[JackSpratts]

Woman Gets Web Address Tattooed On Forehead For $10,000

They say everybody has a price, and Kari Smith's was $10,000. That's how much a gambling website paid her to tattoo their web address on her forehead.

Smith, 30, said the money will give her 11-year-old son a private education, which she believes he needs after falling behind in school. She sold her unusual ad space on eBay.

"For the all the sacrifices everyone makes, this is a very small one," she said. "It's a small sacrifice to build a better future for my son," she said.

"To everyone else, it seems like a stupid thing to do. To me, $10,000 is like $1 million. I only live once, and I'm doing it for my son," she said.

Tattoo artist Don Brouse said he kept the inch-tall letters close to her hairline, where bangs or a hat could provide some cover, and he only went through with it after he and his staff spent nearly seven hours trying to talk her out of putting GoldenPalace.com above her face.

Bids for Smith's eBay auction reached $999.99 before Goldenpalace.com, an Internet gambling company in the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake, Canada, met Smith's $10,000 asking price. The auction drew more than 27,000 hits and 1,000 watchers.
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/features...eadtattoo.html





Product Placement for the Whole Family
Ross Johnson

At least some reviewers of Walt Disney Pictures' "Herbie: Fully Loaded" found themselves caught in a modern-day conundrum: Should they review the movie about a fledgling ESPN journalist turned Nascar driver who says she's willing to kill for Tropicana orange juice and seldom leaves home without her Goodyear cap? Or just skip the film and go straight to its ubiquitous promotions?

"This is a product-placement movie gone wild," Richard Roeper said on WBBM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Chicago. "There's a commercial contained within nearly every frame." "Fully loaded with what?" Ty Burr of The Boston Globe said, adding, "Product placement, as far as I can tell."

The fifth incarnation of Disney's 1963 film "The Love Bug" - which features 19-year-old Lindsay Lohan as the driver of an aging Volkswagen Beetle (and enjoyed favorable notice from some reviewers) - has taken in about $37 million at the domestic box office since it opened last month. But the film may ultimately be remembered less for its star or its box-office performance than for the boldness of its promotions.

Within three minutes of her on-screen introduction in "Herbie," for instance, Ms. Lohan's character, Maggie Peyton, is congratulated in two separate scenes by different characters for landing what promises to be a "great" and "cool" job as an assistant producer at ESPN - a cable sports network that happens to be owned by the studio's parent, the Walt Disney Company.

The only time Ms. Lohan/Peyton touches food or drink is when she pulls a prominently displayed bottle of Tropicana orange juice from a kitchen refrigerator. In a scene 20 minutes later, Maggie enters the kitchen growling at another character, "If you touched that orange juice, I'll kill you." Tropicana, a division of PepsiCo, is the official soft drink of the Nascar racing team headed by Jeff Gordon, who plays himself in the film.

And "Herbie" features a 15-minute stretch early in the film when Ms. Lohan's character wears a Goodyear baseball cap in every scene. The cap's bill was weathered by the film's wardrobe department - and tattered facsimiles, called the Herbie Derby, are currently available free to purchasers of a set of four Goodyear tires.

The deals behind those on-screen story beats were put together by David Leener, a marketing veteran whose headquarters are in the Santa Monica, Calif., offices of the producer Jerry Bruckheimer. (Mr. Bruckheimer is not among the producers of "Herbie: Fully Loaded," although he worked with Mr. Leener recently on another Disney film, "National Treasure.")

Mr. Leener says product proliferation occurred in the current picture largely because its Nascar theme brings with it an inescapable web of commercial connections. "The 'Herbie' deals were not about money," he said. "There was no way we could have gotten this film done without the cooperation of Nascar, and the deals were essentially a trade-out for services."

At one point, for instance, Mr. Leener had to secure cooperation from General Motors - and had to convince executives that audiences would accept the company's Pontiac GTO being whipped by a Volkswagen Beetle in the film's first race. These same executives, Mr. Leener said, were not open to a negotiation about a later match race in the film where Herbie went up against the company's venerated Chevrolet Corvette. (The Corvette won.)

To stay in tune with the Goodyear Tire Company - which sponsors three of the top Nascar racing series - Mr. Leener similarly had to make sure that a scene in the script involving a blowout would be changed to a relatively harmless "wall scraper," with no corporate signage in the background, that was clearly not caused by a failure of Goodyear tires.

Some of the film's writers said such considerations taxed their ingenuity to the hilt. "There's so much product placement in the film that it's really hard to sneak it by," said Thomas Lennon, who with his writing partner, Robert Ben Garant, came up with the idea of setting the long-delayed "Herbie" project in the Nascar milieu. (Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who did later work on the script, declined to be interviewed.)

But, Mr. Garant said, "people who have problems with the 'Herbie' promotions don't understand Nascar."

"Fans can't see the drivers during the races, so they are sort of just cheering for the car and the sponsor's logos on the car," he continued. "When these fans see a Nascar driver out of his car, they just expect to see a lot of logos around him."

Audiences can be forgiving when it comes to product placement tastefully done. Many filmgoers, for instance, were intrigued when a new Aston Martin was introduced in the James Bond series. But they can also rebel when they feel a filmmaker crosses the line. Thus, antismoking advocates expressed outrage when it was revealed in 1994 that Sylvester Stallone agreed to accept $500,000 from the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation to use its products in five planned movies.

Martin Kaplan, an associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, cautions that things may be going too far, not just with "Herbie" but with the growth of product placement even on Broadway, where the producers of the current revival of the 1966 musical "Sweet Charity" - with the permission of Neil Simon, who wrote the original script - changed a line to mention Gran Centenario tequila.

"Do we really want our entertainment to make us think about brand equity strategy instead of whether the boy gets the girl?" Mr. Kaplan asked.

A Disney spokesman said he was not concerned about the way product placement had leaked into the "Herbie" reviews, since the film wasn't "review dependent." At ESPN, Rosa Gatti, a senior vice president for corporate communications, said that clearance of the ESPN name was granted to Disney only for reasons of "script authenticity," and not to promote the network.

One company that will not be explaining its "Herbie" plugs is Volkswagen, maker of the Beetle. Neither the company name nor the abbreviation VW is once mentioned in the film.

Volkswagen, which recently signed an overall deal for product placement with NBC Universal Pictures, agreed only to provide a Volkswagen Touareg sport utility vehicle and a new Beetle for a handful of "Herbie" scenes.

"There was no deal with Volkswagen," Mr. Leener, the marketing executive, said, "because their executives said, 'Why would we want to promote an old car?' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/06/movies/06herb.html





INTERVIEW-Hackers Make Way For Criminals, Experts Say
Lucas van Grinsven

Spotty teenage hackers who set off global email viruses are being replaced by serious online crooks whose stealth attacks don't make headlines but

cause more damage, security software makers said on Tuesday.

"Two years ago we stayed up all night, concerned about a great mass-mailing worm," said Mario Juarez, a product manager at the security business unit of U.S.-based Microsoft.

"Today, we worry not about a virus that will take every machine down, but that may attack one machine or a set of machines," he said in an interview at a Microsoft Tech Ed developers conference.

"What you see more of are a variety of attacks that are carried out to make money, such as stealing credit card details or threatening a Web site with a denial of service attack unless it pays then money."

He spoke on the same day a 19-year old German man admitted in court he had written the Sasser computer worm.

In 2004 the worm knocked out an estimated one million computer systems among home users and companies by spreading on the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows operating system.

The U.S. computer giant has since had to close many open back doors in its software and fix other security holes. After issuing a series of patches, it claims its software is a lot safer now. More improvements are planned.

"Today in Outlook Express, if you click on a link, the virus programme won't execute," said Detlef Eckert, senior director for trustworthy computing at Microsoft's European organisation, referring to Microsoft's email software.

What helps is that consumers are better informed about viruses and worms and have become reluctant to open email attachments that may unleash a harmful computer programme.

Sophisticated Attacks

But the targeted robberies of individuals or small groups of people are more sophisticated than the mass-mailing worms that created only modest damage.

Some new viruses now infect Web sites and can then enter personal computers that are well protected, Eckert said.

"Very often, these customers don't know they are at risk, or even that they are being attacked," he said.

Other software security experts said there were fewer scares over mass-mailing worms this year but instead there was a sharp increase in the number of "Trojans" that can quietly obtain bank account details and passwords.

"We've seen many more Trojans. The more organised groups are aiming at targeted victims. And if you're an organised crime group, you don't want the headlines. You may be a lot more successful without them," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for British anti-virus firm Sophos.

Cluley said it was too early to cry victory over mass-mailing viruses and the trend of real criminals hitting on select groups of users meant that Microsoft programmes were no longer the default target.

Until now, teenage hackers aimed at Microsoft programmes not only because they had security holes, but also because they run on 95 percent of all computers and were the best chance for a global spread of a virus.

However, if the main aim is to steal money, the criminal hackers would focus on the weakest link, which in the future may well be non-Microsoft programmes, Cluley said.

The computer security experts do not expect there will ever be perfectly safe computers. The attraction of more online financial transactions was too appealing for criminals.

"The first lock attracted a lock picker," Juarez said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...RS&srch=sasser





Napster, Dell In College Alliance

Dell Inc., the world's largest personal computer supplier, and Napster Inc. on Wednesday said they will provide colleges with a legal online music hardware and software package.

The offering combines Napster's digital music service with Dell's PowerEdge 1855 servers that will boost network bandwidth at schools. Colleges will be able to use the servers to store music from Napster's library locally, allowing network processing speed to remain fast while hundreds of students simultaneously download music.

The University of Washington is the first school to sign up for the package, set to launch this fall, the companies said.

This partnership will augment Napster's previous university initiative, which provided the service at 13 universities.

Under the deal, Dell will sell Napster subscriptions to additional colleges and universities at a discounted academic rate and also offer special prices on bundles that include Dell's digital music players.

The pact follows closely on the heels of last week's landmark Supreme Court ruling that found Internet file-trading networks such as Grokster and Morpheus can be held liable when their users copy music, movies and other protected works without permission.

The ruling was hailed by recording and movie companies and was considered a boost for lawful Internet businesses such as Napster, Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes online music store and RealNetworks Inc. Rhapsody music subscription service, while it put the future of file-sharing networks such as Grokster in doubt.

Entertainment companies have been waging war on file- sharing networks for the last six years, blaming illegal copying for cutting into sales by more than 25 percent.

The entertainment industry managed to shut down Napster in its original renegade file-trading form after it introduced millions of fans to the concept of unauthorized peer-to-peer song-swapping. After undergoing several changes and owners, Napster now offers a legal music subscription service similar to Rhapsody.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...ER-DELL-DC.XML





Teen Ordered Held Without Bail In iPod Stabbing Death

One of two Brooklyn teens arrested yesterday in connection with the stabbing death of another teen, a crime that allegedly began with the theft of the victim’s iPod portable music player, was arraigned on murder and robbery charges Monday.

Darran Samuel, 16, was formally arraigned this morning. He was ordered held without bail.

No formal charges were filed against 17-year-old Darryl Stephen, who was also arrested Sunday, but the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office says the case is still under investigation.

Police say Samuel and Stephen were responsible for Saturday's deadly attack on 15-year-old Christopher Rose.

Rose was attacked at approximately 5:30 p.m. near the corner of East 40th Street and Avenue D in Brooklyn's Flatbush section. According to investigators, Rose was walking with three friends on his way to the Port Authority Terminal when a group of young men tried to take his iPod.

When he resisted, Rose was stabbed twice in the chest.

According to the New York Post, police say two Good Samaritans followed the alleged killers for more than two miles from the scene of the crime, and then told police where the suspects could be found.

Rose's father says he had moved Christopher to Pennsylvania during the school year to avoid this kind of violence. Christopher was on his way back to Pennsylvania to visit friends when he was killed.

"I called him and I said, 'Christopher, it's a holiday weekend, so when you go to the Port Authority, don't talk to strangers, anybody in uniform is the best person to talk to,' and he said, 'Yes dad,'" said Christopher's father Errol. "Five minutes later I called him back again and emphasized the same thing, and he said, 'Yes dad.' And as soon as left – within half an hour – they killed him."

Neighbors say the boy tried to run from his attackers.

"You heard him running and they were chasing him, and they were like, 'Get him, get him,'" one eyewitness said.

"He came down this block and the kid ran out of breath," said another. "He ran out of breath and the kids caught up with him."

"It's horrible," added a woman who lives in the area. "I have a 17-year-old that lives here – my daughter has an iPod – and I have to really be careful now about her going to school and coming home. It's a shame."

Earlier this year, New York City Police said that crime on the subways was up due in large part to the popularity of iPods and other electronic devices. From January through May, authorities say fifty iPods were reported stolen on the city's subway system.

Police sources told the New York Post that this is the first known murder in the city over the popular iPod player.
http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index...id=9&aid=51919





US Lawmakers Move To Help Telcos Offer Video

U.S. House and Senate lawmakers on Thursday unveiled two measures designed to make it easier for telephone companies to launch video service to compete with cable and satellite services.

The measures would eliminate the need for companies like Verizon Communications <VZ.N> and SBC Communications Inc. <SBC.N> to seek authority from towns and cities to offer their video services, a process they have called cumbersome.

Cable operators and telephone companies have been encroaching on each others' turf, battling to offer consumers a suite of communications and entertainment services. Such packages are often lucrative to the providers' bottom line.

But SBC and Verizon, which are spending billions of dollars to launch their video services, have said their efforts to compete against cable operators are being slowed by having to get approval from every municipality.

"I am confident that this bill would promote competition and lower prices for consumers by allowing alternative television service providers the opportunity to widely offer their services," said Rep. Albert Wynn, a Maryland Democrat who co-authored the House measure.

The measures introduced on Thursday were mostly similar and offered by Sen. Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, Sen. John Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican and Wynn.

The bills would also bar providers from denying service to potential customers based on their income. Cable operators and some lawmakers have accused SBC and Verizon of targeting wealthier customers and ignoring poorer areas.

The measures would permit cities and towns to seek so-called franchise fees from the new entrants. Verizon and SBC have diverged over their willingness to pay those fees, which cable operators already pay and can be up to 5 percent of gross revenue.

SBC has said it does not need franchise authority and is willing to make some limited payments to cities, while Verizon has been trying to negotiate agreements and has expressed a willingness to pay the necessary fees.

"SBC is committed to bringing video competition to consumers, and these bills clearly reflect Congress' intent to promote competition for consumers," said Tim McKone, SBC senior vice president for federal relations.

Additional legislation addressing that issue and others is expected to be offered by leaders of the House and Senate Commerce committees later this summer.

Republican Federal Communications Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy said earlier on Thursday the FCC could also become involved in the fight between cable and telephone companies over franchise requirements for video services.

"Today, all of the debates are taking place at the states," Abernathy said. "There are some legal arguments that under the statutes we may have the abilty to pre-empt the states. But no one has filed a request asking us to do that."
http://reuters.com/news/newsArticleS...h=+worm+author





AOL Takes Streaming Video to Next Level
Anick Jesdanun

How times have changed since Victoria's Secret tried to broadcast its Spring Fashion Show over the Internet more than six years ago.

Victoria's Secret couldn't handle all the pairs of eyes that wanted to see supermodels in racy lingerie. Many visitors saw jagged video or nothing at all. But the company learned and added capacity the next time around, as did others who have since tried to webcast big events.

Fast forward to 2005: America Online Inc. broke its own records - and possibly all Internet records - in delivering seven separate feeds from Saturday's Live 8 concerts - all without any meltdowns.

Keynote Systems Inc., an Internet performance measurement company, recorded only minor problems, though it would not elaborate.

Call it a milestone in the maturity of streaming video, AOL's ability to show the global concerts live. Web companies now set up excess capacity and can also distribute content from computers around the world to reduce bottlenecks.

AOL also managed to make the experience compelling, said one fan, Maria Miceli, a Westlake, Ohio, office manager who switched off the MTV coverage because she felt it focused too much on its hosts and too little on the actual music.

Miceli particularly liked the ability at AOL to switch among different feeds from London, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Toronto and a separate global feed that included footage from four other venues.

The ability to give control to users - not a television director - is what gives the Internet an edge over television and radio, said James Bankoff, AOL's executive vice president for programming and products.

Bankoff says AOL expects to increase its video offerings - it's making preparations, for instance, to webcast the resumption of space flight this month.

Bill Wilson, senior vice president for AOL programming, said the company has had much practice, given the concerts it webcasts weekly, and even made arrangements for the Live 8 shows for outside providers to supplement AOL's internal capacity, though the need didn't arise.

Still, the peak of 175,000 simultaneous users - reached at about 6:30 p.m. EDT Saturday - was a record for AOL.

Its biggest events to date had involved streaming from the "Big Brother" reality television show and events related to the Pope John Paul II's death, but none exceeded 100,000 streams at once, Wilson said.

Speedera Networks, now part of Akamai Technologies Inc., reported handling 132,000 streams at its peak on Feb. 8 for Chinese TV's celebration for Chinese New Year.

Victoria's Secret, meanwhile, prepared for up to 500,000 viewers at once for its heavily hyped 1999 webcast, but it's not clear how many were able to view it before technical problems arose.

Overall, AOL said it had 5 million unique viewers on Saturday, some of whom watched multiple streams.

Internet video may have matured, but more can be done, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group.

Although more than half of households now have broadband connections, Enderle said relatively few have computers attached to their TVs, meaning people can't yet watch Internet programming on large screens.

And programmers can do more to truly take advantage of the medium's strengths.

With a concert, for instance, a truly interactive experience would let a musician at home play along and have the sound mixed in with the band's performance.

Enderle said even the AOL concert streams feel too much like television: The experience of switching feeds reminded him of DVDs, while the ability to replay concerts on demand was a bit too much like cable TV.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





Where's The iTunes For Movies?
John Borland

Jonathan Marlow has spent much of the last two years trying to persuade filmmakers to put their most valuable products on the Net. On some days, the task feels a little like pulling teeth.

Marlow, a cinematographer and Amazon.com alumnus, is director of content acquisition at Greencine, a small San Francisco-based Netflix rival that is increasingly offering online access to films alongside its rent-by-mail business.

Unlike most video-on-demand providers, he's all but ignored Hollywood. Greencine launched the on-demand service in September 2003 with a small independent documentary called "Mau Mau Sex Sex," about a pair of exploitation filmmakers from the 1950s, and he's continued to focus on indie productions since.

For now, Marlow says it just isn't worth working closely with the big studios. Hollywood is too in love with its own soaring DVD revenues to risk supporting an attractive Internet alternative, and it needs to be shown that video-on-demand services can make money, he said.

"DVD revenues are so out of proportion to every other aspect of this business," Marlow said. "There has to be some proven revenue in the space before the big studios will even think about dismantling a model that has proven so lucrative for them."

Marlow's complaint is echoed by virtually anyone who has tried to make a business from video-on-demand services: Even as consumers and technology are showing signs of being ready for a video-on-demand service with the scope and appeal of Apple Computer's iTunes music service, Hollywood remains unconvinced.

The vision of the ideal service may have been outlined most succinctly by Qwest Communications' early advertisement for broadband services, in which a clerk in a third-rate motel blandly promised in-room access to "every movie ever made, in every language, any time, day or night."

Easy enough. After all, hasn't iTunes shown the way? Hasn't the increasing popularity of on-demand programming at cable networks such as Comcast shown the demand?

Yes, and no. Aspiring on-demand services face a chicken-and-egg problem similar to the early days of digital music. Consumer demand for their services remains low, in large part because their prices are high and they offer fewer choices than ordinary rental stores. Yet Hollywood won't offer them more favorable movie release policies until demand improves.

Nor has Net-based technology, with today's bandwidth constraints and PC-focused services, provided a movie-watching experience as compelling as a DVD.

"The problem that differentiates Internet-based delivery and cable and satellite...is quality of service," said Warner Bros. Chief Technology Officer Chris Cookson. "We are not going to get the quality of service readily over the Internet until the Internet gets its act together a little better."

On top of that, the studios already have a lucrative way to reach home consumers. For the last few years, DVD sales have soared to more than $15 billion a year at a time of falling box-office revenues. Industry wags are only half joking when they say that big-screen theater releases have become little more than promotional tools for home video release.

At least today, the studios aren't willing to risk undercutting those revenues by allowing on-demand rental services--which produce far less revenue than do DVD sales--to compete directly.

"It's not the best business right now," said Stephan Shelanski, senior vice president at the Starz Entertainment Group, which offers subscription movies and pay TV channels on cable networks and the Internet. "I know the studios are experimenting to try to make it more viable, but they have so much money coming in from DVDs. They're really trying to find a business model that works."

Take a number at the window
For years, the studios have tightly controlled what they call "release windows"--essentially the staggered release of a movie first to theaters, then to home video, to video-on-demand services and pay television, and finally to broadcast television.

Until the last few years, the video-on-demand side of this was the relative backwater of pay-per-view cable television networks, where more attention was focused on live programming such as sporting events. But with the advent of digital cable and Internet services, the offerings are evolving dramatically.

Yet even if on-demand content services now see themselves as rivals to a video store--without the hassle of driving--studios have left them in the old pay-per-view category, which means they get first-run movies as much as two to three months behind video stores or Netflix, and are allowed to offer those movies for only a few months at most. Cost is also a factor, with Netflix providing a much better bargain for frequent movie watchers.

That's badly hampered on-demand's ability to compete with DVD rentals. Even Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who plans to launch a Net-based service later this year, has publicly said he expects the first versions to be "underwhelming."

Indeed, these tightly drawn categories also hamper the ability to create such an online Netflix, in which subscribers would pay a monthly fee for unlimited viewing. Under the studios' current contracts, cable television companies Starz, HBO and Showtime have exclusive contracts for subscription services that cover both broadband Internet and cable television distribution.

"The truth is that VOD (video on demand) can get a lot better," said Macrovision Senior Marketing Director Adam Gervin, whose technology is used to protect movie content against copying. "What people want is the ability to get a movie from a cable or satellite provider on the same day they can buy it at Wal-Mart. But that won't happen until the studios feel confident that their content won't be cannibalized."

To be fair, the technology for the perfect video-on-demand service isn't quite ready either.

On the cable television side, what's available is essentially constrained by the server capacity of the cable company. Starz, which tends to have several thousand titles under license at any given time, usually has only a few hundred available through cable networks such as Comcast.

Internet-based services have the flexibility to offer far more content. But even as bandwidth has grown, and video-compression technologies such as Microsoft's Windows Media 9 and the new MPEG 4 AVC have improved, studio executives aren't satisfied with the quality of delivery.

Once a movie reaches the home, most Internet services remain aimed at the PC, which remains a poor alternative to the television for watching movies. However, a new generation of "media adapter" devices, scheduled for release this fall, promise to make it increasingly easy to stream video from a PC directly to a television.

Taking the long way around
Given these constraints, it's no wonder that the Net's on-demand services have remained small. But a few changes are on the horizon that could transform the business.

Some involve new technology that will bring on-demand rental services into the movie sales business. Studios are warming quickly to the idea of "digital sell-through," an industry term for selling a permanent copy of a movie that can be downloaded to a computer. Sony Pictures, Warner and others expect to offer this kind of online distribution as early as this year, executives say.

CinemaNow CEO Curt Mavis, who has been negotiating with studios since his service opened in 1999, says this could help reinvent his business.

"I think the DVD business has proved that people like to collect movies, maybe more than people anticipated," Mavis said. "I think when we get into digital sales, where sell-through has some pricing advantages, the content offering can be more broad and vast and deep than what you get in the retail store."

Studios are also talking about new digital sales channels, such as selling movies on flash memory for mobile phones.

"It's not about locking things up," said Marsha King, the general manager of Warner Home Video. "What we like to do is find as many ways as possible to make compelling propositions about movies, so that consumers can find exactly what works for them. What we investigate are things that consumers would like to see. It comes down to whether consumers want to do it."

Marlow's Greencine and a handful of other companies are pursuing a more indie approach, which may ultimately do as much for the future of digital distribution as the efforts of Greencine's venture-funded and studio-backed rivals will.

Greencine today has about 3,000 works available for on-demand viewing. It's in the final days of an online documentary film festival, where the winners will be shown in a San Francisco theater.

Marlow's goal now is to persuade independent filmmakers to put their works on Greencine at the same time as the theatrical release. Even the biggest indie films rarely get shown in theaters outside the biggest cities, and the smallest ones are lucky to find a theater screening at all, he notes. On-demand can level that playing field. It's still a hard road, although he thinks some filmmakers with recognizable names will assent this year. The problem is that old traditions, from the windowing to eligibility for Academy Award nominations, still die hard. "If you're fortunate enough to get a review in The New York Times, but you're only playing in New York, it seems wise to leverage that publicity with a way that people can actually watch the film," Marlow said. "We keep talking about it but haven't found anyone bold enough yet to try. But we're close."
http://news.com.com/Wheres+the+iTune...3-5772286.html





Small Screens Spell Turkey
Holly J. Wagner

Sony's PlayStation Portable is flying off the shelves, but despite claims of lofty sales for some movies in the PSP's proprietary disk format, it's not clear whether people want to watch movies on a small screen.

Most of the major studios and several smaller content suppliers are cranking out a steady stream of movie-only discs in the PSP's Universal Media Disc format. To date, 31 titles have been released on UMD. By midyear, 130 titles should be available.

Out of the gate, Sony included a copy of Spider-Man 2 with the first million PSPs it shipped in the United States, and a few weeks later began offering about a dozen movie titles for PSP.

Sony claimed UMDs of its titles House of Flying Daggers and Resident Evil: Apocalypse sold in excess of 100,000 units each.

Since then, Hellboy, Hitch and XxX have joined the list.

"It's really been fantastic the way people have responded to this technology," said Sony Pictures Home Entertainment spokesman Fritz Friedman.

According to Friedman, 100,000 copies of each title have been sent to retailers, and 60 to 80 percent have been sold to consumers.

But actual sales figures are difficult, if not impossible, to pin down.

Nielsen VideoScan, which uses point-of-sale records to track sales of DVDs and video products, can't get a fix on it, mainly because Wal-Mart and other major retailers don't participate. Nielsen showed just 17,280 UMD copies of House of Flying Daggers sold by the end of June, but a representative acknowledged that's an undercount.

A survey by Texas-based research firm Parks Associates in June found that the PSPs mainly appeal to gamers.

Top factors influencing their interest were graphics quality (34 percent), gaming capabilities (29 percent) and a large catalog of games (29 percent). Just 6 percent ranked video playback as an important feature, well behind TV connectivity (20 percent).
"At this stage, most PSP buyers are hard-core gamers who want to play games on whatever platform they can get," said Harry Wang, a Parks Associates analyst. "They will jump on a cool device or game titles that are available. That's why PSP sold 1.3 million units in three months, and game titles are selling well, too."

While gamers play their games over and over, they may not care to watch a small-format movie more than once. No problem. Within days of the first UMD release, a Murietta, California, entrepreneur registered the URL and launched UMDtrader.

The website lets people auction off their old PSP games, accessories and UMD movies to other PSP enthusiasts. Since the products are used, prices are generally less than the items would cost new.

However, UMD seems to have clearly upstaged Warner Home Video's Mini-DVD format with a 2.5-inch screen, which was introduced in the 2004 holiday season.

Warner is the only studio to have committed titles to the Mini-DVD format, which will play on standard DVD players as well as handheld players created for the 3-inch DVD discs (UMDs will only play on PSP units). It's also the only movie studio that hasn't announced titles for PSP.

Wang said it may not be the format of the movies but the players' small screen size that is turning off consumers.

"Mini-DVD apparently didn't take off as Warner had expected," said Wang. "The reasons are various, but I believe small screen and the dedicated Mini-DVD players are a turnoff to other age groups, and maybe to the targeted 'tween group as well."

Wang said screens measuring at least 3.8 inches to 4.5 inches, with good resolution and graphics, may prove acceptable. Still, it's not clear whether the little boxes will catch on for movie viewing.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,68068,00.html





Music to Your Cellphone
Thomas J. Fitzgerald

The cellphone has acquired a host of new features in recent years, from text messaging to video. Now cellphone makers and wireless operators are shifting their attention to music, taking a swipe at the iPod and other stand-alone music players.

With high-speed cellular networks soon to be widely available, wireless operators are exploring new ways to deliver not only over-the-air music downloads, but also music videos, streaming and other new products tied to music.

While it remains to be seen whether consumers will take to buying music on cellphones, a variety of cellphone models with built-in MP3 players have reached the market or are about to be released. These phones still revolve around the PC for most of their music content, and compared with music players like the iPod from Apple Computer, most have smaller capacities for storing music files and fewer music features. But they also provide a new set of options for putting collections of music on devices that many people have to carry anyway.

The Sanyo MM-5600, available from Sprint (www.sprint.com; $279.99 with a 2-year contract ), has a built-in media player that plays music files stored on a miniSD card. The included card has only 16 megabytes of capacity, which is small by music standards, and may hold only four or five songs. The phone can take cards up to 1 gigabyte (sold separately for about $105), which can hold about 240 songs of average size, and a U.S.B. cable is included for transferring files from PC's to the card while inserted in the phone.

For listening to music, a stereo headset with a standard 2.5-millimeter jack is included, along with a built-in speakerphone with pretty good sound for music; songs can be played in random order and repeated. And as a flip phone, the MM-5600 can be closed while playing music, keeping the keypad and screen covered while volume controls are still available along the side.

The phone, which also has a 1.3-megapixel camera, works with Sprint's optional music streaming services. MSpot Radio, for example, costs $5.95 a month and offers music in various genres. Not surprising for streamed music, though, the sound was slightly tinny in my tests.

The Sony Ericsson S710a is one of several music-playing phones that are available from Cingular (www.cingular.com; $199.99 after rebate). It plays music files stored on an included 32-megabyte Memory Stick Duo, and can accommodate Memory Sticks up to 128 megabytes. As with the MM-5600 and most other cellphones, the S710a can play MP3 files but not copy-protected files like those sold at many online music stores.

To transfer files to the stick, a Memory Stick reader is included for plugging into a computer's U.S.B. port. Files can be dragged from a computer or copied from CD's using the Sony Ericsson Disc2Phone software, available for download at the company's Web site. With the built-in Bluetooth wireless connection, files can be transferred to and from the card while it is inserted in the phone.

The S710a comes with a stereo headset and a built-in speaker with decent sound for music, and its music interface includes an equalizer to adjust bass and treble. The S710a is a swivel phone, and when music is playing with the phone in either the open or closed positions, the exposed keys and buttons can be locked.

A phone offered by T-Mobile, the Samsung P735 (www.tmobile.com; $499.99 with a 1-year contract), comes with a 32-megabyte Reduced-Size MultiMediaCard, also available separately in capacities up to 512 megabytes. The phone is more compact and rugged than the S710a, and as a flip phone that also swivels, it can be closed while listening to music. But on the P735, unlike some of the other phones, files cannot be transferred to the card while it is inserted in the phone, and a card reader is not included. The phone comes with a stereo headset, and songs can be sorted by name and date.

The Motorola V710 (www.verizonwireless.com; $99.99 with 2-year contract) is being offered by Verizon Wireless. It, too, uses a memory card for storage, but one is not included. The phone accepts TransFlash cards available in sizes up to 256 megabytes, and as with the P735, files must be transferred to the card before inserting it into the phone, and a reader is not included. And unlike some of the other phones, the V710 has a music interface that enables playlists to be created.

A number of so-called smart phones - cellphone-organizers with advanced software - have music-playing abilities as well, including the Audiovox SMT 5600, which uses Windows Mobile 2003 for Smartphone as its operating system. The device, available from Cingular ($199.99 after rebate) supports miniSD cards up to 1 gigabyte and includes Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, which can play copy-protected music purchased from some online stores like MSN Music and Napster. A stereo headset is included and a speakerphone is built in.

The Treo 650 from PalmOne, available from Cingular, Sprint and Verizon Wireless, can play MP3 files and RealAudio files with an included RealPlayer application. Music can be heard through a built-in speaker or headphones. For file storage, the Treo 650 accepts MultiMediaCards and SD cards sold separately in sizes up to 2 gigabytes.

And a number of phones on the way will offer more music features. The W800 Walkman phone, from Sony Ericsson, is expected to be available in August. A feature distinguishing the W800 is its music-only mode, enabling it to be used solely as an MP3 player while its cellphone transmitter remains off. Sony Ericsson estimates 30 hours of listening time in this mode.

With a U.S.B. cable, files can be dragged to the W800 from a computer or copied from CD's using Sony Ericsson's Disc2Phone software. Files can also be transferred wirelessly with an infrared or Bluetooth connection, and they are saved on a Memory Stick inserted in the side of the phone; a 512-megabyte stick is included and the phone will accept sticks up to 2 gigabytes (about 120 and 480 songs, respectively).

Other features include a built-in FM tuner that uses the stereo headset as an antenna and provided good reception in tests, and an equalizer with MegaBass. The W800 is expected to cost $499, Sony Ericsson officials said, and will not be sold through carriers in the United States. Instead, the company said it would offer the phone directly to consumers from its Web site (www.sonyericsson.com). As a tri-band phone that uses the 900-, 1800- and 1900-MHz bands, it will be able to work on T-Mobile's network (with a SIM card provided by T-Mobile).

Farther down the road are phones with built-in hard disks, which can carry larger collections of music. Nokia's N91, with a 4-gigabyte hard disk, is not likely to be available in the United States until 2006, a Nokia spokesman said. And Samsung's SGH-i300, with a 3-gigabyte disk, a scroll wheel for navigation and the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, is expected to be available in Europe soon; it is not yet clear if it will be offered in the United States.

Other music ventures are under way. A Motorola phone announced last year and expected to feature a mobile version of iTunes, Apple's music software, is due for release this summer, according to Motorola.

Napster announced plans with Ericsson, a supplier of technology to wireless operators, to offer a Napster service on the operators' networks. The service is expected to be available within a year and work with a variety of handsets.

The current crop of music-playing cellphones offer a range of choices for music on the go, and those options are certain to grow.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/07/te.../07basics.html





Kaplan: Microsoft Tried to Crush Startup
Greg Sandoval

The inventor of one of the precursors to handheld devices - an operating system that enabled computer users to write with a pen instead of a keyboard - long suspected Microsoft Corp. of crushing his business.

Now, Jerrold Kaplan says he has the evidence - documents that surfaced during a class-action suit filed in Minnesota indicating that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates set out in the early 1990s to discourage other companies from doing business with Kaplan's startup, Go Computer Inc.

An antitrust suit Kaplan filed in San Francisco federal court last week quotes from letters purportedly written by Gates, including one undated note allegedly sent to then Intel CEO Andy Grove, as evidence of Microsoft's "collusive and exclusionary" business practices.

Microsoft first tried to launch a competing operating system, and when that plan failed, it made threats or offered incentives to companies to prevent them from endorsing or investing in Go, the suit claims.

"I guess I've made it clear that we view an Intel investment in Go as an anti-Microsoft move," Gates wrote Grove, according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by The Associated Press. "I am asking you not to make any investment in Go."

Intel, which had planned to endorse Go's technology, backed off after Microsoft's lobbying, according to Kaplan's lawsuit. Such "incentives and threats" also discouraged other business partners from adopting Go's operating system, ultimately killing the technology, the lawsuit says.

"This was a corporate mugging," Kaplan said in an interview on Tuesday.

A Microsoft spokeswoman, Stacy Drake, scoffed at the idea that Go was victimized by a Microsoft plot.

"These claims date back nearly 20 years," Drake said. "They were baseless then and they are baseless now."

Once one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups, Go no longer exists as a standalone business. The company was sold to AT&T Co. in 1994, and the rights to its assets were transferred to Lucent Technologies Inc. two years later.

Kaplan, who confirmed facts of the case but would not elaborate on his attorney's advice, was subpoenaed to testify last year in an unrelated class-action suit against Microsoft in Minnesota. It was then that he learned of the documents involving his old company. In April, Kaplan reacquired the rights to sue on Go's behalf.

Formed in 1987, Go Computer developed a tablet computer as well as software that enabled computers to understand handwriting. Decades later, the ability to write with a stylus is a key function of many personal digital assistants as well as of tablet computers, for which Microsoft developed a variation of its Windows XP operating system.

Drake said Go's technology, at the time Kaplan alleges Microsoft conspired to crush his company, was flawed.

"Handwriting had severe limitations," Drake said. "There were a number of companies that attempted pen computing and none of them were successful during that time."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





"Ten Years of Chilled Innovation"

That's the fallout from the Supreme Court ruling on file-sharing technologies, says Creative Commons chair and law prof Larry Lessig

For years, Larry Lessig has been at the increasingly contentious frontier where intellectual-property law meets technology innovation. A professor of law at Stanford Law School, he's the author of the books Free Culture, The Future of Ideas, and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

He also chairs Creative Commons, a nonprofit project that offers flexible copyright arrangements for creative work. And most recently, Lessig argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft against extending copyright terms, though his client Eric Eldred ultimately lost the case in early 2003.

Lessig's experience makes him uniquely qualified to render his opinion on the landmark June 27 decision by the Supreme Court in MGM v. Grokster to side with recording studios and against companies distributing peer-to-peer file-sharing software that lets people trade commercial songs for free.

He's somewhat pleased that the court's decision to send the case back to the Ninth Circuit court in effect upheld an earlier Sony (SNE ) decision involving the Betamax VCR, which declined to hold manufacturers liable for illegal acts by their users. But Lessig contends the Supreme Court's decision will chill innovation by introducing a new level of uncertainty about whether a technology creator had an intent to allow copyright infringement.

He spoke the day after the decision with BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief, Robert Hof. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Q: What do you think of the decision?
A: This is a pretty significant defeat here. Certainly the result is better than what the MGM companies wanted -- because they wanted the Sony case modified -- and [Justice David Souter, who wrote the decision, isn't] modifying Sony. But still, this intent standard...will invite all sorts of strategic behavior that will dramatically increase the cost of innovating around these technologies.

Q: How so?
A: Imagine that you're a company with a copyright and you see a company coming out with a technology you don't like because it's challenging your business model. We've seen lots of these -- for example, ReplayTV, or the VCR. Obviously, if the technology is illegal, you can just get it stopped.

But a second way to stop the innovation is just to litigate. Look what happened to ReplayTV: It spent years and millions of dollar litigating to defend its right to have the ReplayTV technology as it was. Essentially, it had to fold the company because the legal standard then was so uncertain that you had to get to trial before you could resolve the case.

Q: What's the alternative?
A: Congress can regulate, as Congress has repeatedly regulated in the context of new technologies. They can decide whether technologies are good or bad.

The thing about Congress regulating new technologies is that if you're a new innovator, you're worried about it, but it's not the sort of thing on which you'll have to spend millions of dollars in litigation costs on the first day you walk out the door.

Q: So the problem with the decision is just that the Supreme Court rendered an opinion at all, rather than letting legislators decide?
A: Right. By making it a process that goes through the courts, you've just increased the legal uncertainty around innovation substantially and created great opportunities to defeat legitimate competition. You've shifted an enormous amount of power to those who oppose new types of competitive technologies. Even if in the end, you as the innovator are right, you still spent your money on lawyers instead of on marketing or a new technology.

In Congress, we might have a lot of argument about what the statute should look like. But that would be a process that would resolve this intensely political issue politically. Instead, Justice Souter engages in common-law lawmaking, which is basically judges making up the law they want to apply to this particular case. And not just Supreme Court judges -- what they've done is invite a wide range of common-law lawmaking by judges around the country trying to work out the details of what this intent standard really is.

Q: Do you think in fact we'll see a dampening of innovation?
A: Yes. Now, I don't think we're going to see tons of litigation. What you're going to see is innovation that's channeled in ways the copyright owners can agree to, or channeled in ways that avoids any kind of possibility of this kind of litigation.

That has already had its effect in the Valley, and already money has shifted into places which will avoid any conflict with the copyright holders. Why buy a lawsuit when you can buy a new innovation that doesn't get you a lawsuit? And you don't even see it -- you don't even know what you don't get because people are afraid.

Q: Why do you think the Supreme Court decided to take on this case rather than letting the issues get decided in Congress?
A: Increasingly, this court is oblivious to the costs of its own decisions. The Reagan Administration pushed the regulatory-impact statements. I think we need an equivalent Ronald Reagan to push the judicial-opinion-impact statement that tries to calculate the efficiency costs of certain legal rules. I continue to be disappointed in Justice Souter's obtuseness to the costs of the complexity that he adds to the copyright system.

The harm of what the Supreme Court did is totally independent of this particular case. It's about changing the way innovation happens. Now, when you innovate, you're going to have a legal review -- what can you say, what kind of things can you signal.

Q: How does the decision make the legal situation less certain for tech companies?
A: Take the number of [Apple (AAPL )] iPods sold and take the number of iTunes songs sold, and divide it, and it's something like 25 songs per iPod. You know there's more than 25 songs on every iPod. Where did people get their music? Well, they rip it from their CDs. Is that legal? Good question. It's not protected by the audio home recording act, which explicitly said you're allowed to make an analog copy of your CD. But [on the iPod], it's a digital copy.

Ask [former Motion Picture Association of America CEO] Jack Valenti or ask the recording industry whether it's fair use to be copying CDs. Well, they don't think it's fair use. So in selling iPods...[Apple is] encouraging CDs to be ripped. If it weren't Apple, which is a relatively strong company, but another company that's starting with this new technology, what would happen if you filed a lawsuit against them? Your lawyer would tell you, you can't afford to fight this.

Q: One might say it's not Apple's strength protecting it, rather that it puts a wrapper on iPods that says "don't steal music," thus indicating a clear intent to discourage infringement.
A: I don't think that's right. Is a warning a sufficient step? Probably not, or at least there's a pretty good question whether it's enough.

Go back to the Sony Betamax case. The Sony Betamax was developed and advertised in a way that they knew they were encouraging certain kinds of behavior [copying movies], over 90% of which was illegal. Would that case have really survived the standard that was announced in Grokster? I don't know.

Q: So it's not at all clear what startups should do to avoid lawsuits?
A: No, [it's not clear]. It's going to take some time. It might take 10 years of litigation to get a clear sense of this. That's 10 years of chilled innovation. That's really quite costly.

Q: What role could or should Congress have now that the key issues in this case have essentially been decided?
A: All the pressure for Congress to pass a statute now has been removed because the Supreme Court has given the industry what it wanted. That's the perversity here. It's not like these were a bunch of poor immigrant workers who couldn't get Congress' attention. This is an industry that can get Congress to jump through hoops whenever it asks. And it was struggling because there's so much opposition to this kind of legislation that you never saw Congress able to pass something.

Q: What do you see doing personally or with your allies?
A: Too much of the attention on these issues has been focused on the "piracy" question. Instead, we've got to focus people on really much easier questions that the law is just as grotesque about. I'm more concerned about getting people to see how copyright generally is imposing such a burden on innovation and creativity in lots of areas that we ought to simplify it.

I want people to think about, for example, Wal-Mart (WMT ) refusing to print images [if the chain decides the digital photographs a customer submits could be copyrighted]. When people see examples like that, they're much more likely to be on the side of reform.

Q: So this court decision could actually focus more attention on your efforts at Creative Commons?
A: If we had a stock price, our stock price would have shot up after the decision. One very effective way to architect your product to control illegal use would be to add Creative Commons licenses to it. So here we are, open for business, giving away free tools for avoiding Grokster liability.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...2928_tc057.htm





This Blog Is 100 Percent Solar
Amit Asaravala

Most web-hosting companies pride themselves on the speed and reliability of the servers they house in their data centers.

But for a select few, the pride comes from knowing that the electricity coursing through their servers is 100 percent clean.

Over the past several years, these boutique firms have carved out a "green" niche in the crowded web-hosting market by running data centers powered entirely by solar panels.

The panels are not only good for the environment, they're also good for business. In addition to saving the companies thousands of dollars a month in electric bills, they're drawing in customers from all over the world who want to host their websites in a green data center.

"That was a big plus for us," said Phil Nail, technology manager at Southern California's Affordable Internet Services Online, or AISO, which converted its data center to solar power in 2002 as a cost- saving measure. "We've brought on probably a good couple-thousand customers since the panels were installed. The majority of those customers were searching for green hosting options and found us."

Customers who signed up with AISO long before the panels were installed are also pleased.

"It's a nice match with what we do," said Mike Lutz, director of distribution at MacGillivray Freeman Films, an Imax film production studio in Laguna Beach, California. "Over 30 years, we have focused on delivering films that feature science and conservation, and working with a company that is powered by solar power certainly fits that bill."

The positive response is not surprising to John Gethoefer, president of Portland, Oregon, company ecoSky. Gethoefer launched ecoSky in 2003 with the goal of serving companies that want to operate with the least impact on the environment.

"What it comes down to is that there's a lot of movement in this country and in this world by people trying to live more sustainably," he said. "A lot of business owners are responding to that."

Data center owners are responding, too. In addition to AISO and ecoSky, the list of green web hosts includes Elfon, Locomotive Media, Solar Data Centers and Sustainable Marketing, among others.

Not all the companies get their power from on-site solar panels. Some buy renewable energy credits from their regional power utility. The utility, in turn, agrees to purchase a set amount of electricity from a green producer, like a solar farm or a wind farm.

But the end result for the companies' clients is the same: They feel better about themselves at the end of the day.

"Customers who are residential subscribers -- they get the peace of mind knowing that they're part of something that is improving society's relationship with the environment and reducing pollution," said Gethoefer.

"For business users, they also get to extend that to their customer base," he added. "There are a lot of business users who advertise that they have an environmentally responsible website."

Indeed, some ecoSky clients feature small "Powered by Solar Energy" logos at the bottom of their web pages. Similarly, AISO clients often display a "Site hosted with 100% Solar Energy" button.

Unfortunately, as well-meaning as they are, these gestures aren't likely to have much of an impact on the world's overall energy consumption -- at least not until major data centers begin to follow the lead of the boutiques. And that's not going to happen anytime soon, say energy analysts.

"Data centers may be quicker to adopt alternative energy faster than other businesses, but that doesn't mean they're going to adopt it rapidly," said Dale Sartor, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "There may be a handshake -- the idea of having multiple sources of energy and distributed supply may be appealing -- but my gut feeling is that they're probably not going to be making the huge investment."

Part of the problem, said Sartor, is that large web-hosting companies and internet service providers just don't have the roof space to set up enough solar panels to make their investment worthwhile.

A data center at a major web-hosting company may need as much as 200 watts per square foot of power, according to Sartor. Solar panels, on the other hand, typically generate 10 watts per square foot on a clear day.

AISO has worked around this problem by installing its panels on the ground around its data center, which is located on a 1.3-acre plot in rural Romoland, California. The company also hosts fewer websites than massive data centers, so its power requirements are lower.

At the least, large hosting companies can buy renewable energy credits. But those don't save the company any money, the way solar panels can once they've paid for themselves.

Or, they can focus on conserving energy. But even there, the boutique companies seem to be more nimble. AISO recently upgraded 500 of the older processors in its data center to more efficient AMD Opteron processors -- a move that cut power consumption by 60 percent, according to Nail.

The company's data center was also designed from the ground up with power conservation in mind. Solar tubes bring sunlight into the building so lamps aren't needed in the daytime. Extra layers of insulation keep the cool air in the building. And cooling ducts carry the heat dissipated by the servers straight outside.

For now, AISO president and owner Sherry Nail (who is married to Phil Nail) isn't concerned about what the bigger hosting companies are doing -- or not doing. She's just happy to be giving her clients the best possible place to host their sites, she said.


Of course, should some of the bigger hosting companies' clients decide they'd be better off with a more environmentally responsible host, like AISO, she won't turn them away.

"We plan on expanding as necessary," she said.
http://www.wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,67785,00.html





An Aura of Mystery Still Hovers Around the Man Who Is Deep Throat
Michiko Kakutani

Deep Throat, a k a W. Mark Felt, a k a "the Secret Man" of Bob Woodward's new book, was the most famous anonymous source in modern American political history. And thanks to the 1976 movie "All the President's Men," he also became an iconic symbol of the secret truth teller. He was the man in the raincoat in the shadows in the garage, the tortured world-weary source who guided the brash Mr. Woodward and his partner, Carl Bernstein, through the Watergate labyrinth, the insider turned informant who helped expose the Nixon administration's abuse of power - its misappropriation of campaign funds, its attempts to bend the C.I.A. and F.B.I. to its own ends, its efforts to smear the political opposition and intimidate the press.

"The Secret Man" provides an intriguing if not fully satisfying portrait of the real-life relationship between Mr. Woodward and Mr. Felt, and it reaffirms the vital role that confidential sources play in keeping the public informed. Deep Throat's identity remained a mystery for more than 30 years, and his repeated insistence on what Mr. Woodward calls in these pages "secrecy at all cost" suggests that today's media-bashing climate - when reporters' right to keep sources secret is under attack - could well inhibit sources like Mr. Felt from stepping forward.

The book also reminds us that without Mr. Felt and a host of other confidential sources, the course of history might have been very different: the Woodstein efforts to unlock the Watergate scandal could easily have stalled, and without their articles in The Washington Post a special prosecutor would most likely not have been appointed, Congressional investigations and impeachment inquiries would not have got off the ground and President Nixon would not have been forced from office.

While "The Secret Man" yields yet another angle on the perennial puzzle of Watergate, it does not provide political junkies with much hard news. The revelation that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, a former No. 2 official at the F.B.I., was made a month ago in Vanity Fair magazine by members of Mr. Felt's family, and in a subsequent Washington Post article Mr. Woodward basically set forth an outline of this book, detailing his complex, often tortuous relationship with his source.

In fact, much of this book's narrative consists of the author's dovetailing accounts of the work he and Mr. Bernstein did in piecing together the Watergate scandal (accounts that will be highly familiar to anyone who has read their 1974 best seller "All the President's Men") with accounts of Mr. Felt's experiences at the F.B.I., which were laid out in his own far less famous 1979 book, "The FBI Pyramid From the Inside," in which the author asserted that he had "never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!"

Scattered here and there in "The Secret Man" are some interesting tidbits. Mr. Woodward reveals that The Washington Post might have had its own leaker - possibly in the paper's legal department - who was providing "information to the Justice Department and the White House" and that "the White House apparently came very close to establishing that one of our sources was Felt."

Mr. Woodward also says he learned in 1976 that an assistant attorney general, Stanley Pottinger, had more or less figured out Mr. Felt's secret identity, but kept mum about his discovery. During grand jury testimony on another matter, Mr. Pottinger said, a member of the jury asked Mr. Felt if he was Deep Throat; when Mr. Pottinger reminded the witness that he was under oath and asked if he would like the question withdrawn, Mr. Felt flushed and quickly said, "Withdraw the question." What "The Secret Man" does not do is shed light on many of the lingering mysteries of Deep Throat, like how Mr. Felt managed to monitor Mr. Woodward's apartment balcony to see if the reporter had set out the flowerpot with a red flag, their signal for calling a secret late-night meeting. Mr. Woodward also writes that he never learned how Mr. Felt knew in November 1973 that the Nixon tapes contained deliberate erasures, since he had retired from the F.B.I. several months earlier.

For that matter, the portrait of Deep Throat that emerges from this volume is in many ways as enigmatic as the one that appeared in "All the President's Men." While Deep Throat's name has been revealed, the mystery of his identity - his personality, the competing claims of pride and guilt on his conscience - remains.

Mr. Woodward, whose books routinely plow ahead with little analysis and context, can only speculate about Mr. Felt's reasons for talking to The Washington Post. Like many journalists before him, he suggests a complex mix of motives: Mr. Felt's realization that "the system of justice had been so polluted and corrupted and politicized by Nixon and his men that the F.B.I. could never get to the bottom of Watergate"; longstanding bitterness at the efforts of the Nixon White House to manipulate the F.B.I. for political ends; resentment, after J. Edgar Hoover's death, at being passed over for the top job; anger at the cozy, complicit relationship the new acting director L. Patrick Gray had with the Nixon White House; and a simple love of "the game," based on his early training as a spy hunter.

The main reason the portrait of Deep Throat in this book is so fuzzy is that Mr. Woodward never really tried to dig out an "exacting explanation" until a few years ago, by which time it became evident that Mr. Felt, now 91, was suffering from severe memory loss. The reporter had put off talking to his old source, this book suggests, because he was fearful about the sort of reception he might receive.

In 1974, in the wake of the publication of "All the President's Men," Mr. Woodward did place a phone call, but Mr. Felt abruptly hung up on him. "For days I was haunted, imagining the worst," Mr. Woodward writes. "The worst ranged from the possibility that he might take his own life to the higher likelihood that he would go public and denounce me as a betrayer and scum who had exploited our accidental friendship."

The two had met - in one of those utterly random accidents of history - in 1969 or 1970, when the future reporter was still in the Navy. And in the years before Watergate they developed a father-son, mentor-apprentice sort of relationship, with Mr. Felt offering the ambitious, needy and often pushy young man career advice and occasional tips.

Watergate dramatically altered both their lives, in very different ways. The forces of public accountability unleashed by the scandal soon caught up with Mr. Felt: although he would later be pardoned by President Ronald Reagan, he was convicted in 1980 of authorizing government agents to break into homes, without warrants, in pursuit of anti-Vietnam War bombing suspects in the radical Weather Underground. "Felt had helped light a fuse that was racing inexorably toward him," Mr. Woodward writes, adding that he experienced "growing feelings of personal responsibility" for his former source's plight.

Mr. Woodward, by contrast, would not only be hailed as a hero, along with Mr. Bernstein, for breaking the Watergate story, but also go on to a lucrative career as a book writer, known for his high-level access to inside Washington sources - access, he acknowledges here, that was based on the reputation he earned with Deep Throat.

"Repeatedly, those I had interviewed for my books or stories for the Post," he writes, "had cited my willingness to protect a source such as Deep Throat for nearly 30 years as a reason they were willing to talk about some of the most sensitive and Top Secret deliberations in the U.S. government."

Indeed, the fact that Vanity Fair ended up scooping The Washington Post on its own story underscores how seriously Mr. Woodward, Mr. Bernstein and their editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee, took their promise of confidentiality to Deep Throat. The narrative of this book also points up startling parallels and differences between the Watergate era and our own - two periods marked by a White House obsessed with secrecy and control and an eagerness to try to cow the press.

In the case of Watergate, The Washington Post stood behind its reporters when the Nixon White House attacked their stories as being "based upon hearsay and on sources that will not reveal themselves," and the paper continued to protect Deep Throat's identity, even in the face of charges that he did not exist or was an overdramatized, composite figure.

Today, in a climate where the public has a deepening distrust of the press - in part because of self-inflicted wounds, in part because of efforts on the part of the Bush administration and ideological partisans to discredit the news media - more and more reporters are being threatened with jail if they do not reveal their confidential sources. Just last week, after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal, Time magazine gave in to demands of federal prosecutors to turn over documents concerning a reporter's confidential sources.

"The Secret Man" emphasizes what Mr. Woodward has called "the monumental risk" Mr. Felt took in becoming a source and the extraordinary lengths he went to in order to protect his anonymity. It makes clear that he would not have talked with Mr. Woodward had the reporter not guaranteed him absolute confidentiality, a promise that reporters today - like Judith Miller of The New York Times and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, who have been held in contempt for refusing to testify about their confidential sources - cannot make without facing the possibility of being sentenced to jail.

"It is critical that confidential sources feel they would be protected for life," Mr. Woodward writes near the end of this slight but provocative book. "There needed to be a model out there where people could come forward or speak when contacted, knowing they would be protected."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/06/bo...aku.html?8hpib





Kleptomedia

With Covers, Publishers Take More Than Page From Rivals
Andrew Adam Newman


Naum Kazhdan/The New York Times

Same image, slightly different use: two works of fiction, both from 2002, share a look, just as two books on raising children do.

When a book hits stores with a cover nearly identical to another's, it's the publishing equivalent of arriving at a party wearing the same dress as the hostess. But while book jacket look-alikes may chafe publishers, it happens more often than you might think.

The image on the cover of Todd Hasak-Lowy's short-story collection, "The Task of This Translator" (Harvest Books, an imprint of Harcourt), released in June, shows a hat floating over a necktie-wearing headless man - nearly identical to the one on a 1999 story collection, Barry Yourgrau's "Wearing Dad's Head" (Arcade Publishing).

The hall of mirrors continues: both books appear to riff on Fred Marcellino's celebrated floating-bowler-hat illustration for Milan Kundera's novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," which itself appeared to be a homage to the Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte, who frequently depicted men with bowlers.

Sometimes the photographs on book covers are not just similar, but exact duplicates. Rather than pay photographers' day rates, most book designers turn to stock- photography agencies. Top agencies charge $1,200 to $1,500 a photograph, and twice that for exclusive rights, a premium publishers are loath to pay.

That's where the trouble starts.

Seven years ago, an edition of Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's "Raising Your Spirited Child" featured on its cover a stock photograph, from the Photonica agency, of a girl running with outstretched arms. Five years later, another parenting book, "Children at Promise," by Timothy S. Stuart and Cheryl G. Bostrom, featured the identical photograph, as does a recently released paperback version of the book.

Mary Schuck, senior art director at Harper Perennial, which published the first title, learned of the latter only recently, when directed to it on the Internet. "Oh, wow," Ms. Schuck said. "They used the same photo. It's just a huge mistake for this publisher to have done this."

At that other publisher, Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley, the look-alike cover also came as news.

"It's in all our best interests to make sure that image isn't already being used in the same medium," Jean Morley, Wiley's vice president of creative services, said in an e- mail message. "When our designers use stock art, they routinely ask if the image is being used for other purposes, and most stock houses will volunteer that information."

She added, "I suspect the reason this happened was probably because that information wasn't shared or possibly because we thought that first book was outdated or not directly competing in the marketplace."

"Raising Your Spirited Child" hardly appears outdated: the book was recently No. 38 on Amazon's parenting and families top-seller list; Wiley's "Children at Promise" didn't make that Top 100 list. (The older book's overall sales rank was 645; the newer was 314,488.) It's unclear how many bookstores stack them near each other; both address parenting, but only "Children at Promise" is Christian-themed.

David Neilson, the chief executive of Photonica, said in an e-mail message that "it's likely" Wiley was warned of the previous book cover: when a "client calls in to request a photo, we will check the image's history automatically."

In any case, neither publisher has any recourse against the agency, as neither paid for exclusivity. Ditto for Bloomsbury and Doubleday, which paid Photonica for nonexclusive use of the same photograph of a knee-socked woman, though used upside down in one case. The books - Melissa Pritchard's "Disappearing Ingénue" (Doubleday) and a British edition of Jeffrey Eugenides's "Virgin Suicides" (Bloomsbury) - were both published in 2002, in May and October, respectively. Mr. Neilson said "crossover is likely to have been minimal," as "The Virgin Suicides" cover in the United States differs from the one in Britain. In British bookstores, however, the covers are likely to be the same: Amazon's British Web site shows the Pritchard and Eugenides books with the identical images.

As the covers of "The Task of This Translator" and "Wearing Dad's Head" suggest, photo agency rates do not explain all such cases. Book designers can wade into familiar waters even when they choose different photos. The cover of "The Task of This Translator" is "similar enough to other projects that someone should have a red face about it," said Giles Hoover, a book designer who with his wife, Amanda Smith, runs the book-design blog Foreword (www.ospreydesign.com/foreword).

"If I had done that, I would be super-embarrassed," Mr. Hoover said.

Jennifer Gilmore, director of publicity at Harcourt, publisher of "The Task of This Translator," said she had not been aware of the cover of Mr. Yourgrau's book. She said the similarities were "strictly coincidental."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/07/books/07cove.html





Parts Of UK Best-Seller Found To Match 1933 Novel
Cheryl Juckes and Jeffrey Goldfarb

A 2005 best-selling memoir about a child abused by nuns contains passages strikingly similar to those in a renowned 1933 book on growing up in a convent, UK publisher Bloomsbury said.

Judith Kelly's "Rock Me Gently", released by Bloomsbury in February, includes numerous passages and characterisations that are similar, and in some cases identical, to those in Antonia White's acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel, "Frost in May".

The revelation comes as Bloomsbury gears up for the release of the sixth instalment of the Harry Potter saga, a lynchpin to the company's financial success.

"There are striking similarities to 'Frost in May' and other books and the author is at the moment going through the text and checking everything to make sure that the text is corrected for the next edition," Bloomsbury Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Pringle wrote in an email on Wednesday.

The next edition will be a paperback due out in February 2006, a Bloomsbury spokeswoman said.

The email was in response to a Reuters query about the similarity of the passages.

"We have sought legal advice and apparently there are not enough similarities to count as infringement of copyright," Pringle wrote. "However, it is obviously essential that this is dealt with and as swiftly as possible." The media industry has been rocked in recent years by several high-profile plagiarism cases, with renowned U.S. historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin among those facing accusations of copying others' work.

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling won a U.S. court case in 2002 against a writer who claimed Rowling had stolen ideas for her series about the boy wizard.

Best-Seller

Virago Press, a publisher of women's literature and a division of Time Warner Books <TWX.N>, re-released "Frost in May" in 1978. It was the first title under the Virago Modern Classics imprint dedicated to rediscovering out-of-print books.

Pringle was also editor of the Virago Modern Classics series in 1978.

The Bloomsbury spokeswoman said that Virago founder Carmen Callil originally commissioned "Frost in May" and that Pringle read it only once, more than 20 years ago.

A spokeswoman in London for Time Warner Books and Virago said the publisher had no comment.

"Rock Me Gently" became a top-10 non-fiction best-seller in Britain shortly after its publication. It was ranked No. 469 on Amazon's UK site on Thursday.

Among numerous examples of similar passages in the two books, Kelly in one instance wrote, "I stayed in my position for a few minutes, breathing slowly and deeply but awake. I shall never get to sleep, I thought wretchedly. But even as I thought it my lids grew heavy and my crossed arms began to uncurl. I had just time to remember to whisper 'Jesus', when Ruth's gruff voice rang out...."

"Frost in May" reads: "Nanda retained her position rigidly for a few minutes. 'I shall never get to sleep,' she thought miserably, as she heard the outdoor clock strike eight. But even as she thought it her lids grew heavy and her crossed hands began to uncurl. She had just time to remember to whisper 'Jesus' before she was fast asleep."

"Frost in May" tells the story of 9-year-old Nanda Grey, daughter of a Catholic convert, who is sent to a British convent boarding school just before World War One.

"Rock Me Gently" is billed as Kelly's tale of the abuse she suffered as a child in a Catholic orphanage before she moved to a kibbutz in Israel as an adult.

In her email, Pringle wrote that Kelly was confused by her own notes and "lost sight of what was hers and what was not hers", and said the author was "horrified and upset" at what happened. Kelly could not be reached.
http://reuters.com/news/newsArticleS...h=+worm+author
















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- js.


















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