[JackSpratts]

Who Owns the Live Music of Days Gone By?
Robert Levine

When it began in 1973, the “King Biscuit Flower Hour” was very much of its time. Bob Meyrowitz, who ran the show during its heyday, had the idea to start a weekly rock concert radio program as an alternative to chaotic festival shows after a fan was killed at the Rolling Stones performance at Altamont.

“I thought people would bring their cars into big parking lots and dance to the music,” Mr. Meyrowitz said. The first episode featured the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Blood Sweat & Tears and a barely known singer from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen.

Back then no one thought much about what would happen to the King Biscuit recordings, which grew to thousands of hours featuring nearly every top act in ’70s and ’80s rock.

Now, more than 30 years later, the archives of radio and television shows like “King Biscuit,” “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert” and “Later ... With Jools Holland” have become valuable prizes in the desperate search for new content for Web sites, DVDs and video-on-demand services.

“It’s all about supply and demand, and with all these new media — broadband, mobile phones, video on demand — there’s more of a need for content,” said Pat McDonald, co-president of Northstar Media.

Northstar recently brokered a deal for a company called Concert.TV to license video-on-demand rights to “Later ... With Jools Holland,” a British music program that has featured performances by R.E.M., Beck and scores of other artists.

But live recordings can come with thorny legal questions. They were often made outside the studio under contracts that did not clearly assign copyrights to a record label. Now the content owners are scrambling to get the permissions needed to sell the material in formats that did not exist when the music was recorded. And labels and musicians are also asserting their rights to such recordings — in one instance, in court.

The King Biscuit property, which has changed hands twice, is now owned by Wolfgang’s Vault, a company involved in a particularly important dispute about how such recordings can be used.

The company also owns the archive of the late San Francisco concert promoter Bill Graham, and is being sued on charges of copyright infringement and bootlegging, among other things, by a group of musicians, including the Grateful Dead and members of Led Zeppelin and the Doors.

Mr. Graham’s collection of recordings is remarkable, with performances by those acts and dozens of others in their prime. After Mr. Graham died in 1991, his production company was sold to Clear Channel Communications, which in 2003 sold a warehouse of Mr. Graham’s music memorabilia to William E. Sagan, a businessman in Minnesota, for more than $5 million.

Mr. Sagan started the Web site WolfgangsVault.com to sell items from the museum-worthy collection, which includes original posters, tickets and photographs (Mr. Graham’s given name was Wolfgang Grajonca.) Last year, to draw potential customers, Wolfgang’s Vault began streaming over the Internet some of the concerts Mr. Graham had recorded.

The streaming audio, according to Ashlie Beringer, a lawyer with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who is representing the bands suing Wolfgang’s Vault, “was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

The legal duel involves a number of issues, including the rights to sell reproductions of the items in the warehouse that feature the likenesses of the artists or the bands’ logos. But the most important issue, given the value of what is at stake, is precisely what Mr. Sagan owns. In a statement released when the suit was filed, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead said that Mr. Sagan’s actions amounted to stealing.

“Just because you own the tapes doesn’t mean you have the copyright to the music on them,” said Ms. Beringer, who argues that Mr. Graham never had a copyright to this music in the first place. “The copyright act says that the performers are the presumed owners of the copyright.” Since some artists were under contracts that specifically granted live recording rights to the label, Sony BMG Music Entertainment has also joined the suit.

In a counterclaim filed this month, Mr. Sagan asserts that Mr. Graham acquired these rights by making these recordings, with the explicit or implicit permission of the artists, who knew of his reputation for taping performances. In a sign of the acrimony the case has stirred up, the filing includes a defamation claim against Mr. Weir.

“A copyright owner is someone who contributes to that work, and our position is we contributed to the development of the sound recording,” said Michael S. Elkin, a lawyer with Winston & Strawn, which is representing Wolfgang’s Vault. He said that Mr. Graham had used some of the recordings over the years, and that the artists had not objected.

Mr. Graham could not have anticipated the ways it is now possible to market music and the legal confusion that would follow. Standard record company contracts give the label rights to artists’ recordings, but some older contracts don’t specify what kinds of performances that might include. The number of rights required to market a live recording without fear of litigation can make one’s head spin as much as some of the music played at Mr. Graham’s concerts.

“You have to look at the artist’s contract with the record company to see who would own recordings not made in the studio,” said Robert L. Sullivan, a lawyer with Loeb & Loeb who represents the estate of Johnny Cash. In the case of a performance originally intended for broadcast, he said, “you’d have to look at the radio show contract, and those vary widely.”

For decades, the expense and hassle of clearing all of those rights made it impractical to sell old live recordings.

“These are niche products and they’re not for the casual fan,” said Danny Goldberg, president of the artist management company Gold Village Entertainment. But Internet marketing and online stores have made it easier and less expensive to reach fans, and Mr. Goldberg said that he was considering buying a catalog of live recordings, even though he might acquire the rights to release only a fraction of them.

At a time when music sales are declining, many expressed frustration that it was so complicated to find a way to make money on these kinds of recordings. In an odd twist, material by older artists is especially desirable, since their adult fans tend to buy music rather than download it illegally.

“At some point it becomes irrational not to figure out a way to exploit this stuff if the parties involved will benefit,” said Greg Scholl, president and chief executive of the Orchard, a digital distribution company. “There’s no question this stuff is more saleable than it was.”

To get a sense of the value of historical musical performances, consider what Andrew Solt has made of the archive of “The Ed Sullivan Show.” As a director and producer of rock documentaries, Mr. Solt kept returning to the Sullivan archives to license footage from Mr. Sullivan’s family, which owned the rights to the program under the terms of Mr. Sullivan’s deal with CBS.

Mr. Solt’s licensing costs became so expensive that he inquired about buying the rights to the show, which he did in 1990, for a price said to be below $10 million. “I paid every penny I had to lawyers and borrowed all the money from a bank,” he said. “I would wake up at night and say, ‘What did I do?’ ”

But it seems that Mr. Solt got a very good deal. He has used the material in the archives to produce television specials and DVDs, but he said that the most valuable material is the musical performances, including historical appearances by Elvis Presley and the Beatles.

He has released a DVD featuring the Beatles’ performances on the show, which he said has sold 200,000 copies; last fall, he released a similar Elvis package that he said has already sold 100,000 copies; and he licensed the material for “Ed Sullivan’s Rock ’n’ Roll Classics,” a box set distributed by Rhino, a subsidiary of Warner Music.

Mr. Solt, who also bought the rights to “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert” with a partner a few years ago, believes such content will eventually generate even more revenue on the Internet.

“You won’t need Andrew Solt to make you an ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ anymore,” he said. “You’ll be able to go to a menu, choose your own favorites and use what you want.”
http://news.com.com/Who+owns+the+liv...l?tag=nefd.top





Where Did the Music Industry go so Wrong?
Patrick Faucher

Wasn't it all so gloriously simple back when people listened to top 40 radio and obediently paid $20 for discs at record store chains?

Labels set the deal terms for artists; managers handled the "biz"; the touring circuits were maintained by well-mannered warlords that politely divvied up the venues; and everyone had their place in the pond.

So where did it all go wrong with the music business? Somehow, the pond became stagnant over time, mucked up with greed, laziness, contempt and excess. People got bored with music. Then, someone threw a rock into the middle of it called "The Internet" and nothing will ever be the same. Today, anyone can hum a tune, mix it with a rhythm track and some samples on their Mac at home, put it up on MySpace, and end up with a publishing deal from Moby who will then sell it to the next Superbowl sponsor.

The industry has become decentralized. Major labels no longer have the market muscle or control over the distribution channels as they once did. Technology and consumer choice have caused a shift from the traditional music business model of major labels throwing copious amounts of money behind a few big hits to that of a vast collection of individual artists creating pockets of more moderate success among passionate fan bases.

This shift requires a different approach to the development and monetization of music by the producers and promoters--one that more directly resembles that of more traditional venture-backed business. The entrepreneurs (artists) create new intellectual property (music, artistic brand) that has a demonstrated market (fans) that is robust enough to attract investors (for example, a label) that wants to own some equity in that IP and wishes to put money into the asset to enable it to engage in value-building activities (distribution, merchandising, licensing, and so on). Oddly enough, this "new" model is, in fact, not new.

We've all heard of The Grateful Dead, Phish, Ani DiFranco, Aimee Mann and the Barenaked Ladies. These great artists have grassroots beginnings. They all employed clever uses of the technology available to them at the time to find fans and create direct distribution channels (from bootleg cassettes and toll-free phone orders to MP3s and e-mail distributions). Using these methods, these "artist-entrepreneurs" have circumvented the traditional channel gatekeepers and have blazed a trail for the rank-and-file working artists and the weekend warriors to follow.

Now all serious artists need to conduct themselves as entrepreneurs engaged in building a business, not just playing and selling music. There are many tools and services out there that artists can use to help them sell. Still, it's not enough to put up a MySpace page and get a song on iTunes. They need to build a brand that has long-term value. They need to own that brand and their customers outright. There is a need for artist platforms that make this process more efficient so the economics make sense. Those solutions increasingly are becoming available.

Investors--including the major labels--need to understand the intricate partnership role they play in development. It's no longer about throwing money into the ether, marketing to no one in particular, and seeking only mega-hit payouts. It's about patience and commitment and focus. The labels--or their successors--need to get down to sea level, pick up an oar, and help row with the artist into this new ocean of opportunity.
http://news.com.com/Where+did+the+mu...3-6167346.html





Report: Warner Music Considering Fresh Takeover Bid For EMI
FMQB

After EMI rejected a $4.1 billion takeover bid from Warner Music Group (WMG) earlier this month, WMG is reportedly ready to sweeten the deal. Warner chief Edgar Bronfman Jr. will soon meet with EMI chairman John Gildersleeve to discuss a fresh proposal, however, Bronfman wants an assurance from EMI that they will be prepared to consider a revised deal before he ups the ante, according to the U.K.'s Observer.

An industry executive told The Observer, "This is a marriage that is going to happen at some point; they have talked so often in the past." And some EMI shareholders are believed to be unhappy that the company has failed to leave the door open to negotiations with Warner, especially in light of EMI's recent profit warnings.

EMI's Board rejected WMG's most recent offer because they felt it was not in the best interests of the shareholders to entertain an offer which would entail prolonged regulatory scrutiny (ala the Sony BMG merger) and unacceptable operational risk at a critical time for the company. "The Board also regards a price of 260 pence per share as inadequate, having regard to the stand-alone value of EMI, the synergies available from a combination with WMG and the risks identified above," EMI said in a statement.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=366974





Hip-Hop Is Rock ’n’ Roll, and Hall of Fame Likes It
Jon Pareles

It’s official: Hip-hop is rock ’n’ roll.

Last night at the Waldorf-Astoria, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who proved that hip-hop was more than party music with their 1982 hit “The Message,” became the first hip-hop group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Joseph Saddler, better known as the disc jockey and producer Grandmaster Flash, said backstage, “It opens the gates to our culture.”

Jay-Z, the rapper who is chief executive officer of Def Jam Records, handed the awards to the group. Reading his speech from a personal digital assistant, he said, “The shot heard ’round the world was fired from the South Bronx.”

When Melle Mel, the rapper on “The Message,” stepped up to speak, he urged the music executives in the audience to “make hip-hop the culture that it was, instead the culture of violence it is right now.”

Joining the rappers as new members of the Hall of Fame were the poet-turned- punk-rock-pioneer Patti Smith, the three-member girl group the Ronettes, the hard-rock band Van Halen and the Georgia college-town rockers R.E.M.

It was the hall’s first awards ceremony to be broadcast live, on both the cable channel VH1 Classic and on the Web by America Online. VH1 will broadcast an edited version of the ceremony on Saturday at 9 p.m.

On the stage, strong women’s voices dominated the music. Aretha Franklin swooped through “I Never Loved a Man,” singing in tribute to the hall’s founder, Ahmet Ertegun, who died in December. Ronnie Spector belted “Be My Baby” with the Ronettes, and Ms. Smith brought an idealistic fervor to her songs.

Accepting her award, Ms. Smith recalled a kitchen table argument with her husband, Fred Smith, shortly before he died in 1994. “He said to me, ‘Tricia, one day you’re going to get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “He asked me to accept it like a lady and not say any curse words and to make certain to salute new generations. Because it is the new generations that will redefine the landscape of rock ’n’ roll.”

Still, the epithets arrived when Ms. Smith tossed off her jacket, untucked her shirt and belted a punk anthem about being “outside of society.” She said it was her mother’s favorite song. The night’s closing all-star jam was also one of her songs, “People Have the Power.”

Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam paid tribute to R.E.M., saying he had, by his calculations, listened to their album “Murmur” 1,260 times in the summer of 1984. Referring to R.E.M.’s hard-to-understand singer, Michael Stipe, he said, “One of the reasons I was listening so incessantly was I had to know what he was saying,” Mr. Vedder said. “He can hit an emotion with pinpoint accuracy or he can be completely oblique, and it all resonates.”

R.E.M. performed with its original drummer, Bill Berry, who had retired after suffering a brain aneurysm. Mr. Vedder joined R.E.M. onstage to sing “Man on the Moon,” and Ms. Smith joined them for the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” It was a reminder that Iggy Pop and the Stooges, whose music was a cornerstone of punk-rock, have not been elected to the Hall of Fame.

Old feuds were not left behind. The Ronettes, whose hits were triumphs of their producer Phil Spector’s “wall of sound,” pointedly didn’t mention him in speeches that thanked a lifetime of other supporters, including Mr. Spector’s songwriting collaborators and the Ronettes’ arranger, Jack Nitzsche.

Introducing the Ronettes, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones described hearing the group warming up backstage when they shared touring bills in the 1960s. “They could sing all their way right through a wall of sound,” he said. “They didn’t need anything.”

Ms. Spector, who was married to Mr. Spector from 1968 until 1974, recalled the days of “our dresses slit up the side and our beehives up to here,” pointing well over her head. “All my life, all I ever wanted to do was sing rock ’n’ roll.”

The omission of Mr. Spector’s name reflected a 15-year court battle between the producer and the group. The Ronettes were paid less than $15,000 when they signed with Philles Records in 1964, and never saw another payment. In 1987, the Ronettes sued Mr. Spector — who also wrote their songs and owned their label — for royalties. They won an award of $2.6 million in 2000, but it was overturned on appeal.

After the Ronettes performed last night, Paul Shaffer of “Late Night With David Letterman” — who led the stage band — read a brief congratulatory message from Mr. Spector in which he said, “I wish them all the happiness and good fortune the world has to offer.”

Mr. Spector, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989, meanwhile, is about to go on trial for the 2003 killing of an actress, Lana Clarkson, at his Los Angeles mansion; jury selection is to start on Monday.

Van Halen, which planned and then canceled a tour this summer with its original singer, David Lee Roth, couldn’t manage a reunion for the Hall of Fame. Its guitarist, Eddie Van Halen, entered a rehabilitation center last Thursday, according to a statement on the band’s Web site, and negotiations over which songs Mr. Roth might perform broke down. Only Van Halen’s bassist, Michael Anthony, and its second lead singer, Sammy Hagar, attended the ceremony. They performed the 1986 hit “Why Can’t This Be Love” with the stage band.

Velvet Revolver, which includes members of Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots, handed the members of Van Halen their awards and performed two additional Van Halen songs.

Mr. Hagar, accepting his award, said, “I couldn’t tell you how much I wish everyone was here tonight. It’s out of our control.” He also thanked the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for including him as a Hall of Fame member, although he did not join Van Halen until 1985, after Mr. Roth left.

“They didn’t have to do that,” Mr. Hagar said. He added that while he regretted the full band wasn’t at the ceremony, “You couldn’t get me from here with a shotgun.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/ar...ic/13hall.html





Sho ’Nuff

New Style for Studios: Peddling Films Softly
Sharon Waxman

As one of this summer’s most anticipated and heavily marketed movies, “Spider-Man 3,” the latest in the Sony Pictures blockbuster superhero series, will be hard to miss. But this week at ShoWest, the movie industry’s annual convention for thousands of theater owners, filling four days and two Las Vegas hotels, a giant poster in the convention area is pretty much all the promotion it is getting.

Three years ago, leading up to “Spider-Man 2,” Sony’s efforts did not cut such a low profile. Conventiongoers were treated to a special preview of the main action sequence, as spider-costumed acrobats descended on black cables from the ceiling of Le Theatre Des Arts at the Paris Hotel here.

The other major Hollywood studios are following similar no-frills scripts at what is the principal industry showcase for mainstream movies. A frayed relationship between the major studios and exhibitors, cost-cutting across the board and consolidation among the national theater chains has turned a promotional event for big-budget movies into one that is not promoting very many big-budget movies.

“It’s expensive,” explained Richard Cook, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios. Last year Disney screened Pixar’s “Cars” for the convention, but on Tuesday it showed only a trailer of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” and 12 minutes of the next Pixar animated movie, “Ratatouille.” “You still have to sell the movie,” he added. “You just do it in a different way.”

Mass events at places like ShoWest have been replaced by one-on-one contact with the exhibitors responsible for the lion’s share of American cineplexes, like AMC, Regal and Cinemark. Studio executives say they can cover most of the country with a few phone calls or a visit to an exhibitor’s headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., or Knoxville, Tenn.

Mr. Cook said Disney executives would spend much of ShoWest in private meetings with the large exhibitors, promoting coming movies. And just a couple of weeks ago, Paramount played host on its Hollywood lot to executives from a small, regional chain, Pacific Theaters, showing them scenes from two high-end movies still in production, “Drillbit Taylor” and “Sweeney Todd.”

As recently as three years ago, exhibitors were treated to the full-on glamour treatment by Paramount, with a cavalcade of stars from the studio’s lineup of films, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep and a dozen others, attending a lavish dinner for the ShoWest delegates. The cost for the evening, according to a Paramount executive, was close to $6 million. It did not, however, result in greater theatrical bookings for Paramount films.

“In the old days, when we had a huge dais of stars, it was pretty sexy and cool,” said Rory Bruer, the domestic distribution president for Sony. “Now ShoWest has evolved in a far more practical, business manner. It’s become about the whole operational aspect of theaters.”

This means presentations about new projectors and sound systems, and debates over advertising costs, the rating systems and the relative merits of popcorn makers. Delegates are also invited to sample panels, like one about the hearing-impaired and another on the dangers of trans fat at the concession stand.

“Nuts and bolts, that’s why we come — for the seminars, the trade show,” said Brian MacLeod, the vice president for operations at Empire Theaters, a 54-theater chain based in Canada. “It’s always nice to see the stars, but that doesn’t help me with my job directly.”

But the shift at ShoWest is also a sign of continuing tension between the Hollywood studios and the exhibition chains, a demotion of sorts, as festivals in places like Toronto and even Venice have absorbed more attention from the news media.

Though the industry’s domestic box-office gross revenues rose 5.5 percent in 2006 after a disastrous drop in 2005 (and is off to a good start this year, thanks to movies like “300” and “Ghost Rider”), the major studios still complain that theaters are not doing enough to lure customers off their couches and into the multiplex. Among the studios’ desires: hiring more ushers to cut down on cellphone use and other noise.

Meanwhile, exhibitors resent Hollywood’s pressure to shorten the interval between the theatrical first run of a film and its DVD release. That interval, known as a window, shrank an average of 10 days last year, to three months and 25 days, according to John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners. Exhibitors are concerned that people won’t make the trek to the theater if they know the movie will soon show up at the local video store.

“What message are we sending to the patron with these short windows?” he said in his speech on Tuesday to exhibitors, betraying annoyance. “Get the DVD really fast,” just because the movie stank? he asked, using a more vulgar term. He added, “That part wasn’t in the script.”

Asked later about tension with the studios, he said, “I wouldn’t say it’s completely dissipated, but it’s certainly improved.”

Exhibitors have also not rushed to install digital projectors in their theaters, an expensive process whose cost they are sharing with Hollywood studios. After years of discussions with manufacturers, there are now 2,300 screens across the country with digital projectors, still a small fraction of the nation’s 37,000. The higher-quality equipment is not expected to be widely installed until 2009, when a few high-profile movies in 3D requiring digital projection (like James Cameron’s “Avatar”) are scheduled for released.

Screenings and stars have not been completely banished from ShoWest; the actor Shia LaBeouf came with the director Michael Bay and 20 minutes of their movie, “Transformers.” But the dream machine has lost some of its dazzle. The studios are instead using ShoWest to promote some of their lesser-known releases rather than big-budget spectacles.

MGM (now a modest-size distributor) showed “Mr. Brooks,” a psychological thriller with Kevin Costner and Demi Moore (though it excluded reporters from the screening). And Paramount screened a small movie, “Disturbia,” also starring Mr. LaBeouf.

“We have a bunch of movies with a lot of profile,” said Rob Moore, president of worldwide marketing and distribution at Paramount, explaining the decision not to show the studio’s most anticipated films. “I don’t need to show ‘Shrek 3’ or ‘Blades of Glory’ to anybody.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/movies/15show.html





Edison the Inventor, Edison the Showman
Randall Stross

This article was adapted from "The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World," by Randall Stross, a contributor to The New York Times. The book, to be published on Tuesday by Crown Publishers, examines the reality and the myths surrounding the Edison legacy.

THOMAS ALVA EDISON is the patron saint of electric light, electric power and music-on-demand, the grandfather of the Wired World, great-grandfather of iPod Nation. He was the person who flipped the switch. Before Edison, darkness. After Edison, media-saturated modernity.

Well, not exactly. The heroic biography we were fed as schoolchildren does have its limitations, beginning with the omission of other inventors who played critical roles — not just Edison's gifted assistants, but also his accomplished competitors. What's most interesting about the standard Edison biography that we grew up with is not that it is heroic but that it is outsized, a projected image quite distinct from the man who stood 5-foot-9.

Edison is famously associated with the beginnings of movies, which is where the modern business of celebrity begins. But he deserves to be credited with another, no less important, discovery related to celebrity that he made early in his own public life, accidentally: the application of celebrity to business.

No one of the time would have predicted that it would be an inventor, of all occupations, who would become the cynosure of the age. In retrospect, fame may appear to be a justly earned reward for the inventor of practical electric light in 1879 — yet Edison's fame came before light. It was conferred two years earlier, for the invention of the phonograph. Who would have guessed that the announcement of the phonograph's invention was sufficient to propel him in a matter of a few days from obscurity into the firmament above?

After "Edison" became a household name, he would pretend that nothing had changed, that he was as indifferent as ever. But this stance is unconvincing. He did care, at least most of the time. When he tried to burnish his public image with exaggerated claims of progress in his laboratory, for example, he demonstrated a hunger for credit unknown in his earliest tinkering. The mature Edison, post-fame, is most appealing whenever he returned to acting spontaneously, without weighing what action would serve to enhance his public image.

One occasion when Edison cast off the expectations of others in his middle age was when he met Henry Stanley, of "Dr. Livingston, I presume" fame, and Stanley's wife, who had come to visit him at his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey Edison provided a demonstration of the phonograph, which Stanley had never heard before. Stanley asked, in a low voice and slow cadence, " Edison, if it were possible for you to hear the voice of any man whose name is known in the history of the world, whose voice would you prefer to hear?"

"Napoleon's," replied Edison without hesitation.

"No, no," Stanley said piously, "I should like to hear the voice of our Savior."

"Well," explained Edison, "You know, I like a hustler."

Edison had retained the patent rights and business stakes in the phonograph, so when the business came into its own, he approved the construction of expanded manufacturing facilities adjacent to his laboratory to handle the orders that poured in. This was followed by still more growth, and more building: an entire block adjacent to the laboratory was filled with five-story hulks. By 1907, as the company erected its 16th building, Edison boasted of "the largest talking machine factory in the world."

Edison and his copywriters courted the urban middle class with advertising that made prospective customers feel as entitled to enjoy the pleasures of recorded music as anyone. "When the king of England wants to see a show, they bring the show to the castle and he hears it alone in his private theater." So said an advertisement in 1906 for the Edison phonograph. It continued: "If you are a king, why don't you exercise your kingly privilege and have a show of your own in your own house."

Other advertisements developed the theme of the phonograph as the great leveler. In 1908, a man in formal wear and his slender wife stood on one side of a table, upon which sat a phonograph; on the other side stood four servants, wearing smiles and expressions of curiosity. The caption said the Edison phonograph had brought the same entertainment enjoyed by the rich within the range of all. The credit for making the phonograph "the great popular entertainer" was to be bestowed upon Thomas Edison. "He made it desirable by making it good; he made it popular by making it inexpensive." Another advertisement promised that the phonograph would "amuse the most unresponsive," adding reverently, "It is irresistible because Edison made it."

IN truth, the Edison phonograph fell short of being irresistible; nor did it lead the industry in technical innovation. It was the Victor Talking Machine Company that made discs a practical medium. The disc's flat dimensions offered a more convenient means of storing many songs than the three-dimensional Edison cylinder. It was Victor that came up with a disc that offered four minutes of capacity when Edison's cylinder's had only two minutes. And it was Victor that introduced the Victrola, which hid the horn of the phonograph within a wood cabinet, transforming it into a piece of fine furniture — and a very profitable item for its manufacturer.

Edison's offerings may have lagged, but such was the demand for kingly entertainment enjoyed at home that the Edison Phonograph Works prospered along with Victor and Columbia, the companies that with Edison comprised the dominant three in the industry. Edison's cylinder, which cost about 7 cents to manufacture, sold for 50 cents, providing a nice gross margin that covered all manner of strategic missteps. One of those was Edison's conviction that there was no need to switch to discs. When he finally gave in and brought out discs, he could not bring himself to relinquish cylinders, so resources had to be spread across two incompatible formats. Nor would he permit his standards for sound quality to be compromised. He insisted that his discs be twice the thickness of those produced by the competition and much heavier, which provided for better sound but made them far more cumbersome.

Edison was adamant that Edison recordings would be played only on Edison phonographs. His competitors, Victor and Columbia, shared the same playback technique, etching a laterally cut groove that sent the needle moving horizontally as the record played. Their recordings could be played on one another's machines. Edison, however, adopted his own design, a groove that varied vertically, called at the time a "hill and dale" cut. An adapter permitted Victor records to be played on an Edison Disc Phonograph, but Edison forbade the sale of an attachment that permitted his records to be played on competitors' machines.

Edison had never shown a talent for strategy, and he did not give the subject close study. He spent most of his time working on problems related to industrial chemistry, principally those related to batteries, and, secondarily, those related to mass production of cylinders and discs. Yet he did take time to make decisions about music, personally approving — and, more often, disapproving — the suggestions of underlings about which performers should be recorded. His dislike of various musical genres and artists was strong and encompassed almost everything. Popular music — "these miserable dance and ragtime selections" — had no chance of receiving his blessing. Jazz was for "the nuts;" one performance reminded him of "the dying moan of dead animals." But he was no elitist. He also dismissed the members of the Metropolitan Opera House as lacking tune. Sergei Rachmaninoff was just "a pounder."

In 1911, Edison wrote a correspondent that he had had to take on the responsibilities of musical director for his company because the incumbent had made what Edison deemed to be awful decisions, permitting players to play out of tune and, most egregiously, tolerating a defective flute that "on high notes gives a piercing abnormal sound like machinery that wants oiling."

To Edison, the technical problems posed in recording sound by purely mechanical means, prior to the development of the microphone, were far more absorbing than business issues. He allocated his time accordingly. He spent a year and a half overseeing research on how to record and clearly reproduce the word "sugar" perfectly. Two more months were needed to master "scissors." He wrote, "After that the phonograph would record and reproduce anything." This was not wholly true. Recording an orchestra with pre-electric acoustic technology presented insoluble problems. He did his best, ordering the construction of the world's largest brass recording horn, 128 feet long, 5 feet in diameter at the end that received sound, tapering down to 5/8 of an inch at the other. Its construction required 30,000 rivets alone, each carefully smoothed on the interior surface. It was a marvel of metalwork, but as an instrument for recording sound, it never worked very well. (It did serve its country well, however, being sent off for service in World War II in a scrap drive.)

Edison's partial loss of hearing prevented him from listening to music in the same way as those with unimpaired hearing. A little item that appeared in a Schenectady newspaper in 1913 related the story that Edison supposedly told a friend about how he usually listened to recordings by placing one ear directly against the phonograph's cabinet. But if he detected a sound too faint to hear in this fashion, Edison said, "I bite my teeth in the wood good and hard and then I get it good and strong." The story would be confirmed decades later in his daughter Madeleine's recollections of growing up. One day she came into the sitting room in which someone was playing the piano and a guest, Maria Montessori, was in tears, watching Edison listen the only way that he could, teeth biting the piano. "She thought it was pathetic," Madeleine said. "I guess it was."

EDISON, though, was undaunted by the limitations of his hearing, which would make for an inspirational tale, were it not for the fact that he was the self-appointed musical director of a profit-seeking record business, whose artistic decisions directly affected the employees of the Edison Phonograph Works. His judgments and whims met no obstruction.

Workers spread word daily about Edison's mood. "The Old Man is feelin' fine today" was welcome news. But if the word was "the Old Man's on the rampage," employees dove for cover, "as in a cyclone cellar, until the tempest was over."

Not just his employees but also the general public angered Edison. He was exasperated by a public that clamored, he said, "for louder and still louder records." He believed that "anyone who really had a musical ear wanted soft music." And it was those customers, the "lovers of good music," whom Edison in 1911 said would be "the only constant and continuous buyers of records." This was wishful thinking. What was plainly evident to everyone else was that the only constant in the music business was inconstancy, the fickle nature of popular fads. The half-life of a commercially successful song was brief. By the time Edison's factory shipped the first records three weeks after recording, the flighty public had already moved on.

Even then, in the founding years of the recorded-music business, the economics of the industry was based upon hits, the few songs that enjoyed an unpredictably large success and subsidized the losses incurred by the other releases. On rare occasions, Edison grudgingly granted this. Then he would concede that the popular music he disdained was in most demand, and he took what comfort he could in the thought that the "trash" his company reluctantly released did help to sell phonographs and indirectly help him to provide "music of the class that is enjoyed by real lovers of music."

This business was not so easily mastered, however, and the contempt with which Edison regarded popular music did not help him understand his customers. They would purchase the records of particular performers whom they had heard of but shied away from the unknown artists. Decades later, economists who studied the workings of the entertainment industry would identify the winner-take-all phenomenon that benefited a handful of performers. The famous become more famous, and the more famous, the richer. Everyone else faces starvation. This was the case at the turn of the 20th century, too.

The management of the Victor Talking Machine Company understood these basic market principles long before Edison absorbed them. Shortly after the company's founding in 1901, Victor signed Enrico Caruso to an exclusive contract, paying him a royalty that was rumored to be 25 percent of the $2 retail price of a Caruso record. His estimated annual earnings from royalties in 1912 was $90,000, at a time when the second most popular singer earned only $25,000.

At the same time Victor was writing checks for the leading talents of the day, Edison brought out his checkbook reluctantly and rarely. One exception was when, in 1910, he signed the woman who way back on a wintry night in 1879 had visited his Menlo Park laboratory: Sarah Bernhardt.

In the Edison Phonograph Monthly, the company's internal trade organ, much was made of the difficulties that had had to be overcome in order to land an artist such as Bernhardt. She had had to be persuaded to discard her "professional aversion to exploiting her talent in this manner." The monetary terms supposedly were not an issue. The sticking point was her concern that crude recording technology would leave posterity with a sound inferior to her voice. According to the company's publicists, a demonstration of the phonograph persuaded her that Edison would produce "perfect records." The company urged dealers to write their local newspapers and reap free publicity: "No paper will refuse to publish the news, as everything that the immortal Bernhardt does is eagerly seized upon by the press."

We do not know whether Bernhardt ruled out commercial considerations. (She did endorsements for commercial products like a dentifrice for a fee, but she did draw the line when P. T. Barnum offered her $10,000 for the rights to display a medical curiosity: her amputated leg.) We do know that Edison hated the negotiations with recording stars, which entailed monetary demands far in excess of what Edison considered reasonable. He complained that despite their talk about their love for their art, "it is money, and money only, that counts." Even the large sums paid to the most famous failed to secure their loyalty. He grumbled that artists would bolt "for a little more money offered by companies whose strongest advertising point is a list of names."

EDISON convinced himself — without consulting others, in typical fashion — that he could simply opt out of competition for stars. He tried a small-budget alternative, scouting undiscovered voices among local choirs in Orange, New Jersey, and Newark. He wrote a correspondent in 1911, "I believe if you record church choir singers and musical club, glee club, etc., singers, that we shall be able to discover a lot of talent just suitable for the phonograph." He was pleased to have found locally two tenors who "can beat any opera tenor except Caruso." Over time, Edison did add Anna Case, Sergei ("the Pounder") Rachmaninoff and a few others. But he permitted competitors to snatch up other performers like Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Fannie Brice and Al Jolson. The first record to sell one million copies was Vernon Dalhart's hillbilly ditty "The Prisoner's Song." Not surprisingly, it was a Victor recording, not an Edison.

The fame of the performers whom Victor Talking Machines astutely signed did more than bolster record sales; it also added great luster to Victor's brand. A "Victrola" soon replaced "phonograph" as the generic term, a development that caused Edison considerable distress.

Edison dealers grumbled among themselves, too. The Topeka, Kansas, agency, for example, complained in early 1915 to the one in Des Moines, "We have no artists of any note on the Edison." It fell to Edison's salespeople to explain their absence on the Edison label. A sales manual from this time laid out the company's defense, which directed the public's attention to "the great Wizard" who personally tested voice samples using techniques of his own devising and selected "those voices which are most worthy of re-creation by his new art." Only the voice, not the reputation, mattered to the Wizard.

So determined was Edison to strip artists of their vanity and unreasonable demands that he refused to print the name of the recording artist on the record label. When his dealer in Topeka asked him to reconsider, Edison let loose a torrent of pent-up opinion:

"I am sure you will give me the credit of having put a tremendous amount of thought into the phonograph business after the many years that I have been engaged on it. Not alone to the technical side of the business have I given an immense amount of thought but also to the commercial side, and I want to say to you that I have most excellent reasons for not printing the name of the artist on the record. Your business has probably not brought you into intimate contact with musicians, but mine has. There is a great deal of 'faking' and press agent work in the musical profession, and I feel that for the present at least I would rather quit the business than be a party to the boasting up of undeserved reputations."

Edison wrote this in 1913, when he was 66 years old. His confidence in his business acumen had, if anything, grown over time. And in taking this stand, he reveals a nature that could not see the inconsistency: Here his own companies used his fame as the Wizard to market his inventions, prominently displaying his name and driving off anyone who threatened to infringe the trademark. But he could not abide others — in this case, his own recording artists — using fame, even though much more modest, for their own commercial interests.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/bu.../11edison.html





South Korea Creates Ethical Code for Righteous Robots
New Scientist Tech and AFP

South Korea is drawing up a code of ethics to stop humans misusing robots – or vice versa – officials announced on Wednesday.

The government expects to issue a "Robot Ethics Charter" for manufacturers and users in April 2007. Its key considerations are preventing illegal use, protecting data acquired by robots and establishing clear identification and traceability of machines.

But the charter will also cover ethical standards to be programmed into robots, the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy says. A five-member task force including experts, futurists and a science fiction writer began working on the code in November 2006.

"The government plans to set ethical guidelines concerning the roles and functions of robots, as robots are expected to develop strong intelligence in the near future," the ministry said in a statement. As the South Korean population ages, various service robots will come into use, eventually becoming "key companions to human beings", it added.

Robot rules

However, one robotics researcher warns that it remains a mystery whether machines will ever be able to understand ethics in the same way as humans.

"Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives," Park Hye-Young of the ministry's code of ethics team says. "Others may get addicted to interacting with them just as many internet users get hooked on the cyberworld."

Hye-Young adds that the government's guidelines will reflect the "Three Laws of Robotics" put forward by science fiction author Isaac Asimov. These are:

1. A robot may not injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm

2. A robot must obey orders given by a human unless these conflict with the first law

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as this does not conflict with the first or second law

Max Lungarella, a robotics researcher at the University of Tokyo in Japan told New Scientist that rapid progress in the field has made robot ethics a hot topic. But he adds that it is still unclear whether an ethical code could ever be programmed into a robot effectively.
Context counts

"Good and bad depends on the context and on the situation," Lungarella says. "One issue is to program robots to be secure and dependable. It's quite another to have robots that 'know' what is good and what is bad, or that can act on an intrinsic shared value system."

South Korea is currently developing various types of robot. In September 2006, the government unveiled a machinegun-toting sentry robot designed to patrol the heavily fortified border with North Korea.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology, in Seoul, is also working on robot caregivers that can perform simple chores and monitor the health of elderly people. The project is due for completion in 2013. The same institute developed EveR-2 Muse, a robotic "woman" that can speak and reproduce various facial expressions.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...us-robots.html





Bowing to Sikhs’ Call, California Wants Textbook Change
Jesse McKinley

The picture on Page 95 of “An Age of Voyages: 1350-1600,” a seventh-grade history book used in California schools since last fall, had been unremarkable to state education officials: a stiff 19th-century portrait of a man with a trimmed beard holding a few beads and wearing a crown.

But for Sikhs, that image of Guru Nanak (1469-1538), their religion’s founder, is anathema to everything they believe about the prophet, a simple man who preached to the poor and certainly, they say, never wore a crown.

So, after months of lobbying by Sikhs, the California Board of Education voted unanimously on Thursday to ask the book’s publisher to remove the portrait from future printings, and to provide a sticker with another image or text to place over the portrait in existing copies.

“The image itself was offensive to the Sikh community,” said Thomas Adams, director of the Curriculum Frameworks and Instructional Resources Division of the State Education Department. “And it wasn’t defensible on the issue of accuracy, because it is from a later period” than the one in which Guru Nanak lived.

Sikhs, who trace their religion to the late-15th-century Punjab region of what are now Pakistan and India, number some 24 million around the world and about 500,000 in the United States, says the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, based in Washington. According to Kavneet Singh, the fund’s Western regional director, 75,000 to 100,000 live in California, though some estimates put the number at twice that. Many arrived in the United States in two waves, immigrating either as laborers during the early 20th century or as skilled professionals since World War II.

Sikhs in California had pushed to have the picture removed from the text ever since the book first arrived in schools at the start of the academic year. Gurcharan Singh Mann, a Sikh who lives in Fremont and who was active in the effort, said that in addition to the crown, the trim of Guru Nanak’s beard was in the style of a Muslim or a Hindu rather than a Sikh.

“It is not a suitable picture,” Mr. Singh Mann said. “Every Sikh at their home has a picture of Guru Nanak, and it looks like the modern dress of the Sikh, of the 21st century, with a turban and a fully grown beard.”

The book’s publisher, Oxford University Press, did not return a call for comment. But education officials and other publishing houses said the episode was just the latest example of a textbook change prompted by concerns about giving offense to various racial, ethnic or religious groups.

California’s school board has a public — and often lengthy — process of reviewing textbooks before they are made available for purchase by individual school districts. Last year, for example, the board took comments from a variety of groups, including representatives of the Jewish, Muslim and Hindu religions, each looking for changes to a proposed social sciences curriculum. The textbooks were approved last March, but only after the board had given publishers a 126-page list of suggested tweaks, trims and fixes.

“This has always been the story of the California adoption process,” Mr. Adams said. “It is intended for the public to participate. It’s not intended for a bureaucrat like myself to sit behind a desk and do it comfortably.”

But publishers say that with the rise in cultural sensitivity and in new educational standards, including those from federal programs like No Child Left Behind, the cost and time consumed in making schoolbooks have also increased.

“We jump through a lot of hoops, and a great deal of money is spent in terms of developing materials,” said Jay Diskey, executive director of the school division of the Association of American Publishers. “And there’s a very strong correlation, particularly in California, that the new standards do indeed lead to more pages and lead to more costs.”

Still, publishers usually make the changes, if only because of California’s size and buying power. The schoolbook market in the United States is roughly $4.2 billion, Mr. Diskey said, and California schools are the nation’s No. 1 purchaser: the state government allocated $403 million for schoolbooks in 2006, Mr. Adams said, not counting federal money or lottery revenue.

It is not just ethnic or religious groups that lobby over the issue, either. Last year the California Legislature approved a bill forbidding any negative portrayal of lesbians and gay men in textbooks, though it was vetoed in September by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on the ground that existing antidiscrimination law was sufficient to address the matter.

Mr. Singh Mann said the depiction of Guru Nanak was important not only for historical reasons but also to help keep students from confusing Sikhs with other ethnic groups. He said that several Sikhs were assaulted after the attacks of Sept. 11 and that some non-Sikh students still treated Sikhs with suspicion or worse.

“You’re in the school and some kids have a turban, they’ll be called Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Singh Mann said. “And the kids want to drop out the school. We don’t want to be a burden on the country, but if a kid drops out, it is a problem.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/us/10textbook.html





Triumph of Willful Blindness to the Horror of History

LENI RIEFENSTAHL
A Life

By Jürgen Trimborn. Translated by Edna McCown.

Illustrated. 351 pages. Faber & Faber. $30.

LENI
The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl

By Steven Bach

Illustrated. 386 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.


Michiko Kakutani
Leni Riefenstahl liked to say that her art and life were devoted to the pursuit of Beauty. But her career, as Hitler’s favorite and highly gifted filmmaker, stands as an enduring rebuke to Keats’s assertion that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and that is “all ye need to know.”

She arguably remains the most controversial filmmaker in history. The critic John Simon hailed her as “one of the supreme artists of the cinema, the greatest woman filmmaker ever.” And she is the sole woman director on a Time magazine list of the all-time 100 best films.

Susan Sontag, in contrast, went from arguing, in the mid-’60s, that Riefenstahl’s films “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” transcended “the categories of propaganda or even reportage” to concluding, a decade later, that the very conception of “Triumph of the Will” “negates the possibility of the filmmaker’s having an aesthetic conception independent of propaganda.”

Sontag also observed that “the purification of Leni Riefenstahl’s reputation of its Nazi dross has been gathering momentum for some time,” with her defenders, including many in the avant-garde film establishment, suggesting that she was first and foremost an “indomitable priestess of the beautiful,” fascinated by the ideal and the monumental, “a beauty freak rather than a horrid propagandist.”

This of course is what Riefenstahl — who died in 2003 at 101 — has maintained since the end of World War II, and it’s what she argued at length in her 600-plus page memoir (1993) which attempted to create a portrait of the author as a political naïf and victim of slander, even as it promoted an image of her as a visionary artist.

The chief value of two new biographies of Riefenstahl — one by Jürgen Trimborn, a professor of film, theater and art history at the University of Cologne; the other by Steven Bach, the author of biographies of Marlene Dietrich and Moss Hart — is that they both serve as much needed correctives to all the spin, evasions and distortions of the record purveyed by Riefenstahl, and that they both re-situate her work (and recent efforts to divorce her work and her aesthetic from the context in which they were created) in a historical perspective.

In “Leni” Mr. Bach notes that in the 1970s the feminist movement “sought to claim her as forerunner or exemplar,” while proponents of the auteur theory encouraged “viewing her work for its style, for its formal qualities and technical innovations, as if her art were independent of subject and technique were irrelevant to content.”

In “Leni Riefenstahl” Mr. Trimborn points out that critical praise for the formal qualities of this filmmaker’s work, along with growing historical distance from the Third Reich and respect for her advanced age, led “to an increasingly unbiased acceptance of Riefenstahl” on her own terms in the last years of her life. The dangers of this development, he astutely points out, is that it reflects a willful determination to deny or ignore her role in promoting Hitler and the Reich, and points, in Germany especially, to “a questionable comprehension of history, which desires to attain ‘normality’ at any price.”

It is Mr. Trimborn’s conclusion that Riefenstahl was “primarily a careerist:” “through her friendship with Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl made her career, the peaks and valleys, the breaches and contradictions of which are not atypical of many Germans of the 20th century.” As for Mr. Bach, he writes that “the ‘horror of history’ in which her apologists thought her ‘imprisoned’ was a narrative of her own making about which she remained nostalgic and unrepentant. It was richly rewarded and free of any compulsion save ambition. She did not suffer from it but profited and to suggest otherwise — as she often did — is an insult to the millions who died at the hands of a regime she took pride in glorifying, using and enabling.”

Both books do an energetic job of trying to ferret out the facts of Riefenstahl’s life, facts obscured by her own lies, boasts and denials, and a job made all the more difficult, as Mr. Trimborn writes, by the lack of dependable evidence from other sources relating to many of the early chapters of her life. Both books trace her early ambition and dogged determination — which were transferred from dance to the cinema, after a knee injury — and both note her reliance on powerful male mentors and collaborators, despite her assertions of independence.

Riefenstahl’s stint as the star of a series of mountain movies made by Arnold Fanck — whom she’d sought out and impressed, after seeing his picture “Mountain of Destiny” — would pave the way for her work for the Reich. Fanck, as Mr. Bach points out, “gave her a foundation in filmmaking that would prove indispensable for everything that followed,” including an appreciation of striking visuals, strong angles and monumental vistas.

In addition the mountain film genre, with its echoes of German Romanticism and emphasis on heroic striving, would dovetail, in many ways, with a developing fascist aesthetic. Hitler himself was a fan of Fanck’s movies and responded quickly when Riefenstahl wrote him in 1932, requesting an audience. “Once we come to power,” he told her, “you must make my films.”

It would be a useful collaboration for both parties. The Reich’s lavish financial backing gave Riefenstahl unusual logistical and creative freedom along with a luxurious life among the elite, and she and the architect Albert Speer, Mr. Trimborn writes, “quickly rose to international prominence as figureheads of the Nazi regime,” while helping “to erect the facade that diverted the rest of the world from Hitler’s true plans and goals.”

Although Riefenstahl would later claim that “Triumph of the Will” was “a pure historical film” without “a single reconstructed scene,” Mr. Bach suggests that it was actually a carefully orchestrated, stage-managed work (which included rehearsed scenes and fragments of speeches delivered at various times); moreover its virtuosic manipulation of formal elements were put in the service of exalting Hitler and his movement.

As for Riefenstahl’s film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, “Olympia,” it was secretly financed and sponsored by the Reich, and it played a key role in Goebbels’s broader propaganda campaign, Mr. Bach notes, “to present the New Germany to the world in a positive light, deflecting attention from repressive racial policies by emphasizing Strength through Joy.”

Riefenstahl would repeatedly ignore or deny news reports of anti-Semitic atrocities in Germany. Mr. Bach reports that she claimed not to believe reports about Kristallnacht, shrugging it off as slander on her homeland, and that during a 1938-39 trip to the United States, she told a reporter that as an artist she could not be expected to know about events, even if the rest of the world did. “There are four walls about me” when she was at work, she said, and “it is not possible for me to know what is true” or what is a story.

In 1940, with the fall of Paris, Riefenstahl wrote Hitler an ecstatic telegram: “With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany’s greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind.”

This from a woman who wanted history to see her simply as an artist, who falsely denied ever making anti-Semitic statements, who implausibly claimed she knew next to nothing about Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, a woman who never acknowledged moral accountability for the role her movies played in promoting Hitler and his cause, a woman who in recent decades would win acclaim from cineastes on her own terms as a great artist and who, in 1974, received a tribute from the Telluride film festival for her “exemplary contributions to the art of the film.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/books/13kaku.html





What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing
John Tierney

So there are these two muffins baking in an oven. One of them yells, “Wow, it’s hot in here!”

And the other muffin replies: “Holy cow! A talking muffin!”

Did that alleged joke make you laugh? I would guess (and hope) not. But under different circumstances, you would be chuckling softly, maybe giggling, possibly guffawing. I know that’s hard to believe, but trust me. The results are just in on a laboratory test of the muffin joke.

Laughter, a topic that stymied philosophers for 2,000 years, is finally yielding to science. Researchers have scanned brains and tickled babies, chimpanzees and rats. They’ve traced the evolution of laughter back to what looks like the primal joke — or, to be precise, the first stand-up routine to kill with an audience of primates.

It wasn’t any funnier than the muffin joke, but that’s not surprising, at least not to the researchers. They’ve discovered something that eluded Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud and the many theorists who have tried to explain laughter based on the mistaken premise that they’re explaining humor.

Occasionally we’re surprised into laughing at something funny, but most laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. It’s not about getting the joke. It’s about getting along.

When Robert R. Provine tried applying his training in neuroscience to laughter 20 years ago, he naïvely began by dragging people into his laboratory at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to watch episodes of “Saturday Night Live” and a George Carlin routine. They didn’t laugh much. It was what a stand-up comic would call a bad room.

So he went out into natural habitats — city sidewalks, suburban malls — and carefully observed thousands of “laugh episodes.” He found that 80 percent to 90 percent of them came after straight lines like “I know” or “I’ll see you guys later.” The witticisms that induced laughter rarely rose above the level of “You smell like you had a good workout.”

“Most prelaugh dialogue,” Professor Provine concluded in “Laughter,” his 2000 book, “is like that of an interminable television situation comedy scripted by an extremely ungifted writer.”

He found that most speakers, particularly women, did more laughing than their listeners, using the laughs as punctuation for their sentences. It’s a largely involuntary process. People can consciously suppress laughs, but few can make themselves laugh convincingly.

“Laughter is an honest social signal because it’s hard to fake,” Professor Provine says. “We’re dealing with something powerful, ancient and crude. It’s a kind of behavioral fossil showing the roots that all human beings, maybe all mammals, have in common.”

The human ha-ha evolved from the rhythmic sound — pant-pant — made by primates like chimpanzees when they tickle and chase one other while playing. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Washington State University, discovered that rats emit an ultrasonic chirp (inaudible to humans without special equipment) when they’re tickled, and they like the sensation so much they keep coming back for more tickling.

He and Professor Provine figure that the first primate joke — that is, the first action to produce a laugh without physical contact — was the feigned tickle, the same kind of coo-chi-coo move parents make when they thrust their wiggling fingers at a baby. Professor Panksepp thinks the brain has ancient wiring to produce laughter so that young animals learn to play with one another. The laughter stimulates euphoria circuits in the brain and also reassures the other animals that they’re playing, not fighting.

“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Professor Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave organisms effectively into the social fabric.”

Humans are laughing by the age of four months and then progress from tickling to the Three Stooges to more sophisticated triggers for laughter (or, in some inexplicable cases, to Jim Carrey movies). Laughter can be used cruelly to reinforce a group’s solidarity and pride by mocking deviants and insulting outsiders, but mainly it’s a subtle social lubricant. It’s a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy.

Which brings us back to the muffin joke. It was inflicted by social psychologists at Florida State University on undergraduate women last year, during interviews for what was ostensibly a study of their spending habits. Some of the women were told the interviewer would be awarding a substantial cash prize to a few of the participants, like a boss deciding which underling deserved a bonus.

The women put in the underling position were a lot more likely to laugh at the muffin joke (and others almost as lame) than were women in the control group. But it wasn’t just because these underlings were trying to manipulate the boss, as was demonstrated in a follow-up experiment.

This time each of the women watched the muffin joke being told on videotape by a person who was ostensibly going to be working with her on a task. There was supposed to be a cash reward afterward to be allocated by a designated boss. In some cases the woman watching was designated the boss; in other cases she was the underling or a co-worker of the person on the videotape.

When the woman watching was the boss, she didn’t laugh much at the muffin joke. But when she was the underling or a co-worker, she laughed much more, even though the joke-teller wasn’t in the room to see her. When you’re low in the status hierarchy, you need all the allies you can find, so apparently you’re primed to chuckle at anything even if it doesn’t do you any immediate good.

“Laughter seems to be an automatic response to your situation rather than a conscious strategy,” says Tyler F. Stillman, who did the experiments along with Roy Baumeister and Nathan DeWall. “When I tell the muffin joke to my undergraduate classes, they laugh out loud.”

Mr. Stillman says he got so used to the laughs that he wasn’t quite prepared for the response at a conference in January, although he realizes he should have expected it.

“It was a small conference attended by some of the most senior researchers in the field,” he recalls. “When they heard me, a lowly graduate student, tell the muffin joke, there was a really uncomfortable silence. You could hear crickets.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/sc...d10&ei=5087%0A





Government Releases Transition Plan For End Of Analog TV

The government will provide coupons to help households buy analog-to-digital converter boxes so they can continue to receive over-the-air television for free.
K.C. Jones

The federal government has released its final rules on plans for a digital-to-analog converter box coupon program to help Americans receive free digital TV transmission when the age of analog comes to a close in the United States.

"This really has the opportunity to be an absolute game changer in the broadband marketplace," Assistant Secretary of Communications and Information John Kneuer said during a news conference Monday.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced rules Monday that set the stage for manufacturers and retailers to move forward with a switch that is supposed to result in clearer pictures, more programming, broader spectrum for wireless service, and interoperability for emergency responders. The digital age of television is scheduled to take off Feb. 17, 2009, when full-power television stations stop analog broadcasts.

Federal laws require the switch. They also require the government to help some Americans pay for boxes that will allow their television sets to receive digital transmissions.

From Jan. 1, 2008, through March 31, 2009, each U.S. household can request up to two coupons worth $40 each toward the purchase of two analog-to-digital converter boxes, the NTIA said. The federal government has allocated $990 million for the program. Administrators expect that to fund more than 22 million coupons. The NTIA can ask Congress for about $500 million more to cover more than 11 million additional coupons and contingent funds, which administrators said they would reserve for homeowners that only receive over-the-air broadcasts.

Regulators say people with cable and satellite television should not need the boxes. The coupons apply only to basic boxes that meet energy efficiency standards, not for boxes with advanced recording and playback features. Government contractors will store applicants' information in a database. The government will prosecute individuals who commit fraud using criminal statutes, and retailers violating the terms of the program will be banned from it, NTIA administrators said during the news conference.

Consumer electronics and broadcasting groups have formed a coalition to cooperate on an analog-to-digital public education campaign.

Industry and government leaders are eager for the switch to digital, which will broaden the transmission spectrum to provide capabilities that public and private groups seek.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=198000216





Tech Firms Push to Use TV Airwaves for Internet

Cable, Phone Companies Watch Warily
Charles Babington

A coalition of big technology companies wants to bring high-speed Internet access to consumers in a new way: over television airwaves. Key to the project is whether a device scheduled to be delivered to federal labs today lives up to its promise.

The coalition, which includes Microsoft and Google, wants regulators to allow idle TV channels, known as white space, to be used to beam the Internet into homes and offices. But the Federal Communications Commission first must be convinced that such traffic would not bleed outside its designated channels and interfere with existing broadcasts.

The six partners -- Microsoft, Google, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Philips -- say they can meet that challenge. Today, they plan to give FCC officials a prototype device, built by Microsoft, that will undergo months of testing.

If the device passes muster, the coalition says, it could have versions in stores by early 2009.

Proponents liken the idea to so-called WiFi signals, which provide wireless Internet access from phone or cable companies to users in airports, coffee shops and elsewhere.

"These devices have the potential to take the success of the WiFi phenomenon to another level," said Jonathan S. Adelstein, an FCC commissioner.

Warily watching from the sidelines are the major telephone and cable companies that compete to bring high-speed Internet into millions of businesses and homes.

Telecommunications officials and analysts differ on the degree to which TV-spectrum-based Internet access might seriously threaten existing Internet providers.

Some said a new Internet provider might force the older companies to drop prices. Others said the available white-space spectrum might be too limited to make much of an impact.

Wireless carriers said they were not afraid of new rivals. "The wireless industry was born in a competitive environment," said Jeffrey Nelson, a Verizon Wireless spokesman, playing down the risk to his company. AT&T said in a statement that FCC rules "should protect not only current TV band incumbents from interference but also those services that will be introduced into adjacent spectrum" in the future.

Several analysts said a TV-spectrum system might make the most sense in rural areas, where high-speed Internet access via phone or cable lines is expensive to deploy. Small companies might build some towers, beam white-space spectrum to farm homes and cabins, and connect it to an Internet provider, they said.

In urban areas, a TV Internet system might somehow be combined with phone- or cable-provided Internet service to redirect signals through every wall of a house or office -- without replacing the phone or cable company as the provider, said a person affiliated with the coalition. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record about such possible uses.

In a document filed with the FCC, the coalition stated: "As the world's largest producers of consumer electronics, software, semiconductors, personal computers, and peripheral devices, the Coalition's members stand ready to commit substantial resources to bring these advancements to consumers."

Google joined the coalition because the effort could create opportunities to transmit information over new platforms. It also might strengthen Google's hand should the traditional Internet pipelines -- big phone and cable companies -- start charging Internet companies higher prices to move their content more swiftly to consumers.

"It recognizes that the heart of the problem is a lack of competition on the broadband platform," said Rick Whitt, Google's telecom and media counsel in Washington. "We're very interested in finding ways to create platforms for other broadband connectivity."

Staff writers Sam Diaz and Alan Sipress contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031201395.html





Not so Fast, Broadband Providers Tell Big Users

Firms impose limits even as demand rises
Carolyn Y. Johnson

Amanda Lee of Cambridge received a call from Comcast Corp. in December ordering her to curtail her Web use or lose her high-speed Internet connection for a year.

Lee, who said she had been using the same broadband connection for years without a problem, was taken aback. But when she asked what the download limit was, she was told there was no limit, that she was just downloading too much.

Then in mid-February, her Internet service was cut off without further warning.

For Lee and an increasing number of people, a high-speed Internet connection is a lifeline to everyday entertainment and communication. Television networks are posting shows online; retailers are lining up to offer music and movie downloads; thousands of Internet radio stations stream music; more people are using WiFi phones; and "over the top TV," in which channels stream over the Internet, is predicted to grow.

That means that more customers may become familiar with Comcast's little-known acceptable-use policy, which allows the company to cut off service to customers who use the Internet too much. Comcast says that only .01 percent of its 11.5 million residential high-speed Internet customers fall into this category.

"Comcast has a responsibility to provide these customers with a superior experience and to address any excessive usage issues that may impact that experience," Comcast spokeswoman Shawn Feddeman said in a statement. "The few customers who are notified of excessive use typically consume exponentially more bandwidth than the average user."

Feddeman declined to say where Comcast draws the line on too much Internet usage, instead saying the amount of data that could trigger a warning call would be roughly the equivalent of 13 million e-mail messages or 256,000 photos a month. Although those files vary in size, a typical photo file size is 1 to 2 megabytes, meaning that excessive users are downloading hundreds of gigabytes per month.

Matt Davis, a research director at IDC Corp., said that because of the way cable high-speed Internet works, a person using a huge amount of bandwidth will slow service for hundreds of customers.

"You look at it and see there's some two to three people in the neighborhood or a college dorm . . . and what they're doing is impairing the customer experience for the rest of the people off that node," Davis said. "Then it's a business decision: Do you alienate a small percentage of customers to make your other customers happy?"

Davis said that even if only a tiny fraction of customers are downloading enough to trigger the policy, that will probably change as more entertainment moves to the Internet. Today, he said, an average subscriber downloads about one gigabyte per month, but even if everyone on the network began downloading just one movie a month, it could have a dramatic effect on the network.

Downloading is "certainly going to increase dramatically over the next five years," he said. "And even if it's double or triple or quadruple, it's going to place a lot of pressure on networks that are being pressured right now."

Limiting Internet use to maintain good service for everyone is common among providers, and Comcast says it does not disclose a hard-and-fast limit because numbers would shift as the network evolves. But the policy contrasts with Comcast's marketing, which emphasizes download speeds and touts its PowerBoost service, which gives customers an extra surge of speed when downloading large files.

"If Comcast has that limit, they really need to say what that is," said Frank Carreiro of West Jordan, Utah, who said he contacted customer support via an online chat after his family got a phone call warning that they were using the Internet too much. The customer representative said there was no official limit; the family's service was shut off in January.

"It's like if you're driving down freeway, and there's nothing to say what the speed limit is," Carreiro said.

It also seems to be something that the company's own customer support representatives are unfamiliar with, according to three people who were recently kicked off Comcast Internet service.

Lee said that she was not given specifics about how much to reduce usage and that when she called customer support to get more information about the warning, the customer service representative suggested that it may have been a prank call.

Joe Nova in Attleboro said a Comcast representative called in June to inform him that he was downloading too much content and must stop immediately or lose Internet service for a year.

When his service was cut off, he called customer support. "I told them I was willing to sign up for a professional account, a business account, and they said they never heard of a bandwidth limit," he said.

Nova, Lee, and Carreiro admit to activities that devour bandwidth, like downloading movie and television shows, listening to Internet radio, or making video calls. But they also said they weren't given clear guidelines about how to remedy the situation and were told repeatedly that there was no download limit, even though they were warned that they were downloading too much.

Acceptable use policies that state that consumers cannot download so much content that it degrades service are common among Internet providers.

Although Richard Ramlall, RCN senior vice president of strategic and external affairs, said in a statement that the company "does not suspend service related to the frequency or size of downloads," RCN's policy says customers cannot "act in a manner that negatively affects use of the Internet by other subscribers, users, individuals, or entities."

Verizon's DSL service has a different network architecture that means a single "bandwidth hog" should not affect neighbors and does not limit downloads, according to spokesman Mark Marchand.

"Legitimately, everybody's going to be a bandwidth hog sooner or later, because that's what the Internet is, going forward," said Linda Sherry of Consumer Action.
http://www.boston.com/business/perso...ell_big_users/





AT&T, Yahoo May Scale Back Co-Branding Deal

Yahoo and AT&T are negotiating potentially sweeping changes that could scale back their partnership, a person familiar with the matter said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The fraying of the alliance could be a blow to Yahoo, which gets roughly $200 million to $250 million of revenue annually from AT&T, according to two people familiar with the matter, the Journal said in a report on its Web site. The newspaper said it also showed how AT&T itself is much stronger, and less reliant on Yahoo, than during the early days of the alliance, which was announced in late 2001. The partnership offers co-branded dial-up and DSL service.
http://news.com.com/ATT%2C+Yahoo+may...l?tag=nefd.hed





Yahoo Stock Dives on News of AT&T Loss
AP

Yahoo Inc. recently resurgent stock retreated by more than 5 percent Friday amid fears that a setback in a lucrative partnership with AT&T Inc. will undercut the anticipated gains from an overhaul of the Web portal's advertising platform.

The sell-off was triggered by an unconfirmed report in The Wall Street Journal that AT&T wants to stop giving Yahoo a slice of the subscriber fees from a 6-year-old co-branding agreement to sell Internet access in most of the country.

If AT&T gets its way, Yahoo would have to be satisfied with whatever money it could make by selling its own online products, such as digital music or matchmaking services, to subscribers of the joint service.

San Antonio-based AT&T declined to comment on the substance of the Journal's report, but acknowledged in a statement that its Yahoo partnership "is rooted in the open and ongoing dialogue we maintain."

A Yahoo statement included that same language and dismissed the Wall Street Journal report as "based on rumor and speculation." It added, however, that the companies were discussing ways to expand their partnership to include AT&T-owned Cingular Wireless.

Investors drew their own negative conclusions. Yahoo shares fell $1.59, or 5.2 percent, to close at $29.12 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Before Friday's downturn, Yahoo's stock had climbed by 20 percent this year, rebounding from a horrible 2006 performance. That reflected Wall Street's widespread belief that Yahoo will prosper from a month-old upgrade to its formula for linking ads to search requests.

However, a reshuffling of the AT&T deal would deliver a substantial blow.

Under the current terms of the contract, AT&T is believed to pay Yahoo $200 to $250 million annually, accounting for more than 25 percent of the $798 million in total fees that the Internet powerhouse collected last year. Most of Yahoo's revenue - which totaled $6.4 billion last year - comes from advertising.

Compounding the pain, Yahoo's profit margins on the AT&T partnership are much higher than on many of its other services because the telecommunications carrier handles most of the heavy lifting.

Standard & Poor's analyst Scott Kessler estimated the reported revisions in the AT&T deal would reduce Yahoo's annual profit by $30 million to $70 million, or 2 to 5 cents per share.

Analysts expect Yahoo to earn nearly $780 million, or 54 cents per share, this year.

The damage to Yahoo could be worse if its other major Internet access partners - Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), BT Group PLC (BT) and Rogers Communications Inc. (RG) - follow AT&T's lead when they renegotiate their contracts.

Yahoo hasn't publicly disclosed the length of the contracts with its Internet access partners, but the AT&T alliance reportedly expires in April 2008.

Friday's news woke up many investors who thought Yahoo had turned the corner after slowing revenue growth and competitive challenges posed by increasingly popular Internet hangouts like MySpace.com contributed to last year's 35 percent decline in Yahoo's stock price.

An improved advertising system known as "Panama" - unveiled Feb. 5 after a three-month delay - has become the foundation for Yahoo's turnaround hopes. The upgrade is supposed to begin boosting Yahoo's profit in the second half of this year - a prospect that now looks shakier, Kessler said.

"A lot of people have gotten scared again and are starting to realize that they have been pinning their hopes on the promise of something that is still uncertain," he said.
http://www.9news.com/money/article.aspx?storyid=66174





SkyPilot Touches Down At Low End Of Muni Wi-Fi

The company's latest access point product aims to fill in those critical last-mile holes in citywide Wi-Fi networks.
Richard Martin

As more and more municipal wireless networks are deployed, cities and service providers are finding that fulfilling promises of citywide coverage over the unlicensed spectrum is more difficult than anticipated.

Seeing a market opportunity, SkyPilot on Monday announced a new access point -- known as the SkyAccess DualBand -- that it hopes will help fill holes in wide-area Wi-Fi networks at a relatively low expense.

A streamlined version of SkyPilot's flagship SkyExtender DualBand product, the new dual-radio devices will not extend a mesh network, but will act as edge connections that provide the last hop of the system. Like SkyExtender, the new devices have two radios: a mesh backhaul component operating in the 4.9 GHz to 5.8 GHz frequency band, and a Wi-Fi access point that operates in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band. In addition to providing high-speed Internet access to residential and business users, the dual-radio SkyAccess offers backhaul connections over distances up to 12 kilometers, the company said, to upstream mesh nodes.

The new device is "really a coverage fill-in" product, said SkyPilot VP of product marketing Brian Jenkins, "that offers increased flexibility to service providers."

Using the SkyAccess nodes at the edge of the network can reduce overall capital expenses for network build-outs by up to 33%, Jenkins claims.

That's an important benefit in a market where many service providers are finding it more costly than expected to build out Wi-Fi networks in densely populated urban areas. In San Francisco, a partnership with Google and EarthLink to provide a citywide network was among the earliest and most ballyhooed municipal Wi-Fi deals. Public criticism has mounted over, among other things, the level of coverage planned for the system. In Mountain View, Calif., Google has built a Wi-Fi network designed as a test-bed for future state-of-the-art systems. Even there, users have complained about the spotty coverage.

Many experts also have warned that that municipal mesh networks will be plagued by radio-frequency interference, slowing connection speeds to dial-up levels.

The result: wireless providers have been forced to provide node densities (i.e., the number of radios per square mile) much higher than in their designs, pushing the expense of building such networks to unforeseen levels.

The SkyAccess device is designed to fill holes in the network without driving budgets to the point where business models become nonviable.

"The price point of the SkyAccess DualBand allows us to fill in the coverage gaps and expand the reach of our overall service area without breaking our budget," Jim McKenna, president and CEO of RedZone Wireless, a provider based in Rockland, Maine, said in a statement.

"Since a last-hop mesh node doesn't need to repeat the wireless signal, we designed this product to provide the same performance and coverage at a lower cost," Jenkins said.

At a list price of $1,799, the SkyAccess DualBand costs about half as much as a SkyExtender node.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=198000227





Where Neo-Nomads' Ideas Percolate

New 'bedouins' transform a laptop, cell phone and coffeehouse into their office
Dan Fost

A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they've come to be known as "bedouins."

San Francisco's modern-day bedouins are typically armed with laptops and cell phones, paying for their office space and Internet access by buying coffee and muffins.

"In 'Lawrence of Arabia,' the bedouins always felt like they were on the warpath. They had greater cause," said Niall Kennedy, a 27-year-old San Franciscan who quit his day job at Microsoft Corp. to run his own Web company, Patrick Media, out of cafes and a rented desk. "At a startup, you're always on the go, plowing ahead, with some higher cause driving you."

San Francisco's bedouins see themselves changing the nature of the workplace, if not the world at large. They see large companies like General Motors laying off workers, contributing to insecurity. And at the same time, they see the Internet providing the tools to start companies on the cheap. In the Bedouin lifestyle, they are free to make their own rules.

"The San Francisco coffeehouse is the new Palo Alto garage," declares Kevin Burton, 30, who runs his Internet startup Tailrank without renting offices. "It's where all the innovation is happening."

Burton and Kennedy are among those popularizing the bedouin name, separating the movement from traditional freelancing by stressing the workers' involvement in technology, in general, and Web 2.0 ideology in particular. While the movement is at its apex in San Francisco, where young urban independents can easily find a coffeehouse with the right vibe for them, it's also happening across the more suburban reaches of the Bay Area, and across the country as a whole.

The move toward mobile self employment is also part of what author Daniel Pink identified when he wrote "Free Agent Nation" in 2001.

"A whole infrastructure has emerged to help people work in this way," Pink said. "Part of it includes places like Kinkos, Office Depot and Staples." It also includes places like Starbucks and independent coffee shops, where Wi-Fi -- wireless Internet access for laptops and other devices -- is available.

"The infrastructure makes it possible for people to work where they want, when they want, how they want," said Pink, who is based in Washington, D.C. Pink said numbers are hard to pin down, as the Census Bureau does not count independent workers. Using available census data and private surveys, Pink estimates that one-fifth of the workforce, or 30 million out of 150 million people, are working on their own.

In February 2005, the census identified 10.3 million independent contractors, 2.5 million on-call workers, 1.2 million temporary help agency workers, and 813,000 workers with contract firms. The independent workforce is hard to track, as the workers are neither employee nor employer -- and yet, in what Pink termed a "Zen turn," they are both employee and employer.

"It's been a slow steady trajectory over the last 15 or 20 years for a whole host of reasons. One of them, obviously, is there's no lifetime job security any more. I'm going to be more secure working for myself."

Pink calls it "Karl Marx's revenge, where individuals own the means of production. And they can take the means of production and hop from coffee shop to coffee shop."

Funny he should mention Marx. Soviet iconography is popping up all over the Bay Area's bedouin landscape, from the coffee cup and star on the red background of Ritual Roasters' logo, to the cell phone and mouse that look suspiciously like a hammer and sickle on the logo of Web Worker Daily, a blog that covers the bedouin phenomenon.

Web Worker Daily is published by GigaOm, a media company that practices what it preaches. Om Malik, 40, a technology journalist who lives in San Francisco's Financial District, started blogging five years ago and last year quit his day job, taking an undisclosed amount of venture capital to launch GigaOm as a business. He now has a full-time staff of five and a team of freelancers, all scattered about, contributing to different online journals. One is in Oakland, one in San Mateo, two in San Francisco and one at Lake Tahoe, he said. The freelancers are in Utah, Denver, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and spread around the world.

"There is nothing more free than being a Web worker," Malik says. "There is no boss. You work for yourself. This is the new Wild West. The individual is more important. That's the American way. It's about doing things your own way. Web workers represent that. ... It's the future, my friend."

There is a downside, Malik readily admits. "I can put in an 18-hour day," he said. "You don't know when to stop."

The Starbucks model

If you could split the Web workers into two main camps, you could say that one camp plugs in at Starbucks, while the other chooses independent neighborhood cafes. The two have vastly different ethics.

Starbucks offers a more corporate culture, and is a popular place for business meetings. Executives who travel a lot often prefer Starbucks, knowing they can find many branches in whatever city they go to. They also pay for the Wi-Fi, through Starbucks' partnership with T-Mobile.

Malik, for instance, swears by his Starbucks. (He doesn't want to say where it is, for fear that publicists from the companies he covers will stake him out there and ruin the experience.) "The biggest day of my own little boy life was when my own local Starbucks made me 'customer of the week,' " Malik said. "That's a Web worker gold medal."

Yet many of the scrappier startups, particularly those who have not taken funding from venture capitalists, prefer the ethos of the independent cafes, where the music is a little louder and the Wi-Fi is free.

Ritual: the scene

Ritual Roasters in San Francisco's Mission District is in many ways the epicenter of the bedouin movement. Ritual, on Valencia Street near 21st Street, is almost always packed with people working on laptops.

Every bedouin seems to have a Ritual story. There's the time someone buzzed through the cafe on a Segway scooter. Rubyred Labs, a hip Web design shop in South Park, had its launch party there. Teams from established Web companies such as Google Inc. and Flickr, a photo sharing site that's now owned by Yahoo, meet there. "You'd never know these guys were millionaires," said Ritual co-owner Jeremy Tooker.

The founders of Web video startup Dovetail Television were meeting there one day, griping as usual about how hard it was to find talented programmers.

"I'm looking around and there's gotta be 50 people with laptops," said Brett Levine, 31, a co-founder and the company's lead programmer. "I got on a chair and yelled, 'Hey, are there any ActionScript programmers in the room?' People at the counter looked at me glaringly, but a couple of people looked around and raised their hand."

They lined up for interviews. None were actually hired, but it cemented in Levine's mind the notion of where the talent pool lies.

Kennedy, the self-professed bedouin who has worked at blog aggregator Technorati and at tech giant Microsoft but who is now working on his own idea of developing a new more personal way to search the Internet, is a regular at Ritual and blogs about it often. Kennedy tries to earn his spot in the cafe. "They'll come up to me and say, 'Did you notice that the Wi-Fi is down?' I can troubleshoot that kind of thing. Or when they were talking about redesigning their Web site, I was able to give advice."

"In the old days, people used to yell, 'Is there a doctor in the house?' " Kennedy said. "In cafes now, it's, 'Is there a Wi-Fi technician in the house?' "

On one recent weekday, software engineer Chase Tingley, 29, worked at one table, where he telecommutes for Idiom, a Massachusetts software company. Tingley moved to San Francisco when his wife took a job at a law firm. At the next table, three friends worked on their own projects: system administrator Sean Kelly, 36, wrote database reporting scripts, while Kaytea Petro, 28, worked at her job in publishing, and Robert Boyle, 37, hacked out code for the company he's co-founded, Podaddies.com, which he said will "monetize user-generated video."

As for why they're there, Kelly said, "I'm visiting with my friends instead of being locked up in a big building in the South Bay."

And he added, cheekily, "If you bring a flask, you can tip it into your coffee and your boss isn't watching you."

Tingley, at the next table, turned around and asked, "Can we be in separate articles?"

Coffee to the people

Kevin Burton, an expert in blogs and RSS feeds who runs a Web startup called Tailrank.com that claims to "track the hottest news in the blogosphere," spends about 10 percent of his time at Ritual, but the crowds have driven him elsewhere. His favorite at the moment is Coffee to the People on Masonic Avenue.

When you enter, you have no doubt you're in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The coffee drinks have names like Flower Power, the menu includes a vegan blueberry cornbread. At one table, a woman with an open laptop talks on her cell phone, while the man reading a paperback next to her keeps a hand over his ear. (Most bedouins say cell phones need to go outside the cafe.) Nearby, Kiff Gallagher, 37, pursues his passion, making music, while trading stocks online.

"I have a home office, but I just get cooped up," he said.

Burton arrives at 11 a.m., and his lead engineer, Jonathan Moore, 30, arrives a few minutes later. Burton has a double latte and a cupcake, and starts explaining how his site uses "wisdom of the crowds" algorithms to scrape the hottest news from the blogosphere and upend the mainstream media.

As he talks, Gallagher joins in, and advises, "Lower your voice. I already know the ins and outs of your business plan from the last time I was here."

That is an occupational hazard in the bedouin workforce. Kennedy rented a desk at San Francisco's Obvious Corp., a Web company in South Park, so he could have confidential meetings. Kennedy also said he has equipped his laptop with a firewall that's always on and e-mail and instant messaging encryption. He said it's fairly easy to sit in a cafe and start "sniffing the network, see what sites people are accessing, get an idea of a site that hasn't launched yet, see people's e-mail logins and passwords."

Bedouin history

Using a cafe to run a business is nothing particularly new. Venerable insurance firm Lloyd's of London was actually started in a coffee house, Kennedy points out. According to the Lloyd's of London Web site, "Edward Lloyd opened a coffee house in 1688, encouraging a clientele of ships' captains, merchants and ship owners -- earning him a reputation for trustworthy shipping news. This ensured that Lloyd's coffee house became recognized as the place for obtaining marine insurance."

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of their best work in Parisian cafes. And in San Francisco, writers and poets of the Beat generation, such as Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, wrote in the cafes of North Beach.

Caffe Trieste was among the most popular North Beach hangouts. "To have a cappuccino, you come to North Beach, to Caffe Trieste," says Giovanni "Papa Gianni" Giotta, the founder.

Now Caffe Trieste has joined the ranks of Wi-Fi cafes. It would figure that the one laptop in action on a recent afternoon belonged to an art dealer. "A cappuccino for overhead isn't bad," said David Salow, 33. He struck out on his own three months ago, and has yet to open a gallery. "Sixty to 70 percent of what I do can be done with the standard tools available to everyone -- a phone, a computer and a laptop connection."
So, how much coffee do you need to buy?

The proliferation of Wi-Fi cafes brings with it a moral dilemma: If you're one of these people sitting around and working on your laptop in a cafe, how much coffee do you need to buy?

Every cafe owner has wrestled with the flip side of that question: How much do I need to sell to make it worth letting someone take up space in my cafe?

Roger Soudah, owner of Cafe Reverie on Cole Street, was persuaded in 2004 to add Wi-Fi by one of his steady customers, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. But Soudah got fed up with the Wi-Fi squatters by the next year.

"I got fed up and pulled it out of the wall, and my employees cheered," he said. "My space is really small. We count on turnover for that reason."

He tells of one woman who designs places with feng shui principles. "She comes in with all these humongous blueprints and a laptop, taking up four tables, then has the nerve to say, 'Can you turn the music down?' " he said. "I feng shui'd her out of here."

Newmark says he won't be deterred. "My evil plans include using a cellular data connection," he said. "I plan to foil Roger again."

Other cafe owners welcome the bedouin workforce and its laptops.

At Ritual Roasters in the Mission, co-owner Jeremy Tooker said the main downside is the cost of power, which he said runs $2,000 a month. (Some laptop workers in the cafe said that's not so bad, calculating on the fly that that pencils out to about $64 a day, or $4 an hour.) Ritual covers up its outlets on weekends, and Tooker said it will likely eliminate many other outlets altogether, figuring that will increase turnover.

The hardcore customers shrug off the change. "I bought three batteries" for the laptop, said system administrator Sean Kelly. "It's a little spendy, but it's totally worth it."

Cafe Lo Cubano in San Francisco's Laurel Heights is contemplating a tiered system for access, according to floor manager Jeremiah Vernon. "People sit outside in their cars, stealing the Wi-Fi without buying anything," Vernon said.

To solve the problem, the new system would give small purchases an hour of free Wi-Fi, modest purchases would get five hours, and $10 or more would buy a full day. That allows the morning business customers the chance to buy their cafe Cubano and check their e-mail, as they do now, without allowing others to clog up the space for hours. One regular buys a cup in the morning, and returns with the cup hours later asking for a free refill, Vernon said.

One coffee shop, Coffee to the People in the Haight, even wrestled with the issue on its blog last year. "Here at CTTP, we need to bring in on average $100 PER HOUR simply to cover our costs," co-owner Karin Tamerius wrote. "That means, if all of our customers were people who stayed for three hours and spent $1.50 for coffee, we would require 200 people in our shop every hour we were open, 7 days a week, just to stay in business."

"Fortunately, not all of our patrons are quite so thrifty."

Indeed, almost every mobile worker interviewed said they try to buy something at least every hour.

But not everyone.

Ryan Mickle, 26, moved to San Francisco last month to run a Web site he co-founded, DoTheRightThing.com, which lets users rate companies on their social value. But Mickle can't always afford to do the right thing himself.

"We're bootstrapping entrepreneurs. We don't have any funds," he said. His Web site is not yet bringing in any money. "I'm reluctant to pay $9 for the overpriced food that tends to be in the cafe," he said. "It's the Wi-Fi user's dilemma. ... It's a mind game I play with myself: How many coffees is fair? I need to be sure to invest in them as a consumer or they're not going to last very long."

But Mickle vows that when he does incorporate, make money and issue stock, he will give shares to the cafes that he used as office space.

In a way, argues author Daniel Pink, the Wi-Fi cafe is bringing efficiency to the commercial real estate market.

Most offices sit vacant all night long, he said, creating an "incredible inefficiency." Pink, the author of "Free Agent Nation" and "A Whole New Mind," said people can rent interim offices from companies like Regus Corp., where the coffee is free, or do their work in a cafe. "This is just confirmation that Starbucks and its cousins are all really in the commercial real estate business," he said. "They're giving very cheap real estate for a very pricey cup of coffee."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...GKKOCBA645.DTL





Meet cGrid, the Real-Time P2P Punisher
Jacqui Cheng

There's a tool in the war on piracy that's picking up steam, and its proponents are thrilled with what it can do. Dubbed "cGrid," the application is powerful and daunting to those caught in its snares, for it can boot users off the network in real-time if it suspects that they are engaging in P2P file sharing, or even if they are using so-called darknets. As you might expect, the entertainment industry loves it.

cGrid was a hot topic of conversation at last Thursday's House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, where the problem of piracy on US college campuses was the focus. It's not hard to see why: colleges are being accused of being too lax on piracy and taking too much time to act on reports of file sharing. cGrid's developer Red Lambda hopes that the current imbroglio between the RIAA and America's colleges will turn into a business opportunity.

cGrid's developers describe it as "the industry's most advanced P2P and file-sharing mitigation technology." It uses undisclosed techniques to monitor and record traffic at the packet-level and also uses proprietary behavioral analysis to determine whether individual users are participating in illegal file sharing. It monitors local networks and keeps historical logs on users according to their MAC addresses. In this way, cGrid can also monitor private file sharing such as that done with invitation-only FTP servers and other normally closed "networks."

The software provides detailed usage reports to administrators which can then be used to discipline students who have had multiple infractions. However, one of the most distinct features of the software is its ability to instantly kick users off of the network for engaging in suspicious behavior.

Red Lambda says that cGrid monitors "a large variety of different P2P clients, in addition to other avenues of file-sharing including Windows file sharing, FTP, IM, and others," and that cGrid does not perform content inspection but instead focuses on the behavior of the protocols being monitored. But the company does not expand on how it differentiates between legitimate uses of those technologies and illegal ones, raising questions of its effectiveness in an academic setting where students may be using P2P and other services potentially flagged by the system for legitimate, academic reasons.

cGrid is lauded by the RIAA and MPAA because of its ability to automatically determine usage patterns and remove offenders' Internet access on the spot, without the lag of involving bureaucracy. The University of Florida, where the cGrid was first developed under the name "Icarus," itself reports that it has been monitoring its dorm networks since 2003 with some success.

While students have been finding ways around the service (as discussed, perhaps not too wisely, on Facebook), UF's interim CIO Marc Hoit told Gainesville.com that the university has seen a dramatic reduction in downloading. Instantly kicking students off the network for suspected infractions seems to work, too: "The first and second warnings are sufficient" in scaring students straight about piracy, Hoit said.

Red Lambda's CEO Greg Marchwinski testified at last Thursday's hearing, saying "I think the Congressmen in this committee are losing their patience." Red Lambda would undoubtedly love for Congress to mandate universities to install such a solution, with its $1 million price tag for installation and $250,000 yearly operation costs.

Will cGrid become a member of the campus cops? The executive vice president of the Association of American Universities, John Vaughn, testified that the cost of such a system is prohibitively expensive, and that universities and colleges were already making an effort to curb piracy in other ways. There are other concerns about cGrid as well, including infringing upon student privacy and stifling the creativity of students who might be working on cutting-edge projects.

But the low recidivism of students caught by cGrid may make all of that moot, at least for some college administrators who would rather get the piracy monkey off their back. According to the University of Florida, only 10% of students identified by the system as engaging in unauthorized activity were caught a second time, and only 10 percent of those students were caught a third time.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-punisher.html





Microsoft Suffers Latest Blow As NIST Bans Windows Vista

Tech staffers at NIST, a part of the Department of Commerce charged with promulgating technology standards, are scheduled to meet next month to discuss their concerns about the new operating system.
Paul McDougall

In a new setback to Microsoft's public sector business, the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology has banned the software maker's Windows Vista operating system from its internal computing networks, according to an agency document obtained by InformationWeek.

Tech staffers at NIST, a part of the Department of Commerce charged with promulgating technology standards, are scheduled to meet on April 10 in Gaithersburg, Md., to discuss their concerns about the new operating system, which Microsoft released to consumers in January amid much fanfare and to businesses in December with lesser flair.

According to the formal agenda for the meeting, NIST technology workers will attend a session entitled "Windows Vista Security" to discuss "the current ban of this operating system on NIST networks." NIST officials weren't immediately available to comment.

Word of NIST's Windows Vista ban comes a week after InformationWeek revealed that the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration have both imposed similar blackouts on the operating system, as well as on Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.

FAA CIO Dave Bowen told InformationWeek that he may forego upgrading the aviation safety agency's computers to Microsoft's latest offerings in favor of desktops running some combination of Linux and Google Apps, Google's new online suite of office productivity tools.

Among other things, Bowen said he is concerned that Windows Vista may be incompatible with many software applications already in use at the FAA.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=198000229





Top Five PC Manufacturers Fail Naked PC Test

A ZDNet special investigation into buying PCs without an operating system from the top five PC vendors uncovered a litany of conflicting advice and confused instructions

IT professionals are being forced to adopt Microsoft's operating systems — even if they tell their PC supplier they want a system free of Microsoft software, ZDNet UK's research has revealed.

ZDNet's reporters posed as undercover buyers to identify the policy of the top-five PC vendors in terms of supplying systems without an operating system, known as naked PCs. A naked PC gives IT professionals freedom to install the operating system of their choice.

But the ZDNet investigation showed that none of the five manufacturers would sell any PCs without Windows, our reporters found.

The reasons — or excuses — were varied.

Acer said it would give our reporter a refund of £30 for not using Windows, but would only make a refund if we drove to its Plymouth "repair" centre. In contrast to other reports, Dell refused to refund the Windows software if it went unused. Instead it offered to cancel the shipping charge of £50 as a compromise.

We backed up our undercover enquiries with official calls to every one of the five vendors. Two of the five — Acer and Toshiba — would not discuss the matter with us. Dell, HP and Lenovo claimed it was possible to buy naked PCs from their company — but our attempts to follow their guidance to buy one proved impossible.

Dell and HP both claimed it was possible to buy a naked PC from them, but we were unable to buy one from either vendor. Lenovo told us it sells PCs with pre-installed Linux, but it could not tell us how we could buy such a system.

Microsoft has placed considerable pressure on a number of PC vendors not to sell systems without Windows. Critics have suggested that vendors have yielded to such pressure because they are afraid of losing their bulk purchasing discount with Microsoft. Others have suggested that it would cost PC vendors considerably more in unit costs to produce naked PCs.

Ranjit Atwal, Gartner principal analyst, is pessimistic about the future for naked PCs. "The market for Linux is probably not big enough for them [suppliers] to go down that route," said Atwal, adding that he thought the number of users wanting to use Linux at the desktop was "in the small single digits".

"To do that [provide systems without Windows] costs them money," he argued.

Yet many customers have demanded naked PCs. A user forum set up in February by Dell has been inundated with such requests.

While customers find it difficult to get naked PCs, some of the vendors are beginning to apply more thought to loading Linux on PCs for both high-street buyers and corporates. HP is one such company. It recently began a feasibility study that tested the public's appetite for the operating system.

"We carried out a test marketing exercise and made Linux PCs available to users," explained Peter Murray, director of enterprise server and storage at HP. "It was disappointing and we had very little interest. We looked at the exercise and we think we may have got the marketing wrong so we are trying it again."

Murray believes there is a market for Linux in the UK but is also aware of the issues facing any large supplier who wants to make Linux boxes available. "It means diverting production lines and that is a lot of money and so we have to prove the business case," he said. However, he made it clear that he is enthusiastic about the idea and wants to make it work. "We just have to show it is worthwhile," he said.

Dell's position is less clear. The company has said it is keen to promote Linux and systems ready to run with Red Hat Linux are available on its site, but only in the US. While Linux is not available to UK users, Dell is currently assessing user interest on its own site and is asking for input from potential Dell/Linux users.

We have used the latest figures on PC sales from Gartner to identify the top five vendors. We detail our findings one vendor at a time over the following five pages.

Additional reporting by Colin Barker of ZDNet UK.


A trip to Plymouth with Acer

Acer did not return our call seeking to clarify its policy on naked PCs and whether it would offer a refund on Windows software.

However, we called its customer call centre, and recorded the following conversation:

ZDNet: I'm wondering whether you supply notebooks without Windows software.

Acer: I'm afraid not, no.

No? Nothing at all?
Although we can do the refund for the operating system as per the OEM licensing.

So if I get a machine with Windows on, you'll give me the refund?
There is a refund process, yes. I don't know the exact terms of it. You'd need to speak to tech support, unfortunately, but it is entirely possible. I don't know if it's financially viable or not, but it is possible.

Tech support wanted to send us an email to explain its policy. In the email Acer said: "These items [the notebook] will need to be returned to your local Acer Repair Centre in order to allow us to remove the Windows Operating System and refund you for it. Acer will refund you in accordance with the value of the operating system shipped: XP Home = €30 and XP Professional = €60. Shipment of the product to our repair centre and back to you after the removal of Windows will be at your own expense. As this is not a manufacture defect and not covered by the warranty, you would have to organise your own courier when the machine is ready to be sent back to you. Following the refund, any remaining software support on your Acer warranty will be void."

Acer's sole repair centre in the UK is in Plymouth.

Free shipping from Dell

Dell told ZDNet UK: "The Dell n Series solution for notebook and desktop PCs is designed for those customers who do not want to be burdened with the cost of an installed OS, and would prefer either to load Linux or their own licensed software. Dell's Latitude notebooks, OptiPlex desktops and Precision workstations offer the n Series solution on all of their systems in EMEA. n Series has been available in the UK for UK customers for over four years."

The company said customers should call its sales call centre to order a naked PC, and that it was impossible to do it online.

Dell told us that if a customer purchased a PC with Windows and subsequently did not use the software, no refund would be made. "It is not Dell policy to issue refunds," a Dell spokeswoman told us.

Our reporter found a completely contradictory response from Dell's customer call centre. The conversation was as follows:

ZDNet: I'm looking at buying a notebook. I just wondered whether you can supply a notebook without Windows. Can you do a Latitude or something like that without Windows?

Dell: What type of laptop is that?

A Latitude looks good.

Just a moment, sir. Which model of Latitude is that?

I just wondered whether I can get a Latitude without Windows on it?

Yeah, I mean which model is that in the Latitude?

I don't know. I was hoping you would be able to tell me.

Neither of the laptops on Dell doesn't come with any Linux on it.

OK, but I can install Linux myself. Would you just be able to ship it without Windows?

We'll send XP Pro in that. You just need to uninstall that.

I don't want Windows at all. Can you send it without Windows?

Without Windows. Just a moment sir... I've spoken to my manager regarding this. I'm sorry, sir, every computer from Dell does have an operating system in there.

So there's no way of getting it...?

You can uninstall it, sir. If you want, I can give you a discount of operating system price on the computer and give it to you.

On the grounds I don't use XP?

All you need to do is after it's been rescheduled, just format the computer and everything has been lost sir, that's it. If you do that, I won't charge you anything for operating system.

OK. That's cool. What have you got then?

[We discuss the precise specifications.]

The operating system is XP Pro. I'll give you a £50 discount.

OK, so I don't have to pay that £50 in the first place. You'll just knock that off, will you?

£50 is not required. One more thing, sir. Microsoft Office. Did you get any information about the latest ones, Microsoft Office.

No, I'm going to run OpenOffice, so I don't need Microsoft Office.

So the price of this computer — which is a Latutide D520, we call it — £499, which is excluding VAT, sir.

£499 ex VAT. Do I have to pay for delivery on top of that?

I'll give you a free delivery charge. Delivery is £50 pounds extra and I'm getting rid of that for that [lack of] XP Pro option. I'm adding XP Pro but I'm giving you the free shipping offer on that XP Pro, which is £50 exactly. The total price comes to £587.

I'm just wary that I'm not infringing anything from Microsoft in getting the XP. So if I uninstall it, it's fine is it?

That's it, sir. You don't need to do anything until you get the computer. You just need to uninstall the computer specifications. You have an option in the control panel that you can format the computer and then you can download Linux if you want.

HP's elusive FreeDOS version

An HP spokeswoman told us: "HP offer desktops with no operating system if requested by the customer (available via direct or indirect)."

The spokeswoman added that no refund would be made even if the customer declined the End User License Agreement (EULA). "If a customer does not require this [Windows] when placing the order and purchases an operating system, HP will not refund regardless of the End User License Agreement for Windows," she said.

Ian Dent, Linux Business Manager for HP, added more information on HP's policy. "There are two options: PCs with Windows and a version with FreeDOS." Dent said there was no minimum order, and the FreeDOS PCs could be ordered through any of HP's sales channels.

ZDNet UK asked HP for a URL from which readers could buy a FreeDOS-based PC. HP promised us the URL, but has not sent it.

HP's call centre told us that all machines come with Windows, and that it was not possible to buy any PCs without Windows.

Lenovo: Refunds not possible

In an email, a Lenovo spokesperson told us: "Lenovo has designated two 'Linux' ready models which ship with a DOS operating system allowing the user to install Linux on a clean hard disk. I can confirm that there are two Linux models: the ThinkPad T60p UT08YUK and the ThinkPad T60p UT08ZUK."

But despite repeated requests, Lenovo could not say how customers could buy either of these models.

Lenovo adopted the same policy as Dell, HP and Toshiba over claiming a refund on unused Windows software. The spokesperson added: "In line with the licence agreement, and because the software is pre-installed, Lenovo does not offer refunds for those looking to remove the software."

Lenovo's call centre could not identify any machines with a clean hard disk, only those with Windows. It said it used to give a refund for customers who returned Windows software, but said refunds now "won't be possible".

No refunds from Toshiba

Toshiba did not return our calls seeking to clarify its policy on naked PCs, and whether it would offer a refund on Windows software.

We had the following conversation with its customer call centre, which clarified that it would sell only PCs with Windows.

ZDNet: I just want a notebook without Windows. Can you supply me one without Windows?
Toshiba: I can't I'm afraid. It's always going to be pre-installed.

It's got to have Windows?
Yes.

If I'm paying for Windows, can I get a refund on that? I'm not going to use it.
Obviously the Windows, it's sold at a certain price. The price is considerate of the fact it comes with the operating system pre-installed.

But I'm not going to use it. I'm going to turn down the licensing agreement for it.
Yeah. There's no way of sending the machine with different specs, I'm afraid.

OK, but can I get a refund from you for not using Windows?
Erm, no you wouldn't be able to, I'm afraid.

Right. So even though I'm not using it I've still got to take it and I can't get any money back?
I'm afraid we only sell the machines as they are.

OK, so it's take XP or Vista basically.
That's the case, I'm afraid.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1...9286228,00.htm





H.P. Restarts as Spy Case Lingers On
Damon Darlin

Mark V. Hurd, the chairman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, would prefer that the discussion at the annual meeting this afternoon focus on the company’s future, not its past.

But the revelations of last fall that a dysfunctional board spied on its members and on journalists still casts a shadow on a company that by most measures is performing well.

Since the meeting in a hotel in Santa Clara, Calif., would be the first opportunity for shareholders to question him directly as chairman, Mr. Hurd said he expected that he would be fielding at least a few questions about the boardroom meltdown, which led to the resignation of three directors, including its chairwoman, Patricia C. Dunn, and the filing of criminal charges against her.

Mr. Hurd said he would answer shareholders’ questions, but he wants to look forward. “We still have a lot of work to do,” Mr. Hurd said in an interview. “The board still has a lot of work to do.”

Nor, he said, would the meeting be a celebration of everything that did go right at the company in 2006, though it could be. Among H.P.’s accomplishments were besting its rival Dell as the world’s largest maker of personal computers, adding $5 billion in annual revenue for a total of $91.7 billion, surpassing I.B.M. as the world’s largest technology concern, and increasing profit margins in all operating units.

All those factors pushed the stock price up 19 percent in the last year.

“The focus will be on what will be done, not on what has been done,” Mr. Hurd said.

The spying operation, managed by Ms. Dunn in an effort to stop boardroom leaks to the media, was in large part the reason for a shareholder proposal to make it possible for stockholders to nominate directors. The proposal is to be voted on at the meeting.

“We think it is time that shareholders who watched the board soap opera for years try to fix it once and for all,” said Richard Ferlauto, director of pension and benefit policy at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees pension fund, which sponsored the proposal along with the New York State Common Retirement Fund and several other funds.

The proposal is opposed by the board, which said such a step might allow special interests to nominate candidates. It was not expected to pass. But it demonstrates the trouble that a divided board continues to bring the company, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Mr. Hurd, who will preside over the meeting for the first time since becoming chairman last fall, said that Bart Schwartz, whom he hired to examine the company’s investigative practices, is expected to finish his report within a few weeks. Mr. Hurd said the report, which will recommend the best way for the company to conduct investigations, is part of an overall effort by Mr. Hurd to restore an ethical reputation. “It’s part of a bigger plan for us,” he said.

H.P. hopes that federal prosecutors will not file charges, and it expects a resolution with the Securities and Exchange Commission over its failure to reveal details of the resignation of one of its directors, Thomas J. Perkins, last May. Mr. Perkins, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, says he resigned when he learned of the spying operation.

Mr. Hurd said the company’s top executives and directors were being trained about ethics and the company’s core values. “We are trying to transform the board as we are trying to transform the whole company,” Mr. Hurd said, adding that the board would continue to seek new members. He did not, however, specify any particular type of director the board is looking for.

Richard A. Hackborn, who worked at H.P. for 33 years and has been designated the board’s lead independent director, said the board is looking for one director who has experience with management software for large data systems and another familiar with an Internet service business. Both are areas that the company is emphasizing for future growth.

“It is not enough,” said Mr. Ferlauto, whose proposal is also supported by Calpers, the large pension fund of California state public employees. He argues that the board needs more fresh blood and only outside nominations will bring it. “We view it as an insurance policy for reform,” he said. “If the reform process doesn’t continue, then we will have a mechanism in place to add directors.”

Mr. Hackborn said he expected that tensions within the board would be a thing of the past with the resignation of Ms. Dunn, Mr. Perkins and George A. Keyworth III, a physicist and former science adviser to President Ronald Reagan. “I do not see any of the personal animosities that were going on last year,” he said. “We have a very strong core.”

Yet the Hewlett-Packard board recently came under criticism from Mr. Perkins. In a speech last month before a conference in San Francisco, he lamented that the board has become a “compliance” board that watches that the company’s management does everything by the book. He says such boards are boring, and more to the point, legalistic. Ms. Dunn was a proponent of this approach.

His preferred model, Mr. Perkins said, is a “guidance” board that focuses on technical strategy, marketing and other issues. He also said the “embarrassing mess” of September was “actually the culmination of a war for control of the board.”

Mr. Perkins attached a higher purpose to the conflict between himself and Ms. Dunn. But the spying, several board members and people close to board members say, nevertheless was the result of two people who did not like each other. The two went at each other in a recent article in The New Yorker about the spying.

Mr. Perkins also needled Ms. Dunn in the speech, laying the blame for the spying at her feet. Her criminal defense lawyer, James J. Brosnahan of Morrison & Foerster, was quick to respond: “He has made the biggest mistake of his career. He is a bully, and he is bullying the wrong people.”

The speech drew more attention to past events, and Mr. Hurd can only stand by and watch. “Neither Pattie nor Tom have any direct affiliation with H.P.,” he said. He said he expected that would be the answer he would give shareholders who ask him about the board conflict.

Mr. Hackborn said that he disagreed with the assessment by Mr. Perkins of the H.P. board as a compliance, not a guidance, board. “My view is that you have to have a board capable of doing both,” he said. “We spend as much time if not more on the basic business models and business strategies.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/te...14hewlett.html





Fed case still pending

County Court Dismisses Charges Against Former HP Chair

Attorney general cuts back on case for all defendants
Benjamin Pimentel

Embattled former Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairwoman Patricia Dunn scored a major legal victory Wednesday after a Santa Clara County judge dismissed the case against her in connection with the corporate spying scandal at the Palo Alto company.

The ruling by Superior Court Judge Ray Cunningham, which came after the state attorney general had reduced the charges against all four defendants, marked a decisive turning point in the corporate spying scandal that ruptured the reputation of one of the Silicon Valley's most revered companies and focused national attention on pretexting, the use of false identities to obtain private information.

With the decision, Dunn, who was forced to give up her positions as director and chairwoman as a result of the scandal, eluded a long, debilitating trial that could have adversely affected her health while exposing more details of HP's botched probe of boardroom leaks to journalists.

Dunn, who has been described by some analysts as HP's scapegoat, is battling ovarian cancer and California Attorney General Jerry Brown's office cited her health as a factor for the agreement.

However, her attorney James Brosnahan maintained that Dunn did not commit any crime and that the new attorney general became convinced that the case should not go forward.

The state case against Dunn and her co-defendants was filed during the administration of former Attorney General Bill Lockyer, later elected state treasurer.

"The new administration came to the view that this case was not an appropriate one to pursue," Brosnahan said in an interview. "I think that as a matter of public policy and priority, the new administration felt that this case should go. ... Pattie has maintained her innocence all the time."

However, it is unclear how the outcome will affect the federal investigation of the HP scandal.

Justice Department spokesman Luke Macaulay said the federal investigation is ongoing.

Brosnahan said Dunn is happy about the dismissal of the case.

"She is doing OK," he said. "She is getting by. She is active in a couple of public interest groups. A lot of people have come to support her."

In a statement, Dunn said Wednesday, "I am pleased that this matter has been resolved fairly, and want to express my deep gratitude to my husband and family, who never lost faith in me throughout this ordeal. I have been strengthened by wonderful support during this difficult time -- both from my dear friends and from people I have never met."

The court also offered to dismiss the charges against three other defendants if they each complete 96 hours of community service and make any necessary restitution to victims of the HP probe.

Brown's office initially reported Wednesday that Dunn and her co-defendants had agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of fraudulent wire communications but later said the agency had made a mistake in the announcement.

Dunn had been charged with felony identity theft and conspiracy with four other defendants: Kevin Hunsaker, HP's former ethics director, and three private investigators involved in the HP probe of boardroom leaks, Ronald DeLia, Matthew DePante and Brian Wagner.

Wagner pleaded guilty to federal charges in January as part of an agreement in which he will help federal prosecutors investigating the case. As a result of Wagner's plea, Brown's office dismissed state charges against him.

The state charges stem from an internal probe of HP board members to determine who was leaking information to journalists. The investigation included falsifying identities to obtain phone records of both directors and members of the media.

The state agency had reduced the charge against Dunn, Hunsaker, DeLia and DePante to one misdemeanor count of fraudulent wire communications. Dunn did not enter a plea during Wednesday's hearing; her co-defendants pleaded no contest, Brown's office said. Cunningham dismissed the misdemeanor charge against Dunn.

Brosnahan said the agreement involving his client was reached Tuesday and formalized at a hearing on Wednesday.

The spying scandal dates to early 2005, when then-CEO Carly Fiorina and other directors began looking into leaks of board deliberations to journalists.

After Fiorina was fired, her successor as chairwoman, Dunn, pursued the investigation, which eventually pointed to director George Keyworth.

Another director, Thomas Perkins, a Keyworth ally, left the board in protest over the handling of the probe.

Dunn and Keyworth also later left after the scandal became public last year.

In a statement, Perkins, a respected Silicon Valley venture capitalist who became known as Dunn's nemesis, said, "The attorney general and the court have fashioned a most appropriate resolution of the case. My thoughts and hopes continue to be with Pattie Dunn in her courageous battle against cancer."

Last month, Perkins had publicly criticized Dunn's leadership on the HP board, which prompted Brosnahan to fire back and accuse Perkins of being a bully who was subjecting Dunn to "cowardly attacks."

Brosnahan had also accused Perkins and Keyworth of inaccurate statements about what happened and about Dunn's role in the scandal.

Asked if Dunn was planning any action against them, Brosnahan responded, "We are reviewing everything. Pattie Dunn has been put through a terrible time here, but we're reviewing things, but we're not announcing anything."

HP Spokesman Ryan Donovan said the company had no comment. The company held its annual shareholder meeting in Santa Clara Wednesday.

During the meeting, HP CEO Mark Hurd announced the resolution of the state case against Dunn and other defendants but said he and other HP officers were not going to answer questions about that development.

Hunsaker's attorney Michael Pancer said his client is also happy about the court decision.

"He has maintained his innocence from the beginning of this prosecution," he said in a statement.

William Keane, a criminal defense attorney with Farella Braun & Martel, said the court decision is "obviously a big turnaround for the state."

"This is clearly a big win across the board for the defense," he said. "Such a dramatic turn of events makes you wonder if the decision came down from the new attorney general. Either he thought the case was weak or simply wasn't worth the resources to fight over."

But Charles Weisselberg, a UC Berkeley law professor, said state prosecutors must have weighed the merits of the case against Dunn and the other defendants before filing the case.

"Obviously we had a change in attorney general, but this was a high-profile case," he said. "One assumes that it was thought through very carefully at the time the decision was made to file it."

Brosnahan noted, however, that the case was filed by Lockyer "at the height of the hysteria" over the spying scandal.

Joseph Grundfest, a Stanford law professor, also noted, "I think it is not irrelevant to observe that the case was brought by an attorney general running for election as state treasurer and the case was settled by an attorney general who only had to look at the reality of the law and not the dynamics of the ballot box."

He added: "The decision suggests that the case should not have been filed in the first place. ... There is a significant difference between bad judgment as may well have occurred and criminally illegal conduct."

But Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for Lockyer, countered that allegations the former attorney general used the HP scandal as a way to draw attention to his campaign "never held water."

"Anyone with a scintilla of knowledge about the California political scene in 2006 could tell you that," he said.

"In terms of the case itself, all five defendants broke California law, pure and simple. They used false pretenses to invade people's privacy in violation of our statutes."

He said Lockyer stands by the decision to file the case.

"He offers no apologies for bringing this case, to hold people accountable for breaking the law," Dresslar said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...G2IOL3JG46.DTL





Simpson Book Rights Will Be Auctioned

The rights to the aborted O. J. Simpson book, “If I Did It,” will be publicly auctioned so the family of the murder victim Ronald L. Goldman will receive all future proceeds from their sale, a judge in Los Angeles ruled yesterday.

Jonathan Polak, a lawyer for the Goldman family, said Mr. Simpson’s original contract with HarperCollins stipulated that on May 8 the rights to the book would revert to Lorraine Brooke, which Mr. Polak called a shell corporation set up by Mr. Simpson to hide proceeds from the book.

If the rights had reverted to Lorraine Brooke, Mr. Simpson could have potentially sold them to another publisher, an action the Goldman family was trying to prevent, Mr. Polak said. If no publisher bids on the book, he said, “then the Goldmans will buy it and lock it up.”

After a public outcry over Mr. Simpson’s book last fall, HarperCollins canceled plans in November to publish it. In December, the company dismissed Judith Regan, the publisher of ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins that was to publish the book, and a month later announced that it would dissolve ReganBooks.

Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, declined comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/us/14simpson.html





Avoid Static Damage to Your PC

If you're upgrading your PC, static electricity can cause real damage. But a few precautions can protect sensitive electronics.
Stan Miastkowski

All of us are familiar with walking across a rug, reaching out to touch a doorknob, and getting zapped by a charge of static electricity, what's technically known as electrostatic discharge, or ESD. For most of us, it's annoying; for some, dangerous (fireworks and explosive makers have to take special precautions to avoid static sparks); and for the sensitive electronics inside a PC, static can be a computer-killer.

For most day-to-day PC use, static isn't much of a problem, but the chances of problems go way up if you pop open your computer's case to add RAM, upgrade your CPU or hard drive, or plug in a new sound card or graphics.

A little background: Static electricity is much more common than you might think, and most of it is created by a process called triboelectrification, when two materials touch (your fingers and your PC keyboard, for example) and then move apart or rub. Electrons are exchanged, and one object becomes electrically positive; the other electrically negative. When you touch another object with an opposite charge, or a ground (neutral charge), electrons flow.

The amount of voltage involved in static electricity sounds impressive. Walk across that rug and touch a grounded metal object, and the voltage can be in the 10,000-to-12,000-volt range. (If you think back to your high school physics class, you'll remember why static voltage isn't life threatening. Its amperage is miniscule. And it's amps, not volts, which are dangerous.)

There are many variables involved in how much static voltage triboelectrification creates, including the materials involved and the humidity. Low humidity causes static shocks with more kick. But for PC upgrades, the important thing to remember is that while a static shock must be 3500 to 4000 volts before you can feel it, it's the voltage below that level that is common, and insidious. It's entirely possible that you'll open up your PC, plug in an add-in card or some RAM, never have any sensation of static, and still have zapped the electronics. That's because the integrated circuits can be damaged or destroyed by static voltages as low as 400 volts.

What's worse is that the component you installed may appear to be fine, but days, weeks, or months later your PC may lock up or start acting strangely. A dead board or RAM module is easy to diagnose if it doesn't work immediately after you install it, but low-voltage static charges can also cause latent damage, destroying a few gates out of the millions in a typical integrated circuit. That damage can be almost impossible to diagnose, and may not cause problems for a long time. It's also quite possible that you might never take precautions to avoid static and yet never lose a component to static damage.

To avoid the ravages of static damage, your body and the components you're working with (add-in card, RAM, PC case, and so on) must be at the same electrical potential. And the easiest way to do this is to make sure that all static charges are drained to ground, an object connected to the Earth, which can harmlessly absorb the static charge. Until recently, that wasn't difficult. Since all standard AC wiring includes a common ground, you used to be able to ground yourself by touching the case of your PC while it was switched off but still plugged into the wall outlet. However, since today's PCs have voltage flowing through their motherboards whenever they're plugged in (5 volts direct current are used for switching the PC on and off), it's all too easy to accidentally short something and zap your motherboard, without static being involved at all. That's why it's essential that PCs be unplugged when you work with them.

If you're daring and careful, you can still keep yourself and the computer at the same electrical potential by constantly touching the case while installing an upgrade, but it's a juggling act. And if you accidentally touch something with a different electrical potential--such as the tabletop the computer is sitting on--all bets are off.

Using a ground is still the most effective way to minimize the potential damaging effects of static electricity, although you'll need to invest in some additional components Here's how to do it:

• Check your AC wiring: Before you can use the electrical ground in your home or office, you need to make sure it's actually working. Old homes may have grounded outlets on the wall, but they may not be grounded. And even new construction isn't necessarily safe, given the time constraints of harried builders. The best way to check the wiring is to buy a wiring checker. Sophisticated units can be expensive, but Radio Shack has a $20 tester (Catalog # 910-5501) that will tell you if the ground is working, and much more. If you do find problems, call a licensed electrician to fix them. While they're usually used for bathroom and kitchen AC outlets, Underwriter's Laboratories, the leading U.S. safety certification organization, suggests you have a licensed electrician install ground fault circuit interrupters on all your AC outlets. While their main purpose is to prevent life-threatening shocks if problems develop with the ground in your AC wiring, they're a logical upgrade for your computer-upgrade work area, because they shut the power off completely if the ground isn't working.


• Use a wrist strap: The easiest way to dissipate static electricity is to use an antistatic wrist strap, which connects to your AC ground. Follow the manufacturer's instructions carefully to connect it. Wrist straps are available in a wide variety of models, from disposable units for under $10 designed for one-time use , to $50 units designed for those who use them regularly. Sources include ESD Systems, Radio Shack, and Visiflex Static Solutions. If you don't want to deal with a ground, $39 cordless wrist straps, based on a technology that uses the Corona principle to dissipate static without using a ground, are also available at Directron.com. Industry experts say they're not as effective as a true grounded wrist strap, but they're better than taking your chances.

• Use additional antistatic components: If you work with computer upgrades regularly, consider investing in additional antistatic measures, such as grounded pads that you can lay your PC case on when you work with it. (You should still use a wrist strap.) The companies listed above have a wide range of products to choose from.

• Prepare your work area: Make sure the area where you're working on your upgrades isn't full of other static-inducing components. A bare table is best. Keep plastic desk accessories, wastebaskets, and telephones away from your work area. And one of the worst creators of static charge is a rolling desk chair. Push it away, and stand up when you're working on your PC.

• Control the humidity: The lower the humidity, the more likely it is that damaging static charges will build up quickly. If your ventilation system allows you to control it, a humidity level between 35 and 50 percent is ideal. If you can't control your humidity, don't do upgrades on a cold winter day when the humidity tends to be very low, or on a warm day with the air conditioning turned up high. If you live in an area where the humidity is generally high, it's not a bad idea to open the windows while you do your upgrades.


While the precautions above can't guarantee to prevent static electricity discharge, they will at least reduce the chances that your memory or hard drive upgrade will leave your system permanently damaged.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,82...1/article.html





Awaiting a Compromise on YouTube
Joe Nocera

“Viacom is so ticked off at YouTube,” my son Nick informed me not long ago. “It’s just so obvious.”

Nick, who is a senior in high school, knew this not because he reads the business pages; like most 17-year olds, he doesn’t. He knew it because he is a YouTube fanatic, and has a keen understanding of the rhythms of the online video site. For months, he had been able to watch clips of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” or “The Colbert Report” on YouTube — shows that were produced by Viacom’s Comedy Central channel.

Suddenly, though, he couldn’t get access to them. They had disappeared from YouTube, as had most of Viacom’s other copyrighted fare, like “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “South Park.” Clearly, something was up. Viacom was, indeed, upset with YouTube.

So upset that this week Viacom filed a $1 billion copyright infringement suit against YouTube and its parent, the mighty Google, which last year bought the tiny start-up for a jaw-dropping $1.65 billion. At that point, YouTube was a fledgling company with no profits and negligible revenue. But it had already become the site for posting — and watching — short user-generated digital videos. Most of the videos on YouTube really are generated by users — there are lots of spoofs and home videos and the like on the site. But there are also plenty of users who are “generating” content by slapping up shows, or portions or shows, that are owned by the big media companies like Viacom. Shows like, well, “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.”

At first glance, the Viacom lawsuit may seem like a carbon copy of the music industry’s fight against Napster in the late 1990s. Old-line industry sees new threat from the Internet and tries to sue it into oblivion. But it’s not. In that earlier case, the music industry won the battle only to lose the war. Although the courts decisively ruled that Napster was infringing copyrights owned by the big music companies, that decision didn’t exactly eliminate the practice of stealing copyrighted music from the Internet. All it meant, in practical terms, was that youths had to find other, more shadowy sites to use to download music. Pandora’s box having been opened, it couldn’t be shut again.

The Viacom suit is about something a good deal more complicated. Just as getting music from the Internet is here to stay, so is downloading videos. All the big media companies understand that. They all realize that the Internet has created potential new methods for distributing their shows — and that creates both great possibilities and great pitfalls. They all fully understand that they are not going to be able to litigate YouTube off the face of the earth.

The fact that Google owns YouTube gives the small company leverage Napster never had.

So the big media companies are all grappling with how to deal with YouTube. Ultimately, they all want money for their content, no matter how it is distributed or by whom.

Some companies, like CBS, have decided that honey catches more flies than vinegar. Its approach has been to play nice with YouTube, and do small deals in the hopes that it can eventually work out something big. (It is putting March Madness on YouTube, for instance, in a deal sponsored by Pontiac.) Others, like Time Warner, while deeply annoyed with YouTube, are continuing to negotiate. The company’s patience is wearing thin, however.

But Viacom has decided that the only way to deal with Google and YouTube is to sue. In talking about its suit, Viacom officials use phrases like the sanctity of copyright, and they speak harshly about what they see as Google’s and YouTube’s willful misuse of their property. But really, their goal isn’t all that different from CBS and Time Warner. Viacom wants money for its content. The only real question is whether this suit will get it for them.

“Google respects copyright,” insisted Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. In fact, he told me a few days after the suit was filed, “we need copyright to be effective because we don’t make our own content.” In Mr. Schmidt’s opinion, even though YouTube doesn’t prevent users from posting copyrighted material on the site, that doesn’t mean the company is ignoring the law. On the contrary. “We are governed by a law called the D.M.C.A., and we are in compliance with that,” he said.

One of Mr. Schmidt’s great qualities is that he always sounds like the voice of sweet reason. You come away from an interview with him wondering how anyone could possible think that “Do No Evil” Google could be less than fully engaged in protecting the copyrights of others. As Mr. Schmidt points out, the Viacom suit came “in the context of a business negotiation” in which the two companies were trying to work out a deal. From Google’s point of view, the lawsuit is little more than effort to gain some increased leverage in the negotiations. And it most certainly is that.

But when you look at it a little more closely, you realize that it is also about those initials Mr. Schmidt used a few paragraphs ago. D.M.C.A. stands for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that governs how Internet companies are supposed to handle copyrighted material. At its core, the lawsuit is about whether the D.M.C.A. should favor Google’s approach to copyrighted material, or Viacom’s.

Paradoxically, the law was originally intended to help the big media companies, which, in the wake of Napster, were terrified that they were losing their ability to control their copyrighted material. But it also had an important sop to Internet service providers: it said that they shouldn’t be held responsible if people used their service to post copyrighted content. What they had to do, however, was promise to remove such content immediately when a copyright holder complained.

This is what Mr. Schmidt means when he says that YouTube is abiding by the law. YouTube doesn’t police its site because its doesn’t have to, under its interpretation of the D.M.C.A. But whenever a copyright holder complains, it removes the offending material. The reason you don’t see much Jon Stewart on YouTube anymore is that Viacom has been complaining — a lot.

But from Viacom’s point of view, it is ridiculous that it should bear the onus of finding the offending material and asking YouTube to remove it. “To say that the D.M.C.A. protects a company like YouTube when they systematically show copyrighted material is an extremely twisted interpretation,” said Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom’s chief executive. According to Viacom, YouTube has allowed tens of thousands — nay, well over 100,000 — of its copyrighted clips to be posted on the site. The company claims it is spending more than $100,000 a month hunting them down and asking that they be removed. Can this really be the intention of the law?

One provision of the D.M.C.A. is that in order to be held harmless for copyrighted content, an Internet company has to have no knowledge that the content is on the site. Google, of course, says that it has no idea whether material on YouTube is being posted illegally or not. But here’s where Viacom goes completely ballistic. Surely, it says, YouTube knows that Viacom’s material is on the site — everyone knows how popular Jon Stewart is to YouTube viewers. “If you are aware of copyrighted material being put up and you are profiting from it, then you have an affirmative duty to do something about it,” Mr. Dauman said. He also complained that Google was willing to filter copyrighted content — but only with companies that cut deals with it.

One of the things you realize when you begin to talk to people who care about copyright law is how fervent they can get. For much of the technorati, Viacom is a dinosaur that doesn’t understand the new world — or the power of YouTube to act as a marketing vehicle for their shows.

“YouTube has become a brilliant promotional platform for video content,” said Roger McNamee, the technology investor. “How can it be bad that all the Comedy Central stuff is on there?” Lawrence Lessig, the law professor at Stanford who specializes in copyright issues, said that YouTube “allows people to signal what is interesting and what is valuable.” If Viacom, he went on, “thought about how to leverage the value instead of trying to stop it, they would be better off.”

But from the Viacom side, the issue is simple: It’s their property, and they should get to decide who to give it to and how much to charge for it. “The law says this is our material,” said Michael Fricklas, a company lawyer. “Google is saying, ‘We’ll take it and then we can have a business discussion.’ ”

The problem for both sides is that copyright law is not nearly as black and white as Google and Viacom are making it out to be. It is filled with compromises and ambiguity. People have always been able to use small amounts of copyrighted material without asking permission, for instance. And though both sides insist that the law is on their side, it is impossible to know right now how a judge might ultimately rule.

Which is where the real danger lies for both sides. Victory would be sweet, but losing could be disastrous. If Google wins, YouTube will never have to pay much to anyone for copyrighted content, and companies like Viacom will wind up either handing over their material or continuing to ask that it be removed — again and again and again. Smaller companies — not to mention the artists themselves — will probably have less control over their own work. If Viacom wins, YouTube will no longer be able to allow copyrighted content to be posted — which will surely hurt its business prospects. And it will make it more dangerous for any Internet site to use copyrighted material — even when it is legal to do so.

That’s why, as adamant as they sound now, it is highly likely that Google and Viacom will figure out a way to settle their dispute — and in so doing set an example for everyone else trying to figure this out. Sometimes, a little ambiguity isn’t such a bad thing.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/17.../17nocera.html





Streamcast Heading Back To Write The Latest Chapter In The Grokster Supreme Court Ruling
Mike

Nearly two years ago, when the Supreme Court came out with its ruling in the MGM v. Grokster case, many people simply assumed that that was the end of it -- and the Supreme Court had shut the file sharing companies down. Certainly, that's what the folks at the RIAA wanted everyone to believe -- even publicly saying that the Court ruled in a way it absolutely did not. The Court never said that Grokster and other file sharing apps were illegal. It simply said that if they were found to be actively inducing unauthorized file sharing then they could be sued for infringement as well. That's a pretty big "if." While many other file sharing networks figured it wasn't worth the fight and shut down, Streamcast decided to keep up the fight. Unfortunately for Streamcast, the lower court judge found that, indeed, Streamcast was guilty of infringement by actively inducing unauthorized file sharing.

Brian Deagon, from Investors Business Daily, writes in to point to his own article about the next step in the case, where Morpheus returns to court later this month to argue with the RIAA over what happens next. The judge clearly wants the two sides to work out a settlement (one that either kills Streamcast or forces them to be an RIAA-sanctioned software provider, which is effectively the same thing as killing Streamcast). If not, apparently the judge will mandate what kind of filtering solution Streamcast must use in its file sharing application. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. While Deagon's article quotes EFFites like Fred von Lohmann worrying about what kind of precedent it sets for a judge to be picking the technological solution, it's certainly not a first for this kind of thing.

Back in 2001, the judge in the Napster case forced Napster to put in place filters, which were completely useless. In the summer of 2005, a judge imposed similar restrictions on Kazaa, who started blocking thousands of songs -- which people also quickly discovered to be useless. In both cases, the effective result was the same. Soon afterwards, the regular free file-sharing app was forced to shut down completely as the filters served no purpose, and both tried to resurrect the brand as a "legitimate" music download service with the blessing of the RIAA. Yet, as a separate sidebar from Deagon notes, neither resulted in any reduction in unauthorized file sharing. In fact, it just keeps on growing. So, while Streamcast may be relegated to the dustbin of P2P history, it's not as though it has any real impact on the issue -- though, we're sure that the RIAA will grandstand about how it's their latest "significant blow" against piracy.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070313/010506.shtml





CD With Medical Data of 75,000 is Found
Milt Freudenheim

A missing CD containing confidential medical and personal information on 75,000 Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield members was recovered Wednesday.

Erin Sommers, a spokeswoman for Magellan Behavioral Services, a managed care company that monitors payments for mental health and substance abuse cases of insurers, said the company received a telephone call Wednesday morning saying that the CD was delivered by mistake to a residence in the Philadelphia area. The CD had been missing since January.

Magellan sent two security employees to identify the CD, interview the people who received it and bring it back. "We have no reason to believe, based on our interviews, that there was any improper access to the evidence," Sommers said.

The recipients were assembling a new audio system when they found the Magellan disc among the packages, she said.

The coding and password protection for the information on the CD, which included the names of patients, their doctors, hospitals, Social Security numbers and medical claims going back to 2003, had been removed by the sender, Health Data Management Solutions, a company working for Magellan, Sommers said.

Health Data Management Solutions is a unit of ActiveHealth Management, a data management company owned by the Aetna insurance company. Health Data and Magellan staff members "had agreed to exchange the data in an unencrypted manner," ActiveHealth spokeswoman Oonagh Holt said.

Both companies said that they are no longer sending patients' information without coding protection. Failure to provide adequate security protection for individuals' medical records is prohibited by privacy laws.
http://news.com.com/CD+with+medical+...3-6167435.html





U.S. Patent Office Says Free Music Downloads Could Harm Children, National Security

The report states that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults, making them the target in most copyright lawsuits.
K.C. Jones

The United States Patent and Trademark Office claims that file-sharing sites could be setting up children for copyright infringement lawsuits and compromising national security.

"A decade ago, the idea that copyright infringement could become a threat to national security would have seemed implausible," Patent and Trademark Director John Dudas said in a report released this week. "Now, it's a sad reality."

The report, which the patent office recently forwarded to the U.S. Department of Justice, states that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults. That could make children the target in most copyright lawsuits and, in turn, make those protecting their material appear antagonistic, according to the report.

File-sharing software also could be to blame for government workers who expose sensitive data and jeopardize national security after downloading free music on the job, the report states.

"There are documented incidents of P2P file sharing where Department of Defense sensitive documents have been found on non-U.S. computers with no protection against hostile intelligence," the Patent and Trademark Office explained in a statement.

In 2005, the Department of Homeland Security announced that government workers had installed file-sharing programs that accessed classified information without their knowledge.

"There will almost never be a legitimate business or governmental justification for employee use of file-sharing programs," the report said. "Nevertheless, preventing employees from using these programs on corporate or government networks can be both difficult and expensive."

Some unanswered questions raised in the report could be addressed by consumer-protection advocates or agencies or by computer science researchers, the report states.

Dudas said he commissioned the report after hearing some of the information the authors compiled for a law review article. After publishing the report on his office's Web site last week, he urged further investigation.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=198000239





Chatterbox

What the f*ck do the desk-jockeying sh*t-stabbers at the f*cking patent office know about national security and the safety of children?

If it's Un-American and "terroristic" to share files, just call me Alsama Bin Downloaden. In fact, go ahead sign me up for all of the Un-American you've got, because the adjective "American" has come to mean "embarrassing, backwards, and pridefully ignorant on a massive scale".

Dr. Avery

http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=12457


















Until next week,

- js.



















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