"I feel like a woolly mammoth." - Mark McKinnon
"It seems so creepy when it’s put like that. But everybody’s at it. Aren’t they?" – Michael
"Why would I sit through all of that if I can get what I like for free online, listen to it on my own time and not be guilted for weeks into giving money?" – JoAnna Michaels
"The question we're asking ourselves is, 'Is the business model of public radio prepared for a future where geographic boundaries don't exist?' " – Maria Thomas
"The message is clear - companies are telling their employees, 'Behave yourself because we're watching you.' " – Masakazu Kobayashi
"I interpret this as a clear decision that individual file sharers, if they don't earn money from file sharing, won't get anything more than a fine. That means we can't trace IP addresses, which means that we can't trace private file sharers." – Hĺkan Roswall
April 8th, ’06
Hollywood To Sell Digital Films Online
Gary Gentile
Hollywood studios will start selling digital versions of films such as "Brokeback Mountain" and "King Kong" on the Internet this week, the first time major movies have been available online to own.
The films can't be burned onto a disc for viewing on a DVD player. Still, the move is seen as a step toward full digital distribution of movies over the Internet.
Six studios said Monday that sales will begin through the download Web site Movielink. The site is jointly owned by five of the seven major studios.
Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and MGM will offer some first-run and older titles on Movielink. New films will be priced similar to DVDs - between $20 and $30 - while older titles will sell for $10 to $20.
In a separate announcement, Sony and Lionsgate said they will sell films through the CinemaNow site.
Films from The Walt Disney Co. will not be available, although both services say talks are ongoing.
"Digital delivery hasn't arrived until the major studios allow home ownership, and now they have and now digital delivery is very real," said Jim Ramo, chief executive at Movielink.
Studios will sell some new films online the same day they become available on DVD. Most films will be made available within 45 days.
Studios began renting films online several years ago as a way to combat illegal downloading. Movies have been available through the Internet 30 to 45 days after hitting video stores, with rentals lasting just 24 hours for viewing primarily on computer screens.
Digital delivery of video grew rapidly after Apple Computer Inc. began selling episodes of TV shows through its iTunes online store last October.
This year, devices powered by new Intel computer chips and TV service delivered over the Internet will allow more consumers to watch Web video on their TVs instead of their computer screens, a key factor in downloading to own, analysts said.
Studios are being cautious about selling films online in part because DVD sales produce more profit than box office receipts.
But studios are also preparing for the day when major retailers such as Wal-Mart and Amazon.com begin offering their own movie download services.
"The important thing is to embrace the future, respect the economics of DVD but move forward into digital delivery," said Ben Feingold, president of Worldwide Home Entertainment at Sony Pictures.
The films available on Movielink can be stored indefinitely on a computer hard drive or transferred to as many as two other computers. The movies can be played on a TV if the computer is part of a home network.
A copy can be burned to a DVD as a backup. Discs can be played on up three PCs authorized by Movielink but cannot be viewed on a standard DVD player because of special security coding.
Consumers will not be able to transfer the films from a PC or laptop to a handheld portable viewing device. But that capability should be available sometime within the next year, Ramo said.
Films on CinemaNow will be playable on just one computer. The company said it eventually expects studios to allow consumers to burn movies on DVD and transfer them to portable devices.
"This is a first step, but it is far from the final model," said Curt Marvis, chief executive of CinemaNow.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT
Vivid Entertainment to Sell Adult DVDs Using Download and Burn Technology
Andrew McLaughlin
A new service being launched by Vivid Entertainment on April 3rd, 2006 will allow consumers to purchase, download and burn a complete DVD for instant gratification. Always on the leading edge of technology innovation, the adult entertainment industry is again among the first to offer the ability to download and burn a fully functioning DVD complete with menus, chapter navigation and subtitles (do adult entertainment videos even have subtitles?). The initial launch of the service will include 30 movies from the Vivid Video collection and will cost about $25, which is the same price as purchasing the physical DVD.
This may not be exactly what Bill Gates was referring to when he said that the format war between Blu-Ray and HD DVD would likely be the last, but this is clearly a step forward for the digital distribution of content. The Vivid download DVDs are using a DRM technology that will only allow the video file to be burned to a DVD once. This technology is an important step in providing Vivid with the confidence to go forward with its plan. It’s not known whether the burned DVDs will be encrypted with CSS and can be unencrypted and replicated using software such as DVD Decrypter or DVDShrink.
Mainstream studios will probably pay close attention to this service to see if the initial 30 DVDs start to show up on P2P networks with any greater frequency as an indication of piracy rates of movies distributed in this manner. The benefits of digital distribution are significant since it reduces manufacturing and distribution costs as well as any issues with inventory surplus or shortfall (not to mention personal discretion). Despite these advantages, I don’t think we’ll be seeing any of the major studios following suit anytime soon.
http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/23...tertainment_to
Digital Hollywood Mulls Changing Content Rights
Laurie Sullivan
Consulting firm Accenture LLC is working to develop a cross-platform digital rights business model that would allow consumers to access the content through an unlimited number of devices after paying for license rights once.
A maturing industry continues to push the change, an Accenture executive at the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, Calif., told TechWeb on Wednesday. "If these companies don’t make the decision in a timely fashion to adopt this model the consumer will make the decision for them," said Richard B. Le Vine, Accenture senior manager of global architecture and core technologies.
Software would identify the consumer rather than the device. Telecommunication companies, cable operators and wireless companies would sort out the billing behind the scenes.
Content providers that stream movies into the home, for example, from online or through cable identify "the box" as the valid network device. A consumer can't finish watching the $6 movie in their bedroom that they began to watch in their living room the night prior because the content provider non-repudiates the box rather than the person.
Companies are pouring "hundred of millions" into various projects to initiate change, Le Vine estimates. And change already is underway.
Telecommunication, satellite, movie studios, and content providers have put together an architectural blueprint that describes the required equipment and processes.
Companies have been selected to build software, servers, storage, content management, network infrastructure, authentication digital rights management and conditional access platforms. "There are billions to be made," Le Vine said. "Companies that embrace this disruption will succeed and capture mindshare. Some are marching down the path."
Sling Media Inc. offers Slingbox, a device that allows consumers to access their local television content from any location their PC or mobile phone. Widespread deployment of this type of technology could arrive within two years, Le Vine estimates.
"Many of today's pirates wear $100 jeans and carry $3,000 laptops and never run out of the restaurant without paying a bill," he said. "So they aren't really looking to break piracy rules, they are just rebelling against the business model because it's broken."
In a separate panel discussion on rights-holder options, Le Vine said the model has met with resistance because it excludes many companies, such as those that want to sell portable music services. "I may have music at home," he said. "I've paid for the right. It's in my earphones and I'm not sharing it with anyone else."
Fred Davis, founder at Davis, Shapiro, Lewit, Montone & Hayes, moderated the panel. Participants included Steve Manning, director of broadband content at VeriSign; Jason Johnson, director of licensing and business development at Via Licensing, a Dolby co.; Ian Ballon, shareholder at Greenberg Traurig; Christopher Amenita, senior vice president, enterprises group, ASCAP; and Neil Edwards, chief executive officer at .mobi.
http://www.techweb.com/showArticle.j...leID=184401388
Megaplex Owners More Worried About DVDs Than Theaters That Treat Customers Right
from the it's-dandy,-now-shut-up dept
Mike
It's still kind of scary to see that big movie theater owners don't seem to recognize what business they're in. They're so focused on the "threat" of movie downloads, that they don't seem to realize that it's easy to compete with them, if they just offered a better movie-going experience. Going out to the movies has always been a social experience, about more than just the movie itself. While a few smaller theaters have started to recognize this, the big chains still seem confused. The best example of this was how they reacted to the movie Bubble, which was offered on DVD the same day it was released to theaters -- hopefully giving people a choice in how they wanted to watch it. If the theaters were smart, they would have tried to play up the overall experience of the theaters -- but they couldn't, since that experience just hasn't been very good lately. There would be plenty of opportunities to profit from such simultaneous releases. For example, they could have sold the DVD to people leaving the theater who enjoyed the movie. Instead, the theater owners claimed that releasing a move on DVD took away their only competitive advantage. If they really believe that exclusivity is their only advantage, they deserve to die off.
However, it's fascinating to see Wired Magazine ask the CEO of AMC theaters some tough questions about this phenomenon, only to see him respond by totally missing the point. The interviewer asks a few times what's wrong with showing simultaneous "day and date" releases -- and he basically responds by saying that, by definition, any such release can't be good. He doesn't comment on the actual quality of the movie -- but simply insists that a studio wants to release it so quickly on DVD it simply has to suck. Then, when the interviewer notes that the high price of attending a movie upsets people, the guy responds by making a bogus comparison, saying that it's cheaper than going to more expensive live events, and then saying the real problem was that movie quality sucked -- a theme the theater owners love to repeat. The final question, basically notes that the overall experience of going to a megaplex sucks, and smaller boutique theaters seem to be much more enjoyable -- which is why their business is booming. The CEO totally misses the point, by bragging about how many millions of people go to his theaters, saying that proves they're doing something right. So, in other words, he's saying that everything is going just great with their product... even though the big theater owners were just saying that something as simple as releasing DVDs simultaneously will ruin their business, and that downloading is a huge threat? Meanwhile, he's complaining about movie quality, while the interviewer pointed out that movie quality doesn't seem to be a problem at all for the smaller theaters that focus on a better movie-going experience. So, his summary seems to be that everything is going great -- and the thing to worry about is not the real competition from smaller theaters that treat their customers right, but those damn people at home.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060330/117239.shtml
Beatles Record Label 'Missed Out'
The Beatles' record label has been told it "missed out" in the fight against piracy by failing to sign up for Apple's iTunes downloading service.
London's High Court was told that the "genius" of the system is that it provides security for music.
But Apple Corps is not distributing the Beatles' back catalogue through iTunes, said Apple Computer's lawyer.
The label claims the US computer firm has breached an agreement preventing it from entering the music business.
The case is the latest in a long series of legal wrangles dating back to the 1980s when the record label took Apple Computer to court over a logo dispute.
'Very narrow use'
Apple Corps is seeking a court order to ban the computer firm from using the logo in connection with its online music store, which recently registered its one billionth internet sale.
"Apple Computer has been able to persuade every major content provider to distribute through the iTunes Music Store," said Lord Grabiner QC, acting for the US firm.
"But Apple Computer has not been able to persuade Apple Corps in relation to the Beatles catalogue," he added.
The company's lawyer also argued that the case "ignored key features" of a 1991 agreement with Apple Corps, saying it is permitted to operate in a wide range of fields including processing and broadcasting.
"By contrast Apple Corps' field of use is very narrow indeed, being confined to creative works whose complete content is music," he said.
Lord Grabiner denied that Apple Computer was preventing Apple Corps from using the famous logo, and said: "They must not do their business in a way which might cause conflict with our marks."
He also claimed that Apple Corps objected to the payment made on every download from iTunes, but there was no reference to this in their agreement, calling the record label's case "inherent nonsense".
Apple Corps, owned by former Beatles stars Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison, was founded in 1968.
Apple Computer, the firm whose home computers helped launch the personal computer industry, was founded in 1976.
The computer company's logo is an apple with a section removed out of the side. The record company is represented by a complete green Granny Smith apple.
An agreement between the two companies to share use of the Apple trademark was first established in 1981.
But as Apple Computer's business increasingly entered the world of entertainment, the company sought a less restrictive trademark agreement and a court battle ensued in 1989.
The case continues.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/4861164.stm
Apple Defends Its Use of Logo on iTunes Store
AP
A lawyer for Apple Computer dismissed as ridiculous on Thursday a long-running trademark infringement claim by another cultural icon, the Apple Corps recording label of the Beatles.
"Even a moron in a hurry could not be mistaken about" the distinction between the computer company's iTunes online music business and a recording company like Apple Corps, a lawyer for Apple Computer, Anthony Grabiner, said.
At the center of the dispute are conflicting interpretations of a 1991 settlement that ended more than a decade of legal wrangling between the companies, with each of them agreeing not to tread on the other's sphere of business.
In the High Court of Britain, Mr. Grabiner rejected Apple Corps' claim that the technology company's iTunes Music Store violated that agreement. He said the computer company had paid the record company $26.5 million as part of the settlement and in return had received "a considerably expanded field of use." The terms of the deal were kept confidential at the time.
Mr. Grabiner said the "distribution of digital entertainment content" was permitted at Apple Computer under the agreement.
But a lawyer for Apple Corps, Geoffrey Vos, had argued that Apple Computer's music distribution business "was flatly contradictory to the provisions of the agreement."
Apple Corps was started by the Beatles in 1968 and is still owned by Paul McCartney; Ringo Starr; Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon; and the estate of George Harrison. Its lawsuit seeks to force Apple Computer to drop its apple logo from the iTunes Music Store and pay unspecified damages.
Mr. Vos argued on Wednesday that although services like iTunes were permissible, Apple Computer should stay out of the music business if it uses the logo, a cartoonish apple with a neat bite out of its side. Apple Corps' logo is a green Granny Smith apple.
Mr. Vos said the 1991 agreement set out the areas under which each company could operate using its respective apple trademarks and that by selling music under the apple mark, the computer company was overstepping its boundaries.
But Mr. Grabiner argued that Apple Computer was not a recording label simply because it distributed music, so it did not violate the agreement. He said no "reasonable person" would assume that Apple Computer created or owned the 3.5 million songs on its hugely successful iTunes Music Store.
"It's obvious that Apple Computer is not the source or origin of the content," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/te...y/31apple.html
Judge Rules in Favor of 'Da Vinci' Writer
Jill Lawless
A judge ruled Friday that best-selling author Dan Brown did not steal ideas from a nonfiction book, ending the suspense about whether the novelist committed copyright infringement in his thriller "The Da Vinci Code."
High Court judge Peter Smith rejected a copyright-infringement claim by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," who claimed that Brown's blockbuster "appropriated the architecture" of their 1982 book. In the United States, the book is titled, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail."
A film based on Brown's book and starring Tom Hanks opens May 19.
"It would be quite wrong if fictional writers were to have their writings pored over in the way DVC (Da Vinci Code) has been pored over in this case by authors of pretend historical books to make an allegation of infringement of copyright," Smith said in his 71-page.
"Today's verdict shows that this claim was utterly without merit, I'm still astonished that these two authors chose to file their suit at all," Brown in a statement, adding that he was "eager to get back to writing."
"I'm pleased with today's outcome, not only from a personal standpoint but also as a novelist," he said.
Both books explore theories that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, the couple had a child and the bloodline survives. Most historians and theologians scoff at such ideas, but Brown's fast-paced mix of murder, mysticism, code-breaking and art history has won millions of fans.
"The Da Vinci Code" has sold more than 40 million copies - including 12 million hardcovers in the United States - since it was released in March 2003. It came out in paperback in the United States last week, and quickly sold more than 500,000 copies, an astonishing pace for a paperback release. An initial print run of 5 million has already been raised to 6 million.
Random House said the case should have never made it to court.
"We never believed it should have come to court and frequently tried to explain why to the claimants," said Gail Rebuck, chief executive of Random House Ltd.
Leigh and Baigent may have to pay costs that legal experts estimate will top $1.75 million.
A victory by Baigent and Leigh would have challenged the concept that copyright protects the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself.
"A victory for Leigh and Baigent would make it very difficult for novelists, particularly historical novelists," Fiona Crawley, a copyright expert with law firm Bryan Cave LLP, said before the ruling.
"They go to source books to research the history to incorporate into their novel. It would call into question how they can research a historical novel without being accused of copyright infringement by the historian who has written the key work on that incident in history."
The case drew a packed crowd of journalists, Brown fans and theological revisionists to London's neo-Gothic High Court last month.
Smith retained an air of bluff good humor during sometimes esoteric hearings that touched on the Roman Emperor Constantine's deathbed conversion to Christianity, the founding of the medieval warrior order the Knights Templar, the Merovingian dynasty allegedly descended from Jesus, and the perfidy of a seventh-century official named Pepin the Fat.
The publicity-shy Brown traveled from New Hampshire to testify on behalf of his publisher, and spent three days on the stand.
Brown acknowledged that he and his wife, Blythe, read "Holy Blood" while researching "Da Vinci," but said they also used 38 other books and hundreds of documents, and that the British authors' book was not crucial to their work.
Baigent and Leigh claimed Brown's novel contains the same central themes as their book. But under cross-examination, Baigent conceded that it had been an exaggeration to say that Brown used "all the same historical conjecture" as their book.
Random House lawyer John Baldwin said that while many of the incidents in "The Da Vinci Code" had been described before, "no one has put them together, and developed and expressed them, in the way Mr. Brown did. That is why he has a best-seller."
Thanks to the case, so do Baigent and Leigh. Their 24-year-old book is selling 7,000 copies a week in Britain, compared with a few hundred before the case began. Baigent's new book, "The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History," has an initial print run of 150,000 copies in the United States.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT
Future Brightens For Napster
Jim Welte
Subscription service raises its outlook for the fourth quarter, sending shares up more than 20 percent on the day.
Shares in digital music subscription service Napster jumped more than 20 percent today after the company raised its financial outlook for the fourth quarter on better-than-expected revenue gains.
The company said strong gains in the number of subscribers for its "all-you- can-eat" download service will push its fiscal fourth-quarter revenue in excess of $26 million, surpassing its previously forecast of revenue of $25 million. That, in turn, will lead to a lower-than-expected quarterly loss.
"Napster's premium subscriber growth was extremely strong during our most recent quarter, resulting in revenue that exceeded our expectations," Napster CEO Chris Gorog said in a statement.
Napster, one of the most recognized brands in digital music and once synonymous with the peer-to-peer (P2P) free-music bonanza, has hit rough terrain in recent months. The company laid off 10 employees in January and widespread speculation surrounded that the company was up for sale, with Google being mentioned as a possible suitor.
But the layoffs have helped the company keeps its costs down, Gorog said today, and the company's pricey marketing campaign during the latter part of 2005 appears to have paid some dividends.
As he has in all of his public statements in recent months, Gorog pointed to Napster's forthcoming Web-based initiative as a future driver of the company. The company has yet to release any specific details about the venture, only saying that it will provide music-related content to users and will be supported by advertising.
"We believe this will be a unique music destination, unlike anything currently on the Web," Gorog said today. "It is being designed to attract and retain millions of fans and provide them with superb music-oriented content while in turn creating a highly targeted and attractive demographic for advertisers."
The company will release its quarterly financial results on May 17.
After rising more than 12 percent in early-morning trading, Napster shares kept climbing for the remainder of the day, closing at $4.05, up 68 cents, or 20.2 percent, on the day.
http://www.mp3.com/news/stories/4001.html
Fair Use In Hungary
p2pnet
Warner Music, EMI, Sony BMG and Vivendi Universal, the venal Big Four, classify their customers as marks to be screwed, blued and tattooed as often as possible and the labels' mottos might be, 'Never give a sucker an even break,' to quote WC Fields.
With that in mind, it's refreshing to come across an agreement between artists and music lovers in which strenuous efforts appear to have been made by both sides to be fair and reasonable.
For example, among other things, it states, "Consumers are to be protected when they copy music for their private needs, even if they use an illegal source in good faith. Private copying is fair and not contrary to the general requirements of copyright exceptions as long as it does not exceed the extent needed for one’s own enjoyment of works and that of the family or close friends, respectively. The private copying exception does not cover the dissemination (communication) of digital copies, e.g. via file sharing.
"The private copying levy paid for blank media is an adequate tool for balancing between different interests, as it makes possible consumers’ protection as well. This levy is justified as long as consumer private copying is technically possible."
The contract is between Hungary's National Association for Consumer Protection (NACPH) and the Socoiety Artisjus Hungarian Bureau for the Protection of Authors' Rights (ARTISJUS) and was forwarded to us by Nick Bentley. Thanks, Nick.
The NACPH is a non-profit, politically independent, non-profit, non-governmental association in Hungary whose aim is, "the general protection of consumers (in this respect, the protection of their fundamental rights). NACPH identifies, represents and protects consumer interests."
ARTISJUS is the, "Hungarian civil law association of composers, lyricists and music publishers, dealing with collective management of their rights and carrying out the representation of their interests. It joins authors, in order to strengthen them by exercising their individually unenforceable rights. It grants copyright licenses to the commercial exploiters of music, collects royalties, and distributes collected sums among its more than 1.200 full members, 4.300 mandating authors, and the members of 80 similar foreign composers' societies."
We've included the full NACPH / ARTISJUS agreement below. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Cooperation Agreement Between the undersigned:
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER PROTECTION IN HUNGARY (hereinafter referred to as NACPH)
and
SOCIETY ARTISJUS HUNGARIAN BUREAU FOR THE PROTECTION OF AUTHORS’ RIGHTS (hereinafter referred to as ARTISJUS)
Whereas,
· consumers and authors of music have many common interests,
· both consumers and authors are weaker parties vis-á-vis the commercial exploiters of music, therefore they assert their rights in a similar position.
· it is useful for the associations of both groups to cooperate in exercising their rights,
NACPH and ARTISJUS conclude the following agreement:
1.) Common interests of authors and consumers in general NACPH and ARTISJUS hereby agree with respect to the following principles:
1.1. If authors can safely subsist on their earnings, which include copyright royalties, it provides them incentive to create additional works. This leads to cultural diversity and wideranging musical supply, which is a primary interest to consumers.
1.2. The commercial exploiters of music should disseminate the works to the public in a way that takes into due account the interests of consumers as well. It is important for composers that consumers – fans and those having an interest – enjoy music without disruption and with great pleasure.
1.3. The commercial exploiters of music should disseminate the works to the public in a way that respects the moral rights of authors as well.
The consumer has a right to know not only the performer’s but also the author’s name (subject to the circumstances i.e. to the mode of use or perception). This promotes consumers’ freedom of choice by providing complete information in a lawful way.
It is important not only for the author but for the consumer as well, that the work (message) of the author should reach the public in an undistorted, unabridged way.
1.4. The collective management of music authors’ rights is advantageous to consumers as it provides the widest possible musical choice. It affords an opportunity for restaurants, radio,television, record labels, internet content providers and each commercial exploiter of music, to take their pick from almost every musical work of the world, irrespective of its genre and others’ business interests.
1.5. The Parties welcome the adoption of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expression and hope that the Hungarian Republic will also sign this shortly.
1.6. It is becoming increasingly important to protect Hungarian music – particularly at a time of intensive, global expansion of the Anglo-American music industry – and for this reason, there is a need for the protection of Hungarian authors and performers creating quality music.
A good means to achieve this goal could be the use of minimal quotas – in line with the acquis communautaire – for the protection of Hungarian music not only on television but on the radio as well.
2.) Common interests of authors and consumers in the digital world (access to music, private copying)
NACPH and ARTISJUS jointly declare the following:
2.1. Wide scale and well-ordered online access to culture is a public interest.
· The wide access to works of art gives incentives to create new works. This is equally important for consumers and authors as well.
· Copyright is not an obstacle to the public for freely using the content of the work for their own private purposes.
· Copyright does not prevent creators from freely using the basic building elements of musical art (style, rhythm schemes, harmony, tempo, music ideas).
· There is need for inexpensive, legal musical content service of good quality and with wide repertory being available online, that respects both consumers’ and authors’ rights.
· 'Free access to culture' is not meant to jeopardize the living of authors. There should be opportunity for inexpensive access to culture in libraries, archives, schools and museums. Local and national governments should make contributions to this end not only by restrictions of authors' rights (which seems necessary in the information society), but much more by organizational and financial means.
Consumers being able to pay for technical devices used to enjoy culture, should feel it obligatory to contribute to the costs of the content as well: to the existence of authors and performers and to the continuous creation of works. Consumers should avoid sources which presumably make works available by not observing authors and performers' rights.
2.2. The technical restrictions of access to and copying of musical recordings (the so-called "DRM systems") should not infringe the interests of consumers and authors.
· If commercial exploiters of music restrict the playing or use of musical recordings via technological measures, it should only take place by means accepted by consumers as well. This is the only way to communicate music to the widest possible public which is a primary interest of authors.
· Commercial exploiters of music should inform consumers in an appropriate manner on the manner in which such technological measures taken restrict the playing or copying of musical recordings.
· Technological measures used in restricting access, copying or other use should make it possible for the consumer to enjoy the purchased musical recordings at home on every digital player device ('interoperability'), and to prepare private copies needed for this purpose.
· No personal data of the consumers or data on their consumption habits should be collected, processed or shared without the expressed consent of the consumers. Such a practice cannot even be justified by the fight against copyright infringement.
· Copyright exceptions mean a real restriction of copyright. They should not be precluded or made valueless by technological restrictions.
2.3. The private copying of works is the unrestrictable freedom of the consumer.
· The protection of consumers acting in good-faith is in the public interest.
· Consumers are to be protected when they copy music for their private needs, even if they use an illegal source in good faith. Private copying is fair and not contrary to the general requirements of copyright exceptions as long as it does not exceed the extent needed for one’s own enjoyment of works and that of the family or close friends, respectively. The private copying exception does not cover the dissemination (communication) of digital copies, e.g. via file sharing.
· The private copying levy paid for blank media is an adequate tool for balancing between different interests, as it makes possible consumers’ protection as well. This levy is justified as long as consumer private copying is technically possible.
2.4. Online service providers taking part in the online dissemination of music should also participate in the protection of consumers’ and authors’ rights, and contribute to royalties as well.
· Online service providers take great financial advantage from the online use of music and other works. However, up to now, they have refused to pay any fees for authors. It is desirable that they ensure to associations of consumers and authors the data necessary to exercise their rights efficiently against the adequate person.
· Due care should be devoted to the service providers’ obligation of continuously making public their contact data.
· The limitation of liability of online intermediaries in the field of copyright and consumer protection civil law is not justified if they make available the content under their own name, by their own electronic commercials. It would be desirable to adjust community and national law to this requirement.
3.) NACPH- ARTISJUS cooperation
NACPH and ARTISJUS will contact each other in all matters falling within the aim and scope of activity of the other organization in order to express professionally
well-founded opinions, mainly in the field of legislation.
NACPH and ARTISJUS will hold regular expert meetings to exchange their experience regarding new phenomena in the commercial exploitation of music and their possible effects on consumers and authors, respectively.
NACPH and ARTISJUS shall jointly inform the press from time to time about their opinions falling into the common scope of interests.
NACPH and ARTISJUS intend to cooperate in the future in other ways not specified herein, in order that the affected parties and the society at large realize and acknowledge the common interests of authors and consumers.
NACPH and ARTISJUS authorize each other to announce this agreement to the public. This agreement is concluded in the Hungarian language, however, thisEnglish version is likewise accepted by both parties and can also be made public by either party.
The parties express their consent by undersigning this agreement in two identical copies.
http://p2pnet.net/story/8375
DRM and the Myth of the 'Analog Hole'
George Ou
There seems to be a persistent myth floating around the board rooms of the movie companies and Congress that analog content is the boogie man of music and video piracy. In fact they're so paranoid about it that they're considering a mechanism called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that punishes law-abiding customers for content that they legally purchased.
DRM… has to be better quality and easier to use than bootleg content or consumers won't accept it.
It isn't even for something bad that they've done, but for something they theoretically might do which is to copy an HDTV movie at maximum 1920 by 1080 resolution using an analog video connector that doesn't have copy restrictions built in. But ironically, the real content pirates who make millions of bootleg movies have no intention of ever taking advantage of the so called "analog hole" because that is the slowest and lowest quality method of stealing content. The victim is the consumer who's only crime is that he couldn't afford the latest HDTV set with an HDMI content-protected connector so he or she gets punished with quarter-resolution 960 by 540 output while paying for high definition 1920 by 1080 (1080p or 1080 progressive) content.
Copying high definition 1080p content over an analog signal is very expensive, time consuming, and prone to quality loss during the conversion even without ICT restrictions. Even if there was no way to make a high-speed bit-for-bit digital copy directly in a computer because of some DRM mechanism, there will always be some way for determined crackers to intercept unprotected digital content before it's delivered to the video output device. It is simply naive to think that any music or video pirate professional or casual is going to use the so called "analog hole" to pirate content and even dumber to pass laws that make maximum quality analog connectors illegal. Most new HDTV sets don't even have HDMI connectors let alone older HDTV sets so if ICT enforcement is ever adopted, almost everyone will be negatively affected. Most movie companies with the exception of Warner Brothers have already indicated that they would not initially implement ICT because they realize that they would have an uproar because so many people would be adversely affected. But in the future when enough HDMI-capable HDTV sets are on the market, there is no guarantee that the movie companies won't try to sneak ICT enforcement in to future releases.
To prove the point that the analog issue or even DVD encryption is moot, anyone who's visited a relatively modern third world country will have seen the $1 bootleg DVDs lining the market. Those bootleg DVDs didn't get there because someone used an "analog hole" nor did they get there because some pirate used a decryption algorithm that may have been printed on someone's T-Shirt. They got there because someone simply made a bit-for-bit copy of the original DVD. There is nothing unique or special about a DVD (or HDDVD or Blueray disk) and it could simply be replicated and mass produced verbatim. But anyone who wanted to make a legitimate backup of their own legal DVD collection because they may have small children who have talent for shredding DVDs wasn't allowed to because the software was made illegal. Perhaps the movie companies are trying to stop casual copying but obviously all their efforts have not worked because it's easy as ever to copy and backup a DVD without ever resorting to expensive and imprecise analog video — so what's the point to ICT?
I'm not against the concept of DRM and I view it as a balancing act between the rights of the content creators and the rights of the consumers. At the very least, the music and movie industry need to recognize that they cannot step on their customers rights and expect them to remain loyal paying customers regardless of where the law stands because consumers will either stop buying or simply bypass the restrictions. If we as a society are going to tolerate DRM, it should at least be open enough to allow competing vendors to play even if there is no official standard. Apple for example is notorious for abusing their dominant status in the online music business and will sue anyone who dares to be compatible with iTunes. Apple controls the playback and the distribution of digital music and they're not about to give that up without a fight. Consumers must be able to make legitimate backups and transport their legally acquired content on any device they choose. Ultimately it won't matter what the laws on DRM are because it has to be better quality and easier to use than bootleg content or the consumers won't accept it.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=180
DRM Key to Linux's Consumer Success?
Ingrid Marson
A RealNetworks executive has claimed that Linux risks being excluded from the consumer market if it does not add support for copyright protection technologies.
But the Free Software Foundation Europe countered this claim on Thursday, saying consumers have made it clear that they do not want digital rights management, or DRM, restricting their use of digital media.
Jeff Ayars, a vice president at RealNetworks, said in a talk at LinuxWorld here Tuesday that if Linux does not offer support for DRM, people will not be able to run restricted digital content on the operating system, which will damage its success in the consumer market.
"The consequences of Linux not supporting DRM would be that fixed-purpose consumer electronics and Windows PCs would be the sole entertainment platforms available," Ayars said. "Linux would be further relegated to use in servers and business computers, since it would not be providing the multimedia technologies demanded by consumers."
He pointed out that Microsoft Vista is implementing a number of digital rights technologies, such as Protected Media Path, Protected Video Path and Protected User Mode Audio. "I would like Linux to be able to do that as well," he said. The support must be included in the Linux operating system, as a DRM system would not be able to trust drivers that were separately installed, according to Ayars.
But Georg Greve, the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, disagreed with Ayars' claim that Linux risks being excluded from the consumer market, arguing that users dislike DRM.
Georg Greve
"The Sony rootkit case made it quite clear why DRM is not accepted by consumers and why there is no successful business case for DRM," he said in an e-mail. "Apple iTunes allows people to burn their tracks on regular CDs, which can then be re-encoded and file-shared easily--so is better described as 'digital inconvenience management' only. eMusic.com offers clean audio tracks without any restrictions. No DRM platform comes close to either of these in popularity."
"So fortunately, it is up to the consumer to decide what the consumer market wants. And its answer is clear: It does not want DRM!" he said. "The sooner we bury the foolish notion of putting each and every use of a computer under control of the media industry, the sooner we can start looking for real alternatives."
Although Ayars refused to discuss what he termed the "philosophical" objections to using DRM, he admitted that there were "potential" negative consequences of supporting DRM in Linux, such as the risk of innovation being stifled.
"There are limits on the innovation that is possible around protected media," Ayars said. "With protected content, you wouldn't be able to create a new business model like TiVo did with time-shifting television--it was able to do that because there was no protection on signal."
Although much of the open-source community is likely to object to the addition of DRM to Linux, commercial Linux vendors may be more willing.
"When I talk with Red Hat, Novell or Linspire--these distributions are in the business of creating software for consumers--they are interested in people who buy their products being able to (view DRM-protected multimedia)," Ayars said.
Linspire's chief technical officer, Tom Welch, agreed that his company would definitely consider DRM.
"Linspire has not added DRM into our (distribution) yet but would like to add it if we are given the opportunity, provided it is a DRM that is being used by consumer products (such as Apple's FairPlay or Microsoft's PlaysForSure). If someone comes out with an open-source DRM, we'd be behind it, but we need major content providers to support it as well," Welch said.
Novell said it is keen to support more media formats but did not mention support for DRM.
"We are looking forward to the time when Linux users will have access to media in all formats. We obviously support open media formats in our offerings now, and we're currently in discussions with vendors who control proprietary formats to include support for them, as well," said Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, Novell's director of Linux product marketing.
Red Hat was unable to provide comment at the time of writing.
Ingrid Marson of ZDNet UK reported from Boston.
http://news.com.com/DRM+key+to+Linux...l?tag=nefd.top
Anti-DRM Flashmob Hits Paris CD Superstore
Cory Doctorow
A group of technology activists staged an anti-DRM flashmob/protest in a large Paris music-shop yesterday. The group is called STOPDRM, a created by members of the Framasoft.net forum, where free software enthusiasts gather -- this is the same place that created the EUCD.INFO group that's been working on improving the upcoming French copyright law.
The activists went to FNAC, a giant record store, and at 7PM, a whistle was blown, whereupon the whole group unfolded anti-DRM signs saying things like "STOP DRM" "SAY NO TO RESTRICTED CDs" "YOU OWN THE MUSIC YOU BUY" and began to hand out leaflets explaining the dangers of DRM to other patrons. After they were all kicked out, they set up an anti-DRM information picket in front of the story.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/31...shmob_hit.html
Justice Department Subpoenas Reach Far Beyond Google
In its effort to uphold the Child Online Protection Act, the U.S. Department of Justice is leaving no stone unturned. In addition to America Online, MSN, and Google, the government has demanded information from at least 34 Internet service providers, search companies, and security software firms,
InformationWeek learned through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Thomas Claburn
In its effort to uphold the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), the U.S. Department of Justice is leaving no stone unturned. Its widely reported issuance of subpoenas to Internet search companies AOL, MSN, Google, and Yahoo is just the tip of the iceberg: The government has demanded information from at least 34 Internet service providers, search companies, and security software firms.
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by InformationWeek, the Department of Justice disclosed that it has issued subpoenas to a broad range of companies, including AT&T, Comcast Cable, Cox Communications, EarthLink, LookSmart, SBC Communications (then separate from AT&T), Symantec, and Verizon.
Asked which companies objected to, or sought to limit, these subpoenas, Department of Justice spokesperson Charles Miller declined to comment, citing that the litigation was ongoing. He also declined to comment on the utility of the information gathered by the government.
The documents presented to InformationWeek reveal that some companies did object to the government's demands. In an E-mail sent to the Department of Justice last July, Fernando Laguarda, an attorney representing Cablevision Systems Corp., characterized some of what the government was asking for as "overly broad, vague, ambitious, and unduly burdensome."
In a letter sent to the Department of Justice in August, Joseph Serino Jr., an attorney representing Verizon, voiced similar objections. However, he clearly states that his objections are routine and intended to protect the company.
The one exceptional objection he cites has to do with the sensitivity of the information sought. Serino said Verizon Online is concerned that documents might be forwarded to people working for entities hostile to Verizon Online, or that are suing the company, including the Justice Department itself and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Verizon didn't respond to requests for comment.
The subpoenas were issued between June and September 2005. Beyond AOL, MSN, Google, and Yahoo, the only other search engine subpoenaed was LookSmart.
It's likely, however, that the government's interest in LookSmart stems not from the company's search engine, but from its ownership of Internet content filtering software company Net Nanny.
LookSmart declined to comment about the information it was asked for and the information it provided. EarthLink likewise declined to comment.
The bulk of the subpoenas were directed at Internet service providers and makers of content filtering software. The effectiveness of filtering technology is a critical issue in the COPA case. If the Department of Justice can prove that filters fail to shield minors from explicit material online, COPA may well be reinstated.
The full list of companies subpoenaed by the Department of Justice includes: 711Net (Mayberry USA), American Family Online, AOL, AT&T, Authentium, BellSouth, Cablevision, Charter Communications, Comcast Cable Company, Computer Associates, ContentWatch, Cox Communications, EarthLink, Google, Internet4Families, LookSmart, McAfee, MSN, Qwest, RuleSpace, S4F (Advance Internet Management), SafeBrowse, SBC Communications, Secure Computing Corp., Security Software Systems, SoftForYou, Solid Oak Software, SurfControl, Symantec, Time Warner, Tucows (Mayberry USA), United Online, Verizon, and Yahoo.
The subpoenas directed at security software companies asked for a substantial amount of information, including any and all documents that fall into 29 separate categories, including the kinds of content filtering products or services offered, the number of customers using those products or services, how users configure their filters, how filters get updated, R&D spending on such products, the methodology used to generate blacklisted or filtered sites, and pretty much any data gathered that relates to the use of filters. "What they are doing, from our perspective, is engaging in a massive fishing expedition in an attempt to find some shred of evidence that they think can change a result they didn't like, which is that COPA violates the First Amendment," says Aden Fine, an attorney for the ACLU.
While the government's demands for information from Internet search engines have privacy implications for individuals, its interest in corporate information raises questions about the rights of businesses.
Stephen Ryan, a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Washington D.C., considers the scope of the government's discovery efforts unusual. "I'm not surprised that the Google piece looks like the tip of an iceberg," he says. "But it is sort of surprising that they're using their authority this broadly."
Ryan acknowledges that government subpoenas place undue burdens on companies every day, noting that there are probably scores of attorneys at large ISPs who do nothing but process subpoenas. He suggests that as information technology produces more information, the government will want greater access to that data.
With regard to the financial impact of subpoenas, Ryan notes, "If you look at the Office of Regulatory Affairs at Office of Management and Budget, there's something called the Paperwork Reduction Act. And there's supposed to be an evaluation of the burden that a government law or regulation will make on the public. I'll bet there's never been a burden analysis of what they're doing."
Justice Department spokesman Miller said he would inquire about this, but didn't have an immediate answer.
Dan Jude, however, did. Jude, president of filtering software company Security Software Systems, confirms that the subpoena his 12-person company received was a burden. "It was a pain," he says. "I don't have exact figures, but it took 40-plus hours to put stuff together."
Jude says the Department of Justice asked for proprietary information about his company's content filtering software. Despite assurances that the information would remain confidential, he says he refused that particular demand, fearing it might be revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request.
Jude contends that the government's efforts to prop up COPA are misguided. "It's a waste of time," he says, noting that he testified before the COPA Commission about the prevalence of explicit material online in August 2000. The problem, he says, is that U.S. legislation has no teeth because half of the Web servers with explicit content are located in other countries.
If COPA were to be reinstated, Jude suggests that the Department of Justice would have to turn ISPs into content police in order to deal with offshore offenders.
As someone who sells a technical solution, it's perhaps no surprise that Jude has faith in filtering. "The great thing about the technology is that it allows parents to make the determination of what they want their kids to be able to do and not to do," he says. "And isn't that what we're supposed to be doing in this country?"
http://www.informationweek.com/share...leID=184401156
Piracy Crackdown Urged In Russia
The US movie industry is urging Russia to crack down on piracy to aid the revival of its own business.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said both US and Russian films lost money due to the illegal trade in the country.
"I believe that the politicians in Russia need to make this a much higher priority," said MPAA chief executive Dan Glickman on a visit to Moscow.
Russian film-makers joined the MPAA's call for a crackdown.
'Dagger in the heart'
Russian economy minister German Gref, US ambassador to Moscow William Burns and industry leaders also attend the meeting.
Mr Glickman estimated Russian piracy cost the US $266m (Ł253m) a year while non-US films lost $122m (Ł70,000).
Sergei Selyanov, a producer of the Russian film Brat (Brother), said: "The more Russian cinema becomes successful, the less tolerable this is.
"The pirate market does not allow us to make profits and make new films."
Mr Glickman added: "Piracy is a dagger in the heart of a growing Russian film industry."
Russian has made numerous attempts to stem piracy and counterfeiting but they remain among the sticking points of Russia joining the World Trade Organization.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/4860584.stm
Blacks Turn to Internet Highway, and Digital Divide Starts to Close
Michel Marriott
African-Americans are steadily gaining access to and ease with the Internet, signaling a remarkable closing of the "digital divide" that many experts had worried would be a crippling disadvantage in achieving success.
Civil rights leaders, educators and national policy makers warned for years that the Internet was bypassing blacks and some Hispanics as whites and Asian-Americans were rapidly increasing their use of it.
But the falling price of laptops, more computers in public schools and libraries and the newest generation of cellphones and hand-held devices that connect to the Internet have all contributed to closing the divide, Internet experts say.
Another powerful influence in attracting blacks and other minorities to the Internet has been the explosive evolution of the Internet itself, once mostly a tool used by researchers, which has become a cultural crossroad of work, play and social interaction.
Studies and mounting anecdotal evidence now suggest that blacks, even some of those at the lower end of the economic scale, are making significant gains. As a result, organizations that serve African-Americans, as well as companies seeking their business, are increasingly turning to the Internet to reach out to them.
"What digital divide?" Magic Johnson, the basketball legend, asked rhetorically in an interview about his new Internet campaign deal with the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln Mercury division to use the Internet to promote cars to black prospective buyers.
The sharpest growth in Internet access and use is among young people. But blacks and other members of minorities of various ages are also merging onto the digital information highway as never before.
According to a Pew national survey of people 18 and older, completed in February, 74 percent of whites go online, 61 percent of African-Americans do and 80 percent of English-speaking Hispanic-Americans report using the Internet. The survey did not look at non-English-speaking Hispanics, who some experts believe are not gaining access to the Internet in large numbers.
In a similar Pew survey in 1998, just 42 percent of white American adults said they used the Internet while only 23 percent of African-American adults did so. Forty percent of English-speaking Hispanic-Americans said they used the Internet.
Despite the dissolving gap, some groups like the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network, which introduces digital technologies to young people, say the digital divide is still vast in more subtle ways. Instant messaging and downloading music is one thing, said Marlon Orozco, program manager at the network's Boston clubhouse, but he would like to see black and Hispanic teenagers use the Internet in more challenging ways, like building virtual communities or promoting their businesses.
Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which has studied Internet use by race, ethnicity and age, cautioned that a new dimension of the digital divide might be opening because groups that were newer to the Internet tended to use less-advanced hardware and had slower connection speeds.
"The type and meaningful quality of access is, in some ways, a more challenging divide that remains," Ms. Rideout said. "This has an impact on things like homework."
In addition, Internet access solely at institutions can put students at a disadvantage. Schools and other institutions seldom operate round the clock, seven days a week, which is especially an issue for students, said Andy Carvin, coordinator for the Digital Divide Network, an international group that seeks to close the gap.
But not everyone agrees that minorities tend toward less-advanced use of the Internet. Pippa Norris, a lecturer on comparative politics at Harvard who has written extensively about the digital divide, said members of minorities had been shown to use the Internet to search for jobs and to connect to a wide variety of educational opportunities.
"The simple assumption that the Internet is a luxury is being disputed by this group," Ms. Norris said.
The divide was considered so dire a decade ago that scholars, philanthropists and even President Bill Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union address fretted over just what the gap would mean in lost educational and employment opportunities for young people who were not wired.
In an effort to help erase the divide, the federal government has provided low-cost connections for schools, libraries, hospitals and health clinics, allocated money to expand in-home access to computers and the Internet for low-income families and given tax incentives to companies donating computer and technical training and for sponsoring community learning centers.
As a result of such efforts, "most kids, almost all kids, have a place in which they can go online and have gone online," said Ms. Rideout of the Kaiser foundation.
Jason Jordan of Boston is one of the young people closing the divide. Jason, 17, who is black, is getting a used computer from an older brother. He said he had wanted a computer for years, since "I heard about a lot that I was missing."
Jason said he had access to the Internet at school, where he is pursuing a general equivalency diploma, but looked forward to having his own computer and Web access at his home in the Dorchester section of Boston. "I can work in my own place and don't have to worry about the time I'm online," he said.
Like Jason, almost 9 out of 10 of the 21 million Americans ages 12 to 17 use the Internet, according to a report issued in July by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Of them, 87 percent of white teenagers say they use the Internet, while 77 percent of black teenagers and 89 percent of Hispanic teenagers say they have access to it, the report said.
The gap in access among young Americans is less pronounced than among their parents' generation, said Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew project. "Age continues to be a strong predictor for Internet use," Ms. Fox said.
While, overall Internet use among blacks still significantly trails use among whites, the shrinking divide is most vividly reflected in the online experience of people like Billy and Barbara Johnson. Less than two years ago, the Johnsons, who are black, plugged into the Internet in their upscale suburban home near Atlanta for the first time. Mrs. Johnson, a 52-year-old mother of four and homemaker, said she felt she had little choice because her school-age children needed to use the Internet for research.
And then there is e-mail. "No one really wants to take the time anymore to pick up the phone and keep in touch," lamented Mrs. Johnson, who said that so much of the communications with her children's school was done through e-mail correspondence. "I felt like I was pretty much forced into it."
Even so, Mrs. Johnson said her husband, an assistant coach for the Atlanta Falcons, still chided her when she neglected to check her e-mail at least every day.
Ms. Norris and other experts on Internet use see progress on the horizon. They note that the declining cost of laptop and other computers, and efforts, like those in Philadelphia, to provide low-cost wireless Internet access, are likely to increase online access for groups that have been slow to connect.
Philanthropic efforts have also helped to give more people Internet access. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $250 million since 1997 for American public libraries to create Internet access for the public. Martha Choe, the foundation's director of global libraries, said some 47,000 computers had been bought for 11,000 libraries. Today, Ms. Choe said, most libraries in the United States have public Internet access.
Education levels remain a major indicator of who is among the 137 million Americans using the Internet and who is not, said Ms. Fox.
There is also a strong correlation, experts say, between household income and Internet access.
With so many more members of minorities online, some Web sites are trying to capitalize on their new access. For example, the New York/New Jersey region of the State of the African American Male, a national initiative to improve conditions for black men, is encouraging men to use digital equipment to "empower themselves" to better their lives. The site, which includes studies, public policy reports and other information about issues related to black men, promotes using digital cameras, mobile phones and iPods, but mainly computers, to organize through the Internet, said Walter Fields, vice president for government relations for the Community Service Society, an antipoverty organization, and a coordinator of the black-male initiative. Users are encouraged to submit articles, write blogs and upload pertinent photographs and video clips.
"What we're doing is playing against the popular notion of a digital divide," Mr. Fields said. "I always felt that it was a misnomer."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/us...rtner=homepage
AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet Connections "Irrelevant"
Nate Anderson
At this week's Media, Entertainment and Telecommunications conference, AT&T COO Randall Stephenson told his listeners that increased bandwidth was no longer of great importance to consumers.
"In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is irrelevant because the backbone doesn't transport at those speeds," he told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests have shown "no discernable difference" between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone.
Certainly this is true for general web browsing, which rarely taxes the speed of even a slow DSL connection, but it seems like bandwidth would be crucial for next-generation applications such as IPTV that the telcos soon hope to provide. Right? Not according to Stephenson, who points out that bandwidth is of less importance to IPTV setups because of the switched nature of the system. Generally, only a couple of channels are transmitted at one time, and this does not change no matter how many total channels are offered to the consumer (see our overview of IPTV for more information on how this works).
In terms of Lightspeed's ability to push through hundreds of video channels, including high-def video, "we're not constrained by bandwidth. You're not constrained by the size of the pipe anymore," Stephenson said, referring to the switched-video capacity of the network which delivers only one service to a single customer at a time.
This is a direct response to the criticism that AT&T has suffered for deploying a fiber optic network that reaches only to the local node, not directly into a customer's home—which means that the "last mile" connection is still copper wire. Verizon, by contrast, is deploying fiber directly into the home, making for much higher speeds. AT&T argues that its model is cheaper, faster to deploy, and just as capable as Verizon's, which currently uses much of its massive bandwidth to distribute RF TV channels.
Pressures on satellite
In related television news, it looks like the squeeze play is underway against the satellite industry. The telcos, such as AT&T, have generally partnered with a satellite company in order to offer television service. Now that they're getting into the game themselves, these partnerships are dying. Pressure is also coming from the cable companies, which are getting onboard with Cablevision's plan to move the DVR into the headend. This will cut costs for the cable companies, who no longer have to send out trucks to install, troubleshoot, and repair DVRs in homes, but it's a move that satellite operators can't match.
He [Comcast COO Stephen Burke] said a network recording service would help cable companies compete against satellite TV operators such as DirecTV and EchoStar, which cannot cut the cost of the DVR box out of their pricing structure.
This kind of pressure from the cable companies, combined with the price war which could ensue between cable operators and the telcos, will certainly make it harder for satellite to compete over the next few years. Whether they can carve out a niche and remain a viable proposition remains to be seen, though it should be noted that satellite is not sitting still waiting for the axe to fall. DirecTV, for instance, has been pondering plans to roll out broadband services of its own, and satellite can still claim to offer a higher-quality picture than cable (in most cases). IPTV, though it could spark a price war with both services, won't be coming to most cities for some time, so satellite should have a few years of breathing room before the squeeze is on in earnest.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060331-6498.html
Former Eastman Kodak Manager Sues Company
Ben Dobbin
An Eastman Kodak Co. manager claims she was fired for protesting a cost-saving proposal that would have quietly compressed millions of digital images stored by customers on the world's leading online photography site.
While acknowledging it has discussed ways to cut back on the rising cost of online storage, Kodak insisted Thursday it would never condense images in a lower-resolution format -- and thereby potentially diminish their quality -- "without our customers' knowledge."
"It's an issue I'm sure all online photo services are discussing" as the image capacity of newer digital cameras expands, said David Rich, vice president of marketing at the Kodak EasyShare Gallery. "However, we have not made any plans nor any decisions about any compression of existing images within our service."
Maya Raber, former director of software development at the online unit in Emeryville, Calif., claimed in a lawsuit that her job was eliminated in August because she opposed a plan to shrink disc space and save Kodak money by compressing more than 800 million photo files owned by about 13 million active members.
Raber, 41, said she warned her bosses that doubling the compression of image files already in storage could "irreversibly alter and damage" them. Although the proposal was not carried out, Raber said she was fired for raising a ruckus.
Kodak's EasyShare service, which formerly went by Ofoto, is free, though customers must make at least one purchase -- a 15-cent print counts -- to store images beyond a year. Sites such as these make their money primarily by selling prints, mugs imprinted with photos and other items.
In October, the photo-storage and printing business began offering its members an option of uploading images 50 percent faster. But that upload program would "still result in the same high-quality image they would expect" for prints as large as 8-by-10 inches, Rich said.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Oakland, Calif., maintained that employees who complained about the compression proposal were told that "this is not a democracy" and that "objection to the project will be noticed."
Raber, who is seeking unspecified monetary damages, alleges she was wrongfully terminated and claims Kodak disguised her firing as a restructuring move.
Kodak declined to comment on the reasons she left the company. "This is a personnel issue, so we cannot discuss specifics," Kodak said in a statement.
Ed Lee, a digital photography analyst at InfoTrends Inc. in Weymouth, Mass., said online sites "should be just one other way of storing your photos. It shouldn't be your only way (because) every time you edit your photo and re-save it, there generally is some re-compression and you are actually losing some quality.
"If consumers have the original on their computers, then it's never really a problem," Lee said. "If they want a poster-size print, they could just upload that same image again at the higher resolution."
Midway through a four-year makeover, Kodak is struggling to turn profits from its digital businesses. It lost $1.4 billion in 2005 even as digital sales exceeded sales from film and other chemical-based businesses for the first time.
Kodak, however, has climbed to No. 1 in sales of digital cameras and digital X-ray systems in the United States and leads the world in sales of photo kiosks, thermal home printers and online photo services. Along with the most online customers, Kodak also leads Shutterfly.com and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Snapfish.com in online revenues, Lee said.
http://www.latimes.com/business/inve...ck=1&cset=true
Tempting, Isn't It?
It's easy for young people to grab movies and music from the net. Lia Timson reports on why generation tech pays no heed to copyright laws.
Rose* is no slouch when it comes to finding her way around the internet. Like most 15-year-olds, she has grown up with computers and has the skills to track down the things that most interest her - and if you know what you are doing, the best stuff on the web doesn't cost anything.
Together with her brother, Jonathan*, 13, she regularly downloads illegal music off the internet. Their friend Bob*, 12, also downloads lots of songs to his computer and then onto his MP3 player and mobile phone.
The trio knows that copying music that would normally be sold is not legal, but they have no trouble doing so. "Everyone does it because the police aren't going to go after everyone," Rose says. "They can't put everyone in jail,". "If they do track us down, it will be through MSN or Yahoo and no one is going to put their real name on there," Jonathan says. T
o these young people, copying songs, and sometimes games and movies, via peer-to-peer networks is a means to an end; a minor indiscretion committed at home in the name of entertainment.
"Some movie stars and singers don't really need the money," Bob says. "They get millions and million of dollars. "Initially someone needed to get it from a paid CD anyway [before uploading to a file-sharing network]." Nearby, 12-year-old Simon* is building a library of illegal South Park episodes.
He recently fell in love with the cartoon series and now can't get enough of it on free-to-air television. He doesn't see a problem with the copies. Together these children are a sample of generation tech, those young people who have grown up with the internet and with its many jewels and pitfalls at their fingertips.
Whether it is copying the latest hit songs to their mobile phone, finding "cracked" versions of games and other software, or downloading full-length feature films before burning them to DVD, just about everything is available to them online and there is very little, if any, attention paid to questioning the morality of their actions.
"Our dad does it as well," Rose says. "He [downloads] episodes of Stargate and some movies that haven't come here yet. It doesn't worry us," Jonathan says. "We do it because it's easy," Bob says. But they wouldn't dream of stealing a CD from a shop, hacking into a website to steal content, or plagiarising a school assignment.
For them, the ripping mentality does not translate to "physical" crime or cheating at school. "Assignments? No, that's different because the teachers will know that you are cutting-and-pasting and not doing the work," says Rose, with the others in agreement.
Besides, if they cheated on school work, a classmate who worked hard to prepare the assignment from scratch might receive a lower mark than them. "I wouldn't be comfortable with that," Rose says.
The most recent study conducted for the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) (
http://www.aria.com.au), by Quantum Market Research, in 2003, shows illegitimate channels account for 10.7 per cent of all music acquired by the general population in Australia.
Illegal file-sharing and CD burning is higher among under-17s (31 per cent) and in the 18-to-24 age group (21 per cent). Industry experts say that's partly because the laws are misunderstood, and partly because until iTunes Music Store (
http://www.itunes.com) was launched in Australia in November there were few ways to download legal music.
Bob, for example, wasn't aware that Australia's Copyright Act prohibits the copying of one's own CDs onto another storage device, such as an MP3 player.
"I thought you just couldn't sell it to people," he says. Lui*, a 20-year-old rugby player, was also not sure if the DVDs his mates make of downloaded movies are illegal.
But he thinks borrowing them is not as bad as ripping music. In theory, the act also prohibits people making back-up copies of their DVD collection and copying TV programs to watch later - a practice known as time-shifting.
It also prohibits the copying of software, photographs, games and any other authored material without permission. But no record label, film studio or software company is interested in prosecuting individual offenders here at present.
"In Australia we have taken the decision to go against the P2P [peer-to-peer] networks," says Stephen Peach, ARIA's chief executive. The association represents music labels such as Sony BMG and Universal.
Late last year, ARIA successfully sued Sharman Networks, the owner of the popular file-sharing system Kazaa, for allowing its users to illegally share copyright content. Although Kazaa and similar sites warn members not to use their software for illegal purposes (
http://www.au.kazaa.com/eula.htm), the Federal Court held the warnings were ineffective.
Sharman is appealing the decision.
Other P2P sites have been operating normally. Peach believes the appeal will not succeed, but in the meantime is working with record labels and other content providers to increase the availability of legal content in Australia.
These include starting legitimate pay-per-download and subscription websites, and new retail models such as the Sanity (
http://www.sanity.com.au) music kiosks.
Sanity's kiosks launched in February and let shoppers buy and burn individual songs or compilations onto CD or removable storage device in-store.
"Although illegal and causing significant harm to the industry, [illegal downloading] demonstrates preference," Peach says. "Consumers want choice and access to a vast repertoire. The industry must produce compelling alternatives.
"The technical simplicity and the sheer volume of readily available online content is very attractive to music lovers." Francine Garlin, a lecturer in consumer behaviour at the faculty of business at the University of Technology, Sydney, says the laws aren't taken seriously because it's human nature to take risks.
The low probability of getting caught and peer-group pressure are factors influencing the prevalence of file-sharing. It's the show-off factor, she says. "Consumer psychology has answers for that.
We take on roles in groups and we know we can have more or less status [according to the role]. If the glue that binds a group is technology, there could be status conferred to people for what they can [download].
" In a posted comment to the movie chat forum In Film Australia (
http://www.infilm.com.au), site administrator Bucky says people use their judgement when interpreting rules. "Certainly in the eyes of the law there is no doubt [it's illegal], but every person with a brain understands that the law is far from a morally pure entity, thus it is always up to our own sense of judgement about which laws we really take seriously and which laws we don't," he says.
Meanwhile, some research studies are starting to show a small decline in the number of illegal downloads, in favour of legal online purchases. Jason Juma-Ross, senior research analyst at AMR Interactive, says statistics from recent Australian surveys show a small shift to paid music and video downloads, now that they are available.
This is consistent with figures from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (
http://www.ifpi.org), which show the number of illegally available music files on the internet is down 20 per cent on the 1.1 billion peak in 2003.
That's partly due to new legal sites, and partly due to efforts by some artists, such as Madonna, to stamp out the illegal practice by uploading ruined copies of their songs to file-sharing sites. Adrienne Pecotic, executive director of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, says their advertisements screening on rental DVDs and cinemas since mid-2004 are also starting to make a difference to the pirating of movies. The ads start with the phrase:
"You wouldn't steal a car." Pecotic says: "A lot more people understand it's a crime. People don't think everything on the internet is free any more, just as it's not true." The ads have encountered cynicism from illegal movie downloaders. Some chat-room users branded the campaign "lame" and wondered how much interest it would spark among people who may not yet share files. "I wonder how many people see that ad ... then get home and look into downloading movies," says one user.
Pecotic says it is not a criminal offence to download an illegal file or copy a CD - an individual can be sued but not arrested - but it is criminal to upload illegal files for sharing, distributing or profiting. But in the end, she says, children and their parents must question their morals, while government and the industry must better explain the effect of piracy.
"People in chat rooms may not necessarily care, but their children may not get a job in a video store or a role in a movie because of the impact on the business," she says.
"Piracy is a direct threat to the creation [of works]." ARIA's Peach is hopeful that online music retailers such as iTunes and Sanity (
www.sanitydigital.com.au) and ISPs such as BigPond, which last month launched a movie download service (
http://www.bigpondmovies.com), will help make illegal files less attractive.
He believes that in time people will come to see that illegal downloading is "a B-class way of acquiring content".
* Not their real names.
Fair use
In the United States a "fair use" provision in the copyright law permits people to make one copy of a CD or DVD they have purchased, or copy a broadcast TV program, for their personal use.
This means time-shifting is widely accepted, as is copying an entire CD collection onto an MP3 player or onto CDs to enjoy in the car.
The Australian Copyright Council (
http://www.copyright.org.au) has suggested amendments to the Copyright Act to include provision for such "private copying".
Other alternatives include the introduction of a copyright levy added to the price of hardware such as digital music players and video recorders.
Amendments are under consideration by the Federal Government, with no date announced for a decision. Libby Bauch, the council's executive officer, says that in theory until such changes are accepted, copying is illegal.
In practice, however, "it's a non-enforceable activity. It can't be stopped," she says. "The levy system is a practical solution." Infofile At
http://www.moviepiracy.org.au you can dob in a scurvy movie pirate.
Games piracy can be reported to Crimestoppers (
http://www.crimestoppers.com.au).
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technolog...page=fullpage#
Sling Media: We're Good For Cable
Mark Sullivan
Sling Media Inc. CEO Blake Krikorian testified before the House Commerce Committee that his video “place shifting” device will help, not hurt, broadcasters and cable providers.
Sling Media's “Slingbox” grabs the TV signal at the home and slings it out over a broadband connection to a laptop, cell phone or any other connected device. Where the Tivo allows viewers to “time shift” their programming, Sling allows them to “place shift” it.
While Sling is still a young company and the quality of "slung" media is poor given bandwidth constraints, some members of the content and broadcasting communities have already expressed concern over the device. Krikorian points out, however, that the skepticism is unfounded because Sling neither records content nor distributes it to more than one end point at a time.
“I think for the cable company this is a great thing, I think a product like this is going to help drive their services,” Krikorian told the Committee Wednesday (March 29).
According to Krikorian, Sling helps extend the reach of content owners and broadcasters. “From a local broadcaster perspective, this is one of the technologies that will help broadcasters stay relevant in this day and age,” Krikorian says. “With Sling in the home, you could reach me for 10 hours a day that you couldn’t reach me before.”
The National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) declined to comment on the Slingbox, as did Comcast Corp.
The House Commerce Committee is holding hearings to decide whether or not to make changes to "fair use" language in the copyright law now that time- and place- shifting technologies have emerged.
John Feehery of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said the large studios want to work directly with makers of new technologies on digital rights management issues. “We have to have the protections in place so that it doesn’t get out of hand and lead to massive piracy,” Feehery explained.
Krikorian told the committee that fears of copyright infringement have hung over the company since its inception. Investors too, he said, were nervous about backing the idea because of potential legal problems.
“It was very difficult to raise money; investors were very nervous,” Krikorian told the committee. “It was tough living under that shadow of possible litigation.”
The Slingbox has been selling for just over a year now, Krikorian says. His company won’t reveal how many of the devices have been sold, only that it’s in the six figures. The product is manufactured in a former Sony factory owned by a private company in Singapore, he said.
“You need to help preserve a marketplace where new innovation is possible and people can work and develop new products under fair use [law] and not have to ask permission in advance,” Krikorian said.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/s...leID=184416953
Jailed Chinese Journalist's Family Mulls Filing Court Action Against Yahoo
AFX
Internet firm Yahoo may face legal action for allegedly providing information which allowed a Chinese journalist to be jailed for 10 years for leaking state secrets, his family said.
Zhang Yu, representing the family of Shi Tao, said they were considering taking Yahoo Hong Kong Holdings to court either here or in the United States.
'We believe what (Yahoo) did was illegal so we are considering taking Yahoo to court,' Zhang told reporters, adding that Yahoo had refused to discuss the matter with him.
Shi was sentenced in April last year after posting on the Internet a government order barring Chinese media from marking the 15th anniversary of the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown on democracy activists.
Yahoo allegedly provided information that proved Shi had emailed the order from his office computer at the Contemporary Business News.
Pro-democracy legislator and lawyer Albert Ho showed journalists a copy of the verdict issued by a court in the central Chinese province of Hunan.
The document said: 'Yahoo Hong Kong Holdings provided materials that confirmed the user's information.' It also gave the IP (Internet Protocol) address of Shi's computer and his work phone number and address.
Ho said a formal complaint has been made to Hong Kong's Office of the Privacy Commission for Personal Data, a privacy watchdog, which told them it will investigate the case.
Shi has insisted he is innocent, arguing that the government order was not a state secret.
http://www.forbes.com/work/feeds/afx...fx2636580.html
Toshiba Launches 1st HD-DVD Player in Japan
Martyn Williams
Toshiba began selling the world’s first HD-DVD player on Friday in Japan, moving the format battle between the world’s largest consumer electronics makers from the floors of trade shows to retail stores.
HD-DVD is backed by Toshiba, the DVD Forum and companies including Microsoft and Intel, and is vying for supremacy with Blu-ray Disc, which is backed by Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Samsung Electronics and others, in the race to replace DVD for high-definition content.
Toshiba’s first player, the HD-XA1, is one of two models first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. It’s scheduled to go on sale in the United States in April along with another player, but the Japan launch Friday marks the first time a dedicated player for either format has reached the market.
The player was originally due out late last year, but delays in completing a content protection specification meant Toshiba had to push the launch back a few months. The player goes on sale just over a month after a preliminary version of the specification, called the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), was completed.
The late finalization of AACS affected content providers as well as hardware makers such as Toshiba. The first video content for HD-DVD isn’t due on sale in Japan until April 7.
Toshiba will make about 2,000 of the players per month at first, but expects total worldwide sales in the next year of 600,000 to 700,000 units, said Yoshihide Fujii, head of Toshiba’s consumer electronics unit, at a news conference in Tokyo.
The player will sell for 110,000 yen (US$936) in Japan. In the North American market there will also be a cheaper player, the HD-A1, priced at $500. Toshiba said the price in Japan is based on its expectation that video enthusiasts will be first to adopt the technology, while in the United States, the prices are aimed more at average consumers who are more price conscious.
Early buyers of HD-DVD and Blu-ray products face the risk that their chosen format might eventually be pushed to the sidelines of the market. There is at least one incentive to purchase now, however: The HD-XA1 has no region coding for the HD-DVD content, meaning it can play HD-DVD discs purchased anywhere in the world. A decision on region codes isn’t expected to be made for several months.
http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=19788
Sony Trounces MSFT & Nintendo In Brand Trust Survey
Vladimir Cole
Forrester Research has published a new report that examines the trust that American households place in PC and consumer electronics (CE) brands, including the brands of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. The results may be surprising to gamers.
In Forrester's analysis, Sony's brand garnered the highest marks of the three companies (Sony also ranked 3rd out of 22 companies), earning an average grade of A plus. Of the companies surveyed, only Bose and Dell ranked higher than Sony overall. Meanwhile, Microsoft's brand ranked 20 out of 22 brands, dragged down by low brand trust. Nintendo's played 17 out of 22, pulled towards the bottom of the ranking by low brand potential and low brand adoption.
One figure from the report showed how the companies compared on the dimensions of brand potential and brand trust. In this figure, Sony and Nintendo were clustered together in the middle of the pack, with Sony enjoying higher trust and higher potential. Microsoft, however, was hovering near the origin, a clear outlier position indicating that the company will fight an uphill battle in trying to win consumers over to its CE and PC products.
A couple revealing quotes from the study:
· "Microsoft faces big consumer defection risk." Approximately 5.4 million households "know they run Microsoft software but would be just as happy to leave it behind -- if they could."
· "Sony's current customers are affluent, young, and more likely than the general population to stick with a brand they like."
Remember, though, that this survey is based on broad attitudes towards these companies' entire product lines. The applicability of these results to the gaming market is an open question (and perhaps unfair to the gaming brands that Sony and Microsoft have endeavored to build through the PlayStation and Xbox brands, respectively. Intuitively, however, the attitudes expressed in the survey feel close to the attitudes we see on this blog from commenters.
Microsoft tends to be afforded very little leeway or margin for error. The company hasn't got a ton of trust, at least amongst Internet communities that have for years now vilified the company for real or perceived exploitation of dominant marketshare in the PC software market. Additionally, Microsoft is also the newest of the big three console makers, so it's had less time than the other two to build trust within the gaming segment. We're all still trying to figure out the company's sophomore effort.
That said, perhaps the real insight to be gained from this study is Apple's standing on the brand trust scale. If Apple were to introduce a gaming handheld targeted at the mainstream and designed as well as the iPod, this study indicates that the company would be a strong competitor versus Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
[update 1: replaced the post image with a new image, added URL link to Forrester's report, reduced the size of the quotes in the two bullet points, revised language throughout.]
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/03/30/so...-trust-survey/
Seeking Changes To The DMCA
Declan McCullagh
Because of a controversial 1998 copyright law, it may be illegal to defang even potentially harmful software, like the anticopying technology found on some Sony BMG Music Entertainment CDs.
But those strict legal restrictions should stay in effect, entertainment industry lobbyists said Friday, when they urged the U.S. Copyright Office to avoid making any changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
"There are many other avenues to address these questions, and certainly many other laws that may be relevant in this circumstance," said Steven Metalitz, a senior vice president at the International Intellectual Property Alliance. The group represents large copyright holders.
Computer security experts have asked the Copyright Office to alter the DMCA to protect their research. Edward Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, said Friday that he and graduate student J. Alex Halderman uncovered the Sony problem a month before the news about it broke in November--but feared a lawsuit under Section 1201 of the DMCA if they disclosed it without the record label's authorization.
Because of the lag time, "a great many of consumers were at risk every day," Felten said. "Our exemption request is fundamentally asking for protection for those consumers."
Under federal law, the Copyright Office is required to solicit public opinion every few years on whether any amendments--called "exemptions"--to the DMCA are necessary. Section 1201 of the law broadly restricts circumventing "a technological measure that effectively controls access" to a copyright work.
Sony rootkit's lesson
In the past, security researchers would notify the vendors first of any bugs, but now they're afraid to disclose such flaws without first consulting a lawyer, Felten said. He added that the DMCA has discouraged security researchers from embarking on new projects and has driven some away from the field. (Felten once was threatened with a DMCA lawsuit by the recording industry for exposing weaknesses in a music-watermarking scheme.)
After a public outcry last fall, Sony voluntarily said it would halt production of certain copy-protected CDs. Those CDs installed a bundle of software, including a "rootkit" used to mask the presence of copy-protection software--and, if abused, malicious programs as well. The incident prompted one Homeland Security official to suggest banning rootkits.
Aaron Perzanowski, a law student at the University of California at Berkeley's Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic, and clinic director Deirdre Mulligan, said that Felten could have been subject to legal liability if he had disclosed his findings about the Sony rootkits. After he found the flaw, Felten said he called lawyers and spent a month in negotiations with them, and decided not to publish his results right away. Programmer Mark Russinovich did instead.
Lobbyist Metalitz offered a detailed list of reasons why he said such an interpretation of the DMCA was incorrect. The law already provides sufficient protection in Section 1201 for researchers like Felten to do their work, he said. (That section, 1201(j), permits bypassing anticopying technology "solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting, a security flaw or vulnerability.")
But in the Sony BMG incident, the record label's first crack at an uninstaller proved riddled with new problems, Felten said, and even the latest version of the patch won't prevent reinstallation of the rootkit each time the type of copy-protected CD is inserted into a computer. Felten and other security professionals have been able to devise alternative uninstallers that would prevent such reinstallation indefinitely, but are worried that their "unauthorized" methods could get them sued.
"It's this uncertainty that creates the very risk," agreed Matthew Schruers, a lawyer for the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Sun Microsystems, Verizon and Yahoo. "So that raises for me a perplexing question: Why on earth are we putting cybersecurity in the hands of copyright lawyers?"
Previous DMCA exemptions granted by the Copyright Office include: Researchers into filtering could study blacklisting techniques, and obsolete copy-protection schemes could be legally bypassed.
When reviewing the DMCA, the Library of Congress is required to consider the impact that the anticircumvention sections have "on criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research (and) the effect of circumvention of technological measures on the market for or value of copyrighted works."
The Copyright Office received more than 100 comments on its notice of proposed rulemaking published last year and plans to release its final determinations by the end of October. Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights, said that the office has reached no conclusions yet on any of the exemptions.
http://news.com.com/Seeking+changes+...3-6056616.html
Cheap bastards
Howard Stern Lashes Out At Some Fans
AP
Howard Stern is angry more fans haven't followed him to satellite radio. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the 52-year-old shock jock lashes out at those of his fan base who haven't made the transition to Sirius Satellite Radio.
In January, Stern moved his popular and bawdy morning show to the subscription satellite radio provider.
"I was just at my psychiatrist and I said, `I just got great news: We hit the 4 million mark. And I'm angry. It should be 20 million,'" Stern says in the magazine, on newsstands Monday.
"It's insulting to me that everyone hasn't come with me. I take it personally," he says.
"I want to say to my audience ... `You haven't come with me yet? How dare you? We're up to wild, crazy stuff, the show has never sounded better. You cheap bastard!'"
In February, CBS Radio, formerly known as Infinity Broadcasting, filed a lawsuit against Stern for improperly using airtime to promote his new show on Sirius.
Stern has claimed the lawsuit is without merit.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT
Seattle's Shattered Rave 'Family' Seeks Answers to Killings
Jessica Kowal
The candykids, juggalos, groovers and burners are uniting here with fresh purpose this week. Dancing to the synthesized music that binds them together, planting memorials of candles and their signature beaded bracelets, they join together not to rave, but to mourn slain friends.
One woman had a rainbow of yarn woven into her hair. Two men had faces painted in red and black. A man in a suit and tie had a pinkish mohawk. Dozens of others wore baggy clothing or unremarkable dress. All showed up on Tuesday at a spring-green park with a spectacular view of the Space Needle.
Exhausted by sorrow and lack of sleep, they seemed dumbstruck that the community of ravers, who follow a mantra of "plur," for "peace, love, unity and respect," had been punctured by senseless violence.
Six friends were killed early Saturday, when, the police say, Aaron Kyle Huff, 28, barreled through the front door of a small house on Republican Street, armed with a semiautomatic handgun and a 12-gauge shotgun.
At 7 a.m., a few dozen ravers were in the house to talk, drink beer, sleep, watch cartoons or otherwise decompress after attending a zombie-themed rave elsewhere.
Mr. Huff, an unemployed onetime pizza deliverer, had been invited to the house party by others at the rave. Without warning, he collected the guns from his truck parked nearby and swiftly killed four men and two teenage girls with gunshots to the head and chest, the King County Medical Examiner said Wednesday.
Confronted by a police officer, Mr. Huff committed suicide. The police have not determined his motive.
To the mourners in Volunteer Park and to those who lingered at the house on Wednesday with their tents and trinkets, it was unbearable that Mr. Huff had brutalized the self-described "family" of music-loving slackers, students and young professionals who often exchange beaded bracelets, called candy, as a friendship gesture.
"These are peaceful people," said Wally Hansen, 24, a rave promoter from Tukwila whose face was drawn and pale, with dark circles under his eyes. "Why would he do this to people who accepted him, who welcomed him into their own home?"
The victims, ages 14 to 32 and with rave nicknames like Sushi, Deacon and Chinadoll, were familiar faces at spirited parties attended by hundreds of people in the Puget Sound region. In warehouses, art spaces or nightclubs on Friday and Saturday nights, dressed in clothing that defines them into smaller cliques like candykids and juggalos, they dance energetically to musical genres like house, trance and jungle and stop to rest in "chill rooms" tuned with quieter ambient music.
The dancing is powered by energy drinks, candy and snacks, although many ravers concede that alcohol, marijuana and Ecstasy are part of the scene.
The rave community here had been mostly invisible to people who were not part of it. After the killings, talk-show hosts and columnists, intent on finding lessons, have focused on the youngest victims, Melissa Moore, 14, a ninth grader from Milton, and Suzanne Thorne, 15, a 10th grader from Bellevue.
Many people have criticized what they see as lax gun-control laws, pointing out that Mr. Huff was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2000 after shooting a moose sculpture in his Montana hometown, Whitefish. He was allowed to keep the two guns used in the shooting here.
Other critics have faulted what they describe as permissive rave culture, lax parents or lenient laws that allow teenagers into clubs where alcohol is not served.
Kyle Moore, Ms. Moore's father, refused to blame anyone but the gunman. He said he and his daughter, nicknamed Chinadoll, trusted other ravers to protect her.
"She just loved meeting the different people, seeing the different costumes, and she loved the music, the beat," Mr. Moore said in a telephone interview. "She was brighter than the sun out there. I just would love to know why she felt that she couldn't call me to pick her up."
Most likely, the two teenagers were waiting for the county bus to restart its downtown route at 7 a.m., said Nicole Loerke, 17, of Everett, who, like other candykids at the park, had a peach-colored Care Bears backpack. Ms. Loerke started going to raves last year, she said, when she had no friends in high school.
"They accept you as a person, the virtues and values you hold," she said of the ravers.
She said that she noticed Mr. Huff at the rave and that he stood against a wall with folded arms and did not mingle in a millieu where people greet one another as close friends within minutes of meeting.
"I asked him, 'Is there anything wrong?' and he turned his head," Ms. Loerke said. "I said, 'If you need anyone to talk to, I'm here to listen.' He looked right at me, and said, 'Thank you.' He must have had some screws loose."
Outside the Republican Street house, the ravers pitched tents on the grass and stayed in shifts to protect a growing memorial of candles and candy bracelets strung with words like "plur" and "luv all." The neighbors have given them hot chocolate and offered the use of bathrooms.
Josh McPharlin, 24, a rave promoter, looked at the mementos on the sidewalk and said: "I enjoyed these people. It's just unbelievable that I won't ever be able to spend time with them again."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/na...tle.html?8hpib
CD Sales, Shipments Down in 2005
Thomas Mennecke
It's been an era of change for the music industry. After achieving a peak year in terms of total units shipped and dollar value in 1999, these values have been on the steady decline. Perhaps most dramatic is the continued and accelerated decrease in the public's interest in the Compact Disc.
In 2000, the total number of CD units shipped was 942.5 million, with a total value of just over 13.2 billion dollars. This represented the CD format's peak year, although combined sales of all formats were already in decline.
In sales statistics just released by the RIAA, 2005 faired little better with 8% drop in CD units shipped. Accompanying this decline was an 8.1% drop in dollar value from 2004. In all, the total number of CD units shipped fell from 767.0 million in 2004 to 705.4 million in 2005.
Dollar value also fell substantially from 11.4 billion to 10.5 billion. This decline represents the greatest drop since 2002, when shipped units and dollar value fell by 8.9% and 6.7% respectively.
Its apparent since 1999, something occurred which suddenly reversed the public's interest in physical media. Some blame Internet piracy, others the brief global recession. Perhaps a more detailed look at the RIAA's statistics reveals a less complex answer.
Since digital music's introduction, growth for the music industry has been impressive. Out of all available formats, including DVD Audio, digital downloads have clearly led the charge in the new millennium. The total number of units shipped (downloaded) totaled 139.4 million in 2004, and then skyrocketed to 366.9 million in 2005. Dollar value nearly mimicked this trend, by increasing from 138.0 million in 2004 to 363.3 million in 2005 - a 163.3% increase.
With a near limitless demand for MP3 players - rather than bulky portable CD players - it’s becoming apparent that convenience is driving the music industry's recovery. Interest in digital music has become so strong that it continues to reverse the industry's fortunes. Although every physical format continues to suffer with lackluster performance, the digital format generated enough interest to increase total units shipped (CDs, digital, etc) to over 1.3 billion 2005 - a record high. Total dollar value continued to decline however, but only by 0.6% from 2004.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1143
Windows Hasta La Vista - Ironclad Security
Robert Storey
Review
It has been three long years to the day since we last looked at that unusual distribution called Windows. Although at that time it was considered by many to be little else than a bizarre joke (who on earth would design an operating system that doesn't provide a way to grep files?), a recent rumour about a new release has piqued our curiosity. Developed by a large group of programmers who, believe it or not, all work in one building, the new version is predicted by some journalists to be one of the most secure operating systems ever created. Robert Storey, our ardent distribution reviewer, couldn't hold on any longer and downloaded the most recent beta version of Windows Vista from a nearby mirror to take a look.
Introduction
Greetings to all! As some of you may recall, it's been a long three years since I last occupied this space, writing a review of Windows XP - An Operating System You Can Trust. Sadly, I must confess that the reason for my prolonged absence from this web site is that I was in trouble with the law once again. As my former readers will no doubt remember, I was previously under the influence of evil Linux hackers. During that time, I committed several serious crimes - in particular, I violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and infringed several software patents. Fortunately, that crime spree was brought to an ignominious end when the Intellectual Property Police raided our Linux Users Group meeting. Being a first-time offender, I was paroled after only eight months in prison. I have since gone on to lead a clean and productive life using only safe and secure Microsoft software installed on my computer.
Linux Users Group Meeting
Alas, I must confess to backsliding. My downfall came in the form of a computer magazine. Inside the magazine jacket was a CD containing the evil Linux operating system! I foolishly installed the software, and - just like an alcoholic who claims he's only going to have "one drink" - I was hooked again!
Fortunately, Windows XP was still installed on my hard drive. Windows correctly detected the presence of a Linux partition, and the built-in Microsoft Snitchware immediately reported the situation to the Department of Homeland Security. Since installing Linux was a violation of my parole, I was arrested by the FBI and sentenced to a further two years in a federal penitentiary.
All this might sound tragic, but really, it's not. In the end, things worked out for the best. After only one year in prison, I became eligible for a new experimental rehabilitation program. I am happy to report that it's been a great success! After receiving counselling, medication, electroshock therapy and a prefrontal lobotomy, I am once again a happy Windows user.
As a condition of my early release from custody, the parole board has ordered me to perform 300 hours of community service. This I have gladly done. Working in close cooperation with the Business Software Alliance, I have been visiting public schools, lecturing students on the evils of open source software. I can't begin to describe the satisfaction this work gives me, saving impressionable young minds from the temptation of so-called "free software." At the end of my talk, our team hands out T-shirts emblazoned with the motto, "Linux - Just say No!"
As a further public service, we then audit the students' computers for pirated software. Just last week we caught three students with unlicensed video games installed on their machines. Since they were minors, the students were not arrested - rather, they were put in foster care and their parents were fined US$150,000 for each pirated program. Considering the seriousness of the crime, this was a mere slap on the wrist. However, since these were first-time offenders, it's understandable that the authorities should be so lenient.
Installation
This is supposed to be an operating system review, so I apologize for the above digression. Sometimes I just get carried away with my personal issues - it's probably just a side effect of the lobotomy. So let's get back on topic.
Today, I am reviewing Microsoft's greatest operating system ever, Windows Hasta La Vista, or WHLV (which is also the name of a talk radio station in Hattiesburg, Mississippi - Microsoft is now suing them for trademark infringement). But to simplify things, we'll just call this OS "Windows Vista" or "Vista" from now on.
Those who have been following the latest tech news are well aware of the fact that Vista will not, in fact, be released to the public until early 2007. Fortunately, for techies who just can't wait to get their hands on the latest and greatest offerings from Microsoft, there are two simple solutions - pay the Earth to become a Windows developer, or volunteer to be a beta tester. I chose to do the latter.
The beta version of Windows Vista - officially known as the Community Technology Preview (CTP) - can be downloaded through Microsoft's developers' site. Please note that the CTP is a time-limited copy which will self-destruct (along with your data) at a secret predetermined date.
I enthusiastically downloaded my copy and began the installation procedure. This might be a good time to mention that the Vista installation program differs from the Windows XP installer in several significant ways. For example, when XP installs, it merely wipes out any Linux partitions on the hard drive. Windows Vista, on the other hand, will go much further - it will mount any Linux partitions it finds and then plant viruses and root kits in /usr/bin. After all, Linux hackers have been doing stuff like this for years to Window users - now it's time for some payback.
Just as when you install XP, at the very end of the installation process, Vista insists that you need to type in a user's registration key. However, XP requires a mere 25-digit alpha-numeric key which is not even case-sensitive. Vista, which is far more secure, requires a 250-digit key which is case-sensitive and also includes spaces and various symbols. For example, a valid registration key might look something like this:
5|_4!C|@W/#\r$cw3 r\/1=|\xV|Zb0+aR t3qh h^0w ilE |r_1]n\/x-(pY)5\C 3k&|\|3*j[%=G(.Mx^G$Hd:" 7{OK4"GDe:E &y$C[;}4!s3C|@W/O8@#\r$Uc~w3 r\`/1=|\xV|Z"b>,0+]{*$4%f_b+a@Q=-^.>c#wC|@=}4!+sG$]Hd:C)|@W/0+&]{ qC h=G?(>,0+] \/1?+n]e{f *^j0w@~>n V^"|k\E$
If you make a mistake when typing the key, the installation program will abort and you have to start over from the beginning. Furthermore, users will be required to retype the key every time they restart Windows. Leave it to Microsoft to come up with such a clever method to protect us from the evils of software piracy!
All About Security
As you can see from the foregoing process, Microsoft is very concerned about security. Indeed, the 250-digit registration key is only the first step in protecting users from depraved software pirates. Microsoft has incorporated many other exciting features to ensure that Vista is the most secure OS ever!
Vista comes with built-in support for Microsoft's Software Quality Assurance program. The way it works is that if users inadvertently attempt to install a dangerous open source program such as the notorious OpenOffice, Vista will intervene. The fiendish program won't be installed, and Vista will instead download the equivalent closed source program (in this example, Microsoft Office) and automatically bill the customer's credit card. I can't but express my admiration on this innovative approach to protecting customers, as well as Microsoft's profits.
Microsoft's award winning browser, Internet Explorer, has also been beefed up with new security features. For example, attempting to download illicit MP3 files will result in a security alert being emailed to the RIAA. Similarly, any attempt to share movies will be reported to the MPAA. Software pirates will have their activities reported to the Business Software Alliance. All other suspicious activities will be reported to the Department of Homeland Security and Interpol. Only through such diligent cooperative efforts between Microsoft and the relevant authorities can we protect our cherished free society.
One frequently requested feature by users is the ability to encrypt the filesystem, and Vista supports this. However, the filesystem is not encrypted by default - the user has to set this up. When you enable this feature, Vista sends an email to inform the US National Security Agency (NSA) that you have done so. Then, using the NSA Back Door, FBI agents can periodically check your computer to ensure that your machine contains no terrorist messages, pornography or open source software. Users might be concerned about having such a back door on their system, but they really shouldn't be. The FBI has assured everybody that they will not abuse this power, and only concentrate on catching terrorists and other miscreants. I see no reason not to believe them. After all, if you can't trust the FBI, who can you trust?
Project Cyborg
One of Microsoft's most innovative projects yet involves the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. These "tags" - a chip smaller than a grain of rice - have generated much discussion lately. Large supermarkets and department stores are very interested in placing RFIDs inside of products - then a tag reader at the cash register would automatically ring up the purchase without the need to physically handle the merchandise. RFIDs have also been used for electronic toll collection. The chips have also been placed under the skin of dogs and cats in order to identify lost pets. Most recently, several countries have decided to put RFIDs into "biometric passports" - this makes it much easier for criminals and terrorists to identify wealthy foreign tourists in a crowd, which helps facilitate mugging and kidnapping.
Further expanding on this great new technology, Microsoft plans to use RFIDs with Window Vista in order to facilitate payment. Here's how it would work. First, Vista users would get the tag surgically implanted in a convenient location, most likely the back of the neck. The RFID would contain an individual's Windows product registration key, so "chipped" users would no longer need to type it. Furthermore, customers with the embedded tag would be able to enjoy online shopping without the need to type credit card numbers - a tag reader on their computer would do all the work. This system is destined to replace Microsoft Passport. Other uses for the embedded RFID tag would be to alert authorities if users attempt to access forbidden web sites, or send emails to shady individuals on a government watch list.
Furthermore, thanks to Microsoft's cooperative agreement with with Wal-Mart, chipped customers would no longer need to pay cash or show their credit cards at the checkout stand.
Consumers are going to love these great new convenience features. Nevertheless, some whiny so-called "privacy advocates" have made a big fuss over Project Cyborg. Without a doubt, they are a bunch of left-wing Linux loonies who can be counted upon to always oppose the advancement of technology. Needless to say, it's a waste of time trying to argue with these Luddites - it's just best to ignore them.
Special Edition
As you may have read elsewhere, Microsoft plans to release several editions of Windows Vista, thus catering to specialized markets. For example, several high-ranking government officials and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates would like a special edition that lacks a registration key, does not monitor online activity, and doesn't support Project Cyborg. Microsoft will generously cater to these customers' needs by producing a version that meets their requirements - however, it will only run a rare computer based on a CPU called an Itanium, affectionately known to geeks as the Itanic. Literally dozens of Itanics have been sold so far, and market analysts predict that nearly 100 will be in circulation by year 2010.
Conclusion
Clearly, with Windows Hasta La Vista, Microsoft has another winner on its hands. With valuable built-in convenience features and ironclad security, Microsoft has definitely responded to customers' needs. Furthermore, erh...ahh, what's this? Sorry everybody, somebody is at the door. Just a moment...
It's the Intellectual Property Police. Hmm...they've got a warrant. It seems that by writing this review, I violated the Non-Disclosure Agreement which I clicked on when I downloaded the beta. Damn, I really need to read those 150-page End User License Agreements before clicking on "I Agree." Oh well, you've got hand it to Windows Vista - just look at how efficient it was at reporting my illegal activities to the authorities! What an amazing operating system!
I'm about to be arrested, so I guess it might be a few more years before you'll be hearing from me. Given the circumstances, I can't think of a more appropriate thing to say except, Hasta la vista!
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?res...eview-winvista
Late Grateful Dead Leader's Toilet Stolen
The long, strange trip continues for Jerry Garcia's toilet. Police say the Grateful Dead leader's commode was stolen recently from a driveway along with three other toilets and a bidet, The Press Democrat newspaper reported Saturday.
Garcia's salmon-colored toilet was the subject of a legal battle before it was finally moved to Sonoma, to await shipment to a Canadian casino.
It's unclear if the toilet was swiped by a wayward Deadhead or a thief remodeling a bathroom. Police have no suspects or leads.
Henry Koltys bought Garcia's Marin County home for $1.39 million in 1997 and removed the toilet and other items he planned to sell to raise money for a charity.
After Koltys sold the house to a friend of the band's, the new owner sued to block the auction. The dispute was resolved last year, and Koltys moved the items to his home in Sonoma, about 40 miles north of San Francisco.
Last month, Koltys sold the Grateful Dead singer's toilet for $2,550 to online casino Goldenpalace.com, which planned to use it as part of a traveling marketing exhibit. The casino is offering a $250 reward for its return.
Henry Koltys said Friday that the toilet once stood in the master bathroom of Garcia, who died in 1995 at age 53. "It would have been his personal head," he said.
The casino has made other unusual purchases in the last year - it paid $25,000 for actor William Shatner's kidney stones and $28,000 for a grilled cheese sandwich that reportedly had the image of the Virgin Mary on it, Koltys said.
Jonathon Lipsin, who worked for Garcia as a gardener and now owns a Northern California record store, said the toilet might appeal to dedicated Deadheads.
"It's a little gross," Lipsin said. "But I could see it at a rock 'n' roll museum, too."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T
Internet Injects Sweeping Change Into U.S. Politics
Adam Nagourney
The transformation of American politics by the Internet is accelerating with the approach of the 2006 Congressional and 2008 White House elections, prompting the rewriting of rules on advertising, fund-raising, mobilizing supporters and even the spreading of negative information.
Democrats and Republicans are sharply increasing their use of e-mail, interactive Web sites, candidate and party blogs, and text-messaging to raise money, organize get-out-the-vote efforts and assemble crowds for a rallies. The Internet, they said, appears to be far more efficient, and less costly, than the traditional tools of politics, notably door knocking and telephone banks.
Analysts say the campaign television advertisement, already diminishing in influence with the proliferation of cable stations, faces new challenges as campaigns experiment with technology that allows direct messaging to more specific audiences, and through unconventional means.
Those include Podcasts featuring a daily downloaded message from a candidate and so-called viral attack videos, designed to trigger peer-to-peer distribution by e-mail chains, without being associated with any candidate or campaign. Campaigns are now studying popular Internet social networks, like Friendster and Facebook, as ways to reaching groups of potential supporters with similar political views or cultural interests.
President Bush's media consultant, Mark McKinnon, said television advertising, while still critical to campaigns, had become markedly less influential in persuading voters that it was even two years ago.
"I feel like a woolly mammoth," Mr. McKinnon said.
What the parties and the candidates are undergoing now is in many ways similar to what has happened in other sectors of the nation — including the music industry, newspapers and retailing — as they try to adjust to, and take advantage of, the Internet as its influence spreads across American society. To a considerable extent, they are responding to, and playing catch up with, bloggers who have demonstrated the power of their forums to harness the energy on both sides of the ideological divide.
Certainly, the Internet was a significant factor in 2004, particularly with the early success in fund-raising and organizing by Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential contender. But officials in both parties say the extent to which the parties have now recognized and rely on the Internet has increased at a staggering rate over the past two years.
The percentage of Americans who went online for election news jumped from 13 percent in the 2002 election cycle to 29 percent in 2004, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center after the last presidential election. A Pew survey released earlier this month found that 50 million Americans go to the Internet for news every day, up from 27 million people in March 2002, a reflection of the fact that the Internet is now available to 70 percent of Americans.
This means, aides said, rethinking every assumption about running a campaign: how to reach different segments of voters, how to get voters to the polls, how to raise money, and the best way to have a candidate interact with the public. In 2004, John Edwards, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina and his party's vice presidential candidate, spent much of his time talking to voters in living rooms in New Hampshire and Iowa; now he is putting aside hours every week to videotape responses to videotaped questions, the entire exchange posted on his blog.
"The effect of the Internet on politics will be every bit as transformational as television was," said Ken Mehlman, the Republican national chairman. "If you want to get your message out, the old way of paying someone to make a TV ad is insufficient: You need your message out through the Internet, through e-mail, through talk radio."
Michael Cornfield, a political science professor at George Washington University who studies politics and the Internet, said campaigns were actually late in coming to the game. "Politicians are having a hard time reconciling themselves to a medium where they can't control the message," Professor Cornfield said. "Politics is lagging, but politics is not going to be immune to the digital revolution."
If there was any resistance, it is rapidly melting away.
Mark Warner, the former Democratic governor of Virginia, began preparing for a potential 2008 presidential campaign by hiring a blogging pioneer, Jerome Armstrong, a noteworthy addition to the usual first-wave of presidential campaign hiring of political consultants and fund-raisers.
Mr. Warner is now one of at least three potential presidential candidates — the others are the party's 2004 presidential and vice presidential candidates, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Mr. Edwards — who are routinely posting what aides say are their own writings on campaign blogs or on public blogs like the Daily Kos, the nation's largest.
Analysts said that the Internet appeared to be a particularly potent way to appeal to new, young voters, a subject of particular interest to both parties in these politically turbulent times. In the 2004 campaign, 80 percent of people between the age of 18 and 34 who contributed to Mr. Kerry's campaign made their contribution online, Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University.
Not incidentally, as it becomes more integrated in American politics, the Internet is being pressed into service for the less seemly side of campaigns.
Both parties have set up Web sites to discredit opponents. In Tennessee, Republicans spotlighted what they described as the lavish spending habits of Representative Harold E. Ford Jr. with a site called
www.fancyford.com. That site drew 100,000 hits the first weekend, and extensive coverage in the mainstream Tennessee press, which is typically the real goal of creating sites like this. And this weekend, the Republicans launched a new attack site,
www.bobsbaggage.com, that is aimed at Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and focused on ethics accusations against him.
For their part, Democrats have set up decoy Web sites to post documents with damaging information about Republicans. They described this means of distribution as far more efficient than the more traditional slip of a document to a newspaper reporter.
A senior party official, who was granted anonymity in exchange for describing a clandestine effort, said the party created a now-defunct site called D.C. Inside Scoop to, among other things, distribute a document written by Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, discussing the political benefits of the Terri Schiavo case. A second such site,
http://capitolbuzz.blogspot.com, spread more mischievous information: the purported sighting of Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, parking in a spot reserved for the handicapped.
On the left in particular, bloggers have emerged as something of a police force guarding against disloyalty among Democrats, as Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic consultant, learned after he told The Washington Post that bloggers and online donors "are not representative of the majority you need to win elections."
A Daily Kos blogger wrote: "Not one dime, ladies and gentlemen, to anything connected with Steve Elmendorf. Anyone stupid enough to actually give a quote like that deserves to have every single one of his funding sources dry up." Asked about the episode, Mr. Elmendorf insisted the posting had not hurt his business, but added contritely: "Since I got attacked on them, I read blogs a lot more and I find them very useful." One of the big challenges to the campaigns is not only adjusting to the changes of the past two years but also to anticipate now the kind of technological changes that might be on hand by the next presidential campaign. Among those most cited are the ability of campaigns to beam video campaign advertisements to cell phones.
"All these consultants are still trying to make sense of what blogs are, and I think by 2008 they are going to have a pretty good idea: They are going to be like, 'We're hot and we're hip and we're bloggin',' " said Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos. "But by 2008, the blogs are going to be so institutionalized, it's not going to be funny."
Bloggers, for all the benefits they might bring to both parties, have proved to be a complicating political influence for Democrats. They have tugged the party consistently to the left, particularly on issues like the war, and have been openly critical of such moderate Democrats as Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.
Still, Democrats have been particularly enthusiastic about the potential of this technology to get the party back on track, with many Democratic leaders arguing that the Internet is today for Democrats what talk radio was for Republicans 10 years ago. "This new media becomes much more important to us because conservatives have been more dominant in traditional media," said Simon Rosenberg, the president of the centrist New Democratic Network. "This stuff becomes really critical for us."
For all the attention being paid to Internet technology, there remain definite limitations to its reach. Internet use declines markedly among Americans over 65, who tend to be the nation's most reliable voters. Until recently, it tended to be more heavily used by middle- and upper-income people.
And while the Internet is efficient at reaching supporters, who tend to visit and linger at political sites, it has proved to be much less effective at swaying voters who are not interested in politics. "The holy grail that everybody is looking for right now is how can you use the Internet for persuasion," Mr. Armstrong, the Warner campaign Internet adviser, said.
In this age of multitasking, voters are not as captive to a Web site as they might be to a 30-second television advertisement, or a campaign mailing. That was a critical lesson of the collapse of Mr. Dean's presidential campaign, after he initially enjoyed great Internet success in raising money and drawing crowds.
"It's very easy to look at something and just click delete," said Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. "At least if they are taking out a piece of mail, you know they are taking it out and looking at it on the way to the garbage can."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/wa...rtner=homepage
Computer Software That Can Turn You Into a Songwriter
Michael Walker
I'M not a musician, but I recently composed and recorded a song. More than that, in a Paul McCartneyesque fit of post-Beatles hubris, I played all the instruments and produced and engineered the entire thing, even though I have no experience producing and engineering anything more complicated than a Bombay martini.
The title is "Eventide," meant to evoke not some ye olde troubadour's serenade but the trademark I glimpsed on a fearsome-looking piece of sound reinforcement equipment backstage at a Ted Nugent concert. "Eventide" is four blistering minutes and 31 seconds long; it features three electric guitars, electric bass, grand piano, electric piano, two string sections, synthesizer, drums, congas, bongos, tambourine and shaker. I think it's smashing, frankly — the old "Avengers" theme smudged with the dark atmospherics of Sigur Ros.
There's just one thing: I didn't compose "Eventide" any more than Ashlee Simpson sang "Pieces of Me" on "Saturday Night Live." The song sprang from computer-sampled snippets of musical instruments that I stitched together using Apple Computer's GarageBand software. GarageBand is a denatured version of industry-standard recording software that allows amateurs to cobble together a song using nothing but the program's digital instruments. You preview the samples from a Chinese-menu-like array, drag them into a virtual mixing console, push them this way and that, and voilŕ! The software automatically renders the composition into a tidy audio file that can be posted to Web sites like MySpace.com, which teems with thousands of MP3 files from would-be Coldplays and Alicia Keyses.
The process is so seamless and absorbing that I can't really recall how "Eventide" came together. Did I start with the "80's Pop Beat No. 09"? The "Modern Rock Guitar No. 14.1"? The "Edgy Rock Bass No. 01.1"? All I know is that at some point, "Eventide" began to coalesce around a keyboard figure, "Classic Rock Piano No. 06," and the dreamy "70's Ballad Strings 02." It was like watching a Polaroid photograph develop, except that I could fuss with the image as it came into focus. By then I had stacked up seven instruments I didn't know how to play into a song I didn't know how to write.
Given my total inexperience at composing, the result should have sounded ridiculous; instead, it sounded pretty cool. The repeating digital loops could have caused "Eventide" to seem less like a song and more like Booker T. and the MG's vamping until Otis Redding strutted from the wings to wail "Mr. Pitiful." But a click and a drag transposed the key of the song heavenward a couple of notches — an old trick of country music composers, among others, the final chorus of "I Will Always Love You" being an excruciating example.
I built "Eventide" a "bridge," a pile-driving chorus of strings, tambourine, piano and scorching guitar. For the finale, I merely copied the opening and pasted it onto the end, fiddled with each instrument until none was too loud or too soft — my ham-fisted equivalent of mixing — and slapped some cymbal crashes onto the last few bars to tart up the climax.
And so I was done. Now it was time for the song to meet its public. I uploaded it to MySpace's music section, the Web's largest clearinghouse of self-recorded music with more than 600,000 bands, the majority amateurs.
Almost immediately, I got a message from an indie band in Brooklyn asking if I'd add them to my "Friends" list. With 66 million MySpace subscribers, to rise above the fray — and perhaps attract the attention of a record company executive — the goal is to link one's page to as many other MySpace members as possible, called an "add," just like in radio. (The Brooklyn band had already amassed more than 136,000.) Log-rolling is rampant. "hey I'll help promote ur band ... and whoreing u if u would add me," someone forthrightly posted on one band's MySpace page.
"Eventide" scored only five listens until I got five other bands to add me to their lists. Thereafter, it scored just two more. My tour of MySpace was beginning to feel suspiciously like the nonvirtual world of agents and editors, the capricious gatekeepers the Internet was supposed to usurp.
So I decided to play "Eventide" for Nic Harcourt, the host and musical director of "Morning Becomes Eclectic" on the public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica. I also wanted to discuss with him the implications of songwriting software. Was a song written by a nonmusician using nothing but digital loops as legitimate as one by a traditional composer?
"What music software does," he told me, "is enable people who perhaps have a rudimentary understanding of music to flex their creative muscles, even if they don't have any musical training, and I think that's good. I mean, let's be honest: a lot of people who don't have musical training make hit records."
"To me it's just another barrier coming down," he added. "We're putting the power back into the hands of the artists."
Including an "artist" such as myself?
"How a listener chooses to respond to music made with this technology," Mr. Harcourt said, "depends on what they expect from a song. If you don't expect much, then listening to a piece of music that's been sort of thrown together with samples can probably be satisfying. If you expect poetry and composition in the tradition of great songwriters. ..."
Well, he had a point. Plus, aside from a bit of haphazard enthusiasm, there was no emotional force behind my song. Maybe it showed.
While "Eventide" languished on MySpace, Mr. Harcourt telephoned one afternoon and announced, "We're going to listen to it right now."
I'd told him from the beginning that, as a nonmusician, I had no ego attached to "Eventide." I'd told myself the same thing, even as I listened to it over and over, liking it more and more with each playing. But now, I was appalled to realize, I really cared what he thought.
Then, through the phone, I heard my song trickling out of Mr. Harcourt's laptop speakers. Now that it was playing outside the Carnegie Hall of my mind, the song suddenly sounded not cool at all but, in fact, ridiculous. I could picture Mr. Harcourt's lip curling in disgust. Thirty seconds passed. He asked, "Is there a vocal on it?"
I heard myself bleat, "No, but hang in there — we're coming up to the bridge."
"Eventide" clunked away a few seconds more. Then I heard the middle section's keyboard and strings swoosh in. It sounded marginally less awful.
Mr. Harcourt announced, "Sounds like you could be on a Windham Hill record." And finally, "It sounded fine."
I realized that he had shifted to the past tense. And that I couldn't hear "Eventide" anymore. He'd turned the song off halfway through.
I blurted, "But you're missing the big build!"
I asked Mr. Harcourt what he'd think if he had heard the song cold. He paused, then said: "I'd be like, O.K., it's a piece of film music. You know what I mean? It's not a song." He added: "It sounds ... O.K. It doesn't sound like a songwriter wrote it. It sort of sounds like a computer generated it."
And there he had me. A computer had generated it. I had helped things along but was more of a spectator. Nevertheless, "Eventide" was something I had created, and like all creations was entitled to a measure of emotional exuberance from its creator. So what if it had died on the vine at MySpace and Mr. Harcourt considered it "you know, film music"?
And maybe there was hope. Mr. Harcourt had tantalizingly pointed out, "Somebody's going to put together a song this way that's going to find its way around the Internet that will end up becoming a hit."
Perhaps "Eventide." Or maybe Windham Hill will go for it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/ar...c/02walk.html?
Death by Smiley Face: When Rivals Disdain Profit
Richard Siklos
THE tectonic changes facing media companies are by now the topic of an often-recited sermon. Put briefly, digital technology is placing control over much information squarely in the hands of consumers and creating all kinds of opportunities for new entrants who can push the revolution forward.
Understandably, attention in this race is focused on the companies that are, as the management consultants like to say, transferring value from conventional outlets to new disruptors that deliver personalized media more efficiently and hence with greater profitability. In other words, to the victor go the spoils.
The obvious standouts are Google and Yahoo with their aggregation software, prominent brands and ability to layer advertisements all over the Internet and perhaps beyond; or Apple Computer with its iTunes and iPod and their utter dominance over portable music.
Consider Monster Worldwide, the online employment advertising company, where the numbers tell the story: Monster, the owner of the
www.monster.com site, has a stock market value of $6.2 billion, some 40 percent greater than the amount for which Knight Ridder, the newspaper chain owner, is being sold. But Monster has only one-third of Knight Ridder's $3 billion in annual revenue.
There is another breed of rival lurking online for traditional media, and it is perhaps the most vexing yet: call it purpose-driven media, with a shout-out to Rick Warren, the author of "A Purpose-Driven Life," for borrowing his catchphrase.
These are new-media ventures that leave the competition scratching their heads because they don't really aim to compete in the first place; their creators are merely taking advantage of the economics of the online medium to do something that they feel good about. They would certainly like to cover their costs and maybe make a buck or two, but really, they're not in it for the money. By purely commercial measures, they are illogical. If your name were, say, Rupert or Sumner, they would represent the kind of terror that might keep you up at night: death by smiley face.
Probably the best-known practitioner is Craigslist.org, the online listing site. Although it is routinely described as a competitor with — and the bane of — newspaper classified ads, the site is mostly a free listings service that acts as a community resource. When the company contemplates imposing fees for using its site in a particular city, as it has recently in New York, it does so cautiously and thoughtfully, as a means to weed out real estate brokers who are abusing the site by posting their ads over and over.
The twist about Craigslist and its ilk is that their egalitarianism could make them very valuable someday — although Craigslist's founder, Craig Newmark, has proclaimed no interest in cashing in. EBay, no doubt sensing the commercial potential, bought a 25 percent stake from a former employee last year. Other examples are the "for sale by owner" Web sites that have cropped up across the country, in which people can sell their homes at a cost that is a small fraction of the usual broker's fee.
And let's not forget that Google began life as one of these ventures: it was only a handful of years ago that one of Google's founders quaintly decried the evils of advertising before figuring out a do-gooder way (as they saw it) to sell boatloads of it.
Now Google, with its market valuation of more than $100 billion, has drawn the ire of the newspaper and book publishing industries, among others, which argue that its supposedly benevolent search robots have been usurping their intellectual property.
Purpose-driven media, by the way, are even more common in the software world. The shining example is the Firefox browser that is available free for download and has emerged as a credible rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. And, for icing on the cake, Firefox makes money for its not-for-profit owners because Google pays to be its search engine.
Another example of genius ideas from people who don't seek Internet riches is Chowhound.com. This nine-year-old site features community-generated restaurant review boards in various cities and steadfastly refuses to accept restaurant advertising. Rather than continue to grovel for donations and make a few dollars selling Chowhound books, the founders sold the company last month to CNET Networks, a Web business known for its reviews of technology products, for an undisclosed amount. Unlike Chowhound, whose independence and spirit it has vowed to maintain while helping to spiff up the site, CNET.com is chockablock with ads.
A fascinating new entrant in the field is LaLa.com, a music-swapping site introduced last month. Depending on where you are sitting, the LaLa concept is either brilliant (if you are a music fan with a lot of CD's you don't listen to, or if you are an artist) or terrifying (if you are a retailer of new or used music, or perhaps even a music label).
Here again, the founders are not in it just for profit. Rather, their idea is that despite all the cool new digital music services, well over 90 percent of the music industry sales are still in the CD format; most people still have CD's and artists don't gain any benefit from the sale of used discs. Many music lovers, the founders contend, feel disenfranchised by the way music is sold.
So LaLa is essentially a CD-swapping site that matches people who want one another's old CD's. It charges them a mere $1 a disc and provides the postage-paid envelopes to send them in for 49 cents apiece. Out of each dollar, the company voluntarily pays 20 cents to the performer on the recording; there is no more a legal obligation to do so than there is to pay General Motors a cut every time a used Chevy changes hands.
Bill Nguyen, the man behind several Silicon Valley start-ups, who is one of LaLa's founders, said that the service might work just as well at a cost of $4 a CD — still a quite a bit cheaper than a typical used CD on eBay or in an East Village record shop — but that making money wasn't the point.
Like those of other purpose-driven ventures, the company's costs are relatively low: it has only 17 employees at its offices in Palo Alto, Calif. So far, the site has been operating by e-mail invitation only because Mr. Nguyen and his partners want to build a strong base of music lovers, and not just people looking for cheap CD's. Mr. Nguyen maintains that the site already has 1.8 million album titles available for swapping. By comparison, Amazon has more than one million different CD's available for purchase, according to a spokeswoman for the company.
MR. NGUYEN expects to open the site to the broader public by the summer. And no matter how successful the site becomes, he vows that it will not carry ads for the music industry or for anyone else — except some links to charities. Nor will the company sell singles, although it will sell physical and download versions of entire new albums.
He also asks that LaLa members "do the right thing," as he sees it, and erase from their hard drives and iPods any copies of songs from CD's they have traded. "We did a lot of weird things that didn't make sense," Mr. Nguyen said proudly.
Or, maybe they do. After all, the company did manage to attract $9 million in financing from the venture capital firms Bain Capital and Ignition Partners. Obviously, these investors believe that there is money to be made in communal efficiency, just as CNET must believe in its purchase of Chowhound or eBay in its investment in Craigslist.
Maybe the lesson for media companies is to keep your friends close but to keep these friendly menaces even closer. As far as Mr. Nguyen is concerned, pursuing his labor of love is enough reward in and of itself. "We just dig music," he said. "Karma plays a role, man."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/bu.../02frenzy.html
In a Wired South Korea, Robots Will Feel Right at Home
Norimitsu Onishi
South Korea, the world's most wired country, is rushing to turn what sounds like science fiction into everyday life. The government, which succeeded in getting broadband Internet into 72 percent of all households in the last half decade, has marshaled an army of scientists and business leaders to make robots full members of society.
By 2007, networked robots that, say, relay messages to parents, teach children English and sing and dance for them when they are bored, are scheduled to enter mass production. Outside the home, they are expected to guide customers at post offices or patrol public areas, searching for intruders and transmitting images to monitoring centers.
If all goes according to plan, robots will be in every South Korean household between 2015 and 2020. That is the prediction, at least, of the Ministry of Information and Communication, which has grouped more than 30 companies, as well as 1,000 scientists from universities and research institutes, under its wing. Some want to move even faster.
"My personal goal is to put a robot in every home by 2010," said Oh Sang Rok, manager of the ministry's intelligent service robot project.
Reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, South Korea decided that becoming a high-tech nation was the only way to secure its future.
The government deregulated the telecommunications and Internet service industries and made investments as companies laid out cables in cities and into the countryside. The government offered information technology courses to homemakers, subsidized computers for low-income families and made the country the first in the world to have high-speed Internet in every primary, junior and high school.
As with robots and most other specific technologies, the government has had a strong hand in guiding businesses and research centers. Failures have occurred — most spectacularly in biotechnology, when the cloning scientist, Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, was exposed as a fraud — but the successes are many.
South Koreans use futuristic technologies that are years away in the United States; companies like Microsoft and Motorola test products here before introducing them in the United States.
Since January, Koreans have been able to watch television broadcasts on cellphones, free, thanks to government-subsidized technology. In April, South Korea will introduce the first nationwide superfast wireless Internet service, called WiBro, eventually making it possible for Koreans to remain online on the go — at 10 megabits per second, faster than most conventional broadband connections.
South Korea, perhaps more than any other country, is transforming itself through technology. About 17 million of the 48 million South Koreans belong to Cyworld, a Web-based service that is a sort of parallel universe where everyone is interconnected through home pages. The interconnectivity has changed the way and speed with which opinions are formed, about everything from fashion to politics, technology and social science experts said.
Chang Duk Jin, a sociologist at Seoul National University who has studied the effects of technology on society, said it had profoundly influenced domestic politics. Two years ago, after the opposition-led National Assembly impeached President Roh Moo Hyun, a consensus began forming on the Internet that the move was politically motivated — two hours after the vote took place, Mr. Chang said.
"That quickly led to mass demonstrations," he said. "That kind of thing had never happened in Korea before. Everyone is connected to everyone else, so issues spread very fast and kind of unpredictably."
There has been at least one unpredictable side effect: fierce witch hunts. In a case that caused national soul-searching, a woman riding the subway with her dog last year refused to clean up after it defecated in the car. One angry passenger photographed her with a camera-equipped cellphone and later posted the photos. Soon, all of wired South Korea seemed to be on the hunt for "Dog Poop Girl." Several misidentified women were verbally attacked, and finally the woman herself was identified on the Internet and humiliated as the topic of countless online discussions.
Such problems have led the government to consider curbing anonymity on the Internet, a proposal that has drawn strong opposition here. In another response, in February, the government released a 256-page "IT Ethics" textbook for junior and high school students. Teachers are expected to spend 30 hours instructing from the textbook, whose chapters include "Healthy Mobile Phone Culture," and "Protecting Personal Privacy."
"Education has lagged behind the technology," said Park Jung Ho, a professor of computer science at Sunmoon University here.
The government, though, is pushing ahead relentlessly. It has drawn a precise timetable on specific technologies to develop or invent, one of them robotics.
Mr. Oh of the Communication Ministry said South Korea lagged behind American, Japanese and European competitors in robotics but was aiming to be No. 3 by 2013. While other countries have focused on developing military, industrial or humanoid robots, he said, South Korea decided three years ago to develop service robots that, instead of operating independently, derive their intelligence from being part of a network.
Late last year, three types of robots were distributed to 64 randomly selected households, as well as two post offices, with mixed results, Mr. Oh said. In October, a second phase in the testing will put robots in 650 households and 20 public places.
By 2007, the networked robots are expected to be on the market. Yujin Robot started developing prototypes in 2004 and has sold 100, mostly to universities and research institutes, said Shin Kyung Chul, the company's president. It is the leader in making small, $500 robots that move around the house using sensors, vacuuming or sweeping. They have become popular gifts for newlyweds.
One of the networked robots — the two-foot-tall Jupiter with a big monitor in its chest, a round rotating head with big eyes that change shape to emulate emotions — can recognize faces and voices. Jupiter recited a nursery rhyme and danced, as Mr. Shin explained his vision of a robot-centered "intelligent society."
Kim Mun Sang, director of the Center for Intelligent Robotics, which groups about 500 scientists in a project by government and industry, said networked robots needed a "killer app" before they could become fully integrated into the wired society. He said the conditions were not ripe yet and would not be for another "5 to 10 years."
"But eventually robots could change how we live in a way we can't predict right now," Mr. Kim said. "It's like the PC. No one ever thought the PC and the Internet would transform our society the way they have."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/wo...a/02robot.html
Warped Tour Thrives Even As Music Business Slumps
Gelu Sulugiuc
When only 800 kids showed up to see 10 bands for the first performance of the 1995 punk rock extravaganza the Warped Tour, founder Kevin Lyman's worst fears about his new venture seemed to be coming true.
The tour was a disaster, selling only 56,000 tickets that summer and landing a penniless Lyman back in his regular job of stage manager at a Los Angeles club.
But 11 years later, the punk and skateboarding tour employs more artists and crew than there were ticket buyers that first day.
The Warped Tour has become the largest and longest running traveling festival in the United States, selling almost 700,000 tickets at $25 apiece last year and spinning off a winter version, the Taste of Chaos tour, even though it seldom features household-name bands.
"I never thought it would last this long," Lyman, 44, told Reuters. "I should be a schoolteacher somewhere."
As Warped grew, festivals like H.O.R.D.E., Lilith Fair, Smokin' Grooves and Lollapalooza that relied on big name artists but charged up to $100 for tickets disappeared or downsized to one location amid a downturn in the concert business.
Last year, the top 100 touring acts sold a combined 36.1 million tickets, down 1.5 million from 2004 as average prices rose to $57 from $52.39, according to trade publication Pollstar.
While stalwarts like the Rolling Stones, who sold 1.2 million tickets in 2005, still filled stadiums, newer bands without radio hits looked to Warped for exposure.
Ozzfest is the only other festival still on the road, piggy-backing on the perennial popularity of Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath. But Ozzfest charges lesser-known bands tens of thousands of dollars for a spot on a secondary stage, while at Warped nobody pays to play.
Winning Formula
Lyman, a workaholic former weight-loss camp counselor, pioneered the successful integration of corporate sponsorships with music and extreme sports. His tours relied on low costs, marketing savvy, cheap tickets and cooperation between bands.
Bands shared buses, equipment and crew, while sponsorships brought in 30 percent of gross revenues. Skateboarding shoe company Vans bought a majority stake in the tour.
"Try to do it without these corporate relationships and charge $25 for 100 bands. It's impossible," Lyman said.
Bands that only commanded niche audiences and would never be able to get anyone to sponsor their tours came together under the Warped umbrella to reach new fans who otherwise would never see them. The tour propelled artists like Sublime, Blink-182, Atreyu and even Eminem into the mainstream.
Now more than 1,000 bands clamor to get on every year. This year's trek will hit 50 venues in two months, with performers like Joan Jett, Buzzcocks, The Germs and NOFX.
Record Label
Meanwhile, just as U.S. CD sales fell last year to their lowest since 1996 and major labels were dropping artists who weren't delivering instant hits, Lyman started a record company.
He teamed up with Bob Chiappardi of Concrete Marketing, the largest U.S. independent music marketing company, to form Warcon Enterprises.
They thought the traditional music business model in which a few superstars brought labels massive amounts of cash while most artists lost money was unsustainable.
With Warcon, they wanted to slowly guide bands to successful careers even without massive hits.
"I want a band to become the next NOFX or Bad Religion," Lyman said. "They've been doing it for 20 years and don't depend on a gold record. With our label, 20,000 (records sold) is break-even, 50,000 to 100,000 is a home run -- the band is making money and we're making money."
Among their first signings were Helmet and The Smashup.
In a break from the standard practice of giving a band 10 to 15 percent of album profits, Warcon bands got 50 percent after marketing and other costs. In return, they gave up a percentage of merchandise, touring and publishing revenue.
"It's about being partners with the bands," Chiappardi said. "We become involved in all aspects of their career."
Some critics called the model utopian, others said the bands were being ripped off. Lyman responded by posting contracts on the Internet, telling bands not to contact him if they disagreed with the terms.
"It isn't an overnight success," he said. "I'm letting (bands) keep enough so they can all go buy a house and then they can start sharing back with the record label."
Lyman himself tries to share back, supporting various high-minded issues every year with his tours. This year he wants Warped bands and crew to build houses for Habitat for Humanity and plans to run all his 40 tour buses on biodiesel.
Married and the father of two girls, he hopes eventually to get away from spending half a year on the road.
"I'd like to start a nursery and teach kids about gardening," he said. "But I also feel obligated to keep what I'm doing going. It's a great thing for our scene, a big umbrella that everyone works under."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False
Netflix Hopes Customers Will Fall For "Cowboy"
Gina Keating
Online DVD renter Netflix Inc. hopes its subscribers will fall in love this week with "Cowboy del Amor," and many other unsung movies it is quietly buying at film festivals to release in arthouse theaters.
Netflix will begin offering its customers the low-budget, independent "Cowboy" film as the first title it has backed with a theatrical release under a strategy to be the only place cinephiles can rent some small, critically praised works.
Typically, DVD rentals get a boost from the publicity films receive in theatrical release. That is especially true for low-budget and art-house films like "Cowboy," which was released at theaters in a handful of cities for a few days in February .
Netflix's publicity department made sure "Cowboy" -- a documentary by award-winning filmmaker Michele Ohayon about an ex-rodeo cowboy who runs what he calls a "woman bidness" to introduce lonely American men to marriage-minded Mexican women -- got noticed by reviewers.
For the next month, "Cowboy" will be available only at Netflix.
"I was married to an American woman for 17-1/2 years. She spoke perfect English and I never could understand her," begins the film's folksy narration, by "Cowboy Cupid" Ivan Thompson, who Netflix sent out on a media tour, including a visit to Howard Stern's radio show set for Monday.
Lonely and unable to find an American wife, Thompson ran an ad in a Mexican newspaper more than 16 years ago and said he was astounded to receive replies from more than 80 women, including one from the gal he married, then divorced -- twice.
"I said to myself, 'Self, this will make a good bidness,' and so I started doing it for the public," Thompson explained.
The film, shot over three years in Mexico, New Mexico and Texas, traces the varying successes of three of Thompson's customers in finding cross-border love.
"To present a woman good, I have to be enthused about 'em and like 'em, so it's a whole lot like the horse bidness," Thompson muses toward the end of "Cowboy."
'Data-Driven Hunches'
Data collected on Netflix's 4.2 million subscribers' movie tastes help the company find an audience for hidden gems like "Cowboy," Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said.
"We do fill a unique niche around small-market films," Sarandos said.
Netflix often recommends little-known films to subscribers based on ratings customers give to earlier movies they have rented. Netflix's practice has built a level of trust among subscribers who believe the company is recommending a movie they will like.
The company, which pioneered online DVD rental, began dabbling in distributing small films in 2004 with DVD releases of films such as "Born Into Brothels", a documentary on the children of prostitutes in Calcutta, which later won an Academy Award for best documentary.
From "Brothel," Netflix learned "the importance of making the film an event for a particular audience but not trying to make one film for everybody," Sarandos said. "Being able to identify what niche wants a particular film and marketing that film (to them) ... is really valuable."
Sarandos said he and his staff plan to secure rights to 100 more titles per year based on what he called "data-driven hunches."
Sarandos saw "Cowboy Del Amor" at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, and realized it was made by Ohayon, whose previous two films, "The First Year" and "It Was A Wonderful Life," were distributed exclusively by Netflix.
"As far as I'm concerned everything I have done with Netflix has been successful," Ohayon said. "I know that every film has a long shelf life if you handle it right. There was complete respect for the filmmaking behind it, which is a filmmaker's dream."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False
Sony Goes Prime-Time With "LocationFree TV"
Nathan Layne
Sony's dream of freeing TV from the confines of the living room is looking more like reality with a gadget that allows you to watch local broadcasts on a PC even if you are thousands of miles from home.
Imagine checking out your local news channel during an international flight or enjoying your favorite baseball team live while on a business trip in Dubai.
Sony Corp. is notching up strong sales of a small black box that can do just that, providing that the airplane is Wi-Fi enabled and your hotel in Dubai has a broadband connection.
The book-sized device plugs into your home TV antenna, converts the signal to the MPEG-4 digital standard, encrypts it for security and streams it over the Internet to your PC.
It also works with Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld video game device and compatible mobile phones will be out soon.
"I want to put it into any electronics device that has communications ability and a display," Satoru Maeda, head of Sony's "LocationFree TV" business, said in an interview.
This is not Sony's first try at what the industry calls "place-shifting TV." Over five years ago, Sony launched the Airboard -- a wireless flat screen device designed to be carried around the house to view television or the Web.
But it failed to gain much traction with consumers, who were excited about the idea but not happy about paying more than 100,000 yen ($852.20) for the device.
Sony's new LocationFree Base Station, which retails for about 32,000 yen ($272.70) in Japan, including proprietary software, seems to have struck a sweet spot.
It is a hit with Japanese men in their 30's and 40's, especially those stationed overseas who want to watch their favorite programing from Japan. The gadget can also be hooked up to a DVD recorder, allowing for viewing of prerecorded shows.
"People come into the store asking for the product by name. It practically sells itself," said a salesman at a major retailer in Tokyo's famous Akihabara electronics district.
License To Sell
Location Free TV has the full backing of chief executive Howard Stringer, which created a buzz around the technology at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by showing how the PSP can show live television from anywhere in the world.
Sony currently sells the base station in Japan, the United States, Canada, Taiwan and South Korea, and plans to launch it in Europe later this year. It is aiming for global sales to clear 100,000 units in the business year ending on Friday.
Maeda said he expected sales to at least double in each of the next few years, but that Sony would actively look to license its technology to other electronics and software makers as a source of income and to ensure that the industry grows.
Earlier this week, Sony announced that it would license its location free software for Windows Mobile and cellphones to Japan's Access Co. Ltd., aiming to encourage the development of compatible mobile phones.
"We cannot develop this market on our own," Maeda said.
Sony only has a handful of competitors, the main one being U.S.-based Sling Media Inc., but several new players are expected to pile into the market, which should boost competition and drive prices down.
Maeda said Sony's main advantage was its prime mover status and the fact that it held many key patents on the technology.
Still, he acknowledged there were hurdles to overcome.
In a demonstration of the technology at Sony's office, the quality of the picture on the PC was noticeably below regular TV viewing, while the picture on the PSP was very sharp and clear.
But indications are that many consumers don't care if the picture is perfect or not.
"People seem to be satisfied even if the picture quality is not great. They are just happy if they can see what they want even if they aren't at home," the Akihabara salesman said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...-PLUGGEDIN.xml
Apple Faces Second Attack Of The Clones
Alan Kohler
APPLE Inc's iTunes music store seems to be rapidly becoming one of the most powerful retailers in the history of the world.
Never before have we seen global domination by one retailer in a product category. Apple is also possibly the most secretive retailer on Earth.
What is happening is fascinating and scary, and anyone in the entertainment business anywhere in the world — nowhere more than in Australia — needs to understand it. Unfortunately Apple will not talk, so the profit margins and the process of deciding who gets to sell through the iTunes store is a mystery.
Here is what we know: music and video are going entirely digital. It won't be long before CDs and DVDs are obsolete as storage. The new device of choice is the iPod, which is in the midst of an incredible global boom that is enriching Apple and its shareholders. The only place you can easily buy material for your iPod, as opposed to stealing it, is the iTunes online store.
The free file-swapping sites that started with Napster (which the courts shut down) and continued with Limewire and the various Bit-torrent sites, are still seeing plenty of pirate traffic, but a growing number of people are queasy about that.
Also, the free files are often mangled and it is hard to find what you want. As the iPods/digital music phenomenon goes mainstream, so legitimate sales of digital entertainment via the internet are booming as well.
With iPods and iTunes, Steve Jobs and his team at Apple have created a beautifully functional closed system for selling and consuming digital music and video that looks to be heading for total dominance.
The music industry fled into Jobs' arms in desperation as it watched piracy erode its sales, so Apple signed great distribution deals with all the major labels. The people who manage the iTunes inventory are developing a stranglehold over digital music distribution that is giving iTunes enormous power. The record labels have to deal with iTunes or face oblivion as the iPod population grows.
In fact there is a good chance the whole thing will end up like the Macintosh computer: early dominance through its beautifully designed integrated package of hardware and operating system, but later obliterated by Microsoft Windows, which was licensed to any manufacturer. More on that later.
iTunes is efficient and seductive. You register with Apple and provide your credit card details. Then you browse the store or search for the song or artist you want. One song is $1.69, albums $16.99 or $17.99. You click it, and — zip — you've bought it, credit card debited. Plug your iPod into your computer and the music is automatically loaded.
I no longer use a stereo that plays CDs — I just stick my iPod in the top of a box of speakers that I bought from Apple. The sound quality is great and my entire record collection is now in the iPod, and growing every day at $1.69 a song.
As well as its incredible inventory of all kinds of music, iTunes in the US is selling TV programs for $US1.99, just one hour after they go to air on the networks. You can buy a cable that connects your iPod to your TV set, or a cradle that allows the iPod to sit on top of it; the quality of both sound and vision is fine.
Americans don't need to have a computer in the lounge room to buy one-off TV shows and play them on their plasma — they just carry them in the iPod.
I tried to buy a TV show on the US iTunes site, but a message told me I wasn't allowed to because I live in Australia. I rang Apple in Sydney and asked when Australians will be able to buy TV shows on iTunes as Americans do. No comment.
I asked around the TV industry and it seems the local networks are in some disarray about this and don't know what to do. We should never underestimate Australian TV networks' ability to block something new — Kerry Packer kept pay TV out for five years — but it will come.
I might be wrong, but it seems to me the ability to easily buy a single, new episode of a TV show (and repeats), as well as single songs, albums, movies and music videos in a form that is easy to watch or listen, will change everything.
The key is the device — the beautiful iPod — and the simplicity of buying stuff through iTunes, which is why Apple is becoming such a powerful retailer.
That is, until Microsoft and/or Google come along, which will be soon. The shock troops for Microsoft's victory over Apple in personal computers in the 1980s were Intel, Compaq, IBM, Dell, Toshiba and so on — that is the chip manufacturer and the cheap PC makers that licensed the Windows operating system.
With digital music and video it will be Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson — the mobile phone manufacturers.
This year they will start releasing phones with the same storage as iPods — up to 30 gigabytes. iPods themselves will have to become phones.
Microsoft's software will power the new generation of phone/music players, and the business of selling digital songs and TV shows will open up. Google will probably run the most popular online store, but there will be thousands.
The iPod/iTunes system will move into a niche with Macintosh computers because Steve Jobs has again stuck with closed architecture and total control. This will happen quickly because mobile phones are being turned over about every year.
It is quite a thrilling time to be alive.
We will witness the creation and destruction of a market dominance in the time it used to take to work up a business plan.
http://theage.com.au/news/technology...441370852.html
The State of Digital Music in 2006
Chris Nickson
Digital Music Demand is Greater than Ever
With the start of 2006, digital music has started its growth from infancy into adolescence. In the week between Christmas 2005 and New Year’s, 20 million tracks were downloaded in America, and another million in Britain. Those are some seriously healthy numbers. Not only do they reflect the huge amount of iPods and other portable devices sold, but also the spread of broadband connections, and the fact that people are now comfortable consuming their music digitally, on a track-by-track rather than album-by-album basis. Long predicted, the listening habits of the general population are beginning to shift.
It’s seismic, but it’s still small—digital music accounted for only six percent of total music sales in 2005. Yet even that is a massive increase over the year before, a whopping 194 percent, which is fiscally valuable as the sales of CDs continue to decrease (although even with digital sales, the record labels experienced another downturn in 2005). While the young, usually the first to adopt and adapt to new technology, have been downloading and swapping music for quite some time, there’s been a ripple effect into the older, warier area of the population, one that will only increase. Thank—or blame—Apple and its iPod, or any of the many other makes selling like hotcakes in the stores.
As a real indicator that digital demand has moved beyond the young, music giant Universal recently announced plans to digitize 100,000 tracks from its vaults over the next four years. That’s a big move, but it’s more important for its implications. They’re not talking about music for teenagers, so they obviously believe there’s a burgeoning market among baby boomers, now quite happy and very willing to part with money to download obscure songs from their youth.
But if digital music is now a teenager, it’s one with a number of issues, and one of the biggest and trickiest is digital rights management (DRM). In essence, it’s a limit on what you can do with the tracks you buy and download. In some cases, you can share the track between a limited number of computers and portable devices. In other cases, as with material purchased from Apple’s iTunes store, if you want to send the tracks to a portable device, it has to be an iPod (which will only play unprotected mp3s and material from iTunes). Given that iTunes is now one of the largest music retailers in the world, this could cause potential long-term problems. After all, having paid for the track, shouldn’t you be allowed to do what you want with it?
With digital music and the portable player becoming ever more widespread, this is a question that’s only going to become more vexing. The early adopters were willing to accept the limitations, but things are going to have to change as everything rapidly reaches critical mass. The whole concept of DRM is going to have to be rethought. That’s going to cause a lot of tension with record labels, who guard their product very closely. Some encode their own players on a disc to prevent copying.
Indeed, the idea of DRM has already caused one major furor, when it was discovered that Sony BMG went far beyond a player and used a virus-like system, XCP, to stop piracy and copying of some of its CDs, while other CDs were protected by a system called MediaMax. The XCP system was hidden deep in the Windows operating system, and the row and consumer lawsuits followed its discovery. Those were resolved in December 2005, when a judge approved a deal involving Sony BMG giving cash refunds and free downloads to consumers who bought CDs with the XCP technology (those with MediaMax only received free downloads).
Privacy and Security
That leads easily into privacy issues, which have also been tripping up iTunes lately. A new version of the software features a Mini Store, which searches for similar tracks and brings up recommendations when a person clicks on a track in iTunes. According to some bloggers who investigated, data is being sent back to Apple containing not only details of the music, but also the unique identifiers for the computer and the iTunes account (in fairness, the license for iTunes does state that it contacts the Gracenote music database to discover which album is being played via the program, and Apple says it doesn’t save any information collected, and that when the Mini Store is hidden, no data is passed).
One thing the coming year might decide is the future of the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing services, such as Kazaa, where people share music and video files for free. Organizations like the RIAA have been bringing lawsuits against individuals and demanding compensation from heavy P2P users, and trying other tactics such as posting empty or misleading files in an attempt to discourage people. To an extent, it’s been working, although not as well as they’d hoped; a survey shows that 51 percent of those who download music have done so illegally at some point. But like prostitution, it’s unlikely to ever vanish completely—whatever happens, there will always be a hard core who want music for free, and who seek the obscure that they can’t find elsewhere. However, as more tracks, both the most recent and the older, are digitally easily available via pay services, fewer people will use P2P. For the most part, P2P interfaces are awkward. You never know what’s going to be available for download, or whether you’ll be able to grab it before it vanishes offline. And, for many, it raises the query of virus transmission. What the industry needs to address isn’t so much going after illegal downloaders but rather why they’re doing it in the first place, and to change that. People are willing to pay for music. That much has been amply demonstrated in the last year. If they can do it in a secure environment and at a reasonable price, they’re happy.
Digital Music Pricing
Yet this, too, raises another question—equitable pricing. Depending on where in the world you are, the cost of downloading the same track can vary. Understandably, that makes a lot of people—certainly the ones paying higher prices—angry. England pays more than the rest of Europe for a track on iTunes, for example, and it’s a price significantly higher than that for U.S. consumers. While it’s supposedly because of rights issues in different countries, the fact is that that cyberspace is meant to be a global economy. And as digital music continues to expand, that’s an issue that going to have to be faced.
So, too, is the idea of subscription versus purchase models. For now, subscription seems to work well enough. But the question is, how much of a future does it have? Basically you’re renting the music, and as long as you keep up the payments, you can play it. But once you stop, it’s all gone. How long that can really satisfy people remains to be seen. Those who follow the charts might be happy as the music is ephemeral, but most people prefer to own the music they pay for, and that could well cause a shift in thinking for many of the services, placing less emphasis on subscriptions and more on ownership.
And this, too, feeds back into pricing. In the near future, the biggest factors to draw customers will be the depth of a library and the price per track. A high profile helps (as iTunes shows), but as the market changes, it might become less of a factor as competitors become more aggressive to claim their share of a growing pie, and many services get essentially equal libraries. After all, it’s in the interests of record labels to have their product as widely available as possible—you couldn’t imagine Sony selling only to Borders and ignoring every other chain, for example (at the same time, it’s not uncommon to see services offering limited-time exclusives on tracks to lure in customers). As people become savvier about the different services, they’ll shop around for tracks, taking some here, some there, much as they might flit between Target and Wal-Mart, for example.
Although popular music remains the biggest and most lucrative market, the smaller niches have shown a rise in digital sales. It gives curious consumers a chance to taste without a significant investment. And even in areas that require more commitment from the listener, such as classical music, the increase in digital demand has been staggering—up almost a hundred percent in the U.S. during 2005 (and this, interestingly, among a group generally seen as audiophiles, whom you wouldn’t imagine going for the relatively low-fi mp3s). It’s not yet a panacea for declining CD sales, but it’s a big help in plugging the gap.
The big players in the game are already established, on both first and second tiers. A couple more might join the fray, but the lines have essentially already been drawn, with everyone gunning for iTunes to take chunks out of its share. That could well happen; the ongoing supremacy of Steve Jobs’s baby is far from guaranteed. Once someone else figures out a model that works better for the consumer, actually listening to and providing what customers really want, all bets will be off. And, sure as eggs is eggs, it’ll happen.
Although digital music is essentially home-based—you download onto your computer—some people are betting it can become a public commodity. The number of digital music kiosks in stores is growing, where you can download tracks onto a CD or your mp3 player. A number of chains have experimented with them, such as McDonald’s and Starbucks, which currently offers a million song catalog and a seven-track CD burned for $8.99, with each additional track 99 cents. There are plans to put them in other coffee shops, airports, and convenience stores—basically anywhere people gather. But there’s one big problem: The tracks sold by the kiosks are protected by Microsoft Windows technology, which means they won’t play on an iPod. In other words, it comes back to DRM, one of the main labyrinths that will need to be explored this year.
What we’re really seeing is a market that’s growing almost too rapidly. The baby steps have become longer strides, but right now it remains rather confused about its future. The only thing that’s certain is that there’ll have to be a lot of change if the growth is to continue. Digital music is undergoing its teenage angst. As any parent can tell you, those are difficult times, when the youth are finding themselves through a series of identity crises. It’ll come out the other side, more mature, stronger, and ready to face the future. But 2006 is going to be a critical year in its development.
http://news.designtechnica.com/print...article52.html
Prisoner of Redmond:
Yet Another Way Paul Allen Isn’t Like You or Me
Robert X. Cringely
There are hundreds of Microsoft millionaires (and even a few Microsoft billionaires) in the suburbs of Seattle. For the most part, these are people who no longer work for Microsoft, but still own company shares. They worked very hard for years and are now reaping the rewards of that work combined with their good luck. Most of them are proud of their careers, but a few are secretly ashamed. Climb high enough in the organization, and it becomes clear that Microsoft’s success has not always been based on legal or ethical behavior. The company is, after all, a convicted monopolist, and the exercise of those monopoly powers wasn’t just through a Gates or a Ballmer, but also through dozens of top managers, at least some of whom had to have known that what they were doing was wrong. These are smart people, but also people trapped by their own success. Some are in denial, some are just quiet. Nobody wants to risk what they have accumulated by talking about it. You would think great wealth would be freeing, but it isn’t always. Sometimes it is a trap.
Paul Allen is one week older than me. I have more kids but he has more toys -- a LOT more toys -- including professional football and basketball teams, SpaceShipOne, lots of planes and a HUGE boat. Allen is an enthusiast of epic proportions, but one of my fondest images of him was from the 20th anniversary party for the Altair 8800 computer (arguably the first PC), when Paul Allen-the-billionaire wanted some fast food late at night and -- not having a car -- WALKED through the drive-through as part of a long line of cars.
There was a time when Paul Allen, not Bill Gates, was the boss at Microsoft. When it came time to visit Albuquerque to demonstrate that first BASIC interpreter to the folks at MITs, Allen made the trip, not Gates. It was Paul Allen, not Gates, who was later offered the job as head of software for MITs -- a job I have in the past characterized as the single most expensive position in the history of employment because accepting that job meant that Allen got only 36 percent of Microsoft’s founders shares, compared to Bill Gates’ 64 percent.
There’s an irony in that stock differential, and it is that Gates argued HE was working 100 percent for Microsoft while Allen was working for both Microsoft and MITs, Microsoft’s only customer, and therefore deserved less stock because of his divided duties. The irony is that shortly after they divided the shares, Gates went to MITs founder Ed Roberts asking for a job, too, which Roberts gave him, paying $10 per hour. A more aggressive Paul Allen would have demanded a share adjustment at that point, but the real Paul Allen let it slide. “I made out okay,” he told me when I asked about it.
Four years later, when Microsoft had left New Mexico for offices in a bank building in Bellevue, Washington, and Jack Sams came from IBM looking for an operating system for the secret Project Acorn -- the IBM PC -- Allen was still the guy in charge. Sams mistook Gates for the office assistant. Though both Gates and Ballmer took part in those first talks with IBM, Sams recalled that the authority figure was definitely Paul Allen.
These roles changed over time, of course, and what clearly precipitated the change was Paul Allen’s health. He contracted Hodgkins Disease, a form of cancer, in 1982 when Allen was in charge of the development of MS-DOS 2.0, a complete rewrite of PC-DOS 1, which was itself mainly derived from Seattle Computer Products’ Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) that Microsoft had acquired when Digital Research was unable to come to terms with IBM about using CP/M for the original PC. QDOS was simply not a very good product, and DOS 2.0 was intended to overcome the earlier products’ many problems. It would also eliminate that nascent rumor that QDOS was riddled with code “borrowed” from CP/M.
So DOS 2.0 was the most important Microsoft product to date and vital to cementing the company’s relationship with its biggest customer, IBM. It was also by far the most complex product in Microsoft’s young history, which again is why Paul Allen was put in charge. As development continued, Allen’s health began to deteriorate, so much so that the IBM team was worried that Allen might not survive. “He looked like death,” Sams told me. “But still they pushed him.”
In the Boys’ Club that was Microsoft in those days, maybe the concept of mortality was too abstract, maybe Allen’s poor health wasn’t as obvious to those around him every day as it was to the IBM team that visited from time to time. To his credit, Allen stayed long enough to finish the job, delivering DOS 2.0 then leaving the company forever, eventually to have a bone marrow transplant that cured him completely.
But during one of those last long nights of working to finish-up DOS 2.0, something happened. I have heard this story from two people, each of whom was a friend of Allen’s and in a position to know. Each told me the same story the same way. I am not staking my reputation on the accuracy of the story, but I am saying I have it from two good sources. Paul Allen certainly won’t confirm or deny it, so I’ll just throw it out for you to consider.
During one of those last long nights working to deliver DOS 2.0 in early 1983, I am told that Paul Allen heard Gates and Ballmer discussing his health and talking about how to get his Microsoft shares back if Allen were to die.
Maybe that’s just the sort of fiduciary discussion board members have to have, but it didn’t go over well with Paul Allen, who never returned to Microsoft, and over the next eight years, made huge efforts to secure his wealth from the fate of Microsoft. He sold large blocks of shares on a regular basis no matter whether the price was high or low. Then in October and November of 2000, just as he was finally leaving the Microsoft board, Allen did a series of financial transactions involving derivative securities called “collars,” that are a combination of a right to buy and a right to sell the stock at different prices such that both his upside and downside financial potential are limited. By the end of 2000, though Allen technically still owned 136 million Microsoft shares, his wealth was for practical purposes separate from that of Gates, Ballmer, and the rest of Microsoft.
I confirmed this with Peter Newcomb, the editor at Forbes whose job includes keeping track of the world’s 400 richest people and their money. Calling-up Allen’s financial information on his computer screen, Peter pointed to the sports teams, valued together at about $1 billion, the huge investment in Charter Communications, Allen’s Dreamworks stake, another $1 billion in real estate, and, oh yes, that Microsoft collar. “He’s worth a total of about $14 billion at this moment and while he has more than 100 million residual Microsoft shares,“ Peter said, “does Paul Allen care what happens to Microsoft? Only tangentially.“
Peter and Forbes were available in this case through the help of Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes, who is an old friend.
What do you do when your wealth is immense but completely tied to people whom you inherently do not trust? If you are Paul Allen you watch your tongue and spend eight years getting out from under that burden.
My reason for bringing up this topic at this time is because it will all shortly be back in the news as Microsoft goes to court later this year in what might well be its last-ever anti-trust trial. Remember those 19 states and the District of Columbia that settled over time for software vouchers and promises from Microsoft to no longer do evil? Well only Iowa remains, represented by a lady lawyer from Des Moines named Roxanne Conlin whom I have met. Roxanne is not in any way impressed with Microsoft vouchers, no matter how many there are. Looking for real money for the people of Iowa, Ms. Conlin is about to dredge-up all this old news and put a new spin on it.
Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down. It should be interesting.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060330.html
NASA HQ Raided In Kiddie Porn Probe
Feds: "Skin tone filtering system" helped nab space agency executive
The Washington headquarters of NASA was raided this week as part of a kiddie porn probe targeting an executive with the space agency, The Smoking Gun has learned. On Wednesday morning, federal investigators seized a laptop computer, a hard drive, CDs, and other material from the office of James R. Robinson, who was present when agents with NASA's inspector general executed a search warrant at his E Street office.
According to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court, Robinson, 42, used his office computer (and another in his Virginia home) to trade and examine illegal image and videos. An excerpt from the affidavit, sworn by agent Paul Danley, can be found below. Robinson, a program executive with NASA's In-Space Propulsion, Mission and Systems Management Division, was snared last year in an online operation run by postal inspectors. In correspondence with a series of undercover agents, he described his preferences as, "probably priority right now would be boy-on-boy or boy-with-Man, and girl-on-girl. But really, anything is of interest." Robinson, who has not been arrested, wrote that he was "Not a cop," and explained that he amassed his child porn collection via downloads "via Kazaa and usegroups." The affidavit also indicates that Robinson, who traded via a Yahoo! mail account using the alias "Jim Saron," trolled "alt.chxld.mxlexter.com."
In December, after being contacted by postal agents, NASA's inspector general opened its own probe of Robinson, which included a review of reports from the space agency's "web activity monitoring application." The NASA system, dubbed Web ContExt, is apparently a state-of-the-art application that used a "skin tone filtering system" to determine that Robinson was viewing child porn from his office computer, most recently in January, according to the affidavit.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0331061nasa1.html
Homeland Worker Allegedly Boasted To 'Girl' In Porn Sting
Nick Timiraos
Washington -- Sheriff's detectives in Polk County, Fla., never know what they're going to find when they fish for sexual predators by creating bogus profiles on adult Internet sites.
But they were stunned last month when they ran across a man representing himself as an official of the Department of Homeland Security -- complete with lapel pin and a government telephone number -- and looking to connect with a 14-year-old girl.
Prosecutors prepared Wednesday to extradite Brian Doyle -- a senior public information officer in the Homeland Security Department in Washington who faces 23 felony counts of using a computer to seduce a child and transmitting harmful materials to a minor.
Homeland security press secretary Russ Knocke said the department is cooperating fully with the criminal investigation in Florida, adding that Doyle's security clearance, employee badge and facility-access permissions have been suspended.
The sheriff's office, which serves an area in central Florida east of Tampa, alleges that Doyle, who turns 56 Friday, used the Internet to start conversations with what he thought was a 14-year-old girl about sexual activities he said the two would engage in.
Doyle also allegedly sent pornographic movies and nonsexual photos, including one of himself wearing a Homeland Security lapel pin and a lanyard that says "TSA." Doyle previously worked for the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Homeland Security Department.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Doyle bragged to the "girl" that he worked for Homeland Security and in later conversations provided his office phone number and the number of his government-issued cell phone.
The arrest led to calls on Capitol Hill on Wednesday for tighter employee screening at the Department of Homeland Security.
"What if the person on the other end had been a member of al Qaeda or a similar terrorist organization and used this information to blackmail Mr. Doyle?" House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., asked in a statement Wednesday. He promised to investigate the department's hiring policies next month.
Colleagues expressed shock over the news of Doyle's arrest and described him as a friendly co-worker who loved telling stories and spouting sports scores. "There's not a person I know who doesn't like him," said Dennis Murphy, who supervised Doyle for two years before leaving Homeland Security.
The arrest is the second of a department official recently on a sex offense. Frank Figueroa, 49, who oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Florida, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he exposed himself to a girl at a mall last year in Tampa.
While most investigations of online predators take months, Judd said his office made the arrest just weeks after the first conversation on March 12 because "of his high-profile position and us not knowing how much information he had access to or who he could share that with."
He also said Doyle would sometimes call the girl a different name, "which leads us to believe he may have had other chats with other girls."
Running stings against Internet users interested in child pornography has become a regular part of operations, a Polk County Sheriff's Office official said. The county has a zero-tolerance policy on all adult-oriented businesses, including strip clubs and pornographic bookstores.
Agents in the U.S. Secret Service, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and the department's inspector general served a search warrant with the Montgomery County police and the Polk County Sheriff's Office.
No bail was set Wednesday. Doyle was joined at the hearing by a woman that his attorney, Barry Helfand, identified as Doyle's life partner of 15 years.
Each felony carries a maximum five-year jail sentence.
Doyle was hired by the federal government, at the Transportation Security Administration, in 2002. He previously worked, for 26 years, as a reporter for Time magazine in Washington. A former colleague said Doyle is divorced.
People in Doyle's neighborhood said they were surprised that the mild-mannered security employee was nabbed in the sting. Doyle's house is just behind an elementary school yard.
"I was shocked, because I didn't think it was something he would do," said Asha Andreas, a neighbor. "He was gone a lot working. It worries me, too, because I have three kids."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGKMI47P01.DTL
Mitsubishi Harnesses Colored Lasers to Produce New-Generation Lightweight HDTV
Michel Marriott
As if shopping for new flat-panel, high-definition television is not hard enough, Mitsubishi is scheduled to announce this week that it has developed commercial television that uses colored lasers to display bright, deep images on large, thin, lightweight screens — surpassing images seen on film. The television sets, which Mitsubishi is calling the first of their kind, are expected to reach stores sometime late next year.
At the heart of the first generation of this new television is an existing rear-projection technology called digital light processing. In the past, this technology, developed by Texas Instruments, used white-light mercury lamps as the television's light source. With laser television, separate red, green and blue lasers are used in conjunction with an HDTV chip, said Frank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi.
He and Mitsubishi engineers said this provided a new look in large-screen units, signaling a move to lighter, slimmer profiles for rear-projection television. In terms of performance, Mr. DeMartin said, laser television promises a greater range and intensity of colors. He said the new sets would be made with compact, sculptured cabinets and remain relatively light because the screens would be advanced plastics rather than the glass common in plasma television flat-panel units.
The screens will be so lightweight that the need for frames will be significantly lessened, Mr. DeMartin added. This will give the television a cleaner, practically all-screen look.
Its lighter weight, about half that of plasma models with comparable screen sizes, will also have a smaller footprint, he said. For example, a 50-inch plasma or L.C.D. television requires stands up to 17 inches deep to rest securely, Mr. DeMartin said.
Laser television technology is not new. For years, engineers have experimented in laboratories and research centers, seeking to illuminate television images with lasers. But the most optimistic outlook had been for laser television to be available in two to three years. Power and costs were barriers to bringing the technology to the marketplace.
But Marty Zanfino, the director of product development for Mitsubishi, said those issues had been resolved, resulting in large-screen laser television that is expected to be competitively priced with plasma television in sizes of 52 inches and larger.
Mr. DeMartin said laser television would use about a third the power of conventional, large-screen models that depend on high-power lamps. In such television, he said, the lamps are required to be on at full power whenever the sets that use them are on. But Mitsubishi's new lasers, which are based in semiconductors, turn on and off when needed. For example, Mr. DeMartin said, when black is required in an image — still a challenge for some plasma-based television — the laser switches off.
These solid-state lasers, he added, will greatly outlast lamps. As a light source, he said, they are practically "permanent," meaning that the lasers should last for the set's lifetime.
A 52-inch model of the Mitsubishi laser television is scheduled to be demonstrated when the company shows its new lines on Friday in Huntington Beach, Calif. Mitsubishi is showing the new product at a time consumers are expressing interest in high-definition, flat-panel units.
Industry statistics show that consumers in the United States are buying large display television at twice the pace they did three years ago. Mitsubishi executives said Americans were buying five million high-definition television units a year, urged on by increased high-definition programming, the move to high-definition video consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, and high-definition DVD players coming to market.
But unlike old technologies based on the cathode-ray tube, or C.R.T., which remained basically unchanged for decades, flat-panel television is continuing to evolve rapidly.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Toshiba and Canon demonstrated their jointly developed S.E.D. (surface-conduction electron-emitter display) televisions, new flat-screen units that essentially combine the best of C.R.T. emitter technology with digital flat-panel technology. The two companies recently postponed their introduction until next year.
"It's a story of complexity," Ted Schadler, a Forrester Research analyst, said of the dizzying array of choices prospective buyers face. He said there were more technologies, more shapes and sizes and more competing manufacturers' agendas.
While he said the S.E.D. and laser television technologies had "characteristics that are extremely interesting," he warned that consumers and retailers were going to have to do their homework as the flat-panel choices grew more complex.
"Television used to be very, very simple," he said. "You bought a big one or a small one that was black and white or color."
That has all changed, Mr. Schadler said. "Now we've got complexity like buying real estate or buying a car or something," he said. "It's just gotten tremendously complicated."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/business/03hdtv.html
Critic's Notebook
Now Playing on YouTube: Web Videos by Everyone
Virginia Heffernan
Skinny guys with moppy hair in modest houses have officially staked their claim to the latest medium for short, loud adolescent messages: YouTube.
It's not semi-nudes or celebrity satire or kittens' antics that dominate the most-viewed list at YouTube.com, the popular clearinghouse for international homemade video. So exactly what videos are drawing viewers to this ascendant site, which, less than a year after its launch, averages around 25 million hits each day?
YouTube makes this question easy to answer by giving users several ways to sort the videos, including by "most discussed," "most recent" and, handily, "most viewed." It turns out that most of the videos that get millions of looks are humorous posturings by kids who in other places and at other times might be collecting near-mint X-Men comics, or practicing Metallica licks.
Take the most-viewed YouTube video of all time. Though it has been up for only four months, the "Pokémon Theme Music Video" has accumulated 6.8 million views, according to the site's counter. (You can go to
www.youtube.com and search for all of these.) The video, a lip-sync duet by Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox of smosh.com, is a fine example of YouTube's charming two-housebound-handsome-guys genre. Judging from the effusive if subliterate comments section, it's not disliked by anyone, which is rare. The comments section can be harsh.
Mr. Padilla and Mr. Hecox are viral video's Matt and Ben, but they short-sell their good looks by capering around to — in this case — the theme to the Pokémon game that so many American teenagers grew up playing. The song underscores both the insidious pleasure and mental isolation of the popular game.
Mr. Padilla and Mr. Hecox, who post somewhat more sophisticated videos on smosh.com, make the most of the lyrics, fiercely hitting their marks without cracking up as they bound around what looks like a messy suburban bedroom. It's a testament to the unimpeachable humor of this video that even its blasphemy — at one point, Mr. Hecox sucks on a Jesus figurine — hasn't provoked a credible backlash in comments.
"This is an awesome video," a typical comment reads. "The only negative criticism I have is DON'T EAT JESUS!!!" Another ventured, tamely: "aw por Jesus."
David Lehre, whose video "Myspace: THE MOVIE!" has just slipped from second to third most views of all time, with 4.9 million, gives Mr. Padilla and Mr. Hecox a run for their money. Just as the smosh guys did with Pokémon, Mr. Lehre attracts a huge viewership by exploiting an obvious sideline obsession of YouTube fiends: MySpace.
Mr. Lehre sends up various conventions of the overexposed online Place for Friends. In the first section, a kid is photographing himself from odd angles for his profile. Right when he's trying to get a sexy shot of himself in undershorts, his mother walks in. Later, in the second section, we learn that MySpace participants who show "the angles" — photographs of various body parts rather than a full-body pose — are concealing ugliness. Or so goes the Generation M rule of thumb. The joke drags after that, but it has made its point.
At No. 2 is a meticulous, live-action staging of the intro to "The Simpsons." It has attracted around five million views. At first, "The Real Simpsons" looks like a brilliant D.I.Y. project, but actually it's a full-dress trailer for the new "Simpsons" season by Britain's Sky One channel. If you didn't catch it at the beginning of the "Simpsons" episode shown on Fox on March 26, here's your chance to see a human Bart skateboarding over Homer's car, or a real Maggie being passed through a supermarket checker. Beware, though: there's something unsettlingly British about it. Did they get every frame but miss the Simpsons' American spirit?
After that, the most-viewed videos include some professional work, including lackluster music videos and evocative commercials for Nike ("Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold") and Sony Bravia. Advertisers take note: apart from movie trailers, the commercials that are currently the most successfully viral — passed around by e-mail — are tender and recessive, like ballads. Fans seem to like their brasher stuff homemade.
Videos with Asian and Asian-American themes get heavy play. Anime clips and trailers, weird work like "Korean Madness," and the much-emulated comic stylings of "two chinese boys," who have multiple entries on the site, are the bread and butter of YouTube. One Chinese-American contributor seems to have discovered a reservoir of humor that he and others might draw on for years to come. This is "Crazy Asian Mother," which has the subtitle, "how asian parents really act when childrens get B+." The spelling error seems to be deliberate. The sketch is amateurish, but it comes together. The comments are almost all amens: "It's soooo true," "reminds me of my own mother," and so on.
The most beautiful video, by far, is called simply "guitar," and it has drawn, according to YouTube, nearly two million views. (It's also the No. 2 most-discussed video on the site.) Like the Nike commercial, and the mesmerizing, disturbing "Knife Skills," in which a sullen young woman wields a butterfly knife at high speed, "guitar" is a display of unalloyed physical virtuosity that preempts criticism. After a black screen, the opening bars of Pachelbel's Canon begin, and title cards identify the piece, adding, "Arranged by JerryC," and "Played by funtwo." Funtwo, presumably, then shows up: he's a young-looking guy in a T-shirt and a baseball cap that obscures his face. He's sitting by a computer and holding an electric guitar. He looks like any introverted kid with frontman fantasies.
Still, the anonymous image is arresting. Bright light shines through a window behind him, surrounding him with a glow; the effect is dreamlike. Funtwo then plays JerryC's rock embellishment over the classical piece with amazing dexterity, managing to enliven the music and create a lasting work of pop art. As the comments say: "dude teach me how to play," "it is undeniably one of the best solos ive ever see," "u could go up against jimi hendrix." What's most impressive about the performance is the combination of funtwo's shyness and his aggressive, guitar-god fingerwork.
Some posters try to suggest that the performance is fake; but someone called fablesoftherest seems to silence most of the skeptics: "I'll end the guesswork-the kid is for real," adding, "Funtwo's is the definitive version. This kid is destined to be one of the great guitarists of all time."
Finally, an extremely funny video that deserves more views on YouTube is "Leprechaun in Mobile," a local Alabama news segment that seems too hilarious to be real. (Is it a hoax? Does it matter?) Yes, the video is nothing more than its title says, a Leprechaun in Mobile. But if you're into short video, that's more than enough.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/arts/03tube.html
Not Tonight Darling, I’m Online
Adrian Turpin
On a winter afternoon in Trafalgar Square, Michael (”Please don’t use my second name”) is trying to explain how the internet has changed his life and the lives of thousands like him.
“How many men are there here?” he asks, standing on the steps of St Martin in the Fields church. He surveys the tableau of anonymous office workers muffled against the cold. “Say there are 100, 200, 500...? How many will go home tonight and, with or without the knowledge of their partners, look at porn on the internet? You’d be surprised. Timothy Leary said about Sixties drug culture, ‘tune in and drop out’. The modern equivalent is ‘log on and get off’.”
He draws a line in the air between Nelson’s Column and the National Gallery. “You might think they don’t look the sort. Well, I don’t look the sort - but I’ve spent whole weekends with the curtains drawn, sitting in the dark apart from the blue light of the screen. It seems so creepy when it’s put like that.” He laughs and shrugs. “But everybody’s at it. Aren’t they?”
The question is all the more unsettling for being rhetorical. Can it be true that a great swathe of the UK population is spending its spare moments surfing for naked flesh and, if so, what effect might that have on the nation’s collective psyche? What does it say about our emotional lives? You don’t have to look far to find evidence that Michael’s “everyone’s at it” contains more than a kernel of truth.
Dr Marios Pierides is a consultant psychiatrist with the Capio Nightingale hospitals in London, who specialises in treating patients with addictions. “The man who tells you he hasn’t looked at pornography on the web is the man who tells you he hasn’t masturbated,” he says.
According to the internet filter company N2H2, its database of pages identified as pornography grew from 14 million in 1998 to 260 million in 2003, a 1,800 per cent increase. Type “XXX” into Google - a rough and ready reckoner of the number of adult sites - and you will get millions of results, while in January this year, The Washington Post reported that the online porn business was worth $2.5bn a year, compared with just $1.1bn for music downloads.
“One of my colleagues calls internet porn the crack cocaine of the internet,” Pierides says. “It would not be unreasonable to call it an epidemic. In the past 12 months, I’ve seen an explosion in the number of people referred to me with issues about it. It has tripled. This is causing real problems.
“I’ve had many wives complaining about it and simply going along with it, and the number of people in offices is startling. It’s now not at all uncommon for me to be consulted by high-flying professionals who fear their addiction will lead to them losing their jobs.”
The psychiatrist’s views find accord in the US. According to Mark Schwartz, the clinical director of the Masters and Johnson Clinic in St Louis, “Pornography is having a dramatic effect on relationships at many different levels and in many different ways - and nobody outside the sexual behaviour field and the psychiatric community is talking about it.”
Statistics about internet usage are often sketchy and raise as many questions as they answer. Still, the dots are there to be joined. In 2001, the internet tracking company Netvalue made headlines when it reported that more than a quarter of Britons who had access to the net from home had looked at adult websites over the course of a month. Of those, students (23 per cent), manual workers (15 per cent) and professionals (almost 13 per cent) were the most frequent visitors.
Now consider the near exponential increase in internet access in the past decade. The Office for National Statistics recorded that just 9 per cent of UK households were online in 1998; by 2004 that figure had risen to 52 per cent. The amount of time spent online seems to be expanding too. Last month, Google claimed that the average Briton now spends more time trawling the web (164 minutes a day) than watching television (148 minutes). It seems fair to assume that not all this time was spent innocently shopping on eBay or doing homework.
Given such growth, talk of pornography flooding into Britain’s homes as never before is neither hyperbolic nor judgmental; it’s a statement of fact. The internet has released a genie from the bottle. Once pornography had to be actively sought; now it is accessible and affordable for the majority of the population, anonymity guaranteed at the click of a mouse. The consequences are staggering. In 2004, the American internet tracking service ComScore revealed that more than 70 per cent of men aged 18-34 visit a pornographic site in a typical month. “It’s a high number,” one of the company’s analysts told The New York Times, “but it won’t shock anyone who’s worked in the industry.”
Michael is not shocked either. But nor is he entirely comfortable with his own situation. “When I talk to you about this for the first time, I feel queasy. It’s not quite a moral queasiness. I’m not talking about the ethics of pornography or the exploitation of women. Whatever I ought to feel about that, that’s the easiest bit for me to rationalise.
“It’s not sexual guilt. It’s more a sense of waste and puzzlement. What am I lacking in my life and my marriage that I need this? You are meant to get to know yourself as you get older. I’m 32 and sometimes I think I’m getting more confused, lost in cyberspace. But the most baffling thing is that I can say all this to you, but when I go home tonight I’ll probably boot up my machine and start all over again.”
I had found Michael through a friend of a friend, and e-mailed him a couple of weeks before our London meeting. I told him I was writing about how the internet had affected people’s relationships - more specifically about how the online revolution had brought the guilty secrets of pornography into men’s erotic lives. His first response was: “Why me?” His life was so ordinary. “Exactly,” I replied. “That’s the point.”
Michael was right about not seeming “the sort”. At first, we exchanged e-mails. For someone who spent so much time on line, he seemed awkward, cool to the point of terseness. It took a while before he told me his background: a happy childhood; two degrees - a bachelor’s from a red brick university and an Oxbridge PhD; a relatively high-flying job in academia that he liked rather than loved.
The really personal stuff was left until we met face to face - a face that seemed the antithesis of the pasty-faced onanist: shaven head, broad smile, good-looking in a slightly ruddy way with a self-deflating sense of humour.
Had he ever had problems establishing relationships with women? “I wasn’t Casanova,” he deadpanned. “Eight or ten relationships, flings, whatever, since I left university.” He met his wife five years ago, marrying in 2003. They have no children. “It’s a comfortable relationship,” he said. “But I would never tell her about the porn. It’s something I’d dabbled in occasionally for a long time. When I lived in London I would occasionally get magazines from a news stand outside Victoria station, always at night. But it was only really when I got the internet that I got serious.”
In the days before broadband, downloading pictures was painfully slow. He instead turned to MSN’s chat rooms, which have since closed down after the internet service provider became nervous about their ability to police paedophile activities. “I can’t remember the first time. But I can still remember the feeling. There was a sort of tingle of expectation - adrenaline - perhaps as the modem started to whine. I once read that some people get turned on just by hearing that sound. I can believe it.
“I’d be seeing a girlfriend but I’d choose to spend time getting aroused online rather than with her. It wasn’t always the case. Sometimes I’d go for weeks without logging on. But I’d always relapse in little bursts. A couple of hours a night for a week, if I got a chance.” By the time he was married the sessions sometimes lasted until three or four o’clock in the morning, after his wife had gone to bed. “Was it a sign that something was wrong with my relationship or that something was wrong with me?”
These days, Michael spends little time in chat rooms and more downloading pornographic pictures and videos from websites (he says that he prefers websites that show more natural, less silicone-enhanced women). His wife’s absence on business trips gives him time and opportunity to seek them out.
Has his online life changed the way Michael relates to her? “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I know I love her, although our sex life seems to have tapered off as I watch more. On a bad day, I feel it’s gnawing away at some human part of me.”
Jane Haynes knows all about the vagaries of human behaviour. For almost 20 years, she has practised as a relational psychotherapist, having trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst. Her consulting room at the Group Analytic Practice in London is discreetly tucked away in a mansion block near Marylebone Road. A box of tissues on the arm of the sofa suggests the hidden dramas that take place here, but Haynes radiates a soothing calm.
Never judgmental, she expresses wry wonder at the tangles in which people find themselves over sex. She used to be an actor. Now she often comes out of sessions with the words of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ringing in her head: “Lord, what fools [we] mortals be!”
She stresses that she speaks as a clinician rather than an academic, and she tells it as it is rather than as it ought to be: “In the last few years, the issue has come up more and more among the women I see professionally. I’m generally talking about women aged 30 to 40 who are outraged to find out that their husband is looking at some website or other. I hear it so often I sort of want to smile.
“In my work, I find it’s men who are bored by straight sex and women who say, ‘Why on earth, when I’ve only been married for a year, does my husband want me to take another woman to bed with us?’ So for me the big question is: what is the easy availability of porn doing to people’s minds and expectations?”
She is reluctant to take an ideological stance, pro- or anti-porn: “In my line of work I try to get people to understand that there are differences between men and women. And it may be that that, in the sexual arena, those differences are very profound.
“I have mainly found pornography to be a male problem. Unlike men, for example, very few women have problems that they’re more turned on by porn than by their partner. But then I don’t think men are naturally monogamous. So perhaps for them pornography is an attempt to come to terms with that without rocking the boat of their relationship. Domesticity is an enemy of the erotic life. I should also say there’s an important distinction to be made between porn used alone and pornography used together as a couple: sometimes consensual porn can actually enhance a relationship because it is shared and not split off into a private world.”
To some men, Haynes argues, clicking on porn is simply a way to pass the time. “It’s a hobby. Once they’d idly play solitaire; now they idly click on a porn site.” Others, though, succumb to addiction: “It isn’t just lonely, perverse men this happens to. It doesn’t just hit because men haven’t got a relationship. A man can be interacting well with his partner, but at the same time he’s addicted to these sites. That can be very distressing for him. Most addictions are to do with internal emptiness, wanting to fill up dead space, and addiction is always destructive.”
One problem is defining where normal behaviour ends and addiction begins - especially when so many people seem to be indulging. One much-quoted American survey labelled someone who looked at internet porn for more than 11 hours a week as a compulsive user. Using a similar benchmark, a study in 2000 by psychologists concluded that 200,000 people in the US were internet sex addicts.
Testifying to a US Senate committee in 1999, Dr Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s sexual trauma and psychopathology programme, said that “even non sex-addicts will show brain reactions on PET [Positron Emission Tomography] scans while viewing pornography similar to cocaine addicts looking at images of cocaine.” The implication is that the human brain is hardwired to crave porn. Given the opportunity, we may all have the potential to become addicts.
I phone Michael. Does he think he’s addicted? “I haven’t bankrupted myself with subscriptions to porn sites. I’m still in a relatively stable relationship. And I’m not seeing a therapist, although I’ve thought about it,” he says. “But, yes, I know there’s an element of compulsion there.”
I tell him about how Pierides’ colleague described pornography as the crack cocaine of the internet. “I don’t feel like a crack addict, more like a binge drinker,” he replies, speaking low so that his wife can’t hear him in the other room.
“I know it’s not doing me good or making me happy at some level and I’d be embarrassed to let anyone know how much time I was spending online looking at porn. It’s like when the doctor asks how many units you’re drinking and you halve it.”
In the US, the debate about porn’s effect has been energised by the publication of Pamela Paul’s book, Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families. Paul, a contributor to Time magazine and The New York Review of Books, describes herself as a liberal who had never really given pornography much thought before she came to write about it. “I set out to do a book that wasn’t politicised because I felt that people’s perceptions of the subject were set in stone.”
Her conclusions, however, echo many of the concerns of old-school feminists and the Bible-bashing right. “In America at least, a veil of political correctness has fallen over the subject. People think it’s either harmless entertainment or that it’s empowering or good for a relationship.”
What gives Paul’s polemic weight is the number of interviews she has done with users and those around them. “My starting point was that we knew about the supply but very little about the demand,” she says. If she thought that porn fans would be another species, she was soon disabused. One of the author’s first finds was Jonah, a religious school teacher who enjoyed looking at images of genital torture.
“I found him on the internet absolutely anonymously,” she says. “But it turned out that he used to work with me. He would have been the last person who I’d have thought would have been into that kind of thing.”
The words of Pornified’s female interviewees make uncomfortable reading. There is Ashley, whose boyfriend is quite open in his use of pornography but finds it hard to maintain an erection. Every man she has dated fixates on porn: “Their view of sex is really skewed. It’s gotten dirtier, raunchier. They want you to do a lot of degrading things.”
Bridget, a 38-year-old accountant from Kentucky, feels rejected by her partner: “When I found out he was looking at all this porn I just felt thrown away.”
Variations on this story recur repeatedly in Paul’s book - and are echoed on hundreds of websites about the subject. Typical are such women as marriedlove, who logged on to the “Husbands and internet porn” discussion board at
www.aphroditewomenshealth in February. “I’m often struck in these (increasingly common!) debates over porn, how often female frigidity is referred to as cause for frequency of male porn use,” she writes.
“I’d be happy to engage in some form of sexual play or another with my partner multiple times per day, but he still looks at porn alllllll the time. Maybe I’m unique in this, but I don’t think so.”
In Pornified, however, it’s the testimony of the men that is most striking. “Overall one of the surprising things was the extent to which men would talk to me,” Paul said. Kevin, a 32-year-old photographer from Colorado, describes how, having broken up with his fiancee, he began to go online looking for porn almost daily: “I would want more and more. It wasn’t enough to see bare breasts, it had to be bottoms, then it had to be couple, anal and group sex, multiple men and multiple women, bisexual.”
“More than anything else it was making me jaded,” Kevin tells Paul. “I wasn’t finding pleasure in the little things, with women or with life in general. Things that used to be erotic bored me.”
Harrison, a graphic designer, finds his appetite for porn interfering with his libido: “I’ve gotten used to a certain heightened level of stimulation, and when compared with porn, real sex just isn’t that exciting.” (Jane Haynes knows this pattern only too well: “I see it time and again clinically. Porn doesn’t enhance libido, it tends to drain it, which is what drives thinking men to despair.”)
Pornified is subtle enough not to depict the world in black and white. There are men, couples and occasionally even solo women who profess to love porn, use it, and believe they have no problem controlling any demons it might unleash. But the overwhelming tone of the book is of male melancholy, best summed up by Kevin. “I don’t know if porn was an addiction for me,” he tells Paul, after deciding to stop looking at adult material online. “I don’t think so. But it was certainly a depressant.”
For Paul, the problem with porn is as much about self-harm as it is about objectifying women. “It’s like before [Eric Schlosser’s book] Fast Food Nation or [Morgan Spurlock’s film] Super Size Me people didn’t know junk food was bad. They just thought it tasted good. They didn’t know about the odd chemicals and cooking processes that go into a chicken nugget.” The difference is that where McDonald’s or Burger King can only be found on the high street, the majority of homes now offer the means to view internet porn.
For Michael, however, ease of access is only part of the problem. “It’s easy to think of the internet as just another medium,” he says, “a high-tech version of dirty magazines or films. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.
“To me, the most disturbing thing about the internet is that it has the perfect structure to promote dissatisfaction. You click on an image, it’s not quite right. So you click on another, then another. It’s completely open-ended. If you just keep looking there’ll be that image that’s just right. But the more you look, the less you get turned on by the stuff you did before. So, you have to search harder.”
You don’t have to be a moralist to see a downside in millions of men regularly seeking oblivion in an activity that is doomed to disappoint them and which (if Paul’s interviewees are typical) frequently depresses them.
However you judge it, the scale of this flight into fantasy is strange. To some it may look like both symptom and symbol of a wider malaise, marking a collective failure to connect with one other and engage with reality. Has an addictive, acquisitive society lost sight of what makes it happy beyond the next serotonin-inducing surfing session?
Pornified’s most memorable quote pursues a similar train of thought. “The metaphor of a man masturbating at his computer is the Willy Loman of our decade,” says Mark Schwartz of the Masters and Johnson Clinic, referring to the spiritually rudderless protagonist of Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman. “In a sociologist’s terms, it’s anomie - the completely lonely, isolated man having sex with an airbrushed woman on a computer screen. It’s truly pathetic, even tragic.”
What might this mean for children and adolescents learning about sex? Pamela Paul quotes the feminist writer Naomi Wolf: “Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training - and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.”
Certainly, familiarity with adult material appears to be starting earlier. “It’s not uncommon for children to be talking about internet pornography in the playground,” says Dr Pierides. A 2003 study for the London School of Economics (LSE), “UK Children Go Online”, found that 75 per cent of nine- to 19-year-olds have accessed the internet from home. Of these, 57 per cent say they have seen pornography online, 36 per cent have accidentally found themselves on a sexually explicit website, and 25 per cent have received a pornographic e-mail.
But the effect of such exposure is almost impossible to quantify. “There just isn’t the data,” says Sonia Livingstone, who co-authored the LSE report. “The ethical problems of conducting research involving children are so great it’s hard to identify the areas for concern.”
Unflappable as ever, Jane Haynes counsels against a moral panic. “To some degree, where there is more openness about sex, boys are probably less driven in wanting to explore it. My 14-year-old grandson has seen a lot of porn on the internet and he is completely dismissive of it.
“You could say, though, that we are undergoing a huge experiment. This is the first generation who are flicking on pornographic websites in front of their parents - when it comes to 18-year-olds, you’ll find that a lot in professional families. I think it will take years to know what the implications are of young people having absolutely easy access to this material.”
If the genie of instantly accessible porn can’t be recorked, what can be done about it? For Haynes, used to picking up the pieces, that question is about as useful as asking what to do about the weather. “You can stop people watching pornography in offices,” she says. “You can stop people watching it in schools. But it’s there and it’s only there because there’s such a huge demand for it.”
Marios Pierides - dealing with the sharp end of addiction - prescribes psychotherapy and sometimes drugs. “Interestingly, a number of studies show that some antidepressants can have an effect on the problem,” he says.
Pamela Paul advocates what she terms “censure not censor”. The tub-thumping conclusion to her book is a call to arms against liberal relativism. “Pornography,” she declares, “is a moving target and it’s time we catch up with it. For years, the pornography industry and the pornified culture have told women to shut up or turn a blind eye. They have accused anti-pornography activists, or even those who have dared question their profit equation, of being anti-sex and anti-freedom... Those who are quiet must now speak out.”
For Michael, at least, the process of speaking seems to have been therapeutic. A couple of weeks after our meeting in Trafalgar Square, an e-mail from him arrives. “Cold turkey”, reads the header. With his wife trying for a baby, he’s been thinking about his online pursuits and it seems like a good time to stop.
For the immediate future, he intends to keep his study door open and avoid working at home while she is out of town. The credit card subscriptions have been cancelled and the history of the internet sites visited erased from his computer for the last time, or so he hopes. “One down, several million to go,” Michael drily concludes. “Failing that, same time, same place next year?”
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