diamonds and Rust" — was on A&M, didn’t show up. Oh well.

It was a lovely nostalgic evening, with Imogen Heap giving us a song and Sergio Mendes leading the band.

Jimmy Iovine, whose Interscope inherited A&M after its sale to Polygram and subsequent merger with Universal Music Group, made some nice, funny remarks about Alpert and Moss.

But it was Sting who said it best: “You felt like you could sit on their desks and sing your dreams to them.”

He added about signing with A&M: “We always felt we’d be looked after.”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,251410,00.html





EU May Require "Cooling Off" Period for Online Music Sales
Eric Bangeman

A new Green Paper on the Review of the Consumer Acquis outlining the results of a European Commission review of consumer protection laws within the EU has been published, and it may have ramifications for the online music market. One of the sticking points in Apple's row with Norway and Sweden is the "cooling off" period mandated by Scandinavian consumer protection laws. The EC is considering whether to standardize the cooling off period across the EU, and more importantly, whether to apply it to digital goods (e.g., music).

Consumers in some European countries have the right to return items with no questions asked for a specified time period after purchase. The Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman says that Apple violates the country's Marketing Control Act by not offering a cooling off period for music purchases, as Apple's terms of service have no provision for refunds.

Many other EU member countries have similar provisions in their consumer protection laws, but the details differ. The EC would like to standardize cooling offer periods along with other aspects of the EU's consumer protection laws. One of the issues being considered is whether the rules on consumer sales should apply to "digital content services" like music.

The other big issue with digital music in Europe is interoperability. Apple has been criticized by many in the public and private sectors for not opening up its FairPlay DRM to competitors. Steve Jobs has famously laid out the company's rationale for maintaining its closed ecosystem and the company is unwilling to budge on the issue.

While the EC report does not directly address the issue of interoperability, it does talk about "problems" with music downloaded from the Internet and used on digital music players or cell phones. It appears that the EC is willing to use concerns over interoperability as the basis to require online music stores to accept returns.

Such a move could cause problems for the major music services, which would have to create a rights-revocation system able to handle individual tracks. Current systems which force DRM to expire based on the authorization status of a particular motherboard or whether a monthly subscription has been paid may not be able to handle the case of an individual song being "returned." Even if a consumer decides to "return" a purchased track after the cooling off period, there is nothing preventing her from burning a copy to CD prior to returning it.

Now that the "green paper" has been published, there will be a three-month consultation period. The EC will accept comments on the various proposals contained in the document, and Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva will take the consultation "on the road," meeting with stakeholders around the EU.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070212-8815.html





Universal Near Deal With Video Site on Royalties
Saul Hansell

Universal Music Group is poised to win a small battle in its war to claim royalties from sites that allow users to upload videos that contain its music.

Universal, the country’s largest music label, is in the final stages of negotiating a settlement with Bolt.com, an online community that it sued last November over copyright infringement.

Bolt has agreed to admit that the uploads were a violation of Universal’s copyrights and to pay a settlement valued at several million dollars, said Aaron Cohen, Bolt’s chief executive. Bolt will also agree to pay royalties in the future any time its users submit videos that contain Universal Music.

Peter Lofrumento, a Universal spokesman, confirmed that the company, which represents artists like U2, Kanye West and Mariah Carey, is in talks with Bolt. The settlement could be concluded as soon as this week.

Bolt is also negotiating similar royalty arrangements with other music labels, including Warner Music Group, Mr. Cohen said.

To pay for the settlement, which will combine cash, stock and advertising credits, Bolt has agreed to sell itself to GoFish, a smaller rival, for as much as $30 million in GoFish stock.

“This deal is economically painful to Bolt shareholders,” Mr. Cohen said. “It is setting a precedent that companies that violate copyright at minimum risk litigation.”

Universal, a unit of Vivendi, hopes the settlement will set a precedent that will help its ongoing case against MySpace, the vast social network owned by the News Corporation, and against Grouper, a video sharing site owned by Sony. Universal has sued both for copyright infringement.

Representatives of the News Corporation and Sony declined to comment on the specifics of Universal’s claims, but they both asserted that their Internet sites were in compliance with copyright law. Music executives familiar with the cases said that there were not active settlement discussions between Universal and either the News Corporation or Sony. Lawyers on both sides are gathering evidence and preparing for arguments in court toward the end of this year.

After it was sued, MySpace started trying to remove Universal content uploaded by its users. It has been using technology to automatically identify audio files from Universal, and today it plans to announce that it has started to test technology that will automatically block videos that use Universal songs.

"MySpace is dedicated to ensuring that content owners, whether large or small, can both promote and protect their content in our community,” Chris DeWolfe, the chief executive of MySpace, said in a statement. “For MySpace, video filtering is about protecting artists and the work they create.”

Mr. Lofrumento said this move did not address what Universal considers the past copyright violations by MySpace.

“The copyright law doesn’t give people the right to engage in the massive infringement of our content to build a thriving business and then, after the fact, avoid exposure by saying they will prospectively start to filter,” he said.

These issues are central in the intense jockeying between Hollywood studios and YouTube over its potential liability for copyright infringement from videos uploaded in the past and royalties for future use.

Google, which owns YouTube, has offered some studios as much as $100 million to reach agreements, but it has struck none so far. Last month Viacom said negotiations broke down and asked YouTube to remove 100,000 video clips that it said contained its copyrighted content.

Just before it was acquired by Google last year, YouTube reached settlements with several music companies, including Warner and Universal, agreeing to pay royalties for both past and future videos using their music. It agreed to use the sort of automatic filtering that MySpace has started to use, but has said the technology is not ready yet.

At issue is a provision of a 1998 amendment to copyright law, known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that was meant to protect certain Internet companies from copyright violations made by their users. It says that those companies do not have to monitor files transmitted or stored by their users for copyrighted material. Rather, they simply must remove that content promptly when the copyright holder asks them to.

Universal and other music and film companies have argued that this act does not apply to sites like MySpace and YouTube.

Moving forward, Bolt and GoFish also plan to use technology that automatically scans the audio tracks of videos that are uploaded and identifies those that contain songs by Universal and other companies with which it has arrangements. It will pay royalties both on complete copyrighted works, like music videos, and also on so-called mashups, in which users add copyrighted music to their own creations.

Bolt, which was started in 1996 as a Web site for teenagers, has refashioned itself as a home for user-created video and music. In December it had 5.3 million users in the United States, according to ComScore Media Metrix. It had revenue of $7 million last year.

GoFish was started in 2005 by Global Asset Capital, a venture capital firm. Last year it went public through a procedure known as a reverse merger, under which it was acquired by a company that had publicly traded shares but no operations. Despite virtually no revenue, it has a market value of $134 million. GoFish.com, which allows people to watch user-uploaded videos much as YouTube does, had 1.4 million users in December.

The combined company will focus less on displaying Hollywood material and more on content from users and from small production companies. GoFish, for example, has created programs that combine some professional content and submissions by users. In one such program, America’s Dream Date, users submit videos of themselves performing certain tasks. The top man and women, as chosen by the audience, win a vacation together.

“If you can tap into the energy and excitement of users and channel it into original programming, it represents an unprecedented opportunity for consumers to engage,” said Tabreez Verjee, a director of Global Asset Capital who is on the board of GoFish. “Original content has the ability to draw brand advertisers in a way that can help us create a meaningful business.”

The chief executive of the combined company will be Michael Downing, the chief executive of GoFish. The company will have two co-presidents, Mr. Verjee and Mr. Cohen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/te...gy/12bolt.html




A Celebration With a Soft Spot for the Oldies
Jon Pareles

How the Grammy Awards love the oldies. A random viewer tuning in to the awards broadcast on Sunday night might have had a long wait for music from the year being judged — October 2005 through September 2006 — as songs from the past claimed the airtime.

Sometimes the oldies worked, as television if not as pop promotion. They did last night when the reunited Police charged through “Roxanne” to open the show; when Christina Aguilera belted her way through James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World” with a drop to her knees and just one scream too many; and when Mary J. Blige revived one of the ultimate soul-diva songs, Lorraine Ellison’s “Stay With Me,” as a postscript to her own award-winning song, “Be Without You.” Beyoncé sang “Listen” from the movie “Dreamgirls,” the least contemporary-sounding song on her best contemporary R&B album, “B’Day.”

Sometimes the oldies just raised the question of whether the Grammys respect the music they claim to celebrate. The big winners, the Dixie Chicks, were more eloquent when they performed “Not Ready to Make Nice,” the song that brought them top awards, than they were in their speeches; Natalie Maines sang it with a defiance and resentment that still smoldered. But the show seemed almost apologetic about other nominees. The best it could do for the Red Hot Chili Peppers was to shower them with confetti as they performed “Snow (Hey Oh)” — get it?

John Legend, John Mayer and Corinne Bailey Rae shared a medley that had Mr. Legend’s subtle song about a soldier at war, “Coming Home,” tucked in the middle. But in a Grammy Awards show that could be seen as the revenge of the leftists — with major awards for the Dixie Chicks, an appearance by Al Gore and even an award in the contemporary world music category for the Klezmatics’ settings of songs by Woody Guthrie — for some reason Mr. Mayer performed his song “Gravity” rather than the socially conscious song that won him the best male pop vocal performance award, “Waiting on the World to Change.”

Perhaps the televised awards show that promises to sum up recent music has misgivings about the general popularity of current pop, with its brusque electronic beats and splintered markets. After all, last year the show was trounced in the ratings by “American Idol,” where virtually all the music comes from the past.

The Grammys show had its own shameless “American Idol” imitation: a telephone-poll winner, Robyn Troup, got her chance for an onstage duet with a game Justin Timberlake. She was poised and skillful, but even “My Love,” a song from Mr. Timberlake’s hit album, had to have an oldie, Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” as a lead-in. (Earlier, in a nod to the YouTube audience, Mr. Timberlake pointed a low-resolution video camera at his face as he performed “What Goes Around.”)

The recording-business professionals who are voting members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences regularly show their disdain for the present. This year, the first award handed out in prime time, for best pop collaboration with vocals, went to Tony Bennett and Stevie Wonder rather than Ms. Blige with U2 or Shakira with Wyclef Jean. (Ms. Blige got some recognition later, pouring out tears and thank-yous that ran overtime.)

Songs eligible for awards got new, often backdated arrangements; Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” arrived with an orchestra and choir suggesting the theme from “Exodus,” while the musicians inexplicably wore airline-pilot uniforms. Shakira and Mr. Jean did a Bollywood variation on their “Hips Don’t Lie,” with irresistible undulations from Shakira and a clumsy back flip from Mr. Jean.

But this year’s show plunged into a morass partway through with an endless Eagles medley featuring the best new artist, Carrie Underwood, who put across her songs, and the best-selling country act Rascal Flatts, which made seemingly surefire songs like “Hotel California” sound like shrill karaoke. And a rhythm-and-blues medley representing three generations presented the music as if it were suffering a long decline: from Smokey Robinson through Lionel Richie to Chris Brown, who’s more dancer than singer.

At a time when recorded music needs all the commercial help and television exposure it can get, the Grammy Awards broadcast retreated too often into memories.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/ar...ic/12note.html




Alpine, N.J., Home of Hip-Hop Royalty
Douglas Century

DRIVING north on the Palisades Interstate Parkway, it’s easy to blow past this town and end up halfway to Rockland County. But make the turn onto Old Closter Dock Road, and you’ll find yourself touring one of the richest towns in America, a hamlet of small leafy streets and stately homes, a longtime preserve of the wealthy white elite.

By Alpine’s standards Eddie Farrell’s house is hardly jaw-dropping. A five-bedroom split-level ranch with a lawn and swimming pool, it is to all outward appearances a slice of cookie-cutter, upper-middle-class domesticity.

But buzz the intercom, and a visitor soon descends into a hip-hop version of Bruce Wayne’s Batcave: a gleaming wonderland of computers, keyboards and recording gadgetry hidden behind the soundproofed suburban facade. On a recent winter morning Mr. Farrell, a producer and D.J. known professionally as Eddie F., was holding court in his Mini Mansion Recording studio. Loading a pair of MP3 files — recent releases by Young Jeezy and Jay-Z — he used the Serato Scratch Live program and a pair of time-coded control records on his Technics 1200 turntables to execute a series of precise cuts and scratches. “It’s all digital, but the sound, the touch, everything’s the same as we used to get with vinyl back in the day,” he said.

Some of the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B, from 50 Cent to TLC to Mary J. Blige, have made the pilgrimage to Mr. Farrell’s basement to record and mix hits, a fact well documented by the rows of platinum-sales plaques and Ascap songwriting awards on his walls. But his more buttoned-down neighbors would never know it. “I try to keep a real low profile,” he said, casually dressed in a gray T-shirt, gray shorts and black slippers, a diamond stud adorning his left earlobe.

He made the move from his native Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1990, at the height of his success as the D.J. of Heavy D & the Boyz. “I was one of the first out here in Alpine,” he said. “There was no one doing hip-hop out here back then. I used to have to give people real specific directions to get out here to do a session.”

Seventeen years later they all know the way. Hip-hop has come to Bergen County full force, and this tiny, affluent town has blossomed into the favored bedroom community of rap’s moneyed set, including artists like Sean (Diddy) Combs, Lil’ Kim and Fabolous and music executives like Andre Harrell and Damon Dash. Giving a tour of his home and recording complex, Mr. Farrell pointed out the loft space where Mr. Combs used to sleep. “As a matter of fact Puffy used to live with me for about a year or two,” he said, using Mr. Combs’s now-retired nom de rap.

These days Mr. Combs hardly needs to crash on a homeboy’s sofa. The house he recently bought here, for a reported $7 million, is a 17,000-square-foot hilltop mansion with eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, indoor and outdoor pools (complete with waterfall), racquetball and basketball courts, a home theater, a wine cellar and a six-car garage.

The rapper-turned-C.E.O. Andre Harrell says it all started in nearby Englewood. “The first attraction was the glamour of the Hollywood in Jersey that Eddie Murphy created,” he said. When Mr. Harrell moved to Alpine in 1990, however, he found something quite different. “The trees and the rugged kind of nature had a serenity. If you came from an environment of any sort of urban blight, it made you feel like you’ve finally made it and you’re at peace. It was so serene and storybooklike. It was the kind of thing you grew up watching on television. You said, ‘O.K., this is what the American dream is.’ ”

Fabolous, the rapper who grew up as John Jackson in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, said the seclusion and serenity in Alpine remain a major attraction for the younger generation of hip-hop stars. “It’s a quieter environment,” he said. “It’s being able to get away from the whole hustle and bustle of the city. It puts you in a different zone, into a real comfort zone when you’re working.”

The town has long been defined by its deliberately low profile. There is no thriving downtown, no velvet-rope restaurants, no reason to come here unless you belong. Even the mail knows its place: in other towns, civil servants might stride right up to your home and drop off your letters, but in Alpine, where homes are preceded by heavy gates and long driveways, your letters are respectfully held for you until you send someone for them.

Lately, however, the town has begun appearing in both lyrics and news reports. On her song “Aunt Dot,” Lil’ Kim name-checked it: “Come on Shanice, I’m takin’ you to my house in Alpine,” she rapped. And last year, when she was released from a federal prison, reporters trailed her back to her luxurious Alpine town house, where she served 30 days on house arrest.

IT marks a strange moment in the evolution of hip-hop when its stars view Ivy League-educated, old-money establishment figures as the most desirable neighbors. And it’s a strange moment in the evolution of American capital when that old-money establishment begins to view the hip-hop stars the same way.

But on one level at least it makes perfect sense, given the mainstreaming of a once underground musical genre and its celebration of C.E.O. culture. “I don’t buy out the bar, I bought the night spot/I got the right stock,” Jay-Z raps on his new album.

Jeff Chang, the author of the hip-hop history “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” said: “Rap fortunes form as powerful an American myth as is the creativity of poverty. When these rap entrepreneurs move to Alpine, they embody a new way of envisioning the classic American capitalist story. It’s why Russell Simmons and Diddy have called their clothing lines ‘urban aspirational.’ ”

On a freezing January afternoon Wendy Credle, an entertainment lawyer and real estate agent who has lived in the Alpine area for years, and Jade Stone, a bank loan officer, offered a reporter a driving tour. “The land value out here is through the roof,” Ms. Credle said. “I know people that tear down their own house and rebuild, because they’ve got such amazing property value in the land.”

The new houses resemble Mediterranean villas or small hotel complexes, with immense indoor-outdoor pools and garages that could double as airplane hangars. That kind of room, Ms. Credle said, “affords you the head space to be creative.”

Ms. Stone, who helped secure mortgages for leading rappers like Cam’ron and Biggie Smalls, said it had not always been an easy move to make: “A few years ago, I had a client — she was a major artist too — that had excellent credit, over $2 million in the bank, was buying a house for a million-five, and because she was a new, young artist, the underwriter didn’t want to give her a mortgage.” No longer, she said. “I would say that now the banks are fighting for these guys. If I bring in a client like Jim Jones” — a rapper who is part of Cam’ron’s crew — “you’ll have three or four banks competing to do his mortgage.”

In part that is a matter of pure arithmetic. “The entry level now, they’re making $20 million,” Ms. Stone said. “The entry level back then, they were making maybe a million, so they bought a three- or four-hundred-thousand-dollar town house. Then as they got bigger, like Kim, they moved up to a $800,000 town house. Then they bought the million-five home.”

And what about the other side of the hip-hop lifestyle, the partying that earned Mr. Combs the ire of some of his Hamptons neighbors? “There’s no issue where he is now,” Ms. Credle said, explaining that in the Hamptons his guests had to park on the street. “On his estate now, trust me, he’s got room to park as many guests as he wants.” It’s all very discreet. (And fittingly, through a publicist, Mr. Combs declined to comment for this article.)

Experts say the phenomenon of the newly rich gravitating toward country-club enclaves like Alpine is well established in American society. “The old adage is ‘crowding into the winner’s circle,’ ” said Jim Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. “And so these superaffluent communities are very desirable for the big winners in our society, and there’s always the contrast between the old money and new money.” Especially in the case of hip-hop stars, many of whom insist they’ll never lose touch with their street roots.

But despite these contrasts, Mr. Hughes said, these groups have more in common than it might seem. “You have the new ultra-wealthy whose wealth may have come from sports and entertainment rather than conventional business like the corporate chieftains, lawyers, hedge-fund managers and the like. But where they want to live reflects the same values. They want to live with other winners in society. They want to live in the prestige areas. They want to live in areas that are somewhat secluded and offer them protection from citizens like you and I.”

INCORPORATED in 1903, Alpine started out as a sleepy, wooded outpost. In 1937 Frank Sinatra had his first important gig here at the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse where he did double duty as headwaiter. Today the population of 2,183 is still overwhelmingly white (77 percent, according to the 2000 United States census, compared with 19 percent Asian, 2.5 percent Latino and 1.5 percent African-American). But the roadhouse era is long gone.

In 2005 Alpine’s ZIP code, 07620, was identified by American Demographics magazine as the seventh most affluent in the country. And a high percentage of the black homeowners are celebrities from the worlds of music, film and sports, like Chris Rock, Stevie Wonder, Wesley Snipes, Gary Sheffield and Patrick Ewing.

Still, the public culture of celebrity does not seem to have followed them home. “Alpine was always a pretty sleepy place, and that’s the way we try to keep it,” said Paul Tomasko, the town’s mayor. “You mentioned Stevie Wonder. He has owned a house here for quite a while now, but we rarely see him around. In fact I’ve never seen him here. You mentioned Chris Rock. I’ve seen him a total of one time in all the years that he has lived here.”

Mr. Farrell said music industry heavyweights run into one another at places like Dimora Ristorante, in Norwood, or the Kiku sushi house in Alpine. They say hello at the post office. That’s about it.

The adjacent towns of Bergen County have their own constellation of hip-hop stars. Wyclef Jean, Reverend Run and Ja Rule are Saddle River residents. Mary J. Blige has a mansion in Cresskill. Yet even among these elite addresses, Alpine has a distinct cachet. One of New Jersey’s leading real estate agents, Michele Kolsky-Assatly of Coldwell Banker, said that had to do with its limited housing supply. The last remaining privately held country clubs were sold off in the past few years and turned into Alpine’s newest cul de sac neighborhoods. “There is no more land in eastern Bergen County,” she said. “It is gone. The land is finished.”

Ms. Kolsky-Assatly, who has worked with Damon Dash and Jay-Z, added that unlike older communities in Westchester County or Long Island, these new neighborhoods — which she says her clientele prefers — have no history of discrimination. “There’s no historical anything,” she said. “This is all new.”

Though the median house price in Alpine has been estimated by Forbes at more than $1.7 million, real estate experts say the numbers are now much higher. “This side of the street is Cresskill; this side is Alpine,” Ms. Kolsky-Assatly said during a recent drive. “These are all two-acre lots, each worth between two and a half to three million dollars for the land alone. On the Cresskill side the houses go for five million and change; on the Alpine side they go for double that.” But taxes are low: there are few public school students and a minuscule police force.

Hip-hop is a culture that emerged amid urban deprivation. From the bombed-out wasteland of the South Bronx in the mid-’70s, a young generation created new beats from the breaks in old funk and disco records, often pirating power from street lamps for “park jams” where the likes of Grandmaster Flash would spin.

They dreamed of something better, but it was all relative. “When we were starting out with Heavy D,” Mr. Farrell said, “I remember guys rapping about Jettas like it was this almost unattainable car.” Big Bank Hank of the Sugar Hill Gang, in the seminal “Rapper’s Delight,” boasted of having “a color TV, so I can see the Knicks play basketball.”

Can leafy suburbs and 21st-century mansions be equally conducive to that creative process? Mr. Farrell shrugged: “By the time you’re getting ready to make records, you’ve pretty much lived a whole lifetime of music culture. You’ve been in the streets, you’ve been in the clubs. So at the end of the day you can go into Sony studios in Manhattan or come to my place.”

In designing Mini Mansion Recording, he said, he attempted to bring the best aspects of several popular hip-hop recording spots to Bergen County, right down to the 1980s vintage Pac-Man video game in the studio lounge. And he modeled his mixing console on that of Greene Street Recording, where Hank Shocklee recorded Public Enemy.

But what about lyrical content? Can a rapper really stay true to his street roots when his neighbors are horseback-riding hedge-fund managers and wild deer are scampering across his dew-covered front lawn?

“First of all, when you talk about New Jersey, you’re not talking about Beverly Hills,” Mr. Harrell said. “The influence of the urban experience is 30 minutes away, but you don’t have to be in the noise all the time.” He added, “You have to have quiet as an artist to hear your inner voice.”

And Fabolous said he had not entirely isolated himself. “I still go back to Brooklyn all the time,” he said, “just to remind myself how far I’ve come and get inspiration from that. And I don’t think if I see a deer on my lawn, it will shake me too much.” He added, laughing, “If I do see a deer, it might be something funny I can put in a rhyme.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/ar...ic/11cent.html





Google Decried as Friend of Piracy Over AdSense Earnings on Piracy Sites
Ken Fisher

Google rules the direct marketing world thanks to AdSense, and AdSense is popular thanks to the fact that almost anyone can sign up. As it turns out, that's a problem when sites break the law.

A significant collection of media giants have accused Google of aiding two piracy web sites by both directing traffic to those sites and by selling advertising for them, according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). The cadre of media powerhouses includes News Corp., Viacom, Sony, NBC Universal, Time Warner, and Disney, the majority of which are involved in legal actions against the operators of the sites in question.

Details of the imbroglio are indeed slim, and it would appear at this time that no legal action against Google is pending. The situation is an embarrassment for the company, however, and the media companies are looking for promises from Google that this won't happen again.

Legal filings show that Google worked with EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com from 2003 to 2005, generating more than $1.1 million in revenue for the sites through the AdSense program. The sites were generally oriented towards facilitating piracy, and site operators Brandon Drury and Luke Sample are now facing legal action for inducing others to infringe copyright. Both sites sold a repackaged BitTorrent client and access to a P2P search system, but the defendants argue that they are not guilty of the charges.

According to sworn statements from the two men, Google reportedly noticed the amount of traffic and advertising served by the two web sites and assigned them an account representative to help optimize their efforts. This has been construed by the media companies as a collusive act, but is it?

The WSJ fails to note that what the defendants did was something any AdSense or AdWords partner can do. The fact that the defendants were assigned an account manager is not particularly surprising: this happens to many "high traffic sites," Ars included, but does not necessarily mean that the content of a site is closely scrutinized. This may be why no legal action against Google has been announced; the real issue is client screening, and whether or not Google will now pay closer attention to the kinds of sites that allowed into its AdSense program. For its part, Google told the media companies that they would institute new screening processes immediately. Google also said that they would stop targeting keywords that are frequently used by pirates (such as "bootleg").
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070212-8814.html





Missing FBI Laptops Still a Problem
Pete Yost

Between three and four FBI laptop computers are lost or stolen each month on average and the agency is unable to say in many instances whether information on the machines is sensitive or classified, the Justice Department's inspector general said Monday.

The inspector general said the FBI is doing a better job of reducing the number of thefts and disappearances of weapons and laptop computers, but that not all problems were corrected as urged in a report five years ago.

"Perhaps most troubling, the FBI could not determine in many cases whether the lost or stolen laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information," said the report. "Such information may include case information, personal identifying information, or classified information on FBI operations."

In a report five years ago, the inspector general said 354 weapons and 317 laptop computers were lost or stolen during a 28-month review.

The new report found that 160 weapons and 160 laptop computers were lost or stolen over a 44-month period.

The FBI said it was preparing a response to the report.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...s/4546725.html





Azureus Partners with Starz Media to Deliver Popular Anime, Sci-Fi, Horror and Comedy Television Programming Online
Press Release

Azureus, the company behind one of the most popular Internet applications for the distribution of large files, today announced a content partnership with Starz Media to make a broad range of top video genres available online. The deal marks the third distribution agreement for Azureus since its launch in December. High resolution, long-form content from Starz Media will be available to users on Azureus’ digital media platform, currently code named Zudeo (www.zudeo.com). In December, the company announced its first content partnership with BBC Worldwide.

Anime, comedy, sci-fi and horror are among the in-demand genres from the diverse Starz Media library that will be represented in this partnership. Starz Media series that will be available on Azureus later this year include, Street Fighter Alpha, Ghost in the Shell, Astroboy and Ninja Scroll, as well as Season 1 from the Masters of Horror series and Tripping the Rift.

“With Starz Media, we continue to build upon our commitment to deliver a robust offering of genre based entertainment within an optimal viewing environment,” said Gilles BianRosa, CEO, Azureus.

Azureus provides an alternative distribution platform for content providers focused on genres for which there is an avid following. Azureus’ new platform, currently code named Zudeo, enables content providers to publish, showcase, and distribute high resolution, long-form content easily, securely and at minimal cost. This includes video and games in High Definition or DVD quality over the Internet. Innovative service features also include content discovery through search, browsing, channels and tagging, as well as easier integration with firewalls, and a completely revamped, easy-to-use interface.

“Through this partnership with Azureus, we hope to reach the millions of genre fans online and build upon the avid audience interested in our video titles and series,” said Marc DeBevoise, senior vice president, business development and strategy, Starz Media. “We’re excited about Azureus’ high resolution format and its potential.”
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...&newsLang =en





Weston Man Charged in Toilet Bombings Sentenced
AP

A Weston man once called one of the Internet's most notorious pirates of music and movies pleaded guilty Monday to a federal charge that he blew up a portable toilet last year.

Bruce Forest, 50, was charged last year with a series of toilet explosions in 2005 and 2006. But under a plea agreement, Forest admitted guilt in one incident, that of blowing up a toilet in Weston in February 2006. No one was injured in any of the blasts.

His defense attorney said the incident was completely out of character for Forest. His wife, Mitzi, also came to her husband's defense. They said he had been addicted to painkillers initially taken for migraine headaches caused by a severe fall about 10 years ago. A prescribed drug intended to wean him off the painkillers caused psychotic episodes, they said.

"He's the sweetest, gentlest person," his wife said. "He never hurt a fly."

Forest was an Internet pirate in the late 1990s, said J.D. Lasica, a San Francisco writer who dubbed Forest "Prince of the Darknet" in his 2005 book "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation."

His wife also discounted those claims. She said he actually worked with the federal government to tighten safeguards against piracy.

Prosecutors said Forest began a string of bombings in Weston where he blew up portable toilets in 2005 and 2006. He was also charged in explosions at the former Fitch School in Norwalk and at an abandoned gas station in Weston.

Most of the explosions occurred at night in isolated areas, but the last blast in Norwalk occurred during the day in a heavily populated area, authorities said. The explosives involved a mixture of chemicals, police said. Prosecutors said they were detonated by an assault rifle.

Forest thanked U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall for allowing him to remain out of prison for the weeks leading up to the hearing. After the hearing, he was taken into to custody.

He faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced on May 3.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1031283





Teenagers Misbehaving, for All Online to Watch
Corey Kilgannon

Dozens of teenage boys hovered outside Deer Park High School Thursday afternoon, some holding schoolbooks, some holding skateboards and some holding camera-equipped cellphones to record the proceedings.

“There’s going to be a fight,” said one boy with shaggy hair over his eyes. “Anything funny or crazy that people would want to see and talk about, we tape it and post it online.”

School officials shooed the boys away, and at a Starbucks nearby, 17-year-old Gary Buley-Neumar explained: “Kids beat up other kids and tape it, just so other kids will see it and laugh. Or they just post stupid things they did online so other kids will look at their Web page.”

The police are watching as well. On Feb. 2, Deer Park officers announced that five teenagers had been arrested for fence-plowing — a recent fad that involves youths taking a running start and hurling themselves into a fence, sending slats flying. The authorities said the teenagers may have been imitating a popular YouTube video posted last year that received three and a half stars and had nearly 70,000 viewers.

Last month, after viewing a video of the beating of a 13-year-old girl that was broadcast on Web sites including MySpace, Photobucket and YouTube, the authorities arrested three freshman girls from nearby North Babylon High School.

Such sites are flooded with teenage-fight videos, and there are many sites, like PSFights.com, devoted solely to similar acts. In response to such cyberbullying, Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, recently asked school districts to designate a staff Internet monitor to watch for Web-posted misbehavior among students.

Schoolyard scraps, spectacular skateboard spills, puppy-love quarrels, goofy antics like placing a slice of American cheese over the face of a snoring buddy, and bruising stunts like hurling one’s body through a neighbor’s wooden fence — these and other staples of suburban teenage life have taken on a new dimension as online cinéma vérité. Instead of being whispered about among friends and then fading away, such rites of ridiculousness are now routinely captured on video and posted on the Internet for worldwide perusal, and posterity.

“Teens have been doing inappropriate things for a long time, but now they think they can become celebrities by doing it,” said Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Schneider Children’s Hospital at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.

“In the past, you’d brag to your friends in the locker room about doing something stupid or crazy or daring,” Dr. Adesman said. “Now the Internet provides additional motivation. But these things can just as easily lead to criminal prosecution as broad celebrity.”

In the classroom, in the cafeteria, in their bedrooms or on the street, teenagers are quick on the draw with the camera phone. They flip, click and post, then hope Web users will watch them.

Most suburban teenagers, it seems, can rattle off a litany of the latest teens-gone-wild offerings as though they were the local multiplex listings: boys holding cellphones under the lunch table to photograph up girls’ skirts; an innocent kiss at a party posted out of context on an ex-boyfriend’s Web site; someone bursting in on friends who are in the bathroom or sleeping, drinking or smoking; students goading teachers into tantrums; assaulting homeless people.

“Teens always do crazy stuff, but it’s just that much more intense and fun when you can post it,” said Nathaniel Visneaskous, 18, of Deer Park. “When you live in a boring town, what else is there to do?”

Parry Aftab, a New Jersey lawyer whose Web site, WiredSafety.org, offers parents help on issues like cyberbullying, noted that “you have girls at slumber parties taking pictures of each other in their bras and panties, and somehow the shots wind up on a porn site.”

“Anytime a teen is around friends now, anything they do can be filmed and put online,” Ms. Aftab said. “They say, ‘I can become a movie star or at least make it onto “The Montel Williams Show.” ’ I tell them: ‘Be careful, because what you do now is forever. When you’re applying to college or an internship or that dream job at MTV, people are going to look at what’s been posted of you online.’ ”

YouTube says it reviews videos posted on its site and removes those that violate guidelines. “If your video shows someone getting hurt, attacked or humiliated, don’t post,” the Web site warns.

Mr. Levy, the Suffolk County executive, said the authorities’ Internet focus has expanded from stopping sexual predators to making “sure the child is not being humiliated by his or her peers on online video.”

“Some kids want their 15 minutes of fame by holding other kids up to ridicule,” he said. “A premeditated attack is assault, but how about the friend who plots with the perpetrators to film it? When does that become a crime?”

Chris Marotta, a high school junior from Huntington Station, not far from here, said that with so many camera phones and digital cameras around, “at any given time, someone’s taping you.”

“Kids put their fights online for street cred,” he noted. “If it’s a bad fight and their face is in the video, they can get arrested.”

Nancy E. Willard, author of the 2006 book “Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats,” said that adults “might not consider it a great idea to post online a video of yourself committing a crime for all to see, but a lot of teens have this idea that life is a game and it’s all just entertainment.”

“In doing this, they’re jostling for social position and status, or establishing themselves in a certain social group, or just attracting attention,” she said. “To them, this is defining who they are and what people think of them. The idea that ‘people know my name’ is an affirmation of who they are.”

Indeed, Adam Schleichkorn, 25, of Huntington, has been proclaiming himself the godfather of fence-plowing, since his seminal 3 ½-star clip, popularized on YouTube, was cited by the news media in reporting the Deer Park fence-plowing arrests. Mr. Schleichkorn, admittedly a bit old for teenage tricks, said he never meant to promote vandalism; the video, he said, shows his cousin hurling himself through a segment of fence that relatives owned and that needed to be torn down anyhow.

No matter. The fence-plowing frenzy, Mr. Schleichkorn said, has driven tens of thousands of visitors to his YouTube page, where his more serious projects — he is a producer of films, videos and advertisements — can also be found.

“A week ago, no one knew who I was — now my name has been on every news and talk show,” Mr. Schleichkorn said. “I don’t care that it’s for something stupid. I was on Fox News cracking jokes. Maury Povich called me today.

“So I’m known as the fence-plowing kid,” he added. “At least I’m known.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/nyregion/13video.html





Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology

What? Huh? Illinois Bill to Ban Social Software
Michael Stephens

I can't believe this... I hope the Illinois Library Association rallies around this to oppose it! Illinois librarians -- are you listening? I hope we get a statement soon from the ILA and Illinois State Library!

Latest Developments
Yesterday, Senator Matt Murphy (R-27, Palatine) filed Senate Bill (SB) 1682, only minutes before the bill introduction deadline in the Illinois Senate. The summary is below:

Senate Bill 1682
Creates the Social Networking Web site Prohibition Act. Provides that each public library must prohibit access to social networking Web sites on all computers made available to the public in the library. Provides that each public school must prohibit access to social networking Web sites on all computers made available to students in the school. Provides for enforcement by the Attorney General or a citizen. Amends the State Mandates Act to require implementation without reimbursement. Effective January 1, 2008.
http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/full...Sess=&Session=

I can't believe the blanket prohibition here: (pardon the #s)

Section 10. Prohibition.

Each public library must prohibit
1 access to social networking websites on all computers made
2 available to the public in the library. Each school must
3 prohibit access to social networking websites on all computers
4 made available to students in the school.

5 Section 15. Enforcement.

If a public library or school
6 fails to comply with Section 10 of this Act, the Attorney
7 General or a citizen of this State is authorized to seek
8 enforcement as provided in this Section. The Attorney General
9 or a citizen shall first mail to the applicable administrative
10 unit or school board a notice of intended civil action for
11 enforcement that shall identify each public library or school
12 location at which a violation is alleged to have occurred and
13 shall specify the facts and circumstances of the alleged
14 violation of Section 10.

So, Illinois librarians - it's time to act. Call your representatives. Call the State Library.
http://tametheweb.com/2007/02/what_h...ll_to_ban.html





Die, Harry Potter, Die
Lawrence Van Gelder

Who wants Harry Potter dead? No, not just his evil nemesis Voldemort. The latest death wish comes from none other than Daniel Radcliffe, who portrays the boy wizard on screen. Discussing J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the saga’s seventh and concluding volume, scheduled for publication on July 21, two days before Mr. Radcliffe turns 18 and has access to an estimated $35 million fortune, he told The Observer magazine in London what he thought would happen to the character he plays. Will he die? “I think I will,” said Mr. Radcliffe. “I sort of hope I will, really. I think that’s really the only way Jo can end it,” he said, referring to Ms. Rowling, “if Harry and Voldemort . . . Maybe one can only die if the other one dies. I don’t know that for sure. But I’m quite looking forward to doing a death scene, if I get that opportunity.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/books/13potter.html





Google Loses Copyright Case in Belgium
Aoife White

A court on Tuesday ruled in favour of Belgian newspapers that sued Google Inc., claiming that the Web search Internet search leader infringed copyright laws and demanded it remove their stories.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company that operates the world's most-used search engine immediately said it would appeal, claiming its Google News service was "entirely legal."

A Brussels court ruled in favour of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine's "cached" links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.

It ordered Google to remove any articles, photos or links from its sites — including Google News — that it displays without the newspapers' permission.

But in the future, it said it would be up to copyright owners to get in touch with Google by e-mail to complain if the site was posting content that belonged to them. Google would then have 24 hours to withdraw the content or face a daily fine of 1,000 euros ($1,295 U.S.).

The court cut a retroactive daily fine of 25,000 euros for each day Google did not comply — far lower than an earlier judgment that threatened 1 million euros a day.

However, since Google removed content and links to Copiepresse newspapers such as Le Soir and La Derniere Heure in September, it is unclear how much any total fine would be.

Google would not comment on the fine, saying its lawyers were still examining the judgment, but did say it was disappointed with the ruling and would appeal.

"We believe that Google News is entirely legal," the company said in a statement. "We only ever show the headlines and a few snippets of text and small thumbnail images. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper's website."

Google said its service actually does newspaper a favour by driving traffic to their sites.

But the court said Google's innovations don't get exemptions from Belgian data storage law.

"We confirm that the activities of Google News, the reproduction and publication of headlines as well as short extracts, and the use of Google's cache, the publicly available data storage of articles and documents, violate the law on authors' rights," the ruling said.

Most Belgian newspapers offer new articles to readers for free but charge for access to older stories.

Copiepresse first cried foul last February after Google launched a Belgian version of its Google News service in January, 2006, displaying content from local newspapers found by its search engine.

Copiepresse insisted that Google should have asked first before it posted a headline and a link to the story. It also claimed that Google hurt the rights of authors because its stored cache of older stories effectively gave away content to archived stories they usually charge for.

A court ruling in September agreed and ordered Google to remove newspaper content from its news index under threat of daily fines of 1 million euros.

That decision came as a shock to Google, which had failed to appear at an earlier court hearing. The court later agreed to hear the case again to allow Google to put its side forward.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl.../Business/home





Web Censorship Proposed For Norway

Aqwis writes
"A Norwegian Web filtering system (link in Norwegian), comparable to the Great Firewall of China, has been proposed to the Norwegian legislature. It would, if enacted, block all Web sites and servers that contain hate material (racial hate, pro-Nazi sites, hate towards the government, etc.), most kinds of pornography (not only child pornography), foreign gambling sites, and sites that share copyrighted or other material that it is not legal to share (such as most BitTorrent sites and services such as LimeWire). Reactions have been mixed; however they are mostly negative."
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/02/13/011233.shtml





Imprisoned Journalist Josh Wolf Speaks Out From Jail After Over 170 Days Behind Bars

Josh Wolf, 24, has spent almost six months in jail. More time than any journalist in US history for protecting his sources. He was jailed on August 1st of last year when he refused to turn over video that he had shot of an anti-G8 demonstration in San Francisco to a federal grand jury. [includes rush transcript]

Wolf had sold some of the footage to the nightly news as well as posted some on his website. The news broadcast attracted the attention of local and federal law enforcement agents who were investigating clashes between the police and demonstrators at the protest. They later served Wolf a federal subpoena requiring he turn over his unpublished video footage as well as testify about the protesters seen on the tape. When Wolf refused to comply, he was charged with contempt of court and incarcerated.

Wolf’s imprisonment has prompted outcries by advocates for freedom of the press who say it is out of proportion to the scale of the investigation. Lucie Morrillon of Reporters without Borders has stated ''this is one more example of the increasing attacks on confidentiality of sources in the United States, one more blow to investigative journalism and, eventually, to the right for American people to be informed. This is a bad signal sent to the rest of the world.''

On Friday we spoke with Josh Wolf from his jail cell in Dublin California. I began by asking him why he was in prison.

We asked a spokesman for the U.S Attorney's office to join us on the program today. They declined our invitation - but Luke Macaulay, spokesperson for the U.S Attorney's office for the Northern District of California sent a statement. It reads: "We have an obligation to the community to investigate and gather evidence of serious crimes. The incident is under investigation so that the grand jury can determine what, if any, crimes were committed. As our court filings state, Wolf videotaped a public demonstration where there may have been an attempt to set a police car ablaze, and where a San Francisco Police Officer's skull was fractured when he was hit from behind by a demonstrator. Six separate judges - one federal Magistrate Judge, two federal District Court Judges, and a panel of three 9th Circuit Judges - have now ruled that this office has issued a lawful subpoena for legitimate investigative purposes, and that the material and testimony in question should be provided to the grand jury."

Martin Garbus is Josh Wolf's attorney. Time Magazine calls him "one of the best trial lawyers in the country," while the National Law Journal has named him one of the country's top ten litigators. He joins me in the studio today.

AMY GOODMAN: On Friday, we spoke with Josh Wolf from his jail cell in Dublin, California. I began by asking him why he's in prison.

JOSH WOLF: I’m here for refusing to comply with a subpoena demanding that I both testify and turn over a tape of a protest that occurred on July 8, 2005.

AMY GOODMAN: Why are you refusing to comply?

JOSH WOLF: Well, there's a number of reasons. It's been viewed that the tape is central to the issue, but it's also the testimony. Essentially, what the government wants me to do, as we can tell, is to identify civil dissidents who were attending this march, who were in mask and clearly did not want to be identified, but whose identities I may know some of, as their contact that I’ve been following in documenting civil dissent in the San Francisco Bay Area for some two-and-a-half years now.

AMY GOODMAN: US Attorney Kevin Ryan's office says they're investigating whether protesters tried to torch a police car. Ryan's spokesperson, Luke Macauley, said the grand jury needs the video to "determine what, if any, crimes were committed." Your response?

JOSH WOLF: Well, my response is that we've offered to turn the video over to the judge to review in camera to determine whether or not there is any evidence on the tape. The US Attorney's office has said that that would not be appropriate, because there's certain information that only the grand jury is privy to. I don't understand why the grand jury information can't be then passed on to the judge, who can balance all these factors and determine whether or not there is any evidence on the tape, which I contend to this day there isn't, because all newsworthy material on the video was put out online the night of the incident, because I had no idea this was going to all bubble up when I was shooting the video that night and editing it down later on.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened that day in 2005. What was the protest you were covering?

JOSH WOLF: The protest was against the G8 summit, which was going on in Gleneagles, Scotland, at the time. It started in the Mission -- it was actually completely in the Mission District of San Francisco. There was probably about 100 people, mostly anarchists. It was facilitated by a group called Anarchist Action, and they proceeded to walk through the streets. There was some minor property damage, some spray-painting, that sort of thing, dragging newspaper stands into the streets. At some point in time, the police -- kind of the tactical police squad backed off, and the main police didn't seem to be around. At that point, a lone squad car that was just patrolling the neighborhood proceeded to accelerate into the crowd. This is what set off the issues that have since become so explosive, because shortly after the car rammed into the crowd, they took off and tackled two individuals.

I happened to be witnessing and filming one, who was being choked, and you could see it on my videotape. The other individual, the other cop that took off, I don't really know what happened, because I was following the one. The cop that I wasn't filming was apparently struck in the head during some sort of an altercation, and at some point, allegedly by the US Attorney, someone threw some sort of a firework four days after the Fourth of July in the vicinity of the cop car, although when I walked past the cop car I certainly didn't see any flames protruding, and the damage report shows that there wasn't really any damage to the cop car beyond a broken taillight.

AMY GOODMAN: Josh Wolf, why aren't you protected by California Shield Law, that protects journalists?

JOSH WOLF: I am protected by the California Shield Law. This isn't in California state court, though. This is in federal court. And the federal government does not acknowledge any sort of federal protections for journalists.

AMY GOODMAN: How did this end up in federal court?

JOSH WOLF: The government contends that there is a statute that says that because the San Francisco Police Department gets money from the government for training against terrorism and other stuff like that, that any property belonging to the San Francisco Police Department is of federal interest, and therefore, this is a federal offense that they're investigating. But clearly this seems like an attempt to sort of circumvent the protections that California feels are due to journalists in order to prevent the situation that I’m currently dealing with at this moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Josh, what has been the response of the journalistic community in this country to your incarceration?

JOSH WOLF: It's difficult for me to gauge what the journalistic response is. I obviously don't have internet access or anything like that in here. I do get the newspaper, and the San Francisco Chronicle's covered this story quite well. I’ve been told that it's been a sort of lackluster response. I’m not entirely sure why that is. But it seems to me that part of it may be that the existing news media doesn't want to acknowledge that independent journalists who don't rely on television stations or large-scale newspapers or anything like that really are an additional form of journalism that's part of the media today.

AMY GOODMAN: You were named, however, the Northern California 2006 journalist of the year by an establishment journalistic organization, the Society of Professional Journalists.

JOSH WOLF: That's correct, and I’ve also been told that on Tuesday I was awarded the James Madison Award by the same group for online journalism.

AMY GOODMAN: The protests that you were covering, what do you think the government is trying to find out about the protesters?

JOSH WOLF: I think that their intent is two-fold, or even more than that. One thing that they're trying to do is they're trying to basically move toward state-sanctioned journalism. They're trying to say that I’m not a journalist, and even if I was, that journalists aren't protected, in order to basically force journalists to act as agents for the state. Beyond that, they're also trying to identify civil dissidents and form databases. The ACLU has uncovered numerous instances of the government trying to capture identities of people who are protesting against the government. Dissent may be patriotic, but this current administration doesn't think so, and they're doing everything to criminalize it, or at least intimidate those that are engaged in it to the point that they feel that it is not safe to continue expressing their beliefs.

AMY GOODMAN: You have used the term, Josh, “anarchist witch hunt” in your blog. What do you mean?

JOSH WOLF: Well, the grand jury itself is a very strange segment of the government, in that there's no attorneys, there's no judges. It's just the US Attorney and the grand jury, and it's my belief that what they want to do is they want to call me, have me identify the people in the video. Then any people that I’m able to identify would in turn be called in. Those people would then be forced to either go to jail for contempt or name the people in the video that they saw. Then those people would follow the same procedure like so forth and like so forth until they had a database of everyone that was there that night. We've seen similar things happen in regards to the ELF, the Environmental Liberation Front, as well as the ALF, the Animal Liberation Front, in several Bay Area grand juries that have resulted in grand jury resisters and other people that have chosen not to resist and told what's going on.

AMY GOODMAN: Josh, in a January 29th court filing, federal prosecutors said that it's in your "imagination" that you're a journalist.

JOSH WOLF: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response?

JOSH WOLF: I think it's a very scary idea that the US Attorney, the Justice Department, the government prosecution feels that they can determine who is and isn't a journalist. I think that's the first step towards state-sanctioned journalism, and I think it also is indicative of a world almost a 1984 Orwellian world that I don't think we want to live in. As far as whether or not I’m a journalist in my imagination, the New York Times has said I’m a journalist. The Society of Professional Journalists has awarded me an award as a journalist. Countless media outlets have said I’m a journalist. So if it's my imagination and other journalists' imagination, then who decides what is and isn't a journalist? The government?

AMY GOODMAN: Jailed journalist Josh Wolf speaking to us from the federal correctional institution in Dublin, California. We'll be back with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to the federal correctional institution in Dublin, California, to the interview with jailed journalist Josh Wolf. He has spent the most amount of time in jail for protecting his sources than any journalist in history, almost six months. I asked him to describe what his time has been like in prison.

JOSH WOLF: Yeah, it's getting very close to six months. I’ve probably read about sixty books. I’ve written some 300-400 letters in response to things that have come in to me. I’ve written hundreds of pages in my journal, wrote numerous blog entries, played a lot of dominoes, exercised, ate and slept, and that's basically all that one can do inside of a prison environment. I’ve socialized with the inmates, gotten a better understanding of the justice system, made some good friends and acquaintances.

AMY GOODMAN: Who is imprisoned along with you?

JOSH WOLF: Well, for one thing, Greg Anderson, who's also in contempt for -- regarding the BALCO case. He's there.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who Greg Anderson is.

JOSH WOLF: Greg Anderson is Barry Bonds's trainer, who has refused to testify in the grand jury that's investigating whether or not Barry Bonds lied under oath in the grand jury. So he's there in the unit. There's a number of drug dealers, felons with guns, illegal immigrants --that's one of the most frightening things is, a lot of the people there have done nothing more than cross an imaginary line, and that's their crime, and they're often given three, four, five years before being deported, which is just unbelievable.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you been able to interview them?

JOSH WOLF: I’ve spoken to them at length. I recently wrote something about my understanding of their situation, which I believe is on my blog right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And how is your -- how are the guards, how is the prison treating you?

JOSH WOLF: With a level of professionality that I did not expect, not just in terms of myself, who is clearly here for a different sort of situation than other people, but also in terms of just all of the prisoners that are here. I was kind of quite surprised that there is this, you know, professional courtesy given towards the inmates, but I’ve been told that that's one of the major differences between the federal and state systems of incarceration.

AMY GOODMAN: Josh Wolf, why did you go to the protest that day in July of 2005?

JOSH WOLF: To document a demonstration that the news media was almost certainly likely to ignore.

AMY GOODMAN: At this point, after being imprisoned for almost six months, are you sorry you went?

JOSH WOLF: I’m not sorry at all I went. Had I known that the FBI was going to subpoena my footage in this way, and given the fact that I knew there was nothing on it, it may have been a smarter practice from henceforth to take all of my material and put it online and say, complete video, edited video, and then there would have been no need to subpoena the footage. That may be a best practice. Perhaps a better practice is, once I finish editing a video, to destroy the master footage.

AMY GOODMAN: What kind of effect has your imprisonment had on your family?

JOSH WOLF: It's been very frustrating for my mother. Clearly she, you know, doesn't want her son to be in jail, especially for six months now. There's been some difficulties with the home situation, in that, you know, here I am not able to pay my rent, having to rely on other people to take care of that. That sort of situation is quite stressful. But everyone's very supportive. Both my mother and father have been behind me 110%. And they know that I’m doing the right thing and have my back for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Josh, I know we don't have much more time in this conversation, which is limited to fifteen minutes, but I was just looking at your blog and the poem you wrote, "The Alarm Clock." Do you remember it off the top of your head?

JOSH WOLF: I don't remember it off the top of my head.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, your last lines, “I am an alarm clock/And I am sounding the alarm/Like Paul Revere did years ago/I’m riding down the lane/Screaming/‘Wake up!’” Do you think your imprisonment is having that effect?

JOSH WOLF: I’d like to think it's having that effect, but my fear is that instead of having the effect of making people wake up and realize that we need to do something about the impending police state that we're living in that will send a journalist to jail for six months, who was accused of doing nothing wrong, that instead of causing people to stand up, that it's scaring people into not speaking out at all, and that's a very frightening concept that reminds me of what happened during World War II or the lead-up to World War II in Germany, in that all these people saw what was coming their way and could have decided to react, to resist, but were too afraid. And I’m worried that America is too afraid, and even though maybe my situation has helped them realize what's coming down the pike, that instead of jolting them out of bed, it's just lulled them deeper into sleep and helped them pull the covers over their head in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, if they don't see it, it will all go away.

AMY GOODMAN: How much longer will you be jailed?

JOSH WOLF: I’ll be jailed until the judge, William Alsup, decides to say, “He's not going to give in. We have to let him go.”

AMY GOODMAN: Could it be indefinitely that you're held?

JOSH WOLF: It's not likely to be indefinitely. Civil contempt lasts the length of the grand jury with a maximum of eighteen months, and the grand jury expires in July, but then can be extended for six more months. So the longest that I would be likely to be here would be about eighteen months total. About a year from now is when I’d be worse case likely to be released. But then, of course, there is also the possibility that they'll bring criminal contempt charges against me, and there really is no limitations to the penalties for criminal contempt. And theoretically, God forbid, I could face life imprisonment, but I don't really see that happening. I certainly am optimistic that that won't happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you afraid?

JOSH WOLF: At this point, the whole thing's become so bizarre that there is some fear that they are going to go that far. But I have hope that basically that a jury wouldn't convict me of criminal contempt after having been through this and that a judge wouldn't decide to take such a ridiculous course of action.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you plan to continue to be a journalist, Josh Wolf, once you are freed?

JOSH WOLF: Absolutely. This has just made me more determined to get the stories that are not being covered out than ever before, because someone needs to cover this. There's a lot of people that are, but we need more. Every single person that can stand up and document injustices they see around them is one more person that will help lead towards an understanding and enlightenment of our society about what's really going on.

AMY GOODMAN: If people want to reach you, where can they write? Can they email you? Can they write you letters?

JOSH WOLF: If they visit my website at joshwolf.net, there's my blog that they can read about what's going on, there's a resource page that explains the situation a little better. And at the bottom, it says, “mail me.” Right there is my address. And if you don't want to send snail mail, you can just click the email button and send an email to freejosh(at)joshwolf.net, and those will get printed and sent to me. But please do include your snail mail address, because I can't email you back.

AMY GOODMAN: And would you recommend to young journalists -- of course, you're one yourself -- you're how old?

JOSH WOLF: I’m 24 years old.

AMY GOODMAN: 24 years old. Would you recommend to other young people to go into journalism?

JOSH WOLF: Absolutely. This has demonstrated that there are risks that we don't imagine, in terms of the dangers of journalism. More experienced journalists are aware of those risks, especially covering other countries, but the stories need to be told, and the mainstream media is letting the ball slip, so we need to basically form a sort of compendium of journalists, compendium of activists who will document the world they see, get those stories out, work to get those stories picked up by the mainstream media so that they can't be ignored anymore, so that the people demand to know what's going on. And then, once that happens, maybe we'll start to see some change in the mainstream journalistic front, and then from there, we'll start to see a change in the way that our government is being perpetuated.

AMY GOODMAN: When we interviewed you for the brief respite that you got out of jail in September, live in studio at the Link TV studios in San Francisco, we also talked to the San Francisco Chronicle reporter -- two reporters there also face imprisonment for not revealing sources in exposing the steroid Barry Bonds case, what you were talking about, but they have not gone to jail. What's the difference?

JOSH WOLF: The legal difference is not much. It clearly shows how the government's deciding to deal with corporate media versus an independent journalist, is that they've said, well, we're not going to make you go to jail until the Ninth District rules one way or the other, and then the Ninth District's hearings have been pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. Mine, on the other hand -- I was escorted into custody from the courtroom the day I was ruled in contempt. The Ninth Circuit ruled, while I was in custody -- or actually the Ninth Circuit spent a month waiting to determine whether or not to grant me bail -- granted me bail, passed it on to the next panel. That panel ruled, and then immediately they said I needed to go back into custody while we still had another level of Ninth Circuit appeals pending. So it's definitely a divergence between how the government’s handled my situation as an independent journalist and how they've dealt with the corporate media, who has also been found in civil contempt.

AMY GOODMAN: US Attorney spokesperson Macauley said six separate judges or panels have now ruled unequivocally that "we've lawfully issued a subpoena for legitimate investigative purposes and that the material in question should be furnished to the grand jury." What kind of faith does this give you in the system?

JOSH WOLF: Unfortunately, Amy, I don't really understand that question. I’ve been told I need to wrap the conversation up, so I probably am going to have to let that question go unanswered.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, thanks very much, Josh, for joining us. Last words to the listening and viewing audience in this country, the United States and around the world.

JOSH WOLF: Look around you. If they're sending me to jail for essentially no charges, what's next? We need to wake up. We need to come to terms with the government we have right now and demand a change, demand a free media that's not encumbered by interference, that doesn't force journalists to act as agents of the state, that truly is free, both in terms of corporate control and government control, and hopefully if we demand it, we'll have it.

AMY GOODMAN: Imprisoned journalist Josh Wolf speaking from his jail cell at the federal correctional institution, Dublin, California. He spoke to us on Friday afternoon.

We asked a spokesperson for the US Attorney's office to join us on the program today. They declined our invitation, but Luke Macauley, the spokesperson for the US Attorney's office for the Northern District of California, did send a statement. It reads, "We have an obligation to the community to investigate and gather evidence of serious crimes. The incident is under investigation so that the grand jury can determine what, if any, crimes were committed. As our court filings state, Wolf videotaped a public demonstration where there may have been an attempt to set a police car ablaze, and where a San Francisco Police Officer's skull was fractured when he was hit from behind by a demonstrator. Six separate judges -- one federal Magistrate Judge, two federal District Court Judges, and a panel of three 9th Circuit Judges -- have now ruled that this office has issued a lawful subpoena for legitimate investigative purposes, and that the material and testimony in question should be provided to the grand jury.” That was the statement from the prosecutor's office.

Martin Garbus is Josh Wolf's attorney. Time magazine calls him one of the best trial lawyers in the country. The National Law Journal and Newsweek cite Martin Garbus as America's most prominent First Amendment attorney, joining us now in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Martin Garbus.

MARTIN GARBUS: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response to that statement?

MARTIN GARBUS: I think that what he said, namely, that they're investigating what may have been an attempt -- may have been an attempt to set fire to a police car, you don't set up grand juries in order to see whether or not there was a crime or not. You have a grand jury to investigate something that is a crime. I think the significant thing here is that the grand jury subpoena has been issued by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, so I think that you should put the Josh Wolf stuff aside, in a way, namely whatever happened at that particular demonstration, I think it's an attempt to get at people who were critical of the Bush administration. There is no crime -- there is no grand jury sitting right now in the state court. There is no crime being considered in the state court. The whole question of whatever happened to a policeman is a state court problem. You could not issue a subpoena out of the federal court to investigate what is a state court problem. There is no investigation of any kind going on, so far as we know, in the federal court. So there's no reason to hold him, and we have made this argument, and the argument has been rejected.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is going on?

MARTIN GARBUS: I think basically it's an attempt by the government -- the Joint Terrorism Task Force is controlled out of Washington. I think it's an attempt, as Josh said, to learn the identity of people who are hostile to this administration. And the people who were at the demonstration, in addition to demonstrating about the subject of the demonstration, also had anti-Bush signs, also had anti-Iraq signs. Now, this subpoena was issued, as we know, early last year. I think that what you see is an attempt by the Bush administration to crack down on its critics.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, there is a grand jury impaneled now.

MARTIN GARBUS: There is no grand jury impaneled in the state court, which relates to the crime about the --

AMY GOODMAN: But in the federal court?

MARTIN GARBUS: In the federal court, a grand jury is impaneled. So far as I know, it has not taken any evidence for the last four or five months. Now, what we did last time before Judge Alsup is we asked the government to tell us whether or not there was a grand jury taking evidence. The grand jury refused to tell us that. We then made an attempt to get discovery to find out for ourselves if a grand jury was sitting -- a federal grand jury was actually sitting and taking evidence. Judge Alsup denied that. If you represent somebody who's before the grand jury, you have very, very limited rights. The normal things that go on in a lawsuit, discovery or getting information from the government itself, you can't get.

AMY GOODMAN: So, right now, is it possible -- or how long do you foresee Josh Wolf being held? Now, it's almost been six months.

MARTIN GARBUS: I think the high probability is that he’ll be held certainly until July, which is supposedly the ending of this grand jury panel. Of course, the judge can extend the grand jury panel for another period of time. We'll be making a motion next month to try and get him out. The law is that once the detention time becomes punishment, then he should be released. In other words, as long as he's being held and there's some possibility that he'll give information, then the judge is right to hold him. But at the point that a judge becomes convinced that holding him any longer will not get any information, the judge is obligated to let him out. Now, this is a subjective approach, and this is a judge who’s not terribly sympathetic.
http://www.democracynow.org/article..../02/12/1540208





Sony's New Blu-ray Marketing Message: Format War is Over
High-Def Disc News

Seizing on widely reported January sales numbers from Neilsen VideoScan, a Sony executive said Friday that the studio plans to begin marketing Blu-ray as the winner of the high-def format war.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment worldwide president David Bishop made the comments to trade newspaper Video Business in reaction to widely reported Neilsen/VideoScan sales figures indicating that Blu-ray discs outsold HD DVD in January by a ratio of 2:1.

"The message that we’re going to put out to the consumer now is, now it is safe to make a choice," explained Bishop. "No more fence-sitting is needed... We have a critical mass of content, we have the biggest mass of consumer electronics companies in the world supporting this format. That has moved Blu-ray into the forefront."

Adding further credence to the previously-released VideoScan numbers, studio sources told Video Business that for the first three weeks of January, the top selling Blu-ray title ('Crank') sold 7,500 units, while the top selling HD DVD title ('Batman Begins') sold 4,100 units. In a business traditionally dominated by new release disc sales, 'Batman Begins' on HD DVD is something of an anomaly, as it was released back in November.

And yet while all agree that it was a strong month for Blu-ray, opinion is split on whether the surge in sales is an indicator of stronger user adaption of Blu-ray compared to HD DVD, or simply a reflection of the larger number of new Blu-ray titles that hit the market over the month -- 25 new Blu-ray titles were released in January, compared to just 11 titles on HD DVD for the same period.

One thing is for sure -- after months of playing the underdog to HD DVD, Blu-ray is now the format to beat. And with many more announced titles for Blu-ray in the coming months than there are announced titles for HD DVD, it doesn't look like this overall trend will reverse itself any time soon.

Expect the next round of mainstream punditry to come later this month with the release of the per-format sales figures for two of February's most eagerly anticipated dual format titles, 'Babel' and 'The Departed.' An apples-to-apples comparison of disc sales of the same title on both formats is expected to serve as a leading indicator of consumer acceptance for both HD DVD and Blu-ray.

As always, stay tuned...
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/468





All the World’s a Stage (That Includes the Internet)
Scott Kirsner

AT lunchtime, or when he is walking the halls of his workplace, Roy Raphaeli’s colleagues often beseech him to do a magic trick. Usually, he obliges. “I take the opportunity to show people my new stuff and see how they react,” said Mr. Raphaeli, 23, a Brooklynite who works for a mail-order camera retailer.

While Mr. Raphaeli, known professionally as Magic Roy, has been entertaining people with card tricks and sleight-of-hand since he was 5, he does not perform at birthday parties or casino showrooms.

Instead, Mr. Raphaeli’s stage of choice is the Internet, where he has posted 30 short video clips to Metacafe, a Web site that pays video creators based on how many viewers their work attracts. So far, Mr. Raphaeli has earned more than $13,000 from the site, where his most popular card trick has been seen 1.4 million times.

As video sites look for ways to attract higher-quality content, they are dangling cash, usually offering to cut creators in on the advertising revenue their work generates.

Revver, the Los Angeles company that pioneered the practice, shows a still-frame ad at the end of a video, and funnels money to the creator every time a viewer clicks on the ad to visit the advertiser’s Web site. Metacafe inserts a similar still-frame graphic at the end of a clip; it pays creators $100 when their video has been viewed 20,000 times, and $5 for every 1,000 additional views.

Other sites, like TurnHere and ExpertVillage.com, offer upfront payments for videos on assigned topics, like a tour of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, or an instructional video about skydiving. And in January, Chad Hurley, a YouTube co-founder, announced at the World Economic Forum that his site, now owned by Google, was exploring similar ways to “reward creativity.”

While the sums involved are not yet impressive enough to lure established TV or movie producers into the world of Internet video, they can be significant for people on the fringes of the entertainment industry, or those who see video production as a sideline to their day job, like Mr. Raphaeli.

He had originally planned to sell DVD compilations of his best tricks, before discovering that he could earn more, and reach a larger audience, by posting his videos online.

Kent Nichols, co-creator of Ask a Ninja, a series of comic videos in which a cranky ninja responds to viewer questions, says he managed to earn more than $20,000 last year on Revver. Mr. Nichols now has an agent, who recently helped him negotiate what he says is a more lucrative advertising deal with another company.

Ahree Lee, a graphic designer in San Francisco, earned “a couple of thousand dollars” in 2006 when a short film she had made became a hit on AtomFilms.com. It featured a fast-paced succession of still photographs she had taken of her face over several years, set to music composed by her husband.

More than a dozen sites now offer payments for videos that range from short snippets to full-length feature films. Some, like Revver, Metacafe and Manhattan-based Blip.tv, generate money from advertising; others, like Brightcove, DivX Stage6 and Cruxy, allow a video’s creator to set a price viewers must pay to view it, and exact a small transaction fee.

Most of the sites require that videos be uploaded to them, rather than sent on a DVD or a tape. When a video is viewed enough times to start generating revenue for its creator, the money is typically transferred to a PayPal account set up by the creator.

But the biggest challenge is attracting an audience.

A co-founder of Metacafe, Arik Czerniak, says his site has around 100,000 people who like reviewing new videos. “They’re practically video addicts,” he said. “If a video is interesting or engaging, it will get very high ratings from them.”

Videos that win raves can wind up on the site’s home page, where, Mr. Czerniak said, “a video can get 500,000 views in a single afternoon, all without you really worrying about marketing your video.”

Others say that a little self-promotion can’t hurt. “We have a MySpace page and a Facebook group,” said Matt Wyatt, a member of the Los Angeles comedy troupe Invisible Engine, referring to two popular social networking sites where he posts the group’s latest videos. “We also e-mail a link to sites like StupidVideos.com and Transbuddha.com — sites that can help a video take off.”

When these sites choose to “embed” a video, using a bit of HTML code to weave it into one of their pages, the advertising still appears and the view is tallied, which generates revenue for the creator.

Some videos manage to catch fire with little effort. Fritz Grobe, a juggler who lives in Buckfield, Me., still cannot explain why a video he posted last June became so popular. It featured an array of two-liter bottles of Diet Coke that he and his partner, Stephen Voltz, detonated using Mentos candies.

“It sparked an instant reaction,” Mr. Grobe said. “Two days after we’d posted it on Revver, ‘The Late Show With David Letterman’ called.”

The video was eventually seen more than seven million times, earning Mr. Grobe and Mr. Voltz about $35,000. (A second video in the Extreme Mentos and Diet Coke Experiments series, released in partnership with Google last fall, has not managed to surpass that amount.)

Some semiprofessional videographers and independent filmmakers are relying on Web sites to make money between projects. Steve Janas of Belanco, Pa., says he has earned $500 to $2,000 for short videos he has made for the Web site TurnHere.com.

Most of his videos have been tourist guides to cities like Philadelphia, Princeton, N.J., and Reykjavik, Iceland, but Mr. Janas has also produced video tours of multimillion-dollar condos, intended to help sell them. TurnHere pays a flat fee for each video.

But only a few sites offer that kind of upfront payment. More common are sites like Break.com, where videos entertaining enough to win a spot on the home page earn $2,000, or sites like Revver and Metacafe, where the payment is based on the number of views.

Just as Hollywood moguls have yet to find an infallible formula for producing a blockbuster, Internet video producers still don’t know why some clips “go viral,” sent by e-mail from person to person and incorporated into blog entries, and others languish, seen only by the auteur’s dorm mates.

“A video has to grab you by the neck in about five seconds — otherwise people lose interest,” Mr. Czerniak said. “The maximum length is about 90 seconds.”

An acrobatics demonstration in which Joe Eigo, a Canadian martial-arts expert, executes flips and high-kicks like a character from a video game, has chalked up $25,000 worth of views for him.

Several painting demonstrations, using canisters of spray paint, have earned Brandon McConnell, a former zoo groundskeeper, almost $10,000. One element of success, he says, is choosing an intriguing image for the still-frame that represents each video on a site, enticing visitors to play it.

“I try to think about what’s going to cause people to say, ‘What’s that?’ ” Mr. McConnell said.

And he did not want his day job to get in the way. In December, he resigned from the San Diego Zoo to make videos full time. “Lately,” he said, “I’ve been trying to do one video a day, and make that a goal.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/te...y/15video.html





In India, the Golden Age of Television Is Now
Vikas Bajaj

GHANSHYAM P. SHAH, an 82-year-old widower, spends up to eight hours a day in front of his television watching prayer services, soap operas and financial news. But one afternoon last December, he was completely disconnected from his favorite pastime — and visibly unsettled — because his new digital set-top box was not working.

“I’ll become really agitated if I can’t watch,” Mr. Shah said as Rumy M. Bhagat, the owner of a small cable company, gave up and plugged the wire directly into the television until he could return with another box. The image was no longer digital, but that did not matter to Mr. Shah, a retired gold and silver dealer, whose face lit up as CNBC India reported that the price of gold was up in afternoon trading.

Mr. Bhagat explained that some set-top boxes, which had been sitting in warehouses for months in advance of a government-mandated change to digital television, had proved a weak match for the heat and humidity of Mumbai. “Sometimes we have teething problems,” he said.

Growing pains like these are common throughout India’s booming television industry. Deregulation and new technology have combined to produce an explosion of new offerings. Before the early 1990s, a single government broadcaster provided a handful of channels. Now a crowded field of domestic and global media companies, including the News Corporation, Sony Entertainment and Walt Disney, offer hundreds of channels.

Indian films, especially the flashy musicals and dramas of Bollywood, have grabbed plenty of attention in the West. But the country’s lesser-known television business is more than twice as big, with an estimated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2005, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. It is also starting to exert greater cultural influence.

Television ownership is growing fast here, and it has plenty more room to expand. There are roughly 105 million homes with televisions in India, up from 88 million in 2000. The current number of television households is about the same as in the United States, though for India that amounts to only about half of the country’s households, compared with 98 percent in the United States.

Advertising spending on Indian television increased by 21 percent a year, on average, from 1995 to 2005, when it reached $1.6 billion, according to ZenithOptimedia, which tracks advertising globally. Double-digit growth rates are expected to continue for years.

Such numbers are very tempting to companies like the News Corporation, Disney, Time Warner and Viacom, which are losing viewers and advertisers in their core Western markets. (In addition to the domestic market, Indian television is also delivered via satellite and cable to the global South Asian diaspora.)

The pace of change in India is supercharged because the country is catching up to, and in some cases leapfrogging, developments that took decades to play out elsewhere.

“Everything that happened in the rest of the world in 10 years, is happening here in two years,” said Vikram Kaushik, the chief executive of Tata Sky, a satellite-TV company that is jointly owned by the News Corporation and the Tata Group, the Indian industrial conglomerate.

In the 1990s, media companies seized on new opportunities in India after the government, which had controlled broadcasting for nearly 50 years, began releasing its grip. The first big changes in Indian television came in the early part of that decade, when cable operators used satellite dishes, illegal but tolerated at the time, to give subscribers access to news on CNN, as well as American soap operas and movies. Viewers could also watch Indian movies and music on Zee TV, then a fledgling joint venture between the News Corporation and an Indian entrepreneur.

Previously, India’s ruling elite had a dual and somewhat contradictory view of broadcasting. On the one hand, politicians considered it too powerful a force to be left to the private sector, especially in the years after independence in 1947, when the nation’s unity and secularism were considered vulnerable. On the other hand, television was seen as too frivolous to merit much investment at a time when politicians were focused on turning India into an industrial power.

Those attitudes began to change after a financial crisis in the early ’90s forced the Indian government to devalue its currency, the rupee, and to start relinquishing its tight control over the economy. Then, in 1995, the country’s highest court declared the government’s monopoly over broadcasting unconstitutional.

When it did yield, India went further in deregulating television than it did in other sectors of the economy. It also gave up far more control when compared with China, the country against which it is most often measured. Foreign media companies can fully own entertainment networks here; they cannot in China. (India does, however, limit foreign ownership to 26 percent of television news channels and newspapers.)

THE open environment attracted the News Corporation, which entered the market in 1993 by acquiring Star TV. Star has the highest-rated shows among the private networks in Hindi-speaking parts of the country. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Sony started its flagship channel here in 1995 and now has seven channels; the company owns about 61 percent of the business, with Indian investors owning the rest. The biggest Indian broadcasters are Zee and Sun TV, which dominates ratings in non-Hindi-speaking southern India.

Still, Doordarshan, the public broadcaster, remains the most widely available network, especially in rural areas, where a majority of the population lives.

To keep up with changing times, Doordarshan has retooled its programming, adding genres like soap operas and musical contests to a lineup that is still dominated by more high-minded — and what some critics would call staid — cultural programming. It has also started a satellite-TV service that has no subscription fees but also does not include the most popular private channels.

Star has been one of the few consistently profitable businesses in Indian television. Although the News Corporation does not disclose financial details of its operations here, Merrill Lynch estimates that Star accounts for 3 percent of the company’s total operating income, or about $116 million in the 2006 fiscal year.

Zee, which started by offering a few hours of programming a day, now has more than two dozen channels; it started a satellite-TV service, DishTV, in 2004. “We offered an alternative to a broadcaster, Doordarshan, from which urban audiences felt disconnected,” said Ashish Kaul, a senior vice president at Zee. “You cannot blame Doordarshan; it had a national obligation.”

About 60 percent of the nation’s television households subscribe to the cable or satellite services that carry private channels. Though Indians theoretically have dozens of channels to choose from, a handful dominate the ratings and earn most of the profits. A fragmented cable business is straining to reshape itself in response to new regulations and competition from satellite television services.

The transition to digital cable, meanwhile, has so far occurred only in parts of India’s four most populous cities. The changeover has been troubled by technical problems, weak enforcement of a Jan. 1 deadline and a shortage of set-top boxes.

At the same time, the newest technology operates alongside the often stark economic and social realities of India. Black-and-white televisions still account for an estimated 40 percent of all TV’s in use, and about 56 percent of rural households do not have electricity, according to India’s 2001 census. And because most homes in India that have a television have just one set, watching TV can be a communal activity that brings together the entire family, and often the neighbors, too.

Perhaps the most striking of the changes in Indian television is what is starting to show up on the screen.

“Dhoom Machaoo Dhoom” (Hindi for “Let’s have a blast”) is a Disney show aimed at teenagers, and it might look at home on the Disney Channel in the United States. It is about four teenage girls, one of them from New York, who want to start a band so they can represent their school in a talent contest. They face a number of challenges, including an arrogant classmate who is determined to derail their plans.

But the show, which went on the air last month, has an Indian twist. Priyanka, the New Yorker who has returned to her family’s native land, wants the girls to perform a song they have created, rather than using a tune from a popular Bollywood movie, as the local norms dictate. In one episode, Kajal, played by Sriti Jha, complains that Priyanka doesn’t understand India. “Only Bollywood works here,” she insists.

The girls do not dwell on the issue, but it is an important consideration for television executives and media companies here. Indian television has a strong partnership with the film industry, whose stars appear on its shows as guests, contestants and hosts. Movies and music videos from Bollywood remain staples on television here.

Yet in the last decade television has attained influence over the popular culture that is starting to rival that of the film business. And whereas filmmakers have traditionally worked in close-knit networks that operate in a single language, media companies have been exploiting the large and growing capacity of cable and satellite networks to cheaply develop customized channels and shows for different parts of the country. Zee, for instance, operates several regional-language entertainment and news channels.

“We have a vibrant TV industry,” said Rama Bijapurkar, a business consultant whose clients include Disney and who also writes a column for The Economic Times. “When talking about the hinterland, TV is what Bollywood would like to be.”

Nachiket Pantvaidya, an executive director at Disney’s Indian operations, predicted that “Dhoom” would be a breakthrough for Indian television because it was one of the few shows produced for teenagers, and specifically for girls. He said that more than 90 percent of what Indian youths watch on TV are family dramas and other shows created for their parents.

“This is a story of kids who are trying to do something out of the ordinary,” Mr. Pantvaidya said. “Nobody makes TV for the real world. This kind of TV is rare.”

Ms. Jha, the 20-year-old who plays one of the girls on “Dhoom,” added: “This can’t be compared to the whole lot of family serials. This is much more real and close to the lives of kids.”

“Dhoom” is Disney’s sophomore effort at producing TV shows in India — its first, “Vicky Aur Vetaal,” was based on an Indian myth about a prince and a genie-like figure. The company sees television as the first step in a broader India strategy that includes films, merchandising and possibly a theme park. Last year, Disney spent $44.5 million to acquire a 15 percent stake in UTV, a production company based in Mumbai, and to buy Hungama, a television channel of children’s programming created by UTV.

“We decided early on that this had to be driven locally,” said Gary Marsh, president of entertainment for Disney Channel Worldwide in Burbank, Calif. “If we were to truly become a global company, we had to let our regional organizations create their own programming.” India was the first country where the company developed local Disney Channel shows, something it is now doing in Britain and Japan, too.

Many of Disney’s competitors have built their businesses on a similar strategy. Time Warner, which operates the Pogo and Cartoon Network channels here, is offering an Indian version of “Sesame Street” called “Galli Galli Sim Sim.” The show uses some material from the popular American show, but it is set on an Indian streetscape and is anchored by four local Muppets. A large orange-and-red lion named Boombah replaces Big Bird.

Television executives say the ventures by Disney and others aimed at youths and various niche markets are a welcome break from the way business has been done in India. A handful of channels — which carry soap operas, reality shows, music shows and important cricket tournaments — receive the bulk of the advertising. Yet entrepreneurs continue spending millions of dollars starting copycat networks. India has more than 40 cable news channels, for example.

“Here it is, we have 200 channels of the same stuff, and people are saying let’s do more of it,” said Sameer Nair, chief executive of Star Entertainment, a News Corporation subsidiary. “That will churn and change.” (In an indication that competition is intensifying, Mr. Nair announced last month that he would be leaving Star in March. According to news reports, he will be helping a rival Indian-owned TV company start a new entertainment channel.)

AS media executives try to introduce innovative programming, exactly what can go on the air in India remains fluid. There is no overt censorship of television content, but most media companies say they aggressively police themselves to avoid running afoul of political and cultural mores.

Several movie channels were forced to go off the air for more than a week last summer when a court in Mumbai ruled in favor of a schoolteacher who had argued that films that had been rated for adult viewing only in their cinematic release could not be shown on television without being edited and recertified for a wider audience.

In some ways, television fare in India today is far more adventurous than it was even five years ago. A recent adaptation of “Big Brother,” known here as “Bigg Boss,” for instance, has stirred the pot by showing minor celebrities behaving badly. Though it may seem insignificant, the show has let viewers see famous people as human beings, said Kunal Dasgupta, who heads Sony’s Indian television operations, which broadcasts the show.

Still, Mr. Dasgupta knows that social customs evolve slowly here. He said he was considering “with kid gloves” a proposal from an Italian company to help produce a miniseries that would be based loosely on the life of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of India’s ruling Congress Party who is the widow of the former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi.

The proposal calls for an Indian cast, but the series would take an “Italian perspective,” Mr. Dasgupta said. “I find it very exciting and challenging,” he said. “At the same time, knowing our own media, we could be ripped apart.” He said he was “trying to see if we can get people who are really in power to accept that if we do such a thing it will be O.K.”

The fact that he is even considering such a proposal is a sign of how far television has come in India. And as the country continues to experience major economic and social changes, the shape of Indian television is likely to keep evolving.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/bu...y/11india.html




High-Tech Jobs Abound in Iowa. Why Aren't Workers Filling Them?

- Fewer students
- No established tech cluster
- Outsourcing fears
- State's rep as farming hub

Donnelle Eller

A tech company new to Des Moines — BayTPS — needs a couple of dozen electronic detectives who will help the California company find online users who illegally download clients' music, movies, TV shows and other materials.

But the jobs — paying $21,000 to $70,000 annually — have gone begging.

"We've had to be a lot more proactive about it," hitting the university and community college circuit to recruit workers as well as advertising the positions, said Jim Graham, a spokesman for BayTPS, based in Los Gatos.

A lot more companies are working a lot harder to find the computer and information technology workers they need.

Some companies are paying rates that near $125,000 annually to contract companies for experienced tech workers, paying signing bonuses, recruiting workers' friends, colleagues and former college classmates, as well as looking overseas for potential workers.

"There's tremendous need for skilled IT workers — across the board," said Leeann Jacobson, president of the Technology Association of Iowa, who added that about 80 percent of its 200 members are looking for workers.

"We have more jobs than workers to fill them," said Mike Lang, chairman of the group's board. He also leads a tech consulting and recruitment company. "It goes in cycles ... but I think we're at a critical point."

Shea Daniels, a computer science student at Iowa State University, received offers for two jobs at Principal Financial Group. He was recruited at Principal after meeting a computer contract worker for the Des Moines company in a martial arts class. "I just stumbled into it," said the Marion native.

Principal sweetened Daniels' signing bonus by $1,000 to $2,500 when the 22-year-old said he was concerned he should search further before committing. It wasn't a salary negotiations ploy, said Daniels, who will be an IT applications analyst at Principal. "I just called the recruiter to talk about what I was thinking."

Officials worry the worker crunch could slow efforts to build Iowa's fledgling tech industry. For example, the state is investing $800,000 in BayTSP, which has promised to create 75 jobs that pay an average of $47,840 annually. The company has pledged to invest about $1.4 million in its Des Moines operations.

Technology jobs also are critical to Iowa's fast-growing financial and insurance industries, experts say. "If companies can't find the workers, the jobs will go where the workers are," Jacobson said.

State lawmakers are considering spending $10.55 million next budget year to attract more workers in advanced manufacturing, technology and biosciences - three industries identified as key to the state's economy.

The proposal would work to attract high school and college students to technology, upgrade existing workers' skills and expand internships. It also would better connect large businesses with small technology companies for services that in the past would have completed in-house. And it would better market Iowa's technology opportunities.

Gary Dickey Jr., a state economic development administrator, said the proposed approach is comprehensive — tackling everything from making technology fun for students to developing more entrepreneurs. "There's no silver bullet," he said.

Iowa faces losing students like Amy Joines, an ISU computer science engineer, who would like a job with the U.S. Department of Defense in Washington, D.C.

She said she's attracted to the East Coast, but more important, the job opportunities. She could work to track terrorists electronically or help defend national data from hackers. "There's a lot of opportunity out there," Joines said. "I feel like I'll have my choice of location, company and type of work that I want to do."

Here's what contributing to the tech shortage:

- Fewer students: The dot-com bust in 2001 and concern that companies will continue outsourcing tech jobs overseas is keeping students from getting computer science, management information and other tech-related degrees.

Their worries are showing up in enrollment numbers. ISU, for example, had about 800 computer science students six years ago vs. 250 now. Management information students have dropped from 800 to fewer than 200. "It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Doug Jacobson, a computer engineering professor at Iowa State University.

- Greater demand: Fewer workers entering technology-related fields comes at a time when demand for computer know-how is increasing. "They're putting computers in just about everything," said ISU's Jacobson, driving the need for technology workers to help design and manufacture products, install equipment, manage the systems and help consumers use it.

And Iowa - better known for farming than technology - struggles to compete against states with bigger, better-known tech clusters.

Sireesha Suryadevara, a software developer recruited from Los Angeles to work at GCommerce Inc. in Des Moines, said she's been telling friends, family and former co-workers that they should consider Iowa and the Midwest.

"They don't know how many good companies are here or how good the market is," Suryadevara said.

Finding experienced workers like Suryadevara is critical for companies like GCommerce, said Jason Popillion, the company's chief technology officer.

The company — whose products allow retailers, distributors and manufacturers to communicate — tried to recruit workers by itself, but the process took too much time, Popillion said.

That's why the company decided to pay $60 to $90 an hour to Lang's company, Alliance Technologies, to provide "contract to hire" workers. Suryadevara was the first worker hired under the deal, which gives a company a couple of months to try out a worker before deciding whether to hire.

A native of India, Suryadevara said she's struggled with Iowa's cold, but she likes the short commutes and lower cost of living. Suryadevara, who is looking for a house with her husband, Hemanth, said GCommerce's atmosphere is family-like. "It makes a big difference," said Suryadevara, 27.

Jacobson, the leader of the state technology group, said she believes that the tech demand can provide opportunities for a wide range of Iowans - from stay-at-home moms to seniors looking for a second career to workers who have struggled to find employment.

Jay Nickelson, an instructor at Des Moines Area Community College, said he believes the school could place twice as many students graduating with a two-year degree. About 200 students leave the school each year with technology-related degrees.

Karl Lantz was driving a delivery truck for a national home improvement store when he decided to go to the Des Moines-area college for a tech degree. Before that, he worked in a soybean processing plant, and before that, as a valet at a casino.

Today, the 31-year-old is a digital video network technician at Iowa Networks Services in Des Moines. He helps download, process and deliver a 200-channel lineup of digital video for cable customers of independent Iowa telephone companies. It's his third technology job since graduating.

"It's let me make a change from working at jobs to building a career."
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/app...=2007702120325





Jupiter Analyst: Interoperable DRM Won't Solve Music Industry Dilemma
Scott M. Fulton

The lead analyst of last week's JupiterResearch report showing a majority of music industry executives in the EU agreeing that a world without digital rights management would be a world with greater revenues, told BetaNews in an exclusive interview this afternoon that his firm believes the interim solution supported by 70% of executives polled - a single, open, interoperable, standard DRM scheme - would still be rejected by consumers in a market where Apple's iTunes continues to reign supreme.

JupiterResearch vice president and research director Mark Mulligan told us he feels the problem surrounding DRM concerns whether the consumer of digital music feels trusted by an industry that seemed to trust him well enough in previous years. When the right to use music as one wishes is impeded technologically, consumers reject the technology. In fact, this could be why the downloadable segment of the overall music industry is not growing as fast as it could.

Mulligan spoke to BetaNews at length from his offices in London, UK

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: With regard to our initial story which discussed the figures in your report, a lot of the discussion that arose had to do with what it is that the music industry executives believe. The conclusion was clearly that they believe the current state of affairs with digital rights management may be a hindrance, in their minds, to improved sales. The solution, it appears in their minds, is to move toward a single, interoperable system - I think the number was 70% who agreed with the statement that the interoperable system would be an improvement.

Mark Mulligan, JupiterResearch: I think there's absolute consensus that the current setup just isn't working. The role of DRM is supposedly to protect content and cut down on piracy. Clearly that isn't happening. That's why the report exclusively focuses on piracy and DRM, because the two are explicitly linked. Piracy isn't going away. Online piracy is absolutely established, so DRM is clearly not doing its purpose of preventing piracy.

However, it is clearly not a consumer-friendly proposition. There's definitely consensus within the music industry that DRM, as it stands at the moment, is neither a consumer-friendly proposition, nor is it doing what it's meant to do. It's less clear, though, what the music industry actually wants to do about that. So there's definitely clear support for interoperability, but the whole thing about interoperability is that it's very difficult to understand how that would be enforced, and whether you make an industry standard DRM or whether you make sure that each DRM is capable of talking to the other DRMs out there. Either of those options is likely to take a very long time to implement, either because it will take a long time to be forced through from legislation and court cases, or because it will take a long time for the industry to come up with its own solution.

I'll point you to the experience in the mobile arena at the moment, to see what happens when the industry does try to create its own industry standard. There's a body there called the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), and they've been charged with the task of creating an industry standard digital rights management [scheme] for mobile. As is so often the case when you get industry groups supposedly working for the industry, but essentially having to fight a lot of very delicate political battles, it took so long to create the first standard [that] everyone else went on and developed their own, and one of the first OMA standards that did come out, all it was, was non-forwarding [where you can listen but not give to others], basically outdated by many, many years in terms of its flexibility.

Now, mobile music is adopted across the European marketplace, and yet most of the operators are using their own DRM standards because they simply can't wait for OMA to get its act together to create the next mobile DRM standard. So take that as evidence that that's what happens when you try to get the industry to create its own industry standard. Normally, when a business is pushing ahead with its own business objectives, with its own cost concerns and everything else associated with it, then you come up with market leading solutions which are deployed quickly and are agile.

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: The IFPI seems to be backing the Coral Consortium as a way of at least going forth, however slowly, with a single industry standard a la OMA. But the IFPI claims to represent the same people your study surveyed, and yet it appears the people in your survey are saying, "Yea, but..."

Mark Mulligan, JupiterResearch: Absolutely, and I think that's one of the things that's really clear from here: There's a really strong division of thought within the record labels themselves. For example, we looked at how the responses differed within each record label. Those are really significant variations. What that reflects is, the music market is bang in the middle of a very fast period of change, that is intensified by the fact that music revenues are declining, and therefore record labels are having to basically consider options that they've never been willing to consider before in order to try to turn around the decline in music sales. What that means is, sometimes decisions are made so quickly, it's before there has been unity within the label in terms of their position on certain issues.

As [evidence] of that, the day before Universal Music struck its deal with YouTube, one of the senior Universal Music executives went on record saying that he thought YouTube should be sued for infringement of copyright. And then the next day, the deal was struck. That gives you a sort of illustration of how much difference of opinion there is within record labels, let alone within the overall industry.

Scott Fulton: The CEO of Wurld Media, Greg Kerber, who runs the P2P service Peer Impact, frequently tells me that in the end, the record labels with whom he deals come to the conclusion that DRM is necessary because it's the only structural software you can provide which gives a latticework for online music operations to develop a business model for subscriptions, for downloading, for limiting terms of use. This implies that the Steve Jobs solution from last week - kicking all DRM aside - would eliminate that latticework, and not give the labels anything with which to structure a business model around.

Mark Mulligan: Three things I'd say to that: First of all, anything that happens with DRM now is not suddenly going to drive adoption of digital music. Interoperability issues are not holding back music adoption at the moment. It's simply not a consumer issue; despite that a lot of consumer groups have taken action, it's not consumers who are driving it. The very simple reason that isn't happening is because there's little or no reason for an iPod owner to want to buy music from anywhere else but from the iTunes music store.

It's not a consumer issue, but it will be sometime in the future, should an "iPod killer" arrive and give lots of people reason enough to want to have a device that isn't an iPod.

In terms of moving away from DRM, one side of the argument is that, until very recently, that's how the entire music industry worked. Vinyl, tape, CD - none of those had rights management on them. Home copying has been around for ages. Once the music industry lost its fight to stop having recordable cassette decks in in-home stereos, ever since then, the music industry has known and accepted that home taping is part of music consumption. People recording from the radio is part of music consumption. All of those things didn't stop the music industry having its strongest-ever decade of sales.

So you can make an argument that, well, selling online without any DRM at all would just be doing the same as selling a CD. But the difference with selling a CD is that the music industry is basically saying, "We trust you with this purchase. We know you're probably going to do a few things we'd rather you didn't," because in Europe, unlike the US, we don't have Fair Use, so it's not actually legal to be able to make a copy for your car or for your living room. "We trust you, but we accept the fact that you are going to go away and do some of the things you shouldn't do."

With digital rights management and digital downloading, it's actually a completely different ideological perspective. It's saying, "We don't trust you. However trustworthy you might be, we are not going to trust you. We are going to tell you very clearly what you can and can't do." There's a very different approach. It seems like digital rights management should be an absolutely fundamental part of the digital music market, but it's actually quite an alien concept in terms of overall music. You've seen how much backlash there has been from consumers, as those record labels have tried to introduce digital rights management onto CDs themselves. You've seen a massive backlash and move away from that.

But the final thing I'll say is: Jupiter isn't advocating a complete move away from digital rights management, but instead, an evolution of digital rights management to do exactly that: Rights management, not rights protection. There's many ways in which digital rights management can be used to manage and develop distribution of music, that enables it to a) give music fans the ability to do what they want with their music within reasonable bounds, and then b) develop and generate extra revenue on anything that happens beyond that. So for example, you can have music downloads that you buy once, you can burn onto CDs as many times as you like, you can put onto any of your registered devices. You could even send it to a friend, but if a friend tried to play it more than two or three times, then they have to pay for it. Those are sorts of examples of how digital rights management could be used in a creative way, that isn't just about restricting what people do.

Scott Fulton: Well, if Jupiter is, as you say, advocating more of the evolution of DRM, isn't that evolution only possible when the industry collaborates and agrees to a common platform?

Mark Mulligan: Not necessarily. What's fairly unique about the online music market is, with the concentration of so much important content within the major record labels, they are the gatekeepers. They have the ability to be able to dictate and shape what usage patterns the stores like Apple's iTunes can do with the music. That's how digital rights management came around in the first place.

Now, the record labels - should they want to - could say, "We will only license it to you on the following terms and conditions..." It can be actually implemented from the content providers themselves. And that is a very clean way of doing it, that doesn't require Apple being taken to court, it doesn't require some complex interoperable standards being developed.

What happened last time the record labels tried to stand up to Apple - about 10 months ago, with the negotiations about having variable pricing - they actually backed down and lost the negotiation against Apple. I think they learned a lesson that time, and there's a definite consensus that Apple's negotiated position is too strong, and the next time around that licenses are offered for negotiation, the record labels will take a much stronger stance. I would say that that's absolutely right, because however much Apple may be an important part of a digital music market, digital music itself is actually a really small part of the overall music market at the moment. You're talking just a few percentage points of total music sales. So that [could be the industry's tack] right now, to potentially aggravate one of the key partners, rather than setting in stone some usage patterns which are going to permanently inhibit the total potential of the online music market.

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: You said that if there were such a thing as an iPod killer, a true competition not just for the gadget but for the whole iTunes platform, then perhaps there might be more public attention toward the idea, "We've got to make things play right and play together." As of now, it's not an issue. Would it be to the industry's benefit, then, to subsidize an iPod killer?

Mark Mulligan, JupiterResearch: First of all, the music industry is in such a dire economic situation at the moment, it really doesn't have the resources available to be able to do that. And also at the moment, sales of the iPod are an incredibly important part of the digital music market, and Apple is the dominant force in all European markets, as it is in the US. If someone were to go out there to try to weaken the iPod, it's a gamble because it might be that all that happens is, it just weakens the overall MP3 player market. Apple loses some of its luster, yet the competition that's fighting hard against it isn't actually as great as people had hoped it would be; [in] a fragmented market, some of the impetus goes away, which the music industry can't afford to have at the moment.

It's going to be a heck of a thing to be an iPod killer. No one has managed it yet. Zune certainly isn't it. So it's not even as though there's a likely candidate that the music industry could back. Even if it did, it would then face potential sanctions from regulatory bodies.

Scott Fulton: Your earlier statement about trust, that the consumers appreciated in the past the position of trust [on the part of record manufacturers]...In the video industry, I've noted that when it comes to AACS protection for Blu-ray and HD DVD, a lot of consumers are vehemently opposed to the notion of investing even a dollar in high definition technology, after having read that with AACS, there is this concept called the revocation key...It's the feeling that people have that they're being distrusted that probably prohibits them from wanting to invest in that. So I'm thinking, even if there is this interoperable DRM solution, doesn't that feeling of distrust continue, if there's one standard or many?

Mark Mulligan: Absolutely. That's what's both dangerous and difficult about online music, the fact that if there's any type of digital rights management - whether it's interoperable or whether it's got liberal or very conservative usage terms built into it - it's something that's completely different from how people have experienced music up until the modern day. That is, music was there, you [decided] how you wanted to use it. Yes, regardless of whether there's an interoperable standard or whatever else, all that will mean is that it makes the pill slightly less bitter to swallow.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Jupi...mma/1171664985





Light on their feet

RIAA Adopts New Policy, offers "Pre-Doe settlement option" if ISP Holds Logs Longer, Asks ISP's to Correct Identification Mistakes

The RIAA has sent out a letter to ISP's attempting to change its prelitigation policies:

Letter from RIAA to ISP's*

While we have not had time to analyse the letter in detail, some of its interesting features are:

-creation of a new "Pre-Doe settlement option";
-it will only make the "Pre-Doe settlement option" available to customers of ISP's who agree to preserve their logs for 180 days;
-the "Pre-Doe" option will supposedly allow settlement at a reduced amount, with a discount of $1000 or more, if they settle before a John Doe lawsuit is brought;
-the RIAA will be launching a web site for "early settlements", www.p2plawsuits.com;
-the letter asks the ISP's to notify the RIAA if they have previously "misidentified a subscriber account in response to a subpoena" or became aware of "technical information... that causes you to question the information that you provided in response to our clients' subpoena";
-it requires ISP's to notify the RIAA "as early as possible" as to whether they will enter the 180 day/"pre-Doe" plan;
-it mentioned that there has been confusion over how ISP's should respond to the RIAA's subpoenas;
-it noted that ISP's have identified "John Does" who were not even subscribers of the ISP at the time of the infringement; and
-it requested that ISP's furnish their underlying log files as well as just the names and addresses.

* Document published online at Internet Law & Regulation
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...s-pre-doe.html




Pirates of the Multiplex

Under U.S. pressure, Swedish authorities are going after the popular Pirate Bay Web site for illegal distribution of video files. But if Hollywood wants to stop online pirates—who cost the industry some $7 billion in 2005—it needs to join them, not beat them.
Steven Daly

I was a reluctant convert, to say the least. When I got the call from my old friend Richard back in late 2005, he sounded far too enthusiastic about the latest Internet gimmick that was going to "change my life." Richard, you see, is prone to great enthusiasms, and I was not particularly disposed to listen to his ravings about some Web site called UKNova, which supposedly let him download all kinds of amazing British TV shows completely free of charge.

I relented and signed up for UKNova membership. The site functions as a "torrent tracker," a skeletal database that allows users to locate and share digital files with other users. Unlike some previous peer-to-peer content-sharing programs, the files are not located on a Web site or taken from any single source; they're shared among members in the form of tiny digital fragments that are eventually reconstituted, like a completed jigsaw puzzle, as a single file on your desktop. The operation—which incidentally makes it difficult to sue members of a site like UKNova—is enabled by an ingenious little software application called BitTorrent, a paradigmatic advance in file sharing that has engendered many variants since its 2002 advent.

Loath as I am to admit it, UKNova did change my life—at least as far as my viewing habits are concerned. After downloading free BitTorrent software, I could use UKNova to procure—slowly at first—television shows that would have hitherto obliged me to beg British friends and relatives to record them for me on VHS (remember tapes?) and send via airmail. The unalloyed thrill of watching all this downloaded Brit-TV stuff easily outweighed the nagging shame of staring at a computer screen for hours on end.

Mock if you will, but I assure you that this was nothing but top-drawer telly: a typical evening's viewing schedule might include an episode of Peter Ackroyd's magisterial history of London, the upsetting documentary Rock Family Trees: The Prog Rock Years, and another on postwar British universities that made me feel vindicated for bypassing higher education. And thanks to the many kind souls who are digitizing their dusty VHS stacks for UKNova dissemination, I've acquired all manner of presumed-lost British TV classics, from the sci-fi mockumentary Alternative 3 to the groovy 1970 kids show Here Come the Double Deckers.

I began storing all my UKNova downloads on blank DVDs—first on spindles of 10, then 25, then 50. I soon had enough material to program my own TV channel—Steve TV!—for weeks on end; my Time Warner Cable box was switched on only for live soccer games and weekly HBO favorites. This UKNova habit went well beyond the recreational-use stage: according to site statistics, I have downloaded a frankly embarrassing 800 gigabytes' worth of files—well over 1,500 hours of programming. And since UKNova expects members to maintain a decent balance between material uploaded and downloaded, my computer stayed connected to the Internet for, more or less, 18 months straight in order to allow other users access to my file fragments. The cost of two burned-out hard drives seemed like a small price to pay.

Then this BitTorrent junkie discovered that Philips made a DVD player (Model DVP642) that would play, straight from the disc, UKNova files that previously required hours of reprocessing to watch on a standard player. Which is when I started making over-enthusiastic phone calls to my friends.

Surprisingly, not everyone was receptive to my BitTorrent evangelism—in fact, some went as far as to suggest I had turned into some kind of cyber-criminal. Sure, I knew that the Motion Picture Association of America claimed worldwide losses of $18.2 billion to movie piracy in 2005, $7.1 billion of which was ascribed to Internet file sharing. And I knew that even though the U.S. government had shut down prominent Internet operations for violating copyright laws—eDonkey, Grokster, Kazaa—there are now many BitTorrent mega-sites that continue to thrive; in particular, the Pirate Bay (ThePirateBay.org), based in Sweden, stands as probably the prime destination for anyone looking to download, unrestricted, the very latest in Hollywood movies, video games, TV shows, music, software, and pornography.

But I was not some snickering teenager looking to get cool shit for free. I was a tasteful, middle-aged gent with a victimless hobby. The sprawling, lawless frontiers of the file-sharing universe looked too much like the Wild West to me—I was happy to stick to the Victorian tea party that is UKNova. In file-sharing terms, UKNova (originally created for soap-opera-craving British expats) is a genteel anomaly, a highly regulated community whose many rules include a strict ban on any material commercially available on DVD. Nonetheless, with its limited membership list and impressive inventory, the site shines through the surrounding chaos as an exemplary—albeit rudimentary—model of digital media distribution.

As my exquisite digital-video library threatened to overrun my apartment, even my original BitTorrent pusher Richard was starting to talk about the dark side of the file-sharing phenomenon: according to him, this fun little application was going to bring about nothing less than the end of the entertainment industry as we know it. Typically hyperbolic, I thought—until my friend cited the damage file sharing had done to his former company, a marketer of left-leaning documentaries. Then again, weren't his products targeted at exactly the same demographic of pesky young troublemakers who have the time and ingenuity to copy DVDs and share them over the Internet?

Without doubt the entertainment industry is feeling the financial effects of Internet-based piracy—but, really, how bad could it get? There will surely always be a huge portion of the population far too busy to learn about intricate new file-sharing technologies, just as there will always be a large category of DVD releases for which only the legitimate version will do. I mean, what self-respecting film snob wants to show off his Criterion classics on a plastic spindle? And what father would give his little daughter a copy of the 20th-anniversary edition of The Little Mermaid with the title scrawled in Sharpie?

When I awoke from my UKNova-induced idyll and looked at the bigger picture, it seemed like Sharpie stock must be on the rise. Legitimate-DVD sales have been slowing down for some time now. The movie studios as a whole are in trouble, and piracy is—along with rising costs—one of the main factors being cited. DVD revenue is a critical component of Hollywood's bottom line, and with theatrical box-office receipts believed to be in long-term decline, DVD sales look set to become an increasingly important revenue stream.

As long ago as November 2005, Warner Bros. abruptly laid off 260 employees (more than 5 percent of its staff) on a single day, this after a very healthy fiscal year. Soon after, Disney announced plans to cut more than twice that many jobs (which it did in summer 2006), and to drastically reduce the number of films on its annual production slate.

The dominoes continued to tumble through late 2006 as we read countless business-section stories about Hollywood's financial woes, along with heart-wrenching tales of movie-star salaries' being cruelly slashed by millions of dollars. When multiplex titan George Lucas came out with the startling announcement that his company had decided that making feature films was now "too expensive and too risky" in the current climate, my friend Richard's apocalypto vision of the show-business future started to seem more plausible than I could have ever imagined.

The industry has assigned the task of repelling the pirate hordes to the Motion Picture Association of America, a body best characterized by a 2006 public-service announcement that shows action-movie oldsters Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger riding twin motorcycles in front of green-screened freeway mayhem. "Let's terminate piracy!" bellows Schwarzenegger. Your more sentient Hollywood graybeards will have flashed back to 1982, when then M.P.A.A. president Jack Valenti fired off a warning to Sony about its newfangled Betamax video recorder. This sinister device, said Valenti, would do to the American film industry what "the Boston Strangler did to a woman alone."

The modern M.P.A.A., as if to prove itself capable of a more nuanced approach to the file-sharing threat, recently collaborated with the Boy Scouts of America, who are now offering a merit badge for anti-piracy activities. Another P.S.A. argues that people who buy pirated films are hurting Hollywood's ordinary folks, the humble artisans who toil backstage building pedestals for the stars. The M.P.A.A.'s case might have carried more weight had it not featured the heartfelt testimony of Ben Affleck, a man who was paid $12.5 million to star in Gigli.

Showdown

If the online file-sharing universe is the Wild West, Sweden is Deadwood—a place where the rule of law leaves barely a footprint. Thanks to a combination of national copyright laws, laissez-faire social attitudes, and inexpensive and superior bandwidth, gentle little Sweden—which refers to itself as Europe's "duck pond"—has become a file-sharing fortress in which more than 10 percent of its nine million citizens trade digital material, much of it provided by the country's Pirate Bay site.

Early on the morning of May 31, 2006, Swedish police launched the kind of cleanup operation the M.P.A.A. had long been craving. Law-enforcement officials raided eight locations related to Pirate Bay, with more than 50 police officers involved in arresting the site's operators and seizing their computer equipment. As one Swedish Internet entrepreneur puts it, "When was the last time the Swedish police had 50 people doing anything?"

When Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm first heard that there was police activity at the site's main location, he jumped in a cab and headed straight there, only to be pulled over by a police car with lights flashing and siren blaring. Svartholm's business partner, Fredrik Neij, had also been alerted to the raid in progress, and was able to back up most of Pirate Bay's files before showing up and doing a bit of "who-are-you-ing" with the invading lawmen.

If Svartholm and Neij's experience sounds like something out of a generic mid-90s cyber-thriller, neither of them is exactly leading-man material. Neij, a 28-year-old who is the more gregarious of the pair, is a scruffy, impish type who regards his outlaw status with wry detachment; Svartholm is a sad-eyed 22-year-old with wispy hair and near-translucent skin that positively scream out "Dungeons and Dragons Master."

Although this pair of Internet scofflaws (or criminal masterminds, if you prefer) now live with the threat of prison sentences looming over their heads, neither seems particularly jittery as they conduct a brief tour of their modest empire on a sunny afternoon in Stockholm. The police raids focused particularly on the basement premises Pirate Bay occupies in the back of an office building in Solna, an unremarkable suburb of the city.

Pirate Bay HQ is a shabby, low-ceilinged concrete bunker that bears little resemblance to anyone's idea of a high-tech Death Star that is threatening to annihilate Hollywood. A handful of cheap desks are strewn with standard dude detritus: empty beer bottles, scattered paperwork, take-out-food cartons, and so on. In the middle of the floor stands a red-and-black Honda Super Sprint motorcycle belonging to Neij. It was moved inside after some of the kids in his neighborhood tried unsuccessfully to break the heavy-duty chain around the front wheel; instead, they burned a patch of paint with a lighter. "I don't mind copying," Neij notes, "but I don't like taking."

Neij certainly didn't like it when the Swedish police entered this facility and confiscated 186 pieces of computer equipment, most of which were servers, from him and his partner—particularly since only about 20 of those machines were connected to Pirate Bay. The other equipment belonged to PRQ, the legitimate Internet-service provider from which Neij and Svartholm make their living. In a back room there are now a few replacement servers stacked up in small, uneven piles.

The Swedish courts decided that the police could keep the PRQ servers, and those belonging to company clients, for forensic examination until May 2007. When PRQ sued for the return of the non–Pirate Bay equipment, the prosecutor responded in hysterical Valenti mode, comparing Pirate Bay to the I.R.A.—the judge ruled that the police could keep any computer equipment netted by the raids until the trial date.

Despite the hardware hardships inflicted by the raids, Pirate Bay managed to find a temporary home in the Netherlands within 24 hours, and, thanks to borrowed equipment, the site was fully functional within three days. Fredrik Neij takes great pride in the way this rapid regeneration wrong-footed the authorities. "The prosecutor didn't know we were back up," he says. "A journalist asked him what he thought, and had to explain that the site was back up. The anti-piracy chief said, 'They won't be back up.' When he was corrected, he said, 'Well, it still works a bit bad.'" The Swedish government had been outdrawn by the fastest guns in Deadwood. (Incidentally, the HBO series of that name continues to be available for free download through Pirate Bay—along with such recent movies as Borat, Blood Diamond, Apocalypto, and Night at the Museum.)

Pirate Bay has now taken careful steps to ensure that any future raids will inflict minimal disruption to the service. "We have divided the servers up geographically—they are hidden," explains Svartholm. "If they come after us again they will only find our front end. A single metal box with a short message stuck on the front: 'You forgot to take my label writer.'"

In reality Svartholm does not expect another raid: "At this point it would be political suicide," he says. Shortly after the raid more than 1,000 citizens attended Pirate Bay rallies in central Stockholm and Sweden's second-largest city, Gothenburg, events which were captured by the quickie documentary Steal This Film. The recently formed Pirate Party doubled its membership, and even mainstream politicians—mindful of Sweden's million or so file-sharing voters—weighed in on the Pirates' behalf.

As Neij pilots his red, rusted Chevy Van 20 toward another scene of the May raids, he explains that he himself is too busy to maintain a serious file-sharing habit. In keeping with the classic computer-geek stereotype, he admits to "pretty much downloading every episode of every sci-fi series that's out there." The late-night animated show Robot Chicken is the entertainment of choice for Svartholm, the Pirate Bay partner who posts diligently bitchy replies whenever the site receives threatening letters from corporate lawyers.

The other locus of the Pirate Bay raids was a giant data-storage facility that is also used by many of Sweden's major banks. It so happened that the company responsible for operating the surveillance cameras at this location relied on Svartholm and Neij's PRQ company for its Internet connection—which may be why grainy footage of the raid appeared on the Internet soon after it happened.

The publicity generated by the Pirate Bay raids gave a huge boost to the site's traffic, which already stood at more than one million visitors per day, and forced the company to hire five new workers to cope with merchandising demand. There are thousands of back orders for the original Pirate Bay T-shirt, which features a skull and crossbones with a cassette tape in the center. When Neij was wearing the shirt on a 2006 business trip to San Francisco, he was surprised to find how far the Pirate cult had spread. "There was a school class lined up outside a museum, a big group of eight- or nine-year-old American kids. And a bunch of them started pointing at me: 'Hey! Pirate Bay! Cool!'"

The New Frontier

As befits an organization of global disrepute, Pirate Bay had its beginnings not in Scandinavia but in far-off Mexico City, where Gottfrid Svartholm was working, in 2003, for an Internet-security firm. As a devout member of Sweden's pro-piracy Web site Pirate Bureau, Svartholm agreed to use the security firm's servers to launch the Swedes' BitTorrent venture, and when he returned home the following year, he found a new accomplice in Fredrik Neij, a self-taught programmer who got his first job through a criminal act. "I hacked a company's service provider and put up obscene messages," says Neij. "The company said work for us or we prosecute." Asked why he committed the original act of vandalism, Neij responds brightly, "Because I could!"

By the time Neij got involved with Pirate Bay (there is a third, silent partner, named "Peter"), the site had effectively outgrown its host. "We had no idea it would happen," says Rasmus Fleischer, co-founder of Pirate Bureau. "It started off as just a little part of the site. Our forum was more important. Even the links were more important than the [torrent] tracker."

With a membership of more than 60,000, Pirate Bureau was originally devoted to the unofficial distribution of music files; expanded bandwidth enabled the transmission of video files. Fleischer neatly summarizes the ethos of his site: "We don't want to reform copyright law—we just don't want the state to enforce it."

Fleischer likes to frame the copyright issue in historical and theoretical terms, expounding on ideas about "how value is produced in the cultural sector." He sees the notion of music copyright in particular as a transitory construct. "This has been the business model for some bit of the 20th century," he says. "Music has always worked in different economic ways, and copyright has only applied to a few genres historically."

As dryly academic—and, frankly, downright Swedish—as this analysis might sound, it was effectively endorsed several years ago by one of the most consistently innovative figures of the rock era. Speaking to The New York Times in 2002 about the future of the music industry, David Bowie said, "Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity."

Another of Pirate Bureau's founders, Marcus Kaarto, believes that the U.S. entertainment industry itself is, ironically enough, responsible for the rise of the BitTorrent protocol that is now sending the Hollywood community into such a tailspin. "The record industry destroyed Kazaa," says Kaarto, referring to the once popular file-sharing service. "They hired companies to fill it with bogus content and viruses—and that drove users to BitTorrent." And the new software happened to be far more efficacious for transmitting video files. What had begun as a music-business problem was now, thanks to sites like Pirate Bay, starting to send gusts of panic across the television and movie industries.

Among the underlying reasons that Sweden became the hub of the burgeoning culture of international file sharing, the most often cited are national copyright laws that were, until fairly recently, relatively lax toward Internet piracy. Other factors include tax benefits offered for purchasing computers and, more important, one of the most developed Internet infrastructures in the world. Kazaa was invented in Sweden by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who together went on to create Skype, the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) company that they ultimately sold to eBay for $2.6 billion.

One of the main engineers of Sweden's Internet pre-eminence is 34-year-old Jonas Birgersson, also known by the nickname "Broadband Jesus." Birgersson is a former military-intelligence prodigy whose tiny Broadband Company became a major telecommunications player in the late 90s by laying fiber-optic cable across much of the country, giving Swedish consumers cheap access to vastly expanded bandwidth.

In 2000, Birgersson was lauded in a Newsweek article that gushed over Stockholm's high-tech success story and anointed the city "a Scandinavian Seattle."

Thanks to the Pirate Bay raids, Sweden's cuddly image has, in the minds of many in the entertainment business, been supplanted by something much more ominous. Birgersson is among those who think the hostility is completely misguided. "Sweden is not the enemy," he says. "Sweden is the prototype of society to come."

A Hollywood Production

Not only had the Swedish police been heavy-handed in their seizure of Pirate Bay's property, they had, on the evidence of a private investigator's report, questioned a female acquaintance of Neij's and searched her apartment. Also hauled in for questioning was Pirate Bay's legal counsel, Mikael Viborg; for some reason police saw fit to take a DNA swab from the inside of his mouth, as they'd also done with Neij and Svartholm. Initial public outrage over the police's actions only increased when widespread suspicion about the raids' origin was confirmed. It turned out that the whole operation was indeed a Hollywood production.

In late 2005, Sweden's Motion Picture Association was imploring the country's justice department to prosecute Pirate Bay for large-scale copyright infringement, but chief prosecutor Hakan Roswall decided that the site's owners were doing nothing actionable concerning American films' copyrights. Shortly after the raids the Swedish media discovered what had inspired Roswall's change of heart.

In June 2006, the Swedish media exposed a leaked March 17 letter from John Malcolm, head of anti-piracy for the U.S.-based M.P.A.A., to Dan Eliasson, state secretary to Sweden's minister for justice. Malcolm's missive referred to an earlier meeting between the pair and urged the Scandinavian official "to take much-needed action against the Pirate Bay." Eliasson's cordial reply was dated April 10.

Malcolm and Eliasson had been brought together in October 2005 by Monique Wadsted, lead lawyer for Sweden's M.P.A.; Wadsted also happened to have been a law-school classmate of Eliasson's boss, Justice Minister Thomas Bodström. Frustrated by the lack of police resources allotted to her ongoing complaint against Pirate Bay, Wadsted successfully suggested that the M.P.A. hire a private detective to put together a file on the site. "We provided information to push on the investigation," she admits.

Wadsted found herself caught up in the public backlash against the Pirate Bay raids when her personal details were posted on the Internet by persons unknown. The lawyer complains vociferously about having her privacy violated, yet she refuses to allow that other Swedish citizens may also have had their privacy violated as a result of the M.P.A.'s scattershot intelligence gathering. "The private investigators haven't done anything illegal," Wadsted insists. "It's a different thing to give people personal information on a lawyer and urge people to harass her. I'm not a criminal. I'm not even suspected of being a criminal."

As it turned out, Monique Wadsted and her local M.P.A. colleagues were little more than supporting players in a global economic power play that, according to many sources, has seen the U.S. government directly interfering in the domestic affairs of another sovereign nation. According to Swedish news reports, just before Easter 2006, a delegation from Sweden's police force and its Justice Ministry visited Washington, D.C., where high-ranking U.S. officials reportedly threatened to put Sweden on a World Trade Organization "priority watch list" if it did not immediately clamp down on the nettlesome Pirate Bay. After initially denying that the raids were a result of these U.S. threats, State Secretary Eliasson relented; he admitted, on-camera, that the consequences of non-cooperation had been "explained" to him and his colleagues in D.C. The M.P.A.A.'s John Malcolm denies advance knowledge of this meeting.

In terms of international-copyright malfeasance, Sweden found itself among some heavyweight company. The U.S. had, for instance, become extremely frustrated that it hadn't insisted on China's compliance with digital-piracy laws before China joined the W.T.O. And the very same issue has been one of the major obstacles to the admission of Russia, a nation where former military bases have been converted to factories that churn out millions of bootleg CDs and DVDs.

On July 5 of last year, with the Swedish government still reeling from the Pirate Bay scandal, and ministers being subjected to investigation, there was momentary relief in the form of a national-newspaper article. The story alleged that Neij and Svartholm had all along been making a healthy financial score off Pirate Bay, in the form of advertising revenue. Posing as a potential advertiser, a journalist had approached the company that sells banner ads on Pirate Bay, and estimated that these must be generating, in Swedish advertising alone, as much as $80,000 per month, and claimed that these funds were being channeled into a front company in Switzerland.

"I wish I earned that!" counters Neij. "Do I look like I have, like, $2 million?"

Neij insists that whatever advertising revenue is generated is severely limited by the fact that the site operates in a legal "gray zone," and Svartholm points out that they lost $60,000 worth of equipment in the raids. "It's not free to operate a Web site on this scale," he adds. In early 2007, one of the companies advertising on Pirate Bay was none other than Wal-Mart—touting DVDs, no less. Svartholm says he doesn't know which third party bought the space on Wal-Mart's behalf (it was an Israeli company), and he continues to maintain that the site yields only enough profit to cover operating costs. "If we were making lots of money I wouldn't be working late at the office tonight," says the pallid Swede. "I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere, working on my tan."

As the M.P.A.'s Wadsted is eager to point out, any conclusive proof that Pirate Bay's owners are businessmen rather than amateurs would alter the complexion of the impending legal proceedings against them. "This would be a more serious matter altogether," she says. "The judge could end up sending both of these guys to prison for five years."

Remote Control

After my fact-finding safari in Sweden, I returned to Paris, where I was temporarily domiciled, and where my personal piracy habit was expanding quite impressively. During a settling-in period in France, my wife happened to mention how much she regretted missing the third season of Project Runway (which was supposedly even better than the first two). Proving that chivalry is not dead, I strayed from the genteel UKNova tea party and downloaded, through the torrent tracker mininova.org, all the new episodes of Bravo's flagship reality series. It didn't stop there: I went on to indulge myself with the pilot episodes (unscreened at that point) of Studio 60 and Knights of Prosperity, among other U.S. network treats.

But I still drew the line at downloading movies. This was mainly because, in light of my irrational dislike of French TV variety shows, I had already prepared for our relocation by augmenting "Steve TV" with several months' worth of illegally copied movies—meaning that I'd rented dozens of DVDs from Netflix and duplicated them using a fun (and completely illegal) little computer application called Mac the Ripper. There may be those who need their Criterion Collection DVDs in the lavish original packaging, but it turned out I wasn't one of them—apparently I've become just another one of the millions worldwide who can't resist the idea of getting stuff for free. "Because I can."

Among the few senior entertainment executives who have been able to absorb this seemingly basic aspect of human nature is Anne Sweeney, president of Disney–ABC Television. In her keynote speech at the October 2006 MIPCOM audiovisual-content market in Cannes, France, Sweeney broke ranks with her boardroom peers to make a bracingly pragmatic statement. "Piracy is a business model," Sweeney said. "It exists to serve a need in the market—consumers who want TV content on demand. And piracy competes for consumers the same way we do: through quality, price, and availability."

The major television networks have been finding it far easier than the Hollywood studios to adapt to the dramatic technological shifts that will be reshaping the traditional media marketplace for years to come. The networks have already enjoyed the luxury of experimenting with different distribution models, from selling episodes on iTunes to the more realistic approach of giving them away on the Web with advertising intact.

It has been more than a year since the 260 layoffs at Warner Bros. confirmed that Hollywood's executive class is anticipating turbulent times ahead. And yet, in the interim, the movie industry's response to digital piracy has been about as effective as a dawn raid by the Keystone Kops.

In terms of offering consumers legitimate movie downloads, disunity and incompetence have been the order of the day. As far back as 2002, Paramount, Universal, MGM, Sony, and Warner Bros. joined forces to launch the download site Movielink, but the paltry fare offered is so hopelessly freighted with protective technical restrictions that BusinessWeek, in a 2006 article, poignantly described it as "difficult or impossible to use." A similarly hidebound rival site called CinemaNow has proved equally unappealing to the millions who already consume their movies online for free.

Last summer, Apple's era-defining iTunes service strode into the movie-download arena amid much fanfare—but it initially offered only a meager inventory of around 75 films from Disney, the only company with which Apple had struck a deal. This is not surprising, given that Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs is Disney's largest shareholder, as well as a company director. So what is preventing other studios from signing up? One name: Wal-Mart.

As the retailer responsible for shifting around 40 percent of the $17 billion worth of DVDs sold in 2006, Wal-Mart wields uniquely powerful influence over the way in which Hollywood studios choose to distribute their product. Until Paramount announced a deal with iTunes this past January, no studio other than Disney was willing to risk offending Wal-Mart, a company that they fear more than Pirate Bay itself. So even though DVD sales are slowing and online piracy is booming, Wal-Mart can restrict the studios' downloading plans and hold them to a pact of mutually assured self-destruction.

This past fall, Wal-Mart took its first baby steps into the movie-downloading arena, offering a rudimentary service to its online customers—not even the most paranoid Wal-Mart executive would be threatened by the other major legal-download service currently in operation, Amazon.com's Unbox. In its current iteration Unbox boasts a reasonably large inventory of films, but with many unappealing restrictions: the movies it provides can be viewed only on Windows devices (i.e., video iPods not invited); hit-movie downloads are priced slightly lower ($14.99–$19.99) than physical DVDs, but they cannot be burned onto blank DVDs and they self-delete in 24 hours.

In 2004, longtime M.P.A.A. president Jack Valenti was succeeded by Dan Glickman, the secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration. While Glickman's public pronouncements on piracy can tend toward Valenti-like belligerence, in person he is alarmingly reasonable when discussing Hollywood's piracy problem. Glickman believes that the movie industry will soon give the public "a reasonably priced, hassle-free alternative" to illegal downloading. "Most people, if it's easily available, will not steal it," he insists.

This assertion is not necessarily supported by the available data. For instance, although Apple's iTunes service became known as the savior of the record business by generating millions of dollars a year through its legal, hassle-free downloads, the market share is less than healthy. A recent industry study estimated that iTunes accounted for a mere 2.5 percent of music files downloaded from the Internet. Glickman is undaunted by this grim statistic. "I see the glass half full, not half empty," he states. Though he'll admit that there is "a lot of trial and error going on" during this "digital transition," he insists that Hollywood will soon get its act together.

Glickman supports this positive forecast with two examples, neither of which really stands up to serious scrutiny: Yes, the studios have made BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen guarantee that his site (bittorrent.com) will no longer host any illegal content. So one pirate surrendered—the fleet is still growing by the day thanks to Cohen's original software. Glickman's other ray of hope is Guba, a marginal site that offers visitors a smorgasbord of YouTube-like amusements, plus commercial fare that again comes with severe technical restrictions. January 2007 saw the launch of Qflix, a movie-download system endorsed by all the major studios. Qflix sounded like a promising development and a marked improvement on existing services, but once again there was a catch: most customers would need to purchase a new DVD burner in order to use it.

While the movie business continues to prove itself less than effective in combating the threat of digital piracy, the electronics industry has done very well by joining the pirates' fleet. When electronics giants like Philips, Daewoo, and Samsung are flooding the market with DVD players specifically designed to play raw MPEG and AVI computer files, they are clearly enabling the viewing of illegally downloaded content on domestic television sets. This trend approached critical mass in late 2006 when TiVo unveiled its latest software update, which could play downloaded video files; when Steve Jobs introduced AppleTV in January, all the chatter about the computerization of television seemed to coalesce into an irresistible force.

Meanwhile, Hollywood continues to depict its battle against Internet piracy as an almost biblical struggle between good and evil—much to the delight of its young adversaries in Sweden and elsewhere. These are people who regard the M.P.A.A.'s chest beating as something between a joke and a dare, and they will continue to facilitate mass file sharing simply "because they can."

Sweden's beloved high-tech millionaire Jonas Birgersson derides the U.S. entertainment industry for its futile stand against evolutionary tides; he points out that although something like iTunes is regarded as a major boon to the music business, the innovative service was created by the computer industry. And now that iTunes has leveled the distribution playing field to the great disadvantage of major labels, Birgersson poses the question "What do you need these multi-billion-dollar companies with all their skyscrapers for? We shouldn't sacrifice a lot of these gains to prolong that system for another few years."

At the risk of sounding sentimental—or even, God forbid, anti-progress—there surely has to be a moment for speculation on what could be lost if the current scenario plays out to its logical conclusion. Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier, the man who gave us the term "virtual reality," is one of the few credentialed individuals to have spoken out against the coming age of "digital Maoism." If Hollywood's ancient regime is indeed swept away by unstoppable technological changes, the old patronage system may one day be regarded with nostalgic benevolence in light of the rising mob culture and YouTube novelty-storm that is replacing it.

"There are new business rules, and some art forms won't be able to be supported anymore," Birgersson responds. "I mean, in ancient Rome they used to stage full-scale naval battles in the Colosseum. We don't do that anymore." Sweden's "Broadband Jesus" appears to be suggesting that the sun is setting on the era in which Ben Affleck got paid $15 million for Paycheck.

Birgersson still believes that Hollywood can avoid its own worst-case scenario, but only if it rapidly renounces business practices it has held as eternal verities since Louis B. Mayer was selling scrap metal. This would more or less involve concurring with Anne Sweeney of ABC-Disney that piracy is, in fact, a business model, then finding ways to adapt pirate-model technologies to deliver movie downloads at prices well below the current level.

Should the movie industry decide that any appeasement of file sharers would be tantamount to surrender, and keep trying to put the digital genie back in the bottle, Birgersson believes, it would be virtually guaranteeing its own obsolescence. In a recent briefing to Swedish media executives, he said, "You say you're going to war. Pray that these people don't believe you." Drawing on his military-intelligence background, Birgersson says the entertainment industry's hostile declarations on piracy are entirely counterproductive. "The harder you push people to go in one direction, the harder they'll push in the opposite direction," he says. "And right now the pirates are having the time of their life."

One person who is relishing the idea of asymmetrical warfare with the M.P.A.A. is Pirate Bureau chief Rasmus Fleischer. "Mark Getty [the photo-archive mogul] said that intellectual property is 'the oil of the 21st century'—and oil apparently means war," states Fleischer. "Copyright is so incompatible with so many cultural and technological developments. This is going to be a growing problem for years ahead."

M.P.A.A. chairman Dan Glickman may have erroneously hailed the raids on Pirate Bay as "a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves," because the ultimate ruling in the case against Svartholm and Neij will have virtually no effect on Hollywood's losing war against file sharers.

Regardless of whether the Pirate Bay case is finally judged by the Swedish courts—and sources close to the prosecutor are confident that charges will be brought in May—it is likely that both Pirate Bay and BitTorrent will be replaced as leading facilitators of Internet piracy. And as has happened repeatedly in the past, file sharers will gravitate toward delivery methods that are more powerful and more problematic for law enforcement. Sweden's pirate contingent is already developing a new file-sharing program that will grant a sturdy shield of "anonymization" to its users—whether they be movie downloaders or persons of the darkest criminal intent.

So, the question remains: Will Hollywood adapt and survive, or will it continue to escalate its apparently futile battle against the collective intelligence of a million resourceful and highly motivated computer geeks worldwide? (The kind of people who recently unlocked the supposedly resilient copy protection on Hollywood's new HD DVD format.) Once again, the situation was adroitly summed up in the words of Anne Sweeney, no matter how unpalatable they may have been to the lunchtime crowd at the Ivy. In her 2006 MIPCOM speech, Sweeney plaintively stated, "We want to go wherever our viewers are. Viewers have control and show no sign of giving it back.''

I wonder what's on Steve TV tonight?
http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/f...?currentPage=1





Ouch

Consumer Electronics are a Joke. It's Everyone's Fault But Mine. You Assholes.
Joel Johnson

These guys want me to write a weekly column, but I hate consumer electronics, I hate marketing, and I hate you people, because you're all so dumb. If you're lucky and I need the money, I will.

I gave up two years of my life writing about gadgets for this site. Waking up every morning at 5 AM, chewing up press releases to find the rare morsel of legitimate information, chasing down "hot tips" that ended up being photochops of iPods with reflections of genitals in the touchscreens. Oh, and the worst: fielding emails from PR parasites eager to suck away precious time in a half-hour phone meeting while the Senior Vice-President of Smoke Blowing tells me about how his company's software—based on an idea cribbed from Google—is going to change the way I look at something I didn't care about in the first place. (Inevitably, "forever.")

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

Then you had the audacity to complain about broken phones, half-assed firmware that bricked your gear, and winner-takes-nothing arms races between the companies whose gear your bought and the hackers who had nothing better to do than try to fix it. Do you realize how ridiculous that is? Programmers with free time did more to help you get quality products than you ever did by buying the broken gear in the first place.

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn't do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it.

You want to know the punchline? The average Joe that makes up the market is smarter than you saps. The market-at-large waits until a clear leader emerges, then takes a modest plunge. You may think you're making up the "bleeding edge" of "gadget pimpatude" but you're really just a loose confederation of marks the consumer electronics industry uses as free market research and easy money. "Give me the latest version," you coo, hiking up your skirt another inch over your exposed wallet. "Point Oh One upgrades make me so hot."

And for god's sake, Gizmodo, stop giving this stuff such a free pass. Stop using terminology that they've programmed into you by puking it into your eyeballs via press release after press release. What is this "unleashes" horseshit, Deleon? You're not in marketing. Don't write like you are. This is obviously a not a real product, Frucci. Did you even read the site you linked? Are you actually writing boosterism-filled copy about products that don't actually exist? Oh my god, Wilson, you're writing about that house-printing machine? I wrote about that almost three years ago. (You get a slight pass because I couldn't find my old link in Google because of Gawker's inexplicable "Wheel O' Permalink Syntax," but still, you guys are supposed to be well-versed experts about technology. You should know about this stuff. The C in "Gizmodo" is for "some fucking context," which you should provide, even if you only get paid per cock joke.)

While we're on the subject of your torpid, irresponsible copy, stop calling stuff "*tastic." Especially "geektastic," your slackest-jawed portmanteau. Would you drop that bon mot to a woman you were trying to hit on in real life? Of course you would, because I know you guys, and you're dorks.

Get it together: every single one of these consumer electronics companies should be approached as the enemy. They work for us. Hold their feet to the fire when they say their product is going to change even a small part of our lives. Circle back again in six months when they're shilling the incremental upgrade and ask them why the last version didn't cut the mustard. Step out of your blogging trench and ask yourself what your responsibility is to the tens of thousands of idiots who are reading this site right now to determine what they should spend their next paycheck on. They've already proven they're too imbicilic to make any smart purchases on their own. (Remember, Gizmodo was a nexus of debate over which MP3 player was going to "kill" the iPod two years after Apple won.) If you write like another stupid fanboy who ricochets a pillar of spunk off the roof of his gaping mouth just because something is glossy and uses electricity, you're just doing the work of the companies trying to get rich selling us broken promises.

Ah. I feel better. Didn't help a thing, but I feel better, and I'm what's important here.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/feature/h...rap-236310.php

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

February 10th, February 3rd, January 27th, January 20th, January 13th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. Questions or comments? Call 213-814-0165, country code U.S..


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black