[JackSpratts]

Napster's Learning Curve
Don Dodge

Shawn Fanning created Napster in his dorm room at Northeastern. It was the fastest-growing application in the history of the Internet. We changed the world but failed to achieve business success. Here is a glimpse into that story.

Napster started out as a free download tool for college students. Later the goal was to make it a real business in partnership with the record labels. At first Napster was too small and unknown to get a meeting with the major labels. That changed fast. In less than four months Napster went from being an unknown underground technology to the biggest threat the record labels had ever seen.

Napster wanted to be the online distribution channel for the record labels, much like iTunes and the new Napster is today.

Napster's promise was simple: It could target niche music markets and easily find the 400,000 people who loved a particular brand of new age techno or Irish folk music. More artists could make more money, and the record labels could avoid much of the manufacturing, promotion, and sales channel expenses. Digital downloads could be much more profitable than CDs.

We had a plan. We just didn't get a chance to make it work.
Things looked promising. Hummer Winblad made a first-round investment in Napster and installed Hank Barry as CEO. Hank hired several music industry veterans to prepare Napster for a real business relationship with the labels. We had a plan. We just didn't get a chance to make it work.

Later, Bertelsmann Music Group CEO Thomas Middlehoff made a significant investment in Napster. Middlehoff made billions for BMG in a joint venture deal with America Online to establish AOL Europe. He thought that Napster would be the next big thing and that he could broker business deals with the other record labels. Things were looking good.

Then the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster on behalf of the major record labels. Napster hired David Boies, one of the best trial lawyers in the country. We lost the case in the first round, but won a stay that allowed us to continue operating until an appeal was heard.

We made one last effort to convince the labels that they should do a deal with us. A little-known underground product called Gnutella had just surfaced. It was a P2P file-sharing program that required no central server and no company to operate it. If the labels didn't do a deal with us, and instead put us out of business, then Gnutella and its derivatives would become unstoppable. If we worked together now we could convert the market to a paid- subscription model. If we didn't do a deal, chaos would ensue. The labels didn't believe us and didn't really understand what this Gnutella threat was.

Big mistakes
The RIAA succeeded in shutting down Napster, but lost billions in potential revenue over the next several years to Gnutella, Grokster, Morpheus, Kazaa and others.

We made several big mistakes. We were conflicted about who we were and what we wanted to do. We embraced the bad boy rebel image that our users enjoyed, but we knew that we had to make peace with the labels to have a viable business.

We were naive about what the labels would or could agree to. It was not reasonable to expect that we could challenge their fundamental business model, and then agree to work together as partners. It is now clear that they couldn't have made a deal with Napster even if they wanted to. Their existing contracts with the artists had no royalty provisions for digital distribution of individual songs. The payments to artists were all based on CD sales through the normal retail channels. It took them several years to rewrite their contracts with artists to get to the point where today you can buy a single song via digital download.

What lessons can be learned from this experience?

• Never get too far ahead of the market. Creating new markets, business models, and value propositions is very risky and takes lots of time and money.

• Understand who your customer is, what problems you need to solve, and how much they are willing to pay for it.

• Never start a business focused on solving a big company's problem. They don't know they have a problem...and they are probably right.

• Test your assumptions. Interview your potential customers. Understand their top 10 problems. Don't try to convince them that you have a solution to a problem they don't know they have.

• Marketing and image matter. Provocative challenges make good headlines but don't make good business.

Napster changed the world. Millions of people rediscovered their love of music through Napster and created a whole new way to enjoy it. We made mistakes, but we learned valuable business lessons. The business lesson of the Internet is that you can attract a much larger audience--and generate more revenue--with a "try it for free and buy it if you like it" approach. Five years later, the music industry is still struggling with how to capitalize on the Internet business model.
http://news.com.com/Napsters+learnin...3-5901873.html



Napster's Business Lessons - Plus A Few Lessons Of Non-Commercial Nature
TankGirl

Sources:
C|Net story
Don Dodge's blog

Don Dodge, Napster's former VP from its wild early days, has written to C|Net an interesting story about his insider experiences within the company during the time it was simultaneously enjoying huge popularity as the meeting place for all music lovers of the planet and being fiercely attacked by the RIAA. He accounts the same story even more personally and interestingly in his blog.

He sums up his personal business lessons into these points:

What lessons can be learned from this experience?

• Never get too far ahead of the market. Creating new markets, business models, and value propositions is very risky and takes lots of time and money.

• Understand who your customer is, what problems you need to solve, and how much they are willing to pay for it.

• Never start a business focused on solving a big company's problem. They don't know they have a problem...and they are probably right.

• Test your assumptions. Interview your potential customers. Understand their top 10 problems. Don't try to convince them that you have a solution to a problem they don't know they have.

• Marketing and image matter. Provocative challenges make good headlines but don't make good business.

Those of us who were there to witness the Napster drama from the user community point of view remember well how intense, dynamic and chaotic the whole phenomenon was until the RIAA killed it. Napster's exploding popularity challenged the server side of the semicentralized network constantly, and the discussion forums that were there to serve both as a community meeting place and as a feedback channel were wild and noisy to say the least. Even in retrospect it is hard to see a strategy or sequence of moves that would have allowed the company to create a succesful business out of that chaotic activity in those very unstable and hostile conditions. Despite developing one of the true killer applications of the PC era and despite being passionately loved by its customers, Napster the company was simply too small, too resource stretched, too financially vulnerable and politically way too uninfluential to survive the RIAA's attack. The RIAA had all the lobbying power, all the paid politicians, all the mainstream media and virtually unlimited legal funding on its side. In the early days even the majority of p2p users were still under the spell of the RIAA's propaganda machine, buying the idea that they are doing something naughty or illegal that might harm the proverbial starving artist so tenderly cared by her corporate masters. It took years for the average p2p users to start to see the true nature of copyright cartels and the damage they are doing to culture, creativity and legislation, not to talk about their often criminal practices to manipulate and rip off their customers.

Napster's smallness as a company also prevented it from establishing a stable and committed customer base that might have turned profitable at some point in the future when the company would have figured out a working business model for all that feverish filesharing activity and the all-time social gathering it was hosting. It had gained millions of enthusiastic customers in record time but these customers made it clear early on that they would not pay for the software, for the service or for the content that they provided themselves, nor would they tolerate any filtering or censorship on sharing. So the profit method would have to be something else, something more indirect. I suppose they could have come up with some useful ideas later on but they ran out of time long before that.

If you want to keep millions of customers happy and committed to your service, you need preferably hundreds and at minimum dozens of customer service professionals to make it work. Enthusiastic self-assigned volunteers stepped in to help with customer support, just as other inspired volunteers stepped in to virally market the service and thus save the company from all marketing costs. That sort of community based strategy might have even worked had it been properly organized, supported and coordinated. The company never did any serious moves into that direction though, and being left on their own these often active and talented volunteers naturally grew loyal to each other, distancing themselves from the weird non-communicative company. One by one they started to embrace the free p2p agenda where they could take their fate and activities into their own hands, thanks to the emerging open source p2p software.

Dodge concludes his blog entry:

Napster changed the world. Millions of people rediscovered their love of music through Napster, and created a whole new way to enjoy it. We made mistakes, but we learned valuable business lessons. The business lesson of the Internet is that you can attract a much larger audience, and generate more revenue, with a “try it for free, and buy it if you like it” approach. Five years later, the music industry is still struggling with how to capitalize on the Internet business model.

What Dodge says about millions of people rediscovering their love of music through Napster is certainly true and perhaps the most essential thing that happened. Napster indeed changed the world - especially the online world - and it initiated a wave of further technical innovation with related social developments. That wave has been going on strong ever since, and as much as the copyright cartels would love to see it dying away, the movement just keeps growing stronger, smarter and more popular every year.

During its short and stormy life Napster managed to demonstrate to millions around the planet the dramatic benefits that non-commercial social networking on Internet can provide when the software is powerful enough to provide each participant global visibility, global reach, tools for unrestricted sharing and searching plus elementary social tools like browsing, IMs and chatrooms to make social life possible. This is all the technology needed to enable spontaneous growth of fascinating, diverse and deep content pools where new interesting works and artists can be discovered anytime through active searching, random browsing or peer recommendations. This is also all the technology needed to set up a virtual social playgrounds where likeminded people can find each other regardless of their geographical locations, ideologies or social statuses, where they can enjoy each other's personal tastes and personal libraries, to chat and make friends with each other. And it soon became obvious that all this good stuff could be provided effectively for free, if not by commercial ventures then by open software developers who (led by the charming Justin Franklin) had already started to work on fully decentralized technology requiring no hardware, bandwidth or personnel investments to keep the network running.

Napster's impressive technological demonstration and the following collective realization of how much we could already do on our own, with no contributions or assistance whatsoever from old copyright businesses, official institutions or government authorities, was a crucial, paradigm-changing one. Technology had swiftly and almost without warning evolved to a point where we private citizens were suddenly empowered with industrial class distribution powers and could therefore see for ourselves that all the digital fruits of culture, commercial or not, could be efficiently and economically kept available and delivered to whoever happened to need them anywhere on the planet. In other words we had suddenly been given both the means and the know-how to move the majority of world population over to a new era of cultural abundance - with virtually zero costs. This realization of sudden and dramatic consumer empowerment hasn't gone anywhere, and it won't, as it is based on solid technical reality. We cannot avoid the obvious logical question: if we already have a superior free technology to give us a superior cultural infrastructure, why the hell are we still wasting precious time and our hard earned money to fill the pockets of copyright cartels whose technical services we don't need anymore and whose greed-driven corporate agendas make them irresponsible and often harmful guardians for our culture?

While Napster was being developed, Groove, another early p2p startup, was also poised to make a technological breakthrough by developing a p2p based virtual office environment for business customers. Being a much more solid and better resourced company with a straightforward business idea Groove fulfilled its venture capitalist agenda perfectly, their independent story ending into a succesful sale to Microsoft. But Groove was never to cause any revolution á la Napster - it was just innovative software business as usual. Revolutions need the passion and the momentum of the masses to fuel them, and Shawn Fanning just happened to find the magic formula that would first excite the masses and then start a revolution that would go much further than Shawn himself or his venture capitalist pals could ever have imagined.


Dodge Responds

TG, Excellent post and insights about Napster. You are right, it was chaotic and exciting. We knew we were making history, and there were many times we thought we would actually win. We almost did. We were just too far ahead of the curve, and moving way too fast to back up and wait for the record labels to get to where they are today.

However, the Napster revolution made it possible to have digital downloads of music today. Without Napster it wouldn't have happened anytime soon.

Funny you should mention Groove. After leaving Napster, I was VP of product management at Groove. Groove flirted with the idea of using its secure encrypted network for music...but never seriously. Groove was great for business, and for consumers who had large files to share.

P2P has lots of potential applications, many of which we will discover in the years ahead.

Thanks for the great forum.

Don Dodge


Thank you, DonDodge, and welcome to P2P-Zone.
TankGirl

Yep, you were clearly ahead of your time. In a sense you started the new p2p timeline, the clock started to tick from you, and therefore you were doomed to be ahead of all other businesses. The music industry woke up from its own status quo and stagnation only when Napster already enjoyed huge popularity, and at that point the RIAA had its entire learning curve ahead.

My own gut feeling is that the RIAA has remained some 1-2 years behind the technical edge to this date, and I doubt whether they have even today any clue of what has happened on the social p2p scene. They were obviously incapable of making any realistic scenarios or predictions about what would happen to p2p technology or to p2p users after Napster's shutdown but nevertheless they insisted on shutting it down. The mass exodus of deserted users first to OpenNap servers and later on to Morpheus, Fasttrack etc. happened surprisingly smoothly, and after a few obligatory evacuation practices the average p2p users have grown savvy enough to survive any such attacks or scare campaigns. The insecure and ignorant Internet rookies of year 2000 have grown into smart, battle hardened p2p experts of 2005. This collective learning process has been one the remarkable consequences of the p2p revolution, and it is a new factor to be considered by anybody wishing to do serious reality-based business on the public p2p scene. But as said, I have my doubts on whether the RIAA is even aware of such a remarkable social development within its previous customer base.

- tg

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22093





iMesh Becomes a Legal Peer-to-Peer Client
Tudor Raiciu

Even though "in the good old days" iMesh was fighting hard with music labels for infringing copyrights, now the software is turning legitimate and with it's 6.0 version it will also benefit from the support of the music labels.
This is practically the rebirth of the iMesh network, which takes the role of the first P2P service that is fully legal while allowing file sharing through a Peer-to-Peer client.

To better understand the situation, iMesh representatives officially announced that the latest version of the software (version 6.0) will include special filters which prevent sharing music that is not protected in the Gnutella network. The only files that will be shared without any inhibition will be "fake" songs

or content provided by independent artists.

Soon, iMesh will announce the launch of a service that allows downloading an unlimited number of songs in WMA DMR format, the monthly fee for such a service being $6.95. At the same time, the network will allow sharing video files with a total lenght of less than 15 minutes or size less than 50 MB.

Even though iMesh 6.0 will be completely legal, older versions which illegal allow file sharing will still be possible for older versions of the software. Users will not be able to download kits to install these older versions, but the once installed will work just as before.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/iMesh...nt-11132.shtml





iMesh Light 6.0

An Lite version of iMesh 6.0 will be available soon. Many of our users and of course people who are new to iMesh Light may wonder whats so special about iMesh 6.0?

iMesh 6.0 is spyware and ad clean! So no need for an "Light" version, right? No, our team is working on a Special iMesh (Light) 6 version.

New Skins, Plugins, Max Performance, More Networks, Tools, and the ability to transfer other files then only music and video will be the base of iMesh Light 6. It will be worth it.

Stay tuned iMesh Light has some big things coming up as you could read in the previous news post.
http://www.imesh-light.com/index.php?id=news





The RIAA’s Russian Front

The U.S. recording industry is in a one-sided showdown with retailer AllofMP3.com, and chances are good that this time Goliath won’t win
Christian Gaston

An internet retailer that’s selling Franz Ferdinand’s latest album for $1.14? Sounds too good to be legal, right? Not in Russia.

AllofMP3.com, a digital music warehouse akin to iTunes, has ruffled the feathers of industry recording groups by selling albums at a cut rate, seemingly bypassing industry-standard repayment and copy protection schemes. To add insult to injury, pressure from the recording industry to shut the company down has fallen on deaf ears.

Those ears, belonging to Russian prosecutors, are deaf to the noise produced by recording companies because Russian copyright law may not cover “digital media.” And if the RIAA can’t shut the site down, AllofMP3 poses a more dangerous threat: outperforming accredited mp3 vendors in the marketplace.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been scrabbling since the 1999 debut of Napster to deal with internet music distribution. The organization started by suing companies that maintained “file-sharing” networks, winning victories over Napster and likeminded companies. But since that brief period of success, the recording industry has had a difficult time pinning down responsibility for the file-sharing boondoggle.

In 2003 a federal appeals court ruling allowed Internet Service Provider Verizon to refuse the RIAA’s request for data on its customers. The RIAA has since moved to suing individuals who download or “share” a significant amount of music, but the campaign to discourage internet piracy has caused a massive backlash among internet denizens.

In the case of AllofMP3, the case seems fairly clear, if the RIAA and its international counterpart, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, can’t get Russian authorities to shut down the service, then they may have to resort to suing the users.

But that’s where things get tricky. In essence, the suits that the RIAA brings against individual music pirates in the U.S. are consistently valid because, almost unquestionably, those who download albums from Grokster, Soulseek or Bittorrent know that what they’re doing isn’t legal.

But customers of a commercial web site like AllofMP3, which seems to be on the up-and-up aside from the grammatical awkwardness of its moniker, have a lack of apparent intent. Instead of being obvious scofflaws, these users are more like unwitting purchasers of untaxed cigarettes. In that case the RIAA may have a very difficult time bringing lawsuits against AllofMP3 users, and it’s unlikely that federal prosecutors would bring charges.

In the course of my reporting, I couldn’t find any federal officials that would call the AllofMP3 situation a “law enforcement” priority. Nor did the RIAA have comment.

This sort of silence just underlines the complexity of problems that law enforcement and the record industry have encountered in trying to shut down the burgeoning online music trade.

According to a spokesperson for the International Federation of Phonographic Industries quoted by ZDNet columnist David Berlind, the federation has succeeded in having the German government declare AllofMP3 illegal and in shutting down the Russian company’s operations in Italy.

But ultimately they haven’t made any progress toward getting the Russian government — the only government with jurisdiction here — to close down the site.

Beyond threatening the RIAA’s authority in the states AllofMP3 also has the potential of threatening iTunes’ hegemony in the marketplace. Because, from a consumer’s perspective, it’s better.

AllofMP3 users have the option of downloading songs in whatever format they’d like. Cutting-edge “lossless” formats are available next to common MP3 and OGG.

With AllofMP3, users don’t have to own an iPod, reformat their music themselves, or break the law by actively ditching the copy protection tags attached to the files they buy online. None of these problems exist because none of the restrictions of use present with current online music brokers are present at AllofMP3.

Fred Von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit working in the field of digital music consumer rights, hopes that the impermeability of the Russian threat will make the music industry take notice of their own weaknesses.

“I hope the music industry learns from this that there is still a considerable amount of demand out there that’s going unmet,” Lohmann said.

“Copy protections or restrictions are not slowing down unauthorized file trading at all. Every song that’s on iTunes is on EDonkey in about 5 minutes,” he said, “So the only thing they’re doing is frustrating legitimate music fans.”

Those frustrations are in place because of, not in spite of, the RIAA. The recording industry could easily re-contract with Apple or the now-reborn Napster in order to eliminate the copy protections, add new transmutable format options or lossless quality (akin to the extreme hi-fi of a direct drive record player circa 1977).

But that course seems as unlikely as the RIAA actively suing users of AllofMP3 or PayPal, the moneychanger that manages fund transfers between customers and the company.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a productive option to try to sue every competitor out of existence,” Lohmann said. “The option is for the music industry to compete with free.”

“High prices, limited inventory and restrictions on the files are not the way to compete with free.”

And if competing with free is out of the question, it seems that the RIAA will have to learn how to compete with $1.14.
http://www.dailyvanguard.com/vnews/d.../43591cd631d82






Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems
Sam Dillon and Stephen Labaton

The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications.

The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.

The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers.

It also applies to municipalities that provide Internet access to residents, be they rural towns or cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco, which have plans to build their own Net access networks.

So far, however, universities have been most vocal in their opposition.

The 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requires telephone carriers to engineer their switching systems at their own cost so that federal agents can obtain easy surveillance access.

Recognizing the growth of Internet-based telephone and other communications, the order requires that organizations like universities providing Internet access also comply with the law by spring 2007.

The Justice Department requested the order last year, saying that new technologies like telephone service over the Internet were endangering law enforcement's ability to conduct wiretaps "in their fight against criminals, terrorists and spies."

Justice Department officials, who declined to comment for this article, said in their written comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission that the new requirements were necessary to keep the 1994 law "viable in the face of the monumental shift of the telecommunications industry" and to enable law enforcement to "accomplish its mission in the face of rapidly advancing technology."

The F.C.C. says it is considering whether to exempt educational institutions from some of the law's provisions, but it has not granted an extension for compliance.

Lawyers for the American Council on Education, the nation's largest association of universities and colleges, are preparing to appeal the order before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice president of the council, said Friday.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, has enlisted plaintiffs for a separate legal challenge, focusing on objections to government control over how organizations, including hundreds of private technology companies, design Internet systems, James X. Dempsey, the center's executive director, said Friday.

The universities do not question the government's right to use wiretaps to monitor terrorism or criminal suspects on college campuses, Mr. Hartle said, only the order's rapid timetable for compliance and extraordinary cost.

Technology experts retained by the schools estimated that it could cost universities at least $7 billion just to buy the Internet switches and routers necessary for compliance. That figure does not include installation or the costs of hiring and training staff to oversee the sophisticated circuitry around the clock, as the law requires, the experts said.

"This is the mother of all unfunded mandates," Mr. Hartle said.

Even the lowest estimates of compliance costs would, on average, increase annual tuition at most American universities by some $450, at a time when rising education costs are already a sore point with parents and members of Congress, Mr. Hartle said.

At New York University, for instance, the order would require the installation of thousands of new devices in more than 100 buildings around Manhattan, be they small switches in a wiring closet or large aggregation routers that pull data together from many sites and send it over the Internet, said Doug Carlson, the university's executive director of communications and computing services.

"Back of the envelope, this would cost us many millions of dollars," Mr. Carlson said.

F.C.C. officials declined to comment publicly, citing their continuing review of possible exemptions to the order.

Some government officials said they did not view compliance as overly costly for colleges because the order did not require surveillance of networks that permit students and faculty to communicate only among themselves, like intranet services. They also said the schools would be required to make their networks accessible to law enforcement only at the point where those networks connect to the outside world.

Educause, a nonprofit association of universities and other groups that has hired lawyers to prepare its own legal challenge, informed its members of the order in a Sept. 29 letter signed by Mark A. Luker, an Educause vice president.

Mr. Luker advised universities to begin planning how to comply with the order, which university officials described as an extraordinary technological challenge.

Unlike telephone service, which sends a steady electronic voice stream over a wire, the transmission of e-mail and other information on the Internet sends out data packets that are disassembled on one end of a conversation and reassembled on the other.

Universities provide hundreds of potential Internet access sites, including lounges and other areas that offer wireless service and Internet jacks in libraries, dorms, classrooms and laboratories, often dispersed through scores of buildings.

If law enforcement officials obtain a court order to monitor the Internet communications of someone at a university, the current approach is to work quietly with campus officials to single out specific sites and install the equipment needed to carry out the surveillance. This low-tech approach has worked well in the past, officials at several campuses said.

But the federal law would apply a high-tech approach, enabling law enforcement to monitor communications at campuses from remote locations at the turn of a switch.

It would require universities to re-engineer their networks so that every Net access point would send all communications not directly onto the Internet, but first to a network operations center where the data packets could be stitched together into a single package for delivery to law enforcement, university officials said.

Albert Gidari Jr., a Seattle lawyer at the firm Perkins Coie who is representing Educause, said he and other representatives of universities had been negotiating with lawyers and technology officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies since the spring about issues including what technical requirements universities would need to meet to comply with the law.

"This is a fight over whether a Buick is good enough, or do you need a Lexus?" Mr. Gidari said. "The F.B.I. is the lead agency, and they are insisting on the Lexus."

Law enforcement has only infrequently requested to monitor Internet communications anywhere, much less on university campuses or libraries, according to the Center for Democracy and Technology. In 2003, only 12 of the 1,442 state and federal wiretap orders were issued for computer communications, and the F.B.I. never argued that it had difficulty executing any of those 12 wiretaps, the center said.

"We keep asking the F.B.I., What is the problem you're trying to solve?" Mr. Dempsey said. "And they have never showed any problem with any university or any for-profit Internet access provider. The F.B.I. must demonstrate precisely why it wants to impose such an enormously disruptive and expensive burden."

Larry D. Conrad, the chief information officer at Florida State University, where more than 140 buildings are equipped for Internet access, said there were easy ways to set up Internet wiretaps.

"But the wild-eyed fear I have," Mr. Conrad said, "is that the government will rule that this all has to be automatic, anytime, which would mean I'd have to re-architect our entire campus network."

He continued, "It seems like overkill to make all these institutions spend this huge amount of money for a just-in-case kind of scenario."

The University of Illinois says it is worried about the order because it is in the second year of a $20 million upgrade of its campus network. Peter Siegel, the university's chief information officer, estimated that the new rules would require the university to buy 2,100 new devices, at a cost of an additional $13 million, to replace equipment that is brand new.

"It's like you buy a new car, and then the E.P.A. says you have to buy a new car again," Mr. Siegel said. "You'd say, 'Gee, could I just buy a new muffler?' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/te...rtner=homepage





Intel Changes CPU Road Map

Some chips killed, others delayed to ensure compatible configurations.
Tom Krazit

Intel has announced several changes to its road map for server processors, delaying its first dual-core Itanium 2 processor and replacing a future multicore Xeon processor with a new design that eliminates the performance penalty of shared connections to a chipset.

Montecito, the dual-core version of the Itanium 2 processor, will not be available in large volumes until the middle of next year, instead of the early part of next year as originally planned, said Scott McLaughlin, an Intel spokesperson, on Monday. While preliminary shipments of the processor are already under way, Intel decided to make a few changes to the chip in order to reach the company's standard for "production level quality," McLaughlin said, declining to specify the nature of the changes.

But Montecito will no longer ship with Foxton, a sophisticated power- management technology, and the speed of its front-side bus connection to memory will run at 533MHz instead of the 667MHz speed originally scheduled for the design, he said.

Chips Killed

Intel also has killed Whitefield, a multicore Xeon processor for servers with four or more processors, McLaughlin said. It is being replaced by a new processor code-named Tigerton that will appear in 2007, the same time-frame in which Whitefield was expected to arrive.

Tigerton processors will use a high-speed interconnect technology that will allow each processor to connect directly to the server's chipset, McLaughlin said. Current Xeon processors in multiprocessor servers must share a front-side bus connection to the chipset in order to access data from system memory or I/O, a bottleneck that industry analysts have blamed for the current performance gap between Intel's server chips and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processors.

Intel's next-generation architecture, announced by President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini in August, will be used as the blueprint for Tigerton. This architecture is based on low-power design principles used to build Intel's Pentium M processor for notebooks.

Whitefield had been expected to help tip the performance battle back toward Intel in 2007, but Tigerton should be even more powerful, McLaughlin said. AMD has enjoyed favorable reviews from industry analysts, and even companies such as Hewlett-Packard, for the performance of its Opteron server processors as compared to Intel's Xeon chips.

Intel is not specifying exactly how the Tigerton processors will connect to the server's chipset, such as whether they will use integrated memory or I/O controllers or a next-generation interconnect technology that Intel has vaguely discussed at previous Intel Developer Forums.

Socket Compatibility Sought

The Caneland platform, or the combination of Tigerton and its related chipset, is not the design that will bring socket compatibility to Intel's Xeon and Itanium processors, McLaughlin said. Intel wants to make a chipset that can accommodate either a Xeon processor or an Itanium processor, which will help reduce product development costs for both Intel and its partners. That compatibility is slated to arrive along with Tukwila, a multicore Itanium 2 processor now scheduled to arrive in 2008 as a result of the Montecito delay, he said. Intel is still evaluating when its Xeon processors will be designed for that compatibility.

Intel had been expected to introduce an integrated memory controller design at the same time it engineered the compatibility between Itanium and Xeon, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with Insight 64 in Saratoga, California. Intel had never publicly confirmed those plans, but the company has spoken in general terms about the need for integrated memory controllers at some point in the future.

An integrated memory controller means the logic responsible for coordinating the exchange of information between the processor and memory is built right onto the processor, allowing it to run at the same speed as the processor and improving overall system performance. Since Intel would have had to make significant changes to its processor and chipset designs in order to make the Xeon and Itanium processors fit into the same chipset, it was considered a logical time to introduce an integrated memory controller, he said.

Cache Changes to Come?

AMD's Opteron uses both point-to-point interconnects like Tigerton's and an integrated memory controller. But Intel has been reluctant to embrace integrated memory controllers, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst with Mercury Research in Cave Creek, Arizona. Leaving the memory controller on the chipset allows Intel to more easily accommodate changes in memory standards, because it's much easier to change a chipset design than a processor design, he said.

One reason for moving out the common architecture target date, and therefore the potential integrated memory controller, could be that Intel plans to increase the size of cache memory on its future processors, McCarron said. Cache memory stores frequently used data right next to the CPU where it can be accessed much more quickly than data stored in the main memory chips.

The combination of larger cache memory and the direct connections between Tigerton processors and chipsets could provide a significant performance boost for Intel-based servers in 2007, McCarron said. It's very early to know for sure, with even sample chips still far away, he said.

However, Tigerton will certainly be more efficient than Whitefield because of the new interconnect design, Brookwood said. "What happens on the chip matters a lot, obviously, but ultimately the performance of these chips is constrained by how fast you can feed them data," he said.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123190,00.asp





Foxtel To Sell Handheld Pay TV Device
Julian Lee

Television is finally leaving the living room. The day before Apple is expected to announce an Australian music and video download service, Foxtel has announced a portable device to watch Pay TV on the go.

The details are sketchy, but Foxtel today promised to launch a portable digital TV device within 18 months. The device would only be available to Foxtel digital TV subscribers who own the IQ "personal video recorder".

The IQ, which downloads TV shows for later viewing, would transmit programs to the new "IQ On The Go" device, which features a 7-inch viewing screen.

Foxtel boss Kim Williams told the media today: "Not only will you be able to watch what you want, when you want, now you will be able to watch it where you want."

Portable video has long been regarded as a niche market because of the tiny screens on such devices. But interest grew 11 days ago when Apple introduced a video iPod.

Apple is holding a press conference in Sydney tomorrow, where it is expected to unveil a long-awaited Australian version of its iTunes website, which will sell music and possibly video.

The US version of iTunes already sells popular TV shows for $US2 ($A2.67) each. Australia's Free-To-Air TV stations have also shown renewed interest in portable video.

Last week the Seven network revealed plans to distribute programs such as Home and Away, Blue Heelers and Dancing with the Stars to the internet, portable media devices and mobile phones by mid-2006.

"Mobility is the next move," Seven spokesman Simon Francis said at the time. "By this time next year you will see some significant moves in delivery platforms beyond broadcast TV."

It is not clear if Foxtel's "IQ On The Go" would be compatible with the Free To Air devices. Mobile phone companies are also expected to offer live TV on the latest third-generation mobile phones.

Optus already offers TV networks CNN International, ABC and SBS on its mobiles.

Foxtel also announced today that it plans to offer two 24-hour High Definition digital TV channels by 2008. All existing Foxtel and Austar subscribers are expected to be switched to digital TV by April 2007.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/...006043100.html





Apple Launches iTunes In Australia
Garry Barker

Finally, it's here. Australia's iTunes Music Store, without doubt the most anticipated music event of the decade, launched officially at 6 am today and the first download began within a second of the electronic doors opening.

Since then the big servers maintained in the main Australian cities by US internet caching company, Akamai have been busy feeding what looks like a music feeding frenzy.

Some fans began trying to log into the store from about midnight sitting beside their computers hitting the refresh button every minute or so and drinking black coffee to keep themselves awake. It made queuing for the first Grand Final tickets look dated.

The music store is launching with 1 million songs, tailored for the Australian market, including what Apple's chief of iTunes, Eddy Cue, calls the biggest and best selection of local independent music yet assembled for an iTMS opening.

This is the 21st music store Apple has opened since its first, Mac-only, US-only download site began two and a half years ago.

Songs cost $A1.69 a track and music videos, playable on the new iPod video, released to the Australian market yesterday, are priced at $3.39. Most music albums, including classical selections, cost $16.99.

Missy Higgins did well at the opening with The Special Two but was quickly overtaken in top spot by End of Fashion's Oh Yeah. By mid-morning, The Veronicas were in third place with 4ever. But Missy Higgins won on volume. Of the top 10 on Australia's iTMS, she had second, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh.
Staff reporter adds: Short films from cartoon maker Pixar can also be purchased. No TV clips are as yet available.

Those who buy music from the music store can also pay by using an iTunes Music Store card.

A statement from Coles Myer said it had become the sole outlet for the cards which were available in denominations of $20, $50 and $100.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/...006094108.html





MEDIA

The Village Voice, Pushing 50, Prepares to Be Sold to a Chain of Weeklies
Richard Siklos

The company that publishes The Village Voice and five other alternative newspapers is to announce today an agreement to be acquired by New Times Media, the largest publisher in the market. The deal would create a chain of 17 free weekly newspapers around the country with a combined circulation of 1.8 million.

The merger - coming in the same week as The Voice's 50th anniversary - will undoubtedly raise questions about whether The Voice and its siblings can preserve their anti-establishment roots as part of a growing corporation.

But in an increasingly rocky media landscape, an equally important question is whether conglomeration will give the chain - which would include LA Weekly, SF Weekly, Miami New Times and The Dallas Observer - the editorial and financial muscle to compete against free competitors, both online and in print.

James Larkin, the chairman and chief executive of New Times, said in an interview that the merger, unlike those in the broader newspaper industry, where consolidation has led to accusations of uniformity and boilerplate coverage, "allows us to get stronger and to have stronger content."

The most pressing issue raised by the deal is how it will play with antitrust regulators, with whom the merger partners have already had one run-in.

In 2002, the Justice Department charged New Times Media and Village Voice Media with illegal collusion and blocked a deal between them to shut down money-losing publications in Los Angeles and Cleveland.

As a result, those papers were sold to other publishers, and the companies signed a consent decree in 2003 that, while they admitted no wrongdoing, ensures that their planned combination will get plenty of regulatory scrutiny.

As part of that settlement, the companies agreed that any further deals over the next five years would have to be submitted to the government for approval. In any case, because of its size, the transaction would require approval under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976.

In addition, after an article speculating about the deal was published several months ago in a rival San Francisco weekly, the California attorney general's office put New Times on notice that it expected to be notified of any deal. Mr. Larkin described the consent decree as an albatross that stemmed from bad legal advice.

Although no money is changing hands, people involved to the merger said it valued the combined companies at about $400 million. The merged company, which will continue to use the name Village Voice Media, is effectively an acquisition by New Times, whose current shareholders will own 62 percent of the new company and hold five of nine board seats.

It will have revenue of roughly $180 million. Both companies are private and therefore do not publish their financial results, but Mr. Larkin said that the combined entity would be profitable and that, despite industry pressures, New Times had been increasing revenue and profit by single digits each year.

In 2000, the Voice chain was acquired by an investor group that includes David Schneiderman, a former editor, and various arms of the investment firms Goldman Sachs; Weiss, Peck & Greer; and Trimaran Capital Partners. None of the current investors are exiting as part of the merger, although Mr. Larkin said the expectation was that he and his partners would buy out the financial backers in five years.

Mr. Larkin is to be chairman and chief executive, and Michael Lacey, New Times's executive editor, is to continue in that role at Village Voice Media.

A trust controlled by Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey, who have been publishing partners since 1971, will hold 53 percent of the combined company's shares; they would be the largest individual shareholders within that trust. They have been backed in their efforts to assemble a chain of weeklies by Alta Communications, a private equity firm in Boston that currently holds 14 percent of New Times Media.

Mr. Schneiderman, who is currently Village Voice Media's chief executive, is to take a new position as head of the group's online efforts. Donald H. Forst, the editor of the Village Voice newspaper, will continue in his role once the deal closes. But Mr. Forst and all the Voice Media editors will now report to Mr. Lacey, rather than their individual publishers.

Mr. Lacey said the Voice papers are a good fit with New Times's crusading culture and emphasis on in-depth magazine-style coverage of local news, although observers noted that New Times had been deliberately apolitical and The Voice had been unstintingly left-leaning.

"I don't think it will have a negative impact on the content of the papers," said Jane Levine, a former publisher of The Chicago Reader who is now on the paper's board. "There may well be changes to the content of the papers being bought, and there will be people who think that they will be negative, in part because New Times doesn't endorse political candidates. If you think the loss of the endorsements is a big negative change, you won't be happy with this deal."

Another criticism of New Times has been the development of a consistent design that Mr. Lacey described as a template aimed at appealing to travelers, but he said The Village Voice would retain its logo and format.

The Village Voice newspaper, with its weekly circulation of 250,000, will be the flagship of the company as well as the national brand for a new alternative media Internet portal that the merged company is planning.

Generally, the alternative weekly format of melding provocative writing, serious arts coverage and extensive listings and classifieds has become unbundled by the Web. And readers of New Times and Voice papers, like those of all news media businesses, are spending more time online.

The online move that is meant to reposition The Village Voice as a national brand also represents the company's most immediate commercial challenge: the Voice's once-lucrative classified advertising business, unique in its size among all the papers in the new company, has been hampered by the success of the free ad site Craigslist.

Mr. Schneiderman said that the company was having a "fantastic year" relative to the daily newspaper industry, and that advertising categories other than classified ads were performing well at The Voice. "It's painful," he said. "We've lost millions of dollars of revenue to free online classifieds."

Part of the strategy to address that shortfall will involve integrating Village Voice Media papers with backpage .com, which is New Times's attempt to compete with Craigslist for free advertising.

Additionally, the papers are to become part of a broader effort to tap into national advertising through a New Times business called Ruxton Media Group, which sells marketing packages in print and online meant to appeal to the typically young tech-savvy readers of alternative weeklies.

Together, the merged companies' publications would represent roughly 25 percent of the 7.6 million in weekly circulation that the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies counts among its 126 North American members. But that total does not include the many rivals looking for the attention of those readers or a slice of the alternative weekly advertising pie.

Among them are the so-called faux alt weeklies produced by daily newspaper publishers; new giveaway dailies like amNew York; and online journalism sites like Slate and Salon.

The companies' filing under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act is subject to a 30-day government review period. The government could request additional information that might delay the deal's completion.

Mr. Lacey lamented that during that period he and Mr. Larkin would have to refrain from sharing specific plans with employees at Village Voice Media, a silence that he said would only enhance the perception they are the industry's bogeymen.

While acknowledging that the pending union will raise anxiety, both Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey said they hoped to be received as dedicated long-term proprietors after a string of unconventional owners of The Voice during the last two decades, including the media baron Rupert Murdoch, the real estate and pet-food mogul Leonard N. Stern and the current consortium of financial firms.

"I'm doing it because I love good journalism," Mr. Larkin said. "I want to have newspapers in the most exciting markets in the country. This is not a financial play."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/business/24voice.html





Gas, Food and Therapy on the American Road
A. O. Scott

IN Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown," Claire Colburn, a cheery flight attendant played by Kirsten Dunst, extracts a promise from Drew Baylor, the film's hero. Instead of flying home to Oregon from the Kentucky village that gives the movie its name, Drew must drive. When the time comes, Drew (played by Orlando Bloom) finds that Claire has prepared an elaborate multimedia guide - a kind of do-it-yourself AAA TripTik - complete with maps, commentary and mix CD's to give each vista its appropriate musical accompaniment. In other words, Claire has thoughtfully put together a package guaranteed to make Drew feel exactly as if he were in one of those cross-country road-trip montages that occur so frequently in movies like this.

We hear a lot about America's love affair with the automobile, but Drew's leisurely drive is a reminder that the relationship is frequently a three-way romance involving a movie camera as well. This ménage has spawned a vast filmography of buddy pictures, getaway pictures, existential wandering pictures and innumerable hybrids - from "Thelma and Louise" and "Rain Man" back to "Sullivan's Travels" by way of "Harry and Tonto" and "Easy Rider," to name only a few.

If nothing else, these movies serve to remind us that we inhabit an endlessly photogenic nation. But they also acknowledge the anxious distance that the film industry perceives between itself and the rest of the country. The movie road trip is at once an acknowledgment of the artificiality of movies and an imaginary antidote to it. After indulging the pretense that a studio back-lot set or a street in Vancouver is really downtown Chicago, how satisfying it is to be treated to views of Monument Valley or the Mississippi Delta, whose specificities of terrain and custom make them impossible to counterfeit.

The itinerary Claire has carefully mapped out takes Drew from Louisville to Memphis and then curls across the Mississippi River, through Oklahoma into the Great Plains. The song list, meanwhile, meanders from James Brown to U2 to Stephen Foster. After two hours of watching Drew and Claire flirt and canoodle, you pretty much know where it will end, but this sequence has ambitions to be something more than a cute, geographically expansive variation on the sprint to the airport that concludes so many romantic comedies. The American landscape, after all, is a rich repository of visual grandeur and historical meaning, a democratic vista that contains, and connotes, much more than the infatuation of two fresh-faced young citizens.

Drew's winding sojourn across the heartland comes at the end of a trying week, during which he has endured the death of his father, the loss of his promising career and the collision of the West Coast and down-home branches of his family. Threaded through these personal difficulties are some larger issues. Instead of a standard, tiresome Red State/Blue State confrontation, Mr. Crowe examines the tensions within an extended family - and within the heart of an individual - between the hometown comforts of small- town life and the demands of mobility and achievement.

Drew's road trip allows him to have both, since the main destination on this kind of trip is not a particular place but an idea of place. If your iPod and your GPS navigation system achieve the right synchronicity, you may find yourself transported to an authentic, mythic America - without Wal-Marts or Starbucks or strip malls. The purpose of the trip is not only to re-establish a connection, however glancing, with that old, reliable America, but also, this being America, to find yourself, to heal.

A similar episode of therapeutic tourism occurs at the end of Wim Wenders's "Land of Plenty," a low-budget film that opened in New York the same week as "Elizabethtown." Mr. Wenders's love affair with the wide-open American landscape dates back at least to "Paris, Texas" his 1984 film, written by Sam Shepard. "Land of Plenty," which takes place mostly in rundown parts of Los Angeles, is - not entirely unlike "Elizabethtown" - a fable of American disconnection and family estrangement. Lana, a selfless, politically serious young woman played by Michelle Williams, comes to Los Angeles to look for her uncle Paul (John Diehl), a mentally disturbed Vietnam veteran. At the end, Lana and Paul, fulfilling the dying wish of Lana's mother, set out on a cross-country drive to discover the beauty and variety of America, from Truth or Consequences, N.M., to Down East Maine.

As in "Elizabethtown," this concluding montage is moving, in part because it answers a deeply felt, almost mystical need to believe that the beauty of the American landscape has the power to soothe even the ugliest divisions within American society. Paul and Lana's estrangement is a metaphor for some of these rifts, which are less ideological than temperamental. It is not so much a matter of left against right as a clash between piety and paranoia, both of which represent strains in the national psychology older than the nation itself.

But the country - the physical landscape - is nonetheless imagined to contain any schism, and cure any wound. Some of the sites selected by Claire (and by Mr. Crowe, of course) offer further testimony to this idea: Drew pays a visit to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and also the memorial to the victims of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Her voiceover emphasizes the soothing, inspiring aspects of these memorials and discreetly omits the acts of domestic political terrorism that are their reasons for existing.

That may be a prerogative of movies, and of tourism, which is as much about safety and familiarity as about discovery. But the concluding montages of "Elizabethtown" and "Land of Plenty" call to mind the ending of another film that uses similar imagery to a slightly different purpose. I'm thinking of the denouement of Spike Lee's "25th Hour," a 2002 film that remains unmatched in its portrayal of the raw, angry, tender mood of New York City in the months after Sept. 11. Monty Brogan, the mid-level drug dealer played by Edward Norton, is heading upstate to serve a seven-year prison sentence. His father, who is driving, suggests that they turn left at the George Washington Bridge and head west. In some small desert town, his father says, Monty can lay claim to his American birthright and start again, with a new identity and a new life, a good life free of the compromises and conflicts that have wrecked the old one.

It is a seductive scenario, and as it plays out over Terrence Blanchard's lush, swinging score, it brings a tear to the eye, as do Mr. Crowe's and Mr. Wenders's variations on the same theme. But the difference is that Mr. Lee, perhaps less inclined to sentimentalize America, at once recognizes the power of the fantasy and acknowledges that it is a fantasy. In the last shot, we see that they have driven past the bridge rather than over it. The continent on the other side of the Hudson remains a place full of endless possibilities, forever out of reach.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/movies/23scot.html





A Wild Rumpus in the Hollywood Jungle
Charles Fleming

ON May 25, 1963, a 34-year-old Maurice Sendak put together a small, handmade volume with which he had been struggling for eight years. Titled "Where the Wild Things Are," it used just 338 words and some occasionally disconcerting illustrations to tell the story of a boy named Max, who, sent to his room with no dinner, rebels by running away to a creature-infested island where he is named king of the beasts.

After a brief but exhausting adventure - "Let the wild rumpus start!" the book reads - Max returns to his bedroom, where he finds "his supper waiting for him."

That much-honored book about childhood anger stands on the brink of becoming a Hollywood movie - but only after a 15-year trip through the woods, and an occasional rumpus among the producers, directors, screenwriters and executives who have been struggling to make a picture with which even Mr. Sendak can be happy.

In the project's current incarnation, Spike Jonze, of "Being John Malkovich" fame, will direct, from a screenplay he has written with the novelist Dave Eggers. Mr. Sendak will serve as a producer along with John Carls, in concert with Tom Hanks's Playtone Productions, for Universal Pictures.

Pre-production is well under way. Animatronic "wild things" - six- and eight-foot-tall monsters that are operated from the inside by actors, and which will eventually be given computer-generated faces - have been tested for cinematic impact. So have exotic locations in New Zealand and Australia. Pending approval by Mr. Sendak and Universal executives of a screenplay draft due within a week or two, a 2006 start date is likely. A budget of "well under $100 million" has been roughly agreed upon, Mr. Carls said. (A Universal spokesman declined to comment, beyond saying the project was in development at the studio.)

"I don't know what to make of it, exactly, but I am so for it," said Mr. Sendak, 77, speaking by telephone from his home in Ridgefield, Conn. "I am in love with it. If Spike and Dave do not do this movie, now, I would just as soon not see any version of it ever get made."

To date, the film has done a very good job of not getting made, despite a march toward the screen that began in the early 1990's. Mr. Carls, then an executive at Orion Pictures, became interested when he read the book to his 3-year-old daughter. Using Orion's relationship with filmmakers like Jonathan Demme, Milos Forman and Woody Allen as bait, Mr. Carls contacted Mr. Sendak, and proposed that he consider a studio deal.

Before any deal could be made, however, Orion fell into financial difficulties. Several key Orion officers, among them Orion's president Mike Medavoy and his vice presidents, Marc Platt and Stacey Snider, landed at TriStar Pictures, recently purchased by Sony. Mr. Carls and Mr. Sendak created a production company, called Wild Things Productions, and set up shop at TriStar. They moved into offices on Sony's Culver City lot and began working toward turning Mr. Sendak's books into movies.

Writers and directors met with Mr. Sendak and his associates. But the author said recently that he had difficulty finding someone he could "clinch with and collaborate with."

"What most people wanted was a reproduction of the book, because the book made money," Mr. Sendak said of a work that has sold seven million copies, according to a representative for its publisher, HarperCollins. "I'm very fond of the book," he said, but "the film would be about seven minutes long."

Executives who were on the lot at the time said that Mr. Sendak was reluctant to turn his prize book into a Hollywood guinea pig. "Maurice was very protective of 'Wild Things,' " said one who asked not to be named, to avoid disruption of working relationships. "This was his first foray into the feature film world. He wanted to see how the process worked on something else."

Mr. Sendak did not deny he was protective, or that he insisted on staying involved. "I didn't want to turn it over to a director who would never see me again," he said. "What do you get for that? A packet of money for having sold your book."

He had then and has now, Mr. Sendak said, "a loathing of movies that are based on children's books, and a loathing for most children's books." In his words: "It's all vulgar. It's all Madonna." Asked about the film versions of Dr. Seuss's "Cat in the Hat" or "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" - both released by Universal, where Ms. Snider is now chairman - he said: "What is the purpose of this debauchery? Money! Only a seriously sick or brainless person could like them."

Even though "Wild Things" wasn't officially in development at TriStar, Mr. Sendak and Mr. Carls continued to attempt to make movies from other children's books. The project that came closest was another classic, Crockett Johnson's 1955 "Harold and the Purple Crayon," which tells the illustrated story of a boy so dismayed by the impending arrival of a younger brother that he uses a magic crayon to draw a universe where he can trap and ultimately defeat his enemy.

After meeting with many directorial candidates, and finding them wanting, Mr. Sendak met with a young video director named Spike Jonze - and fell in love.

"He was the strangest little bird I'd ever seen," Mr. Sendak said. "He had fluttered into the world of the studios and, could he not be swatted dead, I knew he would manage. I had total faith in him."

Michael Tolkin, whose screenplay for the 1992 Robert Altman film "The Player" had skewered studios very much like Sony's Columbia and TriStar, was brought on to write a script that would feature a technologically advanced combination of live action and animation. A budget of slightly under $50 million was set, and animation was begun.

Then the top management of Columbia and TriStar was ousted - and new managers had less faith in the material, and none at all in Mr. Jonze, a first-time director. Two months before principal photography was to have begun, Mr. Carls said, TriStar pulled the plug.

"The budget kept changing, and the script kept changing, and they got nervous," Mr. Tolkin said. The problem, Mr. Tolkin said, was that Mr. Jonze "was a genius who hadn't yet made a feature."

By Mr. Carls's account, he and Mr. Sendak were "really upset" by Sony's behavior. "We walked away, leaving six projects behind," he said, among them "Harold and the Purple Crayon." So the two men turned their efforts to television. Over the next several years, they made several animated features and television series with the Canadian animation company Nelvana.

But Hollywood's interest in "Wild Things" was undiminished. Mr. Snider and Mr. Platt, the executives who had brought Mr. Sendak to TriStar, moved to Universal. Mr. Hanks's Playtone was now housed on that lot, and being run by Gary Goetzman, whom Mr. Carls knew from the Orion days. "Wild Things" suddenly had new life as a Universal property. Gore Verbinski, who had already made the Nathan Lane child comedy "Mousehunt," was hired to direct, and he brought in the screenwriter Eric Singer.

The plan was to take advantage of new computer technology and make "Wild Things" a live-action movie with enhanced effects. But Mr. Singer's script, Mr. Carls said, took too long to arrive and then "failed to satisfy the demands of the book." Then Mr. Verbinksi left the project to direct "The Mexican."

Mr. Carls and Mr. Sendak next turned to a more traditional approach, hiring an animation director (Eric Goldberg, a veteran who had worked on the Walt Disney Company's "Aladdin," "Hercules" and "Fantasia/2000" features ) and an animation writer (David Reynolds, of "Mulan," "A Bug's Life" and "Tarzan"). But Mr. Carls and Mr. Sendak disliked their version, which Mr. Carls said was "too Looney Tunes-ish" and "too much like an amusement park."

Further efforts included a fresh screenplay draft by Michael Goldenberg, who wrote the 2003 remake of "Peter Pan" and the upcoming "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." By then, Mr. Carls had made peace with Sony and was busy doing pre-production on that studio's upcoming animated film "Open Season," a deer-bear buddy comedy. Mr. Sendak had turned his attention to other collaborations, most pointedly an American version of the Czech children's opera "Brundibar," in concert with the playwright Tony Kushner. To finance the opera, Mr. Sendak wrote a book version of the story, which was published in 2003.

Sometime in 2004, their optimism revived by the Goldenberg script, Mr. Carls and Mr. Sendak approached Mr. Jonze, who had recently overseen the successful release of his second feature, "Adaptation." The director's response "was immediate and passionate," Mr. Carls said. Mr. Jonze brought in Mr. Eggers - then hot off his autobiographical best seller "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." The two made a fresh start with a fresh take on the story. (Representatives for the director and screenwriter said their clients had no comment.)

The plot and details of the Jonze-Eggers script are a tightly guarded secret, but a great deal of Max's adventure now involves his journey home. In the book, readers learned that the island king's beastly subjects begged Max not to leave: "Oh please don't go - we'll eat you up - we love you so!" In the Jonze-Eggers script, Mr. Carls said, Max must make a daring escape with the "wild things" in hot pursuit. The pair have also brought to the material a fresh twist on Max's relationships with the "wild things," in particular one of them.

Mr. Sendak, who said his health prevented him from leaving Connecticut, said he was at work writing and illustrating a new children's book. "I can't say what it is because I don't know yet," he said. "I work very slowly, and I go by these little mysterious clues, like little lightning bugs in the night."

Despite revival of interest at Sony in "Harold and the Purple Crayon," which Mr. Carls said may go forward now as an entirely animated film, based in part on Mr. Tolkin's original, 12-year-old adaptation, Mr. Sendak said "Where the Wild Things Are" will surely be his last involvement in film.

"I don't think anyone ever wanted me for anything but 'Where the Wild Things Are' anyway," he said. But Mr. Jonze and Mr. Eggers have remained in close contact. "They call, they write, they send postcards, they show me script changes, they send me pornographic pictures and models of the monsters," Mr. Sendak said. "They're very attentive. They make me useful to them."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/movies/23flem.html





Books of the Times | 'The Beatles'

Behind the Beatlemania: Just the Facts, Lots of Them
Janet Maslin

Bob Spitz says that his book about the Beatles is only one-third as long as the manuscript that he submitted to Little, Brown. Even so, it spans nearly a thousand pages and is longer than major new biographies of Mao and Abraham Lincoln. Why?

Is it major news? A press release citing the book's big revelations includes "a full account of the day Ringo was stolen away from his previous band to join the Beatles." Keyhole-peeping? The gossip is kept at bay. A trove of musical minutiae? While the musical details will be new to some, many a Beatlemaniac already knows that it took three pianos and 10 hands to hit the walloping E chord at the end of "A Day in the Life."

Here's the new angle: Mr. Spitz means to outdo these conventional tactics by elevating the Beatles' story to the realm of serious history. Imagine "John Adams" with music and marijuana. "The Beatles" is written for the reader who seeks deep, time-consuming immersion in the past and can look beyond traditionally lofty subjects to find it. Like Mark Stevens's and Annalyn Swan's recent biography of Willem de Kooning, it means to meld the forces of personality, culture and art into a broad and emblematic story.

At first this is worrisome. Yeah, yeah, yeah: Mr. Spitz goes back centuries to link the slave trade with American and West Indian exports shipped back to Liverpool. He locates John O'Leannain and James McCartney II as Irish refugees from the potato famine of the 1840's. He embroiders the atmosphere of his subjects' early years, imagining how young John Lennon (as the family name evolved) was awakened by "a clatter of hoofbeats as an old dray horse made milk deliveries along the rutted road."

But the built-in momentum of the material quickly takes over. And this book - with its eerily gorgeous cover, unguarded photo illustrations and enchanting endpapers that reproduce a teenage Beatlemaniac's love-struck scrawl - begins to exert its pull. With sweep already built into its story and the cumulative effects of the author's levelheaded, anecdotal approach, the book emerges as a consolidating and newly illuminating work. For the right reader, that combination is irresistible.

Much of this information can be found in other accounts. There are nearly 500 Beatle books floating around. But Mr. Spitz means to be authoritative, to cut through the fictions and calumnies of earlier versions, and to put together a broad, incisive overview. Among the areas in which he succeeds startlingly well is the specifics of songwriting, performance and studio work that made the Beatles worth such scrutiny. (Mr. Spitz relied on the extensive archives of the New York Times music critic Allan Kozinn in some of his research.) The arc of their life together is revealed by the arc of their work.

"The Beatles" amplifies and corrects some of what is known about the band's formative years. It shapes a particularly vivid picture of the young, surly John Lennon, with a particularly revisionist and haunting portrait of his mother. It also captures the exhilarating freshness of young English musicians ready to try any crazy thing (another band of the time: the Morockans) with no clue about how far they might go. "It had never occurred to the Beatles that they might have fans," Mr. Spitz writes. And he transports the reader to the time when that could be true.

Like Martin Scorsese' recent documentary about the young, meteoric Bob Dylan, this book powerfully evokes both the excitement and the price of such a sudden rise. This book is with the Beatles as they hit upon a winning, hair-shaking performance style and as they watch the world go berserk over it. When the exhilaration begins to sour, it captures the frightening fishbowl sensation of their being imprisoned by fans' hysteria and critical acclaim. Among its quaint notes are stories about the naysayers who dismissed the Beatles' sound. ("Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody.")

Mr. Spitz contends that the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" days were more remarkable for innovative recording tactics than for songwriting depth. He makes a fascinating case by describing the step-by-step construction of some of the best-known recordings in existence. George Martin, the Beatles' producer, is one of many figures who were close to them and wrote about his experience in detail. But Mr. Spitz is able to incorporate these and other memoirs into a bigger picture. By and large, it's a captivating picture that hasn't been seen before.

"The Beatles" also illuminates the way in which the collaboration came apart. Mr. Spitz replaces rumor-mongering and finger-pointing with a clear understanding of how the slights and misunderstandings accumulated. "He could charm the queen's profile off a shiny shilling," one associate snipes about Paul McCartney, whose quiet efforts to buy shares in the Beatles' publishing company infuriated John Lennon. The book also fathoms the union of Lennon with Yoko Ono and illustrates, with unusual acuity, how and why he angrily outgrew his Beatle role.

Length notwithstanding, "The Beatles" does not deign to describe certain things. It essentially ends with the group's breakup. It does not invade privacy by recounting the details of Lennon's death or George Harrison's. Time and again, it chooses perception over presumption in ways that set it off from the pack of Beatle stories. There is one exception: the author has had the effrontery to register thebeatles.bobspitz.com as a Web site, although it is not yet active. Here is one more bit of evidence that those fascinated by the Beatles have made the Beatles part of their lives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/books/20masl.html





The Way We Live Now

Beyond Human
Christopher Caldwell

Many of the fans milling into this year's postseason baseball games have been wearing authentic major league uniforms, with GUERRERO, say, or OSWALT, stitched on the back. True, society has traditionally encouraged kids to fantasize about what they'll be as adults. But most of the people I've seen in $200 regulation shirts are adults. What they're fantasizing about is an alternative adult identity for themselves.

Why do they do this? The literary critic Paul Fussell once speculated that wearers of "legible clothing" like T-shirts were merely losers trying to associate themselves with a success, whether it be a product (Valvoline) or an institution (The New York Review of Books). A conservative view held that dressing like a child meant shirking the responsibilities of adulthood. It was a subset of dressing like a slob. But these explanations do not cover the ballpark people or (to take a similar phenomenon) those weekend bicyclists in their expensive pretend-racer costumes, with European team logos and company trademarks. The message in their clothing is aimed not at others but at themselves. It is a do-it-yourself virtual reality.

Abandoning your own world for a made-up one is an ever larger part of adult life. For the futurist Ray Kurzweil, this is only the beginning. According to his new book "The Singularity Is Near," we are approaching the age of "full-immersion virtual-reality." Thanks to innovations in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, you'll be able to design your own mental habitat. You'll be able to sleep with your favorite movie star - in your head. (It is not lost on Kurzweil that you can already do that, but he insists it will be really, really realistic.) Those same technologies will help us "overcome our genetic heritage," live longer and become smarter. We'll learn how brains operate and devise computers that function like them. Then the barrier between our minds and our computers will disappear. The part of our memory that is literally downloaded will grow until "the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate."

But this raises questions: What will then be the point of unenhanced human beings? And what will become of our relations to one another? A willingness to run head-on at these moral-technological issues has made the French novelist Michel Houellebecq one of Europe's best-selling writers and arguably its most important. His "Elementary Particles" (2000), set in the year 2079, recounts the near-total extinction of ordinary human beings. His new novel, "The Possibility of an Island," due out in the United States next spring, describes the triumph of a cult that believes man was created by nondivine extraterrestrials and sees genetic engineering as a path to "immortality."

The novel cuts between a sex-obsessed comedian, Daniel1, and two of his enhanced clones, Daniel24 and Daniel25. It would not surprise Houellebecq that Kurzweil, like other technological optimists, should use sex to sell his utopia. For Houellebecq, the important line the cult crosses is not a scientific but an anthropological one. By making credible promises of longevity and sex, it manages to elevate materialism (more specifically, consumerism) into a religion. Daniel1's girlfriend, the editor of a magazine called Lolita, explains, "What we're trying to create is an artificial humanity, a frivolous one, that will never again be capable of seriousness or humor, that will spend its life in an ever more desperate quest for fun and sex - a generation of absolute kids."

But something gets left out of sex when it is idealized, marketed, venerated or souped up: other people. Regardless of whether your girlfriend can handle your sleeping (virtually) with Angelina Jolie, it is very likely you'll find the hard work of maintaining a relationship less rewarding when so many starlets beckon. Americans may be surprised that Houellebecq attributes the bon mot about masturbation being sex with someone you love not to Woody Allen but to either Keith Richards or Jacques Lacan. But whatever its source, the narrator Daniel25 views it as one of the more profound insights of our time.

Human interactions of all kinds, especially those that involve caring for others, appear less and less worth the trouble. Houellebecq is fascinated by young couples who have pets instead of children, and by the French heat wave of 2003, which killed thousands of senior citizens who were forgotten by their vacationing children and abandoned by their vacationing doctors. Daniel1 mocks the newspaper headline "Scenes Unworthy of a Modern Country." In his view, those scenes were proof that France was a modern country. "Only an authentically modern country," he insists, "was capable of treating old people like outright garbage."

If we treat our fellow humans this way, why should we expect posthumans to care for us any better? We shouldn't. In the novel, when an acolyte witnesses a murder that, if revealed, could derail the cult's DNA experiments, the chief geneticist orders her thrown from a cliff. He feels no shame, nor does the narrator see any reason why he should. "What he was trying to do," Daniel1 writes, "was to create a new species, and this species wouldn't have any more moral obligation toward humans than humans have toward lizards."

In his recent book, "Radical Evolution," Joel Garreau suggests a "Shakespeare test" to determine whether Prozac or cloning or full-immersion virtual reality robs us of our humanity: would the user of these innovations be recognizable to Shakespeare? Houellebecq suggests that the answer is tipping toward No. "Nothing was left now," Daniel25 notes, "of those literary and artistic works that humanity had been so proud of; the themes that gave rise to them had lost all relevance, their emotional power had evaporated."

Many Westerners looking to the future think they're about to attain the prize of a fantasy-filled high-tech life that lasts until a ripe old age. Houellebecq warns that second prize may be a fantasy-filled high-tech life that lasts forever.

Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about Turkey.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/magazine/23wwln.html





Microsoft to Offer Online Book-Content Searches
Katie Hafner

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it planned to join the online book-search movement with a new service called MSN Book Search.

And in a nod to the growing influence of a recently formed group called the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft announced its plans to join it. The group is working to digitize the contents of millions of books and put them on the Internet, with full text accessible to anyone, while respecting the rights of copyright holders.

Microsoft is making the largest contribution to the alliance to date - $5 million - which is enough to scan about 150,000 books.

In aligning with the Open Content Alliance, MSN is joining forces with its archrival Yahoo, which announced its support of the project this month.

Several universities, including the University of California, Columbia University and Rice University, as well as the Internet Archive and the National Archives of Britain, have joined the alliance.

MSN Book Search will go online in test form early next year. Although the content of out-of-copyright books will be accessible at no charge from MSN Book Search, Microsoft is talking with publishers about how it might charge for books under copyright - perhaps per page, perhaps per chapter.

"We're thinking through a whole host of business models for the in-copyright stuff," said Danielle Tiedt, general manager of search content acquisition at MSN.

Google's service, called Google Print, has come under a great deal of criticism since it was announced nearly a year ago.

Last month, a group of authors sued Google, asserting that Google Print is engaged in copyright infringement. While only text fragments are displayed in the course of a search, a book must be digitized in its entirety to make it searchable, the authors said.

Last week, five large publishing companies - McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons - filed a similar lawsuit.

Instead of the "opt-out" approach taken by the Google Print Library Project, which gives copyright holders until Nov. 1 to contact Google if they do not want their work scanned, MSN and other Open Content Alliance members plan to ask copyright holders for permission before digitizing a work.

"We're pretty strongly 'opt-in,' " Ms. Tiedt said. "We're very aligned with protecting copyright and intellectual property."

"We're rolling now, and very few institutions will say no," said Rick Prelinger, administrator of the Open Content Alliance.

The alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that is building a vast digital library.

Mr. Kahle has said repeatedly that one of his greatest hopes is to have Google join the project. Mr. Kahle said Tuesday that talks with Google seemed to be progressing toward an agreement. Nathan Tyler, a Google spokesman, confirmed Tuesday that Google was speaking with Mr. Kahle about joining the alliance, but there was nothing yet to announce.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/te...gewanted=print





Judge Chides Microsoft Over Exclusive Music Proposal
AP

The federal judge overseeing Microsoft Corp.'s business practices scolded the company Wednesday over a proposal to force manufacturers to tether iPod-like devices to Microsoft's own music player software.

Microsoft abandoned the idea after a competitor protested.

In a rare display of indignation, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly demanded an explanation from Microsoft's lawyers and told them, ``This should not be happening.''

Legal and industry experts said Microsoft's demands probably would have violated a landmark antitrust settlement the same judge approved in 2002 between the company and the Bush administration. The government and Microsoft disclosed details of the dispute in a court document last week.

The judge said Microsoft's music-player proposal -- even though it was abandoned 10 days later -- ``maybe indicates a chink in the compliance process.'' She made her remarks during a previously scheduled court hearing to review the adequacy of the settlement.

The disputed plan, part of a marketing campaign known as ``easy start,'' would have affected portable music devices that compete with Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iPod. It would have precluded makers of those devices from distributing to consumers music software other than Microsoft's own Windows Media Player, in exchange for Microsoft-supplied CDs.

``I do want to know how this happened,'' the judge said. ``It seems to me at this late date, we should not have this occur.'' She did not indicate she plans to punish Microsoft, but her comments were remarkable because she generally praises efforts by the company and government under the settlement.

A Microsoft lawyer, Charles ``Rick'' Rule, blamed the proposal on a newly hired, ``lower-level business person'' who did not understand the company's obligations under the antitrust settlement. The agreement constrains Microsoft's business practices through late 2007.

``This is an issue that Microsoft is concerned showed up,'' Rule said. He added that Microsoft regrets the proposal ever was sent to music-player manufacturers and that the company was ``looking at it to make sure this is a lesson learned.''

Responding to related complaints by Microsoft's competitors, the European Union ordered the company last year to sell a version of its dominant Windows operating system without the built-in media player software. Microsoft appealed the decision, which included a $613 million fine, but now sells a Windows version in Europe without its music software.

A Justice Department lawyer, Renata Hesse, said the government will discuss with Microsoft its legal training for employees about antitrust rules. The government previously said the incident was ``unfortunate'' but said lawyers decided to drop it because Microsoft pulled back.

``I think we, like you, believe it should not be happening at this point,'' Hesse told the judge.

Microsoft wants consumers to use its media software to transfer songs onto their portable music players from Internet subscription services, such as those from Napster Inc., RealNetworks Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. Each company currently offers its own media software.

Microsoft and others have struggled to match the runaway success of Apple's iPod player and iTunes music service.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...printstory.jsp





South Korea's Antitrust Watchdog Keeping Up Pressure On Microsoft
AP

South Korea's antitrust watchdog said Wednesday it won't drop its investigation into allegations Microsoft Corp. engaged in unfair trade practices even if the U.S. software giant reaches an accord with the South Korean company that first brought the complaint.

Daum Communications Corp., a South Korean Internet portal, filed a complaint to the country's Fair Trade Commission in 2001 alleging that Microsoft violated trade rules by tying its instant messenger software to Windows.

The Seoul Economic Daily said Wednesday that Microsoft and Daum Communications are trying to work out a settlement and that industry expectations for one are high.

``We have been promoting competition in markets and enhancing consumer benefits to strengthen the national economy,'' the Fair Trade Commission said in a statement. ``In this respect, we will continue to assess the Microsoft case regardless of whether it and Daum Communications reach an agreement.''

Oliver Roll, Microsoft's general manager for marketing in Asia, said he couldn't confirm whether his company was in negotiations with Daum, citing confidentiality issues. He said, however, that Microsoft ``is always willing to talk to people, including Daum.''

A Daum spokeswoman, who asked not to be quoted by name, called the newspaper report ``unfounded.''

The Fair Trade Commission held its last hearing into the Microsoft case Wednesday. Roll said a decision was expected ``in the next few weeks.''

The commission can order ``corrective measures'' such as separating the bundled software if Microsoft is found to have engaged in unfair practices in South Korea. Fines of up to 5 percent of total sales in the country for Windows software during the period of any unfair practices can also be levied.

``We're very keen to settle the issue with the KFTC,'' Roll said. He also said Microsoft has the option to appeal in court if the commission rules against it.

Earlier this month, U.S. company RealNetworks Inc. reached a a $761 million legal settlement with Microsoft that ended all their antitrust disputes worldwide, including in South Korea.

The Fair Trade Commission said at the time of the settlement that it would continue its investigation.

RealNetworks, based in Seattle, accused Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft of illegally forcing Windows users to accept Microsoft's digital Media Player. RealNetworks said its own player suffered as a result.

The European Union ordered Microsoft in March 2004 to pay $601 million, share code with rivals and offer an unbundled version of Windows without the Media Player software. The Court of First Instance, the EU's second-highest court, has not yet set a date to hear Microsoft's appeal. The EU said Microsoft's settlement with RealNetworks was irrelevant to the pending case.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/13001044.htm





U.S. Asks China For Details On Anti-Piracy Efforts
AP

The Bush administration, under pressure to deal with a soaring trade deficit with China, asked the Chinese government Wednesday to outline what it's doing to reduce the piracy of American movies, computer programs and other copyrighted material.

The formal request for details on China's enforcement efforts was made through the Geneva-based World Trade Organization and could be a precursor to WTO-authorized economic sanctions if the United States uses the information in a trade case against China. Japan and Switzerland filed similar information requests.

``The United States is deeply concerned by the violations of intellectual property rights in China,'' U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman said in announcing the action. He said ``piracy and counterfeiting remain rampant in China despite years of engagement on this issue.''

A call to the Chinese Embassy seeking comment was not immediately returned.

The U.S. request sought information on how many enforcement cases have been brought by the Chinese, including a breakdown of how many resulted in criminal penalties and civil fines.

The U.S. is seeking a response by Jan. 23. U.S. officials said they were hopeful China would comply but that Chinese officials had given no indication during prelimary talks about what they intended to do.

American businesses contend they are losing billions of dollars a year because China is failing to enforce the laws it has on the books to prevent the piracy of American-made movies, music, computer software and other products. The U.S. industry has estimated that in some categories virtually 90 percent of the items being sold in China are pirated.

``Today's action speaks loudly to the will of the administration to press the Chinese government for key reforms that will help China meet its international obligations,'' said Mitch Bainwol, chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America. ``We hope China will soon develop strategies to attack piracy more successfully.''

Portman said that if China believes it is doing enough to protect intellectual property ``then it should view this process as a chance to prove its case. Our goal is to get detailed information that will help pinpoint exactly where the enforcement system is breaking down so we can decide the appropriate next step.''

U.S. business groups have been lobbying the administration to bring a formal WTO complaint against China's enforcement of intellectual property rights, a step that could lead to economic sanctions against China if the United States won its case.

U.S. officials said the information gathered from the Chinese will help determine whether the United States will pursue a WTO case against China.

China announced this summer after meetings with Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez in Beijing that it would file more criminal charges in copyright cases, crack down on Chinese exports of pirated products and focus special attention on movie piracy.

The administration is facing growing pressure from Congress to do more to narrow a soaring trade deficit with China, which hit a record $162 billion last year and so far this year is running 30 percent above the 2004 pace.

A number of lawmakers are supporting legislation that would impose 27.5 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports unless China goes farther to allow its currency to rise in value against the dollar. U.S. manufacturers contend that the yuan is as much as 40 percent undervalued, giving Chinese products a huge competitive advantage.

U.S. industry would like the administration to target China in its next congressionally required report on whether any countries in the world are manipulating their currencies to gain unfair trade advantages. The administration said that report will be released in November.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...y/13003154.htm





Babies For Sale On China's eBay Site
Shanghai

Chinese police are investigating baby trafficking over the internet after an ad for newborns was placed on the US-based online auction site eBay, state press and company officials say.

Baby boys were advertised on eBay EachNet at 28,000 yuan ($A4606), and girls at 13,000 yuan, the China Daily reported, citing Tang Lei, manager of EachNet, eBay's China site.

No sales were made but more than 50 people browsed before the posting placed on October 16 was pulled down. One person left a message.

The seller, under the username "Chuangxinzhe Yongyuan" or "innovator forever," said all the babies came from Henan province in central China and would be available 100 days after birth.

The ad said it was trying to help the country's millions of infertile couples.

Police gave no details of their investigation, but Tang did not discard the possibility it was a hoax.

In a statement, the company blamed its monitoring system and said it would move immediately to improve technological monitoring and management.

California-based eBay paid $US150 million ($A199 million) to take over Shanghai-based EachNet, a company started in 1999 by two Chinese Harvard graduates, and which it has owned one third of since 2002.

China forbids trafficking of children and those prosecuted can receive the death penalty in egregious cases, although the practice remains widespread.

A court in the southern province of Guizhou recently sentenced seven people to death for trafficking at least 60 children in 2003. And in August, a man was sentenced to death for running a child trafficking ring that sold 44 children to Singapore.

China's "one child" birth control policy, coupled with the country's long tradition of favouring boys, are seen as catalysts for the trafficking of children.

Last year, 3500 children were rescued from their captors in 1975 cases, according to earlier state media reports.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/...775932765.html





Bid To Block Online Child Porn
David Batty

A Labour MP is today introducing a bill to compel UK internet service providers (ISPs) to publicly state whether they block their customers from accessing known paedophile websites.

Margaret Moran, MP for Luton South, wants ISPs to declare in their annual accounts or on their websites whether or not they bar access to websites that contain images of child abuse.

MPs and children's charities believe that if the 10-minute rule bill became law, it would shame ISPs that have so far taken no action to combat internet paedophiles to change their stance.

The Home Office opposes compulsory disclosure, preferring the industry to regulate itself.

But John Carr, internet safety adviser at the charity NCH, said under the current system of self-regulation many ISPs have done nothing to prevent the spread of internet paedophilia.

He said: "Margaret's bill is intended to smoke out those companies who are doing nothing. I doubt many company directors or shareholders will be happy at the thought that they are required to declare publicly that they are doing nothing to stop child sex abuse images reaching their customers."

Mr Carr praised AOL, BT, Yahoo and mobile phone operators including Vodaphone for introducing technology to block access to known paedophile websites, but said around a fifth of the UK's 200 ISPs had yet to declare what, if any, action they were taking.

BT launched a system that prevents its customers from accessing paedophile websites known to the UK's internet safety regulator, the Internet Watch Foundation, 18 months ago.

Ms Moran said that while many overseas ISPs had expressed an interest in using the Cleanfeed system, which BT will freely provide, few UK ISPs had done so.

She said: "The bulk of illegal images of children on sale on the internet are being produced by criminal gangs, who sell the pictures to make money, often to fund other illegal activities. If measures such as BT's Cleanfeed are taken up by UK ISPs, it will block access to the sites.

"If people cannot reach the sites, they cannot buy the images, and if this happens, the criminals will stop producing them for sale. Thus, fewer children will be raped in order to make them in the first place."
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/new...601037,00.html





E-mail Law Upsets Parents

Indecent messages still reach children
Kortney Stringer

Michigan's new law to protect children from viewing pornography and other adult e-mail ads so far hasn't done much of anything -- except irk parents.

What's covered

Under Michigan's do not e-mail registry, categories include, but are not limited to:

Alcohol
Tobacco
Pornography or obscene material
Gambling
Lotteries
Illegal drugs
Fireworks
Firearms

To register or get more information in Michigan, go to www.protectmichild.com.

Beginning Aug. 1, the Michigan Children's Protection Registry Act was supposed to stop companies from sending messages pitching products and services that are illegal for minors to use to e-mail addresses on a state-maintained list. But the law hasn't been effective because it isn't being enforced -- or advertised much -- while the state Legislature tidies up some of its language.

Two bills -- one to clarify the maximum amount Michigan can charge to ensure marketers' lists comply with the state registry and another to make it easier and more affordable for small mom-and- pop shops to comply with the law -- have passed the state Senate but are yet to be approved by the House and signed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

If all goes well, Michigan says the law could be enforced as early as the end of this month. But that's little consolation to the 3,000 parents and 27 schools that have been signed up for the registry since July.

Talia Goetting, a Ferndale mother of an 8-year-old, said she was looking forward to the protection she thought her daughter would get from the new law when she signed up for the registry last summer. Now, she laments about the questionable e-mails her daughter still gets about male enhancement drugs. (Those e-mails would be included under the law if they were illegal for a child to purchase or view.)

"What was the whole point in signing up if it's not doing any good? Is this just the legislature and the governor trying to look good and tough, but in the end, just kicking up dust?" said Goetting, who now scans her daughter's e-mails before allowing her to read them. "I'm doing what I hoped was going to be done by the registry. I feel like they're duping people."

Letters pour in

The Michigan Public Service Commission, charged with enforcing the law, and the office of state Sen. Mike Bishop, who helped to sponsor the law, have received calls, e-mails and letters from angry parents.

"There is a growing tide of parents who're demanding their kids get the protection the legislation has promised them," said Matthew Prince, CEO of Unspam Registry Services Inc., which operates the systems that ensure companies' compliance with the laws and passes on to Michigan the e-mails from parents. "There is definitely a sense from parents who've signed up that they expected the law to come into enforcement when it was scheduled to and they are disappointed."

This isn't the first time the Michigan law has come under fire.

Michigan and Utah drew controversy this summer when they became the first states to create do-not-e-mail registries targeting children, which are essentially databases of e-mail addresses similar to the federal do-not-call registry that prohibits most telemarketing calls to numbers on the list. By comparison, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 permits sending e-mails to any address as long as the recipient has the opportunity to opt out of future communications

Michigan's do-not-e-mail law takes that a step further by making companies responsible for ensuring messages don't reach addresses on the list if they are marketing products and services that minors are prohibited from "purchasing, viewing, possessing, participating in or otherwise receiving."

A first violation would be a misdemeanor, while multiple violations would be felonies, punishable by up to three years in jail and a $30,000 fine. Additionally, companies that violate the law could be forced to pay civil penalties.

But while Utah is implementing its registry, Michigan has yet to enforce companies' compliance with the law even though parents can continue to get their children's addresses on the list.

Now, those who once praised the law are criticizing it. "I haven't seen any advertisements or anything," about the Michigan law, said Pat Sorenson, spokeswoman for child-advocacy group Michigan's Children, and a mother of three. "We need the strongest protections for our children who're using the Internet."

Meanwhile, the nation's first do-not-e-mail laws continue to draw scrutiny and warnings from marketing groups and affected businesses that say the cost of compliance with the law isn't practical and its penalties for violations are so stiff that it might discourage many smaller companies from e-mail marketing efforts altogether.

Under Michigan's law, companies are expected to remove e-mail addresses on the state registry from their mailing lists within 30 days of their registration into the system. To do this, companies will be charged $0.007 cent by the state for each e-mail address checked. For example, a marketer with a million e-mail addresses on its mailing list would pay $7,000 to scrub the list one time. If that process were repeated each month, the company would wind up spending about $84,000 a year.

Additionally, marketers say the laws are too vague since they're not product- specific, leaving potentially broad government interpretation. And some say they are counterproductive because they might actually create more avenues for unscrupulous businesses to specifically target children.

Hard to enforce

Furthermore, some critics say the Michigan law is ineffective because it will be almost impossible to enforce.

Trevor Hughes, executive director of Email Service Provider Coalition, a trade group of 80 e-mail service providers, said while the organization is sympathetic to the issues the Michigan law is trying to address, he believes the law won't stop the flow of unwanted e-mails to children.

"Everyone's looking for a silver bullet, but this is not it," he said. "This law suggests every pornographer should scrub their lists against the registry in Michigan. It's very difficult to enforce that. We frequently say many spammers enjoy the impunity of anonymity."

"Just because you have a good goal in mind, doesn't mean you'll reach a good result," said Dan Jaffe, vice president of government relations for the Association of National Advertisers, a group of 350 advertisers that's exploring potential challenges to the laws. "These are vague laws that have not been clearly thought out."

But for now, Michigan has even bigger fish to fry than the potential legal challenges it might face from marketers. Since the law is voluntary and it hasn't been enforced or advertised much in its first few months, the state says it must again figure out how to drum up awareness and excitement among Michigan parents if the language in the bill is remodeled and compliance begins.

"There are thoughts about how we will re-educate the public about this law," once it's being enforced, said Dennis Darnoi, a spokesman for Bishop's office. "There's definitely concern too much time has passed."
http://www.freep.com/money/business/...e_20051025.htm





Music Boosts Sporting Performance

If you want to get the most out of your fitness regime think carefully about the type of music you listen to while exercising, a UK study suggests.

Dr Costas Karageorghis, of Brunel University, found listening to the right songs before and during training boosts performance by up to 20%.

He recommends fast tempo music for high intensity exercise and slower tracks to help with the warm up and cool down.

The speed of the music is the key, whether it be classical, rock or pop.

Music to sweat to

Dr Karageorghis says individuals need to create their own play list according to their personal music preferences and the intensity of activity in which they are engaged.

Just before sport, loud, up-beat music can be used as a stimulant or slow, soft music can be used to calm pre-performance nerves.

For example, James Cracknell, who rowed to glory and into the record books at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, said that listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' album "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" was an integral part of his pre-race preparation.

The Olympic super-heavyweight champion Audley Harrison listens to Japanese classical music before a fight to calm his nerves, said Dr Karageorghis.

As exercise begins, the music tempo can be synchronised to work rates to help regulate movement and prolong performance.

During this phase music can also help to narrow attention and divert your mind from sensations of fatigue.

The right tempo

Dr Karageorghis said: "It's no secret that music inspires superior performance.

"The sound of 'Swing Low Sweet Chariot' reverberating around a rugby stadium is an example of how music can provide great inspiration and instil pride in the players.

SELECTING THE RIGHT MUSIC

Very fast tempo for highest intensity exercise eg) very hard running
Rock: The Heat Is On - Glenn Frey
Pop: Reach - S Club 7
Soul/R 'n' B: Everybody Needs Somebody to Love - The Blues Brothers
Classical: William Tell Overture - Rossini
Fast tempo for high exercise intensity eg) working hard on an exercise bike
Rock: Born to be Wild - Steppenwolf
Pop: Movin' Too Fast - Artful Dodger & Romina Johnson
Soul/R 'n' B: I Feel Good - James Brown
Classical: Troika - Prokofiev
Medium tempo for medium intensity exercise eg) a gentle run or leisurely swim
Rock : Keep on Running - The Spencer Davis Group
Pop: Don't Stop Til You Get Enough - Michael Jackson
Soul/R 'n' B: I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor
Classical: Radetzky March - Johann Strauss
Slow tempo for low intensity exercise eg) weight lifting or speedwalking
Rock: The Best - Tina Turner
Pop: Lifted - Lighthouse Family
Soul/R 'n' B: Back to Life - Soul II Soul
Classical: Spring, from The Four Seasons – Vivaldi

"However, our recent research shows that there's no definitive play list for today's gym-goers or tomorrow's sporting heroes.

"Songs are particular to an individual - they are not prescriptive. So it's up to the individual to select songs that drive them and inspire them."

He said the athletes he trains had seen an 18% improvement in adherence to exercise regimes with the help of the right music.

He believes gyms and health clubs should offer a wide choice of music to suit their clients' needs.

For example, those on running machines should listen to music with a very fast tempo, whilst those who are weight training would benefit from medium tempo music coupled with inspirational lyrics.

"Rather than blasting out the same music loudly in all areas of the gym, it would be better to turn the volume down so those on the treadmills and bicycles can tune into personal music selections, while those in weight training rooms can hear the uplifting beat of the background music," he said.

John Brewer, director of the Lucozade Sports Science Academy, said: "This confirms what we have suspected and known anecdotally for years.

"Music does have an impact on physical performance.

"If you go into the dressing room of any premiership league football club on a Saturday afternoon you will certainly see the players in there listening to music to psyche them up and get them ready for the performance."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...th/4359874.stm





Danes Design Singing Pillows for Soldiers
Garentina Kraja

Getting a good night's sleep in the Balkans can be rough for peacekeepers bunking in a military camp far from home and family for months at a time. Now Danish researchers have come up with an unusual solution - MusiCure, a soft pillow that chirps like a bird and is designed to sing soldiers to sleep in Kosovo, Iraq and other hotspots.

With built-in speakers, the white pillows release sounds from nature combined with acoustic instruments such as cellos to provide a serenade designed to help stressed-out minds shed unpleasant thoughts.

Its designers say that if it works, the pillow one day could join rifles, flak jackets and helmets as part of the basic equipment soldiers carry into conflicts.

In Kosovo, 10 pillows provided by Denmark's Defense Academy have become popular among the 340 Danish soldiers deployed here, said Maj. Helmer T. Hansen, the battalion surgeon at the Danish military clinic in the province.

Soldiers can keep the pillows for two weeks, said Hansen, ticking off their benefits with the air of a hypnotist.

"You will not think about what is maybe happening with your wife at home, or your children," he said. "All thoughts will disappear, images will be created - forests, beaches, mountains. And then you will fall asleep."

The pillows are part of a trial that began a month ago. So far, about 20 Danish troops in need of relaxation and some quick sleep in the often ethnically tense province have used them to get some shuteye.

The Danish troops are in Kosovo as part of the 17,500-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force that has been deployed in the province since the fighting between Serb forces and ethnic Albanians ended in mid-1999.

The province since has been run by the United Nations. But scattered violence persists and sometimes it has targeted foreigners.

Nowhere in the province are tensions higher than in the town of Kosovska Mitrovica, where the Danish soldiers are based. The town, which is divided by a river and ethnic animosities into a Serb-dominated north and an ethnic Albanian south, has been the scene of frequent violent clashes.

Last year, Kosovo saw three days of ethnic rioting that left 19 people killed and more than 900 injured. Now, as the province prepares for U.N.-brokered talks on its future status, there are fears of a backlash of violence.

Soldiers assigned here can't escape that stress, Hansen said as he gently squeezed one of the warbling pillows.

"I will recommend that this will be a part of our equipment in the future," he said.

Some soldiers that have tried the pillow sing its praises.

"The problem was I fell asleep too quickly," one wrote jokingly.

"It is good to keep the noise out of my mind," wrote another. "It's a very good way to relax. But the pillow is too thick."

First created nearly 10 years ago, the MusiCure pillow originally was intended for use in psychiatric wards and to help patients recover from surgery while minimizing the need for medicine, Hansen said.

Music therapy is just as handy at a military camp, where sleeping pills can't be used to ensure soldiers are ready to deploy in case of emergency, he said.

"It's the first time we're using it," he said. "But my advice will be that we have it for a long time."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT





The Net Is Anarchy: Keep It That Way
Chris Berg

The internet, long seen as a neutral realm free of government interference, is now hot political property. Not surprisingly, therefore, both the European Union and the United Nations are now trying to grab control of the internet. This has major consequences for business and for individuals.

Since 1998, a non-profit organisation named ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has been responsible for managing and coordinating the internet's domain names. ICANN ensures that what is typed in the address bar matches the site trying to be accessed. Such an organisation is necessary to ensure the stability and growth of the internet.

At the moment, the internet is an ungoverned, unregulated, anarchic medium — merely a mutual agreement between computer users all around the world to connect to each other in a certain way. Given this blank slate, business and innovation has thrived online. Business to business commerce has exploded over the past few years. In Australia, 31 per cent of businesses reported placing orders over the internet in 2004. This will grow as business uptake of broadband intensifies.

Until now, ICANN's role has been merely to facilitate and smooth this explosion of internet activity.

The European Union, as well as a motley collection of less-than-democratic nations such as Iran, Cuba and China, are forcefully trying to replace ICANN with an as-yet-unspecified UN department. Such a proposal will be under consideration at the United Nations Working Group on Internet Governance meeting next month in Tunis.

Arguing that the internet is a global resource, the European Union insists that the private sector must share its responsibility of overseeing it with the UN.

By ceding this power over to governments, every aspect of the anarchic freedom that the internet represents is under threat. The UN wants to use the internet's structure to pursue specific goals — to close the "digital divide" and to "harness the potential of information" for the world's impoverished.

But the inequalities the UN claims it wants to overcome stem not from the internet itself, but from government policy. Syria has even advocated taxing domain names to subsidise an international universal service right.

No matter how hard the new UN body will try to reverse the "digital divide" by reallocating domain names and shifting the location of servers, the only way that internet uptake can be increased internationally is through action within the countries themselves.

That is, the same way any technological advance has filtered down to the poorer countries. By building stable institutions, maximising economic freedom, and ensuring prosperity, which creates consumer demand. No amount of political action by the UN can replace this process.

The defining characteristic of the internet is not intelligence or its capacity to fulfil specific aims, but its simplicity. It is a "dumb" medium, which is only structurally suited to transmitting data from one computer to another. It can't conduct public policy.

Businesses and individuals have come to rely on the internet to carry out their personal and commercial interactions. UN control threatens this.

What this new bureaucracy would clearly be able to do is restrict and censor websites and addresses, as well as place heavy regulatory burdens on their authentication, maintenance and pricing structure. This is a prospect no doubt relished by European social democrats who would like to extend their national content and industry policies across national borders.

Consider the countries most actively pushing for the UN takeover. Leading the charge is Iran, with Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba and Venezuela hot on its heels. None of these nations is known for their promotion of political, economic or social freedoms. Iran bans more than 10,000 websites on charges of immorality, and jails journalists and bloggers who disagree with the ruling elite. The "Great Firewall of China" has a similar effect.

Should the internet be under the control of a network of regulators hammering out compromises about what is and isn't proper online activity? Member states in the UN run the gamut from the totalitarian to the democratic. Any attempt to assert control will result in an approach contrary to the liberal democratic ideals that dominate online activity.

The internet needs the technicians of ICANN, not the policy committees of the UN.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/...006004185.html


















Until next week,

- js.


















Current Week In Review






Recent WiRs -

October 22nd, October 15th, October 8th, October 1st

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


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black