[JackSpratts]

"Packet examinations are noninvasive and infallible. There are no false positives." – Safwat Fahmy


"I would say the hammer's coming. I want to see universities get serious about it." – Rep. Ric Keller (R-Orlando)


"We're spending taxpayer dollars tracking down RIAA problems. Are we an agent of the RIAA? Why aren't they paying us for this?" – Walter Weir


"There's nothing we can do." – Zac Reimer


"Weekly Blu-ray film sales are actually three times higher than HD DVD." – 20th Century Fox, via news wire


"We Just Got Xvid Working on the Apple TV." – Akward


"I actually believe that allowing open file sharing to take place will indeed increase sales." – John C. Dvorak


"The message is clear. The internet cares deeply about being able to download music illegally." – The Consumerist


"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection." – Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr.


"Holy moly, look at this! To get drugs we can eliminate free speech in schools?" – Robert A. Destro





































March 24th, 2007






Copyflop

DMCA Architect Acknowledges Need For A New Approach

McGill University hosted an interesting conference today on music and copyright reform. The conference consisted of two panels plus an afternoon of open dialogue and featured an interesting collection of speakers including Bruce Lehman, the architect of the WIPO Internet Treaties and the DMCA, Ann Chaitovitz of the USPTO, Terry Fisher of Harvard Law School, NDP Heritage critic Charlie Angus, famed music producer Sandy Pearlman, and myself. A video of the event has been posted in Windows format.

My participation focused on making the case against anti-circumvention legislation in Canada (it starts at about 54:30). I emphasized the dramatic difference between the Internet of 1997 and today, the harmful effects of the DMCA, the growing movement away from DRM, and the fact that the Canadian market has supported a range of online music services with faster digital music sales growth than either the U.S. or Europe but without anti-circumvention legislation.

The most interesting - and surprising - presentation came from Bruce Lehman, who now heads the International Intellectual Property Institute. Lehman explained the U.S. perspective in the early 1990s that led to the DMCA (ie. greater control though TPMs), yet when reflecting on the success of the DMCA acknowledged that "our Clinton administration policies didn't work out very well" and "our attempts at copyright control have not been successful" (presentation starts around 11:00). Moreover, Lehman says that we are entering the "post-copyright" era for music, suggesting that a new form of patronage will emerge with support coming from industries that require music (webcasters, satellite radio) and government funding. While he says that teens have lost respect for copyright, he lays much of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s.

In a later afternoon discussion, Lehman went further, urging Canada to think outside the box on future copyright reform. While emphasizing the need to adhere to international copyright law (ie. Berne), he suggested that Canada was well placed to experiment with new approaches. He was not impressed with Bill C-60, seemingly because he does not believe that it went far enough in reshaping digital copyright issues. Given ongoing pressure from the U.S., I'm skeptical about Canada's ability to chart a new course on copyright, yet if the architect of the DMCA is willing to admit that change is needed, then surely our elected officials should take notice.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1826/125/





Broadcasters Challenge Streaming Rules
Seth Sutel

A wide array of broadcasters and online companies on Monday challenged a ruling from a panel of copyright judges that they say could cripple the emerging business of offering music broadcasts over the Internet.

Clear Channel Communications Inc., National Public Radio, and groups representing both large and small companies providing music broadcasts online were among those asking the Copyright Royalty Board to reconsider key parts of its March 2 ruling.

That ruling, the challenging parties say, would greatly increase the amount of royalties that online music broadcasters would have to pay to record labels and performers as well as put unreasonable demands on them to track how many songs were listened to by exactly how many individuals online.

The royalties in question only apply to digital transmissions of music, such as through Web sites, and are paid to the performers of songs and record labels. Webcasters also pay additional royalties to the composers and publishers of music, similar to those also paid by over-the-air broadcasters.

Digital performance rights were originally granted to record companies in 1995, in part with the intention of protecting them against the possibility that digital transmissions could erode the sales of CDs.

Under a previous arrangement, which expired at the end of 2005, broadcasters and online companies such as Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit could pay royalties based on estimates of how many songs were played over a given period of time, or a "tuning hour," as opposed to counting every single song.

Jonathan Potter, the executive director of the Digital Media Association, which represents major online companies affected by the decision, asked that the judges specifically allow a per-tuning-hour approximation measure for paying the royalties.

Potter also asked the judges to clarify a $500 annual fee per broadcasting channel, saying that with some online companies offering many thousands of listening options, counting each one as a separate channel could lead to huge fees for online broadcasters.

NPR argued in its filing Monday that the new rules would have "crippling effects" on public radio's ability to meet its mandate of serving the public interest, and it also objected to the $500 per-channel minimum fee.

A group of commercial broadcasters including San Antonio, Texas-based Clear Channel, the largest radio company in the country, also asked for a reconsideration of key parts of the ruling, saying that the methods used to calculate the fees were faulty.

The motions filed Monday covered relatively technical aspects of the ruling and mark the first of what is likely to be other legal challenges to the decision.

NPR said in its filing that it also intended, in due course, to appeal the overall decision by the copyright judges to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.

A previous agreement covering small commercial webcasters, which also expired at the end of 2005, allowed those companies to pay a flat rate of 12 percent of annual revenues in lieu of calculating the total number of listener-hours as larger broadcasters and Web companies were required to.

The ruling makes no such provision, something that those companies are asking the judges to reconsider.

SoundExchange, an entity that collects royalties from digital music broadcasters and distributes them to rights holders, has said the ruling was fair and that the rapid growth in advertising revenues from online music broadcasting would more than allow webcasters to cover the new fees.

SoundExchange pointed to research finding that those ad revenues grew from $50 million in 2003 to $500 million last year.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...ap3531170.html





A Fee Per Song Can Ruin Us, Internet Radio Companies Say
Robert Levine

New-media companies and record labels are feuding again. But this time, it is the digital companies that warn they may be driven out of business.

Several Internet radio companies are arguing that a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board, a three-member panel under the Library of Congress, would make it almost impossible for them to stay afloat.

Under the ruling released on March 2, Web broadcasters must pay each time a listener hears a song, at a rate that began at 0.08 cent in 2006 (the ruling applies retroactively) and rises to 0.19 cent in 2010. Besides increasing the charge for each song, the ruling established a $500 minimum payment for each Web channel — making it difficult for companies like RealNetworks and Pandora to offer as many different kinds of music as they do now.

“We would have to provide less choice and less diverse programming,” said Robert Kimball, senior vice president for business and legal affairs at RealNetworks.

In the last few years, as broadband Internet connections became more popular, online radio offerings have proliferated. On Wednesday, Mr. Kimball testified to the House Commerce subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet that online radio played a greater variety of music, but that it was unfairly limited by restrictions that did not apply to conventional radio stations.

As the recording industry sees the matter, though, Web-based broadcasters are simply building a business with their content, which they deserve to be compensated for.

“They said the same thing in 2002,” the last time such fees were set, said John L. Simson, executive director of SoundExchange, the group that collects royalties from online radio and distributes them to labels and artists. “Not only did it not drive them out of business, we saw more people come online.”

Companies that operate Internet radio channels are expected to ask the Copyright Royalty Board to reconsider the case.

Internet radio royalties have become a thorny issue in part because conventional stations do not pay to use recordings. Both online and regular stations pay royalties to songwriters. But under a 1995 law, companies that transmit music using the Internet, cable or satellite must compensate both. The money is split between the owner of the recording, usually the label, and the performers.

Until the end of 2005, Internet stations could pay royalties based on either the number of songs they played or the number of hours listeners tuned in, and small companies had the option of giving SoundExchange about 12 percent of their revenue.

For some Internet radio operations, the new royalty obligations would exceed annual revenue. Kurt Hanson, who publishes a newsletter and runs AccuRadio, a site with 320 channels, said he took in $400,000 in 2006, almost all of it from advertising. He estimated that under the new payment structure, he would have owed $600,000 for the year.

The $500 minimum for each channel is among the ruling’s more difficult aspects. Many Web radio sites offer thousands of channels, a strategy that would be impossible with this rate structure. AccuRadio, for example, offers one channel that consists entirely of classical oboe music.

“Among oboe players, it’s very popular,” Mr. Hanson remarked.

There is a question whether that minimum fee would be applied to each channel on sites like Pandora, which offers users personalized music streams. “But no one has a viable business at the new rate, regardless of what happens to the $500 fee,” Pandora’s chief executive, Joe Kennedy, said.

Many involved in Internet radio contend that the Copyright Royalty Board members do not understand the technology. At one point in the proceedings, according to the transcript, one member asked if the term “albums” could refer to CDs as well as vinyl records.

Internet radio operators also say it would not be in the interest of labels to stifle a business that is paying them fees to use their music, especially at a time of declining CD sales.

“That’s counterproductive to the copyright holders,” said Terry McBride, chief executive of the Nettwerk Music Group, a label and artist-management company, adding that the ruling could be bad for performers whose music would not be played on conventional radio.

The decision comes as sites like Pandora are only beginning to explore the possibilities of personalized online radio, said Mike McGuire, a research vice president at Gartner. “One hopes the mind-set will be that nobody wants to see anybody go out of business,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/te...gg&exprod=digg





Chicago's 9 FM Bans CD Giveaways
FMQB

Newsweb Radio Company's 9 FM, which trimulcasts on WDEK, WKIE and WRZA in Chicago, has decided to ban CD prize giveaways as an act of protest against the recent royalty rate hike for online music streaming.

"When I read that the RIAA and SoundExchange needed money so badly that they were going to price gouge independent Web streamers and radio stations who stream online, I knew we had to do our part," said Matt DuBiel, Director of Programming for 9 FM. "In the face of the RIAA's struggles, it just doesn't seem fair for us to be giving away CDs (for free) to music fans fully capable of paying for the music themselves. We're inviting everyone who has won a CD from 9 FM or any other radio station in Chicago this year, to return it to us and we'll exchange it for a 9 FM t-shirt and give the CDs back to the RIAA. Radio stations need to be able to stream online affordably."

9 FM also has been airing public service-style announcements encouraging listeners to voice their concerns over the Copyright Royalty Board's rate hike ruling by signing a petition posted on 9 FM's Web site: WePlayAnything.com.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=373556





CRB Grants Motion Allowing For Possible Rehearing On Internet Royalty Rates
FMQB

After petitions and pressure from NPR and other broadcasting organizations, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has agreed to grant motions for a possible rehearing over the controversial, proposed new Internet radio royalty rates. The decision was formally made late Tuesday and the CRB cited a number of petitions from NPR, DiMA, Sound Exchange and many others.

There is no guarantee that a rehearing will be held, but in the official order, Chief Copyright Royalty Judge James Scott Sledge wrote that the "Copyright Royalty Judges desire to hear the positions of each party on each of the issues raised in these motions." Responses to the motions may be filed no later than April 2, which is also the date that written arguments may be filed on the issues raised by the motions.

Yesterday, DiMA executive director Jonathan Potter summed up his organization's position on the issue by stating, "We do not believe that the Copyright Royalty Board intended to shut down the vast majority of legitimate online radio services immediately when it issued its decision, yet that is the sober reality facing many services." Over the past week, there has been an immediate and vocal reaction to the proposed new royalty rates for Internet radio, with the mainstream media picking up the story around the country.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=374260





Government Blocks Torrent Site, Citizens Protest
enigmax

May 2006 saw the admin of one of Bulgaria’s largest BitTorrent trackers arrested by the police, accused of putting links to over 20 million copyright works on the internet. Despite the fact he has been released, the Bulgarian Interior Ministry has now ordered all ISP’s to block access to the torrent site.

Eliyan Geshev was the administrator of Arenabg.com, Bulgaria’s largest BitTorrent site, which is among the 10 most visited websites in the country. He was originally arrested in late May 2006 and although it is unclear if he was released on bail in the meantime, it is now being reported that he has been released. By order of the Sophia Town Court, Geshev was freed due to “lack of grounds for his arrest”. As he tried to leave the courtroom, security guards struck journalists trying to interview him. The journalists say they intend to complain.

Despite Geshev’s apparent innocence, a Bulgarian Interior Ministry order has stopped clients of the Bulgarian Telecommunications Company (BTC) accessing the arenabg tracker. Organized crime fighting supremo Yavor Kolev said that all ISP’s have been ordered to block access to arenabg.com.

Bulgaria had promised to “show no mercy” to site administrators who illegally distribute copyright material but as BitTorrent trackers merely point to content and do not host it, it is unclear what they intend to do about them. Blocking access to the sites, regardless of their legality appears to be one option.

However, it seems that Bulgarian citizens are not pleased with this course of action and intend to make a public protest in support of torrent site administrators who they believe are being unfairly treated. On March 15th, the organisers applied to the Sophia Municipality to hold their demonstration which will protest against what they claim is illegal state-sponsored action against Bulgarian torrent site administrators.

The protest will take place on March 22nd in front of the Aleksandar Nevski Cathedral.
http://torrentfreak.com/government-b...izens-protest/





Russia to Solve the Piracy Problem "Soon"

As a partner country at this year's CeBIT, Russia wants to show the world that it is an emerging high-tech industrial nation. Part of a good reputation, though, is combating computer crime and software piracy at home. "We are aware of the problem. We hope we can solve it soon," Russian Telecommunications Minister Leonid Reiman told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) on Friday. He said that Russian authorities were already taking far-reaching steps to combat computer crime.

"But problems with copyright, such as piracy and illegal copies, are something that plagues all western industrialized countries, not just Russia," Reiman stressed. He says that Russia has made progress over the past few years. For instance, a number of plants that were producing illegal copies of CDs and DVDs have been closed down. Current loopholes in the law are to be closed when the Civil Code is revised. Oleg Bjachow, chief strategist for the Ministry of High Technology and Communication, recently stated that the share of pirated copies of all software programs is around 60 percent in Russia.

IT security experts say Russia is one of the main countries that produce spam emails and virus programs after China and Latin America. But Reiman says such claims are "a myth." "Viruses are written all over the world. Russia is waging a consistent and successful war on malicious software." The Russian minister called for a legal foundation to allow prosecutors to work together across national borders to combat Internet crime.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/86951





India Needs Special Courts to Deal With Piracy
Ritwik Donde

Although the growth story for the software market in India continues to show promise, the market is loosing millions of rupees as softwares like Adobe, McAfee, Microsoft and Symantec continue to be sold for mere pennies on the roadsides. Last estimated, the Business Software Alliance seized about $2.1 million worth of pirated software in 2006. The worst is yet to come as internet penetration rises to newer heights, says Joseph FitzGerald, Symantec vice-president (intellectual property), in an interview to ET. Excerpts:

How do you view the Indian intellectual property rights scenario? How is it compared with other countries?

For one, Indian laws certainly provide for IP protection. But the challenge here is the enforcement of the prescribed laws. The enforcement is lacking at different levels. First, users (consumers) themselves are not aware about the fundamentals for IP. According to statistics, the domestic software industry has been bleeding losses of over half a billion dollars thanks to the piracy nexus.

Why do you think IP is so important for the IT industry in India?

When you have a fundamental base of IP protection that allows to you to unleash more innovations from the Indian technical community only then will there be more investment in innovations from the venture capitalists. Moreover, IP protection can also mean more jobs for the IT industry.

According to an economic impact study conducted by IDC, if the present piracy rate of 72% in India is curtailed by even 10 percentage points by 2009, India could benefit with an additional 1,15,000 new IT jobs, an additional $5.9 billion pumped into its economy and increased tax revenues of $386 million. But then that still leaves you at about 60% piracy rate which is huge and needs to come down.

Although patents filed from India by multinational software makers has increased, piracy still continues to eat into their market penetration. On last count piracy rate in India was 72%.

What is your advice to lawmakers to ensure better protection of copyrights in India?

Most importantly, consumers need to be educated about the lack of support extended towards pirated software. Second, a dedicated IP court as well as specially trained law enforcement personnel to tackle infringement and piracy cases would be a positive step. At present, the Indian courts are already under pressure with serious criminal cases with them. The IP cases are also brought to the same courts.

Hence, the need is for having more resources to be allocated to aid courts and getting the law enforcement to take serious note of IP rights infringement. Another effort that lawmakers could take is impose statutory damages for IP infringement. The extent of damages could even have potential jail term like in the US. In short, the Indian courts need to be given some guidance as to how to deal with copyright violation.

Do you think reducing software prices could counter piracy in India?

Decreasing prices will not help curb piracy. If you go by a survey conducted recently for the Asia Pacific region, it reveals that mostly it is the companies which are rich in resources that are indulging in the use of pirated software.

P2P networking and several websites offer free downloads of popular softwares. How has internet, especially, web 2.0 and user-generated content affected the software market? Even if its P2P and its free, it is still stealing. No doubt the distribution mechanism works, you may get the actual code that works but what the user does not know is what goes on behind the scenes in terms of malware and trojan hits to the systems. Having said that, you have to accept that one may never be able to eliminate peer-to-peer downloads.

Therefore, we have to look at enforcing technical measures like user-friendly digital rights management systems and hope that this helps curbs such activities. But in the end, there would always be people who circumvent the system.
http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1785773.cms





CRIA Vs. The Minister of Canadian Heritage
Drew Wilson

While the Minister of Canadian Heritage hasn't built a reputation for being quick on the copyright legislation draw, it doesn't mean the government has nothing to offer on the subject. Apparently, it's this open insight that has CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) upset in the first place.

Research studies and the recording industry have gone back a long way in both their reputation and the numbers they show. While CRIA, RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have all been known to release studies in the past, it's the disclosure aspect of the process that CRIA and its American counterparts diverge.

Some critics argue that studies released by the American entertainment industry are often vague. This appears to be the opposite case for CRIA, where in the past, studies have been released in full. The most well known study the CRIA conducted was the Pollara study in 2006. Some media outlets republished the CRIA's claim that the study offered a crystal clear view that file-sharing was severely hurting the industry. Yet when the study was published in full, it was later revealed that only snippets supported the industry's claim. Law professor Michael Geist picked up on the study and pointed to several instances that countered CRIA's claim. This led to a heated argument between Geist and, surprisingly, Pollara.

While CRIA's own study may have proved to go both ways instead of such a 'crystal clear' outlook, another study was then released. This study was done by the Minister of Canadian Heritage, the one government official many in the creativity community have been keeping close tabs on for a long time.

Last year, the Canadian government commissioned a firm called 'The Connectus Consulting' to do research on the issues. Later on, the firm submitted their findings to the government in a report called 'The Economic Impact of Canadian Copyright Industries - Sectoral Analysis'. The most interesting piece of information that many noted from the study was best portrayed by a bar graph indicating that the industry has experienced major growth between 1999 and 2004 - a direct contradiction to earlier claims by CRIA. Of course, the study was released in full for the public to read.

Fast-foreword to today, it seems the Canadian government has released another study, and was released in full for the public to read.

"Throughout this report it is important to remember that we are looking at the music business, which according to most accounts is doing very well, as opposed to the CD and record business, which is not." Stated the report while talking about the music business, "Indie companies are considered to be more vital today than ever before – references throughout this examination will help to explain why. Although accurate Canadian figures are not available, at the present time, there are over 10,000 indie labels operating in the United States – and our reality is at least proportionate."

Before it got into more controversial aspects that divided the industry in the first place, it first described the state of consumers with the following: "How many fans looked at their CD collections and thought – I paid $18, for one or two great songs and a lot of filler? That can happen once, but when you look at the yardage of CDs on the shelf and you feel pretty much the same way about much of your collection, trouble is brewing.

In Canada, the industry decided to make matters worse.

During this crucial period, a music fan could go into Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysée, or HMV in Oxford Circus, or Tower Records in New York and lose himself in a CD single section that ran for aisles and aisles, often exceeding 5,000 square feet, offering thousands of single titles. What the industry was doing was trying to respond to some of the criticisms and reply to the fans who were willing to buy the song but not the album.

In Canada, the industry decided otherwise – no singles for us."

The report then delves into the recent developments to help consumers connect with their music while still compensating artists who want to be paid; this was namely digital music stores. It seems, according to the government, that fans saw music they wanted, but couldn't really have access to it because it was physically elsewhere. The report depicts infuriated music fans taking one of two roads to satisfy their wants. This was either finding digital music stores or resorting to file-sharing like the first version of Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus. "[...] new opportunities arose with the growth of web based virtual retailers, spearheaded by Amazon. Here was an opportunity for the busy, harried, multitudes to shop 24/7 at “retailers” who were rarely “out-of-stock”," the report said.

The effect on the "Brick and Mortar" music stores as a result could be an echo to what free and open source applications have been doing to Microsoft's software - namely offering consumers a substitute product..

The report also describes the so-called "Wal-Mart" effect which was touched on in the controversial Pollara study. If there are a number of things that could be negatively impacting the major music record labels, it seems that the "Wal-Mart" effect could be one of those culprits. "Given the choice of buying the new Top 10 CD at a music retailer for $16.99 or $11.99 from Wal-Mart – well, the obvious happened [...] The revenue per item for whatever they continued to sell would be whittled away by price pressure from the Big Boxes but the negative effect would be compounded by price cuts instituted by the multinational distributors [...] By all accounts, the magical 35% gross margin that retail lived on for so long is now hovering in the mid 20% range. Given the labour and occupation costs, the picture is far from rosy for continuing to retail music through speciality retailers."

The report then goes in to the heart of an issue that has been making the major record labels crying foul for years, file-sharing. "['P2P' and 'file-sharing'] strike terror in the minds and hearts of the traditional industry gatekeepers as well as many influential stakeholders.

There are those in the music industry, however, who have different takes on these issues and while not always openly endorsing the current situation (some do), they recognize that the genie will not go back in the bottle"

The report also quotes Kusek and Leonhard, "Future of Music": "New research in 2004 from the Pew Internet Project shows that 60% of the musicians/songwriters that they surveyed do not believe that the RIAA’s lawsuits will benefit artists or songwriters….In addition, 83% of the musicians surveyed have provided free samples of their work online and a significant number say free downloading has helped them sell CDs and increase attendance at concerts."

While describing the views of DRM (Digital Rights Management), the study makes a very interesting point that says, "It is instructive to remember that DRM refers to the digital management of rights and NOT the management of digital rights – a fine but important distinction"

The study then describes how file-sharing came to be, "In the beginning, P2P file sharing of music became popular and easy because people often knew what they were looking for before they logged on. It was also about exploring new avenues, finding what you want and getting it. File sharing exploded in popularity because it became easy to do and supported self-directed and collaborative musical exploration."

It then quotes the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) with the statistic that over 72 million people using file-sharing networks to obtain music in the United States. 20 billion songs, according to the BPI, were downloaded worldwide with 1 billion of that coming from Canada. An interesting number considering US senators last week used Fox statistics to portray Canada as a piracy haven, though it was directed mainly at camcording. This was in an effort to pressure Canada into changing its copyright laws despite the government already explaining that camcording in theatres is already illegal in Canada.

The report also cites Big Champaign figuring that, at a peak time, over 9 million people were online at one given time - but no more than 10 million.

This expansive report also covers things like 'The Net Generation', Digitizing and 'The Future of Downloads', artists and many other things.

While some may consider the report moving, the report also infuriated CRIA. CRIA's president Graham Henderson reportedly described the reports as 'one-sided' and fails to depict what is really ailing the industry. He also said that, in Canada, 1.3 billion files were "illegally swapped annually" instead of the 1 billion the BPI had said.

Graham Henderson also reiterates that the report was "erroneous" on the point that independent labels have prospered in Canada. To illustrate the point, he points to Maple Music and Paper Bag Records who cooperate with major record label Universal Music.

In the same report, CIRPA's (Canadian Independent Record Production Association) Geoff Kulawick was reportedly positive on the report, saying that while piracy is an industry-wide issue, independent musicians and record labels also face other uncertainties. One point was raised that Canadian independent musicians needs all the help they can get to benefit Canadian consumers.

While it seems unlikely that a copyright bill will be tabled in this parliamentary session, it seems that the Canadian Government has aired some figures that doesn't settle well with CRIA.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1443





The Federation Goes Soft on File Sharing

Piracy group casts net towards corporates
Mark Ballard

The Federation, the UK trade association that prosecutes people for copying software, is letting individual file sharers off the hook and going after corporate software pirates instead.

It used electronic surveillance techniques last year to track down bedroom file-sharers in a £100,000, 10-month investigation it called "Operation Tracker". The organisation, which represents the $100bn software industry, consequently secured a court against a mobile engineer from Epping in Essex, demanding he pay £3,400 for copying a £35 software programme.

John Lovelock, director general of The Federation, formerly the Federation Against Software Theft, conceded there might be good reasons to let file sharers off the hook.

"Going to court is not cost effective, so we might have to let some fish through the net," he said.

"We don't want to go to war and extract every last pound of flesh. That's not what we are all about," he added.

He said that he might even consider the social situation of those file-sharers still caught in The Federation's tracker beam when it takes them to court.

However, there are still a handful of file-sharers the Federation wants to punish before it turns a new leaf.

Butterworth was one of 99 people who had their personal details given to The Federation last January, under a court order placed on their ISPs. The Federation had tracked them down on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and recorded their IP addresses.

The Federation sent the offenders letters demanding they scrap their shared software or pay the £35 licence fee and a £315 fine to cover the costs of its own investigation. Lovelock said that 30 to 40 paid immediately, while about another 30 paid after another letter was sent six months later. Another 30 had still not put up or paid up, so the Federation would send them final demands within a matter of days.

He said it was necessary to take a hard line on software theft because the $35bn of software sales were lost last year from businesses using illegal software, while the UK software industry lost about £1bn.

He did not know how much the industry lost to file sharers. Neither could he imagine whether file sharers would buy the software they shared if sharing was punished indiscriminately.

"It's hard to say - someone who buys a counterfeit Rolex, would they spend £4,000 on a genuine Rolex?" he wondered.

The more he was pressed on the matter, however, the more he reverted to stereotype. File-sharers were bad "in principle", regardless of the value of the software they exchanged.

"We are offering people a third opportunity to pay for their wrongdoing and get on with life, which I think is not unreasonable," he said.

"Buy whatever it is that you need to buy or don't use it. If you can't afford to buy it because you're on the dole, we can't have it," he said.

"I don't think there's an excuse for breaking the law," Lovelock added.

Lovelock refused to identify the software that the file-sharers were being prosecuted for sharing because he wanted to preserve the reputations of the software firms who were prosecuting them.

"Publishers don't like to be seen taking individual court action against people," he said.

"The general mode of software publishers is not to punish, they leave that to us. They don't want to be seen as bad guys," he added.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03...-sharers_free/





Clouseau: New Technology Ends Illegal Peer-To-Peer File Sharing
Press Release

SafeMedia Corporation, premier developer of advanced Internet Piracy Prevention (IPP) technology, today announced the introduction of its flagship product, Clouseau, the world's first and only truly effective solution for Internet peer-to-peer (P2P) copyrighted material piracy.

Clouseau is a network appliance deployed on subnets that completely eradicates all illegal P2P, and makes it impossible to send or receive any illegal P2P transmissions.

"Losses to P2P piracy are higher then ever. Billions of dollars and thousands of jobs are lost. Current technology is clearly ineffective at stopping P2P piracy," said Safwat Fahmy, CEO and founder of SafeMedia Corporation. "What was needed is a totally new approach in system architecture. Clouseau is the best-of-breed Internet Piracy Prevention solution. It was designed from the ground up specifically to stop all P2P Internet piracy no matter where it originates world wide, it is safe and invisible, causes little or no latency in the network, it is self-healing and best of all, it is a user-friendly compliance, and completely shields user anonymity."

Advanced technology and a unique approach to fingerprinting and DNA markers created by SafeMedia allow the thorough examination of all incoming and outgoing packets: illegal P2P is eradicated, while legal P2P passes along to its destination with no measurable delay.

"We've made Clouseau dynamically proactive, safe and hardened," added Mr. Fahmy. "Pirates are smart and innovative, and so is Clouseau. Our technology is dynamic, sees through all multi-layered encryptions, adaptively analyzes network patterns and constantly updates itself. Packet examinations are noninvasive and infallible. There are no false positives."

"For the first time, policy makers have the solution to insure compliance with the law. Businesses, universities, organizations and Internet users can comply in a friendly positive environment without expensive and hostile legal action enforcement. Copyright holders can finally make the Internet available as a safe, viable distribution channel for all content industries."
http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-e...2032007-1.html





Paid Downloads Cool Down
Marc

According to Nielsen Soundscan, there were 581 million downloads in 2006 for a growth rate of 54 percent over last year, less than the previous year's growth rate of 163 percent. Market share leader Apple has sold two billion downloads in four years.

We covered this a year ago when weekly year to year growth rates were lower than the previous year. The year end numbers confirm this trend. We wrote then, as now, that the explosion in paid downloads is over. Growth will continue to decline as the digital market reaches maturity, unless the major labels open up licensing
http://www.p2p-weblog.com/50226711/p..._cool_down.php





The Unintended Consequences of P2P Piracy
John C. Dvorak

Some stories hitting the blogs recently seem to indicate that, as an unintended consequence of BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer systems, the business of organized piracy has been seriously hurt.

When you think about this, it's obvious. In fact, online piracy could be used as a strategy by record producers and movie folks to eliminate piracy altogether. But would anyone listen to the idea? And would there be anyone visionary enough to even dream up the concept?

Let me outline the architecture and strategy that the music industry could deploy today. It would cost less than the horrible current strategy of lawsuits and futile threats.

STAGE ONE First of all, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have to let the online file sharing go nuts. Cut it loose. Let all the users do what they want. You won't know the extent of the problem unless you let it surface and go crazy, just as happened with Napster years ago when millions of people were trading music on the system.

STAGE TWO Let the rampant online file-sharing world impact and ruin the organized pirates who sell CDs, DVDs, and other purloined-content items. It should make their profitability fall enough that they will all disappear. Let's face it: They are already working on a thin margin. A high-quality counterfeit DVD typically sells for $2 in Indonesia. This has to include pressing, smuggling, distribution, markup, and payoffs. How much profit can there be? They obviously make most of their money from sheer volume. Any impact on that volume, and these folks will be looking for better things to do.

The unintended consequences of file-sharing piracy are thus witnessed.

STAGE THREE Now this is the hard part, because while the hard pirates might be eliminated, the soft pirates (aka file sharers) will be going nuts. This is the time for the industry to study the actual impact, since file swapping will be out of control. If it turns out that soft piracy results in increased sales—as was the case during the Napster era—then you just stop the program and let the situation continue unabated. At least you'll know whether or not the Napster thing was just a fluke. If sales continue to decline and the movie industry, too, can see an impact, then you'll know that file trading is bad for business, and now you can actually prove it. Until now, the industry's complaints have been hot air.

I actually believe that allowing open file sharing to take place will indeed increase sales, and that people still like owning the real thing. Most file sharing is done in an effort to find out what is out there to buy. Radio stations used to provide this service, but they no longer do. But for the sake of argument, let's say that the RIAA and the MPAA can show that this trading actually does hurt business. They could continue the process thus:

STAGE FOUR Let file trading do a market-share climax. Typically, if given a chance, a market will emerge, whereby one or two file-sharing systems will become dominant. It's almost impossible for this not to happen. So you let it happen and let the dominant players emerge while the others just die.

STAGE FIVE You co-opt the leaders. You buy into the companies, or simply buy the companies. You can do this with all sorts of rationales. You can say that this is the future of the business and you need to be part of the action. Or you just form an investment consortium consisting of all the major players and the RIAA and MPAA, then start buying them out one after another until you own them all. Let's face it: These people will sell.

STAGE SIX Consolidate as many sites as you can until you have one great site that everyone uses. Get patents. At this point, if any better providers crop up, you buy them out immediately or sue them if you have to.

STAGE SEVEN Here is the point where you can fork this process into many variants now that the control is all yours. 1) You can evolve the mega site into an e-commerce site. This is the absolute best idea. 2) You can simply shut the site down and let the users scatter—although they will probably begin to build up again slowly. 3) You can pollute the site with lousy copies of everything. 4) You can choke the bandwidth. 5) You can create a database of users whom you can scare with cease-and-desist orders.

Something like this would put the music execs and copyright owners back in control and perhaps eliminate worldwide piracy altogether. But would anything like this actually happen?

Not a chance.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2105447,00.asp





Actors, Film Industry Differ on Proposed Image Protection Law
Dave Collins

For actor Paul Newman, a state law is needed to protect people's images and words from being used without their permission in commercials or derogatory ways.

For film and media companies, the law would conflict with their First Amendment rights and open up the entertainment industry to a slew of lawsuits.

Both sides offered testimony Wednesday before the legislature's Judiciary Committee about the "Right of Publicity" bill. Nineteen other states have similar laws.

Newman, who lives in Westport, told the committee that Connecticut needs to send a strong message to people who do not use computer imaging and audio technology responsibly.

"We are living in an age of cheap and easy electronic manipulation," said Newman, who was joined at the hearing by actor James Naughton, who grew up in West Hartford and lives in Weston.

"Almost anyone with a computer can now lift a few frames of someone's image ... and expand it into a production that there's no resemblance of the original but can look and sound as though those who appeared are actually filmed doing and saying what they appear to be doing," Newman said.

The proposed law would give people a right to publicity in the use of their "personas," which include their names, voices, mannerisms, photos of them and other likenesses.

Without permission, people would be banned from using others' personas for commercial purposes and fundraising, and in digitally manipulated ways that make them say things they never said or appear in circumstances in which they do not approve.

There are exceptions for news and public affairs programs, original works of fine art and other instances. Anyone who breaks the law would have to forfeit $2,000 or pay damages and profits related to the illegal act, whichever amount is higher.

Wednesday's testimony came nearly a year to the day after Newman and other actors testified before lawmakers on a similar bill, which died in committee. Lawmakers said at the time that they were interested in the proposal, but it was brought up late in the legislative process.

Executives from the film industry and major media companies testified against the latest bill, saying there are already laws on libel, copyrights and trademarks. They also said it conflicted with free speech rights.

"When you start dealing with changing the law so you're liable for something that's legal under the libel laws, then you're treading on dangerous ground," said Jared Jussim, executive vice president of intellectual property for Sony Pictures Entertainment.

"You've got to do it carefully," he said in spirited testimony. "You've got to understand that many people have many rights."

Henry Hoberman, senior vice president of litigation for ABC and ESPN, said the proposed law would infringe on free speech rights. He gave the example of a popular bit on the "Jimmy Kimmel Live" late night talk show that takes videos of celebrities and politicians speaking and inserts beeps in strategic places to make it appear they are saying something crude.

"That kind of speech would clearly be imperiled by this statute," Hoberman said. "We're just here to say let's be mindful of the First Amendment."

Film industry executives also said such a law would make them think twice about making a movie in Connecticut. Lawmakers are now debating whether to offer more incentives for film companies to come to the state.

Newman questioned the film industry's motives.

"I wonder why the Motion Picture Association is so frightened by us having this right to ourselves, to protect ourselves, unless they want to steal it," he said.

State Sen. Andrew McDonald, a Stamford Democrat who is co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said there is a long list of organizations opposed to the bill. He urged those on both sides of the issue to try to work out a compromise.

The committee took no action on the bill Wednesday. It has until April 13 to approve the proposal and send it to the full General Assembly.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...03-21-19-38-21





Colorado Woman Sues To Hold Web Crawlers To Contracts

Web site owner Suzanne Shell's lawsuit against the Internet Archive poses a question: "Can software programs be held liable for their actions?"
Thomas Claburn

Computers can enter into contracts on behalf of people. The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) says that a "contract may be formed by the interaction of electronic agents of the parties, even if no individual was aware of or reviewed the electronic agents' actions or the resulting terms and agreements."

This presumes a prior agreement to do business electronically.

So what constitutes such an agreement? The Internet Archive, which spiders the Internet to copy Web sites for posterity (unless site owners opt out), is being sued by Colorado resident and Web site owner Suzanne Shell for conversion, civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations act and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act.

Shell's site states, "IF YOU COPY OR DISTRIBUTE ANYTHING ON THIS WEB SITE, YOU ARE ENTERING INTO A CONTRACT," at the bottom of the main page, and refers readers to a more detailed copyright notice and agreement. Her suit asserts that the Internet Archive's programmatic visitation of her site constitutes acceptance of her terms, despite the obvious inability of a Web crawler to understand those terms and the absence of a robots.txt file to warn crawlers away.

A court ruling last month granted the Internet Archive's motion to dismiss the charges, except for the breach of contract claim.

In a post on law professor Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law blog, attorney John Ottaviani, a partner at Edwards & Angell in Providence, R.I., says the issue is "whether there was 'an adequate notice of the existence of the terms' and a 'meaningful opportunity to review' the terms."

If a notice such as Shell's is ultimately construed to represent just such a "meaningful opportunity" to an illiterate computer, the opt-out era on the Net may have to change. Sites that rely on automated content gathering like the Internet Archive, not to mention Google, will have to convince publishers to opt in before indexing or otherwise capturing their content. Either that or they'll have to teach their Web spiders how to read contracts.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=198001674





Carol Burnett Sues TV's "Family Guy" Cartoon

Comedian Carol Burnett has filed a copyright infringement suit against the makers of Fox TV's cartoon sitcom "Family Guy" over an episode poking fun at the performer and her variety show from the 1960s and '70s.

The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, claims "Family Guy" violated Burnett's exclusive rights to her name and likeness by depicting her signature cleaning-woman character in a segment last April without her consent.

The suit, which seeks at least $2 million in damages, also says the cartoon episode used a "slightly altered version" of the copyrighted musical theme to "The Carol Burnett Show" without permission from the 73-year-old entertainer.

A spokesman for 20th Century Fox Television, which produces "Family Guy," said on Friday the suit was without merit and that references to Burnett and her show in an 18-second sequence of the cartoon amounted to parody.

"'Family Guy,' like the 'Carol Burnett Show,' is famous for its pop culture parodies and satirical jabs at celebrities," the studio said in a statement. "We are surprised that Ms. Burnett, who has made a career of spoofing others on television, would go so far as to sue 'Family Guy' for a simple bit of comedy."

The episode in question refers to Burnett by name as working as a part-time janitor, and depicts her "charwoman" character -- complete with trademark blue bonnet and mop bucket -- cleaning the floor of a pornography shop, the suit says.

Another character then makes a vulgar reference to the signature ear tug used by Burnett at the close of her variety show each week, according to the lawsuit.

Burnett and her company have urged Fox to reedit the "Family Guy" episode to remove any reference her, but the studio has so far refused, the suit said.

"The Carol Burnett Show," combining comedy sketches and musical performances, aired on CBS from 1967 to 1978 and was one of the most popular shows on U.S. television in that era.
http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMos...24604020070317





The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (if You’re Patient)
Manohla Dargis

SOME film critics wax nostalgic about the big-screen experience in the age of the diminishing movie image, but I can’t relate. For me movies are movies whether on the big screen or small, on my laptop or on a plane, captured in celluloid or digital. My preferred medium is film, though like a lot of Americans, I imagine, my movie love was nurtured at home while flopped in front of a television, in my case while watching “Chiller Theater” and, every Sunday morning without fail, Abbott and Costello. The first commercially exhibited moving pictures were watched through peepholes in machines called Kinetoscopes, so watching a film on an iPod shouldn’t really seem all that different.

A screen is a screen is a screen — isn’t it?

My interest in that question partly explains why I was eager to start downloading movies, which, like DVD and video rentals, seems to offer choices not only in what we watch but also in how. I enjoy the social aspect of going to the movies, but I also love watching films at home, for both the ease of use and the intimacy. When I was a teenager, I watched movies on a tiny black-and-white television in my bedroom, wrapped in an adolescent cocoon. Now I watch DVDs on a plasma television set in my living room and on the computer monitor in my office, sometimes with family, sometimes alone. On occasion I will watch a movie on my small laptop, so I can take the images with me as I fold the laundry or wash dishes.

Certainly the idea of downloading sounds irresistible: you scroll through the delectable offerings — in the video store in my head, Abbott and Costello and Bela Tarr are both just clicks away — hit a few buttons, and voilà: cinema! The reality, as I recently discovered, is messier. No matter how souped up, a television set is just another household appliance; adding TiVo makes it a better appliance, but you still turn the box on and off. Downloading movies onto a computer, by contrast, is rather more complicated because computers are not yet appliances; they’re infernal machines.

When all the planets are aligned and your computer has enough memory and hasn’t been deluged with spam for lots of little multicolored pills, it will function just dandy. But try to download without enough disk space and through a wireless connection, as I initially did, and you may soon wonder why you’re spending so much time and energy to watch films you’ve never heard of on your computer rather than watching a “Children of Men” DVD on your dreamy big television.

My first download stop was a new site called Jaman (jaman.com), still in the test stage, which promotes itself as “a global online community” that’s “pioneering social cinema.” I didn’t recognize most of the titles, though I see hundreds of films a year, and neither did a friend who programs a major American film festival. I did, however, come across Bryan Singer’s first feature, the creepy “Public Access,” which wasn’t dated, but which I saw when it had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993. Scrolling through the 55 titles from Asia, I scoped out that some of the women looked as if they were wearing bouffants, while a few of the men looked ready to hit the disco. Jaman doesn’t date its offerings, but a search on a movie information site soon solved two mysteries: “King Cat” was from 1967 and “Hong Kong Nocturne” from 1966.

I ended up downloading two features and one short from the North American section (196 titles), only because I planned to watch the films on my laptop. It’s incredibly frustrating to watch subtitled films on a small screen, which is why I ponied up for a 32-inch flat-screen television several years ago. I picked the first film to download, J. T. Petty’s “Soft for Digging,” because I liked the nicely composed photograph of two men walking in the woods and the short clip (one of the site’s best features is its preview snippets) of a guy who looked a little like Ed Koch stalking about in a blood-red bathrobe. The film had played at some festivals, which, while not a guarantee of quality, did suggest some kind of provenance.

While no Luddite, I turned out to be woefully unprepared to join the download revolution. It took many frustrating hours to get Jaman’s proprietary player up and running and then to download my selected titles. I had better success elsewhere: I downloaded a smeary-looking copy of Marlon Brando’s “One-Eyed Jacks” from GreenCine (greencine.com), a boutique online site with terrific rental titles (it has Criterion titles I’ve never heard of) but rather less tantalizing video-on-demand offerings. I also tried to download a copy of “Team America: World Police” (because once is never enough) from iTunes. That site suggested that I didn’t have enough disk space to download the movie but encouraged me to proceed. I did. As it happens, I did not have enough space, so I couldn’t complete the download. iTunes billed me $9.99 anyway.

In the end it took several days and many more glitches, including a few crashes, as well as a last-ditch consultation with my on-site technical adviser (my husband) to diagnose the problems I was having with Jaman, which were eventually solved by buying a larger hard drive and forgoing my usual wireless connection. I lost track of how many hours it took to access “Soft for Digging” (Jaman said it would take “1 day, 2hr” to download), but I finally watched it, or at least the first half-hour or so. I just lost interest around the time a man (not the Ed Koch look-alike) appeared to strangle a little girl. One of the nice things about controlling your content is that you can hit the off switch whenever you want.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/movies/18darg.html





Little Films on Little Screens (but Both Seem Set to Grow)
Noah Robischon

IN the award-winning 2005 movie “Black,” the Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan plays an eccentric, disillusioned teacher who helps a blind, deaf and mute girl learn to speak and rejoin her family. But the “Miracle Worker” roles are reversed years later, when the girl discovers that her teacher is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

“Black” was chosen as one of the 10 best movies of 2005 by Time Europe. But chances are you’ve never heard of it. Like the vast majority of films made each year “Black” was never released theatrically in the United States. It is not even available on DVD. You can, however, watch it on your computer screen for $1.99 at Jaman.com.

At least a half-dozen download services like Jaman want to become your digital art-house cinema, offering movie lovers a universe of alternative films they otherwise might never have known they wanted to see, or had a clue on how to find if they did. At the moment these sites pretty much appeal only to hard-core cineastes, mainly because watching movies on a computer monitor is far from an ideal entertainment experience.

But a slew of gadgets, like the coming Apple TV, promise to erase the divide between the Internet and your home entertainment center by easily transporting a movie file sitting on the computer to the 52-inch plasma television in the living room, or magically giving the set Internet access. If that transition becomes seamless, digital film distribution might just make celebrities out of a new crop of talented unknowns, just as the advent of home video in the 1980s jump-started the careers of filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee and John Sayles.

“There is an ever-widening opportunity for non-mainstream content to get discovered,” said Curt Marvis, co-founder and chief executive of CinemaNow. “I’m not talking about YouTube videos, but films that might go to Sundance. And because the subject matter is too controversial, or the audience is too hard to reach, or because of the dynamics of the finances involved, traditional distribution doesn’t work. There is absolutely an audience for those films on the Internet.”

Like most digital movie theaters CinemaNow (cinemanow.com) offers a confusing number of ways to pay for and watch a film. You can rent a 24-hour digital movie stream for as little a dollar. Pay a slightly higher price, and you can buy a movie and store it on a computer hard drive. You can also sign up for a rental subscription plan similar to that of a DVD-by-mail service, or even purchase the rights to burn a hit film onto your own DVD for $14.99. But CinemaNow’s focus is on mainstream releases like “Borat,” and only around 300 of its movies are undistributed elsewhere.

The offerings on Jaman, on the other hand, are the antithesis of mainstream. The site, whose backers include former Senator Bill Bradley and Jeff Berg, who runs the talent agency International Creative Management, has a catalog of 1,000 documentaries, features and international releases harvested almost entirely from film festivals, like the Mexican psychological drama “Las Lloronas.” Watching the movies requires that you download a separate player application that improves the quality of the video while also speeding the time required to transfer a file.

A similar technology underlies Joost (joost.com), an interactive TV platform from the creators of the pioneering Internet phone service Skype. Instead of paying rental fees, visitors to Joost must sit through advertising to enjoy its wares, which includes 67 hours of programming from the DVD distributor IndieFlix (indieflix.com), including festival award winners “Outpatient” and “The Flats.” GreenCine (greencine.com), the five-year-old grand dame of the online indie film scene, has the quirky documentary “24 Hours on Craigslist” alongside such classics as the 1961 Marlon Brando film “One-Eyed Jacks.”

While navigating GreenCine is a pain, its video-on-demand catalog of 12,o00 titles is huge compared with the 400 or so movies now available from Apple’s iTunes store. More familiar companies are taking on the upstarts. Amazon acquired the obscure DVD distributor CustomFlix in 2005 and is now using the company to stock its all-digital Unbox store. And the DVD-by-mail company Netflix is investing $40 million this year in its “Instant Watching” feature, which lets subscribers rent digital movies as part of their monthly plans.

Two thirds of the “Instant Watching” offerings come from outside the studio system. “It’s universally accepted that porn is the biggest trailblazer in new technology,” said Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, who trolls the festival circuit for new material. “It’s overlooked that indie and foreign films also benefit disproportionately from the conservatism of Hollywood.”

Major studios — fearful of both piracy and cannibalizing the money they make from DVDs, their biggest source of revenue — are entering the Web film market cautiously. The few hit films online are generally put there only after they are widely available elsewhere, and often for the same price as a DVD.

But the major studios may not be able to play possum much longer. The DVD business is flattening. And media forecasters are busy out-predicting one another about how many billions of dollars Internet video will throw off each year.

Those predictions are looking far more realistic than they did a decade ago. Sony recently introduced the Bravia Internet Video Link, a device that attaches to the back of its popular line of TVs and delivers high-definition online programming. And TiVo’s 1.5 million Internet-connected subscribers already have access to downloadable movies from Amazon’s Unbox and the Independent Film Channel.

Then there is the $299 Apple TV. A hard drive about the size of a thin hardcover book, it wirelessly synchronizes the movies and series downloaded from the iTunes store and plays them on your flat screen. Apple TV, which is set to be released this month, could do for movies what the iPod did for music.

But scrolling through 1,000 songs is a lot easier than trudging through an Internet full of movies. Almost every Web film purveyor is planning to solve this bane of the modern culture consumer — too much choice — with some form of social networking. Recommendations, user reviews, friend lists and member pages are designed to help viewers determine which films they should watch. Jaman even allows its members to write commentary tracks onto its streaming movies to share with others.

“If you tell me you’ve seen this film and you like it, that’s what is going to get me interested rather than advice from above,” said Edward R. Pressman, an investor in Jaman and a producer of films like “Badlands” and “The Cooler.” But community-driven recommendations can, instead of opening up new worlds, reinforce existing tastes. Hockey die-hards may be able to convince fans of other sports to watch the underground hit documentary “In the Crease” (available on Unbox), but someone who loves romantic comedies aren’t likely to come across their testimonials. And the digital download sites will also have to overcome the hesitation of moviemakers wary of supplying their newly finished films.

The audience for Joe Swanberg’s films, for example, got a boost from his Web-only series “Young American Bodies” for Nerve.com. But Mr. Swanberg still considers digital distribution a last resort. Showing a film online, he said, would hurt his chances of being accepted into a festival like South by Southwest, where his third feature, “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” made its debut last week. “Sitting in that room with all those people and seeing it on the big screen just reconfirmed that it is the best experience,” he said, “and the one I’m always going to shoot for.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/movies/18robi.html




Look at Me, World! Self-Portraits Morph Into Internet Movies
Keith Schneider

NOAH KALINA flew to Switzerland last month to attend the opening of “We’re All Photographers Now,” an exhibition at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. The show is a survey of trends in digital photography, particularly portraiture, and Mr. Kalina produced its foremost example of how technology is changing the genre. His globally popular video “everyday” is composed of 2,356 daily self-portraits shot from Jan. 11, 2000, to July 31, 2006.

Mr. Kalina, 26, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and earns his living photographing the interiors of Manhattan bars and restaurants. Ever since he posted “everyday” to YouTube in August, this six-minute film has generated a low-level conversation in photographic circles about its artistic merits.

But what makes “everyday” truly exceptional is how easy it was to make and how quickly it attracted a huge audience, said William A. Ewing, director of the Musée de l’Elysée, who selected it for the exhibition.

“Noah’s video represents a phenomenal amplification not just in what he produced and how he did it, but how many people the piece touched in such a short period of time,” said Mr. Ewing, the author of “Face: The New Photographic Portrait” (Thames & Hudson). “There is nothing comparable in the history of photography.”

“Digital technology, computers, software and the Internet multiply the number of people with access to taking and viewing pictures,” he added. “Once you buy the camera, there are almost no other costs. That is increasing the variety and creativity in how people take pictures, and what they do with them.”

“We’re All Photographers Now” (www.allphotographersnow.ch) continues through May 30.

Mr. Kalina, like other photographers in the show, many of them amateurs, used a combination of digital tools and technical know-how that has become routine for his generation. By adroitly joining digital still photography, computer software and the Internet, he turned a student art project characterized principally by self-absorption into a global phenomenon.

“Everyday” succeeds in large part because it adheres to all three of the new principles of digital media, said Jonathan Lipkin, a professor of digital media at Ramapo College in New Jersey and the author of “Photography Reborn” (Abrams).

“The hallmarks of the new age of digital imagery are distribution, combination and manipulation,” Mr. Lipkin said. “The use of digital technology is especially revealing in portraiture. The digital camera has changed the genre. Before now it was just about impossible to do what Noah Kalina has done.”

Just one facet of the film project took real devotion: Mr. Kalina’s daily routine of snapping his own picture for nearly six years. The other part — transforming portraits that individually had attracted no attention into a film that is riveting — was almost too easy.

One afternoon in late August, prompted by a similar film of time-lapse portraiture made that month by the California graphic designer Ahree Lee, Mr. Kalina collected the digital self- portraits he had taken since he was a 19-year-old student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He downloaded them into the Windows Movie Maker software program on his desktop computer, spaced the portraits at an interval of six images per second, set the film to a shadowy and insistent piano soundtrack (composed and performed by Carly Comando, his girlfriend at the time) and wrote the credits and title.

Making the film took four hours. That’s all. Then Mr. Kalina, like millions of others of his generation for whom stylized digital self-portraits are an important personal message and a form of self-actualization, posted it on Aug. 28 to YouTube. (It can also be found on noahkalina.com.) The response, he said, was instantaneous and unnerving. Thousands of young people, who regard the Internet as a vast digital campfire, found “everyday,” shared links with their friends and built an audience that has reached 5.3 million and is growing by 10,000 per day.

“Until that moment it was always a still-photography project,” Mr. Kalina said. “A friend suggested that it could be a movie. I was never convinced it would really work until I saw Ahree Lee’s movie. Now there’s a whole group of people making these kind of films and posting them on the Internet.”

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new age of digital portraiture is the ease with which photographers, professional or amateur, can so easily produce images, videos, sequences and other projects that are dramatic, fresh and interesting. “Digital technology has changed what portraits look like,” Mr. Lipkin said. “If you pay attention to Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and the other social Internet sites, you see right away how stylized the portraits are. How they are taken from odd angles and with interesting lighting. It’s the angle of the hand-held digital camera.”

Jonathan Keller, a 31-year-old multimedia graphic artist studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit, turned eight years of daily self-portraits into a video titled “Living My Life Faster” and posted it to his Web site (c71123.com/daily_photo). But his more significant contribution to the new form is his online archive of what he calls “passage of time” and “obsessive” photo projects.

Among the 40 projects on the site is Ms. Lee’s “me,” composed of more than 1,000 self-portraits taken from November 2001 to November 2004 and regarded as the first digital video portrait. Ms. Lee said she used a Nikon digital camera that had a flip screen so she could see herself while snapping the image. She used Photoshop software to align her eyes and After Effects software to create the animation. It took her 200 to 300 hours, she said, and on Aug. 8 “me” was posted on AtomFilms (me.atomfilms.com), an Internet site for independent filmmakers. She also posted it on YouTube, where it has attracted more than three million viewers.

“It would be possible to do this without digital technology, but it would be so much more difficult and expensive,” said Ms. Lee, 35, who lives in San Francisco (ahreelee.com). “If you use a film camera, you would have to buy rolls of film and get them processed, and do whatever you would need to do — and I don’t know what that is — to turn it into a film.”

Whether “me” or “everyday” or any of the other projects archived on Mr. Keller’s site qualify as art is in dispute in some quarters of the photography world. Richard Benson, a photographer, printer and professor of photography at Yale University since 1979, called them “a complete waste of time.”

“They are people who don’t know what they are doing and who celebrate themselves,” Mr. Benson said. “I find it completely boring.”

But Mr. Ewing and Mr. Lipkin say such views may reflect generational insecurity, prompted by the old-guard notion that good work that isn’t laborious isn’t worth much. Mr. Kalina’s “everyday” is a dramatic challenge to those conventions, Mr. Ewing said, because it breaks barriers, has helped to establish a new form of portraiture and sets a new standard of audience interest.

Mr. Kalina’s instinct for narrative makes the film work. The background is the room in which he’s living at the time. It changes episodically, producing visual interest and adding information. Ms. Comando’s soundtrack, which she now sells on the Internet, is appropriately portentous. Mr. Kalina doesn’t age, though at times he looks worn, and his haircut evolves through phases of short, long and unkempt. His gaze also doesn’t waver.

“He hypnotizes you with those eyes,” Mr. Ewing said. “The changing background and the changing hairstyle enhances a frenetic pace, the feeling of hurtling through space. But there is also a sense of a kind of dispassionate distance, the feeling of being the observer. Unlike a single digital image, the kind that appears on Flickr, in this film there is a sense of rapidity and infinite possibility.

“It’s a remarkable piece,” Mr. Ewing continued. “That’s why we ask in our show: Is this a revolution or just an evolution? The answer is it’s a revolution.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/ar...gn/18schn.html





The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse
A. O. Scott

FOR some time now, it has been possible to imagine a moment when you — yes, You, the Person of the Year, the ultimate arbiter of cultural relevance — will be able to watch whatever you want whenever you want in the setting of your choice. The handful of Web sites that now offer streaming or downloadable feature films, along with wider video on demand through the cable box or satellite dish, offer a glimpse of what is to come.

Perhaps the most intriguing promise these sites hold, at least for those whose interest in film extends beyond the new, the recent and the aggressively hyped, is of a kind of virtual cinematheque. The retrieval and preservation of film history has been a project of many decades, accelerated and democratized by the rise of the DVD, which has put integral, aesthetically credible versions of hundreds of old films in easy reach of the multitudes.

Not that the effort has been systematic or complete: there are still hundreds more titles awaiting transfer to digital media. But the Internet, even if it currently lags behind the DVD market in terms of what is available, extends the promise of comprehensiveness and universal accessibility. It is now possible to imagine — to expect — that before too long the entire surviving history of movies will be open for browsing and sampling at the click of a mouse for a few PayPal dollars.

This aspect of the online viewing experience is not, in itself, especially revolutionary. It makes established home viewing habits a bit easier to indulge. What seems potentially more consequential is the rise of video on demand as a form of first-run distribution, a way not only for old movies to be saved, but also for new ones to be discovered. “Straight to video” is now more or less synonymous with “bottom of the barrel.” But the cost of prints and ads, along the small size of the audience for art and foreign films, has made straight to video, whether online or on disc, a more attractive option for the serious as well as the sleazy.

More and more movies that gain a bit of exposure on the festival circuit — where they are written about, primarily, in Web-based publications and blogs — will find their public not at the multiplex or the art house, but at your house.

This, at any rate, is the possibility held out by sites like GreenCine, Jaman, EZTakes and others like them, and also by Google Video, through which you can purchase or “rent” a wide variety of films. If you look at Google’s extensive documentary menu, you may be struck not only by the diversity of subject matter, but also by the variety of running times. One thing online distribution seems to accomplish is the erosion of the tyranny of the feature. It is nearly impossible for a film that runs less than 70 minutes to be booked into a theater by itself, or for, say, a 67- or 17-minute movie to be given a block of television time. But on-demand screen time is more flexible and may thus reward filmmakers for brevity or at least economy of expression.

But the filmmakers whose work circulates primarily through the various Web and on-demand applications will be entering a marketplace that is already glutted. The number of theatrically released films to open in Manhattan — that is, the movies that merit a review in The New York Times — has nearly doubled since the start of the decade, to around 600 a year. Add the films that play only at festivals, and the number reaches the thousands; include straight-to-video movies, on the Internet or DVD, and you have the potential of tens of thousands of movies competing for the burdened attention of the viewers.

How will they be sorted out? How will you know which ones you might want to see? I don’t ask this question defensively, as a cultural gatekeeper fretting over my waning authority — enough about you! some of us are trying to make a living here — but out of genuine curiosity. It has become something of a truism that Web culture is driven not by traditional, top-down forms of tastemaking like the judgments of professional critics or the strategies of corporate marketers, but rather by the lateral operations of social networks. Niches and coteries form organically, as like-minded people bond in cyberspace over shared enthusiasms.

And this, in turn, encourages a do-it-yourself approach to production and distribution. Just as a band, at least in principle, no longer needs a record label to be heard, so can a filmmaker forego the meddlesome mediation of a studio. Shoot your picture in your living room with your friends, edit it on your laptop, and I’ll watch it on mine, in my living room, with my friends.

Or something like that. Surely there can never be too many movies. Or, to put it another way, there will always be too many movies, more than anyone can keep track of. That more will be made, and that more will have a chance to be seen, is hardly cause for complaint. But by now we should have learned to regard utopian — or apocalyptic — predictions about the impact of the Internet with a measure of skepticism. The technology has yet to be developed that can increase the number of hours in the day, which means that, somehow, we will still need to choose among the thousands of movies at our instantaneous disposal.

What will guide those choices? Will the social networks that drive taste on the Web discover new and neglected works? Will they manage to circumvent both relentless marketing and criticial myopia? If the short history of the Internet teaches anything, it’s that any decisive, early answer is sure to be wrong.

I doubt that, at least in the foreseeable future, a filmmaker with a choice will refuse theatrical distribution in favor of the Web, or that a Web-distributed feature will match the gross of even a modest art-house release. But at the same time it seems likely that a hot new filmmaker will be soon discovered on a download site and given a shot at old-fashioned Hollywood success, a chance to make movies for the big screen. In any case, we’ll have to keep watching.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/movies/18scot.html





Government to Take a Hard Look at Horror
Michael Cieply

To drive almost anywhere here this week is to run a gantlet of advertising for movies about killing.

Posters for Warner Brothers’ film “The Reaping,” about deadly plagues, and the torture-filled “Captivity,” from After Dark Films and Lionsgate, appear on bus shelters on Pico Boulevard between two elementary schools. A fright puppet from Universal’s “Dead Silence” peers menacingly from a construction-site wall by a children’s center in Santa Monica. A few blocks away, a large billboard promoting Sony Pictures’ “Perfect Stranger” overlooks the campus of the Crossroads School, the daytime home for the offspring of many in the film industry.

All rated R for violence, among other traits, the films belong to what has become an annual winter-spring crop of horror and suspense. But the harvest is trickier than usual this year, as Hollywood braces for a new government review of the marketing of violent entertainment to the young.

The Federal Trade Commission is putting the final touches on a follow-up to its September 2000 report on the marketing to children of violent movies, music and video games. The first such assessment in three years, it will examine the selling practices of a mainstream entertainment industry that in the interim has become increasingly dependent on abductions, maimings, decapitations and other mayhem once kept away from studio slates.

Seven years ago the film industry narrowly avoided federal regulation of its advertising practices, as politicians, in the wake of the Columbine High School killings, called executives before a Congressional committee but eventually agreed to let Hollywood police itself.

The effectiveness of the resulting marketing guidelines is now being tested by rougher movies, competitors not bound by strictures that apply to the trade association’s major studio members, and a flourishing Web culture that has driven big openings in the last three years for harshly violent films like “Saw” or “Hostel” without much concern about the age of viewers.

If the new study were to find that the industry has violated or has outgrown its voluntary standards, it might kick the issue back into the political arena ahead of a presidential election. There it could trigger fresh calls for regulation, or even kill a gory source of relatively easy money.

Earlier this week, After Dark and Lionsgate scrambled to contain the public-relations damage after a Los Angeles Times columnist quoted several young students objecting to an especially gruesome billboard for “Captivity” near their middle school. After Dark, which is expected to release the film on May 18 with Lionsgate, quickly agreed to pull part of its ad campaign. After Dark executives and a lawyer representing the company did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Neither After Dark nor Lionsgate is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the major studios. Such nonmember companies are not bound by the association’s promise to keep ads away from television shows, magazines and Web sites for which 35 percent or more of the audience is under 17. But they do agree to use approved advertising materials for any film that is submitted to the group for rating. In the case of “Captivity,” the association had disapproved of the material and is now considering disciplinary measures.

“I’m very, very troubled by this particular case,” Dan Glickman, the trade group’s chief executive, said Thursday about the “Captivity” billboards. “I can tell you this issue will not go unnoticed.”

He added that complaint levels to the association about selling violence to youth “by and large have been very low.” Nonetheless, he said, the group has been fine-tuning its own standards, while exploring technology that will help it keep the young from being marketed to on the Internet.

Horror aficionados date the genre’s current flourishing to October 2004. The first of Lionsgate’s “Saw” movies, about a demonically inventive serial killer, opened to a surprisingly strong $18 million on its first weekend, though it lacked an expensive cast or a pedigreed filmmaker. Sequels, imitators and close cousins soon followed. Most of the major studios and some independents, notably Lionsgate, quickly ginned up cheap fright fare for release mainly in the first quarter of the year, then again in the fall, in the spaces between summer blockbusters and classier Oscar aspirants.

While generally careful to observe the letter of their agreement not to directly solicit the young in selling violent movies, some of Hollywood’s big studios have had close shaves with the rules of late. Fox Atomic, a division formed by Fox Searchlight to cultivate the late-teenage and early-adult audience, on March 6 placed an ad for its film “The Hills Have Eyes 2” with an evening showing of “Dodgeball,” rated PG-13, on FX.

The ad identified “Hills,” about National Guard trainees brutally murdered by mutants, as being not yet rated, though film association guidelines call for the disclosure of ratings in ads, and the company had accepted an R rating the day before. John Hegeman, Fox Atomic’s chief operating officer, said the R rating was missing because it takes about two days to alter a television spot.

“We are M.P.A.A. signatories, and we do follow their rules,” said Mr. Hegeman. He pointed out that “Dodgeball” on that evening attracted an audience about 71 percent of which was 18 and over.

Yet things become murkier when studios — which often attempt to block the underage from visiting their official sites for R-rated fare — deal with Bloody-disgusting.com, Arrow in the Head (joblo.com/arrow), Fangoria.com, or any of another dozen such Web sites. (Bloody-disgusting, for example, includes chat forums that address such questions as: “Can anyone suggest a good torture-esk movie?”) Hollywood companies commonly buy advertising on such sites. Perhaps more effectively, they also open the doors for set visits, early viewings, promotional contests and anything that will attract fans.

The operators of several such sites said they had no way of knowing how many of their visitors were under 17, but believed the numbers were substantial.

“The horror site skews a little more toward the younger ones,” said Berge Garabedian, founder of the Joblo.com film site and its associated Arrow in the Head horror section, which this week carried a banner ad for an unrated DVD of “Sublime,” about gruesome murder in a hospital, from Warner Home Video. Mr. Garabedian said he tried to block visitors under 15 from discussion boards in order to eliminate “a lot of MySpace craziness,” but thought a considerable share of his Arrow in the Head visitors to be in the 13-to-18-year-old age range. (A Warner representative said the studio believed fewer than 4 percent of the visitors to Joblo.com were teenagers, based on information provided by the agency that places it ads, but had no figures for the smaller Arrow in the Head site.)

Whether such underage visitors are actually seeing R-rated horror in theaters or on DVDs without a parent’s presence is unclear. Both film association and studio executives said they could not provide the number for young viewers for their films, an exercise that could be complicated by a tendency of underage respondents to misrepresent their ages in exit polls. But a study last fall by Experian Simmons Research found that 12 percent of respondents between the ages of 12 and 17 reported watching “Saw II” in theaters, while 12 percent said they had seen the film on DVD, and 26 percent reported viewing any horror in theaters.

In its 2004 report, the Federal Trade Commission said that in 36 percent of their attempts, its underage “mystery shoppers” were able to buy a movie ticket without an age check in theaters, down somewhat from about half in 2000. Meanwhile 81 percent of the young buyers obtained R-rated DVDs without a check.

Bracing for the next report, the National Association of Theater Owners last fall provided the commission with a detailed description of its efforts to keep the unaccompanied young out of violent fare. But at the same time, the theater owners strongly criticized the studios’ home entertainment divisions for promoting versions of some of the same movies on DVD as being unrated and uncensored.

According to Mr. Glickman, the number of such DVDs is small. “It’s obviously something we’re taking a look at, but in terms of its being a substantial problem, it’s not,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/movies/24horr.html?hp





The Tricky Task of Taking Science-Fiction Stories to the Screen: Not for the Faint of Heart
Don Kaye

When director Alfonso Cuarón was promoting his stunning, apocalyptic "Children of Men" late last year, he said in at least one interview that the movie was not science fiction, but a chase thriller with sociological overtones. Cuarón's position was similar to that of P.D. James, author of the novel on which the film was based. James, an esteemed mystery writer who made her first foray into writing about the future with her novel "The Children of Men," ruffled the feathers of other science-fiction writers by distancing herself from them. "P.D. James won few friends in the [sci-fi] community by whining about how her serious book wasn't science fiction, all the while rewriting an old Brian Aldiss novel, "Greybeard," says British author and film critic Kim Newman.

Why would both James, already a proven writer in another genre, and Cuarón, who previously dabbled in fantasy with "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," be so determined to separate their work from a field whose practitioners include literary luminaries such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick, along with filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg? The answer seems to lie with the long, torturous road that science fiction has taken from the page to the screen, as well as the reputation that's been attached to the field since its earliest days.

Often derided as children's literature, early science fiction was filled with spaceships, alien invaders, ray guns and swashbuckling heroes. But there were real ideas in there, too, about mankind's place in the universe and the advancement of its technology. The "New Wave" of science fiction, brought to the forefront in the '60s by authors such as Harlan Ellison, Thomas Disch and Michael Moorcock, introduced even more provocative concepts and the "soft" sciences — sociology, psychology and anthropology, among others — to the genre's lexicon. While movies have struggled and sometimes succeeded in keeping up with the literature, the last two decades have seen "real" science-fiction cinema pushed almost to the fringes by space operas, video-game adaptations and comic-book franchises. Even movies based on written science fiction — most notably that of Philip K. Dick, who has probably been adapted more than any other sci-fi writer in the last 25 years — have fallen prey to marketing notions that action is more riveting to the modern moviegoer than ideas and imagination.

Two upcoming films based on classic literary sci-fi works don't hold out much hope for change. "The Last Mimzy," out on March 23, is based on "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" by the husband-and-wife team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore (under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett). "Mimzy" takes the haunting original story — about two children who evolve quickly beyond their parents' understanding, with the help of toys from the future — into a heavy-handed and often insipid plea for understanding and family interaction. The story posited the ultimate parents' nightmare, in which they are no longer capable of communicating with or comprehending their kids, partly through their own lack of participation. The movie keeps the family united and also argues that "innocence" is a genetic trait that, hundreds of years from now, has been shut down — all we need to save the future Earth is a little girl's teardrop containing the crucial DNA.

The end of April will bring "Next," a Nicolas Cage vehicle based on a Philip K. Dick tale — yes, there he is again — called "The Golden Man." To be fair, we haven't seen the film yet, but judging by its trailer, "Next" already has at least one more explosion than the Dick story (which had none, although it did feature some ray guns) and follows the action-chase framework of "Total Recall" and "Paycheck," also adapted quite loosely from the writer. "Next" seems to have taken Dick's frightening idea of unexpected human mutation and stripped it down to a more prosaic melodrama incorporating one element of the story: a man who can see his own future. So much of Dick's work is mind-bending in the audacity and sweep of its ideas, but filmmakers have frequently been stumped when it comes to recreating that consciousness-expanding effect on-screen.

Who's to blame for all this? We'll point the finger at that famous punching bag of fan boys everywhere: George Lucas. When Lucas made "Star Wars" in 1977, he was paying tribute to a subgenre of science fiction that he loved dearly as a boy: the space opera. But although the breathless serial adventures of Flash Gordon and his ilk had their pleasures, they were often treated with tolerance, at best, by more serious science-fiction writers and readers. Nevertheless, the success of "Star Wars" changed the movie industry's perception of science fiction forever. As much as we love "Star Wars" for what it is, it nearly killed Hollywood's willingness to fund science-fiction movies that actually said something about the human condition.

After the serials of the '40s and the atomic monster movies of the '50s, science-fiction cinema seemed to grow up right alongside the literature itself in the '60s, culminating in the ultimate marriage of the two: "2001: A Space Odyssey." Director Stanley Kubrick went right to the source for his visionary classic, enlisting Arthur C. Clarke to write the screenplay with him and presenting perhaps the most serious, adult treatment of science-fiction themes to that date. Other literary adaptations followed. Kubrick did it again in 1971 with "A Clockwork Orange," while "Logan's Run," the remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "Soylent Green" and the cult favorite, "A Boy and His Dog," all brought real science-fiction novels or novellas to the screen with varying degrees of success. Even nonliterary offerings such as "Silent Running" and Lucas' own "THX 1138" made sobering statements. But "Star Wars" effectively ended all that, substituting space battles, nonstop special effects and simple good-versus-evil archetypes for the more complex shadings and themes that marked science fiction to that point.

In the following years, as many filmmakers tried to outdo "Star Wars" in terms of spectacle, more cerebral sci-fi outings fell by the wayside. They're considered classics now, but "Blade Runner" (from a Dick novel) and "The Thing" (less a remake of the 1951 original than a return to the original John W. Campbell Jr. story, "Who Goes There?") were box-office failures when first released. Despite the star power of Harrison Ford in the former and the shocking monster effects of the latter, both were bleak portrayals of dehumanization that couldn't compete that same year with the childlike innocence of Steven Spielberg's "E.T." With only a few exceptions, like 1980's "Altered States," 1984's "The Terminator" and the subversive films of David Cronenberg (whose "Scanners," "Videodrome" and inspired remake of "The Fly" were among the best sci-fi movies of the decade), the '80s were mostly dominated by "Star Wars," "Star Trek" and "Superman" installments. One major adaptation of a classic science-fiction novel, David Lynch's "Dune," was a colossal disaster.

The '90s saw an increased reliance on spectacle, bringing us the ultra violence of "Total Recall" (another attempt at Dick), the raised stakes of "Terminator 2" and Spielberg's childhood fantasy of "Jurassic Park." All these movies are superb roller-coaster rides in their own way, but they are remembered more for their dazzling effects or jaw-dropping action sequences than for their story lines. At the same time, the turn of the millennium upped the ante for comic-book heroes, bringing to the screen "X-Men," "Spider-Man," "Fantastic Four" and the regenerated "Batman" and "Superman" franchises, and investing what were essentially fantasies with the same big-budget technical gloss and action wizardry previously applied to "Terminator," "Star Wars" and all the rest. Science fiction ultimately became almost solely associated with the summer blockbusters designed to drive teens into theatres and sell never-ending streams of merchandise.

This brings us back to "Children of Men" and the quandary of author James and director Cuarón. Neither was interested in a story that could be used as an excuse to sell a Clive Owen action figure but, by going out of their way to avoid saying the name of their tale and "science fiction" in the same breath, they subtly insulted the honorable history of the genre. "The Last Mimzy," meanwhile, is being marketed as a children's film, while "Next" is simply the next Nicolas Cage orgy of destruction, with an ESP angle worked in. It's difficult to imagine how the rumored adaptations of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy or Dan Simmons' masterful and intricate "Hyperion" books would fare when Richard Matheson's landmark novel, "I Am Legend," has been filmed (for the third time) as an action vehicle for Will Smith. It will probably remain as true to the source material as the actor's romp through Asimov's "I, Robot" in 2004.

As usual, some of the better science-fiction cinema has come from the indie field, with Darren Aronofsky's number theory creepfest "Pi" and the 2004 brain twister "Primer" being two examples. Aronofsky also came close to capturing some of the awe of both "2001" and written science fiction with last fall's "The Fountain." It may be up to director Danny Boyle — his "28 Days Later" helped recharge horror (another honorable genre now associated with pointless remakes and torture porn like the "Hostel" movies) — to give science fiction a similar jolt with "Sunshine," even though the movie was recently bumped from a March release all the way to "TBD 2007" (though it will release internationally earlier in the year). Could it turn out to be a Christmas gift for sci-fi fans craving the same sense of awe they get from their favorite authors? We wish we had a time machine so we could tell you.
http://movies.msn.com/movies/sci-fi?GT1=7701





Blu-Ray Aims to Oust DVDs Within Three Years
Lucas van Grinsven

The Blu-ray disc association said on Thursday it aimed to replace the DVD storage format within three years.

"Within three years it will just be Blu-ray," Frank Simonis, the Blu-ray Disc Association's European chairman, said at the CeBIT technology trade show.

Blu-ray, which offers five times more storage capacity than DVDs for storing high definition films and other content, will first have to beat the rival HD-DVD format which offers somewhat lower storage capacity but claims cheaper production of players, burners and discs.

Measured in the number of players, Blu-ray is already well ahead of HD DVD because Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) video games console comes with a built-in Blu-ray player.

Sony Computer Entertainment said it had sold 1.84 million PS3s by the end of December in Japan and North America and that one million PS3s are ready for launch next week in Europe.

The HD DVD camp conceded it is being outsold by Blu-ray because of PS3 by at least five to one, but it claims that sales of movie titles are still level. Film studio 20th Century Fox, which supports Blu-ray, said weekly Blu-ray film sales are actually three times higher than HD DVD.

A total of 5.2 million Blu-ray discs have already been sold, said Nick Sharples at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. Hundreds of thousands of titles have been given away to consumers buying a PS3.

Europe Is Behind

Any difference between regional sales may be explained by the fact that European consumers cannot yet buy PS3s and there are only two Blu-ray players available, Simonis said.

"It's the launch of the hardware, pulling the software. That has yet to play out in Europe," said David Walstra, director of AV technology at Sony.

Sony reiterated its target to have sold six million PS3 game consoles by the end of the year.

Five out of eight major Hollywood studios support only Blu-ray. One studio, Universal, supports only HD DVD.

The HD DVD promotional group, in a separate presentation, said consumers should not only focus on the big blockbuster titles from Hollywood, but also those from regional film houses in Europe and Asia which would bring many titles to HD DVD because it was cheaper and simpler.

Toshiba and Microsoft, as the two main backers of HD DVD, support film studios and production houses to bring out their films on HD DVD, several studios said on Thursday.

Hollywood and electronics manufacturers hope new high-definition DVDs, with better picture quality and more capacity, will rejuvenate the slowing $24 billion home DVD market.

But the war between HD DVD and Blu-ray -- also supported by companies like Samsung, Philips, Matsushita, Apple, and Dell -- has curbed adoption.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...33248620070316





It’s a small world after all

Apple TV Has Landed
David Pogue

In the technology world, conventional wisdom says that we’ll soon be saying R.I.P. for the DVD. Internet downloads are the future, baby. No driving, no postpaid envelopes. Any movie, any TV show, any time.

Only one problem: once you’ve downloaded the shows to your computer, how do you play them on the TV?

Now, there are people — at least 12, for sure — who actually watch movies right on their computers, or who wire their PCs directly to their TV sets.

The rest of us, however, are overwhelmed by cultural inertia. Computers are for work, TVs are for vegging out, and that’s final.

No wonder, then, that when Apple announced Apple TV, a box that can connect computers and TVs without wires, the hype meter redlined with millions of search-engine citations, a run-up in the Apple stock price and drooling analysts.

After many delays, Apple TV finally went on sale yesterday for $300, but there are plenty of companies trying to solve what you might call the “last 50 feet” problem. A couple of prominent examples: In addition to its game-playing features, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 ($400) performs a similar PC-to-TV bridging function; in fact, it even has its own online movie store. Netgear’s week-old EVA8000 ($350) also joins PC and TV, but adds an Internet connection for viewing YouTube videos and listening to Internet radio.

And so Apple TV has landed. How does it stack up?

In looks, it sits at the top of the heap. Apple TV is a gorgeous, one-inch-tall, round-cornered square slab, 7.7 inches on a side. It slips silently and almost invisibly into your entertainment setup. (You can’t say that for the Xbox, which in comparison is huge and too noisy for a bedroom.)

The heartbreaker for millions, however, is that Apple TV requires a widescreen TV — preferably an HDTV. It doesn’t work with the squarish, traditional TVs that many people still have.

Apple defends its audience-limiting decision by saying that the future is HDTV; Apple is just “skating to where the puck is going to be,” as a product manager put it.

Apple TV doesn’t come with any cables. You’re supposed to supply the one your TV requires (HDMI, component video or HDMI-to-DVI adapter). They cost $20 at Apple’s online store.

So what is Apple TV? Basically, it’s an iPod for your TV. That is, it copies the iTunes library (music, podcasts, TV shows, movies) from one Mac or Windows PC on your wired or wireless home network to its 40-gigabyte hard drive and keeps the copy updated.

The drive holds about 50 hours’ worth of video or 9,000 songs; if your iTunes library is bigger than that, you can specify what subset you want copied — only unwatched TV episodes, for example.

At this point, you can play back videos, music and photos even if the original computer is turned off or (if it’s a laptop) carried away. (Photo playback requires iPhoto on the Mac, or Photoshop Album or Photoshop Elements on Windows.)

A tiny white remote control operates Apple TV’s stunning high-definition white-on-black menus, which are enlivened by high-resolution album covers and photos. You can see the effect at apple.com/appletv.

The integration of iPod, iTunes and Apple TV offers frequent payoffs. For example, if you paused your iPod partway through a movie, TV show or song, Apple TV remembers your place when you resume playing it on your TV. Cool.

Although only one computer’s files are actually copied to Apple TV, you can still play back the iTunes libraries of five other computers by streaming — playing them through Apple TV without copying them. Starting playback, rewinding and fast-forwarding isn’t as smooth this way, and photo playback isn’t available. But it’s a handy option when, say, you want to watch a movie on your TV from a visitor’s laptop.

All of this works elegantly and effortlessly. But there are lots of unanswered questions that make onlookers wonder if Apple has bigger plans for the humble Apple TV.

For example, it has an Internet connection and a hard drive; why can’t it record TV shows like a TiVo?

Furthermore, it’s a little weird that menus and photos appear in spectacular high-definition, but not TV shows and movies. All iTunes videos are in standard definition, and don’t look so hot on an HDTV.

And then there’s the mysterious unused U.S.B. port.

Still, if you stay within the Apple ecosystem — use its online store, its jukebox software and so on — you get a seamless, trouble-free experience, with a greater selection of TV shows and movies than you can find from any other online store.

But in Netgear’s opinion, that approach is dictatorial and limiting. Its new EVA8000 box plays back many more video formats, including high-def video; can play the contents of any folders on your Mac or PC, not just what’s in iTunes; offers Internet radio and YouTube videos; and works with any kind of TV. It can even play copy-protected music — remarkably, even songs from the iTunes store (Windows only).

Unfortunately, this machine (2 by 17 by 10 inches) is as ugly as Apple’s is pretty. Its menus look as if they were typed in 12-point Helvetica. The software is geeky and unpolished; for example, during the setup process, it says “Failed to detect network” if no Ethernet cable is plugged in, rather than automatically looking for a wireless network.

The Netgear model is also filled with Version 1.0 bugs, including overprinted, blotchy menu screens and incompatibility with Windows Vista. Netgear promises to fix the glitches, but concedes that it timed the EVA8000’s release to ride the wave of Apple TV hype.

The two-year-old Xbox 360 is far more polished. Like Apple TV, it can either stream photos, music and videos (Windows PCs or, with a $20 shareware program, even Macs) or play them off its hard drive.

What’s different, though, is that you can’t copy files to this hard drive over the network; you can download shows and movies only straight to the Xbox from Microsoft’s own fledgling online store. You can buy TV shows for $2 each ($3 in high definition), or rent movies for $4 ($6 for high def). Microsoft movies self-destruct 24 hours after you start watching them. (Apple movies cost full DVD price, but at least you can keep them forever.)

Note, too, that the Xbox’s primary mission — playing games — doesn’t always suit music and movie playback. It can’t get onto a wireless network without an add-on transmitter ($100 — yikes). You can’t control the speed of a slide show or fast-forward through a song.

And in general, the included game controller makes a lousy remote control. There are no dedicated buttons for controlling playback; instead, you have to walk through the buttons on an on-screen control bar to reach, say, the pause function.

And alas, these products can require a journey through the hell of home networking. The Xbox couldn’t get online at first, thanks to an “MTU failure.” A Microsoft techie in India named “Mike” claimed that my cable-modem company would have to make a change in my service. (He was wrong; a router setting had to be changed instead.)

When the Netgear EVA8000 couldn’t get on the network, I waited 30 minutes to speak to a technician, who announced that I’d shortly get a call back from a senior tech. Five days later, I’m still waiting. (The solution was to uninstall — not just turn off — Microsoft’s OneCare security suite.)

In the end, these early attempts to bridge the gulf between computer and TV perfectly reinforce the conventional wisdom about Apple: Apple TV offers a gracious, delightful experience — but requires fidelity to Apple’s walled garden.

Its rivals, meanwhile, offer many more features, but they’re piled into bulkier boxes with much less concern for refinement, logic or simplicity.

Put another way, these machines aren’t direct competitors at all; they’re aimed at different kinds of people. Microsoft’s young male gamers probably couldn’t care less that they can’t change the slide-show speed, and Netgear’s box “is for people who are more experienced,” according to a representative. “This is not for the random person.”

Apple, on the other hand, is going for everybody else, random people included (at least those with HDTV sets). And that, perhaps, is Apple TV’s real significance. To paraphrase the old Macintosh advertisement, it’s a computer-to-TV bridge for the rest of us.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/te...2pogue.html?hp





Apple TV does not Require Widescreen TV or HDTV, Works with Standard TVs

"Today our Apple TVs have finally arrived and I've been testing them out," Paul Kafasis blogs for Rogue Amoeba.

Kafasis discusses some Apple TV surprises and his impressions:

• The AppleTV doesn't ship with any connection cables

• The AppleTV doesn't require a "Widescreen TV" or an HDTV: Let's dispense with one myth right now - the AppleTV does not need a widescreen TV. AppleTV does have a 480i mode, which works with standard-def TVs. My guess is that Apple would rather lose a few customers than confuse everyone. Only standard-def TVs made in the past few years will have component inputs, so most of the fifty years worth of standard-def TVs out there still won't work with the AppleTV. By referring to Widescreen TVs, they may prevent people with standard-def TVs from buying only to find out they need a new TV. But if you've purchased a new, non-HDTV in the past few years, the AppleTV will work for you (provided you have component input jacks).

• The AppleTV works pretty well with your music library

• If iTunes can play it, AppleTV might be able. Or maybe not: Certainly, AppleTV can play any audio or video you purchase from the iTunes Store. However, iTunes uses QuickTime for playback of videos, while AppleTV does not. If you try and sync unsupported video content from iTunes to AppleTV, the files won't sync over.

• Video playback, including streaming, works well
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/we...omments/13062/





Let the modding begin

We Just Got Xvid Working on the Apple TV
Akward

Hey, Sabretooth and I just officially got xvid/everything else supported by Perian working on the Apple TV.

I promise you this image is legit and this is an episode of Lost encoded in Xvid (FAKE FAKE RAHGHG FAKE):

We're doing a writeup, but the short of it is...

1. Open it up (4 screws on the bottom, small Torx bit)
2. Put the 2.5" drive into a USB enclosure or whatever you want
3. Mount the HFS filesystem
4. Install Perian in /Library/Quicktime (as you normally would)
5. Install Dropbear (or enable SSH if you know how... we gave up and used Dropbear)
6. Add a startup script to disable the firewall or open up the ports you need for SSH
7. Put the drive back in and boot it, ssh login as frontrow, password frontrow (or add an ssh key for yourself)
8. Use a reference movie (use QT Pro to save a reference movie) to bootstrap your xvid file

voila

Should see a writeup later today.

Edit: digg article is here apparently : http://digg.com/apple/XviD_fully_functional_on_Apple_TV


UPDATE
kextstat and ps aux on page 3
So has anyone busted out their drive yet? I want to make sure someone else can keep responding to questions here. I'd give you ssh access to ours but it's behind a big fancy VPN.

We got SSH up by adding a startup script to disable the firewall and start dropbear:

code:

bash-2.05b# cat /System/Library/StartupItems/fw/StartupParameters.plist
{
Description = "Firewall";
Provides = ("Firewall");
Requires = ("Network");
OrderPreference = "None";
}

code:

bash-2.05b# cat /System/Library/StartupItems/fw/fw
#!/bin/sh

/sbin/ipfw -f flush
/sbin/ipfw add 65535 allow ip from any to any

/sbin/dropbearkey -t rsa -f /etc/dropbear_rsa_host_key
/sbin/dropbear -r /etc/dropbear_rsa_host_key -p 22222

Note that the firewall is wide open now so be careful

Also the dropbearkey part is only necessary once to generate the key, so you can delete that after the system has rebooted once.

To get dropbear go here: http://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html
Compile it on an x86 machine (I used my Macbook Pro) and just transfer those binaries over to the HD yourself using a USB enclosure or whatever you have that can interface with a 2.5" PATA drive.

It is likely you can get the system's built-in SSH working correctly. We were in a hurry, and after running into a kink we were like "gently caress it" and threw dropbear up because it was a pretty instant win.

To ssh in you use: ssh -p 22222 frontrow@1.2.3.4
To scp stuff to it use: scp -P 22222 /path/to/localfile frontrow@1.2.3.4:/path/to/senditto

I know this is still a pretty ugly list of steps, and if you're confused just wait until everything gets a bit more streamlined. I just want to get more hacker folks involved so work can continue as fast as possible.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/sho...readid=2391956





Viacom’s Full-Court Press for Online Ads
Louise Story

Justin Timberlake did not attend Nickelodeon’s annual advertising presentation this month, but one of Viacom’s own ad sales executives, Jim Tricarico, took the stage to perform a rendition of the singer’s “SexyBack.”

“Nicktropolis, Nick at Nite, cool Web sites,” he rapped to advertising executives gathered at the Nokia Theater in Times Square. “Come to the Nick and get your sales on.”

Nickelodeon was the first of many television networks that will be rapping about their digital assets this spring as ad executives determine how to spend their clients’ money at the annual advertising previews, known in the trade as the upfronts.

Video advertising, while less than 5 percent of online spending, is the fastest-growing advertising category online, generating $410 million last year, an increase of 82 percent from 2005, according to eMarketer, an online advertising research firm.

While all television networks have seized upon online video, few invested more aggressively than Nickelodeon’s parent company, Viacom. MTV Networks — the division of Viacom that oversees 28 networks in the United States including MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Spike and Country Music Television — manages 44 domestic Web sites and was among the first to put video from its TV shows online, posting MTV video in 1994.

And Viacom has been aggressive in different ways. Last week, the company sued Google, asking for more than $1 billion in compensation for its clips from shows that have been uploaded by users to its YouTube site. Other networks have negotiated deals with YouTube privately while Viacom executives have openly criticized the video site when Viacom owned-shows like “The Colbert Report” appeared there.

“Every day we have to scour the entirety of what is available on YouTube, so we have to look for our stuff,” Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom’s chief executive, said last week. “It is very difficult for us and places an enormous burden on us.”

Other major media companies have accused YouTube of copyright infringement, but Viacom’s lawsuit underscores its particular vulnerability in the face of the popularity of video site.

First, Viacom has been adamant about maintaining its own relationship with advertisers, in part because it is trying to sell ads across platforms, using the popularity of its Web properties to bolster its television ad revenue. That is leverage the company would lose if it cannot draw enough viewers to its own Web properties.

According to Hank Close, executive vice president for ad sales at MTV Networks, advertisers will get a spot online at events like the “Kids Choice” awards program on Nickelodeon and the MTV Music Awards show only if they agree to buy commercials on the television broadcast, as well.

“These are exclusive properties, and you’re not going to get into them unless you do television too,” Mr. Close said. “We’ve got the ability to connect with consumers and move with them from screen to screen.”

Viacom also has a enormous amount of content aimed at younger viewers, the kind most likely to click on YouTube or other sites. More than 80 percent of Nickelodeon’s and MTV’s audiences are under 34, as is 57 percent of Comedy Central’s, according to Nielsen. (Viacom says that clips of its programs have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times on YouTube.)

Advertisers like Internet commercials linked to online video because it allows them to communicate their brand messages with sight, sound and motion. And Web sites like video ads because they are paid more for each viewer than they typically would be with simple text or banner ads.

Google, thanks to YouTube, remains the colossus of online video, with 1.167 billion videos streamed for viewing in January by 54.7 million people, according to data from comScore to be released publicly this week. By comparison, Viacom Digital had less than a quarter of the streamed videos — 264 million — and just over a third the number of people, or 18.9 million, making it the fifth most popular online video company in terms of video streams.

Nickelodeon, MTV and VH1 sites account for more than 70 percent of those streams. A user-generated video site that Viacom acquired last year, iFilm, represents about 15 percent of the streams and Comedy Central about 1 percent, comScore figures show. (MTV Networks says comScore Media Metrix does not capture video viewing on some of its sites.)

To close the gap with Google, MTV Networks last year hired several new executives who had digital expertise. Mika Salmi, now head of the networks’ digital media, had been chief executive of Atom Entertainment, which Viacom acquired in August. Nada Stirratt, the networks’ executive vice president for digital ad sales, was hired from Advertising.com, a large third-party ad server.

And Adam Cahan, formerly a member of Google’s strategy team, was named executive vice president for strategy and business of MTV Networks. While television also falls under his authority, video distribution online is a large part of Mr. Cahan’s focus. That has brought him into competition with his former employer.

In the last year, Viacom spent about $1 billion buying Web sites specializing in games, user-generated content and other entertainment likely to be popular with its young audiences.

Nickelodeon, in particular, has been expanding. In the fall, it acquired AddictingGames.com. Last month, the network created Nicktropolis, a virtual site like Second Life where young users can interact online. It recently introduced MeTV, a site where viewers post their own video creations, and some of those videos are later shown on television. And Neopets, the network’s virtual pet site, is moving into mobile phone offerings. Nickelodeon executives said they have learned how to reach younger viewers on multiple screens at all times of the day.

“Kids are now in the driver’s seat,” said Jim Perry, executive vice president for MTV Networks’ Kids and Family ad sales, “determining when and how they want to interact with us.”

Viacom is not entirely opposed to sharing its content with others, if paid for it. Last month, the company said it would allow Joost, an online video site now being developed, to show some of its clips. And in the fall, MTV Networks participated in a video distribution test of Google’s AdSense program, which distributes video to thousands of sites, sharing the revenue with the media companies.

But in contrast to other companies like Condé Nast, which allowed Google to sell the ads that accompanied their videos, MTV Networks insisted on selling theirs.

“From a strategic perspective we deeply value our relationships with our advertisers,” Mr. Cahan said in discussing the AdSense test. “It’s very important that we maintain those relationships, regardless of platform.”

At last year’s upfronts, Viacom executives talked at length about the digital space at MTV Networks’ presentation at Madison Square Garden, where the lobby was filled with an array of computers, iPods and other devices displaying the company’s Web content. The approach seemed to work. MTV Networks landed a deal with OMD, an ad-buying unit of the Omnicom Group, that bundled $300 million worth of digital and television ad sales.

But the emphasis by Viacom and other networks on digital media caused confusion at many agencies. Ad buyers traditionally purchase only one medium, and many large advertisers hire separate agencies to handle their digital and television ads, so many television buyers were unsure if they could purchase online video ads. In the last six months, several large agencies have responded by consolidating all video ad buying, including television and Internet, under one person.

Other media companies have been making similar changes, signaling a sea change in the ad-selling business, as well. Last month, for example, NBC placed all ad sales, including television, under its digital chief, Beth Comstock.

“The networks are putting their stakes in the ground to grow that side of the business so they don’t lose it,” said Jason Maltby, president and co-executive director for national broadcast at MindShare North America, a WPP Group unit that buys ads.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/bu.../19viacom.html





Make Way for Copyright Chaos
Lawrence Lessig

Berlin

LAST week, Viacom asked a federal court to order the video-sharing service YouTube to pay it more than $1 billion in damages for some 150,000 videos that Viacom claims it owns and YouTube users have shared. “YouTube,” the complaint alleges, “has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale,” threatening not just Viacom, but “the economic underpinnings of one of the most important sectors of the United States economy.”

Yet as federal courts get started on this multiyear litigation about the legality of a business model, we should not forget one prominent actor in this drama largely responsible for the eagerness with which business disputes get thrown to the courts: the Supreme Court.

For most of the history of copyright law, it was Congress that was at the center of copyright policy making. As the Supreme Court explained in its 1984 Sony Betamax decision, the Constitution makes plain that “it is Congress that has been assigned the task of defining the scope of the limited monopoly,” or copyright. It has thus been “Congress that has fashioned the new rules that new technology made necessary.” The court explained that “sound policy, as well as history, supports our consistent deference to Congress when major technological innovations alter the market for copyrighted materials.” In the view of the court in Sony, if you don’t like how new technologies affect copyright, take your problem to Congress.

The court reaffirmed this principle of deference in 2003, even when the question at stake was a constitutional challenge to Congress’s extension of copyright by 20 years. Challenges are evaluated “against the backdrop of Congress’s previous exercises of its authority under the Copyright Clause” of the Constitution, it wrote. Congress’s practice — not simply the Constitution’s text, or its original understanding — thus determined the Constitution’s meaning.

These cases together signaled a very strong and sensible policy: The complex balance of interests within any copyright statute are best struck by Congress.

But 20 months ago, the Supreme Court reversed this wise policy of deference. Drawing upon common law-like power, the court expanded the Copyright Act in the Grokster case to cover a form of liability it had never before recognized in the context of copyright — the wrong of providing technology that induces copyright infringement. It announced this new form of liability even though at precisely the same time Congress was holding hearings about whether to amend the Copyright Act to create the same liability.

The Grokster case thus sent a clear message to lawyers everywhere: You get two bites at the copyright policy-making apple, one in Congress and one in the courts. But in Congress, you need hundreds of votes. In the courts, you need just five.

Viacom has now accepted this invitation from the Supreme Court. The core of its case centers on the “safe harbor” provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The provision, a compromise among a wide range of interests, was intended to protect copyright owners while making it possible for Internet businesses to avoid crippling copyright liability. As applied to YouTube, the provision immunizes the company from liability for material posted by its users, so long as it takes steps to remove infringing material soon after it is notified by the copyright owner.

The content industry was a big supporter of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. Viacom is apparently less of a supporter today. It complains that YouTube has not done enough “to take reasonable precautions to deter the rampant infringement on its site.” Instead, the Viacom argument goes, YouTube has shifted the burden of monitoring that infringement onto the victim of that infringement — namely, Viacom.

But it wasn’t YouTube that engineered this shift. It was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As the statute plainly states, a provider (like YouTube) need not monitor its service or affirmatively seek facts indicating infringing activity. That burden, instead, rests on the copyright owner. In exchange, the law gives the copyright owner the benefit of an expedited procedure to identify and remove infringing material from a Web site. The provision was thus a deal, created to balance conflicting interests in light of the technology of the time.

Whether or not that balance made sense in 1998, Viacom believes it no longer makes sense today. Long ago, Justice Hugo Black argued that it was not up to the Supreme Court to keep the Constitution “in tune with the times.” And it is here that the cupidity of the court begins to matter. For by setting the precedent that the court is as entitled to keep the Copyright Act “in tune with the times” as Congress, it has created an incentive for companies like Viacom, no longer satisfied with a statute, to turn to the courts to get the law updated. Congress, of course, is perfectly capable of changing or removing the safe harbor provision to meet Viacom’s liking. But Viacom recognizes there’s no political support for the change it wants. It thus turns to a policy maker that doesn’t need political support — the Supreme Court.

The conservatives on the Supreme Court have long warned about just this dynamic. And while I remain a skeptic about deferring to Congress on constitutional matters, this case is a powerful lesson about the costs of judicial policy making in an area as complex as copyright. The Internet will now face years of uncertainty before this fundamental question about the meaning of a decade-old legislative deal gets resolved.

No doubt the justices are clever, maybe even more clever than Congress. But however clever, it’s hard to believe that their input is worth the millions in economic value that will be wasted long before they announce their decision.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/opinion/18lessig.html





How Viacom Could Really Protect its Content

The battle between Viacom and Google demonstrates the fundamental divide between media and tech companies. But there is a way Viacom could achieve many of its goals, says Fortune's David Kirkpatrick.
David Kirkpatrick

In the epic philosophical and financial battle between West Coast and East Coast, between software and old media, the East this week fired perhaps its biggest gun so far. Viacom filed a $1 billion-plus lawsuit against Google's YouTube, asserting "massive copyright infringement" as a result of YouTube airing hundreds of thousands of video clips taken from Viacom television programs like The Daily Show and South Park.

Make no mistake, this really is a war between two fundamentally different points of view about what is happening on the Internet, and what should happen. One side wants to create software that enables people and companies of all sizes and importance to communicate and gain power, and the other side wants to retain control of content they've spent a lot of money to create.

Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom, puts it this way in an interview: "This is the first time in my experience of a couple decades that I've seen a significant consumer media company not feel they have to obtain rights before they utilize content." Unlike me, he sees Google as a comparable media company simply not abiding by the rules of the game.

By contrast, listen to Glenn Brown, product counsel for Google (Charts): "We're excited to keep giving creative people of all kinds - from your local hobbyist videographer to big professional media companies like the BBC - the ability to host their content. We're still full speed ahead." Google sees its role as one of empowerment.

YouTube rivals: Thanks, Viacom!

In legal terms the suit relies on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which made it illegal to deploy technology intended to circumvent legitimate copyrights. But the law included a so-called "safe harbor" provision, which indemnified some kinds of Internet companies if they could show they didn't know what content users were using their services to distribute, and if they immediately blocked or removed such content when a copyright holder informed them it was there.

The resolution of this lawsuit, if it comes to trial, will hinge on whether or not the safe harbor provision of DMCA applies or not. Google believes it does. Viacom insists it does not. Says Viacom corporate communications chief Carl Folta, "We think that's for dumb pipes, belonging to service providers who really have no idea what's flowing through their channels. Google is an active participant with its users."

Google lawyer Brown, by contrast, celebrates DMCA as a "forward-thinking law" which "has really enabled all the interesting innovations we've seen on the Internet in the last few years, down to your personal blogging software and software that allows you to put your personal photos online."

There is no right or wrong answer for those of us who are observing from the sidelines. Of course I want Viacom to keep paying people like Jon Stewart to create great content. When I watch TV it is more often tuned to Viacom channels than any other. Viacom needs a fair return on its investment.

But Google rightly sees itself as leading a revolution in simplifying and making it less expensive to communicate and to get access to information and entertainment. Who among us can't say we've benefited from that, probably daily?

If we didn't have amazingly ambitious software companies like YouTube and Google pushing forward, we wouldn't have access to all the fabulously useful content that has been created by individuals and smaller less well-financed companies than Viacom. The giant media companies, before the Internet revolutionaries came along, weren't about to create software for blogging, or to make it easy to host your own video, or any of hundreds of other new ways for individuals to express themselves, and gain audiences.

If the law is to be tested, these are the right two companies to get into the ring. Each represents the contemporary pinnacle of a certain type of innovation. For Google it's centered around software. But Viacom's Folta makes a fair point: "We're the masters of the short attention span, among content producers. Our content resonates more than that from any other company on places like YouTube."

Viacom also, among major media companies, is among the most aggressive in attempting, belatedly but purposefully, to mimic the innovations of Silicon Valley. For example, about a month ago it launched its own three-dimensional virtual world for children, called Nicktropolis. It's already got a million registered users. Dauman is convinced that the company can draw consumers to use its products legally and in a way that will be profitable if Viacom offers them well-designed, easy-to-use services of its own.
Viacom sues 'GooTube' for $1 billion

In this, more than in the lawsuit, he is addressing the fundamental problem. Consumers are the ones putting up illegal Viacom content on YouTube. They like the ability to do things like that. If, because of Viacom's lawsuit or other constraints put on companies like Google, it becomes hard, they will find other ways and other places to do what they want.

I'm a technological determinist. If technology makes it possible, people will do it. As processing power and bandwidth get cheaper, and the design of Web sites and computers get better and better, it becomes trivially easy to do whatever you want with any kind of digital content.

In the end, no legal battle will stop the kind of infringement of its copyrights that Viacom hates. Only a change in consumer ethos could do that. Such a wholesale ethical revival is unlikely. For all the record companies' efforts in shutting down Napster, Kazaa, and other music-sharing sites, illegal downloads continue in huge numbers.

Some people, in the end, did stop downloading free music, but it wasn't because of the record company lawsuits, for the most part. It was because Apple (Charts) created a convenient and affordable way to get music legally, called iTunes. To achieve a similar result here, Viacom needs to continue making MTV.com and Comedycentral.com and all its other properties better and better, which it seems committed to doing.

That, not a lawsuit, is what will most powerfully slow down the erosion of Viacom's control.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/15/tech...tune/index.htm





Infringing Videos On iFilm Could Cause Problems for Viacom
Eric Bangeman

Even as Viacom sues YouTube for what it describes as "brazen" copyright infringement, some of Viacom's own dirty copyright laundry is being aired. Ars searched one Viacom property—iFilm, which was acquired by Viacom in 2005—and found several instances of infringing video hosted by iFilm—content for which Viacom does not own the copyright.

In its complaint against YouTube, Viacom bemoans the fact that it is required to file DMCA takedown notices for each copyrighted clip it spots on YouTube. With over 150,000 infringing clips of Viacom properties identified so far, the company believes that YouTube should be working harder to proactively identify and remove infringing videos.

Does Viacom hold its own properties to the same standard? We contacted both Viacom corporate and iFilm to ask them if they took steps to proactively identify and remove infringing videos or if they relied on copyright holders to notify them of infringing content. Some time after publication, Viacom responded with the following statement: "Contributions to iFilm are all screened by iFilm employees prior to posting, to ensure that copyrighted, pornographic or other restricted content is not posted to the site." A search using the term "NBA Brawl," however, returns a number of clips of televised footage of both NBA and college football fights and it is not clear that Viacom owns the copyrights on those clips. In fact, it looks a lot like what one would find on YouTube.

I talked to Greg Gabriel, a copyright attorney at Kinsella Wietzman Iser Kump & Aldisert, about the issue. He told me that if Viacom isn't willing to take the same steps with iFilm that it wants YouTube to take with copyrighted content, Viacom may have a harder time making its case before the judge presiding over the case.

"It would have some persuasive value with a judge if YouTube says 'look, they're ranting and raving about all this infringement occurring on my site and they're not doing anything about it themselves,'" said Gabriel. "YouTube is testing the limits of the DMCA and Viacom is asking them to do something that the letter of the law does not require. Viacom is really asking the judge to do something extraordinary here."

As written, the DMCA does not require any type of active monitoring on the part of site owners. What Viacom wants is for the judge to "make a new interpretation of the law," as Gabriel describes it. The problem that Viacom will have in making its argument is that there's no precedent for the judge to draw upon. As a result, "Viacom's own conduct with iFilm will likely be a factor that the judge looks at," said Gabriel.
Following in the RIAA's footsteps?

Some analysts have raised the prospect of a widespread legal attack on the part of Viacom against those who upload copyrighted materials. Under the DMCA, YouTube must produce all identifying information about a user if they are presented with a subpoena. It has happened before: in January, YouTube was forced to give Fox all the information it had on users who had uploaded entire episodes of The Simpsons and 24. Last year, the video-sharing site turned over data to Paramount in another infringement case.

Viacom could hit YouTube with a blizzard of subpoenas and then use the information received (e.g., e-mail address, IP address) to in turn go after ISPs to discover the identities of those who have uploaded copyrighted content and file infringement suits against them. It's not outside the realm of possibility, but it's extremely unlikely.

No matter where one's own opinions lie about the legality and morality of file-sharing, almost all observers agree that the RIAA's jihad against individual file-sharers has been nothing short of a public relations nightmare. Although Viacom has demonstrated that it is willing to go beyond saber-rattling and take on another huge company in court, it's very doubtful that it will have the stomach for a large-scale battle against its fans—even if it would provide lots of fodder for The Colbert Report.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...or-viacom.html





Viacom Sued Over YouTube Parody Removal

Activist groups sued Viacom Inc. on Thursday, claiming the parent of Comedy Central improperly asked the video-sharing site YouTube to remove a parody of the cable network's ''The Colbert Report.''

Viacom responded by saying it had no records of ever making such a request.

Although the video in question contained clips taken from the television show, MoveOn.org Civic Action and Brave New Films LLC argued that their use was protected under ''fair use'' provisions of copyright law.

With Viacom identified by YouTube as the source of the removal request, they said Viacom should have known the use was legal and thus its complaint to YouTube to have the video blocked amounted to a ''misrepresentation'' that is subject to damages under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The challenge, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, came about a week after Viacom filed its own, $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube, claiming that the wildly popular Web site is rife with copyrighted video from Viacom shows, including ''The Colbert Report.''

Neither YouTube nor its parent, Google Inc., was named in the latest lawsuit, filed on the plaintiffs' behalf by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.

Viacom termed the lawsuit a waste of scarce judicial resources and said the plaintiffs should have checked first with the company.

In a letter to the plaintiffs' lawyers, Michael D. Fricklas, general counsel for Viacom, said the company had no record of sending YouTube a complaint, despite YouTube's identification of Viacom as the source. YouTube had no comment about the discrepancy.
After reviewing the clip, Fricklas said, ''I can inform you that Viacom has no problem with your client's continued use of it on its website or on YouTube.''

Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the EFF, said the organization had checked directly with YouTube staff to confirm Viacom's role and would investigate further with YouTube.

''We're happy they don't have a problem with our clip, ... but at this point it is still our understanding that they sent a takedown notice based on it,'' she said. ''As far as we're concerned we still have a lawsuit pending.''

Under the DMCA, YouTube and other service providers are generally immune from copyright lawsuits as long as they promptly respond to copyright complaints, known as takedown notices. According to the lawsuit, a takedown notice was sent to YouTube last week, and the video was blocked almost immediately.

Service providers are not required to investigate claims under the DMCA and in fact could lose their immunity if they take too long to respond. The law does give users the right to sue the issuer of the takedown request when it contains misrepresentations that an item is infringing. Such lawsuits are rare, though.

''People just shoot off a takedown notice without really giving a second thought to the material being taken down and whether it's really proper to be taken down,'' McSherry said. ''A lot of people cave in because they don't realize they can push back or they can't afford to push back.''

The lawsuit seeks unspecified legal costs and damages on grounds the plaintiffs' free-speech rights were harmed.

''With this lawsuit, we are making clear that corporations like Viacom must not be allowed to muzzle independent video creators and censor their free speech,'' said Eli Pariser, MoveOn's executive director.

The parody ''Stop the Falsiness,'' a play on host Stephen Colbert's use of the term ''truthiness,'' was jointly produced by MoveOn and Brave New Films, an activist production company that has made documentaries on the Iraq war, Wal-Mart and the Fox News Channel.
http://www.tech2.com/india/news/webs...removal/4839/0





Maybe Google Wanted to be Sued: YouTube and Plan B

No matter how you spun it, a lawsuit was waiting to pounce on YouTube. And when the lawsuit came, it would be from multi-billion dollar media conglomerates. Worst of all, people feared it will trigger a landslide of more lawsuits. And even still, Google bought YouTube. And now the billion dollar war has begun.

And I wondered: Maybe Google actually wanted to be sued.

Backroom Discussions

First of all, in a perfect world, no, Google wouldn’t want this. And Google, hoping that the world is close enough to perfect, did buy YouTube. But somewhere during discussions, someone must have asked, “How is this different from Morpheus and Kazaa? Won’t we be sued into oblivion?”

The smart lawyers at Google probably mentioned something about the DMCA, but honestly, would you want to buy a company that would be hated, constantly, by the very people who own the content that keeps you afloat? Or better, how will such a site remain #1 if there is a unified effort by content owners to either displace or destroy you? Most of all, media companies, who have significant clout and money, wouldn’t let YouTube host their content for free without a fight. There was more to this purchase than meets the eye.

No matter how you look at it, the purchase came with a lot of legal risk. I believe nobody at Google is surprised that Viacom is suing and wants $1 billion, A.K.A. most of the sum Google paid for YouTube. This is all part of the expected road map in owning YouTube.

So plan A was to hope people would be nice and look the other way. That worked for a year so far, and Google hoped it would continue. Plan B was to get sued.

This isn’t any ordinary “get sued and win” plan. Waiting to get sued so you can win in court is a defensive move for most companies. But for Google, this is preemptive. This is about Google defending YouTube instead of YouTube defending YouTube.

Why Getting Sued is a Preemptive Strategy

Let’s pretend that YouTube was not bought out because talks got delayed. Then realize that it would have probably been sued a lot sooner by a lot more people. Investors would flee and nobody would want the company now. If YouTube goes broke, that would have likely pushed Myspace Video to #1, giving Interactive Corp a huge edge since it happens to own Fox Entertainment. Myspace Video would become whatever was in the best interest of Big Media. Probably a DRM infested piece of crap that sued its users for uploading copyrighted material.

On the other hand, if YouTube didn’t go broke and fought the lawsuits, imagine if they had lost. Myspace Video gets to keep whatever edge it has, but virtually every other video site on the Internet becomes illegal overnight. Thousands of user records and IP addresses would get subpoenaed, and video sharing dies in one fell swoop.

Why Does Video Sharing Matter to Google?

What’s the next big thing on the net? Video. Google cares what happens in video sharing because it wants a slice of the video ad market. It doesn’t want to just be in the market, it wants to own it like it owns text ads. But that’s not the whole answer.

Google bought YouTube because it wanted to make sure of three things:

1. Google has first dibs for video ads on the biggest video site on the Internet
2. YouTube remains legal
3. Expand and protect current fair use related provisions involving copying intellectual property

The first point is obvious, and the second point feeds into point #1.

But the third point is the most important for Google. If YouTube were to lose a lawsuit for hosting intellectual property, it would severely weaken Google’s position in a variety of current and future endeavors. Any aspirations Google has of some day crawling and indexing video content (nope, they don’t have this technology yet) would now be in a legal limbo. It would also potentially re-introduce new arguments against their Google Image Search. And their book search program might suffer a similar fate once the YouTube precedent settles in. Google, being a company that spiders and indexes (stores) massive amounts of copyrighted information, would now be in serious legal jeopardy.

YouTube is Google’s Future

Thus, Google not only threw money at YouTube: it threw its lawyers at YouTube too. Google’s lawyers are some of the most well-versed copyright lawyers in the world since so many of their lawsuits deal with that issue.

The goal here is simple. Google wants to own the #1 video sharing site (completely legal), own 100% of the ads on that site, and clarify many currently-ambiguous copyright issues in their favor. If all of that goes as planned, the $1.5 billion paid to YouTube was a small price to pay. But if they had never gotten involved, the potential losses were far greater than a billion or two. Since Google has a market capitalization of over $130 billion, even a dip of 1% means losses of over $1 billion. But if entire sections of their business model became legally uncertain, you can bet they’d lose a lot more than 1%, especially with their insanely high P/E ratio (the ratio between how much they make and what their stock is worth).

By fighting a lawsuit, Google gets to prove the legitimacy of Internet video distribution - something that will probably never flourish under the “old media” regime. Unfortunately for them, the DMCA protects site owners from liability of what its users do — or at least that’s the general interpretation. Letting YouTube fight this battle alone with their own lawyers might have resulted in a very public and unnecessary loss that would have crippled Google’s video ambitions and possibly caused collateral damage to a bunch of related industries (especially search). This would have forced everybody to play by the conglomerates’ rules, and taken anyway any guarantee of Google getting any cut of the video ad pie. Video sharing needs this clarification before it can move forward. And if Google legitimizes it, they will have the biggest video site on the web for their video ads to play.

So let’s ask ourselves again: would Google pay $1.5 billion so it can fight the lawsuit on behalf of YouTube? Now that I think about it, it seems like a wise long term move.
http://duggmirror.com/tech_news/Why_...be_to_be_Sued/





News Corp. and NBC Announce Partnership to Create YouTube Competitor
Jacqui Cheng

News Corp. and NBC have announced a deal to create a new video distribution site, dubbed the "YouTube killer" by many. The companies have also formed partnerships with a number of big players, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Time Warner/AOL to supply content and provide distribution channels. The service, which currently does not have a name, will launch this summer with a number of TV shows and movie content.

The full list of TV shows that will be available at launch, according to News Corp., will include Heroes, 24, House, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, Friday Night Lights, The Riches, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, Prison Break, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, and Top Chef—"plus hits from the studios' vast television libraries." The service will also feature movies, including Borat, Little Miss Sunshine, Devil Wears Prada, The Bourne Identity, and Bourne Supremacy at launch.

Video available via the new service will be ad-supported and "free" to consumers via the web. Big brand advertisers that have already signed deals with News Corp. and NBC include Intel, Cisco, Cadbury Schweppes, Esurance, and General Motors. News Corp. and NBC plan to syndicate the content via other web channels such as MySpace, MSN, and Yahoo! News Corp. indicated in its announcement users will be allowed to embed videos from the service on their own MySpace profiles and other web pages, mirroring YouTube's popular sharing format.

"This is a game changer for Internet video. We'll have access to just about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want—professionally produced video delivered on the sites where they live. We're excited about the potential for this alliance and we’re looking forward to working with any content provider or distributor who wants to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity," said News Corp.'s President and COO Peter Chernin in a statement.

AOL spokesperson Anne Bentley tried to play down the competition between the new venture and YouTube. "As you're aware, Google has a 5 percent stake in AOL," she told Ars. "Our goal is to provide the largest number of video assets to our audience of more than 100 million unique visitors a month. Just as we continue to work closely with Google in search and other areas, we also work closely with other partners."

The announcement comes shortly after Viacom accused Google of not making enough effort to keep its content off of YouTube. Rumors of such a partnership have been popping up since the middle of last year. The major TV networks have shown interest in distributing their content online, but have been hesitant to make use of YouTube's extremely popular channel when they (think) they can create one themselves. Why let a competitor distribute your content when you could do so yourself?

The success of News Corp. and NBC's new service will be watched closely by competitors. The companies already have the advantage of a strong network of partnerships for both content and distribution channels, but will the suits and ties at these companies be able to create something as virally popular as YouTube?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ompetitor.html





NBC/News Corp. Video Site to Be 'Mostly Free'
Bryan Gardiner

At a news conference held by News Corp. and NBC Universal on Thursday afternoon, the two media giants confirmed that they would be teaming up to launch a YouTube-like online video site this summer that will feature "mostly free" content from both companies.

According to both Jeff Zucker, president and chief executive of NBC Universal, and Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of News Corporation, the yet-to-be-named site will launch at some point this summer.

In addition to featuring full-length television shows, movies, and clips—including NBC and Fox shows such as "Saturday Night Live," "Heroes," and "The Simpsons," "24," and films like Borat—the online video site will also have user-generated material like YouTube, according to Zucker.

The objective in creating the service, which has supposedly been under negotiation for quite some time, was to aggregate as much content as possible from both companies, while at the same time servicing copyright holders and giving them the opportunity to control the look and feel of their content, both men said.

"It's been well documented that we've been talking for a while," Zucker said. "I think what brought it to fruition here in the last week, is the distribution partners saw the value in all of this. It's been a long road, but [one] that actually only came together recently in that respect."

"This is about being as open as we possibly can," Chernin added. "We're trying to push it out there as widely as we can. At launch, we'll probably be the largest advertising platform in the world."

Zucker and Chernin say the new site will give advertisers a one-stop shopping opportunity, allowing them access to safe, premium content and a vast Internet viewership—94 percent of the Internet audience, according to Chernin.

"The opportunity this provides to advertisers is to be associated with a top-of-line huge video repository," Zucker said. "Within four hours of our announcement, we had five charter advertisers signed up," he added, saying that they are now in discussion with many others.

Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Microsoft, and News Corp.'s MySpace will all be the site's primary distribution partners to begin with, according to News Corp. and NBC Universal.

Additionally, both men denied that the new site was created to directly compete with Google's YouTube.

"This is obviously not a YouTube killer," Chernin said, adding, "we believe in the power and benefit of ubiquitous distribution."

"We are open for business with everyone," Zucker said. "…We're willing to sit down with [YouTube] and anyone else who can agree to the economic terms and copyright protections..."

Additionally, both men said on Thursday they didn't believe the site would cannibalize the content already available on their respective vertical sites, adding that there would remain content only viewable on NBC.com or Fox.com.

"Ultimately, we believe this is just the beginning," Chernin said. "We are in discussions with other content holders right now."

"One of the most important things for us is making it so that the consumer has control of the site," Chernin said. "That's how it will be designed and created. Will it look like YouTube? Probably not. Will it look like a contemporary, professional, Web 2.0 site? Probably."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2107102,00.asp





Microsoft Temporarily Closes Video Site
Greg Sandoval

Microsoft is closing its video-sharing site, Soapbox, to new users for up to two months so it can create better safeguards against pirated content.

The software giant, which agreed earlier Thursday to distribute movies and TV shows for big media companies, has seen Soapbox fill up with unauthorized clips since a test version of the site launched last month.

No new subscribers will be accepted, but anyone who has already signed up for Soapbox can continue to access the site, said Adam Sohn, a director in Microsoft's online-services group.

Microsoft stood to be embarrassed by the existence of pirated work on Soapbox. There was a real possibility that the company could have found itself distributing video from News Corp. and NBC Universal, at the same time another one of its units was hosting material stolen from those same companies.

Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo have agreed to be part of a new online joint venture of media conglomerates that also includes NBC Universal and News Corp. The new video network, scheduled to debut this summer, will feature full-length programming, movies and clips from at least a dozen television networks and two major film studios.

Copyright issues have become a central issue to the nascent online video market. On YouTube, the largest video-sharing site, there are thousands of clips posted to the site without the copyright holder's consent.

To help create a filtering system that would prevent the uploading of copyrighted video clips, Microsoft licensed digital-fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic.

Sohn said the changes were not forced on Microsoft by its new partners, although he acknowledged that some of the content providers were very interested in how his company planned to clean up Soapbox.

"This software company is aligned very closely with the notion of intellectual-property rights," Sohn said. "We feel this is the right time to make these changes and stand up to do the right thing."
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+tempor...3-6169851.html





NFL Fumbles DMCA Takedown Battle, Could Face Sanctions
Jacqui Cheng

It's no secret that some content owners don't seem to understand how the DMCA works—that, or they simply don't care when sending mass takedown notices. This seems to be the case with the recent saga of legal maneuvers between the National Football League (NFL) and Brooklyn Law School professor Wendy Seltzer. The two have been going back and forth with DMCA-related "requests" since early February—with YouTube stuck in between—and in the process, the NFL itself appears to have violated the DMCA.

The story began when Seltzer posted a YouTube clip on her personal blog in early February. The clip showed the NFL's copyright message that aired during the Super Bowl:
This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited

Seltzer took exception to this claim—as it clearly makes no concession for fair use—and wanted to show her students how content owners are beginning to exaggerate their rights.

Five days later, she received a DMCA takedown notice through YouTube, saying that the NFL had claimed copyright violation and that the clip had been removed. Ironic? Perhaps, but it gets better. Seltzer, law professor by day, is also staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by night and founder of Chilling Effects, a web site dedicated to educating the public about online rights. Very well aware of her own rights under DMCA, she promptly sent a counter-notification to YouTube (generated by the Chilling Effects counter-notice generator, no less), citing Section 512 of the DMCA saying that YouTube must replace the material if they receive a counter-notification asserting "good faith belief" that the material removal was a mistake.

Several weeks after that, Seltzer's Super Bowl copyright notice clip came back online as a result of her counter-notification. Seltzer was happy that the system appeared to work the way it was designed to work and assumed that the NFL had decided not to sue to keep the video offline. She was wrong, however. Just 12 days later, the NFL filed yet another takedown notice with YouTube for the clip, and YouTube complied once again.

This is where the saga starts to get messy. Seltzer's counter-notification—which was forwarded to the NFL from YouTube—clearly described her use of the clip as fair use: "an educational excerpt featuring the NFL's overreaching copyright warning aired during the Super Bowl." As Seltzer outlines in her blog post, the NFL's only option in response to her counter-claim would be to force her to remove the clip via court proceedings. This obviously did not happen, and instead, the NFL chose to ignore her claims completely. After receiving her counter-notification claiming fair use, sending another takedown notice over the same content is considered a knowing misrepresentation that the clip is infringing, according to DMCA section 512(f)(1). Under the DMCA, the NFL would be liable for all legal fees incurred by the alleged infringer, along with damages.

Essentially, the NFL is now in violation of the same law that it is using to try to protect its own content. And, instead of following the proper procedures outlined in the DMCA, the NFL appears to be choosing to beat her over the head with takedown requests. Would this be happening if YouTube was not caught in the middle, hosting the clip for Seltzer? There is no way to know, but it seems that the trend du jour is for content owners to target YouTube with these requests, knowing that YouTube is likely to comply immediately and ask questions later. But Seltzer isn't likely to let this issue rest now, and seems more than happy to continue pushing back on the issue until it goes to court. It's hard to imagine that a court would do anything but decide in Seltzer's favor, and if that were to happen, it may force content owners to be more cautious about sending takedown notices in the future.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...sanctions.html





Congress Must Make Clear Copyright Laws To Protect Consumers

Here comes another in the long line of lawsuits between media companies and Internet companies over who gets to distribute content. This time it's Viacom, the enormously rich owner of properties like Paramount Pictures and Comedy Central, suing Google, the enormously rich owner of YouTube.

The issue: Viacom wants to get paid more than Google wants to pay it for all of those fuzzy, two-minute clips from programs like "The Daily Show" that users post to YouTube. The companies tried to negotiate a deal, but the talks failed, so Viacom is suing for $1 billion.

I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea how this lawsuit will wind up. I suspect it is mainly a bargaining tactic by Viacom. But I know one thing: This fight isn't primarily about consumers and their rights, and its outcome won't necessarily make things better for Internet users.

Consumers won't be a party to this case any more than they were in the room when the latest major copyright law was passed by Congress. That law, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was enacted at the behest of record labels and movie studios. Their purpose was to stop people from using computers and the Internet to distribute digital copies of material to which they didn't hold either the copyright or a distribution license.

That idea makes sense. Unlike some Internet zealots, I believe that intellectual property is real and that some form of copyright is appropriate to protect it. I am against the unlicensed copying of DVDs for sale on street corners, or the mass uploading of songs to so-called sharing sites.

The Internet and technology companies managed to insert a clause in the DMCA sparing them from penalties for carrying copyright content on grounds they were just innocent conduits. That will be a big issue in the Viacom case. But consumers got no such get-out-of-jail-free card.LAW BLOG ON DMCA

A professor at Brooklyn Law is taking on the National Football League in a debate over what content can be legally posted on YouTube. Weigh in.

In fact, the DMCA, and other recent laws and regulations passed under pressure from media companies, are pretty hostile when it comes to consumers. They turn essentially innocent actions into unlawful behavior, because they define copyright infringement too broadly. They have given rise to a technology called Digital Rights Management that causes too many hassles for honest people and discriminates against the new digital forms of distribution.

Even Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who created a DRM system for music that actually has worked, recently called for an end to copy protection of legally sold music, mainly because the record labels apply that protection only to online sales, not to physical compact discs.

Most honest people wouldn't consider it piracy to buy a CD, copy it to a computer and email one of the song files to a spouse or friend. But the record industry, backed by the laws it essentially wrote, does. Most honest people wouldn't think that uploading to YouTube a two-minute TV clip, which they paid their cable company to receive, is piracy. But Viacom, backed by the laws its industry essentially wrote, is demanding that Google remove all such clips.

To be fair, Viacom, unlike the misguided record labels, isn't suing the actual consumers who posted these clips. It's suing Google because it claims Google is making money from them and refusing to pay for that privilege.

Google isn't blameless here, either. It does make money, at least indirectly, from other companies' copyright material, for which it didn't pay, even though it has negotiated some paid deals and says it is willing to negotiate others. And while Google says it diligently removes all copyright clips for which it hasn't secured paid rights, every YouTube visitor knows that this system is, at best, imperfect.

As a nonlawyer, I think these clips seem like "fair use," an old copyright concept that seems to have weakened under the advent of the new laws. Under fair use, as most nonlawyers have understood it, you could quote this sentence in another publication without permission, though you'd need the permission of the newspaper to reprint the entire column or a large part of it. A two-minute portion of a 30-minute TV show seems like the same thing to me.

But why should I have to guess about that? What consumers need is real clarity on the whole issue of what is or isn't permissible use of the digital content they have legally obtained. And that can come only from Congress. Congress is the real villain here, for having failed to pass a modern copyright law that protects average consumers, not just big content companies.

We need a new digital copyright law that would draw a line between modest sharing of a few songs or video clips and the real piracy of mass distribution. We need a new law that would define fair use for the digital era and lay out clearly the rights of consumers who pay for digital content, as well as the rights and responsibilities of Internet companies.

If you don't like all of the restrictions on the use of digital content, the solution isn't to steal the stuff. A better course is to pressure Congress to pass a new copyright law, one that protects the little guy and the Internet itself.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...main_tff_t op





Surveillance

F.B.I. Is Warned Over Its Misuse of Data Collection
Scott Shane

House Republicans joined Democrats on Tuesday in warning the F.B.I. that it could lose the power to demand that companies turn over customers’ telephone, e-mail and financial records if it did not swiftly correct abuses in the use of national security letters, the investigative tool that allows the bureau to make such demands without a judge’s approval.

The warnings came at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee into a recent report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine. The report found that the F.B.I. had repeatedly violated the rules governing the letters, sometimes by invoking emergency procedures to exercise them when there was no emergency, and had bungled record keeping so badly that the number of letters exercised was often understated when the bureau reported on them to Congress.

“I just want to convey to you how upset many of us are who have defended this program and have believed it is necessary to the protection of our country,” Representative Dan Lungren, Republican of California, told Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau’s general counsel.

If the handling of national security letters is not improved soon, added Mr. Lungren, a former California attorney general, the bureau will not “have to worry about improving your procedures for N.S.L.’s because you probably won’t have N.S.L. authority.”

Representative Darrell Issa, also a California Republican, said he was “shocked” by the bureau’s transgressions and suggested that they might have broken the law.

“If what was done was done by a private-sector individual, wouldn’t the F.B.I. be arresting them?” Mr. Issa asked. “Wouldn’t the U.S. attorneys be prosecuting people who played fast and loose with these rules?”

Mr. Fine replied that the question of whether laws were broken “depends on the intent involved and what happened.” He said that while his investigation had found sweeping problems resulting from “mistakes, carelessness, confusion, sloppiness, lack of training, lack of adequate guidance and lack of adequate oversight,” it had not found proof of deliberate wrongdoing.

Ms. Caproni did not take issue with the findings.

“I can tell you that we’ve had a lot of soul-searching at the F.B.I.” since the inspector general placed “an F on our report card,” she said.

Ms. Caproni said officials of the bureau believed that the problems might result in part from the secrecy that cloaks the use of national security letters, which are exercised most often in counterterrorism investigations. Unlike criminal cases, in which any F.B.I. misconduct is likely to be discovered by defense lawyers and federal judges, national security investigations are rarely subject to outside scrutiny, she said.

“That imposes upon us a far higher obligation,” she said, “to make sure that we have a vigorous compliance system, that we have in place the training that is necessary.”

On Friday, the F.B.I.’s internal inspection division began an audit of the use of national security letters in all 56 field offices and announced that such reviews would be undertaken regularly. Bureau officials say new guidelines and training and a computerized tracking system for the letters will be in place later this year.

The Judiciary Committee chairman, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, called the F.B.I.’s misuse of the letters “a serious breach of trust” and said the bureau had “converted this tool into a handy shortcut to illegally gather vast amounts of private information.”

Mr. Conyers has long been a fierce critic of the Bush administration. But the outspoken criticism from Republicans at the hearing was striking. One of them, Representative Tom Feeney of Florida, told Ms. Caproni, “This isn’t right, and it can’t continue.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/wa.../21fbi.html?hp





Official Alerted F.B.I. to Rules Abuse 2 Years Ago, Lawyer Says
Edmund L. Andrews

Almost two years before the Federal Bureau of Investigation publicly admitted this month that it had ignored its own rules when demanding telephone and financial records about private citizens, a top official in that program warned the bureau about widespread lapses, his lawyer said on Sunday.

The official, Bassem Youssef, who is in charge of the bureau’s Communications Analysis Unit, said he discovered frequent legal lapses and raised concerns with superiors soon after he was assigned to the unit in early 2005.

Stephen M. Kohn, the lawyer for Mr. Youssef, said his client told his superiors that the bureau had frequently failed to document an urgent national security need — proving “exigent circumstances,” in the bureau’s language — when obtaining personal information without a court order through the use of “national security letters.”

Mr. Youssef said his superiors had initially minimized the scope of the problem and the likely violation of laws intended to protect privacy, Mr. Kohn said.

“He identified the problems in 2005, shortly after he became unit chief,” Mr. Kohn said. “As in other matters, he was met with apathy and resistance.”

Mr. Youssef’s criticisms were first reported on Sunday by The Washington Post, which also cited internal e-mail messages in which Justice Department officials had discussed the legal lapses surrounding national security letters.

Mr. Youssef, born in Egypt, is suing the bureau for discrimination, charging that senior officials improperly suspected his loyalties in part because of his Egyptian origins.

On March 9, the inspector general for the Justice Department sharply criticized the F.B.I. over its heavy use of national security letters, saying it had found many instances in which the bureau had improperly and sometimes illegally used them to demand personal records from telephone companies, Internet service providers, credit companies and other businesses.

The report has provoked angry reactions from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, some of whom have charged that the bureau ran roughshod over civil liberties.

Unlike a search warrant, which must be approved by a judge, a national security letter can be approved by the agent in charge of a local F.B.I. office. The bureau has issued more than 20,000 such letters since it received authority under the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act of 2001.

One of the report’s biggest criticisms was that top bureau officials signed off on many of the demands for information without properly justifying a specific national security need, like a clear link to a specific counterterrorism investigation. Mr. Kohn said that Mr. Youssef had had a long familiarity with national security letters from earlier work on counterterrorism investigations, and that he began reviewing recent letters and spotting legal deficiencies almost immediately.

“It was the same issue that was in the inspector general’s report,” Mr. Kohn said Sunday. “They didn’t have the proper legal justifications in writing to back up their searches.”

One of the F.B.I.’s few fluent Arabic speakers, Mr. Youssef won the Director of Central Intelligence Award in 1995 for his work infiltrating the Islamic group led by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is now serving a life sentence in prison on charges tied to the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993. From 1996 to 2000, Mr. Youssef was the Justice’s Department’s legal attaché to Saudi Arabia, where he won praise for his work with Saudi officials on investigations of the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1996.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/wa.../19letter.html





FBI Issues New Rules For Getting Phone Records
John Solomon

The FBI, which has been criticized for improperly gathering telephone records in terrorism cases, has told its agents they may still ask phone companies to voluntarily hand over toll records in emergencies by using a new set of procedures, officials said yesterday. In the most dire emergencies, requests can be submitted to the companies verbally, officials said.

This month, the bureau sent field agents a new "emergency letter" template for seeking the records, shortly before the public release of a report by the Justice Department's inspector general that documented abuses of emergency phone-records collection by counterterrorism agents, officials said. That report created a furor on Capitol Hill and prompted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to take personal responsibility.

The report documented instances in which agents gathered phone records between 2003 and 2005 using emergency powers when no emergencies existed. It also reported that agents did not follow basic legal requirements, such as certifying that requests for phone records were connected to authorized FBI investigations.

New rules from the FBI general counsel's office tell agents they are to limit emergency requests for phone records to the most dire situations, in which the loss of life or bodily harm is believed to be imminent. They are to document carefully the circumstances surrounding the request.

Agents also have been relieved of a paperwork burden that was at the heart of past problems, officials said.

Under past procedures, agents sent "exigent circumstances letters" to phone companies, seeking toll records by asserting there was an emergency. Then they were expected to issue a grand jury subpoena or a "national security letter," which legally authorized the collection after the fact. Agents often did not follow up with that paperwork, the inspector general's investigation found.

The new instructions tell agents there is no need to follow up with national security letters or subpoenas. The agents are also told that the new letter template is the preferred method in emergencies but that they may make requests orally, with no paperwork sent to phone companies. Such oral requests have been made over the years in terrorism and kidnapping cases, officials said.

"Emergencies will still come up. If we have a child kidnapping or a 'ticking bomb' terrorist threat, we will ask the telecommunications carriers to provide records under the authority provided by law," said FBI Assistant Director John Miller. The new procedures, he said, will include "an audit trail to ensure we are doing it the right way."

The new guidance to agents cites a provision in federal law allowing a telephone provider to voluntarily turn over phone records to law enforcement figures "in good faith" if they "believe that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay," a senior FBI official said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031901775.html





ISPs Could be Forced to Police User Behavior in Europe
Nate Anderson

The EU is moving closer to adoption of a new law that makes many forms of intellectual property infringement criminal rather than civil offenses. The first version of the new IP law, IPRED, did not contain criminal penalties, but those penalties show up again in a new version of the legislation, commonly called IPRED2. Consumer advocates worry that vague wording will make ISPs responsible for pirated files passing through their networks.

In a vote today, the European Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee adopted a set of amendments to the proposed legislation rather than discarding it, as some MEPs wanted. The Criminal Sanctions Directive now enforces piracy and counterfeiting laws with enhanced criminal protections, though the law does not currently apply to patents.

Just before the vote, Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure's (FFII) Ante Wessels commented that US content owners were pushing the bill. "Unfortunately," he wrote, "one strong pressure group is quite happy with this turn of events: Hollywood and the music industry. They want to equate the younger music-downloading generation with industrial pirates, and let the police take over prosecutions which hurt their public image. They push for the weakest possible definitions, in order to criminalize end users and hold software providers liable. Hollywood has been calling Members of the Legal Affairs Committee daily."

But Hollywood didn't get its way. Copyrights, trademarks, and designs are protected with fines and jail time, but they apply only to "commercial" infringement. An amendment adopted by the committee states that "this would exclude acts carried out by private users for personal and not for profits purposes." This doesn't appear to make file-sharing legal, though, as current civil laws still seem to apply. Criminal penalties might be leveled at ISPs, though, depending on how courts interpret the law.

After the vote, the FFII expressed its displeasure. "By not making a distinction between piracy and other infringements, the Commission creates bizarre consequences," it said. "It is impossible to write software without violating patents. A whole industry will be criminalized. Microsoft has been violating many patents, and had to pay huge damages. With this directive, we could see Bill Gates in prison."

That's because one of the new amendments to the bill makes "aiding or abetting and inciting such infringements" worthy of criminal prosecution. "Incitement" is a tricky word, and could be applied to both P2P software and to ISPs who refuse to block, say, BitTorrent connections. The language is vague and could be applied to many situations at the discretion of the courts.

This sort of thing is a real concern to ISPs. Late last year, a Danish court forced ISP Tele2 to block AllofMP3.com, essentially forcing the ISP to take responsibility for enforcing IP laws. Should the new directive pass Parliamentary scrutiny, other European ISPs might starting blocking access to services and web sites in the hopes of staying out of the courtroom.

The EU legislation does include a protection for consumer fair use rights, but it fails to define "piracy," "incitement," and other key terms, leaving detractors to wonder just how the law would end up being used.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...in-europe.html





Swedish Internet Surveillance Law Stalled

Privacy advocates get some breathing room on vast expansion
Anders Lotsson and Marcus Jerräng

The Swedish Social Democratic Party said Monday that it will block a bill authorizing extensive surveillance of e-mail and other Internet communications.

Although the announcement was welcomed by privacy advocates, it delays but does not permanently block the bill. The Social Democrats, being a minority in Parliament, can only postpone the vote on the FRA bill for one year. They're supported by the Green Party and the Left Party.

Commentators also question the sincerity of the Social Democratic spokesman on legal matters, Thomas Bodström, who announced the block. As minister of justice until last year's elections, which brought a non-Social Democrat cabinet into power, Mr. Bodström himself introduced a number of laws authorizing snooping on private communications. The bill that he has now advised his fellow Social Democrats to block was initiated, although not completed, while he was still in charge.

The bill would give the National Defense Radio Establishment, known by its Swedish acronym FRA, the right to intercept all Internet communications crossing Sweden's borders.

Until recently, the FRA was a little-known government agency, listening in on military and diplomatic radio communications from all over the world. From the FRA's point of view, Internet surveillance is an obvious extension of the agency's traditional activities. The bad guys, the agency insists, whether they're terrorists, spies, politicians or common criminals, don't use radio much any more, they use the Internet.

But despite FRA officials' insistence that the FRA has no interest in reading the private e-mails of Swedish citizens, the bill created an uproar. Newspaper editorials across the political spectrum denounced the FRA bill as a threat to privacy.

Obviously, because of how the Internet is designed, a large percentage of even e-mails between Swedes will pass the border at some point. And if it crosses the border, FRA has the right to intercept it.

Although the main sponsor of the bill, defense minister Mikael Odenberg of the Moderate party, will be able to depend on most, if not all, members of parliament from the governing four-party coalition to loyally vote for it, there is much unease among legislators.

"There is an obvious danger for misuse of signals intelligence," said Allan Widman of the Liberal party, which is part of the government coalition. "This is not only a matter of adapting to new technology," he added. "E-mails are the letters of our times. So it's a widening of the scope."

"The FRA will be authorized to collect intelligence on any vital political question. But can we actually solve environmental problems by intercepting e-mails?" Peter Eriksson of the Green Party, which is not part of the governing coalition, said. "Would we like to live in a state with unlimited rights to monitor and supervise everything we do? Can we trust the government? Experience teaches us not to."

The Council of Legislation, a nonpolitical official body of judges that pronounces on the legality of proposed legislation, has criticized the FRA bill severely. This caused the Department of Justice to make some edits, but the bill was not retracted.

Critics fear that the intelligence gathered by the FRA will not only be used by Swedish military and diplomats, but that sensitive information on Swedish citizens will be passed on to foreign intelligence services.

"We can't impose this on Swedish citizens," said Thomas Bodström as he announced his proposal to block the bill. "The bill isn't balanced and neglects the right to due process. The minister of defense says that there will be no actual change, but I won't be fooled. The mandate of military intelligence is extended to the field of law enforcement. It includes arms dealing and trafficking - regular crimes."
http://computerworld.com/action/arti...&intsrc=kc_top





Public to Shape Smart Tag Policy
Mark Ward

The stakeholders may eventually draft new regulations to police the tags, but, for now, the commission proposes no new laws to govern their use.

"We must not over-regulate RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)," said Viviane Reding, information society and media commissioner, during a news conference at the Cebit show, where the results of the 12-month consultation were unveiled.

Ms Reding said the market for the radio tags had to be given the chance to grow without interference from the European Commission.

"Europe is very strong in this domain," said Ms Reding. "I think we are in the driving seat."

Surveillance

Smart radio tags typically unite a small chunk of computer memory with a radio transmitter. Businesses see huge advantages to labelling goods with these tags as they will streamline delivery networks and help manage stocks on shelves.

Ms Reding said that smart tags had already generated about 500m euros (£340m) in revenues across Europe, and this was expected to grow to more than 7bn euros (£4.7bn) within 10 years.

Ms Reding warned that heavy-handed regulation could stunt this growth.

Instead, she said, industry had to get the chance to "go for it".

"It's the whole application of these chips to solve problems in our society that will be of the utmost importance," she said.

"But, we must also make the industry be aware of the fact that the 'internet of things' has to become an 'internet for people'."

The RFID Stakeholder Group will help to oversee the growing use of smart radio tags and look into ways for consumers to protect themselves from the potential casual surveillance that they make possible.

Good or bad?

Ms Reding said the group would aim to produce recommendations by the end of 2008. These could include amendments to existing e-privacy directives or guidelines for businesses on how RFID tags can be used when they affect consumers.

While businesses using RFID tags to mark such things as shipping containers may not have to think about consumers, others will have to take this into account, said Ms Reding. She cited the example of German retail giant Metro, which had run trials in which shoppers deactivated any tags on the goods they had bought at the checkout.

Ms Reding said the stakeholder group would also drive European Commission efforts to educate people about smart tags and their potential uses.

One of the most striking results from the year-long consultation, she said, was the 60% of respondents who said they simply did not know enough about the technology to know whether it would be good or bad.

Despite this, 55% of the respondents to the consultation said regulations would be needed to police the use of the tags.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6453931.stm




DCoT Helps Find Lost Child
Tim Fehlman

A recent comment from Erik made my day! It seems that he has found a unique way to use the Lost Drive application that recently appeared in Popular Science. Erik writes:

This little program saved my wife and I a lot of of grief and emotional trauma while on vacation. Read on.

I am a PopSci reader and linked to DCoT via the mag. My family, which includes two VERY energetic boys, five and three, went to Disneyland for a little get-a-way. Before we went I told my wife about the ‘I’m Lost’ program that one can install on a jump drive.

We decided to buy three 32Mb drives, which are a dime a dozen nowadays, one for each boy and one for us with the same program and ’secret phrase’ on it. We also included our cellphone numbers. Two lanyards with dangling USB drives that had a ‘I’m Lost’ label adhered to them and tucked into their shirts later, we had two boys that if got lost would be found and be reunited with us quickly.

We told the boys to cry for mom or dad if they wander off or got lost and then give the USB drive to the person that found them.

Our three year old did just what we thought he would do - Disappeared. Within 13 minutes of being ‘lost’ though, my cellphone rang. My three year old whom we thought didn’t understand what we told him about the funny thing around his neck actually did what we told him. The account from our boys ‘finder’ was humorous and panned out like this: My little redheaded boy was SCREAMING for his mom. The ‘finder’ came to help him, the boy showed the ‘finder’ the labelled USB drive, the ‘finder’ then brought him to security, security plugged the USB drive in to his computer, saw the message and called me on my cellphone. When we went to retrieve our boy the security guard asked for our USB drive with the secret phrase on it. The USB drives performed just as set up to. It had my cellphone number, my boys’ first name (first name only!) to calm him down and his favorite treat.

To say the least, D-land security was very impressed and the ‘finder’ equally impressed and my redhead boy was wearing M&M’s on his lips and chin.

There it is. Not only can you retrieve lost USB drives with this you can also find lost kids. Thank you!

First of all, I’m really glad to hear that everyone is safe and sound. The biggest fear that I have is that something will happen to my kids. That must have been the longest 13 minutes of your life!

Second, that is a really cool way of using the application. I had never thought of it in that way but it is definitely something that I would consider setting up for my kids.

Third, this really makes my day. There are times when we all wonder whether or not we are making a difference in the world. Well, I sure don’t feel that way today! Thank you for sharing your story and I wish all the best for you and your family!
http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/0...nd-lost-child/





Vehicle Warning System Trialled
Mark Ward

Vehicles may soon be swapping information about road conditions to warn drivers about jams and dangers.

A German research project on show at hi-tech trade fair Cebit envisions a peer-to-peer network for vehicles on a road passing data back and forth.

Cars or bikes experiencing problems would pass data that would ripple down the chain of vehicles behind them.

Information would be conveyed to drivers via a dashboard screen or through a mobile phone headset.

Dr Anselm Blocher - a researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence who is co-ordinating the project - said the ad hoc communication system could mean that drivers found out about dangers or jams ahead much more quickly than they do now.

For spotting dangers and jams, the system would use data from sensors that were likely to be fitted to cars, bikes and trucks in the future, Dr Blocher added.

For example, cars could spot oil on the road by combining temperature readings with wheel traction information, he said.

A wheel slipping on the road even though the temperature was not low enough for frost or ice would suggest oil or another slippery substance was present.

Once a car detected this sort of danger, information about it would be generated and passed down the line of vehicles approaching the patch of oil.

"When the motorbike comes after to the point of danger, information has been spread out by wireless network and the danger will be propagated to the driver in the motorbike," said Dr Blocher.

Dashboard warning

The system was smart enough to recognise how busy a driver was and would adjust warnings to take account of the "cognitive load" a driver was under, he said.

If a driver was executing a series of fast manoeuvres, such as a motorbike driver leaning to go fast round a bend, the system would not use a blaring alarm to warn them of the upcoming oil patch.

Instead, he said, it might generate a warning on the dashboard of the bike or mark the danger point on a digital map.

By contrast, if a driver was driving at low speed along a straight road, the system may use visual cues on a dashboard screen as well as telling the driver about the problem via a headset.

As well as giving information about dangers, drivers could also ask the SmartWeb system for information about traffic jams, speed traps, parking availability and other problems in natural language.

Starting a query would kick off a web search for the area a car was travelling through which would generates requests to vehicles ahead or nearby.

The SmartWeb project is being co-ordinated by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence but has 16 other partners including BMW, Siemens, Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Telekom and the European Media Lab.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6461831.stm





US Customs Seizes YouTube Records in Drug and Death Threat Investigation

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency executed a search warrant against YouTube and Hotmail as part of an investigation against a drug trafficker who was threatening the life of his brother, Google Watch has learned.

The drug trafficker, who was arrested in May, 2005 at the Mexico/California border after agents found 25.3 kilograms of cocaine (about 56 pounds) in the spare tire of his 2003 Chevy Silverado, is suspected of sending death threats to his brother via YouTube's video e-mail service.

According to the search warrant, the death threats were sent after the brother assisted Customs' officers by informing them that the drug trafficker -- who was living with his mother post-arrest -- had falsified information relating to his sentencing, and that the trafficker was bragging about "pulling one over on the government."

But instead of sending the threats directly to his brother, the trafficker -- apparently a YouTube member -- sent them to his brother's son, who has a Hotmail account.

The search warrant, executed March 16, requests "all images, text messages and other from any and all YouTube accounts associated with" the drug trafficker's name. The search warrant also requests records from Hotmail pertaining to the death threat recipient.

"YouTube complies with valid U.S. legal process," a YouTube spokesperson said via e-mail. "As a matter of policy we generally do not publicly discuss legal matters."

The first threat arrived January 24, 2007. The e-mail read (identifying names and e-mail addresses have been removed):

FROM: YouTube Service
To: XXXXXX@hotmail.com
Subject: XXXXXX sent you a video!
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:32:49-0800 (PST)

The email included a hyperlink to a video (since removed) and a description of that video which, translated into English from Spanish, read: "here is presented a video pertaining to Valentin Elizalde's cause of death, and this song and video was made at the behest of El Chapo Guzman and is dedicated to his enemies..."

The video included images of people who were apparently assassinated by gunfire. The personal message read: "Your dad needs to see this video before he makes phone calls. Thanks, XXXXXX."

The personal message was signed by a screen name that mimicked the name of the known drug trafficker.

The following day the son received another video e-mail depicting an assassination, followed by another personal message in Spanish. The translated message read: "Young man: Give this message to your dad: Listen Mr. XXXX, if you fuck us, we will fuck you with all our might. Think about it well man. The Gulf." The message was signed by the same screen name.

According to the search warrant the drug trafficker's mother, upon learning of the brother's involvement with Customs, threatened to disinherit the brother if he continued to work with the government against the family.

Although it is unclear whether the drug trafficker is associated with Mexican drug cartels, those cartels have been taunting each other with YouTube videos in recent months.
http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content...stigation.html





Indicted Lawyer Wants Charge Dismissed, Saying Feds Overreached
John Christoffersen

A prominent defense attorney charged with destroying evidence in a child pornography investigation said Thursday authorities are overreaching, expanding a law in a way that could make parents, employers and others vulnerable to such prosecutions.

Philip Russell was charged Feb. 16 with destroying a computer that contained child pornography at Christ Church in Greenwich. Former President George H.W. Bush attended the church while growing up and funeral services for his parents were held there.

Russell, the former attorney for the church, is accused of obstructing an FBI investigation that led to the January conviction of the church's music director, Robert Tate, for possessing child pornography.

Russell was charged under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which Congress passed in 2002 after a wave of corporate accounting scandals to make it easier to prosecute such cases. He faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted.

Russell filed court papers Thursday urging a judge to dismiss a count that involves the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, saying the law was meant to prevent corporate document shredding.

The law made it easier to prosecute obstruction of justice by requiring only that an investigation was foreseeable rather than already pending.

If the government's view of the law is correct, many others could face obstruction charges, Russell contends.

"A parent who finds pictures of 'naked boys' in his/her child's backpack would also face a 20-year federal felony for obstruction ... if he/she throws the pictures out to insulate the child from future legal difficulties," wrote Russell's attorney, Robert Casale.

"Similarly, if the government is correct, an employer who finds child pornography on the computer of an employee who has just retired after decades of loyal service would be committing an act of obstruction if he/she deletes these images from the computer to spare all concerned unseemly embarrassment and possible prosecution," Casale wrote.

While legal experts agree that lawyers can't destroy evidence, they are concerned that prosecutors' use of the federal law will pressure defense attorneys to betray their clients' confidences and report potential evidence to authorities or risk prosecution themselves.

Russell acknowledges he destroyed the computer, but says he had no reason to believe the matter was under investigation or that it would lead to an investigation.

"Phil Russell's conduct may have been ill-conceived, but it was not criminal," Casale wrote.

Prosecutors declined to comment on the latest court papers, but have defended Russell's indictment.

"Those who possess child pornography or hinder the prosecution of those who do by destroying evidence and impeding investigations will be prosecuted, particularly when the obstructionists are attorneys and officers of the court," U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor said last month.

The trial in April could spell the end of a career for Russell, whose recent clients included Andrew Kissel, a wealthy Greenwich developer charged in a multi-million dollar real estate fraud case. Kissell was found slain in his home last year days before he was to plead guilty.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...03-22-19-03-53





Access to High-Speed Internet is an Economic Matter
Art Brodsky

The big telephone and cable companies have a secret. The leadership of the Maryland House of Delegates is perfectly willing to let them keep it, taking the side of the two companies which in recent days each raised their rates while supposedly competing against each other, rather than help consumers by taking an action to help spur competition in Maryland broadband services.

There is no dispute that the Internet has become as valuable to most people as electricity or telephone service. By any measure, access to the Internet opens up a whole range of new opportunities, from students doing homework, to entrepreneurs developing new products to people who work from home.

But not everyone’s Internet access is equal any more. Some places, like my neighborhood in Olney, have been outfitted with the newest and fastest optical fiber from Verizon, to go along with Comcast’s Internet service. But other neighborhoods around the state have to make do with the old dial-up service, which was fine 15 years ago, but doesn’t work well today with newer, more complicated Web sites offering video and music and other features.

Not long ago, a constituent asked Del. Herman Taylor (D-Dist. 14) of Ashton why her neighborhood was stuck with the slow Internet service while others had the good stuff. Taylor tried to find which neighborhoods were being served and which weren’t. He discovered there was no good information. The statistics collected by the Federal Communications Commission are meaningless. And, Taylor had concerns about some areas being left out of the high-speed Internet evolution in an electronic red-lining.

So, being a responsive legislator, he introduced a bill (HB-1069) — which was later pulled from consideration — requiring any companies offering high-speed Internet service (also known as broadband) to report to the Public Service Commission where the service is being offered. The PSC, in turn, would post those reports online.

The Attorney General’s office thought the reporting was a good idea, saying in a letter to Del. Mary Anne Love (D-Dist. 32) of Glen Burnie that ‘‘the public availability of such information could arguably advance competition.” It would advance competition throughout the state as consumers could see whether they were going to be favored with the best service.

But Verizon and Comcast didn’t like the idea of having to make public where they would put their improved services, so they launched an attack. While they called the reporting requirements ‘‘onerous,” they muddied the issue by directing their ire at another part of the bill that suggested that companies offering high-speed Internet service do so without playing favorites, as the states being served by AT&T will be required to do as a condition of that company’s merger with BellSouth. It was only a ‘‘finding” or suggestion, because state legislatures don’t have the authority regulate the Internet. There was no regulation involved.

Yet, at an Economic Matters Committee hearing, Verizon and Comcast representatives made charges that the bill would regulate the Internet, cost jobs, stop innovation and even close down coffee houses. None of that was true. The committee members should have known it, but instead they listened to the scare stories, ignoring all the e-mails and calls from people who wanted to know where they were in the Internet pecking order.

If you want to see the future of the Maryland economy, you need to know where, when and how broadband is growing. The bill was within the authority of the state to collect information about services being offered in the state. But according to the House, Verizon and Comcast and their lobbyists know best. Apparently it wasn’t enough of an economic matter.
http://www.gazette.net/stories/03160...09_32327.shtml





Beef Up Your Wireless Router
Josh Kuo

Sure you have one. Everyone nowadays has at least one wireless router at home, be it Linksys, NetGear, D-Link, or Buffalo. With new wireless products being released nearly every month, I am willing to bet that some of you even have a couple of the older wireless routers collecting dust in your closet. Well, it’s time to take them out and put them to good use.

Check out the OpenWRT project. OpenWRT is a Linux distribution for embedded devices, and it brings a lot of exciting possibilities to your humble wireless router. Although still in its release candidate stage (currently at RC6), OpenWRT is very usable and feature-rich right out of the box. Be warned, you could void your manufacturer warranty by installing OpenWRT on your wireless routers.

So what can you do with an embedded Linux device running on limited RAM and very small storage? As it turns out, quite a lot actually. You can install asterisk, and have your personal, customizable PBX (private branch exchange). If you already have a SIP phone or some kind of VoIP phone interface (such as the Cisco ATA 186 adapter), you can have your very own VoIP system at home, all running out of your low power-consumption embedded hardware.

Put your router/firewall on steroids by installing packages like nmap (network security scanner), snort (intrusion detection), and tcpdump (packet sniffer). Together with iptables (which comes with the Linux kernel), you can turn your OpenWRT box into a powerful security tool. Install openvpn, and you have a very affordable VPN device. And if it strikes your fancy, you can install quagga and turn your dusty little Linksys into an OSPF and BGP-capable router.

Want to provide your own wireless hotspot? No problem. Install chillispot, and you are ready to go. You can even install FreeRADIUS on the OpenWRT for the authentication back-end, and WPA (wifi protected access) for the added security.

You can turn it into an all purpose office server by installing DHCP, cups (print server), lighthttpd (web server), NTP (time server) and OpenSSH or dropbear (secure remote administration). If your router has a USB port, you can also turn it into a file server by hooking it up with a USB hard drive and installing NFS.

And don’t forget that this is a wireless router. It has a wireless card, so take advantage of it! Install kismet on it, and you have a wireless sniffer. This can prove to be invaluable if you ever need to analyze the airwaves at a remote location, but don’t want to leave your expensive laptop on-site. Drop in place a $50 OpenWRT box loaded with kismet instead.

Here is one way to use your old wireless router: In the past, I had setup a few cheap Linksys WRT54g boxes with OpenWRT and vtun, and dropped one at each of our remote locations. This gave me the ability to have layer 2 tunnels to each of the remote sites. I kept one in my house, and if I ever needed to troubleshoot a remote network problem, I just setup the tunnel between the two OpenWRT boxes, connected my laptop or testing equipment to the OpenWRT sitting on my desk, and it was like being on the remote physical network! This saved me a number of times, being able to perform packet capturing on the remote network, observing the network traffic in real-time, requesting and obtaining DHCP addresses… essentially, I could experience exactly what the remote user was experiencing, all from the comfort of my own home.

This is just the beginning of what embedded Linux can do for you. To find out more what embedded Linux can do fo r your enterprise, check out Secure Linux Appliances in Your Enterprise. So dig up your old wireless router, check it against the hardware compatibility list, and see if your router is OpenWRT compatible, and open yourself up to a wrt of possibilities!
http://www.qbangsolutions.com/blog/i...reless-router/





Enormous Database of Wifi Routers - Including Yours!

Summary: Quite a few people have by now read about AOL's new Skyhook "Near Me" buddys plug-in. That's the plugin for the service which lets you know if any of your buddies are geographically near to you, and puts them in a "Near Me" buddies group. But what far fewer people realize is exactly how it works. How does it know when you are near one of your buddies? The answer may surprise - and concern - you.

Quite a few people have by now read about AOL’s new Skyhook “Near Me” buddy plugin. That’s the plug-in for the service which lets you know if any of your buddies are geographically near to you, and puts them in a “Near Me” buddies group.

But what far fewer people realize is exactly how it works. How does it know when you are geographically near one of your buddies?

The answer may surprise - and concern - you.

The underlying technology is provided by Skyhook Wireless. According to news sources, Skyhook has spent the past several years “driving a fleet of 200 trucks up and down the streets of 2,500 cities and towns across the United States and Canada,” mapping every single wireless router. Not just commercial hotspot routers. They openly admit that their trucks “scan for the pulse given off at least once a second by every home wireless router or commercial hotspot, recording the unique identifying code for that piece of Wi-Fi equipment.”

Then, that code - of your home wireless router - “is correlated with the exact physical location where it was captured using GPS in the trucks, which cruise the streets at 15 to 50 miles (24 to 80 kilometers) per hour as they collect this information.”

Just in case the picture isn’t clear, let me paint it for you:

Skyhook’s trucks have been cruising your street, have identified your home wireless router by its unique code that only your home wifi has - and is correlating it with your location using GPS.

And then they put it in a databse

Yep, Skyhook has what has got to be the largest database of wifi access points - public and private - anywhere. According to reports, the database has 16 million wifi access points “covering an area where Skyhook says 70 percent of the U.S. population lives and six Canadian markets where the majority of that nation’s people live.” Including you.

Including your wireless router.

At your home address.

How do you feel about that?

Oh, and the purpose of this database? Why, to make it available for commercial applications, of course.

Suddenly the issue of whether your computer is seeping data seems a lot more relevant, doesn’t it?
http://www.theinternetpatrol.com.nyu...k-announcement





US Company Offers Wi-Fi-Proof Paint

Tinfoil-hat brigade rejoices
Lewis Page

An American company says it has successfully tested wireless-blocking paint. EM-SEC Technologies, in a release last week, said its "Coating Solution", applied to a test facility, had successfully protected "wireless devices and other electronic equipment".

According to the company, "a one-time application of the coating creates an 'electromagnetic fortress' by preventing airborne hackers from intercepting signals".

EM-SEC reckon this would be useful for corporate offices, boardrooms, server and computer rooms, and R&D labs. It seems that wireless nets can be operated without trouble inside a painted building or room.

This latest launch by EM-SEC is an attempt to move into corporate security. Previously, the company has dealt more with government and military customers, earning some impressive validations. Its website claims that the coatings have been checked out by various groups including Sandia Labs and the Naval Surface Warfare Centre Crane Division (NSW-Crane develops and tests technology for the terribly-secret-yet-famous Navy SEAL special forces).

Perhaps even more significantly, the RF-proof paint is approved as a TEMPEST countermeasure by the US National Security Agency (NSA). Before wardrivers and Wi-Fi were ever heard of, security types were warning about TEMPEST vulns, where attackers sniff the emissions from kit which isn't even meant to communicate wirelessly. Depending on competence, equipment, and proximity TEMPEST attackers can supposedly lift info directly from unshielded electronics.

Of course, most black hats in the commercial world aren't in this league, and indeed it could be said that many corporate Wi-Fi users might do better to enable their built-in encryption than redecorate the office with radio-proof paint. Especially if they want to use their mobile phones, or look out of the window now and then.

Still, products like this seem bound to find a wide market. Cinemas or theatres might use such tech to cut off mobile phones, avoiding the legal issues around jamming.

Famous Wi-Fi-allergic latin teacher Michael Bevington might wish to paint his house or classroom with EM-SEC paint. Mobile mast antis could buy the product for use at home.

And, if EM-SEC could develop a body-paint version of the technology, they would no doubt have the tinfoil-hat tendency queuing round the block. Although they could face stiff competition in this latter arena from Clarins, which already markets an allegedly electromagnetism-proof anti-ageing cream. Clarins lacks the crucial NSA and Navy-SEAL endorsements, however, choosing instead to partner with ladies-smellies and designer togs purveyor Thierry Mugler.

One does note that EM-SEC already has RF-proof fabric at its disposal in addition to paint, offering a range of nifty laptop bags, phone holsters, etc. Could a collection of stylish headgear for the tinfoil-clad be on the cards?
http://www.theregister.com/2007/03/23/rf_proof_paint/





T r u e C r y p t
WebBlurb

Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP/2000 and Linux

Main Features:

Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.

Encrypts an entire hard disk partition or a storage device such as USB flash drive.

Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.

Provides two levels of plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:

1) Hidden volume (steganography – more information may be found here).

2) No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data).

Encryption algorithms: AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish. Mode of operation: LRW.

Further information regarding features of the software may be found in the documentation.
http://www.truecrypt.org/





Beyond the News, Reminders of the War
Alessandra Stanley

The hosts of “Today” and “Good Morning America” began yesterday on their feet, standing like evening news anchors alongside maps and images of Iraq — marking the fourth anniversary of the war by looking back at its disappointments. Images of roadside bombings and sectarian carnage flashed across the screen along with a clip of Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 saying that American troops would be “greeted as liberators.”

President Bush delivered a televised rebuttal with a live address to the nation. Standing in front of a long shelf of books in the Roosevelt Room, a stance meant to project wisdom more than power, Mr. Bush assured viewers that since the January troop increase, there were “some hopeful signs” on the ground.

The war has changed dramatically since the early, heady days of shock and awe. Television over the past four years has changed with it, not always for better but not necessarily for worse. Most Americans, spared tax increases, rationing or a draft, still have no direct sense of the war beyond the television set. When asked in January what sacrifices Americans have made, Mr. Bush replied, “They sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”

The networks, which covered the early days of the invasion on tiptoe, worried that their patriotism in the wake of 9/11 would be questioned, have grown more openly skeptical. But news programs are not the only place where viewers are exposed to the conflict in Iraq.

Since the invasion, and most particularly in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the war on terror has surfaced as a subplot or subliminal theme, not just on “24” or ripped-from-the-headline crime series like “Law & Order,” but even on reality shows and sitcoms. On NBC’s “30 Rock,” the network executive played by Alec Baldwin tells co-workers that he is dating Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Most of the shows echo the public’s disenchantment after Abu Ghraib and the military failures in Iraq.

Sometimes the Iraq conflict takes over an entire plotline: an episode of “Criminal Minds,” a CBS series about serial killers and psychopaths, turned its focus to a Muslim terrorist suspect being held at Guantánamo — without due process. (He is thrown on the floor of an interrogation room in his underpants, hands and feet bound by chains and his face bruised from beatings.)

Other times, references to the war pop up almost gratuitously. On CBS’s “Without a Trace,” an F.B.I. agent described a potentially disastrous pipe leak in the ocean as “the ecological equivalent of Iraq.”

Television shows process news events much faster than ever before, but not much more directly than they did at the time of “Hogan’s Heroes,” “M*A*S*H” or “China Beach.” They do not grapple any more straightforwardly with the larger issues of whether the war is right or wrong, or even try to paint the full reality of the war itself. “The Unit,” a CBS series about the derring-do of top-secret special forces, prefers to set its combat scenes elsewhere than Iraq, sometimes as close as Afghanistan, but more often Africa or Asia.

That could be because Steven Bochco’s “Over There,” a 13-episode series about soldiers fighting in Iraq, was not a hit. Shown on FX, it was the first television drama about the conflict, and hard to watch: a series that turned a war into entertainment while it was still being fought.

Producers and writers prefer a more elliptical approach, siphoning off the most dramatic and troubling elements. On ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters,” the drug-addicted youngest brother is a damaged veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Even “Grey’s Anatomy” wriggled its way into the war: Meredith’s half-sister, Molly, gave birth while her husband was in Iraq.

But most of all, shows write in references to torture and the abuse of prisoners, perhaps because those acts so sharply undermine the idealization of civil servants and servicemen on shows like “CSI” or “NCIS” on CBS. Fox’s “24” is a counterterrorism thriller that supports the notion that in the war against extremism, the use of torture is both necessary and effective. It’s the exception.

Last season “Sleeper Cell,” a series on Showtime, dramatized the opposite argument: the terrorist leader, Farik, sat in a C.I.A. prison, withstanding gruesome psychological and physical torture and taunting his captors about their ambivalence about such methods. “You Americans are so obsessed with yourselves,” Farik says, “that you care more about analyzing your guilt than achieving victory. That is why we will win, and you will lose.” (The C.I.A. outsources him to the less inhibited interrogators in Saudi Arabia.)

Torture is turned into a joke on “Saturday Night Live” or “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” as well as on the much discussed and now defunct Fox series “Arrested Development.” At the end of that sitcom’s run in 2006, two Bluth brothers traveled to Baghdad to seek their other brother’s release from an Iraqi prison. “It’s U.S.-run,” one says. “God knows what they are doing to him.”

The topic is anything but funny on dramas. On NBC’s “Heroes” two Los Angeles police officers race to interview a suspect unfairly tagged as a Muslim extremist. “He’s got one hour before Homeland Security sends him down the rabbit hole as a suspected terrorist,” an officer says.

Crime series have long dramatized the tensions between police officers and the F.B.I., but over the past four years the F.B.I.’s handling — or mishandling — of the terrorist threat has provided new fodder for conflict. On TNT’s show “The Closer,” the F.B.I. tries to take over a homicide case from the Los Angeles Police Department, arguing that the murder is a matter of “national security.” An Iranian suspect tells an agent that he has legal rights. “Really?” the agent replies. “You might want to take a closer look at the Patriot Act.”

Americans don’t watch the news as closely as they should, but the news has a way of closing in on popular culture.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/ar...on/20watc.html





Hot But Virtuous Is an Unlikely Match for an Online Dating Service
Brad Stone

The women who appear in Web ads for the dating site True.com almost certainly do not need to look online for a date.

The buxom and often barely dressed models, posing next to slogans like “It’s nice to be naughty,” are plastered across the Internet these days, and are hard to avoid on the social networking site MySpace.

In part because of its provocative ads, True.com, based in Irving, Tex., has seemingly come out of nowhere to become one of the most visited sites in the $700 million-a-year online dating industry, attracting 3.8 million people last month.

True’s rise has been controversial. The company has riled competitors like Match.com and Yahoo Personals, which say that True’s lowbrow advertisements clash with its high-minded lobbying and legal efforts. True, which conducts criminal background checks on its subscribers, is the primary force behind a two-year-old campaign to get state legislatures to require that social Web sites prominently disclose whether or not they perform such checks.

True also says it is preparing to sue an ex-convict from Florida in Texas state court for violating its terms of service by joining the site.

“I want to make sure that our members have a wholesome environment for courtship,” said Herb Vest, True’s 63-year-old founder and chief executive.

Rivals dismiss the company’s piety as a play for publicity. They also assert that the company makes it especially difficult for users to cancel its $49.95-a-month service, and that it has a history of generating automated messages that appear to be flirtatious “winks” from other users.

“True is the controversial child in the Internet dating industry. They are loathed by everybody,” said Joe Tracy, publisher of Online Dating Magazine, a Web site on the industry.

Mr. Vest, a Vietnam veteran with a Texas accent, brushes off the criticism. “If there was a popularity contest among the entire population of the United States, I most assuredly would come out at the very bottom of that,” he said. “But you are not going to stop me by calling me names.”

True joined the crowded online dating scene in 2004. To distinguish itself from the pack, it offered a range of personality and sexuality surveys. It also hired the data broker ChoicePoint to perform background checks on customers to ensure that they had no criminal record and were not married.

The company then tried to have laws passed in several states that would require other sites to conduct background checks or disclose that they do not.

Companies like Yahoo, Google and IAC/InterActiveCorp, which owns Match.com, lobbied against the proposal through NetCoalition, an industry trade group. Markham Erickson, the group’s executive director, said background checks were ineffective, partly because felons can easily circumvent them by providing false information. “Their initial sound bite sounds great, but once you get past that, you realize it’s totally unworkable,” he said.

True has had little political success so far, but is backing bills that legislators are considering in Florida, Texas and Michigan.

Mr. Vest has used political tactics before. His first company, the financial firm H. D. Vest, helped pass legislation in nearly all 50 states that allowed certified public accountants to earn commissions on the sale of securities. Critics who said the move would influence the financial advice of accountants — and benefit H. D. Vest, which offered tax and investment guidance — were overruled.

Mr. Vest sold his company to Wells Fargo for $128 million in 2001, then gravitated to the online dating market, with the professed aim of restoring family values. “I looked at the divorce rate and said, ‘That’s a bunch of nonsense. I can do something about that,’ ” he said. He himself underwent what he called a painful divorce in 1991 and has remarried.

True.com grew too quickly in its first year and sailed into financial trouble. At the end of 2004, Mr. Vest, its primary investor, laid off 90 employees, more than half its staff.

Soon after, True became more aggressive, and sex-themed, in its advertising. While the site continued to pitch itself as a safe way to date, its ads now featured voluptuous women and slogans like “Come and get them while they’re hot.”

Newer True.com video ads depict models in their underwear, imploring men to visit True and chat with them over live Web cameras.

According to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, True.com spent $52.2 million over the first 11 months of last year on Web ads, more than double the amount its rivals spent online. (EHarmony, which runs TV ads, is the offline leader with $110.1 million in spending.)

Mr. Vest said the company’s ad budget continues to expand. He said the company is profitable and has 16 million members, but he declined to say how many of them actually pay the company, and how many use the more limited free services or no longer visit the site.

Match.com and Yahoo declined to discuss True.com. But David Evans, who writes Online Dating Insider (onlinedatingpost.com), a blog about the industry, said the competition was upset with True because its ad blitz, which included text ads tied to dating-related search terms, is driving up advertising costs while harming the industry’s reputation.

“They worked hard to overcome the stigma of providing these services,” Mr. Evans said. “And True comes in, grabs the lead in page views and drives up the cost of dating keywords on the search engines for everyone else.”

The ad campaign has also brought some strenuous objections. MySpace users have started four groups on the site asking it to reject True.com ads. Mr. Vest denies that his ads are exploitive or semipornographic. “We are very conscious of our reputation,” he said. “Pornography brings perverts, and we do not want perverts on our site. On the other hand, you can state from me in bold letters that True is in favor of sex.”

The ad carpet-bombing has worked in one way: last year, True jumped to the top of several lists of the most visited personals sites. According to comScore Media Metrix, True.com’s 3.8 million visitors in February put it slightly behind Yahoo Personals and Match.com, but ahead of older rivals like eHarmony and Spark Networks, which owns JDate.com and other sites.

However, True still significantly trails those players in more important categories, like time spent on the site. That suggests that many users are either not signing up for paid memberships or are quickly dropping the service once they do.

Or at least trying to drop it. On many Web forums, online daters have shared horror stories of trying to cancel their True.com accounts. True requires members to telephone the company to cancel, but it appears to go the extra step of sometimes failing to honor those requests.

Preston Roder, a 54-year-old liquor store manager in Mundelein, Ill., said he tried to quit True.com last September after an unfruitful yearlong membership but was still hit with an array of charges over the next four months.

“True is a big company, but they could care less when you try to cancel,” said Mr. Roder. “They got your money so they are through with you.”

Mr. Vest said the company recently revised its policy on cancellations. “We are not as good as I want to be. We still have an ongoing project to improve,” he said.

The site has also been criticized for generating random “winks” — the industry term for messages of interest from other members. Dan Consiglio, a 49-year-old engineer from Vancouver, Wash., said he received dozens of winks from women after signing up for True, and responded to many of them. He got only one response, from a woman who kindly informed him that she had not, in fact, winked at him.

Mr. Vest acknowledged that the service sends artificial winks, but he said users have the option to disable them and that they serve an important purpose. “We try getting people who otherwise might be very retiring or shy to meet each other and fall in love and have children,” he said. “We are just trying to do our job as a matchmaker.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/te...true.html?8dpc





U.S. Judge Blocks 1998 Online Porn Law
Maryclaire Dale

Software filters work much better than a 1998 federal law designed to keep pornography away from children on the Internet, a federal judge ruled Thursday in striking down the measure on free-speech grounds.

Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. also said the Child Online Protection Act fails to address threats that have emerged since the law was written, including online predators on social-networking sites like News Corp.'s MySpace, because it targets only commercial Web publishers.

"Even defendant's own study shows that all but the worst performing (software) filters are far more effective than COPA would be at protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Web," said Reed, who presided over a monthlong trial in the fall.

The never-enforced law was Congress' second attempt to protect children from online porn. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 2004 a temporary injunction blocking the law from taking effect; Reed on Thursday issued a permanent injunction.

The law would have criminalized Web sites that allow children to access material deemed "harmful to minors" by "contemporary community standards." The sites would have been expected to require a credit card number or other proof of age. Penalties include a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web sites backed by the American Civil Liberties Union had challenged the law on grounds it would have a chilling effect on speech. Joan Walsh, Salon.com's editor in chief, said the law could have allowed any of the 93 U.S. attorneys to prosecute the site over photos of naked prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

"The burden would have been on us to prove that they weren't" harmful to minors, Walsh said Thursday.

In his ruling, Reed warned that "perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection."

Daniel Weiss of Focus on the Family Action, a lobbying arm of the conservative Christian group, said it would continue to press Congress for a workable law.

"The judge seems to indicate there's really no way for Congress to pass a good law to protect kids online," Weiss said. "I just think that's not a good response."

To defend the nine-year-old law, government lawyers attacked software filters as burdensome and less effective, even though they have previously defended their use in public schools and libraries. That case was over a 2000 law requiring schools and libraries to use software filters if they receive certain federal funds. The high court upheld that law in 2003.

The plaintiffs expect the Justice Department to appeal. Justice spokesman Charles Miller said the department still was reviewing the decision and has "made no determination as to what the government's next step will be."

"I would hope that Attorney General (Alberto) Gonzales would save the U.S. public's money and not try to further defend what is an unconstitutional statute," said John Morris, a lawyer with the Center for Democracy and Technology, which wrote a brief in the case.

"That money could better be used to help educate kids about Internet safety issues," he said.

The plaintiffs argued that filters work best because they let parents set limits based on their own values and a child's age.

Reed concluded that filters have become highly effective and that the government - if it wants to protect children - could do more to promote or subsidize them.

The law addresses material accessed by children under 17, but only applies to sites hosted in the United States.

The Web sites that challenged the law said fear of prosecution might lead them to shut down or move their operations offshore, beyond the reach of U.S. law. They also said the Justice Department could do more to enforce obscenity laws already on the books.

Reed noted in his 83-page ruling that, since 2000, the Justice Department has initiated fewer than 20 prosecutions for obscenity that did not also involve other charges such as child pornography or attempts to have sex with minors.

Although the government argued for the use of credit cards as a screening device, Reed said he saw no evidence of any accurate way to verify the age of Internet users. And he agreed that sites that require a credit card to view certain pages would see a sharp drop-off in users.

The 1998 law followed the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Congress' first attempt to regulate online pornography. The Supreme Court in 1997 deemed key portions of that law unconstitutional because it was too vague and trampled on adults' rights.

COPA narrowed the restrictions to commercial Web sites and defined indecency more specifically.

"This is the second time Congress has tried this, and both times the courts have struck it down," said the ACLU's Chris Hansen, a lead attorney on the case. "I don't see how Congress could write a constitutional statute."
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/2007...t-blocking.htm





Lies and statistics

Market Share Myth 2007: iPod vs Zune and Mac vs PC

Analysts and reporters like to talk about market share statistics, but the conclusions they draw are often misleading. Here's a look at how those numbers are used to paint grossly inaccurate portrayals of the market share of the Zune among iPods, and alternatively the Mac among PCs.

Market share simply refers to the portion of a vendor’s unit sales compared to the overall market. However, most large markets include specialized niches that each act as a market. For example, within the overall market for vehicles are passenger cars, and buried within that major segment is the small but profitable luxury car market.

BMW doesn't compete against ship and plane builders, nor even the entire line of cars built by GM. It would therefore be absurd to talk about BMW's small share of the "vehicle market," or even to compare its market
share among other car makers. It's simply pointless and irrelevant.

Why is market share so important in the PC world, particularly for Apple?

The Slippery Numbers of Market Share
Microsoft-enamored analysts have long been titillated to report Apple's small Mac market share in comparison to all PCs sold worldwide.

They are not as quick to mention that the definition of “the PC market” ballooned as PCs makers pushed into markets unrelated to Apple's business, resulting in a commensurate decrease of Apple's share as the overall PC market rapidly expanded into unrelated directions.

By referring to Apple at every opportunity as having "less than a 3% share of the market," it enables them to casually suggest that a $77 billion company with the world's hottest consumer brand is really just of little consequence.

Gartner reported in January 2007 that the worldwide PC market in Q4 2006 grew by 7.4% over the previous year to 67.3 million units. Apple sold 1.6 million Macs in that quarter, giving it a mere 2.3% of that global market.

Charting Gartner's sales numbers for PCs since 1991--including its estimated sales through 2010--provides Apple with an embarrassingly tiny bit of blue next to the towering yellow bar representing the entire worldwide PC market, even when the chart is expanded vertically to flatter Apple.

However, in the same January 2007 press release, a Gartner analyst also stated that "the PC industry battled for wallet share against other consumer electronics products, such as games consoles and flat panel TVs." In other words, the vast PC market is but part of a larger market: consumer electronics.

Additionally, Gartner also breaks out the US market as distinct from the worldwide market. Worldwide, Lenovo, Acer, and Fujitsu place third, fourth and fifth, while in the US market, they don't show up in the top five at all. Further, while HP leads worldwide PC sales, it is second to Dell within the US. How is that even possible?

Clearly, market share isn't a subject where numbers "speak for themselves." The more contextual information one has, the less relevant a specific portion of the entire world's market share appears to be.

In fact, if we throw all of the top eight brands Gartner tracked since 1991 into our chart, they all look rather unimpressive next to the overall, worldwide market, graphically demonstrating the fallacy of relying upon PC market share numbers to “speak for themselves.”

The Slippery World of Percentages
Comparing a half to a seventh to a thirty-third is difficult to conceptualize. With everything in hundredths, a portion of the overall pie is easier to fathom.

Even with percentages however, it is easy to set up comparisons that are very misleading. A vendor selling 100 units in a year and 200 the next year could be accurately described as having "200% of the previous years sales" or "a 100% increase over last year," or alternatively only having sold "50% as much" the prior year.

That variety in phrasing, combined with variations in the definition of a market, can be used to tell remarkable stories that entirely misleading, but which appear to be supported by logical and accurate statistics.

Zune, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
When Microsoft announced it would abandon its PlaysForSure partners and take on Apple’s iPod with its own Zune music player, analysts were careful to point out that Microsoft had taken over markets before.

Since Apple had sold lots of iPods, it was assumed to be an easy feat, and since Microsoft had outsold the Mac a decade ago, it logically followed that history was about to repeat itself, or so they said.

Apple's iPod has experienced phenomenal growth since its 2001 unveiling. Like the Mac, the iPod largely created a new market rather than displacing an existing one. In 2002, Apple had 33% of the hard drive music player market with 4th quarter sales of 140,000 iPods. A year later, it had 64% of that market selling 304,000. Apple more than doubled its sales, while the rest of the market failed to grow at all.

A year later, Apple had 82% of the hard drive market with sales of 2 million in its winter quarter, meaning that all its competitors were selling less than a half million units combined, a minor increase over the previous two years.

Apple wasn't eating into other players' sales, it was greatly expanding the entire market for hard drive audio players.

That was just what Microsoft had done in the computer world the early 90s: it didn't sell Windows to the existing market of Mac users, but rather sold Windows PCs to a broader market around the Mac, replacing dumb terminals and DOS boxes, and putting Windows PCs on desks that had never had a computer before.

Microsoft didn't replace the Mac; it pioneered new markets outside those Apple was targeting. In doing so, Windows helped impede any major new growth of the Mac platform, but sales of new Macs remained fairly consistent at around 3-4 million per year over the last decade and a half since 1991.

If we pull the yellow bar “of all PCs sold” out of the above chart, it demonstrates that Apple continued to sell roughly the same 17 million Macs every five years since 1991. Gartner estimates that Mac sales will roughly double between 2006-2010.

Analysts Get It Backwards
While analysts once liked to say that the Zune would take over the music player world in the same manner that Windows PCs engulfed the Mac, the situation was really not even remotely similar. Analysts had things entirely backwards.

With the Zune, Microsoft would not be selling a cheaper version to a different audience, but rather introducing a device of the same price to compete against an established brand.

Microsoft was attempting to eat into the high end of iPod sales, not roll out a cheaper version of the iPod to cube dwellers who had never heard of music before.

However, as predicted in Myth #8 of 10 iPod vs Zune Myths, the only sales Microsoft could easily displace with the Zune were its own partner's PlaysForSure devices.

Microsoft gnawed off its own foot, which while technically an achievement, only managed set the company back in its efforts to expand in the overall market and to push the adoption of Windows Media in place of the QuickTime-based iTunes.

It will be very difficult for Microsoft to grow that foot back. As for the prey it had intended to eat in its feeding frenzy: the iPod--in the same quarter--grew dramatically larger by extending its appeal to new buyers rather than just resorting to cannibalizing itself for some quick sales.

The tables have turned 180 degrees since Copland. Microsoft is now the one trying to bite into an established market but only eating itself up, while Apple's iPod is growing rapidly by broadening its appeal to new customers. How well will Microsoft continue to fare in a market with real competition?

Billionaire Ballmer Blows Beaucoup Bologna
In the same CNBC interview where Steve Ballmer erroneously referred to Apple's iPhone as "the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace," Microsoft's CEO also flamboyantly presented bogus market share numbers for the Zune which were also grossly exaggerated for dramatic effect:

“We took, I don’t know, but I think most estimates would say we took about 20-25% of the high end of the market. We weren’t down at some of the lower price points, but for devices $249 and over we took, you know, let’s say about 20% of the market."

Actually, the difference between 20% and 25% of the music player market is around four hundred million dollars of revenue. No doubt Ballmer has a lost his grasp of the value of money, but that's still a lot of cash to toss around as a rounding error.

Ballmer also took the liberty of inventing his own concept of what the “music player market” is: when talking about Zune market share, the market only includes music players that cost as much as the Zune. In reality, Ballmer’s reported market share for the Zune was off by an order of magnitude, more than a billion dollars.

Using Ballmer’s “make it up” market share methodology, what is Apple's market share of PCs costing more than $1000? Dell and HP dump out massive numbers of PCs, and have an average selling price of around $740.

If we can simply define our own “market” to fit our own needs, we can come up with whatever percentage we want. Off the top of my head, I believe Apple's share of the $1100 white Core Duo laptop market is around 90-95%, and I didn't even have look for actual sales numbers.

NPD's Smoke and Mirror Market Share Numbers
The best sounding news about Zune sales came from NPD. It reported that the Zune had taken 10.2% of the market in December. That would represent a dramatic and impressive first showing, even if it only represented a rush of early adopters. In reality however, NPD's numbers were grossly misleading for a number of reasons.

Data Source: First, NPD only reports on subset of retailers, mostly big box stores. That section of the market would represent the majority of Zune sales, because Microsoft lacks major direct sales channels; it has no retail stores, nor does it operate a web store selling lots of Zunes.

Apple, on the other hand, has a series of web stores serving education and the general public; a significant retail presence of its own, with over a billion in sales last quarter; and lots of school campus stores selling lots of iPods. Apple also sells a lot of its iPods through other direct channels, including mail order and other web stores.

Defined Market: Even more disturbing about NPD's 10.2% was that it was based only on the "market for 30 GB hard drive players." In other words, NPD gerrymandered a Ballmeresque "market" based on the Zune's description, comparing it only against Apple's smaller capacity, full sized iPod model.

Users buying a full size iPod are tempted to spend another $100 to get nearly three times the capacity in the 80 GB model. Why cut those buyers out of the "Zune market?" To create an intentionally false story, of course.

Sales Period: When counting all music players, NPD only reported 2.8% market share for the Zune. But it was still only able to do that by creating a special five week period that added in the Zune's debut week in November with the rest of December. How convenient, because Zune sales imploded after its initial debut week.

Once again, NPD’s numbers excluded the Apple Stores' billion in sales, and all of the direct iPod sales, including popular online sources such as Amazon; recall that it was Amazon's popular sales reports that documented the rapid freefall of Zune sales after its debut week.

NPD simply pulled out all the stops in trying to define a set of circumstances that would suggest that Zune sales amounted to anything worth mentioning. It even appeared to invent the concept of weekly market share reports, and only abandoned them after it became clear that the tactic wasn’t helping to flatter the Zune.

Growth Segment: At the same time, NPD initially reported that Apple's overall share of the entire market for music players had actually increased substantially over the previous year, from 42% to 57%. Again, that excluded all of Apple's retail stores and other direct sales.

Obviously, the Zune didn't eat into iPod sales at all, but only cannibalized the sales of its PlaysForSure partners, primarily SanDisk and Creative, the two brightest luminaries of the PlaysForSure universe.

Apple's share had continued to grow, even when only considering NPD's subset of numbers from general retailers. The iPod ate up 17 new percentage points of the market pie, compared Microsoft's debut at just 2.8, nibbled out of the share formerly owned by Microsoft's capriciously jilted partners.

Later in the month, NPD reported new revised numbers that still gave Zune 2.8% for its magic five month period, but assigned the iPod 72% of the entire market for the overall quarter, rather than the preliminary figure of 57% for that odd five week period that was most flattering for the Zune.

This Just In: Pac Mac Still At It
Just three days ago, NPD reported figures for January 2007, reporting on a quarter billion dollars of MP3 players:

•Apple 72.7%
•Sandisk 8.9%
•Microsoft 3.2%
•Creative Labs 2.9%
•Samsung 2.0%

Once again, NPD’s numbers only cover retailers that supply it with data, which excludes Apple, Costco, online sales, and mail order outlets.

Based on NPD’s numbers and my math, it would appear Microsoft sold $7.2 million in Zunes in January via retail outlets, which at $250 each would be just short of 29,000 units, making its Dr Evil goal of “one million Zunes!” by June 2007 a bit of a joke.

Is There a Better Way to View Markets?
Given the near worthlessness of NPD's absurd market definitions and carefully cut out statistics--all based upon an unclear subset of the overall market--is there a more accurate way to look at markets than consulting heavily massaged market share numbers that jump around erratically in a dance that appears to be performed for the benefit of Microsoft?

Yes, and it says a lot about both the market for the Zune among iPods and the Mac among PCs. It just isn’t as flattering for Microsoft, so it would only appear on a website supported primarily by reader’s donations.

In other words, this site, in the next article.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM...ED246674C.html


Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC

It's not billionaire executives nor genius engineers who decide whether the world's resources will be used to design and build iPods or Zunes. It's the millions of consumers who choose to buy them. Companies in Redmond and Cupertino simply build their products, advertise them, and then wait to see what the market decides.

The Campaign for Dollars
Markets provide an efficient and fair way to determine how the world's resources will be used. If a company delivers a poor product, or simply fails to campaign for it in the market with effective advertising, consumers will vote with their dollars for alternatives instead.

Earning the votes of consumers in the market is a powerful incentive to develop better products. The market rewards companies that deliver the best work, whether best happens to mean cheapest, highest quality, most reliable, or whatever balance of features appeals most to consumers.

Maladies of a Monoculture Market
Markets generally work well to sort out who should be rewarded with profits, but things can go wrong if choice in the market is restricted:

1.
•When companies only care about being cheap and efficient, buyers end up with a dreary monoculture and are cheated with poor quality, while artisans and workers are exploited. Example: Wal-Mart.

2.
•When companies interfere with a market by fixing prices or negotiating cartel pacts, consumers are overcharged and get a poor selection, while artisans and workers are exploited. Example: the RIAA Labels.

3.
•When companies monopolize a market and prevent any natural competition from occurring, prices stay high, innovation lags, and the threat of government regulation looms. Example: Microsoft.

4.
•When governments interfere with markets and try to set prices artificially, it commonly results in just the opposite of what was intended: production stagnates and prices inch up anyway. Example: The 70s.

All of these problems can be corrected by new sources of competition and choice. More competitive choice in the market means more incentive to develop better products, more pressure to lower prices, and less need for the complications of government regulation.

Sharing the Market
Looking at sales figures helps to determine how consumers have voted for the various available choices with their dollars.

When presented with little choice, consumers are all forced to buy the same thing. When presented with a variety of choices, consumers flock to the best products, inciting competitors to invent new ideas, copy good ideas, and run their business more efficiently so they can offer consumers lower prices.

Comparing companies' shares of the market helps to get an idea of how successful each is in its competitive efforts. However, as Market Share Myth 2007: iPod vs Zune and Mac vs PC described, market share figures can be used to present misleading conclusions by:


1.
•artfully defining a very specific market that flatters a vendor
2.
•mixing in irrelevant market segments that marginalizes specialized companies
3.
•considering a specific sales period that flatters one vendor
4.
•only portraying a small sample of the total sales in a market

A more accurate way to look at the market is to look at installed base. That's the same kind of figures commonly used to compare sales of console video games.

Market Share vs Installed Base
What is Microsoft's share of the video game console market? What is Sony's share of the handheld gaming market? Don't know?

It is certainly not commonly reported, and nobody seems to need to know or repeat those numbers. Why not, particularly since market share is so critically important to relate about Apple’s Mac and Microsoft’s Zune?

For console gaming and other markets relating to a platform product--anything that demands a minimum threshold of community or developer support to be useful--the most informative numbers for determining market position and competitive ability are the number of units in the installed base.

1.
•Market share refers to a vendor’s percentage of sales in a market over a specific period of time.

2.
•Installed base refers to the total number of units sold and in use for that vendor’s platform.

In video gaming, it doesn't really matter who leads the overall sales in a specific week or month, only that each platform has enough momentum to sell games.

Looking at installed base numbers makes that clear. For example, Nintendo has long owned the handheld gaming market, while Sony has long dominated the home console market.

What about the market for the Zune among iPods, and the Mac among PCs? Compared to the world of video games, the markets for music players and PCs offer more complications when trying to figure installed base.

Installed Base Complications
Market share is easy to report for third parties like NPD with access to channel sales numbers, but installed base figures come from unit sales supplied by manufacturers. There are several complicating factors:

Unreported Data: Some manufactures don't break out specific sales by model, or don't report their sales at all. Most only report numbers at regular intervals.

For example, Apple reports iPod sales quarterly, but does not usually break down sales into specific models. When it reports Mac sales, it doesn't always break down how many were laptops, or how many were professional vs consumer versions. Microsoft has suspiciously never reported actual Zune sales, only throwing out the distraction of a June 2007 “goal” to ship a million units.

Channel Stuffers: Manufacturers can stuff the channel with unsold inventory and report it as sold, when it's really only sitting in a warehouse, not part of an installed base.

Apple stuffed the channel with Performa Mac models in the mid-90s in the hopes that Sears would sell them just to avoid dangerously tall piles of boxes in its stores. Microsoft is doing the same thing with the Xbox, allowing it to report having shipped 10 million Xbox 360s when sales reports indicate only 5 million have actually been sold.

Base Definition: For some products, particularly PCs, it's not known how units will actually be used. For example, what proportion of PCs are used in the home market, making up an installed base that matters to consumers? How many are still working and in use?

Mac vs PC Life Span
PCs have a short life span, and a large percentage--around half, according to IDC--are sold to businesses that dutifully recycle them at regular intervals.

Among home users, the epidemic of Windows malware and viruses prompts most users to just dump their existing PC and buy a new one rather than spend hundreds of dollars on tech support to clean it up and keep it working.

Maintaining a PC costs professional users around five times as much as a Mac.

The volume of new Windows PCs sold is therefore more impressive than the installed base of existing PCs. For Macs, the opposite is true. Macs tend to be kept in use longer, for a number of reasons:


1.
•Apple extends support for older machines far longer with its operating system software.
2.
•Older Macs are faster running a newer version of Mac OS X; older PCs can't even run the latest Windows.
3.
•It is easier to support and maintain older Macs; older PCs rapidly become more expensive to maintain.
4.
•Older Macs retain a high resale value, older PCs actually have a negative value after the recycling fees.


Put Out To Pasture: a PC Inventory
In studying the history of PC purchases made by a client with around a hundred employees, I found the company was still using all of their original Macs dating back to 2001, with a few even older Macs still in secondary use.

In contrast, there were no PCs more than three years old still in use, and most of the older models were in poor shape. Around 80% of its machines were PCs, and nearly all of those were commercial grade Dell OptiPlex or Latitude models; the other 20% were Macs. About a third of the entire 115 machines were laptops.

The older PCs simply did not make sense to keep around because each used different hardware components, they couldn’t adequately run modern software, and were problematically expensive to maintain, even with a dedicated IT staff available to service them.
It was simply cheaper to throw them out and buy new PCs. The resale value for those three year old PCs was basically zero. Had they bought Dell’s consumer brands, such as Dimension and Inspiron, their investment would been even more problematic, more expensive to support, and shorter lived.

Their Dell systems cost on average around $1500, but struggled to last for three years. Their Mac systems were closer to $2000, but were useful for six years or more and required less support, making them a better value.

Installed Base by Life Span
Assigning Macs a five year useful life span, and PCs a two year life span, the installed base for Macs among PCs on the planet is around 4.5%.

In the US, where Apple sells half of its Macs, Apple has over 8% of the usable installed base: 10 million five year old US Macs vs about 120 million two year old US PCs.

There are of course many older PCs still in use, but they are not getting upgrades and new software because with Windows it doesn't make economic sense to invest in old junk when a new PC costs on average $740.

A large portion of these older PCs are now running Linux, or alternatively, pirated commercial software, neither of which assists the retail software business.

PCs don’t vanish after two years, but they do stop contributing toward a commercial impact on the market.

Just Ask Microsoft
Commercially significant PC users' machines are only a couple years old; that's why Microsoft made no attempt to get Vista working on PCs more than two year old, and why the now discontinued Windows XP was not happy running on PCs built a year or two before it was released in 2001.

Looking further back, Windows 2000, 95/98/Me, NT, and even 3.0 all required PC hardware that was brand new. Certainly Microsoft is keenly aware of the PC software business, and if it made any business sense to market an OS upgrade to an installed base of many hundreds of millions of old PCs, it would do so. It does not.

The market for Windows upgrades has always been small; Microsoft reports that 80% of its revenues come from OEM bundled copies of Windows. Since retail copies cost around ten times as much as the big OEMs pay: $29 vs $299, Windows upgrades are only 20% of its dollar business, and an even smaller percentage of its unit sales.

Microsoft automatically sold 235 million OEM licenses with new PCs last year, but can’t sell even a fifth as many in retail upgrades. Windows PC users do not pay to upgrade their software, they simply throw their old PCs away. Microsoft runs a disposable platform which enriches it at the expense of the environment and its users.

The Installed Base of Macs
In contrast, Apple's Mac OS X Tiger still supports Macs sold back in 1997; those machines are ten years old! Apple has always supported a long tail of old Macs in its latest operating system. In 1998, Apple’s last upgrade for classic 68K Macs updated five year old systems and even ran on some ten year old Macs.

No doubt many of the 35 million Macs sold in the last ten years aren't still in operation, but analysts report that more than half are--22 million of them are even running Mac OS X, according to Keith Bachman, an analyst with Bank of America Securities. That reinforces the point that Macs have at least a five year life span.

The comparison of life span and installed base helps to explain why major developers such as Microsoft and Adobe expend significant resources to develop Mac versions of their software: it earns them revenues.

While a 2% share of the entire world’s PCs wouldn’t suggest much of a reason to target Macs for software development, having 8% of the active US installed base certainly does.

Installed Base in Consumer PCs
Of course, that 8% figure compares Apple’s installed base against the overall, worldwide PC market.

Since more than half of all PCs are used in business, Apple owns an even larger portion of the consumer market’s installed base, where Apple choses to compete.

Pulling out business PCs, Apple's share of the consumer PC installed base is above 15%, which correlates with the software available for the Mac.

In education, Apple has a 23% share of all new sales in the US, and around 15% in Europe.

Its corresponding installed base in education is even higher.

The Halo Effect Switchers
PC mercenaries have long ridiculed Apple's Switchers campaign and later the idea of the iPod Halo Effect, but despite market share touting doubters, those two phenomena have had a major impact on Apple's consumer sales, particularly in the US where they were focused.

NPD just reported figures that report Apple took 10% of January's billion dollar laptop sales in the retail channels it monitors; recall that NPD only reports on big box retailers, not Apple Stores or any online sales.

That means Apple has a much larger share of the retail laptop market than any rival of the iPod has in the retail music player market: more than SanDisk, Creative, or Samsung and far more than the Zune.

How Big is the Pie?
More importantly, Apple’s 10% laptop share in January is carved out of a billion dollar pie; NPD’s January music player market is a quarter billion dollar pie.

That highlights another fallacy common among Zune optimists who like to say that the Zune’s ~3% share of the NPD music player market is better than the Mac’s ~2% share of the worldwide PC market: in the last reported quarter, Zune’s 3% share was worth $7 million while the Mac 2% share was worth $4,400 million.

Clearly, market share is meaningless taken out of context, and anyone insisting that market share “speaks for itself” probably has good reason to avoid explaining things.

Apple vs Microsoft: Some Explaining
In the final quarter of 2007, Apple earned $7.1 billion in revenue, compared to Microsoft’s $12.5 billion in total revenue. Yes, that’s right, Apple brought in more than half as much money as Microsoft, despite Windows owning 98% of the PC market.

Even stripping Apple of its iPod revenues, which PC pundits love to do, the company still earned $4.4 billion on its Macintosh business, over a third as much Microsoft brought in from its entire Windows, Office, and server operations combined. Apple’s 2% of the PC market doesn’t seem so small anymore.

Of course, Microsoft actually lost a lot of money on all of its consumer electronics products, so looking at profits, Apple earned $1 billion compared to Microsoft’s total $3.4 billion in profit.

The main difference is that Apple actually developed new business in retail and music, and designed the iPhone and Apple TV to sell this year, while Microsoft only defended its monopolies from collapse and designed the Zune.

That also helps explain why Apple isn’t interested in throwing away its hardware business in order to try selling Mac OS X to PC makers. If Microsoft only earns three times as much as Apple while sitting on 98% of the PC operating system market, how could Apple make a fraction of its current revenues trying to sell Mac OS X?

Party Like It’s 1991
With Apple selling 10% of all laptops in the general US retail market, it is now back to the same proportion of Macs the company was selling at its heyday in 1991. The difference today is that Apple is selling another billion per quarter in its own retail stores.

Around 43% of Apple's revenues are for the Mac, which for some reason PC users like to use in their efforts to discount Apple’s ability to sell Macs. Again, the percentage is a distraction, because Mac sales are actually up.

Consumers visiting Apple's retail stores for iPod accessories are now surrounded with laptops and desktops, giving Apple a major bump in the number of Macs it sells. That bump is significant, and particularly kicked in during 2006 with the arrival of Intel Macs.

The Million Mac March
As noted earlier, Gartner reports Apple has sold an average of 17 million Macs every five years since 1991.

1.
•From 1991-1995, Apple sold 16.2 million classic 68K Macs.
2.
•From 1996-2000, it sold 17.6 million PowerPC Macs running a version of System 7, the Classic Mac OS.
3.
•From 2001-2005, another 17.2 million PowerPC Macs were sold running Mac OS X.
4.
•From 2006-2010, Apple’s Macs will be Intel-based, but there won't be just 17 million sold.

Between fiscal 2001-2004, Apple was unable to ever sell one million Macs within a quarter; it sold around 800,000 Macs per quarter during that time.

In fiscal 2005 (which began in the winter quarter of 2004), Apple sold its first million Macs in a quarter since the tech bubble in 2000.

Since then, Apple has never sold less than a million Macs per quarter.

For the last two quarters, Apple sold over a million and a half per quarter, double what it was selling just two years ago.

By doubling the number of new Macs sold, the installed base of Macs will grow even faster relative to short lived PCs that give up after a brief but troubled life in the virus and malware infected swamps of the Windows world.

Based on Gartner’s estimated sales forecasts for 2006-2010, Apple’s percentage of the overall installed base will jump by 50%.

More Macs Mean Many Fewer PCs
The worst news for Microsoft is that every new Mac sold to a former PC user means that at least two Windows PCs will go unsold: the initial PC and its mid-life crisis, second string replacement.

Compared to the 240 million PCs sold last year, Apple’s small share of around 6 million Macs per year won’t put Microsoft out of business any time soon. However, it means that 12 million Windows licenses will go unsold. That’s up from less than 4 million Macs eating up 8 million potential Windows licenses just two years ago.

The faster Apple grows, the more devastating this effect will be to Microsoft's automatic sales machine, which in turn will help open the market up to new choice and options, including Linux desktops. Once Microsoft loses its monopoly control of the OEM market, Windows will fare as well in the market as the Zune.

A prime segment of choosy consumers are going out of their way to not buy Windows. Microsoft doesn’t want to dominate the low end of cheap PCs; that market is already headed towards Linux anyway.

Microsoft wants to retain the valuable top tier of the PC market, the segment rapidly buying new Macs.

That’s why Microsoft is promoting premium products like Media Center, and working to create a pantheon of Vista versions which push consumers to buy higher-end upgrades.

Microsoft doesn’t just want “market share,” it wants to make money. Apple wants the same thing, it is just achieving that more successfully.

What about Zune?
Installed base is flattering to the Mac, but sure isn't for the Zune. That's why so much news was made regarding its carefully crafted market share numbers: without creating the suggestion that Zune had "captured market share," it would simply pale in comparison to the vast installed base of iPods.

PC market share numbers are thrown at the Mac to call attention to the fear, uncertainty and doubt that questions whether enough Mac software will get delivered to keep the platform viable. The case for getting a PC is that without enough "market share," there won't be enough software.

With the Zune, there is no fear-based argument regarding market share and the availability of software, because the Zune can play any music available on CD. Users with iTunes songs can even burn their songs to CD and upload them onto the Zune player.

The only reason to worry about scant market share for the Zune would be related to users who want to take advantage of its ability to wirelessly squirt advertisements of purchased songs to other users: there simply are no other users. Further, a significant chunk of purchased songs can't be squirted anyway.

Janus DRM and Installed Base
Zune market share is really only a concern for Microsoft, which planned to sell Zune users music using Windows Media DRM. Without an installed base of users, there is no business model behind selling subscriptions of songs that can delete themselves.

Zune users don’t need to worry about market share and installed base as long as music is available on CDs or can be downloaded via a format that can be put on their player, either plain MP3 or iTunes’ FairPlay burned to CDs. Market share is only a concern for the establishment of a secure DRM monopoly ruled by Janus.

One Million Zunes!
To pacify the most die-hard proponents of squirting, and to suggest that Janus still has a shot at binding the world under one DRM, Microsoft announced that it would ship a million (!) Zunes by the middle of 2007.

While this worked well as a smokescreen to distract from the fact that actual sales data was abysmal and does not at all support that goal, and hides the suspicious lack of any real numbers from Microsoft, it still doesn't provide any good news for Windows Media.

Even if Microsoft had shipped a million Zunes already, it would barely even show up as a blip on the installed base of iPods, or in comparison to any other recent consumer electronics launches.

For a point of reference, here's what a million Zunes would look like next to the iPod, when added to the chart of the installed base of video game systems:

The chart assumes Microsoft will actually eventually sell a million, and credits those million back into 2006, just to be charitable. Even so, one million units in seven months of sales is simply nothing in consumer electronics.

In reality, Apple will sell roughly another twenty million iPods by June 2007, blowing its green line out the top of the chart and leaving the Zune an invisible dot in Apple's rear view mirror, even if Microsoft can meet its goal by stuffing the channel with unsold Zunes, just as it did with the Xbox.

And in June, Microsoft will have another product to worry about: the Windows Mobile Killer.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM...1D1688E00.html





Adobe Says no Way to Vista Updates
Grant Robertson

Adobe says you'll have to upgrade to new versions of popular (and really expensive) software like Photoshop, InDesign and DreamWeaver if you want them to run well under Windows Vista.

Current versions of many Adobe products won't run flawlessly under Windows Vista, this announcement only confirms that they never will. So, if you're a creative professional (who hasn't already jumped ship to OS X) start getting out the check book. Adobe's CS3 creative suite will be out next week, and it ain't gonna be cheap.

We probably should have realized something was up when Adobe's own document on Vista compatibility (which we wrote about almost a month ago) dodged the question by stating that Adobe would release free patches for "some of Adobe's currently available products." To our credit, it would have been much easier to spot if they'd said, "some of Adobe's currently available products, but not the ones anyone actually uses or cares about."
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/03...vista-updates/