[JackSpratts]

Refugee P2P Outpost Escapes Authority
John Borland

Deep in the tense Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian West Bank, a new file- swapping service is daring record labels and movie studios to turn their piracy-hunting into an international incident.

Dubbed Earthstation 5, the new file-swapping network is openly flouting international copyright norms at a time when many older peer-to-peer companies are trying to establish themselves as legitimate technology companies. One of the brashest of a new generation of file-trading networks, it is serving as a new test case for the ability of high-tech security measures and international borders to preserve privacy on the Net.

As the deadline looms this month for what will likely be thousands of copyright lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against individual computer users, anxious file swappers are turning to this and other new services in hopes of avoiding legal consequences. In EarthStation 5's case, it is returning industry legal threats with bravado.

"We're in Palestine, in a refugee camp," said Ras Kabir, the service's co-founder. "There aren't too many process servers that are going to be coming into the Jenin refugee camp. We'll welcome them if they do."

On its face, Earthstation 5 appears to be at the leading edge of the movie and music industry's next nightmare--copyright-flouting networks based in a territory without strong intellectual property laws, with security built in that protects users from scrutiny. Indeed, the company is confident enough in its territorial immunity that it even streams and offers downloads of full albums and first-run movies like "Terminator 3" and "Tomb Raider" directly from its own servers, an activity that has previously resulted in lawsuits and the prompt disappearance of predecessors.

As an unabashed advocate of unrestricted file swapping, the company may also serve to undermine recent conciliatory efforts of older peer-to-peer companies. Companies such as Kazaa parent Sharman Networks have tried to open negotiations with the recording and film industries in hopes of ultimately reaching a legal compromise. Several groups of peer-to-peer companies have opened trade associations and lobbying branches in Washington, D.C., aiming to show they are legitimate parts of the technology economy.

Like others in a new generation of file-sharing networks such as Blubster and Filetopia, Earthstation 5 bills itself primarily as an anonymous service. That's helped all of them draw computer users anxious to escape the high-profile recording industry campaign to find, identify and ultimately sue thousands of individuals trading music on networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

Trouble is, the claims to anonymity are as highly controversial as the services themselves.

"We have yet to see a P2P network where we have not been able to target individuals who are infringers," said Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of the RIAA. "This is marketing hype of the worst kind. It is playing on the fears of others, encouraging them to engage in behavior that will get them into a boatload of trouble."

Out of the West Bank
According to Earthstation 5 founder Kabir, the company was formed after a conversation with his brother Nasser in Ramallah two years ago, as Napster was circling toward its nadir. Over time, they won the financial backing of investors in Israel, Saudi Arabia and Russia, who have asked to remain anonymous. Those funds were used in part to pay contract programmers, largely in Russia, to help build the basic software.

The 35-year-old Kabir, who speaks fluent English, says he is Palestinian but spent much of his childhood in Manchester, England, with his mother. He now has homes in Jenin and elsewhere in Palestine, where Earthstation 5 is based, he said.

He's not worried about legal attacks from the RIAA or the Motion Picture Association (MPA), groups that have successfully shut down many of the most blatant copyright violators online, he said. In the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli government has ceded civil law enforcement to the Palestinian Authority. That body has propagated copyright rules that protect Palestinian copyrights but don't have strong protections for foreign works, he said.

He's now making sweeping claims for the success of the service: that it has been translated into more than a dozen languages, ranging from Turkish to Chinese, which has helped it be downloaded more than 22 million times--a number that would put it on track to rival the reach of file- swapping giant Kazaa.

Like much else in the gray areas of Internet file swapping, much of this is hard to confirm in detail. Nor are claims always genuine in this industry. In April, a Netherlands- based company that calls itself "The Honest Thief," which similarly advertised file sharing beyond the reach of American law, turned out to be a hoax.

Internet addresses Earthstation 5 uses point to Israeli hosting company SpeedNet, which did not return requests for comment. The file-swapping company's domain name itself is registered to an address in "Jenin refugee Camp #23," although that does not prove its actual location there.

The company's Web site gives an address in Gaza, as does the contact information for another Net address used by the service.

According to Download.com, a popular software aggregation site News.com publisher CNET Networks operates, the English version of Earthstation 5 has been downloaded just 25,500 times, with far fewer instances of other languages. Kabir said most of his downloads come from other sites or from the company's own site.

The software itself does not include a way to verify the number of people online at any given time.

Is secure really secure?
If the story of a refugee camp-based network that's flying in the face of international copyright norms is compelling, it is ultimately the strength of the technology itself that will determine the success of the service or of any of its new generation of rivals.

By comparison to more established services, Earthstation 5 is difficult to use and buggy. It claims to use a series of different technologies--most of which are similar to nascent efforts by rivals--in order to keep its users' identities safe.

First, it uses a different Web protocol, called UDP (for User Datagram Protocol), to transmit much of its information. This is harder to detect and track to a single computer than is TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which is used by most file-swapping services and Web functions.

The company adds SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption--the same technology that prevents hackers from seeing password or credit card numbers being sent to e-commerce sites--to protect data in transit. And finally, it encourages users to search and even transfer files through proxy servers, the electronic equivalent of using a middleman to exchange goods. That way, anybody who tries to download files will see only the Net address of the proxy server doing the relaying, not the person originally sharing files, according to the company.

None of these methods is a perfect guarantor of anonymity. Nor does the company provide enough real detail on its security to satisfy others in the privacy business.

"If I'm going to lay my anonymity on the line, I would want to see all the details about how a system works," said Ian Clarke, founder of Freenet, a yearslong project dedicated to producing a genuinely anonymous file-swapping and Net publishing system. "This is an issue we think about a lot. When we have people in China who could go to jail or worse for using Freenet, we want to make sure that we're not exaggerating those claims and what level (of anonymity) they afford."

Companies dedicated to scouring file-swapping networks for infringements say proxy servers could help people be temporarily anonymous, but they have flaws as well. A server could, for example, be a "honey pot," a trap set up by a group like the RIAA or MPA that will in fact do nothing to preserve privacy.

Kabir said his company runs several of its own proxy servers and encourages people to swap files through these. But if the service becomes extremely popular, with hundreds of gigabytes going through the service every day, running anonymous proxies would likely become prohibitively expensive and impractical.

"Right now, the proxy features in just about every P2P client don't work well. They end up slowing downloads and aren't highly utilized," said Travis Hill, director of engineering for BayTSP, a company that works for record companies and movie studios to find copyright infringements online. "But if and when they do start being used effectively--if proxy operators are allowing their machines to distribute copyrighted material--copyright owners will start notifying them and pursuing them also."

The U.S. copyright community has previously shown some restraint in dealing with infringing issues in the Middle East. File-swapping firm iMesh, based in Israel, is one of the oldest and most popular of the post-Napster networks and has thus far escaped lawsuits altogether.

Even if the RIAA and MPA can't go to Israel or the Palestinian territories to have the company's servers shut down, they do have options inside the United States. They've previously filed lawsuits against major U.S. backbone Internet service providers to block access to Web addresses that offer copyrighted material online and have said they are willing to do so again.

For now, Kabir and his brother are worrying just as much about maintaining a functioning technology operation in an area where suicide bombings and military reprisals are still a way of life. The company has talked to militant Palestinians as well as Israelis and has gotten the go-ahead to operate without being drawn into the ongoing conflict as much as possible, he says.

"We have met with the organizations on our side, met with the leadership, and we said we just want to support ourselves and support Palestinians," Kabir said. "Everyone thought we were nuts. But we all came to agreement. We're entitled to eat, too."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-5063641.html


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Pop Goes The Warning
Jack Kapica

The Canadian music industry will be sending warnings to users who are offering copyright music files on peer-to-peer programs.

In what it calls "the second phase of our education program with Canadian users of file-sharing services," Canadian Recording Industry Association president Brian Robertson said CRIA will use the Instant Messaging function of the peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa to communicate its message to individuals who appear to be distributing copyrighted music without authorization from the rights owners.

Unlike the Recording Industry Association of America, its U.S. counterpart, its U.S. counterpart, CRIA has not launched lawsuits against users of such networks as Kazaa, which share digitized versions of music CDs.

The test of the message reads:

"Warning

"It appears that you are offering copyrighted music to others from your computer. While we appreciate your love of music, please be aware that sharing copyrighted music on the Internet without permission from the copyright owner is illegal. When you do so, you hurt the artists, songwriters and musicians who create the music and the other talented individuals who are involved in bringing you the music.

"More than 40,000 Canadians work hard producing and supporting the music you appear to enjoy, including producers, engineers, retailers, music publishers, distributors, manufacturers, record companies, concert promoters and broadcasters.

"When you break the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a simple way to avoid that risk: Don¹t distribute music to others on a file-sharing system like this. For further information, please go to www.cria.ca.

"Remember that you need music and music needs you."
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/


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Singingfish To compete with iTunes and File-Sharing programs?
Mr Ocean

Is Singingfish.com the Multimedia Search engine (Owned by Thomson) competing with File-sharing programs like Kazaa etc?
Producing a monthly top list of most popular song searches shows Beyoncé Knowles "Crazy In Love" as the #1 searched song, at doing a search several results come up, most of them streamed, similar to online radio streaming.
For most somewhat handy computer people it's not that difficult to download the existing file, but here is a though, when i listen to the streamed audio (Of the whole song) do i commit an illegal act?
I don't have any idea, i would guess not, and if my instinct is correct, will this be a legal way to listen to music without downloading it to your computer (Which in most cases makes it illegal) like a personal radion in a way, you can request any song you want.

To me this makes Singingfish also a competitor to services like iTunes, sure you will have to stream the file each time you want to listen to it, but for people with broadband connections this shouldn't cause a problem.

Searching multimedia isn't a new thing, it's been done before and most search engines like AltaVista and Fast-WebSearch include Multimedia as a choice of search, Singingfish presents undoubtly much better results in all areas than they do.

I am certainly looking forward to see where this ends it may prove a good competitor for both Pay-Per-Song services like iTunes but also File-Sharing services like Kazaa and Morpheus etc.
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comm...id=817_0_5_0_C


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Higher Education & Entertainment P2P Report:

A report explicating what could happen to students who use school networks for file sharing has just been released by the Hollywood inspired Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities.

Among other things, "mandatory-minimum statutory damages even for non-willful infringements by a student could be enormous (in the millions of dollars)," it states, going on, "Within the range, a court would consider what is 'just'. Juries could act with compassion, but that is not guaranteed."

It also warns, "Students engaged in file sharing, distributing P2P software, or operating P2P networks are not likely to qualify as online service providers under the DMCA."

Called Background Discussion of Copyright Law and Potential Liability for Students Engaged in P2P File Sharing on University Networks, it's released under the ACE banner.

Behind the Joint Committee are educational institution administrators, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), the heads of several movie studios, and various Hollywood lawyers and marketeers.

"[...] a number of colleges and universities have begun to inform students about potential liabilities that arise from certain P2P file-sharing activities," it states. "Given the seriousness of the liabilities and their negative implications for students’ lives, it is right to catalog the liabilities and appropriate to weigh the risks."

Graham Spanier, Pennsylvania State University president, used to be its chair, with Cary-Sue Sherman, RIAA president, as co-chair. But Spanier seems to have been replaced by John Hennessy, Stanford University president, and relegated to co-chair, alongside Sherman. See the bottom of the story for a full list.

A preface to the report signed, interestingly, only by Hennessy and Spanier, states:

"As discussed in the paper, the P2P file sharing software is not itself unlawful, but its use for unauthorized downloading and uploading of copyrighted music and other works likely constitutes copyright infringement. Copyright owners are expanding their efforts against such infringement through a variety of legal means. The enclosed paper is intended to assist campus administrators in understanding the application of copyright law to P2P file sharing and the potential serious liabilities that may be incurred by students who engage in that activity; we encourage you to share this paper with appropriate members of your administration.

"We intend to distribute another document shortly that will describe a number of approaches that various institutions have taken to educate students, faculty, and staff about copyright rights and responsibilities and P2P file sharing. In the meantime, we hope that you will find the enclosed paper to be helpful in thinking about this issue and framing your own
institutional policies."

What's the bottom line?

• As to the merits of P2P file sharing by students on university networks, serious liability could arise for direct infringements of multiple copyrighted works. There also appears to be a reasonable likelihood of success on contributory copyright infringement claims against students who materially contribute to the direct infringements of other students. Given the complexities and conflicts in recent court decisions, this determination will turn on the facts of each case.

• Students engaged in file sharing, distributing P2P software, or operating P2P networks are not likely to qualify as online service providers under the DMCA.

• As a general proposition, whether a student has acted 'willfully' and, therefore, qualifies for augmented statutory damages will depend on the facts and circumstances of each case. In any event, mandatory- minimum statutory damages even for non-willful infringements by a student could be enormous (in the millions of dollars). Within the range, a court would consider what is 'just'. Juries could act with compassion, but that is not guaranteed.

• Upon a finding of infringement, entry of an injunction against a student’s infringing activities is likely. Court- ordered impoundment or other disposition of a student’s computer and telephonic equipment used to facilitate file sharing is a possibility.

• A student could be ordered to pay the costs and attorney’s fees of a successful plaintiff in addition to the student’s own costs and attorney’s fees. To mount a vigorous defense, substantial monetary resources might be necessary. The attorney’s fees just for a settlement can cost thousands of dollars.

• If the student engages in file sharing of live musical performances that have been taped, similar liabilities could arise from the federal anti-bootlegging statute.

• In the worst cases, criminal prosecutions could occur with multiple counts, raising the possibilities of potent penal sanctions including terms of imprisonment, fines, and forfeitures of technological equipment used in P2P file sharing.

• Finally, liabilities might arise from application of other state and federal statutes. Given the right fact pattern and jurisdiction, lawsuits could also arise in foreign countries. Colleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students’ private conduct. Students therefore should not assume that their college or university will accept liability for them or provide them with legal representation.
http://www.p2pnet.net/article/7408


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Are You Wanted by the Recording Industry?
Chris Sherman

Concerned that information about your file-sharing user name may have been subpoenaed by the Recording Industry Association of America? Check this database to see if you're a potential target.

Ever since Napster made it easy for music lovers to share files, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been on a crusade to put an end to what they allege is illegal file sharing. The RIAA successfully sued Napster, resulting in the demise of the popular service.

The battle has escalated this year, with the RIAA shifting its targets from companies to individual users. On June 25, 2003, the RIAA announced that it will begin suing users of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems beginning at the end of August.

Targets of RIAA actions are users of services like Grokster, Morpheus, KaZaA, Aimster, Gnutella, and others. According to the RIAA, it plans to selectively target users who upload or share "substantial" amounts of copyrighted music.

How does the RIAA identify those users? By using software that scans users' publicly available P2P directories, and then identifies the ISP of each user. Then, under the provisions of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the RIAA subpoenas ISPs for each user's name, address, and other personal information. The RIAA will then sue those individuals.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is helping users deal with the draconian tactics of the music industry cartel. It has created a Subpoena Database that lets you check the user names and IP addresses used on a file sharing service against a database of those user names specified in hundreds of subpoenas the RIAA issued to Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

"The recording industry continues its futile crusade to sue thousands of the over 60 million people who use file sharing software in the U.S.," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "We hope that EFF's subpoena database will give people some peace of mind and the information they need to challenge these subpoenas and protect their privacy."

"EFF is also documenting the scope of privacy invasions committed by the RIAA," explained EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "EFF's subpoena database will help document the damage done to innocent people misidentified as copyright infringers in the RIAA's overzealous campaign."

If you're a user of a P2P system, it's important to realize that these systems are legal, and using them is not a crime, despite the RIAA's heavy-handed tactics. If you are a P2P user, take a look at How Not to Get Sued by the RIAA for File Sharing.

If you feel you've been wrongly targeted by the RIAA, visit the Subpoena Defense Alliance, a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the US Internet Industry Association and other organizations that began in April of 2003. Its purpose is to assist consumers and Internet Service Providers who have been served subpoenas seeking the identity of customers who use the Internet for private communications.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/2241591


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Download Battle Reaches Europe
BBC

Microsoft has launched a music download service in Europe after the success of a similar service run by rival Apple in the United States.

Microsoft's MSN Music Club allows fans in the UK, France and Germany to buy single songs from 75p, or 0.99 euros. It is being billed as the first pan-European pay-as-you-go online music shop.

Apple's iTunes music store, which offers songs for $0.99 (62p), was an instant hit when it launched in the US in May - but Microsoft has beaten it to the European market. Through Microsoft, fans can buy more than 200,000 songs from all five major record labels - roughly the same as the iTunes catalogue. Many tunes are priced at 75p, with more popular songs at 99p and "gold" singles at £1.19. Gold tracks are new singles, available as soon as they are sent to radio stations - up to six weeks before the CDs reach shops and full albums will be priced to download from £7.99, or 12.49 euros. Songs are available through the 250 million copies of the latest version of Microsoft's Windows Media Player as well as its website.

The new service was given a "soft launch" last week and is being run in conjunction with digital music company OD2. There has already been a "dramatic" increase in users after Microsoft 's previous subscription-only model was expanded, OD2 chief executive Charles Grimsdale said. ITunes enjoyed surprise success when it launched in the US in May, selling more than five million songs in the first two months. Microsoft's service was not a direct response to iTunes' popularity, but was designed to please fans who were reluctant to sign up for a subscription, he said. It had also been made possible because record companies had "opened up" their licensing requirements in the last six months, he said.

"These new services represent the second generation of online music stores in Europe," he said. Fans can copy tracks, burn them to CDs and transfer them to other devices as much as they want "within reason", he added. An Apple spokesman could not say when iTunes music store was likely to launch in the UK because they were currently negotiating with record companies.

"There are people thrashing out deals as we speak," he said. He added that iTunes used a higher quality audio file and that users had the same level of rights as people who bought CDs. It is currently only available to Mac users, but a Windows version of iTunes is expected to be launched in the US by the end of the year.

The new services are leading the way in legitimate downloading after several years during which unofficial sites have allowed fans to access music for free.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ic/3148327.stm


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RIAA Says 'Happy to Talk'
Jo Maitland

The ISP community, represented by NetCoalition, has received a lukewarm response from the Record Industry of America Association (RIAA) regarding its complaint against the association’s litigious approach to preventing file-swapping on the Internet (see ISPs Hit Back at Record Industry).

Yesterday, NetCoalition hand-delivered a letter signed by several major ISP associations, to the RIAA, criticizing it for its heavy-handed approach to slapping subpoenas on ISPs’ customers that are downloading music files on the Net. The full text of the letter can be read here.

The RIAA responded to NetCoalition via an email to Boardwatch:

We welcome the opportunity to sit down with anyone in the ISP community to discuss internet piracy and how we can work together constructively. We have already reached out to many ISPs to discuss these issues. We look forward to dispelling some of the gross inaccuracies contained in the letter, and hope that these ISPs will help to foster the legitimate on line music marketplace.

An RIAA spokeswoman told Boardwatch, "We are happy to talk."

NetCoalition is unimpressed. “They have responded through the media, which is indicative of this whole effort,” says Kevin McGuiness, executive director and general counsel of NetCoalition. “It’s a campaign of intimidation."

McGuiness says he hasn't received an official response from the RIAA, “not even a phone call."

Industry observers say it might be time for some of NetCoalition’s larger members to stand up and make some noise on behalf of ISPs in this battle. The Virginia ISP Alliance signed the letter and among its members are AOL Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: AOL) and EarthLink Inc.
http://www.boardwatch.com/document.asp?doc_id=38575


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D’oh!

Fancy Fragrances Provoke Hornets To Attack

A common ingredient of cosmetics and perfumes can cause hornets to attack humans, new research has revealed. Professor Masato Ono and his team at Tamagawa University, Tokyo, have shown that hornets release chemicals similar to those found in certain cosmetic products when they are threatened. It follows from this that humans wearing such cosmetic products might inadvertently provoke confused hornets into attacking them.

The researchers identified a multi-component alarm pheromone in the venom of the world's largest hornet, Vespa mandarinia. One of the ingredients of this chemical cocktail elicits a strong attack reaction by fellow hornets, the team found. Worker insects exposed to the extract flew excitedly around the nest and rushed towards the target.

The team went on to analyse the volatile components in venom from all seven Japanese hornet species. The samples contained chemicals that are common in manufactured food as well as cosmetic products.

'As these chemicals are sometimes used in food flavourings, and as fragrances in cosmetics, it is possible that they might provoke a seemingly unwarranted hornet attack on humans,' Professor Ono writes in the latest edition of the journal, Nature.

'It may therefore be sensible to screen these commercial products for the presence of pheromones that might act as an alarm signal to dangerous insects,' he adds.

Up to 74 people die each year in Japan after being stung by insects, with hornets being among the worst offenders.

Source: http://www.nature.com
http://www.cordis.lu/express/


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Steve Jobs is Raking It In
Graef Crystal

One group seems to have totally escaped the hard economic times of the last three years: chief executive officers of major U.S. companies.

Would you believe average annual pay of $12 million a year?

A review of total pay from 2000 through 2002 for 243 CEOs running companies with 2002 revenue of $5 billion or more also shows that total pay ranged from a low of $336,000 a year received by Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Warren Buffett to $219 million a year for Steve Jobs of Apple Computer Inc.

My review looked at three years because all compensation elements aren't present in any single year. Data for the study were furnished by Equilar, Inc. an independent provider of executive compensation information.

Sharing the spotlight with that $12 million average annual total pay figure is that there is little rhyme or reason why one CEO makes more than another. Consider these findings:

-- Company revenue and its three-year total return to investors can explain 20 percent of the variation in the combination of base salary and annual bonus. Still, 80 percent of pay variation seems not to be explained by anything rational.

-- That pay variance explanation drops to 16 percent with the combination of salary, bonus, grants of free shares of stock, and payouts under other long-term incentive plans. Even worse, three- year total returns explain no pay variation at all.

-- The pay-level variance drops to 14 percent if you look at everything just mentioned and the estimated present value of stock option grants (measured at the date of grant using the Black- Scholes model). And forget about any emphasis on three-year total returns.

Besides having the group's highest three-year average annual pay, Jobs also wins my Most- Ludicrous-Pay-Package trophy, which isn't awarded every year. When Jobs returned to Apple in August 1997 to run the company he co-founded, he started out with a pay package of precisely one element -- $1 a year in salary.

Then, in a stunning display of love gone out of control, Jobs' board in 2000 gave him title to a free Gulfstream 5 jet for his personal use and also history's most valuable stock option grant, one covering 20 million shares, equal to about 6 percent of all outstanding shares.

The jet, including reimbursing Jobs for all of his taxes on the gift, as well as the taxes on the taxes on the taxes, set back the shareholders $84 million.

In fiscal 2002, after it became clear his 20 million option shares weren't likely to rise out of the muck of San Francisco Bay, Jobs's board gave him options on another 7.5 million shares.

In March 2003, after the end of my study period, Jobs gave up the ghost entirely on stock options. He turned in his 27.5 million option shares for a grant of five million free shares worth $74.6 million.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news...=a2lC5UYqKkSI#


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Publishers Cut Back Despite Big Sales
Hillel Italie

This should be a great time for the book world.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has set sales records. Hillary Clinton's memoirs, Living History, has sold more than one million copies.

Other recent successes include Oprah Winfrey's book club pick, East of Eden, and Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin.

But instead of celebrating, publishers have been cutting.

Scholastic, Inc., the U.S. publisher of the Potter books, announced in May that 400 employees had been fired worldwide and said that in mid-July there would be additional spending reductions. Simon & Schuster, which released both the Clinton and Isaacson books, announced this week that 75 employees would be laid off.

"The fact remains that our industry continues to be challenged by any number of issues, including the most prolonged period of depressed sales in memory," Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos wrote in a companywide e-mail.

For publishing people, the value of books like Living History and Order of the Phoenix isn't only in the splash, but in the ripples. The industry had hoped the Potter boom would carry over to other titles, but most report either modest increases or none at all.

Once the boom receded, fundamental problems remained: a slow economy, a distracted public.

"It's not a brand new day," says Laurie Brown, a vice-president for sales at Harcourt Trade Publishers. "I would guess you'll find universally cautious positions on sales figures and marketing budgets."

"It's harder for books to catch on," says Gary Fisketjon, a longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf.

"I think the slump probably started in the (2000) presidential election that wouldn't end. And that spring (2001) was the dot-com crash. Then you have Sept. 11 and a constant war footing ever since. People are just preoccupied in all sorts of ways."

Big sales don't necessarily mean big profits, especially if everyone is expecting a hit. With Clinton receiving an $8-million-US advance, Simon & Schuster needed hundreds of thousands of sales to make money on the book. And Amazon.com, anticipating tremendous competition for the Potter book, offered a 40 per cent discount on the $29.99 US suggested price.

The result: Despite more than one million sales worldwide, the online retailer announced it essentially broke even with Order of the Phoenix.

With more than 100,000 titles annually released in the United States, the industry doesn't sustain itself on high-profile books alone. It also needs steady sales of older titles and surprise hits like Alice Sebold's million- selling novel, The Lovely Bones.

Sebold's book, published a year ago, was the literary event of 2002 and cost a fraction of the Clinton book to produce. But more than halfway into 2003, no new literary novel has had any significant impact, despite books from Robert Stone, Norman Rush, Don DeLillo and Jane Smiley.

"The fiction market in general has been very sluggish," says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "I don't think there has been a book this year that really took the world by storm. That's what it takes, something that lights people up."
http://www.canoe.ca/JamBooks/jul25_cut-ap.html


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Software Helps Tame the Copyright Jungle

Clients seeking footage can view it online and apply for licenses
Jon Healy

Executives at the nonprofit National Geographic Society see gold in the videos they've amassed of exotic locales and roving wildlife.

But each of the hundreds of thousands of clips in the society's vault comes with a tangle of strings attached, thick as a jungle.

A producer may hold distribution rights outside the United States. A song in the soundtrack may be cleared to play in Asia but not in Africa. And a billboard in the background may show the logo for a brand-name sneaker, requiring the shoe's manufacturer to weigh in.

All that can be intimidating to filmmakers, ad agencies and others that might want to use the footage. So the society is trying to make its collection more accessible, with a Web site where customers can review its vast trove and apply for myriad licenses.

The site is powered by software developed by RightsLine Inc. of Beverly Hills, which sees a gold mine of its own in helping companies sort through the maze of overlapping copyrights affecting their video, music, images and trademarks.

RightsLine was founded in 1999 by three former executives at database powerhouse Oracle Corp.

Russell P. Reeder, RightsLine's chief executive, said the major bottleneck for media companies has been understanding what they own — what footage, images and other items they have the right to distribute, and where those rights apply.

The Internet has opened the door to a slew of new opportunities for offering content, but copyright law still can get in the way. Each segment of a video may be covered by different restrictions on where it can be shown, what it can be used for and when it can be sold.

RightsLine's software is designed to track those restrictions down to a single frame of film. It also helps companies discover the rights they have yet to exploit. For example, a Hollywood studio may have licensed the rights to sell the Spanish-language DVD of a film in South America, but not the Portuguese version.

"Once you understand what you own, then you can create these new business models," Reeder said.

The Internet-based approach doesn't eliminate the need to have people physically review license applications to make sure footage or images won't be used inappropriately or fuel copyright violations, a prime concern in an era of widespread Internet piracy.

Still, Vivendi Universal's Universal Studios, which started using RightsLine's software in 2001, has cut the approval time for the average deal from 10 days to two — with some deals taking as little as 15 minutes, said Jeremy Laws, Universal Studios' vice president of media licensing.

Universal also has seen revenue from its film clips and photographs go up 50% over the last two years, "and the rate of revenue growth continues to accelerate," analysts Gale Daikoku and Van Baker of GartnerG2 reported in June.

What's more, by making it easier for companies to obtain footage legally, Universal reduced the amount of unauthorized uses, said Robert Gleiberman, RightsLine's chief operating officer.

Matthew White, vice president of the film library at National Geographic Television & Film, sees another potential benefit to his organization's new Web site, which it plans to unveil this month. By eliminating much of the pain from licensing, the library hopes not only to spur more creative uses of its footage, but also to prompt other libraries to follow suit.

"We're expecting others to come with us as well," White said. "If we provide those kinds of tools to producers, all of these archives around the world open up."

RightsLine is trying to attract more than just video companies.

Its customers also include telecommunications company Sprint Corp. and image clearinghouse Corbis Corp. Although the market for video "stock footage" is about $300 million worldwide, White said, the Licensing Industry Merchandisers Assn. estimates that the market for all copyrighted or trademarked images — think Laker jerseys and Mickey Mouse watches — is $105 billion in the U.S. alone.

As a result, the potential for firms that manage copyrights is huge.

NextQuarter, a corporate research firm in Rye, N.H., estimated that the market for rights-management software would rise from $3.1 billion in the U.S. this year to $5.5 billion over the next three years, and from $9 billion worldwide to $16.2 billion.

RightsLine steps in after a firm has done the painstaking work of combing through its contracts and cataloging all the restrictions on its assets. It lets its customers hide that complexity from potential licensees, while also keeping track of any new restrictions imposed by exclusive deals for footage or images.

White said that National Geographic Film & Television used to require customers to describe the footage they were looking for, then wait for the library's researchers to send them segments on videotape that might fit their needs. If clients saw something they liked, they would have to come back to the library for a license and a copy suitable for broadcasting.

With the Web site, customers will be able to search through a digitized collection of about 100,000 videos, view and select the footage that suits their needs, and fill out a license application online. RightsLine's software is designed to show only those clips that would be eligible for licensing.

The process still has some major flaws, White said, noting that the library can't deliver master versions of the clips to most customers because of the lack of a standard format. But a group of stock-footage companies hopes to address those shortcomings through a trade association formed this year.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology



Cell Phone Music Plans Have Labels Listening

BPOD Network hopes to offer downloadable songs for about $2 each. Sprint, Warner Music already have a deal.
Jon Healey

Dick Wingate spent the late 1990s on a largely futile mission: trying to persuade the major record companies to use Liquid Audio Inc.'s technology to sell songs that could be downloaded to computers.

By the time top label executives were gung-ho about downloading, the market had been overtaken by free file-sharing services on the Internet. And Liquid Audio, which had morphed from pioneer to also-ran, had been gutted by dissident shareholders.


Music downloads — An article in Monday's Business section about music delivered to cellphones misstated the amount of time it would take to
download a song using JukePhone technology from DotPhoto Inc. and BPOD Network Inc. The typical JukePhone song would take six minutes or less, not at least 10 minutes, to download to a cellphone.


Now, Wingate is president of BPOD Network Inc., and he's trying to talk the labels into selling downloadable songs for what he thinks will be the next hot platform — cell phones.

This time, label executives acknowledge they can't afford to move as slowly in the wireless market as they did on the Internet. And Wingate has noticed the difference.

"Back then, it was like screaming into the Pacific Ocean," he said. Now, "You're not speaking to people who are not listening."

Wingate expects a deal with a major mobile phone company that would offer downloadable songs within two months, potentially reaching millions of customers in more than 30 states. The downloads would be made available through DotPhoto Inc., a digital media software company that New York-based BPOD is assisting.

Meanwhile, Sprint Corp.'s Sprint PCS wireless unit and AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music Group are days away from offering an online jukebox with full-length songs that customers can play on their cell phones.

The success of these ventures — and whether more will roll out quickly — will depend in part on how well music fans respond to the diminished sound quality produced by today's wireless phones and networks. Another important factor is whether concern about piracy gives the labels cold feet again.

Mobile phone networks are the next great opportunity for distributing digital music; they can deliver songs on demand to hundreds of millions of music fans wherever they go. But in most of the world, wireless technology isn't up to the task. Downloads are painfully slow, transmissions are unreliable and sound quality is poor.

Many mobile carriers are limited to offering ring tones based on popular songs or, for those with advanced phones, rings that are snippets of the songs themselves.

Consumers have shown a voracious appetite for custom ring tones. The number of U.S. Internet users who have bought a ring tone exceeds the number who have paid to download a song to a computer by more than 50%, according to Jupiter Research. And ring tones sell for as much as $3 each, which makes them two to three times more expensive than a downloadable song for a computer. Worldwide, consumers have spent about $2 billion on ring tones, according to Strategy Analytics, a technology research firm.

That kind of money is what's driving the development of music-oriented applications for cell phones, despite the technological hurdles. Labels and technology companies are working on novel ways to promote concerts and CDs, introduce people to new music and let artists create short works specifically for cell phones.

Sprint and Warner Music are likely to be the first to offer full-length songs to cell phone users across the United States. The companies already offer unlimited access to 30-second samples of songs for a little less than $16 a year. Within a week, they expect to let customers play full-length songs from an online jukebox for the same price.

Paul Vidich, executive vice president for business development at Warner Music Group, acknowledged that the sound quality "is not as good as we'd like it to be." Nevertheless, he said, the samples attracted a "meaningful" number of subscribers.

"People have a lot of curiosity about how they can use cell phones in new and exciting ways," Vidich said.

At BPOD, Wingate is negotiating deals with the major record companies that would let his company and DotPhoto offer 50 to 100 downloadable songs to cell phone users for about $2 apiece.

To prepare them for wireless transmission, Wingate said, the "JukePhone" songs would be squeezed to about one-sixth the size of the typical MP3 file — yet they would still take at least 10 minutes to download. To make room for a new song, the previous one would have to be erased. And to deter piracy, songs would be stored in a portion of the cell phone's memory that cannot be copied or forwarded.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology



Techies, Politics Now Click

The 'geeks' who once shunned activism amid the digital revolution are using their money and savvy to influence public policy.
Joseph Menn


The first call came before 9 a.m.

For the next eight hours, they kept coming: call after call at the rate of 20 per second, crippling the telephone systems of several U.S. senators.

The geeks were speaking — in opposition to the imminent war in Iraq.

After years as political agnostics, the programmers and engineers who orchestrated the technological revolution of the 1990s are trying to reboot government. Top technology executives such as Bill Gates found their public voice years ago. Now, the tens of thousands of technology workers who toiled in cubicles writing software and creating gadgets are making their influence felt.

They have money, earned during the boom. They have time, found since the bust. And they are using their technological savvy to recruit even casual Internet users to their causes.

They want to make sure civil liberties aren't trampled in the push for greater security. They want privacy respected. And they want the media and the political conversation in general to be freed from the dominance of a small number of powerful groups and corporations. Otherwise, they are hard to place on the political spectrum.

One of the leaders of this loose-knit movement is Wes Boyd, a 42-year-old computer programmer who works out of a book-lined home office in a leafy section of Berkeley.

He made his money selling computer games and screen savers — those flying toasters that became an early icon of high-tech chic. Then, disgusted by what he saw as the political grandstanding surrounding the impeachment of President Clinton in 1998, Boyd posted a Web site to vent.

MoveOn.org fielded 500 hits its first day, 7,000 the second. Within a few months, more than 250,000 visitors had signed an electronic petition calling for Congress to censure Clinton and "move on." Those early visitors formed the core of a group that now claims more than 1.3 million U.S. followers.

MoveOn members pay no dues but agree to receive e-mail notices of new positions and calls for action. Many pass on the information they get, becoming volunteer recruiters. MoveOn takes stands on a variety of issues, but describes itself primarily as a catalyst for grass-roots action — on whatever its members think is important.

The group helped persuade more than 100,000 people to join an antiwar march in San Francisco in February, the largest such demonstration in the U.S.

It generated 150,000 electronic complaints to the Federal Communications Commission about its plan to let big media companies get even bigger, a policy change now under assault in Congress. And hundreds of thousands of MoveOn supporters took part in the February phone blitz of U.S. senators over their support of the Iraq war.

"You wish these things would be taken care of by other people," said Boyd, who founded MoveOn with his wife, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Joan Blades, after spending most of his life on the political sidelines. "But it turns out that if we don't play, if we don't work to make a difference, no one's going to do it. We just discovered that we couldn't look away anymore."

The organization raised $3.5 million to give to candidates who ran for federal office last year. In April, it said it was dedicating itself to unseating President Bush in 2004, though it has not come out in support of a candidate to replace him.

"We've been trying to engage people in other things, and almost always the answer comes back, 'Why bother? It's not going to matter if we don't get rid of Bush,' " Boyd said.

Dislodging a well-funded president might be beyond its reach. But some analysts see MoveOn and similar groups as a potent political force.

"I don't know of any group that has 1.3 million members who are as motivated to act when asked to," said Michael Cornfield, research director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. MoveOn, he said, "has the potential to become through the Internet what the Christian Coalition became through direct mail."

Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee credit MoveOn and other Web activists with igniting the uproar that caused them to vote to cut off funding for the Terrorism Information Awareness program, a Bush administration initiative to scour databases for information on private citizens.

Another techno-populist group, DigitalConsumer.org, has attracted more than 50,000 adherents to its cause of protecting the right of consumers to make copies of the electronic content they buy.

The group was founded in 2001 by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, Stanford University graduates who made millions of dollars from their Web search firm Excite Inc., and it reflects the wider geek movement in its preference for personal freedom over increased protection of intellectual property.

DigitalConsumer's congressional testimony and lobbying helped kill a bill that would have granted legal immunity to entertainment companies if they damaged computers suspected of being used to swap pirated music. The group is now drumming up opposition to legislation that would make uploading a copyright song to the Internet a crime punishable by more than a year in jail.

Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, technology enthusiasts became irritated that movie studios and television networks were trying to prevent them from skipping commercials when using ReplayTV, a digital version of a videocassette recorder.

The entertainment companies sued Sonicblue Inc., the Santa Clara, Calif., firm that made ReplayTV devices, prompting a group of consumers — including Craig Newmark, founder of a popular Internet bulletin board, Craigslist.org — to file a countersuit supporting the manufacturer. ReplayTV is now made made by a division of D&M Holdings Inc., which recently decided to eliminate the devices' ad-skipping ability, though the suit is pending.

Similar techno-activism helped the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has operated below the radar for most of its 13-year history, triple its dues-paying membership to 8,500 in the last three years. The foundation made its name representing in court a programmer who developed a system for encrypting private e-mail. The case established that software deserved protection as speech under the 1st Amendment.

More recently, the foundation has provided legal support to two song-swapping services, Morpheus and Grokster, in their battles with record labels. It also has helped block state versions of a controversial federal law that would have given Internet service providers the power to decide what sorts of devices could get access to the Net.

A primary issue uniting activists is what they see as the war on terrorism's collateral damage to civil liberties. Elements of the USA Patriot Act — including secret property searches and the tracking of e-mail — have provoked the libertarian right even more than the liberal left.

"There's nothing that gets people in the high-tech world more excited than Big Brother and the misuse of technology, especially by the federal government," said Wade Randlett, an advisor to DigitalConsumer.

The libertarian mind-set among the technologists who congregate around San Francisco has many origins, said Paulina Borsook, author of "Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech."

The technology culture of Silicon Valley came into its own after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, "when people were very suspicious of government," she said. Many engineers were impressed with the tech sector's rapid advance when it was free of most regulation. Then there is what Borsook calls "the scary, essentialist notion that there's something about working with computers that makes you the solo commander of your destiny."

Although libertarian philosophy has had adherents in Silicon Valley, they have shied away from political activism. This was in stark contrast to Hollywood, whose screen stars and studio bosses have long lent glamour and financial support to Democratic candidates and causes.

"There was a generalized feeling here, whatever your politics, that it was sort of unseemly," said Doug Carlston, who directs MoveOn's political action committee and previously co-founded Broderbund Software Inc., the company that made "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" and other educational computer games.

That feeling began to change in 1996, when a San Diego trial lawyer, William Lerach, spearheaded a statewide ballot initiative to make it easier to sue companies in California courts when their stocks tumbled. High-tech companies, whose stocks are famously volatile, felt they had to fight back. Led by Tom Proulx, co-founder of financial software firm Intuit Inc., and prominent venture capitalist John Doerr, the valley led the trouncing of Proposition 211.

"We concluded that the valley needed to have a political voice," Proulx said. "It can't just rally the troops in an emergency and then disband our army."

That realization was cemented in 1998 with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As the DMCA extended copyrights into the digital world, it limited the ability of technologists to tinker with software protecting copyrighted material. Because the language in the act is vague, it has been used for purposes far removed from protecting movies and music from piracy. Many in Silicon Valley saw it as stifling innovation and creativity.

Among the firms successfully sued under the act was a maker of ink cartridges that tweaked software to make its products compatible with another company's printers. The DMCA also reduced protection for those who cracked DVD encryption for innocent purposes — such as playing a legally purchased movie on a computer running the Linux operating system.

Then came the Bush administration's expansion of searches, wiretapping and other law enforcement powers after Sept. 11, 2001.

All the while, technology was spilling out of office parks and into homes. Consumers were getting increasingly concerned about junk e-mail and the amount of personal information available on the Internet. Tens of millions flocked to song-swapping service Napster, which was shut down by a federal judge because it ran afoul of the DMCA and other copyright laws.

At MoveOn, issues and allies are chosen carefully. The group created its own software that allows members to set priorities and take stands on issues by plebiscite.

On those key issues, MoveOn provides money for full-page newspaper ads. A recent series depicted Bush under the headline "Misleader" and faulted his prewar claims that Iraq was concealing "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

The group also conducts campaigns with groups such as People for the American Way, which monitors judicial nominations, and Win Without War, which opposed the war in Iraq.

"What is new in the valley is people applying the tools they know how to use to other problems — the problems of politics," said John Gilmore, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Indeed, Boyd of MoveOn works like any other business-minded engineer with enough seniority to sign on from home. As one computer displays e-mail and another instant messages, he uses conference calls to query his tiny staff about what political acts would provide the biggest return on MoveOn's investment.

For some groups, the challenge is simply to make voters and politicians aware of issues that might otherwise escape notice.

At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, staff activist Ren Bucholz is trying to thwart what the group sees as an attempt to shackle communication between the government and its citizens. The U.S. Forest Service floated a proposal in December that would let it give less weight to e-mails commenting on proposed rules if the messages appeared to be computer-assisted versions of the same letter.

To forestry officials, the change would mean a welcome reduction in workload. To Bucholz, it would undercut electronic activism.

"It's important that all the comments at least go into the public record," Bucholz said, because that would give the writers standing for subsequent court challenges.

Looking to the future of techno-activism, Boyd sees vast numbers of frustrated people who are just starting to act.

"I think the base is inexhaustible," he said. "Hopefully, we can show others that."

MoveOn is considering hiring a Washington lobbyist. It's a tricky step for a group that shuns the methods of the political establishment. Boyd and his colleagues think they can manage the transition — as long as they don't adopt Beltway tactics.

"People have gotten so turned off, so cynical, that you see policy torqued around by the extremes. The only people playing are freaks and weirdos," Boyd said. "The more people we get back to the table, the more sound our policy will be."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology



Rio Making a Play to Regain Dominance in Portable Music

The firm is replacing its entire product line, exiting the CD market to focus on hard- disk and chip-based MP3 players.
Jon Healey

It took Rio Audio just three weeks this spring to go into bankruptcy protection, cut its ties to floundering former owner Sonicblue Inc. and emerge as part of Tokyo's D&M Holdings Inc.

Now, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based maker of portable digital music players is spending the next three weeks replacing its entire product line in a bold bid to regain the dominance it squandered during Sonicblue's financial troubles.

The company has a long way to go. Once the leading name in pocket-size MP3 players, which store music on computer memory chips, Rio saw its share of the market shrink from about 40% at its peak to about 15% today, President Jeff Hastings said.

The decline came as demand for MP3 players started to heat up. Manufacturers' sales of MP3 players to dealers were stuck at or below $100 million from 1999 to 2001, according to the Consumer Electronics Assn., but steadily declining prices caused demand to more than double in 2002 and sales to rise to an estimated $178 million.

Sonicblue's financial problems were a major factor in Rio's slide, Hastings said. Sonicblue, which filed for U.S. Bankruptcy Court protection in March, couldn't pay its suppliers enough to keep stores stocked with its products, which included ReplayTV digital video recorders and Rio MP3 players.

D&M bought Sonicblue's Rio and ReplayTV units at a bankruptcy auction in April for $18.2 million and $18 million, respectively, and established them as separate business units under its Digital Networks North America subsidiary.

The market for chip-based players had shrunk in the face of two new lines of MP3 products: portable CD players that could handle discs filled with MP3 songs, and palm-sized players with hard drives that could store 100 times as many songs as the top-selling Rio models.

Rio then responded on both fronts, offering a hard-drive-equipped model and a line of CD-based MP3 players. Those efforts, however, proved to be failures.

Hastings said the company was dropping out of the portable CD business, which he said accounted for 40% to 45% of the market for MP3 players.

"The CD market is extremely unprofitable now," he said, adding that it was hard for manufacturers to differentiate their products.

The company also is replacing its bulky hard-drive player with a smaller and lighter 20- gigabyte model, dubbed Karma, that's shorter but thicker than Apple Computer Inc.'s acclaimed iPod. And it's breaking ground with an even smaller player, dubbed Nitrus, that uses the new slender 1.5-gigabyte hard drive from Cornice Inc.

Analysts expect Cornice drives to power a new and potentially profitable niche in the MP3 market: devices that combine the portability of chip-based players with the capacity of hard-drive models, with prices that fall between the two.

Although hard-drive-based players have created most of the buzz in the industry, in large part because of Apple's marketing of the iPod, they represent only 10% to 15% of the market, Hastings said. That's why Rio expects most of its profit to continue coming from chip-based players.

With that in mind, Rio is trying to breathe new life into its chip-based players with slicker designs and better software, including the ability to load the players automatically with a new set of songs whenever they are connected to a computer.

Hastings, who was vice president of engineering at Sonicblue, said D&M had kept a restructured Rio team in place, although with fewer people and a tighter focus.

"The first thing is profitability," Hastings said. "If you lose money, there's a bad outcome at the end of it, no matter how good it sounds in the short term."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology



Don't Use Those Words: Fox News Owns Them

Jack M. Balkin

Fox News is suing comedian and writer Al Franken in the New York courts, attempting to stop the sale of his forthcoming book, "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Fox claims that Franken may not use the expression "fair and balanced" because it has been trademarked by Fox News and that Franken's book would confuse viewers about the source of the book and about the objectivity of its coverage.

The court papers filed by Fox are particularly colorful, describing Franken as a "parasite," "shrill and unstable" and as a person whose "views lack any serious depth or insight." It also accuses him of attacking Fox news personalities when he was either "intoxicated or deranged" at a press correspondents' dinner in April 2003.

Because Franken's obvious purpose is political parody and satire and, in particular, parody of Fox News among others, the lawsuit should not succeed.

Fox may well argue that Franken's parody tarnishes its business and its mark, but the whole purpose of political parody is to poke fun at people one disagrees with. If Franken may not use the expression "fair and balanced" in a book that accuses Fox News of failing to be "fair and balanced," there is something seriously wrong with trademark law under our 1st Amendment. And if Fox can get an injunction preventing the sale of the book, we can be sure that the expansion of intellectual property rights has gone too far.

The most troubling aspect of the lawsuit is its attempt to harass a political opponent through the use of intellectual property laws. Fox News vs. Franken is merely one episode in a much larger conflict between freedom of speech and intellectual property rights.

Trademark, like copyright, has now become a general-purpose device for private parties to use when they want the state to suppress speech they do not like. And they are trying to suppress the speech of others not merely to protect their legitimate economic interests but because of aesthetic and political disagreements as well. This is a misuse of trademark, which is designed to protect ongoing commercial interests, and it is a misuse of copyright, which is designed to promote progress in ideas, not inhibit robust debate about ideas.

Fox will richly deserve the bad press it's going to get for filing this lawsuit, first, for being on the wrong side of a free speech controversy and, second, for attempting to squelch criticism of its coverage of the news. It is egregious for a news organization to try to use the courts to harass its political critics.

In 1964, at the height of the civil rights movement, an Alabama police commissioner, L.B. Sullivan, tried to use the state's libel laws to shut down the New York Times for publishing an advertisement that condemned racial discrimination in the South and implicitly criticized him.

The Supreme Court wisely decided that protection of an individual's reputation had to yield to the promotion of "uninhibited, robust and wide-open" debate in a democracy. Its decision in New York Times vs. Sullivan established that free speech was protected even if it included "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks."

Now Fox News is trying to circumvent that rule by claiming not that Franken is defaming it but that Franken is stealing and misusing the words "fair and balanced," which Fox News claims to own. But no one should own the words necessary to engage in public protest.

It's time for the courts to consider whether trademark law, like defamation law before it, needs greater constitutional boundaries to protect robust debate. Throwing out Fox's lawsuit would be a good first step.

Jack M. Balkin teaches constitutional law at Yale Law School.
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/s...n14aug14.story



LETTERS TO THE TIMES

Internet File Sharing: Theft or a Loan?

Re "Tone-Deaf Music Industry," editorial, Aug. 4: Calling Internet song sharing "theft" is like calling the Major League Baseball Players Assn. a "labor union." Ordinary people just don't use the language like that. If you take something of mine without my permission, that is theft. If I give it to you, it isn't theft. If I buy a CD, it's mine and I can burn a copy for a friend if I want. It's my CD. The artists got paid when I plunked down my money and got paid quite handsomely, given the incredible price gouging that goes on in retail music stores. If Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-North Hollywood) wants to sponsor legislation to protect corporate profits, he should consider outlawing all sharing, not just file sharing.

Every time I lend my chainsaw to a friend, I cost Sears some money. Every time I lend my truck to a friend, I cost Ford some money. How can we tolerate the millions of Americans who share equipment every year? If outlawing lending your tools strikes you as ludicrous, why doesn't outlawing the sharing of your music? There isn't any difference between the two.

Michael Helwig

http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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Tandberg Demos DSL TV
Press Release

SOUTHAMPTON, U.K. -- At IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) 2003,TANDBERG Television will build on its leadership in the advanced encoding and video over DSL markets with the launch of a complete system designed to open up new low bit-rate video business opportunities for Telcos. On TANDBERG Television’s stand (1:461), visitors will be able to see a live system that combines products from a number of vendors, all of which are designed to bring the benefits of Windows Media 9 Series to DSL operators. Key components include very low bandwidth real-time encoding of turnaround and local channels, IP multicast of live TV, content capture and distribution, video on demand (VoD), EPG portal, set-top-boxes, live encryption and DRM.

“It is clear that Telcos see video-centric services as a key driver for revenue and customer retention in the future. However, the battle for bandwidth in video over DSL application creates a number of challenges and puts operators in a position of potential compromise regarding quality of video services, number of channels and even coverage/penetration. By deploying the bandwidth and operational benefits of our end-to-end Windows Media Audio and Video 9 based system, operators can realistically look to offer broadcast quality multichannel TV and on demand services on their deployed ADSL networks,” says Eric Cooney, President and CEO of TANDBERG Television.

The core of the new system is the TANDBERG EN5920 real-time hardware- encoding platform for Windows Media 9, a result of TANDBERG Television and Microsoft Corp‘s engineering collaboration, which provides the very lowest possible bit-rate available on the market today. Launched at NAB earlier this year, the EN5920 will have its IBC debut in Amsterdam this September. The EN5920 can be provided with the capability to transmit MPEG-2 video alongside the Windows Media 9 Series streams, making it ideal for operators to test and transition to the new encoding platform.
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=38584


Top 10 D/Ls - Singles

BigChampagne


A Private Windfall For Public Property
Norman Ornstein and Michael Calabrese

We're no fans of the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to relax ownership requirements for TV stations and newspapers, but it would be a shame if the battle between FCC Chairman Michael Powell and Congress on this issue distracted attention from another harmful move being contemplated by the commission.

We're talking about the privatization of the airwaves, a public resource worth hundreds of billions of dollars in both market value and future federal revenue. The contemplated FCC action could result in the biggest special interest windfall at the expense of American taxpayers in history.

The rapid trend toward wireless communication has made access to the prime frequencies that pass easily through walls, trees and weather an increasingly valuable right. A recent study estimated the market value of this spectrum at $770 billion. These airwaves are owned by the public. For more than 75 years broadcasters, cellular phone companies and other commercial service providers have acquired exclusive access to scarce spectrum space only under temporary, renewable licenses; in return, they serve the public interest.

But if the FCC has its way, that social contract will be voided. In recent months, through a series of rule changes, the FCC has begun to implement a radical shift in the nation's spectrum allocation policy. Recently it adopted rules allowing licensees -- whether or not they paid the public for their license -- to sell or rent unused capacity to other firms. It also proposed to let universities and other holders of free licenses sell their spectrum to private firms, thus encouraging these hard-pressed nonprofit institutions to abandon their educational use of the airwaves in return for a quick buck on the new private spectrum markets.

The blueprint for this privatization of the public airwaves is a pair of FCC staff reports released last November. In essence, the FCC's Spectrum Policy Task Force proposes that incumbent licensees be granted permanent, private-property-like rights in the frequencies they currently borrow. The task force proposes that future licenses grant firms "maximum possible autonomy" to decide what services to offer, what technical standards to adopt or whether instead to sell or sublease their frequency assignments to other firms. In the future, access to the airwaves would be a commodity traded on secondary markets and free of virtually all public interest obligations.

This is not all bad. The FCC's outdated command-and-control approach -- based on rigidly zoning the airwaves by service and assigning exclusive licenses at zero cost -- has exacerbated the scarcity of wireless bandwidth, stifling competition, slowing innovation and restricting citizen access to the airwaves. The problem is not the stated goals of the task force but the means of achieving them.

The commission's senior economists have added a proposal that these new and valuable rights to sell and sublease frequencies be given away to incumbent licensees at no charge. The proposal is dressed up as an "auction," but it is one in which any incumbent opting to sell its license would be entitled to keep 100 percent of the revenue -- money that under current law would flow into the public treasury. The logic of the proposal is that broadcasters and other spectrum incumbents have so much political clout that the only practical way to reduce scarcity is to bribe them to bring their spectrum to market.

But this approach confers a massive and undeserved financial windfall -- up to $500 billion -- on a few lucky industries. And freezing the old zoning system into permanent private property rights would forestall emerging "smart" radio technologies that can dynamically share today's underutilized spectrum space. Today the fastest-growing demand for telecommunications involves inexpensive WiFi -- short for "wireless fidelity." College campuses and "hot spots" in airports and Starbucks offer this cheap and mobile Internet access by creating a wireless local area network on a small band of "unlicensed" frequencies shared with cordless phones, microwave ovens and baby monitors. Unfortunately, privatizing frequencies would turn this sharing into "trespassing," allowing licensees to demand payment for access to their airwaves.

Market-based spectrum reform can be achieved without a massive giveaway. The flexible new licenses proposed by the FCC task force could be rented for fixed terms. This would put all companies on a level playing field, permit property-like rights for limited periods, protect capital investment by incumbents and internalize incentives to use spectrum efficiently.

The good news is that the FCC cannot transfer a wireless windfall to special interests without additional authorization from Congress. Both the administration and some influential members of Congress have expressed support for spectrum user fees. The bad news is that Congress is not exactly trustworthy when it comes to protecting the public interest from broadcasters and other powerful license holders. The champions of the public, led by Sen. John McCain, have their work cut out for them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Aug11.html


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As Belated Converts, Schools Keep Vigil for Internet2
Jeffrey Selingo

IN its early days, the Internet was essentially the domain of the government and universities. Few elementary and secondary schools were connected to the worldwide computer network by the time the Internet spread to the masses as a commercial enterprise in the mid-1990's. Even today, many public schools log on to the Internet through sluggish dial-up connections.

Public schools do not want to be left behind again. That's why a few educators are now looking for ways to take advantage of the speedier data transfers promised by Internet2, the next-generation Internet, which was developed by the nation's largest research universities in 1996 after the original Internet became too clogged to allow researchers to share huge amounts of data easily.

Today, only about three million people, mostly on college campuses, have access to the network backbone, known as Abilene, that is the heart of Internet2, compared with an estimated 600 million users of the original Internet. But for those sharing data, sending e-mail or browsing the Web on Internet2, the difference in speed is striking.

Just how fast is Internet2? Recently, scientists transferred 6.7 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of two feature-length DVD movies, across 6,800 miles in less than one minute. That is more than 3,500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.

While university researchers need such speedy connections to trade large files like astronomical data, an eighth grader's need for such a huge pipeline is less demonstrable. What's more, most local networks will need to spend thousands of dollars on upgrades to reach the speeds of the Abilene backbone.

As a result, only about 7,100 of the nation's public elementary and secondary schools, about 8 percent, are now connected to Internet2. (The Education Department says that 99 percent of the nation's schools now have Internet connections.) As more schools are linked to Abilene through statewide education networks, however, the challenge for teachers will be to learn how to take advantage of the technological advances that are useful to them, said Louis Fox, the director of the Internet2 K20 Initiative. The initiative is a broad effort by college and state education officials to enlist innovators at schools, libraries and museums to develop curriculums and master technical issues related to Internet2.

"There are a set of capacities that most of higher education takes for granted that can add value and be relevant for K-12 schools," said Dr. Fox, who is a vice provost at the University of Washington. "What we're trying to do is figure out which technologies are useful for schools and which ones are not very useful."

One of the most popular functions of Internet2, and the most appealing for public schools, is digital videoconferences. The new network also allows for "multicasting" digital video, which means that instead of creating separate copies of the video at the source to send to each user's computer - which eats up valuable bandwidth along the way - the original is sent over the network and copies are made closer to the user's computer.

With such high-speed videoconferencing, for instance, a team of educators in different parts of the country can get together in a virtual classroom to teach a course that is then sent to other schools. State officials are already looking at Internet2 as a way to bring specialized classes like Advanced Placement courses to schools that do not have them now.

Internet2 can also help busy teachers get training without leaving the classroom. Such classes are already being offered over the high-speed network in California. Last year, for instance, 25 teachers in the state took part in videoconferencing to learn how to use Hands-On Universe, an astronomy project based at the University of California at Berkeley, as a teaching tool.

"The teachers were 200 miles away, but they seemed to learn just as much as if they were here," said Carl Pennypacker, a research astronomer at Berkeley.

As more schools get access to Internet2, Dr. Pennypacker said, researchers will develop applications for children that demand the faster network. In the future, for instance, he anticipates that fourth graders will be able to search Internet2 to request images of black holes. Given the bandwidth that such images consume, he said, "You need Internet2 for that kind of traffic."

The higher speeds of Internet2 will also make it easier for teachers to develop multimedia presentations that can be shared with colleagues around the country. In Oklahoma, geography educators have put together classroom materials on Great Plains Indians, and hope to use the Internet2 in the coming school year to share the oral history narratives of tribe members.

"What happened here is important to students in Oklahoma, but it's also significant to students around the country," said Brooke Barnett, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Alliance for Geographic Education, which directs the project. "Without Internet2, it would be very difficult to share all this information easily and quickly with everyone else."

It's not just elementary and secondary schools that are seeking to take advantage of Internet2. Nearly 1,500 public libraries are connected to Abilene. Access to the high- speed network could change the perception of libraries as places that only house books, said Joseph Janes, an associate professor at the University of Washington's information school. "There hasn't been a screaming need for bandwidth among library users," Dr. Janes said. "When people walk into a library, they aren't thinking of downloading a film from the Library of Congress."

That soon could change, since the Library of Congress is in the process of digitizing part of its collection of historical films. At a library with Internet2 access, a user could download the old movie to create a multimedia presentation.

"Internet2 is one of those things that if you build it, they will come," Dr. Janes said. "Once this kind of bandwidth is readily available, then you will see people develop applications and services for it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...ts/14next.html


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All Quiet on Campus Save the Click of Keys
Katie Hafner

SOON after Bill Brawley arrived at Dartmouth College eight years ago to work for the campus computing services, something about his new office struck him as odd. At first he had trouble putting his finger on it. All seemed normal enough. He had been supplied with the usual accouterments - a desk, a computer and, of course, a phone.

Then he figured it out: the phone never rang. In fact, nobody's phone rang much at all.

That's because everyone on campus was busy blitzing.

For nearly 20 years, the 13,000-odd students, faculty and staff members of Dartmouth have communicated by using Blitzmail. Strictly speaking, Blitzmail is a campuswide e-mail system, but it is so fast that it qualifies as instant messaging. And as instant messaging becomes a fixture on college campuses, Blitzmail serves as a signpost for what others might come to expect when most communication on campus is accomplished by way of keyboards.

The Dartmouth e-mail system has become such a vital part of campus life that many cannot imagine a day without it. Not only is Blitzmail the centerpiece of campus logistics, but it is the warp and weft of the student body's social fabric.

But like any technology, Blitzmail has its less appealing side. It has technical limitations. And Blitzmail can be annoying, even oppressive at times, occasionally prompting users to seek refuge from the constant flow of messages.

Back in 1984, administrators at Dartmouth, long known for its innovative use of computers, decided that personal computers were a good idea and should perhaps even be a requirement for students. The campuswide e-mail system was established the following year.

"We decided e-mail would be the killer app," said Larry Levine, Dartmouth's director of computing. But when he and his colleagues looked for a commercial e-mail application to buy for the campus, none fit the bill. "So we said, hell with it, we'll write one of our own,'' he said.

The original program, written by Dartmouth students, was nicknamed Blitzmail because it was put together in a hurry, and the name stuck. Blitzmail quickly became an indispensable tool even among those who had never heard of e-mail. "In the old days you could say, 'Blitz that to me,' and people would say, 'Sure,' " said Mr. Levine. "But if you said, 'E-mail it to me,' they'd say, 'What's that?' ''

Everyone on the Dartmouth campus has a Blitzmail account. Sending a message does not require knowing the recipient's log-in name; the sender simply types in a name and the system can supply the moniker (for common names, it presents several choices). Blitzmail can be set so that messages pop up on the screen the way they do with instant messaging.

New users take to the program immediately as they grasp that to live the Dartmouth life, constant use of Blitzmail is expected.

Dartmouth designates one day each fall for distributing computers to freshmen who did not arrive with one. "We watch the statistics," Mr. Brawley said. "By midnight of the first day with the computer, 99 percent have logged in to Blitzmail." The program has become so ingrained on the campus that the word "blitz" can be used as a noun, a verb and an imperative.

" 'I'll blitz you this,' or, 'Please blitz me that,' " said John Winn, a professor of chemistry at Dartmouth. "It's changed the way people talk."

The system is students' primary means of contact with the faculty. If a class is canceled, a teacher conveys the message through Blitzmail, and it is the rare professor who does not encourage students to ask questions by Blitzmail. Tory Fodder, a Dartmouth junior, said he was taken aback when a professor warned students not to blitz him. "It was surprising," said Mr. Fodder as he lounged on the campus green one day in July. With a computer on his lap and an astronomy textbook at his side, Mr. Fodder blitzed periodically while he studied.

The bleat of cellphones, common on other campuses, is relatively rare at Dartmouth. When Cordelia Zukerman arrived on campus as a freshman last fall, she had her cellphone close at hand, expecting to be as dependent on it as she had been at home in New York. Soon she found that she wasn't using the phone at all, and let the contract run out. "It seemed like a waste of money," she said.

"Blitzmail has taken cellphones off the map," Dr. Winn said. "They just aren't an issue the way they are elsewhere."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...ts/14blit.html


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To Each, His Own: Sharing a Family PC
Ian Austen

FOR the family with just one, a computer can rival toothpaste-tube etiquette as a source of disagreement. I don't share my youngest son's view, for example, that a Web site about the arcane world of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards makes a useful browser home page. His older brother and I similarly disagree about what makes a pleasing computer desktop. And my wife, who works all day on a Windows-based computer, seems to approach the family Mac with despair after the rest of us have had our way with it.

The easy way out, of course, is a computer for everyone. In the era of the $600 PC and relatively simple and inexpensive networking equipment, that has become the 21st- century version of a chicken in every pot for some people. But when multiplied by four or five family members, the cost adds up quickly.

And there are other reasons for having a one-computer household. It is simpler to police time limits on games or keep track of children's computer activity when the machine is in a common family space rather than in a child's bedroom. Owning a single computer also means having just one set of programs to update and maintain.

The trick is to find a way to make the lone computer act as if it is each person's private possession rather than communal property. That, and making sure that while the kids are engrossed in Age of Empires, they are not also (inadvertently or otherwise) corrupting the PowerPoint presentation you promised your boss for Monday.

Owners of relatively recent computers running the latest versions of Windows or the Macintosh operating systems may already have some of the solutions for peacefully sharing one computer.

"A lot of people don't know that they have features that allow them to have multiple users and give them control over what the kids do on the machine," said Chris Bourdon, Apple's senior product line manager for the OS X operating system.

The feature that sets the new operating systems apart from their ancestors is something that has long been common in corporate computer networks. Windows XP and OS X allow owners to set up a password-protected account for every user. When a computer has a single user, the log-on feature of Windows XP can be a bit of a nuisance. But with multiple users, it does much more than prevent unauthorized snooping. The log-on also summons the users' personal settings (and personal tastes in desktop decoration), file folders, Web browser bookmarks and address books.

With Microsoft's system, one user must be designated as the computer's administrator. In the home version of XP, everyone else then gets a limited account. (Detailed directions for setting up accounts can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/h...g/default.asp.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...ts/14basi.html


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For Luscious Laptop Listening, a Wireless Link to the Hi-Fi
Ian Austen

Laptops may be handy for students who are on the move between classes and libraries. But back in the dorm, they fall short in one area: their tiny speakers take sound quality back to the earliest days of transistor radios.

The RCA Lyra RD900W, however, offers a way to get downloaded music from a laptop - or any other Windows-based computer - into a proper sound system without the bother of burning CD's. It creates a wireless link between the two electronic devices and even gives users the luxury of issuing the commands through a remote control.

Rich Phipps, the director of audio and video at Thomson, the parent company of RCA (www.rca.com), said the device should appeal to students with tinny computer speakers as well as those in a "communal living situation."

A transmitter plugs into the laptop or PC, and a receiver plugs into the stereo unit. But while it is wireless, the $100 RD900W is not one of the countless gadgets based around the 802.11b, or Wi-Fi, wireless standard. It uses a proprietary 900-megahertz transmission system that Mr. Phipps said would not degrade audio quality and is relatively unaffected by interference from microwave ovens.

The system does have some specific technical requirements. It will only work with Windows computers that have the MusicMatch Jukebox or Rhapsody Digital Music Services software installed.

Once the system's two pieces of hardware and its software are installed, it can move any kind of audio, including Internet radio, from the computer to the stereo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...ts/14musi.html


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Q & A

Smaller and Smarter: The DVD Advantage
J. D. Biersdorfer

Q. What are the differences between DVD's and laser discs?

A. Before the DVD format arrived in the late 1990's, laser discs were the preferred format for prerecorded movies among home-theater buffs who found the picture and sound quality superior to that of films on videocassette. DVD has since become the dominant format for movies, however, supplanting laser discs and even VHS tapes in some stores.

In addition to an obvious difference in size - laser discs measured 12 inches across, versus 5.7 inches for DVD-format discs - the discs differ in their picture quality and the amount of data they hold.

Most laser discs held about an hour of video on each side, which meant that a viewer had to flip the disc or insert another one in the middle of a film. A DVD, on the other hand, can store at least 4 hours of video on one side and up to 8.7 hours by using dual layers of data on both sides of the disc. Because they can hold so much more data, DVD movies often come with extra features like alternate soundtracks, video outtakes and interactive menus.

A laser disc usually displayed images in 400 to 425 horizontal lines of resolution; DVD yields 480 to 500 lines, giving it the edge in picture quality.

Although a digital soundtrack was used in some later titles in the laser disc era, films on laser discs were originally recorded in analog form. A DVD stores all of its its video and audio data in digital form.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...ts/14askk.html


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My Dead Hard Drive Story Or How I Restored My Save Games
This is the story of how I ressurrected my hard drive.

How I fritzed my hard drive

I went away on holidays for 2 weeks, came home, turned on my PC and after about 10 seconds, heard some electrical fizzing. Ack! I quickly turned off my PC, but being an idiot, thought, "I'll just make sure all the cables are in correctly and try again." So I do that and hit the power switch. This time I get more buzzing and smoke starts coming out of my power supply. Nice one! Ok, so I go and buy a new power supply. No worries. Get it home, replace the fritzed one. Turn on the PC. Hmmm, something's wrong. Something's dead wrong. My main Seagate 80gig hard drive is not being recognised. I put my ear next to the drive - there's no sound - it's not even spinning up. I try a few things - using a different power connector, different ide connector, etc - all to no avail.

My hard drive is dead. Panic sets in...Backups? What backups? Uh, yeah - maybe 3 months ago... 3 months of emails, 3 months of code, 3 months of NeverWinterNights save games...

How to fix a hard disk

So I do some searching on Google. I turn up lots of sketchy info about how other people have fixed hard drives. I even try some of them. One of my favourites - put the hard drive in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer - cooling it down shrinks the parts and may enable the drive to spin up properly. I actually try this and get lots of funny looks from my wife. Still, it doesn't work. I look at some businesses that do hard drive recovery - the prices are exhorbitant! I could buy 2 replacement drives for those prices.

The techy answer to everything - open it up! So I look at the hard drive - man, I don't even know what type of screws those are! More searching on Google lifts my ignorance - they are Torx screws. So off I go to the shops to buy a Torx screwdriver set. Dick Smith's has them for 12 bucks. Cool. I get them home and off comes the cover. I can't discern anything wrong but I assume the logic board is fried somehow.Now I get to thinking - I'm almost positive the actual drive is ok - if I could just replace the logic board...

Shopping for hard drives

So I go get a replacement hard drive. I'd only bought this hard drive 5 months previously so it wasn't too hard to find exactly the same model from a number of dealers. I actually end up buying it through my brother's business.

The grand experiment

I get the new drive home and things are all set.Here are the drives - Mmmmm lovely new drive in its clamshell - am I about to kill it as well??? Note at this point how they look the same - they are both Seagate Barracuda IVs model number ST380021A.

I take the logic board off the old drive.

Ok, let's get the new drive...Now I take the board off the replacement drive. Here are the 2 logic boards. Wait a sec. There are some differences there.... Hmmmmm - a closer look is in order.

My original drive's logic board :

The new drive's logic board :

Oh well, still worth a try. I put the new logic board onto the original drive. Put the cover back on and cross our fingers...

The moment of truth...http://www.deadharddrive.com/












Until next week,

- js.









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Recent WIRs -


http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17176 August 9th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17108 August 2nd
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17051 July 26th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16975 July 19th





Jack Spratts’ Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts at lycos.com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.