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August 2nd, 2008




‘Dark Knight’ Wins Again at Box Office
Brooks Barnes

Batman fever continued over the weekend, with ticket sales for “The Dark Knight” far outpacing the competition and breaking a fresh batch of box-office records.

“The Dark Knight” sold an estimated $75.6 million in tickets at North American theaters from Friday to Sunday, according to Warner Brothers. Among other records it delivered the best second-weekend gross in recent Hollywood history.

“This picture has really taken on a life of its own,” said Dan Fellman, Warner’s president for domestic distribution.

The success of “The Dark Knight” is an example of what can happen when an array of factors coincide very much by accident, industry analysts and studio executives said.

An expertly executed promotional campaign from the studio’s marketing chief, Sue Kroll, helped build anticipation for the performance as the Joker by Heath Ledger, who died in January. The brooding film, directed by Christopher Nolan, also fits the nation’s mood, Warner Brothers executives said. The sour economy is probably helping, as movies are still a relatively affordable form of entertainment.

“We are starting to see a lot of repeat business,” Mr. Fellman said. “Older audiences are also starting to turn out in big numbers.”

Going into its second weekend “The Dark Knight” may also have benefited from a storm of publicity that came when its star, Christian Bale, was questioned by the police in London after his mother and sister accused him of assault. Mr. Bale denied the accusations and was released without being charged.

“The Dark Knight” has sold $314.2 million in tickets domestically in its first 10 days of release, a record. The film is still rolling out internationally.

The weekend was not as kind to 20th Century Fox. The studio’s “X-Files: I Want to Believe,” a big-screen revival of the hit television series, sold an estimated $10.2 million in tickets in North America. It landed in fourth place, narrowly ahead of “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” which sold $9.5 million in tickets — $72 million total since its July 11 release. Chris Aronson, Fox’s senior vice president for distribution, said that “X-Files” had also sold $9.3 million in tickets in its limited overseas release, and as a result, the $30 million movie “will be more than profitable at the end of the day.”

“Step Brothers,” starring Will Ferrell and distributed by Sony’s Columbia Pictures, opened in second place with an estimated $30 million in domestic ticket sales, demonstrating continuing demand among younger moviegoers for sophomoric comedies.

In third place was “Mamma Mia!” with an estimated “$17.8 million in sales ($135.3 million total). The second-weekend performance of the musical, distributed by Universal Pictures, was strong, dropping just 35 percent, one of the lowest dips of the summer among wide releases.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/movies/28box.html





Secrecy Cloaked 'Dark Knight'

Warner Bros. took painstaking care to thwart pirates ahead of the film's premier, and the effort paid off.
Dawn C. Chmielewski

For Warner Bros., the mission was to keep "The Dark Knight" from seeing the light of day.

In an era of instantaneous digital copying and widely available high-speed Internet access, the premature and unauthorized release of a movie to the public -- especially a coveted summer blockbuster -- can spell disaster. If the movie's a stinker, the word will travel at the speed of a mouse click, ruining chances of making back money. And if the movie's popular, piracy can rob ticket sales and cut into revenue.

Executives at Warner Bros. knew they didn't have to worry about the first scenario: Buzz had been building for months about late actor Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker and director Christopher Nolan's dark rendition of the Batman legend. And marketing surveys pointed to a record-smashing opening weekend for "The Dark Knight" at the box office.

Instead, Warner Bros. was worried about what would happen if a copy of the movie slipped into public before the theatrical opening, which would result in it competing against pirated DVD copies. The ardent fan-boy appeal of "The Dark Knight" created opportunity and risk in equal measure for the studio.

The Batman sequel's core audience of superhero geeks is the same group of young men who gravitate to online file-sharing communities. Fear that pirated copies would pop up on the Internet during the film's crucial opening weekend prompted Warner to devote six months to an unprecedented anti-piracy strategy, painstakingly locking down the movie as it moved from production to post-production to movie theaters.

Warner created a "chain of custody" to track who had access to the film at any moment. It varied the shipping and delivery methods, staggering the delivery of film reels, so the entire movie wouldn't arrive at multiplexes in one shipment, in order to reduce risk of an entire copy being lost or stolen. It conducted spot checks of hundreds of theaters domestically and abroad, to ensure that illegal camcording wasn't taking place. It even handed out night-vision goggles to exhibitors in Australia, where the film opened two days before its U.S. launch, to scan the audience for the telltale infrared signal of a camcorder.

Warner Bros. executives said the extra vigilance paid off, helping to prevent camcorded copies of the reported $180-million film from reaching Internet file-sharing sites for about 38 hours. Although that doesn't sound like much progress, it was enough time to keep bootleg DVDs off the streets as the film racked up a record-breaking $158.4 million on opening weekend. The movie has now taken in more than $300 million.

The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks.

"One of the reasons why it's so important to try to protect the first weekend is that it prevents the pirate supply chain from starting," said Darcy Antonellis, president of Warner's distribution and technical operations. "A day or two becomes really, really significant. You've delayed disc manufacturing that then delays distribution, which then delays those discs from ending up on street corners for sale."

Piracy experts say such tight security measures are now commonplace among studios seeking to protect big-budget summer blockbusters.

Studios fear a reprise of the "Hulk" piracy debacle. A rough, early version of Ang Lee's 2003 summer movie made its way to the Internet two weeks before the film's scheduled premiere, provoking negative reactions from the comic-book film's devoted fans, whose opinion carries far more weight in determining the success of this film genre than that of mainstream film critics.

"A lot of people decided not to go near it. Hollywood argued, correctly, that many more people would have gone to see it, had online buzz not been so critical of the movie," said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne Online Media Measurement, which monitors file-sharing networks and is a consultant to the entertainmentindustry.

"Hulk" still had an impressive opening, grossing $62 million in its first weekend. But by the second week, mediocre reviews and corrosive word of mouth pushed grosses down 70%. The studios aren't eager to give the audience advance -- and uncontrolled -- viewings of its tent-pole films.

"If the movie's a stiff, and word gets out too early that it's a stiff, it's devastating to the business model," Garland said.

Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research Inc., a San Francisco company that develops anti-piracy technology, said that unlike with music, one viewing of a film -- even in blurry, camcorded form -- often is enough.

"With rare exception, once you've seen the movie you're unlikely to watch it a second time," Kocher said. "You don't have the benefit the music guys have, that piracy can help build buzz. For the movie industry, it's purely a destructive force."

Studios use tracking methods to keep tabs on who handles a film and when, and mark the prints sent to theaters. That makes it possible to identify where a pirated copy was recorded, Kocher said.

The thorniest issue, when it comes to anti-piracy measures, is advance screenings. Studios balance the desire to perform the kind of rigorous bag checks that would make airport security blush against the fear of antagonizing critics.

"That's the one where there's the endless debate about what you do," Kocher said.

Big-budget summer popcorn flicks hold powerful lure for Internet bootleggers. Last year's Disney/Pixar Animation Studios animated film "Ratatouille" leaked out five days ahead of its cinematic premiere, and George Lucas' 2005 film, "Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith," similarly found its way to file-sharing networks days before it reached the big screen. The illicit Star Wars copy contained time codes indicating it slipped out of post-production. It nonetheless went on to gross $380 million domestically.

Michael Robinson, the Motion Picture Assn. of America's director of North American anti-piracy, said all the studios had improved security at post-production facilities. The trade group, in turn, uses a combination of gumshoe tactics and technology to crack down on piracy after the fact, going so far as to follow suspected pirates into theaters.

"At any given time, there are only a handful of truly professional camcorders out there who are recording," said Robinson, who spent 30 years in law enforcement, including a dozen years as head of the Michigan state police. But all it takes is one good-quality recording to generate thousands of Internet downloads and bootlegged DVDs sold at swap meets.

MPAA investigators used the lure of "The Dark Knight" to catch a suspected bootlegger in the act during a 9:40 a.m. showing in a theater in a southeast suburb of Kansas City, Mo.

A Lee's Summit Police Department spokesman said the MPAA investigators spotted the man in the back row of the theater, trying to cloak his video camera with black tarps as he allegedly made an illicit recording. A subsequent police search of the man's home turned up hundreds of DVDs that are believed to be pirated, the spokesman said. The case has been referred to the FBI.

"This wasn't necessarily one of our most covert operations," Robinson said. The investigators in the theater looked like G-men from central casting, wearing MPAA letters emblazoned on their shirts. "It was kind of brazen on this guy's part. Maybe he thought all the MPAA did was rate the movies."

It's hard to quantify how the broad availability of pirated online copies of films affects box-office receipts. But a study commissioned by the MPAA found that Hollywood's major studios lost $6.1 billion to film theft in 2005.

Warner Bros took no chances with "Dark Knight," a movie that opened in 12 overseas markets before it reached the U.S. It even maintained a swat team of sorts, composed of the piracy and production teams, which remained in constant contact as they continuously scanned the pirate networks throughout the weekend for illicit copies.

"As we have often said, we view piracy as a competitor," Warner distribution chief Antonellis said.

Still, the anti-piracy hurdles are enormous, and in the end success is determined by how long a studio can stave off the inevitable.

The first pirated copy of "The Dark Knight" was available on a top-level pirate site by Friday night, two days after its Australian premiere, said Mark Ishikawa, chief executive of BayTSP Inc., a Los Gatos firm that does online tracking of copyrighted works. By Sunday, it could be downloaded on BitTorrent file-sharing sites or viewed on YouTube, he said.

"Such a widely released film in such high demand, by virtue of its following, significantly increased chat and overall online interest in the title within pirate networks," Antonellis said. "Whenever those factors come together, it makes our challenges from an anti-piracy perspective much harder."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...127,full.story






MPAA Planning Site to Offer Legit Movie Links
Jacqui Cheng

The Motion Picture Association of America has tried any number of tactics to fight piracy, but its latest scheme might actually prove useful to movie consumers on the Internet. The group is supposedly working on a new website that will offer information on how to find legit sources of movies so that users won't have to resort to copyright infringement.

The site, which does not yet have a name, would allow users to search for film titles, and in return it would provide links to places to buy movie tickets, to locations where searchers could buy or rent a DVD, or to sites where they can buy or rent a download from an online source. All of the major movie studios are behind the initiative, an anonymous movie studio source told Variety, and all legit "partners" would be linked on the site. Assuming this information is accurate, it could include links to Fandango, Movietickets.com, Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, Xbox Live Video, Hulu, and more. The site will be not-for-profit (except, of course, that it will be pointing to a million places that sell/rent movies for profit).

The rationale for the venture was allegedly provided by research from the studios that found that many users have a hard time differentiating between legal and illegal content online. While some of us may scoff at such an assumption—it's not exactly difficult for tech-savvy users to know the difference between downloading a movie from iTunes versus BitTorrent—such a confusion does sometimes come up among your average Joes and Janes. Just casually chatting with several of my own family members shows that they haven't the foggiest idea of where to start looking for legal music and video content outside of "the Google," which has sometimes in the past pointed them directly to not-so-legit content. Having a one-stop shop could definitely help in this case, especially if it doesn't discriminate between various online stores and merely provides a comprehensive listing for each film. Hell, throw in a column to list the price and even I would use it.

An MPAA spokesperson declined to comment on the website, but said that the organization is always looking for new ways to help users find legal alternatives. Of course, most of the MPAA's past efforts to "help users" have not exactly revolved around making things easier for anyone; they have instead included legal attacks on P2P sites, pushing for Internet filtering on college campuses, trying to stop DVRs from recording movies, and paying $15,000 for the private e-mail addresses of TorrentSpy users. But, if this initiative turns out being as simple and straightforward as it sounds, and if it gains enough popularity to be widely used, then it could actually offer something of value to consumers.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...vie-links.html





MPAA Legal Movie Download Site a Wasted Effort | DRM & Over-Pricing Needs to Be Addressed
Dave Parrack

The MPAA has had a slight change of focus and now wants to educate instead of irritate with a central website to help people find legal downloads, but is it doomed to fail?

This is an attempt to draw people away from the piracy realm. While this seems like a step in the right direction the issues of excessive DRM and over-pricing will likely make it an ineffective strategy. People will continue to be drawn to piracy when it offers a better service than the legal alternative.

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is the organization charged with protecting the rights of movie studios in the US, and seeing as that’s where Hollywood is, that’s a pretty large chunk of the worldwide movie industry.

Fight Or Promote?

Since the emergence of the Internet as a viable source for obtaining copies of movies, a large part of the MPAA’s fight has been online, promoting legal sources of movie downloads, while trying to inhibit illegal sources.

Attack on illegal sources such as torrents and peer-to-peer clients has included legal shut-downs, filtering college campuses, and that whole sorry TorrentSpy mess.

Now, rather than going after what it deems the bad guys, the MPAA has decided to instead focus on promoting the legal destinations for movie downloads. To that end, it is in the process of setting up a one stop shop for legal sources such as Amazon, Netflix, Apple iTunes, and others.

Directory Website

According to Variety the as-yet unnamed website will work as a kind of directory, with links to external sources allowing consumers to purchase cinema tickets, buy or rent DVDs, and download copies of the movie to their PC. This is a bit like what LocateTV.com is already doing.

All of the major studios are thought to be behind the initiative, which is being done in an effort to those people who can’t quite determine legal and illegal sources for movies on the Web.

While you may be thinking that those people surely don’t exist, there are more people venturing online now than ever before, and not all of them will be au fait with the actual difference between BitTorrent and iTunes.

In fact there are a lot of paid torrent and movie download services which provide pirated versions of movies, and the less tech savvy among us would not be able to tell if the content is pirated or not, especially when these paid sites claim to be legal.

A Noble Cause… At Last

This is the kind of thing the MPAA should have been doing a long time ago, working with new technology to rise up to consumer demand, rather than trying to fight it.

While I think piracy will always exist, and there will always be an illegal trade in movies, and TV content, the more legitimate destinations there are on the Web, the less chance there is of it becoming an out of control problem.

A Wasted Effort?

Unfortunately with legal video downloads coming with more DRM and more restrictions than a VCR, as well as having higher costs than renting or buying a tangible DVD, the TV and movie industry is still way off meeting consumer demands.

So while this is a step in the right direction its a pointless step if these other issues are not addressed.
http://www.webtvwire.com/one-stop-sh...etflix-itunes/






MPAA Sues Sites for Fueling Piracy

FOMDB.com, MovieRumor.com included in suit
William Triplett

Acting on behalf of the major studios, the Motion Picture Assn. of America has filed legal action in federal court in Los Angeles against FOMDB.com and MovieRumor.com for allegedly helping online pirates access bootlegged movies and TV shows.

"These sites contribute to and profit from massive copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organizing and indexing links to infringing content found on the Internet that consumers can then view on demand," the MPAA said Tuesday.

Since both sites take advertising, MPAA lawyers argued that the sites employ business models that seek profit through encouraging users — an estimated 27,000 unique visitors per month, combined — to violate copyright protection.

"There are many people operating illegal websites like these who are profiting from the theft of protected content," said John Malcolm, MPAA exec VP and director of worldwide anti-piracy ops, in a statement. "We have filed several other similar lawsuits and will continue to do so in order to hold operators accountable for their illegal activities. We have every intention of shutting down these, and sites like them, for good."

Neither website responded to a request for comment.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...goryid=22&cs=1





RIAA Critic Beckerman Scores Judiciary's Ear
David Kravets

New York attorney Ray Beckerman, an outspoken critic of the Recording Industry Association of America, has acquired the ear of thousands of federal judges nationwide.

The American Bar Association's "Judge's Journal" summer issue is publishing his lengthy paper, Large Recording Companies v. The Defenseless (.pdf). The publisher of the blog, Recording Industry vs The People, does an excellent job of explaining the finer legal points of the RIAA's litigation machine.

Beckerman, who defends people sued by the RIAA, chronicles RIAA litigation start to finish -- from the investigative stage, to how the RIAA acquires the name of the ISP account holder to the payment of a few thousand dollars that usually settles a lawsuit out of court.

The bulk of the article deals in highly legal matters concerning venue, jurisdiction, dismissal, discovery, confidentiality, legal fees and default judgments. It's a must read for anybody who has ever been on a file sharing networks like Kazaa, and a must read about an area of litigation that has ensnared more than 20,000 defendants.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ritic-bec.html





Tenise Barker Takes On RIAA Damages Theory
NewYorkCountryLawyer

Tenise Barker, the young social worker from the Bronx who took on the RIAA’s “making available” theory and won, has now launched a challenge to the constitutionality of the RIAA’s damages theory. In her answer to the RIAA’s amended complaint, she argues that recovering from 2,142 to 428,571 times the actual damages would be a violation of Due Process. She says that the Court could avoid having to find the statute unconstitutional by construing the RIAA’s complaint as alleging a single copyright infringement — the use of an “online media distribution system” — and limiting the total recovery to $750. In the alternative, she argues, if the Court feels it cannot avoid the question, it should simply limit the plaintiffs’ damages to $3.50 per song file, since awarding more — against a single noncommercial user, for a single upload or download of an MP3 file for personal use — would be unconstitutional.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/28/1658212





New RIAA Lawsuit Defense Tactic: Admit Liability, Challenge the Law
David Kravets

Here's a unique defense to a Recording Industry Association of America file sharing lawsuit: Admit liability and challenge the law under which you're being sued.

That's what a Bronx woman did Monday in New York federal court. Denise Barker is accused of file sharing eight songs on the Kazaa network in 2004. If found liable, she faces fines under the Copyright Act of $750 to $150,000 per song.

Barker's attorney, Ray Beckerman, admitted the woman file shared and challenged the constitutionality of the Copyright Act, the law under which the RIAA sued Barker and thousands of others. The fines the act authorizes for each download is unconstitutionally excessive and against U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Beckerman said.

Beckerman, who writes the Recording Industry vs The People blog, estimated its costs the industry $3.50 per download, meaning the penalties could exceed thousands of times the actual injury to the industry. Rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts say financial punishments exceeding a 9-to-1 ratio are unconstitutional.

"It's an ideal case to litigate the damages issue. She actually did make some copies through Kazaa," Beckerman said in a telephone interview.

The RIAA has sued more than 20,000 individuals for illegal file sharing. Most of the accused settle out of court for a few thousand dollars.

Only one case has gone to trial.

In that case, A Duluth, Minnesota jury last year ordered Jammie Thomas to pay $222,000 for file sharing 24 songs on Kazaa. She denied her guilt and challenged the constitutionality of the Copyright Act after she was found liable in October.

The Bush administration weighed-in, urging Judge Michael Davis to uphold the penalty.

A hearing in Thomas' case was set for Monday, where the arguments instead are expected to focus on the so-called "making available" argument.

The RIAA claims that file sharers are liable for infringement solely for making available copyrighted works of music on peer- to-peer file sharing networks. Among the reasons the RIAA makes such an argument is because it's technologically impossible to know if a file sharer's music has been downloaded by somebody who has not been authorized to copy it.

The judge in the Thomas case is considering ordering a new trial. He's concerned that he erred when he instructed jurors in October that the "making available" argument amounted to unauthorized distribution.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...aa-lawsui.html






Italian Media Company Sues YouTube
Dawn Kawamoto

Italian media company Mediaset announced on Wednesday that it has filed a lawsuit against YouTube and owner Google, alleging that the video-sharing site distributed and exploited its commercial property.

Mediaset alleges that it found at least 4,643 copies of its programming on YouTube on June 10, when it conducted a sample survey. That programming represents approximately 325 hours of material, Mediaset claims.

The media company, as a result, alleges that its three Italian television networks have lost nearly 315,700 viewer days, which, in turn, represents lost advertising opportunities for its television programs, Mediaset alleges.

Mediaset is seeking damages of at least 500 million euros ($779 million).

Google and Mediaset were not immediately available for comment.

YouTube, however, issued a statement, according to a Reuters report:

YouTube respects copyright holders and takes copyright issues very seriously.

There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs.

In the United States, the issue of viewers bearing liability for watching copyrighted material posted to YouTube has also been raised, as noted in a blog by Surveillance State's Chris Soghoian.

In the case of Mediaset, the allegations could potentially create more of a rift than a garden-variety copyright infringement case.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls Mediaset, according to a Bloomberg report.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10002413-93.html





IFPI, Italian Police Take Down "Italian Pirate Bay"
Jacqui Cheng

A popular torrent tracker in Italy closed up shop today, handing the international music trade group IFPI another victory against P2P. Colombo-BT.org now points to a page that says, "Access denied in execution of an Italian Court Authority injunction." The shutdown came after action was taken by the Guardia di Finanza, an Italian police force that operates under the Italian Armed Forces. Unsurprisingly, the IFPI applauded the move and took it as a sign of progress against piracy online.

The Guardia di Finanza was able to take action by working in conjunction with the FPM, an Italian antipiracy group that is, in turn, affiliated with the IFPI. Police froze two bank accounts in connection with the site and seized several computers. The three men who ran Colombo-BT were charged with copyright infringement and now face up to three years in prison, along with "heavy financial penalties through administrative actions," says IFPI.

According to the group, the Italian BitTorrent site made more than 390,000 music files and 500,000 movies available, some of which were pre-release titles. The site apparently had 800,000 unique visitors per month and almost half a million registered users. Those who ran the site allegedly made money by accepting donations.

"Colombo-BT.org was Italy's version of The Pirate Bay. Its operators deliberately facilitated availability of copyright infringing content to line their own pockets," FPM president Enzo Mazza said in a statement. "The gang of three now face potential prison sentences and hefty fines as a result of their activities. This police action sends a strong message that Italy will not tolerate serious online music piracy, so criminals looking for get rich quick schemes should consider other options."

This isn't the first torrent tracker that the IFPI has taken down; in fact, the IFPI has enjoyed a fair bit of success in fighting illegal file-sharing in Europe. Last year, the IFPI announced the arrest of a UK man who was selling vouchers for Russian MP3 site AllofMP3. In October, the IFPI and BPI (a UK music trade group) worked with police to shut down another popular BitTorrent tracker called OiNK. And, in April of this year, the IFPI helped Czech police shut down a 4TB file server that was known for its pre-release music archives and was housed at the Czech Academy of Sciences.

The only site that the IFPI can't seem to take down is The Pirate Bay, based in Sweden. Law enforcement has been trying to take down the most popular torrent tracker for years with little success. Even after having been raided by Swedish police in 2006, things are still up and running and membership is stronger than ever. Now, an investigator controversy could taint law enforcement's case against The Pirate Bay.

Still, IFPI seems happy to shut down other major P2P sites in the meantime,with the goal of making such trackers hard enough to find and use that ordinary people find it isn't worth the hassle. Due to differences in laws (and to judicial hostility toward forcing ISPs to turn over user data), Europe has seen fewer court cases against individuals and casual users, but plenty of action against the major trackers.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...t-tracker.html





Mexican Authorities Shut Down File-Sharing Server
Ayala Ben-Yehuda

Mexican authorities have shut down a file-sharing server that enabled the exchange of music and videogames online via DirectConnect, a worldwide peer-to-peer network that has been the subject of IFPI lawsuits and international police raids.

The Mexican server was a hub of DirectConnect known as "Sunnydale," and contained "more than 1.5 terabytes of illegal content, including local and international music repertoire," according to an IFPI statement.

Using information supplied by local anti-piracy trade group APCM via an Internet search, the Mexican attorney general's office asked the hub's internet service provider to shut down Sunnydale's connection. The server has shown no signs of activity since July 3.

IFPI Latin America helped shut down a DirectConnect hub in Chile in March, which was identified as having enough capacity to host up to 1.8 million songs.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...3a092c8e4a6f33





Two OiNK Uploaders Go Free
Ernesto

Yesterday we reported that the bail date for OiNK administrator Alan Ellis and the six arrested OiNK uploaders was extended again. New information, however, now shows that two of the six uploaders were released from further investigation and can get on with their lives.

While hundreds and thousands of filesharers in the UK receive a warning letter from their ISP this week asking them nicely to stop sharing copyrighted files, six members of the OiNK tracker have been waiting anxiously for the results of a criminal investigation.

There is some good news though, as two of the six - a 19 year old man and a 28 year old women - wont face any further charges, and now go free. For the other four, and Alan Ellis himself, the wait continues. Alan told TorrentFreak that his new bail date is set for September 10th.

Thus far, the police have not replied to our inquiries so it remains unclear why two of the six uploaders have been released from any charges. The uploaders were arrested by detectives involved with ‘Operation Ark Royal’ this May, on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry” and other copyright offenses. No further arrests have been made since then.

OiNK was one of the largest private BitTorrent trackers, hosting hundreds and thousands of torrents. The site was shut down in a joint effort by Dutch and British law enforcement in October 2007, based on inaccurate intel from the IFPI and the BPI, two well known anti-piracy organizations.
http://torrentfreak.com/two-oink-upl...o-free-080729/





Public Left Out of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Talks
Michael Geist

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the leaders of G8 countries closed their recent summit in Hokkaido, Japan by encouraging "the acceleration of negotiations to establish a new international legal framework, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and seek to complete the negotiation by the end of this year." The decision to fast-track the controversial ACTA has led to new momentum for the still-secret treaty as the Australian government recently disclosed that a new round of negotiations will commence this week.

The ACTA attracted considerable attention earlier this year after leaked documents revealed the treaty could result in broad new surveillance requirements on Internet service providers as well as new powers for border guards cracking down on allegedly infringing activities. In fact, the concern grew so loud that Industry Minister Jim Prentice sought to assure Canadians that his recent legislative proposals would not result iPod searches at the border.

What Prentice did not reveal is that officials have been developing plans to establish an "insider" group comprised solely of government departments and industry lobby groups that would be provided with special access to treaty documentation and discussion.

According to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act and reported here for the first time, the government has been crafting an Intellectual Property and Trade Advisory Group. The initial plans for membership in the group were limited exclusively to 12 government departments and 14 industry lobby groups. These include the Canadian Recording Industry Association, the Canadian Motion Picture and Distributors Association, and the Entertainment Software Association of Canada.

The early membership lists omit several key industry representatives likely to be affected by ACTA, including telecommunications, technology, and Internet companies. Moreover, there is absolutely no representation of the public interest — no privacy representation despite the obvious privacy implications of the treaty (the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada was not included on the government invitee list), no consumer representation despite the effects on consumer interests, and no civil liberties representation on a treaty that could fundamentally alter Canadian civil rights.

The government documents indicate that members would engage in "in-depth exchanges on technical negotiating issues" and therefore be required to sign confidentiality agreements in order to participate.

The decision to create a two-track approach for ACTA consultations appears to have been deliberate. The same documents discuss the prospect a public track that would include a general public consultation (which was held in April) along with the insider group that would be privy to treaty information.

The secretive Canadian approach stands in marked contrast to other countries. Australia has already launched two public consultations on the treaty — one to consider entry into the negotiations and the second to discuss substantive positions. Canadian groups tracking ACTA have been forced to rely on Australian documents to glean some insight into the treaty process.

Even the public consultative processes have been more transparent outside Canada. The United States Trade Representative, which managed the U.S. public consultation, has publicly posted copies of all responses it received to its consultation. Canadian officials have not provided any feedback on the results of its consultation nor any indication if they plan to disclose the responses they received.

Moreover, both U.S. and European Union officials have held open meetings with a broad range of groups to shed further light on the ACTA. There have been no similar meetings in Canada.

With Canadian law enforcement agencies increasing their efforts to address counterfeiting activities — the RCMP recently shut down a major Ontario counterfeiting operation and a British Columbia court just awarded record damages against a distributor of counterfeiting products — there is a growing sense that Canada already has laws sufficient to address counterfeiting concerns.

Few would challenge the need to combat counterfeiting, yet secretive, fast-track negotiations and insider consultations do little to inspire public confidence.
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/468267





Wikileaks Releases ACTA Negotiations As "0-Day"

An anonymous reader writes

"Wikileaks has released a new document about the ACTA negotiations occurring in Washington over the next three days. This might be the shortest time between authorship of a document and its publication on Wikileaks so far. The brief 3-page memo, dated today, could add quite a bit of oil to the fire of the ACTA debate. It is titled Business Perspectives on Border Measures and Civil Enforcement and it contains a set of proposals to the 'ACTA negotiators' issued by 'Concerned business groups operating in ACTA nations.' Among many highly invasive methods and approaches proposed in this memorandum, the reader can find detailed demands for: full disclosure of relevant information by Customs to trademark holders so that they can mount private investigations; disclosure of identities and other information about copyright infringers; and increased inspection of goods. This document is especially important to raise public awareness on these negotiations and their implications for the future."
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/07/29/198229.shtml





Time to Drop Cable Television? Not So Fast
Kenneth Li

Couch potatoes love television, but some simply have no interest in watching sports or kids shows. So why should they pay for it?

More U.S. TV watchers are asking the same question as cable and satellite TV bills creep higher. The government wants to know why consumers can't just pay for the channels they want and many technology and media companies are dreaming up new alternatives for delivering only the TV programs viewers want.

A fresh batch of options from Sony Corp (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Netflix Inc (NFLX.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Roku, as well as Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) video game console Xbox 360 launched over the past few weeks promise to do away with cable all together.

The latest push into the living room aims to solve what has stymied earlier products, including the complexity of hooking up these devices, lack of content and relatively high prices, with some devices costing well past $500.

About 8 million Netflix customers, accustomed to renting DVDs by mail, can now purchase a $99 set top box from Roku and watch some 12,000 films and shows on television for no additional fees.

Sony Bravia TV owners who buy a $300 device that connects to the back of TVs and to the Internet can already watch YouTube videos. Soon, Bravia customers will be able to order from Amazon movies and shows streamed directly to TVs.

But even the experts don't think cable will be replaced anytime soon and point to a string of high profile failures, including Walt Disney Co-backed (DIS.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) MovieBeam and privately held Akimbo.

"The content deals are starting to come together, but the library is still pretty narrow," said Mark Kirstein of Scottsdale, Arizona-based market research firm MultiMedia Intelligence.

A general aversion to yet another gadget in the living room and the high prices are other reasons why the idea has failed to catch on. Premium channels such as Time Warner Inc's (TWX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) popular HBO are also unavailable on the Internet to non-subscribers, except through iTunes, where some programs are sold.

But that has not stopped the tech industry from buzzing again after a number of new products that address some of these issues were unveiled in quick succession.

Ubiquity, Simplicity

A new set-top box born out of a partnership between DVD rental business Netflix Inc and device maker Roku, in which Netflix owns a minority stake, is emerging as a leading candidate for consumer appeal, Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said.

"Despite its relatively meager content, the Netflix Player by Roku is a solid winner, overcoming the barriers that hamper the rest," McQuivey said.

Unlike others that came before it, Roku is counting on offering services beyond Netflix, said Tim Twerdahl, vice president of consumer products at Roku.

"Our vision is to open up the box," he said.

Prepare to find free, advertising-supported video services, pay-per-view services and YouTube-like user generated videos.

Netflix is also planning to let current subscribers find its movies online in as many ways as possible. It struck a deal with Microsoft to allow subscribers to the video game console Xbox 360's online service to also watch streamed Netflix movies.

Earlier, Netflix said it would offer its Internet service on an LG Electronics Inc (066570.KS: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz)-manufactured set-top box.

"It's too early to tell who is going to prevail," Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said.

Tech industry watchers say the current crop represent the first wave of products that have shown any real promise. Importantly, many are backed by financiers with deep pockets.

But will it matter? Apple Inc's (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) AppleTV has yet to light up the industry the way its iPod and iTunes service transformed the music business, critics point out.

Then there's Hollywood, which has been reluctant to offer more new releases on the Internet for fear of jeopardizing DVD sales that account for more than half its profits.

"They're going to fight amongst each other for a teeny-tiny part of the market," McQuivey said. "If you have cable service and a DVD player, you already have a much better solution than any of these boxes can provide you."

Sony is tackling the problem in yet another way by appealing to its own movie studio to release its films ahead of the DVD release. It plans to offer Sony Pictures's "Hancock" later this year for Bravia TV owners.

For now, "this is a Sony initiative. It's something that can be realized with other studios," said Sony Electronics's senior manager of business development Robert Jacobs.

(Editing by Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...29877920080725





Earnings Rose 12% for Verizon in Quarter
Laura M. Holson

Verizon Communications is having a harder time pushing its television service, which competes with the big cable companies, but the company said the slowing economy had not hurt its cellphone business.

In releasing its earnings report on Monday, Verizon said it added 1.5 million new wireless customers, the same number as last quarter. It was 25 percent fewer than the two million it added in the fourth quarter of 2007, but Verizon Wireless, which is a joint venture with Vodafone, said its churn rate — the pace at which customers defect to other carriers — fell to 1.1 percent from 1.2 percent in the previous quarter. By comparison, Sprint Nextel has a churn rate of 2.45 percent.

Analysts, however, were concerned about the pace at which Verizon was winning customers for its fiber optic delivery of television programming, called FiOS TV. Verizon added 176,000 customers in the last three months, compared with 263,000 customers in its first quarter. In addition, the company said it added 187,000 FiOS Internet customers.

“That FiOS is already seeing a sequential deceleration is a startling development,” a communications analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, Craig Moffett, wrote in a research report.

Dennis F. Strigl, Verizon’s president, was puzzled by analysts’ questioning of Verizon’s FiOS results.

“I’m not sure where the concern is coming from,” Mr. Strigl said in an interview after the company reported its second-quarter results.

He said it cost Verizon less to acquire FiOS television customers in the second quarter than it did six months ago because the company had been offering new customers a free 19-inch high-definition television, which cost the company $200 each. (The televisions were an incentive only in the first quarter.)

Verizon began offering the FiOS service, which the company hopes will compete with the major cable companies, in New York City on Monday. But as the slower adoption rates show, Verizon is entering a hotly competitive market where customers are as jealously guarded as a seat on a crowded subway.

Verizon sued Time Warner Cable earlier this year, saying some of its rival’s commercials included false and misleading statements. And Verizon has sparred with Comcast and Time Warner over marketing techniques that Verizon was using to retain customers who wanted to switch to a competitor.

In June, the Federal Communications Commission said Verizon could not talk customers out of switching to another phone service provider while waiting for their phone numbers to be transferred, a victory for Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which filed a complaint in February.

“It’s a natural phenomenon,” Mr. Strigl said of the aggressive customer tactics. “It happened in the early days of the wireless business.”

Verizon reported second-quarter net income of $1.88 billion, or 66 cents a share, a 12 percent increase compared with profit of $1.68 billion, or 58 cents a share, in the second quarter of last year. Revenue increased slightly to $24.1 billion, from $23.3 billion a year ago. Mr. Strigl said he was pleased with the results.

Verizon, like AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile, sees data as the growth engine of its wireless business.

Mr. Strigl said more than 30 percent of the mobile devices Verizon is selling have access to the Internet, and also receive and send e-mail and text messages. By contrast, he said, “a year ago it was half that.”

Verizon’s expansion efforts could be thwarted if union-represented employees walk out when their contract expires on Aug. 2. (They voted last week to authorize a strike.) Verizon executives said they were confident that a resolution would be reached.

Mr. Strigl conceded that there was one area that had disappointed Verizon. The company lost 133,000 customers for its D.S.L. Internet service, which uses phone lines.

The loss had nothing to do with the flagging economy, he said. Many analysts have feared that customers tend to drop costly services when personal budgets need to be trimmed. Mr. Strigl attributed the loss to some customers switching to FiOS, while others defected to competitors.

Verizon also lost 920,000 residential and business telephone lines — they now tally 38.3 million — a decline of 8.5 percent year over year. The drop was steeper among residential customers, an 11.4 percent drop compared with the same period a year ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/bu...29verizon.html





Comcast Profit Rises 8 Percent
AP

Comcast Corp. said Wednesday its second-quarter profit rose 8 percent as cable TV rates rose and consumers ordered more digital and premium services.

But that was still shy of Wall Street's forecast. The second quarter is traditionally slower for the company because snowbirds and students disconnect their cable for the summer.

Philadelphia-based Comcast posted second-quarter net income of $632 million, or 21 cents per share, compared with $588 million, or 19 cents per share, in the quarter a year earlier.

Revenue rose 11 percent to $8.55 billion.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial were expecting, on average, slightly higher profit of 23 cents per share on revenue of $8.54 billion.

Operating cash flow was up 8 percent to $3.36 billion. But free cash flow more than tripled to $1.16 billion in the quarter, after Comcast cut its capital expenditures by 20 percent.

The company said its spending on wiring new communities has fallen 50 percent in the housing slump. Last year, the company also spent money meeting the federal July 1 deadline that required cable operators to start using new boxes with separable security.

Comcast lost 138,000 basic subscribers in the quarter but added 320,000 digital customers. Total video revenue was up 3 percent to $4.73 billion. Video customers on average paid $63.98 a month, up 4 percent.

High-speed Internet added 278,000 new subscribers, down 18 percent from 2007. Revenue was up, however, by 10 percent to $1.8 billion. Customers on average paid $42.01 a month, down 3 percent.

Digital voice added 555,000 net new customers, down 20 percent from a year ago, but revenue also was up 77 percent to $636 million. Customers paid $39.48 a month on average, down 7 percent.

Comcast also reaffirmed its previous guidance for an 8 percent to 10 percent increase in revenue and operating cash flow for 2008. It also expects free cash flow to increase 20 percent or more.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi...s-Comcast.html





Broadband Said to Hit 77% of US Households by 2012
Brad Reed

The United States will close its digital divide significantly within the next four years, with 77% of U.S. households having a broadband Internet subscription, according to a new Gartner study.

Just over half of U.S. households currently subscribe to broadband Internet services, but Gartner predicts that that percentage will grow by more than 20 points by 2012. Amanda Sabia, a Gartner principal research analyst, says one of the biggest factors in the spread of broadband will be the advent of such 4G wireless services as WiMAX and Long Term Evolution that are expected to be launched in various markets over the next four years.

Worldwide, 17 countries will have broadband penetration rates of 60% or more by 2012, up from five countries in 2007, Gartner says. South Korea, which currently has the highest rate of broadband penetration in the world, at 93% of households, will retain its lead as the most-connected country in the world, with 97% of households having a broadband subscription.

With a projected 77% household penetration rate, the United States will be tied with Japan for the fifth-highest broadband-penetration rate in the world, trailing only South Korea (97%), the Netherlands (82%), Hong King (81%) and Canada (79%). "Depending on the specific market conditions, availability of Internet-enabled devices and the continued impact of broadband on consumer lifestyles, we expect some markets will have a broadband ceiling at 80% penetration or greater," Sabia says.

As broadband becomes more ubiquitous, ISPs will concentrate less on building out their networks to reach new customers and more on expanding what customers can do with their broadband Internet connections, Sabia says. In particular, ISPs will focus on delivering entertainment applications, such as Internet video content and games, as well as IPTV content and home networking applications, she says.

The digital divide between urban and rural areas in the United States has been a hot topic among both politicians and ISPs. Because many ISPs have stated consistently that there isn't enough money to be made that would justify expanding their broadband networks to large areas with low population density, many in government have suggested subsidizing rural broadband in the United States. A recent report issued by content-delivery-network provider Akamai Technologies found that significant disparities remain between urban and rural areas in broadband-connectivity delivery, despite a relatively high number of broadband connections nationwide.

In particular, the report found that most of the states with the highest percentages of 5Mbps connections are East Coast states that have large urban areas. Delaware has the highest percentage of 5Mbps connections at 60%, followed by Rhode Island (42%) and New York (36%). Seven states have broadband-connection rates of less than 10%, with Hawaii having the lowest percentage at 2.4%, the report shows.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/14897...broadband.html





Does Your House Need a Tail? Sizing Up Customer-Owned Fiber
Timothy B. Lee

The really long tail

Last month, construction was completed on a pilot project that ran fiber optic cables to 400 homes in Ottawa. Stringing fiber optic cables isn't a big deal by itself—Verizon has been running fiber to millions of homes in the US—but the Ottawa project comes with a twist: rather than providing Internet access for a monthly fee, the company plans to sell the fiber strands outright to individual homeowners.

This isn't how we're used to doing telecommunications infrastructure. Traditionally, a "last mile" copper loop, coax cable, or fiber strand has been owned by an incumbent telephone or cable company, and the customer has paid a monthly fee for telecom services. But, if the Ottawa experiment is a success, that could change.

In the future, it could become commonplace for homes to come with "tails." These customer-owned, fiber-optic connections would link them to a network peering point. Without the expense of rolling out last mile infrastructure to every home, many more ISPs could afford to serve a given neighborhood by running wiring to the peering point, leading to more competition and lower prices. Perhaps best of all, the growth of customer-owned fiber could make debates over "open access" and network neutrality moot, as robust telecom competition should prevent the worst of the monopolistic behavior exhibited by telco and cable incumbents.

It's a tantalizing prospect, but a lot of practical difficulties will have to be overcome to make it a reality. Incumbent telecom firms may not like the prospect of increased competition, and they've never been shy about using regulatory barriers to strangle potential competitors in red tape. Meanwhile, promoters of the concept face a kind of chicken-and-egg problem: a customer-owned fiber strand is only useful if there is robust competition among ISPs at the other end, but companies aren't going to enter the residential ISP market until there's a critical mass of customer-owned fiber.

Most importantly, it's not yet clear how the economics will work. The Ottawa trial suggests that a fiber connection can cost less than $3000 per household, but the exact cost depends heavily on site geography and the rate of customer uptake. It will take several years for the concept to prove itself. And, if it does, it will take a number of additional years for it to be widely adopted.

Confronting the "last mile" problem

In the quarter century since the breakup of Ma Bell, policymakers have struggled with the "last mile" problem. Competition is good for consumers and for innovation, but rolling out redundant copper, fiber, or coax lines is wasteful—especially in dense urban areas where it requires ripping up busy streets. In the late 1990s, the FCC attempted to deal with this problem with a strategy called "open access," which forced incumbent telephone companies to "share" their infrastructure at rates dictated by the federal government.

The effort wasn't exactly a rousing success. Competitors accused the Baby Bells of foot-dragging and obstructionism. The Baby Bells, in turn, complained bitterly that the prices set by the FCC were too low to recover their costs. They also noted that they had little incentive to invest in infrastructure upgrades because any new infrastructure would have had to be shared with competitors.

After years of litigation and regulatory uncertainty, in 2005 the Supreme Court confirmed that cable incumbents were not subject to open-access rules. Soon afterwards, the FCC threw in the towel on open access for the Baby Bells as well. The result was the now-familiar duopoly: most American consumers can now get broadband service from their local phone company or their local cable company, but that's it.

The new arrangement is an undeniable improvement over the old Bell monopoly, but it still has plenty of problems. In his landmark paper that coined the phrase "network neutrality," Tim Wu positioned network neutrality regulations as a better strategy for achieving the goals of open access regulation. As it became clear that the open access model was failing, some activists shifted their focus to demanding the passage of "network neutrality" regulation.

But network neutrality regulation has proven no less controversial. Critics, including me, warn of the dangers of putting the Internet under the control of the political process. Just as uncertainties in the 1996 Telecom Act led to almost a decade of costly litigation, so too could the vagueness of network neutrality regulation could lead to a decade of litigation and the investment-stifling uncertainty that comes with it. Moreover, there are plenty of historical examples of regulatory schemes with unintended consequences. Most famously, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the nation's first modern regulatory agency, did more to protect the railroads from competition than to protect consumers from the railroads. There is a real danger that incumbent broadband providers could find ways to manipulate network neutrality regulations to their advantage, just as the railroads did a century ago.

The result has been a broadband policy stalemate. Congress considered, but failed to pass, network neutrality regulation in 2006. Since taking control of Congress, the Democratic majority has shown no interest in reviving the proposal. Proponents of regulation have touted pledges from every Democratic Senate challenger to support regulation, but the prospects for action in the next Congress remain cloudy. It wouldn't be the first time that the telcos have derailed legislation they didn't like.

Customer-owned fiber

Customer-owned fiber may offer a way out of this regulatory morass. It's hard to believe today but, as Google's Derek Slater points out, there was a time when the phone company owned the entire telephone network, including the wires inside our homes and the phone on our desks. Shifting the demarcation point to the outside of our homes created a vibrant market for customer premises equipment: not just telephones, but modems, fax machines, answering machines, and other specialized gear. With customer-owned fiber, the demarcation point would be shifted even further from the customer. That would once again mean more responsibility for the customer, but with offsetting benefits that could flow from greater competition.

Slater is working with Tim Wu on a forthcoming paper that discusses the customer-owned fiber model. Under their proposal, each customer would pay the up-front costs of stringing fiber to her own home. The fiber would terminate at a carrier-neutral colocation facility, where a variety of ISPs would have a presence. Because customers, rather than any given ISP, would own the "last mile" to the customer's house, many more ISPs could afford to compete on an equal footing for customers' business.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...wned-fiber.ars





Who Should Solve This Internet Crisis?
Robert M. McDowell

The Internet was in crisis. Its electronic "pipes" were clogged with new bandwidth-hogging software. Engineers faced a choice: Allow the Net to succumb to fatal gridlock or find a solution.

The year was 1987. About 35,000 people, mainly academics and some government employees, used the Internet.

This story, of course, had a happy ending. The loosely knit Internet engineering community rallied to improve an automated data "traffic cop" that prioritized applications and content needing "real time" delivery over those that would not suffer from delay. Their efforts unclogged the Internet and laid the foundation for what has become the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

The Internet has since weathered several such crises. Each time, engineers, academics, software developers, Web infrastructure builders and others have worked together to fix the problems. Over the years, some groups have become more formalized -- such as the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Architecture Board. They have remained largely self-governing, self-funded and nonprofit, with volunteers acting on their own and not on behalf of their employers. No government owns or regulates them.

The Internet has flourished because it has operated under the principle that engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.

Today, a new challenge is upon us. Pipes are filling rapidly with "peer-to-peer" ("P2P") file-sharing applications that crowd out other content and slow speeds for millions. Just as Napster produced an explosion of shared (largely pirated) music files in 1999, today's P2P applications allow consumers to share movies. P2P providers store movies on users' home and office computers to avoid building huge "server farms" of giant computers for this bandwidth-intensive data. When consumers download these videos, they call on thousands of computers across the Web to upload each of their small pieces. As a result, some consumers' "last-mile" connections, especially connections over cable and wireless networks, get clogged. These electronic traffic jams slow the Internet for most consumers, a majority of whom do not use P2P software to watch videos or surf the Web.

At peak times, 5 percent of Internet consumers are using 90 percent of the available bandwidth because of the P2P explosion. This flood of data has created a tyranny by a minority. Slower speeds degrade the quality of the service that consumers have paid for and ultimately diminish America's competitiveness globally.

While we at the Federal Communications Commission are trying to spur more competitive build-out of vital "last mile" facilities, especially fiber and wireless platforms, this congestion will not be resolved merely by building fatter and faster pipes.

Last summer, a new nongovernmental organization, the P4P Working Group, was formed to find a solution. The group has already field-tested dramatically increased delivery speeds of P2P content over cable networks (up 235 percent) and other networks (up 898 percent in some cases). It is working with industry and consumers to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities."

Such dynamic work is progressing without a government mandate or regulatory framework. Soon, however, that could change.

Since the fall, the FCC has been considering allegations filed by public interest groups that cable operator Comcast violated FCC rules by "managing" or "interfering with" the upstream flow of certain P2P video applications, namely those of a company called BitTorrent. The allegations boil down to a suspicion that Comcast was motivated not by a need to manage its network but by a desire to discriminate against BitTorrent for anticompetitive reasons. Comcast maintains that any interference was imperceptible to consumers, occurred in minuscule amounts of time, and was limited to peak congestion periods and areas. Comcast and BitTorrent settled their dispute in March; in fact, they issued a statement saying in part that "these technical issues can be worked out through private business discussions without the need for government intervention."

Despite this settlement, some are calling for the FCC to rule that Comcast's actions were illegal and should be punished. Others contend that the FCC has no enforceable rules that apply to such situations and that the issue should be addressed through a rule-making proceeding, with an opportunity for public comment, or through congressional legislation. We have examined the arguments on both sides and are poised to decide the matter this week. But regardless of what that ruling stipulates, the issue of what constitutes appropriate Internet network management will be debated for some time.

Our Internet economy is the strongest in the world. It got that way not by government fiat but because interested parties worked together toward a common goal. As a worldwide network of networks, the Internet is the ultimate "wiki" environment -- one that we all share, build, pay for and shape. Millions endeavor each day to keep it open and free. Since its early days as a government creation, it has migrated away from government regulation.

If we choose regulation over collaboration, we will be setting a precedent by thrusting politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions. Another concern is that as an institution, the FCC is incapable of deciding any issue in the nanoseconds that make up Internet time. And asking government to make these decisions could mean that every few years the ground rules would change based on election results. The Internet might grind to a halt in such a climate. It would certainly die of clogged arteries if network owners had to seek government permission before serving their customers by managing surges of information flow.

A better model would allow collaborative groups to continue to do what they have done for years. If they can't reach an agreement, -- which has never happened -- then government could examine the situation and act accordingly. Sometimes shining sunlight on issues produces amazingly beneficial effects, and the public interest groups that raised the BitTorrent matter should be praised for doing so. Yet before venturing into the unknown, we should remember something President Bill Clinton said in 1997: "Governments should encourage industry self-regulation wherever appropriate and support the efforts of private-sector organizations to . . . facilitate the successful operation of the Internet." What we do, or don't do, will affect tomorrow's networks. Let's stick with what works and encourage collaboration over regulation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072701172.html





AT&T Will Disconnect Wireless P2P Users

AT&T will jettison wireless users that engage in P2P file-sharing over its network, the company said Friday in a letter PDF filed at the FCC (and flagged today by Ted Hearn at Multichannel News). Senior lobbyist Robert Quinn answered a question posed at hearing last week by Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell about the company's policies of managing P2P network traffic on its broadband wireless platform.

Quinn said that AT&T's terms of service (as well as the TOS for most other carriers) bars the use of P2P applications on the wireless platform. "Use of a P2P file sharing application would constitute a material breach of contract for which the user’s service could be terminated," he said.

Because P2P file sharing applications typically engage in continuous (rather than bursty) transmissions at high data rates, a small number of users of P2P file sharing applications served by a particular cell site could severely degrade the service quality enjoyed by all customers served by that site.

AT&T hasn't yet booted anybody off the network for using P2P, Quinn said.

The FCC's McDowell is likely to vote against an order, slated for vote on Friday, that finds Comcast secretly degraded P2P traffic in violation of the agency's network neutrality principles. AT&T's written admission that it won't permit any form of P2P on its broadband wireless network is likely to be used by McDowell in arguing against the order, saying, in essence, that Comcast's supposed transgressions aren't as bad as blocking P2P altogether. (One crucial distinction between the two circumstances: Comcast wasn't "transparent" about its P2P throttling while AT&T is apparently upfront about it in its user agreement).

However, it's all but certain that the order will pass given that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, a proponent of punishing Comcast, likely has the two other votes needed to succeed, with Democratic Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein no doubt siding with him on this smatter. Less clear is whether any action by the FCC will stand up on appeal. CNET's Declan McCullagh today joins the growing consensus that the FCC does not have the authority to take this action.
http://www.ipdemocracy.com/archives/..._p2p_users.php





FCC Orders Comcast to Modify Network Management
Peter Kaplan

Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) has been ordered to change how it manages its broadband network after U.S. communications regulators concluded some of its tactics unreasonably restrict Internet users who share movies and other material.

In a precedent-setting decision, the five-member Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to uphold a complaint accusing Comcast of violating the FCC's open-Internet principles by improperly hindering peer-to-peer traffic.

"Subscribers should be able to go where they want, when they want, and generally use the Internet in any legal means," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said in a statement.

Comcast said it was disappointed by the decision and was considering all its "legal options."

The ruling by the FCC does not include any fines against Comcast. But it requires the company to cease impeding peer-to-peer applications, to tell the FCC how the practice has been used, and to notify customers about other network management practices it adopts in the future.

The complaint against Comcast was filed by consumer groups who said the company had blocked file-sharing services, such as BitTorrent, that distribute TV shows and movies.

The case has become a flash point for a growing debate over a concept known as "network neutrality," which pits open-Internet advocates against some Internet service providers, who say they need to take reasonable steps to manage ever-growing traffic on their networks for the good of all users.

Return To Sender

Comcast has said its network management practices were a reasonable choice and has argued that the FCC does not have the authority to enforce its open-Internet policy.

Martin likened Comcast's network management to "the post office opening your mail, deciding they didn't want to bother delivering it, and hiding that fact by sending it back to you stamped 'address unknown -- return to sender'."

Martin said the technique ran afoul of the FCC because it was too sweeping and was not disclosed to customers. He said Comcast's justification for using it -- that it is needed to manage network congestion -- did not add up.

Martin said he was especially troubled because the file-sharing targeted by Comcast was a potential competitive threat to the company's own video services. He said that if the FCC failed to take action in the Comcast case, it could provoke lawmakers in Congress to slap even more explicit rules on broadband providers.

Rival network operators Verizon (VZ.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and AT&T (T.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) issued statements immediately after the vote saying the FCC's action showed that there is no need for Congress to intervene.

"We have argued repeatedly that there is no need for federal legislation in this area, and today's FCC action proves that point," AT&T senior executive vice president Jim Cicconi said in a statement.

Joining Martin to uphold the complaint were the FCC's two Democratic commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein.

However, the decision drew sharp dissents from Martin's two fellow Republicans, Robert McDowell and Deborah Taylor Tate. They said it was overly intrusive, and worried that it might inhibit broadband providers from cracking down on illegal content like child pornography and pirated material.

McDowell and Tate said the agency should have allowed Comcast and its critics to iron out their dispute without intervention by the government.

They noted that Comcast had already reached an agreement with critics to change the way it manages its network and cooperate with BitTorrent and others.

"For the first time, today our government is choosing regulation over collaboration when it comes to Internet governance," McDowell said. "The (FCC) majority has thrust politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions." (Reporting by Peter Kaplan, editing by Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssT...47623420080801





Reactions to FCC's Comcast Decision Come Fast and Furious
Matthew Lasar

Hope, indignation, and outrage greeted the Federal Communications Commission's enactment of sanctions against Comcast for throttling P2P applications. Much of the response came before today's ruling, following FCC Chair Kevin Martin's disclosure last week of the impending decision.

A "historic test," complainant Free Press called the move. "If the commission decisively rules against Comcast, it will be a remarkable victory for organized people over organized money." Today's decision confirmed the advocacy group's hopes. "Defying every ounce of conventional wisdom in Washington, every-day people have taken on a major corporation and won an historic precedent for an open Internet."

Jay Monahan, General Counsel of Vuze, told Ars yesterday that when the hi-res video content company filed its net neutrality petition, he didn't expect the explosion of passionate support that followed. "When I saw the thousands of submissions to the Commission by consumers and the standing room only FCC field hearings that we attended and in some cases testified at, that part surprised me," Monahan confided in an interview. "That there were that many people paying this much attention to this."

The FCC's action may also be a global precedent. Ars asked Columbia law professor Tim Wu whether any other country has taken similar steps. It's a tricky call, he responded, because, unlike the United States, some countries have retained their common carrier powers over the Internet.

"However, in terms of enforcement, this is a first in the world as far as I know," Wu said.

Comcast and its allies

Meanwhile, Comcast, the recipient of today's punitive FCC Order, has been serving up a steady stream of clenched jaw rhetoric. "The Commission's order raises significant due process concerns and a variety of substantial legal questions," the company warned today. "We are considering all our legal options and are disappointed that the commission rejected our attempts to settle this issue without further delays."

The rest of the cable industry has resolutely stood by Comcast's side. On Tuesday, a senior VP of Time Warner cable met with the FCC, warning that "government intrusion into broadband providers' traffic management practices would have a chilling effect on investment and innovation." Four days earlier, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association sent the agency a chart of the network management practices of the nation's top colleges and universities. "If there is to be regulation, therefore, it must apply equally to all providers," NCTA's filing grimly advised.

But the undisguised outrage has come from the hardcore right, which views with horror the spectacle of Republican FCC Chair Martin delivering what it sees as the broadband equivalent of the Fairness Doctrine. The Wall Street Journal's editorial writers—who must surely sign a pact never to read the newspaper's excellent articles about telecommunications—lambasted Martin on Wednesday as a self-appointed "Master of the Media Universe," a chump for Moveon.org, and worse.

"Mr. Martin is also greasing the skids for a potential Barack Obama Administration to take an Internet industrial policy who knows where," the Journal warned. Ditto, declared House Republican Minority leader John Boehner, who the next day sent an angry letter to Martin, denouncing his efforts to "hijack the evolution of the Internet to everyone's detriment."

One senses in these frantic protests legitimate fears that Martin's move represents yet another sign that these are the End Days of the Reagan Era. It is very unlikely that the FCC's 42-year-old chief parties with the Free Press crowd. But with today's ruling, he has clearly sided not just with the FCC's "two Democrats," as the Journal bitterly calls them, but with a younger, technology-loving generation that sees government as an ally rather than The Problem.

Net neutrality isn't a slippery slope

In Ars' interview with Jay Monahan, the attorney bristled at the Wall Street Journal's insistence that "net neutrality is a slippery slope toward interventions of all kinds." It is the opposite, he insisted. "What Martin has proposed, and what the Commission is about to do, is exactly designed to protect innovation, and to protect competition," Monahan argued. "If net neutrality means anything, it means not that each of us is made equal in the marketplace, but that at least we have an equal set of rules that are transparent to all of us in order to compete."

Nobody, least of all Vuze, thinks this fight is over. Monahan says he fully expects Comcast to "appeal the Commission's order"—which means a lawsuit against the FCC, a Congressional counterattack, or both. Still, he sees today as a day to celebrate.

"We do view this as a first step," Monahan concluded. "A first step towards helping to build an open and free Internet. And we're grateful to the Commission for having the courage to adopt this order so that we can move forward and go back to our Palo Alto office and continue to compete in this marketplace."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...d-furious.html





Clear Channel Shareholders Approve Merger
FMQB

Clear Channel Communications announced today that, based on a preliminary vote count, Clear Channel shareholders approved the merger agreement with a group led by Bain Capital Partners, LLC and Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. The number of shares voted in favor of the transaction represented more than 74 percent of the total shares outstanding and entitled to vote. The preliminary tabulation indicates that approximately 97 percent of the shares voted were cast in favor of the transaction. The parties intend to consummate the merger on July 30, according to a statement.

"We are pleased with the outcome of today’s vote," said Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays. "On behalf of Clear Channel’s Board of Directors, I want to thank our shareholders and hard-working employees for their support throughout this process."

In May, Clear Channel entered into a third amendment to the merger agreement with the private equity firms. Under the new terms of the deal, Clear Channel shareholders will receive $36 in cash for each share they own. As an alternative to that, shareholders were also offered the opportunity to exchange some or all of their shares of Clear Channel common stock on a one-for-one basis for shares of Class A common stock of CC Media Holdings, Inc., the new corporation formed by the private equity group to acquire Clear Channel.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=807226





Sirius Satellite Loss Narrows, Subscribers Rise

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc (SIRI.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) said on Monday its second-quarter adjusted quarterly loss narrowed as it increased subscribers to its pay radio service.

In a preliminary report, Sirius, which is acquiring rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings (XMSR.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), said its adjusted loss from operations is expected to be $24 million, compared with a loss of $79 million a year earlier.

Sirius did not provide a net loss figure, nor did it give details on what gains or losses were factored into the "adjusted loss from operations."

Revenue rose 25 percent to $283 million.

In the quarter, Sirius added a net 279,820 new subscribers. It ended the period with 8.9 million subscribers, an increase of about 25 percent.

Sirius, the satellite radio home to "shock jock" Howard Stern and the National Football League, said retail subscribers increased 7 percent, while automotive subscribers rose 53 percent.

Last week Sirius' proposed $3.3 billion acquisition of XM drew nearer to completion after it was approved, with conditions, by U.S. communications regulators. The deal will leave just one U.S. satellite radio service.

The Federal Communications Commission voted in favor of a proposal that would allow the deal to proceed as long as the companies meet a series of consumer-protection conditions, including a three-year cap on prices, setting aside 8 percent of their channel capacity for minority and noncommercial programming, and payment of a $19.7 million penalty for past FCC rule violations. (Reporting by Franklin Paul; Editing by Derek Caney and John Wallace)
http://www.reuters.com/article/media...46288020080728





A Quiet Investor Becomes a Media Powerhouse Everyone and Nobody Knows
Tim Arango

Over the Fourth of July weekend at the billionaire Ronald O. Perelman’s 57-acre East Hampton estate the Creeks, Vivi Nevo was in his element.

Mr. Nevo, with his fiancée, the megawatt Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi (the star of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), sitting on his lap, watched Jon Bon Jovi give an impromptu performance before taking a turn on the dance floor to Dave Mason’s “Feelin’ Alright.”

A wind-up doll of kinetic energy, who bounds about like a shortstop, Mr. Nevo, who is 43, is said to be the largest individual shareholder of Time Warner, was once the largest private investor in Goldman Sachs, is engaged to China’s most famous actress, vacations on Rupert Murdoch’s sailboat, is the godfather of Lachlan Murdoch’s son, counts Lenny Kravitz as a good friend and attended Madonna’s wedding in 2000.

And many people, including even some of his close friends, a few of whom joined him at Mr. Perelman’s estate over the Fourth of July — and spoke about the party anonymously because it was a private event — have no idea what his background is or how exactly he made his fortune.

Twenty years or so ago, Vivi Nevo, his first name a nickname for Aviv, was living in a studio apartment in the Concorde building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Today he is the media industry’s Zelig, often referred to among his media friends as “the international man of mystery.”

“He is everywhere, all the time, like no one I have ever seen,” said Graydon Carter, the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, which frequently hosts Mr. Nevo at its high society parties.

Who is Mr. Nevo? An Israeli who took a modest inheritance from his family and parlayed it into a sizable fortune through savvy investing, much of it in media and Internet companies — and into connections in the media world.

Behind the scenes, his influence on the media industry is subtle. For upstart Internet companies, he has been an important broker of relationships with traditional firms; and for Time Warner, in particular, he was an advocate, when the Yahoo takeover battle erupted, of trying to assemble a three-way partnership among Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN and Time Warner’s AOL.

Of all the characters the media business attracts — and creates, for that matter — perhaps no one is more remarked upon, wondered about or marveled at than Mr. Nevo. Among his many overlapping circles of friends, nearly all say that Mr. Nevo is a force in their lives: a loyal friend, a trusted conveyor and keeper of information and someone who never forgets a birthday or a bar mitzvah.

“He’s someone I’ve really liked,” said John J. Mack, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, who met Mr. Nevo several years ago while he was at the helm of Credit Suisse. “I trust him. He’s got great instincts for the business.”

Gordon Crawford, senior vice president and a director of Capital Research and Management and one of the best-known media investors, met Mr. Nevo around 10 years ago and the two became close. This month they flew together to Sun Valley, Idaho, for the investment bank Allen & Company’s annual media conference. “I don’t know anyone who’s worked harder at developing contacts,” Mr. Crawford said. “It’s definitely more than social. I think he’s a pretty astute observer of what’s going on in the media.”

Mr. Nevo has an uncanny ability to network and a knack for putting himself in the right place at the right time.

In the spring of 1999, John Thornton, who was then president of Goldman Sachs, was in Los Angeles for the bank’s road show before it went public, and after giving a presentation, he sat down. “The guy sitting next to me was Vivi Nevo, and we just started talking and developed a nice rapport right then.” Later, Mr. Thornton became an adviser to Time Warner. “So I dealt with him a lot there,” Mr. Thornton recalled. “He was very active in talking with management. I can’t think of anyone who is principally a private investor who is that focused on one industry.”

Mr. Nevo’s discretion, combined with a lack of a paper trail, equates to a constant chirping of questions in the media industry about his back story.

“He’s a great character, so that draws attention to him,” said Lachlan Murdoch, explaining the growing fascination that people in the media business have about Mr. Nevo. “He’s also a very private individual.

“When I moved back to Australia” — after leaving the News Corporation, where his father is chairman, in 2005 — “we spoke a lot. He’s been a friend through thick and thin.”

Those who knew Mr. Nevo in the 1980s, after he moved to New York from Israel, have watched his rise with curiosity.

“You’re asking questions I’ve asked myself many times,” said Nicolas Rachline, who met Mr. Nevo in the late 1980s when both were part of a fashionable New York expatriate crowd that hung out at Le Bilboquet, a French restaurant on the Upper East Side. “What the hell does Vivi do? He seems to be a powerful player in the entertainment industry. How, I don’t know.”

Mr. Perelman met Mr. Nevo years ago on the Los Angeles social scene — either at Barry Diller’s or at the house of a Creative Artists Agency partner, Bryan Lourd, he said — and the pair’s relationship is purely social. “There’s no business element,” Mr. Perelman said. “It’s purely social, but it’s a deep social. He’s around my family, I’m around his fiancée. We take a lot of trips together.”

The glittery social world that Mr. Nevo inhabits is secondary — and the byproduct of — what is the core of his professional existence: a sizable stake in Time Warner he has maintained for years, apparently with impeccable, buy-and-sell timing. Mr. Nevo, through his firm NV Investments, has never owned 5 percent or more of the company, which would require public disclosure, but it is widely believed in the industry that he is the largest private shareholder; Mr. Nevo himself often says so.

A Time Warner spokesman said that Mr. Nevo is a shareholder but could not verify the size of his holding. But Mr. Nevo does have, and has had for years, the ear of management.

Mr. Nevo, whose workaday uniform is snug, black Christian Dior suits, has a particularly close relationship with Richard D. Parsons, Time Warner’s chairman, who stepped down in January as chief executive. Like many of his media mogul friendships, his relationship with Mr. Parsons started years ago in Sun Valley. “I first met Vivi at the duck pond in Sun Valley,” Mr. Parsons recalled in a phone interview. “In typical Vivi Nevo fashion, we shortly became best buds.”

The personal connections are part of how Mr. Nevo makes investment decisions. “He informs his instincts by being in the space,” Mr. Parsons said. “This is how he absorbs what’s going on, and decides where to place his bets.”

For a man who has become a ubiquitous figure in a very public industry, Mr. Nevo is, and has remained, largely a private, unknown quantity. “He’s not so much mysterious, as he just doesn’t want to be public,” said Mr. Parsons, who is an executor of a trust Mr. Nevo established for his daughter, Lilly, age 6, from a previous relationship. “The mysterious part is, you can’t Google this guy and get his whole story.”

Mr. Nevo has always refused requests for interviews, and he declined to comment for this article. In private conversations with some friends and associates, however, Mr. Nevo has provided glimpses into his background.

The silhouette of Mr. Nevo’s story goes like this: he was an only child who was born in Bucharest, Romania, and moved with his parents to Tel Aviv when he was a baby. His father was a chemical engineer and his mother was an anesthesiologist. As a boy, Mr. Nevo would vacation with his parents in Los Angeles, where he became enchanted with the glamour of Hollywood.

There was family money — his father ran a chemical company, according to several people, including Mr. Nevo’s friend and tennis partner Frank Biondi, the former head of Universal Studios and chief executive of Viacom. But the driving force of his life is the memory of his mother, who died of cancer in the late 1980s, leaving him an inheritance that allowed him to start investing.

“It’s all about the respect he had for his mother,” said Elizabeth Saltzman, international social editor of Vanity Fair, who met Mr. Nevo on the New York social scene in the 1980s (the second time she met him she shared a helicopter with him to the Hamptons). “His mother was everything. I think there’s a huge mama complex, of trying to make her proud.”

With the inheritance — which one business associate of Mr. Nevo’s, who spoke anonymously because his conversations with him were meant to be confidential, pegged at around $10 million — Mr. Nevo set about investing and networking. He opened trading accounts at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, as well as Allen & Company, which eventually won him an invitation to Sun Valley, the place that became the locus for so many of his relationships, including those with Mr. Parsons and Lachlan Murdoch. Through diligence and hard work, the right contacts and a lot of the right trades during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, he turned his inheritance into a sizable fortune.

Mr. Mack said: “He took the money his family left him and he really created this media, trading empire. At Credit Suisse we did a lot of trading business with him, either outright or with derivatives.”

How much money he made is really anyone’s guess. When Mr. Nevo began appearing a few years ago on certain lists, like Vanity Fair’s New Establishment list, Forbes tried to gauge Mr. Nevo’s wealth to see if he belonged on the magazine’s list of billionaires, but ultimately gave up trying. Mr. Nevo owns homes in Malibu, Calif.; the Los Angeles-area neighborhood of Brentwood; the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York; London; and two homes in Tel Aviv, including his modest childhood home outside the city, which sits empty. In addition, he and Ms. Zhang recently bought a home in Beijing.

“Vivi is a very hard worker, and we’d begin chatting about the markets in the early morning, and then we’d talk late in the afternoon,” said Bob Packer, who ran Goldman Sachs’s institutional equities unit in San Francisco and handled many of Mr. Nevo’s trades. “He loved working with the markets. He’s just a really affable, wonderful, loyal guy.”

In the case of Time Warner, his relationship with the company and its executives began in the early to mid-1990s, when he established a relationship with Gerald M. Levin, then chief executive.

“It was in a social context,” Mr. Levin said, trying to recall how he met Mr. Nevo. “I would go to every major fight that HBO had in Las Vegas. It was either at the fights in Las Vegas or at some movie premiere. No, I think it was in Vegas.”

“I spoke to him about Time Warner and what we were doing. Increasingly, he got interested. Unlike some other financial players, he has an interest not just in the financial aspect itself but also the personalities. The social nexus is part of his understanding and analysis.”

Joseph Ravitch, a prominent media investment banker at Goldman Sachs, said Mr. Nevo was “extraordinarily Zelig-like in the sense that he endears himself to a totally diverse group of people from C.E.O.’s to artists and rock stars.”

“But it’s not really Zelig,” he continued, “because he is always the same, open and straightforward Vivi.”

Several years ago, Joseph R. Perella, who led investment banking for Morgan Stanley and was the senior banker on the Time Warner account, received a phone call from Mr. Parsons. “Parsons said, I know a guy you’d like to meet,” Mr. Perella recalled. “Interesting guy. Knows a lot about the business.”

Mr. Perella said they hit it off almost immediately over lunch at San Pietro, a Manhattan restaurant favored by investment bankers. “He’s one of the least boring types I have ever met,” Mr. Perella said. “My sense is he’s a self-made guy who made it himself. He’s just a smart investor. As for the building blocks of his fortune, I have no idea.”

Of late, Mr. Nevo has been sprinkling money around in private companies, many of which are new media ventures. He has around 25 private investments, according to a business associate, including stakes in Demand Media, a social networking company; CityVoter, a social site that allows city dwellers to post about things like where to eat and where to shop; an online music site, Buzznet; Spot Runner, an online advertising company; and the Internet video company Joost. He also has an investment in the Weinstein Company, the film company run by the brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, and had a small investment in Bette, a now-shuttered New York restaurant that was owned by Amy Sacco, a prominent nightlife entrepreneur.

Many of the investments are modest in size — about $1 million in the Weinsteins; six figures in Demand Media — but Mr. Nevo’s association with a company brings value beyond the size of the check he writes. “He’s sort of like a media Wizard of Oz,” said Tyler Goldman, the founder of Buzznet, who approached Mr. Nevo last year about investing. “He had some strategic advice, but mostly relationship advice. We were working on a number of deals with bigger media companies, and he had advice on how to approach those.”

Nick Grouf, the chief executive of Spot Runner, said that Mr. Nevo was instrumental in brokering relationships, including with Lachlan Murdoch, who also invested. “Vivi has been very helpful to us in making introductions to his friends,” Mr. Grouf said. “Lachlan is a great example. And with Time Warner, I met Dick Parsons through Vivi.”

In fact, Mr. Nevo’s value — beyond friendship — to many executives is his wealth of information and contacts. “Vivi is plugged in to everything,” Mr. Parsons said. “He hears everything.”

For others, Mr. Nevo is a great friend with a comfy house in Malibu in which to crash, as Lenny Kravitz did during the West Coast part of his 2004 world tour. “It was nice to just have a place to put your stuff,” Mr. Kravitz said in an interview. “If I had to say anything about Vivi Nevo, it’s that he’s all heart. He operates on trust, heart and feeling.”

And about Mr. Nevo’s business? “I don’t go there with him,” Mr. Kravitz said. “And that’s part of our understanding. I’m interested in Vivi Nevo the person.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/bu...ia/28vivi.html





Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes
Andrew Adam Newman

There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a “dear friend.” Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.

While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with “Sail,” a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.

The funeral at Hachette — an office party in the audio-book department — mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc. (The CD, too, is in rapid decline, thanks to Internet music stores, but that is a different story.)

Cassettes have limped along for some time, partly because of their usefulness in recording conversations or making a tape of favorite songs, say, for a girlfriend. But sales of portable tape players, which peaked at 18 million in 1994, sank to 480,000 in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The group predicts that sales will taper to 86,000 in 2012.

“I bet you would be hard pressed to find a household in the U.S. that doesn’t have at least a couple cassette tapes hanging around,” said Shawn DuBravac, an economist with the Consumer Electronics Association. Even if publishers of music and audio books stopped using cassettes entirely, people would still shop for tape players because of “the huge libraries of legacy content consumers have kept,” he said.

As long as people keep mix tapes from a high-school sweetheart up in the attic, Mr. DuBravac said, there will still be the urge to hear them. “People have a tremendous amount of installed content and an innate curiosity when coming across a box of tapes to say, ‘Hey, what’s on these?’ ” he said.

The tapes started to really take off in 1979, the year that a radical new cassette player — the Sony Walkman — was introduced, enabling people to listen to Donna Summer and the Knack’s “My Sharona” while they were jogging (remember jogging?). The heft of the early Walkman — slightly smaller and lighter than a brick — is comical by today’s wispy iPod standards, but during the Carter administration it seemed sleek.

Nowadays, listening to music on cassettes is a dying pastime. None of Billboard’s Top 10 albums last week were issued on cassette, though half were released on vinyl, which has been resurging. Last year, only 400,000 music tapes were sold, representing one-tenth of 1 percent of all physical and digital music sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. In 1997, the figure was 173 million, and that was when cassettes were already getting a drubbing by CDs. (The iPod wasn’t introduced until 2001.)

“I would not expect to see a revival of cassettes like we’ve seen in the LP market,” Mr. DuBravac said. While vinyl records have always been prized artifacts for their devotees, the plastic cassette tape has little sex appeal.

Such was the case for the eight-track format as well, which was popular in the late 1960s and ’70s. It died relatively quickly with the advent of cassettes because eight-tracks were not widely used for personal recording or mix tapes, Mr. DuBravac said.

While the chances of finding cassette players in a dorm room today are slim, they are still available for sale: on Amazon, Sony alone offers 23 tape players, from the Walkman to boomboxes.

Popping a cassette in the car tape deck is also passé. Only 4 percent of vehicles sold in the United States during the 2007 model year had factory-installed cassette players, according to Ward’s Automotive Yearbook. As recently as the 2005 model year, 23 percent of vehicles had them.

Given that the median age of a car in the United States is nine years old, said Alan K. Binder, the editor of Ward’s yearbook, it is most likely that the majority of the 200 million cars and light trucks on America’s roads have cassette players (though how many have had the same Bob Seger tape lodged unplayable in them for 11 years is impossible to determine).

Cassette tapes’ tendency to hiss — and to melt in the summer and snap in the winter — turns off audiophiles. But for audio books, the cassette is an oddly elegant medium: you can eject it from your car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in the same place, an analog feat beyond the ability of the CD.

Cassettes accounted for 7 percent of all sales in the $923 million audio-book industry in 2006, the latest year for which data is available, according to the Audio Publishers Association. While many publishers, like Random House and Macmillan, stopped producing books on cassette in the last couple of years, there are holdouts.

At Blackstone Audio, which produces cassette versions of its roughly 340 annual titles, Josh Stanton, the executive vice president, said there was still demand from libraries and truckers, who buy them at truck stops. But he could forecast only that his company would produce cassettes through 2009.

Recorded Books, whose authors include Philip Roth and Jodi Picoult, still issues cassettes of all its titles, roughly 700 a year. Retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble have essentially stopped ordering them, but libraries have been slower to abandon them, said Brian Downing, the company’s publisher.

The Web sites of Barnes & Noble and Borders, however, indicate that they still offer some cassettes, though publishers say the stores’ buyers have expressed little interest in ordering more in the future.

At some point, the cassette will go the way of the eight-track, Mr. Downing acknowledged, and his company will publish only in other formats.

“I would guess it would be pretty much gone in three years,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/bu...8cassette.html





Stones Roll Over To Universal Music Group
FMQB

After months of speculation, The Rolling Stones have left EMI for Universal Music Group. UMG said that the new deal with the Stones covers a portion of their back catalog and any future releases. The agreement gives the Polydor imprint any new records from the band, along with full digital and physical rights to releases. The deal also puts the distribution rights for the entire Stones catalog in one place for the first time. UMG already had distribution rights to the band's early catalog, up to 1970. The new agreement now includes everything from 1971's Sticky Fingers onward.

In a statement, the Stones said, "Universal are forward thinking, creative and hands-on music people. We really look forward to working with them." In March, UMG released the soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese Stones documentary Shine A Light in a one-off deal.

UMG said in a statement that it "will begin planning an unprecedented, long-term campaign to reposition the Rolling Stones' entire catalogue for the digital age." UMG CEO Doug Morris added, "There is no question that the Rolling Stones are one of the most important bands in music history."

Reuters reports that Live Nation also tried to add the Stones to their growing roster of exclusive artists.

In related news, happy birthday to Mick Jagger, who turns 65 tomorrow (July 26).
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=808587





Yahoo Offers Coupons for Music that Stops Working
Anick Jesdanun

Yahoo Inc. is offering coupons or refunds to users who find songs they bought inaccessible after Sept. 30, when the company shuts its music-download service.

The decision to close the Yahoo Music Store had added fuel to criticisms over copy-protection measures known as digital rights management, but Yahoo promised it won't entirely abandon loyal customers.

The company said Wednesday it is offering coupons on request for people to buy songs again through Yahoo's new partner, RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody. Those songs will be in the MP3 format, free of copy protection. Refunds are available for users who "have serious problems with this arrangement," Yahoo said.

Spokeswoman Carrie Davis said a "small number" of users are affected by the change. Yahoo wouldn't disclose the actual number.

Yahoo announced this year it was ceasing its online music subscription service and switching customers to Rhapsody. Subscriptions will continue at the same monthly rates for an unspecified period.

For people who bought songs outright — paying a one-time fee for a specific track rather than a continuing subscription for unlimited music — Yahoo will be shutting the digital-rights management servers needed to verify eligibility. Copy-protection measures placed on the tracks require access to those servers when users buy a new computer or upgrade their operating system.

The company warns that "after the store has closed, you will not be able to transfer songs to another computer or relicense these songs after changing operating systems."

Yahoo says users can burn songs onto a regular audio CD and rip them back as an MP3 file without the copy-protection technology, but that requires time and blank CDs, and can result in a loss in quality.

Critics of digital rights management point to Yahoo's decision to end support for legally purchased music as yet another reason to push for tracks free of such limits, something the recording industry is starting to embrace.

Earlier, Microsoft Corp. backtracked from plans to shutter its MSN Music servers this year and agreed to continue authorizing music on new computers through at least 2011.

But Davis said Yahoo opted to shut down its system to avoid "delaying the inevitable."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080730/...3RQ 2Ny1k24cA





ImageShack’s Free Torrent Download Service Expands
Ernesto

ImageShack, one of the largest media hosting websites, has implemented some significant upgrades to their torrent download service. One of the most innovative new features is the “video preview”, which allows users to browse through stills of the video they are downloading, to get an impression of the quality of the file.

ImageShack, as the name already suggests, is best known for their image hosting. However, the site has more to offer, like their torrent download service for example.

ImageShack allows its users to upload a .torrent file to the site, which will then be downloaded to the ImageShack servers. After the download is complete, the files can be easily downloaded via a http link in any browser. The service is ideal for people who have throttled connection, and those who don’t want to give out their IP address to the public.

In April we reported that ImageShack had rolled out the BETA version to the public but since then some exiting features have been added. One of these new features is the video preview feature. When you add a popular video torrent to your download queue, it will show you a time-line of image stills, so you can verify the content and the quality of the file. Below is an example of such a time-line.

Torrent download services are not new, but there are only a few that don’t change any money. Jack Levin, the founder of ImageShack explained to TorrentFreak why he started the project: “We think its going to be a great service for users, especially in the light of ISPs rate-limiting torrent traffic. There are a lot of free and legal torrents out there that people should have easy access to too. We have the capacity to do it, and the world needs it.”

Although the service is free, there is a storage limit of 5GB and a transfer limit of 10GB per month. Users that would like to use the service more intensively will have to pay a subscription fee, starting at $10 a month for 10GB disk space and 15GB bandwidth.

Initially, we had some concerns about the service, because it did not support seeding. The torrent simply disconnected as soon as the download was finished, which hurts the overall swarm speed. This has changed as well, as ImageShack now allows users to seed files up to 150%.

The torrent downloads are pretty easy to manage, and the site provides some basic details about the progress of the downloads. Under the “status” link it lists information about the download progress, connected seeds and leechers, share ratio and more. Other great features are selective downloading, which is ideal if you only need one file from a big torrent, and the ability to request an email notification when the download has finished.

It’s doubtful that Hollywood will like the service. However, Levin is not worried about this: “DMCA applies, so, if we get reports from copyright owners to take down content, we will comply,” he told us earlier. Overall we would say that the service does what it promises, it downloads files much faster than most residential connections would, and has become more friendly to the torrent community now it allows seeding. Worth a try.
http://torrentfreak.com/imageshacks-...xpands-080727/





Red Lasso Closes Video Search After Being Sued
Greg Sandoval

RedLasso has suspended access to its video search-and-clipping site two days after NBC Universal and Fox filed a copyright suit against the company.

File this one under inevitable.

RedLasso, which announced the closure in a statement on Friday, recorded TV shows and then indexed clips so users could find, pull, and embed them on other Web sites. They did so without permission. The company had suggested that it was in talks to obtain licenses. RedLasso will keep operating its Radio To Web service, which allows radio stations to search and upload their content to their own Web site.

In May, NBC Universal flatly denied that it had any affiliation with RedLasso when the entertainment company sent a letter accusing RedLasso of "building a business based on the unauthorized syndication of" the content owners' shows.

The era of companies following in YouTube's shoes is over. No more are the studios going to sit back and allow tech start-ups to use their content to grab eyeballs and then negotiate terms later.

Not when they are giving their content away free, at sites like Hulu, the video site created by NBC Universal and News Corp. Anyone can go to Hulu and grab embed code for feature films and many NBC Universal shows without violating the law.

"We are very disappointed in the actions of select networks," RedLasso said in a statement. "We believe we have always acted within the law and have been respectful of the networks' rights. Unfortunately, they have forced our hand."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9999592-93.html





Google to Face Charges Over Down's Syndrome Video

Italian prosecutors say a video which showed four youths taunting a teenager with Down's syndrome was an invasion of privacy
Jonathan Richards

Google is to face criminal charges in Italy over a video which appeared on one of its sites showing a disabled teenager being taunted by his peers.

Italian prosecutors have indicated that they will press charges against four Google executives over a video which was posted on one of the search giant's Italian sites in 2006, which showed four youths making fun of a disabled teenager in a classroom in the northern city of Turin.

Magistrates who have recently ended a two-year investigation into the incident claim that the airing of the 191-second clip, which showed the youths making fun of the teenager before hitting him over the head with a box of tissues, amounted to a breach of privacy and was defamatory.

A Google spokesman said today that the company had co-operated fully with the Italian authorities and that it was "disappointed" with the decision to send Google employees to trial.

"We believe that this proceeding is not about Google Video and what happened, but about the internet as we know it - an open and free environment," the spokesman said.

Google is understood to have removed the clip from the Google Video site within hours of administrators being notified of its existence in September, 2006.

Google has had several run-ins with governments around the world over its video-sharing site, which does not screen content before it is uploaded and relies on its users to point out offensive content.

The case bears resemblances to an incident in the UK in November last year, when a video which appeared to show a 23-year-old woman being sexually assaulted was posted on YouTube. Google, which owns YouTube, was not prosecuted in that case, although it admitted that it had been too slow to remove the clip.

The Italian investigation was prompted after a group acting on behalf of people with Down's syndrome was alerted to the video. The four youths who filmed the incident are also reported to have faced criminal prosecution.

A Google spokesman was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying that there was no basis for the legal action because under EU legislation - which has been incorporated into Italian law - Google isn't required to monitor third-party content on its sites. It must only take down offending content when it is notified.

The four executives involved are reported to be the chairman of Google Italy at the time, another Google Italy board member at the time, an executive responsible for privacy policy in Europe, and the then head of Google Video for Europe.

In the past governments in several countries - including Pakistan, Thailand, and Morocco - have temporarily suspended YouTube for streaming what they said was offensive content.

A spokesman for Google today declined to comment on the proceedings.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle4397511.ece





Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine
Miguel Helft

In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.

Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.

On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.

“I think it will be better,” Mr. Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”

Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is only the latest in a long string of start-up companies that have been founded and financed with the goal of competing with Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. (In June, Google accounted for 61.5 percent of search queries in the United States, while Yahoo held 20.9 percent and Microsoft had 9.2 percent, according to comScore.) Some of the most prominent include Powerset, which Microsoft recently bought, and Wikia, which was founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. So far, none have managed to make a dent in the search market.

But some analysts say Cuil has potential, in part because of the pedigree of its founders.

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

Google would not comment on Cuil and would not disclose the size of its own index. But in an e-mail statement, Google said that it maintained “the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web” and welcomed competition.

Mr. Sullivan said he was unimpressed by Cuil’s claim that its index includes more Web pages, noting that that could mean users are “overwhelmed by a whole bunch of junk.” But he said that Cuil’s new approach to ranking pages and presenting results could prove to be a hit with some users.

“If it turns out that they have good relevancy, I could see that the word of mouth” would bring Cuil some popularity, he said.

Ms. Patterson left Google in 2006 to found Cuil. The new company has other prominent ex-Google employees, including Russell Power, who worked with Ms. Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine. Cuil, which has about 30 employees and is in Menlo Park, Calif., has raised $33 million from venture investors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/te...gy/28cool.html





Discovering How Greeks Computed in 100 B.C.
John Noble Wilford

After a closer examination of a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology known as the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, on Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with Archimedes.

Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the Moon’s orbital course.

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the first analog computer, was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the tiny island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C.

Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument’s back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.

In the journal report, the team led by the mathematician and filmmaker Tony Freeth of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, in Cardiff, Wales, said the month names “are unexpectedly of Corinthian origin,” which suggested “a heritage going back to Archimedes.”

No month names on what is called the Metonic calendar were previously known, the researchers noted. Such a calendar, as well as other knowledge displayed on the mechanism, illustrated the influence of Babylonian astronomy on the Greeks. The calendar was used by Babylonians from at least the early fifth century B.C.

Dr. Freeth, who is also associated with Images First Ltd., in London, explained in an e-mail message that the Metonic calendar was designed to reconcile the lengths of the lunar month with the solar year. Twelve lunar months are about 11 days short of a year, but 235 lunar months fit well into 19 years.

“From this it is possible to construct an artificial mathematical calendar that keeps in synchronization with both the sun and the moon,” Dr. Freeth said.

The mechanism’s connection with the Corinthians was unexpected, the researchers said, because other cargo in the shipwreck appeared to be from the eastern Mediterranean, places like Kos, Rhodes and Pergamon. The months inscribed on the instrument, they wrote, are “practically a complete match” with those on calendars from Illyria and Epirus in northwestern Greece and with the island of Corfu. Seven months suggest a possible link with Syracuse.

Inscriptions also showed that one of the instrument’s dials was used to record the timing of the pan-Hellenic games, a four-year cycle that was “a common framework for chronology” by the Greeks, the researchers said.

“The mechanism still contains many mysteries,” Dr. Freeth said. Among the larger questions, scientists and historians said the place of the mechanism in the development of Greek technology remained poorly understood. Several references to similar instruments appear in classical literature, including Cicero’s description of one made by Archimedes. But this one, hauled out of the sea in 1901, is the sole surviving example.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/sc...1computer.html





In Study, Evidence of Liberal-Bias Bias

Cable talking heads accuse broadcast networks of liberal bias -- but a think tank finds that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Barack Obama than on John McCain in recent weeks.
James Rainey

Haters of the mainstream media reheated a bit of conventional wisdom last week.

Barack Obama, they said, was getting a free ride from those insufferable liberals.

Such pronouncements, sorry to say, tend to be wrong since they describe a monolithic media that no longer exists. Information today cascades from countless outlets and channels, from the Huffington Post to Politico.com to CBS News and beyond.

But now there's additional evidence that casts doubt on the bias claims aimed -- with particular venom -- at three broadcast networks.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

Conservatives have been snarling about the grotesque disparity revealed by another study, the online Tyndall Report, which showed Obama receiving more than twice as much network air time as McCain in the last month and a half. Obama got 166 minutes of coverage in the seven weeks after the end of the primary season, compared with 67 minutes for McCain, according to longtime network-news observer Andrew Tyndall.

I wrote last week that the networks should do more to better balance the air time. But I also suggested that much of the attention to Obama was far from glowing.

That earned a spasm of e-mails that described me as irrational, unpatriotic and . . . somehow . . . French.

But the center's director, RobertLichter, who has won conservative hearts with several of his previous studies, told me the facts were the facts.

"This information should blow away this silly assumption that more coverage is always better coverage," he said.

Here's a bit more on the research, so you'll understand how the communications professor and his researchers arrived at their conclusions.

The center reviews and "codes" statements on the evening news as positive or negative toward the candidates. For example, when NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell said in June that Obama "has problems" with white men and suburban women, the media center deemed that a negative.

The positive and negative remarks about each candidate are then totaled to calculate the percentages that cut for and against them.

Visual images and other more subjective cues are not assessed. But the tracking applies a measure of analytical rigor to a field rife with seat-of-the-pants fulminations.

The media center's most recent batch of data covers nightly newscasts beginning June 8, the day after Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination, ushering in the start of the general-election campaign. The data ran through Monday, as Obama began his overseas trip.

Most on-air statements during that time could not be classified as positive or negative, Lichter said. The study found, on average, less than two opinion statements per night on the candidates on all three networks combined -- not exactly embracing or pummeling Obama or McCain. But when a point of view did emerge, it tended to tilt against Obama.

That was a reversal of the trend during the primaries, when the same researchers found that 64% of statements about Obama -- new to the political spotlight -- were positive, but just 43% of statements about McCain were positive.

Such reversals are nothing new in national politics, as reporters tend to warm up to newcomers, then turn increasingly critical when such candidates emerge as front-runners.

It might be tempting to discount the latest findings by Lichter's researchers. But this guy is anything but a liberal toady.

In 2006, conservative cable showmen Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly had Lichter, a onetime Fox News contributor, on their programs. They heralded his findings in the congressional midterm election: that the networks were giving far more positive coverage to the Democrats.

More proof of the liberal domination of the media, Beck and O'Reilly declared.

Now the same researchers have found something less palatable to those conspiracy theorists.

But don't expect cable talking heads to end their trashing of the networks.

Repeated assertions that the networks are in the tank for Democrats represent not only an article of faith on Fox, but a crucial piece of branding. On Thursday night, O'Reilly and his trusty lieutenant Bernard Goldberg worked themselves into righteous indignation -- again -- about the liberal bias they knew was lurking.

Goldberg seemed gleeful beyond measure in saying that "they're fiddling while their ratings are burning."

O'Reilly assured viewers that "the folks" -- whom he claims to treasure far more than effete network executives do -- "understand what's happening."

By the way, Lichter's group also surveys the first half-hour of "Special Report With Brit Hume," Fox News' answer to the network evening news shows.

The review found that, since the start of the general-election campaign, "Special Report" offered more opinions on the two candidates than all three networks combined.

No surprise there. Previous research has shown Fox News to be opinion-heavy.

"Special Report" was tougher than the networks on Obama -- with 79% of the statements about the Democrat negative, compared with 61% negative on McCain.

There's plenty of room for questioning the networks' performance and watching closely for symptoms of Obamamania.

But could we at least remain focused on what ABC, NBC and CBS actually put on the air, rather than illusions that their critics create to puff themselves up?
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics...0,712999.story