[JackSpratts]

Playing Favorites On The Net?
Declan McCullagh

Broadband providers and e-commerce companies, historic allies on many political fronts, are finding themselves butting heads over federal legislation that could change the way either side does business.

A bill expected early next year in the U.S. House of Representatives, coupled with recent comments made by executives from BellSouth and the newly merged AT&T and SBC Communications, has raised the prospect of a two-tiered Internet in which some services--especially video--would be favored over others.

No broadband provider has proposed to block certain Web sites. But they have said Yahoo, for instance, could pay a fee to have its search site load faster than Google. Other possibilities include restricting bandwidth-hogging file-swapping applications, or delivering their own video content faster than a similar service provided by rivals.

That prospect has dismayed e-commerce and Internet companies including Amazon.com, eBay, Google and
Microsoft, which are lobbying to maintain what they call the principle of "network neutrality"--namely, that network owners must not pick favorites among the myriad technologies, applications and users that travel across their pipes.

"We're trying to ensure that our customers are able to get to us without impairments along the way," said Paul Misener, vice president for global public policy at Amazon.

Broadband providers, on the other hand, say that intrusive federal legislation would prevent new business models from being invented and reduce the incentive to invest in speedier networks. It also, they say, could prove disruptive.

"Network neutrality is a nearly indefinable concept," said Brian Dietz, a spokesman for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. "For instance, does network neutrality mean that network operators can't block spam? Should network operators be allowed to stop viruses from spreading? Should large users of peer-to-peer software be allowed unlimited bandwidth so service for other users is slower?"

On one level, the dispute invokes the philosophical question of what legal rules broadband providers will be required to follow. Will they enjoy the freedom to manage their bandwidth as they please, and will Internet users continue to expect that their provider will act as a simple pipe or conduit--one that does not prefer one destination over another?

At another level, though, the political wrangling is a routine business dispute that happens to be playing out before Congress. Not only are Yahoo, Google and Microsoft deeply interested in online video, but AT&T and BellSouth are planning to offer Internet-based television. For them, it's also a way to strike back at cable companies, which sell phone service.

Billions of dollars are at stake. AT&T is spending $5 billion to install an additional 40,000 miles of fiber to its networks and plans to pipe Internet Protocol-based television and other high-speed services into 18 million households by the middle of 2008. Its backbone network already shuttles 4.6 petabytes of data on an average business day. Similarly, Verizon Communications switched on its Fios television service in Texas and has plans to expand to Florida, Virginia and California.

Hypothetical "neutrality" concerns
Amazon and its allies have been touting the importance of network neutrality since at least 2002, and even went so far as to ask the Federal Communications Commission to endorse the principle.

Until recently, their worries were mostly hypothetical and gained little political traction. Michael Powell, FCC chairman at the time, dismissed their concerns a year later, saying there was no need for pre-emptive regulations that could imperil still-to-be discovered business models on the Internet.

Then along came the case of Madison River, a North Carolina telecommunications company that intentionally blocked Internet phone traffic. Madison River had a strong financial incentive: It offered both DSL (digital subscriber line) and voice telephone service.

The FCC responded swiftly to a complaint from Vonage, and Madison River soon agreed to stop blocking voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls.

A few months later, in August, the FCC adopted a "policy statement" (click here for PDF) on network neutrality. While not a binding regulation, the statement says that Americans are "entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice." (At the time, Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat, said (PDF) he "would have preferred a rule that we could use to bring enforcement action.")

Now Congress is becoming interested. A draft bill (PDF) prepared by Texas Rep. Joe Barton, a Republican who chairs the committee overseeing telecommunications law, says providers "may not block, or unreasonably impair or interfere with, the offering of, access to or the use of any lawful content, application or service provided over the Internet."

But the e-commerce and Internet companies say that language is too vague for comfort. They're also troubled about a section permitting providers to offer their own "broadband video service." That, they say, may create a loophole permitting mischief by the increasing number of broadband providers that offer IP-based television services.

In a statement provided to CNET News.com, BellSouth said it and other broadband providers should be able to offer "different plans that feature enhanced levels of service or that promote their own brand names and products or the services of selected vendors." That includes, BellSouth said, entering "into arrangements with content providers by which the content provider pays for special treatment, such as preferential listing or faster downloads from that provider's Web site or receiving higher quality of service."

The latest broadband bill to enter the fray, introduced last week by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, proposes a broad deregulatory framework for the communications industry but does not explicitly refer to network neutrality. The closest it comes is to direct the FCC to look for "unfair methods of competition." A similar bill proposed in July by Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, refers more directly to network neutrality by saying that broadband providers "shall not willfully and knowingly block access" to content. Amazon, however, said such provisions don't go far enough.

SBC, which recently purchased AT&T, created an uproar in the Net world last month with a bold pronouncement: The Googles, Microsofts and Vonages of the world shouldn't expect to freeload off its network.

"I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," Ed Whitacre, CEO of the newly merged AT&T and SBC, told BusinessWeek magazine in a widely cited interview.

Charging subscribers higher prices for greater connection speeds is nothing new among Internet service providers. Most of the Bells, for instance, now offer tiered DSL plans that start in the $15 range for the slowest download speeds.

"It's similar to paying more to get an overnight package from FedEX or UPS vs. a lesser amount for three- or four- day delivery," said Joe Chandler, a BellSouth representative.

"We have always said that if they want to have, say, a bronze, silver, gold level of Internet access, essentially charging more for more bits...that's fine," said Amazon's Misener.

It's the idea of "impairing" access to content or services that makes companies like Amazon nervous. Misener said he could imagine "discreet" approaches in which a service provider could, for example, return a 404 page- not-found error for every 15th Web hit at a site that doesn't get premium treatment: "It's easy to do, and who is going to be blamed for it? Certainly not the intermediary but the end site."

"We are pleased that the network operators are investing in technology and innovation, and we are proud partners with them in offering content and services to the public," Paul Mitchell, an executive in Microsoft's TV division, told a House committee last month. "We just think that other companies should continue to be able to offer Internet content and services as well."

Not only e-commerce companies are voicing alarm over what they say is a lack of legal protections favoring network neutrality.

Trade association Comptel and about 60 representatives from member companies--including Internet service providers, VoIP sellers, and telephone companies that compete for customers with the Bells--signed a letter earlier this month voicing dissatisfaction with the draft House legislation.

The draft bill will sanction "Internet gatekeepers," wrote Comptel President Earl Comstock. He added: "Allowing this proposed bill to advance any further will undermine the Internet and pave the way for the Bell companies to re-monopolize the nation's communications networks."

No "significant evidence" of problem
Stalling any attempt to craft broad network neutrality rules is the fact that, despite small-scale incidents like Madison River, problems remain mostly theoretical.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told a roomful of communications company executives last week that his agency was hesitant to adopt formal Net neutrality rules because "there hasn't been significant evidence of a problem."

A study published by the free-market advocacy group Cato Institute in 2003 says that federal intervention is unwise and would infringe on property rights and limit business models. So did a paper by Christopher Yoo of Vanderbilt University law school. A counterargument (click here for PDF) by law professors Tim Wu and Lawrence Lessig, on the other hand, says the FCC should ensure the Internet remains as neutral toward applications as the electrical power grid.

When it approved the megamergers of SBC with AT&T and Verizon with MCI in late October, the FCC required both companies to adhere to a network neutrality policy for two years following the closing date of the mergers. Meanwhile, broadband companies have vowed for years that they're not interested in preventing access to legal content.

Aside from the Madison River case, examples are scarce. Missouri-based VoIP provider Nuvio has encountered "some issues" with broadband providers physically blocking Port 5060, the most common carrier of Net phone calls, but the company has managed to settle those complaints easily without turning to the FCC, said CEO Jason Talley.

Talley said he worries that broadband providers will instead take up filtering on "a more intelligent level," monitoring packets of information and then prioritizing or degrading certain content as they please. "Typically customers call in and complain about quality if they have problems like that," he said. "You try to fix it; you try to work with them on that. But at the end of the day, you either figure it out, or the customer cancels."

Even Amazon's Misener acknowledged that outright blocking of sites wasn't a problem now, and would not likely become one in the future.

But without legislative intervention, there's reason to fear that Net surfers may find a more restricted Web, Misener said: "What Mr. Whitacre's interview revealed was, I think he said two very distinct things. One is that the service providers have market power...and part two was, we intend to use it."
http://news.com.com/Playing+favorite...3-6003281.html





Texas Utility To Provide Internet Over Power Lines
AP

The utility TXU Corp. said Monday it will offer high-speed Internet service over power lines to several million Texans as part of a $150 million project aimed at improving its ability to monitor the power grid.

The ``smart grid'' buildout will enable what would be the nation's largest broadband-over-power line Internet rollout.

The 10-year partnership with Current Communications Group Inc., a privately held company in Germantown, Md., is not, however, expected to yield residental Internet service until the second half of 2006.

Once completed, the grid will let TXU check meter consumption remotely and pinpoint problems before they become major blackouts.

TXU spokesman Chris Schein said Internet access was secondary to the smart grid capabilities.

``We really believe that what end users are going to appreciate is when the spring storms hit and they don't have an outage,'' he said. ``Or if they do have an outage, it's not as long as it was.''

Construction on the smart grid system will begin early next year along TXU's 14,000 miles of transmission lines and 100,000 miles of distribution lines.

The deal gives Current access to more than 2 million business and residential customers, mostly in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Proponents say broadband-over-power line technology, or BPL, could be especially significant for rural areas, where high-speed Internet access has lagged due to the higher costs to telecommunications and cable companies of serving sparsely populated areas.

Though pricing and download speeds haven't been finalized, Current vice president Jay Birnbaum expects to compete directly with cable and DSL providers. BPL moves data at roughly the same speeds as cable or DSL lines.

Current's only existing widespread availability is through Cinergy Corp. in Cincinnati, where it charges between $20 to $45 monthly for Internet speeds of up to 3 megabits per second. Birnbaum wouldn't provide subscriber numbers but said the service was available to about 50,000 customers in Ohio.

Current, which counts Google Inc. and The Hearst Corp. among major investors, has smaller pilot projects in Hawaii, Maryland and Southern California.

Most BPL offerings remain in the test phase, said Alan R. Shark, executive director of the Washington-based Broadband Over Power Lines Industry Association. One of the current largest rollouts is in Manassas, Va., where 850 subscribers have signed up since the municipal utility began offering BPL in October.

Shares of Dallas-based TXU Corp. were down $1.49 to close at $52.09 in trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares have ranged from $30.22 to $58.29 in the past year.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/13443745.htm





Start-Up Merges Cell Phone And PC Into A Handheld
Michael Kanellos

It's a cell phone. It's a computer. It's the two invaluable companions of the modern executive in one.

DualCor Technologies next month will unveil the cPC, a full-fledged handheld Windows XP computer that also comes with a built-in smart phone that runs Windows Mobile 5.0.

The cPC is 6.5 inches long, 3.3 inches wide, 1.2 inches thick and has a 5-inch diagonal screen. It will be aimed at sales representatives and executives who travel extensively, said CEO Steven Hanley, who joined the company seven months ago.

There are signs of demand for such a device. A small but growing number of white-collar workers have begun to trade in their notebooks for BlackBerrys and other handhelds.

Sony and start-up OQO have already introduced full-fledged handheld Windows computers. Customers, however, have not snapped up these devices, in part because of short battery life and limited performance.

Through some engineering and design advances, the cPC's battery lasts long enough to let users run applications simultaneously for eight hours or more, he said.

"We seemed to have cracked the code," Hanley claimed.

The cPc jams two devices into one package, Hanley said. The computer part of the equation consists of Windows XP Tablet operating system, a 1.5GHz C7-M processor from Via Technologies and 1GB of DDR 2 memory.

DualCor went with a Via Technologies chip because it consumed a maximum of 7.5 watts of power, but still provided enough performance to function like a regular computer.

"We had an older version that ran a Transmeta chip, but it took 7.5 to 9 seconds for the document to load," Hanley explained.

The cell phone aspect of the device has Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC phone edition, a PXA communications processor from Intel, 128MB of DRAM and 1GB of flash memory.

Together, the computer and cell phone components share a 40GB hard drive.

While this might look like component overkill, incorporating two distinct computing platforms extends the device's battery life. In full computing mode, the battery lasts about 3 to 4 hours, about the same as a standard laptop.

However, the device can run for eight to 12 hours in "smart phone" mode. Because of the memory footprint and other technology, users can access and receive e-mail in smart-phone mode and run applications such as PowerPoint in a limited fashion. As a result, the PC components and OS are asleep most of the time.

"When you pull up an application you can decide whether to run it in x86 mode or on the smart phone," he said. The choice between using the mobile parts or PC elements can also be automated.

The cPC also comes with a few additional features that add shine to its sparkle factor. The screen is made from special glass, manufactured by LG, which provides a brightness level of 200 NITS, which the company claims is brighter than most other smart phone screens.

The company figured how to include TabletPC functionality without incorporating a digitizer, which is an additional chip.

Users can also dock the cPC like a CPU, plugging it into an outlet and LCD screen and it will feel no different than using a regular desktop.

One thing the cPC won't be is cheap. The system--which will get shown off at the Computer Electronics Show and become available in March--will carry a $1,500 price tag, although customers will get volume discounts for buying several at once.

Price could be a problem, said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies.

"There are a lot of subsidies out there in the BlackBerry world, so people aren't used to paying a lot of money for them. Notebooks are going down in price" he said. "I don't know where the magic number is, but it is somewhere in the mid-hundreds."

Nonetheless, the design could grab the attention of shoppers. "It pushes the envelope on what devices can do. It will certainly get a lot of raised eyebrows," Kay added.

Several large companies and consulting firms have already agreed to purchase units, at least for trial, he said. The company has also attracted advisers such as Gordon Bell, the Microsoft Research luminary, and Accenture's Cindy Warner, who advises large corporations on enterprise resource planning and corporate software issues.

Although this is DualCor's first product, the company has been around since 2001. It was founded by Bryan Cupps and Tim Glass. Earlier, the two founded Cyberslice, the first online pizza-delivery service, back in the mid-'90s when anything seemed possible.

DualCor originally thought it would sell to consumers, a market targeted by OQO and Good Technology. Cupps knew Hanley from when they both worked in the enterprise software industry and they ran into each other again in 2004.

Hanley was immediately enthusiastic. He recalls telling Cupps: "What you have here is genius, but it's aimed at the wrong people. This is for the global knowledge worker."
http://news.com.com/Start-up+merges+...3-5997426.html





Microsoft Patch Jams Up IE
Joris Evers

Last Tuesday's "critical" security fix for Internet Explorer is causing trouble for users who have been testing the new IE 7 browser.

Microsoft has received "scattered reports of users experiencing odd browser behavior" after installing the latest security update, Jeremy Dallman, project manager for Internet Explorer security at the company, wrote in a Friday posting to a corporate blog.

Three different problems have been reported: The browser could crash right after starting up; links may come up blank; or multiple windows may open when the browser is initiated, according to the posting.

"After investigating several of these reports, we have traced these issues to a common source," Dallman wrote. The culprit is IE 7, the next version of Microsoft's Web browser, which is in beta testing. The problems occur only if IE 7 is installed on a machine alongside IE 6. That double-IE configuration is not supported by the fix, according to Dallman's note.

When installed next to IE 6, the first beta of IE 7 will add an incorrectly configured key to the Windows Registry the first time it is run, he wrote. The problem with the patch can be solved by deleting the key from the Windows Registry. The Windows Registry is a core part of the operating system that stores PC settings.

The trouble doesn't affect a large number of users because IE 7 has not yet been publicly released. The first test version of the browser, or the "private" beta, has only been available to selected testers. Microsoft has said that it plans to release an updated beta build of IE 7 for Windows XP before the end of March 2006.

Microsoft's patch on Tuesday included a fix for a critical security flaw in Windows that is being exploited in online attacks against IE users and three other bugs. The software maker released the patch in security bulletin MS05-054, as part of its monthly patching cycle.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+patch+...3-5999193.html





Dasher Worm Gallops Onto The Net
Dawn Kawamoto

A Windows-targeted worm that drops spying software on vulnerable PCs is spreading across the Internet, security experts have warned.

The Dasher.B worm exploits a flaw in Microsoft Windows Distributed Transaction Coordinator, or MDTC, security companies said Friday. Microsoft announced and patched the hole in the component for transaction processing in October. However, initial glitches with the update may have left some users without a properly implemented fix, Sophos said.

"The worry is that the problems with the patch may have prevented it from being successfully rolled out onto some vulnerable computers," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the security company, said in a statement.

Cluley noted that computers running Windows 2000 and those that have not been updated with MS05-051 face the greatest risk.

Dasher.B is a network worm that has the potential to open a back door on computers with the MSDTC flaw, security experts said. The infected systems are then prompted to connect to a remote computer for instructions. Once connected, it downloads a malicious program that tracks keystrokes.

"This new worm aims (to) install software that tries to infect other vulnerable systems, and that also can be used to log keystrokes and turn the computer into a remotely controlled 'bot' system," James Rendell, a technical product manager at Internet Security Systems, said in a statement.

A third version of the worm emerged Friday, Dasher.C, which almost looks identical to Dasher.B, said Oliver Friedrichs, senior manager at Symantec's Security Response Center.

Three versions of Dasher--B, C and A, which emerged earlier this week--have infected at least 3,000 systems worldwide, Friedrichs said, noting the growth rate of the infection has since leveled off.

Security experts at Internet Security Systems expressed concern about the new worm and warned users to be vigilant.

The United Kingdom's computer emergency response team also issued an advisory Friday on Dasher.B, citing an update from the Australian CERT.
http://news.com.com/Dasher+worm+gall...3-5999114.html





Time Warner to Sell 5% AOL Stake to Google for $1 Billion
Saul Hansell and Richard Siklos

Rebuffing aggressive overtures from Microsoft, Time Warner has agreed to sell a 5 percent stake in America Online to Google for $1 billion in cash as part of an expanded partnership between AOL, once the dominant company on the Internet, and Google, the current online king.

At stake in this battle was leadership in Internet advertising, which is a growing threat to other media companies. The loss is a blow to Microsoft, which had sought AOL as a partner in its advertising venture to undercut Google, its potent rival.

Though Google is only seven years old, its lucrative search advertising business and its technical prowess could enable it to offer consumers free software and services that would directly attack Microsoft's core software business.

While the terms of the proposed five-year deal are largely set, it will not be final until it is ratified Tuesday by the Time Warner board, an executive briefed on the talks said.

Google has agreed to give AOL ads special placement on its site, something it has not done before. Until now, Google prided itself on its auction system for ads, which treated small businesses on an equal footing with its largest customers.

By agreeing to change its business practices for this deal, Google fends off what could have been a significant challenge from a combination of AOL and Microsoft and cements its position as far and away the largest seller of search advertising.

"This is Google's first test as a chess player in a major corporate battle," said John Battelle, the author of "The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture."

"They are saying, 'We will take some of our pawns and block the move to our queen by Microsoft,' " he said. "Until now, Google has said, 'We don't think about our competitors. We spend all our time building better products for our users.' "

Negotiations among the companies reached a fevered pitch Thursday night, executives briefed on the talks said, when teams from Google and Microsoft were in separate conference rooms in the Time Warner Center in New York and executives from the media company walked back and forth between them.

At the same time, Time Warner was holding its corporate Christmas party at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which is also in the Time Warner Center, overlooking Central Park.

At 9 that evening, Richard D. Parsons, the chief executive of Time Warner, left the party to tell Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, who was leading its negotiations in another part of the complex, that he would accept Google's recently sweetened offer.

According to one executive, Mr. Parsons called Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, at 10:30 a.m. Friday to tell him that the deal that Microsoft had so eagerly sought - and had thought it had won - was going to Google.

Microsoft had proposed that it and AOL form a joint venture to sell advertising on their own sites and eventually on other sites. Now Microsoft will compete in the search business as a distant No. 3, behind Yahoo.

Representatives of Time Warner, Google and Microsoft declined to comment about the negotiations.

The deal is a coup for Mr. Parsons because less than a year ago, Wall Street and even people within the company were treating AOL as a declining asset and a drag on Time Warner. The deal is meant to confirm Time Warner's claim that AOL is worth $20 billion, a number many had said was too high.

Yet investors did not immediately see a Google investment as a sign that Time Warner's stock was greatly undervalued, as Mr. Parsons had hoped they would. Time Warner closed yesterday at $18, up 34 cents. Google closed at $430.15, up $20.95. Microsoft ended at $26.90, down 81 cents.

In the last year, Time Warner has pursued a new strategy to replace its declining profits from its Internet access service with advertising revenue from AOL.com and other free Web sites. It has enjoyed enough of a resurgence to attract the courtship of not only Google and Microsoft, but for a time Yahoo, the News Corporation and Comcast.

Time Warner ultimately chose to go with Google because its proposal was simpler than the Microsoft one. Moreover, the lucrative offer promised to help drive more traffic to AOL's Web sites.

Google has been providing Web search and search ads for AOL since 2002. In the new arrangement, Google will offer promotion to AOL in ways it has never done for another company, two executives close to the negotiations said.

If a user searches on Google for a topic for which AOL has content - like information about Madonna - there will be a special section on the bottom right corner of the search results page with links to AOL.com. Technically, AOL will pay for those links, which will be identified as advertising, but Google will give AOL credits to pay for them as part of the deal. They will also carry AOL's logo, the first time Google has agreed to place graphic ads on its search result pages.

Google will also provide technical assistance so AOL can create Web pages that will appear more prominently in the search results list. But this assistance will not change computer formulas that determine the order in which pages are listed in Google's search results.

Google will also make a special effort to incorporate AOL video programming in its expanding video search section and it will feature links to AOL videos on the video search home page. These links will not be marked as advertising.

An executive involved in the talks said Time Warner asked Microsoft to give AOL similar preferred placement in advertising and in its Web index and that Microsoft refused, calling the request unethical.

Mr. Battelle said that while each of Google's accommodations to AOL could be seen as consistent with past practices, "each of them represents a step closer to a slippery slope."

He added, "What they are giving away is the perception in the market place that Google isn't for sale."

An executive involved in the talks said that as recently as two weeks ago, Mr. Parsons told Microsoft executives that he preferred their bid. Still, that executive said, Microsoft had the impression that executives in the AOL unit preferred to work with Google. Yesterday, several AOL executives said that was true. A source close to Mr. Parsons said his only goal was to do the best deal for AOL's future.

But. a turning point, in Microsoft's view, was an article that Stephen M. Case, AOL's co-founder and the architect of the deal with Time Warner, wrote in Sunday's Washington Post calling for the company to be split up, two executives involved with the negotiations who were familiar with Microsoft's views said.

Mr. Case's argument was timed specifically to encourage a Google deal, said one person close to him. Mr. Case's longstanding animosity toward Microsoft played a part, this person said, but his main reasoning was that Google has proved itself far smarter about the Internet than Microsoft. That person said that Mr. Case thought that a deal with Google was the best of all the options other than spinning off AOL. Carl C. Icahn, the financier who, like Mr. Case, has been pressing Time Warner to split up the company, was not mollified by the Google deal.

"I don't want them doing anything that could preclude them from selling or spinning off AOL in the future," Mr. Icahn said. "But the real point is that Parsons shouldn't be running AOL, and I shouldn't be running AOL, either. As Parsons says, 'We're two guys who grew up in Queens 40 years ago.' Neither of us understands the digital world." Then he added, "But I could do infinitely better."

Edward I. Adler, a Time Warner spokesman, said: "We're not going to comment on every little thing Mr. Icahn says. The management team running Time Warner knows AOL's business in great depth and any potential transaction that we may or may not do will be done in the interest of all the shareholders."

While AOL's deal with Google is not as complicated as the proposed joint venture with Microsoft, Google is offering several ways to help AOL enhance its advertising sales business, executives briefed on the negotiations said.

Under the current arrangement, Google sells all the search ads that appear on AOL's sites. This year, Google's revenue from ads on AOL will be roughly $500 million, estimates Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. Of that, Google will pay AOL about $430 million.

Under the new deal, AOL's sales force will also have the ability to sell search advertising that appears only on AOL's sites, even though those ads will compete for placement with those sold by Google. AOL's sales force will also have the right to sell some display advertising that will be placed on the vast network of Web sites for which Google sells ads.

AOL executives are attracted to the idea of offering marketers a full range of Internet advertisements, from splashy ads on the home page of AOL.com to text ads.

Larry Haverty, a fund manager with Gabelli Asset Management, a Time Warner shareholder, said the deal with Google was "very reinforcing to the idea that Parsons is doing what he can to highlight the values."

For Google, he added, "there are two good reasons to do this deal: one, it's chump change; and, two, it really makes life difficult for Microsoft."

Andrew Ross Sorkin contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/technology/17aol.html





Google Whistles A New Tune
Elinor Mills

Google on Thursday launched a new service intended to give searchers fast links to song lyrics, musical artists and CD titles on the main search results page.

Google Music will allow a person to type in the name of a band, artist, album or song in the main Google search bar, and results will appear at the top, accompanied by icons of music notes, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google.

Items that can be purchased will have links to merchants for online ordering or downloading, she said. Initial merchant partners include Apple Computer's iTunes service, RealNetworks Rhapsody, eMusic and Amazon.com.

"We aren't building out a music store," Mayer said. "We are getting people to the iTunes store" and others.

Results will also include links to supplemental Google Web pages with more information about the music, including names of tracks on a CD and other CDs a band or artist has released. Google also will provide snippets of reviews from sites on the Web and links to those sites.

"This has been one of the longstanding unfilled user needs," Mayer said. "We saw a search need where we weren't providing users with the highest-quality results that we could."
http://news.com.com/Google+whistles+...3-5995864.html





Columnist Resigns His Post, Admitting Lobbyist Paid Him
Anne E. Kornblut and Philip Shenon

A senior scholar at the Cato Institute, the respected libertarian research organization, has resigned after revelations that he took payments from the lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing columns favorable to his clients.

The scholar, Doug Bandow, who wrote a column for the Copley News Service in addition to serving as a Cato fellow, acknowledged to executives at the organization that he had taken money from Mr. Abramoff after he was confronted about the payments by a reporter from BusinessWeek Online.

"He acknowledges he made a lapse in judgment," said Jamie Dettmer, director of communications at Cato. "There's a lot of sadness here."

Copley suspended Mr. Bandow's column.

Efforts to reach Mr. Bandow through the Cato Institute and at home were unsuccessful.

The revelation caps a year of disclosures about partisan payments to seemingly independent writers, including Armstrong Williams, the conservative columnist and television host, who received payments from the federal Education Department at a time when he was promoting the Bush administration's education policies in his columns. The administration has been under mounting pressure to become more transparent in its communications after accounts that it paid for and printed articles in Iraqi periodicals as part of its overseas propaganda effort.

Mr. Bandow did not take government money, but the source of his payments - around $2,000 an article - is no less controversial. His sometime sponsor, Mr. Abramoff, is at the center of a far-reaching criminal corruption investigation involving several members of Congress, with prosecutors examining whether he sought to bribe lawmakers in exchange for legislative help.

A second scholar, Peter Ferrara, of the Institute for Policy Innovation, acknowledged in the same BusinessWeek Online piece that he had also taken money from Mr. Abramoff in exchange for writing certain opinion articles. But Mr. Ferrara did not apologize for doing so. "I do that all the time," Mr. Ferrara was quoted as saying. He did not reply to an e-mail message seeking comment on Friday.

At Cato and similar institutions, adjunct scholars are not always prohibited from accepting outside consulting roles. But at Cato, said Mr. Dettmer, and at the American Enterprise Institute, said a spokeswoman there, rules require scholars to make public all their affiliations, and there is an expectation that scholars will not embarrass the institution.

"Our scholarship is not for sale," Mr. Dettmer said.

Glenda Winders, the vice president and editor of the Copley News Service, said in a statement that the company was immediately suspending Mr. Bandow's column pending further review.

Mr. Abramoff, who built a powerful lobbying business largely through his affluent Indian tribe clients in the late 1990's, paid Mr. Bandow during those years to advance the causes of such clients as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

In one column in 2001, Mr. Bandow extolled the free-market system that had allowed the Marianas to thrive, saying that fighting terrorism was no excuse for "economic meddling" - the same position that Mr. Abramoff was being paid to advance.

The federal government "should respect the commonwealth's independent policies, which have allowed the islands to rise above the poverty evident elsewhere throughout Micronesia," Mr. Bandow wrote.

In an earlier column, in 1997, Mr. Bandow defended the gambling enterprise of the Choctaws. "There's certainly no evidence that Indian gambling operations harm the local community," he wrote.

Mr. Abramoff, whose work has already been the subject of Senate hearings, is suspected of misleading the tribes about the way he used tens of millions of dollars in payments. He has been indicted in a separate case in Florida, where he is scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 9 on charges of defrauding a lender as he tried to buy a fleet of gambling boats.

Although Mr. Abramoff has not yet been charged in connection with any lobbying case, his money is considered so tainted that on Friday, for a second time this week, a member of the Senate who had received large political contributions from Mr. Abramoff's clients and partners announced that he was returning the money.

The latest announcement came from Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, who is up for re-election next year and who said he would return about $150,000 in contributions from Mr. Abramoff, his clients and his associates. Earlier in the week, Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said he was returning $66,000 in contributions from Mr. Abramoff's partners and Indian tribe clients.

"The contributions given to my political committees by Jack Abramoff and his clients, while legally and fully disclosed, have served to undermine the public's confidence in its government," Mr. Burns said in a statement. "From what I've read about Jack Abramoff and the charges which are pending or about to be brought against him, he massively deceived and betrayed his clients."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/po...rtner=homepage





Where Have All the Howlers Gone?
A. O. Scott

JUST last summer the air was filled with anxiety about an apparent box-office slump, as journalists and studio executives alike wondered why fewer people seemed to be going to the movies. The most obvious explanation - or at least the one I favored at the time - was that the movies just weren't good enough. But now that the season of list-making and awards-mongering is upon us and the slump talk has quieted down, I find myself preoccupied with a slightly different, not unrelated worry: What if the problem with Hollywood today is that the movies aren't bad enough?

Which is not to say that there aren't enough bad movies. Quite the contrary. There is never a shortage, and there may even be a glut. The number of movies reviewed in The New York Times - those released in New York - grows every year; in 2005 it will approach 600. Given that so much human endeavor is condemned to mediocrity - like it or not, we spend most of our lives in the fat, undistinguished middle of the bell curve - it is hardly surprising that many of these pictures turn out not to be very good. But the very worst films achieve a special distinction, soliciting membership in a kind of negative canon, an empyrean of anti-masterpieces. It is this kind of bad movie - the train wreck, the catastrophe, the utter and absolute artistic disaster - that seems to be in short supply.

And this is very bad news. Disasters and masterpieces, after all, often arise from the same impulses: extravagant ambition, irrational risk, pure chutzpah, a synergistic blend of vanity, vision and self- delusion. The tiniest miscalculation on the part of the artist - or of the audience - can mean the difference between adulation and derision. So in the realm of creative achievement, the worst is not just the opposite of the best, but also its neighbor. This year has produced plenty of candidates for a Bottom 10 (or 30 or 100) list, but I fear that none of the bad movies are truly worthy of being called the worst. And this may be why so few are worthy of being considered for the best.

The thin line separating abject failure from dazzling success is the subject of "The Producers," which happens to be one of the year's exemplary not-bad-enough movies. At one point Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, in a rare unfrenzied moment, sit in an office strewn with scripts, rifling pages in dogged pursuit of the most atrocious play they can find. Their scheme to make a quick fortune by persuading rich old ladies to bankroll a bomb depends on finding a show that is not merely lousy, but transcendently, world-historically awful. Their carefully planned failure fails: on the opening night of "Springtime for Hitler," the audience's disgust turns to delight as a clumsy exercise in Nazi apologetics mutates into an inspired spoof and the show becomes a hit.

But the kind of ambition that can yield greatness or abomination is not something Hollywood has much interest in encouraging these days. The storied wrecks of the cinematic past - "Showgirls," "Heaven's Gate," "Duel in the Sun" - all exhibit a spark of madness that keeps them alive in memory. One of the few recent pictures that seems at all likely to join their company is Oliver Stone's "Alexander," which is unmistakably the record of its maker's obsession (and to some degree identification) with the film's world- conquering hero. The narrative scheme makes no sense; the motives of the major characters are at once overly emphatic and maddeningly opaque; it is too long, too ornate, too talky - too much. But no one would ever call it mediocre, or accuse Mr. Stone of laziness, indifference or unseemly willingness to compromise.

In partaking of the hubris of its hero and wrecking itself in the process, "Alexander" presents an anomaly. It is much more common to see ambitious films that seem hobbled by caution, their wilder urges awkwardly contained by the demands of convention.

Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York," for example, is a project as close to its maker's fanatic heart as "Alexander." It has lots of greatness and grandeur, but what holds this movie back is the intrusion of a movie-star-driven romance into its teeming pageant of violent social change. It is hard to care what happens between the romantic leads, but their story is pushed into the foreground, obscuring and truncating the director's audacious attempt to reanimate the historical sensibilities of John Ford and Luchino Visconti onto the landscape of 19th-century urban America.

It is certainly possible that, had Mr. Scorsese pushed the history into the center of the frame, "Gangs of New York" might have been a botched epic on the order of "Heaven's Gate." But the movie, as released, never embraced the full risk of its outsized and perhaps inchoate intentions. It planted its flag on the middle ground and was met mostly with mild disappointment and qualified admiration.

A similar response - though the disappointment was more intense and the admiration more grudging - greeted Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown," perhaps this year's best example of a movie that failed at once to be as wonderful and as awful as it might have been. The early word from critics who saw it at the Venice and Toronto film festivals was that it was an utter botch, exasperating and all but unwatchable. With about 20 minutes trimmed away, the cut that arrived in theaters this fall was messy and underwhelming, with glimmerings of inspiration and long stretches of wheel-spinning. A parable of failure and redemption - in which the hero's professional flameout is answered by the discovery of his extended eccentric family as well as by a new romance - "Elizabethtown" flounders in the middle ground between them, eking an adequate romantic comedy out of a berserk mixture of pathos, farce and social observation.

And adequate is what movies, these days, are above all required to be: tasteful, familiar and safe. The failure of such movies is as uninteresting as their success. "Memoirs of a Geisha," for instance, is quite pretty to look at, but it is also dull and fastidious, and to imagine how it might have been improved - more passion, more madness, a deeper inquiry into the sexual politics of the geisha world - is also to envision the possibility of a kabuki "Showgirls." "Memoirs" never rises to the exalted, operatic level of great melodrama because it carefully avoids the risk of camp. The one truly memorable sequence - in which Gong Li, wild-eyed and disheveled, sets fire to the geisha house - is a symbol of precisely what the film refuses to do, which is to go crazy and make a mess.

And Hollywood, once notorious for excess, has come to loathe messiness. What the French call folies de grandeur - works of megalomaniacal madness, overlong, over budget, over the top - are in danger of extinction. The classic tales of visionary recklessness - Francis Ford Coppola spending months (and millions) in the Philippine jungles making "Apocalypse Now," Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman traipsing through the desert in pursuit of Elaine May's "Ishtar," Brian De Palma burning money and daylight on "The Bonfire of the Vanities" - have the ring of ancient legend. They are also regarded, inside and outside of the film industry, as cautionary tales. It is generally agreed that the business is better served by discipline, responsibility and practicality.

But what about the audience? As the grand follies are driven to extinction, so too are the cheesy, campy, guilty pleasures that used to bubble up with some regularity out of the B-picture ooze of cut- rate genre entertainment. Those cherished bad movies - full of jerry-built effects, abominable acting, ludicrous story lines - once flickered with zesty crudity in drive-ins and grind houses across the land. B-picture genres - science fiction and comic-book fantasy in particular, but also kiddie cartoons and horror pictures - now dominate the A-list, commanding the largest budgets and the most attention from the market-research and quality-control departments of the companies that manufacture them. There are exceptions, like the grisly "Saw" slasher franchise and the Rube Goldbergian "Final Destination" teen-horror series. And there are a few genre blockbusters - "The Lord of the Rings" most notably - that rise to the level of greatness. But for the most part, the schlock of the past has evolved into star- driven, heavily publicized, expensive mediocrities that carefully balance novelty and sameness. "Batman Begins," "Fantastic Four," "Chicken Little," "Madagascar," "Flightplan," "Stealth" - the list goes on, encompassing movies that are not great, not terrible and not worth the money that was spent on them.

Sure, adequate is not bad. In the major Hollywood studios, at least, the technical standards are generally high, partly because the budgets are too. Fifty or a hundred million dollars can buy a lot of competence. In a run-of-the-mill studio picture, the story will move along crisply, the soundtrack will be full of pleasant pop songs, the stars will be nice to look at, the lighting will flatter them and a digital broom will have swept away any lingering infelicities. Eva Mendes and Will Smith look terrific in "Hitch," and so does Manhattan, which looks nice in "Prime" as well. The robots in "Robots" are as pleasingly shiny as the chickens in "Chicken Little" are feathery, and precocious viewers will enjoy identifying the movie stars doing the funny voices. You won't see the wires in the action sequences or the boom microphone floating down into the frame, and if you're lucky you might hear a snippet of James Brown doing "I Feel Good." The script will have been worked over by one committee, and another will have kibitzed in the editing room and collated results from the test screenings.

In this climate, good movies are apt to be small movies. More and more, the studios have delegated artistic ambition to their specialty divisions, which turn out modestly budgeted, sophisticated pictures, the best of which bear the stamp of a filmmaker's uncompromised vision. Each year it is those movies - the current crop includes "Brokeback Mountain," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Capote" and "The Squid and the Whale" - that crowd the year-end lists and pre-Oscar critics' awards.

Good for them. But for us, not so great. There are fewer and fewer movies being made that send us from the theater reeling and rubbing our eyes, wondering "what the heck was that?" or demanding a refund. For precisely that reason, we are less and less likely to emerge breathless and dazzled, eager to go back for more and unable to forget what we just saw.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/movies/18scot.html





Is Mark Cuban Missing the Big Picture?
Randall Stross

MARK CUBAN is known to many in the sports world as the madcap-billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, the one who relishes every opportunity to defy propriety. Less well known is Mr. Cuban's day job as co-owner, with Todd R. Wagner, of 2929 Entertainment, a holding company encompassing a movie production and distribution complex that is moving toward all-digital delivery.

On his blog, Mr. Cuban has compared the differences between the sports world, which requires consistent repetition of outstanding performance, and the business world, which does not. He wrote: "In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once. One single solitary time and you are set for life." Mr. Cuban is indeed set, his pockets bulging with party-like-it's-1999 money.

His digital media business rests upon one more foundational concept, which Mr. Cuban transferred from Dallas to Hollywood: that fondness for defying propriety. At a conference for digital cinema planners held in September in Montreal, he said gleefully that he had been reading in the Hollywood trades that he and his business had been irritating a lot of people - "and we like that."

Mr. Cuban seems so attached to the pleasures of provoking others, however, that he is unwilling to acknowledge inconvenient trends that may upend some of his plans. His rationale for making hugely expensive investments in Landmark Theaters, the art-house chain owned by 2929 Entertainment, seems dangerously ungrounded in reality.

As a self-made tech billionaire, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes at around $1.8 billion, Mr. Cuban enjoys the presumption of possessing impeccable credentials as a business strategist and a technology futurist. Does it take anything away from those 1.8 billion reasons to listen to Mr. Cuban, the digital oracle, to note that the great fortunes of him and Mr. Wagner were acquired in a brief, anomalous moment in business history? Their start-up, Broadcast.com, was born in 1995 and then sold in 1999 to Yahoo for $5 billion at the tip-top of the bubble, an act of exquisite timing.

The Internet was very, very good to Mr. Cuban, so it's perfectly understandable why his subsequent business ideas circle around digital themes. Upgrading theater projectors, which use film technology that has not changed much since Thomas Edison's time, to digital technology would seem perfectly matched to Mr. Cuban's interests. Digital projection is coming, not only to Landmark Theaters but to the larger chains, too. It is Mr. Cuban, however, who was so eager to have his theater chain credited as the first to adopt a costly new line of Sony projectors with the highest resolution (4096 x 2160 pixel, or 4K) before they were even complete. Actual installation of the first machines, each of which costs about $100,000, has been repeatedly delayed while Sony works on debugging.

People in the theater exhibition industry know what many outside it may not: that the transition from film to digital will not improve the visual experience for theater customers. Nothing yet invented can match the richness of film. When digital projection arrives, the best selling point that theater owners can offer may be, "Don't worry about it; you probably won't notice." The principal reason that the owners will convert is that the movie studios wish to save the considerable expense of manufacturing and distributing film. Digital projection "won't increase our attendance," said Kurt Hall last March, when he was chief executive of the Regal Entertainment Group, the largest exhibitor in the country.

Regal and other exhibitors, though not Mr. Cuban's Landmark Theaters, put off their own orders for digital systems until the studios provided the bulk of the financing. In just the past few weeks, a string of announcements from DreamWorks, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox have finally provided the financial arrangements, using third-party equipment distributors, that exhibitors were waiting for. Next year the industry will move from the testing phase to permanent conversion to digital projection. It will take years before all 37,000 auditoriums in the United States are upgraded.

It may not take so long, however, if the theater business keeps shrinking. Theater attendance in 2005 is down 6 to 7 percent from 2004, after declines the preceding two years. John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theatre Owners, contends that the downturn is an inconsequential blip in a cyclical business. He reassured his members that the "slump reflects the nature of the recent product supply, rather than portends some structural problem with the industry."

Similar reassurances were provided to theater owners in the 1950's, said Robert Sklar, a historian and professor of cinema studies at New York University. During that decade, average theater attendance dropped about two-thirds from the peak in 1948; today, on a per capita basis, we go to the movies only one-sixth as often as we did then. Many developments prompted this change, but the most important was the proliferation of television; the big screen in the theater could not compete against a tiny screen at home. "In 1949, nine inches was a monster screen," Mr. Sklar said. "It was a thrill to have a screen in your home -and it has never stopped being a thrill."

In the long historical view, the movie theater was a makeshift response to immature technology not quite ready for the home, the first-choice place to enjoy entertainment. Now, however, advances in digital technology offer in the comfort of one's own family room a visual and aural experience that approaches that of the theater. The transition to digital in the home, unlike that in commercial theaters, will result in a huge difference: the incumbent technology isn't very-high-resolution film but low-resolution analog television.

Popular demand for wide-screen HDTV sets has reached the point that every retailer wants a piece of the action - even Home Depot sells them. When holiday sales are tallied and as theater attendance continues to sink, the theater operators a year hence may have a hard time accepting today's official party line promulgated by Mr. Fithian that "the biggest challenge is getting good movies, not competition from the home."

Mr. Cuban is similarly sanguine about the business. Last week in an e-mail exchange, he argued that the theater business had only to extol "the virtues of enjoying a movie in a theater with fellow movie fans" - as if sitting quietly in the dark with a few dozen others is no less gregarious an activity as cheering on the Mavericks with 20,000 boisterous neighbors.

The one remaining attribute of theater exhibition that the home cannot match is temporary exclusive access to new releases. The window of exclusivity has become ever shorter in the past year, as studios begin collecting DVD revenue as early as they dare. On this issue, Mr. Cuban speaks not as a theater operator or a studio honcho, but as an anarchist: blow up the rules and release to theaters and to DVD's at the same time. This offers the attraction of a single marketing push, reducing studio costs. But the theaters would suffer dearly. If universal release became standard industry practice, Mr. Fithian said, it would most likely mean the end of theaters.

MR. CUBAN has not had all the necessary pieces of his complex in place long enough to try out his plan. But when discussing the details at the September conference, he tacitly conceded that his studio would have to devise new incentives so that buyers of DVD's would not cannibalize theater attendance. He floated the idea of a rather weak sweetener with every purchase of theater tickets: a soundtrack available for download that was withheld from the DVD.

The problem that Mr. Cuban faces is that 2929 Entertainment is well positioned for the shift to digital only if he leaves out his own Landmark Theaters. His holding company owns two high-def television channels, HDNet and HDNet Movies, but the gains they make in numbers of subscribers will make it that more difficult for Landmark to convince happy HDTV fans to leave home.

Theater operators need not abandon all hope. Mr. Sklar, the historian, offered this prediction: "Teenagers' need to get out of the house will keep theaters alive." It doesn't really matter, he added, what the movie is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/bu...tml?oref=login





Before You Buy a Ticket, Why Not Buy the DVD?
Laura M. Holson

At the Dubai International Film Festival last week, Morgan Freeman, the Oscar-winning actor and star of last year's "Million Dollar Baby," took on his most challenging role yet: movie entrepreneur.

Dubai was one of several stops on a Middle East tour for Mr. Freeman, who was meeting with local moviemakers, hoping to find independent films to distribute through his Internet venture, ClickStar. Mr. Freeman and Intel founded ClickStar this summer with an eye toward offering downloads of a movie at the same time as its theatrical release.

Mr. Freeman said in a phone interview Wednesday from Dubai that the industry practice of showing feature films in theaters first, then selling them later on DVD, was outdated. With new advances in digital filmmaking, he predicted, consumers will demand better access to movies.

"We want to give people what they want, when they want it," said Mr. Freeman. "We are following the wave."

Mr. Freeman is not the only entrepreneur riding the digital technology surf. In the last several months, a handful of new ventures have been formed to help filmmakers find their audience - online, on DVD and at the movie theater.

Among them is IndieFlix, based in Seattle, which was introduced by two independent filmmakers in October. For $9.95 a disc, the company will burn a feature or documentary film onto a DVD and ship it to a customer who has ordered it online. Another outfit, 2929 Entertainment, has teamed up with the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh to offer the forthcoming movie "Bubble" simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and on cable television.

But how big is the market? Even those working on distributing movies in new ways cannot predict what will capture the public's interest. As many entrepreneurs did in the early days of the 1990's dot-com craze, they are experimenting with untested business models. Hollywood has a long-established way of promoting its movies, mainly through blockbuster releases. Until that changes, entrepreneurs will probably continue to find it challenging to get people to watch their films and to earn enough money to make their ventures profitable.

"The idea that a lot of things can get out without marketing clout is not there," said Bob Berney, a Hollywood veteran and president of Picturehouse, a theatrical distribution company. "I think there are complications for the next several years, as we are still in a theatrically driven mode."

Still, many in Hollywood smell opportunity, particularly since Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple and an industry outsider, announced he would offer some television shows and movies on the video iPod. "I've seen more movement in the last three months than the previous five years," said Todd Wagner, who along with his business partner, Mark Cuban, will release Mr. Soderbergh's "Bubble" in late January. "I think people are now saying they can't avoid this."

Smaller movies with limited appeal could have the most to gain from alternative distribution, either through movie downloads or bypassing studios altogether and selling DVD's directly to consumers. Such opportunities are enhanced in a digital world, which is not defined by international borders or movie-release patterns.

"There is a middle class of movies that have a niche audience," said Lori McCreary, Mr. Freeman's business partner. "If you put those audiences together throughout the world, it becomes a big audience."

Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi, a co-founder of IndieFlix, said that 10 years ago, most independent filmmakers sought distribution deals with studios they hoped would market their films smartly. "That has changed," said Mr. Scandiuzzi. "Film studios are less likely to buy little-known movies, so the film's makers have to ask, 'How can I make money?' "

Mr. Scandiuzzi and his business partner, Scilla Andreen, started IndieFlix to give directors a place to sell smaller films that major studios would not choose to distribute. Directors submit their films to IndieFlix, which posts descriptions of them on a Web site. When customers pick a movie to buy, IndieFlix burns it onto a DVD and ships it to them. Each film's success depends largely on word of mouth.

Since mid-October, when IndieFlix opened for business, the service has sold about 100 copies of movies a day (about 60 are currently for sale on the site) and the average person buys two or three, Ms. Andreen said. By the end of the year, she said, IndieFlix hopes to offer about 160 films. But success may not be easy to measure: IndieFlix does not track filmmakers' budgets to see if movies make a profit.

"We're something of a petri dish, and want to see what comes of this venture," said Ms. Andreen.

Hollywood executives say that movies, particularly independent films, need smart marketing plans to break out of the clutter. At the Sundance Film Festival this year, 2,600 feature films were submitted for review, and only 120 were accepted.

Mr. Berney said that most filmmakers still needed a relationship with a studio to succeed. When he was involved in the release of "Happiness" in 1998, he said, "I did it out of my house with a telephone." But he conceded he would not have been able to do so if he had not had longstanding relationships in Hollywood. "I had a lot of connections to the film business," he said.

Peter Broderick, president of Paradigm Consulting, an independent film consultant based in Santa Monica, Calif., advises moviemakers on how to distribute their films in theaters and online. In 2003, he attended the Cannes Film Festival, where he helped sell "Faster," an independent documentary film about motorcycle racing narrated by Ewan McGregor. It had a limited release in theaters.

The makers of "Faster" had the right to sell the DVD themselves, and the film got its biggest boost on its Web site, Fastermovie.com. In particular, said Mr. Broderick, "They had a killer trailer."

Mr. Broderick said the film sold 5,000 DVD's the first two weeks it was for sale online, and an additional 8,000 DVD's in subsequent months. He estimated that by selling the DVD for about $23, the filmmakers earned about $16 to $18 per disc, compared with the $2 they would have made under a standard studio contract.

Later, when the filmmakers sold the DVD in retail stores, they added a bonus documentary and more footage. And as an incentive for fans who already owned the DVD, they offered a free T-shirt with the purchase of a second. Mr. Broderick said the film sold about 50,000 DVD's in retail stores and an additional 7,000 of the extended version on the Web site.

But most important, filmmakers get the names and e-mail addresses of fans, and can use that information to market their other movies, Mr. Broderick said. "The filmmakers have a sense of their audience that the studios don't," he said.

While most do-it-yourself distributors focus on online marketing or DVD sales, 2929 Entertainment works more broadly. The company has several entities: HDNet Films, which finances smaller-budget movies; Magnolia Pictures, a distributor; Landmark Theaters; and HDNet and HDNet Movies for cable broadcast.

Mr. Wagner, Mr. Cuban and Mr. Soderbergh plan to release "Bubble" simultaneously in their theaters, on DVD and on cable television. What the three men are proposing is a radical - and, to theater owners and existing distributors, not particularly welcome - model of how movies could be distributed one day. Theater owners complained several months ago when some media executives said the window between a movie's theatrical and DVD release would shrink. And video rental stores, which already fear going out of business if their renting customers become retail buyers, worry about an acceleration of that trend.

None of that is lost on Mr. Wagner, who conceded that a same-day multifaceted release of "Bubble" would not be possible if his group did not own both theaters and a cable channel. "It's not by coincidence," said Mr. Wagner. "I know if I went to another theater and said, 'Let's sell the movie at the same time on DVD and in the theater,' they would say 'no.'

"I don't think there is a right answer yet. We are experimenting. If we are just dead wrong, we are not going to do it anymore."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/bu...9Theaters.html





Slacker Dot-Com
Craig Modderno

Kevin Smith wrote and directed the slacker hits "Clerks," "Dogma" and "Chasing Amy," but lately it is his other life - maintaining six Web sites that he describes as "devoted to my fans and my films" - that seems to consume him.

"One site deals with comic books, another gives new filmmakers a chance to communicate and another offers merchandise from my movies," he said. "On each site I've got news about every major actor I've worked with; reviews of my movies that are written by fans, which pull no punches, and notices about special events."

Viewaskew.com, the site of his production company, made its debut in June 1996 and has the highest profile of Mr. Smith's Web enterprises. But together, the six sites receive more than 100,000 hits a day and have nine employees, he said. Mr. Smith won't reveal how much money the sites generate. "Let's just say I make enough money to take my wife and daughter on a nice vacation, which I did last year," he said. "And I still spent two hours each day on the Web sites, vacation or not, because the sites can pay off in other ways."

For example, when his film "Jersey Girl" came out - amid a flurry of publicity about its stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez - Mr. Smith recalled, "I went on my sites, offered film clips, interviews with my actors, and talked to the fans directly about the film." That, he feels, helped the movie at the box office and in DVD sales.

Mr. Smith, 35, is working on "Clerks 2: The Passion of the Clerks," tentatively scheduled for release in the spring. "All I can say about 'Clerks 2' is that it deals with what happens to this angry young man when he becomes 35 and is no longer relevant to society since he's not in the age group targeted by corporations anymore."

That message, Mr. Smith said, will resonate with his most dedicated audiences. "My Web sites tell me my fan base is overeducated, underemployed slacker college kids like my two 'Clerks' characters and generally myself," he said. "It's as if I'm the local garage band that became famous and then kept the fans they had when they were unknown and now they've become close friends and want to make more and better music together."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/movies/18modd.html





Changing habits

Lutes + Synthesizers +Rock Beats = America's Most Popular Christmas Music?
Jody Rosen

The Kansas Coliseum is a 12,200-seat hockey arena that rises above a wind-lashed plain 11 miles north of Wichita. On a brisk evening a few days before Thanksgiving, 36 snowmen, gingerbread men and elves - local theater students, concealed beneath sports mascot-style costumes - were standing outside, greeting a throng of arriving concertgoers. The crowd had come to see the instrumental ensemble Mannheim Steamroller, but the music onstage was just part of what the band likes to call "the complete Mannheim Christmas experience," a full sensory immersion in holiday pomp. Carolers roamed the arena corridors. Santa-hat-wearing ushers distributed programs. Balconies were festooned with holly. The pièce de résistance, located at the rear of the arena floor, was the 2,000-square-foot "Christmas village" diorama: a snow-dusted Old World hamlet inhabited by glassy-eyed dolls and encircled by a chugging miniature train. About a half-hour before the show started, four men dressed as toy soldiers marched out in lock step to stand sentry around the diorama's perimeter, a well-timed bit of theater, since several kids looked ready to break free from their parents' grasp and stampede across the thing, crushing houses and villagers underfoot.

Just after 7:30 p.m., Mannheim Steamroller - a six-piece band backed by a 22-member orchestra - hit the stage. In the middle, sitting high atop a riser, was Chip Davis, the group's 58-year-old drummer, composer, producer and mastermind. For more than two decades, Davis has made his living trading on the American passion for Christmas songs. He looks the part. A stout, ruddy man with tousled reddish-brown hair and a close-cropped beard, he has an air of jolly St. Nick about him - Santa Claus as a Midwestern Regular Joe.

But Davis is not quite an Everyman. He is one of the most successful recording artists in the history of American music. Mannheim Steamroller has sold more than 27 million albums, more than Frank Sinatra, the Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, R.E.M. or Eminem, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Davis has racked up these astonishing sales figures operating out of his home base in Omaha, Neb., releasing all his records on his own label, American Gramaphone. "I'm not in a major media center where a lot of people are looking over my shoulder trying to figure out how I've sold so many records," Davis told me. "I'm harder to knock off, 'cause nobody knows what I'm up to. I'm out in the sticks, laying in the weeds."

What he has done out in the sticks is corner a market. "Chip Davis owns Christmas," says Sean Compton, programming vice president of Clear Channel Communications, which owns more than 1,200 commercial radio stations. "He is the Christmas king." Years ago, Mannheim Steamroller surpassed Elvis Presley as the top-selling Christmas artist of all time; even those who've never heard of Mannheim Steamroller have most likely heard its music. This year, more than 160 radio stations around the country have switched to an all-Christmas music format during the holiday season, some beginning as early as the first week of November. Mannheim Steamroller dominates those radio playlists, with as many as 15 songs in regular rotation on some stations. If you've wandered down a department-store aisle in the last few weeks, Davis's versions of "Silent Night" or "Deck the Halls" have probably drifted into earshot. The music is strange: a hodgepodge of rock rhythms, blipping synthesizers, Renaissance instrumentation and orchestral extravagance - a big, bright and, even by Christmas standards, fearlessly schlocky sound that Davis has called "18th-century classical rock." In Davis's reworked carols, the showy time-signature changes and keyboard passages of 70's progressive rock rub up against lutes, cornemuses and other 15th-century instruments; classical piano filigrees and gusty Muzak strings rise over a thudding backbeat.

For years, critics have savaged this music, dismissing Mannheim Steamroller as "the Lawrence Welk of New Age." "I've read some of the headlines, things like 'Commercial Musical Stew,"' Davis says. "All I know is that 15,000 people came to my concert, and I saw them stand up. And they weren't standing up to leave."



The headquarters of Chip Davis's musical empire occupy three sprawling low-slung warehouses 10 miles north of downtown Omaha. Davis moved his business here in 1983,
and American Gramaphone, now a 50-employee operation, retains a folksy feel. Many of Davis's top staff members are old friends; Brian Ackley, the company's chief operating officer, is Davis's former recording engineer, and he still occasionally breaks from his executive duties to do a session behind the mixing board. When I arrived, on an unseasonably sultry morning in October, I was greeted by Dan Wieberg, the director of promotion. "Welcome to the only record label in the United States that has suffered turkey damage," he said, gesturing to the parking lot where a flock of wild turkeys once attacked several company cars.

A few minutes later, Davis appeared. He was dressed in black tennis shorts and a matching black polo shirt, emblazoned with the Mannheim Steamroller logo. "It's actually adapted from the crest of the city of Mannheim," he said. "I got permission from the Burgermeister himself." (The name Mannheim Steamroller is derived from a German term for crescendo.) Davis has a gentle, soft-spoken manner - a kind of amiable post-hippie vibe - but when talk turns to his business, he grows animated. Davis has reached beyond traditional music retailers, selling his records in a variety of oddball outlets: greeting-card shops, truck stops and sporting-goods stores, and on "clip strips" in the candy aisles of drugstores. This Christmas, a new Mannheim Steamroller holiday compilation, "Sweet Memories," is on sale exclusively at Lowe's, the home-improvement chain.

I asked Davis to explain the theory behind his marketing schemes, and he told me a story about the release of "American Spirit," a collection of patriotic songs "done Mannheim style." Just before Memorial Day in 2002, the CD went on sale in several stores at a busy Omaha intersection, including a Super Target and a Baker's supermarket. The Target store, where the discs were discounted to $12.98, sold just a dozen copies, but the supermarket, which priced them at a full $15.99, "blew through 60 pieces." Why? "We put the CD's next to the hot-dog buns, where everyone was going for their holiday barbecues," he told me. "We weren't sitting in the music department with some big display saying, 'Mannheim CD's.' We have a slogan around here: we try to put our music in the path of what people do everyday."

In recent years, Davis has been doing brisk business with the American Gramaphone "clothing and lifestyle" mail-order catalog. Davis led me to a vast storage room, where metal supply shelving was stacked with the group's four Christmas studio albums and a couple of dozen other titles - along with products for sale in the catalog. There were the Mannheim Steamroller Bath and Body Basket, a collection of scented candles and beauty items; hundreds of bottles of Bry, a spray-on barbecue sauce that Davis invented in his kitchen; and packages of Mannheim Steamroller Cinnamon Hot Chocolate, Davis's most popular food product. There were a lot of pricey Christmas knickknacks, from "20-Year Collectors' Edition" Mannheim Steamroller Christmas ornaments ($49.98) to wind-up "Gigantic Musical Christmas" snow globes ($79.98). "I feel honored and humbled that millions of people have involved me in their families at Christmastime, involved me in their thought processes," Davis said. "I'm just a small-town Midwestern musician."



Chip Davis was born Louis Davis in 1947, in Hamler, Ohio, about 50 miles southwest of Toledo. The Davises were a musical family - both his mother and father taught music
- and as a child, Chip studied bassoon, sang in choirs and dreamed of becoming a composer. When he was 11, Davis was given the chance to join the Vienna Boys' Choir (his parents wouldn't let him go); by age 16, he was filling in occasionally on bassoon in the Toledo Symphony. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1969 with a degree in music education but soon joined the Norman Luboff Choir, singing tenor and soaking up Luboff's eclectic easy-listening repertory. "When I was in college, I was so straight classical," Davis told me. "Norman got my mind open. We sang everything: pop songs, cowboy songs - and Vivaldi."

In the early 1970's, Davis landed in Omaha, where he took a gig writing commercial jingles for the Bozell & Jacobs advertising agency. In one of his first jobs, Davis was asked by the firm's creative director, Bill Fries, to write a country-flavored tune for a Sioux City bakery. The TV and radio spots revolved around the exploits of a fictional trucker named C.W. McCall and his waitress girlfriend, Mavis, with lyrics written and talk-sung by Fries in a twangy basso profundo style. The commercials were a sensation, and Davis and Fries decided to record a single, which quickly became a regional hit.

Word spread to Nashville, and soon the ad executive and the jingle writer found themselves signed to MGM Records under the moniker C.W. McCall. By 1975, C.W. McCall was churning out country novelty hits that set Fries's drawling monologues to Davis's big, goofy arrangements - synthesizers, string fanfares, chirpy background chorales. That December, they hit pay dirt with the trucker anthem "Convoy," which topped the Billboard pop charts, spurred the late-70's C.B. craze and inspired the Sam Peckinpah-Kris Kristofferson movie of the same name.

In his spare time, Davis was busy fiddling with Moog synthesizers and Baroque sonatas, refining a peculiar musical mix. "I was taking classical-sounding pieces of mine that were originals and eclecticizing them, making them sound more popular," Davis told me. He is a recording-studio savant, and he cut a great-sounding demo, which he began shopping to record labels. "I had record-company presidents tell me: 'I love this music, but I don't know where to put it in retail. But I'll take 50 copies, because I have a bunch of friends who would like to hear this."' Spurned by the major labels, Davis founded American Gramaphone and took Mannheim Steamroller as his band's name. He pressed an album, "Fresh Aire," and got it placed as a demonstration disc in hi-fi stores, where it developed a cult following among audiophiles wowed by the record's stellar sound and production values.

Today Davis is convinced that these efforts to woo hi-fi nerds led to his big breakthrough, "Mannheim Steamroller Christmas," the 1984 album that rocketed the group's sales into the stratosphere. "When the Christmas record came along, that was, like, a cool new deal for the audiophiles," he said. "It was something they could play at Christmastime, and maybe they were impressing their girlfriend. Who they end up marrying. Well, then they had kids. And by now there are two or three more of those Christmas records out there. So within their family it's starting to become a tradition. And now the audience demographics start switching, because Mom is the primary record buyer at Christmastime. So now my predominately male audience shifted to a family audience."

Davis can talk shop for hours, riffing in business-school patois about marketing strategies and "brand extensions." But he has a far more eccentric side, which came into focus when I visited his home just outside Omaha. The rambling house that he shares with his wife and three children looks out over 100 acres of woods and farmland. On a golf- cart tour of his property, Davis showed me various wooded spots that he'd given Dungeons & Dragons-like names: the Path of the Animals, Elf Alley, One Faerie Way. Back at the house, he took me to the "University of Downstairs," the state-of-the-art basement recording studio where he composes and records much of his music. The place was cluttered with mixing boards, keyboards and sequencers; "stars" twinkled in constellations that Davis had installed in his ceiling. He dragged out his theremin, the early-20th- century electronic instrument made famous by the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." In no time, Davis had dialed up a hammering electronic beat on one of his computers - fast and tough enough to pass muster in a techno club - and began improvising swooping theremin lines over it.

That evening, Davis excitedly outlined one ambitious scheme after another. He discussed his goal of exposing a new generation of children to classical music through his "deranged" versions of Bach, Grieg and Wagner and talked in hushed, earnest tones about his Native American artifacts, including a headdress that he dons occasionally to get his creative juices flowing. "Whether the Indian headdresses and the rattles are really communicating with some spirit, or just opening my mind, I'm not sure," he said. "It's the same with my ancient Egyptian artifacts."

Davis has long had a taste for the mystical. His eight albums in the "Fresh Aire" series include meditations on space travel, Greek mythology, the power of the number 7 and, in the series finale, "Fresh Aire 8," a consideration of the "8 Topics of Infinity." His current passion involves "psychoacoustics" and healing: recording nature sounds and packaging them with music into something called the Ambient Therapy System, a device Davis invented, which is currently being tested in a local Omaha hospital and at the Mayo Clinic. You can hear both Davises - the hardheaded entrepreneur and the New Age shaman - when he talks about the project. "The A.T.S. is such a worthy cause. It has huge business potential. And huge upside healing potential."



When Mannheim Steamroller began doing Christmas tours in the mid-1980's, they had a virtual monopoly on their brand of holiday entertainment. But Davis's success hasn't
gone unnoticed, or unimitated. This year, two different touring versions of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a kind of Christmas rock opera act, are barnstorming arenas. Davis was dismissive when I asked how he felt about the competition - "Have you ever had a fly land on your arm?" he replied - but his head of marketing and promotion for the tour, Anne Schlachter, was a little concerned. "Ticket sales in Philadelphia are looking a bit soft," she said, standing near the Christmas village before the Wichita show. "There's just so much more Christmas entertainment these days. TSO is touring, of course. [Andrea] Bocelli is out, Clay Aiken is out with a Christmas show. The Rockettes have franchised."

Still, Mannheim Steamroller can turn out its audience. From where I was sitting at the Wichita show, it looked as if every seat in the house was full - lots of middle-aged couples, some younger parents with kids and plenty of grandparents. They roared when the group kicked into the opening song, "Celebration," a Davis original. The members of Mannheim Steamroller have played together for years, and the band is tight. They have to be: the songs are synchronized with elaborate visuals projected above the stage on giant Christmas-tree-shaped movie screens, and with a variety of other effects, like the miniature blizzard that is unleashed on the audience by snowmaking machines installed in the rafters. It is here, smack in the center of the heartland, that you would expect to find the archetypal Mannheim Steamroller audience. The group's association with Rush Limbaugh, who has championed Mannheim on his radio show, has reinforced the band's reputation as a purely red-state phenomenon. But Mannheim has sold CD's all over the country, and the current tour includes a stop at the 19,000-seat TD Banknorth Garden, in that bluest of cities, Boston.

In fact, what's most striking about a Mannheim Steamroller show is its strangeness, a mix of seasonal iconography and musical pastiche so loopy that you can almost see how, as Davis boasted to me, the group was once regarded as a "weird art act." Images flash past on the overhead movie screens: horse-drawn sleighs plying snowy hillsides, Mannheim performing at a White House tree-lighting ceremony, a soft-focus dramatization of the Magi's desert crossing, with a cameo by Davis, swaddled in robes. One minute the band is playing a mild funk-rock "Good King Wenceslas," with Davis smacking away at his high-hat and delivering a spooky vocoder-like vocal coda, the next they've broken out the krummhorn and lute and are doing an early-music medley at the front of the stage, while a filmed re-enactment of a 15th-century banquet bacchanal plays on the screens above. At such moments, it seems astonishing that Mannheim Steamroller has become a kind of latter-day Bing Crosby, whose music represents for millions the home-and-hearth comforts and traditions of the holiday.

But then Christmas has always been a bizarre ad hoc creation. It took 1,500 years of costume and name changes to turn Nicholas, a fourth-century monk from Myra in Asia Minor who was revered for his charitable good works, into Clement Clarke Moore's "right jolly old elf," who pilots a reindeer-drawn sleigh, fills stockings and ascends chimneys with a nod. The listener for whom Mannheim Steamroller's synth-pop "Deck the Halls" evokes the essence of the Yule may just be on to something.

On the way out of the coliseum, I passed a merchandise stand, where fans were loading up on shirts, CD's, DVD's and other Mannheim goodies. The line of concertgoers slowed near one of the doors, and I found myself standing next to a middle-aged woman, who was cracking open her purchase, the "Mannheim for All Seasons" box set, a four-CD package that includes the album "Christmas Extraordinaire," along with the group's Halloween, July 4 and Valentine's Day discs. Davis would have been pleased. "I joke that it only took me 25 years to discover that there were other holidays," he had told me. "But now I'm really getting into them."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/ma...istmas.html?hp





Unlikely Trendsetter Made Earphones A Way Of Life
Larry Rohter

In the late 1960s, Andreas Pavel and his friends gathered regularly at his house here to listen to records, from Bach to Janis Joplin, and talk politics and philosophy. In their flights of fancy, they wondered why it should not be possible to take their music with them wherever they went.

Inspired by those discussions, Pavel invented the device known today as the Walkman. But it took more than 25 years of battling the Sony Corporation and others in courts and patent offices around the world before he finally won the right to say it: Andreas Pavel invented the portable personal stereo player.

"I filed my first patent a complete innocent, thinking it would be a simple matter, 12 months or so, to establish my ownership and begin production," he said at the house where he first conceived of the device. "I never imagined that it would end up consuming so much time and taking me away from my real interests in life."

In person, Pavel seems an unlikely protagonist in such an epic struggle. He is an intellectual with a gentle, enthusiastic, earnest demeanor, more interested in ideas and the arts than in commerce, cosmopolitan by nature and upbringing.

Born in Germany, Pavel came to Brazil at age 6, when his father was recruited to work for the Matarazzo industrial group, at the time the most important one here. His mother, Ninca Bordano, an artist, had a house built for the family with a studio for her and an open-air salon with high-end audio equipment, meant for literary and musical gatherings.

Except for a period in the mid-1960s when he studied philosophy at a German university, Pavel, now 59, spent his childhood and early adulthood here in South America's largest city, "to my great advantage," he said. It was a time of creative and intellectual ferment, culminating in the Tropicalist movement, and he was delighted to be part of it.

When TV Cultura, a Brazilian station, was licensed to go on the air, Pavel was hired to be its director of educational programming. After he was forced to leave because of what he says was political pressure, he edited a "Great Thinkers" book series for Brazil's leading publishing house in another effort to "counterbalance the censorship and lack of information" then prevailing.

In the end, what drove Pavel back to Europe was his discontent with the military dictatorship then in power in Brazil. By that time, though, he had already invented the device he initially called the stereobelt, which he saw more as a means to "add a soundtrack to real life" than an item to be mass marketed.

"Oh, it was purely aesthetic," he said when asked his motivation in creating a portable personal stereo player. "It took years to discover that I had made a discovery and that I could file a patent."

Pavel still remembers when and where he was the first time he tested his invention and which piece of music he chose for his experiment.

It was February 1972, he was in Switzerland with his girlfriend, and the cassette they heard playing on their headphones was "Push Push," a collaboration between the jazz flutist Herbie Mann and the blues-rock guitarist Duane Allman.

"I was in the woods in St. Moritz, in the mountains," he recalled. "The snow was falling down. I pressed the button, and suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling, to realize that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation."

Over the next few years, he took his invention to one audio company after another--Grundig, Philips, Yamaha and ITT among them--to see if there was interest in manufacturing his device. But everywhere he went, he said, he met with rejection or ridicule.

"They all said they didn't think people would be so crazy as to run around with headphones, that this is just a gadget, a useless gadget of a crazy nut," he said.

In New York, where he moved in 1974, and then in Milan, where he relocated in 1976, "people would look at me sometimes on a bus, and you could see they were asking themselves, why is this crazy man running around with headphones?"

Ignoring the doors slammed in his face, Pavel filed a patent in March 1977 in Milan. Over the next year and a half, he took the same step in the United States, Germany, England and Japan.

Sony started selling the Walkman in 1979, and in 1980 began negotiating with Pavel, who was seeking a royalty fee. The company agreed in 1986 to a limited fee arrangement covering sales only in Germany, and then for only a few models.

So in 1989 he began new proceedings, this time in British courts, that dragged on and on, eating up his limited financial resources.

At one point, Pavel said, he owed his lawyer hundreds of thousands of dollars and was being followed by private detectives and countersued by Sony. "They had frozen all my assets, I couldn't use checks or credit cards," and the outlook for him was grim.

In 1996, the case was dismissed, leaving Pavel with more than $3 million in court costs to pay.

But he persisted, warning Sony that he would file new suits in every country where he had patented his invention, and in 2003, after another round of negotiations, the company agreed to settle out of court.

Pavel declined to say how much Sony was obliged to pay him, citing a confidentiality clause. But European press accounts said avel had received a cash settlement for damages in the low eight figures and was now also receiving royalties on some Walkman sales.

These days, Pavel divides his time between Italy and Brazil, and once again considers himself primarily a philosopher. But he is also using some of his money to develop an invention he calls a dreamkit, which he describes as a "hand-held, personal, multimedia, sense-extension device," and to indulge his unflagging interest in music.

Recently, he has been promoting the career of Altamiro Carrilho, a flutist whom he regards as the greatest living Brazilian musician. He is also financing a project that he describes as the complete discography of every record ever released in Brazil.

Some of his friends have suggested he might have a case against the manufacturers of MP3 players, reasoning that those devices are a direct descendant of the Walkman. Pavel said that while he saw a kinship, he was not eager to take on another long legal battle.

"I have known other inventors in similar predicaments and most of them become that story, which is the most tragic, sad and melancholic thing that can happen," he said. "Somebody becomes a lawsuit, he loses all interest in other things and deals only with the lawsuit. Nobody ever said I was obsessed. I kept my other interests alive, in philosophy and music and literature."

"I didn't have time to pursue them, but now I have reconquered my time," he continued. "So, no, I'm not interested anymore in patents or legal fights or anything like that. I don't want to be reduced to the label of being the inventor of the Walkman."
http://news.com.com/Unlikely+trendse...3-5999561.html





Study: Wikipedia As Accurate As Britannica
Daniel Terdiman

Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature.

Over the last couple of weeks, Wikipedia, the free, open-access encyclopedia, has taken a great deal of flak in the press for problems related to the credibility of its authors and its general accountability.

In particular, Wikipedia has taken hits for its inclusion, for four months, of an anonymously written article linking former journalist John Seigenthaler to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy. At the same time, the blogosphere was buzzing for several days about podcasting pioneer Adam Curry's being accused of anonymously deleting references to others' seminal work on the technology.

In response to situations like these and others in its history, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has always maintained that the service and its community are built around a self-policing and self-cleaning nature that is supposed to ensure its articles are accurate.

Still, many critics have tried to downplay its role as a source of valid information and have often pointed to the Encyclopedia Britannica as an example of an accurate reference.

For its study, Nature chose articles from both sites in a wide range of topics and sent them to what it called "relevant" field experts for peer review. The experts then compared the competing articles--one from each site on a given topic--side by side, but were not told which article came from which site. Nature got back 42 usable reviews from its field of experts.

In the end, the journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts, in the articles. Of those, four came from each site. They did, however, discover a series of factual errors, omissions or misleading statements. All told, Wikipedia had 162 such problems, while Britannica had 123.

That averages out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.

"An expert-led investigation carried out by Nature--the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science," the journal wrote, "suggests that such high-profile examples (like the Seigenthaler and Curry situations) are the exception rather than the rule."

And to Wales, while Britannica came out looking a little bit more accurate than Wikipedia, the Nature study was validation of his service's fundamental structure.

"I was very pleased, just to see that (the study) was reasonably favorable," Wales told CNET News.com. "I think it provides, for us, a great counterpoint to the press coverage we've gotten recently, because it puts the focus on the broader quality and not just one article."

He also acknowledged that the error rate for each encyclopedia was not insignificant, and added that he thinks such numbers demonstrate that broad review of encyclopedia articles is needed.

He also said that the results belie the notion that Britannica is infallible.

"I have very great respect for Britannica," Wales said. But "I think there is a general view among a lot of people that it has no errors, like, 'I read it in Britannica, it must be true.' It's good that people see that there are a lot of errors everywhere."

To Britannica officials, however, the Nature results showed that Wikipedia still has a way to go.

"The (Nature) article is saying that Wikipedia has a third more errors" than Britannica, said Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica.

But Cauz and editor in chief Dale Hoiberg also said they were concerned that Nature had not specified the problems that it had found in Britannica.

"We've asked them a number of questions about the process they used," Hoiberg said. "They said in (their article) that the inaccuracies included errors, omissions and misleading statements. But there's no indication of how many of each. So we're very eager to look at that and explore it because we take it very seriously."
http://news.com.com/Study+Wikipedia+...3-5997332.html





The Bane Of File Sharing
François Joseph de Kermadec

I have worked with many flavors of Mac OS and Windows, from System 7 and Windows 95 to Tiger and XP, fooled around with some distributions of Linux and read plenty of stuff about a slew of embedded operating systems I couldn't even boot by myself with an instruction manual. All these operating systems have one thing in common: they all include, in some way or the other, the ability for users to share files over a local network, by dragging and dropping a couple files here and there, checking a couple boxes and sitting back. And of course, over the years, all these operating systems have seen security updates because of privilege escalation issues, because of information leaks, denial of service attacks, etc... all of these revolving around that one ability to share files.

Now, sharing files is a laudable goal but who on earth really uses File Sharing for good? After having worked in different offices, from independent places to large corporations, I have witnessed it in use just about everywhere, on every platform, but never in the right way. One of my former bosses used to share his confidential documents over the network (unknowingly, of course), some of my colleagues were hosting malware on their machines (again, not on purpose) and a couple servers I know were hacked through that very medium. In that mess, was anyone able to share files? Hardly, as most computer users are much more comfortable committing the ultimate heresy that is using email to send large files.

Solutions abound today to quickly and easily share files between users and computers, be it by setting up a dedicated server, renting some online space, transferring the file through IM... In fact, there is no other excuse I can see for File Sharing than the replacement of a real server in an office space that does not wish to invest in one. This, of course, is the first step towards a security nightmare as no file sharing system has really been designed to seriously share anything -- a few files, tops, all belonging to the same security group.

Today, operating systems would be much more attractive if they came bundled with an online service (think .Mac without the outages and included in the price tag) than by including some of these features whose meaning has long been lost. Through force of habit, though, and because they know users still go ahead and enable file sharing first thing, computing companies are reluctant to make that feature evolve. Apple, by actually shipping server-grade tools under the cover of "Personal" sharing in Mac OS X, has made the first step in that direction but lots of work still needs to be done to ensure users only share what they should.
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/8743





Copyright Infringement Does Not Equal Theft
Russell McOrmond

Online there's a relatively well known concept called Godwin's Law which suggests once a comparison to Nazis or Hitler is made, a conversation should be declared to be over. Once these analogies are made, any ability to have a rational conversation is dead and all focus will be on the analogy.

I believe a similar problem exists with the terms "theft" and "property" in conversations about copyright. I simply see nothing in common between the concept of "theft" of tangible property and the concept of infringement of intangible exclusive rights, such as copyright and patents.

This hasn't yet stopped me from trying to engage in conversation with people who think that infringing copyright is a form of "theft", but it isn't a conversation that tends to be very fruitful and I often call it the Jefferson debate, as this has been a debate waged for hundreds of years with no resolution. On August 13, 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Isaac McPherson which included part of this debate.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

The full letter explains in a very eloquent way the fact that intangibles such as ideas are entirely different from physical/tangible things.

I believe there are more accurate analogies to copyright infringement than "theft". If I own a home, and a brothel moves in next door, their actions have reduced the value of my property. Since running a brothel is not legal in Canada, the activity that reduced my property value is handled under the law. If I instead had a neighbour that simply never kept up their home, this could reduce the value of my property, but in a perfectly legal way. There are even calls to municipal governments to pass by-laws about such activities which reduce property values.

No matter how frustrated I may be about the legal or illegal ways in which other people may reduce the value of my property, it's not rational to use the term "theft" to describe it. Even if the value of my property is reduced to nothing, I still posses the property and thus nothing can be claimed to be stolen.

When someone infringes copyright, they're reducing the value of the copyright in an illegal way, but it is equally inappropriate to use the term "theft".

Just because I entirely reject the concept of "theft" as applied to copyright doesn't mean I feel there's no problem with infringement. The reason I disagree with the word relates to how it closes the minds of those who use it to more modern ways to produce, distribute and fund creativity.

If people believe holding a copyright is like owning a car, it greatly narrows in their mind the ways in which they can possibly make money while at the same time reducing the incentives for people to infringe.

This narrow thinking is also dangerous when in the minds of policy makers who enact laws which, while intended to help creative people, end up greatly harming the majority of us.

For the software I create, I use a business model that couldn't exist if I were making and selling birdhouses or anything that's tangible. I call it the 95% solution: 95% of what a customer wants their computer to do is already solved within the public pool of software licensed under FLOSS licenses. I then get paid a one-time fee to author the missing 5% which I not only deliver to the customer, but also put back into that public pool to enhance that commons.

My business model relies on the fact that for intangibles such as software, the marginal cost of reproduction and distribution is zero. When I make a copy of some existing FLOSS software it didn't cost the author anything, and when people make copies of the software I authored, it doesn't cost me anything.

My work isn't put into the public domain, but publicly licensed. This is an important distinction as I do want my creative rights to be protected against a different form of copyright infringement.

Traditional copyright holders want to get paid royalties for any copies made of their work. I not only do not want to get paid royalties for my work, but the "Share and Share Alike" style license I use demands that those who make derivatives of my work also make their work available royalty-free. While I'm not asking for a monetary per-copy payment, I am asking that those who build on my work pay me by making their work available in the same way. Since my business model relies on the fact that most of a customer's problem is solved in this public pool of software, it's obvious why I want to use any leverage I can to ensure that this pool constantly grows.

Nothing of what I'm doing in my commercial software business makes sense to those whose minds have been narrowed by the concept of copyright "theft". Those who believe that making an unauthorized copy is theft also tend to believe the way to get paid is to charge royalties on authorized copies.

It's not only software where this confusion exists for them. When musicians take their recorded music and make non-commercial distribution royalty-free using one of the non-commercial Creative Commons licenses, they're not "giving away" their music. What these modern musicians have done is realized that by licensing their music this way they can turn something that isn't money making for them anyway into something that works as very inexpensive advertising.

Rather than paying expensive promoter of music they turn their fans into promoters, they take a smaller and less expensive risk by authorizing non-commercial distribution. They make money the way they always had: commercial distribution and use of their music.

Those whose minds are closed by the concept of "theft" won't understand how this can make musicians more money. To them, any royalty-free distribution is a loss of money, and they can't see how the theoretical loss of royalties from non-commercial distribution is most likely going to cost far less than an equivalently effective paid marketing campaign. While music promoters won't like being replaced by Internet peer-to-peer advertising, the positive outcome for the musicians themselves can be far greater.


We need to look more closely at those who are the loudest in the copyright debate.

Are these people who represent musicians, or are they people who represent legacy middle-men who are actually fearful of being made redundant ("right sized") by modern business models?

In Canada the most vocal groups are the US and the European major labels represented by the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Associatioin) that are the most vocal, followed by the United States government, and then pay-per-copy royalty collection agencies such as Access Copyright. These groups don't represent creativity or creators, but they do represent legacy middle-men or legacy business models that are being "right sized" or "transformed" in a new economy.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/5002/theft.html

















Until next week,

- js.

















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